There are lots of people who went to school, worked hard, provided for our families, raised our kids, tried to do the right things . . . no one lionizes us but we’re dreamers too . . .
For Some Reason, I Thought Transgender Models Would Be Smarter Than Regular Models
L’Oreal SACKS its first transgender model after she blasted ‘ALL white people are racist’ in shocking Facebook rant — The Sun
The Facebook post, since deleted, said (WARNING: British spellings ahead):
Honestly I don’t have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more. Yes ALL white people.
Because most of ya’ll don’t even realise or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour.
Your entire existence is drenched in racism. From micro-aggression to terrorism, you guys built the blueprint for this s***.
Come see me when you realise that racism isn’t learned, it’s inherited and consciously or unconsciously passed down through privilege.
Once white people begin to admit that their race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth… then we can talk.
Until then stay acting shocked about how the world continues to stay f***** at the hands of your ancestors and your heads that remain buried in the sand with hands over your ears.
That’s the “shocking” rant?! I’m yawning here because I’ve heard this same “rant” a thousand times. Usually it’s not called a rant. It reinforces the speaker’s image of the kind of person they are and it helps them fit in with the groups that they want to fit in with.
The shocking thing is that someone got fired for saying white people are all racists, which is a pretty mainstream progressive position.
People who picked their audience correctly (e.g., the BET Awards) have said the same thing to great plaudits.
I love people of all skin colors, hair colors, eye colors, genders, the poor, the handicapped, except for white people who are ALL VIOLENT RACISTS.
OK thanks for the message of acceptance and unity.
Not a fan of people being fired (or “sacked” as the Brits say) for their opinions but I am glad to see this kind of unhelpful, holier-than-thou bullshit getting some blowback . . .
Biggest CFB Upset Ever
Walter Becker, 1950-2017
It’s hard times befallen the Soul Survivors
She thinks I’m crazy but I’m just growing old
RIP Walter Becker
Don’t Stare At It Directly
A University Professor Suggested Harvey Was Karma for Texas Republicans
Then — he was fired.
The tweet, since deleted, from Kenneth L. Storey, formerly of the University of Tampa, read: “I dont believe in instant karma but this kinda feels like it for Texas. Hopefully this will help them realize the GOP doesnt care about them.”
In a follow-up, he said that “good people” in red states like Texas and Florida “need to do more to stop the evil their state pushes.” He continued: “I’m only blaming those who support the GOP there.”
Let this hurricane be a lesson to the evil people of Texas: Vote Democrat!
If you’re a university professor, left-of-center opinions usually won’t get you fired, but exceptions may occur.
Another professor, Kathy Dettwyler, was fired by the University of Delaware in June for writing in a now-deleted Facebook post that Otto Warmbier, who was taken into custody in North Korea, then fell into a coma and died, was “typical of the mindset of a lot of the young, white, rich, clueless males who come into my classes. Is it wrong of me to think that Otto Warmbier got exactly what he deserved?”
I’m going to say yes, thinking that certain people deserve to be killed for nothing more than the adjectives you’ve chosen for them is wrong.
A Google search reveals that Kathy Dettwyler, while maybe not rich, is white and clueless, and must have been young at one time.
To Young Women Considering a Career in Technology
You’ve probably read a lot of articles about how sexist and awful the culture is for women in technology.
I think if anything deters young women from technology careers, it’s this glut of articles saying how sexist and awful the culture is.
I’ve worked in software development for 30 years. In my experience — and feel free to discount this because I’m not a woman — the culture is not tough for women. If anything, men give women the benefit of the doubt because they’d like to have more women around.
As Holden Caulfield used to say, “I like to be somewhere at least where you can see a few girls around once in a while, even if they’re only scratching their arms or blowing their noses or even just giggling or something.”
Yes, I have seen bad things happen to women in tech, but I’ve seen bad things happen to men and I’ve had bad things happen to me. I’m also aware of bad things happening to women in other professions. We’ve all had our ups and downs.
How to explain this? Bad things happen to women because they’re women and bad things happen to men because — what? We deserve it?
You’ve probably also read a lot of articles about a “diversity chasm” in tech, usually written by women who work in tech and can’t understand why every young woman in America is not making the same career choices they themselves have made.
Women, like any group, are under-represented in some professions (like tech) and over-represented in other professions — education and health services, for example.
Is a software engineering career objectively better than being a nurse or a teacher or a therapist or any of the careers that women seem to prefer?
I’m happy to admit that I don’t know what the “right” male-female ratio is for any given profession and that I don’t know what other people should be doing with their lives.
Programming has been a pretty good career for me — I like to build things and I like to solve hard problems — but I’ve spent most of my life alone in a room or cubicle staring at a computer screen. It’s not for everyone. There are pros and cons like any other job.
I don’t have a daughter but my son never took an interest in programming and I never pushed him to do so. He graduated college with a degree in business. I have no reason to think his life will be less fulfilling because he’s not working in a technology job.
TL;DR:
- Don’t pursue a technology career because someone else thinks you should.
