Showing posts with label woke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label woke. Show all posts

June 3, 2023

Anti-woke annals of absurdity are crazy times crazy, consider two stories in today's news

 By Hal Brown

Background public domain, Popeye's fried chicken on Wikipedia by Evan-Omas CC0


This story is as delicious as the best southern fried chicken, crisp and spicy on the outside and tender and flavorful on the inside:

'No longer the Lord's chicken': 'Christian woman' says she's 'grieving' over 'woke' Chick-fil-A


This story was reported in the United States on Raw Story but over in the United Kingdom Brits have to be relieved that they lost the Revolutionary War when they read articles like this from the BBC:

Utah primary schools ban Bible for 'vulgarity and violence



Click to read article.

Above is how HUFFPOST covered the story on the top of their website this morning.


There are two sides of the anti-woke movement. One is fascistic and no joking matter. The policies being promoted and in an alarming number of states enshrined in law will harm people. They will lead to, among other things, women being forced to have babies they don't want to children being denied medical care gender affirming care to a rise in hate crimes. 

The other rises to a level so far beyond absurdity it is difficult to mock by rational people yet those who believe in them do so with passion and conviction.

There is irony in the fast-food chicken story because the woman who is boycotting one chain store is now going to a competing chain store which is far more LGBTQ+ friendly than the one she believes serves chickens from Hell.

Whoever decided to push for a ban on the Bible was doing this to make a valid point about book bans and must be pleased that their success made not only national but international news. 

There are other instances of this fevered lunacy. For example this story from Florida:


This demonstrates that even a high school yearbook can share something in common with the Bible and highly regarded works of literature.



While rational democracy loving people will find these skirmishes or battles absurd there is nothing remotely amusing about these aspects of what has been called a culture war. They represent an gangrene  infection in the body of the populace so dangerous that it should be amputated like a frost-bit toe or a severely infected diabetic foot.


Related:

How Fox News is boosting a “coordinated planned attack on the LGBTQ+ community” during Pride month

"This is just one side of this extremist playbook," Human Rights Campaign advocate warns

Trump appointed judge works to keep drag shows lawful in Tennessee

Late Friday, Judge Thomas L. Parker ruled anti-drag laws unconstitutional after a two-day trial


Addendum:

I am lucky enough to live in the Portland, Oregon suburbs where we are celebrating Pride Month. 

Click above to read story and view interview


May 2, 2023

Stop calling the GOP anti-woke hysteria weird. Weird is wonderful. Call it wiggy instead.

By Hal Brown

The GOP has gone wiggy in their war on woke.

The author lives in a suburb of wonderfully weird Portland, Oregon.

Click above and below to enlarge the images

Here in Portland, Oregon we are proud of being weird and wonderful. Keep Portland Weird is a frequently used slogan (read about it on Wikipedia).

This is the webpage of Travel Portland:

This conveys how Portland is both weird and woke.

This is from the website Boundless Roads:

Cities like Portland aren't the only promoters of weird and woke as a positive image. For example Weird N Woke is a line of clothing which combines weird with woke in their name  .

The company, founded in Lancaster, PA, offers clothing like the Liberty is Dead t-shirt. Here's their Facebook page. I am now a fan of the company and appreciate that the founder Austin Welk (about him) resides in the Republican Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It voted GOP in every presidential election since 2000 and in the last Presidential election the vote was Republican, 56.9% to 41.2% Democrat. 

Another way weird is used in a positive sense is in services. For example some of these are described here.

The first column I read this morning was this (subscription):

One word in a sentence prompted me to write a comment in the article:

But Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird.
Here's my comment:

I live in Portland, Orgeon, which proudly proclaims (as does Denver) itself as wonderfully weird. Thus I suggest that calling the Republican Party weird is a misnomer and does weirdness a disservice. I suggest the word wiggy which includes weird in the definition: emotionally uncontrolled or weird.
At this writing seven readers there recommended my comment:


Following posting this I realized I should have included Austin as a proudly weird city.



