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.

After an election where Identity Politics generated an identity politics backlash that overwhelmed the Identity Politicians, MTV News triples down with perhaps the most textbook example of tone-deafness in a movement that can’t carry a tune in a bucket in the first place.

Broad, ofay stereotyping is now good, apparently:

“White guys”.  Huh.  Because an Italian about as much socially in common with a Swede as a Korean has with a Philipino?

My “favorite”?  “Learn what ‘mansplaining’ is, and stop doing it”.

Ma’am, I know what “mansplaining” is.  It’s a way to dismiss someone’s argument without actually having to address it.  It’s a weaponized rhetorical coin trick that genderizes, at most, poor communication, and at the very least, personal annoyance and peevishness.  Nothing more.  In a world run by Mitch Berg, using the term “Mansplaining” to cut off an argument would be grounds for spraying people in the face with mace.

And if I could just take a moment to express my complete fatigue with Millennial hipster pajama-boy gamma male virtue-signalling?

I plan on circulating this far and wide – until it gets disappeared, at least.

It’s also more than a little tempting to do my own New Years resolutions list for MTV and our Social Justice Warrior community.

Why, no, Ms. Social Justice Warrior, I’m not appropriating Latino culture by eating a burrito.  This is a Pølse – a lefse (potetkakke, to be precise) wrapped around meat, vegetables and sauces to taste.

Not a freaking burrito.

Check your privilege.

We have offically hit Peak Social Justice:

In a piece for the Patriot, the school’s official student newspaper, Leah Power explains that although she has “attempted to build up a thick skin towards the insensitive jokes, stereotypes, cultural appropriation and overall ignorance” that she sees around her, she just cannot help but get very upset every time she hears someone who is not from the South use the word “y’all.” Power writes that she remembers traveling outside of the South when she was young and having to deal with “people joking about my accent and the stereotypes of the dumb, inbred, redneck hicks who made up the southern states,” but that “sometime in the last year or so, [‘y’all’ has] gone from a redneck pronoun to a socially acceptable form of addressing a group of people.”

Well, Ms. Power, all I can say is “d’uuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhh”.

Yes, it has.  And I’ve contributed to it.  And I will continue to contribute to it.

English is one of very few languages without a second-person plural.   In German, the singular you is “Du”; if you’re referring to more than one person, it’s “ihr”.  (In formal situations – another thing English lacks – it’s “Sie” and “Ihnen”).

But for English – since the demise of “Ye”, anyway – we have no word for second-person plural.

And there are times that causes problems.

Enter “y’all” – the southern dialect group’s great contribution to grammar.  It is a second person plural.  And unlike the Northern dialect group’s “Youse”, it’s  not phonetically awkward; it’s easier to go from an “L” to most other sounds than from an “S”.

So yes Ms. Power; by your leave (or even without it), I’m going to use “y’all”.   I’m also going to appropriate any parts of southern culture that suit me – Tom Petty, a sarcastic “yee haw” on occasion, Emmylou Harris, rockabilly, cheese grits, whatever.

And not just southern culture, either.  I will take whatever parts of other cultures and incorporate them into my life in any way I see fit; I’ll listen to R&B, Jazz and black Gospel music; I’ll incorporate words like “Boondocks” (stolen from the Philippines) and “Cojones” (Mexico) and others into my vernacular;  if something in another culture makes my life better and more interesting, I’m going to take it,and I’m going to dare you to do anything but whine about it.

Because that’s how all human cultures throughout history have formed, intermingled and grown.  Western European culture is the result of 2,000 years of various levels of mixture of Latin, Gallic, Frankish, Saxon, Anglic, Teutonic, Slavic,  Near Eastern, Nordic, Greek, and countless other cultures, customs and languages, none of which existed anymore in the original forms, because they all appropriated each other, and themselves, out of existence.   And it’s the same for every other culture on the planet – African, Asian, you name it.  The only exceptions are tribes in the impenetrable wilds of New Guinea or the Philippines that have gotten through these last 2,000 years with no other human contact.

So save us the jabbering about appropriation.  Every culture appropriates every other culture, always has, and always will.  Take what you need and leave the rest.

Or whine.

