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TONGUE TIED ARCHIVE
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November 19, 2005Even Blacks can't Criticize Blacks Now
So it seems from the following article. Excerpt:"Williams lamented the fact that some black principals haven't seemed as willing as their white counterparts to embrace some key parts of his reform agenda or meet for a few extra hours without pay - as salaried professionals often do - to help kids in the largely minority district. The fact that Williams, who is African-American, singled out principals by race has roused the political correctness police and prompted the principals' union to call for a School Board investigation".Yet another outlet for free speech closed off. The guy was trying to help black kids so guess who is going to suffer if he is muzzled? Is giving them money and phony educational qualifications the only way you are allowed to "help" blacks?
Clowns Offensive?
If you can't laugh at clowns what are they for? Severe sense of humor deficit in Sarasota Florida:"In an effort to raise money for its 25th anniversary, the Hospice of Southwest Florida thought it would be a nyuck-nyuck-nyuck idea to place 70 fiberglass clown figures around town and have various businesses sponsor local artists to paint them. How benign would you think this could be? Instead, the fundraiser has become something of a pancake-makeup cause celebre in Sarasota, dividing the arts community while turning the clown project into a politically correct civic dunk tank....There was some bozo concern the statues might lead to a pandemic increase in coulrophobia -- a fear of clowns. "The clown phobia thing is huge," Virginia Hoffman, chairwoman of the Sarasota Public Art Committee, sniffed to the Miami Herald. "I'm concerned about the fallout. What if there are protests by clown haters or people who want to vandalize clown statues?"
Is there ANYTHING somebody won't get offended by? Thankfully, it looks like the city is going to ignore the whiners.
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Australian Politics
I hope I can be forgiven a commercial of sorts but I want to let people here know that I now have a blog going that focuses exclusively on events in Australian Politics. As there seems to be a lot of goodwill towards Australia in the USA, I thought a few readers here might like to have an occasional glance at what is actually happening in Australia. After a couple of years blogging about political correctness, I have the impression that Britain leads the pack in looniness, followed by the USA and then followed by Australia. But that is only a matter of degree. We certainly have some lulus in Australia at times. Just as a matter of interest, I think below is the most loony bit of political correctness of all time (from Britain). Excerpt:"A family doctor has been summoned to a formal hearing over his refusal to put a 34-year-old male patient on the list for screening for cervical cancer".A male does not have a cervix, of course
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But ... But ...
A US military effort to recruit more Latinos as officers on American campuses is coming under fire from California activists who call the initiative racist, according to the Daily Sundial, the student newspaper at California State University in Northridge.
The Hispanic Access Initiative was established in the late 1990s with the intention of helping produce more Latino officers in the military so its leadership better reflects the gorgeous cultural mosaic that is America.
But Karina Ceja, a senior Chicano/a Studies major and member of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan, is among those on campus who think it's unethical for the military to reach out to a particular minority group with special incentives or encouragement.
"They shouldn't be recruiting one specific ethnic group if they consider themselves non-racist and non-discriminatory," she said.
Barmy, I Tell Ya
Yet another local council in Britain is erasing the C-word from its annual winter display of colored lights in order to avoid offending non-Christians, and The Sun is there.
Council officials in Havant are changing the name of their several-thousand-dollar display to "Festival of Lights." Even local Muslims and Hindus described the move as "barmy."
Update
The author of an op-ed piece in the student newspaper at Winthrop University in South Carolina who expressed the view that some African-American students on campus are overly argumentative and don't appreciate everything the campus and country does for them has quit school because of the furor it kicked up, according to the Johnsonian.
Junior psychology major Christine Byington was described by professors as one of the most talented students in the psychology program. Her article, however, prompted such an outcry on campus that school officials were forced to convene a special forum on the issue.
No indication of her reasons for leaving were given, but school officials asked her to reconsider, saying "Winthrop University is strongly committed to being a campus where troubling issues can be discussed openly from all perspectives."
