RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274755/making-term-illegal-aliens-disappear-matthew-vadum

Leftists are fond of summoning the magic of euphemism to make the social problems they create go away.

Like the editors of the Newspeak Dictionary in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, these social engineers define out of existence the atrocities that necessarily grow out of their ideology.

Take Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who has introduced legislation that would strike “alien” and “illegal alien” from the federal law books and replace them with “foreign national” and “undocumented foreign national.” The lawmaker’s twin brother, Democrat presidential candidate Julian Castro, endorsed the measure.

Rep. Castro says his bill, the proposed “Correcting Alienating Names in Government Act,” or CHANGE Act, is “integral to creating a more welcoming and inclusive environment for incoming and current immigrants living in the United States.”

Castro wants “illegal alien” banished because it (quite properly) stigmatizes behavior –that is, being a foreigner present in the United States without authorization— that is unlawful.

There is a certain logic to this.

The Left has to make the hordes of illegal aliens their various so-called immigration law reforms have unleashed on their fellow Americans over the years seem normal and acceptable. This is also why the Left describes just about everyone touched by the nation’s immigration laws as an “immigrant” – whether they’re illegal aliens or legal permanent residents. Smearing anyone who believes in the rule of law as anti-immigrant over and over again makes people defensive and wears down the opposition. It’s a kind of brainwashing.

Radicals who carry “no human being is illegal” placards at protests and Associated Press reporters agree with Castro that lying to destigmatize unlawful behavior is morally virtuous. The thought police at the AP stylebook now declare that “illegal” should be used only to describe an action “such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.”

They also give a thumbs-down to “illegal alien” and “undocumented,” which itself is already a euphemism. USA Today and other media outlets followed suit. Then-California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) jumped on the bandwagon in 2015 by signing legislation excising “alien” from the state’s labor code.

“Words matter,” Castro said in a press release.

“It’s vital that we respect the dignity of immigrants fleeing violence and prosecution in our language. The words ‘alien’ and ‘illegal alien’ work to demonize and dehumanize the migrant community. They have no place in our government’s description of human beings. Immigrants come to our borders in good faith and work hard for the opportunity to achieve a better life for themselves and their family. Eliminating this language from government expression puts us one step closer to preserving their dignity and ensuring their safety.”

And it makes illegals and their enablers feel good about breaking the law, which is largely the point of the exercise.

Well, that, and it helps to create pressure to get “comprehensive immigration reform,” a euphemism for immigration amnesty, through Congress.

President Donald Trump uses the words and phrases the Left hates because they’re accurate, his base loves them, and leftists hate them. All conservatives and right-thinking patriots should do the same.

Although the likelihood of Rep. Castro’s legislation making it all the way across Pennsylvania Avenue to President Trump’s desk is somewhere between slim and none, federal lawmakers do occasionally banish unfashionable words from the statute books.

Congress banned the perfectly good word “lunatic” in federal legislation in 2012 because it was deemed mean. In 2010 our elected representatives banned “mental retardation,” replacing it with “intellectual disability” in federal laws. And they’ll do it again when other useful words are no longer fashionable.

The feces-covered leftist hell known as San Francisco is getting rid of its crime problem by introducing new vocabulary.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/22/san-francisco-introduces-sanitized-language-to-describe-criminals-aka-justice-involved-persons/

Who would you be more apt to hire—a “convicted felon” or a “justice-involved person”?

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is betting you would go with the second choice—which is why they have introduced gentle, non-judgmental language to describe hardened criminals and drug offenders. The goal of their nonbinding resolution is to change people’s “racist” views about those who commit crimes—including rapists, pedophile, and murderers, apparently.

The newspeak comes as the city reels from high rates of crime, homelessness and drug abuse, Fox News reported.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, from now on a convicted felon or an offender released from custody will be known as a “formerly incarcerated person,” or a “justice-involved” person or just a “returning resident.”

A juvenile “delinquent” will now be called a “young person with justice system involvement,” or a “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system.”

