Tuesday July 7 Reads

Good on Halle Berry, but I wish she didn't resort to apologizing to that bunch.
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Little wonder then, why this man is so screwed up.
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Yes, Mary Trump leaked information about her uncle's tax schemes.
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So-called "cancel culture" needs to die like yesterday.  The worst aspects of it are on the queer theory/postmodernist "woke" left, which is virulently sexist and fucked up in the head.

J.K. Rowling, Bari Weiss, Noam Chomsky, and more than 100 other writers, scholars, and academics signed a letter in Harper’s Magazine calling for “open debate” and an end to cancel culture, sparking backlash from both liberal and conservative pundits.

The letter addressed the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests and calls to defund the police — acknowledging that the demands are over due while warning against cancel culture and being intolerant of differences.

That "defund the police" horseshit is a perfect dog whistle for the political right. I think a lot of these "woke" people are actually tools working for the other side. This happened during the 1960s as well.
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Lots and lots of well-known names on that letter as well as a few well-known bloggers or former bloggers.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

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Noted Arizona hate preacher Steven Anderson is possibly embroiled in a big scandal, or at least some of his children are.

It hasn't hit the major media yet, but in due time it probably will be.

From Twitter is more about it.


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