Category: Social Justice

Elite coastal Jews advocate discrimination against white and Asian males

by philg

Let’s look again at White men correctly perceive American Jews as their enemies? Here’s the latest from our Jewish-owned media elite… “Californians, Vote Yes on Prop 16” (New York Times, October 27):

Black and Latino people have been hit hardest by America’s recent one-two punch of public health and economic crises. They’ve been hospitalized for Covid-19 at quadruple the rate of white Americans. Their businesses have struggled to get the support they requested from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program. As of August, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was nearly double that of white Americans.

Amid these widening disparities, California voters are weighing a measure that could be a big help to women, Black and Latino students and business owners. Proposition 16 aims to reverse Proposition 209, a measure that California passed 24 years ago banning consideration of race, gender or ethnicity in public university admissions and public contracting. California was the first state to try to ban affirmative action, and others — including Michigan, Arizona and Washington — later followed suit.

Given that slots at public universities and funding for business owners are fixed and limited quantities, when Women, Blacks, and Latinos (but not the Latinx?) are advanced, necessarily, it is back of the bus for those unwise enough to identify as “white man” or “Asian man.”

Who else loves discrimination against white and Asian males, according to the NYT?

Proposition 16 has its supporters: the governor, Senator Kamala Harris, top public university officials.

So… a Jewish-owned newspaper reaches out from thousands of mile away to advocate for government-organized discrimination against white males and we will simultaneously say that white males who oppose Jewish-Americans are filled with irrational hatred? (We will also declare that white males who vote against the presidency of Kamala Harris are “voting against their own interest”!)

Related:

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Free to identify as Albanian American or a Girl Who Codes at GWU

by philg

From my beloved alma mater, George Washington University, “Student groups required to update bylaws to meet GW inclusion policy” (The GW Hatchet):

More than 20 student organizations were found to have violated GW’s gender, race and religion nondiscrimination policy, according to an email officials sent to those organizations last month.

“The University does allow organizations to choose between open and selective criteria for membership – however, selective criteria for general membership into the organization must abide by University policy, including its nondiscrimination policies,” the email states.

Graham said officials contacted 23 student organizations like Girls Who Code College Loop, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Albanian American Student Association.

“Queens Movement is focused on women’s empowerment – how can we be more open and inclusive within our organization if our organization is meant to support women?” Morrisey said in an email.

“Despite these concerns, we remain committed to remaining a safe and empowering place for all of our sisters, regardless of their gender identity, and are confident that these new measures will not infringe upon our ability to do so,” Ades said.

“Title IX tried to protect students from discrimination, and sometimes the best way to do that is to create a space specifically for minority voices,” Mobarhan said in an email. “Orgs like DPE sorority, Women in Finance, GW Women of Color, Women in Computer Science and so much more are necessary for equal opportunity.”

So much great stuff here! GWU is 62 percent female (US News), but those who identify as “women” are examples of a “minority”. It is possible to be a “sister” even if one identifies as a “man”, for example. One will soon be able to identify as a “girl who codes” without identifying as a “girl”. Most confusing: How exactly does a person identify as an Albanian American?

(Readers who thought that I was merely an MIT nerd: I attended GWU as a 14-year-old growing up in Washington, D.C, then transferred to MIT as a 15-year-old sophomore. In other words, I transferred from a school that is now 62 percent female to one that was 17 percent female and called myself intelligent. Also fun: during my attendance there, a dispute arose among the trustees regarding how to make the school more “selective”. One trustee was quoted as responding, “There is a place for a mediocre university in this country and GW is it”. I personally had a great experience there. The professors were passionate about teaching and weren’t consumed with their labs, postdocs, graduate students, etc.)

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Rainbow flags for our prisons?

by philg

Here’s a luxury resort in the Catskills that you might not want to visit… Federal Correctional Institution, Otisville:

As we looked down from the Cirrus SR20 (IFR training), it occurred to me that the prison is lacking one thing: a rainbow flag. I’m hopeful that President Harris will correct this and then the prison can be renamed “Ministry of Love is Love”.

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AFAF: How do I find a gay bar if every bar has a rainbow flag in front?

by philg

Asking for a friend…

Here’s a bar in Portland, Maine:

Note that the largest and most prominently featured signs are a rainbow flag (in a city with 358 gay households) and a Black Lives Matters sign (“Black people — many of them immigrants — make up less than 2 percent of Maine’s population but almost a quarter of its coronavirus cases” (Washington Post)). You have to scan down with your eyes and read a smaller font to see the name of the bar: Portland Hunt & Alpine Club. Maybe these symbols are like the crosses that adorn the top of church facades? Christian believers expect to see a cross that is larger than the text providing the name of the church.

How would a person seeking a gay bar find a gay bar, if every bar signals that its primary mission is serving the LGBTQIA+ community?

Also from Portland, October 15, every other table featured COVID-19 fatalities..

