The latest anti-liberal rant thread (get your daily dose here)

[VINC.XXIII]

Take note that "idolatry" isn't obviously depreciative from me, I'm just re-using an old catholic approach and applying it to modern situation for item n°4. And yes they use "idolatry" and adoration in the book.

"Les catholiques français et l'héritage de 1789: d'un centenaire à l'autre ..."
De Institut catholique de Paris. Colloque, Pierre Colin
p.154

1-fascism: idolatry of the State
2-communism: idolatry of the People
3-national-socialism: idolatry of the Blood
(Me think, we have a new recurrent obsession contained in "globalism")
4-globalism: idolatry of the Other


Jean-Luc Mélanchon, french politician
-"Everywhere dominated this superb brown color worn by the most beatiful human beings. Here the skin color is a social signal." (2&4)

Pope Francesco:
-"We believe that Jesus was a refugee, had to flee to save his life, with Saint Joseph and Mary, had to leave for Egypt,” Pope Francis said, according to Zenit. “He was a refugee. Let us pray to Our Lady who knows the pain of refugees.”


"I would like to start with the image that inspired Pope Pius XII in his Apostolic Constitution Exsul Familia(1 August 1952). During the flight into Egypt, the child Jesus experienced with his parents the tragic fate of the displaced and refugees, “which is marked by fear, uncertainty and unease (cf. Mt 2:13-15, 19-23). Unfortunately, in our own times, millions of families can identify with this sad reality. Almost every day the television and papers carry news of refugees fleeing from hunger, war and other grave dangers, in search of security and a dignified life for themselves and for their families” (Angelus, 29 December 2013). In each of these people, forced to flee to safety, Jesus is present as he was at the time of Herod. In the faces of the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, strangers and prisoners, we are called to see the face of Christ who pleads with us to help (cf. Mt 25:31-46). If we can recognize him in those faces, we will be the ones to thank him for having been able to meet, love and serve him in them.


Displaced people offer us this opportunity to meet the Lord, “even though our eyes find it hard to recognize him: his clothing in tatters, his feet dirty, his face disfigured, his body wounded, his tongue unable to speak our language” (Homily, 15 February 2019). "

http://www.vatican.va/content/france...-day-2020.html

On Mélanchon, he performed honest scores at elections. And this sentence while getting a little old, is summarizing the decades old xenophilie from the french left and the Catholic Church(I would say the preaches comparing refugees to Jesus, based on Emmaus episode, date back from the 80's).

[Pontifex Maximus]

don't give a damn about the high court in England. you want to talk about Spanish legislation?

Children aren't allowed to get tattoos. Society limits the extent to which children can alter their bodies because children make bad decisions all time time. For example, as a child of six I would have chosen to subsist on nothing but double stuf oreos and at fifteen I would have gotten snake bites to impress my friends. Allowing children to ingest puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, or a more invasive procedure such as gender affirming surgery (which is irreversible and sterilizes them) is beyond the pale in terms of bad decisions. Once someone turns 18, no time or opportunity has been lost to do any of those things. If there's even a ten percent chance that a 14 year old girl undergoes a double mastectomy, four years of testosterone that renders her sterile for life, and that she later on regrets this at 18, decides she made a mistake. Wow, that then?

[Sir Adrian]

It doesn't matter "then what" as long as people can feel morally superior and make some money from the treatment. Who cares if promoting these kind of treatments this is actually homophobic or if transexuals suffer and die (meaning it's transphobic as well), it's all about the slefish interest of people who will never willingly undergo the treatment.

[Pontifex Maximus]

The sooner the "enlightened left" understand the argument has nothing to do with their being transgender and everything to do with their being children the better. but of course, the slow march left has the makings of imputing the ability to consent on children. Gee, I wonder what the lefties will be saying minors can consent to next?

