RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/affirmative_action_scrabble_to_hit_shelves_soon.html

Scrabble is revamping—a more “inclusive” and “accessible” version is set to hit the shelves for those who don’t like the “competitive” nature of the traditional game. (Spoiler alert: The intended audience is Gen Z.)

Here’s the story, via a BBC report out yesterday:

Mattel is to launch a new version of Scrabble which is designed to be more collaborative and accessible for those who find word games intimidating.

The new double-sided Scrabble board will still feature the original game for those who want to play the traditional version.

But the new game on the flip side will include helper cards, use a simpler scoring system and be quicker to play.

Here’s what English broadcaster Gyles Brandreth said of the announcement:

‘The makers of Scrabble found that younger people, Gen Z people, don’t quite like the competitive nature of Scrabble….’

A “simpler” scoring system? How much “simpler” could Scrabble be though? As long as you can add into the single- and double-digits (or triple-digits with the right letters and premium squares), and you know your multiplication tables, the scoring system is self-explanatory. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/04/having-a-mangina-is-not-a-human-right/

Most men are quite attached to their penises. Even the fellas who tuck theirs into silky ladies’ knickers and ‘identify as women’ rarely actually part with their meat and two veg. So it should come as no surprise that a 33-year-old ‘nonbinary’ man in Ontario, Canada is suing for the right to keep his willy.

No, he is not at risk of some cruel and unusual punishment from the state. KS, as he is referred to in court documents, is actually demanding to undergo a ‘penile-sparing vaginoplasty’. This costly procedure would leave him with intact male genitals alongside a faux vagina. This is apparently so his body can better align with his nonbinary ‘gender identity’.

The Canadian health service has, quite sensibly, refused to pay for KS’s mix-and-match surgery out of the public purse. So he is now suing the government. Bizarrely, this self-absorbed man has not been laughed out of court. Instead, his case is being considered as a matter of human rights.

KS is demanding that the Canadian state pay for him to travel over one thousand miles to a specialist clinic in Austin, Texas where the surgery he wants can be performed. Ontario’s Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) initially denied his request back in 2022, on the grounds that the procedure is experimental and not performed in Canada. Following an appeal from KS, and a counter-appeal from his insurance provider, the decision has landed with Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, where the case was heard in late February.

Why is KS so persistent? Supposedly, this is a vital treatment. ‘It is very important for [KS] to have a vagina for her [sic] personal interpretation of her gender expression, but she also wishes to maintain her penis’, his doctor wrote in a letter to OHIP. Apparently, this is because KS ‘is transfeminine but not completely on the “feminine” end of the spectrum’. KS himself has gone further by claiming that denying this request amounts to an act of conversion therapy.

It would be easy to laugh off KS’s ludicrous demands for a surgically constructed mangina. But he has good reason to think that his special request might actually be granted. This is the wacky world into which Canada has been led by the trans ideology.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/29/why-is-a-full-grown-man-competing-against-teenage-girls-in-swimming/

“This is what happens when you let trans ideology run riot.”

First they let men compete in women’s sports. Now they’re letting adult men compete against teenage girls – and wander into their changing rooms.

As hard as it might be to believe, in Canada a 50-year-old man really is being allowed to compete in swimming competitions alongside 13- and 14-year-old girls. Melody Wiseheart, formerly Nicholas Cepeda, is a professor of psychology and behavioural science at York University in Toronto, specialising in children and young people.

Concerned parents tipped off Rebel News, a right-wing website, about Wiseheart in October last year. He was spotted swimming in a competition at the Markham Pan Am recreation centre, representing the Orangeville Otters swimming club.

The next week, to try to stand up the story, Rebel News reporter Davide Menzies confronted several staff members at the recreation centre. Its competition coordinator initially said he could not recall seeing ‘a 50-year-old man’ competing alongside teenage girls. Menzies then presented him with the competition schedule, which showed Wiseheart’s name and age alongside those of nine teenage girls. Only then did the coordinator admit that Wiseheart had indeed been allowed to take part. The Daily Mail alleges that Wiseheart has been competing against teenage girls since 2019.

