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Vote Accordingly

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For those who haven’t been following, leftists cropped out a snippet of a photo from the promotional campaign for Converse sneakers and accused the company of promoting the KKK.

Converse has been apologizing ever since.

I do feel bad for the pretty Korean model but I feel worse for the rest of us.

Imagine what these people will do if they come back to power. Are you completely sure you never posted anything that can be cropped creatively to get you accused of some atrocity? Are you sure you are ready for a reality where this isn’t simply what some morons online do but official government policy?

Think about this prospect and vote accordingly.

35 responses to “Vote Accordingly”

  1. ed Avatar
    ed

    These are issues nobody outside X, academia, or the real world in general care about.

    Like

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Tell that to Mr Cafferty:

      “Emmanuel Cafferty was a San Diego Gas & Electric utility driver who was fired in June 2020 after a viral social media photo falsely accused him of flashing a white supremacist hand gesture”

      https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/

      Or the cafeteria workers who were persecuted for serving watermelon juice to block students

      Or the nurse at Meritus Medical Center in Maryland who was fired in 2024 after Facebook posts criticizing DEI and “unconscious bias training” as “thought reform.”

      https://www.wsj.com/opinion/i-was-sacked-from-my-nursing-job-for-criticizing-dei-unconcious-bias-training-b21a43cf

      I can continue this list until tomorrow.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply
  2. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “leftists …. accused the company of promoting the KKK”

    I’ve said it before, among the left there is _tremendous_ demand for racist stuff they can feel good about denouncing. Since the real world doesn’t come close to meeting the pent up self-righteous demand… they have to produce it.

    Deeply unwell people…

    Like

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    1. ed Avatar
      ed

      People on the right also love to subscribe to this nonsense to have something to be outraged about.

      Like

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “People on the right also love to subscribe to this nonsense”

        Not this nonsense particularly. Yes, self-righteous anger is an _extremely_ addictive emotion and people do go out of their way to get that high, but with different issues and they mostly don’t have the cultural and corporate power to ruin people’s lives over it.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply
      2. oldcowboy3 Avatar
        oldcowboy3

        Got news for you, people that were once center, or even left, are sick and tired of the seemingly endless insane lefty emotional horseshit. Enough rot:

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I really hope so. Do people really want to go to 2021 levels of insanity but increased by many degrees? Because that’s what’s at stake in this election. That, and the reopening of the border.

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          1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
            oldcowboy3

            Well, it is truly worrisome because we truly cannot trust the media, and er, well, those easily influenced by them ;-D

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            1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
              oldcowboy3

              On the hand Kid, both of us were once lefties — mind you, those were somewhat gentler times…today ;-D

              Like

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              1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
                oldcowboy3

                But Kid, there is hope. The young woman talking to Marshall may have a ring in her nose, but she is also educated, and awake rather than woke.

                Like

  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “Converse has been apologizing ever since”

    I saw one report that the creator of the ad campaign was black…

    Like

    Reply
    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I have no idea how people manage to convince themselves that this will not touch them. The whole point of the system is that everybody is at risk. Everybody can have racist motives imputed to them. How does anybody convince themselves that they are so incredibly special that this will not be deployed against them?

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply
  4. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    How on earth are they interpreting that as something KKK?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “How on earth are they interpreting that”

      they cropped the picture and increased the contrast…. supposedly they also see K K K in there… somehow

      https://x.com/LeeMerrittesq/status/2101034606065582427/photo/1

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply
      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        New marketing guidelines just went out: no white clothes. Too racist.

        Meanwhile… bet the same people could find racist imagery in every single inkblot.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply
        1. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          “the same people could find racist imagery in every single inkblot”

          They are gagging for offensive racial imagery and the world keeps on being stingy and not giving to them.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply
      2. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        The highlighted part of the model’s skirt is supposedly a KKK hood, and the sneakers she is holding are on a black person who was hanged by the KKK.

        Once again, I have to ask: why would anybody believe that this exact same process cannot be applied to a picture or a text they posted at any time in the past? The foundation of the leftist dogma of anti-racism is that intentions don’t matter. What is the plan for when such accusations are made against you?

