Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread for August 23, 2021

rwkasten · 2021-08-23T18:07:44+00:00

New thread posted: https://saidit.net/s/CultureWarRoundup/comments/8grw/offtopic_and_loweffort_cw_thread_for_october_11/

Per user suggestion, until traffic on this sub picks up a bit, I'm going to create a single thread that may correlate to several weeks' worth of threads in the subreddit. We have this option because saidit's automoderator doesn't appear to have the "auto-post new threads" feature. There is no cutoff that will generate a new OT/LE thread, but practically-speaking, it will probably be somewhere in the 2-3 weeks/100 comments range to start. We have flexibility at the expense of a small amount of convenience.

That said, here is the cross-link to the current OT/LE on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/q0yrmd/october_04_2021_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-11T15:18:29+00:00

N.C. lieutenant governor faces calls to resign for calling LGBTQ people 'filth'

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-11T05:11:16+00:00

High school begins all staff meetings with ‘commitment to dismantling whiteness’

Richfield High School Principal Stacy Theien-Collins revealed her school’s commitment at last Monday’s school board meeting, Alpha News.com reports.

“We’re going to start like we start all of our high school meetings, which is with our Richfield High School vision of equity,” Theien-Collins told the board. She noted “100% of her staff” added input on this “vision” last school year, and that every Richfield staff member created “a personal vision of equity.”

Richfield’s commitment states:

“At Richfield High School we believe in providing a rigorous and equitable education reflecting the strengths and experiences of our community. We believe students learn best when they feel safe and affirmed in who they are. Therefore, we commit to dismantling policies and processes that benefit whiteness and other systems of privilege.”

The Richfield Public Schools’ “equity” page states the district is “committed to viewing and analyzing all of [its] work through a racial and cultural equity lens so that each individual can learn, grow and excel.”

[...]

Alpha News notes Richfield schools recently were embroiled in controversy over a sex education curriculum in which students were requested to “role play as gay and transgender characters navigating sex scenarios.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-10T19:37:41+00:00

Women prisoners who call transgender inmates ‘he’ or ‘him’ face extra jail time

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-10T15:09:09+00:00

[Andrew Sullivan] Dave Chappelle Is Right, Isn't He?

The use of trans people in this way follows a pattern. The woke left uses gay people in the same way: calling all of us “queer” to ensure our continued marginalization, merging us into postmodern categories like “LGBTQIA+” to deny our distinctive human experiences, erasing gay men and lesbians whose politics are not far-left and whose lives are not much different than our straight friends, describing gay men who are attracted to the same sex and not always the same gender as transphobes, literally falsifying history and re-making the English language to make it conform to their ideology.

The weapons deployed in pursuit of this fantasy are those that are always used by those seeking to impose utopia on free people: the brutal hounding of dissent, the capture and control of every single cultural institution, the indoctrination of the young, cancellations, bullying. The costs are mounting. Across the West, people are being fired, targeted, prosecuted, even jailed, for stating biological facts. Children are being medicated with off-label drugs — “puberty blockers” — that can permanently sterilize them, arrest their neurological and mental development, and deprive them of the ability as adults to experience an orgasm.

I didn’t know the latter until I read the account by two leading transgender surgeons in medical treatment of children with gender dysphoria on Bari Weiss’s substack. These doctors are not marginal to the field. They are: “Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic.”

They explain that when you halt puberty in a natal boy with a penis, and then switch the kid to female hormones, the genitals remain like a child’s, never develop the sensitivity of adolescence and there is therefore not enough penile material to invert into a created vagina. Surgeons sometimes have to take parts of the colon to patch it together. Money quote:

“If you’ve never had an orgasm pre-surgery, and then your puberty's blocked, it's very difficult to achieve that afterwards,” Bowers said. “I consider that a big problem, actually. It’s kind of an overlooked problem that in our ‘informed consent’ of children undergoing puberty blockers, we’ve in some respects overlooked that a little bit.”

The purposeful, life-long removal of sexual pleasure by operating on children? Where are we, Somalia? How on earth can a pre-pubertal child meaningfully consent to that? The reason we are told it is hateful and insensitive to discuss these actual realities is that, if we did, we’d be horrified. Which is why I’m not surprised that when these two leading trans physicians proposed an op-ed on this subject for the NYT — a big scoop — they were turned down, on the grounds that the subject was “outside our coverage priorities right now.” Yet the paper just published this piece, which urges less gate-keeping and describes the current situation as “100 percent justifiable and safe.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-09T18:08:32+00:00

[Matt Taibbi] The Cult of the Vaccine Neurotic

If you’re thinking it was only a matter of time before the mere fact of molnupiravir’s existence would be pitched in headlines as actual bad news, you’re not wrong: Marketwatch came out with “‘It’s not a magic pill’: What Merck’s antiviral pill could mean for vaccine hesitancy” the same day Merck issued its release. The piece came out before we knew much of anything concrete about the drug’s effectiveness, let alone whether it was “magic.”

Bloomberg’s morose “No, the Merck pill won’t end the pandemic” was released on October 2nd, i.e. one whole day after the first encouraging news of a possible auxiliary treatment whose most ardent supporters never claimed would end the pandemic. This article said the pill might be cause to celebrate, but warned its emergence “shouldn’t be cause for complacency when it comes to the most effective tool to end this pandemic: vaccines.” Bloomberg randomly went on to remind readers that the unrelated drug ivermectin is a “horse de-worming agent,” before adding that if molnupiravir ends up “being viewed as a solution for those who refuse to vaccinate,” the “Covid virus will continue to persist.”

In other words, it took less than 24 hours for the drug — barely tested, let alone released yet — to be accused of prolonging the pandemic. By the third day, mentions of molnupiravir in news reports nearly all came affixed to stern reminders of its place beneath vaccines in the medical hierarchy, as in the New York Times explaining that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who initially told reporters the new drug was “impressive,” now “warned that Americans should not wait to be vaccinated because they believe they can take the pill.”

Since the start of the Trump years, we’ve been introduced to a new kind of news story, which assumes adults can’t handle multiple ideas at once, and has reporters frantically wrapping facts deemed dangerous, unorthodox, or even just insufficiently obvious in layers of disclaimers. The fear of uncontrolled audience brain-drift is now so great that even offhand references must come swaddled in these journalistic Surgeon General’s warnings, which is why whenever we read anything now, we almost always end up fighting through nests of phrases like “the debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in a lab” in order to get to whatever the author’s main point might be.

This lunacy started with the Great Lie Debate of 2016, when reporters and editors spent months publicly anguishing over whether to use “lie” in headlines of Donald Trump stories, then loudly congratulated themselves once they decided to do it. The most histrionic offender was the New York Times, previously famous for teaching readers to digest news in code (“he claimed” for years was Times-ese for “full of shit”) but now reasoned a “more muscular terminology,” connoting “a certain moral opprobrium,” was needed to distinguish the “dissembling” of a politician like Bill Clinton from Trump’s whoppers. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” could be mere falsehood, but “I will build a great great wall” required language that “stands apart.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-09T16:20:21+00:00

A Renowned Composer Showed His Class ‘Othello’ Featuring Laurence Olivier. Students Led A Revolt And Now He’s Accused Of Racism.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-08T22:41:11+00:00

Not Using Preferred Pronouns is a Human Rights Violation, Canadian Tribunal Rules

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-08T16:08:11+00:00

UK citizens could be forced to take COVID test on livestream

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-08T14:14:08+00:00

Earth-Salter Apartheid

As a fan of speculative dystopian fiction, and as someone who’s studied real-life historical apartheids and exclusionary societies, I consider it a perverse privilege to be able to document exactly such a transitional period—that “B” between Point A (old America) and Point C (“You’re white? Go pave a road”). Because make no mistake—that’s where we are right now: on the path to an antiwhite racial dystopia. We’re not there yet; we may in fact be at the last juncture where the brakes can be applied. But the car’s only moving in one direction, and it’s toward that dystopia, not away from it.

For those of us who see this period as a novel’s prologue, it’s vital to not fall victim to the grandiose alarmism that affects the work of bad scribes. There’s not going to be a race war, or a civil war, or secession, or “national divorce,” or racial “homelands.” It’ll be a banal apartheid. Most whites will just keep on keeping on. Never underestimate mankind’s capacity to absorb a beatdown.

And that’s especially true of apartheids in which the elite members of the group getting beaten down are in on it. That might be the only thing that old hag got right with Handmaid; from what I recall of the film, elite women were the most brutal enforcers of the female slavery system. There are multiple historical examples of members of an oppressed group collaborating with their oppressors, and by studying those precedents, we can better understand what makes our coming dystopia so much worse.

[...]

Our incipient American apartheid is based solely on tearing down. On being antiwhite for the sake of it, as opposed to being antiwhite because others believe they can “build better.” That’s why this incoming apartheid is dystopian and dysgenic. Again, say what you will about the brutality of SA apartheid, Nazi Germany, British colonialism, and Manifest Destiny, but those things were carried out by people who genuinely believed that they deserved the reins because they could forge something greater.

American blacks don’t deny that they’re disproportionately arrested and incarcerated. They don’t deny that they disproportionately score low on standardized tests. They don’t deny that they can’t achieve employment or college admission without the “extra help” of affirmative action and diversity quotas. In fact, they wallow in these ills; they’re the first to cite them as proof of their “oppression.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-08T00:54:09+00:00

Kentucky Cop Punished For Praying In Front Of Abortion Clinic Sues City

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-07T21:59:43+00:00

French mayor says foreigners are ‘ethnically cleansing’ French natives in certain neighborhoods

In certain French regions, the immigrants who settled there are harassing the indigenous population to the extent that it amounts to “ethnic cleansing,” said Gilles Platret, mayor of the central French town of Chalon-sur-Saône, on the news program of the popular CNews television channel.

“In certain neighborhoods — and I am going to use a strong word that will raise some eyebrows — I sense a certain ‘ethnic cleansing,’ meaning that you have people of foreign origin who are slowly hunting what demographic experts call the ‘natives,’ that is people who are from that county, to make place for themselves,” said Platret, who belongs to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.

“We see people of immigrant background in neighborhoods physically and verbally assaulting older people. They tell them that they ‘must clear out,'” said Platret.

His statement caused some rumblings in the studio, but Platret continued:

“The words (i.e. how you say it) do not matter. In more concrete terms, people not belonging to a Muslim group are being pushed out through violence, threats, and insults. They are being ejected from these neighborhoods and that is a reality.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-07T16:35:33+00:00

Sweden suspends the use of Moderna vaccine for those 30 and under due to side effects

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-07T14:09:15+00:00

Economics professors argue abortion is beneficial because it reduces black birth rates

A group of 154 economists, many of whom are professors, recently submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court ahead of a December 1 hearing on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

The brief states that the court should strike down a Mississippi law that prohibits abortions after 15 weeks because abortion access has “changed the arc of women’s lives.”

Particularly, the economists say, black women have benefited from abortion more than any other racial group, as seen by the higher rates of abortion.

[...]

The College Fix reached out to five of the signers of the amicus brief to ask them if they had any concerns that their amicus brief could be interpreted to mean that abortion is good for society because it leads to fewer black babies.

The Fix also asked if the professors believe government entities should help black women have more abortions.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-06T18:28:03+00:00

German pop singer calls for Beethoven’s body to be exhumed for a racial DNA test

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-06T17:55:57+00:00

St Andrews reverts to 16th Century Calvinism: Instead of original sin, students now have to acknowledge 'personal guilt'

You would be forgiven for thinking that universities are secular institutions. But it turns out that the University of St Andrews is reverting to something akin to 16th Century Calvinism: except that this time it is preaching the doctrine of ‘personal guilt’ rather than ‘original sin.’

The university has introduced new induction modules for students (or should I say converts?) for students on sustainability, diversity and consent, and will not allow students to matriculate if they do not pass. How do students pass? By agreeing with certain statements, such as “acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful start point in overcoming unconscious bias.”

Surely St Andrews — and indeed, all universities — should be focusing on providing quality teaching and learning for their students, rather than forcing undergraduates through a tick-box exercise that adds nothing to the pursuit of academic debate and inquiry? After all, does an 18-year-old who wants to undertake a BSc in Molecular Biology really need to ‘prove’ their purity and acquiescence in order to be allowed to study at a particular institution?

It’s easy to see the test as a form of indoctrination: few students will dare to sacrifice themselves as free speech martyrs, or risk alienating themselves from their peers by admitting that they are non-believers. But then they won’t have to, because the reality is the test achieves nothing. Rather than genuinely exploring and analysing the notion of privilege, undergraduates will simply learn what statements they need to agree with in order to pass, and therefore any ‘atonement’ will be purely performative.

There is also a deep irony that the test is supposed to help teach ‘good academic practice.’ Good academic practice should be about fostering intellectual curiosity, weighing up evidence, considering alternative opinions, and trying to come to original, convincing conclusions — it should not be about blindly following dogma.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-06T16:04:28+00:00

Chicago professor has MIT lecture canceled after campaign from Twitter mob

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-06T15:16:09+00:00

DEI vs. USD: The woke blob swallows the University of San Diego.

Many conservative parents looking for moderately traditional college options for their children seek schools that are under the protective cover of a church. The University of San Diego (USD), a Catholic school with a law school not unfriendly to conservatives, may once have been such a safe haven, but no longer. Under President James Harris, the school has undergone a kind of hostile takeover by the forces of wokeness. The story of what happened to USD provides a cautionary tale to parents, donors, and students trying to outrun the spread of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), as detailed in a new report entitled “The Woke Takeover at University of San Diego.”

Until the George Floyd-BLM riots, USD had standard-fare diversity classes and diversity committees. Then, in Fall 2020, Harris and Provost Gail Baker established an Anti-Racism Task Force (ARTF), which established four sub-committees: Anti-Racism Training; Policies related to Acts of Intolerance and Acts of Hate; Faculty Recruitment, Hiring & Retention; and Student Recruitment and Retention. Its 28-page report, containing 41 recommendations, was released in December 2020.

[...]

Every element of the student experience is to be oriented toward DEI indoctrination. Test scores will no longer be consulted for admissions, since they discriminate among students. Instead, grade point averages and answers to personal insight questions determine admissions. Before accepted students even get to campus, their orientation in DEI begins with “Torero Circles,” an online training for incoming students. The first week of Circles concerns “diversity, inclusion and community” through a course designed around “key concepts” like “identity, bias, power, privilege, and oppression, to understand the benefits of a diverse community, and to develop skills related to ally behavior, self-care, and creating inclusive spaces.” Later weeks concern academic success.

Students get another dose DEI in August after their arrival on campus, where they celebrate “Diversity, Inclusion, Social Justice & Changemaking Day.” Students engage in dialogue about the urgent challenges of institutional racism in our day. Student orientation, captured in part in this video, pushes white students to acknowledge their unearned privilege as it points to a “white racial identity.”

Students are directed to “living-learning communities” (LLC) for required classes after orientation. LLCs point students to leftist community activism with courses like “Introduction to Changemaking,” “Writing as a Form of Advocacy,” and “Introduction to Ethnic Studies.” USD’s general education requirements have doubled the number of explicitly-dedicated DEI credits needed for graduation under Harris.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-06T00:40:43+00:00

Sonic Worker 'Under Investigation' Over Drive-Thru Misgendering

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-05T21:33:07+00:00

Environmentalism is class war by other means: Scenes of furious motorists clashing with eco-snobs make it all crystal clear.

Modern politics starts to make a lot more sense when you realise that a lot of the mad movements that have sprung up of late are just waging a class war by other means. The woke middle classes demonise working-class people as unreconstructed bigots, Remaoners rail against the ‘uneducated’ throng, and bourgeois environmentalists block roads in an attempt to make the lives of the drivers they’re blocking tougher and more expensive.

Every so often the mask slips and the class dynamics become crystal clear. That’s precisely what happened earlier today on Wandsworth Bridge in London. Members of Insulate Britain, the Extinction Rebellion offshoot now 11 days into its road-blocking campaign for double-glazing, were filmed being dragged out of the road by enraged working-class men who did what the authorities couldn’t and cleared the road of these Home Counties irritants.

‘It’s a fucking ambulance, you stupid prick, get out the road’, one furious motorist shouted, in one of the viral clips of the clash, as he and others dragged protesters out of the path of said ambulance. It perfectly summed up the mix of fury and bemusement with which most people look upon Insulate Britain. By the Blackwall Tunnel, which IB was also blocking, a woman was filmed begging the protesters to let her through so she could get to her sick mother in hospital, slamming the assorted crusties for their selfishness.

That IB, XR or whatever this lot will call themselves next week, are dominated by middle-class people isn’t a slur — it’s an empirical fact. Last year, academics from the University of Exeter, Keele University and Aston University published research showing that XR activists are overwhelmingly middle-class, highly educated and southern. A whopping 85 per cent of them have degrees. (Incidentally, going on the snaps of those arrested in recent days, a surprisingly large proportion of them appear to be vicars.)

Those scuffles on the roads have beautifully illustrated what has been clear for some time: that eco-activism is essentially comfortably off middle-class people agitating to make ordinary people’s lives worse. Their mission flows from their tactics. They block a road and a load of people’s days are ruined. Meanwhile, the protesters’ overriding goal, spelled out in their leading lights’ public statements, is to bring about a society in which cars, flights and ‘non-essential consumption’ are banned.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-05T20:52:16+00:00

Black History Month website deletes article calling white people ‘genetically defective mutants’

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-05T19:04:41+00:00

American Booksellers Association to hold 'racial justice' workshop for white women to help them deal with 'internalized white superiority'

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-05T18:35:46+00:00

Hoax alert: East Carolina student arrested for sending fake racist invite to rival fraternity party

A black East Carolina University student was arrested last week on charges he sent a fake racist party invitation to a rush event hosted by a rival fraternity.

James Edwards, 19 (pictured), allegedly sent an invite to a party being thrown by a campus fraternity that said, “Theta Chi rush party. PNMs (potential new members) and girls only. No blacks. Girls 5$ @door. Call or text.” The message, posted on the social media site Yik Yak, included the name and contact information for a Theta Chi member.

Edwards is a member of Pi Lambda Phi, a rival fraternity. The Pi Lambda Phi website lists him as the vice president of recruitment for the fraternity.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-05T15:13:32+00:00

California to let “violence prevention” researchers access data of gun owners in the state

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-05T13:52:55+00:00

The New Secession Movement

A new poll from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics finds that large portions of the American public now favor blue and red states going their own ways to form separate countries. The survey results, writes political scientist Larry Sabato, highlight the “deep, wide and dangerous divides” between Trump and Biden voters, presaging a new secession movement. But the schism was already evident in the increasing number of state and local officials enacting laws and policies that ban travel and restrict commerce with other American places with governments they object to—a trend that the Covid-19 emergency has only deepened. In everything from tax policy to travel to contracting rules, a secession movement within the states has been building for years.

California recently banned any state-sponsored travel by its employees to Ohio, based on a 2016 law that imposes penalties on states that California officials deem to be discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender residents. At issue is Ohio’s new “conscience clause” law, which allows a medical provider to refuse to perform certain procedures, such as gender-transition surgery, if they violate a doctor’s religious or moral beliefs. The Golden State originally passed the 2016 legislation after North Carolina enacted a bill requiring people to use public bathrooms based on their birth gender. Five other states—Washington, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut—joined California in restricting commerce with North Carolina. Since then, the number of laws that allegedly run afoul of California’s 2016 measure have proliferated—and so have the bans. California now restricts government-financed travel in 18 other U.S. states containing 116 million people—including both Carolinas, both Dakotas, Texas, and Florida. Most recently, California applied its restrictions to states that require transgender athletes to participate in high school sports based on their birth gender—even though prominent LGBTQ athletes such as Martina Navratilova have endorsed a similar policy.

Once states and cities embark on these kinds of prohibitions, there’s nothing to stop them from spreading. And they have. A decade ago, for instance, Los Angeles restricted travel by city employees to Arizona because of its immigration policy and urged city departments not to do business with firms in the state. Among other things, city police refused to send helicopter pilots to training sessions taking place in Phoenix, and city council members refused to attend a National League of Cities conference in Arizona. A few years later, L.A. added its own restrictions on travel to North Carolina and Mississippi over their transgender bathroom laws.

[...]

Ordinarily, the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which gives the federal government the right to regulate trade among the states, prohibits such restrictions, but courts have recognized the right of states to impose bans during emergencies. Yet, as with lockdowns, states continually expanded their travel bans based on emergency powers, in the process voiding the intention of the drafters of the Commerce Clause for unprecedented periods. New York’s travel and quarantine rules lasted ten months, Maine’s for more than a year, and Hawaii’s for a year and a half—and counting. Governors frequently jousted over the restrictions, with officials in Florida, New York, and Rhode Island waging a war of words at various points during the pandemic.

The power of the Commerce Clause is fading in other troubling ways. State laws like California’s 2016 LGBTQ discrimination measure are designed to extract some economic toll on other states, but even more powerful economic weapons are available. One troubling trend has been the decline of Commerce Clause protections against states’ reaching into other locales for taxation of citizens and businesses, resulting in an increase of out-of-state punitive actions. For generations, U.S. courts, led by the Supreme Court, interpreted the Commerce Clause as requiring a firm to have some physical presence in a state to be subject to taxes there. But the rise of remote work and technological advances like cloud computing have prompted states to redefine what constitutes a business’s “presence,” sparking widespread poaching of tax dollars. During the mid-2000s, for instance, New Jersey revenue agents stopped thousands of trucks with out-of-state license plates and impounded them, demanding that the owners pay a steep minimum corporation tax simply because the trucks were using the state’s roads to deliver remotely ordered products from businesses that had no presence there. The practice spread to other states and became punitive. Colorado legislators even passed a resolution urging their revenue agents to target trucks from states that had pursued Colorado companies.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-05T02:32:03+00:00

Minnesota Middle School Announces It Will Stop Giving ‘F’s To Fight ‘Systemic Racism’

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-04T20:42:48+00:00

Club wielding mob of adult Antifa surrounds high school in Thessaloniki, Greece, only to get beaten in the streets by the students

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-04T20:16:05+00:00

Report: Too Many White People Studying Racial Disparities in Health Care

Is studying racial disparities in health care just another example of white supremacy run amok? A recently published investigative report suggests the answer is yes.

