political correctness

I believe this is the first time I've ever said this: Mark Zuckerberg is entirely right.

Some in the tech world are in a moral panic about the fact that zillionarie tech baron and Facebook board member Peter Thiel is a major donor to the campaign of the vile Donald Trump. Now, there are many reasons to want to keep as far from possible from Thiel; this is a guy who actually said, way back in 2009, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"and spoke of the extension of the franchise to women as a negative development. He's also one of the founders of Palantir, a primary contractor of the "national security" deep state -- a hell of a thing for a self-described "libertarian" to be involved with. So his politics are awful, contradictory, irrational, and inhumane. In that realm, anyone paying attention concluded "fuck Thiel and the horse he rode in on" long before Trump became the GOP nominee, and his support for Trump is actually kind of low on his list of sins.

But the idea that a company should purge itself of board members based on ideological purity, on political opinions and affiliations outside their corporate role, is exactly the sort of self-sorting and silencing of dissent that is taking us down the spiral of partisanship.

Note at the start of the video, she asks her male friend if he has scissors, a clear threat to forcibly cut his hair -- shades of 1960s right-wingers assaulting hippies. He tries to leave, she grabs him and pulls him down the stairs.

Not only is this a criminal assault motivated by historical ignorance (locked and matted hairstyles have been found in many cultures outside of Africa) and ontological confusion (culture is not property and doesn't belong to anyone), but nonsense like this makes it that much more difficult to deal with real incidents of racial oppression -- a "boy who cried wolf" phenomena.

I stumbled across the vile and ridiculous "pick up artist" or "neomasculinity" site Return of Kings some years ago. It's pathetic and stupid, and its denizens and it's host deserve to be ridiculed. But the recent moral panic about Roosh's planned meetups, the misrepresentation and the gleeful threats of violence, and the calls for him to be banned from even entering some nations, are troubling. Elizabeth Nolan Brown has a good take over at Reason.

How Maryland 'Neomasculinity' Blogger Roosh V Became an International 'Pro-Rape' Villain (Reason.com)

The story has been magnified out of all proportion because for a lot of traffic-thirsty web writers or editors, putting "pro-rape activists" in headlines or tweets is too good to pass up—even if it may not technically be true and props up a man and movement they claim to abhor. But while it's likely to have limited reach and flash-in-the-pan stickiness for most, the Roosh situation is still interesting as a case study of collective catharsis through call-out culture and moral panic as meme.

As the article points out, African-American U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch (who is a terrible person who has defended civil forfeiture, let banksters off the hook, been a part of the War on Drugs, and generally been a willing cog in the human meatgrinder known to mankind as the American "criminal justice" system -- but that's another rant) is also named "Lynch". By coincidence, or sometimes distant family ties, some people have the same name as people who did awful things.

People with aspirations of intellectualism -- e.g., college students -- ought to be able to deal with that fact. This is a very different case than, for example, the proposed renaming of Byrd Stadium, where the building's namesake stands accused of significant misbehavior.

Naming of Lebanon Valley College's Lynch building questioned amid equality push (PennLive.com)

Students at the private college in Annville have demanded administrators remove or modify Dr. Clyde A. Lynch's last name, as it appears on a campus hall, due to the associated racial connotations.

...

But while their remaining demands...appeared warmly received at Friday's forum...a call to change the name of Lynch Memorial Hall has been decidedly more controversial, both at the school and beyond.

In the days that followed, commenters on pennlive.com leapt to defend Lynch, who served as the college's president from 1932 to 1950 when he died in office, saying he's been unfairly dragged into the fray by this modern-day movement.