Tag: woke culture

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ideological culture

Zero/Not-Zero

Fulnecky, essay, trans, gender, Bible

Forty-four million views later, the University of Oklahoma has advised student Samantha Fulnecky that the zero her paper received won’t be factored into her final course grade.

While it’s good that the school won’t hold that zero against her, she deserves a grade — an honest, objective grade — for her work.

Fulnecky did submit a paper, contrary to what is implied by the zero. She did indeed turn in an essay on the topic of “gender, peer relations and mental health” that her class was assigned.

Perhaps the word “gender” has given you the clue. You guessed it: she took the wrong view.

The Washington Post reports that her essay “rejected the concept of multiple genders and cited the Bible to support her view that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes. ‘Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,’ Fulnecky wrote.”

Turning Point USA, which collected 44,000,000 views for its post about the controversy, has also posted the essay itself.

Whether Samantha Fulnecky’s work precisely follows the requirements of the assignment I don’t know; these have not been posted as well. Though not deathless prose, the essay is intelligible and on the assigned topic, if perhaps annoying to those who, like the transgender professor who assigned the paper, disagree with its Biblical perspective and non-novel view of male and female.

In other words, it’s not nothing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The French King Flip Flap

Jerry Seinfeld, censorship, woke culture, wokeism

There’s this great Jerry Seinfeld bit about how we treat our “important” friends on our smartphones: “They don’t seem very important, not the way you scroll through their names on your contact list like a gay French king.” And Mr. Seinfeld flipped his wrist in a motion of dismissal. “Who pleases me today?”

Well, Seinfeld is not pleasing the woke. Not today. Not The Washington Post’s Brian Broome. 

“Wake up, Mr. Seinfeld. Mean-spirited humor isn’t cool anymore,” is Mr. Broome’s title. And his opinion is that times change, and meanie Mr. Seinfeld is a has-been for making fun of marginalized people. 

You may have judged Jerry Seinfeld as one of the lighter, cleaner comics, his act almost universal. Broome says you’re wrong. “I have never found Jerry Seinfeld funny,” he explains. “Even in the ’90s when his show was all the rage, I didn’t get why people thought it was hilarious. It always seemed to me to be about immigrants being odd or unhygienic or making fun of women’s faces or body parts. The show always seemed mean-spirited to me, and that’s just not my kind of humor.”

O, shall thy pearls be clutched!

Wasn’t the self-described “show about nothing” really a comedy of manners where the main characters, George Costanza, Elaine Benes, Cosmo Kramer, and Jerry himself served as the actual butts of the jokes? These four egoists fretted over their ultra-liberal concerns about good manners but always behaved badly. And we always knew it. And somehow still liked them — because Seinfeld was not mean-spirited!

Broome characteristically ends on a vindictive note: “So, yes, if you make ham-fisted jokes about women or the LGBTQ+ community or people living with disabilities or the French, someone will come for you.” Thus, the mob beheaded the king. And the priest. All with wrong opinions.

Would Broome think the point of the “gay French king” joke was to make fun of gays? But recall the actual target: ourselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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They Don’t Get It

Jerry Seinfeld, woke culture, humor, comedy, TV

Jerry Seinfeld seems so everyday-observant you get the idea that there can be nothing controversial about his comedy. But that just isn’t so. He’s had to avoid colleges for many years because the humorless young simply cannot take thoughts that lie even slightly outside their safe-space delimited comfort zones.

Right now he’s getting some viral shares for an interview he did, wherein he clarifies his position.

Comedy, he says, is something everyone needs. “They need it so badly, and they don’t get it. It used to be you’d go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M.A.S.H. is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’ You just expected, ‘there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.’

“Well, guess what. Where is it? This is the result of the extreme left, and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

In other words, wokeness kills comedy.

“When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups, ‘Here’s our thoughts about this joke . . .’ well, that’s the end of your comedy.”

Yet, Seinfeld went on to explain how he works around all this. Avoiding colleges is only a part of it. 

In the end, it helps being good at what you do. Work around the nonsense, most of the time, but speak out against it, as he does now and then.

And it might help to continue laughing at the woke as well as laughing in spite of them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

College Censors Squelched

college, censorship, academia, woke, wokeism

If you attend Oklahoma State University, you are, I hope, now free to speak.

OSU will shut down a “bias response team” instituted to harass speech on campus. We can thank a group called Speech First, which sued the school.

