RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/05/rowan-atkinson-is-dead-right-about-cancel-culture/

Actor, comedian and national treasure Rowan Atkinson has attacked cancel culture, comparing it to the actions of the ‘medieval mob’. In a world where ‘controversial’ opinions can be banned from social media and dissenters are subjected to hate campaigns, he could not be more right.

In an interview with the Radio Times, the actor spoke of a serious problem with online debate – or rather, the lack of debate:

‘The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society. It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be “cancelled”’.

Atkinson also highlighted the vital importance of free speech:

‘It’s important that we’re exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion, but what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn. So it is scary for anyone who’s a victim of that mob and it fills me with fear about the future’.

He is, of course, correct. Exposure to different views broadens our minds. In suppressing alternative ideas, we behave like the irrational and hysterical witch-hunters of old.

This is not the first time Atkinson has spoken words of wisdom about freedom of speech. When Boris Johnson was attacked for comparing women in burqas to letterboxes, Atkinson argued that ‘All jokes about religion cause offence, so it’s pointless apologising for them’.

More recently, he has criticised the authoritarianism of the SNP’s Hate Crime Bill, which would criminalise speech even in the privacy of our own homes.

We should all be free to air our opinions in the public sphere, safe from censorious interventions by either the government or the cancel-hungry mob. That this even needs to be said is a sign of our illiberal times.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/seven-deadly-sins-woke-loyd-pettegrew/

“Woke” as a term originated in the 1940s. Oxford Dictionaries recorded its early politically conscious usage in a 1962 article, “If You’re Woke You Dig It” by William Melvin Kelley in The New York Times. The term has reared its ugly head again recently as a concept symbolizing perceived awareness of social issues and enlightened social movement. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics, social justice activism and progressive or socially liberal causes such as anti-racism.

Many believe woke is simply a manifestation of adolescent consciousness and wannabe activism. Besides the social idiocy with which woke is aligned, the term’s problem stems linguistically from the fact that it can be used as an article (woke actor), a noun (AOC is woke), an adjective (Chuck Schumer is a woke senator), a verb (the radical feminist really woked her accounting class), an adverb (Kamala Harris governs woke), a conjunction (progressive and woke), preposition (Biden’s stealing the 2020 election from Trump was a woke election) and last but not least, an interjection (woke, how socially responsible of her).

Perhaps woke isn’t a word form at all, but simply a leading indicator of abject stupidity. It would seem that if you are a progressive, woke has become both your being and your nothingness (with half-hearted apologies to Phenomenological Ontologist Jean-Paul Sartre). Jorge González-Gallarza argues convincingly what woke is a cannon of identity politics, “a toxic outgrowth of Protestant Christianity that threatens the American regime of liberty and self-government…both Christian and woke worldviews build moral orders around the categories of innocence and transgression—but with vastly different effects.”

González-Gallarza continues, “By placing atonement for past transgressions at the center of politics, wokeness seeks to apportion power in proportion to innocence. Note that how in woke terminology ‘speaking as’ a member of an innocent group instantly confers a legitimacy akin to what Coleman Hughes calls ‘heightened moral knowledge.’” Ah ha! All those George Floyd rioters last summer had to be given a hall pass from prosecution and lionization from Democrats because of their moral courage! So that’s how it goes!

Those who aspire to live the woke life are electrified at being able to thrust their cravenly nonsensical views in our face. All of us, if truth be told, believe in justice but only if it is applied blindly to every morsel of our Constitutional Republic. When the woke are blinded by the fires of their social justice insurrection, they are unable to see the injustice of their destruction of businesses and the myriad lives who overcame real injustices to create their own American Dream. When woke suppresses other’s rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, it becomes a vacuous four-letter word. You may be innocent of the soup du jour social injustices but if you dare to question methods and results, you likely will be shouted down, knocked down and put down with a loud WOKE YOU! Here are the seven deadly sins of woke.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/01/04/amen-to-that-democrats-will-have-to-change-hundreds-of-english-words-if-they-really-want-to-be-inclusive-n1304673

Rep. Ewomanuel Cleaver, Missouri Democrat, (I’ve taken the liberty of changing his name from “Emanuel” to remove any offensive reference to the males of of our species) lifted up the “prayer heard ’round the world” over the weekend. He closed it with the Shebrew word “amen,” but then added “a-woman” to be inclusive.

That’s not the end of the inclusive effort, or at least it shouldn’t be. Literally dozens of English words have “men” embedded in them.  Many also have “him” and “he” embedded, including the always useful “heh.”

Let’s change that one to “sheh.”

It’s time to root those “men” out in the name of including all the genders.

Some of the words that must be changed to reflect our 2021 sensibilities are just so obvious I can’t believe no one thought of it before Rep. Cleaver provided enlightenment, sorry, enlightenwoment, to us all.

mentor

Duh. “MENtor” is so gender-specific. We must change it to “womentor” immediately.

menopause and hymen

https://dianebederman.com/war-of-the-worlds-cancel-culture-versus-western-culture/

Allan Bloom, author of the Closing of the American Mind,1987, wrote that  many of us find our purpose and our intellectual and spiritual connection to the world through the stories and wisdom of the Bible, unlike many people who live with “an open-ended future and the lack of a binding past” and are in “a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone.”

The west is at war. A battle between two cultures that are diametrically opposed to each other.  I believe this war is only possible because we stopped teaching the Judeo/Christian ethic that underpins freedom. Niall Ferguson wrote in 2011: “Maybe the ultimate threat to the West comes from our own lack of understanding and faith in our own cultural heritage.”

