Showing posts with label woke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label woke. Show all posts

April 17, 2025

Wait until Trump & Co. find out about Harvard Law's initiatives to "honor the enslaved people whose labor generated wealth that contributed to the school's founding." Harvard took a stand for truth, justice, and what should be the American way. By Hal M. Brown --

 


Trump’s war against Harvard is all over the news, but he has missed Harvard Law in particular.

In 2021 Harvard Law School changed it’s crest because the previous one had a connection to a slave owner. The Latin words mean truth, law, and justice. This is similar to Superman’s slogan about his fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way” which also has a complicated, albeit not tawdry, history (here)

Here’s an article about this from The Harvard Crimson:

The dean of the school, John F. Manning, wrote “I believe that the simple, elegant, and beautiful design of the new shield captures the complexity, the diversity, the limitlessness, the transformative power, the strength, and the energy that the HLS community, in Cambridge and throughout the world, sees in Harvard Law School.” There’s that verboten D word, diversity.

As if this isn’t enough reason for Trumpworld to go after Harvard here’s another.

Trump continues to try to make good on his promises about ending wokeness in universities:

Donald Trump’s vision for education revolves around a single goal: to rid America’s schools of perceived “ wokeness ” and “left-wing indoctrination.”

The president-elect wants to forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion offices. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports.

Throughout his campaign, the Republican depicted schools as a political battleground to be won back from the left. Now that he’s won the White House, he plans to use federal money as leverage to advance his vision of education across the nation.

Trump’s education plan pledges to cut funding for schools that defy him on a multitude of issues.

On his first day in office, Trump has repeatedly said he will cut money to “any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.” On the campaign trail, Trump said he would “not give one penny” to schools with vaccine or mask requirements. Reference.

I don’t want to give the Trump and his anti-woke sleuths another reason to go after Harvard, and especially such a bastion of liberalism as their law school. This reputation is in spite of the fact that notable conservatives like Ted Cruz got their law degrees there. While not lawyers, Trump has had many advisors who went to Harvard including Stephen K. Bannon, Jared C. Kushner ’03, Wilbur L. Ross, Jr., Michael R. Pompeo, and Elaine Chao (Reference). 

From: Harvard Alumni Have Powered the Trump Administration.

Harvard’s silence on graduates as recent as 2016 using their Harvard degrees to wage a full-fledged assault on the truth is unworthy of the University’s own “Veritas” motto. Failure to take a position or set the record straight on Harvard’s expectations of its alumni is a tacit endorsement that power itself is the school’s only true value. Discussions of ethical and moral leadership in my classes at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School ring hollow against this reality. Harvard should publicly commit to higher expectations for its alumni than achieving the social cachet to dance with the stars (as former Harvard Institute of Politics fellow Sean Spicer quite literally did last year).

I am getting off-topic here. 

Back to Harvard Law: I am surprised the Trumpers haven’t already found out about Harvard Law and gone after it in particular. Not only about the logo change, but what they did the following year:

Excerpt:

report issued on April 26 by the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery recounts in detail the many ways Harvard University participated in, and profited from, slavery, and the long history of discrimination against, and exclusion of, Black people by the university long after slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment.

In a statement to the Harvard Law School community shortly after the release of the committee’s report, Dean John F. Manning ’85 commented on the report and the law school’s own connections with slavery, and he announced several initiatives to honor and commemorate the enslaved people whose labor generated wealth that contributed to Harvard Law School’s founding and to better understand the legacy of slavery and the as yet unfinished business of advancing racial justice.

“[T]hough it is difficult, indeed heartbreaking, to read in cumulative detail the pervasive and grievous wrongs committed here at our university, only by honestly reckoning with this history can we together find new ways to make meaning of our past,” said Manning.

“We must also do these things in part because of the distinctive roles that law and the legal profession, at their best, can play in furthering the highest ideals of law and justice,” Manning wrote, stating that the law school must recommit itself to remedying the ills of “racism, inequality, and many other injustices that continue to this day in our society.”

Harvard Law is proudly woke, but when it comes to teaching about slavery, so is the the rest of the university. For example here’s just one of their courses from their Department of Continuing Education: Slavery and Race in American Law. “This course explores the relationship between enslavement and racialization in American law. The course starts from the premise that American slavery was an institution that enlisted law in support of power and exploitation.”

