@Tarnstellung's banner p

Tarnstellung


				

				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 05 12:50:41 UTC

				

User ID: 553

Tarnstellung


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 12:50:41 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 553

An Interview With the School Board Chair Who Forced Out a Principal After Michelangelo’s David Was Shown in Class

On Thursday, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that the principal of a local charter school, the Tallahassee Classical School, was forced to resign after three parents complained about an art teacher showing a picture of Michelangelo’s 16th-century sculpture of David.

Reading the entire interview, the school board comes out looking only slightly more reasonable than was portrayed in the "mainstream media".

The chair of the school board, Barney Bishop III, insists that the David incident was only a small contributing factor, but when asked to elaborate why the board decided to pressure the principal to resign, he says:

based on counsel from our employment lawyer, I’m not going to get into the reasons.

To me, the overall tone of Bishop's statements suggests that the David incident was in fact a major reason, if not the sole reason, for the firing (sorry, "resignation under pressure"). Bishop says:

The teacher mentioned that this was a nonpornographic picture, No. 1. The teacher said, “Don’t tell your parents,” No. 2. (...) Three parents objected. Two objected simply because they weren’t told in advance. One objected because the teacher said nonpornography. Nonpornography—that’s a red flag. And of course telling the students, “Don’t tell your parents”—that’s a huge red flag!

The interview doesn't say in what context the teacher told the students not to tell their parents or that the images were not pornographic. (Maybe the original article does? I haven't read it because it's paywalled.) Out of context, it does sound suspicious. I suppose the first could have been a joke. As for the second, I'm not sure why the teacher would need to tell the students in the classroom that the images were not pornographic. In any case, my priors are that it is extremely unlikely that the teacher was a "groomer" trying to sexualize the kids.

The year before, the school had notified the parents that their children, who are 11 and 12 years old, were going to be exposed to the horror of a statue depicting a human. This year, the teacher teaching the class told the principal (the one who was later fired) to send out a similar notice, but the principal apparently forgot. This is an "egregious mistake":

98 percent of the parents didn’t have a problem with it. But that doesn’t matter, because we didn’t follow a practice. We have a practice. Last year, the school sent out an advance notice about it. Parents should know: In class, students are going to see or hear or talk about this. This year, we didn’t send out that notice. (...) This year, we made an egregious mistake. We didn’t send that notice.

Michelangelo's sculpture of David is "controversial":

Well, we’re Florida, OK? Parents will decide. Parents are the ones who are going to drive the education system here in Florida. The governor said that, and we’re with the governor. Parents don’t decide what is taught. But parents know what that curriculum is. And parents are entitled to know anytime their child is being taught a controversial topic and picture.

Parents choose this school because they want a certain kind of education. We’re not gonna have courses from the College Board. We’re not gonna teach 1619 or CRT crap. I know they do all that up in Virginia. The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids. Teachers are the experts? Teachers have all the knowledge? Are you kidding me? I know lots of teachers that are very good, but to suggest they are the authorities, you’re on better drugs than me.

The interview ends with the reporter saying "I just don’t think this statue is controversial", to which Bishop responds:

We’re not going to show the full statue of David to kindergartners. We’re not going to show him to second graders. Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age. We’re going to figure out when that is.

And you don’t have to show the whole statue! Maybe to kindergartners we only show the head. You can appreciate that. You can show the hands, the arms, the muscles, the beautiful work Michelangelo did in marble, without showing the whole thing.

An article in the BBC relates this to the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, AKA the "Don't Say Gay" Bill. Personally, I think it's just typical American prudishness. In other Western countries, it is perfectly normal and unremarkable for statues with exposed penises and breasts (non-pornographic, of course) to be displayed in public, where they are easily seen by children of all ages.


At one point, in describing the school, Bishop says:

We don’t use pronouns.

Obviously the sentence is false if taken literally, as critics have pointed out. But does anyone know what he might have actually meant? They don't have pronoun badges? They don't put pronouns in their email signatures? They don't use trans people's preferred pronouns? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious as to what leads people to say nonsensical things like this, what they understand the word "pronoun" to mean.

