The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Woke and Cancel Culture Gone Wild, Chapter III

    By artappraiser on Wed, 03/08/2023 - 2:51pm |

    “In much of the Western world, the liberal takeover of institutions is nearly complete. But the revolution isn’t coming.” — @verdur_in observes a reactionary backlash emerging instead https://t.co/7dw6VFWMqz

    — The Critic (@TheCriticMag) March 8, 2023

    (Continued. Chapter II is HERE (locked to new comments)

    Comments


    by artappraiser on Wed, 03/08/2023 - 3:07pm

    While contemplating white male privilege... (Murdaugh et al)

    Then again what's happened to the head of BLM with her new houses And such?


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 03/08/2023 - 7:57pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/09/2023 - 12:31am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/09/2023 - 2:33am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/09/2023 - 5:15am

    W. VA votes for traditional values

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-to-ban-child-marriage-in-west-virgin...


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 03/09/2023 - 1:05pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/09/2023 - 1:10pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/09/2023 - 3:43pm

    Carl's a normie Dem with 10K followers - not even centrist, he's pretty FDR liberal - following people like him is how I know that Woke lefty cancel culture is still very much operative:


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/10/2023 - 1:24am

    here we go again:

    that the NYPost is making a big deal about this story is part of the whole shtick


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/09/2023 - 3:51pm

    here we go again, II:


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/09/2023 - 3:53pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/09/2023 - 7:44pm

    he got several good replies, but this is the best one wink


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/10/2023 - 4:09am

    Joker and Taxi Driver? Are you saying PoC's are laughable and mentally unbalanced? White privilege again...


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 03/10/2023 - 8:33am

    Paging Doc Cleveland, bet he's having some fun now, yep, oh boy

    the quips continue...

    and then there's retweets like this

    publish or perish, madam, and bullshit or not that's the narrartive that the powers-that-be are publishing these days in the humanities


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 12:10am

    Stanford Law School is far from immune, here's proof at the end of his thread:

    Really disgusting behavior! Just wait til this crew starts showing up in the courts.

     


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 12:21am

    More -


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 4:58pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 6:57pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 7:16pm

    How'd she get to be Dean?  She's a 12-year-old.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 8:49pm

    Ted Cruz sees red meat here, just pointing it out:


    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/14/2023 - 5:21pm

    the drama at Stanford Law continues (thread)


    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/14/2023 - 8:23pm

    good question:

    This Stanford brouhaha just makes me want to grind this axe again — why would Stanford Law School, an institution whose only purpose in life is to be exclusive and hierarchical, have a dean whose job is to pretend to be trying to make it equitable and inclusive?

    — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 17, 2023

    And it’s not like this is unique to Stanford. The core function of every high ranked American college and university is hierarchy and exclusion.

    Maybe they want to also be diverse, but that’s different from being equitable and inclusive.

    — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 17, 2023

    & there's a long thread of replies

    but let me just point out the thing of elites thinking they represent what 'the underclass' wants again


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/17/2023 - 12:00am

    and not enough Dems are willing to 'Sister Souljah' them


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 4:24pm

    1978, what's old is new again.Inflation soaring,underclass being a big problem with babies having babies, Carter's version of the 'new south' all the rage, so "Hollywood" was doing the 'woke' thing hot and heavy, Dems still all for tax-and-spend" LBG era, and so a whole bunch of Dems became "Reagan Democrats" -


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 4:46pm

    res ipsa loquitor -


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 5:04pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 5:32pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 6:39pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 7:01pm

    "tenets", dammit.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 03/11/2023 - 8:52pm

    very sad -


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/12/2023 - 6:27am

    A bit dumb. Blacks made up 1/4 the vote in 2016 primaries. Even tho Biden's black support fell, he won 90% of the black vote (and 39% of his vote was PoC). Unsurprising that a devoted block of voters gets a shout-out. Here maybe 50% black, not sure where or for what the photo is. And w/o Clyburne's deal, he was running i to trouble in the primary vote that would've hurt him.

    Maybe I was youthfully naive, but i thought Jackson's "Rainbow Coalition" was kind of cool (but it wasn't built on white shaming, justifying destructive riots and spikes in gun deaths - somehow felt more like kitchen table issues).

    Interesting 538 exercise showing black peer pressure gets black conservatives supporting a black liberal (Obama).

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-so-many-black-voters-are-democr...

    Meanwhile, here's how Joe's 2020 figures panned out - not losing non-college whites while padding college whites a bit made for the success - yes, Cubans and Texas Mexicans abandoned but also Wisconsin Hispanics. Part we can guess is Hispanics aren't so down with BLM and George Floyd junkie messaging, while Hispanics are building on the American dream, not so much Latinx woke victimhood.

    https://www.vox.com/2021/5/10/22425178/catalist-report-2020-election-bid...

     

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 03/12/2023 - 8:16am

    Sorry it's your opinion that strikes me as clueless. Reasons off the top of my head:

    1) The vote for Biden has something to do with who gets to be congressional interns?

    2) Black voters care who gets to be congressional interns? If so, won't the Dem picture make Black male voters angry?

    I find their photo nearly as insulting to the intelligence as this:

    Fact check: Kente cloths have ties to West African slave trade


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/12/2023 - 8:59am

    Well you did catch me before coffee, so i didn't register it was congressional interns.

    25% of Congress folk are PoC, so interns that are closer to 50% PoC would st Ike me as discriminating against whites pretty hard, and it can be a pretty important credential for budding politicians or bureaucrats/civil servants.

    Actually if 90% of PoC in Congress are Democrats, then roughly 40% of Dem congresspeople would be PoC? so an ethnic makeup in that ballpark is near normal, no?

    (this photo was taken in 2016, numbers have shifted a bit since - quite a few more females were elected in 2018, 2020 & 2022, tho i can't say female PoC or especially black female).

    (and to be sexist, i imagine often females will do a better job in the kind of work interns do than frequently testosterone full-of-themselves males who may expect more to start towards the top, but then again, female law students prolly aren't gunning for coffee/Xerox duty either - not sure what the background is for these interns - all high school, or some college?)


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 03/12/2023 - 1:09pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/12/2023 - 8:44am


    by artappraiser on Mon, 03/13/2023 - 3:37am


    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/14/2023 - 5:26pm

    This video is not "woke". But I think it's wonderful!


    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/14/2023 - 8:39pm

    Here comes free money

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/san-francisco-considers-reparations-payou...


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 03/15/2023 - 10:58am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/19/2023 - 10:21am


    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/21/2023 - 3:32am


    by artappraiser on Wed, 03/22/2023 - 7:30pm

    oh boy frown


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/16/2023 - 6:28am

    Well, to detox a colon sounds like i gotta go pollute it first,
    wish I could drink like in the old days... would help me ignore this rubbish.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 03/16/2023 - 12:53pm

    Martha Stewart: she's coming after your shtick (and your friendship with Snoop won't help you as he's complicit)


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/17/2023 - 2:35pm

    Good to know my pickle containers are tabooi remember coming to India how even disheveled shanties on the inside could look immaculate with super clean sheets, etc 

    But that's just me appropriating.


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 03/17/2023 - 7:52pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/17/2023 - 3:16pm

    what's new is old:


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/17/2023 - 3:30pm

    Norway's healthcare watchdog not woke:


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/17/2023 - 4:03pm

    Anti-woke in the Bronx:


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/17/2023 - 4:58pm

    'The free speech skeptics abandon Salman Rushdie'

    #savethewriter https://t.co/mMTu9iEp81

    — Michael Maiello (@MichaelMaiello) March 17, 2023

    https://t.co/gM9f6dyRpf via @Harpers

    — Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) March 17, 2023

    I'm gonna paste the whole article, fair use basis, because it's important, not the least of which because Oates is mentioned in it (as signing a letter against an award to Charlie Hebdo) and one wonders whether she has changed her mind. My underlining:

    A Climate of Fear Harper's March 2023 issue

    The free speech skeptics abandon Salman Rushdie
     

    Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, closes as its author emerges in 2002 from years in hiding; he bids goodbye to members of the security detail that has guarded him since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa called for his death. “That was it,” Rushdie writes. “More than thirteen years after the police walked into his life, they spun on their heels and walked out of it.” Still, he wonders whether “the battle over The Satanic Verses” has ended in “victory or defeat.”

    This may seem a strange question. Rushdie’s novel had not been suppressed; in fact, its literary and political significance was widely recognized, and its author was alive and well. Both Rushdie and those charged with his protection believed that the threat against him had abated enough for him to return to public life. Yet Rushdie ends his memoir on a note of concern: he writes that the “climate of fear” had intensified since the fatwa was issued, making it “harder for books like his to be published, or even, perhaps, to be written.”

    As it happens, he had cause to worry. In the intervening years, support for Rushdie and for free expression has narrowed—a fact made particularly clear since his August 2022 stabbing by an American of Lebanese descent who expressed admiration for Khomeini and condemned Rushdie after reading “a couple pages” of The Satanic Verses. The assault, which put Rushdie in intensive care and left him blind in one eye, would have been unimaginable without the fatwa, yet many have been content to treat it as a random act of violence by a lone madman.

    An August 19 New York City rally of writers gathered in support of Rushdie reprised a 1989 demonstration against the fatwa in which Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, and others participated, but the later iteration “paled in comparison,” a Le Monde editorial remarked. Across social media, writers expressed concern for Rushdie’s health, but an instinctual solidarity with him and the sense—so strong at the time of the fatwa—that his fate spoke to all of us as members of a liberal society did not materialize. Even among his defenders, free speech took a back seat.

    Why? One reason is fear. In 2009, the British writer Hanif Kureishi told Prospect Magazine that “nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses.” He might have added that no one would have the balls to defend it. Most writers, Kureishi continued, live quietly, and “they don’t want a bomb in the letterbox.”

