…you realize that Social Justice snowflakes can’t even criticize fellow social-justice snowflakes without sounding like someone doing a hamfisted satire of social-justice snowflakes.
It’s getting to the point where satirizing overly-fruity academic writing is passé and redundant. .
NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch forced to move her family due to constant, legitimate death threats…
…from “Violence” activists:
National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch announced Sunday on Twitter that her family had been forced to move suddenly after she received multiple death threats from gun control advocates.
Loesch, a conservative commentator and syndicated talk radio host, followed the announcement of her family’s move by condemning the way politically progressive society has treated not just her, but conservative women as a whole.
There are two huge points here:
The threats from gun control activists is pretty much par for the course. Even locally, some local “gun safety” activists like to spice up their social media interactions with weird, muted threats of mayhem.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The Harvey Weinstein story is troubling. It’s as if he thinks a powerful man can walk up to women, grab them by the p—y, do anything to them. And we know that’s false because everybody jumped all over Donald Trump when he said it – didn’t DO it – merely said it. This guy actually did it, repeatedly, and everybody around him not only knew about it, they helped him get away with it.
Where are the pink hat people marching in protest?
Joe Doakes
Rhetorical question, right?
Two incumbent Minneapolis city councilbots, and five challengers with decent chances of winning, said they can see a future without a Minneapolis Police Department:
Asked, “Do you believe that we could ever have a city without police?” two incumbents and five serious challengers running for City Council answered “yes.”…Those who did and said they believe “we could ever have a city without police” were Bender, Ninth Ward Council Member Alondra Cano; Phillipe Cunningham, who’s running for council in the Fourth Ward; Jeremiah Ellison, who’s running in the Fifth Ward; Janne Flisrand, who’s running in the Seventh Ward; Ginger Jentzen, who’s running in the Third Ward and Jeremy Schroeder, who’s running in the 11th Ward.
Let’s be clear; even the candidates (mostly) say this is in the realm of imagination, if not fantasy:
“It’s aspirational, but it’s way aspirational,” said Council Member Lisa Bender, who said yes to the question. “We have a very long way to go before we would approach public safety without police.”…”The question wasn’t, ‘Do you promise to eliminate MPD by the end of your first term,’ it was ‘Can you imagine a city without police,’ ” said [long-shot candidate Phillippe] Cunningham, who’s running against Council President Barb Johnson…
Now, let’s be frank; a society without the need for police would be a good thing, from a conservative perspective. And it can, and has, worked; in the old west, before the idea of “police” had migrated out from places like New York and Boston, communities did in fact police themselves. Of course, they also governed themselves – without the need for Minneapolis-style city councils and bureaucracies…
…but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Here’s the problem; part of it is that it’s a spitballing fantasy.
Part of it is that, being not merely DFLers but DFLers to the left of Betsy Hodges, they’re putting their faith in the wrong institution to bring this utopian vision about:
[Several of the respondents said] they were describing an ideal future in which inequality and racism are eliminated and government policy has solved many of the social problems now handled by police arresting and imprisoning people.
Uh oh.
For starters, government policy is behind most of the social problems facing Minneapolis, especially the North Side; from the warehousing of the poor in places like North Minneapolis, to the inertia of the police reform process, to the artificial hikes in the minimum wage and immigration policies that have made entry level work impossible to get for too many poor youth, most of the problems trace back to City Hall, the State Capitol, or DC.
But here’s a more troubling part:
Prosperity without order is impossible (even if it’s enough “prosperity” to pay taxes to support a leech-like bureaucracy like Minneapolis’s); freedom without prosperity is meaningless. If you think that’s an idle bromide, look at Detroit, Camden or Stockton.
So something has got to keep order. Sometimes – like in small towns out west, or in the Old West example above, or in areas where natural disaster has swept away government at least temporarily, that order is kept by the people agreeing on some basic rules to live by, and some simple means to enforce them.
In this day and age, in the big city, it’s a police department, a prosecutor’s office, a judicial system, a corrections system, and a parole and probation system, and the bureaucracies that recruit, train, advise, pay, and take care of all the above after they retire, and the bureaucracies that do the same for those bureaucracies.