[sumskilz]

Some excerpts from an article about California's new mandatory ethnic studies curriculum:

Kaplan, 53, a Bay Area mother of two grown children who describes herself as a lifelong Democrat, was further surprised to discover that a list of 154 influential people of color did not include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, though it included many violent revolutionaries. There was even a flattering description of Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for the murder of a quarter of the Cambodian population during the 1970s.

Kaplan began calling friends. “Have you read this?” she asked, urging them to plow through the 600-page document. The language was bewildering. “Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations. …” This was the telltale jargon of critical race theory, a radical doctrine that has swept through academic disciplines during the last few decades…

Capitalism was classified as a form of “power and oppression,” and although “classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia” were also listed as forms of oppression, anti-Semitism was not. Jewish Americans were not even mentioned as a minority group…

Kaplan wasn’t the only one upset about the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. Clarence Jones, former legal counsel and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr., in a letter he wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s Instructional Quality Commission, called the ESMC a “perversion of history” for providing material that refers to non-violent Black leaders as “passive” and “docile.” Jones, who is co-founder of the University of San Francisco Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, decried the “glorification” of violence and Black nationalism as “role models for the students,” and rejected the curriculum as “morally indecent and deeply offensive.”

The unassailably liberal LA Times editorial board weighed in, criticizing the offering as “an impenetrable mélange of academic jargon and politically correct pronouncements” that served as an “exercise in groupthink, designed to proselytize and inculcate more than to inform and open minds.” It warned it was “in bad need of an overhaul.”

A group of Asian Americans urged the state to develop a program that would “inspire ethnic pride in all students and inspire them to work together, rather than against one another,” while Hindu, Korean, Armenian, and Sikh groups complained of being left out as did several Jewish groups. The California Legislative Jewish caucus published a letter saying the ESMC “effectively erases the American Jewish experience.”…

Critical race theory in education, writes Daniel Solorzano, a scholar cited in the ESMC, “challenges the traditional claims of the educational system such as objectivity, meritocracy, color-blindness, race neutrality, and equal opportunity.” Critical race theorists argue that these traditional claims act as a camouflage for the self-interest, power, and privilege of dominant groups in U.S. society…

Nevertheless, in 2020, Gov. Newsom signed into law AB 1460, which requires that every student in the Cal State system—the largest four-year public university system in the country, of which San Francisco State is a part—take a three-unit course in ethnic studies. The governor’s decision defied the recommendations of the university’s own chancellor, members of the university’s board of trustees, and the university’s academic senate, all of whom opposed the bill, objecting to the government’s unprecedented intrusion into the university’s curriculum…

Several districts in California have already implemented ethnic studies courses on their own, independent of the ESMC. Some are controversial and some are not. Although the ESMC was originally intended for high school students, an entire chapter deals with K-12 integration. Because of the public outcry following the unveiling of the proposal, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required an ethnic studies class for graduation from high school. (The bill has been reintroduced.) Meanwhile, the city of Seattle has already created a proposed framework for implementing ethnic studies throughout its K-12 curriculum. Math teachers will ask the following questions: “identify how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,” “analyze the ways in which ancient mathematical knowledge has been appropriated by Western culture,” “how important is it to be right?” and “Who gets to say if an answer is right?”…

But of even greater concern to Jews, she believes, is the singling out of Jewish students as enjoying racial privilege. “I don’t see any way that Jewish students can sit in an ethnic studies class and not feel they have a double target on their backs,” she said, fearing hatred and violence will ensue. First, because they’re Jewish, and considered white and part of the 1%, the purported villains of the teaching, and then through an assumed association with Israel. “There’s a state requirement that you have to sit through a class that says to Jewish students they have extraordinary racial privilege and yet forbids them from speaking because ‘this course is not about you?’ If you don’t accept it, you’re publicly shamed and ostracized—you can’t even speak up and say, ‘I’m not sure if I think that all white people are racists.’”

