Monday, 23 November 2015

In Passing

And besides, it’s ‘‘cultural appropriation’’

Alinsky Rule #4  Dept

The Telegraph:
Ban Christmas ads if you don’t like religion, Church tells cinemas

Cinemas should ban all Christmas adverts after refusing to screen a commercial featuring the Lord's Prayer because of its religious content, the Church of England has said.

The Church is threatening to take legal action against Digital Cinema Media (DCM), which handles adverts for cinema giants Odeon, Vue and Cineworld, after it barred an advert featuring the Archbishop of Canterbury encouraging prayer.

DCM told the Church the advert risked ‘‘upsetting or offending audiences’’ and pointed to its policy document barring commercials that advertised ‘‘any religion, faith or equivalent systems of belief’’ or ‘‘any part’’ of any such religion or faith.

Rev Arun Arora, the Church of England’s director of communications, told the Telegraph: ‘‘If they want to be consistent on not carrying any ads that have any connection with religious belief, I’d like them to cancel all ads linked to Christmas as a Christian festival.

‘‘If they’d like to apply it consistently, ban every ad that mentions Christmas.’’
‘‘RULE 4: ‘Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.’

Elsewhere:

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Wednesday, 18 November 2015

Linkage

‘‘How many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?’’


Monty Python meets Islamic militancy.

(A reader reacts: ‘‘Is it bad that I found that to be the funniest thing I’ve read all day and probably all week?’’)


(More at --and via-- Instapundit)

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Tuesday, 17 November 2015

Clipfile

Clipfile - November 17, 2015

‘‘For years popular culture has spread the lie that Peace, Love, Togetherness and Teddy Bears trump all the evil things that men do.  If we all hold hands around the Christmas Tree like the citizens of Whoville, singing carols and swaying together, we can re-start the Grinch’s heart and make it all better.

‘Violence never solves anything’ is one of the biggest lies ever told.  The ability to make judicious use of force in defense of yourself, your loved ones and your social group is a primary sign of maturity, adulthood and independence.  That’s why governments and socialists want to breed it out of the race.’’

- ‘‘Davem123’’, commenting at Stoaty’s

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In Passing

Forecast: Same old same old


Mike Hendrix on what follows:

...Hey, we’ll get to have who knows how many cute little parades showing how we’re all Charlie Hebdo Paris now, and how we’re ‘‘Boston Paris strong,’’ and how we ‘‘stand in solidarity with the people of Paris,’’ and how our ‘‘universal values’’ (which aren’t universal at all) will triumph in the end even if we can’t be bothered to actually defend them beyond crying a lot and lighting some candles and building those maudlin memorials to all the people killed by our fecklessness, cowardice, and inattention every time another of these Moslem slaughters even occurs.  So we got that going for us.

We’ll light up our buildings and public squares in red, white, and blue, and sing La Marseillaiseand the Star Spangled Banner till our throats are raw.  Our news-readers will report all this twee horseshit with a tear in their eye and a quaver in their throats, simply overcome with emotion at the sheer courageof it all, assuring us that such noble, brave heroes as we will never be defeated, because HISTORYâ„¢.  And the tough, doughty, dauntless #HashtagWarriors will march on, until it’s all forgotten in a couple of weeks, and we’ve all re-assumed the position of presenting our soft underbellies for the next slash of the Moslem scimitar.

At this late date in the death agonies of the enervated West, besieged on one side by violent animals and on the other by idiot Leftists who have nothing but spiteful resentment for the blanket of civilization they cower under, what is there left to say?  We aren’t going to do a damned thing to end this...
Read the rest.  You know you want to.

LATER:
S.Weasel objects:  No. More. TEDDYBEARS.

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Sunday, 15 November 2015

In Passing

Beyond talk?


‘‘CBD,’’ blogging at Ace:

Last night, barely 24 hours after the cowardly Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris claimed the lives of so many innocents, I experienced something that was both reassuring and oddly disturbing.  I was eating with family in a French bistro in Manhattan (A good one. If anyone wants the name I will e-mail it.) when, half way through the meal, to a packed restaurant, one of the waiters, a late-middle-aged woman, climbed the stairs to the second floor and belted out an excellent rendition of ‘‘La Marseillaise,’’ the French national anthem.  All of the patrons stood, and many joined in to sing with her.  I was pleased that even in the heart of liberal, accommodationist America we can still recognize patriotism and understand the need for unity with and support for one of our allies.

But....I am troubled that we in the West have become so soft that we have replaced steadfast belief in ourselves, and the determination to defend Western culture, with emotional responses that, ultimately, do nothing.  It is one thing to sing La Marseillaise.  It is quite another thing to support a long, painful war against an adversary that will give no quarter and whose goal is the utter and complete destruction of our way of life.


LATER (151115 23:36):
‘‘kennycan’’ comments at Instapundit:
‘‘Je Suis Charlie Hebdo.’’

Remember that?  What was that, 9 months ago?

There will be arrests.  There will be hashtags.  There will be pronouncements that they are contained.  There will be massive pushing down the memory hole.  There will be business as usual.

Then, Unexpectedly! There will be another attack.

