What would a world be like run by ordinary, not necessarily all-that-elite, college-educated Americans? You can find a pretty good demonstration just by looking at what things are like at a current Sci Fi fan convention.

Last Sunday, for instance, there was trouble with a capital-T at the 42nd WISCON convention.

Today’s geeks and nerds are a sensitive and Woke lot, prone to devote serious thought to important moral questions and to consider the plight of unpopular minorities, minorities like J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs and Robert A. Heinlein’s bugs.

So a chin-stroking panel was scheduled with some serious scrutiny of certain guilty Living & Dead White Authors on the agenda. Its mission was described, thusly:

In SFF with an action element there’s a desire for cool giant battle scenes, heroes who spin, twirl, slice off heads, and general melee violence. This is an old background trope: the killable mook, guard, or minion whose life can be taken in a cool or funny way is familiar from traditional action films. But many SFF stories take this trope further with a killable race or non-sentient army: the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, the Chitauri in Avengers, and the many robot armies that we see represented solely so that heroes can create cool violent carnage without having to answer difficult moral questions. What happens when SFF comes to rely on this trope? If we’re going to have violent action in SFF, is this better than the alternative? Is it ever not just super racist?”

Apparently, however, all the Social Justice was marred by the intrusion of (the horror! the horror!) a dissenter who triggered the panelists and caused harm to these sensitive souls through vocal thought crime.

As we all know, saying things people don’t like constitutes harassment.

The WISCON 42 blog has the details:

During the Killable Bodies In SFF panel at WisCon this morning (Sunday), a panelist engaged in Nazi and Confederate apologia and also appeared to posit that disabled or injured people sometimes “have to be sacrificed.”

They continued this behavior even after the audience and other panel members expressed the harm this was causing them.

WisCon rejects these ideas. They are in conflict with our Code of Conduct. The panelist in question will be banned and asked to immediately leave convention spaces.

The relevant passage from the Code of Conduct is here:

Harassment includes: Verbal or written comments or displayed images that harmfully reinforce structures of oppression (related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, geographic origin, or class); deliberate intimidation; stalking; body policing (including gender policing in all bathrooms); unwelcome photography or recording; sustained disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact; and unwelcome sexual attention.

Please read the full Code of Conduct here.

If you or anyone you know are in need of any support following this experience, please contact us. We will be working to find folks who can provide emotional support to you.

ETA: This particular individual has been banned for WisCon 42. The decision as to whether this ban will be extended in the future will be determined by our Anti Abuse Team post-con. Should you have information to contribute, you are welcome to email safety@wiscon.net.

Keziah Daum wore this quite becoming Cheongsam dress to her Utah High School Prom, and proudly tweeted some photos. And why not?

But the dress offended SJW Jeremy Lam, who reprovingly tweeted:

Note: 41,958 retweets — 178,771 likes !

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Iowahawk observed sharply in reply:

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And the editorials are still flying, days later. David French is perfectly correct.

As you survey pop culture, the academy, and American corporations, which side has the upper hand? Which side is defining American discourse? America’s most prominent culture-makers obsess over identity. They elevate prom dress choices to matters of national debate. And that’s why people who still possess a sense of reason, proportion, and manners (on both sides of the political aisle) need to push back. Reason can’t cede the public square to rage. Sometimes a prom dress is just a prom dress. But Lam’s tweet wasn’t “just” a tweet. It was a symbol of the incoherent anger that is tearing this nation apart.

J. Christian Adams read the complaint filed by the engineer Google fired last year and is absolutely appalled at the totalitarian regime in full operation at the dominant search engine company. They really are evil.

Congratulations on finding this article if you used Google. A civil rights lawsuit filed this week revealed its search engine blacklists authors and ideas distasteful to the company.

Google engineer James Damore’s class action complaint describes a creepy cult-like orthodoxy at Google, where dissent is smashed, and the color of your skin is far more important than the content of your character. Reading the complaint is a deep dive into wicked, racial groupthink, and a frightening reminder that it really can happen here. At Google, it does. …

This article cannot possibly capture all of the rancid, racialist, thuggish things going on at Google, so I’d urge you to take time to read the whole complaint. It’s like reading Solzhenitsyn’s travel log from Ekibastuze. It reveals nothing short of the psychologies of totalitarianism in their timeless forms. The purges. The moral relativism. The threats. The lists of enemies. The upside-down world of the wicked justifying their wickedness.

To be sure, Google doesn’t have the Google Gulag, but the thinking that is normal inside a powerful institution like Google should alarm all actual, normal Americans.

