Thursday, February 01, 2024

Links - 1st February 2024 (2 - General Wokeness)

FIRST READING: The Canadian military’s all-in embrace of far-left 'anti-oppression' dogma - "The Canadian Military Journal is the official peer-reviewed academic journal of the Canadian Armed Forces. Published quarterly since 2000, it has the stated mission “to enhance the continuing development of the profession of arms in Canada.” Its inaugural issue discussed the expansion of NATO. In 2005, it devoted an entire issue to Arctic sovereignty. As recently as 2020, it was considering the implications of filling the RCAF with unmanned drones. But the latest edition — which was just posted online — contains little to no mention of strategy, geopolitics or the avalanche of contemporary problems facing the Canadian Armed Forces. There’s not a single reference to the recruiting crisis, which has left vacancies of up to 40 per cent in some departments. No mention of the plummeting maintenance standards that recently prompted the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy to declare that his fleet was in a “storm” with no end in sight. No discussion of why Canada is slashing its military budget even as its peer countries do the exact opposite. Instead — in a signal of just how far the Canadian Armed Forces has embraced far-left “anti-racist” ideology — the entire issue is devoted to how the Canadian military is a racist, patriarchal den of colonialist oppression that needs to be torn down and remade from scratch... it’s a series of 13 essays all devoted to what an introduction describes as a “feminist intersectional trauma-informed approach to reimagine and transform CAF culture.”... On the whole, the issue’s contributors are very open about the fact that they are adherents of “critical race theory” — a term that appears in the text five times... In just the last few years, the Trudeau government has leaned hard into anti-racism ideology. In 2021, the Privy Council issued an order that the federal public service would now be informed by “anti-racist” tenets. In 2023 the Trudeau government founded the Federal Anti-Racism Secretariat with the explicit goal of overseeing funding, data-collection and policy that would be specifically directed along racial lines."

Crémieux on X - "Average sentence lengths have decreased for Black offenders and increased for White offenders. As a result, White and Black offenders receive nearly equal sentence lengths now and sentences are equal for drug crimes. Race might not matter for criminal sentencing anymore."
This doesn't matter. More blacks than whites go to jail, so there's still "structural racism"

Meme - Get Her, Jade! @keatingssixth: "Why do we even give this cotton- picking, shuck & jiving, "noooooo CaLVin," brittle hair Cantu using bigot and her Uncle Tom foolery cOOnery any attention #CandaceOwens"
Get Her, Jade! @keatingssixth: "Chris Rock's one "joke" was rooted in misogynoir, texturism, & ableism. Degrading a Black woman, in a room full of her peers, on live TV. The fact ya'll don't see that as violent is beyond me."
Liberals are the real racists

i/o on X - "Liberals see the world as a battle between victims and oppressors.   Conservatives see the world as a battle between civilization and barbarism.   Libertarians see the world as a battle between freedom and coercion.   — Arnold Kling, "The Three Languages of Politics""

Paul Golding on X - "Swedish national TV pushing historical disinformation that ancient Swedes were black!"

Goldsmiths and the bigotry of low expectations - "Ask the average person what racial equality is and they will probably say it’s when we treat people the same, regardless of their skin colour. But in the weird world of woke identity politics, equality means the exact opposite: treating whites and non-whites differently.  Goldsmiths, part of the University of London, has announced that ethnic-minority students will now be able delay their exams and get extensions on assignments if they have suffered from ‘racial trauma’... It’s not clear what ‘racial trauma’ actually means here – and what life experiences would be considered sufficiently traumatic to qualify. And so Goldsmiths will let students decide for themselves. Students will not even be expected to provide evidence of their ‘trauma’. Instead, they can ‘self-certify’ their own claims before submitting them for review by the university."

