Really? Gillette is still in business?
You couldn’t prove it by me.
Gillette Gets Woke and Goes Broke
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Tag Archives: SJWs
Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt
The judge in the Gibson’s Bakery case has ordered Oberlin College to post a $36 million dollar bond if it appeals the $31.5 judgment against it. An appeal could require several years, and interest on the judgment is piling up at the rate of several thousand dollars a day. It seems that the judge believes Oberlin’s claims of financial distress and wants to make sure that the plaintiffs can collect their judgment after the college’s appeals are exhausted.
They’re Not Going to Like Their New Rules
Victor Davis Hanson has a post over at American Greatness titled Would President Joe Biden Become 25th Amendment Material?.
Biden is only the most egregious example of the impending applicable double standard that progressives have crafted though their own unhinged effort to abort the Trump presidency. Knowingly or not, they have made the once normal—allow an incoming president to face the consequences of his policies in his first midterm election and ensuing reelection bid—into the taboo.
Apparently, Democrats never imagined that their own slate of candidates might, according to their own standards, have far greater liabilities than Trump himself. And as we are likely soon to see, and as Biden himself has darkly hinted, ol’ Joe’s sins may pale in comparison to those of his now acerbic rivals.
We are in new territory where nothing is sacred, nothing is a gaffe, nothing is just a slip of the tongue—given that any means necessary were long ago justified to achieve the end of ousting Trump. And those means are soon going to be applied to the very politicos who recalibrated and welcomed them—and Biden first, and most embarrassingly, of all.
Read the whole thing.
My Face, Unshocked
I’ve let the Google story broken by Project Veritas percolated through the Interwebz for a day before commenting. I wanted to see how some of the usual suspects reacted. There’s only been one real surprise so far, and that was how long it took YouTube, a sister company to Google, to send the Project Veritas video down the memory hole. (BTW, if you haven’t seen the video, it’s available here. Go watch it, and come back. I’ll wait …)
Today’s TKPOTD deals with an effort back in 2015 to silence me. As part of that effort, my business and personal Twitter accounts were shut down. Twitter claimed that it was because of “targeted abuse” but could not cite a single example. I believe I was being punished for not following their approved narrative. However, I was one of the earliest victims of Twitter’s “safety” system, and my permanent suspension was only temporary. When the false criminal charge failed for lack of evidence, Twitter seemed to realize their potential liability. My business account was reinstated, but the lessons learned from that failure were used to refine their tactics.
Facebook, Google, YouTube, Pinterest, … the list goes on. They all seem to have the same sort of definition of fairness, one that wouldn’t survive the old Fairness Doctrine I worked under as a broadcaster in the ’60s and ’70s. These companies’ users aren’t customers. The users are the product being sold to advertisers, and as product, they are something to be moulded and controlled.
So why am I still on Twitter if I view it as an unfair platform and untrustworthy business partner? I can use it to promote blog posts at no real cost to me. Beyond that, it has no real appeal. I got on Gab when it was brand new, and I’ve made a small investment in the company because it really seems dedicated to free speech.
Except for Maps and Scholar, I’ll pretty much given up on Google. DuckDuckGo has been my default search engine for over a year. I’ll still link to YouTube content, put if I wanted to post a video, I’d use BitChute. I’ve deleted my Pinterest account. I no longer post to Facebook.
And I’m not the only person who has grown tired of online services who despise me.
Twenty years ago, as the Internet Bubble was bursting, Google survived because it was a robust company infrastructure with a viable business model. Coincidentally twenty years ago, Venezuela was one of the wealthiest countries in the Western Hemisphere with thriving petroleum industry. While I’m saddened, I’m not shocked by what Marxism has done to Venezuela. If I’m still around in 2039, I suspect that I’ll feel more schadenfreude than sadness for what a post-modern, neo-Marxist business model is likely to do for Google. Or Twitter. Or the rest of ’em. I certainly don’t expect to have use my shocked face.
Gibson’s Bakery Jury Awards Triple Damages
Last week, the jury in the Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College lawsuit awarded a total of 11.2 million dollars in compensatory damages to the plaintiffs. Today, the jury awarded punitive damages as follows:
David Gibson – $17.5 million punitive damages
Allyn W. Gibson — $8.75 million punitive damages
Gibson Bros. Inc. (the Bakery) – $6,973,500 punitive damages
These awards will probably be reduced because they exceed the twice compensatory damage cap in Ohio law.