Damore’s worst sin at Google was to be white and male and to presume that shouldn’t matter. In this, Damore was up against the roaring prevailing winds from the Left, where “whiteness” is wickedness, where “maleness” is a construct, and where the bright young things at the tech giant are remaking the world in their own image.

This is an example of the viewpoint of Google SJWs.

RTWT

Siege of Fort McHenry, 13 September 1814, lithograph, Library of Congress.

Jefferson Morley, originally in the hard-left Alternet and reprinted in Salon, says:

It is time to examine the words and the origins of our national anthem, another neo-Confederate symbol. …

What we are seeing is the popular repudiation — and violent defense — of the neo-Confederate ideology that has shaped the symbols of American public life for the last 150 years. Some of these symbols now draw protests, while others are woven into public life.

For example, observing Memorial Day and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” are uncontroversial patriotic gestures, yet there is no disputing that neo-Confederates developed these rituals. …

Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” with its lyrics deriding black people who took up arms to gain their freedom in the War of 1812, became a point of pride for Southerners.

RTWT

The offending lyrics occur in stanzas 3 & 4:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.

It is actually far from obvious that Francis Scott Key, the alleged neo-Confederate writing in 1814, was referring to literal slaves at all. He more probably was simply expressing conventional contempt for paid mercenaries in the British service and for impressed seamen.

Francis Scott Key 1779-1843, who died long before the Civil War, is a neo-Confederate? The insanity get crazier all the time.

Dan Greenfield has it right.

When the left insists that everyone with white skin is part of white supremacy, that Shakespeare, Beethoven and all of Western civilization embody white supremacy, it’s echoing the actual talking points of white supremacy.

If you tell all Obama critics and Trump supporters that they’re racists often enough, some will decide that maybe they are racists.

If you tell a student who objects to racially segregated areas on campus that she is a white supremacist, she will be more likely to become one.

When you marginalize everyone to the right of you, some of the marginalized will accept the definition.

And when that happens, the left wins, the extremists win, and it becomes harder to maintain any kind of functioning civil society in which we settle conflicts through compromises rather than street violence.

Compromises are uncomfortable.

After the Civil War, the Union was preserved, but Southerners were allowed to honor their cause. It was an uncomfortable compromise, but it helped limit the violence from a conflict that had claimed the lives of 2% of the population. The Taliban campaign by black nationalists to tear down Confederate memorials was a deliberate effort at shattering a compromise that kept civil society working.

And that too led to Charlottesville.

Uncomfortable compromises are how we learn to live with each other. It means that there can be memorials of Robert E. Lee and streets named after Malcolm X. Tolerating people whose views we don’t like is one of the best ways to marginalize domestic extremists. When one set of extremists is empowered to wipe out the other, we end up with a civil war. Just ask Edmund Ruffin and John Brown.

Democrats claim a mandate from the “Right Side of History” to eliminate all the compromises. Catholic nuns must pay for abortions and birth control, Christian bakers and florists must participate in gay weddings, every white person must confess their racism, and every left-wing extremist must get their way.

That’s how you tear a society apart.

The Bill of Rights is an uncomfortable compromise. It says that we have to put up with people we don’t like. The Democrats, under the influence of the left, are rejecting that idea. But that goes both ways too.

You can have a liberal society or an illiberal one. But you can’t have a society that is selectively liberal when it comes to your bigotry, but illiberal of the bigotry of others, that believes you have the right to say anything you please without consequences, but that no one else does, that you can punch, but not be punched. That’s a totalitarian state. And the only way to realize it is through violence.

Democrats need to take an honest look at the street violence in Seattle, in Portland, in Berkeley and Charlottesville, and decide if this is what they really want. If they don’t, it’s time for them to stop normalizing left-wing extremism. If they do, then they are to blame for the next Dallas or Charlottesville.

RTWT

Babylon Bee:

At a special press conference held at the technology giant’s sprawling campus Tuesday, Google engineers revealed exciting new technology that autocorrects any errant thoughts its users are having, replacing them with positions approved by the company.

Utilizing advanced retinal scan and proprietary telepathic scanning technology, the new automatic thought correction algorithm is now live for users of Google’s search engine, Android operating system, Chrome OS, and the hundreds of other apps and services the company provides.

“Let’s say you start thinking there may be some kind of inherent biological difference between men and women,” Google employee Ryan Vo said in a live demo of the new tech. “Immediately, the thought suggestion program in any nearby Google device, app, or service will scrub the idea of inherent gender differences and replace them with the sure knowledge that there are at least three hundred different genders in existence, and always has been.”