Your call.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Just because you can’t pay your mortgage is no reason not to give you a mortgage.  That was the thinking behind CRA and it caused the housing crisis that tanked the economy for the last 10 years.

 Seeing how well that worked, Social Justice Warriors in Seattle are expanding the plan.  Just because you can’t pay your rent is no reason not to rent to you. 

 I confidently predict a shortage of rental housing will afflict Seattle within the next five years, and the cause will be a complete mystery.

Coming soon to a local government near you . . . .

Calling Alondra Cano…

One of the features that originally put this blog on the map was “The DFL Dictionary” – a list of the Democrat party’s perversions of the English Language.

It occurs to me – the feature hasn’t been updated in close to eight years.

So today I’m going to start working on an update

New Terms:  Here are some of the new terms I’d like to try to define:

• Rape Culture
• Safe Space
• Trigger
• Systemic Racism
• Black Vulnerabilty
• cultural normalcy
• Vagenda of Manocide
• Mansplaining

  Patriarchy
• Voter Suppression
• Wage Gap
• Consent Text
• Privilege
• Cisgender
• Shaming
• Police Brutatily / Police Overreach
• Race based
• Hands Up Don’t Shoot
• “Justice” (saka “Racial Justice”)
• “Oppressor”
• Social Justice Warrior
• Privilege
• Appropriation
• Supremacy
• Xenophobic
• Misogynistic

I’m open for new definitions of these terms (and I have a few myself, but most of you are smarter than me).   If you’ve got a definition or two, throw ’em in down in the comment section.

And then…:

What Have I Missed?:  I know I’ve missed some terms.  Throw ’em in down in the comment section!

My new hero; the Lyft driver who told “Feminist” tyrant (and supremely annoying “human”) Annaliese Nielsen where to stuff her virtue-signalling:

Why is it so vital to resist the Wahhabi Social Justice Warrior?

Because they kill people.

UPDATE:  Commenter Seflores notes something that I’d missed the first time about Ms. Nielsen:

Coincidence? I think not.

And of course, being a “social justice warrior” in today’s academic and media society involves little more actual thought than…

I mean, why not?

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is shopping in the dairy aisle at Target in Roseville.  

Suddenly, Avery LIBRELLE rounds the corner.  With LIBRELLE is Ashley FIGG, a young woman of apparently mixed but minority-ish ethnicity.  

LIBRELLE:   Merg!  It’s time for you to admit your privilege!

BERG:  OK.  I was born into an intact family who made sure I stayed in school, kept my pants zipped until I could support a family, and ensured I grew up knowing that actions had consequences.

LIBRELLE:   No, no, no.  You’re white!  I want to introduce you to Ashley Figg.  She is a student at Macalester College.

BERG:  Ms. Figg.

(FIGG glowers at BERG)

LIBRELLE:  We’re going to have a debate!

BERG:  A debate?

LIBRELLE:  Yes.  First, Ms. Figg.

BERG:  …I”m not really…

FIGG:   You are white.  You have privilege.

LIBRELLE:  Your turn, Merg.

BERG:  Um, OK.  Ms. Figg, what is it you would have us do about this “privilege” you talk about.

FIGG:  The fact that you even ask is racist.

BERG:  Um, how do you figure?

FIGG:  That’s racist, too.

BERG:  Seeking clarity in the discussion is “racist?”

FIGG:   You’re using your power over me.  That’s racist.

BERG:  That’s just bizarre.

FIGG:  F**k you.  I hate you.  I hope you die.

BERG:  (Turns to LIBRELLE):  Er, Avery?  What’s the…

LIBRELLE:  We should stop the debate…

BERG:  …um, yeah?

LIBRELLE:  Because clearly, Merg, you are racist.

BERG:  What, now?  I never mentioned race.

LIBRELLE:   You were using your power, being a racist.   Being a racist, race is endemic in everything you say, and do, and don’t say, and don’t do.  Right, Ashley?

(FIGG glowers)

BERG:  Lavrentiy Beria called.  He said “dial back the kangaroo”.

LIBRELLE:   And now you’re mansplaining.

BERG:  (Looks beyond FIGG and LIBRELLE).  Hey, look – it’s Hillary Clinton!  And she’s giving out suckers!