    The effectiveness of threatened violence was proven by an event that came to be known as “the Danish cartoon crisis.” In 2005—the same year that Ayatollah Khamenei reaffirmed Rushdie’s death sentence—the left-wing Danish author Kåre Bluitgen sought an illustrator for a children’s book about Mohammed but was reportedly unable to find one due to artists’ fears of retaliation. The story caught the attention of editors at Jyllands-Posten, one of Denmark’s leading newspapers, who solicited members of the forty-two-person newspaper illustrators’ union to draw the prophet in a test of self-censorship. They received twelve submissions. Their publication, alongside an essay on the experiment by culture editor Flemming Rose, led to a series of violent protests over several months in which hundreds of people died. The controversy became international news, but the vast majority of U.S. outlets that covered it did not reprint the cartoons, so as to avoid instigating more violence.1 When Yale University Press published the definitive scholarly work on the subject, Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons that Shook the World, the publishers also declined to reprint the cartoons, against the author’s wishes. The press’s director, John Donatich, explained that he did not shy away from controversy, as shown by the fact that he had published an “unauthorized” biography of the Thai monarch: “I’ve never blinked.” But despite this record of untold bravery, he did not want “blood on [his] hands” by reprinting the cartoons.

    That offense to fundamentalist Muslims will result in bloodshed—and that any spilled blood would be “on the hands” of those whose free expression caused the offense—remains a bedrock assumption for editors and publishers, as recent examples demonstrate. In 2008, Random House—Rushdie’s own publisher in the United States—sent around advance copies of The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Mohammed and his child bride, for promotional blurbs. When some of those solicited declined on the grounds that the book might provoke violence, Random House simply pulled the plug, claiming that it wanted to protect “the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel.” Rushdie was vocal about his disappointment: “This is censorship by fear,” he said, “and it sets a very bad precedent indeed.”

    Censorship by fear can take two forms: top-down or bottom-up. From the top, a publisher or editor can stop publication over concern about a potential reaction. If the right to free expression is qualified by the condition that you not “upset someone, especially someone who is willing to resort to violence,” Rushdie noted in Joseph Anton, it is no longer a right. However, the text or cartoon still exists, and might appear elsewhere (a small publisher picked up The Jewel of Medina after Random House scrapped it). But bottom-up censorship—self-censorship—is more nefarious, more widespread, and more difficult to track. Writers shelve projects before they see the light of day. The cartoon is undrawn, the novel or the scene unwritten. “The fight against censorship is open and dangerous and thus heroic,” the Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kiš observed in 1985, “while the battle against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and unwitnessed.”

    Despite the heroism of so many writers behind the Iron Curtain, some Western commentators throughout the Cold War claimed that citizens of the Soviet bloc valued the right to work, housing, free medical care, and education, but didn’t desire the imposition of Western liberal principles. Demands that those living under communist regimes be guaranteed freedom of expression were thus considered a form of imperialism. Many progressives offer the same interpretation when discussing the Muslim world today.

    There is another reason support for Rushdie is not as strong as it should be: the increasingly widespread belief that free speech operates as a tool of the elite, that it ought not to be applied to speech that risks harm to marginalized groups. In a 2015 interview, Rushdie suggested that if the fatwa had come down then, commentators would be more upset that he’d insulted a minority group than that his life was endangered.

    At the time, Rushdie was responding to fresh controversy: PEN America—the writers’ organization for which Rushdie had previously served as president—had given the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo an award after Islamic terrorists raided an editorial meeting and slaughtered twelve people over the magazine’s history of mocking Mohammed.2 To Rushdie’s amazement, over two hundred great and not-so-great writers—including Francine Prose, Geoff Dyer, Michael Ondaatje, Joyce Carol Oates, and Teju Cole—protested the award. If a writers’ group cannot defend free expression, Rushdie wondered, what can it do? To the righteous protesters, the cartoonists had intended to cause “humiliation and suffering” by attacking devout French Muslims who were “already marginalized, embattled and victimized.” Moreover, the cartoonists ignored the power dynamic at play—the fact that, supposedly, the illustrators with their pens held all the power, while the terrorists with their guns held none. (Convey that news to the families of the dead.)

    This protest demonstrated the left’s retreat from free speech. For the American essayist Eliot Weinberger, the award was “merely the latest instance in the now-rampant free expression of gentlemanly Islamophobia.” Weinberger was probably pleased that the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a British outfit which claims to defend “the oppressed,” bestowed its “Islamophobe of the Year” award on Charlie Hebdo just two months after the massacre. First you get murdered in your office, then a human rights group posthumously condemns you for offending your killers.

    The PEN protest popularized the idea that free speech should face limits when it comes to marginalized groups. The free speech movement of the old campus left apparently had the story upside-down: the new progressive credo posits that free speech sustains racism. In a recent article with the lovely title the settler coloniality of free speech, the scholar Darcy Leigh argues that free speech props up “white supremacist colonial power.” Rather than serving as a public good, Leigh explains in a model of academic prose, the “liberal politics around the freedom of free speech have functioned to control or silence Indigenous, Black, and/or otherwise racially othered speech.”

    What this view means in practice was recently demonstrated at Minnesota’s Hamline University, when the adjunct professor Erika López Prater showed a fourteenth-century painting of Mohammed to a global art history class. The image was not a satirical drawing but an illustration from medieval Persia, and López Prater gave advance warning, allowing any student who might take offense to leave. Nonetheless, the university fired López Prater following complaints from Muslim students, and the university’s president co-signed a letter stating that the feelings of the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.”

    The free speech skeptics might want to read up on the history of abolitionism. In 1860, Frederick Douglass participated in a meeting of abolitionists in Boston. A mob of anti-abolitionists stormed the hall and silenced the gathering. When Douglass finally gave his prepared remarks, he included some thoughts on free speech. He found the excuse that the meeting in crisis-ridden Boston was “ill-timed” unconvincing: “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.” The right to free speech, he stated, strikes fear in the heart of tyrants. “It is the right which they first of all strike down. . . . Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble. . . . Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

    One wonders what the bien pensants who prefer inoffensive expression would do with Voltaire, who regularly signed his letters “Écrasez l’infâme!” This translates to “crush the abomination,” by which he meant the Catholic Church. Today’s progressives would probably charge him with humiliating the faithful. Voltaire failed to understand the plight of provincial Catholics; Weinberger would doubtless take him to task for a gentlemanly anti-clericalism.

    The point is, the liberal literati are backing away from freedom of expression. As one British free speech advocate recently asked, “Where is the ‘Je suis Salman Rushdie’ movement? Answer: nowhere.

     is the author, most recently, of On Diversity.

    also note the reference in the article to leftists during the Cold War who excused lack of freedom of speech in the Soviet Union, and think about how that relates to Putinist Russia 


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/19/2023 - 1:58am

    The Samizdat literary warriors under Communism relied on a brother/sisterhood of patriots to free speech to keep forbidden material in circulation. The signatories if the Czech dissident Charter77 were known as much for their resultant suffering - Havel's incarceration the best known, but far from the only - while government reprisals against any signs of non-allegiance were quick, even tho often mundane - loss of job, exile from Prague to a village, reprisals against one's parents, and other assorted deaths by a thousand cuts. Voting was expected to be 100%, so anyone not participating was chased through the streets lest the village suffer reprisals as a hotbed of non-conformity. Waving the appropriate flag on whatever Communist commemoration was of course de rigeur, and non-participants even through foolish neglect would see "privileges" rescinded. Children were expected to be good "pioneers" (Communist version of scouts), training ground for next-gen fellow travellers. This is covered by the the movie "years under the dog", where a Prague café socialite/actress and her foolish but tnthusiastic business husband are exiled to the non-cafe'd well socially monitored boonies a few miles out of Prague.

    "


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 03/19/2023 - 4:09am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/19/2023 - 11:14am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/19/2023 - 12:10pm

    whatever continues 'the narrative'


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/19/2023 - 11:33pm

    three of those evil white hetero guys plotting white supremacy or some such 

    (just because I felt like sharing the picture; I was never a big fan of any of the 3 but now they look comparatively charming to pop culture these days)


    by artappraiser on Mon, 03/20/2023 - 1:15am


    by artappraiser on Mon, 03/20/2023 - 1:41am

    This really should be every bit as disturbing as what Scott Adams said, if even more patronizing.

    — Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) March 20, 2023

    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/21/2023 - 3:28am

    The reality is, we do end up with our racially limited cliques whether we say it overtly or not.
    It's the irony of academia and such where we're supposed to be so level and equal,
    and then people want their celebrations. I still remember college with the "black table"
    in the cafeteria - yet I joined them a few times, all was cool (maybe not if they were more radical).


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 03/21/2023 - 4:55am

    He's correct:


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/23/2023 - 7:03pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/24/2023 - 1:30am

    Nate Cohn  What’s ‘Woke’ and Why It Matters

    A marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years

    at NYTimes.com 'Tilt' subscriber-only newsletter, March 24, WITH MY UNDERLINING. (fair use full copy)

    Believe it or not, the term woke wasn’t uttered even once in the Republican debates back in 2015 and 2016.

    Now, I’d be surprised if we make it out of the opening statements of the first primary debate without hearing the term.

    Whatever you think of the phrase, the rise of “woke” to ubiquity is a helpful marker of just how much American politics has changed over the last eight years.

    There’s a new set of issues poised to loom over the coming campaign, from critical race theory and nonbinary pronouns to “cancel culture” and the fate of university courses. Fifteen years ago, I would have said these topics could divide a small liberal arts campus, not American politics. I would have been wrong.

    This change in American politics is hard to analyze. It is hard to craft clear and incisive questions on these complex and emerging topics, especially since the phrase “woke” is notoriously ill-defined. Last week, the conservative writer Bethany Mandel became the subject of considerable ridicule on social media after she was unable to concisely define the term in an interview. She’s not the only one. Apparently, there’s a “woke” part of the federal budget. “Wokeness” was even faulted for Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

    But while the definition of “woke” may be up for debate, there’s no doubt that the term is trying to describe something about the politics of today’s highly educated, young “new” left, especially on cultural and social issues like race, sex and gender.

    As with the original New Left in the 1960s, the emergence of this new left has helped spark a reactionary moment on the right. It has split many liberals from their usual progressive allies. And it has helped power the rise of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has done more to associate himself with fighting “woke” than any other politician. Like it or not, “woke” will shape this year’s Republican primary.

    What’s woke?