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply
        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          I in fact went and pulled a random Nike ad just now, enlarged it, and found multiple K-shapes in the clothes of the athlete. Just to see how easy it was. It’s that easy.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply
        2. Avatar
          Anonymous

          I can’t believe (Actually, I can!) that Converse was so gutless that they apologized to the goddamn idiot who took an OBVIOUSLY innocent photograph and DELIBERATELY cropped it to create a false image that somehow screamed “Racism.”

          They should have told him to crawl under a rock and die!

          Dreidel

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        3. v07 Avatar
          v07

          —why would anybody believe that this exact same process cannot be applied to a picture or a text they posted at any time in the past?

          It sure can, in the sense that the probability is not zero. But then one should compare it with non-zero probability that things will go south as a result of the Right staying in power. As I keep repeating, the Right-wing intellectuals have the same problem as the Left-wing intellectuals – they idealize their respective “base”.

          Look, we here had this Gad Saad guy. Who produces non-PC stuff every single day. He does not look very “cancelled” to me… I heard recently he decided to play the “it is not safe here because of antisemitism” card and moved to the US.

          Also, based on my observations, paradoxically, it helps to not be part of the ultra-woke crowd. They are more eager to police each other than to police the outsiders. Because it “works”. I’ve said or done or written a number of non-PC stuff over the years, so if someone decides to come after me… I’ll deal with that then.

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            This is so exceptionally unfair. Yes, Gad Saad has the charisma, the capacity, and the desire to transition into a career as a social media influencer. But he’s one in ten million with the skill set and the desire to put it to use. But what about all the rest of us who are unable or unwilling to change course and adopt this completely new profession? Everybody can’t be exceptional. It’s beyond neoliberal to say that if you cannot bootstrap yourself into this extremely unusual, exceptional reality, you deserve whatever is done to you. I have a colleague who was driven to a heart attack in 2021 because he expressed a very mild disagreement with the COVID regime. What, now it’s his fault for not being able to Gad Saad himself into money and fame?

            Today, a colleague in my department is giving a mega woke talk. He has absolutely no fear or concern. That is great. I don’t want him to be afraid of speaking his mind. But I could not give a similar talk expressing my beliefs because I’m terrified. This is not a probability or a likelihood. This is a fact. It already exists. I’m terrified. There is absolutely no equivalency between people who managed to terrify their opponents into complete silence and the people who didn’t do any of the kind. I know two people on campus who voted for Trump. They are as deep in the closet as gays in Iran. It’s not a probability. It’s how people live their lives. But I guess it’s their fault because they could have become famous influencers and solved the problem, right?

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply
  5. v07 Avatar
    v07

    I am not sure you understood me.

    My point was that Gad Saad has been a professor and an influencer simultaneously for years and he was not cancelled from his job as a professor. I did not imply that anybody else should become like him, for any reason, to save themselves or otherwise. I do not think it was being an influencer that saved them for cancellation. If there were appetite for cancelling him, he would be cancelled (as a professor). The people who cancel are very self-righteous and him having any number of subscribers on youtube would not stop them (because according to them his subscribers are fascists anyway and their opinion is irrelevant).

    It is also not correct to say that the Right has nothing to do with cancel culture. Quite the opposite, before the leftwing cancel culture even existed, and until relatively recently, one could get cancelled for “antisemitism”. And seems that as recently as last year some people got fired for mocking Kirk after he was killed. The mechanism was the same as left-wing cancellations – pressure the employer into firing the person because person’s views or behaviour outside of work reflect badly on the employer. So it is not some love for free speech that prevents the Right from engaging in cancelling their opponents, it is their lack of control of academia and of the other parts of the system that are currently “woke”.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I don’t know what “cancelled” means to you. To me, it means that a person is persecuted and bullied at their place of employment. Of course, no university administrator is going to get into it with a media personality with a multimillion following because the media personality will immediately turn it into engagement content. But they will get into it with a regular Joe schmo who has no platform and who has nobody to defend him.

