Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread for December 13, 2021

rwkasten · 2021-12-13T14:33:01+00:00

New thread posted: https://saidit.net/s/CultureWarRoundup/comments/8vyk/offtopic_and_loweffort_cw_thread_for_february_7/

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://www.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/sgtzor/january_31_2022_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-09T15:50:56+00:00

How the Left betrayed the Truckers: The convoy is despised by those who should support it

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-07T21:19:48+00:00

Judge grants interim injunction against loud honking at Ottawa protest

Ontario Superior Court Justice Hugh McLean has granted a 10-day injunction to prevent truckers parked on city streets in downtown Ottawa from honking their horns incessantly.

McLean said Monday the injunction is temporary because he needs to hear more evidence, but that he has heard enough to make this ruling as a protest against COVID-19 pandemic measures continues to paralyze the national capital around Parliament Hill.

Paul Champ, a lawyer representing central Ottawa residents in a proposed multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit, had argued the loud and prolonged honking is causing irreparable harm.

Keith Wilson, representing three of the respondents in the case, had told McLean the ruling on the injunction would carry national importance.

McLean said he heard enough evidence that the continual blaring of horns was having an effect on residents that their right for "quiet, if we can use that term," trumped the honking truckers' right to protest.

Anarchotyrann, eh?

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-07T06:17:28+00:00

Hoax alert: Black Illinois student criminally charged for racist notes

Illinois law enforcement announced Friday that Kaliyeha Clark-Mabins, a black female college student, will be charged with three counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report.

Kevin Schmoll, the chief of police for Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, made the announcement on Friday. The College Fix had started asking questions about the investigation last week.

The notes said “DIE BITCH” and “BLACK PEOPLE DON’T BELONG” according to charging documents provided to The Fix by the Madison County State’s Attorney office.

“SIUE Police received [on January 23] a report of a hate crime involving the posting of hand-written notes on the door of a room in Woodland Residence Hall, along with an alleged anonymous text message thread from fall 2021 containing threatening and racially hostile content,” campus Director of Media Relations Megan Wieser said in an email to The Fix. Police responded to reports of disorderly conduct and suspicious activity, according to the crime blotter.

The investigation included not just the campus police, but the “Madison County State’s Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Secret Service,” the email said. The investigation cleared two white students falsely accused of involvement, Amanda Jerome and Jimmi Thull.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-06T22:08:45+00:00

‘The Rock’ Seems To Denounce Joe Rogan, Then Video Resurfaces Of His WWE Chinese Impression

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-06T21:40:04+00:00

Big Tech vs the working class: GoFundMe’s withholding of donations to the Canadian truckers is a foul, classist attack on democracy.

We need to talk about GoFundMe’s withholding of millions of dollars from the Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates. This is union-busting 21st-century style. This is a multimillion-dollar company using its corporate clout to starve working-class activists of funds. This is a signal from Silicon Valley, clear and loud, that it will wield its power to crush any form of political agitation from ‘the lower orders’ that pushes too hard against the political consensus. Anyone who thinks this clash between a profit-making fundraising website and drivers pissed off at being pushed around by Covid authoritarians is just another weird online spat needs to think again. This is far more than that. It is a scoping out of the battlelines over freedom and power that are likely to define the internet era.

GoFundMe’s deprivation of funds to the truckers protesting against Canada’s vaccine rules is, to my mind, one of the most egregious and anti-democratic acts yet carried out by the California-based elites who oversee the World Wide Web. These truckers, such essential workers, are revolting against Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s introduction of a new rule earlier this month stipulating that truckers who cross the Canada-US border will need to be vaccinated or else go into quarantine after every trip. This is a mad demand. It would severely undermine some truckers’ ability to earn a living. So truckers have risen up. They drove their vast rigs across Canada in what came to be known as the Freedom Convoy before stopping in the capital Ottawa where they have been blocking roads and causing fainting fits among middle-class liberals who cannot understand why these oiks won’t just carry on dropping off sacks of kale to the local Whole Foods and stop going on about their pesky rights.

There has been an outpouring of support for the truckers. Canadians and Americans tired of corona-authoritarianism are cheering the truckers for honking a huge collective horn at the elite consensus on Covid. Despite the best efforts of woke politicians and columnists to depict the truckers as QAnon on wheels, as a motorised version of Mussolini’s March on Rome, many people know that in truth they are decent working people who simply object to the state making their lives that bit harder. People also know that the woke set’s attempts to delegitimise the Freedom Convoy by flagging up ‘far-right’ comments made by a tiny handful of the truckers is a tactic as old as capitalism itself. Elite opponents of working-class organisation have always used smear and innuendo to try to nullify the throng. Seeing this smear campaign for what it is, lots of folk decided to give the truckers a few bucks. But GoFundMe had other ideas.

GoFundMe says the 10million Canadian dollars raised via its website, on a page titled ‘Freedom Convoy 2022’, will not be given to the truckers after all. It cited police reports about ‘violence’ in the convoy. What violence? Where? Thousands and thousands of people have joined the truckers’ protest and yet there have only been three arrests. One person was arrested for being in possession of a weapon, one for causing ‘mischief’, and one for making a threatening comment on social media. As far as mass protests go, this is a staggeringly low level of allegedly criminal behaviour. I once visited the Occupy camp at St Paul’s in London and witnessed at least three misdemeanours in the one hour I was there (public urination, threatening speech, and a disturbing of the peace by a man on smack who kept shouting ‘GET TAE FUCK’). For a mass, angry, revolting movement, Freedom Convoy is uncommonly peaceful. GoFundMe’s ‘violence’ blather is clearly a jumped-up pretext for its political decision to punish the truckers.

On Friday, GoFundMe issued a statement saying that Freedom Convoy was a peaceful movement when it first started but it has since ‘become an occupation’. And so, ‘no further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organisers’. Instead, the $9million that remains in GoFundMe’s coffers will be distributed to ‘credible’ charities or refunded to the people who donated if they fill in a form. As if to make it super clear that this is all very political, Facebook has now removed a page promoting a Freedom Convoy in Washington, DC and deleted the personal account of the trucker who set it up. ‘It’s censorship at its finest’, he said, and he’s not wrong. This looks like a cut-and-dried case of the new capitalist oligarchies siding with the political establishment – in this case, Justin Trudeau – to shrink and silence the consensus-threatening cries of ordinary people.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-06T18:30:33+00:00

Five women were shot during a Milwaukee High School basketball game where district kicked out the police to appease BLM

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-06T17:32:18+00:00

GWU students demand firing of professor who wouldn’t let service pitbull into class

According to The Hatchet, Professor Marie Matta argued with student Liza Malinsky in class late last month about the dog’s (named Charlie) presence in class.

Malinsky, who describes herself as a “disabled Black woman with a history of trauma” and “crippling anxiety,” claims on her Instagram page that Matta “humiliated” her and acted illegally by “expos[ing] confidential information about [her] accommodations and disabilities in front of all of [her] peers.”

[...]

One of Malinsky cheerleading teammates, Carly Shaffer, started a Change.org petition on February 1 calling on Matta (left) to be fired for engaging in “racial and ableist injustices.”

[...]

In response to a Facebook comment which claimed Charlie isn’t actually a service dog and that she trained the dog herself, Malinsky said “all legal under [Americans with Disabilities Act] law.”

While it is true service animals do not have to be professionally trained, the ADA specifically notes “emotional support, therapy, comfort, or companion animals” do not qualify as service animals. There is an exception, however, for “psychiatric service animals” which serve to calm those with anxiety attacks.

"Emotional support pitbull" 📯📯

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-05T21:07:36+00:00

Kids Full of Life, Adults Obsessed with Death: The insanity of masking children—by the numbers

These are nationwide statistics. But, of course, there has been a huge difference in mask policies toward kids—and others—across the several states. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida’s children have lived freely, except in particular localities that have imposed their own mandates. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, by contrast, California’s kids have lived a masked existence, with partial exceptions in counties (such as Orange) where Newsom’s decrees have been only loosely enforced.

Children’s lives have been radically different in these two states. As long as they haven’t ventured into Walt Disney World—which apparently thinks that required mask-wearing is compatible with being the most magical place on earth—kids in Florida have been free to live like kids. In California, however, unless they’ve been raised in a liberty-loving place like Huntington Beach and been home-schooled, children have been forced to live like minimum-security prisoners.

The result? From January 1, 2020, to January 15, 2022, 99.999 percent of kids in California didn’t die of Covid—either because they didn’t get it, or because they recovered from it. Over that same span of time, 99.999 percent of kids in Florida didn’t die of Covid. Both states’ numbers matched the national average. So, where would you rather be growing up?

Or take two adjacent states with very different attitudes toward the masking of the American kid. Under Governor Kate Brown, Oregon’s schoolchildren are required to be masked in schools, as well as when they enter other buildings apart from private residences. Directly across Oregon’s eastern border, meantime, under Governor Brad Little, Idaho has not had a mask mandate at any time during the pandemic, either in or out of schools.

From January 1, 2020, to January 15, 2022, Oregon had just two Covid-related deaths of kids (those under age 18); Idaho, with about half the population, had just one—giving kids in each state a Covid survival rate of 100.000 percent, or 99.9998 percent when taken out to the fourth decimal point. A huge difference in freedom produced no difference in fatality rates.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-05T20:28:52+00:00

When Asked ‘What Are Your Pronouns,’ Don’t Answer: A seemingly innocuous question masks a demand for conformity with a regressive set of ideas.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-05T18:31:07+00:00

Students demand revocation of assistant professors’ honorary degree for his Christian beliefs

Over 300 students, faculty, and alumni from Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee have signed a petition calling on the Vice Chancellor of the school to renounce the honorary degree of conservative Christian writer Eric Metaxas.

The petition calls for the revocation of Metaxas honorary degree due to what it calls "anti-LGBTQ" and "anti-democratic" beliefs and statements. It references an article written by the assistant professor in which he said that the LGBTQ community Is “capturing the hearts and minds of young people” through literature.

In the article, Metaxas warns parents to shield children against such influences.

"Anyone who reads books for teens these days will tell you that portrayals of gay relationships and characters are rapidly increasing," reads the piece in question. "In fact, they’re increasing to the point where they’re all out of proportion to reality. If you know the statistics on rates of homosexuality in the real world, you know that it’s somewhere around 3 percent, maybe less. Not so in the world of Young Adult fiction; there, it’s far more pervasive."

The signatories of the petition content that Metaxas’ statements are contrary to the university's mission because of its commitment to diversity and inclusion.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-05T17:06:21+00:00

President of El Salvador asks if the destruction of American cities is a 'deliberate plan': “Is there a deliberate plan to destroy the United States from within?” Bukele tweeted on Monday. “...Why are they letting their beautiful cities rot?”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-05T12:33:53+00:00

[Matt Taibbi] The British Medical Journal Story That Exposed Politicized "Fact-Checking": The fact-checkers who flagged Paul Thacker's British Medical Journal article about a Pfizer subcontractor for Facebook admitted they police narrative, not fact

After going through both legal and peer review, but without contacting Ventavia — apparently, they feared an injunction — the BMJ published Thacker’s piece on November 2nd, 2021. The money passage read:

A regional director who was employed at the research organization Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.

Beginning on November 10th, 2021, the editors began receiving complaints from readers, who said they were having difficulty sharing it. As editors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbassi later wrote in an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context ... Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”

Facebook has yet to respond to queries about this piece. Meanwhile, the site that conducted Facebook’s “fact check,” Lead Stories, ran a piece dated November 10th whose URL used the term “hoax alert” (Lead Stories denies they called the BMJ piece a hoax). Moreover, they deployed a rhetorical device that such “checking” sites now use with regularity, repeatedly correcting assertions Thacker and the British Medical Journal never made. This began with the title: “The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.”

The British Medical Journal never said Jackson’s story revealed “disqualifying flaws” in the vaccine. Nor did it claim the negative information “calls into question the results of the Pfizer clinical trial.” It also didn’t claim that the story is “serious enough to discredit data from the clinical trials.” The BMJ’s actual language said Jackson’s story could “raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight,” which is true.

The real issue with Thacker’s piece is that it went viral and was retweeted by the wrong people. As Lead Stories noted with marked disapproval, some of those sharers included the likes of Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy. To them, this clearly showed that the article was bad somehow, but the problem was, there was nothing to say the story was untrue.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-05T02:54:11+00:00

Joe Rogan outrage did little to affect Spotify user numbers: Media reports that users are leaving the app in droves are false, data suggests.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-04T19:43:33+00:00

Like pottery: University of Kansas diversity head resigns for plagiarism on MLK Day

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-04T19:16:21+00:00

Teacher Made White Elementary School Children Apologize to Black Kids For Their Skin Color: Irate parents expose more CRT madness.

The sensational claim was made during a school board meeting by the mother of a child who attends AM Kulp Elementary School.

“I actually pulled my daughter out of AM Kulp because of the 5th grade teacher who lined those students up, from whitest to darkest,” she said.

“(The teacher) made them turn around and made the white ones apologize to the black ones – now do not tell me that did not happen in this district,” the mother added.

“You need to put an end to this. Kids do not see color and you are segregating them and you are separating them. This is not OK. Do something or get out of those damn chairs!” she concluded.

The mother’s complaint was bolstered by a further claim by another individual at the meeting who described how the same teacher forced children to take part in a ‘privilege walk’ multiple times.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-04T18:05:11+00:00

John Money: The Pro-Pedophile Pervert Who Invented "Gender"

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-04T17:40:09+00:00

'Perfectionism,' having a 'sense of urgency' are examples of White supremacy, academics argue

The Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis hosted an event that made headlines before it even began, called “Is Professionalism a Racist Construct?”

In the event, the presenters characterized various qualities of workplace environments such as “perfectionism,” “a sense of urgency,” “defensiveness,” “worship of the written word,” and “quantity over quality” as characteristics of White supremacy culture.

One presenter, Assistant Dean for Field Education Jewel Stafford connected these alleged characteristics of White supremacy culture to the idea that “even though we're working really hard, there's a narrative that we're not enough, that somehow who we are, what we do, it's just not enough.”

The host, Associate Dean for External Affairs Gary Parker, noted that “there were some media outlets that portrayed this talk in a less than flattering light.”

Another presenter, Assistant Dean of the Office of Community Partnerships Cynthia Williams, addressed this controversy in her speech, noting multiple times that she was “getting into good trouble” with her colleagues, and specifically addressed the “provocative” nature of the question, “Is professionalism racist?”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-04T17:02:35+00:00

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem Signs Bill Banning Biological Males From Girls’ Sports

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-04T16:01:28+00:00

[Christopher F. Rufo] Prison-Gang Politics: The Left’s racialist ideologies threaten to transform America into a prison yard.

California prison gangs operate on a model of collective, identity-based security. If a white inmate attacks a black inmate, or vice versa, their racial compatriots must fight to protect the group’s interests. The threat of race war, they believe, is the only way to secure peace. The prisoners maintain separate facilities, separate sleeping quarters, and separate trade networks. They communicate with the other races through “reps,” or emissaries, who deliver messages on behalf of gang leaders. An individual might not want to join the white supremacists or the Norteño drug-runners, but his survival depends on doing so. Courts have occasionally attempted to integrate prison facilities but have never succeeded. Prison wardens have accepted the racial reality and work in tacit cooperation with the gangs to maintain segregated intake, cell assignment, and amenities.

I spent three years directing a documentary about life in America’s three poorest cities, including Stockton, California, which has some of the highest crime and incarceration rates in the country. Stockton is a case study in America’s diverse racial future: it is approximately one-quarter white, one-quarter black, one-quarter Latino, and one-quarter Asian. In the city’s daily activities, the racial groups generally cooperate and go about their business together. There are widespread interracial friendships, marriages, and families. Even some of the city’s street gangs are multiracial. But in the jails and prisons that surround the city, the cultural divide is stark: inmates are subsumed into their racial group; enmity between the races is the assumed condition; racial violence, retaliation, and revenge always loom. There are no individuals, only identity-based expressions of power. This “prison politics” has been cemented into the system.

A few years after making the documentary, I began studying critical race theory and the racialist ideologies that are becoming entrenched in American schools. Though the comparison is provocative, frightening parallels exist between the racialist logic of the prison yard and the racialist pedagogy of many public schools. First, schools that have adopted critical race theory reject individualism and colorblindness; to achieve an authentic identity and gain collective power, individuals must identify first and foremost with their racial group. Second, as in the prison yard, some public schools have begun segregating teachers and students for training sessions, classroom exercises, field trips, and even playground activities. Third, many schools that have adopted critical race theory explicitly teach that children belong to categories of “oppressor” or “oppressed” based on a racial hierarchy, and then tell students that they must tear down society in order to “decolonize” the land, settle racial scores, and direct the spoils to their compatriots.

This development might not come as a total surprise. Critical race theory draws heavily from black nationalist ideology, such as that of the Black Panther Party, which came to fruition in California prisons in the 1960s. The new iteration of this ideology might have abandoned the militant rhetoric of the Panthers in favor of the therapeutic language of the school psychologist, but it nevertheless threatens to replicate the destructive features of prison-gang politics in the “outside world.” If American institutions succumb to this ideology, they can expect a brutal future: the suspension of individualism in favor of racial collectivism; a nihilistic, zero-sum vision of society; and endemic racial conflict as a baseline condition. It would reverse the racial progress that the United States has made over the centuries.

To avoid this fate, Americans of all racial backgrounds must work together to defeat this ideology, down to its roots. Despite the success of critical race theory in prestige institutions, American voters still prefer individualism, colorblindness, and equal protection under the law. Even voters in deep-blue California have rejected affirmative-action policies that would judge individuals according to race rather than merit. The challenge is to turn this public preference into public action. Critical race theory has spread through our institutions, despite strong public opposition. Americans must act to prevent the country from becoming the equivalent of a sprawling, open-air prison yard.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-04T03:21:34+00:00

Canada’s Truckers Hold The Line Against Absent Trudeau as Provinces Announce End of Restrictions.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-03T23:34:46+00:00

A Colorado school district was forced to cancel classes after teachers called out sick to protest the new conservative school board

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-03T21:55:53+00:00

The Thought Police are here: Criticise the trans lobby and you can expect the cops to come round to ‘check your thinking’.

Orwell tropes are overused. I’m guilty of it myself. And yet there are times when only a Nineteen Eighty-Four reference will do. The police questioning of Scottish charity worker Nicola Murray is one of those times. After Ms Murray issued a statement saying that her domestic-violence charity would no longer refer women to the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, because of ‘deeply concerning comments’ made by the trans woman who runs the centre, the police came knocking. ‘We need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind making your statement’, they told Murray. Police officers visiting a woman’s home and grilling her over her ‘thinking’? Yep, we need Orwell for this.

Ms Murray’s crimethink was to feel uncomfortable with comments made by Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman who is CEO of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). Last year, Wadhwa said some women who experience sexual abuse and rape are ‘bigoted people’ and they should expect to be ‘challenged’ on their bigotries if they turn up at the crisis centre looking for help. Sexual violence is ‘not [a] discerning crime’, said Wadhwa. It ‘happens to bigoted people as well’. And ‘if you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature [to the crisis centre], we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma… but please also expect to be challenged on your prejudices’. In short – if you’re a woman who doesn’t believe that someone born male can become a woman, and who doesn’t want to see blokes of any sort in a rape-crisis centre, then you’re a ‘bigot’ and your trauma therapy will come with a side order of woke lecturing.

Not surprisingly, many campaigners against sexual violence were horrifed by Wadhwa’s comments. In my view, the very idea of a rape-crisis centre being run by a biological male is pretty disturbing. But the fact that that biological male is also happy to brand some rape victims as ‘bigots’ who essentially need re-education is just despicable. Women turn up at rape-crisis centres for urgent assistance following a terrible exprience, not to be interrogated on how au fait they are with the latest beliefs and decrees of the cranky cult of genderfluidity.

Ms Murray runs Brodie’s Trust, a charity that provides help to women who have experienced the loss of a pregnancy through domestic violence or a forced termination. In September, in the wake of Wadhwa’s comments, she said Brodie’s Trust ‘cannot in all conscience send vulnerable women to [the ERCC]’. She made the perfectly reasonable point that it is not for sexual-violence charities to police vulnerable women’s thoughts. ‘We have no interest in our clients’ religion, sexuality [or] political views’, she said. And so she said she would no longer ‘signpost’ vulnerable women to a centre whose CEO was openly threatening to police and correct vulnerable women’s beliefs.

The police didn’t see it as reasonable, though. In November, detectives from Edinburgh knocked on Ms Murray’s door. They had in their possession screenshots of her tweets and a printout of the statement made by Brodie’s Trust. Get your head around that – actual police officers printed out a statement made by a charity and went around to the charity founder’s home to talk to her about it. This is banana republic stuff. The officers confirmed to Ms Murray that she hadn’t said anything ‘hateful’ – ‘there isn’t a crime here’. So why were they in her home waving around printouts of her comments, she asked? ‘Because we need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind your statement’, they said.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-03T18:41:57+00:00

ADL Changes Its Definition Of Racism Again, Calls It An ‘Interim Definition’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-03T15:59:24+00:00

Student suspended for privately discussing Christian beliefs sues school district

According to The Detroit News, Plainwell High School student David Stout claims the three-day suspension last fall was for talking about the topic “in a private text conversation and in a hallway.”

As noted in the complaint, one of Stout’s text read “the Bible teaches that homosexual conduct is a sin,” and that “everyone is a sinner due to freewill choices.” He also wrote he “would pray for (homosexuals) ‘to repent and follow Jesus.'”

The suit claims one of the school’s band directors, Austin Hunt, chided Stout for “not policing and reporting other students’ inappropriate jokes” — meaning he laughed at others’ (inappropriate) “racial and homophobic jokes” and “didn’t immediately stop them.”

Hunt (left) allegedly told Stout he had to cease discussing religion on social media, and that he and his bandmates were “stealing others’ happiness.”

