The Value Of Virtue Signalling

Academia is a weird, wonderful and entertaining place. Faculty members and administrators turn to the left harder than a NASCAR driver. They are windsocks wagging feverishly in even the slightest winds of political correctness. That they admit to being the smartest folk on the planet only adds to the humor value of their herd mentality and constant demonstrations of "failure to think things through." 

And now none other than the President of Princeton has proclaimed that Princeton is now and always has been systemically and structurally racist. Yes indeed. He went there. A contrary perspective was offered up by a Mathematics professor. Unsurprising as Math seems the last remaining bastion of logic in academia.

But then it got interesting.

While the Princeton President was basking in the glory of self flagellation he seems to have forgotten that he actually said this stuff out loud. And someone heard him. Someone from outside the apparently appropriately named Ivory Tower. The head of the Department of Education heard him loud and clear. And now? The DOE wants their money back. Seems he didn't realize that his wonderfully PC admission of SSR was also an admission that Princeton had also violated Title VI, a direct contradiction of former statements that Princeton was in compliance. And that compliance is a requirement for Federal funds. Funds Princeton has already received. Funds they may well be required to return.

To the tune of $75M.

While we may not know the value of virtue signalling but we are about to find out about the cost.

Just OK...

...Is Still Not OK.

Free Shave

Not "free" as in "free beer" but "free" as in "liberated." Liberated from the outrageous hysteria that is the life blood of this political correctness epoch. How? Glad you asked. Just ditch that Gillette crap that comes with political agenda (is that really the way you want to start your day?) and get one of these:

The Best ANYONE Can Get!

A thing of beauty, standing proud. Whatever symbolism you prefer it is a statement; an honest statement.

What to do with all that obsolete Gillette crap cluttering the bath? Sounds like something to donate to those who appreciate something for nothing, the message that comes with it and the PC society that promotes it. 

Dick's Grows A Pair

Balls or boobs, the jury is still out but based on the likelihood of getting bitch-slapped the smart money is on the latter. Responding to the hashtag hysteria following yet another public school shoot-em-up[1] Dick's has decided to cease all sales of "assault rifles"[2]. Fine. It is a business and it is their business and if they want to take a product off the shelves, for any reason, that is really no one else's business.

But then they went a bridge too far. They decided that they would not sell firearms and ammo to anyone under the age of 21. Hypocritical hashtag hurrahs all around. But imagine they didn't want to sell a weapon to someone over 60 or a 20-year-old soldier, or that someone didn't want to sell a fast car to someone under 25, or an expensive house to someone of "a certain skin tone" or, hey, how about this, what would these hashtag heretics think of a baker who doesn't want to make a cake for a gay couple's marriage? Exactly! That would trample the Constitution along with the enumerated rights of several groups.

Dick's is a business, not a sovereign country and they do not get to pick and choose which laws of this land they consider worthy of their consideration or observance. The Constitution of the United States protects the 19 year old shopping in their store every bit as much as the gay couple wanting that special cake.

Even in the United States of Hashtags you cannot just make laws on your own because you're terrified of a zombie army of Twitter Stormtroopers.

[1] You know that these are drug free zones as well as gun free zones. "Soft Target" is the term nutbags use for these sites.

[2] Unlike a similarly capable "hunting rifle" an "assault rifle" has no shiny bits and is exclusively black making it the only thing left in America where it is politically correct to declare that something so black can be so evil. 

Doritas

Folks, it is a snack food, not a political statement. If you want to get your gender-neutral undergarments in a twisty regarding Doritos why don't you focus on health impacts? How about the environmental aspects of the packaging? Carbon footprint anyone? Instead the PC fascists are all hashtag horny over the fact that the president of PepsiCo, a woman, proposed a product variation suited to a particular demographic, women. Her mistake was she was really targeting a missing demographic, ladies. She was thinking gentility rather than genitalia.

What IS a boy to do? If chivalry is dead it did not die of natural causes--it was assassinated by a bunch of egotistical whiners leveraging social media to conflate a predilection to self-serving victimhood into persecution by claiming that a hangnail-calibre offense has seared their soul. Perhaps this is as fleeting a madness as #bringbackoutgirls or #oscarssowhite with a return to normalcy when the fever breaks.

Maybe chivalry isn't dead...



...it's just hiding.

Cis-tra, Cis-tra

From the Agnes Scott College Statement on Gender Expression and Gender Identity:

“We support students, including students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex or questioning (LGBTQIQ). This support takes the form of a variety of campus services designed to create a safe learning and living environment for all. We recognize and value individuals across the spectrum of gender and are proud of the trans women, trans men, and non-binary individuals who have been admitted and/or graduated from Agnes Scott. We embrace our identity as a women’s college and as a community are committed to inclusive excellence in our mission.”

