Wikipedia Sucks!

The decision process was a joke. The committee’s research seems to have consisted mostly of cursory Google searches, and the sources cited were primarily Wikipedia entries or similar. Historians were not consulted. Embarrassing errors of interpretation were made, as well as rudimentary factual errors. Robert Louis Stevenson, perhaps the most beloved literary figure in the city’s history, was canceled because in a poem titled “Foreign Children” in his famous collection A Child’s Garden of Verses, he used the rhyming word Japanee for Japanese. Paul Revere Elementary School ended up on the renaming list because, during the discussion, a committee member misread a History.com article as claiming that Revere had taken part in an expedition that stole the lands of the Penobscot Indians. In fact, the article described Revere’s role in the Penobscot Expedition, a disastrous American military campaign against the British during the Revolutionary War. (That expedition was named after a bay in Maine.) But no one bothered to check, the committee voted to rename the school, and by order of the San Francisco school board Paul Revere will now ride into oblivion.

Citing the death of native peoples that resulted from the Gold Rush, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a committee member said, “I don’t think the concept of greed and lust for gold is a concept we want our children to be given”—an idealistic, if possibly futile, position in a city whose median household income exceeds $100,000.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) name is on the list after the former San Francisco mayor allegedly ordered a Confederate flag to be replaced after it was torn down, the Sacramento Bee reports.

The school board relied on a spreadsheet, apparently compiled by someone who spent 10 minutes on the Internet, to list the offenses against contemporary mores that justified the renamings. The result is many howlers. Paul Revere was erased for commanding the “disastrous Penobscot Expedition of 1779,” which the spreadsheet asserts “was directly connected to the colonization of the Penobscot.” This was actually an expedition to reclaim Maine from the British, not to colonize the Penobscot people, who sided with the patriots.

The spreadsheet originally called out the 19th-century abolitionist poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell on the grounds that “he did not want Black people to vote.” When this was pointed out as false, the spreadsheet was adjusted to read: “He advocated suffrage for blacks, yet he noted that their ability to vote could be troublesome.” The “facts” change, but the verdict remains the same: Off with his name!

Well, one person at least, a public high school teacher in San Francisco named Ingrid Seyer-Ochi, who wrote an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle that appeared on Sunday and quickly went viral. Seyer-Ochi’s objection was to the “privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege” symbolized by Sanders’s choice of a relatively casual Burton snowboarding jacket and repurposed wool mittens.

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 03, 2021 1:38 am

This item caused a ragestorm on conservative media. Predictably. But other places like the Atlantic (I DARE anyone to call the Atlantic a "conservative magazine", they just spent four years ranting about the evils of Trump) are starting to notice.