Designated Survivor Revisited – Woke Watch - "If anyone read the first part of the DS “review” on this site they will know I watched the first season or most of the first season but declined to watch season 2 as it was so over the top on the SJW talking points... I can say it was not the same as it was last time I watched. It was 100% worse. Holy crap, transgender sister in law, gay secret service agents, latina stereotype, they literally couldn’t have crammed more SJW talking points into this show, I am in show 4 and I have to bail. Yeah of course Trans people exist, but really how is it that a group of people that make up less than 1% of the population are suddenly EVERYWHERE…. this show is about as hot a SJW mess as any human could ever create."
No wonder it got cancelled
Conservatives should watch Netflix's "Designated Survivor" - "Though short, Netflix’s season three confronted issues that matter deeply to groups who are often underrepresented on screen. The show introduced Sasha, president Kirkman’s (previously unmentioned) sister-in-law, who is transgender... By making LGBTQ concerns White House concerns, and directly so, Designated Survivor 2.0 approached social divisions (and biases) with the seriousness they demand. Throughout season three, the show exhibited a similar sensitivity toward Dontae Evans, a social media strategist on Kirkman’s campaign staff. The relationship (and specifically, a steamy sex scene) between Evans—an HIV-positive, gay black man—and Troy, a Secret Service agent, caught viewers off guard. But as Phillip Zonkel wrote for QVoiceNews, Designated Survivor became one of the first shows “to debunk the misinformation about what it means to be HIV positive and undetectable.” By paying attention to the LGBTQ community, the show’s third season welcomed differences, and paid homage to human decency... Throughout season three, Kirkman’s social agenda demonstrates that what affirms people’s dignity isn’t necessarily politically palatable. In addition to addressing LGBTQ issues and racism, he contends with hot-button issues that include fake news, assisted suicide, opioid addiction, and immigration. In the season’s sixth episode, a Guatemalan family arrives illegally in the US in the hopes of securing a kidney transplant for their young son. The Kirkman administration carefully explores the ramifications of allowing the child medical care. Helping little Mateo is the right thing to do but, as Kirkman notes, allowing the family to remain in the US could signal a broader willingness to help anybody with medical problems who crosses the border. Ultimately, Designated Survivor‘s greatest success (and perhaps a reason for its cancellation) is that it got too close to real politics. However brief, Netflix’s experiment helped give a voice to marginalized people—often of color—living under the presidency of a white man"
A pretty naked admission that it was a shit show which just crammed in liberal politics
Opinion | The Virginia Election Shows Why Democrats Are in Trouble - The New York Times - "Days before it became clear that the Republican Glenn Youngkin would win Virginia’s gubernatorial race, pollsters, pundits and political strategists were trying to explain why a race that was the Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s to lose was on its way to being lost. Some explanations were more convincing than others. Least convincing was the suggestion that Youngkin, a former private equity executive, won by dogwhistling Dixie. The pro-McAuliffe Lincoln Project even tried to troll a Youngkin event in Charlottesville with tiki-torch bearers, but they were exposed. That theory fails to explain why Youngkin ever would have thought he could win by moving to the hard right in a state where no Republican has won statewide office in a dozen years, and which Joe Biden won last year by 10 points. Another explanation is that early political reversals for an incumbent party are normal. The Republican Chris Christie of New Jersey won a similar bellwether gubernatorial election in 2009, almost a year into Barack Obama’s first term. That win anticipated the G.O.P.’s historic 63-seat gain in the 2010 House elections, but it did not keep Obama from getting his signature legislation enacted, much less from being re-elected. Then there is the fact that McAuliffe ran a lousy campaign. State races are about state issues. McAuliffe’s focus was to paint Youngkin as a Trumpkin, going so far as to invent a fictional Youngkin-Trump joint campaign event. Youngkin focused on issues like cutting taxes on groceries and giving parents more of a say in their kids’ education. Voters typically want governors to solve problems, not serve as moral avatars. Finally, there’s