Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

By John Ruberry

Deep down every wokester is weak. Just as most bullies are. You criticize a woke person and you are called a racist, a bigot, or some sort of “phobe” or another. They expect you to cower in shame afterwards.

And if you don’t?

Like the dystopia described in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the editing of books deemed offensive has begun. The endgame in Bradbury’s storyline was the banning of all books. 

Last week the publisher of Roald Dahl, Puffin, announced it was editing some of his works–which include the classics Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda–to remove language they deem offensive. Augustus Gloop, the gluttonous German boy in the first book, will no longer be “fat,” he’ll be “enormous.” In Matilda, “mothers and fathers” become “parents.” The bald witches in The Witches will come with a disclaimer about baldness. 

Next came the backlash.

But let’s talk about the author first. 

Dahl, who died in 1990, had slight misanthropic and even more direct anti-Semitic sentiments. At the very least he was a beast of a person. Dahl’s marriage to Hollywood actress Patricia Neal–one of my late mother’s favorite performers by the way–was tumultuous. Neal suffered a stroke while pregnant, and as she recovered, she couldn’t remember the words of many things. Dahl, a serial adulterer throughout their marriage, refused to give his wife things she asked for, including food, until she used the correct word. 

Neal’s nickname for her husband was “Roald the Rotten.”

Dahl’s publisher for much of his career was Alfred A. Knopf.

After asking Knopf that a person who was “competent and ravishing” should send him dozens of Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, Dahl was sent different ones, after his first request was laughed off. Dahl made more demands and then threatened to send his writings to a different publisher.

But instead, Knopf released the popular author. Employees of the publishing house cheered when they heard the news of Dahl’s dismissal. They fought back against a bully and won.

Salman Rushdie, who lost his sight in one eye after a recent attack, was one of the prominent writers who came to Dahl’s defense. “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship,” Rushdie Tweeted. “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”

Even Queen Camilla voiced her support for him.

A few days later Puffin backed off. Oh, it will still publish the edited, make that censored, versions of Dahl’s books. But the original Dahl works will also be printed. Here’s my prediction: Woke Dahl, just like the New Coke debacle several decades ago, will go down as colossal failure. Vintage Dahl will win.

Heroes are hard to find in these complicated times. But the legacy of “Roald the Rotten” has been used to fight back against another bully, the woke movement, which deems itself morally correct and beyond reproach.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Dating Apps and Bigotry

Posted: February 26, 2023 by datechguy in culture
Tags: ,

Of all the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go any length for it-risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself.

Mark Twain

Something stuck me when I saw this piece on Twitchy:

Kaeley Triller’s been described as a “highly skilled female operative of the theocratic right” and considers herself an old-school AstroTERF. On Saturday she decided to share some of the matches a lesbian dating app found for her friend:

ah the agony of choice…

As you might guess there are plenty of people who insist that a woman like Kaeley is a bigot if she doesn’t consent to date and/or sleep with any of these people, but looking at this photo brings up an obvious question to me..

How many of the “transwomen” are as they would call it “transexclusionary” when it comes to dating?

I mean after all if these “transwoman” are in fact women as they maintain and are in fact lesbians as the also maintain then surely they would not exclude other “transwomen” from their dating pool would they. In fact if these woman are not rushing to choose other “transwomen” as both dates and sexual partners must we conclude that they are by their own standards bigots?

Now I don’t know the answer to my question and perhaps someone who has a greater knowledge of these dating apps and how they keep stats can figure it out. If they determine that the “transwomen” there are in fact happy to date other “transwoman” then I’ll gladly concede that my supposition is wrong.

But if in fact they are holding out for actual women then they become the ultimate confirmation of the Mark Twain quote above

Jason “Sonny” Pratt: I get it, by day the mild mannered children’s book author, by night the fearsome masked avenger.

Jon Sable [in B.B. Flemm guise] Just the opposite actually. If anyone knew I was writing Children’s books…I don’t even want to think about it.

Sonny Pratt: Well if you’re embarassed about being a children’s author why do you keep doing it?

Jon Sable: Sonny, There’s just so damn much money in it.