I do not think this it is any accident that if you look up Harvard Medical School this is what you see on their website:

Here’s the article about Harvard rejecting the Trump administration’s demands.

Trump obviously is going after Harvard with a vengeance because it is our preeminent university and has a legitimate reputation as being liberal. 

He’s going after Columbia and other colleges too, see for example “Trump demands unprecedented control at Columbia, alarming scholars and speech groups.”

The Trump administration brushed aside decades of precedent when it ordered Columbia University to oust the leadership of an academic department, a demand seen as a direct attack on academic freedom and a warning of what’s to come for other colleges facing federal scrutiny.

Federal officials told the university it must immediately place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years.” The demand was among several described as conditions for receiving federal funding, including $400 million already pulled over allegations of antisemitism.

I think that the anti-Semitism rationale is merely an excuse. The same goes of all the transgended and DEI attacks. If it wasn’t these issues Trump would find another reason to attack and try to control what universities taught. He may not know much about Mao’s reeducation camps where for decades, the Communist Party of China relied on reeducation camps to reform “parasites” and persuade people to support the communist cause. I have no doubt he wants our universities to be loyal and obedient supporters of him personally and his regime.

Here’s another quote from the article about Columbia:

President Donald Trump has been threatening to withhold federal funding from colleges that do not get in line with his agenda, from transgender athletes’ participating in women’s sports to diversity, equity and inclusion programs. On Friday, his administration announced investigations into 52 universities as part of his DEI crackdown.

What do freedom loving people around the world think about all of this? What do they think about the fact that the United States not only has an Education Secretary whose assigned mission is to demolish the Department of Education and comes from the world of Professional Wrestling, but who earned herself a fact check on Snopes? It is true that U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon twice referred to artificial intelligence — AI — as "A1."

Here she is in one of her X posts:

It has become hackneyed to bring up 1984 where the truth is what Big Brother says it is and to share this photo from the movie, but in closing, I will do it anyway.

On a related matter: 

What I don’t understand is how Trump can take away the tax exempt status of a university. I can see him having legal grounds for cutting their federal funding, but eliminating the tax exempt status of Harvard or any other university seems problematic. 

Even the Church of Scientology, after a several years long battle, maintained their tax exempt status as a religious insitition.

This is what the Association of American Universities says about the tax exempt status of colleges. The detailed article begins:

The vast majority of public and private universities and colleges are tax-exempt entities as defined by IRC Section 501(c)(3) because of their educational purposes—purposes that the federal government has long recognized as fundamental to fostering the productive and civic capacity of its citizens—and/or the fact that they are state governmental entities. In turn, states generally grant tax-exempt status to organizations, including universities and colleges, which qualify as tax-exempt entities under Federal law.

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Addendum: 

If you have 22 minutes I strongly recommend you watch this video.

Read my previous Substacks.


June 3, 2023

Anti-woke annals of absurdity are crazy times crazy, consider two stories in today's news

 By Hal Brown

Background public domain, Popeye's fried chicken on Wikipedia by Evan-Omas CC0


This story is as delicious as the best southern fried chicken, crisp and spicy on the outside and tender and flavorful on the inside:

'No longer the Lord's chicken': 'Christian woman' says she's 'grieving' over 'woke' Chick-fil-A


This story was reported in the United States on Raw Story but over in the United Kingdom Brits have to be relieved that they lost the Revolutionary War when they read articles like this from the BBC:

Utah primary schools ban Bible for 'vulgarity and violence



Click to read article.

Above is how HUFFPOST covered the story on the top of their website this morning.


There are two sides of the anti-woke movement. One is fascistic and no joking matter. The policies being promoted and in an alarming number of states enshrined in law will harm people. They will lead to, among other things, women being forced to have babies they don't want to children being denied medical care gender affirming care to a rise in hate crimes. 

The other rises to a level so far beyond absurdity it is difficult to mock by rational people yet those who believe in them do so with passion and conviction.

There is irony in the fast-food chicken story because the woman who is boycotting one chain store is now going to a competing chain store which is far more LGBTQ+ friendly than the one she believes serves chickens from Hell.

