Today, I Work: Real things to celebrate on December 25th

I am so glad I live in Taiwan. I will go to work on Wednesday and teach my students because Tomorrow’s Just Another Day. I will get New Year’s off, and that’s fine with me.

The two worst things I remember about December back in Canada were:

(a) The “participate or shut up” attitude. Saying that you “don’t celebrate xmas” does NOT “ruin other people’s fun” no matter how often they lie. Hearing the same lousy ‘songs’ for three weeks or more is not ‘fun’. Nobody owns December 25th.

(b) Being hostage or going stir crazy. EVERYTHING closes for eight to twelve days and there’s little or nothing to do. The only places open from the 20th to 24th were department stores, and from the 25th to 27th or 28th, only convenience stores and gas stations.  (Canada has boxing day, so everything’s closed on the 26th as well.)  It was bad in the 1990s, but at least there was the internet, and maybe computer games in the 1980s. Imagine how dull life in December was before then. TV was part of the misery.  There was no escape.  (And then add being trapped in a house with a crappy family….)

For those needing a boost, here’s a partial list of genuine historical events that happened on December 25th that are worth noting:

Birthdays:

  • 1642: Isaac Newton
  • 1652: Archibald Pitcairne, doctor, author, scholar
  • 1700: Leopold II, Prussian general
  • 1821: Clara Barton, founder of US Red Cross
  • 1876: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan
  • 1899: Humphrey Bogart
  • 1907: Cab Calloway
  • 1918: Anwar Sadat
  • 1924: Rod Serling
  • 1930: Emmanuel Agassi, Iranian boxer, father of Andre Agassi
  • 1949: Sissy Spacek
  • 1954: Annie Lennox
  • 1958: Rickey Henderson
  • 1972: Josh Freese, session drummer (Devo, NIN, etc.)

Events:

 

Why are there contradictions in the Bible?

There are a large number of Christians who think that the Bible is inerrant and infallible because it was inspired by their god, similar to the way that Muslims think that the Koran must be 100% correct because their god directly dictated it to their prophet.

This of course poses some problems because there seem to be some clear contradictions between different parts of the Bible. When I was an undergraduate, I was a believing Christian but not a biblical literalist and some of us used to have a little fun at the expense of a local evangelical preacher by asking him to explain certain obvious contradictions in the four different versions of Jesus’s life told in the four Gospels and then watching him twist himself up in knots to try and show how they were all in fact consistent when the plain words showed otherwise.
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Rationality Rules is an Abusive Transphobe

Abuse comes in more forms than many people realize. Take financial abuse, where someone uses economic leverage to control you, or reproductive coercion, or this behaviour.

Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse where the abuser intentionally manipulates the physical environment or mental state of the abusee, and then deflects responsibility by provoking the abusee to think that the changes reside in their imagination, thus constituting a weakened perception of reality (Akhtar, 2009; Barton & Whitehead, 1969; Dorpat, 1996; Smith & Sinanan, 1972). By repeatedly and convincingly offering explanations that depict the victim as unstable, the abuser can control the victim’s perception of reality while maintaining a position of truth-holder and authority.

Roberts, Tuesda, and Dorinda J. Carter Andrews. “A Critical Race Analysis of the Gaslighting against African American Teachers.” Contesting the Myth of a” Post Racial Era”: The Continued Significance of Race in US Education, 2013, 69–94.

A small but growing amount of the scientific literature considers gaslighting a form of abuse. It’s also worth knowing about a close cousin of gaslighting known as “DARVO.”

DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle blower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation. […]

In a 2017 peer-reviewed open-access research study, Perpetrator Responses to Victim Confrontation: DARVO and Victim Self-Blame, Harsey, Zurbriggen, & Freyd reported that: “(1) DARVO was commonly used by individuals who were confronted; (2) women were more likely to be exposed to DARVO than men during confrontations; (3) the three components of DARVO were positively correlated, supporting the theoretical construction of DARVO; and (4) higher levels of exposure to DARVO during a confrontation were associated with increased perceptions of self-blame among the confronters. These results provide evidence for the existence of DARVO as a perpetrator strategy and establish a relationship between DARVO exposure and feelings of self-blame.

If DARVO seems vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s a popular tactic in the far-Right. Brett Kavanaugh used it during his Congressional hearing, this YouTuber encountered it quite a bit among the Proud Boys, and even RationalWiki’s explanation of it invokes the Christian far-Right. DARVO may be common among sexual abusers, but it’s important to stress that it’s not exclusive to them. It’s best to think of this solely as an abusive tactic to evade scrutiny, without that extra baggage. [Read more…]

First you struggle, then you get coopted by religion, and then you die

I just learned that the Art Institute of Seattle has closed. This is bad news — I knew people who went there and others who aspired to go there. It seemed like a good place, and the closure is doing deep harm to people.

