Thursday, August 25, 2022

Links - 25th August 2022 (1 - General Wokeness)

Meme - "Please just call me a faggot"
Unicorn March @UnicornMarch: "Anyway, I just figured out how to incorporate the L and still have a pronounceable acronym:
QTIPAL+
Queer/Questioning
Transgender
Intersex
Polyamorous/bi/pan
Ace/aro/agender/ally
Lesbian/gay
+ all others who need it
pronounced cutie-pal"
iFunny blocks "faggot" grr

A Shave, a Haircut, and a Blood Pressure Test (Update) - Freakonomics - "JENA: Can you think of a situation where something like this came up where you were treating a Black patient who you thought had better outcomes because you were the one who was involved in the care of that patient?
ESSIEN: Absolutely. When I got into medical school — third-year medical student rotating on internal medicine and we were really struggling with communicating with one of the patients on our team, predominantly white, a couple of Asian individuals on our team. And my attending said, “You know what, why don’t you go chat with, with Mr. L. He’s someone that I think you guys could really bond with, really relate with.” And I think I kind of got what he was saying. I was the one African American member of the team. This was an African American patient. And our relationship did influence the way that we were providing care for that patient, who again, was kind of giving us the cold shoulder and not really interested in our recommendations for his care. And I think him and I really connected in a way that was meaningful, not just because that was a third year med student who had more time than the rest of my team members, but because of that relationship. And I’ve seen this time and time again throughout residency... we looked at these eight states that have had these affirmative action bans in 21 public schools in those states. And so, that includes Arizona, California, Florida, and a few others. And we looked at the five years after that affirmative action ban to see how their numbers of underrepresented in medicine students changed. we saw this nearly over 30 percent drop in underrepresented in medicine students, at these medical schools in states that had affirmative action bans. Policy actually influences the diversity of our medical schools and ultimately our physician workforce. As we already have been talking about, I do personally believe — and I think the data suggest — that diversifying our workforce matters for the health of our patients."
So if white male patients have better outcomes when treated by white male doctors...
The fetish over student-teacher ratio is instructive for this demand for affirmative action - in reality when more teachers are hired to reduce it, quality drops and students have worse outcomes

US conservatives are routing the failing Left, and the Tories can learn from their success - "American politics today is dominated by a generation of Left-wing politicians who are all in, or fast approaching, their 80s. They are out of ideas and out of successors. If you look at the bench of Democrat politicians likely to replace Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi it is very thin pickings indeed. Can anyone imagine a great wave of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg?... all eyes are on the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis...   DeSantis, by contrast – at half Trump’s age – spells a break from the past as well as a continuation of it. These things are not mutually exclusive. The 43-year-old could thank Trump for some of the good things he achieved, but promise to take it from here without the overweight baggage that Trump has come to be.  Best of all is that, as Governor of Florida, DeSantis has some serious successes behind him. He was the Governor who during Covid made sure that his state did not lock down...   On other issues DeSantis has been a hero to many conservatives. In America, as in Britain, the Left fights an endless, comprehensive culture war. It tries to reframe everything, making things everyone knew until yesterday into things that nobody can say today. DeSantis plays them at their own game. When the college athlete Lia (born William) Thomas knocked biologically female athletes off the top podium in a college swimming competition earlier this year many people were outraged. The Left has continued pushing Thomas, nominating her for awards for “women’s swimming” and much more. DeSantis has responded by signing a declaration saying that Florida recognises the women who came second and third as the people who actually came first and second.  Of course, a portion of the Left then howled at DeSantis. How could he be so bigoted? How could he be so petty? In fact, he is simply asserting what everybody would have asserted until about three years ago. Nothing he has done is bigoted. Nothing he has done is hateful. He has simply asserted a truth and stuck to it.  It is the same with other “culture war” issues. Major American corporations have kept injecting themselves into political debates. When the state of Georgia recently passed legislation on voter ID (asking that voters prove who they are when they show up to vote) the Left denounced it as “racist”. For reasons too ridiculous and obvious to get into, major corporations threatened to boycott the state. Georgia looked in trouble for a bit.  Then earlier this year they tried the same thing on Florida... DeSantis did something almost unheard of in the culture wars. He fought back...   In Britain, our conservatives don’t always like this sort of talk. They watch the Left play remorseless culture wars and then wimp out from responding in kind. Boris Johnson was well placed to push back against many of the Left’s advances in the UK. He did nothing.  But as Kemi Badenoch has shown, the Right can, and should, push back. In her position as equalities minister Badenoch made her name by rejecting the Left’s race-based educational ideas. She resisted forcibly and comprehensively the Left’s insistence that Britain is a “systemically racist” country. And she pushed back against her predecessor Penny Mordaunt’s ludicrous idea that people must be said to be biologically whatever it is they claim to “feel” to be that day. This is not a side show. It is part of a path to victory. To show that conservatives will not just be pushed around, but that conservatives will fight back"

