Bad words.

As usual, those on the Left are portraying themselves as champions of banned books, but not giving the facts behind the books the Right want banned -- which are only and specifically graphic sex books from kids' libraries. Seems like a reasonable ask.

On the other hand, conservatives are not the ones who subject books to diversity and sensitivity readers. These new drugs on the market are paid by publishers to read books before they go to press and flag things that might be offensive or triggering to readers. But only certain readers, as we shall see. 

Obvious ones are, of course, words insulting to ethnicities, but there's definitely a hierarchy in place. Words that have been used to insult blacks are out entirely (unless maybe if used by a black author). Even if an evil character uses the word, it cannot be allowed in print. Words offensive to Latinos face automatic ejection as well, but may not bring the ban hammer down on the author. I'm told it's all about context.) Words that insult Asians of any type may be used if important to the story. Jews and other whites (all Jews are now whites even if they aren't) are fair game. 

Wops, Micks, Dagoes, Krauts, Squareheads, Hebes, Polacks, Rednecks, Crackers, and so on -- use them all you want. And as a white guy I have no problem with that. Here's a little white secret: We use those terms on one another, even within our own families.

Some ethnic words have to go, we are told. But there are many words that you might not know are ethnically insulting that are also banned. Cakewalk, for one, has a historical background that makes it (all together now!) problematic. Master bedrooms are no more, as you may have heard. And don't talk about slaving away on a project, even for comic exaggeration, even if you had a Castilian ancestor sold into slavery by the Barbary pirates. 

Of course, insulting words about sexual orientation are right out. So is misgendering -- and this can be a bear trap for the unwary, as there are now more genders than Baskin-Robbins flavors. This also means you can't use any collective noun that implies gender -- not just the long-despised mankind but also guys as in Hey, you guys! Even ladies and gentlemen, which used to cover everyone, is insulting because it leaves out those who do not conform to either or who choose multiple genders. 

Let us not forget the words that are banned because they might offend the differently abled. Bruce Springsteen can no longer be blinded by the light; he may be dazzled or find it difficult to see but not blinded. Never mind that the light actually caused a brief loss of vision; the verb is no longer allowed. Similarly, deafening is out. Dummy is no good anymore, not because it offends the mannequin-American community, but because it was used to make fun of deaf-mutes. 

Crippled? Are you kidding? Banned for life.

What about the crazy people, you ask? Well, you are now banned for using the word crazy. Mental illness isn't funny, buster! Wacko, looney, nuts, ga-ga, all those words are problematic because insane people need love too, right up until the moment they shoot up a school. (Then it's the gun's fault, anyway.) 

Don't expect to get away on technicalities. Words that sound like banned words are also banned, even if there's no connection. A guy lost his job for using the word niggardly, which comes from Middle English and Norse (hnøggr, meaning stingy). Merriam-Webster even warns against its use -- not that it can bring itself to use the word that it sounds like. As for spick-and-span, its origin is "short for spick-and-span-new, from obsolete English spick spike + English and + span-new" -- but you'd best drop it anyway. I'm surprised KIK Consumer Products still uses the brand name Spic and Span.

🔨🔨🔨🔨🔨

Most of you know I'm a pretty nice guy, and I genuinely try to be respectful to everyone. But I'm also respectful of the idea that speech must be free, and not restricted among adults for any trivial reason, least of all because someone might get annoyed. (Christians have been getting annoyed for 2,000 years and no one worries about our feelings.) Adults have the freedom to not listen to or read something we don't like. If its very existence bothers us, we need to grow up.

I have one simple message, and if you never remember anything else I've written, I would ask you to remember this: 

Do not take seriously the claims about banning books by people who are set on banning words.

Thank you and good day!

Oh, Brave New Year, that has such people in it.

Okay, today we play Fun with Doomcasting. 

