- Conservative ideas of education: replace teachers with robots;
- Takes on Stephen Miller, white supremacists, Trump voters, college Republicans, taking away the car keys, and Pete Hegseth by Tom Nichols and Paul Krugman;
- Radiohead: “I Might Be Wrong”
This is a pretty easy one.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: Why MAGA fears human teachers, subtitled “Melania Trump’s robot stunt opens a new front in the GOP’s war on education”
Describing Melania Trump’s appearance with a humanoid robot, as in the photo above.
For decades, the GOP has been leading an assault on public education. In the 1980s and 1990s, the gripe was “stick to reading, writing and ‘rithmetic,” which implies hostility toward expanding those lessons to more complex ideas like literary analysis, critical thinking, and higher math and sciences. This talking point, which implies that no one needs more than a fifth grade education, fell out of favor as more kids began going to college. The shape of the complaints may have shifted. But conservatives have clung to arguments about providing students with a “classical education,” which essentially means not teaching anything that wouldn’t have been found in a 19th-century classroom. They have pushed “school choice,” which has the end goal of funneling money out of public schools and into religious schools run by fundamentalist Christians. They have also championed homeschooling. Most recently, we saw the rise of Moms for Liberty, a group whose name hides its real aim: to redefine censorship as “parents’ rights” with the goal of removing books that portray people of color, women and LGBTQ people as deserving of full rights and dignity.
The GOP wants to replace human teachers with robots. As always, their motivations are obvious, and are consistent with their antipathy toward the complex and the modern. And:
The right’s war on public education has always been rooted in fear that kids will learn empathy, curiosity and critical thinking skills — all of which could lead to them questioning, or even challenging, authority. But while some right-wing radicals, especially in the homeschooling world, do fantasize about ending public schools altogether, there’s a begrudging acceptance in the GOP that it’s nearly impossible to work and live as an adult in a 21st-century economy without a level of knowledge and skills that only trained educators can provide. This has given rise to a persistent fantasy of finding a way to circumvent the role of the teacher and instead download literacy, math and other basic skills into students, without teaching them all the analytical skills that provoke independent thought.
Of course, neither AI itself nor robots (which would require AI) can do any such teaching yet. What’s really going on here?
Melania Trump explicitly dangled the promise that AI teachers would allow parents to forgo school for homeschooling, “completely replacing the ‘woke’ public school teachers who insist on ‘pushing’ social-emotional learning and various other progressive ‘agendas.’” Homeschooling would mean taking students out of the peer group a school provides.
And,
“Social-emotional learning” is pedagogical jargon for the school’s role in teaching kids social skills, and it’s become a demonized concept on the right. They’re not wrong that kids who learn basic lessons like “respect others” at school might start extrapolating to forbidden ideas on the right, like “bigotry is bad” and “Donald Trump is immoral.” But while it may have a new term, social-emotional learning has always been a vital function of education. It’s why schools have clubs, sports and school dances, instead of, well, strapping every kid to a computer that tries to download basic knowledge and skills they will need to perform job tasks, but offers them nothing about relating to others, which are often called “soft skills.”
My take on this is blunt: conservatives seem to want to program their children into a fixed set of ideas and beliefs, and avoid any kind of reflection or analysis that might encourage them to think for themselves, or challenge authority. Preserve the past; everything worth knowing was known by the ancients, by the prophets, by the elders, by the founders. And suppress any evidence to the contrary. (And this works! Until the world starts changing, as it’s been doing in recent centuries.) Marcotte concludes:
Kids are entitled to a well-rounded education that teaches them to be better people, not just parrot information. Knowledge without thinking has long been a right-wing dream, but it’s incompatible with how human brains actually work. We need each other to give information context and meaning — to have teachers. AI is a shiny new toy, but it can’t dislodge this basic reality of human psychology.
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More insights into the people running our government, and their supporters.
JMG (from Daily Mail): Daily Mail: Voldemort Ordered ICE Agents To “Force Confrontations” With Protest Groups In Minneapolis
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Washington Post, today: Trump officials cite white supremacists in bid to end birthright citizenship, subtitled “An argument heading to the Supreme Court is built in part on a post-Civil War campaign that scholars say was steeped in anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism.”
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NY Times, guest essay by Kristen Soltis Anderson (a Republican pollster), today: MAGA Was Supposed to Be Antiwar. Nope. [gift link]
My take: MAGA has no principles, beyond tribal loyalty to Trump. They may have said they supported no-more-wars and America-first, but if Trump wants to start a war, they’re all for it.
When I separate Republican respondents on whether they think of themselves as a Trump supporter or a Republican Party supporter first, I find that more than nine in 10 Trump-first Republicans support the Iran strikes, compared with only 72 percent of party-first Republicans. When explicitly asked if the war counts as an America-first policy, only 9 percent of Mr. Trump’s most loyal backers say it does not.
