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P.C.-CULTURE

Expelled from a Progressive Think Tank—for the Crime of Denouncing Antifa Violence Craig McCann

https://quillette.com/2022/02/22/expelled-from-a-progressive-think-tank-for-the-crime-of-denouncing-antifa-violence/

On February 2nd, I wrote an opinion piece entitled “Beware the Anti-Fascists, for they have become what they oppose,” on behalf of the UK-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR)—a research centre for which I served, until recently, as a policy and practitioner fellow. That article began as follows:

I am increasingly concerned at the rate at which the so-called “CVE field” [countering violent extremism] is being infiltrated by activists describing themselves as “Anti-Fascists” who advocate for committing criminal offences in furtherance of their opposition to the radical right. This has exploded since the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, for which a large number of criminal investigations are still ongoing. As someone who has spent more than a decade delivering and studying state responses to counter the radical right, as well as other forms of terrorism, I feel compelled to challenge the implied narrative that the only way to oppose the radical right is by emulating their tactics.

One might think that this wouldn’t be a controversial opinion. Yet it was met with an avalanche of abuse and hit pieces emanating (and apparently coordinated by) Antifa-linked social-media accounts in the United States. Despite the fact that I had written numerous articles for CARR over the last four years (17, according to the website), it was suddenly (and ludicrously) claimed that my former career as a police officer meant that my supposed “bias against antifascists” had always been lying in plain sight.

CARR, as per its website, is dedicated to “the study and countering of radical right extremism and intersecting phenomena (e.g., populism, gender, antisemitism, and Islamophobia) that aims to support a variety of mainstream groups, from government agencies to grass-roots charities, through podcasts, commentary, research reports, presentations, media interviews and commissioned work.” As a former senior counter-terrorism officer who’s served in the London Metropolitan Police Service’s Counter Terrorism Command (SO15), as well as the author of a book on state responses to right-wing extremism (based on my PhD research), I was invited to become affiliated with the group in mid-2018.

The Bitty Bug Transgender Circus A miniature, knitted prosthetic penis arrives to save your female toddler from being misgendered. Thom Nickels

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/bitty-bug-transgender-circus-and-womens-sports-thom-nickels/

It seems that the transgender revolution sweeping the globe has finally caught the eye of merchandisers.

Consider the Bitty Bug Soft Packer, a custom made prosthetic for your (gender ambiguous) toddler. Vaguely reminiscent of a knitted glove, the Bitty Bug is actually a miniature knitted penis that parents can pin to their female child’s underwear to give a life-like impression of the male gender. The crocheted device is manufactured by Stitchbug Studio for just $6 a pair and guarantees that your biological female child will never be mistaken as female. Bitty Bug penises come in a variety of colors like pink, hummus, brown, black, white, blue, and purple. There are also a variety of sizes: 1 inch, 1.5 inches, 2 inches, and 2.5 inches.

 Daily Mail.com reported,

The controversial £4.20 item is available in multiple colors and was even advertised on the company’s website using a photo of a teddy bear with a bulge protruding from his children’s underpants. Similar adult ‘packers’ have become popular in the trans community to help reduce gender dysphoria and anxiety, however this range were noticeably smaller than usual.

At first glance, the Bitty Bug Packer looks like unhinged satire, but it as real as UPenn swimmer Lia Thomas, aka Will Thomas, a tall transgender woman with big hands and feet who regularly crushes biological female competitors while making many of them feel uncomfortable in the shower.

Evolution, Hyper-Novelty and Cultural Noise Michael Giffin

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/01/evolution-hyper-novelty-and-cultural-noise-2/

EXCERPTS

“Science occurs along a spectrum, sound on one end, unsound on the other. We live in an age where facts are scientific if they serve the narrative of whatever ideology is currently hegemonic and unscientific if they do not. One of the delusions of our age is the belief that sex and gender are functionally independent, from each other and from evolutionary biology too. Scientists now reinforce this delusion, because it bankrolls their research, controls government and education, and drives public policy. This is the backstory of the AMA recommendation against recording sex on birth certificates.

