Today is supposedly Great Stupid Day, or Throw a Tantrum Day, or something. One of my previously functioning lawyer friends on Facebook posted the nonsense below, saying that “we all” should follow its wisdom “if we can”:
The Great Stupid
Amazing Stories of The Great Stupid: “Interracial Dating as a Sociopolitical Strategy”
This headline on a New York Times “The Ethicist Column” justly attracted mockery across the conservative media spectrum: “As a White Man, Can I Date Women of Color to Advance My Antiracism?” One could do a packed seminar on what’s wrong with that question. You can do whatever you want to do within the law. Whether you are white or not doesn’t change that fact. Dating to make a political statement rather than dating because you want to develop a personal, intimate, lasting relationship with someone else is a Kantian ethics violation, using a human being as a means to an end, thus demeaning and manipulating that person.
This is a victim of The Great Stupid, crying for help without realizing it. My favorites excerpts from the head-exploding letter to Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah from”Name Withheld”(“a straight white dude and recent college grad who has very progressive beliefs and is looking for a committed partner who, in time, can equitably raise a family with me”):
Gee, I Wonder Why Hooters Is Declaring Bankruptcy?
BEFORE DEI HIRING…
AFTER…
and…
Huh. Well, I guess dining out habits in the U.S. have been evolving since the pandemic, as today’s news stories astutely observe…
Hooters, famous (or infamous) for a crude play on words and its mandatory attire for waitresses, is preparing for a potential bankruptcy filing as it works with creditors on a plan to restructure its operations, according to Bloomberg News.
What a surprise.
Is “The Three Amigos” Really Racist, or Have I Just Been Brainwashed?
I am proud to say that I thought “The Three Amigos” was a largely unfunny and lousy movie when I saw it the first time…this, despite the fact that I generally admire John Landis as a director of comedies (he will always have a place dear in my heart for directing “Animal House”), and although I generally appreciate the talents of the movie’s stars, Steve Martin and Martin Short (Chevy Chase not so much). For some reason it has been showing repeatedly on MGM+ of late, and upon re-watching the thing after my sock drawer was in order, I found another reason to hate it other than its annoying tone and its predictable gags. This time around, the film seemed egregiously racist.
Oh no! Have 40 years of relentless bludgeoning by political correctness, hyper-sensitivity and wokism taken over my brain? When I first viewed the film (which Wikipedia tells me was ranked 79th on Bravo’s list of the “100 Funniest Movies,” a factoid that only reaffirms my long-standing belief that Bravo is useless), that thought never occurred to me for a second.
One of many films that borrows heavily from the Western classic (and ethics movie) “The Magnificent Seven,”—others include “A Bug’s Life” and “Battle Beyond the Stars” along with a pretty bad remake, with Denzel Washington standing in for Yul Brenner—“The Three Amigos” (the film’s score is by the same composer who scored “The Magnificent Seven”) tells the tale of three incredibly white silent movie stars who end up rescuing a town of substantially helpless and poor Mexicans. The town’s tormenter is “El Guapo,” the evil leader of the most ugly, stupid, dirty and brutal band of Mexican bandits in silver screen history. All right, maybe the Mexicans in “The Wild Bunch” are worse, but the white guys in that bloody film are hardly what you’d like to see your daughter bring home to meet the family either. Naturally the three white guys prevail, despite their collective IQ of about 210, for an average of 70 each (it actually breaks down to 85 for Martin’s character, with Short at 70 and Chase at 65).
At the University of Michigan, A Controversy Reveals Dishonesty and Hypocrisy Underlying the DEI Fad
If Donald Trump accomplishes nothing more in his next four years than ending the nation’s tolerance to open borders while fawning over “good illegal immigrants” and driving a metaphorical stake through The Great Stupid’s DEI fad, electing him will have been worth all chaos that will come along with it.
DEI thrives as a hypocritical way to discriminate against white men and shift to a society based on rewarding achievement, diligence and ability to one based on group membership. That makes it un-American to the core. At the University of Michigan, the “director of the university’s office of academic multicultural initiatives”—you know, DEI—spoke out at a conference of such officers the university to opine that her university was “controlled by wealthy Jews and that because Jewish students are “wealthy and privileged” the don’t need diversity services. “Jewish people have no genetic DNA that would connect them to the land of Israel,” Rachel Dawson was quoted as saying.
If Trump Is Going To Take The U.S. Out Of ‘The Great Stupid’ He Has His Work Cut Out For Him: The Dangerous Cosmetology Student
I find this story, a Great Stupid phenomenon if there ever was one, almost too stupid to believe.