Jon Sable Freelance #7 1983

One of the things that has become very apparent in reading about the Transgender push among medical centers, particularly involving the young is that it’s a cash cow.

You not only have low risk (in terms of complications leading to death) elective surgery but you have drugs and hormone treatments taking place over the course of years or even decades and a psych department staying busy with counseling that can last just as long.

That’s a ton of billable procedures and products for EACH person who dives into the Transgender pool that will keep your practice and department in the black for many many years and all it requires is to throw out that pesky first principle of medical treatment “Do no harm” and replace it with “Do no harm to your bottom line.”

While exposing this might be effective to some degree against hospitals and practices that depend on donations and sponsors no amount of public shaming or twitter quips or thoughtful commentary or even detailed exposés is likely to cause people who have abandoned both Judeo-Christian ethics and medical ethics for profit to change their behavior.

This however might:

A woman in Ontario who identified as transgender and underwent hormone therapy, a bilateral mastectomy, and a hysterectomy filed the first lawsuit in Canada against her healthcare providers for facilitating her transition. 

Michelle Zacchigna, a 34-year-old woman from Orillia, Ontario, recently announced a lawsuit she filed against the eight doctors and mental health professionals who treated her over the years, alleging that they failed to address her complex mental health needs and instead allowed her to self-diagnose as transgender and undergo irreversible procedures that she now regrets. 

It’s worth noting that this woman is 34 and started this process at 21 meaning that this has been going on for a very long time before attention was being drawn to it.

“I will live the rest of my life without breasts, with a deepened voice and male-pattern balding, and without the ability to get pregnant. Removing my completely healthy uterus is my greatest regret,” Zacchigna wrote in a blog post for Lighthouse Forum.

Zacchigna’s lawsuit claims that the healthcare providers who treated her failed to address her serious mental health issues and developmental disabilities and instead offered her irreversible medical interventions. 

“The Defendants permitted Michelle to self-diagnose as transgender and prescribe her own treatment without providing a differential diagnosis or proposing alternative treatments,” reads the Statement of Claim filed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

I suspect this is the first of many such lawsuits we are going to see over the years as people who have been castrated and sterilized in their youth discover that it doesn’t bring them the relief promised by those who drugged and cut them up for fun and profit.

Mind you as I noted this woman was 21, can you picture how strong that argument might be for a person who started this as a teen, as a minor, as a pre-teen. The lawsuits practically file themselves. Once we start seeing jury awards in the millions or even tens of millions (after all when your life has been destroyed by thirty you might have fifty years of suffering to pay for. the cost benefit analysis will change in a real hurry.

These suits will be a series of solid jabs to the transgender body mutilation industry, and now Florida is preparing a follow up right cross taking a completely different tack:

The new bill, called the Reverse Woke Act, flips the gender transition movement on its head by requiring employers that provide coverage for gender transition procedures also to provide coverage for de-transitioning. It even puts employers on the hook for de-transitioning coverage for people who are no longer employed by the company if they worked there when they transitioned.

“An employer that covers the cost, directly or through benefits, of gender dysphoria treatment for employees must also cover the total costs associated with treatment that reverses the gender dysphoria treatment, regardless of the rate of coverage provided for the initial treatment,” reads the proposal introduced by Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia.

“An employee who received gender dysphoria treatment through coverage provided by an employer is entitled to full coverage by that employer of the total costs associated with treatment that reverses gender dysphoria treatment if the employee later determines that the gender dysphoria treatment was not appropriate for him or her and wants to reverse the treatment, regardless of whether the person is currently employed by that same employer at the time of such determination,” the bill continues. “An employer’s obligations under this section are not affected by whether the initial treatment is provided in this state, and an employer may not make coverage of subsequent treatment contingent on whether the employee receives such subsequent treatment in this state.”

So if you’re a woke employer or corporation coving Transgender transition to show just how moral you are, you are on the hook to take care of the person who changes their mind, even if the person in question no longer works for you. You could be stuck dealing with such cost years or even decades later and subject to civil suits if you don’t pay up.

Can you say “Cost prohibitive?”

