1.) A good episode of the Zero Squared podcast (I'd never heard of it before) wherein Freddie DeBoer and Spiked Online's Brendan O'Neill discuss whether we should "punch Nazis" (they both say No). That is the topic but the speakers both go into more detail about the present moment and the left's response to it. I agree with about 90% of what I heard. O'Neill seems very knowledgeable about leftist history and DeBoer is very thoughtful about the left and what we do next.
2.) Betsy DeVos was narrowly confirmed as Secretary of Education. The Senate vote was split 50-50, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote in her favor.
Vice News tells about how Detroit schools were gutted by people with a mindset like DeVos.
The gutting of Detroit’s public schools is the result of an experiment started 23 years ago, when education reformers including Betsy DeVos, now Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, got Michigan to bet big on charters and school choice.Freddie DeBoer writes on Facebook:
Median charter schools and private school voucher programs don't meaningfully outperform traditional public schools. High-performing charters are generally not remotely scalable. Charter schools writ large are rife with mechanisms that screen out the hardest-to-educate students, even when they advertise as open to all. Schools like the Harlem Children's Zone schools are notorious for sky-high student attrition rates. Systems like the Success Academies rely on a constant churn of teachers coming into and out of the system in a regular and predictable burnout cycle; this in turn requires a steady influx of educated labor willing to work in poor conditions, a situation that cannot possibly be ported from New York City to, say, the Mississippi Delta. According to charter advocates hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country would have to be fired, but we already face a teacher shortage and there is no bullpen of teachers ready to step in. Attacks on tenure make the job of public teacher less attractive; claims that this will be mitigated with increased teacher salaries depend on utterly fanciful notions that we'll dramatically raise property taxes across the country. Charter and private schools have direct financial incentive to commit fraud to raise standards. I could go on.
3.) Amnesty International has released a report stating that as many as 13,000 people have been hanged in the Syrian government's Saydnaya prison over the course of the civil war, dating back to 2011 up until December, 2015, and they believe there is no reason to believe the practice has stopped. "The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population." The executions take place after sham trials lasting 1 or 2 minutes.
The Amnesty report prompted a strong reaction from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who, "was horrified about what was in the report," according to U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
"We have repeatedly raised serious concerns about the grave violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law in Syria, including in detention centers and government-run prisons," Dujarric told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York. "What is important is that there needs to be accountability for all the victims in this conflict."
...
The chilling accounts in Tuesday's report came from interviews with 31 former detainees and over 50 other officials and experts, including former guards and judges.
Jacobin has an engaging interview between a Syrian who participated in the 2011 demonstrations against Assad and who is now studying in Sussex, and an American activist on activism in support of Syria in the age of Drumpf.
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