Links - 23rd June 2019 (2) (General Wokeness)

Nothing Scares the Identity Politics Left like an Actual Working Class Uprising - "The English-language corporate media, after doing their best not to cover these protests (and, instead, to keep the American and British publics focused on imaginary Russians), have been forced to now begin the delicate process of delegitimizing the gilets jaunes without infuriating the the entire population of France and inciting the British and American proletariats to go out and start setting cars on fire. They got off to a bit of an awkward start... the corporate media were insinuating that diabolical Russian Facebook bots had brainwashed the French into running amok, because who else could possibly be responsible? Certainly not the French people themselves! The French, as every American knows, are by nature a cowardly, cheese-eating people, who have never overthrown their rightful rulers, or publicly beheaded the aristocracy. No, the French were just sitting there, smoking like chimneys, and otherwise enjoying their debt-enslavement and the privatization of their social democracy, until they unsuspectingly logged onto Facebook and … BLAMMO, the Russian hackers got them!... members of the Identity Politics Left, who are determined to prevent the working classes from rising up against global neoliberalism until they have cleansed their ranks of every last vestige of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, and so on... as leftists, they kind of need to express their support for a bona fide working class uprising. At the same time, they need to delegitimize it, because their primary adversaries are fascism, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and assorted other isms and phobias, not the neoliberal ruling classes."

US journalism has become more subjective: study - "U.S.-based journalism has gradually shifted away from objective news and offers more opinion-based content that appeals to emotion and relies heavily on argumentation and advocacy, according to a new RAND Corporation report.In a unique analysis on news discourse and presentation, researchers found that the changes occurred over a 28-year-period (1989 to 2017) as journalism expanded beyond traditional media, such as newspapers and broadcast networks, to newer media, such as 24-hour cable channels and digital outlets... Before 2000, broadcast news segments were more likely to include relatively complex academic and precise language, as well as complex reasoning. After 2000, broadcast news becomes less pre-planned as on-air personalities and guests engaged in conversations about news. (That year, 2000, is significant in the evolution of the media landscape, as viewership of all three major cable networks began to increase dramatically.)... Newspapers have changed the least over time, with content slightly shifting from a more academic style to one that is more narrative. As for digital journalism, the report found that online content is more personal and direct, narrating key social and policy issues through personal points of view and subjective references."

Salon Media Announces $5 Million Sale After CEO Resigns; ‘Bankruptcy and Liquidation’ Threatened If Deal Falls Through - "for years Salon — deeply unprofitable — had been kept afloat by elderly benefactors, John Warnock, a co-founder of Adobe, and Bill Hambrecht a venture capitalist. The two are now 78 and 84 respectively."
Get woke...

WALSH: The Left Attacked A White College Student For Saying He Loves White People. That's Wildly Hypocritical. Here's Why. - "He gives white people credit for "inventing science and industry." This is obviously hyperbole. Just like "white people are the best thing ever" is obviously hyperbole. People often describes things as "the best ever" not meaning it to be interpreted as a literal statement. Last week I had several slices of a delicious deep dish pizza and later described it as "the best thing ever." I realize, of course, that pizza is not literally the best thing. It is only the 5th or 6th best thing out of all the things in existence.If we can see past the hyperbole, which he admits was hyperbole, there is nothing factually or morally wrong with his comments. White people may not have invented the concept of science or industry, but the fathers of modern science and modern industry are certainly predominately white. White people did not build modern civilization alone, but statistically speaking, they were its predominant builders. White people may not be the best thing ever, but they have often been a very good force in the world. Just as with every race, white people have done some great things and some terrible things. But they have indeed done some great things. That's inarguable.If von Abele was a member of any other race, and he had been caught on video making the exact same theatrical statements about himself and "his people," there would be no outrage at all. Scratch that: there would be outrage at the people harassing him for expressing his pride... people get tired of double standards after a while. Especially when the double standard demands that a whole race of people express nothing but shame for themselves and their ancestors as all other races of people express nothing but pride in themselves and their ancestors."

WATCH: Columbia Student 'Under Investigation' For Praising White People Responds To Backlash - "University Senator Alfredo Dominguez argued that allowing free speech on campus essentially sparked the encounter. "You can have arguments all you want about free speech and people being entitled to say what they want," Dominguez told the Spectator. "But when that bubbles [into] assaulting black or brown people with that and then stalking them ... you're getting into levels of hate crime and your speech being directly related to violence.""
"Violence" and "hate crime"

Not Woke Enough: Slate Writers Vote To Go On Strike - "The leftist writers of the leftist online magazine, Slate, have voted to protest Slate for not being leftist enough... The writers are reportedly unhappy with the pay, the lack of diversity, and the management’s support of “right-to-work” policies which allow workers to opt out of joining a union and contributing financial support."
What happens when you hire SJWs...

