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Post by jdredd on Jul 8, 2020 2:52:35 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/arts/harpers-letter.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage"The killing of George Floyd has brought an intense moment of racial reckoning in the United States. As protests spread across the country, they have been accompanied by open letters calling for — and promising — change at white-dominated institutions across the arts and academia. But on Tuesday, a different type of letter appeared online. Titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” and signed by 153 prominent artists and intellectuals, it began with an acknowledgment of “powerful protests for racial and social justice” before pivoting to a warning against an “intolerant climate” engulfing the culture. “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter declared, citing “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” Is it any surprise Noam Chomsky signed this? He is a forking Libertarian.
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Post by jdredd on Jul 14, 2020 13:59:59 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/cancel-culture-.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage9. The heat of the cancel-culture debate reflects the intersection of the internet as a medium for cancellation with the increasing power of left-wing moral norms as a justification for cancellation. "It’s not just technology or ideology, in other words, it’s both. The emergent, youthful left wants to take current taboos against racism and anti-Semitism and use them as a model for a wider range of limits — with more expansive definitions of what counts as racism and sexism and homophobia, a more sweeping theory of what sorts of speech and behavior threaten “harm” and a more precise linguistic etiquette for respectable professionals to follow. And the internet and social media, both outside institutions and within, are crucial mechanisms for this push. It’s debatable whether these new left-wing norms would be illiberal or whether they would simply infuse liberalism with a new morality to replace the old Protestant consensus. It’s arguable whether they would expand the space for previously marginalized voices more than they would restrict once-mainstream, now “phobic” points of view. But there’s no question that people who fall afoul of the emergent norms are more exposed to cancellation than they would have been 10 or 20 years ago." Here is another new right-wing bugaboo: Cancel culture. But if it is replacing the "old Protestant consensus", so much the better.
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Post by jdredd on Jul 31, 2020 22:38:03 GMT -5
Well, in my totally subjective opinion, after decades of cultural stagnation, 2020 has brought the fresh air of change. The Boomer death grip on the culture has loosened.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 18, 2020 10:08:13 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/us/politics/trump-patriotic-education.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage"WASHINGTON — President Trump escalated his attacks on “left-wing demonstrators” and “far-left mobs” on Thursday, portraying himself as a defender of American heritage against revolutionary fanatics and arguing for a new “pro-American” curriculum in the nation’s schools. Speaking at the National Archives Museum, Mr. Trump vowed to counter what he called an emerging classroom narrative that “America is a wicked and racist nation,” and he said he would create a new “1776 Commission” to help “restore patriotic education to our schools.” The president reiterated his condemnations of demonstrators who tear down monuments to historical American figures, and he even sought to link the Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., to the removal of a founding father’s statue in Mr. Biden’s home state, Delaware. “Our heroes will never be forgotten,” Mr. Trump said. “Our youth will be taught to love America.” So Trump and his ilk are going to try to re-indoctrinate our youth. Good luck with that. (I remember well all the anti-Commie propaganda in my schools when I was growing up) The problem with that is Trump and his allies' lameness when it comes to historical facts. They want to bring back the discredited myths of American history. And not only that, they are just uncool and classless.
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Post by jdredd on Nov 14, 2020 17:21:31 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/us/samuel-alito-religious-liberty-free-speech"Justice Alito went on to quote, with disdain, Mark Tushnet, a Harvard Law School professor. The professor, Justice Alito said, had written: “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won.”This was evidence, Justice Alito said, of ju“For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom,” he said. “It’s often just an excuse for bigotry, and it can’t be tolerated.” In an interview on Friday, Professor Tushnet said Justice Alito’s criticism of the statements he made in a blog post four years ago indicated that the points he made were correct. “The very intensity of Justice Alito’s remarks seems to me to confirm my judgment about who won the culture wars,” Professor Tushnet said. “His are in fact the observations of a person who hasn’t come to grips with the fact that he’s been on the losing side of many culture war issues.” My question is: Why does Alito care what some Harvard professor says? But it does make me wonder about the role religion plays in cultural stagnation. On the other hand, Trump fanatics ARE changing the culture, just like BLM did.
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Post by jdredd on Dec 5, 2020 16:00:54 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/arts/design/monolith-destroyed-california-atascadero.html"How the third monolith to crop up in the past month arrived atop Pine Mountain in Atascadero, Calif., where it was discovered by a hiker on Wednesday, remains a mystery. How it left is no secret: Several young men who officials said had apparently driven five hours from Southern California livestreamed themselves tearing out the shiny, three-sided steel structure in Stadium Park early Thursday morning, and then leaving a plywood cross behind in its place. “ Christ is king!” the men , wearing night vision goggles and camo gear, chanted in the grainy video as they toppled the shiny structure, in a video that was posted to the streaming site DLive.tv by someone using the name CultureWarCriminal, but later removed, according to The San Luis Obispo Tribune. The Tribune described the video as “at times racist and homophobic” and said that the men sang along to country songs." Ah, the lovely marriage of religiosity, militarism, and country music.
