10218

report that claimed Duggar sexually molested five girls as far back as 2002. The incidents were not reported to police until 2006 and authorities could not pursue charges because the statute of limitations had passed.

Jesus. How short is the statute of limitations on child molestation in that state?

10219

https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article251069219.html

On Wednesday, Samsel, R-Wellsville, was substitute teaching at the Wellsville school district’s secondary school. Throughout the day, high school students began recording videos of the lawmaker talking about suicide, sex, masturbation, God and the Bible.
[…]
Samsel is the second Kansas lawmaker to be arrested this year. Former Senate Majority Leader Gene Suellentrop, a Wichita Republican, was charged with felony eluding and fleeing from police and also faces misdemeanor charges of drunk and reckless driving […] On Twitter, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas posted: “What the hell is going on with the #KSLEG this session?” He added that Samsel “shouldn’t just be terminated from substituting. He should be blocked from being around all kids.”

10220

There are some real WTF moments in there. Such as kneeing a student in the crotch, suggesting a foster kid who had gay parents would want to kill themselves, bullying a student, telling kids to go make babies.

Just, wow.

10221

Lock him up!

10222

Speaking of bad teachers…

In what turned out to be a Zoom class unlike any other, students at Dickinson High School said their teacher gave them a profane rant — and a lesson in hate. A discussion on climate change devolved as teacher Howard Zlotkin aired his grievances with the students.

“If you think I’m privileged then f— you, because my daughter thinks I’m privileged and I don’t speak to her,” he was seen saying in a recording of the online class session. At one point he started yelling and cursing at one student.

“I hear people whining and crying about Black Lives Matter, but George Floyd was a f-----g criminal and he got arrested and he got killed because he wouldn’t comply and the bottom line is we make him a f-----g hero,” Zlotkin is heard saying in a recording.

Zlotkin has been at Dickinson High School for 20 years, teaching various courses like Biology, Science and Landscape and Design.

He also has been suspended with pay from his adjunct professor position at Hudson County Community College, HCCC spokeswoman Jennifer Christopher said. She said his “offensive and derogatory language” is in violation of the college’s anti-harassment policy and professional conduct policy.

10223

Romney was booed off the stage at the GOP state convention today.

If I was the Dems, I’d be using that for attack ads targeted at never-Trumpers to show them that they’re not going to be welcomed back. Especially if Cheney gets primaried out.

The lesson is: you either come along with us, or you get the fash.

10224
10225

My fantasy is that a couple of Republican senators flip to the Dems side and vote to make DC a state. I have a better chance of winning the lottery, I know.

10226

Don’t you need a LOT of senators to flip so they can’t filibuster? Cloture requires 60 votes, and it feels like “a few” doesn’t get us from 50 to 60.

10227
10228

I mean we know this is how it works, but generally it’s considered bad form to admit to being bribed.

10229

Some quality fellow-kids there in Cruz’s tweet.

Also I love so much the Republican tantrums about big corporations bowing to uh wokeness or whatever.

There may be the occasional C-level exec factoring “woke” moral judgments into their decisions, but 99 percent of the time they are following what the marketing & branding bots are telling them is best for the company’s image with the consumer demos they care most about.

So I guess have fun declaring war on, like, people who shop at Target. Pricks.

10230
10231

I feel like it’s bad to get stuck in the dichotomy of “critical race theory is bad” and “slavery is bad”.

Slavery is entirely bad… But critical race theory involves a lot of intellectually bankrupt bullshit.

10232

I think critical race theory in this case is being used as an attack in the same way communist is being used as an attack against Romney.

In the context of the tweet “critical race theory” means “someone expressed sadness over slavery”

10233

I mean, the guy who said it is obviously a dumbass, so who knows.

The kinds of things that I’ve seen advocated in critical race theory, that I don’t think have value teaching, are notions that logical discourse doesn’t have value because it’s inherently racist, being developed by the greeks.

To me, it seems like we can teach kids logic as a universal skill, while simultaneously teaching actual historical information about racism and slavery.

10234

Critical Race Theory is arguably like many western intellectual academic theories since the 1980s deeply feminist and psychologically female in that they’re much concerned with reacting rather than action and making the other party aware of their actions rather than changing their own. Very deeply concerned with validating experience and externalizing the cause and blame of that experience. No one would ever dare say this outside of … like… a forum buried in the internet though.

This doesn’t mean by its nature that makes it wrong entirely either it’s just … very not how many men see their interaction with the world and find it foreign on the face of things. It’s also because that since the 1970s strictly speaking legal discrimination based on race had been banned, so finding the cause of inequalities sort of by default have to have a new framework under which to operate.

10235

This sounds a lot like Pomo ideas Dawkins railed against 20 years ago in Unweaving the Rainbow, but I don’t know whether he was attacking a caricature to some extent. The “Principia as rape manual” bit is a famous chestnut from those rhetorical battles.

Anyway I’m not well read enough in critical race theory (that is, at all) to have a useful opinion.

10236

Wow, that’s a take and a half. The complaint about cancel culture is like the cherry on top.

The kids of things I’ve seen advocated in conservative theory, that I don’t think have value teaching, are notions that gay people cause hurricanes.

Dawkins is not at all a trustworthy source on this topic.

10237

There wasn’t anything about cancel culture there at all, or at least not intentionally. Anyway the point was that Critical Race Theory has some valid points and more importantly different points of view, rather than saying it’s all right or all wrong. Like all these sorts of modern ideologies though they’re only off the rails a bit if you take it as the sole and entirely complete “theory” of modern western societies; and of course some of its advocates surely do, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to.

The problem CRT has is that it, if you kind of follow down its logic, seems to reject all current nation-states and the legal systems underpinning them on a very fundamental level. It’s kind of the modern version of Marxism in that respect, where rejecting the inequalities of capitalism means chucking the whole thing overboard. CRT can hold these views without big issue as long as it remains more or less an academic discipline like post-modern philosophy or whatever. It’s hard to see putting the whole tranche of CRT beliefs into practice, were it to really, actually get political power on a significant and continental scale, without more or less blowing up the world. IE, it’s fine as critique from a point of view, it’s not so fine as a solution.