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Notes -
The Karen Sleeper Cell Has Activated
A woman in Kansas City attempted to set fire to a warehouse that was alleged to be an ICE facility of some sort. Or, maybe, it was planned to be an ICE facility in the future. Or something.
I suppose there's room to quibble over this being a technical act of terrorism, insurrection, or just normal arson. Despite my tongue-in-cheek title, I also don't think this is some sort of a flashpoint for semi-organized violence on the part of lefty activists. Probably, it's just one individual who took a leave of their senses and did something dumb, pointless, and illegal.
But it is worth speculating on, on the internet, the mental processes that led to this behavior. One product of the many, many, _many, comments on the Minnesota ICE shootings was the idea that a large part of what's going on is an extreme from of LARPing. Some of these protestors see themselves literally as the inheritors of the Civil Rights Movement, the American Revolution, and The Rebels from Star Wars all in one. They are of The One Right and True Cause and, therefore, all of their actions have inherent justification.
When that line of thinking gets to compound on itself for long enough, people start to burn things.
I've always been suspicious of the "radicalized online" idea. Aside from a few already very mentally odd individuals, I don't buy the idea that you can read enough schizo posts that, one day, you decide to up end your life and do something drastic. I think it's far more likely you just spend more and more time online and indoors engaging in fantasy conflicts.
But I do believe in radicalization as a concept more broadly. Cults and mass social movements exemplify this. At a lower stakes level, simply hanging out with a certain "scene" (think metalheads, goths, punks, whatever) can meaningfully change a person's behaviors and beliefs.
I wonder to what extent the various Minnesota-like organized protesting is now seriously breaking contain for lefties - many of them female - who would, otherwise, mostly vent their aggravation by doing their own kind of schizo posting on Facebook or elsewhere. If this is the case, then we're dealing with something a lot more like a cult or, more geopolitically relevant, something similar to how ISIS spread so quickly after their initial emergence. That does concern me.
Anecdotally, one (broadly) lefty woman I knew didn't believe me when I told her that Americans in fact do not have a constitutional right to obstruct government agents ("so what, they're just supposed to protest on the side? Are you sure?"). I think some people just don't really understand what's allowed and what isn't for reasons that I can only speculate about. We may find this Karen someday shocked to be clapped in irons for attempting to burn down the ICE fulfillment center.
My opinion is that US schools do a really bad job of teaching the civil rights protests of the 1960s era. A lot of people unironically believe that Rosa Parks was just some random nice lady who was too tired to change seats on the bus that day, and that MLK Jr assembled a group of purely peaceful protestors who shamed the evil whites into doing the right thing. The reality is... a lot more complicated.
FWIW I didn't learn until well into adulthood that Rosa Parks was a setup. Which is kind of a shame, because it would have been interesting to learn that civil rights activists wanted to mount a legal challenge to bus segregation; that they found a sympathetic plaintiff; and they planned the whole incident.
I don't see that this would undermine the curriculum, but apparently the ideologues who put together our class materials wanted to deify Rosa Parks and the civil rights leadership to the maximum extent feasible.
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Furthermore they should teach that other countries have wide spread use of public transit and even wealthy people use it. Meanwhile in the US Rosa Parks made public transit a last resort option for those too poor to care about being stabbed.
Do you believe that the thing keeping people from being stabbed on public transit was that blacks had to give up their seats to whites when the bus was full?
It's kinda connected. The particular regulation isn't, but the practice that ultimately developed that having and enforcing a policy of removing disruptive people who are minority members would result in painful legal action whereas just letting shit happen wouldn't, was.
The radical policy of putting criminals in jail without segregating the bus would have permitted Montgomery to have avoided the bus boycott entirely.
Sure, but they were segregationists; it wasn't about crime.
Seems like a remarkable coincidence, dontcha think? That the people being segregated just happened to have a murder rate that was 5-10 times higher than the majority population?
Saying 'they were segregationists' seems close to saying they were murderists.
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Come to think of it, what was the point of separating blacks and whites? It's easy to think of Southern segregationists as moustache-twirling villains who wanted little beyond stigmatizing blacks and keeping them down, but perhaps there was an actual practical reason for this type of segregation?
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Well, and yet none of the other countries with more broad-based usage of public transport physically segregate minority riders. If you want to argue that the US is unique because segregated seating became a civil rights issue and this resulted in an overcorrection preventing more justified action against minorities on public transport, then it seems as fair to say that "Rosa Parks made public transport a last resort option" as it is to go one step up the causal chain and say "segregation made public transport a last resort option".
I'm pretty skeptical that the southern USA is the only society to segregate like that. Enough African states on functional Apartheid or superduper demographically-driven class systems in trains and whatnot.
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Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Though obviously it wasn't just segregated seating; it was segregated everything, voting rights, etc.
No, because that's attributing actions done by the civil rights activists (enshrining black people as a privileged group) to actions done by their opponents. It's basically the bully's "Look what you made me do".
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I dunno about that take. I feel pretty confident that Montgomery, Alabama did not have great public transit in the 1940s. I also think history classes should stick to teaching history instead of opining on the quality of public transit in different countries in modern times.
It would be interesting to find some statistics on public transit use by race in Southern cities, year by year, from 1945 onward. Plus Chicago and DC for never-segregated controls.
I continued to enjoy Chicago public transportation well into the 2000s, and will probably visit and take my kids on it. There are just certain park and ride places not to park at, because your car will get stolen, but that's true in the Southwest too (which was never segregated).
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Is there any topic where current US schools do a good job of teaching?
It is certainly not basic reading, writing and arithmetic.
And even when the system really tries, the effects are not great. See one historical event that TPTB consider crucially important for everyone to know, event that is taught not only in schools from the earliest age, but also in popular media and entertainment.
Despite all this effort, the result is glass about half empty. Not encouraging sign about the system's capability.
I think the public education system does a fine job at catechizing the basics of Holocaustianity; it happened, it was the worst thing ever, and the most important thing in the world is making sure it never happens again. Expecting normies to remember a number or a date is... too much. They don't remember that about anything, not even the things they care about.
As a proud techie-identifying person, I've never bothered remembering constants. You can look those up.
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US schools actually do do a very fine job of teaching, comparisons are just compiled on the basis of comparing scores between poor black kids in the inner cities and the kids of the Japanese elite so the education system can pitch a bigger fit about 'inadequate resources'.
This, plus selection bias. Outside of the nordics, there are plenty of working class Euro kids who just don't go to school after 8th - 10th grade. And for the year they do attend, it's just several hours of goofing off before they can continue to goof off in their neighborhoods.
The U.S. has all kinds of truancy and mandatory education laws that vary by state and level of enforcement.
If school attendance was actually totally optional all the way through, I believe that by 9th grade or so, the U.S. would have far and away the top median scores of all nations.
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Metric system. Kids in school know what 9mm are.
One of the problems with teaching US history - it is really hard to not turn the pupils into white supremacists or just flat out patriots. Do you guys have any idea how fucking awesome USA is before Vietnam or Clinton - depending on how generous you want to be.
But can they tell if 9mm is bigger or smaller than .40 S&W and by how much?
In the better Red Tribe schools, of course. In Blue Tribe schools, maybe but not because of anything they learned in schools (maybe videogames). In underclass schools, oh yes, definitely, it's of practical importance.
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I think they do a decent job of teaching older history. It's just, they start at the back and work forwards, so they run out of time with the postwar 20th century stuff at the very end of the school year. Plus all the obvious culture war angles to it.
All the way through high school (graduated in 1985) history classes stopped at 1945.
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