This is bizarre.
I've noticed indigenous "land acknowledgements" lately, something like, "We hereby acknowledge that this campus resides on stolen land," blah, blah...
Professor Reges ain't taking it.
At the F.I.R.E., "University of Washington: Professor created ‘toxic environment’ by deviating from university-approved language about Native American land."
A great piece, from the fearless Gleen Greenwald, at his Substack page:
The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record. One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed. The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing). She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation. The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.” That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform. That is deliberate. Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way). This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life. But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society’s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter. By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic. During Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet’s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton — there still is not — without being branded a misogynist. A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — also one of the world’s richest and most powerful figures — as she sought the power of the Oval Office...
Still more.
And at Hot Air, "Glenn Greenwald’s Insightful Take on the Taylor Lorenz Situation."
It Is Time to Debate—and End—Identity Politics https://t.co/7cHwsBqMwr— Mike Gonzalez (@Gundisalvus) October 8, 2018
America’s partition into mutually antagonistic identity groups has reached every nook and cranny of society, from sports to education , the corporate world and politics . It has never been openly debated or voted on by the American people, however.Still more.
Identity politics sparks emotional reactions both among its supporters and its detractors because it deals with the larger issues of our day. It is about what convinces people to band together in society and to agree to a common project.
Academics on both sides have spoken past each other, but Americans have never had a political debate on it. For that to happen, politicians on opposing sides would have to debate each other with specifics.
Yes, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton presented broad opposing views on identity politics in 2016—she for it, he against it—but there was no discussion of what it is, how it came about, whether it is a good or bad thing and, if the latter, how to end it.
It’s time to correct this oversight and have that political debate now. Identity politics is a new animal. It is very different from Martin Van Buren knowing how to secure the Dutch vote in the Hudson Valley, or Boss Tweed getting the Irish to vote Democrat.
It instead looks at America through a post–modernist lens of power struggles among groups based on race, ethnicity or sex, but where the individual loses agency. It resegregates America into subnational “protected” groupings whose members receive benefits simply as a consequence of group membership and in whose name self-appointed leaders demand unequal treatment. How this backdoor return to Plessy era distinctions has gone without argument is a major victory of the left that often goes unrecognized.
This is a view of America that diametrically opposes the “We Are All Created Equal” position. The two may be irreconcilable. It may very well be that, just as the country was not large enough in 1860 to encompass the master blueprints of slavery and abolition, America today cannot house these two opposing blueprints. One or the other must win in the (peaceful) marketplace of ideas.
John Locke and those he influenced —which includes the Founding Fathers of America and, two-and-a-half centuries later, the enemies of identity politics—are convinced to leave the state of nature and create a society by their mutual need to secure natural rights. One of the most basic of those rights is that we’re all “born free and equal,” in the words of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights.
Around these principles there emerged in the United States a creed and a culture which formed “One People.” Immigrants were expected to assimilate into such an overall national culture (which had geographic pockets to be sure), accept the creed and adapt to civic life.
To the supporters of identity politics, what causes Americans today to band into subnational clans is the need to tear down “structural racism” and the hegemony of white, male, able-bodied heterosexuals. And to advocates of identity politics, it was Lockean thought and the Founding Fathers’ creed and culture that produced white dominion.
As Courtney Jung, one of the leading thinkers of identity politics, once said, “One’s ability to get oneself heard in a democratic system crucially depends on whether one can claim membership in a group with a preexisting political weight, or forge a group identity with new political weight. In contemporary politics, race, gender and ethnicity have developed such a weight.”
Moreover, according to Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on equality, “There is a danger of (strict) equality leading to uniformity, rather than to a respect for pluralism and democracy. In the contemporary debate, this complaint has been mainly articulated in feminist and multiculturalist theory.” Citing various studies, the entry says, “‘Equality’ can often mean the assimilation to a pre-existing and problematic ‘male’ or ‘white’ or ‘middle class’ norm. In short, domination and a fortiori inequality often arises [sic] out of an inability to appreciate and nurture differences—not out of a failure to see everyone as the same.”
Some Americans believe that the current division of their country into ethnic, racial and sexual groups (Hispanics, Asians, gender) responds to a grassroots desire to seek dignity and that such a dispensation was arrived at after transparent and political debate.
They would be very wrong on both counts...
#JamesDamore you are a hero for being brave enough to dare to have a "wrong" opinion/thought, and openly sharing it. I salute you. pic.twitter.com/jEIwZHStnL
— Danacuss (@DAWoodPangaea) August 8, 2017
The lone wolf is the new nightmare, dramatized and amplified this week by the hostage-taking attack in Sydney. But there are two kinds of lone wolves — the crazy and the evil — and the distinction is important.Still more.
The real terrorists are rational. Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, had been functioning as an Army doctor for years. Psychotics cannot carry that off. Hasan even had a business card listing his occupation as SoA (Soldier of Allah). He then went out and, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” shot dead 13 people, 12 of them fellow soldiers. To this day, Hasan speaks coherently and proudly of the massacre. That’s terrorism.
Sydney’s Man Haron Monis, on the other hand, was a marginal, alienated Iranian immigrant with a cauldron of psychopathologies. Described by his own former lawyer as “unhinged,” Monis was increasingly paranoid. He’d been charged as accessory to the murder of his ex-wife and convicted of sending threatening letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers.
His religiosity was both fanatical and confused. A Shiite recently converted to Sunni Islam, his Internet postings showed not just the zeal of the convert but a remarkable ignorance of Islam and Islamism. He even brought the wrong Islamic banner to the attack. He had to ask the authorities to provide him with an Islamic State flag.
