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P.C.-CULTURE

New York Orders Museums to Hire People By Race Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273718/new-york-orders-museums-hire-people-race-daniel-greenfield

Another great idea from New York City’s white mayor and white city council speaker.

They’ve destroyed so much of New York City. But even in the city’s darkest days, the Met, Carnegie Hall, and other classical cultural institutions had survived. Now the cultural revolution is coming for them.

The heads of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall are among dozens of cultural institution leaders quaking in their boots as Mayor Bill de Blasio considers slashing their funds if they fail to meet his staff diversity criteria, The Post has learned.

De Blasio’s decree targets the nonprofit organizations that run the 33 museums, theaters, concert halls, botanical gardens and zoos that comprise the city’s “Cultural Institutions Group.”

But in 2017, de Blasio reversed course and warned that diversity “will be a factor in funding decisions,” claiming, “We do this because we believe in fairness.”

And nothing says fairness like giving people jobs because of their race.

The move is intended to help boost people with African, Latin, Asian, Arab and Native American heritage, “LGBTIQ populations,” people with disabilities, non-English speakers and the poor.

The next great Met conductor can be one or all of the above.

School May Erase Mural of George Washington Over Concerns It ‘Traumatizes Students’ By Katherine Timpf

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/school-may-erase-mural-of-george-washington-over-concerns-it-traumatizes-students/

There is nothing we can do to change some of the horrifying aspects of our history as a country. So how do we handle them?

A school district in Northern California is considering the removal of a mural depicting George Washington from George Washington High School over concerns that it “traumatizes students and community members.”

The panels of the mural had been painted in 1936 by Russian-American painter Victor Arnautoff, as part of a Works Progress Administration project during the New Deal. Now, a working group made up of several panels has concluded that the artwork might be upsetting to Native Americans and African Americans and should be removed from the walls of the school and archived.

“[San Francisco Unified School District] convened a ‘Reflection and Action Working Group’ that was comprised of members of the local Native American community, students, school representatives, district representatives, local artists and historians,” district spokeswoman Laura Dudnick, told The College Fix.

According to The Fix, the group received input during four public meetings from December 2018 to February 2019.

“At its conclusion the group voted and the majority recommended that the ‘Life of Washington’ mural be archived and removed because the mural does not represent SFUSD values,” Dudnick continued.

The Humanitarian Hoax of Political Correctness: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 29 by Linda Goudsmit

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22649/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-political-correctness

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy. Political correctness is a humanitarian hoax. It is a deceitful end-run around the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. This is how it works.

The freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution award citizens the right to disagree without fear of reprisal. American civil society is predicated upon the freedom to express disagreement, and is diametrically opposed to the politically correct demand for avoidance of language that might be offensive and hurt someone’s feelings.

The freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution do not care about anyone’s feelings – political correctness does. Political correctness is a severe prohibition on free speech disguised as courtesy.

Political correctness (PC) is marketed by its devotees as progressive, compassionate, sensitive, and caring. It is defined as the avoidance of language or actions that are seen as excluding, marginalizing, or insulting to groups of people who are seen as disadvantaged or discriminated against, especially groups defined by sex or race. Political correctness has been embraced by leftist liberals with religious fervor in America. The problem of course is deciding WHO will determine what is and what is not insulting.

Standing Against Psychiatry’s Crazes By Abigail Shrier *****

https://www.wsj.com/articles/standing-against-psychiatrys-crazes-11556920766

In 1979 Dr. Paul McHugh closed the sex-change clinic at Johns Hopkins. In the ’80s he testified against phony ‘recovered memories.’ He hasn’t given up the fight.

You might have heard this joke: A man in a car gets a call from his wife. “Honey, be careful,” she says. “A car is going the wrong way on the highway.” He replies: “It’s not just one car. It’s hundreds of them!”

If it were a psychiatrist joke, Paul McHugh, 87, could be that driver. A professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a tenacious skeptic of the crazes that periodically overtake his specialty, Dr. McHugh has often served as psychiatry’s most outspoken critic. Either he’s crazy, or all the other psychiatrists are.