Dear "revisionists", where are all the Jews?

A couple of months ago, I had a discussion with the self-proclaimed "revisionist" @SecureSignals concerning the veracity of the Holocaust, always a fun topic.

There was a bit of back-and-forth on the archaeological evidence and witness testimony, which I eventually gave up on because SS (very subtle username, by the way) clearly knew much more about the subject than me, and could thus, as the saying goes, drag me down to his level and beat me with experience. Calculating the number of corpses that can fit in a given volume definitely felt like I was being dragged down a few levels.

A more fruitful line of questioning is that of where millions of Jews disappeared to. In response to SS's accusation that:

It's astounding how much nonsense you are willing to believe without any concrete physical evidence or without the claims even being remotely possible. But believing this story requires belief in the impossible, because the official narrative makes impossible claims only supported by witnesses who lack credibility and have an obvious motive to lie.

I said:

The best piece of physical evidence I have is the missing six million Jews. Where did they all go? If Treblinka was merely a transit camp, where did the Jews transit afterwards? Compare the pre-war and post-war census data in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. Even accounting for emigration, millions of Jews disappeared.

In general, I think census data is a reliable source for estimating the number of victims. I'm not familiar with the details of the Holocaust in Europe as a whole, so the best example I can provide is the Jasenovac concentration camp. Shortly after WWII, it was estimated that around 600,000 people were killed there. These estimates were widely accepted, including by the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Later claims went as high as a million or more. In the 1980s, two researchers independently arrived at much lower estimates based on demographic data. Eventually, after the end of communist censorship, a new consensus formed that the number of victims is around 100,000, an order of magnitude lower than previous estimates.

This shows that it is entirely to possible for new research to greatly lower the estimated number of victims. There is no conspiracy to suppress the truth. Indeed, despite the number six million being embedded in popular culture, some credible historians place it at closer to five million. Yad Vashem says "the number of victims was between five and six million".

SS replied with arguments as to why the "official narrative" on Treblinka is implausible, which I was unable to argue against because, as I said, I'm not familiar with all the details of every Nazi camp. It is possible that the consensus figures for a single camp are wrong. As in the Jasenovac example, this has already happened (though it should be noted that most of the victims at Jasenovac were not Jewish). Even if true, this is at most evidence that the consensus on Treblinka is incorrect. It says nothing about the other camps, where the vast majority of the murders happened. In my reply, I said:

You clearly know much more about Treblinka than I do, so I'm not sure if I can provide any good counterarguments. Let's suppose, then, for the sake of the argument, that the archaeological evidence for the "official narrative" is insufficient. That means we don't know what exactly was done with the Jews.

Other evidence exists for the claim that over 700,000 people were killed at Treblinka, such as the Höfle Telegram and the Korherr Report. But looking at them, thanks to the euphemisms used, I suppose they might also be interpreted as supporting the transit camp theory.

However, you did not address the question in my previous post: if Treblinka was merely a transit camp, where did the Jews transit from there? Where were the hundreds of thousands of eyewitnesses after the war who testified that they passed through Treblinka and were peacefully resettled?

And more broadly, demographic data has millions of Jews unaccounted for after the war. Where did they all go? Or do you accept the rest of the "official narrative" and are only sceptical with regard to Treblinka? Auschwitz had proper crematoria, with fuel and everything – do you believe that over a million people were killed there?

As far as I can tell, SS never addressed any of this. It seems some of the comments in the thread have since been deleted, which apparently hides all child comments when viewing the thread directly, though they are still visible on the profile page. This makes it hard to reconstruct the exchange, but looking at SS's profile, I can't find anything where he addressed my argument. From his post below on Holocaust education, we can infer that he does indeed believe that not just Treblinka but the entire Holocaust is fake, a position for which he has not provided any evidence.

So, to SS and any other "revisionists" who may be lurking: Where are all the Jews?

