Category Archives: Privilege!

Our Not-So-Bright Critical Class

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The daughter of Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua (who we last encountered in this space eight years ago) is going to be clerking for Justice Kavanaugh…

…after she said she wouldn’t be…

…after her Mom praised Kavanaugh – apparently accurately. I’ll be adding emphsis:

Which is where our story today picks up.

Chua, [a Yale law professor and the author of the book “Tiger Mom”, a manifesto for ruthlessly deliberate parenting] who serves on the school’s clerkship committee, wrote that her daughter had accepted an appellate clerkship from Kavanaugh, but that she would find a different judge to clerk with if his nomination was successful.
She also described Kavanaugh as a “mentor to women.”
The op-ed drew severe criticism, with many arguing that she wrote it aiming to guarantee her daughter a Supreme Court clerkship.

Brief aside: using “many” as a source is becoming my journalistic pet peeve.

But let’s go one step beyond. Would a woman who wrote an entire book on parenting, which included parenting tips such as…:

…a total ban on TV-watching, play dates and sleepovers. Chua wrote of how when Lulu was 4, she rejected her daughter’s homemade birthday card for looking sloppy.
Lulu was ordered to practice the violin six hours a day, and both girls were required to play the piano flawlessly — or Chua would threaten to burn their stuffed animals. The merest hint of failure was met with name-calling: Sophia was “garbage,” Lulu a “disgrace as a daughter.”

…bat an eye at brown-nosing a SCOTUS nominee?

Dear “Many”: Your promotion from Captain to Major Obvious is granted. Congrats.

#Resistance Is Feudal

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According to the not-at-all-conservative but fairly rational Joel Kotkin, the modern left is retreating into a sort of feudalist orthodoxy:

In the past, the right, notably the segment affiliated with religious belief, was closely associated with censorship and control of thought. Today, enforced orthodoxy derives primarily from the left, emboldened by near total control of the media, university curricula and cultural products.
Remarkably [to the authors, anyway – Ed.], a recent study by the Atlantic found that “the most politically intolerant Americans” tend be white, highly educated urban progressives.
Conservatives may have once driven intolerance from the pulpit and the press, but they no longer have the ability to exercise thought control in a meaningful way.

Long ago, religious zealots embraced feudal ideals, but increasingly it’s the ultra-secular progressives who reprise the role of Medieval Inquisitors.

One of the things that originally led to “Berg’s Seventh Law” was noticing that, while John Kerry was quick to condescend to his various opponents’ lack of “Nuance” in approaching complex issues, it was in fact people on the left that exercised the most rigorously reductionistic approach to analyzing the world.

I’m happy to see I’m not alone:


Today these ideals are being undermined by a fevered rush to reject empiricism and complexity. “There’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right,” suggests the left’s super-star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .
This emphasis on intent and “morality” reflects a more Medieval attitude than that of a reasoned politics that grows from facts and evidence.
As in the Middle Ages, the new progressives often seek to impose a secular version of the imperial theocracy. Like the Medieval Catholic Church, new school progressives often exhibit hostility to the roots of our own past, whether verities contained in Shakespeare, the writings of the founders or even the notion of disinterested jurisprudence. In the new fundamentalism, as in the old, there can be only one set of truths, while all others are viewed as evil.

Can you remember when this scene…

…actually didn’t remind you of a typical day at a modern American university?

All The Wrong Reasons

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I’ll admit it. I’ve never much cared for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Even when I was much younger, the idea of pledging allegiance to a government skeeved me out. Governments should get the loyalty they deserve.

Starting in my teens, when I was for any reason involved in saying the Pledge, I’d hold a clenched fist over my heart, by way of saying my allegiance had best not be betrayed – because my real allegiance is to freedom, to government of by and for a free association of equals, ruling by consent of the ruled – to the ideals, not the bureaucracy headquartered in DC with branches close to wherever you live.

But the Saint Louis Park City Council, having solved all the west-suburban town’s other problems, has voted unanimously to stop reciting the Pledge before City Council meetings.

And I’m not impressed with the rationale:

“In order to create a more welcoming environment to a diverse community, we are going to forgo saying the Pledge of Allegiance before every meeting,” said Council Member Tim Brausen. At the meeting, Brausen said members might recite it in the future if there’s an appropriate opportunity, like if Boy Scouts are there.  

Any parts of that “diverse community” that are uncomfortable with the fact that this is America should perhaps re-evaluate why they’re here. Stat.