      As for the videos mocking Charlie Kirk, again, this is a false analogy. I don’t want to post videos mocking anybody’s death. I want to be able to say at work, “I’m a conservative. I vote Republican,” without fear. That’s not a big ask. It’s nothing remotely similar to posting videos of myself imitating political assassinations.

      I do strongly believe that conservatives are a lot more tolerant than liberals. Conservatives have been exposed and overexposed to liberal thought. It doesn’t trigger us like conservative thought triggers liberals. It triggers them so badly because they never encounter it. I tried to come out as a conservative to a colleague with whom we had a pretty close relationship. She told me, “I don’t believe that you are a conservative because that would mean that you are a bad person.” To me, the knowledge that she is very left-wing never meant that she is a bad person. I think she’s a great person with very different beliefs than mine. I do not think that she should be prevented from teaching her students the way she sees fit, but she does not believe the same about me. That is the radical inequality between the left and the right. We listen to them speak and never insult them or decide that they are bad people because of their beliefs. But they do invariably think this of us without even listening. My colleague came up with the diagnosis of “You’re a bad person” in reaction to the single word “conservative.” I never got a chance to explain my beliefs. People tell me that they are communists, and they continue cheating dumbly in a completely friendly manner, even though I know that they would not extend anything like the same courtesy to me. There is no analogy here. We are not equal. Our degree of tolerance is incomparable.

      Liked by 1 person

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      1. v07 Avatar
        v07

        Thank you.

        With all due respect, you personally feeling in any particular way does not prove much about other people on the Right. ANY large enough group of people, left of right, has some subset of people who, with sufficient permission or encouragement, will turn on whomever they consider undesirables. “To teach them a lesson”… To exercise their self-righteousness in some other way… In other words, the presence or absence of this trait (which is essentially related to narcissism) is primary with respect to person’s politics. The left and the right just have different ideas about what is undesirable.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          Everybody thinks cancel culture is fine as long as it’s people they dislike getting canceled :/

          Unfortunately, that’s not even the biggest political problem of our time: that problem is fraud. And right now: Democrats are the party actively defending fraud. This, more than cancel culture, more than possibly anything else, will tank the country. It may not be possible to reverse all of it, or even enough of it, but certainly my vote will go to whoever has the greatest likelihood of tackling it.

          Liked by 1 person

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            It’s true, at least with the Republicans holding both branches of power, we started talking about this before this information barely trickled in, and most of the population had absolutely no idea. I watched a video today on Matt Walsh about how COVID payouts financed the assassination of the president of Haiti. I highly recommend. Voting for Democrats is voting for more of that. And it’s not like the Democrats have offered a solution for reducing diesel prices.

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            1. methylethyl Avatar
              methylethyl

              And even with all the information crashing in from multiple gigantic scams: ballot fraud, medical care fraud, daycare fraud, student funding fraud, visa fraud, homeless-help-nonprofit fraud, autism-funding fraud, ActBlue campaign funding fraud… Democrats out there fighting like maniacs to keep the fraud going. I will not contemplate voting D unless or until an enormous purge happens to throw that out and get rid of every party operative defending it, running it, or profiting from it. At this point that’s looking like dang near everybody in the party, so… not this lifetime probably.

              Liked by 1 person

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          2. v07 Avatar
            v07

            speaking of fraud – the following is a genuine question.

            There is a lot of information circulating about the insider trading and other unethical and possibly fraudulent activities by the members of your ruling family and of the current administration.

            Does this information

            a) not reach you

            b) reaches you but gets dismissed as “Democrat propaganda” and “fake news”

            c) reaches you and you find it plausible, but you still dismiss it because “democrats do it more” or because the Great Leader has to be protected or mask-wearing lesbians will take over?

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              We know. We hate it. The cryptocurrency was a mega bummer, and of course it’s completely corrupt. All the rest of it, the wedding, the grifting moron relatives, how can one possibly not know? It would have been fantastic if somebody offered us a candidate who is honest, not corrupt, and who would close the border, remove men from women’s jails, and do all the rest of the great things that we want done. Such a candidate was not on offer. Our choice was between “slimy and does the things we hate” versus “slimy and does things we love.” Would it be rational for us to choose the former and not the latter?