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JMG, from the Guardian, today: College Republicans Leader Made Racist, Antisemitic, Homophobic, And Sexist Statements On Livestreams
The newly appointed College Republicans of America political director Kai … Schwemmer said he would accept a world in which slavery was legal if abortion was criminalised, describes himself as “very much an anti universal suffrage guy” and accepts a supporter’s description of him as “our Mormon Nick Fuentes” – referring to the white nationalist influencer whose platform he streamed on for years.
And: “he claims gay men are ‘weaponizing’ gyms ‘to give you Aids'”. It’s key that these people are so stupid.
Once again, not every Republican is racist and so on, but people who are racist, antisemitic, homophobic, and sexist are almost certainly Republican.
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Via AlterNet: The Guardian, opinion by Gaby Hinsliff, today: Never mind leading the free world, if Donald Trump were your ageing father, when would you take away his car keys?
Subtitled: “Presidential decisions can mean life or death for millions around the world, that’s why constitutional safeguards exist. But do they work in practice?”
Donald Trump’s cognitive skills are amazing. So amazing! So great! So much better than any other dumb presidential contender you could mention, at least according to Trump himself, who bragged once again last week of how he had repeatedly aced what he calls “a very hard test for a lot of people”. (It’s thought he means a screening tool for mild cognitive impairment in elderly people.)
Sure, the 79-year-old leader of the free world recently interrupted a cabinet meeting in the middle of a war to ramble on at length about a conversation he supposedly had with the head of the Sharpie pen company over supplying bespoke presidential felt-tips, of which the firm said it could find no record. And made a baffling joke about Pearl Harbor during a press conference in front of an alarmed-looking Japanese prime minister. And called the strait of Hormuz the “strait of Trump”, before adding that that was absolutely deliberate because “there are no accidents with me”. But anyway, to be clear, his mental state is great. The greatest!
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The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, today: Pete Hegseth Is Vice Signaling, subtitled “The defense secretary is trolling America.”
The term virtue signaling refers to an annoying moral peacocking that has less to do with politics than with self-gratification. It’s the dinner guest who feels compelled to comment on the climate impact of every course. It’s the guy who annoys his colleagues during meetings with constant bits of civic guidance. …
But Donald Trump and his administration have embraced the Mirror Universe version of virtue signaling. They’ve pioneered the practice of “vice signaling,” or saying insulting or odious things both as attention-seeking behavior and as a way of showcasing their supposedly transgressive political views. They aim to demonstrate strength by being willing to appall other people, much as schoolyard bullies insult their classmates to gain the approval of other bullies. It’s the same peacocking, but with uglier feathers.
Few people besides the president himself have done more to advance the cause of vice signaling than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a man who honed his communication skills at Fox News, where the hosts routinely say outrageous things as a way of showing their viewers how eager they are to own the libs.
Concerning his deletion of four black and female officers from a promotion list, and many other examples.
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And Paul Krugman today.
Paul Krugman: Pete Hegseth Believes in the Lethality Fairy
Subtitled: “Overwhelming violence of action” as the solution to all problems
He recalls the “confidence fairy” as the imagined solution to the financial crisis of 2008.
In this case, our Secretary of Defense, which is his legal title, although he calls himself the Secretary of War, continually argues that if only we get even more violent, if only we do even more damage, that this will somehow translate into success in Iran. He clearly relishes the thought of violence himself. He’s now holding prayer breakfasts, and in his prayer breakfast, he called upon the Lord to support us in “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
I think this is deeply un-American, but anyway, aside from the evilness — I don’t think there’s any other way to put it — of the world view, how is this supposed to work? If you look at the plans or ideas that are being bruited for using ground forces now, and that’s clearly very much sort the next step here, for using ground forces against Iran, well, yeah, you can seize Kharg Island, although hanging onto it could be very expensive, but then what?
He goes on about how our current military plans make no sense. Concluding:
I really don’t know how this ends, except that it does feel as if this is a quagmire largely in the minds of top Trump officials, Trump himself and Hegseth, who having this utterly unshakable belief that hurting people will produce great results, respond to each failure of violence to produce results by getting even more destructive with no end game in sight.
Have a great day.
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Here’s a song from Radiohead’s album Amnesiac, from 2001, which I think was the first one of theirs that I bought. I’m endlessly fascinated by this album, because it’s weird and immersive and despite the fact that it all sounds pretty much the same. (Or maybe because the track listing on the back isn’t numbered and so it’s actually hard to tell which track you’re listening to at any given moment.) The album is said to be largely leftovers from the previous album, Kid A, which had more distinctive hits. This is “I Might Be Wrong.” Lyrics here.
