Gen Z and Pessimism

"Is Gen Z depressed because the world is a harsh place? Or do they think the world is a harsh place because they are depressed? By definition, depression involves perceiving the world around you in a more negative light.

Even before COVID, teens were more likely to agree that “When I think about all the terrible things that have been happening, it is hard for me to hold out much hope for the world” and “I often wonder if there is any real purpose to my life in light of the world situation” than at any time in the past five decades. Gen Z is pessimistic about the state of the world and isn’t afraid to say so (see Figure 6.52).

The changes show the power of perception, not events. Sometimes teens’ pessimism spiked in response to national events (like the LA riots in 1992 and the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009), but other big events did not lead to pessimism: The first survey after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in spring 2002, actually saw an all-time low in pessimism among teens. Plus, if the economic woes were the main cause, pessimism should have gone down after 2012, when the economy improved. Instead it continued to go up.

Gen Z is also less optimistic about their personal prospects. After rising sharply between Boomers and Gen X’ers and staying high among Millennials, teens’ expectations for their future educations, jobs, and material prospects suddenly declined as Gen Z began answering the questions (see Figure 6.53). Fewer Gen Z’ers expect to work in professional jobs, fewer expect to get a graduate or professional degree, and fewer expect to own more than their parents—even though median incomes rose during this period. Gen Z is more uncertain about their future than Millennials were. “Gen Z is distinctly nihilistic,” one young adult wrote on Reddit. “I feel like it’s the reason why so many of us struggle with mental health issues. 99% of people who are like, ‘LMAO, life is pointless, but don’t worry, I’m fine’ are NOT fine.” When Hunter Kaimi made a TikTok video trying to explain Gen Z’s economic situation to older generations in 2022, he said, “You had the privilege of growing up in a world where there was hope and opportunity—and we don’t.” The outsize optimism of the Millennial young adulthood is gone, with Gen Z’s increasing self-doubt overwhelming the usual push of individualism toward self- confidence

Negativity among the young is also not good news for politics and society. For a democracy to survive, its citizens need to believe that the system is fair and that the country functions reasonably well—these are positive and optimistic beliefs. It also helps to have an inspiring origin story about how the country was founded.

Among young people, all three of those beliefs are in peril. First, young adults are less likely to believe that “America is a fair society where everyone can get ahead.” Six out of 10 Gen Z’ers disagreed with this statement, thus arguing that the society is unfair. Perhaps as a result, 3 out of 4 Gen Z’ers think we should, in effect, tear it all down and start over, saying “significant changes” to the government’s “fundamental design and structure” are necessary (see Figure 6.54). The old way of doing things, they feel, doesn’t work anymore.

Most stunning is this: 4 out of 10 Gen Z’ers believe that the founders of the United States are “better described as villains” than “as heroes.” Somewhere along the line, a significant portion of young adults developed the idea that America’s founders were more evil than good. Fewer than 1 in 10 Silents or Boomers—four to eight times fewer—agree, creating a substantial generation gap.

This result also argues against the idea that Gen Z is pessimistic because things really are worse: They are negative not just about the current world but about a time 250 years in the past. Their disapproval of their country is so well entrenched that 4 out of 10 think that the founders of the U.S. were the bad guys in the story instead of the good guys.

n a July 2021 poll, only 36% of 18- to 24-year-olds (all Gen Z) said they were “very” or “extremely” proud to be an American. In contrast, 86% of those 65 or older (Boomers and Silents) said they were proud to be American. John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, spoke to hundreds of young people for his 2022 book, Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America. When asked to describe the U.S., he found, young Millennials in the mid-2010s used words like “diverse,” “free,” and “land of abundance.” A few years later, Gen Z’ers instead said “dystopic,” “broken,” and “a bloody mess.” When he asked Gen Z’ers about moments that made them proud to be Americans, “I got blank stares, or examples of random sporting events like the USA soccer team finally beating Ghana in a 2017 friendly match,” he writes.

Young people have also become more negative about capitalism. While younger adults once had a more positive view of capitalism than older adults, that flipped after 2012 as Gen Z started to age into adulthood. By 2021, only a bare majority of U.S. young adults saw capitalism in a positive light, compared to nearly 2 out of 3 older adults (see Figure 6.55)

One young Gen Z voter told Della Volpe that their definition of capitalism was “Children grow up to work until they’re mentally unstable and call it normal.” Another, a 16-year-old in Ohio, said, “Our school system is based on being successful in a capitalistic society. It’s not about being happy, it’s about working for the big guys and helping them make money and then you can spend your money on their products.

Gen Z has a point that the U.S. government and free market capitalism are far from perfect. But these are not new problems. Income inequality, for example, rose the most between 1980 and 2000, not from 2000 to 2020.

So why did pessimism increase? Technology may have something to do with it. Social media and the internet became the default source for news. Negative stories get clicks; positive stories not so much. In addition, online discussions become aggressive and negative more quickly because people are not looking each other in the eye. It’s much easier to be insulting and impatient with someone you can’t see.

Twitter is a prime example: If it’s negative, everyone has a lot to say; if it’s positive, there are often crickets. The site is sometimes a giant complaint machine. TikTok, Gen Z’s social media of choice, seems more positive with its cool dances, but it often features dark humor. In one video, a young man sings a catchy tune about how everyone needs to do their part to help the environment —but it soon becomes clear he’s being sarcastic (“Don’t dump 2.4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico!”). Like many TikToks, it ends abruptly (with the exclamation “Metal straws!”). The message: Sure, we can all talk about what to do to help the environment, but it’s big companies that are destroying it, so what’s the point?

The increases in depression among teens and young adults may also help explain their negative outlook. Depression is not just about emotion; it’s about thinking. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the most popular and effective therapy for depression, observes that depression often involves cognitive distortions. Several of those distortions are relevant for how people view society. These include negative filtering (focusing almost exclusively on the negatives and rarely noticing the positives, such as “Look at all of the bad things happening in the world”) and discounting positives (thinking that the positives are unimportant, such as “Freedom doesn’t mean much if the system is so unfair”). It’s not just that more young people are suffering from depression—which is already very concerning—but also that more view society negatively, and then want to work to change it. That instinct can lead to positive change, but can also lead to trying to x things that aren’t broken. When you’re depressed, more of the world looks broken.

Another cognitive distortion characteristic of depression is dichotomous thinking, or viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. In everyday life that might be a thought such as “Everyone is so rude.” In considering the society, dichotomous thinking might lead to thoughts such as “This country is no good.” In other words, because a few things don’t work well, it might be better to change everything—a thought very similar to how the majority of Gen Z says significant changes are needed in the structure of American government. Viewing people in all-or-nothing terms (“You’re either for us or against us,” or thinking someone who makes one mistake is evil) also has consequences, including cancel culture and political polarization—two other features of Gen Z’s world.

Going forward, this will be the biggest challenge in the U.S. and potentially around the world: How can leaders convince young people that their country is a good place to live? If they can’t, young people might want to junk everything and start over. There’s a name for that: a revolution."

---  Generations The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future / Jean M. Twenge

Together with other traits she identifies Gen Z as having (e.g. Liberal Unhappiness and Depression, Political Activism, Political Polarization, Perceiving Discrimination and Having an External Locus of
Control), this explains modern liberalism

Links - 20th November 2023 (1 - Covid-19)