When a break-up requires a trip to the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles…

When you don’t have to lock your car because young people don’t know how to operate the four-speed transmission:

Don’t invite anyone out on your boat, including family members:

While you wait for the next order from the governor and wear the Church of Shutdown’s hijab, never forget that it was some other county in which tyranny prevailed. Fragments of the Berlin Wall:

Fill the door to your shop with color-coordinated Covid-19-related messages, including “Don’t dilly dally”:

(If stopping Covid-19 is our nation’s only goal, why do we still have retail stores?)

Circling back to the bar, what does it mean when the rainbow flag and the BLM sign are larger than anything identifying the business?

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Get your yard ready for Election Day

by philg

From a single house near our local airport (in Lincoln, Massachusetts):

One of my big concerns with the above is that the LGBTQIA+ rainbow flag, part of the Biden-Harris sign, is placed in an inferior position to the American flag, which the 1619 Project informs us is a symbol of oppression (not to mention treason against legitimate British rule that would have ended slavery decades earlier!). In what moral universe does the Flag of Slavery (TM) get to be placed higher than the Rainbow Flag of Tolerance?

(Note that “Science is not a Liberal Conspiracy” is illustrated with lithium, useful for treating poor mental health occasioned by forgetting to take away the Deplorables’ right to vote.)

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Racialized groups in our local public school

by philg

From the folks who will, if all goes according to plan, eventually occupy what will be the most expensive (per-student) school ever constructed in the United States:

Dear faculty, staff, parents, and guardians,

As you know the district has partnered with NCBI (National Coalition Building Institute) to support us in our work to become an antiracist district and our larger AIDE work (antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity). One of the many facets of our plan this year is for NCBI to conduct focus groups with a series of stakeholders including students, parents/guardians, and district staff.

The list below shows all of the focus groups we plan to hold over the coming two months:

Boston-resident students in METCO program grades 4-6
Boston-resident students in METCO program grades 7-8
Lincoln-resident students in grades 4-8 who identify as Black, biracial, or mixed
Lincoln-resident students in grades 4-8 who identity as part of other racialized groups (LatinX, Indigenous, Asian-American, Middle Eastern)
Lincoln-resident students in grades 4-8 who identify as White

What’s a “raciliazed group”? From Wikipedia:

In sociology, racialization or ethnicization is the process of ascribing ethnic or racial identities to a relationship, social practice, or group that did not identify itself as such. Racialization or ethnicization often arises out of the interaction of a group with a group that it dominates and ascribes a racial identity to for the purpose of continued domination; over time, the racialized and ethnicized group often gradually identifies with and even embraces this identity and thus becomes a self-ascribed race or ethnicity. These processes have been common throughout the history of imperialism, nationalism, and racial and ethnic hierarchies.

With almost everyone, except for Donald Trump, dropping dead from COVID-19, how important is this?

We recognize that everyone has a lot going on in life now — and we also believe that it is important for us to dedicate time to listening to the experiences of our fellow community members.

I would love to know who these people are who have “a lot going on in life now”!

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Apple builds a virtual city on a hill

by philg

Within my Apple News app:

iPhone owners can make a difference, learn, give back, take action, and more! Let’s click and check the range of political opinion that Apple expects phone owners to want to learn about…

And scrolling…

There is nothing better than “grappling with … privilege” from the vantagepoint of a $1,400 iPhone 12 Pro Max!

Wouldn’t people have a lot more to donate “in support of Black lives and communities of color” if they kept their old phones and/or bought Google Pixel phones rather than Apple?

As part of this section, Apple also notes “Racism is a factor in health care, criminal justice, education, and other crucial election issues. Learn more about where the presidential candidates stand.” This leads to a Trump, who ripped Apple’s zero-tax rug out from under the company, versus Biden section:

Would resurrecting the ERA actually be a move in the direction of social justice? How could the federal government continue to have quotas for women-owned businesses, for example? Couldn’t people identifying as “men” or “not women” say that this program violated the ERA? The Biden-Harris campaign platform promises to direct billions of dollars to those who identify as “women”:

Biden will: Direct federal funding to women-owned businesses, including through his new historic $400 billion investment in additional federal purchases of products made by American workers, in his first term. This will be the largest mobilization of public investments in procurement, infrastructure, and R&D since WWII, and it will critically be designed to support small businesses and those owned by women and people of color. … Improve and expand the Small Business Administration programs that most effectively support women-owned businesses, especially those owned by women of color. Immediately after taking office in 2009, the Obama-Biden Administration started to make billions of dollars in capital available to women-owned businesses… Biden will build on this work and expand SBA programs that target women.

District courts struck down a bunch of stuff that Trump was trying to do because they found that his campaign rhetoric was evidence of wrongthink. Unless Presidents Biden and Harris can rip out the hard drives at archive.org, there will be a huge mountain of evidence that their intent for much of their agenda was motivated by a desire to help Americans with a particular gender ID, something that would then be prohibited by an adopted Equal Rights Amendment:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

(does the ERA itself need to be amended? It sounds as though it might be tainted with some gender binarism and transphobia)

Readers: Can we be redeemed merely by following Apple’s guide?

Related:

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What new monuments do we need?

by philg

From the New York Times:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the United States, has pledged to spend $250 million over five years to help reimagine the country’s approach to monuments and memorials, in an effort to better reflect the nation’s diversity and highlight buried or marginalized stories.