"‘Health equity tourists': How white scholars are colonizing research on health disparities," reads the headline of the report, which appeared last week on the health care-focused website Stat. Such research is now "in vogue," writes national science correspondent Usha Lee McFarling, who appears to be white. "Journals are clamoring for it, the media is covering it, and the National Institutes of Health, after publicly apologizing for giving the field short shrift, recently announced it would unleash nearly $100 million for research on the topic."

Isn't that good? Not really. The heightened focus on racial health disparities has created "a gold rush mentality where researchers with little or no background or training in health equity research, often white and already well-funded, are rushing in to scoop up grants and publish papers," to the detriment of BIPOC researchers who are eager to push back against what they see as a form of colonialism.

"Medicine does that, they Columbus everything," said Monica McLemore, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who is pictured in the article wearing a shirt that reads "Educated & Blaccinated." She is concerned about the influx of white researchers interested in her field of study—reproductive health in marginalized communities—and what she describes as a concerted effort to "invisibilize the essential work of women of color."

One particularly "glaring example" cited in the report was the Journal of the American Medical Association‘s (JAMA) publication in August of a special issue focused on "racial and ethnic health disparities in medicine." Rather than being celebrated for highlighting these issues, the journal was denounced as "an illustration of the structural racism embedded in academic publishing" because none of the five research papers included in the special issue had a lead author who was black.

Ignore racial differences? Racist!

Study racial differences? Double racist!

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-04T17:23:42+00:00

Why the word “woman” is tying people in knots

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-04T16:28:33+00:00

Fairfax County ends arrest blotter over concerns data could be used in effort to deport immigrants

Fairfax County police have stopped publishing a weekly arrest blotter after county officials found it violated a policy that restricts the dissemination of personal information that could aid immigration enforcement.

Immigrant rights and civil liberties groups had been pushing for the change, arguing the weekly compilations that include arrestees’ addresses and other details could allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to target immigrants for deportation and raise privacy concerns.

But open-government advocates and some politicians have criticized the move, saying it decreases police transparency and keeps critical safety information from the public, including details about some violent, sex and property crimes.

[...]

Fairfax County police said the disclosure of arrestees is required by the state’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), so the information cannot be restricted altogether. The department will continue to publish crime statistics and a weekly highlight of a selection of serious crimes.

The group ACLU People Power and others began lobbying for the change in arrest reporting after the county Board of Supervisors adopted a “Trust Policy” in January. The policy requires the county to cooperate with ICE when mandated by state or federal law but otherwise restricts the county from releasing the personal information of county residents that ICE could use to conduct immigration enforcement. The policy was a response to stepped-up ICE activity during the Trump administration.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-04T15:46:03+00:00

Prominent French magazine publishes ‘The Suicide of America’ issue, criticizing Biden, wokeness

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-04T14:36:52+00:00

School boards group asks Biden to consider labeling opponents ‘domestic terrorists’

The National School Boards Association has asked President Biden to look into slapping a “domestic terrorist” label on “angry” parents and community members who speak their minds at board meetings.

“America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat,” the group says in its letter to the president. “[As] acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

[...]

But some of the instances cited by the NSBA in its letter appear to be free speech, to say nothing of “terrorism.” For example, the group cites a person yelling “a Nazi salute in protest to masking requirements,” while another’s actions “prompted [a] board to call a recess because of opposition to critical race theory.”

As repugnant as it may be to some, doing a Nazi gesture in opposition to mask mandates in a public forum is protected speech … as is someone speaking out against critical race theory.

It’s certainly not “terrorism” to go over a speaking time limit or to refuse to sit down, and definitely not something worthy of anything beyond the purview of local law enforcement.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-04T05:22:20+00:00

DHS to Shield Majority of Illegal Aliens From Deportation, Including Mentally Ill Criminals

Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is no longer going to "deport people solely because they are undocumented" and is advising ICE to consider shielding mentally ill criminals from deportation in the name of "achieving justice."

[...]

"Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday said immigration officers can no longer detain and deport people from the U.S. solely because they are undocumented," CNBC reported.

"The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen will not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them," Mayorkas' new guidelines state.

None of the thousands of illegal aliens he's allowing to march into our country every single day are "undocumented."

They are fully documented, they just throw their documents in the garbage before crossing because they know that means Mayorkas will give them special treatment and allow them to stay.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-03T17:48:42+00:00

China to ban video games promoting ‘effeminate males,’ gay relationships, report says

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-02T22:37:20+00:00

Macron, France Reject American 'Woke' Culture That's 'Racializing' Their Country

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-02T20:46:14+00:00

The NYT's Partisan Tale about COVID and the Unvaccinated is Rife with Sloppy Data Analysis

A widely shared article recently appeared in The New York Times’ “The Morning” newsletter titled “Red Covid,” authored by David Leonhardt. This article, presented as news reporting and not an opinion piece, argues that deaths from COVID-19 are “showing a partisan pattern,” with the worst impacts of the disease “increasingly concentrated in red America.” Given that this narrative perfectly flatters a liberal sense of superiority, it has predictably gained substantial traction on MSNBC and on Twitter.

One particular claim in the Times' article caught my attention: that there is a clear and strong association on a county level between COVID deaths and support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Specifically, the article alleged that those counties which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump had more than a four-fold greater mortality rate than those counties which decisively voted against Trump. If true, that would indeed be a striking observation.

But, as is often the case with epidemiological observations, the question is more complicated than two variables. There are three analytic errors that can lead someone to make false conclusions from what appears to be a meaningful association between two variables: bias, confounding variables, and random statistical error. In this case, the Times’ analysis failed to discuss significant confounding variables.

Age is a common confounder in public health research, and COVID-19 is no exception. The mortality burden of COVID-19 is not randomly distributed across age groups. Indeed, age appears to be the “strongest predictor of mortality” from COVID-19, with one’s risk of death increasing exponentially with age. According to CDC figures, the oldest populations experience a rate of death 570 times higher than that of the youngest populations. This is precisely why older populations were vaccinated first; we knew that prioritizing this population would have the most dramatic effect in curtailing hospitalizations and deaths. Yet the crude county-level analysis reported in The New York Times failed to adjust or account for age at all.

Why is it especially important that we adjust for age when comparing COVID-19 mortality rates in “red” counties with “blue” counties? Because age is not randomly distributed geographically, nor is it randomly distributed on a partisan basis. Republican voters tend to be older than Democratic voters. And rural counties, where Trump won by the largest margins, have older populations than suburban and urban counties. So this means that age is clearly a third, unaccounted for factor that is associated with both the independent variable (a county’s political affiliation) and the dependent variable (COVID-19 fatality rate) in question. This makes it a significant confounder that could easily exaggerate or distort the measured effect and lead one to spurious conclusions.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-02T17:53:03+00:00

UK: Judge rules firing of train worker over social media post breached Equality Act

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-02T16:00:23+00:00

HOAX: Black woman charged after allegedly posing as white male and sending violent, racist notes to neighbors

Police identified Terresha Lucas, a 30-year-old African-American female, as the suspect behind the notes, charging her with eight counts of making terroristic threats, according to a police statement.

Police said that residents of Manning Drive in Georgia began receiving notes in December from a person claiming to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. "Lucas allegedly described herself as a six-feet-tall white male with a long, red beard who did not live in the neighborhood," the police statement said.

[...]

"The notes threatened to burn their houses down and kill them and said that they didn't belong in the neighborhood," he said.

"Subsequent notes with similar verbiage were placed in residents' mailboxes on Feb. 17, Feb. 22, March 1 and March 3. After a six-month absence, the final note was placed on Sept. 6. Shumaker said there were likely more notes written," the police statement said.

According to CBS46, the notes were received by at least seven black people who lived in the neighborhood. The notes reportedly contained the N-word and talked about hanging people and killing kids.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-10-01T15:26:30+00:00

The Plague of the Poor: A dangerous COVID-era authoritarianism targets the most vulnerable—and threatens the foundation of democratic society

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-10-01T14:01:13+00:00

Hoax alert: Black student admits to writing racist graffiti in high school bathrooms

Following a raucous and emotional classroom walkout last week to protest racist messages in a Missouri school’s bathrooms, a black student ended up admitting responsibility for it.

The graffiti at Parkway Central High near St. Louis included a “racial slur for African Americans […] as well as a statement wishing the death of Black people,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

During the walkout, students “yelled questions” and cursed at Parkway Principal Tim McCarthy, shouted “no justice, no peace” and complained about feeling unsafe at school.

Parkway School District Superintendent Keith Marty (left) said in a statement the fact that the culprit is black “does not diminish the hurt it caused or the negative impact it has on our entire community.” This is an almost-verbatim response from a similar incident four years ago.

[...]

A district spokesperson said officials “don’t know why” the (black) student wrote the graffiti. Marty added “We cannot presume the reasons a student would do this,” which is another almost-repeat statement from 2017’s hoax.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-30T22:01:56+00:00

Czech Prime Minister: Only Increased Birthrates Can Prevent the Extinction of Europeans

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-30T20:17:12+00:00

Stop “Civil Rights” Abuse: States must block the federal government from countermanding localities with fake constitutional protections.

In late August, as students headed back to school, the Biden Department of Education made clear to parents what close observers had predicted: this administration defines “civil rights” as “whatever the left happens to prefer.”

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona announced that his Office for Civil Rights (OCR) would investigate five states that have prohibited universal mask mandates. He declared that these investigations would explore whether such prohibitions violate Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and interrogate “each state’s compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973,” which guarantees people with disabilities “an equal opportunity to receive program benefits and services.”

The Biden administration, it seems, believes that a student has a civil right to have his school board force his peers to wear a mask.

This is a willful and arbitrary exercise of power, and a revealing one. If the political polarity of masking were reversed, one could easily imagine the Biden administration arguing that mask mandates discriminate against students with disabilities—students like Daniel Volodin, who has autism and epilepsy and is being denied in-person instruction by the Abermarle County school district because he is unable to wear a mask all day.

That argument would, in fact, have greater merit than the grounds cited by the Biden administration. No “investigation” should be necessary to determine the legal question of whether prohibiting a mask mandate violates Title II of the ADA. It either does or it doesn’t.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-30T19:28:20+00:00

Texas Teachers Instructed To Help Students Hide Gender Identity From Parents

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-30T19:21:49+00:00

There is no such thing as white privilege: Even swearing is now classified as ‘white privilege’. What a load of bollocks.

So now wearing second-hand clothes is a sign of ‘white privilege’. Just when you thought you’d heard it all from the loopy identity lobby, they come out with the idea that putting on a vintage dress or a musty old man’s shirt you bought from Oxfam is proof that you enjoy racial favouritism. This crackpot claim is made in a course being foisted on students at the University of Kent. If you can wear second-hand clobber without this being held up as yet another example of the ‘bad morals of [your] race’, then you are apparently white and you’re definitely privileged.

I have so many questions. First, who exactly is going around saying to ethnic-minority people who dare to don vintage fashion, ‘Oh God, how typical of your race to wear second-hand clothes?’. I am going to say ‘nobody’. When racist toerags do accost people who look different to them, it is usually not to critique their Seventies florals or dad’s old blazer. Secondly, it will surely be news to all the less well-off white kids who have little choice but to wear second-hand clothes – ‘hand-me-downs’ – that their repurposed trainers and patched-up jumpers are proof of their privilege. Some of us who crazily cling to the belief that class and income remain the key shapers of privilege in our society might even say that the wearing of second-hand clothes in such circumstances is proof of the absence of privilege. Mad, I know.

The Kent course, titled ‘Expect Respect’, is only the latest example of students being inculcated into the ways of moral conformism. It’s a mandatory module, which takes four hours to complete, and is designed to raise students’ awareness about white privilege, microaggressions, pronouns and other riveting topics. The module includes a ‘white privilege quiz’ – such fun! – in which the freshers are grilled over the societal benefits enjoyed by whitey. Apparently if you can swear without being called a disgrace to your race or go shopping without being followed or harassed, then you enjoy white privilege. Students who correctly identify all the indicators of racial privilege get a gold star. Presumably those who don’t get branded with the letter ‘R’ for racist.

The list of things that are apparently signs of white privilege grows longer and more demented by the day. Saying ‘I don’t see colour’ is white privilege. Eating French food is white privilege. Drinking milk is white privilege. Saying ‘I don’t have white privilege’ is white privilege. Of course it is. ‘For white people to dismiss the benefits they’ve reaped because of their whiteness only goes to show how oblivious – and privileged – they really are’, says one writer. This is the Kafkaesque trap of identity politics. There’s no winning in this slippery game. Refuse to acknowledge another person’s race and you’re racist. But obsess over another person’s race and presumably you’re also racist. Saying ‘I don’t see difference’ is racist. But saying ‘Oh you seem different, where are you from?’ is racist too. Confess your white privilege, and clearly you’re privileged. Deny it and you’re really privileged. It’s like being an old lady on a ducking stool in medieval times. Float, you’re a witch. Die, you’re a witch.

The idea of ‘white privilege’ sums up how toxic identity politics has become. The belief that folk with white skin have certain privileges conferred upon them is widely held in millennial circles, in the education system, in much of the political sphere, in popular culture, and in the opinion-shaping – or rather, orthodoxy-enforcing – world of social media. Even the BBC is getting in on the act, no doubt as penance for the sin of being ‘hideously white’ (in the words of its former director-general, Greg Dyke). BBC employees are given diversity training that involves taking a ‘privilege test’. BBC Bitesize, Auntie’s educational wing, last year provided a lecture for schoolkids on white privilege. ‘White privilege’ is not something that was ‘made up to make white people feel bad’, it said. Defensive much?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-30T13:48:56+00:00

UK police officer fired over sharing memes “offensive” to BLM, LGBT – but investigators won’t show the memes

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-30T13:10:23+00:00

The White Backlash That Wasn’t: Opposition to critical race theory is broad and bipartisan.

Over the past year, the left-leaning media has peddled the narrative that an emotional constellation of “white resentment,” “white fragility,” “white rage,” and “white fear” drives opposition to critical race theory in America’s public schools. Now NBC News claims it can prove it.

In a long story featuring analysis of demographic data, NBC News reporter Tyler Kingkade and data editor Nigel Chiwaya claim that the parent uprisings against critical race theory, which have occurred in more than 200 school districts across the country, are a “backlash” against “rapid demographic change” and “the exposure of white students to students of color.” Or, to put it bluntly, it’s the ugly reaction of white racism in the face of rapidly integrating schools. As left-leaning Slate concluded, NBC’s reporting proves that fear of “white replacement” and the desire to “protect whiteness” motivate the anti-critical race theory movement.

There is only one problem: NBC’s analysis is nonsense. The report, like the left-wing narrative about critical race theory more generally, fails both statistically and imaginatively. NBC News builds its narrative on the claim that “many of the school districts facing backlash over equity initiatives are diversifying faster than the national average.” The report provides data for 33 school districts, which undermine its argument in two ways: first, one-third of these districts have diversified slower, rather than faster, than the national average; and second, according to NBC News’ own reporting, there have been anti-critical race theory protests in at least 220 school districts nationwide, which means that NBC failed even to analyze 85 percent of the evidence.

But the NBC report, like almost all mainstream media coverage, fails an even greater imaginative test: these publications cannot imagine a world outside the framing of the 1960s civil rights era, comparing opposition to critical race theory with racial segregation, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan. NBC suggests darkly that these communities “have long segregated their schools” to exclude blacks, while the Slate piece makes a more explicit comparison between parent protesters and “Louisiana’s White League,” “racist mass shooters,” and the “Capitol insurrectionists.”

These comparisons fall apart after the most basic examination. Parents in Loudoun and Fairfax County, Virginia, whom the NBC News report cast in a negative light, aren’t old-line racists and segregationists but educated, affluent, and diverse citizens in the elite suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C. Contrary to the narrative about white families lashing out against an influx of black students, Loudoun County has roughly the same proportion of blacks as it did 20 years ago; the highest rate of population growth has been among Asians and Latinos, who, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, oppose critical race theory by a two-to-one margin—the same as white voters. In nearby Fairfax County, the leader of the parent opposition is an Indian-American woman, Asra Nomani, who has blasted critical race theory for reducing academic standards and discriminating against high-performing Asians.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-29T19:04:13+00:00

Muslim inmate challenges strip-search by transgender guard

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-29T17:50:47+00:00

Someone Orchestrated the Border Crisis: America increasingly resembles a failed state.

From D.C.’s perspective, then, the crisis is nearly over. The optics are under control: there are migrants visibly expelled from the country, there is a visible law-enforcement surge (albeit mostly Texan, not federal), and the media is effectively prohibited from direct access to the site. You’d think the last bit would be something media would protest, but no: excepting a few citizen journalists and right-of-center outlets who mean nothing to the federal apparatus, media acquiesces to the restrictions. They are the willing handmaidens of the elite narrative, not its skeptics—and certainly not its opponents.

Confronted with a truly historical event—it’s impossible to think of anything quite like fifteen thousand foreigners establishing an ersatz colony on American soil in the past century—the intent is to memory-hole it. There isn’t even a meaningful inquiry into why it all happened.

That doesn’t mean there are no answers. The answers exist. Todd Bensman of CIS did what virtually no member of the media has done—excepting one Los Angeles Times reporter I’m aware of—and crossed into Ciudad Acuña to talk to directly to the migrants on the Mexican side. What he found was surprising, and shocking. The Haitians reported that they, longtime residents of Mexico, were abruptly released by Mexican authorities to proceed north and cross into the United States in mid-September. The reason given: a gift in celebration of Mexican Independence Day. So they did—by the thousands.

Someone orchestrated this.

Who? To what end? These are questions a press corps competent to its putative purpose might pursue. These are questions to which a government genuinely concerned with the welfare and sovereignty of the United States might demand answers—and accountability. Neither media nor the federal government will do anything like that. We are left to ask it ourselves, and we start with the understanding that if Bensman’s account is accurate, then the Haitian incursion and encampment, stupendous and alarming as it is, is not the real crisis. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s a crisis in full, but it’s a crisis covering for something else.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-29T15:23:44+00:00

New FBI Crime Data Shows Record Surge in Black-on-Black Homicide, and Increase in Anti-White Hate Crimes

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-29T13:25:38+00:00

Why Aren’t Men Going to College? Do disappearing college males know something we don’t?

Political future #1. Just over forty years ago, President Ronald Reagan ushered in a low-tax revolution which made it possible for better educated people, not only to get higher paying jobs, but to keep and enjoy the financial fruits of their labor. But between society’s current need to pay down the Covid-juiced federal debt and the rise of progressive thinking in the Democratic party, the probable tax burden on high earners has clearly diminished what ambitious workers can expect to receive for their labors. This development may not be as important to women, for whom the ability to earn a prestigious career title is still a historical novelty. But believing that some future progressive government will always provide them with at least a comfortable lifestyle, many young men might feel it’s not worth the educational effort required to achieve the shrinking financial reward.

Political future #2. Everything noted above, except that with fewer Americans working hard to produce needed goods and services the government goes broke, reducing once-promised entitlements to a trickle. In which case, what’s a better way for today’s young man to invest his time: earning an expensive university degree or going to work long enough for his brother-in-law, the electrician (plumber, bricklayer, or carpenter), to learn a useful trade? Name one novel or movie about some dark economic future where the most privileged male survivors are waving their college diplomas.

An abusive and uncaring educational system. In the 180 years since Horace Mann’s invention of our public school system, the nature of manufacturing has evolved from a reliance on physical labor to sophisticated industrial robots, the nature of military service from riding horses to mastering smart weapons, and the nature of accounting from paper journal keeping to the use of computerized spreadsheets. Yet in all that time the underlying structure of K-12 education, with its fixed grade levels, uniform class structure, one-size-fits-all curriculum, and nine-month school year has remained essentially unchanged—a testament to society’s interest, not in addressing the unique instructional needs of each child, but in challenging teachers and administrators as little as possible. After 13 years of enduring such a system—which consistently ranks near the bottom of international comparisons—is it so improbable that a good portion of young men, more impatient by nature than women of their age, might have had enough of any schooling?

Useless coursework. In 2005, Dr John Ioannidis, co-director of Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, published an influential study which showed that much of what for passes for ”settled science” in medicine, biology, economics, education research, the social sciences, and other university disciplines cannot, in fact, be replicated. In other words, by the ultimate test of scientific validity—getting the same result from repeating the same experiment—a lot of what professors teach their students isn’t true.

Indeed, concerns about what is called “experimental irreproducibility” have been growing for nearly a decade. In 2012, scientists at the biotech firm Amgen found they could confirm the results of only six of 53 supposedly landmark cancer studies published in prominent journals. Four years later, Nature conducted an online survey of scientists, 70 percent of whom said they’d tried and failed to reproduce their colleagues’ published findings.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-29T02:39:42+00:00

London Police to rollout “Retrospective Facial Recognition,” scanning old footage with new invasive face recognition tech

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-28T18:47:27+00:00

The media ignore black murder victims because they don't want to highlight black perpetrators

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-28T18:24:40+00:00

The Linguistic Equivalent of War: Today’s progressives are heirs to a long tradition of abusing words to advance their policy goals.

A day before an ISIS attack killed 13 Marines in Kabul, President Joe Biden declared cybersecurity “the core national security challenge we are facing.” Cybersecurity is critical. But with the Taliban retaking Afghanistan after being routed by the U.S. military two decades ago, calling it the “core” national security challenge of our time was bizarre. Still, Biden’s August comments were an improvement from June, when the president declared climate change the greatest threat to American security.

You would think that the commander in chief responsible for one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in decades would choose his words more carefully. But that’s not how his party tends to operate these days. George Orwell warned of the dangers of imprecise political speech in his seminal essay “Politics and the English Language.” The problem, in Orwell’s telling, is that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Political speakers reach for muddled, vague language to sell the public on their indefensible policies. This is bad enough, but it presents a broader issue because “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Orwell’s diagnosis is as true in America today as it was when he wrote those words 75 years ago. And while both political parties are guilty of indulging in bad rhetoric that corrupts policy, Democrats are the more frequent and more serious offenders, largely because linguistic manipulation is central to so many progressive political ideas.

