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P.C.-CULTURE

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Luke, I am your parent By Marie Richter

By on January 4th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/luke_i_am_your_parent.html

Insanity strikes again. The Twilight Zone episode in absentia is the liberal war on family and religion.  The incoming House of Representatives, led by insatiable radical Democrats, is on the verge of adopting rules for the 117th Congress eliminating gender terms as fundamental as mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister.  Pelosi & Company justify the changes on the basis of gender inclusivity.  But the ramifications on our cultural norms and the foundations of faith and family will be suffocating.  The speech police will be awarded greater tyrannical authority.  When governing, precedent shadows everything.     

The list of gender terms to be excluded covers father and mother (use parent), son and daughter (use child), brother and sister (use sibling), uncle and aunt (use parent’s sibling), nephew and niece (use sibling’s child), husband and wife (use spouse), father-in-law and mother-in-law (use parent-in-law), son-in-law and daughter-in-law (use child-in-law), brother-in-law and sister-in-law (use sibling-in-law), and so forth for stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, and granddaughter.

So I guess eventually Mother Nature will be called Parent Nature and Father Time will be known as Parent Time.  No doubt Mother’s Day and Father’s Day will come under attack.  One will become Parents’ Day and the other Children’s Day.  The next step will be to eliminate both as it will become insensitive to refer to anyone in terms of biological or family connections.  At best we may be left with People or Person’s Day.  Don’t forget to change Big Brother to Big Sibling and Soul Sister to Soul Sibling.  Better yet, Big Person and Soul Person. 

Wife and husband are on the gender chopping block.  In the movie Jerry Maguire, the line perfectly delivered by Tom Cruise, “I miss my wife” will have to be dubbed over to say I miss my spouse.  It just doesn’t have the same emotional ring.  Democrats are determined to destroy joy and distinction in this world.  The happiness newlyweds feel when introducing their wife or husband is heavenly.  Throughout married life, it remains endearing to call your life love my husband or my wife.  But now such talk will become tarnished and maybe even classified as hate speech.

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From Cool to Cringe: what’s happened to American culture? From Miles D to Cardi B Will Lloyd

By on January 3rd, 2021

https://spectator.us/american-cool-cringe-end/

Back in March, around 4,000 years ago, the world was ending. Plague swept in from the east like a horde. Clam-tight lockdowns, unthinkable even days before, were announced everywhere. Who could save us?

On March 18 our prayers were answered. An honor roll of Hollywood bluebloods took action. Assembled by Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, they created a video montage cover of John Lennon’s masterpiece — yes! — ‘Imagine’, which she posted — thank goodness! — on Instagram. ‘We’re all in this together,’ said Gadot’s expensive oval face, and, in a sense, she was right. Will Ferrell and Mark Ruffalo, Sia and Zoë Kravitz, Norah Jones and Amy Adams: they were all in this big wet bathful of tears together. The stars were taking a forced break from riding their chariots through the clouds. They were just like you, just like me. ‘Imagine there’s no religion,’ they sang, as every church, mosque and synagogue in two hemispheres was padlocked and shuttered.

Now, on magazine paper, these were some of America’s coolest people. Tasteformers, platinum artists, red-carpeters — a glittering bunch. But this video, which quickly reached 10 million views, was mortifying. The global embarrassment it inflamed could’ve roasted the thigh fat off a regiment of sumo wrestlers. There was nothing to envy. It was tone-deaf, cheesy and, above all, cringe.

It wasn’t a one-off.

Somehow, being Cool blew up in America’s face. Cool became cringe, and cringe is everywhere you look. When the third millennium began, Tom Wolfe could write about ‘American superiority in all matters of science, economics, industry, politics, business, medicine, engineering, social life, social justice, and, of course , the military’.That superiority evaporated, leaving behind large, damp patches of awkwardness. Yes, America is still culturally hegemonic — no doubt there. But it’s limping along on anti-prestigious name recognition. Yes, through Netflix and Disney, Penguin Random House and Apple, Facebook and Twitter, and by a million other means, American mores are broadcast, published, disseminated; stubbornly world- dominating, ploddingly imitated. Yes, the United States still gives off a massive light. But it’s not the hopeful shine of a beacon on a hill. It’s the flickering glare of a dumpster fire.

