Category Archives: PC

Political Correctness and its “unintended’ consequences.

Words Have Meaning – Sometimes

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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

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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

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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!

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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…

 

Watching The Defectives

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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

  1. 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
  1.  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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. We demand Twin Cities Pride divests from all corporations as they promote the marginalization, exploitation, and criminalization of marginalized communities
  1. 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
  1. 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

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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.

Because Katy Perry Doesn’t Do That Much Politics, Really

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I try to be civil. I truly do.

But John Fugelsang is the one person on this entire planet that saves Samantha Bee from the title of “Most Vapid Pundit On Planet Earth”.

Seriously – Fugelsang, whose qualifications as a public intellectual seem to begin and end at “hairdo”, has already earned himself a Berg’s Law, and just keeps getting worse.

Image may contain: 1 person, text

To which one responds “Only in America can you be pro-gun-control, pro-“campaign finance reform”, turn a blind eye to intellectual censorship and oppression on campus (and, increasingly, elsewhere), pretend “Antifa” is no big deal, oppose school vouchers and homeschooling, propose or support “Climate Nuremberg Tribunals” for scientific skeptics, and still call your self “pro-choice” with one cerebral lobe tied behind one’s back to make it fair.

Trapped In A World, Identity And Reality That I Never Made

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If race is a social construct with no fixed definition but is something we do and others do to us, then why can’t a person identify as a different race?  Example, Rachel Dolezal, was the White woman who identified as Black so she could run the Seattle chapter of the NAACP.  What’s wrong with that. Apparently, asking that question is hateful.

I thought the justification for affirmative action and protection legislation was because people were being discriminated against on account of things they had no control over, such as being Black or being a woman.  But if race and gender are now self-determined, why do they need protection?  Shouldn’t those laws be repealed?

I was disappointed that neither the author nor the scholar mentioned the most brilliant transracialist of all: Godfrey Elfwick.  #wrongskin.  The struggle is real.

Dear George Orwell:  you were an optimist.

Some Culture I May Just Appropriate

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The Chinese have hatched a word for “white liberal snowflakes“; Baizuo:

In China for instance, they have a word for these people. They are called “baizuo” or the “white left” on social media. Which is interesting, because even though China has its fair share of socialists and communists, they don’t have a direct equivalent to our liberal snowflakes. Most of the Chinese are still fiercely nationalistic and anti-immigrant, regardless of political affiliation. That country just doesn’t have a large population of politically correct, affluent liberals (presumably, they were all killed off during the Great Leap Forward). So what does this term mean to the average Chinese citizen?

Read the whole thing.

Prediction And Opportunity

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Last week, the “hate crime” at Saint Olaf – a typewritten racist message left under a black students windshield wiper – turned out to be a hoax.

As, in fact, have the vast majority of “Hate Crime” incidents in the past six months; for all the caterwauling about the wave of hate certain to accompany Donald Trump’s election, nearly every episode has turned out to be lefty false-flags.

I Don’t Make The Rules::  It’s gotten to the point where it’s time to codify this as law.  Berg’s Law – in this case,

Berg’s Twentieth Law of Social Justice Warmongering:   All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.

No, Actually, I Do Make The Rules:  Saturday, the City Pages ran a story involving some anti-semitic, anti-muslim imagery around Uptown and Lake of the Isles:

The street sidles Lake of the Isles one block to the west in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis.

On Thursday, a resident was enjoying the agreeable spring morning when she came upon a disconcerting sight. Affixed to light poles on the northwest side of the lake along a paved trail were anti-Semitic and Islamophobic stickers.

“Fuck Jews” read one. The other had a hand giving the middle finger and the word “Islam” below it.

She summarily took down the stickers and contacted Councilwoman Lisa Goodman,  telling her, “I was so shocked. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like that in Minneapolis.”

As of late Thursday afternoon, neither the Minneapolis Police Department nor the Park Police had received report of the incident.

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At the bottom of the Islamophobic sticker listed a website: tightrope.cc.

“It’s not illegal to be white… yet!” reads tightrope’s main page.

The site is a one-stop shop for all goodies intolerant, from the “Racist Joke Book” to “White Lives Matter” stickers to KKK hats.

This episode doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Whi;e, “Tightrope.cc” could just as easily be legitimate as a false flag ( the proprietors die in a fire, either way), putting a link on a poster is easy.

But the posters around Uptown and Lake of the Isles?  My BS detector practically jumped out of its mounting bracket.

First – cutesy photoshops with mid-level production values that look like they were done by art school fops, profaning religious imagery?  That’s a Minneapolis lefty thing (If I didn’t know better – and I actually don’t – I’d say that middle finger up above looks like Ken “Avidor” Weiner’s work – but I’m told he’s at least semi-retired from whatever it was he did).

And Uptown and Lake of the Isles?   Please.