Goldie Hawn Talks Staying Out Of Politics: ‘I Stay In My Lane,’ We Should Entertain ‘For All People’ - "Oscar-winning actress Goldie Hawn on Friday discussed the heavy political activism of Hollywood, stating that she likes to “stay in her lane” when it comes to politics and believes entertainers should strive to “serve” and perform “for all people.” SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly broached the subject with Hawn during her Friday show. “I think it’s why it drives people crazy when Hollywood tries to act holier than thou and starts lecturing middle America about morality and so on,” Kelly said. “And you know, these people sitting in Iowa who have never done any, they’ve never tried to put someone on a casting couch … They’re like, you could save your lectures for somebody else.”... “I stay in my lane,” Hawn continued. “The reality is, is that if we want to do anything, we want to do it for all people, not just for a group or whatever.”  “What makes polarity even more is creating teams on either side of the aisle,” she emphasized. “And I don’t think that’s what we do. I think we entertain. I think we bring awareness to people, just of their ability to laugh, to have joy, to experience it, to cry. We are emotional beings and create emotion in others. And it’s in this case, I think we’re in service.”... comedian and “After Life” creator Ricky Gervais sounded off on Hollywood figures’ lecturing, targeting the Golden Globes, specifically, which Gervais has hosted numerous times.  Most people are completely done with the “lecturing” and “virtue signaling,” especially from wealthy elites, the comedian bluntly asserted.  “With all of the austerity and people struggling, they think, ‘Why are these people lecturing me? They’re going   to an awards ceremony in a limo and are telling me to recycle?’” Gervais explained.  “People just got sick of it, just got sick of virtue signaling,” he continued. “And they were like a beacon to aim their wrath at. … The people with nothing became tired of being lectured by people who had everything.”"

"I Am Not Ready to Reenter White Society" is an actual headline from lefty magazine The Nation and that's not even the worst of it. - "This piece in The Nation is about more than yet another Ivy League alum (Harvard College and Harvard Law School) sitting at the pinnacle of American society prattling on about how very hard he has it. Sadly, there's nothing particularly new about that.  The piece does, however unintended, shine a very bright light on the unavoidable outcome of all-racism-all-the-time thinking that is being administered to the public like arsenic, poisoning the polity slowly but most assuredly over time. Oh, make no mistake, author Elie Mystal is not fond of white people, that much is certain... Here's his mindset. White people have all these "implicit biases," and he has been avoiding going shopping for a year.  He is primed and ready to be offended, and nothing is going to stop him... Here's my lived experience: I have been mistaken for "the help" numerous times. It's happened in Home Depot, it's happened at a drug store, it's happened at an office supply chain. I've been in a shirt and tie and it's happened.  More than once, I have been mistaken for a gardener WHILE WORKING IN MY OWN YARD.  All of which begs the question, why are people like Mystal so offended to be mistaken for a common person? What is it about the lower classes that they view with such disdain, the people who work with their hands, who work in retail. I've always considered it a complement of sorts. I must look like I know what I'm doing, or my yard looks nice.  These champions of the downtrodden sure don't seem to actually like the downtrodden all that much... I don't doubt Mystal has been the target of such, but how much validity will I give such an accusation if he cries wolf the other 99 times?  It also makes it impossible for people of different races to form meaningful personal relationships.  You can't get close to someone if you feel like you're constantly walking on eggshells around them lest some innocent comment trigger them or you mistakenly step on a land mine they planted.  If you leave your house believing that you live in a racist country, you are going to see racism in every benign encounter.  No wonder he doesn't want to leave his house."
When the left go beyond hating on white people to support segregation

Meme - George Takei @GeorgeTakei: "P!nk Just Announced Her Iconic Plan To Fight Book Bans In Florida-And We're So On Board"
Clownworld Chronicles @Clown...: "Said the people who cancelled 'baby it's cold outside'"

MJ on X - "are you actually mad at baby it’s cold outside or are you just lonely and unfamiliar with sexual tension"
Jae Dugald on X - "People always misread this song. It’s not about a creep trying to pressure a woman into sex. It’s about a woman who wants to get laid but is worried about her nosy neighbor and family members gossiping."

ColdCathodeMan on X - "Best part of Baby it’s Cold Outside is that it was purposely written with interchangeable sex roles. There’s nothing said nor sung to distinguish the male role from a female role... The original song is devoid of male/female identification and labels the parts as “mouse” and “wolf,” and in its first major public appearance that won it an Oscar the song switched sex roles in the middle."

Comedian ROASTS Woke: WAP vs Baby It's Cold Outside - YouTube

ColdCathodeMan on X - "Translation: the puritan culture the song is cheekily referencing is the same puritan culture attacking the song today, albeit it under a modern set of social mores."