The perils of associating "white" with "privilege" in the classroom - "As a scholar of political psychology, I believe that associating "white" with "privilege" can do more harm than good because it reinforces harmful stereotypes. It can make people of color feel that social privilege belongs only to white people. If racial minorities believe they are perceived as disadvantaged, the stereotype can diminish their academic performance by activating a psychological phenomenon called stereotype threat – the fear of conforming to a negative stereotype.  That, in turn, induces underperformance on intellectual tasks. And it has also been shown to reduce confidence and heighten anxiety.  Discussions regarding white privilege are not restricted to social media. Increasingly, they are being adopted by university websites and racial justice activists.   This phrase can serve as a constant reminder to students of color that society perceives them as being socially inferior and economically disadvantaged by default.  In other words, those using the phrase "white privilege" to address racial inequities may, paradoxically, reinforce white privilege...   An exercise conducted by Kanakuk Link Year – a Christian program for post-high school students – offers a good example.  In the exercise, an instructor asks a group of teens to participate in a race for US$100. Before starting, he asks participants to take several steps forward if they meet the criteria of privilege, such as having a father figure at home or access to a private education...   Academics argue that such an exercise can do more harm than good. That's because it stigmatizes people of color instead of challenging institutions that perpetuate inequality."

UBC apologizes after ‘yellow privilege’ document sparks controversy among students - "An email from a residence advisor to students about Asian privilege is facing backlash over its language and claims.  A Reddit user posted the document, titled “Yellow Privilege,” which was contained in an email sent to students living in UBC Exchange Residence on November 26.  The six-page document sought to educate residents on “yellow privilege,” defining it as “very real advantages to East Asians such as protections under the criminal law.” The document discusses the model minority myth, arguing that it has enabled Asians to become oppressors of other minorities while also becoming accommodating to white supremacy... Users on Reddit raised concern over the racially insensitive use of the word “yellow,” particularly given the sharp rise of anti-Asian hate crime incidents since the onset of COVID-19"
I guess we all need to start talking about "Yellow Privilege" now as our friends to the north try to one-up us in the intersectionality sweepstakes. - "Stephen Chang of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, wrote a paper nearly five years ago titled, yes, "Yellow Privilege."... The outrage here should not be with this kid, everything in this document is vanilla wokism and consistent with critical race theory. I hate to say it, but there's nothing new here, not if you've spent any time on a college campus lately."

Photo of College Lecture on 'Right-Handed Privilege' Goes Viral - "A photo of an activist giving a presentation about "right-handed privilege"—a theory that those who are right-handed have life advantages over those who are left-handed—at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), has gone viral... Students at the university confirmed to Newsweek that the presentation was not satire, and was in fact part of a mandatory program by the university's Office of Fraternity & Sorority Life, which oversees the 51 fraternity and sorority organizations at the institution... Christina Parle, a leftwing activist and an instructional designer for the company Social Responsibility Speaks, gave the presentation on October 18... The hour-long presentation at UNC Chapel Hill also spoke about intersectionality, Indigenous land acknowledgement, identity politics, as well as privilege, social constructs and systems of oppression.  The Carolina Review reported that attendees were instructed to take notes and electronic devices were prohibited, and Greek organizations were threatened with fines if they didn't send chapter representatives to the lecture."

Teach your children about 'white privilege', Barnardo's tells parents prompting MPs' complaint - "The UK’s biggest children’s charity has been reported to the official regulator over new guidance that says parents and grandparents should be teaching children about “white privilege”....   "Many people who would want to support Barnardo’s will be turned off if they think it has become yet another charity more obsessed with political correctness and virtue signalling than actually helping people in need."... Kemi Badenoch, the Equalities minister, told MPs in October that teaching children about "white privilege and their inherited racial guilt" could be "breaking the law"."