Twentieth-century progressives, for example, were enamored with philosopher William James’s idea of “the moral equivalent of war.” In his 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson declared “an unconditional war on poverty,” inaugurating an era of U.S. leaders declaring war on concepts. More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter directly quoted James in a speech calling the energy crisis the “moral equivalent of war.” By now, we’ve seen the fallout of the twentieth century social policy’s moral crusades. As Charles Murray shows in Losing Ground, poverty rates began climbing in the 1970s, despite the expansion of government power and spending inaugurated by Great Society antipoverty programs. Medicare, another campaign in the War on Poverty, is projected to run out of money by 2026.

Democrats today don’t speak in such martial terms as their mid-century predecessors, but the broadness of their vision and goals—and the language they use to describe them—is a contributing factor in spreading already-ineffective federal agencies even thinner. In addition to a resurgent Taliban and the global challenge presented by an increasingly aggressive China, the Department of Defense must tackle climate change. With inflation rising, members of the congressional Squad want the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to focus “on eliminating climate risk and advancing racial and economic justice.” And the Centers for Disease Control, whose botched coronavirus response shows that it can barely handle its core mandate, was te

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-28T15:20:36+00:00

Scientific American Says Jedi Are Problematic White Saviors, Practice Toxic Masculinity

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-28T14:08:36+00:00

Is Long Covid a myth? Middle-class hypochondria seems to play an important role in this ill-defined condition.

Discussing the cultural influences on the idea of Long Covid is controversial. Experts who have raised cultural factors have been demonised and harassed. And yet it’s a discussion we must have, especially us in the UK. As a headline in The Sunday Times asked back in June, ‘Why is Britain now the capital of Long Covid?’. We really are the capital. Where early Covid victim Italy has not seen a huge wave of Long Covid cases, and where even the United States hasn’t been overrun by people who claim to suffer from these strange long-term symptoms, the ‘situation in the UK has been very different’, as The Sunday Times says. Numerous Long Covid clinics were lined up here, we were told that a million or more Brits were suffering from it (now being revised down), and the media couldn’t get enough of grim, nightmarish tales about this disease.

Of course there could be any number of reasons for this disparity between nations. Perhaps Britain is just better at diagnosing Long Covid. An Italian doctor told The Sunday Times that Italy’s first-ever Long Covid clinic shut down after just six months, and this may have simply been down to the fact that Long Covid ‘is not one of the main topics on the public agenda. There isn’t a large public-health structure devoted to this problem.’ Others have noted how national, cultural factors help to shape ‘health-seeking behaviour’. Dr Rubeshan Perumal of the University of Cape Town says Long Covid is a problem in South Africa, but it is not comparable to the presumed extent of Long Covid in the UK. ‘Contextual factors play into health-seeking behaviour’, he says. ‘Some societies are better able to provide a platform for people to express their difficulty in recovering from Covid. It may be easier to express your difficulties in [the UK].’ Maybe where South Africans are more likely to persevere through fogginess and tiredness and muscle ache – out of necessity, no doubt – Britons are given to saying, ‘I can’t do this. Diagnose me.’

Jeremy Devine, a psychiatrist at McMaster University in Ontario, has caused a storm by digging down into the psychological and cultural factors that might lie behind Long Covid. He doesn’t deny that there are after-effects from Covid, but he believes that the ‘hysteria’ over Long Covid has convinced many people they have it, when they don’t. ‘It’s psychosomatic’, he says. ‘People don’t fully appreciate the ability of the psyche to convince itself that it’s sick. I don’t think people are overtly malingering. I do think they fall into a cycle of disability and it stems maybe from this subconscious desire to be sick in some cases, maybe just a belief that they are sick rooted in depression and anxiety. This is in a way a kind of mass hysteria: the more attention you give a syndrome like this, the stronger it becomes.’

A ‘subconscious desire to be sick’ – this may be a very controversial idea, and no doubt offensive to some, but it does capture something about our times. One of the most curious and worrying features of our era in which so many areas of life have been medicalised and pathologised, where feeling stressed about exams is reimagined as a mental illness and where it can be positively status-boosting to suffer from certain mental and physical ailments, desiring to be sick, or at least desiring a diagnosis that explains why you are the way you are, has become quite commonplace. It makes sense to me that in the Covid era, when so many people felt fearful, uncertain about the future and locked into their own little worlds, some would seek out a diagnosis to describe their emotional state as much as their physical one. Is it possible that middle-class hypochondria, a feeling of dread among one time go-getters who were laid low by the Covid crisis, led to an explosion in claims of Long Covid?

Jeremy Devine has also controversially dug into the national cultural factors that might be shaping the Long Covid phenomenon. ‘The reason this is so prevalent in the UK is because of the chronic fatigue lobby’, he says. ‘They have shaped the discourse on Long Covid. You guys are the origin.’ In mentioning chronic fatigue syndrome – also known as ME – Devine has tapped into deeper and more complicated questions that we really should discuss out in the open far more than we do. The question of whether some people seek medical diagnoses for what are in truth personal difficulties. The question of whether the cult of medicalisation is so entrenched that people are now wrapping diagnoses around themselves like comfort blankets, in the belief that a doctor’s note is all they need to make sense of their personal failings, fears or sense of exhaustion. The question of whether the undoubted problems that can attend recovery from viral infections in some people have been transformed into definitive illnesses – ME, Long Covid – which people covet in order to make sense of themselves and their lives.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-27T17:31:13+00:00

Twitter censors e-mail correspondence that appears to show Duck Duck Go discriminating against White males

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-27T16:52:22+00:00

Fully Oligarchic Luxury Californication

What California is creating can be best described as oligarchic socialism, a form of collectivism that combines hierarchy with “equity,” regulation with oligopoly, and progressive intentions with feudal results. Like so much else, the pandemic has accelerated this trend, vastly enriching the tech elite, while turning much of the working and middle classes dependent on what Marx called “the proletarian alms bag.”

In contemporary California, traditional notions of economic development and upward mobility have been replaced by subsidized housing, a state bailout for renters in default emergency aid to small businesses and enhanced unemployment payments. Once all the state’s new commitments are met California’s much ballyhooed $75 billion surplus, Chapman economist Jim Doti estimates, shrinks to a still considerable $25 billion.

With such a rich surplus, other states would consider either spending the extra cash, as Texas and other states do, on economic development, either through tax cuts, regulatory holidays, or incentives. But work and upward mobility for the middle and working classes are no longer a prime concern in the Golden State. “The culture for much of California, driven by state politics, is one of benefits (and now guaranteed income), not a jobs strategy or expectation,” suggests Michael Bernick, a former director of the state’s Employment Development Department.

Bernick notes that this approach—as opposed to boosting employment—is also popular both with the tech oligarchs and bureaucrats who together dominate the state. The synergy between Silicon Valley wealth and the expansive welfare state is clear: with seemingly unlimited capital gains and income receipts, the state can fund ever more dysfunctional schools at a high level, pay enormous pensions, and generally expand the role of a state government.

This faith in government seems odd given its record of incompetence, from the high speed rail fiasco to forcing a bailout of the marijuana industry. The state has also mishandled unemployment claims, according to the Los Angeles Times, with more than a million Californians awaiting unemployment checks that were delayed or frozen. Worse yet, the state last year gave payments of $11 billion to various scammers, including people in jail and criminals from Nigeria and Russia.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-27T16:07:35+00:00

‘Manipulating humanity’: French medical professionals, academics denounce transgenderism

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-27T15:09:44+00:00

Black students harass white peers at Arizona State U. multicultural center

This past Thursday, a pair of black female Arizona State University students came upon two white male peers in the campus multicultural center … and promptly began berating them for the invasion of their “space.”

The women, identified as Mostadi and Zara, took immediate offense to a laptop sticker one of the men had which says “Police Matter.” The other male wore a shirt which reads “Didn’t Vote for Joe Biden.”

In video of the encounter, the men tell the female duo “We’re just tryin’ to school” and “It’s just a sticker.” Mostadi or Zara replies “But this is our space […] you’re making this space uncomfortable.”

One girl continues: “You’re white! Do you understand what a multicultural space– it means you’re not being centered!”

In response to one of the men asking “White isn’t a culture?” she tells him “No, it’s not a culture! White is not a culture!” She yells: “This is the violence that ASU does and this is the type of people that they protect! This white man thinks he can take up our space … they think they can get away with this s**t!

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-27T05:58:09+00:00

UW-Madison department to faculty: participate in annual 'anti-racist' experience, or lose your pay raise

Some faculty and staff members at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be required to participate in annual "anti-racist practices" or will forfeit "pay plan and merit increases.

The move, announced Aug. 23 on the school’s website, applies to the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Staff in this department will be required to “participate annually in at least one experience that enhances their understanding of diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism.”

Staff will be required to document these experiences in their annual activity reports and self-evaluations and is required in order to be considered for departmental awards and salary increases.

Mandatory compliance with the policy will begin in the fiscal year 2023.

The school’s website said that this requirement came from the CALS Equity and Diversity Committee, which “emphasized the need for employees to understand systemic racism and to learn anti-racist practices.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-27T00:48:58+00:00

Yes, the NFL's taunting penalty is racist: The enforcement of this rule screams ‘play the white way’

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-26T16:27:35+00:00

Police in Australia turn up on doorsteps to quiz citizens over social media posts

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-25T16:47:05+00:00

Evidentiary hearing in Kyle Rittenhouse case appears to have been a victory for the defense

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-25T15:23:11+00:00

Lancet accused of sexism after calling women ‘bodies with vaginas’: The prestigious medical journal has prompted a wave of anger online after a 'well-meaning but unhelpful attempt to be inclusive'

The Lancet medical journal has been accused of sexism after describing women as “bodies with vaginas” on the cover of its latest edition.

A tweet sharing the front page has provoked a wave of criticism, with academics cancelling their subscriptions and resigning as reviewers, doctors blasting the phrase as “dehumanising” and activists suggesting the term is “unhelpful” for broader debates about inclusivity.

The cover refers to an article, titled ‘Periods on Display’ and published on September 1, which reviews an exhibition on the history of menstruation at the Vagina Museum in London. In the piece, the writer says "women" four times, but also uses the phrase "bodies with vaginas" once.

It is a quote including this latter term that the Lancet's editors chose to use on the front page. “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected,” it says.

While the language is an attempt at inclusivity it has prompted a furious response, with some academics suggesting they will never work with the journal again.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-24T22:21:07+00:00

Review board finds Google’s retaliation over conservative employee’s comments violated “protected worker behavior”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-24T20:38:49+00:00

Texas sues Biden over ‘illegal’ transgender, pronoun mandates

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is taking the Biden administration to court over an “unlawful” federal mandate which seeks to force businesses to concede on the use of sex-based bathrooms, dress codes, and pronouns as subjectively determined by employees, regardless of their actual sex.

On September 20, Paxton filed a lawsuit against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), its chairwoman Charlotte Burrows, and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, petitioning the Northern District of Texas federal court for “declaratory and injunctive relief” from Burrows’ June 15 guidance.

The guidance document outlined a requirement for employers “to allow exceptions from their generally applicable workplace policies on usage of bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers … dress codes, and pronoun usage, based on the subjective gender identities of their employees,” according to the lawsuit.

In contrast, Paxton’s office released a statement declaring that “States have the sovereign right to enact their own policies regarding things such as bathroom usage,” characterizing the move by the EEOC as “an extreme federal overreach by the federal government.”

Paxton himself added that “States should be able to choose protection of privacy for their employers over subjective views of gender, and this illegal guidance puts many women and children at risk.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-24T16:16:29+00:00

The Destructive Legacy of the Great Society: Government subsidies for antisocial behavior stalled decades worth of black progress.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-24T15:06:44+00:00

Black man arrested for ‘N-word’ graffiti, swastikas at Emory University

Emory University’s Police Department on Wednesday arrested the man accused of writing racial slurs and swastikas at its autism center in early August.

Roy Lee Gordon Jr. (right) is charged with second-degree burglary, Emory officials said in a news release that indicated Gordon is also the same person who allegedly wrote the “N-word” and drew swastikas at the Emory Autism Center last month. He is a former employee of the university.

A police mugshot published by the Atlanta Journal Constitution shows that Gordon is black. This is the first time his race has been revealed publicly.

Although Emory officials have known the man accused of the racial vandalism is black since early August, they have not informed the campus community of his race, which may have put a different interpretation of the incident on it.

Asked for a mugshot and information on what Gordon is accused of stealing, and what his possible motivation was for allegedly committing these acts, Emory spokesperson Gana Ahn told The College Fix on Thursday that, “Unfortunately, we are unable to share any additional details beyond what is in the statement.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-23T15:25:33+00:00

IMF report suggests credit scores could soon be based on web browsing history

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-23T13:54:53+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud | An axis of the CIA, Big Tech and the DNC-allied wing of the corporate media spread an absolute lie in the weeks before the 2020 election. We now have definitive proof.

A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.

But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation's oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden's son Hunter at a repair shop.

From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post's archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter's own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden's profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine before risking one's career and reputation by reporting them, it was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.

Despite all that, former intelligence officials such as Obama's CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was "Russian disinformation.” Note that this phrase contains two separate assertions: 1) the documents came from Russia and 2) they are fake ("disinformation"). The intelligence officials admitted in this letter that — in their words — “we do not know if the emails are genuine or not,” and also admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.” Yet it repeatedly insinuated that everyone should nonetheless believe this: 🖼️

But the complete lack of evidence for these claims — that even these career CIA liars acknowledged plagued their assertions — did not stop the corporate media or Big Tech from repeating this lie over and over, and, far worse, using this lie to censor this reporting from the internet. One of the first to spread this lie was the co-queen of Russiagate frauds, Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and now promoted, because of lies like this, to CNN. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared her headline in Politico on October 19, just five days after the Post began its reporting. From there, virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-22T15:20:34+00:00

The Subjugation of the Deplorables: They know it’s illegal. They just don’t care.

Never mind that, a year and a half after the commencement of the March 2020 lockdowns, and in the face of mounting inflation, Americans have stubbornly managed to stabilize the economy. Never mind that myriad struggling mom-and-pop landlords are irreparably harmed by an arbitrary, zero-sum handout to tenants at the expense of landlords. And never mind that, as constitutional scholar Eugene Kontorovich wrote last month, the Biden administration was “clearly using a public health emergency as a substitute for economic legislation—and this is what the moratorium always was.”

As Kontorovich concluded, the eviction moratorium—both in its initial decree and its lingering vitality—was always a quintessential example of Rahm Emanuel’s injunction to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” But the COVID era has furnished countless examples of progressive governance-by-crisis, from the local or municipal level to the state and national level.

Everywhere one looks, going back to those first two weeks of “15 days to slow the spread,” COVID has legally emboldened a pan-institutional ruling class that was already champing at the bit to consolidate its ideologically monolithic rule and subjugate all free-thinking “deplorables” who so much as seemed hesitant to advance it.

As the 2021-2022 school year begins, this subjugation can be expected to rapidly accelerate and metastasize. Ron DeSantis, stalwart governor of my new adopted home state, Florida, now finds himself in the midst of intense litigation for the right to—wait for it—leave masking decisions for elementary school-age children in the hands of parents, not the left-wing public school foot soldiers. This, notwithstanding the rudimentary truism of our federalist constitutional structure that sovereignty below the federal level inheres in states and not their various municipalities, let alone those municipalities’ public school bureaucrats. That basic principle did not stop Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper, whose ruling had to be stayed by Florida’s First District Court of Appeals.

But why should it? None of this is actually about the rule of law. It is about two things: power tout court, and preferential allocation of scarce, zero-sum resources so as to benefit the Left’s favored groups (such as aggrieved tenants and teachers unions) and punish the Left’s disfavored groups (such as landlords and parents skeptical of the benefits of forcing their young children to wear a face diaper in school all day). That is what matters to folks like President Biden and Judge Cooper.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-22T15:06:38+00:00

San Fran Mayor Defends Partying Maskless Despite Mandate: ‘I Was Feeling The Spirit,’ ‘Don’t Need The Fun Police’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-22T12:40:08+00:00

To My Daughter's Therapist: You Were Wrong

It has been some months since you and my daughter had the last of four sessions. In the third session I was invited to sit in on a discussion of the effects of T, testosterone, on a human female body. You smiled calmly as you led us through a series of Powerpoint slides, explaining that my daughter’s reproductive organs would atrophy, that she would grow a beard, that her voice would deepen, and that “the phallus” would become enlarged. I sat listening, summoning all of my own skills as a clinical psychologist to not let a tirade loose at you in front of my brittle and fragile 17 year old.

[...]

I asked what it was specifically about my daughter that convinced you that medical transition would be the right course of action to relieve her distress. You said, “He has Gender Dysphoria.” I said, “She has an eating disorder, body dysmorphia, and ADHD, all of which seem to have some overlapping features with Gender Dysphoria. Why wouldn’t you assess for and treat those before triggering any kind of medical intervention?”

I asked you what happens if my daughter, upon taking T and going through the changes you described, is not relieved of her dysphoria. What if her feelings and symptoms of self-loathing, dissociation, anxiety, depression, and self harm become exacerbated? You visibly cringed at my questions and responded that most people who transition are satisfied with their results and don’t regret their decision. I asked where I might find peer-reviewed longitudinal studies that suggest that affirming and facilitating social and medical gender transition produce happy, well-adjusted teens and young adults. You said you would gladly send me links to those studies. The links never came.

[...]

Thinking back to that conversation I feel a delayed sense of dread as that was before I knew that major medical and mental health associations, the law, and key players in our state and federal government had also adopted a gender identity affirming stance, albeit for their own personal and political purposes. At the time I was unaware that in some instances parents had been reported to Child Protective Services just for refusing to address a child with his or her chosen name and preferred pronouns. In a way, though, I’m glad for my ignorance because I believe my forceful early pushback saved my child’s life. I would not take any of it back.

[...]

A critically important thing that we learned along the way is that my daughter, as many other young people who declare transgender identity in adolescence, is on the autism spectrum. She was diagnosed by an experienced child and adolescent psychiatrist and is now coming to understand how certain aspects of her autism resulted in collapsing and narrowing her focus into gender identity as a way of explaining and coping with what made life so difficult for her during her middle and high school years. She is learning to reconcile with being socially awkward and having idiosyncratic interests and will be better for it as she inhabits her full adult self sometime in her late 20’s. She is a brilliant and beautiful human being whose entire future came so close to being stolen from her by the gender transition industry. It is alarming that an entire generation of gifted children who may be on the autism spectrum is being sterilized in what amounts to a eugenics experiment with the participation of big-name medical and professional institutions, and to the benefit of a novel category of mental health practitioners: gender therapists like you.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-22T00:54:14+00:00

Bombshell allegations at another City school -Dead students enrolled, Classes didn't exist

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-21T15:25:17+00:00

Wisconsin introduces bill to curb social media censorship and deplatforming

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-21T14:03:16+00:00

Teaching children to hate each other

The influence of identity politics has become a serious problem in Britain’s schools. Some teachers now seem to think it is acceptable to present critical race theory or ideas of ‘white privilege’ as fact. And others choose to exploit their position by filling young, impressionable minds with religious bigotry.

Take, for example, what happened a few months ago at Richmond Hill Academy, a multi-ethnic, religiously diverse primary school in Leeds. A Muslim supply teacher, covering a Year 6 class, reportedly told her 10- and 11-year-old pupils that ‘white people and white children think they are superior’. She also said she was ‘happy’ and ‘proud’ to be a Muslim because it meant she ‘knew respect’. And, to top it all off, she allegedly accused one Muslim pupil of not being her ‘level of Muslim’ because the pupil in question supposedly did not always eat halal meat.

It beggars belief that a teacher could peddle such divisive nonsense to a class of impressionable pre-teens. And the fact she did so at a school with such a diverse student population only makes matters worse.

The headteacher, Anna Mackenzie, handled the situation well. After being told what had happened by the pupils involved, Mackenzie pulled the supply teacher out of the class and ordered her off the school’s premises. According to the GORSE Academies Trust, which runs Richmond Hill Academy, the matter has been referred to the local authority and to the agency which provided the supply teacher.

Nevertheless, this case raises serious questions over the regulation of supply teachers in the UK – and whether the process is open to abuse by those wishing to exert undue influence over young people. There are safeguarding and social-cohesion issues to consider here, too. Schools – especially those in diverse areas – should be places in which pupils of different ethnic and religious backgrounds mix and form bonds. They should not be taught to hate each other.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-21T05:05:20+00:00

Buffalo Philharmonic: No White or Asian Conductors Need Apply

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-20T21:01:31+00:00

Psak Suggests Illegal Immigrants Don’t Need To Prove Vaccination Status Since ‘They’re Not Intending To Stay Here’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-20T20:27:34+00:00

Domelife: Sterile subhumanity is our lot under the theocracy of disease.

In Seeing Like A State, James C. Scott identified the phenomenon of merging scientific technocracy with the State as High Modernity. High Modernity serves a similar function to the Dome without the easily identifiable physical presence. It is the established religion of our economic zone, faith in a technocratic vision of permanent management. From stars to microbes, no organism capable of detection will be left alone. Dissenters represent a crack in the glass, an intolerable existential threat.

The media describes these malcontents as bleach injectors and swallowers of horse deworming formula, but their real sin is the refusal to defer to High Modernity-approved experts. Whether we are fighting a war against global terror, racism, viruses, or white supremacy, the target is the same: grow the surveillance state, gather data, build an apparatus of global security and control, and wear down objections to the hegemony of the Dome. In the name of safety, be it from terrorists or microbes, no one will be allowed to opt out.

A disappointingly large group of people who see themselves as educated free-thinkers have thoroughly adopted the rhetoric of pharma lobbyists. They talk about the rubes who sent their children to die in Iraq, who watched them die of opioid overdoses, and mock them as hicks who refuse the vaccine because they believe it magnetizes the body. The coming caste system is almost too good for them.

Why revel in these caricatures and delight in the agonizing hospital deaths of the unelect? High Modernity is a religion, and to depart from it would be to exile oneself to the land of the heretics. For millions, to distrust the media would be to live without their substitute for hope in the heavens. If they lose faith in the benevolence of the CDC and Silicon Valley and the pharmaceuticals, then they face the same problem which makes the dissenters nervous: there’s nowhere else to go.