Oberlin: Bouncing The Rubble

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On top of the $11 million in compensatory damages a few weeks back, an Ohio court has awarded Gibon’s Bakery $22 million – the statutory maxiumum – in punitive damages over the bakery’s defamation suite:

The counts were:
Defamation – Oberlin College and Raimondo were found liable
Infliction of intentional emotional distress – Oberlin College was found liable
Intentional interference of business relationships – Raimondo was found liable
Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar in a letter to the campus community on Friday expressed dissatisfaction with the jury’s decision, and signaled the college plans to appeal its findings.
“Let me be absolutely clear: This is not the final outcome. This is, in fact, just one step along the way of what may turn out to be a lengthy and complex legal process,” Twillie Ambar said. “We are disappointed in the jury’s decisions and the fragmentary and sometimes distorted public discussion of this case. But we respect the integrity of the jury, and we value our relationship with the town and region that are our home.”

Note to Social Justice warriors – outside your bubble, your curious illogic doesn’t fly. As Paul Mirengoff notes:

As I understand it, Oberlin argued at trial that it isn’t liable because its students, not the college, were to blame for harming Gibson’s. Then, at the damages phase, Oberlin argued that the college shouldn’t be slammed with a big damages assessment because that outcome would harm its students.
I suspect the jury hated Oberlin and its students and wanted to punish both.

And it turns out that outside that bubble, real-world rules apply..

…to the chagrin and, I suspect, the deep surprise of the SJWs.

It’s a wonderful day.

Now We Have A Precedent. Ho Ho Ho.

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Oberlin – perennial contender for the most obnoxiously “progressive” college in the country – gets hit with an $11 million defamation judgment after its social justice legion falsely accused a local bakery of racism:

A Lorain County jury ordered Oberlin to pay $11 million in compensatory damages to Gibson’s Bakery, a local fixture since 1885 that was beset by protests and racism allegations after three black students were arrested for shoplifting the day after the 2016 presidential election.
“The jury saw that Oberlin College went out of their way to harm a good family and longtime business in their community for no real reason, and the jury said we aren’t going to tolerate that in our community anymore,” Owen Rarric, an attorney for the Gibsons, told Legal Insurrection.

The award, which could triple at Tuesday’s hearing on punitive damages, came as a warning to universities that encourage social-justice activism as student protests spill from the campus to the local community.

The protests started after three black students were arrested for shoplifting.

And what of that?

Meanwhile, the three students pleaded guilty to shoplifting and aggravated trespass while issuing statements absolving the bakery of racism.
In 2017, Gibson’s sued the college for libel; tortious influence with business relationships and contracts, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, culminating in the nearly month-long trial in Elyria, Ohio.
“The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners,” Mr. Jacobson said. “The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.”

Let the caterwauling about “chilling effecdts” begin.

More of this. Faster.

UPDATE: It’d seem Oberlin itself is doing its best to make sure more of this happens faster.

UPDATE 2: Oberlin costs $55K a year. Don’t you just love it when people with that kind of pedigree start yapping about other peoples’ “privilege”?

(Post title h/t Paul Havemann)

The Snowiest Flake

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75 years ago, thousands of Americans – teenagers or not far removed from it, mostly – waded through the surf into machine gun fire to begin liberating Europe.

This is their legacy of boldness and forthright courage:

Mr. Ford: the National Day of Prayer “stigmatizes” you in exactly the same way the Irish Fair “stigmatizes” Norwegians.

If Atheists managed to jam down a “National Day of Skepticism”, all it would do is keep them occupied (presumbly withe the vegans and crossfitters) while I go about my business.

But then, I’m not nearly that “woke”, so what do I know?

Just Desserts

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Attorneys representing Nick Sandman, the Covington Kid who was the subject of Big Left’s two minutes’ hate a couple weeks ago, have started the wheels rolling on lawsuits.

Over fifty of them:

“The legal counsel representing Nick and his family, Todd McMurtry and experienced libel and defamation lawyer L. Lin Wood of Atlanta, have said they will seek justice for the harm allegedly done to the teen,” The Enquirer reported. “McMurtry is with the law firm of Hemmer Defrank Wessels and has practiced law in Greater Cincinnati since 1991. He said a team of seven lawyers has been working full-time to review the media accounts of what happened.”
The letters come in response to the media’s smearing of Sandmann after a selectively edited clip of an incident on January 19, 2019, went viral that showed Sandmann standing face-to-face with Native American Nathan Phillips, who was beating a drum in Sandmann’s face.

