patrick.net

I love this article, even if it sounds kinda woke at first. I don't care that the writer is a lesbian or a Jew. She should not have even mentioned those.

I realize the faddish thing to say these days is that we live in the worst, most broken and backward country in the world and maybe in the history of civilization. It’s utter nonsense. ...

But there is no gulag in America. There are no laws permitting honor killings. There is no formal social credit system of the kind that exists right now in China. By any measure, we have achieved incredible progress and enjoy extraordinary freedoms. And yet people aren’t acting that way. They are acting, increasingly, like subjects in a totalitarian country.

These people write to me daily. They admit to regularly censoring themselves at work and with friends; succumbing to social pressure to tweet the right hashtag; to parroting slogans they do not believe to protect their livelihoods, like the greengrocer in Václav Havel’s famous essay “The Power of the Powerless.”

These people aren’t crazy. They are scared for good reason.

How much does it cost me to log on to Twitter and accuse you, right now, of an -ism? America is fast developing its own informal social credit system, as the writer Rod Dreher has noted, in which people with the wrong politics or online persona are banned from social media sites and online financial networks. ... (see original post) ...

It’s time to stand up and fight back. That means you. Social conservatives. Never-Trump Republicans, and anti-anti-Trump Republicans, too. Lukewarm liberals and libertarians. Progressives who have a little curiosity still left. Exhausted parents who want nothing to do with politics. Joe Rogan stans. Reddit revolutionaries and the hedgies getting crushed. Facebookers and email chainers and Etsy-shop owners and Boomers who still use AOL accounts. Start with the following 10 principles:

1. Remind yourself, right now, of the following truth: You are free.

It’s true that we live in an upside-down time in which pressing the “like” button on the wrong thing can bring untold consequences. But giving in to those who seek to confine you only hurts you in the long run. Your loss of self is the most significant thing that could be taken away from you. Don’t give it up for anything.

2. Be honest.

Do not say anything about yourself or others that you know is false. Absolutely refuse to let your mind be colonized. The first crazy thing someone asks you to believe or to profess, refuse. If you can, do so out loud. There is a good chance it will inspire others to speak up, too.

3. Stick to your principles.

If you are a decent person, you know mob justice is never just. So never join a mob. Ever. Even if you agree with the mob. If you are a decent person, you know betraying friends is wrong. So if a friend or a colleague does something you disagree with, write them a private note. Don’t be a snitch. Any mob that comes for them will come for you.

4. Set an example for your kids and your community.

That means being courageous. I understand that it’s hard. Really hard. But in other times and places, including in our own nation, people have made far greater sacrifices. (Think of those “honored dead” who “gave the last full measure of devotion.”) If enough people make the leap, we will achieve something like herd immunity. Jump.

5. If you don’t like it, leave it.

A class in college, a job, anything. Get out and do your own thing. I fully understand the impulse to want to change things from within. And by all means: Try as hard as you can. But if the leopard is currently eating the face of the person at the cubicle next to yours, I promise it’s not going to refrain from eating yours if you post the black square on Instagram.

6. Become more self-reliant.

If you can learn to use a power drill, do it. If you’ve always wanted an outdoor solar hot tub, make one. Learn to poach an egg or shoot a gun. Most importantly: Get it in your head that platforms are not neutral. If you don’t believe me, look at Parler and look at Robinhood. To the extent that you can build your life to be self-reliant and not 100 percent reliant on the Web, it’s a good thing. It will make you feel competent and powerful. Which you are.

7. Worship God more than Yale.

In other words, do not lose sight of what is essential. Professional prestige is not essential. Being popular is not essential. Getting your child into an elite preschool is not essential. Doing the right thing is essential. Telling the truth is essential. Protecting your kids is essential.

8. Make like-minded friends.

Then stand up for them. Two good tests: Are they willing to tell the truth even if it hurts their own side? And do they think that humor should never be a casualty, no matter how bleak the circumstances? These people are increasingly rare. When you find them, hold on tight.

9. Trust your own eyes and ears.

Rely on firsthand information from people you trust rather than on media spin. When you hear someone making generalizations about a group of people, imagine they are talking about you and react accordingly. If people insist on spouting back headlines and talking points, make them prove it, in their own words.