In their rush to triumph, those who control the institutions are hasty. If they move fast and break enough things they think they can hold the loyalty of those addicted to the highs of two-party political hatreds. But they break too much. The ACLU, guardian of civil liberties, says that violations of biological autonomy are a way of protecting civil liberties. But people are not stupid. They know Satoshi Omura won a Nobel Prize for discovering Ivermectin. They know billions of people have taken it. They are aware of the long catalogue of lies from the establishment as well as the revolving door between the CDC and the pharmaceutical companies. To be forced to surrender bodily autonomy is bad. But to turn their bodies over to institutions which sowed so much disinformation that their prime supporters, Democrats, are the most uninformed demographic regarding SARS-CoV-2 death rates, is out of the question. The lies are too visible and the main thing propelling High Modernity’s dreams of control through this civic crisis is not Science but simple old-fashioned two-party hatred.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-20T18:54:59+00:00

Pregnant People? Some advocates on the left want America to talk about pregnancy and birth in gender-neutral terms. But this language change might not be so easy for the country to embrace.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-20T16:35:10+00:00

Yes, Your Kid’s Trans Thing is a Phase

When I was a kid, my family had a set of rotadraw circles that fascinated me. These were circular plastic stencils. First, you drew in all the stenciled openings for “1,” then rotated the circle one phase and filled in those for “2,” etc. This process took concentration and careful alignment. Slowly, the underlying drawing was being built, but you would not be able to recognize it until you completed the task and lifted the stencil off to reveal it. The anticipation was agony. It was brilliant.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that toy recently, and our culture’s general impatience. Just over a year ago, our then 15-year-old son announced to my husband and I that he thought he might be trans. As my other essay described, this was not just totally out-of-the-blue, but totally out-of-character.

As many other parents have described, this announcement usually triggers a brutal, all-encompassing, multi-front campaign into finding a therapist, reading the latest research, exploring anti-depressants, physical and cognitive assessments, re-evaluating and adjusting your child’s friends and internet influences, reinvesting in family time, and hopefully building a support group. It isn’t easy.

As this process plays out, parents are filling in the stencils, shifting the circle, and following the guidelines. Literally – this is how mature parents are designed to work. Life has taught us to look before we leap. Years of observation and self-reflection have revealed to us that humans sometimes want things or do things that are short-sighted and harmful to ourselves and others. A little bit of time, a deep breath, a small moment away to stop and think and gather more information can prevent a lot of errors.

But teenagers are not capable of this. They lack the ability to accurately estimate risk. They are impulsive. They misread social cues. They can be aggressive. Their brains are literally under construction at this point. Their prefrontal cortex won’t be fully formed until they are around age 25. These trans-identified kids are prematurely lifting off their rotadraw stencil, declaring that they are absolutely certain they know what the final design should be, and demanding the permanent markers, scissors and glue to form it the way they think some intangible gender spirit tells them it should be. They literally cannot think logically about this topic. They only think emotionally.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-20T15:09:43+00:00

Facebook won’t respond to accusations it “asked fact-checking partners to retroactively change their findings”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-20T14:01:22+00:00

For Best Picture Contenders, Race and Sex Inventory Time Is Here

On Wednesday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presents the Oscars, quietly launched its new RAISE platform, an online system designed to collect identity and content information from the producers of films in the 2021 Best Picture race. Last year, 366 films qualified, so the impact will likely be wide. Responses are required by Nov. 15. The demand for data begins implementation of previously announced Oscar representation and inclusion standards: Films that don’t meet inclusion thresholds won’t be excluded until the 2024 show, but detailed reporting begins now.

“We are pleased to announce the official launch of the Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (RAISE), designed to facilitate the confidential collection of data and information relevant to the Academy’s Representation and Inclusion Standards,” said a Wednesday email, apparently intended for contenders, from the Academy’s Office of Representation, Inclusion and Equity.

Every would-be contender will receive a RAISE identification number on completing the data form. “A RAISE ID will be required in order to complete the submission,” the email said of this year’s Oscar process.

The platform is open only to those who have submitted a film. But a user-provided glimpse at its opening pages and the initial sections connected with its On-Screen Representation, Themes and Narratives Standard—one of four standards, two of which must be met to qualify for future Best Picture awards—reveal an expansive, detailed and insistent approach to data collection.

“All submissions will be monitored and analyzed to identify key trends relevant to the industry,” says in introduction to the platform. “Submitters are encouraged to share as much data as possible across all the standards.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-19T22:09:53+00:00

Parents Band Together, Force Resignation Of School Superintendent Who Pushed For Teaching Critical Race Theory

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-19T18:20:56+00:00

German ministers crack down on 'gender neutral' language in universities

Last month, nine German universites including Konstanz and Stuttgart released common guidelines which gave advice to staff and students on how to avoid the use of masculine and feminine forms of nouns.

However, Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder, 54, has slammed the new gender neutral language regulations at universities as 'indoctrination'.

He has also ordered a review into the contents of the guides saying that language cannot be 'prescribed' and that students who do not use the new terminology should not be marked down.

The special language guides warned against the use of male forms of words to refer to groups of men and women - which has been traditionally used in German to address groups in general.

Speaking to local newspaper, Augsburger Allgemeine, Mr Söder, who is also the leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) party, said that it would be intolerable if academics were to mark down students who failed to use the new gender conventions.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-19T17:24:58+00:00

Ahh, so we're reliving that part of the Twenties: The Moral Panic about Eugenics Poses a Threat to Abortion Rights

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-19T03:42:16+00:00

Instagram blocks results for “natural immunity” hashtag

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-18T20:53:58+00:00

World Economic Forum tells U.S. colleges to 're-educate the racists among us'

“Fighting racism demands confrontation at all levels on college campuses by uprooting racist institutional designs inherent in campus-wide admissions systems, recruitment, scholarships, cultures, and histories,” researchers from KAIST-Korea Policy Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution wrote.

The World Economic Forum is an organization that advocates for cooperation among the world’s largest governments and corporations. It is also known for its “The Great Reset” series, a provocation to redesign the global economy following COVID-19 and the lockdown-induced global recession.

The article calls for using “data-driven methods” to measure racial “climates,” as well as “promoting anti-racist culture and policies” through projects such as Centers for Racial Justice.

Additionally, universities must “support affected minorities at various levels,” which — includes “educating people to eradicate their hate” through mandatory diversity training, according to the researchers.

Aiming to solve underrepresentation among faculty and the student body, the researchers also propose a “diversity barometer'' that can “track such progress and hold university leadership accountable” through periodical reviews.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-18T18:36:55+00:00

Wi Spa suspect still at large — has history of indecent exposure and masturbation

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-18T16:02:18+00:00

San Francisco mayor caught partying maskless with BLM co-founder at nightclub in violation of her own health order

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-18T00:44:38+00:00

Entire Eastern District Court of Missouri Recused From Lawsuit Alleging Massive Family Court Corruption

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-17T22:20:10+00:00

Anti-white bias in the classroom is real, and it's toxic

The Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state's largest teaching union, is providing its members with a seminar focused on the New York Times podcast, Nice White Parents, Todd Shepherd of Broad and Liberty reported. This podcast describes itself as a series dedicated to "building a better school system, and what gets in the way." And, as this advertisement shows, "what gets in the way" is merely a trope for "blame white people."

The seminar will happen through Zoom over three weekends between Oct. 4 and November. It is union-funded indoctrination at its worst. It is propaganda seeking to indoctrinate teachers across the state that, essentially, white parents are the root of all evil when it comes to education problems in our country. Teachers will then pass on this indoctrination to students.

"Nice White Parents is a halfway interesting, largely self-absorbed podcast that seeks to blame rich, white New York City liberals for lagging achievement in an urban school," Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Broad and Liberty.

"At a time when students are facing unprecedented learning loss and at the beginning of what’s certain to be another administratively and pedagogically fraught school year, the fact that Pennsylvania’s largest teachers union is conducting a lengthy seminar series on this New York Times podcast is worse than a bad joke," Eden said. "It shows that their priorities are on broadcasting culturally left bona fides rather than helping students recover and learn."

I understand that this is teachers union propaganda, designed mostly to shift blame from its own institution's role in destroying public education. It takes some gall to attack any parents, given that the teachers unions have put so much pressure on them and harmed their children so much by keeping schools closed. Yet the ugly racial aspect of this propaganda should not be overlooked, either.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-17T15:22:14+00:00

She Accused Her Ex-Girlfriend Of Sexual Misconduct After A Bad Breakup. The School Determined Their 2-Year Relationship Was ‘Nonconsensual.’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-17T14:38:36+00:00

James Beard Awards will now require chefs to show a social-justice commitment

For the first time, winning James Beard Awards, long known as the top honors in the restaurant and food media world, won’t just depend on someone’s skill with a whisk or with words.

The organization that doles out the prestigious annual awards has retooled its criteria and now will also base decisions on whether candidates have shown a “demonstrated commitment to racial and gender equity, community, environmental sustainability, and a culture where all can thrive.” The James Beard Foundation, which administers the awards, also announced a slate of other changes aimed at diversifying its judging committees — a move it ultimately hopes will lead to a more diverse group of winners — and screening for potentially problematic chefs taking the industry’s top honors.

The move comes as the foundation is positioning itself not just as the promoter of American cuisine, as it has for years, but of social-justice causes within the restaurant industry.

“Excellence in your craft, whether you’re a chef or a restaurateur or a writer, that’s still key,” Dawn Padmore, the vice president for awards, said in an interview. “It’s an awards program. But what else are we doing — all of us — to create a better industry and community? It’s aspirational for where we want to go.”

The changes were prompted in part by the controversy that surrounded its last awards cycle. In 2020, just before the traditional announcement of winners, the foundation announced it was scrapping the bulk of that year’s awards program and that it planned to return in 2022. Ostensibly, the reason was the pandemic that had shuttered many restaurants and inflicted pain across the industry, making some in the industry worry about the optics of self-celebration.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-17T02:19:58+00:00

Princeton freshmen taught professor who criticized black student group is part of 'systemic racism'

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-16T21:51:09+00:00

Biracial Student Was Allegedly Subjected To Taunts, Threats Of Failure By Teachers Because He Looks White

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-16T21:23:28+00:00

Inside ‘The Activist’ Meltdowns as the Entire Shitshow Spiraled Out of Control

It took just a few hours for CBS’s new reality competition The Activist to be globally panned. A Frankenstein mashup of a Hunger Games-style dystopian world mixed with hints of Survivor and The Apprentice, the show places six activists into teams and pairs them with a “high-profile public figure” to duke it out in challenges to promote their various causes. At the end of the five-episode series, they will have the chance to pitch their cause at the G20 Summit in Rome. Whoever secures the most funding wins the show.

Instead of world leaders or any sort of mission-driven experts being tapped to host the show, Usher, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianne Hough will serve as co-hosts and offer up advice to the contestants.

The Daily Beast reviewed the six contestants’ social media accounts—including TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram profiles—which were all created in August. One posted, “Help me win by commenting and liking my posts through the next few missions!” Another contestant thanked his followers for donating to his GoFundMe, which went towards covering the unpaid time off he took as an elementary teacher in order to compete on the show.

Needless to say, the announcement of a show that pits serious causes against one another and then relies on superficial social media metrics to determine which campaign is more successful—in the middle of global pandemic—did not go over well.

And by Wednesday night, Global Citizen and Live Nation, who are both producers of the program, announced the show would be restructured into a documentary special, completely removing the competition element.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-16T19:13:44+00:00

Virginia high school English teacher faces calls to be fired for claiming on video that telling kids to sit still is 'white supremacy': 'Sitting quiet and being told stuff is not a thing that's in many cultures'

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-16T16:46:54+00:00

Barnard tried to force Jewish students to violate religious laws for COVID monitoring

Barnard College told its observant Jewish students that they would have to violate their religious beliefs and use a mobile application on Shabbat and during the high holidays for COVID-19 monitoring.

Observant Jews are prohibited from using technology on the Sabbath and high holy days, which includes Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The latter starts tonight.

Cynthia Yang, the head of Barnard’s Pandemic Response Team, sent an email to students who identified themselves as a "Sabbath-observer" to Barnard Residential Life and Housing Department.

The email came in just hours before the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, on Monday.

“We recognize that how you have practiced religious traditions in the past may not align with the use of technology during the high holy days or the Sabbath, but this year it is paramount for the community’s health and safety (as well as your own) that you abide by the Barnard pledge and follow the College’s policies and procedures,” Yang wrote.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-16T16:38:27+00:00

American Airlines Turns Plane Around, Kicks Two-Year-Old Off Flight For Not Wearing Mask During Asthma Attack: "The only thing that COVID has done to society is to remove people of their compassion"

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-16T16:17:31+00:00

Med school to host ‘body terrorism on fat LGBTQ+ people’ seminar

What are future doctors learning about in med school? Well, at the University of Louisville they’re learning about “the oppressive history of the Body Mass Index (BMI) within the medical industrial complex.”

But wait, there’s more. Those who sign up for Thursday’s online seminar will also discuss “the impact of body terrorism on fat LGBTQ+ people.”

The event is titled “The Intersection of Fatphobia and LGBTQ+ Health.” It aims to identify “best practices to reduce the harm experienced by fat LGBTQ+ patients in healthcare settings,” according to organizers.

Continuing education academic credits will also be offered for doctors, nurses and those in the social work and psychology fields who attend, according to the LGBTQ+ Affirming Healthcare Series’ website.

The fatphobia event will be facilitated by “Goldie (they/them),” but no last name or bio is given on the website. Upcoming topics in this series also include “An In-Depth Look at Gender Affirming Hormone Care” in October and the “Impact of Racism on LGBTQ+ Health & Healthcare” in November.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-16T15:41:53+00:00

BBC chairman calls for crackdown on speech online

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-16T14:20:11+00:00

English opera fires White musicians to increase diversity

The English Touring Opera (ETO) has fired half of its musicians in order to increase the diversity in its ensemble, resulting in the dismissal of 14 White people between 40 and 66 years of age. They were all informed that they will not be offered any new contracts for the new season beginning in spring 2022.

“English Touring Opera is committed to increasing all kinds of diversity in its team, and while there have been appreciable, steady advances on stage in this area, we have prioritized increased diversity in the orchestra. This is in line with the firm guidance of the Arts Council, the principal funder of ETO’s touring work, and of most of the trust funds that support ETO,” Daily Mail quotes from the letter of Director James Conway to the musicians concerned.

The musicians are officially freelancers who can be fired season-to-season, but many have played for the ETO for 20 years.

The musicians’ union condemned the measure, stating it was “horrified” by the move. After the lockdowns, artists said they were hoping to get back to work next spring to pay off debts accumulated during the pandemic.

There are currently no non-white musicians in the orchestra, which is scheduled to resume concerts in the coming month. Those who had their contracts terminated

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-15T17:01:17+00:00

The Guardian Flatters Fauci As ‘Sexiest Man Alive’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-15T14:47:41+00:00

Where is the feminist outrage over Afghan migrant stabbing a German woman for ‘working’?

Any scenario in which a White Neo-Nazi or “incel” stabs a woman nearly to death merely for “working” would elicit outrage in Germany — and rightfully so.

After the attacks, extensive media coverage would undoubtedly follow, along with German politicians racing to be the first to offer their condemnation — again, rightfully so. Commentators would decry toxic masculinity, the danger of the White male patriarchy, and demand increased funding to fight right-wing terrorism and violence against women. Left-wing groups would also surely mobilize protests of their own.

Last week, an Afghan refugee stabbed a 58-year-old female gardener in the neck multiple times, then proceeded to stab an elderly man trying to intervene. The perpetrator told the police afterwards that he stabbed her because she was working, and that he did not approve of women working.

The attack has elicited little in terms media commentary in Germany, let alone outrage. From any point of view, the attack is abhorrent, but from the feminist perspective, it could not be a more clear case of misogyny: a woman attacked at random simply for doing her job.

Yet prominent German feminists, such as Margarete Stokowski and Sophie Passmann, are notably silent. They did not say a word in response to a woman being brutally stabbed simply for “working”, despite their usual habit of commenting on every triviality or microaggression on their Twitter accounts. The German media has been remarkably quiet as well, running short news blurbs such as Deutche Welle’s English-language headline: Berlin: Man attacks woman with knife for ‘working’. Even less content is provided in German-language pieces, such as the Focus headline, “Man stabs female gardener in the neck multiple times in a park – motive still unclear”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-15T14:10:20+00:00

NY Governor Kathy Hochul urges Facebook to censor “misinformation” in pro-life articles and memes

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-15T13:37:48+00:00

Retroactive cancelation: College apologizes for operetta it staged 11 years ago, deletes old photos of it

The president of Muhlenberg College on Monday publicly apologized for its 2010 production of the operetta “The Mikado” and deleted all photos of the performance from its website.

And although President Kathleen Harring’s Sept. 13 apology statement did not mention it by name, the theater department also apologized for its 2004 production of the musical “Annie Get Your Gun” in its footnote on “racial stereotypes and deleted photos.”

“While these shows were performed more than 10 years ago, it is important to acknowledge the impact that the use of racial stereotypes had — and continues to have — on members of the Muhlenberg community,” Harring stated.

“Specifically, we were made aware of a 2010 production of The Mikado at Muhlenberg Summer Music Theatre which featured examples of yellowface and a related photo gallery of the performance that was on our website. We removed the images and we provided a footnote explaining the reason for this action.”

Muhlenberg is a private college in Pennsylvania well known for its theater arts programs, but in the wake of George Floyd’s death, in June 2020, its Department of Theatre and Dance was accused of racism.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-14T21:21:42+00:00

Mel Gibson Says A ‘Sickness’ Is Affecting The Catholic Church, Slams Woke Bishops As ‘Hirelings’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-14T20:46:26+00:00

The Masking of the Servant Class: Ugly COVID Images From the Met Gala Are Now Commonplace

Last month, a delightful event was hosted by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for wealthy Democratic donors in Napa — the same wine region of choice for Gov. Newsom's notorious dinner party — at which the cheapest tickets were $100 each and a "chair” designation was available for $29,000. Video of the outdoor festivities showed an overwhelmingly white crowd of rich Democratic donors sitting maskless virtually on top of one another — not an iota of social distancing to be found — as Pelosi imparted her deep wisdom about public policy.

Pelosi's donor gala took place as millions face eviction, ongoing joblessness, and ever-emerging mandates of various types. It was also held just five days after the liberal county government of Los Angeles, in the name of Delta, imposed a countywide mask requirement for "major outdoor events.” In nearby San Francisco, where Pelosi's mansion is found, the liberal-run city government has maintained a more restrictive outdoor mask policy than the CDC: though masks were not required for outdoor exercising (such as jogging) or while consuming food, the city's rules for outdoor events required “that at any gathering where there are more than 300 people, masks are still required for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.” Though Pelosi's fundraising lunch fell below the 10,000-person threshold for LA County's outdoor mask mandate, it may have fallen within San Francisco's mask mandate. Either way, it appears arbitrary at best: how would The Science™ of COVID risk have drastically changed for those sitting with no distancing, at densely packed tables, if there had been a few more tables of Pelosi donors? The CDC's latest guidelines for outdoor events urge people to “consider wearing a mask…for activities with close contact with others who are not fully vaccinated.”

Trying to find a cogent scientific rationale for any of this is, by design, virtually impossible. The rules are sufficiently convoluted and often arbitrary that one can easily mount arguments to legally justify the Versailles-like conduct of one's favorite liberal political leaders. Beyond the legalities, everything one does can be simultaneously declared to be responsible or reckless, depending on the political needs of the moment. But what was most striking about Pelosi's donor event was not the possibility of legal infractions but rather the two-tiered system that was so viscerally and uncomfortably obvious.

Even though many of the wealthy white donors had no food in front of them and were not yet eating, there was not a mask in sight — except on the faces of the overwhelmingly non-white people hired as servants, all of whom had their gratuitous faces covered. Servants, apparently, are much more pleasant when they are dehumanized. There is no need for noses or mouths or other identifiable facial features for those who are converted into servile robots.

Similar scenes were visible at the even more opulent birthday bash which former President Barack Obama threw for himself to commemorate his 60 years on the planet. Held at his sprawling $12 million weekend estate on Martha's Vineyard, Obama and 400 of his closest maskless friends spent hours in indoor tents dancing, chatting in close circles, and yelling in each other's ears over the live music. While custom-made masks engraved with Obama's renowned humility were provided to the guests (“44×60”), only the servants were reported to have worn masks. Who can throw a Hawaiian luau-themed party at one of the country's wealthiest retreats in the middle of a pandemic and joblessness crisis while wearing disfiguring masks, however chic and carefully hand-crafted they might be?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-14T15:42:50+00:00

WASPs, Jews, and Elite Failure: Today’s clerisy puts pluralism at risk by failing to mitigate its banality.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-14T14:52:26+00:00

Belfast Stickers Defining “Woman” Declared “Transphobic”; Reported to Police

On September 3, 2021, the Belfast Telegraph reported that the Rainbow Project, an LGBT organization in Northern Ireland, had complained about “transphobic stickers” being placed in Belfast’s city centre and was planning to report this to the Police Service of Northern Ireland as “a targeted crime”.

The Rainbow Project also tweeted that razor blades were placed behind the stickers (this claim was excluded from the Belfast Telegraph article). Charges of razor blades behind stickers is an unsubstantiated accusation various activists make whenever reports of “transphobic stickers” emerge. No evidence of these allegations has ever surfaced.

Based on photos included in the article, the stickers included the dictionary definition of the word “woman” – adult human female – over a black background, the text “men’s sexual rights movement” placed over a blue, pink and white background (the colours and pattern of the original transgender flag), and the text “transwomen are men” over a red background.

Various local politicians condemned the reports of these stickers, with Lord Mayor Kate Nicholl tweeting they were “despicable”, People Before Profit leader Gerry Carrol saying it was “a scummy thing to do”, and Lisnasharragh councillor Seamas de Faoite stating they were “horrible”, and that everyone should be concerned “when small minded individuals seek to spread hate like this”.

