#woke madness

[commonsensecommentary]

“I believe the 2024 elections boiled down, when all was said and done, to a single, overriding factor: Voters are sick of the incessant nagging and scolding of easily offended and perpetually aggrieved Democrats who sneered at the concerns—and denigrated the values—of those whom they deemed less educated, less worthy, and less enlightened than they.”

[dragoneyes618]

The major lesson that reviewer Christine Rosen extracts from Rob Henderson’s new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, is: “The people who control a great deal of our cultural and political conversations are a rarified elite with little understanding of how most people live their lives.” (I have not yet read Troubled, though I’m eager to do so. What follows draws primarily on Rosen’s review in the Free Beacon and on Henderson’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.)

To comprehend the gap between those elites and the vast majority of Americans, consider a recent Rasmussen survey of what the authors call “elites” — more than one post-graduate degree, an annual income of $150,000 — and a subset of those “elites,” who attended an Ivy League school, or another elite private school, such as Stanford or University of Chicago, whom Rasmussen dubs “super-elites.”

Three-quarters of the elites and nearly 90 percent of the super elites describe their personal incomes as on the upswing, while almost none describe their incomes as on the decline. For all Americans, however, nearly twice as many view their income as worsening as view their financial situation as improving — 40 percent to 20 percent.

Despite having eventually made it to Yale as an undergraduate in his mid-twenties and later earning a PhD in psychology at Cambridge University, Henderson most certainly did not stem from the elite class from which so many of his classmates came. Students at Yale from families in the upper 1 percent of wealth are more numerous than those from the bottom 60 percent.

One of Henderson’s Yale classmates, who had attended Phillips Exeter Academy, America’s top prep school, once lectured Henderson on his white privilege — even though he is actually half Asian and half Hispanic. Yet it would take a certain obliviousness to label Henderson a child of privilege. One of his earliest memories is of his drug-addict mother being pulled away from him in handcuffs and hauled off to jail, when he was three. He never knew his father.

After that, he was shuttled between various foster homes, none of them stable, until he joined the US Air Force after high school. The discipline of the military helped him overcome some of the chaos that had characterized his life until then. But many of the old demons remained, including his penchant for self-medicating with alcohol, and he ended up in a detox program, where a talented therapist helped him work through some of those demons.

One of the central messages of Henderson’s memoir is that a non-stable childhood family life is not just bad because it hurts your chances of getting into an elite college or attaining a high-paying job later in life, but also because those raised in such an environment experience “pain that etches itself into their bodies and brains and propels them to do things in the pursuit of relief that often inflict even more harm.”

Given their difference in backgrounds, Henderson found many of the social rituals of his classmates incomprehensible. One example was when the Yale campus erupted in hysteria over an email from Erika Christakis to the students of Silliman residential college, of which she served as co-master with her husband Nicholas, suggesting that they were old enough to work out themselves which Halloween costumes to wear, without asking the administration to issue an elaborate set of rules to avoid “microaggressions” or “cultural appropriation” — e.g., a white student wearing a sombrero. After the childhood and teenage years he experienced, a fellow student in a sombrero did not seem like such a big deal to Henderson.

Erika was eventually force to resign her position in Silliman and on the Yale faculty, much to Henderson’s disappointment, as he had been eager to take her course on early childhood development. Meanwhile, the black undergraduate who confronted Nicholas Christakis in the Silliman courtyard, in an expletive-laden tirade, in front of a group of students cheering her on, was given an award for extracurricular excellence at the next Yale graduation.

Henderson offers an invaluable term to describe the opinions expressed so fiercely and with no tolerance of opposing views by his fellow undergrads: “luxury beliefs.” Luxury beliefs, as Henderson defines them, “confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” The conspicuous displays of wealth and leisure activities that broadcast elite status in Thorstein Veblen’s time have been replaced by opinions and beliefs that give proof of one’s elite education. After all, Henderson notes ironically, how many non-Ivy-League-educated Americans can easily toss off terms like “cisgender” or “heteronormative”?

Mantras such as “defund the police” are luxury beliefs because their impact on those living in gated communities or the most affluent neighborhoods is likely to be negligible. Henderson comments about the policies implemented to combat white privilege, “It won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.”