So much for white privilege... - "The Office for Students (OfS) claims that ‘poor white teens’ are being ‘left behind’ by not going to university. Chris Millward, the director for fair access and participation at the OfS, looked at a ‘combination of factors such as race, poverty and place’ and identified 90 per cent of those young people in the lowest higher-education-participation quintile as white British. These young people also either received free school meals or grew up in neighbourhoods with low HE-participation rates... While 40 per cent of white British kids go to university, only 16 per cent on free school meals go. In comparison, 59 per cent of Black African and 73 per cent of Asian Chinese kids on free school meals continue their education after secondary school. As writer Kenan Malik has pointed out before, class is important. ‘African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants to Britain have come largely from working-class and peasant backgrounds’, he wrote. ‘Indians, Chinese and Africans tend to be more middle class.’ So much for white privilege. It’s depressing that it takes stats showing kids at a disadvantage in places like Hillsborough, Skegness or Great Yarmouth to prove the idiocy – and elitism – of identity politics... we need to think about how we might provide opportunities for smart young people who have very little in the way of a support network"

‘White privilege’ should not be taught in schools as fact, says Nadhim Zahawi - "Schools should not teach “white privilege” as a fact, the Education Secretary has said.  “Contested theories” and opinions should also not be presented to children without an appropriate balance, according to a new paper presented to parliament by Nadhim Zahawi.  The paper was written in response to the education select committee’s report about how white working-class pupils have been “let down” by the state.  Earlier this year, the committee concluded that white working-class pupils have been “neglected” by the education system for decades.  In their report, MPs urged schools to cease using the term “white privilege”, which “pits one group against another”.  MPs said that promoting this kind of terminology in schools could potentially contravene their duties under the Equality Act 2010...   “Schools must not promote partisan political views and should take steps to ensure the balanced treatment of political issues”...   Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, pictured below, has previously said that the concept of “white privilege” is “stoking divisions” and “marginalising the most disadvantaged” in society...   He said that political issues relating to racial and social justice could be taught about as long as it is done in a “balanced and factual manner”...   The proportion of white British pupils on free school meals who went on to study at university after finishing school was just 16 per cent, the lowest of any ethnic group other than travellers of Irish heritage and gipsy/Roma."

Teaching of 'white privilege' rife in schools despite warnings it is unlawful - "Teachers have been accused of introducing “politically biased” materials to pupils during lessons about the police, racism and colonialism... the Free Speech Union submitted a dossier to Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, which contains the details of cases where schools around the country have engaged in “politicised teaching”.  It includes one case at the Piggott School, an academy in Berkshire, where parents raised concerns about a classroom resource titled “A kid-friendly guide to social justice terms”.   This worksheet defined the police as “workers chosen by, protecting and serving people in power”, and racism as “rules, ideas, and actions that target people of colour to keep them under the control of those who already have racial power”. Children were also taught that “micro-aggressions” are a form of “unintended discrimination” and can include asking someone from an ethnic minority whether they speak good English, or telling them that their hair would “look so good if it was straight”. The school declined to comment.  At another secondary school in Lewisham, south London, students were told that they were “privileged by virtue of being white” and “that the police must be reformed, that students should engage in protest”, according to the dossier.  Pupils were also told that “whiteness will always protect and insulate someone from racism” and that the court system is biased due to white privilege.  Meanwhile, at a secondary school in Kent, the dossier revealed that a teacher compared the former US president Donald Trump to Hitler during a history lesson. At Chesnut Grove school in Balham, south London, pupils were given a worksheet which asked them “what is the purpose of a police officer?” and then had a section of “key words” which were “colonies, racial profiling, juvinile [sic], corruption, reform, accountability”.  A spokesman for the school denied any involvement in political indoctrination"

Even an English accent counts as ‘privilege’, according to the NHS woke brigade - "Speaking with a “cottage cream-thick English accent” is an example of privilege, NHS leaders have been told in seminars on racial justice.  NHS executives and medics have attended a series of online sessions discussing “whiteness” and “systemic” racism in the health service, as part of diversity training...   Each speaker stated their pronouns, such as she/her and he/him, while introducing themselves...   In one talk in June, titled “creating an anti-racist NHS – what is the work to get us there?”, Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies, claimed the NHS needed to “acknowledge that there was systemic racism in the workplace from individual workers to executives”.  He went on to tell 850 NHS staff that they needed to “unlearn” their preconceptions about privilege and realise “all it means is that you’re protected from the effects of adversity”...   Conservative MPs and the Health Secretary are understood to be concerned that taxpayer money handed to the NHS after the National Insurance rise could be spent on diversity training."
Clearly the Tories are just deliberately underfunding the NHS