10. Use your capital to build original, interesting and generative things right now. This minute.

Every day I hear from those with means with children at private schools who are being brainwashed; people who run companies where they are scared of their own employees; people who donate to their alma mater even though it betrays their principles. Enough. You have the ability to build new things. If you don’t have the financial capital, you have the social or political capital. Or the ability to sweat. The work of our lifetimes is the Great Build. Let’s go.

https://notthebee.com/article/the-national-archives-put-a-harmful-language-warning-on-the-site-that-hosts-the-constitution-declaration-and-other-historical-records

The National Archives put a "harmful language" warning on the site that hosts the Constitution, Declaration, and other historical records

What harmful or difficult content may be found in the National Archives Catalog and our web pages?

Some items may:

reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes;
be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more;
include graphic content of historical events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, natural disasters and more;
demonstrate bias and exclusion in institutional collecting and digitization policies.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/83090?mailing_id=6169&utm_medium=patrick.net&utm_source=patrick.net&utm_campaign=patrick.net&utm_content=body

Orwell and the Woke
Orwell would say of the woke, “It was impossible to say which was which.”

Epigraph: “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” George Orwell, “Animal Farm”

What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants?

Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a designer dress to the more than $30,000-a-ticket Met gala? Her entourage needs were certainly well-attended to by masked Morlock servants.

Did the leftist celebrities at the recent Emmy awards gather to discuss opening Malibu beaches to the homeless when the (unmasked) stars virtue-signaled their wokeness?

For answers about these hypocritical wokists, always turn first to George Orwell. In his brief allegorical novella, “Animal Farm,” an array of animal characters — led by the thinking pigs of the farm — staged a revolution, driving out their human overseers.

The anti-human animal comrades started out sounding like zealous Russian Bolsheviks (“four legs good, two legs bad”). But soon they ended up conned by a murderous cult of pigs under a Joseph Stalin-like leader. And so, the revolution became what it once had opposed (“four legs good, two legs better”).

Our own woke, year-zero revolution is now in its second year. Yet last year’s four-legged revolutionaries are already strutting on two legs. They are not just hobnobbing with the “white supremacists” and “capitalists,” but outdoing them in their revolutionary zeal for the rarified privileges of the material good life.

The Marxist co-founder of BLM, Patrisse Cullors, is now on her fourth woke home. She has moved on from the barricades to the security fences of her Topanga Canyon digs in a mostly all-white, all-rich rural paradise — the rewards for revolutionary service.

Professor Ibram X. Kendi has evolved from the edgy revolutionary work of flying all over the country, hawking his Orwellian message of “All racism bad! But some racism good!” Now he has mastered the art of zooming the wannabe woke for his $20,000 an hour avant-garde hectoring.

What of Colin Kaepernick, the mediocre second-string quarterback turned sudden firebrand? He refused to stand for the national anthem and spread his “take a knee” kitsch throughout professional sports.

Kaepernick became a boutique revolutionary multimillionaire. For $12 million a year, he pitches Nike sneakers, often made in Chinese forced-labor camps.

Woke NBA star LeBron James, from his $23 million Brentwood mansion, blasts America for its endless unfairness — in service to his totalitarian Chinese paymasters who will ensure his good life with an eventual lifetime $1 billion payout for hawking their goods.

Our other elite wokists navigating around the revolution are even more cynical. The corporate and Wall Street capitalists feel that a little virtue signaling, showy diversity coordinators, and woke advertising will more or less buy off the latest version of Al-Sharpton-like shake-down artists.

Then there are the trimmers and enablers. These are the wealthy, rich, and the professional classes. They feel — in abstract — absolutely terrible about inequality, but hardly enough in the concrete to mix with the unwashed.

For them, wokism is like party membership in the late ethically bankrupt Soviet Union. It is necessary for peace of mind and good income, but otherwise not an obstacle for the continuance of the privileged, comfortable life.

The more TV news hosts rant about “systemic” this and “supremacy” that, and the more college presidents write stern penance memos to their faculty about “that’s not who we are,” the more they feel not just good about themselves, but relieved of any real obligation to live and socialize with the Other.

As for the self-declared non-white Other, wokism is also a top-down revolution of celebrities, intellectuals, actors, activists, academics, grifters, lawyers, and the upper-middle class and rich. And they are not calling for a Marshall Plan to bring classical education to the inner city. They themselves have little desire to move in or spread their wealth. They rarely mentor others on their shrewd capitalist expertise that made themselves rich.

They are far more cynical than that. The regrettable violence of the street, the 120 days of 2020 looting, death and arson, are the levers of the woke professionals. They fight with the various tribes of the same class and mindset over the slices of the same coveted elite pies. But they bring to the scrap the unspoken cudgel that without greater non-white de facto quotas in comic books, TV commercials, Ivy League faculties and students, symphonies, and sit-coms, then “systemic racism” could once again ignite downtown Portland or Seattle or Baltimore.