Leigha Lemoine, a cosmetology student at Horry-Georgetown Technical College in South Carolina, was suspended and banned from the campus after she directed the phrase “get blasted” at someone in a SnapChat group discussion. The object of the term was not a student, but students were participants in the online chat. One of those students complained to the administration, which investigated and determined that Laigha had not seriously threatened anyone. Then an earlier social media post surfaced showing her firing a pistol. Using that as the “context” of her remark, the school suspended her….for a full year!
She is suing. Good.
Stupid Thanksgiving Tricks [Repaired]
“It’s The Great Stupid, Charlie Brown!”
1. I saw that meme on Facebook today. Is that the kind of misinformation social media platforms are supposed to censor, or is there value in learning that one’s Facebook friend is a moron?
2. On today’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast on NBC, three separate hosts mispronounced “Rockettes.” One called them the “Rockets,” another said “Rockeets,” and a third said “ROCK-ettes, with the accent on the first syllable. The Radio City Music Hall iconic kick-line dancers have been part of the parade for decades, and NBC has had broadcast rights for the event all year. Yet their “journalists” couldn’t bother to check to see what the perennial act is called? (Or learn to read?)
One More Reason Trump Won…The Barking Girl at the Classroom Window
[No, I am not making up what follows…]
Yesterday I was chatting with a woman whose two Golden Doodles are fond of romping with Spuds. She told me about her recent experience at a private school where her daughter attends, but soon will attend no more, as you will shortly understand.
This school is famously progressive, and among other things indulges “furry” delusions among its students. Don’t you know about “furries??
Oh, listen my children and you shall hear of this crazy fad the woke hold dear…
Tales of the Great Stupid Across The Pond: Idiocy Test For the United Kingdom [Corrected]
The BBC tells us, “Commonwealth leaders have agreed the ‘time has come’ for a conversation about reparations for the slave trade, despite the UK’s desire to keep the subject off the agenda at a two-day summit in Samoa.”
Great! Has the “time come” for everyone to paint themselves blue, speak in squeaky voices, and to run naked in the streets singing show tunes? I bet the Commonewealth, made up of former members of the British empire, would love to have poor, declining Great Britain transfer millions to all the “victims” of the nation’s imperial and colonial ways. The UK would be permanently crippled, but right is right.
England banned the slave trade in 1809, more than 200 years ago. Ah, but evil is forever! Besides, just imagine every all the other things Great Britain had to own up to. I think it should be forced to pay reparations to all descendants of slaves in the U.S., and all the people in the world, especially Native Americans, permanently wounded by our awful country. After all, the “1609 Project” says the United States was founded on slavery. But that’s just the beginning. The American music industry should get reparations as compensation for the “British invasion” in the Sixties. At least for Herman’s Hermits….
Ethics Dunce: The University of Kansas [Corrected]
No, what’s insane is for anyone to watch that video and misunderstand the clear meaning of what lecturer Phillip Lowcock said. I doubt anyone did misunderstand him. This manufactured scandal is conservatives acting like political correctness-addled progressives.
“[If you believe] guys are smarter than girls, you’ve got some serious problems. That’s what frustrates me,” Lowcock says in the video. “There are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president. We could line all those guys up and shoot them. They clearly don’t understand the way the world works.”
And he clearly doesn’t understand how university administrators work in age of The Great Stupid. They are weenies. They sacrifice common sense and principles to avoid conflict.
I have read conservative piranha claiming that he said that any man who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris should be shot. No, he said that thinking that women aren’t smart enough to be President is an idiotic reason not to vote for a woman, and they “should be shot” means that such ignorant bigots are useless and a blight on the culture, which isn’t that far off the mark. Now, thinking Kamala isn’t smart enough to be President is something else, and completely reasonable, but Lowcock didn’t say that.
As for “Did I say that? Scratch that from the recording. I don’t want the deans hearing that I said that,” it’s obviously a joke, not a serious cover-up. His tone is humorous. I’ve been a stage director long enough to know when a line is not intended to be taken seriously.
Any conservative social media troll or university administrator who seriously thinks Lowcock’s comment was anything but facetious exaggeration and completely benign should be shot.
I wish Lowcock would stand his ground and refuse to be sacrificed to the God of Perpetual Offense, but he’s already groveling. This is how the censors break you: it’s like Winston Smith having the hungry rats at his face. No job is worth surrendering one’s self respect to save.
Ethics Alarms 