What could be worse?
One of the study’s designers answers:
“Police reform doesn’t actually work,” [survey organizer, designer and artist Ashley] Fairbanks said. “We need to radically re-imagine what policing will look like in our community.”
And all those roads seem to lead, according to any of the councilpeople, to policing attitudes, not behavior. To eliminating badthink.
In other words, they’d get rid of the guys in cars patrolling for speeding tickets, and replace them with thought police.
Bonus Sign of the Apocalypse: And in this survey, one of the voices of practicality, of feet-on-the-ground common practical sense, of dealing with the “now” rather than fantasizing about the indeterminate future, is…
…Alondra Cano?
Cano said right now she actually wants a greater police presence in the Ninth Ward, which includes several neighborhoods along East Lake Street.
“The solution is not really no cops, but it’s more how do we get rid of homelessness, how do we get rid of commercial sex exploitation, how do we get rid of chemical dependency?” she said. “Then you start alleviating the pressure that a lot of police officers feel to address these very deeply rooted challenges in our community, which they themselves know they’re not going to be able to solve.”
Given Minneapolis’ electorate’s state of mind these days, that might come back to haunt her.
Half of Californians say housing prices are making them think about leaving the state, and an awful lot of them think rent control is the answer:
About half of the state’s voters – 48 percent – said they consider the problem of housing affordability “extremely serious.” Concerns are more prevalent in areas seen as ground zero for the crisis, including the Bay Area, where 65 percent of voters described the problem that way.
The issue has led to an intensifying debate over rent control in California. In Los Angeles County, 68 percent of voters said they support stronger limits on rent increases, while 63 percent in the Bay Area said so.
The majority of support for rent control is among renters, who have seen prices grow nearly 4 percent since last year, according to data compiled by the real estate listing service Apartment List. California’s median rent for a one-bedroom is now at $1,750, while a two-bedroom is $2,110, Apartment List found. Among the most expensive cities are San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento.
Of course, being progressives, they don’t bother with history – and I doubt the history of rent-control in places like New York City is covered in the textbooks progressives are allowed to read.
But in New York, it worked a little like this:
Given the mindless “progressivism” of California government, this will hasten the state’s decline. The bad news? It’ll also increase the number of Californians bringing their bobble-headed politics to sane states.
I’m just saying that in the future, if some future wannabe despot wants to take over this country, suspend the Constitution and crush our freedoms without firing a shot (up front, anyway), he’ll need a society full of people who “think” like the Strib editorial board to have a chance of succeeding. r
They want the President to stop having rallies like last week’s event in Phoenix – for everyone’s best interest:
These campaign-style rallies serve little practical purpose with the next presidential election not until 2020. Instead, they unnecessarily stoke anger and division at a volatile time, with the rally locations attracting the violence-prone on all sides of the political spectrum.
Well, no. For the past year and a half, they have drawn unstable, violence-prone, Urban-Progressive-Privilege-sotted “Anti”-Fa blackshirts. Lately, to be sure, they’ve drawn people on the other side who’ve come to aggressively defend themselves. What, you expect people to stand still while they’re being gassed and clubbed for exercising their rights?
Clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters have already left one woman dead. It is only by the grace of God that more people didn’t die in Charlottesville. Or that violence didn’t spiral out of control during another gathering last Saturday in Boston.
Excluse my middle English, but bullshit. All the violence in Boston was on the left. Thousands of drooling scumbags descended on an expressly peaceful event that specifically excluded and condemed “white supremacists”. Boston was a monument to the spoiled entitlement of Big Left and its idiot children – which is why it’s disappeared from the media.
It’s just common sense to let these tensions settle down and, until then, not offer up another obvious gathering point for extremists itching for action. President Trump should have recognized this before Tuesday’s rally, but making his way through the large, tense and often heavily armed crowd in Phoenix should have really driven that point home. Thankfully, there were no serious injuries Tuesday, but the event clearly strained local law enforcement’s capacity.
