Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread for October 11, 2021

rwkasten · 2021-10-11T16:09:19+00:00

New thread posted: https://saidit.net/s/CultureWarRoundup/comments/8os5/offtopic_and_loweffort_cw_thread_for_december_13/

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

That said, here is the cross-link to the current OT/LE on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/ra06gd/december_06_2021_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-13T06:29:37+00:00

Will California ever be safe? The affluent look away while their cities burn

What makes this affluence particularly damaging is the fact that the rich are the furthest removed from the consequences of their negligence. In California, those with enormous wealth are often also the loudest advocates for leniency towards criminals. Those individuals, who have the least contact with crime, are frequently the most enthusiastic proponents of reforms that reduce the safety of the average American. Democratic donors give their money to candidates who support defunding the police. They campaign against stop-and-search, three strikes, and “broken window” policies. They argue for lighter sentences or even the decriminalisation of certain crimes — shoplifting, for example, has been all but legalised in San Francisco.

Wealthy liberals for some reason feel more compassion for those committing crimes than for their victims. They believe in a form of “progress” that ignores human nature and social reality. As Mary Harrington recently wrote: “Team Empathy… tends to skew wealthy: it’s easier to believe people are naturally good if you’ve led a sheltered life.”

Meanwhile, some of the politicians they support, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even deny problems such as smash-and-grab exist. Others urge the public not to be distracted by rising crime, but to follow the “arc of history” towards the utopia of social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism. Melina Andullah, founder of Black Lives Matter LA, recently said of those concerned about the rising tide of crime: “They’re trying to move us backward. We don’t want to move backward; we want to move forward.”

On December 1, Jacqueline Avant, the wife of Clarence Avant and mother-in-law of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, was shot and killed in her home in Beverly Hills. The suspect, Aariel Maynor, was attempting to rob her home when he shot her. He also attempted to kill her security guard.

On hearing the news, Abdullah’s response was to condemn it as “appalling”, yet also called on officials not to use it as an excuse to introduce tougher measures on crime. Elsewhere, Oprah Winfrey mourned the loss of her friend with a social media post that ended with the comment: “The world is upside down. And deeply in need of some love today.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-12T19:05:23+00:00

With Border Wide Open, Biden Admin Puts Border Agents Through ‘Unconscious Bias’ Training

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-12T18:21:33+00:00

Parents ask why cops shot knife-wielding, physically abusive son at Florida Tech

The parents of a Florida Institute of Technology student want to know why police shot and killed their son who was chasing students around with a knife. Law enforcement also suspected the male student of assaulting several women.

Police shot and killed Alhaji Sow on December 3 after he “was reportedly armed with a knife and assaulting students around 11 p.m. [December 3],” according to WSB 2. “Witnesses said he went into a residential building on campus.”

He ended up dropping his knife and grabbed a pair of scissors, which he held when he tried to attack local cops.

“During the confrontation, police said Sow lunged at an officer, which led to a police officer and a campus security officer shooting at him,” WSB reported several days later. “Officers attempted lifesaving measures, but Sow died at the scene.”

The news station said the family’s attorney wants to know why cops did not use a non-lethal option instead of a firearm. Attorney Greg Francis said the response by the university is being investigated. He is a personal injury attorney based in Florida. Francis said Sow “posed no threat to other students” according to WSB 2’s paraphrasing of his comments.

Truly a mystery for the ages.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-12T03:22:38+00:00

Activists Demand Matt Walsh’s ‘Johnny The Walrus’ Be Removed As Amazon’s Top ‘LGBTQ+’ Book

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-11T19:07:09+00:00

California school district reportedly encourages using witchcraft on people who say 'all lives matter'

A California school district reportedly removed a link to resources that, among other things, outlined how to cast a spell on people who said things like "all lives matter."

That content was included as part of a Google Drive for a "Black Lives Matter Resource Guide." A document on "Writing Prompts on Police Brutality and Racist Violence" encourages high school students to write a "curse" for police and others.

"Hexing people is an important way to get out anger and frustration. Make a list of specific people who have been agents of police terror or global brutality," it reads.

"This list can be wide-ranging, from small microaggressions to larger perpetrators (i.e., people who say ‘all lives matter’ to the police officers who arrest non violent protestors to George Zimmerman). Pick one of those people on your list."

It adds: "Read Martin Espada’s poem 'For the Jim Crow Restaurant in Cambridge Massachusetts Where My Cousin Esteban was Forbidden To Wait Tables Because He Wears Dreadlocks.' Write your own hex poem, cursing that person." Another prompt asks students to imagine a world "with no police."

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-11T17:57:56+00:00

Facebook boasts about new AI-based censorship

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-11T00:13:09+00:00

The Media’s Color-Coded Parenting Standard: White parents of school shooters are culpable; black parents of inner-city gangbangers are blameless.

On April 19, 2021, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski suggested in a text to Chicago’s mayor that the parents of two children recently killed in Chicago’s gang activity had “failed those kids.” Kempczinski’s text became public in November 2021, prompting widespread accusations of racism and calls for his resignation. Kempczinski confessed to his white privilege and apologized profusely for holding parents responsible for the fate of their children.

On December 3, a district attorney in Michigan filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of Ethan Crumbley. The 15-year-old Crumbley allegedly killed four fellow students during a shooting rampage at his Oxford, Michigan high school on November 30. The prosecutor based her indictment of Crumbley’s parents on the fact that they had allowed Ethan to access a legally purchased handgun and ought to have known that the boy was primed to kill his classmates. The press, Democratic politicians, and gun control advocates greeted the homicide charges against the Crumbley parents with ecstatic approbation.

The divergent reactions to the Kempczinski text message and the Crumbleys’ indictment illuminate the different standards to which minority parents and white parents are held. When black juveniles perpetrate street violence, the press and public officials almost never ask: where were the parents? The less involved a parent is in a child’s life, the less society expects of him. These double standards may have a benign intent, but they enable a cultural dysfunction whose effects are thousands of times more lethal than school shootings.

Kempczinski made his ill-fated suggestion of parental responsibility after seven-year-old Jaslyn Adams was gunned down by her father’s gang rivals. Jaslyn and her father Jontae Adams were parked in a McDonald’s drive-thru lane on Chicago’s West Side on April 18, 2021, when two gunmen jumped out of a car and unleashed at least 45 shots at their car. Jaslyn was struck six times and died; Jontae was seriously wounded. A convicted heroin dealer, Jontae knew that his gang’s enemies were out for his blood. The day before the shooting, he tweeted: “Opps probably downstairs waiting on me.”

[...]

Kempczinski would pay the price for saying the unsayable. After activists obtained and released the text message in November, a coalition including Color of Change and Showing Up for Racial Justice released an open letter to the CEO: “Your text message was ignorant, racist and unacceptable coming from anyone,” the letter read, “let alone the CEO of McDonald’s, a company that spends big money to market to communities of color and purports to stand with Black Lives.” McDonald’s employees and race advocates protested outside the company’s headquarters and demanded reparations. U.S. representative Bobby Rush joined calls for Kempczinski to resign. A McDonald’s worker told a local TV station that Kempczinski was “putting the blame on parents for the violence in the streets. He can’t relate because he is wealthy.” Jaslyn Adams’s mother, heretofore a cipher, emerged from her obscurity to vent her anger: “How dare you judge me! . . . You come from privilege. You can’t speak about me.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-10T22:58:24+00:00

Superintendent says Detroit schools 'deeply using critical race theory'

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-10T17:47:37+00:00

‘Internet Do Your Thang’: School District ‘Racial Equity’ Official Resigns After Doxxing White Parents Fighting Vaccine Mandate

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-10T17:09:34+00:00

Wow, Media Openly Advising Public to Use The Safari Rules When Entering Democrat Municipal Regions

An inevitable evolution now takes place as rampant crime, violence and anarchy take over the municipal regions controlled by leftists and Democrats. What is described, in the video excerpt from ABC news in Maryland, is what we have described as the “Safari Rules.”

As stunning as it may seem at first glance, the media are informing the public on how to behave when entering any area were Democrats are in charge of civil society. It is important not to accept this new normal; instead think about this broadcast in the larger picture of what it represents. The media no longer question if you will be attacked; the media are now advising us on how to mitigate our pending attack. The attack itself is a foregone conclusion.

The deeper blue the region, the more dangerous the crime within it. This is the natural outcome of policy on a local level that allows criminal elements to operate without fear or accountability. Smash and grab robberies, armed robberies, carjacking, looting and the general breakdown of law and order is well underway in the municipal regions under the control of the Democrat Party apparatus.

These outcomes are the natural cause and effect from leftist policy being carried out. This is exactly the type of social anarchy that is predictable from a process of demonizing law enforcement, promoting social justice and letting the criminal elements within society take over.

The evolution of the Safari Rules has been ongoing for several years; however, now it appears the point of no return has been crossed. The situation is no longer reversible because the law enforcement mechanisms have been deconstructed entirely. Additionally, the application of law and consequence has been withdrawn from the system.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJlpsu3sLMw

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-10T00:09:37+00:00

Jussie Smollett Trial Live Updates: Actor Found Guilty in Fake Hate Crime Case

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-09T18:47:22+00:00

Closures and Consequences: Politicians in both parties, but especially Democrats, need to understand just how unpopular school shutdowns are with parents.

School closures are persisting, and not just because of Covid-19. Across the country, officials have closed schools to solve other, long-standing issues that predate the pandemic. As education site The 74 has reported, 621 schools across 58 districts announced new closures, many of which weren’t virus-related, during the last full week of November. Burbio, a data company that has monitored school reopening patterns during the pandemic, has identified nearly 1,000 school districts that have enacted temporary closures during the 2021–22 school year. Reasons for these sudden disruptions have ranged from teacher burnout to mental health and staff shortages; some officials have even justified closures by citing the need to perform “deep cleanings” of school facilities, despite scant evidence that Covid is transmitted via surfaces.

These school closures aren’t just gratuitous—they’re having political consequences. Our research suggests that if they continue, they could be devastating for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections.

Before reviewing the data, consider the attitudes that surfaced in a Virginia focus group held after that state’s gubernatorial race. Several participants—women who lean Democratic and supported both Ralph Northam in 2017 and Joe Biden in 2020 but voted for Glenn Youngkin in 2021—cited school closures as their main motivation for supporting Youngkin. As many parents saw it, the so-called laptop class was insulated from the costs of prolonged school shutdowns, while those parents who work outside the home struggled to balance their own jobs and their kids’ education. As The Intercept reported:

The anger [these voters] felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s COVID-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. . . . One Latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents. . . . As she put it: “They asked us [parents] to do all this work for months and then [McAuliffe] says it’s none of our business now.”

