You better watch out. You better not cry.
Ah, Christmas. That joyous time when all mankind comes together as one in love and merriment. Families put aside their squabbling, factions their differences, nations their wars, progressives their thought control, and we all link arm in arm and, in one voice, sing the worst song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The only negative thing even your humble narrator can come up with about all this — aside from that song, anyhow — is that it’s all a sack of rubbish. If anything, here in the year two thousand and whatever, people use Christmas as an excuse to kick their misanthropic crusades up another level.
In case you can’t quite see where I’m going with this artless lede, we’ll get right to it. Harvard University has given its inmates an early Christmas present: social justice placemats to bring home on break, so they’ll have easy access to disingenuous leftist twaddle when their less-enlightened family members need their idiotic ideas corrected. I promise I’m not making any of this up; the things even have the words "HOLIDAY PLACEMAT FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE" stamped on them in hideous block print. Here’s my favorite bit:
ISLAMAPHOBIA / REFUGEES
We shouldn’t let anyone in the US from Syria. We can’t guarantee that terrorists won’t infiltrate the ranks of refugees. They’ve already done it in France.
Response: The US has been accepting refugees from the war-torn areas of the world for decades. Remember the wars in Central America? They were extremely violent, and the US accepted refugees from all sides of the wars with very strict vetting and not one incident of violence. Racial justice includes welcoming Syrian refugees. [All emphasis original]
Now that’s my kind of Christmas present! This snippet perfectly illustrates the utter senselessness of the modern left. There’s a monstrously false analogy, a non sequitur conclusion, and an assertion of the consequent, all wrapped up with the gorgeous holiday bow that is a glaring typo right in the headline. Thanks, social justice placemat! You’re the best gift a snotty critic of the social justice war could ask for!
Harvard Crimson columnist Idrees M. Kahloon took issue with the placemats, noting in a column that the majority of the placemat’s content was taken "word-for-word" from a poster created by a group named Showing Up for Racial Justice.
"That organization’s professed aim," Idrees wrote, "is to move ‘white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority for justice with passion and accountability.’"
Is "whitesplaining" a thing? I mean, I know it isn’t actually a thing, but are leftists pretending it is? Because I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what obvious white supremacist Idrees M. Kahloon is engaged in here. Pretty sure that’s a typical, Appalachian WASP name anyhow, so this is obviously just another case of power distance, check your etc.
Anyhow, here’s some red meat right from Showing Up for Racial Justice’s web site:
One of the things that dominant white culture teaches us is to feel isolation and scarcity in everything we do. SURJ believes that there is enough for all of us, but it is unequally distributed and structurally contained to keep resources scarce. We can fight the idea and the structures that limit and control global capital by creating a different world together.
So they’re idiots, then? Aces. At least they’re relatively polite. Still and all, you may wish to reconsider sending your beloved children to any institution of higher education that thinks these clowns and their warmed-over, discredited communism are a viable resource. Said institution is clearly spending too much time on the "higher" and not enough on the "education."
Speaking of economic idiocy
I know it’s shocking to think that there could be any strife or conflict in Iraq more than thirteen years after the United States government brought permanent peace and stability to the poor benighted Islams, but the genius technocrats apparently had the "democracy" dial set just a hair out of the correct position, which resulted in the entire country becoming a bombed-out ruin, millions of people dead, and these psychopaths calling themselves the Islamic State lording over the innocent population. Of course, this was just a tiny, technical mistake, and there was no way to see it coming, so what are you going to do?
Not all is bad news, though. ISIS has joined the social justice war on the side of social justice! They’ve recently begun cracking down on retailers in the warn-torn city of Mosul, making sure they aren’t committing the terrible social heresy of price gouging. This is a social justice reform that I’m sure my friends at Showing Up for Racial Justice would applaud, since, as we all know, scarcity is a myth created by White culture, and it’s important to use our feelings to overturn structures that blah blah blah Marx. You get it.
Islamic State has arrested dozens of Mosul shop owners accused of raising food prices in the nearly besieged city, to tamp down discontent as a U.S.-backed offensive closes in on the group’s last major stronghold in Iraq, residents said on Monday…
Most of the people executed previously in Mosul were former police and army officers, suspected of disloyalty or plotting rebellions against the militants’ rule. The arrest of the shop owners is meant as a warning to retailers to refrain from price hikes that would cause unrest in the city.
