Links - 21st June 2024 (1 - Get Woke, Go Broke)

Meme - Amazon: "BUT.. BUT I'VE BOUGHT THE RIGHTS"
FANDOM: "AND THIS GIVES YOU POWER OVER ME?"

Meme BEZOS as Saruman: "The Tolkien fans review bombed my show! They drove the ratings so low, we had to bring in you activists! Attack every fan!"
Dunlendings: "Racists!" "Tolkien is just a dead white guy!" "You just don't like black people!"

Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain its Big Spending - Bloomberg - "In the past nine months, Amazon has released at least a half-dozen pricey series that failed to deliver huge audiences. Daisy Jones & the Six, The Power, Dead Ringers and The Peripheral all cost more than $100 million to produce but failed to crack Nielsen’s list of the 10 most-watched streaming programs in the US. Even The Rings of Power ($400 million-plus), a show that attracted a large audience, failed to hold on to most of its viewers over the course of the season... With Bezos’ blessing, Salke went on a spending spree that she hoped would shift the studio in a more commercial direction. She spent almost $50 million on three films in one year at the Sundance Film Festival and signed overall deals with Get Out director Jordan Peele, Atlanta creator Donald Glover and Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, among others. They all agreed to bring Amazon their best TV ideas in exchange for funding.  Many of these deals yielded no projects or duds, as chronicled in a THR story by Kim Masters. The article also noted that a minority of the viewers who started The Rings of Power, Amazon’s most expensive project ever, finished the series. Her report prompted Amazon to limit what viewership data its own employees can see. Salke’s supporters dismiss criticism of her reign as a mix of sexism and elitism... Even Salke’s biggest supporters acknowledge Citadel hasn’t panned out as intended"

Meme - *Rings of Power* "Do you know why a kilogram of paper boats float but a kilogram of stones doesn't? That's right! Because stomes are heavier than feathers!" Meme - Aragorn: "What does your heart tell you?"
Gandalf: "That not even the left enjoys Rings of Power. They just pretend to like it, because they are mad at the right for disliking it for the wrong reasons"

Meme - "Remember: They don't care about Tolkiens world. It's all about the agenda.
Our favourite Silvan elf returns for #TheRingsOfPower Season 2 and to find out what he might be getting up to in the second season make sure to check out this Sundays TSAS with all the latest scoops!
Silvan Elves
Skin Color: Light"

Meme - "The new Lord of the Rings show having it's chief lore expert depart is a sure sign the show is Dead on Arrival. Tom Shippey is regarded by tolkien enthusiasts as the biggest authority on Tolkien Legendarium alive. If you watch a documentary on the matter he will probably be in it. The fact that this man was happy to be a part of the PJ trilogy despite all of its adaptations and retcons to the books, and left the Amazon Series because of "creative differences" tells you all you need to know. Instead, they hired a Diversity & Equality Officer from University of Glasgow. She's pretty much of the opinion that Tolkiens works are the favorite books of neo fascists. That - and the failure of the Wheel of Time- should tell you everything"
"Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Galadriel
Amazon's The Rings of Power Galadriel"

Meme - "But they were all of them deceived, for another wig was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a master wig to control all others. And into this wig he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life."

Meme - "Galadriel: No man can fool me.
Sauron: puts on wig* I am no man."

Meme - "5 years ago at Amazon: "We want to make an adaptation of the Second Age using the appendices from LOTR. Who wants to run with it? Who's read the source material?" *crickets*
Amazon: 'Who's read LOTR?"
Guy: "The movies?*
Amazon: 'No the books."
Guy: *lowers hand*
Amazon: "Anyone?"
Amazon: "Ok. Who's seen the movies?"
*a smattering of hands go up.*
Amazon: Who of you wants to write the show?"
*hands fall down except for one*
Guy: "I like Game of Thrones. I can do that... but with a mix of Harry Potter style magic and poor fan fiction. Oh, and I can leave out the nudity and blood too"
Amazon: "Can you add topical social issues like race and gender identity to make it relatable to people who don't like fantasy?"
Guy: "You bet"
Amazon: "Ok. Write like it's meant for CW or Netflix, but with a big budget. Don't actually use the budget on worldbuilding props and costumes though."

Elon Musk's Exposure Of Disney's D.E.I. Memo Shows Deeper Issues - "X owner Elon Musk on Feb. 6 revealed a Disney document entitled, “Disney General Entertainment Content Inclusion Standards,” that outlines the corporation’s hiring and creative diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies as he prepares a class action lawsuit against the company for racial and gender employment discrimination, which fired Mandalorian actress Gina Carano will be participating in.  The document reveals apparent racial and gender hiring quotas in what would be a clear violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex and religion.  In publishing the document to his X account, Musk wrote, “An anonymous source just sent me this from Disney. It is mandatory, institutionalized racism and sexism!” As it turns out, Musk did not need an anonymous source to expose the policies, as the documents are published publicly on Disney’s website for Disney General Entertainment in its pitches to investors. An identical guide for ABC Entertainment, a subsidiary of Disney General Entertainment was also published... These appear to be racial and gender hiring quotas, which are an explicit violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on employment discrimination on the basis of race or sex... if these are not racial and gender hiring quotas, then why is asking if these are quotas a “frequently asked question” in its CYA FAQ? Here Disney is admitting outright that it “frequently” must defend its racial and gender hiring quotas as not being quotas — because they are. You can’t make this stuff up. As Rehnquist would have noted, this is Orwellian Newspeak propaganda... Now, Musk is pursuing aggressive litigation against Disney for its allegedly illegal hiring practices"

Disney+ Loses 1.3 Million Subscribers As MCU Fallout Continues

Meme - "*Indiana Jones swap meme* Disney
Anything Profitable
*Trans Pride flag*"

Meme - "DISNEY IN 1996:
Protect me, Maria
Don't let this siren cast her spell
Don't let her fire sear my flesh and bone
Destroy Esmerelda
And let her taste the fires of hell
Or else let her be mine and mine alone
DISNEY IN 2023:
And this is the thanks I get?!
This is the thanks I get?!
And this is the thanks I get?!
And this is the thanks I get?!"

Meme - "DISNEY EXCITED FOR THEIR 100TH ANNIVERSARY
RACHEL ZEGLER CONTINUES TO EMBARRASS THEIR UPCOMING SNOW WHITE REMAKE, LEADING TO ITS DELAY
THEIR ONLY PROFITABLE FILM THIS YEAR IS GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 3, WITH CHRIS PRATT AS THEIR LEAD
THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA HAS TURNED AGAINST THEM, REPORTING ON THE COMPANY'S REPEATED FAILURES
MICKEY MOUSE WILL BECOME PUBLIC DOMAIN ON 01JAN24"

Meme - Rachel Zegler AUGUST 2023: "I mean, you know, the original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. There's a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird!"
Rachel Zegler DECEMBER 2023: "The cartoon is so beloved - it's like a monumental moment in film history. All these amazing things that happened for that film... made Disney what it is."

‘Silk: Spider Society' Writers Room Scrapped by Amazon - "The hotly anticipated Silk: Spider Society has let go of its entire writers room, minus its showrunner and one of the co-executive producers, as the show gets a developmental overhaul, a source close to the show tells The Ankler... One source close to the series claims that Silk was being refocused with a more male-skewing audience in mind.
Weird how they don't know that diversity is the way to make bank

United Methodist Church slashes budget to smallest in 40 years after mass exodus from denomination - "Go woke, go broke: Church Edition.  The UMC is going to have its smallest budget in 4 decades thanks to its unbiblical stances."

Leyna Bloom - Wikipedia - "In March 2021, it was announced that Bloom would appear as a model in the July swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, making her the first openly transgender Black and Asian-American Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue model."
Kim Petras Featured As 2023 SI Swimsuit Cover Model - "As a transgender woman, Petras has become an icon in the LGBTQ+ community."
Sports Illustrated Actually Said Coaches Praying In Public Would Erode Democracy 🤡
Report: Sports Illustrated lays off ENTIRE staff after AI controversy, using trans models on cover of Swimsuit Edition

Meme - "Guess which one won 2023 Sport Illustrated Swim Search? *fat black woman, 3 thin white women, 1 thin black woman*"
Actually all the finalists were co-winners, but still

Meme - "*Mystique lesbian kiss with Destiny from Immortal X-Men* does this scare you?"
"Not in the least . I could care less. it's simply not going to sell many comics. That's the current reality."
"good! we're pirating anyway since disney is supporting isr*el!"
Why catering to SJW demands is a disastrous business strategy - they won't buy your product anyway

“Wokeness” is Now Almost as Dangerous as “Racism” for Politicians and Businesses - "Which is stronger, the accusation of racism or the accusation of wokeness? And to what extent is one more powerful than the other? This is an important question because the Left has wielded “cancel culture” to great effect, and their primary charge is “racism.” Therefore, anything that undermines the Left’s cancel culture or promotes the rise of a cancel culture of the Right could significantly alter America’s culture war. Furthermore, in the economic realm, non-Hispanic whites accounted for 70% of all buying power in the United States in 2020, and are projected to have 68% of US buying power in 2025...
61.9% of respondents said they are less likely to support a business if it is accused of being racist.
But only 41.8% said they would be willing to follow through with boycotting a business that is accused of being racist if they had to pay 10% more or drive an extra mile.
43.7% said they are less likely to support a business if it is accused of being woke.
But only 29.1% said they would be willing to follow through with boycotting a business that is accused of being woke if they had to pay 10% more or drive an extra mile...
many Republicans and Independents think that it is not just theoretically possible to be racist against whites, but that anti-white racism does in fact happen in real life and is even increasing. Therefore, anti-racist sentiment should be understood as oftentimes also encompassing racism against whites... A 2023 NYU report stated that the average net profit margin for businesses excluding financials was 7.77% as of January, 2023, with some sectors being significantly less. Therefore, a business with a slim profit margin could potentially be just as devastated by an accusation of being woke as of being racist, as illustrated strongly by the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco.   Therefore, the Right clearly has substantial parity with the Left in its potential for an economic cancel culture of its own. Blue America has long terrorized Red America with cancel culture, even going so far as to cancel a NASCAR driver of all people for merely liking a meme which was critical of George Floyd.If Red America is to defend itself, it has no choice but to go on the offensive.  What do these numbers mean for the upcoming elections? Much of the outrage from a charge of racism comes from voters who were unlikely to vote Republican anyways... Republican candidates who pander to minority groups will not only waste precious capital trying to obtain a few extra votes which were probably never in the cards to begin with; they could also lose votes if their pandering leads to a charge of being woke. If Republicans are accused of or perceived as being woke when they behave like Democrats, this could very well end their political careers. This phenomenon could in part explain why the “red wave” of the 2022 midterm elections turned out to be a “red puddle.” RINOs and RINO hunters take note.  Moreover, 7.2% of white Republican respondents said that an accusation of racism would make them more likely to vote for a political candidate. The 2022 Blake Masters campaign is a possible example of this phenomenon."