Perhaps most alarmingly, in response to Stout telling Hunt that he was being “very one-sided” and was trying to “shame, intimidate, and silence conservatives and Christians,” Hunt said that was a “correct” assessment.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-03T05:19:23+00:00

United Nations is passing out cash and debit cards to would-be illegal aliens near the Guatemalan border in Mexico

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-02T23:24:43+00:00

Mother of 'trans' child poses as teen to find out how Trevor Project grooms kids into transitioning: What emerged in the online chat with the Trevor Project was advocacy for transitioning, no information about detransitioning, and apparent certainty on the benefits of gender transition.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-02T22:43:48+00:00

[Michelle Malkin] Why Airbnb Banned Me (And My Hubby, Too!)

So here is the grim reality of life in Woke America 2022. In November, I spoke at a peaceful conference held by an organization that is deemed a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League. The title of my talk was “Race, Immigration, and Con. Inc: How I Came to See the Light.” It was a wide-ranging discussion of my three decades of reporting on the nation’s demographic and cultural deterioration—which I’ve chronicled firsthand on college campuses, at our borders, and in every crime-ridden, riot-prone, and mass migration-transformed metropolis from Los Angeles to Seattle and Portland, to Baltimore, Washington, D.C, New York, and Denver.

As I’ve done throughout my career, I lambasted both Swamp Democrats and establishment Republicans for selling us out. The speech delved into the K-20 metastasis of anti-white curriculum, the corporate media’s whitewashing of black-on-Asian attacks, and the long campaign to censor nationalist dissidents who put America first. A week after my talk, San Francisco-based Airbnb notified me that I was banned from using its services ever again and imperiously deleted my account. Poof!

“My name’s Cedar, and I’m with Airbnb’s Trust team,” the Nov. 24, 2021 e-mail began. “It has come to our attention that you were a keynote speaker for the 2021 American Renaissance Conference earlier this month in Tennessee. Airbnb’s community policies prohibit people who are members of or actively associate with known hate groups. Due to your promotion and participation in a known white nationalist and white supremacist conference, we have determined that we will remove your account from Airbnb. This is consistent with action we’ve taken to ban people associated with this conference in past years.”

Airbnb’s ideological witch hunts have claimed an unknown number of victims since 2016 as part of a woke company initiative to root out “bias” and expel anyone deemed an “extremist” with a “dangerous organization affiliation.” Press coverage of previous purges strongly suggests that the aforementioned character assassins of the SPLC are involved through use of their far left, anti-white, anti-Right “Hatewatch” list. Ever since I wrote my first book, Invasion, in 2002, the SPLC and ADL goons have sought to stifle my voice.

But this latest salvo crosses the line. It’s not enough that I—a “woman of color” (the Left’s own descriptive label, not mine) and mother of two multiracial children – was pronounced guilty of “hate” crimes and “promotion” of “white supremacist” ideas for delivering a speech whose full content Airbnb didn’t even bother to obtain from me. The Airbnb bullies also banned my equally non-violent, non-hateful husband – who did not attend the conference and who is not a public figure or activist.

Just make your own ~~platform~~ ~~ISP~~ ~~university~~ ~~bank~~ ~~insurance company~~ housesharing service!

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-02T18:49:06+00:00

The last stands: Richmond starts taking down Confederate statues’ pedestals, too

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-02T18:02:14+00:00

Even in Idaho: Arcane and radical pedagogy has infiltrated schools across America's heartland.

Many aspects of Idaho’s education system suggest parents are correct that the sexualization of children cannot happen in Idaho. Our schools are not required to teach sex education, unlike many other states. School districts can offer sex education programs but only within the limits of Idaho Statute 33-1608, which says the primary responsibility of family life and sex education rests with a student’s home and church and that school should do nothing to upset those established standards. Schools are required to teach abstinence and provide factual, medically accurate and objective information.

But advocacy groups and other branches of government undermine the sound intent at the legislative level. Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) has been implementing the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (APP) program in K-12 schools across the state since 2017. APP claims to teach abstinence but really encourages kids to engage in sexual activity and toward adopting social constructivist views of sex and gender. The DHW claims to be operating the program in every school district, affecting more schools every year.

According to the APP curriculum standards, students are taught to be activists for transgenderism and other LGBTQ issues, promote safety for sexually active kids rather than absitence or marital sex, and differentiate between biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression by the end of eighth grade. The DHW never reports the names and numbers of schools where the APP program is implemented — a transparency problem that can hardly be accidental.

Advocacy groups actively work to promote sex education material and radical gender policies at the local level. Sometimes school districts adopt APP curriculum, sometimes they quietly allow alternative sex education advocacy groups into the schools to offer programs. There is no transparency on the operation of such programs, so it is impossible to know what any individual school district is doing. But we know that advocacy groups are very active in school districts because the interest groups themselves brag about it, even though school districts don’t inform the public about it.

The Committee for Children Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum Second Step is used in many school districts statewide including Coeur d’Alene, Pocatello-Chubbuck, and West Ada. Second Step encourages students to question their sexual orientation and gender, be activists for issues such as transgenderism, and use the website LoveIsRespect.org for sex advice. The website includes resources such as “Five tips for your first time,” refers places to get an abortion, and promotes sexual taboos like polyamory.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-02T16:39:12+00:00

British Cycling Members Warned Not to Criticize New Trans Policy .. and urged to report behavior and language to the "Integrity and Compliance Department."

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-02T15:18:04+00:00

Georgetown student protester requests place on campus for people to cry about controversial tweets

At another juncture, a student demanded that the dean cover for the classes that the activists had missed as a result of the sit-in, suggesting that the move should be part of a “reparations” package for black students. She followed up by insisting that students be given a designated place on campus to cry. “Is there an office they can go to?” she asked. “I don’t know what it would look like, but if they want to cry, if they need to break down, where can they go? Because we’re at a point where students are coming out of class to go to the bathroom to cry.”

“And this is not in the future,” she added. “This is today.”

The administrators took the law student’s query seriously. “It is really, really hard to walk out of class or a meeting in tears, and you should always have a place on campus where you can go,” Dean [Mitch] Bailin told her. “And if you’re finding that you’re not getting the person that you want to talk to or not getting the space that you need, reach out to me anytime — anytime — and we will find you space.”

Yet another student pressed the deans to send out an email attacking [Georgetown Black Law Student Association] critics.

“Something that’s important is to remind our classmates that are attacking us that they are only here because our ancestors were sold for them to be here,” she said. “And I think it’s a very important fact that is not talked about explicitly enough, because we are still being attacked. So I just would appreciate in whatever message that’s going out [to the student body], that our classmates are explicitly reminded: Do not attack the people who were sold for you to have this opportunity . . . That needs to be something that these people are reminded of, because they continue to attack us as if it is not on our backs that they are even here.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-02T05:54:34+00:00

Equalities watchdog warns of 'genuine public concern' trans rights are conflicting with the rights of women

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-01T22:49:45+00:00

COVID Affects Your Memory: Masks have never worked. Testing has always been problematic. Kids were never high-risk. The past has never been altered. Welcome to the COVID consensus, circa midterms 2022.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-01T22:07:23+00:00

An Awakening Community: Repelled by progressive policies, Asian-American New Yorkers look to the other side of the aisle.

Three in four Asian New Yorkers are immigrants. They have long been considered reliable Democratic voters, but lately, many seem more animated by opposition to Democratic policies. The extent of the shift became clear in the New York City elections last year, when Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, as well as some candidates for city council, scored well in Asian-heavy districts. While Democrats try to figure out what this means, Republicans hope to capitalize this year—and beyond.

[...]

Asians constitute about 15 percent of New York City’s population—about half of these Chinese—but they weren’t known for being vocal on civic issues until 2015, when thousands protested against the indictment of Peter Liang, a rookie cop who, while on patrol, accidentally shot dead an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, in a Brooklyn housing project. In the eyes of the protesters, Liang, a Chinese-American, was a scapegoat for public anger resulting from non-indictments of some white cops involved in killings of black people.

Asian voices have only grown louder since then. They fought against former mayor Bill de Blasio’s specialized high school reform proposal that, they worry, would reduce the chance of admission for Asian students; the borough-based jail project that would bring an expanded jail to Manhattan’s Chinatown; the state’s marijuana legalization; and bail reform and the defund-the-police movement, which cut against their public safety concerns.

With each protest movement came the emergence of community activists new to politics. Phil Wong is one. An immigrant from Hong Kong and a father of three, Wong participated in protests for the first time in 2018 against specialized high school reform. Now he’s a civic leader mobilizing Chinese parents to fight affirmative action and critical race theory. “The atmosphere at schools here is more and more like China’s cultural revolution that encourages students to cancel teachers and parents, all in the name of equality,” Wong says.

Yanling Zhang is another, a volunteer for Vickie Paladino, a Republican who won the city council seat in District 19. “When I heard Vickie talking at a party, I thought she represents the traditional American values that attracted me to the U.S.,” says Zhang, who came to the U.S. for graduate school more than 20 years ago and had not participated in politics until she joined Paladino’s campaign. “But now this country has changed. Personal freedom is eroded by overbearing governments, and the media ignores the voices of ordinary people.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-01T20:10:40+00:00

Gender neutral terms such as ‘birth-givers’ may put women’s health at risk, researchers warn: Research finds that gender inclusive words, such as ‘chestfeeding’, may be ‘sexist’ and cause more ‘insidious discrimination against women’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-01T16:06:09+00:00

Nightclub event slammed for charging White, straight males six times more than ethnic minorities for entry

Pxssy Palace, the organizer behind an event held at the E1 nightclub in east London on Jan. 28, advertised tickets for the event with three different price categories, based on a club-goer’s skin color and sexual orientation.

Black homosexuals, trans people, and non-binary people of color were able to purchase a ticket for £16.80 (€20), however the ticket price was 50 percent more expensive for White trans or gay men and straight Black women.

If a club-goer had the audacity to identify as a White, straight male however, they were billed £112 — more than six times the regular price — to attend the event.

[...]

Incensed social media users slammed what they regarded as a “discriminatory” door policy, and called on the Metropolitan Police to investigate the practice.

Others suggested those eligible for the higher ticketing band simply self-identify as another gender or sexual orientation in order to avoid higher fees.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-02-01T06:03:58+00:00

Hispanic Students Were Forced To Learn Critical Race Theory. They Hated It. Kali Fontanilla discovered that not only was CRT being taught in the classroom—her minority students were failing it.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-31T22:25:26+00:00

Teacher who was suspended after allegedly manipulating girl, 11, into believing she is a boy and 'stalking' middle-school students for LGBTQ club is mom of transgender son

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-31T21:08:36+00:00

Pregnant New Zealand journalist is forced to turn to the TALIBAN for help after she was left stranded in Afghanistan because of Jacinda Ardern's draconian Covid laws

Charlotte Bellis, a broadcast journalist, said she has repeatedly tried to return to New Zealand since she learned she was pregnant in September.

She has submitted 59 documents to New Zealand officials in Afghanistan in an attempt to secure an emergency return home, but her bid was turned down and led her to turn to the Taliban, one of the world's most oppressive regimes, for sympathy.

It's a particularly cruel twist of fate for the woman who was revered worldwide for her fearless questioning of the jihadist group's previous record on women's rights.

[...]

Writing in the New Zealand Herald on Saturday, Ms Bellis said it was 'brutally ironic' that while she had once questioned the Taliban about their treatment of women, she was now asking the same questions of her own government.

'When the Taliban offers you - a pregnant, unmarried woman - safe haven, you know your situation is messed up,' she wrote

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-31T17:24:04+00:00

Red America’s Favorite Sport Is At War With Its Fans: NASCAR’s attempt to tamp down an anti-Biden catchphrase reflects the sharpest divides in American culture.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-31T15:42:08+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] Covid as Liberal 9/11:" Covid is not over, or have you forgotten?"

Forgive me if this others have made this comparison, but it’s remarkable how this moment echoes that one in the obsession with mutual surveillance and moral hygiene, all enforced with constant reference to a real crisis and imagined dangers. It’s not just the serial overreactions, the threatening intensity, the constant reference to dramatically worse events supposedly yet to come. It’s the feeling of mandatory panic, the insistence that anyone who does not allow the crisis to dominate their internal life is somehow guilty of causing it, the desire to blame a disaster on people who are thought to not take it seriously enough. This self-impressed doomsaying reminds me so much of the people who constantly said, after 9/11, that al Qaeda was all around us, that the big attack was yet to come, that sleeper cells planned to nuke shopping malls…. 9/11, too, produced a type of proud Cassandra, haughty and contemptuous, who simply lived to let the rest of us know that the rest of us just aren’t serious enough, who believed that the crisis meant that every single moment of our lives was now a character test, one that we failed if we did exist in a permanent state of anxiety and fear.

Ours is a discursive atmosphere in which (a year into the pandemic) a mainstream magazine published a piece where the author gradually became more and more convinced by a legitimately deranged prepper’s rantings about Covid as the end of days. (When said deranged prepper says “SARS-2-CoV-19 is to the human race what an asteroid was to the dinosaurs,” the author says that this prediction is likely half-right, then suggests it may be even closer than that.) People openly salivate over the prospect of another, more virulent strain. They do! Look on social media. The sheer white-knuckled excitement when they predict the next brutal wave…. These are ostensibly warnings but they sure sound like yearning to me. If 9/11 taught me anything it was that there is such a thing as a national mood, and that it can have serious consequences.

Covid-19, like 9/11, has functioned as all-encompassing excuses to justify the preferences of people who want those things anyway. After 9/11, the call went out that the country was soft and fat, that we were not sufficiently devoted to national defense, that we needed to be more aggressive in foreign affairs, and that the country had grown insufficiently nationalistic and militaristic, that we all needed to toughen up and salute the red, white, and blue. These were of course beliefs held by many conservatives long prior to 9/11, and they exploited the moment. The ritualistic expression of anger at those who wanted to live in a post-9/11 world was really the defense of a new regime. Now many on the left of the political spectrum are attempting to do something like the same, turn disaster into opportunity. Even if it’s merely the opportunity to do the only thing that gets them out of bed these days, the opportunity to judge others.

[...]

For those on the far left, I think, Covid has been particularly seductive. In the last several years I have watched as the nihilism and anger that have never been rare in the socialist left have metastasized, curdling into this terrible black pit in the heart of people who have ostensibly revolutionary politics but who believe that no positive change is possible. So many people I know, including many very good people, have given up; so many are resigned to the idea that the system cannot be reformed from inside. But they are also not so deluded as to think that armed revolution could possibly succeed. (As I am fond of reminding people, the state has satellites that can read your t-shirt from space.) So a lot of people who are ostensibly socialists and radicals have succumbed to this grinding nihilism, this black, lol-nothing-matters defeatism. And so they stock whatever’s left of their hopes in extreme events - in Charlottesville, which they insisted was the start of a new street war against fascism, all sense to the contrary; in January 6th, which they hoped might present them with the opportunity to resist a totalitarian government; in climate change, which they imagine will bring us a post-apocalyptic world of endless possibility, rather than the far more likely future of a hot and unpleasant and environmentally devastated world where the powers that be nevertheless still rule and where inequality only grows.

Then Covid came and, for a brief moment they convinced themselves that it was the big one at last, and everything was possible. Now they are forced to confront the fact that the system is more powerful even than a pandemic, and that no disaster is coming to save us from our miseries.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-31T06:35:31+00:00

Research: another casualty of woke

Take UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the super-corporation that brings together the university research councils. It boasts 7,000 employees, a wage bill of nearly half-a-billion, and distributes some £8 billion of taxpayers’ money (roughly £120 for every man, woman and child in the UK) for research every year.

This month, UKRI produced a new draft equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. This is worth some close scrutiny.

[...]

There is an overt commitment to ‘treating people equitably to achieve equality in outcomes’ and to ‘reshaping the system’ so as to create ‘welcoming and equitable structures’. Other aims include making every employee ‘inclusive in all that they do’; ‘addressing under-representation’ on racial lines; producing a research system ‘by everyone, for everyone’ (whatever that means); and doing all this with a ‘representative and diverse workforce’ (ie, quotas by another name).

This new strategy applies not only to UKRI itself. If you want any money from it, you’d better toe the line, too. It wants UKRI-supported research to be ‘delivered in inclusive ways to create more equitable outcomes and benefits’, and wants to ‘use levers’ to ‘make change’ (work that out for yourself).

[...]

This is not only misguided but very worrying. For one thing, radical social activism of the kind discreetly promoted here is all very well with politicians and, let us add, with professors. It is not alright in a non-political organisation set up to distribute government largesse in an even-handed manner to those it thinks will use it most efficiently. We do not expect bodies of this kind to boast of their contacts with political ‘advocacy groups’ and ‘grassroots movements’, or to be ‘championing and focusing on systemic and structural change’.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-30T19:37:10+00:00

Swiss man changes gender to retire and receive his pension a year earlier

New rules introduced on Jan. 1 enable any Swiss resident with the “intimate conviction” that they do not belong to the sex they are registered as in the civil status register can apply to change their gender, in addition to their first name, for just 75 Swiss francs (€72).

And it took just four days for the system to be taken advantage of with Swiss daily Luzerner Zeitung reporting that a man from Lucerne applied to change his gender so that he could receive his state pension at the Swiss retirement age for women of 64, a year earlier than men.

While there are regulations supposedly in place to prevent individuals from making “manifestly abusive” applications, there is in reality “no obligation” on the part of civil servants to “verify the intimate conviction of the persons concerned” and the sincerity of the applicant is presumed in accordance with the principle of good faith.

The policy has raised further questions about how individuals could abuse the system in future to their own benefit, with critics warning that men could use the loophole to avoid a mandatory summons for national service.

One social media user suggested there was nothing stopping a male from applying for a gender change at the age of 17 to avoid military conscription. “At 30, you go back and change your name to man and that’s it,” wrote one user, all for the cost of 150 Swiss francs.

No word on whether his car insurance premiums have also decreased.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-30T18:49:28+00:00

MSNBC claims opposition to “LatinX” designation is fueled by White “right-wing propagandists”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-30T17:05:45+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech” to mean "views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.

This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-29T18:48:41+00:00

Parents say school had secret 'gender identity' meetings with 12-year-old prior to her suicide attempt: It was after the father received a phone call that informed him that his "daughter attempted suicide," that he became aware of the "secret meetings" and gender identity issues.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-29T18:08:11+00:00

UPDATE: Suspended professor who was forced to take diversity training sues university

A professor who was targeted and suspended after using censored language in a test question to make an example of employment discrimination just filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The controversy began in 2020 when Jason Kilborn, a law professor at UIC, posed a hypothetical question in an exam surrounding illegal discrimination in the workplace. The question referenced anti-black and anti-women slurs, but were not fully spelled out. Instead, they were simply displayed by their first letters, "n" and "b."

Despite keeping the words censored, a petition was launched against Kilborn condemning him for the contents in question. A short time after, UIC suspended Kilborn and announced he would be forced to take a five-week diversity training course in order to return to teaching.

Yesterday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) announced their partnership with Kilborn in a First Amendment lawsuit against the school. In the announcement, they claim that the diversity training Kilborn was subjected to "uses the exact same redacted slur in the training materials."

[...]

The lawsuit details that when Kilborn was called into a dean's meeting following student complaints about the question, he voluntarily sent an apology letter to his upset students. But nonetheless, the professor was soon placed on "indefinite administrative leave" and was barred from stepping foot on campus and participating in remote school activities.

[...]

The following Monday, One of the students who had also met with Kilborn, met with the dean -- along with several other students -- and falsely claimed "that [Kilborn] had exclaimed that he 'was feeling homicidal or 'would become homicidal,'" the lawsuit states. This prompted the dean and other defendants to invoke UIC's Violence Prevention Plan to summon a BTAT (Behavioral Threat Assessment Team).

So class, what did we learn? Never apologize.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-29T16:54:12+00:00

Yale’s online Covid reporting system is turning students against each other

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-29T05:57:03+00:00

Chicago Schools Tells Teachers Sex Is ‘Socially Constructed,’ Tells Them To Hide Students’ Gender Pronouns From Parents

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-28T18:33:11+00:00

Progressives Against Transparency: The ACLU joins Democratic politicians in opposition to making school curricula available to parents.

As debates over school curricula have raged for the past year, progressives have openly expressed anti-democratic views about how the education system should operate. Nikole Hannah-Jones, progenitor of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, made her view clear during an NBC appearance. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” she said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have expertise in the subject area.” Meantime, Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe arguably cost himself a second term in the governor’s mansion by admitting that he didn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

So it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that the Democrats are resisting public school transparency. What’s more surprising is that the American Civil Liberties Union decided to join them in taking this position. The ACLU wrote on Twitter that the curriculum transparency bills are “are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools.”

[...]

When the ACLU was demanding transparency about issues like religious instruction or sex education, it didn’t need to choose between government accountability and progressive social revolution. But the modern ACLU worries that greater government transparency may prevent “teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools”—by which it really means learning and talking about race and gender in a way that the new progressives approve.

By opposing transparency, progressives, the ACLU among them, may have made a tactical mistake. Public schools are government institutions paid for by taxpayers; with few alternatives, most parents are compelled to send their children there. It’s hard to argue that curricula should be kept secret. Some states, like Ohio, already have laws that allow parents to request instruction materials, reading lists, and curricula. To argue that schools can’t teach kids certain material unless it’s kept secret is to concede that the material wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny.

[...]

The ACLU of old would never have argued for government secrecy, especially when it comes to public schools. America still needs the commitment to government transparency that the ACLU once exemplified. One might even say that we need it more than ever.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-28T17:39:19+00:00

93.6% of prosecutors at Portland’s DA’s Office agree that “people of color” should be given special treatment

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-28T17:39:09+00:00

Biological Man, 26, Who Molested Girl To Be Housed With Females In Juvenile Detention After Identifying As Woman

Guess that thing that TRA's tell us "never happens" happened again:

Tubbs went into a female restroom at a Denny’s restaurant in 2014, grabbed a 10-year-old girl by the throat, locked her in a stall, and molested her until another person walked into the bathroom, reports say.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-28T16:03:42+00:00

German Health Minister Admits 'Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated' Narrative Was A Load Of Crap, Blames 'Software' Error

The German government has admitted that the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" narrative they used to oppress purebloods was based off a "software" error which incorrectly told them 90% of new covid cases were among the unvaccinated.

