Tag: political correctness

A SATANIC REBELLION

The last time Lucien Greaves got into this much trouble over a photograph, he had his genitals out.

In July 2013, Greaves gained nationwide media attention for resting his scrotum on the gravestone of the Reverend Fred Phelps’s mother—a stunt designed to protest the homophobia of the Westboro Baptist Church, an ultra-conservative group that was then regularly featured on the news. Greaves was trading offense for offense. Phelps’s church had a habit of protesting soldiers’ funerals with placards telling gay people that they were going to hell. So Greaves claimed to have performed a “Pink Mass” that turned the mother of Westboro’s patriarch gay in the afterlife.

The stunt was typical of Greaves and of the Satanic Temple, or TST, the group that he had co-founded months earlier. The Temple uses Greaves’s talent for the profane and the outrageous, along with strategic lawsuits, to target Christianity’s special status in American public life. Think of it as the ACLU with pentagrams. Greaves himself is a striking figure, charismatic and droll, pale and slender, usually dressed in black, often wearing a bulletproof vest and dark glasses. His name—or rather, his pseudonym, because his real name is Doug—shows up on Fox News chyrons, legal filings, and envelopes containing death threats. For a decade, he has been a master of carefully calibrated provocation. More recently, though, the people he’s offended have been his own congregation.

This past June, he posed for his second-most-controversial photograph, standing in front of a statue of Baphomet at the Temple’s headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts. The problem wasn’t the nine-foot bronze monument, which features adoring children gazing up at the occult goat deity—and which was then decorated with rainbow balloons in honor of Pride month. The problem wasn’t what Greaves was wearing, either—this time, he was fully clothed. The problem was the man next to him: David Silverman, a former president of the organization American Atheists. “Great to see you again and thanks as always for your activism!” Silverman wrote when he tweeted out the photo.

Greaves barely registered the existence of the photograph at first: “I have a lot of engagement on Twitter,” he told me. But in the small world of radical atheist activism, the image was instantly divisive. Silverman had been pushed out of American Atheists several years earlier amid accusations of sexual misconduct, which he denied, and he had drawn criticism more recently for arguing that it wasn’t transphobic to say, in reference to transgender rights, “[live] your life as you see fit, but stay out of women’s showers and don’t groom kids.”

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BBC Cancels Event Of Singer Who Criticized Puberty-Blocking Drugs

The Telegraph is reporting that the BBC has removed Irish singer Róisín Murphy from a prepared feature radio broadcast.

The reason is a comment opposing puberty-blocking drugs. While I understand why such criticism is deeply hurtful to some, it is also political speech. Artists should be able to hold opposing views. I would feel the same way if BBC blocked an artist for supporting puberty-blocking drugs. However, these controversies evidence an orthodoxy that seems to only run against those on one side in this and other issues.

Murphy’s comment on social media was reportedly leaked by a friend last month. In the posting, she wrote “Puberty blockers are f—ing, absolutely desolate, big pharma laughing all the way to the bank. Little mixed-up kids are vulnerable and need to be protected, that’s just true.”

She added:

“Please don’t call me a TERF, please don’t keep using that word against women.”

We have seen cancel campaigns launched against figures like J.K. Rowling as TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) for criticizing transgender policies.

The same inexorable pattern emerged for Murphy. They have targeted her new album for boycotts simply because they disagree on the issue. The Guardian declared that the album was now “compromised” and “for many fans, particularly queer fans, this album is DOA [dead on arrival].”

BBC insists that the cancellation was due to other factors, but many have their doubts.  What is clear is that a full boycott campaign is now being launched despite Murphy offering a full-throated apology for uttering opposing views:

“I have been thrown into a very public discourse in an arena I’m uncomfortable in and deeply unsuitable for. I cannot apologise enough for being the reason for this eruption of damaging and potentially dangerous social-media fire and brimstone. To witness the ramifications of my actions and the divisions it has caused is heartbreaking.

I will now completely bow out of this conversation within the public domain. I’m not in the slightest bit interested in turning it into ANY kind of ‘campaign’, because campaigning is not what I do… My true calling is music and music will never exclude any of us.”