The word was used in this sentence:

As a result, “They have to win the endorsement of a crowd in an echo chamber having a conversation that the rest of the country thinks is too nasty or weird to join,” he wrote.

Headline writers often use alliterations so anti-woke weird warriors sound good. In my opinion wiggy is a better word in this context.

This is how my online dictionary defines weird and wiggy:

Weird
weird wird | adjective suggesting something supernatural; uncannythe weird crying of a seal• informal very strange; bizarrea weird coincidence | all sorts of weird and wonderful characters• archaic connected with fate.

Wiggy: 

wiggy ˈwiɡē | 
adjective (wiggierwiggiestinformal, mainly North American emotionally uncontrolled or weirdyou've been acting all wiggy.

Since both word have the soft W sound wiggy can be used in phrases with anti-woke and warrior as an alliteration. Both words can mean bizarre. Wiggy adds emotionally uncontrolled to the definition. Therefore it describes the Republican war on wokeness. Not only does weird have a positive connotation, but another reason I'd like wiggy used instead is that weird is overused and wiggy is a far less used word.

Addendum:

We can thank Ron DeSantis for pushing the war against woke to and beyond the breaking point by going after Disney and continuing to dig in his heals in his utter bigotry. For example: 

Here's what an hysterical bigot had to say in a Fox News opinion piece.   I found his essay when I did my web search for woke and weird.

Here's what my tour around America taught me about the weird, woke and wicked

Here's what I'm hearing from panicked parents around the country

The author spews intolerance.

* "Why is there a seemingly sudden increase in pedophiles, sexual deviants? Why do we have so many amoral—or plainly immoral—educators, school administrators, school boards, politicians, community leaders, and even judges, hell-bent on advancing the sexualization of our innocent children, and pushing perversion into the hearts and minds of the most impressionable among us?

*Why are too many of these leaders hiding their aberrant "sex education" and "gender-affirming" curricula from the parents of their students, stripping moms and dads of their rights to determine when and how their children are exposed to sensitive topics in school?

* What do these groups of decadent influencers have to gain?  In short, their ambition is the total breakdown and collapse of the family. Their target is our children.  Their goal is social chaos.  In some cases, they have been successful. Tragically successful.


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Weekly stats for the blog. Note the number of readers from Russia. I would like to have international readers comment about what they think about what is happening in America.

Click above to enlarge






April 30, 2023

My title is too clever by half, but Republicans really row Roe up the river

 By Hal Brown

Original uploader was Brett Weinstein (Nrbelex)
 at en.wikipedia
 - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons

I grew up in a suburb of New York City where everyone knew what up the river meant. Up the river referred literally to Sing Sing Prison which was about 30 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. 

Going up the river had nothing to do with navigating against the current. Inmates obviously wouldn't arrive on a boat. If they came from New York City they might arrive in one of these:

The virtual museum of the American Police Car

When I was a kid Ossining was rural. We used to go on picnics at nearby Pound Ridge Park and there probably were campgrounds in the area (they currently have them). Quite obviously, anyone sent up the river was decidedly not a happy camper. 

Now we have the ass-backwards position that the GOP has adopted as a major part of their positioning as they campaign for the 2024 elections to represent the country 2024.

They are rowing up the river against the current, meaning the majority opinion about favoring abortion with various restrictions. More than any other of the GOP positions their anti-abortion stance is the one that most Americans are against.

If you've every rowed a rowboat or are into skulling you know that you literally sit backwards as you row. Thus they are leading with their asses.

Public domain from Wiki
The boat they are rowing is certain to capsize. Even the Coast Guard won't be able to save them:


Put another way, they have hitched their campaign cart to asses that are, well, too stubborn to go anywhere.
Adapted by author

Remember how the Democrats defined the tendency to shoot themselves in the foot when it came to campaigning? For example, Hillary and her basket of deplorables comment might have cost her the election.