I had a good discussion regarding the case of Sam Brinton, buried deep in last week's thread. I am reposting here so that more people can see it and possibly participate. I hope this is appropriate and doesn't constitute self-promotion.

I wrote:

What would even constitute evidence that Brinton was hired based solely or primarily on his identity? He has a master's degree in the relevant field (from MIT, though other comments are telling me that doesn't really matter) and has co-authored several research papers. To me it looks like he's about as qualified as anyone.

@Astranagant replied:

Well this is the problem with identity hiring, isn't it? How does anyone know you didn't get the edge over your competitors because of that? Unless he was literally the only applicant for the job, I'd find it hard to swallow that the topic of his... presentation... never came up. Meaning the department most likely consciously chose him, and whether this is in spite of or because of his affectations would largely come down to whether he was wildly head-and-shoulders better than his competition. Employers will overlook some affectation for a genuine rockstar employee, but there's a limit proportionate to how irreplaceable you are.

So either Brinton is hyper-competent and got the job in spite of his affectations, which according to the rest of the thread -- and your own comment "as qualified as anyone" -- his education history and performance on the job doesn't bear out. So if it's not that, can we then assume that the affectations served the purpose of the administration somehow? This is a government job, it's impossible... alright, improbable to believe they didn't do their due diligence.

To which I replied:

If the employer has whittled down the list of applicants to a group of people with similar qualifications, and more detailed information that might help the decision is impossible or infeasible to attain, then the choice of whom to hire will be arbitrary. In this case, I don't see how hiring Brinton because of his unusual presentation is any worse than rolling a die or flipping a coin to make the final choice.

To me, the phrase "hired for your identity" implies that standards have been lowered and the candidate was picked over someone more qualified but with a less-favoured identity. As far as I can tell, this is not true in Brinton's case.

One form of affirmative action that I've heard about is that, when two or more candidates appear to be equally qualified, and one belongs to a historically marginalized group, that candidate should be chosen. As I said above, when it comes down to this kind of decision, the choice is arbitrary, and I don't see any harm in the affirmative action method. Indeed, if the group to which the candidate belongs really does face some kind of disadvantage, picking them is the rational choice for the self-interested employer, as it indicates that the candidate has achieved the same qualifications despite more difficult circumstances. Of course, simply considering a few categories such as race and gender can never provide the full picture: for example, among two candidates there may be a woman from a rich family and a man whose family was poor growing up; overall, the man had it worse, but an application generally includes gender but not family circumstances, so applying the method here would lead to the wrong choice. It is just a heuristic, and no heuristic is perfect, but as I said, at some point acquiring more information about the candidates becomes impossible or infeasible; except for some very specific positions, an employer won't hire a personal investigator to carefully investigate the candidate's past: this is where heuristics come in.

The above method is very different from lowered standards for different groups, or straight-up quotas, both of which I vehemently oppose. Finally, it must be noted that:

  1. In the real world, "historically marginalized" groups have been granted various advantages, which might reduce the method's accuracy.
  1. Situations where several candidates are, in fact, equally qualified, and only one belongs to a historically marginalized group, are not actually that common.
  1. The heuristic requires that the candidates' identity not be considered until the final choice: a woman must be just as good as a man, without considering the fact that she is a woman. Otherwise, we would be adjusting for identity twice, which would result in a lower standard for women.

I wonder, is there anyone on The Motte who opposes nuclear power? Either because of concerns relating to safety, waste disposal and other "environmentalist" canards, or because it's supposedly uneconomical.

And if everyone here is pro-nuclear, why is that? Are mottizens just more rational than everyone else, or is it because of chronic contrarianism?

(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)

Like embedding a Tweet? I don't think you can do that. But there's a "Copy link" button under every comment and you can put an @ in front of a username so that it links to their profile and they get notified.

You haven't provided an argument as to why civilians need easy access to guns for a society to be free. You are just asserting that this is the case.

Did anything come of /u/MaxwellHill?

