Critical Race Theory (CRT) is nothing new and has been around for decades, but it seems to have been suddenly thrust into the mainstream debate within the last year or so and branded as public enemy #1 by its critics who call it Marxist ideology or some sort of communist conspiracy ‘pushed’ by liberals and Democrats in an effort to make students ‘hate America’. I don’t doubt that liberals and Democrats tend to be more supportive of CRT, but to confuse it with Marxism or some sort of nefarious plot is just silly in my opinion.
Jonathan Rowe and David Bollier raise some really good thought-provoking questions in this article about economics, ‘the market’, and its insidious creep into every aspect of our lives. They ask, “Is everything for sale?” It touches on the need to create boundaries on the market’s “relentless creep”.
Again, I’ve stumbled on an article today that mirrors so many of my thoughts. This is another article of the sort I was planning on trying to write at some point, but Dr. Philipsen has beaten me to it in excellent form.
In this great article, Packer hits on many points and thoughts that echo my own. The true tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic’s affect on the US isn’t the virus itself, but the woefully inadequate response led by incompetence, decades of cuts to public spending and infrastructure, privatization of public resources and services, and political squabbling.
A co-worker encountered a form on an internal site the other day where the input field for an alphanumeric ID was set up erroneously as an integer field with a step value. Whenever he tried to enter his ID, the field stripped the letters and rounded the remaining numbers to the nearest 10,000 or something dumb like that.