Category Archives: PC

Political Correctness and its “unintended’ consequences.

Our Cuturally-Illiterate Elite

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I may owe Ryan Winkler an apology.

I mean, growing up in rural North Dakota back when only Al Gore had access to the Internet, even I knew what “uncle Tom” meant when applied to a black man – so naturally I figured someone in his position, Harvard grad and all, would as well. Clearly, so did many others.

And although I’m an Anglo from the northern Plains, I’ve known what a Coyote – a slang term for a human trafficker who brings people across the border, either as illegal immigrants, sex slaves or mules – was for quite a while now.

But apparently a Harvard education does one no better in this context:

Y’know what’s “sickening”? Having a bunch of people whose opinion is considered above the rest of the world by dint of being a “blue check”, who are given to lecturing the deporables about their cultural illiteracy, who are themselves so culturally illiterate:

Just remember that when Blue America starts talking about getting rid of the electoral college.

Virtue Confectioning

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Let’s say you had again for a candy bar. Maybe even a whole bunch of them – like, you wanted to distribute candy bars.

A “Mars“ bar, perhaps, or maybe a pack of M&Ms? Which are, as it happens, a product of the Mars company?Where would you go? Especially if you are a diligent quarantiner, and can’t leave the house?

“Maybe“, do you think, “I can go to the Capt Mars Candy Company website“.

Certainly, you might think, that would be a place you could go to find out more about candy bars.You might think that.

And you would be wrong.

Go ahead – see how far down you have to scroll to find any reference to, well, candy.

Make Nick Sandman Rich Again

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A whole bunch of general counsels for a whoooole bunch of media outlets are changing their drawers right about now:

I’m smelling panicky settlements in the air.

Subservient

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These tweets have made the rounds of conservative social, cable and broadcast media.

Which doesn’t mean they don’t need to be splattered far and wide.

Berg’s Seventh Law is omnipresent:

“Irony” – Judge Coney Barrett is already one of the nation’s most powerful jurists, even if she never gets on the SCOTUS (and here’s hoping she does, and soon). She’s accomplished more in her life, so far, than any of the people yapping on Twitter about “The Handmaids Tale” “parallels” in her faith life.

Just saying – if “People of Praise” preaches “subservience for women”, they’re doing a terrible job of it.

Oh, yeah – Berg’s Seventh Law”

If the left didn’t have double standards…

…well, you know where we go from here.

The NYTimes‘ Memory Hole

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The NYTimes is trying to disappear some of their own paper’s history in re the “1619 Project”, which claimed that, based on the premise that America was founded primarily to exalt slavery, the nation was really founded when the first slave arrived.

Or…so they said. For a while:

Editors recently removed (without explanation or acknowledgment) the provocative statement that the project “aim[s] to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” from the article series’ online introduction. Lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones has repeatedly claimed it is a myth that the project proposes 1619 rather than 1776 as the country’s birth year: She blamed bad-faith critics on the right for tricking the media into believing otherwise.

“One thing in which the right has been tremendously successful is getting media to frame stories in their language and through their lens,” wrote Hannah-Jones in a subsequently deleted tweet. “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”

Forget for a moment that Hannah-Jones’ Twitter banner is a picture of 1776 crossed out and replaced with 1619. Forget that multiple progressive media outlets that were sympathetic to the project’s aims used the 1619-as-true-founding summary in order to explain it. Forget that a year ago, after the articles were published, both Hannah-Jones and New York Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein described the project in exactly these terms: “We sort of proposed the idea in a variety of ways that if you consider 1619 as the foundational date of the country, rather than 1776, it just changes your understanding and we call that a reframing of American history.” Just consider one last piece of evidence that Hannah-Jones is being deceptive about who invented the 1619-not-1776 framing.

My guess – she’s not being “deceptive”. She, and the Times, are backfilling and memory-holing because Identity Politics stands to cost the Democrats.

Again.

Generation Plath

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Consider the possibility that humans evolved over millions of years. Consider the possibility that survival traits selected for evolutionary value are different for women than men. Consider the possibility that the most evolutionary successful survival traits for women include the herd instinct, and maternal instincts.

College teaches women to be strong, independent, career-oriented people who have children late in life, if at all. Everything about modern feminist education directly contradicts the millennia of hardwired evolutionary instincts. The endless mental conflict between what society tells you to do and what your instincts tell you to do, is exhausting and depressing.

But that’s all silly, isn’t it? That’s just white privilege and mansplaining and patriarchal oppression. 

Isn’t it?

Joe Doakes

To answer your observation of the contradictions, shut up.

And Then…

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

White, Jewish girl from Kansas City pretends to be Black girl from the ‘hood, for her entire career.  

She has a Ph.D.  from U-W, Madison.  Figures.

What do you bet she rode the Affirmative Action express all the way up?  “Black” woman applying to college and then to grad school – guaranteed admission.  “Black” woman doing “research” for a Ph.D – easier grading, more help, less criticism.  “Black” woman academic with excellent grades applying to be college professor – the script writes itself.

