Links - 3rd July 2023 (1 - George Floyd Unrest)

Meme - Xi Jinping: "We develop new spy balloons that US military won't touch"
"Black Lives Matter"

The forgotten alliance between Black activists and China - The Washington Post - "the most vocal support for Black lives from Asia came from the representatives of Beijing. State-run media outlets such as the Global Times and the China Daily published hundreds of articles related to the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent unrest. Lijian Zhao, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, described the United States’ race problem as a “social ill” and argued that “Black Lives Matter and their human rights should be protected.” Another spokesperson, Hua Chunying, affirmed a now common refrain of the movement by tweeting, “I can’t breathe.”... For decades, Black activists argued that race matters in foreign relations. Without a commitment to human and civil rights, U.S. diplomacy is an engine running on fumes. Only moral leadership, they believed, could reinvigorate democracy and prevent the world from spiraling into less favorable hands.  If China’s worldview risks substituting one form of domination for another, then the current Black Lives Matter movement, with its grass-roots, multiracial coalition, paints a more hopeful picture. Like their 20th century predecessors, the two have common cause: Both seek an end to racial subjugation and poverty on a global scale. But only the latter, in its inclusiveness and refusal to adhere to old hierarchies and racial boundaries, can move us beyond “the color-line,” toward a day when liberty and dignity can be enjoyed by all."
They know how to play the system. Anyhow the historical cooperation is because they had (and still have) a common enemy. BLM has been revealed to be a grift, but that hasn't stopped naive liberals supporting it

Latinos must confront 'ingrained' anti-black racism amid George Floyd protests, some urge - "White-presenting Latinos should use this time to "reconcile with the privilege" their light skin gives them in systems tainted with white supremacy and figure out ways to use it in a productive way, Sanz said. Jasmine Haywood, an Afro-Latina who has researched anti-black Latino racism, told NBC News that millennial Latinos like Sanz are looking to break cycles of internalized racism and the ways Latinos perpetuate and uphold white supremacy."
Some BIPOCs are more equal than others

Meme - Nike @Nike: "We will continue to stand up for equality and work to break down barriers for athletes* all over the world... BLACK LIVES MATTER. How Nike Stands Up For Equality"
"Nike BEGS Portland mayor for police protection to reopen shuttered community store plagued with retail theft"

U.S. Army sergeant convicted of murder in protester's shooting death in Texas - "A U.S. Army sergeant who fatally shot a protester in 2020 at an Austin demonstration against police brutality and racial injustice was convicted Friday of murder.  A Travis County jury found Daniel Perry, 35, guilty in the death of Garrett Foster, 28... Police said Perry, based at the time 70 miles north at Fort Hood, was driving in downtown Austin on the evening of July 25, 2020, when he encountered demonstrators in the street and came to a stop.  Witnesses told NBC affiliate KXAN of Austin that Perry aggressively accelerated before stopping.  Foster was legally carrying a semiautomatic rifle when he approached the intersection where protesters had gathered, police said, and was fatally shot by Perry, who stayed in the vehicle and used a handgun.  Perry claimed to police that Foster, a U.S. Air Force veteran, had pointed the weapon at him, inspiring him to shoot in self-defense"
Even if you believe that this wasn't self-defence, the same people who said Kyle Rittenhouse was at fault for bringing a gun to a demonstration, which provoked people into attacking him, are not going to condemn Foster for doing the same thing

Officer testifies Garrett Foster had been warned about the way he carried his rifle at earlier protests - "a police officer testified he had seen officers warn Foster at previous protests that he was carrying his rifle in a dangerous manner.  Senior Austin officer Brent Cleveland said during Perry's trial late Thursday that Foster was "visibly and verbally not receptive" to the police criticism. Cleveland said he never spoke to Foster but had seen him carry an AK-47 in a strap slung with the barrel pointed down in previous protests. He told jurors that if Perry had raised the barrel even a small amount, it could be considered threatening. AK-47 rifle bullets can penetrate car doors and police vests, Cleveland said. The officer testified that if he had encountered someone with an AK-47 who was carrying the rifle slung down like Foster was, and that person raised the barrel slightly, then he would shoot them... Alexandria Bills, who was an Austin police crime scene specialist at the time of the shooting, also testified Friday that she examined Perry's car after the shooting and lifted 24 sets of fingerprints off of it. Defense attorneys have said Perry was threatened by a crowd of protesters who surrounded his car and banged on it."

href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0dzh2fq">BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Police bodycam footage shows abuse of Tyre Nichols - "‘The fact that the officers were themselves black has added an extra layer of pain but Mr Nichols mother Rovonne Wells told me the issue was the race of the victim, not the race of the police’
‘What they did was wrong and what they're doing to a, the black communities is wrong. We don't care that it's a black police officer, you're a police officer and you're a bad police officer. That's what we're focusing on, the bad police. We're not worried about the race of the police officer, we're worried about the conduct the conduct of the police officer’"
This is telling. They only care when black people are the "victims"

href="https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/stolen-camera-burglars-milwaukee/">Stolen camera live still streaming from burglar's home in Milwaukee - "The two men snatched thousands of dollars worth of tools from the house near 74th Street and Silver Spring Drive. They apparently also unwittingly grabbed a security camera that is still transmitting from their kitchen table... She shared video recorded Monday, a week after the burglary, still in the home of the burglar.  "We're seeing people doing drugs. We're seeing people talk about how they sold the stuff, where the money went."  Winship said she can only assume they don't realize the camera is still transmitting."
The man is wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt

href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/blm-chapters-sue-organization-head-over-alleged-10-million-theft/">BLM Chapters Sue Organization Head for Alleged $10 Million Theft - "A lawsuit filed by a coalition of 26 Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapters has accused the organization’s foundation head of “unjust enrichment,” specifically the theft of $10 million in charitable contributions for personal expenditures. Black Lives Matter Grassroots claims that Shalomyah Bowers, the leader of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, defrauded the local activist groups by siphoning funds away from them... Bowers denied that he engaged in financial misconduct, suggesting that the BLM grassroots network is complicit in systemic racism in launching litigation against him... Bowers said the complainants, who named him and the headquarters in the suit, have fallen “victim to the carceral logic and social violence that fuels the legal system.”  “They would rather take the same steps of our white oppressors and utilize the criminal legal system which is propped up by white supremacy (the same system they say they want to dismantle) to solve movement disputes,” the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s board of directors, on which Bowers serves, said in a joint statement."

href="https://ifunny.co/picture/oKvMyF1TA">Meme - Bomb on Combat Aircraft: "Black Lives Matter"
Keywords: Missile, Fighter Jet, Bomber Aircraft, BLM

href="https://unherd.com/2020/06/why-dont-black-lives-matter/">Has BLM picked the wrong target? - "While a black Brit may have personally experienced racism, chances are the Nigerian in Nigeria hasn’t. Yet both clearly seem to have shared something unifying in recent weeks, and I have wondered what exactly is at play here, beyond the ubiquitous and increasingly indefinite concept of ‘racism’. A discernible majority of the black opinion I have engaged points to the key role of another, slightly more specific, R-word: Respect...   Whether it is Libyans selling black Africans into slavery, which is happening right now, Chinese people contemptuously discriminating against blacks in China, or Indians doing same in India, a general low regard for black people across the world does seem to be a constant. In fact, the reason we focus on racism in the West and not elsewhere is because western societies are the most responsive to black opinion. As a general rule, the Chinese, Indians and Arabs don’t seem to care very much whether we consider them racist or not. Their societies are openly assertive of their felt superiority.  So we know about the negative perceptions of black people created by slavery and colonialism, but what exactly is driving this hierarchy today? “White supremacist propaganda”, according to the BLM narrative. Western movies and media contain overt and covert messages propagating black inferiority. These are internalised by white people and others, including black people, thus sustaining global belief in black inferiority. Hence, the ongoing campaign to pull movies and TV shows deemed racist from the sites of Netflix et al...   The “white-supremacist messaging drives global disrespect for black people and black self-hate” argument was technically plausible in the 20th-century, when Western entertainment and media were essentially the only game in town. But since the beginning of this century, we’ve lived in a world where people have access to multiple sources of information, can follow who they want on social media and one where Nigerians watch more Nollywood movies than Hollywood movies. Yet, white people are still welcomed with open arms everywhere while black people are often not. So what gives? It is surprising to see radical Leftists so focused on white-supremacy ideology as the great explainer of racism, when Marx himself clearly argued it is the material which determines the ideological, rather than the other way around. We live in a capitalist world, hence, our values are shaped by capitalism’s values, both at conscious and subconscious levels. What does capitalism value most? Wealth and success. So these are what impress most of the world today.  It is why even intellectuals who love bashing capitalism make sure to emphasise they are “best-selling” authors on their social-media profiles. It is why most people adopt an instinctively respectful tone in the presence of the significantly successful. They listen to their words attentively, like they expect to hear something worth knowing. Because, like it not, the world has bought into the idea of success being an indicator of specialness... Nigerian scholar and historian Toyin Falola characterised contemporary black-white relations thus: “If Europeans regarded Africans as the ‘primitive Other’, the colonial experience enabled Africans to construct themselves as a terrorised race, raped and exploited by the patriarchal, powerful ‘white Other’.”  This reactive construct of Africanness resembles very much the construct of global blackness offered by the BLM school of thought. The problem with this approach is that it appears more interested in portraying the present vulnerability of the black collective as a moral virtue rather than focusing on eliminating that vulnerability. It obsesses over the appeal and power of whiteness, instead of trying to figure out how to make blackness more appealing and powerful. This construct may inspire the world’s sympathy, but it will not win its respect. Perpetual sympathy without respect means being viewed as a perpetual victim... The achievement of black strength and resultant respect can come from a consciously determined focus on black economic advancement within the diaspora populations and, crucially, in Africa. The Jewish story is a great example of collective vulnerability transformed into collective strength in the space of a generation"