Look at the bright side; being a Red area, at least the cops in Phoenix showed up.
My suspicion; Big Media is decreasingly able to cover up the depravity of its nephews and nieces in the extreme left.
SCENE: Press conference where a Free Speech Rally is being announced for the Minnesota state capitol grounds. A group of reporters is questioning the organizers of the rally – Madison JAMES, Tyrone JEFFERSON, and Jorge WASHINGTON.
WASHINGTON: …So to sum up, we will hold our Free Speech rally at precisely noon. We have our permit, and we are ready to stand up for the free speech rights of all Minnesotans and all Americans.
JEFFERSON: Even those we don’t agree with.
JAMES: We’ll now take questions. (Sees hands rising, points to a sallow endomorph in his late forties with severe acne). Yes.
REPORTER 1: I’m Edmund DuChey, from “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”. So your rally of Nazis and White Supremacists…
WASHINGTON: Yeah, you can stop right there. As noted before, this rally specifically denounces the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and everyone who would actively curtail the rights of others based on their ethnicity, religion or anything else.
JAMES: And we’ve specifically disinvited them from the rally, and are ready to enforce that.
JAMES: Next question.
REPORTER 2: Walter Lennon-Marks from Minnesota Public Radio. I notice that you have not disinvited people who plan on carrying firearms, concealed or openly, from the rally.
JEFFERSON: That’s correct.
LENNON-MARKS: Don’t you find that intimidates other speech?
WASHINGTON: I find that it most definitely intimidates those who would threaten our rally with violence like “Anti”-Fa did in San Francisco.
JEFFERSON: Or those who would act on those threats, as “Anti”-Fa did in Boston, and clearly plan to elsewhere. Inducing them to keep their speech non-violent is a feature, not a bug.
JAMES: Next question?
REPORTER 3: Yes – Yvette Stahlen from the Star Tribune. Why do all three of you make the scare quotes with your fingers whenever you say the “anti” in “Antifa?”
WASHINGTON: Because they are “against fascism” in exactly the same way the Bloods are against the Crips, or the Gambinos were “against” the Luccheses. These are two sides of the same noxious, anti-democratic, anti-freedom, pro-totalitarian coin.
STAHLEN: But my editors’ oldest daughter is a member of Antifa, and has been ever since zhe graduated from Oberlin.
WASHINGTON: (Walks down from the stage with a microphone, hands it to STAHLEN). Here.
STAHLEN: What do you want me to do with this.
WASHINGON: Drop it for me. I couldn’t possibly have ended this better than you did.
(And SCENE)
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Trump said only one side had a permit to be at the rally in Emancipation Park. The Left jumped all over that – it’s a lie, the counter-protesters had a permit, too.
No, they didn’t. Their permit is for two different parks, a couple of blocks away. When they left their permitted area to go to the other side’s permitted area, they were acting without a permit, exactly as Trump said.
Trump is correct. The Left is lying. Again.
Who’s got my shocked face? I need it back.
Joe Doakes
When the left started jabbering that the “counterprotestes” had a permit, my BS detector started howling. Permits exist to prevent confrontations. That’s why protests are supposed to get them.
Woman who destoryed a confederate statue in (where else?) Durham NC…
…is a Marxist North-Koreaphile.
Fighting a legacy of slavery with a present of slavery!
James Damore is exploring his legal options against Google.
And apparently he has some:
According to Dan Eaton, an attorney and ethics professor at San Diego University, the engineer certainly has grounds for a case on two fronts. “First, federal labor law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions,” Eaton writes.
And second, because the memo was a statement of political views, Eaton says Google may have violated California law which “prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.”
An international corporation with armies of both lawyers, Google knew all this. They decided to take their chances with state and federal law anyway rather than stick up for one of their employees and risk public backlash. That’s an incredibly telling decision from a company that has mastered everything from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars.
Question: Will a Goodle “self-driving car” actually drive someone who opposes Planned Parenthood?
But I digress. If Mr. Damore has a legal plaintiff’s fund, I’ll be contributing.
