all 272 comments

[–]rwkastenBring on the dancing horses[S,M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Twilight of the American Left

“The most vulgar, simplistic view of the Left — that dissolves all the supposed distinctions between centrists, liberals, leftists, socialists, communists into one homogenous Democratic blob — happens to be correct.” So writes Benedict Cryptofash, an anonymous Twitter user and self-described “anti-leftist” whose other theoretical contributions include “the Left and Right are fake and gay” and “only libtards care about policy”.

Despite appearences, Cryptofash — his pseudonym mocks the tendency of online leftists to accuse their critics of “cryptofascism” — is not your typical Right-wing internet troll. He’s a Marxist who regards “leftism” as the ideology of bourgeois supremacy, the twenty-first-century equivalent of the classical liberalism that Karl Marx spent his mature years attempting to demolish. “My critique focuses on the Left,” Cryptofash writes in one of his periodic straight tweets, “not because they are worse than the Right, but because they are better than the right at precluding proletarian class consciousness.”

[...]

The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general. The Republicans, however loathsome, are largely a distraction — a tenuous alliance between a minority faction of the ruling class and petit bourgeois.

Effectively incapable of governing outside the bounds set by the Democrats and Democrat-aligned media, corporations, NGOs and government bureaucracies, the GOP’s real function is to serve as a sort of ideological bogeyman. By positioning itself as the last line of defence against phantasmic threats of “fascism” and “white nationalism” coming from the Right, the ruling class is able to legitimise its own power and conceal the domination on which that power rests.

Leftists, in this telling — whether Ivy League professors or Antifa militants on the streets of Portland — are thus little more than the unwitting dupes of the ruling class. However much they profess to hate the Democratic Party, they are, in practice, its running-dog lackeys. They support the party electorally, harass and cancel its designated enemies and enforce pro-Democrat ideology in the media, academia and the workplace. Crucially, they also help maintain the permanent state of moral emergency that serves as a pretext for the expansion of ruling class power, whether in the form of the increasingly direct control that tech monopolies wield over political discourse or the pursuit of Covid policies that transfer wealth upward and subject workers to a dystopian regime of medical surveillance.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] Is the Conventional Wisdom on Educational Spending All Wrong? I doubt it, but who knows

Do school expenditures determine student performance? Are our educational gaps resource gaps? I would have thought that I could confidently answer with a no and not be challenged, at this point. People have regressed spending by countries, states, and districts on outcome metrics for a long time, and they pretty much universally show that there is no relationship between spending and success as defined in traditional terms. Neither countries that spend more nor states that spend more consistently outperform their stingier counterparts. We haven’t been able to make real causal statements, but in education we almost never can, nor is it easy to do so at the scales we’re talking about here. Perhaps the most commonly-cited review comes from the Hoover Institution’s Eric Hanushek1, who is a zealous advocate of teacher quality measures (and their nastier consequences) and who since the 1980s has been a loud voice saying that we can’t spend our way out of our problems. In the intervening decades this view has become the conventional wisdom. But lately, there’s been a growing sense that it’s wrong.

I doubt that anyone would object to the claim that the United States has been trying to spend its way out of educational inequality for decades. Though you sometimes hear, absurdly, that we are “defunding” education, we are spending as much as we ever have, in inflation-adjusted dollars, and that is significantly more than we spent for the great bulk of the history of public education. And this funding increase has been steered in dominant majorities towards “need,” which means poorer schools and disproportionately higher-minority schools2. It’s typical for left-leaning people to lament that poor districts are broadly underfunded relative to others, but it’s hard to justify this belief. Part of the perception problem is that people are operating in a local-spending dominant mindset, when that reality doesn’t really exist anymore.

The growth of state spending has been a quiet but major story in recent decades, in part due to the massive expenditures necessitated by NCLB and ESSA testing requirements. State funding sources are now at parity with local sources and while federal education spending is still far behind, that expense has grown to something like .5% of GDP. Discretionary fed money tends to be heavily concentrated in the worst-performing schools, and state expenditures also are often steered towards struggling schools and districts. Here’s Title I spending as a convenient indicator of the larger dynamic, again old data but the trend hasn’t changed.

We’re spending more, and we’re steering the money where people say they want it to go. It just hasn’t worked.

I really need to underline this point: lower educational expenditures per student can’t be the source of race and income gaps because Blacker and poorer schools receive more per-pupil funding than whiter and richer schools. Sosina and Weathers 2019: “On average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively.” Check the tables in the study for more. And this does not encompass the small but growing amount of private dollars that are finding their way into public schools through various grant programs and foundation spending, which likely almost all goes to struggling poor and high-minority schools. This finding flies so directly in the face of the progressive conversation that I find people just can’t hear it, but it actually makes perfect sense. Of course those schools have more funding; we’ve been throwing money at our achievement gaps for 40 years.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The point is control

So let’s not pretend I’m Malcolm Gladwell or some similarly slimy asshole seeking to “both sides” a clearcut moral issue. Let’s pretend I am me. Flash back to about a year ago, when there was real, widespread, and sustained support for police reform. Remember that? Seems like forever ago, man, but it was just last year… anyhow, now, remember what happened? Direct, issues-focused attempts to reform policing were knocked down. Blotted out. Instead, we were told two things: 1) we had to repeat the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE, and 2) we had to say it was actually very good and beautiful and nonviolent and valid when rioters burned down poor neighborhoods.

Now, in a relatively healthy discourse, it might have been possible for someone to say something like “while I agree that American policing is heavily violent and racist and requires substantial reforms, I worry that taking such an absolutist point of demanding abolition and cheering on the destruction of city blocks will be a political non-starter.” This statement would have been, in retrospect, 100000000% correct. But could you have said it, in any worthwhile manner? If you had said something along those lines, what would the fallout had been? Would you have lost friends? Your job? Would you have suffered something more minor, like getting yelled at, told your opinion did not matter? Would your acquaintances still now–a year later, after their political project has failed beyond all dispute–would they still defame you in “whisper networks,” never quite articulating your verbal sins but nonetheless informing others that you are a dangerous and bad person because one time you tried to tell them how utterly fucking self-destructive they were being?

It is undeniably clear that last year’s most-elevated voices were demanding not reform but catharsis. I hope they really had fun watching those immigrant-owned bodegas burn down, because that’s it, that will forever be remembered as the most palpable and consequential aspect of their shitty, selfish movement. We ain’t reforming shit. Instead, we gave everyone who’s already in power a blank check to fortify that power to a degree you and I cannot fully fathom.

But, oh, these people knew what they were doing. They were good little boys and girls. They have been rewarded with near-total control of the national discourse, and they are all either too guilt-ridden or too stupid to realize how badly they played into the hands of the structures they were supposedly trying to upend.

And so left-liberalism is now controlled by people whose worldview is equal parts superficial and incoherent. This was the only possible outcome that would have let the system continue to sustain itself in light of such immense evidence of its unsustainability without resulting in reform, so that’s what has happened.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Poland: Pro-family law upheld by regional councilmen despite EU threats

Lesser Poland region councilmen decided to uphold a law which opposes ideological LGBT indoctrination. Civic Platform politicians who were backed by European Commission threats designed to challenge the law were unable to halt the law from passing.

The issue concerns a document which the Lesser Poland councilmen passed in 2019, known as the “opposition to introducing LGBT ideology to municipal communities” bill. The international media and LGBT activists has described the bill as an anti-LGBT declaration or law, which has enabled left-wing groups to abuse this phrase in an attempt to define the document as homophobic. However, the law does not concern anyone’s sexual preferences and merely refers to neo-Marxist LGBT ideology.

[...]

On Thursday, Lesser Poland councilmen voted over a proposal to withdraw the bill, with 23 voting against the motion, which was enough to keep the law in place. EU pressure was present in the background, as the European Commission has been threatening the Lesser Poland region with suspending €2.5 billion in funds from the 2021-2027 financial framework with claims that the law allegedly violates European values.

[...]

The Lesser Poland school superintendent Barbara Nowak told portal wPolityce.pl that the regional parliament did not bow to blackmail.

“The rejection of the European Commission’s demands fills one with pride. It shows that Poles have honor. We were offered to trade our freedom and values. We were offered payment for giving up our convictions and the fact that the majority of the local parliament opposed such a motion absolutely fills me with pride due to the stance of our chosen representatives,” she said.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

State Bans on Critical Race Theory Won’t Work: Massive bureaucracies will evade them. The better solution is to break up huge school districts.

I knew we’d lost the day I met the superintendent of North Carolina’s schools in 2011. I was leading a nonprofit whose civics curriculum was a stark improvement over the mishmash that the state’s teachers were then using. The Legislature had recently passed the Founding Principles Act, which required North Carolina schools to teach concepts like property rights, due process and federalism. Unlike the textbooks then in use, our materials were loaded with facts and original documents, illuminating concepts that undergird the U.S. Constitution and its founding. We were offering exactly what the state’s new law required.

The superintendent and her team were polite and engaging, but we couldn’t understand much of what they said. They tossed around jargon like “inquiry models” and “cross-walked objectives,” and insisted that North Carolina schools already met the new law’s standards. My colleagues and I walked out of that meeting knowing that—law or no law—civics instruction in our state wouldn’t change a bit.

I recall this experience as state legislatures debate bans on teaching Critical Race Theory, a body of conjectures that is, according to its defenders, simultaneously sound and nonexistent. Even where allowed to stand by courts, these laws, like other efforts to rein in education bureaucrats, will be swallowed up in the spreadsheets and matrices into which state departments of public instruction lure and quietly strangle every curricular reform.

That’s not to say that state leaders have no options for warding off CRT, transgender mania, Howard Zinn -style grievance Marxism and other dogmas festering in schools of education. They have the authority to implement a solution that harnesses the common sense of everyday American parents. They can bust up large school districts.

Take Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia, ground zero for the CRT war. Loudoun County, once 522 square miles of horse pasture with scarcely enough two-legged residents to qualify as a bedroom community, saw its population explode by nearly 400% over the past 30 years. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of students in Loudoun’s public schools grew from 14,174 in 1990 to 83,606 in 2020—an increase of 490%. Nine school board members oversee curricular decisions and teacher training affecting tens of thousands of families in an area nearly half the size of Rhode Island (which, by comparison, serves its 144,000 students via 66 separate school districts).

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Bank of Amerika: The financial giant teaches that the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work.”

Earlier this year, Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte market president Charles Bowman announced a new “equity” initiative called United in Action, in partnership with the United Way of Central Carolinas. According to documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, BOA executives launched the initiative by encouraging employees to participate in their “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge,” a race-training program funded in part by the bank and built on the principles of critical race theory, including intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.

One the program’s first day, Bank of America teaches employees that the United States is a “racialized society” that “use[s] race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression,” which “give[s] privileges to white people resulting in disadvantages to people of color.” According to the training program, all whites—“regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages”—are “living a life with white skin privileges.” Even children are implicated in the system of white supremacy: according to the program materials, white toddlers “develop racial biases by ages three to five” and “should be actively taught to recognize and reject the ‘smog’ of white privilege.”

Over the next three days, Bank of America teaches employees about intersectionality, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and systemic racism. “Racism in America idolizes White physical features and White values as supreme over those of others,” the program asserts. As a result of being part of the “dominant culture,” whites are more likely to “have more limited imagination,” “experience fear, anxiety, guilt, or shame,” “contribute to racial tension, hatred, and violence in our homes, communities, and world,” and, subsequently, “react in broken ways as a result.” People of color, on the other hand, cannot be racist, because “racism is used to justify the position of the dominant group . . . and to uphold white supremacy and superiority.” Therefore, the discussion guide claims, “reverse racism and discrimination are not possible.”

On days five and six, Bank of America encourages white employees to confront their “white privilege” and “white fragility,” in order to “discover where [they] are on the privilege spectrum” and “if [they] exhibit ‘white fragility’ traits.” As part of the program, Bank of America employees take a series of diagnostic tests, in which they assess their racial and sexual identities, check a series of boxes to identify their “white privilege,” and probe racist attitudes that could contribute to their “white fragility.”

In days seven through sixteen, Bank of America covers a laundry list of progressive concepts and policy priorities, including “microaggressions,” “racial trauma,” “the abolishment of the police,” “the school-to-prison pipeline,” and “environmental justice.” The training program claims that racist microaggressions can contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder in black Americans and that “racism can be just as devastating as gunfire or sexual assault.” America’s economy is described as a “caste system” with “African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate.” The American policing system, according to the materials, was founded on “slave patrols whose task was to capture, control, and brutalized enslaved people”; this system is “woven into the DNA” of American society and, according to the activists in the training module, can be solved only through “the defunding and even the abolishment of the police.”

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Steve Sailer] Our Culture of Lying

To climb the career ladder in modern America, you are expected to lie: about race, about crime, about men in dresses.

And if you are in the U.S. deep state, you have to lie about our Afghan allies. For example, general Mark Milley, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and advocate of reading Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo to understand “white rage,” announced in Kabul in 2013:

This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day.

Underlings figure out what the bosses don’t want to hear and then don’t tell them. Colonel Bob Crowley reported in the Afghan Papers:

Truth was rarely welcome…so bad news was often stifled. There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small—we’re running over kids with our MRAPs—because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome and the boss wouldn’t like it.

Lying isn’t just bad for the soul, it’s bad for effectiveness at dealing with reality. After 1991, we of course stopped winning wars. But now we can’t even avoid losing in spectacularly humiliating fashion.

If there’s anything we’ve learned about the deep state from this episode, it’s that it’s real…and it’s inept.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

After threat of lawsuit, Princeton seminary excused student from ‘whiteness is sin’ anti-racism training

The student, Timothy Keiderling, was able to negotiate a compromise that got him out of the anti-racism training, which teaches that being white is “something to repent for” and “whiteness is a form of structural sin,” Real Clear Investigations reported this week.

Keiderling complained the mandatory trainings did not allow for debate or disagreement, which stood in contrast to the private seminary’s promotional literature and student handbook pledging free speech — grounds for litigation.

Keiderling asked the seminary president for “an exemption from all upcoming trainings,” calling them “antithetical to PTS’s mission and vision” and saying they “will impinge upon our freedom of thought, and … present a profound threat to freedom of conscience.”

He added: “As fellow followers of Jesus, we have no business treating each other differently based on our race. Don’t we remember that in Christ, these distinctions have no place anymore? Or what else did the Apostle mean when he wrote that ‘in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free’? The problem of racial injustice cries to heaven. But dividing us from each other is not the way to right the wrongs.”

[...]

“[M]y point that the training to which I object violates representations of academic freedom made by PTS on which I relied in accepting admission, and which I believe represent legally enforceable terms of the contractual relationship between PTS and me,” Keiderling responded.

[–]Node 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

‘whiteness is sin’ anti-racism training

lol?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] There's No Alternative to Cultural Appropriation

It’s encouraging to see that a drive-by accusation of cultural appropriation was met with the mockery that it deserves. (I assure you that those 6,000+ quote tweets are not echoing the sentiment.) As I’ve said, as hegemonic as this particularly cruel strain of social justice politics has become, the worm has already begun to turn against it. While we’ll be signaling our social justice bona fides for the rest of our lives, the particularly aggressive and self-aggrandizing school of woke politics is bound to lose, as it’s profoundly unpleasant. It also asks us to do things that we cannot possible accomplish - like living without cultural appropriation. I think it’s really important to underscore this point. The point when rejecting the cultural appropriation discourse is not merely to say that we should be able to mix and match cultural products to produce something new and better, though of course we should. The bigger point is that there is no alternative. There is no such thing as cultural change that does not include cultural mixing and exchange.

The woke Völkisch movement is based on a completely impoverished notion of how human beings develop cultural products like food, literature, visual arts, and music. Principal among these misconceptions is that cultural production is chosen and conscious. When someone makes an accusation of cultural appropriation, they’re claiming that somebody else has made a deliberate choice to integrate a given cultural product into what they produce. “Aha,” says white artist, “let me steal from the cultures of the global south for my own enrichment!” But that’s nuts; it’s simply not how influence works. You go to an art gallery, you see things there that you find moving or challenging, you go home and paint a painting. I promise, some of what you just saw in that gallery will appear in your painting no matter how much you might try to stick to your “culture of origin,” whatever that could possibly mean. We are all the sum of everything we have done and seen and experienced. Can you really look at every aspect of your personality and ascribe each bit of it to some specific discrete event or influence, then trace them back to a given cultural frame of reference?

I’ll answer for you: no, you can’t. And this is as true of someone who lived on a Polynesian island 500 years ago and never left as it was of Paul Gauguin when he toured those islands 350 years later. Humans integrate, we borrow, we assimilate, we iterate. Gauguin was a genuinely bad person and a great artist. He painted scenes from those Polynesian islands and wore the influence of their art on his sleeve in doing so. But if he had gone back to France and insisted on trying to paint only “European subjects” in “European style,” itself an inherently vague and contradictory goal, he would still carry the islands in his brush. Because that’s how humans work. We are not a collection of discrete experience particles but a swirling mixture of influences we barely understand. And some agonizingly progressive art student who self-consciously rejects Gauguin for his crimes, who makes it their mission not to be influenced by them? They’re bound to fail. Once they’ve seen his art, that art is imprinted on their brain, and it will assert its influence despite every conscious intention.

Cultural exchange always goes both ways. Yes, jazz is a quintessentially Black American artform, though all of the greatest Black jazzmen have given great credit to the white musicians who participated in its production. But to call jazz Black does not and cannot mean that it’s entirely distinct from white art as well. Jazz drew from ragtime, also “coded” Black, but ragtime drew from marches, drawn in great measure from white men John Philip Sousa and (eep) Wagner. Of course, there’s also march music from Bangladesh, Japan, Colombia, Turkey, even the Caucasus, home of the literal Caucasians, who are not very white. It’s turtles all the way down: you can’t ever get to the pure origins, because there are no origins. There’s mitochondrial DNA in culture, pure essence of human creativity that has no bedrock beyond what’s shared in the human experience. Trying to shed the bad adulterants and get to the pure cultural product, crafted only by the legitimate owners of that product, was stupid and futile when Goebbels attempted it and it’s just as stupid and futile when some Evergreen College sophomore tries to do it on social media using a iPhone that draws parts from 43 countries and scientific influence from vastly more.

Gospel was a white artform before it was a Black one. Does that invalidate gospel as a part of the Black experience, make gospel “less Black”? It’s an absurd question. Yes, early rock and roll was deeply influenced by rhythm and blues and the Black artists who pioneered it. But it was also influenced by the skiffle movement among white artists in the United Kingdom - which in turn drew from Black jug bands, but also from white folk acts, who in turn were influenced by traditional European musical styles, which did not spring fully formed from the head of Odin but from a panoply of earlier predecessors that stretch back to the dawn of civilization. People these days are very defensive about Black cultural production, and I get it. But what does it cost Black people or Black culture to point out that they too have been influenced by artists of other racial and ethnic origins, that they no more created cultural products in a vacuum than did Elvis or the Beatles? Yes, celebrate Blind Lemon and Robert Johnson, and give Black artists the credit and financial support they were once denied by the industry. (That’s one we can safely put in the win column, it seems to me, though I know it’s forbidden to identify progress.) But there’s no need to cancel Elvis to do that. Like all racial progress, cultural progress is not zero sum. Which is good news because, again, if the sands of the Sahara thousands of years ago were insufficient to preclude cultural exchange, the inevitability of that exchange in 2021 is such a foregone conclusion that you better make peace with people of all kinds being influenced by the entirety of the human experience in ways we can’t predict or fully understand and certainly can’t prevent.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Lockdown Forever: Scotland’s Leftist Govt Want to Make Emergency Coronavirus Laws ‘Permanent’

The leftist governing party of the devolved Scottish parliament is calling for its emergency coronavirus powers to be made “permanent”, giving them the ability to shut schools, enforce mask-wearing, and impose lockdowns without time limit.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) — which, despite being in favour of superstate EU membership, exists to campaign for the North of Britain to break away from the United Kingdom — published on Tuesday an announcement for a 12-week public consultation on removing the expiry date of the leftist government’s ability to enforce wide-ranging lockdown measures, also apparently broadening them beyond the scope of dealing with the Chinese coronavirus.

“…the powers that have enabled this are temporary and will exist only for as long as the current Covid pandemic remains a public health threat. However, it seems likely that Covid will not be the last infectious disease or public health threat Scotland will face.

“As a result, and based on the experience of managing Covid, the Government considers that building public health resilience in the future requires action to ensure a permanent suite of powers that will allow Scottish Ministers to tackle any type of infectious disease or contamination that may pose a significant health threat,” the consultation paper said.

Naming such powers that are due to expire on March 2022 as “prohibiting or limiting numbers at gatherings; introducing lockdown measures; and requiring that face coverings are worn”, the document said that the proposal would give Scottish ministers “the same powers to protect the people of Scotland from any incidence or spread of infection or contamination which presents or could present significant harm to human health in Scotland, not just Covid”.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The authoritarian takeover of Australia

New South Wales chief health officer Kerry Chant became world famous recently when a video of her went viral. In it, she said, in the patronising tone of a school matron:

‘It is human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly. Unfortunately, this is not the time to do that. So even if you run into your nextdoor neighbour, in the shopping centre, at Coles, Woolworths or Aldi or any other grocery shop, don’t start up a conversation.’

Some of us thought: who the bloody hell is this sheila? Not only had I never heard of her, I hadn’t listened to anything anyone like her had said since I’d been kicked out of high school. My robust upbringing among ratbags and larrikins in the Australian suburbs had instilled in me an instinctive and entirely rational distrust of anyone who, like her, placed an undue significance on obedience above personal freedom and responsibility. My life has been, and continues to be, all the better for it.

New South Wales residents were surprised to learn they had been paying Chant’s wages since she joined the public service in 1991. Like many of her fellow neo-authoritarians, she had spent her entire career cloistered away from the freely enterprising general population, biding her time until the opportunity arose to exercise the powers none of us knew she had.

Now she and her type are all around us, telling us what to do every minute of the day. She is emblematic of Australia’s new elite, from the cops who told me to ‘move on’ when I was enjoying the sunshine by myself at Bondi Beach recently, to prime minister Scott Morrison, who peppers his updates on the latest panicking policies with reminders that ‘we are all in this together’.

No, we’re not. The elite in government and the bureaucracy, some of whom have even been granted pay rises since these lockdowns began, are laughing all the way to the bank while the nation’s middle-class, small-business entrepreneurs – the cultural descendants of the emancipated landowners of the 19th century – are driven to despair and bankruptcy. These elitists might evoke the Australian traditions of ‘mateship’ and the ‘fair go’, but they advocate nothing of the kind. Instead, they impose rules that are only possible under their newly created ’emergency powers’, and which would have been comprehensively ridiculed and rejected in any state or federal parliament at any other time in our history.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Big Drag: From campy fringe to corporate cringe

I used to think the drag queen trend had burned itself out by 2019 with the proliferation of Drag Queen [Horror] Story Hour at local public libraries. The premise is right out of a nightmare—outlandishly corpulent men in face paint, wigs, and tacky dresses reading awful books to sparse crowds of similarly-sized single mothers and their terrorized, fatherless children.

Some drag lectors proudly display large beards, their hairy chests and flabby bingo-winged arms protruding from the tops of their corset gowns.

Even the mothers in attendance have to force smiles on their faces. On high alert for every microaggression, in bad moods after spending two hours getting their three-year-old boys to put on their sister’s dresses, those mothers are probably a tough crowd.

[...]

Mercifully, the pandemic put a shiv into the bloated, hairy gut of the DQ story hour.

Unfortunately, post-pandemic, these freaks in fright wigs are back with a fierce vengeance—and the backing of every corporation in America.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

‘Nature’ magazine has lost its way

It’s all the more concerning then, that in the last few years, Nature has handed over an increasing amount of editorial space to social justice activism. In February of 2019, Jordan Peterson remarked that a once-great publication was going “farther down the social constructionist rabbit hole”.

The latest example comes in the form of a piece titled “Anti-racist interventions to transform ecology, evolution and conservation biology departments”, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. No less than twenty-six authors are listed under the title, suggesting this was not some trivial undertaking. It includes charts, tables and even a glossary of key terms (with entries such as “racial microaggressions” and “white privilege”).

The authors begin by noting that, in their field of conservation biology, “institutional and structural racism continue to create barriers to inclusion for Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour”. They proceed to describe the nature of this “institutional and structural racism”, before outlining their proposed “anti-racist interventions”. These include prioritising recruitment of “BIPOC”, setting up protocols for “anonymous reporting of hate”, and discussing anti-racist values “on the first day of class”.

Needless to say, I’m not convinced by the authors’ proposals, nor indeed by their use of the nebulous term “structural racism”. To begin with, they lump together several quite separate issues, while claiming that each is a manifestation of the same general “oppression” faced by non-white people in conservation biology. For example, the overrepresentation of whites in PhD programs and the “marginalisation” of local communities by some modern researchers are surely distinct phenomena? And neither necessarily indicates “racism”.

The authors take the usual swipes at historical figures whose views were not in line with contemporary sensibilities, grumbling that “many species carry scientific and common names that commemorate eugenics proponents”. And they argue that even the writings of Charles Darwin “contained racist ideas”. (Earlier this year, Science published an editorial describing him as “an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices”.) As to what departments should do about “problematic” figures from the past, the authors note that “buildings and gathering places can be redesigned with equity in mind”.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Academic claims critical race theory allows her to make racist comments

Aysha Khanom was canned from her position at Leeds Beckett University after tweeting racist remarks to a mixed-race political pundit and a social media commenter back in February.

According to The Guardian, the Twitter account associated with the Race Trust, which Khanom founded, asked black conservative commentator Calvin Robinson if he felt any shame due to the fact that “most people” view him as a “house negro.”

Though Khanom claims she did not personally write the tweet, she accepted responsibility for it. However, Khanom later personally called a commenter to that tweet a “coconut.”

[...]

In “what is believed to be the first case of its kind,” Khanom is suing her former employer under the UK’s Equality Act, arguing that CRT and black radicalism are “protected beliefs.” In June, an employment appeals tribunal ruled that “gender-critical” opinions are protected under the act. (Remember: There is no First Amendment in the UK.)

