Only on the American left can someone with this sort of public/self image…:
…Write something like this… 
…unironically.
Don’t Try This Yourself (Unless You’re Suitably “Progressive”)
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Category Archives: PC
All Too True
Part of this article reads like wishful thinking – but given the generation we have coming up right now, I wanted to take nothing for granted.
Right Now In Berkeley
I just got this from a contact of mine at UC Berkeley:
My contact asked “is that all they could find – one quote from Ben Shapiro?”
It’s Satire
Barely.
Milk Is Racist!
No, really!
And, snark aside, they have a point – it’s people from northern Europe, as well as people from cold, high-altitude places like Tibet and the Caucasus, that have any tolerance for other species’ milk; it was a trait selected for by millennia of survival in places where people couldn’t eat most of the vegetation most of the time, but animals could, turning inedible celliulose into edible fat.
But that’s about all the slack I’ll give the article, by one Andrea Freeman, a law professor; the rest of it is chock full of lines like this:
Popular racial stereotypes cast African-Americans and Latinos as fat and lazy, lacking the will power necessary to ward off obesity and other food-related illnesses.
Popular smug liberal stereotype of honkeys is that we “cast African-Americans and Latinos” as anything at all as a group.
Never Waste A Crisis
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
If the dams break, if Houston is washed away, if the earth is scraped clean . . . what a wonderful opportunity for urban planners to rebuild ‘the right way.’
Tear up all freeways and residential streets. Replace them with bike trails and light rail. Mail and deliveries to be made by electric drone.
Ban fossil fuel vehicles. Permit electric trucks in alleys to restock stores but nowhere else.
Ban single-family houses, strip malls, chain bookstores and big-box retailers.
Build apartments with a pocket park every six blocks for picnics. Require space for a coffee shop, nail salon, cell phone store and sub shop in every development.
Chase away all industry. Dig up all underground tanks from former gas stations. Rename public places in Esperanto to avoid cultural insensitivity.
This is an exciting opportunity. The city council should adopt the new plan fast, before any scruffy citizens can show up at the meetings to complain.
Wanna bet Betsy Hodges wishes we got hurricanes?
I’m Shocked…
…no, shocked, I tell you, to get this news.
Big Media is papering over Marxist thugs; what’s a little acting like ISIS among pals?
Remember After Charlottesville…
…when a phalanx of liberal bobbleheads chanted “If you don’t denounce Nazis, that must mean you support them?” [1]
OK, “progs”. Your turn. Sound off like you got a pair.
Rebooting Berkeley
This email was circulated at Berkeley earlier this week, according to an acquaintance of mine:
“Dear Students, Faculty and Staff,This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear; public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections.But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint—that we’re required to allow it—but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right. It is who we are.Nonetheless, defending the right of free speech for those whose ideas we find offensive is not easy. It often conflicts with the values we hold as a community—tolerance, inclusion, reason and diversity. Some constitutionally-protected speech attacks the very identity of particular groups of individuals in ways that are deeply hurtful. However, the right response is not the heckler’s veto, or what some call platform denial. Call toxic speech out for what it is, don’t shout it down, for in shouting it down, you collude in the narrative that universities are not open to all speech. Respond to hate speech with more speech.We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space. These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley. The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal. If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.We will have many opportunities this year to come together as a Berkeley community over the issue of free speech; it will be a free speech year. We have already planned a student panel, a faculty panel and several book talks. Bridge USA and the Center for New Media will hold a day-long conference on October 5; PEN, the international writers’ organization, will hold a free speech convening in Berkeley on October 23. We are planning a series in which people with sharply divergent points of view will meet for a moderated discussion. Free speech is our legacy, and we have the power once more to shape this narrative.Sincerely,Carol ChristChancellor”
In between the lines, it looks like the Chancellor is trying to reboot Berkeley’s policy to disallow violent suppression of dissenting opinions. This is a marked contrast from the University’s behavior over the winter.
Of course, the real bellwether would be “how do the campus’s tiny conservative minority fare in day to day interactions”. That’s the part I’m most intrested in.
But it’ll be interesting to see if this announcement is followed up with effective execution – and if any other schools follow suit.