COVID-Zero: Was It Worth It? - "The Australian Standard for Risk Management obliged our governments to consider the impact of intervention. Our leaders refuse to release any evidence that they did this. In the first four months of 2021 we enjoyed a “COVID normal” life. Not one Australian died of COVID-19. But according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) death in Australia has increased 5.6 percent over our pre-pandemic, seasonally adjusted average. Our concern that shutting down hospitals to “flatten the curve” would kill people was dismissed by the health establishment. They knew better. The ABS analysed every single doctor-certified death in Australia and compared it to the five years between 2015 and 2019. According to the ABS, cancer deaths are up by 8.9 percent. We sacrificed our businesses to protect the elderly in nursing homes. Dementia deaths are up 18.9 percent. The health establishment is taking victory laps over a reduction in influenza death thanks to our closed borders and social distancing. Deaths from respiratory diseases are up by 1.9 percent. Doctors convinced us that our friends and family were dangerous to our health. Not one person died of COVID-19 and somehow our national mortality rate has increased from an average of 375.9 deaths per day to 378.4 deaths. COVID-Zero costs five Australians every two days from “natural causes.” The horrifying part of this dry statistic is that it doesn’t include suicide or self-harm.  There is a waiting list for the coroner to declare a death with “no suspicious circumstances” as a suicide. It will be at least two years before we know how many Australians died at their own hand for COVID-Zero. I doubt it will be good news... We’ve covered the blood, but what about the treasure? How much did this cost?  According to the Treasury, the Federal Government spent $311 billion pursuing COVID-Zero up to the end of April. This excludes the $15 billion in small bank loan guarantees and $20 billion in business loan guarantees as well the $50 billion spent by states, as well as anything spent after May. The IMF numbers suggest a national burn rate of $320 billion per year... Is it really fair to deny young people those formative experiences like falling in love, getting heartbroken, backpacking through Europe, going to concerts, bribing their way through South-East Asia and getting evacuated by DFAT? What about the impact on little kids at school? Is it really reasonable to go from the start of year 1 to the end of year 3 with only a dozen or so weeks of classroom time? I don’t know.  And what about the elderly? The people we’re told we’re protecting. We’ve denied them the comfort of their loved ones as they lie dying. We insist that only a handful of their loved ones maintain a distance of 1.5 meters, wrapped in a head-to-toe encounter suit, covered in a mask so that they can’t see each other’s faces. That is assuming we let their loved ones into their presence at all. Can’t be too careful—we might give that old man with late-stage organ failure and hours to live COVID-19 and we wouldn’t want that. One for the road I say to myself ironically as my thoughts turn to the cost of COVID-Zero for our sense of national cohesion. To protect COVID-Zero our federal government secured a High Court ruling that Australian citizens do not have a right to enter Australia. Over 30,000 Australians are stranded overseas. We implemented curfews, deployed the army to “supplement” policing. Our police behaved like an occupying army—wearing riot gear on standard patrols. They’re flying drones and helicopters equipped with infrared cameras to keep surveillance on all of us at all hours day and night.  Those QR codes that we were promised were only for contact tracing? They’re being used to “assist the police with their inquiries” in every state. I don’t know why—we’ve been tracking every mobile phone’s location and storing it for two years. Every police force in the country has had warrantless access to this “metadata” for nearly two decades now. The QR codes seem excessive given the longevity of other “temporary” mass surveillance programs... For months Dr Young opined about her preference for the Pfizer vaccine—denigrating the most widely used COVID vaccine in the world. Surely it’s just a coincidence that on the very day the Daily Telegraph newspaper published a story about Dr Young’s husband having commercial links to Pfizer she encouraged all Queenslanders to get the AZ... The deal we agreed to at the start was two weeks to flatten the curve so our medical establishment could buy ventilators and prepare our health system. Then we would use restrictions to regulate COVID-19 hospital admissions to match hospital resources. We tripled ICU capacity and all those ventilators are sitting there in shrinkwrap. Somewhere along the way our medical establishment salami-sliced us to COVID-Zero as the only way to protect our health"
From 2021

School Closures and Student Health - "By now a mountain of evidence shows that Covid school closures were a serious error that caused K-12 learning loss, but according to a report published Wednesday, that’s only the beginning. “Three years after the start of the pandemic,” it says, “Covid-19 is continuing to derail learning, but in more insidious and hidden ways.” The report is the latest from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, or CRPE, which is warning this time about the poor state of student well-being. “More than 8 in 10 public schools reported stunted behavioral and social-emotional development in their students because of the Covid-19 pandemic,” it says, citing federal survey data. Nearly half of schools “reported an increase in threats of physical attacks among students.”  The rate of playing hooky is way up: “16 million students were chronically absent (i.e., missed more than 10% of school days) during the 2021-22 school year, twice as many as in previous years.” The share of students who reported missing five or more days in a month doubled to 10% between 2020 and 2023. “Students in schools that closed the longest were more likely to disengage from school, to drop out or stop attending school,” CRPE says. Even students who have succeeded academically and gone to college weren’t unaffected. “The enforced isolation of the pandemic has delayed developmental milestones for many of our traditional-aged students, affecting their social development, emotional health, and cognitive readiness,” writes Joanne Vogel, vice president of student services at Arizona State University. “Incoming students are displaying behavior we might expect of younger adolescents.” What does that mean in practice? “Difficulties managing their daily responsibilities, challenges resolving interpersonal conflicts, and troubling incidents of violence, vandalism, and even vigilantism,” she says... These days even teachers union chief Randi Weingarten pretends she was frantically trying to reopen schools all along. Parents and students will remember, though, as they spend years trying to dig themselves out of a hole."
Heartless. They just want to kill grandma

Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics - "as the UK's weekly death count mounted, peaking at about 600 in the week ending Oct 17, 1957, there were few hysterical tabloid newspaper headlines and no calls for social distancing. Instead, the news cycle was dominated by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik and the aftermath of the fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in the UK... The relative unconcern about two of the largest influenza pandemics of the 20th century—the Encyclopaedia Britannica estimates that the 1968 pandemic, due to an H3N2 influenza virus, was responsible for between 1 million to 4 million deaths globally—presents a marked contrast and, to some critics, a rebuke to today's response to COVID-19 and the heightened responses to outbreaks of other novel pathogens, such as avian and swine influenza. “When hysteria is rife, we might try some history”, opined Simon Jenkins in an article in The Guardian titled “Why I'm taking the coronavirus hype with a pinch of salt”. “The [1968] pandemic raged over three years, yet is largely forgotten today”, commented The Wall Street Journal, “a testament to how societies are now approaching a similar crisis in a much different way”... critics of the UK Government's response are perhaps right to point to the role of epidemiology and statistical modelling in propagating fear... Charles Graves, the brother of the novelist Robert Graves, recalled how when news of the influenza outbreak reached his publisher, Icon, it put the publication of his book Invasion by Virus on hold, citing concerns about “frightening the public”. The result was that it was not until 1968 that Icon finally agreed to release the title, having been reassured in the meantime that influenza in 1957 “was no real killer”. In his book Graves compared the 1957 and 1968 pandemics to that of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic and asked “Could it happen again?” His answer was yes and that the UK had been lucky that the recent pandemics had been of a “mild type” of influenza. He closed by reassuring readers that history was unlikely to repeat itself before 1998, “by which time the medical profession will know a great deal more about immunisation that it did in 1918—or does now.” Graves was right on both counts, but wrong to think that better medical knowledge of vaccines and statistical modelling would reduce public anxiety about pandemics."
When life is too good, people make up shit to worry about

More Than 400 Studies on the Failure of Compulsory Covid Interventions (Lockdowns, Restrictions, Closures)

The Unmasking of America - "Surely more people went along with the lockdowns, masks, closures, and mandates than would have been predicted in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Europeans were on the streets far more than Americans. And it took the moral courage and activism of Canadian truckers to instantiate the rebellion against Covidian control in North America...   In the last several weeks, the scenes in airports have been rather bizarre. Even as the rest of society in most places had the feel of total normalcy, in the airport the plague seemed everywhere. The masks, the loud announcements, the preposterous signs to socially distance even as everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and the way we were required to ritualistically eat crackers in order to earn the right to breathe – it was all too much.   Covid protocols were doing nothing to stop the pandemic but plenty to make it a massive presence in our lives even if none of it was real anymore. At some point, it felt like any run-of-the-mill dystopian movie: the goal of the despotic government is to manufacture a crisis so that people live in fear and obey.   But the airport was particularly strange. Why does the fear here exist but doesn’t exist a few miles down the road? For that matter, why does the fear exist while walking or standing but go away once you are shelling out $20 for a cocktail at the airport bar?   The TSA had already stopped barking at people for not wearing masks. And many people were already testing just what they could get away with. The answer was plenty. Yes, you had to perform maskiness when boarding but after that, it could slip below the nose and finally rest on the chin, and the enforcement became little more than maybe a touch on the shoulder. Gone were the aggressive threats to ban you for life from flying again.   The Biden administration had already made a massive miscalculation in January 2021 by announcing 100 days of masking in order to stop the virus, and of course (and who didn’t know this would happen?) the 100 days came and went and the spread was worse than ever and the mask mandate persisted...   In my lifetime, I’m not sure I can remember a single other time when a federal government rule imposed upon an entire country, one that affected so many people on a daily basis, was suddenly declared to be completely illegal – not just newly illegal in light of new data but illegal all along. It means that the government, not the people, had been in violation of the law. That is nothing short of astonishing. Surely the implications of this will resonate for many years to come.   Keep this in mind: it was public opinion that drove this. That’s glorious. That in turn was informed heavily by the intelligence and bravery of average people who had long ago lost trust in the authorities... [December 2021] seems to have been the turning point, that moment for which so many people had waited so long, the dawning and entrenchment of a realization: the “public health measures” that government had long pushed on us had not actually worked. Maybe, just maybe, a pandemic takes a predictable trajectory, like the sun and the stars and the tides, and government only pretends to control it. .. I happened upon a movie on Netflix, and it is a great movie, but I would never recommend it to anyone because it is too psychologically terrifying. It is called After Masks and over 100 minutes it tells the tragic stories of many individuals living in isolation. Imagine a movie about solitary confinement in prison except that the prisoners have smartphones. It was deeply painful, almost as much as life has been for so many for these two years...   It did not happen by accident. It happened because a tiny group of intellectuals, who implausibly gained control over a machinery of power, believed that they had the power to remake the world and used a pandemic to try out their skills. That’s a terrifying reality, and one that should loom large in our minds and hearts for many years to come."

