Rise Of The Bedlamites
Andy Ngo on paying the price for other people’s intersectional piety:
[Portland bakery owner, John] Blomgren’s chronology matches and corroborates [his employees’] version of events. However, having established that his staff had done nothing wrong did not alter Blomgren’s decision to fire them. “In this situation it doesn’t really matter that the two staff members working are not themselves racist because the call they made to deny [student and activist, Lillian Green] service caused her to feel like she had been discriminated against,” his statement explained. “Sometimes impact outweighs intent and when that happens people do need to be held accountable.” The bakery has since deleted this statement and denies firing the employees to “save face or to appease anyone.”
If the word accountable has a perverse and sour ring to it, it should. “Dismantling the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy,” as Mr Blomgren puts it, is apparently something that small eateries should do now, ostentatiously, above all else, and is best achieved, it seems, by firing female employees for the sin of doing their jobs. Mr Ngo covers the escalating drama, and others, in some detail, and none of it is particularly encouraging. But it does reveal quite a lot about who such people are, the psychology in play, and the consequences of prostrating yourself in front of relentlessly spiteful “social justice” bedlamites.
The section on Cameron Whitten, one of Portland’s more prominent “social justice” activists, is also worth highlighting:
“I think he’s actually a sociopath,” speculates ‘Alex,’ a Portland-based social justice activist who has worked extensively with Whitten and witnessed his strategic use of baseless accusations of racism to take down opponents and manipulate allies. Fearful of retribution given Whitten’s growing influence, Alex spoke to me on condition of anonymity but provided evidence of their relationship. “He’s created a chilling effect in Portland. People are scared of him and no one knows how to intervene.” Alex expressed sympathy for Blomgren and said Whitten selects his targets carefully — mainly white progressives who are likely to trip over themselves when accused of racism. Some of them offer him money or career opportunities.
If you think the word sociopath sounds a bit strong, do read the whole thing.
[ Added: ]In the comments, Rafi notes that the above bears a striking resemblance to a protection racket, which it pretty much is. It certainly seems to have attracted the kinds of personalities that you’d expect to find involved in one. And if you encourage the credulous to cultivate delusions of collective guilt, and to contort themselves, abase themselves, in order to conform – and if you do it institutionally, systemically, in the name of progressive education – then it’s hardly surprising that moochers, narcissists and marginal personalities waste no time in exploiting it.
The curriculum will be oriented around the Feminist Business School’s “Guide to Prototyping a Feminist Business,” which outlines steps that entrepreneurs can take to help create a more “feminine economy.”
https://pjmedia.com/trending/feminist-business-school-to-launch-anti-capitalist-summer-camp/
I’m sure that’ll work out well for them…
No actual business skills — such as bookkeeping or marketing — will be taught.
Defending tertiary education isn’t much of a solution. The SJWs don’t come from poor backgrounds and will still go to college. The deserving poor will be the ones that miss out.
The selective defunding of angry studies is a possibility, but they’ll just take over and ruin other subjects.
At high school level private schools are as “progressive” as public in general. Although in my country the worst ones are the very richest and very poorest public schools.
The solution, really, is for society to realise that degrees in angry studies are useless. If we start considering a person with three years work experience more useful that a fresh BA in “colonial studies”, as most here would, then people will stop getting them. Or at least employing them.
Of course that means *society* has to move. The “burn it down” crowd want it to be fixed externally, as if the ills of society are ever fixed by the government.
When the Left want the government to fix society’s problems from above we should mock them, not agree. Same for the their opponents.
Stalin’s line about needing to break some eggs to make omelettes comes to mind. A bad chef breaking eggs is not a solution. How many of you have been to Dresden? It’s not been improved by being fire-bombed flat.
Sorry, my autocorrect makes defunding into defending. Which is quite the wrong way round!
“Dismantling the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy,” as Mr Blomgren puts it, is apparently something that small eateries should do now, ostentatiously, above all else, and is best achieved, it seems, by firing female employees for the sin of doing their jobs.
Get woke, go broke.
And while Ms Green is filming herself engorged with indignation – and demanding the firing of two unfortunate sales clerks, essentially because they’re white
That.
That.
Well, I suppose you have to wonder how Ms Green, our professional agitator, might have behaved if the sales clerks had been brown-skinned but said exactly the same thing and for the same innocuous reason. Isn’t she basing her vindictive crusade on their skin colour?
@Champ
The curriculum will be oriented around the Feminist Business School’s “Guide to Prototyping a Feminist Business,” which outlines steps that entrepreneurs can take to help create a more “feminine economy.”
“>https://pjmedia.com/trending/feminist-business-school-to-launch-anti-capitalist-summer-camp/
I’m on the process of setting up a new business (well, two) at the moment. Their 12 steps seem to be utterly different to the process I’m following. If, however, I was writing a self-help book for the self-obsessed and hard-of-thinking market, I may recognise more of what the Feminist Business School is offering.