Most people who do this sort of thing stay on home turf.   There’s a reason the snowflake at Saint Olaf dropped a racist note at ˆSaint Olafˆ- because it’s home turf.   The perp knows that if he’d have dropped anti-black racism in North Minneapolis and been caught, they’d be finding pieces of him in dog stools for weeks.

My guess – and it is a guess, but if I were a gambling man I’d bet money on it – is that this was done by a couple of twenty-something social justice snowflakes looking to false-flag the right – all the right.

Am I right?

Who knows?   I’ve been wrong – once or twice.

But’s called “Berg’s 20th Law” for a reason.

Deranged

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Berg’s Eighth Law (“American liberalism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder”) gets overshadowed by the Seventh and, lately, the Eighteenth Laws.

But it is no less universal – as that noted conservative tool, the City Pages, noted last week.   As we noted two weeks ago, new MNGOP chair Jennifer Carnahan stomped down hard on a fairly racist Facebook meme posted by the 7th CD.   Even the City Pages approved:

For her part, Carnahan did everything right, wasting no time publicly apologizing and demanding the resignation of the person responsible.

But Berg’s Eighth Law reared its head:

But as news of the Ellison post spread, hate mail started piling up in Carnahan’s Facebook Messenger. People didn’t seem to care that she wasn’t the person who created the post. They called her a racist. They demanded she step down. They were all from people who hate racism, presumably, though some were plenty racist themselves.

They certainly were:

They apparently missed the relatively dispositive fact that Carnahan didn’t, y’know, actually write or post the “Goat-Humper” meme herself.

If you’re black, Asian, Latino, gay or female, Big Left hates you.

Appropriate Appropriation

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Aristotle explained the difference between dialectic and rhetoric.  Higher learning has been a White Male tradition for thousands of years.  White males in monasteries preserved the knowledge until White males at universities could share it with other White males.  For anybody else to go to college is cultural appropriationand it’s got to stop.

I notice, by the way, that the author skips right over the historical context for the pasta he thinks his culture would claim.  That belongs to the Chinese.  He’ll have to go back to eating clams on sea weed or something more authentic.

Joe Doakes

If you’re reading English and are not descended from, well, the English, it’s time to go back to your own ancestral tongues.

I’m a quarter Scots, so I’ll grandfather in.  Og jeg snakker lille Norsk, so jeg er OK..

“Eurasia Has Never…No, Has Always…er…LINE!”

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Steven Colbert went in front of his audience on Tuesday afternoon and broke the news that Comey had been fired.

That’s where it got interesting:

Colbert’s audience roared their approval…

…having not yet been told that Democrats never wanted Comey fired for never ever blaming him for Hillary’s campaign collapse, and weren’t, nosirreebob, demanding his ouster mere moments before Trump whacked him.

Further proof that badly-trained apes that make up the audience at shows like Colbert, Bill Maher, Samantha Bee and The Daily Show are  actually as dumb and manipulable as the left thinks the right’s audience is.

Color Me Shocked

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Steven Colbert – a person who’d still be playing character parts on Law and Order if there weren’t a wave of pervasive liberal smugness to ride – is in a bit of “trouble” for saying the sort of thing that would have gotten a Congressional hearing if Rush Limbaugh had said it.

It’s all just wind in sails, of course; Urban Liberal Privilege means that there’s no penalty for violating PC codes when one is attacking apostates (and as an NYC plutocrat, who should be a “progressive” and was a Democrat, Trump is surely an apostate).

Honestly?  Up until the last year or two, I’d have figured it would fly for the same reason that black people can drop the n-bomb or the Irish can call themselves “harps” but have license to pound the stuffing out of anyone else who does; I always figured Colbert was gay.

I’m told he’s not.

Now, I don’t care either way.  I’ve seen a lifetime grand total of 40 minutes of Colbert.  I don’t plan to add to it.  Ever.  Even if he has a late-life epiphany and becomes a conservative firebrand.  His delivery, his style, and even the timbre of his voice annoy the living bejeebers out of me. Also, he’s just not very funny.

Upper Middle Class White Peoples’ Burden

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As we noted earlier this morning, the mayor of Seattle is expanding his “soda tax” to cover diet pop1 because apparently minorities drink more sugar-sweetened pop than honkey does.

And the tax – which was ostensibly about taxing people into health – became a matter of crushing white privilege.

As commenter Mammathus Primigenius noted in the comment section, the idea that upper middle class honkeys drink diet pop is sooooo 1986.

If the Mayor of Seattle (and let’s be honest, Minneapolis will want to keep up with the social justice joneses; it’s the city’s one productive industry) wants to stick it to honkey, I think we need to create a list of things that are genuinely associated with his and Betsy Hodges’ main voting bloc  upper-middle-class urban “white privilege”.