Orwell would say of the woke Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Bernie Sanders, LeBron James, or Ibram Kendi — and their supposedly unwoke, but similarly rich and privileged enemies — “It was impossible to say which was which.”

https://notthebee.com/article/a-chicago-museum-just-fired-all-of-its-guides-because-they-were-mostly-white-females-and-thats-not-diverse-enough

The Art Institute of Chicago fired all of its guides because they were mostly white females and that's apparently not diverse enough

Patrick says

https://notthebee.com/article/a-chicago-museum-just-fired-all-of-its-guides-because-they-were-mostly-white-females-and-thats-not-diverse-enough

The Art Institute of Chicago fired all of its guides because they were mostly white females and that's apparently not diverse enough

The guides were unpaid volunteers. The new hires are paid employees.

The Art Institute should continue this line of thinking to include its executives.

So many untold stories. You should hear what the Met Opera in NYC did.

What did they do?

Used it as an opportunity to get multi-year wage concessions - agree to 30% wage cuts going forward (this was in 2000) from the Stagehands, Orchestra, etc. into 2022 or be laid off permanently. Apparently the NY Philharmonic demanded until 2024!
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/12/meta-d12.html

$1500/week ain't shit to work in NYC. Esp. for Stagehands who do 'real' work involving carpentry, painting, complex lighting setups, etc.

None of the mostly wealthy board or upper management took a permanent pay cut, or any kind of pay cut. 'Cos you know, Leadership.

The Met has published its tax returns for the year ending July 2020, four months of which were shut by Covid.

Two chiefs continued to draw their pay.

Met general manager Peter Gelb earned $1.46 million, marginally down from $1.49 million the year before.

Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin cashed in $915,571, up from $392,152 in 2019, when he had just two productions.

Total salaries fell from $240 million to $199 million.

So the workers - the people who build the stage, run the lights, actually perform - get shafted but the executives who "make important decisions" do just fine.

Not mentioned in the article, they let go scores of performers in Summer 2020 - then brought in an entirely new set a few months later, instead of hiring back the ones they laid off.

Very much like the Kennedy Center which was publicized:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/kennedy-center-announces-250-more-layoffs-in-wake-of-25-million-federal-grant/2020/03/31/461d21ec-72b7-11ea-a9bd-9f8b593300d0_story.html

All of these Art Fag institutions get mucho tax payer monies, and they got extra COVID bailouts. It's all going to frippery and expansion, not keeping the employees working.

I should also mention the Kennedy Center, the Met, the Philarmonic, are not like your downtown playhouse, scratching by on donations or a private owner who lives in penury in a bedroom next to the box office. These places clear hundreds of millions a year and pay multi-million dollar contracts to conductors, directors, etc, have Sirius FM contracts, and lease out the building to other major events.

Oh, by the way, although my interest in Fine Performing Arts is about as large as my interest in Menudo's Greatest Hits... it should come as no surprise that the Fine Music world is all about sucking dick. And not necessarily the gal who plays 2nd Violin, but the guy who plays two kinds of Trombone. Most directors, conductors, executives, producers...

ALL of these fucks are far left democrats who whinge about Abuse and Bullying from Straights and "Ignorant People".

From a mailing list I'm on:

I just listened to a very interesting video. Each local, city, state and federal position has to have a surety bond. We can sue the position for malfeasance, buy filing a pro se attack/ claim on the bond. Many claims filed at once can shut down the system as the insurance companies back down. The bond is a set amount, and when that goes, the person can no longer act in the capacity of the position, and then they are removed. This can work on School boards and even the governor. We can’t attack the laws, but we can attack their relationship with the few insurance companies issuing these bonds. This was done already in some states.

Very interesting, thanks @Patrick.

I asked for the link to the video. Will post if I get it.

Here's the link to the video:


original link
/

Patrick says

Here's the link to the video:

Look at his previous videos. I think he's a crackpot, but I have listened to several of his videos.

Jim Willie is a favorite of mine, but he's certainly a crackpot - also creepy as shit with female interviewers. Benjamin Fulford is also a crackpot, but I listen to him. I do enjoy hopium. Who doesn't like promise and hope even when it's false promise and hope?

