Mitch, I wanted to write a novel like you, but I need professional
help.  The notes in parenthesis are the editor’s:

“I was doing my homework when someone knocked on our door.  An Asian
(RACIST) girl (SEXIST) about my age (AGEIST) stood (ABLE-IST) on the
doorstep. She must have been shy (ASSUMPTION), she was holding a book
against her chest the way girls do (SEXIST) and kept looking down
looking at our feet (UNNECESSARY DETAIL). She was slender (FAT SHAMING)
and short (HEIGHT-IST), with nice hair, dark (RACIST STEREOTYPE) and
glossy, that fell around her face, hiding it (OFFENSIVE STEREOTYPE).”

Revised version:

“I was doing my homework when someone knocked on our door.  A person
stood there holding a book.  The person had hair.”

I dunno – does it lose something in the translation?

Joe Doakes

And people ask why I made the villains in Trulbert the Methodists.

This is today’s celebrity class:

This video is Wuhan Virus for your eyes.pic.twitter.com/AaUfgBuzqQ

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) March 19, 2020

The TL:dw version: A bunch of entitled, overpaid people blessed/cursed with fame, are virtue-signaling the rest of us by “singing” the worst song in pop music history [1] – a mewling paeon to socialism and atheism from a singer who himself became so embittered and disconnected from the world by his fame and wealth that it had become something of a cultural punch line before he was murdered and became the icon for the death of every baby boomer’s innocence – as they hole up in their Manhattan condos, California estates and rural getaways…

…as millions of people wonder how long their paychecks are going to keep coming, or if they will, and the rest of the country waits to see if the army of homeless that crowd California’s streets get completely ravaged by this new plague.

Imagine, indeed.

I’ve never been a hugeLarry the Cable Guy fan, but for today, I am totally on board.

[1] This may be a reach – but work with me, here.

I think “ex-Beatle preference” is a key dispositive indicator of political outlook and personal attitude.

I suspect “progressives” prefer John Lennon. He was the angsty, prickly one, the one who seemed most prone to have a penchant for Sylvia Plath He died tragically, relatively young, and in the grand romantic tradition, illustrating and confirming the progressive’s innate hopelessness.

I’m going to guess conservatives trend toward the sunny, optimistic, irrepressible McCartney.

Me? I’m a guitar player. I’m with Harrison.

City council in the Finnish city of Oulu devises a radical new approach to the rape epidemic that is no-how, no way associated with migrants pouring into the area with no incentive or intent to assimilate:

Sorry if you can’t un-think this.   But it’s important; if someone in Scandinavia is doing this, it’ll be in Minnesota eventually. 

As Titania McGrath notes, if German women had known this in 1945, the Soviet mass rape camnpaign would have stopped in its tracks. 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Experts advise washing your hands to avoid Corona virus, at least 20 seconds, long enough to say the Alphabet or sing Happy Birthday.

I can’t believe Democrats have missed this opportunity to expand the welfare state.  “Because of the wealth gap and income disparity that has existed in America since 1615, and cruelly perpetuated by the Bad Orange Man’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich-only, our most vulnerable people – the poor – who are disproportionately women and children and persons of color and LGBTQ+ – are ill-equipped to survive this deadly virus.  They cannot afford to let the water run all day long.  We must immediately allocate billions of dollars of Water Bill subsidies to help those who need help most.  It’s a matter of survival.”

Although . . . maybe the Democrats are having an internal struggle and haven’t figured out which of their principles polls the best?

“Letting the water run to wash your hands wastes water.  Millions of fish and precious woodland creatures will die of thirst as Americans steal their water and run it down the drain. This species-ist attack on the rest of the planet must end today.  No More Handwashing!”

I’m so confused.

Joe Doakes

Don’t give them ideas, Joe.

Also, as a sidenote to Joe: women? LGBTQ? The poor? People of color?

No mention of transgender people?

Where are you making them invisible? When did you become transphobic. 

I asked American progressivism “American “progressivism”, you couldn’t possibly out-do your myopia from 2016, could you?”

And American progressivism – in this case Vox.com – said “hold my kombuchba“:

The idea that identity politics is at odds with liberalism has become conventional wisdom in parts of the American political and intellectualelite. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has condemned contemporary identity politics as “an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values.” New York Times columnist Bari Weiss argues that the “corrupt identity politics of the left” amounts to a dangerously intolerant worldview. And New York magazine’s Andrew Sullivanclaims the “woke left” seems “not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion.” This line of thinking is practically the founding credo of the school of internet thought known as the Intellectual Dark Web.

