winsor

Gee, and I thought everyone loved 'Colored Spade' from 'Hair.' Maybe the 'Age of Aquarius' is a better choice in mixed company.

Nope, I just reserve the right to call bullshit when appropriate. Calling someone whatever name they want is really no big deal, so long as it doesn't have too many syllables (i.e. "His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hajj Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular"). If someone is not okay with a he, she or it, and insists on being addressed as 'fnerg' or whatever, I'm done. I'm not going to call them anything, if possible, and may revert to 'that individual' or something equivalent. Mind you, this is all an abstraction since the issue has not come up in practice. BSBD, Winsor

If simple decency is defined as humoring the delusional, you're absolutely right. When I see headlines breathlessly exclaiming "Man Gives Birth!" I first think of the Life of Brian bit or Richard Simmons. Then it turns out that the 'man' had a uterus handy. Okay, whatever.

How DARE he qualify his statements?! You must be right.

Hey, I didn't write the article. I'd rather read a lengthy, well considered piece than terse nonsense.

That's why he's a Linguistics Professor at Columbia. Kind of a job requirement.,

Professor McWhorter is very much in tune with the reality that Woke has negative net value at best: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/wokeness-america.html The University of Chicago’s Dorian Abbot is a climate scientist with some vital observations about the sustainability of life on other planets. He planned to share them at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in its esteemed annual Carlson Lecture. But Abbot has also advocated race-neutral university admissions policies, including co-writing an essay in Newsweek arguing that race-conscious admissions criteria (as well as admission preferences for children of alumni and for athletes) should end. Abbot’s invitation drew opposition from some students and faculty, and this year’s Carlson Lecture was subsequently canceled. In response, Prof. Robert George, who leads Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, invited Abbot to speak at Princeton. But M.I.T.’s message had already been sent and seems hard to misinterpret: Abbot was not suitable for general consumption. I’m less concerned with the particulars of Abbot’s case here than how it demonstrates our broader context these days. I refer to a new version of enlightenment; one that rejects basic tenets of the Enlightenment, as exemplified by Prof. Phoebe Cohen, chair of geosciences at Williams College, who downplayed Abbot’s apparent disinvitation with the observation, as reported by The New York Times, that “this idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism” — the idea, presumably, that the widest possible range of perspectives should be heard and scrutinized — “comes from a world in which white men dominated.” A major problem with this new mood, this dis-enlightenment, in which Abbot is denied a prominent forum seemingly because his views on racial preferences don’t suit a certain orthodoxy, is that it demands that we settle for the elementary in favor of the enlightened. Among the ultra-woke there seems to be a contingent that considers its unquestioning ostracizations as the actualization of higher wisdom, even though its ideology, generally, is strikingly simplistic. This contingent indeed encourages us to think — about thinking less. For example, affirmative action and its justifications are a complex subject that has challenged generations of thinkers. A Gallup survey conducted in late 2018 found that 61 percent of Americans generally favored race-based affirmative action. But in a survey taken a few weeks later, Pew Research found that 73 percent opposed using race as a factor in university admissions. In a Supreme Court decision in 2003 allowing a race-conscious admissions program, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor surmised that 25 years hence, racial preferences in admissions would no longer be necessary — which would mean we have only seven years to go. Clearly some cogitation is in order. Yet it appears that Abbot was barred from a more august podium out of an assumption that his views on racial preferences are beyond debate. Even though he was to speak on an unrelated topic. This “deplatforming” — if we must — was, in a word, simplistic. Simplistic, too: Cohen points to a time when white men, exclusively, were in charge. Yes, but the obvious response is: “Does that automatically mean that their take on intellectual debate and rigor was wrong?” The implication that the questions Abbot raised are morally out of bounds forbids basic curiosity and rational calculation and stands athwart the very purpose of the small-L liberal education that universities are supposed to provide. Another sign of this dis-enlightenment: the modern fashion that treats stereotyping as sophisticated analysis. We’re told much about a vague monolith of white people ever ready to circle the wagons and defend white interests. Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling “White Fragility” is Exhibit A of this trope, and her latest book, “Nice Racism,” includes a chapter titled “Why It’s OK to Generalize About White People.” But the existence of racism does not, as DiAngelo suggests, make it valid to propose that there is a kind of undifferentiated body of white people with indistinguishable interests. White America consists of myriad groups and individuals, whose actions and non-actions, intentional and not, have a vast range of effects whose totality challenges all thinking observers. Writers like DiAngelo, who wield enormous influence in our current discourse, encourage the assumption that white people act as a self-preservationist amalgam. This notion of a pale-faced single organism stomping around the world is a cartoon, yet smart people hold this cartoon up as an enlightened way of thinking, and it has caught on. I also suspect I am hardly alone, when hearing the term “systemic racism,” in quietly wondering how useful it is to use the same word, racism, for both explicit bigotry and inequality, even if the latter is according to race. In his similarly best-selling “How to Be an Antiracist,” the Boston University professor Ibram Kendi begins by defining a “racist” as “one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” He then defines an “antiracist” as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.” His simplistic definitions declare a dichotomy between racism and antiracism with naught in between — quite a blunt instrument to apply to something as complex as the sociology and history of race in our nation. The looming implication that a system, a society, can be racist is not accidental: It tempts, in anthropomorphizing the complexities of race-based inequalities, how they emerge, and what to do about them. A symptom of these less-reflective, too-reflexive approaches is the zeal for banishing apostates so common today, when it is accepted as appropriate and cutting-edge to tell those who dissent from the woke take on race to hit the road. Abbot was but one example, prevented from speaking to a broad audience at a university on a topic that has nothing to do with racial preferences, as if his opinions about racial preferences irrevocably taint his climate science work. As if his views on racial preferences themselves are unworthy of reasoned discussion. Consider, also, cases in which some obviously non-malicious breach of woke liturgy results in some degree of shunning: The week before last, you’ll recall, I wrote about the University of Michigan professor Bright Sheng. We are back to the age of Galileo’s inquisitors. This treatment of different opinions and approaches as heresies is one of many signs that a new religion is afoot. I’m not kidding. The Emory University philosophy professor Robert McCauley, for example, teaches that religion tends to anthropomorphize. He sees a major difference between religious belief and science as the tendency for the former to attribute agency and intentionality to things we may not be able to explain. I’m thinking of how one might say that a guardian angel facilitated good fortune, or even how a natural disaster may be seen as an “act of God.” In the new woke religion, society is described as “racist,” a term originally applied to people. Note also the eerie parallel between the conceptions of original sin and white privilege as unremovable stains about which one is to maintain a lifelong concern and guilt. Religions don’t always have gods, but they usually need sins, which in the new religion is the whiteness that supposedly bestrides everything in our lives. There is a pitchfork aspect to how this way of thinking is penetrating our institutions of enlightenment. With an unreachable pitilessness, a catechism couched in an elaborate jargon is being imposed almost as if sacred: privilege, decentering, hegemony, antiracism. Nonbelievers, sometimes even agnostics, are cast out, leaving a cowed polity pretending to agree. This is a regrettable kind of religion, aiming to run the state. That’s not how this American experiment was supposed to go. The only thing that will turn back this tide is a critical mass willing to insist on complexity, abstraction and forgiveness. As a Black man, I am especially appalled by the implication that to insist on these three things in thinking about race issues is somehow anti-Black.