What is alarming is that artists must now repeat approved positions on political and social issues or, as here, pledge to remain silent in order to be artists.

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‘Empty shelves with absolutely no books’: Students, parents question school board’s library weeding process

Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

Those are all examples of books Reina Takata says she can no longer find in her public high school library in Mississauga, Ont., which she visits on her lunch hour most days.

In May, Takata says the shelves at Erindale Secondary School were full of books, but she noticed that they had gradually started to disappear. When she returned to school this fall, things were more stark.

“This year, I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books,” said Takata, who started Grade 10 last week. 

She estimates more than 50 per cent of her school’s library books are gone. 

In the spring, Takata says students were told by staff that “if the shelves look emptier right now it’s because we have to remove all books [published] prior to 2008.” 

Takata is one of several Peel District School Board (PDSB) students, parents and community members CBC Toronto spoke to who are concerned about a seemingly inconsistent approach to a new equity-based book weeding process implemented by the board last spring in response to a provincial directive from the Minister of Education. 

They say the new process, intended to ensure library books are inclusive, appears to have led some schools to remove thousands of books solely because they were published in 2008 or earlier.

Parents and students are looking for answers as to why this happened, and what the board plans to do moving forward.

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Local outlet calls on Providence, Rhode Island to ‘sever any and all official ties’ with HP Lovecraft

Providence, Rhode Island has officially designated September 10 Edward Mitchell Bannister Day as a tribute to the trailblazing 19th-century African-American painter. While some simply celebrated the move, others used it as an opportunity to suggest that the city’s other artistic giant, HP Lovecraft, should be canceled. 

GoLocal Providence ran an editorial piece on Monday urging Providence to erase any trace of the acclaimed horror author, citing statements he had made about black people and Jews.

“With the celebration of African Bannister’s contributions to the city’s vibrant art community, Providence, once, and for all, needs to sever any and all official ties to Lovecraft,” the outlet wrote. To not do so undermines the city’s efforts to celebrate its racially and ethnically diverse past and present.”

While the authors described Lovecraft as a “talented horror writer,” they accused him of also being a “documented anti-Semite and racist,” pointing out that there is an online game wherein players have to choose whether a given quote is attributable to him or Adolf Hitler.

“These weren’t the ‘antiquated’ musings of America’s slave-holding founding fathers; nor were they of the Civil War era,” they explained. “They were the beliefs of a documented racist and anti-Semite well into the 20th century, at the very moment the seeds were being sewn for the Second World War and the Holocaust.”

The authors cited Lovecraft’s claims that black people were “fundamentally … biological inferior of all white and even mongolian races,” as well as one instance where he wrote that, “Just as some otherwise normal men hate the sight or presence of a cat, so have I hated the presence of a Jew.”

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Shakespeare’s Macbeth Branded as Racist for Themes Like ‘Darkness’

William Shakespeare’s Macbeth has been accused by an academic hosted by the Globe Theatre of being “racialised” with references to “darkness”.

In the latest instalment of ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare’ webinars hosted by the Bard’s Globe Theatre in London, assistant professor of English at Trinity University in Texas Kathryn Vomero Santos declared that the language in Macbeth demonstrates the alleged racial bias of the 17th century playwright.

According to comments reported by the Daily Mail, Vomero Santos claimed in the discussion that the use of words such as bat, beetle, black, and night could be seen as examples of “racialised” language in the play that examines the corrupting nature of power.

Pointing to a scene in which the lead character is referred to as “black Macbeth”, the American academic reportedly said: “I think that it’s important to help our students to see the ways in which a play we might not recognise immediately as a ‘race play’ is relying on racialised language and playing on the dichotomy of whiteness and blackness and dark and light.”

The professor was backed up by playwright Migdalia Cruz, who said of the use of words such as Jew, Moor, and Turk within the play:  “A lot of people cut those things and I thought, I am not going to make him not a racist, he is a racist – but a racist of his time. Everyone in his time were racists.”

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Call of Duty to snoop on players for ‘hate speech’

Games publisher Activision has announced that it will use artificial intelligence to listen in on the voice chat of ‘Call of Duty’ players and punish anyone using “hate speech” or “discriminatory language.” 

