From The Fourth Checkraise:
John Derbyshire, the cranky old paleo among the neocon crew of the National Review, is certainly my favourite writer in that outfit, plus his "Derb Radio" podcasts always lighten up the Friday afternoons considerably. He now has a new book out, aptly titled "We Are Doomed" which I would immediately put on hold at the library, if they had it... dang, I guess that will have to wait. Meanwhile, in his September diary Derb discovers that kids can go through the whole K-12 without learning about Pol Pot. Heh, really, Derb, this was news to you? I remember wondering about that exact same question like ten years ago. Of a random sample of one hundred high school seniors, I'd bet that 90 would know who, whom, where and when (within a decade) about Adolf Hitler, but only 50 could answer these questions about Joseph Stalin, and at most one or two would have even heard of the Old Pol from Sorbonne. Which is indeed strange... actually, no, it's not. This seeming paradox follows with crystal clear logic from the ideology that is currently dominant in humanities and education. To tell the kids why exactly Pol Pot was bad, unlike Hitler who can be easily associated with eugenics and highways and many other bad things that progressives dislike, they would have denounce most of their own ideology of anti-individualist equalism that this vanguard of the masses simply took to its logical conclusion.
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