The news story compares her to Rachel Dolezal, the White woman who pretended to be Black to get a white-collar job (running a branch office of the NAACP).   True, but oddly, the story makes no mention of Elizabeth Warren, the White woman who pretended to be an American Indian so she could ride the Affirmative Action escalator into a professorship at Harvard.

That’s all fine, this woman confessed, she’s out in the open, and then . . . well, then what?  The college says they can’t comment on personnel matters, which implies she’s still working there.  She didn’t quit?  She didn’t give back the job she gained under false pretenses, the money that should have gone to another, more morally deserving person?

I see the confession . . . where’s the penance?

Joe Doakes

Penance is a form of white supremacy.

Haven’t you been paying attention, Joe?

Tag It And Bag It

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Dennis Prager puts it well – the Left (today’s extreme left, not the center-left American liberalism of Hubert Humphrey or John F. Kennedy) destroys everything it touches.

The American Civil Liberties Union of the sixties and seventies, the ACLU of Nat Hentoff and other principled center-left civil libertarians was an organization with a political point of view, but that realized civil liberties were for everyone; that if the Manhattan crowd infringed rural Missouri’s civil liberties, they’d eventually regret it.

I’ve been joking – and then “joking” (see Berg’s 21st Law) – since the nineties that the ACLU should obey truth in advertising laws and change its name to the San Francisco, Hollywood and Upper East Side CIvil Liberties Union (SFHaUESCLU), since that’s really all they represent.

So I’m not sure if I should be happy or concerned that the ACLU has dropped all pretense to the contrary.

Ain’t S**t Indeed

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John Thompson – the DFL endorsed candidate for the Minnesota House, who threatened to burn down Hugo, Minnesota – is clearly not a fan of the police.

And it’s causing the DFL problems – while by all indications Ken Martin is keeping Thompson locked up in a closet and not letting him anywhere near the public, the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, normally a reliable endorser of DFL candidates, has switched its endorsements in two swing House districts, and possibly more. The kerfuffle – which the media hasn’t been able to bury, despite their best efforts – caused the DFL to bag a fundraiser with Thompson and other DFL officials last week, which is a big deal, two months before an election.

Now, I’ve had a policy since the beginning of this blog: I leave peoples’ families out of it. Some of my various stalkers haven’t been quite as discriminating – and yes, that does make me a better person than them.

And I’m not going to change that now.

But while it seems that candidate Thompson’s son has had some brushes with the law, it also seems that the son also owes his life to one of the Saint Paul cops who, Thompson the Elder reminds us, “ain’t s**t”:

In early August 2018, a St. Paul officer was credited with saving his life after he was shot outside a funeral home on the 700 block of Portland Avenue.

Thompson was found in an alley with gunshot wounds to his chest and abdomen after a confrontation with a fellow citizen became violent. The St. Paul Police Department said that officer Mathew Jones aided Thompson and stemmed his bleeding until EMS arrived to transport him to the hospital. It is unlikely that Thompson would have survived without the medical care Jones administered, authorities said.

Reports from Fox 9 and the Pioneer Press identified the man who was shot on Aug. 6, 2018 as Thompson’s son Damarco. The St. Paul Police Department confirmed with Alpha News that Damarco’s life was saved by Jones, who received the Life Saving Award for his actions that day.

“While the saving of a life is generally attributed to the hospital and responding EMS crews, the officers who take those initial actions, such as Officer Jones, should receive the lion’s share of the credit,” St. Paul Fire’s EMS coordinator, Captain Kenneth Adams, said of the incident. “For if it were not for them and their actions, the EMS crews and hospital staff would not have a patient to work with.”

I leave families out of things – but it doesn’t seem remotely unfair to point this out.

Privileged Couple’s Gentrified Night Out Interrupted By Austere Social Scholars’ Mostly Peaceful Protest

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OK, that’s not the real tag line on the story.

Yet.

But it doesn’t seem implausible at all, does it?

Minneapolis couple out on the town in the North Loop, attacked by 8-10…

…well, the piece leaves that wide open:

Probably more white supremacist Hells Angels. They’re behind everything that’s wrong in Minneapolis.

Darned white supremacists.

Hail To The…Er, VIP

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A friend of the blog emails:

Last night at a prayer meeting one of the members of the group told us that Minneapolis public schools made a change to job titles. This friend of mine is a teacher at Minneapolis South. He said it was announced yesterday that all titles in the Minneapolis public school system with the term Chief in them will be changed. It’s the end of racism as we know it.

Excising a word that existed in a constant context in the English language for hundreds of years?

Yeah, that oughtta fix it.

Open Letter To House Majority Leader Winkler

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To: Rep. Ryan WInkler, House Majority Leader
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Timing

Rep. Winkler,

Yesterday you tweeted in re the shooting in Kenosha:

Rep Winkler, I say the following with all due respect.

I’m just spitballing, here, but maybe a white, suburban Harvard grad who called one of the leading jurists in the nation an “Uncle Thomas” because he departed the Democrat Party’s plantation, might want to sit out the whole “white supremacy” thing.

That is all.

Appropriation!

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I sometimes “joke” that labeling any of modern society’s more mundane amenities – a garbage truck, a bottle of mustard, a rake, whatever – as “artisanal” will get a premium from the gullible.