It's fine to listen to them, but with a very very tiny grain of salt. People don't realize that salt was once a currency, so the smaller it is, the less you should trust it. So you don't take something with a giant grain of salt, you take it with the smallest if you distrust it. It doesn't really matter though, when people hear "grain of salt" they already know it's not credible.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/84701?mailing_id=6327&utm_medium=patrick.net&utm_source=patrick.net&utm_campaign=patrick.net&utm_content=body

Patrick says

From a mailing list I'm on:

I just listened to a very interesting video. Each local, city, state and federal position has to have a surety bond. We can sue the position for malfeasance, buy filing a pro se attack/ claim on the bond. Many claims filed at once can shut down the system as the insurance companies back down. The bond is a set amount, and when that goes, the person can no longer act in the capacity of the position, and then they are removed. This can work on School boards and even the governor. We can’t attack the laws, but we can attack their relationship with the few insurance companies issuing these bonds. This was done already in some states.

I'm interested in trying this.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/what-functional-america-wants/?source=patrick.net

What Functional America wants
An end to disorder and CRT-loving hustlers who fan the flames of hate ...

America’s welfare class possesses cars, cable televisions and air conditioning. But basic needs like safety, love and trust that governments cannot conjure go missing. So the charity and benevolence are not working. They are instead producing monsters like Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha parade killer, and the shock troops of the radical left.

That’s where Kimberlé Crenshaw and other racial firebrands come in. Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher professor of law at Columbia University and distinguished professor of law at UCLA, Crenshaw exclaimed on Twitter the day of the Rittenhouse verdict: “Acquitted. All fucking charges. Understand what this means.” Crenshaw’s take on the Waukesha Christmas Parade massacre is yet unknown, and her agent at the Creative Arts Agency (CAA) is unlikely to clarify. ...

Stirring racial animus has been Crenshaw’s lifelong modus operandi, and she’s good at it. ...

But Crenshaw is a mere device. The real woke power lies with kingmakers like CAA that steer the nation’s meta-narrative almost invisibly. Crenshaw gets the mike and drum to bang. Billionaires watch the world burn in their mansions and townhouses ringed with security guards, using injustice and racial discord in the US to distract from their global predation.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/woke-mental-gymnastics-tenement-museum-race/?source=patrick.net

That is what wokeness drives otherwise intelligent people to do: twist facts to match “the Narrative” (“we have a winner, folks, nobody suffered more than black people, with thanks to our Holocaust refugees as the runner-up”) rather than allow facts to create a narrative (America treated its nineteenth-century white immigrants poorly, visiting upon them many of the same discriminations as it did slaves, because class and capital, not race, is controlling).

No less than the Ancient Order of Hibernians said it is also concerned about the Tenement Museum’s replacing its Irish single family tour with a hybrid story of Irish and black families. The Museum was quick to respond they aren’t doing away with the Irish, just pushing them toward the back of the bus a bit to make room for some 2021 liberal tears. ...

Wokeness, and flippant accusations that anyone who disagrees with it is a racist, shields society from asking questions, and creates a stage where any intellectual bull is accepted as long as it sells the narrative, whether at the Tenement Museum or the Daily Beast. At its heart, wokeness is anti-intellectual, almost medieval, with today’s canceled comedians or the Irish of the Tenement Museum, as the modern Galileo.

The bottom line is this: If you are offended by something you read, or your feelings are otherwise hurt, you own the problem. You can choose to deal with it in a variety of ways, either by refusing to read any potentially offensive material, by ignoring the offense, or by writing cogently in response, critiquing the ideas one finds offensive. But it is your problem to deal with. Others are not obliged to cater to your sensibilities in advance, nor need they be censored after the fact. In my day, recognizing this reality was called growing up.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist. "The cells in your right hand are probably from a different exploded star than those in your left."

https://notthebee.com/article/totally-based-mystery-florida-man-putting-flyers-on-cars-with-new-york-tags-telling-woke-people-theyre-welcome-to-leave?source=patrick.net

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/17306137/microsoft-inclusiveness-checker-office365-word/?source=patrick.net

Tech giant Microsoft trying to make world more woke by rolling out ‘inclusiveness’ checker in Word

The answer is to no longer use Word.

when a progressive person says something based not of fact; simply say. oh conspiracy theories. they have no clue how to handle this since only bad people rely on them. now they are totally baffled.

we should start calling out everything as racist. weather it benefits us or not. just blur the playing field with there own nonsense till they can't see straight, oh wait... well do it more.

or you can approach them even more radical to the left than they are. then they start to defend conservatives ideals a little or they say well I didn't vote for that.. oh wait, ah, yes, you did, lol.

Patrick says

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/17306137/microsoft-inclusiveness-checker-office365-word/?source=patrick.net

Tech giant Microsoft trying to make world more woke by rolling out ‘inclusiveness’ checker in Word

The answer is to no longer use Word.

https://www.libreoffice.org/?source=patrick.net

It's funny that MS Office still exists.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/deep-state-no-conspiracy/?source=patrick.net

The deep state is no conspiracy theory
Progressive monoculture has enveloped many of our private and public institutions. Aldous Huxley saw it coming ...