(as an aside: Feminist business school is an interesting collision of words that have (or should have) very little reason to appear together:try as I might, I cannot come up with a triad of less similar terms)
…might have behaved if the sales clerks had been brown-skinned but said exactly the same thing…
I suspect, exactly the same way – her complaint would still have been that the last customers served were white. She might have made the claim that the putative black clerks had been co-opted by the white capitalist oppressors. Perhpas she would have targetted extensive re-education for the staff instead of immedite dismissal, but she would not have forgone the opportunity to launch an obnoxious complaint.
her complaint would still have been that the last customers served were white.
Or put another way, “Mad woman offended by prosaic random event.”
“If capitalism is an economy that values masculine traits, what could another economy look like?” asks Jennifer Armbrust, the Evergreen State College graduate who serves as the Feminist Business School’s only instructor. Instead, a more “feminine economy” could value other traits, such as “generosity,” “empathy,” “gratitude,” “integrity,” and “intimacy,” Armbrust suggests.
That’s what the traditionalists have been saying all along…
The solution, really, is for society to realise that degrees in angry studies are useless. If we start considering a person with three years work experience more useful that a fresh BA in “colonial studies”, as most here would, then people will stop getting them. Or at least employing them.
Yeah, but that realization is too late to do any good. The money (our tax dollars) have already been spent to “educate” this person. And I bristle at the idea of getting “Society” to do any thing. The funding for this nonsense needs to be cut. Period. If people spend their own money on it, that is their problem. But wasting time and effort, especially in much of the “core” classes of BA degrees and such, is a unnecessary burden on the deserving poor and an opportunity cost for the rest of us…and the deserving poor as well.
Where is it written that every professional occupation requires exactly 15 * 2 * 4 = 120 credit hours of post-high school education to be successful? And of course now a Bachelors isn’t sufficient anymore thus to achieve status you need to waste even more money on a Masters. It’s a crock. We need to dump this whole idea of 4 year colleges and such and get back to the concept of apprenticeships and sabbaticals and such. People need to work a little so that they understand what it is that they really need to know, not grab all their education in one front-loaded gulp. Especially as technology changes more and more rapidly. Hell, software technology goes through revolutions every four years or so.
Also, forcing young people to delay getting started professionally until they are 22 or so is bad for society in general. A young man should be able to support himself and a wife and possibly even one child at such an age without incurring huge debts. There are very, very few professions that a reasonably intelligent young person can’t get a start in after what could be taught in 12 years of regular school. Now of course we’ve dumbed down our education such that what I just suggested is not rationally possible today. But there is no reason a 12 year education can’t be equivalent to an Associate’s degree.
All of the above in US context of course. May need some conversion to the metric system…
And their gods are extraordinarily arbitrary and capricious.
The goal posts shift, continually and often erratically, in order to keep the victim wrong-footed. That way, no-one can be sure of being spared the Mao-lings’ ire. They want to be offended and unhappy – it’s the premise of their status and inflated self-importance; it’s the thing that excuses all that lovely scolding and those acts of malice. And so there’s little point trying to engage with such people on their own terms, as if you could find some mutual accommodation short of your own humiliation and deference, or somehow make them less obnoxious.
The hope that these creatures are amenable to realistic debate, or will ever admit error, or that they want anything besides the enjoyment of dominating you, is, as we’ve seen, quite misplaced.
They want to be offended and unhappy – it’s the premise of their status and inflated self-importance;
Yeah, this is spread much further than just the Mao-ling domain. It was something that I noticed as a child, mostly with many women/girls, bullys, and non-to-be-touched-because-they’re-so-smart boys. The simplest things, the breaking of an excessively fine-tuned rule of decorum, that set them off. I’ve always been suspicious of, and also somewhat consciously obtuse to, taking manners too far. Obviously one should show a degree of class and decorum in how one states things. And a failure to do so, to understand what those limits are, is certainly a legitimate red flag for immaturity. But on the other hand, “politeness”, extreme pearl clutching and beyond, can be taken sooo far such that the “decorum” itself becomes a form of rudeness.
What I find interesting is many “conservatives” that express this delicacy seem to make up a good percentage of the #NeverTrump domain.
Here’s a recent example of (choose one)
a) performance art
b) dismantling white supremacy
c) running out on the tab
d) sticking it to The Man
e) a failed “Portland” caper
Group lights up, walks out on $420 restaurant bill
http://wreg.com/2018/06/06/group-lights-up-walks-out-on-420-restaurant-bill/
sticking it to The Man
Bah.
For the benefit of European visitors who may not be able to view the WREG website, here is the text of the story.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Police are looking for a group of nearly 20 people who they say tried to do drugs inside a popular Midtown restaurant, then skipped out on a $420 bill.