It is also deeply, profoundly wrong.

If you are deeply, profoundly progressive, anyway. . “Liberalism” and “progressivism” intersect only occasionally, if by “liberalism” you mean any of the traits that’ve made Western Civilization free, inclusive and prosperous in a way that is utterly anomalous through human history, which “progressives” most certainly do not. 

What these critics lambaste as an attack on liberalism is actually its best form: the logical extension of liberalism’s core commitment to social equality and democracy, adapted to address modern sources of inequality. A liberalism that rejects identity politics is a liberalism for the powerful, one that relegates the interests of marginalized groups to second-class status.

The bit of “science”-y content that fueled governent’s current vape panic…

…has been retracted. 

Last June, the authors, Stanton Glantz and Dharma Bhatta of the University of California San Francisco, stated in the original study that vaping and smoking cigarettes posed a similar risk, while doing both at the same time was an even more dangerous option. Following its publication in the summer, the peer-reviewed research was referenced by major news organizations, including CNN, Yahoo News, and USA Today.

In a statement explaining the retraction, editors at the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) expressed worry that the study may have been based on misleading data.

“The editors are concerned that the study conclusion is unreliable,” they wrote.

JAHA pulled the paper after Brad Rodu, a tobacco control expert at the University of Louisville, noted that many of the vapers Glantz and Bhatta analyzed for the study were also current or former smokers. Rodu argued that there was a possibility that the use of combustible cigarettes is what made them more likely to suffer heart attacks

I bring this up not so much to troll the city full of puritan prohibitionists who’ve been hacking away at vaping in legislatures and city councils around the state – although I am. 

Mostly, though, it’s about the wave of virtue-signaling third-rate “progressive” “thinkers” who affect “evidence-based” as their latest intellectual accessory – and don’t get the the sarcasm when you point out that the Flat Earth is “evidence-based”, if your evidence is flawed enough,.  

Joe Doakes from Coko Lark emails:

I’m informed race is not genetic, it is a social construct.  The Obama’s lived in America when their daughters were born, hence, they look like this:

If the Obama’s had lived in Sweden when their daughters were born, they’d have looked like this.

Okay, I get it now.  Makes perfect sense to me. 

Joe Doakes

And, let’s be honest, if Sasha and Malia identified as Swedish, the same thing would happen.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is watiing in line at his favorite barbeque joint when Aaron ROSTON, writer at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, walks into the store and gets into line behind BERG. ROSTON is a crossing guard at a school in rural southern Minnesota, and is a bullying activist – mostly focusing on promoting bullying of children of conservatives.

ROSTON notices BERG, despite BERG’s best efforts.

ROSTON: Merg!

BERG: Uh, hi, Eric…

ROSTON: Eric?

BERG: Sorry. Mistook you for someone else.

ROSTON: (not waiting for BERG to finish his sentence) Minnesotans are moving out of state because they’re racists. The Center of the American Experiment is basically the Klan Robe crowd for pointing it out.

BERG: “Klan Robe Crowd”, huh?

ROSTON: Yep. That’s the only reason to leave Minnesota. Racism.

BERG: Right. Not schools that are collapsing, a hostile business and tax environment, stagnant economy outside the metro because the economy is being hobbled by taxes, regulation and the stranglehold of one party on the bureaucracy, spiking urban crime, totaly bonkers transportation and energy policy, and a cold, tax-hostile place to retire?

ROSTON: Come on. You’re better than that!

BERG: What does that mean?

ROSTON: You know the roots of conservatism are entirely in racism.

BERG: I know that that’s precisely false in regards to modern, post Sharon Declaration conservatism.

ROSTON: You know you’re wrong.

BERG: Er, I know you’re gaslighting.

ROSTON: It’s true. Full stop.

BERG: “Full stop?” What is this, freshman comp class?

ROSTON: Experts the world over agree.

BERG: Name them.

ROSTON: It’s’ not my job to do your research for you.

BERG: There is noi “research”. Name just one of these “experts”.

ROSTON: It would blow your mind if I did.

BERG: You are right in more ways than one. (Looks over ROSTON’s shoulder). Hey, look, Eric…

ROSTON: Who?

BERG: …sorry, Aaron. Look – a six year old with a red cap that looks like a Trump cap!

ROSTON: (Spins around and looks in vain. But BERG uses the opportunity to make good his escape).

And SCENE

Ben Sexsmith in Spectator on Taylor Swift’s pummeling into a deluxe, fashion-forward conformity.

