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Alternative Math
Rarely do we have the opportunity to laugh at the antics of the Left and the irrationality of their ideas. Instead, we bemoan the distortions of truth and call out for rational, sensible behavior. Sometimes, it’s satisfying to just laugh at all of it.
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Published in Culture
Great minds, huh? Good to hear from you @kidcoder!
First thing I noticed.
I love Tom Lehrer. When I was a kid we had an album with that song. But, being a record, it didn’t have this:
How are the newlyweds doing? Back from the honeymoon?
Isn’t 2 + 2 = 22 called concatenating? Or is that equation written differently?
I didn’t make past the beginning of video:(
Yes.
I mean who’s to say her $4000 answer is wrong?
Oh, way more than just two! And not just in the talking heads segment, either.
Still funny, though!
My guess is the filmmakers don’t see it as something laid squarely at the feet of the left.
I get the sense they’re mocking an American phenomenon, not just a left-wing phenomenon. I have little reason to doubt my left-leaning friends who went into education would find this just as funny as we do.
Let us look on the bright side. At the end of the video, the Truth won out. People can run from the Truth as hard as they can but in the end the Truth always comes back.
That’s what I saw, also. The Left doesn’t even recognize that they are the ones screwing up the school system, even as they mock the screwing up of the school system.
Isn’t the most memorable example of this kind behavior by parents against teachers the teaching of evolution in schools?
That’s the one that the media makes the most fuss about. For my money, the lack of basic economics and the glorification of the Howard Zin approach of American history is a bigger deal but that is so commonly accepted by media people they don’t make a fuss.
Thanks so much, @henrycastaigne! Peterson is always awesome. Ban radical stupidity!!!
On the Dr. JBP clip:
Excellent, @arahant! We rebels-in-waiting will follow you!
This post is a PowerLine pick today! Nice cross-promotion with overlapping but not identical audiences.
How far we have come from Ma and Pa Kettle doing math! The humor then assumed common knowledge and agreement on basic arithmetic.
Cool! Anyone want my autograph? (Seriously, it is neat. ;-))
I don’t think it’s an attempt at “balance,” and I’m not so sure this film was even intended as a commentary on the school system. I think they might be straight-up liberals who set out to make a film mocking conservatives.
My first clue was the title “Alternative Math,” which I took to be a play on “alternative facts,” and sure enough I found this from an interview with the director:
He also confirms there’s a political message to the film, without actually saying what it is:
My theory is the film started with liberals rolling their eyes at Trump-supporting conservatives with their “alternative facts” and asking something like “surely even Trump voters couldn’t deny that 2+2=4, could they? Wait, what if they did?” And then the school setting was almost incidental, it was just the logical place for a story about a world where even arithmetic falls within the domain of “alternative facts” subject to political spin.
What I find amusing is that they may have intended to ridicule conservatives, but I think they did an excellent job of caricaturing themselves. It’s just another example of how the left is unable to reflect on their own attitudes and behaviors and how they try to blame others. Depending on one’s viewpoint, they were a huge success or a dismal failure. I’ll take the latter.
I’m not sure the school setting was entirely coincidental. @valiuth mentioned the Evolution Wars earlier, and I think there’s something to that.
Conservatives, of course, have a hard time relating to parents who don’t expect their child to be punished for getting arithmetic wrong. Generally, conservatives complain that children aren’t punished enough for poor arithmetic. But conservative parents also care very much about schools respecting parental authority. Which means if there were conservative parents who sincerely believed 2+2=4 was a liberal lie, they would be likely to support their child in the way parodied.
Rather than thinking of this as an example of liberal lack of self awareness, I’m inclined to think of it as just successful comedy about American life. It succeeds in being funny for all of us, capturing tensions in American culture we can all relate to.
Four legs good, two legs better.
And “what is important right now is equal outcome, not equal opportunity. Which means for any people who have the privilege of being born in this country, you better learn to take a back seat to new arrivals, and learn some Spanish while you’ re at it.”
No hablo Español.