As a result of the outpouring of criticism of the first ESMC draft, in August 2019, Superintendent Thurmond ordered a revision. A second draft was completed in August 2020 and was immediately criticized for simply moving objectionable material to the appendices and footnotes. In the current, third draft, released in December, some of the most offensive material was actually moved back in. For example, an historical resource was added with the following description of prewar Zionism: “the Jews have filled the air with their cries and lamentations in an effort to raise funds and American Jews, as is well known, are the richest in the world.”…

To placate critics, the third version has added lessons about Korean Americans, Armenian Americans, and Sikhs. Two lessons have been offered about Jews. One, following crude CRT dogma, teaches that Mizrahi Jews coming to the United States from Arab lands were mistreated by “white” Ashkenazim. The other suggests that Jews of European descent have white privilege.

The Jewish Journal points out that Jews are the only group in the curriculum for whom the term “privilege” is used. And this privilege is not earned by way of talent, or educational and professional attainment, but rather trickery. The ESMC, echoing Nazi propaganda about Jews as impostors and appropriators hiding in plain sight, points out that American Jews often change their names (“this practice of name-changing continues to the present day”) to change their rank in the social hierarchy.

The historical reality of repeated genocidal attacks on Jews because of their perceived or imagined privilege is not offered as counterpoint, because ethnic studies teachers assume the Holocaust is taught in world history class. But next year in San Mateo County, world history will be replaced by ethnic studies…

[mishkin]

Children aren't allowed to get tattoos. Society limits the extent to which children can alter their bodies because children make bad decisions all time time. For example, as a child of six I would have chosen to subsist on nothing but double stuf oreos and at fifteen I would have gotten snake bites to impress my friends. Allowing children to ingest puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, or a more invasive procedure such as gender affirming surgery (which is irreversible and sterilizes them) is beyond the pale in terms of bad decisions. Once someone turns 18, no time or opportunity has been lost to do any of those things. If there's even a ten percent chance that a 14 year old girl undergoes a double mastectomy, four years of testosterone that renders her sterile for life, and that she later on regrets this at 18, decides she made a mistake. Wow, that then?

You have compared getting tattoos with the intake of medications prescribed by doctors. We are not talking about the whim of some children.

The sooner the "enlightened left" understand the argument has nothing to do with their being transgender and everything to do with their being children the better. but of course, the slow march left has the makings of imputing the ability to consent on children. Gee, I wonder what the lefties will be saying minors can consent to next?

Pedophilia has already been associated with transsexuality in this discussion, don't be shy.

[Knight of Heaven]

All of this is familiar. First the statues, now they want the books gone, all in an effort to teach kids what to think, instead of how to think.

...
Though he was pre-Christian, I considered the wandering King of Ithaca as a patron saint. There was no trap he couldn't escape with his wits. His story has shaped Western literature — as well as "Star Trek" — for some 3,000 years.
But there is one thing Odysseus may not be able to withstand:
The woke culture.

The political left and the growing disrupttexts movement — fueled by critical race theory — in American public schools wants him gone.
Classic Western literature, from Homer to Shakespeare, Mark Twain and even Harper Lee, is now being canceled, much in the same way that the Islamic State and early Christians destroyed ancient statues that offended them.
There is something barbarous about it all.
Just a few days ago, zealots in San Francisco began stripping "offensive names" from public schools. Names such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and even Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is a living witness to her own cancellation.
The stripping of names are public events. They pit aging, worried traditional liberals against a radical leftist movement that will devour them as surely as the relentless Bolsheviks devoured the more moderate Mensheviks.

...

But the purging of great literature often takes place quietly, among woke teachers and librarians. If the classics aren't exactly banned outright or burned, they have another way:
To place offending literature on the back shelf, out of the reach of the young, where they're lost to gather dust in the shadows.
Author Padma Venkatraman wrote an essay titled "Weeding Out Racism's Invisible Roots: Rethinking Children's Classics" in the School Library Journal. She supports this purge.
"Challenging old classics is the literary equivalent of replacing statues of racist figures," she writes. "… Exposing young people to stories in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm may sow seeds of bias that can grow into indifference or prejudice."
And so, the astounding complexity of great literature and great writers is now reduced, as are so many things these days, to angry zealotry and political correctness.


