Friday, June 25, 2021

Hitler's Missing Speech

 

 

 

 By Nitzhakon

 

 So I’ve “gotten into it” any number of times about Hitler being a Socialist, that you can’t say NAZI without understanding it comes from “National Socialist German Worker’s Party”, and so on.  And there is plenty of evidence that he was, indeed, a Socialist.

I  was born and raised in the “People’s Republic of Marxachusetts” and grew up very, very liberal.  Name a Left/Right issue, I was on the Left.  No question.  Yet each time I abandoned a Left position to move Rightward, I can point to a seminal event or other piece of insight/learning that ushered in a reconsidering of my former position and – often – describe my thought process after that event as well as new insights and thought patterns that started to ascend.

As one example, still fresh in my mind despite (cough cough a long time), is the moment when I started to doubt the anti-gun teachings I’d been impressed with all my life (bolding in original):

I was living in the Midwest when my police officer neighbor remarked that I should get a gun for self-defense. Having been raised, all my life, to believe that civilian gun ownership was wrong, it shocked me to my core that – of all people – a cop was telling me this.

Unlike most Leftists – and have no doubt that I still was one – I didn’t dismiss this as a flier data point stated by a knuckledraggingslopedforeheadredneck, but rather it made me think those great two words that often stand at the threshold of a new insight: That’s weird

I can also describe – and did – the thought processes and cascades that came from that moment.  As I can when I started to question my “pro-abortion” stance to move towards the pro-life view.  And many other shifts, including my transitioning from a climate alarmist to CO2-mageddon skeptic.  All of this ties back to something our host said some time ago on their old blog about humility.  In this context, the willingness to admit the possibility of error.  Humility is the opposite of Vanity, and while the Seven Deadly Sins – and Seven Heavenly Virtues – are Catholic constructs (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) I have found them to be useful intellectual tools. I have told my children, in teaching them my values, that it’s my belief that all humans have 1-2 sins that dominate a particular person’s weaknesses, that there are 1-2 that are “intermediate”, and the rest fall off Pareto-like into the trivial.

As noted in an excellent book I recently read, learning requires change, and change requires the humility to admit one might be wrong in one’s beliefs.  This is, as an aside, is something I would ask when doing interviews back in my days as a corporate slave, er, drone, um, I mean employee: Tell me about a time when you changed your mind on something significant.  Describe the background, your initial thoughts, what you changed to, and why you changed your mind.

If reworded a little, it’s also an excellent question to ask of a potential new boss.

 

Sunday, June 06, 2021

What Happens When YouTake School Choice Away

 

 Free picture: school, classroom, empty desks

 

My, my... Leave it to Sodom on the Bay to not only close schools for weeks, but to come up with a forced, mandatory requirement to 'expand diversity' which gave most parents zero choices of where their children could go to school. This so-called 'Zone system' the school board voted in back in  December was designed to 'increase diversity' in the public schools no matter what. And, as a cherry on top, students living in public housing and their parents were given a priority in the selection process. 

 What that meant is that if you had a child in a decent elementary school near where you live, they could be sent  anywhere. And parents were prevented from any appeal about it, even if it meant their children would be going to school in a dangerous neighborhood far away, with substandard teachers and curriculum and problems with gangs. 

 

On the other hand, if your child already was in such a school, instead of improving it with better teachers and disciplining the trouble makers, You would get  the priority of sending him or her to the good schools in your 'zone'. Not only that, but the curriculum of all public schools will also be 'diversified...and I'm sure you know what that means...the teaching of critical Race theory in all public schools.

  While on the face of it this seems like it might have some good points, the obvious reasons for doing it was highly suspect. Among other things, it was scheduled to cost $2.5 million over the next 18 months. 

Hmm, no interest in how how the existing schools could have been improved with that money instead! The real reason of course has nothing to do with diversity. So the real reason it was done is obvious. It's about power and control. These children will be subjected to the far Left's views on morality, America, and of course critical race theory. 

Not only that, but families were not to be allowed  to appeal any decision of the Bureaucrats. And since students living in public House projects will get priority in picking whatever school they want, teachers who are actually trying to educate a class of students can no longer teach to the general learning level of a classroom, which of course means that the smarter kids with the higher learning capacities suffer.

It also means that people who struggled to save and  buy a home at San Francisco's high prices in a nice neighborhood because of the good schools were getting ripped off big time.Especially since they pay the highest taxes.

So how well did this expensive program work out? Simple. Much of San Francisco white and Asian parents took one of two ways out. They either found private and/or Parochial schools to send their kids to, which meant that they were still getting ripped off and  stuck paying those high taxes as well as private school fees.

The other choice of course, being to relocate outside the district or maybe even move away from SF period.

When I first read about this , I sympathized, since I got my kids out of the public schools where I lived  myself as soon as possible, respectfully in the 5th and 3rd grades and found an excellent parochial school for them. I still think that it was one of the best moves we ever made as parents, expensive though it was.

Surprise! That's exactly what happened in San Francisco, and their racist woke tactics cost them a bundle. This s what happens when the people supposedly running the public school district spend their time debating on how to rename public  schools after Lefty 'heroes' instead of historic American heroes. And the kids are already behind, because there was almost a year's lock down mandated by the teacher's union.

According to the SF Chronicle, more than 1,700 public school students have simply left the public schools. And they're expecting a lot more to  leave at the start of the next academic year in the fall. And guess what?  Any teacher will tell you that one of their important duties is that morning head count, which determines how much Federal money the school gets.

According to the Chronicle, this is going to cost the district $20 Million in Fed money...not that the public schools are doing very well otherwise academically, like a lot of California public schools. You see, with the better students leaving, the remaining children in SFUSD were at 12% proficiency in Math & 19% in English, with 80% of those kids who are left  not meeting reading literacy requirements.

The Sf school district already has a lawsuit to deal with because of its decision to rename schools named after Washington,Lincoln, etc for their 'racism.' 

Meanwhile, the School District Vice President, Alison Collins

 ðŸ‘‡Entire senior staff of San Francisco schools denounces ...

 was under fire because of a number of tweets criticizing Asians of being racist and not woke. After she refused to resign or remove the tweets (see, if you use Twitter and are from the right demographic you can get away with racism). She sued the School District for $87 million after she was removed from her position. I haven't bothered to check whether she won, since all this shows is the quality of who's running the school district....

Again, in big letters.....THIS IS NOT ABOUT BETTER EDUCATION.IT IS DEFINITELY NOT ABOUT THE WELFARE OF THE KIDS, IF ANYTHING, IT'S THE REVERSE.  SO WHAT IS IT REALLY ABOUT???

SIMPLE, IT'S ABOUT CONTROL, WASTING OTHER PEOPLE'S HARD EARNED MONEY, INFERIOR TEACHERS PROTECTED BY A POLITICALY PROMINENT UNION AND MOST OF ALL, MIND RAPING YOUR CHILDREN.

 TO FIX IT WILL TAKE PARENTS THEMSELVES GETTING IN THESE PEOPLE'S FACES AND VOTING THEM OUT OF POWER. Or SIMPLY LEAVING THE DISTRICT AND STARVING THE BEAST. HOME SCHOOLING IS ALSO AN OPTION.

THINK ABOUT IT. YOUR KIDS ARE WORTH IT.


Rob Miller

Rob Miller writes for Joshuapundit. His articles have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Examiner, American Thinker, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The San Francisco Chronicle, Real Clear Politics, The Times Of Israel, Breitbart.Com, Yediot and many other publications.