Tag: Vibrancy is our strength

An impossible conundrum

It’s rather remarkable that in this long article about female fans doing to the new Star Wars what female fans always do – which is turn literally everything into sordid romance – that the author can’t possibly figure out why nearly all of them are intent on putting Rey together with Kylo rather than with the nominal hero of the piece:

In those days, as now, fan-fiction was a hobby largely undertaken by women; though solid data is sparse, most of it shows cisgender men in the minority by a wide margin. There’s no single agreed upon answer to the question of why this is, but one common explanation cites the desire to create narratives outside the male perspective that has historically ruled the entertainment world. Interviewed by Fangirl Chat in 2014, Maggie Nowakowska, a prominent member of the early Star Wars zine scene, recalled that this was an explicit goal of hers: “We wanted to make sure we got some female Jedi in there because we were afraid the boys would get on it first and the next thing you’d know women were never Jedi.”

Not all fan fiction centers on romance, but a good portion of it does. In many fandoms (The Force Awakens included), “slash” stories about men getting with men tend to be very popular: perhaps for some of the same reasons lesbian porn is popular among straight men, or because pop culture generally tends to create more (and more fleshed-out) male characters than female ones, or because media has historically lacked for queer love stories. Even when the subject of a story is a heterosexual relationship between leading characters, foregrounding romance can be a transgressive move depending on the source material. At one point in the ’80s, Lucasfilm broke with a policy of mostly ignoring fan fiction by sending publishers warning letters because of a story that featured love scenes between Han and Leia….

 “There’s a curve as to which ships are the most popular and which are the least. That Reylo is bigger than Finn and Rey is surprising to me.”

It’s true: Stories by fans about The Force Awakens’s two lead heroes falling in love are far outnumbered by ones about the movie’s heroine and its village-slaughtering villain doing so. One common explanation for this says that Rey and Kylo are simply the most fascinating people on screen. J.J. Abrams has talked about his philosophy of movies being “mystery boxes,” and certainly both of these characters, with Rey’s unexplained backstory and Kylo’s hazy motivations, fit that description.

There’s also a level of moral unsettledness that make them stand out. Kylo is visibly tempted to turn back to good; Rey has more pressing concerns than the fate of the galaxy. Ricca explained it to me in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Rey’s focused on the bottom, on survival, while Kylo highmindedly obsesses over being the best Dark Sider he can be. “Having the two meet as equals is bizarre, and hints a lot of things,” Ricca said. “Some of those things are explored in Interstellar Transmissions, and a lot of them aren’t, because there’s so much potential.”

The problematic fact that they are attempting to avoid mentioning is that Finn is black. The reason so little fan fiction is written about Finn and Rey is because, despite being under constant barrage by Hollywood and the advertising industry pushing miscegenated propaganda, the vast majority of white women simply don’t find black men to be as attractive as white men. Like calls to like, as it has always done and as it always will do.

However, the article does indicate the primary problem with science fiction and fantasy today. Most of it simply isn’t genuine science fiction and fantasy, it’s merely professional fan fiction.

Diversity is educational

A freshman at the University of Texas receives a Very Important Lesson in diversity:

University of Texas freshman Haruka Weiser wrapped up a class at the drama building about 9:30 p.m. She called a friend to say she was on her way, according to an Austin police affidavit.

She never made it.

The remains of Weiser, a first-year theater and dance major, were found about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday in a creek near the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center, on the university campus in Austin, not far from the school’s football stadium, officials said. An autopsy noted trauma to the body and the death was termed a homicide.

Investigators “don’t have a clue what the motive” was for the homicide, Acevedo said….

Not a clue. No idea at all. Who could possibly figure out what might have led to the first murder on the UT campus since 1966? I guess we’ll never know.

Say what you will about diversity on campus, but you cannot deny that it is educational.

America is the world

A Broadway producer agrees to pretend to consider white people:

The hit musical “Hamilton” has drawn widespread praise for its use of a diverse cast to explore American history. But a casting call seeking “nonwhite men and women” to audition for the show drew criticism from the union representing theater actors, prompting “Hamilton” to say Wednesday that it will amend its language to make clear that anyone is welcome to try out for the show.

The dispute is in some ways semantic — audition descriptions of many of the characters in “Hamilton,” as for other Broadway shows, often specify the race, gender and age range of the characters, and that is standard practice in the theater industry. But Actors’ Equity said that auditions should be open to anyone.

At the end of the day, the producers of “Hamilton” said that they would change the posting that had drawn criticism, to make it clear that people of all ethnicities are welcome to audition, but would not back away from the show’s commitment to hire a diverse cast.