He recounts the story of a refugee from the North Korean police state, attending Columbia University, who raised concerns about the anti-free speech movement on campus, only to be taunted with “Go back to Pyongyang” on a social media site for Ivy League students. Normally, nothing will earn faster exile to social media purgatory than telling an immigrant, “Go back to where you came from,” but this particular refugee was deemed deserving of insult, writes Henderson, because she “undermined these people’s view of themselves as morally righteous.”

Incidentally, I would rank as near the top of “luxury beliefs” the familiar chants about Israeli genocide and apartheid. They cost their proponents nothing, yet effectively broadcast one’s moral righteousness and humanity, not to mention elite education, especially when terms like settler-colonialism and intersectionality are thrown into the mix.

Henderson is primarily concerned with the way that bad ideas — e.g., dismissal of matrimony and monogamy as passé, decriminalization of drugs — filter downstream in the culture, where they wreak havoc. As Charles Murray thoroughly documents in Breaking Apart, rates of marriage, children living in two-parent homes, and attendance at religious services have remained more or less constant in the most affluent quintile of the population, while plummeting in the lower quintiles. But on elite campuses, marriage is more likely to be portrayed as a prison for women, just as the same students for whom the words “capitalist oppression” roll trippingly off their tongues can be found the same day lining up for interviews with Goldman Sachs.

But the danger posed by the holders of luxury beliefs lies not only in their pernicious cultural influence. Holders of those views are quite comfortable with the use of coercion to advance their beliefs. Four-fifths of the super elites, interviewed in the Rasmussen poll cited above, would ban gas-powered cars. Just under 90 percent support strict rationing of meat, gas, and electricity, and 70 percent would ban all nonessential air travel.

The impact of these restrictions on the most affluent would likely be relatively small. They can afford electric cars, and would buy carbon offsets to circumvent some of the most onerous rationing or purchase them on the black market. And dollars to donuts that their air travel would be deemed necessary. The impact of such policies on the less affluent doesn’t figure into their calculations.

Elite campuses have been focal points for the limitations on free speech, and over half of the super elites educated on those campuses describe Americans as possessing too much freedom. That goes with a general contempt for markets, which allocate equal weight to the choices of the unenlightened and the enlightened.

That concern with “too much” freedom goes together with a remarkable trust in government among 70 percent of the elites and 90 percent of the super elites. Government is beneficent, in their eyes, because it can force people to do what the enlightened have determined is good. The elites know that their hands will be on the levers of coercion, particularly administrative agencies. (I would wager that the majority of those lower-level staffers staging mini-rebellions in the White House and the State Department over American support for Israel’s war on Hamas are holders of elite credentials.) Ronald Reagan’s quip, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’ ” does not resonate with the elites.

Sixty years before Rob Henderson first stepped onto the Yale campus, another man already in his mid-twenties entered Harvard as an undergraduate. Like Henderson, Thomas Sowell came from a deprived background and served in the military before entering college. He was born in the Jim-Crow-era South, in a home without electricity, and served in the Marines during the Korean War, after dropping out of high school.

The 1969 black student riots at Cornell, where Sowell was an economics professor, and subsequent pressure at UCLA to lower his standards for students, soured Sowell on academia, which he left for a position as senior fellow at the Hoover Institution almost half a century ago.

Over 50 years and almost 40 books, most still in print and many of them standard texts in economics, and ten volumes of collected columns, Sowell has leveled a sustained critique at the dominant intellectual doctrines of our day, in particular those of his fellow black intellectuals, whom he views as having spectacularly failed the black masses by advocating for policies that may serve their interests but not those of the large majority of American blacks. (Only about one-third of his writing concerns issues of race, and he has penned classic works in intellectual, social, and economic history.) Jason Riley’s intellectual biography of Sowell is appropriately titled Maverick.

In a short new work, Social Justice Fallacies, which I would commend to every college student and social justice warrior, Sowell fleshes out many of Henderson’s observations, including the detachment of elite theorists from the lives of those whom they purport to advocate, and their sometimes subtle, sometimes not, contempt for those whom they view as their inferiors.