Truth in Advertising
A California gardening company that advertised the fact that its employees speak English is being criticized as perpetuating racist stereotypes by activists in its community, according to KGET-TV.
The ad in question, published in the Bakersfield Californian, read: "having problems communicating with your current gardener?--Talk to us, we're English-speaking."
The man who ran the ad says he is just trying to compete. But Lou Gomez, the President of the Hispanic Chamber of commerce, called the ad racist.
Even Italy
Reuters reports that an actor on stage in Italy was forced to put out a cigarette he was smoking after a member of the audience complained loudly in the middle of the performance.
Sebastiano Lo Monaco was smoking, as per the script, during a peformance of Henry Miller's A View from the Bridge at at a theater in Mestre when the woman complained. After a 15-minute break, the performance resumed with a a non-smoking main character.
In January, Italy banned smoking in all enclosed public places.
SIU Under the Gun
Southern Illinois University's least favorite professor, Jonathan Bean, is being blamed by his colleagues for ratting out the school about its inability to find qualified white males for graduate fellowships, according to the Southern Illinoisian.
The Justice Department has put the Carbondale University on notice that the hiring practices for its three graduate fellowships discriminate against white males and "non-preferred minorities" in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The DOJ says it will sue SIU unless it cleans up its act. None of the 120 or so fellowships awarded in the past few years went to white males.
Some faculty members believe it was Bean who contacted the Center for Equal Opportunity, which brought the issue first to the attention of the school (and got no response) and then to the feds.
Bean, who would not comment on the matter, gained fame earlier this year for distributing reading material in class about 1960s black radicalism that made two teaching assistants uncomfortable.
More Racist Assumptions from the Left
We have all recently heard how incorrect it is to mention that blacks once picked cotton and how sports team managers dare not even mention blacks, but it seems that if you are a "liberal", none of that applies. Note the racially discriminatory comments below from the Left-leaning Houston Chronicle. The paper seems to imply that it is only blacks who object to homosexual marriage on religious grounds. If I were to play the "sensitivity" games that the Left play I would say that in the context of Leftist contempt for religion, the excerpt below is a "dumb N*****" claim:""The hopes of gay rights advocates to stop the addition of a ban on same-sex marriage to the Texas Constitution ended last Tuesday. Texas voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, the constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Among Harris County residents who cast a vote on the issue, 72 percent favored the ban. Across Texas, 76 percent of voters approved......Inner city black voters in Harris County, many of whom have long experience with the denial of civil rights, favored the marriage amendment by an even higher majority than the general Harris County voting population. Black discomfort with homosexual marriage is rooted less in conscious discrimination than in religious belief, but support for the amendment brought blacks into incongruous accord with members of the Ku Klux Klan, whose members rallied in Austin in support of Proposition 2".
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Cotton Picking Update
The school concerned has now dropped the song about picking bales of cotton. What a pity to lose such a lively and enjoyable song.
And a reader writes: "The weirdest thing of this is that the song was made famous in US by Harry Belafonte. The screaming ultra liberal himself."
Disrespectful Memories
The Detroit News reports that a song about picking cotton has been removed from a middle school band's folk song show following complaints from a local parent that it glorifies slavery and is insensitive.
The song, "Pick a Bale of Cotton," was to be played at the Berkley School District concert later the week but was pulled after parent Greg Montgomery complained. Montgomery's daughter, a student at the school, said: "They were bringing back the memories of how African-Americans picked cotton, and it wasn't a good memory. It was disrespectful to African-Americans."
The offending lyrics go something like, "Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton. Gotta jump down, turn around, Oh, Lordie, pick a bale a day."
Make Someone Happy
The producers of this year's staging of the Vagina Monologues at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have said that white women need not apply for onstage roles because they want only women of color at center stage this year, according to the Michigan Daily.
But that's okay, because they are doing it only to "rectify biases of the show and reignite interest among the study body."
Critics have accused the play's writer, Eve Ensler, of putting minority women only in roles that highlight sexual violence, alienating potential actresses of color.