The West, promoting freedom, free will, free speech, the knowledge that one is the subject of their destiny because one has the right and the obligation to choose his/her path, and this new culture; Cancel Culture, what writer Wesley Yang refers to as “the successor ideology;” is a culture that takes us back to a time of an artificially designed hierarchy which  promotes the belief that one is the object of one’s fate, hampered, held back, by race, colour, creed religion or sexual orientation. A culture that promotes standing on the shoulders of giants, not to rise up and reach for the stars, but bury them in the dust and then blame others for their personal failures.

Cancel culture is the Siamese twin of Progressivism: “Given the predilection to progress, the past is viewed as an inferior state of existence with various afflictions that wither away over time.”

Cancel culture has no use for the individual.Instead of uniting behind the social contract, the general will and the COMMON good, cancel culture is intent upon dividing us into competing tribes:divide and conquer. Cancel culture did not insidiously infiltrate ours; rather it hit us head on, without mercy and little resistance.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/luke_i_am_your_parent.html

Insanity strikes again. The Twilight Zone episode in absentia is the liberal war on family and religion.  The incoming House of Representatives, led by insatiable radical Democrats, is on the verge of adopting rules for the 117th Congress eliminating gender terms as fundamental as mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister.  Pelosi & Company justify the changes on the basis of gender inclusivity.  But the ramifications on our cultural norms and the foundations of faith and family will be suffocating.  The speech police will be awarded greater tyrannical authority.  When governing, precedent shadows everything.     

The list of gender terms to be excluded covers father and mother (use parent), son and daughter (use child), brother and sister (use sibling), uncle and aunt (use parent’s sibling), nephew and niece (use sibling’s child), husband and wife (use spouse), father-in-law and mother-in-law (use parent-in-law), son-in-law and daughter-in-law (use child-in-law), brother-in-law and sister-in-law (use sibling-in-law), and so forth for stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, and granddaughter.

So I guess eventually Mother Nature will be called Parent Nature and Father Time will be known as Parent Time.  No doubt Mother’s Day and Father’s Day will come under attack.  One will become Parents’ Day and the other Children’s Day.  The next step will be to eliminate both as it will become insensitive to refer to anyone in terms of biological or family connections.  At best we may be left with People or Person’s Day.  Don’t forget to change Big Brother to Big Sibling and Soul Sister to Soul Sibling.  Better yet, Big Person and Soul Person. 

Wife and husband are on the gender chopping block.  In the movie Jerry Maguire, the line perfectly delivered by Tom Cruise, “I miss my wife” will have to be dubbed over to say I miss my spouse.  It just doesn’t have the same emotional ring.  Democrats are determined to destroy joy and distinction in this world.  The happiness newlyweds feel when introducing their wife or husband is heavenly.  Throughout married life, it remains endearing to call your life love my husband or my wife.  But now such talk will become tarnished and maybe even classified as hate speech.

https://spectator.us/american-cool-cringe-end/

Back in March, around 4,000 years ago, the world was ending. Plague swept in from the east like a horde. Clam-tight lockdowns, unthinkable even days before, were announced everywhere. Who could save us?

On March 18 our prayers were answered. An honor roll of Hollywood bluebloods took action. Assembled by Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, they created a video montage cover of John Lennon’s masterpiece — yes! — ‘Imagine’, which she posted — thank goodness! — on Instagram. ‘We’re all in this together,’ said Gadot’s expensive oval face, and, in a sense, she was right. Will Ferrell and Mark Ruffalo, Sia and Zoë Kravitz, Norah Jones and Amy Adams: they were all in this big wet bathful of tears together. The stars were taking a forced break from riding their chariots through the clouds. They were just like you, just like me. ‘Imagine there’s no religion,’ they sang, as every church, mosque and synagogue in two hemispheres was padlocked and shuttered.

Now, on magazine paper, these were some of America’s coolest people. Tasteformers, platinum artists, red-carpeters — a glittering bunch. But this video, which quickly reached 10 million views, was mortifying. The global embarrassment it inflamed could’ve roasted the thigh fat off a regiment of sumo wrestlers. There was nothing to envy. It was tone-deaf, cheesy and, above all, cringe.

It wasn’t a one-off.

Somehow, being Cool blew up in America’s face. Cool became cringe, and cringe is everywhere you look. When the third millennium began, Tom Wolfe could write about ‘American superiority in all matters of science, economics, industry, politics, business, medicine, engineering, social life, social justice, and, of course , the military’.That superiority evaporated, leaving behind large, damp patches of awkwardness. Yes, America is still culturally hegemonic — no doubt there. But it’s limping along on anti-prestigious name recognition. Yes, through Netflix and Disney, Penguin Random House and Apple, Facebook and Twitter, and by a million other means, American mores are broadcast, published, disseminated; stubbornly world- dominating, ploddingly imitated. Yes, the United States still gives off a massive light. But it’s not the hopeful shine of a beacon on a hill. It’s the flickering glare of a dumpster fire.

ttps://www.theepochtimes.com/proposed-house-rules-seek-to-erase-gendered-term

Leaders in the House of Representatives announced on Friday a rules package for the 117th Congress that includes a proposal to use “gender-inclusive language” and eliminate gendered terms such as “‘father, mother, son, daughter,” and more.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern (D-Mass.) announced on Friday that the rules package includes changes that would “honor all gender identities by changing pronouns and familial relationships in the House rules to be gender neutral.”

A separate announcement from McGovern (pdf) said that the Democratic rules package will make “Changes [to] pronouns and familial relationships in the House rules to be gender neutral or removes references to gender, as appropriate, to ensure we are inclusive of all Members, Delegates, Resident Commissioners and their families—including those who are nonbinary.”

James McGovern (D-Mass.) speaks during a meeting at the Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 21, 2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Terms to be striked from clause 8(c)(3) of rule XXIII, the House’s Code of Official Conduct, as outlined in the proposed rules (pdf), include “father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, first cousin, nephew, niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, [and] granddaughter.”