I’ll start things out.  You feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.  I’ll send them to the Mayor when we’re done:

  • Kombucha
  • Coconut Oil
  • Raw Denim
  • Beard-care products
  • Any coffee or tea beverage that includes more than coffee or tea
  • Riding bicycle paths
  • Skateboarding
  • Art crawls
  • Skiing and snowboarding
  • Yoga classes and accessories
  • Four year private colleges
  • Membership fees in “gun safety”, environmental and animal rights groups and the ACLU.
  • Subarus
  • Whole Foods goods of any and all types
  • Doulas
  • Anything purchased from Etsy

Carry on!

Paging The 14th Amendment…?

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The Earl Mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray, proposed a Bloomberg-style pop tax.

Bad enough?  Sure.

Then, the social justice warriors sounded off, pointing to statistics saying that minorities drink more pop than honkeys.

At first, the tax was to make distributors of sugary drinks pay 2 cents per ounce with the mayor claiming it would bring in $16 million.

It won’t.  But, again, not the point.

The mayor changed his tax when his staff told him that it would disproportionately affect minorities, who apparently have higher soda consumption rates than white people.

The tax has now become an “issue of equality” as far as the mayor is concerned because “upper-middle-class white people” who consume diet drinks more frequently must be taxed to fight “white privileged institutionalized racism”, according to Reason.

I’m beyond thinking the laws actually affect this sort of behavior on the part of government.

Memoryhole-o-matic!

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A regular reader writes:

A year ago, Slate asked if the civil war could have been avoided and went back decades before the war to point to events leading up to and potentially giving rise to the civil war, as well as potential ways conflict might have been diverted.
Today, I’m told that it is a stupid, crazy thing to ponder and that the civil war happened in 1861, not decades earlier.
I’m not excited about Trump talking up a pro-slavery Democrat. But, I think the Left’s reaction is funny.

In the late thirties and early forties, after the USSR and Germany signed the Molotov/Von Ribbentrop Pact, folk singer and communist Pete Seeger wrote a series of songs castigating FDR for criticizing Stalin’s new bestie Hitler.    Then, when Hitler abrogated the pact by invading the USSR, Seeger withdrew the songs from circulation – literally, asking fans to return their copies to the store – and wrote music praising FDR and the war effort.

If Big Left couldn’t flush it’s own past down the memory hole on demand, the entire movement wouldn’t be intellectually sustainable.

Vital Questions – Answered

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From the email:

Mitch

I see that the Minneapolis park board has changed the name of Lake Calhoun to “Lake Bde Maka Ska”.

How in the flaming hootie-hoo is that pronounced?

Sincerely,

Woe-Begone

Ms. Begone:

“Bde Maka Ska” is pronounced “Betsy Hodges Slop”.

Glad to help.

That is all.

Now That All Of Minneapolis’ Problems Are Solved

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The city of Minneapolis is going to vote on whether to change the name of Lake Calhoun – currently named after John Calhoun, an ardent supporter of slavery.Among their top choices of new names:

10.  Lake Quetzl-Jambo-Wang-Tse (a perfectly-engineered word incorporatiing all indigenous traditions except English).

9.  Lake Julia

8.  Lake Grievance

7.  Collective Lake

6.  Lake Debs

5. Lake Marx

4. Lake Wobegone

3. Lake Castro

2. Gus Hall Lake

1. Lake Guevara

Votes in the comment section.

There Will Come A Day When Berg’s Seventh Law Is Required Reading In All Classrooms

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Bit by bit, some liberals are getting it.

John Kass at the ChiTrib?  He seems to have figured out the Big Lie of the Big Left:

The lie we were told as kids was this: The end of American liberty would come at the hands of the political right.

Conservatives would take away our right to speak our minds, and use the power of government to silence dissent. The right would intimidate our teachers and professors, and coerce the young.

And then, with the universities in thrall, with control of the apparatus of the state (and the education bureaucracy), the right would have dominion over a once-free people.

Some of us were taught this in school. Others, who couldn’t be bothered to read books, were fed a cartoon version of the diabolical conservative in endless movies and TV shows.

Best bad example?  Every episode of Law and Order after about season 5.

The most entertaining of these were science fiction, sometimes with vague references to men in brown shirts and black boots goose-stepping in some future time.

…

But the lie is obvious now, isn’t it?

A lie – and a Berg’s Seventh Law invocation.

Because it is not conservatives who coerced today’s young people or made them afraid of ideas that challenge them. Conservatives did not shame people into silence, or send thugs out on college campuses to beat down those who wanted to speak.

The left did all that.

It’s there in front of you, the thuggish mobs of the left killing free speech at American universities. The thugs call themselves antifas, for anti-fascists.

They beat people up and break things and set fires and intimidate. These are not anti-fascists. These are fascists. This is what fascists do.

We have not just one, but two generations of people who think 1984 is about the right, and who think they’re Winston Smith.