By the way –
“Progressive” woman risks all to tell the world what used to be screechingly obvious:
I asked why as a woman who was born with woman parts it is now considered transphobic to want to have conversations about the distinct and unquestionable differences in life experience between cis and trans women. I asked why when women have faced systematic violence at the hands of men and 1 in six women is raped, is it wrong for cis women to have some spaces just for them to feel safe in a world where they don’t? And I was immediately threatened, labeled as transphobic, and left to feel as if my voice was nothing.
I am angry. Angry because now even questioning these issues is seen as an act of hate, discrimination, or intolerance. Angry because wanting to have open conversations is now considered hate speech. I am angry that as a woman who has constantly had to be careful of my language and behavior around men to ensure my own safety, I am now being forced to police my language even more, around and for trans women who had entirely
different experiences and anatomy. Female language around female issues is important to many cis women because we have struggled to even have our identities and issues seen as valid.
All these liberals reading 1984,and nobody gets it; it’s not about solving anything. It’s about destroying the will to be free by making it too exhausting, fraught, and dangerous.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A Seattle councilman says cleaning human urine and feces off the sidewalk outside the courthouse is . . . wait for it . . . racist.
The technological advance that enabled people to live in cities without rampant disease was the sanitary sewer, invented 4,000 years ago. If Seattle can’t even manage to maintain the basic level of sanitation achieved before the Bronze Age, our civilization is doomed.
Joe Doakes
So many “progressives” want to return to the Bronze Age – provided they’re the aristocracy. And they will be.
Swedes burn books to sanitize the historical record…
The other day came the news that the library in Botkyrka municipality, on the outskirts of Stockholm, had burned older editions of one of the Pippi books, Pippi in the South Seas (1948), because local officials have decided that they “contain racism.”
After this action came to light, the municipality issued a press release acknowledging that the books had indeed been destroyed because they contained “obsolete expressions that can be perceived as racist” – but that they had been replaced on the library shelves by a 2015 edition of the book from which those expressions have been carefully scrubbed.
Problem solved?
Since Lindgren died in 2002, of course, she was not around to grant anybody the right to fiddle with her prose. Her publishers had simply taken it upon themselves to do to her work what a lot of people would love to do to, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Like Mark Twain, Lindgren was the very opposite of a racist. But her use of language in Pippi in the South Seas, like that in Huck Finn, violates the Left’s current ideological tests.
The news of the Botkyrka book-burning was first reported on a July 9 broadcast by investigative journalist Janne Josefsson, who appears to be one of the few level-headed practitioners of that profession left in Sweden. “When you burn books for ideological reasons,” Josefsson later told Expressen, “there’s something in me that says, wait a second now, are we really going to let these things disappear? Shouldn’t they be allowed to survive so that that I can explain to my child that this is how you talked in those days?”
To Big Left, history is just another egg to be broken to make the omelette.
From the New York Times’ piece on the left eating itself at “progressive” Evergreen State:
For expressing his view, Mr. Weinstein was confronted outside his classroom last week by a group of some 50 students insisting he was a racist. The video of that exchange — “You’re supporting white supremacy” is one of the more milquetoast quotes — must be seen to be believed. It will make anyone who believes in the liberalizing promise of higher education quickly lose heart. When a calm Mr. Weinstein tries to explain that his only agenda is “the truth,” the students chortle.
I include the video link in the text. You can click on it. It won’t work.
The video – showing
students bulling, shouting down and threatening Weinstein and other Evergreen staff has been “removed for violating Youtube’s bullying policy”.
Of course, it chronicled bullying; it documented the Evergreen Social Justice sturmabteilung trying to bully Professor Weinstein.
The left and their friends in social media are actively shutting down anything in their power that challenges the narrative.
At the “Pride” Parade in Minneapolis yesterday, the processijon got delayed 20 or so minutes by a BLM group that apparently couldn’t find the freeway.
After they’d had their die-in, they got up and spent the rest of the parade marching a block or two ahead of the rest of the procession.
But not before issuing a list of demands…to the Pride organizers.