Inside Google's Civil War - "The company says it is trying to manage its ballooning diversity of perspectives and projects, as well as do a better job predicting the kinds of issues for which employees will demand full transparency. However, it adds that the activist employees are a small but vocal group, and that their opinions don’t represent those of employees at large... When it comes to employee activism, Silicon Valley is at a crossroads. At some tech giants (Apple, Facebook, Oracle), workers are still largely toeing the company line. But others are contending with employees who seem to be following the Google playbook... [Google] disbanded its artificial intelligence ethics council after employees published an open letter contesting the appointment of the president of conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation."
Ideological diversity is evil, so it's no surprise Google disbanded its AI council

The Deep Roots of the Illiberal Left - "Left-wing illiberalism, in particular, may seem like a recent phenomenon, especially when it takes the form of social media outrage mobs, but its roots run much deeper than that. For example, the term “political correctness,” which is commonly associated with the PC craze that began in the 1990s and has peaked in recent years, first on university campuses, then in the culture at large, was, in fact, “first used in the innumerable and acrimonious discussions among Communist ideologues . . . to judge the degree of compatibility of one’s ideas or political analyses with the official party line in Moscow.” Then as now, political correctness, which is inherently antithetical to factual accuracy and necessarily entails restrictions on free speech, served to protect axiomatic visions and assumptions from inconvenient realities. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse’s theory of “repressive tolerance”—toleration of “reactionary” speech—provided a moral justification for the hard left’s increasing political intolerance, which the post-Marxist thinker referred to, in Orwellian fashion, as “liberating tolerance,” meaning “‘the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements’ on the Right, and the aggressively partisan promotion of speech, groups, and progressive movements on the Left.”... a belief in the unlimited power of words may play a role in why progressive outrage mobs invariably react with hysteria to taboo words, regardless of context and intention, failing even to distinguish between primary and meta-linguistic usages"

A.N. WILSON on the new dark age of intolerance - "What began as our very decent desire not to be nasty to those of a different ethnicity, or sexual proclivity, from ourselves, has turned into a world as intolerant as monkish Christianity in the days of the Dark Ages, when any freedom of thought is questioned.Tim Farron, leader of the Lib Dems during the General Election, was asked repeatedly about his views on gay marriage. As a fairly old-fashioned Christian, he did not believe it was possible — marriage should be between a man and a woman.As the leader of a modern political party, he knew that it would be political death to admit this. He was finally forced to resign.This was a signal to the world that if you want to succeed in modern politics, it is simply not allowed to hold views which, until a very short time ago, were the consensus among the great majority of people in the Western world... an army of self-appointed censors — from internet trolls to angry students, lobby groups, town hall officials, craven politicians and lawyers and Establishment figures, as well as a host of other sanctimonious and often bilious busy-bodies — have taken it upon themselves to police what we can and cannot think or say.Not believing in abortion, like not believing in gay marriage, is now, unquestionably, a thought crime... As in the case of abortion, debate is no longer allowed on transgender issues. There was a BBC2 Horizon Programme last Tuesday night called Being Transgender. The close-up shots of transgender surgery in a Californian hospital will not easily leave the mind.We met a number of nice people who had decided for one reason or another that they were not the gender which they had once supposed. They were all undergoing some form of transformative medical treatment, either taking hormones or having surgery.What made the programme strange as a piece of journalism was the fact that it did not contain one dissenting voice. Not one psychiatrist or doctor who said they doubted the wisdom of some of these procedures, especially in the very young... 'Burn in a fire, TERF'. 'I want to f*** some TERFS up, they are no better than fascists'.The use of the word 'fascist' is commonplace in our new Dark Age for anyone with whom you happen to disagree. You hear it all the time in the Brexit arguments which rage all around us and which I dread. As it happens, I voted Remain. But I do not regard Brexiteers as 'fascists', and many of their arguments — wanting to reclaim the power to make our own laws and control our own borders — are evidently sensible. Yet I have lost count of the number of times I have heard Remainers say that Brexiteers are fascists. As a matter of historical fact, many of the keenest supporters of a united European superstate were actual fascists... Rather than having a reasoned debate weighing the evils of racist colonialism against Rhodes's benevolence, the student at the forefront of the movement — who had actually accepted a £40,000 Rhodes scholarship funded by the fortune the colonialist gave to Oxford — wanted to pull down the statue.This is the same attitude of mind as that which led monks in the Dark Ages to destroy the statues of pagan gods and goddesses, or the Taliban to do the same to age-old Buddhist artefacts."

Aldi’s square sausage sparks ‘cultural appropriation’ outrage on social media among Scots - "The product was launched on Tuesday and a backlash swiftly followed on Twitter, with some people accusing the budget supermarket of cultural appropriation for not having credited Scotland’s traditional Lorne sausages, which are also square-shaped and have been a breakfast staple in the country for years."
When will the madness stop?
Given that it's the same country, does this outrage even make sense?
Yet some people choose to believe that it's only the English who want to highlight their national identities and that Englishness is problematic