RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/hard-to-swallow/

In his Road to Wigan Pier, which touches often on the miserable diets of the poor in that unfortunate town, George Orwell reserved a special contempt “the food crank” who is

…by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

Such sorts were attracted, he said, by

… the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ [which] draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Those words were published in 1937, when the Left’s ratbag fringe was the chief sanctuary of those given to lecturing a population recently reminded of what they were missing by the empty bellies of the Great Depression and, according to the food fanatics, shouldn’t be eating anyway. In one word: meat to build bones and bodies.

That was then. Today the commissars of cuisine no longer need hector and lecture from the outer edges of rational discourse. Indeed, the local variety now get to deliver their sermons from the pulpit of Their ABC’s news pages, where authors Rosemary Stanton and Kris Barnden today prescribe the diet we must embrace to stymie “the ongoing devastation of our planet.”

Blessed with the authoritative tag line “analysis”, rather than the more appropriate “opinion”, they detail a menu that, while it might not help you live longer, will certainly make it seem that way (emphasis added).

https://canadafreepress.com/article/how-to-lose-a-culture-war

The owner of a gym in Troy, Missouri recently asked army vet Jake Talbot not to wear his “Trump 2016” shirt to her gym in the future. The owner did so in response to complaints from other customers that the shirt made them feel “uncomfortable.”

It is all too common nowadays for graduates of our finer colleges to accord moral significance to their feelings, regardless of whether those feelings are objectively reasonable. You’re uncomfortable? Then clearly someone needs to alter his behavior. Reports say that some customers found the shirt “offensive” or “racist.” That such judgments are preposterous is irrelevant in our brave new world of political correctness.
The culture warriors at Ms. Drew’s gym have won a small victory over President Trump’s America

What about the discomfort of Mr. Talbot at having to alter his dress at the whim of anonymous complainers? Also irrelevant. As a white male, Mr. Talbot has no say in the matter. Gym owner Liz Drew texted that she just wants “to ensure that all my members feel safe and unthreatened.” Threatened? By a shirt with our president’s name on it? Ms. Drew is well schooled in the lingo of the Left.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/honoring_country_music.html

Country music has almost always been counter-counter-culture. Country music honors ancestors and traditions, while hardcore rocker bands like Stick To Your Guns glorify felons Eric Garner, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, the ludicrously named Prophets of Rage mock “the chosen whites” who “wear[ ] badges” (“Killing In The Name”), and Vampire Weekend and Foster the People shill for socialist retread Bernie Sanders.

Often featuring sharp and witty lyrics and hummable tunes, Country fosters a patriotic love of the land and its people, and displays a spirit of proud independence. As such, it is among the most engaging of musical idioms. It is at its purest an amalgam of swagger and humility. True, its subject matter can’t help but touch the world out there and can’t help but convey attitudes and beliefs, often of a patriotic nature, but it is certainly not an agenda-driven program for incendiary or subversive or revolutionary change. It purveys no drummingly sociopolitical message. Rather, Country in its essence expresses natural and universal feelings of love and home and basic human experience — “the basics of love,” as Waylon Jennings put it in “Luckenbach, Texas.” Anchored in everyday life, it does not hector or seek to persuade but treats of perennial themes while retaining a distinctive artistry in melody and lyric.

As Alan Jackson sings in his haunting 9/11 requiem, Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning, he is not “a real political man,” unlike the smug patricians of the reigning Western cultural elite. Jackson’s elegy for Hank Williams, “Midnight in Montgomery,” is unforgettably poignant and as unpolitical as it can get, very much like Williams’ signature “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Williams is reputed to have said: “God writes the songs. I just hold the pen” — a way of articulating a felt truth and a welcome antitoxin to the malignant spirit of decay and subversion that has permeated the cultural, political and institutional life of America today. Such cultural decadence is the reason why so much of its music is trash.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272630/ten-truths-about-hijab-danusha-goska

In a city I cannot name, on a date I cannot specify, an anonymous woman and I embarked on a risky drive to an institution whose address I cannot disclose. “Aisha” and I had eaten, gabbed, laughed, worked and dreamed together. I had met her family. They were lovely people. They planned to kill her. She had violated their Islamic expectations. Thus our drive to a remote safe house. In the United States. In the twentieth century.