...

Shakespeare's glaring sin is his anti-Semitic treatment of Jews in the "Merchant of Venice." But isn't there value in his works? Do I really have to ask that?
Harper Lee's sin is creating hero Atticus Finch, the white liberal would-be savior of a Black man wrongly accused.
And what is the blind poet Homer's outrage? He didn't think of himself as belonging to the West, the way we think of the West.
But when Odysseus enters the underworld and meets the vain and deadly killer Achilles, Odysseus is told this:
"I would rather be a slave of a landless barbarian than king of all the dead."
A disrupttexts leader, Lorena German, author of "The Anti-Racist Teacher," explains the sweeping purge this way:
"So, let us be honest, the conversation really isn't about universality … . This is about an ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization."

If the new test for all literature, movies, statues — anything of historic value — is 100% purity, all will fail. And who would grade the test?

https://www.startribune.com/the-woke.../?refresh=true

[Lord Thesaurian]

It’s times like these I’m grateful the US is a union of states. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if the left’s Cultural Revolution were unimpeded by the decentralized nature of 50 different state governments; if the Department of Education could simply write historical figures and cultural values out of textbooks, or otherwise rewrite them as evil bourgeois antagonists against the “proletarian struggle.” The fiascos seen in California and other blue states serve as a canary in the coal mine; a cancerous trend whereby an empowered elite minority seek to turn children into useful ideological soldiers against their parents and their peers. If this continues, America’s adversaries won’t need to lift a finger. Protect your kids, protect yourselves.

[Sir Adrian]

The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.

Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.


Pitted against them is a younger, more diverse guard that considers these theories as tools to understanding the willful blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still recoils at the mention of race, has yet to come to terms with its colonial past and often waves away the concerns of minorities as identity politics.




Disputes that would have otherwise attracted little attention are now blown up in the news and social media.The new director of the Paris Opera, who said on Monday he wants to diversify its staff and ban blackface, has been attacked by the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, but also in Le Monde because, though German, he had worked in Toronto and had “soaked up American culture for 10 years.”
The publication this month of a book critical of racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars — and has received extensive news coverage. Mr. Noiriel has said that race had become a “bulldozer’’ crushing other subjects, adding, in an email, that its academic research in France was questionable because race is not recognized by the government and merely “subjective data.’’
The fierce French debate over a handful of academic disciplines on U.S. campuses may surprise those who have witnessed the gradual decline of American influence in many corners of the world. In some ways, it is a proxy fight over some of the most combustible issues in French society, including national identity and the sharing of power. In a nation where intellectuals still hold sway, the stakes are high.


Continue reading the main story


With its echoes of the American culture wars, the battle began inside French universities but is being played out increasingly in the media. Politicians have been weighing in more and more, especially following a turbulent year during which a series of events called into question tenets of French society.


Mass protests in France against police violence, inspired by the killing of George Floyd, challenged the official dismissal of race and systemic racism. A #MeToo generation of feminists confronted both male power and older feminists. A widespread crackdown following a series of Islamist attacks raised questions about France’s model of secularism and the integration of immigrants from its former colonies.
Some saw the reach of American identity politics and social science theories. Some center-right lawmakers pressed for a parliamentary investigation into “ideological excesses’’ at universities and singled out “guilty’’ scholars on Twitter.
Mr. Macron — who had shown little interest in these matters in the past but has been courting the right ahead of elections next year — jumped in last June, when he blamed universities for encouraging the “ethnicization of the social question’’ — amounting to “breaking the republic in two.’’

Rest of the piece here https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/w...versities.html

Personally I think the French are right. Your nation's future is only as good as the education of it's current youth, and we have seen how identity politics have completely collapsed the quality of university education in the United States. What do you think?

