RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/27/paris-olympics-a-smug-spectacle-of-wokeness/

Is anyone else bored of ‘queering’? Everything’s getting ‘queered’ these days. We’ve had ‘Queering the Curriculum’. ‘Queering the Arts’. And my personal favourite: ‘Queering Palestine.’ This entails academics ‘unpack[ing] the multiple intersections of queer politics and the Palestinian struggle’. Hot tip for these profs: if Hamas ever invites you to discuss your theories, don’t agree to meet them on the high floor of a building. ‘Queering the Pavement’ is the only thing they’re interested in.

Now, with soul-zapping inevitability, we’ve had the ‘queering’ of the Olympic Games. Yesterday’s rain-sodden opening ceremony in Paris was super LGBTQIAzzz.
There were drag acts everywhere. A bearded bloke twerked for the world. A bollock-naked man in blue paint was served on a platter of fruit to a gaggle of diet-dodging drag queens. Look, if I wanted to be exposed to the camp debauchery of drag culture, I’d go to a kindergarten.

It really was a naff, dispiriting affair. It was the first opening ceremony to take place, not in a stadium, but in the heart of the hosting city. Boat after boat after boat carried the Games’ athletes along the Seine as 300,000 spectators in soaked plastic macs craned their necks for a glimpse. It seemed to go on forever. It was so bad that even square liberals on X started using the favoured slogan of the right: ‘STOP THE BOATS.’

The weather didn’t help. The lashing rain hampered the audio, making it hard to hear the ceremony’s star turns, Celine Dion and Lady Gaga (an upside of the downpour, I suppose). What we could hear was just weird. Like when a headless Marie Antoinette sang the opening bars to an ear-splitting heavy-metal ditty. The ceremony organiser, Thomas Jolly, said he wanted his spectacle to be a ‘celebration of being alive’ – here we had a celebration of being dead.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/drag-queens-parody-the-last-supper-during-olympics-opening-ceremonies/

Drag queens parodied Leonardo da Vinci’s rendition of the Last Supper during the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics on Friday evening, creating international outrage.

During the Olympic ceremonies, 18 performers re-created the scene, a depiction of Jesus Christ’s final meal with his disciples before his crucifixion. The burlesque performance was an “interpretation of the Greek God [of wine and festivity] Dionysus” to make viewers “aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings,” the Olympics said on X.

The scene featured some half-naked performers, one in the middle with a halo atop her head, behind a long table. A man who was painted blue, and with only vines covering his genitals, sat in the middle of the table and was surrounded by flowers. Viewers called the performance “crazy,” and Christian commentators on social media said that the scene made a mockery of the Christian faith.

The Paris games also opened this year with a performance by LGBTQ icon Lady Gaga paying tribute to French dancer and singer Zizi Jeanmaire near the River Seine, a performance by French-Canadian singer Céline Dion by the Eiffel Tower, and a torch-bearing act by rapper Snoop Dogg.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/affirmative_action_scrabble_to_hit_shelves_soon.html

Scrabble is revamping—a more “inclusive” and “accessible” version is set to hit the shelves for those who don’t like the “competitive” nature of the traditional game. (Spoiler alert: The intended audience is Gen Z.)

Here’s the story, via a BBC report out yesterday:

Mattel is to launch a new version of Scrabble which is designed to be more collaborative and accessible for those who find word games intimidating.

The new double-sided Scrabble board will still feature the original game for those who want to play the traditional version.

But the new game on the flip side will include helper cards, use a simpler scoring system and be quicker to play.

Here’s what English broadcaster Gyles Brandreth said of the announcement:

‘The makers of Scrabble found that younger people, Gen Z people, don’t quite like the competitive nature of Scrabble….’

A “simpler” scoring system? How much “simpler” could Scrabble be though? As long as you can add into the single- and double-digits (or triple-digits with the right letters and premium squares), and you know your multiplication tables, the scoring system is self-explanatory. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/04/having-a-mangina-is-not-a-human-right/

Most men are quite attached to their penises. Even the fellas who tuck theirs into silky ladies’ knickers and ‘identify as women’ rarely actually part with their meat and two veg. So it should come as no surprise that a 33-year-old ‘nonbinary’ man in Ontario, Canada is suing for the right to keep his willy.

No, he is not at risk of some cruel and unusual punishment from the state. KS, as he is referred to in court documents, is actually demanding to undergo a ‘penile-sparing vaginoplasty’. This costly procedure would leave him with intact male genitals alongside a faux vagina. This is apparently so his body can better align with his nonbinary ‘gender identity’.

The Canadian health service has, quite sensibly, refused to pay for KS’s mix-and-match surgery out of the public purse. So he is now suing the government. Bizarrely, this self-absorbed man has not been laughed out of court. Instead, his case is being considered as a matter of human rights.

KS is demanding that the Canadian state pay for him to travel over one thousand miles to a specialist clinic in Austin, Texas where the surgery he wants can be performed. Ontario’s Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) initially denied his request back in 2022, on the grounds that the procedure is experimental and not performed in Canada. Following an appeal from KS, and a counter-appeal from his insurance provider, the decision has landed with Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, where the case was heard in late February.