This is McCarthyism in BLM clothing - "The first sign that something was amiss was Blackout Tuesday, when friends were posting black squares on Instagram and other platforms. Not only was this gesture taken up by celebrities, media organisations and large corporations, but those who were thought to have posted clumsily, insincerely or self-servingly – or who had failed to post at all – were criticised and called out. How had an innocuous expression of solidarity immediately become the focus for recrimination and shaming? Later the same week, my employer and my trade union emailed me on the same day, both proudly announcing their support for the protesters’ cause. How had an avowedly anti-establishment protest become the basis for consensus?... First, there is the pressure to adopt certain behaviours or say certain things. This is not just a matter of posting the correct hashtags and properly worded messages on social media, where a culture of calling out and clapping back has become normalised, though that is bad enough. The same imperative now extends to the offline world, where people perform self-abasing rituals of obeisance, such as taking the knee and foot-washing, and declaim public admissions of inherited guilt. Even if kneeling politicians are seen by many as performing superficial gestures for the cameras, there is still pressure to conform and vilification of those who refuse – as Daily Mail columnist and serial dissenter Peter Hitchens discovered when he was followed through the streets by a group of protesters angry at his presence. It is also difficult simply to opt out of obligatory confessions of guilt and professions of support, since silence is now deemed to be equal to complicity with violence – reminiscent of those whose refusal to answer accusations about their un-American activities in the 1940s and 1950s was taken by Senator Joseph McCarthy as ‘the most positive proof’ of guilt.  Secondly, there has been a symbolic cleansing of the public sphere... It was broadcasters who pulled an episode of the much-loved 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers, for example, and it was rugby football’s governing body that suggested banning fans from singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. The cultural illiteracy of these new puritans is astounding. Fawlty Towers featured racist attitudes in order to ridicule them, and rugby fans were singing a song written in the 19th century by a former slave and adopted by the 1960s civil-rights movement. Before Prince Harry waded in to offer his support for banning a song ‘associated with slavery’, perhaps someone should have told him it had previously been proscribed as ‘undesired and harmful’ by the Nazis, or that one of the most famous versions of the song is the 1920s recording by Paul Robeson, later targeted by the McCarthyites for his radical political activism.  Thirdly, and most worryingly, people’s attitude to BLM has become grounds for being suspended or sacked from their jobs, particularly in the media and universities. The ever-lengthening list of things that can get you in trouble at work includes saying ‘All Lives Matter’, saying ‘Canada is not a racist country’ (a view shared by most Canadians), criticising the concept of ‘white privilege’ and questioning the relevance of BLM protests on the Isle of Man. Even tactical criticism of BLM is dangerous – as data analyst David Shor found when he questioned the political effectiveness of rioting. Shor was only summarising the research of a black academic, but that did not prevent him from being accused of ‘anti-blackness’, since quotation and context are now no defence. People have been suspended and investigated for reportedly quoting someone saying ‘a word that should never be used’ during a news editorial meeting, and even for reading out Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail during a lecture on the history of racism... An anonymous (black) history professor at Berkeley wrote that he did not dare publicly voice his criticisms of BLM because ‘dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation’. His concerns seem entirely justified. Students at Cornell have demanded that a professor be fired for questioning whether a well-publicised incident of a protester being pushed to the ground should be described as police brutality, for example, and academics have petitioned the management of the Journal of Political Economy to remove its editor after he criticised BLM’s call to defund the police. Astonishingly, dozens of poets have also petitioned the management of the Poetry Foundation, demanding that its president be replaced and that the governing board issue a ‘meaningful statement’ in support of BLM. The Foundation’s mistake, apparently, was that its initial statement of solidarity was too ‘vague’ and ‘contained no details, action plans, or concrete commitments’. Even if all the accusations were true, all the accused were indeed guilty, all the words, songs and films deeply offensive, do we really want to live in a world of political-purity tests for opinions, words, artworks, films and songs? We will all be like the Hollywood Ten, our future job prospects dependent on professing the correct political views...   Freedom of speech, already under attack for years, is particularly threatened by identity politics. From that perspective, words, ideas and cultural symbols are understood not as things to be interrogated and argued over, but as defining – and so potentially threatening to – one’s very sense of selfhood...   Ultimately, we are asked to distrust ourselves. According to the new gurus of unconscious bias and race awareness, our sincerely held beliefs about ourselves cannot be taken at face value... The graphic is currently circulating among psychologists and other health professionals, who may soon begin to diagnose racism as something akin to a disease or a mental disorder. The really radical change is to separate us from each other and strip us intellectually naked before the inquisitorial eye of the new thoughtpolice of trainers and awareness-raisers."

How can the Black Lives Matter riots be justified, whereas the “Stop the Steal” riot is not? « Law# « Cambridge Core Blog - "During the middle of the Stop the Steal riot on Wednesday, some commentators on social media argued that this showed how those who defended Black Lives Matter riots in the summer were wrong. At first glance it seems like the height of hypocrisy to defend rioting by protestors for a cause you support, while condemning rioting by your political opponents. It is far more prudential to simply do what President-elect Joe Biden has done, and condemn all forms of political violence. But this approach is misguided because it neglects a crucial difference between the two sets of riots—the Black Lives Matter riots were democracy preserving, whereas the pro-Trump riots were a direct attack on democracy."
Democracy involves rioting. Amazing. Given that BLM is based on lies this article is rich

Teen Who Filmed George Floyd’s Death Says Minneapolis Police ‘Killed My Uncle’ Following Fatal Car Crash - "A video captured by teenager Darnella Fraizer was key in the investigation of the murder of George Floyd. Since then, the teenager has been the focus of much media attention.  The 18-year-old has revealed that her uncle, Leneal Lamont Frazier, died after Minneapolis police accidentally collided with his car during a high-speed pursuit of a carjacked vehicle."
Conspiracy theories are good if they help your cause

The white & the woke - "They had to make it all about themselves, didn’t they? No sooner had black Americans started protesting the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, than the whites took it over. They pushed the protests towards fighting the police. They denounced the incorrigible racism of their nation and families. They ‘took a knee’ at every opportunity, even though the posture looked oddly like the one struck by Officer Derek Charvin when he had taken a knee on George Floyd’s windpipe. The killing was the spark and the coronavirus the accelerant – when one of the Four Horsemen is around, the other three are sure to turn up sooner or later – but the dry tinder came from all over. We have seen racial protests on a scale last seen in the late Sixties. This is strange. By every index, racial equality has improved since the reforms of the Great Society...   Something else is going on here. We know this because something else very quickly did go on here. The propagandists insist that the response to the killing of George Floyd was unified, and a mostly sympathetic American media has repeated this. But the truth is that the protesting, looting and rioting rapidly divided on racial lines. So did a more radical and open-ended political campaign that used the killing of George Floyd not to end police racism, but to pressure elite institutions.  Black protestors in the cities tended to direct their protests at the local police and their violence at the local stores they looted. Only in St Louis, Missouri, a city especially troubled by drug-related gang violence, were the police shot at in the chaotic first week. Meanwhile, white protestors tended to respond differently, and in distinctly generational ways.  When order broke down at the protests, younger whites fought the police. The instigators were the cells known as Antifa or the “black bloc”. These European-style anarcho-communists emerged from the aspic of 1968 at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. In almost every major city after every major march, Antifa and its sympathizers fought the police. Not without reason, black protest organizers and inner-city residents complained that their cause and protests were being hijacked by woke whites.  Antifa and its black-clad wannabes were also prominent as the disturbances moved into their second phase. After two weeks, the black inner-city neighborhoods had cooled. The sites of confrontation now moved out of black neighborhoods and in two directions. One path led back to a battlefield on which black and white groups had united in the early days of Black Lives Matter: attacks on statues to Robert E. Lee and other heroes of the Confederacy.   The other path led to a battle with the American system itself. The targets this time were not local or state policing, or the management of communal relations, but symbols of the American founding...   The further the focus of protest moved from police violence against black people, the further it moved from black neighborhoods, and the whiter the faces in the footage became. The anarchists who seceded from the United States by declaring the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in six gentrified, heavily gay and mostly white blocks of Seattle were almost entirely white. They rectified this by delegating security in their urban Eden to Raz Simmons, a black rapper who poses with a machine gun in his Twitter profile. Simmons delivered his first exemplary beating within hours of his appointment.  Meanwhile, older whites – call them the weak, rather than the woke – engaged in ritual abnegations and atonements. White church leaders knelt to wash the feet of black church leaders. In Virginia, white suburbanites rallied to raise their hands, testify to their sins and announce their spiritual rebirth, as though appropriating the habits of evangelical black churches.  Prominent whites in the media confessed too. Condé Nast, a top-of-the-market titan that had laid off dozens of employees due to the coronavirus, was a particular locus of revolutionary conscious raising. Anna Wintour suddenly realized that it must be hard to be black and work at Vogue. The editor of foodie magazines Bon Appétit and Epicurious resigned after it emerged that he had attended a Halloween party in the guise of a Puerto Rican...   None of this had anything to do with George Floyd or police violence against black men. Nor did the revolt of the newsroom at the New York Times after it published an op-ed in which the Republican senator Tom Cotton called for the use of force against rioters, a notion endorsed by a majority of Americans. The weapons of struggle were now the thought-crime language of the private campus: institutional racism, white supremacy, whitesplaining, cultural appropriation. Those wielding them were the graduates of four-year colleges, the kind of people who can afford to take entry-level jobs in the media.  Again, the white generations divided, only this time their antagonism was obvious. As with the #MeToo scandals, the young are “calling out” the complicity of the old... The generation that graduated after 2008 are lost and angry...   The young American left talks like Marx, but their revolution is Tocqueville’s: the “revolution of rising expectations”. As in pre-1789 France or pre-1917 Russia, America’s educational system produces more prospective members of the elite than the state and the market can employ. The liberal order that enriched the Millennials’ grandparents and parents has failed to enrich them...   The Millennials talk of “safe spaces” because there are fewer safe spaces in American life, fewer secure perches in a gig economy that makes Uber drivers out of college grads. The only safe space is now inside an institution, whether of government, education or media. Once you have that spot, the only way to protect it from the increasingly vicious competition of your peers and rivals is to outplay them in the rhetoric of identity politics.  We are witnessing the end of the post-Sixties liberal system in America... The younger, radical generation is taking the civil rights of blacks as a pretext for levering their parents’ generation out of power. They have no time for free speech: why would they want anyone to describe what they’re doing?"

