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The New Normal/Political Correctness Run Amok Thread


Muda69

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25 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Native American community condemns Anderson's 'Indian' mascot

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2022/04/15/native-americans-anderson-high-school-indian-mascot-peace-pipe-ceremony/7283327001/

More snowflakes out looking for something to offend them.  And sacrificing history and tradition in the process. Sickening.

 

Wondering when the "Cowboys" are going be asked to changed their name......Thinking maybe the Indians may be offended or maybe even Texans......IDK.....

Rodney King - "Can't we all just get along"?

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I spent some time teaching on/in the Navajo Nation.  I learned a few things.   My great-grandma was from another nation (tribe).  I lived in Ecuador, Colombia, the Navajo Nation, Indiana and spent months in Peru.   It's hard telling another culture how to feel, but some people like to.  

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  https://nypost.com/2022/04/28/joe-biden-under-fire-for-dystopian-disinformation-bureau/

Oh, (Big) Brother!

President Biden came under fire Thursday for the creation of a “dystopian” disinformation bureau created under his Homeland Security department, which critics are blasting as just a way for the government to police free speech online.

Conservatives slammed the Department of Homeland Security’s Orwellian new “Disinformation Governance Board” – with some suggesting the timing is convenient given Elon Musk vowed to make Twitter a free speech haven after his $44 billion takeover of the social media platform notorious for selectively censoring right-leaning points of view.

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley called the new board a “disgrace” that was designed to “monitor all Americans’ speech.”

In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Hawley said he initially thought Wednesday’s announcement was “satire.”

“Surely, no American administration would ever use the power of government to sit in judgement on the First Amendment speech of its own citizens. Sadly, I was mistaken,” Hawley wrote.

“Rather than protecting our border or the American homeland, you have chosen to make policing Americans’ speech your priority.”

Florida Republican Congressional candidate, Dr. Willie J. Montague, tweeted: “Is there anything more dystopian than a Disinformation Governance Board run by the federal government?”

And Texas GOP Congressman Troy Nehls griped: “They didn’t need a ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ until @elonmusk threatened their control over the narrative.”

Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert accused Democrats of spending “the last weeks planting the seeds for the back-up plan in case the Twitter deal actually happened.”

She, too, called the news “dystopian” and said the left “can’t afford to let the truth be anything but what they say.”

The hashtag “Ministry of Truth” was also trending on Twitter as critics compared the new board to George Orwell’s “1984” novel.

“Adolf Hitler had a Ministry of Truth. Joseph Goebbels had a Ministry of Truth. Joseph Stalin had a Ministry of Truth. Joseph Biden has a Ministry of Truth,” tweeted Errol Webber, GOP congressional candidate in California.

Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde added: “Biden’s dystopian Disinformation Governance Board is seriously dangerous and wholly unconstitutional. I’m demanding Congress investigate DHS’ Ministry of Truth — NOW.”

The newly formed panel will target supposed misinformation aimed at key points of vulnerability for Biden and Democrats such as southern border migrants, as well as monitor and prepare for Russian disinformation threats as this year’s midterm elections near, the DHS said.

“The spread of disinformation can affect border security, Americans’ safety during disasters, and public trust in our democratic institutions,” the department said in a statement.

DHS said that the board will “protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties” as part of its duties.

The board will be led by Nina Jankowicz – a disinformation expert who has been criticized for repeatedly casting doubt on The Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she didn’t have details on the board’s role, or its executive director, during her Thursday press briefing, but said President Biden supported the effort.

“We know that there has been a range of disinformation out there about a range of topics — I mean, including COVID, for example, and also elections and eligibility,” Psaki said. “But I will check and see if there’s more specifics.”

 

The backlash over the creation of the board came as the Biden administration also unveiled an international “Declaration for the Future of the Internet” with 50 other countries on Thursday that endorsed efforts to also curb online “disinformation” and “harassment.”

The document outlines ideas for “reclaiming the promise of the Internet” and US officials described it as an effort to counter the practices of countries including China and Russia.

It notably doesn’t mention domestic US struggles over internet freedom, such as politically motivated censorship of news stories by private companies and alleged illegal government mass surveillance.

The term disinformation has been used to censor content that later gains broad acceptance — such as The Post’s reporting on documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Twitter blocked and Facebook throttled, and speculation that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab, which Facebook banned before US intelligence agencies later found the scenario one of two “plausible” pandemic origin theories.

The vague document doesn’t describe a specific remedy for disinformation, but does call for governments to “[f]oster greater exposure to diverse cultural and multilingual content, information, and news online.”

“Exposure to diverse content online should contribute to pluralistic public discourse, foster greater social and digital inclusion within society, bolster resilience to disinformation and misinformation, and increase participation in democratic processes,” the document read.

The new document is signed by many US allies, including the governments of France, Israel, Japan and the UK, but the list doesn’t include many of the largest but relatively poor democracies, such as Brazil, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines.

 

“Adolf Hitler had a Ministry of Truth. Joseph Goebbels had a Ministry of Truth. Joseph Stalin had a Ministry of Truth. Joseph Biden has a Ministry of Truth,”

And the person in charge of this is none other than a person that believed and pushed the Trump Collusion story while discounting the Hunter Biden laptop story.......

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

The Generation That Hates George Washington: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/generation-that-hates-george-washington-culture-wars/

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Today the Washington Post publishes this essay by George Washington University senior Caleb Francois, who seems to hate his university as a cesspit of vice. Excerpts:

These problems are rooted in systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy. There are at least four ways the university could achieve progress: Decolonized university curriculum, increased Black enrollment, the renaming of the university and the selection of an African American President.

Yes, young Caleb, that would fix everything. But wait, what’s this about renaming the university?

But it’s not just the university’s name that’s a problem. Just blocks from the main campus is the Mount Vernon Campus, named for George Washington’s former slave plantation. Every day, hundreds of Black students walk on a campus named after an enslaver of men and study at a site named after dark parts of history. Such sites, among other locations and buildings, are touted as glorified mementos here at GW. The indignity and injustice of such sites remain overlooked. The racist visions of James MadisonWinston Churchill and others are glorified through building names, programs, statues and libraries that honor their memory.

The controversial Winston Churchill Library must go. The university’s contentious colonial moniker must go. Even the university’s name, mascot and motto — “Hail Thee George Washington”— must be replaced. The hypocrisy of GW in not addressing these issues is an example of how Black voices and Black grievances go ignored and highlights the importance of strong Black leadership.

This privileged twerp — where do you even start? Remember how we were all told that it was just the Confederate statues they were after, not the Founding Fathers, for heaven’s sake? It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it. Wakanda forever!

My challenge to you is to find a single prominent liberal commentator who forthrightly denounces this repugnant crap. They can’t do it, even if they think it, because they are terrified of the radicals in their midst.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Washington Post today, a reporter observes Republicans preparing to pounce. Excerpts:

Republicans believe they’ve found an edge in the culture wars.

On the campaign trail, they’re railing against critical race theory and gender identity discussions in schools. In state legislatures and via executive fiat, they are trying to limit medical procedures for transgender children and punishing large companies they view as overly politically correct. They’ve found success by weaponizing the left’s “defund the police” movement, which advocates for reallocating resources to limit police power.

And they’re already accusing President Biden of catering to college-educated elites as he considers forgiving student loan debt.

In primary races ahead of November’s midterm elections, Republican candidates are embracing contentious battles over gender, sexual orientation and race rather than sticking to tried-and-true attacks on inflation or Biden’s low approval ratings.

I mean … how dare they?! Liberals love to blame conservatives for fighting the culture war, which usually means resisting whatever radical aggression the liberals have tried next. More from the story:

Some Democrats, meanwhile, are explicitly backing away from those battles.