Why Old TV Shows Are Beating Hollywood’s Billion Dollar DEI Machine - "Even as streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ are spending almost incomprehensible amounts of money creating the movies and shows fueling the Peak TV wars, the numbers show that audiences are turning down much of that content to watch old television shows instead... according to Nielsen... “the most minutes last year – more than 57 billion – were spent watching ‘Suits,’ a legal drama that premiered 12 years prior.” The show had more than double the number of viewing minutes than Netflix’s race-swapping woke usurpation fantasy, “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.”... the “top 10 overall titles in Nielsen’s year-end rankings are all acquired shows, the first time that’s happened in the four years streaming rankings have been publicly available.” Acquired means the library of older shows that Netflix bought after spending $17 billion on content, much of it on new shows like “Bridgerton” whose three seasons cost $168 million, only to lose to the estimated $200,000 per episode that it paid for “Suits”.   In 2023, more people were watching “NCIS” reruns than the top two streaming programs combined. And more are watching old episodes of “Friends” than either “Ted Lasso” or Star Wars’ “The Mandalorian” despite an estimated $120 million per season budget.   In 2022, Amazon had spent $500 million to buy the rights to Tolkien’s world in order to produce a woke multicultural version of “The Lord of the Rings”, but twice as many people watched “Seinfeld” reruns (not to mention “The Great British Baking Show”) as “The Rings of Power”.  After an unfathomable $238 billion in Peak TV spending that year, most viewers were comfortable dialing up old episodes of “NCIS”, “Criminal Minds”, “Gilmore Girls”, “Seinfeld”, “Supernatural”, “The Simpsons”, and “Heartland”: a show about a horse ranch set in Canada...   The issue isn’t just “wokeness”. Apart from ‘Heartland’, the old shows that are popular now are not traditional or conservative, but they were generally popular in their own time. Some of the shows were made with a more male audience in mind, a demographic that is no longer serviced by the current streaming industry with rare exceptions like Amazon’s ‘Reacher’.  (‘Reacher’ now ranks as the number two series on streaming, vastly outperforming anything else on Amazon, suggesting that male audiences have been deprived of programming.)  But another issue is a radical demographic transformation in the industry that began with #MeToo and the BLM hate movement. Hollywood made DEI commitments and carried them out, whether it was locking the Oscars behind racial quotas for participating films or dumping white male talent in favor of affirmative action quotas... While you don’t need to be a white man to write, such a massive industry demographic turnover could not happen without bringing in a whole lot of unqualified personnel for the wrong reasons.  The demands of DEI and the need to produce massive amounts of new content for the streaming wars led to a hiring surge of writers, directors and other creative personnel who were not actually qualified. The impact of that is all around us.  Disney has lost a fortune on movies staffed by inexperienced DEI hires. “The Marvels”, its first comic book universe movie that didn’t even hit $100 million (amounting to likely losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars) was written and directed by Nia DaCosta, hailed as the first black woman to direct a superhero film, with one previous low budget horror film to her name. Her fellow writers had little more than a few episodes of Disney+ Marvel shows under their belts.  “Madame Web”, a recent effort to launch a Spider Man movie franchise without Spider Man, performed even worse for Sony. The movie was helmed by a TV director based on a screenplay originally written by an otherwise mostly unknown minority writer/director, and crashed badly. The decline of animation quality at Disney has been chronicled in features like Film Threat’s D-Files which put it down to an urgent need to hire new diverse staff while purging the “old white guys”  The new diverse hires “understood very little about actual animation and bringing art to life”, and “struggled to succeed at a job they weren’t qualified to have in the first place”. Their ineptitude was blamed on an intolerant workplace and the veterans were forced out.  Something similar has been going on across the industry and no one is allowed to talk about it...   Why are shows from the 1990s beating billion dollar projects at Netflix, Amazon and Disney?  One answer is that Hollywood purged or sidelined a lot of its own talent leading to productions that have ten times the cost of their old forebears, but are badly written, acted and directed...   The issue is not just wokeness onscreen, but wokeness behind the scenes. A lot of the old movies and shows were woke for the level of the time, but they were also competently written, directed and acted by some of the best talent that money could buy. That is no longer true.   Sam Goldwyn, an immigrant and former glove salesman who never learned to speak proper English, yet was responsible for some of the greatest films of the forties, had a simple formula. “You get yourself a great story. Then you get the best writer available. Then you get the best director. Then you hire a first-class cast, the right cast, and a great cameraman.” Not anymore.  Now you get a story that conveys an important socially relevant message about a minority group. Then you get an inexperienced writer from an oppressed group, a BIPOC director who has done nothing except four music videos, a TikTok BLM influencer as your star and a cameraman who is also the only white male on the set and prays all day not to be fired... TV shows were ‘woke’ ten, twenty and thirty years ago, but the message was, except for some artsy projects, a subtle addition rather than the entire purpose of every single movie and show. Hollywood hypocritically pushed wokeness, but was careful about adopting and internalizing it. And while the upper ranks of Hollywood still mostly consist of white men, the creative talent was fed to the sharks leading to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger overseeing a sinking DEI ship.   Last fall, Disney was being congratulated for landing Ahsoka, its latest woke Star Wars series, in the number two spot of original streaming shows, but it didn’t even break the top 10 overall. Disney had spent as much as $25 million an episode with more special effects than many movies only to lose to Suits: a show from 2011 with few effects and a budget of $3 million."

DEI Quotas Have Created Garbage that Turns Off Most Viewers - "This reminds of a time several years ago, when Dan DiDio was still publisher of DC, it was told the audience preferred a lot of older stories over the newer ones he’d produced. And that figures. He made the DCU so insufferable, and it was said he’d told in interviews he didn’t think superheroes should have happy lives. That kind of mandate was exactly what brought down the DCU in many ways, and it’s still suffering badly as a result. Some of what DiDio turned out seemed to have served as a template for movie screenwriters to go by, and we’ve seen the results in the years since, with many consecutive film adaptations faring worse at the box office than the previous ones."

Benny Johnson on X - "DEADSPIN is a fake news media company that falsely accused a 9 year old boy of wearing blackface at a Chiefs game.   In response, the boy’s family is now suing them to hell for defamation.  Today, Deadspin was forced to lay off their entire staff and sell the company.  Fake News is the enemy of the people.  FAFO."

Miss Universe Judge Says Bankruptcy Due To "Outrage" Over Transgender Organiser - "Emily Austin, the 2022 Miss Universe judge, said at a Fox News programme called it "morally wrong"... The organiser of the competition, JKN Global Group, is owned by LGBTQ activist and one of the world's richest transgender women Anne Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip - who bought the pageant in 2022 for $20 million."
A lot of left wingers were shaming a meme claiming that there were no examples of "Get woke, go broke". How short and selective their memories are

Indiana Jones, The Marvels Confirmed Nearly $400 Million Loss For Disney - "Add another $130 million to that $224 million already lost by The Marvels and Wish, and with Indiana Jones and the Dial Of Destiny, Disney has lost nearly $400 million on the projects in 2023."
So much for the cope

Meme - Wesley Yang @wesyang: "It's not a boycott anymore. The marketers told their main drinkership to piss off and so they did and found easily available substitutes no worse than the piss water they were drinking solely by habit. It's a new equilibrium that will not change."
"Super Slump. Change from year ago in U.S. case volumes for two weeks ended Feb. 17
Bud Light -30%"
I still see left wingers sharing a meme pretending no company has ever gone woke and gone broke

Meme - Jinkx Monsoon @JinkxMonsoon: "🤟🏻🖤 @Slate"
"Doctor Who's Newest Villain Might Drive Some Viewers Away"
Jinkx Monsoon, Doctor Who’s newest villain, has a message for her haters: “Who needs ’em?” - "I truly believe that for every fan we lose to transphobia, we’re going to have two to three more coming in because they’re excited for trans representation."

Ncuti Gatwa Doctor Who Posts Record Low Ratings With "Space Babies" and "The Devil's Chord" - "Doctor Who’s overnight ratings are out for “Space Babies” and “The Devil’s Chord” and they mark the lowest ratings for Doctor Who episodes ever, faring far worse than even Ncuti Gatwa’s prior record low in “The Church On Ruby Road” special. This follows a press tour from Gatwa and showrunner Russell T. Davies...   Russell T. Davies made it clear the show would be an ode to identity politics in his several interviews, with his now-infamous smug talking point, “If you’re not writing that [in 2024], what on Earth are you doing? I think our rights are in danger. I’m talking as someone who’s lived through gay liberation, all the way through the AIDS crisis, all the way through to the freedoms that we have now. I can see them spinning and being endangered, so there’s no choice in this. And if the most exciting and entertaining action-adventure show on television can also do that, I think that’s wonderful.” Ncuti Gatwa gave several interviews leading up to the program, paving the way for a failure, followed by a lecture to the audience to call them bigots for not enjoying the changes in Doctor Who, a playbook no doubt taken from Disney P.R. as we’ve seen time and time again starting with the Captain Marvel movie. The interviews consisted of lecturing fans on “white mediocrity” and finally culminating in telling viewers, “Don’t watch.” Viewers did exactly as Ncuti Gatwa commanded them, seeming completely indifferent to both “Space Babies,” an episode that appears to be wrapped around a pro-abortion message with the entire point of it to lecture viewers on it, and “The Devil’s Chord” which featured a hard-to-watch transgender person followed by a very gay song and dance routine to end the show in the style of Glee—something that doesn’t fit Doctor Who at all... Ratings for overnight for “Space Babies” was 2.6 million and “The Devil’s Chord” 2.4 million, marking the lowest premieres for Doctor Who ever.  As a contrast, Jody Whittaker’s first episodes of her final season, which was the prior low marker for Doctor who posted 4.43 million and 3.96 million respectively, nearly double what the Ncuti Gatwa era brought in for its beginning."
Once again, hating and having contempt for your audience and encouraging them to stop consuming is a winning strategy
I like the cope that the weather was too good

Meme - "HOW IT STARTED...
Sorry straight white men, Doctor Who was never made for you
...HOW IT'S GOING
BBC Doctor Who fans label new series 'woke' and 'unwatchable' as viewer ratings drop"

Links - 20th June 2024 (2 - Harrison Butker)

What Did Harrison Butker Say In Speech? Read Full Transcript - "For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.  I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on the stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.  She's the primary educator to our children. She is the one who ensures I never let football or my business become a distraction from that of a husband and father. She is the person that knows me best at my core, and it is through our marriage that, Lord willing, we will both attain salvation.  I say all of this to you because I have seen it firsthand how much happier someone can be when they disregard the outside noise and move closer and closer to God’s will in their life. Isabelle’s dream of having a career might not have come true, but if you asked her today if she has any regrets on her decision, she would laugh out loud, without hesitation, and say, 'Heck, no.'"
The left hates Christianity, so it's no wonder they were so upset
The amount of misrepresentation is unsurprising, given that the left loves to loudly misunderstand things.