Chief Inspector Rosie Thompson confirmed that police had received a report on September 3 by a member of the public that stickers “perceived to be offensive, had been placed on walls in the Waring Street area of Belfast”.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-13T23:25:02+00:00

3 Million Sample Size GWAS on Educational Attainment

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-13T22:18:16+00:00

It's Time to Acknowledge Anti-White Racism

Recently, Michael Tesler commented on “The Rise of White Identity Politics.” Tesler’s analysis draws on years of research into racialized politics, and he shows convincingly that there is a rise in white identity politics and that this rise is tied to “perceptions of anti-white discrimination.” However, when trying to explain why perceptions of anti-white bias might also be on the rise, his analysis falls flat. Supposedly, it has something to do with Republicans and Donald Trump.

Never once does the author speculate whether “perceptions” of such discrimination might be on the rise because anti-white racism is becoming increasingly common. In other words, perhaps white Americans are accurately perceiving a real phenomenon that is now pervasive in schools and the workplace.

[...]

A recent training program at Bank of America made the consequences of such commitments unmistakably clear. It instructed “white employees in particular” to “cede power to people of color.” There was no word that any member of Bank of America’s board of directors had offered to step down to make room for a replacement of color. Demands for self-denial are always made by persons who already hold seats of power and privilege (and who have no intention of giving them up). It is ever the less privileged employees who are expected to submit to degradation based on their race or sex.

Thus far, the discontent arising among marginalized employees is only being discussed in whispers. Anne Applebaum recently interviewed a couple of men who believe they were punished at work “because a white, male boss felt he had to publicly sacrifice another white man in order to protect his own position.” Yet Americans are reluctant to speak out about anti-white racism, lest they be accused of being anti-black.

Racism of any kind is never a single, defining act. It is death by a thousand cuts, and these cuts to white employees have become ubiquitous.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-13T21:23:34+00:00

A gay saint? L.G.B.T. groups are pushing for 9/11 hero Father Mychal Judge’s canonization

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-13T21:10:15+00:00

Woke Crescent: Like Obama, Biden bends the arc of the Left toward Islamism.

The Obama worldview is simple. The Muslim world is engaged in a multilateral civil war. Radically incompatible visions of Islamic faith, culture, and society are vying to define modern Islam. Because there’s no way to contain a convulsion involving more than a fifth of the globe, it’s incumbent upon all outsiders to find Islamic allies. That much is hard to dispute.

The problem comes in the allies that Western progressives have selected. Under progressive “intersectionality,” the authentic, and thus most worthy, voices of any non-Western group must be those that are angriest, most aggrieved, and most anti-Western; anything else represents a degrading sellout to centuries of imperial impositions. In today’s Islamic world, the voices that progressives deem authentic therefore belong to the Islamists—angry, intolerant, anti-liberal, anti-Western, antisemitic Muslim supremacists.

Islamist organizations vary widely on both strategy and tactics. The MB, now over 80 years old, is a tightly disciplined organization capable of taking a long view, pushing incremental advancement, and working through existing institutions. Most of the more spectacularly violent Sunni Islamist groups—including Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the PLO—trace their founding to impetuous Brothers who split with the MB because of their preference for action and notoriety.

Similarly, the Shiite Islamists running Iran have managed to temper their own revolutionary instincts enough to run a country and a movement simultaneously for more than 40 years—a feat requiring a certain amount of restraint, plausible deniability, and long-term thinking.

To woke progressives like those staffing the Obama and Biden administrations, these disciplined (though decidedly not moderate) Islamists are ideal Muslim allies. Biden’s abdication in Afghanistan arose because he decided that the Taliban had matured to the point that it too could demonstrate the sort of disciplined Islamism necessary to join the international community. His withdrawal did more than extricate the U.S. from a situation that had confounded Trump, Obama, and Bush—it signaled to Iran that the U.S. stood behind disciplined Islamists.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-13T20:25:55+00:00

Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt. A program known as XCheck has given millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users special treatment, a privilege many abuse

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-13T17:48:46+00:00

Environmentalism is a revolt against the people

To understand the green movement, really understand it, you could do worse than look at the photographs of today’s vast tailbacks on the M25. Here were thousands of ordinary people – workers, deliverymen, mums and dads, holidaymakers – delayed for hours by the self-righteousness of middle-class greens. Activists from a group called Insulate Britain – which, almost comically, agitates for the insulation of British homes – blocked various junctions on the M25, causing distress to people who had places to be. It was eco-elitism distilled: the sanctimonious zealots of the green religion disrupting the lives of the plebs to make some daft point.

The first notable thing about today’s act of public nuisance masquerading as a protest was the hilarity of the campaign group itself. Remember when radicals fought for higher wages or better working conditions or for a revolution to replace capitalism with something else? Not anymore. Today’s self-styled militants demand the insulation of houses. ‘What do we want? The creation of a thermal envelope in people’s homes! When do we want it? Now!’ What a crock to go to the barricades for. Also notable is the irony of supposed planet-lovers causing so much pollution by forcing hundreds of cars and trucks to sit still for ages, chugging fumes into the air for nought. Well played, greenies.

But the most striking thing about these kinds of protests is their sheer arrogance. Their inherently anti-democratic, anti-masses nature, where the aim is always, but always, to inconvenience the little people and teach us a lesson. You’re on your way to Heathrow for a much-needed jaunt to Malaga to escape the stresses of work? Not anymore, you’re not – the eco-elitists blocked junction 14, which leads to one of Heathrow’s terminals. You’re a knackered trucker who’s been driving all night long and now wants to get back to his family? Tough shit. These plummy alarmists have decided to make you the collateral damage of one of their narcissistic stunts.

It often seems as though environmentalism is the mask class hatred wears in the 21st century. Climate-change alarmists really seem to have it in for ordinary working people. Consider Insulate Britain’s parent group, the posh death cult that is Extinction Rebellion, whose Wicker Man-style prancing about on the streets of London seems expressly designed to disrupt the lives of people with jobs. Remember when XR twits mounted a tube train at Canning Town, only to be dragged down by angry working-class people who, funnily enough, don’t like being pontificated to by middle-class misanthropes at 8 in the morning. XR has also inconvenienced the working men of Smithfield Market, to make a point about the meat industry or something.

It’s always been this way. One of the most media-flattered green groups of the 2000s was Plane Stupid, a bunch of borderline aristocratic greens who were forever moaning about ‘cheap flights’. They openly demanded an end to the ‘binge-flying’ of the kind of people who attend stag nights in ‘Eastern European destinations chosen not for their architecture or culture but because people can fly there for 99p and get loaded for a tenner’. One of Plane Stupid’s leading agitators is now high up in Extinction Rebellion: Tamsin Omond. She’s the granddaughter of a baronet. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-13T16:55:50+00:00

German man raided by police after calling politician a “dick” on Twitter

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-13T16:32:52+00:00

UMich anti-racist hiring initiative to 'decolonize educational material'

The University of Michigan Department of Health Management and Policy is hiring for tenure-track research positions on “Anti-Racist Policy Analysis."

This new set of five hires will be distributed among the Department of Health Management and Policy, College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan Medical School, and School of Nursing, and School of Information.

Research will focus on “[r]acial bias and unintended racist consequences in health, health care, and the data and technologies that enable healthcare."

This research is part of a larger “five-year strategic objective to create an anti-racist curriculum and decolonize educational material, with the goal of developing anti-racist graduates.”

The cluster will also create an equity pedagogy to integrate “anti-racist and social justice methods will be integrated into all degree programs and professional development programs for faculty.”

Cost disease in action.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-13T15:14:52+00:00

Villagers campaigning against gay sex parties at their 18th century former local pub are accused of 'hate crimes' against transgender owner

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-13T06:49:57+00:00

Trans Activist Allegedly Tries to Burn Lesbians at French Pride March

The footage, posted by radical feminist group Résistance Lesbienne, describes the incident as a "trans-identified male" from extremist group Antifa trying to burn the lesbians holding a pride march in the port city of Bordeaux.

The video shows a procession of women marching with signs opposing recent pushes to demand lesbians open up their sexual preferences to include trans-identified males, one reading "lesbians don't have penises."

The women are suddenly approached by a small group of individuals described to be trans actvists. They are holding a sign which reads "ANTI TERF" in red, with one of the activists holding a lit flare he is swinging towards the lesbian demonstrators.

At one point, the activist with the burning flare appears to charge at some of the women near the individual filming, leading to a scuffle and causing some of the women to rush away.

This is not the first incident of trans activists targetting lesbian demonstrations in France, with Résistance Lesbienne and other French feminist groups documenting multiple incidents in just the last few months.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-12T17:06:50+00:00

How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science: Imperatives like skepticism and disinterestedness are being junked to fuel political warfare that has nothing in common with scientific methodology

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-12T01:15:28+00:00

'Black national anthem' makes its debut at the NFL

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-11T17:24:12+00:00

Lowell got rid of competitive admissions. New data shows how that's impacted the school's diversity

Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a critic of the new admissions policy, noted that before the change Lowell’s student body was 82% non-white.

The board’s problem is not underrepresentation, it is “a perceived over-representation of a community of color the Board disfavors — Asian Americans,” she wrote in a 14-page letter to the board after its decision in March.

Other opponents of the move, who filed a lawsuit over it in April, said the board’s February vote violated the state’s open meetings law by fast-tracking the issue and failing to gain proper public input.

They also argued that instead of ensuring that all students were qualified to attend and welcome at Lowell, they took away a point of pride in the city, one of the top-performing public schools in the country, which has perennially churned out prominent figures in politics, entertainment, literature and science.

“They failed the underrepresented students,” said attorney Christine Linnenbach, who represents the opponents, adding that the district has created a “false narrative that merit-based education cannot be equitable education.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-11T16:59:13+00:00

Time’s Up Dissolves Advisory Board To ‘Shield’ A-Listers Like Reese Witherspoon And Natalie Portman, From ‘Unfair Scrutiny’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-11T15:43:36+00:00

They took it: UTSA abolishes 'Come and Take It' football chant

The University of Texas at San Antonio is no longer using “Come and Take It” as a football chant.

In August, university President Taylor Eighmy expressed concern that “Come and Take It” is inseparably linked to political debates, including those over gun rights.

The chant is emblazoned on a flag waved at UTSA's football games and also used as a rallying cry during the fourth quarter.

The phrase has roots in the Battle of the Alamo, which occurred in San Antonio and preceded the formation of the Republic of Texas.

Eighmy created “task force” to explore the school’s continued usage of the “Come and Take It” imagery and on Tuesday told the university community that UTSA would cease endorsing the phrase.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-11T02:32:03+00:00

American Express engages in 'reverse discrimination' against White people, current and former employees say

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-10T22:02:16+00:00

Don’t Be Evil: A Google employee program claims that America is a “system of white supremacy” and that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”

I have obtained a trove of whistleblower documents from inside Google that reveal the company’s extensive racial-reeducation program, based on the core tenets of critical race theory—including “intersectionality,” “white privilege,” and “systemic racism.” In a foundational training module called “Allyship in Action,” Google’s head of systemic allyship Randy Reyes and a team of consultants from The Ladipo Group train employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, and then rank themselves on a hierarchy of “power [and] privilege.” The trainers then instruct the employees to “manage [their] reactions to privilege”—which are likely to include feelings of “embarrassment, shame, fear, [and] anger”—through “body movement,” “deep breathing,” “accessing [their] ‘happy place,’” and “cry[ing].”

The program presents a series of video conversations promoting the idea that the United States was founded on white supremacy. In one video, Google’s former global lead for diversity strategy, Kamau Bobb—who was later reassigned to a non-diversity-related role at the company after being exposed for writing that Jews have “an insatiable appetite for war and killing”—discussed America’s founding with 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones. Jones claimed that “the first Africans being sold on the White Lion [slave ship in 1619] is more foundational to the American story” than “the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock.” She claimed that she led the New York Times’s 1619 Project—a revisionist historical account of the American founding—to verify her “lifelong theory” that everything in the modern-day United States can be traced back to slavery. “If you name anything in America, I can relate it back to slavery,” Jones said in the video. At the end of the conversation, Jones concluded that all white Americans benefit from the system of white supremacy. “If you’re white in this country, then you have to understand that whether you personally are racist or not, whether you personally engage in racist behavior or not, you are the beneficiary of a 350-year system of white supremacy and racial hierarchy,” she said.

Next, Sherice Torres, Google’s then-global inclusion director (now a vice president of marketing at Facebook Financial), hosted a video discussion with Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi about racism in American life. Kendi argues that all Americans, including children as young as three months old, are fundamentally racist. “To be raised in the United States, is to be raised to be racist, and to be raised to be racist is to be raised to almost be addicted to racist ideas,” he said. “The youngest of people are not colorblind—between three and six months, our toddlers are beginning to understand race and see race.” The solution, Kendi claimed, is for all Americans to admit their complicity in racism and “respond in the same way that they respond when they are diagnosed with a serious illness.” Denying one’s complicity in racism, Kendi argued, is only further proof of a person’s racism. “For me, the heartbeat of racism is denial and the sound of that denial is ‘I’m not racist,’” he says. Ultimately, Kendi argued that policymakers should deem any racial disparities the result of racist policies—and work to undo the deep-seated racism that permeates every institution in our society. “Certainly, it’s a critically important step for Americans to no longer be in denial about their own racism or the racism of this country,” he said.

Finally, employees at Google created an internal document called “Anti-racism resources,” which contains reading lists, graphics, and racial-consciousness exercises. The document contains a disclaimer that it was “not legally reviewed” and, therefore, not to be considered official company policy—but it was created by Google diversity, equity, and inclusion lead Beth Foster, hosted on Google’s internal-resources server, and made available across the company. One graphic in the document claims that “colorblindness,” “[American] exceptionalism,” “Columbus Day,” “weaponized whiteness,” and “Make America Great Again” are all expressions of “covert white supremacy.” Another graphic, titled “The White Supremacy Pyramid,” advances the idea that conservative commentator Ben Shapiro represents a foundation of “white supremacy” and that Donald Trump is moving society on a path toward “mass murder” and “genocide.”

When reached for comment, Shapiro blasted Google’s depiction. “All it would take is one Google search to learn just how much white supremacists hate my work, or how often I’ve spoken out against their benighted philosophy,” Shapiro said. “The attempt to link everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton to white supremacism is disgusting, untrue, and malicious.” Google declined to comment on this story before publication.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-10T21:25:49+00:00

School Board Member Whose Father Led 9/11 Hijackers’ Mosque Opposes Resolution Honoring Victims

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-10T18:52:38+00:00

How the Guardian became the Pravda of the trans movement

Butler’s central thesis can be boiled down to the idea that no one can escape power structures, and that the best we can hope for is to subvert (or ‘queer’) our allotted gender roles. Under their burqas, women in Afghanistan can rest assured that all they need to do is to ‘queer’ their gendered performance. In the lengthy interview, Butler complains of an ‘anti-gender ideology movement, a global movement, insist[ing] that sex is biological and real’, as if two billion years of evolutionary fact is just a crackpot theory.

Butlerian theories have been fed to generations of gender-studies students. The ideas are laughable, but their social impact has been significant. Ever wondered where the fad for drag performances and the plethora of new genders have come from? Blame Butler.

The interview with Butler was conducted before the news broke that the ‘trans woman’ who was accused of flashing women and children at Wi Spa had been charged with indecent exposure. Previous Guardian articles had implied, as Gleeson’s question had done, that the whole incident was a hoax dreamt up by right-wingers. It later transpired that the accused, Darren Merager, is a registered sex offender with an extensive criminal history.

Merager’s crimes, and the inconvenient existence of his victims, put the Guardian in a tight spot. In its coverage of the Wi Spa incident, Guardian reporters cast doubt on the initial complainant’s claims. They also tried to draw links between the feminists protesting over women’s spaces with the far right and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Instead of issuing an apology for its misleading articles, the Guardian chose to amend just one article: the Judith Butler interview. It erased Gleeson’s question on the Wi Spa incident and Butler’s response. Now, at the end of the updated article, the Guardian notes: ‘This article was edited on 7 September 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place.’

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-10T16:04:58+00:00

Writer Christopher Rufo was unverified on Twitter after exposing controversial Google employee trainings

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-10T15:04:01+00:00

Shot: Canadian schools burn and destroy books to appease indigenous population

French-speaking schools in the Canadian province of Ontario removed almost 5,000 books and burned some of them in a “flame purification ceremony” to appease the local indigenous population, Radio Canada and the National Post reported.

A video prepared for students of some of the 30 schools on the subject said, “We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security.”

Lyne Cosette, a spokeswoman for the publicly funded francophone Catholic schools of Ontario, told the National Post newspaper, “Symbolically, some books were used as fertilizer,” as well.

On the one hand, she expressed “regret” that the board overseeing the schools did not “ensure a more appropriate plan for the commemorative ceremony and that it was offensive to some members of the community.”

On the other hand, she maintains that the removal of 4,700 books and counting over their subject matter is just fine.

Chaser: School board says it got burned in Indigenous book burning project

After torching 30 books they felt were offensive toward Canada’s Indigenous peoples, and delisting 4,700 others, Ontario’s Conseil scolaire catholique Providence has acknowledged they were not aware the Aboriginal credentials a person they partnered with on the project are in question.

“We are deeply troubled and concerned,” board spokesperson Lyne Cossette told the Toronto Sun on Thursday.

The person whose verification is under scrutiny is Barrie-area resident Suzy Kies, an outspoken First Nations advocate who has appeared on stage and in photographs with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

She has now resigned from her Indigenous leadership role within the Liberal Party.

In a statement to CBC’s Radio-Canada, Kies said, “I refuse to have my story used to harm Justin Trudeau and our party” and “this is the reason why I am resigning from my position as co-chair of the Indigenous peoples’ commission.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-09T23:18:55+00:00

Virginia's woke 2021 time capsule: Box filled with BLM stickers, Pride badges, COVID vaccine vial and photos from protests will replace 1887 artifacts buried in pedestal of Richmond's toppled Robert E. Lee statue

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-09T23:02:33+00:00

Live Like the Amish?

America’s traditional Mainline Protestant denominations are bleeding out so quickly they will likely be gone within 20 years. That is not my prediction, but their own. The ELCA (the main Lutheran branch) projects they’ll only have 16,000 worshippers by 2041; the PCUSA (the main Presbyterian branch) lost almost 40% of their members in the last decade, causing one analyst to note, “At its current rate of shrinkage the PC(USA) will not exist in about 20 years;” and data for the Episcopal Church shows the same 20-year timeline until the denomination runs out of people in the pews.

More conservative denominations used to chuckle at these headlines and say, “If only they preached the Gospel instead of liberal activism, they’d be growing like us.” But they don’t say that anymore. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest of the Evangelical churches, has lost 14% of their members since 2006; the Methodists are losing members while in the middle of a brutal split; and for Catholics, according to Bishop Robert Barron while speaking at the 2019 bishops’ annual conference, “Half the kids that we baptized and confirmed in the last 30 years are now ex-Catholics or unaffiliated.”

There is one major exception, though: the Amish—a mustard seed that is growing into a large tree in front of our eyes. The Amish arrived in the United States shortly after their founder, Jakob Ammann, split with the Mennonites in 1693 for being too lax on enforcing their communal rules, as laid out in the Dordrecht Confession of Faith. For the next 200 years, the Amish were just a few eccentric families in Pennsylvania that spoke an archaic Swiss German. By 1920, these few families had grown to 5,000 people and since then have doubled about every 15 to 20 years, including between 2000 and 2020 when they doubled to 351,000.

Unless something changes drastically within their culture, this doubling is projected to continue. One demographer, Lyman Stone, showed that at their current rate of growth, they will easily make up a majority of the United States in 200 years. This means the current moment may mark the halfway point between them arriving as a small band of friends and their inheriting the most powerful nation on the planet. They may seem like a backwards remnant of the past, but in reality, they will almost certainly play a major role in the future. This will become more evident after they soon dwarf more well-known churches like the Episcopalians and Lutherans.

So, when virtually all other Christian groups are seeing plummeting, or at best stagnant, numbers, why are the Amish seeing growth like this? The answers people typically give are that they have a very high birth rate and an over 90% retention rate. But that’s like saying someone is wealthy because they made a lot of money and then saved most of it. It begs the question—how? How do they have such large families—with 6 or 7 children per woman—while the country at large has a below-replacement rate of 1.6 children? And how are they able to keep all those children within their communities?

Note: The author is incorrect about Pennsylfaanisch Deitsch having Swiss origins, it's a descendant of Pfälzischdeutsch. ‘Tis a fine article, but sure it is no pool, Englisch.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-09T21:58:43+00:00

Exclusive: Silicon Valley investor dismissed racism, called BLM "the true racists"

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-09T20:39:30+00:00

The Wi Spa scandal is worse than we thought

There should be a lot of soul-searching in broadsheet newsrooms right now. For the way journalism’s self-styled warriors for decency initially responded to the Wi Spa incident was genuinely disturbing. They essentially tried to rubbish the viral-video woman’s claims. The incident could have been ‘faked’, said a headline in the Independent. It reported that LGBT activists believe ‘the video may be a hoax’. The word ‘hoax’ was on the lips of many a woke observer. ‘The Wi Spa video may have been a hoax’, said Slate, but it ‘inspired real anti-trans violence’. So the woman complaining of indecent exposure was essentially a liar and the real victims were trans people? Nice. ‘[T]here was likely no trans woman there to begin with’, said Slate; rather, this was a ‘hoax’ used as a ‘pretext’ for ‘outbursts from the far right’. Slate has now quietly added a note to its piece pointing out that a ‘serial sex offender’ has been charged with indecent exposure at Wi Spa.

The Guardian took a lead in casting doubts on the claims of indecent exposure. The headline of its feature article was ‘A nightmare scenario’ – though, remarkably, that was a reference not to the alleged sexual offence committed against women who just wanted to use a spa but rather to the subsequent online pushback against the trans ideology. The Guardian said it was ‘unclear whether a trans woman was actually present’. It said a spa employee claimed ‘there were no trans patrons with appointments that day’. So maybe, the Guardian’s intrepid reporters wrote, ‘the incident was staged’. There have been ‘no other witnesses’, they said, just Cubana Angela. We now know that isn’t true.