Khanom told The Guardian “[The remarks] were offensive – they’re meant to be offensive because they’re antiracist terms. You’re highlighting a problem, so how can someone be racist by calling someone out for going against their own kind? It’s almost upholding white supremacy. It’s so contradictory it’s unreal, racists have taken these terms and defined them for us.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

UMich prof says math and science classes are racist

According to Ball, “Whiteness” plays an integral role in explaining the racial and ethnic disparities that exist in mathematics performance. She claimed that since White and Asian students are overrepresented in high-level mathematics, new pedagogy is required to increase access to underrepresented minority students.

“Mathematics, despite the way we represent it, is something that many cultures and communities have created and there are people, scholars in our country, and teachers who have exploited opportunities to broaden kids’ views of mathematics," Ball said in the podcast.

More broadly, Ball views racial injustice as an issue that permeates the educational system. Writing for the Detroit Free Press on March 21, Ball stated, “As districts emerge from the quarantine of the last year, the plans for a safe return to school must take a fuller view of the safety needed to dismantle anti-Blackness and white supremacy in our educational systems.”

Additionally, her official biography states that her research uses mathematics as a way to investigate how to build relationships with children and also how to “disrupt racism, marginalization, and inequity.”

Her past positions include dean of the University of Michigan School of Education, president of the American Educational Research Association, and member of the National Science Board.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] Who Tells Them Things They Don't Want to Hear? Can the New York Times ever defy its affluent white subscriber base again? Sources speaking on condition of anonymity say it's unlikely

If you’re new around here, the basic scenario is that we’ve had a years-long moral panic in which elite white tastemakers adopted the political posture of radical Black academics out of purely competitive social impulses, trying on a ready-made political eschatology that blames the worlds ills on whiteness and men and yet somehow leaves space for an army of good white people and good men to cluck their tongue about it all. Concurrently, the most influential paper in the world emerged from decades of fiscal instability by going hard on digital subscriptions, paywalling more and more of its content and rattling its tin cup more loudly than ever before. The result has been boom times, attenuated only by the end of the immensely lucrative Trump years. (I believe Chris Hayes is covering Trump’s latest spray tan tonight.) The trouble is that this model leaves them even more dependent on a particular social and political caste, namely the educated white professional class that graduates from top 25 universities, moves to Echo Park or Andersonville or Austin, then sends Zane and Daschel to pre-K that costs more than their Audi. Oh and they, like, care about justice and stuff. Conservatives hate read the NYT and thus have traditionally brought in advertising revenue, but they don’t hate subscribe, and the end result is that a paper that was about a 6.5 on a ten-point Liberal Elite Scale when I was a kid has moved to a 9.5. And there’s nothing internal to the publication that can stop this leftward march.

This will invite reprisals for speaking out of turn, but all of the following comes from public knowledge, other people’s reporting, what former and current employees have said, and a little bit of gossip. The social and professional culture within The New York Times is notoriously toxic, the confluence of people with immense career ambitions and total shamelessness about using social justice rhetoric to attack their enemies; watercooler shit-talking and mean-girling has moved to Slack, where it’s somehow even worse than it was before; all of the younger staffers see their jobs as straightforwardly activist positions, and the role of the paper to advance a pro-Democrat social justice ideology rather than to report objectively or to present a range of viewpoints; executive editor Dean Baquet is afraid of his own employees; the Sulzbergers don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations with their fellow white liberal elites at the food co-op or whatever; and in general absolutely every internal incentive within the paper points towards uncritically advancing a Robin Diangelo-approved race and gender ideology, a class-never, deferential-to-woke-norms soggy social justice politics that says nothing remotely challenging to said staffer cliques or the Hermosa Beach soccer moms who now fund the paper. When Bari Weiss resigned the media Borg represented it as all about Weiss, but her story was really about the kind of perspective that can’t exist anymore at The New York Times. I’m sure the blob would deny this stuff, but again none of these are well-kept secrets. If Ben Smith was not paid by the New York Times he would have reported this out long ago.

If you disagree with me, well, point me to some counterexamples. Since the Tom Cotton editorial, what pieces has the Times published that defy the woke politics shared by the vast majority of their staffers? No one remains on staff who regularly puts their thumb in their eye of the rest of the writers and editors there, who consistently violates the assumed politics of the NYT subscriber base - affluent and educated white liberal urbanites who stick BLM signs in their windows and make sure the $30k/year private schools (I’m sorry, independent schools) they send their kids to have a good social justice curriculum. People who wouldn’t fit in at the UC Berkeley recycling club aren’t welcome. They certainly frog marched James Bennet right out of there, didn’t they?

Yes, there are people who are not liberals on staff, but they’re a certain kind of not-liberals. I like and admire Ross Douthat very much, and I don’t think he pulls his punches or changes his views to suit the NYT crowd. But I think that his natural tendency is to be precisely the kind of conservative the Times wants, which is the kind that doesn’t activate the culture war resentments of their median reader or inflame the rest of the staff. Similarly, my readers recently informed me that Coaston is a libertarian, which is cool. I think Coaston is the real deal. But again, while I’m not questioning her honesty or the independence of her thinking, she is very much a NYT libertarian, one uniquely suited to flatter their audience. They aren’t looking to hand a contract to Reason’s Robbie Soave, are they? So who else? Michael Powell, I guess. Nellie Bowles, whose “book leave” looks pretty damn likely to become a “just leave”?

You can talk about Bari Weiss, you can talk about the Cotton brouhaha, you can discuss the inherent and ugly incentives of the subscription model for the paper. But the Donald McNeil firing is truly the bellwether. A reporter with 45 years of NYT experience on an absolutely essential beat said something clueless but utterly anodyne to some spoiled adolescents on a trip that 99% of people their age can’t access. Despite the fact that what he said would have been totally unremarkable even in liberal circles five years ago, the situation caught the staff’s attention and its ire and they vented that ire with the typical absurdist claim that McNeil had put them “in danger” in some incredibly vague way. (On Twitter, of course). So McNeil was duly dispatched, and the basic power dynamic of the modern day New York Times was laid bare: a handful of the paper’s untouchable celebrities can kick up the junior staff into a frenzy, and once that catches fire on Twitter, there is no one in the paper’s leadership who has the honesty and integrity to tell them no. No one. (The NYT’s self-exonerating reaction to McNeil’s defense is quietly hilarious.) The simple fact of the matter is that Baquet has not demonstrated anything like the public courage it would take to face down a Twitter storm prompted by Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., and there’s no reason to think that that’s going to change anytime soon. The media types would reject all of this, if anyone at a big-shot publication had the integrity to write a story about these open secrets. But I’m not lying.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Biden administration may consider 'vaccine passports' for interstate travel

The AP reports that "...while more severe measures — such as mandating vaccines for interstate travel or changing how the federal government reimburses treatment for those who are unvaccinated and become ill with COVID-19 — have been discussed, the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment."

"That's not to say they won't be implemented in the future," the AP writes, "as public opinion continues to shift toward requiring vaccinations as a means to restore normalcy."

[...]

Georgetown Law took up the question of Americans' rights to travel freely within the United States under the Trump administration at the start of the pandemic. At the time, Americans in many parts of the country were asked to "lockdown" for two week and to "slow the spread" so that when Americans got sick and ended up in the hospital, they didn't all end up there at once, overwhelming the medical infrastructure.

Meryl Chertoff, Executive Director, SALPAL writes: "The right of Americans to travel interstate in the United States has never been substantially judicially questioned or limited. In 1941, the Court declared unconstitutional California's restriction upon the migration of the 'Okies'—whose travails are famously documented in 'The Grapes of Wrath.' Justice Douglas referred to 'the right of free movement' as 'a right of national citizenship,' and the rights of the migrants were upheld under the Commerce Clause."

"The Privileges and Immunities Clause protects the rights of US citizens," Chertoff goes on to say, "who are each also the citizens of a state, against discriminatory treatment under the law of a different state. In a 1985 case, the Court found that the Privileges and Immunities clause prohibited discrimination against a non-resident except where (i) there is a substantial reason for the difference in treatment; and (ii) the discrimination practiced against nonresidents bears a substantial relationship to the State's objective. In deciding whether the discrimination bears a close or substantial relationship to the State's objective, the Court has considered the availability of less restrictive means."

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The cruelty of Australia’s endless lockdown

How has lockdown become so acceptable in Australia, a country where the seven-day average for Covid-19 deaths sits at just two? The answer, I suspect, is because its impacts are not equally shared.

Lockdowns’ worst effects have not been felt by Australia’s elites, including the professional middle classes, who dominate the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, the media and the academy. The same social classes also dominate politics, since today’s professionalised political parties are only weakly linked to their erstwhile social foundations. Consequently, their interests and worldviews have shaped the framing of the pandemic and responses to it.

[...]

In 1996, iconoclast American historian Christopher Lasch’s book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, was published posthumously in America — yet its resonance today is surely apparent in Australia. In the book, Lasch argues that elites in Western societies, including the professional middle classes, have abandoned their responsibilities towards their fellow-citizens and nations, orienting themselves towards cosmopolitan identities and agendas. Noblesse oblige, as limited as it was, was replaced by a sense of moral superiority, derived from the feeling that their elevated position in society was earned and meritorious.

If Lasch had been around today he would have readily recognised that the elites in our Covid-stricken societies — not just in Australia — are still in revolt. Faced with these devastating impacts on their fellow-citizens, many elites and middle-class professionals have preferred to look the other way, conflating their own interests with society’s.

They have become lockdown’s biggest cheerleaders and portray their own compliance with lockdown rules as an expression of individual moral superiority, conveniently forgetting that the privileges afforded by their income and lifestyle are not shared by all. They have dismissed resistance to lockdowns as extremism, although evidence from recent rallies in Australia suggests that a number of participants were not fringe-dwelling conspiracists, but ordinary people struggling with long lockdowns.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Bloomington ‘all-ages’ Pride event features Satanist pornographer

The city’s August 14 Pride event will feature performances from several drag queens, including a “story hour and show” with Martina Marraccino. Children are the usual target audience of “drag queen story hours” and an advertisement for the event says “all ages” are welcome.

Marraccino’s public Facebook page, listed under the name “The Lady Martina,” includes several pictures of him stripping. On his personal page, Marraccino asked his friends last month to donate to The Satanic Temple for his birthday and followed that up with a “Hail Satan” post.

Becky Strohmeier, a concerned resident who runs the Bloomington Patriots group, discovered that Marraccino appears to perform under the name Adam Divine as well. A Twitter profile with that name consists of “nearly 100% gay pornography,” according to Strohmeier.

“It’s very clear by his physical appearance that they are the same,” Strohmeier told Alpha News, noting that Marraccino commented on a Bloomington Patriots post about his alleged sexual exploits and didn’t deny it was him.

“This is childish and I’m not bothered. Your children crave love and acceptance, you seem to only have room for hate. That’s sad for them, and for you. Jesus would be ashamed of you,” Marraccino said.

🤡🌎

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Texas determines sexual reassignment surgery for children is 'child abuse'

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services announced Wednesday that sexual reassignment surgery for children is "child abuse."

"Genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery is child abuse," Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters said in a press release. "This surgical procedure physically alters a child's genitalia for nonmedical purposes potentially inflicting irreversible harm to children's bodies."

The release was issued in response to an Aug. 6 inquiry by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and said that sex reassignment surgery could cause a threat of harm from physical injury.

Masters's determination and its enforcement would be "effective immediately," Abbott said Thursday.

The Texas law prohibits female "genital mutilation" for girls younger than 18, but it says nothing about prohibiting male "genital mutilation" for someone of that age.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Anti-White Infrastructure Bill

Americans are enthusiastic about spending money on infrastructure -- bridges, roads, broadband and green technologies. But this racist bill locates and hands out jobs and contracts projects based on race, not merit. Minority businesses and neighborhoods hold the inside track. If you're white, you're low priority.

The bill includes grants to install solar or wind technologies and generate jobs in areas decimated by closing coal mines or coal-fired electric plans. Here's the catch: when contractors bid, the bill says minority-owned businesses will get chosen first. Bad news for white contractors and displaced coal miners, who are overwhelmingly white and need jobs. (Section 40209)

The same is true for the bill's proposals to improve traffic patterns in cities. Contractors and subcontractors get priority only if they're owned by minorities or women. White male business owners can take a hike. (Section 11509)

Americans should be outraged. But not surprised. After all, President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan Act, which passed in March, also put into place an ugly system of discrimination against whites. It offered debt relief to Black farmers but not white farmers. Another provision offered billions in aid to minority-owned and women-owned restaurants, but it told struggling restaurants owners who happened to be white men that they had to go to the back of the line.

The injustice was obvious. White male farmers and restaurant owners sued, claiming the anti-white provisions are unconstitutional. So far, they're winning. In every case, federal judges have halted the race-based programs in the American Rescue Plan Act until the challengers have their day in court. Politico reported last week that Biden's Justice Department may fold without a fight on the Black farmer debt relief cases because the law is not on their side.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The trans takeover of schools

Trans’ is a magic word. It is impervious to science, common sense and even to concerns about the safeguarding of children. Thhe Scottish government has now released guidance entitled Supporting Transgender Pupils In Schools, which instructs teachers to affirm, unquestioningly, children’s trans or non-binary identities from the age of four.

Teachers are advised to use preferred pronouns, including ‘zie’ or ‘ey’ or ‘per’, at the behest of pupils. And they are told they need to treat any disclosure of a child’s transgender identity as confidential, withholding it even from the child’s family. The idea that children and adult authority figures should collude to keep secrets from parents is deeply troubling.

Tellingly, the 70-page document states that ‘social justice’ is ‘core to what it means to be a teacher in Scotland’. This bizarre and ideologically drenched guidance represents a fundamental shift in education. It seems that children are now expected to lead and instruct adults.

Of course, youngsters should be listened to by teachers. When a child says he or she feels uncomfortable then adults must take note. That some children have a profound discomfort with their body (a condition known as gender dysphoria) is undeniable. But it does not follow that the person suffering has been born into the wrong body. Symptoms such as gender dysphoria or bodily dissociation are common responses to trauma. Any disclosure of these feelings should not be ignored. It might even be an indication that a child has been abused.

Instead, this irresponsible guidance instructs teachers that ‘if a young person comes out to you, it’s also important not to deny their identity, or overly question their understanding of their gender identity’. This is wrong. Adults should not to be led, either by children or ideologues, to affirm a child’s identity – it is adults’ job to listen, to take responsibility and to apply the experience they have gained with age.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Intersectional AmEx: The firm teaches employees that capitalism is fundamentally racist, then asks them to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities.

According to documents that I have obtained from a whistleblower, AmEx executives created an internal “Anti-Racism Initiative” following the death of George Floyd last year. The initiative subjects employees to an extensive training program based on the core tenets of critical race theory, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “intersectionality”—a component of critical race theory that reduces individuals to a collection of racial, gender, and sexual identities, which determine whether an individual is an oppressor or one of the oppressed.

In a foundational session, an outside consulting firm called Paradigm trained AmEx employees to deconstruct their own intersectional identities, mapping their “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity, [and] citizenship” onto an official company worksheet. After employees categorize their identities, they can determine whether they have “privilege” or whether they are a member of a “marginalized group” that is “underrepresented, stigmatized, or otherwise undervalued in society.” Thus, employees can judge their position on the intersectional hierarchy—presumably with straight white males in the oppressor position, and racial and sexual minorities in the oppressed position.

In a related lesson, American Express then instructs employees to change their behavior in the office based on their relative position on the racial and sexual hierarchy. The trainers provide a blue flowchart with specific rules for interacting with black, female, and LGBTQ employees: if a member of a subordinate group is present, employees should practice “intersectional allyship” and defer to them before speaking. In another handout, the instructions for white employees are even more explicit: “identify the privileges or advantages you have”; “don’t speak over members of the Black and African-American community”; “it’s not about your intent, it’s about the impact you have on your colleague.” Even common phrases are subjected to race-based regulation: white employees are told not to utter phrases such as “I don’t see color,” “we are all human beings,” and “everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough,” which are categorized as “microaggressions” against their black colleagues.

As one of the company’s high-profile “anti-racism” events, American Express executives invited Professor Khalil Muhammad—great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, who led the Nation of Islam—to lecture on “race in corporate America.” Muhammad argued that the system of capitalism was founded on racism and that “racist logics and forms of domination” have shaped Western society from the Industrial Revolution to the present. “American Express has to do its own digging about how it sits in relationship to this history of racial capitalism,” said Muhammad. “You are complicit in giving privileges in one community against the other, under the pretext that we live in a meritocratic system where the market judges everyone the same.”

After establishing the company’s participation in racist oppression, Muhammad then encouraged AmEx executives to begin “the deep redistributive and reparative work” and to “lobby [the government] for the kinds of social policies that reflect your values.” Muhammad argues further that the company should reduce credit standards for black customers and sacrifice profits in the interest of race-based reparations. “If American Express cares about racial justice in the world, it can’t simply say the market’s going to define how we price certain customers who happen to come from low-income communities,” Muhammad said. “If you want to do good, then you’re going to have to set up products and [product] lines that don’t maximize profit.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Antonio García Martínez] Silicon Valley’s fake diversity problem

Once our lucky candidate is given the job, the measurement doesn’t stop. Every tech company has an involved performance review process, aligned with whatever management gospel they believe. Employees, having spent long hours both working in Zoom meetings and bonding in “offsites” — imagine a school trip combined with group therapy — are then asked to submit “360-degree feedback”. Similar to East Germans writing Stasi reports on their neighbours, employees rank all their colleagues according to whatever rubric is deemed most important.

The calculus is even harsher among Silicon Valley’s high-growth startups. Here, returns on techno-capital can be stratospheric, way beyond even other capitalism-soaked boom times of the past. A single well-timed investment can make good on a venture capitalist’s entire fund, and a few choice years at the right company can set up an engineer for life.

But herein lies the problem: if venture-capital-fuelled technology is one of the most brutal, though effective, amplifiers of human talent, then the outcomes will be spectacularly unequal. Which is why the diversity agenda — the thought that all groups must enjoy equal representation everywhere we choose to measure — reaches such a crusading fervour inside the tech industry. The economic peaks and valleys that must be pummelled smooth are Grand Canyon-esque in their proportions. But in the current American zeitgeist, that enormous discrepancy in outcome is instantly projected along a single obsessive dimension: race and ethnicity.

The diversity reports from large public tech companies — they’re all required to publish them nowadays — reflect this one-dimensional focus. Consider a table from Google’s 2021 US diversity report below. Asians constitute over 40% of all of Google; that’s a seven-times overrepresentation versus their population percentage. Whites form barely 50% of Google, which is less than their percentage of the population as a whole.

More amusing in Google’s report is the crude racial categorisation which perfectly captures the progressive agenda’s simplistic approach to “diversity”. Here you can toggle the region to any part of the globe, and all of humanity in its spectacular diversity reduces to essentially the same five buckets: Asian+, Black+, Latinx+, White+ and Native American+. In true American style, it takes all the world’s real-life cultural diversity, puts it through the meat grinder of American racial politics and pops out five flavours.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Professor specializing in black feminist ‘ghosts’ opposes prison tours because it makes inmates feel ‘embarrassed’

A University of Massachusetts Dartmouth criminology professor who once authored an academic paper on “Black Feminist Hauntology” said she believes students should not be allowed to take field trips to prisons as it might “harm” prisoners.

[...]

“Many of us took the stand that said no, that’s really harmful to prisoners, to be looked at like animals in a zoo kind of visit, that really hurts them,” Saleh-Hanna said at the June meeting. “So does educating students allow us to hurt prisoners in this way?”

[...]

Saleh-Hanna received her Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2007, where her doctoral research was on “Crime, Resistance and Song.”

[...]

But Saleh-Hanna’s most notable research product came in the form of a 2015 academic paper which studied “hauntology and the sociological study of ghosts, historic memory, abusive structural relationships and works inspired by Toni Morrison’s and Octavia Butler’s novels.”

“Hauntology,” writes Saleh-Hanna, “is a socio-philosophical study of ghosts through whom we can locate the abusive and morally bankrupt nature of structural race relations as they manifest through the violent race-making and land-grabbing conquests of colonialism.”

I believe in last week's thread someone made the claim that "years of education" was strongly correlated with intellegence and attractiveness., to which I reply: lmao

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Tumblr Transformed American Politics

The journalist Wesley Yang’s “successor ideology,” his term for “wokeness” (or neoliberalism, political correctness, social justice, et al.) follows a similar trail, and his Substack Year Zero sets out to chronicle the history and rise of our new cultural and political landscape, or as he once framed it, our “bourgeois moral revolution.”

In his inaugural post, Yang alludes to successor ideology being a culmination of aspects of several important historical movements and events, including the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, the New Left, and the social movements these things spawned. Perhaps there is no single antagonist; instead, we were brought to our current moment by a number of factors, that, paradoxically, are contradictory.

Yang’s thesis seems more reasonable, as it appreciates just how complicated our current moral landscape is. The changes we’ve seen have been so vast and, in some cases, so radical that to pinpoint one cause (the university, feminism, the economy) seems like a fool’s errand.

Although it’s too early to tell with Yang’s work, as he’s still in the process of publishing it, others in the field of anti-woke criticism seem to miss an important element of the story. Just how did these theories spread so effectively? Yang and Lindsay are likely right—a complicated convergence of activism, policy, and economic changes led to a shift in our culture, the seeds of which were planted far before the Obama administration. But the narrative they’re piecing together seems to be missing one thing: the fact there was a clear and, importantly, documented “super-spreader” event.

That was the strange and powerful union of fandom, social media, and journalism between the years 2013 and 2015.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Now even rape victims are being called bigots

The list of ‘anti-trans bigots’ grows longer by the day. We already know that this McCarthy-like list includes any woman who dares to speak up for women’s sex-based rights and who would prefer not to have blokes in her changing rooms and bathrooms, and any lesbian-rights activists who object to the idea that in order to be a good, woke person she must agree to feel sexually attracted to someone with a penis who fantasises that he is a gay woman. Those, and others, have for a long time been branded thoughtcriminals against transgenderism, deserving of No Platforming and ceaseless harassment online. Now, another group of people has been added to the list: rape victims.

Yes, now even women who have suffered from sexual violence are being looked upon as potential bigots. It is increasingly difficult to feel shocked by the claims of transgender activists. These, after all, are the kind of people who think violent male sexual offenders who identify as women should be housed in women’s prisons, and who responded to the Wi Spa controversy in LA – when a male-bodied person paraded around in the nude in the women and girls’ section – essentially by saying: ‘Well, maybe seven-year-old girls shouldn’t be looking at trans people’s genitals.’ And yet, even for this increasingly eccentric and misogynistic lobby group, this latest development feels especially disturbing.

The attachment of the word ‘bigot’ to some women who have suffered from rape or other forms of sexual violence was made by Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman who is CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis. That a born male is overseeing rape-crisis centres that were traditionally intended to be women-only spaces has already, and understandably, caused controversy. Now Wadhwa has further alarmed women’s rights activists by arguing that some women who get raped are ‘bigoted people’ with problematic views about trans issues. And so when they arrive at a rape-crisis centre, they may need to have their ‘prejudices’ challenged. Read that again: women seeking help following a sexual assault may need to be re-educated and cleansed of their allegedly backward beliefs.

It was For Women Scotland that spotted Wadhwa’s comments. They were made on the Guilty Feminist podcast. In a discussion about ‘trans inclusion’ in rape-crisis centres – let’s be honest about what this really means: men being allowed to access what were once women’s spaces – Wadhwa said that some ‘survivors’ of sexual violence are ‘misinformed’ about what a trans-inclusive rape-crisis centre looks like. And so they turn up feeling ‘fearful’ and – get this – with possibly ‘bigoted’ views. ‘[S]exual violence happens to bigoted people as well. And so, you know, it is not [a] discerning crime’, said Wadhwa. And if these ‘bigots’ arrive at an Edinburgh rape-crisis centre, they can apparently expect to be lectured about their views. ‘[If] you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature, we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma… but please also expect to be challenged on your prejudices.’

This should horrify everyone who supports women’s rights, and especially the right of women to access advice and assistance following a sexual assault. What is a ‘bigoted’ idea in the eyes of trans activists? It can include, as JK Rowling has discovered, arguing that biological sex is real. It can also include the belief that people who were born male should never be allowed into women-only spaces. It can include making a distinction between women and ‘trans women’, by believing, for example, that the former are real women and the latter are not. So is a rape victim a bigot if she arrives at a rape-crisis centre and asks to speak to a woman rather than a man? Is she a bigot if she would rather not be counselled by a male person in women’s clothing? Will that woman – distressed by her experience of sexual violence and understandably preferring not to speak to a man about it – be looked upon as a ‘bigot’? Will she have her ‘prejudices challenged’?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Media Bashes Unvaccinated Kirk Cousins; Cheers Unvaccinated Lamar Jackson

The sports media crucified Vikings QB Kirk Cousins for much of the week because Cousins has refused the COVID-19 vaccine. Meanwhile, the same press welcomed Ravens QB Lamar Jackson back to practice Saturday with applause after testing positive for COVID a second time. Like Cousins, Jackson has refused the vaccine.

“Why did Kirk Cousins, who didn’t even test positive, get destroyed for multiple days over COVID and Lamar Jackson gets essentially ignored?” Clay Travis asked on Twitter.

The answer: because Kirk Cousins is white and Lamar Jackson is black.

The media’s logic is simple. If ESPN, the New York Times, or USA Today criticize Jackson’s personal decision to avoid the vaccine, the outlets risk someone claiming they are trying to dictate a black man’s health decisions. Just the thought of that response quashes the idea of publicly questioning Jackson’s decision.