(LIBRELLE and FIGG wheel around, as BERG slips away)

(And SCENE)

(LIghts fade up in screening room.  BERG is sitting in the middle of the room.  A few rows behind, covered in popcorn debris and spilled soda, are Edmund DUCHEY and CAT SCAT, bloggers with “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com” a possibly fictional Minnesota liberal blog.  )

(DUCHEY leaps to his feet, scattering popcorn debris in all directions)

DUCHEY:  Merg!  Unless you can prove every word in that film short was true, you’re a liar!.  (Pauses to wipe drool from his chin).

BERG:  It’s satire.  It’s meant to illustrate larger truths through a caricature of people and events.  In this case, that the left’s social justice warrior class has become simultaneously obsessed with virtue-signaling, McCarthyistic witch-hunting and public shaming of dissenters, while simultaneously becoming less able to state a coherent case.

SCAT:  The fact is, the law says you have to have a degree in satire from an Ivy League school to practice it!

BERG:  You’re making that up.

DUCHEY:  So you’re saying it never happened?  Hah!

BERG:  Actually, of the dozens and dozens of these “dramatization” scenarios I’ve written in recent years, this one may be the least fictional of all.

DEUS (EX MACHINA, via thunderstorm).  You’re kidding?

(Urine stain appears on DUCHEY’s pants)

BERG:  (Looking upward)  Nope.    It pretty much happened.

DEUS EX MACHINA:  Wow.

(And SCENE)

When I was a kid, the world’s social justice warrior crowd warned us that the world was headed for inevitable catastrophic famine.  Some of the very voices behind “global warming” today – Paul Ehrlich springs to mind – warned (and profited greatly from warning) us that India would be down to under 100 million people by 1990, and that Africa was going be pretty much revert to nature, its human inhabitants all starved out.  Even the US was going to be the subject of “inevitable” food riots by the mid-eighties.

Naturally, the only possible remedy was to socialize the world economy.

Today?

People are wondering with a straight face if we have “too much food”, as the world has more overweight than malnourished people for the first time in history.

I fully expect to see a Kyoto Treaty for fat, sooner than later.

Yesterday was Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day – where Real Minnesotans came together to lobby their legislators to pass Second-Amendment-friendly legislation, and shun the stupid bills that Michael Bloomberg is paying for.

And since the legislature was busy talking about all the bills they were introducing, the other side – to the extent you could call it that – was also at the Capitol.

Let’s compare and contrast.

The Herd:  Here is the “group” from the pro-slavery group “Moms Want Action”.  

Count ’em.   That’s 26 people.  And most of them were being  paid, directly (DFL pols, people on the Bloomberg payroll) or indirectly (cops representing the Police Chiefs Assocation) to be there.

If one-third of the people in that photo above were not present for vocational reasons, and being compensated in some way for their time, I’d be amazed.

In other words, at the most Moms Want Action drew eight “activists”.  And that’s being generous.

Drone photo courtesy Dustin Doyle

The Pack: Meanwhile at the foot of the Capitol Mall, there was a different crowd – distinguisted by being an actual crowd.  It was GOCRA’s “MNGOLD” group – or as the sensible refer to them, the “Real Americans”.
I was proud and honored, by the way, to have been invited to be the Master of Ceremonies.   We were joined by an array of speakers, each of them authorities in their area of the issue; Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt (who pledged a lonely death for all of Bloomberg’s bills this session), Oleg Volk (who talked about life without freedom in his native USSR), Rep. Jim Nash, a second-Amendment leader in the House, Professor Joe Olson, the longtime leader of GOCRA, as well as GOCRA president Andrew Rothman and Rep. Tony Cornish, who noted “a bill won’t get passed if it never comes up for a hearing” – which, in his committee, none ever will.

I counted about 170 people – mostly younger, almost exclusively working people, outdoors in temperatures that hovered below 40 degrees as the rally started,  taking a few hours off from their mostly private-sector jobs to come and fight for freedom; most of the crowd, clad in their maroon GOCRA t-shirts, went straight in to the Capitol to buttonhole their legislators and let them know the votes they expected (and to thank the good ones for the pro-freedom votes they made, if applicable).

And not a single one of them was there because it was their job (other than the state’s NRA rep).

