Displaying posts categorized under

P.C.-CULTURE

CNN Calls Out U.S. Coronavirus Task Force for… Lack of Diversity? By Jim Treacher

https://pjmedia.com/trending/cnn-calls-out-u-s-coronavirus-task-force-for-lack-of-diversity/

The Coronavirus is making a lot of news these days, and it’s tough to know how worried we should be. Is it something to sniffle at or not? That remains to be seen, but there’s another illness that we know we must eradicate from our society: white people.

You see it? You see the problem? No, of course you don’t. But that’s okay, because CNN’s Brandon Tensley did:

It’s a statement that’s as predictable as it is infuriating: President Donald Trump’s administration lacks diversity…
Who are these experts? They’re largely the same sort of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who’ve dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning.
By contrast, former President Barack Obama’s circle of advisers in the face of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was hardly so monochromatic. Neither was it so abysmal in terms of gender diversity.

Are these people qualified to tackle this problem? It doesn’t matter. This is bad because they’re mostly white people, and mostly males.

Joe Biden ups the ante in the woke sweepstakes with his latest about transgenderism By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/joe_biden_ups_the_ante_in_the_woke_sweepstakes_with_his_latest_about_transgenderism.html

Anybody who says Joe Biden isn’t a follower is a stone-cold liar. At the macro level, Biden’s been disavowing his 47-year history in Congress and the White House by moving as hard to the Left as he can. At the macro level, it’s all pander, pander, pander. His latest attempt to out-do his fellow Democrats is his push for peak woke with the all-important transgender lobby, a group that, in a comprehensive 2016 study, was estimated to make up 0.6% of the American population.

To be fair to Joe as he competes in the “most woke on transgender issues” category, he’s already said that one of his top legislative priorities would be to pass the Equality Act which, among other things, forces schools to let biological males compete on girls’ sports teams. That’s woke but the competition has been getting tough.

Elizabeth Warren has long been sounding the transgender horn. Already back in 2017, she was sending out tweets on Transgender Day of Remembrance, something she was careful to do again in 2019 when the Democrat primary was heating up. Warren outdid herself, though, when she got endorsed by Black Womxn, an organization for “all black folks that do not claim male identity,” including “black trans & cis women, gender non-confirming folks and others.” Proving that she had read Black Womxn’s web page, Warren tweeted back, “Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy.” Who knew?

A British feminist says men who dislike “woke” women are destroying the world By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/a_british_feminist_says_men_who_dislike_woke_women_are_destroying_the_world.html

British actor Laurence Fox became a target when he refused to accept allegations about overarching white racism and toxic masculinity in Britain. He recently earned additional ire from the left when he announced in a Sunday Times article that he does not “date woke women.”

Woke woman Vicky Spratt was outraged. In an article at Refinery29 entitled “The Dangerous Rise Of Men Who Won’t Date “Woke” Women,”* she wrote,

Laurence Fox – who you perhaps only knew as Billie Piper’s ex-husband because you’ve never seen Lewis (what?) – does not date “woke” women who he believes are being taught that they are “victims”, irrespective of whether they are right or not.

[snip]

Not wanting to date “woke” women, far from being laughable, is actually one of the more insidious aspects of it. Spend an afternoon on any major dating app and you’ll come across (generally white) men saying openly sexist and misogynistic things. They might say “no psychos” or that they “fucking hate big eyebrows” in their bios. And, by and large, they also tend to hold extremely right-wing views and see themselves as victims of liberal thinking.

To Spratt, men who won’t date “woke” women are far-right wackos who like Jordan Peterson even though he denies white privilege and urges millennials to stop being social justice warriors. Worse, aside from the “incels” (heterosexual men who have given up on women), Spratt says that evil anti-woke-woman men are becoming right-wing!