According to the competition coordinator, Wiseheart has the right to compete in girls’ competitions under Swimming Canada’s ‘trans inclusion’ rules. He has registered himself as female and is thus treated as female. And although the competitions he swims in consist almost exclusively of teenage girls, this is simply a matter of convention. It seems that, since no adult had ever tried to enter a teenagers’ race before, there had been no need to draw up explicit rules. In other words, Wiseheart did not even need to ‘identify’ as a 13-year-old girl to assert his ‘right’ to enter the girls’ competition.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-jarring-opera-on-jarring-themes

EXCERPTS:

Peter Gelb hired the company’s first chief diversity officer, even as the Met was warning of imminent financial collapse. This new position was based on the idea that the present-day Met discriminated against qualified black artists and needed a high-priced overseer to combat its reflexive racism.

Anthony Davis is arguably the most militant of today’s black composers. (Daniel Bernard Roumain would vie for that title, but he is younger and less well known.) Davis favors tales of black victimhood, whether the alleged railroading of five black teenagers for the brutal 1989 rape of a white jogger in Central Park (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Central Park Five) or the struggles of blacks and homosexuals in the McCarthy era (Shimmer, still in development).

He has been showered with almost every honor that can grace a contemporary composer—from fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy and the MacDowell Colony to awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, OPERA America, and other institutions. He has taught at prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Yale. Malcolm X premiered to sold-out audiences at New York City Opera, then the second-most prestigious American venue for operas. The current production received a rare Ford Foundation grant (Ford stopped underwriting anything “white” long ago) as well as a National Endowment of the Arts grant.

By a stroke of good fortune, the libretto for X contains the line: “You have your foot on me, always pressing.” Cue the George Floyd comparisons. The aria containing the line, sung by Malcolm in prison, “captures the relation of our community to the police and the power structure and the pain that comes out of that,” Davis said. Davis’s brother, Christopher, who wrote X’s book, described the reaction of Detroit school students to the aria: “They were like, ‘YES!’ and unfortunately, considering the way things are going, there will always be that reaction.” (For the record, there are counterarguments to the idea that the police and other representatives of the white “power structure” are the main threat in the black community today.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-admin-theres-no-room-for-william-penn-in-pennsylvania/

The cultural revolution continues. And its target of the moment is William Penn: the liberal Quaker who founded Pennsylvania. And since Columbus, Ohio canceled Christopher Columbus, the Biden administration is moving to cancel Penn in Pennsylvania.

The National Park Service proposes to rehabilitate Welcome Park to provide a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience for visitors. Welcome Park was designed by the internationally acclaimed design firm Venturi & Scott Brown Associates. The park is located on the site of William Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House, and is named for the ship, Welcome, which transported Penn to Philadelphia.

Now, Penn and his house are no longer welcome in Welcome Park on the site of his house.

The Penn statue and Slate Roof house model will be removed and not reinstalled. In a separate and future effort, new exhibit panels will be installed on the south site wall to replace the Penn timeline.

Also visitors will be invited to burn American flags and chant for the decolonization of America.

The proposed rehabilitation of Welcome Park includes expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia and was developed in consultation with representatives of the indigenous nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Shawnee Tribe, and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.

The National Park Service solicited input from people living in Oklahoma, not in Philly.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/philadelphias-woke-entertainment/

When you attend a play at one of the smaller theaters in Philadelphia, what you get before Act One is something called a ‘Land Acknowledgment’ speech. This is a statement reminding you that the ground the theater was built on was once “owned” by Native Americans before it was stolen by the evil colonists and settlers.

What that statement never explains is that when the same land was “owned” by Native Americans centuries ago, it was often stolen by other Native tribes in violent ways.

In other words, Native American society was just as warlike as any other in human history.

Jeff Flynn Paul in ‘The Spectator,’ explains:

“In North America, most Natives were primitive farmers. This means that (with some exceptions) they had no permanent settlements: they farmed in an area for a few decades until the soil got tired, before moving on to greener pastures where the hunting was better and the lands more fertile. This meant that tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes.“

Real history, of course, doesn’t matter, since most of the subscribers at these little theaters are committed leftists.

Thankfully, there are no ‘land acknowledgment’ speeches in the city’s larger, commercial theaters. Yet even here on opening night you’ll hear a sprinkling of words like “equity” and “diversity” in the welcoming remarks—a little woke salt to keep pace with the more radical thespians on the other side of town.

Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the city’s commercial venues fill opening night with stories about how Native Americans built wigwam settlements and campfires where the theater’s bar is located.