The list of people and entities served includes:

  1. The Washington Post
  2. The New York Times
  3. Cable News Network, Inc. (CNN)
  4. The Guardian
  5. National Public Radio
  6. TMZ
  7. Atlantic Media Inc.
  8. Capitol Hill Publishing Corp.
  9. Diocese of Covington
  10. Diocese of Lexington
  11. Archdiocese of Louisville
  12. Diocese of Baltimore
  13. Ana Cabrera (CNN)
  14. Sara Sidner (CNN)
  15. Erin Burnett (CNN)
  16. S.E. Cupp (CNN)
  17. Elliot C. McLaughlin (CNN)
  18. Amanda Watts (CNN)
  19. Emanuella Grinberg (CNN)
  20. Michelle Boorstein (Washington Post)
  21. Cleve R. Wootson Jr. (Washington Post)
  22. Antonio Olivo (Washington Post)
  23. Joe Heim (Washington Post)
  24. Michael E. Miller (Washington Post)
  25. Eli Rosenberg (Washington Post)
  26. Isaac Stanley-Becker (Washington Post)
  27. Kristine Phillips (Washington Post)
  28. Sarah Mervosh (New York Times)
  29. Emily S. Rueb (New York Times)
  30. Maggie Haberman (New York Times)
  31. David Brooks (New York Times)
  32. Shannon Doyne
  33. Kurt Eichenwald
  34. Andrea Mitchell (NBC/MSNBC)
  35. Savannah Guthrie (NBC)
  36. Joy Reid (MSNBC)
  37. Chuck Todd (NBC)
  38. Noah Berlatsky
  39. Elisha Fieldstadt (NBC)
  40. Eun Kyung Kim
  41. HBO
  42. Bill Maher
  43. Warner Media
  44. Conde Nast
  45. GQ
  46. Heavy.com
  47. The Hill
  48. The Atlantic
  49. Bustle.com
  50. Ilhan Omar
  51. Elizabeth Warren
  52. Kathy Griffin
  53. Alyssa Milano
  54. Jim Carrey

Defamation cases are very hard to win. Justifiably so.

But I hope Sandmann cleans clock on this.

Pour Le Encourager Les Autres”

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Black transgender Minneapolis City Councilor was chastised by a barista at a southside coffee shop. The barista, who apparently didn’t know his place on the intersectional plantation, was sacked.

A friend of the blog writes, quoting the Strib  article:

“My intent is to help them and the broader community understand each other’s roles and how to be better community members.”
But, don’t take time to understand the new barista and what he might have thought. Don’t take any moment at all. Just fire him. That’ll make him understand his role..

Intersectional gobbledigook and virtue-defense follows in the Strib article.

I get the intended sarcasm – but yes. It did convey the role, if not of the barista, then of every other person living and working in Minneapolis. “For the encouragement of the others”.

‘Splain Me This

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Ever wonder what the protcol is for explaining things to women, if you’re a man, without being accused of “mansplaining”?

A professor – I know, contain your shock, right – heard your, er, “plea”:

Er, yeah, Ms. Goodwin. I’m sure you did.

Anyway, here’s the chart.

Apparently in Ms. Goodwin’s world, people grow infallible with experience, and should not be questioned by (male) underlings (no word if it cuts both ways – if a woman with less experience should “just stop talking now” when the guy outranks her?

As Dennis Prager says, it takes an elite education to be this stupid…

Unpacking Peggy McIntosh

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About a year and a half ago, I wrote one of my favorite pieces in the history of this blog – Unpacking the Invisible NPR Tote Bag, which spelled out the ideal of “Urban Progressive Privilege.

I described the phenomenon if “Urban Progressive Privilege” by tracing a line from the document from which the term “White Privilege” sprang – “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by one Peggy McIntosh:

Urban Progressive Privilege is like an invisible weightless NPR tote bag of special permissions, immunities, secret handshakes, Whole Foods gift cards, a virtual echo chamber accompanying everyone who has that privilege, filtering out almost all cognitive dissonance about political, social or moral questions, and a virtual “cone of silence” immunizing them from liability for anything they say or do that contradicts the group’s stated principles.  As we in Human studies work to reveal Urban Progressive Privilege and ask urban progressives to become aware of their power, so one who writes about havingUrban Progressive Privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

It was, to a degree, satire – and, like a lot of satire, it was simultaneously journalism.    Privilege does exist in our society – but social, economic, educational and geographic class at the end of the day count for (I’ll be charitable) every bit as much as race.   Can anyone say that Clarence Thomas is held in lower regard (by people other than Ryan Winkler, anyway) than John Roberts?

