Wednesday, April 25, 2018



It’s Time Everyone Realised Political Correctness Has No Place In Cartoons

Should you feel bad for watching The Simpsons in 2018?

This Sunday’s episode flashed a middle finger at concerns that Apu (a 7/11 store owner with an exaggerated Indian accent), is a racist caricature of South Asian people. It was only a matter of time until the topic came up, since the controversial documentary, The Problem With Apu came out late last year.

Towards the end Lisa—the show’s moral compass—breaks the fourth wall, turning to the viewer to say, ““Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?” The shot then pans to a picture of Apu with the phrase, “Don’t have a cow”, inscribed.

Predictably, fans are divided. The scene doesn’t deny Apu is a cruel caricature: it implies you shouldn’t get upset about it. As the show’s success is based on making fun of everyone and everything (particularly a white dude called Homer), some argue that this is all just a ridiculous display of faux-sensitivity.

Imagine being someone that get’s offended about a stereotypical character in a show comprised of stereotypical characters.

Now imagine being so offended by it you make a documentary about it and cry when the show’s creators tell you to GTFO.

Others say it’s easy not to be offended when you’ve never experienced being a minority in an (at least) occasionally racist environment—and when any jokes made at your own demographic’s expense you wrote yourself (the Simpsons’ writing team is virtually all white, middle-age men).

The question then becomes: should you only make fun of your lived experience? Surely not. Writers might fail, but saying they can’t try would be liberal-fascism. For most of The Simpsons’ history Apu was seen as funny, but now is being retroactively judged. Whether this is an ‘awakening’ of true empathy, or a virtue-signalling epidemic that will end in ever-blander sitcoms remains to be seen.

Although political correctness has no place in cartoons, contrary to popular belief, The Problem With Apu documentary doesn’t advocate political correctness. Hari Kondabolu (its creator) isn’t criticising the Simpsons’ right to ridicule a racial minority—he’s criticising their decision to do so (and how they did it). Whether you think this is patronising or progress is another matter entirely.

It’s also worth noting that although Carl (one of the show’s African American characters) is obviously a caricature, the depiction has never really been complained about. This doesn’t necessarily mean the creators were biased, but does indicate that they had a better (or at least, less wrong) understanding of African American culture than they did of Indian American.

Either that or they realised, given the country’s history, that middle class America (the show’s main audience) had more of an appetite for making light of South Asian immigrants than African Americans

SOURCE





‘Let them display their symbols’

Chris Kenny

In a fortuitous coincidence, The Australian today published comments from Australian soldiers a century apart in their origins and inspiration, yet surely linked by culture and relevance.

Former sergeant Justin Huggett reacted viscerally to new defence chief Angus Campbell’s ban on “death-style iconography” and other symbols used by army units to identify and motivate themselves. He says the new directive “denigrates morale” for soldiers and this can only diminish their combat power.

“There’s a lot of history with this. There’s the spirit and pride. I’ve had Vietnam veterans tell me about the emblems from Vietnam. This is a tradition that has been around for years. They are going to be lost to history,’’ Mr Huggett told The Australian.

It is difficult to disagree with the soldier’s point of view. We expect — nay demand — our military personnel are trained to kill, in order to protect our way of life, and we expect — nay demand — that they are prepared to risk their own lives in order to do so. There can be no greater expectation.

We send our military personnel into theatres of horror and uncertainty. We cannot imagine the pressures or the difficulties, not to mention the terror and grief they have confronted over recent decades in Afghanistan where Huggett was awarded a Medal of Gallantry and 41 Australian soldiers have been killed.

I have been lucky enough to meet soldiers on deployment in East Timor, Solomon Islands, Iraq and Afghanistan — their professionalism, dedication and refusal to ever complain is always immensely impressive. Yet, dug in on a mountain outpost in Afghanistan, or bunkered down against terrorist insurgencies in Iraq, we demand they don’t display symbols of death or camaraderie?! They are in a situation where the choice is to kill their enemies or be killed; yet from the offices of defence headquarters in Canberra our soldiers are constantly lectured on gender diversity and fluidity, inclusive employment targets and eschewing symbols of war.

They are paid to kill and risk their lives on behalf of all of us but, at all times, to watch their manners and be sure not to offend the sensibilities of self-righteous human resources professionals and human rights advocates back home.