The second chapter compares the Progressive movement of the early decades of the 20th century to present-day progressives. At first glance, it would appear that little connects the two groups, apart from their position on the political left of their day. A strong streak of racial determinism characterized the early progressives, and many of their leading lights fretted about the disastrous impact of an influx of people of inferior races to America. By contrast, today’s progressives start from the premise that there are no differences between races and that all differential outcomes are a result of systemic racism.

In the earlier period, Professor Edward Ross, the chairman of the American Sociological Society, warned that America was headed toward “race suicide” by virtue of being inundated by people of “inferior types.” American universities and colleges taught hundreds of courses in eugenics, defined as the reduction or prevention of the survival of people considered genetically inferior. The most famous economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, was founder of the Eugenics Society at Cambridge.

Irving Fisher of Yale, the leading monetary economist of the period, advocated for the isolation or sterilization of those inferior types. Or as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “Three generations of idiots are enough.” Sowell remarks upon how casually Fisher spoke of imprisonment of those who had committed no crime and the denial of normal life to all regarded as inferior. Not by accident did Hitler yemach shemo term a work on eugenics by Madison Grant, a leading conservationist and advocate for national parks and the protection of endangered species, his Bible.

At first glance, today’s progressives could not seem further removed from their namesakes. They are the opposite of racial determinists. In the modern progressive creed, all differences in outcomes between people of different races can have one and only one explanation: discrimination by the majority group.

Despite the opposite views on race, Sowell finds important continuities between the progressive movement of the early 20th century and that of today. Today’s progressives share, according to Sowell, their predecessors’ aversion to confronting empirical evidence that challenges their fixed verities, and a similar inclination to respond to empirical challenges with ad hominem insults — racist being the most powerful — rather than with counter-arguments and evidence.

And they are similarly inclined to use government power to coerce the less enlightened to behave in accord with their “expert” opinions, and too frequently oblivious to or unconcerned with the impact of their policy prescriptions on those constituting the “lower orders,” in their minds.

Woodrow Wilson, perhaps the leading figure of the Progressive era, served as president of Princeton before being elected president. Like many of his fellow progressives, he was an unabashed racist who insisted that black employees in government offices be physically segregated.

But what joins him to present-day progressives is his enormous confidence in government by experts. He presided over a massive expansion of the federal government and the creation of many of the largest administrative agencies, run by “experts.” He viewed the Constitution as outmoded for a modern age. But not to worry, government agencies headed by experts would usher in a “new freedom,” albeit not quite the freedom of a constitution limiting the power of government and enshrining individual rights.

Today, DEI bureaucracies on almost every campus seek to enforce right-thinking and enter into every aspect of university governance, including faculty hiring. Those mushrooming bureaucracies account for a large part in the explosion in higher education costs.

Sowell takes aim at the racial theories of the early progressives and contemporary ones alike. He seeks to empirically refute the claim that each race has a different “ceiling” for intelligence. (If anecdotes were data, his own genius would serve as refutation.) He met with and debated Professor Albert Jensen, one of the leading modern proponents of that view.

Sowell argues that environment, not inherent ceilings, underlies much of the difference in IQ between races. For instance, those raised in the Hebrides Isles and the hill country of Kentucky, though of pure Anglo-Saxon stock, have IQs comparable to American blacks. And like American blacks, their IQs tend to decline from childhood to adulthood. Social isolation appears to be the key. Sowell cites another study that blacks raised by white adoptive parents had IQs six points above the national average.

As an amusing example of the fallibility of IQ tests as measures of inherent capabilities, Sowell quotes Carl Brigham, who developed the SAT test. Brigham claimed on the basis of army mental tests administered in World War I that the myth that Jews are on average highly intelligent had been refuted. At least he had the good grace to admit by 1930, as Jews excelled on standardized tests, that his earlier conclusions had been without merit, and had failed to take into account that most immigrant children were raised in non-English-speaking homes.

Sowell is equally effective skewering the present-day progressive belief that all differences in outcomes are explained as products of racial discrimination. He chafes at the resultant cult of victimization that stands in the way of examination of cultural behavioral factors that prevent black advancement.

