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P.C.-CULTURE

Is the Wisdom of Homer Immune to Cancel Culture? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2021/01/07/is-the-wisdom-of-homer-immune-to-cancel-culture-n1311490

Amid the current hysteria of toppling statues and renaming things, we keep mindlessly expanding the cancel culture.

We are now seeing efforts to ban classics of Western and American literature. These hallowed texts are suddenly being declared racist or sexist by preening moralists.

Or, as one Massachusetts high school teacher recently boasted on social media, “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!”

Proud?

Over 20 years ago, John Heath and I co-authored “Who Killed Homer?” We warned that faddish postmodernist race, class and gender theories — coupled with narrow academic specialization — was killing the formal discipline of classics in universities.

We worried that without custodians, the appeal of the great literature of Greece and Rome might wane in high schools as well. And it apparently has.

But why should we still read classics such as Homer’s “Odyssey” in the first place?

Classics teach us about the great challenges of the human experience — growing up, learning from adversity, never giving up, and tragically accepting that we are often at the mercy of forces larger than ourselves. All of these trials are themes of “Odyssey.”

Sometimes, Odysseus needs more than brains and brawn — like luck and divine help. How does the old Odysseus, after 10 years of wandering to get home to Ithaca, differ from his younger heroic self on the battlefield at Troy? What old skills and what new ones allow him to defeat the human and inhuman forces of the universe that try to stop his return home?

Great Western literature also questions, or even undermines, the very landscape it creates. Why is Athena, the tough female god, so much more astute than male Olympians like the touchy braggart Poseidon?

How does a supposedly docile, wifely Penelope outsmart the purportedly best and brightest male suitors on Ithaca?

Nancy Pelosi’s Bizarre House Rules Democrats control the 117th Congress, and they’re intent on pushing that control to the limit. Douglas Andrews

https://patriotpost.us/articles/76807-nancy-pelosis-bizarre-house-rules-2021-01-05

If you thought House Democrats would, beginning with the seating of the 117th Congress, reflect back on the shellacking they took on November 3 and exercise a bit of humility going forward, well, you’d be wrong.

“Georgia voters,” begins The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman, “you can’t say Nancy Pelosi hasn’t warned you. The Speaker of the House is clarifying today that without a Republican Senate to serve as a check on her chamber, the 117th Congress is prepared to follow the fiscal blowout of 2020 with another historic surge in federal spending and debt. New House rules will eliminate one of the few modest institutional restraints on government budgets and further reduce the power of minority Republicans to impede the Pelosi agenda.”

The centerpiece of this brave new budgeting world is a resolution that allows the Democrats to grant “emergency” status to their pet priorities and thus move them forward posthaste. The new rule would give House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth (D-KY) the ability to “adjust” the cost estimates for any spending bills related to the coronavirus or to climate change “so that their budgetary impacts don’t count as increasing deficits under House rules,” explains CQ Roll Call. “In practice, the new section means legislation that fits within the two broad new categories doesn’t need to comply with appropriations limits affecting discretionary programs, or pay-as-you-go rules.”

In other words, “Shut up,” Speaker Pelosi will now explain to her Republican colleagues when they deign to debate such things as responsible government spending and the proper use of taxpayer dollars.

As the Journal’s Freeman notes, “The pile of publicly held U.S. Treasury debt is now larger than our entire economy and Washington’s unfunded entitlement promises are many times larger than that.”

Amen to That! Democrats Will Have to Change Hundreds of English Words if They Really Want to be ‘Inclusive’ By Bryan Preston

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

War of the worlds: Cancel Culture versus Western Culture Diane Bederman

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.

Luke, I am your parent By Marie Richter

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.

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

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.

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

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.”

Hester Prynne Arrives by Andrew I. Fillat

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.

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

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.

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

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.