For those unfamiliar, /u/MaxwellHill is a Reddit account that moderated a bunch of big subreddits and posted a lot, many of their posts being highly upvoted and widely seen. In short, it was very influential on Reddit. When Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, the account suddenly stopped posting (and it hasn't posted since). Some people noticed this, and, speculating that Maxwell herself was behind the account, started looking through its posts. They found some more circumstantial evidence, like a mix of British and American English (Maxwell moved between the two countries), and breaks in posting lasting a few days at a time that lined up with major events in Maxwell's life, during which she would have been distracted or busy. There's much more to it than this; you can read a summary here.

The little media coverage it received at the time was of course entirely dismissive; see for example the article in Vice.

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories – I think Epstein may well have killed himself, for example – but this one aroused my suspicion at the time, and it's strange how it suddenly fizzled out. The Vice article above mentions private messages exchanged between /u/MaxwellHill and some other moderators (there are screenshots out there, but those are trivial to fake), but if the person behind the account was still there, why did they stop posting, and why haven't they started again after over two years?

If it was Maxwell, why didn't she give the password to someone to make a post and remove any suspicion? "Hi, I'm still here and I'm not Ghislaine Maxwell, but I'm going to abandon this account because of all the harassment I've been receiving." (Whether there was any harassment is irrelevant.) Would she have been prevented from doing this? I assume she was able to communicate with her lawyer, at least.

At the time, it was speculated that Reddit wanted to cover this up, as it would be embarrassing if it was revealed that one of their most influential users was an international child trafficker. Why didn't they just take control of the account and post something? Surely the admins can do this. Or just edit the database manually, as /u/spez infamously did. To me it seems like they wanted to sweep it under the carpet, and they thought any activity would just bring more attention. If this was their strategy, it appears to have worked.

A large part of the anti-trans side, such as the religious people you mentioned, wouldn't accept Jane as a woman even if we had magical-level medical technology.

As for those who do accept that medical technology currently cannot make Jane "actually a woman", but it might be able to do so in the future – and I am assuming you belong to this group – I have to ask: what is a woman? What medical procedure would Jane need to "actually" become a woman?

Is it about external appearance? In that case, Jane can already easily get very convincing breasts, and it is my understanding that a convincing neovagina can also be created, though this is more complicated than breasts. The neovagina wouldn't be able to provide lubrication for sex, but we're talking about appearance.

Is it about reproduction? Medicine isn't very close to allowing trans women to get pregnant, but if this is needed for a woman to be "actually a woman", then plenty of cisgender women who are unable to get pregnant would also be excluded.

Is it about genetics and chromosomes? Now we get into various intersex conditions, and again we risk excluding cisgender women, or even including cisgender men.


P.S. Note the complete absence of trans men in your comment, and their near-total absence in the broader debate. To me this indicates that concerns about trans women are not fundamentally rational, but that they are the result of some sort of deep-seated emotional concern about purity, or about women's safety (the latter indicative of a misandrist view that men are inherently dangerous). If there are people here who believe trans men aren't actually men, I kindly ask that they also provide the criteria for distinguishing men from non-men.

My beer consumption in general is small enough to not be a real market for brewerys. But for those of you who do, I encourage you to continue with the boycott. I'm far from the most anti-trans poster here, but I'm excited to see a big company brought to its knees when it give into corporate woke.

Did they really "give in" to wokeism? Given that:

The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it.

Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?

After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”

I can understand how hearing that may seem creepy in that context, given that she just found out she would be staying with him, but in general, masturbating in a situation like this is a great idea. I have long though that men should masturbate before doing something important that involves women, sex, etc., to prevent their brain being overpowered by their penis.

For example, the inclusion of trans athletes in women's sports, or the inclusion of trans people in women's bathrooms, or the inclusion of trans people in women's prisons. (...) And then when those externalities do happen, and a male-born trans person wins against a female athlete (inherently, unfairly), or a trans person assaults a woman in the bathroom, or a trans prisoner impregnates a woman, those objections are at best handwaved away and dismissed as outliers or discredited, or at worst labeled "transphobic" and censored.