It happened at Frida’s Mexican Restaurante on Madison Avenue this past Sunday night.
Surveillance video from inside the restaurant shows a table of 16 people eating and enjoying themselves.
Frida’s manager Jesse Gonzalez says they were one of the last tables seated at around 10:30, a half hour before closing.
“They came in at the last minute. We didn’t think anything of it.”
He says they treated themselves, ordering some of the most expensive things on the menu, including $11 margaritas.
“The grand burritos, Frida’s special steak, steak and shrimp,” he said.
But soon, he said, the bartender got a whiff of something that didn’t smell like grilled steak and peppers.
“It was just one guy smoking weed. We asked him to stop. I guess he was the leader or the group and he made a scene,” Gonzalez said.
At that point, Gonzalez said, the group started berating the staff.
“They started getting louder and louder, getting upset, yelling offenses to the server, saying come on, come on.”
Eventually, one by one, the people finished their drinks and left the table.
Two women left behind didn’t seem to be in as much of a hurry, though. One even carried her blue margarita away from the table after the group ignored staff and skipped out on the $420 bill.
Gonzalez says they even pushed one of the servers in the stairwell. He says he’s never seen anything like it.
“Our walk-outs are, they forgot to pay or they’ll come back next day. Major walkouts like that, that’s our first and biggest one.”
Gonzalez says he thinks they planned the whole outburst so they could skip out on the bill.
“You don’t think they’re gonna do that, especially on a Sunday night. One guy got them all riled up at the same time.”
The manager says at this point he’s not too worried about the money. He’s just glad all his staff is ok.
But he does want police to catch the people who did this so if you recognize anyone in the video make sure you call Memphis Police.
Group lights up, walks out on $420 restaurant bill
¿ Piensas Ud., Capitán Obvio ?
Bah
Dave – try this for a summary.
If that doesn’t work – a dozen or so “patrons” walked into a Mexican restaurant in Nashville a half hour before closing, ordered the most expensive food and drink, proceeded to spark up, when asked to stop, started berating and assaulting the staff, whereupon the lot slipped out the door skipping out on a rather appropriate $420 bill.
If I mentioned race, I would have to denounce myself once again.
Thanks.
It was just destiny! ‘420’ is the universal stoner code for ‘Time to fire up a jay!’. If you’re smokin’, and they just SHOVE ‘420’ in your face like that, you JUST GOTTA burn one!
Plus, oppressed minorities stickin’ it to the man, bla bla bla. You know, white Hispanics named ‘Gonzalez’.
e) a failed “Portland” caper
I dunno about failed. Seems to have worked so far. And The manager says at this point he’s not too worried about the money. He’s just glad all his staff is ok.
So…no harm, no foul.
What I find interesting is many “conservatives” that express this delicacy seem to make up a good percentage of the #NeverTrump domain.
Previously on David Thompson . . . !
But on the other hand, “politeness”, extreme pearl clutching and beyond, can be taken sooo far such that the “decorum” itself becomes a form of rudeness.
The flip side of this is that the overdue backlash against such self-serving pearl-clutching comes from those who seem the least adept at calling out the behavior for what it is, or employing tactics effectively countering it. Instead, we’re treated to gratuitous rudeness and name-calling every bit as self-serving as the behavior it’s supposedly responding to.
One of the reasons I find Dr. Peterson so refreshing is that he possesses the temperament and rhetorical skills to push back without coming across as a knuckledragger. Instead, he remains more pleasant and friendly than anybody would expect, and allows his interlocutors to show their true colors when they get flustered and frustrated by his stubborn (yet polite) refusal to follow the script.
Plus, he’s Canadian, so he’s insulated against the usual #TRVMP/#NeverTrump cheerleading.
The flip side of this is that the overdue backlash against such self-serving pearl-clutching comes from those who seem the least adept at calling out the behavior for what it is
And it is here where I see much of the problem lies. This political correctness aggression has been going on for decades. It seems that those “adept” at calling it out are either ineffective at doing so or are afraid to stick their necks out. And thus the problem has advanced so far along that a polite (even in the already quaintly polite Canadian context), well mannered, soft spoken, slow to anger (again) Canadian Dr. Peterson has drawn the ire of the PC crowd. They have, as I said, silenced enough of the polite opposition, moved the Overton Window so far that they are running out of targets on the right, at least in academia and infotainment. It has even gotten to the point that the polite ones on the right now pearl clutch at those impertinent ones whose frustration levels have hit a point where they elect a Donald Trump to do some “fine adjustment with a sledge hammer”.
“Feminist Philosopher” treads close to libel about Jordan Peterson
He responds.
“Feminist Philosopher” treads close to libel about Jordan Peterson
Imagine my surprise.
He responds.
From the comments on his website:
That. In spades.
I think this site rather better be than in the Ephemera: https://twitter.com/AsheSchow/status/1005555764776357890?s=19