    The new left emerged in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. At the time, liberalism seemed utterly triumphant. Yet for young progressives, “hope” and “change” had given way to the realization that Mr. Obama’s presidency hadn’t cured income inequality, racial inequality or climate change. These dynamics opened a space for a new left, as young progressives started to reach for more ambitious politics, just as the triumph of the Obama coalition gave progressives the confidence to embrace ideas that would have been unimaginable in the Bush era.

    A decade later, this new left is everywhere. On economic issues, there has been the Bernie Sanders campaign and calls for Medicare for all; democratic socialism; and the Green New Deal. On race, there has been the Black Lives Matter movement; kneeling in protest during the national anthem; and defund the police. On gender and sex, there has been the Me Too movement and the sharing of preferred pronouns and more.

    On class and economics, it’s easy to delineate the new left. Mr. Sanders helpfully embraced the democratic socialism label to distinguish himself from those who would incrementally smooth out the rough edges of capitalism. It’s harder to distinguish the new left from Obama-era liberals on race, gender and sexuality. There is no widely shared ideological term like democratic socialism to make it easy.

    And yet the differences between Obama-era liberals and the new left on race, sexuality and gender are extremely significant, with big consequences for American politics.

    Here are just a few of those differences:

    • The new left speaks with righteousness, urgency and moral clarity. While liberals always held strong beliefs, their righteousness was tempered by the need to accommodate a more conservative electorate. Mr. Obama generally emphasized compromise, commonality and respect for conservatives, “even when he disagreed.”

      As Obama-era liberalism became dominant, a more righteous progressive discourse emerged — one that didn’t accommodate and even “called out” its opposition. This was partly a reflection of what played well on social media, but it also reflected that progressive values had become uncontested in many highly educated communities.

    • The new left is very conscious of identity. Obama-era liberals tended to emphasize the commonalities between groups and downplayed longstanding racial, religious and partisan divisions. Mr. Obama was even characterized as “post-racial.”

      Today’s new left consciously strives to include, protect and promote marginalized groups. In everyday life, this means prioritizing, trusting and affirming the voices and experiences of marginalized groups, encouraging people to share their pronouns, listing identities on social media profiles, and more. This extension of politics to everyday life is a difference from Obama-era liberalism in its own right. While the Obama-era liberals mostly focused on policy, the new left emphasizes the personal as political.

      Today’s new left is conscious of identity in policymaking as well, whether it’s arguing against race-neutral policies that entrench racial disparities or advocating race-conscious remedies. Obama-era liberals rarely implemented race-conscious policies or mentioned the racial consequences of racially neutral policies.

    • The new left sees society as a web of overlapping power structures or systems of oppression, constituted by language and norms as much as law and policy. This view is substantially informed by modern academic scholarship that explains how power, domination and oppression persist in liberal societies.

      Indeed, almost everything debated recently — critical race theory, the distinction between sex and gender, we can go on — originated in academia over the last half-century. Academic jargon like “intersectional” has become commonplace. It can be hard to understand what’s going on if you didn’t read Judith Butler, Paulo Freire or Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in college.

      Academic scholarship is also the source of the expanded, academic meanings of “trauma,” “violence,” “safety” and “erasure,” which implicitly equate the psychological harm experienced by marginalized groups with the physical harms of traditional illiberal oppression.

      This does not readily lend itself to a “politics of hope,” as virtually everything about America might have to change to end systemic racism. No law will do it. No candidate can promise it. But it does imbue individual actions that subvert oppressive hierarchies with liberatory and emancipatory implications, helping explain the urgency of activists to critique language and challenge norms in everyday life.

    • The new left view that racism, sexism and other oppressive hierarchies are deeply embedded in American society all but ensures a pessimistic view of America. This is quite different from Obama-era liberalism. Indeed, Mr. Obama himself was cast as a redeeming figure whose ascent proved American greatness.

    • When in conflict, the new left prioritizes the pursuit of a more equitable society over enlightenment-era liberal values. Many of the academic theories, including critical race theory, critique liberalism as an obstacle to progressive change.

      In this view, equal rights are a veneer that conceal and justify structural inequality, while some liberal beliefs impede efforts to challenge oppression. The liberal value of equal treatment prevents identity-conscious remedies to injustice; the liberal goal of equal opportunity accepts unequal outcomes; even freedom of speech allows voices that would offend and thus could exclude marginalized communities.

    Is this a definition of woke? No. But it covers much of what woke is grasping toward: a word to describe a new brand of righteous, identity-conscious, new left activists eager to tackle oppression, including in everyday life and even at the expense of some liberal values.

    Why woke matters for Republicans 

    The rise of the new left on race and gender is already reshuffling conservative politics.

    For this year’s Republican primary, one of the most important things about this rise is that it has helped bridge the usual divide between the conservative base and the establishment.

    At least for now, the establishment and the base share the fight against “woke,” for two reasons:

    • The new left is far enough left that there’s room to side with the right while keeping one or both feet in the center. Whether it’s a MAGA fan or a Reaganite, there’s a path for an enterprising politician to bash “woke” and get on Fox News without alienating donors. Anyone can be a conservative hero, even a private equity magnate who would have been seen as an establishment squish in 2015, like Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

      Anti-woke politics seems to animate elite conservatives as much as the activist, populist base. After all, the new left is most prevalent in highly educated liberal bastions like New York or Washington, and among the young in highly educated industries like the news media and higher education. Its rise has probably been felt most acutely by highly educated conservatives as well.

    Whether this dynamic changes is an important question as the primary heats up.

    Over the last few months, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have staked out farther-right positions that might put this question to the test. Mr. Trump, for instance, said he would pass a federal law recognizing only two genders and would punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care for minors. Mr. DeSantis, for example, would ban gender studies. As the campaign gets underway, they may go further. We will learn whether other candidates match their positions, and whether there’s a cost if they do not. There is even a chance conservatives go too far.

    Another big question is whether anti-woke politics can supplant older culture war fights, like abortion or immigration. Most anti-new-left conservatives still vigorously oppose the old liberals on immigration, secularism, feminism and more. It remains to be seen whether attacking D.E.I., Disney and university professors, as Mr. DeSantis did in a recent trip to Iowa, is the red meat for rank-and-file conservatives that it is for conservatives in urban centers like Manhattan who feel under siege by an increasingly assertive left.

    Unfortunately, there is almost no survey data that helps answer these questions at this stage. The behavior of Fox News producers and the rise of DeSantis suggest that there’s some kind of mass constituency for this politics, but whether it amounts to 30 percent or 60 percent of the Republican base and whether it’s compelling enough to carry a primary bid is entirely unclear.

    In the most extreme case for Democrats, the backlash against the new left could end in a repeat of how New Left politics in the 1960s facilitated the marriage of neoconservatives and the religious right in the 1970s. Back then, opposition to the counterculture helped unify Republicans against a new class of highly educated liberals, allowing Southern opponents of civil rights to join old-school liberal intellectuals who opposed Communism and grew skeptical of the Great Society. The parallels are imperfect, but striking.

    On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the possibility that a populist, working-class conservative base perceives little distinction between “woke” and “liberal,” and would rather hear the old classics on illegal immigration, crime and coarse language about women and Mexicans than fight new battles against “woke capital,” critical race theorists and transgender teenagers.

    The range of possibilities for the general election are similarly wide. We’ll save the general election for another time.


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/24/2023 - 10:57pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/24/2023 - 11:13pm

    Well, Bernie a non-Democrat running against Hillary, running on mostly unachievable or unrealistic policies for the petulant crowd, and then pouting his way through the convention and half his followers left certainly helped the party, even as she was bailing out Obama's mis-managed DNC yet getting blamed for it (Tulsi's early role in pumping up the # of debates flap was grand; Bernie's campaign role in jíst happening to find Hillary's donation target database open and downloading copies - again Hillary getting blamed for it...

    I'm still trying to figure out if ActBlue's $27 donation miracle/madness could be gamed by an outsider - say Russians with PayPal accounts - but the initial websites i found say it's actually reported VA anonymous donations direct to a candidate (some overall iverco tributiins, but I'm more talking about massive $15mil in individual donations when Bernie announced before was even well-known)

    How much of what's happening now is surreptitious funding & incitement of both left & right, whether Roger Stone-like or foreign gov like would be useful to know. The patterns are being outlined in Proud Boys - enlist the "normies" to augment the limited hardcore insurrectionists. Except it works for both sides - so even George Floyd protests.

    Alright, my token conspiracy post.

    ETA - the 3rd wave feminism that condemned Hillary's expecting any female support as white privilege certainly helped launch the latest round of wokedom, including horrifically misogynistic rants about "i don't vote my vagina", meaning "fuck that Clinton cunt", frequently in that harsh terminology. Black rapper Killer Mike repeating the uterus slur & being excused by the Sanders campaign as basically Hillary trying "gotcha politics" vs getting edyikated by Jane Elliott, ur-woke diversity author (and ignoring the traditional role of black rapper misgyny as well) and immediately plumping for Nina Turner - black state senator. Message: female PoC, cool! White female? Take 2 or 3 steps back. And thus over sexism against whites became a commonstaple of our modern leftist contingent, often by white women like Elliott as much as black females or "Latinxes".  Killer Mike mansplainin' Hillary's uterus and getting away with it - quite the day.
    Here's how they justified Killer Mike using another woman to set up the equity cue balls:


    I'm trying to remember how Elizabeth Warren survived as well as she did.
    Curious if health care is still remembered as a goal 7 years later, universal unlikely,
    if a "bullshit drug war" back then is tied to black-and-black mass shootings now,
    if kids getting shot might prevent them from going to college,
    if "super-predator" would be ok to use for shooters who ravage an elementary school.
    But crime & violence takes a backseat to the need to comb through history & fix it all - 
    statues, commentaries, official pronouncements, whatever - learning to read can't compete
    with equity-splainin' all of history.

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 03/25/2023 - 8:28am

    Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop contributions to woke shouldn't be forgotten, even if not very political.

    Here she is in a trial for leaving a ski accident with a guy having skull injury and broken bones, but still manages to find the worst lawyer in the world to cringingly fluff up her fashion ego during testimony, seemingly while she again underestimates the seriousness of the event, and has weirdly said her brain thought there was some sexual assault going on because her legs were spread apart and she heard a guy grunting with his body pressed against her. "left him with “a brain injury, four broken ribs and other injuries” TFW.