Whoever decided to push for a ban on the Bible was doing this to make a valid point about book bans and must be pleased that their success made not only national but international news. 

There are other instances of this fevered lunacy. For example this story from Florida:


This demonstrates that even a high school yearbook can share something in common with the Bible and highly regarded works of literature.



While rational democracy loving people will find these skirmishes or battles absurd there is nothing remotely amusing about these aspects of what has been called a culture war. They represent an gangrene  infection in the body of the populace so dangerous that it should be amputated like a frost-bit toe or a severely infected diabetic foot.


Related:

How Fox News is boosting a “coordinated planned attack on the LGBTQ+ community” during Pride month

"This is just one side of this extremist playbook," Human Rights Campaign advocate warns

Trump appointed judge works to keep drag shows lawful in Tennessee

Late Friday, Judge Thomas L. Parker ruled anti-drag laws unconstitutional after a two-day trial


Addendum:

I am lucky enough to live in the Portland, Oregon suburbs where we are celebrating Pride Month. 

Click above to read story and view interview


May 2, 2023

Stop calling the GOP anti-woke hysteria weird. Weird is wonderful. Call it wiggy instead.

By Hal Brown

The GOP has gone wiggy in their war on woke.

The author lives in a suburb of wonderfully weird Portland, Oregon.

Click above and below to enlarge the images

Here in Portland, Oregon we are proud of being weird and wonderful. Keep Portland Weird is a frequently used slogan (read about it on Wikipedia).

This is the webpage of Travel Portland:

This conveys how Portland is both weird and woke.

This is from the website Boundless Roads:

Cities like Portland aren't the only promoters of weird and woke as a positive image. For example Weird N Woke is a line of clothing which combines weird with woke in their name  .

The company, founded in Lancaster, PA, offers clothing like the Liberty is Dead t-shirt. Here's their Facebook page. I am now a fan of the company and appreciate that the founder Austin Welk (about him) resides in the Republican Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It voted GOP in every presidential election since 2000 and in the last Presidential election the vote was Republican, 56.9% to 41.2% Democrat. 

Another way weird is used in a positive sense is in services. For example some of these are described here.

The first column I read this morning was this (subscription):

One word in a sentence prompted me to write a comment in the article:

But Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird.
Here's my comment:

I live in Portland, Orgeon, which proudly proclaims (as does Denver) itself as wonderfully weird. Thus I suggest that calling the Republican Party weird is a misnomer and does weirdness a disservice. I suggest the word wiggy which includes weird in the definition: emotionally uncontrolled or weird.
At this writing seven readers there recommended my comment:


Following posting this I realized I should have included Austin as a proudly weird city.



The word was used in this sentence:

As a result, “They have to win the endorsement of a crowd in an echo chamber having a conversation that the rest of the country thinks is too nasty or weird to join,” he wrote.

Headline writers often use alliterations so anti-woke weird warriors sound good. In my opinion wiggy is a better word in this context.

This is how my online dictionary defines weird and wiggy:

Weird
weird wird | adjective suggesting something supernatural; uncannythe weird crying of a seal• informal very strange; bizarrea weird coincidence | all sorts of weird and wonderful characters• archaic connected with fate.

Wiggy: 

wiggy ˈwiɡē | 
adjective (wiggierwiggiestinformal, mainly North American emotionally uncontrolled or weirdyou've been acting all wiggy.

Since both word have the soft W sound wiggy can be used in phrases with anti-woke and warrior as an alliteration. Both words can mean bizarre. Wiggy adds emotionally uncontrolled to the definition. Therefore it describes the Republican war on wokeness. Not only does weird have a positive connotation, but another reason I'd like wiggy used instead is that weird is overused and wiggy is a far less used word.

Addendum:

We can thank Ron DeSantis for pushing the war against woke to and beyond the breaking point by going after Disney and continuing to dig in his heals in his utter bigotry. For example: 

Here's what an hysterical bigot had to say in a Fox News opinion piece.   I found his essay when I did my web search for woke and weird.

Here's what my tour around America taught me about the weird, woke and wicked

Here's what I'm hearing from panicked parents around the country

The author spews intolerance.

