Friday roundup

The jackboots will tolerate not the slightest departure from total orthodoxy.

Mark Duplass is an up and coming filmmaker and actor. On July 10, he tweeted his intention to "perform one random, tiny act of kindness each day for the next 365 days." So far, so good. Liberals can be kind, right? 

Then, Wednesday, he tweeted "Fellow liberal: If you are interested at all in ‘crossing the aisle’ you should consider following @BenShapiro. I don’t agree with him on much but he’s a genuine person who once helped me for no other reason than to be nice. He doesn’t bend the truth. His intentions are good." (The tweet has since been deleted.)

Variety called that tweet "controversial." As if calling another human being genuine and thanking them for being nice is a controversial act. "Nice" is controversial unless the person has been vetted by the Hollywood Church of Liberalism.

By the reaction, you'd think he advocated for Caligula. Liberals, especially ones in the Hollywood Church of Liberalism, are not interested in "crossing the aisle." They are not interested in tolerance, or acts of kindness toward conservatives. They are not interested in facts, truth, science, or genuineness. They are not interested in the good intentions of others who don't share their specific worldview on topics like abortion, guns, and immigration. They are not tolerant of people who dare to reach out like Duplass did.

By Thursday, Duplass had been beaten to a bloody pulp on Twitter, and his forced confession of sin was posted publicly. 

"So that tweet was a disaster on many levels," Duplass tweeted. "I want to be clear that I in no way endorse hatred, racism, homophobia, xenophobia or any such form of intolerance." He went on with blather about "communicating clearly" and "bi-partisan understanding." But clearly, Duplass was defeated and put in his place.

The McDonald's corporation intends to have ordering kiosks installed at all its stores within a couple of years. The reason is obvious to anyone who understands basic economics:

. . . these sorts of jobs were always supposed to be . . . [f]irst jobs. The place where you learn some of the basics of getting used to working for a living. Showing up on time, working on a team and putting out a product. You can also earn enough money to help work your way through school or just keep gas in your car until you either move up the ladder or move on to a permanent career. And the fast food industry – which runs on very tight profit margins for most franchise outlets – had the benefit of low-cost labor to run their operation.

But when the government decided to get involved on behalf of the unions and force these employers to pay double the previous wages, offer full healthcare, paid family leave and other benefits, the labor costs skyrocketed. At that point, expensive investments in automation technology suddenly began looking more affordable. And now that they’ve sunk the money into it there’s no turning back. Why would you go back to paying some kid to take orders when the kiosks take no time off (except for occasional maintenance or repairs), demand no benefits and work tirelessly from morning until night without needing a break?

Rich Lowry at NRO makes the case that NATO - and you can use that as shorthand for the West - ought to quite vigorously serve notice to Russia that the Baltic states are going to remain sovereign and have their own distinct cultures.

Amy Contrada at The American Thinker fills us in on the chilling details of how Boston activists pushing for the obliteration of scientific and spiritual understanding of normal human sexuality have made an end run around the 1995 SCOTUS decision (Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc.) by helping to elect a hard-left mayor who has facilitated the usurpation of one of Boston's Catholic community's most cherished institutions: the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

As if post-America weren't raising its middle finger to Almighty God high enough already, get ready for the social-media "theybie" community:

 Three-year-old twins Zyler and Kadyn Sharpe scurried around the boys and girls clothing racks of a narrow consignment store filled with toys. Zyler, wearing rainbow leggings, scrutinized a pair of hot-pink-and-purple sneakers. Kadyn, in a T-Rex shirt, fixated on a musical cube that flashed colorful lights. At a glance, the only discernible difference between these fraternal twins is their hair — Zyler’s is brown and Kadyn’s is blond.

Is Zyler a boy or a girl? How about Kadyn? That’s a question their parents, Nate and Julia Sharpe, say only the twins can decide. The Cambridge, Mass., couple represent a small group of parents raising “theybies” — children being brought up without gender designation from birth. A Facebook community for these parents currently claims about 220 members across the U.S.

“A theyby is, I think, different things to different people,” Nate Sharpe told NBC News. “For us, it means raising our kids with gender-neutral pronouns — so, ‘they,’ ‘them,’ ‘their,’ rather than assigning ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ ‘her’ from birth based on their anatomy.”

Parents in the U.S. are increasingly raising children outside traditional gender norms — allowing boys and girls to play with the same toys and wear the same clothes — though experts say this is happening mostly in progressive, well-to-do enclaves. But what makes this “gender-open” style of parenting stand out, and even controversial in some circles, is that the parents do not reveal the sex of their children to anyone. Even the children, who are aware of their own body parts and how they may differ from others, are not taught to associate those body parts with being a boy or girl. If no one knows a child’s sex, these parents theorize, the child can’t be pigeonholed into gender stereotypes.

This type of parenting received widespread attention in 2011, when a Toronto couple announced that they were raising their child, Storm, without gender designation, sparking a media frenzy. Progressive parents, who see their child’s gender as fluid rather than binary, took notice. A Brooklyn couple runs a blog featuring their 2-year-old, Zoomer, and offering advice on how to navigate the world while raising a “theyby.”

Others have taken to Instagram to share photos and support.

Some developmental experts see gender-open parenting as a noble goal, but they also wonder how it will hold up once kids enter a gendered world that can be hostile to those who don’t fit clearly into categories. Gender-nonconforming children are more likely to be bullied. Last year, 10 states considered “bathroom bills” requiring people to use bathrooms aligned with the gender assigned to them at birth (none passed).

“Once your child meets the outer world, which may be day care, or preschool, or grandparents — it's pretty much impossible to maintain a gender-free state,” Lise Eliot, professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” said in an email. “And depending on how conventional your community is, you could be setting your child up for bullying or exclusion.”

Aw, Dr. Eliot, that's so sad. Poor widdle Zoomer is going to encounter a world where people operate on worldwide, thousands-of-year-old understanding of normality and the parameters of the way God constructed nature.

It's never a good idea to subject kids to government schooling, but a study now bears out the notion that letting Leviathan gets its claws into their skulls at the earliest possible age is a real bad idea:

Latest results from the first randomized control trial of a state pre-kindergarten program found participants’ early gains quickly transformed into worse academic performance, more discipline problems, and higher special education placements than children who hadn’t participated. By second or third grade, the nearly 3,000 children studied who participated in Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K Program (TNVPK, or VPK) had statistically significant negative results compared to peers who mostly stayed home with their families.

“One possibility is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, some children may be better off academically if—instead of attending public pre-k—they stay at home at age four,” says a study summary from the Arnold Foundation’s Straight Talk on Evidence research clearinghouse (h/t Jay Greene). 

Tennessee’s pre-k program was touted as a national model long before high-quality studies could be completed to test that assertion. That is typical of preschool advocacy, which is lush with foundation and government funds but low on reliable, replicable benefits to children and taxpayers. Partly because of this persistent PR push, two-thirds of four-year-olds and two-fifths of three-year-olds currently attend pre-primary programs. Half of that number are enrolled in government programs, a proportion that has grown rapidly in the past few decades despite parallel growth in government debt and deficits.

Few jobs in this world could be more tiring than being a White House communications-shop person trying to stay one step ahead of the Very Stable Genius's mouth.