What are the political consequences of this frustration? Across Virginia’s 132 school districts, we examined Youngkin’s performance relative to Donald Trump’s in 2020, in an effort to assess the effect of district school closures. As the figure below clearly shows, school closures were associated with significant movement toward the Republican candidate. In districts with local public schools open for less than a full month of in-person learning, Youngkin outperformed Trump by nearly 2 percentage points. When we controlled for other factors that could explain Youngkin’s overperformance—such as the percentage of the eligible electorate that is white in each school district and the district’s baseline level of support for Trump in 2020—the margin narrowed, but school closures still explained anywhere from one-half to one percentage point of Youngkin’s overperformance in a given locality.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-09T17:40:08+00:00

The Turn: When I saw the left give up everything I believe in, I changed politically. You can, too.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-09T01:21:26+00:00

Is math education racist? Debate rages over changes to how US teaches the subject: Bold recommendations to make math more inclusive are blowing up the world of math education. Opponents say the movement effectively dumbs down math.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-08T23:37:25+00:00

Doctors Warn New Medical School Guidance Would Lead to Unqualified Physicians and Unscientific Medicine

The two accrediting bodies for American medical schools now say that meritocracy is "malignant" and that race has "no genetic or scientific basis," positions that many doctors worry will lower standards of care and endanger lives by discouraging vital genetic testing.

The Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits all medical schools in North America, is cosponsored by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)—the same groups that on Oct. 30 released a controversial guide to "advancing health equity" through "language, narrative, and concepts."

Those concepts include the ideas that "individualism and meritocracy" are "malignant narratives" that "create harm," that using race as a proxy for genetics "leads directly to racial health inequities," and that medical vulnerability is the "result of socially created processes" rather than biology.

Integrating these ideas into medicine, five professors and practicing doctors told the Washington Free Beacon, would be a catastrophe, resulting in underqualified doctors, missed diagnoses, and unscientific medical school curricula.

The guidance won't just influence the way doctors talk, these practitioners said, but also what they know and how they treat patients. It could even make them unwilling to screen racial minorities for serious conditions—including many types of cancer—that they are more likely to inherit, on the mistaken belief that genes play no role in racial health disparities.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-08T18:47:55+00:00

Judge Halts Biden Vaccine Mandate For Federal Contractors

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-08T17:51:16+00:00

GA Mom Says Rittenhouse’s “Bad” Parents Are To Blame; She Is Then Killed By Her Own Son On Thanksgiving

A Georgia family is still in shock as on Thanksgiving, Marcia Chance, 42, was fatally stabbed by her own son. Arriving on the scene, police found Chance inside a Lawrenceville home, on the floor – lifeless.

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Having received reports of domestic assault, the Gwinnett County police arrested her 18-year-old son, Varian Alexander Hibbert, who was living at the residence and charged him with felony murder and possession of a knife during the commission of a felony.

While this is of course a tragic event for a family, days before her untimely death, Chance took to social media to blast the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and how his “bad” parents were to blame.

It should come as no surprise that the mainstream media is only reporting on the fact that Chance was murdered by her son. But in the video, which is featured below, host Greg Foreman of Black Conservative Perspective, dives deeper into the life of Chance and what she was doing the days leading up to her death.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-08T03:58:55+00:00

New Zealand Prime Minister: Mandatory bi-annual Covid-19 vaccinations “have no end point”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-08T00:03:38+00:00

Ontario union votes two extra days off for black employees only

An Ontario union has voted overwhelmingly and without debate to allow black employees two extra days of mental health leave to deal with the impact of “anti-black racism.”

True North had previously reported that the Association of Management, Administrative and Professional Crown Employees (AMAPCEO) was considering the motion for its annual conference.

The chairperson of AMAPCEO’s black caucus, Elaine Spencer, claimed this coverage “demonized” black employees and provided all the more reason to give her members special consideration.

“Many of our members have volunteered their time to combat the anti-racism struggle in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) and that has led to burnout, a tremendous amount of re-lived traumas and exhaustion,” she said.

The motion was pushed through with no debate and no indication of the vote tally after considerable discussion ensued in response to a similar black caucus motion.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-07T17:09:55+00:00

Google promises to censor “misinformation” during French presidential election

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-07T07:45:58+00:00

George Floyd’s Nephew Arrested for Intimidation of Kyle Rittenhouse Jurors

A man who’s been identified as both a relative, close friend, and nephew of the deceased George Floyd was arrested sometime on Thursday for alleged intimidation of jurors assigned to Kyle Rittenhouse’s homicide trial, having previously threatened to publicly identify jurors and expose them to violence and harassment. Cortez Rice was reportedly arrested Monday in accordance with a warrant accusing him of communicating with jurors.

Leftist militants immediately proceeded to raise money for Rice’s bail.

It’s unclear at this time of Rice was arrested for the threats made in his video uploaded during the Rittenhouse trial, or subsequent jury intimidation following Rittenhouse’s acquittal. Considering Rice’s warrant alleged communication with jurors, it’s possible Rice either encouraged or communicated with jurors themselves subsequent to the trial.

Cortez Rice, who has variously been identified as a associate and relative of the armed robbery convict Floyd, previously threatened to identify Rittenhouse jurors during the trial in a social media video.

“I ain’t even gonna name the people that I know that’s up in the Kenosha trial. But it’s cameras in there. It’s definitely cameras up in there. There’s definitely people taking pictures of the juries and everything like that,”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-07T01:28:37+00:00

Oregon Governor Spotted Maskless At D.C. Gala, Despite Pushing Permanent Mask Mandate In Her State

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-06T17:48:00+00:00

Parent group files civil rights complaint against NYC Public Schools for segregating students by race

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-06T17:04:18+00:00

Go woke, go broke? Americans don’t care for corporate activism

A new warning to woke CEOs: Americans don’t want corporations meddling in divisive political issues, and they perceive such activism as phony pandering. There’s also a huge gap between what consumers believe about woke activism compared with out-of-touch executives, according to a study conducted by the Brunswick Group, a management firm.

Amazon yanks a documentary about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. EBay scraps Dr. Seuss books. Disney fires actress Gina Carano. Do consumers agree with these moves?

Brunswick found 63 percent of corporate executives “agree unequivocally that companies should speak out on social issues,” but a mere 36 percent of voters agree. Corporate brass also has “a highly inflated sense of how effective corporate communication has been on social issues compared to voters.”

An overwhelming 74 percent of business executives think corporate activism is effective, compared with just 39 percent of voters. Companies spend billions of dollars building brand equity through marketing campaigns. Turns out their virtue-signaling could be counterproductive because voters believe it’s inauthentic.

The study found more than 60 percent of voters think “companies only speak out on social issues to look better to consumers and are not being sincere,” even as 57 percent of executives said companies “speak out on social issues because they want to achieve real change.”

Archive.org is misbehaving, will replace with archive link later.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-06T06:11:43+00:00

Next Step for the Parents’ Movement: Curriculum Transparency

The last year and a half has demonstrated the need for transparency measures. As many public schools migrated to “virtual only” learning in response to the pandemic, parents received a first-hand look at the divisive, racialist curricula being taught to their children. They learned that public schools were forcing third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, showing kindergarteners dramatizations of dead black children and warning them about “racist police,” and telling white teachers that they were guilty of “spirit murdering” minorities. These were not isolated incidents.

These revelations prompted parents to demand to know exactly what was being taught to their children. They felt that the public-school bureaucracies had been hiding controversial materials and exerting undue influence over their children, all in the service of fashionable left-wing ideologies.

Frustrated parents understandably pushed back, protested at school board meetings, and, in some cases, forced the resignations of school superintendents who refused to listen to their concerns. School officials often responded to parents’ concerns with resentment. Some were so agitated by the parental pushback that they sought federal intervention—including through a well-publicized (and since retracted) letter from the National School Boards Association comparing parents to “domestic terrorists.” Other school officials insisted that they, not parents and not voters, should be in charge of children’s pedagogy. This is precisely backward. While government schools necessarily cannot meet every parent’s demands, parents have a fundamental right, long recognized in law, to guide their children’s education and moral conscience. To exercise those rights, parents need accurate information about the learning materials and activities their kids are encountering in government schools.

Our model for transparency adequately balances the needs for robust curricula and parents’ rights in a pluralistic society. It does not attempt to define specific concepts, methods, or ideologies. Nor does it seek to ban, restrict, or discourage any materials, activities, or pedagogies. Its aim is simply to provide parents with information about the curricula used in the classroom across all subjects—and to let families, teachers, and schools negotiate disagreements at the local level. If they cannot resolve their differences, parents have options: petition elected leaders or run for school board seats themselves, move to a different area, or remove their children from the public school system.

According to the Education Liberty Alliance, 11 states already have state-law provisions for parental review of curricular material. Legislatures in Utah, Arizona, and Wisconsin have recently seen bills introduced to require online access. More states will surely follow.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-05T21:52:09+00:00

REEEEEE! Supply Chain Crisis Leads To Shortage Of Chicken Tenders, Second Chicken Shortage In 2021

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-05T21:01:49+00:00

[Glenn Greenwald] To Deny the "Lab Leak" COVID Theory, the NYT and WPost Use Dubious and Conflicted Sources: A bizarre and abrupt reversal by scientists regarding COVID's origins, along with clear conflicts of interest, create serious doubts about their integrity. Yet major news outlets keep relying on them.

For months, that letter shaped the permissible range of debate regarding the origins of COVID. Or, more accurately, it ensured that there was no debate permitted. The Science™ concluded that COVID was a zoonotic virus that naturally leaped from non-human animal to human, and any questioning of this decree was deemed an attack on The Science™.

That Lancet letter has fallen into disrepute due to the key role in its publication played by one of its signatories, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance. To say that Daszak had a gigantic but undisclosed conflict of interest in disseminating this narrative about the natural origins of COVID is to understate the case. Daszak had received millions of dollars in grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to conduct research into coronaviruses in bats, and EcoHealth awarded part of that grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab which would be the leading suspect, by far, for any COVID lab leak.

Daszak's enormous self-interest in leading the world to believe that a lab leak was impossible is obvious. It would be a likely career-ending blow to his reputation if the Wuhan laboratory to which EcoHealth had provided funding for coronavirus bat research was responsible for the escape of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world and caused enduring suffering among countless others due to lockdowns and economic shutdowns.