The worst element of the Guardian’s shoddy, partisan reportage was its nudge-nudge comments about Cubana Angel. Can this woman really be trusted, the Guardian essentially asked? After all, she’s a Christian. ‘Her social-media page frequently features Bible quotes’, we were told. The horror. She has also expressed opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. And? So what? Committed black Christians can be victims of sexual offences too, you know. The Guardian skirted perilously closely to saying Cubana Angel was not a reliable or convincing victim, like those sexist judges of old who would wonder out loud if women of ‘questionable’ morals could really be trusted on matters of sexual offence. What happened to ‘Believe Women’, the rallying cry of the #MeToo movement? It seems such belief is fully suspended when the woman is a Christian and the person she’s making accusations against is a man who allegedly identifies as trans.

And so we end up in the truly bizarre situation where the Guardian and others respond to an accusation of indecent exposure by crying ‘hoax’. Where so-called liberals took the side of a white man who allegedly showed his semi-erect penis to women and a girl over a black woman who raised the alarm about this alleged sexual offence. Where commentators like Owen Jones could denounce the ‘campaign of lies’ over Wi Spa before he knew the facts, and Laurie Penny could say to a mother worried that her daughter might see a naked man in a female changing area that her daughter should not ‘stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude’. Yeh, that’s the problem here – not blokes flashing their penises but rude girls looking at them. Victim-blaming on steroids.

This affair has exposed the confusions, dishonesty and moral contortionism of identity politics and of the transgender ideology in particular. It confirms that feminists are right to worry that some born males will seek to exploit self-ID loopholes to do harm to women and girls. And it confirms that the woke set’s devotion to the trans cause is now so singular, so unthinking, that their instant response to an allegation of a seeming trans person victimising women is to call the women liars and to accuse them of assisting the far right. What a low approach to matters of women’s safety and rights. As I say, we must wait to find out the full truth about what happened in Wi Spa. But one thing we know for certain already is that sections of the liberal media have abandoned truth-seeking for virtue-signalling, and that adherents to the cult of genderfluidity have become so dogmatic that they will respond with unforgiving intolerance to any incident or claim that challenges their holy narrative. Anyone who thinks any of this is ‘progressive’ is living in cloud cuckoo land.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-09T18:20:13+00:00

US Constitution gets a trigger warning on the National Archives website

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-09T17:40:04+00:00

Maiming a generation: The medicalisation of gender non-conforming young people is the biggest medical scandal of our time

We’re in the middle of another medical disaster that rivals — some would say dwarfs — the Thalidomide affair. But unlike previous scandals, the medicalisation of gender non-conforming (GNC) young people has continued for years after clinicians first raised concerns. Disturbingly, these whistleblowers have been maligned by the pro-transition lobby and, worse, by fellow clinicians for speaking up.

One of those was Sonia Appleby, children’s safeguarding lead for the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust which runs the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the UK’s only gender clinic for under-16s. Sonia was approached by several members of staff in 2016 and 2017 who expressed alarm that many young people waiting for assessment by GIDS were being provided with puberty-blocking drugs by a private GP.

Appleby raised numerous concerns in private; these ranged from the rogue GP to the lack of adequate record keeping at GIDS, to overworked staff and other serious safeguarding issues. Nor was hers a lone voice: in February 2019 GIDS governor Marcus Evans resigned, warning that the service had an “overvalued belief in [its own expertise] which is used to dismiss challenge and examination”.

A couple of months later five further clinicians resigned, saying they felt treatment amounted to “conversion therapy” for young lesbian and gay people. They told of homophobic parents bringing in their GNC children to “correct” their aberrant behaviour. “There was dark joke among staff that there would be no gay people left,” two of them told The Times. These concerns were reported by Newsnight last year:

There have been many times when the push to transition has come from families who are uncomfortable with the sexual orientation of their child [Newsnight reported]…some parents express real relief that their child is not gay or lesbian, suggesting being trans is a better outcome for their child.

More whistleblowers told their stories to the distinguished psychiatrist David Bell, who in 2018 wrote a report that wasn’t just ignored by GIDS: for unspecified legal reasons, the trust’s chief executive and chairman of the board both forbade him to send it to the council of governors; he was also told not to write or talk in public about anything “not directly connected to his NHS employment”.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-09T14:57:36+00:00

Google Is Teaching Employees That Listening To Ben Shapiro Leads To ‘Genocide’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-09T13:45:36+00:00

Merit system is unjust because it rewards productive individuals, professors argue

Professors from the University of Arizona and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs are arguing that "success and merit" are "barriers" to the equity agenda.

“Admitting that the normative definitions of success and merit are in and of themselves barriers to achieving the goals of justice, diversity, equity and inclusion is necessary but not sufficient to create change,” professors Beth Mitchneck and Jessi L. Smith recently wrote for Inside Higher Education.

Mitchneck and Smith attributed those definitions to a "narrow definition of merit limited to a neoliberal view of the university." Specifically, they express concern that universities receive funding and recognition based on the individual performances of professors’ own work such as peer reviewed journals and studies.

Campus Reform reached out to Smith, asking what should be done to alter the merit system. Smith did not provide any alternatives.

The professors are not the only scholars in academia to critique the merit system. Last month, University of Illinois professor Eunmi Mun said that merit-based pay does not take "nonperformance-related factors" into account.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-08T23:41:23+00:00

USDA announces racial preferences in new 'climate smart agriculture' funding

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-08T22:58:31+00:00

America’s Intersectional Caste System

The demonization of white people is linked, paradoxically, to the notion of their inherent white privilege, a concept derived from theoretical suppositions sheltered assiduously from data. Across the United States, white people, all 200 million of them, have been reduced to a uniform blob. Progressives enjoy talking about lived experiences, but they ignore the lived experiences of white people. After all, the lived experiences of a white Wall Street executive are very different from those of a white farm laborer in Montana. It is true that the very top of the American economic elite is disproportionately white, yet it is just as true that farmers commit suicide at three times the national rate, and  95 percent of American farmers are white. Within our intersectional caste system, though, facts, no matter how stark they may be, cannot compete with fallacious, emotionally-charged narratives.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, many minority groups earn considerably more than whites, from Pakistani Americans to Lebanese Americans, South African Americans to Sri Lankan Americans. Of all the ethnic groups, Indians are the highest earners. This should be celebrated: the United States, as promised, is a country where hardworking, diligent individuals, no matter their skin color or ethnicity, are rewarded for their efforts. So why do continue to hear that America is shot through with white supremacism?

Though Eric Weinstein’s concept of the gated institutional narrative (GIN) wasn’t necessarily designed to explain prejudice towards whites, it’s the perfect tool to explain this phenomenon. The GIN explains the ways in which heavily filtered information is presented to the public by the mainstream media and academics. The New York Times’ 1619 project, for example, which has been heavily criticized by respected historians, paints the United States as inherently racist. This narrative, either implicitly or explicitly, labels all whites oppressors, the beneficiaries of a despotic system, and is widely accepted across all elite sectors of society.

The GIN is like an exclusive nightclub. Only the right kind of people can enter. Heterodox thinkers and heterodox ideas are frowned upon. A very specific “dress code” is required, and very specific narratives must be adhered to. An increasing number of universities also subscribe to the GIN. Take Yale University, for example, where a lecturer recently shared her fantasies about murdering white people with students. 

Sadly, this type of racism has worked its way into government legislation. As the New York Post reported in March, President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act explicitly discriminated against whites. Black farmers were offered debt relief. White farmers, meanwhile, were not. Another provision, according to the Post, “offered billions in aid to minority-owned and women-owned restaurants, but told struggling restaurant owners who happened to be white men that they had to go to the back of the line.” The infrastructure bill currently before Congress is full of anti-white racism. 

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-08T21:43:41+00:00

Parents sue California over mandated ‘chants to Aztec gods’ in ethnic studies classes

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-08T19:19:40+00:00

[Peter Boghossian] My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit: The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced.

So, in 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” This example of pseudo-scholarship, which was published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued that penises were products of the human mind and responsible for climate change. Immediately thereafter, I revealed the article as a hoax designed to shed light on the flaws of the peer-review and academic publishing systems.

Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.

I continued to believe, perhaps naively, that if I exposed the flawed thinking on which Portland State’s new values were based, I could shake the university from its madness. In 2018 I co-published a series of absurd or morally repugnant peer-reviewed articles in journals that focused on issues of race and gender. In one of them we argued that there was an epidemic of dog rape at dog parks and proposed that we leash men the way we leash dogs. Our purpose was to show that certain kinds of “scholarship” are based not on finding truth but on advancing social grievances. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous.

Administrators and faculty were so angered by the papers that they published an anonymous piece in the student paper and Portland State filed formal charges against me. Their accusation? “Research misconduct” based on the absurd premise that the journal editors who accepted our intentionally deranged articles were “human subjects.” I was found guilty of not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects.

Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-08T18:24:45+00:00

Poetry mag Barren drops editor over tweet

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-08T16:46:36+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] Why Resist Blank Slate Thinking? For One, Look to No Child Left Behind: one of the worst and most consequential education laws in American history could only have sprung from a blank slate mindset

NCLB was, notoriously, a massive disaster. It was so obviously a disaster, in fact, that when the endless war between Barack Obama and the Republican Congress was at its height, the two sides still came together to get rid of the law. What made NCLB such a profound failure? Well, for one thing, the collision of Common Core and NCLB created onerous testing requirements that drove parents to rebel and passed down huge costs to states, resulting in the opt-out movement that has become woven into today’s social justice movement. More relevant here, NCLB essentially mandated perpetual improvement in student scores and in effect demanded 100% compliance with state standards. Schools that failed to meet these requirements faced harsh sanctions. This resulted in both states and the feds devising workarounds for what was the law of the land - states set standards that were so low it strained the very definition of a standard, and the Obama Department of Education issued exemptions by the bushel. It turns out that you can do a lot of talking tough about how you’re going to insist on excellence, but that doesn’t change the fact that excellence can never be mandated, particularly when dealing with the crooked timber of humanity. And while NCLB is gone, its replacement (the Every Student Succeeds Act) still enshrines unmeetable goals for our education system, just largely toothless ones. Meanwhile, states, schools, and teachers continue to shoulder the burden of the “no excuses” rhetoric that led to No Child Left Behind.

I really must underline this point. A little back-of-the-envelope math suggests that more than 100,000 public school teachers in this country operate under merit pay systems. Those teachers are seeing their wages fluctuate based on the outcomes of their students. Thousands of teachers in this country have been fired (or had their contracts not renewed) on the basis of poor academic performance in their classrooms, and hundreds of schools nationwide have been closed based on test scores and other quantitative educational metrics. But this whole edifice depends on the notion that student outcomes are more or less under the control of schools and teachers. If, on the other hand, we pay attention to decades of research, the experience of many teachers, and common sense, we would rather assume that different people have different levels of intrinsic underlying academic ability, and that this inequality prompts the remarkable stability of relative academic performance over time. And if we thought that way, we would have never passed NCLB in the first place. A truly ruinous law, passed with great fanfare by liberals and conservatives working together, would have been avoided had we taken genetic influence on cognition seriously. How could you say that this scenario doesn’t have policy relevance, Dr. Quiggin?

“No excuses” thinking was always based on blank slatism. The entire school reform movement was predicated on the assumption that talk of inherent ability was just excuse making, lazy teachers and corrupt unions trying to shirk their professional responsibilities. That movement, though wounded in the present moment, has had immense political and policy consequences. Meanwhile, speaking as someone who reads a lot of education research, the topic of student ability sort of flits around the field, not expressly forbidden but rigorously avoided. In study after study, including ones that expressly seek to understand parental influence, the question of any given student’s inherent tendency to struggle or excel is studiously avoided. Similarly, wonks of all types who work at nonprofits and in media conspicuously avoid discussing whether everyone has the same academic potential. When inherent ability is referenced at all in the literature it tends to be a vague handwave that does not factor into the final analysis. But if what we’re interested in is how people learn and why some succeed and some fail, this is totally nuts!

[...]

Again, I’m left with the same basic point: it is not remotely scientifically contentious to say that literally all elements of our physiological selves are influenced by our genome. If that’s true, how could it possibly be the case that there is no influence of our genes on our behavior or cognition, which arise from the physical bodies that we all acknowledged are built by DNA? That notion is so obviously untrue that almost no one is willing to come out and state it directly. But since denialists also don’t want to acknowledge that it’s unthinkable that our genomes could mean everything to our bodies but nothing to our behavior, they partake in the previously-mentioned lawyering as a means of avoidance. I have already read several reactions to Dr. Harden’s book that fixate on minute details, the typical methodological criticisms of kinship studies and GWAS, without once engaging with the question of whether it’s even remotely conceivable that bodies that are built with DNA can house minds that are completely uninfluenced by that DNA. But that’s the fundamental question, the essence of this whole debate. If given perfectly matched environments, will two people with different genomes have the exact same outcomes? And how could such a condition square with 150+ years of research suggesting that genes change everything?

Also, to return to Quiggin’s tweet, we are already changing the gene pool. Assortative mating, which has massively increased in recent decades, is among other things an effort in genetic engineering. Mate selection among humans is a very complicated thing, but there’s no doubt that we are in part selecting for reproductive fitness, broadly defined. If someone decides that they want to partner up with someone else because that person will help provide financial stability - a very common concern in marriage and a perfectly legitimate one - that person is, to some degree, selecting based on genes. Physical attraction is also, among other things, related to our perceptions of the desirability of the genes that potential partner might pass on to our children. But of course it is; we are the products of evolution, and evolution forces us to want to produce offspring who are more likely to produce lots of offspring. Those professional class liberals who are delaying marriage and kids until later and later in life are practicing excruciatingly exacting mate selection, looking for just the right person to make some babies with. That is genetic engineering; the fact that it’s the polite kind does not change the fact that, if such trends continue, on a long enough timescale we will have a rigidly stratified species based on genetic parentage. I do not need to share the extremely durable research showing that more highly-educated parents have more highly-educated children, which has serious consequences even if you suppose that influence is entirely environmental. If it’s even partially genetic, the consequences are civilization-altering. But how can we think through that condition if we must pretend genes and behavior are totally disconnected?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-08T16:31:29+00:00

Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts ‘Primates’ Label on Video of Black Men

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-08T14:06:51+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics: In a New York Times op-ed this week, the group completely reversed its views, arguing vaccine mandates help civil liberties and bodily autonomy "is not absolute."

If you were surprised to see the ACLU heralding the civil liberties imperatives of "vaccine mandates” and "vaccine requirements” — whereby the government coerces adults to inject medicine into their own bodies that they do not want — the New York Times op-ed which the group promoted, written by two of its senior lawyers, was even more extreme. The article begins with this rhetorical question: “Do vaccine mandates violate civil liberties?” Noting that "some who have refused vaccination claim as much,” the ACLU lawyers say: “we disagree.” The op-ed then examines various civil liberties objections to mandates and state coercion — little things like, you know, bodily autonomy and freedom to choose — and the ACLU officials then invoke one authoritarian cliche after the next (“these rights are not absolute") to sweep aside such civil liberties concerns:

[W]hen it comes to Covid-19, all considerations point in the same direction. . . . In fact, far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties. . . . .

[Many claim that] vaccines are a justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity. That may sound ominous, because we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others. . . . While vaccine mandates are not always permissible, they rarely run afoul of civil liberties when they involve highly infectious and devastating diseases like Covid-19. . . .

While limited exceptions are necessary, most people can be required to be vaccinated. . . . . Where a vaccine is not medically contraindicated, however, avoiding a deadly threat to the public health typically outweighs personal autonomy and individual freedom.

The op-ed sounds like it was written by an NSA official justifying the need for mass surveillance (yes, fine, your privacy is important but it is not absolute; your privacy rights are outweighed by public safety; we are spying on you for your own good). And the op-ed appropriately ends with this perfect Orwellian flourish: “We care deeply about civil liberties and civil rights for all — which is precisely why we support vaccine mandates.”

What makes the ACLU's position so remarkable — besides the inherent shock of a civil liberties organization championing state mandates overriding individual choice — is that, very recently, the same group warned of the grave dangers of the very mindset it is now pushing. In 2008, the ACLU published a comprehensive report on pandemics which had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics.

The title of the ACLU report, resurfaced by David Shane, reveals its primary point: "Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health – Not a Law Enforcement/National Security – Approach.” To read this report is to feel that one is reading the anti-ACLU — or at least the actual ACLU prior to its Trump-era transformation. From start to finish, it reads as a warning of the perils of precisely the mindset which today's ACLU is now advocating for COVID.

In 2008, the group explained its purpose this way: “the following report examines the relationship between civil liberties and public health in contemporary U.S. pandemic planning and makes a series of recommendations for developing a more effective, civil liberties-friendly approach.” Its key warning: “Not all public health interventions have been benign or beneficial, however. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have encouraged abuses of state power. Atrocities, large and small, have been committed in the name of protecting the public’s health.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-08T00:40:57+00:00

20 states sue Biden administration over radical transgender mandates

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-07T19:11:55+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] Genes Believe in You

Here are three statements I’m willing to make, of descending certainty - that is, the first is just true, the second is a seemingly obvious extrapolation from the first, and the third is a supposition about the nature of the second.

People sort themselves into academic ability bands relative to peers at a very early age and at scale more or less remain in those bands throughout their academic lives. The star students in first grade are very likely to be the star students in college, again with exceptions but as a general rule with remarkable consistency. This general dynamic is observed across all manner of educational contexts and despite constant environmental changes over the course of life. I have made this case at great length here.

The prior statement suggests that there is such a thing as innate academic ability, an intrinsic property of individuals that inclines them to be better or worse in school. To attribute that condition to pure environmentalism requires truly immense amounts of mental work, given how dramatically environments change over the course of life without attendant dramatic changes in student outcomes. But an assumption of some innate property of educational ability fits perfectly with the basic contours of static educational hierarchy.

The most parsimonious explanation for such a quality as innate academic ability or tendency would be genes.

I’ve told this story before, but I feel moved to tell it again. In 2018 hundreds of verified users on Twitter and thousands of their unverified hangers-on started a meltdown about me. Their claim of injustice was that my book, recently under contract, was a pro-race science book. This claim was remarkable not just because it was false, but also because my book did not exist - I had not written it yet. They were making pronouncements with absolute confidence about the argumentative contents of a book that did not have contents. This was particularly strange because my elevator pitch to publishers literally began with the assertion that racial differences in education are not genetic - “someday we’ll close the racial and gender achievement gaps, but what will remain is even more insidious, the innate talent gap.” None of this stopped hundreds of journalists and academics, whose job it is to both collect and source information, from spreading this claim about my book with absolute confidence across thousands of tweets. When I searched for hours for the source of this idea I found that it came from a single unverified pseudonymous shitposting account with a Michael Cera avatar and a few hundred followers. That was the standard of information sufficient for people who now work at places like The New York Times and The Washington Post and Buzzfeed and many more, and at some of the most prestigious universities in the world, to assassinate my character and begin a campaign to get my book dropped by my publisher. To my knowledge not a single one, not one, has ever retracted the tweets or apologized, despite the fact that they have had over a year now to verify that the actual book is explicitly and unambiguously anti-race science.

This is the rhetorical environment in which Paige must now survive.

The rude thing is… I just don’t believe people, on this issue. When they say that they think all people have the same innate ability to perform well in school or on other cognitive tasks, that any difference is environmental, what I think inside is, I don’t believe that you believe that. When researchers in genetics and evolution who believe that the genome influences every aspect of our physiological selves say that they don’t believe that the genome has any influence on our behavioral selves, what I think inside is, I don’t believe you. I think people feel compelled to say this stuff because the idea of intrinsic differences in academic ability offend their sense of justice, and because the social and professional consequences of appearing to believe that idea are profound. But I think everyone who ever went to school as a kid knew in their heart back then that some kids were just smarter than others, and I think most people quietly believe that now. Like I said, it’s rude. But I can’t shake it.

What liberals don’t like, they mock. What they cannot refute, they ridicule.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-07T18:56:09+00:00

Satanists Demand Religious Exemption To Perform ‘Abortion Ritual’ Illegal Under Texas Law

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-07T15:37:13+00:00

Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?

On sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, Harden and Elliot Tucker-Drob, a colleague to whom she was married at the time, were invited to New York City with their two young children—a three-year-old boy and a nine-month-old girl—as visiting scholars-in-residence at the Russell Sage Foundation. Russell Sage, which occupies a handsome Philip Johnson building in Manhattan, primarily supports sociologists, journalists, and economists, but it had recently launched an initiative to integrate the biological sciences. Harden felt almost immediately unwelcome at the regular fellows’ lunches. Many of the left-leaning social scientists seemed certain that behavior-genetics research, no matter how well intentioned, was likely to lead us down the garden path to eugenics. The world would be better, Harden was told, if she quit. When their cohort went to see “Hamilton,” the others professed surprise that Harden and Tucker-Drob had enjoyed it, as if their work could be done only by people uncomfortable with an inclusive vision of American history.

Harden assumed that such leeriness was the vestige of a bygone era, when genes were described as the “hard-wiring” of individual fate, and that her critics might be reassured by updated information. Two weeks before her family was due to return to Texas, she e-mailed the fellows a new study, in Psychological Science, led by Daniel Belsky, at Duke. The paper drew upon a major international collaboration that had identified sites on the genome that evinced a statistically significant correlation with educational attainment; Belsky and his colleagues used that data to compile a “polygenic score”—a weighted sum of an individual’s relevant genetic variants—that could partly explain population variance in reading ability and years of schooling. His study sampled New Zealanders of northern-European descent and was carefully controlled for childhood socioeconomic status. “Hope that you find this interesting food for thought,” she wrote.

William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke and perhaps the country’s leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality, answered curtly, starting a long chain of replies. Given the difficulties of distinguishing between genetic and environmental effects on social outcomes, he wrote, such investigations were at best futile: “There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial research.” By the time he wrote again, several hours later, one of Harden’s few supporters among the fellows had changed the thread’s subject line from “new genetics paper” to “Seriously? Holocaust deniers?” Darity responded, “I feel just as strongly that we should not keep the notions that the world is 6000 years old or that climate change is a fabrication under consideration.”

