RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/08/contemporary-capitalisms

At the recent National Conservatism conference in the US, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made the startling observation that the biggest threat to personal freedom was now not the State but the Corporation.  Carlson suggested that making this claim was unbelievable, even to him. Similarly, Matthew Crawford in American Affairs talks of “outsized commercial entities that play a quasi-governmental role in our lives”.  US Senator Tom Cotton calls the new corporate reality nothing less than a “dictatorship of woke capital”.

No less a woke oligarch than Mark Zuckerberg himself has stated, “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company … We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.” George Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

Is Carlson’s making this claim, and is it plausible?  Well, yes, it is entirely plausible, and this should chill us all. Many of us, for a long time, have been defending corporations against what might be termed the “old Left”. What Carlson was referring to is not simply the “corporation” as we all once knew it.  No, he is speaking of the emergence of a fundamentally new kind of corporation.  Let me explain.

The modern corporation – ubiquitous, unaccountable, condescending, emboldened, menacing – acts on a very, very broad canvas, with coercive powers and in ways previously unimagined, way beyond the original remit of traditional private sector companies. 

These are corporations that enforce oppressive new rules and protocols for employees, contractors and recipients of sponsorships, rules that are inimical to the exercise of personal freedom, of freedom of speech and of conscience.  They are seeking to set social standards for us all, they are limiting behaviour in the workplace, they are attacking opponents, they are punishing and rewarding governments according to whether their policy decisions meet corporate approval, they are boycotting states (in the US), they are bullying other businesses. In short, corporations are seeking to drive social change and this is constraining individual lives and transforming our culture — all in ways that not so long ago only governments could and did. 

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/valentina-sampaio-is-the-first-openly-trans-victorias-secret-model

After years of sticking to an outdated brand model even in the face of declining sales and threatened irrelevance, Victoria’s Secret has finally made an attempt to answer the public’s repeated calls for diversity by hiring its first transgender model, Valentina Sampaio.

The Brazilian model first sparked rumors that she had signed with the brand last week after tagging a Victoria’s Secret account in an Instagram post and using the hashtags #vspink, #campaign and #diversity. Sampaio continued to feed the rumor mill a few days later with another post, a video, featuring the hashtags #staytuned, #vspink and #diversity.

Some months ago, much to the surprise of men everywhere, the Gillette company decided to inform its core customers just what rotten, sexist and generally appalling specimens they are. It seemed an odd strategy at the time, and parent company Proctor & Gamble’s latest financial reporting confirms as much. Ad industry website Campaign Brief reports:

Gillette’s infamous “toxic masculinity” ad may cost Procter & Gamble more than anyone imagined in January, reports The Washington Times.

The year that Gillette launched its “We Believe” campaign and asked “Is this the best a man can get?” has coincided with P&G’s $8 billion non-cash writedown for the shaving giant.

Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller attributed much of the losses on “new competitors” offering “prices below the category average,” Reuters reported.

Observers such as Red State’s Brandon Morse responded by essentially likening the public stance to a lie by omission — the “toxic masculinity” ad punctuated news cycles for weeks and was repeatedly mocked on social media.

“Perhaps P&G isn’t willing to come forward yet with the fact that they made a monumental error in assuming men would take the ‘toxic masculinity’ commercial well, but they should soon,” Mr. Morse wrote Wednesday for the conservative website. “The brand is damaged enough to lose billions, and men aren’t coming back, especially with cheaper alternatives embracing men for who they are and not assuming the worst about them.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/29/lesbian-transgender-partner-wants-hook-run/

We’re hurtling to hell in a handbasket so fast it makes you think of those calculus problems where you have to find the increase in the rate of increase. “We went from ‘Bake the cake, bigot’ to ‘Wax my [testicles], bigot’ really fast,” to quote Erick Erickson’s snappy comment on the “transgender woman” who is demanding that a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal force female beauticians to handle his junk or be driven out of the bikini waxing business.

That wasn’t even the most telling story to emerge that week from the fever swamp that is our culture in the Year of Our Lord 2019. The highly competitive prize for the culture-off-the-rails news of last week goes to the jaw-dropping account of the personal life of Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay, as told by Kera Bolonick in an article that ran on social media under the headline “The Harvard Professor and the Paternity Trap.”