Joe Biden. He is manifestly inept... The last three explanations are true as far as they go. But they don’t sufficiently capture the Democrats’ deeper problem, which is the persistent and justified perception of a party too often composed of fake moderates and dissembling radicals. Middle-of-the-road voters — the kind who still decide elections in purplish places like Virginia — sense they’ve been bamboozled. Who’s a fake moderate? Biden campaigned as the most centrist Democrat in last year’s primary field. He is trying to govern as the most socially transformational president since Lyndon B. Johnson. Attorney General Merrick Garland looks like a fake moderate, too willing to cite the power of the federal government after angry parents at school board meetings were labeled domestic terrorists. Whatever happened to Democrats as civil libertarians? As for dissembling radicals, note the way in which the controversy over critical race theory is treated by much of the left as either much ado about an obscure scholarly discipline or, alternatively, a beneficent and necessary set of teachings about the past and present of systemic racism in America. But C.R.T. is neither obscure nor anodyne. It is, according to many of its leading theoreticians, a “politically committed movement” that often explicitly rejects notions of merit, objectivity, colorblindness and neutrality of law, among other classically liberal concepts. That’s no reason to ban teaching it or any other way of looking at the world. But it is dishonest to argue that it is anything less than ideologically radical, intensely racialized and deliberately polarizing. It is even more dishonest to suggest that it exists only in academic cloisters. We live in an era of ubiquitous race-based “affinity groups,” incessant allegations of white supremacy, and pervasive censorship and self-censorship in everything from words that can be said and documentaries that can be watched, to jokes that can be laughed at. No wonder the debate over C.R.T.-influenced pedagogies in public schools — which liberals insist don’t even exist in the state’s public schools, although they clearly do — had such a galvanic effect on the Virginia race... the Democrats’ political problem is either dishonesty about the kind of country they want, a lack of self-awareness, or some combination of both. An America in which group identity takes precedence over individual merit, racial categories become moral categories, success based on achievement is denigrated as “privilege” based on ancestry, blind justice is attacked as systemically biased, and independent thinking risks being treated as heresy, will eventually cease to be a free, fair and just country."
Election results: Virginia Republicans won equality vs. equity debate - "Terry McAuliffe lost the Virginia governor's race when he labeled parents' concerns about critical race theory being taught in public schools as a "racist dog whistle."... Before George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, there was broad consensus that a color-blind equality was our national goal. Now, and without much open debate, that has flipped to a race-conscious equity, at least in the rhetoric of the news media, Democrats and large corporations' HR departments. For such a fundamental change to be accepted, there has to be a discussion about it. Judging by the Virginia election results, moderate and independent voters are far from sold on the idea. We can expect coming elections all over the country to focus on equality versus equity as well. Third, one outgrowth of the equality-versus-equity debate is that to win, Republicans will have to define themselves ever more strongly as the color-blind party of equality."
Facebook - "5 year old kid alleged of racism for saying "I don't like you" to a 1.5 year old kid. Why attribute it to race when it could simply be due to how kids can simply be extraordinarily and inconsistently mean at times ? This is a plain unreasonable conclusion, and what happens when you allow identity politics to take root, lay down its insidious seeds and tear a society apart. Racism is an extremely grave charge. *It follows that a serious allegation must always be backed with the strongest standard of proof*, due to the consequences of getting the allegation wrong. And if you think you're helping as a member of a majority race by backing his allegation you're dead wrong. What you're doing is encouraging a race to the bottom, rewarding a hair trigger reaction to pull the race card. You're also teaching everyone else who wants to avoid trouble, that this race should be treated with delicate gloves instead of you know, fairly, just like everyone else in a truly race blind society."
