Yeah, exactly - that’s just an argument to not have a school at all. Because those parents do exist who don’t “believe” in one thing or another, collectively denying all subjects. (I remember reading a news story in the early '90s about a family who took their children out of school to prevent them from learning about “Africa.” Apparently they felt the continent was insufficiently Christian and didn’t want their children exposed to that knowledge - or at least, that was their public argument.)
17 Likes
Blithering idiot did not dither - oh no, he came right out and said it with no hesitation whatsoever.
One wonders how someone who could even entertain this notion ever got to be a principal. Is it possible to get that far merely by being an administrator as opposed to an actual educator?
2 Likes
Here is a fantasy: make him watch all of Shoah and book him on a flight to tour Auschwitz. It seems the Holocaust Museum wasn’t convincing enough. But perhaps even after all that he might continue this shrugging posture of “whelp, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.” In the words of a German poet: “Against stupidity the gods themselves labor in vain!”
If I muster up some compassion here, I suppose I can understand how some things are too horrible to accept as real. And yet, they are.
2 Likes
I hate to break it to you, but…
“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” Mr. Latson wrote, making a distinction between his personal beliefs about the Holocaust and his role as the leader of a public school. “I do allow information about the Holocaust to be presented and allow students and parents to make decisions about it accordingly. I do the same with information about slavery.”
(emphasis mine)
via:
11 Likes
Where he’s wrong, though, is that both of those events DID happen. There is incontrovertible proof. Mountains of it. It’s like questioning evolution or gravity. No educator should be doing that, even if some assholes are dancing around arguing that evolution and gravity are myths. Historical facts, much like scientific ones, should not be up for debate, full stop.
At some point, we have to start understanding that arguing about the causes and meaning of historical events is not the same as arguing about events happening. There is plenty of debate about the holocaust and what led up to it, how deep that goes, why it happened, and if we can compare it to other events - all entirely legitimate topics of discussion. When we start to debate the fact of it, well, the nazis have already won, to some degree.
22 Likes
I was just thinking that a person of color who’s in denial about the Holocaust probably has some self hatred issues as well. Get him far away from any position where he can further poison children’s minds with hateful disinformation, STAT.
Fuckin’ A.
13 Likes
This is probably a good place to drop this article…
Especially since this is the 100 anniversary of Primo Levi’s birth…
17 Likes
God damn, did nobody read the fucking article?
He’s not a holocaust denier, he’s a coward afraid of upsetting holocaust deniers.
And his weasel speak isn’t alt-right trolling, it’s passive voiced educator jargon. Instead of piling on the black man in Boca Raton as if he were a racist, we should be finding out where he got this quisling posture. Has he encountered Holocaust deniers before? Where did the policy of treating all beliefs as equal and never offending any parents come from?
8 Likes
That’s even worse, then.
I don’t care what he actually believes, I care that he’s been exposing his ignorance and/or his intellectual cowardice to impressionable kids.
30 Likes
Who came up with Florida Man?
Ponce de Leon, Florida Man
5 Likes
There was a history teacher in my high school who, when he taught WWII, often told his students that Hitler was mostly just misunderstood and actually had a lot of good ideas. This was in Texas in the mid 1980s. Almost all of my high school’s history teachers were coaches, who hadn’t actually majored in history. It was also a common path to school administration (Vice Principal, Principal, District Supervisor, Assistant Superintendent, etc.). I don’t know how common this practice still is, or if this idiot followed that track, but it used to explain a lot of public school administrative nonsense.
7 Likes
"The study also found significant gaps in knowledge about the Holocaust:
- Nearly one-third of all Americans (31 percent) and more than 4-in-10 Millennials (41 percent) believe that substantially less than 6 million Jews were killed (two million or fewer) during the Holocaust
- While there were over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, almost half of Americans (45 percent ) cannot name a single one – and this percentage is even higher amongst Millennials"
9 Likes
Heck, most people don’t know there were over 40,000 camps and ghettos. They think there were about 10, and that’s it.
Every single town had at least one small one connected to it. Which is why the claim that they didn’t know what was happening doesn’t pass the smell test: it was happening in their own backyards, not hundreds of miles away.
11 Likes
This is one of the reasons that I find the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s position on Ocasio-Cortez’s correct characterisation of the ICE border facilities as concentration camps so puzzling. They more than most were in a position to use this as a high-profile and wide-reaching learning opportunity about the history of concentration camps, while still emphasising that the Nazi practise was a special but far from improbable nadir.
10 Likes
Triangle man,
Triangle man.
Three branches of the government man.
When executive branch gets of of line,
Congress should whine.
accordian music
6 Likes
Even the organizations that expressed concerns over the use of the terminology agree about the inhumanity of the detention centers:
Unfortunately, all they ended up doing was giving ammunition to the Trumpists.
1 Like
I’ll never stop being amazed by how ‘alternative facts’ get their hooks into people.
2 Likes
Technically true as he is losing that particular job.
1 Like
If only he’d said it on a Saturday no one would have seen 
Possibly because they tend to use shorter words…?
*shrug
4 Likes