I wrote the piece originally because the ideal that “whiteness” – whatever that means, as if a “race” that simultaneously includes Norwegians and Armenians, Slavs and Spaniards, has any actual ethnic meaning – conveys so much privilege by itself that a white house painter in Spooner Wisconsin has social, cultural, financial and legal advantage over Oprah Winfrey or Sarah Jeong is so comically absurd.

So absurd, I thought, that it had to have been written by someone who was so detached by class privilege that they hadn’t the foggiest idea what life was like outside of their class bubble.

Lo and behold, I was right.

William Ray digs into Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack in this brightly illuminating piece in Quillette.

When I say “I was right” – well, I was being modest:

Peggy McIntosh was born Elisabeth Vance Means in 1934. She grew up in Summit, New Jersey where the median income is quadruple the American national average—that is to say that half the incomes there are more than four times the national average, some of them substantially so. McIntosh’s father was Winthrop J. Means, the head of Bell Laboratories electronic switching department during the late 1950s. At that time, Bell Labs were the world leaders in the nascent digital computing revolution. Means personally held—and sold patents on—many very lucrative technologies, including early magnetic Gyro-compass equipment (U.S. Patent #US2615961A) which now helps to guide nuclear missiles and commercial jets, and which keeps satellites in place so you can navigate with your phone and communicate with your Uber driver. Means is also recorded as the inventor of a patent held by Nokia Bell in 1959 known as the Information Storage Arrangement. This device is the direct progenitor of ROM computer memory, and is cited in the latter’s patent filed in 1965 for IBM. So, long before Peggy McIntosh wrote her paper, her family was already having an outsized effect on Western culture.

Elizabeth Vance Means then attended Radcliffe, a renowned finishing school for the daughters of America’s patrician elites, and continued her private education at the University of London (ranked in the top 50 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings), before completing her English Doctorate at Harvard. Her engagement to Dr. Kenneth McIntosh was announced in the New York Times‘s social register on the same page as the wedding of Chicago’s Mayor Daley. McIntosh’s father, Dr. Rustin McIntosh, was Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at Columbia University. His mother was President Emeritus of Barnard College, an institution in the opulent Morningside Heights district of Manhattan, famous since 1889 for providing the daughters of the wealthiest Americans with liberal arts degrees…[husband] Kenneth McIntosh was himself a graduate of the Phillips Exeter Academy, which boasted alumni including Daniel Webster, the sons of Presidents Lincoln and Grant, and a number of Rockefeller scions. He later completed his elite education at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School. By the time of his marriage to Elizabeth, Kenneth McIntosh was a senior resident at the prestigious Brigham Hospital in Boston, founded by millionaire Peter Bent.

In other words, Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since.

So Peggy McIntosh is the scion – scienne?  Scionette? – of a family that is in the top fraction of the top 1% of people in this country in terms of social, educational (or at least “Educational Affiliation”), financial and cultural stature.

And this leads up to a summation that could soon become a Berg’s 7th Law corollary:

Her ‘experiential’ list enumerating the ways in which she benefits from being born with white skin simply confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy.

And – I’d add, from my position as an observer – it provided cover for the vastly more toxic “Urban Progressive Privilege”.   Ray says nearly as much:

All of which means that pretty much anything you read about ‘white privilege’ is traceable to an ‘experiential’ essay written by a woman who benefitted from massive wealth, a panoply of aristocratic connections, and absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. This alone calls into question the seriousness and scholarly validity of the derivative works, since they are all the fruit of a poisonous tree. But McIntosh’s hypothesis was eagerly embraced nonetheless, because it served a particular purpose—it helped to mainstream a bitter zero-sum politics of guilt and identity. This dark epistemology has quietly percolated through the universities and the wider culture for two decades now. It has had the effect of draining attention from a massive and growing wealth gap and it has pitted the poor against one another in public spectacles of acrimony and even violence.

“Progressivism” has ended up on the “wrong” side of the class war it has always espoused: they are the patricians, and have been for over a century now.