And extension of that concept is that if you label it as “Native American”, you will ring up a premium from the most gullible of all, “progressives”.

For example, firefighting:

And, by way of follow-up…:

All due respect to MPR’s finely-honed journalistic chops, but are they referring to setting a “backfire”? One of the most common tactics of wilderness or open-country firefighting?

Or the concept of a “controlled burn”, used throughout the Great Plains to cut down on the fuel loading of a piece of land, to mitigate future fires?

Just curious.

Casualties Of Leftism

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“The left destroys everything it touches”.

It’s a Dennis Prager quote, and it may be among his most valuable ones.

And it’s true.

Academia.

K-12 Education.

Entertainment.

Music.

And…late night TV.

There is not a single one of life’s petty joys that they don’t completely trash.

The New Kulaks

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Remember when “racism” meant “hating, disparaging or discriminating against someone because of their ethnicity?”

And the good guys and gals sought “equality” – the whole “judging by the contents of peoples’ hearts rather than the color of their skin” thing.

Those were quaint days indeed.

Today? Big Left isn’t seeking “equality”. The goal is “anti-Racism”.

And the “racism” they are against is, when you dig beneath the twaddle, all of Western CIvilization.

Open Letter To Seth Rogen

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To: Seth Rogen
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Issues In Fulfilling Your Request

Mr. Rogen,

In regards to your request that everyone who questions “Black Lives Matter“ should“F*** off” and not go to any of your movies: We’ve got a bit of a problem here.

I’m not going to say I haven’t enjoyed a few of your movies; “Zack and Miri make a Porno” was worth a watch. And Freaks and Geeks was pretty essential, although that was mostly a Linda Cardellini thing – and you played basically the same role you’ve played in just about every movie since.

Which brings us, with all due respect, to the point; you’ve kind of got a formula – to the extent that once you’ve seen one of your movies, you’ve kind of seen them all.

Which puts us in a bit of a pickle. I can’t “f*** off” and skip your movies, since logically, unless your formula changes, I have already seen all your future, lovable-bumbling-stoner/slacker-fish out of water movies as well

Please see to this.

That is all.

Snappy Answers To Casual Gaslighting, Part II

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“If You’re ‘On The Fence’, You’re Complicit”\

No. If I’m “on the fence on an issue”, then neither side has convinced me yet. “Better to be quiet and have people think you might be a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.

And being considered a fool by anyone using a line like the star of today’s piece is at best irrelevant and at worst mutual.

Snappy Answers To Casual Gaslighting, Part I

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“Silence is Violence”.

No. It’s not.

Silence – if you catch me silent at all – is me keeping my mouth shut while I figure out what I think, to say nothing of what I’m going to say. Your freedom of speech doesn’t give you the right to tell me what I’m going to say.

If your response to that is “there is only one thing to say”, and that’s to agree with your point of view – then most likely you’re trying to logroll and shame people into knocking off all that pesky thinking, and just acquiescing.[1] If your position is worthy, I may eventually agree with you. Not doing so, in and of itself, doesn’t make me the immoral one.

Logically, it’s Orwellian – silence is the opposite of violence. Morally, it’s worse than Orwellian.

If your response is “that’s how Germans reacted when Jews were getting hauled off” – well, there’s your opportunity to convince me that the issue we face is, actually, that clear-cut.

If it’s not? If there are some facets to the issue at hand over which reasonable people may debate?

If you were to tell a spouse or a significant other “if you’re not verbally acquiescing with my point of view, you are party to evil”, a therapist would call you an emotional abuser.

And they’d be right.

Logrolling is no substitute for a convincing argument.

Unfortunately, people using this form of logrolling, gaslighting chanting point aren’t trying to “convince”, and they’re not trying to provoke thought.

Complementary Mass Psychoses

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I figured this out the other day.

Just as “White Privilege” is really class privilege sanitized for white progressives’ protection…

…so, too, is “white fragility” in fact “blue fragility” – the inability of “blue-state” progressives to reconcile their class advantages with their white prog guilt.

And both, also, are one sweet bit of grifting, if you got in on the ground floor:

DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” article was, in a sense, an epistemological exercise. It examined white not-knowing. When it was published in 2011 in The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, it reached the publication’s niche audience. But three years later it was quoted in Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger, during a fierce debate — with white defensiveness on full view — about the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s casting of white actors as Asians in a production of “The Mikado.” “That changed my life,” she said. The phrase “white fragility” went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month,

This is verging on becoming, if not a full-fledged “Berg’s Law“, at least a corollary to the 7th.  

Uncanny

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember the Indians who tore down the Columbus statue on the capitol grounds, as Capitol Police stood by and did nothing?

Governor Walz promised there would be “consequences.”  Haven’t noticed any news articles about charges being filed. Did they get a time out? Double secret probation?

What exactly are the consequences for destroying government property? I’m feeling oppressed by the health department. Can I go burn it down?

Joe Doakes

If the “Penalty” for destroying statuary is nervous foot-shuffling and occasional statements with no followup, I’m totally going after that Floyd Olson statue.