The best-known, and most controversial, decision of his professional life is newly relevant—and recently reversed. In 1979, as psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he shut down the Gender Identity Clinic, which performed sex-change operations. In his view, the hospital had “wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it,” as he wrote in 2004. In 2017 the clinic was reopened as the Center for Transgender Health, performing what it now calls “gender-affirming surgeries.” Its medical-office coordinator, Mellissa Noyes, told me “the demand is massive.”

Every Pronoun Must Go !!!! To root out gender inequity, we must search every corner. Theodore Dalrymple

https://www.city-journal.org/scottish-maritime-museum-gender-neutrality

Two types of people desire to impose politically correct locutions on the rest of us: those who possess unlimited power and fear to lose it and those who aspire to unlimited power and need a means to attain it. And there is, after all, no greater power than that of prescribing what others must say and what others must not think.

The Scottish Maritime Museum, dedicated to the history of the country’s shipbuilding industry, has decided that it will no longer use the words sheand herto refer to ships, but rather itand its. This is in response to feminists, who have defaced plaques referring to ships as sheor her. This change would negate centuries of tradition, during which the words traditionally used on launching a ship, “May God bless all who sail in her,” carried no connotation of insult or deprecation—rather the reverse.

The Maritime Museum’s surrender is yet another instance of the craven surrender of British officialdom to the demands of a small but vociferous group of monomaniacs who make the imposition of their views the purpose of their lives. Museum authorities have argued that they must move with the times, and the prevention of vandalism is important, for economic reasons among others. Yet this rationale is something like awarding burglars a pension in an effort to prevent burglary.

The Scruton tapes: an anatomy of a modern hit job How a character assassination unfolded on Twitter Douglas Murray

https://spectator.us/scruton-tapes-anatomy-hit-job/

Sometimes a scandal is not just a scandal, but a biopsy of a society. So it is with the assault on Sir Roger Scruton, who in recent weeks has been smeared in the media, fired by the government and had his life’s work assailed. Scruton is the latest, though far from the first victim of the modern outrage mob.

It is now four years since the Nobel prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt was fired by University College London (among other institutions who were lucky to have him). That happened after one member of the audience at a conference in Korea tweeted something he had said about working with women and professed outrage at the comment’s alleged sexism. None of the institutions which dropped Hunt asked if there was any case for the defense. They all just behaved as almost everyone in authority now does: they saw a potential fight and ran. And though they left their man behind — as is also the new way — they also relied on the assumption that the world would soon forget and everyone (except the trampled victim) would move on.

In January, we saw the Covington Catholic scandal, when a group of schoolboys became the subject of a two-minute hate for allegedly surrounding and taunting a Native American tribal elder. By the time the facts came out (there had been no taunting, the boys had done nothing wrong) they had been denounced as racists in front of millions. But if winning a Nobel prize in science is no mitigation in being falsely accused, what chance do schoolboys or the rest of us have? Anyone, it seems, can claim a scalp using Twitter: twist the words of your victim and let the outrage mob do the rest.

Edelweiss über alles by Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/9314/edelweiss-uber-alles

On Friday I started the day with three hours of substitute-host-level Excellence in Broadcasting on America’s Number One radio show. The Mueller Report predominated, but we got to other topics as well: You can find a few moments from Open Line Good Friday here. Thank you as always to Mr Snerdley and the rest of the gang: the best team in radio, no question.

~The moronization of society proceeds apace. As we mentioned on the show, a bigshot New York Times correspondent thinks that playing “Edelweiss” at the White House is some kind of Nazi dog-whistle to Trump supporters. It is tragic and profound the way even small artifacts of our inheritance get trashed in these witless arguments, so, if you want to know the real story of the very last song in the Oscar Hammerstein catalogue, here’s what I had to say a couple of years back:

Not long after Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote the song, Theodore Bikel was leaving the theatre when he found a fan and fellow immigrant waiting at the stage door for his autograph: ‘I love that “Edelweiss”,’ said the theatregoer. ‘Of course, I have known it a long time, but only in German.’

