Sunday, July 22, 2018


I Was the Mob Until the Mob Came for Me

I drive food delivery for an online app to make rent and support myself and my young family. This is my new life. I once had a well paid job in what might be described as the social justice industry. Then I upset the wrong person, and within a short window of time, I was considered too toxic for my employer’s taste. I was publicly shamed, mobbed, and reduced to a symbol of male privilege. I was cast out of my career and my professional community. Writing anything under my own byline now would invite a renewal of this mobbing—which is why, with my editor’s permission, I am writing this under a pseudonym. He knows who I am.

In my previous life, I was a self-righteous social justice crusader. I would use my mid-sized Twitter and Facebook platforms to signal my wokeness on topics such as LGBT rights, rape culture, and racial injustice. Many of the opinions I held then are still opinions that I hold today. But I now realize that my social-media hyperactivity was, in reality, doing more harm than good.

Within the world created by the various apps I used, I got plenty of shares and retweets. But this masked how ineffective I had become outside, in the real world. The only causes I was actually contributing to were the causes of mobbing and public shaming. Real change does not stem from these tactics. They only cause division, alienation, and bitterness.

How did I become that person? It happened because it was exhilarating. Every time I would call someone racist or sexist, I would get a rush. That rush would then be reaffirmed and sustained by the stars, hearts, and thumbs-up that constitute the nickels and dimes of social media validation. The people giving me these stars, hearts, and thumbs-up were engaging in their own cynical game: A fear of being targeted by the mob induces us to signal publicly that we are part of it.

Just a few years ago, many of my friends and peers who self-identify as liberals or progressives were open fans of provocative standup comedians such as Sarah Silverman, and shows like South Park. Today, such material is seen as deeply “problematic,” or even labeled as hate speech. I went from minding my own business when people told risqué jokes to practically fainting when they used the wrong pronoun or expressed a right-of-center view. I went from making fun of the guy who took edgy jokes too seriously, to becoming that guy.

When my callouts were met with approval and admiration, I was lavished with praise: “Thank you so much for speaking out!” “You’re so brave!” “We need more men like you!”

Then one day, suddenly, I was accused of some of the very transgressions I’d called out in others. I was guilty, of course: There’s no such thing as due process in this world. And once judgment has been rendered against you, the mob starts combing through your past, looking for similar transgressions that might have been missed at the time. I was now told that I’d been creating a toxic environment for years at my workplace; that I’d been making the space around me unsafe through microaggressions and macroaggressions alike.

Social justice is a surveillance culture, a snitch culture. The constant vigilance on the part of my colleagues and friends did me in. That’s why I’m delivering sushi and pizza. Not that I’m complaining. It’s honest work, and it’s led me to rediscover how to interact with people in the real world. I am a kinder and more respectful person now that I’m not regularly on social media attacking people for not being “kind” and “respectful.”

I mobbed and shamed people for incidents that became front page news. But when they were vindicated or exonerated by some real-world investigation, it was treated as a footnote by my online community. If someone survives a social justice callout, it simply means that the mob has moved on to someone new. No one ever apologizes for a false accusation, and everyone has a selective memory regarding what they’ve done.

Upon reading Jon Ronson’s 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, I recently went back into my Twitter archives to study my own behavior. I was shocked to discover that I had actually participated quite enthusiastically in the public shaming of Justine Sacco, whose 2013 saga following a bad AIDS joke on Twitter forms one of the book’s central case studies.

My memory had told me different. In my mind, I didn’t really participate. It was others who took things too far. In reality, the evidence showed that I was among the most vicious of Sacco’s mobbers. Ronson describes a central problem with Twitter shaming: There is a “disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment.” For years, I was blind to my own gleeful savagery.

I recently had a dream that played out in the cartoon universe of my food-delivery app, the dashboard software that guides my daily work life. The dream turned my workaday drive into a third-person video game, with my cartoon car standing in for me as protagonist. At some point, I started missing some of the streets, and the little line that marks my trail with blue pixels indicated where I’d gone off-road. My path got erratic, and the dream became other-worldly, as dreams eventually do. I drove over cartoon sidewalks, through cartoon buildings and cartoon parks. It’s a two-dimensional world in the app, so everything was flat. Through the unique logic of dreams, I survived all of this, all the while picking up and dropping off deliveries and making money. In my dream, I was making progress.

