Not only can you do fuck all to improve anyone's lives, but you can inadvertantly campaign to re-elect Trump or maybe 'anti-woke warrior' Ron DeSantis
Remember James Damore, the Google employee who sent a lengthy, well-considered memo to his work colleagues on why there aren’t more women in STEM?
He got fired and became a darling of the right.
He’d received thanks privately from fellow colleagues who weren’t brave enough to express what Damore had said in his response to requested feedback from a diversity seminar they’d attended. His memo wasn’t a right-wing rip on women having little place at Google, it was researched, well-considered, and referenced the work of respected British clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, offering ideas for how to accommodate men’s and women’s different ways of thinking (and they are different) rather than resorting to the diversity ‘discrimination’ of mandating biology-based job placement.
However much one agrees or not with Damore, his rich content was worthy of discussion and debate, not firing. Since he likely couldn’t practice his craft again for Da Man (who would hire someone that social media-explosive?), he hit the talking-head circuit, eagerly embraced by righty superstars like Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Milo Y. It was disappointing to watch him get sucked into that toxic orbit, but it wasn’t like the left was showing him any love. They ‘cancelled’ him and pushed what seemed like a fairly reasonable, just not far-left young man into the arms of the far-right.
Damore struck me as someone who had been willing to look at different sides of an issue, rather than succumbing to brainless partisanship. But the hostile left preferred to push him toward extremists. When you’re an extremist yourself, a moderate looks like t’other side.
Instead of acknowledging there may be reasons besides discrimination and ‘patriarchy’ to explain women’s lower representation in STEM, the left condemned him for pointing out what they’d rather not acknowledge.
Men and women are different. Think differently. And have different values and objectives.
The left’s resistance to sex differences, particularly psychological, stems from the justifiable fear the right will use it to validate discrimination, supported by the right’s long history of doing exactly that.
But hiding from the truth serves neither side.
The left could conceivably have pulled the new influencer into its orbit where perhaps he could have done some real good in the world, but instead it chose to fake-social justice and ‘cancel’ him, while doing fuck-all to promote more diversity in STEM.
‘Economic’ vs ‘social’ radicalism
A recent Atlantic article detailed (called out?) the fake reforms of window-dressing ‘woke’ capitalism. It provides the best explanation I’ve seen so far for why corporations and their boards are such spineless wusses at standing up to social media woke bullies.
Preserving power at the top is what’s important.
‘Social radicalism’ is the window-dressing and branding exercises companies exert, like marching in the Pride Parade with fashionable rainbow banners, versus ‘economic radicalism’ which is doing something that truly changes the system. Wal-Mart raising the minimum wage for their employees without being forced by law is economic radicalism, since they were the wage trend-setters. Other businesses had to follow suit to compete for hiring, and in the process raised a few more boats.
But it demands less to virtue-signal with blithe declarations that Black Lives Matter at the top of one’s website, or acknowledge your organization sits on land once settled by Indigenous groups than it is to, say, hire qualified black job applicants for the better-paying jobs customarily held by whites, or pay actual rent to the descendants of the formerly occupying Indigenous groups pushed out so many years ago.
And of course, when the ‘woke’ on social media identify someone who committed some minor infraction, either now or in years past, and demand their head on a platter, those at the top are relieved to offer a cheap sacrifice so the mob moves on and no inconvenience need be suffered in the C-suite.
The outsized power of Twitter
I will never understand the power accorded this social media platform which is mostly populated by largely anonymous accounts driven by the suspiciously young and unemployed, and a fair chunk of whom seem mental health-challenged.
Companies that take months to hire a job candidate, terrified they’ll make a less-than-perfect choice, will run the shortlist through numerous, lengthy job interviews, personality and skills tests, and then fire that person in a heartbeat because a bunch of anonymous strangers on Twitter didn’t like something they said, did, wrote or posted about immigrants.
Not only is someone needlessly cut off from their source of income by vindictive tyrants, but how inclined are they to favour liberal political candidates in the next election?
Whether Donald Trump runs for president next year or not, Ron DeSantis is who the GOP is rallying around, as he establishes his political brand as a warrior against the ‘woke’. Love him or hate him, it’s a winning message.
Every person successfully cancelled is a vote that may well go Republican.
DeSantis has a good shot at this. Trump is a loser and the Republicans are getting very tired of losing.
The left will certainly help fund his campaign with its own morally brainless causes, but every time the left ‘cancels’ someone for sins kilometers down the road from Weinstein’s or Cosby’s, they will push away less-partisan, ‘undecided’ voters toward the guy who, however repugnant his political views are, at least doesn’t think people should lose their jobs over unpopular tweets.
