Day: June 8, 2020

It’s very easy to become a totalitarian pig. Most people carry the seed inside and have to make specific efforts not to let it grow.

Here’s an example. Yashar Ali, who used to be a real journalist and a serious person, spent the day trying to cancel a colleague for an ancient Halloween costume she had worn when she was a 23-year-old kid. She dressed as Amy Winehouse, and Ali dug out the photo on MySpace (remember MySpace?) and accused the colleague of cultural appropriation.

I’ll let everybody guess which culture he thought the Winehouse costume represented.

I remember how during Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity some politicians decided to pander to the protesters.

“You are heroes! You are all real heroes!” one of them famously wailed from the stage.

The pandering made protesters so angry that the politicians who tried it don’t have careers to speak of any more. It wasn’t uncommon for a politician to go from 60% approval rates to 10% in a matter of days simply for trying to pander.

Of course, those protesters weren’t there to feel virtuous or pose for social media. They were defending national sovereignty. And when your cause is real, people who are fake tend to stand out a lot and make everybody angry.

You’d think this is a staged meme for “Creepy Things White People Do”:

What an embarrassment.

In the meantime, our college administration is ordering us to call police on anybody who appears on campus without a mask. If we don’t do it, we will be “sent home without pay.” This is a literal quote. All sorts of quips about being sent to bed without dinner and “sir, may I have more gruel?” come to mind.

But this isn’t very funny. It is even less funny that the same professors who spent the weekend posing for pics in the allowed and encouraged protests against policing are aggressively and I’d even say hysterically embracing this instance of excessive policing.

On CNN, the Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender is informing viewers that if a person has their house broken into in the middle of the night, the desire to call the police “comes from a place of privilege.”

And then people ask me if Democrats have changed. They haven’t changed, they have walked away. They don’t exist anymore. They have gone away and now the space where they used to be is occupied by truly horrible, horrible human beings like this Lisa Bender.

And the fact that nobody is standing up to Lisa Bender and saying out loud what a horrible person she is demonstrates that she’s not an outlier.

It might be nothing to those of you who never were Democrats but I registered as a Democrat immediately after I became a citizen and could vote. Obviously, the vicious little twerps like this Bender weren’t what I wanted to vote for.

Titania McGrath is officially out of business. There can’t be a parody of a movement that is far beyond any parody:

MPD150, a community advocacy organization in Minneapolis, focuses on abolishing local police. Its work has been spotlighted since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis Police custody.

“The people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises,” the organization says.

Rather than “strangers armed with guns,” the organization says, first responders should be mental health providers, social workers, victim advocates and other community members in less visible roles.

These are deeply unhealthy people and for some unfathomable reason we are all humoring them.

If you substitute “white people” with “sinners” and “racism / biases / inequality” with “sin,” this will be the talk that the priest gave to me to prepare me for my first confession.