“You want culture wars? I’m not your guy,” Rep. Tim Ryan said in a video released just before he won Ohio’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate — a video in which he also denounced the idea of defunding the police. “You want a fighter for Ohio? I’m all in.”

J.D. Vance, the Republican who will face Ryan in November, offered a heavy dose of culturally fueled grievance during his victory speech last week. Minutes after capturing the GOP nomination, he complained that the Democratic Party “bends the knee to major American corporations and their ‘woke’ values,” and he predicted that Ohioans feel alienated by the left.

In a brief interview while he was campaigning in West Chester Township, Ohio, Vance offered a critique of the identity politics he said Democratic politicians are embracing. The emphasis on race, gender and sexual orientation by the left is a distraction, dividing voters who should be united against powerful interests intent on preventing prosperity in the lower classes, Vance said.

“Very often what is framed as diversity, equity and inclusion is actually an excuse to make the American people poor,” Vance told The Washington Post. He noted that Democrats celebrate Janet L. Yellen as the first female treasury secretary, rather than debating whether her ideas have led to inflation.

Damn straight. J.D. Vance understands that often, culture war is class war. Tim Ryan is not going to fight the culture wars because he knows his party holds contemptible, losing positions. One more quote:

Overall, Fratto described a dynamic that many Democratic lawmakers have noted privately: that ideological purity tests on issues such as trans rights in schools or other LGBTQ rights have not left room for argument.

“The problem with a lot of these issues is, if you don’t adhere to the views of the ideological poles, then you’re not pure enough, and so you’re going to be in disfavor,” Fratto said. “So there’s a sense that you need to go further to the point where you find yourself where the middle of America looks at you, frankly, like you’re weird.”

Read it all. 

I remind you that the political scientist Eric Kaufmann earlier this year warned that conservatives had better make fighting the culture war their most important priority. He says that most people over age 30 favor what he idiosyncratically describes as “cultural liberalism” — meaning tolerance for liberty and diversity. But those under 30 favor what he calls “cultural socialism” — no tolerance at all for anything opposed to wokeness.

Caleb Francois is our future, unless we fight back. No Democrat at the national level has the guts to say a word of criticism of him and his ideological confreres. In all of our normative institutions, the leaders grovel in front of the Caleb Francoises. Find politicians prepared to push back hard against these radicals, and not just rhetorically, and they will win power. When they win power, they’d better use it, too.

 

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Bill Maher: Trans Kids Are ‘Cannon Fodder’ in the Culture Wars

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bill-maher-trans-kids-are-cannon-fodder-in-the-culture-wars/

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Bill Maher is still a Democrat, but he’s become the kind of Democrat who posts NR headlines on Real Time and makes points that echo the ones we make all the time here. In other words, he’s a National Review kind of Democrat. Welcome, Bill.

In a piercing and astute Friday monologue on his HBO talk show, Maher noted that “if something in the human race is changing at a previously unprecedented rate, we have to at least discuss it,” and cited polls showing that the percentage of Americans identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transsexual is roughly doubling every generation, now surpassing 20 percent: “If we follow this trajectory we will all be gay in 2054. When things change this much this fast, people are allowed to ask, ‘What’s up with that?’ All the babies are in the wrong bodies? Was there a mix-up at the plant?” He noted that when adults used to ask children what they wanted to be when they grew up, “They meant what profession.”

Maher said he was happy for gay (etc.) people who get to openly be their authentic selves, adding, “We should all be mindful of respecting and protecting. But someone needs to say it: Not everything’s about you. And it’s okay to ask questions about something that’s very new and involves children.”

Maher worries that “we’re literally experimenting on children. Maybe that’s why Sweden and Finland have stopped giving puberty blockers to kids.” As he spoke, Maher posted the headline of this NR piece.

What are we doing to kids who say they’re transgender?

We just don’t know much about the long-term effects although common sense should tell you that when you reverse the course of raging hormones there’s going to be problems. We do know it hinders the development of bone density, which is kind of important if you like having a skeleton. Fertility and the ability to have an orgasm seem also to be affected. This isn’t just a lifestyle decision. It’s medical. Weighing tradeoffs is not bigotry. Yet when a book questioning the sudden uptick in transitioning children was released, a trans lawyer with the ACLU tweeted, ‘Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100 percent the hill I will die on.’ How very civil liberties of him.

Maher said that increased frankness is likely a factor in the polls showing more and more sexual minorities, saying, “And that’s all to the good.” But he added, “Some of it is: It’s trendy. ‘Penis equals man? Okay, boomer.’ Remember, the prime directive of every teen is: Anything to shock and challenge the squares who brought you up . . . And if you haven’t noticed that with kids, doing something for the Likes is more important than their own genitals, you haven’t been paying attention.”

Maher pointed to the skepticism of Dr. Erica Anderson, a transgender 71-year-old psychologist who questions the spike in transgender children. “The L.A. Times summarizes, ‘She’s come to believe that some children identifying as trans are falling under the influence of their peers and social media.’ If you attend a small dinner party of typically very liberal upper-income Angelenos, it is not uncommon to hear parents who each have a trans kid having a conversation about that.”

Why are kids in major liberal enclaves suddenly announcing they were born in the wrong bodies in numbers never dreamt of even a decade ago? Maher suggests there is a mind contagion at work. He asks, “What are the odds of that happening in Youngstown, Ohio? If this spike in trans children is all natural, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.”

Maher thinks a little frankness is in order: “If we can’t admit that in certain enclaves there is some level of trendiness to the idea of being anything other than straight, then this is not a serious science-based discussion. It’s a blow being struck in the culture wars using children as cannon fodder.

When it comes to the long-term health of our kids, some parents seem to think gender transitioning is the one safe thing that children can do: “I don’t understand parents who won’t let their nine-year-old walk to the corner without a helmet, an Epipen and a GPS tracker — and God forbid their lips touch dairy — but ‘hormone blockers and genital surgery? Fine.’”

To summarize: “Never forget children are impressionable and very, very stupid . . . Maybe the boy who thinks he’s a girl is just gay. Maybe the girl who hates girly stuff just needs to learn that being a girl doesn’t mean you have to act like a Kardashian. Maybe childhood makes you sad sometimes and there are other solutions besides ‘hand me the d*** saw.’’

And we seem to have forgotten that kids have phases: “They’re kids, it’s all phases. The dinosaur phase, the Hello Kitty phase . . . genderfluid? Kids are fluid about everything. If kids knew what they wanted to be at age eight, the world would be filled with cowboys and princesses. I wanted to be a pirate. Thank God nobody took me seriously and scheduled me for eye removal and peg-leg surgery.

Some great points here by Mr. Maher.

 

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Princeton Finally Fires Katz: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/princeton-finally-fires-katz/

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Well, we knew they were going to get Joshua Katz, and the finally did, terminating the Classics professor’s employment after 25 years.In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (paywalled), Katz reflects on his mistake in claiming last year that he had survived cancel culture at Princeton, because Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber had publicly conceded that his controversial op-ed was protected speech. Excerpts:

The issues around my termination aren’t easy to summarize. What is nearly impossible to deny (though Princeton does deny it) is that I have been subjected to “cultural double jeopardy,” with the university relitigating a long-past offense—I had a consensual relationship with a 21-year-old student—for which I was already suspended for a year without pay well over a decade after my offense. This was, I emphasize, a violation of an internal university rule, not a Title IX matter or any other crime.

More:

So what did I get wrong? There are at least five things of which I was unaware.

