Category Archives: Political Correctness

Sheryl Sandberg Sandbagged For Forgetting To Blame Men

Feminism, Labor, Political Correctness, Regulation, Sex

As this individualist sees it, Sheryl Sandberg is a remarkable woman who holds unremarkable opinions. There is nothing remotely controversial about what the chief operating officer of Facebook, a Democrat, has said about women’s work on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

Women are too nice. They don’t take credit for their greatness. They don’t raise their hand enough. They don’t “Lean In” (the trite title of Sandberg’s new book) as they should. They “attribute their success to luck, and help from other people,” while men will attribute their success to their own core skills.

Sandberg holds humdrum feminist views. According to this mainstream opinion, society and the patriarchy have conditioned women to be nurturing and apologize for any male-like, go-getter ambitions they harbor.

Interviewer Norah O’Donnell is the very embodiment of banality—and hypocrisy. O’Donnell’s beauty (she is certainly no brainiac) could not have damaged her career on the Idiot Box. Just in case her looks—sorry, “skills”—went unnoticed, O’Donnell has posed as a pin-up.

In any case, O’Donnell the pin-up was having none of it. “But some women will hear that and say, ‘Wow, she’s telling me I’m not working hard enough, I’m not trying hard enough. She’s blaming women…”

Matthew Cooper is another feminist with a Y (chromosome). Cooper took a tougher tack. So sinister were Sandberg’s pronouncements on women that she deserved to be exposed for all the bad (unrelated) things she’d done. Some of these were implied: “She made a billion” was a recrimination of sorts.

Some were asserted: Mr. Cooper saddles Sandberg with the deregulation of the financial sector [where? When?] and the financial crisis. She was only 30 when she helped “repeal the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that had separated investment banking from the commercial, insured kind. This was, in retrospect, a huge mistake,” noodles Cooper.

This is such bad journalism.

To those of use who put a premium on teasing out the issues with precision, there is no daylight between Sheryl Sandberg and her feminist foes.

Sheryl Sandberg is being sandbagged for forgetting the only acceptable meme: Saddle “society” and the “patriarchy” for any and all female failure.

Nobody has picked on Sandberg for failing to blame biology, which accounts to a greater degree for the observed, aggregate differences in drive and priority setting that separate the sexes.

NORA O’Donnell Showcasing Her Professional Skills :

MLK Spared a Thought For Poor Whites

Affirmative Action, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

There were many reasons not racist for which to dislike MLK, not least of them was the man’s dalliance with communists. “His associations with communists” is why Jackie Kennedy’s husband, hero of Chris Matthews’ last book, ordered the wiretaps on King.

Jacqueline Kennedy, as revealed from audio recordings of Mrs. Kennedy’s historic 1964 conversations on life with John F. Kennedy, held a low opinion of Martin Luther King, the man America has since deified. Jackie was unafraid to say as much.

But then she lived BPC: before political correctness.

Whatever politically incorrect realists like Jackie Kennedy had to say about MLK, he was nothing like the black community’s current, corrupt race hustlers.

“It is a simple matter of justice,” said Martin Luther King,” that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro [MLK’s words] from backwardness [MLK’s words], should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.

In anticipation, let me say that no, affirmative action is always wrong from my perspective. The point of the post is to point out that MLK did not share the militant Afrocentrism that has become the norm in the US with dreck like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (the son of the shakedown artist is a paragon of virtue too), and the agitators that are slowly replacing them.

MacFarlane Against The Boobs

Celebrity, Film, Hollywood, Judaism & Jews, Music, Political Correctness

I’m in Seth MacFarlane’s corner, despite his smarminess. The master of ceremonies at the 85th Academy Awards managed to annoy the right people.

In “Oscars’ Hostile, Ugly, Sexist Night,” Amy Davidson, an affirmative fem at the New Yorker, kvetched over the “hostility shown to women in the workplace.” The meandering Davidson was moaning about MacFarlane’s “We Saw Your Boobs” routine (I didn’t see it), and its implication:

We saw your boobs, but that’s not even what we find attractive, so you exerted no power in doing so—all you did was humiliate yourself?

Behold the sacred boob! So now if a woman strips and a man laughs he risks accusation of impropriety. Besides, women rule the work place, toots. I know men who don’t dare greet a female for fear of an harassment suit.

Another anemic New Yorker writer whined that MacFarlane insulted those Who’re Always Ready to Receive Offense.

Snivels She Who Took Offense:

MacFarlane came off as kind of a pig, as he made fun of women for being too thin, too old, too naked. How sophisticated is it to call the pretty, popular girls sluts? I had to stand up and move away when he turned his sights on the lovely black nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, nominated for Best Actress. I felt sick imagining where MacFarlane might go. So when he simply made a joke about George Clooney sleeping with her down the road, I felt my body relax.

I’ve now watched “We Saw Your Boobs.” If this is indeed MacFarlane singing, he has a better voice and is more musical than all the other warblers who “sang” last night, except for Dame Shirley Bassey, of course, who can do no wrong.