In their book, Bret and Heather discuss a common misunderstanding of our age, that because men and women work side by side, and are equal under the law, they are the same. To ignore their differences, to demand they be the same, is sexism of another kind. We were sexual beings long before we were human, and our desire to reproduce is hard-wired. It is a fool’s game to pretend, as our culture now pretends, “that sex equals gender, or that gender has no relationship to sex, or that either sex or gender is not wholly evolutionary”. Sexual differences can be valued without embracing the naturalistic fallacy.

Men and women have three possible reproductive strategies to choose from: first, “partner up and invest long term, reproductively, socially, and emotionally”; second, “force reproduction on an unwilling partner”; third, “force nobody, but also invest little beyond short-term sexual activity”. The first is best for men, women, children and society. The second is morally reprehensible and, historically, available to men rather than women. The third is now widely embraced by women in an age of sexual liberation, birth control and abortion on demand.

Yet sexual liberation has consequences—emotional, societal and evolutionary—the cost of which must be borne, ultimately, by some individuals or groups. Cheap sex has not empowered women in their negotiations with men. The non-judgmental, value-free welfare state was established to protect women, but its benefits are mixed; many women are disempowered, and what results is a class of self-perpetuating social disadvantage. Without monogamy, Bret and Heather believe sexuality is reduced to “females burdened with the entire chore of reproduction, and undiscerning males always on the make”.

Sex Offenders in Colorado Will No Longer Be Called ‘Sex Offenders’ Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/11/20/sex-offenders-in-colorado-will-no-longer-be-called-sex-offenders-n1534915

The Colorado Sex Offender Management Board (SOMB) has determined that referring to people who commit sexual crimes as “sex offenders” isn’t “person-first” language.

Instead, rapists, flashers, peeping toms, and other perverts will be called an “Adult who commits sexual offenses.” According to Denver Post writer Alex Burness, “Those who supported this change feel the ‘sex offender’ label is not nuanced enough and can impede rehabilitation.”

Leaving aside the documented fact that most sex offenders will re-offend and rehabilitation is a waste of time, what could these people be thinking?

“This language in the committees I’ve been on seems to be the most supported of these options. … It highlights the active reason why someone is in treatment, and it doesn’t assume the behavior is over,” SOMB member Carl Blake said.

“Victims advocates, therapists, law enforcement that I’ve spoken with, along with all of the DAs I represent, are not in favor of replacing this term,” SOMB member Jessica Dotter said.

The changes are not final. There will be a 20-day comment period for the public to weigh in before the board meets again in December.

Apparently, sex offenders are offended about being referred to as an offender.

CBS4:

Derek Logue says he shouldn’t have to carry the label for life, “Referring to me by a label for something I did half my life ago is inappropriate and downright offensive.”

He argued “client” would be a better term.

Public Defender Kathy Heffron agreed, “It takes into consideration the uniqueness of individuals who are receiving treatment.”

How about changing it to “inhuman monster”? Would that do?

Leftists continue their assaults on language to achieve political goals By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/leftists_continue_their_assaults_on_language_to_achieve_political_goals.html

People have been noticing lately that leftists are working hard to change the language to achieve their goals. Leftists are fully aware of the fact that, as George Orwell argued, when you change the available vocabulary, you also change people’s ability to think about things. If you erase from the English language any words tied to liberty (e.g., freedom, individuality, liberal, etc.), people will eventually lose entirely the whole concept of freedom. It’s with that thought in mind that some in the LGBTQ+ crowd are working to rebrand pedophilia. The latest euphemism is “Minor-Attracted Person” but it’s the same old sick idea.

Certain words decline with value over the years. The word beldam, or old hag, comes from the French belle dame, meaning beautiful lady. Once, young people respectfully called elderly women, especially grandmothers, belle dame, and then the word degraded.

Another word that degraded was spinster. Once, it meant a woman who would spin for a living. Eventually, it came to mean a repressed, desiccated, permanently unwed woman. Now, of course, the word is gone entirely because there’s no stigma attached to remaining unmarried.

And then there’s the word “pedophile.” It’s a neologism that psychiatrists created in the 1950s, from the Greek for “loving children,” something the ancient Greeks proudly did. Isn’t that sweet? Except, of course, there’s nothing sweet about it. Pedophiles are people who are sexually attracted to children and, in the worst cases, they act on that attraction. Since its inception, that word has had purely negative connotations.