While complaining that country singers are expected to “shut up and sing” because Dixie Chicks…:

Swift is shown to have been under at least some pressure to avoid being ‘political’, including from her own father, but the media she appears to be so vulnerable towards was criticizing and deriding her for not being political enough. Her reputation, which is so important to her, was suffering in the late 2010s because her silence on the Trump administration was held to represent ‘white privilege’ if not outright racism.
There was article after article about her ‘blinding white privilege’ and her ‘indifference to the struggles of people of color’. For Quartz, Swift represented ‘a dangerous form of white women’. For The Root she was ‘one of the most dangerous types of White woman’ (my emphasis). A Daily Beast writer said Swift was ‘the living embodiment of white privilege’. 
This was the greatest pressure that Swift’s reputation faced and it is hard not to suspect that her politicization did not have something to do with answering such criticism. There is no point in complaining about celebrities being progressive. You might as well complain about the winter being cold or the tides coming in. But it is preposterous to imply a celebrity’s progressivism takes courage and iconoclasm. It is expected if not demanded of them, and Swift and her friends clinking wine glasses as they toast ‘the Resistance’ is one of the most bourgeois images of our times.

About the same time I read the article, I heard this episode of the NPR “prog media” cheerleading broadcast “On The Media”, talking (approvingly) about the extent to which celebs have to go to prove they’re “woke”, and its political ramifications.

And it reminded me of the sort of exaggerated denouncements that people issued during Stalin’s show trials – when people literally virtue-signaled to save their lives. The Modern Left is a show trial that never ends – but hasn’t killed anyone. Yet.

The University of Minnesota is going to be starting mandatory pronoun training:

Faculty and staff at the University of Minnesota are gearing up to undergo pronoun training in order to make the campus a more welcoming environment for “transgender” and “non-binary” community members.
A university policy first floated in the summer of 2018 and recently finalized dictates that university employees “are expected to use the names, gender identities and pronouns specified to them by university members.” Failing to abide by this policy “could result in discipline,” according to the policy’s FAQ page.
Training for the new policy has begun, The Minnesota Daily reports. The training program involves instructing staff and faculty in the new gender pronoun rules; those staff will then be “tasked with working to educate their colleagues, helping them work through questions and mistakes.”

There are really two responses to this. Technically three, but “unquestioning acquiescence” is off the table. .

I can either:

• Point out that this sort of thing is at best an unproductive and ultimately damaging diversion to someone’s mental illness, and at worst catering to someone’s attention-seeking
• Tell U of M staff that my preferred pronouns are “His Highness / The Grand Admiral “

I’m leaning toward “B”. Satire seems to be more useful these days.

Connecticut legislature proposes a new state police unit to investigate terrorism.

But only “far-right” terror, natch: (Emphasis added)

The proposal, which was unveiled Wednesday as part of the state Senate Democrats’ “A Just Connecticut” agenda, would publicly fund a new state police department that specializes in investigating “far-right extremist groups and individuals,” according to a news release.

Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney said the proposal is aimed at combating “potential” hate crimes but stressed that his caucus has no intention of persecuting people for their political beliefs, the Hartford Courant reported.
“Unfortunately, people who entertain hateful beliefs … are protected as long as [those beliefs] don’t result in hate-crime actions. That’s what we’re talking about,” Mr. Looney told reporters Wednesday. “We want to be more aggressive in enforcing our laws and identifying likely sources of potential domestic terrorism acts against religious institutions and ethnic institutions.”

Big Left has been trying to make “terror” (not to mention “racism, misogyny, white supremacy, Naziism and transphobia”) synonymous with “conservatism” for years – which is almost more insidious than the inevitable statutory persecution that this measure signals.

Connecticut Republicans, such as they are, at least are showing some backbone:

Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, a Republican, said there is “strong bipartisan support against any type of terrorism” but he took issue with the proposal only mentioning right-wing extremism.
“When they put a right-wing label on extremism, they do that to elicit a political response,” he said, the Hartford Courant reported.

The Democrat messaging strategy in a word: gaslighting.

There’s a significant part of me that thinks I said everything that needed to be said about the notion of “white privilege” with this bit here.

But just in case there’s some rubble left unbounced out there:

Mayor Frey is apparently a White Supremacist:

I mean, we’re just going by the standards they impose on others…

Article in the new Bench and Bar magazine written by Justice Paul Thissen of the Minnesota Supreme Court, entitled “When Rules Get in the Way of Reason: One Judge’s View of Legislative Interpretation.”

