By coincidence, just last week I read about the sad death of historian Robert Conquest, the man who was able to succeed where Muggeridge failed and drag Britain and America kicking and screaming into admitting Stalin wasn’t such a great guy. Conquest had one great advantage over Muggeridge, which was that he wrote in 1968 when, far from being our allies in a world war, the Soviets were technically our Cold War enemies and we were sort of okay with hearing bad things about them. But even then, he faced an extraordinary uphill battle.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/

haha what is this backwards shit

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

i'm getting flak (lol) from dudes who say my rebuttal is hard to read because of all the insults. i said nice things though. have you met me??

i know someone who loves this shitty codex and once i sent them the exiled thing about malcolm gladwell and they refused to read it because it wasnt professional sounding, too many insults

EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

Goatstein crossposted this on MPC

i keep forgetting that site exists then when someone brings it up i go and check the top posts

I just completed my first year of teaching. Most of what I'll say in this post won't really surprise any of you racist pieces of shit here on MPC, but it might be helpful if you're considering homeschooling.

I taught 6th graders at a school district that was, until a few years ago, very small and very white. It was the kind of town where the school staff probably went to church with most of the parents of their students. It was known in the immediate area as the place to go for good schools. Like every district I've worked for, the superintendent is a corrupt shitbag surrounded by a small army of ass kissing sycophants. A few years ago they had a bit of a budget problem, so to make some money fast they opened the school district. Before this, they kept the schools white by having staff that drove around and verified addresses; this kept DeShaun's mom from lying about his address to get him in. They removed that requirement in order to get more students and thus more funding. Since the district is fairly close to Dallas, all of those good boys and girls who don't do nuffin but get kicked out of school anyway were able to flood into the district. This was, of course catastrophic.

Immediately the district's test scores dropped. Previously, this district was full of schools that were always Exemplary or Recognized, which means a high percentage of students passing the STAAR test, which is the Texas standardized test. Even the schools that were on the poor side of town did pretty well. With the influx of vibrant diversity, the scores dropped and everybody started panicking. Don't let anybody fool you, either. Those test scores are the ONLY metric anybody cares about.

So when I started teaching, the district was still struggling to handle their newly vibrant student population. We had a discipline system that was created to address the typical problems of a white, small town. I have no doubt it was a terrific system when it was created, but it just cannot handle typical black behavior. I think Pleasureman was the first person I ever heard talk about how whites are inherently high order, while blacks are inherently low order. I knew what he meant, but given control over classes of whites, blacks, and Mexican kids, it's painfully clear.

Most black students, simply put, are not fit for classrooms designed for white children. The white classroom, the white teacher, and the white students all want some order. They want quiet when they try to work. Chaos isn't enjoyable for them. That isn't to say white kids don't like cutting up and cutting loose, but if they are expected to learn, they want to do it in an organized fashion. Black students, on the other hand, cannot understand why they can't talk over each other. They don't get why they can't talk over their teacher. They don't understand why they're getting in trouble for yelling in class. They're upset that they can't sing, or dance, or listen to music loudly. Sitting there, being quiet, is nearly impossible for a lot of my black students. Part of this was their age, but the majority of my white and Mexican students were able to control themselves, even when they were bursting with energy. Blacks just think you're a weirdo for not wanting them to rap a little in the middle of a lesson.

To kind of give you an idea, here is what a typical class might look like. I had to monitor the hallways in between classes (more on this in a bit), so I had to start each class outside of my room. I give students a small assignment to work on before the lesson starts. When I walk in, out of 30 students, maybe 20 have completed the assignment and are talking quietly with their friends, or are working on it. The remaining students are usually the black students. They're doing a variety of things. Most common is yelling at each other in conversation. They yell over each other, they yell at each other, they yell across the room. They sit in small groups, yelling at each other, usually with one repeating something over and over at the top of her lungs, something like "OH MY GAH! OH MY GAH!". Some of them are up and chasing each other around. A lot of times they'd be dancing or singing. I'd get them under control and start handing out discipline, to a chorus of "What? I didn't even do anything! I was just talking!"

So I'd start the lesson. During the lesson, the black students are shouting out. I found that there is no real way to stop them from shouting out answers or opinions. If you get a lesson they really enjoy, they'll only shout enthusiastic answers, but they will shout out.(Tip : If you can relate your lesson to a recent horror movie in any way, black kids will like your lesson) You can write them up all day every day for it, but they just can't help themselves. If you do get them to raise their hands, they can't do it without going "Ooooooo oooo ooo ooooooo!" while they wave their hands and stand up. Usually, though, they'll just start having a loud conversation that interrupts everybody else. When you call them on it, they argue that they weren't doing anything but talking. To a black kid, talking loudly during a lesson isn't anything bad. The chaos and noise of these conversations is normal for them. If you've ever been around groups of black people, you know what I'm talking about. That conversational order, that process of listening and talking, is mostly foreign to them. They want to talk, at the same time, getting louder and louder.

This wasn't just my low scoring kids, either. I had black girls and boys who were meticulous with their work, high scorers, good readers and writers. Intelligent kids. They still did this, though, all of the time. It's a cultural thing, and it is completely incompatible with classrooms that you or I would learn in. The lack of future time orientation is another big problem. More than once, I would address a black student directly. "If you do that one more time today, I'm going to call your parents." A lot of black parents are fond of belt discipline, and their kids would tell me that. So I'd give them a few chances, then tell them I'd call their parents. They'd still do whatever I'd told them not to. I'd tell them I'd call their parents, and they'd start crying, hysterically, knowing they were going to get "a whuppin." I'd ask them why they continued acting up after I'd told them I'd call their parents, and they'd always answer "I don't know.". And they didn't know. This would happen to the same kids, over and over, and they'd never learn to stop before it got to that point. It was mind boggling. I had white and Mexican kids that I'd had to threaten to call parents once all year. After that, when they got close to that point, they'd shut up and sit down quietly for the rest of class.