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gwyneth-paltrow-testifies-initially-think...


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 03/26/2023 - 2:40am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/26/2023 - 11:55am

    Well shut my mouth. Wait til Mammy hears about this...


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 03/26/2023 - 1:29pm

    good sarcastic illustration of the meme


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/26/2023 - 5:44pm

    Oh Jesus, they just put Whoopi Goldberg out of business - not enough black people to fund her crossover linguistically-rich success. Fred Sanford's rolling in his grave, or him & 'Lizabeth finally up in heaven together looking down going WTF? Richard Pryor - don't be laughing at his eyes now. Sheet. Bill Cosby neither - "Right... you co-opting honky motherfucker."

    I guess it was the overwarnest Black Panther revolutionaries who won, rather than the "can't we all just get along" or "here's one that'll crack you up..."

    I remember my first job, a white co-worker would catch this old black guy in the hall and ask him, "you got any white jokes?" and he'd say "now where the hell would I get a white joke? But here's a new black joke..." And proceed to knock us in the gut laughing.

    Different era, sadly.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 03/27/2023 - 9:21am

    Oh shit, reprimanded & forced to apologize for saying "grandmammay", now fired for saying "Fo' shizzle my nizzle"

    Ooh baby baby it's a wild world...

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/news-anchor-snoop-dogg-quote_n_64210fd6e4...


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 03/27/2023 - 10:27am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/26/2023 - 12:20pm

    The flattering conceit that we could discuss 160-year-old events in an intelligent, relatively detached way, vs the feeling that it's yesterday's news all emotional.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 03/27/2023 - 9:32am

    Shit that's my train, not taking the subway anymore, that's it


    by artappraiser on Sun, 03/26/2023 - 4:24pm

    everything is because: racism; this has 10,000 likes and counting:

    In 24 hours Jonathan Majors has already received more press attention for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend than Dana White did for being caught on video slapping his wife around.

    I wonder whyTE. pic.twitter.com/2BzwOk0AZu

    — Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) March 26, 2023

    not to mention it is totally ignoring the nature of celebrity.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 03/27/2023 - 12:57am

    Too much time on my hands, but it rather appeared Dana White's wife slapped him first, which might make some difference. Yet again, these were a couple slaps, not the football player smashing his wife/GFriend in the elevator.

    But i forget, everything's equal.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 03/27/2023 - 9:28am

    not for the reason you might first think:


    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/28/2023 - 1:44am

    TFW you haven’t yet realized Gramsci and others replaced the worker as the revolutionary subject of history with disaffected bougie kids and grad students. https://t.co/k4xyJ0pApe

    — Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) March 26, 2023

    Presented without comment pic.twitter.com/I9taU0MgHE

    — (@EudaimoniaEsq) March 26, 2023

    Can’t pin this on Gramsci

    — alice (@AliceFromQueens) March 28, 2023

    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/28/2023 - 4:50am

    She wanted to be an iver-testosterined male - i guess she succeeded. Only in America.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 03/28/2023 - 4:58am

    Just maybe. (But not counting on it):


    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/28/2023 - 1:07pm

    At what was once perhaps considered the most prestigious place to study Art History in the U.S., there is now an Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora Arts. I don't really need to say anything else <sigh>

    Excited to share that I’ll be joining the faculty at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts as Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora Arts this coming fall! I’ll be focusing on teaching and research about modern and contemporary art/media/visuality, antiblackness, critical theory, etc.

    — catastrophe fashion (@erichKJr) March 28, 2023

    by artappraiser on Tue, 03/28/2023 - 2:12pm

    But he's male!

    This one too: https://mobile.twitter.com/selascholar/status/1640845750761586688

    And what's this "tysm" stuff?


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 03/29/2023 - 2:20am

    He's a least in Ethnic Studies so the slant is already there.Also Loyola Marymount is Jesuit Catholic university so there's a tradition of liberation theology. But note he also throws in "Queer" as one of interests, as if that's an Ethnic Studies, Chicano or Catholic thing. NOT.

    But NYU Art Institute is the creme de la creme Art History, it's where all the giants in the field have taught, and is small, elite and exclusive, like the Courtauld in London. It's 'The Canon" place, not for fads, for very serious scholarship on a grad and post-grad level. So they basically gave in, The Canon is going to change to allow for pandering to the latest fads


    by artappraiser on Wed, 03/29/2023 - 3:10am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 03/30/2023 - 5:58pm

    Apparently class triggering is worse than fingers on triggers in classrooms.
    Irony abounds.
    Dangerous panda - eats shoots and leaves


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 04/01/2023 - 3:53am

    Tensions Flare Inside NPR After Staff Layoffs and Town Halls

    NPR has held multiple all-hands meetings in the days since its layoffs, and some employees say they’ve lost trust in management

    Sully's comment actually seems quite accurate after a couple years of reading this stuff now!


    by artappraiser on Fri, 03/31/2023 - 6:30pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 04/01/2023 - 3:56am


    by artappraiser on Sat, 04/01/2023 - 4:12am


    by artappraiser on Sat, 04/01/2023 - 11:34pm

    New: In a letter welcoming the new local US attorney, Mayor London Breed asked for help against drug dealing: “Our local law enforcement is doing its best to enforce against drug dealing, however the scale of the problem is beyond our local capacity.”

    tweeted by Mallory Moench on March 31

    S.F. Mayor Breed asks new U.S. attorney for help against drug dealing: ‘The problem is beyond our local capacity’ 

    at San Francisco Chronicle
    March 31, 2023 Updated: April 1, 2023 10:29 a.m.

    by artappraiser on Sun, 04/02/2023 - 12:27am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 04/02/2023 - 3:47pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 04/02/2023 - 11:15pm


    by artappraiser on Mon, 04/03/2023 - 12:49am

    Obama the evil gentrifier


    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/05/2023 - 11:04am

    Elmar Gentry


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 04/05/2023 - 11:34am

    Strikes me as equally wack as raising children in a Hasidic life or home-schooled conservative Christian. A few brave and exceptional kids make a run for it when they turn 18 and adjust to the dominant culture but that's rare and most simply end up living in the tiny subcultures they were raised in, or just weird and fucked-up trying to adjust:

    Non-Binary Woman who is in a 3 way relationship with two Trans biological men raises her kids as non-binary and claims her 2 year old doesn’t know their gender…

    Video Source: Truly pic.twitter.com/Z3E8Hg0Sdl

    — Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 5, 2023

     


    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/05/2023 - 12:04pm


    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/05/2023 - 12:25pm

    ^ I think it's getting kinda like Savonorola's followers after The Black Death


    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/05/2023 - 12:30pm


    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/05/2023 - 12:32pm

    Wesley Yang makes a great thread for the cultural history books by simply asking his followers:

    What is the most benign thing anyone has been canceled for?

    — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) April 4, 2023

     

    Note most people just answer matter-of-factly; there is no anger.

    It makes an incredible laundry list, proof that this shit is real, is actually happening in our time!


    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/05/2023 - 12:37pm

    he agrees:


    by artappraiser on Thu, 04/06/2023 - 12:36am

    Well, some of these are a bit iffy, as you might expect. A British physicist for European Space Agency at a big space success wearing a sexy girl shirt that belongs in Vegas is probably not acting professional enough for a big org spending billions to attract young girls to that STEM/space future. Would Neil Armstrong have been ok in a Baywatch t-shirt? (yes, anachronistic) https://phys.org/news/2014-11-space-scientist-shirt-sexist.html Someone mentioned the "Dean Scream", but that was CNN bringing him up in the mix & normal media tut-tutting, not a cultural cancelling. It'd be good for someone to have editorial control over the list to give people a real idea what it means. Getting fired for addressing women as "ladies" seems extreme, as is firing a guy for accidentally forming an ok-sign/"white supremacy sign hanging his arm out the driver's window... The Aziz actor who had the cringy date all over the place ("well, this is going awful - let's at least try a blowjob..." - which was agreeable to the girl) might repulse lots of people in whatever era, even though the girl seemed awful too. But for me the worst was it kind of set back MeToo with "maybe all this complaining about assaults is exaggerating", unlike the Mira Sorvinos who had their careers destroyed.

    On the other hand... losing a nice job application cuz "Perrone said Kwiecinski told him that using "ladies" as a greeting was hostile and derogatory and that "the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem,'" he told the Gazette, adding that she also reprimanded him for using "ladies" as a microaggression."


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 04/06/2023 - 5:23am

    She's been infused with Black Supremacy propaganda, plain and simple:


    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/05/2023 - 12:42pm

    The Iowa girl was gracious.

    Class speaks for itself. 

    Charles Barkley noted the ring thing was a distraction.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 04/05/2023 - 9:13pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 04/06/2023 - 1:04pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 04/06/2023 - 12:01am


    by artappraiser on Fri, 04/07/2023 - 1:06am

    well said:


    by artappraiser on Fri, 04/07/2023 - 1:59am

    Trans crate: what parents don't know

    (ok, the Daily Mail, but seems real enough.

    Years in the wanna convert closet?)

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11944141/amp/One-mother-tells...


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 04/09/2023 - 1:26am

    good to see him counter Woke spin

     

    where reporting on crime must be muzzled! Really! It's actually absurd! Where denying reality is gonna help, believe and it will come true...


    by artappraiser on Sun, 04/09/2023 - 2:15pm

    Richard Dawkins apparently has seen enough


    by artappraiser on Sun, 04/09/2023 - 3:42pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 04/11/2023 - 4:51pm

    Should a person be considered unhirable for publishing an empirical research finding that was contrary to the hopes of advocates?

    I can see some problems for the world if that becomes an accepted norm!https://t.co/5UjbA0hVAX

    — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 12, 2023

    Stepping back from the specifics of @jenniferdoleac’s narcan paper the unfortunate truth is that the fentanyl problem is legitimately very hard and nobody is quite sure what to do — we need to both try some stuff and also have genuine assessment.https://t.co/WJk0sPThqn

    — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 12, 2023

    The question here isn’t whether Doleac should be “unhirable” it’s should she be made head of a $400mn criminal justice reform advocacy and research center. Those are very different questions!