Here they are – direct and unedited:
LIST OF OUR DEMANDS
- We demand that Twin Cities Pride honors the legacy and life of trans women of color and recognize Pride as the byproduct of their resistance of police brutality and repression
- We demand Twin Cities Pride combats State violence with the total elimination of police and law enforcement
I’m sure that’ll go over well.
- We demand Twin Cities Pride is accountable for their perpetuation of white supremacy and homonormativity and that they eradicate their normalization of these violent systems
“Homonormativity”.
I’m just gonna let that sit there like a big glob of goo.
- We demand Twin Cities Pride provide an exclusive healing space at future events for indigenous and people of color to process, rest, and restorative justice
“Process, rest and restorative justice” – Verb, Verb, Noun phrase?
Apparently grammar is an agent of white supremacy.
- We demand Twin Cities Pride divests from all corporations as they promote the marginalization, exploitation, and criminalization of marginalized communities
- We demand Twin Cities Pride funds and organizes a Town Hall alongside members from marginalized communities including but not limited to Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar, Native Lives Matter, and Justice4MarcusGolden
- We demand Twin Cities Pride provide radical reparations via redistribution of resources and monetary compensation to grassroots organizations of the coalition’s choice
And there we are; good old-fashioned extortion.
My big question: will the left manage to eat itself before it eats everything of worth in our society?
Jamie Robinson, owner of the “Northbound Smokehouse” in Minneapolis, supports the $15 minimum wage – with a tip credit (allowing the restauranteur to deduct tip money from the basic wage).
For this, the Social Justice Warriors trashed him on social media.
Lately, Robinson’s noticed that his political activism has turned Northbound’s Facebook page into a political arena. According to Robinson, supporters of the “15 Now” movement, which wants a $15 minimum, with no exception for restaurants, are leaving negative comments — not about Northbound’s food or beer, but about its owner…Last week, Robinson decided he was so sick of those critics, he didn’t want any more of their money. If any of them showed their “hypocritical face” in Northbound, and Robinson recognized them, they’d be “escorted right out the door in shame,” according to a Facebook post screenshot.
I’ve eaten there in the past – the food and beer are all excellent.
And I’ll be going there again, on basic principle. Soon.
“White Privilege” has been all over the news this last couple of years.
It’s been there because the Big Left has ordained that it should be. My theory; in a nation full of “privilege” – class, racial, academic, social and, let’s be honest, the privilege of being born here rather than Russia or Nigeria or Burma – Big Left needed to focus on racial, “white” privilege to whip up black votes for Hillary Clinton, a geriatric white plutocrat. As a result, all discussion of other “privilege” is off the table.
Terms, Terms, Everywhere Are Terms: White privilege exists, of course. It goes hand in hand with the idea of “we-ism” – the idea that everyone on earth is more comfortable around, and accomodating of, people more like them than less.
Beyond that? In my more sardonic and less cautious days, I defined it as being a descendant of a society from a harsh, lethally inhospitable place that had zero words for “hakuna matata” but more words for “stab him!” than Eskimos have for “snow”; a dour, patriarchal warrior culture that killed everyone that had designs on enslaving them. As a result, my culture has no commonly-held concept of being enslaved. We operate from the standpoint of people who’ve been free (or at least subjects of generally benign monarchs) as far back as our cultural memory goes. On behalf of all my cultural cousins, I am sorry for those of you who are descended from matriarchal hunter gatherer societies that couldn’t effectively resist the slave merchants, but I can’t change history any more than you can. Just the present – a present I and my cultural cousins have been trying to change for 240-odd years, now.
More soberly, and after interviewing a representative of Black Lives Matter on my show, I arrived at the idea that “white privilege” is the ability to walk into a room and not have everyone wondering if you’re “one of the good ones”. It was a little after that that I first encountered the academic paper in which the term “white privilege” was coined, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh. It supplied fifty definitions of white (also male) privilege.
Every one of which, by the way ,translates to “freedom”, “justice” and “being accorded the dignity of being treated as an autonomous individual rather than a member of a group” – all of which are supposed to be values near and dear to our Republic and Western Civilization itself, and all of them things we should be working tirelessly to spread to everyone.
