RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/metropolitan-museum-of-art-defaces-facade/

The new curator placed surpassingly ugly statues in the large niches, which were better left empty.

The facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, designed by Richard Morris Hunt in 1902, contains four large niches that might display sculpture but have traditionally been left empty. This was prudent good taste on the Met’s part, since sculpture on buildings is a tricky business that few artists in our age of individualism would understand: Facade sculpture must be part of a harmonious whole. If a piece draws undue attention to itself, it detracts from the building. And buildings, as architecture, have long been the most important, the most pervasive, and also the least consciously respected form of art.

The concept of the harmonious whole may be outdated. It comes from an age when an entire city of artists might devote their lives to a single, collective project: The sculptural niche is a trope of the cathedral, where the building and its adornment were in total alignment, under the unified direction of the master mason. In the absence of that perfect alignment, those exterior spaces might better contain nothing at all. Which is perhaps why, after the British rashly smashed all their niche sculpture during the Reformation, they decided to leave the niches empty rather than replace them with something new. This emptiness was later copied, perhaps unwittingly, by American architects in their homage to the British style, which is why our neo-Gothic college campuses are replete with little sculptural tabernacles and niches, all of them bare.

This is not to say the Met couldn’t have found some appropriate sculpture with which to decorate their facade: They might, for example, have drawn from their ample supply of Rodin bronzes. But if they pulled those Rodins out of their convenient, indoor galleries and stuck them 30 feet above the ground, it would be hard to get a good look at them. And so the sculptures would enhance the building at their own expense.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/dont-say-we-didnt-warn-you-hey-guys-is-now-off-limits-according-to-the-language-police/

Here we go again. As illustrated in the extremely insensitive Morning Briefing written by PJ Media’s Stephen Kruiser yesterday, there are some words we just can’t say anymore. The PC Language Police are issuing directives again in condescending tone. Your speech patterns and colloquialisms like “hey guys” are sexist and offensive. (Got that Kruiser? I’m reporting you if you do it again.)

“Now This News” is behind this particular video. NTN is owned by “Huffington Post” and is considered a fake news outlet by Punditfact, a fact-checking site. NTN published a video claiming that CNN deleted a poll that showed Bernie Sanders beating Hillary Clinton. Fact checkers found that to be false and gave NTN a “pants on fire” rating. NTN also claimed that Bill Clinton didn’t sign NAFTA and called Donald Trump a liar. Fact checkers also found that to be false. “Clinton signed the deal on Dec. 8, 1993. His speech that day is available in print form and on YouTube,” they reported.

Considering NTN’s history with spreading false information, perhaps we should ignore this latest ridiculous claim. But the idea behind the “hey guys” controversy isn’t new. Just a few months ago at the Democrat Socialists got triggered by similar language. Paul Joseph Watson’s video about it shouldn’t be missed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/gender-activists-losing-cult

A broad group of dissenters is united by the belief that every woman matters, that every girl matters — that the female sex matters.

Remember the viral video of the Scottish teenager who was thrown out of class for saying there are only two genders? Now there’s another clip, in the same genre, doing the rounds. This week, approximately 150 parents and pupils (mostly girls, the footage suggests) staged a protest against enforced “gender neutral” uniforms outside a high school in Sussex, England.

Piers Morgan, the presenter of Good Morning Britain, who attended the school in question, tweeted, “The protesting parents & students have my full support. This whole gender neutral craze is out of control. Let girls be girls & boys be boys.”

Interestingly, this kind of teenage activism appears to be on the rise. The same goes in the United States. National Review readers who follow my reporting on gender extremism will be familiar with Selina Soule, the brave young athlete from Connecticut who, along with two other girls, has filed a Title IX complaint with the Education Department, which is now investigating the state’s policy allowing boys to thrash them in sports.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/liberal-author-normal-people-must-stop-wearing-any-kind-of-red-hat/

Rebecca Makkai, a former finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, apparently believes red hats make ‘disenfranchised people feel unsafe.’

A prominent liberal author has compared the red “Make America Great Again” hats to Nazi swastikas, and told “normal people” — that is, people who don’t support Trump — to stop wearing any kind of red hat, lest they start “making people scared.”