The other quotes — dating from experiences exactly a century ago — come from our most celebrated soldier, General Sir John Monash. He is quoted in Paul Kelly’s article today from his own memoir, writing about the character of the Australian soldier. “His bravery was founded upon his sense of duty to his unit, comradeship to his fellows, emulation to uphold his traditions and a combative spirit to avenge his hardships and sufferings upon the enemy,” wrote Monash.

“Very much and very stupid comment has been made upon the discipline of the Australian soldier. That was because the very conception and purpose of discipline have been misunderstood. It is, after all, only a means to an end. It does not mean lip service, nor obsequious homage to superiors, nor servile observance of forms and customs, nor a suppression of individuality.

“The Australian is accustomed to teamwork. The teamwork which he developed in the war was of the highest order of efficiency. The truest test of battle discipline was the confidence which every leader in the field always felt that he could rely upon every man to perform the duty which had been prescribed for him, as long as breath lasted. A soldier, a platoon, a whole battalion would soon sacrifice themselves than ‘let down’ a comrade or another unit.”

Sir John Monash would know. Our current defence leaders might want to ponder this culture, this legacy.

Our men and women in the battlefield need to be accorded the freedom and encouragement to fight for their values and their comrades rather than have to worry about the equal opportunity goals of their superiors or contemplate how they can mete out the ultimate in violence without ever giving the impression that they might be motivated to employ actual aggression. Let them be. Let them proudly display their symbols of defiance, aggression and teamwork.

SOURCE 





Rodeo issue victory puts kids above political correctness

It never ceases to amaze me how far Washington wants to reach into our personal lives. I have always believed in a limited federal government, one that defers to the states and individuals to make the vast majority of decisions. But that isn’t the way Washington bureaucrats operate.

Most recently, the federal government attempted to micromanage how South Dakota 4-H formats its rodeo. All three of our kids competed in rodeo growing up, and I volunteered with the program for more than 16 years. When you’re part of rodeo, it’s clear the sport is heavily dependent on the skill of the contestants, but the inherent differences between sexes can have an impact on the winner in many cases. Nonetheless, the federal government sought to force “gender neutral” competition, putting political correctness above the rodeo experience for the kids involved.

After phone calls, texts, and letters to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Secretary Sonny Perdue, the agency finally listened to those actually involved, hit pause, and allowed South Dakota youth rodeo to continue to operate as it has for decades.

SOURCE





An interview with a most politically incorrect man.  Excerpts:

An awful roar rose up as the hundreds of angry protesters pounded on the locked panelled doors and stained-glass windows of the historic sandstone hall, yelling out a volley of obscenities designed to drown out the guest speaker about to step up to the podium. To Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and fiery anti-PC warrior, the shadowy figures prowling up and down outside the soaring arched windows at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, looked like zombies. But if the steely professor was rattled, he didn't show a sliver of it in front of his 900 fresh-faced fans.

The raucous demonstration at Queen's University occurred only days before he arrived in Australia for a speaking tour (tickets sold out within days in Sydney and Melbourne and just seven hours in Brisbane, according to his promoter, True Arrow). A virtual cheer squad of conservative columnists from The Australian and Sydney's Daily Telegraph, including Miranda Devine and Janet Albrechtsen, turned out gushy pieces about their new hero. Meanwhile, such is his divisiveness, the mere mention of Jordan Peterson's name was turning some dinner party conversations into cage fights.

Why all this heat about a 55-year-old university professor, who, in his personal deportment, looks as plain and harmless as an aspirin? Because Peterson has the cojones to say a lot of bold, some would say bad, things. Political correctness has gone overboard. Men are in crisis. The gender gap isn't simply the result of sexism but of deep biological differences that no amount of social engineering will remove. Women tend to choose caring careers that pay less; men are more likely to opt for dangerous and dirty jobs that pay more. Motherhood has been devalued. Blaming inequality on capitalism or the patriarchy is a leftist delusion. The Western helicopter parent needs to back off: children are tough and resilient. The term "white privilege" is a racist insult, a self-loathing term used by shallow liberals.

Worse than all this, there's no room for even tepid dissent. Criticise the left and you're labelled a fascist, a toady of the alt-right. Dare to criticise the extremes of Islam and you're branded an Islamophobe. Question LGBT+ politics and you're a homophobe; refuse to use gender neutral pronouns and you're a transphobe.