The changes, according to the author of Brave New World, would be almost imperceptible. “All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial,” he continued. “Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.” ...

In lofty circles, it is said that the Deep State is a far-right conspiracy theory, nothing more. The very words elicit an eye-roll and a smirk. But what else synchronizes uncountable public agencies and their private-sector partners — wink-wink — in the absence of executive statesmanship? What has made the wheels of government go round and round this last year, and if we are honest, for a very long time?

Surface government, elected and appointed, is only its polished clock-face. Television and newspapers report the ticks and tocks daily. Right now, this clock-face looks like something melting, or covered with ants, a surreal dreamscape straight out of Salvador Dali. ...

Woke has been trying for years to drum limited-government nationalists out of public life, calling them white supremacists and deplorables. Highly contestable outlooks on equity, race, acceptable speech, and biology stand inside public life as revealed virtue or expedient virtue. Woke can be a liturgy or a useful hustle. A malleable, celebrity-struck electorate wants its politics fast, simple, and preferably juicy. Junk news gets the eyes and clicks. Social media is trying to get inside your head, and knows how to do it better each year.

Promoted and funded by the Deep State, multicultural and therapeutic wrecking engines invade private institutions and endowments, forcing “diversity” makeovers. National courts and nonprofit lawyer-activists codify matters once left to private judgment, families, and churches. Litigation functions to delay justice and to sidestep public will and oversight.

The moral arrogations of our times are said to be about justice and equality, but they are actually about the redistribution of power, wealth and status at the expense of property holders and taxpayers, targeting white America as devils. Claiming moral advantage, the unscrupulous and the predatory have used race, sex, and inequality to damn and destroy their foes. ...

“We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world,” the irrepressible French writer Michel Houellebecq predicted at the onset of Covid. “It will be the same, just a bit worse.”

One more way to fight wokeness: read Agatha Christie mysteries.

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/deep-conservatism-agatha-christie/?source=patrick.net

Christie could be direct in censuring not only modern architecture, but modern art and literature, which she found vapid and uninspiring. A character in Murder Is Easy considers disguising himself as an artist but admits he can’t draw or paint; someone responds: “You could be a modern artist…. Then that wouldn’t matter.” In another story, Poirot examines a piece of modern art and finds that the contrasting images contained are incoherent and meaningless.

https://www.thehebrewconservative.com/2022/02/17/pride-and-forgetfulness/?source=patrick.net

https://stanfordreview.org/announcing-woke-watch/?source=patrick.net

No idea should be off-limits at a university. But when an ideology becomes so prevalent that it is nearly impossible to challenge, it becomes a serious problem—and a threat to academic freedom.

Over the last few years, Stanford has been taken over by a collection of theories that view society as consisting only of the oppressors and the oppressed, see words as violent and disagreement as danger, and deny the existence of objective truth. Whether these theories are called anti-racism; social justice; Critical Theory; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; or simply being “on the right side of history;” their effect is the same. They chill free speech, encourage conformity, and demonize disagreement.

We at the Review are deeply concerned about the stranglehold these ideas place on rational discourse. In this spirit, we are launching “Woke Watch,” a new series that gives readers an inside look into how wokeness is rotting the intellectual foundations of one of America’s leading universities.

Over the coming weeks, you’ll read about CS professors crusading against “very masculine movie posters,” therapists promoting anti-Semitism in the name of “equity,” Green Library’s glorification of the Black Panther Party, and much more.

We hope that by shining a light on the bizarre, performative, and insidious world of “social justice” at Stanford, Woke Watch will draw attention to the havoc these ideologies have wreaked—and bring us closer to solutions.

Stay tuned for the first Woke Watch article coming out tomorrow. And don’t worry: you’ll also be able to follow along on our Twitter page, given the social media platform's recent liberation.

The Review Staff

Some Stanford students are fighting the good fight.

https://notthebee.com/article/celebrate-juneteenth-with-vince-everett-ellison-as-he-spits-nuclear-fire-at-democrats-race-hustlers-and-communists

thats a good list actually

https://notthebee.com/article/i-have-no-idea-how-this-ad-relates-to-luxury-watches-but-its-the-most-anti-woke-commercial-ive-ever-seen

Patrick says

https://notthebee.com/article/i-have-no-idea-how-this-ad-relates-to-luxury-watches-but-its-the-most-anti-woke-commercial-ive-ever-seen

based!