Black Lives Matter calls for month-long boycott of 'white companies' to support 'BlackXmas' - "Black Lives Matter has announced its seventh year of boycotting 'white companies' during the holiday season to support 'Black Xmas.'  On Black Friday, the official Black Lives Matter Global Network shared an Instagram post calling to 'support Black-led-Black-serving organizations.'   'We're dreaming of a #BlackXmas. That means no spending with white companies from Black Friday until New Years Day', the official blackxmas.org site states. The group suggest three ways for its supporters to take part in Black Xmas: Build Black, Buy Black, and Bank Black.   The group is encouraging its followers to 'buy exclusively from Black-owned businesses' claiming 'white-supremacist-capitalism uses policing to protect profits and steal Black life.' ... 'Great idea by blklivesmatter! def gonna make sure the local owned shops I buy from are white owned! we gotta support our own race! so glad we are finally on the same page,' @Sligresda commented.   Many Twitter users also pointed to several Black Lives Matter leaders that have bought expensive houses in predominately white neighborhoods in recent years.   'Give us your money so we can buy more houses worth millions and then blame white supremacy again,' @Mikail58980053 tweeted.   'Or hear me out...build a $35k fence around your $1.4m home in a predominantly white neighborhood and BOOM liberated. Doing pretty good for a "marxist",' @ljmikeii wrote."
There used to be a term for discriminating against people based on race. Now that term is "anti-racist"

A requiem for Black Lives Matter - "Black Lives Matter has yet to receive a requiem, a summation in print. More than seven years into the globally unavoidable anti-police movement, there certainly exists a sizable BLM academic literature, dealing – as my political science colleague Bob Maranto has pointed out – with questions ranging from how the movement impacted on youth-voter turnout to the social impact of Ben & Jerry’s selling politically themed flavours of ice-cream.  However, almost no one has examined how well Black Lives Matter met its initial goals: reducing the police violence that was invariably presented as ‘epidemic’ or ‘genocidal’ and reducing crime more broadly, as brothers and others came to trust a fairer criminal justice system. For that matter, whatever happened to the literally billions of dollars donated, in good faith, to national and local BLM chapters?  This article takes a shot at those tough questions. In most cases, unfortunately, the blunt but real answer seems to be: Black Lives Matter had few, if any, positive impacts. Police violence is down slightly, if at all, while overall crime in BLM-affected areas has sky-rocketed back to 1990s levels. As Dr Maranto and I recently noted for Commentary magazine, rates of fatal shootings of civilians by US police – per an authoritative database from the Washington Post – appear to have hardly budged during the post-2014 BLM era... The modern leftist ‘kinder and gentle’ approach to the policing of tough urban areas has been tried over and over since its genesis during the 1960s, and the results have always been basically the same. Back in 2016, during the first wave of what has now been seven or eight years of BLM unrest in the US, a neighbourhood Chicago paper – with a heavily black readership – ran the tear-jerking but unremarkable headline: ‘Chicago Police Stops Down 90 per cent… Gun Violence Sky-Rockets.’ Decades before this, the Miranda v Arizona and Escobedo v Illinois legal cases, fruit of the poisoned-tree evidence doctrine, both shifted the balance of power in interrogations in favour of suspects. Meanwhile, the community policing movement, ‘maximum sentence’ campaigns and so forth of the 1960s led directly to a brutal new normal for American crime, which endured until the Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani backlash of the fed-up post-OJ 1990s... there seems little doubt of a causal relationship here. The highly professional CCCJ report notes that: ‘Homicides, aggravated assaults and gun assaults rose significantly beginning in late May and June of 2020.’ As we know, George Floyd died on 25 May 2020, and widespread unrest and police pullback began almost immediately afterward... donations to BLM-related causes – the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) and other NGOs at the heart of international BLM – between May and December 2020 amounted to $10.6 billion... a shortlist of causes to receive at least a six-figure grant from BLMGNF includes: ‘Trans United, the Audrey Lorde Project (Trans Justice), Black Trans Circles, the Transgender District, the Black Trans Travel Fund, the Okra Project, For the Gworls, the Trans Justice Funding Project, the Trans Housing Coalitions Homeless Black Trans Women’s Fund, Black Trans Media, and Black Trans Femmes in the Arts.’ Very probably, BLMGNF – an entity which is ‘unapologetically queer’ – has committed more money to gay and particularly trans-advocacy organisations than to black groups focused on improving the ‘hood’ or fighting police brutality. Indeed, a collective of urban Black Lives Matter chapters known as the #BLM10, which includes the significant New Jersey and Hudson Valley branches of the organisation, has publicly complained that its chapters have received ‘little to no financial support’ since BLM’s launch in 2013.   Be that as it may, organisational contributions and individual speaking fees have certainly enabled a pleasant lifestyle for the Black Lives Matter national leadership team, as well as those affiliated with the charities they support...   From my perspective on a typical American street, however, a quick and negative summary of the effects of BLM comes immediately to mind: Black Lives Matter got a lot of black people killed."
The liberal cope is that black people killed by the police is a huge tragedy because the state, which is supposed to protect you, has failed, whereas black people killing each other doesn't matter because the state isn't involved. From the perspective of the dead black people and those affected by their deaths, that doesn't matter, of course (even if we pretend that all the black people killed by police were innocent)

Links - 2nd July 2023 (2 - Covid-19)

The Coronavirus Lab-Theory Cover-Up: When Truth Serves Prejudice | National Review - "Why, one might ask, was someone such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin — a woman who couldn’t tell a pangolin from a giraffe — so extraordinarily invested in the idea that the coronavirus had come from animals? Like almost all of her fellow eye-rollers, Rubin is not a virologist or an epidemiologist or a zoologist; she is a journalist, whose only real-life experience has been in enthusiastically changing her mind.  On closer inspection, though, the reason for this investment comes clearly into view: that, like the people who openly root for a shooter to be of a particular color or political persuasion, Rubin and Co. believe that the answer to the question, “Where did the virus originate?” is much less important than the answer to the question, “What will Americans make of the answer to the question, ‘Where did the virus originate?’” Or, put another way: What has really mattered to those who have been scornful of the “lab leak” theory was not the underlying scientific question of whether it is true, but what the people they dislike might think and say as a result of its being discovered to be true. And, indeed, if it is true that the COVID-19 outbreak was the result of an accident at a laboratory in China, we might well come to reevaluate some things. We might come to see virologists both as the villains and the heroes of the piece. Western criticism of the Chinese Communist Party — which far too many left-leaning Americans have decided represents “xenophobia” — might increase. There might be a great deal of justified anger aimed at the handful of people who have caused this much suffering and damage. We might have to acknowledge that Tom Cotton was right about something. And we might end up less worried about Donald Trump’s having called it the “China virus.” It is certainly not a coincidence that the people who have been the most dismissive of the lab-leak theory are the people most desperate to avoid these eventualities.  A long time ago, when Barack Obama was president, the blogger Ace of Spades complained correctly that substantive politics had given way to a focus on “Macguffins.” What mattered to the press, Ace suggested, was not the detail of a given policy or aim, but who wanted that policy and who opposed it. If Barack Obama hoped to achieve something, Ace argued, that became the story, and everyone else in the saga was placed according to that fact, with those who agreed with him playing the role of the good guys and those who stood in his way playing the role of the bad guys.   It is impossible not to have noticed this trend throughout the recent coronavirus pandemic, during which everything that Republican governors did was met with eye rolls at best and charges of homicide at worst, while Democratic governors were held up on pedestals even when they were responsible for precisely the sort of “Neanderthal” decisions for which their counterparts had been lambasted. It is impossible, too, not to have seen it in the discussion around the “lab leak” theory, which has seen the skeptics reflexively cast as outré in defense of a theory that has always been little more than a guess. Rarely in the history of human discourse has the press corps been so dismissive of something about which it knew so little. Rarely has it been so obvious what it was doing."
From 2021

Vaccine Hesitancy Is On the Rise — & Experts Are Sounding the Alarm
Actual Antifascist on Twitter - "The subtext is that Pharma and the CDC [pardon the redundancy] created millions of *actual* antivaxers through their deceit on Covid jabs."

The Kids Are Not Alright: Growing concerns - "Something is happening with B.C.’s youngest students — those who spent some of their most important formative years during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Teachers are seeing it in their classrooms, parents are living with and dealing with it at home, and now it is the focus of an in-depth CityNews investigation, The Kids Are Not Alright... Knibbs and other primary grade teachers who spoke with CityNews describe Grade 1 and Grade 2 students who are far behind peers in previous years when it comes to social and emotional skills, things like problem-solving, and negotiating conflict. There are also higher levels of anxiety and disruptive behaviour in the classrooms...   Kang says in 20 years of practice and working with the school system, she has never seen such burnout and stress among teachers who are dealing with both children’s and parents’ anxiety."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "while the media was alarmed over Trump’s support for unproven, though relatively harmless therapeutics, they’ve been relatively silent over the many missteps by the Biden administration regarding the response to Covid."
Epic Fail: Vaccination Rates Now Lower Than When Biden Took Office – Issues & Insights - "  While there’s no evidence that his call for mandates has accelerated vaccination rates, it appears that Biden’s dictates are contributing to the labor shortages – including in hospitals – that are plaguing the economy, disrupting supply chains, and pushing up prices...    A poll by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 90% of its members say it will be difficult to implement Biden’s mandate"
From 2021

We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole - "Martin Kulldorff: I am aligned with the Left when I defend the COVID-19 strategy in my native Sweden. But here in the United States, when I defend very similar strategies implemented by the Republican governors of South Dakota and Florida, I am perceived as being aligned with the Right. It is a little weird. Among my infectious disease colleagues that favor an age-targeted strategy rather than lockdowns, most are left-wing progressives, while most of my Twitter followers are on the Right. As a public health scientist, it is my duty to fight for public health independently of partisan politics. I hope that people from across the political divide can come together to end a lockdown that is so damaging to public health, and instead advocate for age-targeted counter measures that properly protect high-risk individuals. After all, we live in this world together, sharing both its beauties and its viruses... An age-targeted strategy protects all older high-risk individuals until herd immunity is reached, whether rich or poor, while keeping schools open for our children and letting young low-risk adults live their lives and support their families. For more information, I recommend reading a fantastic interview with Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University. In my view, she is the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist. Katherine Yih: The responsibility needs to be shared. Progressives need to reject the unquestioning lockdown approach, which is simply inappropriate unless and until hospitals and other health care facilities are in danger of being overwhelmed...   The moralistic finger-wagging must also stop. It makes no sense to try to shame or, worse, expel from college young people who go to parties or bars. My colleague Julia Markus has written persuasively about how counterproductive this attitude is. Infectious diseases will spread, and exposures in young, healthy people contribute to the herd immunity that will ultimately benefit all.   Progressives should be advocating for a sustainable, communitarian approach that is informed by the knowledge that the virus will spread until herd immunity is achieved, acknowledges the need for stringent protections of the vulnerable in order to minimize deaths, and recognizes the harm caused by crude across-the-board lockdowns and their disproportionate impact on workers and people of color."
From 2020. Despite the provocative headline (it's from Jacobin, after all), this was a great interview. It's a tragedy the wisdom was not heeded

