Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread for April 19, 2021

rwkasten · 2021-04-19T11:45:02+00:00

New thread has been posted: https://saidit.net/s/CultureWarRoundup/comments/80fc/offtopic_and_loweffort_cw_thread_for_june_24_2021/

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-24T21:25:36+00:00

Now 'trigger warning' is banned by Brandeis University along with the 'offensive' phrases 'picnic', 'rule of thumb' and 'take a shot at it'

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-24T15:47:43+00:00

White working-class kids are casualties of the culture war

Have you noticed that anyone who talks about the problems facing white working-class kids is instantly accused of starting a culture war? Talk about trans kids and the media will be knocking on your door to commission a documentary. Talk about the specific problems facing children of West Indian or Bangladeshi heritage and the chattering classes will be all ears. But so much as mutter the phrase ‘white working-class’ and you’ll be viewed as iffy. Here comes another culture warrior stirring up racial tensions, the right-on will cry. They might even call you racist.

The Guardian is at it again today with a front-page splash saying: ‘Tory MPs accused of adding fuel to “culture war” in education report.’ What is this fuel that the dastardly Tories are recklessly pouring on to the cultural clashes of the 21st century? It’s a new report that says ‘white working-class pupils have been let down by decades of neglect in the English education system’. That’s it. The report is ‘controversial’ and ‘divisive’, the Guardian warns its readers. Nothing highlights the bourgeois smugness of intersectionality better than the fact that a paper like the Guardian will publish article after article about every identity group in the land and then clutch its ethically sourced pearls the minute anyone mentions the words ‘working class’.

The education report is actually not shocking or controversial at all. Nor is it a hand grenade lobbed into the culture war. It’s quite sensible. Produced by the education select committee, the report says it’s a national scandal that white working-class kids have been allowed to fall behind in education. It points out that disadvantaged white pupils are doing badly ‘every step of the way’. For example, just 18 per cent of white pupils on free school meals achieved Grade 4 or higher in GCSE English and maths, whereas the average for pupils on free meals is 23 per cent. A paltry 16 per cent of white kids on free meals get places at university, compared with 59 per cent of black African kids on free meals, 59 per cent of Bangladeshi kids on free meals, and 32 per cent of black Caribbean kids on free meals.

These are striking disparities. And the report makes the very logical point that they cannot be explained by poverty alone. All of these children come from cash-strapped, difficult circumstances, and yet the white ones do significantly worse than the others. There must be cultural reasons for this, the report suggests. It argues that kids from ethnic-minority backgrounds are offered more assistance than white working-class kids. It also ridicules the teaching of ideas like ‘white privilege’. Quite right. Telling white working-class children, who are lagging so severely behind every other social group, that their skin colour bestows upon them some kind of lifelong privilege is just perverse. It’s cruel, in fact; almost a form of mockery.

I would add to the report’s observations that there is also a worrying culture of low expectations in some white working-class communities. Where the children of immigrant communities – Indians, Nigerians, Bangladeshis, Irish – are often driven and aspirational, the children of the native white working classes too often expect too little of themselves. Education is something to ‘get through’ rather than to be challenged and changed by. Decades of economic, political and cultural neglect in working-class towns has sadly deflated many people’s sense of self. Which makes the cynical jibe of ‘white privilege’ all the more obnoxious. The elites hollow out the futures of the white working classes and then have the termity to lecture the white working classes about their ‘privilege’.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-24T13:46:55+00:00

‘Stop talking right now’: University of Oklahoma training shows instructors how to censor, indoctrinate students

Do you question whether refusing to use preferred pronouns is hate speech? You can’t — writing on that topic is “not acceptable.”

Think Black Lives Matter shouldn’t engage in property destruction? We’ll have to “re-adjust” your thinking.

If you’re a student at the University of Oklahoma — congratulations! Your instructor may already have done all of the thinking for you. But beware: Deviating too far from an instructor’s personal opinions can cost you.

A recording of an “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” workshop acquired by FIRE raises alarm bells about the state of free expression and freedom of conscience at Oklahoma’s flagship university.

The workshop in question trains instructors on how to eliminate disfavored but constitutionally protected expression from the classroom and guide assignments and discussion into preferred areas — all for unambiguously ideological and viewpoint-based reasons. FIRE’s concerns are further compounded by the University of Oklahoma’s brazen and unconstitutional track record of putting individual rights out to pasture.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-23T20:46:51+00:00

Harriet Tubman Statue To Replace Christopher Columbus In New Jersey

The mayor of Newark in New Jersey has revealed designs for a statue of Harriet Tubman set to replace a monument to Christopher Columbus that was removed from the city last year.

Ras Baraka said the new statue honouring the abolitionist was ‘better than what we envisioned,’ confirming the monument would be officially unveiled next year.

The statue of Christopher Columbus stood in the city’s Washington Park for almost a century before it was officially removed in June 2020, amid a nationwide reckoning over monuments to racist US historical figures in the wake of renewed Black Lives Matter protests.

Newark mayor Ras Baraka said choosing Tubman to occupy the space was ‘poetic’ given her ties with New Jersey. Tubman is known to have spent time in the state raising money for her work with the Underground Railroad, and is thought to have brought dozens of escaped slaves through Newark itself, which was the last stop on the railroad before New York, NPR reports.

[...]

News of the statue comes on the same week that the city unveiled a new statue of George Floyd, set to be displayed in front of the city hall for at least a year.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-23T19:08:02+00:00

Is it racist to confront a suicide bomber?

The independent inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, in which 22 pop fans were killed by an Islamist extremist, has published the first volume of its report. It makes for chilling reading. The inquiry has found there were numerous ‘missed opportunities’ to confront Salman Abedi, the bomber, and potentially stop him from detonating the device in his rucksack. Most chilling of all is the reason given by one of the key security guards on patrol that evening as to why he failed to question Abedi. He was worried, he said, that asking a brown-skinned man why he was hanging around the arena might be construed as racist.

Take that in. There was a very shifty-looking young man around the foyer and mezzanine of the Manchester Arena towards the end of an Ariana Grande concert, carrying a ‘bulging’ rucksack so large he ‘struggled’ under the weight of it, and a security guard was reluctant to confront him lest he be accused of racism. In the words of the report, this was a significant ‘missed opportunity’. The ‘inadequacy’ of the security guard’s response to the presence of a highly suspicious individual was one of the many misjudgements made on that black, fateful night, the report says. Is it possible that the fear of being thought of as racist is screwing up everyday life, and even hindering sensible action in threatening situations?

To be clear, the security guard who was cagey about questioning Abedi is not responsible for the failure to stop Abedi from detonating his device. The first volume of the inquiry’s report – which covers security at and around the arena on the night of 22 May 2017 – criticises certain individuals, including the security guard, for not doing their jobs diligently enough. But it says that it was the organisations responsible for security at the arena – the arena’s own security firm and also the British Transport Police – that were ‘principally’ to blame for the ‘missed opportunities’. It also makes the reasonable point that it is impossible to know what would have happened if Abedi had been confronted. It proposes that there may still have been loss of life – if, for example, he had detonated his device while being questioned – but that it would have been less severe than the horrors that shortly unfolded.

It is disturbing to read the list of ‘missed opportunities’. Abedi was in the arena for more than an hour and a half before he detonated his bomb. He arrived at 20.51 and blew himself up at 22.31, as the concert attendees started to leave. In that time, this young man with a massive rucksack was seen by numerous people. He was described by some of them as ‘nervous’ and ‘fidgety’. He looked out of place – his age ‘meant that he did not fit the demographic of a parent waiting for a child’, as the inquiry says. And yet as a result of individual and organisational failure – including, the inquiry says, insufficient training of the security guards on duty that night – the message didn’t get through that there was a fidgeting, agitated man with a bulging rucksack hanging around for 90 minutes at the exit area of a venue that was largely packed with children and teenagers.

Remarkably, some people at the arena who saw Abedi thought to themselves that he was a suicide bomber. Christopher Wild and his partner, Julie Whitley, who were picking up Whitley’s daughter, discussed the possibility that Abedi had a bomb in his rucksack. Wild actually did confront Abedi and asked him what was in his bag. Abedi nervously brushed him off. Wild reported his concerns to security guards at 22.15 – 16 minutes before the explosion – but he was ‘fobbed off’. Another parent said the security guards were ‘really quite dismissive’ of Wild’s concerns. It is deeply disturbing that parents at the arena rightly suspected Abedi was a bomber and yet nothing was done to challenge or remove him.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-23T14:59:24+00:00

The battle between the two Americas

In recent history, the United States has arguably never been so divided — but not in the way you might think. Yes, the country has been split by the culture wars, with their polarising focus on race and gender. But behind the scenes, another conflict has been brewing; shaped by the economics of class, it has created two Americas increasingly in conflict.

The First America is made up of the highly educated and affluent, who have already managed to recover their pandemic-depleted incomes. Its biggest winners, though, have been large tech firms — notably Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google — who together have added more than two and a half trillion dollars to their valuation since 2019, and last year enjoyed record breaking profits.

In contrast, the Second America, made up of the working and private-sector middle classes, has been devastated by the pandemic, with more than half of small businesses unlikely to fully recover. Meanwhile, the expanding serf class, many of whom were employed in small businesses, has become increasingly dependent on handouts from Washington and bloated state governments, so much so that it has made little sense for many to go back to work.

At stake, increasingly, is the future of America as an aspirational country. Traditionally, the growing gap between the rich and the other classes would be fodder for a Left-wing bonfire, but the progressive Left now gets much of its funding from the corporate elite, notably Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The oligarchy not only funded Biden’s campaign, but, particularly in the case of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, leant critical support to boost the November electoral turnout.

Taking on the oligarchy, therefore, has not been Biden’s priority, at least to date. Rather than focus on traditional working-class concerns, he has been swept up by the cultural memes of the HR departments, newsrooms and faculty lounges. The results have been all too predictable: draconian energy policies, the racialisation of education and support for public sector unions, the one arguably working-class bastion for the Democrats.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-21T06:06:56+00:00

Google force installs Massachusetts MassNotify Android COVID app

Google is force-installing a Massachusetts COVID-19 tracking app on residents' Android devices without an easy way to uninstall it.

For the past few days, users have reported that Google silently installed the Massachusetts 'MassNotify' app on their devices without the ability to open it or find it in the Google Play Store.

"This installed silently on my daughter's phone without consent or notification. She cannot have installed it herself since we use Family Link and we have to approve all app installs. I have no idea how they pulled this off, but it had to involve either Google, or Samsung, or both," a user wrote in a review on the Google Play Store.

"Normal apps can't just install themselves. I'm not sure what's going on here, but this doesn't count as "voluntary". We need information, and we need it now, folks."

MassNotify is Massachusetts' COVID-19 contact tracing app that allows users who have opted into Android's 'COVID-19 Exposure Notifications' feature to be warned when exposed to the virus.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-20T17:20:19+00:00

Leftists Furious Over ‘Far Right’ And ‘Homophobic’ Straight Pride Posters In Ireland

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-20T16:09:49+00:00

'Trans widows’ fear being trapped in loveless marriages if gender law changes

‘Trans widows’ face being trapped in loveless marriages if their spouses no longer need their permission to change gender, MPs examining proposals to change the law have been warned.