He insists that behaviors count and explain a great deal of the differences in income levels between different racial groups. For instance, black married couples have experienced poverty rates of less than 10 percent for decades, which is less than the national poverty rate for all families. And black married couples have higher income levels than white single-parent families. The problem is that black marriage rates overall are lower.

It is often said that the high illegitimacy rate in the black community is attributable to the “legacy of slavery.” But for nearly a century after slavery, the rates were relatively low. In 1940, they were one-quarter of what they are today. Sowell suggests that the rapid expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s explains much of that rise, as births to single mothers have also risen rapidly in Sweden, the welfare paradise, where there is no legacy of slavery.

Evidence cited to show discrimination against black children by “white supremacists” — e.g., discipline rates two and a half times those of white students — proves the opposite, Sowell suggests. For white students are themselves twice as likely to be disciplined as Asian students. Perhaps, then, disruptive behavior, rather than discrimination, explains differential rates of discipline. To get rid of school discipline in the name of equity leads to schools in which it is impossible to learn, and ends up harming black students, he argues. Attacks on discriminatory school discipline is thus another one of those “luxury beliefs,” like defunding the police.

One of the major causes of the burst housing bubble of 2007, which Sowell predicted, was government pressure on lenders to greatly reduce credit requirements for mortgages. The regulators’ theory was that blacks were being discriminated against in the mortgage market, as evidenced by the higher rate of rejection for black mortgage applicants. The only problem with the discrimination hypothesis, Sowell shows, was that black-owned banks rejected black mortgage applicants at even higher rates.

The hypothesis that different income levels are exclusively a function of discrimination founders on the fact that other minority groups — e.g., Asians — have, on average, incomes well above the medium national income, and dark-skinned Asian Indians earn on average $39,000 more per annum than full-time, year-round white workers.

The victimization narrative, in Sowell’s eyes, is not only unhelpful but damaging to blacks, as it shifts the focus from one of encouraging the types of behaviors that are associated with success. In the immediate wake of slavery, and for nearly a century afterwards, almost all graduates of all-black Dunbar High in Washington, D.C., went on to college. Black and Hispanic kids in New York City charter schools are six times as likely to pass city math proficiency exams as their counterparts in the regular public schools. Why? Sowell wants to know.

Focusing on the behaviors that foster success rather than wallowing in a narrative of discrimination — which he personally experienced in his younger years and does not deny still exists today — is for Sowell the key to black advancement. And that requires more empirical study and less airy theorizing.

Many of the panaceas that derive from au courant theories have been conclusively refuted on the ground. Black political power in most of America’s largest cities, for instance, has done little to change the lives of the vast majority of black citizens. And affirmative action has, in Sowell’s view, reinforced stereotypes of black inferiority, among whites and, even worse, among blacks themselves, while doing little to help inner city blacks.

Without a clear-eyed attention to empirical evidence and an openness to debate based on facts and logic, in Sowell’s terminology, we are forever consigned to the realm of “luxury beliefs.”

[radykalny-feminizm]

I think I just lost a friend because of my views on feminism. Apparently she doesn't feel safe in this relationship anymore because "she feels uncomfortable with how my second-wave feminism rhetoric paints all men as the agressors" and "she doesn't want to be in a relationship with person with transphobic views". She was the first person I had enough courage to talk to about radical feminism after I peaked roughly a year ago. I know there is no use trying to salvage this relationship. I am crying, but I feel numb at the same time. All the cases of radical feminists being ostracised, cancelled and attacked, sometimes by their close friends, that I read about suddenly feel as tangible as these tears. I know there is no use trying to explain my values to her again, since she would only regard them as an attack on her values again (she admitted that during our discussions she felt that I was, in fact, attacking her views, which was me simply showing her the differences between hers and mine). I know she is not willing to consider a different perspective. But in my breast there is still this visceral desperation to try to make her understand.

She has been hiding this all from me for 7 months. Says it has come to a climax. I don't know what to do. I feel so alone.

I wrote about this to you, because you are Polish, too. I couldn't bring myself to use Polish in this ask, because it would make all of this more unbearable. I see more and more girls and women in Poland endorsing gender ideology or even transitioning. I cannot express how relieved I was to find that there is at least one other compatriot who understands, how it is to be a radfem.

