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Oh, I forgot about the whole ‘defund the police’ thing.. crime went cray and people were getting the shit beaten out of them in the streets, car jacked, robbed, assaulted, and much more besides..
Dude and @Carleas, stop acting like the Biden years were blessed.. the Biden years were a’la Gotham and definitely needed the military out on the streets during that tenure.
“Defund the police” was a far left idea that was never adopted by the government anywhere by anybody. A couple of congresswomen spouted the idea, but they never got any legislation passed. Trump was president when the defund the police slogan became popular.So I’m not sure what your point is.
Biden adhered to a more conventional interpretation of executive power. He allowed the department of justice to function independently. His rhetoric and actions reflected respect for institutional separation of powers and a traditional role of agency experts.
By contrast, the Trump administration has embraced and sought to expand the unitary executive theory. This legal philosophy, which has support among six members of the Supreme Court gives the president nearly absolute control over the executive branch and its agencies. And Trump‘s first term he dismissed any officials that he perceived were disloyal and through executive orders he asserted control over independent agencies. In his second term he appointed a cabinet based on loyalty instead of competence and he is deconstructing the administrative state and targeting the civil service protections.
In terms of their approach to fighting crime, Biden stressed a balanced approach that sought to combine effective policing with addressing the root causes of crime such as lack of economic opportunity in education. He denounced criminal acts while promoting systemic reforms. Perhaps his biggest failure was in the area of immigration control where his policies weren’t effective until the last 100 days of his presidency while Harris was running for president.
Trump employs a tough on crime law and order message, emphasizing a forceful response to criminal activity. He often links, urban crime rates to democratic leadership and focuses on violent acts particularly by immigrants. He generally opposes new gun control measures.
In today’s headlines a series of missteps by Trump’s appointee, Kash Patel the FBI Director, in recent months have invited worries that he has eroded public confidence in the agency. Trump sent over 2300 National Guard troops to Washington DC despite a decrease in crime in that area. They have been deployed to highly trafficked tourist spots to replant grass wash off graffiti and pick up trash. To date the guardsmen have cleared 906 bags of trash spread 744 yd. of mulch removed five truckloads of plant waste and cleared 3.2 miles of roadway and painted 270 feet of fencing.
The mission of the National Guard is to serve state and federal authorities, fighting the nations wars, defending the homeland and assisting communities during domestic emergencies like natural disasters. There was no emergency or natural disaster when Trump deployed the guard so I think it’s a misuse of public funds to make himself look powerful.
Crime in the UK has been falling for years too:
It is a fascist takeover of the US government. It is the death of American democracy. People on the right are openly comparing Kirk’s shooting to the Reichstag fire and calling for the criminalization of the media and their political opponents.
It isn’t subtle.
Yes. And the US President is a convicted felon, and he’s been credibly implicated in a massive child sex trafficking operation and he’s using his office to prevent the investigation and prosecution of the people involved.
How does the existence of corruption support the military occupation of our own cities? Do you think there’s no corruption in the military? Do you think a fascist dictatorship is likely to be less corrupt?
But that just isn’t true. Crime spiked during Covid, and fell precipitously thereafter. It’s returned to pre-Covid levels, continuing its multi-decade decline.
“Defund the police” had very few practical successes. It was a slogan, it generated civilian oversight committees, not police defunding. Police funding has continued to increase:
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Biden let crime run rampant and criminals go unchallenged and unprosecuted.. perhaps he should have deployed the National Guard.
How many stores and restaurants have had to close down across America due to damage destruction and theft ?
..or a country taking back control. 
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What is it you are really resisting, exactly?
I don’t know, how many? Over what time period? Where are they located? How does that compare to other places and times?
What’s your source?
