RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/coca_cola_abandons_american_ideas.html

Now that we have entered the new world of diversity, inclusion and equity, the acronym DIE aptly applies.  While schools have long been involved in these activities, businesses have now voluntarily adopted or been forced to accept this left-wing ideology as well. 

Consequently, Coca-Cola has sent out notices to law firms demanding that the company will “require diversity among law firms who bill it for work in the United States and reduce payments if they do not comply.”

Because of pressure from the Marxist, anti-American Black Lives Matter, many Fortune 500 companies have pledged to address alleged racial inequality more aggressively.

In fact, there is almost a competition among firms to see who gets the highest score of diversity and inclusion.  How is this accomplished? 

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/535732-rupert-murdoch-rails-against-awful-woke-orthodoxy-while-accepting-award?utm_source=thehill&utm_medium=widgets&utm_campaign=es_recommended_content

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch blasted so-called cancel culture and a “woke orthodoxy” that he described as “awful” and suggested was a threat to the free exchange of ideas in the U.S. and around the world.

“For those of us in the media, there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential,” Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp., said in recorded remarks while receiving an award from the Australia Day Foundation, according to The New York Times.

“This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility,” Murdoch added. “Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”

Video of the remarks was also posted on the website of the Herald Sun, an Australian newspaper owned by Murdoch, whose media ownership includes Fox News and the New York Post.

Many GOP lawmakers and media commentators on the right have decried “cancel culture,” calling it a concerted effort by those on the left to suppress opposing viewpoints.

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/535512-cancel-culture-comes-for-the-moderates

The increasing tendency to interpret obviously sarcastic metaphors of violence as if they were real threats makes me want to kill somebody. Am I in trouble because I wrote that? That would be silly, wouldn’t it?   

If you read that sentence as an actual call for violence, you are at best a careless reader. It’s an obviously insincere, satirical claim about my state of mind. It doesn’t call for anyone to do anything. Does it mean that I’m threatening someone? Who? 

The pressure to cancel people because they have violated vague and unpredictable norms has claimed its latest victim in Will Wilkinson, who was vice president for research at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, and who (tenuously) remains a New York Times contributing opinion writer. His firing is particularly depressing, because Niskanen has been one of the most useful sources of independent, contrarian policy analysis. It was started by Cato Institute refugees who were disaffected with the Institute’s dishonest climate change denial. They thought, correctly, that libertarianism properly understood does not allow businesses to harm others, as the fossil fuel industry does. For Niskanen to join the cancellation bandwagon is a major disappointment.

Here’s what happened. After the inauguration, some conservative writers complained that although Biden called for unity, he proposed policies that Republicans could never agree to. “‘Aha! Biden proposes policies I dislike. HIS CALL FOR UNITY IS A LIE!!!’ is all the forlorn conservative mind can seem to muster. Sad,” tweeted Wilkinson.  

Soon after, he followed up with the line that got him fired: “If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence.” 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/05/rowan-atkinson-is-dead-right-about-cancel-culture/

Actor, comedian and national treasure Rowan Atkinson has attacked cancel culture, comparing it to the actions of the ‘medieval mob’. In a world where ‘controversial’ opinions can be banned from social media and dissenters are subjected to hate campaigns, he could not be more right.

In an interview with the Radio Times, the actor spoke of a serious problem with online debate – or rather, the lack of debate:

‘The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society. It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be “cancelled”’.

Atkinson also highlighted the vital importance of free speech:

‘It’s important that we’re exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion, but what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn. So it is scary for anyone who’s a victim of that mob and it fills me with fear about the future’.

He is, of course, correct. Exposure to different views broadens our minds. In suppressing alternative ideas, we behave like the irrational and hysterical witch-hunters of old.

This is not the first time Atkinson has spoken words of wisdom about freedom of speech. When Boris Johnson was attacked for comparing women in burqas to letterboxes, Atkinson argued that ‘All jokes about religion cause offence, so it’s pointless apologising for them’.

More recently, he has criticised the authoritarianism of the SNP’s Hate Crime Bill, which would criminalise speech even in the privacy of our own homes.

We should all be free to air our opinions in the public sphere, safe from censorious interventions by either the government or the cancel-hungry mob. That this even needs to be said is a sign of our illiberal times.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/seven-deadly-sins-woke-loyd-pettegrew/

“Woke” as a term originated in the 1940s. Oxford Dictionaries recorded its early politically conscious usage in a 1962 article, “If You’re Woke You Dig It” by William Melvin Kelley in The New York Times. The term has reared its ugly head again recently as a concept symbolizing perceived awareness of social issues and enlightened social movement. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics, social justice activism and progressive or socially liberal causes such as anti-racism.

