My one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic ranks the top 50 free agents in this winter’s class. I also held a Zoom Q&A via The Athletic’s Twitter account. I feel like those don’t get as many questions as my old Periscopes did, so please let me know how I can make it easier for you to ask questions when I do them.
Over at Paste, I reviewed Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition, the shorter, streamlined version of the massive Terraforming Mars board game. I think it’s better than the original, which is a heavy (physically and in terms of complexity) two-hour affair that just doesn’t benefit enough from the difficulty or length it entails.
My podcast was off this past week, but will return this Tuesday with a new episode. I was on the Athletic Baseball Show again on Friday, which you can catch on Apple or Spotify.
As the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: How two BBC journalists risked their careers to expose Jimmy Savile’s decades-long history of child molestation, and how various people in power tried to squash the story.
- Insider’s Julia Black has a damning exposé of Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, with multiple women accusing him of engaging in nonconsensual violent behavor during sex. Much of the subsequent coverage focused on the stock price of Penn National Gaming, which owns 36% of Barstool, rather than the actual substance of the allegations. The Cut has a summary if you’re not an Insider subscriber.
- A cheating scandal rocked the bridge world, leading to mass forfeits at a recent European championship.
- In 1994, Rodney Wilson, a high school teacher in Mehlville, Missouri, came out to his students, and nearly lost his job. Things in Missouri aren’t really much better 27 years later, as a gay teacher in Neosho was forced to resign because parents said he was going to “teach their kids to be gay.”
- ProPublica exposes how Gov. Jim Justice (R), Gov. Jared Polis (D), former Secretary of Edumucation Betsy DeVos (R), Sen. Rick Scott (R), and other wealthy Americans avoid paying most or all income taxes, using loopholes around philanthropy, family trusts, the SALT deduction, and other forms of chicanery.
- Via Craig Calcaterra, who posted this link in his newsletter this week, a story from Bitter Southerner on what exactly is “Braves Country,” and the lies Atlanta fans are telling themselves about the team’s name, imagery, and chop.
- Dr. Aaron T. Beck, the developer of cognitive behavioral therapy (itself a rejoinder to Freudian analysis), died this week at age 100.
- There’s been some real-world fallout at GrubStreet from the Bad Art Friend story.
- Whether the non-troversy over Critical Race Theory caused the Virginia gubernatorial race outcome or not, it is a non-troversy and the guy stoking it admitted as much on Twitter. He’s funded by dark-money titan Charles Koch, of the Koch Brothers. Don’t fall for it.
- The HPV vaccine is cutting cervical cancer cases by nearly 90%. Can your horse deworming paste do that?
- A new wave of COVID-19 cases, mostly among unvaccinated people, has overwhelmed Colorado ICUs. Gov. Polis (D), mentioned above, has refused to reinstate any sort of mask mandates or restrictions on capacity.
- The Harvard Gazette asked a pediatrician about vaccinations for 5- to 11-year-olds.
- Dr. Sheri Tenpenny, the quack who testified before the Ohio legislature that COVID-19 vaccines would make you magnetic, bragged about traveling on airplanes while sick with COVID-like symptoms. Ohio still hasn’t yanked her medical license.
- The so-called ivermectin meta-analysis preprint that claimed to show evidence the anti-parasitic drug worked against COVID-19 has completely fallen apart now that three of the studies it used have been retracted (or otherwise shown to be bogus).
- A great thread on the value of mentorship, in this case in academia, but applicable to all fields.
- Senator Tom Carper (D), one of our two Senators from Delaware, wrote an editorial in the Delaware News-Journal indicating that he has finally come around to supporting ending the filibuster. Here’s hoping he can convince Sen. Chris Coons (D) of the same.
- And the grift goes on till the break of dawn: Trump’s DC hotel cashed in big-time on the January 6th insurrection.
- Do you want to be better at recycling? And sometimes you put stuff in the yellow (or green) bin that belongs in the trash? You’re wishcycling, and might actually be making the situation worse. Here’s a guide to doing recycling better. Did you know you can recycle pizza boxes after all? I had always read that the grease stains on them made them unsuitable for recycling, but it turns out that that is incorrect.