That doesn’t even begin to do justice to the story. Hay’s tortuous relationship with a purported lesbian and her main squeeze, a “transgender woman,” who seem to have set out with dogged energy to destroy Hay’s already rather unconventional relationship with his three children and their mother, beggars belief. Hay and his children’s mother were no longer legally married, and two of their three children together were conceived after their divorce, but they were living and raising the kids together. They had a mutual understanding—or, rather, one that turned out not to be so mutual—that they would not become sexually involved with other people.

According to Bolonick, not only did these adventurers convince Hay that he was the father of a child who turned out not to be his, he was hurled into Title IX hell on his campus by allegations of rape and abuse. He is still barred from the classroom at Harvard. Also—this takes the cake—the couple apparently stole his house while he was on vacation.

Well, as Bertie Wooster frequently remarks, it just goes to show that half the world doesn’t know how the other three-quarters live. Reading about Hay, it’s hard for those of us with more conventional love lives to avoid the Pharisee-and-the-Publican trap: “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.”

But the most fascinating part of the story is a point of commonality, not of contrast.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274371/taboo-truths-about-transphobia-america-jason-d-hill

Jason D. Hill is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author of several books, including “We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People.”

Gender Dysphoria involves a deep conflict between persons’ physical or assigned gender, that is, the biological sex determined by the chromosomal markers that determine their sex at birth (XX for females, and XY for males) and the gender with which they identify. Persons with gender dysphoria often feel they were born in the wrong body, feel conflicted with the gender roles they are expected to conform to, and are deeply uncomfortable with the anatomical sex body parts that are coterminous with their biological sex.  One should say from the start, that the feelings of pain and suffering such individuals experience are real, and that they should never be eviscerated of their dignity, nor evicted from the domain of the ethical, or the realm of individual rights. They are human beings like everyone else, and they deserve equal protection as individuals (not as special groups) under the law. Such persons are often referred to and identify as transgendered individuals. Other terms used by society and said individuals are transvestites and transsexuals, the latter often being reserved for transgendered persons who have undergone complete gender reassignment surgeries.

In the case of a trans-woman, this involves amputation of the penis and scrotum/testicles, and the creation of an artificial vagina, along with the construction of female breasts, and the in-take of hormonal treatments to transfigure the male body into one that is indistinguishable from that of a female’s body.

Similarly, trans-men (biological females) who undergo such a surgical procedure, often elect to have a double  mastectomy, transfigure their vaginas in a manner that allows for the construction of a male penis, and are the recipients of hormonal treatments that render the body a prototype of the male body, replete in many cases with facial hair, increased musculature and other physical markers that carve out the  male body as distinctly male.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/on_moving_to_the_wacky_wacky_west.html

Now that my wife and I are moving to Vancouver on the west coast of Canada, I’ve begun thinking about the prospects, literary and political, that await us. We had no option in the matter, family obligations having trumped prior intentions. Life, as they say, happens while you plan. Still, the dwelling we bought on Westminster Quay bordering the Fraser River is ideal from the perspective of sheer beauty, the expansive view, the vivacity of river and boardwalk life, and a far less punishing climate than the iron winters and mosquito-infested summers of rural Ontario. But it must be admitted that the political and cultural climate is gruesome. Though we have good friends and know of many admirable people living in la-la land, the West Coast of Canada, like that of the U.S., is for the most part where the lunatic fringe makes its home.

The Gulf Islands, for example, just off the littoral of British Columbia, are a hotbed of social justice warriors, medullary lefties and a clique of novelists and poets whose literary productions would bring any self-respecting country into terminal disrepute. Whole districts of Vancouver itself might be renamed Needle City, swarming with junkies, pushers and spaced-out derelicts, to such an extent that first responders and ambulances struggle to serve other citizens. Moreover, social welfare governments issue asymmetrical budgets favoring the parasitical class at the expense of laboring citizens — West Coast economic thinking with a vengeance.

A litre of gas is equivalent to a mortgage. The land transfer tax for buying a house and for the privilege of contributing to the economy of the region is, in our case, $9000, over and above the cost of purchasing the dwelling. The job-creating oil pipelines are stalled by the social justice types and the leftist NGOs. Clearly, the vast substratum of freeloaders, idlers, sycophants and, well, coasters constitute the growing profiteering class like a colony of aphid-milking ants.