I am terribly sorry that this happened to you. I can't imagine how betrayed and disappointed you must feel. You trusted her, and she betrayed that trust. This person was not your true friend if she rejected you because of your views that don't harm anyone.

I agree that there's no point in trying to explain things to her anymore, since you likely discussed it many times over the course of 7 months and she still didn't understand. If someone steadfastly sticks to their position and is not willing to compromise, despite being shown facts that undermine that position, then that person is simply brainwashed. Woke people are very similar in this regard to religious people. They close their minds to all uncomfortable facts and arguments because they have their set of views that they accepted without reflection and find it comfortable to hold onto. They don't have to think independently and that's convenient. She felt "attacked" because she couldn't intellectually and emotionally handle the possibility that what she and the majority of people from her environment consider to be the truth, might not actually be true.

Your story makes me angry. For fuck's sake, people are becoming radical nationalists, racists, homophobes, misogynists or religious fanatics, and they don't face the same ostracism as radical feminists, especially when they're men. It's sick. I just can't wrap my head around the fact that for some people, the worst thing you can do is simply care about women without regard for men's feelings. It shocks me that people just accept every ideology that becomes popular on the internet and are willing to destroy friendships and lives even, in its name. I know that woke cancer is becoming increasingly common in Poland, and I hate it.

But you know what? There are many of us, more than it may seem, because through situations like yours, we often have to hide. You are not alone. There are many women who don't even know what radical feminism is, but they share most of our views because they simply make sense at a logical level, based on observing reality.

Another matter is that everything comes to Poland with a delay. Here, gender madness is still a novelty accepted uncritically, while in the West this was the case a few years ago. Now, the West is slowly waking up, and more and more people are starting to see the illogicality and harm of this ideology. It will take some time for this to start in Poland as well, but it will start. Then, many people will understand that they were wrong, maybe your friend too. At this moment, the fact that you are right probably doesn't comfort you, but that's how it is. I strongly believe that although we are now being cancelled, judged, and rejected, someday at least some of the people doing this will realize their mistake. Many people who are now radical feminists were previously trans activists and male apologists, including me. Change is coming. We have to persevere and do our part.

I hope you will feel better soon. This person didn't deserve to be your friend. I hope you'll be able to find another friend who will have an open mind and heart. If you'd like, feel free to reach out to me privately. It's important for us to stick together. I am thinking of you and sending you lots of strength.

[theboyonthehighcastle]

Why Are Liberals Having Mental Breakdowns?

Oh, I don’t know, and I don’t care. I love seeing leftist Liberals melting down just like those ALT-RIGHT CHUDS that they claim to hate. 

They are no different than those Alt-right idiots, these woke leftist idiots. 

[mental-mona]

Excerpt:

In 1979, Iran underwent an Islamic Revolution that reversed decades of progress in economic development, women’s rights, education, health, and more. But why would a country that had taken such strides toward a promising future undergo a revolution? To understand this, it's important to recognize that the so-called Islamic Revolution in Iran was not purely Islamic — it was initiated by leftists and executed by both leftists and Islamists.

Many Mullahs, including Ayatollah Khomeini, grew increasingly enraged with Iran's rulers, Reza Shah and his son Mohammad Reza Shah (the last of the Pahlavi royal dynasty) due to their progressive reforms concerning women's rights. These reforms, perceived as Westernized and contrary to Islamic values, were instrumental in inflaming the discontent that fueled the Islamic Revolution. However, the Mullahs themselves lacked the political skills necessary to instigate a revolution on their own.

In the years leading up to the revolution, Iranian leftists, deeply influenced by revolutionary communist theories and literature, were also growing restless and impatient. Lacking the means to mobilize a people’s revolution independently, these leftists found allies in the Islamic clerical establishment. The mullahs, with their extensive network in mosques and influence over the populace, provided the perfect machinery for an uprising. Together, they were powerful enough to overthrow the system.

...