Western society, he suggests, has turned against men. "We are playing very foolish games in the West," he warns in one YouTube video. "And we could bring the house down around us." When a young German interviewer informs Peterson one of her professors recommends not having a child to reduce her carbon footprint, Peterson cracks, "Tell him he can save the planet by jumping off a cliff." In another video, he fumes that "the radical left has never taken responsibility for being on the same side as the Stalinists, Maoists and Cambodian murderers. At least the Germans apologised: 'Sorry about the Nazis.'

In Peterson, conservatives have found a soul mate, a proudly politically incorrect firebrand with a bracing turn of phrase. Progressives, meanwhile, have been busy going into battle or priming themselves for a fight. In The New York Times, columnist David Brooks backed Peterson as the "most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now", while author and filmmaker Richard Poplak, writing in the Johannesburg Review of Books, dubbed him an "academic bullshit merchant", dismissing 12 Rules For Life as a "self-help book for assholes".

Peterson first attracted headlines back in September 2016 when, in a fit of pique, he recorded a video declaring he wouldn't abide by a new bill introduced by the Canadian Government, which he claimed would make it illegal not to address people by their preferred pronouns. In an extraordinary example of overreach, the university issued a warning to him to withdraw his comments – a threat they withdrew after he read their missives to his YouTube audience. Nearly 200 newspaper stories across North America reported on the incident.

But it was his interview – or rather showdown – on the UK's Channel 4 in January 2018 that became a viral phenomenon, attracting more than nine million YouTube views. Peterson's cool corrections ("I didn't say that", "That's not true", "You're not listening to me") to anchor Cathy Newman's floundering list of questions about the gender pay gap (and her clumsy repetition of "So what you're saying is …") turned into a 101 disaster tutorial for journalism students. Instead of being the avenging feminist anchor, Newman's simple projection on to Peterson of a toxic sexism led her straight into a "Gotcha" moment.

Amazingly, Channel 4 saw fit to upload the entire, unedited 30-minute train wreck on to YouTube (only five minutes of the pre-recorded interview went to air), which led to such an overflow of scalding abuse of Newman on social media that Channel 4 roped in "security specialists". Peterson told his Twitter followers, now numbering more than 600,000, not to threaten Newman and to be "civilised" in their criticism.

One moment, he is trading barbs in a podcast with comedian Russell Brand, or joking with openly gay comic Tom Ballard in ABC TV's Tonightly, the next he is standing beside former Nationals MP and deputy PM John Anderson in Sydney decrying identity politics. He describes himself as a classic liberal, but he's the darling of conservatives, hyper-conservatives and the alt-right. He's opposed to social justice warriors, but warns inequality in Western societies can endanger their stability, and supports aspects of social welfare.

How is he finding his new-found fame? "It's been a profound existential shock," he replies. "It began at the end of September 2016 when I made a couple of political protest videos, and it's been one scandal after another ever since, with the media attention accelerating."

This insurgent tell-it-like-it-is attitude has driven Peterson all his life. He grew up in the small town of Fairview, in Alberta, Canada, the eldest son of Walter, a schoolteacher, and Beverley, a librarian. Although the teenage Jordan was a party boy who loved sports and Led Zeppelin, he had a very serious, thoughtful side. He was involved with the social-democratic New Democratic Party but by 18 became disillusioned with their shallowness. "They didn't like or understand the poor at all; they just hated the rich," he says.

He went through a ghastly period, he says, when the university was issuing him with warnings over his opposition to Bill C-16, which banned discrimination on the grounds of gender expression in Canada. "It was very stressful to have my livelihood on the line, and I was also concerned I might lose my clinical licence."

Yet when he goes on to say that 80 per cent of funding for the humanities should be withdrawn to shut down what he claims is the untrammelled influence of "Marxist post-modern" academics, it's clear he doesn't so much want to challenge his opponents as annihilate them. And Peterson by no means has a monopoly on having his free speech or academic freedom threatened.

In fairness to Channel 4 broadcaster Cathy Newman, Peterson can be a hard man to pin down on many issues. I ask him whether he believes in God, a question he has repeatedly dodged in the past. As I happen to believe it's a reasonable line of enquiry of someone who spends so much of his time at the lectern quoting the Bible, I press the point.

Are you a believer?

"It depends on what you mean."

I mean, do you believe in the existence of a Supreme Being?

"I believe that you should carry your cross uphill with goodwill."