Jeezy Creezy

Those public school magi over at Cross Keys High must be all but walking on water when it comes to the Tres R-s. How do we know? Because the teachers have covered all the educational sacraments so well they have time to flash-mob a passion play lest the little buggers not be entertained. But their What-Did-Jesus-Do historical play was widely misinterpreted. By teachers as proselytizing and by some students and parents as Where Did Jesus Go? as he and his family fled the ansturm of the Trump Troopers. Some are calling for a spoiler alert or at least a trigger word warning. Safe places, right? Some faculty, apparently rejected for key roles formed a mob of their own screaming for action from the powers that be. A deaf Pontius Pilate down at the Palace stands with clean hands as he watches the mobs rule.

The Ref

As sure as night follows day we can count on the PC police banning books, though in this case neither those they feel entitled to protect nor those they are protecting the snowflakes from are well equipped to read a book. This all-but-diurnal debate almost always starts with Huck Finn. Why? The N-word of course.[1] Apparently Sam never heard of trigger words, warnings or micro-aggressions as he was too obsessed with macro-aggressions and how could that be of any merit or even interest? He clearly never rode a school bus nor changed trains at the Five Points station and yet he still found the N-word part of the common vernacular. But he also wrote about whitewashing fences--not history and not reality.

Thin skinned hysteria does more than just remove books, it precludes the possibility of debating simple questions like "which of Atticus' depictions of the South has more merit, was more prophetic?" Honestly that wouldn't be likely even if the books weren't banned as we are burdened with students who cannot leave their safe places and educators with no intention of leading them into the real world. No need to study history for what it might reveal when a righteous agenda of ongoing oppression is well served by simply "understanding the never-ending negative impact of slavery" that ended well before Sam put pen to paper.

Oh, and The Ref? Great holiday movie but if your delicate sensibilities are shattered by the F-bomb you may want to stick with It's A Wonderful Life.


[1] TOD could use "niggardly," "niggle" or even "niggalations" but one drop of the N-bomb, even if quoting a gansta rapper  or something overheard on MARTA, would have the PC patrol breaking down the door.  

Faux News

Google and Facebook are responding to claims that their laissez faire approach to  the dissemination of drivel from users' random keyboards may (or may not) have influenced the recent election. By "influence" the current crop of whiners really mean "our candidate lost." Some things never change.

But Google and Facebook are committing to change and if you hold their stock you may want to sell because they intend to cross a line from rather detached self/vanity publishing platforms to curating everyone's content. If this sounds intractable and untenable that is because it is. However briefly this satisfies friends of the Reconciliation Party it will ultimately expose these organizations, with very deep pockets, to all types of legal risks because sooner or later something will slip thru that pisses off some pissy little group of whiners. Like the ADL or the SPLC. In the end this will fall on the (remaining) shareholders.

But this is also a slippery slope and not one littered with just those checkout lane tabloids. Mainstream media, the one where the talking heads ARE the news is also now at risk. Just how far can you cross the line of "truth and nothing but the truth" before you fall out of favour? And does it matter which direction you cross? Apparently so.

The envelope of veracity in mainstream media all but collapsed in 2016 with prevarications, obfuscations and misdirections distinctly trending to a particular direction. Was it accurate to say that Clinton "won the popular vote?" Certainly not. Why? Because Clinton LOST the popular vote since she did not get fifty percent plus one and outside of Clinton victory parties no one held a runoff. While it is accurate to say that Trump lost the popular vote it is somewhat deceptive if not acknowledging that Clinton lost as well.  But like any good con job you only deceive those predisposed to deception.

This was also true with the email whitewashing effort. Private account? Indeed. When you have a private email server you will perforce have private email accounts. Again, true, but not all the truth and much like the server itself designed to ensure that the truth is never known. And the Clintons are not stupid and certainly not naive. They know that emails to and from that server originating or terminating on devices and servers subject to discovery by U.S. authorities would ultimately be uncovered though with great difficulty. These indirect discoveries are the actual cause of the Comey Two-Step. And since Clinton released what she wanted to release and then wiped the drives we will never have insight into those communications where the other parties (think foreign governments) are not subject to U.S. discovery. But instead of pounding this issue mainstream media fell in line with the email "account" obfuscation.

Much of what shows up on the interweb is click-bait and increasingly much of what shows up on incumbent media's "new media" outlets is more subtle click-bait but click-bait nonetheless. Many are blaming incumbent media's shameless chasing of ratings and click-thrus for excessive and free coverage that gave us what we got as if folks were incited to vote thoughtlessly which in their supercilious World-View is by definition The Wrong Way. This is condescension bordering on The Deplorables, but there are many who think it, who say it and who are saying it out loud. Arrogance has no shame.