Punch Back
The builders of the Dakota Access Pipeline are suing the racket of “environmental” groups that spent half a year obstructing their work:
From last summer through the first couple of months of 2017 there was an all-out assault on the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Protesters, summoned to rural south central North Dakota by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a myriad of environmental groups, blocked roads and set fires and harassed pipeline workers all in an attempt derail the project.
It didn’t work. Oil flows through the Dakota Access Pipeline today, but the State of North Dakota did run up a $38 million bill for the law enforcement response.
Anyway, today Energy Transfer Partners (the company behind DAPL) filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing some of the environmental groups involved in the protests of racketeering.
For all the fawning coverage MInnesota Public Radio gave the protests and protesters, I’m almost amazed they weren’t named as co-respondents.
PC Uber Alles
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’ve used the Uber ride-share app. I like it. Uber sent me an email to reassure me that they were standing up against hate, in accordance with their community guidelines. Here’s what the community guidelines say about discrimination:
“DiscriminationUber has a zero tolerance policy towards discrimination of any kind. This means you will lose access to your account if you are found to have discriminated against drivers or other riders based on their race, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, sex, marital status, gender identity, age or any other characteristic protected under applicable law.” (Emphasis added.)
Their company, their rules; but I don’t think their standards give them a basis to deactivate anybody’s account based on marching in a permitted parade in compliance with the terms of a federal court order. It’s creeping totalitarianism. We won’t do business with people whose opinions we don’t like.Ritual posturing. Virtue signaling. Annoying. Enough to switch to Lyft?
Joe Doakes
I switched to Lyft for many other reasons – the rates are competitive, they screen their drivers better (and pay them better to boot).
But if I wanted another reason, I got one.
When You Think It’s The Onion…
…but it’s not. It’s really not.
If only it were.
On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will arrive mid-morning on the coast of Oregon. The moon’s shadow will be about 70 miles wide, and it will race across the country faster than the speed of sound, exiting the eastern seaboard shortly before 3 p.m. local time. It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people.
Dum Dum DUMMMMMMMMM…
Presumably, this is not explained by the implicit bias of the solar system.
Whew. For a moment there, I thought the “writer” might be deranged.
It is a matter of population density, and more specifically geographic variations in population density by race, for which the sun and the moon cannot be held responsible. Still, an eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.
Yeah. We are.
As the “Writer” – one Alice Ristroph, who is apparently a law professor, and no, I don’t believe that’s a real name either – notes, there’s a message. But he got the wrong one.
Not only did the eclipse pass through mostly white country – it passed over relatively few liberals.
It’s a sign.
(Does anyone else remember when the Atlantic wasn’t screamingly stupid?)
Fake But, Regrettably, Accurate
New Google logo?
If the shoe fits…
UPDATE: They keep coming:
Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better
Marines test all male versus gender integrated combat units in battlefield simulations.
The results were completely unexpected – if you were a Google executive. Otherwise, not all that unpredictable.
It’s Everwhere
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Obviously, I have White Privilege, which is hateful and shameful at the same time.
Now it appears I also have Cognitive Privilege, which is just like White Privilege, only moreso.
Next up – Tall Privilege, which unfairly excludes me from the lucrative NBA contract that I so richly deserve.
Joe Doakes
It’s time to check whatever privilege that keeps me and Jemma Arterton apart.
Maybe If He Were Latino And Transgender?
Baker refuses to bake a Trump-themed cake for a 9 year old boy.
The Post reported that, when Dylan [Harbin, a 9 year old California boy] asked for a “Donald Trump cake” for his birthday, his mother “made him one herself, because she couldn’t find a bakery willing and able to do it.”
Michael P. Farris is president, CEO and general counsel of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian legal group defending Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who was sued by a gay couple for declining to make their same-sex wedding cake.
Mr. Farris wondered why bakers are allowed to decline to make birthday cakes supporting Mr. Trump, but not wedding cakes supporting same-sex marriage.