Activists are asking ministers to ditch the requirement for a spouse's agreement, a clause that some women say is a lifeline for them if their husband transitions to a woman.

It allows them to exit a heterosexual marriage before it legally becomes homosexual, or get an annulment for those who cannot divorce for cultural reasons.

The Telegraph has spoken to women who left their male partners when they came out as trans women, sometimes overnight, describing in powerful testimonies how their other half became unrecognisable.

These women, who call themselves ‘trans widows’, are flocking to new support groups, amid fears they may be branded bigots if they find their new situation as a couple to be difficult to comprehend.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-20T04:31:42+00:00

Five Nights at Freddy’s creator Scott Cawthon quits after he’s targeted by cancel campaign over his political donations

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-19T19:24:31+00:00

Amazon Studios Demands Productions Include 50% Female Characters As Well As LGBTQ, Disabled, and Underrepresented Racial Groups

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-19T16:06:21+00:00

Psychiatrist doubles down on claim that white people are ‘psychopathic’

At the April 6 talk, Forensic Psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani said that she fantasizes about killing white people and feels “relatively guiltless” about it.

She added that “there are no good” white people, that whites “make her blood boil,” and that years ago she eschewed just about all of her white friends.

“White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time,” Khilanani said. “We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen.”

In a clip posted Thursday by Temple University’s Marc Lamont Hill, Khilanani reiterated this very contention. Hill asks her “Would it be fair, based on your expertise, to say that white people are psychopathic?”

“I think — I think so, yeah,” Khilanani replies. “I mean, I think there’s many lies that … the way, the level of lying that white people do … started since colonialism, we’re just used to it.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-18T17:42:12+00:00

Juneteenth Is Officially A Federal Holiday, But Blacks Say Whites Shouldn’t Get It Off Work Or Celebrate It At All

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-18T16:37:55+00:00

The Fragile White People Are All Around You

The confession that I am about to make is so radical that I am going to have to be placed in the Witness Protection Program, beyond the reach of my friends and former colleagues at various right-of-center periodicals: I believe in white fragility.

What do I mean by that phrase? Probably not what proponents of so-called “critical race theory” have in mind, though as it happens I am sympathetic to Dr. Aruna Khilanani, who in a talk at Yale Medical School recently described upper-middle-class white women as “passive aggressive” and mocked their feigned gluten allergies after pointing out that for most of human history wars have been fought over access to grain. During the same event Khilanani also confessed her apparent fantasies of shooting white people with a revolver. For this reason, most of what she said will be understandably ignored.

But if “white fragility” simply means that in addition to being passive aggressive, members of our professional class tend to be emotionally unstable, coddled to the point that even their most absurd fantasies are acknowledged as real by doctors, obsessed with health and safety, driven by careerism and social status, and above all convinced that their wealth and privilege are uniformly well-deserved rewards for their hard work and innate virtue, I am firmly in agreement. It’s hard to see why it took a professor to come up with it. Much of it reminds me of “Stuff White People Like,” a hilarious comedy blog from the last decade later adapted into a series of popular coffee table books, or of old stand-up routines by Dave Chapelle and Richard Pryor.

In my experience, the vast majority of the white Americans Khilanani and other critical race theorists are likely to have encountered are in fact like this. They are hilariously risk-averse health fanatics who have anxiety fits at the idea of their neighbors not masking outdoors or their dogs not accompanying them on airplanes. They listen to podcasts and speak in NPR voice (either the affectless lisp of Ira Glass or the condescending smugness of Robert Siegel). They are full of progressive cant, but they don’t want to lose the state and local tax deductions that make their lifestyles possible. Nor do they spend much time around the poor immigrants they pretend to welcome, unless of course it’s a Guatemalan woman raising their children for them.

You can see white fragility at work in the way these people struggle with things like why a GrubHub driver making negative $3 an hour might not be as worked up as they are about a virus whose average victim is older than the American life expectancy. You see it when “birthing person” and “chestfeeding” become actual words that appear in medical textbooks. You see it whenever a black celebrity gets in trouble, especially Michael Vick, whose 30 for 30 special on ESPN was full of grayed-out video footage that made his old dog kennels look like a Soviet prison camp docudrama. (To this day I cannot think of an act more likely to upset a room full of well-to-do suburban women than wearing a Vick jersey, not even saying that you think the Supreme Court was as wrong in Griswold as it was in Roe.) You see it too in the way that, whenever BLM protestors show up at Whole Foods, white women devote an inordinate amount of energy to questions that basically add up to, “Will no one think of the Veganic Sprouted Ancient Maize Flakes? Those thugs!”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-18T02:50:29+00:00

BLM/Antifa trying to establish a second autonomous zone in Minneapolis

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-17T16:32:56+00:00

Google Artificial Intelligence Team Draws From Critical Race Theory, Internal Document Shows

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-17T15:04:39+00:00

Vancouver School Board phases out honours programs in high schools

The Vancouver School Board is cutting honours courses in math and science in its high schools because the school district says they do not comply with the equity and inclusion goal of ensuring that all students can participate in every aspect of the curriculum.

The school board says teachers will instead be encouraged to teach to individual students’ capabilities, including those who excel at math and science. (Honours courses in English were phased out over several years.)

But parents of gifted students say their children will lose the opportunity to dive deeper into maths and sciences without being ostracized in regular classrooms because of their abilities.

Parents were told of the decision in mid-May, months after students had chosen where they would attend high school.

“I find it very interesting that the VSB is using exclusion as the reason for taking away these classes because they were, in fact, the places where I felt the safest,” said Natasha Broemling, whose daughter gave up spots in other schools in order to attend Eric Hamber Secondary School – in part because of the opportunity to enroll in honours courses. Ms. Broemling attended the program herself when she was in high school.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-16T22:45:17+00:00

Unindicted Co-Conspirators in 1/6 Cases Raise Disturbing Questions of Federal Foreknowledge

We are especially interested in the unindicted co-conspirators who belonged to any of the big three “militia groups” — the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters. Indeed, it is these militia groups whose behavior, statements and planning leading up to and during 1/6 most closely align with the “violent insurrectionist” caricature we hear about in the media, and which the government claims to be going after in its aggressive prosecutions.

If it turns out that an extraordinary percentage of the members of these groups involved in planning and executing the Capitol Siege were federal informants or undercover operatives, the implications would be nothing short of staggering. This would be far worse than the already bad situation of the government knowing about the possibility of violence and doing nothing. Instead, this would imply that elements of the federal government were active instigators in the most egregious and spectacular aspects of 1/6, amounting to a monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protestors at the Capitol — and in a much larger sense used to frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists.

This is what’s at stake in getting to the bottom of 1/6.

And so we proceed, unafraid, to investigate the question on which everything else pertaining to 1/6 hinges — did the government have informants or undercover agents in any or all of the “big three” militia groups leading up to or on 1/6? How many of the key unindicted co-conspirators in DOJ prosecutions are unindicted because they are undercover operatives or confidential informants?

In short, what did the federal government know in advance about 1/6, when did they know it — and how far did any undercover operations go?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-16T22:14:21+00:00

Biden admin proposes Americans snitch on family and friends who are potential 'domestic terrorists'

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-16T16:10:16+00:00

Increment the "but that never happens!" counter: She Claimed She Was Raped. Then She Admitted She Lied To Cover Up An Affair

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-16T13:51:39+00:00

A real Pole kneels only before God, says Poland's ambassador to Germany

Poland's ambassador to Germany, Andrzej Przyłębski, has spoken out against players of the Polish national team kneeling before the start of the match in support of the controversial anti-racism movement.

"For me, it goes without saying that the Polish national team will not kneel before the matches during the European Football Championship," said Przyłębski to Junge Freiheit.

"A real Pole kneels only before God — and possibly before the woman he proposes to. Footballers of color are now among the football elite, are wealthy, and are valued and admired. So why should one kneel before them?" asked the ambassador.

"I find it inappropriate to make amends with the colonialism of the past epoch by bowing to people who had nothing to do with it and who were born in England or France, for example," explained Przyłębski.

"Poland never had colonies, so it did not participate in colonialism either. Why should we join a practice born of misunderstood political correctness that affects other countries?" he added.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-16T06:11:34+00:00

Woman Who Threatened to Blow Up School Bus Full of Kids Now Running for Office—With Democrat Support

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-15T22:27:48+00:00

Retail stores across the Bay Area are being looted

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-15T22:06:43+00:00

Is America Becoming a One-Child Country?

Where did all these only children come from? I’ve asked myself this question regularly since I moved back to America after living abroad for eight years. When I left I wasn’t a parent yet, but I came back in January as the mother of three small children. I am amazed at how many of my kids’ little playmates are only children. I estimate the proportion to be around half. Our new neighborhood in Maryland is an interesting mix of blue-collar and white-collar households, but the one-child trend seems to cut across all lines.

[...]

Research shows that most adults are on good terms with their siblings. There’s little specific research about sibling relationships within my own generation, millennials. But I observe most of my peers leaning heavily on their brothers and sisters—primarily for friendship, but also for practical help with things like childcare and sometimes even for financial support. I have two brothers and they are two of my best friends.

What is going to happen when people no longer have siblings? Will the next generation of children think of aunts, uncles, and cousins as mythical beings that don’t really exist?

As extended family networks disappear, we are likely to see even more loneliness, as well as mental health issues and financial insecurity. This will inevitably result in calls for more government programs. Government has long been nicknamed “Big Brother” in reference to George Orwell, but maybe in the future it will be the only brother most people have.

While the puff pieces about the joys of having an only child suggest there are no downsides, I refuse to believe these kids are not lonely. American children spend an average of around one-third of their free time with siblings, and that goes up significantly in bigger families. Friends outside the home can never make up for that level of companionship. Moreover, more only children means that kids have fewer options for potential friends on their street. Neighborhood friendships are ideal because they don’t require an adult chauffeur. I am intimately familiar with the process of arranging playdates with other moms—it can get so complicated I feel like I am Eisenhower planning D-Day.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-15T15:56:00+00:00

Hungary to Vote on Legislation Banning Promotion of Transgenderism to Children

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-15T14:31:16+00:00

OSU students furious after university reports Black-on-White 'hate crime'

Ohio State University students are upset after the school published information about two Black hate crime suspects, as it is required to do under federal law. On September 3, the Ohio State University sent a public safety notice to students, which mentioned a "hate crime" perpetrated by two African-American suspects near Ohio State’s campus. The first correspondence did not mention the victims’ race.

A few days later, the Department of Public Safety sent two follow-up emails, stating that the victims of the crime were White Ohio State students and that the suspects were in custody. One suspect allegedly yelled a racial slur at a student and punched him in the face.

[...]

