The DNC Version of “Democracy”

The recent DNC coup seals the deal. Biden is out and Kamala Harris is in. Is that democracy in action? The Washington Post thinks so, as Matt Taibbi explains in his article, "In Final Kick in the Pants, Departing Biden Denounced as Another Trump: When Joe Biden failed to immediately assume the position when party bigwigs called for his head, Beltway insiders lumped him in with the Orange One". An Excerept:

Florida canceled a primary for him; North Carolina, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Wisconsin submitted only his name to ballots; and New Hampshire chose delegates through a “nominating event” that didn’t include voters. Under a new vision in which “the DNC [was] not something separate” from the Biden campaign, the party refused to schedule debates with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dean Phillips, or Marianne Williamson. Proof that “America’s beleaguered system still functioned” would have involved a competitive primary through which Democratic voters could discover Biden’s infirmities early enough for them to have a say in choosing a fitter candidate. Instead, the public was only confronted with the truth a few weeks ago, by which time only internal party power brokers were positioned to make a change. That’s a failure of democracy, unless you think choosing a candidate without voter input is a systemic improvement.

The Post cheered the stage-managed primary season throughout, running laudatory pieces about “How the DNC challenger-proofed the primaries for Biden” and profiles of the “hidden campaign” Biden ran with the party. The paper noted the Biden team’s belief that the president could “seize the advantage of a unified party apparatus” while “splintered” Republicans faced “an increasingly bitter primary battle between Trump and his rivals for the presidential nomination.” In reality, Republicans benefited from competition, getting long looks at Trump and rivals like Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, while Biden was shielded from competition all the way through his calamitous collapse in the middle of a general election season.

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We Need More Hands-On Education Like This

I'm not being sarcastic. I think that the lack of hands-on know-how is damaging our children. They are not well-prepared for this world by clicking at their laptop computers and using their credit cards to hire other people to do so many of the physical things they need and want.

Thus,this video made my day:

I posted this on FB twice and FB took it down twice because it was "spam." I had merely posted this image with the link to Twitter, along with a comment that I enjoyed seeing this video of a Chinese kindergarten class:

This is the third time this month that FB has deleted my non-spam posts as "spam."

Here's how Facebook defines "Spam":

Spam Policy details

Policy Rationale We do not allow content that is designed to deceive, mislead, or overwhelm users in order to artificially increase viewership. This content detracts from people's ability to engage authentically on our platforms and can threaten the security, stability and usability of our services. We also seek to prevent abusive tactics, such as spreading deceptive links to draw unsuspecting users in through misleading functionality or code, or impersonating a trusted domain.

Online spam is a lucrative industry. Our policies and detection must constantly evolve to keep up with emerging spam trends and tactics. In taking action to combat spam, we seek to balance raising the costs for its producers and distributors on our platforms, with protecting the vibrant, authentic activity of our community.

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The Coddling, Continued . . .

Greg Lukianoff offered this summary of The Coddling of the American Mind as part of an update:

The central premise of the book is that we are giving a generation of young people extraordinarily terrible advice and then being frustrated with them when they follow it. We argue that we are unintentionally teaching a generation of students three “great untruths.” They are:

The great untruth of fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

The great untruth of emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

The great untruth of us versus them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

(Note: In my most recent book with the great Rikki Schlott, The Canceling of the American Mind, we have added a fourth great untruth, The Great Untruth of Ad Hominem, “bad people only have bad opinions.”)"

Continue ReadingThe Coddling, Continued . . .