The answer, of course, is “public accomodation laws”, which address the surface symptom of bigotry to requiring “public accommodations” – stores – to serve everyone. A laudable enough goal – which has had the same effect on bigotry as gun control has had on violence,and for the same reason – but they pretty much trash the idea of “Free Association”. Or worse, really – they determine who can and can not associate freely by social group.
And 9 year old white boys aren’t one of the “favored” groups.
Blast From The Past
Robert Fisk – the gassy far-left Brit columnist upon whose oeuvre the term “fisk” was launched – is back with a bit of virtue-signaling…
…that actually has a point, although I’m not sure Fisk knows it.
The headline – “When you watch Dunkirk, remember that it’s a whitewashed version which ignores the bravery of black and Muslim soldiers” – set off a bit of a teapot-tempest on social media over the weekend.
He’s got about a third of a point.
About a third of the French Army in 1940 was from France’s overseas colonies; black troops from Guinea and Cameroon, Muslim Arabs from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, and Black Muslims from Senegal and Chad. They were among France’s best troops, too – solid fighters who didn’t bother much with hardships in the field. They were a significant part of the French First Army, the vanguard of the French armed forces which had joined with the Brits in advancing into Belgium, only to be cut off by the Blitzkrieg through the Ardennes.
And when Churchill decided to evacuate the “British Expeditionary Force” – the British Army in France and Belgium – with the original stated intent of sending them back to Franch to continue the battle – it was the French First Army that held the Germans off long enough to carry off the evacuation (and then, long enough to get about half of its own troops evacuated).
And among those troops – among the best and bravest of them – were the colonials.
Fisk:
A justly cynical revue of Nolan’s Dunkirk by Francois Pédron in Paris Match points out, correctly, that 18,000 French troops paid with their lives to hold the Dunkirk perimeter and 35,000 were made prisoner – almost 140,000 French soldiers were rescued from Dunkirk – but that not only do the victors write history. Filmmakers write the “history” too, Pedron wrote. He is right. The true story of the Algerian and Moroccan units has still to be filmed. It would make a terrifying drama. The Germans threw raw meat into the prison cages of Algerian and African troops – to show cinemagoers how they fought for the food and tore it to pieces like animals. Algerians were massacred by the Nazis on racial grounds – an act which strongly supports the suspicion of some intellectual Arabs today: that Hitler, after destroying the Jews of Europe and the Middle East, would have next turned his exterminating fury against their Semitic Arab brothers.
All true enough.
(SPOILERS FOLLOW)
But if you remember the movie, there really was exactly one filmic depiction of the French Army holding the line; the squad of metropolitan French holding the roadblock in the town of Dunkirk, in the first two minutes of the show. That’s it.
So yes – Christopher Nolan, in telling the story of three British people at Dunkirk, neglected the stories of black and Muslim French soldiers.
Also those of the rest of the French Army – Catholic, atheist, and otherwise.
It’s the French as a nation, stupid.
And just to show that Robert Fisk is still the fisk-worthy fella he’s been for a decade and a half:
Much has been made, inevitably in The Guardian, of Nolan’s failure to acknowledge the presence of Muslim troops at Dunkirk – Muslim Indian Commonwealth soldiers (from what is now Pakistan)
Which may be because Christopher Nolan is a racist.
Or, perhaps, because the British Expeditionary Force included no “Bengali” (what they called Pakistani) troops – or, for that matter, any of the much more numerous Indian Hindi troops that also served the Brits in the millions. While the British military included millions of troops from colonies like India and Hong Kong, like the French, colonial troops served in colonial units. The Indian and Bengal troops served in large numbers in North Africa, the Middle East, and southeast Asia – including defending India itself from a Japanese invasion – but only rarely did they serve in Northwest Europe during /world War 2.
While PC virtue signaling is easy, facts are hard.
Conundrum
Being of mostly Caucasian descent makes me a beneficiary of “white privilege”. So I’m told.
However, the terms of that “privilege” are entirely defined by those who purportedly don’t have it; indeed, we are told as people who “have” the “privilege” that we can’t possibly understand it.
Apparently we benefit from something we can not only sense or define ourselves, but can not describe. Because privilege.
