Category Archives: culture

I Have to Wonder

Posted on by
Reply

The administrators of Presentation College Carlow, an Irish college a bit south of Dublin, told the female students there

not to wear tight clothing that could “distract” staff members….
[or] revealing clothing, including tracksuit bottoms and gym leggings.

I wonder: why does this school have so many supposedly adult men on its staff who are so easily and pruriently distracted? Or, since the school’s students are as young as 12 years old, why are so many seeming pedophiles on staff?

It’s a concern shared by the students’ parents.

A petition called the policy sexist and noted that male students’ attire was not discussed.
…
“This is appalling, majority of students are 12-18 years old and should not feel [sic] sexualised by their teachers who they are meant to feel safe around,” [the petition] continues.

And

[A parent] told local media outlets that adult male teachers should not be distracted by young girls in the first place.

Indeed.

System Racism in America

Posted on by
2

Shelby Steele had a thought on this. So do I.

Senator Tim Scott (R, SC), Congressman-elect Burgess Owens (R, UT), Herschel Walker, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) and several others, wrote Steele, all spoke at the Republican National Convention. More, each of them spoke as men and women—individual men and women—they did not speak as spokesmen for their color. In particular, they did not speak as the professional victims of “systemic racism.”

They spoke as persons who are part of a new and growing racial order (Steele’s term):

…we blacks aren’t much victimized any more. Today we are free to build a life that won’t be stunted by racial persecution. …we live in a society that generally shows us goodwill—a society that has isolated racism as its most unforgivable sin.

And

This lack of victimization amounts to an “absence of malice” that profoundly threatens the victim-focused black identity. Who are we without the malice of racism? Can we be black without being victims? The great diminishment (not eradication) of racism since the ’60s means that our victim-focused identity has become an anachronism.

And so on.

But I disagree with Steele to this extent: there is systemic racism in America, say I. It’s just not as broad reaching as those Steele decried claim; it is, instead, confined to the Democratic Party, its replacing evolution the Progressive-Democratic Party, and those entities’ adherents and supporters.

The soft bigotry of low expectations is the upper bound, the most generous and favorable position, of those worthies. Blacks, they hold from this position, just can’t compete and need special treatment. That’s what that Leftist icon, Woodrow Wilson, said to a black reporter who was questioning him about his resegregating the Federal government—that blacks should be grateful for the protections of segregation. And it’s the thrust of the Left’s segregationist identity politics.

The main position, however, of the Democratic Party and Progressive-Democratic Party since 1964, illustrated by Lyndon Johnson’s racist remark about why he passed the Civila Rights Act of 1964 is far worse. This position, overtly extant these last 56 years, is that blacks aren’t even human beings. They’re just crops of votes to be harvested every so often for the political benefit of those Leftist politicians.

Between election harvests, those crops are simply covered in the manure of promises (universally empty and unfulfilled), a few coins thrown at the crops in the form of welfare programs (with carefully designed-in cliffs that trap them in those welfare cages), and “affirmative” action programs that do no more than emphasize the Left’s belief in the, at best, inherent inferiority of blacks.

The view of non-humanness is demonstrated by the utter lack of progress in the economic and political prosperity of blacks, beginning with the openly destructive Urban Removal programs begun (and never finished) in Leftist-run cities. The demonstration continued through the Obama administration, with continuing black poverty, continuing high black unemployment, the Left’s continuing efforts to deny black children access to quality schools through choice programs that would let parents opt out of disastrous public schools in favor of voucher and charter schools, and the ever-widening wealth gap between blacks and…everyone else.

Those latter trends—unemployment, school access, wealth gap—were beginning to be reversed under Republican efforts these last four years. That trend reversal has had two primary effects. One is the reducing poverty rates among blacks.

The other has reduced the political power of the Left, and that has led the Left to be increasingly shrill in their cries of nation-wide systemic racism.

Rule By Law

Posted on by
Reply

Rather than Rule of Law, which is how we do things here.

The men and women of the government of the People’s Republic of China change the nation’s laws whenever convenient to their personal aims and whenever convenient to their personal power. This is how those men and women have acted, have preserved their power, since the beginning of the days of Chinese emperors.

Two current examples: their enactment in 2017 of an intelligence cooperation law that requires all PRC companies, whether state-owned or “private,” to cooperate with any intelligence community request for information, including about any company affiliate or customer wherever in the world that affiliate or customer might be.

There’s also the just-enacted law that permits the PRC government to remove—outside of the courts—anyone in the Hong Kong governance apparatus of whom the emperor’s men the men and women of the PRC government might decide to disapprove.

Now we come to the Progressive-Democratic men and women of the Wisconsin State government.

At a special meeting that lasted more than five hours, [Progressive-]Democrats on the state elections commission sought to change recount guidelines after the Trump 2020 Campaign filed a petition to review the state’s votes in Dane and Milwaukee counties.

Existing State law on the matter had become inconvenient to those Progressive-Democrats, so—time to change the rules. As Reince Priebus noted,

The Trump campaign sent the Wis Election Comm. $3 mil and filed its petition for a recount. Then the WEC immediately called a special meeting to change certain recount rules that deal with the issues brought up in the petition? You can’t make this up!

Here are Progressive-Democrats in action.

Continuing Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and controlling shareholder of his Facebook, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday. He said that

his company often must decide between “difficult trade-offs” when it comes to content moderation, and that he believes “some of these trade-offs would be better made through a democratic process.”

Two things on that. One is his stuff about trade-offs via a democratic process. What democratic process he posited is unclear. Would it be one where all of his employees would do the voting? One where all of his censors fact checkers/fact checker overseers would do the voting? There’d plainly be nothing democratic about that since his employees, including his checkers, are overwhelmingly far left, and the press outlets he sometimes uses are nearly as far left.

The larger thing, though, is Zuckerberg’s claimed difficult trade-offs while moderating content. This is Zuckerberg’s cynically offered false premise: there’s no need to moderate content on his facility. Not if he wants to continue as a pipeline rather than a publisher.

For instance, Zuckerberg also testified in that hearing that he has Facebook vetting political ads for “essential accuracy.” This is censoring of political speech, and it’s deeply insulting both to the political candidates involved and to the American voters viewing the ads. The opponent being targeted by a political ad is fully capable of responding for himself, and in his own way, to an ad. He does not need, not by a long shot, Zuckerberg or any of his minions to speak for him. It’s the same for American viewers of political ads. We do not need the Zuckerbergs of the world to speak for us. Nor are we so grindingly stupid—as he so clearly assumes we are—that we cannot evaluate for ourselves, and in our own ways, the ads that we see.

Clearly, though, Zuckerberg has every intention of continuing to censor speech, however he tries to obfuscate his intent.

MeToo

Posted on by
Reply

We hardly knew ya.

Actress Melissa McCarthy publicly apologized this week [last week as this is published] for having briefly helped direct charitable donations toward an anti-sex-trafficking organization….
…
Among 20 charities promoted by the actress was Exodus Cry, a group that “fight[s] for the freedom of all sex trafficking victims” and seeks to “break the cycle of exploitation and help those sold for sex[.]”

All because the Daily Beast claims Exodus Cry is anti-abortion—which Exodus Cry denies.

And: Exodus Cry has been expelled from McCarthy’s “20 Days of Kindness” campaign.

Apparently, as murdering babies in utero is entirely acceptable to Hollywood denizens, so is supporting women who are victims of sex-trafficking just as unacceptable.

So much for Hollywood’s pretense of #MeToo.