Idenitymongering – and the firehose of “privilege” allegations that are one of its weapons – is one way of dividing the unruly plebes against each other, as Ray points out:

A school board in British Columbia even thought it would be a good idea to greet its poor and working class white middle school students with this poster reminding them of the guilty burden they bear on account of their skin:

No, it’s not a flyer for a community theater production of “1984”. Yet.

I grew up a very poor white kid. By which I mean, single-mother-on-welfare-in-Alberta poor. As a child, I remember feeling utterly hopeless about ever making any sort of life for myself. If I were at school in British Columbia today, I would now have to deal with seeing this admonition every morning as well. One wonders why Teresa Downs doesn’t simply step down from her $200,000 a year job and pass it to a person of colour since she acquired it unfairly. Is her public declaration of culpability supposed to be compensation enough? Presumably, like Peggy McIntosh, she has convinced herself that human well-being will be better served by shaming the children of people whose average annual income is around $23,000.

I suggest you read the whole thing; as much as I pullquoted, there is so much more.

Free House. Near Whole Foods. Subaru Needs Work.

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you are a Minnesota White Male who sincerely believes that white privilege exists, that it arises from the vestiges of slavery still persistent in our society, and that you are tainted with it solely because of your race, then you must concede it would be immoral for you to continue to exploit your white privilege at the expense of other, more deserving persons of color and gender.

Having conceded it’s immoral for you to keep your job, your house, your car and your retirement account, shouldn’t you quit your job, give away your house and car, close your retirement account and distribute it to the people holding cardboard signs at stoplights? Shouldn’t you pull your kids out of STEM school so they don’t grow up privileged and thereby perpetuate the inequalities in society?

Shouldn’t a person of moral integrity immediately act to redress existing injustice and avoid causing more?  If you fail to do so, doesn’t that make you a hypocritical lying crap-weasel?  Why would I listen to anything a person like that says to me about privilege or race?

I’m waiting for all the “Free House, Volvo Included” signs to pop up in Mac-Groveland.

You and me both ,Joe.

Power! Power! Power!

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I’ve been known to mock and taunt the likes of Sarah Jeong, Alondra Cano and Nekima Levy-Pounds for their comical take on “privilege” – including the implication that a guy driving a truck 70 hours a week out in Oil Country has “privilege” over people with elite educations and lifetime political / media sinecures.

Some might think I’m being hyperbolic, or exaggerating the moral dementia of this class of “Progressives”.

Oh, silly pollyannas.   I dion’t have to exaggerate anything:

A feminist professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada recently published a book chapter documenting the myriad ways homeless men allegedly perpetuate “hegemonic masculinity” while discussing their hardships.

The book chapter, “When a Man’s Home is Not a Castle: Hegemonic Masculinity Among Men Experiencing Homelessness,” was published last Wednesday by Professor Erin Dej, in a book she co-edited on patriarchy in psychiatric wards and homeless shelters.

The goal of her research, she explains, was to “assess the ways hypermasculinity is performed among men experiencing homelessness.” And to do this, Dej interviewed 27 homeless men and spent and additional 296 hours spying on them in homeless shelters.

Up next – how lab rats are part of the patriarchy.

Joe Doakes’ Last Straw

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The people demanding a ban on plastic drinking straws are all young and hip.  They think it’d be easy to switch to paper straws and way cool.
Those of us who are old and unhip remember paper straws.  They collapsed when sucking a malt.  They got soggy and mashed in your mouth when drinking a Coke so you had to keep ripping the end off, making the straw shorter and shorter.  They were skinny and tasted bad.
But hey, bring back the past, by all means – trains and paper straws and bicycle-only-streets.  I can’t wait for buggy whips.
Joe Doakes

We’re getting a lot of the big innovations from the LBJ and McGovern era.  Why not paper straws.  And Cnevy Citations.

