Tag: anti-woke

Here’s a Blueprint for Fixing Red State Colleges

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Ron DeSantis has provided proof of concept for disinfecting a college of its woke parasites.  The writer of this article goes through the why and the how of doing this to every Red State public college.  and he shows that even the private ones can be stopped from many of their worst excesses by anti-discrimination laws that prevent many of the equity hiring practices.

He draws attention to the fact that although college administrators were willing to adopt the progressive agenda of the woke movement, nevertheless they are easily cowed into following the mandates of the state that pays their salaries.  They’ll probably pay lip service to the cultural marxist outrage professed by the gender studies department but they’ll bend to the mandates of the governor and the legislature to keep their jobs and the gravy train of pension benefits.

And the same goes for the academics.  They know where their bread is buttered and they’ll back down and toe the line rather than lose their generous salaries and fabulous perks.  Kudos ot Ron DeSantis for pioneering this concept.  May all the other Red State governors copy his play book and rid half the country of woke campuses.

Elon and the Deplorables

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Elon Musk has jumped into the middle of the culture war with both feet you could say.  He’s spent fifty-five billion dollars buying a company that the Left thinks must belong to them and that has ticked off the powers that be.  He’s refused to disenfranchise the various deniers; COVID, climate, election, you name it.  He’s even pardoned Donald Trump.  And now he’s unbanned everyone who hasn’t broken the law getting kicked off.  He’s a heretic and must be punished!

Essentially, he’s embraced the deplorables.  Why?  I have a theory.

I think Elon Musk sees an opportunity.  The cultural divide in the United States is a powerful force.  And power, if harnessed correctly is one of the most valuable commodities there is.  The endless conflict between the Left and Right on Twitter is far from a useful activity.  Nevertheless, it is an energetic process.  It doesn’t produce much light but it does produce heat.  And heat is a kind of energy.  And it attracts attention and in some ways that was the main product that Twitter sold during the Trump presidency.  Even with the biased treatment of the two political sides there was an active interest in the antics on Twitter.

And yet Twitter never made any money.  And as the field of battle on Twitter became more and more tilted against the Right it lost more and more money.  I think Elon realized that Twitter was run by very stupid people that had no clue how to harness the tool they’d been given by the government.  After all, the big tech companies exist because the intelligence agencies subsidize their operation in order to use their data feeds as surveillance resources.

I think he realized that if someone smart were running things a profit could be extracted from the operation.  And I’m only guessing, but I suspect he would like to use the outsider status of the deplorables as a marketing mechanism.  Here is an enormous pool of people who have been demonized, mocked and whose purchase preferences have been the target of a campaign of eradication.  Think about it.  Hollywood, television and the major corporations have outlawed anything that doesn’t wholeheartedly embrace and display the woke message.  Old movies and shows have to be remade just to insert abnormal sexual lifestyles and minority characters.  In fact, Hollywood has an actual quota system for actors and production crew.  Straight white men need not apply.

Suppose Elon has decided that this large unappreciated market that is just sitting, waiting for someone to embrace it could make him a lot of money.  Wouldn’t he be the obvious person to take advantage?  And the beauty of it is he doesn’t even have to lose the other part of the market.  He doesn’t have to reject the woke.  All he needs to do is provide an option for each side.

Door Number One could be the present woke system.  It would have all the rainbow and BLM flags flying in the breeze.  There would be trans this, trans that and trans the other thing as far as the eye could see.  Basically, he just links to Disney and Amazon.  But to take advantage of the other half of the world it would require Door Number Two.

It could be a tiny button with a huge warning label that cautioned the general public that down this path are forbidden things.  Books and movies where the cowboys are the good guys and Thomas Jefferson isn’t a monster.  There would be historical dramas about Rome and Greece, Tudor England and the Age of Exploration, where all the actors were (gasp!) white.  It would have an explicit bias toward normalcy and it would be unabashedly proud of the western tradition.  Even Christopher Columbus would still have a place of honor.  Every boy meets girl plot line would feature a real boy and a real girl.  Oh, the horror.  Someone alert GLAAD.

