ENTIRE LGBT COMMUNITY: “Don’t you dare use tired stereotypes of “Groomers” and “Chicken Hawks” to refer to our community! We do not target children!”
ALSO THE LGBT COMMUNITY: (referring to a proposal in the California Assembly that would make soliciting a minor for prostitution a felony):
I’d normally fill in a pithy punch line here, but there truly is none.
Ask not “why is Hollywood endlessly rebooting old movies ideas” . That one’s obvious; Big Hollywood has almost not good new ideas, and comic books are reaching a state of diminishing returns.
The real question is, how will modern morés bastardize their victims – in this case, Fistful of Dollars?
Let’s get our predictions on the board.
The protagonist will be a woman.
Instead of a revolver, she’ll practice some anachronistic martial art. Or maybe use a longbow.
The villains – Mexicans in the original – will be white males.
The townspeople will be plucky single mothers whose white male husbands ran off with saloon floozies (but for a few Latino families and at least one anachronistic black one).
Others?
What’s so funny about showing up to work on time, rational thought and planning for the future?
Joe Doakes, formerly from Como Park, emails:
I am retiring in three weeks. I gave my notice in April but my employer still has not posted my job. HR is considering the job listing. Are those minimum qualifications in line with our commitment to racial justice and diversity in the workforce, or are the minimums too restrictive considering our goal of being a progressive and enlightened workforce? Personally, I don’t care if the job goes unfilled – I’m outta here and not looking back – but it occurs to me that HR’s quandary stems from confusion about cause-and-effect.
In America’s distant past, White people owned Black people as slaves. To make up for it, my employer claims to be Equal Opportunity but in practice implements Affirmative Action to give Black people a leg up in hiring over White people. Except there aren’t enough Black people on the list of eligible candidates so we substitute another “protected class” and hire Asian women instead.
How does hiring an Asian woman today redress the injustices done to Black men a century ago? How can Affirmative Action possibly accomplish its intended goal?
Okay, let’s say it could. So why aren’t there more Black people on the eligible list? Most didn’t apply, the ones who did apply scored too low on the exam, and the ones who scored well have already been snapped up by other employers to meet their Affirmative Action goals and timetables (we do not have quotas, nobody ever has quotas, quotas are Bad; we have “goals and timetables” which are Good even though the results are identical).
Why didn’t more Black men apply for a job which requires a diploma? Why didn’t more Black men score higher? Perhaps because staying in school, showing up on time, working hard, are attributes of White culture (at least, according to the Smithsonian)…
…so obviously authentically Black people don’t apply. But is the applicant’s culture any of my employer’s business? If it is, why aren’t we testing for the cultural values of the culture we want to hire, instead of the culture we’re trying not to hire? And what are those values of Authentically Black Culture? How are they different from the values of White Culture? What should we be testing for?
We must do something about White culture! Really, why? It’s what made this nation work, it got us where we are. Why are we throwing it away? How do we as a nation, benefit from that trade?
Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park
“It’s what’s made this nation work”
There’s your problem right there. To our new ruling elite, that’s a bug, not a feature.
In the immediate aftermath of declaring that realizing the non-charges against Trooper Londregan were “anti-queer” (???), Henco Attorney Mary Moriarty tells us that all that talk about crime in her jurisdiction is fearmongery:
During a May 28 event, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty explained she believes there’s an effort to cause the public to fear crime.
“Moderate Democrats have done a lot of work in making people afraid of downtown Minneapolis,” she said. “There is a concerted effort to make people afraid of crime.”
The conversation took place between Moriarty and Dr. T. Anansi Wilson, a Mitchell Hamline School of Law professor. The discussion centered around being “good trouble” and activism.
Quick – which “protected class” suffers least from society”s alleged intesectionalities – a lesbian county attorney or a black tenured law professor?
“Crime is down”
VIolent crime? In Minneapolis? Not as of yesterday, it isn’t:
This is the sort of thing they talk about inside the echo chamber:
She also discussed her advice for current law students, which was to ask more questions. “You talk about the rule of law, it’s like, what is that? I mean, I kind of wonder how anybody talks about the rule of law now. Wasn’t Roe v. Wade rule of law? I mean, what happened to that?” Moriarty said.
To the modern ultra left,
The only upside? If today’s generation of Henco voters actually do replace Moriarty, it’ll be with someone worse.
Coming in the wake of the celebrations of the 90th anniversary of D-Day, it’d be easy to get hypoerbolic about this.