The Zoom Class Gets Covid - "So it now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection... a complete flip of the narrative they have long preached: anyone who gets Covid has failed to comply, disregards of Fauci’s advice, probably lives in a Red state, rejects the science, and otherwise bears the mark of selfishness and the desire to put freedom ahead of public health.   Getting Covid has heretofore been part of a human stain, consistent with the very long history of demonization of the diseased and the attempt to attribute sickness to moral sin. This impulse dates back to the ancient world, revived with a ferocity in 2020... As time went on, we gradually found out what was considered nonessential. It was church. It was singing. It was going to the beach, attending parties, holding parties, hanging out in a bar, traveling on vacation. Essentially, anything that would normally be considered fun came to be associated with disease, thus further cementing some kind of cultural relationship between sin and disease.   So powerful was this class demarcation that it overrode people’s normal political instincts. The left, long priding itself on its egalitarianism and universal class aspiration, took to the new class system very quickly and easily, as if the betrayal of all political ideals was just fine given the public health emergency. The demand that everyone go along with the experts was something that decades of American political experience had taught us to be gravely mistaken. But in a few fateful months lasting nearly two years, this demand drove out every other consideration...   It’s hard to know what the end game here was. Did the Zoom class honestly believe that they could forever avoid exposure and infection and thus the development of natural immunity? Certainly they did for a time believe that the shots would spare them. Once that did not happen, there was a huge problem. There were no more tools remaining to perpetuate the disease castes that had been forged back in the day.   Now that the people who tried to protect themselves are no longer able to do so, we are seeing a sudden rethinking of disease stigmatization, class disdain, and the treatment of others as sandbags to shield people based on class. Now it is suddenly no longer a sin to be sick.   Fascinating! What went wrong here? Everything. The notion that public health should thusly divide people – based on one pathogen – contradicts every democratic principle. That idea still survives with the vaccines, regardless of the known limitations. The people who invested in these personally and socially will continue to use them to divide and conquer...   What they attempted in 2020-21 was without precedent in the modern world. It did not finally work, even to achieve the aim of keeping the professional classes disease free. This is perhaps the moment when it all finally comes to an end, not with repudiation but with resignation, acquiescence, and surrender. You can stigmatize anyone but you go too far when we do that to the ruling class elites themselves."
I saw many covid hystericists get upset they got it

MAVERICK X on X - "Watch this and have your mind blown. They knew it did this 20 years ago. Whoever wrote the script for this episode of X-Files has to be a time traveler or a senior deep state operative who revealed their entire plan just for giggles."

Aussie Cops Ask Neighbors To Rat Out 'Anti-Government, Anti-Police, Or COVID-Vaccine Conspiracy Theorists' - "Deputy Commissioner Tracy Linford suggested that neighbors need to assume anyone who harbors non-mainstream views is clearly a threat. "As I said before, if there’s anybody out there that knows of someone that might be showing concerning behavior around conspiracy theories, anti-government, anti-police, conspiracy theories around COVID-19 vaccination as what we’re seeing with [shooting perpetrators] the Train family, we’d want to know about it. We want to know about that. And you can either contact the police directly or go through Crime Stoppers," she said.  In response, Rebel News' Avi Yemini replied: "Queensland Police appealing to the public to dob in their neighbours who “are anti-government or believe Covid-19 vaccine conspiracy theories.”""

Matt Orfalea on X - "The COVID lie that started it all!"
Trump makes spurious claims about coronavirus in phone call with Sean Hannity (2020) - "I hesitate to even print the United States president’s words here, because they’re so at odds with what health experts are saying. But the president’s statements to Sean Hannity are significant because millions of people were watching live.  In a phoner with Hannity on Wednesday night, Trump reacted to the World Health Organization’s data-driven assessment of the global death rate for the novel coronavirus — 3.4% — by saying “I think the 3.4% is really a false number.” ...   “You know,” Trump said, “all of a sudden it seems like 3 or 4%, which is a very high number, as opposed to a fraction of 1%. But again, they don’t know about the easy cases because the easy cases don’t go to the hospital. They don’t report to doctors or the hospital in many cases. So I think that that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1%.” Hannity televised Trump’s irresponsible “hunch” to the world…"
Infection Fatality Ratios for COVID-19 Among Noninstitutionalized Persons 12 and Older: Results of a Random-Sample Prevalence Study (2021) - "The overall noninstitutionalized IFR was 0.26%"
Was I wrong about the Covid infection fatality rate? (2023) - "For suggesting that the average IFR of Covid-19 might be between 0.01% and 0.05% during an early 2020 interview with UnHerd, I was mocked by large sections of the media and accused of minimising the harms of Covid-19 in service of a Right-wing libertarian agenda. My analysis was called “spurious” by the Sunday Times, and was quickly dismissed by senior MPs and the establishment press.   Data released this week by Denmark’s health registry however confirms, once again, that the age gradient in mortality from SARS-CoV-2 infection essentially resembles a cliff-face, accelerating sharply only in the ninth decade of life. The numbers come from an exercise undertaken to sift deaths from Covid-19 out of the deaths with Covid-19, which reveals an overcount of around 100% in the Danish data. This puts the average mortality risk over the last three years for those above 20 at 0.089%. Adding the under-20s reduces it further to 0.065%."
Damn misinformation! We all know 3.4% was the real covid IFR

Does the human-rights lobby actually care about our rights? - "The Covid contagion has hit everybody’s rights and freedoms for six. Think the right to run a business or to get your house back from a non-paying tenant. Think the freedom to travel, to dine out, to worship in a church or mosque, to meet with others or to stay with a girlfriend or boyfriend. All these are important moral rights against the state. For good measure, with the possible exception of the right to dine out, they are every one of them also recognised under the European Convention of Human Rights.  There is a government-sponsored body called the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), with a budget approaching £20million a year, whose job it is to protect these rights and to agitate, if necessary, against ministers in order to push back against their curtailment.  You might have thought that as soon as lockdown was announced, the EHRC would have been on to the government like a terrier...  In the US, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), once an admirable organisation unequivocally supporting the rights of all Americans against the state – however undeserving or odious those individuals might be – has quietly morphed into just another progressive pressure group.  The EHRC looks to be moving the same way. It has essentially joined the progressive establishment... Moreover, one suspects that this course of action reflects a longer agenda of the EHRC — namely, to put equality centre stage and to make the rest of us think of it as not so much a political as a rights issue. A report linking Covid deaths to structural racial inequalities – a phrase that can mean almost anything – will give it the opportunity to argue just that. Any government will be able to be characterised as one which does not respect equality or rights if it takes the view that people should be given the best life chances possible, but that it should not be concerned with equality of outcome or the consequences of luck. On the contrary: under this blueprint, it would be the government’s duty to discount whatever public opinion might think and adopt aggressive measures – quotas, redistribution, intrusive investigations into the racial makeup of any organisation – to achieve equality of outcome."
From 2020

Scientists ‘shocked’ and ‘alarmed’ at what’s in the mRNA shots | The Spectator Australia - "Early in 2023, genomics scientist Kevin McKernan made an accidental discovery. While running an experiment in his Boston lab, McKernan used some vials of mRNA Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines as controls. He was ‘shocked’ to find that they were allegedly contaminated with tiny fragments of plasmid DNA.  McKernan, who has 25 years’ experience in his field, ran the experiment again, confirming that the vials contained up to, in his opinion, 18-70 times more DNA contamination than the legal limits allowed by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  In particular, McKernan was alarmed to find the presence of an SV40 promoter in the Pfizer vaccine vials. This is a sequence that is, ‘…used to drive DNA into the nucleus, especially in gene therapies,’ McKernan explains. This is something that regulatory agencies around the world have specifically said is not possible with the mRNA vaccines. Knowing that the contamination had not been disclosed by the manufacturers during the regulatory process, McKernan raised the alarm, posting his findings to Twitter (now X) and Substack with a call-out to other scientists to see if they could replicate his findings.  Other scientists soon confirmed McKernan’s findings, though the amount of DNA contamination was variable, suggesting inconsistency of vial contents depending on batch lots. One of these scientists was cancer genomics expert Dr Phillip Buckhaults, who is a proponent of the mRNA platform and has received the Pfizer Covid vaccine himself...   ‘There is a very real hazard,’ he said, that the contaminant DNA fragments will integrate with a person’s genome and become a ‘permanent fixture of the cell’ leading to autoimmune problems and cancers in some people who have had the vaccinations. He also noted that these genome changes can ‘last for generations’.  Dr Buckhaults alleges that the presence of high levels of contaminant DNA in the mRNA vaccines ‘may be causing some of the rare but serious side effects, like death from cardiac arrest’. He added, ‘I think this is a real serious regulatory oversight that happened at the federal level.’...   There is already at least one peer-reviewed scientific paper demonstrating that the Pfizer Covid vaccine mRNA can enter the human liver cell line and reverse transcribe into DNA in vitro (meaning in a lab dish).  Other studies cited in the case materials show the presence of spike protein mRNA in the nucleus of human cells, and evidence that acquired immune traits pass down to the offspring of mice pre-exposed to the Covid vaccine mRNA-LNP platform. This is suggestive that, once in the nucleus, the vaccine mRNA can be transferred and integrated with chromosomal DNA."