So, Elon Musk is positioned to take advantage of almost half the population looking for someone to sponsor them and sell them things that somehow are now forbidden.  He could be the Jeff Bezos of the Right. His Lord of the Rings series wouldn’t have to have trans-hobbits and boss-girl Galadriel.  He could just follow the books.  His payment system could be PayPal or it could be his own.  And it could be a bank and a crowd funding platform too.  As he’s said he could have his own cell-phone company too.  None of this stuff is rocket science and he is a rocket scientist!  All these things could be packaged to people who currently feel left out by the woke business world.  All he has to do is take our money and get richer.

So, think about it Elon.  Currently you’re losing a billion dollars a year catering to woke snowflakes who spend all their time complaining about their feelings and are too cheap to pay eight dollars a month to be certified on your website that they spend all their time on.  Or you can sell things to people who like to pay cash, believe two plus two equals four, can tell the difference between a man and a woman and only ask for the minimum of respect.  It’s a pretty easy choice.

To Paraphrase Huey Lewis and the News, “It’s Hip to be Unwoke.”

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According to the New York Times there is a troubling trend among some avant-garde kids to assume the trappings of traditional institutions, like the Catholic crucifix, and defy the virtue signaling mantra of their generation’s elite guardians.  So, the Times is looking for a sleuth to ferret out the details of this heresy and hopefully expose the malefactors so that they can be properly punished and then allowed to recant and declare their love for Big Brother.

This New York Times project is described in an article in the City Journal that goes on to try and explain these young rebels as the first fruits of a rebellion of the young against the dominant culture which in this case is the current all encompassing orthodoxy of woke-ism.  In other words, these young people are organizing a counter-culture against what used to be described as the Left’s counter-culture against western civilization.

The author states: “Few things are more natural for young people than to push back against the strictures and norms of their day, even if only to stand out a little from the crowd and assert their independence. A counterculture forms as a reaction against an official or dominant culture—and today, it is the woke neoliberal Left that occupies this position in America’s cultural, educational, technological, corporate, and bureaucratic power centers. In this culture, celebration of ritualized, old forms of transgression is not only permitted, but practically mandatory. Dissent against state-sponsored transgression, however, is now transgressive. All of what was once revolutionary is now a new orthodoxy, with conformity enforced by censorship, scientistic obscurantism, and eager witch-hunters (early-middle-aged, zealously dour, tight-lipped frown, NPR tote bag, rainbow “Coexist” bumper sticker, pronouns in email signature—we all know the uniform).”

Apparently, these young rebels can be found in trendy areas of lower Manhattan and their cachet as members of the avant-garde worries the gatekeepers of public morality at the Times and the author equates this worry with genuine peril that the youth among the elites could be corrupted and driven over to the dark side where one day they would produce a new consensus to shift the balance of power away from the monolithic progressive world view.  And a new regime could populate the Deep State with acolytes of the Dissident Right.

Well, I don’t know about that.  I know that Curtis Yarvin is interested in the lower Manhattan scene being discussed and he is of the opinion that the only way to neutralize the Deep State is to peacefully displace it with a new elite.  But in both of these examples I wonder at the circumstances and the time line that would bring about such a transformation.  Some kids in Manhattan adopting Christian symbology isn’t a bad thing but what is the larger significance?  Do these young people hope to change the values that guide modern life?  Are they looking to traditional values to give meaning to their existence?  And how many people are we talking about?  A handful, a few thousand or a growing trend?

And what will be the reaction of the gatekeepers?  I’m sure they’re already busy looking to siphon off any discontented teens with a Tik-Tok influencer who sports a trans-friendly pseudo-Catholic rosary that involves anti-Pope Francis’ official rainbow seal of approval.

I guess, on balance, any fear on the part of the official organs of the state like the Times is a good and promising symptom.  Therefore, I won’t rain on their parade.  But I think I’ll wait to celebrate until I see some larger more widespread evidence that the Zoomers have begun to rebel.  Possibly the “Let’s go Brandon” cheers (or their actual words) at football games could be interpreted as the first real sign of popular unrest of the young against the Left.  But I’ve assumed that was more of a reaction to the COVID lockdowns by the Biden administration and not a general anti-woke reaction.  We’ll need to see clearer signs such as voting trends or support for traditional institutions like religion and marriage.

But I’ll end by saying that anything that hints at the young abandoning the woke cult is encouraging.  Even if it’s a minority movement, it’s a start.