UPDATE—The jury also awarded attorney’s fees to be determined by the judge.
Educational Mismanagement
My podcasting partner Stacy McCain about what might be called the managerial malpractice of the SJW coterie that has run Oberlin College for the past decade or so. The college is claiming that a significant punitive damage award in the Gibson’s Bakery case could put it out of business.
One of the commenters (Sort-of-Mad Max) suggests:
I don’t know, maybe they could have a…bake sale?
Heh.
Read the whole thing.
Meanwhile, Back at the Court House …
… Legal Insurrection reports that the judge in the Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College case has ruled that the jury won’t be allowed to see the Oberlin email criticizing them, but he also ruled that the jury will be allowed to authorize the court to add attorneys’ fees to the award in addition to any punitive damages.
As we understand the procedure, the jury will get to determine whether to give the judge the power to award the Gibsons attorney’s fees. If the jury so authorizes, the amount will be up to the judge. It’s unclear to us whether the judge could award the amount of the contingent fee (which presumably is the basis on which the plaintiffs’ lawyers took the case), because if so, that could add many millions to the ultimate judgment. Even at an hourly rate, it still would be substantial.
Oberlin filed a motion for a mistrial. The motion was denied, and the case will now proceed to the punitive damages phase.
An Uninsured Loss?
Legal Insurrection reports that the insurance carrier for Oberlin College has notified the school that while its policy does cover a defamation claim, it does not cover some of the other torts claims in the Gibson’s Bakery lawsuit. The insurance company has filed a motion to intervene in the case to find out what proportion of the $11,000,000 verdict was for defamation.
Social Justice Warfare Update
A small, family-run bakery has taken Oberlin College to court, alleging that the school defamed the family and its business through its active support of student SJWs who were protesting the business’s treatment of shoplifters. Today, a jury awarded the bakery and several family members of total of $11,000,000 in damages. A punitive damages phase of the trial will begin next week which could raise the award as high as $33,000,000.
You can read more about the verdict at Legal Insurrection.
UPDATE—My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has some thoughts on the matter here.
Colluding with Reality
I’m so old, I remember when Reality was supposed to have a “liberal bias.”
And Reality has been doing violence to much of the Left’s cherished agenda for the past few days.
UPDATE—
Leftist ideas can’t withstand debate. Leftists know that, which is why they’re always trying to silence their opponents, generally in the name of some sort of decency or compassion that they themselves spectacularly lack.
Twitter Locks Out Aaron Walker
A short while ago, Arron Walker received this email about his @AaronWorthing account—
Aaron was simply using an old Saturday Night Live catchphrase to point out how the Fifth Amendment constrains any government investigation.
Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin were unavailable for comment.
Meanwhile, at the SPLC …
… there’s been a bit of a shakeup. The left-wing hate group has fired its founder and airbrushed his bio from their website. Morris Dees’ sudden transition to unpersonhood has been met with smiles for the karmic irony by some, including my podcasting partner Stacy McCain.
Newsbusters reports that SPLC internal emails have surfaced that contain “complaints regarding sexual harassment and racial biases in promotion and hierarchy.” Of course, such complaints are grounds for firing in the current SJW environment, but in Dees’ case they’re not new. Similar allegations appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser in 1994.
Why fire Dees now?
Discovery. The SPLC settled one lawsuit for over 3,000,000 bucks rather than go through the discovery process and trial. There are other suits pending, and the discovery process can be messy, especially if one has something to hide. It may be that they think that throwing their founder under the bus will appease their critics and moderate their losses. If that’s the case, they don’t understand how people on the right think.
Stay tuned.
Good News for the First Amendment
Colorado lost its first attempt to crush Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop in a 7-to-2 Supreme Court decision affirming the baker’s First Amendment right to practice his religion and not bake a cake dedicated to promoting something contrary to his beliefs. In response, the Colorado (so-called) Civil Rights Commission filed a second case against Phillips. In response, Phillips sued the Commission in federal court alleging violation of his civil rights.
The Daily Signal reports that both the Commission and Phillips have dropped their cases.