Many believe woke is simply a manifestation of adolescent consciousness and wannabe activism. Besides the social idiocy with which woke is aligned, the term’s problem stems linguistically from the fact that it can be used as an article (woke actor), a noun (AOC is woke), an adjective (Chuck Schumer is a woke senator), a verb (the radical feminist really woked her accounting class), an adverb (Kamala Harris governs woke), a conjunction (progressive and woke), preposition (Biden’s stealing the 2020 election from Trump was a woke election) and last but not least, an interjection (woke, how socially responsible of her).

Perhaps woke isn’t a word form at all, but simply a leading indicator of abject stupidity. It would seem that if you are a progressive, woke has become both your being and your nothingness (with half-hearted apologies to Phenomenological Ontologist Jean-Paul Sartre). Jorge González-Gallarza argues convincingly what woke is a cannon of identity politics, “a toxic outgrowth of Protestant Christianity that threatens the American regime of liberty and self-government…both Christian and woke worldviews build moral orders around the categories of innocence and transgression—but with vastly different effects.”

González-Gallarza continues, “By placing atonement for past transgressions at the center of politics, wokeness seeks to apportion power in proportion to innocence. Note that how in woke terminology ‘speaking as’ a member of an innocent group instantly confers a legitimacy akin to what Coleman Hughes calls ‘heightened moral knowledge.’” Ah ha! All those George Floyd rioters last summer had to be given a hall pass from prosecution and lionization from Democrats because of their moral courage! So that’s how it goes!

Those who aspire to live the woke life are electrified at being able to thrust their cravenly nonsensical views in our face. All of us, if truth be told, believe in justice but only if it is applied blindly to every morsel of our Constitutional Republic. When the woke are blinded by the fires of their social justice insurrection, they are unable to see the injustice of their destruction of businesses and the myriad lives who overcame real injustices to create their own American Dream. When woke suppresses other’s rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, it becomes a vacuous four-letter word. You may be innocent of the soup du jour social injustices but if you dare to question methods and results, you likely will be shouted down, knocked down and put down with a loud WOKE YOU! Here are the seven deadly sins of woke.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/01/04/amen-to-that-democrats-will-have-to-change-hundreds-of-english-words-if-they-really-want-to-be-inclusive-n1304673

Rep. Ewomanuel Cleaver, Missouri Democrat, (I’ve taken the liberty of changing his name from “Emanuel” to remove any offensive reference to the males of of our species) lifted up the “prayer heard ’round the world” over the weekend. He closed it with the Shebrew word “amen,” but then added “a-woman” to be inclusive.

That’s not the end of the inclusive effort, or at least it shouldn’t be. Literally dozens of English words have “men” embedded in them.  Many also have “him” and “he” embedded, including the always useful “heh.”

Let’s change that one to “sheh.”

It’s time to root those “men” out in the name of including all the genders.

Some of the words that must be changed to reflect our 2021 sensibilities are just so obvious I can’t believe no one thought of it before Rep. Cleaver provided enlightenment, sorry, enlightenwoment, to us all.

mentor

Duh. “MENtor” is so gender-specific. We must change it to “womentor” immediately.

menopause and hymen

https://dianebederman.com/war-of-the-worlds-cancel-culture-versus-western-culture/

Allan Bloom, author of the Closing of the American Mind,1987, wrote that  many of us find our purpose and our intellectual and spiritual connection to the world through the stories and wisdom of the Bible, unlike many people who live with “an open-ended future and the lack of a binding past” and are in “a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone.”

The west is at war. A battle between two cultures that are diametrically opposed to each other.  I believe this war is only possible because we stopped teaching the Judeo/Christian ethic that underpins freedom. Niall Ferguson wrote in 2011: “Maybe the ultimate threat to the West comes from our own lack of understanding and faith in our own cultural heritage.”

The West, promoting freedom, free will, free speech, the knowledge that one is the subject of their destiny because one has the right and the obligation to choose his/her path, and this new culture; Cancel Culture, what writer Wesley Yang refers to as “the successor ideology;” is a culture that takes us back to a time of an artificially designed hierarchy which  promotes the belief that one is the object of one’s fate, hampered, held back, by race, colour, creed religion or sexual orientation. A culture that promotes standing on the shoulders of giants, not to rise up and reach for the stars, but bury them in the dust and then blame others for their personal failures.

Cancel culture is the Siamese twin of Progressivism: “Given the predilection to progress, the past is viewed as an inferior state of existence with various afflictions that wither away over time.”

Cancel culture has no use for the individual.Instead of uniting behind the social contract, the general will and the COMMON good, cancel culture is intent upon dividing us into competing tribes:divide and conquer. Cancel culture did not insidiously infiltrate ours; rather it hit us head on, without mercy and little resistance.