On September 8, roughly 100 students gathered outside of the school’s administrative offices in order to protest the “error and confusion in the handling of” the public safety notices.

“OSU is mocking their entire Black student body right now. They’re blatantly making campus more uncomfortable and dangerous for us and POC,” tweeted student Deja Geddings.

The group Student Solidarity at OSU argued that the incident was not a hate crime, as racial slurs directed toward White people “are not based on a history of violence & oppression towards White people.”

📯📯

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-14T22:36:57+00:00

Nickelodeon Ratings Crash Amid LGBTQ Push

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-14T20:09:51+00:00

North Korean defector says 'even North Korea was not this nuts' after attending Ivy League school

"I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think," Park said in an interview with Fox News. "I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying."

[...]

She was also shocked and confused by issues surrounding gender and language, with every class asking students to announce their preferred pronouns.

"English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say 'he' or 'she' by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them 'they'? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?"

"It was chaos," said Yeonmi. "It felt like the regression in civilization."

"Even North Korea is not this nuts," she admitted. "North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy."

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-14T18:49:40+00:00

The Mayor, the Teacher and a Fight over a ‘Lost Territory’ of France

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-14T18:04:43+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] The Enduring False Narrative About the PULSE Massacre Shows the Power of Media Propaganda

On June 12, 2016, Mateen spent just over three hours in PULSE from the time he began slaughtering innocent people at roughly 2:00 a.m. until he was killed by a SWAT team at roughly 5:00 a.m. During that time, he repeatedly spoke to his captives about his motive, did the same with the police with whom he was negotiating, and discussed his cause with local media which he had called from inside the club. Mateen was remarkably consistent in what he said about his motivation. Over and over, he emphasized that his attack at PULSE was in retaliation for U.S. bombing campaigns in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. In his first call with 911 while inside PULSE, this is what he said about why he was killing people:

Because you have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of innocent people. What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. … You need to stop the U.S. airstrikes. They need to stop the U.S. airstrikes, OK? . … This went down, a lot of innocent women and children are getting killed in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, OK? … The airstrikes need to stop and stop collaborating with Russia. OK?

In the hours he spent surrounded by the gay people he was murdering, he never once uttered a homophobic syllable, instead always emphasizing his geo-political motive. Not a single survivor reported him saying anything derogatory about LGBTs or even anything that suggested he knew he was in a gay club. All said he spoke extensively about his vengeance on behalf of ISIS against U.S. bombing of innocent Muslims.

Mateen's postings on Facebook leading up to his attack all reflected the same motive. They were filled with rage about and vows of retaliation against U.S. bombing. Not a single post contained any references to LGBTs let alone anger or violence toward them. “You kill innocent women and children by doing U.S. airstrikes,” Mateen wrote on Facebook in one of his last posts before attacking PULSE, adding: “Now taste the Islamic state vengeance.”

It was of course nonetheless possible that he secretly harbored hatred for LGBTs and hid his real motive, but that never made sense: the whole point of terrorism is to publicize, not conceal, the grievances driving the violence. And again, good journalism requires evidence before ratifying claims. There never was any to support the story that Mateen's attack was driven by anti-LGBT hatred, and all the available evidence early on negated that suspicion and pointed to a radically different motive. But the media frenzy ended up, by design or otherwise, obscuring Mateen's anger over Obama's bombing campaigns as his motive in favor of promoting this as an anti-LGBT hate crime.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-14T16:22:56+00:00

BLM blocks a busy Minneapolis street in the middle of night, causing the death of another rioter

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-14T05:21:11+00:00

Federal court scraps law excluding religious students from Vermont voucher program

A federal appeals court ended a Vermont statute that barred state vouchers from funding religious education.

As Campus Reform reported in February, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second District granted an injunction requiring Vermont’s Dual Enrollment Program to give funds to a student attending a Roman Catholic high school. Previously, the student was denied access to the funds due to the religious nature of her education.

The court confirmed that she was denied access to the program “solely because of her school’s religious status.”

On June 2, the Alliance Defending Freedom — the world’s “largest legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom” — announced that the same court struck down the twenty-one-year-old law entirely.

The court’s opinion said that the Supreme Court reminded states four years ago that it “has repeatedly confirmed that denying a generally available benefit solely on account of religious identity imposes a penalty on the free exercise of religion that can be justified only by a state interest of the highest order.” Accordingly, “a state cannot justify discrimination against religious schools and students by invoking an ‘interest in separating church and State more fiercely than the Federal Constitution.’”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-13T17:47:30+00:00

Florida bans teaching critical race theory in schoolsa

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-13T11:03:47+00:00

School District Decides Asians Aren't Students of Color

One school district in Washington state has evidently decided that Asians no longer qualify as persons of color.

In their latest equity report, administrators at North Thurston Public Schools—which oversees some 16,000 students—lumped Asians in with whites and measured their academic achievements against "students of color," a category that includes "Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Multi-Racial Students" who have experienced "persistent opportunity gaps."

Most indicators in the report show that the achievement gap between white/Asian students and "students of color" is fairly narrow and improving over time. It would probably be even narrower if Asian students were categorized as "students of color." In fact, some indicators might have even shown white students lagging behind that catch-all minority group. Perhaps Asians were included with whites in order to avoid such an outcome. (The superintendent did not respond to a request for comment.)

What the equity report really highlights is the absurdities that result from overreliance on semi-arbitrary race-based categories. The report also measured "students of poverty"—those who qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches—against non-poverty students, and unsurprisingly found a much more significant achievement gap. Students of poverty perform 28 percent worse on math tests, for instance. That socioeconomic category captures something real and meaningful in a way that the gerrymandered race category does not.

Outside public-school bureaucracies, these kinds of race-based classifications seem less popular than ever. In the 2020 election, California voters decisively rejected Proposition 16, which would have allowed public employees to consider race as a factor in university admissions, employment, contracting, and other decisions. Race-based admissions have been forbidden in the state since 1996, when voters outlawed them via ballot initiative by a margin of 54 percent to 45 percent. Proposition 16, which would have reversed this, lost by an even larger margin, despite receving enthusiastic endorsements from top Democrats in the state.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-13T04:26:36+00:00

Sex Ed Teacher Leaves Post at Elite Private School After Showing Masturbation Cartoon to First Graders

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-12T22:16:28+00:00

When Buck Breaking goes wrong: VA Football player charged with beating a gay man to death after Tinder encounter

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-12T21:04:00+00:00

Croatia's football team refuses to kneel for BLM during Euro 2020, backs Hungary's position

Following the example of the Hungarian national team, Croats also announced that they will not kneel before the matches of the Euro 2020 Championship, which kicks off Friday evening in Rome with Turkey vs. Italy at 9:00 in the evening.

The players of the Croatian national football team said they will certainly not kneel in their opening match against England. The reasoning on the part of the Croatian federation is the same as the Hungarian position, which points to European Football Association (UEFA), which prohibits players making political gestures.

It is common practice in England for players to kneel before matches, who are campaigning for the controversial Black Lives Matter political movement. The members of the English national team did the same in their preparation match against Austria and Romania despite fans booing the gesture, and the players also plan to kneel during their European Championship matches.

In contrast, the 2018 World Cup silver medalists, the Croats, have announced that they will not join the English before the match and will remain standing after the starting whistle before the ball sets off in a clash in Group D.

At a press conference before the European Championships, Croatian national team spokesman Tomislav Pacak did not want to answer a question related to kneeling, but Croatian journalists said the decision was made by the association because kneeling is not part of the UEFA protocol and the UEFA is explicitly opposed to any politically motivated manifestations in sport.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-12T16:33:56+00:00

“Straight Jerk!” – Teacher Berates 6th Grade Student Who Asked Why Straight Kids Weren’t Allowed to Have Her “Unicorn Cupcakes

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-12T15:33:39+00:00

Second resignation this year at presitigious medical journal after editor questions woke anti-racist narratives

Less than three months after Howard Bauchner, editor-in-chief of Journal of the American Medical Association, accepted a subordinate's resignation for questioning whether racism is embedded in American society, he is stepping down after publicly doubting the notion of "structural racism."

In a June 1 statement, the American Medical Association announced that Bauchner would step down by the end of the month.

Bauchner declared that he took “responsibility” for the comments after a tweet promoting the podcast episode stated that “no physician is racist.”

Campus Reform earlier reported that Deputy Editor Edward Livingston resigned in March after making the controversial claims on the publication's podcast. At the time, Livingston directed his resignation to Bauchner.

This month's statement included an apology from Bauchner: “I remain profoundly disappointed in myself for the lapses that led to the publishing of the tweet and podcast. Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor-in-chief, I am ultimately responsible for them.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-12T01:02:07+00:00

Army LTC to Troops, “If You Are a White Male You’re Part of the Problem”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-11T17:01:14+00:00

Oregon legislature passes HB 3115, forcing all communities to accept homeless encampments on public property

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-11T15:29:29+00:00

Hate-crime hoax: Black student likely egged her own door, police say

A black student who said she was the victim of multiple attacks because of her race has been identified as a primary suspect in the alleged vandalism, according to a police report obtained by The College Fix under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Wayne State University Police Department said it spent “at minimum 200 man hours” investigating the alleged incidents that occurred in February and March 2021.

Zoriana Martinez alleged that on February 16 and March 1 someone threw eggs at her residence hall door. She also said someone tore down her LGBT Pride sticker and stole a photo of her dog.

This happened “all because [she was] a black person living in their space,” she said.

[...]

But the police have concluded that she likely perpetrated the incident herself to obtain a leadership position in the Black Student Union.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-11T00:33:32+00:00

Abertay University student Lisa Keogh cleared after being investigated for saying women have vaginas

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-10T22:29:48+00:00

Stop Asian Hate founder denounces Asians who speak out about Black on Asian hate crimes

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-10T22:07:02+00:00

[Rod Dreher] The Woke J.R.R. Tolkien

The reader who sent this in cites it as an example of O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” The Tolkien Society has announced its summer seminar — and hoo boy, is it ever woke!

We are extremely excited to invite you to our upcoming Tolkien Society online seminar on Saturday and Sunday 3rd-4th July! The schedule is now live on the website and can be viewed here.

With sixteen speakers coming to you live in your own home, the day promises to be full of new and fascinating insights into ‘Tolkien and Diversity’.

What is even better is that the event (to be hosted on Zoom) is free to attend. If you would like to attend then please sign up here. The Zoom link and further details will be shared closer to the event only with those who have registered.

The full list of speakers are as follows:

Cordeliah Logsdon – Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings

Clare Moore – The Problem of Pain: Portraying Physical Disability in the Fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien

V. Elizabeth King – “The Burnt Hand Teaches Most About Fire”: Applying Traumatic Stress and Ecological Frameworks to Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement Across Cultures in Tolkien’s Middle-earth

Christopher Vaccaro – Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings

Sultana Raza – Projecting Indian Myths, Culture and History onto Tolkien’s Worlds

Nicholas Birns – The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Power

Kristine Larsen – The Problematic Perimeters of Elrond Half-elven and Ronald English-Catholic

Cami Agan – Hearkening to the Other: Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth

Sara Brown – The Invisible Other: Tolkien’s Dwarf-Women and the ‘Feminine Lack’

Sonali Chunodkar – Desire of the Ring: An Indian Academic’s Adventures in her Quest for the Perilous Realm

Robin Reid – Queer Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh, My!