I don’t see a problem here. As we all know, Americans can be born anywhere in the world. George Washington may well have been Chinese and Thomas Jefferson from Papua New Guinea, for all we know.

America is the world. Posterity is not the children. Diversity is our strength. Islam is the religion of peace.

No wonder they hate the truth-tellers. There is no room for the truth in their consciousness.

Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that “‘Hamilton’ is, among
other things, about who owns history, who gets to be in charge of the
narrative.”

You don’t say….

A murder in Germany

The German authorities had better respect all of the migrants back to their homelands pretty damned soon, or I expect there is going to be a second Holocaust that will make the first one look downright merciful.

GERMAN-born Iranian Muslim man kills 20-year-old German woman by pushing her into the path of an oncoming subway train in Berlin. German police say a 20-year-old woman has died after being pushed in front of a Berlin subway train by a stranger. The 28-year-old Iranian Muslim has been arrested on ‘suspicion’ of homicide. (Suspicion? Several people grabbed him after witnessing the attack!)

The shocking incident took place when the young woman was standing on the platform waiting for her train and she was pushed in front of an oncoming train by a 28-year-old Hamburg man born of Iranian descent.

After he pushed the woman, shocked witnesses ran toward him and held him back so that he couldn’t escape.

Berlin police spokesman Heidi Vogt said Wednesday that the victim and the suspect didn’t appear to have known each other and there was no indication of a quarrel. Vogt said the man, who was born in Germany but had Iranian citizenship, had previous convictions.

So much for that “innocent second-generation immigrant” idea.

Deport, kill, or die

The Swedes are belatedly coming to the realization that contrary to what they were taught at school, orcs are going to orc:

Swedish police have dealt with 5,000 incidents involving migrants since October as they revealed they are concerned the problems are getting worse.

Officers in the country have been called out to nearly 600 assaults in the last three months as well as four rapes, two bomb threats and 450 fights.

Migrants and asylum seekers have also been involved in 194 violent threats, 58 fires and nine robberies, according to data obtained by SvD.

Given the claimed 80,000-migrant figure, (the actual figure is closer to 160,000 if I understand it correctly) that’s a 25 percent criminal rate per annum. Sweden now finds itself playing a game of deport, kill, or die; the sooner they address the migrant issue by respecting them all, the better it will be for everyone.

Especially the migrants.

Convergence kills

Oxford University learns the hard way that allowing SJWs free rein is an effective and efficient way for an institution to destroy itself:

Oxford University’s statue of Cecil Rhodes is to stay in place after furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

The governing body of Oriel College, which owns the statue, has ruled out its removal after being warned that £1.5m worth of donations have already been cancelled, and that it faces dire financial consequences if it bows to the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign.

A leaked copy of a report prepared for the governors and seen by this newspaper discloses that wealthy alumni angered by the “shame and embarrassment” brought on the 690-year-old college by its own actions have now written it out of their wills.

The college now fears a proposed £100m gift – to be left in the will of one donor – is now in jeopardy following the row.

The donors were astonished by a proposal to remove a plaque marking where Rhodes lived, and to launch a six-month consultation over whether the statue of the college’s biggest benefactor should be taken down.

But Oriel College confirmed in a statement to the Telegraph: “Following careful consideration, the College’s governing body has decided that the statue should remain in place.”

 At a meeting on Wednesday the governing body was told that because of its ambiguous position on the removal of the statue, “at least one major donation of £500,000” that was expected this year has been cancelled. In addition, a “potential £750,000 donor” has stopped responding to messages from the college, and several alumni have written to Oriel to say “they are disinheriting the college from their wills”.

One of those who has already cancelled their legacy was going to leave a “seven figure sum” and the college is aware that “another major donor is furious with the College… whose legacy could be in excess of £100m”.

The report warns that there will now “almost certainly” be “one or two redundancies” in its Development Office team because of the collapse in donations. And it has cancelled an annual fundraising drive that should have taken place in April. The report also warns that Oriel’s development office could now make an operating loss of around £200,000 this year.

As a general rule, it is a massively stupid idea for an institution to allow it’s decision-making to be influenced, let alone dictated, by the antics of the low-IQ, affirmative-action pseudo-scholars who were foolishly admitted in the name of diversity. It shouldn’t be surprising when the pseudo-scholars engage in all sorts of destructive drama; they’re not capable of succeeding at Oxford and they know it, so they find “more important” activities to serve as a mask for their academic inadequacies.

Social Justice convergence kills.