By contrast, bashing a white man — whether he’s an athlete, politician, or actor — comes with virtually no downside. Media outlets know that Cousins, because of his skin and gender, is an easy target. It’s a two-for-one. Twitter users will retweet headlines that demand vaccine mandates and share stories that focus negatively on a white QB. Honestly, crushing Cousins is good for Twitter business right now.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] Sooner or Later, Ability Rules: on a long enough timescale, there's nowhere to hide

Why have remediation costs exploded? Look at the graph above. There is no underlying trend in educational data that would suggest that this vast improvement is underwritten by actual student learning gains. We decided the high school graduation rate was a national scandal, we found that we could not actually bring students up to standards, so we cheated and graduated them anyway. Can’t actually meet standards? Hey, there’s “online credit recovery.” Need a model high school without model students? Here’s one where everybody gets As, regardless of ability. Can’t get students through even with all of these lowered standards and with all of these dirty tricks? Don’t have any standards at all.

When I worked at Brooklyn College there was this constant vexing problem across the CUNY system. Students who do two years at a CUNY community college are guaranteed admissions at a 4-year school, but these students often show up with their transcripts an absolute mess and completely lacking the necessary underlying ability to succeed. Their struggles gets foisted onto already-overworked senior college professors, and of course the community college professors who send them to the senior colleges blame the high schools. All of this contributes to a system where six out of ten undergraduates can’t pass their required math classes. Why can’t these college students do high school math? Well, when the cut score for your state standardized exam is so ludicrously low, what do you expect? Something like this is happening all over the country: unprepared students get into college under misguided access programs or simply through the financial desperation of the schools. Once their lack of ability is apparent, the choices are to either let them drop out and start their lives with student loan debt and no degree, or to simply abandon the idea of rigor and further devalue the meaning of a college education.

Why does that transfer policy persist at CUNY? One, the senior colleges need the enrollments to stay in business, and two, because leadership views it as an equity program and conditions that supposedly increase equity simply cannot be challenged within CUNY. It’s broken, everyone knows it’s broken, nothing changes.

Many people seem content to kick the can further down the road. Even a half-decade ago when I was in grad school there was a burgeoning movement to reject the notions of grading and assessment entirely. (They’re as old as education, but ah well.) Several of my peers said directly that they never gave bad grades, even to people who didn’t once show up or submit an assignment, because grades are the hand of the patriarchy or whatever. You can call that a fringe position, but of course grade inflation has been rampant in college for decades; students are consumers now and eventually consumers get what they want. Now, with a social justice pretext presenting itself, I think eventually most colleges are going to take the path of least resistance and just give almost everybody As and call it a day. Fewer dropouts = more tuition dollars, after all. At scale, we’re already seeing an admissions free-for-all at all but top-tier US colleges. Policy pressure in K-12 has been pushing more unqualified students into the college pipeline from below for decades; the colleges pluck more and more of them up from above to stay fiscally solvent. But the best-prepared students were already going, and now there’s no more low-hanging fruit, and the kids they’re recruiting simply are not prepared and don’t belong in college. So they’ll just abandon rigor.

The problem is, you can only fulfil that bipartisan dream of armies of poor Black kids climbing out of the inner cities to Stanford and on to Google and upper-middle class lives if those kids can actually get the job done, if they can actually engineer, if they can actually code. Many of the students we graduate from high school simply cannot do what’s necessary to have that kind of success. Who is going to show up at Google and tell them that they have to give a programming job to someone who can’t code, because their lack of skills is just another equally legitimate “way of knowing”?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Pro paintballer under fire for saying COVID patient ‘needs a f–king treadmill’

A professional paintballer was kicked off her team Monday for making fun of a teenager infected with COVID-19 and saying he doesn’t need the vaccine but instead, “a f–king treadmill.”

Jessica Maiolo, 31, posted a since-deleted video on TikTok about the Miami teen, who spent 10 days in the hospital with the virus, and how his mother said she’d wished she’d gotten him the vaccine sooner so the serious illness could’ve been prevented.

“Ma’am your kid does not need a COVID shot,” Maiolo, standing in front of a television with the news report paused, said in the video.

“Your kid needs a f–king treadmill. That’s what he needs.”

Maiolo was excoriated on the social media platform for being a “vile human,” fat shaming a teenager and spreading vaccine misinformation.

[–]Node 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Don't associate with idiots at any level. In many areas, that means separation from society itself.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 2)

Until August 2020, Dona Vaughn had been the longtime artistic director of opera at the Manhattan School of Music. Her experience included singing, acting, and directing on and off Broadway and on opera stages. The Manhattan School of Music’s 2019 production of Saverio Mercadante’s little-known opera buffa I Due Figaro showed her influence in some stunningly charismatic and witty student performances.

Vaughn was committed to championing minority musicians—so much so that she endowed a scholarship for them at her alma mater, Brevard College in North Carolina. “In all my years of teaching,” she said at the time, “I often have wished that more minority members were encouraged to pursue a music profession.” Besides the classics, she produced socially conscious contemporary works, giving the first professional staging, for example, at the Fort Worth Opera Festival of a feminist opera about a seventeenth-century nun.

The mob cares nothing for facts, though. On June 17, 2020, Vaughn was teaching a class on opera dramaturgy to high school students via Zoom. An unidentified participant, whose name and image were blacked out (very likely a plant), asked her, out of the blue, how she could justify having produced Franz Lehár’s allegedly racist (in this case, allegedly anti-Asian) operetta Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles) several years earlier. Vaughn cut the questioner off for raising a warmed-over issue irrelevant to the current discussion.

The fuse was lit. A Manhattan School of Music student petition was immediately forthcoming. Vaughn must be fired because she is a “danger to the arts community,” it thundered. The petition resurrected a meme from the time of the Lehár production—that Vaughn had cast a black singer as a butler character, thus proving her racism. A rule banning blacks from playing servant characters would put off-limits some of the most essential roles in the repertoire, including Leporello in Don Giovanni, and Figaro and Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro (the latter of which Kathleen Battle knocked out of the park). For good measure, the petition threw in unspecified “reports” of “homophobic aggression and body shaming.” The petition quickly garnered 1,800 signatures. Phony Instagram accounts under Vaughn’s name suddenly appeared on the Web, containing fake inflammatory material.

Vaughn’s colleagues, cowering from the mob, let her twist in the wind. Almost none came to her defense. Vaughn was fired, and replaced by a black male.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Memo reveals UNC plan to sideline 'diversity of thought' ahead of Nikole Hannah-Jones appointment

Hussman Dean Susan King wrote the August 1, 2020 memo to university Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz. She stated, "There is a fundamental conflict between efforts to promote racial equity and understandings of structural racism, and efforts to promote diversity of thought. These two things cannot sit side by side without coming into conflict.”

King wrote the memo in anticipation of Nikole Hannah-Jones joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty and teaching a class based on the "1619 Project."

"Hannah-Jones will teach a large class open to all students that centers around the 1619 Project. The class will advance all our values around diversity and the media and also offer students- inside and outside Hussman-a much deeper understanding of systemic racism and the impact of slavery on America," King wrote.

Despite an apparent willingness to deprioritize diversity of thought, the plan contains pages of recommendations aimed at advancing racial diversity according to a particular understanding of race and racism.

At the time the memo was written, "it [was] possible for a Hussman student to graduate without taking a course focused on the question of diversity," according to the dean. King wrote, "Faculty believe that is a problem."

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

U. Oklahoma coaches claim they can discipline players for their politics

Two women’s volleyball coaches at the University of Oklahoma argue in a legal motion that they have the right to discipline players for their political beliefs.

Player Kylee McLaughlin sued coaches Lindsey and Kyle Walton along with the OU Board of Regents earlier this year, alleging “she had been excluded from the team […] over her politically conservative views.”

The OU Daily reported that McLaughlin, the OU team captain and first team All-Big 12 selection in 2018 and 2019, had made comments that “at least one” of her teammates considered “racist” following a team viewing of the Netflix documentary “13th.”

[...]

In a nutshell: At a public university they can force players into volleyball-irrelevant political discussions … and to preserve “team unity” all players must agree with them.

Incredibly, the Waltons also contend restricting McLaughlin’s First Amendment rights in political discussions (again, introduced by them) is akin to enforcing rules during an actual volleyball match: “As it relates to on court conduct, for example, students are not at liberty to question the decisions of the coach via a First Amendment claim.”

[–]Node 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Another example of a woman attempting to associate with her enemies. They recognise she is their enemy, but it seems she hasn't got the word yet. Although to be fair, playing the role of the martyr can be a valid strategy.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Teachers union advises members on defending critical race theory — like not using the term

One will immediately note Education Minnesota’s tactics from the document’s title — “Responding to racially motivated attacks on racial equity in schools.” It’s not CRT but “equity.” Criticisms are “racially motivated.”

A “key concept” of the document says teachers should stay away from using the actual words “critical race theory” because it has been “redefined” by conservatives as an “all-purpose racial dog whistle.”

This ties in to another key concept: “ascribe motivations to the opposition.”

“Unfortunately, a few billionaires and the promoters and talking heads they pay for have launched a national campaign to mislead Americans about the lessons educators teach about history, culture, gender and politics,” the document reads. “Once again, they’re trying to distract and divide us so we don’t come together to demand the richest 1 percent and the largest corporations pay what they owe for what our communities need, like smaller class sizes, degrees without debt and affordable health care for all.”

The (conservative) wealthy are blamed again in the union’s advice on how to respond to parents who might say the United States should be “colorblind” and that “race shouldn’t matter”: “We should live in a state where anything is possible for anyone to achieve. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, but the promoters and their billionaire funders are manufacturing outrage to divide us along racial lines.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A Woke Education: At California’s top private school, diversity, equity, and inclusion is the new core curriculum.

Some schools deny that they teach critical race theory, but the College Preparatory School, California’s top-ranked independent high school, leaves no room for ambiguity. According to its seven-page curricular update, revised on June 25, the Oakland school added readings in critical race theory to its constitutional-law elective. “These new readings,” the update announces, “were designed to challenge the law’s propensity to categorize people in ways that silo marginalized groups and to get students to think about how legal advocacy might operate from a more intersectional framework.”

But teaching critical-race-theory texts in one class is a microscopic detail in College Prep’s massive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) push, which accelerated in June of last year. According to a March 22, 2021 letter from Monique DeVane, College Prep’s Head of School, “the School has increased equity and inclusion budget lines” by “approximately $450,000 from the 2019–20 to the 2021–22 school year.” The letter responds to a February list of demands from the school’s Black Student Union (BSU), which urged College Prep to expand on its earlier DEI commitments. DeVane assures students and parents that the school has taken steps that meet many of these demands, including a curriculum overhaul and a test-optional admissions policy.

Over the last year, the school placed race front and center in its curriculum. In its Racial Equity & Belonging: 2020–21 End of Year Update, published in June, the school promises an ongoing effort to “assess and adapt curriculum and pedagogy to support teaching and learning for equity and belonging.” The English department, for example, modified seven of its courses. In one, The Changeling, “a novel that explores the intersection of monstrosity and race/racism,” replaced Shakespeare’s Richard III. The history department now assigns readings from the 1619 Project in both its “Atlantic World” course and its “U.S. and the World” course. The latter includes a culminating project that explores “how certain histories (of marginalized groups, of transnational labor, etc.) provide a broader understanding of events in U.S. History.”

The revisions extend beyond the humanities. The school’s honors biology course began with a week-long orientation on bias and prejudice in the sciences and included units on “how the concept of the gene has been used to perpetuate racism and eugenics.” In the engineering and design course, “students learned that many professionals create products based on their own demographic, which tilts white.” Another science course, “Issues in Science,” made justice “the center of each discussion, with a change of emphasis to how scientific practice and tools manifest whatever biases and prejudices exist in human society.” The math department “took a close look at its curricula and whenever possible, changed the names on theorems from the white European versions.”

No corner of the curriculum appears untouched. The world languages department “continued to incorporate explicit conversations and content about social justice, colonialism, and inequity.” The French IV Seminar “focused on race and diversity in French cinema.” The Dance curriculum “continues to be rooted in a social justice perspective.” Drama Tech students “designed a show in the style of a non-theatrical artist focused exclusively on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists.”

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

MMA Fighter Reported to UK Police Over a Meme

An MMA fighter in the UK who was reported to police after posting joke memes that some claimed were transphobic responded by saying, “I don’t give a shit.”

Darren Till seemingly caused the most offence by posting a meme that depicted a transgender pregnancy.

“When you transgender and you think you pregnant,” said the text accompanying the meme, which showed an image of a baby scan revealing the ‘baby’ to be a turd.

“Have a wonderful week everyone #positivity,” Till wrote under the post.

For this and other “transphobic” memes, Till was reported to Merseyside Police, who subsequently told the Liverpool Echo that “enquiries are ongoing” into the egregious thought crime.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 1)

Classical music is under racial attack. Orchestras and opera companies are said to discriminate against black musicians and composers. The canonical repertoire—the product of a centuries-long tradition of musical expression—is allegedly a function of white supremacy.

Not one leader in the field has defended Western art music against these charges. Their silence is emblematic. Other supposed guardians of Western civilization, whether museum directors, humanities professors, or scientists, have gone AWOL in the face of similar claims, lest they themselves be denounced as racist.

The campaign against classical music is worth examining in some detail, for it reveals the logic that has been turned against nearly every aspect of Western culture over the last year. The crusade began within days of the death of George Floyd in late May 2020. Floyd died during an arrest in Minneapolis; cell-phone video captured Officer Derek Chauvin (since convicted of murder) keeping his knee on the prone Floyd’s neck and back for nearly eight minutes, while Floyd repeated “I can’t breathe.” Riots against police brutality broke out across the U.S.; institution after institution pledged to fight the structural racism that Floyd’s death supposedly represented.

The classical music profession deemed itself implicated in Floyd’s death. On June 1, 2020, the League of American Orchestras issued a statement confessing that, for decades, it had “tolerated and perpetuated systemic discrimination against Black people, discrimination mirrored in the practices of orchestras and throughout our country.” The League was “committed to dismantling” its “role in perpetuating the systems of inequity that continue to oppress Black people” and expected its member orchestras to respond in kind.

That response was immediate. The Hartford Symphony Orchestra apologized for its “history of inaction to effectively confront the racist systems and structures that have long oppressed and marginalized Black musicians, composers, and communities.” The Seattle Opera announced that it would “continue to prioritize” antiracism and “make amends” for causing harm. Opera Omaha sent a message to its “black community”: “We know that you are exhausted and recognize we will never fully understand the depth of your suffering. We know that part of your exhaustion comes from the heartbreak of our silence, inaction, and half-measures.” Every communication that the opera sends out now concludes with the tagline: “We will listen more than we speak, but will not be silent in the face of injustice.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Navy could return to using photos for promotions, personnel chief says

The Navy could include service photos in promotion packages again after data suggested minorities are less likely to be selected blindly in some situations by promotion review boards, the service’s chief of personnel said Tuesday.

Diversity among leadership dropped after photos were removed last year from Navy promotion packages, Vice Adm. John Nowell said during a panel discussion on diversity and inclusion at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.

“I think we should consider reinstating photos in selection boards,” he said. “We look at, for instance, the one-star board over the last five years, and we can show you where, as you look at diversity, it went down with photos removed.”

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper directed all services in July 2020 to eliminate photos from promotion and selection boards to support diversity in the ranks. But Nowell said adding them back could do more to build a more diverse leadership force.

“It's a meritocracy, we're only going to pick the best of the best, but we're very clear with our language to boards that we want them to consider diversity across all areas,” he said. “Therefore ... I think having a clear picture just makes it easier.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Why Private Schools Have Gone Woke: Meet the National Association of Independent Schools, which enforces diversity, equity, and inclusion standards as a requirement for accreditation

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Lebanese Canary in the Identity Coal Mine

In reality, the port blast was a symptom of a deeper and more serious malady: the prominence of identity politics in Lebanese society. Lebanese society is built upon identity politics, reflected in a government and constitution with explicit diversity mandates. The obsession with identity politics has crippled Lebanon since its inception, with the explosion that destroyed the port just the latest in a long list of tragedies its citizens have experienced.

Lebanon’s dysfunction should serve as a cautionarytale for the United States. American politics are increasingly defined by identity and the quest for diversity. For example, in December 2020 none other than President-elect Joe Biden promised that he would deliver “the single most diverse Cabinet based on race, color, based on gender, that’s ever existed in the United States of America.”

The obsession with identity is found at all levels of government. One notable instance is the controversy surrounding the vacancy of Kamala Harris’s Senate seat in California. Representative Karen Bass stated: “Certainly, there will be a void if she [Kamala Harris] is not replaced with an African-American woman.” The Latino Community Foundation took the same tact: “Our [Latino] voice remains missing from the highest levels of our government… It is up to states like California to do their part to ensure that we are building more diverse and inclusive institutions reflective of our society.”

The statements of President Biden, Rep. Bass, and the Latino Community Foundation represent a growing belief that politicians and the U.S. government must be a mirror image of American society. It presumes that a government which “accurately reflects” the various racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities of its constituents will govern more effectively and produce greater stability. According to President Biden, “Building a diverse team will lead to better outcomes and more effective solutions to address the urgent crises facing our nation.”

Lebanon shows us that a fixation on identity politics and diversity leads to dysfunction and policy paralysis. On paper, Lebanon should be a success. It has an educated population, and a venerable history as a center for trade, banking, and financial services.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Professor suggests it should be a federal hate crime to criticize Fauci and other government-funded scientists

Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, is arguing that federal hate-crime protections may need to be extended to Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists “targeted by far-right extremism.”

In his July 28 paper “Mounting antiscience aggression in the United States,” Hotez writes that a “band of ultraconservative members of the US Congress and other public officials with far-right leanings are waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists.”

With that, the professor contends in his paper that Congress “should look at expanded protection mechanisms for scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States,” citing a bill that has been introduced named the Scientific Integrity Act of 2021.

It would protect government-funded scientists “from political interference, but this needs to be extended for scientists at private research universities and institutes. Still another possibility is to extend federal hate-crime protections,” Hotez wrote.

Hotez has become something of a media darling on CNN and other left-leaning news and radio outlets amid the pandemic. His Tweeter feed includes retweets calling the professor a “national hero” and likening him to Dr. Leonard McCoy of “Star Trek.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

University’s anti-racism workshop teaches deans to ‘accept white inferiority’

The University of Kentucky hosted an anti-racism workshop that apparently aimed to teach deans and other top faculty to accept their “white inferiority” and work to enhance diversity, equity and inclusion goals in their departments.

The university paid $5,000 to the Center for Healing Racial Trauma for the workshop, according to invoices recently obtained through a public records act request by Young America’s Foundation.

Titled “Cultivating an Anti-Racist Mindset for Academic Administrators,” the workshop was hosted last winter by the center, which offers trainings designed to heal people of racism and teach them to be anti-racist, among other services.

The center is run by University of Kentucky psychology Professor Candice Hargons, according to its website. Hargons did not respond to a request for comment from The College Fix.

The session involved deans and other top faculty writing out their “chosen metric for anti-racism,” to whom they have chosen to be accountable, and the steps they have taken thus far to address it. The details of the sessions were reported on by YAF, which obtained copies of hand-written cards by participants on how they will be anti-racist.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Why Is Your College Tuition So Expensive? It’s Funding Piles Of ‘Diversity’ Bureaucrats

We discovered that, overall, the number of DEI-dedicated staff is dramatically out of proportion to other programs serving higher education goals. For example, the typical university devotes 4.2 times as many staff to promoting DEI initiatives than they do to helping disabled students get reasonable accommodations — and the latter is required by law. On average, DEI staff outnumbered history professors by 40 percent. Overall, there are 3.4 people working to promote DEI for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.

Some universities had strikingly large numbers of people with DEI responsibilities in their job titles. At the University of Michigan, for example, 163 people have formal responsibility for providing DEI programming and services. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has more than 13 times as many people devoted to promoting DEI as providing services to people with disabilities. Georgia Tech has 3.2 times as many DEI staff as it does history professors. The University of Virginia boasts 6.5 DEI staff for every 100 professors.

We should note that our methodology for counting DEI staff was extremely conservative. We counted only those positions with formal responsibility for promoting DEI. We excluded faculty and staff in academic departments, like African-American and gender studies, even though they clearly promote DEI goals in addition to engaging in traditional teaching and research.

We also did not count the many administrators who tout DEI messages but do not have DEI in their job titles. Finally, we excluded staff with responsibility for ensuring compliance with Title IX and other legal anti-discrimination requirements.

Basically, we only counted those positions that universities wanted to create, not positions they had to fill. Even with these limits, the average university listed more than 45 people as having DEI responsibilities.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

EU Releases Urgent Memo Highlighting The Dangers of “Right Wing” Memes

The report opens very promisingly, by warning that the free exchange of humor will undermine “open societies.”

Humour has become a central weapon of extremist movements to subvert open societies and to lower the threshold towards violence Especially within the context of a recent wave of far-right terrorist attacks, we witness “playful” ways in communicating racist ideologies. As far-right extremists strategically merge with online cultures, their approach changes fundamentally. This trend has been especially facilitated by the so-called alt-right and has spread globally. This predominantly online movement set new standards to rebrand extremist positions in an ironic guise, blurring the lines between mischief and potentially radicalising messaging. The result is a nihilistic form of humour that is directed against ethnic and sexual minorities and deemed to inspire violent fantasies — and eventually action.

The paper then proceeds to explain that in the past, online humor was good, because it helped to “combat extremist ideologies,” though the authors note this comedy may be of dubious effectiveness:

Humour in the context of preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) has largely been discussed as a means to combat extremist ideologies. Various counter-narrative campaigns have deployed humour to question the authority of extremist groups and ridicule their ambitions. Even though it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of such campaigns, research has shown that such endeavours are appropriate to spin democratic alternatives for affected youths.

At many times, the paper actually does a good job of explaining precisely why satire, ridicule, memes, and mockery are politically potent. But the authors themselves are such rigid ideologues that they cannot see the genuine humor at the root of right-wing comedy, and instead can only conceive of “supposed” satire and efforts to manipulate others.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

German Greens demand gender-neutral writing in schools

The Green Minister for Education in the German state of Baden-Württemberg is pushing for the use of gender-neutral language in schools. According to her, the schools should agree with the students on the way of writing generic masculines, for example, expressions such as “teachers” or “pupils”, which can refer to both males and females.

However, the co-ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) criticize the plan for violating the coalition agreement. A wave of resentment has also come from philologists who speak of “language rape.”

Green Minister Theresa Schopper said she wanted to stick to an educational plan for the use of gender-neutral language in schools, which her ministry developed five years ago under the leadership of the Social Democrats. “It would be good if the teachers agreed with the students on gender-balanced words,” the minister said.

One possibility is to use asterisks or underscores to write generic masculine words, such as in the cases of “police officer” (“Polizistin”) or “colleague” (“Kollegin”).

The state Association of Philologists spoke out about her proposal. Chairman Ralf Scholl called it “rape of the language”. The CDU, in turn, accuses Schopper of violating the agreement between the two ruling parties and rejects the introduction of “arbitrariness” in expression and writing in schools.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Nanny State Meets the Marquis de Sade: Using social justice totems to worship state power—all in the name of ‘public health’—is the acme of pandemic-era journalism

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Cancelled by Childline: Ex-barrister lost his job as a volunteer counsellor with the charity after raising fears over the way children confused about their gender are rushed into changing sex

Former barrister James Esses said he was concerned many youngsters were confused about gender identity and, wrongly, were automatically categorised as transgender or fast-tracked into making life-altering decisions such as undergoing major surgery.

But after sharing his concerns on social media, Mr Esses, 29, claims he became a victim of a belief that young children know their own minds about gender.

First, he was told to leave a five-year degree course because of his 'social media activity'.

Ten days later, Childline told him he could no longer be a volunteer counsellor.

'I just wanted an open and honest debate about a hugely important topic – I'm not sure what is wrong with that,' Mr Esses told The Mail on Sunday.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate?

The world’s verdict on the lab leak seems to be shifting. The Biden Administration now thinks there is a credible possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. WHO chief Tedros Adhanome Ghebreyesus has admitted that attempts to dismiss the hypothesis were “premature”. These are, of course, positive developments — but they should also leave us astounded.

In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as “racist”. The question we have to ask now is how, and why, did this happen?

To a great extent, I believe the answer lies with the world’s most powerful news outlet, the New York Times. At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the CCP story on the pandemic’s origins. And it celebrated China’s success in battling Covid-19, taking the CCP’s absurd mortality numbers at face value, reporting in August 2020 that 4,634 Chinese people died from the virus and, six months later, that there were 4,636 total deaths. That in a country of 1.4 billion people only two people died of Covid-19 in the half a year defies logic and common sense. Still, the Times legitimised the CCP numbers by printing them as hard fact.

Of course, over the past year newspapers across the world have fallen for the CCP’s distorted Covid-19 narrative. And there is no evidence to suggest that the CCP did put pressure on the Times. But when it came to the lab leak debate, the Times was relentless. Starting in early 2020, when little was known about the virus — and nothing about its origins — the Times adopted a stridently anti-lab leak stance. In its first report on the topic, a February 17, 2020 article covering comments made by Sen. Tom Cotton, the Times stigmatised lab leak as a “fringe theory”. Once the story was published, its reporter took to Twitter to describe it as “the kind of conspiracy once reserved for the tinfoil hatters”.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Academics say fear of pit bulls is linked to… racism?

Also referenced is the work of Emory University associate professor of philosophy, Erin Tarver. In her work "The Dangerous Individual(’s) Dog: Race, Criminality and the ‘Pit Bull’," Tarver applies French philosopher Michel Focault’s notion of “the dangerous individual” to what she sees as modern racialized attitudes towards pit bulls and the “perceived threat to normative whiteness” such animals pose.

Despite accounting for just 6.5% of all dogs in the United States, pit bulls were responsible for 66% of total fatal dog attacks between 2005 and 2017.

Tying the societal perception of pit bulls to anti-Black racism has become a theme in certain American academic circles.

Harlan Weaver, a professor of gender, women and sexuality studies at Kansas State University, gave a talk at Lafayette College last fall about how racial prejudice has driven the negative perception of pit bulls. The college’s student paper states that his work focuses on “racialization, using this interspecies intersectionality to ‘identify troubling dynamics and inheritances…but also to disrupt what is a very common logic in animal advocacy, in which racism is simultaneously engaged and erased through appropriative and substitutive moves.’”