In July of this year, The Lancet published a new letter from the same group which signed that seminal letter in February of last year. The July 2021 letter included two fundamentally new additions. First, the language about COVID's origins was radically softened from the smug certainty of the February letter that closed debate to humble uncertainty given the lack of proof. While continuing to affirm a belief that COVID was naturally occurring (“our working view” is “that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in nature and not in a laboratory"), they moved far away from the definitive posture of that original letter, acknowledging that “opinions are neither data nor conclusions” and urging further investigation on what they called “the critical question we must address now": namely, “how did SARS-CoV-2 reach the human population?” In other words, after telling the world in February that any questioning of the zoonotic origin was a malicious "conspiracy theory,” they now acknowledge it is “the critical question we must now address.”

The other major change was that this July Lancet letter included what the February letter shamefully omitted: namely, the key fact that Daszak's “remuneration is paid solely in the form of a salary from EcoHealth Alliance,” and that EcoHealth had received funding from NIH to study coronaviruses in bats, and used some of that funding to support research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This disclosed conflict of interest about Daszak was included in the new July, 2021 letter as well as a separate “addendum” called “competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.” No explanation was provided about why these "competing interests” on the part of Daszak were not disclosed in that crucial, debate-closing February letter in the The Lancet.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-04T21:22:40+00:00

BLM mob accuses white mother-of-three, 52, of being the 'new Kyle Rittenhouse' after she sent 50 of them flying across Third Avenue when they 'attacked her car' during 2020 protests: She rejects six-day community service plea deal and demands TRIAL

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-03T23:14:27+00:00

Not My Kids: Recovering victims of woke abuse have had enough.

Women who get out of abusive relationships sometimes say that what gave them the courage to finally leave was the recognition that the abuser had turned his attention to her children. Actions that were overlooked or excused away for herself are seen with clarity and horror when directed at her child.

For years, many of us have overlooked woke manipulation tactics when they were directed at us. “Ok, maybe I have harbored some deep-seated racism of which I have been entirely unaware, and which has never manifested itself in any concrete, culpable act. Mea culpa anyway! I will raise my fist and take a knee, say the words I am supposed to say, be silent when told, and commit to doing the lifelong work of constantly interrogating my inner world for subconscious biases, knowing that I will always be complicit in evil because I am white. Can I go about my business? Or would you like to do a social justice riot on it?

“And yes, corporate overlords, every June please do send me an email from every company I’ve ever patronized telling me to enjoy a transgender burrito at your business, or to #rideproud on your exercise bicycle, and scoop up my ‘love is love’ non-binary tote bag. Such gestures of celebration are the least I can do to compensate for my hegemonic bigotry. I am a bit uncomfortable with the idea that some women have penises so perhaps I deserve this.”

But such coercive manipulation was never supposed to stop with adults, and in fact they were just grooming you to get at your kid.

It is an effective strategy. When transgender story hours garnered national attention, many stared quizzically at videos of woke moms across America clapping and nodding while little Ashleigh and Aster learned to twerk from men in heels and minis at the local library.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-03T22:22:20+00:00

Here Comes the Limited Hangout: America’s Nixonian press corps takes a page from the Watergate playbook to try and cover up its active role in the criminal Russiagate hoax

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-03T15:25:23+00:00

Why Woke Organizations All Sound the Same

A more immediate form of coercive isomorphism pushing schools toward wokeness is accreditation. As Aaron Sibarium reported for the Washington Free Beacon, the National Association of Independent Schools exercises a quasi-governmental role as the accreditation board for top prep schools. NAIS mandates ever more strenuous and belligerent diversity programs so that a school that wants to remain in the club of elite prep schools—with all the prestige and resources that implies—must ratchet wokeness ever upward.

Normative isomorphism means that skilled professionals shape the field toward their expectations. In its original formulation, normative isomorphism meant professionals shaping organizations to act how they learned an organization ought to when they were in graduate school. In this light, it’s worth noting that schools of education have been extremely woke for a generation, far before the rest of the culture, so teachers and administrators have imbibed the doctrine that social justice is inextricably a part of the mission of educational institutions.

In the era of the Great Awokening, it’s increasingly clear that employee activism is a powerful force for shaping firm behavior. For instance, Apoorva Ghosh recently demonstrated in Socio-Economic Review that employee LGBT caucuses are the most important explanation for why corporate America began covering gender transition in employee health plans. As wokeness has rapidly gained popularity with college-educated liberals, they have demanded that their workplaces reflect their values on the “antiracism” movement. Elite prep schools are no different.

Mimetic isomorphism is the tendency of organizations to model their behavior on industry leaders. A practice derives its prestige from association with prestigious organizations. For instance, the private education diversity-consulting firm Pollyanna proudly lists 77 of America’s top high schools as clients. This sends the message that any school that considers itself a peer of Harvard-Westlake or Dalton should hope that Pollyanna is willing to take them on as a client. Pollyanna also illustrates the other two isomorphisms: coercive, since NAIS demands that prep schools hire them; and normative, as consulting agencies are by nature.

Neo-institutionalism helps explain why we see organizations engage in practices that don’t serve the bottom line. Ultimately, legitimacy trumps efficacy. Suppose that you’re a manager who reads the academic literature, sees that the heavy-handed self-criticism styles of sexual-harassment or racial-diversity training are somewhere between useless and counterproductive, and proposes canceling next year’s training. Legal is going to complain that this will look bad if you face a wrongful-dismissal suit anytime soon. And some of your biggest contracts require that co-located employees from your firm have to be certified as having received the training. Many employees will complain that they expect the firm to express their values, which includes holding seminars featuring “privilege walks” to reaffirm the firm’s commitment to ending white supremacy and other forms of domination. These stakeholders will point to the fact that all your leading rivals in the industry hold such seminars; it is a “best practice.” So you go on propitiating the gods, even knowing full well that they don’t exist, because everyone around you believes in the spirits and even more so in the rituals that honor them and would consider neglect of such piety a sign of illegitimate leadership.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-03T02:42:31+00:00

DeSantis: ‘Big Tech Has Become The Censorship Arm Of The Democratic Party’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-02T23:37:54+00:00

NYC's Tenement Museum faces backlash after it REPLACES story of white Irish immigrants with woke tale of black New Jersey family who never even lived in the Lower East Side building

The Tenement Museum is facing backlash for scrubbing the history of the white immigrants who inhabited the building on Manhattan's Lower East Side with stories about black and other races that never stepped foot in its now-hallowed hallways.

Chief among the complaints is the museum replacing the story of an Irish family who resided at the building at 103 Orchard Street in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with that of a black man - who worked near the building and lived in New Jersey for much of his life.

When the museum opened in 1988, it was devoted to re-creating the immigrant experience of the more than 7,000 people who inhabited the 22 apartments in the five-story building during the 19th and 20th centuries.

During that time period, the inhabitants mirrored that of the nation's migration, beginning with the influx of Irish, then German, then Jewish and finally Italian immigrants. There is no historical evidence any black people lived in the cramped quarters of the building during that time period.

However, the museum has decided to set up one apartment in the tenement museum to re-create how a black man named Joseph Moore, and his wife, Rachel, lived at the time, and is revising all of its apartment tours to examine how race and racism shaped the opportunities of white immigrants.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-02T17:29:24+00:00

‘Metastasizing Like A Cancer’ — Parents Across The Country Sue Schools Over Clandestine Transitions

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-02T16:57:09+00:00

At UT-Austin, teaching white 4-year-olds that they’re racist is funded by taxpayer dollars

Here, with GoKar, the university actively chose to provide $100,000 of state money to engage in political persuasion aimed at 4- and 5-year-olds based on the claim that it would be too late to wait until they are adults, or even slightly more mature children, to get them to come around to the political views of the researchers.

GoKar is just one, though a particularly egregious, case of UT-Austin diverting money intended for the support of teaching and research to political activism.

The provost’s DEI grants provide a laundry list of such diversions, with many not even having the pretense of research projects. I assure you there is no equivalent list of provost grants to promote alternative perspectives on any of these DEI issues.

The diversion of state resources to political advocacy through bureaucratic means, with extreme resistance to outside monitoring or oversight by the democratically elected branches of government, is not an exercise in academic freedom but instead a grave threat to the free exchange of ideas.

If certain ideas are so advantaged through government support, as they are at universities, both through state appropriations being diverted and through direct federal programs, then we do not have a true marketplace of ideas.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-02T16:35:39+00:00

GP, 31, who called woman 'a venomous transphobic bigot' and said 'Cis people are just awful' as he used Twitter to abuse people who opposed to his pro-transgender views, has his registration suspended

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-02T15:21:22+00:00

Waukesha Killings Make the Media Colorblind Again: The contrast with the Kyle Rittenhouse case illustrates the double standard.

The Biden administration has picked up where the Obama administration left off. The unwarranted racialization of the Kyle Rittenhouse saga, which concerned one white man shooting three other whites, was a clumsy attempt by President Biden and his allies to further a narrative about bias in the criminal justice system. To their credit, jurors stuck to the facts of the case and Mr. Rittenhouse was acquitted, but liberals and their friends in the media are playing a dangerous game when they selectively invoke race to advance a political agenda.

The same press outlets that portrayed Mr. Rittenhouse as a white supremacist have had remarkably little to say about the racial identity of Darrell Brooks, the black suspect in Wisconsin who is accused of plowing his car through an annual Christmas parade last month and killing six people, including an 8-year-old boy, all of whom were white. Given the suspect’s history of posting messages on social media that called for violence against white people and praised Hitler for killing Jews, you’d think that his race and the race of his victims would be relevant to reporters. Race is all anyone would be talking about if a white man had slammed his vehicle into a parade full of black people. Yet suddenly the left has gone colorblind.

Liberals want us to believe that racial disparities in police shootings and incarceration rates stem from a biased system and have little to do with racial disparities in criminality. They want to talk about so-called hate crimes that involve white assailants and black victims, but not those involving black assailants and white or Asian victims. They want headlines to read “White Cop Shoots Black Suspect,” even when there’s no evidence that the encounter was racially motivated. This is playing with fire.

“Once we go down this road and get into the habit of racializing such events, we may not be able to contain that racialization,” said Brown University economist Glenn Loury in a recent speech for the Manhattan Institute. “Soon enough, we may find ourselves in a world of instances where black thugs killing white citizens come to be seen though a racial lens as well. This is a world no thoughtful person should welcome since there are a great many such instances.”

The political left’s hyperconsciousness about race might help Democrats turn out their base, but at a steep cost. National cohesion in a country as large and ethnically diverse as this one has always depended on our ability to focus not on our superficial differences but instead on what unites us as Americans. The sooner we start choosing political leaders who understand this—and punishing the ones who don’t—the better off we’ll be.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-02T01:53:59+00:00

‘Digressive Victimhood’: Leftists Make Up Another Buzzword To Call People Racist

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-01T23:35:36+00:00

New York’s Parent Revolt: An activist fighting Bill de Blasio’s plan to scrap merit-based K-12 programs looks back on the last three years.