Singapore is importing poisonous American identity politicsMeme - "LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE. COMFORTABLE CHILDHOOD. GIGANTIC EGO. ENTITLEMENT MENTALITY. BELOW AVERGE LIFE ACCOMPLISHMENTS. SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR"
A Headline That Perfectly Encapsulates Mainstream Liberalism: - "“JUST IN: Senate Passes $740 Billion Defense Bill With Provision To Remove Confederate Names Off Military Bases” reads a headline from the digital news site Mediaite, which could also serve as a perfect diagnosis for everything that is sick about mainstream liberal orthodoxy. The Democrat-led House and Republican-led Senate have now both passed versions of this bill authorizing three-quarters of a trillion dollars for a single year of military spending, both by overwhelming bipartisan majorities, on the condition that the names of Confederate Civil War leaders be removed from military bases. Unsurprisingly, Security Policy Reform Institute’s Stephen Semler found a direct relationship between how much a House Democrat has been paid by the war industry and how likely they were to have voted for the bloated military budget which also obstructs any attempts to scale down troop presence in Afghanistan. This is everything that is horrible about the Democratic Party and the ideological position of mainstream liberals. Their leaders have figured out a way to trade hard objects for empty narrative. To get people to consent to almost limitless amounts of thievery, murder and exploitation in exchange for words and stories. They’ll get rid of Confederate names on bases, but they won’t even slightly reduce the vast fortunes they’re stealing from an impoverished populace and pouring into global slaughter and oppression. They’ll kneel wearing Kente cloth, but they won’t even think about dismantling the US police state. They’ll say “I hear you, and that’s something we’re looking at,” but they’ll never intervene against plutocrats funnelling money away from the needful to add to their unfathomably vast fortunes. They’ll call you whatever gender pronoun you like, but they’ll never do anything to inconvenience the oligarchs and warmongers. They’ll still make you fight tooth and claw for each empty concession, because otherwise they’d be devaluing the empty, imaginary currency they’re trading you in exchange for the concrete things they want."
Why One Sociologist Says It’s Time for Black Women to Date White Men - "What do tennis star Serena Williams, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris and businesswoman Mellody Hobson have in common? They’re all married to white men. But despite these real-world examples of interracial relationships, a 2010 Pew Research Center report found that black women are the least likely group of women to marry, especially outside of their own race... “There are far more black women than there are black men in this country, and that’s been for some time,” said Cheryl Judice, a sociologist and adjunct faculty member in Northwestern University’s School of Education and Public Policy. “Right from age 16 and forward, black women start outnumbering black men. For whites, that doesn’t happen until age 32,” she said. “As a result, if you don’t think about dating outside the race, then you very might well may wind up single.”... Judice said it’s common for black women to not consider dating white men for a few reasons, including historical tensions and a lack of positive black female representation in the media."
Woke warriors threaten our sense of identity | Comment | The Times - "Here’s one of those cryptic puzzles familiar to listeners of radio quizzes: what do the sacking of a university lecturer for musing that Jewish people excel in some academic disciplines, the disbanding of a cathedral choir, and Boris Johnson catching crabs in Orkney have in common with the Vancouver Jazz Festival?... It’s true that economics and identity are always in the front seats of the political car, and for most of my lifetime economics has had its hands on the steering wheel. We used to have a consensus on questions of ethnic or gender identity; what divided us were questions about public spending and taxes. In recent years economics has moved over to the passenger seat thanks to a growing consensus on public finances while identity politics have seized the wheel. Western societies are now veering all over the road and the political satnav has lost its signal. This week’s prize nuttiness comes from Duke University, North Carolina, ranked 20th in the world, ahead of the London School of Economics and Edinburgh. Its “Teaching for Equity” programme tells academics that “objectivity”, “perfectionism” and “a sense of urgency” are traits of — I kid you not — “white supremacy”. As is “worship of the written word”. Here, the decision to disband the Sheffield Cathedral choir, while no doubt largely down to some internal disputes, owes something, apparently, to the notion that choral music is alienating to what the dean calls a “mixed urban community”: code for a city with some people of colour in it. Tell that to the great bass baritone Sir Willard White, or to the soprano Kathleen Battle, both pretty “urban”.... while [Miles Davis] regarded Marsalis as a