A key architect in building the ideological framework for the Islamic Revolution was the Iranian sociologist Ali Shariati. Influenced by his time among Parisian radicals in the 1960s, he sought to reinterpret Islam with a strong emphasis on social justice and anti-imperialism by incorporating elements of revolutionary Marxism. He aimed to synthesize these schools of thought to mobilize the Muslim masses (especially the youth) against imperialism, and to promote social change within an Islamic framework. His Islamic-left ideology was the single most influential doctrine that led to the 1979 revolution.

The revolution succeeded. The Pahlavi shahs were deposed and the Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as the leader of Iran. It didn’t take long after the success of the revolution, however, for leftist ideals to be jettisoned.

...

In 1988, the Islamic Republic began coordinating extrajudicial mass executions of political prisoners, including the Tudeh Party and members and supporters of other leftist political groups. The main target of the killings was the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a militant leftist group. Khomeini issued an order for their execution referring to them as "moharebs" (those who war against Allah) and "mortads" (apostates from Islam), using their alleged non-Islamist beliefs and actions as a justification.

...

Iran today ranks among the least free countries in the world. LGBT people have virtually no rights. Same-sex behavior between gay and bi men is a crime that carries a maximum penalty of death. Indeed, thousands of LGBT people have been executed by the Iranian regime since the 1979 Revolution. Women who refuse to wear the hijab risk brutal attacks, imprisonment, or even death, as the much-publicized case of Mahsa Jina Amini showed. And political and religious minorities live as second-class citizens or worse. How might things have turned out if the progress prior to the revolution had been allowed to continue?

The trends, behaviors, and beliefs that led to the disastrous Iranian Revolution threaten to repeat themselves today in the West. We have already begun to see early glimpses. The most prominent example is the ongoing wave of mass anti-Israel and/or pro-Hamas protests following the Oct 7th attacks. Not only has Hamas been a disaster for women, LGBT people, and their own civilians, but the Palestinian “one state” solution would result in a country as unfree as Iran —  and one equally antithetical to left-aligned values. Other warning signs include the case of Hamtramck, Michigan, where a progressive-backed Muslim-majority town council voted to ban Pride flags, or the spate of young TikTokers siding with Osama bin Laden’s 21-year-old “Letter to America.” This goes beyond Islamism. Segments of the far-left and Christian far-right are more than willing to team up, as we’ve seen in recent years with European populist movements, the opposition to defending Ukraine from Russian conquest, and radical lefties voting for Donald Trump to “let the empire burn.” The question is: why?

There is a particular strain within leftist thought that often exhibits a fascination with revolution and a drive to dismantle and disrupt, sometimes indiscriminately. Young (and some not-so-young) radicals see the problems that exist today, and with no appreciation for how far we’ve come, pronounce society to be irredeemably flawed. The only solution is to tear it all down. Whatever rises from the ashes, this dubious logic goes, cannot help but be better than the status quo. This perspective, while rooted in a desire for human betterment, usually leads to the precise opposite. Such revolutionary zeal is not just a desire for change, but an impulse to break the existing order, often “by any means necessary”, as so many recent anti-Israel protest signs can attest. This includes allying with any group or ideology that opposes the current power structures. This “enemy of my enemy is my friend” approach leads to alliances that are, at best, ideologically inconsistent, and at worst, counterproductive to the values that many leftists traditionally uphold.

In their pursuit of anti-establishment goals, many leftist factions find common ground with Islamist movements, not because of shared values, but because of a shared opposition to perceived imperialist or colonialist forces. The fact that Islamic fundamentalists oppose women’s rights, secular governance, and basic freedoms; the fact that they criminalize homosexuality and bisexuality in every society they control, is willfully overlooked by the far-left in the pursuit of a common adversary. But the blanket romanticizing of perceived underdogs, often without a critical assessment of their values or intentions, risks empowering forces that, given requisite power, could establish regimes far more oppressive than those they replace. In their quest for a radical overhaul, they’re willing to discard tangible progress in the pursuit of an idealized, hypothetical future. In Iran, decades of progress in economic development and women’s rights were thrown away in the revolution. The West today, which is so much further along, has even more to lose.

[gamer2002]

What is the purpose of a crosswalk?