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Proposed House Rules Seek to Erase Gendered Terms Such as ‘Father, Mother, Son, Daughter’ By Mimi Nguyen Ly

By on January 2nd, 2021

ttps://www.theepochtimes.com/proposed-house-rules-seek-to-erase-gendered-term

Leaders in the House of Representatives announced on Friday a rules package for the 117th Congress that includes a proposal to use “gender-inclusive language” and eliminate gendered terms such as “‘father, mother, son, daughter,” and more.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern (D-Mass.) announced on Friday that the rules package includes changes that would “honor all gender identities by changing pronouns and familial relationships in the House rules to be gender neutral.”

A separate announcement from McGovern (pdf) said that the Democratic rules package will make “Changes [to] pronouns and familial relationships in the House rules to be gender neutral or removes references to gender, as appropriate, to ensure we are inclusive of all Members, Delegates, Resident Commissioners and their families—including those who are nonbinary.”

James McGovern (D-Mass.) speaks during a meeting at the Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 21, 2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Terms to be striked from clause 8(c)(3) of rule XXIII, the House’s Code of Official Conduct, as outlined in the proposed rules (pdf), include “father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, first cousin, nephew, niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, [and] granddaughter.”

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Hester Prynne Arrives by Andrew I. Fillat

By on December 31st, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/30/hester-prynne-arrives/

There are many examples of scarlet-letter-like labels, which are used as a cudgel to exercise fascistic control of expression.

The Nathaniel Hawthorne character, branded with a scarlet “A” for her adultery, is becoming a recognizable paradigm in today’s highly charged American society. The use of labelling, perhaps more aptly described as branding (as in cattle), has become a method of punishment for those who disagree with an ideology and effective blackmail to force others into compliance.

Labels – sexist, racist, homophobe, etc. – are now the currency of social justice enforcement and wokeness activists. They no longer limit branding to actual acts of discrimination. For them, it is not enough to assure that opportunities, whether jobs, school slots, social positions, or the like are available to anyone based on relevant capability, experience, and commitment, without regard to identity.

These activists not only demand special consideration based on identity (a topic for another day), but they are also exploiting our various biases as leverage to create guilt or fear of disagreement. That those biases may be based on experience or reasoned learning does not matter. The threat of “outing” a real or claimed bias and associating it with a defamatory label is used as a cudgel to exercise fascistic control of expression.

Today’s most potent weapon for activists is to threaten someone with the label “racist” even when there is no tangible act to support it. The supposed justification for the label may be based on a presumed bias, a distorted interpretation, exaggeration, or extrapolation of one’s statements, or even by imputing the meaning of silence. The latter evokes the case of Sir Thomas More, who was beheaded by Henry VIII solely for his silence’s implied disapproval of the king becoming head of the church to declare his own marriage annulment.

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How a Vindictive Classmate and a Cowardly University Ruined a Girl’s Life By Isaac Schorr

By on December 31st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/how-a-vindictive-classmate-and-a-cowardly-university-ruined-a-girls-life/

And how the New York Times helped justify it.

ARacial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning”

That’s how the New York Times headlined its hit piece on a college freshman for something she had said as a high school freshman. Mimi Groves was still a child when she said, in a Snapchat recording, “I can drive” followed by the “n-word” — the racial slur.

Jimmy Galligan, a half-black student who graduated from Heritage High School in Virginia this past spring with Groves, obtained this video during their senior year. Per Galligan himself, he waited until Groves had been accepted to, and chose to enroll at, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville to release the video — which went viral.

The resulting firestorm led to a torrent of abuse, and to an ultimatum from the University of Tennessee to Groves: withdraw voluntarily or have your offer of admission rescinded. Groves, who is white, chose the former and is now taking courses at a local community college instead of at her dream school — the reckoning.

Should the former two have led to the third on the scale that Groves is now facing? Any reasonable person would say no. Even conceding the obvious — she shouldn’t have used that slur in any context — there’s little indication she used it out of hatred for black people. In fact, the context seems clear: Groves said it casually, as hundreds of hip-hop tracks do every year. That doesn’t excuse the behavior, which should be considered unacceptable. But it is an important distinction from using the slur with animus, which was obviously not her intention.

