Tag Archives: culture

What are my Pronouns?

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The Wall Street Journal actually had a lengthy article on how to answer that question when asked. That prompted a series of Letters in the WSJ‘s Letters section. The article and responding letters tended in the right direction, but not completely so, IMNSHO.

The correct initial response is simply to ignore the question altogether and get on into the conversation. If pressed, the correct response then becomes to state clearly that the questioner and I do not know each other well enough to be on a first name basis, and from that, we don’t know each other well enough for his question to be anything other than a rude imposition of a level of familiarity that doesn’t exist. Then I close my response with, “Mr Hines works just fine.”

Genocide Olympics

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Chen Weihua, China Daily European Union Bureau Chief and well-known and highly placed apologist for the Communist Party of China, is showing his manufactured anger over the Holocaust Museum’s comparison of the People’s Republic of China government’s ongoing genocide of the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province (and anywhere else they can be rooted out and rounded up).

What the Museum said:

At the #Olympics you’ll see a well-known tradition—the torch relay—which the Nazis used at the 1936 Olympics for propaganda purposes. Today, we witness how the Olympics can still be used to distract from atrocities, such as the persecution of the #Uyghurs.

What Chen said:

Shame on the Holocaust Museum. Are you saying Nazi Holocaust of Jews was nothing but vocational training? More than 30,000 Jews sought refuge in Shanghai during the war and this is now your appreciation to the Chinese people?

That’s not the comparison, as Chen knows full well. The Nazis murdered millions of Jews, and the PRC’s CPC is murdering millions of Uighurs. If there’s any vocational training going on, it’s solely by the CPC’s minions being trained in mass murder.

As Chen also knows full well, the anger over the PRC’s governing CPC behavior is directed at those persons of the PRC government and CPC, not at the Chinese people.

If Chen and his ilk don’t like being criticized over their genocide against Uyghurs, then they need to stop committing the genocide.

Voter Discrimination

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Alabama, pursuant to the latest decennial census, has drawn its electoral map, and the outcome supposedly yields a House delegation of six white Republicans and one Black Democrat for the Federal Congress.

Opponents of the map say it disadvantages black voters. So far, the map stands, as the Supreme Court ruled that the map mustn’t be changed this close to an upcoming Federal election, but it’s a temporary ruling: the Court said it will hear the full case in its next term, starting in October. Thus the map will be the one in effect for next November’s midterms.

The “disadvantages black voters” bit rings hollow to me. There’s no doubt that the map is gerrymandered to favor one group of Americans over another, but that’s what gerrymandering does, and both parties have been doing it, for good or ill, ever since there were two dominant parties in our Republic.

What makes the beef ring hollow though, it the bit about disadvantaging one group of Americans over another. That suggests, strongly, that it would be OK to advantage that group of Americans over the other, currently advantaged. Or even merely to seek some version of “equity” or “equality.”

Either way—explicitly targeting one group of Americans separately from another, regardless of purpose—is nothing but rank identity politics. While there remains bigotry afoot in our republic, this is no longer the 1950s. We have come far closer today to realizing our ideal—as carved into the Supreme Court building—of all Americans being equal under law, just as we are—as acknowledged in the opening sentences of our Declaration of Independence—equal under God.

There is no need, any longer, to explicitly carve out districts to favor any race or ethnicity over any other: we’re all the same voters; we’re all American voters.

The answer, of course, for all that it’ll be easier written than done, is to do away with gerrymandering altogether. Divide each State up into squares of substantially equal populations of citizens, beginning at the State’s geographic center, and deviating from straight-line district boundaries only at the State’s boundary with an adjoining State.

Madness

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That’s what the Ottawa Police Chief, Peter Sloly, claims the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa is.

[a] nationwide insurrection driven by madness

Because the truckers disagree with the Canadian government’s diktats regarding individual health and individual decisions regarding health.

Now where have I heard before such characterizations of disagreement with Government being the definition of madness?

Oh, yeah—Nikita Khrushchev’s and his successor Tzar General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev’s, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (For completeness’ sake, they were only extending and expanding Josef Stalin’s use of psychiatry as a political tool of control, but that’s a separate story.) Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s USSR government would routinely decide dissenters were insane—suffering from delusions of reformism—and confine them to asylums until they were…cured. Or died from one cause or another. Major General Pyotr Grigorenko was only one of the more prominent ones “driven by madness.”

Now here is Sloly: a wrong-minded protest—his position—must perforce be an “insurrection,” and insurrections must be—again, his position—acts of insanity.

“in the event of an investigation into a user”

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The IRS is bent on using facial recognition to allow (or block) an American taxpayer to have access to his own tax records that the IRS maintains on each of us. The program is called ID.me, and it

will require a face scan, with which it will then “verify” a person’s identity, store in a database, and use for future logins.

As the WSJ asks, What could go wrong? It then answers the question:

Tucked into the agency’s ID.me project document is a line explaining that the agency will also use the mobile phones that submit selfies as a “piece of identity evidence” and that “geolocation can be gleaned from [mobile network operators] in the event of an investigation into a user.”

This is People’s Republic of China-grade surveillance, this time by a weaponized IRS of each of us American citizens. This is the IRS whose weaponization was begun under the Progressive-Democrat, Barack Obama. This is the IRS whose weaponization is being expanded to republic-threatening levels by the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden.

Update: The IRS now claims it’s not going to do the facial recognition bit. But it hasn’t made any similar claims regarding “geolocation” or any other piece of “identity evidence” that it might hold, or get hold of, and would willingly pass along to support any “investigation” into a user.

Sort of like tax data and forms that it already has a history of passing along to the press.