The feature was rolled out on Wednesday for US players of Call Of Duty’s ‘Modern Warfare II’ and ‘Warzone’ titles, and will be launched globally with ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III’ on November 10.

In a statement on Wednesday, Activision said that it will use a machine learning tool to “identify in real-time and enforce against toxic speech,” including “hate speech, discriminatory language, harassment and more.” 

Activision’s announcement made no distinction between private chat among teammates and public chat audible to all players in a server. Presumably, both will be subject to the same monitoring.

Call Of Duty’s code of conduct bans insults based on race, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, culture, faith, and country of origin. Players deemed to have breached this code of conduct will be punished with temporary voice chat restrictions, temporary account bans, or permanent bans for repeat offenders, Activision said.

Around 90 million gamers worldwide play Call of Duty every month. At present, Activision depends on reports from other players and text chat monitoring to weed out allegedly “toxic” conduct. According to the developer, around one million accounts have been penalized since the launch of ‘Modern Warfare II’ last October.

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NSA ORDERS EMPLOYEES TO SPY ON THE WORLD “WITH DIGNITY AND RESPECT”

THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, the shadowy hub for the United States’ electronic and cyber spying, has instructed its employees that foreign targets of its intelligence gathering “should be treated with dignity and respect,” according to a new policy directive. The directive, released this summer as internal guidance, is for the NSA’s vaunted signals intelligence, or SIGINT, division, which is responsible for covert surveillance and data collection worldwide.

“In recognition that SIGINT activities must take into account that all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they might reside,” says the previously unreported directive, which was issued by NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone. 

Civil liberties experts say the PR-friendly directive is an attempt to mollify European partners and American critics amid a simmering congressional debate over whether to reauthorize the NSA’s broad surveillance authorities. Experts also pointed to the absurdity that the NSA, an intelligence agency that specializes in electronic eavesdropping including the interception of text messages and emails, could do so respectfully.

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LAWSUIT: FIRE sues to stop California from forcing professors to teach DEI

Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching. 

The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints. 

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The narcissism of queer theory

The museum dedicated to conserving and displaying Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, published a blog post this week about ‘queering the Mary Rose’s collection’. It promised to understand the items recovered from this 16th-century wreck, from nit combs to gold rings and paternosters, through a ‘queer lens’.

The results are ridiculous. The connections between these items and ‘queerness’ are a figment of the curators’ imaginations. Take the Mary Rose Museum’s description of a salvaged wooden mirror frame:

‘Looking at your own reflection in a mirror can bring up lots of emotions for both straight and LGBTQ+ people. For queer people, we may experience a strong feeling of gender dysphoria when we look into a mirror, a feeling of distress caused by our reflection conflicting with our own gender identities. On the other hand, we may experience gender euphoria when looking in a mirror, when how we feel on the inside matches our reflection.’

This tells us nothing about the nature of the mirror frame or the role and significance of mirrors in 16th-century England. It is an expression of contemporary identity politics.

There is no good reason for wanting to ‘queer’ this collection. The artefacts on display at the Mary Rose Museum belong to the Tudor era. They provide insight into that specific world. Indeed, the sheer difference between then and now is precisely what makes the study of history so exciting. I was living just miles from where the Mary Rose wreck was discovered in the Solent in 1971. I remember how, aged 11, my friends and I all became (fleetingly) obsessed with Tudor history. We wanted to know about the fashions, the wars and Henry’s wives. In my case, it resulted in a rather gruesome school project on torture and punishment in the 16th century. This demonstrated the truth of LP Hartley’s observation that ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.

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‘Native American Guardians Association’ Petition To Restore Washington Redskins Name Goes Viral

A Change.org petition in support of changing the Washington football team’s name BACK to the Redskins has gone viral and is racking up tens of thousands of signatures in real time.

At the time of publication, the petition was nearing its goal of 75,000 people.

The petition was launched by an organization called the Native American Guardians Association whose stated goal is to end the “cancel culture” of Native Americans. 

NAGA spox Healy Baumgardner joined Newsmax’s Carl Higbie to discuss the groups efforts, quipping that the Washington Commanders must be getting advised by Megan Rapinoe.

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