I have been spelling that out on this thread since January 22, 2025 so I’m surprised at your question. The issues we are resisting include:
Authoritarianism. Undermining the US constitution, freedom of speech and the separation of powers, civil, and human rights; threatening sovereign nations, and America’s allies; targeting specific businesses and favoring others, illegal overreach with tariffs, extorting and leveraging power against universities and political enemies, forcing companies to surrender portions of their revenue and give the US government golden shares, deporting people without due process, harassing people based on racial profiling…
Oligarchy. favoring tax breaks for billionaires; enriching the elite at the expense of working people and illegal access to power and confidential information by lobbyists and cronies like Elon Musk, cutting medical insurance to the poor.
Divisiveness. Trump’s strategy of dividing Americans along political, racial, religious and sexual orientation lines.
Corruption. Monetizing the presidency. Using presidential power to enrich himself and his family, enriching himself with deals and a jet plane from Persian gulf nations, new crypto ventures, merch, and selling influence, all of which is illegal under the constitution.
Denying freedom of information. Failure to release the Epstein files as promised.
Failure to fulfill promises to bring down inflation and end the war in Ukraine. Last but not least, we oppose the continuation of support of Israel‘s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.
The passengers killed on the first boat are still unidentified and the allegation that they were trafficking drugs is unconfirmed.
I mean there’s always been that element of American ideology. Raising the flag, teaching the greatness of the American system, the privilege of having it. Was this not quite universal throughout the schooling system? Thats the impression Ive always had.
And to be clear, I think that’s a realtively healthy sort of ideology; quite conductive of virtue, in the sense of excellence. And that’s what, it seems, the point of it was.
But I specified what I meant with ‘none’ - focus on facts (such as geography), methods for gaining knowledge (such as math), languages and fitness, rather than on moral values. Of course this preference is itself a somewhat moral valuation, but I acknowledged that.
The most difficult subject in this sense is history.
It’s more than that. Let’s look at the subjects you mention, because I agree it’s a good list, but I don’t agree that it’s possible to build a curriculum in those subjects without embedding countless value judgements.
I’ll acknowledge that math is probably the least value-laden: almost by definition, it is intended to deal with only those things that are provably true with minimal reference to the external world.
You didn’t mention it, but I would think of science falls under “methods for gaining knowledge”. And I’d think it similar to math, but that too is a value judgement: a lot of what we learn when we start doing science is challenging to certain worldviews – just ask Galileo.
More generally, methods for gaining knowledge are not perfectly objective. Should we teach kids how to listen to their emotions, or only reason? And what role faith? Should we teach them to listen to their elders, or question everything? Listen to experts, or ‘do your own research’? Trust intuition, or teach cognitive biases?
It seems like you see the trouble with respect to history, and I agree that’s one of the subject where what I’m saying is clearest: history is a bunch of competing narratives that simplify a colossally large set of facts. Although, I’d argue here that it’s often easier to ‘teach the controversy’, because e.g. every war has at least two sides, and the narrative of each side was often written down at the time.
Geography has a lot of the same problems history has. That’s easiest to see considering the independent countries of southeast Asia, or the southwestern border of Israel or Russia. And as soon as we ask questions like, “why is Northern Ireland part of the UK instead of Ireland?”, we have all the problems of narrative we have in history.
Language is even worse. First, we’re choosing which language to speak. Maybe this is less a problem in the Netherlands (are there any Dutch schools that teach Frisian?), but in the US there are plenty of districts where the majority of students speak Spanish at home, not to mention native languages that have been spoken in the Americas far longer than English. Should we encourage people to be bilingual?
But there’s also a clear political choice in how we teach language. Which dialect do we teach? Is it “color” or “colour”? Is the word “ain’t” a proper word? Can I use double negatives? We end up teaching a specific dialect, and it’s usually similar to the dialect spoken by some of the students and not the dialect spoken by others.
And we can’t teach literature without books, and choosing which books we read is absolutely a value judgement. You might thing, “teach the classics!” but there is no objective list of classics, and in any case we can’t read them all so we have to pick one. Classics that show war in a positive or a negative light? Classics that portray Christianity positively or negatively? Classics that endorse or criticize systems of class and power? There’s no objective answer, it has to be a value judgement.
