Roxane Gay

How Woke and Whacked-Out Is Harvard? This Woke and Whacked-Out…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’m supposed to turn in my Harvard reunion report on my life since Old Ivy for the school’s “red book.” Last time, I devoted my essay to explaining why my alma mater was an embarrassment. This time, I’m tempted to skip the whole exercise. It’s futile.

Harvard Medical School held an absurd event called “the Pathology of Unruly Bodies.” A panel devoid of doctors or medical experts declared that anti-obesity drugs were part of an imperialistic “indoctrination” of society. Gee, I never thought of it that way! I never thought of it that way because it’s irredeemably stupid.

The panel included Da’Shaun L Harrison, who claims that GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic and Zepbound are weapons of “genocide” against fat people. [See this post from yesterday. “Genocide” no longer means genocide to the Left, so when Israel is accused of genocide, who knows what they mean?] It also includes Ethics Villain Roxane Gay, hilariously the occupant of Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She’s also the “artist-in-residence”—whatever that means— at Harvard Medical School and has a column in the New York Times (of course she does!).

Gay (she’s the cousin of disgraced former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, which I did not know when she was in the process of proving what an unforgivable DEI selection she was) has called for the release of Luigi Mangione, the man whjo murdered the CEO of UnitedHealthcare two years ago. That alone should disqualify her from participation in any event that is supposed to enlighten young minds, but Harvard decided she was a font of wisdom.

In the panel discussion, Harrison argued that the companies offering the anti-obesity drugs are, well, let me quote her or him (I can’t figure out which so far, and frankly, I don’t care): “This practice of forcing people into manipulating and changing or shifting how they look is oftentimes about making bodies militarisable. Building up a military to defend an imperialist state…A lot of doctors, medical professionals and folks who collaborate with them — be it through the government or media — are advocating for atrocities that are directly impacting our citizens, but also citizens around the globe. It then becomes about creating this ideal body that you are always being pushed and pulled towards, as a way to represent this patriotism that is intended to indoctrinate one into the military, into the defense of the country.”

Okayyyy..Uh, what color is the sky on your planet, Da’Shaun?

Professor Turley comments, “The suggestion that weight loss drugs serve imperialist, militaristic goals is obviously bonkers. It is the kind of raving you would expect on a subway from someone wearing a handmade cardboard sign and a tin foil hat.”

Not to Harvard’s leaders and administrators, though! Maybe I’ll post this essay in the “red book.”

Oh.. I almost forgot. This is what Roxane Gay looks like…

I wonder why she’s convinced weight loss drugs are part of a right wing plot?

Ethics Corrupters: “Work Friend” Advice Columnist Roxane Gay And The Irresponsible Newspaper That Employs Her

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The latter would be the New York Times. Gay (above) has a long and disturbing dossier at Ethics Alarms (under two tags, here and here, because of her annoying misspelling of her own first name).The last time I visited her work as an ethics corrupter, I wrote,

It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the biases of the New York Times that its workplace ethics column, “Work Friend,” is authored by race-obsessed, radical, and combative gay feminist Roxane Gay. No biases there! …I have concluded that Gay is too often intellectually and rhetorically dishonest because of her ideological mission, and people like that shouldn’t have regular platforms (or advice columns) in the New York Times.

Now I have discovered that I was too kind in that evaluation. It isn’t just that Gay is so woke she can’t see or think straight; her ethics are rotten to the core, if one can call them ethics at all.

In today’s edition of her weekly workplace advice column for the Times, an inquirer writes that she and her colleagues have discovered that the sales office’s star employee has been faking her results, and is being rewarded for it. “She’s logging calls that never happened, and falsifying her activity to get to the top. This colleague now gets special praise each month, got promoted and is in a mentorship role, and makes everyone else’s numbers look bad,” the questioner writes. What should be done?

What should be done??? Could a work-related question be easier? Go to the management with your colleagues and your evidence, and demand that the lying, fabricating co-worker be properly dealt with. Be prepared to go up the ladder as far as it is necessary to go. The situation has to be exposed, and nothing short of a fair resolution should be accepted. Continue reading →

On “Correct Pronouns,” Part I: Roxane Gay

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the biases of the New York Times that its workplace ethics column, “Work Friend,” is authored by race-obsessed, radical, and combative gay feminist Roxane Gay. No biases there! She has also been described here as a prolific writer of prose and fiction and a visiting professor at Yale, and that’s all accurate too. However, her biases increasingly poison her advice as thoroughly as they poison her opinion columns.

Her last two of those for the Times were a laborious spin job to make Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock at the Oscars somehow virtuous (“a rare moment when a Black woman was publicly defended”) and a standard issue rant against the likely Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe.

Ugh. I have to pause a bit here because I have concluded that Gay is too often intellectually and rhetorically dishonest because of her ideological mission, and people like that shouldn’t have regular platforms (or advice columns) in the New York Times. Here is a representative line from that second essay: “[W]e should not live in a world where someone who is raped is forced to carry a pregnancy to term because a minority of Americans believe the unborn are more important than the people who give birth to them.”

Continue reading →

From The “Bias Makes You Stupid Files”: The “Work Friend” Misses The Point

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Roxane Gay is an impressive character. She’s a prolific writer of prose and fiction (including science fiction and comic books), a visiting professor at Yale as well as a professional feminist and LGBTQ advocate. She also contributes opinion essays to the New York Times, and as if she isn’t busy enough, is one of their advice columnists, writing the “Work Friend” Sunday column, which is almost always astute and wise in its advice regarding workplace politics and ethical dilemmas.

Not in this case, however. A female inquirer took offense when two male colleagues offered her unsolicited advice about improving her Zooming technique. She framed them as sexist attacks on a woman’s “appearance,” and Gay took the bait. Continue reading →

The Name Game

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

It’s “racist” to get someone’s name wrong now?  What will the grievance bullies think of next?

The latest irritating aspect of life that has been appropriated to serve as a “microaggression” and proof of the U.S.’s “systemic racism” is people mispronouncing names. The complaint has gotten a boost from mispronunciations of Kamala Harris’s name, although I’ve never heard one. (I just call her “that phony” or “the jerk” and largely avoid the problem.) This is a continuation of the current trick: if something bad happens to a “POC,” like, say, getting shot while resisting arrest, it’s racism; if the exact same thing happens to a white person, that’s just bad luck, or the dude deserved it, or “Who cares?”

Admittedly, I am especially unsympathetic to the name game. My parents both were terrible at pronouncing names; it was a running joke between my sister and  me. It wasn’t just people’s names either. There was an ice cream store on Cape Cod called “Emack and Bolio,” and we used to ask Mom about it just to hear her say “E-MACK-a-Bowlee.” Because my mother was Greek, all ethnic names magically became Greek names to her. A Boston Red Sox infielder named Gutierrez became “Gouttarras.” My father mispronounced names like he mispronounced many words, and it didn’t matter how many times he was corrected. He thought, for example, that the words “fiasco” and “fiesta” were the same word, “fiesca.”

But in the New York Times weekly column “Work Friend,” this phenomenon was used for race-baiting, aided by the new narcicsism in which everyone’s name is some kind of badge of honor. “Call me what you want, just don’t call me late for dinner!” Dad would say when the misnaming issue came up. Of course, that Jack Marshall, like this one, went through life being called “John” and seeing his name spelled with only one “L.” He didn’t take it personally. He knew that what matters in life is what you do, not what you are called while doing it. Continue reading →