First, I didn’t yet know that one of my colleagues had, in her official capacity as director of graduate studies, written an individual letter to every graduate student in the classics department about the “pain” I had caused.

Second, I didn’t yet know that, in a Zoom session about “equity” only a couple of days later, students and colleagues would badger me to apologize. (For what exactly, they did not say, and I refused—which was absolutely the right thing to do.)

Third, I didn’t yet know that, with only a handful of exceptions, almost none of my colleagues would ever speak to me again.

Fourth, I didn’t yet know that the university would make an example of me to the entire incoming freshman class in August 2021, singling me out among sitting faculty as a virulent racist, in part by doctoring a quotation from my article—a move that has brought widespread condemnation.

And then there is the fifth thing. I didn’t yet know at the end of July 2020—and could scarcely have imagined—that two student reporters at the Daily Princetonian had begun digging into my past in an attempt to destroy me. The result of their investigations was published in early February 2021, whereupon the editor-in-chief wrote an email to her staff about the “stellar reporting,” which “has been in the works for seven months,” that is to say, since early July 2020, only days, if not hours, after I had criticized the faculty letter.

This stellar reporting uncovered the illicit relationship, which was already known to the administration and for which I had already been punished. But that is not all: The reporters also made a series of false and outrageous claims about my behavior. As longtime New York Times legal reporter Stuart Taylor Jr. put it, the Daily Princetonian’s “unprecedented investigation and hit piece . . . threw away basic journalistic standards,” for “[n]o credible newspaper would . . . print an article with such a large number of unnamed sources, filled with conjecture and innuendo.

Anybody with two brain cells to rub together knows that if Joshua Katz had not written an op-ed criticizing a totalitarian power grab by racialized Princeton faculty in the Summer of Floyd, he would still be teaching at the university. Princeton’s board might have fired Joshua Katz, but what it has really done is killed its reputation as a place where academic freedom exists. Again, even if we concede, solely for the sake of argument, that Prof. Katz had not been sufficiently forthcoming in 2018, it could not possibly be clearer that this was a political firing.

Here is a link to the 2020 Quillette op-ed that led to his firing. Behold, the crypto-Klucker rhetoric the distinguished Classicist deployed in objecting to the ultra-woke proposal to racialize Princeton life. Excerpt:

But then there are dozens of proposals that, if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate. Some examples: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary” and “Faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical” and “Provide additional human resources for the support of junior faculty of color.” Let’s leave aside who qualifies as “of color,” though this is not a trivial point. It boggles my mind that anyone would advocate giving people—extraordinarily privileged people already, let me point out: Princeton professors—extra perks for no reason other than their pigmentation.

If you say that it’s wrong to give extra pay to Princeton professors simply because they are black, then, well, you’re basically Lester Maddox. 

What a shitshow American higher education is, especially at the elite level. Who but persecutorial woke commissars like Eddie Glaude and Dan-el Padilla Peralta could possibly want to teach in them? It’s going to take a lot more than things like this to ruin the reputation of Princeton, or any other Ivy, as a portal into the American ruling class. But young Americans who value intellectual freedom and old-fashioned American liberties ought to be put on notice by Princeton’s throwing Joshua Katz to the woke mob. Steer clear of this university. It is a place where professors now know that to get on the wrong side of the woke mob is to risk career destruction.

This could happen anywhere wokeness rules institutional culture. Which is just about everywhere. You may think, Too bad for Joshua Katz, but that couldn’t happen to me. You are wrong. And when they come for you, do your best to hold your ground and your head high, like Joshua Katz did. They fired him, the bastards, but they did not break him.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

The Progressive Grievance Parade

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-progressive-grievance-parade/

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I know this is going to shock you, but it turns out that young, woke progressives are exceptionally hard to work with, and they see each other as hard to work with — in fact, they find each other almost as insufferable and infuriating as we find them. Earlier this month, the Intercept revealed what many of us have long suspected, that having a staff full of outspoken young, woke progressives is making progressive organizations nearly impossible to manage:

That the [Guttmacher Institute] has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.

 
 
 
 
 

In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society. . . .

Sometime in the summer, the forward momentum stalled, and many of the progressive gains lapsed or were reversed. Instead of fueling a groundswell of public support to reinvigorate the party’s ambitious agenda, most of the foundation-backed organizations that make up the backbone of the party’s ideological infrastructure were still spending their time locked in virtual retreats, Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.

“So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bullsh** that it’s had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver,” said one organization leader who departed his position. “It’s been huge, particularly over the last year and a half or so, the ability for groups to focus on their mission, whether it’s reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change.”

The story is full of spectacular quotes, but perhaps none better than these:

Executive directors across the space said they too have tried to organize their hiring process to filter out the most disruptive potential staff. “I’m now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?’” said one, echoing a refrain heard repeatedly during interviews for this story. . . .

Another leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. “I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,” said another longtime organization head. “Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. . . . Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.

How spectacularly disruptive and grievance-obsessed are progressive activists? So bad that even Bernie Sanders told his presidential campaign to stop hiring them, because they created more problems than they solved!

I’ll pause for a moment, so you can wipe away the tears of laughter.

The Intercept article made only a passing reference to the extraordinarily nasty and public tumult at the Washington Post that swirled around Dave Weigel and Felicia Sonmez, and didn’t mention the perpetual drama surrounding Taylor Lorenz, last seen lecturing Matt Yglesias about the alleged horror of joking about his own case of Covid-19. But both cases seem like good examples of the same phenomenon: employees who put their never-ending personal grievances and branding ahead of the organization’s mission, and who are incapable of resolving disputes quickly and quietly behind closed doors.

 

My home has one teenager and one near-teenager, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what kinds of lessons are important to instill in young people as they approach their first experiences in the workplace.

It’s a free country; believe whatever you want to believe. But for heaven’s sake, don’t be the kind of person who obsesses over anything that could remotely be interpreted as a slight, a microaggression, a lack of respect, or a violation of some unspoken code. You go to work to do a job (and try to do it well), collect a paycheck, and get experience that with luck will lead you to the next job that you like even better. If you get along with your bosses and co-workers, that’s gravy. But your boss is not your parent. Don’t be someone who turns every interpersonal dispute into a grand crusade, someone who can’t let anything go. (I know, I know, I have my own battles with “Irish Alzheimer’s,” where you forget everything except a grudge.)

You don’t want to be the kind of person who is always dwelling on some sort of problem with a co-worker or boss. Seeking out reasons to be upset and angry makes you a miserable person, and that often makes everyone else around you miserable as well! How you feel about the state of your life, your workplace, your community, your state, your country, and the world will be largely determined by what you look for and choose to focus on. As a wise warrior once said, “your focus determines your reality.” (Okay, that was Qui Gon Jinn in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and he was killed shortly after he said it, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong.)

One of the hard but important truths in life is that very few people care that much about your feelings. Oh, there’s a low, decent-society baseline of care — everyone hopes you’re feeling well, not battling depression, etc. But in the end, your mental health is your responsibility, not other people’s. There’s a limit to how much others are willing to bend over backward so that you feel happier. Your mission is to figure out how to thrive in a world full of people who will not be what you want them to be. You can’t control what other people do; you can only control how you react to them.

In Josh Barro’s terrific “your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac” essay, he observed:

I would finally note one thing: Organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have various problems, but they don’t have this one. And this phenomenon extends well outside the media, to liberal-staffed nonprofit and political organizations, where leaders are terrified of their employees’ potential outbursts and are therefore letting them run roughshod over strategic goals — and especially over prudent decision-making that might help win elections but do not meet every checkbox of the left-wing keyboard warriors who could cause so much trouble inside and outside the organization.