Opinion: The day DEI World entered Canadian politics - The Globe and Mail - "In the 2020 debate, B.C.’s New Democratic Party premier was clearly confused when faced with a question straight from the weltanschauung of DEI World. He had good reason to be.  This was the question: “How have you personally reckoned with your own privilege and unconscious bias as a white political leader?”  In Liberal World, a similar question might have been phrased something like this: “Many voters are concerned about racial discrimination, in everything from housing to education to the job market. If elected, what will you do to address racism?”  But that’s not what was asked. The political leaders were not queried about their plans to govern. They were asked how they had “reckoned” with their “privilege” as white people, including their own alleged bias – unconscious bias, no less – against non-white voters.  It was like something out of a religious ceremony, in which people were invited to acknowledge the impossibility of transcending the stain of original sin, with the only possible response being, “yes, I am a sinner.”  But I live in Liberal World.  So did John Horgan, the then-premier and NDP leader. This is how he answered the question: “I grew up in southern Vancouver Island. I was a lacrosse player. I played with Indigenous friends; I played with South Asian friends. For me, I did not see colour. I felt that everyone around me was the same. And I brought that through my entire adult life, and I’ve instilled that in my children.”  It wasn’t the eloquence and precision of Martin Luther King Jr., but the words were in the ballpark. Mr. Horgan reflexively reached for ideas from Liberal World. And in Liberal World, the dream is that your friends and neighbours won’t be constantly sorting one another into racial categories. You’ll all be friends and fellow citizens, full stop. I’m white, you’re Black, whatever.  But that doesn’t square with the DEI World catechism. Race is not a thing to be overcome. It is the thing to centre everything around. In DEI World, a white person failing to confess to inherent racism scans as racism.  And so, as soon as the debate was over, Mr. Horgan apologized. He said it was “inappropriate to say I don’t see colour,” because “I don’t have a clue, as a white person, the challenges that people of colour face every day.” He acknowledged that, when it came to his “privilege,” he of course had “work to do.”  But his brain was mostly still in Liberal World, because he added: “I did grow up in poverty, I did grow up with Indigenous friends and South Asian friends, and for me it was normal to be poor and to be part of the crowd that nobody paid attention to.”  Liberal World is where most of our minds still live. And as liberals, nobody is against lower-case diversity, equity and inclusion. As for anti-racism, isn’t that a good thing too? Racism is bad; anti-racism must be the opposite. Right?  If you’d gone to some corporate non-discrimination training a decade or more ago, you might have been taught about practical things like fair hiring practices, how to avoid giving offence to colleagues and being sensitive in a culturally diverse workplace.  But today’s anti-racism training often isn’t at all like that. Which is how you end up with Laith Marouf. He worked for an organization that received federal funding to deliver anti-racism education, and whose contract was terminated after it came to light that he was posting antisemitic content online.  In Liberal World, claiming to be against racism, while discriminating on the basis of race, is not only wrong, it’s a philosophical contradiction. But DEI World’s anti-racism doesn’t work that way. It starts by putting groups of people into either the good racial box or the bad one, so that one can decide who is oppressed and oppressor, and who is entitled to what sort of treatment.  That’s how you end up with people posting things online that, in Liberal World, are clearly racist – and yet these same people, their minds in DEI World, sincerely believe themselves to be anti-racists."

Meme - Wanjiru Njoya @WanjiruNjoya: "Epic exchange. The "land justice" person here says he wants all land owned by white South Africans."
Umusaba Kza-Soze Ungamazi @Kza_Soze: "We want all that's with White's all of it, period"
ChrisC @squareleg89: "I want a Ferrari"
Umusaba Kza-Soze Ungamazi @Kza_Soze: "Who cares what you want?"
"My point exactly"
"Justice" means getting rid of white people

Military equity chief says she's 'exhausted with white folx' and more - "Wing wrote “I’m so exhausted at these white folx in these PD sessions this lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too….I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS…we are not the majority, we don’t have power.”...   “I am exhausted by 99% of the white men in education and 95% of the white women,” Wing said in another tweet. “Where can I get a break from white nonsense for a while?”  Wing also has tweets referring to former President Donald Trump as “whole boy version of a Karen” and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as “the queen of Karens.”...   Wing is not the first diversity specialist brought on by the DoD to come under scrutiny for past comments. Last March, the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) announced it had hired Richard Torres-Estrada to serve as the command’s first-ever chief diversity and inclusion officer. Estrada came under investigation within SOCOM after announcing his hiring, as resurfaced Facebook posts showed he shared made politically charged posts including one of a digitally altered image comparing Trump to Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler."