“Google will begin rebuilding your mind, piece by piece,” he added to the cheers and applause of the tech bloggers and industry professionals gathered.

According to the spokesperson, Google is also utilizing crack teams of ex-military personnel to round up anyone who resists the new technology, taking them to a new portion of Google’s campus known as the “Department of Love” for questioning, reconditioning, and re-introduction into civilized society.

RTWT

Two Minutes of Hate

Breitbart:

Numerous individuals alleged to be members of Google’s management team have been caught bragging about forming blacklists to impact the careers of colleagues with different political beliefs.

In a series of screenshots from 2015 onwards provided to Breitbart News by a verified Google employee, individuals described as left-wing Google management employees can be seen discussing the ways they punish their colleagues both inside and out of the company. …

“One of the great things about Google’s internal communication mechanisms (G+, mailing lists, etc), is that, as a manager, I can easily go find out if I really want to work with you,” wrote another individual described on social media as a Google manager, Collin Winter. “I keep a written blacklist of people whom I will never allow on or near my team, based on how they view and treat their coworkers. That blacklist got a little longer today.”

In the comments, one Google employee can be seen asking, “Are such blacklists allowed at Google?” before another added, “I would talk to legal before assembling a list of people who are possibly creating a hostile workplace.”

“And now I know that if I ever sue Google for harassment I should demand to see all manager’s shit-lists to see if this was something management already knew and thus let happen (my tormentor could be on there and not dealt with). It would probably increase the settlement aware considerably,” he continued. “I would encourage anyone else getting mistreated at Google to do the same.”

This week, a Google employee’s ten-page document went viral, after he called for more ideological diversity at the company. …

The employee’s manifesto quickly prompted extreme responses from left-wing users, including one SJW, Emily Gorcenski, who claimed she would “beat the sh*t out of him.”

Gorcenski frequently retweets and expresses support for It’s Going Down, an extremist far-left Antifa organization, who have previously doxed and harassed college students, and encouraged violence against Trump supporters.

Alon Altman, who according to social media posts is a senior software engineer at Google and who describes himself as an “intersectional feminist” and uses “they/them/their” pronouns, was also seen in leaked screenshots urging Google management to fire employees who agreed with the anti-political correctness manifesto that was revealed this week.

In leaked screenshots, Altman added that should the employee behind the manifesto not be fired by the end of the month, he would hand in his resignation notice.

In another post, alleged Site Reliability Manager Paul Cowan warned to employees that “freedom of speech is the right to freely express an opinion. It is most assuredly not the right to express an opinion with freedom from the consequences.”

Cowan continued to reference a post from Google dissidents, who were discussing the blacklists being created by an “SJW cabal” at the company, before defending the concept of punishing anti-SJW employees.

“To be clear: this is, in my opinion, perfectly acceptable,” he declared. “Quoting this as if it were some egregious abuse of power, or of your rights, is laughable… My life, happiness, and mental health, are worth too much to me to burn my precious happy-fu working with people I find contemptible, unpleasant, or even in some cases merely irritating.”

After being warned that keeping blacklists could result in him being reported to Human Resources, Cowan then bragged on Twitter that they were “threats I ignored, naturally, and which ironically grew the list substantially.”

In older posts, Kim Burchett, a now ex-Google employee and Antifa supporter, also discussed blacklists in a post on Internal Plus.

“I am considering creating a public-inside-google document of ‘people who make diversity difficult’,” claimed Burchett. “I am thinking of something like google doc that accepts comments, and which calls out those googlers who repeatedly made public statements that are unsupportive of diversity, with links to those statements so that readers can decide for themselves.”

RTWT

These days you are not allowed to associate with people like yourself, people you like, without making a point of including representatives of groups enjoying special elite-conferred status and privileges. So this University of Alabama Alpha Phi sorority recruiting video, featuring only pretty, white, well-groomed, mostly blonde, upper-middle-class girls, naturally attracted the wrath of one of our urban community of fashion grand inquisitors, one A.L. Bailey.

The Most Politically Correct Mr. Bailey watched all the bouncing, smiling, and flouncing and was not amused. These girls were all apparently having a good time and looking pretty doing it.

No one was ministering to some unhappy unfortunate. No was protesting social injustice. No one was saving the planet. And no one was embracing an obvious homosexual or a person of color. Is it possible that it is even legal to produce a video of this kind without including some minimum number of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, handicapped Americans, and queers?