German Whistleblower Finds DNA Contamination Up To 354 Times Recommended Limit in BioNTech-Pfizer Vaccine - "Replicating the findings of American scientists Kevin McKernan and Phillip Buckhaults, the German biologist Jürgen O. Kirchner has also found massive levels of DNA contamination in vials of the BioNTech-Pfizer mRNA vaccine deployed in the home country of the vaccine, Germany... Kirchner also criticised the Paul Ehrlich Institute for failing to perform adequate quality control of the vaccine before approving batches for release... Citing one of the PEI’s own publications, Kirchner notes in particular that it does not test the purity of the vaccine solution... Kirchner notes that whereas the PEI did not conduct advanced testing for contaminants of the BioNTech vaccine – even though the EMA had already identified the risk of DNA contamination in the industrial production process – it did require such testing for the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, which is based on more traditional recombinant protein technology"

Job Search, Job Posting and Unemployment Insurance During the COVID-19 Crisis - "During the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses had to close and unemployment skyrocketed. To help the unemployed, the CARES Act increased US unemployment benefits by $600 a week, which increased unemployment benefit replacement rates (benefit/wage) to unprecedentedly high levels, above 100% for many workers. We investigate the state of the labor market during the COVID-19 crisis, using job applications and vacancy listings by occupation, state and industry from the online platform Glassdoor. We document two new facts. First, applications-per-vacancy were higher during the COVID-19 crisis than before. This is because job vacancies decreased by 64% during the crisis, while job applications only decreased by 21%. Job applications decreased before the CARES Act, and remained relatively stable until June 2020. Second, applications and applications-per-vacancy were slightly lower in occupation-states with a larger increase in the replacement rate after the CARES Act, but these differences are not entirely explained by the CARES Act. Overall, our evidence suggests that employers did not experience greater difficulty finding applicants for their vacancies after the CARES Act, despite the large increase in unemployment benefits."

Unemployment insurance claims and COVID-19 - "We explore the effect of various factors on interstate differences in weekly unemployment insurance claims, focusing specifically on the determinants over the initial period of the pandemic in the U.S. We consider the effects of COVID-19 cases, state policies enacted in response to COVID-19, relevant provisions of Federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) legislation, and the nature of state economies. We find that during the initial weeks of the pandemic, unemployment claims were driven by consumer reactions to the coronavirus. We find that over the March 21-April 25 period states with greater employment in industries most affected by the virus and which issued orders closing nonessential businesses experienced greater weekly unemployment claims. We find mixed evidence that unemployment benefits affect the number of unemployment claims. However, we find no evidence that the ability to work at home mitigated the increase in unemployment rates during this period, nor evidence that the CARES Act’s Payroll Protection Program influenced the level of new unemployment claims."

She got a Paycheck Protection loan. Her employees hate her for it. - "The anger came from employees who’d determined they’d make more money by collecting unemployment benefits than their normal paychecks. “It’s a windfall they see coming,” Black-Lewis said of unemployment. “In their mind, I took it away.”  “I couldn’t believe it,” she added. “On what planet am I competing with unemployment?”
From 2020

SG bashed for being too diligent - "How did the infections among migrant workers get so widespread?  The workers’ living conditions can certainly be improved. But epidemiologically speaking, the key was probably not the conditions per se, but simply communal living. One has to remember this: about half of dormitories are infected – including the best equipped and designed ones. We also saw the virus spread like wildfire on one of the most advanced US aircraft carriers. If we hadn’t stopped BMT, the same scenarios would have happened too to our NS boys.  Look, if a student brings home the virus to a condominium flat, it is most likely the whole family will get infected because of close proximity. When you eat together, use the same dining table, utensils, bathrooms, appliances and leisure facilities, your chances of infection is very high. It has little to do with living conditions.  I would caution all the champagne socialists not to be too quick to use an “inequality and ill treatment” narrative to explain the spread. Many of these workers chose Singapore over our neighbours and more importantly, their own countries, to come here to make a living. They know conditions here are better than many places, And the Government, to its credit, has come out strongly to help them, pledging taxpayers’ money to protect their jobs, income and their healthcare needs should they fall ill. Do not be too quick to judge. By contrast, in India, Modi just declared shutdown within hours and let millions of his own walk hundreds of miles, with many starving to death. People like Prof Tommy Koh and Tay Kheng Soon were spending most of their life enjoying the good life and nowhere to be found near the migrant workers. Suddenly they are scolding the government, like they were the only ones who care for the workers?   Could government have moved in earlier to lock down the dorms or thin them out? Easier said than done. If we had locked down the dorms without any sign of viral spread inside, people would have accused us of discriminating against the workers, violating their human rights, blah blah blah.  Thinning them out? Even now, for the 7,000 essential workers in purpose-built dorms, only some have been moved out. Some are being separated within the dorms. That shows how hard it is to accommodate 7,000 workers. Rehousing even half of 200,000 would mean using every scrap of space we have. How many would complain if the unsold unit next to theirs was used for this?"
From 2020

China’s Responsibility for the Global Pandemic - "China craves recognition as a great power and a world leader. If the Chinese government fails to acknowledge its negligence and accept its responsibility for the spread of the coronavirus, and does not offer compensation for the resultant ongoing pandemic’s dire worldwide consequences, then it will continue to be viewed as a pariah rather than a partner."
Too bad they're too big and too contemptuous of responsibility to be held accountable

Links - 19th November 2023 (2 - Trans Mania)

Mia on X - "Yesterday, CBC made the strongest argument in favour of Saskatchewan's Parents' Bill of Rights I've seen yet. This girl's teachers allowed her to socially transition, without parental knowledge or consent, when she was in Grade 6!   Imagine. An 11-year-old girl announces she's a boy, and a teacher, indeed the whole school, just goes along with it and no one even bothers to contact her parents.  If teachers want to give an 11-year-old so much as a Tylenol, they need parental consent. But they can alter the trajectory of a girl's whole life without any parental involvement. Madness.  #Bill137 #Saskatchewan"

Meme - Wolf: "TODAY IS THE DAY... *holding sheep costume*
I BE WHO I TRULY AM. *wolf in sheep costume*
OH NO... I CAN FEEL EVERYONE'S EYES ON ME.
MAYBE I CAN'T REALLY BE ME..."
Cat: "HI, SHEEP! WHAT CAN I GET YOU?"
Wolf in sheep costume: "Or maybe I can..."
This got shared by "Wholesome Humor". Ironic, since a very obvious interpretation of this is that the wolf is pretending to be a sheep while pretending that this is who he really is, and society is playing along with the delusion

Meme - "Future historians will study this in horror and wonder how society ever embraced it.
*Beautiful blonde girl vs FTM zippertits "nonbinary"*"

Meme - jesse @yummygoth: "DONT invite me over for girls night unless we're doing blindfolded pussy taste test"
rose ('s boobs hurt) @roselightheart: "damn everyone's gonna immediately recognize me"
skc @skcc22: "Damn shawty that shit stank huh?"
rose ('s boobs hurt) @roselightheart: "i have a dick and balls"

Meme - "Does this look familiar?
Lopez Raymundo"
Tess T. Eccles-Brown, PhD: "OMG what did I miss lol"
"The unveiling of Gorlock it seems"
John @johnEiid: "This him?"
On Gorlock the Destroyer

Meme - Gorlock: "I only date black men"
My black friends: *Spider-man getting rid of symbiote*"

Richard Hanania on X - "Japan used to only let you change your sex if you got sterilized, and if you were unmarried and without children. Supreme Court throws out the sterilization requirement."

river buddy butcher 🤠 on X - "if you can pretend that a groundhog is predicting the weather for the next six weeks, you can use they/them for a single person"
When they admit it's make-believe

Meme - "r/trans
I sometimes have violent thoughts about cis women
Vent
I hate the body I'm stuck in so much. Why couldn't I have been born in the right body?? When I see a pretty cis girl I get extremely jealous. Why is she so lucky? Why should she get to be so pretty and be born that way. I get so angry to the point I just want to punch them. I would never act on it but I just hate being near them."
Clearly not male aggression, but just "resistance" against "oppression" and "transphobia"

Meme - "If genitals do not define sex, then how does altering them affirm it?"
Or gender, if you prefer

Meme - "Emotionally abusive people: If I don't get my way, I will off myself!
TRAs: [chuckles] I LIKE THAT. I'M GOING TO STEAL iT. THAT'S MINE NOW."

Turning Point USA on X - "UNIVERSITY OF UTAH: TPUSA students were violently interrupted by protesters while screening “Damaged," a @DailyCaller documentary series on adults who underwent sex changes as children. The event was eventually shut down, and cops escorted students safely to their vehicles. @tpusastudents"

Mia on X - "Women: *give birth to literally every single human being that has ever walked this planet*
A tiny % of men in the 21st century: "We possess magical woman souls; therefore, we are literal women."
Everyone: I have no idea what a woman is now.🤷‍♀️"

Meme - "New alarming trend is women having their ears sewn into elvish tips - people are doing this and it's going to be getting more popular"
"You will never be a real elf. You have no grace of llluvatar, you have no agelessness, you have no far seeing eyes. You are a cruel mockery of Tolkien's perfection."

