Tag Archives: Spiked

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More Sex is Better, Right? More News, Too?

“The sexual revolution obviously succeeded in its aim: more freedom”, writes Rob Henderson[1], who publishes a newsletter on human nature.  “But many people conflate liberation with happiness and, sadly, the world doesn’t work that way,” Women are freer today, he argues, but they are less happy.

It’s the same with access to information. We all have access to much more information today, both free and paid, but it’s debatable whether we are better informed. 

When I was a kid in a small Connecticut town in the 1950s, we got our news facts from the Meriden Record newspaper delivered in the morning and the New Haven Register newspaper delivered in the afternoon. In the mail, we got weekly issues of the magazines U.S. News & World Report, Life and Time and monthly editions of the National Geographic and Reader’s Digest. 

We also listened to radio, mostly station WTIC out of Hartford. In the early 1950s we got a black and white TV (We didn’t get a color TV until the 1960s) and started watching evening news shows. 

Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.

We thought that was plenty to connect us with local, national and world news.

But the internet proved us wrong, at least with respect to the volume and variety of available news. Where news used to come out of a straw, now it’s spewed out of a bullhorn. It’s turning us all into nervous wrecks.

As Tom Slater, the editor of Spiked put it, with the deluge of commentary out there, “We are riven by ‘culture wars’ and hot-button topics that no one cared about five minutes ago.” 

We’re smothered in a torrent of news 24/7 from a fragmented media environment, much of it of dubious veracity.

A clear majority of U.S. adults (86%) say they at least sometimes get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet, including 57% who say they do so often, according to the Pew Research Center , and a high number still get their news from television.  Americans turn to radio and print publications for news far less frequently. In 2024, just 26% of U.S. adults say they often or sometimes get news in print, the lowest number Pew’s surveys have ever recorded.

There are several different pathways Americans use to get news on their digital devices, Pew says. News websites or apps and search engines are the most common: About two-thirds of U.S. adults at least sometimes get news in each of these ways. A little more than half (54%) at least sometimes get news from social media, and 27% say the same about podcasts.

Younger people, in particular, get their news from digital devices, with 86% of people ages 18-29 and 72% of people ages 30-49 preferring digital devices as their news source. 

But is the wider availability of news making us all smarter, better informed, more responsible participants in the dialog of democracy? 

In a recent essay in The New Yorker, staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote that “the Internet age and the era of social media has led not so much to engagement as enragement, with algorithms acting out addictively on tiny tablets.” 

“The aura of the Internet age is energized, passionate, and, above all, angry,” Gopnik wrote. “The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.”

The deluge of information posing as news has also left us in a constant rush, buried in misinformation and outright lies unchecked by gatekeepers like the editors of yore. As Hamish McKenzie, a co-founder of Substack, puts it, “With few exceptions, the media power brokers of yesterday now oversee a series of properties with dwindling reach and a limited ability to convince anyone of anything,”

One result – a growing lack of trust in all media. 

The just-released Trust in Media Survey results from Gallup “leave no doubt that members of my profession are officially America’s lowest life form,” Gopnik wrote.

The Gallup survey asked:

In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media — such as newspapers, T.V. and radio — when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly — a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?

  • A great deal 7 
  • Fair amount 25 
  • Not very much 29 
  • None at all 39

That’s 68% saying they have “not very much” or “none at all” trust and confidence in mass media., which includes newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet.

In the current political environment, the fragmentation and declining reliability of the mainstream media has led to a decline of its influence. 

“One of the contradictions of the social-media age is that we can follow the campaigns incredibly closely—tracking every movement in the polls, listening to every concerning Trump remark—but somehow this flood of content makes us feel even more distant from the process, and less empowered,” Jay Caspian Kang, another staff writer at The New Yorker, asserts. “…the proliferation of content has actually weakened the mainstream media’s influence on voters, many of whom have moved on to alternative outlets of news and commentary.”

And those alternative outlets are often little more than collections of conspiratorial rubbish, like the manufactured news that Hillary Clinton was running a pizza-restaurant child-sex ring, accusations that FEMA prevented Florida evacuations in the recent hurricanes and claims that funding for storm victims was instead given to undocumented migrants. And all of this is reinforced by the echo chambers online news consumers occupy.

 “It used to be in this world that people could at least agree on the same set of facts and then they could debate what to do about those facts.,” says writer, Steven Brill. “We’re at a point where nobody believes anything. Truth as a concept is really in trouble.”

That has led to a widespread feeling of disappointment in America and its institutions.

Author and theater critic, Hilton Als, wrote of Joan Didion’s “romance with despair.” That’s where we are. Wallowing in such gloom can’t be good for this country.