The Art Institute of Seattle will close abruptly on Friday, leaving about 650 students in the lurch — without classes, professors, or possibly diplomas.

The Washington Student Achievement Council (WSAC), a state regulation agency, announced the end of the school’s 73-year tenure on Wednesday, just over two weeks before the winter quarter was supposed to end.

These are students who’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars into their education, who are probably still carrying daunting amounts of debt, and who’ve now been told they pissed away years of their youth and all of their investment and will get nothing for their trouble. How could this happen? How can the government stand aside and let this happen? This was an accredited institution which, one would think, was an assurance of quality.

One clue is in a few key words in this summary:

The Art Institutes, a group of art colleges nationwide, has struggled with financial troubles for years; the company that owned them went bankrupt in 2017 and Dream Center Foundation, a faith-based nonprofit, bought the schools. Court filings show that since the purchase, the schools have grappled with financial issues.

Oh, here’s another clue: A College Chain Crumbles, and Millions in Student Loan Cash Disappears. Somebody skimmed off a lot of cash in this deal, not just from the Art Institute, but a whole mess of struggling colleges that were snapped up by a religious entity.

The affected schools — Argosy University, South University and the Art Institutes — have about 26,000 students in programs spanning associate degrees in dental hygiene and doctoral programs in law and psychology. Fourteen campuses, mostly Art Institute locations, have a new owner after a hastily arranged transfer involving private equity executives. More than 40 others are under the control of a court-appointed receiver who has accused school officials of trying to keep the doors open by taking millions of dollars earmarked for students.

26,000 students? This is unconscionable. The first problem is that these colleges were bought out by Pentacostal evangelical Christians with no experience in running an educational institution.

Dream Center is connected to Angelus Temple, which was founded by Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist once portrayed by Faye Dunaway in a TV movie, “The Disappearance of Aimee.” It is affiliated with the Foursquare Church, an evangelical denomination with outposts in 146 countries.

Buying a chain of schools “aligns perfectly with our mission, which views education as a primary means of life transformation,” Randall Barton, the foundation’s managing director, said when Dream Center announced its plan.

But Dream Center had never run colleges. It hired a team including Brent Richardson, who worked on the conversion of Grand Canyon University to a nonprofit as its chairman, to lead the schools’ corporate parent, Dream Center Education Holdings. He stepped down in January.

Alarms were ringing from the moment the takeover was proposed. Dream Center’s effort to buy the failing ITT Technical Institutes schools had fallen apart after resistance from the Obama administration. When it asked to buy Education Management’s schools, consumer groups, members of Congress and some regional accreditors raised concerns.

The second problem is more secular: the gang of idiots currently running the country, who are engaged in a thrilling give-away of our assets to line their own pockets.

Led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Education Department has reversed an Obama-era crackdown on troubled vocational and career schools and allowed new and less experienced entrants into the field.

“The industry was on its heels, but they’ve been given new life by the department under DeVos,” said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

Ms. DeVos, who invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges before taking office, has made it an agency priority to unfetter for-profit schools by eliminating restrictions on them. She also allowed several for-profit schools to evade even those loosened rules by converting to nonprofits.

That’s what Dream Center wanted to do when it asked to buy the remains of Education Management Corporation.

Schools are just plunder to these people. One has to wonder, though, how the church’s “mission” would have been implemented in these secular schools, if they hadn’t run them straight into the ground.

Pruitt Resigned! Now what?

EDIT: Pruitt is being replaced by his deputy, Andrew Wheeler. More on him soon.

Living in the Trump era has made me more than a little paranoid. I think it’s a good thing that Pruitt is out, but I do not trust that he left for the obvious reasons. I would very much like to be wrong, but I doubt this will mean an end to Pruitt’s agenda, or to deliberate waste of resources. Twenty years ago, I think we could expect that Pruitt’s resignation would be followed by his incarceration, and some level of contrition from his defenders. Ten years ago, I would expect Pruitt to be replaced by somebody who is much more boring, and will push ahead the exact same agenda with less flambouyant corruption.

Now? Now I’m not so sure. For all I know, the “new normal” is escalation, and the next person will be Charles or David Koch, or Joe Barton.

This could be a victory, but I think it’s far too soon for celebration.

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The Gender Inclusivity of Diverse White Privilege Equity

Blame Shiv for this one; she posted about someone at Monsanto inviting Jordan Peterson to talk about GMOs, and it led me down an interesting rabbit hole. For one thing, the event already happened, and it was the farce you were expecting. This, however, caught my eye:

Corrupt universities—and Women’s Studies departments in particular, he says—are responsible for turning students into activists who will one day tear apart the fabric of society. “The world runs on ideas. And the ideas that are in the universities are the ideas that are going to be in the general public in five to ten years. And there’s no shielding yourself from it,” he said.