  1. I don't deny that trans women can have an advantage and that it may be reasonable to exclude them from participating in a women-only sport. But it is strange that people's views on this particular question seem to align perfectly with their views on trans people in general. In principle, it should be possible for someone to support treating trans people as their preferred gender when there are no externalities, but to exclude them from women's sports. The entire argument about women's sports is self-contained and irrelevant to the broader debate about trans people.
  2. I am not aware of a single case of a trans woman assaulting a woman in a women's bathroom. This is purely hypothetical as far as I know. If it happened, I expect the anti-trans side would publicize it heavily.
  3. The one case I am aware of where a trans prisoner was placed in a women's prison and impregnated a woman involved consensual sex. The safety of other prisoners was not endangered. It may still be desirable to prevent that kind of thing, but it is very different from sexual assault. And if preventing that is your goal, it doesn't follow that trans women should be excluded from women's prisons. A few years of HRT, or an orchiectomy/sex reassignment surgery, will suffice.

Medical transitions are a form of genital mutilation which cause massive harm similar in kind but greater in magnitude to rape. I would rather a child be groomed into sex with a pedo than groomed into undergoing medical transition, because the former would leave fewer long term irreversible trauma and could hopefully eventually be healed and recovered from.

  1. Medical transition involves HRT and not just surgery. There are trans people who choose to only get HRT and to never have genital surgery.

  2. There are many trans people who voluntarily have genital surgery and are happier afterwards. There are no (or negligibly few) children who voluntarily have sex with adults and are happier afterwards.

Who are "Neoliberal Adherents"?

gas stoves

There was a minor media circus about them, but they haven't actually been banned, have they?

Anyway, induction is amazing and I hope both gas and conventional electric stoves get banned.

  • -23

You seem to be implying that he said that having his daughter murdered is an acceptable trade-off for good food. He didn't. He just said that the vast majority of Mexicans are not violent murderers and they shouldn't be collectively punished for the actions of a single madman.

Assuming you are a White American, I don't think you are in any way responsible for the actions of John Wayne Gacy. If you are from a different ethnic group, I'm sure it has produced similarly evil people, and you are not responsible for their actions unless you directly assisted them.

https://transresistancenetwork.wordpress.com

A very important and representative organization, I am sure.

I happen to agree with your overall point, but I think your post breaks basically every rule that this website has. This is not Rdrama. Your post is almost entirely sneering without any actual arguments.

If you say that HRT is less harmful for children than sex with an adult, you need to be able to substantiate your claim.

Given that one is a medical treatment and the other a criminal offence, our prior should be that it is less harmful, and the burden of proof is on you to substantiate your claim.

But okay, I'll try. Google gives me the meta-analysis article Hormone Therapy, Mental Health, and Quality of Life Among Transgender People: A Systematic Review, which concludes:

This systematic review of 20 studies found evidence that gender-affirming hormone therapy may be associated with improvements in QOL scores and decreases in depression and anxiety symptoms among transgender people. Associations were similar across gender identity and age. The strength of evidence for these conclusions is low due to methodological limitations

It includes four studies on minors:

  • de Vries, 2011 reports positive outcomes, however, it only looks at puberty blockers, not cross-sex hormones

  • de Vries, 2014 looks at puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery, and reports positive outcomes

  • Achille, 2020 looks at puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and reports positive outcomes

  • López de Lara, 2020 looks at "cross hormonal therapy", which I assume is the same as cross-sex hormones, and reports positive outcomes

This post has a summary of the long-term effects of child sexual abuse, including "consensual" statutory rape, with an extensive list of references. It says, among other things:

There have been numerous studies examining the association between a history of CSA and mental health problems in adult life that have employed clinical samples, convenience samples (usually students), and random community samples. There is now an established body of knowledge clearly linking a history of CSA with higher rates in adult life of depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, substance abuse disorders, eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Briere & Runtz 1988; Winfield et al. 1990; Bushnell et al. 1992; Mullen et al. 1993; Romans et al. 1995; Romans et al. 1997; Fergusson et al. 1996a; Fergusson et al. 1996b; Silverman et al. 1996; Fleming et al. 1998; Fleming et al. 1999). A more controversial literature links multiple personality disorder with CSA (Bucky & Dallenberg 1992; Spanos 1996).