The members of the state’s commission could have been held “personally liable” for harassment if the matter continued, said Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
“It’s probably because they may have finally gotten scared that they were going to get hit with sanctions for, in essence, directly thumbing their nose at the Supreme Court and the court’s decision in this issue,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “It could make them personally liable for damages if they abuse their positions to try to harass an individual.”
In the 7-2 majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated [Phillips’] objection[.]”
It’s amazing how the possibility of being held personally responsible for one’s virtue signaling can change someone’s perspective. Actual accountability and the possibility of real consequences usually moderates behavior.
We need to see more of this.
Forgetting Why
Joel Kotkin has an essay posted at Tablet titled Why Social Justice Is Killing Synagogues and Churches. He begins by noting that as religious organizations become more focused on “social justice” their membership invariably declines.
However satisfying to its practitioners, the emphasis on social justice is clearly not attracting more worshippers. Almost all the religious institutions most committed to this course are also in the most serious decline, most notably mainstream Protestants but also, Catholics and Reform and Conservative Jews. The rapidly declining Church of England, which is down to 2 percent share among British youth, is burnishing its progressive image by adding the use of plastics to its list of Lenten sacrifices, but seems unable to serve the basic spiritual and family needs of their congregants.
Judaism and Christianity both teach that we should treat one another fairly and with compassion, but that is not the central point of either religion. Both rest on the first principle of their shared scriptures—
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
All their other teachings are commentary on that fact, explaining how to go about living in a proper relationship to the Creator. We are called to good works as part of a loving relationship with God and, by extension, our fellow creatures. When people neglect that vertical relationship with God and focus only on the horizontal relationship with each other, they ignore the reason that were called by God. They have wandered away from what should be their real common purpose.
Ultimately, … religions … can only hope to thrive if they serve a purpose that is not met elsewhere in society.
Just so. Society cannot do for us what God can.
Trigger Warning
The College Fix reports that a person wearing a cowboy outfit at Wake Forest caused someone to file a racial bias complaint.
The Old Gold & Black reports someone ended up filing a Bias Incident Report (BIR). According to Chief Diversity Officer José Villalba, the “official” Bias Incident group concluded the person in the pic was “impersonating a cowboy by wearing a Western-style shirt with part of an American flag on it and a lasso across his chest and shoulder.”
Apparently, someone unfamiliar with cowboys thought the lasso was a noose.
Nevertheless, Student Senators Miles Middleton and Fadi Narouz “understood” the lasso to be a noose, and at a February 12 Student Government General Assembly meeting decided to bring up the issue as well as other matters of a racial nature — like “Caucasian students behaving rudely to employees of color” and “students of color being scared to enter certain spaces on campus.”
Middleton conceded that if the Bias Incident group said the lasso wasn’t a noose that he would “take them on their word.” However, he said he had his “own set of opinions about how the campus should be dealing with these types of things in a deeper manner.”
The picture that caused the controversy was taken at a campus Subway restaurant. Maybe Wake Forest should add a Roy Rogers restaurant to improve the students’ general knowledge of American culture.
BTW, the hangman’s knot used to make a noose and the honda knot used to make a lasso are two very different knots.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Alas, it seems my favorite SJW doesn’t understand how Twitter works.
It Twitter had an IQ filter set for a lower limit at around 90, it’s traffic would plummet, something an advertising-based service can’t afford. She’ll just have to deal with the capitalist reality of the situation.
Child Abuse?
Q What do all these have in common: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Cable News Network, Inc. (CNN), The Guardian, National Public Radio, TMZ, Atlantic Media Inc.,Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., Diocese of Covington, Diocese of Lexington, Archdiocese of Louisville, Diocese of Baltimore, Ana Cabrera, Sara Sidner, Erin Burnett, S.E. Cupp, Elliot C. McLaughlin, Amanda Watts, Emanuella Grinberg, Michelle Boorstein, Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Antonio Olivo, Joe Heim, Michael E. Miller, Eli Rosenberg, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Kristine Phillips, Sarah Mervosh, Emily S. Rueb, Maggie Haberman, David Brooks, Shannon Doyne, Kurt Eichenwald, Andrea Mitchell, Savannah Guthrie, Joy Reid, Chuck Todd, Noah Berlatsky, Elisha Fieldstadt, Eun Kyung Kim, HBO, Bill Maher, Warner Media, Conde Nast, GQ, Heavy.com, The Hill, The Atlantic, Bustle.com, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, Kathy Griffin, Alyssa Milano, and Jim Carrey?