In fact, in most cases "they didn't even know who was vaccinated and who was not," the National Pulse reports.

Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, the top health official in Germany whose position is equivalent to the CDC director in America, claimed last week that "it was a mistake" and "was not done on purpose in order to largely blame the unvaccinated for the pandemic."

[...]

When are CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci going to apologize for pushing the same lie?

We know from Humetrix's study for the Department of Defense's Project Salus which looked at Medicare data hidden from the general public that "fully vaccinated" Medicare patients made up an estimated 60% of hospitalizations in the week ending August 7th and were more than 71 percent of COVID-19 cases as of August 21.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-27T23:14:31+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] Human Capital is Real, and Some People Are Smarter Than Other People: until we acknowledge that, there can be no coherent discussion of education

When I set out to write my book, I knew the idea of intrinsic or inherent academic talent, an innate predisposition to succeed or fail, would be controversial, and was prepared for that controversy. The repeated reassurances that the book rejected race science, which annoyed some readers so deeply, were in part an attempt to ward off deliberate misunderstandings of what I was saying. (That is, that individual talents can vary thanks to genetics without that implying that group differences are genetic.) What I was consistently surprised by, though, was the number of people who responded to my book by insisting that there is no such thing as a summative difference in intelligence or academic ability - that is, that not only are there no inherent predispositions towards being good or bad at school, no one even becomes better or worse, no one is smarter than another. There are no measurable differences in what we know or can do intellectually. Or, in some tellings, no one knows what smart is, it’s some sort of ineffable quality we can’t pin down, or the very idea of “smart” is a racist Western imperialist hegemonic heteronormative con.

I find this all unhelpful. Narrow down as specifically as you can and no one can persist in denying that there are differences in summative ability. Can anyone really claim that I can do calculus as well as a math professor who teaches it? Because I can’t do calculus at all! Of course people have different things they know she understand and can do intellectually. I’m not naturally talented at math. I don't like it but it's true. And easily quantifiable. If there were no such distinctions school would not exist.

But the will to obscure this fact is strong. In many fields, the academics at the top are busily abstracting and mystifying success, the better to insist that no one is bad at what you study. (My old field, writing studies, is filled with academics who believe there is no such thing as being better or worse at writing, which makes you wonder why anyone is paying their salaries.) Every day academics declare that grade are a capitalist plot, tests evil, and the very idea of assessment offensive. But there really are things that you can know and not know in life, and some of them, such as reading, are really important. And in fact we are very good indeed at creating instruments that measure whether you can read or write or do algebra. It’s just that their results are socially inconvenient.

If the concern is saying that there are attributes and abilities in life that matter that are not academic or connected to intelligence, and that they should be taken seriously and rewarded, the news is good, as this is perhaps the core argument of my book. If the concern is saying that being smart is an unhealthy obsession in our society and too essential to having material security, the news is good, as that is perhaps the other way to state the core argument of my book. But I don’t understand why we would pretend that academic or intellectual ability doesn’t exist, and act as though that attitude is a prerequisite to be a progressive person who desires equality of rights, dignity, and human value. As I never get tired of pointing out, traditional left thinkers like Marx never pretended that all of us are equal in our abilities. (“From each according to his abilities” implies the opposite!) What the left pushes for is equality of human value, including across - perhaps especially across - differences in talent. Equal value, equal dignity, and equal right to demand the minimum conditions needed for human flourishing.

We can lawyer about the concept of intrinsic ability as much as we want. (For the record, acknowledging that genes and environment both play important roles in education, and that there are complex interactions between them, does not imply that outcomes are therefore mutable.) We live in a world where some people can do things, intellectually, that are monetarily rewarded and socially valuable, and some people can’t. Our attempts to spread these abilities universally have been an abject failure. Because each of us has a nature, and while we’re all good at something, we’re not all good at the same things, and capitalism most certainly does not reward all gifts equally, and so much the worse for us. (Indeed, this is the very reason redistribution is necessary.) Yes, intelligence is multivariate and complex and exists in many dimensions. But so is love, and no one pretends that love therefore does not exist. We are already asking the impossible of our education system, expecting it to reward excellence and create equality at the same time. Let’s not burden it even further by pretending we don’t know some people are better and some at worse at school.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-27T23:07:17+00:00

Police seize ‘anti-trans’ book from activist Jennifer Swayne in raid on home

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-27T17:49:39+00:00

University assignment has students record themselves accusing someone of racism or homophobia

An assignment obtained by Campus Reform from a University of New Hampshire course shows an instructor directing students to locate someone that they can accuse of "racism," "ableist racist or homophobic use of language," or "micro-aggressions."

Students in the "Introduction to Language and Social Interaction" course were told to "Call in someone on their ableist racist or homophobic use of language, for micro aggressions (or an act of racism) towards a person of color, homophobia against LGBTQI+ or ableism against a disabled person."

The assignment for the course, specifies that students must also record the interaction "in order to get credit," while clarifying to get permission before doing so.

"Remember to say you know they mean well and are a good person," reads the assignment.

Students are instructed to give their target "an alternate way of expressing themselves that doesn't marginalise [sic] or oppress," and warned to "Research your proposed alternative to make certain its [sic] not oppressive itself!!" because "You will fail if you tell someone to say something racist or sexist or homophobic."

A work-study program for America's future замполиты.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-27T16:14:02+00:00

Prof under investigation after making comments about race and IQ in class

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-26T23:30:03+00:00

Georgetown’s severe COVID restrictions are nonsensical — and destroying my senior year

Georgetown’s restrictions are so nonsensical that they seem spiteful.

While all campus facilities are shut down, the university curiously left housing open so that students are not entitled to any refund for their missed time, as they were during the fully virtual 2020-21 school year. This refund is significant when tuition alone is $60,000 each year. Instead, students are left paying the full cost without any of the benefits of a campus. Apparently the virus spreads in classrooms but not dorm rooms.

In defense of maintaining the maximum tuition rate despite the shutdown, Georgetown Provost Robert Groves claimed “campus will be open and functional during this period.”

This assertion is laughable. The quality of a campus where the classrooms, student centers, gym and dining hall are shut down is obviously near zero, but by making a return to school “optional” the university can maximize profits at students expense.

The school also makes a tremendous amount of money from its historically good basketball program, so students are allowed to attend the games in droves but cannot sit in class. The university’s priorities are clear, and they are not public health or students’ interests.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-26T22:49:17+00:00

NY Parent Told Maskless 8-Year-Old Will Be Segregated, Not Given ‘Instruction’ Despite Court Ruling

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-26T20:06:06+00:00

A House Aggrieved Cannot Stand: Our rulers stoke a civil conflict because they want to win it.

Joshua Mitchell’s recent book ably demonstrates how these realities establish a moral economy. Grievance becomes currency—it can buy things. Like a kind of money, people are incentivized to collect and spend their grievances. I do not mean to suggest that certain minority—or majority—groups do not have some legitimate grievances; they do. Minorities and majorities both know well what can be gained from leveraging their grievances. When grievance serves as the moral currency in a society, it is natural that every individual will seek to realize whatever gains can be had from demanding satisfaction. The problem today isn’t the existence of grievances, or even a will to redress them. The problem is the fetishization and commodification of grievance.

Today’s populist discontent is a byproduct of the grievance economy—and a backlash against the unfair rules by which it operates. When moral virtue is determined wholly by the grievances held by a particular individual or class, this encourages an endless deliberation about which grievances are legitimate (and thus, embody real debts), and a toxic calculus to determine who has more grievance (and therefore, a more compelling demand for redress). In short, the people with the most grievances become the good people—people whose concerns are granted a disproportionate weight in public life. The people who purportedly have fewer grievances are implicitly marked as bad people—people whose demands for political satisfaction can be safely ignored.

The effect of this grievance economy is that you have an entire nation of people who have been trained to be aggrieved, but the regime rules by ensuring that certain grievances will be routinely dismissed. These are deemed to have arisen from historical “privilege”—privilege that must be surrendered so as to pay the debt to the aggrieved. Many people who seem to have little privilege are nevertheless deemed as beneficiaries of it. These are the rural, white members of the working class who have been abandoning the Democratic party at a rate identical to the one at which the left has fetishized minority grievance. When a society implicitly states “grievance is what matters,” but tells certain aggrieved groups that their gripes are illegitimate, it is no surprise that this creates alienation. Because a large government like ours is justified precisely on the grounds of its responsiveness to all the needs of its citizens, this alienation is understandably directed at the regime and its clients. As a result, our leaders’ dismissal of public grievances leads to one more grievance.

[...]

Today, the United States government has inverted the idea of sovereignty: it carefully takes account of the external demands made upon our nation by foreign powers and peoples, while it sees itself as internally sovereign in relation to the people it rules. The state does not recognize its obligation to respond to certain classes of citizens—and when the people use their vote to register their discontent with this abdication of duty, the state ensures that this discontent will be contained and neutralized.

In a democracy, the regime itself is not meant to be sovereign in relation to the citizens it governs: that’s authoritarian autocracy. Democratic government is not independent from the will of the people—on the contrary, if it won’t address their grievances, then it must yield to a majority of citizens’ decision to install officials who will. Ultimately, grievance is also the political capital of our society—the state holds sole power to decide whose grievances are legitimate and whose are not. The resolute rejection of the grievances claimed by half the country has understandably provoked an enormous anger. The continued refusal of elites to acknowledge these grievances only accelerates our cultural fragmentation—and thus increases the chances of what would surely be a catastrophic “civil war”—one that they claim they do not want.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-26T19:18:09+00:00

Honking intensifies: Angry White Women Yell 'Black Lives Matter' While Reportedly Assaulting Black Man Over Mask Etiquette In Elevator

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-26T19:05:52+00:00

What’s going on in Quebec? The French Canadian province has gone in an increasingly authoritarian direction

Never fully in but never fully out, Quebec has always had an awkward status in Canada. Fiercely protective of its French identity, it has long flirted with separating from its anglophone motherland but, a bit like Scotland, the support was never quite there. Also like Scotland, it has, throughout the pandemic, tried to flex its (limited) autonomy over health policy by consistently pushing for more restrictions than the national government.

The announcement of a ‘health tax’ in Quebec for the unvaccinated (at least C$100), followed by a decree that only vaccinated Quebecois could access the province’s liquor and cannabis stores, has drawn this point into sharper focus. These measures are just the latest examples of an increasingly authoritarian attitude towards Covid, but they are not the most severe; at the height of the pandemic in 2020, the Premier Francois Legault passed Bill 61, a highly controversial piece of legislation that sheltered the Government from oversight and limited parliamentary discussion on new projects to just one hour.

The illiberal strain in the Quebecer character is nothing new; in fact, Covid has merely brought it to the surface. During a period known as ‘The Great Darkness’ in the 1940s and 50s, the French-Canadian province was run by Maurice ‘The Chef’ DuPlessis, whose leadership was marked by repression, persecution and patronage. His name has since become a byword for authoritarianism, with one parliamentarian accusing Francois Legault last month of channelling his inner DuPlessis.

Where Justin Trudeau has gone to great lengths to frame Canada as a beacon of multiculturalism, Quebecers have been far more assertive over their local identity. In 1988, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Quebec’s original language law, which banned the use of English on commercial signs, violated charter rights to freedom of expression. More controversially, it copied France with a laicity law of its own, banning public workers in positions of “authority” from wearing religious symbols in 2019.

Covid has accelerated these tendencies, most of which are popular with the Quebecer public. On a recent talk show, for example, a giddy presenter asks a panel of children whether they support mandatory vaccinations (a strange thing to ask children in and of itself). In unison, they reply “oui” before being asked about what “should be done” about the unvaccinated (again, a rather peculiar way to talk about 15% of the province’s population). One boy says that “we should call the police”, while another offers a rather more detailed proposal: “We should cut everything from them little by little until they submit and get vaccinated”. Cue thunderous applause and a prediction from the presenter that there is a “future politician in the making”.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-26T17:55:42+00:00

Is Spanish-Language Radio Really a Threat to Democracy? Democrats can only explain electoral losses among Hispanics by infantilizing us as victims of ‘misinformation’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-26T16:51:56+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] Shovel More Dirt on Pre-K

So I would ordinarily shy away from doing an old-school blog post that simply links to something else, but this feels like a study that calls out for an exception. I’ve just been reading a paper in the journal Developmental Psychology1, thanks to a friend’s library access. It’s a pre-K study that has many virtues, including

Large n (2990 kids)

Genuine random assignment

Longitudinal design

Confirms my priors

… and it says kids who were assigned to the pre-K condition actually did worse than kids who were not.

Pre-K advocates tend to fixate on non-academic indicators as a way to justify pre-K programs. But attendance was mildly worse for the pre-K group:

Attendance rates in sixth grade (proportion of instructional days without a recorded absence) were high for both TN-VPK participants and nonparticipants. Nonetheless, the difference between groups was statistically significant with a slightly higher rate for nonparticipants (97.5% vs. 97.1%, p = .013 for the ITT analysis with observed values). Supplemental Table S11 provides model details for each year (see also Supplemental Figure S3). Sixth grade was the first academic year with a significant attendance difference between conditions, although there were marginally significant effects in kindergarten and first grade.

[...]

There are always exceptions and there are examples touted as proof that pre-K works. But the drift from the initial positive studies to more pessimistic later studies seems clear, from where I’m sitting, and the most compelling and parsimonious explanation is that we’ve gotten better at doing this research over time, with better study designs and higher data quality. The results are what they are. But liberals are forever looking for magic bullets in education, and a lot of them got very professionally, politically, and emotionally invested in pre-K, and it’s just really hard to get them to confront all the bad news.

(Figures in original not preserved.)

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-25T16:39:08+00:00

New York City's natural history museum has removed a Theodore Roosevelt statue

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-25T15:27:50+00:00

A Covid Origin Conspiracy? Newly released emails make more plausible the contention that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins presided over the suppression of the lab-leak theory for political reasons.

A striking feature of the excerpts released in the committee’s January 11, 2022 letter is that the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation. The focus of their attention was a genetic element called a furin cleavage site. This short snippet of genetic material is what makes the virus so infectious for human cells. Scientists sometimes add this element to laboratory viruses to make them more virulent, but in nature, viruses usually acquire runs of genetic material like this by swapping them with other members of their family. The furin cleavage site in the Covid virus sticks out like a sore thumb because no other known member of its family—a group called Sarbecoviruses—possesses a furin cleavage site. So how did the virus acquire it?

A member of the Andersen group, Garry of Tulane University, remarks in the latest emails on the fact that the inserted furin cleavage site, a string of 12 units of RNA, the virus’s genetic material, was exactly the required length, a precision unusual in nature: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”

Another member of the Andersen group, Farzan of Scripps Research, apparently felt much the same way. “He is bothered by the furin cleavage site and has a hard time explain[ing] that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely),” the House committee’s letter says of his remarks. Farzan noted that viruses can acquire elements like furin cleavage sites when grown in cultures of human cells, so “instead of directed engineering . . . acquisition of the furin site would be highly compatible with the continued passage of virus in tissue culture.” Both routes— direct insertion of the cleavage site or tissue culture—would mean that the virus came from a lab.

The conferees were clearly aware of the possibility that the virus had originated in the Wuhan lab. “So I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this together,” Farzan wrote, “whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature—accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40,” meaning he thought lab origin considerably more likely than not.

You might think that the senior administrators present at the conference would have rushed to investigate the startling inference that their expert advisers had drawn. But just one day after the teleconference at which his experts explained why they thought the virus seemed manipulated, Collins complained about the damage such an idea might cause. “The voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony,” he wrote on February 2, 2020, according to the new emails.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-25T04:21:29+00:00

DOJ Says Christian Teacher Must Use Students’ Preferred Pronouns

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-25T00:53:47+00:00

Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Affirmative Action at Harvard and U.N.C.

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are lawful, putting the fate of affirmative action in higher education at risk.

The court has repeatedly upheld similar programs, most recently in 2016. But recent changes in the court’s membership have made it more conservative, and the challenged programs are almost certain to meet skepticism.

The case against Harvard accused it of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage and kindness and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions.

[...]

In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs made more familiar arguments, saying the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The university responded that its admissions policies fostered educational diversity and were lawful under longstanding Supreme Court precedents.

Both cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a legal entrepreneur who has organized many lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies and voting rights laws, several of which have reached the Supreme Court.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-24T22:49:05+00:00

Toddler Rapist Now Award-Winning Trans Rights Activist

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-24T22:26:30+00:00

To witness the Covid divide, walk from Brooklyn to Queens: Attitudes are no longer about red states or blue states — it's all down to class

In the US, the divide over Covid-19 restrictions is often cast as a matter of red versus blue states. Republican states like Florida have banned vaccine passports and school mask mandates, and have heavily restricted the ability of employers to mandate vaccination for their employees. In blue states, and especially in deep-blue cities like New York and Washington, D.C., mask mandates are the norm and patrons are required to show proof of vaccination to enter a bar, eat indoors at a restaurant, or go to a movie theatre or gym.

Or at least, that’s what the law says. In practice, in vast swathes of America’s blue cities, these rules are entirely theoretical. I live in New York, and stringent Covid restrictions are almost exclusively the preserve of affluent (and predominantly white) neighbourhoods — most parts of Manhattan, plus the expensive, heavily gentrified areas of Brooklyn.

In Prospect Heights, where the median sale price of a home is $950,000 and the vaccination rate is 92.68% mask mandates are strictly enforced in all indoor settings. Most residents have voluntarily upgraded to N95s, and many of them have resumed masking outdoors. Businesses check vaccine cards and photo I.D.s as a matter of course. When I saw Licorice Pizza at a swanky local movie theatre, I was informed that the concession stand had been closed so that patrons wouldn’t be tempted to remove their masks to eat popcorn or take sips of water.

By comparison, my own neighbourhood, Ridgewood, Queens (median sale price: $646,000, vaccination rate: 78.44%), feels as if it’s a different country. Indoor mask compliance is closer to 50%, and entirely voluntary — I’ve never witnessed an employee ask a patron to mask up or shoo a maskless customer out of an establishment. The vaccine pass is, similarly, almost totally unenforced, except in the hip establishments that cater to young creatives, most of them concentrated in the western portion of the neighbourhood bordering Brooklyn. My gym, on the Hispanic-and-white-ethnic east side, is entirely maskless, and takes a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude toward vaccination. When I expressed my gratitude to one of the gym’s employees for the mask-optional policy, she replied, in heavily Polish-accented English, that we were all adults and could make our own decisions.

Pandemic restrictions may be a partisan divide, but they are also, increasingly, a class divide. Even within one of America’s deepest-blue cities, strict adherence to Covid precautions has become a symbolic gesture among affluent, vaccinated white people — in other words, those least at risk from the virus. But among the people who are, objectively speaking, more at risk — minorities, members of the working class — the attitude seems to be: it’s time to get on with life.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-24T19:33:30+00:00

Saving Democracy From the Pandemic: Three years of crisis were used to justify the concentration of powers and suppression of freedoms that must be clawed back

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-24T18:35:04+00:00

The culture war is a class war in disguise: By attacking marriage, family and education, progressive elites are kicking away the ladder from the working class.

Take the question of marriage. The idea that marriage is a positive value, and an important grounding unit for families, society and the nation more broadly, is decidedly outré on the left, where marriage is viewed as an outdated institution. Liberal outlets are chock full of essays asking ‘What does marriage ask us to give up?’ and ‘Why marriage requires amnesia’. Divorce, meanwhile, is talked of as a form of ‘home improvement’. In 2020 Black Lives Matter had to scrub a page of its website that was a bit too honest. ‘We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children’, the page read.

But the debate about the value of marriage isn’t just a cultural one or a religious one. It’s also one with huge economic ramifications – because married people earn considerably more than those who aren’t married, by as much as 30 per cent. Married men on average make $80,000 a year, compared to just $50,000 for their non-married counterparts. And the same is true across racial groups. While the racial earnings gap persists across the board, married black men out-earn single white men and single white women. The median income for married heads of black households is over $90,000 – compared to just $38,000 for their unmarried counterparts. The poverty rate for black Americans in 2020 was nearly 20 per cent – but for black married couples, it was just six per cent.

Moreover, it is now uncontroversial that children raised by two parents do better than children raised in any other family structure. A state’s share of married parents is the best predictor of upward mobility for poor kids – better even than race or college education.

Of course, it’s difficult to say whether the link between marriage and higher earnings is causation or correlation. Some economists have argued that people with greater earning potential compete better in the marriage market, while others have argued that married people climb the job ladder faster. Others have argued that married men work harder. Still others believe that married people can take bigger risks in looking for better work while relying on their partner’s income in the meantime, or that the qualities that make people good workers are the same qualities that make them good husbands. On the other side of the equation, many poor and working-class people feel they just can’t afford to get married.

Whatever its cause, the economic incentive to get and stay married is something the upper crusts know well. The class divide in America is as much a marriage divide as it is an educational one. College-educated, affluent Americans are overwhelmingly likely to be married, while working-class and poor families are living increasingly precarious lives, both economically and in terms of their family relationships. For instance, just 11 per cent of babies born to college-educated women are born out of wedlock, as opposed to over 50 per cent of babies born to women who never went to college, and 64 per cent of women who are poor. Just 26 per cent of poor families and 39 per cent of working-class families are married – compared to 56 per cent of middle- and upper-class ones.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-24T17:16:36+00:00

Lia Thomas Teammate Speaks Out: ‘Women Are Now Third-Class Citizens’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-24T16:07:53+00:00

I’m a Public School Teacher. The Kids Aren’t Alright.

When we were physically in school, it felt like there was no longer life in the building. Maybe it was the masks that made it so no one wanted to engage in lessons, or even talk about how they spent their weekend. But it felt cold and soulless. My students weren’t allowed to gather in the halls or chat between classes. They still aren’t. Sporting events, clubs and graduation were all cancelled. These may sound like small things, but these losses were a huge deal to the students. These are rites of passages that can’t be made up.