In January, 2019, after Ilhan Omar [pictured above] was sworn in as a new congresswoman, my liberal Facebook friends celebrated her and Rashida Tlaib. They made three false claims: “First refugee elected to Congress! First Palestinian! We celebrate diversity!”

No, Omar was not the first refugee elected to Congress. Jewish refugees, and refugees from Communism preceded her.

No, Tlaib was not the first Palestinian. Justin Amash, a male, Christian Republican, was. Newly sworn-in Donna Shalala, like Tlaib, is an Arab. She is a Catholic who supports Israel. None of the memes celebrating Tlaib celebrated Shalala or Amash.

The third lie is that celebrations of Omar and Tlaib were celebrations of diversity. At the same time that liberals were elevating Tlaib and Omar to meme stardom, they were maintaining complete radio silence about a story that was rocking the world. Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun is a Saudi teenager who, in early January, 2019, escaped from her family and was granted asylum in Canada. Alqunun described beatings, captivity, and the threat of death for abandoning Islam. She insisted that her case was not unique, and that women in Saudi Arabia “are treated like slaves.”

Also in January, 2019, the New York Times brought attention to Loujain al-Hathloul, who has “worked relentlessly to earn Saudi women the right to drive.” For her efforts, al-Hathloul has been tortured, water-boarded, and threatened with, and possibly, raped.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/child-sex-change-charity-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/

It enjoys financial support from the British government—and political support from one daft congresswoman.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a useful idiot for many causes. Now we can add extreme transgender ideology to the list. The 29-year-old congresswoman appeared in a livestream to support Harry Brewis, a British gamer, who played the entire game of Donkey Kong in one sitting in order to raise $340,000 for Mermaids UK, a British charity that promotes sex changes for gender-confused children.

Mermaids has received substantial public funding in Britain, sparking great controversy. Last year this included £35,000 from the Department for Education and £128,000 from Children in Need. The most recent grant was £500,000 by the national lottery. But after complaints, the grant was suspended pending review.

Mermaids must be one of the most contentious charities in Britain. For one thing, it is continually butting heads with Britain’s National Health Service in its efforts to, as the Times of London reports, “overturn an NHS ban on under-16s being treated with cross-sex hormones, which cause permanent body changes and compromise fertility.”

Mermaids’ chief executive, Susie Green, is a similarly divisive figure. Green took her 16-year-old for sex-change surgery in Thailand — a procedure that is now illegal — and advocates for other people’s gender-dysphoric children. The award-winning British columnist Janice Turner recently noted that:

At a trans medical symposium in Buenos Aires last month, Susie Green tweeted approval of a US speaker that “surgery should be allowed based on competency NOT age of majority. Psychological assessment should not be needed for surgery as this is not required for cisgender surgeries of ANY type.” In other words, children should be allowed significant gender operations without counselling. In America girls have double mastectomies at 13.

https://quillette.com/2019/01/22/anatomist-

Glenn Loury has the ability, occasionally displayed by great writers, of articulating his opponents’ arguments fairly while simultaneously exaggerating their claims ever so slightly in order to hint at their fundamental unsoundness. In our interview, he provides an example. Asked whether he believes African Americans should be encouraged to take pride in being citizens of the United States, he offers this characterization of the view espoused by many on the anti-racist Left:

America’s overrated. America is a bandit, a gangster nation. America is run by war criminals. American capitalism is rapacious. America is nothing but hypocrites. They dropped the bomb on Hiroshima; they exterminated the Native Americans and they enslaved the Africans. White supremacy rules here. Why should I want to fight and die for such a country? I don’t want to fight and die for it; I don’t even want to stand while the anthem is being played for it!