As my REM cycle intensified, my dream concluded. I was jolted from my two-dimensional app world and thrust back into the reality of the living world—where I could understand the suffering, carnage and death I would have caused by my in-app actions. There were bodies strewn along the streets, screaming bystanders, destroyed lives, chaos. My car, by contrast, was indestructible while I was living in the app.

The social justice vigilantism I was living on Twitter and Facebook was like the app in my dream. Aggressive online virtue signaling is a fundamentally two-dimensional act. It has no human depth. It’s only when we snap out of it, see the world as it really is, and people as they really are, that we appreciate the destruction and human suffering we caused when we were trapped inside.

SOURCE






No, mobile phones still won’t give you brain cancer

That the upsurge in mobile phone use over the last 20 years has not coincided with an upsurge in brain cancer is total disproof of any link

The supposed health risk from mobile phones is the story that will never die. The latest claim, branded an “inconvenient truth” by the Observer newspaper, is that new research shows they cause cancer in rats. But like all previous incarnations of this tale, the real truth is that the evidence has been overblown and there is nothing to worry about.

Cell phones have been accused of everything from causing brain cancer to “frying” men’s testicles over the years. Phones emit radiation to communicate with mobile phone masts, and radiation has always had a bad rap, thanks to the well-known effects of X-rays and nuclear fall-out.

But phones use a form known as non-ionising radiation, meaning it doesn’t carry enough energy to tear electrons away from their atoms and turn them into ions. It’s this electron-stripping that means X-rays, for instance, can cause cancerous mutations in our DNA.

The latest work, done by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), exposed rats and mice to non-ionising radio-frequency radiation like that emitted by phones. As the NIH already reported in interim findings two years ago, some of the exposed animal groups did have a higher incidence of damage to the heart, and cancers in nerves to the heart.

But the animals were given much higher doses of radiation than people experience in real life – even those of us who are glued to our phones. They were kept in special chambers that exposed them to high levels of radiation over their whole body, for nine hours a day for the duration of their two-year lives. So the findings cannot be assumed to also apply to humans, NIH researcher John Bucher said in a statement.

No good evidence

More importantly, there has been no good evidence that cancers of these types are increasing in people. Our use of mobile phones and other wireless devices in our homes has been increasing at unprecedented rate. Cancer incidence is tracked carefully in countries such as the UK and the US – if tumours of the heart or brain were on the rise, we would know about it by now.

It’s impossible to prove a negative, of course. And with phone technology changing all the time, it’s right that we continue to study this question.

Still, the lack of an increase in cancer rates suggests that if phones have any effect on our risk of developing tumours it seems to be minuscule compared with the other everyday risks we are happy to take – and so not worth worrying about.

SOURCE






NEW BOOK: Politically Correct Fairy (in the Mythical Little Magic Person Sense) Tales and Conservative Rebuttal Tales

by Dr. Sam Bierstock

A hilarious look at Political Correctness in today's society with classical fairy tales rewritten from both the politically correct liberal vantage point, and conservative counter versions of the same fairy tales. A satirical commentary on the relentless drive to offend absolutely no one and the ludicrous extent to which society has gone down this path.Enjoy "Snow Melanin Deficient and the Seven Height-Challenged Individuals" and "Little Ruddy Riding Hood" among other tales designed to be sure that absolutely no feelings are hurt - together with the corresponding tale from the vantage point of conservative thinkers.

Amazon





Pompeo: Trump Administration Sounding 'Clarion Call for Religious Freedom Around the World'

In anticipation of next week's Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Washington Watch today that the Trump administration is sounding the "clarion call for religious freedom around the world" and that many foreign officials, religious leaders, rights advocates, and NGOs will be attending the event July 24-26 at the State Department in Washington, D.C.

This gathering is "incredibly important for our administration, President Trump’s administration, to make the case, sound the clarion call for religious freedom all around the world," Secretary Pompeo told host Tony Perkins.

"We believe religious freedom is important for every citizen around the world and we want to bring everyone together to discuss how all faiths have the right -- people, individual -- have the right to worship in the way they choose," he said.  "Every country ought to honor that."

Secretary Pompeo stressed that the ministerial is not just talk but action. "“We expect this to be far more than just talk," he said. "Putting people together from all across the world in a room talking about this topic will empower them to go back to their home country and advocate for religious freedom as well."