“We are excited to announce that OSU will be eliminating their insidious bias reporting system that told students to anonymously report on one another for ‘bias’ and that they will have to rewrite their harassment policy to include important speech protections so that students can no longer be punished for merely expressing their views,” says Cherise Trump, executive director of the organization.

“We have also secured a change to their computer policy so that it no longer targets the protected political speech of students.”

The settlement also requires the school to pay Speech First $18,000 for legal expenses.

OSU had tried to get the lawsuit dismissed because Speech First protected the names of its plaintiffs, OSU students.

Speech First’s reason for using pseudonyms is pretty commonsensical: to protect plaintiffs from retaliation. That a university with a policy of punishing students for renegade speech might also punish them for participating in a lawsuit to end this policy doesn’t seem like a farfetched concern.

The resolution of the case hardly means that the fight for freedom of speech on campus is over. But it may help other universities realize that, as Cherise Trump puts it, “there is a high cost to violating students’ constitutional rights.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Wider Conversation

Richard III, acting, art, theater, wokeism, woke culture

“There can be nothing about us without us.”

That’s the clever slogan of the Disabled Artists Alliance, which last week tweeted a complaint about the casting of Richard III by Shakespeare’s Globe.

They weren’t complaining, as a naïf might suspect, about an actress playing the king.

Oh, no.

“We,” the signed letter explained, “are outraged and disappointed by the casting of a non-physically disabled actor in this role, and the implications this has not only for disability, but the wider conversations surrounding it.”

Michelle Terry, the Globe’s current artistic director, cast herself as Richard. Daring move? An advance for her “gender”? You may find the choice forced, or kind of dumb, but on the London stage it may seem like turnabout as fair play. In Shakespeare’s own time, men and boys often portrayed women and girls on stage. So the acting profession has a long history of making do with less-than-convincing performers in roles. 

The Disabled Artists Alliance wants us to side with disabled actors, as a class, even if, as has been noted, past disabled players of Richard III had not suffered from the precise disability of the historic English king: scoliosis.

The idea is that a disabled actor has more relevant “lived experience” to offer to the role than a healthy actor.

Yet, that’s just one element of the character. Why not look for actors with the same moral defects? There’d be plenty.

Or choose a royal. For the relevant experience.

Isn’t Prince Harry out of work?

Next up: Flat-earthers complain about the name of the theater wherein the scandal occurs: the Globe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights scandal

The Resignation

woke campus culture

The fall of Harvard President Claudine Gay is not exactly the triumph we were looking for. 

Her resignation letter focused on the recent congressional hearings in which she found herself in the uncomfortable position of selectively defending free speech against a Republican politician slinging charges of “genocide” and “racism.” 

It was all very . . . the opposite . . . the upside-down . . . of how Democrats and Republicans had been dealing with free speech these last few years.

And that is the most important context. Her letter’s evasion of discreditable cases of academic plagiarism — at Harvard, no less! — while not honorable, was at least politically apt. One administrator’s fraudulent academic history is no match for the issue of freedom of speech.

Which, as a legal matter, is as Ms. Gay said it was, a matter of context. You have the right to advocate genocide or say racist things on your property or on hired property. You do not have the right to shout such things just anywhere.

But college campuses aren’t just anywhere. They are allegedly places for intellectual debate. The practice of academic freedom means that the property and customs of universities and institutions of higher learning allow differing opinions to be aired. 

In classrooms; in papers; in auditoriums. 

Still, these student academic free-speech norms don’t extend anywhere and everywhere, in all campus contexts. No student may hide behind “free speech” or “academic freedom” to corner and scream hatred of Israel at every Jew on the quad. That’s where Ms. Gay’s answers in congressional hearings were so unsatisfactory. Especially since Harvard and other major higher education institutions have been disallowing some speech from academic contexts and celebrating other quite threatening speech in the university’s public places.

Gay’s resignation reminds us of Al Capone’s imprisonment for tax evasion: a work-around at best. The underlying issues remain unresolved.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Bigger Boycott Before Bud Light

Bud Light, boycott, woke, wokism

It’s bigger than the beer.

“Bud Light’s business has collapsed since April,” explains sports commentator Clay Travis in a recent column for Fox News, “plummeting 30% in consumption, the result of the company putting a trans influencer on a can to celebrate the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament.” 