@calamityjayrn • To everyone screaming about how Harrison Butker should be supported by the NFL because it’s fre... • Threads - "To everyone screaming about how Harrison Butker should be supported by the NFL because it’s free speech, ask them if they felt the same about Colin Kaepernick’s free speech, because I’m noticing everyone who demanded Kaepernick be removed for his speech is now saying the opposite of Butker for his speech.It’s almost like their idea of free speech is only for the people they like or something."
Meme - "How come the right isn't posting "shut up and kick" for this guy? I seem to remember LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick and Serena Williams being told to shut up and stick to their sport. I wonder what that difference could be?"
Left wingers really think that hijacking a work event to protest is the same as making a speech you were asked to do on your own time in a Catholic venue espousing Catholic values. Of course, all the left wingers bashing Butker were supporting Kaepernick and the other players pushing the left wing agenda but of course that's not hypocrisy

Meme - "Unmarried alcoholic girlbosses when a Catholic athlete speaks to Catholic students at a Catholic school about Catholic values: *Midsommar scene*"

Meme - Butker: "IT'S OK TO PRIORITIZE FAMILY OVER CAREER"
Left winger screaming: "LITERALLY HANDMAIDS TALE!"
Left wingers hate women who stay at home, so

Meme - True Discipline @TruueDiscipline: "Based on the reporting on this speech you would think he told women to get back in the kitchen he seemed to just affirm the decision that women seem to mostly make when when they have the ability to:"
"Super rich couples remain super traditional. The majority of the very richest American heterosexual couples have kept the traditional mix of male breadwinner and stay-at-home female partner, even as most others are increasingly becoming two-earner households. The lines refer to the share of couples in each group in which a man works and a woman is not employed."

Meme - "Harrison Butker's women's jerseys have sold out across multiple major sites. Butker's jersey also became the highest jersey in the league after his controversial speech. REPORT"

Chiefs' Harrison Butker Sends Message on Graduation Speech - "Chiefs head coach Andy Reid backed Butker. “I don’t think he was speaking ill toward women, he has his opinions. We all respect that. I let you guys in this room and you have a lot of opinions that I don’t like,” Reid said."
You're only allowed to have an opinion if it's a left wing one

Meme - Normal person: "FAMILY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE"
Female soyjak: "THAT'S LITERALLY HANDMAIDEN'S TALE!"

Meme - Butker as Jordan Peterson: "Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker. [Applause Lasting 18 Seconds]
Cathy Newman:  "SO WHAT YOU'RE SAYING IS THAT WOMEN WITH DEGREES ARE ONLY USEFUL AS BABY FACTORIES."
Butker: *annoyed*
The left wing always has terrible comprehension skills. Partly because the media selectively quote to fan outrage

As a Former Working Mom, Here’s Why Harrison Butker's Speech Doesn't Offend Me - "As a mother myself, while I don’t agree with everything Butker espoused (for one, I’m not Catholic like Butker), I found his sentiments concerning motherhood praiseworthy and brave, albeit perhaps hindered by some clumsy word choice... As a mother who has worked outside the home—in national intelligence, actually—I know the validation that can be found in a career, especially one devoted to public service. But having had two children while working outside the home, I also know the great joy, beautiful difficulty, and life-altering fulfillment that comes with motherhood.   I had my first son earlier in life than planned, and surprise though he was, he brought into my life a love and a purpose greater than anything my exciting career came close to offering. Even though my first baby wasn’t planned and even though I loved the fast-paced job that I had, becoming a mother irrevocably changed my life for the better, provided fulfillment deeper than that of my career, and inspired me to be a better version of myself in my pursuits both in and outside of the home.  I’m lucky to know other incredible mothers who are business owners, entrepreneurs, teachers, in the process of getting degrees, and those who identify as traditional homemakers—all of whom would echo this sentiment. I don’t doubt that all of them would affirm that their children are the most life-changing and wonderful parts of their lives, no matter how passionate each of these women are about a career or educational pursuit... regardless of a mother’s approach to homemaking (which is highly subjective depending on the mother and current phase of her life), motherhood is fulfilling in a way that little else this side of heaven is. And this fulfilling nature of motherhood came through in Butker’s remarks in praise of his wife (comments which mothers in various walks of life can agree are certainly worth applauding).  This brings me to the fact that while some expressed disdain at Butker’s comments about motherhood and homemaking directed at newly minted college graduates, I found it a fitting inclusion in a commencement speech. After all, being a mother encompasses overseeing the needs of children, a principal one of which is education. There is no reason that high-achieving college graduates should not hope to use their education in the pursuit of homemaking.   In fact, by praising motherhood and homemaking to women who had just undertaken higher education, I believe that Butker was rightly elevating motherhood by categorizing it as a true and serious vocation. And so, as a mother, I agree with the sentiment behind Butker’s comments and laud him for being brave enough to broach the topic of motherhood in a commencement speech."

Meme - Brian Moote @MootePoints: "The best part about Harrison Butker being a misogynist psycho is that a lot of dudes can head hunt his stupid kicker ass for a 15yd penalty next season and get a lifetime of credit with the women in their lives"
wanye @wanyeburkett: "You don't have to say something about everything, but if I were this guy I would reflect on the fact that this is what compelled me to fantasize about on-field revenge and not any of the dramatically more heinous things NFL players have done over the years, including literal violence against women"

Meme - "NFL PLAYERS DOING THE MOST HEINOUS ACTS IMAGINABLE *i sleep*
A Catholic NFL Player talking about Catholic values to Catholic students at a Catholic University *real shit*"
Ironically, those who keep claiming racism is why Butker isn't condemned by non-left wingers are the racist ones

Meme - Hot Takes Nobody Asked For: "colin kaepernick opted out of his contract with the san francisco 49ers in march 2017. some teams might have been hesitant to sign kaepernick due to his playing style, which is more suited to a specific offensive scheme. and his controversial protesting was done during nfl events. butker's speech was not during an nfl event."
Houston Chronicle @HoustonChron: "Why the NFL dumped Colin Kaepernick but won't do squat to Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker"

Meme - Morgan J. Freeman: "This says everything."
*LeBron James on the court* "Shut up and play basketball."
*Colin Kaepernick kneeling in the stadium* "Shut up and play football."
*Megan Rapinoe preening in football stadium* "Shut up and play soccer."
*Harrison Butker giving speech at university* "Stunning and brave. Living his truth. Why do you hate free speech?"
John Lynch: "Says don't protest while you are at work and in uniform. Actually, one of the 4 is not protesting anything."
I saw many left wingers sharing the original meme. Given that the difference between Butker and the other 3 is literally depicted in the meme, this is proof that left wingers have very poor critical thinking skills

Dying of Lactose Intolerance / Kanga and Pooh / Origin of Starbucks

"*Funeral* "HOW DID HE DIE?"
"HE WAS LACTOSE INTOLERANT"
"IS THAT HIS WIFE"
"YEA"
*Busty wife*
*Dead man smiling in coffin with t-shirt: "CERTIFIED TITTY BOY"*

*Still from Winnie the Pooh where it looks like Kanga is riding Pooh and having sex with him*

Jose Necktie: "A Coffee?"
*Woman with crown and green-and-white-striped leggings and white heels with legs up and almost over her head* *Starbucks logo*

Links - 20th June 2024 (1)

Meta's news ban in Canada: screenshots win, local news loses, study shows - "National news outlets lost about 64 per cent of the engagement previously generated by users on their Facebook pages, the preliminary research shows. Local news outlets lost about 85 per cent of their Facebook engagement, the study says, and almost half of all local news outlets stopped posting on Facebook entirely in the four months following the ban. Some outlets "have gone dark entirely because they're no longer getting the ad revenue being driven from Facebook to their sites," said Aengus Bridgman, who directs the Media Ecosystem Observatory. "And so this is hugely consequential for both Canadians and for news outlets." Some outlets were able to maintain engagement on their Facebook pages because their news is still viewable outside Canada, and they have maintained an international audience. While news outlets suffered, Meta itself was seemingly unaffected. "One of the remarkable things we saw was the overall behaviour on the platform didn't decrease," said Bridgman... They saw a similar volume of posting within political discussion groups but instead of links to news articles, people posted screenshots of them, Bridgman said. That means readers are seeing the content, but outlets aren't seeing the revenue."
Time to blame Meta for refusing to be extorted

Facebook turned off the news in Canada. What happened next? - "Large publications, with their own apps and widely known brands, are well placed to weather the ban. But for some digital-only titles, Meta’s blackout has been “absolutely devastating”, says Paul Deegan, head of News Media Canada, which represents publishers. Adam Reaburn, editor of Energetic City, a site covering what he says is otherwise a “news desert” in rural British Columbia, says the news ban initially cut his readership by 30-40%. “I don’t understand why Google, Instagram and Facebook need to pay us when we use their platforms to share our articles,” he wrote in his final Facebook post in August... Canada’s communications regulator will decide later this year whether the fact that Meta has blocked news links excuses it from making payments. Ms St-Onge says Meta should still have to pay, because news content is still finding its way onto its platforms. If the regulator disagrees, then “we’ll see how it’s possible to amend that piece of legislation, because as long as we’re in government, we’re not going to give up,” she says. Any amendments would have to respect Meta’s freedom of expression and make sure that “we don’t infringe on that [by] obliging certain content to be shown,” she acknowledges. News Media Canada, which supports the new law, is attacking Meta on another front, lodging a complaint with Canada’s competition regulator, arguing that Meta’s link-blocking is an abuse of its dominant position. Canada’s difficulties may cause countries mulling similar laws to think carefully. When Australia wrung a reported A$200m ($130m) per year out of Google and Meta using its news-media bargaining code, passed in 2021, countries including Britain, Brazil and South Africa pricked up their ears. But Meta appears emboldened by its Canadian experience. In February it said it would not renew the deals it had earlier struck in Australia. “For now, Meta has left the building,” Jesper Doub, who was head of international news partnerships at Meta until last year, told a journalism conference in Italy in April. “If you want to measure the value [of news], take it away and see what happens. And they did in Canada …Nothing happened.” In future, whenever Meta faces demands for payment, “they will just walk away,” Mr Doub said. That will mean less news on the world’s biggest social network, and fewer readers for small publishers... “The act is supposed to help us,” she says. “But it’s hurting us.” ■"
When your extortion attempt fails and you're still scraping the bottom of the barrel to justify it