That is, conservatively (how else) about seven times the crowd of unemployed/underemployed wannabe social justice warriors and other layabouts that came out to work toward your enslavement.  Or more like 20:1, if you just count people there voluntarily.

If it’d been a Saturday – or a vital hearing – the odds would have been 2-3 times as strongly in the Real Americans’ favor.

Welcome to hell, pro-slavery activists.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Bad news: Shot In The Dark failed to make the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups again this year.

There are only six hate groups in Minnesota.

A chapter of the KKK somewhere Up North.  Not sure how they found them, I never heard of them.

Vinlanders Social Club, a racist skinhead outfit in Vinlanders, Minnesota

A Christian preacher in Annandale who preaches that homosexuality is wrong.  [I bet that’s Bradlee Dean – Ed]

The Remnant Press, a traditional Catholic publisher in Forest Lake.

The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, a black separatist church in Minneapolis.

Weisman Publications in Apple Valley, Christian Identity, whatever that means.

Even if we concede that the KKK and racist skinheads are hate groups, so what?  Hate speech is constitutional in Minnesota, has been since the St. Paul cross-burning case.

And what’s up with calling the others haters, simply because they’re Christians of one stripe or another?

This looks like nothing more than a list of “people we don’t agree with and wish to silence.”

I’m not sure what you need to do to amp up the hate around here so you can get yourself noticed, Mitch.  But there’s one consolation – Powerline didn’t make it, either.

Always next year.

The potatoes seem so small, we’d call them “popcorn” where I come from.

But with the SPLC – which is sort of the curia of the Social Justice Warrior community – there’s always a next year.

I’m frankly more worried SITD will be considered a terrorist outfit than a hate group.  It seems pretty likely, with another Democrat administration.

To:  Colgate
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Super Bowl Ad

Colgate,

So I watched the teaser for your Super Bowl spot:

I get it.  There’s big money in appealing to the altruism of the soft-core social justice warrior.  There’s a whole generation of Millennials out there who are impressed by symbols.

And I am not one of the people who “wastes” water like the guy in the ad.  I’m way too frugal for that.

But I have a question.  Several, actually:

1. If I did leave the faucet running, what do you think would happen (other than inflating my water bill)?   Would the water disappear from the face of the earth, never to be seen again?    Of course not; it runs down the drain, through the sanitary sewer, back to sewage plant and a holding pond, where it evaporates, turning into humidity, clouds, and eventually rain or snow, falling…somewhere in the world, usually to repeat the cycle over and over and over.
2. For that matter, what do you think happens to the water I drink?  That it disappears from the earth for good?  No – it comes back out in one form or another; #1, #2, sweat, tears, spittle, whatever.  It eventually gets back to the environment, where it evaporates and becomes humidity, clouds, fog, snow, rain, ice, glaciers, or something.  And then repeats the cycle, over and over again.
3. You end the ad with a young, ethnically-ambiguous girl (Asian? Central American?  Briilliant casting, actually) thirstily and heart-rendingly slurping up every drop of the “wasted” water she can get her hands, literally, around.  Now, I live in a part of the world blessed with a lot of water.  My city water comes from the Mississippi River.  And any water I don’t physically consume eventually probably gets back there, or seeps down into an aquifer, or evaporates back into the atmosphere to go heaven-only-knows where.  So please tell me; if I don’t use a gallon of water, how do you propose that it gets to that little girl in Myanmar or Honduras?  Can I pack it up in a jug and send it there, with Colgate paying the freight? Will you be holding a water drive?  How is my use of water – which, between nature and a government that handles basic services with some degree of competence, is plentiful where I live – related to the availability of water in a third-world hellhole beset by banana-republic socialists, corruption and incompetence?   Can the water I don’t use be re-purposed to drowning the successive waves of dictators that have managed to make places like the little girl’s hometown short of water, even though they’re by a freaking rain forest.

Thanks in advance.

The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) is stumping for the University of St. Thomas to get rid of Theresa Collett,  an outspoken pro life law professor and former congressional candidate.

In case you missed that in the first paragraph; NARAL is plumping it’s well-heeled legions of social justice warriors to get rid of a a pro-life professor…

… at a Catholic University.

Remember first, last and always: conservatives think progressives are wrong; progressives think conservatives are evil.