    — Chase Madar (@ChaseMadar) April 12, 2023

    I think the idea is very clearly that it should count against her as a job candidate that her research came out “wrong” in this case. The idea of the article is to send a message to scholars that if that happens in the future they should desk-drawer it instead of publishing.

    — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 12, 2023

    Who'd thunk that SCHOLARSHIP NEEDS TO BE TOTALLY SEPARATE FROM 'POLITICS', golly gee. Yglesias is basically being a chump for white western Enlightenment ideals, fooled by racist, colonialist imperalists.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/12/2023 - 2:22pm

     ^ Jason Connor uses the terrifying word. Is President @ConfluenceStat Biostats consultant. Carnegie Mellon PhD. Texas A&M BS. UCF COM & Hopkins SPH  prof. Coalminer's daughter's son.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/12/2023 - 2:26pm

    I think: big mistake that the Democratic party can't 'Sister Souljah' The Woke just a bit more


    by artappraiser on Thu, 04/13/2023 - 12:45am

    HEY WOKEES, GUESS WHAT? Social workers can be as fucked up as cops can be sometimes. Who knew?


    by artappraiser on Mon, 04/17/2023 - 6:45pm


    by artappraiser on Mon, 04/17/2023 - 7:59pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 04/18/2023 - 1:48pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 04/18/2023 - 6:53pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 04/18/2023 - 8:29pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 04/18/2023 - 9:43pm

    The way they label & demean trans fats is totally unacceptable.

    I feel there's a rich white carbohydrate behind this privileged shaming.- no doubt male.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 04/19/2023 - 10:00am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 04/20/2023 - 2:00am

    ^ she's using her real name but has this on her home page: Views=mine,not an institution’s


    by artappraiser on Thu, 04/20/2023 - 2:05am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 04/20/2023 - 1:26pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 04/22/2023 - 12:04am


    by artappraiser on Sat, 04/22/2023 - 12:06am


    by artappraiser on Sat, 04/22/2023 - 12:10am


    by artappraiser on Sat, 04/22/2023 - 12:27pm


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 04/25/2023 - 3:28pm

    thread


    by artappraiser on Fri, 04/28/2023 - 6:29am

    but it's all relative and you have to act before you start the big spiral down

    (we're talking maintaining civilization in big crowded urban places)


    by artappraiser on Fri, 04/28/2023 - 7:08am

    Not Woke at all when it comes to persons with XX chromosomes:

    Where's the outrage?


    by artappraiser on Sat, 04/29/2023 - 10:37pm

    meanwhile


    by artappraiser on Sat, 04/29/2023 - 11:01pm

    Rap? Woke?


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 04/30/2023 - 5:39am


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 04/30/2023 - 6:11am

    YUP!

    It’s going to be hard for Biden to ever get really good numbers on the economy because not only are Republicans going to say everything is awful regardless, but a lot of left advocacy groups are institutionally committed to doomerism.

    — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 5, 2023


    You had this when Bill Clinton was president too but back then the left was so weak and marginalized that only weirdo Nation subscribers like my parents even knew what the left view on things was.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 5, 2023

    What do you think causes the lefties to be doomers?

    — tubpatrol (@tubpatrol1) May 5, 2023

    pic.twitter.com/qTWZ5grR9y

    — Jakub Vlášek (@jakubvlasek) May 5, 2023

    It was because Bill Clinton (& Al Gore too) "Sister Souljah'd" lefty nonsense from the getgo! The DLC was basically created to get the lefties to SIT DOWN & SHUDDUP so Dems could win some elections instead of losing all the time. Now instead the Democrats baby and suck up to AOC, "The Squad" and the DSA types while allowing for constant bashing of Joe Manchin types without saying a word.

    To the point of in a way, thank god for the Supreme court ruling against Roe. The GOP's overreach on that front is the only thing that has a chance of helping centrist Dems win office.

    The only flaw I see in Joe Biden's poltical activities is his unwillingness to publicly "Sister Souljah" the lefties, that's why the center doesn't see him as they should, as doing everything for their benefit.It should be to say take your DSA ideology and shove it, loud and clear, but for some reason it never happens anymore.


    by artappraiser on Fri, 05/05/2023 - 4:37pm

    Anarchists have no history of winning elections in the U.S.:

    The class folks like this idolize isn't the proletariat in a Marxist schema. No--they're the lumpenproletariat, and Marx had nothing but contempt for people who thought they ever had any potential as a revolutionary class. https://t.co/70xorCfkXE

    — CougarSpider (@CougarSpider) May 6, 2023

    There's always been a silly strain of anarchism that valorises crime as a kind of social banditry & primitive rebellion & treats *any* concern about it as 'bourgeois' respectability politics.

    — Ralph Leonard (@buffsoldier_96) May 6, 2023

    And can I just add: few wish for Robin Hood ethos here.


    by artappraiser on Fri, 05/05/2023 - 10:14pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/07/2023 - 1:07am

    Idjits:

    Another NYPD cop on a motorcycle is taunted by protesters and cause the officer to run over an American flag.#JordanNeely pic.twitter.com/chln2Cpodh

    — Rebecca Brannon (@RebsBrannon) May 6, 2023

    edit to add:

     


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/06/2023 - 2:51am

    The dude just wants to go to work.

    These loons are gonna turn me right-wing. I'm getting off Twitter for a sec to order my MAGA hat (and a DeSantis pin, just in case). https://t.co/g8piVio3lW

    — Carl (@HistoryBoomer) May 6, 2023


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/06/2023 - 7:17pm

    ^ I got a kick out of the Black cop with the salt-and-pepper beard sort of rolling his eyes at the end of the tape.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/06/2023 - 7:22pm

    but wait, there's more:

    am I allowed to note how many of the idjits on the tracks appear to be White?


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/06/2023 - 7:25pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/07/2023 - 12:30am

    retweeted by @NYCAntifa

    High bail was set

    NYPD & the DA are punishing a vulnerable comrade for protesting #JordanNeely’s lynching.

    Help the community pay for their comrade’s freedom.

    DONATE HERE: https://t.co/S3YtMc2zwb (add “protester bail” in comments)

    FUNDS NEEDED ASAP https://t.co/ZbIZIq9qqK

    — Peoples Bail Out NYC (formerly Covid Bail Out) (@PplBailOutNYC) May 8, 2023

    by artappraiser on Tue, 05/09/2023 - 6:49pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/06/2023 - 8:15pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/07/2023 - 11:30pm

    Good news?

    https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews/


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 05/08/2023 - 2:53pm

    Progressive troll armies:

    he retweeted this reply:


    by artappraiser on Tue, 05/09/2023 - 6:07pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 05/11/2023 - 6:02pm

    The Enlightenment ended in 1815 or thereabouts. There have been several periods since. Slave trade largely died around then, slavery persisted another 50-80 years. Mass European immigration from several racial pools into industrialization along with the conquering of Hispanic and Native populations didn't wipe race away, and post-Civil War grudges as much shifted that race issue as ended it. 100 years later that Enlightenment ideal finally became largely accepted, but the practicalities and uneveness if the following 60 years illustrate that societies are not near as monolithic anymore to produce simple obvious changes. Yet we still have blacks as bottom rung in most free roam, unselected situations. Sure, school quotas can contest this, but there's a heavy weight against a black man going for a job or walking down the street or entering many stores that defies the more even distribution and attitudes for all other ethnic/racial/religious categories (i don't think it's near as bad for black females). For America's melting pot, the exception continues to prove the rule. Indian? Hardly any problem (yes, there are incidents). Vietnamese? Now part of the landscape. Hispanics? Now broken into different origins but most considered well-adapted politically & economically vs Cesar Chavez's day. Jewish, Italian, Irish, Chinese, Iranian, Arab.... not that much of a problem anymore.

    Certainly the high participation in crime and the seeming inability to extend lower-middle class success to the lower rungs highlights things. It's harder to explain why. 


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/12/2023 - 1:31am


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/13/2023 - 5:04pm

    Not so much to the leftist allegations. "Boths sides complain" isn't a good litmus.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 05/16/2023 - 2:28pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/14/2023 - 12:44am

    DEIB already there

    https://www.findem.ai/knowledge-center/what-is-diversity-equity-inclusio...


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 05/16/2023 - 2:08pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/14/2023 - 11:16pm


    by artappraiser on Wed, 05/17/2023 - 12:30am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 05/18/2023 - 11:57am

    The type of thing that can happen when no one in power bothers doing a 'Sister Souljah' thing to the lefties:

    AOC is preening at Jordan Neely's funeral??? What a fucking joke.

    The Party of Arrested Development doing what it does! pic.twitter.com/QvC63LPtnn

    — Theo Jordan (@Theo_TJ_Jordan) May 19, 2023

    Just goes to show it is all performance.

    — Libertarium (@1nsidethewir3) May 19, 2023

    So gross.

    — Martine Torres-Aponte, thought criminal since 1960 (@la_smartine) May 19, 2023

    Gotta keep those optics up!

    — ɛɭʋɕɨɳɑɫɛ (@elucinate) May 19, 2023

    edit to add:


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/20/2023 - 12:39pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/21/2023 - 12:24am

    speaking truth to wokee power


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/20/2023 - 6:08pm


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 05/21/2023 - 9:12am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/21/2023 - 1:26am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/21/2023 - 10:00pm

    Dumbfuck enviros trash Trevi Fountain

    Need sociologists who know how to wield a truncheon.

    https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/charcoal-trevi-fountain-rome-climate-...


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 05/22/2023 - 6:13am

    Am kinda amazed at how viral this has gone: the tape of Brit police protecting anti-oil protesters from a guy trying to clear them from blocking traffic. It's been going on for a couple days now, lots and lots of people are just outraged about it to tweet about it, and seems almost all genuine. Though I kvetch about this type of thing, as a New Yorker I'm just kind of used to it and expect it to happen.But judging from this viral reaction, this type of protesting is just so incredibly counterproductive, as never before:


    by artappraiser on Tue, 05/23/2023 - 12:14pm

    Norway joins Sweden, Finland the United Kingdom, Kentucky, Texas and Florida in banning sterilization, castration and mastectomies on minors. https://t.co/ncZbzhIbQl

    — Kelley Paul (@KelleyAshbyPaul) May 22, 2023


    by artappraiser on Tue, 05/23/2023 - 5:10am

    Sometimes it seems to me like woke lefties are just really stupid, they offer up all of the past civil rights and anti-racism struggles to be easily co-opted by conservatives on the right

    To most 'normies', you can't logically be both for skin-color-based identarianism and anti-racism. Tim Scott types win.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 05/23/2023 - 12:27pm

    Note their byline is "Fake news you can trust."


    by artappraiser on Tue, 05/23/2023 - 12:35pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 05/23/2023 - 12:31pm

    Some were saying she should only do makeup that makes her look like.mm herself!