I for one believe the shooter should not be misgendered. Misgendering is disrespectful to all trans people. I guess I am a true believer.

There was a Reddit thread, a few months ago maybe, discussing a crime committed by a trans person. It was a murder or something similarly universally condemned. Some of the commenters were misgendering the perpetrator, others were criticizing the misgenderers.

One of the arguments brought up by the latter group was that you wouldn't call a Black person a "nigger", even if they have committed a vile crime. Using the word "nigger" is offensive to all Black people. It implies that being Black is bad in and of itself. Likewise with misgendering.

This is, of course, addressed to those who believe that misgendering trans people is not otherwise acceptable. Whether it is acceptable to misgender trans people in general, whether trans people really are their identified gender, etc., is a separate discussion.

How exactly do cars, single family homes, and meat (of all things) make people harder to control?

Also, are you saying single family homes and car culture are not a cause of poor urban planning, which makes housing inaccessible, worsens people's health (as they just drive a car everywhere instead of walking) and contributes to climate change (as people need to drive everywhere, hence using more fuel)?

I actually considered using Chauvin as an example instead of Gacy. I opted for Gacy because his actions are much more unambiguously evil and indefensible. Given this site's bent, there was a possibility that some might believe Chauvin's actions were justified, in which case the example wouldn't work.

Anyway, White Americans are not responsible for Chauvin's actions either.

And that's setting aside that no one had the ability to stop Gacy from being in the country, since he was born an American. Mexican migrants, particularly illegal ones, are here as the result of deliberate policy decisions to do nothing about them. If a father who has just lost his daughter cannot even question the wisdom of those policy decisions, he deserves contempt. But my sympathy is limited, as I'm sure his daughter would have never questioned those policies either, even as the knife went in.

No one decided to deliberately let in murderers. Yes, if you let in millions of people, some of them are probably going to commit murder. But unless they commit murder at a higher rate, you are not actually increasing the natives' probability of being murdered. In that case, highlighting individual murders committed by immigrants is dishonest fearmongering.

The question then is whether immigrants do commit violent crimes at a higher rate. Apparently this is not the case and illegal immigrants actually commit less violent crime than natives.

While the EU is nominally in favor of cultural diversity, it means they will subsidize folk dresses and bland exhibits with 27 flags. It does not mean they will allow an Eastern European country to be against gay marriage.

A bizarre assertion, given that, according to my count, 13 of the EU's 27 members don't allow gay marriage.

It does not mean they will allow a country to practice eugenics

Eugenics is not part of the traditional culture of any country. The reason it's not implemented anywhere is a lack of popular support; it has nothing to do with the EU.

or protect key industries.

This has moved well beyond preserving culture and into plain economics. The EU does in fact protect traditional products. What the EU doesn't allow is protectionist restrictions that are meant to benefit one country's companies over those of another.

“Someone asked the prime minister if he wanted Hungary to stay in the EU. “Definitely not!” he said, adding that Hungary has no choice, because 85 percent of its exports are within the EU.”

What is that supposed to mean? He doesn't want to be in the EU but he "has no choice" because being in the EU is good for Hungary? He always has the option to pull a UK and tank the country's economy in exchange for "sovereignty" if that's what he wants. It seems that he realizes that leaving the EU would be a monumentally stupid decision, and is just using "the EU" as some kind of vague bogeyman.

What is your source on the US borrowing $100 billion to fund Ukraine? The total aid according to this article is worth only $50 billion, and most of that is in-kind (old weapons stockpiles etc.) and not financial.

people who, for instance, will give a baby soda in their bottle

Do people actually do this? Why would anyone ever do this?