Weaver began his talk by stating that “stigma” aimed at “communities of color” posed a threat to pit bulls, stating that “tacit heteronormative whiteness” is not good for the dogs. According to him, America is “presenting injustices faced by pit bulls as like racism by appropriating the rhetoric and often the effects or emotions associated with race related social justice issues.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Revolt of the Unwoke: Three progressive San Francisco school board members are targeted for a recall.

What has the board done to make itself so unpopular? Consider what it didn’t do. San Francisco was one of the last public school systems to reopen. It was so bad, at one point the city itself sued the school district.

Meanwhile, in January the board found the time to vote to strip 44 public schools of their names, including Abraham Lincoln High and Dianne Feinstein Elementary, over alleged complicity in racism or oppression. This was followed by an embarrassing about-face when it emerged how flimsy the criteria were. Alamo Elementary School made the list even though it was named not for the Texas battle but for the Spanish word for poplar tree.

And the board wouldn’t be woke if didn’t also manage to punish Asian-Americans. A month after its infamous name-change vote, the school board scrapped merit-based admissions in favor of a lottery system at Lowell High School, crown jewel of the city’s public system. The idea was to increase minority representation at the school.

But as critics noted, Lowell was already 82% nonwhite. It’s just that progressive math excludes Asian-Americans. Apparently it never occurs to the woke that the regular use of diversity to penalize Asian-American children for their hard work and achievement might itself be a form of systemic racism.

“The denial of equal rights to educational opportunity for Asian-American children by those claiming progressive values is particularly tragic in light of the recent pandemic of violence against Asian-Americans,” says Lee Cheng, a co-founder and director of the Asian American Legal Foundation. “The street thugs and the educrats in San Francisco share many characteristics and prejudices. Both are racist. Some are just better dressed.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Nebraska largely scraps gender identity lessons after uproar

Nebraska education officials announced Thursday that they have largely scrapped plans for gender identity lessons in public school curriculum after an uproar from conservatives who argued that the topics weren’t appropriate for children.

The new draft of the proposed sexual standards from the Nebraska Department of Education came after agency officials faced intense criticism from parents, school boards, state lawmakers and Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who held town hall events to blast the proposal. Opponents flooded a meeting of the Nebraska State Board of Education, an elected board that oversees the agency.

“What we’re really trying to do is understand what Nebraskans as a whole accept as a standard and an expectation of what our students learn in school,” Matthew Blomstedt, Nebraska’s education commissioner, said Thursday at a press conference. “There’s always going to be a little bit of tensions over those types of issues, especially in this sense.”

Nebraska currently has no statewide sex education standards. Even if adopted, the proposal would just be recommendations that school districts could use or ignore.

The original draft would have suggested lessons about family structures, including same-gender families, for kindergartners, and a discussion about gender identity and stereotypes for first-graders. Sixth graders would have learned about a range of gender identities, and seventh graders would have been taught about different types of sex and how diseases are transmitted.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

University refuses to rehire math professor who criticized slavery reparations

Saint Joseph’s University will not renew its contract with math Professor Gregory Manco despite the fact that a three-month investigation into his Twitter history found he had not violated any campus policies.

Manco has been a non-tenured assistant professor of math at Saint Joseph’s since 2005 and also a volunteer assistant baseball coach, but tweets in February criticizing slavery reparations and racial bias training had prompted the probe even though he used an anonymous account.

[...]

Manco, for his part, told The College Fix this week that he is talking to his lawyer and hopes to appeal the decision and continue teaching at Saint Joseph’s.

“I never should have been investigated for my contractually protected extramural speech,” he and, “I surely should not have been pulled out of the classroom for 11 weeks on top of it.”

Manco said he worries that the dispute will harm his professional reputation and remains convinced the decision was politically motivated.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Can opera survive the culture wars?

What a difference a year makes. In late February 2020, the Scottish Opera mounted a sold-out run of Nixon in China, John Adams’s opera about President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Communist China. The reviews of the production were uniformly glowing: it was “entrancing”, “gripping”, one of the “most rewarding and thought-provoking evenings available in any theatre this year”.

Last month, the company proudly announced that its Nixon had been nominated for a South Bank Sky Arts Award. Yet less than 48 hours later, the company withdrew from the nomination and issued a grovelling apology for causing “offence”. It begged for “space” to learn from its errors.

What had changed between 2020 and 2021? The meltdown among global elites over systemic racism after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. In this fevered, racialised atmosphere, the hapless Scottish Opera committed an offence that heretofore no one had known existed.

The company’s transgression lay in casting white singers in the roles of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, consistent with over three decades of performance practice. The fact that a black baritone sang the role of President Nixon, a first for Nixon in China, earned the Scottish Opera no protection from accusations of racism.

“Yellowface in opera has to stop,” commented British baritone, Julian Chou-Lambert. “It’s like blackface, but applied to East and South-East Asian characters. It’s offensive and dehumanising for ESEA people. Opera folks, please learn about this and do better.” A Scottish MP from the Labour Party, Sarah Owen, lamented the paucity of Asians in the production and the “exaggerated winged eye make-up”. She wondered ominously if Nixon in China had received taxpayer funding.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Biden ATF Nominee 'Frustrated' That Gun Owners Have Freedom of Speech

In 2019, Biden's ATF pick David Chipman appeared on British news network BBC to attack President Donald Trump and law-abiding American gun owners.

Speaking on national television, Chipman complained that it is "frustrating" the U.S. government cannot violate people’s right to bear arms if they use “hate speech” on the internet.

"The frustration is in the United States the freedom of speech and to say things is largely cannot be regulated,” Chipman said on BBC.

[...]

“The FBI, other federal agencies, have a tough job responding to these threats when they don’t currently have the authority to remove weaponry just because people are saying hateful things,” he also said.

The definition of “hate speech,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder, giving the most censorious persons increasing power to decide what others may think and say.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Katie Herzog] Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex

Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”

In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.

The idea that sex is a social construct may be interesting debate fodder in an anthropology class. But in medicine, the material reality of sex really matters, in part because the refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes.

In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he’d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Labour is in thrall to the trans Taliban

This week, Labour MP Rosie Duffield drew online stones from the trans Taliban when she dared to ‘like’ a tweet. The MP for Canterbury signalled her support for a post by Twitter user Kurtis Tripp, a gay man who suffered an attempt at conversion therapy as a teenager.

Tripp’s tweet criticised the growing use of the word ‘queer’ in LGBT circles: ‘And look at who is reclaiming it? Mostly heterosexuals cosplaying as the opposite sex and as “gay”. Stop co-opting our language. Stop colonising gay culture.’ Tripp is the wrong sort of gay, it seems. A gay who dares to object to trans orthodoxy. And Duffield, by association, is now marked as unclean.

Anyone who has dipped their toe into the piranha-filled waters of social media will understand that simply farting in the vicinity of transgender activists is enough to have you branded a transphobe and condemned to death. In response to the unguarded ‘like’, LGBT+ Labour called for Duffield to have the whip removed and to be suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party. LGBT+ Labour chair Alex Beverley said:

‘We have been concerned with the transphobic interactions on Rosie Duffield’s social-media profiles for over a year. During that time, we have tried to constructively engage with her and have repeatedly called on the leadership to take clear and decisive action.’

There have been calls for Duffield to ‘re-educate’ herself in line with the party’s stance on trans matters before. In August last year, Duffield was mobbed online after she liked a tweet by Piers Morgan in which he took issue with a CNN post that referred to ‘individuals with a cervix’. After she was criticised for liking the tweet, Duffield reacted by saying: ‘I’m a “transphobe” for knowing that only women have a cervix…?!’

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Catholic providers booted from university health system for not committing abortions

The Board of Regents for the University of California recently voted to not renew agreements with Catholic hospitals and healthcare providers over policies against abortion and transgender surgeries.

The vote comes after a state senator, Scott Wiener, introduced legislation with a similar goal, though that bill has remained in committee. The specific language of the regents’ resolution is due out in several weeks in August.

The motion to terminate the relationships in 2023 passed at the meeting at the end of June with 21 votes in favor, with only one member abstaining. There were two amendments, both for language clarification, that passed overwhelmingly.

Anne Shaw, a spokesperson for the Board of Regents, has not responded to a media request for comment sent three weeks ago that asked for an explanation of the policy and the religious freedom aspects of it.

The institutions referred to are primarily made up of religious medical institutions that do not perform abortions or gender affirming treatments. The resolution will bar UC health centers from forming new ties with these sorts of healthcare providers.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

UK Man Jailed For 'Hate Speech' Gets Lectured On 'White Privilege' After Release, Threatened With Jail Again

Louis Duxbury was convicted of "inciting religious hatred" and sentenced to 18 months in jail in late 2019 for going on an "anti-Muslim rant" to a few Facebook followers in the wake of a series of deadly Muslim terrorist attacks against his country in 2017.

Last month, Duxbury shared the Orwellian details of his two trials and imprisonment in an interview with Rob Warner's Crimebodge and revealed how he is still being hounded by the government and his probation officers who are threatening to throw him in prison again.

As I previously reported, Duxbury, who was 22 years old at the time, said one day after the Nov 29, 2019 London Bridge terror attack in a video uploaded to Facebook that he thought Muslim terrorists should be "wiped off the face of the earth."

[...]

Such a statement with no actionable intent would undoubtedly be ruled to be free speech here in America but in the UK where free speech has been abolished it will get you a year and a half in prison.

In contrast, Cambridge University academic Priyamvada Gopal went on a similar rant on Twitter in 2020 where she said that "White Lives Don't Matter" and we must "Abolish whiteness" and was not only not prosecuted for it but was rewarded by getting promoted to a full professorship.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Bari Weiss] A Witch Trial at the Legal Aid Society

The trouble began in late 2019, when Maron’s boss, Tina Luongo, informed her she was being investigated following a complaint from members of the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus and Attorneys of Color of Legal Aid. “I knew the accusations were baseless,” Maron said. “It had everything to do with them deeming me an enemy of their politics and trying to go after me at work.”

A former colleague of Maron’s said: “It was McCarthyism. That is the only word to describe it.” Like several others I spoke to, this lawyer requested anonymity out of fear of professional repercussions.

After an investigation that entailed reviewing all her case files and interviewing her direct supervisors, which the lawsuit details, Maron was cleared in January 2020. If she were someone else — a little more politically astute, a little less principled — maybe she would have understood the episode as a warning to shut up. But on July 23, 2020, Maron published an Op-Ed in the New York Post under the headline “Racial obsessions make it impossible for NYC schools to treat parents, kids as people.”

[...]

That’s when things at work blew up. Three days after she published the piece, the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus put out a lengthy statement saying that “Maud Maron has no business having a career in public defense, and we’re ashamed that she works for the Legal Aid Society.” It declared: “Maud is racist, and openly so,” and offered no evidence to back up the charge. It said that this veteran public defender was a “prominent opponent of equality” and a “classic example of what 21st century racism looks like.”

The statement said that Maron “is one of many charlatans who took this job not out of a desire to make a difference, but for purposes of self-imaging.” It claimed: “She pretends to favor integration while fighting against it and denying the existence of racism in education.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

[–]Node 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Those people all have names, some even listed in the article.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Man, Wearing a Dress and Wig, Jailed for Masturbating in Three Different Stores

On July 20, 2021, Bo Yu was sentenced to eight months in prison for masturbating on different days in three separate stores, including in one of the store’s changing rooms.

A security guard at House of Fraser in Dundrum testified that on November 27, 2019, he had observed Yu wearing a dress and a wig while masturbating in the women’s section. Just three days later, Yu was again observed masturbating in the store. On both occasions, the store contacted Gardaí­, the national police service of the Republic of Ireland.

Then on December 3, 2019, a security manager at Penneys in Dundrum witnessed Yu masturbating and then going into the changing rooms. Yu also touched a number of items in the store, which had to be removed and not sold. Yu was told to leave the changing room and to take a used condom found on a seat with him.

That same day, Yu was observed applying liquid to his hand and masturbating in the lingerie section of Marks & Spencer in Dundrum. While paying for tights at the cash register, Yu again masturbated. The store called Gardaí­, who subsequently arrested Yu. At the time of his arrest, Yu was found to be in possession of a sex toy, an unused condom and lubricants.

Yu pleaded guilty to public masturbation at House of Fraser, Penneys and Marks & Spencer. At the sentencing hearing, Judge Melanie Greally said the footage clearly showed that Yu was “manifestly in a state of considerable arousal throughout all the incidents”. While other shoppers appeared not to have noticed Yu, the judge remarked that there were also children at the stores. Judge Greally also noted that Yu suffered both physical and emotional abuse from his father and dressed as a woman “as a means of dealing with his stress and anxiety”.

Another one for the "but that never happens!" file.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You can be stabbed for criticising Islam?

Ms Tash is a former Muslim who is now a Christian and a prominent critic of Islam. Her religious view is that Muslims should be encouraged to convert to the Christian faith in order to save themselves. No doubt many Muslims find this an offensive idea, which they are perfectly at liberty to do. Tash is a regular of Speakers’ Corner. She engages in heated debates with Islamic preachers and others. Yesterday she was wearing a Charlie Hebdo t-shirt and making her usual comments about Islam, when a man in a black hood lunged towards her with great force, slashing at her face and her arm. Her face was covered in blood. The video, which has been widely shared online, is a difficult watch.

As the Met Police have said, we do not yet know the motive of the attacker. But one can make a reasonable guess that Tash was assaulted for her beliefs. Indeed, this isn’t the first time she has been attacked. Last year, she was punched in the face after displaying a cartoon of Muhammad at Speakers’ Corner. She was advised by police not to return to Speakers’ Corner – traditionally the one place in the UK where you can express pretty much any belief you like – for her own safety. Tash is living proof that being an ex-Muslim can be a risky business in our supposedly secular, free nation.

Let’s be real about what appears to have happened in Hyde Park yesterday – a woman known for her critical attitude towards Islam was violently assaulted with a weapon. In Britain, in the 21st century. Where are the cries of denunciation, or at least of concern? The woke left claims to be against fascism, yet it is eerily quiet about a seemingly extremist attack on a woman for holding particular beliefs. Our media elites shake their heads over online abuse, but they haven’t yet mustered up the energy to talk about this act of brutal physical abuse against a woman – an immigrant woman, at that – who was only criticising a world religion.

The hush, so far, in relation to this attack is a depressing sign of the times. Our society seems incapable of speaking honestly and frankly about Islamic extremism. And this assault, at this point, appears to be such an act. Consider, also, the failure of many of the candidates in the Batley and Spen by-election to stand up for the Batley Grammar schoolteacher, who was hounded into hiding simply for displaying an image of Muhammad during a classroom discussion of blasphemy and offence. In fact, barely any politicians or institutions, including the teaching unions, were willing to give a full-throated defence of the teacher. Every time there is an outburst of worrying Islamist activity, those in the opinion-forming set just stare at their feet. ‘Make it go away’ is their attitude.

One could argue that there is a depressingly symbiotic relationship between the cowardice of the establishment and the cockiness of some Islamic extremists. The former emboldens the latter. In many ways the political and media classes, through promoting the idea of ‘Islamophobia’, have helped to pave the way for today’s extremist intolerance of any criticism of Islam. In depicting, and very often demonising, critical comments about Islam as a species of bigotry, as an unacceptable ‘phobic’ outburst, the virtue-signalling set gives succour to the notion that it is always wrong to question Islam and its followers’ beliefs and practices. They green-light, unwittingly, no doubt, the more extremist attitude that essentially says: ‘Yes, it is a form of hatred to criticise my faith, and I will punish anyone who does it.’ Witness how some of the fundamentalist protesters outside Batley Grammar used the PC-sounding language of ‘offence’ and ‘protection from harm’ to justify their persecution of a teacher for, in their view, insulting their prophet.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Meet the CDC-Backed Groups That Want To Teach Trans Ideology to Kindergartners

The National Sex Education Standards, which provided a roadmap for Nebraska Department of Education, teach kindergartners the names of reproductive body parts and define gender identity and reproduction. Children in Grades 3-5 are taught about masturbation, hormone blockers used to transition pre-pubescent children, STDs, and the differences between cisgender, transgender, nonbinary, and "gender expansive." Grades 6-8 are taught about abortion, contraception, and differences between vaginal, oral, and anal sex. Grades 9-10 must teach "reproductive justice," which entails unlimited abortion access.

Dr. Susan Greenwald, a retired pediatrician in Nebraska who worked with childhood victims of sexual abuse for 35 years, said the standards are closer to "grooming" than age-appropriate education.

"The first thing out of my mouth was, ‘holy s***—what pedophile wrote this?'" Greenwald told the Free Beacon. "This is grooming 101. If you were a pedophile and wanted to teach your kid to be a victim, this would be what you use."

The Nebraska curriculum takes a number of exact phrases and guidelines from the National Sex Education Standards' Second Edition, which was released in 2020 by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), Advocates for Youth, and Answer. The three groups rake in millions of dollars each year from the federal government and abortion-focused charities. State and local education departments from Nebraska to New York have adopted the curriculum, but parents, doctors, and government officials are starting to push back against lesson plans that focus on hormone therapy, abortion, and gender transition.

Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts (R.) is publicly feuding with the state's department of education. The governor calls the curriculum unworkable and is hosting town halls across the state for hundreds of parents to voice their concerns about the sex education standards.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

America’s Class War Over Abortion

As a moral and legal matter, the Court should overturn Roe. But powerful considerations may stand in its way. The justices of the Supreme Court are by any measure members of America’s ruling class. Whatever their background, they have acquired advanced degrees from the nation’s leading schools, and now belong to what may be the nation’s most exclusive club. They move in a world where educational attainment and professional success are highly valued.

All of this tends to place them on one side of the abortion divide. For on abortion, as on other issues, our culture war is a class war. As the New York Times recently noted, there is only a five-point gender gap on abortion (smaller than on several other contentious issues) but there is a 20-point class gap. Forty-seven percent of Americans with a high school education or less think that abortion should be illegal. Only 27 percent of those with a postgraduate degree agree.

America’s dominant class valorizes educational credentials and professional advancement, even at the costs of goods such as closeness to friends or family. Abortion is a powerful symbol of this class’s willingness to sacrifice whatever stands in the way of career.

It should not be surprising, then, that the rights of the most vulnerable are now being defended by the state of Mississippi. Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation, with a median household income less than half that of Washington, D.C. By some measures it is also the least educated. Mississippi is about as far as one can get from the centers of wealth and power in America. Neighboring Alabama is home to one Fortune 500 company, while Louisiana claims two and Arkansas five. Mississippi has none.

The abortion battle is not only a culture war. It is also a class war. In order to realize their aims, abortion opponents must take this fact to heart. To the extent that our country remains dominated by the professional class, the rights of the unborn are likely to be ignored.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

White woman making 'improved' congee apologizes

The company, which sells pre-packaged meals it had referred to as congee, issued the apology in a statement on its website this week after it was criticized by many across social media for exoticizing the comfort food and trying to reframe the already-popular dish. It had previously claimed to have altered congee to fit “your modern palate” and “improve” a dish that’s been beloved by Asian cultures for centuries.

“Recently, we fell short of supporting and honoring the Asian American community and for that, we are deeply sorry,” the statement said. “We take full responsibility for any language on our website or in our marketing and have taken immediate steps to remedy that and educate ourselves, revising our mission to not just creating delicious breakfast meals, but becoming a better ally for the AAPI community.”

Asian Americans had taken issue with several aspects of the company, including how the staff did not appear to include employees of Asian descent and how Taylor, an acupuncturist and self-proclaimed “Queen of Congee,” had written a now-edited post titled, “How I discovered the miracle of congee and improved it.”

Congee remains a staple for Asians, with different versions cooked by nearly every country across the continent. The word congee itself has Tamil roots. It’s largely regarded as a comfort food, and in the Chinese tradition, it’s often served at dim sum with flavors like thousand-year-old-egg and pork, or duck. Taylor’s version includes flavors like apple cinnamon and uses ingredients like oat groat.

In its statement, Breakfast Cure, founded in 2017, referred to its meal packs as “Oregon porridge,” rather than congee as it had previously been calling them. It also said that its products, which include ingredients and flavors that bear little resemblance to the original dish, was “inspired” by traditional rice congee, “an incredible, healing dish with references dating back to 1,000 BC.”

Profoundly unfair to make this woman apologize for improving congee while giving a free pass to every shitty "fusion" sushi place that wants to charge me $20 for mayonnaise and avocado wrapped in rice.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Eco-fascism is our future

In the end, as the wildfires, droughts, ice melt and supply chain collapses mounted, a stark choice presented itself: an ambitious plan to Save The Earth, or a collapse into barbarism. That was how the media sold it, anyway, and since it had been long anticipated, nobody really minded much. We were all locked into the machine by now, after all: all reliant on its largesse to eat, sleep and work. The worse things got — and they were getting worse fast — the more appetite there was for bold, assertive, planetary-scale action. And since the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone had got used to obeying the authorities and submitting to behavioural monitoring, in order to prevent mass disaster.

And so, the global empire arrived, largely on schedule. Corporations, well-heeled NGOs, states and regional blocs, trailing a bevy of media and intellectual lapdogs in their wake, consolidated their Green New Reset, or whatever they were calling it today, with impeccable ease. The new world would be progressive, inclusive, open, sustainable, gender-neutral and, above all, intensely profitable. The ongoing assimilation of any ecosystems, cultures, perspectives and lifestyles that conflicted with progress would be implemented in a manner which ensured carbon neutrality. The sustainable global machine — smart, interconnected, perpetually monitored, always-on — would encompass everything and everyone, producing cascading benefits for all. The long-held Western dream would finally be achieved: the world would become one. One market, one set of values, one way of living, one way of seeing.

By the time some of the environmentalists realised who they had sold their soul to, it was too late. But what, in any case, had the alternative been? The small-is-beautiful crowd, with their patchouli-scented jumpers and their 1970s talk about limits and sovereignty, had been cancelled as eco-fascists long ago, exiled to distant smallholdings and housing co-ops with their well-thumbed copies of Tools for Conviviality and other yellowing tomes by dead white men. Now that an actual eco-fascism was on the horizon — a global merger of state and corporate power in pursuit of progress that would have made Mussolini weep like a proud grandfather — there was nothing to stand in its way.

Unlike previous empires, this one knew how to present itself: with wind farms rather than dreadnoughts, pictures of smiling children rather than squares of redcoats. It used eco-friendly, inclusive language as it enclosed land, funnelled wealth upwards and coated wild landscapes in renewable technologies made from rare earth metals (a regrettable necessity, but a temporary one: sustainable asteroid mining was well on the way). But it was curious how the wealth and power seemed to stay in mainly the same hands; odd too that the rolling eco-crisis never seemed to actually go away, however many billionaires and NGOs attempted bright new techno-fixes. In fact, the tighter the empire gripped, the more everything seemed to slip away from its grasp. It was almost as if the techno-fixes themselves were the problem.

Over time, the inevitable happened: the age-old progress trap closed in like a Venus Flytrap patiently digesting its victims. The genetic modifications and the nanotech “solutions” went awry, as Earth’s inscrutable systems refused to behave the way the computer models had predicted. The mass dumping of iron filings into the ocean did not sequester as much carbon as hoped, but it did lead to an unexpected collapse in whale numbers. The Bill Gates-funded sun-dimming technologies had succeeded in lowering the planet’s temperature, but the feedback loops that kicked in lowered it much more than expected, leading to mass crop collapse and famine, which in turn caused riots across the world. The early 2040s saw half of Africa subsisting for several months on locust swarms while Silicon Valley’s finest dined on sustainable insect burgers in their New Zealand redoubts.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A reminder not to take any media figure's self-reported "harassment" seriously: She Claimed She Received Threatening Letters. Video Footage Showed She Sent Them To Herself.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Social Justice Network: Facebook announces sweeping new restrictions on criticism of protected groups.

Until recently, most online platforms largely defined “hate speech” as speech that could lead to imminent physical harm. But Facebook now demands that its users “not post” speech critical of “concepts, institutions, ideas, practices, or beliefs associated with protected characteristics, which are likely to contribute to imminent physical harm, intimidation or discrimination against the people associated with that protected characteristic.”

“Protected characteristics,” according to Facebook, include “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease.” On its face, this sounds neutral and universally applicable. Yet anyone following the matter knows that it is inconceivable, for instance, that Facebook would ban critiques of “cisgenderism,” a concept whose purpose is to attack heterosexuality and the legitimacy of the generative family. It is similarly unimaginable that protected groups would be blocked from criticizing American constitutionalism as a construct of “whiteness.” Oppressor groups, after all, do not possess “protected characteristics.”

Discrimination once meant denying housing, access to public accommodations, or employment to people based on immutable characteristics. This, of course, was corrected by civil rights laws. But discrimination now means speech that protected groups find insulting. In other words, the last place where discrimination exists is in the minds of oppressor groups.

This new view of discrimination conflicts with the basic requirements of political liberty. It means, for instance, that speech defending the traditional family harms the self-respect of LGBTQ people; that arguments in favor of secure borders harm the self-respect of illegal immigrants; and that analyses of the different rates of criminality among demographic groups harm the self-respect of some groups, while also lowering their stature in the eyes of the oppressor group. Anti-discrimination comes to mean enforced silence on behalf of protected groups, no matter how central the issue in question is to the nation’s political and social future.

[...]

Forbidding the discussion of “concepts, institutions, ideas, practices, or beliefs associated with protected characteristics” also hobbles the use of speech as a tool for discovering the truth about basic matters. Leading “hate speech” restriction advocates already demand the banning of factual claims, should they harm the self-respect of protected groups. Facebook’s guidelines could preclude the critical discussion of dogmas claiming that all oppressor-group members are unconsciously biased, or that only racism accounts for disparities among groups.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

“Keep leftist, demoralizing and indoctrinating ideologies away from our children!” warns Polish education minister

Minister of Education Przemysław Czarnek referred on Polish Radio to the draft project of the amendment to the Polish education law. The new laws are intended to increase the role of the state school superintendent.