Meme - "Hill: ovarians will get mad at "female" and "ovarian," but stay quiet when they're called chestfeeder and birthing person.
'Hearing someone say 'female' instead of woman in real life'"

Meme - White light: "What's it to you? It's just a label"
*prism*
"Hormone Blockers"
"Drag Queen Story Time"
"Pronouns"
"Every  other Commercial"
"Bathrooms"
"Trans Kids"
"Military Sex Change Surgeries"
"Birthing People"
"Trans in Women's Sports"

Men Flood Women's Job Fair After 'Lying' About Being Nonbinary - "An event billed as the largest gathering of women and nonbinary technologists in the world was recently dominated by men, causing uproar among attendees and leading to apologies from organizers. The in-person Grace Hopper Celebration was organized by AnitaB and took place from September 26-29 in Orlando, Florida... instead of catering to its intended audience that paid about $1,300 per ticket just to get in the doors, organizers soon realized that cisgender men had flooded the conference allegedly for their own personal gain. "This is supposed to be a joyous event that centers around you," AnitaB Chief Impact Officer Cullen White told attendees on September 27. "Yesterday, it became clear that there are a far greater number of cisgender men attending than we anticipated. "Simply put, some of you lied when you registered. And as evidenced by the stacks and stacks of resumes you're passing out, you did so because you thought you could come here and take space to try and get a job. We need male allies; we need men who want to celebrate women, work with and for women. So, we welcome men in this space—to learn and support and improve."
Weird. I thought policing sexual identity was transphobic

The words 'woman' and 'mother' absent from University Arts London's menopause policy

Tory backlash as children set to gain gender-change rights at school - "Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, is facing a backlash from Conservative MPs and figures in Downing Street and the Equalities Office over plans to allow pupils to choose their own pronouns if their parents give consent...  It emerged this week that at some secondary schools in England, teachers have agreed to affirm children’s demands to be recognised as cats, horses and dinosaurs."
We'll still be told that it's a paranoid far right conspiracy theory that there're students who identify as cats

I refused to play along when my sister switched gender - "She said nothing of this to my parents or me at that stage, but we later found out that in her early teens she had told all her friends that she was trans. What we did know then was that the change in her physical appearance correlated with a deterioration in her mental health. She started to refuse to go to school. At home she was self-harming. I was desperately worried for her. So were my parents and she was now receiving counselling at Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). When we went into Covid lockdown in 2020, she became glued to her iPad and phone, spending hours a day on her own. She was 15 by then, and we thought she was trying to keep in touch with her friends. What she was actually doing was immersing herself in online transgender culture. She became obsessed with trans influencers, adapting her personality to imitate them. She bought the same trousers as one of them and wore the same jewellery... My parents were naturally concerned about their vulnerable teenage daughter. They didn’t tell her outright, “You’re not a boy, don’t be silly.” But because they didn’t affirm her in exactly the way she wanted – because they didn’t say she was their son, nor contact her school and our whole family and tell them this, nor agree to puberty blockers – she lost her temper with them night after night.  Cowering upstairs, I heard her screaming and shouting at them, repeating what I subsequently discovered from my own internet research were stock phrases that gender-questioning teens are encouraged to use by members of the trans community online. “If you don’t affirm my identity, I’ll kill myself,” she threatened. There was something weirdly robotic about it, as if she had been indoctrinated and was following a script, although her passion and upset was clearly very real. I felt painfully conflicted. My generation has been influenced to think trans is something you have to support unquestioningly. And I did – until it became a reality in our household. Only then did I realise how dangerous this side of the internet is, in which vulnerable teenagers who feel they don’t fit in are encouraged down a route that might not be right for them. My sister seemed to think that, because she was struggling mentally and didn’t fit in, she must be a boy. Looking back, I can see how this powerful online community validated her. She connected with others like her – or those she thought were like her... It was when she returned to school after lockdown – she was in Year 11 by then – that we received the worst fright of all. My sister, who was taking antidepressants and anxiety medication, overdosed on paracetamol. At school she collapsed and was rushed to A&E. Thankfully, she was OK. But in these circumstances, CAMHS is alerted, and she told them she was a boy trapped inside a girl’s body. She also told them her parents had refused to accept her name and new identity. My mother received an extremely upsetting visit from social services as a result. In many ways we were lucky. The social worker decided the case need not be taken any further – she could see we were a loving and supportive family. And while some schools seem to allow children to change their names and pronouns without even telling their parents, my sister’s school did not go along with her new gender identity. They knew she had mental health problems, had been bullied and was vulnerable, and sensibly didn’t want to rush down the gender route beside her. (The same could not be said of her CAMHS therapist who, it turned out, was advising her to attend a support group for trans children, run by trans adults.) I couldn’t tell my friends about any of this. I was afraid I would be labelled transphobic and unloving for refusing to blindly accept that my sister was really a boy. I badly wanted to support her, but I knew my sister so well, and knew this wasn’t who she was. Finally, last year, we learned what was really going on: my sister, by then aged 17, was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Her feelings of discomfort within her own body turned out to be not because she was actually a boy, but because of sensory issues that are common among those on the spectrum: a feeling of overstimulation brought on by her changing shape as she went through puberty. Last summer, she and I and our mum sat down and had a long chat. “I used to think I was trans,” said my sister. “Now I realise it was my ADHD and autism.”  She told us she had felt vulnerable and isolated going into lockdown, and had completely immersed herself online and found this ready-made support system of trans people. The way she described it, it was more like a cult than a community. She recognises she was sucked into thinking she was someone she wasn’t. Her emergence from trans was gradual. But hearing her say out loud that she now knew this wasn’t who she was was such a relief, my mum and I burst into tears... I feel like I lost my sister and have now regained her. But at age 16, I still can’t talk about this openly. There are strict rules my generation is expected to follow when it comes to trans, and I know I’d be breaking them if I told the full story and how it made me feel. This has made it a very isolating experience. I don’t know anyone else who has been through the same experience, perhaps because so few people of my age dare to talk about trans in any way but positively. It was so hard seeing someone I loved being effectively brainwashed. I hope that in speaking out, even anonymously, other young people worried about vulnerable siblings questioning their gender will know they are not alone."
Damn internalised transphobia! That's the only explanation for "his" detransition and now rejection of the trans identity!

CANADA: Man Who Raped Infant Quietly Moved to Prison with Mother-Baby Unit After Transgender Claim - "A Canadian man who was convicted of the horrific rape of a 3-month-old infant boy has begun identifying as transgender while incarcerated and is currently being held in a women’s correctional facility with a mother and child unit.  In 1997, Adam Laboucan sexually assaulted a three-month-old baby boy in Quesnel, British Columbia. Laboucan was 15-years-old at the time and had been hired to babysit the child. The infant was so brutally injured by the attack that he had to be flown to Vancouver, 410 miles away, to undergo reconstructive surgery. After committing the horrific assault, Laboucan “mutilated himself and ate his own flesh”... Addressing the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Heather Mason told members of Canada’s federal government that multiple women had reported being the victim of sexual harassment by trans-identified males who had been placed in female institutions.   “One of these women reported that while in the mother-child program, two transgender individuals with convictions for pedophilia, Madilyn Harks and Tara Desousa, would loiter near her and her child, making sexist and inappropriate antagonizing comments,” Mason said in her statement.  Harks, whose given name is Matthew, is a serial pedophile who has been described as having “all-encompassing preoccupation in sexually abusing young girls.” Authorities believe he targeted at least 60 victims before being charged for approximately 200 offenses related to sexual abuse.  In 2019, a sexual assault report was filed against him by a female inmate, but no charges were pursued. That same year, the former Deputy Commissioner for Women, Kelly Blanchette, revealed that of all the requests from men to transfer into women’s prisons, half were from convicted sex offenders.   Mason shared with Reduxx exchanges she’d had with women being held in Fraser Valley. One inmate confirmed that Laboucan was being housed in a unit next to the Mother-Child Program residence, and said that he had been “staring” at the children to “antagonize” the women...   Indigenous women make up nearly half the female prison population, according to data from Canada’s Correctional Service. Compared to the average citizen, incarcerated women are more likely to have a history of physical or sexual abuse, and have a higher incidence of mental health issues. Female offenders are also far less likely than men to be convicted for violent crimes.  A report released by the Correctional Service in 2022 revealed that 82% of “gender diverse” prisoners in Canada who had a history of sexual offending were men who identified as transgender. Almost all had committed their crimes prior to claiming a transgender status. The overwhelming majority committed offenses that caused death or serious harm to their victims, over half of whom were women or children. In June of 2017, the category of “gender identity” was made a protected characteristic after it was added to the Canadian Human Rights Act via a controversial piece of legislation known as Bill C-16. The Canadian government claimed the bill had been assessed for its impact on women prior to approval, but has refused to release any details of the assessment’s findings."
Clearly, according to liberal logic, there are a ton of cis female sexual offenders that we haven't caught yet and/or discrimination and stigma make transwomen sex offenders, and transphobia are why transgender prisoners didn't come out before being caught. Because transwomen are identical to cis women and no one abuses trans laws

Meme - The Independent @Independent: "Opinion: What the white supremacist roots of biological sex reveal about transphobic feminism"

Meme - Uplift Trans Voices 2.0: "Just went through over one thousand screenshots. 148 are selected for the police report for now. Also, I've seen the photos from the group claiming I'm just panhandling, lying, or have 'no right to ask the cops for help because I'm ACAB' and at this point, say what you want, every picture sent to me, names and all, are going in the file. (So are all the profiles laugh reacting)."
Why are trans people always wanting to weaponise the state and police even though they're ACAB?
Laugh reacting is a hate crime!