And drug addicts or substance abusers, meanwhile, will become “a person with a history of substance use.”

One of the objectives of the resolution is to avoid “inaccurate information” reportedly, but the new language seems purposefully misleading. A “justice-involved” person sounds like it could be someone who works in the justice system. Similarly, a “young person with justice system involvement” could well be a teenager who interned in a law office.

http://politicalmavens.com/

If New York City taxpayers want to know how their money is spent by the Dept of Education, they can consider the program to train computer science teachers to help students see this subject connected to their own lives. You might guess that ordinary inducements such as doing better in school, doing better in an increasingly computerized job market, earning more money – all of which apply to all races and ethnicities – would be reason enough to be grateful for having computer science courses available in school. You might imagine that by the time a Muslim student is in school, it is no longer essential to capture his attention by the fact that he can make a 3 D symbol of Allah’s name in Arabic script. You would hope that infantilization would not be so rampant that a teacher would boast of making up a song similar to “the head bone connected to the neck bone” in order to stimulate interest in computers. These examples are from an article in today’s WSJ and make us wonder whether school is synonymous with Sesame Street and whether all we are really doing is encouraging the soft bigotry of diminished expectations (WSJ NYC Teachers Get ‘Culturally Responsive’ Training, 8/14)

The fact remains that the whole issue of racial and cultural sensitivity has been captured by Black and Hispanic groups looking for outside answers to inside problems. Asian and Indian students seem to have no trouble meeting the criteria of NYC public schools and do not demand more Chinese teachers or more examples of Japanese food in their math problems or Indian folk legends in our literature. They have no trouble passing standardized tests in English and Math whereas only a third of Black and Hispanic students manage this basic requirement. The notion that what’s holding them back is the insufficient depiction of people of color in our curricula is as preposterous as the suggestion that Black children should be excused from the rules of decorum because their home lives have different standards of acceptability. Children of all ages must understand that school and home are vastly different and the way to adjust to this is not by talking down to them or showing them more selfies.

We are already living in an overly narcissistic culture with people consumed with posting pictures of themselves and checking their facebook pages and demanding “safe spaces” when they are not in 100% familiar territory. At the same time, we are obsessed with stressing the need for ever more diversity which seems to leave some people of color too uncomfortable to even listen to American history or see a statue on the street. In the WSJ article, a teacher summed up the issue that warranted this program for culturally responsive training: “I want to learn computer science; I’m not here for political mumbo jumbo.” The sooner our educational administrators apply this to students as well, the greater the chance for seeing real achievement.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/08/contemporary-capitalisms

At the recent National Conservatism conference in the US, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made the startling observation that the biggest threat to personal freedom was now not the State but the Corporation.  Carlson suggested that making this claim was unbelievable, even to him. Similarly, Matthew Crawford in American Affairs talks of “outsized commercial entities that play a quasi-governmental role in our lives”.  US Senator Tom Cotton calls the new corporate reality nothing less than a “dictatorship of woke capital”.

No less a woke oligarch than Mark Zuckerberg himself has stated, “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company … We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.” George Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

Is Carlson’s making this claim, and is it plausible?  Well, yes, it is entirely plausible, and this should chill us all. Many of us, for a long time, have been defending corporations against what might be termed the “old Left”. What Carlson was referring to is not simply the “corporation” as we all once knew it.  No, he is speaking of the emergence of a fundamentally new kind of corporation.  Let me explain.

The modern corporation – ubiquitous, unaccountable, condescending, emboldened, menacing – acts on a very, very broad canvas, with coercive powers and in ways previously unimagined, way beyond the original remit of traditional private sector companies. 

These are corporations that enforce oppressive new rules and protocols for employees, contractors and recipients of sponsorships, rules that are inimical to the exercise of personal freedom, of freedom of speech and of conscience.  They are seeking to set social standards for us all, they are limiting behaviour in the workplace, they are attacking opponents, they are punishing and rewarding governments according to whether their policy decisions meet corporate approval, they are boycotting states (in the US), they are bullying other businesses. In short, corporations are seeking to drive social change and this is constraining individual lives and transforming our culture — all in ways that not so long ago only governments could and did. 

