Facebook - "Race has never been represented on the #PrideFlag because it's not about race. We have racial issues in the #LGBTQCommunity, but they have nothing to do with our flag and changing its colors does nothing to resolve those issues. We can do better than this. #DontRacializeOurFlag ✊"
Wake Up, Singapore - Posts | Facebook - ""If we allow it to, queerness can free us all. Queer kinship can teach us to take care of each other beyond narrow notions of family. Queerness is life-affirming, gorgeous, revolutionary, and irreverent to authority – and I want us to never forget it. We do not request for our freedom, we do not plead for acceptance, we do not wait for approval. We do not surrender our bodies and relationships to state regulation. We do not need to bargain with the architects of our oppression. Your dignity and mine are non-negotiable." Kokila Annamalai, a community organiser, delivered a moving speech at Pink Dot 14 that touched the hearts of many attendees. In her speech, she shared her dreams for the queer movement."
The tension within Pink Dot (inoffensiveness to do a bait and switch on moderates vs strident activism) has been breaking through for a while but this might be the most extreme manifestation of it yet
UK's first female suicide bomb plotter, 37, planned to blow up St Paul's at Easter to 'kill as many as possible' - "Safiyya Amira Shaikh, 37, carried out a trip to the City of London to scope out St Paul's as a potential target while staying in a hotel... Shaikh became radicalised in 2015 after converting to Islam in 2007 following an act of kindness from a neighbouring Muslim family. Christened Michelle Ramsden, she became isolated from her family during her conversion."
Damn racism and white supremacy!
Trigger Warnings Are Trivially Helpful at Reducing Negative Affect, Intrusive Thoughts, and Avoidance - "These results suggest a trigger warning is neither meaningfully helpful nor harmful."
But then trigger warnings are really about controlling other people and virtue signalling rather than helping anyone
Comment: "Trigger warnings are just a surface feature of the real problem, which is the systematic infantilisation of young adults. The more we protect people from discomfort, the more fragile they become."
Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead - "Trigger warnings increase peoples' perceived emotional vulnerability to trauma.
Trigger warnings increase peoples' belief that trauma survivors are vulnerable.
Trigger warnings increase anxiety to written material perceived as harmful."
Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories - "Trigger warnings alert trauma survivors about potentially disturbing forthcoming content. However, empirical studies on trigger warnings suggest that they are functionally inert or cause small adverse side effects. We conducted a preregistered replication and extension of a previous experiment. Trauma survivors (N = 451) were randomly assigned to either receive or not to receive trigger warnings before reading passages from world literature. We found no evidence that trigger warnings were helpful for trauma survivors, for participants who self-reported a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, or for participants who qualified for probable PTSD, even when survivors’ trauma matched the passages’ content. We found substantial evidence that trigger warnings countertherapeutically reinforce survivors’ view of their trauma as central to their identity. Regarding replication hypotheses, the evidence was either ambiguous or substantially favored the hypothesis that trigger warnings have no effect. In summary, we found that trigger warnings are not helpful for trauma survivors."