Lord knows, conservative organizations, including the one I work for, have their own share of quirky personalities and internal disagreements, often passionate ones. But if, as it seems, organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have employees that are generally better team players, we have a fascinating inversion of the expected dynamic. In a workplace full of folks who classify themselves as rugged individualists, those folks are in fact willing to put aside their personal desires and feelings from 9 to 5 or so, for the sake of participating in a smoothly running, effective organization. Meanwhile, the workplace full of self-professed collectivists, who believe the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, is increasingly debilitated by runaway narcissism, petty infighting, and self-absorbed grievance-mongering.

Finally, on that last term, I am reminded of an observation about the psychological state of mass shooters by Willard Gaylin, a preeminent psychology professor, which I wrote about a few years ago. Gaylin discusses the dangers of “grievance collecting” in his book Hatred: The Psychological Descent into Violence:

Grievance collecting is a step on the journey to a full-blown paranoid psychosis. A grievance collector will move from the passive assumption of deprivation and low expectancy common to most paranoid personalities to a more aggressive mode. He will not endure passively his deprived state; he will occupy himself with accumulating evidence of his misfortunes and locating the sources. Grievance collectors are distrustful and provocative, convinced that they are always taken advantage of and given less than their fair share. . . .

Underlying this philosophy is an undeviating comparative and competitive view of life. Everything is part of a zero-sum game. Deprivation can be felt in another person’s abundance of good fortune.

As I wrote at the time, “At the heart of the grievance collector’s worldview is that he is not responsible for the condition of his life; a vast conspiracy of malevolent individuals and forces is entirely at fault. There is always someone else to blame. . . .”

This isn’t to say that every whiny, self-absorbed, irresponsible employee will turn into a mass shooter. But there are healthy ways of dealing with life’s challenges, and unhealthy ones — and these progressive organizations appear to be filled to the brim with toxic personalities.

....

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

When a quarter of the class identifies as trans

https://pitt.substack.com/p/headline-when-a-quarter-of-the-class?r=7bjvz&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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A quarter of the girls in my daughter’s class identify as transgender. Seven out of 28.

When I said that on Twitter recently, I was roundly attacked for being a TERF who makes up ridiculous stories to harm trans people. 

While I may be a TERF, I did not make this up. A quarter of the girls in my kid’s class identify as boys. One of them has had four names this year, all from anime series.

I keep seeing people say, both on the hell-site Twitter and in the popular media, that the trans population is a tiny minority, less than 0.1% of the population. If that is true, what is going on at my child’s school? What has made the number of trans-identified girls in one year group grow from a constant zero pre-pandemic, to 25% now?

Here’s my theory, and I know that this will be a familiar story for many parents.

The first issue is with what the school is teaching children. My daughter’s trans identity started when the school taught a module on ‘identity’ during which they told a group of 11-year-olds that, if you feel uncomfortable in your body, it means you are transgender. My daughter had just had her first period two months prior to this class. Of course she was feeling uncomfortable in her body. She went home, looked up ‘transgender’ on Tiktok, and that was it. She was now trans.

The second issue is a related one, and that is to do with the school’s non-stop celebration of LGBTQI+ identities. I used to be proud that my children attended a progressive school that is anti-racist, inclusive, and believes in social justice. We chose the school for these qualities. But in the last two to three years, this has meant a relentless stream of identity flags and rainbows. Transgender ‘heroes’ like Jazz Jennings are worked into any part of the curriculum that they even vaguely fit. This is a school for kids aged 9 to 13. I’m no prude, but I also don’t think a constant parade of sexual politics is appropriate for such young children.

The third issue is with how the school is approaching the children ‘coming out’. Their official policy seems to be to just go with whatever the kids say without informing the parents. If a child says they have a new name and pronouns, the school just rolls with it—and they create the scenario where an already distressed child ends up cycling through four names in six months.

(I say it ‘seems to be’ the policy, because this policy is nowhere written down or official. My child’s name and pronouns were changed by the school without my knowledge. We didn’t get so much as a phone call, when we have been at the school for years, we know the teachers well, and we have been active members of the school community.)

None of this would matter if it was just about flags and fun identities. But it is not. For my daughter, the name and pronoun change (which we foolishly went along with, on the advice of a therapist) was a tipping point into depression and self-harm. It has made her miserable.

When I spoke to the school about the harm they are doing, they would not hear it. They told me that they celebrate all identities, that they pride themselves on being inclusive. They cannot see the transgender issue as anything other than fun flags and inclusivity and respect. They do not see the dark side that we parents do: we are trying to protect our kids from bone-crushing puberty blockers; from taking cross-sex hormones when they’re too young to have had sex; from having radical surgery on their developing bodies. Some days it feels like we are holding back a tsunami.

I regularly speak to the parents of the other girls. Everyone has had a different response: some have started to medicalise, others are against it; some have bought binders, others not; some have gone with the name changes, others are resisting. The one thing that all the parents share is a sense of bafflement. What the hell is going on here? Why is a quarter of the girls in the class identifying as trans? 

I guess in the 90s, a lot of us were in anorexic friend groups,” said one mother. I think the similarities are striking, but there is one major difference: in the 90s, no medical professionals were encouraging these groups of girls in their skewed perceptions of their bodies, and their self-harm. No school celebrated anorexia. But this time, the doctors and schools are helping the anorexics to diet.

Yep, it is the progressive liberals that appear to have taken over a majority of the administration and teaching positions at  government and private schools  that is driving this trans madness.

BTW, I recently watched the excellent documentary "What is a Woman?" by Matt Walsh.   I suggest everybody else watch it as well.

 

 

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Disney fans outraged after ‘fairy godmother’ ditched for gender-neutral titles: https://nypost.com/2022/07/20/disney-ditches-fairy-godmothers-for-gender-neutral-titles/

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Disney said it is ditching “fairy godmothers” for more inclusive, gender-neutral titles at dress-up boutiques inside its theme parks — and some fans are less than enchanted with the news.

Specifically, the Mouse House is getting rid of the “fairy godmother” title at its Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutiques located in both Disney World and Disneyland, according to an update on Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World Resort’s websites. 

The salons, which give makeovers to kids ages 3 to 12 to transform them into princesses or knights, will reopen from pandemic-era closures on Aug. 25, the company said this week.

When they return, employees who were formerly called “Fairy Godmothers in Training” will now be called “Fairy Godmother’s Apprentices.”

“This way, cast members that might not identify as female can still be part of the process to dress up & style the children without having to refer to themselves as a female Disney character,” according to Disney blog “Streaming the Magic.”

The news set off some Disney fans, who felt that the Mouse House is going overboard leaning into “woke” culture.

“This is a mental illness…the magic is gone,” wrote one Twitter user.

“Get woke, go broke,” tweeted another.

“I hate this world!,” another Twitter user wrote of the news, while another tweeted, “Birthing People Apprentices” — an apparent riff on the term “fairy godmother’s apprentice,” comparing it to the ridiculed gender-neutral term “birthing people.”

Recently, Disney has made a push to appear more inclusive and politically correct, angering some Disney diehards.

Last summer, Disney scrubbed the use of “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” from its theme parks, and changed its once-strict dress-code policy. Theme park employees now can show up to work with visible tattoos in whatever gender costume they wish.

This past weekend, the company quietly omitted a time-honored speech from its co-founder Walt Disney at Disneyland’s 67th anniversary bash, leaving some to guess it was because of his alleged racist and anti-Semitic views.

Elsewhere, Disney has removed a shrunken head dealer character named “Trader Sam” from Jungle Cruise and gotten rid of the “Take a wench for a bride” scene from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride. The scene depicted crying women tied together with ropes.