No need to read the article,  the title says it all.  Isn’t this pretty much the definition of judicial activism?
By giving it prominent play in the Bar Association magazine, aren’t they normalizing radical behavior?
Or is radical the new normal, so this view is not controversial, it’s mainstream?
Joe doakes

Pretty simple, really.

Radical is radical on the right. On the left, it’s progress because shut up.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing the two winners of the “Speaking Proudly” speech contest on my show.

Much as I razz the kids, they were both pretty impressive. It kind of made me feel a little more sanguine about the near future.

And I needed that little dose of sanguinity, when I read this report from the academic front lines.

Articles like these are the reason women in the sciences are not taken seriously.  
Carmen and Leonie have PhDs in computer science.   Divya is a student of geology on other planets.  They’re probably brilliant people in their fields but when they write stuff like this, they remind everyone of the shirt incident, which reinforces the reason nobody wants women in the sciences.
There is a silver lining.  I can’t wait for President Trump to issue an Executive Order directing all federal agencies to stop using the Supremacy Clause as Constitutional justification for federal laws over-riding state laws.  Power to the People, baby!
Joe Doakes

From the article:

We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.
The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.

Read: A tsunami of stupid, driven by an ignorant, incurious media, might cause idiots – invariably idiots on the left – to think “quantum supremacy” is a racist dog whistle.

In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.

Let’s be honest – it’s not just women who publish this twaddle.  Bowderiing science like this, if it jumps the banks of Moron Creek, will harm everyone, matter their pigment or genitalia.  

There used to be more holidays.  Nowadays, we’re down to a few Sales Events.  I miss holidays.
George Washington had his own birthday holiday. We gave Valentines to classmates, planted a tree in the yard on Arbor Day, and hung construction paper cones on doorknobs on May Basket Day.   
The high school band marched in the Memorial Day parade.  The school bell rang at 11:00 on Armistice Day as we sat silent for one minute. We knew who Squanto was and why he got invited to dinner by Pilgrims, the man carrying a musket while wearing a tall black hat with a shiny buckle on the front; the woman in a bonnet near a big, fat turkey.  We put out our shoes for Saint Nicholas and sang familiar songs in the Christmas concert.
The musket violates the zero tolerance policy for guns. It’s unfair to celebrate one President’s birthday but not the others.  Valentine was a Catholic saint, apartment dwellers have no yards to plant trees; parading on Main Street disrupts traffic and singing about a long-ago silent night converts schools into cathedrals.
We have cut ourselves off from our cultural traditions and wonder why our children have no sense of history, of belonging to a great nation, of pride in our culture.  And I fear what happens to a people who have no sense of history, of belonging to a great nation, no culture.  
Joe Doakes

The only mistake is to assume that this isn’t all according to plan. 

Racist pig and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib blames “white supremacy”…

…for an attack carried out by black “Jews”.

Brazilian “comedy” features a gay Jesus:

The Brazilian comedy group Porta dos Fundos (which literally translates to “back door”) appears to have a real hang-up about our Lord and Christianity in general. Last December the group released The Last Hangover on Netflix, a movie that blends Christ’s Last Supper with his disciples and The Hangover into a night of drunken debauchery where Jesus disappears.
This year, in this new Christmas special, Jesus turns 30 and brings his gay boyfriend home to meet Mary and Joseph.

Pretty daring.

Not as daring as a gay Mohammed would be.

Wonder why nobody’s green-lit that?

Oh, yeah. Christians won’t blow you up.

Not to Hollywood; wanna be really “transgressive”? Portray Christ as the focal point of a western civilization that made your life, and the intellectual (and “intellectual”) freedom to make your lives possible.

You’d never do lunch on Rodeo Drive again, of course, but you’d sure be transgressive!

If gender is just a construct…

…then “mens'” opinions about abortion are of absolutely equal weight with “womens'”.

You’re welcome.

Tyrants, like abusive spouses and sociopathic gaslighters of all kinds, are fond of making their victims believe that their travails are their fault.

Westerners – those who still bother to criticize Red China, anyway – learn with some muted horror that when the Chinese government executes a convict via their preferred method, a bullet to the back of the head, the officials follow up by sending a bill for the bullet to the family of the deceased.

Seems barbaric?

Compare it with the behavior of the authorities in Berkeley – not just students, but the authorities themselves – after protests and violence broke out at an Ann Coulter appearance last week.