When Daniel Fish’s rehabbed “Oklahoma” came to the city’s Forrest Theater in 2022 (in 2009, the rights to the original show were sold to a Netherlands-based pension fund), audiences were in for a shock. Suddenly, middle class season ticket holders were face to face with a didactic, virtue-signaling Bolveshik rape of a beloved American classic.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2023/11/05/one-of-glamour-mags-women-of-the-year-is-you-guessed-it-a-dude-n4923642

You might think this game is getting tired, but the left is just getting started. Gracing the featured photo for Glamour magazine’s 2023 Women of the Year edition is someone who has no business being part of a Women of the Year feature at all, because he is not a woman. But in these halcyon days of the left’s hegemony, up is down and black is white and fantasy is reality, and so men are women, Hamas jihad terrorists are oppressed freedom fighters, and Joe Biden is a capable, competent chief executive.

Glamour didn’t just feature this guy in, you know, a glamor shot, doing his level best (with the help of an untold number of surgical procedures, tons of makeup, strategic lighting, and I shudder to think what else) to fool the world into thinking that he really is a woman. The venerable fashion giant also made him the subject of a lavish, two-thousand-word puff piece that was published Wednesday, all about how he has suffered from the stifling mores of hidebound traditionalists who insist on believing that men are men and can’t become women no matter how energetically they fantasize.

But at Glamour, as with the left in general, fantasy is the name of the game. The title of the puff piece is “Geena Rocero Is Writing Her Truth,” and there you have it: “her truth,” not the truth. The hubristic and godless left believes that it can remake reality any way it wishes, and if the facts don’t match its view of the world, then so much worse for the facts. 

And so the Glamour piece happily pretends that Geena Rocero is actually not only a woman, but a fashion model, with his accessories lovingly noted underneath each glamor shot: “Gucci look. Maria Tash earrings.” “Fendi dress. Maria Tash earrings. Cartier bracelet and ring. Giuseppe Zanotti boots.” “Area suit. Maria Tash earrings. Cartier ring. Jimmy Choo pumps.” Apparently “Maria Tash earrings” is akin to “There’s no place like home” in “The Wizard of Oz”: repeat it often enough, and presto! Geena will be a real woman.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/04/the-book-ban-clan/

In Rules for Radicals, far-left organizer Saul Alinsky’s classic work on labor activism,  number 13 in his rules of power tactics reads, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Alinsky’s words are in full view these days in the form of “book banning” charges, a current mantra of the American left. And, as we are in the middle of “Banned Books Week,” the onslaught is massive. Front and center in the movement is the American Library Association, whose 2023 Banned Books Week theme is “Let Freedom Read.” The ALA insists that our democracy is imperiled and “that the safety of our right to speak and think freely is directly in proportion to our right to read.”

Similarly, a new report from PEN America, a left-wing advocacy group, informs us that school book bans and restrictions in the U.S. rose 33% in the last school year, continuing what the organization deems a worrisome effort aimed at the “suppression of stories and ideas.” 

The Biden Administration thinks we are in dire straits and has appointed a deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. This “book ban czar” is entrusted to “enforce federal civil rights laws and address threats to civil rights.”

A spokesman from the Education Department adds, “The Department of Education remains firm in its commitment to ensure all students are protected from all forms of discrimination.” 

Not to be outdone, California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill into law barring school boards from banning books, instructional materials, or curricula labeled as inclusive or diverse. He proclaims, “Remarkable that we’re living in a country right now in this banning binge, this cultural purge that we’re experiencing all throughout America, and now increasingly here in the state of California, where we have school districts large and small banning books, banning free speech, criminalizing librarians and teachers.”

In reality, whatever righteousness Banned Books Week may have once held – it started in 1982 – it has been taken over by progressives who, in large part, are trying to legitimize the field once known as “obscenity.”

In fact, most of the so-called “banned books” are nothing more than an attempt by parents not to have their children exposed to kiddie porn. For example, they don’t want their children to read books like Gender Queer, in which the protagonist says, “I can’t wait to have your c**k in my mouth — I’m going to give you the bl*w j*b of your life. Then I want you inside me.” Or maybe they don’t think their kid should be subjected to Lawn Boy, which contains a passage about 10-year-old boys performing oral sex on each other. Or perhaps they don’t want their child to be read Crank, which details meth addiction and rape.