Such a view, dominant though it may be in America’s discourse on racial inequality, is for Loury nothing more than a “posture,” or at best a “pout.” It is neither productive nor reflective of the reality of African American life in 2019, Loury argues, and it functions more as a rhetorical trick than as a coherent plan of action for improving blacks’ prospects. Against any sort of reflexive anti-Americanism, Loury is unafraid to urge “a kind of patriotism aimed at African Americans.” He knows, though, that such urgings are probably futile, especially given his social environment: Loury has taught at Brown University for over a decade, an institution where pleas for American patriotism are likely to be summarily dismissed. So why does he insist on making them?

Part of it, he says, is a matter of personal integrity; he believes that adopting a pro-American attitude is the right thing to do. And what does having integrity mean if not saying what one believes to be correct? But another reason why Loury extols the virtue of a benign kind of nationalism can be discerned in a question he frequently asks himself: What are his duties as an African American intellectual? He reflects on this question often in his podcast, The Glenn Show, as well as in his writing (he has written four books on race), and he seems to have reached the following conclusions. As an intellectual, his duties, at least in theory, are spelled out in the very definition of that term: Following careful study, he must publicly express himself with clarity, purpose, and authority. But as a black intellectual, his duty is to discuss unpalatable truths about the black experience—and perhaps chief among these unpalatable truths is that white supremacy, however grotesque it may have been in past eras, is no longer the primary obstacle to black advancement.

https://www.city-journal.org/toxic-masculinity

Over the weekend, a disturbing video of a group of boys from a Catholic School in Covington, Kentucky catapulted Twitter into one of its regular nervous breakdowns. The video appeared to show the boys surrounding and taunting a lone, elderly Native American man as he chanted and played a drum in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The Indian was a veteran; his demeanor was stoic and dignified. The boys were loud and rowdy, the kind adults routinely cross the street to avoid. They were also—with one or two exceptions—white. A few were wearing MAGA hats. They had just come from the annual anti-abortion March for Life.

In other words, the video could have been scripted by a gender-studies professor from Middlebury, staged by the director of Gillette’s viral ad on toxic masculinity, and given an official seal of approval from the American Psychological Association, the august organization whose recently published guidelines elaborating on the evils of “traditional codes of masculinity” made waves a few weeks ago. There it was: toxic (white) masculinity, for all to see and deplore.

Or so it seemed. As it happens, the video had been substantially edited to leave out some details that, while not fully settling the matter, provided a good deal of mitigating context. If you missed the miserable affair, you should see the accounts given by Rod Dreher or by Robby Soave. For now, let’s consider how “toxic masculinity,” now a cultural meme embraced by the academy, much of the media, psychologists, and even corporate boards, has itself become toxic.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/

The most famous first line in 20th-century American literature set in Kings County, New York, must be incomprehensible to many current residents of that highly literary territory. “One of the longest journeys in the world,” writes Norman Podhoretz in the opening of his 1967 autobiography, Making It, “is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.”

Podhoretz was of course speaking figuratively, referring to cultural and class differences separating the two boroughs that were infinitely wider than the East River. Today’s Brooklyn is different—apartment hunters are likely to find it less expensive to live off Park Avenue than in Williamsburg, Cobble Hill, or Fort Greene, where rents have soared due to the constant influx of tech-savvy millennials.

But back in the day, the price you paid to get from a working-class Jewish enclave in Brownsville to Columbia University and then the literary salons of the Upper West Side was constant re-invention, repeatedly shuffling off old selves and girding on new ones. That journey, as well as Podhoretz’s political transformations, from liberal to leftist to conservative, maps the last six decades of American society and culture and the Jewish community, and where and how they intersect. Today, he turns 89.

We’ve met several times over the last few years, first at lunch close to his home on the Upper East Side. “Here’s where Madonna lives,” he told me on the sidewalk, pointing to a large fortress-like structure, as if to note how the neighborhood of white-shoe lawyers and Wall Street financiers had morphed into something from Page Six.

