RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/who_exactly_gets_offended_by_cultural_appropriation.html

We live in an age of mass stupidity, with totally ridiculous notions elevated to the status of self-righteous causes. But among the most absurd complaints that predominantly young wokesters embrace is the censure of what they call “cultural appropriation.” By this, they mean people of one ethnicity using cultural artifacts of another culture.

Having lived in Japan, which eagerly embraced Westernization more than 150 years ago, and where classical music is far more popular than in the United States, this seems an odd complaint. Cultural appropriation has made Japan rich, diverse, and happy. McDonald’s is the biggest restaurant chain, thiough sushi and ramen remain immensely popular too. It is a delightful mix of opportunities for fun in every realm of human endeavor, with all the world’s cultural achievements available for sa,p[ling on today’s Japan. 

The wokesters, of course, have no knowledge of such matters, and focus almost exclusively on complaining about Caucasians dressing, eating, singing, or otherwise sampling cultures which the wokesters have decided are victims.

But what they fail to understand is the cultural pride almost everyone feels when others find their own practices worthy of emulation.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/07/jordan_peterson_in_hot_water_over_pronouns_again.html

God bless Jordan Peterson.  “Up yours, woke moralists,” Peterson told Twitter in a recent podcast when they suspended his account for tweeting a missive that apparently used incorrect gender pronouns and somehow violated Twitter’s ambiguous and purposely vague rules of conduct.  

Peterson wrote: “Remember when Pride was a sin?  And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”  Peterson is not bending to the woke mob, and says he’d rather die than delete his tweet.  Good for him.

Contrary to woke dogma, gender pronouns are meaningless.  Put another way, they are incoherent and indefinable, and when explored with any logic or rigor, they unravel into mush.  They violate basic grammar rules and create confusion in both the speaker and listener.  Using “they/them” as singular pronouns causes ambiguity and problematizes communication, and destabilizes established cultural and linguistic norms.  Further, because modern gender ideology teaches that gender is fluid and not fixed, pronouns can change at any time for any reason.

According to NPR’s “A Guide to Gender Identity Terms,” a person could identify as “he/they” or “she/they” simultaneously.  Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, who contributed to NPR’s guide, elaborates: “That means that the person uses both pronouns, and you can alternate between those when referring to them. So either pronoun would be fine — and ideally mix it up, use both.  It just means that they use both pronouns that they’re listing.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/07/05/another-liberal-celebrity-bravely-tells-truth-about-transgenderism-n1610401

If you dare to speak out against transgender ideology, you’ll likely find yourself censored from social media and ostracized by your woke friends. The far left has highly politicized the issue of transgenderism, using its influence in pop culture and government to brainwash the public, particularly children, and force them into compliance with bully tactics.

So when someone on the left dares to speak out, it’s noteworthy. Why? Because they know the risks of doing so and have decided the truth is more important. As such, I applaud Grammy-winning singer Macy Gray for having the courage to speak the truth during her recent interview with Piers Morgan.

Morgan said he believed that transgender people deserve “fairness and equality,” and Gray agreed; however, he did point out that when it comes to sports, males have a clear biological advantage over females, and Gray agreed.

“I totally agree,” Gray told him. “And I will say this, and everybody’s going to hate me, but as a woman, just because you go change your parts doesn’t make you a woman. Sorry.”

“You feel that,” Morgan followed up.

https://nypost.com/2022/07/05/bette-midler-sparks-debate-by-saying-trans-inclusive-language-erases-women/

Bette Midler caught some fire on Twitter on Monday when she tweeted about the trans community and the language used to describe them.

The “Hocus Pocus” star, 76, scribed: “WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name!”

“They don’t call us ‘women’ anymore; they call us ‘birthing people’ or ‘menstruators,’ and even ‘people with vaginas!’ Don’t let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you,” she continued.

Fans slammed the “First Wives Club” star for her tweets about women and the LGBTQ community on

Twitter users slammed Midler on social media, with several arguing that her words were false.

“Really disappointed in this as a trans man and a Bette Midler fan. Bette, including trans men in the conversation about reproductive health does not harm women. We have the same organs, and even greater vulnerability, as cis woman,” one person replied to the “First Wives Club” alum.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cancel-culture-goes-to-washington-slavery-emancipation-freedom-history-president-11656699767?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

George Washington is a problem for George Washington University, according to the Washington Post. For years, the university in the nation’s capital has struggled with the shadow cast by President Washington’s ownership of slaves. In 2020 university officials began investigating the school’s sports teams’ name, the Colonials, because of the “ways colonists ravaged communities of color.” Last month “Colonials” disappeared. This spring, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Caleb Francois, a senior at the school, insisting that the university deal with “systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy” by dropping the Washington name completely and renaming the university for Frederick Douglass.

George Washington certainly did own slaves. In addition to the 10 he inherited from his father, he accumulated another 65 through outright purchase over the years. When he married Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759, she brought another 84 slaves to the household at Mount Vernon. By 1786 the slaves numbered 216. In 1799, the last year of his life, Washington owned 317 men, women and children. Even in the years Washington served as the first president, he kept at least eight slaves in his home in the first capitals, New York and Philadelphia.

Nor was Washington necessarily an easy master. He punished four slaves for their “pranks” by selling them to the hell-on-water of the West Indies, and he approved the whipping by his overseers of the “very impudent.” When Ona Judge, one of the dower slaves Martha Washington brought with her to Philadelphia, bolted for freedom, Washington tried (in vain) to re-capture her. As a cure for his endless dental problems, he yielded to the persuasions of a French dentist in 1784 and paid his slaves for nine teeth to be extracted from their mouths and implanted in his.

Yet Washington’s time was also the Age of Enlightenment, when the classical hierarchies of the physical and political worlds were overthrown, to be replaced by the natural laws of gravity and the natural rights of “Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence put it. Labor ceased to be a badge of subservience, and commerce became admirable. As commerce and labor gave people a greater sense of control over their lives for the first time in human history, slavery came to be seen as repugnant and immoral.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/in_a_crisisridden_era_the_us_navy_focuses_onpronouns.html

Winston Churchill memorably described British Navy traditions as “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” In America, the lash, thankfully, is gone and rum is for off-duty hours but sodomy (that is, homosexuality) has moved front and center. The latest example is the childish video the Navy is having its members watch so that they can learn how pronouns work, including avoiding “misgendering” fellow members of the Navy.

Our military exists to defend America against foreign enemies, whether the battle is fought overseas or, God forbid, ends on American soil. Currently, we have a lot of enemies: Biden is busy trying to get us into a hot war with Putin, China is expanding its military and geographic reach, Iran continues its efforts to develop a nuclear bomb, and North Korea already has a nuclear bomb.

And while those threats face America, our Navy is focused like a laser on pronouns. This focus doesn’t just represent a complete collapse in the military’s mission. It also represents a serious threat to the military’s operational efficiency.

Pronouns actually aren’t complicated, whether in English or any other language. They are the word we substitute in lieu of nouns or proper nouns when referring to any person, animal, or object. A sentence such as “Mary went to her room to gather her books and bag so that she could go to her school” becomes a clunky nightmare if we remove the pronouns: “Mary went to Mary’s room to gather Mary’s books and bag so that Mary could go to Mary’s school.”