The latest study on trigger warnings finally convinced me they’re not worth it. - "“Cognitive avoidance is really counterproductive,” psychologist Darby Saxbe told Katy Waldman for a 2016 Slate story on the then-current science of trigger warnings, a point Jones also made to me. I know this extremely well from my days avoiding public speaking: Having an anxious reaction, and living to tell the tale, is actually an important part of learning to live with one’s brain. That’s not to say that people who have experienced trauma should be left on their own to have that panicked response and just get over it. “Rather than issuing trigger warnings, universities can best serve students by facilitating access to effective and proven treatments for P.T.S.D. and other mental health problems,” Richard McNally, a Harvard psychologist and co-author on the paper with Jones, wrote in the New York Times in 2016. He argued that emotional reactions to assigned readings were “a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome P.T.S.D.” In other words, if you feel you need a trigger warning, maybe what you really need is better medical care... There are other problems with trigger warnings. Even if they did work, how would we go about issuing them for all possible triggers? Different people have different triggers, which are based on personal experiences and may or may not be connected to what the average person considers disturbing or explicit. “My experience is that the audience can do a better job than I can at figuring out what kind of content will upset them by reading the headline than I ever could randomly guessing what blog posts count as triggering,” Amanda Marcotte wrote in Slate in 2013"
Trauma and sex surveys meet minimal risk standards: implications for institutional review boards - "Institutional review boards assume that questionnaires asking about "sensitive" topics (e.g., trauma and sex) pose more risk to respondents than seemingly innocuous measures (e.g., cognitive tests). We tested this assumption by asking 504 undergraduates to answer either surveys on trauma and sex or measures of cognitive ability, such as tests of vocabulary and abstract reasoning. Participants rated their positive and negative emotional reactions and the perceived benefits and mental costs of participating; they also compared their study-related distress with the distress arising from normal life stressors. Participants who completed trauma and sex surveys, relative to participants who completed cognitive measures, rated the study as resulting in higher positive affect and as having greater perceived benefits and fewer mental costs. Although participants who completed trauma and sex surveys reported slightly higher levels of negative emotion than did participants who completed cognitive measures, averages were very low for both groups, and outliers were rare. All participants rated each normal life stressor as more distressing than participating in the study. These results suggest that trauma and sex surveys pose minimal risk."x
Trigger warnings are about power, not preventing harm, after all
Trigger warnings and resilience in college students: A preregistered replication and extension. - "Trigger warnings notify people that content they are about to engage with may result in adverse emotional consequences. An experiment by Bellet, Jones, and McNally (2018) indicated that trigger warnings increased the extent to which trauma-naïve crowd-sourced participants see themselves and others as emotionally vulnerable to potential future traumas but did not have a significant main effect on anxiety responses to distressing literature passages. However, they did increase anxiety responses for participants who strongly believed that words can harm. In this article, we present a preregistered replication of this study in a college student sample, using Bayesian statistics to estimate the success of each effect’s replication. We found strong evidence that none of the previously significant effects replicated. However, we found substantial evidence that trigger warnings’ previously nonsignificant main effect of increasing anxiety responses to distressing content was genuine, albeit small"
Doesn't change the finding that they are either useless or counter-productive
Trigger warnings for abuse impact reading comprehension in students with histories of abuse - "Results: Results showed that students did not differ in their selection of TW-labeled and unlabeled articles. Students with a history of interpersonal violence, however, showed significantly poorer reading comprehension of a TW-labeled article than those who read the same article but denied such histories (p = .004). Conclusions: Results did not support the concern that students may use TWs to avoid content but did support the concern that use of TWs may result in deleterious effects counter to their intended purpose."