In my classroom, the learning loss is noticeable. My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. Some of my students chose not to come back at all, either because of fear of the virus, or because they are debilitated by social anxiety. And now they have the option to do virtual schooling from home.

One of my favorite projects that I assign each year is to my 10th grade students, who do in-depth research on any culture of their choosing. It culminates in a day of presentations. I encourage them to bring in music, props, food—whatever they need to immerse their classmates in their specific culture. A lot of my students give presentations on their own heritage. A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was one of the best days that I can remember. She was proud to share her story—she had struggled with homesickness—and her classmates got a lesson in empathy. Now, my students simply prepare a slideshow and email it to me individually.

My older students (grades 11 and 12) aren’t even allowed a lunch break, and are expected to come to school, go to class for five and a half hours and then go home. Children in 9th and 10th grades have to face the front of the classroom while they eat lunch during their second period class. My students used to be able to eat in the halls or the cafeteria; now that’s forbidden. Younger children are expected to follow the “mask off, voices off” rule, and are made to wear their masks outside, where they can only play with other kids in their class. Of course, outside of school, kids are going to restaurants with their families and to each other’s houses, making the rules at school feel punitive and nonsensical.

They are anxious and depressed. Previously outgoing students are now terrified at the prospect of being singled out to stand in front of the class and speak. And many of my students seem to have found comfort behind their masks. They feel exposed when their peers can see their whole face.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-24T07:28:31+00:00

University language guide says 'grandfather,' 'housekeeping,' 'spirit animal' are 'problematic' words

A University of Washington language guide is calling everyday words used by Americans "problematic."

The University of Washington Information Technology department released an "inclusive language guide" that lists a number of "problematic words" that are "racist," "sexist," "ageist," or "homophobic."

According to the guide, words such as "grandfather," "housekeeping," "minority," "ninja," and "lame" are considered "problematic words."

[...]

"Housekeeping," is another "problematic" word that the guide recommends should be avoided by others working in the information technology industry because it can "feel gendered."

Phrases with "man" such as "manpower," "man hours," or "man-in-the-middle" is considered "not inclusive" and "thus sexist."

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-23T16:47:22+00:00

CDC Finally Admits Cloth Masks Were Always Political Theater

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-23T15:50:08+00:00

Wokery beyond parody as university slaps a TRIGGER warning on George Orwell's 1984 as it contains 'explicit material' which some students may find 'offensive and upsetting'

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.

Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book.

[...]

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘There’s a certain irony that students are now being issued trigger warnings before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it.

‘Too many of us – and nowhere is it more evident than our universities – have freely given up our rights to instead conform to a homogenised society governed by a liberal elite “protecting” us from ideas that they believe are too extreme for our sensibilities.’

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-23T01:54:36+00:00

Denver Elementary School To Hold BLM Event Teaching Kindergarteners, First Graders To Disrupt The ‘Nuclear Family,’ Recognize ‘Trans-Antagonistic Violence’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-22T20:48:34+00:00

"To Begin the Process of Decanonization"

It’s always fun to check up on what’s going on in academia. Here’s an announcement that showed up in the Bard College library newsletter (Bard tuition, $57,498 a year):

In keeping with campus-wide initiatives to ensure that Bard is a place of inclusion, equity, and diversity, the Stevenson Library is conducting a diversity audit of the entire print collection in an effort to begin the process of decanonizing the stacks. Three students, who are funded through the Office of Inclusive Excellence, have begun the process which we expect will take at least a year to complete. The students will be evaluating each book for representations of race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and ability.

So, to paraphrase this library announcement: three Bard students, chosen and paid for by the Office of Inclusive Excellence, are tasked with reviewing every book in the Bard library to evaluate how well it adheres to their moral standards. Facing outrage from library-fans, Bard quickly retracted and rewrote this announcement and clarified that the audit was more high-level analysis of each book and author.

Still I like to imagine these students marching through the stacks, pulling every spine, reading every page to examine for “representations of race, gender, religion, and ability.” Does Charles Dickens dehumanize someone with a limp somewhere? I bet he does. There’s some nasty ableism in Beowulf. Was Aristotle a feminist? This could take a while. Also, I think I kind of want to be on this committee.

[...]

There’s of course a whole new intellectual underpinning for all of this. Here’s the librarian Sofia Leung, who offers trainings and workshops on critical race theory in libraries:

“Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks,” she writes, asking her readers to pause and think about that in her essay, Whiteness as Collections. Or watch her talk with the University of Michigan on the “‘Ordinary’ Existence of White Supremacy in Libraries.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-22T19:34:39+00:00

Oregon School Launches LGBT Club For 4th And 5th Graders; No Parent Consent Needed

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-22T17:15:39+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] Congress's 1/6 Committee Claims Absolute Power as it Investigates Citizens With No Judicial Limits

In its ongoing attempt to investigate and gather information about private U.S. citizens, the Congressional 1/6 Committee is claiming virtually absolute powers that not even the FBI or other law enforcement agencies enjoy. Indeed, lawyers for the committee have been explicitly arguing that nothing proscribes or limits their authority to obtain data regarding whichever citizens they target and, even more radically, that the checks imposed on the FBI (such as the requirement to obtain judicial authorization for secret subpoenas) do not apply to the committee.

As we have previously reported and as civil liberties groups have warned, there are serious constitutional doubts about the existence of the committee itself. Under the Constitution and McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases interpreting it, the power to investigate crimes lies with the executive branch, supervised by the judiciary, and not with Congress. Congress does have the power to conduct investigations, but that power is limited to two narrow categories: 1) when doing so is designed to assist in its law-making duties (e.g., directing executives of oil companies to testify when considering new environmental laws) and 2) in order to exert oversight over the executive branch.

What Congress is barred from doing, as two McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases ruled, is exactly what the 1/6 committee is now doing: conducting a separate, parallel criminal investigation in order to uncover political crimes committed by private citizens. Such powers are dangerous precisely because Congress’s investigative powers are not subject to the same safeguards as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. And just as was true of the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that prompted those Supreme Court rulings, the 1/6 committee is not confining its invasive investigative activities to executive branch officials or even citizens who engaged in violence or other illegality on January 6, but instead is investigating anyone and everyone who exercised their Constitutional rights to express views about and organize protests over their belief that the 2020 presidential election contained fraud. Indeed, the committee's initial targets appear to be taken from the list of those who applied for protest permits in Washington: a perfectly legal, indeed constitutionally protected, act.

This abuse of power is not merely abstract. The Congressional 1/6 Committee has been secretly obtaining private information about American citizens en masse: telephone records, email logs, internet and browsing history, and banking transactions. And it has done so without any limitations or safeguards: no judicial oversight, no need for warrants, no legal limitations of any kind.

Indeed, the committee has been purposely attempting to prevent citizens who are the targets of their investigative orders to have any opportunity to contest the legality of this behavior in court. As we reported in October, the committee sent dozens if not hundreds of subpoenas to telecom companies demanding a wide range of email and other internet records, and — without any legal basis — requested that those companies not only turn over those documents but refrain from notifying their own customers of the request. If the companies were unwilling to comply with this "request,” then the committee requested that they either contact the committee directly or just disregard the request — in other words, the last thing they wanted was to enable one of their targets to learn that they were being investigated because that would enable them to seek a judicial ruling about the legality of the committee's actions.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-21T23:30:27+00:00

Western Australia says vaccine passports to access public spaces could last “years”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-21T21:23:15+00:00

Ahead of trial, Finnish MP facing jail after tweeting Bible verse says case a test of religious freedom

According to ADF International, a Christian legal group that is supporting her, Räsänen could be given a two-year prison sentence for the tweet, after the Finnish Prosecutor General filed criminal charges against her on April 29, 2020.

The MP could also face additional jail time if convicted of two other alleged offenses relating to her comments in a 2004 pamphlet and on a 2018 television program, the group said.

[...]

The 62-year-old MP, who was chairwoman of the Christian Democrats party from 2004 to 2015, is an active member of the Finnish Lutheran Church. But she questioned her church’s sponsorship of an LGBT pride event in 2019.

On June 17, 2019, she asked in a Twitter post how the sponsorship was compatible with the Bible, linking to a photograph of a biblical passage, Romans 1:24-27, on Instagram. She also posted the text and image on Facebook.

[...]

Juhana Pohjola, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, was also charged for publishing Räsänen’s 2004 pamphlet “Male and Female He Created Them.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-21T18:45:00+00:00

M&M's To Make 'Inclusive' Candy Featuring More Masculine Female Characters, Male Character With Anxiety

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-21T16:30:10+00:00

Penn professor faces termination for comments about Asian immigrants

The investigation is related to comments Wax (pictured) made in December on a podcast with Brown University Professor Glenn Loury (pictured). The topic for the show was “Contesting American Identity.” She posted follow-up comments on his Substack that also drew criticism.

Ted Ruger, the dean of Penn law school, released a statement saying Wax has “repeatedly made derogatory public statements about the characteristics, attitudes, and abilities of a majority of those who study, teach, and work [at Penn].”

[...]

“Taking her public behavior, prior complaints, and more recent complaints together, I have decided it is my responsibility as Dean to initiate the University procedure governing sanctions taken against a faculty member,” Ruger said. He previously said Wax had made comments using the “vernacular of white nationalism and white supremacy.”

Wax spoke with Professor Loury on his podcast “The Glenn Show” in late December saying the “influx of Asian elites” is “problematic.”

The Penn professor said many Asian immigrants are “more conformist to whatever the dominant ethos [is]” such as “wokeness.” She said a better policy is one that focuses on the “heartland population” of white and black citizens who are “the descendants of people that built this country.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-21T07:41:56+00:00

Mask Mandates Causing Over 350% Surge In Childhood Speech Delays.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-21T04:24:21+00:00

For MLK Day, Spice Company Says All Republicans 'Racist,' Want to 'Shoot a Black Person'

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-20T20:31:54+00:00

Microsoft launches ‘woke’ spelling tool

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-20T19:25:19+00:00

Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here. The Implicit Association test — the much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II. The same social psychologists, broadly speaking, also casually regard conservatism (in the guise of “system justification”) as a form of psychopathology.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-20T16:17:47+00:00

Canada: Law Could Lock Up Religious People For Five Years If They Resist Child’s ‘Transition,’ Gay Identity

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-20T15:51:13+00:00

Public Health’s Truth Problem: Throughout the pandemic, medical and scientific institutions have disseminated dubious advice, flawed studies, and even outright falsehoods.

Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have omitted uncomfortable truths, made misleading statements, and advanced demonstrably false assertions. In the information era, where what one says is easily accessible and anyone may read primary literature, these falsehoods will be increasingly recognized and severely damage the field’s credibility. No doubt, officials and organizations promulgating them had a range of motivations—including honorable ones, such as wanting to encourage salutary choices. Yet the subsequent loss of institutional trust may result in harm that far outweighs any short-term policy objectives.

Consider some messages the field has promoted to the public over the last two years and their shaky relationship with the truth.

Any mask is better than no mask. Last week, CDC director Rochelle Walensky asserted that “any mask is better than no mask.” This statement was factually incorrect when she said it. The only published cluster randomized trial of community cloth masking during Covid-19—performed in rural Bangladesh—found that surgical masks reduced the spread of Covid-19 among villages assigned to wear them, while cloth masks were no better than no masks at all regarding the primary endpoint of blood-test-confirmed Covid-19. In an umbrella review of masking that I coauthored, we found no good evidence to support cloth masking. Two days after Walensky’s statement, the CDC conceded that cloth masking was inferior to other masks. Notably, however, this is still misleading because cloth masking is not just less effective—it is entirely ineffective.

You should wear an N95 mask. Now the CDC has endorsed the use of N95 or equivalent masks in community settings, which it presents as the superior choice. Here, too, the evidence is misleading. First, a masking policy involves more than just the filtration properties of the material; it should consider both filtration and human behavior. Will people wear the mask appropriately? Will there be gaps around the nose? Will they cheat to scratch or drink? Will it cause discomfort and lead to discontinuation? Will they feel invulnerable and seek out higher risk settings? Simply put, the CDC does not know that advising the public to wear N95 is good policy. It could have run a cluster randomized trial, as was done for cloth and surgical masks in Bangladesh; it did not. In fact, the agency has run no randomized trials of masking this entire pandemic.

The virus changes, but our policies remain the same. Masking—even if it works—is not a permanent solution. It cannot work when you stop doing it. Recently, in a striking admission, Anthony Fauci confirmed not only that the virus will not be eliminated, but also that it will eventually infect us all. Even vaccination is not enough to entirely halt omicron breakthroughs. Thus, even if N95 masking delays the time to infection, we will eventually be infected. The question becomes: Is it worth it? We aren’t getting any younger, and at some point we will have to trust our immune systems (helped by vaccination) to fight off the virus. Is it worth it for a young person to delay exposure with an inconvenient and intrusive mask?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-20T04:37:50+00:00

Not One Corpse Has Been Found In The ‘Mass Grave’ Of Indigenous Children In Canada

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-19T20:49:10+00:00

The Rule of Midwits: A set of decentralized, ideologically driven selection mechanisms is propelling the decay and collapse of American institutions

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-19T19:14:18+00:00

We need more kink-shaming

If someone had told you a few years ago that in the future USA Today would publish an article expressing sympathy for paedophiles, you’d have thought them mad. This most middle-market of newspapers, landing on the doorsteps of decent folk up and down the Land of the Free every morning, shedding a tear of empathy for paedoes? Get real. Not going to happen. Ever. Well, welcome to 2022 folks, where wokeness has dragged us so far down the putrid well of moral relativism that now even family newspapers are wondering out loud if perhaps we have been a tad harsh on people who find children sexually attractive.

I wish I was making this up. But it’s there in black-and-white for all to see. ‘What the public keeps getting wrong about paedophilia’, said the USA Today headline. Stupid public! The article opens as follows: ‘Paedophilia is viewed as among the most horrifying social ills. But…’ But! That’s probably when the reporter should have stopped writing. It’s at that moment they should have shut down their Mac and ventured out for a long walk to ponder how their career brought them to a situation where they’re saying ‘But’ to the long-held belief that paedos are sickos. ‘But’, the piece says, ‘scientists who study the sexual disorder say it is also among the most misunderstood’. Apparently, boffins have discovered that you can be born a paedophile, just like you can be born gay. ‘Paedophilia is likely determined in the womb’, we’re told. How long before paedos start marching behind the banner ‘Born this way’? ‘Don’t hate me, I can’t help lusting after toddlers, I was born like this.’

So that’s one of the things the ignorant public gets wrong about paedophiles, apparently. You prejudiced idiots think paedos are perverts who create and indulge their perverted fantasies through illicit associations and the sharing of warped ideas and images, when in truth they were born with this predilection for kids, much as they were born with blue eyes or fair hair. ‘The evidence suggests it is inborn. It’s neurological’, one expert tells USA Today. And if it’s inborn, if it can’t be helped, then we shouldn’t be too tough on paedos, right? Yes, brace yourselves, USA Today hints at this very point. Perhaps it is time we started ‘destigmatising paedophilia’, it suggests.

There is ‘controversy over “destigmatising paedophilia”’, USA Today says – no shit! – but perhaps it’s time we had that conversation. It tells readers there is ‘growing support in the field’ for the proposal that paedophilia should be destigmatised and that paedos should now be referred to as ‘minor-attracted people’. Apparently this would encourage more paedophiles to seek help and therapy. At the moment they’re too ashamed to say, ‘I’m a paedophile, I need help’, so maybe we should allow them to say: ‘I’m a minor-attracted person. I was born like this. I would like some assistance to make sure I never act on my inborn sexual impulses.’

I’m going to put my neck on the line here and say that if you’re a paedophile, if you sexually desire children, then you should feel ashamed. You should be consumed by shame, in fact. There should be a stigma attached to paedophilia! I can’t believe it is necessary to write that sentence. A stigma is a mark of disgrace. And adults who fantasise about sex with children are a disgrace. They are a disgrace to themselves, to their families, and to society. The very notion of ‘destigmatising paedophilia’ speaks to the relativistic rot we now find ourselves in, where our willingness to make moral judgements has been so throttled by decades of anything-goes, everything-is-valid bullshit that we can’t even bring ourselves to say: ‘Paedophilia is bad. Paedophiles are not good people.’

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-19T16:08:51+00:00

Parents Group Claims Saint Paul Public Schools Indoctrinating Preschoolers On Transgender Issues

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-19T15:26:35+00:00

Defy the nonsense of indigenous land acknowledgments

How do you make the progressives on campus so “horrified” that they spring into action to defend their sacred ideology? Make an indigenous land acknowledgment that doesn’t match their view of history and watch them lose their minds. Let me describe how that happened to me.

[...]

As the university says on its web page, explaining its suggested version:

"This language template is spoken by UW leadership during events to acknowledge that our campus sits on occupied land. We recognize that this is a difficult, painful and long history, and we thank the original caretakers of this land."

This is a blatantly political statement. My office and classroom are on occupied land? Then why don’t we give it back to the rightful owners? And if we’re not going to give it back, then why bother acknowledging them? Activists often say that making such an acknowledgment is a way to counter the erasure from our collective memory of the awful treatment Native Americans have suffered at the hands of European settlers.

[...]

There’s just one problem. What if you don’t agree with them? After all, if we are making an “acknowledgment,” wouldn’t you want us to say what we really believe? They can’t possibly be asking us to affirm something that we believe is false, can they? I decided to test this by crafting my own version of the land acknowledgment:

"I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington."

I don’t claim that this represents ultimate truth, but it is an alternative viewpoint that I value based on John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. I included this on my course syllabus for the winter quarter, and the reaction has been extreme. Allen School officials declared this to be “offensive” and said that they were “horrified” and promised to have it removed immediately. Our director said that it creates “a toxic environment” in my course. I have written elsewhere about how the school censored my syllabus, apologized to my students, and created an alternate section of the course so that offended students could be taught by a different instructor.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-19T03:26:11+00:00

Hey, remember that "math is racist" nutcase from Seattle? Meet The Seattle Schools Woke Indoctrination Czar Who Married A Child Molester: America's schools are following the footsteps of Seattle on a quest for racial equity. But Seattle's efforts have been marked by animus, lies, and worsening results.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-18T18:09:57+00:00

Teacher alleges she was fired for not 'meowing' back at student who identifies as a cat

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-18T17:45:35+00:00

Our Language Has Gotten More Emotional. Why?

Language is getting less rational. That's the gist of new findings from researchers at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Indiana University. Their study—"The rise and fall of rationality in language," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America—found that the past 40 years have seen a shift from the language of rationality to the language of emotion.

"Whatever the drivers, our results suggest that the post-truth phenomenon is linked to a historical seesaw in the balance between our two fundamental modes of thinking: Reasoning versus intuition," study co-author Ingrid van de Leemput said.

The researchers looked at the language used in millions of English- and Spanish-language books published between 1850 and 2019, analyzing the use of 5,000 frequently used words. The rise of reasoning words like determine and conclusion and the decline of intuitive words like feel and believe could be seen starting around 1850 and lasting until the late 20th century. But over the past 40 years, this trend reversed, as words associated with intuition and emotion were used more frequently and words associated with fact-based arguments were used less frequently.

[...]

The phenomenon has only sped up in more recent years:

After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.

The accelerating shift since 2007 coincides with the rise of social media, which the authors offer as one potential explanation.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-18T16:14:34+00:00

UK government hires ad agency to convince the public they don’t need privacy

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-18T15:30:31+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] Perhaps Not Everything is Eugenics

One of the things I discovered early, in my little political niche, was the obsession with magic words. Leftists were forever throwing emotionally loaded terms around, like when the coffeehouse didn’t have raw sugar and they called it fascism. It’s not really hard to understand why: when you have no power, you resort to mysticism. You instill words with powers they can’t really have because you’re desperate to feel in control of something, anything. That’s what “eugenics” has become online; it’s not much different from your average depressed wine mom talking about Mercury being in retrograde. They all just want to feel a little bit of power.

Eugenic beliefs go back a very long time, but are often associated with the early 20th century. Eugenics entails belief in a program for orchestrated, top-down, and directed change of the human genome with the intent of creating a population with more “desirable” traits, such as intelligence or physical fitness, typically through sterilization of those believed to have “undesirable” trains and forced breeding of those whose traits the eugenicists want to spread. Eugenicists, famously the Nazis but more prototypically the early 1900s American Progressive movement, thought that society would be improved by eliminating undesirable traits from the collective genome and attempted to orchestrate that as policy. Unsurprisingly, these beliefs are all tied up with pseudoscientific racism and justifications for imperialism. It should go without saying that eugenics is bad.

However, not everything is eugenics. Some things that are not eugenics include

The observation that differences in our genomes have consequences for our personalities, our tendencies, our strengths, and our weaknesses

Attempts to quantify those relationships

Discussions of what policies and philosophies are correct in light of those relationships

The empirical observation that a given strain of a virus hospitalizes and kills at different rates than other strains

The empirical observation that people with different traits, such as preexisting conditions, suffer or die from a given disease at different rates

The empirical observation that a strain of a disease may be so transmissible as to overwhelm any of our attempts to stop its spread

People making good-faith calculations about what the appropriate level of restriction on behavior may be to contain such a disease, taking in light the unclear benefits of certain restrictions and the social, cultural, and economic costs of restrictions

The recognition that society constantly makes choices that increase likelihood of death in some domains, given complicated cost-benefit math, such as in permitting the use of automobiles, licensing the practice of cosmetic surgery, allowing the sale of alcohol, or not forcibly restricting people with infectious diseases into strict quarantines

Choosing to eat certain foods out of a concern for your health or appearance

Getting horny for one person and not for another

The final tweet is just factually wrong, for the record. “Passive eugenics” is not a thing because absent deliberate manipulation the genome still evolves. That’s pretty much the only thing the genome does, change over time! In fact, it slowly and fitfully evolves towards eliminating those traits that are not fit, that is, traits that lower the likelihood of living long enough to have offspring. The glory of being a human in the modern world is that we have medical science and all manner of other tools to ensure that people who would otherwise die at an early age are able to live and flourish and contribute to society and pass on their genes. But to talk of passive eugenics is to get religious, frankly. Are indigenous tribes that lack modern medicine practicing eugenics when their children die of disorders that would be treatable in the modern world? Who is the evil force to which we should ascribe the malevolent intent that is a prerequisite of eugenics? It’s a bizarre idea.