Another Small Step Toward Holding Woke Organizations Accountable

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First the Ohio Appeals Court Upholds $31 Million Award Against Oberlin College for calling innocent people racists.  Now another Ohio college has to pay a professor $400,000 for trying to force him to kowtow to the “pronoun” speech dictates of delusional students.  What is it with Ohio colleges?

This needs to happen more and more.  After enough colleges are bankrupted through lawsuits, they’ll start towing the line.  If the spineless “conservatives” on the Supreme Court were not mostly useless they’d spend the next year clearing out all the unconstitutional things going on in the country and rid us of our woke masters.  But in the meantime, it looks like the solution is more lawyers who know how to hit these people where it hurts, in the wallet.  Although I have to confess, I’d prefer if these were criminal cases where the perpetrators could go to prison for a decade or two.

What I really wish is that I lived in a state like Florida where they are addressing these problems head on with laws and government actions against the perpetrators.  Keep it up people.  If enough action is taken, we’ll start seeing this stuff rolled back.

08AUG2021 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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So the big news is I’ll be busy testing out my A-Mount lenses on the LA-EA5 adapter.  But I’ll keep up with what’s going on in the world.

The two headlines that caught my eye this morning are:

2 Chicago police officers shot, 1 killed in West Englewood shooting

I watched the clip and listened to pop-eyed Lori Lightfoot emoting for the shot cops.  Really kind of hard to believe she has the best interests of the police officers or the wider public in mind.  I will say she seems burnt out.  I doubt she runs for re-election.  Not that anyone would elect her at this point.  She is the poster child for a law and order rebound in Chicago’s future.  But maybe I’m wrong.  The numbers at this point may be for the gangs to run Chicago.  And I say let them have it.  Anyone who stays in the big cities has a death wish.

NBC sees ‘worst case scenario’ as Olympics ratings plunge amid ‘woke’ protests

I was reading the comments and the overwhelming majority opinion is that NBC and the sponsors got exactly what they deserved.  Whoever is still watching the “Hate America” Olympics is the woke sports viewer.  Apparently they’re not a big enough crowd for money to be made by sponsors and advertisers.  Good.  Come back when you can make believe you love America.  But at that point the number of suckers will be a pretty small number.  They’ve killed the goose that lays the golden eggs.  Now they can pound sand.

Well, the COVID harpies are pushing for vaccine passports and masks again.  They’ll be torturing small children going to school this year.  So far they haven’t forced the grocery stores and retail stores to force their patrons to either prove they’re vaccinated and/or wear a mask but it’s probably in the cards.

But I just attended a family get together yesterday and despite the nervousness of certain folks we didn’t have any mask nonsense or even waste any time talking about it.  Hopefully we’re past all that at this point.

Well, off to do some camera work.  Stay tuned.

What Happens When Your Identity is Declared Evil?

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Whiteness, White Privilege, Unconscious Bias, Systemic Racism, Critical Race Theory.  What they say it all means is that just by being myself I am doing wrong.  What they want me to do is spend all my time somehow atoning for being me.  I need to give up my culture, heritage and history and pretend that I believe the lies about those things they say and grovel and pay reparations forever for being me.  Sounds wonderful.

I am aware that there are white people who will do this.  Maybe there are a lot of them.  But at the same time there are a lot who won’t.  And if the powers that be and the cultural trend setters declare this to be the cultural norm of our society then these people who won’t submit will become a separate culture.  We will celebrate different holidays; worship develop different customs and eventually use a different language.  And already we see this happening.  What hasn’t happened yet is the result of this.  Some of the results will be separate religions, separate schools and specialty businesses to cater to the needs of this separate identity.  The schools and religions will need books and videos and other instructional materials to teach the beliefs that are forbidden in the outside culture.  In the case of the present Woke Culture it means that foods will be differentiated too.  Our people will eat meat while the Woke will be eating bugs or at best tofu.  Even our cars and homes will be different.  We’ll be driving gasoline powered vehicles and they will be charging up their battery cars and mostly driving bicycles.  We will be living in homes heated by gas or oil and they will be living in underground dugouts buried under a sod roof full of cockroaches and warming themselves by a solar and wind powered space heater.