    So no more costume art, stay in your lane, don't expand past your own identity, maybe your own tribe... The restraints clasp tighter.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 05/24/2023 - 5:31am

    Yeah not to mention just imagine how it will confuse the A.I. all to heck if we don't stay on being racist and tribal with the images on the internet!


    by artappraiser on Wed, 05/24/2023 - 10:30am

    What are its pronouns? Is it appropriating other cultures or mind-melding with the oppressed and victimized?

    Not easy to be a replicant in 2023.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 05/25/2023 - 2:52am

    BREAKING: Full statement from Target announcing changes to Pride merchandise from stores ahead of June Pride month. Says threats to workers forced the change. pic.twitter.com/fuYtY1rhqn

    — Matt Young (@MattYoung) May 24, 2023

    Story below. I've asked Target for specifics on what is being changed. No word yet. https://t.co/Om6UvTlkGT

    — Matt Young (@MattYoung) May 24, 2023

    All of this strikes me as absurd. Why are companies like Target, Budweiser and Disney participating in culture wars issues to being with? Why do they have to take sides? They never did before. 

    Why does Target have to have a LBGTQIA+ display to begin with? (there's so many letters now in that abbreviation that even I, once labelled a 'fag hag',cannot remember them all and have to look it up!) They never did before and I don't remember any complaints. If trans women are women, they shop for women's clothing,right? Some gays like men's clothes, some like women's, never a problem before. Both large male drag queens and women with large feet were a small market that went to specialty retailers, right?

    Why did Budweiser feel the need to do commercials with a trans woman? Did they think it would get them a few new customers or what? What does beer have to do with any of this? Humans either like beer or they don't, the market is already defined.

    Not sure on Disney, but with the other two, it's like they chose to participate in and further fuel culture wars!


    by artappraiser on Tue, 05/23/2023 - 11:29pm

    Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?


    by artappraiser on Thu, 05/25/2023 - 11:03am

    seems almost always this kind of stuff is spun to the max, by both sides of activists (along with journos who just want more clicks for profit) to rile people up:

    The parent complaint seems ill-motivated, but the school says the poem wasn't banned but moved to the Middle School section of the library. If true, it's not the same. People toss these claims of "banning" out, but it's hard to know if they can be trusted.https://t.co/e9vZU2deUI https://t.co/K1axDQiVvt

    — Carl (@HistoryBoomer) May 24, 2023

     


    by artappraiser on Wed, 05/24/2023 - 12:31am

    Oh look, The Root has discovered new ways to get clicks:

    Well, welcome to the, uh(?), the uh club ? pic.twitter.com/GrMbnEU1PV

    — Patrick M. Lockwood (@DoctorLockwood) May 24, 2023

     


    by artappraiser on Wed, 05/24/2023 - 12:33am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 05/25/2023 - 12:14pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 05/25/2023 - 6:29pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 05/25/2023 - 10:52pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 05/26/2023 - 2:32pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/27/2023 - 11:20pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 05/30/2023 - 12:25pm

    so I'm not crazy after all:


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/28/2023 - 6:27pm

    From Black to Black - Q:What part of “Black Culture” needs to be “fixed?” A:


    by artappraiser on Thu, 06/01/2023 - 11:39pm

    "The First Amendment" reminds us:


    by artappraiser on Thu, 06/01/2023 - 11:12pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/02/2023 - 10:07pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 06/03/2023 - 12:21am

    ^ "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" ~ George Wallace, 1963

    Him and Bishop Swan, like two peas in a pod.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 06/03/2023 - 12:25am

    nod, nod:


    by artappraiser on Sat, 06/03/2023 - 12:57am


    by artappraiser on Tue, 06/06/2023 - 12:37am

    I had a debate recently over the ethics of Christianity - basic simple principles that could be passed on, but instead are lost.

    "Hate the sin, not the sinner!"

    "As you do unto the least of my followers you do to me."

    Compassion and forgiveness over all.

    "Do unto others..."

    "Turn the other cheek" (or at least "Don't take the Gauntlet")

    All scoffed at by the new ethic where scoring internet points counts, and we can dismiss "Free Speech" as a government issue, not a laudable social liberty.

    It used to be Christianity was working on yourself to some extent. Now it seems like finding the fault in others.

    "For those who see themselves without sin, start throwing".

    Chutzpahism.

    I'd never realized that Samaritans were a shunned religion - i just assumed it was good to help others out, even if you weren't an outcast, whatever your religion or ethnic group. Guess I'm getting old. 


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 06/06/2023 - 8:26am


    by artappraiser on Tue, 06/06/2023 - 5:00pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 06/06/2023 - 5:05pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 06/06/2023 - 5:09pm

    Washington state news


    by artappraiser on Thu, 06/08/2023 - 8:52pm

    Yeah, wasn't that long ago when Jews became "white". Italians as well. While Poles and Irish just had to open their mouths for the secret to pop out if wasn't obvious from 100 other tipoffs. Sure, skin color helps the slow figure it out, but if they want to hate on your tribe, they will. Thousands of years of practice. Remember those religious wars?


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 06/09/2023 - 8:22am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 06/08/2023 - 9:04pm

    This is one of the hardest things I've watched in a long time. https://t.co/vvEyQXz8oU

    — Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) June 8, 2023


    by artappraiser on Thu, 06/08/2023 - 9:54pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 06/08/2023 - 10:32pm

    surprise, kids! reality!


    by artappraiser on Thu, 06/08/2023 - 9:51pm


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 06/09/2023 - 8:32am


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/09/2023 - 6:38pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 06/10/2023 - 8:17am


    by artappraiser on Sat, 06/10/2023 - 9:04am

    They're not trying to win over - they want others to give up, submit, take a permanently lower position as penance.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 06/11/2023 - 2:30pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 06/11/2023 - 10:49pm


    by artappraiser on Mon, 06/12/2023 - 3:04am

    Oxfam Terf Wars - JK Rowling as lead witch

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12171177/JULIE-BINDEL-surpris...


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 06/13/2023 - 11:05pm

    A.P. Stylebook:


    by artappraiser on Wed, 06/14/2023 - 4:35pm

    in *some* women's spaces


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 06/15/2023 - 12:50am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 06/15/2023 - 11:43am

    Carl shows how to harass a troll properly and win friends and influence people. (Arguing with them and spewing invective at them is what they want to encourage)

     


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/16/2023 - 9:07pm

     

     


    by artappraiser on Sat, 06/17/2023 - 2:45am

    Odd that this privileged white guy thinks blacks killing 100 other blacks weekly is a blot on any Black Lives Matter effort. Or that they were more worried that the Clintons called vicious black repeat offenders "Superpredators" than that they out a shit ton of effort into making black neighborhoods livable, black home ownership affordable and putting blacks in high government positions.

    The term "super predator" was coined in 1995 by Princeton University professor John DiIulio. It came to define a generation of "radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders,'' according to a 2001 report by the New York Times. DiIulio has said he regrets inventing a theory that "took on a life of its own."

    During a 1996 campaign speech for President Bill Clinton, the then-first lady used the term to describe "gangs" of kids without empathy, while crediting the crime bill's allowance for more police officers for a reduction in crime, gangs and drugs.

    "We need to take these people on, they are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators. No conscious, no empathy," Clinton said, according to a video recording provided by C-SPAN.

    Well, good thing in 2023 there aren't black gangs doing waves of attacks on retail stores or committing continual mass shootings inspired by outlaw fuck the police rap music 27 years later.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 06/18/2023 - 3:20am


    by artappraiser on Sat, 06/17/2023 - 9:53pm

    Hannibal Lectern will eat your liver.

    How do female replicants count doing exotic snake dances?


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 06/18/2023 - 3:11am

    This kind of catty social-media attack (and I've noticed quite a few) is gonna backfire big time with those that similarly shallowly care about "first lady" appearance. This is nothing more than a totally charming photograph of a couple! Anyone who sees something else is addled by partisan derangement syndrome:


    by artappraiser on Wed, 06/21/2023 - 12:24am

    It's an older photo (they have it in this April NY post article

    https://nypost.com/2023/04/25/insiders-reveal-how-queen-of-camelot-2-0-c...

    Yes, the demeaning attack on women's looks (and if she looked plain they'd be attacking too) and the anippiness over every thing.

    But then the retro Jackie bit is strange as well - the GOP hates Camelot and ita morals, no? Jackie caught reading The Dharma Bums? Why pull that off the school shelves)

    Oddly i read a thing in Jackie & her sister Lee yesterday, a bit strange relatio ship. Liked her best when she was more reclusive in NY dealing with books.

    Anyway, rather bored with all the glitterati stuff, whatever the politics.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 06/21/2023 - 2:01am


    by artappraiser on Wed, 06/21/2023 - 6:00am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 06/22/2023 - 7:12pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 12:50am

    Did you know there were 1200 white lynchings among those 3600 black lynchings?

    But yes, discussing this stuff as if it's current events helps to cement resentment and anger.


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 1:04am

    Mammy

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/ibetyouhaventseenthisbefore/permalink/22...


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 1:36am


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 1:39am


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 3:48am

    Please help me, wut? Wasted opportunity at the Smithsonian?

    She just got tenure at UNH, and wastes the opportunity to do anything deep & impressive with it.

    Oh, did she mention she's blackqueer Jewish agender (but can't seem to write a modern paean for exploring space with some technical prowess, instead harkening back through black music collections... How will blacks find the space zeitgeist except in race culture wars and class terms? I mean, weren't aliens supposed to embody strange race/gender/physiology mashups? Why is she still stuck to earth?