Travis calls it “the most crushing boycott of a large consumer product brand in modern history,” adding that Bud Light “might be finished as a popular beer.”

However, Travis also rebutted “many in the media” for “proclaiming Bud Light as a unicorn, the first of its kind conservative boycott that has obliterated decades of goodwill for a company.”

Not true, he argues: “The most consequential consumer boycott of the 21st century didn’t come from drinkers’ rejection of a beer, it came from sports, in particular the NBA, which has destroyed its brand with a large percentage of the American sporting public by embracing woke, political, far-left-wing messaging in its games.”

Travis informs that, since the 1998 NBA Finals, when superstar Michael Jordan sank a late jumper to win, there has been a 75 percent drop in viewership of the National Basketball Association’s championship. “Indeed,” he offers, “four of the five lowest-rated NBA Finals of the past 30 years have occurred in the past four years.”

Count me as one data point: I watched that great 1998 NBA Final and yet, today, I do not tune in. Why? I disagree with the NBA’s political bent and its repellent propaganda.

“More people were interested in watching” the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship “in 2023,” reports Travis, “than the NBA Finals in 2020 and 2021.” (I saw that women’s championship game and declined both NBA Finals.)

But . . . why has the NBA’s nosedive in popularity not been news until now?

Mr. Travis says it’s because “the media loves the NBA embracing woke politics” and, therefore, “refused to share the data right in front of their eyes.”

Another case of so-called journalists deciding they like their readers and viewers less informed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Bud Lite, basketball, woke, wokeism

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No Mystery, Just Confusion

woke, pc, woke culture

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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Roald’s Revenge

Roald Dahl, censorship

Two centuries after the heady days of Elizabethan drama, Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler produced The Family Shakespeare. 

In it they infamously “bowdlerized” the Bard. 

History has accelerated. Roald Dahl, the beloved author of arch children’s books (and more adult fare, too), had been dead only 33 years when it came out that his publisher is sanitizing his books. 

For the children.

For wokeness.

It’s not nice, you know, to call someone fat. Or to suggest that witches wore wigs because they were bald. 

So snip-snip and a trip to the thesaurus later, and British kids can now read the word “enormous” instead of “fat.” And learn, via addition (something the Bowdlers didn’t dare: they only made careful cuts), that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

Salman Rushdie called this “absurd censorship” and said that the culprits, Puffin Books and the Roald Dahl estate, “should be ashamed.”

The backlash has been huge, but the umbrella publishing house, Penguin, insists the unexpurgated Dahl will still be available, in a “Roald Dahl Classic Collection.”

Shades of New Coke versus Classic Coke!

In America, Penguin won’t even try to publish its sanitized editions.

There are several footnotes to the story. 

One: a four-decades old conversation “has come to light, revealing that [Dahl] was so appalled by the idea that publishers might one day censor his work that he threatened to send the crocodile ‘to gobble them up.’” 

Two: Ian Fleming’s James Bond is getting a similar treatment.

I’m reminded of the all-too-hungry crocs in Live and Let Die.

And where Dahl’s gobble-uppers should be when publishers place their toes in censorious waters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling government transparency

Parents Kept in the Dark

education, sexual orientation, teachers, parents, children

When does it become irresponsible to send children to a public school? 

Has the line been crossed in Fairfax County, Virginia?

Their school board now prohibits teachers from telling parents when children “change gender” or pretend to change gender. Such decisions may be evidenced by a student’s changing his name or by identifying as a member of the opposite sex or as “nonbinary” on a school’s learning portal.

The district is not inviting teachers to exercise discretion about whether to inform parents. One can imagine cases in which a teacher knows parents to be physically abusive and likely to come down on a kid like a ton of bricks if alerted to such an event.

Rather, the policy stipulates that parents needn’t ever be told about such matters. To the extent teachers obey, parents won’t know unless informed by the children themselves.

If you live in Fairfax County, you could protest.

And you could do other things, such as

  • attend school board meetings to object, as parents attended a Fairfax board meeting to object to the policy of suspending fourth-graders for using the “wrong” pronouns for classmates;
  • join the shadow board that parents have formed to criticize the doings of the Fairfax County board;
  • vote against a school board member or try to recall members — unless a judge decides that your recall petition fails to show “probable cause for removal.”

Or you could just get your kids the heck out of the public schools.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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