- Don’t pursue a technology career to make some point about gender roles in society.
- Don’t be scared off by inaccurate (IMO) generalizations about anti-female culture.
- Follow your heart.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
There’s No Perfect Place to Live
Orange County isn’t in a flood zone like Houston but it may be within range of a North Korean missile . . .
When You Lose the Mayor of Berkeley, You’ve Lost America
In the aftermath of a right-wing rally Sunday that ended with anarchists chasing attendees from a downtown park, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin urged UC Berkeley on Monday to cancel conservatives’ plans for a Free Speech Week next month to avoid making the city the center of more violent unrest.
“I’m very concerned about Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and some of these other right-wing speakers coming to the Berkeley campus, because it’s just a target for black bloc to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street,” Arreguin said, referring to militants who have also been called anti-fascists or antifa.
Fighting Fascism With Mob Violence
Here’s how different media outlets covered yesterday’s Berkeley rally . . .
USA Today and the Sun-Sentinel, a Florida paper, play it straight up, telling us what happened and who was responsible: Black-clad anarchists stormed the rally, fighting against hate by kicking and punching people until police intervened.
Even the Washington Post, the most left-wing, anti-Trump paper in America, which recently informed readers that there is no political violence on the left, got this one right.
The Daily Mail uses the same photo as USA Today but reports only that violence broke out between the two sides. If they know any more about who was responsible, they’re not saying.
Finally, NPR reports that scattered violence between left and right marred an otherwise peaceful protest. NPR notes that a radio host tried to protect a man he was afraid would be beaten to death by “a group of protestors.” If you click into that story, you see that the next sentence is “It’s unclear how the aggressors were aligned.”
True story, NPR couldn’t figure out how the “aggressors” were “aligned.” They must have had some big brains working on that one.
Some Things You Never Get Used To
Our whole family has been seeing the same doctor for about 15 years.
I had an appointment with her today and she was a nervous wreck. She told me she’s flying to Houston tonight with her son, who’s starting college at Rice University.
I’ve already had a child move away for college so she asked, “How did you handle this? I feel like I have a rock on my chest.”
“Well, it’s a challenge when you love someone so much and they leave. Maybe prescribe yourself some Xanax.”
“What do you do at the end? How do the parents leave? Does everyone just hug and say goodbye?”
“You probably have to follow your heart on that. My goal was not to cry in front of the boy and I did accomplish that. I hugged him, I said ‘I love you, I’m proud of you,’ he walked into the dorm and I got in the car and drove home.”
She started grasping at straws. “I guess you get used to it over time,” she said.
“Not really. It’s been six years and I still haven’t gotten used to it.’
An Insignificant Number of Confused, Poorly Organized Losers
News networks have been running a two-week-long (with no end in sight) infomercial on white supremacists and white nationalists and neo-Nazis as though they represent a powerful force that has to be reckoned with, a vast army of domestic terrorists, which they don’t.
The most important thing to know about white supremacists and neo-Nazis is that there are actually not very many of them.
The leading white supremacist organization is the Ku Klux Klan. How many members do you think the KKK currently has? Take a guess. Keep in mind we live in a country of more than 320 million people.
Estimates of current KKK membership run between 5,000 and 8,000 members. Is that less than you thought?
As for neo-Nazis, the New York Times ran an article a few years ago on the National Socialist Movement (NSM), which they identified as the largest neo-Nazi group in the country. Take a guess how many members the National Socialist Movement has.
According to the Times, the National Socialist Movement has about 400 members.
“White supremacy: Are US right-wing groups on the rise?,” published this week by BBC News, suggests that roughly 10,000 Americans might qualify as active white supremacists.
They mention “groups like the NSM” as being active in 32 states, without mentioning that the groups are very small. Describing a small, poorly organized number of people as being “active in 32 states” sounds a lot scarier than saying “about 400 members.”
A collection of 10,000 people represents less than .01 percent of the US population. If you want to flip it around, you could say that 99.99 percent of us are not white supremacists.
White supremacists are an insignificant number of confused, poorly organized losers. That’s how they should be referenced in media reports: “an insignificant number of confused, poorly organized losers.”
How did such a small, loosely connected group of people manage to capture such a large national mindset?
President Trump was portrayed by opponents during the 2016 campaign as the second coming of Hitler. His supporters were portrayed as white supremacists and Nazis.
After he was elected and the concentration camps failed to materialize as predicted, Trump opponents were still on the lookout for opportunities to resurrect the Nazi theme.
The only way a “Trump is courting the white supremacist vote” theory makes sense is if you don’t know what the actual numbers are.
If you do know what the numbers are — about 10,000 people — it becomes mathematically ridiculous. No one wants or needs the support or endorsement of white supremacists at the cost of pissing off the other 99.99% of America. No one is saying “I’ve got to capture the Nazi vote — all 400 of them.”
My guess is that most media people, who according to Harvard University are very biased against Donald Trump, don’t know or care what the white supremacist numbers are. They just push their narrative and follow the crowd.
