Friday was a wild night in which mobs of men ran around the Stockholm train station attacking people. Something must be done about these immigrants! Foreigners!

Only it wasn’t the immigrants doing the attacking. It was native Swedes concerned about the purity of their country.

Hundreds of masked men marched through Stockholm’s main train station on Friday evening, reportedly beating up refugees and anyone who didn’t appear to be ethnically Swedish.

Wearing all-black balaclavas and armbands, the men “gathered with the purpose of attacking refugee children,” Stockholm police spokesperson Towe Hagg said.

Masked men slapping children around? Sounds brave and noble. Also so logical.

After the attack, the Swedish Resistance Movement, a neo-Nazi group, released a statement claiming the attack had “cleaned up criminal immigrants from North Africa that are housed in the area around the Central Station”.

“Police have clearly shown that they lack the means to stave off their rampage, and we now see no other alternative than to ourselves hand out the punishments they deserve.”

Who was rampaging here? Who deserves punishment? It seems to me that the neo-Nazis just indicted themselves.

There is a high school in Oklahoma that calls their athletic teams the “Redskins”. No, really — all the national debate about offensive sports team names sailed right on by them, and after years of public discussion elsewhere, it took until 2016 for McLoud, Oklahoma to stop and debate whether their name is inappropriate.

They had a public discussion, and then the school board voted to keep an ethnic slur as the proud label for their football team.

But that’s not all! Let’s abuse American Indians who argued against the name!

Bella Aiukli Cornell, a 14 year old Native American girl and a citizen of Choctaw Nation, gave a testimony against the name and mascot of the McLoud High School Redskins in December, at a school board meeting. A male peer, and a racist, yelled get off the stage, squaw!

Nice to know the rot extends to all ages.

We’ve got a lot of history, said Albert Baldwin, 74, a life-long resident of McLoud. I don’t know anyone around here that objects to being a Redskin. If there is, I don’t know about it.

That is simply the perfect explanation for this phenomenon.

It’s no secret that universities suffer a steady attrition of students. We get applicants; not all the accepted decide to attend. We lose students the first year, the second year, etc.; not every student meets the graduation requirements, so not every student gets a degree. This steady loss is simply a fact of life.

But that doesn’t mean we give up and don’t try! We faculty have a responsibility to our students. Are you leaving because you can’t afford tuition? Let’s refer you to financial aid, and let’s elect Bernie. Is it the lack of social support? Let’s help you find a study group, or a campus club, let’s try to enroll more people like you to get the critical mass. Did you miss out on some essential academic skills? Here’s a remedial class, here’s our tutoring center.

Good teachers want to improve retention and shepherd more students to completion of their degree because we care about the students, every one of them. So much of my effort is spent on trying to figure out ways to make teaching more inclusive: every year, I look at the exams and see that some percentage of students are struggling to grasp some basic concepts, and my goal then is to try something different, some new approach, that will reduce that percentage.

Of course, if I were an administrator, I might have a different goal. Another strategy would be to make like so miserable for those students who didn’t get the concept that they drop out, and therefore aren’t around at the end of the term to lower the average grade of the course, and most importantly, weren’t enrolled to submit negative evaluations of my teaching.

I don’t think that way, but apparently Mount St. Mary’s University President Simon Newman does.

[Read more…]

Look at this guy: tolerant, thoughtful, trying to see the other person’s side, and using buzzwords like “privilege”. Why, you almost expect him to hug a black man.

I wonder how all the people who thought his satirical schtick on the old Comedy Central Colbert show was genuine are coping now.

So…what are you going to do?

Here’s a little background information that surprised me:

Because the refuge is so remote and no government employees are at risk, law enforcement isn’t likely to immediately confront the militia. But law enforcement will be under great pressure to act because of the Bundys’ confrontation in Nevada. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management retreated from that confrontation and has yet to publicly act against the Bundys to collect $1 million in unpaid grazing fees. That retreat has emboldened militia members as they now face the prospect of another standoff.

A bunch of white religious nuts and far-right yahoos have been pillaging federal property to the tune of a million dollars, and the government does nothing? Don’t try to tell me there isn’t a whole lot of privilege going on.

Has there ever been an analogous incident, where a minority group took control of a remote location? I wonder how the federal government responded then.

On February 27, 1973, a team of 200 Oglala Lakota (Sioux) activists and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) seized control of a tiny town with a loaded history — Wounded Knee, South Dakota. They arrived in town at night, in a caravan of cars and trucks, took the town’s residents hostage, and demanded that the U.S. government make good on treaties from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Within hours, police had surrounded Wounded Knee, forming a cordon to prevent protesters from exiting and sympathizers from entering. This marked the beginning of a 71-day siege and armed conflict.

Of course, that was completely different. The Bundy gang is asking for property and the right to exploit the land, and demanding that a pair of arsonists be set free.

AIM was asking for respect and that the US honor their word. That can’t be allowed.

There have always been wretched racists in this country, but it’s troubling that even now some of them seem to take their prejudice as a matter of course. Watch this guy go up to a small group of anti-fracking protesters and calmly declaim some vile racist remarks. He clearly thinks there will be no consequences.

There were consequences, fortunately — he was fired by his employer. But still, it says there is a population of deeply deluded people in America who think that their racism is perfectly normal. That’s what ought to worry us.