Anyway, here's the reason why they want you to switch to electric cars

[profgandalf]

Raging at the Wind: Contemporary Censors of Texts Created by Others

In the second paragraph of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” the narrator stops to play with the idea that although the phrase “dead as a doornail” is immediately and so broadly recognized that it borders on being cliché, and that he thinks “dead as a coffin nail” would be more fresh and accurate, he finishes by observing that “the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it” (Carol 1).

Well, this is the generation of those with “unhallowed hands.”  I have written before about my dismay concerning the decision to remove various books or illustrations by Dr. Seuss. Specifically “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street” which wonderfully portrays a child’s imagination let loose, and was told by some on this platform that it was all well and good. Now, however, I suppose most of you know that Roald Dahl’s children’s books "James and the Giant Peach," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Witches," and "Charlie and the Glass Elevator" are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin. (Penguin, the parent company, has indicated they are going to publish uncensored versions as if that makes things better). 

Meanwhile, Alan Gribben a professor at Auburn University has an edition of Huck Finn in which he removes the N-word as well as Injun and replaced them with “slave” and “Indian.“  And now I understand that according to a new report in "The Sunday Telegraph," new editions of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels will omit offensive passages when released this spring by Ian Fleming Publications.  And like Dr. Seuss, it’s the people who control the text who are doing this so they can get away with it legally.  My comment to all of these second-rate unimaginative pariahs is "keep your lousy, “unhallowed hands” off other people’s art!" 

Would Dahl care?  Of course, he would!  Dahl was notorious for fighting editors over his word choices, but he’s gone now and the foundation can do what it likes.  My impotent fury on his behalf feels like raging at the wind.  Only in this age is the writer faced with the possibility that his actual text, never mind film interpretations of it, might be altered by people who no more understand the creative process nor have any ability to shape imaginative text than deep sea-lantern fish understand the nature of sunscreen. 

Publishers should NOT have the right to alter an author's intended words because they can.  Even if it is legal: It’s wrong, and if I ever become a published author I am going to include in my contract that NO such alterations can ever be made by my publishers or my offspring no matter how many generations pass.  Dickens didn’t think of this because he couldn’t imagine it.  Congrats you woke folk, you’ve created a whole new clause in contracts!

At least when the Victorians Charles and Mary Lamb rewrote the stories of Shakespeare they called it “Tales from Shakespeare: Designed for the Use of Young Persons” And perhaps one could claim that these Dahl, Twain, and Seuss books are intended to protect children who need protecting. I think that is an error and would suggest just finding an alternative author. However with the censoring of Ian Fleming’s adult spy novels, the pernicious nature of these so-called editors are revealed.  It’s almost amusing.  Rather than accept the fundamental fact that different ages have different ways of thinking (which is part of the benefit of reading literature) and that the artist’s vision is sacred, they now insist that everyone see things as they do, and if authors take is not 100% acceptable, then their works are just altered to do so.  It’s like putting a pair of briefs on Michelangelo’s “David.” 

Years ago Christians were accused of being closed-minded censors. A lot of parents got upset with the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” and a lot of liberals had a good laugh at their expense.  But no Christian parent suggested that the F word be removed from J.D. Salenger’s book while keeping his name on the cover!  Final thought: Write your own damn books and leaves those written by masters alone.  If you're so wise and clever, write your own books!

[constantreadermk]

“Gaslighting”. Manipulation. They really do like those terms don’t they… like many other psychology terms. Let’s see… “Nothing bad is happening”, “you’re imagining things”, “woke politics is not everywhere, don’t exaggerate”, “you poor snowflake, maybe it’s your problem that you see it everywhere”. Wait. Maybe they just like that gaslight and manipulate. Let us constantly gaslight you into believing that you’re the problem if you think something is happening, yeah, great. Nothing is happening. I’ve grown with a manipulative psychological and physical abuser. It sounds the same. “You imagined it”, “you’re too sensitive”, “maybe it’s you who’s the monster”. Nothing is happening. Awesome. Now we’ve got a whole manipulative culture going on.

[slightlyhonest]

I honestly don't care who the next James Bond will be since the new movies have nothing to do with the source material anymore. I'm not going to waste my time with those.

Also please do NOT wish for or celebrate anyone's demise just because you don't agree with their views! Same thing happened with Robbie Coltrane. It's disgusting!