There are many to blame for what’s happened. If Groves can be held responsible for a poor decision rendered in her mid teens, surely Galligan can be as well for deliberately trying to ruin a classmate’s life four years later — a worse crime at a more mature age. But regardless of Galligan’s culpability, institutions such as the University of Tennessee and the New York Times are far more deserving of scorn than either of these Virginia teens.At the university, cowardice won the day. Facing calls on social media for Groves’s acceptance to be rescinded, administrators bowed to pressure from a vocal minority, forgoing what was right to do what was most convenient. It was easier for university officials to hang Groves out to dry than to withstand the intense but brief storm themselves. So that’s what they did.

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Insanity Wrap #114: Transgender Propaganda Claims Straight Is Hate By Stephen Green

By on December 30th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2020/12/29/insanity-wrap-114-transgender-propaganda-claims-straight-is-hate-n1289653

Insanity Wrap needs to know: When is it wrong for straight men to want to date actual women?

Answer: When they’re married to some other actual woman, and that’s about it — no matter what today’s woke propaganda insists.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

WHO is happy to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CCP
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is even more entitled than her Veep character
You’re gonna need a bigger Newspeak dictionary

And so much more.

Shall we begin?

“Straight is hate” is what “morality” requires us to believe now, that men who don’t want to date men are filled with hate.

Insanity Wrap is so old that we remember back when the Left said that what people do in their own bedrooms is their own business.

Be straight. Be gay. Be whatever it is you are to the best extent you can manage, and find happiness by being in accordance with what you are.

But if your brain is so divorced from your own chromosomes that you have to play dress-up or either chemically or surgically alter your body in order to find some simulacrum of happiness, then at least have the decency not to demand that the rest of the world play along.

Also: Seek help, not political power.

Insanity Wrap really is trying to help, and has nothing but the deepest sympathies for anyone with this condition.

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University Of Michigan IT Department Wants People To Stop Saying ‘Picnic,’ ‘Preferred Pronouns,’ And ‘Girl’ December 28, 2020 By Paulina Enck

By on December 28th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/28/university-of-michigan-it-department-wants-people-to-stop-saying-picnic-preferred-pronouns-and-girl/

The University of Michigan’s technology department is doing the important work of protecting students from the horrors of words like “picnic,” “girl,” “man,” “preferred pronouns,” and “honey,” even though the real horror would be finding these offensive. The list, created by the “Words Matter Task Force,” details words and phrases deemed anathema to an “inclusive” work and academic environment, offering awkward or non-specific replacements.

The strangest inclusion on the list would have to be “picnic,” which finds itself on the chopping block due to a false story about its origin. Rumors spread across social media contending that the word “picnic” developed in the context of lynching black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, but these claims have been debunked.

The word actually derives from the French “pique-nique,” which was coined in the 17th century to describe people coming together to eat as a group, with participants responsible for bringing different food. The university thus wishes to censor language based on an internet hoax.

Likewise, the common expression “long time no see” is derided for potentially being derogatory towards people from Asian descent. Or Native Americans. No one is quite sure. Due to the ubiquity of the phrase, it is virtually impossible to trace its origins, but it likely arose as a direct translation from Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, or a Native American dialect. Yet the leap from “may have started from direct translations from an undetermined language” to “harmful and exclusionary” is vast.

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Beware: New Civics Mandates Will Be Woke By Stanley Kurtz

By on December 28th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/beware-new-civics-mandates-will-be-woke/

Americans dismayed by the mendacity and distortions of the 1619 Project are headed for a fall. A commendable desire to counter both civic illiteracy and the excesses of woke ideology has produced a new national movement to mandate history and civics standards. Unfortunately, that strategy will produce the very opposite of its intended effect. Far from restoring traditional understandings of American citizenship, the proposed history and civics mandates will entrench woke ideology nationally, imposing it on the reddest of red-state school-districts, and ultimately on private and religious schools as well.