Joel Merriner – Hidden Visions: Iconographies of Alterity in Soviet Bloc Illustrations for The Lord of the Rings

Eric Reinders – Questions of Caste in The Lord of the Rings and its Multiple Chinese Translations

Dawn Walls-Thumma – Stars Less Strange: An Analysis of Fanfiction and Representation within the Tolkien Fan Community

Danna Petersen-Deeprose – “Something Mighty Queer”: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien

Martha Celis-Mendoza – Translation as a means of representation and diversity in Tolkien’s scholarship and fandom

What can men do against such reckless hate?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-10T16:39:12+00:00

Oxfam training guide blames ‘privileged white women’ over root causes of sexual violence

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-10T15:21:00+00:00

Stop this culture war against the working class

So now we know what ‘taking the knee’ is all about. Now we know why footballers in the UK – 4,000 miles from the site of George Floyd’s murder last year – are still bending down in silence at the start of every game. It isn’t about Floyd. It isn’t about racism. It isn’t about raising awareness of the fact that some lowlifes on Twitter think it’s funny to racially abuse black footballers. No, taking the knee is now little more than an elitist provocation. It has become a way of goading working-class football fans. This is the footballing elites – cheered on by the media class, the political establishment and the Twitterati – reprimanding the masses in the stands for their presumed prejudices and idiocies. The bent knee is yet another weapon in the never-ending culture war on the oiks.

This is why the recent storm over the taking of the knee, the noisy booing of it by irate fans, has not led to a rethink of this increasingly bizarre pre-match ritual. On the contrary, there’s been a doubling down, a stubborn insistence on the part of everyone from England manager Gareth Southgate to all those turbo-smug NuFootball scribes on the broadsheets that this showy genuflection to the politics of identity must continue. To teach the Neanderthals a lesson, you see. That some fans have booed the taking of the knee shows why the taking of the knee is so necessary, everyone is saying. And there it is. The truth about this patronising spectacle. It isn’t about Derek Chauvin, or police brutality, or the mercifully small number of wankers who say racist things on social media. It’s about you, the prole in the terraces, the oaf watching on TV – it’s about reminding you of your moral inferiority. That’s why it must continue.

Southgate has rather given the game away. After England fans booed the taking of the knee at the Austria game last week and at the Romania game yesterday, he made it clear the kneeling will go on. With added oomph. ‘We feel more than ever that we are determined to take the knee throughout this tournament’, he said (my emphasis). And the fans who have loudly registered their disapproval of this infiltration of football by virtue-signalling? Screw ’em. ‘We’re going to ignore that and move forward’, said Southgate. This is unusual behaviour. People who run institutions or organisations might normally be expected to engage with displeasure in their ranks. Not in this case, though. The displeasure of fans over the politicisation of the beautiful game must simply be ignored, or mocked, or agitated against with ever-more determined knee-bending. Because that’s what the kneeling is increasingly all about – it’s a knee on the metaphorical neck of the gruff, unenlightened little people who make up football’s fanbase.

Football pundit and Remainiac anti-democrat Gary Lineker has also indicated that the kneeling is now primarily aimed at the oiks. ‘If you boo England players for taking the knee, you’re part of the reason why players are taking the knee’, he declared. For those football commentators who love football but fear its strange, loudmouthed fans, the booing is proof of what hotbeds of hate the stands have become. The booing is a ‘shameful, hurtful act’, says the Guardian’s Barney Ronay. It confirms there are ‘racists, boneheads and people without compassion’ in football stadiums, which have now virtually become ‘theatre[s] of hate’. May I politely suggest that if your dainty ears cannot handle a few boos – or rude chants, or swear words, or explosions of passion – then perhaps you should find another sport to follow. Bowls?

More and more, the knee-taking at games will become an act of moral distinction. As the controversy over this gesture intensifies, footballers will be taking the knee essentially to distinguish themselves against ‘problematic’ fans, to make a public statement of their own puffed-up virtue against the presumed prejudices of the jeering fanbase. And they will be egged on by both the footballing establishment and the middle-class media, much of which has always looked upon football fans as a suspect swarm, as hooligans in waiting, as an insufficiently enlightened mob requiring re-education through everything from rainbow laces (to remind them that homosexuality is fine) to incessant BLM-style sloganeering (to remind them not to be such racist scumbags). ‘Kneel down, stick it to those insufferable proles’ – that’s really what the identitarian elites are saying now.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-10T00:16:46+00:00

Report: San Francisco School Enrollment Plunges as Mostly White Families Flee District

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-09T22:25:42+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] Yet Another Media Tale -- Trump Tear-Gassed Protesters For a Church Photo Op -- Collapses

For more than a year, it has been consecrated media fact that former President Donald Trump and his White House, on June 1 of last year, directed the U.S. Park Police to use tear gas against peaceful Lafayette Park protesters, all to enable a Trump photo-op in front of St. John's Church. That this happened was never presented as a possibility or likelihood but as indisputable truth. And it provoked weeks of unmitigated media outrage, presented as one of the most egregious assaults on the democratic order in decades.

[...]

But as usual, the self-proclaimed Superior Liberal Truth Squad instantly declared them to be lying. The Washington Post's "fact-checker,” Phillip Bump, mocked denials from Trump supporters and right-wing reporters such as Hemingway, proclaiming that a recent statement from the Park Police “brings the debate to a close,” as it proves “the deployment of security forces using weapons and irritants to clear a peaceful protest so that the president could have a photo op.”

All of this came crashing down on their heads on Wednesday afternoon. The independent Inspector General of the Interior Department, Mark Lee Greenblatt, issued his office's findings after a long investigation into “the actions of the U.S. Park Police (USPP) to disperse protesters in and around Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, on June 1, 2020.” Greenblatt has been around Washington for a long time, occupying numerous key positions in the Obama administration, including investigative counsel at the Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General and Assistant Inspector General for Investigations at Obama's Commerce Department.

The letter released by Greenblatt's office accompanying the report makes clear how far-reaching the investigation was:

Over the course of this review, our career investigative staff conducted extensive witness interviews, reviewed video footage from numerous vantage points, listened to radio transmissions from multiple law enforcement entities, and examined evidence including emails, text messages, telephone records, procurement documents, and other related materials. This report presents a thorough, independent examination of that evidence to assess the USPP’s decision making and operations, including a detailed timeline of relevant actions and an analysis of whether the USPP’s actions complied with governing policies.

The IG's conclusion could not be clearer: the media narrative was false from start to finish. Namely, he said, “the evidence did not support a finding that the [U.S. Park Police] cleared the park on June 1, 2020, so that then President Trump could enter the park.” Instead — exactly as Hemingway's widely-mocked-by-liberal-outlets article reported — “the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31.” Crucially, “ the evidence established that relevant USPP officials had made those decisions and had begun implementing the operational plan several hours before they knew of a potential Presidential visit to the park, which occurred later that day."

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-09T21:48:42+00:00

Two Latina school Boston School Committee members resign after expressing bigotry against White students

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-09T17:49:36+00:00

Farewell, New York City

Even the magnificent Central Park is racially divided. Check real estate prices at the southern end of the Park, called Billionaires’ Row, versus the northern end where the Park is capped by liquor stores with bars on the windows and tenements poor people have been swapping out since 1900. Chinatown and Greektown sound fun for tourists, but nobody is comfortable admitting we also have Hebrew Village, Blacktown, and Caucasianland.

The underlying financial system is unsustainable, far too few people (fewer now with COVID flight) paying too many taxes to support, indefinitely, too many others. The wealthy still enjoy NYC as long as they stay in their own layer, living hundreds of feet above the city, taking advantage of cheap labor for their needs, and scuttling to cultural events in town cars like cockroaches when the kitchen light flips on. They don’t live in New York, they float above it. Many play at liberalism, supporting the cool-kids-approved cause of the day espoused by the Daily Show and donating to PBS, but they really have no way to care. They literally do not even see what is happening around them.

New York had great pizza, enough to have America’s only professional pizza tour guide (though the city has fallen to a disgraceful third place nationally.) Amazing bagels. Shopping to die for. The museums. The energy. Broadway. But the list of what one has to put up with on an everyday basis to access all that grows worryingly longer, even without factoring in COVID. Street crime. Homelessness. A deteriorating public transportation system that gets more expensive to use proportionally as it gets less pleasant.

Take a non-rush hour bus ride and you will almost certainly be forced to navigate around someone with mental illness. The police force has either pretty much given up doing anything more than keeping the combatants apart or is a racist invading army, depending on where you think. I love a great slice of pizza, but I also got beat up on my own block, in what the cops said was some sort of gang initiation, and I was damn lucky not to have gotten seriously hurt.

Add in the black-slush lagoons that form on every street corner after a heavy snow melts. The co-op apartment system where each building is like a bitchy mini-Vatican with its own rules and eccentricities. Some of the highest taxes in the country. Creaky infrastructure that leaks water, steam, gas, and electricity, sometimes all at once, to blend with the street gravy of the homeless.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-09T16:41:50+00:00

Wow, with all these black Trump supporters how did he ever lose? 'You're not even from this country, you ch**k!' Shocking moment man hurls slurs at Asian NYPD officer before yelling 'black people can't be racist'

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-09T15:08:15+00:00

When the State Comes for Your Kids

Because of a Covid-19 policy, Ahmed could not stay at the hospital with his son back in October. Syed, in a sleep-deprived and confused state, furious at the parents who had admitted him, and in consultation with hospital staff and a social worker, decided that his problem was gender.

The age at which minors in the State of Washington can receive mental health and gender-affirming care without parental permission is 13. In other words, the emails Ahmed received from the hospital were effectively a courtesy; the hospital did not require Ahmed’s permission to begin his son on a path to medical transition.

But unlike some other parents I would later speak with, Ahmed’s cool head prevailed. Believing he might be walking into a trap, Ahmed reached out to both a lawyer and a psychiatrist friend he trusted. The psychiatrist gave him advice that he believes saved his son, saying, in Ahmed’s words: “You have to be very, very careful, because if you come across as just even a little bit anti-trans or anything, they’re going to call the Child Protective Services on you and take custody of your kid.” The lawyer told Ahmed the same: “What you want to do is agree with them and take your kid home. When the gender counselors advise you to ‘affirm,’ go along with it. Just say ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay, let’s take him home, and we’ll go to the gender clinic.’”

Ahmed assured Seattle Children’s Hospital that he would take his son to a gender clinic and commence his son’s transition. Instead, he collected his son, quit his job, and moved his family of four out of Washington.