"Basket of deplorables" is a phrase from a 2016 presidential election campaign speech delivered by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on September 9, 2016, at a campaign fundraising event. She used the phrase to describe "half" of the supporters of her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump, saying, "They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic". The next day, she expressed regret for "saying half", while insisting that Trump had deplorably amplified "hateful views and voices". Wiki.
It isn't only the Republican candidates and their anti-abortion extremism that is rowing them up the river against the majority of the beliefs of the population. The entire so-called anti-woke agenda earns a hokum ho-hum from the majority, some of whom don't even know what woke or elements of woke like Critical Race Theory are.

Add to that the fact that the majority don't see LGBTQ+ people as carriers of a disease deadly as diphtheria and drag as dangerous as dengue fever. Quite the opposite, so many people have friends, family, and acquaintances who are members of the LGBTQ+ community that they know from personal experience that they are just as human as everyone else.

The pundits I follow lean towards saying that Trump would be an easier candidate for Biden to defeat and express concern than DeSantis would be more difficult. In fact because both of them, and also all of the other candidates described as likely GOP candidates, are embracing and running on, positions and policies not supported by the majority.

This is why I say they should dig their dumbass ditch deeper and deeper because the more they do so no ladder will be long enough for them to climb out of.


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April 23, 2023

Toxically masculine men boycotting Bud Lite fear the Babadook, as so do many women...

Hal Brown's Blog

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and other subjects. My posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I'm a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was also a cranberry farmer. Scroll archives on bottom of page to see previous blog stories. There are new ones added almost every day, although if I don't have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.

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If it's a word or if it's in a look you can't get rid of the Babadook. Movie poster above in center.
The monster design for the Babadook movie poster was inspired by The Man in the Beaver Hat in
 
London After Midnight (1927) above. Public domain 
"For some, trans people represent just the latest
 
Babadook, a complex fear they cannot tolerate." Wash. Post essay

Glass on right added by Hal Click to read article (subscription

I knew there was a controversy involving Bud Lite somehow endorsing through their recent advertising the dreaded acceptance of members of the LQBTQ+ community as just being plain regular folks. Bud Lite became a target of the frothing at the mouth rabid woke warriors.

I wasn't following the story until I saw and read the opinion essay by Brian Broone, an author I wasn't familiar with, in this morning's Washington Post about toxic masculinity. The article focuses on men. There are, of course, many women, perhaps just as many as men, who buy into the woke fear mongering.

Here's an excerpt: 

Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer with more than 10 million followers, documented her transition over the course of a year. To celebrate Day 365 of her journey, Bud Light sent her some personalized cans of beer. She unveiled them on TikTok in a partnership with Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch.

This attempt on Bud Light’s part to be forward-thinking about how its customers live and love has been met with a backlash by one group of people who seem to believe that another group of people should not exist. Kid Rock used his gun to shoot several cases of the beer; another guy destroyed a can of Bud Light with a baseball bat in a typical digital tantrum.

For some, trans people represent just the latest Babadook, a complex fear they cannot tolerate.

A note to those folks who are upset that Anheuser-Busch relied on a trans woman as a quasi-spokesperson: Whether you like it or not, queer people have been drinking “your beer” for decades. In fact, as long as there’s been beer, queer people have been drinking it.

Mulvaney’s celebration for some reason threatened the very existence of a whole bunch of guys who aren’t ready for that reality. This will surprise no one who has ever been a small boy. Every boy knows the sting of being called a sissy. Boys are raised to believe that so-called feminine traits represent a danger they must avoid. Boys learn early that they can expect to be punished if they stray in any way into risky, weakening feminine behaviors. These lessons take root deep in our psyches as youngsters, and they stay there forever.

This is from Fox Business News:

We can thank one far-right extremist for what has come to be called the culture war and it, perhaps amazingly, isn't Donald Trump. 

When you come right down to it, the fact that Ron DeSantis, a deadly dull Florida stocky stick in the mud man, managed to demonize all things LGBTQ+ is dumbfounding.