* "Why is there a seemingly sudden increase in pedophiles, sexual deviants? Why do we have so many amoral—or plainly immoral—educators, school administrators, school boards, politicians, community leaders, and even judges, hell-bent on advancing the sexualization of our innocent children, and pushing perversion into the hearts and minds of the most impressionable among us?

*Why are too many of these leaders hiding their aberrant "sex education" and "gender-affirming" curricula from the parents of their students, stripping moms and dads of their rights to determine when and how their children are exposed to sensitive topics in school?

* What do these groups of decadent influencers have to gain?  In short, their ambition is the total breakdown and collapse of the family. Their target is our children.  Their goal is social chaos.  In some cases, they have been successful. Tragically successful.


Thanks for reading. Scroll down to make comments and share on social media. The archives and tags are on the bottom of the main page. If you are reading on Booksie, Substack, or Medium click below to go to the blog web page. 

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Weekly stats for the blog. Note the number of readers from Russia. I would like to have international readers comment about what they think about what is happening in America.

Click above to enlarge






April 30, 2023

My title is too clever by half, but Republicans really row Roe up the river

 By Hal Brown

Original uploader was Brett Weinstein (Nrbelex)
 at en.wikipedia
 - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons

I grew up in a suburb of New York City where everyone knew what up the river meant. Up the river referred literally to Sing Sing Prison which was about 30 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. 

Going up the river had nothing to do with navigating against the current. Inmates obviously wouldn't arrive on a boat. If they came from New York City they might arrive in one of these:

The virtual museum of the American Police Car

When I was a kid Ossining was rural. We used to go on picnics at nearby Pound Ridge Park and there probably were campgrounds in the area (they currently have them). Quite obviously, anyone sent up the river was decidedly not a happy camper. 

Now we have the ass-backwards position that the GOP has adopted as a major part of their positioning as they campaign for the 2024 elections to represent the country 2024.

They are rowing up the river against the current, meaning the majority opinion about favoring abortion with various restrictions. More than any other of the GOP positions their anti-abortion stance is the one that most Americans are against.

If you've every rowed a rowboat or are into skulling you know that you literally sit backwards as you row. Thus they are leading with their asses.

Public domain from Wiki
The boat they are rowing is certain to capsize. Even the Coast Guard won't be able to save them:


Put another way, they have hitched their campaign cart to asses that are, well, too stubborn to go anywhere.
Adapted by author

Remember how the Democrats defined the tendency to shoot themselves in the foot when it came to campaigning? For example, Hillary and her basket of deplorables comment might have cost her the election.

"Basket of deplorables" is a phrase from a 2016 presidential election campaign speech delivered by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on September 9, 2016, at a campaign fundraising event. She used the phrase to describe "half" of the supporters of her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump, saying, "They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic". The next day, she expressed regret for "saying half", while insisting that Trump had deplorably amplified "hateful views and voices". Wiki.
It isn't only the Republican candidates and their anti-abortion extremism that is rowing them up the river against the majority of the beliefs of the population. The entire so-called anti-woke agenda earns a hokum ho-hum from the majority, some of whom don't even know what woke or elements of woke like Critical Race Theory are.

Add to that the fact that the majority don't see LGBTQ+ people as carriers of a disease deadly as diphtheria and drag as dangerous as dengue fever. Quite the opposite, so many people have friends, family, and acquaintances who are members of the LGBTQ+ community that they know from personal experience that they are just as human as everyone else.

The pundits I follow lean towards saying that Trump would be an easier candidate for Biden to defeat and express concern than DeSantis would be more difficult. In fact because both of them, and also all of the other candidates described as likely GOP candidates, are embracing and running on, positions and policies not supported by the majority.

This is why I say they should dig their dumbass ditch deeper and deeper because the more they do so no ladder will be long enough for them to climb out of.


Thanks for reading. Scroll down to make comments and share on social media. The archives and tags are on the bottom of the main page. If you are reading on Booksie,Substack, or Medium click below to go to the blog web page. 

Click to go to main blog. Updates will be posted here rather that on Booksie, Substack, or Medium.

If you don't see the Disquis section below and want to comment this is the best place to do it. Click here and scroll down the page.


30 Barbies: Not good at parenting or at the maths. By Hal M. Brown

 In the past few days we’ve had Trump or his minions prove that they probably failed their math  (or as the Brits say “maths”)  in grade sch...