In fact, we will need parallel companies to provide us with much of what we need.  We’ll even need our own companies to employ us.  After all we’ll be untouchables.  No self-respecting woke corporation will employ a white man who doesn’t submit to a weekly struggle session where he confesses some new atrocity to his BIPOC coworkers.

All this seems excessive.  After all, why not just work for Google and buy your crap from Amazon?  Many will, maybe most.  But there will be a good-sized minority who just won’t do it.  And for them being a shunned minority may just be the best option available.  There are advantages to being separate.  Once you unplug from the dominant culture you can avoid the irritants that exist in the outside.  Once your children attend their own schools and churches you will be automatically selecting for the kind of friends and eventually mates they will have.  And outside communities tend to work together closely on political and community initiatives that impact them.

But most of all you will be avoiding the impact of the toxic narrative that woke culture aims at your children.  Telling young people that their parents and ancestors are evil is about the worst thing you can do to someone’s community.  And we’ve been putting up with this to a higher and higher degree for the last seventy-five years.  It is time to admit that trying to reform the whole culture is an impossibility.  The Elites have the reins of power and all the means of education and communication at their disposal against us.  All that’s left to us are our families and our minds.  We need to consciously define ourselves as separate and embrace our old culture and break away from the woke culture in every way we can.  And we’ll be all the better because of it.

Coinbase and Base Camp Have Spawned an Anti-Woke Movement

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Hat tip to Vox Day for the link to this article.  Although he thinks this centrist approach is doomed to failure.

“Mission Protocol” is the watchword that a number of Silicon Valley companies have adopted to describe their policy of outlawing woke activism from their work day.  These CEO’s aren’t conservatives by any stretch of the imagination but they are capitalists and they’ve identified woke activism as a money loser for their companies.  They’ve seen the activist employees divert energy and focus away from the core functions of their businesses and they want to put a stop to it.  And now that a couple of companies have tried it and succeeded the rest of them are interested and some of them seem to be following suit.

Vox sees it as too little too late but I think it’s hopeful if the mindset in one of the most important and youth-oriented sides of the business world is waking up to the fact that letting mentally ill people run your company is the best way to kill your company.  Imagine if it percolates down to dinosaurs like Coke and Pepsi that they don’t have to let HR run their enterprise based on woke sensibilities and marxist dogma.  Hell, they might even start growing their businesses again!

 

 

Merging Identity Politics with Color Blind Policies

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The Dissident Right’s agenda is defined by two facts that they broadcast pretty constantly.  One is that the United States will soon be a minority majority voting population.  The other is that we are not going to vote our way out of the Left’s control.

The demographics of the first assertion seem very likely.  The second proposition revolves around the fact that other ethnicities will vote their own self interests and that they will be convinced that the Democrat agenda represents those self-interests.  I’m not going to state categorically that they are wrong on this second point.  After all, the Democrats get close to 90% of the black vote and the majority of the other non-white ethnic votes.  But even if we despair of winning the national vote for President, within the swing states it seems worthwhile to look at how the ethnic vote could be added to a coalition.

The first thing that should be admitted is that prying the black vote away from the Democrats, even in a Red State is probably an impossibility, at least for the foreseeable future.  And with the recent polarization caused by BLM and Antifa the real question concerning the black population is whether they will be willing to live peaceably with their neighbors at all.  But let’s look at the rest of the ethnic populations.

While it is true that the Democrats have managed to coopt the votes of the Asian and Latino voters pretty successfully in the past it is worth thinking about what the current political realities mean for this existing pattern.  And the woke political policies I mean to concentrate on is the current campaign to delegitimize the police and the reverse discrimination tactic called equity.

First the police.  Even in places like Portland OR and Minneapolis MN where the majority of the citizens are hopeless bug men who yearn for a society where muggers, rapists and murderers are judged not by their crimes but by the color of their skins I bet there is a very healthy sized population of normal people who yearn to escape from the madness of BLM protests and the associated lawless reign of terror.  And not so surprisingly I bet there are plenty of Asian and Latino people among them who wish this nightmare would end and life would return to normal.  And of course, there are black people living in this mess who also wish it would end but they’re stuck in their communities and that’s a problem for another day.  To my way of thinking the political message that should be broadcast to the ethnic communities is that living in a woke community means law enforcement cannot restrain the threat from criminals in the black community.