Boy, 13, turned away from B.C. walk-in clinic because he isn't vaccinated - "Seeking a break from the wildfire smoke at home in Falkland, Kate Stein and her kids were spending the day with her parents in Enderby on Monday when her son fell off his skateboard... After hearing the boy hadn’t been, she was told to take him to the emergency room at Shuswap Lake General Hospital in neighbouring Salmon Arm.  “I was flabbergasted,” she said. “The doctor wouldn’t see us. He was only accepting fully vaccinated patients.”  Stein said she isn’t opposed to vaccination.  “Both my husband and I are fully vaccinated. But my son just turned 13 and we didn’t want to rush into it. We’re still figuring it out.”  Stein eventually drove her son to Salmon Arm. But she’s worried other people might not have that option, particularly in remote communities where there are fewer places to see a doctor, or transportation to another community might be impossible.  “What is happening in our province that health care is now optional?” she said. “If people can’t access health care, I think we have a problem.” On Monday, the B.C. government announced new rules requiring citizens to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination to get into non-essential businesses and events, such as sporting events, nightclubs, restaurants and movies, beginning Sept. 13. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association called the plan, which doesn’t apply to health care, faith services or to children under age 12 who aren’t eligible for vaccines, “arbitrary and illegal.”...   Mario Devault said he had a similar experience at the Enderby clinic on Tuesday...   “I sat in the waiting area and the doctor eventually came out and immediately started yelling at me to get out,” he said.  Devault said he also saw an elderly woman turned away while he was waiting...   A sign posted on the door to the walk-in clinic Tuesday said the clinic was closed until further notice and advised people to travel to emergency rooms in Vernon or Salmon Arm for medical attention.  Both the B.C. College of Physicians and Surgeons, which regulates the practice of medicine under provincial law, and Doctors of B.C., the association representing doctors, are clear that doctors can’t discriminate based on vaccination status."
From 2021. Of course, the media never fixated on how awful vaxholes were, only on alleged "anti-vaxxer" "crimes"

Review - Pulling No Punches (Switch) - WayTooManyGames - "Living in a pandemic wasn’t easy for anyone. We were locked in our homes, not knowing when we would be able to get out ever again, fearing for a disease which could be spread to our loved ones, and, to make matters worse, seeing those who weren’t taking the situation seriously carelessly walking around and spreading misinformation in various selfish ways. We have all had heated arguments with more ignorant family members, started reconsidering some friendships, and changed our lifestyles for a while. In short, we were feeling frustrated. We were getting angry, whether we wanted to or not. Pulling No Punches, a small beat ’em up made by indie Brazilian studio BrainDead Broccoli, is almost like a cathartic representation of our anger in game form... Pulling No Punches basically offers this specific demographic a very cathartic means to vent out these inner frustrations with a decent, albeit short and tiresome beat ’em up, where the objective is simple: beat the living hell out of denialists and other corrupt officials. Think of it as a Final Fight/Streets of Rage clone with some gross-out humor and animations. Instead of gang members, you are punching pandemic denialists, far-right bloggers, televangelists, flat-earthers, and people infected with hydroxychloroquine... Bosses were funny representations of the ones who made our lives miserable over the past years"
Covid hystericists are still batshit insane. And we still get so much gaslighting about "misinformation" (among other things). Ironic, given that covid hystericists did so much of that. All the same, the review (and game, too) demonstrate perfectly the left's politicisation of covid - they just need(ed) scapegoats and someone to heap stigma on

Meme - "Do you not understand ??? We do this to protect your health. Remember *Police brutality at lockdown protest*"

Japanese adult company offers 200 titles for free amid Covid-19 outbreak, site crashes same day - "The country’s adult video company Soft On Demand (SOD) has announced that it will give away 200 of its titles for free to those who have to remain at home throughout the month.  The campaign, which will run until March 31, will allow fans to view titles featuring popular porn actresses on SOD Prime at no charge... Apart from giving out 200 free titles, SOP is also announced that they will hand out SOD Basara masturbation aids to the first 200 registrants."
From 2020

After Coronavirus, Government Will Have to Shrink - WSJ - "In the response to the coronavirus pandemic, leftists see a model for the future... All this intervention has been economically ruinous. No amount of money can fully compensate for social-distancing actions whose effect is to shut down large segments of the economy. Tens of millions have lost jobs, and many thousands have lost businesses. In most cases, compensation from the state is a fraction of what they were earning.  Many of the measures are necessary to combat Covid-19, although we will be able to evaluate them with any certainty only after the crisis. Yet there’s little doubt that the economic damage is staggering. Anecdotal data suggest that drops in global gross domestic product exceed in scale and speed what happened in the 1930s. The underlying assumption—that the economy can be restarted later as quickly as an idle automobile—is dubious... There is another reason to expect a shift to less government: Public-sector balance sheets will be an unholy mess. Even before this crisis, public debt levels were dangerously high. The IMF estimated that 2019 concluded with a global public debt-to-GDP ratio of 83%, amounting to a total indebtedness of about $70 trillion... “Modern monetary theorists” will prattle on about how with low interest rates and monetary expansion this does not matter. Their core belief—that governments can never really run out of money—is nonsensical. Mexico faced default in the 1990s, and Canada came close. The global financial crisis resulted in multiple sovereign debt crises a decade ago.  This time will probably be much worse. Governments began this episode with poorer balance sheets, and central-bank actions effectively nationalized much corporate debt. Unless we experience a period of astronomical global growth, simple arithmetic dictates that many governments, both national and subnational, will experience debt crises or at least severe pressures, in the years to come. If they fail to practice mild austerity proactively, a brutal kind will be thrust on them. One lesson from 2008-09 is that a crisis, as bad as it seems at the time, is actually the easy part for those in public office. In the short term, spending initiatives or tax breaks are always popular, especially when the public wants to see quick action. The inevitable spending cuts and tax hikes later—even those that end temporary measures—will encounter serious resistance.  Despite the unsustainable nature of today’s spending, opposition this time may even be stronger. Many workers have been reduced to limited stipends by government-ordered shutdowns, leading to renewed calls for a “guaranteed minimum income.” And that’s the lesser problem. Those laid off in public institutions have generally received full pay. Their experience of a guaranteed maximum income will feed the delusion that current economic and fiscal management is somehow viable"
From May 2020. Prescient. But many leftists still believe covid showed that money printing is no problem, of course, and inflation is due to corporate greed

Meme - Rory Cooper @rorycooper: "They sued to keep schools closed. They staged mock funerals in front of children. They said lazy parents wanted teachers to die and kicked them out of school board mtgs. They told kids school wasn't a safe place. They falsified data to justify it. And now they're lying, again."
Randi Weingarten @rweingarten: "Glad I had the chance to set the record straight on the fact that since April 2020, the @AF Tunion's agenda was the opposite of wanting to keep schools closed was to reopen them safely."

The Cult of the Vaccine - "it took less than 24 hours for the drug — barely tested, let alone released yet — to be accused of prolonging the pandemic. By the third day, mentions of molnupiravir in news reports nearly all came affixed to stern reminders of its place beneath vaccines in the medical hierarchy, as in the New York Times explaining that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who initially told reporters the new drug was “impressive,” now “warned that Americans should not wait to be vaccinated because they believe they can take the pill.” Since the start of the Trump years, we’ve been introduced to a new kind of news story, which assumes adults can’t handle multiple ideas at once, and has reporters frantically wrapping facts deemed dangerous, unorthodox, or even just insufficiently obvious in layers of disclaimers. The fear of uncontrolled audience brain-drift is now so great that even offhand references must come swaddled in these journalistic Surgeon General’s warnings, which is why whenever we read anything now, we almost always end up fighting through nests of phrases like “the debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in a lab” in order to get to whatever the author’s main point might be. This lunacy started with the Great Lie Debate of 2016, when reporters and editors spent months publicly anguishing over whether to use “lie” in headlines of Donald Trump stories, then loudly congratulated themselves once they decided to do it. The most histrionic offender was the New York Times, previously famous for teaching readers to digest news in code (“he claimed” for years was Times-ese for “full of shit”) but now reasoned a “more muscular terminology,” connoting “a certain moral opprobrium,” was needed to distinguish the “dissembling” of a politician like Bill Clinton from Trump’s whoppers. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” could be mere falsehood, but “I will build a great great wall” required language that “stands apart.” The key term was moral opprobrium. Moralizing was exactly what journalists were once trained not to do, at least outside the op-ed page, but it soon became a central part of the job.. This was the beginning of an era in which editors became convinced that all earth’s problems derived from populations failing to accept reports as Talmudic law...
COOPER: Mr. Vice President, President Trump has falsely accused your son of doing something wrong while serving on a company board in Ukraine. I want to point out there’s no evidence of wrongdoing by either one of you.
The phrase, “no evidence of wrongdoing,” was a mandatory add last year in all coverage involving Ukraine, Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden, from the Guardian (“No evidence the younger Biden did anything illegal”) to CNBC (“There is no evidence that Trump or Giuliani has produced which shows that Hunter Biden was engaged in wrongdoing”) to Newsweek (“Although there is no evidence of illegal wrongdoing by the Bidens in those dealings”) to NBC (“No evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Biden”) to AP (“There has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either the vice president or his son”) to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Axios, and countless others.  The language was absurd on multiple levels, beginning with its incorrectness — unless they were talking purely about a legal definition, the issue of whether or not there was “wrongdoing” in Hunter Biden accepting a no-show $50,000-a-month job from a crooked Ukrainian energy firm was a matter for readers to decide, not an issue of fact. Still, a lot of people not only swallowed it, but vomited these and other terms back up again, over and over, on social media, or to their friends and family, or to anyone at all, in what became a new way for a certain kind of person to relate to the world.  As a student in the Soviet Union I noticed subscribers to what Russians called the sovok mindset talked in interminable strings of pogovorki, i.e goofball proverbs or aphorisms you’d heard a million times before (“He who takes no risk, drinks no champagne,” or “Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run off into the woods,” etc). This was a learned defense mechanism, adopted by a people who’d found out the hard way that anyone caught not speaking nonstop nonsense could be suspected of harboring original thoughts. Voluble stupidity is a great disguise in a society where silence is suspect.  We’re similarly becoming a nation of totalitarian nitwits, speaking in a borrowed lexicon of mandatory phrases and smelling heresy in anyone who doesn’t. This cult reflex was bad during the Russiagate years, but it’s gone into overdrive since the arrival of COVID... News flash: the instinct to armor-plate even unrelated news subjects with layer after layer of insistent vaccine dogma is not for the non-immunized, who mostly don’t watch outlets like CNN or read the New York Times. Outlets apply that neurotic messaging for their own target audiences, who’ve been trained to live in terror of un-contextualized content, which everyone knows leads to Trump, fascism, and death. I’d be the last person to claim there aren’t dumb people out there in America, but at least the audiences of channels like Fox and OAN know that content has been designed for them. The people gobbling down these pieces by Bloomberg and the Times that have the journalistic equivalent of child-proof caps on every paragraph that even parenthetically mentions COVID really believe that content has been dumbed down for some other person. They think it’s someone else who can’t handle news that vaccines work and that there also might be a pill that treats the disease, without freaking out or coming to politically unsafe conclusions. So they put up with being talked to like children — demand it, even. Which is nuts. Right? It is nuts, isn’t it?"
From 2021

