Tag: pc culture

No Mystery, Just Confusion

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 29, 2023
4 Comments on No Mystery, Just Confusion

This week, two examples of “woke” political correctness shot across my visual field.

First, there was another classic 20th century writer bowdlerized by publishers and copyright holders so as not to offend the easily offended: Dame Agatha Christie.

As Robby Soave wrote in Reason, the great mystery writer has had her texts altered before, in the form of the title to her 1939 novel, And Then There Were None, which was originally published as Ten Little Indians. No, that’s not right. It was something far more offensive in America — but in U.S., one edition did use the less-offensive Ten Little Indians.

But now interior content of a much more innocuous sort has been changed. “A character in The Mysterious Affair at Styles who was referred to as a Jew — because, well, he is a Jew — is now just a person,” Soave explains. “And a servant identified as black no longer has a race at all.”

Nicety-mongering went much further in the second case, however, after the shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. The young woman who murdered three students and three adults at the school, and was then herself shot dead, sported, online, the pronouns “he/him.” In between blaming Republicans and the talking heads of The Daily Wire for this trans-gendered person’s suicide-by-cop murder spree, some journalists couldn’t help but scold others for mis-gendering … him?

At least one report referred to the perpetrator (whose name I see no reason to publicize) as a “trans-woman,” though, in current lingo, she (“he”) was a “trans-man.”

It does get confusing — but as sad as it can get, there’s no mystery here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment

Oberlin Must Pay

Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, helped students defame a local business, Gibson’s Bakery, as “racist.”

The two organizations were not strangers, however: Gibson’s Bakery had an agreement with Oberlin to provide baked goods to the school.

It all began when a black Oberlin student shoplifted wine from the bakery. When an employee acted to stop the shoplifter, the thief and two others attacked the employee.

The assailants were arrested. The shoplifter and the others later pled guilty.

But instead of protesting against the thief and his thuggish cohorts, Oberlin students turned against Gibson’s … for acting to stop the theft. College officials helped students conduct their protests and later issued an official statement expressing gratitude “for the determination of our students and for the leadership demonstrated by Student Senate” in launching the protests and smear campaign.

The college also suspended its contract with Gibson’s Bakery.

Oberlin College said that it would consider resuming the contract if Gibson’s agreed to drop charges. In a legal filing, Oberlin asserted that the bakery’s “archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests. The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.”

I guess protecting private property and defending ownership rights is “archaic” — it being so much more progressive to let thieves carry on their thievery.

But that’s not the law of the land. At least yet. A state appeals court has upheld a judgment against the college of $31 million — compensatory damages plus legal fees.

Progressives’ race-based undermining of property rights has lost — for now. Crime still doesn’t pay. And socialists can be reined in.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture Regulating Protest

The Coming Backlash

witches, pc culture, cancel culture, political correctness,

The George Floyd protests and subsequent riots, along with calls for “Defund the police,” are changing political opinions, and not in the way the most in-our-faces activists want.

At Reason, J. D. Tuccille declares 2020 to be the year “gun control died,” arguing that “to push gun control proposals” amounts to advocating “that the likes of Derek Chauvin — the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd — should be armed, while the communities they terrorize should be helpless.”

As movements like “defund the police” make headway, gun control seems increasingly bootless. It is wrong “to insist that when police fail at their supposedly core task of protecting the public, people should be deprived of the means for defending themselves”; it is even worse after woke leftists take police off the streets.

As I noted weeks ago, violence in the wake of (or surrounding) protests causes a backlash.

To which even cancel culture is not immune.

Take the case of David Shor, a social democrat who was not allowed to get away with merely relaying the uncomfortable truth just stated above. On Twitter, he synopsized a study that found that “Post-MLK-assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”

For daring to tell a truth that protesters did not want to hear, he was fired from his job as a data analyst.

As happened in Salem in 1692, this mania will implode, unacceptable in America’s free and open society.

Even witch hunts burn out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Riddle Us That

“Riddle me this,” William Rainford tweeted during the big national #MeToo civil war over the Senate’s confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “Why would the accuser of Kavanaugh take a polygraph, paid for by someone else and administered by private investigator in early August, if she wanted to remain anonymous and had no intention of reporting the alleged assault?”

Dr. Rainford, Dean of the National Catholic School of Social Service at the Catholic University of America, was on a roll.

“Swetnick is 55 y/o. Kavanaugh is 52 y/o,” began a now-removed tweet about another accuser. “Since when do senior girls hang with freshmen boys? If it happened when Kavanaugh was a senior, Swetnick was an adult drinking with&by her admission, having sex with underage boys. In another universe, he would be victim & she the perp!”

Interesting questions. But for students at his university, enraging. Some were angered enough to walk out of class and demand his resignation.

Rainford was suspended and last week resigned as Dean.

Back in September, Will Rainford profusely expressed his contrition in a Cultural Revolution-style statement: “My tweet suggested that [Julie Swetnick] was not a victim of sexual assault. I offer no excuse. It was impulsive and thoughtless and I apologize.”

Strange, then, that media coverage of this case fails to even mention that Swetnick and her attorney, Michael Avenatti, have now been referred to the Department of Justice for possible prosecution for making allegedly false statements to Congress.

Swetnick and Avenatti can, however, expect to receive better treatment than an administrator in an establishment of higher education who dares ask unpopular questions that trigger progressives.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. This edition of Common Sense is condensed from last weekend’s Townhall column by Paul Jacob.

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