Some observations on political correctness in between fights tonight.



Scrolling up this page the things that seem to have people upset are things the government has no control over at all. They're not part of the political ideology of any party. Brands don't change their name or logo or image or whatever due to the government telling them what to do, media companies aren't being told what and what not to broadcast by the government. This stuff is all coming from the public and businesses are responding in the way that will least damage their future profits. On one hand if they bow to the wishes of the woke mob then there's going to be some kind of conservative backlash against them. These days they seem to be siding with the lefty liberal people. Businesses constantly poll and focus group the public to find out what they're thinking about their business. It's hugely important to them. If you're the CEO of a corporation you can technically be sent to prison for not maximising current profits as much as you can or for ignoring future threats to profit making. You can guarantee that any kind of culture war issue that may collide with a particular business/corporation has been extensively, extensively polled, focus grouped and wargamed by that company and they have plans in place to deal with it. In a lot of cases that will mean changing things before they even become an issue. Is the black lady on the syrup bottle in this thread? There's one example.

What does this tell you? It tells us that lefty liberal views have tremendous cultural power these days. Let me tell you why. Corporations/businesses and their advertisers in general (unless you're selling old people shit like stairlifts or whatever) target the under thirty five demographic. Their phone/internet data is far more commercially valuable than middle aged/old people and costs correspondingly more money for advertisers to buy. The reason is middle aged/old people are set in their ways. They have their brands that they like and they buy those brands. Advertising new brands bounces off them to a large extent. Young people are gettable for advertisers so that's who they target their adverts at. They're willing to try new brands, products and services and so on. And if you get them at a young age the chances are you'll have a loyal customer for decades. Meanwhile the old fuckers who may be outraged that you took the old lady off the syrup bottle are going to die soon anyway. So this amplifies young peoples' cultural power. And it leaves half the country who don't like this shit feeling marginalised, feeling like their country is being taken away from them. And of course you have the shower of shit in conservative media amplifying this and creating a daily ocean of bullshit and scaremongering about it because it makes them (collectively) billions of dollars.



Look at this fucker:

https://www.mediaite.com/podcasts/da...ng-50-million/


A million dollars a month to some fucker I've never heard of to do a radio show. There are hundreds of these fuckers in America. This appears to be a deal at or near the very top end of the market. There are hundreds of guys with small time shows out there wanting to be the next guy making a million a month. How do you get there? Amp up the outrage. Anything and everything gets turned into a culture war issue and to hell with the facts. Train crashes, spy balloons, you name it. So on one side of the culture war you have left liberal power outsize to their numbers and on the other you have these grifting bullshitting motherfuckers who will happily risk the end of democracy in America with their lies if it makes them money:


Today in Trump (saddoboxing.com)





Again these right wing people are assailing the government about all this politically enforced control of comedians making jokes, Doctor Seuss books, long grain rice or whatever. But there is now an outbreak of actual political correctness now in America if you define pc as a political party or movement enforcing their ideology on the public. And the call is coming from inside the house. Book banning, monitoring the menstrual cycles of schoolgirls and telling private businesses what their hiring policies should be are some of the highlights. The centrepiece is an all out war on education, because it's the woke schools and universities that are brainwashing kids today and turning them all into lockstep lefties.

An example:

House Bill 999, introduced on Tuesday by Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola), proposes to give boards of trustees nearly unanimous power over state university faculty hiring, allow professors’ tenure to be reevaluated “at any time,” remove critical race theory and gender studies from college curricula, and bar spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The bill also digs in on DeSantis’ obsession with shutting down any educational instruction on race and systemic racism, stating that general education courses must not “suppress or distort” historical events, reference identity politics like critical race theory, or define U.S. history in ways that contradict “universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” Instead, the courses must “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents, including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers.”

[...]


But experts say that the scope of this latest bill stretches farther than his past assaults on the education system.
“We’ve seen educational censorship legislation in Florida and other states in the last couple of years, mostly aimed at classroom instruction,” Jeremy C. Young, senior manager of Free Expression and Education at PEN America, told TPM. “This bill goes far beyond that to censor entire university administrations. It’s basically a massive power grab by the governor and his fleet of political appointees.”
Decisions that are typically made with university presidents and boards of trustees in cooperation with faculty and staff – like setting up core curricula and deciding which departments should close, would be handed exclusively over to the board – members of which are appointed by the governor.
What Daniel Gordon, a historian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author on academic freedom , finds “particularly striking” about the bill is that it doesn’t require trustees to consult university faculty before hiring new professors. “This contradicts a principle, well established by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), that [sic] professors in a given discipline have the expertise needed to select a new faculty member in the discipline,” he told TPM. “Math professors are the people best equipped to assess applications for a professorship in math!”
Experts also argue that the bill imperils academic freedom on college campuses, a principle DeSantis himself has claimed to support.
“It proposes a political litmus test for what can be taught in the classroom,” said Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University and author of “Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution,” “whereas the essence of academic freedom is the freedom of teachers and researchers to pursue the academic task with whatever resources that they think will be helpful.”



Teachers are now being threatened with being charged with a felony if they have a verboten book on the shelf of their classroom library. I am not kidding:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida...use-bill-1467/

I'm guessing that would be the end of your teaching career. So this is basically government appointees telling you what you can and can't teach.



And this shit is spreading throughout the country:



https://twitter.com/JeffSharlet/stat...05536129404928





How well do we think this is is going to go in changing students' attitudes and making them less lefty liberal?

Main event coming up. Back to this later.