I present a lot of these decisions either/or, and many can be addressed by ‘teaching the controversy’. But that too is a value judgement – do we really ‘teach the controversy’ about flat earth? Luminiferous ether? Phlogiston? The humours? Some controversies just aren’t, even though there are vocal advocates for them.
There’s no escaping value judgements. When the population is culturally homogeneous, and the education just teaches the beliefs of the prevailing culture, it might feel like it’s just ‘objective facts’ and free of ‘moral values’. But it’s still teaching values and politics, it just happens to be the values and politics that everyone already agrees with. In a culturally diverse society – and with the internet we can’t avoid cultural diversity – there’s no way to avoid teaching values and beliefs that some people disagree with.
But that’s just fish noticing the water, the water was there the whole time.
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Of course it’s possible.. haven’t you heard of objectivity?
Remember the days when curriculums were objective..? ..when you’ve got teachers from all over the world coming to work in Western schools, they bring their world-view/judgements along with them, telling students that their own [Western] people are bad people.. and who suffers/bears the brunt of it all? ..the average person, that’s who.
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At school, the only subject I recall being contentious was history.. for obvious reasons. With the other subjects, it’s not what they’re taught but how they’re taught it.. because everybody learns differently, which isn’t a contentious matter really.
This is a great pair of claims 
Succinctly demonstrates my point:
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..due to this reason: disgruntled individuals spreading a world-view that is not in the curriculum that they are there to teach, and not due to curricula stopping being objective when they represented more than one worldview.. you’re talking about the educator, I’m talking about the educatee.
What has the educator’s worldview got to do with teaching what is on the curriculum? I’m finding it hard to understand how that is even an issue.
Do you not think they want to spread dissent amongst the natives, so as to divide and conquer?
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“2. Curricula stopped being objective when they represented more than one worldview.”
Why does a curriculum need to be subjective, when it has been designed to teach schoolchildren specific things to aid them through life.
Why can’t it be done through fun things like in cooking class, in sports activities, in global cultural costume exchange events?
Why does it have to be done by spreading hate, dissent, and anger?
This is my point though: there was always a worldview in the curriculum, and the issue is that now there are more.
You’re calling the earlier one-worldview approach, “objective”, but that assumes the truth of the worldview the one worldview that is in the curriculum.
And my point is that the curriculum was always biased, it was always political, it always indoctrinated values.
Because, as I explain above at length, every decision about which specific things to teach schoolchildren is a subjective, value-laden choice.
That was true when I was in elementary school in the 50s and the “Red Scare” was going on. As an adult I read Howard Zinn and realized the American history I had been taught was riddled with propaganda.
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Yes, that was your point, that you tried to ascribe to me.
I never said there was always a worldview in the curriculum, I said there was an objective worldview in the curriculum.. so you are saying that subjective world views have been added to an objective worldview curriculum where before there weren’t any subjective views in the mix?
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Even religious education and history don’t have to be subjective.. so what subjectivity do you envision is going on and in what way and why?
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Is loyalty to its country a bias?
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Then perhaps America has to find a middle ground, and not swing from one extreme to another..?
I am aware of those American biases that have been disseminated for decades, which is probably what @Carleas was alluding to?
Yes, of course loyalty to country is a bias.
And I don’t just mean being loyal to a specific country: the idea that one should be loyal to one’s country is not objectively true, it is a subjective value.
But keep going: even assuming we agreed we should teach kids to be loyal to a their country, there are disagreements about how to be loyal. Is it loyalty to blindly accept and defend what their country is doing, or is it loyalty to identify their country’s failures so they can be corrected? Is arguing for reform disloyal?
And what even is their country? Is the country the people or the place or the ideals or the history or the culture or …?
There is no objective answer to these questions.
That would be great. But, the two party system has amplified conflict and division and Trump is the most divisive figure to hold the office of US president ever. Whereas other presidents have appealed to the better angels of the populous following political assassinations Trump is actually stoking the fires of rage with violent rhetoric against his political enemies.
The Resistance opposes the Trump Administration’s assault on free speech, the latest episode of which is the firing of Jimmy Kimmel.