Little Women Goes to War “Woke” critics express outrage that men stay away from a movie with little to offer them. Kay S. Hymowitz

https://www.city-journal.org/little-women

You might think that when a film you love is nominated for an Oscar for best picture, best adapted screenplay, best actress, and best supporting actress it would be a time for champagne, but in the case of Little Women, it’s been sour grapes all around.  The film received six nominations in total, but its many avid admirers were still furious: Greta Gerwig, the film’s director, was not nominated for best director, proof that misogyny reigns in Hollywood.

Even before it opened, the film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel had taken on heavy sociological and political significance.  Amy Pascal, the movie’s producer, had tweeted that men were not attending screenings of the Greta Gerwig–directed movie due to “unconscious bias” against women. Another Hollywood feminist VIP, Melissa Silverstein, jumped in: “I think it’s total, fully conscious sexism and shameful. The female story is just as universal as the male story.” The media were off and running: “Little Women has a Little Man problem,” Vanity Fair announced. “Men Are Dismissing Little Women: What a Surprise,” was the snarky title of a New York Times column.

Actually, the reasons that men (and a fair number of women like myself) don’t share in the widespread euphoria over the film couldn’t be more mundane. For one thing, the movie is based on a children’s book—to be precise, a book for girls. Thomas Niles, Alcott’s editor at Roberts Brothers, asked her to write a “girls’ book.” And that’s exactly what she set out to do. She wasn’t keen on the idea, but she needed the money. “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this kind of thing,” she complained in her diary in the spring of 1868. “Never liked girls; never knew many besides my sisters.” When Niles reported to Alcott that his niece had found the early pages enthralling, Alcott, who remained unenthusiastic about the project, conceded: “As it is for them, they are the best critics.” No surprise, then, that grown men aren’t crowding theaters to see the latest movie version of a nineteenth-century girls’ book.

The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down written by Kevin Mims

https://quillette.com/2020/01/07/the-national-book-foundation-defines-diversity-down/

“Over the past decade, the National Book Foundation has honored works of fiction such as Great House, I Hotel, So Much For That, Binocular Vision, Refund, The Throwback Special, The Association of Small Bombs, and a lot of other books whose authors not one in 10,000 Americans can probably identify. Decades from now, when people look back on the Lisa Lucas era at the National Book Foundation, they may see a whole lot of ethnic diversity and not much more—except for a lot of forgotten and out-of-print titles.”

Last month the Huffington Post published an essay by Claire Fallon entitled “Was this Decade the Beginning of the End of the Great White Male Writer?” Fallon celebrated the notion that white men are losing their prominence in contemporary American literature and that the best books being published in America today are being written by a wider variety of authors than ever before:

“What was once insular is now unifying,” National Book Foundation director Lisa Lucas told the crowd at the 2019 National Book Awards Gala, where the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry honors all went to writers of color. “What was once exclusive is now inclusive.”

Lucas took over the foundation in 2016, at a time when the high-profile awards had a somewhat checkered record with representation. Though historically the honorees had skewed heavily white and male, that began to change around 2010. (However, there had been some other recent embarrassments, like 2014 host Daniel Handler’s racist jokes following author Jacqueline Woodson’s win for “Brown Girl Dreaming.”) Lucas, the first woman and person of color to helm the foundation, made representation and inclusivity a focus of her messaging.

The Tattoo: A Sign of the Times By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-tattoo-a-sign-of-the-times/

Tattoos are not new. What is new is their ubiquity and extent of body coverage. They meet the eye with livid starkness everywhere one looks, turning the atmosphere and the culture positively fluorescent. What was once a niche market has expanded exponentially. Practically everyone of a certain age group, say, late teens to early fifties, seems to flaunt these decorative glyphs and totems on every visible part of their bodies, including the head and face. (Actress Amanda Bynes and rapper Post Malone are recent celebrity examples.) And judging from my experience in the change room of the gym where I work out, these chromatic blemishes, particle illustrations of a much wider significance, appear on the less visible parts of a person’s anatomy as well.