I think there are very big questions about changing the genome ahead of us, but they aren’t about trying to eliminate people with disabilities but to further exacerbate inequality. We are likely approaching an era of direct embryo editing for desired traits, and some are already selecting IVF embryos for height, health, or intelligence, albeit crudely. It’s very likely that within 50 years people will walk among us who are taller, healthier, smarter, and more attractive thanks to some form of gene editing. These tools could conceivably be used for a widespread eugenic purpose, but I doubt it. It’s far more likely that only the children of the rich will enjoy these advantages, at least at first, and the problem will not be any organized effort to eliminate those with traits perceived to be undesirable. The problem will be that the wealthy will have opened up an even bigger advantage on the rest of us, and they can pass privileges of talent down to their offspring more reliably than they already can. I will again ask that we start the conversation about this now, because people genetically engineered to be smart are coming.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-17T23:28:35+00:00

The Gender Gap Is Taking Us to Unexpected Places

In one of the most revealing studies in recent years, a 2016 survey of 137,456 full-time, first-year students at 184 colleges and universities in the United States, the U.C.L.A. Higher Education Research Institute found “the largest-ever gender gap in terms of political leanings: 41.1 percent of women, an all-time high, identified themselves as liberal or far left, compared to 28.9 percent of men.”

[...]

Take the argument made in the 2018 paper “The Suffragist Peace” by Joslyn N. Barnhart of the University of California-Santa Barbara, Allan Dafoe at the Center for the Governance of AI, Elizabeth N. Saunders of Georgetown and Robert F. Trager of U.C.L.A.:

Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women. At each stage of the escalatory ladder, women prefer more peaceful options. They are less apt to approve of the use of force and the striking of hard bargains internationally, and more apt to approve of substantial concessions to preserve peace. They impose higher audience costs because they are more approving of leaders who simply remain out of conflicts, but they are also more willing to see their leaders back down than engage in wars.

The increasing incorporation of women into “political decision-making over the last century,” Barnhart and her co-authors write, raises “the question of whether these changes have had effects on the conflict behavior of nations.”

[...]

There are a number of possible explanations, Chong said, including “stronger religious and moral attitudes among women; lesser political involvement resulting in weaker support for democratic norms; social psychological factors such as intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty which translate to intolerance for political and social nonconformity; and greater susceptibility to feelings of threats posed by unconventional ideas and groups.” Studies using moral foundations theory, Chong continued, have

found broad value differences between men and women. Women score higher on values defined by care, fairness, benevolence, and protecting the welfare of others, reflecting greater empathy and preference for cooperative social relations. In today’s debates over free speech and cancel culture, these social psychological and value differences between men and women are in line with surveys showing that women are more likely than men to regard hate speech as a form of violence rather than expression, to support laws against divisive hate speech, and to be skeptical that the right to free speech protects the disadvantaged more than the majority.

In addition, Chong said, “Women are also more likely than men to believe that colleges ought to protect students from exposure to controversial speakers whose ideas may create an inhospitable learning environment.”

The 19th Amendment was our nation's suicide note.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-17T22:53:35+00:00

A School Board Banned Ideology From Classrooms. The Schools Simply Ignored It.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-17T21:39:20+00:00

The Art of Omission: On a generational disagreement in France

The French newspaper of record (insofar as such a thing still exists), Le Monde, recently published an interview with the historian Pierre Birnbaum about his book on the rise of American anti-Semitism. America had largely escaped the curse of European anti-Semitism, said Birnbaum, with a few notable exceptions, such as the case of Leo Frank, the young Jewish businessman lynched in Georgia in 1915, and the numerus clausus operated by Ivy League universities against Jews until well into the 1950s. But with the rise of Trumpian populism and the proliferation of far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, open and active anti-Semitism has received a boost, he said, such that synagogues now must be protected in ways that a few years ago would have been unthinkable.

Comparing the situation in the United States with that of France, Birnbaum has this to say: “In the United States as in France, radical populist mobilisations, with their antisemitic prejudices, are on the rise, while in France above all the consequences of conflicts in the Middle East provoke numerous fatal antisemitic attacks.”

Is there not something conspicuously missing here? It is as if someone were to try to speak of anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s without mentioning Nazism or the Gulag in the Soviet Union without mentioning Communism.

The omission, symptomatic of ideological blindness or a misplaced delicacy, is even more remarkable because Birnbaum’s son, Jean, a journalist for Le Monde, has published eloquent books on the refusal of the French Left to recognize the religious element in Islamist terrorism, notably A Religious Silence: The Left in the Face of Jihadism and The Religion of the Weak: What Jihadism Says about Us.

Generational disagreement takes more than one form.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-17T17:35:44+00:00

VIRGINIA: Gender-Fluid School Bathroom Rapist Takes Third Victim, Court Proceedings Allege

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-17T16:28:08+00:00

How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics: I’ve never felt more alienated from the liberal Democratic circles I usually call home.

By January 2021, with my son increasingly disengaged as Zoom school dragged on and no hope of an imminent return to school in Oakland, I promised him I wouldn’t make him go through another year like this. I knew that he desperately needed to learn alongside other kids.

I had until then resisted my dad’s suggestion that I consider sending him to private school. I was a proud alumna of San Francisco public schools and planned for my kids to attend Oakland public schools, despite their reputation for behavioral and academic problems. As an interracial, bilingual/bicultural family, what we wanted was for our son to attend a dual-language immersion program with plenty of other kids of color. My family was also in no way able to pay for private school.

But I began to fear that even in-person school in fall 2021 was at risk because of the impossible demands of the teachers union (that schools remain fully remote until there were “near-zero” Covid cases in Oakland) and apathy of the school board and district; even after teachers were prioritized for vaccination, there was no urgency to get kids back to the classroom. My dad offered to help pay for private school, and we applied. In March we were notified that my son was admitted to a private dual-language immersion school, and that we had been granted a 75 percent scholarship. There was still no deal in place between Oakland’s school district and the union to return to in-person school. I had lost all faith in the decision-makers to do what was best for my kid. So I made the only logical decision.

Even then, I feared what fellow parents might think of me. I’m well aware of the stereotypes of white parents choosing the private-school option when the going gets tough at public schools. I told myself that prioritizing being a “good leftist” at the expense of my son’s well-being wasn’t good parenting, but as a red-diaper baby myself, the white guilt dies hard. My own parents had sent me to an elementary school with a huge majority of Black and Pacific Islander students; while many might assume the white parents documented in the New York Times podcast “Nice White Parents” were pioneers, my parents reverse-integrated me into a “failing” school 40 years ago. Sending my kid to private school was accompanied by a lot of angst.

My fears were amplified by the backlash I and other school reopening advocates had faced throughout the school year, particularly on social media. There were a range of insults lobbed at us: We were bad parents who didn’t care about our own kids or teachers dying, we only wanted our babysitters back and our frustrations about school closures were an example of “white supremacy.” Los Angeles teachers union head Cecily Myart-Cruz stated that reopening schools was “a recipe for propagating structural racism.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-17T07:08:13+00:00

Trans ideology is distorting the training of America’s doctors

More evidence followed. An endocrinologist told a class that females on testosterone had a similar risk of heart attack to males (they have a much higher risk). Debate about all this was apparently off-limits. How has trans ideology made its way into medical schools?

Professional bodies, including the American Academy of Paediatrics, have endorsed “gender-affirmative” care, which accepts patients’ self-diagnosis that they are trans. This can mean the prescription of puberty blockers for children as young as nine. Trans medicine is not a core part of medical schools’ curriculums. But an academic paediatrician (who did not want her name, institution or state to appear in this story) says that all medical students understand that they are expected to follow the affirmation model “uncritically and unquestioningly”. For most doctors that will mean referring a patient to a gender clinic, some of which prescribe blockers or cross-sex hormones on a first visit. “We treat infections with antibiotics, no questions asked—it is just exactly like that,” she says.

Affirmative care has done irreversible harm to some young people’s bodies. This has become especially clear from the experience of “detransitioners” who regret taking hormones or having their breasts or genitals removed. Puberty blockers also prevent bones from developing properly; when combined with cross-sex hormones they can lead to infertility and inability to have an orgasm. A 26-year-old student at a medical school in Florida who plans to become a paediatrician is shocked by what she has not been taught about these treatments. “With other diseases and treatments we are taught in such depth about every possible side-effect,” she says.

Medical-school academics suggest two reasons for all this. One (reflected in the fact that none wanted their names published) is fear. Some trans-rights activists bully anyone who expresses concerns publicly. The other is ignorance. A paediatrician who teaches at a medical school in Florida says once doctors have finished their training, many pay scant attention to new medical research but rely on the media for information. In America there has been little coverage of the dangers of blockers or the woes of detransitioners.

Last year Marci Bowers, a surgeon (and trans woman) who performs vaginoplasties and phalloplasties, said she no longer approved of the use of puberty blockers because they left surgeons with too little genital material to work with and led to a loss of sexual function. This, extraordinarily, appeared to surprise some gender-clinic medics. Ignoring the difference between biological sex and gender at medical school has other risks. Several diseases present differently in men and women or are more common in one sex than the other. A doctor who treats a trans man, say, as a man might miss something important.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-17T00:11:31+00:00

'It’s time for museums to take critical race theory seriously'

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-16T21:06:01+00:00

UK criminologist investigated over tweets saying trans women shouldn’t share prison cells with women

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-16T18:20:32+00:00

Settlement: California agrees to ditch ‘Aztec chant’ from curriculum

The new curriculum would have had students praying to the Aztec dieties Tezkatlipoka, Quetzalcoatl, Huizilopochtli and Xipe Totec.

[...]

The co-chair of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, Tolteka Cuauhtin (left), had said the chants were to “regenerate indigenous spiritual traditions” as Christians had committed “theocide” to “oppress marginalized groups.”

The Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit in September challenging the chants on behalf of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation and three parents. Special Counsel Paul Jonna said “The Aztecs regularly performed gruesome and horrific acts for the sole purpose of pacifying and appeasing the very beings that the prayers from the curriculum invoke.”

Jonna added “Any form of prayer and glorification of these bloodthirsty beings in whose name horrible atrocities were performed is repulsive to any reasonably informed observer.” He also noted the California and U.S. constitutions “prohibit prayer in public schools – particularly prayers drafted by public officials.”

Early Saturday morning, Jonna (below, right) posted on his Twitter account that California had agreed to settle the suit, and to pay $100,000 towards legal expenses.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-15T20:14:41+00:00

Germany’s Lutheran Church is spearheading an assault on Christian values: Germany’s Lutheran Church focuses on the environment, LGBTQ, diversity, gender, and climate, but has very little to do with Jesus Christ

The church’s Go for Gender Justice web page calls for “overcoming devaluation and violence, recognizing diversity and distributing work, power and influence fairly,” but it nowhere rallies believers to help victims of Germany’s woefully managed COVID-19 response, to look after the elderly or to help those who are freezing in their homes due to the skyrocketing costs of Germany’s ideologically-driven green transition.

Instead, the EKD’s new year message is that “human rights apply regardless of gender and sexual identity.” Just to make their manifesto somewhat distinguishable from other secular human rights NGOs’ campaigns, on their website, they go on to call misogyny a sin and state that we are called by God to repent for “harms done to queer people…”

Journalist Josef Kraus has remarked in his article for Tichys Einblick that one has to worry about a “church” that, during one of the greatest health’s crises of our times, does nothing that resembles Christian charity. The many sick, suffering, and lonely people who mourn relatives are left for the most part alone.

Kraus also points out that the church leadership had bowed to the often half-baked dictates and restrictions of freedom promoted by politicians, even the prohibition of church services, without ever questioning them. He calls the EKD a “government-owned, lavishly tax funded, moralizing and politicizing NGO”. He accuses its leader of submitting to gender ideology, while forgetting that gender ideology is in fact just “pink cultural Marxism” that seemingly rallies for diversity, but in reality aims to level all differences between individuals and groups.

Kraus is also right in pointing out that the German Evangelical Church has in recent years started to resemble a state-funded sect, and therefore their tax-free charity status should be reviewed.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-15T18:36:10+00:00

National School Board Association ‘At Risk Of Total Collapse’ Following Letter Comparing Parents To ‘Domestic Terrorists’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-15T13:58:06+00:00

The Fallacy of Equal Knowledge: If we had the same information, we’d all agree—right?

Given the timing of the course and the events of recent months, the death of George Floyd was on many people’s minds. Over the course of our discussion, I asked the class if they thought a reasonable person could view his killing solely through the lens of bad policing, not race. The poll I conducted suggested that about 60 percent said yes, they thought that this was possible.

I was surprised by their openness to this idea. But as the discussion unfolded, it became clear that several people in that group of 60 percent had something else in mind. Many assumed that an otherwise reasonable person could only hold this view if they didn’t yet understand that the reality of racism made it important—even necessary—to see Floyd’s death through a racial lens. This point is controversial, even within the black community, but the students assumed that, once informed, such a person would change his mind.

I ran the poll again. This time, I asked: could a reasonable person, with the same information you have, perceive the killing of George Floyd solely through the lens of bad policing and be unsure about whether it should also be seen through the lens of race? This time, the share of students answering yes dropped to 30 percent.

Assuming someone disagrees with a particular political position or claim because they’re ignorant is a challenge I encounter frequently. By way of context, much of my job involves facilitating conversations about topics that make people uncomfortable. The fallacy of equal knowledge tends to emerge among people used to thinking in a specific way about hot-button political topics. When they consider a view such as opposition to affirmative action, the idea that gender-dysphoric children may be influenced by peers, or even opposition to Covid mandates, they suggest that ignorance could explain such thinking.

However, when treated as a default supposition, this outlook can stand in the way of constructive engagement. It is grounded in the often-false assumption that what divides people on controversial social issues is misinformation. It then creates the idea that giving those with opposing views more or better information must be the solution.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-14T17:33:21+00:00

As of January 1st 2022 in Washington it is now legal for children as young as 13 to get SRS without parental consent but still illegal for them to use a tanning booth until 18.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-14T16:16:07+00:00

Abortionists could receive $20 million in scholarships and loan forgiveness under Newsom’s latest budget

The idea came from a December 2021 report from the state’s “Future of Abortion Council.”

The Golden State must “[i]mprove the education pipeline by creating a California Reproductive Scholarship Corps, open to those training as physicians, nurse practitioners, certified nurse-midwives, physician assistants, and in other health care professions with diverse and/or rural backgrounds dedicated to providing abortion care in underserved areas in California,” the report said.

It proposed a repayment of loans to “increase retention and recruitment of clinicians who provide abortion by allocating funds for health care workforce programs.”

“This is part of California’s plan to become a ‘sanctuary’ state for abortions, meaning it will still permit abortions regardless of federal law,” Insider reported.

A Students for Life of America spokesperson called the proposal “macabre.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-14T01:09:07+00:00

The Idiocy of ‘Shared Oppression’: It’s not true, and betrays the reality of historical suffering

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-14T00:16:26+00:00

Vladimir Zhirinovsky says America will fall as Whites become a persecuted minority

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-13T23:35:12+00:00

Increment the "BuT tHaT nEvEr HaPpEnS!" counter: 4 Male Inmates Secretly Moved to a Women’s Prison; One in Isolation After Raping Women

Violent men were secreted into a women’s prison in Illinois over recent months without public notice while and after a District Court decided state prisons should not automatically house inmates on the basis of sex indicators, such as genitalia and physical stature. One of the men had to be placed into isolation after an investigation determined he raped several of the women after stopping his hormone use.

[...]

The male inmates were “not well received” at the women’s prison: “Many women in IDOC’s care have been exposed to domestic, physical, or emotional violence,” court papers show Dr William Puga, the IDOC Chief of Psychiatry, as having reported, and are therefore “scared” of the male transferees. Of the two men who had already been transferred into the women’s prison at the time of Dr Puga’s report, one was found to have raped several incarcerated women.

[...]

Court documents referenced in Monroe v Baldwin show Dr Puga “received information that Monroe threatened staff and other inmates” at the women’s prison. Monroe, who had intact male genitalia, “stopped taking her hormones and was sexually active.” In addition, “women at the facility filed complaints against Monroe under the Prison Rape Elimination Act [PREA]; some were false but many were legitimate.” One of the women said Monroe subdued and raped her the day they became cellmates. According to her lawsuit against the prison, staff forced her to recant the rape allegation and punished for filing a false complaint under the PREA.

[...]

Sora Kuykendall, a registered sex offender who legally retains his birth name of Jordan Kuykendall, fatally stabbed his 17-year-old girlfriend in the neck and torso. Erin Michelle Schneider, the high schooler, had ended her relationship with 20-year-old Kuykendall and filed an emergency order of protection following years of physical abuse. Kuykendall was captured after crashing head-on with another vehicle while fleeing the scene.

[...]

Lydia Helena Vision, a registered sex offender named Eric Padilla at birth and under the law, approached three black men in 2003 as they walked by a housing project. In an incident presumed to be racially motivated, the Mexican-born man deliberately bumped into Frenaz D. Lyles, age 18, and demanded an apology before stabbing him.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-13T22:24:15+00:00

Waukesha Parade Attack Suspect Kept Driving With Head Out Window As Victim’s Body Blocked Windshield

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-13T21:12:39+00:00

Racial Demographics Influence School Choices for White, Asian and Latino Parents, Finds Study of NYC School Preferences

* Writing up a research proposal to determine if water is wet *

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-13T20:38:19+00:00

China’s Sissy Problem—and Ours

It’s important to make clear that this piece is not an attack on homosexual men; it’s an attack on sissies. There is a difference between the two. In his latest special, Sorry, Louis CK finished the show with a joke about American men. Today, according to Louis, gay men carry themselves with an air of authority, purpose, and meaning. They keep themselves in good shape and dress appropriately. Straight men, on the other hand, have become notably weaker, both physically and mentally; many of them lack the characteristics that we would have associated with previous generations of men. They are sloppy, weak-willed, and overly apologetic. They dress terribly. At the end of the joke, which is much funnier than I just made it sound, the audience applauded and let out a collective roar. Why? Because Louis’s joke resonated. He articulately expressed what so many of his fans were already thinking. The United States, too, has a crisis of masculinity—one even worse, perhaps, than China’s.

For generations, the sissy has been a frowned-upon character in American life. Only recently it has become a respected, even institutionalized lifestyle. California’s Silicon-Valley stereotype of the “soy boy”, a demasculinized consumer of a meatless, synthetic diet, is now national. ( Senator Ted Cruz held a recent rally in Texas where he warned Democrats wanted to “turn the state blue.” If they have their way, he cried, Texas would soon resemble California, swimming in a sea of “tofu and silicon and dyed hair.” There is a commonly-cited association between the consumption of soy products and elevated estrogen levels; basically, there are compounds found in soy that are biochemically similar to estrogen, and while the science isn’t totally in yet, many men online abjure soy consumption as an impairment of testicular fortitude. Good bye Peyton Manning, hello Patton Oswalt.

[...]

However, across the country, according to a Pew Research Center study, rates of children living in single-parent households have never been higher. In fact, the U.S. now boasts the highest rate of children living in single-parent households in the world. As the study notes, “3% of children in China, 4% of children in Nigeria, and 5% of children in India live in single-parent households.” In the U.S., meanwhile, the rate is a staggering 23 percent. At least 80 percent of the country’s single-parent homes are headed by single mothers.

Absolutely nothing good comes from father absence—which,.according to a report published by the U.S. Department of Justice, “has a strong and significant effect on both female and male levels of violence,” including “homicide and robbery.” Children look to their fathers to lay down the rules and enforce them, and learn to do so through imitationtion

To compound matters, fewer young men are entering the labor force. Bloomberg’s Peter McCoy notes that to be out of the labor force means one does not have a job and is “not actively seeking one.” What are America’s young men doing instead? Playing video games. A paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research argues that younger men, “ages 21 to 30, exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years than older men or women.” Since 2004, they continue, “time-use data show that younger men distinctly shifted their leisure to video gaming and other recreational computer activities. We propose a framework to answer whether improved leisure technology played a role in reducing younger men’s labor supply.” Maybe this is why China, the country orchestrating the “attack” on sissy men, is simultaneously cracking down on video games.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-13T20:05:42+00:00

Nation’s Largest Teachers Union Wrote A Letter Calling On Social Media Companies To Restrict ‘Propaganda’ About Critical Race Theory

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-13T19:19:49+00:00

Whole Foods says its First Amendment rights will be violated if it's forced to allow employees to wear Black Lives Matter insignia

Whole Foods claimed in a court filing that the US was attempting to violate its constitutional rights by forcing it to allow its employees to wear Black Lives Matter insignia on the job.

Lawyers for the Amazon-owned grocery chain made the claim in a December 17 filing responding to the National Labor Relations Board's claims that Whole Foods illegally barred employees from wearing Black Lives Matter masks at work.

Bloomberg, which was the first to report on the filing, obtained the document through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In the filing, seen by Insider, Whole Foods accused the NLRB's general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, of attempting to violate the company's First Amendment rights by trying to "compel" speech.

"By singling out the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' the General Counsel is impermissibly favoring, and requiring that WFM favor, certain expressions of political speech over others in its retail grocery stores," the filing said, referring to Whole Foods Market.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-13T18:13:02+00:00

COVID disinformation updates:

Biden Calls For Social Media Censorship On Virus: ‘Deal With The Misinformation And Disinformation’
A group of 270 doctors signed an open letter calling on Spotify, which has exclusive rights to air Joe Rogan’s podcast, to take action against “misinformation” on the platform and increase censorship.
House Republicans Release Text of Redacted Fauci Emails on Covid Origins: NIH leaders advised scientists not to “mention a lab origin as that will just add fuel to the conspiracists,” one researcher told The Intercept.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-13T16:15:26+00:00

Is the Viking next to go? WWU eyes ditching Viking mascot due to colonialism

Western Washington University may scrap its Viking mascot and is currently conducting an investigation to help make a final decision on the issue.