Teachers who use term 'white privilege' should be reported as extremists says Tory - "Jonathan Gullis made the hardline claim at the Tory conference - where he also said teachers who show support for Labour in the classroom should be sacked.  The Stoke-on-Trent North MP, a former teacher himself, made the comments... “The other way we can stop the cancel culture is by actually saying to the woke left lecturers and the woke left teachers, who seem to be becoming more and more apparent, ‘ultimately, guess what’s going to happen’.  “‘If you are going to push your ideology in the classroom there are going to be consequences for you.’  “I don’t push Conservatism in the classroom, it wasn’t an appropriate thing to do…"
Of course his lived experience doesn't mean anything since it hurts the left

christoph on Twitter - "‘It’s time to put away fake tan for good - it represents a double standard of white privilege’, writes @lailawoozeer"
"Of the many gifts the Asian diaspora have given the world, the “White people shouldn’t do this relatively harmless thing because I got bullied 20 years ago” genre of writing is one of our most precious"

Today's lesson children: White privilege and why there hasn't been a black Bond - "A private school in London will teach students why James Bond is always a white man in new "white privilege" lessons.  St Dunstan's, where fees are £18,000 a year and alumni include the former MP Chuka Umunna, has introduced the course following increasing awareness of racial disparities highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement.  The school’s pupils will also be taught about consent, why they do not have to hug their grandparents and topics such as how Meghan Markle may have faced more adversity than Kate Middleton when joining the Royal family.  The classes are taken by pupils from year nine, aged 13, and are thought to be among the first of their kind at a private school."

Facebook - "REMINDER: Self diagnosis is valid because formal diagnosis is a privilege. Pass it on."
When the demand for victimhood exceeds its supply

Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "Perhaps the best measure of the success of our society is that we can afford to subsidize such a large parasite class, often employed basically to complain about our society."

Peter Dinklage Blasts Critics of His Latest Movie Role - "Actor Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones fame says criticisms he received from the “politically correct” for playing Hervé Villechaize were horribly misplaced.  Dinklage starred in the 2018 film “My Dinner With Hervé,” where he played the role of Hervé Villechaize, a French actor and painter. Dinklage explained that critics were wrongly outraged that a white man would play the role of someone they thought was Filipino, even though Villechaize was French... "Hervé was not Filipino, he had a form of Dwarfism that gave him a certain outward appearance""
Ironically, he also played the oppression card for Snow White

Americans are flooding Mexico City. Some want them gone - Los Angeles Times - "The influx, which has accelerated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and is likely to continue as inflation rises, is transforming some of the city’s most treasured neighborhoods into expat enclaves. In leafy, walkable quarters such as Roma, Condesa, Centro and Juarez, rents are soaring as Americans and other foreigners snap up houses and landlords trade long-term renters for travelers willing to pay more on Airbnb. Taquerias, corner stores and fondas — small, family-run lunch spots — are being replaced by Pilates studios, co-working spaces and sleek cafes advertising oat-milk lattes and avocado toast.  And English — well, it’s everywhere: ringing out at supermarkets, natural wine bars and fitness classes in the park... Some chilangos, as locals are known, are fed up.  Recently, expletive-laced posters appeared around town.  “New to the city? Working remotely?” they read in English. “You’re a f—ing plague and the locals f—ing hate you. Leave.”... Rodwell, who is Black, said she doesn’t feel guilty.  “I kind of feel like, as a person of color from America, I’m so economically disadvantaged that wherever I go and experience some advantage or equity, I take it”... Euroza said he was sick of feeling like an outsider in his city. Around 60%-70% of his clients are foreigners, he said.
Is it racist and xenophobic to hate immigrants of another race speaking a different language who are transforming your neighbourhood?
Grievance mongering means people who have been told they are victims are happy to victimise other people

Angela Marie on Twitter - "BREAKING: Portland restaurant comes up with innovative new idea to promote racial equity: Creating separate sections for black and white diners.  "We want to provide a safe space for our diners of color to ease the trauma of living in this racist society," the owner said."
"Coming next week; “separate sections” on Portland buses & in movie theatres, “separate” public washrooms, race-based water fountains, “separate access hours” for swimming pools, libraries, & other public facilities, & MORE! "
"Satire only works if it touches on some truism of lived experience. As someone who lives in Portland and travels in liberal circles, this isn’t satire. It isn’t funny. It’s not an “own the libs” tweet. If anything it’s a self-own considering the number of people who believe it."