Here’s her stunning, sexy, original performance of Gold Finger

As I predicted in Annual Oscar Offal, Adel did deliver a monotone. She has no range. Barbra Streisand was appalling. And I owe you an apology. I promised no Jennifer Hudson. But someone did go primal on stage. I suspect it was Hudson.

Finally, the reason I’m on MacFarlane’s side is because he has set off that ersatz defender of Jewish interests, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL, “on Monday blasted an Oscars sketch in which potty-mouthed film star bear Ted joked about Jews in Hollywood.”

I recall that Foxman had more to say about Mel Gibson than he had about a Seattle based Jihadist, Naveed Afzal Haq. Haq murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building in 2006.

The ADL’s website issued only the tersest of statements. It made no mention of the dead, the injured, and the Muslim. A glance at the League’s site and a visitor from Deep Space might get the impression Seth MacFarlane and other marauding Christian Cossacks like him posed the greatest danger to Jewish continuity.

As I said, I caught but a glimpse of Seth MacFarlane presenting the Oscars. He was not terribly funny, but then they never are. Don’t tell me you found any of the multiple appearances of Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg the least bit amusing.

“Family Guy” is quite cute, but this MacFarlane creation has nothing on Mike Judge’s stuff. “Idiocracy” and Beavis & Butthead are sublimely smart.

MacFarlane is certainly not in Joan Rivers’ league when it comes to impropriety. If only she were unleashed on the Oscar crowd. Now that she’s old, she gets away with speaking her nimble mind.

I laughed so loud and hard at a comment she made on her reality show with Mellisa, the insipid but loving daughter, that I missed at least two more jokes. (I would not recommend watching “Joan Knows Best?”. Like all reality voyeurism, it’s junk—and a schlep, as Rivers would say.)

Ms. Rivers walked in on a football party Mellisa was throwing for her young son and his rowdy small friends. Looking on with disdain at the grubby little boys, Rivers blurted out:

“I don’t know how Jerry Sandusky managed to do it.”

Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism

Ilana Mercer, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, The West

“Originality is rare in punditry these days,” writes Joseph F. Cotto, who is “a scholar and columnist from central Florida.” “Every time a new narrative-of-the-day arrives, we take refuge in groupthink rather than thinking for ourselves. Not Mercer … [who] is one of America’s leading paleolibertarian voices, [with] “a prominent column on WorldNetDaily.”

Mr. Cotto recently interviewed this writer for the Washington Times’ community pages. You can read the interview, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism,” at WND. Here are excerpts:

JOSEPH F. COTTO: This seems like one of the most polarized eras in American politics. Why do you think that our country’s political atmosphere has become so divisive?

ILANA MERCER: I think you are correct in your assessment regarding the unparalleled polarization of American society. Have you noticed how commentators on both sides of received political wisdom attempt to diminish the fact you articulate by referring to America’s fractious history? Nevertheless, this is a complex issue that is hard to answer briefly. I’ll try. In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” economist Milton Friedman underscores this important point: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”
Underway today in the USA is a monumental clash between individualism and collectivism; between the forces of reason and reality, against force and coercion. The “philosophical” differences between the Republikeynesians, on the one hand, and the Democrats, on the other, are insignificant. The first believe individual rights should be carefully calibrated by central planners; the latter believe these natural rights can be overridden.
There is also a cultural dimension to these irreparable divisions. We are today, thanks to social engineering, a deracinated and divided society. We are no longer what John Jay termed “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” There can be no unity without community. The glue of togetherness is gone, replaced by a flimsy, fluid, and thoroughly fake unity peddled by politicians. “Ideas” they call it. On the one day, it’s a crusade for democracy; on the next, it’s a war against racism.

COTTO: Multiculturalism is spreading rapidly across the Western world. This has led not only to cultural barriers, but tremendous religious and ethnic conflicts. What are your views on the subject?

MERCER: Multiculturalism as practiced in the West amounts to top-down, centrally enforced and managed integration. Show me a historical precedent where forced integration has worked. As it works across the Anglo-American and European spheres, one group (the founding, historical majority) is forced by self-anointed and elected elites—no contradiction there—on pain of public and professional ostracism, to submerge its history, heroes, customs, culture, language, and pander to militant minorities, who’ve been acculturated by the same elites in identity-politics warfare. …
… An interesting new book, reviewed by one Barnaby Rogerson, makes the point that the Levant of the 18th century was peaceful and prosperous (and surprisingly libertine), because it was made up of “a grid of self-governing communities.” Integration between disparate communities was not enforced. And surprise, surprise: communities freely chose to live in complete segregation. This freedom fostered “remarkable tolerance” among diverse communities across the cities of the Levant of that time. “Deals before Ideals, City before State, Trade before Politics,” as the reviewer puts it. This freedom of association was the source of strength. These autonomous ethnic communities were free of the top-down, punitive, forced integration that has become the hallmark of the 19th-century nation-state that usurped their authority. …

This interview, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism,” continues at WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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