Questions Unasked (Due To Self-Preservation)

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Our new Division Director is a Black woman whose first act was to order an all-day, all-staff training on racism.  The class starts with slavery, proceeds through Jim Crow, and ends with White Privilege.
I tried to weasel out of going to the class on the grounds that I’m too busy providing service to our actual customers to spent a day sitting in a conference room listening to the same spiel I’ve heard for the last decade, but no luck.  I would have loved to ask a few questions.  I didn’t, of course, because asking questions is asking for trouble; but if I could have done so safely, I’d have asked:
Americans historically were gung-ho on efficiency and innovation. Going all the way to Africa to capture and ship human cargo only to toss half of them overboard (thereby altering the migration habits of sharks) seems like a lot of work and wasteful besides.  Why did Americans invent slavery?
If American’s didn’t invent slavery, who did?  How long was it around before we adopted the practice?  When was the last slave in the world freed?
If slavery was part of the universal human condition since time immemorial until we stopped it a century ago, and if slavery only occurs today in places where America has not exercised its power to stamp it out, then why are we spending all day talking about it?
Formal slavery ended in America 150 years ago.  Jim Crow – when and where it existed – ended 50 years ago.  Minnesota never had either one. Why are we, as Minnesotans, spending all day talking about it?
White Privilege occurs because of White families working and sacrificing so their children would live in a better society. Granted, the children didn’t do anything to deserve that society – they didn’t build that – but why is it wrong for parents to work and sacrifice for their children?  What values should we – as employees of the local government – be encouraging local families to adopt instead?
If only I didn’t need my job . . . .
Joe Doakes

What’s the word for the thing that comes after education has turned into indoctrination, and then into browbeating, and then…

What’s that word?

Ganders

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SCENE:  Mitch BERG is waiting for a table at his local Korean restaurant when Avery LIBRELLE walks in behind him.   

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG:   Ugh,  I mean, hey , Avery.

LIBRELLE: The kids from Parkland High School returned to class, and they feel like they’re “in prison“.

BERG: Do tell.

LIBRELLE: I’ll read from this article:

“Going to school is really so hard, and now it’s going to be so much worse,” said Isabelle Robinson, a senior. “A lot of the people I’ve talked to are dreading going back.”…MSD students will only be allowed to carry clear backpacks on campus and will be required to wear new student IDs at all times.
There will be an increased police presence on campus, as Gov. Rick Scott provides extra Florida Highway Patrol officers to beef up security and provide support to Broward County sheriff’s deputies. Students will have limited points of entry to the school.
The school district also says it’s considering whether to install metal detectors at the school’s entrances. A letter from Principal Ty Thompson sent to families on Friday said that step has not been taken yet.
“It feels like being punished,” Robinson told CNN. “It feels like jail, being checked every time we go to school.”

BERG: Huh.

LIBRELLE: Its just so unfair.

BERG: Why?

LIBRELLE: These kids are being punished for the crimes of a lunatic…

BERG: …even though they, themselves, did nothing and would never have dreamed of harming anyone ?

LIBRELLE: Yeah!

BERG:   So let me get this straight – punishing innocent people – people who’d have never even thought of committing a crime – because of the crimes of a lunatic is a bad thing?

LIBRELLE:  Every time, no exceptions.

BERG:   Huh.   (Notices the waitress motioning him toward a table)   Er, are you going to get a table or order something?

LIBRELLE:  Oh, no.  I’m just here to offer solidarity to these people and their leader Kim Jong Un.

(And SCENE)

The Haves

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A few weeks ago, I was talking with a left-of-center acquaintance of mine – one who workes in the urban education system, and who does, I honestly believe, their level best to try to teach highly disasdantaged kids – about McDonalds aggressively moving to automate its front lines, driving by draconian minimum wage and benefit hikes in ‘progressive” cities.  I pointed out all the entry level jobs, the kinds of jobs this person’s students needed to get started in working life, were going to be lost because of this.

“Well”, this person said, “it was going to happen anyway, and this wijll send a message that companies can’t exploit people”.

The message it sends, I thought demurely to myself, is that progressives really really don’t get economics.  But my response was You are a ‘have” – someone with a career, who back in their teens worked at some crummy minimum wage jobs and learned how to show up for work on time and not be a jerk to people.  Your kids are have-nots, in that respect”.

I never got an reply.

Well, not to the second assertion.  As to the first one, Nancy Pelosi had her own – from the perspective of the “haves” that sre the leadership of the Democrat party:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) on Thursday continued to slam the recently passed Republican tax reform bill, calling the wage increases and bonuses “crumbs” during her weekly press briefing.

Walmart was the most recent company to announce a wage increase and bonuses as a result of the sweeping legislation, which included a slashing of the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent.

“A number of companies are attributing the tax bill for being able to give higher wages to their employees as well as being able to give a number of bonuses to their employees. How do you respond to that?” a reporter asked.