Demanding that Google and Facebook curate and reject content disliked by these elitists is not the answer and we have painful evidence that the PC policies rampant on college campuses have not served us well[1].  Furthermore the subtle, insidiously slanted "news" from incumbent outlets, exempt from these PC police,  does far more damage that sensationalistic headlines and comic book stories found on bogus websites and supermarket tabloids[2]. The American public simply does not have a reliable news outlet that provides the facts, all the facts and nothing but the facts in a forthright and unbiased manner[3].  Until we do we can expect more of the same.



[1] And yes, the safety pin is silly.
[2] In case you were not really, really sure, Martha Stewart did NOT give birth to an alien's baby.
[3] TOD is not the place to get it either.

College Is Over

If you do not believe that College has served its purpose in American Society and needs to be pushed aside then read this:

The Coddling of the American Mind

Political Correctness so out of control that even Left Wingnut Profs can no longer abide it. Does anyone believe this will deliver graduates capable of entering the workforce let alone competing globally? How many generations have we lost? How many more will we lose?

How PC Can You Be?

A white and apparently quite good poet, Michael Derrick Hudson, from Fort Wayne Indiana (home of WOWO Radio) was attempting, without success, to get a poem published.

Then he became Chinese.

It was accepted for print and acclaimed as one of the best American poems for 2015. Without qualification. After forty publication rejections.

Now anyone who has aced a calculus course yet struggled thru a semester of lit knows how subjective, how touchy-feely the dark arts of literature can be. And none more so than poetry. So it comes as no surprise that what one subjective grader deems literary garbage is found by another to be a rare delicacy. But this change in acclaim correlates so strongly with the choice of a nom de plume (and a hyphenated-american one at that) as to border on causality that it has raised more than a few eyebrows.

For many this is just another example of Political Correctness run amok and perhaps it is. For others it suggests what they've long suspected (rightly or wrongly) that the bar for the select, the hyphenated is hardly even a tripping hazard while the white guy's hurdle is so high Fosbury couldn't flop over it. It does seem to speak to a pervasive PC culture that dictates outcomes on almost any criteria but merit. But this is nothing new.

One need only compare To Kill A Mockingbird and Go Set A Watchman. The former, an American Classic, is indeed a masterpiece whilst the latter seems a bit of a patchwork with gaps, weaker plot and character development, tho there are shining moments of the quality of writing that appears throughout TKAM. Is that the real or only difference? Does it fully explain why GSAW was rejected whilst TKAM ran the gauntlet of the publishing process? Were GSAW given the same attention, the same editorial support, subjected to the same review and revision as TKAM where would the real differences appear?

Perhaps it is more about the stories being told, when they were being told and to whom they were told. Perhaps the publishers at the time did not approve of the theme in GSAW whilst that of TKAM resonated with their views and aligned with their agenda even while some reviewers today, including African-Americans, claim GSAW is a more accurate depiction of the times in which it is set.

Is the problem with those of us raised in a PC society, a group taught to adore an elevated Atticus, that we simply cannot entertain that he might have been nobly dedicated to the process of law but not the delivery of justice? Does that shatter the righteousness they wished to be promoted when publishers deferred on one and selected the other? Do we need to be bitch-slapped out of our pollyannish political correctness and poured three fingers of reality?

Collectibles

Political Correctness as a form of Mass Madness has opened some opportunities in the collectibles market.

The obvious is guns and ammo. Stockpiling now allows the savvy investor to cash in when the seemingly inevitable Hillary takes office as there will certainly be a run on guns. You might think this is a narrow market focussing on AR-15s, AK-47s and other intimidating assault weapons but it is broader than you think. The last assault on weapons caused such a run on 22LR that supply has yet to recover. For rimfire, ferchissakes!

If there is anything more abhorrent to the PC crowd than guns it has to be cigarettes and smoking. Collectibles? Ashtrays and cigarette cases and lighters. Just stay away from cheap because there is still too much around of truly high quality. Think art deco or mid century modern. Kinda Mad Men. But rest assured the PC policy will destroy them all so collect now before they're gone.

The current PC attack is against all things CSA. The most obvious is the infamous Confederate battle flag with supplies to dwindle as the PC police have shamed manufacturers into halting or limiting production and retailers into halting sales and doing gawd knows what with existing inventory. But it's more than just banners. There's bumper stickers--Fergit Hell! all the way down to Southern By the Grace of God. CSA belt buckles. Johnny Reb hats. Musical car horns that play Dixie. Hell, what about those GT bottle openers down at the Ace Hardware store? Did you know there are a few bars of Dixie in the middle of Up With The White And Gold? Better snatch those up before they're tossed in the dustbin.

And PC is a weird thing indeed. Chris Rock can lay out the N-word though Oprah will give him shit. You try it and your ass is grass. Obama can say it, intentionally, in public and the AJC quotes him using the full word as if we don't all know what "N-word" means. Does Oprah have the balls to give him shit? No? Well maybe she should go get a pair. We hear Bruce Jenner has a couple to spare. Or is it not PC to say that?