Next comes equity.  The easiest piece of equity to target is what it means for education.  The schools will be dumbed down to avoid “white supremacist ideas” like 2 + 2 = 4.  Some people will claim that only the Asian parents will respond to this second condition but I feel that even many Latino parents are unhappy with the prospect of sending their kids to be taught mush instead of STEM.  After all, even those illegals from Guatemala come here because there’s money to be made.  And they know that education is the key to advancement.

The reason this strategy should work with the non-black minority communities is because woke policies cater almost exclusively to one population, blacks.  And because of this it disadvantages all the rest of the ethnic groups, not just whites.  What other group benefits from black criminals being allowed to rampage through a city.  None.  Everyone else pays the price and it is a steep one.  A clever politician should be able to sell an anti-equity platform to everyone but the black population.

But let’s say that in the swing states the minorities stubbornly cling to the Democrat woke alliance.  Then it is doubly important that the Red States clearly declare that color blind impartiality is the rule for all state-run activities.  In fact, now that the feds and the Blue States have gone all in for “equity” it’s the perfect time to push things back all the way to total color blindness.  In other words, no more reverse discrimination, no more affirmative action, no more quotas, no nothing.  Push back is the right thing at this point.

So that’s the way I think these things should go.  But to do any of this we need real leaders with courage and brains.  We probably should recruit the Wizard of Oz to provide the gifts he gave the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow to all the Red State governors and legislators.  And while he’s at it he might as well give them a heart too.

Apocalypse Basecamp: The Comedy

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Casey Newton of “The Verge” publishes the details of the Zoom meeting where the woke employees have a meltdown when a somewhat conservative manager disputes their definition of white supremacy.  It’s hilarious and maddening at the same time.  The only sad point is that the conservative manager also resigned from Basecamp.  I take that as a definite negative for the whole thing.  If he had stayed it would have been the cherry on the float.

Well, just read the thing.  Understand that Newton is extremely sympathetic to the wokesters and so take that into account with respect to any statements of opinion on motives or judgement.

Here’s the summation at the end.

“But as much as the conversation about Basecamp’s moves has been framed as “politics,” it seems important to remember that the entire affair began when a third of the company — not all of whom are among the 20 who have departed so far, by the way — volunteered to help the company become more diverse and equitable. It was only when their committee dug a skeleton out of the company closet — that list of names — that Fried and Hansson moved to shut the whole thing down.

“It was actually a positive thing we were doing,” one employee told me, marveling at the chaos that had followed. “We had identified the problem, how it happened, and vowed not to do it again. It was a company doing exactly what it should do. The founders refused to lead, and so the company was doing it itself.”

Another employee said they had been thrown by the fact that the founders, after years of telling employees that they were part of an elite chosen few who were good enough to work at Basecamp, would get rid of them so easily.

“They just want to build cool shit all day,” the employee said. “They don’t want to deal with people, which is something you have to do as a manager … Jason and David just threw us away.””

I was saddened to read that not all of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council has resigned.  That, I see, as the real tragedy.  But hopefully the owners are wiser for their sad experience and will stamp out any sparks of wokeism if the appear again.

I think the lesson for the rest of us is that even non-conservatives recognize that a woke presence in a business is poison and unless you suppress its activities it will destroy your company right before your eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

Boy, I Wish I Worked for Basecamp

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Hat tip (second in two days) to Vox Day

Basecamp is a software company and their CEO has decided to get their employees out of the social justice outrage business.  See here and here.  And more than just abstaining from political and social justice topics on the company communication channels, he made a bunch of other sensible and efficient changes.

  • No more societal and political discussions on company account
  • No more paternalistic benefits.
  • No more committees
  • No more 360 reviews.
  • No forgetting what we do here

I had heard about Coinbase doing something similar a while back about political discussions.  Maybe corporations are realizing just how disruptive allowing and even favoring a particular political opinion can be to a company’s bottom line.

I can attest to just how aggravating it is working for a company that allows the SJW’s to infiltrate and finally control the environment that a company surrounds its employees in.  I know people who have left high paying and interesting jobs because of the toxic environment the woke corporation have produced.