'Woke' DOD official Kelisa Wing reassigned after GOP highlights anti-white tweets - "Self-described “woke” Defense Department schools official Kelisa Wing, whose anti-white social media comments garnered national attention last fall, has been reassigned to an unrelated role... The Defense Department in October launched a 30-day review of Wing — the now-former education activity chief diversity equity and inclusion officer — after her Twitter posts with disparaging comments about white people resurfaced.  “I’m so exhausted at these white folx in these [professional development] sessions this lady actually had the CAUdacity to say black people can be racist too,” she wrote in one post from June 2020, using a portmanteau for “Caucasian audacity.”
We keep being told that the woke don't hate white people

DOD school sees 1,250% increase in left-leaning books - "In the six months since a self-described “woke” Pentagon schools administrator‘s racially charged tweets drew national attention and GOP criticism, the number of her far-left children’s books lining the shelves of the elementary, middle and high schools under her authority have increased tenfold...   At the time, about 45 copies of books Wing coauthored – including titles such as “What is White Privilege?” and “What Does it Mean to Defund the Police?” – were available in 11 DOD school libraries, according to a Substack report by OpenTheBooks, a right-leaning nonprofit that tracks government spending.  As of Friday, that number had grown to more than 600 books in 49 DOD schools from Quantico, Va., to Yokosuka, Japan, according to online library databases and the report — an increase of nearly 1,250% since her Twitter scandal broke."

I was on the losing side of the campus culture wars. Here's why we lost - "The obsessions of the left today bear a striking resemblance to the campus culture wars of the late ’90s and early 2000s.  Progressive rejection of the idea that biological sex is immutable and binary, that gender identity should be kept secret from parents, that concepts like merit and objectivity are “white supremacy,” and the popularization of antisemitism dressed up as “anti-colonialsm” were common on university campuses decades before they spilled over into every facet of society. What’s notable is not just the prevalence of these often ridiculous ideas in schools, government and the workplace, but the authoritarian nature in which they are pushed. Disagreement with progressive policies around gender transition in schools, say, or affirmative action, invites one to be slurred as a bigot or worse. And that is a remarkably effective way to stifle dissent from people who see themselves as fair-minded; it weaponizes our very liberalism against us. It is as if campus politics have taken over the entire world, and we are all worse off for it.  I played a small part in those earlier campus battles, and the reason the left won so thoroughly is because, I think, no one took them seriously enough. Or if they were taken seriously, it was assumed — by me, at least — that society-wide consensus around free speech, tolerance and civil liberties would survive. There was no way, I was certain, these lunatics who call anyone who disagrees with them a Nazi would win the day. But we were wrong and now we are all paying the price... One reader who I sparred with regularly sent me a list of neo-Marxist writers that he was sure would change my perspective. He could not fathom that anyone familiar with Marxist literature (I was) would not be convinced of capitalism’s evils. Marxist theory just made me appreciate free societies all the more... The campus authoritarians had started graduating, and were now taking jobs in unions, political parties, universities, the federal bureaucracy and businesses of all kinds. And, of course, they have since taken over the news media. Little by little, the commitment to human liberty is being replaced with particular notions of group membership, and the classification of everyone as either oppressed or oppressor. Those who deviate from progressive dogmas are frequently hounded online and have their livelihoods threatened, no matter how minor their “offence.” In extreme cases, people have faced having their bank accounts frozen for contributing to the wrong cause. Social media companies censor content, even if it is true, often in coordination with governments. And, the federal Liberals are constantly looking for new ways to regulate the internet to protect us from “misinformation.”"

Meme - "High trust society has become a common dog whistle."
"I'll take vibrant multiculturalism and nummy foods over a 'high-trust' society anyway."
"*Metal gate* The pad thai is worth it"

Matthew 18:15-20 - "If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that BY THE MOUTH OF TWO OR THREE WITNESSES EVERY FACT MAY BE CONFIRMED. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector"
Yet, the left keep telling us that Jesus was woke (and that he would've supported massive government spending to help the "oppressed").