If can neither sense it nor know what it is, because of our privilege, how are we supposed to deal with it (other, of course, than shut up and contribute to Nekima Levyi-Pounds, of course)?
Words Have Meaning – Sometimes
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Liberals tell us that words have meaning. We cannot say the N word because the mere act of saying it gives the word power and that power warps our thinking to make us bad people. In fact, thinking it is probably enough.
What happens when a word loses its power?
I was running errands over the weekend and realized it was the first day of Sunday liquor so I stopped at MGM in Roseville to buy a celebratory single can of beer. A dozen people were picketing. “Treat Everyone Equal.” “MGM is Racist.” One picketer offered me a sheet of paper on my way into the store. I declined.
Inside the store, the store manager explained they had to check someone’s bag yesterday and that person felt it was racially motivated, hence the picket today.
I was born when Eisenhower was in office. There was actual racism in the country at that time – segregated drinking fountains, riding the back of the bus, Martin Luther King going to jail. That America disappeared 49 years ago. The young people holding the signs today have never lived in a racist America.
I’ve shopped at that MGM for 13 years, since moving to this neighborhood. I can tell you for absolutely positively certain that they do not discriminate against their own customers. The notion is idiotic. I don’t even need to hear the details of the incident that triggered the protest. Every time some Person Whose Life Matters stubs their toe, it’s a racist hate crime and I’m supposed to collapse in a heap sobbing at the injustice. No more. The word has lost its power over me.
To Liberals, the mere accusation of racism is assumed to be sufficient to make a person apologize, cower, cravenly abase oneself to seek temporary absolution. But it’s so overwhelmingly overused that it doesn’t mean anything, it’s a synonym for “makes me unhappy.” And honestly, I don’t give a hang about things that make other people unhappy. I got problems of my own.
Joe Doakes
“Progressives” destroyed the term “Fascist” at least 30 years ago.
“Racism” can not be far behind.
Profiling
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A shopper at a Roseville liquor store was upset that store management wanted to check her large bag. She was at the store on Sunday with about a dozen people, picketing, signs saying “MGM Racist” and “Treat Everyone Equally.”
Maryam S., the person who complained on YELP on 7-1-17, says MGM never checks anybody’s bags. That’s how she knows she was singled out. Scroll past a few Fake Reviews by Social Justice Warriors from places like Arlington, Virginia and Apple Valley (who obviously never shop there), you find a review from Gnos G. dated six weeks before the complaint, another Asian whose bags got searched.
Maryam says when she called the owner, she was told that searching bags is carefully limited to people whose conduct is suspicious. The owner pointed out that historically, most shoplifting in that store has been done by Black shoppers.
In other words, you were not singled out to be searched, Maryam, because searching bags has been store policy for weeks (and that sign has been on the door for years – I know because that’s my regular liquor store). And you were not profiled for being Asian, they check Black people’s bags, too.
Searching large bags in a store is not racism. It’s loss prevention. If you worked in retail instead of being an Emergency Room Doctor at St. John’s Hospital, you’d know that. I realize it’s jarring to suddenly find yourself being treated unfairly because of what other people have done in the past. Believe me, I know exactly how that feels.
I am constantly berated for having White Privilege. The fact that long ago and far away some White people mistreated some Black people doesn’t mean that THIS White person has mistreated any Black people. I never owned any slaves, no Black person living in Minnesota today toted any bales of cotton, so using the same logic as Maryam’s example, I shouldn’t have to hear another damn word about White Privilege.
What’s that you say? Embedded in the culture? Indirect beneficiary of other people’s crimes? Guilt by association? Racial stereotypes? That door swings both ways, too. Identity politics paints everyone with broad brushes.
It’s all fine and good to mouth Liberal platitudes about justice and equality and vestiges of institutional oppression. But when it comes right down to the bottom line, shoplifting is a crime and loss prevention is the solution. Leave your backpack in the car next time.
Joe Doakes
I’m verging on just about done for apologizing for my skin color.
Soft On The Details
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
All those Liberals on campus protesting White Privilege, it occurs to me to ask: if you succeeded in getting rid of White people, what will you eat?