We've been going through this since at least the Boston Marathon bombings.  Probably longer than that. First WTC bombing, perhaps?

MORE:

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Wednesday, 14 October 2015

Clipfile

Clipfile - October 14, 2015

‘‘The problem with slash and burn leftism is that eventually you run out of other people’s culture.’’
- ‘‘JCStephens,’’ commenting at Instapundit

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Thursday, 01 October 2015

Clipfile

Clipfile - October 1, 2015

‘‘Because true education has been replaced with third-rate credentialing and fourth-rate political propaganda, modern ‘sophistication’ is nothing more than a set of pre-packaged political & social views and a set of pretentious, often poorly thought out, fashion preferences.  There’s really nothing sophisticated about it.’’
- ‘‘wdalasio,’’ commenting at Instapundit

Posted by: Old Grouch in Clipfile at 17:25:09 GMT | Comments (42) | Add Comment
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Thursday, 24 September 2015

In Passing

Organizational capture at Wesleyan

SJWs Always Lie  Dept

Daily Pundit:
That train is never late….

There’s a kerfuffle going on at Wesleyan University over an op-ed piece the student newspaper, The Argus, published recently...

The response — a petition signed by roughly 150 students and faculty — is predictably rich in the variety and inanity of its demands, yet as fascinating as these details are, there is a leitmotif that runs through the outrage — one as familiar to us as the sound of coins clinking in a pocket.

It appears that, in the eyes of the petitioners, the Argus is insufficiently diverse, in part because it offers no ‘‘paid’’ positions on its staff.  This purely volunteer workplace, therefore, is discouraging to students — chiefly minority students — who need compensation for their efforts, owing to their oppressed economic status.

Among the demands of the petition, therefore, is that the newspaper establish a number of staff positions with sufficient hard cash emolument to enable suitable candidates to add their voices to the general chorus, no longer obstructed by the grinding poverty that hitherto has impeded their progress at a $60,000+/year college...
To which Bill Quick offered:
They could add ten paid positions and then, to reflect the racial makeup of the Wesleyan student body, they could give one of those positions to a black kid...

That should make them happy...
Which misunderstands what is really going on:  It’s not about one position that might go to some protected class member, its about the other nine positions which will be filled with noisy Social Justice Warrior types.

Possibly making SJWs the majority of the paper’s staff; certainly putting the paid SJWs at an advantage vis-a-vis the unpaid volunteers.  Expect organizational capture within a year or so.

Remember:  It’s never about the issue; it’s always about the power.

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Friday, 18 September 2015

In Passing

Stock up on coal?

Your Government Inaction  Dept

Trains:
BNSF Railway’s chief executive, Carl Ice, said September 9 that BNSF would in effect shut down most of its network rather than violate a federal law mandating that positive train control be operational by December 31.  CSX Transportation has said it, too, questions whether it should violate federal laws, and other Class I carriers are likely to follow suit.  This set up the real possibility of a national transportation crisis at the beginning of 2016...
...
BNSF reads the law as saying no train can legally operate on a PTC-mandated line if PTC is not in service by December 31...  Ice adds that were his railroad to operate over lines where PTC is not in place and an accident occur[], the exposure to legal claims and punitive damages would be significant.
...
Six years ago Congress thought it was giving railroads enough time to do this...  But implementation has been a disaster.  The technology being put in place is largely new.  [The] FRA was slow to issue necessary rules.  Signal engineers able to put all the pieces together have been in short supply.  And then for more than a year everything ground to a halt because the Federal Communications Commission would not issue permits for construction of radio towers and antennae.
...
...Railroads have sought is an extension of the deadline, something that Congress has thus far refused to act upon... 

Appears we might get a chance to try out the President’s new no-coal energy rules a bit sooner than planned.

Sleep warm!


More:
(Thanks to J.E.D.)

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Wednesday, 16 September 2015

The Press

How they lie


Passive voice, missing details, spontaneous happenings:

HEAD: Jewish Man Dies as Rocks Pelt His Car in East Jerusalem
[ED: ‘‘As rocks pelt his car’’?  How exactly did the rocks go about doing this... get up off the ground and hurl themselves..?]
...
COPY:  A Jewish man died [ED: ‘‘was killed.’’] early Monday morning after attackers pelted the road [ED: ‘‘pelted the road’’?  They were aiming at the pavement?  Please clarify.] he was driving on with rocks as he was returning home from a dinner celebrating Rosh Hashana...
Etc., etc.

Oh, it’s the New York Times. ‘‘Unexpectedly.’’


Elsewhere:
Instapundit: Politics and The English Language
from Skeptical Thinker’s comment:
In the left-wing Hebrew press, the distinction in even greater than in English, because ‘‘progressive’’ writers don’t even use the passive voice, which at least implies somebody threw the rocks or fired the shots.  Whenever possible, they use the ‘‘middle’’ voice (as in Greek), which implies no such actor.  For example, they prefer avanim hit’offefu (literally, ‘‘rocks flung themselves in the air’’) to avanim niz’reku (‘‘rocks were thrown’’).

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 21:34:40 GMT | Comments (109) | Add Comment
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