Harden remarked that being called a climate skeptic was marginally preferable to being called a Holocaust denier. She offered to host a lunch to discuss the uncontroversial basics of genetics research for anyone interested. Darity was reluctant to let the matter go: “One final comment from me, and then I will withdraw into my pique.” In 1994, he wrote, the political scientist Charles Murray and the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein “published a bestseller that achieved great notoriety, The Bell Curve. Apart from its claims about a genetic basis for a ‘racial’ hierarchy in intelligence, the book claimed that social outcomes like poverty and inequality in earnings had a genetic foundation. Personally, I thought the book was outrageous and a saddening resuscitation of ideas that had increasingly been dismissed as ‘pseudoscience.’ Belsky’s work strikes me as an extension of the Murray-Herrnstein view of the world.” He concluded, “At some point, I think we need to say enough is enough.” (Darity told me, of his e-mails, “I stand by all that.”)

An admirer of Darity’s work—especially on reparations for slavery—Harden was surprised that she’d elicited such rancor from someone with whom she was otherwise in near-total political agreement. In the wake of the exchange, some of the other fellows stopped speaking to Harden, and the e-mail chain was forwarded to members of the foundation’s board. The next year, after winning the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, Harden applied for a grant from Russell Sage’s biosciences initiative, which had supported similar research in the past. She received enthusiastic peer reviews from its scientific advisers, and was given to understand that the grant’s disbursal was a fait accompli. During a contentious meeting, however, the full board voted to overturn the scientific panel’s recommendation. Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. In the end, the board chose to disband the initiative entirely. (A spokesperson for Russell Sage told me by e-mail that the decision was based on the “consideration of numerous factors, including RSF’s relative lack of expertise in this area.”)

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-07T15:12:21+00:00

A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’ The number of men enrolled at two- and four-year colleges has fallen behind women by record levels, in a widening education gap across the U.S.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-07T14:17:10+00:00

Professors in America and the U.K. fight back against the cancelation of Geoffrey Chaucer

Academics in both America and the United Kingdom have recently taken actions to prevent Geoffrey Chaucer, the “father of English literature,” from being labeled a rapist, racist and anti-Semite.

In late July, Cambridge University medieval and renaissance English Professor Jill Mann resigned from her position on the board of the Chaucer Review, an academic journal specializing in the work of “The Canterbury Tales” author.

The journal had published an essay called “New Feminist Approaches to Chaucer” in which authors Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Sidhu argued it is time for feminists “to move past Chaucer” because: “He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence.”

The authors also provide evidence that Chaucer himself was a rapist, relaying on a 14th century legal document in which a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne accused Chaucer from a crime known as “De raptu meo.”

Other scholars have argued the word “raptus” could refer to an “abduction” and point out the legal document actually showed Chaumpaigne releasing Chaucer from any legal obligation related to the claim.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-07T04:00:11+00:00

Hampton Inn refuses to punish black cleaner for calling co-workers 'white b*****s and white trash' - but then FIRES white woman for complaining!

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-06T17:02:50+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] All White Men Are White Men: If "white men" does not mean white men, how can "white men" hurt white men?

Categorical claims about people carry a certain amount of rhetorical force. They do so because we have a variety of psychological and political hang-ups about categories like race and gender, but also because categorical claims are, well, categorical - they do not permit exceptions. To be willing to say “yes, all X” seems extreme because we operate in a universe where there are exceptions to just about everything. (Indeed, this is why “yes, all X” is generally not a thing that smart people say.) Meanwhile people make exceptions to what would seem to be categorical thinking all the time, often in untoward ways. You would think therefore that those making categorical arguments for effect would make sure to speak carefully. Sadly….

There are a lot of complaints these days about white men, particularly online where confrontations are much less threatening. People make those complaints in lieu of gathering actual power, which is hard and takes time away from endlessly refreshing Twitter. These categorical claims about white men are existentially harmless no matter where they arise - who gives a shit? - but they are also quite weird when they come from white men. And boy, do woke white men love to complain about white men! Let’s check in with Dr. Grist.

Much could be said here! First and foremost is the fact that “ideas don’t arise from specific individual minds but from the flow of history and our contingent place within that history” is just a crude approximation of Marxism, a philosophy developed by a couple of white men and which famously has a lot of white male admirers. Or, if you squint a different way, you could maybe call this thinking a simplistic consequence of French poststructuralism, an intellectual tradition developed almost exclusively by white men. Etc. Honestly the entirety of 20th century philosophical development points squarely in the direction that Roberts is arguing, so his claim that it would appear deeply threatening to the vast population of white men seems a little odd. I am almost charmed by all of this, in the sense that Roberts has expressed a profoundly undergraduate vision of the history of ideas, one that ham-handedly mirrors more sophisticated and forceful versions developed by white men, and then posits it as both somehow novel and uniquely threatening to white men. Almost charmed, that is, because such a desperate play for the approval of other people (most of them white) dressed up as truth-telling can’t be genuinely charming.

It should go without saying that what Roberts is saying is utterly self-undermining. If Roberts believes that the opinions of white men are inherently suspect because they arise from a situated and contingent position within history, then his own position is inherently suspect because Dave Roberts is a white man. If, on the other hand, Roberts’s point is merely that white male opinions exist within the same contingent and uncertain epistemic status as everyone else’s, then that means that there is no reason to trust white men more but also no reason to trust us less. It’s just the interplay of different ideas, all arising from the inherent confusion of history. Which would mean that the ideas that should and will rule are those that arise from the interchange of ideas, from combat between them… in other words, from the processes of Reason1, which Roberts dismisses here with his usual mixture of confidence and confusion.

That’s all a bit more involved than what’s really going on here, though. Roberts does not really mean that all white men feel any particular way, even less that all white men are bad. After all, he is a white man and he is very nakedly trying to get people to like him more rather than less. (He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted, always.) Roberts means some other white men, white men who do not share his magisterial political wisdom. He gets to speak about the origin of other white men’s feelings without thinking that his own feelings are similarly implicated because, well, he doesn’t really consider himself a white man. But this gives the whole game away, doesn’t it? Once you admit exceptions to the “white man” designator, you’re really just saying “conservative white men” or “unenlightened white men” or “white men who don’t think exactly like I do.” If you’ve done that, why bother with the categorical at all? Why not just restrict your critiques of believing stupid shit to people who believe stupid shit, which yes includes many white men but also includes Candace Owens and Dinesh D'Souza and those two Black Trumper ladies with the WWF tag team names I can never remember? I don’t understand why people make a big show of condemning entire classes of people while also making it very plain that they believe there are exceptions, most importantly themselves.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-06T16:44:13+00:00

NFL Exec Says League’s ‘Social Justice Work’ Is ‘Ramping Up Again In A Big Way’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-06T15:41:43+00:00

University faculty training lists 'perfectionism,' and 'sense of urgency' as indicators of 'white supremacy'

Faculty and graduate students at Colorado University – Boulder were recently encouraged to reject “neoliberal” concepts of time, as well as to avoid "cultural norms of white supremacy" like “sense of urgency" and "individualism" in their classrooms.

[...]

Another tells instructors they should be “Decolonizing the classroom” by changing the way they approach the concept of time. The slide tells participants to “resist colonial and neoliberal coercion around time and productivity” by using flexible deadlines, allowing students to choose their own deadlines, or not penalizing late work. Attendees were advised to “help students become conscious of the colonial morality around the use of time (worth=productivity).” This idea is credited to Professor Sam Bullington, who teaches in the Community Studies Program within the school of education.

Ciancarelli’s presentation credits Bullington for several other cited methods of decolonization, including “incorporate[ing] connecting with the earth into assignments and classroom activities, and “help[ing] students recognize their complicity in promoting human exceptionalism/human superiority.”

Several of the suggestions for decolonizing relate to academic standards. “Critique the (white western masculine) disembodied rationality focus of the educational system,” one item reads. Another says “question the need for mastery, certainty and perfection.”

Other sessions at the conference included “Crafting a Social Justice Syllabus” and “Empowering Microaggression Reporting with your Syllabus.” A representative from CU Boulder tells Campus Reform that no presentation slides were used or recordings made of these sessions.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-05T15:57:09+00:00

Inadequacies in the SES–Achievement model: Evidence from PISA and other studies

Abstract

Students’ socioeconomic status (SES) is central to much research and policy deliberation on educational inequalities. However, the SES model is under severe stress for several reasons. SES is an ill-defined concept, unlike parental education or family income. SES measures are frequently based on proxy reports from students; these are generally unreliable, sometimes endogenous to student achievement, only low to moderately intercorrelated, and exhibit low comparability across countries and over time. There are many explanations for SES inequalities in education, none of which achieves consensus among research and policy communities. SES has only moderate effects on student achievement, and its effects are especially weak when considering prior achievement, an important and relevant predictor. SES effects are substantially reduced when considering parent ability, which is causally prior to family SES. The alternative cognitive ability/genetic transmission model has far greater explanatory power; it provides logical and compelling explanations for a wide range of empirical findings from student achievement studies. The inadequacies of the SES model are hindering knowledge accumulation about student performance and the development of successful policies

[...]

CONCLUSION

The paper critiques the dominant SES model used in the analysis of student achievement. The SES model is failing for several reasons. Its conceptualisation is muddled and contradictory. SES data collected from students are often unreliable, and both parental education and 'books in the home' are, to some extent, endogenous to student achievement. There is also a lack of consistency between the measured components cross-nationally and, in some countries, over time, so it is difficult to sustain the idea that the same concept is being compared. Despite its high profile among researchers and policymakers, SES has only moderate effects on achievement. Even the expansive ESCS measure in PISA explains only modest amounts of variance in PISA test scores. SES effects are likely to be, to a considerable extent, proxies for the effects of parental ability. It is no accident that policies that focus on such an ambiguous and poor explanatory concept as SES are not successful.

We are not arguing that the home environment is completely irrelevant to student performance. Very wealthy and high-income families can send their children to private schools, which increases the chances of university entry (Jerrim et al., 2016). Undesirable changes in home circumstances (e.g., job loss, divorce) can adversely impact student performance (Lehti et al., 2019; Nilsen et al., 2020). Parents influence their children in myriads of ways and most parents monitor their children's education. However, the overall impact of the home environment, SES and parenting are much weaker than commonly assumed. The problem is that the SES model has become an idée fixe among researchers and policymakers, and they insist that it explains much of the variance in student achievement, is theoretically credible, and is sensitive to policies that aim to reduce educational inequalities.

The cognitive ability/genetic transmission model provides more compelling explanations than the SES model. It accounts for the SES–achievement relationship, the small or negligible SES effects when controlling for cognitive ability or prior achievement, or in fixed-effects analyses, the increasing intradomain correlations, the sizeable interdomain correlations, educational differentiation, the enduring effects of PISA test scores on subsequent educational and socioeconomic attainments, and the existence of ‘resilient’ students. Teachers’ judgements of students’ aptitudes are based largely on their test performance, not SES or cultural signals. The cognitive ability/genetic transmission model does not require ad hoc additions to maintain basic plausibility. It can be part of a vibrant growing understanding of student performance.

Although there is a great reluctance among research and policy communities to admit that cognitive ability plays a substantial role in student performance, nonetheless teachers, schools and educational authorities implicitly acknowledge its importance. Teachers routinely allocate students to different learning groups and set work based largely on their prior performance. Most primary schools provide remedial teaching, and at higher grades advanced or extension classes. In middle secondary school, streaming in mathematics and science is not uncommon. In upper secondary school, students are allocated, or allocate themselves, to more and less academically demanding subjects. Some school systems formally track students either on entry to secondary school, or a few years later based largely on their prior performance. So, acknowledging the importance of general and specific abilities would not change the organisation and practices of educational institutions. However, it would change the rhetoric surrounding, and the implementation of, and most likely the success of, educational policies

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-04T17:37:10+00:00

In Literary Organizations, Diversity Disputes Keep Coming

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-04T15:59:58+00:00

Genetic and environmental contributions to IQ in adoptive and biological families with 30-year-old offspring

Highlights

Genetic and environmental sources of variance in IQ were estimated from 486 adoptive and biological families

Families include 419 mothers, 201 fathers, 415 adopted and 347 biological fully-adult offspring (M age = 31.8 years; SD = 2.7)

Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01 [95% CI 0.00, 0.02]

Heritability was estimated to be 0.42 [95% CI 0.21, 0.64]

Parent-offspring correlations for educational attainment polygenic scores show no evidence of adoption placement effect

Environmentalists BTFO.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-03T15:30:07+00:00

Candace Owens Taking Matter To HHS After Being Denied Covid Test For Political Views. Doesn't she know they're a private company? Just build your own hospital!

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-03T14:05:34+00:00

Chase Bank Unveils New “Reputation Risk” Campaign, Targeting Loyal Customers For Their Political Beliefs

On Tuesday Chase confirmed that the cancellation was real and aimed at Flynn’s wife, Lori. The company then tried to walk back the cancellation, claiming that it was all “mistake.” If there was any “mistake” in targeting Flynn’s family, it was in misjudging the PR backlash that would ensue from such an egregious display of political persecution.

Chase’s “mistaken” letter to General Flynn’s wife wasn’t the first time an organization has used “reputational risk” as a pretext for political censorship. In fact, weaponizing claims of “reputational risk” has become a favored tactic for the institutional left to deny its enemies the right to organize or even live normal day-to-day lives.

Long before Gen. Flynn became a target, none other than disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo tried to use “reputational risk” as a means to topple the National Rifle Association.

The State of New York enjoys regulatory power over all banks and insurers chartered or registered in the state — a considerable power when one takes Wall Street into account. In the spring of 2018, Governor Cuomo invoked this regulatory authority in a thuggish attempt to make it impossible for the NRA to publicly campaign for gun rights.

It is typical for shared-interest groups, from the Habitat for Humanity to the New York Bar Association to the NRA, to partner with insurance companies to offer insurance policies to its members. The NRA insurance, known as Carry Guard, reimbursed policyholders for attorney fees and other legal expenses in the event that they used legally-owned guns in self-defense. The NRA’s program was entirely legal, and used routine insurance templates and market practices. However, Cuomo’s administration decided to target the Carry Guard program — and no other affinity-based insurance offerings — for supposed insurance-regulatory infirmities.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-02T17:36:46+00:00

University of Nottingham drops Catholic Chaplain over pro-life views expressed on social media

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-02T17:20:18+00:00

WI Spa update

Sex offending suspect claims transgender harassment in Wi Spa case

In June, a group of women complained that a person who identified as female exposed their penis at the Wi Spa in Los Angeles. The incident led to months of sometimes violent protests, with media outlets declaring it an example of bias against the transgendered, or even that it didn’t happen. Slate said it was a “transphobic hoax.”

But on Monday, charges of indecent exposure were discretely filed against a serial sex offender for the Wi Spa incident, following an investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Sources with knowledge of the case but not authorized to speak publicly say four women and a minor girl came forward to allege that Darren Agee Merager was partially erect in the women’s section of Wi Spa. Besides being a suspect in this case, Merager is facing multiple felony charges of indecent exposure over a separate incident in Los Angeles.

[...]

Law-enforcement sources revealed that Merager is a tier-one registered sex offender with two prior convictions of indecent exposure stemming from incidents in 2002 and 2003 in California. She declined to comment on the convictions. In 2008, she was convicted for failing to register as a sex offender.

A law passed by California Democrats that went into effect this year replaced the state’s lifetime registration requirement to a tiered system. The law allows lower-tiered sex offenders to petition to be removed from the list. However, Merager is not eligible due to ongoing criminal charges. She also has a long criminal history in California that includes nearly a dozen felony convictions for crimes ranging from sex offenses to burglary and escape.

Every. Single. Time.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-02T15:00:54+00:00

Cops imposing brutal lockdown in Sydney's west are caught throwing a PARTY at their police station for LGBTQIA awareness

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-02T13:29:18+00:00

On the Transformation of Small-Souled Bugmen in the Age of Covid

In recent years Western society has given rise to the proliferation of a novel subspecies sometimes referred to as the bugman. The microcosm of the intellectually and morally decaying contemporary technological dystopia, this bugman is mentally and physically insipid, oversocialized, and undertested, devoid of purpose and even individual character. In my capacity as a freelance cultural entomologist, I previously analyzed the figure here. Comparable to the Nietzschean Last Man, we can think of him as a debased, shriveled puppet of the neoliberal elite.

As a result of the Covid agenda, however, the bugman has mutated into something almost unrecognizable. His familiar open-mouthed smile has been muzzled by white polypropylene and the childish glee in his eyes replaced with a look of unprepared apprehension. His life is now defined by an omnipresent feeling of dread that has infiltrated his mind through the array of digital screens he switches between throughout the day. What has happened is the bugman has been patched.

The new software update includes a brain augmentation which more deeply intertwines the bugman’s synapses with the media industrial machine. What we previously called the ‘small-souled’ bugman — the term is borrowed from the Aristotelian idea of being small in mind and spirit — is now almost extinct, outcompeted by the new bugman variant. What we have now is the ‘fear-addled’ bugman, a new generation model that disrupts feelings of self-confidence and independence to extraordinary new extents.

Plugged into the feed of social media-generated news, the bugman had initially been alarmed by ominous clips showing a plague wreaking havoc in China. At first his instinctive fears were soothed when trusted sources brushed off the threat and stressed the greater threat of racism. Soon enough, however, these same sources changed their tune and cranked the bugman’s panic levels to eleven, where they have remained ever since. Facing the most extensive and pervasive psychological campaign in human history he hunkered down at home to help flatten the curve. Lockdowns weren’t so bad, he thought, working now from home in his pajamas. They had given him a chance to reflect on life and watch shows on Netflix, order overpriced fast food from Uber Eats, and toy with the gizmos in his studio apartment.

As some began to recognize the virus itself was not the biggest problem, the bugman entertained himself with pure escapism. In an astonishing twist, he cheered as schools were closed, business owners had their lives destroyed, and mask compliance became total. A surveillance tech fanatic, the fear-addled bugman welcomed the announcements that the new technocratic order was intending to impose an all-consuming social credit score. Whatever keeps us safe, he said, whatever keeps us safe…

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-01T19:19:09+00:00

Vaccine Passports increase rebellion against vaccines, major UK study finds

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-01T18:52:27+00:00

Eco-warriors’ crappy vision of the future

Environmentalists really do seem committed to making life just that little bit shittier. Literally in the case of the British government’s latest green-inspired policy idea – a tax on disposable nappies.

The government isn’t planning on banning them. Not yet, anyway. ‘That would be too tough for parents’, a source said. No, it wants to price them out of everyday use. Turn them into a privilege. Something for special occasions, say, a first or second birthday.

It’s almost as if those in Westminster and Whitehall dreaming up such a proposal barely thought about its consequences. Which, to be fair, they probably didn’t. Many won’t be bothered about paying that bit more for pull-ups. And quite a few will just leave their nannies to bear the brunt of their latest wheeze.

But for most parents – and especially women, who are still responsible for the majority of childcare in the UK – the idea of being encouraged to spend a few more hours a week re-washing nappies, rather than simply bagging up and disposing of them, seems like a massive backward step.

Which it is. The invention of disposables in the late 1940s was a minor liberation. Like more celebrated labour-saving technologies, the humble Pampers nappy, ending the time-heavy process of re-laundering cloth nappies, played a part in releasing women from domestic drudgery. And now, in the name of saving the planet, policymakers and their green whiphands want to return child carers to that tedious, far less free era of thankless housework. Hence, when then environment secretary Michael Gove first mooted an attack on disposable nappies in 2018, director of Netmums called it ‘a bit of a retrograde step’.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-01T17:19:30+00:00

Teacher who says she told kids to pledge to Pride flag removed from California class

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-09-01T12:47:47+00:00

Christian students win exemption from vaccine mandate after legal threat

Loyola University Chicago has agreed to grant religious exemptions to its vaccine mandate instead of potentially going to court.

The Catholic university requires all students, faculty and staff to get vaccinated, but denied exemptions to a number of Christian students who had objections to the vaccine. Its policy would have banned students from enrolling in classes and entering university buildings.

But at least 40 students have now obtained exemptions from the mandate after legal threats from Liberty Counsel, a conservative nonprofit.

[...]

“All Loyola students who have contacted Liberty Counsel after their exemptions were wrongfully denied have now been granted exemptions and are allowed to remain enrolled for the fall semester,” the legal group said.

“The students objected based on the fetal cell line/abortion connection since each of the three injections available were either produced or tested with fetal cell lines that originated in elective abortions.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-09-01T00:34:26+00:00

Miami’s New Diaspora: A wave of refugees is washing up on Miami’s shores, only now it’s disgruntled New Yorkers, fleeing the city’s draconian COVID restrictions and pessimistic politics

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-31T21:50:49+00:00

[Matt Taibbi] NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response

The most important problem of speech regulation, as far as speech advocates have been concerned, has always been the identity of the people setting the rules. If there are going to be limits on speech, someone has to set those limits, which means some group is inherently going to wield extraordinary power over another. Speech rights are a political bulwark against such imbalances, defending the minority not only against government repression but against what Mill called “the tyranny of prevailing opinion.”

It’s unsurprising that NPR — whose tone these days is so precious and exclusive that five minutes of listening to any segment makes you feel like you’re wearing a cucumber mask at a Plaza spa — papers over this part of the equation, since it must seem a given to them that the intellectual vanguard setting limits would come from their audience. Who else is qualified?

By the end of the segment, Marantz and Gladstone seemed in cheerful agreement they’d demolished any arguments against “getting away from individual rights and the John Stuart Mill stuff.” They felt it more appropriate to embrace the thinking of a modern philosopher like Marantz favorite Richard Rorty, who believes in “replacing the whole framework” of society, which includes “not doing the individual rights thing anymore.”

It was all a near-perfect distillation of the pretensions of NPR’s current target audience, which clearly feels we’ve reached the blue-state version of the End of History, where all important truths are agreed upon, and there’s no longer need to indulge empty gestures to pluralism like the “marketplace of ideas.”