For plurals, great!

Your words, not mine. I'll give someone the choice (in English) of he, she or it. If that isn't good enough I may switch to another language, but make-believe is not my long suit.

I'll address them by their legal name, but I won't likely use a made-up gender-fluid pronoun. Is that what you're asking?

FIFY

If you want to join a Lamborghini Owners Club it may be problematic. Actually, since Lamborghini made more tractors than motorcars, I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of the qualified members were farmers. Since J. Edgar Hoover was given to going in drag more often than the cast of Monty Python, it seems that appearing as a man was simply a matter of convention on his part. Also, James Buchanan and Eleanor Roosevelt make anyone else's claim at being the first gay in the White House problematic. In any event, Buckminster Fuller's rationale for business suits and short hair was simple. When putting forth an idea, he did not have time to waste getting over first impressions. I think Levine's 'transition' rather violates that principle. BSBD, Winsor

Again, if someone has a Replicar that looks like a Lamborghint, that's great. I'm sure it makes them happy. When they go to register it, however, it's still a Volkswagen.

Or 'Identify as Vaccinated' as the case may be.

I only know what I read in the papers. Actually, if he wasn't working for the Feds before Jan 6, they very much had him by the balls thereafter. I have a fuzzy idea of what the idiots who stormed the Capitol expected to achieve ("stop the steal?" Right.) but this guy's 'leadership' could not have been more detrimental to the 'movement.' It just goes to show that there's plenty of stupidity to go around. BSBD, Winsor

This is, I'm sure, a dyed in the wool tinfoil hat website: https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-protected-provocateur-who-appears-to-have-led-the-very-first-1-6-attack-on-the-u-s-capitol/ Nevertheless, the compilation of stuff appears to have some traceable data therein. I know enough Feds to be leery of them, just on the basis of their modus opperandi. BSBD, Winsor

If people choose to conduct themselves so the only people they affect are themselves, fine. I might not be crazy about living the Amish lifestyle, for example, but they keep pretty much to themselves and don't see fit to inflict their value system upon me so I'm cool with it. If a group insists on conformity where it is, from my standpoint, none of their goddamned business, I'm not okay with that - even if I might agree with them in an abstract sense. If someone wants to self-identify as a reincarnated Ming Dynasty Emperor or some such thing, I generally don't give a rat's ass. If they insist that I play a part by addressing them accordingly and conducting myself as befits their imperial presence, I'm not game for that. I've lived around gay and trans people all my life, and am generally indifferent (why should I care?). If someone wants to beat someone up for being gay or trans, I will actively intervene to the best of my ability. If someone insists on deference to their world view, with repercussions for failing to do so, I am likely to go along with it until I'm out of range and to avoid them thereafter. I don't impose my will on them, and begrudge their attempt to do so to me. What I hate is people who presume to do my thinking for me, most of whom are singularly unsuited to the task. BSBD, Winsor

Apparently at some Big Sporting Event, while the commentator was discussing the nuances of the game the crowd started chanting "Fuck Joe Biden" quite audibly in the background. The commentator then quoted the crowd as saying "let's go Brandon!" and people have been using the two as interchangeable. I got all this second or third hand, so take it for what it's worth.

You're projecting again.

You're so insightful. Do you give lessons?

If you have to attack the poster instead of content, you have nothing. My point is that Woke is a confluence of stupidity and, for some reason, you insist on proving my point conclusively. BSBD, Winsor

It's been attributed to both Lenin and Goebbels. The Left and Right use the principle equally.

Nope, just paid close attention to Hillary. She's no less evil than the Mango Mussolini but less obvious. He's more like Idi - no filter.

There are 10 kinds of people. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

I still consider Idi Amin to be a better choice than Hillary in the sense that NOBODY would be willing to give him free rein (fake nuclear football, etc.).