[1] Rob Henderson is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Family, Foster Care, and Social Class.” A veteran of the U.S. Air Force, he holds a B.S. from Yale and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Cambridge (St. Catharine’s College).

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Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture Erases J.K. Rowling

The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle.,WA  still displays Harry Potter memorabilia , but it has removed J.K. Rowling’s name from its Harry Potter exhibition. 

Chris Moore, MoPOP’s exhibitions manager, justified the museum’s action in a 1,400-word blog post titled “She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”.

“There’s a certain cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity in the world of Harry Potter,” Moore’s diatribe against Rowling began. “Her transphobic viewpoints are front and center these days, but we can’t forget all the other ways that she’s problematic: the support of antisemitic creators, the racial stereotypes that she used while creating characters, the incredibly white wizarding world, the fat shaming, the lack of LGBTQIA+ representation, the super-chill outlook on the bigotry and othering of those that don’t fit into the standard wizarding world, and so much more,” he continued.

On Aug. 6, 2023, MoPOP’s CEO, Michele Y. Smith, appointed in March 2023, said in a news release that the post was “a collective statement” and that “MoPOP has a commitment to diversity and inclusion leveraging the power of arts to drive social change.”

Rowling has been subjected to criticism for what some have called transphobic remarks. In June 2020, she drew outrage when she criticized an opinion piece published by a website that used the phrase “ people who menstruate.” “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” Rowling tweeted. “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” 

She continued with comments about the concept of biological sex. “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction,” she tweeted. “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

On Aug. 6, actor James Dreyfus defended Rowling in an item he wrote for Spiked, a U.K. publication. “Here we go again,” he wrote. “Another institution, brimming with self-righteous faux outrage, is trying to airbrush JK Rowling’s name out of history, Once again, Rowling’s reasonable and rational defence of women’s sex-based rights is being presented disingenuously as ‘hateful’ or ‘harmful’ towards transgender people, and therefore deserving of cancellation.”

You might already know about this controversy if you follow the news in the New York Post, SkyNews, Euronews, The Jewish Press, the Daily Mail , the Telegraph, MSN or Spiked. But for some reason you won’t have read about it in The Seattle Times. 

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Oregon’s New Ethnic Studies Standards: Identity Politics Run Amok

The Oregon Ethnic Studies Bill signed into law
Gov. Kate Brown signs ethnic studies bill

Say it ain’t so, Colt.

Colt Gill, appointed by Governor Brown as Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction, serves as Director of the Oregon Department of Education.

Oregon HB 2845, signed into law by Governor Kate Brown in June 2017, called for an advisory group to create recommendations for ethnic studies standards. A panel of K-12 teachers aligned the recommendations to 2018 social science standards for use in the classroom. After engaging with the public, the Oregon Department of Education made adjustments to the standards. 

The new standards were approved for classroom use in March 2021. School districts will be required to address the ethnic studies standards beginning in the 2026 – 2027 school year.

The theory behind the new standards was that commonly used textbooks and classroom lessons had too narrow a focus of the history, politics, and human geography and that students would benefit from a more complete and inclusive understanding of U.S. and Oregon history. 

So far so good.

Then not so good.

The Kindergarten Standards with Ethnic Studies, yes kindergarten, start off with the following:

Civics and Government

* Engage in respectful dialogue with classmates to define diversity comparing and contrasting visible and invisible similarities and differences. 

 *Develop an understanding of one’s own identity groups including, but not limited to, race, gender, family, ethnicity, culture, religion, and ability. 

History

* Identify examples of unfairness or injustice towards individuals or groups and the “change- makers,” who worked to make the world better. 

Historical Thinking

* Make connections identifying similarities and differences including race, ethnicity, culture, disability, and gender between self and others. 

Social Science Analysis

* Identify possible solutions to injustices 

The questionable guidance continues for later grades. First grade standards, for example, include: 

*Define equity, equality and systems of power” 

*Describe how individual and group characteristics are used to divide, unite and categorize racial, ethnic, and social groups.”

How, in heaven’s name, do 5-year-olds conduct “respectful dialogue” over “visible and invisible similarities and differences.” How and why should they “develop an understanding of one’s own identity groups,” and identify racial, ethnic and cultural differences?

How and why should 1st graders “define…systems of power”?

“In reality, the point of the exercise is to make children hyper-sensitive to racial differences and encourage them to internalise an identity-based consciousness,” Prof. Frank Furedi wrote in Spiked. “The main objective of this curriculum is to introduce youngsters to an identitarian worldview. When small children are exposed to topics suitable for mature adults it is clear that indoctrination rather than education is taking place.” 

Did anybody outside the education establishment read these standards before they were adopted?

Is this really how Oregon parents want their children taught?