Asian-American parents of gifted students have not traditionally been an activist constituency. But Mayor Bill de Blasio’s attempts to remove merit from the equation for New York City’s specialized high schools and gifted programs brought a forceful response from those whose children would be affected. Beginning in 2018, many parents—especially, but not exclusively, Asian-Americans—entered the political arena for the first time. Three years later, we have secured some important victories: Asian-Americans made their voices heard in the 2021 elections, incoming mayor Eric Adams has shown signs that he understands these parental concerns, and even de Blasio has expressed some regret for his handling of the issue. But if resistance to these plans largely succeeded in making the mayor back down, progressives haven’t given up the fight to make the specialized schools more “equitable”—or, rather, to equalize outcomes. The fight, in which I have been deeply involved, continues.

With a budget of $38 billion, the New York City Department of Education spends $46,000 per student, triple the U.S. average. But the DOE makes every excuse to avoid accountability for its failures. Its continued attacks on certain students based on their race imperils the accelerated learning opportunities that are often the only reason for families to stay in the city’s public school system.

[...]

The attack on the specialized high schools was only one of many attacks on education during the months before the lawsuit was announced in December 2018. The issue was affecting not only Chinese-Americans but also Koreans, Bangladeshis (the fastest-growing group in specialized high schools), Russians, and all who worked hard but did not fall into the administration’s favored groups. This was an assault on all; alliances needed to be built. Non-Asians had to meet with Asians.

The specialized high schools were just a starting point. After a meeting mid-summer between Chinese groups and a multiethnic group of parent and alumni leaders, CEC2 and Stuyvesant school leadership team member John Keller said ominously to me that city hall’s next targets would be the gifted programs and screened schools. I agreed. Parents had to decide: would you fight to save your kids’ chance at opportunity, or vote with your feet?

Under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the DOE was pursuing a path of division, exclusion, and intolerance. Defenders of the system argued that K-8 should be fixed for all students, but the DOE strategy, with Chancellor Carranza leading the charge, was different: to eliminate objective standards, gifted programs, and screened schools; to ignore basic academic skills; to allow for grade fraud so that failing students could pass; to prioritize identity over education; to move children around so that schools could be brought down to the same level; and to call anyone disagreeing with these policies racist.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-01T16:47:11+00:00

School Closures Aren’t Just for Covid Anymore: Remote learning turns out to be an easy fix for other problems—never mind the huge educational costs.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-01T14:23:44+00:00

EU wants to ban the word ‘Christmas’: The terms Miss and Mrs. as well as standard Christian names like John and Mary need to go in the name of inclusiveness

The European Commission wants to erase all references to Christmas along with all gendered terms, according to a recent internal document obtained by Italian daily Il Giornale.

According to the document “Union Of Equality. European Commission Guidelines for Inclusive Communication,” in the future any references to gendered terms such as “workrmen or policemen” must be avoided. That means the use of a masculine pronoun as a predefined pronoun is forbidden along with any attempts to organize discussions with only one represented gender (only men or only women). It is also forbidden to use “Miss or Mrs” the person referred to requires it explicitly.

It doesn’t end there, either. The new rules mean the expression “Ladies and gentlemen,” to address the public is not permitted at a conference. Instead, only the term “dear colleagues,” will be allowed. A desire to cancel the male and female gender reaches paradoxical levels when the Commission writes that it is necessary to avoid using expressions such as “fire is the greatest invention of man” but the fair way to say it is “fire is the greatest invention of humanity.”

The European Commission is also keen to “avoid considering that everyone is Christian,” therefore “not everyone celebrates the Christmas holidays (…) we must be sensitive to the fact that people have different religious traditions.” However, there is a huge difference between respecting all religions and being ashamed or erasing the Christian roots that are the basis of Europe and our identity.

In the name of inclusiveness, the European Commission goes so far as to “cancel Christmas” by inviting us not to use the phrase “the Christmas period can be stressful” but to say “the holidays can be stressful.” A desire to eliminate Christianity that goes further with the recommendation to use “generic names” instead of “Christian names” therefore, instead of “Mary and John are an international couple,” one should say “Malika and Giulio are an international couple”.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-12-01T00:18:48+00:00

Catholic Employee Sues Pro-Abortion Labor Union For Forcing Her To Fund Activism

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-30T19:55:35+00:00

Baby Book Wars: Kids' lit gets lit.

When the frizzy-haired Marxists at my local library start ranting about seizing the means of production, they’re not talking about factories anymore. They’re talking about you, your womb, and its output.

We have put childless despots like this in positions of authority over our kids. They have cleverly figured out that their great nihilistic cultural project requires your children to see it through to the end. And they are coming for them. You can hear the plains vibrating as the great galloping horde approacheth your elementary school.

After all, their harebrained schemes will only work if they can fool a large majority of people to do what they say. You, dear reader, are too smart to fall for their lies! But three-year-olds? Those idiots will believe anything.

Just look around. From the outside, these creatures look normal: young bookstore clerks heaping tables full of rainbow flags and Margaret Sanger hagiographies, lumpy school board officials quietly slipping descriptions of “extreme bestiality and pornography” into middle-grade curricula, feminist librarians proudly displaying Transgender Toddler board books and other government propaganda on the low racks so little kids can easily see them.

Do not be fooled by a Regime functionary’s harmless outward appearance! They are harpies who have swooped into every burgh and barn. They peer at you through jealous eyes as you push your stroller through the park, rubbing their claws together and snapping their beaks as they hatch their plans to ensnare your kids. When I think of these wretched people, I think of Quentin Blake’s drawings for Roald Dahl books like The Witches and The Twits, the evil giants in The BFG, or Giant Peach James’s horrible spinster aunts.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-30T19:31:40+00:00

U Penn Swimmer Competed As Male For 3 Years. Now Dominating Women’s Competitions Identifying As Female

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-30T16:55:46+00:00

School Board Meeting Ends Early When Parents Applaud Man's 'Racist' Comments

The man, who identified himself only as Mark from Gladstone, accused the Bernards Township School Board of "teaching our kids about race and how to hate each other."

"This is horrible: teaching our kids about race, how to hate each other," the man said. "Teach white kids, 'Oh, you got to give up your opportunity, if you get one, and give it to somebody of color.' And then we teach the kids of color, 'It doesn't matter how good your are. You're brown, so you just get.'"

"Nobody seems to care about these kids anymore," the man continued. "It's all about virtue signaling. It's all about politics and it's all about hating Donald Trump, anyone that's a conservative or a Republican. ... You want to talk about racism and being called names? It's called 'toughen up.' It's called 'grow a set.'"

[...]

Board member Ruchika Hira spoke against the man's comments near the meeting's end.

"I am beyond upset to the point I really want to wait to respond," she said according to the news website Patch. "What is the most upsetting part is someone did come up here and made racist comments. They basically said our children should learn to 'grow a set' and you know what the community members did? They clapped, and that to me is appalling."

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-30T16:41:18+00:00

Australia proposes law that would ban online anonymity to curb “defamation”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-30T15:13:33+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] Racial Disparities in the SATs Are Exactly What Antiracists Should Predict: it's implied by their most elementary observations of the world

The SAT is officially gone from the University of California because ~~they’re desperate to reduce the Asian student population~~ they want greater racial diversity. Many prominent liberals have celebrated this news, largely because they already went to college and don’t mind pulling up that ladder behind them. (Also a lot of them didn’t get the scores they wanted and never got over it.) Unfortunately for them, essentially all educational metrics show the racial and income stratification that the SAT shows. That includes GPA, which the people who complain about the SAT constantly nominate as an alternative to… the racial and income stratification of the SAT!

Note too that this is before adjustment via the black-box algorithms that elite universities use to adjust for the inherent noise in GPA. (I say again: some big-time publication should absolutely send someone to report that story out for a year. It’s an area of major public interest in which the industry works under remarkable secrecy.) It’s such an audaciously dishonest conversation that we’re having, attacking one quantitative indicator for demonstrating the same dynamics as the quantitative indicator that’s been nominated to replace it. But then, of course GPA and SAT data agree. It would be bizarre and concerning if the SAT did not agree with GPA data, NAEP data, state standardized test data, attendance and behavioral data, data from academic research, and sundry other educational data that shows these racial and income dynamics. The SAT showing racial and income stratification isn’t a mark of the SAT’s weakness but of its strength. That the SAT demonstrates these effects shows that the test is accurately measuring its construct. It can’t assess the broader sociopolitical conditions that created this dynamic, nor their fairness, as it wasn’t designed to do that.

Now, I suppose my saying that the SAT and other metrics show that poorer students and Black and Hispanic students are genuinely less prepared (on average) would inflame the sensibilities of people who identify as antiracists. But I find that strange - such students being held back in the classroom by structural disadvantage would seem to fit perfectly well with the antiracist worldview. Antiracists (an obnoxious term but let’s roll with it) will tell you that many Black students face all manner of disadvantages in life that can depress their academic performance, and they are correct to do so. But then isn’t it profoundly odd that they’re so angry at the SAT for demonstrating the outcome of that disadvantage? If the test shows Black and poor students struggling, it’s only an indicator of precisely the conditions they think are real and meaningful and troubling. Why would they want to silence that indicator? How does it help them?

You could say that this just proves that we need muscular affirmative action programs to help address this inequality, and I agree, with some important caveats. The first is to understand that actually-existing race-based affirmative action, in many contexts, simply serves as another means for schools to cream the students whose parents are most able to donate, as I’ve discussed here several times. If you create rules for preferential treatment you’ll get colleges that honor the letter of those rules and not the spirit and you’re just further benefiting applicants who already have a host of advantages. The second qualification is this: it’s an act of cruelty to let students you know are less prepared into your college without providing robust (and mandatory) remediation. You let them in despite worse academic preparedness than their peers; if you don’t address that lack of preparedness in a systematic fashion you’re setting them up to fail. But remediation is expensive for institutions and potentially for students if the school doesn’t agree to eat the costs. Then again, what’s the point of letting them in if they don’t get the degree, or getting them the degree if it doesn’t connote actual learning and skills?