But the pseudo-scholars are right about one thing. Cecil Rhodes would have been absolutely horrified to see Africans permitted to engage in these antics at Oxford. Everyone knows that Rhodes was a racist and Anglo-Saxon supremacist, but what those who condemn him are failing to consider is this: he was a racist whose opinion of those he called “the most despicable specimens of human beings” was derived from considerably more direct experience of Africans and African culture than those who condemn him today.

Indeed, the destructive and disrespectful behavior of those African students at Oxford is intended to undermine Rhodes’s reputation, but instead it is serving to support his now-controversial opinions.

Unlike most anti-racists, I’ve worked with African students struggling to stay academically eligible at university. And based on my experience, I can say two things: a) they worked harder and put in more time studying than any of the other students on campus, and b) they absolutely should not have been there. Most of them simply weren’t smart enough to grasp the necessary concepts involved. It’s not that they were stupid, but they were at a 2-SD disadvantage to the average student there.

It is more than unfair, it is downright reprehensible to continually push these young men and women into academic situations where they simply cannot succeed. It doesn’t help them, it destroys their confidence and it undermines the success of the few who are actually capable of succeeding.

It’s exactly like giving the nerds from the high school chess club a college football scholarship, then putting them on the field to play Penn State. Sure, they can legitimately call themselves “football players”, but that’s not much consolation when they’re getting crushed by 250-pound linebackers.

Metaphor and harbinger

No doubt the Swedish family of the 7-year-old girl murdered by an immigrant are pleased to know that although they are burying their little girl, at least no one will be able to call them racist:

A seven year old girl was stabbed to death in an apartment in Upplands-Bro in northern Stockholm on 25 July this year by a 36 year old man, Daniel Gebru. Ten months earlier Gebru arrived as a welfare of migrant from Eritrea to Sweden…. Gebru has not been able to give any concrete reasons for why he cut the throat of the seven-year girl in the bathroom of her home. He had previously been living in the apartment.

Sooner or later, reality always punishes insanity. Immigration is societal suicide. At this point, it seems the only thing that will save Sweden is a) a new Northern Crusade or b) the blood eagle.

Sic semper cuculis.

Cuckservative Churchianity

As Red Eagle and I mentioned in Cuckservative, there is nothing that drives the modern Churchian evangelical like the desire to demonstrate that he is not racist:

When Michelle Higgins addressed a gathering of 16,000 evangelical students meeting in St. Louis this week for a missions conference, she brought the same intensity and fervor she’s often displayed as a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ms. Higgins, a St. Louis native and director of Faith for Justice, a protest group devoted to “Biblical activism,” minced no words when she told the crowd what happened after Michael Brown was killed last year in Ferguson, Mo.

“When I first heard that our brother had been killed, we began looking for churches to host discussion groups,” said Higgins, also the director of worship and outreach at a local congregation. “All of our evangelical partners said, ‘We’re not ready to talk about race and justice; we’re not ready to talk about police brutality and mass incarceration; we’re not ready to talk about the fact that black bodies are grotesque to us – we don’t want to admit that.’ ”

Her provocative words at the 2015 Urbana conference, a student gathering co-hosted by the conservative campus ministry InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, not only laid bare some of the deep racial divisions in the United States after the killings of Mr. Brown and other black men over the past year and half, but they also went directly to the fact that, as a whole, evangelical Christians remain among the least likely to have sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement.

But at the Urbana conference this week, many evangelical student leaders and others have expressed full solidarity with the emergence of the protest movement. Worship leaders onstage, a diverse group leading worship with the kind of praise music that many evangelical churches are known for, wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts and sang songs in Spanish, French, Korean, and Swahili, as well as English.

Those “evangelical student leaders” are pure SJW entryists. Any church that accepts them into leadership will be led astray. Whatever it is they worship, it isn’t the God of the Holy Bible. And whomever it is they follow, it assuredly isn’t Jesus Christ.

Here is a reliable heuristic for the Christian: if a fallen world lauds you for what you are doing, the chances are very good that what you are doing isn’t in line with the Will of God as expressed in the Scriptures.

The New America, in progress

I’m certain this disaster has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the changing demographics of Flint, which has seen the Non-Hispanic Whites population fall from 70.1 percent of the population to 35.7 percent since 1970:

“The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster,” said the city’s mayor Monday evening, as she declared a state of emergency over evidently staggering levels of lead in the city’s tap water. Mayor Karen M. Weaver has requested federal assistance to deal with the fallout from over a year’s worth of tainted water delivered to Flint residents and, allegedly, falsely declared safe by government officials.

