RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-woke-witch-hunt-has-taken-over-the-arts/

Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between how the arts are treated in the UK versus a dictatorship. In Russia and China, the authoritarian state is the oppressive force. In the West, the state won’t arrest you for breaking taboos, and for that we must be grateful. But perhaps we should refrain from being too pleased with ourselves.

Woke – or if you don’t like the word, identitarian – movements rather than authoritarian governments can still force degrading confessions to ideological thought crimes. Friends can still denounce each other, as if we were in America during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s or China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear can still run through the arts, publishing and the liberal press. And, as in true autocracies, the price of speaking out can still mean losing your job and any chance of alternative work in your chosen field.

The accusation that Greig had endorsed an unorthodox opinion was enough to send him into frantic efforts to save his career

So commonplace are the symptoms of fear we barely register them now. A few days ago, to quote an example that got next to no publicity, an ‘interdisciplinary artist’ called Rosie Aspinall Priest took it upon herself to go through the social media of David Greig, a Scottish playwright and theatre director, as if this were an entirely normal way to behave – in the arts today I am afraid to say it is.

Her snooping paid off. She announced that Greig was guilty of ‘openly liking transphobic tweets’: a career-destroying offence, as she must have known. But how transphobic did they need to be to finish Greig off?

One tweet Greig liked referred to ‘gender madness’, a sackable offence, apparently. A second contrasted the police’s cruel arrest of an autistic girl, who had said that one of their officers looked like her ‘lesbian nana’, with the cops’ light handling of a transgender activist who allegedly punched a gender-critical feminist in the face.  

So you can be sure I am not misreading this, here is the tweet Greig liked in full. He was damned for endorsing the sentiment that ‘if you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned’. And that was it. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/08/the-smear-campaign-against-jk-rowling/

Here we go again. Another institution, brimming with self-righteous faux outrage, is trying to airbrush JK Rowling’s name out of history. This time it’s the turn of the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle, Washington, which has removed the world-famous author’s name from its Harry Potter exhibition. Last week, the museum announced that while it will continue to display memorabilia from the Harry Potter books and films, it wants no association with their supposedly problematic creator.

Explaining the decision in a 1,400-word blog, the museum’s exhibitions project manager, Chris Moore, brands Rowling a ‘cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity’. Moore, who identifies as trans and uses ‘he / them’ pronouns, takes exception to Rowling’s ongoing interest in preserving women’s hard-won rights over the ‘right of anyone who insists they are who they say they are’. Once again, Rowling’s reasonable and rational defence of women’s sex-based rights is being presented disingenuously as ‘hateful’ or ‘harmful’ towards transgender people, and therefore deserving of cancellation.

Moore even seems to think it would be better if Rowling had never existed. ‘We would love to go with the internet’s theory that these books were actually written without an author’, he writes, ‘but this certain person is a bit too vocal with her super hateful and divisive views to be ignored’.

Strikingly, Moore goes a few steps further than most of Rowling’s critics. He doesn’t just accuse her of transphobia. He also accuses the Harry Potter books of peddling ‘racial stereotypes’, promoting ‘fat shaming’ and, perhaps most heinous of all, lacking ‘LGBTQIA+ representation’. Surely to goodness there must have been a few pansexual / nonbinary students in the imaginary, magical school of Hogwarts? Shame on JKR for not giving them a voice, eh? The headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, might have been gay, but apparently that’s not enough in our world of 764 genders.

I find myself torn about this particular non-event, to be perfectly honest. On the one hand, I realise this is simply the latest in a long line of attempts to shut Rowling up. ‘I saw Goody Rowling, in the barn, consorting with the devil!’ is the tone of every such outburst. By now, these tricks have become cheap and obvious to anyone observing closely. The smears are always baseless.

On the other hand, the attempts to erase Rowling are deadly serious. Each attempted takedown inevitably leads to her receiving the vilest, cruellest abuse. Abuse which, if you’ve ever taken the time to read it, contains some of the most horrific things one human could say to or about another. Rowling is no doubt a tower of strength and resilience, having been on the receiving end of this bile for years. But it’s probably still having an effect on her, deep down.

Perhaps there is an upside to this stunt by Moore and the MoPOP, however. Removing Rowling’s name from the museum, and condemning her as ‘super hateful’, is so infantile that most right-thinking people will likely see it for the foolishness it really is. Sunlight, on occasions such as these, has a remarkable effect of highlighting the absurd and often cruel behaviour of the gender ideologues. People are getting wise to these smear tactics now that they are so regularly churned out. The problem is it is difficult to get people to speak out against them.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/07/14/you-wont-believe-what-disney-is-doing-to-snow-white-n1710609

Disney is making a live-action version of Snow White, because of course they are, and the movie looks even worse and more woke than even my jaded self could have imagined because management has not yet finished relieving itself on the quality content produced in bygone eras.