The moves come as Disney finds itself ensnared in a culture war in Florida over the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Earlier this year, Disney CEO Bob Chapek declined to speak out against the Florida law, which bans the discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation for kids in kindergarten through third grade.

he lack of response angered Disney employees, causing Chapek to condemn the legislation, putting him in the crosshairs of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In response, DeSantis signed a law that would strip Disney’s Florida theme parks of their self-governing status. The law, which was signed in April, dissolves Reedy Creek Improvement District, which operates as an autonomous entity on land straddling Orange and Osceola counties that has the power to levy taxes, build infrastructure, grant licenses and institute its own zoning laws.

 

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Maine Mom Demands Investigation after School Counselor Secretly Gives Daughter a ‘Chest Binder’: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/maine-mom-demands-investigation-after-school-counselor-secretly-gives-daughter-a-chest-binder/

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It was early December when Amber Lavigne found her 13-year-old daughter’s chest binder.

The undergarment, used to flatten a female’s breasts to make her appear more like a male, looked like a tank top with a built-in bra, Lavigne said. And it smelled. Bad. In her efforts to hide it from her family, Lavigne’s daughter hadn’t put the binder in the laundry for weeks.

That night, when Lavigne picked her daughter up from a school dance, she asked if she was wearing a chest binder. She wasn’t, the girl said, but she admitted she had one. Where had she gotten it? From a friend, she claimed. Lavigne was skeptical.

“I want you to think long and hard if there’s anything else you want to share with me about this,” she said she told her daughter, “because I am going to reach out to your friend’s mom.”

Later that night, Lavigne’s daughter did have more to share. She hadn’t received the chest binder from a friend after all. “This came from my school,” she said, Lavigne recalled.

Lavigne would later learn that earlier in the year, without her knowledge, her daughter had been reassigned to a new social worker at Great Salt Bay Community School in Maine. This social worker, she learned, had been advising her daughter about gender transitioning. He had provided her daughter with the chest binder, telling the girl that he wouldn’t tell her mother, and she didn’t need to either. She also learned that school personnel had been involved in socially transitioning her daughter, referring to her by a new name and by male pronouns.

No one had bothered to notify Lavigne.

Lavigne demanded answers, but for the most part, she said, school district leaders and school-board members have been defensive and evasive. She is now represented by lawyers from the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, who argue that the school’s actions are unconstitutional and violate Lavigne’s rights as a parent to direct the education, upbringing, and health care of her child.

Last week, the Goldwater Institute sent a demand letter to the chairman of the Great Salt Bay school board, calling for an investigation into the counselor’s actions, and calling for the board to update its policies to make it clear that parents must be informed of any decisions affecting the mental health and physical well-being of their children.

“Parents aren’t going to be able to effectively ensure the safety of their kids if they’re missing out on critical information involving their kids,” said Goldwater Institute lawyer Adam Shelton.

Lavigne joins a growing list of parents across the country taking legal action and calling out school leaders for keeping them in the dark about important health issues involving their children, including evidence of possible gender dysphoria. If schools are aware that children in their care are struggling with their mental health, it is critical that parents be aware, they say.

Some transgender activists, on the other hand, say parents aren’t entitled to know if their child wants to change their name and pronouns at school, arguing that knowledge must be earned by parents. Parents who don’t immediately affirm their child’s new gender identity are engaged in a form of abuse, they say.

School-district and board leaders in Great Salt Bay have mostly been tight-lipped about Lavigne’s case. In a letter to community members last month, they claimed that “certain parties are spreading a grossly inaccurate and one-sided story,” but they said they can’t legally respond, for confidentiality reasons. They also linked the allegedly “false narrative,” to two recent bomb threats at the school. “Those promoting this false narrative,” they said in the letter, “are apparently disturbed by our school’s ongoing and steadfast commitment to providing all students with safe and equal access to educational opportunities without discrimination because of, among other things, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, as the Maine Human Rights Act requires.”

Multiple attempts by National Review to reach school-board chairman Samuel Belknap III, superintendent Lynsey Johnston, and principal Kim Shaff on the phone and via email were unsuccessful. School-board member Meridith Verney declined to comment when reached on her cellphone, directing questions to Belknap. Attempts to reach the other board members on the phone were also unsuccessful. The Maine Wire, a conservative news website, reported this week that Johnston and Belknap have “attacked journalists” in the past for reporting on the story and have accused them of “inciting terroristic threats against the school.”

‘This is Happening Everywhere’

While she has received support from local Republican groups, Lavigne said she is no religious fanatic or right-wing culture warrior. Rather, she’s a Democrat who runs a mental-health-services business in Damariscotta, a small coastal town in Maine  best known for its oysters. Her business has worked with transgender clients over the years, she said.

“I’m a pretty open-minded person,” she said, though she said that’s not how she’s been portrayed by school leaders. Lavigne also has two young sons who are four and one.

Last fall, Lavigne’s 13-year-old daughter started eighth grade at Great Salt Bay Community School, which she’s attended since fifth grade. Although she’s struggling with her gender identity now, Lavigne said that when her daughter was young, she was a girly-girl who liked painting her fingernails and putting on makeup.

“That’s one of the most bizarre things about this,” she said. “I wanted so badly for my daughter to be an athlete, because I was an athlete; I was a wicked tomboy growing up. I’m like, she’s going to be a basketball superstar. I couldn’t get this kid to pick up a frigging baseball and throw it at me to save her life. She was into tutus and My Little Ponies.”

But she said her daughter’s girliness started to fade when puberty hit. She presented more as a tomboy, Lavigne said. Lavigne described her daughter as “a little quirky,” and said her friend group includes other “quirky” kids. She said she was fine with that, but she was surprised to learn that some of her daughter’s friends, even as tweens, were exploring their sexual identities.

“The first time I really started to hear her discuss gender ideology in general, she started talking about a friend being pansexual, and another friend being polysexual. I’m like, why are we talking sexual right now? You’re 11,” Lavigne said, adding that at 11 she was “more concerned about getting a game of pickup basketball going than I [was] about the boys in my class.”

When asked if she thought her daughter’s gender confusion could be related to a social contagion, Lavigne said, “110 percent.”

Lavigne said that at the end of her daughter’s seventh-grade year, a school social worker reached out to tell her that her daughter had come to see her. They met and chatted about some of the mental-health issues her daughter was dealing with, including some gender-identity issues. But Lavigne said she came away thinking it wasn’t a very serious issue.

“I have people in my life who work in other public schools in Maine. This is happening everywhere: One day this girl is declaring she’s a boy, and a week later she’s deciding she’s not,” she said. And as someone who works in the mental-health field, Lavigne said she considered it a “beautiful thing” that the school had social workers for struggling kids.

When Lavigne’s daughter started eighth grade, she continued seeing that same social worker. But Lavigne said she has since learned that in October, her daughter was reassigned to another social worker, Samuel Roy, or “Mr. Sam,” as her daughter called him.

Lavigne said school leaders never informed her of the change, and Roy never reached out. Attempts by National Review to reach Roy via email were unsuccessful.

Shelton, the Goldwater Institute lawyer, said the details of Roy’s counseling are still unclear. “What we know is that he gave her a chest binder, and that he told her that he wasn’t going to tell her parents, and that she didn’t need to either,” Shelton said.

Lavigne said that on the Friday night in December after she discovered the chest binder in her daughter’s room, and after her daughter told her she’d gotten it at school, she emailed Johnston and Shaff. She said Shaff, the principal, called her the next morning. Shaff wanted more details about the binder and what, exactly, was in it, she said. “Because in her mind I’m talking about, like, a three-ring binder, something you should find in a school,” Lavigne said.