Opinion: We should be questioning the global suppression of early treatment options for COVID-19 - "While I would imagine it is common knowledge in the medical community that early treatment for any ailment greatly improves the chance of a favorable outcome, why is there a virtual blackout of information surrounding the global conversation of early treatment protocol in order to AVOID hospitalization and death? Controlling the healthy with masks and social distancing and now vaccines, and then Herculean efforts involving the critically ill, have taken up all of the air, while the person in their first two weeks of the infection suffering at home is all but ignored by the medical community.   Dr. Peter McCullough, vice chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, and the most prolifically published academic physician in his field of heart and kidneys in history, has testified several times lately that there is a shocking suppression of early treatment for COVID-19 in medical literature. A review of several of his communications resulted in this summary of his findings. He calls this effort to suppress any hope of treatment, extraordinary... in Australia doctors were threatened with a 6-month prison sentence if they dared to prescribe the antiviral, Hydroxychloroquine. This move is unprecedented. The use of Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 is off-label they said. But off-label use of older medicines for new uses occurs every day. In fact, 20 percent of all prescriptions in the U.S. are written for off-label uses when a doctor thinks a medicine will benefit a patient. Apparently, the list of what not to use is long and broad within the treatment recommendations. We are 16 months into this thing and as-of-yet, there are zero trials of multidrug therapies. There is no national or global panel of doctors in charge of early treatment protocol. Why? Maybe it’s because a vaccine is only allowed to be produced if there are no effective treatments.     The conversation around building up one’s own immune system is also nearly nonexistent in medical and mainstream circles. A study conducted from March-June 2020 including 191,000 patients in the US found that Vitamin D deficiency increased the risk of acquiring COVID-19 by 54.5 percent. Additionally, 80 percent of people with COVID-19 didn’t have adequate levels of the vitamin in their blood. This is a wildly important piece of information that doctors should be shouting from the rooftops. Zinc is also critical as it helps block the virus from multiplying... the sole focus today seems to be on a one-size-fits-all vaccination campaign, instead of on strengthening one’s immune system and finding effective treatments. All of the eggs in the proverbial COVID-19 basket seem to be filled with only one treatment – the vaccine.   Dr. McCullough testifies that there is no scientific rationale to vaccinate anyone under the age of 50. The individual risk outweighs the individual benefit. Also, there were several groups that were intentionally excluded from the Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson vaccine trials in 2020; COVID-19 recovered, suspected COVID-19 recovered, those with COVID-19 antibodies, pregnant women, and women of childbearing potential that couldn’t assure the use of contraceptives. Pregnant women as a rule of best medical practice are always discouraged from coming in contact with anything pathogenic. The COVID-19 vaccine produces a pathogenic protein. Why then, are pregnant women being given the shot? The existing scientific data simply does not ensure that it is safe for this group... What we are witnessing now is tremendous coercion for everyone to receive this vaccine, no matter the individual risk/benefit analysis... Schools are offering vaccine clinics around the world, some without requiring the consent of parents. There simply is no significant evidence that children are at risk of spreading or becoming sick or dying from this virus. To me, these actions are nothing short of criminal."
From 2021

Meme - Occupy Democrats: "BREAKING NEWS: The Biden Administration issues a new eviction moratorium, putting a stop to many looming evictions, in order help stop the spread of the COVID Delta variant. It applies to America's high risk areas - and will last until Oct 3. RT if you support Biden's decision!"
Occupy Democrats: "BREAKING: A large Florida landlord announces that he will begin requiring all new and existing tenants to provide proof of COVID vaccination, saying, "You don't want to get vaccinated? You have to move, and if you don't, we will evict you." RT IF YOU SUPPORT THE LANDLORD'S MOVE!"
"Dems trying to figure out if they're supposed to evict or not evict:"
Comment: "Not surprised these are the same people that claim healthcare is a right but only for the vaccinated."
Addendum: Ahh... When Occupy supports big companies in crushing individuals!

S'pore attracted S$140B thanks to successful COVID-19 handling
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. But this is Michael Petraeus after all

Gorsuch Condemns 'Breathtaking' COVID Emergency Powers - "Justice Neil Gorsuch says all three branches of government share some of the blame for what he calls the "breathtaking scale" of emergency powers wielded by public officials during the COVID-19 pandemic.  "While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws—too often fell silent,"...   Gorsuch's sweeping and powerful statement was attached to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, one of several cases dealing with the Title 42 orders that allowed federal immigration authorities to expel migrants seeking asylum in the United States...   "Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale," Gorsuch wrote before rattling off a list that included stay-at-home orders, school closures, attendance limits on churches, a federal ban on evictions, and the Biden administration's attempt (blocked by the Supreme Court) to impose a national vaccine mandate via a federal workplace safety regulator...   "Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat," he wrote. "We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes."  This is, as Gorsuch also notes, not a new lesson but one that has been part of the story of democracy since ancient times.   Even so, it's a lesson worth revisiting in the aftermath of the pandemic. If there is one thing that ought to change, it's probably the general understanding of what constitutes an emergency in the first place. By definition, it is an acute, immediate crisis. But during the pandemic, that definition was stretched to include adjacent policy issues that had nothing to do with the immediate public health situation. An eviction moratorium never made much sense as a response to a viral outbreak, at least not after stay-at-home orders were lifted. Neither did cross-border travel restrictions after the pandemic's earliest days when it was hoped (wrongly) that such barriers could keep the disease at bay.   "The point of an emergency is that it's a sudden, unforeseen, urgent kind of scenario," says Jonathan Bydlak, director of the Governance Program at the R Street Institute, a right-of-center think tank. Bydlak, my guest on this week's episode of American Radio Journal, compares it to a car accident: a situation where the normal rules might have to be suspended—an ambulance can run red lights, for example, to respond to the call. Months later, however, when an accident victim might be on his way to physical therapy, he doesn't get to bypass the red lights.  "Sometimes people conflate the initial crisis—the initial instigating event—with this broader question and say 'just because something important is going on, it must be an emergency' and that's not necessarily the case," says Bydlak.  That's exactly what happened over and over during the pandemic...   Emergencies may sometimes require that the lawmaking process be temporarily short-circuited, but it's imperative that state legislatures, Congress, and courts at all levels tighten up the circumstances in which emergency powers may be invoked. Gorsuch is right: When officials take shortcuts to make policy, civil liberties are often the cost."

How Canada’s Cult of the Noble Savage Harms Its Indigenous Peoples

How Canada’s Cult of the Noble Savage Harms Its Indigenous Peoples

"How did it come to be, I wondered, that this room full of intellectuals and policy-makers, plucked from among one of the most secular nations on earth, should be called upon to genuflect en masse to animist spirits?...

Racism has taken many forms throughout Western history. But typically, it originates broadly with the idea that one race ranks as inferior to another on some imaginary index of human worth...

In the case of white supremacist attitudes toward Indigenous peoples, however, the history is more complicated...

Written accounts, such as those left by eighteenth century explorer Pierre de La Vérendrye, express admiration for the toughness, survival skills, and ingenuity of the Indigenous groups they encountered. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, France’s Minister of Marine during the reign of Louis XIV century, went so far as to urge a “fusion” between French explorers and the Aboriginal population, as an instrument to expand France’s influence.In the frozen expanses of northern Canada, the impulse toward racism was blunted the hard way, because whites who dismissed the knowledge and guidance of local Indigenous communities often would pay the ultimate price for their arrogance...

Both Canada and the United States eventually imposed policies aimed at annihilating Indigenous cultural practices and languages. Yet, paradoxically, these same white-dominated societies would also lionize individual Indigenous chiefs, warriors, spiritual leaders, artists and writers. In Canada, none would become more famous than the self-proclaimed “Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin, Grey Owl, North American Indian, champion of the Little People of the Forests.” During the 1930s, in fact, Grey Owl would become the most famous Indigenous writer in the world—despite the fact that (as the world learned after his death) he was actually a British immigrant from Hastings, England named Archibald Stanfield Belaney.

Grey Owl was a gifted, if somewhat didactic, middlebrow writer who produced sentimental narratives about the Canadian wilderness he roamed throughout his adult life. Even if he’d been honest about his identity as a white man, he might well have made a successful living from his books. But the ingredient that made him a true literary star—both in Canada and internationally—was his allegedly Indigenous bloodline, which editors and readers alike believed gave him special insight into the secrets of nature and the animal kingdom. Having grown up as an English schoolboy fascinated by First Nations and their habitats, Grey Owl knew exactly what his readers wanted: gauzy sketches of a simpler, more noble, more sacred world than the smog-choked cities they inhabited. Sadly, the simplistic and infantilizing stereotypes he peddled persist to this day.

Canadians now take for granted the portrayal of Indigenous peoples as conscientious, pacifistic stewards of the earth. But as University of Alberta literature professor Albert Braz has noted, this conception of Indigenous life didn’t become popularized until the early twentieth century. Prior to that, it was just as common to hear tales of Indigenous hunters (and fighters) performing wanton slaughter, annihilating other tribes, or whole species of animals. It was Grey Owl, a white man, who led the campaign to rebrand Indigenous peoples as innocent children of the forest. He even went so far as to suggest that it would be preferable for Indigenous peoples to disappear from the planet rather than be “thrown into the grinding wheels of the mill of modernity, to be spewed out a nondescript, undistinguishable from the mediocrity that surrounds him, a reproach to the memory of a noble race.”

In the Canadian magazine Forest and Outdoors, through which Grey Owl first attained a wide readership, editors called the man a “philosopher of the wild.” The language used to describe him in these interwar-era publications was borrowed from Christianity—identifying the emerging author as an ambassador from a real-world Eden...

In the United States, the rise of the interstate highway system is credited with bringing blacks and whites into closer contact, indirectly paving the way for the civil rights era. But the development of modern Canadian transportation networks arguably had the opposite effect—because many rural Indigenous communities instantly became flyover country. Meanwhile, these communities were being transformed into permanent lumber-framed settlements that lacked the romantic appeal of the quasi-nomadic First Nations world mythologized by Grey Owl. Then, as now, alcohol, processed foods, and welfare dependency took their toll on Indigenous life...

While Canadian media outlets are encouraged to print and broadcast abundant material about Indigenous issues, editors are looking for retellings of the same approved bad-news/good-news story—according to which Indigenous communities apply courage and resilience to thwart the forces of white cultural genocide...

For Indigenous Canadians, this political awakening has been a welcome development. But it also has had a destabilizing effect on the self-conception of non-Indigenous Canadian society, which already was deep into the process of shedding its old-fashioned identity as a white, Christian nation. The introduction of Indigenous animist ritualism into Canadian public life over the last decade or so isn’t just an expression of “white guilt,” as many claim. It’s also part of a revival of Grey Owl-era reveries that, in turn, tap into romantic Canadian ideas about the frozen north.