technically great player, his musical eclecticism irked the older man. “They got Wynton playing some old dead European music,” Davis complained. “If he keeps on, they’re going to f*** him up.” Davis’s philosophy was based on the idea that black musicians should stick to the African-American tradition and not fool around with other people’s notes. Marsalis, a bolder, more confident soul, believed that he could take on the European tradition at its own game and win. Progressives today tend to share Davis’s view that people should stay in their lane but I’m with Marsalis. The fact that a particular activity may be dominated by a group does not mean that they own it. No list of great horn players would omit Bix Beiderbecke and Chet Baker. And celebration of a group’s tradition shouldn’t limit its members’ ambition. However, the most serious failure on the left is that we only see identity as a source of oppressing or suffering. Hence when Stephen Lamonby ventured to suggest that Jewish people were among the cleverest in the world, it seems that his university colleagues could only read this as a prelude to discrimination... I am troubled by a judge’s assertion that ascribing certain talents to a group was “potentially racist” because “talents or abilities will vary wildly from individual to individual”. Singing “glad to be gay” does not demean heterosexuality any more than declaring “I am woman” suggests that men are a bad lot. It is true that while most great jazz trumpeters are black I’ll never be one of them. I once ran very fast but I was always a duffer with a cricket ball. Neither fact prevents me from identifying with the success of American jazz musicians and West Indian fast bowlers; pride in my identity does not have to imply criticism of anyone else’s. But increasingly, the woke are turning what should be the very basis of solidarity — pleasure in what people who share your background bring to the world — into a source of suffering, misery and fear. If the left wants to defeat nationalism, it needs to change its tune on belonging. Discrimination on the basis of gender, race or sexual orientation has caused us all much grief. Let’s not make the joy of belonging to a tribe a fresh casualty of the culture wars."
Facebook - "Cheapest and safest way to take down a rich and militarily powerful country is to exploit fault lines internally via fake social media accounts. Happened to the USA, and noted its happening to Singapore as well. A lot of attempts to play up the racial angle on things to get a mob going in recent times, and quite a few innocents swayed by the agitators and taking up torches themselves. Makes it hard to tell who the original ringleaders are, since they can now hide in the crowd."
Anti-racism protesters in Paris yell 'dirty Jews' at counter-protesters - "French anti-racism protesters shouted antisemitic slogans including "dirty Jews""
Clear proof that it's just anti-racism and just anti-Zionism
Opinion: ‘Woke’ psychiatrists have lost sight of the biological causes of mental illness - The Globe and Mail - " We have moved from a narrower biomedical model of understanding mental illness to a more encompassing approach that touches on three factors: the biological, the psychological and the social. Addressing all three is the secret sauce to best outcomes. But as we progressively attend to social determinants of health, we must not lose sight of the biological and organic (in the body) aspects of mental illness. They are essential to understanding, treatment and care. Yet, too many of my peers want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. To be “woke” today is to acknowledge the factors that intersect with mental illness, but to ignore the illness itself. It is almost taboo to suggest that social inequities are not the sole cause for the development of mental illness... The next time you see your doctor for a bronchitis would you really want them exclusively focusing on building codes and HVAC systems?"
MAT192H1 | Academic Calendar - "Liberating Mathematics
Currently, mathematics is at a crossroads between tradition and progress. Progress has been led in large part by women mathematicians, in particular Black women, Indigenous women, and women from visible minorities. Intertwined in their studies of mathematics is a daring critique of traditional mathematics, re-imagining of mathematics culture, and more. This course will compare and contrast new forms of accessible mathematics with standard sources that draw dominantly on the experiences and narratives of men."
Comments: "A history of mathematics course with focus on underappreciated contributions from marginalized groups sounds potentially interesting to me. This page seems scant on details though."
"That is an extremely generous framing for this kind of courses. You are right that there are not a lot of context/details in the submitted course description. Here's some information I could find about the the course's instructor: Her name is Piper Harron, and she is the kind of person who thinks all white men "almost certainly should resign" from their positions or get a demotion, voluntarily. She has a "liberated" résumé, and looking at that, I'd say it is fair to characterize her as a professional victim"