The corpse of Walt Disney could not be reached for comment due to spinning so hard that it was last seen digging its way deep into the Earth’s mantle.

For only the third time in VodkaPundit’s 21-year history, I find myself with almost nothing to say other than, “I literally can’t even.” The first time was maybe a year ago.

But do notice that I wrote “almost nothing,” because, please, just look at this:

The formerly “fair maiden” known as Snow White is now Latina and the Seven Dwarves are One Dwarf and Six Painfully Diverse Magical Creatures Dressed in Garb Cast-Off from the Greater Des Moines Renaissance Faire.

The live-action Snow White will be, from all appearances, not only worse than you imagine but worse than you can imagine.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wokesters-in-search-of-nonbinary-birds-1d65ed47?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The politicization of formerly respected scientific publications is one of society’s more disturbing recent trends and it seems that yet another periodical is willing to surrender its claim to authority.

Laura Helmuth, Editor in chief of Scientific American, recently tweeted:

White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways
P.S. Nature is amazing
P.P.S. Sex is not binary

Other Twitter users were not impressed. Ms. Helmuth’s missive now carries an attachment from Twitter:

Readers added context they thought people might want to know
White-throated sparrows have 2 sexes with 4 unique chromosome combinations.
There are still just 2 sexes that produce either sperm or eggs.
The female types are the white-striped females and the tan-striped females. The male birds are white-striped males and tan striped males.

One can debate whether and how Twitter should address errors in user comments, but it’s clear that the operators of the social media platform are not the only ones raising an objection to the claim of a sparrow with four sexes

https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-is-shakespeare-this-is-woke-shakespeare/

To paraphrase an 80s anti-drug ad, “this is Shakespeare, this is woke Shakespeare.” Any questions?

(If you enjoyed this episode of woke Shakespeare, be sure to tune in to your local PBS station for more.)

The obvious question is “why bother”, but the obvious answer is that wokes (unlike old school lefties who could be creative) are cultural parasites, incapable of creating anything new, and thrive only on tainting the old.

It’s why the entertainment industry churns out bastardized versions of its intellectual properties, yet makes nothing new that endures.

Wokes are incapable of grasping the content of anything, only the surface context. And thus they obsessively remake things in line with their deconstructionist sensibilities. Shakespeare to them is no different than Star Wars, Dickens, 1776 or Marvel comics, it’s all the same, replace the cast with a completely inappropriate identity politics assemblage and revamp its message so that it deconstructs whatever it ever was.

Wokes think that they’re ushering in a revolution when all they’re doing is demonstrating their incomprehension of the original material. But that is why they’re wokes. Wokes can be offended by anything, but they don’t understand anything. Philosophically, they’re all surface impressions, reading their tired Marxist tropes into any classical work and then plugging in a “diverse” cast to hammer home the revolutionary message.

But there are no more revolutions. The only woke cultural revolution still going on is narcissism. Wokes don’t want to change the world, they want to revel only in their outrage and false sense of superiority by destroying anything that predated them, anything they don’t understand, and turn it into a virus broadcasting their virtue.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/19/state-department-official-criticized-for-mandatory-pronouns-use-in-emails/

On Thursday, a State Department spokesman clashed with an Associated Press reporter over a new policy at the agency demanding that all employees give their pronouns in emails.

As reported by the New York Post, spokesman Vedant Patel was giving a briefing when he was asked about the “mandatory” pronouns policy by journalist Matt Lee.

“Have you gotten any emails from any of your colleagues before you came out here… since about noon or so?” Lee asked. Patel asked Lee to clarify what he meant, to which Lee asked if Patel had noticed anything new in the “from” line of any such emails. Patel grew increasingly frustrated, claiming he was not aware of any such changes.

“Within the last hour and a half… the State Department’s internal email system — and I tested this, so I know that it’s true —has added pronouns to people’s … not their signature … but to where it says from,” Lee explained. “Why? This is not something that anybody has a choice about, and so I’m wondering why and who made this decision.” Patel responded by claiming that he was not aware of the “phenomenon.”

Lee continued to press Patel, pointing out that there were many cases of people being addressed with the wrong pronouns.

“I don’t have a problem with doing it and if people want their pronouns attached to it, it’s fine,” Lee clarified. “But it should be a choice. Not something the State Department imposes on people, especially if it’s wrong.”