The conservative-leaning American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is considering a model bill that would have state legislatures mandate history and civics standards. Bipartisan federal legislation to fund curriculum development and teacher training in civics has also been introduced. Comprehensive proposals to create de facto national history and civics standards on the model of Common Core are in the works as well, and likely to be adopted by a Biden administration. Every one of these initiatives will undermine the very ends they appear to promote. Conservative legislators who support them will one day find themselves facing an army of angry constituents. The blowback against these ill-considered civics mandates will make the battle over Common Core look like patty-cake. By then, unfortunately, the damage will have been done.

Sound implausible? It shouldn’t, because it’s happened before. The National History Standards fiasco of the early 1990s chillingly prefigures the trap into which traditionalists are about to tumble. Back then, America was in the early stages of our education culture war. The overthrow of Stanford’s Western Civilization requirement in 1988 had launched the newly dubbed movement for “multiculturalism,” which in turn provoked a counter-attack on what would soon be called “political correctness.”

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Joseph Epstein, In Brief Peter Wood

By on December 27th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/26/joseph-epstein-in-brief/

To think that a single op-ed could elicit such an effluence of opinion and such a diluvium of print is to recognize that Epstein, who will turn 84 in January, has lost none of his touch.

Joseph Epstein has made some news recently, mainly as a target of the cancel culture. The English Department at Northwestern University, where he holds emeritus status, erased him from its website and did all but lapidate him for his crimes against wokery. 

This story is the least of reasons for one to become familiar with Joseph Epstein. He is among the best American essayists—a stylist who seems effortlessly witty, generous, and graceful in both small and large matters. 

I came to know his writing when he served as the editor of The American Scholar, from 1975 to 1997. He turned that once stodgy magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa society into a delight for many, though he riled some readers with his caustic comments on academic feminism and for granting a platform to conservative scholars. Joyce Carol Oates published a letter in the New York Times in 1991 calling Epstein an “embarrassment” to the publication and urging his resignation. PBK kicked him out six years later, and replaced him with Anne Fadiman, who brought a bien-pensant sensibility that restored The American Scholar to dull respectability. 

Epstein, however, continued to write essays and stories, and to publish one collection after another:

Charm: The Elusive Enchantment

Wind Spirits: Shorter Essays

Fabulous Small Jews (stories)

The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff and Other Stories

A Literary Education 

The Ideal of Culture

Essays in Biography

Friendship: An Exposé

Narcissus Leaves the Pool

Snobbery: The American Version 

Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

I list these titles of but a fraction of his 24 books in no particular order.

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What in the Fresh Hell Is This? Wishing Someone a ‘Merry Christmas’ Is White Supremacy Matt VespaMatt Vespa

By on December 26th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/12/25/of-course-wishing-people-a-merry-christmas-is-white-supremacy-n2582127

I mean, we shouldn’t be shocked that people like this exist. Ever since ‘wokeness’ latched onto the political Left like a barnacle, the hot takes have grown more insane. Whatever you thought was ‘too extreme’ quickly was turned on its head with these people. Since Obama, the ‘woke’ Left has thrust scores of pseudo-intellectual talking points into the social media universe in the hopes of making it mainstream. Yet, the most common is making everything into a vehicle for white supremacy and then bashing it. Ladies and gentlemen, these people think that a man who holds the door for a woman is a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. Are we shocked that they decided to put Christmas on the white supremacy list? 

Even now, we can’t say Merry Christmas on certain platforms, who have opted for the more politically correct ‘happy holidays’ send off. But as Jen Bokoff of the Disability Rights Fund reminded all of us today, a lot of people don’t celebrate Christmas, so please be cognizant of that because “the default Merry Christmas as a normal greeting is also white supremacy culture at work.” Yeah, we’re not all mentally defective, Jenny. If I see someone with a yarmulke on, I’m not going to say, “Merry Christmas.” Also, this isn’t some random holiday. It’s not something where only half the nation celebrates. The vast majority celebrate Christmas. In fact, billions do. And not all Christians are white people. I guess it would shock Jen that a lot of people of color are—gasp—Christian. 

The added idiocy with this ‘wishing merry Christmas is white supremacy culture’ take is that it carries this connotation that all holidays are relatively equal with regards to participation. Sorry, given the numbers, no one really celebrates Kwanzaa. I think more people attend ComicCon than those who celebrate Kwanzaa. We’re also the most religious industrialized nation. It’s not even close. The United States has a population of 331 million; 205 million are Christians.

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