Was Ahmed’s reaction extreme? When I first heard it, back in October 2020, I wondered whether he hadn’t overreacted. But as a growing number of parents began contacting me with similar stories, and I delved into the state laws of Washington, Oregon, and California, I came to a different conclusion. Taken individually, no single law in any state completely strips parents’ rights over the care and mental health treatment of their troubled minor teens. But pieced together, laws in California, Oregon, and Washington place troubled minor teens as young as 13 in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own mental health care—including “gender affirming” care—and renders parents powerless to stop them.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-09T04:51:20+00:00

NYT’s Mara Gay: Seeing Trucks with U.S. Flags ‘Disturbing’ — Calls for Separating ‘Americanness, America from Whiteness’

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-09T00:51:10+00:00

1,000+ Lockheed Martin employees forced to take anti-white race training allegedly forcing execs to call white men ‘racist,’ ‘KKK,’ ‘privileged’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-08T21:51:27+00:00

The unbearable annoyingness of Pride

I see the flag-shaggers are out in force. No, not working-class people who hang the Union flag from their living-room window as an expression of pride in their nation. I’m talking about the Pride flag. That omnipresent rainbow eyesore. A virtue-signal made cloth. The flag no one can escape. Yep, it’s Pride Month, which means that everywhere you go for the next four weeks – the bank, the supermarket, Maccy D’s – you’ll have this flag waved in your face to remind you not to be such a horrible, homophobic piece of shit. Happy Pride Month!

God, Pride has become annoying. It’s so gratingly ubiquitous. I haven’t seen this much smug flag-waving since 100,000 Guardian readers wrapped in the EU colours, tears streaking their blue-painted faces, descended on Whitehall to demand the cancellation of stupid northern people’s votes. And yet the people who cry ‘flag-shagger!’ every time Keir Starmer stands stiffly next to the Union flag, or when Robert Jenrick goes on TV with a backdrop of showy British memorabilia, are curiously silent about the adorning of every building in the land with the bloody Pride flag.

[...]

The most virtuous signallers don’t only wave the Pride flag – they wear it. Remember Justin Trudeau’s Pride socks? The New York Times gushed over his ‘socks diplomacy’. Channel 4’s Jon Snow has worn Pride socks and a Pride tie and possibly Pride underwear for all we know. This is the man who made a big deal of refusing to wear a poppy and complaining about ‘a rather unpleasant breed of poppy fascism’. And yet he happily bows to the political, corporate and even military pressure to cover oneself in rainbows – head to toe in his case – every June.

Pride flag-shagging is now virtually mandatory. If you fail to wave the flag you’ll be looked upon as suspect. You might even be cancelled. For the second year running Ockbrook and Borrowash Parish Council in Derbyshire has voted against flying the Pride flag and people are going mental. ‘Anger as Pride Month flag snubbed by Derbyshire council again’, said an actual BBC News headline. One Borrowash resident said the absence of a Pride flag would mean that some people would not ‘feel safe to come to the village’. There you have it. The Pride flag is a statement of virtue and civilisation. Fail to fly it and you risk being considered prejudiced, hateful, unsafe.

What is this all about? Every now and then radical leftists will venture mild criticisms of Pride’s increasingly cosy relationship with capitalism and even with Empire. These corporations and military machines are ‘pink-washing’, they claim, the idea being that they use the rainbow flag to distract attention from their normal immoral antics. This is only a tiny part of the story. The bigger truth about Pride and its annual orgy of flag-shagging is that it confirms the almost unstoppable ascendancy of identity politics, and that the ruling classes of the West are perfectly at ease with this politics. They love it, in fact.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-08T16:53:29+00:00

A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities: Academics are speaking up against the stifling of debate

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-08T15:09:37+00:00

Snowflake CEO Offers Apologies, Support for Hiring Diversity

Snowflake Inc. Chief Executive Officer Frank Slootman apologized to those he said he may have hurt when he suggested during a Bloomberg Television interview that diversity should be secondary to merit in hiring, and acknowledged that people aren’t treated equally in the workplace.

“Comments I made during a media interview last week may have led some to infer that I believe that diversity and merit are mutually exclusive when it comes to recruitment, hiring and promotion. I do not believe this, and I want to personally apologize to anyone who may have been hurt or offended by my comments,” Slootman said in a statement posted Monday on the company’s blog. “I accept full and personal responsibility for the lack of clarity in my comments.”

Slootman said Thursday on Bloomberg Television that a more “moderated” approach was needed to ensure diversity, which shouldn’t override merit in hiring and promoting employees. The CEO of the cloud software maker said other chief executive officers felt the same way, but were reluctant to speak publicly.

[...]

Last year, after the death of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests, Snowflake announced a council to examine the company’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion practices” and make progress “through innovative new ideas from across the entire organization.” The San Mateo, California-based company, which went public in September in the largest U.S. initial public offering in 2020, didn’t release any workforce demographic data in its first annual report as a public company nor is that information listed on its website.

“While diversity, equity and inclusion has long been a focus for Snowflake, we are committed to doing more. We have the responsibility to lead, and we will do so,” Slootman said. “Snowflake, under my personal leadership, will undertake a comprehensive review across our company of all of our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to help ensure that we are taking appropriate steps. We have a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion council at Snowflake, and I am proud of the work they have done.”

The simulation is taunting us.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-08T04:55:44+00:00

Health Care Journal Publishes Research Calling Whiteness A ‘Parasitic Condition’ Without ‘Permanent Cure’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-07T21:16:24+00:00

Why is woke comedy so unfunny?

Comedy was officially pronounced dead at 18.02 on 23 May 2021.

That was the moment BBC Three, which is apparently ‘still a thing’, tweeted a clip from a series called Shrill that confused and appalled the entire internet, as people from across the globe tried to decipher the meaning of this mysterious content.

[...]

The bare facts are: it is a short scene wherein a young white woman goes to a hairdresser and asks for dreadlocks. The black female hairdresser tells her why she can’t have them, explains the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’, then kicks her out.

That is all quite clear. What people have not been able to ascertain is: why this clip / show exists, what it is trying to achieve, and what weapons might kill it.

First, it is true that the scene is not in any way funny. It is not even close to funny. If funny was a holiday destination, Shrill wouldn’t even manage to get in the taxi to the airport. In fact it would lose its passport, then sit alone crying in a heap of clothes, before defecating on itself and passing out. And I am being generous.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-07T19:00:11+00:00

Female Amazon Driver Beats Up Elderly Woman After Reportedly Telling Her To ‘Check Her White Privilege’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-07T18:24:26+00:00

Taking a page out of '1984,' Brown University student newspaper will retroactively change transgender students' 'deadnames'

The editorial board of the Brown Daily Herald announced that it would “respect individuals’ current and lived identities” by adopting “new policy regarding requests from transgender or nonbinary individuals to replace their deadname and/or change their pronouns featured in previously published work on The Herald’s website.”

As defined by Dictionary.com, a “deadname” is “the name that a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses upon transitioning.” For instance, BBC News was roundly criticized in September for “deadnaming” Caitlyn Jenner by calling him “Bruce.”

The Herald added that it would “make the gender-affirming changes online in a timely manner and without a correction or editor’s note marking the change.”

The editors plan to refrain from including an editors’ note because “such a note would risk outing the individual and causing harm.”

“We think this policy reflects both our commitment to accuracy and our ethical obligation to minimize harm,” said the announcement. “We are eager to see how other newsrooms, both our student peers and at professional news organizations, address this and similar questions in the coming months and years.”

Archive? Archive. Archive archive archive. Newspapers are now openly admitting to retroactively editing their stories to be politically correct.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-07T15:56:28+00:00

Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis: An organization that has defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan is split by an internal debate over whether supporting progressive causes is more important.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-07T14:55:22+00:00

[Rod Dreher] Yale’s Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist

It’s hard to come up with a better example of the woke totalitarian capture of elite institutions than this Yale School of Medicine lecture by a hardcore anti-white racist psychiatrist, the audio of which is posted on Bari Weiss’s Substack. Weiss highlights these lines from the lecture:

This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil. (Time stamp: 6:45)

I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)

White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time. (Time stamp: 17:06)

We are now in a psychological predicament, because white people feel that we are bullying them when we bring up race. They feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. They are confused, and so are we. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall. It’s just like sort of not a good idea. (Time stamp 17:13)

We need to remember that directly talking about race to white people is useless, because they are at the wrong level of conversation. Addressing racism assumes that white people can see and process what we are talking about. They can’t. That’s why they sound demented. They don’t even know they have a mask on. White people think it’s their actual face. We need to get to know the mask. (Time stamp 17:54)

[...]

If you go to the Bari Weiss site, you can also read the text of an interview that Katie Herzog did with Dr. Khilanani. It’s chilling, absolutely chilling. What we all need to confront is the fact that this psychiatrist, under the auspices of one of the most prestigious universities in America, delivered a lecture featuring unapologetic, unrestrained racism, and … nobody in that institution or in her circles cared. This is par for the course. They expect it. At some level, they want it.

Do I believe that most white people who heard it, or who, within the Yale community, heard it, believe what Dr. Khilanani said? No, I don’t, though I’m just guessing. But I am 100 percent sure that they are terrified to say something about it, because if you spoke up, that would be the end of you professionally.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-07T05:56:34+00:00

[Katie Herzog] What Happens When Doctors Can't Tell the Truth?

“Wokeness feels like an existential threat,” a doctor from the Northwest said. “In health care, innovation depends on open, objective inquiry into complex problems, but that’s now undermined by this simplistic and racialized worldview where racism is seen as the cause of all disparities, despite robust data showing it’s not that simple.”

“Whole research areas are off-limits,” he said, adding that some of what is being published in the nation’s top journals is “shoddy as hell.”

Here, he was referring in part to a study published last year in the Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. The study was covered all over the news, with headlines like “Black Newborns More Likely to Die When Looked After by White Doctors” (CNN), “The Lack of Black Doctors is Killing Black Babies” (Fortune), and “Black Babies More Likely to Survive when Cared for by Black Doctors” (The Guardian).

Despite these breathless headlines, the study was so methodologically flawed that, according to several of the doctors I spoke with, it’s impossible to extrapolate any conclusions about how the race of the treating doctor impacts patient outcomes at all. And yet very few people were willing to publicly criticize it. As Vinay Prasad, a clinician and a professor at the University of California San Francisco, put it on Twitter: “I am aware of dozens of people who agree with my assessment of this paper and are scared to comment.”

“It’s some of the most shoddy, methodologically flawed research we’ve ever seen published in these journals,” the doctor in the Zoom meeting said, “with sensational conclusions that seem totally unjustified from the results of the study.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-06T17:32:17+00:00

BLM rioters brutally pummel White pedestrian in savage hate crime attack

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-06T16:56:09+00:00

The Child Soldiers of Portland: Public schools are training children to become race-conscious revolutionaries.

Tigard, Oregon, is a placid suburb southwest of Portland. A local shopping mall hosts a Macy's, a Dick's Sporting Goods, and a Cheesecake Factory. The city’s historic main street is a pastiche of coffeehouses, boutiques, repair shops, and restaurants. Historically, the city’s political squabbles have concerned zoning and land-use issues—in other words, the typical politics of an affluent American suburb. Demographically, Tigard is not diverse; it numbers only 636 blacks out of a total population of 52,368, making up approximately 1 percent of residents.