There’s no need to check. I’m pretty confident that all those shop owners are white, or, as my friends in the world of racial justice would say, White. After all, why else would prices go up? It couldn’t have anything to do with supply and demand, since supply is infinite. There’s enough for all of us! So the only other possibility is racism. Check and mate, billionaire fat-cat Mosul shopkeepers! Also you’re White.
In the nearby Aden district, recently recaptured by the elite counter terrorism troops, people came out of their house to greet officers, the Reuters correspondent reported.
"We are so glad that Daesh is gone," said a retired civil servant standing in front of his house, referring to Islamic State by an acronym.
"We will stay here but we haven’t had water or electricity for two weeks," he said, echoing a general concern among residents about shortages adding to their hardship.
Huh. There are shortages? Weird. Anybody have any idea why that would happen? Probably racism again.
We’re from the government, and we’re here to help
Haiti is suffering from a cholera epidemic. Has been for about six years, since a massive outbreak in 2010. More than nine thousand people have died, and hundreds of thousands more have been sickened. But there’s nothing to fear: the United Nations is on the scene! Sure, it’s been going on for six years now, but this time they’re prepared to do whatever it takes to save the world. Here’s secretary general and pretty soldier of love and justice Ban Ki-Moon apologizing for taking so long to get around to it:
"On behalf of the United Nations, I want to say very clearly we apologize to the Haitian people. We simply did not do enough with regard to the cholera outbreak and its spread in Haiti. We are profoundly sorry for our role," Ban said, speaking first in Creole, then repeating himself in French and English.
Of course, what Tsukino Ki-Moon failed to mention was that it was the United Nations that brought cholera to Haiti in the first place. Whoops missus!
Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said Ban’s apology did not go further because a panel that studied the outbreak attributed it to a number of factors.
"We now recognize that we had a role in this but to go to the extent of taking full responsibility for all is a step that would not be possible for us to take," Eliasson told reporters before Ban’s speech.
I don’t know about you, but that’s what my mother taught me: if you get caught doing something wrong — say, sneaking cookies out of the cookie jar, or not returning a library book, or causing a plague that kills a few thousand people — just act like it never happened. Maybe, years later, as the deaths and/or late fees continue to mount, you could consider paying the late fees or buying off the government as long as you can use somebody else’s money. Oh look!
Haiti’s Ambassador Jean Wesley Cazeau praised Ban’s new approach, which seeks to raise $400 million from U.N. member states to provide aid to the afflicted communities and to help eradicate the disease, but he squarely laid the blame for the epidemic on the peacekeepers.
These jokers kill a few thousand people with their world-empire fantasies, and who ends up footing the bill? Yup.
These boots were made for irony
Let’s jump right into this one:
Bermudez says she was driven to protest by the allegedly piggish behavior of men with whom she worked at the Transportation Security Administration headquarters across the street. These men ogled her, she claims, snickered about her being in a "harem" because she’s pretty, and retaliated against her when she complained, ultimately stripping her of employment five days before her probationary period ended.
"TSA has a saying: If you see something, say something," Bermudez, 33, says one afternoon. "Little did I know that when I said something, I would be fighting the agency. It’s a very daunting task."
Alyssa Bermudez now spends her days wandering around downtown in Arlington, protesting against the TSA for sexually harassing her and then unceremoniously kicking her out when she complained. Not that I’m denying that this happened, mind you; I’m just suggesting that it’s important to bear in mind that this is exactly what the TSA does to ordinary Americans also. To put a finer point on it: this is what the job Alyssa Bermudez believes she’s entitled to would have her doing to other people. So, in brief, she’s complaining because she wanted to be a sexual harasser and intimidatrix, but now she’s not allowed to. My heart, it bleeds.
Bermudez’s unusual protest ritual, periodic marathons of six- and seven-hour days at a busy intersection, has served to surface broader problems at a troubled agency assailed by Congress for its treatment of whistleblowers who raise concerns about problems as diverse as alleged sexual harassment and security lapses at the nation’s airports. Bermudez’s vigil has gotten people talking about the indignities allegedly visited upon other female TSA employees, abuse including derogatory comments and women being forced to do push-ups in the office in skirts.
Does the Washington Post even have editors anymore? What do they do all day? Perhaps they’re overburdened trying to cram the maximum amount of social justice into every story, and they’ve forgotten how to compose coherent sentences.