[Lord Thesaurian]

I’m surprised NYT covered this given they are one of the prime culprits for this pseudo intellectual disease. The cancer that produced a year or more of the costliest riots in modern US history is a tragic miscarriage of American intellectual soft power, brought about in no small part through the peerless quality of our universities. The latter are becoming a victim of their own devices, too, as curricula at all levels of education is increasingly censored and “dumbed down” to avoid controversial subjects and mask underperforming school districts/students. This has been going on for a while, but rarely so systematically as it has in recent years as the left half of the American political spectrum, with its almost total domination of national institutions, throws its weight behind radical and deliberately destructive ideas.

This is one area where I can honestly say I wish our European friends the best of luck as they seek distance from the transatlantic cultural exchange. It’s probably too late for the US to tame the monster we created, and if it can turn the most powerful country ever into a quagmire of never ending social and political instability, other countries are right to try and avoid the same fate.

[Aexodus]

Damn. I am very glad Macron has drawn attention to this. The issue sorely needs publicity. All we need is for the media ti shed some light on the problem of ideological academics and public opinion would quickly change.

[Abdülmecid I]

Major threat? Meh, I doubt it. First time I read about critical race theory was today in Wikipedia. I doubt many have heard of it or its various offshoots in France, so they sound as relevant as the QAnon conspiracists. So, their criticism on colonialism and the shady pages of the nation's history seems silly and childish, relying too much on the narrative of nationalists about the role and impact of ethnic divisions. I'm fine with criticising, but going full hysterical and blame a fringe theory for all our misfortunes, past and present seems a tad hysterical. I'm a student in France and the only experience that could relate to what Macron is warning us about is a dispute with a Kanak chauvinist, who argued for the ethnic cleansing of New Caledonia in a manner that would ressemble Haiti's methods. A few minutes later he was removed by the student union, as such polemic and toxic discourse is banned in the university.

Oh, there was also a female student that falsely accused a couple of male teenagers of verbally, physically and sexually attacking her. She turned out to be a far-right activist, whose objective was to fuel sectarian hatred, so I don't think it qualifies as a case of "woke leftism". It was pretty funny, though, she even bruised her own eye to convince the authorities about the truthfulness her misfortunes. So, yeah, it looks like Macron is fishing for ultra-conservative votes, preparing himself for the onslaught of the presidential elections. A bit embarrassing, to be honest, since, if I remember correctly, it was Macron that called for a creative restoration of the Notre Dame cathedral and not Bezmenov's little red men. I don't think it's a viable strategy, since Marine excels in the domain, so the only thing Macron achieved is to legitimise her narrative by a making a mountain out of a molehill. If he's worried about work-class voters in rural Picardy, he should try handling the pandemic crisis more professionally and treating the plebs with slightly less contempt.

[Cope]

I’m surprised NYT covered this given they are one of the prime culprits for this pseudo intellectual disease. The cancer that produced a year or more of the costliest riots in modern US history is a tragic miscarriage of American intellectual soft power, brought about in no small part through the peerless quality of our universities. The latter are becoming a victim of their own devices, too, as curricula at all levels of education is increasingly censored and “dumbed down” to avoid controversial subjects and mask underperforming school districts/students. This has been going on for a while, but rarely so systematically as it has in recent years as the left half of the American political spectrum, with its almost total domination of national institutions, throws its weight behind radical and deliberately destructive ideas.

This is one area where I can honestly say I wish our European friends the best of luck as they seek distance from the transatlantic cultural exchange. It’s probably too late for the US to tame the monster we created, and if it can turn the most powerful country ever into a quagmire of never ending social and political instability, other countries are right to try and avoid the same fate.

It's true that the New York Times is guilty both of observing and disseminating this new-age puritanism. Only last week, the paper fired a leading COVID-19 journalist, Donald McNeil Jr, for having repeated a racial slur whilst attempting to ascertain the intent behind its use in a particular case. McNeil was the subject of furious backlash from Times' staffers, including the propagandist Nikole Hannah Jones, who threatened to personally investigate him.