A It is reported that one of these has been set to each of them—
Of course, The Truth is a defense to a defamation claim.
Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.
Manufacturing Outrage
One of the complaints from the Left about the Right’s seizing and pouncing on Democrat’s gaffes is that the Right is manufacturing outrage about anti-semitism or economic derpness or abortion/infanticide. OK, but to the extent that any outrage was manufactured the process involved telling the truth about what was actually said or done by Democrats.
OTOH, the outrage stirred up against the Covington kids was based on lies.
I believe the Gentle Reader can readily sort out the intrinsic difference between the two approaches.
To Pounce
After seeing several comments on the Interwebz about how the Right was “pouncing” on the errors made in the misreporting of the Covington Kids harassment story, I clicked on the Dictionary widget on my Mac and found this as part of the definition of pounce—
notice and take swift and eager advantage of a mistake, remark, or sign of weakness: reporters who are just as eager to pounce on a gaffe as on a significant news story.
Well, I suppose we are taking advantage of the Left’s mistake. Their whole pitch was based on lies. It was their drummer who invaded someone else’s space. It was their “elder” who tried to provoke children, and it was they who cyberabused the youngsters. And it was their “elder” who may not be a respectable veteran, but a liar who misrepresented a military service record that appears to include stateside AWOL rather than service overseas.
Yeah, we pounced on that, and in the process, turned the Left’s fake news gaffe into a significant real news story.
Accountability?
I hope Film Ladd is correct, at least about the firings. In the case of lawsuits, the process is the punishment, and it can punish both sides. It would be better for the media companies involved to offer generous settlements to the children they appear to have victimized and keep the matter out of court.
However, the individual Twitter thugs shouldn’t be left unaccountable for their cyberbullying. The question remains of how to make a public example of them sufficient to deter such acts in the future.
Public shaming? One massive lawsuit against hundreds or thousands of defendants alleging that they are jointly and severally liable for the incitement to violence?
Alea iacta est.
Stacy McCain and The SPLC
My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has a post up at The Other McCain about a nice turn of events for the Southern Poverty Law Center and one of its lawyers. The SPLC is facing yet another lawsuit that seeks to hold it accountable for lying. As part of his post, Stacy briefly describes that organizations foolish attempt to paint him as a white supremacist.
Over the years, the SPLC’s smear against me has been endlessly recycled, despite its self-evident falsehood. Anyone who actually knows me knows that I am not a “white supremacist,” and if I were concealing a crypto-Nazi agenda, you might think there would be substantial evidence of this. The paucity of evidence — beyond guilt-by-association smears and what I’ve called the “Ransom Note Method” of assembling parts of disparate statements to create a sort of word-collage — is particularly remarkable, given that I’ve been an independent blogger for 11 years now. How can anyone believe that it is my desire to incite hatred or advocate racial oppression, when I’ve published so many thousands of posts here, with no editor to filter my entirely candid expressions, but never once written anything that would justify the “white supremacist” label?
Read the whole thing.
One rather dangerous trend over the past year or so has been the reliance on the SPLC by certain tech and social media companies for advice on determining who should be allowed on their platforms. We can hope that the truth will catch up to them before too much damage is done.
Oh, one more thing …
Writing this post reminded me of a failed attempt by a SJW to use the SPLC to go after a blogger. When Brett Kimberlin sued Aaron Walker, Ali Akbar, Stacy McCain, and me, he made the mistake of calling us as his witnesses. BTW, Eric Johnson, the judge presiding in the trial, is black.
Q: So do you know what the Southern Poverty Law Center is?
MR. OSTRONIC: Objection Your Honor.
THE COURT: What does the Southern Poverty Law Center have to do with this case?
MR. KIMBERLIN: Well Mr. McCain has —
THE COURT: The Southern Poverty Law Center, what does that have to do with this case?