Meme - "Men who have surgeons remove their penises and take laboratory chemicals to grow boobs ARE women. Um, You've been radicalized to the far right by the internet sweetie pie"

Japanese man who spent $16K to become a 'dog' struggles to make friends with real canines - "The man, who goes by “Toco,” shot to global fame last year after spending 2 million yen (around $16,000 at the time) on a hyperrealistic rough collie costume. He has since launched a YouTube channel where he chronicles his adventures — including news interviews and public walks — in his four-legged suit... Toco may find it hard to be pals with real dogs, but he has long expressed hopes to meet like-minded people who dress up as canines. He previously told the New York Post that meetups would be “great.”  He also wants to star in a movie."

JAPAN: Politician Who Supported Gender Identity Bill Sentenced For Creating "Upskirt Porn" In Women's Restroom - "A Japanese politician has pleaded guilty and been convicted of a number of disturbing sex crimes, including entering a women’s restroom to film non-consensual images while dressed as a woman.  Wataru Onishi, 42, had previously acted as the Committee Secretary for Japan’s Communist Party (JCP) in Chiba Prefecture. Onishi is known for having supported a controversial pro-LGBT bill which seeks to enshrine self-declared gender identity as a protected characteristic in Japan... while authorities were investigating Onishi for his voyeurism, it was discovered that he was responsible for yet another sex crime — an act of public exhibitionism and threats to rape a woman... That Onishi had dressed as a “woman” while committing his crimes has prompted widespread discussion on Japanese social media, with many users pointing out that Onishi was a staunch supporter of legislation enshrining self-declared “gender identity” as a protected characteristic in Japanese law.  Onishi, who ran for the House of Representatives in 2017, had also previously responded positively in a questionnaire on LGBT issues, saying, “There are still misunderstandings and prejudices against sexual minorities in society. The more comfortable a society is for sexual minorities to live in, the more comfortable it is for all people to live in.”... Japan’s lower house passed the bill despite its tremendous unpopularity. In one public opinion survey, 91% of respondents asserted that there was no need for the legislation. Rather than voting against their own party, several representatives staged a minor protest and walked out of the deliberation session at the House of Councillors.  In recent months, criticism of the proposed LGBT bill has escalated significantly, with many individuals and politicians vocalizing serious concerns about how the rights of women will be impacted by extending the law to bar “discrimination” against “gender identity.” In May, an emergency press conference was held in Tokyo and featured speakers from several women’s rights and LGB interest groups. One of the founders of Tokyo’s Rape Crisis Center, Michiko Orita, confirmed that the establishment had been denied government funding after being labeled “transphobic” for emphasizing the importance of single-sex services and spaces...  a man was arrested in Tsu city on suspicion of entering a women’s bath while disguising himself as a woman. The suspect denied the charges by simply stating: “I am a woman.”... Public forms of sexual abuse committed by men against women in Japan occur so frequently that the government has had to repeatedly intervene. Counter-measures have included anti-groping campaigns, strategically placed public security cameras, and a popular application that allows victims to alert fellow train passengers in instances of sexual assault.  Some critics of the bill have pointed out that it will result in sexual predators being able to access women’s spaces with legal impunity."
Clearly, they're all not trans, so being concerned about allowing people to enter toilets based on gender identity is not an issue and only transphobes would think so, and we have no reason to fear bathroom bills
So much for Asia being immune to liberal excesses

South Dakota & Gender Ideology: Progressive Business Pushing Red State Leftward - "What was unfolding in South Dakota was the all-too-common story of a powerful progressive business interest that was pushing a deep-red state leftward — even over the express wishes of its broadly conservative voter base...   Even without taxpayer dollars, left-wing lobbying efforts in South Dakota often benefit from generous out-of-state funding...   Despite the overwhelmingly Republican composition of South Dakota politics, gender ideology has made inroads in almost every area of the state’s governing institutions.
Corporate interests are good when they support the left

How multiculturalism fuels hate

How multiculturalism fuels hate

"British home secretary Suella Braverman declared that multiculturalism has ‘failed in Europe’. To illustrate her point, she highlighted the numerous violent clashes, involving distinct ethnic groups, that have erupted ‘on the streets’ of Malmo, Paris, Brussels and Leicester. Had Braverman delivered the speech a few weeks later, she would no doubt have also drawn attention to the Islamist-dominated anti-Israel protests that have taken over European capitals on a weekly basis, following Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October.

She argued that multicultural policies have fuelled this fracturing of society into sometimes antagonistic identity groups. ‘Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate’, she said. ‘It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.’ She added that, in some extreme cases, certain groups of people can ‘pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society’.

To our cultural and political elites, criticising multiculturalism is now tantamount to heresy. Predictably, Braverman was swiftly denounced as a racist and her speech presented as a threat to migrant communities. One commentator went so far as to claim that ‘Braverman’s dangerous rhetoric puts pupils [from migrant backgrounds] at risk’ in British schools...

As we have seen again this week, following Braverman’s call for the police to ban the pro-Palestine march scheduled for Armistice Day, she frequently courts controversy. Her every statement, almost regardless of its content, seems to provide an occasion for liberal hand-wringing. Yet the response to her criticism of multiculturalism was particularly over the top. It seems that anyone who draws attention to its failures is likely to provoke the hostility of the great and the good – and to be accused of xenophobia and racism.

It hasn’t always been this way. In the recent past, the failure of multiculturalism was highlighted on numerous occasions by mainstream political leaders. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel – an enthusiastic advocate of mass migration – declared in October 2010 that Germany’s multiculturalism had ‘utterly failed’. Her criticism was echoed in February 2011 by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British prime minister David Cameron. The latter identified ‘state multiculturalism’ as one of the causes of terrorism...

Criticism of multiculturalism was more permissible a decade ago because the threat posed by global jihadism was still fresh in the minds of European elites...

People from all sorts of ethnic and religious backgrounds have interacted and forged common bonds in societies long before the advent of multiculturalism as an official doctrine. America’s ‘melting pot’, in which different groups of migrants cohere around a common American way of life, proved remarkably successful over many decades. In fact, it was only when multiculturalism was institutionalised in the 1970s that the US started to splinter into different, often competing, identity groups, which has fuelled today’s disunity and polarisation.

In short, the fragmentation of many Western and especially European societies is not because they are multiethnic – it is because they have come to be dominated by the ideology of multiculturalism. Multiculturalists have consciously divided society into self-standing ethnic-identity groups. And this has accentuated, cultivated and inflamed differences between people. In this way, multiculturalism has undermined and impeded the development of any genuine sense of solidarity among citizens.

Indeed, the ideology of multiculturalism thrives in the absence of a vision for society to which everyone feels they can belong. The absence of such a vision is not accidental. It is due to multiculturalism’s insistence that no set of values can be regarded as superior to any other, or looked upon as the desirable norm. The absence of a cohering national vision for society, of a coherent sense of a nation’s shared values and traditions, should therefore be regarded as a direct achievement of multiculturalism.

The ideology of multiculturalism did not develop in response to the arrival of large groups of immigrants into European societies during the 20th century. Rather, it is a product of the European political establishments’ growing crisis of legitimacy after the Second World War.

Two catastrophic world wars, imperial decline and the collapse of laissez-faire liberal capitalism had left the postwar elites bereft of any real sense of purpose. But it was the emergence of the so-called counterculture in the 1950s and especially the 1960s that proved pivotal. This challenged mainstream norms and values and, by politicising certain identities, began to give rise to what we now know as identity politics. And in doing so, the counterculture exposed European elites’ loss of belief, their depletion of moral and political capital. They effectively found themselves unable to respond to the challenge posed by the counterculture and provide a persuasive account of their nations’ way of life. The question of what it is to be British, German or Dutch had become very difficult for them to answer.

In many ways, however, the Cold War postponed a reckoning with this profound crisis of legitimacy. Western elites may not have been able to say with any confidence what their societies were for, or identify their unifying, national values. But they were able to say what they were against. In that sense, opposing Communism at least provided a semblance of national purpose and coherence in the West.

With the ebb of the Cold War, however, Western elites could no longer rely on this anti-Communist crutch. It was at this point, during the late 1980s and 1990s, that they started to embrace and promote the ideology of multiculturalism. This ideology seemed to do two things simultaneously. It provided Western political elites with something that looked like a purpose. And it gave them a means to manage and contain the conflicts fuelled by the growth of identity politics since the 1960s. In short, they had a new slogan and mission: ‘Let’s celebrate difference.’

Multiculturalism has allowed Western and particularly European elites to evade the question of what it is their societies stand for – of what coheres these societies as nations. Britain provides a particularly acute case study of this development. Its political and cultural elites cleave to a multicultural ideology, celebrating ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’ at every possible opportunity. At the same time, they distance themselves from questions of national identity.

Indeed, it is the British establishment’s estrangement from its own nation’s historical legacy, traditions and values that has created the cultural terrain on which the divisive politics of identity and multiculturalism can flourish. As a result, multiculturalism and identity politics have faced very few obstacles in their rise to become today’s ruling ideologies.

Britain’s main public institutions now seem embarrassed by any display of patriotism. The arrogant imperial attitudes of the past have given way to a sense of shame about Britain’s history and its present. Those still given to displays of patriotism are marginalised as relics or, worse still, condemned as racists and xenophobes.