Peterson also shared a trick for figuring out whether or not a child’s school has been affected by the coming crisis: If a schoolteacher uses any of the five words listed on his display screen—”diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equity,” “white privilege,” or “gender”—then a child has been “exposed.”

What’s Peterson’s solution for all this? “The answer to the ills that our society still obviously suffers from,” he said, is that “people should adopt an ethos of responsibility rather than continually clamoring about their rights, which is something that we’ve been talking about for about four decades too long, as far as I can surmise.”

Four decades puts us back into the 1970’s, when women’s liberation groups were calling to be able to exercise their right to bodily autonomy, to be free from violence, to equal pay for equal work, to equal custody of kids. If Peterson is opposed to that then he’s more radical than most MRAs, who are generally fine with Second Wave feminism. I wonder if he’s a lost son of Phyllis Schlafly.

But more importantly, he appears to be warning us of a crisis coming in 5-10 years, one that invokes those five terms as holy writ. That’s …. well, let’s step through it.

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The Heartland Institute.

The Heartland Institute is still busy, somewhat behind the scenes, in their quest to mold the constitution to their desires, none of which are good.

The Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank that promotes free-market ideology and denounces climate-change “alarmism,” published an interview this week with Neal Schuerer, an advocate for a “convention of states” to propose a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The BBA effort is one of several active right-wing campaigns to convene a convention under Article V of the Constitution in order to limit the powers of the federal government. Under Article V, if 34 states submit calls for a convention to propose constitutional amendments on a given topic, Congress must call a convention of states.

[…]

Proponents of a convention to promote a balanced budget amendment have been sparring in recent years with an even more aggressive effort that aims to dramatically limit the jurisdiction and power of the federal government, replacing our current constitutional order with one focused on states’ rights. That effort is backed by Religious Right leaders, including Alliance Defending Freedom’s Mike Farris, Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver, Christian-nation “historian” David Barton and anti-marriage-equality activist Robert George.

Just like our evangelical government, this too is serious business, and needs to be known about and taken seriously. Now that all the christians slavering over end times have gotten their Idiot King to make the Jerusalem move, they are feeling powerful and unstoppable. And they just might be, given that the Tiny Tyrant cannot say no to them, and most people being blissfully unaware of what they are doing.

Schuerer himself calls the BBA a “first step”:

A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is the first step in reining in an all-powerful, all-consuming central bureaucratic government that our founding document attempted to guard against.

We as citizens of the United States have the right and duty to bring about responsible reform to our founding document, reflecting the values of the people and the nature of free and independent states. We know what needs to be done. All we need is the courage to just do it.

It’s important to realize that this is not about constitution reform and dragging that moldy document into the current century; this is about making it even more regressive. These are people who want the power and right to oppress and prosecute all those people they have problems with, which amounts to most people.

Schuerer says his group Campaign Constitution is working with the Heartland Institute’s Center for Constitutional Reform to “bring all the competing interests together.” And he talks about how close his group’s effort is to reaching the threshold of 34 states:

The Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force entered the 2017 state legislative year with great expectations, following the Trump election and the number of Republican governors and legislature majorities growing.

Twenty-eight states had active applications, with the goal of adding four to the number—Arizona, Idaho, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—bringing the number of active applications to 32.

Arizona and Wyoming approved the BBA application resolution. Maryland, New Mexico, and Nevada rescinded applications, making a net loss of one and bringing the number of active applications to 27. Recently, Wisconsin approved the BBA application, returning the total to 28.

Moving into 2018, there is very little margin. Idaho, Kentucky, and South Carolina are a must, bringing us to 31 active applications.

Montana will likely join in when it gets that close, to 32.  Minnesota and Virginia are tough calls because of internal political disagreements on the issue of an Article V amendment convention. Washington state and Maine are anyone’s guess.

That brings the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force and the national Article V movement to 32 states by the end of 2018.

Now would be the time to get very worried, and to try and find ways to counter these evil assholes who are intent on making things much, much worse. Every day, we get closer to the Theocalypse.

Via RWW.

Lies National Geographic Told Me: Trieste

This is part of a short series that I will try to drop over the course of the year. I grew up reading National Geographic and it wasn’t until I was well into my adulthood that I discovered that I had been absorbing subtle doses of propaganda along with the cool stuff that excited and inspired me. While you’re reading about this one, you may be thinking “What about PROJECT JENNIFER?!” and, if you are, don’t worry – I’ll get to that one eventually, too.

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