              To give a useful analogy, here’s the case of the top administrator of my university. We all know that I deeply dislike him. However, he managed to produce the biggest freshman class in a decade, and he managed to achieve a balanced budget. When I saw these great results, I felt sincerely grateful, and I have honestly forgiven him everything else. Dude got results. My department is adding sections and hiring people. I value that because this is a tangible benefit that supersedes many other things.

              Liked by 1 person

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            2. methylethyl Avatar
              methylethyl

              What Clarissa said. Yes, we know about it. We also know that the reason nothing gets done about insider trading is that it’s a completely, fully, bipartisan effort. It’s one of those things everybody in congress agrees on: that your actual pay isn’t what you get out of being in Congress: it’s the sweet bribes, lobbying deals, and insider trading, plus the consulting/speaking gigs after office that are payoffs for whatever corrupt thing you did while in office. “Everybody does it” doesn’t make it right.

              However: it’s not a partisan issue. I wish we could deal with it, but it doesn’t seem tractable because it’s not partisan. I would love to hang out to dry every single politician engaged in this graft, and basically replace the whole Congress, as well as every bureaucratic apparatchik, governor, mayor, city councilman, dogcatcher and judge who’s ever done a “favor” after his wife’s fake charity received a generous donation.

              There’s simply no “republican” and “democrat” there to force action on anything. I WISH the Democrats would hold politicians accountable for that chicanery. But they won’t, because they’re doing it like everybody else. Everybody sucks.

              So… where can we get some action? Turns out that other types of bribery and fraud are not only happening more in blue states than red states, but they are actively supported by the political machinery there. There’s something extremely telling about the whole episode where Nick Shirley exposed obvious daycare/hospice fraud in California, and the immediate response of California was not “OMG let’s shut that down immediately” but instead they passed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act” to prevent further exposure of fraudulent subsidy-leeches. Why did they do that?

              As a counterpoint, I live in a very red area, politically. After the last big hurricane in my neck of the woods, several people were caught with their hands in the disaster-relief till. Everybody was super pissed and those people were arrested and prosecuted. Is there anything comparable going on in CA? I hear that a huge LA-Fires-relief fund just evaporated. Were there any prosecutions? Did anybody even investigate? Or is that just how things work in CA? So we red-state people (and no, our admins are definitely not free of corruption) look at that, look at Newsom being floated for a 2028 candidate, and go “OH HELL NO we don’t want that for the whole country!” We still like to see fraud as an actual crime where people can actually be arrested, prosecuted, and go to jail. Democrats just… don’t seem to see it that way.

              Liked by 1 person

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                This is another important point. At least with Trump, we can hear about these cases of outrageous welfare fraud. With Democrats, we’re going to have a federal Stop Nick Shirley Act. Whether Gavin Newsom is personally corrupt or not, it truly pales in comparison with his championing of this terrible, utterly undemocratic measure.

                Liked by 1 person

              2. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                Newsom is a PRIME example of wife-with-fake-charity shenanigans.

                Like

              3. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                I’m deeply unsurprised.

                Like

        2. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          “prove much about other people on the Right”

          Correct me anyone if I’m mistaken, but I’m pretty sure it’s only those on the right who have been unpersoned and de-banked (for example) and been rendered unable to carry out normal financial operations.

          All corporate buzzwords at present are extreme leftwing.

          Liked by 2 people

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            The drama at that lesbian bar in Massachusetts is what awaits all of us when the left comes back to power. We know that this is true because it’s exactly what happened last time the left was in power. We can argue that, theoretically, if the right somehow magically managed to dominate the entirety of culture and all of the institutions, they would do the same. But this theoretical, fantastical possibility fails to be as threatening as the return of the reality that we all experienced. The insults that the lesbians in Massachusetts are hurling at the bar owner are identical in vocabulary and tone to the accusations that were addressed to me personally when I decided to teach in person during COVID. This already happened. In some places, this is still happening. I find that more disturbing than any hypothetical overreach from the right.

            Liked by 1 person

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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