An incident involving Emily Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South, in November 2014 captures well the contempt that significant sections of the British political class have towards displays of patriotism. During a by-election campaign in Rochester, she tweeted a photo of a house displaying three St George’s flags, with a white van parked outside, and accompanied it with the arch caption, ‘Image from #Rochester’. The snobbery was too much for many and, following a public backlash, she was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet. Few believed Labour leader Ed Miliband’s subsequent claims that ‘people should fly the England flag with pride’.

Thornberry’s contemptuous attitude towards people who fly the English or Union flag reflects a broader elite cynicism towards national identity. This has gone hand in hand with the corrosion of common values like duty and loyalty. Feeling an attachment to one’s wider national community is now treated as something to be ashamed of. These sentiments have flourished in higher education, schools and cultural institutions like the BBC. Sneering at the Union flag has become de rigueur for members of the British cultural elites.

You could see this clearly back in March 2021, in a widely watched interview on BBC Breakfast. The two presenters, Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty, made fun of Conservative minister Robert Jenrick for displaying the Union flag in his office. In the middle of the interview, which was supposed to be about the coronavirus-vaccination programme, Stayt sarcastically said: ‘I think your flag is not up to standard-size, government-interview measurements. I think it’s just a little bit small, but that’s your department really.’ In the background, Munchetty could be seen laughing into her hand.

The two presenters were forced to apologise following thousands of complaints from the public. But no one was left in any doubt that a significant section of Britain’s cultural establishment regards symbols of national identity with a sense of amused contempt.

Indeed, while our elites tend to affirm and ‘celebrate’ most identities, in the name of the ideology of multiculturalism, national identity is the one identity that is wilfully and often joyously condemned.

Little wonder that there is more than a hint of triumphalism among champions of multiculturalism when they declare that the UK faces a crisis of identity. Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch wrote an entire book – Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging – devoted to de-legitimising the very idea of a British national identity. Through multiculturalist eyes, Britain’s culture and past are regarded as little more than a source of shame.

As George Orwell noted in 1941, ‘England is perhaps the only great country where intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality’. Were he alive today, even he would be surprised by the spread of such sentiments from intellectuals to the broader British establishment.

There are some among our elites who are aware that multiculturalism is a problem. They realise that the state-led promotion of difference is allowing a divisive identity politics to flourish. In fact, since the turn of the 21st century, members of successive British governments have been preoccupied with how to promote national values and define what they are.

This question haunted New Labour prime minister Tony Blair. By 2006, he clearly recognised that his proudly multicultural Britain was simultaneously fuelling the rise of radical Islamism. In response, he called for the promotion of national values. He said at the time that ‘We are not being bold enough, consistent enough, thorough enough, in fighting for the values we believe in’. Yet it was far from clear that the ‘values we believe in’ outlined by Blair carried any real conviction or meaning.

Typically, Blair avoided drawing on the legacy of Britain’s past. Instead, his values consisted of a list of fashionable global causes: support for development in Africa, fair migration, tackling climate change, and creating international institutions ‘fit for task’. These were never going to unite a nation and resist the fracturing, divisive tendencies unleashed by multiculturalism...

Even those who recognise its dangers lack the moral, intellectual and political resources to say what society should stand for instead. They reach for some semblance of national identity and purpose, but end up grasping at thin air.

In the 21st century, Britain is not only an island without a story; it is also a place that discourages debate about what kind of stories should be told. ‘The deep guarantee of real strength is our knowledge of who we are’, argue the authors of a 2008 study, Risk, Threat and Security. This is as true now as it was then. When the very meaning of what it means to be British is deeply contested, it is very difficult for society to know itself. We lack any belief in shared values and a sense of purpose.

Sections of the British elites had clearly hoped that multiculturalism could fill the void left by the loss of national purpose. And so they went out of their way to distance themselves from – and often even repudiate – their nation’s historical traditions in the name of multiculturalism. They have been complicit in redrafting Britain’s history as a tale of incessant wrongdoing. As Michael Fitzpatrick wrote on spiked almost 20 years ago, the elite advocates of the doctrine of multiculturalism have ‘expressed a spirit of national self-abasement’. The perverse consequence of this has been to ‘encourage attitudes of anger and resentment among Britain’s ethnic minorities… Instead of producing harmony, multiculturalism has nurtured hatred.’

The constant apologies from public institutions for Britain’s history, and politicians’ frequent, knee-taking acts of contrition, have merely fuelled the demand for more apologies and more denunciations of Britain. In such a climate, cultural entrepreneurs have been incentivised to flaunt their victim status and demand ever greater validation of their identity from the state. These demands are continually accompanied by claims that racism or xenophobia against certain identity groups is getting worse and worse. All the while, the surge in actual hatred against Jews has been effectively downplayed on account of their perceived ‘white privilege’.

The consequences of this grievance culture have been profound. By cultivating and politicising group identities, multiculturalism has estranged people from the nation they inhabit. Continually encouraged to celebrate their difference, members of identity groups have become psychically distant from other members of society. Little wonder some now seem to have more attachment to national and ethnic conflicts far away than they do to the communities in which they actually live.

Multiculturalism may have helped to relieve our elites from the responsibility of providing their society with a national purpose. But the price that society has paid for their act of evasion is deep division and growing conflict.

In response, we need to lay the ground for a renewed solidarity. A shared sense of who we are as a nation and what we stand for is now more necessary than ever."

 

No wonder Braverman got fired - you're not allowed to denounce supporting terrorism

I remember the mid-10s, when liberals mocked talk of "British values" in the UK, claiming that they were really universal values (ironically, that's ethnocentrism/cultural imperialism)

We're still told that liberals don't hate their countries

Links - 19th November 2023 (1 - Barbie)

Meme - "Ken, why are you dress like a Barbie?"
"so i can stay at Barbie house overnight you should try it too"
"disgusting"

Meme - ""Barbies" making fun of a "Ken's" height, weight, job, physical attributes or sex life" *smiling*
""Barbies" when they get called fat" *sad*

Meme - Ricky Martinez: "Wait a minute. The end of the movie. All of the "Barbies" team up and subvert all of the "Kens" by pretending to be normal, then twisting and turning all of the "Kens" against one another, causing them to fight amongst themselves while all the "Barbies" seize control of the world. This movie is a subtext masterpiece."

Meme - "Masculinity written by women: *Barbie*
Masculinity written by men: "You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace"

Meme - Kazol Zaman: "To watch Oppenheimer you need to understand geopolitics, modern physics, astronomy, need to have IELTS score minimum 8.5, gpa 3.9+. And to watch barbie you just need a girl to go with. So watching Oppenheimer is much easier."

Meme - "The Barbie movie is a story about a man who is oppressed by society. When he finally realizes he deserves to be treated better, he is villainized for it. He, along with everyone included) are gaslit into believing that he's the bad guy. In the end, once he realizes that society hates him and the woman he loves doesn't care for him, he takes the black pill becomes a volcel. He decides that even if everyone is against him, that's okay because all he needs is himself. HE is kenough. This movie is literally the origin story of every single man on my friends list.
Side hill: wom*n aren't allowed to comment on this post."

Meme - NPC: "Haha, you men are getting so upset over the Barbie movie just because it doesn't cater to you"
Normal person: "Actually, I fully relate to Ken's yearning for meaning in a world that treats him as a disposable prop while simultaneously telling him that he's an incorrigible evil entity that deserves no sympathy"
NPC: *upset*
"Not to mention the resolution of the plot was to re-establish the status quo that made Ken miserable, but telling him to "just be himself""

Alejo on Twitter: "I’m calling it just from the trailer - The real joke is that #barbie thinks it’s subverting 1950s gender norms when it’s enforcing 2023s gender norms."

Barbie movie: Warner Bros sorry for replying to atomic bomb memes - "Some images showed Margot Robbie with a mushroom cloud hairstyle. The official Barbie movie account replied: "This Ken is a stylist"."

Meme - manu @yonoexiste: "I'm sorry but the way he's getting more praise than all the women in it is starting to piss me off"
Film Updates @FilmUpdates: "Variety predicts Ryan Gosling will be nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 2024 Oscars for #Barbie"

Meme - "Dylan Wilbanks
I'M A BARBIE GIRL
IN OPPENHEIMER'S WORLD
NUCLEAR FISSION
IT'S A VISION
YOU CAN TOUCH MY HAIR
SPLIT ATOMS EVERYWHERE
INFATUATION
I DESTROY CREATION
CMON BARBIE LET'S BECOME DEATH"

Ryan Gosling Reacts to Barbie Fans Saying He's Too Grown Up for Ken Role - " “I would say, you know, if people don’t want to play with my Ken, there are many other Kens to play with," Gosling, 42, told GQ in a new cover interview published Wednesday, when asked of stories published by outlets like the New York Post regarding some fans' disapproval of his casting in the upcoming Barbie movie.  “It is funny, this kind of clutching-your-pearls idea of, like, #notmyken," he continued. "Like you ever thought about Ken before this?”... "If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed," Gosling added. "This is why his story must be told.”"