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/valentina-sampaio-is-the-first-openly-trans-victorias-secret-model

After years of sticking to an outdated brand model even in the face of declining sales and threatened irrelevance, Victoria’s Secret has finally made an attempt to answer the public’s repeated calls for diversity by hiring its first transgender model, Valentina Sampaio.

The Brazilian model first sparked rumors that she had signed with the brand last week after tagging a Victoria’s Secret account in an Instagram post and using the hashtags #vspink, #campaign and #diversity. Sampaio continued to feed the rumor mill a few days later with another post, a video, featuring the hashtags #staytuned, #vspink and #diversity.

Some months ago, much to the surprise of men everywhere, the Gillette company decided to inform its core customers just what rotten, sexist and generally appalling specimens they are. It seemed an odd strategy at the time, and parent company Proctor & Gamble’s latest financial reporting confirms as much. Ad industry website Campaign Brief reports:

Gillette’s infamous “toxic masculinity” ad may cost Procter & Gamble more than anyone imagined in January, reports The Washington Times.

The year that Gillette launched its “We Believe” campaign and asked “Is this the best a man can get?” has coincided with P&G’s $8 billion non-cash writedown for the shaving giant.

Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller attributed much of the losses on “new competitors” offering “prices below the category average,” Reuters reported.

Observers such as Red State’s Brandon Morse responded by essentially likening the public stance to a lie by omission — the “toxic masculinity” ad punctuated news cycles for weeks and was repeatedly mocked on social media.

“Perhaps P&G isn’t willing to come forward yet with the fact that they made a monumental error in assuming men would take the ‘toxic masculinity’ commercial well, but they should soon,” Mr. Morse wrote Wednesday for the conservative website. “The brand is damaged enough to lose billions, and men aren’t coming back, especially with cheaper alternatives embracing men for who they are and not assuming the worst about them.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/29/lesbian-transgender-partner-wants-hook-run/

We’re hurtling to hell in a handbasket so fast it makes you think of those calculus problems where you have to find the increase in the rate of increase. “We went from ‘Bake the cake, bigot’ to ‘Wax my [testicles], bigot’ really fast,” to quote Erick Erickson’s snappy comment on the “transgender woman” who is demanding that a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal force female beauticians to handle his junk or be driven out of the bikini waxing business.

That wasn’t even the most telling story to emerge that week from the fever swamp that is our culture in the Year of Our Lord 2019. The highly competitive prize for the culture-off-the-rails news of last week goes to the jaw-dropping account of the personal life of Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay, as told by Kera Bolonick in an article that ran on social media under the headline “The Harvard Professor and the Paternity Trap.”

That doesn’t even begin to do justice to the story. Hay’s tortuous relationship with a purported lesbian and her main squeeze, a “transgender woman,” who seem to have set out with dogged energy to destroy Hay’s already rather unconventional relationship with his three children and their mother, beggars belief. Hay and his children’s mother were no longer legally married, and two of their three children together were conceived after their divorce, but they were living and raising the kids together. They had a mutual understanding—or, rather, one that turned out not to be so mutual—that they would not become sexually involved with other people.

According to Bolonick, not only did these adventurers convince Hay that he was the father of a child who turned out not to be his, he was hurled into Title IX hell on his campus by allegations of rape and abuse. He is still barred from the classroom at Harvard. Also—this takes the cake—the couple apparently stole his house while he was on vacation.

Well, as Bertie Wooster frequently remarks, it just goes to show that half the world doesn’t know how the other three-quarters live. Reading about Hay, it’s hard for those of us with more conventional love lives to avoid the Pharisee-and-the-Publican trap: “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.”

But the most fascinating part of the story is a point of commonality, not of contrast.