Nonetheless, educators at the Tigard-Tualatin School District have gone all-in on the social-justice trinity of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Last June, at the height of the nationwide unrest, Superintendent Sue Rieke-Smith and Board Chair Maureen Wolf signed a proclamation “condemning racism and committing to being an anti-racist school district.” The preamble to the document recited the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and confessed that the district’s “students of color, and Black students in particular, still regularly experience racism in [their] schools.” To rectify this, the superintendent pledged to become “actively anti-racist,” “dismantle systemic racism,” implement a “collective equity framework,” establish “pillars for equity,” deploy “Equity Teams” within schools, create racially segregated “Student Affinity Groups,” and use “an equity lens for all future curriculum adoptions.”

The next month, the district announced a new Department of Equity and Inclusion and installed social-justice activist Zinnia Un as director. Un quickly created a blueprint, which I have obtained through a whistle-blower, for overhauling the pedagogy and curriculum at Tigard-Tualatin schools. The document calls for adopting the educational theories of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, whose “pedagogy of the oppressed” (summarized in a 1968 book with that title) was originally designed to instill “critical consciousness” among impoverished South Americans and to forge the conditions for overthrowing the dictatorial governments of the era. (See “Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” Spring 2009.) Following Freire’s categorizations, Un writes that the Tigard-Tualatin school district must move from a state of “reading the world” to the phase of “denunciation” against the revolution’s enemies and, finally, to the state of “annunciation” of the liberated masses, who will begin “rewriting the world.”

In her blueprint, Un describes the new oppressor as an amalgamation of “whiteness,” “colorblindness,” “individualism,” and “meritocracy.” These are the values of capitalist society—but for Un, they are the values of white society, the primary impediment to social justice.

What is the solution to pathological whiteness? According to Un and the Tigard-Tualatin School District, the answer lies with a new form of “white identity development.” In a series of “antiracist resources” provided to teachers, the Department of Equity and Inclusion includes a handful of strategies for this identity transformation, intended to “facilitate growth for white folks to become allies, and eventually accomplices, for anti-racist work.” Couched in the language of professional development, the process assumes that whites are born “racist,” even if they “don’t purposely or consciously act in a racist way.” The first step in the training document is “contact,” defined as confronting whites with “active racism or real-world experiences that highlight their whiteness.” The goal is to provoke an emotional rupture that brings the subject to the next step, “disintegration,” in which he or she feels intense “white guilt” and “white shame,” and admits: “I feel bad for being white.” The training then outlines a process of moving white subjects from a state of “reintegration” to “pseudo-independence” to “immersion” to “autonomy.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-05T18:12:42+00:00

Rutgers Law SBA offered funds only to groups promoting CRT

In November, the Rutgers Law Student Bar Association — the “umbrella organization for all other organizations” that governs extracurricular activities — amended its constitution to state that any student group seeking more than $250 in university funds must “plan at least one (1) event that addresses their chosen topics through the lens of Critical Race Theory, diversity and inclusion, or cultural competency.”

Critical race theory posits that American society is irredeemably divided into oppressive and oppressed racial subgroups.

In response to the constitutional amendment, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education sent a letter to Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway to express their concern.

“Rutgers may not condition student organizations’ funding on their willingness to host events that address or promote a specific ideology, as the First Amendment requires that public universities distribute student activity fee funds in a viewpoint-neutral manner,” reads the letter. “It has long been settled law that the First Amendment is binding on public universities like Rutgers. Accordingly, the decisions and actions of a public university and its student government — including the recognition and funding of student organizations — must be consistent with the First Amendment.”

The letter notes that the constitutional amendment “puts student organizations in the unenviable position of deciding either to falsely affirm their belief in an ideological proposition with which they disagree or on which they simply prefer to remain silent, or to forgo accessing university resources.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-04T20:51:39+00:00

University of Washington student government wants school to introduce ‘content warnings’ in class

Leaders of the University of Washington student government have approved a bill that calls on the university administration to create "content warning" standards for classes.

According to The Daily, the Associated Students of the University of Washington Board of Directors approved the resolution which calls on the university to require professors to add "content warnings" before classroom discussions of "sensitive topics."

The resolution recommends that instructors communicate "content warnings" before discussing "sexual assault, child abuse, physical assault, racially motivated violence, abuse, and suicide."

Additionally, the resolution recommends that instructors include a "content warning" in the course description, given to students when registering for classes.

The resolution also calls on the university to create a "formal method for students to submit complaints" if a professor brings up a sensitive topic but does not use a "content warning."

Once again: adult daycare.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-04T19:23:38+00:00

Armed Black Supremacists vow to murder White people during Tulsa, OK march

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-04T19:07:48+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] The FBI's Strange Anthrax Investigation Sheds Light on COVID Lab-Leak Theory and Fauci's Emails

When an independent investigation was finally conducted in 2011 into the FBI’s scientific claims against Ivins, much of that doubt converted into full-blown skepticism. As The New York Times put it — in a 2011 article headlined "Expert Panel Is Critical of F.B.I. Work in Investigating Anthrax Letters" — the review “concludes that the bureau overstated the strength of genetic analysis linking the mailed anthrax to a supply kept by Bruce E. Ivins.” A Washington Post article -- headlined: "Anthrax report casts doubt on scientific evidence in FBI case against Bruce Ivins" -- announced that "the report reignited a debate that has simmered among some scientists and others who have questioned the strength of the FBI's evidence against Ivins."

An in-depth joint investigation by ProPublica, PBS and McClatchy — published under the headline “New Evidence Adds Doubt to FBI’s Case Against Anthrax Suspect” — concluded that “newly available documents and the accounts of Ivins’ former colleagues shed fresh light on the evidence and, while they don't exonerate Ivins, are at odds with some of the science and circumstantial evidence that the government said would have convicted him of capital crimes.” It added: “even some of the government’s science consultants wonder whether the real killer is still at large.” The report itself, issued by the National Research Council, concluded that while the components of the anthrax in Ivins’ lab were “consistent” with the weaponized anthrax that had been sent, “the scientific link between the letter material and flask number RMR-1029 [found in Ivins’ lab] is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary."

In short, these were serious and widespread mainstream doubts about the FBI’s case against Ivins, and those have never been resolved. U.S. institutions seemingly agreed to simply move on without ever addressing lingering scientific and other evidentiary questions regarding whether Ivins was really involved in the anthrax attacks and, if so, how it was possible that he could have carried out this sophisticated attack within a top-secret U.S. Army lab acting alone. So whitewashed is this history that doubts about whether the FBI found the real perpetrator are now mocked by smug Smart People as a fringe conspiracy theory rather than what they had been: the consensus of mainstream institutions.

But what we do know for certain from this anthrax investigation is quite serious. And because it is quite relevant to the current debates over the origins of COVID-19, it is well-worth reviewing. A trove of emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci — who was the government’s top infectious disease specialist during the AIDS pandemic, the anthrax attacks, and the COVID pandemic — was published on Monday by BuzzFeed after they were produced pursuant to a FOIA request. Among other things, they reveal that in February and March of last year — at the time that Fauci and others were dismissing any real possibility that the coronavirus inadvertently escaped from a lab, to the point that the Silicon Valley monopolies Facebook and Google banned any discussion of that theory -- Fauci and his associates and colleagues were privately discussing the possibility that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly as part of a U.S.-funded joint program with the scientists at that lab.

Last week, BBC reported that “in recent weeks the controversial claim that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory — once dismissed by many as a fringe conspiracy theory — has been gaining traction.” President Biden ordered an investigation into this lab-leak possibility. And with Democrats now open to this possibility, “Facebook reversed course Thursday and said that it would no longer remove posts that claim the virus is man-made,” reported The Washington Post. Nobody can rationally claim to know the origins of COVID, and that is exactly why — as I explained in an interview on the Rising program this morning — it should be so disturbing that Silicon Valley monopolies and the WHO/Fauci-led scientific community spent a full year pretending to have certainty about that “debunked” theory that they plainly did not possess, to the point where discussions of it were prohibited on social media.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-04T17:28:35+00:00

"Noose" pareidolia has made it across the pond: Activist Marion Millar charged with sending homophobic and transphobic tweets

The messages investigated by officers are understood to include a retweeted photograph of ribbons in the green, white and purple colours of the suffragettes, tied around a tree outside the Glasgow studio where a BBC soap opera is shot. It is believed a complaint was made to the police suggesting the ribbons represented a noose. It was one of at least six tweets reported to police. The nature of the other complaints is unclear.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-04T16:16:05+00:00

[Matt Taibbi] Congratulations, Elitists: Liberals and Conservatives Do Have Common Interests Now: Well done, snobs of the #Resistance. You made the Horseshoe Theory real.

The hilarious headline in the Daily Beast yesterday read like a cross of Clickhole and Izvestia circa 1937: “Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media? FROM HIS MOUTH TO FOX’S EARS!”

The story, fed to poor Beast media writer Lloyd Grove by certain unnamed embittered personages at the Intercept, is that their former star writer Greenwald appears on, and helps provide content for — gasp! — right-wing media! It’s nearly the exclusive point of the article. Greenwald goes on TV with… those people! The Beast’s furious journalisming includes a “spot check” of the number of Fox items inspired by Greenwald articles (“dozens”!) and multiple passages comparing Greenwald to Donald Trump, the ultimate insult in #Resistance world. This one made me laugh out loud:

In a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.

This, folks, is from the Daily Beast, a publication that has spent much of the last five years huffing horseshit into headlines, from Bountygate to Bernie’s Mittens to classics like SNL: Alec Baldwin's Trump Admits 'I Don't Care About America'. The best example was its “investigation” revealing that three of Tulsi Gabbard’s 75,000 individual donors — the late Princeton professor Stephen Cohen, peace activist Sharon Tennison, and a person called “Goofy Grapes” who may or may not have worked for Russia Today host Lee Camp — were, in their estimation, Putin “apologists.” Speaking of creating your own news cycles, this asinine smear inspired serious stories by ABC News and CNN, and when Gabbard denounced it as “fake news,” Politico jumped in with the now-familiar retort:

“Fake news” is a favorite phrase of President Donald Trump…

For years now, this has been the go-to conversation-ender for prestige media pundits and Twitter trolls alike, directed at any progressive critic of the political mainstream: you’re a Republican! A MAGA-sympathizer! Or (lately), an “insurrectionist”! The Beast in its Greenwald piece used the most common of the Twitter epithets: “Trump-defender.” Treachery and secret devotion to right-wing politics are also the default explanation for the growing list of progressives making their way onto Fox of late, from Greenwald to Kyle Kulinski to Aaron Mate to Jimmy Dore to Cornel West.