[...]

“The Task Force was concerned about the harm caused by asking all members of the Western community to identify with a figure that is potentially exclusive on the basis of both ethnicity and gender,” the taskforce stated in its report.

“Furthermore, the Task Force found names idolizing conquest as out of line with the university’s contemporary values around honoring local Indigenous communities. Task Force members who did not recommend renaming in this report proposed the building name be evaluated alongside the mascot by a separate committee.”

Trustees directed the university “to conduct a more thorough assessment of the Viking name in the broader context of the University mascot,” the December news release states.

[...]

This is not the first time that a mascot change at WWU has been raised. In 2015, an effort to get it scrapped claimed the Viking mascot is “hyper-masculine” and “aggressive.”

Hyper-masculinity and aggression? In sports!? Oh my, get the fainting couch!

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-13T04:32:11+00:00

* shuffles deck * ... Hockey Diversity Alliance unveils #TapeOutHate anti-racism campaign

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-12T23:02:22+00:00

NY Republicans sue to block City Council measure allowing non-citizens to vote

A group of New York Republicans filed a lawsuit Monday to block a new law that will soon allow about 800,000 non-citizens to vote in local elections.

The suit, filed in Staten Island Supreme Court, asks a judge to issue an injunction that prevents the city Board of Elections and the mayor from “implementing the law in any respect” due to its unconstitutionality.

“The law is clear and the ethics are even clearer: we shouldn’t be allowing citizens of other nations to vote in our elections, full stop. We are only two weeks into the Adams Administration and he is already kowtowing to the radical City Council,” New York Republican Party Chairman Nick Langworthy, a plaintiff in the suit, said in a statement.

“This lawsuit is the only thing that will stop them from their ultimate goal of eradicating all the lines between citizens and non-citizens,” he said.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), who represents Staten Island and Brooklyn, called the new measure “careless,” claiming it “dilutes” perspectives of US citizens.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-12T22:11:16+00:00

‘If not us, then who?’: inside the landmark push for reparations for Black Californians

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-12T17:41:59+00:00

Hollywood's New Rules: The old boys club is dead. But a new one—with its own litmus tests and landmines—is rapidly replacing it. 'This is all going to end in a giant class-action lawsuit.'

To help producers meet the new standards, the filmmaker Ava DuVernay—who was recently added to Forbes’ list of “The Most Powerful Women in Entertainment” along with Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift—last year created ARRAY Crew, a database of women, people of color, and others from underrepresented groups who work on day-to-day production: line producers, camera operators, art directors, sound mixers and so on. The Hollywood Reporter declared that ARRAY Crew has “fundamentally changed how Hollywood productions will be staffed going forward.”

More than 900 productions, including “Yellowstone” and “Mare of Easttown,” have used ARRAY Crew, said Jeffrey Tobler, the chief marketing officer of ARRAY, DuVernay’s production company. Privately, directors and writers voiced irritation with DuVernay, who, they said, had exploited the “post-George Floyd moment.” But no one dared to criticize her openly. “I’m not crazy,” one screenwriter said.

Of course, Hollywood, like many industries, does have a clubiness about it. And pretty much everyone on the inside insists it should open up to those who had, for decades, been kept out. But the heavy-handed mandates, the databases, the shifting culture—in which pretty much all white men were assumed to have gotten their jobs because they had the right tennis buddies or ZIP code or skin color—raised the possibility of a new kind of clubiness. When asked whether ARRAY Crew was just replacing one kind of exclusion with another, Tobler sidestepped the question, saying the organization had sought to “amplify underrepresented professionals.”

But the result has not just been a demographic change. It has been an ideological and cultural transformation. We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production.

How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. “Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer said. Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-12T16:53:58+00:00

The Forever Culture War: As Republicans lurch leftward on economics and reposition themselves as the protectors of the working class, every dispute becomes a matter of identity—to the detriment of American politics.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-12T15:47:56+00:00

U. Tennessee to launch CRT center, require professors commit to DEI for tenure

A slate of diversity plans filed by individual schools within the University of Tennessee-Knoxville will require some professors to commit to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices to gain tenure, create a new critical race center on campus, and embed diversity-based curricula throughout the university, according to plans obtained by The College Fix.

The College Fix obtained the plans from 20 different academic departments and administrative divisions, which together totaled 322 new pages of diversity regulations, requirements and goals to improve equity on campus. The plan submitted by the Division of Diversity and Engagement vows to partner with the Critical Race Collective to create a center to “enhance research and scholarship capacity in this area of study and identify current racist policies and practices on campus.”

The College of Law submitted an expansive plan, including provisions to create bylaws “that require a commitment to diversity for faculty tenure and advancement.”

The law school also plans to embed diversity and inclusion “throughout the existing curriculum” by spring 2022 as well as launch a bias reporting system separate from the one maintained by the school. It will also create a certificate program in diversity and inclusion within the college.

Diversity work as a condition of advancement and tenure status for professors was also included in plans submitted by the School of Engineering and School of Social Work.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-12T04:09:54+00:00

A Red State Just Spent Money For Handicapped Pre-Schoolers On CRT Training: Teachers should help preschoolers with "building racial identity."

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-11T18:33:41+00:00

COVID Stuff from Matrix:

[Rod Dreher] DARPA Covid Whistleblower’s Blockbuster Claim

According to alleged leaked documents prepared for the Pentagon’s Inspector General, DARPA rejected a 2018 proposal by the EcoHealth Alliance to do research on bat-borne coronavirus, in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because in DARPA’s judgment, it was too close to forbidden “gain of function” research. But Dr. Anthony Fauci later green-lighted the research, despite later denying under oath that he did.

Here’s a link to the leaked documents.

Project Veritas contacted the Marine Corps major who prepared the report to ask him to verify it. He declined to talk about the documents, but he did say this:

I offer a brief comment to those that desire answers and to those that withhold them:

To those seeking answers, I offer encouragement. There are good people striving for the truth, working together in and out of government, and they succeed.

To those that withhold, I pray for you. Find the moral courage to come forward. Don't let a lie be our legacy to posterity.

The documents also appear to confirm that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for Covid infection. If this is true, and these documents are authentic, it raises the obvious question: why did the US Government work to suppress this knowledge and these treatments?

Dr. Fauci will be questioned today at a Congressional hearing. It will be interesting to hear what he has to say about all this. If these documents are fake, then Maj. Joseph Murphy will have destroyed his military career for the sake of a hoax. How likely is that? If their allegations prove true, though, then the senior US public health scientist signed off on the project that, mismanaged by the Wuhan lab, infected the world with a virus bioengineered by the Americans and the Chinese — and then lied about it.

CDC says 'over 75 percent' of COVID deaths were in those with 'at least 4 comorbidities'

Speaking to Good Morning America, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky confirmed that "the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so these are people who were unwell to begin with."

These comments come as questions are being raised about the data collected and parsed by the CDC, with concerns about the gap between those who died with COVID as opposed to those who died because of COVID. There have been concerns that those who died from other causes, but also had COVID at the time of death, have had their deaths attributed to COVID.

"I want to ask you about those encouraging headlines that we're talking about this morning," the host asked. "This new study showing just how well vaccines are working to prevent severe illness. Given that, is it time to start rethinking how we're living with this virus? But it's potentially here to stay?"

"The overwhelming number of deaths over 75 percent occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities," Walensky said. "So really these are people who were unwell to begin with. And yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron. This means not only just to get your primary series but to get your booster series. And yes, we're really encouraged by these results." She was referring to the percentage of vaccinated people that continue to die from COVID.

Walensky was citing a CDC study released on Friday that found that so-called breakthrough coronavirus deaths among those who are vaccinated were more likely to happen in those with 4 or more comorbidities, Fox News reported. According to CDC data, 52 percent of COVID deaths in the US were COVID plus pneumonia.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-11T17:02:17+00:00

‘Minority privilege’ now more common amid the growing ‘war on whiteness’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-11T15:58:17+00:00

The Costs of Closure: Chicago’s school shutdowns will contribute to its growing child-abuse problems.

As Chicago schools closed again this week, thanks to a powerful teachers’ union that doesn’t think its members should have to work in-person, everyone knows the children are suffering. It is not uncommon to read stories now of kids falling behind academically or experiencing mental-health crises. A recent column by David Leonhardt in the New York Times lays out many of the terrible consequences of school shutdowns—including a spike in suicide attempts—that others have been warning about since early 2020. Unfortunately, Leonhardt failed to note the children suffering abuse and neglect because of school shutdowns.

There are two major problems for kids. First, we know school shutdowns have intensified many of the issues that cause child abuse and neglect. The fact that there were over 100,000 overdose deaths in 2021 tells us not only that many children found themselves left without two parents, or even one; it also tells us that many more adults were abusing drugs, making it more likely that their children would not be properly fed, clothed, or cared for. Substance abuse drives child-welfare problems in this country, and increased stress among those prone to such abuse is a disaster for kids.

The second problem is that, when kids are stuck at home, the signs of abuse and neglect are more likely to go unnoticed by other adults like teachers, who, because they are mandated reporters, are responsible for about a fifth of all reports to child services. Chicago officials are aware of the problem. Between January and May of 2020, calls to the statewide hotline in Illinois decreased by 44 percent. During the first week of May 2020, the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) received 42 percent fewer new reports than during the first week of May 2019. New York saw its numbers drop by a similar amount during that period.

And now the results are in. According to “Impact of ‘Stay-at-Home’ Orders on Non-Accidental Trauma: A Multi-Institutional Study,” presented last fall at the virtual American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference, the number of children experiencing severe abuse tripled during lockdowns. The report looked at data from nine pediatric trauma centers from March 2020 to September 2020 and compared it with data from the same span in the three years prior. Among children aged five and older, the number of abuse victims reached 103, up from an average of 36 before the pandemic. These may seem like small numbers, but they represent only the most extreme cases that led to hospital visits.

The situation in Chicago wasn’t great to begin with. After the deaths in quick succession of three children with cases well-known to DCFS, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker requested a review of the department’s policies in 2019. The University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall research center found a system, as the Associated Press noted, in which there is “profound failure to communicate within the department; overburdened staffers; staffers so convinced that prosecutors wouldn’t agree with requests to remove children from homes that they didn’t bother to ask; and cases in which evidence and suspicions of abuse or neglect were brushed aside.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-11T02:08:38+00:00

The Crisis of Moral Legitimacy: Universities are training students not to see validity in alternative worldviews

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-10T18:38:25+00:00

UK: Parish councillor gets police visit for posting “trans rights are very, very boring”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-10T18:06:27+00:00

UW administrator goes to war over Seattle professor’s hilarious land acknowledgment joke

Left-wing administrator Magdalena Balazinska (she/her/hers) censored the syllabus of a professor at the University of Washington. She claims it’s so offensive that she had to censor it. But that’s not all.

Award-winning computer science professor Stuart Reges rejects the UW’s far-left political agenda. And he used his land acknowledgment to mock the meaningless virtue signal.

“I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington,” Reges wrote.

Balazinska emailed students to apologize for the “offensive” land acknowledgment and said it was removed from the syllabus.

She claimed the professor’s land acknowledgment note was “offensive” because it did not properly pretend to be offended by teaching on land the administration pretends was stolen from Native Americans. She even went so far as to offer a course to compete with the course offered by Reges.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-10T16:53:19+00:00

* shuffles deck * .... Are Bored Apes racist? There's growing controversy around the online art

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-10T16:08:42+00:00

‘I am so proud to be a Christian’ – UK court sides with Catholic nurse who faced discrimination over wearing a cross: The Employment Tribunal has ruled in favor of nurse Mary Onuoha who was a victim of harassment and discrimination by her hospital which forbade her to wear a cross and later fired her

Mary Onuoha worked at the surgery department at Croydon University Hospital in London. She told a court that once a member of the hospital’s board had stopped a patient’s surgery to reprimand her for wearing a cross. At the same time, an anesthesiologist was wearing a necklace and earrings. The hospital had also permitted for other employees to wear jewelry or other religious symbols (turbans or hijabs) or simply keychains.

The tribunal rejected the hospital’s claims that the cross’s ban was due to hygiene requirements. It accepted the opinion of a theologist, who pointed out that wearing a cross was a centuries’ long expression of faith and public expression of faith was an element of the Bible’s teachings.

“I don’t think I could do my job without the cross. I draw my strength from looking at the cross,” the nurse said.

“I am so proud to be a Christian, and I am proud to wear my cross. It’s part of my life, its part of me and I am happy to have it on,” she added.

Similar issues concerning the violation of religious freedom in the form of bans on wearing crosses have been reported in several workplaces in the UK for years. In 2010, the Archbishop of Canterbury had even spoken out about the issue.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-10T06:09:19+00:00

Fordham bans students from drinking water in buildings because .03 percent of school has COVID

Fordham University will slow the spread of COVID by banning students from drinking water out of their own bottles, according to the latest policy update.

In addition to increased testing after a “spike in cases” of the omicron variant, which afflicts people with runny noses and coughs, the Catholic university will stomp out coronavirus with a few more restrictions, the campus paper reported.

The Observer reported:

Fordham also updated its policies for eating and drinking in spaces on campus. Eating or drinking will be prohibited at athletic events until further notice. Food and drink are not allowed in classrooms and instructional spaces such as libraries or laboratories. Throughout the month of January, eating and drinking will also not be permitted at any events or meetings. Additionally, the university canceled all indoor events scheduled for January where food or beverages were to be served.

The student body is more than 99 percent vaccinated as of September, and “no unvaccinated individuals [are] allowed on campus except for individuals with official accommodations or those still completing their vaccination series.”

[...]

“I’m glad they’re taking it seriously, but I’m not sure how realistic it is to expect that students don’t drink water in libraries,” Charles Friedlander told the campus paper. “Personally, I do really prefer in-person classes, but it feels like they should’ve just made the first two weeks or so online – especially if they’re expecting people to get boosters and regular testing.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-10T04:14:39+00:00

Vaccinated Women Are Now Lying About Their Vax Status As More Men See Them As Infertility Risk

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-10T00:04:52+00:00

IRONY: SCOTUS Went Virtual After Triple Vaxxed Lawyer Caught COVID While Arguing Over Vax Mandate

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-09T23:17:37+00:00

Hungary’s top court gives green light to child-protection law referendum: The left never wanted a referendum in Hungary asking the public whether it wants LGBT education in their children’s schools, but Hungary’s top court has removed the last roadblock to put the question to a nationwide vote

Through the child protection act introduced by Viktor Orbán’s government, there are now tougher penalties for child-abuse and radical LGBTQ propaganda is banned from schools, kindergartens and television programs meant for kids. Since the law was introduced, it has been a subject to vicious attacks from Hungary’s left-wing opposition, from EU institutions and gender activist NGOs.

Despite the pushback from the left, Hungary’s government has deemed the legislation necessary, pointing to the radical gender activists who have begun targeting Hungary’s educational institutions with “sensitizing” programs without the consent of parents, which is the same agenda already seen in the Western European and U.S. school system As a result, the Hungarian government proposed a referendum regarding the legislation, where every citizen will have the chance to express their opinion, which could lead to either the withdrawal of the law in case of a negative outcome, or in the opposite case, its democratic legitimization.

However, instead of welcoming the opportunity for the child protection act’s reversal via a referendum, the opponents of the law had attacked the decision at Hungary’s Constitutional Court. It is rather telling that the person or persons who have attacked the referendum wished to remain anonymous, which most probably means that the initiative can be traced back to Hungary’s left-wing opposition, rather than to radical NGOs which revel in publicity and controversy. The petitioner’s objection was that the questions put to voters during the proposed referendum have not been properly legally examined.

[...]

The problem for Hungary’s left-wing opposition is that in the present case, there is a tacit understanding that the government’s child-protection law has overwhelming public support. According to a recent opinion poll, 92 percent of Hungarians believe that pedophile crimes should get tougher sentences, and 60 percent believe that gender propaganda directed towards children should be restricted. Only 33 percent believe that previous legislation was sufficient in regulating LGBTQ education in schools.

Justice Minister Judit Varga has welcomed the court’s decision, saying “the Constitutional Court has decided: there is no obstacle to the child protection referendum! The Hungarian Constitutional Court found in its decision that the motions against the referendum are unfounded. Finally, the Hungarian people can directly express their opinion on child protection. Let’s protect families and parents’ rights!”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-09T22:36:16+00:00

Media narrative collapse: White people made up a shockingly small minority of mass shooters in 2021

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-09T20:27:54+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] The Histrionics and Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, but They Serve Several Key Purposes: As Kamala Harris compares 1/6 to 9/11 and Nancy Pelosi introduces the cast of Hamilton to sing about democracy, today's inanity should not obscure its dangers.

The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay" while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump's 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post's White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic. “House Democrats [waited] their turn on the House floor to talk to Dick Cheney as a beacon for American democracy,” reported CNN's Edward-Isaac Dovere; “One by one, Democrats are coming over to introduce themselves to former VP Dick Cheney and shake his hand,” added ABC News’ Ben Siegel. Nancy Pelosi gravely introduced Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to sermonize and sing about the importance of American democracy. The Huffington Post's senior politics reporter Igor Bobic unironically expressed gratitude for “the four legged emotional support professionals roaming the Capitol this week, helping officers, staffers, and reporters alike” — meaning therapy dogs. Yesterday, CNN's Kaise Hunt announced: "Tomorrow is going to be a tough one for those of us who were there or had loved ones in the building. Thinking of all of you and finding strength knowing I’m not alone in this." Unsurprisingly but still repellently: Kamala Harris today compared 1/6 to 9/11.

That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or "coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-09T19:23:05+00:00

STEM Majors Relying On Diversity, Rather Than Talent, Hurts Ability ‘To Produce Best Science,’ Scientists Say

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-09T17:45:45+00:00

Class War is Just Beginning: Seismic economic and demographic changes will feed division and conflict.

The biggest loser in early twenty first century America has been the working class. With the exception of wage gains made during the first three years of the Trump Administration, this class has seen its real income decline. Today, wages are rising again, but inflation is reducing real incomes, and leaving more Americans, particularly the poorest 50 percent, struggling to make ends meet. The pandemic lockdowns, whether justified or overwrought, have pummeled low-income workers and made more vulnerable those living in crowded housing.

Under lockdown the working class could not retreat, like the laptop class, to their computer screens. Barely 3 percent of low wage workers can telecommute versus 50 percent of those in the upper middle class. Workers at restaurants and shops have faced hard times, but professors and teachers continue to teach on-line, and senior bureaucrats remain on the job. And even when employed, observes the leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald, these workers, “the servant class,” remained masked while their charges, including at the recent Obama birthday celebration, cavort unmasked.

In our pandemic apartheid almost 40 percent of those Americans making under $40,000 a year lost their jobs in the first few months. Some 44 percent of Black households and 61 percent of Latino household, notes Pew, during the first year of the pandemic suffered a job loss or pay cut, compared to 38 percent of whites. “Lockdown fanatics,” thunders the widely circulated “labor populist” blog The Bellows, “have helped manufacture consent for a brutal reorganization of labor that will plunge millions of people into serfdom.“

Where will the serfs go politically? They do not have a sympathetic audience among the progressive gentry. A writer at The New Republic has called for “blue states and cities to effectively abandon the American national enterprise,” dismissing the rest of the country as “crazy, deadbeat in-laws.” Calling people “deplorables” or “clingers” may well be part of the reason that working people, including many minorities, have shifted to the GOP. Salon recently published a piece that applauds the tendency among young progressives to ostracize and avoid contact with Trump supporters, not just politically but in daily life.

Progressive author Joan Williams has accused the national elites of “class cluelessness,” which leaves them vulnerable to authoritarian solutions. “If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous,” Williams avers. What the working class wants, she suggested in a recent episode of Salon Talks, is not more welfare and transfers, as Biden has proposed, but “respect and solid middle-class jobs.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-08T19:05:13+00:00

Report Says Black Men Cost The Economy $50B Annually — Here's Why

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-08T18:09:31+00:00

Texas teacher locks son in trunk of car over COVID-19 worries

A Texas high school teacher has been charged with child endangerment after locking her 13-year-old son in the trunk of her car — because she was afraid of catching COVID-19.

According to KPRC, Cypress Falls High School English teacher Sarah Beam pulled in to a COVID testing site on January 3 when someone “reported hearing something in the trunk.”

Court documents show that witnesses told Beam “she would not receive a COVID test until the child was removed from the trunk” and put in the car. Police were summoned shortly thereafter.

Beam (left) said her son had tested positive for the virus, and that she was bringing him for another test. “To protect herself from being exposed,” Beam put him in the trunk.

The Post Millennial reports Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District confirmed Beam has been in its employ since 2011. She is currently on administrative leave. The Cypress Falls HS contact page has scrubbed Beam’s name; however, the cached version confirms her listing.

If you're not homeschooling your kids are you trusting them to these goofballs?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-07T17:16:41+00:00

America’s Asymmetric Civil War: It’s within metro areas, not between the states

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-07T16:06:36+00:00

Germany: Man threatened with €250,000 fine and prison time for calling his trans neighbor by previous male name

A court in Germany has ruled in favor of a trans woman who had sued her ex-neighbor for repeatedly addressing her by her male birth name, a judgment first reported by the Rheinische Post.

Sophie Vivien Kutzner was born a biological male, but Kutzner says she never felt like a male. In recent years, Kutzner began dressing a woman, painting her nails, and gave herself a new male name. Kutzner brought the court case after her male neighbor refused to call her by her new female name, instead opting to call her by her male birth name, “Rüdiger” — a concept known as “deadnaming.”

The neighbor, Wolfgang E., was reprimanded by the court and warned that should he refer to the trans woman by her former name again, or he could face a fine of up to €250,000 and/or a custodial sentence.

The plaintiff told local media of her satisfaction with the judgment, expressing her relief as she was unsure how sympathetic Germany’s justice system would be towards her predicament.

Two court arbitration appointments have previously failed due to the neighbor’s non-attendance, which saw Vivien choose to go to court.