Well, it turns out that, in today’s progressive world, pedophiles don’t feel that they should be stigmatized in that way. Allyn Walker, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University, in Virginia, is one such person, and Walker is willing to go on the record to make that point.

Progressive Craziness Of The Day: Transgender Orthodoxy Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=c951b15f01

Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake. But somehow I’m just catching on that the latest tactic of the Left in the culture wars is to indoctrinate all the kids from K-20 in the latest insane piece of orthodoxy before letting the outside world, most particularly the parents, know what is going on. So, to use the example of the new racism going by the name “anti-racism” or Critical Race Theory, by the time you find Ibram Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist” on the shelf at your local bookstore, your kid has already without your knowledge undergone multiple years of instruction (if white) that s/he is an “oppressor” and a “systemic racist,” or (if black) that s/he is “oppressed” and a “victim.”

Is the same tactic pervasive in other areas? I had had some inklings that the ideology of transgenderism may be another such area, but I must admit that I hadn’t been paying that much attention. After all, what percentage of the population could this ideology apply to — maybe 0.1%? Then a few weeks ago I read a piece by Abigail Shrier at Bari Weiss’s Substack (“Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care”), and I decided it was time to get Ms. Shrier’s book (“Irreversible Damage”) to learn some more about what is going on out there.

The short version is that we have what may have started as a perfectly reasonable request for respect for a group of people some of whom in the past have experienced ridicule or bullying. But over time the request became a campaign and and campaign fell into the hands of the most extreme activists and ideologues. These people recognize no limits on their demands, let alone any trade-offs in life generally, and are prepared to destroy all who get in their way.

Chicago Museum Goes Woke, Fires All of Its Mostly White, Female Volunteers By Kevin Downey Jr.

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/kevindowneyjr/2021/10/12/chicago-museum-goes-woke-fires-all-of-its-mostly-white-female-volunteers-n1523179

Thank you, ladies. You were kind enough to volunteer for years. Some for decades. Now get out.

The Art Institute of Chicago has canned all of its volunteer docents—well-trained, volunteer educators—almost 150 in total. Their crime? Most were retired white women. No diversity, no inclusiveness. I’m betting many were… ew… straight. And… “cisgender.” Bah.

The Docent Council complained about the decision in a letter to Art Institute President James Rondeau:

We believe we were dismissed (1) because the museum’s perspective is that the current docent corps’ demographics do not meet the need of the strategic plan (2) the museum concluded that reengineering the docent program was a step towards achieving the museum’s important goal of creating a culture of diversity and inclusion.

“Once you cut through the blather, the letter basically said the museum had looked critically at its corps of docents, a group dominated by mostly (but not entirely) white, retired women with some time to spare, and found them wanting as a demographic,” stated the Chicago Tribune.

And if you think that’s ugly, here is the real punchline: Their “diverse” replacements will be paid $25 an hour.

Yes, you read that correctly, a volunteer crew of mostly white older women is out and a diverse, well-paid crew is coming in.

This is the work of the museum’s new Woman’s Board Executive Director, Learning and Public Engagement, Victoria Stein. Stein, who is black, was hired earlier this year.

True Privilege CVS launches a program that forces hourly employees to discuss their “privilege.” Christopher F. Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/inside-cvs-health-corporations-racial-reeducation-program

Last year, CVS Health Corporation—the largest pharmacy chain in the United States—paid then-CEO Larry Merlo almost 618 times the median company wage, while simultaneously launching a mandatory “antiracist” training program for hourly employees to deconstruct their “privilege.”

I have received whistleblower documents from inside CVS that reveal the company’s extensive race-reeducation program, which is built on the core tenets of critical race theory, including “intersectionality,” “white privilege,” and “unconscious bias.”

As a keynote for the initiative, Merlo—who has since retired—hosted a conversation with Boston University professor Ibram Kendi, who told 25,000 CVS employees that “to be born in [the United States] is to literally have racist ideas rain on our head consistently and constantly.” Kendi argued that Americans are “walking through society completely soaked in racist ideas,” including children as young as two to three years old. “Our kids are basically functioning on racist ideas, choosing who to play with based on the kid’s skin color,” Kendi said. The solution, in part, is to “diagnose” employees as “racist” in order to help them become “antiracist” and “stop hurting somebody else.”