However, [UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo] Bennett said she was “sympathetic” to students concerned about the heavy presence of police in riot gear around Wheeler.
“I totally understand that,” she said. “We did messaging to impacted groups that felt the presence of police caused them anxiety.” [UC Berkeley spokesman Dan] Mogulof echoed Bennett. The concerns were “understandable on a lot of different levels,” he said. “We have work to do to continue to find ways we can accommodate profound differences of opinion. We believe we have met our obligations to both free speech and the rule of law, and to provide for the safety and well-being of students and campus guests,” he said. “Having said that, I understand that students are deeply disturbed and unsettled by someone whose views they deeply disagree with.” He said counseling and other services are always available to students.
Unbelievable. The authorities here — the police chief and the university spokesman — sympathize with the mobbed-up students whose fanaticism and violence required police presence so that a conservative speaker could address those who wanted to hear her. No wonder the First Amendment is losing. The authorities pity the tyrannical mob.

It’s not the Coulter spectators, who needed to be escorted into the venue past a mob of slobbering droogs, to whom the administration is apologizing.

No.

It’s the droogs. For being “triggered” by the presence of the police. Who needed to be there because of them.

But it’s not just Berkeley. It’s right here.

Mayor Jacob “McDreamy” Frey, after all but literally inviting thugs to attack attendees at last month’s Trump rally in Minneapolis, and allegedly ordering the police to not intervene as the droogs and their boyfriends chased down old men and sucker-punched 5’2 women, is blaming…

…well, who do you think?

One noxious facet of Urban Progressive Prvilege is that its beneficiaries never have to feel guilty for even their most depraved acts, because “progressive” ends justify all means.

If, as the ACLU says…:

…then I guess men’s opinions about abortion really do matter, then.

The City of Minneapolis is likely going to vote to bar “conversion therapy” for people under 18.

I’m going to add a bit of emphasis:

The controversial practice aims to change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight. It has drawn the ire of many in the LGBT community and others, who say it doesn’t work, has no scientific basis, and amounts to psychological torture.

Of course, the “scientific proof” one way or the other is all “social science”, which isn’t “science” at all.

And if it’s “science” we’re concerned with, it’s worth noting that the idea that “homosexuality is genetic” is a political, not scientific, conclusion.

But with that out of the way – I don’t disagree. Society has known for decades that forcing someone to act like someone they’re intrinsically not is a terrible thing that causes horrendous psychiatric damage when forced upon the subject. This was generally well-known – if frequently contested or ignored – even when I was in high school.

As, indeed, the MPR story on the subject notes:

Roger Sanchez of Minneapolis said he wishes such a ban would have been in place when he was a teenager. Sanchez, who is gay, said his father and a bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints both urged him to get psychotherapy to change his sexual orientation.
It did not involve shock treatments or anything physically invasive, but Sanchez said what he went through was damaging because it made him believe he was somehow disordered.

Bully for Minneapolis. 

Now – if “therapy” to “convert” gays to straight-dom is bad, because (social) science…

…then why is forcing boys to act like girls – verbal, cooperative, social, rather than physical, competitive and restless – any better in any way?

Because science, and a look at the state of boys and young men today, certainly shows the social catastrophe that a generation of changing and medicating that natural male energy, rather than teaching boys to channel it and use it productively, has had on society.

When does that come up on the agenda?

Wait until gang members learned that the first aid kits stock Israeli bandages. What a dilemma for a dutiful Muslim: bleed out or owe your life to a Jew?
Joe Doakes

Progressives, likely, even moreso.

Disney also slammed baby boomers’ attitudes toward millennials, who are less financially stable than previous generations and are dealing with the ever-growing threat of climate change.
“And the more often you object to Millenials’ understandable resentment toward a generation that has selfishly poisoned their water, blown past every climate warning so they could drive their stupid hummers, and looked away or worse for sexual, racial and economic injustice, the more you prove their point that you just don’t understand anything of value to them,” she wrote. “Look, these kids are facing down a rising tide (literally) of changes that threatens everything you and I taught them to hold dear.”
“How about you guys sit the f— down and let the kids drive,” she added.
She concluded: “Get over the idea that all things pass, you are old and you need to let history do what history does: move on.”

“Nice try, Ms Disney, but I honestly don’t think millennials are more virtuous than the Boomer generation before them who thought we were all going to die. In fact, these millenials are still driving, still moving to the suburbs to raise kids, still choosing a lifestyle they can’t afford- all while telling someone else that they can’t. Why, it’s as if the two generations are the same. No wonder they are fighting. The more helpful approach might be to actually understand we can’t move on from history, we can just hope not to repeat the worst parts of the world’s history- something both liberal boomers and millennials seem hell-bent on doing.”

I’m spooling up for a stemwinder on the whole idea of turning generations into identity groups.