University demands people stop saying 'trigger warning' because it's too triggering - "Brandeis University has issued new language that they suggest be used because the previous terms were too offensive, oppressive, and violent. Among those terms to obliterate is the phrase "trigger warning." As alternatives to "trigger warning," which is itself a term that was invented to make college students feel safe in class, Brandeis suggests the phrases "content note" or "drop-in" be used. "The word 'trigger,'" they write, "has connections to guns for many people; we can give the same head's up using language less connected to violence." In addition to "trigger warning," the Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center has made a list of "violent language" that they suggest be removed utterly from a person's vocabulary. The phrase Orwellian comes to mind, and likely they would say that, too, is an oppressive descriptor of their "oppressive language list."... "Killing it," they note, is not okay because "If someone is doing well, we don't need to equate that to murder!" Brandeis suggests that "great job" or "awesome" be used instead. Both "take a shot at" and "take a stab at" are no good either, because "These expressions needlessly use imagery of hurting someone or something." Instead, try "give it a go," or simply "try." Among the other metaphors and creative language that Brandeis wants to simplify, dumb-down, and make less offensive to whoever is actually offended or oppressed by these phrases, are "rule of thumb," because they say that "This expression comes from an old British law allowing men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb."... "Picnic" is not good either, and Brandeis wants people to say "outdoor eating," because picnics are racist. They write: "The term picnic is often associated with lynchings of Black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating, referring to them as picnics or other terms involving racial slurs against Black people."... Even "long time no see" and "no can do" are out, because "These terms as well as other expressions using broken English originate from stereotypes making fun of non-native English speakers, particularly applied to indigenous people and Asians."... Many of the terms Brandeis condemns to the linguistic dust-bin, however, were themselves the kinder, gentler alternative. They state that "committed suicide" is not a good phrase, and it should be replaced by "died by suicide," or "killed themself," even though the phrase "killed themself" was replaced by "committed suicide" when it was believed to be kinder to say the latter than the former. This is literally a reversal. They state that "Language that doesn't say what we mean can often serve to avoid directly addressing what we really need to say. Using euphemisms, vagueness, and inaccurate words can get in the way of meaningful dialogue; PARC encourages you to be transparent around what you mean." What they are really saying is to speak with terms that are precise to what they want you to mean, regardless of what you actually are meaning to say... Instead of identifying a person as a "victim," or "survivor," which progressive linguistics authoritarians have previously told us are the appropriate terms, Brandeis wants us now to be more specific, and to say "person who has experienced" a given thing, as opposed to identifying a person by their trauma or other status."
I once said that my trigger was the term trigger warning.
The "rule of thumb" is an urban legend but facts don't matter - only feelings
Correlates of “Coddling”: Cognitive distortions predict safetyism-inspired beliefs, belief that words can harm, and trigger warning endorsement in college students - "In their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Haidt (2018) contended that the rise of “safetyism” within American society has inspired beliefs and practices that hinder college students' socioemotional development. One of their most controversial claims was that college students' safetyism-inspired beliefs (e.g., emotional pain or discomfort is dangerous) are rooted in and supported by cognitive distortions, or negatively biased patterns of thought (e.g., emotional reasoning). Citing evocative anecdotes, they argued that such distortions emerge in students' perceptions of offensive or ideologically-challenging experiences as disproportionately harmful or traumatic. However, no empirical work has substantiated an association between cognitive distortions and safetyism-inspired beliefs or practices. In a large (N = 786), ethnically and economically diverse sample of college students, we conducted the first examination of the relationship between these variables. Aligning with Lukianoff and Haidt's assertions, we found that students' self-reported prevalence of cognitive distortions positively predicted their endorsement of safetyism-inspired beliefs, the belief that words can harm, and support for the broad use of trigger warnings. Considering our exploratory results, we argue that greater empirical scrutiny of safetyism-inspired beliefs and practices is warranted before such customs become more widely adopted."
Cognitive distortions linked to safetyism beliefs, support for trigger warnings, and the belief that words are harmful - "Results suggest an association between higher cognitive distortion scores and higher safetyism-inspired beliefs. There, too, was an association between higher cognitive distortion scores and the stronger belief that words are harmful. Higher conflict avoidance, higher social liberalism, and higher economic liberalism were all associated with greater safetyism-inspired beliefs as well. On the other hand, greater safetyism-inspired beliefs were associated with lower resilience and lower analytic thinking. Some exploratory mediation analyses indicated cognitive distortions may predict increased support for trigger warning support through the increase of safetyism-inspired beliefs and through the belief that words can harm"