All Western nations have witnessed a general casting about for something to replace religion as an organizing principle in the lives of ordinary people. But Canadians have experienced this phenomenon in an especially acute manner, because two other organizing principles of our national intellectual life—anti-Americanism and regionalism (especially the Quebec separatist movement)—also have fallen away during the same period. While many recent immigrants to Canada still enjoy a vibrant civic culture within their communities, old-stock WASPs inhabit an increasingly denuded spiritual milieu. Indigenous land acknowledgments and other secularized expressions of white original sin now provide the only thin tissue of public ritual they regularly experience.

I am not speaking figuratively here, for it has become genuinely fashionable for educated Canadians to speak of First Nations people as embodying quasi-mystical, even magical, properties. This helps explain why even avowed secularists, who would be disgusted to see a priest or minister preside at a public event, will adopt a solemn mien if a First Nations elder holds forth on the four sacred directions. When I read social-media accounts from my friends who have had encounters with Indigenous elders, they often reflect what Victor Watts called the sacred dialogue, “in which the author describes how some divine spirit or power, at first unknown to him, appears and reveals to him some portion of hidden wisdom.”...

Traditional Indigenous lands exist in the imagination of these authors as places of magic and wonder—a sort of Narnia to which white people can escape when they tire of their own drab existence.

In an essay entitled Two-Step, non-Indigenous author Katherin Edwards appreciatively profiles Carol, an angelic First Nations restaurant owner in Kamloops, B.C. who serves up food with “love, affection, and good will”—even if white people are too callous to appreciate her labours. “I can always tell when [a food] order comes back,” Carol says. “If it’s First Nations [customers], then they take what they are given knowing we give our best. A Caucasian tends to say, ‘I want it done this way, with that’ ” Edwards assents to Carol’s surprisingly crude racial categorization. Indeed, she presents it as a microcosm of a broader, race-based moral hierarchy...

By the end of the story, Edwards surrenders to the idea that no effort to expunge her race’s shame and guilt could ever feel sufficient—a frame of mind that Medieval monks once described as the living “bath of hell.” Author Donna Kane, similarly, reminded me of Lady Macbeth, pleading “Out, damn’d spot!” as she promises readers to “work on my reconciliation for the rest of my life.”

In describing the stock “Magical Negro” who often appears in popular books and movies, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu once noted that this type of character typically is shown to be “wise, patient, and spiritually in touch, [c]loser to the earth.” (Think of Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding in The Shawshank Redemption.) In This Together contains a menagerie of similarly magical-seeming Aboriginals who are “soft-spoken” and “insightful.” A typical supporting character is the hard-luck Aboriginal child whose “entire face seemed to radiate a quiet knowing.” Older characters speak in Yoda-like snippets such as “There is much loss—but all is not lost.”...

It is entirely true that the Indigenous societies of North America were rooted in economic and cultural traditions vastly different from those of the European explorers and settlers who invaded this continent. But it is absurd, and even regressive, to present whole swathes of humanity as inherently benign, or to turn pre-contact North America into a secular Eden. People are people. They come in good and bad flavours, no matter where in the world you go.

In large part, our historical double-standard arises from the fact that Indigenous societies typically had oral cultures, so there are few written sources to document the true fabric of their ancient life. The history of European and Middle-Eastern peoples, on the other hand, is recorded in written histories that clearly show the past to be a long series of wars, slaughters, famines, and epidemics. We can choose to believe Grey Owl-style fables about the one, but not about the other.

The construct of Indigenous people as sacred creatures is now being embedded into official government documents. An Interim Report published in 2017 by a Canadian Inquiry mandated to investigate the scandalously high rates of violent death among Indigenous women and girls, for instance, was titled Our Women And Girls Are Sacred...

Many of the broad patterns of thought that I describe here apply as much to the United States as to Canada. But the particular geography of Canada makes our situation special. In the continental 48 states, all major Indigenous communities can be accessed by road, and tend to be at least somewhat integrated into local economies. In the Canadian north, by contrast, many reserves are isolated fly-in hamlets that still preserve their air of tragic exoticism. And so the racist legacy of Grey Owl becomes that much harder to extirpate.

Moreover, the commanding heights of Canadian arts and letters is still controlled by old-school white Torontonians who cling to the idea of the Arctic (and the north in general) as somehow comprising the frozen soul of a mythical, “true” Canadian identity. To this day, this is the part of the country where wealthy Canadians of a certain vintage go for expensive fishing and hunting expeditions. Or to attend high-end writers’ retreats or detox. While this cult of the north is of little interest to modern immigrants (as a second-generation Jew, I find it utterly baffling), it remains stubbornly influential. And it helps explain the lingering appeal of artists such as Lawren Harris, whose paintings portrayed northern mountainous sunscapes in much the same way as a small child would imagine God staring down at her from the clouds. In this conception, the north is Canada’s Holy Place. And Indigenous peoples are its racially defined priestly class.

And since white Canadians are now encouraged to imagine Indigenous biology as a DNA-encoded marker of exalted consciousness, many of the most bitterly contested debates in arts and letters now centre on allegations that this sacred way of knowing is being despoiled through the heresy of cultural appropriation. In one notorious case that I recently described for Quillette readers, for instance, a white novelist was attacked by Indigenous groups—with the support of the white literary press—for including a First Nations character in her novel; despite the fact that the author had hired an Indigenous consultant to examine her manuscript, and had even appeared before a council of Indigenous elders to answer questions about her artistic choices...

The whole apparatus of Canadian culture, academia, and activism now operates according to an explicitly race-conscious moral hierarchy that draws heavily on the idea of white skin as a badge of guilt and shame. And much of the Canadian Left now organizes its cadres according to the logic of separate-but-unequal. One “Bill of Responsibilities” for white people who seek to help Indigenous causes, for instance, instructs non-Indigenous people to constantly “reflect on and embrace their ignorance of the group’s oppression and always hold this ignorance in the forefront of their minds.” ...

Religious attitudes are now creeping back into public life through a back door. And it is spreading fast. At some Canadian universities, professors now are required to print Indigenous land acknowledgments on their course syllabi. These acknowledgments also are recited every day at my children’s school—the equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer that I was required to recite before eating lunch at an old-fashioned Montreal boy’s academy in the 1980s...

Indigenous people themselves are being made to suffer for white spiritual conceits, because the miasma of guilt and self-censorship that now afflicts politicians and intellectuals is choking off important discussions that Indigenous peoples recognize as necessary to improve their communities.

I will not dwell too much in this space on the cruel, cynical, and utterly disastrous government decisions that have led to the current state of affairs in Indigenous communities. But perhaps the single largest enduring difficulty originates in the fact that land on Indigenous reserves is not owned by residents in their capacity as individuals. Rather, it is controlled collectively, so that no person or family can buy, sell, lease, or mortgage their property in the normal manner that the rest of us take for granted.

This has had a crushing effect on business formation and land improvement. And it is one of the reasons why the housing stock on reserves degrades so quickly: Since no one owns their house in the normal way, there is little financial incentive to invest in any even basic upkeep activities such as mould eradication. And since residents can’t mortgage their homes, no one has any basis for secured lending. Indigenous people are no less industrious and ambitious than anyone else in Canada, but they often must leave their reserve communities to find their fortune. To remain on reserve is, in many ways, to exist as a serf within a welfare state...

The modern white fetish for noble-savage mythology means that my country’s leaders now are effectively putting their thumbs down on the side of cultural preservation over economic development—since it is the spiritual side of Indigenous life that is the real subject of their fascination. ..

Surviving historical records show Indigenous peoples to be skilled negotiators, courageous warriors, and tireless hunters. Yet in the white imagination, these societies are imagined to have been proto-socialists, forever composing wise adages about the cycles of nature. Indeed, in British Columbia, the efforts of white environmentalists to cynically co-opt the mantle of Indigenous protector has been so brazen that some business-focused Indigenous groups now are rebuking them publicly.

Or consider the uproar that followed a 2017 Supreme Court of Canada decision, in which the Justices unanimously ruled against a First Nations band—the Ktunaxa—which opposed the creation of a ski resort on a mountain in British Columbia that, they claimed, was inhabited by a sacred Grizzly Spirit Bear. “Freedom of religion is supposed to provide equal protection for all religions,” wrote a pair of op-ed writers in The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper. “The Supreme Court’s judgment disadvantages Indigenous spiritual traditions, whose objects of reverence are connected to pieces of land vulnerable to physical destruction. The judgment shows how Eurocentric ideas about religion enable the continuing appropriation of Indigenous lands.”

And yet, amid such outrage, virtually none of these writers took note of the fact that a separate Indigenous group—the Shuswap, whose lands lie closer to the proposed ski resort than those of the Ktunaxa—actually supported the ski-resort project because of the jobs and economic benefits it would bring to the region. This is because the Shuswap took what non-Indigenous Canadians regard as an incorrect Indigenous position. In Toronto’s Globe & Mail, for instance, an article that notes that “the Shuswap accepted the [ski resort] proposal, saying the resort would benefit their community” was entitled “Top court deals blow to Indigenous peoples.” By “Indigenous peoples,” this headline writer meant “real Indigenous peoples”—as imagined from the downtown offices of Toronto’s (largely white) press corps.

One of the most brilliant Indigenous artists that Canada has produced is Tomson Highway, an award-winning Cree playwright and novelist who spent nine years at a residential school in Ontario. In early 2015, I commissioned a piece from Highway for a magazine I then edited, in anticipation of the release of a major report on the residential-school legacy. Highway’s submission was brilliantly crafted. It was heretical, too: While acknowledging the terrible effects of residential schools on many Indigenous children, he also credited this education for some of the skills that allowed him to become a renowned artist.

And that’s why the piece was never published. One of my colleagues—a man whiter than me (if such a thing were possible) informed me that the piece would be “problematic” because it would hurt the “relationships” our magazine had created. When I probed further, it was made clear to me that the sensitive constituencies in question included not only Indigenous groups, but also non-Indigenous groups (and donors) that had come to see our magazine as a reliable voice for the approved position on this issue. Which meant we couldn’t just champion the voices of Indigenous peoples—we have to champion the right kind of Indigenous peoples. This sort of surreal and cynical conversation goes on, in hushed tones, all across the Canadian journalistic and academic landscape.

It was one of those moments when I realized that what I had entered was not a journalistic enterprise, but a sort of congregation. And it was only after I left it that I was free to think and pray as I wished. This included the freedom to not pray at all—as is my preference—even when instructed to do so by a kindly old lady."