MR. KIMBERLIN: Mr. McCain is considered a neo-confederate — is one —
MR. OSTRONIC: Objection, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Well —
MR. KIMBERLIN: And the Southern Poverty Law Center —
MR. OSTRONIC: Objection, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Hold on a second. Counsel I appreciate you objecting to my question but I’m not going to overrule myself. That’s not something I do. So what does the Southern Poverty Law Center have to do with this case? I’m not asking you about Mr. McCain, I’m asking you about why are you asking him about the Southern Poverty Law Center?
MR. KIMBERLIN: I’m asking him the Southern Poverty Law Center is the leading, one of the leading civil rights organizations in the —
THE COURT: I understand all of that but what does it have to do with this case?
MR. KIMBERLIN: Because —
THE COURT: And the claim that you are making against these gentlemen?
MR. KIMBERLIN: Because Southern Poverty Law Center regularly outs racists –
MR. OSTRONIC: Objection.
THE COURT: So what if they do. What does that have to do with this case? This case isn’t about racists or racism.
MR. KIMBERLIN: It’s about hate. It’s about hate. These people hate me and they do anything to destroy me.
THE COURT: Well but why are you asking this witness about the Southern Poverty Law Center? First of all he couldn’t testify as to anything they said or did because it wouldn’t be an exception to any hearsay rule. So you would never be able to get that in evidence anyway.
MR. KIMBERLIN: All right.
BY MR. KIMBERLIN:
Q: Mr.–
THE COURT: Your objection’s sustained.
BY MR. KIMBERLIN:
Q: Mr. McCain, do you have a blog?
The direct examination of the witness went downhill for the plaintiff from there.
Don’t Know Much About History
She Guevara tweeted this—
I was going to write a post discussing her tweet, but Andrew Klavan has a tweet that sums up my views more succinctly.
I’ll simply add that Joseph had to briefly take his family beyond Herod’s reach, but after Herod died, the family was able to quickly return to Judea for Mary’s purification sacrifice at the Temple (on the 40th day following the birth) and then go home to Nazareth. They were not immigrants seeking long-term refuge in a foreign land.
Not Quite Up To Date
My favorite SJW has offered these suggestions for New Year’s resolutions—
One of her goals has already been effectively met, and excellent pseudoscientific progress has been made toward another.
Males who self-identify has women are already being allowed to play as women in several sports. It doesn’t take much google-fu to discover news stories of a state wrestling championship for high school girls being won by a biological male or of a 6-foot-3 biological male injuring a woman on a playing field. One of those resolutions is in the bag as a victory for the wusses who couldn’t cut it in The Patriarchy.
And pseudoscience in riding to the rescue of the gender gap in pregnancy, at least in UK, where school children will now be taught that boys can have periods. There’s a long way to go, but that’s a start.
Get Woke, Go Broke, and Facebook Isn’t Your Friend
Over the past day or so, there have been rumblings on the Interwebz of financial distress at certain websites. It appears that the Weekly Standard is on the chopping block and that sites such as BuzzFeed and Vice are struggling. TWS was doing OK until it devolved into the premier Never Trump outlet on the web, alienating a significant portion of its readers. BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox Media, Group Nine Media, Refinery29, and the like have failed to find a way to build viable business models which target SJWs who believe that they are entitled to stuff for free.
Wokeness may feel good. It may even have merit in some virtue signaling sense. But it doesn’t seem to have value in the marketplace, and … what’s the socially just newspeak word for the sexist oldspeak word attaboys? Goodfeels? I’ll try that … and goodfeels can’t be used to pay the rent. Meanwhile, sites that develop are relationship with readers and work to provide them with content worth paying for are making a living for their operators. (See, eg., The Other McCain.) And while many of these successful sites have some sort of presence on social media, their main emphasis is a stand-alone entities in the manner of the early-21st-century blogosphere. They may use Facebook or Twitter to opportunistically promote themselves, but their focus is on creating content for themselves to bring readers to their own sites rather than letting main stream social media have it for free. It’s hard to make a living when you give everything away for free.
15 years ago, an independent blogosphere seemed to the be the future of the Internet. As people begin to understand what “free” social media costs, we may find ourselves going back to that future..
Check Your Privilege
Move the 13 sliders around on the Intersectionality Score Calculator and find out how you are privileged by your identity.
I scored a 3.