Picture of "Sophie" included in link.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-06T23:17:33+00:00

Lockdown has destroyed the Australian spirit: This once easy-going country has become illiberal, mistrustful and divided.

The careless abandonment of liberal-democratic principles in Australia during the Covid-19 pandemic has become notorious. At one end, some abuses are merely foolish and silly, like the warning from a South Australian health officer to Aussie-rules football fans to avoid touching a ball that strays into the stands. At the other end, they have been sinister, notably in the state of Victoria, which has adopted many of the trappings of a police state, backed with intrusive surveillance and intimidation.

One hopes the images that flashed around the world in September 2021, of Melbourne police locked in military formation, firing plastic projectiles indiscriminately at peaceful protesters, represent the lowest point to which Australian civil society can fall and that this will not be superseded by something worse in 2022.

Melbourne is the most locked-down city in the world, having had restrictions in place for 262 days in total, putting it comfortably ahead of second-place Buenos Aires (245 days). Melbourne was the first city in Australia to introduce a nighttime curfew, which was imposed for long stretches in both 2020 and 2021. It was relentlessly enforced by police, who monitored social-media posts for signs of rule-breaking and arrested offenders.

Victoria’s restrictions have taken a devastating toll on small businesses, mental health and trust in the authorities, yet the state’s Labor premier, Dan Andrews, remains not just the darling of the laptop class, but also a popular leader who would win an election comfortably if one were held tomorrow. The same goes for other lockdown leaders, notably the premier of Western Australia, Mark McGowan, who won 53 out of 59 seats in the state parliament for Labor in the election in March 2021.

The vaccine rollout has also gone hand in hand with coercive measures. Rules vary from state to state, but everywhere vaccines are more or less mandatory – unless one is prepared to live a miserable life, barred from shops, restaurants, churches and, in some cases, employment. Like some benighted republic trapped behind the old Iron Curtain, Australia has become a country where one is required to produce one’s papers in the course of everyday life, albeit on the screen of a mobile phone. For much of the pandemic, citizens have required government approval to enter or leave the country, and even permits for internal travel from some states to others. Should you cross certain state borders without the relevant authority, you are liable to be arrested on arrival and detained in a quarantine hotel for 14 days at your own expense, with no remission granted for a negative Covid test. The rules are ruthlessly applied, as Liberal senator Alex Antic discovered at the end of last year, when he flew back to his home state of South Australia after a sitting period in federal parliament in Canberra, only to be frog-marched on to a bus for a fortnight in a down-at-heel hotel.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-06T21:45:23+00:00

The European Court of Human Rights has dismissed a legal challenge in a long-running dispute known as the "gay cake" case, ruling the action inadmissible.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-06T19:17:40+00:00

The liberal fantasy of the Capitol riot: Just like after 9/11, America's elites have weaponised their trauma

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of the rioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was “existential”: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amass WMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based on unreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever found and Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda was overblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest that far-Right terrorism in America has increased markedly over the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of a perpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophic to a pathological degree.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-06T18:29:59+00:00

Schools Got $130B To Re-Open. Some Of It Went To CRT. Now Many Are Closed. Here's how states actually spent money that was supposed to allow them to deal with COVID.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-06T17:54:43+00:00

[Christopher F. Rufo] The Price of Dissent: A Reuters data scientist questioned the Black Lives Matter narrative—so the company fired him.

Zac Kriegman had the ideal résumé for the professional-managerial class: a bachelors in economics from Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard and years of experience with high-tech startups, a white-shoe law firm, and an econometrics research consultancy. He then spent six years at Thomson Reuters Corporation, the international media conglomerate, spearheading the company’s efforts on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced software engineering. By the beginning of 2020, Kriegman had assumed the title of Director of Data Science and was leading a team tasked with implementing deep learning throughout the organization.

But within a few months, this would all collapse. A chain of events—beginning with the death of George Floyd and culminating with a statistical analysis of Black Lives Matter’s claims—would turn the 44-year-old data scientist’s life upside-down. By June 2020, as riots raged across the country, Kriegman would be locked out of Reuters’s servers, denounced by his colleagues, and fired by email. Kriegman had committed an unpardonable offense: he directly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement in the company’s internal communications forum, debunked Reuters’s own biased reporting, and violated a corporate taboo. Driven by what he called a “moral obligation” to speak out, Kriegman refused to celebrate unquestioningly the BLM narrative and his company’s “diversity and inclusion” programming; to the contrary, he argued that Reuters was exhibiting significant left-wing bias in the newsroom and that the ongoing BLM protests, riots, and calls to “defund the police” would wreak havoc on minority communities. Week after week, Kriegman felt increasingly disillusioned by the Thomson Reuters line. Finally, on the first Tuesday in May 2021, he posted a long, data-intensive critique of BLM’s and his company’s hypocrisy. He was sent to Human Resources and Diversity & Inclusion for the chance to reform his thoughts.

He refused—so they fired him.

[...]

Kriegman’s decision to question his company’s narrative wasn’t sudden or impulsive. As he watched the riots and the news coverage unfold, he found himself increasingly filled with doubt and anxiety. He decided to take two months’ leave from Thomson Reuters in order to grapple with the statistical and ethical implications of the company’s reporting on the riots and the Black Lives Matter movement. “I did look through Reuters’s news, and it was concerning to me that a lot of the same issues that I was seeing in other media outlets seemed to be replicated in Reuters’s news, where they were reporting favorably about Black Lives Matter protests without giving any context to the claims that were being made at those protests [and] without giving any context about the ‘Ferguson effect’ and how police pulling back on their proactive policing has been pretty clearly linked to a dramatic increase in murders,” Kriegman told me. “At a certain point, it just feels like a moral obligation to speak out when something that’s having such a devastating impact is being celebrated so widely, especially in a news company where the perspective that’s celebrated is having such a big impact externally.”

During his leave, Kriegman used his skills as a data scientist to conduct a careful statistical investigation comparing BLM’s claims on race, violence, and policing with the hard evidence from a range of academic and governmental sources. The result: a 12,000-word essay, titled “BLM is Anti-Black Systemic Racism,” that called into question the entire sequence of claims by the Black Lives Matter movement and echoed by the Reuters news team. “I believe the Black Lives Matter (‘BLM’) movement arose out of a passionate desire to protect black people from racism and to move our whole society towards healing from a legacy of centuries of brutal oppression,” Kriegman wrote in the introduction. “Unfortunately, over the past few years I have grown more and more concerned about the damage that the movement is doing to many low-income black communities. I have avidly followed the research on the movement and its impacts, which has led me, inexorably, to the conclusion that the claim at the heart of the movement, that police more readily shoot black people, is false and likely responsible for thousands of black people being murdered in the most disadvantaged communities in the country.” Thomson Reuters, Kriegman continued, has a special obligation to “resist simplistic narratives that are not based in facts and evidence, especially when those narratives are having such a profoundly negative impact on minority or marginalized groups.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-06T17:11:34+00:00

*shuffles deck* ... Asia’s Mt. Everest is ‘Racist’ and Nine Black Climbers Are Going to Climb It

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-06T15:51:50+00:00

Macron claims unvaxxed are ‘not citizens,’ vows to ‘piss them off’

French President Emmanuel Macron has called France’s 5 million-strong population of unvaccinated “non-citizens” and revealed his strategy in dealing with them is to “piss them off” in remarks strongly condemned by opposition rivals.

In an interview with French newspaper Le Parisien published on Tuesday, Macron refused to support mandatory vaccination against Covid-19, but insisted he would continue to “piss off” those who remain unvaccinated through draconian and discriminatory social restrictions.

“I won’t send [the unvaccinated] to prison, I won’t vaccinate by force,” Macron told the news outlet. “There is a tiny minority of people who are resistant. We can reduce that, I’m sorry to say, by pissing them off even more.”

“So we need to tell them, from Jan. 15, you won’t be able to go to the restaurant anymore, you won’t be able to down one, won’t be able to have a coffee, go to the theatre, the cinema…”

The specific expression used by Macron, “emmerder”, is a slang term deriving from the French word for shit, “merde”. It can also be translated as “to get on their nerves” however its use is considered to be “very informal” according to French dictionary Larousse, cited by Reuters.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-06T00:22:46+00:00

The US Copyright Office is floating the idea of mandating a content upload filter on the internet

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-05T23:17:19+00:00

Blue America’s Messaging Problem: Fighting the impulse for national divorce with spousal abuse

There has been, lately—and mostly but not entirely from the Right—a great deal of talk about some form of separation, ranging from the late Angelo Codevilla’s call for “radical federalism” to David Reaboi’s bolder proposal for “national divorce.” The latter, obviously, would split the Union but the former is designed to keep it together, by reducing domestic tensions that presently threaten to tear it apart.

The responses from Blues to both proposals were instantaneous, furious, and uniform: Hell, no! and How dare you! Under no circumstances may Reds have any degree of independence, self-determination, or control of their collective destinies. We know what would happen then: “the accelerated subjugation of women and people of color in a new, adjacent Red America,” the rejection of climate orthodoxy, and endless attacks from our religious zealot neighbors. Ed Kilgore, the author of this admirably frank screed, concludes even more bluntly:

I won’t let you go. I have no illusions of compromises yet untried or “third ways” left unexplored. So let’s have it out right here in America as peacefully as we can manage. Perhaps if we continue to battle for control of our common country, one side or the other might win a popular mandate to exercise real power and change the facts on the ground, breaking the perpetual stalemate. If not, then let’s consider the wisdom of those who crushed the Confederacy in the belief that the misery of political conflict is better than the literal civic death of national disunion. [Emphasis in the original.]

Won’t let you go … have it out right here … battle for control … exercise real power and change the facts on the ground … misery of political conflict … and, the coup de grace, crushed. You will stay in this marriage forever whether you like it or not and do what you’re told.

Rebecca Solnit likens Red reluctance to accept the Blue agenda to a dam that will inevitably be breached, with everything on the other side overwhelmed and washed away. She charitably admits that, therefore, Red fears are warranted in the sense that their direst predictions are fated to come true—but also illegitimate, because they deserve what’s coming to them. “Birth can be violent and dangerous,” she concludes, “and sometimes one or the other of the two involved die,” leaving little doubt as to who will be sacrificed in the emergence of coast-to-coast Blutopia.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-05T17:18:41+00:00

17 State AGs challenge NASDAQ’s new race/gender/sexual orientation mandate

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-05T15:49:13+00:00

Manhattan DA to stop seeking prison sentences in slew of criminal cases

Manhattan’s new DA has ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies and drug dealing, according to a set of progressive policies made public Tuesday.

In his first memo to staff on Monday, Alvin Bragg said his office “will not seek a carceral sentence” except with homicides and a handful of other cases, including domestic violence felonies, some sex crimes and public corruption.

“This rule may be excepted only in extraordinary circumstances based on a holistic analysis of the facts, criminal history, victim’s input (particularly in cases of violence or trauma), and any other information available,” the memo reads.

Assistant district attorneys must also now keep in mind the “impacts of incarceration” including on public safety, barriers to housing and employment, financial cost and race disparities, Bragg instructed.

[...]

Bragg’s memo also detailed the following instructions for prosecutors to reduce charges filed by cops in various cases:

Armed robbers who use guns or other deadly weapons to stick up stores and other businesses will be prosecuted only for petty larceny, a misdemeanor, provided no victims were seriously injured and there’s no “genuine risk of physical harm” to anyone.

Convicted criminals caught with weapons other than guns will have those felony charges downgraded to misdemeanors unless they’re also charged with more serious offenses.

Burglars who steal from residential storage areas, parts of homes that aren’t “accessible to a living area” and businesses located in mixed-use buildings will be prosecuted for a low-level, class D felony that only covers break-ins instead of for more serious crimes.

a c c e l e r a t e

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-05T03:55:17+00:00

Woke Arizona State University students accuse college of 'persecuting' them after the pair were found 'guilty' of harassing two white students who entered campus multicultural space with anti-Biden shirt, Chick-fil-A cup and pro-cop sticker

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-05T01:45:37+00:00

New York Teacher Arrested After Allegedly Giving Teenager COVID-19 Vaccine Without Parental Consent Or Medical Background

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-04T22:25:00+00:00

Universities' Covid Policies Defy Science and Reason: Parents and students should challenge dogma with data.

At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door.

[...]

At Princeton University, fully vaccinated students are not allowed to leave the county unless they are on a sports team. They’re also testing all students twice a week, usurping the scarce testing supply from vulnerable communities so that low-risk, young people can use them.

At Cornell, masks are still the rule—and even recommended outdoors. “Masks must be worn indoors at all times, unless in a private, non-shared space (e.g., dorm room or office); we strongly recommend masking outdoors when physical distancing is not possible,” the school announced in mid-December.

At Amherst, students must double mask if they don’t use a KN95. In nearby Boston, at Emerson College, students are tested twice a week and have stay-in-room orders. The college instructs students to “only leave their residence halls or place of residence for testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment, or to get mail.” Seriously.

At these institutions of higher learning and thousands more, science is supposedly held in the highest esteem. So where is the scientific support for masking outdoors? Where is the scientific support for constantly testing fully vaccinated young people? Where is the support for the confinement of asymptomatic, young people who test positive for a virus to which they are already immune on a campus of other immune people?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-04T20:53:03+00:00

Far Left Mayor Demands Removal of Private, Iwo Jima Flag-Raising Mural

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-04T18:11:25+00:00

Public University Offers Professors Cash To Go Woke: University of Memphis asks faculty to infuse social justice into curricula

The University of Memphis told faculty they could collect a $3,000 stipend for redesigning their curricula to align with the university's commitment to "diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice," according to an email sent to all faculty obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The offer is part of the university's "Eradicating Systemic Racism and Promoting Social Justice Initiative."

Interested faculty are asked to submit a copy of syllabi to be reworked as well as a 500-word "narrative" on their "diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophy" and how the new lessons will "address disparities" in their subject area.

The University of Memphis's offer is part of a growing trend on college campuses, where the overt promotion of social justice has become the new norm. At Ohio's Kenyon College, a small liberal arts school, professors can no longer receive tenure unless they can demonstrate "promotion of an inclusive classroom environment that values diversity."

The stipend offer from a public university has triggered concerns from both faculty and lawmakers over use of taxpayer money. One faculty member who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution said the offer "makes you scratch your head" due to the school's financial restraints.

"We've had a hard time retaining good faculty at our salary levels, so anytime you see money being spent on non-student or non-faculty causes, it makes you scratch your head," the professor said. "Could this money be spent on students or retaining quality faculty rather than a progressive agenda that isn't likely supported by the taxpayers or voters of Tennessee?"

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-04T17:35:51+00:00

Trans prisoners ‘switch gender again’ once freed from women’s units

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-04T15:37:44+00:00

White Coats for Black Queer Abolitionist Socialism: A national organization of medical students successfully pressures their schools to embrace radical identity politics.

WC4BL seeks to transform the U.S. medical system. White supremacy, according to the statement, “permeates every dominant American institution, including healthcare.” Part of the reason is the current credentialing system for medical doctors. “Physicians have utilized violence to oust women and femme healers” primarily through “the professionalization of the medical field,” the statement reads. “The power and prestige given to medical doctors in the U.S. today is not a direct result of scientific advancement or service to the larger community, but the intentional and often violent consolidation of power.”

It can be easy to forget that the organization focuses on medical schools; evidently, equity in medicine also requires remaking society. “Black queer feminists,” it explains, “have expanded socialism to further movements that critically approach class, gender, race, and sexuality.” WC4BL is “abolitionist,” calling for the end of both prisons and police. Because prisons are associated with negative health outcomes, “being dedicated to health requires us to abolish (not reform) prison and surveillance systems.” The organization condemns “fatphobia” and “cisheteropatriarchy,” and proposes to “destigmatize and decriminalize drug use,” “decriminalize sex work,” offer “universal” access to abortion, “end the use of BMI,” and remove gatekeepers from “gender-affirming healthcare.”

WC4BL has every reason to play a strong hand. For more than a year, medical schools around the country have followed its lead. The Association of American Medical Colleges’ (AAMC) recent guide to anti-racism planning highlights WC4BL by name, suggesting that universities develop a scorecard “similar to the White Coats for Black Lives’ Racial Justice Report Card.” That’s a significant endorsement. The AAMC cosponsors the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits medical schools.

WC4BL’s other source of influence has come through direct pressure on medical schools. In June 2020, chapters of WC4BL around the country succeeded in effectuating change at medical schools. At UC Davis, WC4BL presented recommendations and its Racial Justice Report Card to the School of Medicine. The administration found them “largely feasible” and responded by creating the Administrative Action Plan to Address Racial Justice. The plan institutionalized, among other things, “a clear system to ensure that perpetrators of racial microaggressions are required to complete corrective action.” Meantime, the school of medicine at the University of Utah received demands from its chapter of WC4BL on June 12, 2020. By December 9, the School of Medicine’s Executive Committee had approved a long version of those demands, declaring that “Racism is a Public Health Crisis” and updating student evaluations to solicit feedback on the “cultural humility” of faculty.

At Columbia University, WC4BL played a part in inspiring the medical school’s anti-racism initiative. One top recommendation in Columbia’s plan involves creating “faculty development” run by “individuals grounded in critical race theory.” At Michigan Medicine, the WC4BL chapter sent a letter demanding a curriculum redesign that employs “an intersectional framework that incorporates critical race theory.” Michigan Medicine adopted that demand almost verbatim, adding only that the new curriculum should draw from the work of Ibram X. Kendi.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-04T00:55:59+00:00

*Shakes dice... *

The Ugly History of New Year’s Is Too Real for White Republicans: Enslaved Black people dreaded New Year’s in Civil War-era America, when they might be separated from loved ones. Just don’t tell the people yelling about “critical race theory.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-03T20:34:21+00:00

School board battles open new front in US culture wars

In Pennsbury, things took a turn for the worse after the board appointed Dr. Cherrissa Gibson -- a local assistant principal -- to a newly created role overseeing diversity and equity in the district's 10 elementary schools, three middle schools, and one high school.

Her first audit in April 2021 found "an underrepresentation of professional staff of color," as well as a disproportionate level of discipline targeting Black students.

Situated in the woodsy outer suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsbury has about 10,000 students, of whom 75 percent are white, seven percent are Black, eight percent are Asian, and four percent are Hispanic, according to the district's website.

For Thomas Smith, the district's superintendent, the audit was a way to help "ensure that every student regardless of where they come from, regardless of their gender, or regardless of the color of their skin are treated equally."

But opponents, like 54-year-old Simon Campbell, believe such initiatives only sharpen divisions.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-03T19:56:09+00:00

Anarcho-tyranny updates:

Oregon bans mugshots specifically to protect BLM & Antifa

Don't forget to declare income from stolen goods and illegal activities, IRS says

Man Convicted, Sentenced for ‘Misgendering’, Insulting Male Who Identifies as Female

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-03T18:23:51+00:00

Facebook censors Catholic charity’s anti-violence campaign for women

A UK-based Catholic charity has accused Facebook of censoring its campaign to protect Christian women who have been exposed to violence in predominantly Muslim countries.

Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) had launched a digital campaign in November to raise awareness of the violence often experienced by persecuted Catholic women in Islamic countries, and had chosen to spend money on Facebook to promote its posts.

However, the social media giant opted to severely restrict the organization’s ability to publish adverts online on Facebook, whilst simultaneously banning the charity from its affiliated platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook restricted the ACN’s campaign by 90 percent in November, explaining to the charity that it had taken the measures to limit the charity’s reach due to a number of users reporting the ads as “offensive, misleading, sexually inappropriate” or “violent.”

Despite taking action two months ago, the tech giant has not yet lifted any of the constraints imposed on the organization, and has repeatedly refused to explain exactly how the adverts violated its guidelines, despite numerous requests by ACN to do so.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-03T17:51:57+00:00

NASCAR walks back approval of Brandon Brown's 'Let's go Brandon' coin sponsorship

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-03T17:29:40+00:00

Debate tournament banned White students from competing

Student-run debate organizations at Northeastern University and Boston College co-hosted the American Parliamentary Debate Association’s (APDA) “inaugural BIPOC tournament” and explicitly prohibited white students from competing.

The BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color,) only tournament included teams from multiple universities including the University of Chicago.

As The Chicago Thinker reported this past semester, The University of Chicago informed students the BIPOC debate was only open to anyone who “does not identify as white.”

In an email obtained by Campus Reform, Devesh Kodnani, president of the Chicago Debate Society, writes “The goal of this tournament is to promote affinity among non-white APDA debaters and cultivate racial diversity on the league.”

[...]

While White students were ineligible to compete in the event, they were able to apply for a judging position, though the university clarified that White students would be “selected with lower priority” than students of color, Chicago Thinker reported.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-03T07:25:06+00:00

The Great Divorce

Mencken famously said that “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” Social media in particular and mass media in general have made this a permanent condition. The constant interaction with the mentally unstable keeps everyone on edge. Instead of living lives of quiet desperation, the soundtrack of our lives is our revenge fantasies.

Of course, you could unplug, which is becoming a thing among people who are waking up to the reality of hyperreality. A big part of the dissident right is the process of separating from the Potemkin reality of liberal democracy. Cut the cord, drop off the mainstream social media platforms, and disconnect from the media. The new countercurrent mantra is “Turn off, tune out, drop out.”

The problem is, Covid has now allowed virtual madness to leave the matrix and invade the physical space. Everywhere you turn when out in public, you are reminded that there are many people with a tenuous grip on their sanity. For going on two years, the harridan with a mask has been stalking the public square, hunting the barefaced like she is rooting out the agents of Old Scratch.

The ceremonial face covering has become the mark of the beast. Everywhere you go there are people wearing a mask, often multiple masks. Talk to one of them and you quickly learn that they are not motivated by bad information. Instead, the masks and the other performative gestures are emotional support items. Instead of carrying a plush toy around for support, they are performing Covid rituals.