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Post by jdredd on Feb 11, 2021 13:23:32 GMT -5
On another thread I mention the unnaming of schools after less-than-admirable people of the past. I'm contending it is a necessary part of changing a culture. Do we need schools named after notorious indian murderers like Andrew Jackson? Not in my book. We should even take him off the $20 bill. But my point is this is all a fight against Cultural Stagnation, which is OK from where I sit. I wish they would rename Fletcher Hills, where I live, named after some housing developer. Isn't there some nice Native American name for the place? Probably long forgotten. Might of been an Kumeyaay word for "boring empty space between the mountains and the ocean".
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Post by jdredd on Feb 22, 2021 18:33:32 GMT -5
www.newsmax.com/politics/republicans-blue-collar-workers-white-collar/2021/02/22/id/1011030/"The percentage of blue-collar workers who said they identify with the Republican Party greatly rose during former President Donald Trump’s time in office according to the latest poll from NBC News. The survey, released on Sunday by NBC’s “Meet the Press,” shows that the number of blue-collar workers who identify as members of the GOP grew by 12 percentage points since 2010, while the number who identify as Democrats fell by eight percentage points. White-collar workers slightly shifted towards the Democratic Party by one percentage point. The number of Hispanic blue-collar workers who indicate support for the GOP rose from 23% in 2010 to 36% in 2020, while support among Black blue-collar workers rose from 5% to 12% during that same time frame. GOP support from white blue-collar workers rose from 45% in 2010 to 57% in 2020." Apparently there is a cultural shift going on in the ranks of blue collar workers. If you are looking at me for an explanation, you are out of luck. Their funeral.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 2, 2021 14:16:05 GMT -5
I've been listening to a little of male chauvinist Jordan Peterson talk and all I have to say is what a Neanderthal. And a Canadian.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 6, 2021 15:55:18 GMT -5
I considered starting a "Cancel Culture" thread, but I think I will submerge such a phony concept as that here.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 19, 2021 15:30:55 GMT -5
www.newsmax.com/stevelevy/bill-maher-irony-construction-china/2021/03/17/id/1014143/"Bill Maher, the comedian host of HBO's ''Real Time,'' can be both a crazy liberal and a sobering check on political correctness. That counterintuitive combination was in focus once again in his latest monologue last week which called out America's woke crowd for obsessing over Dr. Seuss books, while China is eating our lunch by concentrating on building infrastructure and cornering the market on future hi tech. As Maher cleverly observed, ''They build a dam, we debate what to name it.'' The irony in Maher's statement, of which he is totally unaware, is that it has been his traditional liberal dogma that has inhibited our nation from getting things done. In fairness to the host, he was brilliant in refuting the naïve idealistic American youth who virtue signal by brandishing T-shirts emblazoned with the faces of Castro and Che. He astutely noted that they were both part of a communist system that killed hundreds of millions of people around the world." Is "Real Time" still on the air? I guess it's not too surprising considering how long the lame "SNL" has been on TV. But here he pushes two buttons dear to the right: Castigating an in-the-eyes-of-the-beholder "Cancel Culture" and promoting a invented rivalry with China. Good job of making yourself the toast of the right, Bill.
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Post by jdredd on Apr 6, 2021 15:29:19 GMT -5
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Post by jdredd on May 25, 2021 11:51:02 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/opinion/michel-foucault.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage"Meanwhile, conservatives, the emergent regime’s designated enemies, find themselves drawn to ideas that offer what Shullenberger calls a “systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates” — even when those ideas belong to their old relativist and postmodernist enemies. This is a temptation I wish the right were better able to resist. Having conservatives turn Foucauldian to own the libs doesn’t seem worth the ironies — however rich and telling they may be. Yes, the French philosopher was undoubtedly a certain kind of genius; yes, as Shullenberger writes, “his critiques of institutions expose the limits of our dominant modes of politics,” including the mode that’s ascendant on the left. But the older conservative critique of relativism’s corrosive spirit is still largely correct. Which is why, even when it lands telling blows against progressive power, much of what seems postmodern about the Trump-era right also seems wicked, deceitful, even devilish." I love the term "own the libs." As if. Do they really think their bonehead populism is going to overcome people with an actual ideology? By the way, I have no use for Foucault.
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Post by jdredd on Aug 6, 2021 12:20:02 GMT -5
It’s becoming clear how the right plans to win the culture war: Paint all their enemies in the media, academia, woke corporations etc. as Communists! Worked before. Will the Millennials be as gullible?
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Post by jdredd on Aug 10, 2021 16:58:50 GMT -5
It’s just wacky to me that now the Culture War has come down to who or who doesn’t wear a mask. A lady in line with me at Costco complained about all the people not wearing a mask. I, of course, was wearing one in the hope of annoying an anti-masker.
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