My son and daughter go to different schools but right now they’re getting their education in the same location: my home. They’re both learning remotely, joining their classmates and teachers on Microsoft Teams and using things like my phone to take pictures of their work and upload it to the school.
What’s really striking about this is how much work the teachers have put into it, how patient they are with the kids and how brilliantly they’re using the technology. Not all heroes wear capes.
Another day, another example of the private sector profiteering from poverty. This time it’s free school meals. Previously parents were given £30 vouchers to pay for their kids’ school lunches. Now, the lunches are provided for them instead.
Just one problem. Instead of £30 of food, the packages contain about £5 worth of food.
Bootstrap Cook Jack Monroe is rightly furious.
The vouchers were a good idea. They were BLOCKED from being spent on age restricted products, like alcohol, lottery tickets, cigarettes. Despite this restriction, mouthpieces on Twitter with their own austerity agendas claimed that there was widespread misuse. With no evidence.
…Because of a noisy few objecting with fabricated or v rare examples of an abuse of the system (rich when it’s usually coming from people who themselves abuse every financial loophole they can find…) the vouchers, which were a lifeline, have been replaced with a food box.
…Its value at supermarket prices is under a fiver. To replace a £30 voucher.
For many parents, today is the beginning of another block of having the kids attending school virtually rather than in person. It’s many things – difficult and exhausting, mainly – but it’s not homeschooling.
This is not ‘home schooling’. Home schooling is a conscious decision made by some parents having researched that option. This is emergency education, during lockdown, while surviving a pandemic! So, let’s lower our expectations of ourselves a little. #homeschooling #lockdown
As Dr O’Kane adds:
The most important thing is our children’s wellbeing, and our relationship with them. We need to let go of our vision of perfect parenting, definitely good enough is good enough at the moment!
Before they stormed the US Capitol building leading to the death of four people (so far), the MAGA mob cheered a “bizarre” anti-trans rant by Donald Trump Jr.
Speaking before his father addressed the crowd at Wednesday’s MAGA protest against Congress certifying the presidential election, Trump Jr. brought up gender-neutral language as well as transgender women participating in sports as women.
If you were to draw a Venn diagram showing the makeup of the mob – the neo-Nazis, the anti-vaxxers, the anti-semites, the racists and the guys who just want to break stuff – transphobia is where the circles overlap. And the same applies to their cheerleaders in the media, the pundits who’ll spend the coming days and weeks telling you that violent armed mobs are less dangerous than my pronouns. They will ask you to try and understand the angry mob and urge you to listen to their “legitimate concerns”.
We already understand them, because we’ve been listening to them for years. The far right and its enablers always target marginalised groups first. Those groups have spent years trying to tell you about the violent rhetoric, the science denial, the conspiracy theories, the misinformation, disinformation and radicalisation, the rage. We should all be horrified by what happened at the Capitol. But nobody should be surprised.
If you’re not Very Online, you may have missed Bean Dad: for a full day social media was sharing and/or piling on a man who posted about teaching, or rather not teaching, his daughter to use a can opener.
…despite a bombshell story about Trump attempting to manipulate the outcome of the Georgia election, “Bean Dad†was the social media network’s top trending topic. Bean Dad, it turned out, was John Roderick, who had issued a series tweets about how his 9-year-old daughter had asked for his help opening a can of beans while he was working on a jigsaw puzzle. Instead of showing her how to work the can opener, he made her figure it out on her own, which she finally did after six hours of “grunting and groaning.â€
I saw the original posts and assumed it was someone very selectively telling a story in an attempt to go viral, as did Pothast. But as she points out, it became something more interesting when people began to unearth Roderick’s old tweets containing various slurs and quite a lot of homophobia, ableism and antisemitism. The tweets don’t appear to be sincere; they appear to be the kind of “edgy” humour you find in episodes of South Park.
And that got Pothast thinking.
Over the past day, the discourse around the Bean Dad kerfuffle has had me thinking about the larger cultural disconnect it reveals between members of the same community. This is the chasm between between those who have decided that joking about “funny rape†or ironically calling someone a “fag†actually isn’t very original or creative (and honestly never was), and those who feel alienated by the prospect of living in a world where their jokes about Jews (delivered with or without affecting a Cartman voice) are no longer met with unconditional approval.
There’s an odd but interesting series on The Good Men Project called Rideshare Confessionals, which sets out to “[examine] the human experience in passengers’ stories as delivered from a therapist moon-lighting as a rideshare driver.”
I did say it was odd.
This one is about a trans passenger, and while it’s all a bit overwrought for me I though this bit was insightful:
When encountering a transgender woman, many cisgender men don’t see a person. They see a mirror.
I think there’s a lot of truth in that. So much of the discussion about trans people is based not on who we are or what we do, but how our existence makes other people feel. And it’s very difficult to change that: to invert the right-wing trope, feelings don’t care about your facts.
This also applies to other marginalised groups, of course. And sadly it’s often used to justify the mistreatment of members of those groups.
You can bash the mirror by creating laws that marginalize people, try to drive them indoors so you never have to look at them. You can create labels and policies that stigmatize them so they are denied personhood. You can talk to them like objects, and heap all your judgments on them.
…mirrors are fragile things. If not handled with care, they break
My friend Ellie just coined a phrase I really love: whine producers. Think Toby Young, Allison Pearson and all the other people who have bad opinions for money, and who churn out those opinions on an industrial scale.
Jeffrey Ingold, Stonewall’s head of media:
In 2020, The Times (incl. the Sunday Times) wrote 324 articles about trans people & ‘trans issues’. Zero of which were written by trans people themselves.
For comparison, in 2019, The Times wrote 321 articles about trans people & ‘trans issues’. 3 were written by trans people.
Ed Yong is one of the best science reporters we have, and his COVID reporting for The Atlantic has been superb. He’s just published his final piece of 2020: Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us. It’s for a US audience but it’s relevant to many other countries too.
How does a country learn from its mistakes if it cannot even agree on whether it made any?
This article made me laugh: Why is there a bucatini shortage in America?
Being educated noodle consumers, we knew that there was, more generally, a pasta shortage due to the pandemic, but we were still able to find spaghetti and penne and orecchiette — shapes which, again, insult me even in concept. The missing bucatini felt different. It was specific. Frightening. Why bucatini? Why now? Why us?
I didn’t know what bucatini was, so I’ve ordered some to try it for myself. There doesn’t currently appear to be a bucatini shortage in Scotland.