America's Elite vs China's Autocracy - "the abject failure of Obama’s environmental initiatives illustrates the considerable drawbacks of Friedman’s commonsense statist model in practice. Most famously, Obama’s Department of Energy awarded Solyndra, a California solar panel manufacturer, loan guarantees worth more than half a billion dollars only to see its investment go up in smoke when the price of a key ingredient used by Solyndra’s competitors dropped dramatically. At the same time, fracking ushered in the age of cheap natural gas, turning the United States into a net energy exporter and creating jobs for millions of Americans. It wasn’t bitter Republican fossils who thwarted Obama’s forward-looking green initiatives; it was reality... Americans tend to distrust the wisdom of government bureaucrats who believe they can decide which technologies are likely to succeed better than markets can. Maybe bureaucrats in countries like China or Germany are good at this kind of thing; American bureaucrats have been historically bad at it for at least the past half-century. If America could once afford vast, failed attempts at social engineering like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, we can’t now. Californians have seen what the vision of central planning American-style looks like in practice—rolling electricity shortages, brownouts, even blackouts, in the country’s richest and most populous state. China, meanwhile, operating within a set of more pragmatic constraints, seems to have understood the limits of clean tech, which is why it ramped up coal production last year—equal to the European Union’s total capacity—while cutting its investments in renewable energy. So much for China’s fleet of driverless solar-powered electric cars. Friedman may be interested in innovative policies that inspire Americans to dream and build and lead, but that’s not what galvanizes the political, corporate, and cultural elites who quote him. For them, the goal isn’t to compete with China but to reshape America. So what exactly is their vision of the future? One-hundred percent clean and renewable energy—with half the country living below the poverty line? World peace—with Western powers implementing lockdowns pioneered by communist party apparatchiks? None of that makes any practical sense, but the architecture of their utopias is irrelevant, so long as those drawing the plans have the power to reward their friends and to punish anyone they identify as an enemy. Compared to the American elite, China’s one-party autocrats are at least clear about their aims: They want to destroy us, not their own people. So it’s not China that our establishment is actually modeling itself after. This is what democracies look like when the elites grow too powerful and turn against the people they believe themselves to rule by right. Beijing didn’t force Washington to sign a climate agreement that demanded more of American consumers and industry than it did of China. That was Barack Obama’s decision. He chose to do it for the same reason that the Biden administration plans to reenter the Paris Climate Accord and has prioritized returning to Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The American political establishment uses international agreements to force the people they govern to do things against their will. Americans opposed the Iran deal by a 2 to 1 margin, so did their representatives in the House and Senate. In reimposing sanctions on Iran, the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign showed that Americans were right and Obama was wrong—terror states are less threatening to America and its allies when they have less money to spend on terror and on building nuclear weapons. But real-world results don’t deter Joe Biden and his aides from promising to reenter the Iran deal at the first opportunity; the point is to shove the deal down everyone’s throats—Americans, Israelis, Saudis, Emiratis, the 80% of Iranians who hate their own theocratic government—to show who really has the power. Similarly, even though Obama was plainly wrong on clean tech, Biden’s term begins with promises that his Green New Deal will somehow create millions of new jobs. Yet it is certain that if he and Kamala Harris make good on their vows to end fracking, they will eliminate millions of real, existing jobs in the middle of a bad economy. “Environmental justice,” as the Biden team calls it, means laying waste to a vital economic sector in order to remake America—as what? As a place where people who say words like “Green New Deal” call the shots, and other people lose their jobs for being on the wrong side of history. Friedman’s 2009 article is important today because it marks the historical moment early in Obama’s first term when a segment of the country’s establishment defected en masse from the Republican to the Democratic Party—thus unifying the American elite under a single political banner, and enabling them to wage war on the rest of the country... “Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears. The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party.” Democracy has always had its discontents... what has kept the peace, when there has been peace, is a set of unspoken agreements that manifested themselves in national symbols, heroic stories, and sentimental myths. And that’s why these were targeted in a campaign of desecration sanctioned by the establishment that began even before The New York Times’ 1619 project, the COVID lockdowns, and the George Floyd riots... It’s easier to control people when they’re scared and poor. If the goal is social transformation, which is the term that Biden and Harris use, then it stands to reason that the poorer and more desperate people there are, the better. How about a $600 check from the government in return for us taking away your business and your right to work with no legislative or judicial authority? And no more questions about why hundreds of elderly COVID patients were shoved back into nursing homes by order of New York’s Emmy-winning Gov. Andrew Cuomo... China isn’t the the problem. It’s us."

Over 75% of Americans say tipping culture has gone too far: study - "It’s not always humans tipping humans, though — half of CouponBirds’ survey respondents said they had been asked to tip at an automated, self-service checkout."

Korean BBQ joint posts now-viral revenge story billboard - "Chingu Korean BBQ, located in Caroline Springs, has yet to open but is already drawing attention from across the country thanks to the giant billboard attached to the front. “Hey Sophia, you broke up with me because I was poor,” it reads. “Now I have money to open a Korean BBQ, are you regretting it now?”... Others suggested it could just be a clever marketing ploy from the owner to drum up business and stir up interest before the restaurant’s opening... “I don’t think Sophia will be able to see that from her new boyfriend’s yacht,” another wrote. “He’s paying rent for his new business but sophia is still living in his head rent-fee,” one Reddit user jibed. In a more recent post, another local business has got in on the action, seemingly responding to Chingu’s dramatic sign. Gotham Doughnuts, also in Caroline Springs, put out a banner of their own. “Yo, Korean BBQ, don’t worry about Sophia,” their sign plastered to their shop front read. “We have all the dessert you need right here!”... “Dear Steve, I hope you’re happy with her,” the open letter read. “Now the whole town will know what a filthy cheater you are. From Jenny. “P.S. I bought this ad using your credit card.” At the time, the newspaper had been inundated with “dozens” of messages since the full page note went to print. “We do not know who Steve is, but apparently he’s been very, very bad,” a representative of the outlet said in statement. “We won’t be revealing any details about Jenny.” Sadly, the last of Jenny’s revenge seems to have been unsuccessful. “We have not charged the credit card in question,” the newspaper confirmed. Their sales manager Mike McCann told the “Today Show” it held off charging the credit card provided as it could technically have been card fraud. However, he was urging Steve to come forward to “cover the bill.” McCann said staff at the paper thought the ad was “just crazy” and the response since had been phenomenal... Some claimed Jenny and Steve did not exist at all, and the ad was a clever marketing tactic. “This has PR stunt written all over it,” one user wrote. “Good way of getting more likes and readers to your page,” another said."

Vegetarian ate 1 burger, got hooked and became butcher - "Tammi Jonas, a longtime vegetarian living in Victoria, Australia, had a surprising — but undeniable — craving for a hamburger while pregnant with her third child. Just one prime patty after many meat-free years. Now, she’s a professional butcher and a pig farmer... while carrying her third child, she also became “dangerously anemic.” After the iron supplements failed, she pondered if protein would be the best way to get healthy for her and her baby... Her foray into not only eating meat again, but actually producing it, comes from a motivation to make positive change. After a lot of research and planning, she and her husband, Stuart, decided to open a small, sustainable farm in Victoria’s Central Highlands, that promises to treat their porkers with respect."

Granddaughters left with £200,000 legal bill after arguing over £50 inheritance - "Five granddaughters who were each left £50 from their ‘disappointed’ grandad in his will are now facing a hefty legal bill. Frederick Ward Snr, who died in 2020, all but cut out his dead son Fred Jnr’s five adult children from his £500,000 will because he was ‘upset’ they didn’t visit him often during his later years... Now, following a new hearing, the five grandchildren have been left with a £220,000-plus bill to cover their aunt and uncle’s costs of defending the claim against them, as well as their own lawyers’ bills."

Ambulance collides with moose while responding to another moose collision: OPP

How ‘Not Too Sweet’ as an Asian American Meme Turned Into Stereotype - "no one is louder about good desserts being “not too sweet” than the Asian American diaspora. Perhaps you’ve seen a meme about how calling a dessert “not too sweet” is something almost every Asian American has heard from their relatives, and how it’s the highest compliment an Asian person can give a dessert. Or maybe you’ve seen that it’s the name of multiple Asian bakeries and pop-ups. The phrase is not just a marker of taste, but one of identity. For a dessert to be Asian, it must be “not too sweet.” And to be Asian, one must like it that way. Like any in-joke among a marginalized group, “not too sweet” is a defiant shorthand, and one that in its construction necessitates a binary: “too sweet” compared to what? Often, in the Asian American usage, it’s a contrast to Western desserts filled with milk chocolate, sticky caramel, and corn syrup. To say “not too sweet” is to say actually, I don’t want your frosted red velvet cupcakes or your sticky toffee pudding; I long for the subtlety of red bean, the freshness of mango over sticky rice. It’s to say that Asian dessert traditions and flavors — matcha, black sesame, jellies laced with lychee — are superior to flavors associated with whiteness... But while I relish in the sentiment, something sticks like taffy in my teeth. If this is emblematic of “Asian” tastes, then what of the trays of gulab jamun and jalebi at every wedding, sweeter than any sundae? What of Vietnamese iced coffees and Thai iced teas I could barely finish for the sugar, the coconut roti drenched in palm treacle I ate on my honeymoon in Sri Lanka, Malaysian honeycomb cake, or Korean dalgona, literally caramelized sugar candy, as sweet as English toffee?... There is some scientific data as to why people of Asian descent may prefer less sweet things. According to a 2020 study published in Food and Quality Preference, people of Asian descent are more likely to be phenotypically supertasters and “low sweet likers,” as well as more sensitive to sour and metallic tastes. There are also material reasons why sugar wasn’t around. Robert Ji-Song Ku, a food studies scholar and associate professor of Asian and Asian American studies at Binghamton University, says his parents grew up hardly eating sweets in Korea. “That generation went through war and famine,” he says. “Having really sweet foods was a rarity, sugar was really expensive.” Dalgona candy was something they’d eat on special occasions, but the flavor wasn’t pervasive. He notes that now, younger Koreans have embraced sweetness, adding the flavor to foods that didn’t used to be sweet, like fried chicken. “The older generations don’t like it.”... While the U.S. and Germany were the largest consumers of sugar in 2020, Malaysia and Thailand beat out both in per-capita consumption — 41.63 kilograms and 38.66 kilograms per year, respectively, compared to 33.17 kilograms in the U.S., and with Cambodia coming close behind at 32.21 kilograms... there are plenty of “too sweet” concoctions throughout Asian cuisines. Kung mentioned Hong Kong milk tea, black tea made with evaporated milk with loads of sugar, or Vietnamese coffee. Ho says that on a recent trip to Japan, they noticed many of the beverages they tried were incredibly sweet. “I was like wait, huh? And I was in Asia Asia,” they said. “I think that the idea that Asians don’t like things being too sweet is bullshit.”... Estimates put Asia as encompassing about 50 countries, and 4.7 billion people. Do you hear how silly it sounds to describe a cuisine, a behavior, literally anything as “Asian”? How dare you speak for everyone!... When someone says “not too sweet,” it’s not just about how much is “too” much, but what we’re even talking about when we say “sweet” — which may not be sweetness at all."
This is why "Asian" is such a shit term, and Oriental is much better - Southeast Asians and South Asians love sugar. But left wingers are never happy

Edmonton man who sex trafficked teen girl sentenced to 7 years in prison - "Fix sought a sentence reduction for Montasser’s time in remand, which he said included multiple assaults by other inmates and meals containing pork despite being Muslim. Fix painted his client as an unsophisticated “follower” desperate to fit in. While not formally diagnosed, Fix also suggested his client has a learning disability that is “organic and permanent.”... Prosecutor Susan Hughson asked for eight years, citing Montasser’s “predatory” behaviour and noting he was on probation at the time he trafficked the girl. His record includes convictions for failing to attend court, obstructing police, criminal flight, drug possession and possession of stolen property.  Mandziuk ultimately reduced the seven-year sentence by six months to account for time Montasser spent on house arrest, as well as for conditions in remand. The judge credited Montasser 30 days for each time he caught COVID-19 in lock-up, as well as 30 days for the pork incident.  The Crown conceded the remand may have failed to meet Montasser’s dietary restrictions, but said it may have been an accident."