"It’s difficult, as you know, in many countries to even speak of religious freedom," said the secretary. "So we hope to provide a support system and  a basis for some of them to head back to their own countries. We’ll announce the number of initiatives. The vice president [Mike Pence] will be speaking. Senator Brownback will be speaking there."

"We’ll be laying out a path where we are hopeful the State Department here in the United States can lead a process where religious freedom is raised as a priority for the citizens of every country," he said.  "And we will have our teams in the subsequent weeks and months talking about religious freedom on a continued basis."

“We have just three days here, but this will be a mission of the State Department every day," said Pompeo.

Tony Perkins then commented on how the Trump administration is taking practical steps to help advance religious freedom, especially in countries where it is a taboo topic.

“You see that with President Trump very clearly," said Secretary Pompeo. "We think that this forum will reinforce for countries that enjoy that religious freedom and encourage those that are on the cusp, in a place where it’s more challenging, will help provide them courage to continue to make religious freedom a priority for the citizens of their own countries as well."

“This was laid out in the president’s national security strategy," he said. "It was unique and different from previous administrations. We do place a high priority on religious freedom and we will continue to fight for it every place that we travel."

Secretary Pompeo noted that Uzbekistan has "started to move in the right direction" on religious freedom, but added, "this is a long march."

SOURCE






Lauren Southern needs a new t-shirt



 Jeremy Sammut below preaches in favour of the individual and against the fractionating into groups preached by the Left. I wholeheartedly agree with him. He does not however confront the question: "How do we get there from here?"

And that is the fatal flaw in his criticism of Lauren Southern below.  Multiculturalism has an almost complete monopoly of the media.  We are constantly told that no other system of thought can possibly be virtuous.  We are constantly presented with the wonders of all sorts of minority groups.  And those groups are always held up relative to white males.  White males are the boogeymen, the villains.  You can be proud of your identity as long as you are not a white male.

That monologue has to be disrupted if we are to defeat racism.  Because multiculturalism has become a form of racism.  White males are what the Jews historically were:  A group that is too successful and has to be cut down to size wherever possible.

So Lauren disrupts that monolithic narrative.  She shows that another view is possible.  And in so doing she exposes the emperor's clothes.  She openly challenges the "consensus" and shows that there is no answer to her challenge.  Multiculturalists abuse her but no reasoned argument from them is forthcoming. Trump won power by challenging the hate that the Left pour out on ordinary white people so there is great potential for Lauren's message also to hit home.

White males do still undoubtedly rule the roost so they are not as vulnerable as Jews once were but it does get tiresome to be identified day in and day out as the source of all evil.  And it is more than tiresome.  It is borderline deranged. Lauren is in the end standing up for sanity.

Below is a picture of two blue-eyed, blond-haired white men of European origin who rule very big roosts.  Multiculturalism seems to be some way off yet.




It is fair to say that in these politically correct times there is a lack of political leadership around many contentious social issues that many politicians and community leaders hesitate to speak out about.

It is also a truism that politics abhors a vacuum. However, we should be careful not to fill the vacuum with another vacuum.
This thought is prompted by the controversy generated by the visit to Australia by the 23-year-old Canadian alt-right activist Lauren Southern.

Southern — who had already tried to drum up publicity over her initially rejected visa application — pulled another stunt upon arrival in Brisbane by wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘It’s Okay to be White.’

This was followed by Southern — who speaks fluent soundbite — telling the media how pleased she was to be in country committed to “Western culture — something that may not be here for much longer if left-wing Australian politicians continue their pathological worship of multiculturalism.”

If Southern’s heart is in the right place, her arguments certainly aren’t. For many of the things she is saying on western culture and multiculturalism, claims to stand for, and literally wears on her ‘T’, are mutually exclusive.

Yes, ‘hard’ multiculturalism poses a danger to Western culture when migrants from countries with conflicting cultural values migrate and are not encouraged to integrate with the norms and values of their new country.

But, no: the answer to multiculturalism is not to practice a different form of identity politics — a new form of tribalism — by being proud of ‘whiteness’.

What is actually worth defending about Western culture (and is the antidote to identity politics and multiculturalism) is the fundamental principle of respect for the individual — regardless of superficial differences such as those that are literally skin-deep.
If Southern really wants to defend Western culture and all it should truly stand for, she should buy a new T-shirt.
This one should be emblazoned with that famous quote by one of the greatest proponents of the respect for the individual, Dr Martin Luther King: “judge not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

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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