And that gets at the essential point that while these disparities are the product of unfairness they are nevertheless real. The average Black student really does struggle more with reading and algebra etc. than the average white student, and the average rich student really does perform better than the average poor student. Again, this is absolutely what you’d expect if you have a progressive outlook on structural disadvantage. But we can’t get anywhere if we pretend that these gaps are the product of measurement error, nor by positing an immense conspiracy among millions of teachers and administrators to pretend that Black and poor students are struggling when they aren’t. In the long run, such denialism hurts precisely the students it ostensibly helps, as it does nothing to fill in the gaps of human capital under which they suffer. I have very few good things to say about old guard education reform types, but they have always been willing to look at such gaps and understand that the gaps themselves, the underlying lack of ability, are the core problem, the core injustice. Disadvantaged students struggling to get into college is a symptom, not the disease. And the SAT are merely a thermometer that diagnoses that disease.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-30T01:47:02+00:00

New Twitter CEO Wants to ‘Focus Less’ on Free Speech, Claims There’s No Distinction Between White People and Racists

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-29T18:02:18+00:00

In a Nonbinary Pronoun, France Sees a U.S. Attack on the Republic: When a French dictionary included the gender-nonspecific “iel” for the first time, a virulent reaction erupted over “wokisme” exported from American universities.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-29T17:50:01+00:00

See It: Picture Emerges of the Loudoun Rapist the Superintendent Claimed Was Not ‘Gender-Fluid’

A newly-verified picture of the Loudoun County Public Schools rapist, and a letter from the sheriff, raises fresh questions about the honesty of Superintendent Scott Ziegler in his handling of the now-notorious bathroom rape.

The picture shows the teen wearing a skirt and a girls’ shirt designed to expose cleavage, striking a feminine pose and standing in front of a rainbow flag. His hair is tied in a bun, and he is wearing a choker necklace that says “kitten” as well as rainbow socks.

The family of his victim confirmed to The Daily Wire that the boy pictured is the person who was ultimately found responsible of the ninth-grader’s rape in a girls’ bathroom at school, and that he was wearing the same feminine shirt during the assault. The assailant previously acknowledged in court that he was wearing a skirt during the rape.

LCPS officials did not tell the public, report it to the state on mandatory statistics, or remove the student from school after the May incident. On June 22, weeks after the rape, the school board discussed a proposed policy that would allow transgender students to use girls’ bathrooms. To address parents’ concerns about safety, school board member Beth Barts asked Ziegler whether there was a history of bathroom or locker room assaults.

Ziegler responded that there were no bathroom assaults of any sort on record. Barts replied that she was confused because there was a well-known locker-room incident several years prior among male athletes.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-29T16:09:27+00:00

Self-Proclaimed First Grade Teacher Boasts: ‘My Favorite Moments Are Always When My Students Ask About My Queerness’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-29T15:18:56+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] Life Goes On: we move on, from Covid or anything else, whether we want to or not

There is a new variant, apparently. I know because our newsmedia breathlessly and relentlessly reports on bad Covid news. Unfortunately, they simply refuse to report on good Covid news, at least with anything like equal scale; I invite you to investigate the archives of even the most sober of news sources and compare how they cover cases going up compared to cases going down. Meanwhile, the public health authorities react to every twist of the narrative as an excuse for more fear and greater restrictions, insisting that “an abundance of caution” is always the way to proceed. (No word on whether a correct amount of caution would be a good idea.) Meanwhile the virus does discriminate, despite what you’ve heard over and over again, and in fact it discriminates against very particular and easily-identifiable subpopulations, and most people are not among them, and so every turn of this thing that does not result in mass death and disruption for the larger populace makes that populace feel lied to by the endlessly-panicky media and the abundantly cautious public health officials. We are approaching two years of Covid-19 as a crisis and yet no one in a position of authority has seemed to put it together that the public is exquisitely sensitive to those who cry wolf. Maybe Omicron really is “the big one,” but they’ve said that about every last development in this endless story, so how would we ever know?

Meanwhile we live among a Praetorian guard of busybodies who want everyone to know that the rest of us aren’t taking Covid seriously enough. These are people who are existentially similar to the “Karen,” 2020’s favorite archetype, except that they’re used to calling other people Karens. But they are precisely that figure of clueless white deference to authority that self-nominates as the world’s hall monitor. And while they want you to mask up and vaccinate and obey other rules, what’s much more important to them than regulating your behavior is that they let you know that you don’t feel the right way about Covid. You aren’t taking it seriously enough! You aren’t frightened enough! Who told you that you ever get to go back to normal? It’s not enough that you follow the rules and perform these weird rituals that we’re all compelled to. You are damned if you want things to return to normal. To want that is the gravest sin. To prefer the before times is a mark of terrible unseriousness. Covid is not, to these people, a simple public health emergency but some sort of divine test of our character, and what is weighed in that test is not our actions or their outcomes, but our neuroses, our noble anxiety, our sacred attachment to feeling bad and wanting to go on feeling bad.

These people worship “the science” but have, shall we say, a selective understanding of it. We’ve known for a long time that it’s very hard to catch Covid outdoors, and that children face very little risk, and again most adults are vaccinated. And yet if you took your kid trick or treating a month ago there’s a Greek chorus that wants you to know that it was terribly selfish and irresponsible, and some such thing as the science says so, irrespective of what the iterative, provisional, and antagonistic rhetorical processes of epidemiology might have to say. We have created an entirely new epistemology of public health science in the past couple of years, one that is somehow not a branch of medicine or biology but of public relations. Its vectors are not pathogens but perceptions. It tracks not the spread of disease but the spread of blame.

What people of this school demand is not sound public health policy or compliance with common-sense Covid regulations, much less an end to the epidemic. (That would end the fun.) What they want is for the world to stop. They want Covid to matter so much that we all look around and realize that something is fundamentally out of order and thus grind human life to a halt, in much the same way that they said “this is NOT normal!” when Trump was elected, as if that were true, as if the world would care if it was. And thudding around in the background is the palpable sense that they are attached to this condition that they say frightens and disturbs them, that they need it, as they imagine that finally something has come along so extreme and so wrong that it will arrest the world’s progress, stopping the ride so they can get out and cluck their tongue at the ridiculousness and injustice of it all.

But the people are voting with their feet. They’re going about their lives, fitfully but unapologetically. I look around and New York is awake and alive. And the question as to whether all these people returning to normal is good or responsible or sound public health practice just isn’t relevant, isn’t meaningful. People were not going to rot in their houses forever, and this was and remains a statement of fact, not of value. The world is reawakening. Whether it should reawaken is angels dancing on the head of a pin, a trolley problem, a dorm room pass-the-bong puzzler. It can’t be answered and doesn’t matter. Time only spins forward, for good and for bad, even during a pandemic, even when THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL. No time stays special forever, and people like living life. It’s no more complicated than that.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-29T06:37:57+00:00

Leftist Arizona State U. groups demand Kyle Rittenhouse be booted from campus

Progressive student groups at Arizona State University are planning a rally this coming week to demand the expulsion of Kyle Rittenhouse from campus.

This actually might be a bit tough to accomplish given that Rittenhouse — recently acquitted of all charges in the shootings of three people (two of whom were killed) in Kenosha, Wisconsin last summer — is enrolled online.

[...]

Organizations including MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán), Students for Socialism, Students for Justice in Palestine and the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition intend to gather on December 1 to “get murderer Kyle Rittenhouse off [the] campus.”

“Even with a not-guilty verdict from a flawed ‘justice’ system — Kyle Rittenhouse is still guilty to his victims and the families of those victims,” the groups’ Instagram statement reads. “Join us to demand from ASU that these demands be met to protect students from a violent, blood-thirsty murderer.”

Those demands include that ASU withdraw Rittenhouse’s enrollment, put out a statement condemning “racist murderer” Rittenhouse and white supremacy in general, and redirect funding from campus police to the ASU Multicultural Center.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-28T16:44:26+00:00

The Cynical and Dangerous Weaponization of the "White Supremacist" Label

It continues to be staggering how media outlets which purport to explain the Rittenhouse case get caught over and over spreading utter falsehoods about the most basic facts of the case, proving they did not watch the trial or learn much about what happened beyond what they heard in passing from like-minded liberals on Twitter. There is simply no way to have paid close attention to this case, let alone have watched the trial, and believe that he carried a gun across state lines, yet this false assertion made it past numerous Post reporters, editors and fact-checkers purporting to "correct the record” about this case. Yet again, we find that the same news outlets which love to accuse others of “disinformation” — and want the internet censored in the name of stopping it — frequently pontificate on topics about which they know nothing, without the slightest concern for whether or not it is true.

Those who continue to condemn Rittenhouse as a white supremacist — including the author of The Post op-ed published four days after the paper concluded the accusation was baseless — typically point to his appearance at a bar in January, 2021, for a photo alongside members of the Proud Boys in which he was photographed making the “okay” sign gesture. That once-common gesture, according to USA Today, “has become a symbol used by white supremacists.” Rittenhouse insists that the appearance was arranged by his right-wing attorneys Lin Wood and John Pierce — whom he quickly fired and accused of exploiting him for fund-raising purposes — and that he had no idea that the people with whom he was posting for a photo were Proud Boys members ("I thought they were just a bunch of, like, construction dudes based on how they looked”), nor had he ever heard that the “OK” sign was a symbol of "white power.”

Rittenhouse's denial about this once-benign gesture seems shocking to people who spend all their days drowning in highly politicized Twitter discourse — where such a claim is treated as common knowledge — but is completely believable for the vast majority of Americans who do not. In fact, the whole point of the adolescent 4chan hoax was to convert one of the most common and benign gestures into a symbol of white power so that anyone making it would be suspect. As The New York Times recounted, the gesture has long been “used for several purposes in sign languages, and in yoga as a symbol to demonstrate inner perfection. It figures in an innocuous made-you-look game. Most of all, it has been commonly used for generations to signal 'O.K.,’ or all is well.”

But whatever one chooses to believe about that episode is irrelevant to whether these immediate declarations of Rittenhouse's "white supremacy” were valid. That bar appearance took place in January, 2021 — five months after the Kenosha shootings. Yet Rittenhouse was instantly declared to be a "white supremacist” — and by “instantly,” I mean: within hours of the shooting. “A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15,” was how Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) described Rittenhouse the next day in a mega-viral tweet; her tweet consecrated not only this "white supremacist” accusation which persisted for months, but also affirmed the falsehood that he crossed state lines with an AR-15. It does not require an advanced degree in physics to understand that his posing for a photo in that bar with Proud Boys members, flashing the OK sign, five months later in January, 2020, could not serve as a rational evidentiary basis for Rep. Pressley's accusation the day after the shootings that he was a "white supremacist,” nor could it serve as the justification for five consecutive months of national media outlets accusing him of the same. Unless his accusers had the power to see into the future, they branded him a white supremacist with no basis whatsoever — or, as The Post put it this week, “despite a lack of evidence.”