Another fundamental difference between black students and white and Mexican students is the way you have to talk to them. I learned that with white kids, you can be gently firm. Mostly they'll correct their behavior. If you get too sharp with them too fast, it gets them really upset. If you get harsh with them, they assume they made a huge mistake. Black kids, on the other hand, are used to being talked to in a loud, commanding voice. You try gentle firmness with a black kid, and he or she will assume you're weak and unfit to lead them. I had one girl tell me she wasn't afraid of any man that wasn't black. I found that if you get a little loud, a little harsh, they tend to listen. We had a great black female teacher who was aces at getting black kids to listen to her. You could hear her yelling from down the hall. So sometimes I would be a little louder and tolerate less nonsense from the black kids, because that's what they responded to. My principal pulled me aside and told me I was being too harsh, despite the fact that I wasn't even close to as loud and demanding as the black teacher. It was my job to let the black kids run roughshod over me, I guess, in the interest of acting like a good, neutered white.

I want to point out that most of the behavior of the black kids wasn't malicious or mean-spirited. I had a lot of smart and sweet black kids who acted like this, but again it's a cultural thing. I liked a bunch of these kids, and recognized them as decent, but they were wholly incapable of existing within the framework of what I consider a normal classroom. Not to be a corny, backpedaling faggot, but I also had several quiet, smart, well-behaved black kids. They got a lot of shit from their peers, though. The black kids would sneer "Oh, she never get in trouble" or "she always good" to the really good black students. They'd try like hell to get the good kids to act foolish, and ridicule them for not joining in. Again, not to be a corny faggot, but it takes some kind of guts for an 11 year old to reject that kind of peer pressure.

Our hallways were also a mess. All of the black kids would group up and essentially block the hallways, yelling at each other, dancing, chasing each other, or just standing there rapping or singing. They made it mandatory for teachers to go into the hallways and break up these groups, which would break up and immediately reform down the hallway. Again, calling out the students and applying discipline resulted in screeching "I didn't do nothing! You gonna write me up for TALKING!?" (Answer : yes). The students were supposed to have a two minute passing period, but another holdover from the white days was no late bell. So you'd have black kids saunter in ten or fifteen minutes after they were supposed to be in class. Of course, when they walk in late, all of their friends yell out "Ohhhh you late!" and they argue back and forth, and once again I'm wasting class time calming everybody down because there was some minor distraction that turned into a full scale yelling conversation about who was late, who was in the bathroom, and was she taking a boo-boo? Oh my gah, she was takin a boo-boo! When these kids started up, you could see the rest of the class just hang their heads and slump in their chairs. They hated the bullshit as much as I did.

Our administration was caught in limbo. Almost all of the repeat offenders who were getting detentions, in-school suspension, and going to alternative school were black, many were Mexican, and few were white. In an equality-focused and diverse school system, this presents a problem on paper. We normally had a ten step process to wind up in alternative school. With problem minorities, this was often ignored until they had racked up 15 or more. I was told, off the record, that this was to make sure that when the parents came in screaming racism, they could show them that their students had been given far more chances than they should have been. This lead to situations where a student would get three or four office referrals in a day, and the administration would group them together and talk to the student, deciding to make the referrals not count as discipline infractions. Meanwhile, one of my students, a white girl, got into a shoving match with a boy. First big infraction, immediately sent to alternative school. Admin was eager to get some whites in there to bolster the numbers so we didn't look racist. One black kid, who was a notorious troublemaker, only had to serve three days of his 30 day stint in alternative because his mom complained and everybody backed down. The kid was immediately in trouble again, but never got sent back to alternative school. School administration wants nothing more than to avoid rocking the boat.

So, to boil down this gigantic post, a handful of vibrantly diverse students can essentially hold a school hostage. If you have gutless administration and education geared towards a white standard, a lot of black students will be unable to handle it. This is bad for the white kids and the black kids. When I worked in majority black schools, the staff was able to work better in the chaotic environment. They were allowed to do things that we couldn't, like play music. Playing music seems to help a lot for whatever reason. I thought it was insane to see teachers playing R&B while they tried to teach. I get it now. Black kids don't do very well in quiet, orderly classrooms.

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

there's a decent number of dumb typos in the original post (ITOP) that i can't edit. damn you gjoey

yeah that's dumb. I tried to fix a few yesterday. if you want to send me a new version pm it to me and I'll put it in there.

I guess joey probably imagined that if he didn't do that, eventually someone would edit all their articles to just say "haha lol gay balls are gay" or something

thirdplace posted:

I don't understand how you would ever end up here

I don't understand how I did either

aerdil posted:

i keep forgetting that site exists then when someone brings it up i go and check the top posts

apparently my entire family on my mother's side, and all my intermediate classmates at secondary school before i was moved into the higher set, are albino african-americans

There’s also a parallel in that 4chan has generated nationalist ideology via ironic racism. In the case of somethingawful, the subforum laissez faire was taken over by jokers making up ever more extreme left wing philosophies like “Maoism Third Worldism” (not to be confused with Mao’s third world theory), which states that only third worlders are proletarian, and nowadays has sincere advocates (see Jason Unruhe). Eventually the memes became real, and the sub-forum became populated by proto-SJWs.