The first major grant under the new $250 million initiative will be a $4 million, three-year gift to Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based public art and research studio that works with artists and community groups across the country to “reimagine public spaces through stories of social justice and equity,” according to its website.

The cover photo of the story:

Readers: What new monuments do you propose?

My first idea is a monument on the Hudson River to the French software engineers who kept the Airbus A320 from stalling despite Captain Sully’s heroic stick-full-back-the-whole-time landing (some details). Computer programmers are a group whose stories are marginalized, as required by the foundation. How often does anyone want to hear a tale of cisgender white male nerds writing code?

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Black Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter sign for a car

by philg

A friend’s high school-age son recently earned his driver’s license. He already has an idea for improving the family Tesla 3: a rotating license plate, like in the old James Bond movies, that would read “Black Lives Matter” when the GPS determined that the car was traversing urban territory and “Blue Lives Matter” when on the Interstate highway or in the suburbs.

This product seems to be available commercially: licenseplateflipper.com.

I wonder if it could be improved, though. How about E Ink-based signs built into the four sides of a car? As the Social Justice movement progresses over the years, the signs could be kept up to date from a touch screen within the car or automatically downloaded from the manufacturer’s social justice executives. When driving into a retrograde Red State, the messages could automatically be switched to “Heading to Sturgis,” “Preserve the Second Amendment,” and similar.

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How are Californians doing in restoring their race-based university admissions scheme?

by philg

“A Detailed Look at the Downside of California’s Ban on Affirmative Action” (NYT, August 21):

Twenty-four years ago, California was consumed by debate over affirmative action. A charismatic Black businessman named Ward Connerly led support for Proposition 209, a ballot initiative to ban racial preferences in admission to the state’s world-renowned public universities. The measure passed with 55 percent of the vote and inspired similar changes in nearly a dozen other states.

This November, with an initiative to repeal Proposition 209 on the ballot, California voters will have the opportunity to change their minds.

How are the polls on this one? The New York Times says we need to go back to state-run racism and it will actually be the best thing for the Asian kids who don’t get into the colleges of their choice:

Ending racial preferences in a state university system harmed Black and Hispanic students while doing little to lift whites and Asian-Americans, a study asserts.

Buried in the middle:

Of course, selective university admissions is a zero-sum game. For every Black and Hispanic student excluded by Proposition 209, another student, probably white or Asian-American, took their place. But in focusing on those who got into the most selective U.C. campus at Berkeley, the study found that white and Asian-American students received little concrete benefit from the policy. Mr. Bleemer’s study suggests they would have otherwise enrolled in an equally selective college elsewhere, and had the same chances to graduate and begin successful careers.

The Asian kids weren’t harmed because they earn a lot of money anyway even if they don’t get to attend UC Berkeley at a low cost. But maybe this is just a restatement of what economists have found, i.e., that being smart enough to get into an elite college is a great predictor of income, but attending an elite college isn’t that relevant (summary: what is taught in college is of minimal economic value).

Readers: What’s your prediction about how the California righteous will vote on this one? Will there be a rush to hire Victimhood Studies graduates to restart the sort-by-skin-color system for college applications?

My prediction: Census data show that California is 39.4 percent Hispanic. There’s another roughly 6.5 percent who are Black (and whose lives therefore matter!). Ignoring that these categories may overlap to some extent, my prediction is that 45 percent of Californians vote for to bring back race-based admissions out of self interest (since it is designed to help Black and Hispanic applicants; this number might be off if a lot of the folks in the designated victimhood categories are ineligible to vote due to not being citizens). Then add 15 percent of the remainder. These could be white people who aren’t going to have children, for example. Voting to restore race-based admissions can make them feel good without any personal sacrifice or sacrifice for anyone they care about. That’s 8 percent. So the ballot Proposition passes by 53-47.

Related:

  • “Kamala’s America?”: California today boasts a fabulously rich technology elite; it’s also home to the highest poverty rate among the states, adjusted for costs, according to the U.S. Census. Under its largely one-party regime, notes liberal economist James Galbraith, California has seen inequality grow at among the fastest rates in the country. The state endures the widest gap between middle and upper incomes in the country—72 percent, compared with a national average of 57 percent.
  • “Prop 16 confusion: Affirmative action ballot measure struggling in polls” (NBC): … despite the recent political wave in favor of social justice, the ballot measure isn’t polling particularly well. Why? It may have something to do with the measure’s confusing wording. … “Watching a focus group with Black voters from Los Angeles, they all said no we won’t vote for this as it was read to them,” said Eva Patterson, who co-chairs the Yes on 16 campaign. “Then we explained that it was in favor of affirmative action and equal opportunity, and they all said, ‘Of course we’ll vote for this.'” … The latest polling on Proposition 16 shows 31% of Californians in favor, 47% opposed and 22% unsure. In the Bay Area, the numbers are a bit more in favor of the measure: 40% for, 41% against and 19% not sure. [It is “equal opportunity” because opportunity is based on skin color and anyone who wants to can follow Justin Trudeau’s lead in adjusting skin color?]
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