Why is KS so persistent? Supposedly, this is a vital treatment. ‘It is very important for [KS] to have a vagina for her [sic] personal interpretation of her gender expression, but she also wishes to maintain her penis’, his doctor wrote in a letter to OHIP. Apparently, this is because KS ‘is transfeminine but not completely on the “feminine” end of the spectrum’. KS himself has gone further by claiming that denying this request amounts to an act of conversion therapy.

It would be easy to laugh off KS’s ludicrous demands for a surgically constructed mangina. But he has good reason to think that his special request might actually be granted. This is the wacky world into which Canada has been led by the trans ideology.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/29/why-is-a-full-grown-man-competing-against-teenage-girls-in-swimming/

“This is what happens when you let trans ideology run riot.”

First they let men compete in women’s sports. Now they’re letting adult men compete against teenage girls – and wander into their changing rooms.

As hard as it might be to believe, in Canada a 50-year-old man really is being allowed to compete in swimming competitions alongside 13- and 14-year-old girls. Melody Wiseheart, formerly Nicholas Cepeda, is a professor of psychology and behavioural science at York University in Toronto, specialising in children and young people.

Concerned parents tipped off Rebel News, a right-wing website, about Wiseheart in October last year. He was spotted swimming in a competition at the Markham Pan Am recreation centre, representing the Orangeville Otters swimming club.

The next week, to try to stand up the story, Rebel News reporter Davide Menzies confronted several staff members at the recreation centre. Its competition coordinator initially said he could not recall seeing ‘a 50-year-old man’ competing alongside teenage girls. Menzies then presented him with the competition schedule, which showed Wiseheart’s name and age alongside those of nine teenage girls. Only then did the coordinator admit that Wiseheart had indeed been allowed to take part. The Daily Mail alleges that Wiseheart has been competing against teenage girls since 2019.

According to the competition coordinator, Wiseheart has the right to compete in girls’ competitions under Swimming Canada’s ‘trans inclusion’ rules. He has registered himself as female and is thus treated as female. And although the competitions he swims in consist almost exclusively of teenage girls, this is simply a matter of convention. It seems that, since no adult had ever tried to enter a teenagers’ race before, there had been no need to draw up explicit rules. In other words, Wiseheart did not even need to ‘identify’ as a 13-year-old girl to assert his ‘right’ to enter the girls’ competition.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-jarring-opera-on-jarring-themes

EXCERPTS:

Peter Gelb hired the company’s first chief diversity officer, even as the Met was warning of imminent financial collapse. This new position was based on the idea that the present-day Met discriminated against qualified black artists and needed a high-priced overseer to combat its reflexive racism.

Anthony Davis is arguably the most militant of today’s black composers. (Daniel Bernard Roumain would vie for that title, but he is younger and less well known.) Davis favors tales of black victimhood, whether the alleged railroading of five black teenagers for the brutal 1989 rape of a white jogger in Central Park (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Central Park Five) or the struggles of blacks and homosexuals in the McCarthy era (Shimmer, still in development).

He has been showered with almost every honor that can grace a contemporary composer—from fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy and the MacDowell Colony to awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, OPERA America, and other institutions. He has taught at prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Yale. Malcolm X premiered to sold-out audiences at New York City Opera, then the second-most prestigious American venue for operas. The current production received a rare Ford Foundation grant (Ford stopped underwriting anything “white” long ago) as well as a National Endowment of the Arts grant.

By a stroke of good fortune, the libretto for X contains the line: “You have your foot on me, always pressing.” Cue the George Floyd comparisons. The aria containing the line, sung by Malcolm in prison, “captures the relation of our community to the police and the power structure and the pain that comes out of that,” Davis said. Davis’s brother, Christopher, who wrote X’s book, described the reaction of Detroit school students to the aria: “They were like, ‘YES!’ and unfortunately, considering the way things are going, there will always be that reaction.” (For the record, there are counterarguments to the idea that the police and other representatives of the white “power structure” are the main threat in the black community today.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-admin-theres-no-room-for-william-penn-in-pennsylvania/

The cultural revolution continues. And its target of the moment is William Penn: the liberal Quaker who founded Pennsylvania. And since Columbus, Ohio canceled Christopher Columbus, the Biden administration is moving to cancel Penn in Pennsylvania.

The National Park Service proposes to rehabilitate Welcome Park to provide a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience for visitors. Welcome Park was designed by the internationally acclaimed design firm Venturi & Scott Brown Associates. The park is located on the site of William Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House, and is named for the ship, Welcome, which transported Penn to Philadelphia.

Now, Penn and his house are no longer welcome in Welcome Park on the site of his house.

The Penn statue and Slate Roof house model will be removed and not reinstalled. In a separate and future effort, new exhibit panels will be installed on the south site wall to replace the Penn timeline.

Also visitors will be invited to burn American flags and chant for the decolonization of America.

The proposed rehabilitation of Welcome Park includes expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia and was developed in consultation with representatives of the indigenous nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Shawnee Tribe, and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.

The National Park Service solicited input from people living in Oklahoma, not in Philly.