The amendment mainly concerns lessons being taught by associations and organizations at schools. According to the project, a school’s headmaster will be obliged to receive a positive opinion from the superintendent prior to the initiation of lessons by non-government organizations or associations.

After receiving such an opinion, the headmaster will have to present full information about the aims and content of the lessons to a student’s parents. They will also have to present the superintendent’s positive opinion, the positive opinion of the school and parents’ council, and materials which will be used during the lessons.

Moreover, the amendment entails that a student’s participation in such lessons will require the written permission of the student’s parents.

Minister Czarnek emphasized that despite the increase of the superintendent’s competencies, parents will have the decisive vote in the matter, and the goal of the amendment is to strengthen the voice of parents.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Minneapolis business owner who cheered rioters burning down restaurant has van stolen, new business robbed

A business owner in Minneapolis, who set up shop across town a year after his first Indian restaurant was burned down last summer during riots after George Floyd's death, says his van full of supplies for his new establishment was stolen.

Ruhel Islam, an immigrant who grew up under a Bangladeshi dictatorship, said someone took the stolen van to his new restaurant, Curry In A Hurry, from in front of his home then used the keys left inside the truck to enter the building Monday, taking $500 from the register, Fox 9 Minneapolis reported.

His first restaurant, called Gandhi Mahal, was located just blocks away from the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct, which was also burned down by rioters last summer. The restaurant caught fire during the demonstrations. Islam and his daughter, Hafsa Islam, went viral on Facebook, writing in a post at the time, "Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served."

The building that once housed Gandhi Mahal on East Lake Street has since been demolished and a community garden has been erected in its place. Islam later opened Curry In A Hurry less than two miles away, which is open for takeout, delivery, catering and outdoor seating over the summer.

Islam said his catering truck was filled with newly purchased catering supplies, kitchen gear, and private business account paperwork when it was stolen from outside his home in the Morris Park/Nokomis area Saturday afternoon.

Stultorum eventus magister est, but I suppose some are slow learners.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Culture Warrior: Catherine Lhamon is poised to resume her efforts against due process and school discipline.

President Biden has nominated Lhamon to return for a second stint as assistant secretary in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). During her previous term under President Obama, Lhamon transformed that office from a guarantor of statutorily defined rights into a forward operating base for coercing compliance with liberal social dogma on matters ranging from allegations of sexual assault to school discipline to transgender issues.

North Carolina senator Richard Burr, ranking Republican on the committee, described Lhamon’s track record as “deeply troubling if not outright disqualifying.” But he and his colleagues seemed focused on fighting the last culture war—over Title IX and allegations of sexual assault and abuse on campus—rather than the Left’s social crusade de jour: critical race theory.

To be sure, Lhamon’s track record on Title IX is worth scrutinizing. Under her leadership, OCR coerced colleges to adopt a new “preponderance of the evidence” standard for investigating allegations of sexual assault and abuse on campus—a standard that critics on both left and right say creates a presumption of guilt. When Donald Trump’s Education secretary Betsy DeVos issued a regulation with a stronger emphasis on due process, even the liberal Washington Post editorial board admitted that DeVos got quite a bit right.

Reasonable minds may differ on this fraught issue—but senators have good reason to doubt whether Lhamon possesses a reasonable mind. In contrast to the Post editorial board’s nuanced take, Lhamon tweeted that DeVos’s regulation takes “us back to the bad old days, that predate my birth, when it was permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.” When Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) asked about this statement, Lhamon stood by it, declaring that the DeVos “regulation permits students to rape and sexually harass with impunity.”

Lhamon has demonstrated a similar cavalier lack of regard for evidence and due process on another key issue: school discipline. Under her leadership, civil rights investigations became tools of harassment to coerce changes in school policies. These deeply invasive investigations would end only when school districts agreed to adopt lenient discipline policies, notwithstanding evidence that these policies were destabilizing classrooms and leading to increased school violence.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Rod Dreher] Msgr. Burrill & The ‘Droit Du Monseigneur’

It looks like many Catholics, from the progressives to the integralists, are mad at The Pillar for outing a top USCCB cleric over his alleged use of the gay hook-up app Grindr, which is used to arrange impromptu gay sexual encounters. The Washington Postsurveys the reaction. Excerpts:

Is Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill a victim of both the surveillance and morality police? Or a hypocrite who had it coming? The case of the high-ranking Catholic cleric who resigned after allegedly being tracked on the gay dating app Grindr quickly became a Rorschach test Wednesday for Catholics already mired in tension over politics, theology and culture.

Burrill until Tuesday was the top administrator for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He stepped down after a Catholic newsletter presented conference officials with allegations that cellphone data indicated he had repeatedly used Grindr and visited gay bars.

[...]

If Burrill is guilty of what the data indicate, then it’s important to know if he used his position at the NAC to groom others, or in some other way participated in, or turned a blind eye to, predation. It cannot be said enough: these things happen in networks! The late Richard Sipe, a sociologist who knew more about the sociology of sexually active priests that anybody, repeatedly said that the culture of sexual abuse depends on a broader culture of sexual misconduct, which is itself sustained by networks of sympathetic corrupt priests. This is one of the reasons why Janet Smith points out that Catholic seminaries routinely screen the online connections of their seminarians, looking for pornography and other signs of online sexual misconduct. By what rationalization does a senior Catholic cleric have the right to seek out gay sexual encounters on his phone without anyone else knowing about it, but Catholic seminarians do not? Is this what you call the “droit du monseigneur”?

[...]

I honestly cannot understand why anybody who believes that priests having sex is immoral would object to what The Pillar has done. It wasn’t, by the way, like Burrill was (allegedly) having sexual relations with a regular partner. The data published by The Pillar suggest that he was having quick, anonymous sexual encounters with men. Though I suppose it could be said that he only used Grindr to entice gay men into meeting with him so he could share the Gospel with them, and call them to repentance. This is within the realm of possibility, as we have no hard evidence that the monsignor actually had sex with the men he allegedly met via the app.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Greens: torn apart by trans mania

Even when caught with their pants down, the sleazy, duplicitous Tories still manage to look competent and dignified when compared with the squabbling, identity-obsessed left. In May’s local elections, the impressive failure of charisma-vacuum Keir Starmer led to many left-leaning voters switching allegiance. The Green Party enjoyed a net gain of 91 council seats, taking its national total to a record 444. But just a few months after this success, even the greenies are now breaking their vegan diet in order to gorge on each other’s bloodied flesh. Last week, Sian Berry, Green Party co-leader for England and Wales, announced her intention to flounce.

[...]

Somewhat awkwardly for Berry, one of the first to welcome her ‘principled stance’ was Aimee Challenor. Challenor identifies as a woman and was a rising star in the Green Party when, in 2017, he appointed his father, David Challenor, as an election agent. At the time of the appointment, David was on bail, charged with 22 offences – including the rape and torture of a 10-year-old girl, in the attic of his family home in Coventry. It seems the Greens were so excited by the prospect of having a trans candidate that they failed to do their due diligence.

[...]

Ali was not the only wrong-thinker to come under the watch of the Green Party’s Big Sister. Emma Bateman was delighted when she was re-elected as co-chair of Green Party Women (GPW) late last year. As a feminist, she is unequivocal in her view that the sex you are born into determines your life chances – meaning, for instance, that females are more likely to be raped than to be rapists, and more likely to be victims of domestic abuse than to be perpetrators. She also believes that women-only experiences like pregnancy matter.

Bateman shared the role of chairing GPW with Kathryn Bristow, who is male. Bristow describes himself as ‘solo-polyamorous’, ‘pansexual’ and uses the pronouns ‘fae/faer’. Bristow also claims to be a ‘genderfae female person’. Bateman tells me that when she asked if Bristow was female, she was suspended from the party. ‘The complaints system has been used to muzzle insubordinates so the leaders can claim there’s a unified voice’, she says. Bateman thinks that a gulf between the grassroots Greens and the party leaders is becoming obvious:

‘I think most members focus on their local communities and the environment, and are unaware that gender ideology has been nurtured at the party core, while those at the centre saw the “trans women are women” policy waved through and took the lack of opposition for assent and support… Whoever is elected [as Green co-leader], I hope it is someone for whom climate change, not pronouns, will be a priority.’

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Invasive Asian carp will be renamed to remove the term's 'horrible, xenophobic connotations' in the wake of anti-Asian hate crimes

The invasive Asian carp species will be renamed due to the term's 'horrible, xenophobic connotations' in the wake of a surge of anti-Asian hate crimes.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has now joined state agencies in Minnesota in referring to the species as 'invasive carp', despite critics ridiculing the move as misplaced political correctness.

Officials claimed that calling the fish 'Asian' and advocating their culling had xenophobic connotations - but the move sparked mockery on Twitter where users pointed out that the term referred to where the fish were originally imported from.

This could be referring to Asian people as being an invasive species, which is just a horrible connotation,' said Charlie Wooley, director of its Great Lakes regional office.

'We wanted to move away from any terms that cast Asian culture and people in a negative light.'

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

France’s anti-vax movement turns nasty

In the name of freedom, French anti-vaccine militants have attacked two vaccination centres in recent days, burning one to the ground.

In the name of freedom, more than 100,000 people demonstrated in 130 towns last Saturday.

In the name of freedom, some of the demonstrators wore yellow stars of David or carried banners in which President Emmanuel Macron was depicted with a Hitler moustache. The suggestion that vaccination, forced or otherwise, can be compared to the Holocaust has caused widespread consternation in France — and not just amongst French Jews.

The protests last weekend included an extraordinary coalition of the usual suspects of French street politics from the far-Left to the far-Right and from the stubborn rump of the Gilets Jaunes anti-Macron movement of 2018-9.

Other demonstrators — many others — self-identified themselves as being non-political people: restaurant owners, nurses, care-workers all infuriated by Macron’s decision to make vaccination against Covid-19 compulsory for health workers and necessary from August 1st for access to bars, restaurants cinemas and long-haul trains and buses.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Boiling the Frog in South Africa

Since the beginning of African National Congress (ANC) rule in 1994, South Africa has been the anticolonial movement’s great success story. While other African countries fell victim to coups and civil wars, South Africa carried on. Yes, it was a one-party state, corruption was rife, violent crime was out of control, and unemployment hovered between 25 and 33 percent—but somehow the country muddled through.

Alas, muddling through is a tactic that can only work for so long. There are about 14 million registered taxpayers in South Africa, out of a population of nearly 60 million. The bulk of income tax revenue comes from just 574,000 individuals. The ANC’s wager has always been that this tiny tax base could be squeezed for all it’s worth in order to fund lavish social benefits for the rest of the population.

Ramaphosa has articulated this gamble explicitly, according to the posthumous memoir of Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, a longtime MP for the Inkatha Freedom Party who died in 2014. During negotiations over the post-apartheid constitution in 1994, Ambrosini wrote, “Ramaphosa told me of the ANC’s 25-year strategy to deal with the whites: it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly.” Under majority rule, “the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.”

Ramaphosa got the timing right, give or take a few years, but he forgot about the third option: Rather than fight or stay and be boiled, the white minority could always just pick up and leave. When Nelson Mandela came to power, doomsayers predicted a mass exodus similar to that of the Algerian pieds-noirs. Contrary to forecasts, millions of white South Africans stayed, either because they were committed to making the “Rainbow Nation” experiment work or simply because they were too settled to emigrate. That generation is now dying, and their children are constrained by no such inertia.

For a long time, South Africa’s natural resource wealth worked in the ANC’s favor. Gold and diamonds are where they are; you can’t outsource a mine the way you can a factory. However, in 2020, AngloGold Ashanti, a successor company of Anglo American, sold its last remaining operations in South Africa, which meant the end of an unbroken streak that had lasted since Ernest Oppenheimer founded the company a century ago. Even a mining firm’s patience has limits.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

White House Says Nothing ‘Off The Table’ When It Comes To Using Big Tech To Silence Dissent

After admitting that government officials are flagging what they deem “misinformation” to Facebook for censorship, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration is exploring options to exercise more control over social media platforms.

“I don’t think we’ve taken any options off the table. That’s up to Congress to determine how they want to proceed moving forward,” Psaki said. “We are not in a war or a battle with Facebook. We are in a battle with the virus. The problem we’re seeing that our Surgeon General elevated last week is that… inaccurate information about vaccines is killing people.”

Psaki’s latest comments come after bragging last week about the White House’s collusion with Big Tech oligarchs to suppress dissent.

“We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the surgeon general‘s office,” Psaki said Thursday. “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect medical experts who are popular with our audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content — so we are helping get trusted content out there.”

Top officials in the administration, including Biden himself, have alleged that Facebook and “misinformation” are killing people.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Matt Taibbi] NPR's Brilliant Self-Own

The piece is about Ben Shapiro, but one doesn’t have to have ever followed Shapiro, or even once read the Daily Wire, to get the joke. The essence of NPR’s complaint is that a conservative media figure not only “has more followers than The Washington Post” but outperforms mainstream outlets in the digital arena, a fact that, “experts worry,” may be “furthering polarization” in America. NPR refers to polarizing media as if they’re making an anthropological discovery of a new and alien phenomenon.

The piece goes on to note that “other conservative outlets such as The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal” that “publish aggregated and opinion content” have also “generally been more successful… than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR's analysis.” In other words, they’re doing better than us.

[...]

Mixed in with Ibram Kendi recommendations for children’s books, instructions on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and “talk to your parents about racism” (even if your parents are an interracial couple), and important dispatches from the war on complacency like “Monuments And Teams Have Changed Names As America Reckons With Racism, Birds Are Next,” “National” Public Radio in the last year has committed itself to a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the most moralizing, tendentious, humor-deprived, jargon-obsessed segment of American society. Yet without any irony, yesterday’s piece still made deadpan complaint about Shapiro’s habit of “telling [people] what their opinions should be” and speaking in “buzzwords.”

This was functionally the same piece as the recent New York Times article, “Is the Rise of the Substack Economy Bad for Democracy?” which similarly blamed Substack for hurting “traditional news” — and, as the headline suggests, democracy itself — by being a) popular and b) financially successful, which in media terms means not losing money hand over fist. There, too, the reasons for the rise of an alternative media outlet were presented by critics as a frightening, unsolvable Scooby-Doo mystery.

It’s not. NPR sucks and is unlistenable, so people are going elsewhere. People like Shapiro are running their strategy in reverse and making fortunes doing it. One of these professional analysts has to figure this one out eventually, right?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Church of Lockdown

The Reverend Charlie Boyle – the vicar of All Saints’ Church in Poole, Dorset – could potentially be sacked for breaking Covid guidelines. Boyle stands accused of singing the final verse of an Easter hymn without wearing a mask and generally failing to take responsibility for implementing Covid measures in his church. Most alarmingly, he could be punished for hugging a mourning parishioner during a funeral.

[...]

Boyle might well have breached the guidance by hugging a mourning parishioner. But if showing compassion and charity at a time of loss is a crime, it should be one any good priest would be willing to go to jail for. It is disturbing that the Church of England would even consider bringing a case against one of its own for being a good pastor to his flock.

The church has a lot of explaining to do. This is not its first failure during the pandemic. In the first lockdown, all churches were closed down in a faux act of ‘solidarity’ with people at home who were isolating. This measure went above and beyond what even the government had expected. For the first time in centuries, priests were not allowed to enter their churches to pray for their parish. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, who chose to preach from his kitchen counter instead of one of the many chapels in his palace, apparently didn’t think it particularly important to be in a church building.

For Christians, churches are far more than just buildings. They are steeped in decades – sometimes centuries – of prayer. They are also hubs at the centre of the community. For many people, they are a lifeline. Closing the churches, even to priests, was a momentous mistake.

When the Church of England should have been fighting to keep churches open, it let us down. If ever there was a time for the church to step up to the plate and to provide pastoral assistance and moral leadership, this was it. There was a time not too long ago when a priest would rather face martyrdom than close the doors of his church to his people. Yet it is the church itself which is going after one of its vicars for attempting to do his job properly.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Transgender Industry Is Culling Tomboys Out Of Existence

First, this story shows that the transgender movement is coming for very young children, starting in preschool if not sooner. Transgender advocates insist that kindergarteners and even toddlers are capable of committing to transition, and that everyone else must affirm this. Instead of waiting to see what shakes out as children develop, trans advocates demand that children be immediately transitioned socially (new names, new clothes, new pronouns, new bathrooms, etc.), followed by medical transition beginning before puberty.

[...]

Third, this case demonstrates how it is often adults who are pushing for children to transition. The reporter says, “It never occurred to Sophia that she was anyone other than a boy,” which makes it odd that the story does not relate any instances of Sophia saying that she was, or wanted to be, a boy. No evidence is provided for this central claim of the story.

Instead, the article tells about Sophia, then around five years of age, admiring Max from “Stranger Things” to the point of wanting to be called Max. This is presented as a major milestone in revealing Sophia’s trans identity. But “Stranger Things'” Max is a girl. This was nothing more than one tomboyish little girl admiring and wanting to be like an older tomboyish girl on TV.

Indeed, reading the story, which relies entirely on Emily for pertinent information about Sophia/Max, it is striking that no evidence of gender dysphoria is presented beyond a little girl being a tomboy. However, it does appear Emily was distressed at her daughter being a tomboy instead of a girly girl, and we are told that Emily can now get her little “boy” to cooperate in dressing up, albeit in bow-ties and button-down shirts rather than dresses.

[...]

Fourth, this story illustrates the pernicious effects of the trans movement’s hostage-taking. Emily admits to concerns about the future medical transition of her daughter, but dismisses them by repeating word for word the trans movement’s mantra, “I’d rather have a trans son than a dead daughter.” Yet this story presents no evidence that Sophia ever considered, let alone threatened or attempted, suicide. Emily’s fear seem to be entirely instilled from outside sources.

We must secure the existence of our tomboys and a future for girl's sports.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The thoughtpolice can go whistle

‘Bob and the gang have so much fun. Working together, they get the job done.’ The Bob the Builder theme song – ‘Can We Fix It?’ – is all about what humans can achieve when we work together. But Bedfordshire Police has a different interpretation. Its officers seem to believe the catchy tune should be taken as a warning that an appalling racist hate crime is about to be committed.

A man in Bedfordshire has been slapped with a police record for whistling the theme song at his neighbour. Few other details are known about this ‘non-crime hate incident’, other than the fact that the police considered the interaction to be racist.

So-called non-crime hate incidents have proliferated in recent years, with over 120,000 recorded in the past five years alone. Although they do not result in arrest, the ‘perpetrators’ of these non-crimes can end up with a police record. These incidents will show up on any enhanced DBS check. They are supposed to help the police deal with more serious hate crimes, but there is currently no evidence that a single crime has been solved as a result of police recording these incidents.

So what counts as a ‘non-crime hate incident’? Because there is no crime being committed, there is no threshold to determine whether an incident is serious enough to become a police matter. They are also based on the subjective notion of ‘hate’, which is decided according to the feelings of the ‘victim’ or any other person. This means that literally any interaction with another person, animal or inanimate object can now be recorded as a non-crime hate incident.

It’s not just whistling the Bob the Builder theme that can catch the attention of the cops. Other hate incidents recorded by police have included a drug dealer ripping off a gay man (allegedly for his sexuality), a dog pooing on someone’s lawn (apparently this was racially aggravated), and an elderly woman beeping her horn at a slow driver (also racist, allegedly). Even children’s playground insults have been investigated as non-crime hate incidents.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

UNC journalism professors protest ‘objectivity’ in news reporting

Faculty members of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media converged last week to bemoan a statement of values that’s etched in granite and is found in the lobby of their school.

The core values statement, installed two years ago, touts objectivity, impartiality, integrity and truth-seeking, and after their kvetching session that statement was reportedly scrapped from the school’s website, the News & Observer reports.

In 2019, Walter Hussman, a UNC alumnus and owner of a media conglomerate of newspapers and other media outlets, donated $25 million to the UNC journalism school. Part of the donation contract installed those values into the school’s wall and mission, according to UNC’s website.

But Hussman had expressed concerns over the hiring of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the biased New York Times 1619 Project, and she cited the journalism magnate as one reason she rejected the UNC job.

“Faculty say the display gives the impression those statements are values of the school and its faculty, and in a draft of a statement … faculty wrote it should be removed or given more context. The draft also said Hussman’s actions had been harmful to the school’s reputation,” the News & Observer reported.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Two Oregon Educators Fired After Speaking Out About Gender Identity Policies

North Middle School Assistant Principal, Rachel Damiano, and 7th-grade science teacher, Katie Medart, were fired at a public hearing of the Grants Pass 7 school district in Oregon on Thursday. The two women were each terminated by a 4-3 vote of the board after hours of statements, questioning, and debate.

The swing vote in both cases was cast by Cliff Kuhlman, a retired banker and real estate broker, who has served on the board since 1986. At multiple points throughout the proceeding, Kuhlman expressed that he could not hear the discussion, did not know what he was voting on, and did not understand the nuances of Rachel and Katie’s individual cases. Kuhlman asked the chair, rectal surgeon Scott Nelson, to abstain from voting on Katie’s case. He was told that he was not allowed to abstain, and ultimately voted to terminate.

In a statement to 4W, Rachel and Katie described the board’s decision as “disheartening, unjust, and surreal.”

Rachel and Katie were accused of using school district time or resources in the creation or promotion of “I Resolve,” a grassroots movement founded by the two educators which proposes “solutions for education policies” to address the conflict of rights arising from new “gender identity” laws and policies impacting schools in Oregon and across the country. In March, the two posted a video on Youtube describing their proposal, which includes separating school bathrooms by physical anatomy.

Although Rachel and Katie never identified themselves as Grants Pass employees in the video or I Resolve materials, a local parent recognized them and complained to the school. District Superintendent Kirk Kolb, who had been aware of the I Resolve proposals in the development stages and never expressed concern (he even offered to bring the proposals to the school board for consideration), threw the women under the bus after receiving complaints from an extreme minority.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Pope Francis Shuts Down the Latin Mass, Claiming That Returning to Tradition ‘Injures the Church’

Francis made the pronouncement in his latest motu proprio that it will be the “exclusive competence” of a diocesan bishop “to authorize the use of the 1962 Roman Missal in his diocese, according to the guidelines of the Apostolic See.” This will allow Francis’ goons to shut down the traditional Latin mass, which is gaining momentum at a time when the Catholic Church is dying amidst child rape scandals.

“The responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene,” Francis wrote in a letter to bishops published on Friday that makes it clear the Pope wants Bishops to crush the traditional Latin mass.

“Regrettably, the pastoral objective of my predecessors, who had intended ‘to do everything possible to ensure that all those who truly possessed the desire for unity would find it possible to remain in this unity or to rediscover it anew,’ has often been seriously disregarded,” the Pope continued, adding that supporters of the traditional Latin mass have “exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.”

Big League Politics has reported on how Pope Francis has waged war on conservative Catholics as he rejects the truth of Christ for the heresy of Marxism:

“Pope Francis has endorsed globalist communism in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, blaming capitalism for the damage caused by disastrous and unnecessary lockdown policies.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Going All In: The NEA pledges to bring critical race theory to a public school near you.

In the resolution, the union agreed publicly to “convey its support” for critical race theory, oppose restrictions in state legislatures, and use schools to promote political activism. The delegates pledged to “join with Black Lives Matter at School and the Zinn Education Project” to hold a “national day of action” on George Floyd’s birthday, recruiting teachers to hold political demonstrations and “teach lessons about structural racism and oppression.”

The resolution also promised to develop a study to critique “empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, [and] anthropocentrism”—that is, adapting the most fashionable and intellectually bankrupt ideas from the universities for use in grade school classrooms.

Finally, the NEA passed a resolution to “research the organizations” that oppose critical race theory—including grassroots parent organizations—and provide resources to groups and individuals targeting them. The national teachers’ union will use union dues, collected from public employees paid by taxpayers, to attack parents who oppose the racial indoctrination of their children.

Yet we might thank the NEA for one thing. Its new militant stance on critical race theory provides much-needed clarity to the debate on this issue. Progressives such as MSNBC host Joy Reid can no longer disingenuously claim that critical race theory is only taught in law schools or is only a “lens” for examining American history. The teachers’ union has nationalized critical race theory and committed to the full range of left-wing radicalism, including opposition to “capitalism” and “anthropocentrism.”

Moving forward, the question is now clear: Who should decide what happens in public schools—parents, voters, and state legislatures, or the national teachers’ union and its allies in the public school bureaucracy?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Berlin and Munich to ban the term “Schwarzfahren” over racism concerns

Munich and Berlin will no longer allow use of the traditional term indicating that someone is using public transport without a ticket. German cities have decided to ban the word “Schwarzfahren”, which literally means “black riding”, because people might perceive it as a racist insult. Cities in Czechia where the same term is used will not consider making such changes, though.

German transport companies in Berlin and Munich decided not to use the word Schwarzfahren anymore, as well as the term Schwarzfahrer (black rider). They plan to drop these terms altogether.

[...]

The word Schwarzfahren was also banned in Berlin. According to the German linguist Eric Fuss, however, the term Schwarzfahren comes from the word “shvarts” (poverty in Yiddish). So, it is supposed to describe people who are too poor to buy a ticket, not dark-skinned people.

Unlike in Germany, transport companies in the Czech Republic, where the Czech version of the term is also used, do not perceive this to be a problem.

“We usually use the term ‘passenger without a valid ticket’. Informally, people call this ‘black riding’, but no one gives it any racist subtext. However, we do not officially use this term,” ​​said Hana Tomaštíková, a spokeswoman of the Brno City Transport Company.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

At current ammo prices South African looters are now millionaires: 800k rounds of ammo looted from Durban harbor, guns stores looted, gun battles in the streets

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

NFL to Roll Out More Social Justice Messaging in 2021 Season

The NFL also plans to make “Lift Every Voice and Sing” — often referred to as the Black national anthem — a prominent part of all big league events, said sources. They will likely highlight victims of racial injustice with a “Say Their Stories” project, as well.