Trigger Warnings and Mass Psychogenic Illness - "Schools appear to be the most common venue for psychogenic outbreaks, perhaps because a population concentrated in a tight setting makes an ideal conductor... the trigger-warning movement... also creates a state of emergency, draws its power from shared beliefs, and blames injurious effects on phantom causes (such as words on the page). It’s because of the recognized fallacies of hunting for the deep-seated “cause” of our mental ills that the makers of the diagnostic system used to classify psychiatric disorders in the United States—a taxonomy introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980—specifically refrained from making causal attributions. For the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (also introduced in 1980) they made an exception, however. By definition, PTSD is caused by a trauma or “stressor.” Over time, and contrary to the intent of the original designers of the diagnosis, the lowering of the diagnostic threshold made it possible to claim that events well within the scope of common experience set off PTSD. As the chair of the group that drew up the original criteria for PTSD, Nancy Andreasen, noted in 2010, the concept of PTSD following its instatement in the DSM was “steadily broadened by clinicians to include milder stressors that were not intended for inclusion. . . . The diagnosis, assumed to be relatively rare in peacetime, became much more common.” Could those who crafted the diagnosis of PTSD with Vietnam veterans in mind have foreseen the day in 2014 when students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, passed a resolution calling on professors to alert them in advance to material “that may trigger the onset of symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”? A provocative synonym for “cause,” the verb “trigger” as used here and elsewhere by the movement that adopted it exemplifies the beliefs about causality that drive a psychogenic outbreak. Much as illness raced through the Tennessee high school not as a result of a toxic exposure but because those affected got swept up in a frenzy of imitation, demands for trigger warnings raced from coast to coast in recent years in a kind of epidemic manner... While a trigger warning in theory guards against trauma, it has the actual effect of multiplying claims of trauma by students who are primed to expect it and have a ready-made lexicon to describe both its effects and the outrages that bring it on. Elsewhere I’ve discussed the process of “disease-mongering” by which normal experiences like transient depression come to be defined, diagnosed, treated, popularized, and perhaps even suffered as disorders. (See, for example, The Nocebo Effect: Overdiagnosis and Its Costs [Palgrave Macmillan, 2015].) The trigger-warning movement brands and propagates “trauma” in the same way, making it possible to portray even a work as non-inflammatory as The Great Gatsby as dangerous to the psyche of the reader. While the distress of the aggrieved students is real, so was the distress of the Tennesseans who found themselves in the ER as a result of exposure to an agent that didn’t exist. If words on the page have as little power to inflict deep and lasting wounds as an imaginary toxin, then how do they come to be magnified into an existential threat? Possibly the trigger-warning movement itself lends them a virulence they don’t otherwise possess... So much duplication of behavior took place that, in the words of the NEJM authors, symptoms seemed to spread by “contagion”—sociological contagion, that is. For what it’s worth, the medical literature refers to the event inciting such an outbreak as a trigger... While doctors on hand during psychogenic outbreaks tell “war stories” about them and count the costs of the “disruption to the community” (as the NEJM authors put it), the proponents of trigger warnings seek to disrupt the community, just as they aim to impose their own sort of martial law, in which ordinary liberties like respect for the beliefs of others are suspended... a movement intended to give students a sense of security has perversely inflamed their fears."
SJSU bans 'Spartan Up' gesture for resembling a white power hand gesture - "The “Spartan Up” hand gesture will be retired as a San Jose State University tradition because it closely resembles the “white power” hand gesture, SJSU President Mary Papazian announced... Tuite said when the gesture was misinterpreted as an OK sign and not the proper gesture, the improper sign created a division on campus."
Meme - "i knew miss elastigirl was too gorgeous to be straight here's she waving at a woman in the new trailer 2018 IS A GAYS ONLY EVENT"
"Why are all like this"
"SHE'S HAPPILY MARRIED WITH A LOVING AND SUPPORTING HUSBAND AND HAS 3 FUCKING KIDS"
"Ladies, is it gay to smile at another woman?"
"That's not even a woman, that's a LITTLE GIRL. Is this really the hill y'all wanna die on?"
Sears: Criminals Don't End up in Nice Neighborhoods of 'Woke People' Who Let Them Out, Woke Should Help Those They 'Claim to Help' - "Virginia Lt. Gov Winsome Sears (R) said that “we have woke people letting the criminals out” but those criminals don’t end up going to the neighborhoods that woke people live in because the woke crowd lives in nice areas and can afford private security, and urged the woke people to actually help those that they “claim to help and to love more than anybody else.”"