A series of related training modules instructed employees to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves according to their “privilege.” The exercise is grounded in the theory of intersectionality, which holds that individuals can be reduced to a network of overlapping identities that determine their position on the social hierarchy, with privileged groups occupying the “oppressor” role and unprivileged groups in the “oppressed” role. The training asked CVS employees to circle their identities—including race, gender, sexuality, and religion—and then reflect on their “privilege” during the discussion. Examples of privilege, according to a checklist, included “celebrat[ing] Christmas,” “hav[ing] a name that is easy to pronounce,” “feel[ing] safe in your neighborhood at night,” and “feel[ing] confident in my leadership style.”

Ripping Off the Veil A British classical music organization exposes the sordid business behind all racial-preference regimes. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/ripping-off-the-veil-on-diversity-regimes?wallit_nosession=1

Racial preferences have been almost impossible to dislodge because their human costs are usually hidden. College admissions officers don’t inform rejected student applicants that they were turned down to make room for diversity admits. An HR office does not tell job seekers or the company’s own employees that they were not hired or promoted because they would add nothing to the company’s diversity metrics. The rejected applicants may suspect that they didn’t get a desired position because of a racial preference, but they can rarely be 100 percent sure.

The offstage nature of these tradeoffs allows preference proponents to deny that diversity decisions entail a zero-sum calculus. In 2019, a U.S. district court judge upheld Harvard’s racial-admissions preferences after a lengthy trial. In her opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs insisted that race is only a positive factor, and never a negative factor, in Harvard’s admissions process. Such a claim is specious. The only reason that institutions implement racial preferences in the first place is that there are not enough qualified applicants among non-Asian minorities to achieve a racially proportionate student body or workforce under a meritocratic selection system. Hiring a diversity candidate under a preference regime almost always means not hiring a more qualified non-diverse candidate. The former’s gain is inevitably the latter’s loss.

Now a British classical music organization has inadvertently ripped the veil off the diversity arithmetic, and the consequences may be far-reaching. Earlier this month, the English Touring Opera told nearly half its orchestral musicians that it would not be renewing their contracts for the 2022 season because it has “prioritised increased diversity in the orchestra.” In other words, as a bunch of white guys you must be cleared out so that we can boost the collective melanin levels among our musicians. Your talent does not matter; your skin color does.

Here, at last, were concrete, publicly identified victims of a preference regime. The reaction was swift. Since the Sunday Times broke the story, the English Touring Opera has been thrown on the defensive. Arts Council England, a government arts funder and the opera company’s main patron, is backpedaling on its aggressive promotion of diversity after the company claimed that it was only following the Council’s mandates in terminating the white musicians. It turns out that the public has little stomach for watching the diversity sausage be made.

The Left’s War On Comedy Is No Laughing Matter Armando Simón

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/20/the-lefts-war-on-comedy-is-no-joking-matter/

A curious characteristic of totalitarian communist regimes is the dearth, if not the total absence, of comedy. No comedy films were ever made in the Soviet Union or in any of the other Communist countries. In fact, cinemas in communist countries were almost always empty, the films being so mind-numbingly abysmal. (One time in Havana, the government allowed American films to be shown in a theater and the lines stretched around the block, whereupon the government arrested the attendees inside the theater.)

In the Soviet Union, circuses were a major source of popular entertainment, devoid of the usual crude propaganda. The favorite aspect of Soviet circuses were the clowns, when the otherwise unsmiling Russians could let loose with belly laughs.

Yoani Sánchez stated that one of the things that first helped her to break through the indoctrination received at school of the cult of personality of Fidel Castro was her observation that Castro never joked, highly unusual for a Cuban.

We are in the midst of a Marxist upheaval going full throttle towards turning America into a Communist utopia. The symptoms are all there: self-censorship, censorship (aka “cancel culture”), political indoctrination of the military, indoctrination in the schools, network news deliberately becoming propaganda outlets, Balkanizing the population, etc.

Another symptom is the slow strangulation of comics and comedy.