In today’s hyper-partisan media environment, most fans experience football through the prism of television. This year’s renewed social justice messaging efforts will be visible to the 200 million-plus TV viewers who watch game telecasts each season.

In 2020, the league suffered its first regular-season TV audience downturn in three years. Schedule irregularities and postponements due to COVID-19 were a likely factor, though some propose that social justice messaging impacts viewership as well.

While the NFL leans in, other leagues are dialing back. The NBA, for example, has removed most of the social justice signs and messages that were prevalent on courts and player jerseys last season. Commissioner Adam Silver said those messages are being largely delivered off the floor.

[...]

While the NFL declined to comment, sources said this year’s social justice initiative could be as big, if not bigger, than last season’s in terms of spend, resources, and overall commitment.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Biden's pick for Land Management leader has a record of eco-terrorism

She was awarded immunity from prosecution in 1993 when she agreed to testify and admit to her role in an eco-terrorist group responsible for what had happened in the 1989 incident where she had written and sent an anonymous letter telling the world a forest near where she lived in Idaho had been seeded with tree spikes.

According to the Daily Caller, Michael Merkley came forward to shed public light on past incidents, when he saw that Stone-Manning claim that she had never been investigated criminally.

"She was aware that she was being investigated in 1989 and again in 1993 when she agreed to the immunity deal with the government to avoid criminal felony prosecution. I know, because I was the Special Agent in Charge of the Investigation."

[...]

Markley went on to state that, by 1992, and despite Stone-Manning's lack of co-operation, "it became clear that Ms. Stone-Manning was an active member of the original group that planned the spiking of the Post Office Timber Sale trees."

This comes on the heels of another recent revelation, that Stone-Manning is a proponent of population control, calling children an "environmental hazard" in her graduate thesis.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Lawsuit Filed Over Serra High's Name Change to Canyon Hills High School

A lawsuit filed Wednesday aims to reverse the recent name change at what is now Canyon Hills High School in Tierrasanta and restore its previous name: Junipero Serra High School.

“A San Diego Principal and School Board circumvented the law in their rush to erase California history and the legacy of a Catholic Saint,” said Tom Ciesielka, a spokesperson for Thomas More Society, the group that filed the lawsuit.

Father Junipero Serra was an 18th Century Catholic priest largely credited with establishing the first missions in what is now California.

The name switch is has divided those who see it as an assault on history and others who believe Serra and the Conquistadors mascot are reminders of mistreatment towards indigenous people when missions were being established throughout Spain's North American territory.

[...]

Thomas More Society claims the vote that triggered the name change violated the Brown Act, a law that requires adequate notice be given to the public ahead of school board meetings.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Israel’s New Leader Says Their Citizenship Laws are Necessary to Preserve a Racial Majority. Ethnostates for some, "diversity, equity, and inclusion" for others.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

CRT and the sad state of educational politics

Why do I give a shit about this, then? To put it bluntly, I’m struck by the utter fucking inartfulness of CRT’s proponents. At no point has any advocate of CRT presented a case for their approach to education that was at all concerned with persuading people who aren’t already 100% in their camp. There’s been no demonstration of positive impacts, or even an explanation of how the impacts could hypothetically be positive. In fact, so much as asking for such a rationale is considered proof of racism. Advocates posit an image of existing educational policies that is absolutely fantastical, suggesting that kids never learn about slavery or racism or civil rights. But then… then they don’t even stick with the kayfabe. They’ll say “kids never learn about racism.” In response, people–mostly well-meaning–say “wait, umm, I’m pretty sure they do learn about racism.” The response is “we never said they don’t learn about racism.” You’ll see this shift from one paragraph to the next. It’s insane. Absolutely insane.

Or take this talk from a pro-CRT workshop in Oregon. The speaker freely admits that proto-CRT leanings like anti-bias education, multiculturalism, and centering race in historical discussions have been the norm since the late 1980s. The speaker admits that these practices have been commonplace for 30+ years, as anyone my age or younger will attest. Then, seconds later, the speaker discusses the results of this shift: it failed. Unequivocally:

We had this huge, huge, huge focus on culturally relevant teaching and research. [ … ] So you would think that with 40+ years of research and really focusing and a lot of lip service and a lot of policies and, you know, a lot of rhetoric about cultural relevancy and about equity and about anti-bias that we would see trends that are significantly different, [but] that’s not what we’re finding. What we’re finding that you see [is] that some cases, particularly black and brown [students] the results, the academic achievement has either stayed the same and gotten worse.

Translation: here’s this approach to teaching. It’s new and vital but also we’ve been doing it for 40 years. It doesn’t work. But we need to keep doing it. Anyone who is in any way confused by this is a dangerous racist.

Even in the darkest days of the Bush-era culture war, I never saw such a complete and open disregard for honesty. This isn’t to say that Bush-era conservatives weren’t shit-eating liars. They were. But they had enough savvy to realize that self-righteousness alone is not an effective way of doing politics. You need to at least pretend to be engaging with issues in good faith.

This is what happens when a movement has its head so far up its own ass that it cannot comprehend the notion of good-faith criticism. These people do not believe that there can exist anyone who shares their basic goals but has concerns that their methods might not work. Their self-certainty is so absolute and unshakeable that they can proffer data demonstrating the complete ineffectiveness of their methods as proof of the necessity of their methods.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking

Like my friend’s mother, most of them believe some or all of the theories involving fraudulent ballots, voting machines, and the rest. Scratch the surface and you’ll find that they’re not particularly attached to any one of them. The specific theories were almost a kind of synecdoche, a concrete symbol representing a deeply felt, but difficult to describe, sense that whatever happened in 2020, it was not a meaningfully democratic presidential election. The counting delays, the last-minute changes to election procedures, the unprecedented coordinated censorship campaign by Big Tech in defense of Biden were all understood as the culmination of the pan-institutional anti-Trump campaign they’d watched unfold for over four years.

[...]

Throughout 2020, the corporate press used its platform to excuse and encourage political violence. Time Magazine told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving - among others - leaders of the protests, local officials responsible for managing them, and members of the media charged with reporting on the events. They worked together with Silicon Valley to control the messaging about the ongoing crisis for maximum political effect. In case of a Trump victory, the same organization had protesters ready to be activated by text message in 400 cities the day after the election. Every town with a population over 50,000 would have been in for some pre-planned, centrally-controlled mayhem. In other countries we call that a color revolution.

Throughout the summer, establishment governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures, often over the protests of the state legislatures. It wasn’t only the mass mailing of live ballots: they also lowered signature matching standards, axed existing voter ID and notarization requirements, and more. Many people reading this might think those were necessary changes, either due to the virus or to prevent potential voter suppression. I won’t argue the point, but the fact is that the US Constitution states plainly that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections... shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” As far as conservatives were concerned, state governors used COVID to unconstitutionally usurp their legislatures’ authority to unilaterally alter voting procedures just months before an election in order to help Biden make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system. Lawyers can argue over the legitimacy of the procedural modifications; the point is that conservatives believe in their bones - and I think they’re probably right - that the cases would have been treated differently, in both the media and in court, if the parties were reversed.

And then came the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Liberals dismiss the incident because, after four years of obsessing over the activities of the Trump children, they insist they’re not interested in the behavior of the candidate’s family members. But this misses the point entirely. Big Tech ran a coordinated censorship campaign against a major American newspaper while the rest of the media spread base propaganda to protect a political candidate. And once again, the campaign crossed institutional boundaries, with dozens of former intelligence officials throwing their weight behind the baseless and now-discredited claim that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. That lie was promoted by Big Tech companies, while the true information being reported by The New York Post about the laptop’s contents was suppressed. That is what happened.

[...]

The reaction of Trump supporters to all this was not, “no fair!” That was how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012 or Harry Reid’s lie that Romney paid no federal taxes. This is different. Now they were beginning to see, accurately, that the institutions of their country — all of them — had been captured by people prepared to use any means to exclude them from the political process. And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. Trump got 13 million more votes than in 2016 - 10 million more than Hillary Clinton had gotten.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Defund the Arts

The justification for multi-racial casting, at least in my mind, is that it’s simply who we are as a society, and so it is naturally who our talented and available actors are as well. Just as there is nothing wrong with a Shakespeare production in China using Chinese actors, a Shakespeare production in New York should go ahead and use the best actors available here, which usually means actors of all races. The message, to the extent that there is one, is that an actor’s race doesn’t matter.

A very different—indeed, the opposite—message is sent, however, when a production not only goes out of its way to cast all black actors in a Shakespeare play, but more than that, proudly announces the choice in its promotional materials. Needless to say, an email proudly announcing a deliberate white-actors-only production would quickly and deservedly find all those associated with it on the permanent unemployment line.

So what was the justification for this casual in-your-face racism? “Set in South Harlem amidst a vibrant and eclectic community of West African immigrants, MERRY WIVES will be a celebration of Black joy, laughter, and vitality,” the email explained. Black joy, laughter and vitality? Now, what exactly is “black joy”? Is it, perhaps, more uninhibited and exuberant than its pale, restrained white counterpart? And isn’t describing a black community as “vibrant” in 2021 roughly akin to conjuring up the stereotype of an “articulate black man”? The cringeworthy text read as if it came courtesy of the same geniuses who, after George Floyd was killed, decided it would be a dandy idea for a bunch of Democratic senators and representatives, for no apparent reason, to don some Ghanian kente stoles and kneel on the floor of the U.S. Capitol Building.

It is surely not a good omen when the text promoting an installment in an art form built on words is completely tone deaf, and I expect that the only ones who will fail to find this racial pandering utterly laughable will be the septuagenarian white liberal elites who live in the multi-million dollar real estate in the immediate vicinity of Central Park and their only slightly poorer cousins occupying the most desirable zip codes of Manhattan’s Upper West and Upper East Side.

As far as the rest of us, I expect I’m speaking on behalf of a lot of people when I say that our entire public life increasingly feels like a bad performance put on for someone else—a tiny subset of unrepresentative, outspoken activists, fellow travelers with outsized voices and their semi-senile patrons oblivious to the grotesque character of these dog and pony shows.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Ontario: Math Is “Subjective” And “Used to Normalize Racism and Marginalization of Non-Eurocentric Mathematical Knowledges”

Changes to Ontario’s math curriculum announced last year by Education Minister Stephen Lecce will include a ‘subjective’ and ‘decolonial’ approach to mathematics, according to documents posted on the ministry’s website.

“Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline,” reads a section of an online brief highlighting the ‘vision and goals’ of the updated curriculum.

“However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective.”

Math, it continues, has been “used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges,” and explains that taking a “decolonial” and “anti-racist approach” to teaching math will outline its “historical roots and social constructions” to students.

“The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education,” the brief continues.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Federal judge withdraws opinion after anti-white texts emerge in Boston public schools case

Judge William Young, who had issued an opinion favoring the school system's plan to factor ZIP code into admissions, said that he could no longer stand behind that opinion after it appeared that the body's push was motivated by racial animus. During a Friday hearing, Young said that he had been misled when the offensive texts were not originally included in the school's testimony.

"I've been misled, and I don't see how the opinion can stand," Young said, noting that he has never once retracted an opinion in his 35 years on the bench.

The texts, a conversation between former member Alexandra Oliver-Davila and former member Lorna Rivera addressed their hatred of West Roxbury, a mostly white neighborhood in Boston. "I hate WR," Oliver-Davila texted Rivera, to which Rivera replied: "sick of westie whites." Oliver-Davila then followed up, "Me too I really feel Like saying that!!!!"

The texts were leaked last week to several news outlets after Young decided the case in favor of BPS. Both Oliver-Davila and Rivera resigned shortly afterward. At that point, the case had already been appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit by the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence, where it has yet to be heard.

Young in the Friday hearing said that it was "ludicrous" that the texts had not originally been included in the school system's testimony.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Can Britain survive the woke wave?

From one generation to the next, this civic culture left the British hard-wired to feel proud of their institutions and traditions, to instinctively see the best in their country and to be sceptical of radicals whose shrill, dogmatic, messianic and angry politics were seen to threaten this precious inheritance.

Much of this was reinforced by a significant barrier, which is that Left and Right offered broad and unifying narratives of belonging that transcended appeals to individual groups. Throughout the 20th century, Labour and the Conservatives certainly appealed along class lines but they also stressed national citizenship, a moderate patriotism and a sense of obligation to the wider (national) community. On both Left and Right, politicians were not afraid to celebrate Britain’s distinctive identity, its achievements and contributions to the world. Being born in Britain was not a marker of shame; it was the greatest privilege of all.

But how much of this is true today, after four decades in which academia has gone from leaning Left to being overwhelmingly progressive?

Wokeism might not yet be a term used by the masses but it is rapidly going mainstream. Take last week as an example. Excluding references to Luntz’s study, the terms “woke” or “wokeism” appeared in a large number of articles across a diverse array of UK media, from debates about sustainable investing, employee training, William Shakespeare and television advertisements to debates about local councils, Alien, Love Island, university reading lists, the England team and trigger warnings for university students, to name only a few.

As training sessions inspired by critical race theory continue to cascade out of universities and into corporations, government departments, councils, media, schools and religious institutions, as British people continue to debate football players taking the knee, the role of white privilege and the causes of racial disparities – all of which originated in America – the salience of these debates will only increase, pushed on by striking generational divides. The idea, popular on the Left, that wokeism is merely a fringe obsession among right-wing culture warriors appears increasingly absurd.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Jessie Singal] How Science-Based Medicine Botched Its Coverage Of The Youth Gender Medicine Debate

This sort of politicization of a very important scientific debate is pernicious for obvious reasons, and at first glance, a site like Science-Based Medicine would appear to be well-situated to serve as a useful balm to cool things down: Novella and Gorski enjoy leadership roles in a community of skeptics who aren’t afraid to step up and respond forcefully to confident overclaiming, whatever the politics of the overclaimer, on some of the most controversial subjects imaginable. And on this issue, confident overclaiming is rampant, so it’s a target-rich environment.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Instead, Science-Based Medicine has fallen into the exact same trap as numerous mainstream news outlets, violating some of its founding principles in the process. If you read the site’s recent coverage of this issue, you will come away thinking there is a big, broad, impressive body of evidence for youth gender medicine, that there isn’t any actual controversy here at all. Rather than evaluate the available evidence carefully, SBM defaults to just about every activist trope that has come to dictate the terms of this debate in progressive spaces. This is a disturbing example of what complete ideological capture of an otherwise credible information source looks like. Science-Based Medicine has “bought into the hype and failed to ask the hard questions.”

[...]

All three articles contain major errors and misunderstandings and distortions, ranging from straightforward falsehoods to baffling omissions to the re-regurgitation of inaccurate rumors first circulated years ago. Activist claims that stretch or violate the truth are repeatedly presented in a credulous manner, while the myriad weaknesses in the research base on youth gender medicine are simply ignored. The basic problem here is what Scott Alexander calls “isolated demands for rigor.” This is a standard aspect of human nature, a close sibling of confirmation bias. When it comes to claims we don’t want to believe we will insist the evidence isn’t actually as strong as it appears, demand more and more clarification, shift the goalposts of the debate, and nitpick if necessary; for claims we do want to believe, we’ll wave weak evidence right through the gate without interrogating it too harshly, even if it suffers from exactly the same problems.

Isolated demands for rigor are a particularly big problem in areas where we don’t have a robust evidence base to rely on in the first place. Youth gender medicine is one such area, and throughout SBM’s coverage of this issue, the isolated demands for rigor target only research and individuals who appear to complicate the site’s favored narrative: There is nothing to be concerned about here, because youth gender medicine is in overall solid shape. At one point, faced with a published finding that could complicate their narrative, Novella and Gorski write it off as irredeemably bad research (though without explaining why). Then, later in the same paragraph, they accept as true a conclusion produced by the same youth gender clinic, most likely because that finding slots easily into their priors. It’s sort of a Schrödinger’s Evidence type of deal: Source X’s credibility exists in a fuzzy superposition of “totally credible” and “entirely untrustworthy” until we find out whether its claim fits comfortably within our politics, at which point its status collapses conveniently into one state or the other.

What makes SBM’s coverage of this issue so frustrating is that it was a big missed opportunity. Youth trans issues invite a huge amount of screaming and denunciation on all sides, and as a result, sometimes people think the circus itself — all those personalities yelling at each other online — is the actual issue here. But the actual actual issue here is the growing number of American families who face really difficult choices about puberty blockers and hormones that they are forced to make under a condition of terribly insufficient evidence. They desperately need institutions like Science-Based Medicine to step up and provide rigorous, science-backed advice untainted by the toxic climate that besets this issue, because hardly anyone, anywhere is doing so.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Furry Rainbow Monkey with Huge Dildo Performs for Children at Library

On July 10, 2021, as part of a summer reading challenge at U.K. libraries this summer, three performers in animal costumes danced in front of children at a Redbridge library. One of the performers was dressed as a furry rainbow monkey with a huge dildo and exposed buttocks. In a video recording, the monkey character can be seen running out of the library and then dancing in place, with hips shaking so that the dildo swings around.

Initially, RedBridge Libraries seemed to endorse the performance, writing “when you’ve got it, flaunt it” in response to a comment from Exeter Library with a bunch of laughing emojis at the “shock when monkey turned around”. These comments have since been deleted.

Horrified members of the public began to complain on social media, resulting in at least one individual being blocked by the Redbridge Labour Facebook account, and Jas Athwal, leader of the Redbridge Council, accusing a concerned citizen of lecturing and of being a “Johnny Come Lately”.

Following a public outcry, Redbridge Libraries issued an apology, and has said this will never happen again.

It is unclear why the library was unaware of the types of costumes that could be worn by the performers.

🤡🌎

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Police chief demands apology from Democrat state rep who made false accusation of racial profiling

It appears that Rep. Thompson was indeed driving with no front plates, and he even later admitted as much, which would definitely give the police a valid motive to detain him apart from his race.

According to Minneapolis local outlet ABC 5 Eyewitness News, Thompson said the following during a Tuesday speech during a rally outside the Minnesota Governor's residence:

"We're still getting 'driving while Black' tickets in this state and in fact in St. Paul. So let's just call it what it is, right...I shouldn't have to be profiled, so this is ridiculous. Oh, and by the way, it was a sergeant here in St. Paul by the way. We promote bad behavior."

[...]

The controversy surrounding Rep. Thompson has risen to a new level, however, as, according to the Twin Cities Pioneer Press, he appears to have presented a drivers license issued by neighboring Wisconsin.

Thompson is a native of Illinois, and has several addresses on record connected to his public service, but has told the media that he has been a resident of St. Paul for 18 years, which brings up obvious questions about why he didn't have a Minnesota driver's license on hand at the time of the traffic stop.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It’s rude to stare at a woman’s penis

I arrived at the Mindfulnest Spa with high expectations of a spiritually relaxing experience. I checked myself in at the desk for their ‘Simply Soak’ and ‘Rub-Me-Gud’ packages and was impressed when the receptionist asked me what pronouns I use. Well, what she actually did was clock my vibrant shade of lip gloss and while jotting down my details carefully inquired, ‘Erm…are you a “Sir” or a “Madam”?” but that was good enough for me (although I noted she made no accommodation for nonbinary individuals, and I made a mental note to report her before leaving the premises).

I made my way to the women’s changing area so that I could undress in preparation for my probiotic soak. Probiotics are beneficial for women’s health, restoring and promoting the natural balance of friendly bacteria in the vaginal passage, and I was looking forward to the positive effect they would have on my ‘outy’. I removed my clothes and after performing a few lunges to loosen up my chakra I was about to don my spa robe…when suddenly I felt very vulnerable. I could sense eyes upon me. I turned slightly and was horrified to discover every trans woman’s nightmare: the perverted stare of a bigoted child, eye-raping my ball-bag. Even worse than that was the young girl’s mother, also gawping (almost hungrily it seemed to me) at my female penis.

I hurriedly snatched up my clothes, running back into the reception area. The assault I had just experienced had left my mind in tatters. I’d forgotten I was still naked and instead of picking up my clothes I’d mistakenly grabbed the child’s Tickle-Me-Elmo doll which to add insult to injury had begun to laugh hysterically. The foyer was filled with people, each one of them assaulting my genitals with their uneducated faces. The mother came running into the foyer with her depraved six-year-old child in tow, no doubt eager for another glance at my womanly scrotum. To my abject horror the mother lunged at me and I screamed, recoiling from her rapey fists, absolutely stunned that she would sexually abuse me in front of an audience, when I realized she was snatching back her child’s doll.

She was enraged and shouting obscenities, accusing ME of assaulting HER and her daughter! I felt so insulted by this I almost burst into tears, when thankfully a brave hipster wokebro stepped forward and covered my ladysack with his man-bag. ‘Stop right there,’ he said to the hysterical mother. ‘This stunning and brave trans woman was using the locker room to air her female schlong and you and your child decided to attack her in a sexual way with your conservative faces. You should be ashamed and subsequently ousted from society for your violent invasion of this fragile female penis owner’s privacy.’ The woman stopped shouting and just stood there, being intolerant. Her child glared at the floor, uneducatedly.

To my surprise, one by one, the other people in the foyer started clapping. The receptionist came out from behind the desk and told the women and her child that she had already called the police and they were sending a squad car to arrest them both for ocular violation of a trans woman’s penis. I felt so relieved. My faith had been restored. I was so happy, my Joan Thomas was partially erect, but NOT, and I have to stress this, NOT in a sexual way.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A Landmark Civil Rights Lawsuit: Private litigation against critical race theory in Evanston public schools is necessary because the Biden administration won't enforce federal law as written.

The facts of the case are not much in dispute. They were investigated by OCR, which, in January, under the Trump administration, found that “the District engaged in intentional race discrimination by coordinating and conducting racially exclusive affinity groups,” that “the District appears to have deliberately singled out students and other individuals by their race, in order to reduce them to a set of racial stereotypes,” that “the District’s Policy to apparently impose racial discrimination in discipline has no part in federally funded education programs or activities,” and that the district’s “privilege” activities “may have created a racially hostile environment.”

But following President Biden’s Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity, OCR took the perhaps historically unprecedented step of suspending its own decision. It’s hard to imagine that the Biden administration would have walked back the office’s decision if nonwhite students were being victimized. And it’s equally hard to evade the conclusion that the administration has all but formally decided that the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act do not apply to white students or teachers.

This case should give policymakers some insight into the most common “conservative” objection to state legislation colloquially labeled “critical race theory bans.” Some on the right argue that it would be better to curb problematic critical-race-theory instruction by enforcing existing civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race. But the primary enforcement mechanism for the Civil Rights Act in public education is the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—and OCR has signaled that it will not enforce the law to protect white people.

A private right of enforcement exists under Title VI, under which this Illinois teacher—with the help of the Southeastern Legal Foundation—is suing. But this is an inadequate tool for parents concerned that their child’s school has become enthralled by a racist ideology that, according to the suit, trains its teachers that “to be less white is to be less racially oppressive,” that “white identity is inherently racist,” and that labels any teacher who disagrees as a “racist.”

The Biden administration’s abdication of equal protection is why legislation known as “critical race theory bans” are necessary. Passed in a number of states, these bills do not, by and large, directly target curricula. Rather, they tend to prohibit CRT-inspired pedagogy that creates what should be universally recognizable as a racially hostile learning environment: promotion of ideas that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex” or that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously,” as well as “ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs to a race or sex or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Did Twitter break YA?

But it’s not teenagers, the target demographic of young adult literature, that authors and editors hear from on Twitter. There are very few teens involved in these conversations. It is adults. It is booksellers trying to keep up with their favorite authors, and librarians coming up with storytime ideas, and adult readers who understand the boundaries of social media and just want to make sure they don’t miss a new release from their favorite writers.

They're also hearing from the reader who plucks single lines out of context and declares that they're offensive, then demands that the author agree that they're offensive, then further demands that they be changed in future printings, even if the point of the line in context is that a character is saying something the reader is supposed to disagree with. They’re hearing from the person who reviews 50 books a year on Goodreads and has some strong opinions on how most bisexual representation is problematic if the couple isn’t in a sapphic or gay relationship. From the blogger whose website is only a few months old and who, despite being a person of color themselves, dimisses authors of color because they write for white people, not “authentically.”

This scrutiny and demand for perfection is infinitely higher for marginalized authors, who are often the target of the most critical segments of their own reader communities. Black authors must be perfect representations of Blackness despite the wide range of Black experiences. Queer authors must be out of the closet, in a neatly labeled box, for their queer representation to even be considered acceptable.

There is no greater example of this than the story of the #ownvoices hashtag, which was originally created by author Corinne Duyvis to allow readers to know whether a writer from a marginalized background was writing something that reflected their own experiences. The term had to be officially abandoned by We Need Diverse Books five years after its creation because of how intensely the notion of perfect representation had been weaponized—both by readers who didn’t consider representations authentic enough to earn the label, and by readers who dismissed as problematic any representation that wasn’t explicitly labeled ownvoices by its author.

Relying on Twitter to shape a culture like YA publishing inevitably leads to a moment where the most vulnerable participants in that industry will break. Either they become part of the rage machine, or the rage machine turns on them.

I doubt I'm the only Worm reader here who has seen the same dynamics play out in the Parahumans fan community. I put the blame for Ward turning into a tedious morass that's less than the sum of its parts on WB paying way too much credence to the shrieking of the most deranged narcissists on YA twitter.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Matt Taibbi] Is "Critical Race Theory" the Wrong Term?

The war over “Critical Race Theory” in this sense has become a political marketing campaign that’s uniquely double-edged in its cynicism. Democrats are pretending they don’t know what the fuss is all about. Republicans are pretending there isn’t a dog whistle in their backlash campaign. At the center of it all is the concept itself, which does exist but is much broader, and both more interesting and more frightening, than the narrow race theory that has Republican politicians in maximum wig-out mode.

Two years ago, writer Wesley Yang penned a series of tweets about the “new language of power throughout the non-profit sphere,” giving it a name: the “Successor Ideology.” The author of The Souls of Yellow Folk created an umbrella term to explain everything from whatever the hideous moniker “cancel culture” means to purges of classics and STEM disciplines in universities, to the new move toward segregated “affinity spaces,” to “intent doesn’t matter,” to the spread of workforce training sessions that ask white employees in both the public and private sectors to focus on things like “undoing your own whiteness,” to a dozen other things.