Links - 2nd July 2023 (1 - Feminism)

VIDEO: I ‘Walked Like a Man’ and Three Times As Many Women Ran into Me as Men | National Review - "When 25-year-old labor organizer Beth Breslaw’s friend told her that more men than women bump into people on the sidewalk, Breslaw decided to test the theory by walking around New York City without moving aside for anyone. Breslaw told New York magazine that she did this “experiment” for most of December and all of November. And what did she find?  “I could probably count on my hand the number of women that bumped into me and the number of men that didn’t,” she said.    And so the term “manslamming” was born: More men than women refuse to yield to women on the sidewalk because our patriarchal culture conditions them to occupy space without showing consideration for anyone else.  But here’s the thing: I did a similar “experiment,” walking in and around Grand Central for an hour on Friday — and 66 women ran into me as compared to just 23 men. Sure, more than 23 guys got kind of close before they moved, but they ultimately seemed afraid of knocking me over and moved out of my way... should we call it “womanslamming?” No, that would be missing the point — which is that it’s not a gendered phenomenon. If you walk around not caring if you bump into people, you’re going to bump into people. It’s as simple as that.  Maybe it was the area I was in. Maybe it was because more women were on their phones or chatting in groups of friends. And, of course: I was testing the hypothesis that more than just a handful of women would run into me — just like Breslaw was testing the hypothesis that more than a just a handful wouldn’t.  After all, any outliers or biases that could be used to explain away the results of my “experiment” could also apply to hers. (By the way, I am using quotation marks around the word “experiment” for a reason. First of all, it’s kind of hard to define what counts as a “slam” and what doesn’t. Some were smaller bumps, some were full-on pushes and body-checks. And although I know that the “experiment” calls for not altering your path at all, I did move out of the way for babies and people in wheelchairs — which is not something I will apologize for.)... The street-slamming experience you have likely depends on a lot of things: The location. The time of day. Whose winter coats block their peripheral vision. And approximately 9 million other reasons that have nothing to do with gender."
This won't step feminists claiming that it's always men who refuse to get out of the way and pointing to "studies" allegedly proving that (I am unable to find any real studies)

Emily Ratajkowski Said She Attracts "The Worst Men" After Pete Davidson Split - "Emily Ratajkowski Said She Thinks She Attracts “Emasculated” Men Who “Don’t Know How To Handle” A “Strong Woman”"
Feminists mock men who boast about being alpha males, but love "strong women"
I thought wanting men to be masculine was "toxic masculinity"?
Since she seems to be throwing shade at Davidson, does that mean he really isn't an awesome guy after all, so all the female celebrities are dating him for some other reason?

Meme - "PATRIARCHY! MISOGYNIST! INCEL!
The Western Feminist Parrot (Delusionalicus lntelIigensia)
Can be recognized by its limited parroting capacity (it knows only 3 words)"

Arrest, assaults overshadow “men’s issues” lecture - "Farrell, who describes himself as a former feminist, and the only male ever to have been elected to the Board of the National Organization for Women three times, started to include men’s issues in his work about gender in the mid-1980s. About fifteen protestors stood in front of the doors before the event, forming a barricade and blocking attendees from entering through the main doors of the auditorium... There was also significant controversy over the move by protesters to barricade the doors. Many patrons argued that the methods used by the protestors suppressed free speech and stifled debate. The protestors argued that Farrell’s talk was hate speech, and did real damage to women. Demonstrators shouted the slogan “No Hate Speech on Campus” on a number of occasions throughout the night. Farrell’s lecture centred around ten major themes, including discussion of “men’s issues” such as video game or porn addiction, which disproportionately affects men, and boys’ relative disadvantages in education... The lecture was delayed by the crowd of protestors, who had organized on Facebook through a coalition group calling themselves “U of T Students United Against Sexism.” Protestors accused Farrell and the men’s issues awareness movement of misogyny, and of protecting and denying male privilege. “We recognize that they [the men’s issues awareness movement] are really messed up … men are at a point of privilege, so we need to recognize privilege and become an ally [of women’s rights],” said Guled Arale, Scarborough Campus Students’ Union vice-president... “If a man ignoring a woman’s verbal ‘no’ is committing date rape, then a woman who says ‘no’ with her verbal language but ‘yes’ with her body language is committing date fraud. And a woman who continues to be sexual even after she says ‘no’ is committing date lying”... Farrell said that he does not blame date rape on its victims, and that he only made the point that there was an “evolution of misunderstandings between communication and litigation.” He also added an example that a verbal “yes” said in the tone of “no” also means no."
Comments: "Funny how those trying to deny others free speech and assembly are the first to talk about how we live in a "police state"..."
"I was there. They were not peaceful. They physically blocked us, called us "rape apologists" and generally tried to intimidate everyone with aggressive behavior and a numbers advantage. I was there with a colleague of mine - a woman who works with me helping disadvantaged youth in the community - and she was accused of selling out her own gender for my pleasure"
"they try and justify their hypocrisy by labeling it "hate speech." Which, of course, is defined as anything these people disagree with."
"How is a talk violent/oppressive?"

Is Forced Fatherhood Fair? - NYTimes.com - "Women’s rights advocates have long struggled for motherhood to be a voluntary condition, and not one imposed by nature or culture...  If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman, and does not want to raise the child with her, what are his choices? Surprisingly, he has few options in the United States. He can urge her to seek an abortion, but ultimately that decision is hers to make. Should she decide to continue the pregnancy and raise the child, and should she or our government attempt to establish him as the legal father, he can be stuck with years of child support payments. Do men now have less reproductive autonomy than women?  Should men have more control over when and how they become parents, as many women now do?... "if women’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a fetus, then men’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a resulting child"... the new definition of ‘fatherhood’ is driven by the government’s goal of collecting child support from men whose biological offspring are in the welfare system, as well as lawsuits from men aiming to avoid financial responsibility for their dependents... Coercing legal paternity in such cases leads to painful “disestablishment” battles that are unlikely to be in the best interest of the child or promote stable family relationships. Murphy discusses cases in which legal fathers resort to violence or threats of violence against a mother and her children when child support orders are enforced against them... Feminists have long held that women should not be penalized for being sexually active by taking away their options when an accidental pregnancy occurs. Do our policies now aim to punish and shame men for their sexual promiscuity? Many of my male students (in Miami where I teach), who come from low-income immigrant communities, believe that our punitive paternity policies are aimed at controlling their sexual behavior. Moreover, the asymmetrical options that men and women now have when dealing with an unplanned pregnancy set up power imbalances in their sexual relationships that my male students find hugely unfair to them... just as court-ordered child support does not make sense when a woman goes to a sperm bank and obtains sperm from a donor who has not agreed to father the resulting child, it does not make sense when a woman is impregnated (accidentally or possibly by her choice) from sex with a partner who has not agreed to father a child with her. In consenting to sex, neither a man nor a woman gives consent to become a parent, just as in consenting to any activity, one does not consent to yield to all the accidental outcomes that might flow from that activity. Policies that punish men for accidental pregnancies also punish those children who must manage a lifelong relationship with an absent but legal father. These “fathers” are not “dead-beat dads” failing to live up to responsibilities they once took on — they are men who never voluntarily took on the responsibilities of fatherhood with respect to a particular child"
Comments: "Women can "choose" to have sexual intercourse, but then also "choose" not to be a parent. To say that men can choose to be abstinent, but women do not have to face that same choice is profoundly sexist... the readership of the New York Times appears overwhelming to believe that women should have rights while men should have responsibilities."
"Possibly the best advice a father could give his son these days is to create a sperm bank account and then have a vasectomy, thus having absolute control over his own offspring regardless of the desires of his fertile partner."
Interestingly some of the comments are anti-sex and have slut-shaming as a corollary, e.g.: "These men need to pay for their pleasure. If you don't want parental responsibilities then don't get jiggy with it with someone you are not married to and intending to have children with. All the players out there need to be held responsible. Men cannot use women for sex and then not accept the consequences. Don't do the crime If you can't do the time."

Jen Richards on Twitter - "I rarely meet men in real life as extraordinary as ones on film, and rarely see women on film as extraordinary as ones I know in real life."
So many feminists were proudly reposting this. Hating men and glorifying women is good

Bringing Home the Bacon: Marital Allocation of Income-Earning Responsibility, Job Shifts, and Men's Wages - "Studies show that married men earn more than single men, even when human capital is controlled. There has been little effort to integrate the study of the marriage effect on men's wages with the literature on the division of labor in the household or to understand behavioral processes that link marital status to men's wages. This study addresses both oversights. Three dominant perspectives on the allocation of household responsibilities suggest that married couples are likely to assign more income-earning responsibility to the husband. These perspectives can be extended to predict that married men set higher earnings goals than single men. Married men are likely to be more attentive to opportunities to increase their earnings and to risks that could reduce their earnings. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this study focuses on men's job-shift processes. Findings indicate that married men are more likely than single men to pursue job-shift patterns that result in greater wage gains and to avoid those result in lower wage gains and that a portion of the marriage differential in men's wages is attributable to job-shift processes."
Damn gender wage gap! Men need to be punished for working harder

How do marital status, work effort, and wage rates interact? - "How marital status interacts with men’s earnings is an important analytic and policy issue, especially in the context of debates in the United States over programs that encourage healthy marriage. This paper generates new findings about the earnings-marriage relationship by estimating the linkages among flows into and out of marriage, work effort, and wage rates. The estimates are based on National Longitudinal Survey of Youth panel data, covering 23 years of marital and labor market outcomes, and control for unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate marriage effects on hours worked (our proxy for work effort) and on wage rates for all men and for black and low-skilled men separately. The estimates reveal that entering marriage raises hours worked quickly and substantially but that marriage’s effect on wage rates takes place more slowly while men continue in marriage. Together, the stimulus to hours worked and wage rates generates an 18%–19% increase in earnings, with about one-third to one-half of the marriage earnings premium attributable to higher work effort. At the same time, higher wage rates and hours worked encourage men to marry and to stay married. Thus, being married and having high earnings reinforce each other over time."

