In which we post interesting or amusing Tweets about the Biden Presidency

It seems to exist entirely for the purpose of having headlines and unread articles shared and re-tweeted.

 

Cats are the only animal that can divorce its humans, move out, and take on new owners

 

We have a cat moved in at our place in summer because he doesn't like his current owner.

He spends most of his time asleep or grifting for food, then goes out for a night of violent murder.

Sociopathic doesn't really do justice to his lifestyle ...

 

1461506998118330374 is not a valid tweet id

And vice versa

 

And they will taunt you when they do it.

 

Politico is notoriously bad even within the industry.

Pod Save America has a Hot Takes Appreciators pisstake where they rank dumb takes on a Politico scale - the worst take being the full Politico Playbook

 

That's not what the exercise is asking the student to do, though. It's asking the student to assume the POV of the settler, not to understand it. Certainly not to analyze it.

 

That would be less problematic, but I don't see that as being ideal.

You could write a thesis on the problematic framing of the question. The fact that the question specifies neither the race nor the gender of the "American settler" should be setting off your alarm bells.

 

If the instructions don't specify that "American settler" is a euphemism for "white male slaveholder" then it's a big, big problem.

I think there's a big difference between asking a student to understand white squatters seeking to expel Indians from land in order to open up slave-based agricultural development, versus asking them to act as such. The notion that we must empathize with bad actors in the past in order to understand them strikes me as fraught with bad consequences, and I doubt it's good pedagogy to boot.

If I were teaching children about the Holocaust, I would want them to understand that many ordinary Germans went along with it for reasons which made sense to them at the time, or which at the least they were able to justify to themselves fairly easily. I would not ask them to waste time pretending to be a middle-class German clerk writing a letter to the local authorities informing them that his neighbor is actually a Jew who has been hiding his identity.

To quote/paraphrase Vonnegut: we are what we pretend to be. Even putting aside that the exercise in that tweet would require a great deal more study and thought than the average primary or secondary school teacher has to devote to such a complex topic, the act assuming the role of a thoughtlessly racist aspiring slaveowner justifying ethnic cleansing will likely teach a 'lesson' that's implicit in the psychological process needed to fulfill the assignment.