RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/04/22/the-trans-child-as-experimental-guinea-pig/

Standards of evidence have been discarded, and children are being altered for life
Last year Jeanette Jennings, as part of the reality-TV show I Am Jazz, threw her 17-year-old child, Jazz, a “farewell-to-penis party.” Guests cheered as the teenager hacked at a phallus-shaped cake with a knife, shouting, “Let’s cut it off.” The party may have been a bit contrived even by reality-show standards, but the subsequent operation was all too real.

In any other context, we might consider the drug-induced stunting of a child’s penis, followed by its surgical removal, to be mutilation. But in an era of culturally and legally enshrined transgenderism, it’s not just permissible; it’s entertainment.

In February, Representatives Jackie Speier (D., Calif.) and Angie Craig (D., Minn.) participated in the “Jazz and Friends National Day of Community and School Readings,” sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign (a well-funded gay and transgender lobby group) and the National Education Association (a teachers’ union). They read aloud celebratory and euphemistic stories of transgender children (such as Jazz, with the amputated penis) on the House floor. But the mainstreaming of youth transgenderism goes way beyond Congress. In schools nationwide, children as young as five are being taught that they may have been born in the wrong body.

Transgenderism is the theory that each person has an innate gender identity that is distinct from that person’s sex. Theories about gender identity were pioneered by sexologists and academics in the mid 20th century, and they remain widely contested and poorly understood. Despite this, they are being applied in a radical and experimental way to children worldwide. Parents and professionals agonize over the fear that young people will suffer physical and psychological harm from the application of transgender theory, but all too often they are cowed into submission.