Teen changing identity constantly - "I need some help gaining perspective on my 15-year-old child’s whiplash approach to gender and sexuality. For the last three years, they have been on a journey with regard to their sexuality, declaring and changing identities one every few weeks or months, even when those identities have been both contradictory (how can one be both asexual and polyamorous?) and hypothetical (my kid isn’t dating and hasn’t dated). They are committed to being anything but cisgender and hetero, and that identity—whatever it turns out to be—appears from their actions and words to be the central part of their sense of self. They spent a lot of time on queer wikis, looking up new possible identities. They avidly “ship” fictional characters into same-sex couples, express anger/disappointment when shows/books have hetero couples, and talk constantly about LGBTQIA issues, representation, etc... In the last two weeks, my kid has changed their name once and pronouns twice, colored their hair, worn exaggeratedly feminine eye makeup, pinned their hair up to look masculine, purchased a bikini and a dress and then asked me to buy them a binder (because they think it would be “fun” to look like a boy sometimes). At this point, it feels like they’re trying on identities like costumes, and that makes me very uncomfortable. None of it feels authentic—it seems more like a bid to stand out in a crowd or perhaps to find the limits of my acceptance."
Clearly a bigot
The response is that kids try on identities like costumes and that's normal for adolescence. Weird. I thought that kids know their sexuality from a young age, and we must take people's proclamations about their sexualities at face value
White private school boys are the new disadvantaged, says Cambridge academic | News | The Times - "Professor David Abulafia said that the culture wars had made being “white”, “male” and “privileged” terms of disapproval in university admissions. He claimed that white boys from outstanding private schools were going to Durham, St Andrews and Bristol if rejected by their first choice Oxbridge colleges, rather than being given places in the pooled system where they could be picked up by other colleges. Some were heading to Ivy League universities and might never return to Britain... Abulafia, a historian and fellow of Gonville and Caius College, recommended removing school names from university application forms to avoid any perceived prejudice against the privately educated. He wrote in The Spectator: “It is vital to remember that admitting students is all about individuals. University admissions have become another site for culture wars in which ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘privileged’ are terms of disapproval, linked together to justify injustice... teachers at Eton College were puzzled by the sharp reduction in the number of pupils gaining places at Oxbridge, which halved between 2014 and last year. This coincided with an increase in the number of teenagers with top A-level grades from ambitious state school sixth forms targeting Oxford and Cambridge. Stephen Toope, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, told The Times Education Commission last week that “we have to make it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people who are coming from independent school backgrounds into places like Oxford or Cambridge”. Abulafia claimed that this had been “going on for a long time but has simply become more obvious in the past few years” as university’s state school targets crept up. He insisted that snobbery at Oxbridge was “long gone” and that entrance interviews were based on academic discussion. However, he said candidates who had performed better in thinking skills assessments (TSAs) were being turned away in favour of state school applicants with lower scores."
French food is ‘expression of white privilege’ | World | The Times - "A law professor has suggested that France’s food is racist. A video of Mathilde Cohen, discussing “food whiteness” at a seminar organised by the elite Sciences Po and Nanterre University outside Paris, has provoked consternation in France, where cuisine is seen as a cornerstone of the national identity... “eating culture ... has been the central means of racial and ethnic identity formation through slavery, colonialism, and immigration. The whiteness of French food is all the more powerful in that it is unnamed, enabling the racial majority to benefit from food privileges without having to acknowledge their racial origin.” David Abiker, a journalist, reflected on her comments with irony. On Radio Classique he called on the French to take the knee in their kitchens and to “beat themselves with their whisks”."
Liberals hate their countries after all
Mount Everest is too white, black climbers claim | World | The Times - "A team of black mountain climbers is attempting to climb Everest to tackle what one member described as the sport’s “colonial history”."