This year's director, Lauren Whitehead, says she can't change the script but she can change the faces of the women reading the script.
"The script is flawed in its attempt to give all women a voice because it seems to give certain women certain voices," she says. "I often wonder why angry vaginas can't be white and happy vaginas can't be Asian."
Angry Kazakhs
The government of Kazakhstan is threatening to sue a British comedian who regularly plays a bufoonish citizen from the Central Asian republic on US, UK and Australian television, according to Reuters.
The foreign ministry of Kazakhstan says Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, a Kazakh television reporter, is the epitome of bad taste and ill manners. It has said it reserves the right to take "any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind.
"We do not rule out that Mr Cohen is serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way," Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev said.
The last straw apparently was Cohen's recent appearance at the MTV Awards show in Lisbon, when he showed up in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.
Islamophobia
John Stossel reports in the Manchester Union leader that Sony Pictures backed out of a deal to distribute Albert Brooks' new film because he refused to remove the word Muslim from the title.
Brooks made the movie, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, after 9/11 to try and get everyone to lighten up a little bit. He was a bit concerned that Americans were growing leery of even the word Muslim. "A part of me always thought," Brooks said, "what are there, a billion-and-a-half Muslim people on this planet, and I never thought that all of them wanted us dead."
Sony's president demanded that the title be changed, but Brooks refused. Warner Independent Pictures will take it on instead.
Slanderous Shadows
School officials in California removed an artists' silhouettes of happy children on a playground from outside a public elementary school because the images look too much like what one critic called pickaninnies, described as a "derogatory image of little black girls with unkempt short braids sticking out all over their heads." according to the Oakland Tribune.
Artist Jeena Wolfe was commissioned for the work along a fence outside Washington School in Alameda. The images, she said, were intended to be just happy children going about their business. She modeled them after actual kids at the school.
But the school's principal says he removed them after learning of the hate and pain they caused some in the community.
The artist says his decision caused her great pain. "It signifies everything that is wrong with the world and how far we have to come," Wolfe said.
Insulting Jews is OK of Course
We all know now that we can't have Halloween in case it upsets Wiccans and even MENTIONING blacks is a no-no if you are a sports coach. But Jews? No problem! They've been everybody's whipping boy for thousands of years so let the fun continue! And if even the French Ambassador to the Court of St. James can refer to Israel as "that shitty little country", surely anyone can diss Jews! And so it seems to be:"For the second time in barely a year, a contestant on Donald Trump's TV show "The Apprentice" has made an anti-Semitic remark. And once again, the offender was not penalized for doing so. On this week's episode, Clay Lee, a 28-year-old Texas real estate agent, explains (in front of an audience) that his Jewish teammate, Adam Israelov, was cheap on a date because Adam is a "tight Jewish boy." Clay's later apology seems half-hearted, and with Adam out of the room, he blames Adam for being overly sensitive, asserting that Adam "needs to learn to relax.""The furious Leftist hatred of Israel is clearly fueling a re-emergence of open antisemitism. For the record, there are only two Jews who figure in my personal life and both of them are utter gentlemen.
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You Can't Win Sometimes
A British bank was trying to figure out how to handle their staff redundancies in the most sensitive way possible. Sound fair? Sounds fair to me. So who would you ask about how their existing sacking procedures were perceived? The Archbishop of Canterbury? The Dalai Lama? The Pope? The Oracle of Delphi? How about asking the last lot of people who had actually been sacked? Sounds the most obvious source of information doesn't it? It does to me. BUT:
"High street bank Abbey has been criticised by unions after it emerged it has written to former employees asking them what it was like to lose their jobs. The company has written to staff forced out of their jobs earlier this year and asked them to share their experiences of being made redundant and how it affected them. It plans to use the information, from more than 1,000 online questionnaires, to improve its redundancy processes".I think that if I were in charge of the bank concerned, I would give up at that point. If you don't ask, you are "insensitive". If you DO ask, you are still "insensitive". I think we need a lot LESS "sensitivity" all round myself.