“We had a phone conversation Saturday morning. I poured my heart out to this woman,” Lavigne said. “She absolutely validated my feelings and made me feel like something was going to be done. And I demanded a meeting Monday morning with the superintendent and the principal, which they followed through with. And they both sat there and expressed grave concern for what happened with my daughter.”

Lavigne said she left the meeting expecting that action would be taken. Johnston and Shaff were meeting with Roy, the social worker, on Tuesday. By Wednesday, Lavigne said, the school leaders seemed to have changed the perspective. They were supporting Roy, they weren’t answering Lavigne’s questions, and they refused to turn over any records, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Lavigne attended a school-board meeting in December looking for answers, but she got none. She is now homeschooling her daughter.

These people had no desire to work with me as a human being,” she said of the school board and school-district leaders.

‘Parents Should Know’

The right of parents to control the education, upbringing, and health-care decisions for their children has been recognized by the Supreme Court for a century now, Shelton argues, pointing to two 1920s-era court cases. In Meyer v. Nebraska, the court found that a state ban on teaching certain languages was a violation of parental rights. Similarly, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, a challenge to Oregon’s ban on private schools, the court ruled that parents have the right to “direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”

“What we’re saying, what that entails is, in order for a parent to be able to choose what school to send their kid to, in order for that to actually be a real choice about where and how to educate their children, they have to know what is going on at the public schools,” Shelton said.

By assisting in a social transition and providing Lavigne’s daughter with a chest binder, school officials were involving themselves in mental and physical health-care decisions with long-term consequences that would likely impact Lavigne and her family.

We’re talking about a situation of a chest binder, socially transitioning the daughter, which eventually, I think the point of all of that would be to lead to a full-on gender reassignment surgery,” Shelton said. “The school’s not going to pay for that.”

In one of its letters, the school board says it must abide by Maine law, which says that students have the right to access mental-health services without their parents’ consent and the right to establish a confidential counseling relationship with a school-based mental-health provider.

Shelton agrees that Lavigne’s daughter had a right to meet with Roy confidentially, but, he noted, “the social transitioning involved the entire school as a whole, not just the counselor.”

He argues that school officials overstepped their bounds when they started taking active steps to encourage or assist Lavigne’s daughter with a social transition.

“That’s the big difference for us, when it goes from kind of listening and just hearing to actively doing something in support of it,” Shelton said. “Once you go into that active situation, you have to at least inform parents about what’s going on with their children, because if this is something that’s going to be a large, life-changing decision, parents should know so parents can support their children.

‘This Is My Baby Girl’

Lavigne said her relationship with school leaders is akin to the most toxic relationship she’s ever been in. “They’re gaslighting me,” she said. “They’re essentially saying this woman reacted to something that one of our employees did, and because she’s reacting to this thing that this employee did — that he shouldn’t have done — we’re getting bomb threats.”

Lavigne said that since she’s come forward, she’s been the focus on hateful social-media posts and ugly accusations in the generally left-wing community. There are some stores in town she’s not shopping at anymore because she said she feels unwelcome and judged by staff members.

Lavigne said she is allowing her daughter to express her male gender identity in age-appropriate ways, including cutting her hair short. Lavigne said she believes in mother’s intuition, and her intuition is that her daughter is still her daughter at heart.

She said she still sees her act in feminine ways, at least when she’s not thinking about it. After her daughter cut her hair, she said, “we left the barbershop, and she is like skipping down the steps with her hands floating like a fairy.”

If her daughter gets through her childhood and still feels that she is a boy, Lavigne said she will support her decisions, because “it’s my kid.”

“If she at 18 starts taking testosterone and decides to mutilate her body, am I going to express to her some concerns? Absolutely,” she said. “Am I going to write my kiddo off? Never in a million years. This is my baby girl. At the end of the day, I’m not going to destroy my relationship with my child to be right.”

“At the end of the day, she is who she is,” Lavigne said of her daughter. “If she thinks she’s going to live a more fulfilled life as a male, that’s up for her to decide as an adult. At 13, it’s up to me to safeguard my child against doing things to her body that she can’t reverse.”

Your government school system, ladies and gentlemen.

 

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Changes to new editions of Roald Dahl books have readers up in arms: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/21/1158347261/roald-dahl-books-changed-offensive-words

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New editions of legendary works by British author Roald Dahl are being edited to remove words that could be deemed offensive to some readers, according to the late writer's company.

Dahl wrote such books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

British newspaper The Telegraph first reported that the publisher of Dahl's books, Puffin, made hundreds of changes to original texts of the author's well-known children's books.

The character Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is no longer called "fat." Instead he is described as "enormous," The Telegraph reports.

Instead of being called "small men," Oompa-Loompas are now "small people," the article says.

Further, the changes to these books include adding language not originally written by Dahl. In his 1983 book The Witches, he writes that witches are bald beneath their wigs. According to The Telegraph, an added line in new editions says, "There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that."

Puffin and The Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages the copyrights of Dahl's books and works with publishers, didn't respond to NPR's requests for comment.

But The Roald Dahl Story Company told The Associated Press that it worked with Puffin to review the books out of a desire to ensure "Dahl's wonderful stories and characters continue to be enjoyed by all children today." The company said it worked with Inclusive Minds, an organization that works for inclusivity in children's books. Changes were "small and carefully considered," the company told the AP.

The changes have drawn criticism from advocacy groups, readers and writers.

Suzanne Nossel, CEO of the free expression advocacy group PEN America, called the changes alarming.

"Amidst fierce battles against book bans and strictures on what can be taught and read, selective editing to make works of literature conform to particular sensibilities could represent a dangerous new weapon," Nossel tweeted. "Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl's work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities."

Renowned author Salman Rushdie stepped in as well, calling the changes censorship.

Rushdie is, of course, known for being a target for his own work. He spent years in hiding after Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for his death after publishing his novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie was stabbed in August and lost vision in one eye and has nerve damage.

"Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed," Rushdie tweeted.

Dahl died in 1990 at the age of 74 after writing children's books and stories that have been translated into 68 languages. Some of his books became classic movies as well. His book Matilda was just recently made into a musical film for Netflix and premiered last year.

Though his work is revered, Dahl is also a controversial figure for antisemitic comments he made throughout his life. The Ronald Dahl Story Company issued an apology in 2020.

A dangerous new weapon is right.  This is disgusting censorship.

 

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Better to Burn the Books: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/better-to-burn-the-books/

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Roald Dahl believed in physiognomy. This was not some phrenological gobbledygook that said the temper of a man is determined by the curve of his brow ridge. Rather, like most human beings throughout human history, Dahl (who died in 1990) believed our physical realities reflect our spiritual realities, that spiritual realities shape and illuminate the physical world, for they are a unity. And so, as he wrote in The Twits (1980):

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If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Read those paragraphs again. It is all more subtle than society today allows.

And much too complex for Puffin Books. As the Telegraph reported last week, the children’s literature giant has assumed the authority to “regularly review the language” of Dahl’s stories “to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.” This is a self-congratulatory way of saying they partnered with diversity, equity, and inclusion grifters (an outfit called “Inclusive Minds”) to edit his beloved books for a 2022 reprinting. There are too many examples to choose from.

In The Witches (1983), that means everything from replacing a character’s line with its bald significance—“You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet” with “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs” beside being a witch—to trading out a woman working as “a cashier in a supermarket” for “a top scientist.” Out-of-fashion author references (e.g., Kipling) in Matilda (1988) become barely still in-fashion ones (e.g., Steinbeck), so of course these tweaks will never stop. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Augustus Gloop is no longer fat and Mike Teavee no longer has guns. No one is crazy, or dotty, or short, and nothing is monstrous or fearful or any particular color anymore. Everything in 2022 is the same bland beige as the printed page. 