But there must be at least a few who do know what the numbers are and are just yanking our chains.
Pug Photos on Flickr
Things Have Changed
People are crazy, times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but — things have changed
More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of: X Hours of Homework
School is back in session and I’m listening to one of my colleagues say that his son started junior high school this year and had 6 hours of homework last night.
It’s a way of bragging: My kid’s school is more academically oriented than your kid’s school.
Maybe your kid is just slow. Maybe other people’s kids are finishing the homework in an hour.
Or maybe your kid finished his homework 6 hours after he said he was starting his homework because he worked for an hour and spent 5 hours surfing the net for pornography.
It doesn’t make sense to say the school assigned X hours of homework . . .
Poll: Most Black Americans Don’t Want Confederate Statues Removed
NPR and PBS News Hour conducted a poll asking whether statues “honoring leaders of the Confederacy” should “remain as a historical symbol” or “be removed because they are offensive to some people.”
Results by race:
White: 65 percent of respondents said the statues should stay, 25 percent said they should be taken down and 8 percent were unsure. (I know these numbers don’t sum to 100 percent but I’m taking them directly from the link above.)
Black: 44 percent stay, 40 percent remove, 11 percent unsure. (Same comment as previous.)
Latino: 65 percent stay, 24 percent remove, 11 percent unsure.
The media, which according to a Harvard University study are very biased against Donald Trump, have been flogging him with this issue for the past week and a half, the thinking being that anyone who doesn’t support the removal of Confederate statues is a white supremacist, in which case 75 percent of white Americans are white supremacists, as are 60 percent of our black citizens and 76 percent of Latinos.
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
See you in Hell . . .
No Political Violence on the Left?
I’m still shaking my head on this one:
Even left-wing stalwarts like The Atlantic know that the Post’s “no violence on the left” premise is bogus:
Look how peaceful and non-violent everyone is in the Post photo.
Contrast that with, for example, these protesters at Berkeley earlier this year:
I’m drawn to Berkeley examples because our son went to Berkeley and still lives in the area, because I know some current Berkeley students, and because Berkeley, ironically, used to be synonymous with the Free Speech Movement.
The photos above show the protesters who showed up to violently shut down a scheduled talk by Milo Yiannopoulos, but the same thing seems to happen whenever any university schedules a conservative speaker.
Here are a couple more left-wing protests, in Chicago and Charlottesville:
We could go on and on with this . . . we’ve all seen this before so I don’t know who the target audience is for the Post’s “no violence on the left” argument.
And of course Steve Scalise couldn’t be reached for comment because he’s still in inpatient rehabilitation after being shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter a couple of months ago.
It looks to me like there’s plenty of bigotry, intolerance and hatred at both ends of the political spectrum.
The Post’s argument seems to be that while left-wing violence is the work of outsiders and lone nuts, militia culture and violent resistance on the right exists “on unprecedented scales.” The best examples the Post was able to come up with are Ruby Ridge, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Dylann Roof murders in Charleston, two of which happened 20+ years ago and all of which involved one guy, or one guy and an accomplice, or one guy and his family.
Ruby Ridge was a “we thought they were up to something so we had to kill them” government siege and Randy Weaver was not convicted of anything except missing his original court date and a bail violation.
Do those examples indicate organized right-wing violence “on unprecedented scales”? I’d say no, but make up your own mind.
The Post concedes that “occasionally violent groups” such as Antifa are “worrisome,” which sounds like a word my grandmother would have used. But these groups are “loosely banded, disorganized and low scale . . . incomparable to the scope and breadth of organized violence demonstrated by the extreme right.”
Such as?
“Organized militias that are well armed, well trained and well networked” and “armed to the teeth.”
I don’t know what sort of data the Post combed through to come up with that rigorous characterization (“armed to the teeth”?), but I’ve never seen an estimate of more than 10,000 active white supremacists in a country of 320 million people. We’re talking about an insignificant number of confused, poorly organized losers.
As an example of what a well-trained, armed to the teeth, organized militia can accomplish, the Post cites last year’s armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.
The result of that was one militant killed, one militant wounded and 27 militants arrested and indicted. I hate to think what a disorganized, poorly trained militia could have done.
See You in Hell: Robert E. Lee Edition
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Greetings from the underworld!
I saw this on Facebook today:
First of all, the temperature on that screencap — 81 degrees? That’s the temperature in Los Angeles. The temperature here in Hell is much hotter.
Secondly, Americans are the fattest, dumbest people on the planet. Did you know that 25 percent of them think that the sun goes around the earth?
So most Americans don’t even know who Robert E. Lee was, let alone the name of his horse (it was Traveller, with two l’s).
Once it’s explained to them — who Robert E. Lee was, his horse’s name, what the Civil War was all about — they put it all together: the USC mascot is a racist horse!
Also coming under scrutiny: everyone named Robert or Lee or having the middle initial E.
See you in Hell . . .
USC Village Opens
The Reign of Troy continues . . .