Meme -Colonel Otaku Gatekeeper @politicalawake: "A Muslim woman who went on TV complaining about Japanese food having a lot of pork. I translated this amazing response by Cat Suzu into English so you Westerners can understand it "
Cat Suzu @Catsuzuchan_01: "Muslim: "Japanese food is all about pork." "You're a Muslim, right? Japan uses a lot of pork. If you ask me anything, I'll be told that it has (pork) in it, it does. Tempura udon doesn't have pork in it. So when I'm hungry, I have no choice but to look for udon."If you're going to complain about Japanese food, I think you should go back to your home country, a Muslim country, or go to a Muslim country. Japanese food has a lot of pork dishes, such as pork cutlets, pork shabu, ginger grilled meat, shumai, gyoza, pork bone ramen, chashu, pork buns, millefeuille hotpot with pork belly and Chinese cabbage, hamburgers, and minced beef and pork. School lunches also often contain pork dishes. Never compromise on Halal for Muslims when it comes to school lunches (angry). We don't need the multicultural coexistence that Japanese people are forced to endure in Japan (angry). Broadcast in January this year."

Imtiaz Mahmood on X - "When most Westerners, especially the secular ones, think of religion they think of something they have seen in their own cultures and societies, i.e., Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  And quite naturally, since most of them lack the insight and knowledge to understand Islam properly, they tend to lump it in with the other religions. That is a big mistake.  Islam can be properly described as a totalitarian way of life and a highly effective system of conquest, disguised as a religion.  Islam is totalitarian, not just in the sense of theocratic and dictatorial regimes, but also in the sense that there is virtually no part of a believer’s life that is not touched or influenced in some manner by it.   Virtually everything a Muslim does is influenced or guided by his faith, by Sharia law, or both.  In this sense, free will as Westerners and other non-Muslims understand it, is anathema to those inhabiting Dar al-Islam, the “House of Islam.”   Likewise, there is no real analog to the Western notion of liberty or freedom. The Arabic word most closely corresponding to “freedom” is typically said to be “hurriya,” but this is false for the term does not correspond to “liberty” or “freedom” in the sense that an American, for example, would understand it.   It instead means “freedom” to do as “Allah wills” for that individual.  Many traditional religious faiths and systems have laws or codes of law which attach to them.   What makes Sharia (Islamic) law unique, however, is that in theory, it applies not only to Muslims but to non-Muslims as well. At least that is what the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sira command.  Non-Muslims or kafirs, also known as infidels, ~ are denied the most basic of human rights under Islamic suzerainty.   They are most often akin to slaves, serfs, or supplicants, and even those non-Muslim dhimmis who serve a useful purpose to the sultan or caliph and survive on that basis, are still treated with inhuman brutality and can be beaten or slain at the whim of any Muslim male.  Most Westerners are familiar with the history of slavery, but how many know that Muslims have been the greatest slavers in history?   Which is to say, the most prolific takers, buyers, and sellers of slaves in history.   Even today, in many parts of the Islamic world, the Arabic word for slave, “Abd,” is synonymous with the slang or informal word for a black man.  Although the Muslims took many millions of black Africans as slaves, they likewise took many millions of Europeans and other peoples as slaves from temperate climates further north, venturing as far north as Ireland and Iceland on slave-taking raids.  As some of you may know, the very first war fought by the United States as an independent nation was the Barbary War of 1801-1805 (with a brief flare-up in 1815), fought against Islamic raiders and pirates off the coast of North Africa.   These nautical jihadists had been seizing American shipping and holding the passengers and cargo for ransom.   President Thomas Jefferson grew tired of their demands and sent the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to Tripoli to teach them a lesson.  Various Islamic potentates, rulers, and warlords have infamously slain infidels by the multitudes down through the centuries.  According to the work of historians and political scientists who have studied such phenomena, the greatest or largest single genocide in human history was committed by the Islamic Mughal Empire in what is now the Indian sub-continent over years in the 15th century.  During that time, an estimated 270 million Hindus and other non-Muslims were put to the sword.   So many were slain that the streets ran with blood and giant pyramids of human skulls were erected by the soldiers of Allah.  Of course, many other empires and nations have committed acts of genocide, but such wanton bloodletting is impressive even by the standards of the worst tyrants of the 20th century, who had modern industrial warfare and weapons at their disposal but did not manage to even approach the totals of the Mughal Empire.  Historians consider the Armenian genocide (1915-1921) to be the first “modern” genocide since it was the first such atrocity that was recorded by still and motion-picture photography.   The Sunni Muslim Ottoman Empire in what is now modern-day Turkey was responsible for it and even today, under the government of Recep Erdogan, the president of Turkey, it is still a crime to speak or write of the extermination of the Armenians and Greeks, most of whom were Christians.  Anyone who has seen the haunting photos of young girls, Christian virgins, crucified by their captors and slowly dying in the hot sun in the desert, will never forget them.  These basic historical facts about Islam used to be widely known and taught across the West, but they have been politely airbrushed out of our history in recent decades, and now few people know of them …. or the danger presented by the soldiers of Allah."

Imtiaz Mahmood on X - "What did Muslims do to Hindus and Sikhs?   The Biggest Holocaust in World History Francois Gautier in his book "Rewriting Indian History (1996)" wrote:  “The massacres perpetuated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese.”"

🇺🇸Travis🇺🇸 on X - "Meet Laura Kavanagh, the Fire Commander of the New York City Fire Department and the woman who started the investigation into firefighters who booed Letitia James and chanted for Trump.  She was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams and has never been a firefighter herself.    She’s worked on many political campaigns for democrats and even oversaw the complete diversification of the FDNY.  Her office has made it clear that anyone who was involved in booing James will be “educated” on proper conduct.    Why is a woman who’s never served as a firefighter serving as the Commander?"
Allan on X - "Demoralization strategy. Same reason trannies are now in leadership positions in various military branches. With associated media platforms. Marxist Revolution tactics. Would love to hear, @Theo_TJ_Jordan's take on this."
Theo Jordan on X - "This is a letter sent down to NYFD for daring to defame a member of our Hunger Games royalty
"Members don't have a right to make a job related ceremony political"
No such cries for Adams' graphical communist manifesto
"We want the members to come forward"
Go Fuck Yourself! 🖕"

Meme - "Friendly reminder that there's a likely chance that the person you're thinking about going back and forth with who commented something ridiculous on your post didn't properly comprehend what you originally wrote."
"12. 21% of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th- grade level.
13. 19% of high school graduates in the U.S. can't read.
14. 42 million U.S. adults can't read past a 5th- grade level.
15. 50% of adults in the U.S. can't read a book written at an 8th-grade level."

365 days of paid leave won by Chinese man at company dinner sends social media abuzz with excitement discussing if winner should encash or enjoy prize | South China Morning Post - "A lucky Chinese man has become the envy of 250 million people on mainland social media after he won a year off work with pay at an annual company dinner.  The April 9 event, in southern China’s Guangdong province, was the firm’s first annual party in three years due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  As a result, the boss decided to surprise everyone with a special prize, a member of staff from the company’s administrative department, surnamed Chen, told Daxiang News.  However, Chen said the boss was shocked when someone won it because he thought the odds were so low. Another member of staff, surnamed Song, said the chance of hitting the jackpot was one in a thousand... Chen said the winner held a management-level position in the company and said his only question after scooping the prize was: “Who is going to do my work?”... Lu said the company let him choose between taking the 365 days off with full pay or receiving an extra yearly payment without taking the vacation. After Lu’s story topped Weibo’s hot search ranking list and had been viewed 250 million times by April 12, many online suggested Lu take the cash instead of the vacation.  Some worried that he “might find himself replaced or even out of work after resting for a year”.  Lu said he was still considering his options, adding that he had found his job “tiring” in recent years and could use the prize as an opportunity to spend some quality time with his family.  He said he trusted his company and did not fear they would use his good fortune as an excuse to kick him out.  Lu’s success is one of the few happy workplace stories to hit the headlines in China recently.  Earlier this month, a company in eastern China’s Zhejiang province reportedly awarded thousands of yuan to employees who show up for work first and stay the latest."

Meme - "American badgers look like they're about to drag you into a back alley and pull a shiv on you to demand money for their meth habit. European badgers look like they're about to invite you over for a cup of tea and some custard creams at their little cottage in the countryside."

Meme -
"you are *acute angle* *cup of hot tea* *pi*"
"A CUTIE PIE!" "NARROW SCALDING AND IRRATIONAL"

Meme - "What if we hold hands at the Mcdonalds Gulag *McDonald's logo on dirty brutalist building*"

Links - 19th June 2024 (2 - Assassin's Creed: Yasuke)

"Oh no! Someone has been assassinated!"
"Who could've done this?!"
"Search for anyone out of the ordinary!"
*people ignoring Yasuke*
*Yasuke whistling*

'Assassin's Creed Shadows' Makes Franchise History With Most Disliked Trailer Of All Time - "The game is receiving significant pushback for featuring Yasuke, an historical figure of African descent in the game that is set in Japan rather than a male Japanese Samurai.  Two of the top comments on the trailer translated from Japanese read, “European and American game companies: In order to avoid racial discrimination, black characters must be included in games to to ensure the diversity of characters and subvert stereotypes. The same European and American game companies: We decided to put a black samurai in a game with a Japanese background. His mission is to kill various Asians. Thank you Ubi.”  The other states, “If this is true, if there is even a slight mention in a country’s history books that “black people existed at a certain time in history,” all the main characters in games set in that country will be black. There is a possibility.” Other top comments translated from Japanese state, “It’s kind of funny, you should have cast a black protagonist in Assassin’s Creed Unity set in France instead of Sengoku Japan.”  Another reads, “It’s no good to expand on a person like Yasuke, who is only recorded in documents that are less than a few pages long, and turn it into a ‘historical fact.’ A company that practices political correctness can openly discriminate against Japanese people.”  “Discrimination against black people? Absolutely not. Black people have been replaced by white people. Now they are trying to repeat the same mistake by targeting Asians,” reads another."