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 1:23pm

    More than 2 years ago and I was way late to the game because I wasn't paying attention. It's serious, VERY, and it has infected all of academia in the western world including hard science and math. Not a joke. It's the way young people are being taught to think, not just in college but high school and grade school. The Ron Desantis types are not making it all up out of thin air, it's not just politics, it's real, very real.

    (BTW, speaking of politics, "The Squad" of the US House and the D.S.A, are totally supportive of all of this, a "Brave New World". Chose your political allies with open eyes. And you can't cry to me when the youngins treat you like a shithead when you Gen-X'ers are old; I'll be dead. Memories of the way it used to be may be all you have.)


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 6:47pm

    clearly he's heard it umpteen times in the flesh

    Under Marxism, every oppressive cis-normative patriarchal white supremacist bourgeois system will be overthrown and we will all be equally free to have daily 4-hour avocado toast laden brunches while discussing Derrida and the rearticulation of postmodern structural totalities.

    — Carl (@HistoryBoomer) June 23, 2023

    and here's another one I've been following, he doesn't have the same sense of humor, is much more morose about his institution and the whole situation, sometimes seems nearly suicidal


    by artappraiser on Fri, 06/23/2023 - 8:06pm

    Make no mistake, Pat Robertson lives on, his crew (where Pence is a moderate) will always be with us:

    This world is experiencing the darkest days since Sodom and Gomorrah! What is evil and immoral has become "good" and what is godly has been trampled upon. For those who are not in Christ it will be a time of destruction, BUT for the Church the time has come — we'll see our King!… pic.twitter.com/aDKz86FAAT

    — Maranatha777 (@Maranatha7774) June 25, 2023


    by artappraiser on Sun, 06/25/2023 - 1:09pm

    Back in the old daze when I was a 'fag hag', that was done all the time, I repeat all the time; gays were famous for being catty about extremists in their midst, especially earnest ones without perspective and a sense of humor.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 06/25/2023 - 3:00pm

    p.s. comes to mind

    What is ironic about The Importance of Being Earnest?
     
    The majority of the humor in The Importance of Being Earnest stems from dramatic irony: the audience is always aware that Ernest does not exist and that Jack and Algernon are both pretending to be him, but the other characters are not. This dramatic irony is at its most palpable during the two parallel proposal scenes.

    source 


    by artappraiser on Sun, 06/25/2023 - 3:03pm

    Desantis copying wokee cancellation tactics:

     


    by artappraiser on Tue, 06/27/2023 - 4:12am

    the NYC Council as it often does is busy keeping up with its foreign policy work


    by artappraiser on Sat, 07/01/2023 - 4:23am

    Despite his alliance with abortion-rights supporters and L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, the president has deftly avoided becoming enmeshed in battles over hotly contested social issues.

    By Reid J. Epstein

    Reporting from Washington @NYTimes.com, July 4

    President Biden memorably jumped the gun on Barack Obama in endorsing same-sex marriage more than a decade ago, but at a June fund-raiser near San Francisco, he couldn’t recall the letters L.G.B.T.Q.

    And even as the Democratic Party makes the fight for abortion rights central to its political message, Mr. Biden last week declared himself “not big on abortion.”

    At a moment when the American political parties are trading fierce fire from the trenches of a war over social and cultural policy, the president is staying out of the fray.

    White, male, 80 years old and not particularly up-to-date on the language of the left, Mr. Biden has largely avoided becoming enmeshed in contemporary battles over gender, abortion and other hotly contested social issues — even as he does things like hosting what he called “the largest Pride Month celebration ever held at the White House.”

    Republicans have tried to pull him in, but appear to recognize the difficulty: When G.O.P. presidential candidates vow to end what they derisively call “woke” culture, they often aim their barbs not directly at Mr. Biden but at big corporations like Disney and BlackRock or the vast “administrative state” of the federal government. Republican strategists say most of their party’s message on abortion and transgender issues is aimed at primary voters, while Mr. Biden is seen as far more vulnerable in a general election on the economy, crime and immigration.

    Mr. Biden’s armor against cultural attacks might seem unlikely for a president who has strongly advocated for L.G.B.T.Q. people, the leader of a party whose fortunes ride on the wave of abortion politics, and a man who owes his presidency to unbending support from Black Democratic primary voters.

    Yet despite adopting positions over the years that pushed Democrats — and then the country — to embrace more liberal attitudes on social issues, Mr. Biden has kept himself at arms’ length from elements of his party that could pose him political problems. In June, the White House said it had barred a transgender activist who went topless at its Pride event.

    And while Mr. Biden’s age has become one of his chief political weaknesses, both his allies and adversaries say it also helps insulate him from cultural attacks by Republicans.

    “Everybody wants to talk about how old Joe Biden is, but the truth of the matter is it’s his age and his experience allow him to be who he is and allow him to say the things and to help people in a way that nobody else can,” said Henry R. Muñoz III, a former Democratic National Committee finance director. Mr. Muñoz, who is gay, had Mr. Biden serve as his wedding officiant in 2017.

    Much of Mr. Biden’s loyalty from L.G.B.T.Q. Democrats stems from his 2012 endorsement of same-sex marriages when Mr. Obama was still officially opposed to them. Mr. Biden’s position was seen as politically risky at the time, before the Supreme Court in 2015 recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry, but has evolved into something he bragged about during his 2020 campaign.

     

    He has also been on the forefront of recognizing transgender rights. In his first week in office, Mr. Biden ended the Trump-era ban on transgender troops in the military. In December, he signed into law federal protections for same-sex marriages.

    At the same time, Mr. Biden has not adopted the terminology of progressive activists or allowed himself to be drawn into public debates that might leave him outside the political mainstream. On Thursday, after the Supreme Court’s major ruling ending affirmative action in college admissions, a reporter asked him, “Is this a rogue court?”

    Pausing to think for a moment, Mr. Biden responded, “This is not a normal court.”

    He also does not always remember the words most American politicians use to describe same-sex people. At the fund-raiser near San Francisco last month, Mr. Biden lamented the Supreme Court’s decision last year that ended the national right to an abortion and suggested the court was coming for gay rights next.

    During a stop at the Iowa State Fair during his 2020 campaign, a conservative provocateur trailing the Democratic presidential candidates asked Mr. Biden, “How many genders are there?”

     

    Mr. Biden replied: “There are at least three. Don’t play games with me, kid.”

    Then, perhaps not realizing that his inquisitor was a right-wing activist, Mr. Biden added: “By the way, first one to come out for marriage was me.”

    Sarah McBride, a Delaware state senator who recently began a campaign to become the first transgender member of Congress, said Mr. Biden’s language gave him the ability to solidify Democrats behind a progressive social agenda and “reach communities and demographics that are not yet fully in the coalition.”

    “He’s not getting caught up on rhetoric that isn’t understandable for your middle-of-the-road voter,” Ms. McBride said.

    She also pointed to Mr. Biden’s age as helpful for making Democrats’ case on social issues without alienating skeptical voters.

    “His background allows him to say things that I think would be heard as more radical if they were said by a younger politician,” she said.

    As majorities of Americans have accepted gay marriage, social conservatives have made opposition to transgender rights a mainstay of their politics. And Republicans running to displace Mr. Biden have tended to focus on energizing G.O.P. primary voters rather than making a villain out of the president.

    “It’s hard to paint an 80-year-old white man as a flaming woke warrior,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime pollster for Republican candidates.

    Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is perhaps the leading purveyor of Republicans’ anti-“woke” message, throwing barbs both online and in speeches. On Friday, his campaign cast even Mr. Trump as too liberal on L.G.B.T.Q. issues in a provocative video posted on Twitter.

    At a June rally in Tulsa, Okla., Mr. DeSantis described being approached by military veterans who don’t want their children and grandchildren joining the armed forces because of liberal policy changes instituted by Democrats — though the governor blamed Mr. Obama as much as he did Mr. Biden.

    “A woke military is not going to be a strong military,” Mr. DeSantis said. “You got to get the politicization out of it. And on Day 1, we’re ripping out all the Obama-Biden policies to woke-ify the military.”

    Mr. Biden has never presented as a left-wing culture warrior. A Catholic, he has long been wary about jumping headlong into fights over abortion rights. Even as his campaign and party are preparing to make his re-election bid a referendum on Republican efforts to further restrict abortion, Mr. Biden proclaimed to a crowd of donors in suburban Washington that he himself was not eager to do so.

    “You know, I happen to be a practicing Catholic,” Mr. Biden said last week. “I’m not big on abortion. But guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right.”

    That stance has long caused some consternation among Democrats. It took until June 2019, weeks after beginning his 2020 campaign and under immense pressure from allies in his party, for Mr. Biden to renounce his long-held support for banning federal funding for abortions.

    Renee Bracey Sherman, the founder of We Testify, a group that shares women’s stories of having abortions, said Mr. Biden would need to adopt a more forceful position in favor of abortion rights to energize liberal voters in 2024. She suggested that in the same way Mr. Biden hosts championship sports teams at the White House, he should invite women who have had abortions to come and tell their stories.

    “The midterms show that Americans love abortion,” Ms. Bracey Sherman said. “Abortion has a higher approval rating than he does. He should be riding the abortion wave.”

    Kristi Eaton contributed reporting from Tulsa, Okla.

    Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 

     


    by artappraiser on Tue, 07/04/2023 - 1:06pm

    Am really getting sick of this shit:

    In addition to a Director of an Equity Hub, the US Treasury now has a Counselor for Racial Equity, a 25-member Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, an Office of Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity, an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion, and will be hiring… pic.twitter.com/YpKfp35iEv

    — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) July 4, 2023

     


    by artappraiser on Tue, 07/04/2023 - 8:31pm

    Leave. Stop being a fucking edgelord. https://t.co/GEuhaUy37N

    — Dwight (@Wightout66) July 4, 2023

    Our ancestors were literally legal cattle in this country.

    If you can’t see the progress from being cattle to now I don’t know what to tell you.

    We can call out systemic inequality without spitting on our ancestors successful push to make our lives better. https://t.co/8h2PJgFt7a

    — Terry Lee Watkins Jr. (@TerryWatkinsJr1) July 5, 2023


    by artappraiser on Tue, 07/04/2023 - 11:03pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 07/04/2023 - 11:29pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 07/04/2023 - 11:32pm

     

    It’s a federal holiday, which means Slow Boring is taking the day off and unlocking a previously paywalled post for all to read. If you enjoy the article and would like to receive the full five posts per week, consider subscribing! 