The truth is, Trump conservatives and ACLU-raised liberals like myself, Greenwald, and millions of others do have real common cause, against an epistemic revolution taking hold in America’s political and media elite. The traditional liberal approach to the search for truth, which stresses skepticism and free-flowing debate, is giving way to a reactionary movement that Plato himself would have loved, one that believes knowledge is too dangerous for the rabble and must be tightly regulated by a priesthood of “experts.” It’s anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political spectrum.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-04T03:33:26+00:00

Teen Arrested Under Connecticut's Unconstitutional Hate Speech Law for Racist Social Media Post: Calling a classmate a racist slur on Snapchat is offensive. It’s also protected speech.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-03T19:19:00+00:00

An Army of 100 Bots Is Reading Climate Change News and Clicking Every Ad Along the Way: Synthetic Messenger, a project from artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, uses bots to make climate change news more visible.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-03T18:00:46+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] At the Heart of It All: life is not kind, the world is not safe

But of course the world has not changed, not from the way things were in the 90s nor from the 70s, in most important ways. And one way that the world has not changed is that young people still treat each other with casual brutality that stems from the intense self-loathing that powers bullying, the awkwardness of our bodies and selves at that age, and the relentless jockeying for social rank endemic to high school. The vocabulary has changed, and there may be certain new kinds of plausible deniability built in to what were once more nakedly brutal practices. (More naked and thus more honest.) But I promise you that every single day high school students are absolutely savage to each other. What’s more, human nature being what it is, I’m sure that they now do so explicitly utilizing the politicized and therapeutic language that proponents of social justice norms foolishly assume is an antidote to that bad behavior. Because interpersonal cruelty is a universal aspect of the human condition and any philosophy can be bent to its use. This condition can perhaps at times be ameliorated but it can never be eliminated and learning this reality is an important part of growing up. Cruelty is here to stay.

What today’s social justice politics ask for is a world that’s nice, a world that’s safe for everyone all the time. And of course this is impossible. The nice world is never coming. Yes, we need to work to make the world a more equitable and humane place. There are certain areas in that domain where progress is possible. But to say, as many now do, that we need to eliminate bullying, or even eliminate microaggressions, is no less fantastical than saying we need to build spaceships to take us away from this fallen earth. You may as well say we need to eliminate greed or jealousy; these things are part of the basic emotional endowment of being human. People hurt each other out of malice, true, and always will, but much more often they hurt each other because we are clumsy and insensitive creatures by our nature. And our efforts in that regard have consequences. For example, the lab leak hypothesis was forbidden for months largely because it was said that one of the consequences of it being true might be racism against the Chinese. And so a potential truth was traded for the impossible dream of a kind Earth. I think it is fair to say that anti-Chinese racism survived that conspiracy of silence. We make compromises and sacrifices, every day, for this newly mandated, futile effort to make the world nice. We must be allowed to debate them.

No one is against the abstract notion of protection from harm. That effort, in and of itself, is noble. But what we have arrived at now in progressive politics is a grotesque exaggeration of our moral duty to one another, a funhouse mirror version of what it means to be a caring and supportive society. We make promises we can’t possibly keep about protecting the vulnerable and in so doing reduce all who suffer from (the trendy kinds of) injustice to impossibly weak and eternally fragile wards of our benevolence. We speak of ending micro injustice not despite the fact that the macro version spins on all around us but because it does, because we cannot face up to the sheer vast scale of what we will never be able to fix. And in all of this useless effort we have completely evacuated our shared societal vision of two of the most essential elements of being a person: forgiveness and resilience. These are indispensable values in a human world defined by human weakness, but they are inconvenient to those whose personal and professional best interest lies in pretending that human life is perfectible.

You find yourself in life when, under pressures and pain that should break you, you don’t even cry out in pain. Now we tell young people that crying out is their only way to express agency in this world, that crying out is how to be important and special. We have robbed the gift of the inviolable self from a generation in exchange for the promise of a frictionless world we will never, ever be able to give them.

At the heart of human society is a negotiation between safety and freedom. If there is no safety, it’s not a society; if there is no freedom, it’s not human. Deciding the right balance is the basic stuff of politics. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree about how to negotiate one over the other, but they cannot disagree about the fact that it is and must remain a negotiation. My problem is not just that the forces of social justice have decided that we must choose safety over freedom over and over again, that they have put their thumb so firmly on the scale that they advocate for a world where any perceived harm, no matter how small, is always seen as a justification for demanding that everyone else give up some freedom. My problem is that they don’t want all of us to get to take part in the choosing. If you favor freedom over safety, they will call you an abuser, a gaslighter, a misogynist, a fascist, a white supremacist; they will try to divest you of your job, your friends, and your reputation - which of course is an imposition of their “safety” onto your freedom. The fundamentally dishonest nature of the social justice conversation is that its advocates refuse to grapple with the fact that they don’t advocate for anything but demand everything. They seek to do with power what we are trying to do with discourse. But this conflict is inherent and eternal and all of their political and economic and social power can’t stop them from having to live with the inevitable communal demand for freedom that will eventually arise. For all of their privileges they do not enjoy the privilege of hiding from this war.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-03T16:55:43+00:00

Is Wokeness ‘Kryptonite for Democrats’?

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-03T13:29:47+00:00

High school program sponsored by several NY colleges does not allow white students to apply

The “Career Opportunities in the Accounting Profession” program — sponsored by the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants and the Moynihan Scholarship Fund — will introduce 250 “promising underrepresented high school students” to the accounting profession.

In addition to virtual sessions about forensic accounting, interviewing skills, public speaking, networking, and an “accounting profession overview” featuring a panel discussion with experts in the profession.

Nine institutions of higher education in New York — including Ithaca College, Medgar Evers College, Rochester Institute of Technology, St. John’s University, Siena College, SUNY New Paltz, SUNY Oswego, the University at Buffalo, and Westchester Community College — are listed as hosts for the program, which is free of charge for students.

The online application for the program, however, does not include an option white students to apply. Although the application form includes options for Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Native American students, there exists no option for White students.

Five of the nine schools participating in the program — including Medgar Evers College, SUNY New Paltz, SUNY Oswego, the University at Buffalo, and Westchester Community College — are public universities funded by New York state.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-03T03:46:27+00:00

Stonewall ‘threatened’ to silence gender critical barrister by having her sacked, says judge: Allison Bailey is currently suing the embattled charity, claiming it collaborated with her chambers to put her under investigation

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-02T23:28:53+00:00

Following criticism, Washington Post stealth edits article dismissing Covid-19 lab leak theory

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-02T22:32:29+00:00

Google Diversity Head Said Jews Have ‘Insatiable Appetite for War’

Google’s head of diversity strategy said in a 2007 blog post that Jews have an "insatiable appetite for war" and an "insensitivity to the suffering [of] others." The comments were part of a longer meditation from Kamau Bobb, now head of diversity strategy at Google, that also slammed Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Lebanon that same year.

Bobb was at the time a research associate in technology at Georgia Tech, according to his LinkedIn. The post, titled "If I Were A Jew," described how he believed Jewish people should view the Middle East conflict.

"If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself," he wrote in a Nov. 30, 2007, post on his personal blog, where he was still actively publishing as recently as April 2021. "Self defense is undoubtedly an instinct, but I would be afraid of my increasing insensitivity to the suffering [of] others." The blog features commentary from Bobb on a wide range of issues, including racial equality, U.S. politics, and education policy.

Bobb identifies himself as a Google employee in his blog's biography section.

Google and Bobb did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-02T17:40:45+00:00

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Mandates Health Professionals Undergo ‘Implicit Bias Training’ To Obtain License

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-02T14:16:03+00:00

Education Department eyes racial quotas in school discipline, expert warns

Washington D.C. attorney and education expert Hans Bader recently sounded the alarm on the development, writing in Liberty Unyielding that during a May event co-hosted by the Education and Justice departments that speakers signaled plans to bring back Obama administration guidelines that encouraged administrators to discipline racial student groups at the same rate.

“Speakers at the event repeatedly treated higher minority discipline rates as being the fault of school officials, rather than the misbehaving kids,” according to Bader.

In an interview with The College Fix, Bader explained how such guidelines might play out on campus.

“If you have a racial quota on discipline, it means that sometimes white students will be suspended for things that black students are not suspended for,” Bader said.

For example, “if a black student is insubordinate to a teacher, he gets a little note home to his parents, and the white student who does it is suspended,” he said.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-02T03:50:40+00:00

The Revolution Comes to Juilliard: Racial hysteria is consuming the school; unchecked, it will consume the arts.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-01T21:24:57+00:00

UNICEF Says Restricting Children’s Porn Access Infringes Human Rights.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-01T20:29:28+00:00

[Ross Douthat] Why the Lab Leak Theory Matters

Strikingly, though, both Chait and Yglesias argue that this media critique is the most important thing we can take away from the Covid origins debate. “I don’t know if this hypothesis will ever be proven,” Chait writes of the lab leak theory, and “I don’t care,” because “there’s no important policy question riding on the answer.”

This seems mistaken. Yes, if we never figure out the truth of Covid’s origins, the dangers of media groupthink will be the only lesson we can draw for absolutely certain. But if we could find out the truth, and it turned out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology really was the epicenter of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the revelation would itself be a major political and scientific event.

First, to the extent that the United States is engaged in a conflict of propaganda and soft power with the regime in Beijing, there’s a pretty big difference between a world where the Chinese regime can say, We weren’t responsible for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re decadent, and a world where this was basically their Chernobyl except their incompetence and cover-up sickened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe.

The latter scenario would also open a debate about how the United States should try to enforce international scientific research safeguards, or how we should operate in a world where they can’t be reasonably enforced. Perhaps that debate would ultimately tilt away from China hawks, as David Frum argues in The Atlantic, because the lesson of a lab leak would be that we actually need “more binding of China to the international order, more cross-border health and safety standards, more American scientists in Chinese labs, and concomitantly, more Chinese scientists in American labs.” Or perhaps instead you would have an attempted scientific and academic embargo, an end to the kind of funding that flowed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the U.S.A.I.D., an attempt to manage risk with harder borders, stricter travel restrictions, de-globalization.

Either way, this debate would also affect science policy at home, opening arguments the likes of which we haven’t seen since the era of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island about the risks of scientific hubris and cutting-edge research. This is especially true if there’s any chance that the Covid-19 virus was engineered, in so-called gain of function research, to be more transmissible and lethal — a possibility raised by, among others, a former science writer for this newspaper, Nicholas Wade. But even if it wasn’t, the mere existence of that research, heretofore a subject of obscure intra-scientific controversy, would become a matter of intense public attention and scrutiny.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-01T18:35:14+00:00

Those dastardly black white supremacists again! Feds charge 8 Black males with targeting dozens of Asian households for burglary

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-01T17:54:53+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] What Do We Do with Education Research?