Rebecca Makkai, who has been a finalist for both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, made the controversial comments on Twitter, according to Fox News.

To be clear, Makkai really was talking about all red hats. In fact, she even specifically asked fans of sports teams that wear red hats — such as the Cincinnati Reds and Washington Nationals — to not wear those hats out in public to avoid making other people afraid.

“Not worth making disenfranchised people feel unsafe,” she wrote.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/aclu-files-complaint-against-congressional-candidate-who-refuses-to-host-down-syndrome-drag-show/

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a formal complaint against a Republican congressional candidate over his refusal to host a drag show featuring mentally disabled performers at a venue he owns in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Peter Meijier, the heir to a Michigan grocery-store empire and a first-time Republican congressional candidate, refused to host a London-based troupe of drag performers who have Down syndrome out of concern that the performers would be unable to give their “full and informed consent” to participate in a sexualized dance routine.

The ACLU filed a complaint on Thursday with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights on the grounds that Meijer is discriminating against the performers on the basis of their disability and their sex.

“If members of the group were to perform an orchestra recital, chances are he wouldn’t have canceled the performance,” Jay Kaplan, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan, told the New York Times.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/free-association-for-me/

Recent events have left me — admittedly not much of a sophisticate — confused. When I heard that Debrah Messing was looking to effectively blacklist actors who deigned to attend a rally for the president of the United States, I started wondering when it is (and is not) 0kay to exercise freedom of association.

By my count:

It is okay to refuse to hire or work with actors who have attended a Trump rally.

It is not okay that Karen Pence works at a religious school that refuses to hire people whose sexual behavior violates its religious precepts.

It is okay to refuse service to Sarah Sanders at a restaurant for violating its sincerely held political beliefs.

It is not okay to refuse to bake a cake for a ceremony that violates your sincerely held religious beliefs.

It is okay (laudable even!) to exclude whites from all-black dormitories and all-black graduation ceremonies.

It is not okay to exclude men from women’s sporting events.

And it’s not okay to say anything about it, because one side deserves it. Or something.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/thoughts_of_a_hungry_but_woke_white_man.html

In the winter of 2016, Liz Connelly and Kali Wilgus took a road trip from their home in Portland, Oregon to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico.  They fell in love with the tortillas they ate on the beaches there.  Liz told a reporter from the Willamette Week, “I picked the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever, and they showed me a little of what they did.”

Liz and Kali came back to Portland, and they opened a food cart from which they sold burritos comparable to what they had tasted in Puerto Nuevo.  Alas, Kali and Liz did not realize they were committing a great wrong in selling delicious burritos culturally appropriated from Mexico.  Fortunately, this wrong was halted (along with their food cart business) when some brave Portlanders went to battle on their computers and, with death threats and tweets, stopped this outrage.

When I read about this heroic fight against injustice, a sudden uncomfortable question popped into my head.  If selling food from other cultures is cultural appropriation, then isn’t eating it cultural appropriation as well?  I couldn’t sleep worrying about this.  I had been going to Indian restaurants and Chinese food trucks for years, not knowing I was committing a crime against foreign cultures.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/dont_tell_me_your_pronouns__i_can_guess.html

“There are now sixtyish new pronoun sets, just as we are told there are sixtyish new genders. ”

A leftist shtick that been going on for some time in universities, government offices, and other haunts of the chronically offended is the idea of choosing one’s own personal pronouns — and expecting the world to actually use them.  Under this scheme, it would be politically correct for me to self-identify as:

e.m. cadwaladr
he/him/his

The main point of this bold new level of wokeness is that a man who wants to entertain an essentially psychotic delusion that he’s a woman may now style himself:

Higgly-Piggly Doe
she/her/hers

If someone does not go along with such a man’s mentally aberrant state and address him according to his delusional identity, the offending person can be prosecuted in some localities.  Nor is this game limited to mere conventional gender dysphoria sufferers.  There are now sixtyish new pronoun sets, just as we are told there are sixtyish new genders.  I do not know what genders “zie/zim/zir” or “ey/em/eir” denote.  These words sound vaguely Yiddish to me — though they lack the Yiddish language’s quirky charm.  The new pronouns are always uttered with a certain peevish militancy that precludes them having charm of any kind.