Welcome to Sott.net
Thu, 04 Nov 2021
The World for People who Think

Society's Child
Map

NPC

How The 'Illusory Truth Effect' Duped Millions Into Believing in Russiagate

optical illusion
"Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy", read the front page headline of Sunday's New York Times. Bit by bit, mainstream American consciousness is slowly coming to terms with the death of the thrilling conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and with the stark reality that the mass media and the Democratic Party spent the last two and-a-half years monopolizing public attention with a narrative which never had any underlying truth to it.

There are still holdouts, of course. Many people invested a tremendous amount of hope, credibility, and egoic currency in the belief that Robert Mueller was going to arrest high-ranking Trump administration officials and members of Trump's own family, leading seedy characters to "flip" on the president in their own self-interest and thereby providing evidence that will lead to impeachment. Some insist that Attorney General William Barr is holding back key elements of the Mueller report, a claim which is premised on the absurd belief that Mueller would allow Barr to lie about the results of the investigation without speaking up publicly. Others are still holding out hope that other investigations by other legal authorities will turn up some Russian shenanigans that Mueller could not, ignoring Mueller's sweeping subpoena powers and unrivaled investigative authority. But they're coming around.

Comment: Media consumers beware.


NPC

Progressive madness: Three far-left students arrested after setting fire to Tulane conservative student's dorm room

arrested students
Violent fascist students doxxed Peyton Lofton, a chapter leader for Turning Point USA and YAL chapter officer at Tulane University, then lit his dorm room door on fire on Friday.

Mr. Lofton was doxxed by an anti-YAL (Young Americans for Liberty) social media account, according to a fellow YAL member.

Charlie Kirk, the leader of TPUSA sounded the alarm on Saturday.

Charlie Kirk posted photos of the burnt dorm room door and Peyton Lofton and said, "This is Peyton Lofton, our chapter leader for TPUSA at Tulane. He was recently doxxed by the violent left for being a conservative," Kirk said. "Last night his dorm room door was literally SET ON FIRE after he was doxxed. The violent left is targeting students!"

Comment: Someone needs to sit down with the Tulane Police and explain to them that the reason Peyton Lofton is being attacked is because the far left in the US are losing their collective minds. And it just seems to be getting worse!


Heart - Black

3 Russian servicemen died in Syria in February, militants responsible for attack eliminated - MoD

Russian troops Syria
© Sputnik / Russian Defense Ministry
FILE PHOTO: Russian troops in Syria.
Three Russian troops were killed in a gunfight with terrorists in Syria in late February, the Defense Ministry has said. A gang of 30 militants responsible for the attack has since been identified and eliminated.

The Russian servicemen were returning to base in a car after a humanitarian aid delivery in the Deir ez-Zor Province when they were ambushed by a group of gunmen. "After the battle that broke out, the troops were missing in action," the ministry said in a statement.

The search for the troops, which the Syrian military also took part in, started right after their disappearance. The fighters who organized the attack were eventually identified and the death of Russian soldiers was confirmed.

Comment: Those with blood on their hands are not just the terrorists themselves, but those countries that are provably aiding and abetting them:


Palette

UW's teacher preparation program: A militant immersion in social justice activism and identity politics

The UW's teacher preparation program is a militant immersion in social justice activism and identity politics that almost entirely neglects the study of pedagogy, intellectual inquiry, and the development of academic expertise.

University of Washington
© Michael Courtney Design
The University of Washington's Secondary Teacher Education Program (STEP) is a twelve-month immersion in doctrinaire social justice activism and identity politics that awards a masters degree in teaching. Rather than an academic program centered around pedagogy and public policy, STEP is a bizarre political experiment, rife with juvenile requirements and light on academic rigor, in which the faculty quite consciously whips up a fraught emotional climate in order to underline its ideological message. As a consequence, the key components of teaching - pedagogy and the dissemination of academic knowledge - are fundamentally neglected. With no practical training or preparation, students begin their student-teaching practicums woefully unprepared in a sink or swim mentality focused mostly on emotional hypersensitivity. Even for the ardent social justice activist, the program's lack of practicality offers a value to its graduates little more than as a barrier to entering the teaching profession.