‘Quince challenged me’: how to cook, eat and enjoy seven of the world’s most difficult fruits - "No list of difficult fruit would be complete without the durian, the fruit that – while popular in south-east Asia – smells terrible and tastes like onion custard to the western palate. Lebo persevered with durians, only to throw up her hands and admit that she would never truly enjoy eating them. Part of that was cultural, although she wanted to be absolutely sure that she wasn’t adding to the wealth of “white people who might try it, say, ‘This is disgusting’, exoticise it and then discard it”. Eventually, she blended it with condensed milk and popped it into an ice-cream maker. “Arguably delicious,” she says of the results."
White guilt means you must eat food you find disgusting
Meme - "When Foucault was in Tunisia in the late 1960s, he regularly raped boys aged roughly 8- to 10- years-old on the gravestones at a local cemetery, according to Guy Sorman, who met Foucault and saw him paying the children to arrange this."
"Also well known that after his HIV diagnosis he continued to have sex with men in bath houses. (Keep in mind that this is the most cited scholar of all time)"
'Captain Underpants' book pulled over allegations of 'passive racism' - "A new "Captain Underpants" title, "The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future", has been aggressively pulled from shelves by its publisher, Scholastic, amid allegations of what is being called "passive racism"... In the Book, the two protagonists, Ook and Gluk, travel forward in time from prehistoric days to the year 2222, where they meet "Master Wong", who is a martial arts instructor. Master Wong trains the pair so that they can go back in time and "save the day.""
18-Year-Old Trying To File Her Taxes Wishing Her Teachers Had Spent Less Class Time On Polyqueer Trans Theory | The Babylon Bee - "Jones dug up her old notes from her high school economics class, but only found page after page on critical gender theory and a section on the systemic oppression of evil, colonizing arithmetic and its triggering effects on polygender people who bleed. She sighed and rubbed her head. "Well, at least I'll be able to get into Harvard.""
Television Channel In Spain's Valencia Region Refuses To Air Dragon Ball Due To Law Prohibiting “Content That Encourages Gender Discrimination Through Stereotypes And Sexist Roles” - "following a vocal fan campaign requesting that the requesting that the government-owned television channel À Punt air the series, Valencia Deputy of Compromís Mónica Àlvaro asked whether “the General Directorate of the Sociedad Anónima de Medios de Comunicación [planned] to incorporate into the regional channel À Punt the drawings of Bola de Drac in Valencia?”... Despite their belief that Dragon Ball promotes sexism and gender discrimination (in a series featuring, of all characters, Bulma, without whom Earth and the universe at large would have been destroyed a dozen times over), neither the Valencian government nor À Punt Mèdia have provided any specific instances of such content to support their rejection of the series from broadcast."
L.A. Official: U.S. Should 'Make Amends,' Return Land to Black Families - "Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn said Friday that it is time for the U.S. to “make amends” with black families in America by returning land their ancestors owned which was taken from them."
The only thing more important than the public good (served through eminent domain) is anti-racism. Clearly only white people's land should be taken
‘Yellowstone’ Prequel ‘1883’ Dominates Ratings Despite Critic Calling It, ‘Family Values Conservatism’ - "the reviewer gives “1883” a D+, concluding that, “stories of those who sought better futures are certainly worth telling; a problem is that they’ve been chronically incomplete. And in what has been described as a global historical reckoning, as statues and monuments to racism, colonization, and legacies of injustice continue to fall around the world, ‘1883’ just feels like a series out of time.” It’s a sentiment that’s likely shared across Hollywood, but with the audience that “Yellowstone” and “1883” command, it’s clear that the general public has a different take on classic Westerns. “1883” currently has an 88% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s also rated as 86% fresh."
Opinion | This Is How Biden Should Approach the Latino Vote - The New York Times - "We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos... Democrats should call for Americans to unite against the strategic racism of powerful elites who stoke division and then run the country for their own benefit"
This is rich. If you don't support illegal immigration and drugs, want to fund the police and people to follow the law, you are racist. And given that Democrats are the ones using strategic racism to stoke division and run the country for their own benefit...