“In terms of the bonus that corporate America received versus the crumbs that they are giving workers to kind of put the schmooze on is so pathetic. It’s so pathetic,” Pelosi said.

No word from WalMart employees about whether the $11 minimum and the bonuses are “pathetic” or not.

Is It A Double Standard, Or Two Half-Standards?

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When is lack of “privilege” a good thing?

When you commit a crime that’s part of “Feminism’s” narrative.

When a rape is committed against women at “elite” institutions (or not even actually committed, in some cases), by fellow student’s, it’s national news.

When the victim is a girl that works for a living, and the perp is just a common criminal?  The crickets care:

Toxic Eunuchism

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#NotMe

#NeverDidNeverWill

And #RealMenNeitherHarassNorAcceptGuiltByAssociation

And, for those who insist, #QQQQ.

I mean, as long as we’re communicating via the medium of the hashtag.

The #MeToo campaign is doing for sexual harassment what #BringBackOurGirls did for Boko Haram’s hostages; took a seirous issue and made it into a trite, temporal trifle; an “event” rather than either a social malady or a wartime atrocity, respectively.  In 21st century terms, the campaign “raised awareness”, which is a moderne way of saying “generated a lot of shrill chanting, shrieking and marching about, literally and metaphorically, in the interest of waving a bloody shirt”.

Genderquislings:  One of the most noxious byproducts of this bloody shirt campaign are the clumps of “feminist men” whose response to this past two months’ Robespierrian orgy of revelation is to throw themselves prostrate before the court of public opinion and demand mercy – for themselves (whatever) and every other man.

I come not to praise them, but to bury them and those who parrot them, especially via yet two more social media chanting orgies, “#YesAllMen” and “#ShutTheF**kUp”.

Among many other vague and morpheus sins of which they’d accuse their fellow guys is the notion of “toxic masculinity”, which in the hands of “feminists” [1] and their male hangers-on quickly turns into a synonym for “masculinity” of any kind.

My reply:  They – or the things they represent – are the real problem.  Not masciulinity – real masculinity.

Disc-lame-ers:  In an intelligent society that debated the merits of an argument, I could omit this section.

But I live in the “progressive” Twin Cities, so I have to treat much of the audience like ambulance-chasing lawyers.

The “First Wave” of feminism was right:  Women should be the equal of men in the eyes of the law.  They should face no discrimination due to their gender in the work place; they should be paid according to their qualifications, experience, credentials and other factors relevant to the job.  They should not have to accept non-consensual harassment and abuse due to their gender.

The “Second Wave” of feminism – AKA “Identity Feminism” – is wrong.  Women should also have no advantage over men in family court.  Their status as individuals should not be reverted to the Victorian era, where was assumed that a woman’s natural state frail victims (the term “potential victim” is used with a straight face by more than a few modern feminists) that must be protected from the male species, slavering brutes looking to pounce on the defenseless benighted damsels among us.

The Collective:  How this has manifested during the current sexual harassment crisis has been the notion that “#YesAllMen” are complicit in sexual harassment; that sexual harassment is a side effect of “toxic masculinity”; that harassment, abuse and rape are inextricable from being male.   That the world would be a better place if it were more like an anthill – where the women did the thinking and leading and designing, and the men just shut up and did what they were told, and contribute to the gene pool (until genetic engineering obsoletes that, too).

The males who’ve become the leading voices of this orgy of gender-abasement remind me of the people “convicted” of various thoughtdrimes curing the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward who, after weeks, months or years jammed into prison cells and gulags, beaten and sleep-deprived by the Red Guards, abased themselves with almost ritual fervor on film and before crowds, not “begging for mercy” so much as abjuring being worthy of it, before being shot in the back of the head or sent off to be worked to death in the Chinese gulag.

Call them “victims of toxic social work”.

If nobody else will do it [2], then let me be the first to draw my line in the sand and yell “Stop”.

#NotMe

#NoNotAllMen

#QQQQSnowflakes

It’s The Devaluation, Stupid:  Matt Walsh had a great piece in the Daily Caller earlier this week, in which he pointed out the real problem:  not the presence of men, but the lack of Men:

The problem is not that there is too much masculinity in our culture. On the contrary, there isn’t nearly enough. A man becomes an abuser and harasser of women when he rejects that which makes him a man. He is not expressing his masculinity when he strips naked and struts around in front of his unwilling coworkers and subordinates — a move that seems oddly common among these types — rather, he is expressing his almost complete lack of masculinity.