The only other “evidence” ever cited to support the rather grave accusation that this 17-year-old is a "white supremacist” were social media postings of his in which he expressed positive sentiments toward the police and then-President Trump, including with the phrase "Blue Lives Matter." That was all that existed — the entirety of the case — that led the most powerful media outlets and politicians to stamp on this adolescent's forehead the gravest accusation one can face in American culture. This is really the heart of the matter: this episode vividly demonstrates how cheapened and emptied and cynically wielded this "white supremacist" slogan has become. The oft-implicit but sometimes-explicit premise in liberal discourse is that everyone who deviates in any way from liberal dogma is a white supremacist by definition.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-28T05:56:56+00:00

Canadian landlord says tenants need to show a vaccine passport to live in building

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-27T22:12:52+00:00

Former Philly PD Commissioner: California Looting Spree Won’t Be Stopped, Will Spread Across The Country

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-27T21:07:31+00:00

Between-Group Mean Differences in Intelligence in the United States Are >0% Genetically Caused: Five Converging Lines of Evidence

Abstract

The past 30 years of research in intelligence has produced a wealth of knowledge about the causes and consequences of differences in intelligence between individuals, and today mainstream opinion is that individual differences in intelligence are caused by both genetic and environmental influences. Much more contentious is the discussion over the cause of mean intelligence differences between racial or ethnic groups. In contrast to the general consensus that interindividual differences are both genetic and environmental in origin, some claim that mean intelligence differences between racial groups are completely environmental in origin, whereas others postulate a mix of genetic and environmental causes. In this article I discuss 5 lines of research that provide evidence that mean differences in intelligence between racial and ethnic groups are partially genetic. These lines of evidence are findings in support of Spearman's hypothesis, consistent results from tests of measurement invariance across American racial groups, the mathematical relationship that exists for between-group and within-group sources of heritability, genomic data derived from genome-wide association studies of intelligence and polygenic scores applied to diverse samples, and admixture studies. I also discuss future potential lines of evidence regarding the causes of average group differences across racial groups. However, the data are not fully conclusive, and the exact degree to which genes influence intergroup mean differences in intelligence is not known. This discussion applies only to native English speakers born in the United States and not necessarily to any other human populations.

Hasn't turned up on Sci-Hub yet. Could anyone with an institutional subscription PM me a copy?

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-27T20:38:06+00:00

Austrian ruling class throws unmasked party with hit 80s band after ordering everyone else into lockdown!

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-27T18:58:02+00:00

Units of Indoctrination: A Language Arts curriculum widely used in U.S. schools ignores academic fundamentals in favor of radical pedagogy.

Few parents of school-age children would recognize the name Lucy Calkins, but her English Language Arts curriculum, Units of Study, is used in thousands of classrooms across the United States. Calkins’s curriculum is “built on critical theories,” including critical race theory (CRT), which Democrats and the media have repeatedly denied is taught in K-12 schools.

Those denials are true in a narrow sense: K-12 students aren’t reading the primary documents of CRT any more than they’re reading the works of John Dewey or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But the works of writers like Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and others directly inform Calkins’s Units of Study, which focuses on identity-based power dynamics, victimhood, white supremacy, microaggressions, and the like.

It’s hard to determine precisely how many schools use Calkins’s Units of Study. One professor of education acknowledged that publishers “aren’t very forthcoming” with this “very basic data.” The curriculum’s publisher claims that it is used in “tens of thousands of schools around the world,” and a poll from EducationWeek estimates that 16 percent of U.S. elementary school teachers use it, including, one education journalist estimates, at least 55 districts in Massachusetts. It isn’t a stretch to say that thousands of teachers rely on its lesson plans, assessments, and other materials.

One unit in particular stands out for its embrace of principles inspired by critical race theory. The opening pages of Critical Literacy: Unlocking Contemporary Fiction, meant for students in seventh through ninth grade, explain that the unit will engage with “the politics of race, class, and gender.” One activity asks students to break down “hegemonic masculinity” in the books they’re reading. Another builds “identity lenses”’ through which students can analyze various texts, including “critical race theories” and “gender theories.” References to identity pervade nearly every page of the unit. Accompanying materials declare that the curriculum is “dedicated” to teaching “critical literacies” that will “help readers investigate power.”

This unit underscores a problem far larger than a few lesson plans. It exposes a radical approach to education that pervades our schools and upends all of our former notions of what education should be, replacing the goal of fostering inquisitive, capable minds with ideologically trained readers, who already know what a text has to say. Headline-making stories of racialized “affinity groups” and “privilege walks” are only the most visible elements of this pedagogy. Other seemingly innocuous practices are also rooted in a philosophy that treats the immutable characteristics of students as their most central attributes.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-27T17:10:39+00:00

California's new educational guidelines say math is racist

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-26T23:09:56+00:00

Salvation Army Wants White Donors To Offer ‘Sincere Apology’ For Their Racism

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-26T22:05:05+00:00

New Olympic Committee Rules Essentially End Women’s Sports

After years of having very specific rules regulating testosterone levels and in what way biological males would be able to compete in women’s athletic events at the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has determined that there should be no barriers at all to men competing in women’s events. Its new ruling overturns the previous 2015 guidance, and should mean that all women everywhere, whether athletes or spectators, boycott the Olympics entirely, in every category, in every form, across the world.

The previous rules for the participation of men in women’s sports were already unfair, with male athletes having to show that their testosterone levels were below 10 nmol/liter of blood for 12 months or more. Women’s standard amount of testosterone is .09 nmol/liter of blood. Even with the application of testosterone during a British medical study, women were only able to increase to 4.3 nmol/liter. The normal, healthy range for men is 9.2 to 31.8 nmol/liter.

The new rules are couched in ideas of anti-discrimination, but they are only about not discriminating against gender-nonconforming biological males who identify as transgender and use female pronouns, and in so doing, they directly discriminate against women.

The rules say that sports organizations’ eligibility criteria should “not systematically exclude athletes from competition based on their gender identity, physical appearance, and/ or sex variations.”

Overturning the entirety of human history and understanding about biology, the IOC states that “No athlete should be precluded from competing or excluded from competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged, or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-26T21:06:06+00:00

Hillary Clinton: “lack of gatekeepers” and “misinformation” online is clouding Biden’s accomplishments

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-26T18:51:20+00:00

Ignorant and Afraid: Politicians and bureaucrats aren't immune to their own propaganda, and they really are as ill-informed as they seem.

I’ve mentioned this episode a few times: On 11 March 2020, Angela Merkel held a press conference where she remarked that the best hope was to slow the spread of SARS-2, and that 70% of Germans could be infected. The Italian lockdown was only a few days old, and it was plainly not Merkel’s intent to go down the path of mass containment. The United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and likely a few other countries too still planned for an ordinary approach to Corona, with minimal mitigations.

All the while, though, Team Lockdown was hard at work behind the scenes, to bend policy in their direction. As this leaked email from 20 March shows, German medical bureaucrats deputised by the Ministry of the Interior were soon consulting experts on how best to instil “fear and a willingness to obey in the population.”

Because Western governments doubted their capacity to enforce Chinese-style lockdowns, fomenting mass panic became a non-pharmaceutical intervention in its own right. The histrionic media messaging has continued to this day, and it has contributed to a profoundly important division in our society: There are on the one hand those people in essential roles, who have endured exposure to Corona from the beginning, and most of whom have had the virus by now. And there are on the other hand those in Martin Kulldorf’s “laptop class,” that is to say well-off urban professionals, who have spent most of the last 21 months at home, hiding from a virus that many of them believe is approximately as dangerous as SARS. Mass infections among these people are only starting to happen right now.

[...]

To the profound disappointment of Merkel and everybody like her, the vaccines have not eradicated Corona. Every day, the prospect of personal infection looms for these people as a new, uncomfortable certainty. Every day, they and the rest of the work-from-home bureaucracy become ever more terrified. The prime minister of Austria is so afraid that he has confined all unvaccinated Austrians to their homes. When asked, he declared that this measure would have no end date. The Chief Minister of Australia’s Northern Territory is terrified. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is terrified.

You know who isn’t terrified right now? Everyone outside these circles. I and many of the people I know have had Corona, and we’re not terrified. Blue-collar workers have mostly been infected, and they’re not terrified. Grocery clerks, nurses, police officers and bus drivers aren’t terrified. All of the terror is at the top, blaring down at us all of the time. All these people know they are going to get sick in the next few months, and they are railing against this reality.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-26T17:24:12+00:00

America by Gaslight: When institutions and authority figures present open questions as settled and use coercive power to get their way, the collapse of public trust is a predictable result

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-26T16:04:05+00:00

School pulls event with former Islamic State sex slave over fears it would 'foster Islamophobia'

A Canadian school has been forced to apologise after a book club event with Nadia Murad, a Nobel Prize-winner and former Islamic State sex slave, was cancelled over fears it would "foster Islamaphobia.”

Helen Fisher, the superintendent at the Toronto District School Board, voiced her concerns over Ms Murad’s ‘The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State’ and said that her students would not participate in a sit-down event with the author scheduled for February.

The move drew wide criticism, and the board has been forced to clarify that these views are not its official position and that it will be reviewing the books.

Ms Murad’s frightening story details her family being executed and how she was snatched from her home and sold into sexual slavery. She was raped, tortured and exchanged among militants in northern Iraq before escaping.

She is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, UN Goodwill Ambassador, and a leading advocate for survivors of genocide and sexual violence.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-25T18:19:09+00:00

Have a double helping of media Narrative manufacturing:

Media Calls Waukesha Fatal Car-Ramming A ‘Crash.’ They Called 2017 Charlottesville Car-Ramming An ‘Attack.’

WaPo Roasted After Tweeting ‘Waukesha Tragedy Caused By An SUV’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-25T17:34:54+00:00

Indiana teacher who exposed CRT teaching put on leave, has email locked, banned from school buildings

An Indianapolis school administrator who went viral for explaining how his district is pushing Critical Race Theory on children has been locked out of his email and Google Drive accounts and been told to work from home because he was causing other staff members "anxiety."

"As of one hour ago, Indianapolis Public Schools has suspended my access to email & Google Drive," Indianapolis district science coordinator, instructional coach, and administrator Tony Kinnett posted on Twitter along with a screenshot.

"I've been required to work from home the last two weeks, as staff reportedly have 'clinical anxiety' over working with me," Kinnett added. "When I came to get books from my office, phone calls were made to each team member so they'd be clear of the building."

Kinnett added that he has been banned from going to any school building or from hosting professional development while also pledging to continue to release more information that he has already downloaded from the district.