I would call the Puffin edits of Dahl barbaric but that would hardly be fair to barbarians. Indeed, it would be better had the evident cretins at Inclusive Minds just told the yellow-bellied cowards at Puffin it was time to burn the books. Dahl has had more than his fair share of controversy; if we must make clear our devotion to the new religion of global homogenization let us have a proper bonfire. Even Socrates, as Plato presents him in The Republic, only advises expelling the poets from his beautiful regime—this while he is in the very act of composing a competing work of poetry, the city-in-speech itself. 

And this would be the just response to literature one truly believed to be corrupting the youth: first exile or destruction, and then replacement with an alternative, allegedly superior work. But the editors of Puffin, like the Dahl estate and Netflix, which owns all the rights now, are not actually motivated by justice but by avarice; they will edit the books rather than burn them, and continue to make money off the name while earning status amongst their haggish friends. 

Every society uses art to enforce the norms and mores it seeks to cultivate, and children’s literature is an auxiliary in socialization to whatever fundamental canon calls forth a people or composes a civilization. But ours is an anti-culture, dedicated in its commitment to equality to the dismantling of its own canon and the elimination of anything distinctive. Thus unmoored, the preachers of our new morality cannot offer a superior alternative to Roald Dahl; all destroyers can build is rubbish. 

So it should come as no surprise, as outrageous as it is, that they would seek to turn Dahl to their own ends. His work has a fire they have long extinguished. And broken from tradition, with no core account of humanity to uphold or received virtues to inculcate, their efforts cannot be natural acculturation. Instead of cultivating conditions for organic growth, our tastemakers seek to engineer a human type, to oversocialize. By removing offending words or phrases or concepts, by flattening description, they hope to make such thoughts unthinkable. 

The editors at Puffin know what they are doing. They are professionals. These word workers, symbol manipulators, live in worlds of text, and by altering texts they can alter perceived reality. There is, of course, something to that (I am a writer after all). The edited edition of Dahl’s work has excised, as much as possible without undercutting expected sales, language that makes distinction tactile, that ties moral judgments of better or worse to physical reality or that sees the normal in the natural world. 

But in our overmediated anti-culture, where we are cut off from half of the whole of things by technology and simulacra, living in our heads, overwhelmed by ideology and propaganda and advertisement, it has perhaps never been more important for children to see things as Roald Dahl presented them. Sometimes life is strange and scary, full of witches and hags, the crazy and the grotesque. Sometimes life is very ordinary, made up not of people or folks but of men and women, ladies and gentlemen, who are short and tall, fat and thin, attractive and ugly, and in their faces, when we look them in the eye and get to know them, we can even see their character.  

 

 

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School reverses urinal ban after bathroom access debate: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/school-reverses-urinal-ban-after-bathroom-access-debate-97257376
 

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MILFORD, N.H. -- A New Hampshire school board has reversed a policy banning middle and high school students from using urinals after dozens protested the measure, which had been a compromise to a proposal that would have blocked students from using facilities based on their gender identity.

Students at Milford Middle School and Milford High School can still access the bathroom that “corresponds to their gender identity consistently asserted at school."

But at its Feb. 6 meeting, the school board debated a proposal that would require students to use the restroom and locker room of their assigned sex at birth. The proposal upset transgender students, gender nonconforming students and their supporters.

The ban on urinals approved by the board was offered as a compromise measure to the proposal. It also capped the maximum occupancy for bathrooms and locker rooms at the number of stalls each contains, and prohibited students from using shared changing areas.

Dozens of students walked out several days later.

Milford School District Superintendent Christi Michaud said school officials also received emails and phone calls opposing the ban, which led to Wednesday night's vote.

“The board has listened to folks,” Michaud told WMUR-TV.

Republicans across the country have been pushing anti-transgender legislation. While New Hampshire bans discrimination based on gender identity in housing, employment and public accommodations, state lawmakers are considering legislation that says public entities are capable of “differentiating between the male and female sexes in athletic competitions, criminal incarceration, or places of intimate privacy.”

I've been considering having a urinal installed in my home bathroom.  Sounds like with the next decade urinals will be removed from most public restrooms because they "offend" the transgenders.

 

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40 Percent of Liberal Professors Are Afraid They'll Lose Their Jobs Over a Misunderstanding: https://reason.com/2023/02/28/40-percent-of-liberal-professors-are-afraid-theyll-lose-their-jobs-over-a-misunderstanding/

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As the academy gets younger it grows more authoritarian, according to a new survey of over 1,400 faculty members conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The free speech group's findings portend a dark future for higher education if this course isn't reversed—and if faculty minds don't become more open to dissenting viewpoints.

Over the past decade or so, many academic departments embraced ideological views in their teaching and research, promoting social justice–laden scholarship as a way of correcting the wrongs of the past. Unsurprisingly, many departments developed left-of-center academic monocultures, becoming unfriendly to differing opinions. Young faculty entering the profession are only adding to this academic echo chamber.

As a professor, I'm on the younger side for faculty members. My cohort is much more illiberal than their older colleagues. Two-thirds of faculty over 55 years old said students shouting down a speaker is never acceptable. That number plummets to 37 percent for faculty 35 and under.

Shockingly, younger faculty report more acceptance of violence to combat speech. While 97 percent of older faculty say it's never acceptable for students to use violence to stop a campus speech, only 79 percent of younger faculty agree. That one in five younger professors show any level of acceptance for violence to stop speech should alarm all of us. 

Mixing age with ideology reveals even more pronounced support for illiberal attitudes. Among liberal faculty 35 and under, only 23 percent indicated that students shouting down a speaker is never acceptable, compared with 88 percent of conservative faculty. Moderate faculty in this age group were also much more likely than their conservative colleagues to endorse the acceptability of these tactics. 

Perhaps most alarming of all, only 64 percent of young and liberal faculty say it's never acceptable for students to use violence to stop a campus speech.

Illiberalism runs deep among young liberal faculty members, and their views regrettably resemble those of their students rather than their more senior peers. As newer and far less tolerant numbers of professors replace older faculty, colleges and universities may be in a true crisis if the higher education enterprise destroys its core values.

The research also finds that faculty members are self-censoring at higher rates. In 1955, at the end of the second Red Scare after World War II during the age of McCarthy and deep anti-communist fear, 9 percent of social scientists said they toned down their writing for fear of causing controversy. Today, 25 percent say they're very or extremely likely to self-censor their writing in academic publications. 

More than half of faculty—52 percent—say they're afraid they'll lose their job or reputation over a misunderstanding of something they said or did, or because someone posted something from their past online. While almost three-quarters of conservative faculty expressed this year, 40 percent of even liberal faculty agree. That's staggering: two in five professors who are a part of the prevailing orthodoxy on campus are fearful of losing their jobs over a misunderstanding.

As the report says, this "speaks volumes about the climate of fear, intimidation, and censorship on campus."

This cannot be the environment of the future. Our society cannot thrive when opposing voices are met with fists rather than facts. And as a professor, I know that what starts on campus rarely stays there. This fear will continue to grow and infect our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our communities. 

There is still time to course correct. But students, trustees, donors, alumni, and the public must demand better from the faculty today before these young authoritarians run higher education tomorrow.

 

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Hershey's has some competition.  Fricking brilliant!  Hershey's is utilizing a trans woman as their face on National Women's Day.  (Featuring the Her-She bar) Jeremy's answers with the He/Him (with nuts) She/Her (Nutless) bars.