I’ve thought about that conversation often in the years since. I am torn between my general edunihilism and the persuasiveness of his general point, on the one hand, and the sense that an absence of rigorous research couldn’t possibly be better than the flawed research we currently have, on the other. What I am left with is the question of whether it’s possible to meaningfully sort more certainty from less, without treating work that produces less certainty as inherently of lower value than that which produces more, when actual practicing researchers will always have direct professional incentive to represent their work as more definitive. I also wonder whether any of our findings will be truly generalizable, or if the remarkable diversity in contexts and student populations found across schooling makes that impossible. And I wonder if teachers will ever really implement pedagogical techniques we find to be more effective, if such a thing exists, when they will often find their own lived experience contrary to what researchers say, to say nothing of the turf wars and culture issues between practitioners and researchers.

It all seems like a mess, to be frank. But I do think there is little choice but to keep going and to try and get a little better over time - while accepting that, for reasons of both methods and the underlying reality, effect sizes will usually remain small.

To render things in convenient list form: what are the issues with education research?

Methodological and data issues. Small effects, big variance, lots of endogeneity, lots of confounds, available samples are frequently systematically dissimilar from general population, difficult or impossible to truly randomize in many contexts, bogus randomization in many others…. In sheer analytical terms, this is all quite difficult.

Publication and replication issues. All of the conditions that afflict psychology in its replication/p-value crisis apply to education research, potentially even more damagingly. Very often ed researchers have big ol’ spreadsheets with tons of demographic and school variables that they can then quickly correlate with output variables like test scores or GPA, which makes data snooping tempting - particularly given that you need to publish to get hired and get tenure and you need to get a significant finding to get published. And unlike psychological research, which frequently has limited real-world valence, the now widely-discussed issues with p-value hacking and publication bias can have large (and expensive) consequences in ed research, because policymakers are drawing inferences from research that they then use to make decisions that result in the deployment of a lot of public resources.

Conflicting results facilitate selective reading. Because there is so much conflicting data and contradicting studies, you can always build the narrative you want through choosing the data that supports your work and ignoring that which does not.

Institutional capture and optimism bias. Education research is dominantly funded by institutions that are hungry for positive results - positive effects that are purported to derive from implementable pedagogical or administrative changes which would, supposedly, start to “move the needle.” The increasingly brutal competition in academia for tenure track lines makes the need for access to grant funding only more vital over time, and the people who control the purse strings don’t want to hear negative results. There are committed pessimists within the ed research world but very few of them are pre-tenure or otherwise lacking in institutional security. The Gates Foundation, by sheer size alone, disciplines researchers against speaking plainly about negative findings and subtly influences the entirety of the published research record. In a very real sense the dominant ideology of the educational research world simply is the ideology of the foundations, and this is not healthy.

Accurately measured but controversial conclusions. The relationship between SAT scores and socioeconomic status is a classic example: while usually exaggerated, the correlation between SES and SAT scores is real. This is often used as an argument to dismiss the test as invalid. But in fact there is also an SES effect in GPA, graduation rates, state standardized tests, etc., which tells us that rather than being evidence of a flawed test, the correlation is a reflection of the uncomfortable fact that students from wealthier families actually are more college prepared than students from poorer. The reasons for this are complex, but the idea that the test must be inaccurately measuring the intended construct because the outcomes say unpleasant things is obviously wrongheaded. But this dynamic permeates educational research and policy. Consider research which shows that, when looked at longitudinally using the kind of fixed-effects models that can help adjust for the limitations of purely correlational analyses, we find that suspending students from school has weakly but significantly positive effects on their academic outcomes. It’s fair to say many people would not be welcoming to this research’s conclusions. This is, again, consequence-laden in a way the latest stupid fad in psychology research is not. This kind of finding can prompt the kind of controversy that can, in turn, ruin a young career. Education is a sensitive subject and sensitivity makes clear thinking in research much more difficult.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-06-01T16:34:37+00:00

France’s Great Debate Over the Sources and Meaning of Muslim Terror: A rivalry between the country’s two most prominent ‘Islamologists,’ Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, holds the key to understanding the existential and geopolitical tensions in France’s bloody reality

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-06-01T13:00:22+00:00

Foundations Are Setting the Transgender Agenda and Targeting Children

Governments, corporations,politicians, medical institutions and schools, banks, pharma, tech, the media, and Hollywood are promoting the normalization of body dissociation in children. They are destroying our children’s bodies at the altar of “gender identity.” They are silencing critique.

The phrase “transgender youth” is now normal, accepted, and celebrated. Few in society even question what this phrase means. The prominent CBS program 60 Minutes recently aired a piece on the topic. Leslie Stahl opens the segment by introducing Dr. Erica Anderson, whom Stahl refers to as a “gender psychologist.” Stahl states that Anderson “is transgender, herself.” She refers to “young trans patients.” She says that Arkansas recently passed a law prohibiting people from “treating transgender youth.” At no point does Stahl ask anyone what any of these terms mean, or how they could relate to children’s mental health. The piece appears to simply assume that viewers already know.

How did we get here?

In 2019 the Spectator journalist James Kirkup asked why so many people and organizations who had no knowledge of or policies regarding transgenderism at the beginning of the decade were now enthusiastically embracing “non-binary” identities and transition. He unearthed a document by Dentons, the world’s largest international law firm, and Thomson Reuters Foundation, a corporate tax law and media behemoth, entitled: “Only Adults? Good Practices in Legal Gender Recognition for Youth.” The November 2019 document was drafted for ILGYO—International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organization—to assist in advancing the idea that it is possible for a child to “be transgender.” The Dentons document helps these transactivists persuade children to legally “change their gender” without adult approval.

These heavily politicized entities have the legal and media clout to make these changes. “Trust Law” is Thomson Reuters’ pro bono legal program, connecting the most successful law firms and corporate legal teams around the world with high-impact NGOs. The foundation works to drive systemic change in society. Reuters is fond of titles that drive the newly minted categories of “transgender people” and people with “gender identities.” And now they are selling us transgender children, with their legal guide and their news items.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-05-31T22:58:24+00:00

Hate-crime hoax: Noose reported on campus just crane’s steel cable loop

A construction company building a parking structure at Central Connecticut State University had hoisted an American flag at the end of one of its steel cable loops to mark Memorial Day — but a complaint that the cable was a noose prompted campus officials to apologize and pledge to take down the cable as soon as possible.

“Early this evening, we received a complaint about a possible noose found hanging from a construction site on the CCSU campus. Campus Police … investigated and found that it was not a noose but a standard steel cable loop hanging from a crane,” wrote President Zulma Toro in an email to the campus community on Saturday night.

“A construction crew working on campus hung an American flag from the crane’s cable to recognize Memorial Day,” added Toro in her email, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.

Toro continued that steel cable loops are often used by cranes, but that there was another similar concern recently reported regarding another nearby construction site. In the end, Toro sided with those offended by the steel cable loop’s visual similarity to a noose.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-05-31T21:56:03+00:00

Left Explodes Over 60 Minutes Story on Young People Who Regret Transitioning

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-05-31T20:11:09+00:00

Italian judge dismisses case against NGO ship captain who rammed patrol boat to offload illegal migrants

The case against Rackete, a 33-year-old German national, was officially dropped last Wednesday after prosecutors requested that the Judge for Preliminary Investigations (GIP) do. The judge attempted to justify the decision by emphasizing that the patrol boat Rackete had crushed against the dock “is not considered a warship”. The case’s dismissal follows a separate ruling in July 2019 which saw another GIP judge recommend that the charges against Rackete be dropped since she had acted “in a state of need”.

Although the judge’s decision in the previous case was appealed by the Agrigento public prosecutor’s office, the decision was ultimately upheld by the Italian supreme court in February 2020, Italian newspaper Il Giornale reports.

The case against the German far-left activist dates back to the night of June 29, 2019, when Rackete — while serving as the captain of the Sea Watch 3 ship — defied Italy’s blockade of migrant NGO transport ships and rammed Guardia di Finanza patrol boats in an attempt to offload 42 illegal migrants at port on the island of Lampedusa. Prosecutors argued that Rackete’s maneuver endangered the lives of soldiers and migrants.

Later that night, upon setting foot on Italian territory, Rackete was arrested for “resistance or violence against a warship” at the request of the local prosecutor. However, just a few days later she was released by the same investigating judge who closed the case last week.

At the time, Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, had enacted a policy which denied all NGO migrant transport ships access to Italian ports. Reacting to the judge’s decision to dismiss the case, Salvini — the leader of the populist League party — said: “The prosecutors say that Carola Rackete should not be tried? I’ll let them judge, I only say that in 2019, 1,200 illegal immigrants landed. Now, we’re almost at 14,000.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-05-31T16:46:29+00:00

Princeton Drops Greek, Latin Language Requirements For Classics Majors To ‘Address Systemic Racism.’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-05-31T06:44:45+00:00

Wake Forest cancels new building name 19 days after canceling old building name

It only took Wake Forest University 19 days to decide a new name it had given one of its buildings needed to be canceled.

In defense of Wake Forest, the new name chosen for the building was really, really dumb.

On May 7, Wake Forest University announced it would rename its Wingate Hall to “May 7, 1860 Hall” to mark the date it sold 16 slaves about 161 years ago.

[...]

Fast-forward to May 26, when President Hatch sent a memo to the campus community explaining that officials decided to cancel the new building name.

Long story short, the old building name apparently offended some black students, and the new building name also apparently offended some black students.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-05-30T19:11:37+00:00

Major public sector bodies quit Stonewall diversity training as trans rights row intensifies: Exclusive: It comes as Stonewall’s boss has sparked a furious backlash by likening the belief that trans women are men to anti-Semitism

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-05-29T19:59:45+00:00

COVID-19 'has NO credible natural ancestor' and WAS created by Chinese scientists who then tried to cover their tracks with 'retro-engineering' to make it seem like it naturally arose from bats, explosive new study claims

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-05-29T18:42:56+00:00

School Teacher Sues Loudoun County Public Schools For Trying To Bully Him Into Calling Transgender Students Their Preferred Pronouns

On Friday, the Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter to Loudoun County Public Schools on behalf of an elementary school teacher who was suspended by administrators at Leesburg Elementary School for objecting to two proposed school regulations during a school board meeting's public comment period.

The regulations would have required him to call students by their preferred gender as opposed to their biological sex. The teacher, Tanner Cross, objected at the meeting, stating it violated his religious beliefs to call students anything other than their biological sex.

Tanner was placed on administrative leave two days after the meeting, according to a letter from the school, and that he was "Pending an investigation of allegation that [he] engaged in conduct that had a disruptive impact on the operations of Leesburg Elementary School."

Tyson Langhofer, director of the Alliance Defending Freedom Center for Academic Freedom, said in a statement that "Public schools have no business compelling teachers to express ideological beliefs that they don't hold, but it's beyond the pale to suspend someone simply for respectfully providing their opinion at a public meeting, which is what such meetings are designed for."

Multiple studies have confirmed that a person's body stays the biological sex it was created, even after transition therapy. These studies have received very little media coverage despite being groundbreaking in the field.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-05-29T17:42:22+00:00

Descendants of Blacks enslaved by indigenous people push back against renaming Columbus Day at county hearing

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