But in today’s academic culture, making an announcement like this is a little like running off a Higgins boat with a BAR and running toward the muzzle flashes:
“But they’re a small conservative group! They’re not the big pediatrics group!”
Abolitionists were a tiny minority too.
And if you want to go on from there and say the national healthcare authorities of the UK, Norway, Germany and – this is kinda big – Sweden are “little conservative groups”, we need to talk.
I’m predicting the entire “transing kids” social contagion ends in a tsunami of medical malpractice cases.
I’m no expert, but this seems like an important step.
Modern progressivism is a social chameleon; it turns itself, and its history, into whatever it needs to to accomplish its ends.
Modern media, for the most part, are oblivious, if not downright supportive.
But there are exceptions.
David Mikics at “Arts and Letters” reviews Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution, a brief history of modern American progressivism’s contortions since the death of George Floyd.
The latest litmus test goal for progressives, erasing Israel from the map, will prove to be no more achievable than eradicating whiteness. But the movement has never been about actual results, only the public display of righteous intentions. Lately the righteousness has been serving evil ends, but few leftists are willing to admit this. Instead, they say that students demanding justice is a noble thing, whether or not what they are demanding is actually just; or that there really aren’t many extremists; or that they oppose genocide in Gaza, whether or not a genocide is actually happening, and while ignoring the actual genocidal rhetoric and actions of Hamas; or mostly, that you should be denouncing Trump instead.
Michelle Goldberg, in her Times op-ed about Bowles’ new book, wistfully yearned for the return of the “progressive urgency that marked the Trump presidency.” Except, the urgency is still there—not this time smashing the windows of minority business owners, saying that math is racist, or championing the right to shoot up in public, but applauding the murder of Jews, past and future. Putting progressive urgency in the past tense is a way of closing the book on that past while at the same time erasing what progressives are saying and doing in the present, in order to avoid any moral or practical responsibility for a political program that has clearly gone off the rails.
Progressivism’s moral bankruptcy is hard to overlook. Unless, of course, you write for The New York Times, in which case your strategy is to pretend that the left extremism of the past few years either didn’t happen or doesn’t matter. Luckily, we have Nellie Bowles to show us otherwise.
The whole thing is worth a read.
To: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
From: Mitch Berg, Opstandige Boer
Re: The Holiest Time Of The Woke Year
Voor Wie Het Aangaat
Did anyone consult with the flight attendants about this?
Follow-up question: Would the plane take off if I were to buckle my seatbelts as shown above?
Thanks for your attention to this matter.
Dat is alles.
…that at least some of the baby-boomers who protested against Vietnam have got to be looking at today’s mass of bobbleheaded students…:
…and thinking “dial back the crazy, kids”?
…people like this…:
…get angsty about American flags on beaches because, two generations ago, they were the ones shooting down at them from the cliffs.
Joe Doakes, no longer from Como Park, emails:
Seems that Cracker Barrel is in financial trouble after inviting restaurant patrons to celebrate Gay Pride. Go to https://ace.mu.nu/ and scroll down to “The Morning Rant: Cracker Barrel Went Woke and Now It’s Going Broke” for a nice recap.
Sometimes I wonder if every big company is working from the same “How to Destroy Your Business” cheat sheet, but that cynically paints with too broad a brush. It’s not “every big company” but “every company that ought to know its customers better.” This isn’t a woke failing, it’s a management failing. Figure out what the customers want, figure out how much they’ll pay for it, figure out how to sell them what they want at the price they’re willing to pay, then get rich doing it. It’s been the business model of civilization for thousands of years. How hard is it to understand?
I could see Target deciding to go woke. They’ve been on the cutting edge of liberal silliness forever. They were leaders in the trans bathroom issue. They refuse to sell spark plugs because gas lawn mowers kill Mother Nature. For them to put penis shorts in girls’ clothes should have made perfect sense, given the liberal woke crowd they’re marking to. It only blew up because they failed to understand that Woodbury Soccer Moms are all in for gay rights and saving the planet when the issue is theoretical but some of them become Mama Bear protecting her little girl cubs when the issue is personal. “Woke” is fine until their own daughter is at risk of being raped by the trannie in the girls’ bathroom at school, or shot by the vibrant kid who be jus bout to turn his life t’roun, or beat up by the diversity princess because the daughter didn’t respeck her. Then, old fashioned law-and-order values are in hot demand. Not enough to sustain a serious boycott to cause serious damage to the brand, but enough to be noticed. Okay, that’s Target.