Meme - Juan D'Marco: "Also as I said on another comment, Cavill is a creep who says he doesn't flirt with girls just so he won't be called a rapist. He deserves no jobs."
Weird. I thought it was bad to sexually harass women with unwanted flirting. Yet making absolutely sure you never sexually harass a woman is being a "creep" and that means you shouldn't be able to get a job. It's almost as if feminists want there to be more allegations of sexual harassment

I’m a feminist, but I still think men should pay for the first date - they can learn a lot from it
No surprise, since feminism is hypocrisy

Meme - Jesse Case @jessecase: "I guess I wasn't aware that the full phrase was "Believe Women, unless you enjoyed the Pirates of the Carribean franchise so much that you developed an insane parasocial relationship with an actor""
Ironic, given that feminists bitch about how beautiful white women are more likely to be believed

lacheri.tumblr.com/post/686157111593484288/if-a-girl-is-reading-a-really-interesting-book-she?is_related_post=1 - "if a girl is reading a really interesting book she shouldn’t have to go to work. she’s expanding her mind and bettering herself and her employers should understand that"
"a girl shouldn't have to go to work and her employers should understand that"
Another explanation for the gender wage gap

Meme - "Gonna start calling all men "males" like misogynistic men call all women "females""
"I don't think any of us really give a fuck"
Men don't have fragile masculinity

Disney screenwriter is tired of "strong female characters" - "One of Disney’s most prolific screenwriters has had just about enough of the verbiage about “strong female characters.”  Linda Woolverton is the screenwriter responsible for developing Belle into an astute bookworm in Beauty and the Beast. She also had a hand in taking the fiendish Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty and creating a villain among villains. She says she’s familiar with the phrase “strong female characters,” and she’s rather sick of it, saying she’s heard it for years and years.  “It’s just an easy term,” Woolverton said. “What does it mean?”  The famous Disney screenwriter says that there are so many more ways to describe women, rather than limiting that description to only the word “strong.” She goes further by giving her own take on the definition of a “strong female character,” explaining what the phrase should mean, rather than what is usually means in the mainstream.  “[A strong female character] is somebody who is proactive in their world, who affects their world, isn’t a victim, even victimized by it,” Woolverton said. “O if they are victimized by it, they take action to change that for themselves.”  Woolverton says that those so-called strong female characters in stories “look at the world in interesting ways,” and that it is those unique perspectives that serve to make a woman strong if she will stand up and be vocal about her perspectives.  The dynamic Disney screenwriter says that there are so many ways to describe a woman, rather than only referring to her as “strong.”"

Beauty and the Beast screenwriter won’t make money off Disney Plus - "“There are so many more facets to a woman than just ‘strong,’” she explains. “I think it’s a catch-all phrase, that hopefully as we explore the dimensions of female protagonists will fade away into more specifics about that particular character.”  The nuance goes further. It’s not so easy as swapping out male leads for female ones, Woolverton argues.  “Women don’t do things the same, don’t make the same choices, don’t have the same struggles,” she says. “You don’t just take out a male protagonist and plug in a female and put a sword in her hand and call it good because that’s not gonna change anything.”"
I can't find the full interview anywhere

Meme - Shelby Lynn Graves @Graves_Fit: "I've never seen a man put his hand on another man's lower back/waist when trying to move past in a crowd so please stop doing it to women."
Ben Ginsburg: "When I need to push a man out of my way I put my hand on his chest so if you insist I be equal with women I will"
Luc Kisling: "I literally do it to men 5x the amount I do it to women because it's not seen as weird when u do it to a man."

UNPOPULAR OPINION: Men's Domestic Violence Shelters Are a Misuse of Nonprofit Funding - xoJane - "News came out this month that a Domestic Violence shelter for male survivors opened in Batesville, Arkansas. According to the article, it is the first shelter for male survivors in the country... money going towards this shelter means that money did not go towards other services for women, who make up about 80% of DV victims and survivors... No matter who the perpetrators or survivors are, toxic masculinity is always a part of domestic violence and I am skeptical that a shelter for men would spend time indicting the system that makes domestic violence so common (i.e. patriarchy) beyond dealing with the stigma that male survivors face."
Weird. We're told that feminists advocate for men too
I like how men make up 20% of domestic violence victims and survivors, but they shouldn't even get one shelter
Apparently lesbians have more "toxic masculinity" than men

Cásate y sé sumisa: Submissive wives book is controversial bestseller in Spain and angers feminists - "A book which advises women on how to be 'submissive' has become a surprise bestseller, enraging feminists.  The book - a Spanish translation of a book by Italian mother of four Costanza Miriano, entitled Cásate y sé sumisa (Get Married and Be Submissive) - became a surprise hit... Miriano describes the book, which was published by the Catholic Archdiocese of Granada, as "an assemblage of letters to my friends, mostly female, about being a man or a woman, about engagement, marriage, family life, being open to life, having children, raising children."  The book, which Miriano claims is based on the teachings of St Paul, promotes "loyal obediance, generocity and submission" on the part of new wives...   In one protest, demonstrators in the northern city of Bilbao tore up dozens of copies of the cover of the book...   The Archbishop of Granada, Francisco Javier Martinez said the outrage over the book was "ridiculous and hypocritical" in a society that allows abortion, which he believes to be an example of violence towards women which society finds acceptable."
Feminists are anti-choice. The left don't love all books

Shailja Patel on Twitter - "When you tell women and girls to learn self-defense, or carry weapons against rapists, you're not reducing rape. You're just saying "let him rape someone more vulnerable." Stop calling for dystopias. Start working to end patriarchy. Make a world BEYOND RAPE. #Uyinene
Patriarchy wants us to believe that rape has always existed and always will. That rape is intrinsic to masculinity. This myth serves patriarchy by transferring all consequences of rape, including shame and blame, onto victims. Patriarchy stays unaccountable.  #UyineneMrwetyana"
Don't tell people to lock their cars or houses, because you're not reducing car theft or burglary - you're just saying "let him steal another car or burgle another house"
Don't tell kids not to go off with strangers, because you're not reducing child kidnapping - you're just saying "let him kidnap another child"
Clearly rape exists in animals because of patriarchy - it's just that powerful
Liberals believe people don't respond to incentives, and they want more people to be victimised so they gain more political power.

Meme - Vivian @viviannkle: "My gender studies professor told me to go to Subway & snap a picture of a male worker making me asanwhich as xtra cred #patriarchy"
Stephen Beard @SMABSO: "Its funny because a Gender Studies degree only legitimately qualifies you for a job at Subway."

Allie Beth Stuckey on Twitter - "I’m just confused by the women who confidently assert men/the patriarchy have held them back. How? All the people who have given me opportunities & pushed me forward in my career have been men. The most “repression” I’ve suffered has been at the hands of gossipy, petty women."

Can I be submissive in the bedroom and still be a feminist? - "Consensual sex requires that both partners give permission for what occurs, whether they take on a more passive or a dominant role at any given moment. If someone chooses to assume a submissive erotic position, that is an agreement that he or she could withdraw at any time. So, in fact, the submissive partner is actually the moral controller; if that person wishes to gain physical dominance, he or she must first be sure that permission for that is fully granted by the partner. But while these facts may help you to consider physical submission more ethically palatable, in general, erotic connections are heightened when taboos are broken … including what might be considered a feminist no-no."
This first half is some tortured logic. Does this mean feminists should never be dominant during sex?

AWARE Singapore - Posts | Facebook - "Our full statement in response to Minister Ng Eng Hen's comments on gender-neutral National Service: "In principle, we do not support conscription for anyone, no matter their gender. We agree with Dr. Ng that conscription should only be deployed when absolutely necessary for the survival of the nation. Dr. Ng himself emphasised the onerous nature of conscription - that it mandates that someone 'suspend individual liberties as a civilian, give up two years of his or her life, and if they do not, they go to jail'. Ideally, Singapore would not have to ask that of anyone. Yet we recognise that, speaking realistically, Singapore is not at that point in terms of its military capabilities.  The primary purpose of introducing (non-military) NS for women would not be to send an abstract signal of gender equality. The suggestion to make NS gender-neutral and expand it beyond the military was borne out of the practical need for more participation in increasingly urgent areas such as eldercare, fighting climate change and so on. That gender-neutral NS might consequently help to tamper manifestations of sexism such as the gender pay gap - often justified by the reasoning that men deserve higher pay to make up for NS - is an important bonus.  We agree with Dr. Ng that the incautious introduction of NS for women today would likely have negative consequences on women's careers and finances. Women already bear the brunt of unpaid, unrecognised labour in the form of domestic and caregiving responsibilities; the last thing we want to do is impose yet another responsibility for which they don't receive satisfactory compensation. Any initiatives to make NS gender-neutral must come hand in hand with, and indeed cede priority to, other efforts to remove gender-based barriers that keep women from decent work and commensurate pay.""
Feminists are great at rejecting equality when it hurts women

Meme - "When you're being chased by feminists *narrow door*"

Woke Sydney nightclub bans ‘staring’ without ‘verbal consent’ | Toronto Sun - "Club 77 in Sydney has updated its “zero-tolerance policy” on safety and harassment and shared it on its Instagram page that it is “not a place to come to if your sole purpose is to ‘pick up.’”... “RIP to social interaction,” one person wrote. “Everything is becoming social media IRL.”  A second person added, “Congratulations on becoming the laughing stock of Sydney.”  Someone asked, “I’ve got a lazy eye can I sue for discrimination?,” while another simply added, “Go woke, go broke.”"
It would be creepier to ask for consent to stare
Clubs are literally to pick up at

Mom-of-three, 23, reveals how she went from being a 'raging feminist' to a 'conservative tradwife' - "Madison Dastrup, from Cedar City, Utah, posts regular content on TikTok - where she has almost 70,000 follows - and in one clip she reveals that she is a completely different person to the one she was six years ago after becoming a 'conservative tradwife' and having three children."

Man up and take it: Gender bias in moral typecasting - "Informed by moral typecasting theory, we predicted a gender bias in harm evaluation, such that women are more easily categorized as victims and men as perpetrators. Study 1 participants assumed a harmed target was female (versus male), but especially when labeled ‘victim’. Study 2 participants perceived animated shapes perpetuating harm as male and victimized shapes as female. Study 3 participants assumed a female employee claiming harassment was more of a victim than a male employee making identical claims. Female victims were expected to experience more pain from an ambiguous joke and male perpetrators were prescribed harsher punishments (Study 4). Managers were perceived as less moral when firing female (versus male) employees (Study 5). The possibility of gender discrimination intensified the cognitive link between women and victimhood (Study 6). Across six studies in four countries (N = 3,137), harm evaluations were systematically swayed by targets’ gender, suggesting a gender bias in moral typecasting."
Men are evil, women are good. Women are victims, men are perpetrators. Of course, feminism reinforces these stereotypes by painting men as evil
Keywords: women seen as victims

Photographer doesn’t force little girls to smile in photoshoots, and TikTok is calling the results ‘powerful’ - "Brooke Light, a photographer from Charlotte, N.C., has people talking after sharing one of her main rules when photographing girls: If they don’t want to smile, they don’t have to — simple as that.  The approach is meant to put them at ease, boost confidence and not force her subjects to convey false emotions. But after showing off some of the photoshoot results on TikTok, people on the platform have found themselves experiencing some surprisingly emotional reactions to the images...  Instead of capturing “happy” little girls in some kind of a commercial store ad, Light portrays them as strong, independent and more in control of their own image than we typically see in young models... It’s no secret that women have been fed up with being told to smile their entire lives — often by men and society at large. Like it or not, this can start pretty young, with girls being made to feel as though they should always appear happy and eager to please and never, ever complain. When they get older, being told to “smile” may come from men catcalling them on the street or even colleagues and bosses in the workplace."
Feminists are very simplistic. They are against 'stereotypes' so they go do the opposite. In a way they're like Americans. Tell them not to do something and they purposely do it because freedom. So we should tell feminists to go against stereotypes by sleeping with as many low value men as possible