Organized according to the standard tenets of social justice theory, those in the graduate school class who do not identify as a straight white male are encouraged from the outset to present themselves as victims of oppression in the social hierarchy of the United States. And so a culture emerges rapidly in the 60-student cohort in which words and semantics fall under constant scrutiny, and ideas contrary to the ascendant ideology are rooted out in order to advance the high cause of social justice. Moreover, instead of imparting knowledge in pedagogy or working with graduate students to develop academic content and lesson-planning for high school courses, the faculty and leadership declare that their essential mission is to break the colonialism, misogyny and homophobia to which the important civic institutions and those at the top of the social hierarchy as they define it (white, male, straight) in American society are currently engaged. The logic being employed here is that an entire profession of teachers fluent in social justice will have the effect of reordering society itself by educating young people at all levels of K-12 and post-secondary education under this framework. This lofty ethos explains why the program focuses so heavily on training students in the discourse of far-left identity politics, and with such serious outcomes at stake why it demands the total intellectual acquiescence of those within it, with a consequently high drop-out rate and a chilling of frank discussion. When you consider that STEP's purpose is to prepare graduates to become novice high school teachers, such an acrimonious and psychologically manipulative environment in a public university is difficult to justify. I have decided to write this account with specific examples of the daily experience, in order to illustrate how social justice activism in the academy has a high opportunity cost, and how the program has become almost entirely untethered from its mission.

Comment: An absolutely travesty. If this is the level of instruction indoctrination that graduate level courses are teaching future teachers, the education system is surely on its way to utter collapse. See also:


Stock Down

US teens have less face time with their friends - and are lonelier than ever

lonely teen
© REUTERS/Desmond Boylan
Do young people today experience more loneliness than previous generations?
Ask a teen today how she communicates with her friends, and she'll probably hold up her smartphone. Not that she actually calls her friends; it's more likely that she texts them or messages them on social media.

Today's teens - the generation I call "iGen" that's also called Gen Z - are constantly connected with their friends via digital media, spending as much as nine hours a day on average with screens.

How might this influence the time they spend with their friends in person?

Comment: What's become clear is that digital communication is a double-edged sword - sure, we're more 'connected' than ever, interacting with many people previous generations would not have had the opportunity to meet. However, these digital interactions clearly can't replace real face-to-face socializing. As has been put forward by many, social media usage needs to be used with moderation, it's addictive aspects held in check, or future generations will truly be lost.

See also:


TV

TV ad in migrant's native language enrages Swedish, causes backlash on social media

Ahlens store
© Wikipedia / Holger.Ellgaard
A Swedish TV commercial showing a man, presumed to be a migrant, reading his daughter a bedtime story in his native language instead of Swedish sparked social media uproar.

Many Swedish TV viewers were left baffled last week after a local broadcaster ran a commercial in a language that most of the viewers could not grasp - and it didn't even have subtitles.

The ad, launched by the local department store Ahlens, shows a father reading a bedtime story to his daughter - a piece from the Swedish children's book Pippi Longstocking - apparently in Dari, a dialect of Persian spoken largely in Afghanistan.


Comment: See also:


Map

Erdogan mulls reopening Hagia Sophia as a mosque

Hagia Sophia
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday voiced the possibility of reverting the Hagia Sophia, which has been used as a museum since 1935 and is considered one of the world's wonders, to a mosque.

"This is not unlikely. We might even change its name to Ayasofya Mosque," Erdoğan said during a live interview with Turkish broadcaster TGRT.

"This is not a strange proposal," he said regarding the calls to convert the historical building to serve the purpose it did for half a millennium.

Pirates

Irish soldier turned 'ISIS bride' says she wants to return home

ISIS bride
An Irish woman accused of being a member of ISIS says she wants to return home. Lisa Smith is a former Army soldier and Air Corps corporal who went to Syria five years ago and is currently detained in a refugee camp.

"I want to go home. I think the people here should realise all the people here are not terrorists," Smith told a CNN reporter at the Al-Houl refugee camp controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces in northeast Syria.

Smith was asked whether she would be ready to go to jail in Ireland, and said, "I know they'd strip me of my passport and stuff and I wouldn't travel and I'd be watched kinda. But prison, I don't know. I'm already in prison."

Arrow Down

French Muslim council to file complaints against Facebook & YouTube for distributing Christchurch shooting video

ChirstChurch shooting
The French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM) announced they will file a complaint against Facebook and YouTube for hosting the video of the New Zealand shooting, claiming the platforms helped spread the shooter's hateful message.

The CFCM announced their decision to file the complaint on Monday, saying the social media sites had disseminated "violent messages inciting terrorism," which "seriously undermine human dignity" and were "likely to be seen or perceived by a minor," according to a copy of the complaint sent to AFP.

The CFCM is a non-profit organization that serves as an unofficial mediator between the French government and the country's Muslim population.

Comment: Also see: Christchurch Terror Attack: Mass Censorship, Mystery Shooters, And The Globetrotting Lone Gunman


Colosseum

Paul Joseph Watson: The Collapse of Western Civilization

collapse
All around us the signs may be seen. And are accelerating. Watch Paul Joseph Watson as he explains why almost every factor that precedes the collapse of great civilizations has been met by the West.


Comment: See also: Depravity, frivolity, and dissent: The tell-tale signs of the end of an empire