 

 

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From a newsletter:  

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What DEI Is Doing To America

The Revolt Of The Elites At Stanford Law School Continues

 
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The collapse of standards at Stanford Law School goes on:

Hundreds of Stanford student activists on Monday lined the hallways to protest the law school’s dean, Jenny Martinez, for apologizing to Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan, whom the activists shouted down last week. 

The embattled dean arrived to the classroom where she teaches constitutional law to find a whiteboard covered inch to inch in fliers attacking Duncan and defending those who disrupted him, according to photos of the room and multiple eyewitness accounts. The fliers parroted the argument, made by student activists, that the heckler’s veto is a form of free speech.

More:

When Martinez’s class adjourned on Monday, the protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks that read "counter-speech is free speech," stared silently at Martinez as she exited her first-year constitutional law class at 11:00 a.m., according to five students who witnessed the episode. The student protesters, who formed a human corridor from Martinez’s classroom to the building’s exit, comprised nearly a third of the law school, the students told the Washington Free Beacon

The majority of Martinez’s class—approximately 50 students out of the 60 enrolled—participated in the protest themselves, two students in the class said. The few who didn’t join the protesters received the same stare down as their professor as they hurried through the makeshift walk of shame.

"They gave us weird looks if we didn’t wear black" and join the crowd, said Luke Schumacher, a first-year law student in Martinez’s class who declined to participate in the protest. "It didn’t feel like the inclusive, belonging atmosphere that the DEI office claims to be creating."

… After Martinez left the building, Schumacher said, the protesters began to cheer, cry, and hug. "We are creating a hostile environment at this law school," Schumacher said—"hostile for anyone who thinks an Article III judge should be able to speak without heckling."

This has to stop. Expel every one of those students, without warning, and without apology. They have no business at a serious law school. There will be many more willing to take their place — men and women who understand what a law school is, and what the law is in a liberal democracy.

Seriously, this kind of thing has to be shut down. And the poison of DEI has to be extracted from every institution. DEI is destroying us. It’s tearing America apart, making peaceful co-existence impossible. The center will not hold. Look:

 

 

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https://nypost.com/2023/03/16/pantry-porn-rooted-in-racist-sexist-behavior-loyola-doctor/

“Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of ‘niceness’: nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods.

“What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures.”

“Pantry porn, as a status symbol, relies on the promise of making daily domestic work easier. But if women are largely responsible for the work required to maintain the perfectly organized pantry, it’s critical to ask: easier for whom?” Drenten said.

So because Mrs. SF keeps a mostly tidy house, and I take deep measures to keep the lawn mowed, watered and the landscaping neat, we are classist, sexist racists?  Jeez - get a real job lady.....

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  • 2 weeks later...

The Revolution Comes for NPR

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-revolution-comes-for-npr/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

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Like so many media ventures, National Public Radio has fallen on hard times, and it’s had to make some difficult decisions. To make up for what the New York Times reported was a staggering “$30 million gap in its budget,” the broadcasting company recently cut 10 percent of its workforce and ceased production on four of its podcast offerings.

The podcasts that will meet the chopping block include Invisibilia, a popular show about the “unseen forces” that “control human behavior”; a program that explores “racism, misogyny,” and “marginalization in hip-hop,” Louder Than a Riot; and the comedy news quiz show Everyone & Their Mom.

 

Rather than accept the cold logic of budgetary shortfalls, NPR’s put-out staffers are not taking their superiors’ verdicts lying down. As Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman reported, one of the “multiple all-hands meetings” NPR hosted amid growing outrage over the firm’s staffing decisions descended into chaos. There, disgruntled employees deployed what they’ve learned is the most devastating weapon on their arsenals: allegations of racism.

During the meeting featured in Bloomberg’s dispatch, employees reportedly probed their bosses for the precise demographic details of the employees who were laid off so they could perform an identitarian audit of NPR’s remaining staff. The meeting “boiled over” when a former employee alleged that the company had conspicuously withheld financial support from some of its podcasts and demanded “accountability” of some NPR executives by name. CEO John Lansing objected to the former employee’s behavior, at which point all hell broke loose:

Some employees interpreted this as tone-policing and felt uncomfortable.

A few questions later someone referenced the earlier exchange and asked how attendees could be as specific as possible without using people’s names. Lansing re-committed to his answer and said that the conversation should have been more civil, which some employees interpreted as a direct attack on the earlier employee.

They immediately took to Zoom and called Lansing’s response “racist” and out-of-line. Another staff member dropped a link to a segment from NPR’s Code Switch titled, “When Civility Is Used As A Cudgel Against People Of Color.” 

Civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful,” one person wrote, according to screenshots of the chat viewed by Bloomberg.

“This meeting has made me more afraid for the future of public media than any conversation I have had in a very long time,” wrote another.

What NPR’s executives see as baseless allegations of racial hostility are, in fact, supported and reinforced by the tools fashioned into existence by NPR. Given how much this company has devoted itself to broadcasting content that purports to divine racial hostility in unremarkable banalities, its listeners would probably agree with NPR’s disgruntled former employees.

In recent years, NPR has played frequent host to pop-academic fixtures such as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who lectures white listeners on their need to experience discomfort while interrogating their own internalized white supremacy because “‘nice white people’ can still be complicit in a racist society.” It lectures young listeners on the most effective ways “non-black folks” can “talk to your parents about racism.” It diagnoses acute medical ailments that are directly attributable to the existence of racism and poverty.

Applying a secret logic that uncovers “covert racism” in everyday life dominates NPR’s coverage of just about everything. The January 6 hearings were actually all about racism. Banal crime-blotter journalism is rife with racism. Climate-change activism is, in fact, an anti-racist crusade. Philanthropy and charity are tainted by racism. Homebuyers navigate a minefield of racial hostilities. The “food world” is, consciously or otherwise, racist. Birdwatching’s racist legacy pervades the practice even today. The same could be said of conservationism in general. Mundane turns-of-phrase such as “sold down the river,” “grandfathering in,” “master bedroom,” and “cake walk” expose their users as, if not racist themselves, white-supremacist-adjacent.

NPR finds evidence of “systemic racism” in seemingly every legacy institution in the United States, a category that surely includes storied venues such as NPR. By lending undue credence to nearly any allegation of white racial bigotry, the broadcaster was writing the instructions through which the disgruntled can bring down the successful. Did NPR’s executives expect their employees not to notice?

In my book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, I describe the psychological incentives associated with the impulse to impose progressive political themes on otherwise apolitical cultural stimuli — “a power play reserved almost exclusively for the successful”:

Beyond honestly believing they’re doing the Lord’s work, the New Puritans must also find it gratifying to think of themselves as uniquely perceptive. If you are so worldly and astute that you can see the hideous hidden workings of the world, you’re a member of an exclusive club. And once you get a taste of that comprehensive vision—a theory of everything that reveals to you the secret, seedy underbelly of society—it can become intoxicating. Those who are attracted to this psychological orientation are likely to find that its applications are limitless. And when they apply this framework to just about everything, they find that just about everything is a problem.

NPR made this intoxicating philosophy into a business model. Their employees over-imbibed and became understandably besotted with it. The only surprise in the news that the revolution NPR incubated has at last come for NPR is that it took this long.

This would be funny if actually wasn't so sad.

 

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https://nypost.com/2023/04/03/bud-light-partners-with-trans-activist-dylan-mulvaney-for-march-madness-this-isnt-a-parody/

So - Bud Light, with a swing........and a miss......(IMHO)......has to be one of the worst marketing ideas anywhere.....Ever.....

Anyone remember the "Real Men of Genius" campaign - One of the best (even though I don't drink Bud Light)  Oh the humanity........

 

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