    ...Yet even though I think it’s pretty broadly acknowledged that this is a bad way to live one’s life, our educational institutions have increasingly created an environment where students are objectively incentivized to cultivate their own fragility as a power move....

     


    by artappraiser on Wed, 07/05/2023 - 1:47am


    by artappraiser on Wed, 07/05/2023 - 5:46pm

    Land acknowledgments are one of the dumbest things on the planet. (Are you doing to give the land back? Didn't think so. Hush up then.) They also illustrate one of the ways "wokeness" is not a religion (or the "successor ideology") as some claim. No Woke High Council thought this…

    — Carl (@HistoryBoomer) July 5, 2023

     


    by artappraiser on Wed, 07/05/2023 - 6:07pm

    "criminalizing black fashion"?!?!?!?


    by artappraiser on Wed, 07/05/2023 - 6:30pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 07/06/2023 - 11:23am


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 07/06/2023 - 9:35pm

    Where the left meets the right and everyone is "woke"

    (They don't all realize it yet, but RFK Jr., not Trump, is their near-perfect presidential candidate?)


    by artappraiser on Fri, 07/07/2023 - 2:37pm

    BLM and other assorted wokees in education, TAKE A BOW, simply amazing results!


    by artappraiser on Mon, 07/10/2023 - 11:35pm

    Not sure what we're looking at or the results I'm supposed to take away. Hispanic students cemented a gain over a decade, while both whites & blacks fell back a decade - blacks a bit more. The white & black curves are largely parallel, just blacks much lower (a grade level? two?)

    So how'd the Hispanics improve their lot - "structurally" or not, could use a bit more of that "racism"


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 07/11/2023 - 2:06am

    I never thought I would be looking back fondly on Snookie, yet here we are:


    by artappraiser on Mon, 07/10/2023 - 11:58pm

    I for one won't.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 07/12/2023 - 2:05am

    example of those who keep claiming it never happened:

    Hear tell that happened in China as well


    by artappraiser on Wed, 07/12/2023 - 7:58pm


    by artappraiser on Wed, 07/12/2023 - 10:44pm

    Idunno, gets into percents & who controls the public discourse, along with timing.

    I recall being understanding about a 2-day burst of protests, vs a months-long Occupy Wall Street-like engagement, especially as concerns busting out storefronts.

    I remember a lefty friend so happy over street taunting of a street preacher, as if that resolved societal issues, acting obnoxious in the name of George Floyd.

    I also remember a days-long WTO protest where after several hours of peaceful chanting, the organized pros showed up for 5 minutes of targeted window breaking, etc 

    Participation in the 2020 protests was huge (5% of the country? More?) If all had been destructive, we wouldn't have cities left.

    So yeah, the ultra-opinionated shaming outside diners and supporting smash-and-grab runs on inner city stores piss me off. But what was the real %, not just the few amplified and retweeted, including the media able to replay the same incident over and over. After all, ACAB arises out of the feeling that these cop abuses are every single day, when we know for example that unwarranted cop shootings (vs the horrific number of civilians shooting civilians) is fairly reasonable in perspective, but the optics, PR, and reluctance to reform when obviously outrageous are typically damaging and unacceptable.

    Again there will be idiots protesting a cop shooting a 14-year-old about to stab a 13-year-old, demanding a social worker be called instead, but what is the actual % and how does that opinion shift as people see crime rates and killings soar?

    (And what was it in 2020?)


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 07/13/2023 - 3:04am

    15 to 26 million participated (roughly 4.5-7% of the population), "up to* (I e. max, but uncertain) $2 billion damage.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 07/13/2023 - 3:10am

    For those who claim leftie's "don't do that" and Dems don't need some Sister Souljah moments, he's got the receipts:


    by artappraiser on Thu, 07/13/2023 - 12:50pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 07/14/2023 - 9:33pm

    So Slate riffs off a nasty tweet from a Trump supporter.

    It's like the Kool Kidz are part of the PR team.

    Go independent journalism!

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 07/14/2023 - 9:59pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 07/16/2023 - 12:48pm


    by artappraiser on Mon, 07/17/2023 - 3:40pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 07/20/2023 - 2:02am


    by artappraiser on Fri, 07/21/2023 - 11:22pm

    Universe 25 rat analogies

    As the anti-woke crowd tries to draw analogies with the supposed modern "feminization" of males, some analysis and perspective on 50/60-yeat-old rat experiments.

    (Note these science-challenged types never extend their reasoning to say Calcutta or Shanghai or Nairobi, only a few nearby supposed example cases they can cherry pick a bit if behavior out of.

    The scary version appeared on my Facebook timeline, and of course had no way to respond, so here's to QAnon cultyah...)

    https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/hvy95y/calhouns_behav...


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 07/22/2023 - 3:32am

    uh oh the big grift is over; does that mean they will be desperately pestering directly to the public more?


    by artappraiser on Sat, 07/22/2023 - 12:50pm


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 07/22/2023 - 9:36pm

    There's stiil plenty of their students out there, so


    by artappraiser on Sat, 07/22/2023 - 10:11pm

    That’s a phrase they can’t stop repeating it’s like a tic

    — Alice So Good (@AliceFromQueens) July 22, 2023

    Is truly sad what wokeness did to NPR.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 07/22/2023 - 10:02pm

    Oh btw, drowning is a tactic that Democratic presidential families like to utilize:


    by artappraiser on Mon, 07/24/2023 - 7:40pm

    also see 18-tweet by 'lapsed historian' Josh Marshall, starting here:


    by artappraiser on Mon, 07/24/2023 - 8:21pm

    obvious wishes wokees would really get *woke* and says it so well and succinctly:


    by artappraiser on Tue, 07/25/2023 - 5:23pm


    by artappraiser on Wed, 07/26/2023 - 1:57pm

    Well that pleases me. I'm prolly awful for feeling such, but so it goes.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/26/2023 - 2:12pm

    "Moralism Is Ruining Cultural Criticism"

    The left has embraced an approach long favored by the evangelical right.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 07/26/2023 - 11:43pm

    Ah, so that's why I'm so positive - the effects of "praise bands" linger in.

    Sadly (but positively!) in the author's rush to whataboutism (yes, of course, Dems even worse than Repubs! Of course!) the author ignores the blatant merging of the House of God with Republicanism from at least Jerry Falwell's time in the 70s (Billy Graham a bit more subtle), we had the inevitable anointing of Trump by Jerry Falwell Jr before he checks out to watch his wife get banged by a pool boy and poses drunkenly (or opioidy?) with his new friend in Jesus's cutoffs coyly (not) unzipped, and well that was the end of his career and largely Liberty U, but the damage had already been done - similar to the background pandering and payoffs to any religiously fundamentalist political pose, the religious schlocking of 1 party was so complete that Trump could show up, stand on 1 foot waving his hands, and walk off with a majority of them's hearts, minds and souls - "he can grab my pussy - for Christ!" became a winning chant for 2016 and 2020+, and Trump owns the Praise party - let us pray(se) - no real need for the God part of the party anymore - Dems bad, GOP anointed, Trump is God's representative on earth. And even his many unChristian habits just endear him to the masses - "unlike perfect Jesus, we're all flawed - Trump represents us better!"

    How the GOP & Protestantism turned Catholic. Watch your pope hat...


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 07/27/2023 - 12:23am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 07/27/2023 - 3:46pm

    Centrist, neoliberal... Fuck me suck make me write bad checks


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 07/27/2023 - 5:47pm

    Whoever can't see how DeSantis' campaign wants and intends exactly that is blind. Dems might as well make poster that says: Wnen you drive with Wokees, you also drive with DeSantis.


    by artappraiser on Fri, 07/28/2023 - 7:00pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 07/28/2023 - 7:05pm

    "He winks at LatinX" - can't fight poetry


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 07/30/2023 - 11:49pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 07/28/2023 - 7:10pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 07/28/2023 - 7:12pm

    (note: he's a Brit)


    by artappraiser on Fri, 07/28/2023 - 10:12pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 07/30/2023 - 1:51pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 07/30/2023 - 3:44pm

    CRT is here to stay among your future leaders; good luck living under this generation, I'll be dead


    by artappraiser on Sun, 07/30/2023 - 2:01pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 07/30/2023 - 3:28pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 07/30/2023 - 3:49pm


    by artappraiser on Tue, 08/01/2023 - 4:13am


    by artappraiser on Tue, 08/01/2023 - 5:12am


    by artappraiser on Fri, 08/04/2023 - 2:34pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 08/04/2023 - 2:46pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 08/04/2023 - 5:42pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 08/04/2023 - 7:31pm

    His campaign still sees gain in continuing to go there:


    by artappraiser on Sat, 08/05/2023 - 4:45pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 08/05/2023 - 4:47pm

    Yeah, that I'm sympathetic that maybe people who built something would be horrified by its modern aesthetic. Conservative German brewers - can only imagine. 

    Think of turning Habitat for Humanity into a no members of X group - I'm sure Carter would be horrified. 


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 08/06/2023 - 1:56pm

    Oh boy, it's looking to be a lovely future for scholars with the "science of decolonizing historical records" leading the way:


    by artappraiser on Sun, 08/06/2023 - 1:49am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 08/06/2023 - 2:28am

    Make no mistake, liberal elite institutons are still pushing "Abolition"


    by artappraiser on Sun, 08/06/2023 - 2:37am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 08/06/2023 - 3:33am

    I find this is a common reaction to the mob/riot in NYC's Union Square.

    America is now being forced to reckon with an entire generation that hates our country, and would gladly burn it down for clicks.

    The societal contract is broken.

    pic.twitter.com/JTVHI2ZxOb

    — Jason Curtis Anderson (@JCAndersonNYC) August 5, 2023

    One thing that is certainly true is that the solidarity coming out of 9/11/01 is totally forgotten, kaput.

    The rest of the coverage I posted is here on the Crime News thread.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 08/06/2023 - 3:50am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 08/06/2023 - 5:40am

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