And when some mindless Social Justice Warrior jabbers about “smashing white/male privilege”, the proper response is “so – you want to smash freedom, justice and individual dignity? See you at the barricades”.
Discussion of all other privileges – academic, social, class – were drowned out. As they were intended to be.
But with the complete subsumation of the left by identity politics, it’s time to return the favor Peggy McIntosh did us; it’s time to define Urban Progressive Privilege.
Unpacking The Invisible NPR Tote Bag: I’m going to borrow McIntosh’s format – which I suspect was actually tacitly borrowed from Jeff Foxworthy – of the simple list of attributes of Urban Progressive Privilege.
To wit:
Urban Progressive Privilege; Unpacking the Invisible NPR Tote Bag
Mitch Berg
“You were taught to see Urban Progressive Privilege as a bit of talk show rhetoric – not in terms of a very vislble system conferring dominance on my group via a meritless meritocracy”.
As an urban progressive, you have been taught about “privilege” by others who have that privilege. Being able to caterwaul about privilege is a prerogative of the privileged.
Like the concept of “white privilege” (which, conventional wisdom tells us, that “whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege”), the first rule of Urban Progressive Privilege is “I don’t believe there is such a thing”; it’s the water in which the Urban Progressive swims. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have Urban Progressive Privilege. I have come to seeUrban Progressive Privilege as an invisible and group package of unearned assets that I can count on using daily, but about which it’s hard to be anything but oblivious.
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?”
So – when assessing Urban Progressive Privilege, can you say any of the following?:
I’m looking for more examples. Keep ’em generic – not related to any specific issue. .
And if I do, it’s going to read “All claims of racist “hate speech” not delivered face to face by someone proven not to be a ringer should be presumed hoaxes until proven otherwise”.
Because when I got the first word of this “attack”, the first thing that crossed my mind was “No way, just no way, that that actually happened”.
I was right. I’m almost always right
Let me be clear (because liberals have a hard time arguing with anything but straw men, so a conservative must always straw-proof their argument) – any actual hate speech needs to be met by overwhelming opposition, as well as any rules that apply (and don’t violate everyone’s free speech rights).
It’s just that it’s so very hard to find such an episode that isn’t a hoax perpetrated by social justice weasels looking for a headline.
But deep down inside, I do in fact enjoy the fact that this story – about a blackshirt being beaten up by his fellow “progressive” fascists – includes the background fact that the blackshirts panicked and went into full retreat when faced with actual resistance from Real Americans.
More. Faster.
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.
Berkeley – afraid that the generation of Orwellian “social” “jusitice” thugs they’ve raised will throw another costly tantrum at being faced with dissent – cancels speech by Ann Coulter.
Then, getting a wave of negative feedback, they rescheduled it – at a time when nobody could actually go:
Coulter had been booked for April 27, but Berkeley administrators abruptly canceled her engagement on Wednesday, citing security concerns. After massive publicity, they reversed course but reset the event for May 2, when students will be taking finals and therefore will be less likely to attend, according to lawyers representing the Berkeley College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation.
Associate vice chancellor Nils Gilman “grudgingly offered to allow the event from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Tuesday, May 2 — during ‘dead-week,’ when students are not even in class,” wrote Harmeet Dhillon of Dhillon Law Group in a letter to Berkeley interim vice chancellor of student affairs Stephen Sutton.
“Such a bummer that we, here at UC Berkeley, have created an environment where free, dissenting speech is impossible. No idea what we’re going to do about that. But I guess you’re screwed! Those crazy kids. What’s an institution to do?”
As far as public universities go? Legislatures need to start insisting on campuses being environments for free speech, or clearing out management (and if necessary, professors. Tenure should not protect tyrants)
Purdue hires a social justice warrior to head its engineering program.
While overt sexism and homophobia are less common than historically, they still play out in ways that are subtle and, therefore, insidious and hard to combat. How do you see this happening in the sciences, and how do you deal with it?
