RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/a_moment_in_history_pregnant_with_purpose.html

A reader recently posted a comment that has stuck with me.  He asked, “Why do I even bother awakening to face another day of truly impending doom?”  He sarcastically added, “May as well get drunk and go back to sleep cuz the ‘Republicans’ won’t do enough this year or next five to prevent the really bad times coming which will make the Depression/WWII seem like the good old days.”  As someone who regularly partakes in gallows humor, I chuckled at the sentiment.  Over the next day, though, the serious thought behind that sentiment began to increasingly sting like a smart jab to the ribs.

I write a lot about “doom and gloom” issues during this era of great social change, much like how a Bangkok meteorologist writes a lot about rain during monsoon season.  Sometimes the steady downpour of “doom and gloom” feels as if it will never come to an end — just as a persistent monsoon often convinces the body that it will never stop raining.  The wet season, however, does finally pass.  So too will this period of prolonged madness.  

It is why I also write so much about a “Great Awakening” happening both here in America and across the West, in which more and more minds are becoming alert to the evils around us.  Sometimes these “awakenings” happen in spurts, where punctuated events jolt sleeping brains awake for the first time.  Seeing people experience an “Aha!” moment is like watching the clouds part so that sunlight can briefly reach the ground.  Those epiphanies are becoming more frequent, and more sunlight is steadily breaking through the swirling chaos that surrounds us.  That doesn’t just fill me with hope; it provides me with a sustained comfort that comes from a firm belief that we will overcome this chaos together.  Why awaken to face another day of impending doom?  Because we are blessed to be “awake.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/academias-double-standard-on-rape

About ten years ago, when I was a young assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and new to academia, I was taken by surprise when one of my students complained about an assigned text—Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Specifically, her concern was about Ovid’s lack of sensitivity on the subject of rape. The Metamorphoses is a poetic compendium of ancient Greek and Roman myths; one of its common motifs is male gods erotically pursuing females. I was particularly surprised by the student’s comment because Ovid’s elegant and witty text is remarkably sympathetic to the female characters. But I knew that Mawrters are famous for the intensity of their beliefs; it makes sense for students at a women’s college to feel so strongly about violence against women.

In the years that followed, I discovered that in fact the Metamorphoses is a common prompt for virtue signaling, not only for students but also for professional scholars across American universities. It is typical for a public lecture on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to begin with a trigger warning for rape and an invitation to audience members to feel free to step out of the room.

I could never quite square how listeners could be traumatized by Ovidian descriptions of sexual violence. Here, for example, is one of the most famous ones: “while [the god Jupiter] spoke, [the nymph Io] fled, [ . . .] but the god called forth a heavy shadow which involved the wide extended earth and stopped her flight and ravished in that cloud her chastity.” But I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, they not only murdered hundreds of children, elderly, and women and kidnapped hundreds more, but also systematically perpetrated brutal mass gang-rapes, complete with mutilation and other forms of inhuman violence against women. In one witness account, after terrorists finished raping a woman—and while she was still alive—they chopped off one of her breasts and were kicking it to one another like a soccer ball in the dust. In another, a gang-raped woman pleaded with the terrorists to shoot her dead—which they did, once everyone in the group had a turn with her. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-decadence-of-identity-politics

Among anti-cop legislators, “defund the police” may have lost some currency, but “demoralize the police” is doing just fine.

On January 30, the New York City Council passed the How Many Stops Act, over the veto of Mayor Eric Adams. The law requires New York police officers to fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian. If, for example, an officer asks a potential bystander to a shooting if he had witnessed that shooting, the officer will have to complete a form listing the bystander’s race, sex, and age. Are there other potential witnesses in the area who urgently need to be contacted before they disperse? Too bad. Identity-based paperwork comes first.  (If an officer waits to the end of his shift to finish filling out the forms, he will still likely need to have made some contemporaneous record of his encounters.)

The department’s personnel will spend hundreds of hours a day cumulatively on this bureaucratic task—time diverted from bringing criminals to justice.

The rationale for this unnecessary bill, like almost everything encumbering policing today, is the council’s belief that the NYPD routinely harasses people of color, whether suspects or witnesses.  Never mind that civilians in these newly red-taped investigatory stops are free to ignore the officer’s questions, preserve their anonymity, and walk away.  The council still sees a bigoted purpose in an officer’s reaching out to the public for help in solving crime.

The How Many Stops Act is innocuous, however, compared with California’s data-collection requirements for police officers. New reporting obligations under the Racial & Identity Profiling Act require California officers to fill out an eight-page form (up from four pages last year) with nearly 200 fields when they make what is known as a custodial stop (meaning the civilian is not free to walk away).

The form, generated by the California Department of Justice, comes straight from race- and gender-studies classrooms. The officer first documents whether he, the officer, is a “cisgender man, cisgender woman, transgender man, transgender woman, or nonbinary person.” To avoid placing a retrogressive “gender” straitjacket on the state’s public servants, the form allows an officer to check both “Nonbinary person” and one of the other categories, such as “Cisgender woman.”  “N/A” is not an option; the officer must list a sexual identity. Naturally, there is also an extensive “Officer race or ethnicity” section, asking whether the officer is “Asian, Hispanic/Latine(X), Black/African, Native American, Middle Eastern or South Asian, Pacific Islander, White,” or a combination of the above.