Mill ironically pointed out that “princes, or others who are accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects.” Sound familiar? Yes, speech can be harmful, which is why journalists like me have always welcomed libel and incitement laws and myriad other restrictions, and why new rules will probably have to be concocted for some of the unique problems of the Internet age. But the most dangerous creatures in the speech landscape are always aristocrat know-it-alls who can’t wait to start scissoring out sections of the Bill of Rights. It’d be nice if public radio could find space for at least one voice willing to point that out.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-31T21:20:00+00:00

Nashville school board pledges to fight racism, white privilege amid critical race theory ban

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-31T20:44:31+00:00

Woke Bacha Bazi: We looked the other way when our allies in Afghanistan molested boys. Pay attention as the sexual revolution seeks to enlist your children here in America.

Witness the recent Twitter tempest over Prostasia Foundation, a nonprofit that claims to combat child abuse but devotes much of its energy to apologizing for pedophiles. Prostasia has been around for a few years but was thrust into the social-media spotlight over the weekend, when it became widely known that Noah Berlatsky, a contributor to the Atlantic (among many other prestigious outlets), serves as the group’s communications director.

That prompted Atlantic writer Elizabeth Bruenig to showcase some of Prostasia’s greatest, most horrifying hits. The group, she noted, promotes the term “minor-attracted person,” or MAP—a naked attempt to reframe pedophilia as one more oppressed identity calling out for sympathy. The problem, according to Prostasia, arises when some “MAPs” act out on their desires, something that could be better prevented if pedophiles felt less marginalized. Or something.

A screen-captured tweet from Prostasia blog editor Sheila van den Heuvel-Collins read: “Merry Christmas to everyone, including the nepiophiles, pedophiles, hebephiles and ephebophiles who have to put up with . . . stigma every single day of the year.” A nepiophile is someone who wants to rape infants. There is much more where that came from. In a September 2018 blog post, Prostasia lamented Tumblr’s habit of “indiscriminately deleting MAPs’ and allies’ blogs.”

Thank God for stigma. Thank God for Tumblr censorship of “MAPs and allies.”

It’s true that a group like Prostasia exists on a fringe—for now. Then again, Berlatsky for years published in Bruenig’s own outlet, as well as the likes of the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, NBC Think, and Reason. This, even though he hardly made a secret of his views on pedophilia: He had raged against sex-offender registries as “racist” on Twitter and denounced police as “child sex workers’ biggest threat” in the New Republic. Even when Berlatsky came under fire recently, Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley rushed to his defense, accusing Berlatsky’s accusers of promoting “utterly terrifying, Nazi anti-Semitism” in a since-deleted tweet.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-31T15:07:56+00:00

Christian Schools Vastly Outperforming Public Schools During COVID-19, According To New Survey Of Parents

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-31T13:58:50+00:00

[Abigail Shrier] Should Public Schools be Allowed to Deceive Parents?

Last week, I spoke with another mother who discovered her 12-year-old daughter’s middle school had changed the girl’s name and gender identity at school. The “Gender Support Plan” the district followed is an increasingly standard document which informs teachers of a child’s new chosen name and gender identity (“trans,” “agender,” “non-binary,” etc.) for all internal communications with the child. The school also provided the girl a year’s worth of counseling in support of her new identity, which in her case was “no gender.” Even the P.E. teachers were in on it. Left in the dark were her parents.

This duplicity is part of the “plan”: All documents sent home to mom and dad scrupulously maintained the daughter’s birth name and sex. But Mom noticed her daughter seemed to be suffering. Although far from alone in declaring a new identity - many girls in the school had adopted new names and gender pronouns – this girl’s grades fell apart. She became taciturn and moody.

When the mother failed to uncover the source of the girl’s distress, she met with teachers, hoping for insight. Instead, she slammed into a Wall of Silence: no teacher was evidently willing to let a worried mom know what the hell was going on. (Finally, one did.)

When I wrote Irreversible Damage, I documented that California and other public school systems had adopted a policy of creating two sets of documents around minor students’ gender. Similar policies have cropped up across the country, modeled on the one created by the activist organization Gender Spectrum.

A “gender support plan” isn’t merely a secret held between child and teacher, which might be bad enough. This is no private student confession, the silent whisperings of a troubled teenage heart. A Gender Support Plan, or any similar scheme, effects a schoolwide conspiracy to create a secret name and gender identity specifically withheld from parents. I’ve talked to a mom whose middle school daughter slept in the boys’ bunk on the school overnight before she learned her daughter’s school had, for more than a year, called her by a different name and openly referred to her as a boy.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-30T23:04:49+00:00

Teachers Union: ‘It’s OK’ That Kids Don’t Know Math, ‘They Know The Words Insurrection and Coup’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-30T21:58:03+00:00

Thousands of pediatricians sue Biden over transgender policy

Shortly after Joe Biden took office, his Department of Health and Human Services issued a “reinterpretation” of federal medical guidelines when it comes to the treatment of gender dysphoria employing the use of hormone therapy or even “transitional” surgery. Under the new interpretation, medical providers could be held liable if they refused to perform such procedures, including on children, defining such a refusal as “discrimination” based on sex. Despite this order being politically popular on the far left, not all medical professionals were onboard with it. Now, more than three thousand of them have joined a lawsuit against the administration, seeking to force them to reverse the policy change. As with many similar lawsuits currently making their way through the courts, the plaintiffs in this case are being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom. (Daily Wire)

Pediatricians and other health care workers are suing the Biden administration over a mandate tied to health care which would, according to the suit, require medical professionals to provide gender-related services and surgeries despite objections, medical or otherwise.

Objections, even to treating children, would be considered “discrimination,” pursuant to Biden’s reinterpretation of sex to include sexual orientation and “gender identity.”

“The American College of Pediatricians, the Catholic Medical Association, and an OB-GYN doctor who specializes in caring for adolescents filed suit in federal court to challenge a Biden administration mandate requiring doctors to perform gender transition procedures on any patient, including a child, if the procedure violates a doctor’s medical judgment or religious beliefs,” read a press release from the Alliance Defending Freedom.

What’s truly sad about this case (among many sad factors) is the fact that not all medical associations have joined it. Unfortunately, the leadership of the American Medical Association has shifted so far to the woke side of politics in recent years that they actually support the policy change. But this is still a sufficiently large number of doctors and other providers to attract the attention of the courts and attempt to bring the situation under control.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-30T18:53:52+00:00

L.A. City Council Orders a ‘Racial Equity Audit’ of City Programs and Policies

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-30T15:45:53+00:00

AU offers separate classroom, saying it's a ‘safe space for Black Students’

American University has created a Black-only course section, or classroom, for a class on racism, which freshmen are required to take.

Many universities use course sections to break larger cohorts into smaller-sized classrooms.

According to The Eagle, the university added a Black affinity course section to AUx2, a class where students learn about "race, social identity, and structures of power." In the course, students will "evaluate how racism intersects with other systems of oppression."

The student newspaper states that all-Black sections of the course began during the spring 2020 semester, an addition that had been considered for a few years.

“We’ve definitely heard from Black students and other students of color that the material can be a lot for them because it is part of their lived experiences,” Izzi Stern, the AUx program manager told the student newspaper. “And we wanted to create a space where they could be together in community and have an overall positive experience with the course.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-30T15:07:16+00:00

The Masked Ball of Cowardice: How fear of admitting error in trusting China’s coronavirus propaganda is driving Western societies into a doom spiral

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-30T14:05:07+00:00

Whites need not apply? Top German university job advertisement sparks outrage

The Humboldt University of Berlin, one Germany’s most prestigious higher-learning institutions, caused quite the stir last week when its advisory council posted a job advertisement for an ‘anti-discrimination counselor which asked people with white skin not to apply, national broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg 24 reports.

“We ask (…) White people to refrain from applying for this advice center,” the advertisement says, claiming that the consultations work best “when the consultant is Black or is a person of color”.

[...]

A revised version of the job posting, which appeared on Thursday evening, now says, “The counseling work has shown that this is best achieved by people who can advise from the perspective of how they are affected by racist discrimination. Therefore, we would particularly like to encourage people who have experienced racist discrimination to get on the spot to apply.”

This is not the first time that the Advisory Council at the Humboldt University of Berlin has published a racist job advertisement. According to a report from the German newspaper Bild, the council published a similar job advertisement in May 2021, which said that it “desired” the applicant to be “Black or a Person of Color”.

Over the past few years, expressions of anti-White racism have become increasingly acceptable and normal in a growing number of circles.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-29T21:51:39+00:00

Illinois Sex-Ed Classes to Teach Gender Expression as Early as Kindergarten

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-29T18:40:32+00:00

Australia is at breaking point

The world is starting to take notice. International media outlets spent most of 2020 filming bustling Australian streets. We had beaten Covid, they said. Now, they film those exact same streets again, but they are either deserted or filled with protesters battling police.

It really is as bad as it looks on the news. Two stories stand out from the past week. Bourke Shire Council, a rural council in New South Wales, decided last week that it would protect its community by shooting dead 15 impounded dogs. This was to prevent them being picked up by volunteers from a rescue centre in the town of Cobar. The council was so spooked by the Covid situation in New South Wales that it felt it could not risk anyone from Cobar coming across the state to collect the dogs. So the dogs were killed. There have been no new cases of Covid in Cobar in the past 28 days.

Over in Melbourne, the city’s sixth lockdown has brought people to breaking point. A video is circulating online of a child having his eyes wiped after allegedly being pepper sprayed by police. On Saturday, police fired rubber pellets at protesters. The violence was not all in one direction, though: six police officers were taken to hospital.

The police have gone to extreme lengths to enforce lockdown. Last week, a police bomb squad and helicopter were deployed to deal with teenagers partying on a Sydney beach at night.

Those of us who expressed concern about our disappearing freedoms were ignored last year – even while grandmothers were being chased off park benches because sitting there wasn’t ‘Covid-safe’. We were laughed at when we asked whether Australia was turning into a police state. No one is laughing now.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-29T17:24:32+00:00

New York burger joint says business tanked 25% after vaccine passport mandate

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-29T15:58:43+00:00

Woke Brandeis University expands list of words, phrases to avoid using

The new additions also include “whipped into shape,” which PARC says can evoke “imagery of enslavement and torture.”

Instead, students and staffers at the school in Waltham — which charges more than $76,000 a year for tuition, room and board, and a mandatory “activity fee” — are advised to say “organize,” “spruce up” or “put in order.”

A new collection of “violent idioms about animals” contains “more than one way to skin a cat,” “killing two birds with one stone” and “beating a dead horse.”

“These expressions normalize violence against animals,” the PARC says.

Better choices, respectively, are “multiple ways to accomplish the task,” “feeding two birds with one seed; taking care of two things at once” and “refusing to let something go,” it says.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-28T16:27:57+00:00

California Public School Teacher Encourages Students to Pledge Allegiance to LGBT Pride Flag Instead of American Flag

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-28T15:33:03+00:00

Emory University won't share suspect's race after Autism Center was vandalized with swastikas, racial slurs: report

After swiftly condemning an alleged racist attack several weeks ago, Emory University now won't share the race of the suspect accused of vandalizing the university's Autism Center with racist graffiti, according to The College Fix.

Georgia law enforcement charged suspected vandal Roy Lee Gordon, Jr., a former part-time staff member, with burglary second degree for allegedly leaving racist and antisemitic graffiti at an Emory University building, The College Fix reported.

On the weekend of Aug. 7 and 8, the racial slurs were reportedly written along the walls near the workspace occupied by two African American women. Swastikas were also discovered in a hallway near a Jewish man's office, WSB-TV reported.

[...]

However, the university's police department and media relations office refuses to answer questions on Gordon's race. The state has a new hate crime law, but the suspect tied to the early August incident has not been charged under the statute.

[...]

Johnson also refused to provide a copy of the police report, arrest warrant, and photos of the alleged vandalism to the outlet focused on higher education.

Step right up folks, place your bets!

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-28T00:36:01+00:00

School Board Member Who Voted To Mask Children CAUGHT Unmasked At Concert With 10,000 People The Next Day

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-27T16:27:34+00:00

‘No one is transgender’ declares U.S. bishop in new diocesan catechetical aid

A Catholic bishop has issued a short catechesis to help members of his diocese who may feel ill-equipped to deal with the spreading contagion of transgenderism now afflicting many families, especially those with children in public schools.

“A Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology,” published by Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, has drawn the ire of pro-transgenderism & homosexuality forces within the Catholic Church because of its simple proclamation of the most basic truths of Catholicism and natural law.

The Arlington diocese lies across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., and is notably comprised of increasingly liberal suburbs and exurbs in which gender identity battles are being waged in public school systems.

“No one is transgender,” declares the document. “To use names and pronouns that contradict the person’s God-given identity is to speak falsely.”

“We can never say something contrary to what we know to be true,” advises the document, so the “faithful should avoid using ‘gender-affirming’ terms or pronouns that convey approval of or reinforce the person’s rejection of the truth.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-27T15:51:25+00:00

Colonial Williamsburg Begins ‘Reenactments’ About ‘LGBT History In The Colonies’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-27T13:51:50+00:00

[Christopher Rufo] Critical Race Capitalism: Verizon teaches employees that America is fundamentally racist and promotes “defunding the police.”

According to documents that I have obtained from a whistleblower, Verizon launched the “Race & Social Justice” initiative last year and has created an extensive race reeducation program based on the core tenets of critical race theory, including “systemic racism,” “white fragility,” and “intersectionality.”

In the flagship “Conscious Inclusion & Anti-Racism” training module, Verizon diversity trainers instruct employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and, according to their position on the “privilege” hierarchy, embark on a lifelong “anti-racism journey.” Employees are asked to list their “race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, religion, education, profession, and sexual orientation” on an official company worksheet, then consider their status according to the theory of “intersectionality,” a core component of critical race theory that reduces individuals to a network of identity categories, which determine whether they are an “oppressor” or “oppressed.”

In a video presentation featuring a full-screen title card reading “Let’s talk about privilege,” then-Global Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion officer Ramcess Jean-Louis (who has recently moved to Pfizer in a similar role) says: “As a black man in [America], we are viewed as less than. We are viewed as inferior. We are viewed that our life is not as valuable as anyone else.” Set to dramatic piano music and intercut with footage of the “Central Park dog walker” Amy Cooper, the video states that “weaponized White privilege” causes grave “danger” to African-Americans. Jean-Louis, speaking dramatically, to the point of nearly crying, concludes: “If we are not being viewed as humans, if we’re not being viewed as whole people with souls, these things happen and they will continue to happen.”

After establishing the intersectional hierarchy and threat of “weaponized White privilege,” Verizon instructs employees on the firm’s elaborate racial-etiquette system, which provides specific rules for engaging in “conversation about race.” The diversity trainers explain that employees should not commit “microaggressions” and “microinequities,” defined as “indirect expressions of racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, or another form of prejudice” that are “seemingly innocuous” and often “unconscious or subtle,” but make members of certain racial and sexual classes “feel different, violated, or unsafe.” Members of the privileged classes must instead engage in the “lifelong process” of demonstrating “accountability with marginalized individuals.”

[...]

Verizon claims that this conversation, and its broader antiracism program, will “accelerate systemic change.” In reality, however, the company is promoting the conventional wisdom of the academic Left and the American bureaucracy. Diversity lecturers such as Muhammad, pretending to bring radical insights, have simply commodified critical race theory and sold it back to Fortune 100 companies—ignoring how fashionable ideas such as “defunding the police” are deeply unpopular with voters, including the majority of African-Americans. Verizon’s corporate slogan is “Built Right.” If Verizon executives want to live up to it, they should scrap their antiracism program.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-26T23:29:30+00:00

In Mandatory Training, CA Faculty Union Leader Says There's Nothing Good About 'White' Culture

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-26T19:01:56+00:00

It’s illegal to convince a woman not to have an abortion in France, leaving pro-life activists and media voiceless: A private TV channel airing the true story of a former Planned Parenthood clinic director turned pro-life activist stirs an uproar in France. Macron’s government claims showing the movie is a legal offense.

France likes to give moral lessons to others about freedom of expression but seems to have a big problem of its own when it comes to the discussion around certain subjects deemed “sensitive”. This is certainly the case with abortion, as illustrated once again by the hysterical reactions elicited by the broadcasting on a private television channel, C8, of the American pro-life movie “Unplanned”.

Released in 2019 in the United States where it was a big hit despite being censored by some movie theater chains, “Unplanned” was broadcast in France by C8 on Monday night, Aug. 16, without ever having been released for theatrical release in France. The next day, Elisabeth Moreno, the Minister for Equality between Women and Men in the Castex government, “firmly” condemned the broadcast and said that by showing this movie the channel was “guilty of the offense of obstructing” the voluntary termination of pregnancies.

In France, the “délit d’entrave”, i.e. obstructionism, or putting obstacles to an abortion, was originally an offense committed by a person who sought to prevent or hinder an abortion. Since then, with the evolution of French legislation in favor of abortion, which officially became a “fundamental right” in 2014, the simple act of trying to convince a woman not to have an abortion can also be considered an obstruction offense.

At the same time, in 2001, the French parliament abolished the offense of incitement to abortion. In other words, in France, pressuring a woman to have an abortion is no longer an offense, whereas explaining to her that there are alternatives to abortion and showing her pictures of what an abortion really is can be considered an offense of obstruction and can earn you two years of imprisonment and a heavy fine.

So much so that, in France, pro-life organizations can no longer even leave brochures informing women about available assistance in the event of an unwanted pregnancy in or around the premises of hospitals where abortions are performed, for fear of being charged with “obstructing abortions”.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-26T18:30:53+00:00

Pittsburgh, PA psychology professor: “there is an ethical dimension” for advocating suicide to White people

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-26T16:27:57+00:00

MIT welcomes six new assistant deans for diversity, equity, and inclusion

As an important step forward in MIT’s ongoing efforts to create a more welcoming and inclusive community, the Institute has hired six new assistant deans, one in each school and in the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, to serve as diversity, equity, and inclusion professionals.

Set to be in place by the fall of 2021, these new positions are a result of the February 2020 recommendations of the MIT working groups charged with implementing the findings of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) report on sexual and gender harassment of women in academia. Together, these reports called for “a network of support, advocacy, and community-building expertise across campus to improve our community culture.” MIT President L. Rafael Reif echoed these commitments to new staff and resources in his July 2020 letter to the community addressing systemic racism.

“MIT’s success in developing solutions to the world’s greatest challenges depends on our ability to attract and retain a diverse and collaborative community, and these appointments will help us strengthen that vibrant community,” says Provost Martin Schmidt. “This talented group will be an invaluable resource to everyone in our community as we roll out and implement our DEI Strategic Action Plan. I welcome them to MIT and look forward to engaging with them in this work.”

All six searches were conducted simultaneously and coordinated through the Institute Community and Equity Office (ICEO). John Dozier, who heads the ICEO, will serve as a “dotted-line” supervisor for all six assistant deans.

Dozier, along with ICEO Deputy Director Maryanne Kirkbride and Associate Provost Tim Jamison, interviewed the candidates during the search process; together, they are also co-leading the creation of the DEI Strategic Action Plan.

“The search process itself was like a trial run for the kinds of collaborative practices we hope to move ahead with this group,” Dozier says. “We want this team to build on what we have already learned about working together. But we also want them to add their ideas and fresh perspectives to the challenges we face,” he adds. “This is a tremendously exciting opportunity for building community at MIT.”

Terminal cost disease.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-26T15:25:38+00:00

After Pledging They Would Violate Law To Teach CRT, Teachers Scramble To Hide Evidence

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-08-26T13:58:04+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] The Bizarre Refusal to Apply Cost-Benefit Analysis to COVID Debates

While arguments are common about how this framework should be applied and which specific policies are ideal, the use of cost-benefit analysis as the primary formula we use is uncontroversial — at least it was until the COVID pandemic began. It is now extremely common in Western democracies for large factions of citizens to demand that any measures undertaken to prevent COVID deaths are vital, regardless of the costs imposed by those policies. Thus, this mentality insists, we must keep schools closed to avoid the contracting by children of COVID regardless of the horrific costs which eighteen months or two years of school closures impose on all children.

It is impossible to overstate the costs imposed on children of all ages from the sustained, enduring and severe disruptions to their lives justified in the name of COVID. Entire books could be written, and almost certainly will be, on the multiple levels of damage children are sustaining, some of which — particularly the longer-term ones — are unknowable (long-term harms from virtually every aspect of COVID policies — including COVID itself, the vaccines, and isolation measures, are, by definition, unknown). But what we know for certain is that the harms to children from anti-COVID measures are severe and multi-pronged. One of the best mainstream news accounts documenting those costs was a January, 2021 BBC article headlined “Covid: The devastating toll of the pandemic on children.”

The “devastating toll” referenced by the article is not the death count from COVID for children, which, even in the world of the Delta variant, remains vanishingly small. The latest CDC data reveals that the grand total of children under 18 who have died in the U.S. from COVID since the start of the pandemic sixteen months ago is 361 — in a country of 330 million people, including 74.2 million people under 18. Instead, the “devastating toll” refers to multi-layered harm to children from the various lockdowns, isolation measures, stay-at-home orders, school closures, economic suffering and various other harms that have come from policies enacted to prevent the spread of the virus:

From increasing rates of mental health problems to concerns about rising levels of abuse and neglect and the potential harm being done to the development of babies, the pandemic is threatening to have a devastating legacy on the nation's young. . . .

The closure of schools is, of course, damaging to children's education. But schools are not just a place for learning. They are places where kids socialize, develop emotionally and, for some, a refuge from troubled family life.

Prof Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, perhaps put it most clearly when he told MPs on the Education Select Committee earlier this month: "When we close schools we close their lives."

The richer you are, the less likely you are to be affected by these harms from COVID restrictions. Wealth allows people to leave their homes, hire private tutors, temporarily live in the countryside or mountains, or enjoy outdoor space at home. It is the poor and the economically deprived who bear the worst of these deprivations, which — along with not having children at all — may be one reason they are assigned little to no weight in mainstream discourse.

“The stress the pandemic has put on families, with rising levels of unemployment and financial insecurity combined with the stay-at-home orders, has put strain on home life up and down the land,” the BBC notes. But even for adults and those who are middle-class and above, severe and sustained isolation from community and life is bound to produce serious mental health harms, as two mental health experts I interviewed all the way back in April, 2020, warned.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-08-26T01:12:52+00:00

Women Caught on Camera Stealing California Recall Ballots, as Police Find Hundreds More Ballots in Car of Passed Out Felon

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