Gay Couple Was Denied I.V.F. Benefits. They Say That’s Discriminatory. - The New York Times - "A same-sex married couple said in a complaint filed Tuesday that the City of New York discriminated against them in denying them in vitro fertilization coverage under the city’s insurance plan for employees. The couple, Nicholas Maggipinto, 36, and Corey Briskin, 33, claim the policy discriminates against them based on their sex and sexual orientation and that if they were female or in a heterosexual relationship they would have access to the I.V.F. benefits that city employees are entitled to. Mr. Briskin was, until recently, an assistant district attorney. Under the city’s insurance benefits policy, a covered person is only eligible for such services when they are deemed infertile. The policy defines infertility as the inability to conceive after “12 months of unprotected intercourse,” or intrauterine insemination — a procedure that inserts sperm directly inside a uterus — for a period of time."
Biology is discriminatory and homophobic
Then again, since some men can get pregnant, the policy doesn't discriminate against men. And since it covers homosexual women, it doesn't discriminate against homosexuals either
Welcome to the woke age of cinema - where 'historical dramas' peddle revisionist lies - "Even five years ago, it would have been hard to argue with a straight face that a film about a 19th century lady fossil scientist stood as a symbol of one of the great and most menacing social ills of our time. Well, welcome to 2021, a year that – while promising in other ways – seems destined to build on the horrors of its predecessor where woke hegemony and its penchant for ceaseless propaganda, distortion and revisionism are concerned. It has long been obvious that we are living in an age in which historical accuracy has been superseded by the demands of a raging fixation with identity politics and political correctness. But what is becoming freshly apparent is the growing role that TV and film – most of it made by people who have drunk deeply from the trough of woke kool aid – are playing in distorting the past... The film is meant to be about Mary Anning, the 19th century paleontologist (played by Winslet) who made groundbreaking fossil discoveries on the Jurassic Coast. She is a fascinating, totally unsung woman, the story of whose discoveries alone could easily have carried a brilliant, enriching film. All of this was ignored by Francis Lee, the film-maker, who chose instead to focus not just on Anning’s sex life but on an entirely speculative, seemingly fabricated lesbianism with geologist Charlotte Murchison (Ronan). Lee himself is smug about the “storm” this decision has caused, proud of how he has put one in the eye of homophobic western culture and historical tradition. Odd, then, that he seems blind to the fact that he – a man – has usurped and misconstrued the life of the only significant female paleontologist in history in favour of titillation... But Ammonite is just the latest in a growing line of such output. Dickinson, a 2019 drama about Emily Dickinson, featured the famously reclusive 19th century poet as sexually fluid – she actually twerks in one scene. Meanwhile Jamestown, about 17th century settlers in America, had young wives demanding an end to rape, and Hulu’s 2020 drama about Catherine the Great didn’t bother with history at all. Who cares, you may ask? Well, Jamestown or Dickinson alone might not change the course of historical understanding. But other shows will – and have. Take The Crown and Bridgerton, both watched by tens of millions of Netflix subscribers last year. The Crown was based on living characters and real events that most people dimly recognised, so it appeared to be history. Even so, it manipulated reality – and the extraordinary achievements of Margaret Thatcher – in accordance with the politics of Peter Morgan, its maker. Bridgerton, meanwhile, was a costume romp but encouraged viewers to “learn”, misleadingly, that Queen Charlotte was black and that history has been racist in portraying the Regency court as largely white, which it was. History is under siege everywhere from university classes to museum exhibits – and newspapers of the most respectable hue. In 2019, the New York Times launched its 1619 project, an attempt to rescript American history so that it revolves around the date the first slaves were imported, and comes to supersede 1776, the date of American independence. The year 1619 is indeed a terrible and important one, but it’s not where American history starts – and ends." So much for art's duty to portray reality. Of course, its duty to promote liberal gospel is more important