All the food on campus comes from White people. No, seriously, how many left-handed lesbian Latinas grow lettuce or tomatoes? How many transgendered people raise hogs? How many Muslim refugees grow non-GMO wheat, barley or hops? Get rid of ordinary American White people and you say goodbye to having an ice cold beer with your BLT.
Liberals are demanding a Cultural Revolution based on ideology instead of reality, just like Mao: wiping out monuments to the past, punishing people for what they think, next step is to send commisars to the farms to re-educate peasants in fly-over land. Then starvation, which will be proof that the kulaks are counter-revolutionaries who must be slaughtered for their own good. We’ve heard that song before and it never ends well.
Same with Mac-Groveland ELCA-haired Liberals who support Black Lives Matters’ demand that the police be defunded and disbanded. Wait until their house is broken into, or kid is beat up or raped, or car stolen, then what? How to restore social order after you’ve thrown it away? Drum circles?
Future civilizations will look back and say “I don’t get it, they had everything, how could they lose it? It’s as if they intentionally destroyed the foundations underpinning their own civilization. Who could be that short-sighted? No wonder they’re extinct.”
Joe Doakes
It’s a little like all the “workers movements” through the past 200 years that have been mostly college students.
Great Leap Forward!
An American school district practices cultural appropriation, and lifts some culcha from Maoist Cnina:
At a May 8 school board meeting, parent Farran Wilkinson took to the podium to out one educator who recently forced white students to apologize to black students for their white privilege, according to the American Lens.
“I just want to share light on a situation that happened at Western Rockingham Middle School where a teacher caused some of her students to stand up and apologize to other students based on their unequal opportunities of education, so I would like to know how our schools can allow an educator to humiliate, bully and degrade students,” Wilkinson said. (60 minute mark in the YouTube video) “This is not a matter of race but a matter of a teacher using fear and the embarrassment of children to satisfy her own personal anger or beliefs.”
At this rate, Trump may win a third term…
The New Retro
The new retro craze among the kids these days would seem to be The Cultural Revolution.
Especially the forced self-denunciations.
Watching The Defectives
At the “Pride” Parade in Minneapolis yesterday, the processijon got delayed 20 or so minutes by a BLM group that apparently couldn’t find the freeway.
After they’d had their die-in, they got up and spent the rest of the parade marching a block or two ahead of the rest of the procession.
But not before issuing a list of demands…to the Pride organizers.
Here they are – direct and unedited:
LIST OF OUR DEMANDS
- We demand that Twin Cities Pride honors the legacy and life of trans women of color and recognize Pride as the byproduct of their resistance of police brutality and repression
- We demand Twin Cities Pride combats State violence with the total elimination of police and law enforcement
I’m sure that’ll go over well.
- We demand Twin Cities Pride is accountable for their perpetuation of white supremacy and homonormativity and that they eradicate their normalization of these violent systems
“Homonormativity”.
I’m just gonna let that sit there like a big glob of goo.
- We demand Twin Cities Pride provide an exclusive healing space at future events for indigenous and people of color to process, rest, and restorative justice
“Process, rest and restorative justice” – Verb, Verb, Noun phrase?
Apparently grammar is an agent of white supremacy.
- We demand Twin Cities Pride divests from all corporations as they promote the marginalization, exploitation, and criminalization of marginalized communities
- We demand Twin Cities Pride funds and organizes a Town Hall alongside members from marginalized communities including but not limited to Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar, Native Lives Matter, and Justice4MarcusGolden
- We demand Twin Cities Pride provide radical reparations via redistribution of resources and monetary compensation to grassroots organizations of the coalition’s choice
And there we are; good old-fashioned extortion.
My big question: will the left manage to eat itself before it eats everything of worth in our society?
The New Brownshirts
It’s impossible to watch this seven minute video about the descent of Evergreen State University into Orwellian lunacy and not ponder the idea of rebooting this entire country, preferably by “letting” the coasts become their own little insane asylums.
As for me? The world of business needs to institute a system of background checks to weed any child who’s ever been involved in one of these groups out of the hiring process, or public life, for the rest of their lives.
Side note: for a liberal, Bret Weinstein has cast-iron balls.