So you believe in the story of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection?

"I tend not to answer that question, because I don't like to step outside my area of competence."

Which I take as a "no". Do you believe, then, that the lessons of the Bible still stand, regardless of whether we believe in God or not?

"Yes, definitely. I have a lot to say about the Biblical stories psychologically. There is an idea running through the Biblical corpus that you can transcend your suffering by accepting it. It's obvious that if frightened people voluntarily expose themselves to the things they are most afraid of, they get braver. That's one of the pillars of clinical practice."

In one particularly discursive section of 12 Rules, Peterson – who has been married for three decades – asks, "Was it really a good thing … to so dramatically liberalise divorce laws in the 1960s? It's not clear to me that children whose lives were destabilised by the hypothetical freedom this attempt at liberation introduced would say so."

In 12 Rules, Peterson makes a number of claims about hierarchical structures, beginning with lobsters and jumping to chimpanzees, suggesting male domination is at the heart of Mother Nature's pecking order. He suggests primatologist Jane Goodall, in discovering that chimps were capable of killing one another, for some time shied away from the truth of biological determinism. He wrote in 12 Rules: "Because of its shocking nature and great anthropological significance, she kept her observations secrets for years … even after she published her account [in 1974], many refused to believe it."

The social hierarchy of our closest living ancestor is indeed male-dominated, as Peterson suggests, but rank is also dynamic, with some females considered more or less the equals of some of the males. Peterson may be a psychologist with decades of clinical practice under his belt, but that doesn't make him an authority on the evolution of animal behaviour (he spends the first 10 pages of his book referring to the dominance hierarchies of lobsters, but his analysis has been dismissed as a misleading oversimplification by experts like neuroscientist Leonor Gonçalves, of the University College, London).

Nor is Peterson an expert on the gender pay gap. He argues that women are more agreeable than men – by which he means, more compassionate and polite – and uses this to help explain why they're less likely to bargain hard for a pay rise and more likely to be drawn to the caring professions, from child care to nursing. He points to the most gender-equal country on the planet, Sweden, where he claims male engineers still outnumber women 20 to 1. But according to the Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers, one in four engineers in Sweden is now a woman.

Ultimately, however, Peterson's primary red meat appeal to young men has little to do with his comments about the gender pay gap or his reflections on Nietzsche, the Bible and Darwinism, as I discover when I hear him speak. It's about something much more primal.

Jordan Peterson's somewhat feathery voice (one wit unkindly likened it to Kermit the Frog) suddenly turns bass flinty, as he strides the stage of Sydney's Chatswood Concourse. "Societies that betray motherhood," he declares, "invariably collapse." It's the kind of motherhood statement we all agree on, but Peterson makes it sound apocalyptic. Think Moses on high, tablets firmly in hand.

And indeed as, one by one, he runs through his broad-shouldered "12 tips for life", there's a strong echo of what mothers told their sons a generation or two ago: stand up straight, don't lie, speak clearly, be kind to animals and get your hair cut (okay, so Peterson left that last one out). Perhaps men under 40 haven't heard it before.

Following his talk – really, a run-through of the 12 tips outlined in his book – the floor is thrown open for questions, which range from the bizarre (the male insult of circumcision) to basic self-help advice. Afterwards, he sits outside the theatre signing books until after 1.30am.

The next day, Peterson tells me that the continuous careless pushing of people by left-wing radicals is dangerously waking up the right wing. He estimates that he's saved "thousands of young men from the attraction of the radical right". How can he be sure of that? "Because they've told me in person or written to me."

That indeed may be so. Peterson reminds us that Western societies, with our values of equality and freedom of speech, are far and away the best there is to offer in a world increasingly dominated by political despots and religious extremists. "We need tradition to unite us," he says. We also need to believe in ourselves again, and stop constantly engaging in cultural self-flagellation.

For polarising figures such as Peterson, there is an immediate perception that you're either for him or against him, but that's not necessarily the case. At the Queen's University protest in March, a lone LGBTI demonstrator, standing in the cold, waved a placard quoting Evelyn Beatrice Hall: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

If his supporters see Peterson as a harbinger of an ultra-conservative uprising, they may be mistaken. In a video interview, I ask him what's the single thing that people get most wrong about him. "The basic proposition that I'm a right winger of some sort – and that's just not the case," he says firmly.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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