One of the biggest sources of sexism and homophobia is lodged in the epistemology of science. How we think, and what we think, matter in determining what we know and don’t know, and affects our workplace interactions in very negative ways. We think that we eliminate bias by keeping our “personal lives” – some aspects of ourselves – out of the lab, classroom, or office. But actually this is how we allow implicit bias to seep in and saturate everything we do, because that which is male, straight, white, able-bodied, monied, is not left behind in the practice of science and engineering – it is just so normative that lots of us don’t notice.
The story came out on Saturday. I can only hope it’s an April Fool prank – perhaps the most insanely brillaint one o al time.
I’m not very hopeful.
THEM: “The only reason you didn’t vote for Obama was because he’s black!”
US: “Er, yeah, right. Because if a while socialist were running or office, I’d vote for him because he was white. Right? That’s freaking ingenious! You must be one of those ‘smart liberals’ everyone keeps talking about”.
THEM: “The alt-right is an outlet for White America’s endemic racism”.
US: “The “white supremacist right” is a fraction of the size it was 25-35 years ago – but has suddenly gotten a surge in mainstream media coverage. So the “white supremacist right” is really more of an outlet for the Big Left’s hatred of Middle America, and a clumsy, Alinskyite attempt to frame Middle America. But keep trying, genius”.
THEM: “You’re insensitive to the plight of transsexuals and gays”
US: “I’m a working stiff who has to bang out all kinds of overtime to break even. I don’t have time to be ‘sensitive’ to my own sexuality, ifyacatchmydrift, much less anyone else’s. Carry on your little tantrum elsewhere, snowflake.
THEM: “Stand your Ground’ allows white people to kill black people, no questions asked”.
US: “Riiight. Go buy a gun, go to Florida, kill a black kid at random, plead ‘I don’t like hoodies’, and see what happens. Wave ‘hi’ from the electric chair, genius. ”
THEM (in this case, a woman with a German last name playing at being Native American): “Have some Brawndo, Christianists. You won’t be happy until the earth is dead and cold”.
US: “Reel it in, lapsed-Catholic-with-Daddy-issues playing Native American dress-up. Pollution is a fraction of what it was 40 years ago, at least here. But science is hard, isn’t it?”
THEM: “HItler was elected. Just like Trump!”
US: “No. Hitler was elected, just like Al Capone was elected. Learn your history, you gabbling illiterate”.
Tired of being “shamed” by our society’s useless yellow buildup of Social Justice warriors?
As Glenn Reynolds says, it’s ‘time to punch back twice as hard.
A week back, I linked to the fairly noxious MTV video showing a raft of millennials giving “white guys” a series of “new years resolutions”. I’m not going to display it again – once was plenty.
But I figure, one good turn deserves another. I’ve got some resolutions for Social Justice Warriors to observe for the coming year.
Enough with the Whitesplaining: Y’know who I consider the apex of credibility when it comes to running down the crimes of the Caucasoid ethnicity and the scourge of “white privilege”? Upper-middle-class white pseudoacademics with advanced degrees and cupboards full of Whole Foods packages, that’s who!
The next such person to whitesplain (condescendingly explain the sins of “whiteness” while being, y’know, white) me is getting pantsed.
Snowflakes Who Cried Wolf: Not everything that you disagree with is “hate”. Not everyone that disagrees with you “hates” you.
When you call all disagreement, all difference of opinion, all dissent, all views different than yours “hatred”, you make any meaningful discussion impossible.
Speaking of which:
Silence Is Golden: Stop jabbering about “seeking a dialogue” or “wanting a conversation” about an issue, and then aggressively blocking all attempts by people who disagree with you to actually have the disagreement. I’m not gonna name names, but it’s hypocrisy and cowardice, Kim Norton and Alondra Cano and “Protect” Minnesota .
Innocence Until Proven: Believing that suspects are innocent until proven guilty by a jury of one’s peers does not make one “pro-rape”. Say it around me and you will get your face singed so bad you won’t be able to get a tan for 20 years.
You’re welcome.