What Yang went on to describe in a series of articles and appearances isn’t narrowly about race, or trans issues, or feminism, or American history, but a much wider concept that argues that our foundational notions about everything are wrong and need to be overturned.

Conversely, a wide variety of oppositional theologies, of varying degrees of eccentricity, have become allied in a unified front of negation: https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1130859753247260673

The movement Yang describes is strategically brilliant and substantively moronic, a perfect intellectual killing machine. The Successor Ideology has blown through institutional America with great speed, coming to dominate everything from academia to the news media to Silicon Valley almost overnight.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A Disparaging Video Prompts Explosive Fallout Within ESPN: In comments still rippling through the network, the reporter Rachel Nichols, who is white, said Maria Taylor, who is Black, earned the job to host 2020 N.B.A. finals coverage because ESPN was “feeling pressure” on diversity.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Polish brewery sparks outrage with new beer called White IPA Matters and advert featuring black barman drinking it in US-themed bar

The Mentzen brewery, owned by right-wing politician Slawomir Mentzen, has been flooded with complaints by people claiming the commercial is racist.

It features a black barman cleaning glasses with the camera cutting to symbols of America's Deep South, including a Confederate flag.

The camera cuts back to the barman before a customer slides him a bottle of the White IPA - a light-tasting ale generally marketed at people who don't like the taste of beer.

The barman takes a sip and declares: 'This is what I needed.'

[...]

Rafal Pankowski from the Never Again Association said: 'The beer exploits the death of George Floyd and the racist backlash to the global Black Lives Matter movement.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The divisive plan to ‘decolonise’ our schools

The National Education Union (NEU), Britain’s largest teaching union, has lost the plot. After spending the past year demonising children as vectors of disease, ‘who are mucky, who spread germs’ and need to be ‘sprayed front and back with disinfectant’, it is now coming after education itself.

In a new report out this week, ostensibly focused on tackling racism, the NEU says there is an ‘urgent’ need to ‘decolonise’ every subject and every stage of the school curriculum. It wants teachers trained and equipped with tools to ‘make white privilege and colonialism visible’ in schools.

NEU high-ups are happiest when children are not in school and not being taught at home, either. But if teachers are to be forced to sit in classrooms, the NEU would prefer them to indoctrinate their young charges with ideas about ‘white privilege’ than do anything as ‘hierarchical’ as impart knowledge. Its latest divisive project not only racialises children, by pushing them to see each other as members of distinct ethnic groups, but it also gets in the way of teaching knowledge that could have a truly transformative impact on young lives. As always, it will be children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds – those reliant on education to improve their life chances – who will lose out most of all.

The NEU talks of an ‘urgent’ need to decolonise the curriculum, as if this goal hasn’t been central to thinking about education for several years now. There is a ‘silence around British imperialism and racism’ in the education system and Britain ‘ignores the contributions of black people and colonies in the national curriculum’, it insists. It has clearly been a very long time indeed since the union officials who drew up these documents last stepped foot in a classroom. Diversifying reading lists, broadening the history curriculum and holding teacher-training sessions in anti-racism have long been considered ‘best practice’ in education.

But the latest NEU report goes further. Even school classroom layouts are ‘shaped by colonisation’, the new guidance claims. ‘From curriculum to routines to classroom layout, our education system has been shaped by colonisation and neoliberalism’, it says. Apparently, expecting pupils to face the teacher, to sit still and to listen perpetuates a colonial legacy. This would be laughable were it not for the fact that abandoning these practices would mean giving up on teaching entirely.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Decriminalising crime continues to hurt San Francisco

It’s not just small corner stores reeling under the impact — multinationals are adapting to the lawless climate, too. The latest to suffer is Target, a major US retailer. It has been forced to limit trading hours in all six of its San Francisco stores. Shutting up shop at 6pm, instead of the normal 10pm, avoids the popular evening shift for shoplifters.

The mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, says that restricting hours of business is not the answer, but what else does she expect retailers to do? Also, how does she explain the fact that Target hasn’t felt the need to do the same anywhere else in America? The city’s extraordinary experiment with liberalising the law on drug offences and petty theft has produced some nightmarish results.

Meanwhile, the District Attorney, Chesa Boudin, has just announced a “bold new policy directive”: all the staff in his office will now be mandated to ask and use the preferred pronouns of everyone in the criminal justice system. At a press conference, Boudin said that “here in San Francisco…we are leaders in modeling respect and modeling dignity and compassion, in all aspects of our society, including in our legal system.”

However respect, dignity and compassion also requires that law abiding citizens be able to go about their daily business in peace and safety — and on that front San Francisco is anything but a leader. While those at the top of the socio-economic ladder can afford to play pretend with boutique, ‘woke’ concerns, it is the ordinary citizens of the city who must bare the brunt of these foolish policies.

How long can this go on for? Indefinitely, is the probable answer — so long as the tech giants of Silicon Valley don’t quit en masse for Texas. And, of course, the same industry has a variety of solutions for people who can’t get to the shops because the shutters are down. There is no better harbinger for increasing atomisation, and the reliance on new ‘gig economy’ services that serve it, than social disintegration.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Woke Defense Contractor: Raytheon adopts critical race theory and tells employees to acknowledge their “privilege.”

In a related lesson, Raytheon asks white employees to deconstruct their identities and “identify [their] privilege.” The company argues that white, straight, Christian, able-bodied, English-speaking men are at the top of the intersectional hierarchy—and must work on “recognizing [their] privilege” and “step aside” in favor of other identity groups. According to outside diversity consultant Michelle Saahene, whites “have the privilege of individuality,” while minorities “don’t have that privilege.”

The program then tells white employees to adopt a new set of rules for interacting with their minority colleagues. Employees should “identify everyone’s race” during conversations, “including those who are White.” According to the document, white employees must “listen to the experiences” of “marginalized identities” and should “give [those with such identities] the floor in meetings or on calls, even if it means silencing yourself to do so.” This process of voluntary racial silence is a “win-win,” because “you learn more when you listen than when you speak.”

Next, in a chart titled “What Not to Say to Your Black Colleagues Right Now,” Raytheon instructs white employees never to say that they “pray things change soon” or hope that social tensions “calm down,” which “says [their] comfort is more important than the message of anti-racism.” Whites should acknowledge that their own discomfort is only “a fraction” of the emotional distress of black employees, who are “exhausted, mentally drained, frustrated, stressed, barely sleeping, scared and overwhelmed.”

Raytheon executives have also segregated employees by race and identity into Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, LGBTQ, and other categories. The goal of these groups is ostensibly to “advance an inclusive culture,” but in practice, such “affinity groups” often serve to create division and suspicion in the workplace.

Finally, Raytheon encourages white employees to “financially and verbally support pro-POC movements and POC-owned businesses.” In a collection of recommended resources, the company includes an article, “75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice,” encouraging white employees to “defund the police,” “participate in reparations,” “decolonize your bookshelf,” and “join a local ‘white space.’” In another recommended resource, the “21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge,” employees are asked to learn about the “weaponization of whiteness,” quantify the “racial composition” of their friend groups, and “interrupt the pattern of white silence.”

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Woke culture is ‘racializing’ France, Macron says

French President Emmanuel Macron said a new wave of “woke culture” that has migrated from the United States is “racializing” his country.

“I see that our society is becoming progressively racialized,” Macron said during an interview with Elle magazine published this week.

The French president said he disagrees with any ideology that attributes value to people based on their gender or skin color.

“The logic of intersectionality fractures everything,” he said. “I stand for universalism. I don't agree with a fight that reduces everyone to their identity or their particularity.”

His country is regressing, Macron said, because he believes leftist ideology places certain minority groups “under house arrest.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Croatia moves to protect children from pedophilia and LGBT propaganda

The Croatian political scene suffered a massive shock when one of the most renowned opposition MPs, Nikola Grmoja, announced that he will propose a set of bills meant to protect children from pedophilia and LGBT ideology indoctrination.

Grmoja, who is the deputy leader of the “Most” party, presented his idea openly in Croatian media. When he was asked to comment on the recent harsh reaction of the EU towards the Hungarian child protection law, meant to protect children from both pedophilia and ideology which leads to premature sexualization, Grmoja responded that he supports the protection of children.

[...]

“I want to emphasize that some situations which we witness in the so-called progressive West, where children aged five, six, or seven are undergoing gender change operations, cannot be separated from the influence of LGBTQ ideology. This influence has severe consequences on their lives. It is a scenario we will not permit in Croatia,” Grmoja stated.

He admitted that he had been thinking of such a package of laws for a long time, and his idea was not directly influenced by the new Hungarian law. Nevertheless, such laws were a reaction to a certain situation.

“It is a fact that increasingly more people are becoming aware of the dangers and harm of ideologies which are currently be imposed by foreign sources of power which are generously financed,” the MP noted.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Strange Recurring Case of the Collegiate Noose Panic

Controversy broke out at Central Connecticut State University over Memorial Day weekend when a standard steel cable loop with an American flag attached to it — meant to celebrate the impending holiday — at a construction site on campus was mistaken for a noose. After a short investigation made its innocent provenance plain, the college president nevertheless chastised the workers responsible for their “reckless and tone deaf behavior.”

At the University of Michigan, an employee tying a fishing knot on his break inadvertently sent a shockwave across campus when it was found on the ground and interpreted to be a noose.

A prolonged FBI investigation of a noose found on a construction site at Johns Hopkins University ended because “the bureau [was] unable to find sufficient evidence to pursue charges ‘despite extensive efforts.’”

Off campus, too, what has been believed to be a noose has often, in the fullness of time, been revealed to have more innocuous purposes. Famously, NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace mistook a piece of rope that had been in a garage for years for a noose meant to intimidate him.

So why, in the absence of evidence of malice and in the face of a number of similar incidents that have been proven not to have been the racialized incidents they were mistaken for, has Princeton been so adamant in labeling as a noose what it found?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The racism of never criticising Muslims

There has been a surge in the racism of low expectations in recent days. It has centred on the Muslim community. It is wrong – ‘phobic’, no less – to criticise the regressive social views held by some Muslims, left-wing campaigners claim. Any pondering of the possibility that sections of the Muslim community hold less than enlightened views on homosexuality or the rights of Jews to live as free, equal citizens is itself racist, they cry. It’s horrible and unfair. They doll up this desire to protect Muslim attitudes from scrutiny in the language of anti-racism, but it is the opposite. It is time we talked about the racism of not criticising the Muslim community, of refusing to subject Muslims to the same kind of social discussion that every other community in an open, democratic society might expect.

It springs from the Batley and Spen by-election. Keir Starmer’s crowing about his party’s ‘fantastic’ victory there – Kim Leadbeater won by 323 votes – cannot disguise the fact that Labour’s internal woes and tensions have, if anything, intensified off the back of Batley and Spen. The latest Labour infighting is over Muslim voters. Following George Galloway’s strong showing among Batley and Spen’s Muslim community – he came third, with 8,264 votes – Labour officials and activists are fretting that they might now be losing that community that they (arrogantly) presumed would always vote for them. And the Labour left and the self-elected spokespeople for the Muslim community claim to know why – it’s because Labour has refused to take up issues that Muslim voters are interested in (Palestine, Kashmir), and it’s because the centrists around Starmer are being too critical in relation to Muslim attitudes.

There was a firestorm when a ‘senior Labour official’ – anonymously, of course – suggested that some Muslim voters in Batley and Spen were angry with Starmer’s Labour because of its efforts to tackle left-wing anti-Semitism in the party. The official said Labour is ‘haemorrhaging votes among Muslim voters, and the reason for that is what Keir has been doing on anti-Semitism’. ‘Nobody really wants to talk about it’, he or she said, ‘but that’s the main factor’. Another Labour source said the party had ‘lost the conservative Muslim vote over gay rights and Palestine’, prompting more fury from the identitarian set. ‘How dare you suggest that conservative Muslims have a problem with gay rights?!’, they were essentially saying, which, when you think about it, is a truly bizarre question.

These critical noises about the attitudes that exist in certain quarters of the Muslim community confirm that some in Britain’s political class ‘hold Muslims in contempt’, said a writer for Jacobin. Ali Milani of the Labour Muslim Network said the Labour media briefings that mentioned Muslim attitudes on homosexuality and anti-Semitism were a ‘slap in the face’ to Muslim voters. It is ‘deeply upsetting’, he said, ‘for the commentary to be so deeply rooted in Islamophobia’. Mustafa Al-Dabbagh of the Muslim Association of Britain accused Labour officials of ‘briefing frankly Islamophobic statements’. The Guardian’s Owen Jones said that anyone who suggests Labour is doing badly because Muslims voters are ‘bigots’ is a racist – ‘and they must face the consequences of their racism for the rest of their political lives’. Strewth. Redemption be damned.

Let’s leave to one side the eye-swivelling irony that much of the handwringing commentary about the Labour officials who suggested that Labour is losing because some Muslim voters have regressive views is coming from the kind of people who spent the past five years saying that Remain lost because ordinary people have regressive, dumb and racist views. Let’s also leave to one side the fact that the Labour officials quoted in the press were expressly not talking about all Muslims but rather about conservative Muslims – who, like conservative Catholics or conservative Jews, are fairly likely to think that two blokes getting it on is a bit iffy, and possibly evil. The more pressing question is this: is it really racist to draw attention to the unenlightened views that lurk in sections of the Muslim community? Couldn’t one argue that it is more racist not to talk about these things?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

How the Democrats fell for Mussolini

This parallels the alarming transformation of the US Democratic Party, the putative “party of the people” , now increasingly a subsidiary of the corporate elite. Among financial firms, communications companies and lawyers, Biden outraised Trump by five-to-one or more. Today’s oligarchs are particularly keen on the progressive non-profit sector, which provides important support for their political and social advocacy — a means for them to make politically correct statements about climate change, gender and race, while still obtaining enormous profit margins and unprecedented wealth.

But whereas the old fascism sought greater prosperity, its new form, at least in the West, supports only an expanded welfare state that keeps the beleaguered middle and working classes both quiescent and stripped of aspiration. Worthies such as former Bank of Canada and Bank of England chief Mark Carney even embrace “de-growth,” a conscious slowing of the economy and embrace of declining living standards.

Indeed, the widely hailed Club of Rome report in 1972 — “The Limits to Growth” — was financed not by green activists but by the Agnelli family from Fiat, once a linchpin of Mussolini’s original corporate state.2 The Report predicted massive shortages of natural resources, slower economic growth, less material consumption and ultimately less social mobility.3

Fast forward to today’s new economic order, and it’s clear that not all economic animals are equal. There are opportunities galore for Wall Street investors, Silicon Valley tech oligarchs, cobalt miners, electric car manufacturers and renewable energy producers through the massive subsidies for producing green.

And these woke oligarchs, like their fascist counterparts before them, see little use for democracy. Eric Heymann, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, suggests that to reach the climate goals of Davos, corporations will have to embrace “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship”.4 After all, it would be difficult to get elected officials to approve limits on such mundane popular pleasures as affordable air travel, cars, freeways and suburbs with single-family houses, unless they were imposed by judicial or executive fiat.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Matt Taibbi] If Private Platforms Use Government Guidelines to Police Content, is that State Censorship?

Just under three years ago, Infowars anchor Alex Jones was tossed off Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, marking the unofficial launch of the “content moderation” era. The censorship envelope has since widened dramatically via a series of high-profile incidents: Facebook and Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, Donald Trump’s social media suspension, Apple and Amazon’s kneecapping of Parler, the removal of real raw footage from the January 6th riots, and others.

This week’s decision by YouTube to demonetize podcaster Bret Weinstein belongs on that list, and has a case to be put at or near the top, representing a different and perhaps more unnerving speech conundrum than those other episodes.

[...]

There are several factors that make the DarkHorse incident different from other major Silicon Valley moderation decisions, including the fact that the content in question doesn’t involve electoral politics, foreign intervention, or incitement. The main issue is the possible blurring of lines between public and private censorship.

When I contacted YouTube about Weinstein two weeks ago, I was told, “In general, we rely on guidance from local and global health authorities (FDA, CDC, WHO, NHS, etc) in developing our COVID-19 misinformation policies.”

The question is, how active is that “guidance”? Is YouTube acting in consultation with those bodies in developing those moderation policies? As Weinstein notes, an answer in the affirmative would likely make theirs a true First Amendment problem, with an agency like the CDC not only setting public health policy but also effectively setting guidelines for private discussion about those policies. “If it is in consultation with the government,” he says, “it’s an entirely different issue.”

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Venice Beach: the Purgatory Progressives Built

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In iconic Venice Beach, California, it is also paved with feces, structure fires, knives, needles, tarps, and tents. My guide through this dystopian underworld, my Virgil, is named Soledad Ursua. Ursua is a native Angeleno who spent much of her professional life in New York. When she returned five years ago, she wanted to live in a walkable neighborhood similar to her adopted home of New York. Venice, with its mixture of historic bungalows, pedestrian-friendly walkways between them, and its proximity to the beach and restaurants, seemed like a perfect fit. It wasn’t.

[...]

On the boardwalk I see a man sitting on a bench spreading canned tuna across bread with a hunting knife. “I’m glad you saw that,” Ursua tells me. “Would you take your kids here?” This is such a common refrain that I almost think it should be on a bumper sticker. We walk to where the boardwalk meets the boundary between Santa Monica and Venice, which is part of the City of Los Angeles. “It’s like a Tale of Two Cities,” Soledad explains. In neighboring Santa Monica there are no tents on the beach and the boardwalk comes back to life with people. Liberal Santa Monica, not exactly a bastion of rightwing law and order, is where the No Man’s Land ends. Unlike Los Angeles, Santa Monica enforces the laws requiring overnight encampments to be disassembled during the day.

Ursua walks me back down the boardwalk while a woman inside a tent shouts expletives to herself. Along the way she points out a senior center. In the good old days, five years ago, you would see seniors outside the building enjoying the weather. No more. We end up in front of a L.A. County Sheriff’s “outreach” tent where food and drink are being distributed with the hopes of assessing people’s needs and getting them off the streets.

“This is the battleground between capitalism and socialism,” Ursua explains to me. “The Marxists,” by which she means far left activist groups like Street Watch L.A., which is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, “don’t want these people to get off the streets. They want to keep them here so they can keep saying how evil capitalism is.”

Ursua, and other frustrated and beleaguered residents I meet—again, many of them Democrats who likewise denounce the “far left” in their midst—make clear distinctions between the “activists” and the “residents.” The activists show up to shout at law enforcement and hand out food. But then they go home. The residents of Venice can’t go home—this is it.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Nation’s largest teachers union goes on the offensive re: critical race theory

According to Education Week, “several of the proposed new business items” requested that the union officially oppose efforts to “regulate what students learn about the history of race in America” and “to support the teachers who are doing anti-racist work.”

Kentucky delegate Kumar Rashad offered a resolution which states the NEA should “share and publicize” information about what CRT is and what it is not, and organize a “team of staffers” to “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric.”

[...]

Rashad’s item seeks “truthful and age-appropriate accountings of unpleasant aspects of American history,” and notes that the NEA should indicate that by teaching such, it is “reasonable and appropriate” that lessons and curricula make use of “academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory” (emphasis added).

[...]

Oregon delegate Stephen Siegel was behind New Business Item 2 which recommends the NEA do research into organizations which oppose CRT, such as the Heritage Foundation. In its story, Education Week portrays the group Parents Defending Education as having done something sinister by posting online a teacher professional development meeting. In that meeting, a teacher says educators who don’t get with schools’ anti-racism programs are looking to get terminated from their positions: “If you’re going to come with those old views of colonialism, it’s going to lead to being fired, because you’re going to be doing damage to our children—trauma.”

Siegel said the union needs to be better prepared for such “attacks” from “right-wing media.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[David Frum] The Left’s War on Gifted Kids

The Democratic primary voters of deep-blue New York City delivered a message clearly, firmly, and loudly: “Defund the police” was stupid and is now over. The first tally of the mayoral primary showed the pro-funding and pro-reform ex–police officer Eric Adams atop a large lead. The next day, President Joe Biden urged Democratic cities and states to spend some of their billions in coronavirus-relief money to hire more cops and put them on more streets.

[...]

But as unpopular as “Defund the police” is, local progressive activists have found a cause even more anathema—and are pushing it with even greater vigor. Eighty-three percent of American adults believe that testing is appropriate to determine whether students may enroll in special or honors programs, according to one of the country’s longest-running continuous polls of attitudes toward education.

Yet across the U.S., blue-state educational authorities have turned hostile to academic testing in almost all of its forms. In recent months, honors programs have been eliminated in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Seattle. On Long Island, New York, and in Pennsylvania and Virginia, curricula are being rethought to eliminate tracking that separates more- and less-adept student populations. New York City’s specialist public high schools are under fierce pressure to revise or eliminate academic standards for admission. Boston’s exam schools will apply different admissions standards in different zip codes. San Francisco’s famous Lowell High School has switched from academically selective admission to a lottery system. At least a thousand colleges and universities have halted use of the SAT, either permanently or as an experiment. But the experiments are rapidly hardening into permanent changes, notably at the University of California, but also in Washington State and Colorado. SAT subject tests have been junked altogether.

Special programs don’t poll as well when the questions stipulate that many Black and Hispanic students would not qualify for admittance. But the programs’ numbers rebound if respondents are assured that students will have equal access to test prep. The New York Post reported earlier this year on an education-reform organization’s findings that almost 80 percent of New Yorkers would want to preserve selective testing at the city’s elite high schools if it were combined with free access to test-preparation coaching for disadvantaged groups. (The organization is supported by Ron Lauder, the cosmetics heir and Bronx Science graduate, and Richard Parsons, a former CEO of Citigroup and economic adviser to President Barack Obama.) The New York City Council is currently considering a bill that would fund just such test prep for all middle-school students. Adams, the city’s likely mayor-in-waiting, has proposed expanding the number of selective high schools and guaranteeing more spots to top middle-schoolers from across the five boroughs. His fund-plus-reform policing formula may have secured him the Democratic nomination. In the same spirit, coach-expand-test may meet the wishes of urban voting publics.

But rather than expanding gifted programs, many self-proclaimed reformers are moving to shut them down, public opinion be damned. The intention behind the changes is equity. The result is to ignite a thousand local battles over race, class, and opportunity.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Bari Weiss] Amazon's Woke Smokescreen

I thought of this story when I read Amazon Studios’ new inclusion policy, vaunted by stenographers in the mainstream media. It announces a goal, by 2024, of having 50% of creative roles in its movies and shows filled by women or people of color. In addition, the studio promises to try to cast actors whose identity — “gender, gender identity, nationality, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability” — matches that of the characters they play. One wonders how Ariel from “The Little Mermaid” or the sea monster from “The Shape of Water” would be slotted. And God save the intern who has to racially code “Beauty and the Beast.”

By now, this is a familiar story: Amazon is turning the making of TV and film into the same woke numbers game played at every other elite institution. (Exhibit A: Sixty-eight percent of the students admitted to Princeton’s class of 2025 self-identify as “people of color.”)

I decided to read through Amazon Studios’ Inclusion Playbook, designed “to help disrupt the biases that occur across the lifecycle of a series or movie, from the first inkling of a concept to viewers streaming the content on Prime Video.” The playbook directed me to a factsheet that promised to help improve my familiarity with all things diverse and inclusive.

There I encountered entries on things like: acquired limb difference (otherwise known as “amputation”). There’s an entry on mean girls, which, I learned, was a “stereotype of girls and young women characterizing them as socially aggressive and unkind” —characterizations that, apparently, not only “enforce the bad behavior” but “fail to address the larger social issues girls and women face like insecurity, lack of confidence, and pressure to fit the ‘feminine beauty ideal.’” Someone please relay that to Tina Fey.

There were entries on haka (I’ve been a fan for years), unnecessary intersex surgeries (bad), womxn (whatever happened to good old-fashioned womyn?) and the biological clock, which is explained as: “in relation to birthing people, the biological clock refers to the sense of pressure people feel to have children during their ‘peak’ reproductive years.” As a 37-year-old womxn/birthing person, I’m can assure you that scare quotes around the word ‘peak,’ as though human reproduction is some kind of social construct, are superfluous.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

My shamefully silent Church

Of course, none of this stopped the 40,000 England fans at Wembley on Tuesday evening. The popular “Ten German Bombers” might have been banned by the FA, but the fans sang it anyway. So too endless renditions of “Three Lions” and “Sweet Caroline”, without even a modicum of social distancing.

In church, however, the voice of praise has mostly fallen silent. Cowed by a desire to be overly compliant with every jot and title of Government instruction, Britain’s churches have come to resemble mausoleums. We’re advised that our worship must become an internal matter of the heart and that if singing is absolutely necessary, it must be conducted by a professional choir only.

But churches like mine don’t have the money for a professional choir. And I fail to see how the respiratory secretions of an amateur choir are any more dangerous than those of a professional one.

On Tuesday evening, after the match, I quietly celebrated Mass in church, without singing. While at prayer, we were being enthusiastically serenaded by the celebrations of a very different kind of communion in the pub over the road. I concede, given that our church was flattened by the Luftwaffe on the first night of the Blitz, I was not all that horrified at the thought of the RAF shooting down German bombers. No, the irritating thing about it was more visceral: others were allowed to sing while we were being silenced.

The leadership of the Church of England has been depressingly silent in defence of singing. I suspect they believe it is more Christian to sacrifice the worship of the Church for general public safety — perhaps an expression of their obsessive desire to be seen to be compliant with any and every expression of safeguarding without qualification. That is probably why the Bishop of Manchester recently suggested the real moral failure of Matt Hancock’s affair with his aide was one of non-compliance with social distancing regulations, rather than ruining two marriages.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Will Australians ever be free? The fanatical pursuit of Zero Covid is a recipe for never-ending lockdown.

It is estimated that there are fewer than 300 active cases of Covid-19 in Australia. Yet over 12million Australians are currently living under lockdown – more than half the population. This is madness. And it is going to be the norm for Australia for a long time to come.