"It's a good thing I downloaded all of the other racist documents & videos from the public server weeks ago," Kinnett added in the Twitter thread.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-24T22:03:12+00:00

California Community College Promises To Pre-Screen Job Applicants To Ensure They Are ‘Anti-Racist’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-24T21:26:56+00:00

Swedish scientists prosecuted for finding that most rapes are committed by immigrants

A recent case in Sweden could explain why politicians and human rights activists often claim there is no scientific evidence for higher criminality within immigrant communities in Western societies.

A recent case in Lund University is now serving as a clear-cut example of what happens when researches try to gather scientific evidence regarding issues that might not support the officially sanctioned political narrative. It also demonstrates that how funds are restricted for studying the impact of immigration, how research into the subject is not permitted by universities, and how scientists who disobey the restrictions face serious persecution.

This is what has happened to Professor Kristina Sundquist from Sweden’s Lund University, who alongside two other colleagues, conducted detailed research into the profile of those who commit sexual violence in Sweden. The research was not aimed at racially profiling the offenders, as the scientists themselves put it, but they nevertheless have discovered some facts about the ethnic profile of rapists by accident.

Sundquist, who is the most cited professor at her university regarding social research, is now being investigated for publishing an unauthorized research report, and may face prosecution for coming to the conclusion that the vase majority of rapes are committed by immigrants to the country.

But what does the research show? The published results show that immigrants are not only disproportionately overrepresented in rape cases, but despite being a minority in Sweden, they commit the vast majority of sexual violence. This is despite the fact that the study only analyzed cases between the period of 2000 and 2015, that is, before the enormous 2015 influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-24T17:15:57+00:00

Bay Area ABC station responds to wave of organized looting with cringe report on how it is not really looting

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-24T16:02:07+00:00

Catholic university’s painting of George Floyd as Jesus draws outrage

A painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus Christ on display at Catholic University of America that’s hanging in not one — but two — locations at the Washington D.C. institution has drawn outrage and prompted the launch of a petition calling for its removal.

“As students at the Catholic University of America, we believe that it is extremely grave that our university, the official university of the Catholic Church in North America, would cast another in the image of our Lord in this way, particularly for political purposes,” states the petition, which had more than 1,500 signatures as of Tuesday evening.

“No political or social cause ever justifies depicting another in the place of Jesus Christ.”

[...]

The Daily Signal, which first reported the story, notes that students are upset by the images, with one calling it “blasphemous” and another saying “nobody should be portrayed as Jesus except” Jesus himself.

The Signal also reports that “Catholic University appeared to shrug off responsibility for the painting Monday, telling The Daily Signal that artist Kelly Latimore’s painting ‘Mama’ depicts ‘the Virgin Mary supporting the body of the dead Christ’—although the artist has indicated repeatedly that his painting depicts both Floyd and Jesus.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-24T08:15:52+00:00

On Monday, @OSSTFD20TEACHER (Ont Sec School Teachers' Fed, District 20) announced that their rules would be changed so that each non-white union member would have his/her vote weighted more than white members. Here are the slides they used to justify the decision to rank & file

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-23T17:05:31+00:00

National Institute of Health director: those who spread “misinformation” online should be “identified” and “brought to justice”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-23T15:10:55+00:00

Girls who don’t like dolls are treated as transgender, claims Tavistock clinic whistleblower

NHS services treat girls who "don't like pink ribbons and dollies" as if they have been born in the wrong body, a Tavistock whistleblower has warned.

Dr David Bell, a former governor at the gender identity NHS trust, said that under the influence of political lobby groups such as Stonewall, clinicians believe that the “only acceptable explanation” for a range of complex issues is that a young person is transgender.

The consultant psychiatrist described his former employer, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, as a “gateway to puberty blockers”, which put children and young people on the path of a lifetime of medical treatment.

Around 98 per cent of teenagers who were put on to puberty blockers went on to take cross sex hormones, he added.

Dr Bell said that rapid progression to drugs and even surgery in the NHS was “a form of conversion therapy” as with “proper” treatment, many of the children would go on to be gay or lesbian.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-22T16:39:02+00:00

Beto Wants To Pursue Gun Confiscation If Elected Texas Governor, Declines To Invite Biden To Campaign

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-22T15:55:45+00:00

[Freddie deBoer] The Failure of Occupy is Almost Complete

Occupy Wall Street’s deficiencies have been chronicled by many, including me, in the past decade. Even its signature idea, “We Are the 99%,” has its flaws. Most obviously it obscures meaningful class differences within the 99% that are arguably more consequential for day-to-day life than the 99%-1% split. I argued in my book, as did Richard Reeves in Dream Hoarders, the top 20% - an income range in which I myself reside - are in fact pulling away from the 80% to a degree that has profoundly deleterious effects on our society. And this matters beyond mere class war symbolism, as what too many left-of-center people don’t want to admit (and Democrats definitely don’t want to acknowledge) is that to pay for the kind of social safety net we want, people like me have to pay higher taxes too. Too much progressive messaging suggests that we can just tax Elon Musk and be done with it. But it will take a lot more, and the trouble is that liberalism’s takeover by an educated elite is now complete, and so the people who would fight for these tax increases are the people who would receive them, and so unsurprisingly it’s not happening. Either way, the 99% vs. the 1% obscures just how far much the upper middle class is pulling ahead as well, and makes the political task before us seem far easier than it is. So that’s bad.

And yet “we are the 99%,” frequently attributed to the late David Graeber, was elegant, direct, and fundamentally class-oriented; it stressed that people of all colors and kinds were united by our mutual exploitation by the ruling classes of society. It insisted that we were all in this together and that economic class, money, the haves and the have nots, were the basic poles of American political life. Occupy stressed a rhetoric of togetherness and the need for unity to fight against the forces of wealth and privilege. They needed to, as it really will take all kinds of people to defeat the guys in suits who don’t give a shit about BLM or what pronouns to use as long as they can extract every penny they can from ordinary people. The moneyed and the powerful have the money and the power. All the left has is people power, the potential of great masses to come together and, despite their demographic and cultural and lifestyle differences, recognize their shared self-interest and demand change.

And, well… how’s that going now? All contemporary liberals and leftists want to do is to chop that 99% up into smaller and smaller chunks, insisting to many of them that their problems aren’t really problems, setting up a hierarchy of suffering that is as inhospitable to real solidarity as I can imagine. There’s almost zero interest in a politics oriented around opposition to the kleptocracy that runs our system and steadily takes from those with too little and gives to those with too much. Yet that’s the biggest source of real human suffering in this country, need, unnecessary economic need that could be ameliorated by more equitably spreading the wealth. This is deeply related to the identity-based injustices that liberals are now fixated on seemingly to the exclusion of all others. I promise you, as desperately as we need policing and criminal justice reform in this country, poverty hurts more Black people more deeply every day than police do, by a country mile. And yet even the racial justice conversation has little time for questioning the basic distribution of money and power in our society. It’s far more invested in what I’ve called the Rainbow Oligarchy, diversifying our autocratic elite rather than tearing it down.

The lack of any clear class consciousness permeates the left (or “left”) conversation and its priorities. I think about the wearying discourse of deplatforming. “Deplatforming WORKS!” they snidely exclaim, not seeming to realize that, for example, it was conservatives who effectively canceled Milo Yappadapolous, not leftists, or that Alex Jones still has an audience of millions and is a very wealthy man. But those points are less important than recognizing that their targets are all fundamentally irrelevant media personalities, and that they fixate on them precisely because they can’t deplatform the forces that actually hurt poor people in this country. Richard Spencer lost his platform? Damn! Let freedom ring! I mean, he’s always been an utterly irrelevant figure, and every building in the financial district in Manhattan is filled with anonymous figures who do more damage to vulnerable people than Spencer will ever do in his life and then retreat to their tony Boerum Hill townhouses, but sure. We got ‘em, guys, mission accomplish. All 500 of Spencer’s followers have been defeated.

This is what happens when the left gives up on its core commitment to restructuring society at the economic level. You get caught up in this politics of celebrity, where what matters to your movement is the people who most defy its cultural leanings, rather than the structures of money and power that condition human lives.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-22T06:19:50+00:00

Kyle Rittenhouse and the hysteria of the elites

America’s liberal elites are broken. They are now totally deranged and detached from reality. That’s become brutally clear in the past 24 hours. While we all knew it was coming, the collective media and political meltdown over the acquittal of 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse has revealed a ruling class so warped, so unprincipled, so governed by partisan prejudice, that it essentially lives in a parallel universe.

Yesterday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a jury found Rittenhouse not guilty of homicide and attempted homicide over his shooting of three men, two of whom he killed, amid riots in the city on the night of 25 August 2020. The riots erupted after a police shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. Unrest ripped through the city. The defence successfully argued that Rittenhouse fired in self-defence, while he was being chased and attacked.

[...]

As the trial wore on, it became all the more clear that the narrative cast about Rittenhouse and that night last August was utterly false. A narrative neatly summed up by Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who said Rittenhouse was a ‘17-year-old white supremacist domestic terrorist’ who ‘shot and killed two people who had assembled to affirm the value, dignity and worth of black lives’.

There is no evidence that Rittenhouse has white-supremacist leanings. Unless being pro-cop and pro-Trump counts, which apparently it does for many allegedly intelligent people. The idea that he was some out-of-towner who went to Kenosha just to take aim at protesters is also nonsense. While he lives in nearby Antioch, Illinois, his father, grandmother, aunt and uncle live in Kenosha. He also had a job there and was staying with a friend that night. Those he clashed with weren’t all ‘protesters’, either. Joseph Rosenbaum was, by all accounts, a deeply disturbed individual who went downtown that night to look for trouble.

But, with some notable exceptions aside, much of the great and good doubled down on their ridiculous takes even as the trial disproved them. ‘White supremacy maintains its cover’, thundered one MSNBC contributor in the wake of the acquittal. The fact that the three people Rittenhouse shot were white continues to escape the attention of many, including the UK’s Independent newspaper, which told its readers yesterday that Rittenhouse had killed two black men.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-21T16:53:15+00:00

Hamilton high school students fired from co-op placement over “OK” hand gesture

A 17-year-old high school student was fired from a hospital co-op placement after her employer alleged that an “OK” hand gesture she made in a social media photo was a symbol of white supremacy.

The hand gesture, frequently used to indicate satisfaction or approval, has been painted by the far-left as a sign meant to signal “white power.”

According to Grade 12 student Megan Breeze, she had no knowledge the sign could be misinterpreted that way.

“It wasn’t meant to be racist and it wouldn’t happen again. I thought it means ‘OK.’ Like a thumbs-up sign,” Breeze told the Hamilton Spectator.

