What it means to be WOKE

The Left claims Republicans can't define '"woke." Well, how's this?@MSNBC @jrpsaki @joyannreid pic.twitter.com/1FRnOziBkV

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) March 20, 2023

Great Moments in American History, Revised According to AP's Inclusive Style Guide

 What happened: The Associated Press issued new style recommendations that aim to promote diversity and inclusion by discouraging the use of "general and often dehumanizing 'the' labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated."

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America Sticks Out Its Tush

 

Mark Steyn makes a few timely comments on America's crazies.

America, on the other hand, has cut to the chase - indeed, beyond the chase. We have reached that moment in Blazing Saddles when Mel Brooks throws away the script, and the brawling cowboys on one Hollywood soundstage crash through the wall into the next soundstage and start slugging the gentlemen of the chorus rehearsing a dance number called "The French Mistake":

Throw out your hands!

Stick out your tush!

Hands on your hips

Give 'em a push

You'll be surprised

You're doing the French Mistake...

 America has literally lost the plot. On the last soundstage, all parts are interchangeable: Men become women, and the grizzled butch coaches of college athletics can't wait to put 'em on the ladies' track team. Women become men, and then pregnant men, and then threaten the hospital for the humiliation of having to give birth in a "maternity ward". Warner Bros gives J K Rowling the bum's rush for being so out of it as to think periods are something women have. In the TERF wars, lesbians are transphobic because they don't wish to date women with penises. At dark on the streets of US cities, wispy, spindly, elderly eternal "college" boys cheer on hefty psycho-trannies with purple hair and hirsute cleavage as they light up precinct houses. Indulgent prosecutors release them without bail - or, if bail is still quaintly required, Seth Rogen or a Joe Biden staffer will cover it. Stories with less helpful narratives - Democrat Congresswomen getting carjacked, or blacks slaughtering blacks every weekend in Chicago, or black criminals (sprung from the big house by woke DAs) mowing down white grannies at a Christmas parade - are instantly memory-holed. Even real people adjust their actual lives to conform with the needs of the greater narrative: Thus the Vice President of the United States, the first in history to announce her pronouns on Twitter, purports to have celebrated "Kwanzaa" during her childhood in, um, a high-caste Indian household in, er, Quebec.

This is a way more surreal finale than Blazing Saddles. In today's America, everything's ablaze:

Send your daughter to college, get this mentally-ill human debris back.

Word salad for mental illness pic.twitter.com/CIlzRZOKvr

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) July 13, 2021

Meghan Markle is a US culture-war missile aimed at the heart of Britain and Europe

 Mark Steyn:

America's culture wars are an export the rest of the world doesn't thank you for — especially we Britons, who are now saddled with a living embodiment of those wars in the figure of Meghan Markle.

By sending her our way, American culture has fired a woke missile right into the heart of the British establishment. She's a one-woman family destroyer, only in this case, the family in question happens to form one of Europe's most venerable and ancient institutions.

America is buggered because everything now and forever is about race - or rather "race": the country has a unique and tragic history in this respect, quite different from Britain's or Europe's, but the present obsessions of academe and media are no aid to healing those wounds because the unending "national conversation" is fundamentally dishonest. So dishonest that half the country believes the political divide in the United States is between the Democrats and the "white supremacists", even though the latter (whoever they are) are so supremely supremacist that every cultural lever is entirely controlled by the über-woke - media and showbiz, the corporations, the schools and churches, the Boy Scouts and the military. So we have a national discourse that is utterly fraudulent, and thus, even at its least harmful, totally useless and extremely time-consuming. And just as America's unique prism is applied by the ignorant Markles to the Commonwealth, so that racial prism has advanced to orientations and genders and the rest of the great panoply of identity politics and its attendant grievances.

One of the advantages that China has is that it doesn't have to waste a minute on this rubbish. Which frees up a lot of time for taking over the planet. Of course, China has no freedom of speech - but that's less of a difference than you might think when the land of the First Amendment is determined to force every event into a false paradigm. Thus, when a lone crazy tells investigators he is a "sex addict" and needed to "eliminate" the "temptation" by shooting up three massage parlors and killing six Asian and two white women, multiple Democrat legislators stampede to the microphones to denounce it as the latest outbreak of "white supremacy".

~As you know, until the ChiCom-19 put an end to international travel, I liked to venture hither and yon and take a break from this rubbish. It's very pleasant to be in, say, Finland or Slovenia where all the time consumed in America by identity-grievance bollocks is freed up to talk about other stuff. You'd be amazed how much you learn - although America's place in the international schoolhouse hit parade ought to give a clue to what happens to education when you prioritize identity politics over math or Latin.