Calling the CRT issue a non-troversy highlights the Democrats political problem. Of course Republicans are exaggerating how wide spread CRT is in K-12 curriculums, but that doesn’t mean they’re aren’t many people going to bat for CRT or some of its elements. Just as many Republicans attack CRT without a clue of what it means, there are Democrats supporting it without knowing much as well. Pretending there’s nothing there is a political loser and Virginia showed that (though I don’t think you can pin VA on any one issue). I’m paraphrasing someone I can’t recall right now, but even if CRT is a non-troversy, calling it such doesn’t help at all. It is actually hurting Democrats. Instead of trying to change tactics, they stick with what hurts them. It’s maddening to witness how politically inept they are and completely disconnecting themselves from the average voter. Now we are getting a resurgent Republican Party that should’ve been burned to the ground after Trump (or even after Bush’s second term).
Could you define specifically what parts of the graduate-level field of study are being taught in grade schools? And could you acknowledge the difference between rejecting the premise that CRT is bad/wrong and advocating its teaching to children? Clearly, the Democrats need a better response, but we should not be pretending there is a shred of validity to GOP hysteria on this.
The GOP are stoking a moral panic, as ridiculous as the D&D moral panic when I was a kid. We have a bunch of people screaming at school board meetings to pull anything from instruction that makes white kids feel bad, while they give zero shits about whether there are any instructional materials that make minoritized kids feel bad. As I have said many a time, if they aren’t already, Democrats need to be hiring a fucketonne of social psychologists to help with cognitive and emotional strategies for combatting this type of disingenuous bullshittery.
This isn’t “CRT”, but it’s being grouped as such:
https://nypost.com/2019/05/20/richard-carranza-held-doe-white-supremacy-culture-training/
And to your point, not only do Democrats need a better response, but I have to hear from any influential Democrats that a different response is needed. Their attempt to get technical about what is or what isn’t CRT isn’t persuading anyone. It’s as though they’re refusing to learn any lessons from recent elections.
Calling it a “non-troversy” is nonsensical. It’s comparable to people who say January 6th was no big deal. Of course January 6th was a big deal! CRT, while unfortunately reducing a complex subject to a set of three letters, is certainly a controversy. Sadly, both sides of the aisle are just as delusional, just about different things.
Here’s one example – I know someone in high school who talks about how because of the way history is taught, the white kids are referred to as “colonizers”. She’s only 17! She hasn’t colonized anyone!
Condoleezza Rice made some very thoughtful and measured comments on The View (ugh, sorry to even bring up the The View, unfortunately that’s the show she was on), and in general was excoriated for what she said from every media outlet I saw. This quote I think gets to the heart of the matter: “In order for Black kids — who quite frankly, for a long time the way they were portrayed, the way their history was portrayed, [were] second-class citizenship, but I don’t have to make white children feel bad about being white in order to overcome the fact that Black children were treated badly,” Rice said.
When I was in school, we learned about American history, and there was no hiding that George Washington had slaves, and that very few women were allowed the chance to make a difference. And we understood that the world is a different place now. Certainly no one was judging the current kids in the classroom by the actions of people who lived hundreds of years earlier that they aren’t related to. While the specifics of what is being taught in any given school may vary, kids are being pitted against each other based on the actions of people who are long dead. Kids are being taught to look at others only through the lens of the color of their skin rather than who they are as people. And that’s why parents are upset, and this is, indeed, a controversy.
“ I know someone in high school who talks about how because of the way history is taught, the white kids are referred to as “colonizers”. “
Yeah? What high school is that? Because my cousin’s boyfriend’s sister’s mailman’s aunt says this isn’t true.
The high school is Brookfield East, outside of Milwaukee. It’s not like she’s traumatized by it or anything, or that it’s only way white kids are referred to. Just that this is how it was taught in the classroom. Then, kids look at each other derisively and sneer “colonizer” at them if in an argument, or to provoke, etc.. It resulted in a new way to sow divisions between the white and non-white kids than when I was in school. It’s new, and different, and that’s why it’s controversial.
So kids ribbing each other with “wokeisms” that they could have just as easily picked up from social media is supposed to convince me that this isn’t a moral panic?
Yeah, this has nothing to do with that school. That kind of language is all over TikTok, to name just one. Blaming it on CRT is just silly.
Sigh. This is what she told me, that teachers referred to all the whites as colonists, and then it was picked up further by the kids. This was her experience. I cannot change that, and your dismissal of it can’t either. It happened.
I respectfully wrote a response, had the lion’s share of what I wrote ignored, was rudely called a liar, then was still dismissed, with no acknowledgement of the fact that I was not actually making things up. Mocking and completely dismissing people who are acting reasonably is exactly what Mark referred to in his initial post: “pretending there’s nothing there is a political loser”.
Heck, mocking and dismissing people who are being reasonable is a loser in any endeavor.