In September, news broke that lead contamination was on the rise in Flint. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha of the Hurley Medical Center concluded that since the water supply switched from the Detroit system to Flint River in April 2014, the number of infants and children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had doubled, from 2.1% to 4%. While the rise seems small, it is statistically significant. Even so, Attisha warned: “My research shows that lead levels have gone up. I cannot say it’s from the water. But that’s, you know, the thing that has happened.“

The World Health Organization says “lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.”

The high levels of lead have been attributed to old pipes and plumbing, which researchers say rubs off more into Flint River water than it does other sources. Because the water itself is more corrosive than other supplies, it erodes the pipes it flows through, picking up lead along the way.

Flint River is one of the filthiest rivers in Michigan. Over the years, it has housed raw sewage, tires, old refrigerators — which residents have attempted to sift out — and lead. In spite of this, officials declared it safe to drink in April 2014, when they switched the supply to the tainted river.

The change was widely attributed to the city’s switch from Detroit’s water system to the Flint River under the leadership of the city’s previous mayor, Dayne Walling. The shift in supply was a result of failed procedures and negotiations to continue purchasing the water.

Shortly after the April switch, residents complained the water emitted a foul odor and was cloudy in appearance, but local and state officials insisted the water was safe. In spite of these assurances, in January 2015, MLive reported the State Department of Environmental Quality had “issued a notice of violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act for maximum contaminant levels for trihalomethanes — or TTHM — a group of four chemicals that are formed as a byproduct of disinfecting water.”

These chemical byproducts are linked to cancer and other diseases, and presented a separate issue from the lead.

The water was so dirty that in October 2014, General Motors announced it would no longer use treated Flint River water at its engine plant out of fears it would cause corrosion.

It’s probably just Bad Luck. Or Evil Liberal policies, who are randomly adopted by various polities for No Reason At All. Perhaps they should consider importing some Magic Dirt to combat the bad juju in the water. Or sacrifice some albinos to appease the angry river gods.

Now consider the fact that the national US demographics have fallen to around 70 percent Non-Hispanic White already, then contemplate the 40-year projections.

So where is the third shooter?

All the early reports talked about three shooters, the police scanner discussed one suspect being detained, and the two killed in the SUV have been identified as Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik. But there has been nothing more about the reports of the 28 year-old Qatari named “Tayyeep Bin Ardogan” who was also identified as a shooter, although the name seems more than a little dubious as it is very similar to the name of the Turkish prime minister and Ardogan/Erdogan sounds Turkish, not Qatari. And yet, it appears the age is right.

A man who identified himself as Farook’s father told The New York Daily News his son worked as a health technician inspecting restaurants and hotels.

“I haven’t heard anything. He worked in a county office,” he said. “He’s married and has a kid. We’re estranged because my wife got the divorce, and they are together. She doesn’t want to see me.”

He added that he had not seen his son for some time.

“He was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.”

Farook’s name first emerged after the two masked shooters opened fire at the party. Over a radio transmission, an officer could be heard telling a dispatcher that Farook was “acting nervous” and had walked out of the party 20 minutes before the shooting began. Other reports suggested he had been asked to leave.

The attackers were armed with handguns and rifles, and were dressed in camouflage clothing.

Meredith Davis, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, told NBC News: “With my experience with other mass shootings, there are indicators that this was well planned out.

“It was to be violent in nature. They were in tactical gear, I don’t know if they had ballistic protection… And had several several magazines full of ammunition fashioned to their bodies. So they were ready for a gunfight should that occur.”

There is currently scant detail about Tashfeen Malik, the second shooter, but San Bernardino police chief Jarrod Burguan said she was 27 years old.

Mr Burguan said: “We’re pretty comfortable that the two shooters that went into the building are the two shooters deceased on San Bernardino Avenue.”

“The first one is Syed, Rizwan, last name Farook. He is 28 years old. I am told that he is US-born. The person that was with him is a female. Her name is Tashfeen, last name Malik. She is 27 years old.”

Malik and Farook were husband and wife, according to the Los Angeles Times newspaper, while the police would only say they were “in a relationship”.

However, Farook’s colleagues at the Inland Regional Centre – where 14 people were shot dead and another 17 were wounded – told the LA Times that he had gone to Saudi Arabia and returned with a new wife, whom he had met online. An unnamed family member identified the wife as Malik.

One can’t help but notice there is a Saudi connection again. In any event, I’m sure we can all agree that Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change is to blame and we all have a responsibility to ensure the Senate passes the Paris accords.