Konstantin Kisin on X - "All you need to know about Western civilisation: The people who are the strongest advocates for Western civ are people like me who have experienced the alternative. The people who are the biggest critics of Western civ have never experienced anything else."
Miss Jo on X - "Western civilisation is dying. When its own people turn on it then there is no way back. It is now just a question of what comes next."
Barbara on X - "That is the way it works. It is the same with merit. Most of my leftist friends and acquaintances have always been well off. They do not understand that, when you are not born rich, your merits are your ticket to a good life. When you have experienced the practical consequences of killing meritocracy (that died in my country long ago) you understand how important it is. To many, it is just theory."
Melissa Chen on X - "Agree to some extent, but allow me to add a bit of nuance to this.   The problem is that Western civilization, which is synonymous with the Western project, does not inspire admiration from non-Westerners in the way that it used to.  We can track the progress and downfall of entire societies based on the ideas that dominate those cultures. The problem is that the West failed to identify and discard the ones that are extremely destructive to its own existence.  And so those destructive ideas are now synonymous with “Western civilization” and the real world results of today make Western civ almost a joke now. It’s a tainted brand.  What needs to be done is a clear articulation of what made the West flourish and why it regressed, and compare it to other models of development / civilizations currently in existence in a world radically transformed by technological progress."
"Late capitalism" is when life is too good, so you make up random bullshit problems and turn on yourselves and destroy your own civilisation

The Harvard of the Unwoke - WSJ - "Mr. Sasse calls Ms. Gay’s appeal to free speech “laughable” in light of “the culture of trigger warnings and safe spaces and everything else that they’ve built on top of their victimization grid that defines the worldview of Harvard bureaucrats of late.” Mr. Sasse’s view is that toleration of antisemitic expression is a price worth paying for free speech. Ms. Gay expects us to pay it and get nothing in return.  Mr. Sasse, 51, says higher education is having an “emperor-has-no-clothes moment.” Illiberalism, anti-intellectualism and identity politics were spreading on campus for decades before they congealed recently into open and pervasive antisemitism. For those of us who have long been dismayed by this trend, it has been satisfying to watch institutions like Harvard suffer well-deserved reputational damage. But it’s a guilty pleasure. “The culture of ideological conformity and monoculture at those schools is unhealthy not just for them, but for the nation at large,” Mr. Sasse says. “Some people from the right . . . say, ‘Let’s just let it all burn,’ That is not a healthy instinct.”  Fair enough, but what’s the alternative? The boards at Harvard and Penn ditched their embarrassing presidents, but that’s a far cry from actual reform. “Historically they’re resting on their laurels of having delivered a much, much better education,” Mr. Sasse says. “Network effects” make it possible for these schools’ prestige to endure a long and deep decline in their quality. Maybe the answer lies in good old-fashioned competition... The University of Florida may be ideally positioned to become the Harvard of the Unwoke. It is the flagship public institution in a state whose governor and Legislature have declared war on identity politics. There are no racial preferences in admissions, thanks to a 1999 executive order by the underappreciated then-Gov. Jeb Bush. Mr. Sasse himself is a conservative Republican with a scholarly background. He holds a doctorate in history from Yale, and before entering the Senate he taught at the University of Texas and served as president of Midland University in Fremont, Neb. He proudly notes that The Wall Street Journal ranks UF higher than any other public institution in the U.S. (behind 14 private ones). U.S. News puts it at sixth place among state schools nationwide. Taking into account “study, sports and weather, we’re No. 1,” he says. “We have edge-of-Ivy-League-level admissions now. Our average SATs out-of-state are 1450, in-state about 1420.” University of Florida Hillel estimates that nearly 20% of undergraduates are Jewish... Who would speak up for “dead white males” when ideologues declaimed against them? “Moms and dads have day jobs, and they need to provide for their families,” Mr. Sasse says. “They were patted on the head and said, ‘The experts got this.’ Well, the experts, if they’re people like President Gay, they don’t deserve us to defer to the claims of ‘my truth.’ What the hell is that? When she resigns, she goes out and runs to the New York Times and writes an op-ed and defends ‘my truth.’ Well, that’s absolute nonsense. That itself should be a fireable offense.”... “What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or the murdered grandmother. In other grotesque cases, they express simple support for the terrorists.”... Mr. Sasse says he “signed a 36-month pledge of partisan neutrality,” following the example of Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor and Purdue University president. But he touches on the subject when he says he worries that “the collapse of a belief in classical liberalism is what’s eating up all of these institutions,” including but not limited to universities. He blames this on both the “wokes” who have managed to “hijack” those institutions and the “super MAGA” types who would rather destroy than save them.  “You can’t burn down every institution”"

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