The Times justified McNeil's dismissal by arguing that they "do not tolerate racist language, regardless of intent", thereby stripping language from its context - an argument which would be ludicrous had it come from a private citizen, let alone a national newspaper. It should also be remembered that this came from the same outlet, which, in 2018, used context as a defence to justify not dismissing Sarah Jeong after she was exposed for hurling racist abuse on Twitter.

[Sir Adrian]

@Abdul That's what the americans said at first as well, and they let it take over the humanities like a tumor, one cell at a time, and now you have this beauty in California.

[Cope]

That's what the americans said at first as well, and they let it take over the humanities like a tumor, one cell at a time, and now you have this beauty in California.

There isn't any feasible solution to the problem either. The federal government could, for instance, withhold funds from certain institutions, but so long as the Democrats continue to profit from the identity-conscious resentment proliferated by the social justice left, they will do nothing to inhibit it. On the contrary, and as we have seen, they are incentivized to promote it.

For their part, the Republicans have been about as useful as a chocolate fireguard in developing a coherent strategy to stave off the threat. They oppose "wokery" only rhetorically.

[Sir Adrian]

The solution would be a third party of moderates and patriots winning enough seats to pass the appropriate legislation. For example in Romania, as a professor, you are not allowed to discuss or engage in any form of political or religious speech on campus outside the appropriate classes, if you're caught doing it you lose the right to work in education. If you want to talk about trump/gender theory/atheism/religion/whatever with your students you can do so off-campus after class. That would be easy to implement in the US.

[Ludicus]

To be fair, I think the reasons lobotomy isn't used are ethical reasons, not medical

Today? no. Its true that Egas Moniz ( Faculty of Medicine, Lisbon) won the Nobel price of Medicine in 1949, for "his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses." (sic)
Moniz worked with Almeida Lima, the founder of Portuguese neurosurgery (that I have met personally before he died in 1985) to develop a needle-like instrument with a retractable wire loop - the leucotome,

But it's also widely known that lobotomy has serious consequences on personality and intellectual function, so is not a real therapeutic strategy nowadays. Interestingly, practice of lobotomy was preponderant in females. Guess why: watch "Ratched" on Netflix. It's a work of fiction, but it shows the the lecotomy of the so-called "hysterical women".
It was also used, go figure, for treatment of ulcerative colitis and peptic ulcer diseases, because these pathologies were considered to be psychosomatic disorders...
It's also true that at that time only a few drugs were available to relieve human psychoses slightly- until the appearance of chlorpromazine,one of the greatest advances of 20th century medicine in 1950.
Egaz Moniz was a neurologist, ironically awarded as a psychiatrist. Egas received for three times the nomination for the Nobel Prize (1928, 1932 and 1937) for the discovery of cerebral angiography,but he was never awarded for the discovery of this revolutionary technique, and he should be remembered for his key contribution to modern brain imaging- the cerebral angiography - which, until 1975, when CT scan was introduced in the clinical practice, was the sole diagnostic tool to provide an imaging of cerebral vessels.

[antaeus]

I have to say, the word "woke" is right up there with "PC gone mad" for me. When used in this context, all it makes me want to do is to "gouge out their eyes with a spoon, and replace them with slices of cake"

Use of terms like this strip the conversation of subtlety and context and lump a whole array of different but parallel conversations into one big confusing blob that can be dismissed together with the wave of a hand.

[Sir Adrian]

What term would you use?

[antaeus]

What term would you use?

As we do here in our conversations, I would discuss each part of a conversation within it's own context. Even your own OP mixes up feminism with racial justice with religion. They're all separate conversations. Don't force me to go 'yes' or 'no' to all of them under one umbrella when I have vastly differing perspectives on each. This whole discussion is reductionist nonsense designed to discredit a whole gamut of different perspectives at once.