My general rule these days is that, in Christendom, you have to go east to find what's left of the west. The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, being only a third of a century liberated from prison states, retain enough societal memory not to be seduced by nouveau cultural Marxism. In Western Europe, it's a bit spottier, but the French educrats denouncing wokeness would be ending their careers if they tried it here. Then come Britannia and her lion cubs: The UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand have a press that traditionally hoots, "Can you believe what those crazy Yanks are up to now?" - before pathetically adopting all the craziness two, three, five years later.

But leading the charge, because of its general money-no-object approach to what other societies would regard as fringe indulgences, is the United States. It is America, not France or Hungary, that decided to abolish biological sex - and, indeed, to abolish biology, to the point where US birth certificates now cheerfully list a wee bairn's three fathers.

As China gave the world the WuFlu, America exports the Woke Flu. Which, on balance, is likely to prove more fatal.

~Which brings us back to Meghan the Missile fired into the heart of Windsor Castle. She is determined to impose toxic American identity-politics woke wankery on her gelded hubby's family, no matter its stupidity and irrelevance. Hers is a hideous solipsistic inversion of Princess Elizabeth's pledge of Royal duty to our great imperial family all those years ago in South Africa.

The aged Queen and her near centenarian husband have kept that pledge. Whatever criticisms one might lob their way, the 21st-century monarchy is a genuine post-racial institution. Here is Her Majesty throwing a ninetieth birthday lunch at the Palace for various of her viceroys:

See a lot of white folks there? Other than David Johnston, Governor General of Canada (back row, fifth from left), and Sir Peter Cosgrove, Governor-General of Australia (back row, second from right)?

Otherwise, it's (back row) Sir Tapley Seaton, Governor-General of Saint Kitts and Nevis; Dame Marguerite Pindling, Governor-General of the Bahamas; Dame Cecile La Grenade, Governor-General of Grenada; Sir Jerry Mateparae, Governor-General of New Zealand; (after Johnston of Canada) Sir Iakoba Italeli, Governor-General of Tuvalu; Grand Chief Sir Michael Ogio, Governor-General of Papua New Guinea; Sir Elliott Belgrave, Governor-General of Barbados; (after Cosgrove of Oz) Sir Rodney Williams, Governor-General of Antigua and Barbuda; (front row) Sir Patrick Allen, Governor-General of Jamaica; the Duchess of Cornwall; Dame Pearlette Louisy, Governor-General of St Lucia; the Duke of Edinburgh; the Queen; Sir Colville Young, Governor-General of Belize; the Prince of Wales; Sir Frederick Ballantyne, Governor-General of St Vincent and the Grenadines; and Sir Frank Kabui, Governor-General of the Solomon Islands.

That's the life of a working queen, not someone with nothing to do but negotiate seven-figure interviews with Oprah.

Saying you need to flee the Royal Family to find yourself is one thing. When "finding yourself" involves something as adolescent as holing up in Tinseltown and hawking your alleged royalness to grub around the fringes of showbiz, that's just pathetic.

~One final thought on the vile Markles. Listening to Meghan whingeing about how nobody taught her how to curtsey, I found myself rolling my eyes as one does with children going through a particularly teenagey phase. And then I thought: Hang on, how old are these two anyway?

The dreary Duchess is just shy of forty - thirty-nine years and seven months. The gelding is thirty-six years and six months.

Both are older than Diana was at the time she left the Paris Ritz with Dodi Fayed and neglected to buckle her seat belt.

It's weird to watch a couple approaching middle age talk like a pair of angst-ridden youths.

But then that too is a characteristic of the Age of Woke. Our society is dying childishly.

Meanwhile in China, they're laughing their asses off.

Pentagon attacks Tucker Carlson for their "woke" policies.  These recruits are learning to be more like women in the new, improved, "Woke" military.

 

Always Appeals To Men With Pads Featuring Pictures Of Monster Trucks, Pro Wrestlers

CINCINNATI, OH—Always is appealing to the company's male customers with its new "Always Macho" series of menstrual products.

The pads and tampons' packaging will feature pictures of monster trucks crushing each other, AR-15s, and John Cena dropkicking people.

"We want to welcome all people who menstruate, whether you are a cisgender woman, a transgender man, or a dude who really likes monster trucks," said a Procter & Gamble representative. "And you can't go wrong with monster trucks. Monster trucks are big. Monster trucks are cool. Monster trucks go boom."