So the worst example of “CRT” you have direct knowledge of is a teacher calling a group of people primarily known for colonizing America colonists, and then some kids did some playful irony around the specific term. I fail to see how this is a problem.
Let’s add some color to the story for funsies. Maybe assume the teacher said something more stark like “white people throughout history have been colonizers.” This would be admittedly a broad generalization and perhaps a touch more provocative than is necessary, but it would not rank in the top 1000 least-correct things I was taught in school. More to the point, if this sort of experience constitutes the most offense or put-uponness that white students encounter, then it pales in comparison to the baseline of systemic bigotry that black/female/gay/trans/etc students deal with constantly.
And the story has already changed. The teachers aren’t calling white kids “colonizers” other kids are. Guess what? Teenagers call other teenagers insulting things all the time! Blaming this on CRT is hilarious – if the story is even true, which I still don’t believe for a second.
Search TikTok for the term colonizer and you get videos with over 170 million views. It ain’t some random high school teacher causing this.
I apologize if my response made you feel like you were being dismissed or called a liar.
Drew,
I feel as though this is similar to your reaction a few weeks ago when Cultural appropriation was discussed.
The example you gave above, regarding CRT, isn’t an actual example of CRT, as least to the extent that I understand it. (Keith already made almost the exact point I was going to make, so I won’t belabor the point with an example I had prepared). But, I’ll just add, if that story is accurate, the teacher should try his best to explain to the kids why it’s wrong to call the white kids “colonizers” while also ensuring that he makes clear that these issues are being discussed in a historical context.
If the teacher has failed to do that, and the other teachers and administrators are allowing some kids to call other kids “colonizers,” that’s a a failing, for sure, but it’s a failing of behavior, not of CRT itself. Based on my understanding of what CRT is, I don’t understand how anyone would object to teaching it to students at all levels of education as soon as they are old enough to understand the importance of the subject.
Salty – you wrote nothing antagonistic, thanks for the note though.
Frank – thanks for a levelheaded response. I think your comments “at least to the extent I understand it” and “Based on my understanding of what CRT is” goes exactly back to the original post Mark made, that CRT can’t be defined by Republicans, and Democrats support it without knowing about it either. For some, CRT seems to have become an umbrella term which can encompass anything that mentions race in schools at all. For others, they have a much more narrow definition. I’m confident you’re a knowledgeable person, yet you still needed to make an effort to show that your understanding may be incorrect. It’s a hot-button issue, and nobody can even agree on what it is! (Sounds like a controversial thing to me.)
To your last sentence, while you may not, I certainly can at least understand how someone would object to teaching it (refer back to my Condoleezza Rice quote). And that difference in opinion is precisely why I agree with the original post, that it is a controversy, and Democrats denial of that is not reasonable.
With that, I’l bow out, hopefully with a laugh, as the “non-troversy” stuff does make me think of a great scene from the Naked Gun – “Please disperse. Nothing to see here!”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdFl__NlOpA
“It’s a hot-button issue, and nobody can even agree on what it is!”
That’s a blatant lie. Critical Race Theory has clear definitions, easily available to anyone with the internet. Bad-faith actors have co-opted it – and admitted so publicly, as I showed above in Rufo’s tweets – and created confusion about what it means, but “nobody can even agree on what it is” is just false.
[[ Frank – thanks for a levelheaded response. I think your comments “at least to the extent I understand it” and “Based on my understanding of what CRT is” goes exactly back to the original post Mark made, that CRT can’t be defined by Republicans, and Democrats support it without knowing about it either.]]]
Drew – I put your above statement in brackets instead of quotation marks to avoid confusion with the existing quotation marks within the quoted portion –
You’re reading into my post what you wanted to read, not what I actually wrote. I was merely trying to use polite phrasing to call your attention to what I perceived to be your incorrect understanding of what CRT is. I could have simply written, “Drew, CRT isn’t what you seem to think it is, and your example is a bad one that illustrates your incorrect interpretation of the subject,” but I thought my word choice was more tactful. I certainly was NOT trying to convey any agreement with you that “no one knows what CRT is!”
Also, I can’t speak for democrats or republicans (I’m neither), and I don’t know whether you and/or Mark intentionally omitted reference to other political affiliations, but I would guess that most people who share my political affiliation probably understand what CRT is. Not that it matters; in this atrocious two-party system, it’s unlikely anyone from a 3rd party will ever hold position of any importance.