Also, aren't you guys preaching that you are open and accepting and overall the good guys? I dunno, but wishing for someone's death doesn't sent good-guy-vibes to me. It screams bully-behaviour trying to push their victim to their death.

This is what scares me in society these days. You can be pushed to your death for having different views. No wonder do young people have so much anxiety if this is what having an opinion gets them! That's also why thisis not my main account. Because I know that I will get harrassed there.

[pirateprincessjess]

Men are being very normal about the new Godzilla design

[rynli]

officer now is not the time to obsess about your sexuality

[theboyonthehighcastle]

Woke people in the nutshell.

[theboyonthehighcastle]

Scream 7 Actress FIRED Over Social Media Posts About Israel | Woke Holly...

HA! THIS IS THE BED THAT YOU WOKE PEOPLE HAD MADE! HOW DOES IT FEEL THAT YOUR FAVORITE ACTRESS GET’S CANCELLED FOR POLITICAL OPINIONS!? 

GINA CARANO IS STILL INNOCENT! 

[zoestorm]

The manga: a college guy meets his childhood friend, who was formerly a boy but is now a woman, and has run away from home after an unspecified disagreement with her family which has left her with a significant amount of trauma; it's implied she was bullied heavily in the time since they've last seen each other.

But don't worry, she's not trans! She just got an illness which turned her into a woman!

The manga: a high school boy with an interest in make-up uses his gloomy, depressed (male) childhood friend as a model to improve his skills. This causes said friend to have an "awakening" and start dressing as a woman, and to overall be a much happier, brighter, outgoing person.

But don't worry, the friend is not trans! He's just a boy who crossdresses because his childhood friend likes him better that way!

The manga: a high school boy joins a club where the members can turn into magical girls, which in his case involves physically transforming into a girl. When in girlmode, he's much happier and enjoys his life much more, and overall prefers staying in girl mode; when the ability to transform is temporarily taken away from him, he sinks into a deep depressive episode.

But don't worry, he's not trans! He's just a boy who enjoys being a girl!

The manga: a college student loses a bet and has to crossdress for a night out on the town, and meets and hooks up with a butch girl; they fall in love and start dating. The boy always crossdressed when they meet, and starts enjoying being "treated like a girl" in the relationship and starts crossdressing even when he doesn't have to meet his girlfriend and enjoys activities such as clothes shopping and make-up and putting on nail polish.

But don't worry, he's not trans! He's just a boy who crossdresses to please his butch girlfriend!

The manga: a guy is magically turned into a girl as a result of saving his best friend, the crown prince, from an assassination attempt. The prince decides that he has to take responsibility, and asks the new girl to marry him; despite being smitten she refuses, wanting to date first. She is later offered a way to go back to being a man, but when she does turn back she's disgusted by her own appearance and depressed all the time, ultimately deciding to stay a girl.

But don't worry, she's not trans! She's just a boy who's been magically turned into a woman! And decides not to turn back when she can! Because she's not trans! Somehow!

"But we can't write trans women in manga! It's just not something that you do!"

[Image description: A one-comic panel. Gengar is glaring at a crowd of faceless characters; from the crowd, a speech balloon emerges, saying "You could if you weren't a fucking coward". End ID.]

[alethianightsong]

"I miss when movies weren't political-"

ALIEN is about a megacorporation coercing some salvagers into transporting a dangerous creature without telling them what it is, all because the creature could be a great bioweapon for them. When a survivor of this failed transport mission wants reparations, they screw her over to avoid a scandal.

ROBOCOP is about another mega-corporation experimenting with a cop's body and declaring him their property, trying to reduce him to an obedient killing machine who can maintain the status quo for them.

JURASSIC PARK is about a rich billionaire going all out to make a dinosaur-themed amusement park, not caring about the real-world implications of resurrecting giant lizards. He also underpays ONE guy to maintain the entire park's security systems so predictably, that one guy betrays him at a crucial moment.

The best movies weave their politics with plot & character, so you can enjoy them as entertainment but can also notice the themes. Movies without themes wind up being all spectacle and no substance, just noise and color like Michael Bay's Transformers franchise. Yeah, they make money, but they'll be forgotten in 2 generations.