Breeze was accepted into a co-op program at the beginning of the school year with Juravinski Hospital.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-21T02:42:37+00:00

Pedro Gonzalez on Twitter:

Youngkin got elected on culture war issues about race and sex

So, Youngkin chose a guy with pronouns in his bio to do his comms who also served on the Georgetown Latinx Leadership Forum and supports virtually everything Youngkin's voters voted against

This is peak GOP

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-20T23:02:55+00:00

Dem Nadler Calls on DOJ to Review Rittenhouse Verdict

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called on the Justice Department to review the not guilty verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, calling it a "miscarriage of justice."

Nadler pushed a debunked claim about Rittenhouse in his call for the federal review, saying that the teenager was "armed" when he crossed state lines to attend a protest in Kenosha, Wis., where he fatally shot two men and wounded another.

Rittenhouse, who was 17 years old at the time of the incident, said he shot the men in self-defense after they attacked and threatened him at a protest over the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse, an Illinois native, claimed he went to Kenosha to protect small businesses from riots that erupted following Blake's shooting.

A jury acquitted Rittenhouse of all charges Friday. Nadler called the verdict "heartbreaking" and said it set a "dangerous precedent" that warranted federal review. He asserted that Rittenhouse crossed state lines "looking for trouble." He also suggested that Rittenhouse targeted people engaged in "First Amendment-protected protest."

Rittenhouse's critics claimed in the lead up to the trial that he acted as a vigilante, in part by crossing from Illinois to Wisconsin with his gun in tow. But the claim was debunked at trial. Rittenhouse, who testified in his own defense, said he picked up his gun at a friend's house in Kenosha after driving there from Illinois. The friend, Dominick Black, corroborated Rittenhouse's statement in his testimony as a witness for the prosecution.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-20T19:31:34+00:00

Vulnerable House Democrats Vote for ‘Largest Amnesty in American History’

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-20T19:10:32+00:00

Former New York Times journalist says the paper deliberately HELD her story condemning Kenosha rioters until after 2020 election: 'The reality of what brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we were meant to ignore'

A former New York Times journalist has claimed the paper deliberately held a story about how Kenosha rioters destroyed local businesses until after the 2020 election.

Nellie Bowles is the partner of Bari Weiss, a fellow disillusioned former New York Times columnist who says she was bullied out of the newspaper because she didn't align entirely with its views.

Writing for Weiss's Substack channel Common Sense, Bowles revealed on Friday that after the August 2020 riots, she went to Kenosha to speak to the owners of small local businesses that had been razed between August 23 and August 28, after Jacob Blake's shooting.

She found in her reporting that the rioters were indiscriminate in who they targeted, often going after businesses and properties in the poorer parts of town. She focused on the fact that those smaller business owners had a harder time claiming back portions of their money from insurance, and that the riots left them down and out.

She submitted the story but was told 'The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election.'

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-20T17:28:00+00:00

Famously Woke NBA Releases Statement On Rittenhouse Verdict, Claims Rittenhouse’s Attackers Were Peacefully Protesting

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-19T23:40:03+00:00

Support for Black Lives Matter declining across US, poll shows

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-19T22:01:24+00:00

CA Teachers Urge Recruiting Kids Into LGBT Clubs: “We’re going to do just a little mind-trick on our sixth graders.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-19T19:07:26+00:00

Missouri AG sues Springfield for allegedly hiding critical race theory training for teachers

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a lawsuit against the Springfield school district, alleging that the district violated a transparency law by restricting access to teacher and staff training that promoted critical race theory.

"Today we sued Springfield Public Schools on behalf of parents to find out exactly what is being taught to their children, especially as teachers and staff are attending trainings where they’re required to consult an ‘oppression matrix’ and other materials," Schmitt told Fox News on Tuesday. "Springfield Public Schools have stonewalled parents and a state representative, but they will not stonewall the Attorney General’s Office."

The lawsuit alleges that Springfield Public Schools publicly acknowledged that it had been instructing teachers and staff on critical race theory – a framework that involves deconstructing aspects of society to discover systemic racism beneath the surface. In a December 2020 report, the school district reported that it had required district leaders and staff to participate in a one-day training from the Facing Racism Institute, and the district claimed the goal of the training was to "introduce the components of critical race theory from educational research with applications to the district."

In one training session, an instructor told teachers and staff to consult an "oppression matrix" and identify where they fall on it. According to the matrix, "privileged social groups" include "white people," people with "male assigned at birth," "gender conforming CIS-men and women," "adults," and "Protestants."

Instructors also presented staff with a figure on "covert white supremacy," which presented "BIPOC as Halloween costumes," "tokenism," "All Lives Matter," and "Eurocentric curriculum" as examples of "socially acceptable" "covert white supremacy."

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-19T17:33:34+00:00

Cori Bush tells fake story about being shot at, repeatedly, by “White Supremacists”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-19T16:21:07+00:00

(Reposting from elsewhere) I have a question that is both Culture and War but not Culture War: How did the US produce no Afghanistan war music despite being there for almost 20 years? Russians were there for less half the time and they produced some gems:

Обычный Автобус, и все как обычно / The Usual Bus

Три вертушки на Моздок / Three Choppers to Mozdok

Привет Сестрёнка / Hello Sister (Don't tell mom I'm in Afghan)

Седой Парнишка / Grey-Haired Boy

За что мы пьём / For This We Drink

But I can't think of any music popularized by US intervention in Afghanistan like I could for the Revolutionary War (Yankee Doodle), Civil War (Battle Hymn of the Republic), WWI (Over There), WWII (Der Fuehrer's Face), Vietnam (Fortunate Son, Khe Sanh, Gimme Shelter, etc). Even the (second) Iraq War gave us American Idiot but for Afghanistan, bupkis. All of the aforementioned wars have Wikipedia categories for music associated with them with the exception of Afghanistan. What gives?

My first guess is that conscript armies are more likely to contain artists and creative types than the all-volunteer force that we sent to Afghanistan but I'd be interested to read your theories.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-19T03:17:05+00:00

Police caught using online spy tool to plot “pre-crimes”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-18T17:26:23+00:00

Allegations of bigotry and calls for impeachment rock College Democrats

The College Democrats of America — the Democratic Party’s national organization presiding over 500 chapters on campuses across the country — is in turmoil.

The group’s leaders are publicly firing off accusations of anti-Blackness, Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism at each other. Impeachment proceedings are now in the works against the organization’s new vice president, Nourhan Mesbah, who is Muslim. College Democrats say that screenshots of tweets that their peers sent in adolescence spread rapidly through group texts, which already caused a student running for president of the group to withdraw their candidacy in September. And national advocacy groups for Muslim and Jewish Americans are now weighing in with criticism.

The conflict has gotten so messy that the Democratic National Committee is considering disaffiliating with the national collegiate organization altogether and creating a partnership with the state groups underneath the national umbrella, according to a Democrat familiar with the discussions. The DNC declined to comment.

The clashes over religious bigotry and race within the College Democrats of America (CDA) reflect, to a degree, larger debates happening throughout politics. But the next generation seems poised to escalate them further. Some CDA members argue that the internal frictions constitute a turbulent but morally necessary reckoning with systemic racism. Other Democratic officials see it as a bunch of college-educated, hyper-woke kids trying to play politics in a way that’s off-putting to many voters.

“They are caught up in their own drama and playing ‘Boys State’ government,” said the same Democrat. “They think they’re the hottest s--- on Earth.”

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-18T16:34:53+00:00

FBI Whistleblower Claims DOJ Used Counterterrorism Tools against Parents in Response to School-Board Memo

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-18T14:49:37+00:00

America’s Authoritarian Left

A troubling development in contemporary American politics is the emergence and normalization of authoritarian tendencies. I refer not to Donald Trump and his supporters—the usual object of this accusation—but to the American Left. Prominent voices on the Left are now illiberal by the standards that were developed and defended by liberals, sometimes the same ones, of an earlier generation.

Last month, left-wing news and opinion outlets published headlines blaring that Senator Ted Cruz had defended the use of the Nazi salute. This claim was then predictably amplified throughout the Twitterverse. The headlines, however, and the simple-minded and indignant Tweets that followed, were misinformation designed to discredit Cruz, long an object of the Left’s hatred.

Cruz’s remarks took place in a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee at which Attorney General Merrick Garland was testifying. Cruz, in the first place, was not even talking about the use of the Nazi salute to signal allegiance to Nazism. He was instead talking about its use by people who wished to protest—by mocking and insulting—the actions of public officials.

More to the point, however, Cruz was not “defending” the use of the Nazi salute at all. He merely pointed out that its use is, under the prevailing interpretation of the First Amendment, a form of constitutionally protected expression, and that it therefore cannot properly be treated as a reason for a federal investigation. This is not a controversial opinion and would not seem to merit denunciation. Indeed, in his own testimony, Garland immediately agreed with Cruz that the salute is protected by the First Amendment.

There is a serious problem here, beyond the by now very tiresome and predictable dishonesty of much of the American news media. If defenses of First Amendment protections of offensive expression are going to be popularly equated with defenses of the offensive expression itself, then it will, sooner or later, become disreputable to defend constitutional norms of free expression. And as a further result those norms will decay and finally vanish. Constitutional norms cannot live without actual human beings who are willing to uphold them, and such willingness will evaporate if upholding them makes you the object of mass media denunciation.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-17T18:37:35+00:00

The future of France? Civil war and then Islamist dictatorship, says famed Algerian writer

“Strike hard and fast, that’s what the living and the dead are calling for,” said famous Algerian writer Boualem Sansal in an interview with Le Figaro, calling on France to take decisive, hard, and politically incorrect action.

According to him, only a “big reversal” gives a chance to save France from “Lebanonization” or “Algerization.” Sansal, who won the Arab Literature Prize, shared his opinion on the anniversary of the terrorist massacre at the Bataclan Club in Paris.

On Nov. 13, 2015, individuals sworn to the Islamic State terrorist group burst into the Bataclan club in Paris, where a concert was taking place, and shot 80 people with automatic weapons. These terrorist attacks, committed six years ago, were, according to Sansal, “an act of unimaginable violence, to which the French President (Francois Hollande) responded with tears and lamentations.”

As a result, the French were humiliated, as were the French army and police.

“In the face of Islam, France has lost all ability to think, rule and act. It submits and is about to submit again,” he warned.

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-17T17:41:03+00:00

Gun-Control Support Drops Amid Growing Crime and Firearm Purchases

mo-ming-qi-miao · 2021-11-17T17:09:34+00:00

[Minnesota] Governor Tried to Pump Covid Numbers to Justify Shutdown

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