Not for the first time, Hammerstein had done too good a job. Just as his ‘Ol’ Man River’ for Show Boat is assumed by many to be an authentic Negro spiritual, so ‘Edelweiss’ is assumed to be an authentic Austrian folk song.

Activists Must Stop Harassing Scientists written by Peggy Sastre

https://quillette.com/2019/04/01/activists-must-stop

Is this the end of the era of factual, scientific inquiry? In today’s labs, the line between affirmative action and ideological harassment is vanishingly thin. But prioritising scientists who have the correct opinions and tick the right identity boxes rather than because of the quality of their research can lead to real persecution.

“At the moment I prefer to stay anonymous,” explains an astrophysicist. “I am not proud of this, but I have to eat, and I am also responsible for the research opportunities of my students and my postdocs.” He hadn’t killed anyone. Rather, he had just chosen to move from Australia, the country where he earned his degrees and spent most of his career, to China. Why? Because, as a researcher, he has more freedom in China. As unbelievable as this may sound, it’s true. Indeed, for more and more scientists, the pressures in universities and other research institutions to be “politically correct” (for lack of a better term) are so great that going into exile in a non-democratic country, where dissidents disappear and religious minorities are sent to re-education camps, has become a stopgap solution for those who want to be left alone to pursue their research interests. “I left Australia because I am fed up with seeing job and grant opportunities dwindle for real astronomers,” he says.

Today, everyone, or almost everyone, agrees: harassment is a scourge to be fought, whether it’s sexual harassment or discrimination based on race or gender. But the consensus is much weaker when the persecuted—to the point of losing their desire to work or live in the West—are scientists who have been ostracized for “incorrect thinking,” regardless of the integrity, seriousness, or quality of their work.

The Lehman Trilogy Is a MasterpieceBy Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/the-lehman-trilogy-contemporary-stage-masterpiece/
In New York, Sam Mendes directs a gripping play about faith, family & capitalism.

A man in a sharp suit and dress shoes walks a tightrope between two skyscrapers against the New York City skyline. A silhouette – unmistakable – of the Empire State Building can be seen in the distance.

This is the image promoting The Lehman Trilogy, a gripping three-and-a-half-hour play (including intermissions) currently showing at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, which tells the story of the Lehman family and the collapse of their investment-banking firm, Lehman Brothers, precipitated by the 2008 global financial crisis.

The story begins in 1844, when Hayum Lehmann (soon to be called “Henry Lehman”), the son of a Bavarian cattle merchant, arrived at New York Harbor and set up camp in Montgomery, Ala., soon to be joined by his brothers Emanuel and Mayer. From Eastern Europe to the Deep South to New York City; from cotton to coffee to pure investment banking; from the Civil War to the Great Depression to the 2008 crash – The Lehman Trilogy is a story of immigrants, showcasing American success and Jewish resilience.

Written by Stefano Massini, an Italian playwright, the play was translated from Italian by Mirella Cheeseman and adapted by Ben Power. At the Park Armory, it is brought to life by the National Theatre and Neal Street Productions. Sam Mendes directs Adam Godley, Ben Miles, and Simon Russell Beale – three fine actors – and the result is close to perfection.

Parent Coalition Urges Halt to $5.7 Million Taxpayer-Funded Transgender Study on Children By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/parent-coalition-urges-halt-transgender-study-children/

A group of hundreds of concerned parents is calling for an immediate halt to a taxpayer-funded study on transgender youth where the young participants are given powerful hormone blockers to stave off puberty and later a regimen of cross-sex hormones.

The Kelsey Coalition, a grassroots organization of parents whose children identify as transgender but who believe current transgender therapy has seriously harmed their children, sent a letter last week outlining their concerns to Dr. Jerry Menikoff, Director of the Office for Human Research Protections, which is part of Health and Human Services.

“The Kelsey Coalition contends this trial is unethical and violates laws protecting human subjects,” the group said in a statement.

The group said the OHRP confirmed Monday that it will “start a review” of the study.

Four pediatric gender clinics were awarded a $5.7 million grant in 2015 by the National Institutes of Health for the five-year study, “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth,” which had 279 participants in the cross-sex hormone cohort and 71 participants in the puberty blocker cohort as of April 30, 2018.