Auron MacIntyre on Twitter - "America deserves to know where every single Republican stands on the Trump plan to gut the civil service and run the government with Republican Party loyalists because that's fascistAF."
"After a taste of defeat with the Supreme Court the left are pushing “staffing an administration makes you fascist” The realization that the unelected government apparatus that really runs the country may not always work in their favor has shattered the sense of invulnerability"

Marco Rubio on Twitter - "Association which administers medical college admissions test (MCAT) calls for students to demonstrate competence in “white privilege”“anti-colonialism” & “race as a social construct” Because marxists are only satisfied by complete power over everything"

Meme - "THROWBACK TO WHEN SESAME STREET USED 3 BLACK KIDS TO FORM THE LETTER "N""

‘Christ Is King’: Man Allegedly Vandalized Bakery Hosting Drag Show - "“Christ is King” was just one of the ominous messages left scrawled on the walls of the UpRising Bakery and Café in a suburb of Chicago, one night before it planned to hold an evening “Drag Brunch” event... It’s been co-opted in the last year by white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes and his followers, who call themselves “Groypers.” “Christ is King” has become these young white nationalists’ calling card and mantra, particularly as they try to build inroads into more-mainstream Christian communities."
Good luck if you say "allahu akbar" is ominous

Acquitted on Steam - "Piss bottles. Bats. Bike locks. Face the media-manufactured outrage of braindead mobs in a fully destructible, randomly generated riot zone as you try to get home from court alive after each self-defense trial. Shoot, hack, blast & build walls & turrets vs tricky AI in this brutally intense shooter!"
On Kyle Rittenhouse

Meme - "ANC 28 Years of progress *Tree growing on railroad track*"
Damn colonialism!

Meme - Mastercard @Mastercard: "For those who don't identify with the name on their card, a simple purchase can put them at risk. That's why we created True Name, which lets transgender & non-binary communities display their chosen name on their card. Because being your true self is #Priceless"
Punished Wormwood @real_wormwood: "lol it works
NIGGERFAG"

Meme - Anime Msh Cartoon (EGY): "One of the graduation projects of the College of Fine Arts By : Noor Mosaad
One of my fine arts students graduation projects <3
One of the graduation projects of the College of Fine Arts By : Noor Mosaad"
*Man protecting family with shield from rainbow shot by Buzz Lightyear, Evil Mickey grooming boy, Donald Duck with jack-in-the-box*

Identity-Politics Democrats Preach Hate toward Conservatives (aka "Conservative Americans Experience Progressive Identity Politics as Hatred") - "practitioners of identity politics constantly make “motte-and-bailey” arguments... Far-left progressives are constantly making sweeping, stereotypical, and hateful arguments about those outside their own tribe. They’ll speak with venom about white people. They’ll act as if “whiteness” represents a malicious, cultural monolith — lumping together a senator’s child with a foster kid living in a double-wide. They’ll behave as if orthodox Christians are bigots who adopted their theology to justify their hatred.  When called on a level of hatred they’d never tolerate in others, they retreat to their motte, their fort. Love trumps hate, they say. All we seek is racial equality, dignity, and justice for the marginalized. But as soon as the crisis passes, they march right back out to force students to make their privilege walks, silence Christians in the workplace, and hector Americans from every available platform and media outlet...   It’s pretty simple, really. Progressives cannot make false accusations of hate and expect support. And they most definitely cannot seek to restrict another person’s most fundamental rights to speak or practice their religion and expect compliance. Yet that is how conservatives experience identity politics. In such circumstances, can the Left expect anything other than condemnation from its targets?"