Or to paraphrase Sherman: We cannot change the hearts and minds of those woke people in the medical profession, but we can through the courts & legislatures make the financial risks of the transgender industry to hospitals so terrible that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.

This is the first step in a long march, may legions follow.

Actually that’s a rather unfair headline. The Anglican communion has not given up Christianity for Lent, they’ve given it up for good.

Church of England priests will be permitted to bless the civil marriages of same-sex couples in a profound shift in the church’s stance on homosexuality after a historic vote by its governing body.

The vote wasn’t as close as one might have hoped:

After an impassioned debate lasting more than eight hours, the C of E’s national assembly, the General Synod, voted by 250 votes to 181 to back a proposal by bishops intended to end years of painful divisions and disagreement over sexuality.

In one respect it isn’t a surprise, when you have a denomination that was founded on the principle “I get to bang who I want and the hell with what the church says” odds are that right is going to expand in time from just the king to everyone else.

And what is the grand prize they receive for choosing the world over Christ? SCHISM!

A group of Anglican church leaders from around the world have ousted the Archbishop of Canterbury as their head following the decision to allow the blessing of same-sex couples in England.

The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) has said in a statement that it no longer considers Justin Welby to be ‘leader of the global communion’, and it has ‘disqualified’ the Church of England from being its ‘mother church’.

Earlier this month, the General Synod – the Church of England’s legislative assembly – passed a motion to allow the blessing of same-sex couples in civil partnerships.

The GSFA said it speaks for 75% of Anglicans around the world, officially representing 25 member provinces – mainly in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

That number is interesting, 75% of the Anglicans around the world aren’t with this move. You know the ones in Africa, India and Latin America.

I’ll wager the liberal Karens in England who have pushed this have very specific opinions on the clergy of color who are currently critiquing them but are keeping silent due to fears of being outed as racists think they know better than their non-white breathern.

Alas there doesn’t seem to be any signs of a modern St. John fisher or St. Thomas Moore in the west even though the only penalty might be cancellation rather than execution.

Over at Hotair they see where this is going:

Run amok is usually what happens when progressives take control of anything, so I think the remaining Church of England types in England should just bank on it. It’s not looking good for the home team. While I’m sure they’re all patting themselves on the back for their inclusivity and modern approach, when those C of E congregations start shrinking? No doubt they’ll be the most surprised.

This is of course the invariable result when you reject those who support biblical teaching for those who are fruitless and don’t multiply.

Then again when you have a denomination that is a copy of a copy they tend to fade which is the disadvantage of all Protestantism whose primary principle is that the every denomination must keep splitting until everyone has a church that suits either their desires.

Say what you will about the Catholic Church even as Denomination after denomination has embraced contraception, abortion and gay marriage they have stayed steady and not embraced the rebels within.

And of course there is always the choice for some of those Anglicans to decide to re-cross the Tiber per the guidelines set down by Pope Benedict XVI. How anxious Francis would be to welcome such congregations given his own proclivities is of course another story.

So let me say this to the new even more non-biblical Anglicans. I’m sure the press, video, print and online will embrace this decision as “brave” and pols and pundits will all be celebrating you for these moves and the Bishops involved in these decisions will be feted by their worldly pals for the rest of their lives but while you still have a heartbeat let me remind you of this warning from a fellow named Ezekiel:

You, son of man, I have appointed watchman for the house of Israel; when you hear me say anything, you shall warn them for me. If I tell the wicked man that he shall surely die, and you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked man from his way, he (the wicked man) shall die for his guilt, but I will hold you responsible for his death. But if you warn the wicked man, trying to turn him from his way, and he refuses to turn from his way, he shall die for his guilt, but you shall save yourself.

Ezekiel 33:7-9

You, our modernist friends are welcome to ignore the advice of Ezekiel that I’ve in duty repeated to you or choose to embrace it. You have the rest of your lives to do so…

…after that you’re on your own and I wish you the very best of luck.

Postscript. I know today was going to be the Trump advice piece that I wrote two days ago but this coming out the day before Ash Wednesday was ready made for the occasion. I’ll get the trump thing up tomorrow.