Various pictures on the products include the following:

A nuclear weapon decimating a city
Bacon
A 1978 Trans Am with fire coming out of the pipes
Aragorn chopping off an Orc's head
A T-rex with Gatling guns for arms
Batman

Though the product was initially targeted at people who menstruate but don't necessarily identify as a woman, the company is discovering that men who are forced to buy their wives' menstrual products prefer the packaging as well.

"Men are able to go to the check stand and hold their head high, proud to pick up a product with Cena elbow-dropping some fool or a bazooka blowing something up," said the rep. "You're welcome, men."

Burger King's Too Stupid for Words Ad Campaign

Amherst College Language Guide

This is neither a joke ... nor a parody.

Random examples:

BUTCHAn identity term often used to by queer women, particularly by lesbians, who express themselves in masculine ways. Some consider butch to be its own gender identity. While an identity term to some, it can be used as a pejorative.  

CISGENDERAn identity term for individuals whose gender identity matches their birth-assigned sex. Cisgender people receive benefits that trans and nonbinary people don’t have. 

CISHETERO-A pervasive system of belief that centers, and naturalizes,  

NORMATIVITY heterosexuality and a binary system of assigned sex and gender where there are two rigid, distinct ways of being: assigned-male-at-birth masculine man and assigned-female-at-birth feminine woman.  

CISSEXISMThe system of oppression that values and privileges cisgender people, upholds the gender binary and marginalizes, oppresses and makes invisible the lives and experiences of transgender and nonbinary people. 

MALE PRIVILEGE A group of unearned cultural, legal, social and institutional rights extended to cisgender men based on their assigned-sex and gender. Cisgender men have access to institutional power, make the rules, control the resources and are assumed capable. Masculinity, as enacted by cisgender men, is universalized and viewed as the normative gender. Cisgender men are often unaware of their differential treatment (see Fragile Masculinity). While trans men, masculine-of-center women and nonbinary folks have access to benefits based on their proximity to hegemonic masculinity (see above definition), male privilege is reserved for cisgender men. This is particularly true for white cisgender men.

Woke’s on you

Those who doubt the operation of a beneficent, or at least an amusing, providence should consider the case of the British writer Titania McGrath. Margaret Ann Bulkley may have decided to move to South Africa and live her life as a man. But Titania McGrath, a Twitter sensation and the author of the forthcoming Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, is “a radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice, and armed peaceful protest. A regular on the live-slam poetry scene, Titania regularly performs at arts festivals, deconsecrated churches, and genderqueer spiritual retreats.” Nice! Ms. McGrath was guyed by Private Eye forthe way she commended her book to the public: “I have written the most important book of 2019. Do not buy it for my sake, but for the sake of humanity.”

Shameless? Or in-your-face intersectional wokeness?

We incline to the latter view. Ms. McGrath burrows deep into the contradictions of late capitalism, patriarchal privilege, toxic masculinity, white supremacism, and heteronormative binary exclusivity. She is so woke she makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look like Sleeping Beauty. Consider: “If you don’t think exactly the same way as me,” she points out, “then you’ve clearly got a lot to learn about diversity.” Could any triggered academic put it better? “I despise whiteness. Literally nothing about me is white except for my skin colour.”

Remember Jussie Smollett? Titania McGrath gets it: “It is absolutely essential that we believe Jussie Smollett. If we don’t, other people who haven’t been attacked might not have the courage to come forward.”

“Whenever anyone says that women aren’t funny, I take it as a compliment. Humour is a patriarchal construct.” Ditto body hair: “Chest hair is a social construct.” You knew that, right?

Read the whole thing.

" ...like denying the existence of witchcraft in 17th-century Salem."

Robert Stacy McCain

Herzog has awakened from “woke,” as it were, because she found herself attacked by her progressive comrades for Thoughtcrime. She has disagreed with transgender activists and defended Aziz Ansari, among other examples of her political incorrectness. Independent thinking by members of official victim groups — women, racial minorities, homosexuals — is dangerous to the Left because dissent undermines the identity-politics illusion of solidarity against the white heterosexual males who allegedly oppress everyone else. In the 21st century, belief in the pervasive evil of heterosexual white men has become the organizing principle of the Democrat Party, its raison d’être. To suggest to a Democrat in 2018 that perhaps this fathomless contempt for white males is misguided, or that not every member of an official victim group is suffering from oppression, is to commit a sort of political heresy, like denying the existence of witchcraft in 17th-century Salem.

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