The Scientific Importance of Free Speech - "Editor’s note: this is a shortened version of a speech that the author was due to give last month at King’s College London which was canceled because the university deemed the event to be too ‘high risk’...
Stomach problems such as gastritis and ulcers were historically viewed as the products of stress. This opinion was challenged in the late 1970s by the Australian doctors Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, who suspected that stomach problems were caused by infection with the bacteria Helicobacter pylori. Frustrated by skepticism from the medical establishment and by difficulties publishing his academic papers, in 1984, Barry Marshall appointed himself his own experimental subject and drank a Petri dish full of H. pylori culture. He promptly developed gastritis which was then cured with antibiotics, suggesting that H. pylori has a causal role in this type of illness. You would have thought that given this clear-cut evidence supporting Warren and Marshall’s opinion, their opponents would immediately concede defeat. But scientists are only human and opposition to Warren and Marshall persisted. In the end it was two decades before their crucial work on H. pylori gained the recognition it deserved, with the award of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. From this episode we can see that even in situations where laboratory experiments can provide clear evidence in favour of a particular scientific opinion, opponents will typically refuse to accept it. Instead scientists tend cling so stubbornly to their pet theories that no amount of evidence will change their minds and only death can bring an end to the argument, as famously observed by Max Planck... The existence of scientific debate is also crucial because as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman remarked in 1963: “There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.”... When one side of a scientific debate is allowed to silence the other side, this is an impediment to scientific progress because it prevents bad theories being replaced by better theories. Or, even worse, it causes civilization to go backward, such as when a good theory is replaced by a bad theory that it previously displaced. The latter situation is what happened in the most famous illustration of the dire consequences that can occur when one side of a scientific debate is silenced. This occurred in connection with the theory that acquired characteristics are inherited. This idea had been out of fashion for decades, in part due to research in the 1880s by August Weismann. He conducted an experiment that entailed amputating the tails of 68 white mice, over 5 generations. He found that no mice were born without a tail or even with a shorter tail. He stated: “901 young were produced by five generations of artificially mutilated parents, and yet there was not a single example of a rudimentary tail or of any other abnormality in this organ.”  These findings and others like them led to the widespread acceptance of Mendelian genetics. Unfortunately for the people of the USSR, Mendelian genetics are incompatible with socialist ideology and so in the 1930s USSR were replaced with Trofim Lysenko’s socialism-friendly idea that acquired characteristics are inherited. Scientists who disagreed were imprisoned or executed. Soviet agriculture collapsed and millions starved."
Warren and Marshall should have just trusted the science, followed the science, and not been science deniers and continued to spread their dangerous unscientific misinformation

The New Puritans - "UMass policy bans consensual sexual contact between faculty and “any students or postdoctoral researchers they teach, advise or supervise.” Although the College Democrats said Morse “abused his power for sexual relationships,” no one seems to be accusing him of sleeping with one of his own students. The issue here appears to lay entirely in the group’s conception of “power,” which reads like a parody of post-millenial paranoia... the College Democrats just defined communicating on social media as a kind of sexual act... the group explained that when Morse wrote to those adult students – who, of course, gave Morse their contact info voluntarily – they lacked the free will to ignore his communications... American college students, it seems, are so intimidated by someone with a political job title that they lack the agency to ignore an Instagram shout-out... This is not a sexual harassment issue in the classic sense of someone who actually has power over someone else, for instance in the workplace or in a classroom. The concept here is that students who might “wish to enter progressive politics” will feel uncomfortable refusing, or even just not answering, so mighty a personage as the Mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, for fear of what that might do to their job prospects someday, in a field they have not even chosen yet. Therefore, just as a child or, say, a St. Bernard cannot consent to sex, neither apparently can an adult college student with an uncertain job future. And given that consent is “complicated” when such a “lopsided power dynamic” comes into play, it’s no wonder that the actual encounters could be harrowing – even when, as the Boston Globe explained, the victims were not even aware of that “power imbalance” at the time... the most grotesque part of the story is the obsessive/delusional misunderstanding of “power,” which after years of intersectional propaganda has become the primary lens through which young progressives see the world. Constant preaching that all human interactions are political contests, with one side always getting the better of the other, has made a whole generation phobic about adulthood. This terror of a world separated into victimizers and victims has already ruined journalism, where a new class of reporters is so locked into the idea that every second of airtime or line of an editorial is an exercise of power that they’ve begun demanding the removal of alternative political viewpoints from their publications — other ideas make them feel literally unsafe. New reporters see news audiences in much the way the College Democrat leaders view students, as helpless beings incapable of exercising judgment or free will. Journalists like me once enjoyed the idea that our audiences were grownups capable of taking in difficult truths and deciding their meaning for themselves: the new trend is to see audiences as defenseless, childlike lumps, who must be led to the correct political conclusion the way horses are led by their bits... young people seduced by academic busybodies instead of metal stars or rappers, fleeing the freedoms of adulthood instead of rushing toward them, and demanding that they be allowed to remain in a permanent infantilized state as a human right."
This also explains why liberals are so worked up over "misinformation" - they think the hoi polloi can't think for themselves

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