Cracker Barrel, on the other hand, should know better. Their customers are Southern church-goers and senior citizens. It’s the Denny’s crowd, one economic step up from the Waffle House rabble. They’re willing to tolerate queers and trannies but they’re not the least bit interested in celebrating them. If you’re going queer, we’re going elsewhere, same as the Bud Light drinkers.
Personally, I’m waiting for Remington to announce its new Rainbow Pride Rifle to completely finish off the brand forever. Can’t be long now, can it?
Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park
Personally, the problem is that so many of these brands we’re avoiding are ones I haven’t patronized in forever.
Cracker Barrel? In the ’90s – when my budget made a trip to CB a treat for special occasions – it was an event. A destination. The biscuits alone were something I looked forward to.
The last time I ate at a CB – maybe 2017? – it was like eating at a Perkins that’d given up. Them going “woke” was a market anticlimax for me.
Hamline University in Saint Paul is an exquisitely expensive instution that seems to be not quite as prestigious as Saint Thomas, and always a couple of degrees behind Macalester in terms of the impeccability of their leftist orientation.
But they aren’t to be left behind.
Here’s their “pro-Palestine” neo-Brownshirt “encampment”, as a rainy night ended this morning.
So maybe we’ll have Hamline kids puking on their own lawns for a change this weekend.
So, about that “artificial intelligence…”
So, point for “techno-pessimism”…
A couple of points in background:
We’ll come back to each of those.
I could probably quote half of this interview in this post. It’s Ben Shapiro interviewing Abigail Shrier about what’s wrong with kids today:
It’s a well-spent hour, although you can’t speed Shapiro up, since he already sounds like he’s talking at double speed.
We’ll come back to that.
I detest generational politics; the Miillennial / Zeeper taste for blaming “boomers” for their problems is both an evasion and ancient (I keenly felt I was in direct competition with Baby Boomers too, when I was in college, uh, twenty years ago). I might be early Gen-X. Or I might be from “Generation Jones“, the kids who don’t remember the Beatles and, let’s be honest, didn’t spend a lot of time obsessing over their generation – just learned that one last week. Or I might still hold the notion of generational “identity” and politics in sneering contempt.
But just because you detest something doesn’t mean it isn’t coming for you.
The memes are everywhere: Gen-Xers bragging about how they drank from firehoses, stayed out until dark, rode bikes without helmets, and are just plain tougher than the Millennials and Zeeps that followed with their helicopter parents and gluten allergies.
And there may be something to that. Not about the generations themselves, but about how they were raised, and how their feelings were treated.
I’ve joked with my kids, and other younger people, that some of my teachers were World War 2 veterans. My high school chemistry teacher had been a Navy dive bomber pilot, who was fond of telling us that his radioman and tail gunner, whom he trusted with his life, was maybe a year or two older than us, and that he wouldn’t trust us to get the donuts from the bakery.
More on point? “Feelings” weren’t the coin of the realm. If you hadn’t learned the meaning of the word “no” at home, a teacher would set you firmly straight, then and there; some of the men at the tip of a big wooden paddle if it were serious enough – as opposed to medevacing you to a therapist, writing up a special ed plan, and pumping you full of ritalin.
You didn’t get a pass for feeling, or being, bullied. You dealt with them – by hitting back, telling them off, or learning to ignore them (I did a little of all three).
And if you felt, in your adolescent anomie, like you were really, I dunno, Napoleon Bonaparte, you were not hustled to a (let’s come up with a name) personality dysphoria clinic and pumped full of drugs to make you shorter, Corsican and a military genius. You were told “No. You are Jonny Schmidt, and always will be. Now do your homework”.
Sometime in the past forty years, that changed. The emphasis on parenting focused less on community, “normalcy”, and coping. Parenting (and teaching, and child psychology) became therapeutic pastimes, focusing on validation, feelings and perceptions (and, paradoxically, teaching the skills that parents taught Xers/Jonesers and before because a discipline in psychology, “Cognitive Therapy”, that actually works and charges a ton of money);
Anyway – just as people will look at the ceiling when you stare upward, kids who are constantly asked about whether they’re depressed, or suicidal, or suffering “Trauma” from some hurt in their past, or feeling like they’re the wrong gender, are going to start thinking they’re depressed, suicidal or bound by trauma, or the wrong gender. Or at least utterly unable to deal with adverse feelings and events productively (without the help of a cognitive therapist, anyway).