Bailey snarls:

It’s a parade of white girls and blonde hair dye, coordinated clothing, bikinis and daisy dukes, glitter and kisses, bouncing bodies, euphoric hand-holding and hugging, gratuitous booty shots, and matching aviator sunglasses. It’s all so racially and aesthetically homogeneous and forced, so hyper-feminine, so reductive and objectifying, so Stepford Wives: College Edition. It’s all so … unempowering.

Are they recruiting a diverse and talented group of young women embarking on a college education? Upon first or even fifth glance, probably not. Hormonal college-aged guys? Most assuredly yes. Older, male YouTube creepers? A resounding yes. …

[Did he just call me a YouTube creeper? I think he did. –JDZ]

[T]hese young women, with all their flouncing and hair-flipping, are making it so terribly difficult for anyone to take them seriously, now or in the future. The video lacks any mention of core ideals or service and philanthropy efforts. It lacks substance but boasts bodies. It’s the kind of thing that subconsciously educates young men on how to perceive, and subsequently treat, women in their lives. It’s the kind of thing I never want my young daughters to see or emulate. …

During filming, did any of them stop to think about what they’d be selling? Did they think they were selling a respectable set of sorority chapter ideals? Did they think they were selling the kind of sisterhood that looks out for all women? Or were they focused on having the hottest video in the popularity contest that is sorority recruitment? Were they satisfied with being perceived as selling a gorgeous party-girl, cookie-cutter commodity? Were they satisfied with being the commodity?

The upshot, of course, is that the Alpha Phi sorority has removed the offending video, and essentially gone into hiding, as the national witch-hunting PC mob runs furiously about the landscape, looking for some pretty blonde girl to lynch, shouting “Racially Homogeneous!” — “Objectifying!”

Statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was a student for one term in 1873. Rhodes left a portion of his estate to the college.

Last April, a statue of Imperialist hero Cecil Rhodes erected in 1934 was removed from the campus of the University of Cape Town. The statue had been previously desecrated with paint and excrement. When a crane lifted the statue away, celebrating students climbed up and danced on its plinth. Rhodes had to be removed, you see, because the 19th century figure was guilty of believing in African Inequality and was a renowned champion of British Colonialism.

Telegraph story

The insistence upon the removal of prominent historical figures guilty by the present standards of the extremist left of politically incorrect behavior and opinions is not merely restricted to Third World countries where revolutionary regimes have succeeded to power.

In Oxford, in the heart of England itself, the campus left is following the South African example and demanding the removal of a statue of Rhodes from a niche on the facade of his own college. Newsweek

The Left’s war on history, as you see below, at Yale, has been underway for decades.

What could possibly demonstrate the intellectual and moral fatuity of today’s academic establishment than this kind of abject surrender to the worst kinds of left-wing extremism in response to emotionalist blackmail?

If the study of History produces any kind of wisdom at all, the most basic component of that enlightened understanding would have to be the apprehension that it is impossible to pass judgement on the beliefs and actions of people living in the past by the standard of conventional opinions of the present.

The stained glass picture of Vice President, Secretary of State, and political philosopher John C. Calhoun, Yale Class of 1804, ornamenting the Common Room of the Yale residential college named for the great man was deliberately broken by left-wing students during the 1970s. The window was restored, but portions of the window depicting a black slave in chains kneeling at Calhoun’s feet were removed officially in 1993, after a black student complained that he was personally offended.

My initial reaction to the demands of the radical left, the professional race baiters, and conservative and Republican sell-outs like Spengler, Max Boot, Victor Davis Hanson, Nikki Haley, Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush, and Mitt Romney that the Confederate flag be declared politically incorrect, banned from public display, and consigned to ignominious oblivion as a nasty symbol of improper attitudes and opinions is to reaffirm my recent local loyalty to the Commonwealth of Virginia (where I hunted and resided for several years until quite recently), to tell the lot of those Yankee bigots and Holier-Than-Thous to get stuffed, and to post good old Major Innes Randolph’s irredentist ditty:

Oh, I’m a good old Rebel, now that’s just what I am;
For this “Fair Land of Freedom” I do not give a damn!
I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won,
And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.

I can’t take up my musket and fight ’em now no more,
But I ain’t a’gonna love ’em, now that’s for sartain sure!
I do not want no pardon for what I was and am,
I won’t be reconstructed, and I do not care a damn!

How’s that for politically incorrect?