I also like to depict the governor who thought it would prove how ballsy he was by going after Disney because of their LGBTQ+ supportive position this way:


I adapted an image posted by someone else.

Of course his floating the nudnik notion of building a prison next to Disney World or trying to find a corporation willing to invest in opening a competing amusement park when the Orlando Universal Resort is already nearby reeked of hot Floridian flop sweat.

He also has done after everything related to historic American racism as a dire and imminent threat to the very existence to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of everyone who really matters.

While Donald Trump makes fleeting references to how bad being woke is I doubt all that many of his supporters think he gives 1 ½ shits about this.

Yet across the country there are enough people who used to drink Bud Lite to heed the call to stop doing so and cause a decrease in sales. In fact, calling this a bloodbath as Fox Business News does, isn't far off if the plummeting orders in the bars they surveyed reflect a national trend.

The anti-woke movement has had incredible success in lumping together a group of fears many people have into one Babadock.

Who knew? 

This is from Wikipedia:

 LGBT community

In October 2016, a Tumblr user joked that the Babadook is openly gay; in December 2016, another Tumblr user posted a viral screenshot showing the movie classified by Netflix as an LGBT film.[62][31] Despite the absence of overt references to LGBT culture in the film, fans and journalists generated interpretations of queer subtext in the film (dubbed "Babadiscourse"[62]) that were often tongue-in-cheek, but occasionally more serious, highlighting the character's dramatic persona, grotesque costume, and chaotic effect within a traditional family structure. In June 2017, The Babadook trended on Twitter and was displayed as a symbol during that year's Pride Month.[63][64] The social media response became so strong that theatres in Los Angeles took the opportunity to hold screenings of the film for charity.[65] Michael Bronski said to the Los Angeles Times: "In this moment, who better than the Babadook to represent not only queer desire, but queer antagonism, queer in-your-faceness, queer queerness?", and drew comparisons to historic connections between queerness and horror fiction such as Frankenstein and Dracula.[66]

Jennifer Kent said that she "loved" the meme, saying that "I think it's crazy and [the meme] just kept him alive. I thought ah, you bastard. He doesn't want to die so he's finding ways to become relevant."[67]

Donald Trump legitimized the bigotry of a large swath of white Americans against people of color. He allowed people who kept their racism secret to be open about it. 

Trump may or may not be kicking himself for allowing DeSantis for  taking advantage of the homophobia in so many people and adding his turning the teaching about American racism into a war against the new Confederacy.

The good news, reported in a 2019 article, is that Americans Are Becoming Less Racist and Homophobic (link).

Excerpt:

The resurgence of openly racist attitudes in the Trump era has led many observers to question whether the apparent reduction in prejudice in recent years was an illusion. New research provides a reassuring answer.

Researchers find that both conscious and unconscious bias regarding race and sexual orientation declined significantly between 2007 and 2016. For racial attitudes, this change was largely generational, whereas the more relaxed attitudes toward sexuality were found in the population as a whole.

What this tells us is that Americans are less racist and homophobic than they used to be. Because of this, that only having a few policies like being Latino anti-immigration and enacting voter fraud laws to run on, far-right politicians like Trump and DeSantis are taking advantage of cultural issues, gut issues. They want to scare the bejesus out of their base telling them to be terrified of the Babadook.

Addendum:

A poem by DAMETRIAS, 2014

The Babadook


If it's in a word, or if it's in a book
you can't get rid of the Babadook.
He wears a hat
he's tall and black
but that's how they describe him in his book.
A rumbling sound, than three sharp knocks
you better run, or he'll hold you in his locks.
ba-ba-ba-dook-dook-dook...
Your closet opens
and your honestly hopin'
that he won't hear a sound
but that's when you know that he's around.
The book close
you have an itch under your nose
and that's just how the story goes.
So close your eyes and count to ten
better hope you don't wake up again.
'Cause if it's in a word, or if it's in a book
you can't get rid of the Babadook
.... you'll see him if you look


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