Patel then said he would “look into it,” then promptly left the briefing room.

A subsequent statement by the State Department blamed the pronouns ordeal on an error by Microsoft Outlook.

“The State Department’s Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM) is aware of the recent issues with user profiles on Microsoft Outlook and working to remedy the situation,” tweeted spokesman Matthew Miller. “This change was unintentional and the bureau is working to correct this immediately.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/richard-dreyfuss-and-the-difference-between-cultural-capitulation-and-cultural-sensitivity/

There is a massive difference between cultural capitulation and cultural sensitivity. We should resist the former and practice the latter.

What do I mean by cultural capitulation? I mean bowing down to the latest cultural fad, of kowtowing to the most current manifestation of what is PC, of becoming slaves to whatever the societal elites decide is acceptable.

A current example would be the cultural mandate that requires us to give our preferred gender pronouns or to deny biological realities when talking with a trans-identified person. We rightly say no to that mandate for many reasons. (For a listing of relevant articles, go here.)

This, of course, is quite different than cultural sensitivity, by which I mean recognizing what could legitimately offend someone in another culture or be easily misunderstood. This is something we often learn the hard way, especially when traveling to other countries or hosting people from other cultures. There are cultural taboos of which we know nothing until we cross a forbidden line.

The difficult question is to be able to determine when something is a matter of unacceptable cultural capitulation and when it’s a matter of legitimate cultural sensitivity.

All this can be illustrated in a recent interview on PBS’ Firing Line with the famed actor Richard Dreyfus.

He was asked by Margaret Hoover for his views on the new Oscar rules in a which a film would not be eligible for best picture unless it met certain requirements for inclusion and representation.

He responded, “They make me vomit.”

How so? “Because,” explained, “this is an art form, it’s also a form of commerce, and it makes money, but it’s an art. And no one should be telling me, as an artist, that I have to give in to the latest most current idea of what morality is.”

He continued, “And what are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. And you have to let life be life

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/05/09/childism-the-latest-predatory-lgbtq-ideological-machination-n1693895

“The thrust of childism is that children, no matter their age or maturity level, should be granted full decision-making autonomy of the same kind granted to adults – presumably, of course, including consenting to sexual encounters with adults.”

You may, by now, be familiar with the increasingly mainstreamed LGBTQ+++™ sexual identity called MAPS, an acronym that stands for “minor-attracted persons” and serves as a euphemism for pedophiles.

The gist of the pro-MAPS argument, as illuminated below by MAPS apologist and transgender professors Allyn Walker, is that the term “pedophile” is unnecessarily stigmatizing and that MAPS are not necessarily sex offenders because they don’t always act out on their urges.

Differentiating between MAPS and active, offending pedophiles might be legitimate, but the question is: why expend all the effort trying to legitimize a sexual identity that is inherently immoral?

The MAPS even have their very own inclusive LGBTQ+++™ flag!

Very dark stuff, by most normal people’s estimation.

But the rabbit hole into the LGBTQ+++™ abyss only leads to darker darkness – like some other weird euphemism called “childism.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/what_were_they_thinking_at_bud_light.html

Something about the sudden shift in marketing strategy for Bud Light doesn’t pass the smell test.

An iconic brand that, based on some of the best commercials you’ll ever see, never ceased to hit the target of its intended customers has, overnight, decided to abandon those customers and dollars are “fratty and out of touch,” and go after… What exactly?  We do not really know.

Thomas Lifson showed us the video of Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for the Bud Light brand, try to explain her strategy.  I am sorry, but when explaining a marketing strategy for beer it seems both intentional as well as awkward and discomforting to see her children’s artwork posted behind her.  Beer and children just do not mix. 

The result of that strategy should not have been unexpected.  Bud Light sales are in the toilet.  Overnight.  A viral video shows Bud Light sitting untouched in a store’s cooler.   🤣 This is real! I went to my local store, and she said they haven’t sold a 12-pack or 30-pack of Bud Light this whole week! #BudLightWentWoke #budlight

I contend, therefore, this was not the biggest blunder in corporate marketing history.  Anyone could have seen what was going to happen.  To believe this strategy wasn’t market-tested before going full steam ahead is like believing Russia helped Trump win an election, or something like that.

As fast as Bud Light sales tanked, it didn’t take long for Chasten Buttigieg to criticize everyone who boycotted the brand.  His tweet:  “If you’re upset about a beer company supporting civil rights, you might want to start bottling your tears. LGBTQ people drink water, too. Gonna boycott that next? 11:59 AM · Apr 8, 2023”