The legend of Yasuke > Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan - "Though he was now considered a free man by most standards, he did not own any land of his own. He was essentially a samurai in name only. After Nobunaga allowed Yasuke to live with him for more than a year, Akechi Mitsuhide, one of Nobunaga’s most trusted generals, betrayed Nobunaga at Honno-ji and forced him to commit Seppeku, or ritualistic suicide.  When Yasuke received the news of Nobunaga’s death, he immediately withdrew to Nijo Castle, the home of Nobunaga’s heir, Oda Nobutada. Sometime later, an attack by Mitsuhide’s forces followed as well. Yasuke fought alongside Nobutada’s warriors and only surrendered his sword when the last of Nobutada’s warriors did likewise.  When asked what to do with the former slave, Mitsuhide dismissed him as an afterthought, saying Yasuke, and those of the same hue as him, were animals and as he was not a true samurai, not worth killing. With that, Yasuke was taken back to Kyoto to the Jesuits. This is, regrettably, the end of Yasuke’s tale. No one knows what became of Yasuke after he returned to the missionaries. He faded into obscurity, his true story lost to time. He may have earned his complete freedom and traveled back to his homeland. He may have stayed in Japan, or he may have returned with the Jesuits. It is uncertain at this point. But this is the story of Yasuke, the first “Afro-samurai .”"

Senior Writer For 'Assassin's Creed Shadows' Declared: "There's More Than Enough Games Out There With White Men As The Only Playable Characters. Let's Do Better." - "Assassin’s Creed Shadows Senior Writer Giles Armstrong previously detailed an animus against white characters as part of representation ideology."

Meme - Aiko Tanaka: "As a Japanese, I can confirm that Yasuke is not even mentioned in the Daimyoki(大名記) which record the names of all samurai and retainers under control, including those who made no notable contributions. Yet, they still declared him a samurai. Our culture is rich, with many stories and notable figures known only to the Japanese. This game could have been a bridge to share that richness, but instead, they chose to focus on a figure like Yasuke, who is barely known and not mentioned in our historical texts, seemingly to serve their own agendas. We are already aware that other cultures have started casting black individuals in roles that are traditionally preserved by other countries, seemingly just for propaganda purposes, such as the mermaid and Cleopatra. Now, it seems our culture is not being spared; they are merely using Yasuke to push a specific narrative, which is simply common sense.
Edit: I often receive rude comments, mostly from Black people. I'm explaining things nicely here. If you think you know more about our culture, then provide solid evidence that he was a samurai, not just random stuff you've seen on the internet. Stop living in your delusions; it's not healthy."

Meme - Brad Kiely: "That moment when you're a black man in Japan that gets paraded around because of your skin colour, then hundreds of years after your death you get paraded around because of your skin colour."

Meme - Perma Banned: "This is official Ubisoft marketing...and I had to read it a few times to make sure its real. What an odd thing to say Ubisoft. Freeing the Japanese...from who? From themselves? The same way the Conquistadors freed the Native Mayan/Inca/Aztec natives...from themselves? Did the people writing these marketing material even know the setting of the product they are marketing for? Or is this Ai generated text?"
"BECOME A LEGENDARY SAMURAI
As the charismatic samurai Yasuke, strike your foes with brutal precision and power. Use his combat- oriented skills to attack, block, parry, and defeat your enemies. Master the vast arsenal of weapons at your disposal - featuring katana, kanabo, bows, naginata, and more - to free Japan from its oppressors."

Meme - "What are you doing with my bike, Yasuke?" *Samurai with sword*

Meme - "Hey Amber, do you like my new hairstyle? *cornrows*"
"No, it's cultural appropriation. Claiming parts of a culture that isn't your own is problematic! But anyway, let me tell you about the Legendary Black Samuari Yasuke."

Meme - "I've finished the protagonist design for the new Japanese Assassin's Creed game. He's just like you asked"
"God Damn it Parker, you need to get your hearing checked. I said I wanted a Ninja!"

Ubisoft Appears To Confirm 'Assassin's Creed Shadows' Protagonists Yasuke And Naoe Are LGBTQ+ - "the company declared, “Naoe and Yasuke’s disparate personalities also lead them to have different relationships and rapports with other characters, and they don’t always feel the same way about people, nor do people always feel the same way about them.”  Next, they discussed romance options, “Romantically, they will also attract and be attracted to different types of people. Through the pair, players will get to experience a multitude of relationships.”   This revelation comes amid Ubisoft contracting with Dartmouth Associate Professor Sachi Schmidt-Hori. Sachi Schmidt-Hori is an LGBTQ activist with her biography on Dartmouth’s website reading, “I am interested in investigating how gender, sexuality, corporeality, and power are represented and negotiated in pre-seventeenth-century Japanese narratives and illustrations. My first book, Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Japanese Narratives (University of Hawai`i Press, 2021) is on medieval chigo monogatari (Buddhist acolyte tales), which often depict romantic relationships between Buddhist priests and adolescent boys. These tales challenge a host of normative and moral standards we (academics, especially) internalize, including such ideas as ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘transgenerational sex,’ and ‘sexual agency.'”...   Not only has the company contracted with this radical LGBTQ+ activist who appears to be promoting “transgenerational sex,” an alleged internal document shared to social media by Jeremy Hambly, aka TheQuartering in April detailed, “We are proud to represent the diversity and inclusion that exists in society as part of our everyday work. Representation is part of our DNA and will remain that way regardless of external pressure or influences.”  It concluded, “Ubisoft firmly stands for diversity and inclusion in our workplace and our games, and we believe there is no room for hate in gaming.”"

Meme - 𝙲𝚘𝚙𝚊 𝙴𝚡 𝙼𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚊 @CopaExMachina: "Recast Hiroyuki Sanada as T'Challa"

Meme - Japanese man: "急いで動物"
Black Slave: "Pliz help"
Soyjak: "OMG. The first black samurai"

i/o on X - "19,000 likes for a lie that won't go away no matter how clear the historical record: Yasuke (who indeed existed) was not a samurai. He was a servant and retainer. Now the white creators of a popular video game have joined Black Twitter in propagating this durable myth."
IGN on X - "In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you’ll play as 2 protagonists:
- Yasuke, a real historical figure known as the legendary “African Samurai”
- Naoe, a fictional shinobi"

Meme - ">be slave
>only job is carrying weapons for other men
>japs dress you as samurai because they think it's funny
>end up in battle
>immediately surrender
>get enslaved again
>300 years later
>THE LEGENDARY BLACK SAMURAI"

People miss the point about the outrage over Yasuke : r/KotakuInAction - "People seem to think that people are outraged about Yasuke because of historical accuracy. Or the idea that Ubisoft are trying to make him something more than he was (tbh, I’m still not sure what his role irl really was).  No. The problem isn’t in itself that they have made the character a black samurai.  The problem here is that doing so is symptomatic of a larger problem that has infected not just the gaming industry, but film, tv, and most popular media.  Ubisoft didn’t make the main character Yasuke because they were interested in him or telling his story. They did it because they needed the slightest excuse to force diversity into the game.  Every assassins creed game has had a protagonist relative to the setting. Why have Ubisoft gone out of their way to make the protagonist a real historical person rather than an original character of Japanese descent?  It’s not as if AC hasn’t had playable black characters before, and no one was angry about them. Because they fit in reasonably well with their settings, they weren’t forced in.  I think it’s finally time for me to kiss AC goodbye."

Censored Men on X - "🇯🇵🎮 The whole Yasuke in Assassin’s Creed situation is actually very interesting, as it seems to have caused a lot of confusion among liberal gamers.  AC decided to go to Japan for the first time ever and they chose a black samurai as the main character.  Historically, Yasuke wasn’t how he’s portrayed in the game.  The team at AC have deliberately over-exaggerated Yasuke’s role during his time in Feudal Japan.  On one hand, you have liberal gamers saying it’s fine and that gamers are only annoyed at the decision because they’re racist and hate black people.  On the other hand, you have liberals who are calling this cultural appropriation and believe it's essentially taking away from Japanese culture.  And then you have another large part of gamers who believe that an Assassin’s Creed game set in Feudal Japan should have a Japanese MC.  The decision to cast Yasuke as the MC for the game has also been extremely poorly received in Japan, as is evident from the like to dislike ratio on the game’s Japanese trailer.  This whole situation certainly is interesting.  I believe a Japanese person should’ve been the MC for a game set in Feudal Japan.  Anything else simply doesn’t make sense for a plethora of reasons.  What are your thoughts on the situation?"

The Japanese comments on the new Assassin's Creed gameplay trailer are absolutely brutal, some choice examples: : r/KotakuInAction - "628 likes to 6.7 dislikes, keeping in mind dislikes are usually undercounted. I've seen some people on Twitter argue that it's just "Western chuds" disliking, but I scrolled for a good 10 minutes and I haven't read a SINGLE positive comment.
"A torii is not the entrance to a village. Ubisoft knows less about Japanese culture than Koreans do." (in Korean) The Chinese trailer also sits at a similar ratio of 161 likes and 981 dislikes. - Ubisoft has done the impossible, unite Koreans, Chinese and Japanese.
"For UBI's convenience, or to put it bluntly, they only have a perspective that imposes the way of thinking of white and black society on Asian society. Their own society's way of thinking is right, and they force Asians into that mold, which leads to discrimination and insults."
"If you see a black person dressed as a samurai, everyone will assume he stole it."
"Japanese women with slanted eyes are really weird..."
"Naoe also has Southeast Asian features. The sword is curved and not a ninja sword. Yasuke is out of the question."
"Yasuke, who isn't even a samurai, plays at being a samurai and walks through a Japanese city and massacres Japanese people as if nothing had happened - typical of Ubisoft."
"It's so scary to see samurai killing so many people in the streets while Yasuke is saying he won't tolerate evil. They're more like demons than samurai. Why not set it in a battlefield?"
"When Yasuke passes by, the Japanese people make way and bow their heads. And the samurai are just playing a role to humiliate the Japanese in order to elevate the massacred black people in Europe and America."
"Why did he say it is a good harvest when they are in the planting stage?"
"It's so surreal and funny that a huge black man walking around Japan in full armor in the 16th century doesn't seem to be surprised by any of the villagers lol. To a Japanese person, this is just a joke."
"There is a scene where Yasuke crushes the head of a fallen enemy, but this cannot be overlooked. He is not a zombie, so there is no need to destroy his head. Yasuke is not a samurai, he is a racist."
"I find it interesting that Japanese people bow so much to Yasuke."
"I can ignore the historical falsification that Yasuke was a samurai, but this isn't Japan to begin with. It's "Japan made by foreigners" - that's not it, UBI-san. The graphics is good, that's all. I'll buy it if you are able to respect Japan a little more."
"I didn't even travel to France, but I experienced discrimination."
"Is this the legendary game in which black bandits play samurai in Nippon and massacre Nipponjin?
"Who would buy such a middle finger to Japan?"
"Aside from the fictional setting of black samurai, there is no need to portray Japanese people as shabby and make them bow repeatedly every time they pass by. It almost feels like there is malice towards Japanese people."
"Personally, I've never really understood the concept of "cultural appropriation." Now, I've come to fully appreciate how vicious and unpleasant it is."
"It is a well-known historical fact that Yasuke later travelled to Europe, killed French people and became Napoleon"
"When I commented, "Where is the samurai?" in the English version, I was met with a barrage of criticism. Overseas is scary.""