Which leads to a generation of people who not only have a tough time dealing with life, but with each other. Meaning no couples, no kids, no future.
And as it turns out, this is all borne out by research.
Give the interview a listen.
…from our younger generation.
Almost 80 years ago, this was what a group of 18-22 year olds did:
Today?
Well, this may be the modern generation’s analog:
A bunch of guys (lefties call them “frat boys” which I suspect means “any college student that doesn’t have blue hair or non-intuitive pronouns).
We don’t expect much – but by golly, someone delivered!
Everything that needs to be said about you – those who deny the use of the institution for which the majority of the students, and the taxpayers, pay (and pay, and pay and pay and pay) was said almost six decades ago…
…by the best president of my lifetime (and yours, if you’re over 37 years old, whether you’re smart enough to know it or not).
Decades about, the Left used the term “Politically Correct” as a positive virtue; it referred to people, ideas and brands that, in 21st century parlance, signaled the correct virtues.
It took a few years of relentless grassroots conservative satire to turn “PC” into a cultural punchline.
Ditto “Woke”; it had an organic meaning among the black community, was appropriated and perverted into something akin to PC, and has since been pilloried to the point where white progressives have, uh, progressed from demanding conservatives “define woke”, to insisting it doesn’t exist.
Some of the most prominent figures in the Democratic Party have labeled themselves as progressives, but others, for various reasons, have put distance between them and the label recently.
Several Democrats have left the Congressional Progressive Caucus, with some leaving due to a rift over the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. One of the most high-profile departures came when Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) confirmed he was no longer in the caucus and shied away from calling himself a progressive when speaking with NBC News this month…Another Democrat who has shed the progressive label is Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who told NBC News in December 2023 that he is “not a progressive.” He has strayed further from progressive Democrats, especially regarding immigration and Israel, than he was expected to when he was elected in 2022.
Minnesota Democrats, of course, are tripling down; “Progressive” may be too far to their center.
I’m going to do my level best to make sure it hurts them.
In the wake of three episodes of pro-Palestine protesters burning themselves to death, the sixties – the radical-chic version – called to tell the left of the 2020s to dial back the crazy:
I mean, if “interests of power” = weeding out the most insane elements of the crowd that also wants to self-immolate Western Civilization, she may have a point.
On the other hand, it’s a teeeeeny little step from this to “not immolating other ‘serves the interests of power'”.
Hamas*holes in Florida try to block a road.
Get dragged.
Literally and figuratively.
I want to send this video to the Minneapolis City Council, just to see if any of them retreat to a crying room…
“Woke” constituencies in Massachusetts are having a hard time sorting out intersectional value:
The Daily Mail notes that in May, the student newspaper aired accusations that Christian staff members at the school had misgendered children, engaged in conversion therapy, and had even gone so far as to hold a prayer meeting during which there were references to an “LGBTQ demon.”
Trans vs. Christians? Seems like a no-brainer, right?
Not so fast. The Christians were also Latino!
Normally, this outcry would have been met with multiple apologies and reams of new policies designed to accommodate the aggrieved parties. But in this case, the staffers are black and Hispanic. So someone upped the ante. The parents who stated that not enough had been done to protect trans children were then accused of racism.
Only in America. Well, only in Blue America.
I think I just figured out how to make my fortune – running an intersectional small claims court, to adjudicate these sorts of things.
For a price, of course.
One of the big quasi-empirical drivers to “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in the business world was a McKinsey consulting study from almost ten years ago, whose results claimed that diversity was strength, not just for virtue-signaling purposes, but in bottom line terms.
If it seemed like a stretch – it was. A new study can’t reproduce McKinsey’s results:
However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019. Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that corporate America is going to stuff the toothpaste back into the tube; that would be a free market response, and Human Resources is a little bit of government, with all the attendant hidebound inflexibility and mulishness, embedded into the market.
…what surprised me more – that a Catholic church in Manhattan has bouncers…
…or that they did this with some Palestine/Climate/[fill in the cause] protesters on Easter:
My only regret? No clubs were used.
Remember during the oil boom in North Dakota?
When the Strib and every prog pundit with a blog was patronizingly intoning how dangerous all that unseemly oil money was going to be for all the hayseeds out on the prairie? When our cultural elites prowled the prairie looking for the evil that lies at the intersection of rural, Christian and suddenly prosperous?