It is no longer possible to ignore what used to be private madness. A bit of carny trash assaulted an old man on an airplane who was trying to eat his dinner. Her reason for assaulting him was that he did not have on his mask while eating. This woman tested herself mid-flight, got a positive test for Covid, then locked herself in the toilet for the remainder of the flight. For the passengers, there was no escaping her madness.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-02T22:55:23+00:00

CBP reviews secret division that kept databases on journalists and politicians

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-02T19:32:41+00:00

Why Feminism Failed: The ideology of feminism—which sought to achieve material equality of the sexes—was always going to lead to this.

For every conservative woman who rejects feminism, there’s a female pundit who says “but only what it has become.” There are many, it seems, who want to hold on to the idea, or perhaps even just the appearance, of political equity between the sexes, even as they reject what it has brought about.

Far be it from me to expect women in politics, whatever their affiliation, to openly reject the worldview that birthed their careers. But for the sake of intellectual consistency, it should be said that this position is as untenable as its preferred outcome is unlikely. Not only will American feminism never return to its First Wave iteration, but if it were to do so, we would only end up here again. “Here” meaning “birthing persons” protesting abortion laws in uterus hats and men getting snipped as “an act of love.” The logic of feminism has always been totalizing, even if its more radical threads were once hidden to convince the less observant public to back its initial political battles.

One of the best examples of this is in the suffragette movement. Some of the biggest names driving the fight from the beginning—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, her daughter Harriet Stanton Blatch, Charlotte Perkins Gilman—were real radicals. Stanton authored the famous “Declaration of Sentiments” at the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights, which insists “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” In her books Women and Economics and The Home: Its Work andInfluence, Gilman argued that the home was inherently oppressive to women, and they would never reach full health and personal growth until the house was professionalized—that is, all the tasks of the mother, from rearing to homemaking to childhood education, were sold out to professionals, to allow the woman to pursue her own interests. Meanwhile, Blatch organized militant street protests to reinvigorate working-class women for the suffragettes’ stagnating cause in the 1910s, a direct-action approach to politics that the black nationalist movement would later adopt.

But their argument to the public and to the key politicians, both in England and America, masked these more radical aspirations. Never asking the most important question—whether expanding the voting pool would actually be good for the nation, or good for women—they asserted that without votes for women, some 50 percent of society was effectively dehumanized. It’s a tactic that likely looks familiar to our 21st century eyes. Using targeted violence to add muscle to their mantras (“blowing up buildings, shouting down public speakers, pouring acid down pillar-boxes, slashing priceless paintings, horsewhipping ministers on the street,” details TAC’s Helen Andrews) the radical minority succeeded not because the majority of women felt disenfranchised without casting a ballot, but because the majority of male politicians were tired of being nagged. And what could be so bad about letting a couple ladies vote?

In the end, the suffragettes succeeded because they commanded the narrative. The counterarguments that women’s suffrage would politicize women’s issues and create a war between the sexes—consequences predicted by the anti-suffragettes which are becoming reality a century later—were not nearly as catchy as “Votes for Women!” But their goal, though less visible than later generations’, was hardly less radical.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-02T18:38:59+00:00

Transgender TikTok user accuses baby of being transphobic*

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-02T17:07:42+00:00

L.A.’s Arms Race of the Affluent: From Beverly Hills to Santa Monica, the crime-panicked wealthy are banishing bling and buying guns

In Beverly Hills, even the purchase of a firearm comes with certain…expectations. The city’s only gun store, Beverly Hills Guns, is a “concierge service” by appointment only, for a largely affluent clientele. And business is booming.

Since opening in July 2020, the store has seen upscale residents from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills increasingly in a panic following several high-profile smash-and-grab and violent home invasion robberies. The apparent siege has brought in a daily stream of anxious business owners and prominent actors, real estate moguls and film execs, says owner Russell Stuart. Most are arming themselves for the first time.

“This morning I sold six shotguns in about an hour to people that say, ‘I want a home defense shotgun,’” says Stuart, whose store is discreetly located in a Beverly Hills office building, with no sign on the doors, down the hall from a diamond dealer. “Everyone has a general sense of constant fear, which is very sad. We’re used to this being like Mayberry.”

That fear has the wealthiest of local gentry contemplating every more elaborate security measures: armored luxury cars, safe rooms and bullet-proof glass in their homes. One client asked about creating the “Tony Stark-level” security of a half-dozen automated drones to hover over his house, says Stuart, whose gun store is part of his larger security company, Force Protective Agency. “If you want the Gucci package, it’s going to cost money.”

The security business is experiencing a rebound after a couple of diminished years because of the pandemic. Some firms had their on-site security guards sent home for health and social distancing reasons. Not anymore. In Beverly Hills, the craving for additional security dates to the riot that followed an otherwise peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in May 2020, with unprecedented looting along Rodeo Drive that left broken boutique windows beneath beloved luxury brands: Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Michael Kors, MCM, Ermenegildo Zegna. Last March, a $500,000 Richard Mille watch was stolen at gunpoint from a diner at the Il Pastaio restaurant. The Dec. 1 home-invasion robbery and shooting death of philanthropist Jacqueline Avant, 81, in her Trousdale Estates home, only accelerated the arms race among the affluent.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2022-01-01T19:43:13+00:00

Trans Activists Admit They’ve Lost the Debate, Urge Stealth Tactics

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-01T18:03:47+00:00

Bird of Prey: Twitter’s beak drips with the lifeblood of American democracy.

Even by the low standard set by other social media sites, however, Twitter easily ranks at the very bottom of the scale. Facebook caters to pre-existing relationships and the pursuit of interest-based affiliations. Instagram and TikTok are primarily visual. Snapchat is ephemeral. But Twitter offers the allure of meaningful verbal engagement while making it almost impossible to make that fantasy real. Arbitrary character limits, promoted and “trending” content, and popular hashtags manufacture mobbing, hysteria, and psyops instead of political dialogue. If bowling leagues—superficial relationships that deepen over time and create a sense of community, from the vantage point of which serious issues can be discussed by people who already have much in common—constitute one ideal of how true community-building might take place, then Twitter is the very opposite: people who do not know one another and with nothing in common and no reason to keep their relationships intact go right for the jugular, blurting out brief blasts of vitriol about some of the most significant issues we as a society confront, whereupon others hastily leap aboard or else plunge right in with the angriest, wittiest and/or nuttiest rejoinders, retorts, curses and insults they can muster. Most exchanges quickly devolve into a fast and furious barrage of blather. For outside observers or even most participants, following threads is nearly impossible. Unsurprisingly, given this setup, the content that gets the most retweets tends to be the kind that demonizes political opponents, and the kinds of people who get drawn to Twitter and account for much of the activity on its servers are those who relish the prospect of such blood sport.

Twitter, in other words, is a platform expertly calibrated to steer speeding vehicles to pile-ups on the road. Dogpiles, social contagions, and flash mobs are not the product of unfortunate accidents; engineered road rage is the whole point. And the actual substance of any given issue under “discussion” is just another casualty. It is a carcass for the vultures to finish off, leaving a hollowed-out shell, with only the stench of rot to remind us of what it once might have been.

If we conducted our offline lives in this fashion, we would, of course, devolve into barbarism and civil war in a heartbeat … and yet why would we not expect our online interactions to drive us, bit by bit and ever-more-rapidly, in that very same direction? With the time we spend on social media steadily increasing year by year, to an average of 145 minutes per day as of 2020, our online interactions (especially in the age of Covid) comprise a larger and larger proportion of our social universe and, thus, increasingly inform our everyday habits of heart and mind. Should we, then, be surprised if our real-world political interactions feel more and more Twitter-like, i.e.,“elementary, irrational, barbarous and frightful,” to quote Hegel’s description of the activity of the mob? This is precisely how we could get to the point, in the summer of 2020, of going on a Twitter-hashtag-stoked nationwide freak-out, complete with Twitter-style hooting and hollering mobs, profane slogans, looters and rioters and pressure campaigns bullying businesses and institutions to get on board, in response to what, in reality, statistically speaking, was a single unrepresentative incident involving one career criminal and one bad cop in Minneapolis. When we wonder why it is that on this issue or virtually any other we no longer seem able to engage with the “other side” and discuss our ideological differences from the standpoint of mutual respect, we need look no further.

“Self-governing communities, not individuals, are the basic units of democratic society…. It is the decline of those communities, more than anything else, that calls the future of democracy into question,” wrote the left populist Christopher Lasch in 1994. Twitter may not be the ultimate cause of those communities’ decline, but insofar as it purports to serve as their replacement, as our new public square, it is surely the largest contributor to the false notion that we can get by—or, even, are better off—without them. We hear that Twitter is a force that liberates us from our former dependency on centralized information sources and unleashes our full democratic potential, permitting new, organic movements to coalesce in a heartbeat, outside the authorities’ control.

But what Twitter actually unleashes is the rule of the mob, Nisbet’s “normless, unattached, insecure individuals” easily directed yet manipulated by demagogues onto a censorious, narrowing track. True democracy, rests on the assumption that there exists some common good that we not only strive to discern but create by working together in real life, at human scale, in the world outside our door. Twitter undermines that assumption instant by instant, day by day. The conflict is irrepressible. Without our coordinated opposition, the foundations of our democratic way of life will be digitally destroyed. Flexing our political muscle against the Twitterati is as good a place to start as any.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-31T22:25:25+00:00

Royal Bank of Canada accused of denying mortgage to journalist based on political beliefs

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-31T21:08:16+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] New York is Using Race to Determine Access to a Limited Supply of Life-Saving COVID Treatments: The rationale for prioritizing some races over others for access to COVID medications crumbles upon close examination.

But with the Omicron variant now the dominant COVID strain in New York, both the city and state are facing severe shortages in the availability of effective monoclonal treatments. While Pfizer originally claimed its treatment would work against Omicron, the New York State Department of Health issued a memo to all health care providers this week warning that both Pfizer and Merck's treatments are no longer indicated. Instead, “at this time, Sotrovimab (Xevudy) is the only authorized monoclonal antibody product expected to be effective against the omicron variant.” Yet due to “a significant surge in cases and reduced effectiveness of existing therapeutics due to the omicron variant,” the agency warned that “supplies of oral antivirals will be extremely limited initially.” As of today, the agency said, “supplies of Sotrovimab are extremely limited.”

This severe shortage means that there will be far more people who are sick from COVID than there are available doses of monoclonal antibodies treatment. That, in turn, requires that healthcare providers make decisions about who should be prioritized to receive such life-saving treatments and who should be deprioritized, and which factors ought to be used to determine priority.

Before determining priority schemes, it must first be determined which groups of COVID patients are eligible at all to receive these potentially life-saving treatments and which from the start are declared ineligible. The state Department of Health memo sets out the list of all factors which must be met in order for a patient to be eligible. They include age (must be older than 12), COVID status (must have tested positive), and progression of the virus (must have "mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms").

Then there is an additional requirement that makes intuitive sense: the COVID patient must “have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.” It makes sense that the government would seek to prioritize those who are at higher risk for developing severe illness.

But the policy then states that anyone who is non-white — regardless of age, health or underlying medical conditions — is automatically deemed to have met the requirement that one must have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness" in order to receive this treatment (“Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor."). That means that a healthy twenty-year-old Asian football player or a 17-year-old African-American marathon runner from a wealthy family will be automatically deemed at heightened risk to develop serious COVID illness — making them instantly eligible for monoclonal treatments upon testing positive and showing symptoms — while a White person of exactly the same age and health condition from an impoverished background would not be automatically eligible.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-31T17:39:19+00:00

All those lakes in Canada must make for a lot of tragic boating accidents: Hardly Any Canadians Have Turned In Their Now-Outlawed Firearms To The Government

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-31T16:15:41+00:00

Washington state lawmakers introduce bill that would reduce penalties for drive-by shootings

Washington state lawmakers introduced a bill this month that would reduce penalties for drive-by shootings with the aim of "promoting racial equity."

The bill, introduced by Democratic Representatives Tarra Simmons and David Hackney ahead of the state's 2022 legislative session, would eliminate drive-by shootings as the basis for elevating a first-degree murder charge to aggravated murder in the first degree, which carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

Drive-by shootings were added to the list of aggravating factors for murder charges in 1995. Other aggravating factors include the murder of law enforcement officers, murders committed by inmates while they are behind bars, and murder-for-hire schemes.

The aggravating factor that the bill would eliminate reads: "The murder was committed during the course of or as a result of a shooting where the discharge of the firearm… is either from a motor vehicle or from the immediate area of a motor vehicle that was used to transport the shooter or the firearm."

Rep. Simmons, who represents a district in western Washington, argued that "it’s clear that it was targeted at gangs that were predominantly young and Black."

🤡🌎

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-30T18:19:06+00:00

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggests a ‘national divorce’ between red and blue states

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-30T16:50:38+00:00

Homeschool Lectures Created by Ex-Teacher Circulate Online, Promote 'White Wellbeing'

An ex-teacher from Arizona, known online as "Brant Danger," recently launched a new homeschool curriculum designed to teach children about "white wellbeing," and has circulated around the internet.

The School of the West is a homeschooling curriculum that offers paid and free lectures for various subjects including the basics: math, science, history, art and language arts. But one field of study unique to the program is "white wellbeing."

[...]

According to the website, the paid membership plans give access to youth lectures, designed for children ages 4 to 10, as well as teen courses for those 11 years and older.

A summary of the contents of the youth lectures states that the curriculum will help children "understand the gift of being born a member of Westernkind and the qualities that separate us from the other races." The youth curriculum also introduces the concept that "only the White race can build Western Civilization" and that they need to learn to celebrate "aspects of Westernkind."

The teen curriculum is based around "understanding propaganda" and examining "anti-white propaganda" in the news media. The other teen-oriented lectures also promote the idea that "anti-whites" are inflicting harm on Western Civilization.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-30T02:44:08+00:00

How Activists Are Hardwiring ‘Race Marxism’ Into The Medical Field

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-29T18:30:14+00:00

[Steve Sailer] Blue Pills Matter

There is no better demonstration of The Matrix’s concept of the blue pill that leaves its victims able to perceive only the simulacrum of reality curated by the powers-that-be than that virtually every review of the sequel The Matrix Resurrections refers to the auteurs of the 1999 science-fiction classic and its depressing follow-ups as the “Wachowski sisters.”

Even more blue-pilled, many critics have convinced themselves not just to say that frauteurs Larry and Andy Wachowski are now Lana and Lilly, Hollywood’s most famous female sci-fi directors, but to believe it.

Bluest of all, more than a few have trained themselves to have faith not only that the Wachowskis are women in 2021, but also that they—due to transcendental gender dogma’s miraculous power to alter not just the present but the past—were female in 1999, and that therefore the original Matrix was made by women. As Orwell might assert, “The Wachowski brothers have always been the Wachowski sisters.”

Sure, a few showbiz figures such as Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling dare to be publicly red-pilled. But it’s much safer for one’s career to enthusiastically ingest the blue pill and believe.

Of course, The Matrix was just about the least feminine movie since, oh, say, The Deer Hunter, another film of vaulting masculine ambition from a director, Michael Cimino, who later flirted with declaring himself a woman. Neither The Matrix nor The Deer Hunter (much less Cimino’s bankruptingly grandiose Heaven’s Gate) would have been made by somebody who always felt like a girl on the inside.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-29T17:14:08+00:00

AFT Union Encourages Gifting Book About Transgender Children For The ‘Holiday Season’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-29T15:29:55+00:00

[Rod Dreher] Proud Groomer Teachers

Call it confidence, or call it arrogance, but there are some young schoolteachers who brag on TikTok about telling the little kids in their class all about transgenderism and gender theory. For example:

And this:

And this:

These people aren’t hiding it. They are openly bragging about propagandizing children without parental consent. Putting their faces to it and everything for plaudits from their online tribes.

Why don’t these people ever seem to be outed, and parents demand that they be professionally disciplined, and (preferably) fired? This is exploitative and disgusting. Are parents afraid to take a stand and to say publicly that there is something wrong with presenting this material to children? Do they fear the accusation of bigotry more than they care for their kids?

Yes, I think they are — and that’s why these lunatics keep posting these things. They know that most parents in this country would rather sacrifice their children to these monsters than stand up and say HELL NO, for fear of personal and professional repercussions.

I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. I’m a bear when it comes to defending my children. If one of these pushy freaks forced their personal choices onto my children in a classroom setting, where they have authority, I would bring down Armageddon on their heads, and on the heads of the school officials who continue to employ their creepy groomer selves.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-28T23:16:17+00:00

Minnesota gives non-white patients preferential access to life-saving COVID treatment

The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) says in a document titled “Ethical Framework for Allocation of Monoclonal Antibodies during the COVID-19 Pandemic” that “race and ethnicity alone, apart from other underlying health conditions, may be considered in determining eligibility for mAbs [monoclonal antibodies].”

Monoclonal antibodies “are made in a laboratory and act a lot like the natural antibodies that a person’s body makes to fight diseases,” per MDH. Thus far, they have been used to both to treat active COVID cases and to help prevent healthy people from becoming infected. The antibodies have shown so much promise, in fact, that national supplies are running low amid surging demand, resulting in some patients being denied the treatment.

Minnesota’s solution is to ration mAbs based on various health factors, each assigned a different score. The maximum number of points a patient can amass is 24. Antibodies will be distributed based on these scores (highest numbers receiving treatment first) where supplies run low.

Here are the factors and their associated values:

Being BIPOC (2 points)

Age 65+ (2 points)

BMI 35 kg/m2 and higher (2 points)

Diabetes mellitus (2 points)

Chronic kidney disease (3 points)

Heart disease in patients ages 55+ (2 points)

Chronic respiratory disease in patients ages 55+ (3 points)

Hypertension in patients age 55+ (1 point)

Immunocompromised (3 points)

Pregnancy (4 points)

Based on this scoring metric, if two pregnant women, one black and the other white, visited a hospital with limited mAbs supplies, the black woman would receive priority because her score would be six, but the white woman’s score would only be four.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-28T22:45:35+00:00

Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now: How Hamilton, Parks and Recreation, and Harry Potter lost cultural cachet.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-28T17:58:13+00:00

USA Swimming Official Quits Over Trans Swimmer Competing Against Women

The resignation letter to USA Swimming indicates that Millen, who has been involved in the sport for some 30 years, resigned on Dec. 17.

“I told my fellow officials that I can no longer participate in a sport which allows biological men to compete against women,” Millen wrote in the resignation letter, Swimming World reported.

“Everything fair about swimming is being destroyed,” Millen’s letter continued.

“If Lia came on my deck as a referee, I would pull the coach aside and say, ‘Lia can swim, but Lia can swim exhibition or a time trial. Lia cannot compete against those women because that’s not fair.’”

USA Swimming did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.

Thomas, a 22-year-old University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team member who recently broke three women’s records in freestyle swimming, could be a women’s National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) title contender in a few months.

“Lia Thomas had another strong day in the pool for the Red and Blue,” Penn athletics wrote on their website on Dec. 3.

“During the prelims, she set a new pool and meet record in the 500 free. In the finals she swam more than 12 seconds faster, finishing in first place with a time of 4:34.06. That time is currently the best in the country in the event.”

Formerly a member of the men’s swimming program, Thomas underwent hormone suppression and is in line with NCAA rules that allow the athlete to compete on the women’s team, according to Swimming World.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-28T17:18:34+00:00

'Crime is made up': Woke teachers force middle school pupils to listen to BLM activists claim black people who commit crime are being 'enslaved' by being sent to jail and society is being ruined by 'white supremacy and capitalism'

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-28T15:55:21+00:00

[Matt Taibbi] The Democrats' Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump: Terry McAuliffe lost the Virginia governor's race by saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach." If that was no gaffe, Democrats have a lot more significant losing ahead

In the wake of McAuliffe’s loss, the “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach” line was universally tabbed a “gaffe” by media. I described it in the recent “Loudoun County: A Culture War in Four Acts” series in TK as the political equivalent of using a toe to shoot your face off with a shotgun, but this was actually behind the news cycle. Yahoo! said the “gaffe precipitated the Democrat’s slide in the polls,” while the Daily Beast’s blunter headline was, “Terry McAuliffe’s White-Guy Confidence Just Fucked the Dems.”

However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to “experts” and “expertise.”

This was a bad enough error in 2016 when neither Democrats nor traditional Republicans realized how furious the public was with “experts” on Wall Street who designed horrifically unequal bailouts, or “experts” on trade who promised technical retraining that never arrived to make up for NAFTA job josses, or Pentagon “experts” who promised we’d find WMDs in Iraq and be greeted as liberators there, and so on, and so on. Ignoring that drumbeat, and advising Hillary Clinton to run on her 25 years of “experience” as the ultimate Washington insider, won the Democratic Party leaders four years of Donald Trump.

It was at least understandable how national pols could once believe the public valued their “professional” governance on foreign policy, trade, the economy, etc. Many of these matters probably shouldn’t be left to amateurs (although as has been revealed over and over of late, the lofty reputations of experts often turn out to be based mainly upon their fluidity with gibberish occupational jargon), and disaster probably would ensue if your average neophyte was suddenly asked to revamp, say, the laws governing securities clearing.

But parenting? For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-27T19:13:32+00:00

Mankato schools vote to allow extra pay for non-white teachers

The Mankato School Board voted unanimously earlier this month for a policy that may grant additional pay exclusively to non-white teachers.

The board is chaired by Jodi Sapp, who previously came under fire for requiring concerned parents to dox themselves in order to comment on school matters. Under her leadership, the board voted to amend district policy so that non-white teachers only may receive “additional stipends” to become mentors to other non-white colleagues. The new policy will also have the district “placing American Indian educators at sites with other American Indian educators and educators of color at sites with other educators of color.”

These new measures are designed to “increase opportunity for collegial support” for BIPOC teachers, boosting the district’s retention rate among these demographics.

Critics have pointed out that the latter of the district’s new policies, which will have administrators placing teachers in work environments based on their race, looks a lot like segregation. Board members explained that this is not segregation, though, before the vote took place.

“When you’re one [minority] of a [white] majority it can be very isolating and lonely. To have a support system in place for them is not to segregate them, it is absolutely to support them,” member Erin Roberts said. “It’s not about trying to throw the few [BIPOC] individuals we have into one building. It’s about showing them they aren’t alone.”

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