Meme - Kangmin Lee @kangminjlee: "Still can't believe Ubisoft created a game where a black man goes around killing Asians in 2024 lmao. Also blending Japanese traditional music with hip hop because there's a black samurai is just... lol. The pandering is just too on the nose at this point" Meme - "This game is based on real history" *Yasuke doing a flying kick on a peasant* "Assassin's Creed Japan"
"The History" *Black man in hoodie doing a flying kick on an old Asian man* "San Francisco 2021"

Meme - *Japanese woodcut* *Black man in white robe screaming while carrying off television set, with policemen after him*

Palestinian Supporters Wishing Death on Hamas's Victims

Many or most of these were blocked by iFunny. Telling.

From:

raz sauber - רז זאובר on X

"Palestinians and their supporters must be the nicest people on earth…🧵"

Replies to: raz_sauber @raz_sauber: "The victims of Hamas rapists have faces and names. one of them was Gal Abdush (34). They burned her alive afterward."

Voice of Freedom @MayyitAl60210: "Pity ... we could've used the ashes for a bbq"

yourasianfriend. @heynuthere: "The fact that she's saying that because there is NO PROVE AND EVIDENCE OF HER DEAD BODIES."

Indict The Far Reich @IndictTheReich: "Was she a porn star or prostitute?" (ironic username)

Abu Obaida @FTRTTSPWBF: "You sure it's a "she"?"

The Toxic Leftist @MelvinTheMopBoi: "Looks like my favorite TS porn star" (appropriate nickname)

Hijabi Boss @hijabibossbabes: "This man was not raped nor murdered by Hamas, please stop spreading misinformation."

Shabbsyyyy @shabbbydabbydoo: "a) that's a man
b) idf incinerated him with an apache
c) lol"

Mehmet Akif Can @mehmetakifcan79: "How do you know that she was raped if she was burned? Did you talk to her soul?"
maryjaneshoe @strappyshoe: "I saw the damn video of her corpse. Her black dress was hiked to her waist so the viewer could see she was not wearing underwear."
Mehmet Akif Can @mehmetakifcan79: "Maybe she didn't wear at all, lookin at her picture that is not a far guess!"

Βίσωνας @Kyrpandelis3131: "If this was her, I'm sorry but it's hard to believe that they raped her, more likely it's the other way around. You can't hide the thousand cock stare ..."

bonbon @nogodtown: "This man was burnt by idf tanks."

elia Ur Ittussan @elia_urittussan: "I wish this was true so that I can dance on her ashes and celebrate"

Links - 19th June 2024 (1 - General Wokeness)

Meme - The Critical Drinker @TheCriticalDri2: "You can always tell you're on the right side of an argument, when you have to purge anyone who disagrees with you."
Jules Hardy @itsJulesHardy: "can we a agree that for round two of 'this' it can be the final purge of these kinds of gamers? its 2024 I've been arguing about this for decades can we have a last full detox of these dude so we can get back to the positive gaming community we have been creating"

Meme - Michael Duncan @MichaelDuncan: "Is turning the Hagia Sophia into a mosque settler-colonialism? Just wanna understand what the rules are."

Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "When I ran cross country in high school - 50 pounds ago - we had one meet where 16 or so people tried out for the usual top seven varsity men, and we half-jokingly had different racial flights we called the White Flight, Black Attack, Asian Invasion, and Hispanic Panic. Whites had the best overall times, as I recall, but everyone was good.  This is apex healthy."
"What the hell am I supposed to do when kids are racist to themselves? The Indian kids are calling themselves curry munchers and a Chinese kid set his username to dogs4lunch. This is fully out of hand"
Weird. I thought "minorities" "reclaiming" "slurs" was a good thing

Meme - Kirk Lubimov @KirkLubimov: "Victoria, British Columbia, in efforts to reduce the nonexistent stigma around periods, will be displaying a period flag.  In other news there is a period flag.  But this is not the most insane and idiotic thing to come out of Victoria.  That award goes to the ex mayor Lisa Helps who drew a beard on herself to support the drag community 🤦🏼  You can't make the things that happen in Canada up."

A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury. - The New York Times - "Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.  Along the way, he acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class. Lasting victories were achieved, he believed, when working-class and poor people of all races fought shoulder to shoulder for their rights.  In late May, Professor Reed, now 73 and a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, was invited to speak to the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter. The match seemed a natural... He planned to argue that the left’s intense focus on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black people undermined multiracial organizing, which he sees as key to health and economic justice.  Notices went up. Anger built. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.”  “We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial capitalists.” Amid murmurs that opponents might crash his Zoom talk, Professor Reed and D.S.A. leaders agreed to cancel it, a striking moment as perhaps the nation’s most powerful Socialist organization rejected a Black Marxist professor’s talk because of his views on race.  “God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation,” said Cornel West, a Harvard professor of philosophy and a Socialist. “He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century. If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness.” The decision to silence Professor Reed came as Americans debate the role of race and racism in policing, health care, media and corporations. Often pushed aside in that discourse are those leftists and liberals who have argued there is too much focus on race and not enough on class in a deeply unequal society. Professor Reed is part of the class of historians, political scientists and intellectuals who argue that race as a construct is overstated... A contrary view is offered by Professor Reed and some prominent scholars and activists, many of whom are Black. They see the current emphasis in the culture on race-based politics as a dead-end. They include Dr. West; the historians Barbara Fields of Columbia University and Toure Reed — Adolph’s son — of Illinois State; and Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, a Socialist magazine... free public college tuition, a higher minimum wage, reworked police forces and single-payer health care.  Those programs would disproportionately help Black, Latino and Native American people, who on average have less family wealth and suffer ill health at rates exceeding that of white Americans, Professor Reed and his allies argue. To fixate on race risks dividing a potentially powerful coalition and playing into the hands of conservatives.  “An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Professor Reed told me. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”... In years past, the D.S.A. had welcomed Professor Reed as a speaker. But younger members, chafing at their Covid-19 isolation and throwing themselves into “Defund the Police” and anti-Trump protests, were angered to learn of the invitation extended to him... None of this surprised Professor Reed, who sardonically described it as a “tempest in a demitasse.” Some on the left, he said, have a “militant objection to thinking analytically.”... He finds a certain humor in being attacked over race.  “I’ve never led with my biography, as that’s become an authenticity-claiming gesture,” he said. “But when my opponents say that I don’t accept that racism is real, I think to myself, ‘OK, we’ve arrived at a strange place.’”  Professor Reed and his compatriots believe the left too often ensnares itself in battles over racial symbols, from statues to language, rather than keeping its eye on fundamental economic change. “If I said to you, ‘You’re laid off, but we’ve managed to rename Yale to the name of another white person’, you would look at me like I’m crazy,” said Mr. Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin.  Better, they argue, to talk of commonalities... “Liberals use identity politics and race as a way to counter calls for redistributive polices,” noted Toure Reed, whose book “Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism” tackles these subjects... The son of itinerant, radical academics, he passed much of his boyhood in New Orleans. “I came back and forth into the Jim Crow South and developed a special hatred for that system,” he said.  Yet even as he has taken pleasure of late as New Orleans removed memorials to the old Confederacy, he preferred a different symbolism. He recalled, as a boy, traveling to small New England towns and walking through cemeteries and seeing moss-covered tombstones marking the graves of young white men who had died in service of the Union.  “I got this warm feeling reading those tombstones, ‘So-and-so died so that all men could be free,’” he said. “There was something so damned moving about that.”"

𝕐𝕒𝕜𝕠𝕧𝕠𝕝𝕗 on X - "The "white supremacist" "America First" "Christian" movement is led by:
- Nick Fuentes: short, Mexican, gay incel
- Kanye West: Black, bipolar, runs a porn studio
- Jake Shields: punched people for a living, has CTE, closeted gay
- Lucas Gage: has severe PTSD despite not having been in a single battle
- Jackson Hinkle: baby-faced, self-declared communist
- Andrew Tate: sex trafficking pimp
- Dr. Loupis: looks like a magnified herpes bacterium
- Sneako: mixed-race Muslim
- Candace Owens and Jon Miller: Black, not very bright."

Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "It's absolutely nuts that the deaf are a like 1% of the population and get maybe a fifth of the screen. Don't we already have a closed caption option? Do we really need to be distracting everyone with someone waving their hands in the air?"

Campaign group says children as young as five should be taught about LGBT issues - "Stonewall issued the guidance to coincide with the launch of new relationships and sex education (RSE) lessons that begin next September... Stonewall has suggested that teachers use the LGBT rainbow flag to help children understand the meaning of colours. The group adds that teaching about LGBT people should be 'embedded' throughout school timetables.   The campaign group suggested maths questions such as: 'How many biscuits are left at Fatima and Shanika's wedding?'  One example lesson plan suggests that pupils aged seven and eight study and Aids memorial quilt in design and technology lessons. The guidance, sponsored by publisher Pearson and the Government Equalities Office from a £1million grant given to LGBT organisations, also suggests that students in religious education lessons be taught about naming ceremonies for those who change gender. Chief executive of Christian Concern, Andrea Williams, told the Times that Stonewall's inclusive guidance was disguising a 'manipulative agenda aimed brazenly at our youngest and most impressionable'. She added: 'This curriculum is deeply subversive. It should be scrapped.'   The campaign group include quotes from children who have been left disappointed in their schools for not teaching about LGBT issues."

Meme - PinkNews: "Meet the queer hikers proving the great outdoors isn't just for cis, straight, middle class folk"
Simon Edge @simonjedge: "Could you tell us what obstacles these stunning and brave people had to overcome in order to go for a walk? This is something LGBTQWTAF+ historians need to know about, so these amazing folx can take up their rightful place in the hall of fame next to Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing."
John Stuart I @LeestHrm4: "That's not a thing. Plenty of LGB people very into the outdoors, always have been. Is this what 'the struggle' is now; inventing barriers so you can pretend to have overcome them?"

Poll finds declining Canadian support for LGBTQ2 rights and visibility - "Canada, it found, was among the few countries where support for rights and visibility appeared to register “precipitous drops,” Ipsos vice-president of public affairs Sanyam Sethi said."
Clearly, this has nothing to do with queer overreach and trans mania

UNN on X - "Remember Sam Melia?  The English man convicted of putting up stickers?  Well the state has now decided that Sam is a Person Posing Risk to Children (PPRC) because of Sam's "racist posters, insignia and literature" and "racist and offensive attitudes".   He is not allowed any photographs of his children, and his wife Laura is not allowed to mention them to him when they speak.  Child rapists get treated far more leniently.  This is state sponsored torture worse than any other country in the world."