It’s a phenomenon that continues to puzzle me. Every era, of course, is marked by its own fashion anomalies once considered normative or appealing, which we often tend to regard as quaint, ridiculous, garish or merely amusing—to take just one example, the dandyism of red waistcoats, green wigs and blue hair in 19th-century Paris. Today is no exception, though we need not look back to find them absurd or grotesque. How one can appraise sumptuary excesses like the fade cut, pink hair, septum rings, tongue studs, navel piercings, and the prevalence of the orgulous tattoo as in any way attractive boggles the mind.

As the World Journal of Psychiatry points out in a methodological case study focusing on statistical distributions and issues relating to epidemiology, tattoos were traditionally associated with deviance and psychopathology, typically criminals, gang members and “others belonging to marginalized and counter-cultural groups.” (One recalls those Grade B gangster films featuring Russian mafia members, their arms, backs and chests slathered with lurid insignia rankings.) The tattoo serves “to align the wearer with a specific group,” offering comfort, protection and a collective identity. Tattoos are often also used as a kind of rebus meant to “bolster low self-esteem” or “repair a crippled self-image.”

Making gender guinea pigs of children John Whitehall

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/01/banning-alternatives-to-child-gender-experiments/

“It is important to look more closely at the effects of ‘puberty blockers’ and cross-sex hormones because their use is fundamental to medical intervention in childhood gender dysphoria. Proponents maintain they are ‘safe and entirely reversible’ when they are nothing of the kind.

The Labor government of Victoria is in the process of drafting legislation to ban so-called “conversion therapy”, which it defines as “any practice or treatment that seeks to change, suppress or eliminate an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity”.

On the face of it, this would appear to be a good thing, given the effect of the so-called “Safe Schools” program, and other initiatives, which, under the camouflage of anti-bullying, have planted seeds of primordial confusion in the minds of many children with their doctrine of gender fluidity, which preaches there is no such binary entity as a boy or a girl. The ideology asserts that everyone is somewhere on the intervening rainbow, depending on their feelings at the time.

The Victorian government could have been applauded had it decided its Education Department was no longer permitted to promote the ideology that has caused hundreds of Victorian children to be submitted to attempts by members of the Health Department to eliminate gender identity determined by chromosomes, and to change bodies to suit mental orientations.

But no: the Andrews government has no intention of stopping the evangelism and practices of the new ideology. To the contrary, with Orwellian Newspeak, it intends to ban any attempt to “convert” or re-orientate a confused child back to a gender identity congruent with its chromosomes.

Failure to comply with the ban will be punished by criminal or civil law, or both, whether committed by omission or commission. Omission will comprise failure of a therapist or teacher to refer a confused child to the Gender Service at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne where it may undergo “affirmation” of a new gender by means of hormones and surgery. Commission comprises attempts to “make the child comfortable in the skin in which it was born” by means of family and individual psychotherapy: the former mode of therapy that was associated with success, but is now derided as “abhorrent”, and is to be banned as “conversion therapy”.

No Time for Heroes By Will Collins

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/history-without-heroes-villains-incomplete/

Academic history scorns them, but you can’t keep a great man down

It is a strange irony that heroes and villains have retreated from the classroom just as they’ve become ubiquitous in popular culture. Outsized personalities may be disappearing from social-studies textbooks and college history departments, but they live on in airport bookstores and bestseller lists. On YouTube, amateur historians dissect great battles and famous generals with an enthusiasm usually reserved for secondary Game of Thrones characters. Half-forgotten dynasties populate obscure Twitter feeds. Eccentric historical figures are now fodder for rambling podcast episodes.

Great-man theory has long been out of favor with universities, where structural explanations — class, race, geography, gender, and the like — put Hannibal and Napoleon to flight decades ago. Ron Chernow and Robert Caro, two authors who still produce decidedly old-fashioned historical biographies, are notable for both their success and the fact that they have backgrounds in journalism, not academia. Slowly but surely, a pedagogical approach that emphasizes structural factors over individuals is marching through our institutions. California’s proposed new high-school history curriculum is awash in race, gender, and class buzzwords. The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a monomaniacal reinterpretation of American history through the lens of slavery, comes complete with a high-school teaching guide.