Meme - Barbie @Barbie: "Go for the GoldTM with a Signature reproduction of the vintage Gold Medal #Barbie doll from 1975, celebrating teamwork and dreaming big - the perfect gift for the athlete or collector in your life!"
"Barbie Gold Medal Barbie Doll"
Bridget @Bridget22220182: "I don't know many athletes who look like that."
NF_TEndies 0 gibs.eth @nf_tendies: "This is who the US Women's soccer team lost to. *Swedish football team of blondes*"

Meme - ">Barbie movie
>tries to subvert expectations by talking about feminism and women's empowerment
>the men have the most memorable moments and best jokes
>Ryan Gosling even has the best song
Yeah, I'm thinking the Patriarchy is back bros"

Kendom Nationalist on Twitter - "When the Barbies became brainwashed after the Kendom was established, it wasn’t brainwashing; it was actually liberation. The Kendom was a free complementarian society, Barbie Land was an oppressive matriarchy."

Meme - "In Barbieland, every single Barbie has their own house with lawn, pool, garage, etc Not a single Ken owns any piece of property in Barbieland, they sleep on the couch/lawn"
Memes That Would Disappoint Your Mother IV: Mothman's Revenge: "Though to be far, they had a genuine opportunity to encourage actual equality (which they love to claim is what feminism is about) in not having the Ken's go back to being second class citizens but they opted for "girls are always the best and smartest and most right at everything and Ken's should accept that". Which is sad because they really made arguments for both Barbies and Kens so a compromise between the two would have been actual growth from both parties. But hey, Literally Me was hilarious in it so we got that going for us."

Meme - Lunkhead @Antweegonus: "The right way to interpret the Barbie movie is as a Shakespearean tragedy, with Ken as our tragic hero: a would-be Ubermensch of high birth, unparalleled vision and will, whose noble pursuit of strength and vitality is hindered by his fatal flaw: desiring the approval of women"
Lauren Chen @TheLaurenChen: "The Barbie movie literally has Ken try to bring the Patriarchy (explicitly called the Patriarchy) to Barbieland & amend the Barbieland Constitution to remove Barbies from positions of power. The lengths the studio went to hide how INSUFFERABLY WOKE this movie is are astounding."

Thread by @6iege on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The most interesting thing about the Barbie movie is Ken's bloodless revolt against the Longhouse.  You are Ryan Gosling, Gosling is Ken, Ken is Prometheus, and perhaps you are too... Ken is you. He is an exaggerated western man in the 21st century. Anxious, confused, chasing women who don't care about him.  He exits the Longhouse and discovers his own will-to-power. Like you, he decides to bring this knowledge back to his fellow men. Listen to me- this is Ryan Gosling here. He has been the most celebrated avatar of outcast men in our society for years. Ken is the exaggerated antagonist turned hero. If you haven't seen it, Gosling finds himself portraying Ken, a doll designed to vie for Barbie's love and affection, for eternity. An all too modern bugman in a gynocentric world. Except he's not alone. Gosling is surrounded by other Kens, all of which have the same sole goal: get Barbie's attention.  Like crabs in a bucket the Kens are constantly pulling each other down in an effort to impress her. An all too familiar sight...  Ken starts off as the feminist's ideal man. A totally subservient man with a desire for Barbie that is not even sexual, it's just programming. He does not know why he wants to sleep over, he just knows it's something he should want. This all changes when Ken has an opportunity to leave the longhouse for a taste of the exaggerated patriarchal real-world.  Ken is immediately inspired by the achievements of the Faustian man. He develops a fascination with horses, high IQ professions, and feeling respected. Rather than stay in a world where men are obviously better off, Ken decides to RETURN. Like a Prometheus, Ken brings the fire of will-to-power back to the other Kens. Men who he was competing with just days before, men who he was long pitted against in the longhouse. Ken brings these ideas back to Barbie Land and not only do the Kens love it, but the Barbies love it too. When Barbie returns, she discovers the only resistance to Kendom is the weird, ugly Barbies and Alan, the androgynous Michael Cera.  I think you already know who these people are in your reality. The weird Barbies try to usurp Kendom by literally brainwashing the other women with feminist talking points. In order to break up the unity of the Kens, they engage in polyamourous activity to get the Kens jealous of each other once again. While this is clearly a fantasy, Ken's exit from the Longhouse happens to men every day in real life. Just as young women are subjected to long lectures on feminist talking-points. Barbie is an exaggeration of this very real divide between men, bugmen, women and feminists today. Ken's desire for Barbie brought him to the edge, but it was his desire to rise above the mass of Kens that pushed him to take the leap.  When he landed he learned of a world BETTER than his own, and rather than dream it, he shared the knowledge to change his reality forever. Ken doesn't just exit the longhouse, he returns to burn it down."

🔺ʀᴇᴍɴᴀɴᴛ. on Twitter - "Gerwig thought she was making incisive social commentary by creating a Barbie Land where men have no social worth and get tired of that when this is just the world WE actually live in. This reveals everything you need to know about what women think they are "owed" from men."

Bob Roberts, MFA on Twitter - "What’s funny is that they accidentally slipped up in the writing.   [SPOILER]  At the end when the creator of Barbie is talking to Barbie, Barbie mentions how the real world is unfair and mean and there are emotions and failures and patriarchy and whatnot. But she goes on to say that she doesn’t want to be an idea; she wants to be the one who imagines and creates things. “BUT LIFE IS SUCH A STRUGGLE AND HARD”  And this is where the creator says, along the lines of, “That’s what we do when life is hard; men create things like the patriarchy, and we create Barbie.”  A woman literally said life was hard so men figured out how to fix shit, and life was hard for women so Barbie was created to help… by playing with dolls?   Very weird dialogue, but very telling."

Did the 'Barbie' movie really cause a global run on pink paint? - "construction of the expansive, rosy-hued Barbieland — at Warner Bros. Studios in Leavesden, England — had caused an international run on the fluorescent shade of Rosco paint."

Meme - "How Men Are Watching 'Barbie' Wrong"
Crying Wojak Girl: "Nooooo Ken was supposed to be a joke and a mockery of your gender and patriarchy you watched this movie wrong!!!!!"
Gigachad: "I am Kenough."

Ginger Gaetz on X - "Thinking about watching the Barbie movie? I'd recommend sticking to getting outfit inspiration and skipping the theater. Here's why: The Barbie I grew up with was a representation of limitless possibilities, embracing diverse careers and feminine empowerment. The 2023 Barbie movie, unfortunately, neglects to address any notion of faith or family, and tries to normalize the idea that men and women can't collaborate positively (yuck).
Pros:
💅🏽 Margot Robbie's performance
👗 Stunning costume design
🎵 Amazing soundtrack
Cons:
🫣 Unfortunate portrayal of big dreams causing anxiety instead of inspiration
👎 Disappointingly low T from Ken
🤰🏼 Unfair treatment of pregnant Barbie Midge
I really wanted to enjoy it, but ended up feeling let down 😔
@american_girl , please don't take notes on this one 😅"

Now Elon Musk joins backlash against Barbie film's portrayal of anti-man feminism saying: 'If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word "patriarchy" you will pass out before the movie ends' - "'It [sic] you take a shot every time Barbie says the word "patriarchy", you will pass out before the movie ends,' Musk said on Twitter in response to a meme."

The Left Freaks Out Because I Hated The ‘Barbie’ Movie. Here’s The Real Reason Why. - "What I did was apparently terrible. Why? Why the outrage over me not liking the film? I have a question for you leftists. Why are you so upset? I don’t like the movie? You liked the movie? Okay, we can have those differences, so why are you so upset? I understand why I’m upset: What I’m upset about is the lie. You created a movie that is specifically designated for little girls and you slide in a bunch of Left-wing imagery and propaganda about how terrible little girls have it in the United States. Why are you so upset? Your movie made a lot of money over the weekend. This movie made $160 million over the weekend. It blew the doors off the box office opening weekend. What are you so upset about? One person whom you already didn’t agree with politically didn’t like the film and yet you are upset... when you notice their agenda, they get very upset. What they really want is approval... Greta Gerwig is now representative of an actual religious worldview. When I made the kind of quirky comparison between the reaction to me burning the Barbie dolls in this review and flaming the movie and the reaction to fundamentalist Muslims over the burning of the Quran, it wasn’t a frivolous comparison. That’s because they have an actual religious worldview that cannot be attacked. And if you attack that religious worldview, if you say that religious worldview is bad and wrong, then this means that you are a heretic and you must be punished. There’s a really serious undertone to a lot of this stuff. I actually got some death threats over the “Barbie” review. Why? Because there’s an ideology. It is the ideology of the sexual revolution that has been promulgated by the social Left in this country. And it lies at the center of everything they think, everything they feel... Greta Gerwig has a religious worldview. She did an interview with Vogue in which she talked about writing the movie, and she said that before she made the movie, she wrote an abstract poem about Barbie. She wouldn’t read the poem to Vogue, but astonishingly, she compared it to the Apostles Creed, the affirmation of certain core Christian beliefs... There is one speech that America Ferrera makes in the Barbie movie that basically is the Apostles Creed of feminism"

Meme - "Another one to add to the list. Misheru Katorin @MKatorin: "My favorite character archetype is the character that was meant to be a right wing strawman/parody but ends up being so endearing and positively received that the right claims them."
*Archie Bunker, Tanya Degurechaff, Dale Gribble*
*Ken from Barbie*

Meme - "Me realising the Barbie movie was about feminist fragility all along"