In defense of Drew:
I was once called ‘colonizer’ and I’ve never recovered. I was singled out and insulted simply because I’m white. My ancestors weren’t even colonizers! My great grandparents on my father’s side were poor Lithuanian immigrants who migrated (LEGALLY) through the middle passage that was buying a ticket aboard a steam ship to America. I have to re-iterate they were poor, so the conditions they came to America by were very bad. They weren’t chained to the floor or anything, but it was terrible – not a voyage I would pay money for today. On my mother’s side, the circumstances of my ancestry is a little cloudier, but I’m sure since they were in upstate New York and far from the Southern border and our background is French-English they must have migrated here legally; there are literally no other options in my mind, totally legal. When people talk about CRT being in the classroom they are ignoring the simple facts of white people who grew up in America like me! My ancestors weren’t ‘colonizers’ and any education I could have received in a California public classroom ignores the simple fact that most white people like my family are sitting on land that they earned with nothing but their own hard work. That’s America! Now back to my own trauma: I’ve never recovered. I think about it all the time. It consumes all of my thoughts – how 22 years ago, a non-white teacher once referred to me as ‘colonizer.’ Let’s ignore the fact that I had called her a epithet and this is how she could respond, because this is about my trauma. I was the teenager here, so clearly she was the only one in the wrong. I’ve never forgotten that moment and how it caused me to ask why she would use that word. She was my history teacher, and it made me think ‘what is a colonizer?’ I had to READ in order to understand her INSULT. Can you believe that? She called me a name that made me look something up and reflect on how it applied to me! And it didn’t even apply, because as I’ve stated above, there aren’t colonizers in my family! My grandfather was a rocket scientist who got his degree from the GI bill that any race could have accessed in the 1950’s and 1960’s just like he did! He used his excess salary to buy rental properties in California specifically targeting farm workers and lower income families and spent his entire life fighting housing expansion, rent restrictions, and affordable housing expansion. That’s America! HE INVESTED IN THIS COUNTRY. I was lucky enough that he WORKED HARD for the money he had earned and sent me to college, where I was called a ‘colonizer’ a second time. Can you imagine the life I could have had if I had never been called a ‘colonizer?’ I mean, I’m only a white guy who is not a descendant of colonizers who has paid for his own graduate degree in business and was afforded the opportunity to move with my company to Europe (REVERSE COLONIZER?!?!?). It’s incredibly sad that this happened to me, and I want to thank you for defending me (and your friend’s nephew’s kid) here on this site – we need to protect everyone at all times from all things. Thanks again.
Some options for future Zoom meetings:
= It seemed like the two main social media sites that fed questions into your queue were from YouTube and Facebook. It took me a couples of minutes to find the video link on Facebook to ask a question. It might have been the same for YouTube.
– Maybe open the queue for questions earlier, like 30-60 minutes beforehand?
– Maybe be able to feed questions into the queue directly from The Athleitc with links and advertisements there? I suppose that is another opportunity. I didn’t know it was going on until it was about halfway done.
– Maybe integrate the Zoom video feed into The Athletic itself? Bandwidth might be concern as I don’t see too many videos at The Athletic..
– The Cubs beat writers (Sahadev and Patrick) had an audio only Q/A session a few weeks ago, where users directly asked the questions themselves.
In addition to better recycling/trash practices, people should compost more. An article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote up an analysis by the WI DNR showing that 30% of our trash is food, 21% was paper, and 17% was plastic. My city has a compost collection service that we started to use. We keep our closed bin under the sink, and it doesn’t smell like I thought it would.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2021/09/07/wisconsin-residents-throw-away-large-amounts-food-recyclables/5697006001/
A wealth tax is never going to work because of the inability to properly value certain assets like art as well as the general ups and downs of financial markets that would make down years a potential disaster. One simpler partial solution I rarely see anyone advocate for is a steeper graduated tax on capital gains and dividends. There would of course be people that find additional loopholes but if a $25M gain is taxed at 35% and a $50M gain is taxed at 40% and so on with dividends treated similarly and these laws were made as ironclad as possible, the effective tax rate for a lot of the tax avoidance folks would go up dramatically.
Strong agree. It seems easier to reform capital gains to be treated more similar to ordinary income and to be more progressive, and would have less downside for people who nominally have wealth but little income (e.g., elderly homeowners in places like CA).
Not sure if you this article about the moral hazards of letting wealthy philanthropists help “save” a city and of course many of the usual problems emerged that you could’ve guessed. https://time.com/6110450/kalamazoo-foundation-for-excellence/
Sadly, tax avoidance is perfectly legal. It’s tax evasion that is illegal.
But, ya know, don’t expect the laws to change for the better or anything, either.