Man who raped gipsy girl, 12, acquitted because relationship 'common' - "A man who raped a 12-year-old girl was acquitted by a court that deemed their relations formed “part of the cultural reality of the gipsy community”.  Under Spanish law, minors under the age of 16 cannot consent to sex. But the court ruled that the man, who was 20 years old at the time, should benefit from a legal exception... The acquittal is the latest in a series of rulings in which judges have taken into account customs followed by some of Spain’s Roma population when dealing with cases of sexual assault concerning minors... the court ruled to acquit, describing it as “an undisputed fact [that] the relationship took place in the cultural and social context of the gipsy community, where marriages between very young people are frequent”.  The ruling in Ciudad Real comes just two days after another verdict was made public in which another man saw his sentence reduced considerably for the statutory rape of a minor.  The man, who has not been named, was sentenced to 11 years in prison after a sexual relationship with a Roma girl saw her become pregnant three times between the ages of 12 and 15.  The court in León was told by the victim that in her culture it was normal for a 12-year-old girl to have sexual relations with an adult. Prosecutors, who had initially pursued a 37-year sentence on three counts of rape, eventually agreed on a plea bargain deal with the reduced sentence, with the conviction ruling stating that “couples start at very early ages in gipsy culture”... Beatriz Carrillo, director general of non-discrimination and anti-racism within Spain’s Equalities Ministry, described the ruling in León as an “absolute disgrace”.  “The penal code does not exclude Roma minors from protection. If it did so, we would be saying that abusing, attacking or raping gipsy girls has few legal consequences.”"
Cultural imperialism and ethnocentrism!

Meme - Royal Dutch Airlines @KLM: "It doesn't matter who you click with. Happy #PrideAmsterdam"
*2 metal tips, 2 buckles, 1 metal tip & 1 buckle*
*alive man relaxed with properly buckled seatbelt*  
*2 dead people using seatbelts with 2 metal tips and 2 buckles*

Meme - Lolo @LolOverruled: "There is something so demonic about this and I can't even articulate what it is"
"Blind People See For The First Time" "100/1000 people cured"
neil saw itzy !!!: "its the idea that someone with a disability needs to be "cured""
"I will never understand liberal ideology."

Meme - "Woke Priority
*gang members firing guns from car*
*silent police car*
*car defaces Pride crosswalk*
*police car with sirens and lights*"
Vandalism of statues of Confederate Generals is good, of course

Chris 🇦🇺 on X - "A manhunt is underway after a driver left tire marks on a pride mural in St. Petersburg Florida He will be charged will a felony count of criminal mischief if they find him. [donut man should be congratulated]"
Clearly, this means the left wing has no power in the US

Spokane Police searching for arson suspect who defaced Pride mural
Comments (elsewhere): "Offense to the ideology will always take priority over actual criminal acts."
"Painting every surface with that flag is apparently the only way to prosecute graffiti."
"Don't forget, which criminal is safer to pursue has always been a factor in law enforcement."

End Wokeness on X - "BREAKING: A manhunt is underway in Washington for several suspects who "desecrated" a Spokane pride mural. City leaders held a conference on the UNSPEAKABLE tragedy of the mural. Some leaders broke down and cried:"
"Desecrated" has religious connotations. Telling.
They should've vandalised it with "Free Palestine" instead

Spokane, WA, Crime Rate & Safety | U.S. News - "The metropolitan area's violent crime rate was higher than the national rate in 2022. Its rate of property crime was higher than the national rate."
Time to spend even more time cracking down on "hate crime"

David Parker on X - "Keep forcing this nonsense down people's throats and you will find that they don't like it very much. Here is the likely timeline of future events.
1) Queer Ideologues continue to try to push their rainbow rhetoric on the general population;
2) General population becomes more and more fed up by being dictated to by Queer Ideologues;
3) Increased animostity to the Rainbow Guard and everyone who support it;
4) Clashes between Rainbow Guard supporters and normal people become increasingly frequent (YOU ARE HERE);
5) General population begins demanding an end to the Rainbow Guard's policies;
6) Screeching and wailing of the Queer Ideologues as they lose power;
7) Society is thankful that the madness has gone away."

Colin Wright on X - "This person got a PhD in Higher Education at Penn State by using a "Black feminist theoretical framework" to produce an ethnography of "Queer and Trans Drag Artists of Color on College Campus(es)."  The sample size of his qualitative "study" was "5 queer and trans drag artists of color who frequently perform in colleges located in central, PA." The "research" consisted of interviewing each drag queen twice for 1-2 hours, observing their drag performances for 2-4 hours each, collecting an "artifact" from each drag queen, writing about their experience, and attending a "poetry writing workshop."   So a maximum of 60 hours of work interviewing the drag queens and watching their drag shows. Let's be generous and say he spent 2 hours performing actual "mediated writing" on each drag queen (so 10 hours total), and the poetry writing workshop took maybe 5 hours max.   So maybe 75 hours of work for a PhD. And he was likely in the program for 5-7 years.  This is what our universities are putting resources towards and producing."

When schools won’t raise the Pride flag, the message is clear — and damning - "Earlier this year, in lieu of substantive conversations around Pride flags, the YCDSB entertained a motion to ban any flag from flying at its schools (with the exception of national, provincial, and Catholic symbols). While Trustee Frank Alexander’s motion, tabled in January, did not specifically mention Pride flags, skeptics read it as a thinly veiled effort to silence the growing calls to make YCDSB schools more inclusive for LGBTQ2S+ students."
If you don't swear allegiance to the regime and proclaim it for everyone to see, you are clearly the enemy and must be destroyed
Probably the next step is that if you don't wave the Palestinian flag, you support "genocide" and your Palestinian/Arab/Muslim students won't feel "safe"

Meme - *Someone with Trans flag and Trans t-shirt cowering at the sight of a biology book*
*Someone with Communist flag and Communist t-shirt cowering at the sight of an economics book*
*Someone with BLM flag and George Floyd t-shirt cowering at the sight of a statistics book*
*Someone with Palestine flag and Palestine t-shirt cowering at the sight of a history book*

Meme - LearningTheLaw @Mangalawyer: "Game assets from a 20-year-old game look better than Silent Hill 2 remake.  Modern gaming has become a well-oiled machine, catering to the insatiable gluttony of consumers, constantly lowering standards until nothing is satisfying anymore.   The relentless dreams of modern gaming"

Meme - Simon Bravo @sbravodev: "Do you understand now why they get upset when you critize these changes? They self insert in the game and if you don’t like them their ego gets shattered"

Meme - Carl @HistoryBoomer: "This may be my most hated meme.* It’s darkly amusing it’s being used against lefties upset that pro-Palestinian voices are being silenced. I’m ok with some ironic use, but using it seriously is moronic.  *Its closest competitor is that dumb Karl Popper tolerance cartoon."
"Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say. It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it. The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences. If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated. It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole,      [A picture of a partially open door is displayed.]     And they're showing you the door."

Meme - Josh Schwartz @Metal_Crow: "I went from being annoyed by this meme to loving watching it deployed against stunned people who would have themselves used it just a few years ago."
Bayta Darell @sarchasm9: "This was always a nice counter back in the day"
"Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say. It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it. The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences. If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or otherwise punished for your expressed opinions, your free speech rights aren't being violated. For example: let's say that you are a Communist, and the movie studio you work for fires you and blacklists you because you joined the Communist party... you have no reason to complain because the studio has every right to -- oh wait"
Duke It All @DukeltAll: "No, they were correct to do so and McCarthy was demonstrably correct in all his accusations. The state department was riddled with Soviet spies"
Bayta Darell @sarchasm9: "oh I agree, but they wouldn't agree with you which is why they're nothing but hypocrites (obviously) because that's exactly what they did for 10 years til Elon bought X"

Carl on X - "I just wrote this on Facebook (!) so...
"I like xkcd but not this cartoon. He's obviously factually correct. The *right* to free speech only means the government can't silence most speech. It doesn't stop someone else from deciding to cancel your show or ban your posts from an online community, etc, but
a) That's against the *spirit* of a free speech culture that tries to hear more ideas, not fewer.
b) It can easily be applied to ANYONE, including people I'm sure xkcd likes. Why not ban LGBT speakers? Pro-choice speakers? Pro-Israel OR pro-Palestine speakers? "It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."
One reply might be, "Well THOSE people DO ban those ideas." Yes they do. But if that's our only principle—hearing ideas is only good if we like them—it's not a principle I can get behind."
In other words, it's correct about the 1st amendment, but the *spirit* of the cartoon is one of censorship. When people silence you it's because you're an asshole."

wanye on X - "I think it would be too glib to say that people are just simply too stupid to see how the rules they make today will be used against them by their enemies. There must be some kind of blindness, though, because -- as I said repeatedly at the time -- nothing could be more obvious than the fact that this comic justifies basically any institutional or individual reaction to basically any speech. If you can't see how that's going to be used against you down the road, then you have no business opining about, well, anything, really."
EditionA on X - "It’s a failure to “imagine the hypothetical” in two ways: The political tides: The opposing side could gain the upper hand in the future. The epistemological tides: I could be wrong and accidentally censor the truth."
Brotherhood on X - "They have the goal in mind and construct the rationalizations after. Leftists don't have any principles except for power."
ASDF on X: - "I love deploying Popper's paradox of tolerance on those who abused it like last week."

dragonslayer27 on X - "The concept of free speech is distinct from the law. It's not important because of the constitution, it's in the constitution because it's important."
JM-BR on X - "I just hate how wrong it is, which brings to mind another XKCD comic.  It's so blindingly, annoyingly, wrong. Free speech is mainly a framework for resolving issues, a moral concept that guides us when we strive for truth - it means we resolve things by speaking, and we allow others to speak in safety so that truth can surface and wrong ideas can be discredited.   The 1st amendment is just the specific way the US has coded that principal into law, it's not what the principal itself means."

Meme - "BEFORE UC BERKELEY
*pleasant-looking girl*
AFTER UC BERKELEY
*blue haired girl with buzz cut*"

Meme - "r/AmerExit
Moving to Johannesburg from Los Angeles
My family and I are making the leap from Los Angeles to Johannesburg and could really use some advice on finding the right neighbourhood.  Los Angeles has been great but we hate the car culture it's not very bike friendly and the rise of Trump and MAGA it's a scary thought.  We're looking for some family oriented communities in Jo'burg safety and public transport access are our top priorities.  Any recommendations on family friendly neighborhoods in Johannesburg would be incredibly helpful. We're excited to start this new chapter but a little nervous too."
"Hey OP you should probably be aware that people in joburg are running out of power and water and many people refer to South Africa as a "failed state" or close to one. And like for real, not the hyperbole we see about the USA"
"You've got to be kidding."
"Yeah, Jesus. How did that choice of location mature."
""America is scary so we're thinking of moving to the country that is basically the fear mongering view of America but real life.""
"dude if you check his post history i think he's being serious lol"
"I mean, if he gets all his opinions from Reddit is it hardly surprising? American definitely has its problems, but you have to be delusional to think it's not one of the best countries in the world for safety and overall QoL."