Not sure if he’s referring to Charlie Rose or Louis CK – and I”m not sure it matters at the moment.

These men are weird, desperate, self-debasing, and effeminate. If you say we should have fewer of those kinds in positions of power, I agree. Let’s have none at all. But we would do well to replace them with men who are actually men. What we need in our society are chivalrous, strong, respectable, productive, and self-sacrificial men. Real men, in other words. Men who protect, provide, and do all of the things that society has always depended upon men to do. If you are that sort of man, you certainly should not shut up, step to the side, or consider yourself “trash.” Our culture needs your input and leadership more than ever.

Of course, the dominant narrative from a good chunk of our society – Hollywood, academia, the educational/industrial complex, is that traditional masculinity needs to be filed down to sized, tamed.   Primary schools medicate it; popular entertainment castigates it.  Entertainment has combined a relentless, big-budget focus on “girl power” with a near-complete suppression of any notion of giving boys any impetus to be what was traditionally called a “man” – chivalrous, comfortable with but not abusive of his power, driven to defend his family, his significant other and his community, self-sacrificing but optimistic and prone to using his power for good.  Those parts of society mock and taunt those notions (until they need a cop)…

…and propagate them with an education system that systematically feminizes boys, a family court system that ensures boys’ only role models as children will be mothers (who most assuredly do serve a role in raising emotioally boys – but not the only role) and that love, for a male, is an exercise in self-destruction, and an “entertainment” industry that seems to have taught half a generation boys that pornography is sex.

In other words – if you want to create the stunted, anti-masculine caricatures that are Harvey Weinstein, Charley Rose, Al Franken and Louis CK [3], the modern education, entertainment, academic and social justice systems are the most efficient possible factory to create more of them.

The only “Toxic Masculinity” is the stunted variety of caricatured, one-sided, immature, hollow “Masculinity” hat Identity Feminism demanded, and that the feminized Education system and Academy, and Hollywood delivered.

#NotMe:  Well, I’m done.

If you want to signal your virtue by gender self-abasement, expect me to mock and taunt you with the derision you deserve.

If you think the way to achieve equality for women is to beat down men, expect me to punch back twice as hard, and do whatever my feeble best is to lead more men – not males, mind you; men – to do the same.

If your response to discrimination against women is to promote discrimination against men, expect me to point out the obvious; you’re just passing around more discrimination.

You have rotted the society enough.  Hell, it may be too late; you may have killed it already.

I don’t care.

Continue reading →

The Right Profile

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It doesn’t matter how hard they worked, or how much they know.  The authors of the report are not morally qualified to express an opinion: they are the wrong caste. 

Can’t wait until the sewer line stops up and they can’t find anybody to unplug it because none of the plumbers have politically correct qualifications.

Joe Doakes

When all signaling is virtue-signaling, then the signal-to-noise ratio is infinitesimal.

In Other Words, The Status Quo

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Powerline discusses income inequality.  It’s almost entirely caused by White Privilege but not in the way the Left means it.

The newest study says highest income goes to people who stayed in school, stayed out of trouble, got a job and kept it, got married before having kids and stayed married, and have at least two children.   In other words, traditional, conservative, “acting White” behaviors that Leftists call “White Privilege” but we call “normal” or “common sense.”  And those behaviors pay off.

Plainly, this is unfair.  The only solution is to make everyone come out equal:

Prevent studious children from getting better grades than goof-offs by doing away with grades;

Prevent scholars from getting better educations than drop-outs by teaching nothing useful in the schools;

Prevent the law-abiding from having better records than troublemakers by declining to prosecute or by plea bargaining, expunging and eliminating ‘the box’ on employment applications;

Prevent the industrious from having better work records than slackers by making all jobs part-time and temporary, even if it means we must impose exorbitant overhead like Obama-care premiums and $15 minimum wages;

Prevent the burden of dealing with the consequences of sex outside marriage by paying to kill “oops” babies;

Prevent marriage by making it a farce available to every perversion, and punish men who try by making family court a life sentence of penury.

America will only be a Fair society when we all live identical lives and since we can’t elevate everyone to the penthouse, we’ll have to reduce everyone to the trailer park to live solitary, poor, nasty and brutish lives.

We’re well on the way and ordinary Americans know it.

Which might be why Trump’s campaign slogan resonated with so many people.

Joe Doakes

When You Think It’s The Onion…

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…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?)