The boom has moved on.
Progressives have not. Whenever they see new energy, and new money, they are there to whiz in the cereal.
But someone, gloriously, pushed back. This is Ibraham Ali, President of Guyana (via Powerline). And he is not amused by a BBC hack’s by-the-woke-numbers first-world nattering:
I saw this mere moments after I read this piece below – Musa Al Garbi’s observations about the endemic racism of upper-middle-class honkies in Manhattan.
It’s not just Manhattan, and it’s not just race.
So last week, the DFL introduce this amendment to existing state statute on “reasonable force” self-defense in this bill.
And the amendment includes some curious bits of language:
A Kiss Is Just A Kiss
Minnesota law allows the use of “Reasonable” and non-lethal force (that’s another statute altogether) in some circumstances: when you’re:
So far so good.
But the DFL wants to add an exception to the law:
Subd. 4.
Use of force not authorized; reaction to victim’s sexual orientation.
Force may not be used against another based on the discovery of, knowledge about, or potential disclosure of the victim’s actual or perceived sexual orientation, including gender identity and expression, including under circumstances in which the victim made an unwanted nonforcible romantic or sexual advance towards the actor, or if the actor and victim dated or had a romantic or sexual relationship.
So if I read this right – lawyers in the house, please sound off – it sounds like someone who takes a non-forcible pass at someone is fair game for a good slap – but not if they are or are “perceived” to be transgender, in which case it’s off limits?
Again – not being lawyer, I’m unclear on this, but is it currently OK to slap someone who makes a pass at you, if they’re “cisgender?” Or merely gay?
And that’s just the beginning.
Liquored Up?
When booze is involved, things get a little weirder, at least to this non-lawyer: Booze is no defense, except as an aspect of crimes whose elements include a particular state of mind:
An act committed while in a state of voluntary intoxication is not less criminal by reason thereof, but when a particular intent or other state
of mind is a necessary element to constitute a particular crime, the fact of intoxication may be taken into consideration in determining such intent or state of mind
Unless that state of mind involves a crime against a transgender person:
It is not a defense to a crime that the defendant acted based on the discovery of, knowledge about, or potential disclosure of the victim’s actual or perceived sexual orientation, including gender identity and expression, including under circumstances in which the victim made an unwanted nonforcible romantic
or sexual advance towards the defendant, or if the defendant and victim dated or had a romantic or sexual relationship.
So, is there a crime, currently, where the state of mind is an element of the crime, where intoxication can be considered as part of the defendant’s state of mind, that would not be affected by a victim’s perceived gender?
Someone help me out here.
And finally:
If You’re Not A Biologist, Is It Really “Manslaughter?”
Among several other motivations, manslaughter is when one…:
intentionally causes the death of another person in the heat of passion provoked by such words or acts of another as would provoke a person of ordinary self-control under like circumstances, provided that…
That appears to this non-attorney to refer to someone reacting to some form of extreme stressor, like crying child, or…:
(ii) the discovery of, knowledge about, or potential disclosure of the victim’s actual or perceived sexual orientation, including gender identity and expression, including under circumstances in which the victim made an unwanted nonforcible romantic or sexual advance towards the actor, or if the actor and victim dated or had a romantic or sexual relationship
So – is killing someone in the heat of the moment a lesser grade of manslaughter than killing someone of ambiguous gender?
Is it just me, or is that really weird?
Saint Louis Park Public Schools is looking for a new Assistant Superintendent.
But not just any Assistant Super. Nosirreebob.
This one is going to have some extra special administrator-fu (emphasis added):
The first sentence of the position’s summary says, “the Assistant Superintendent proactively supports the Superintendent to create and communicate anti-racist structures and systems, works to interrupt systems of oppression, and serves as a role model for culturally relevant pedagogy.”
The school district continues its summary of the position by saying the assistant superintendent must be “unwaveringly committed to anti-racist actions and use data to adapt and sustain their efforts towards racial equity to plan, direct, and coordinate action to achieve the mission and strategic objectives.”
The job description continues by saying the school district is seeking an assistant superintendent who can “examine the presence and role of ‘Whiteness’ in systems and structures,” and is “open to feedback regarding their own racial blind spots.”
The job will pay between $130-200K.
I think we finally found out what “fully funding education” means.
Lieutenant Governor Flanagan has a unique (?) approach to sports gambling:
I might just have to take enough interest in college hoops to keep track of how her bracket does.