I wanted to speak with Podhoretz for the same reason I’ve read and reread his work over the years—especially, in addition to Making It, Why We Were in Vietnam, The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet, and his two other autobiographies, Breaking Ranks and Ex-Friends. He seemed to me to hold the keys to the vault that contains the blueprint for how we as Americans, how I as an individual, got here, and where we’re going.

https://www.city-journal.org/politicization-of-mass-culture

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin once labeled writers and other creative people “engineers of the soul.” In his passion to control what people saw and read, Stalin both coddled artists and enforced unanimity through the instruments of a police state. Today, fortunately, we don’t face such overt forms of cultural control, but the trends in American and to some extent European mass culture are beginning to look almost Stalinesque in their uniformity. This becomes painfully obvious during awards season, when the tastes and political exigencies of the entertainment industry frequently overpower any sense of popular preferences, or even artistic merit.

Our cultural climate has become depressingly monochromatic. Award ceremonies, once a largely nonpolitical experience, have become reflecting pools for preening progressive artistes. Those emceeing the awards must be as politically pure as possible—sorry, Kevin Hart—and those winning acclaim get the best press if, besides thanking their producers and agents, they take a shot at Donald Trump.

This dynamic is not exactly the byproduct of popular demand. In recent years, ratings for the Oscars have fallen to the lowest levels since the awards were televised, down from over 40 million to fewer than 30 million. The ratings decline tracks the fall in movie attendance, which has sunk to a 25-year low. We’re a long way from a time when awards nights were dominated by popular mainstream winners such as West Side Story, The Sound of Music, or even the original Lord of the Rings. The movie industry makes money now by producing sequels of movies based on comic books, with relentless action and violence but little character development.

As movies and television shows in both the United States and Britain today increasingly adopt the feminist, gay, and racial obsessions of their makers, they have written off a large portion of the less politically “woke” audience. Many of these shows, such as Britain’s venerable Doctor Who, have hemorrhaged viewers since taking on a more preachy, PC aspect. “It’s supposed to be entertainment,” one disgruntled viewer complained. Late-night television, now dominated by stridently anti-Trump comedians, also has seen ratings drop in recent years; no show has close to the number of viewers, let alone the iconic status, enjoyed by the late—and largely apolitical—Johnny Carson.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/transgender-birth-certificate-law-gender-identity-legal-concept-weak/

We’re only just beginning to understand the wider implications of a new law allowing New Yorkers to declare their chosen gender on their birth certificates.

Imagine that a man walks into a courtroom and swears to tell “my truth, the whole of my truth, and nothing but my truth, so help you all.” Imagine your incredulity as, for whatever reason, he gives an outlandishly false testimony. Imagine your dismay as the judge explains that all subsequent evidence and, especially, all cross examination, must support the man’s “truth,” and as he instructs the members of the jury that they, too, must affirm it.

“You be you. Live your truth. And know that New York City will have your back,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told a cheering crowd last year. He was referring to the introduction of a bill — since passed and signed into law — that allows New York City residents to change the sex on their birth certificate to M, F, or, if they like, the gender-neutral X, in order to conform their legal status to their “gender identity.”

Unlike sex, which is an objective and observable fact, “gender identity” — one’s sense of being male, female, or something else — is entirely subjective. It is a feeling. To say so is not to be dismissive or hurtful toward individuals who experience a disconnect between their birth sex and their sense of gender identity (i.e., “gender dysphoria”). It is merely to insist that the purpose of public records, such as birth certificates, is not to affirm or reflect our feelings — however strong or distressing they may be — but to document the truth, rather than your truth or my truth, for practical, legal purposes.

Moreover, that complicated, elusive, and multifaceted feelings now form the overarching theory of “gender identity” is not, as is commonly suggested in the New York Times, the result of some recent scientific advancement. The emphasis on subjectivity is a result of the shifting cultural and political paradigms of the 20th century that have influenced the field of psychology.