[...]

Even those Australians who are legally entitled to leave their homes cannot escape the Covid mania. In South Australia, new restrictions were brought in on 29 June that limited venue capacity to one person per two square metres. The restrictions also meant South Australians were banned from standing while drinking at pubs and clubs – to stop the spread of Covid, of course. There are just 18 active cases in South Australia, by the way. And nobody is in hospital with Covid.

Australia was the envy of the world in 2020, managing to keep Covid cases and deaths very low. We are now the world’s laughing stock. And it is all because of our reckless Zero Covid mentality. All Australian leaders, even if they won’t say it, are clearly committed to the idea that Covid can be eliminated. And all policies are on the table to achieve that. When elimination is the target, no risk is too small to necessitate draconian restrictions.

There was hope that New South Wales would be different. It had the only state government that appeared to recognise the harms of lockdown. It looked as if it wanted to find a way to live with Covid. But those hopes have now been dashed.

No matter where you live in Australia, your leaders can lock you down at any time. There is no escape. And nor will there be for a long time to come. Prime minister Scott Morrison, after returning from the G7 summit in Cornwall, had this to say: ‘Even as the UK is finding with an 80 per cent vaccinated population, they’re not there either because they’ve got over 100 people dying every week… That’s not a situation that I’m prepared to countenance.’ What a terrifying statement for Australians to hear: that even when 80 per cent of adults have been vaccinated, lockdowns will still be a regular feature of our lives.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] Accountability is a Prerequisite of Respect

There is no mainstream media criticism of BlackLivesMatter. There isn’t. There’s explicitly conservative criticism and “Intellectual Dark Web” stuff, which liberals and Very Serious media types dismiss out of hand, somewhat fairly given that much of it is batshit “BLM is a George Soros conspiracy” stuff. And then there’s a small handful of mostly independent, generally small-audience critics from the left who those same liberals and media types simply assert are part of the former group - if you criticize BlackLivesMatter, you are definitionally conservative. Within the liberal media itself there is nothing. There is almost no honest, adult criticism of BlackLivesMatter within establishment media. I encourage you to look for yourself. The number of pieces that are genuinely critical of BlackLivesMatter (and not simply the unpopularity of Defund the Police or critical race theory or questions about the potential corruption of particular leaders) in the NYT or WaPo or New York magazine or other large establishment media publications is pitiful. The Vox/Buzzfeed-style online only liberal publications and the liberal nonprofit types… forget it, man. Tumbleweeds.

What’s more, there is no meta-conversation about this total lack of criticism from mainstream media’s typical internal critics and media reporters. If an employee at The Atlantic calls himself an Associate Editor on his Tinder profile when he’s just an Assistant Editor, Erik Wemple will run a 3,000 word column about it, but he’s not writing about the entire mainstream press refusing to write critically about one of the biggest stories of the past decade. Ben Smith at The New York Times will wring out a piece about what journalists playing Fortnite in their off hours means for the industry but he can’t be bothered to ask “hey, why are the major newspapers and magazines offering universally positive coverage of a highly-contentious and very important movement?” (I emailed both Smith and Wemple to let them have their say. Wemple didn’t respond; Smith did not want to comment. He did, however, consent to me running his photo up at the top.)

Wemple and Smith won’t ever critique the media for its conspicuous silence on this topic for the same reason that so many journalists and writers who spend their entire lives critiquing won’t do so: they’re scared. Wemple and Smith are afraid that asking why the mainstream media doesn’t critically cover BLM will damage their careers and their friendships. And the mainstream media doesn’t critically cover BLM, in large measure, for the same reason - fear. Who experiences 2020, with its absolute lunatic culture of don’t ask questions, and says “yeah I want to stick my neck out and risk being the subject of a dogpile in this financially crippled industry?” You’d like to think that integrity would mean something, but, well… we’re talking about establishment media.

Those within social justice politics defined broadly, the journalists and writers but definitely the activists and academics, insists that we simply accept all such claims as true at all times, if they come branded with the right buzzwords and phraseology. Isn’t that strange? In what other realm of human affairs do people so often say, “oh, they’re saying that this is the way to end problem X - therefore that must be true, and if others even ask whether it is in fact true, they are guilty of not caring about Problem X or even actively working to make Problem X worse.” Adults ask questions! Especially about important stuff! Especially about politics and justice! What is controversial about asking for that? What is contrarian about asking for that?

When a politician comes out with a tax plan, journalists and analysts look at it and say, “does this tax plan add up? Does it have the markings of an effective tax plan?” They’ll poke holes in it - yes, if it’s from the other party, but also if it’s from their own. Because they know we need tested and robust tax plans. But when Ibram Kendi says, “all of my vague recriminations and radical-sounding racialist woowoo is the solution to racism,” every journalist and analyst you know scratches their beard and says, “ah yes, indeed,” and they don’t even say that very loudly. But where’s the proof that any of Kendi’s rhetoric actually leads to any action at all? That such action does/could prompt positive change? Who is checking his work? What has Ibram Kendi’s ideology accomplished, beyond enriching Ibram Kendi? Can we point to, like, a graph that shows the outcome of his good works? It certainly seems that we can’t. Since this is the case, why does 95% of the journalism that references Kendi make literally no mention of the basic concept of efficacy?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

San Jose Will Force Gun Owners to Cover Costs of Gun Violence After Mass Shooting

In a unanimous vote Tuesday night, San Jose’s city council approved a national first that will see gun owners being forced to compensate taxpayers for the spiraling costs of gun violence. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, gun owners in California’s third-largest city will be required to take out liability insurance for their firearms, and pay an annual tax that will help fund emergency responses to gun-related calls.

In a news release ahead of Tuesday night’s vote, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said: “While the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms, it does not require taxpayers to subsidize gun ownership... We won’t magically end gun violence, but we stop paying for it. We can also better care for its victims, and reduce gun-related injuries and death.”

The vote came one month after 57-year-old Valley Transportation Authority employee Samuel Cassidy carried out the worst mass shooting in Bay Area history. On May 26, Cassidy shot nine of his colleagues dead and then, when the police showed up, he turned the gun on himself. After the shooting, investigators found rifles, shotguns, handguns, and around 25,000 rounds of ammunition at the gunman’s home.

According to the Chronicle, the exact details of the gun tax are yet to be worked out. City officials haven’t decided exactly how much they’ll charge gun owners each year as the cost will be determined after an academic study calculates how much gun violence costs the city. The mayor’s office recently estimated its costs at around $442 million every year.

The move is expected to face legal challenges from gun-rights groups.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

California Plague: Blue Locusts

The implicit deal, which I’ve called the “San Francisco Compromise,” is that, first, the left does nothing that directly threatens oligarchic wealth or power. It can tax and spend all it wants, so long as those taxes are easily bearable—and, to the extent possible, legally avoidable—by California’s grandees. And so long as the other policies that increase oligarchic wealth are never questioned, so that at the end of the day it almost doesn’t matter what California tax rates are; whatever they are, the rulers can afford them. The lefties also agree to use their considerable rhetorical power to whitewash and lionize the oligarchs.

For their part, the oligarchs take their cues from leftists on matters of passionate conviction that don’t directly threaten said wealth or power and spend some of their lucre on lefty institutions and make-work jobs.

This works out tremendously well for the oligarchs who, like all elites, are outnumbered and need defenses and justifications for their privilege. And it works out very well for the lefties who are, for the most part, otherwise unemployable—certainly not in any profit-making industry that pays well enough to live in coastal California.

What about everybody else? Aye, there’s the rub. Most of them don’t have it so good. In my 2020 book The Stakes, I describe modern California as crowded, costly, congested, crumbling, incompetent, filthy, dangerous, rapacious, profligate, suffocating, prejudiced, theocratic, pathologically altruistic, balkanized, and feudal. Those interested in the details may peruse the first chapter, in which I attempt to demonstrate each of these claims.

Only four kinds of people put up with all that: those who can buy their way out of the pathology; those for whom California, with all its problems, still feels better than wherever they came from; those with deep roots in the state who can’t bear the thought of leaving; and those who believe they have nowhere else to go.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Step Aside: A modest proposal to uproot systemic racism in the media

Ironically, repressive tolerance is now the overarching dynamic of the woke revolution. White people excoriating whiteness in the name of tolerating black claims of systemic oppression is the most effective way to consolidate white power. The white excoriators are beyond reproach for two reasons. Their prescriptions are unquestionably moral. Their power in their world is punitively absolute.

Now I don’t think that Silverstein should step aside as editor of the New York Times Magazine because he is white; it is Silverstein himself who is making that argument. He has published and defended a vision of American reality in which all white people are complicit in white racism. The more powerful a white person is, the more destructive the effects of his power, and the more urgent the necessity of replacing him with a black person.

Silverstein himself is not just any editor of just any publication. If you believe that the color of someone’s skin signifies a moral quality, then the representative power of a black person in the editor’s chair would be more effective in advancing the woke agenda than any essay Silverstein might ever publish.

Imagine the symbolic value of that. And it’s not just Silverstein. Imagine the symbolic value of David Remnick, who has published one article after another validating the woke vision of systemic racism, following his own magazine’s prescriptions and yielding his place at the head of the toweringly prestigious New Yorker to a black editor.

As I said, I don’t believe that either man should resign simply because he is white. But both have endorsed, again and again, a vision of American history and society that finds outrage and pain in the fact that white people continue to occupy the loftiest positions. How can these two powerful white men not see, by the logic of what they are publishing, the painful, unjust, outrageous irony of their sponsoring one article after another making the case for the dismantlement of a system dedicated to the preservation of white power? The situation cries out for moral clarity.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

All recent US population growth comes from people of color, new census estimates show

As we await the final 2020 census statistics for America’s race and ethnic populations (due later this summer), newly released Census Bureau estimates compiled independently of the 2020 census[1] suggest something unprecedented: The 2010s could be the first decade when the nation’s white population registered an absolute loss.

These new estimates show annual population changes by race and ethnicity between July 2010 and July 2020. They indicate that, for each year since 2016, the nation’s white population dropped in size. Thus, all of U.S. population growth from 2016 to 2020 comes from gains in people of color.

These statistics extend and update a trend revealed in data published last year, and further emphasize why the diversity profile of the U.S. population is rising rapidly. This is especially the case for the nation’s younger population, which experienced the greatest white population losses. The statistics also imply that, as the white population ages and declines further, racial and ethnic diversity will be the hallmark demographic feature of America’s younger generations, including Gen Z and those that follow.

Earlier population estimates have shown that the 2010s decade—especially its later years—was one of historically low population growth. This was the result of declining fertility, increased mortality, and a slowdown in immigration from abroad. The former two trends are especially characteristic of the nation’s white population, who are aging more rapidly than other groups.[2]

As Figure 1 shows, annual white population losses over the four years between 2016-17 and 2019-20 were 129,000; 252,000; 290,000; and 482,000. Together, this loss of more than 1 million white people outweighs the white population gains of the decade’s six earlier years, leading to a likely first-ever decade decline of the nation’s white population when the final 2020 census results are tallied (Download Table A).

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

French food is ‘expression of white privilege’

A law professor has suggested that France’s food is racist. A video of Mathilde Cohen, discussing “food whiteness” at a seminar organised by the elite Sciences Po and Nanterre University outside Paris, has provoked consternation in France, where cuisine is seen as a cornerstone of the national identity.

Cohen, from Connecticut University, suggested that French eating habits reinforced the “dominance” of white people over ethnic minorities.

In an academic paper that formed part of her Sciences Po seminar, Cohen, a former research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, claims that France’s “eating culture ... has been the central means of racial and ethnic identity formation through slavery, colonialism, and immigration. The whiteness of French food is all the more powerful in that it is unnamed, enabling the racial majority to benefit from food privileges without having to acknowledge their racial origin.”

David Abiker, a journalist, reflected on her comments with irony. On Radio Classique he called on the French to take the knee in their kitchens and to “beat themselves with their whisks”.

Sciences Po distanced itself from Cohen, saying she had no links to it.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

NFL Declares 'Football Is Gay' in New Video: a long-awaited acknowledgement of the homoerotic implications of a game where sweaty muscle-men in tight pants compete to penetrate each others "end zones"? Sadly no, the sport's governing body has taken a look at the decline in ratings due to rampant politicization and decided the solution is more politicization. The pandering will continue until morale improves.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Rod Dreher] Life Inside A Woke Corporation

Rick said that in his division, the quality and effectiveness of the work they were doing took a back seat to identity politics. “It became our total motivation: hiring x number of female directors, and x number of black directors.”

There was one case in which the team had the budget to make a hire, and considered taking on a freelancer who had done superb work for them in the past, under budget. The problem: he was a white male.

“Someone present in the hiring meeting said, ‘White people had it good for 400 years – it’s about time they felt the sting,’” says Rick. “None of the people leading the meeting said a word about that.”

There was another case in which a team was carrying out an expensive shoot in an environment in which a black actor hired for the shoot decided on the set that they didn’t want to subject themself to a minor inconvenience that was part of the contract. After the shoot ended, ACME offices were filled with lamentations over how racially insensitive ACME was to expect a black person to do something they didn’t want to do — even though the request was extremely minor, and the actor had signed on for it. As Rick put it, expecting a black actor to honor a professional commitment was considered intolerably racist by ACME staff.

As a conservative Christian, Rick says he felt uncomfortable having to promote LGBT in his work for the company. At one point, he was asked to cast non-binary children in one project. He did as he was told, but as a Christian, thought, “How did I let this get away from me?”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

University offers $1,200 stipends to learn how ‘whiteness is normalized’ and how it can be ‘eradicated’

California State University East Bay faculty members can earn $1,200 if they take professional development courses on anti-racism this summer and continue to work on their projects through the school year.

The stipends go to professors and instructors who attend the “Anti-Racist Liberatory Pedagogy Academy” this July.

The brochure from Professor G.T. Reyes said that CRT IS “a race-conscious framework that examines the ways that whiteness is normalized in our country and in our University.”

“Critical Race Theory takes an intersectional approach to interrogating race and racism in the United States,” the info sheet also said. Professor Reyes did not respond to a June 23 email that asked for a definition of “whiteness” and how many professors were enrolled.

Participants will confront the question of how they can “also aim towards liberatory conditions where whiteness has been eradicated.”

Critical Race Theory sure is lucrative for something the MSM claims doesn't exist.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Critical Race Theory Is Just Anti-White Racism

Critical race theory is the cultural battle of our time. State legislatures across the country are seeking to ban it, parents battle with school boards over it, and several Republican politicians look to make a name for themselves as the ultimate opponent of CRT.

Much of the attention to this previously obscure topic is due to journalist Christopher Rufo. Rufo has done a tremendous job of exposing racial indoctrination in corporations, schools, and government agencies over the last year. He’s even responsible for informing Donald Trump about this topic through a Tucker Carlson segment.

The battle against CRT is a positive development for the American Right and Rufo deserves credit for revealing these insidious practices to the public. But the mainstream anti-CRT movement has serious limitations, the most damaging of which is the hesitancy of its members to stress the primary target of CRT, which, of course, is white people.

Rufo does occasionally acknowledge that CRT is anti-white, but always with unnecessary qualifiers. “Critical race theory is explicitly anti-white,” he replied to Revolver News’ Darren Beattie on the topic. “But it is also anti-Asian, anti-rational, and anti-democratic. I think it is [a] much deeper problem—‘anti-whiteness’ is merely one element.”

Yet based on Rufo’s own reporting, anti-whiteness appears to be the predominant element. School children are not taught to check their “democratic” privilege. These lesson plans don’t say that all “rational” people are racist from birth. We are not told to repeat that our nation was founded on “Asian supremacy.” All of these efforts are directed against whites.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Culture Wars in a Galaxy Very, Very Nearby

What are we to make of the vehemence of the recent culture war fights about Star Wars films? Many who praise The Last Jedi have not only described themselves as progressive, but have characterised critics of the film as “Russian trolls” and anti-progressives. The attempt to cancel Gina Carano is not an isolated example. A number of articles have characterised Disney’s attempts to appeal to long-time Star Wars fans as enabling bigotry, and have even described anyone who disagrees with the series’ direction as alt-right.

Although the term fandom menace has been around since at least 2000—and became especially popular after independent comic artist Ethan Van Sciver adopted the label—it has recently been applied to online commentators who tap into Star Wars fans’ frustrations and criticisms against such progressive attacks. Their comments have in turn spurred a proliferation of self-described anti-woke commentators with sizable online followings. Some on both sides are presumably simply trying to garner clicks or publicity. However, there now seems to be a pervasive worry—almost a paranoia—that nerddom is being infiltrated and attacked by progressives. The result of all this has been a vicious cycle of politicization and hostility in online discussions among fans.

The vast majority of fans are caught in the middle, but seem to be under increasing pressure to take sides. Whether they like Disney’s changes or prefer the old expanded Star Wars universe, in the current environment it is reasonable for them to fear being cancelled for expressing the wrong opinion, derided as blindly consumerist for simply expressing enthusiasm about any Star Wars product, or branded as an enemy of either progressivism or “true” nerddom on a theory of guilt by association. The resulting toxic environment echoes the hyperpartisanship of the wider culture wars: everyone becomes defined by solely by their identity and ideological allegiance.

Not even a franchise as massive and financially successful as Star Wars is immune to the damage such a divisive and toxic fan climate can inflict. Opportunists may profit from the controversy, and Disney may still be able to capitalise on brand recognition for a time, but the longer this drags on, the more likely this ignoble development will permanently blemish Lucas’ legacy. The current toxicity within fandom could worsen to the point where it destroys any sense of community at all among fans—and any prospect of a reliable audience for future projects.

Disney thus faces a conundrum: there is an imbalance in the franchise’s Force. Restoring balance would require them not only to produce new products that build upon existing successes, but to establish a stronger rapport with the fanbase. That won’t be easy, particularly in light of the corporation’s recent track record—for example the technical failings and ethical controversy that have dogged its live-action Mulan remake. But there is a hope: the popular reception of The Mandalorian and of video games like Star Wars Squadrons and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order shows that individual creators are still capable of delivering high quality content.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The new ideological Iron Curtain descends on football

Wednesday's Germany-Hungary football in Munich was a kind of turning point. Not because what was happening outside the game disrupted the idea of a traditionally friendly relationship between the two nations, even though the mass whistling and humming while the Hungarian anthem was playing would have been unthinkable 15 or 20 years ago. The turning point and unprecedented in Europe over the last decades is the extent to which the interstate football match has been misused for ideology.

The Germans didn't care that they were arrogant and that they were bad hosts. The main thing was to "send a signal", to serve as a symbol" - in this case against homophobia and transphobia. The Allianz Arena, lit in rainbow colors, was supposed to disgrace Hungarian guests, especiallyvViktor Orbán, who was originally supposed to attend the match.

Fortunately, UEFA did not allow the mayor of Munich to make such a gesture, but before the match, the German media parade of politicians, public figures, athletes, and large corporations who portrayed the UEFA's deescalation move as a capitulation to evil and dictatorship. The affair continued yesterday at the EU summit, where, according to German correspondents, Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to shake hands with Orbán.

What this is about, and what another German, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, called a "disgrace", is an amendment to the norm tightening pedophilia rates. The norm has two main points, both considering children and adolescents under the age of 18: that they will not be served homosexual and transgender topics and content at school and in textbooks, and that films in which LGBT plays a central role will need to be certified, i.e. that they will not be broadcast before 10 in the evening. Given how many teenagers probably bother watching television anymore, it is clear that the key sticking point is with the schools and textbooks.

The whole conflict is about the sexual education of minors, which, as Orbán points out, should be decided by their parents. It is unbelievable that the European Commission and most member state governments do not hesitate to talk down to another member state regarding such matters. And that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte dares to threaten Hungary to "get it on its knees", and if Orbán does not repeal the law, his country must be cut off from EU membership. Attempts to influence children at a sensitive stage of their development is something that even in our "accepting" times most parents will not tolerate — at least in countries where freedom of speech is still the norm.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Marks & Spencer to sell women's underwear inspired by George Floyd

Just days after George Floyd's first statue was unveiled in the United States, he became the inspiration for an "innovation" in an unexpected field: underwear. The UK's largest lingerie manufacturer and retailer, Marks & Spencer, has announced a new "inclusive" lingerie collection inspired by George Floyd. It presents new colors of clothing according to skin color.

According to the company, the previous offer of underwear was "inconsistent" and did not represent all ethnic groups.

Floyd's death at the hands of former Police Officer Derek Chauvin sparked massive protests in the West, resulting in multiple deaths and billions in property damage during Black Lives Matter riots. A controversial sticking point for many who reject celebrating Floyd is that he served five years in prison for a home invasion in which he is accused of holding a pistol to a woman's belly. Floyd also had a long criminal record and although a court convicted Chauvin of murder, Floyd also had a large range of narcotics in his system at his time of death, including the powerful opiate Fentanyl, which was deemed to be four time the amount that could theoretically lead to an overdose.

The Marks & Spencer company, which also sells clothing and food in the Czech Republic, introduced the new collection of women's underwear a few days ago. The company announced the news as a revamping of its product offering. When presenting the collection, it pointed out the motivation for change.

The company claims the "bold and relevant" campaign called "Nothing neutral about it" draws attention to new colors in the shades of different races.

I bet the bodice is breathtaking!

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Poynter: Media Should End Local Crime Beat to Avoid Connecting 'Black and Brown Communities' to Crime

Poynter, the head of the International Fact-Checking Network which operates Politifact, is calling on local news outlets to stop covering local crime stories to avoid connecting "Black and brown communities" to crime.

https://twitter.com/Poynter/status/1406983494941642753?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Poynter president Neil Brown hates the fact people can still see what's really happening in our streets despite their massive censorship regime and their blacklists.

Last year, the Nieman Journalism Lab also called for ending the local crime beat because, in their words, "it's racist."

The Nieman Journalism Lab exists solely to shut down honest journalism and the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network exists solely to shut down factual reporting.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The tyranny of woke capitalism

It took three decades for the university to become dominated by what was once the counterculture, but which has now become the culture. But in less than a decade business has gone the way of the academy. In his book The Dictatorship of Woke Capitalism : How Political Correctness Captured Big Business, Stephen Soukup points out that this development has been a long time coming:

‘The transformation of Wall Street was no accident. It was the product of a long, careful process, a march through various other institutions, turning them on their heads until the titans of “capitalism” had been fully convinced that their surrender to the culture was not merely inevitable but constituted the only morally legitimate path.’ (1)

But what Soukup’s thesis misses is that the ascendancy of woke capitalism was driven by powerful cultural forces, rather than being an orchestrated march through the institutions.

Pointing to the power of these cultural forces, prescient American social commentator Daniel Bell highlighted in the 1970s the fragile state of capitalism’s cultural authority. His book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) provided an astute analysis of the conflict between capitalist economic growth and the cultural hostility to it. He remarked that the power of capitalism’s hostile ‘adversary culture’ literally ‘shattered’ bourgeois culture to the point that almost no one is prepared to defend it. He concluded that without any significant cultural support, capitalism lacked a ‘moral justification of authority’ (2).

Bell’s insights were anticipated by the Austrian political economist, Joseph Schumpeter. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Schumpeter explained that, through its commitment to rationalisation, calculation and efficiency, capitalism undermines ‘its own defenses’ because it ‘creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own’. Schumpeter claimed that ‘the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes, but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values’ (3). Schumpeter feared that this would destroy ‘those loyalties and those habits of mind… that are nevertheless essential’ (4).

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Pentagon gets ‘woke’: Whistleblowers reveal segregation for ‘privilege walks,’ critical race theory

“One Marine told us a military history training session was replaced with mandatory training on police brutality, White privilege, and systemic racism. He reported that several officers are now leaving his unit citing that training,” Mr. Cotton said. “Another service member told us that their unit was required to read ‘White Fragility’ by Robin DiAngelo, which claims ‘White people raised in Western society are conditioned in a White supremacist world view.’”

He said an airman complained that an exercise called “privilege walk” was a “racist exercise.”

“Members of the wing were ordered to separate themselves by race and gender in order to stratify people based on their perceived privilege,” Mr. Cotton said in describing the airman’s complaint.

The senator detailed several specific complaints last week while questioning Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the committee hearing.

“We’re hearing reports of plummeting morale, growing mistrust between the races and sexes where none existed just six months ago, and unexpected retirements and separations based on these trainings alone,” he said.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Jo Bartosch on why intersex people are fed up with their medical conditions being repurposed as a transgender identity

Nick Webster is an intersex campaigner who spent two years struggling to obtain a diagnosis of Klinefelter Syndrome (KS). He explains that his condition only affects males; it is the result of having XXY chromosomes.

‘The trans movement’s continuous appropriation of people with intersex conditions, using our bodies to defend their ideology, is the most insulting thing of it all’ he says.

Prejudice against people with intersex conditions is common, and Webster is angered that people like him are still ‘called outdated slurs like hermaphrodite’. The fallacious but trendy falsehood favoured by queer theorists, that sex is a spectrum, has done little to redress this harmful misconception.

‘People are born with DSDs (Disorders of Sex Development), and we face daily challenges including pain, mental health issues and body dysmorphia’ Webster says.

‘This leads me on to question why trans organisations have included intersex into the sexual orientation/gender identity acronym, because intersex conditions are not an identity, but a biological reality that myself and many others deal with on a daily basis – after all the acronym community wouldn’t hijack other medical conditions like deafness, blindness or mobility disabilities – why are they hijacking people with intersex medical conditions?’

[–]rwkastenBring on the dancing horses[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Per user suggestion, until traffic on this sub picks up a bit, I'm going to create a single thread that may correlate to several weeks' worth of threads in the subreddit. We have this option because saidit's automoderator doesn't appear to have the "auto-post new threads" feature. There is no cutoff that will generate a new OT/LE thread, but practically-speaking, it will probably be somewhere in the 2-3 weeks/100 comments range to start. We have flexibility at the expense of a small amount of convenience.

That said, here is the cross-link to the current OT/LE on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/p59enx/august_16_2021_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/