Yet banishing biography and personal drama from the classroom hasn’t suppressed our collective fascination with the great figures of the past. It has merely displaced their study to the Internet, where unfashionable, disreputable, and downright offensive ideas live on forever. Far outside the realm of respectability lies the alt-right, which has enthusiastically appropriated the iconography and heroic pose of various historical figures, from Crusaders to Victorians to the statesmen and generals of classical antiquity.

Actress apologizes to Iran for Trump’s airstrike on Soleimani By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/actress_apologizes_to_iran_for_trumps_airstrike_on_soleimani_.html

Actress Rose McGowan channeled her inner John Kerry and apologized to Iran for President Trump’s drone-strike that killed Iranian General and terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani. The Hollywood luminary took to that bastion of erudition, Twitter, to prostrate herself before the Iranian Mullahs—and tell the world of her hatred for the president and the country in which she resides. She tweeted: “Dear #Iran, The USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people. 52% of us humbly apologize. We want peace with your nation. We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime. We do not know how to escape. Please do not kill us. #Soleimani.”

It is nearly impossible to picture a more inane, hypocritical, sickening utterance or a potentially more harmful attitude. Addressing the terrorist regime as “Dear Iran” is gag-inducing on its own, but pales in comparison to the rest of the tweet. She’s concerned we’ve “disrespected” the Iranian flag? Something tells me she’s probably okay with athletes failing to stand for our own flag and national anthem. Arbitrarily asserting that 52% of us not only don’t fully approve of the action but wish to “humbly apologize” to the Mullahs for it should make 100% of Americans want to vomit.

Here’s What’s Going to Happen in 2020 Kurt Schlichter Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/12/30/heres-what-is-whats-going-to-happen-in-2020-n2558641

If you thought you can’t top the stupidity we experienced in 2019, brace yourself for 2020 because it’s going to be a pronoun-fueled weather cult pinko freakshow. But it won’t be all amusing antics – the left hates us and its ugly mask is coming off, revealing the even uglier fascist visage lurking beneath. If you listen to them, and if you aren’t an insufferable goo goo wimp who refuses to hear them, you will know that they intend to silence you, even imprison you, and deprive you of the ability to participate in your own governance. So, if you want to live as a free man or woman – if they have their way, they’ll destroy you for recognizing that unalterable binary – best be ready. 

Be motivated to engage in the cultural melee. 

Vote. 

And buy guns and ammo. As my favorite literary creation famously says, no one has ever regretted being too well armed.

With that in mind, here are my predictions for 2020:

10. Trump Will Be Impeached…Yawn: Poor, flailing Nancy Pelosi will eventually transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate, thereby actually impeaching the President. Now, whether Pelosi’s current antics constitute “impeachment” or not is irrelevant, except denying it due to her gamesmanship is fun because it owns the libs. No one cares, and to the limited extent we normal people do, this alleged impeachment is a badge of honor for the President. Her fringe-driven delay tactics make the Dems look dumber, and eventually she will send it to the Senate where Cocaine Mitch will kill it. Sure, some of the useless GOP caucus will make noises about how this clusterfark must be taken seriously because principles and honor and stuff. Saps. They just better take seriously that we in the base will electorally eviscerate them if they vote to convict. Maybe Mitt the Gimp will vote for it because he’s weak and stupid. Maybe Senator Iglookowski (RINO-AK) will too. But in the end, Trump will triumph and yet again humiliate his opponents.

9. The Economy Will Stay Strong, Disappointing Democrats: The party of the workin’ man is already in mourning because the Trump economy has finally brought some prosperity back to the workin’ man instead of concentrating wealth among the globalist liberal gentry that Obama served. The media will cheerlead for a recession; the Democrats will try to ignore the new Roaring 20s, but America’s success will remain a nightmare for liberals during 2020.