Which led to a frantic search to find an Islamic State connection or conspiracy. But for the disturbed like Monis, the terror group does not provide instructions, it provides a script. It offers the disoriented and deranged a context, a purpose, a chance even at heroism.
I suspect this is the case with most of the recent cluster of lone-wolf terrorist incidents, from the beheading of a co-worker in Oklahoma to the Queens ax attack on New York City police. We fear these attackers because the psychopathological raw material is everywhere, in the interstices of every society. Normally in and out of mental hospitals, in and out of homelessness, some are now redirected to find a twisted redemption in terror.
Nonetheless, in the scheme of things, the crazies are limited in what they can carry out. They are too disorganized to do more than localized, small-scale damage. The larger danger is the Maj. Hasan with his mental faculties intact and his purpose unwavering.
The still greater threat is organized terror, as we were reminded just hours after Sydney by the Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar that killed at least 148, mostly children...
The long reach of Islamist terror hit another Western city on Monday with a siege in downtown Sydney, and we should expect more like it as Islamic State (ISIS) tries to mobilize adherents across the world.More.
Iranian-born Man Haron Monis, a self-styled sheikh with a long criminal history, held dozens of hostages in a cafe while claiming to have bombs on the premises. Police stormed the restaurant and killed Monis after negotiations failed; two hostages died and four were injured.
News reports say Monis targeted the Lindt Chocolate Cafe days after he lost the appeal of his conviction for harassing families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. He also had more than 40 charges pending for sexually assaulting women while posing as a “spiritual healer,” and as an accessory to the murder last year of his ex-wife, who was stabbed and burned.
The cafe Monis attacked is part of Martin Place, a pedestrian mall near local government offices, the U.S. Consulate and major commercial towers. In September police arrested ISIS sympathizers said to be planning a public beheading there as a “demonstration killing.” Monis initially forced hostages to hold an Islamist black flag in the cafe window, then demanded that police provide him with a flag of ISIS, according to Australian media reports.
Monis’s apparent affection for ISIS is shared by a disturbing number of other Australians. Some 70 have had their passports confiscated recently for fear they may travel overseas to fight for ISIS. One such sympathizer stabbed two Melbourne police officers in September and was shot dead. Days before, an ISIS spokesman had called for “lone-wolf” attacks world-wide, including in Australia, and authorities in Canberra raised the country’s threat level to high from medium. This summer an estimated 150 Australians joined ISIS in the Middle East, including a former Sydney resident who posted photographs of his 7-year-old son holding a severed head.
Jihadists haven’t mounted a catastrophic attack in Australia, though not for lack of trying. In the past decade authorities Down Under have uncovered plots against military facilities, a sports arena and the electric grid. Terrorists have had more success targeting Aussies overseas, killing nearly 100 in attacks on the Indonesian resort island of Bali and Jakarta’s Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels. Eleven Indonesians died in a 2009 car bombing at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.
Australia has been America’s staunchest ally in fighting terrorism, deploying troops to Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iraq again. As a liberal democracy with large immigrant communities and Indonesia’s population of 250 million on its doorstep, Australia understands the stakes of the West’s long war against Islamist extremism.
The threat from ISIS in particular needs to be understood as extending far beyond the territory it controls, because ISIS successes in the Middle East could motivate radicals everywhere...
Islamic supremacists and their leftwing lapddpgs didn’t even wait for the bodies to be counted in the latest jihad slaughter in Sydney before the propaganda putsch began — “fear of reprisals” (which never happen), “islamophobia” and “backlash-o-phobia.”RTWT.
I wrote this column this past weekend — before a Muslim terrorist in Sydney, Australia stormed a popular Chocolate shop/cafe. It rings truer still now, in the wake of the Sydney jihad bloodshed.
The scarred, leather-faced tank commander, Don “Wardaddy” Collier (an aggressively deglamorized Brad Pitt), butchers a solitary German officer rather than take him prisoner [in the opening scene]. A short time later, he not only decides to shoot an SS man who surrenders to him, but he forces — in an excruciatingly prolonged scene — a jittery clerk-typist, Private Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), to pull the trigger. “Don’t make me do this!” weeps Ellison as Collier slaps him and wrestles him into position to fire a bullet into the head of a man who has pulled out photos of his wife and children and is begging for his life. And then — blam!"Weeps Ellison." OMG terrible. Just terrible!
Here’s the long and short of it: Fury is probably the best Hollywood WW2 movie since “Saving Private Ryan.” It has courage. It has heart. It is intentionally upsetting. It has unrelenting battle scenes that will have you on the edge of your seat and more than slightly repulsed at the carnage. It has an underlying message of resistance to evil, devotion to faith and ethics that viewers can accept or ignore. The film works as Grand Guignol just as well as it works as a religious statement.Word, brother. Mother f-king Word.
Fury left me deeply moved and more admiring than ever of the Greatest Generation. More than anything, it left me shaking my head about the nation we have become, and how we became such a pale imitation of what we once were.
Evil exists, which is unfortunate, but a reality nonetheless. And to acknowledge as much doesn’t blame either the victim or society at large. When women are harmed, it is not because a “rape culture” is embedded in our society. It’s because of the existence of evil. Denying the existence of evil does not erase it, just as denying the race of those responsible does not erase racism. It only serves to protect evil, allowing it to strike again. And that denial sets a frightening and dangerous precedent for any reporting, especially that of violent crime.That quote doesn't quite do, ahem, justice, so RTWT.
Bullying kids into believing there is no such thing as gender: Good Terrorizing kids about drawing guns or engaging in any fantasy play about weapons: Bad and needing psychiatric “help.”Click through for the full report.
Tar, feathers and a rail just doesn’t seem to enough to visit upon these child abusers.