That’s where every last one of us has skin in the game.
The left and right have both gotten so crazy they can’t fathom that their own so-called ‘social justice’ causes may promote values - from whichever side - that are toxic to society, not to mention themselves and their families. Worse, both sides think that if t’other side doesn’t like something, their side should support it.
Which is why many far-righters rail against the danger of climate change on a planet they have live on too, and left-wingers can’t see how seriously screwed-up drag shows for children are.
Republicans don’t like them, so they must be good social justice!
Therefore don’t question the distinct creepiness that differs greatly from otherwise appropriate shows for adults. Shall we start letting children into strip clubs? Teach little girls pole dancing? Because hey, these little girls down below are already being introduced to dancing sexy for money, perhaps grooming them for a future career as strippers or porn queens.
The left already has some fucked-up ideas about how ‘empowering’ ‘sex work’ (i.e., prostitution) is, because, you know, who wouldn’t want to suck dick for easy money? Porn work? Oh, they’re getting paid to have sex, isn’t that a great career? (One almost never hears women say this.) Let’s also ignore how much the slave labor of sex trafficking powers the porn industry.
The left’s unwillingness to set boundaries will also contribute to the Republican effort to re-elect Trump - if not the man himself, his younger, smarter 2.0 version in H.R. Pufnstuf’s go-go boots.
What we need to remember on the Level Left is that when men push that hard for certain ‘rights’, there’s almost certainly a sexual element behind it.
Unfortunately, it’s not likely any drag queens who perform for children will get cancelled out of a job. The left will not draw lines in the moral sand and say, “No. That’s going too far.”
The ‘woke’ push back when the right-wing media accuses kiddie drag queens of grooming children for pedophilia - and that may be a premature prediction - but there’s something going on with the whole trans movement and the indoctrination of children we can’t ignore. It’s just creepy.
Like the parents of Desmond the Amazing, a kiddie ‘drag queen’, cheered on by the oh-so-inclusive Good Morning America team and its oh-so-woke obedient applauding audience.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, Desmond has attracted the attention of a pedophile who think he’s hot as fuck. Do you think he’s the first?
The right does understand boundaries. They may draw too many and too tightly, and often for the wrong reasons, but they’re fighting back against what looks to those of us in the middle like a left-wing assault on childhood innocence.
Even Jon Stewart has turned into that clueless old grandpa who no longer understands the need to draw boundaries. He recently slammed a Republican senator for wanting to ban drag queens for children rather than tighten gun laws when the leading cause of death for American children is firearm deaths.
Okay, point taken about the right’s disinterest in protecting children’s lives, but really, Jon, do you not understand what’s wrong with sexualizing children, especially in an era when the left is doing nothing to protect them from trans medicalization for a problem they’ll most likely outgrow if allowed to do so without ideological meddling?
One can reject the congressman’s uncritical acceptance of NRA propaganda but wonder why Stewart can’t see there’s something seriously, critically wrong with what these men in drag are doing. I mean Jesus, people, watch these videos on YouTube!
Drag shows are just one way the left will drive the Republicans back into power. It cancels people with political views they don’t like while refusing do deal with its own morally-compromised.
And in the meantime, the planet burns, drowns, starves, and chokes on toxic fumes while the fish and whales die from consuming too much discarded plastic and the rich billionaires build their escapes in far-flung places for the post-apocalypse, just like Y2K ‘preppers’ did 25 years ago. Except now the apocalypse is real, and we weren’t paying attention while we fought over Critical Race Theory and pronouns.
As ye sow…
Cancel culture arguably went off the rails in 2012 with its famous destruction of Justine Sacco for tweeting some not-funny comments about not getting AIDS in South Africa because she’s white. It’s fair to expect negative feedback for one’s public opinions, but getting her fired demonstrated where the left was beginning to lose its moral compass. ‘Social justice’ became a vicious bully pulpit, every bit as willing to censor free speech as the right, and every bit as in denial.
It only occasionally ever canceled a genuine blot on humanity like R. Kelly, while eliminating good liberals like Senator Al Franken because of a dumb photo he took while someone was asleep.
Now they’re oh-so-outraged Ron DeSantis has introduced a bill requiring bloggers who write about him and other elected state officers to register in Florida? Oh, the free speech implications! the woke pearl-clutchers lament, as they campaign to get books removed from Amazon.
Political payback’s a bitch, bitches.
As Jesus put it, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye and then you can see clearly to punch your brother in the face for reading Abigail Schrier’s Irreversible Damage book.”
Or something like that.
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