One of the things conservatives dread is the concept of social credit -- that delightful Chinese Marxist system of ruining the lives of people who do not toe the government line in every way. Disagree with Xi, show interest in Falun Gong, request more pay from your job, and you may find yourself unable to get a decent place to live, a vehicle, a loan, or anything else that ought to be decided by a proper financial credit system.

 

We know there are people who think it would be a good idea here in America. But there are two things we ought to keep in mind: 

1) It is already here unofficially, in the media; 

2) Your social credit score does not start at a baseline and go up or down -- it starts at nothing. You have to earn credit. You actually have to out-earn your fellows.

I've seen it in correspondence among editors and writers when some topic of Sensitivity comes up. Everyone panics a little, and each tries to provide a wokier-than-thou solution. In one story, there was a question about a trans woman whose boyfriend dumped "her" for unknown reasons. Would that make him a transphobe? Because the idea that a man might rather date a woman than a man dressed as a woman would mean he's some kind of evil hater. (Try reversing that -- "So the lesbian doesn't want to date a man dressed as a woman; is she a transphobe?" -- and watch the panic set in.) 

Even worse is medical writing, where we supposedly need to be grown-ups, but we are not. This is because we are no longer men and women, but AMABs and AFABs. 

You remember a few years back when the medical press was having kittens because it turned out that women's heart-attack symptoms were different from men's, and coronary studies always looked at men? It started the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women campaign twenty years ago. Well, now you may Go Red for AFABs, but you'd better drop the "women." 

If we must discuss distasteful subjects like ovarian or prostate cancer -- distasteful because no surgery on earth can give you ovaries or a prostate, yet we have to describe the patient population somehow -- we must refer to Assigned Male at Birth or Assigned Female at Birth. Like the doctor just decided which sex the baby should be. "We're fighting godless commies in Vietnam; better make some more boys today."

But we know that's only a stopgap, because there are campaigners who want to prevent the assignment of sex at birth. A baby should just be registered as "a baby" and it will tell us what it is later. That demand does not come from some lunatic fringe group; it is from the American Medical Association. 

So much for the idea that medical needs are different between boys and girls, and not knowing the difference is dangerous. Better the child should die than be misgendered, or gendered at all. 

What will we do when nothing is assigned at birth? Call them PWOs and PWPs (People With Ovaries/People With Prostates)? 

If you've ever been in a group blamestorm you know how this happens. Everyone is nervous; everyone is scared of being labeled something bad; everyone has to try to top the others, and as fast as they can. Temperance, consideration, sobriety of thought -- these are not considered virtues. We saw that in the wicked Tweetfest following the monstrous October 7 attack on Israel -- after the initial rush to lunacy was over, with its concurrent ratchet effect, the wiser ones silently deleted their Hamas-supporting Tweets. Others doubled down, more frantic than before. This is not adult behavior. 

I don't know where this mania ends, but I suspect it will require a lot of trial lawyers to start suing the ever-loving crap out of the perpetrators of insanity. We're starting to see a little of that, but not enough. Come on, you greedy bastards! There are billions to be made from this. Wise up and get suing! 

P.S.: I guess my social credit is deep in the negatives now. It was bound to happen sometime. It may have happened a long time ago. 

Naughty, naughty words.

The silliest words are completely taboo now. Including taboo, because it might offend some Tongan people out there. 

Censorship has been in the news again, although the proponents aren't calling it that. Roald Dahl's books are getting the workover to remove offensive words like "fat" and "ugly" that might offend people who are... well, fat and/or ugly, I guess. I never liked Dahl's children's books -- he was not a lover of humanity, and his writing for adults has a high enough body count to back me up on that. But you don't even have to read those stories. Spoiler alert: In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory we have children being blown up and squashed, permanently discolored, thrown in the garbage, shrunk and stretched out, and all kinds of things I found traumatizing when we covered the book in second grade. That stuff's fine, but we can't use words like "fat"? 

If they think that taking insulting words out of the discourse will make children be nicer to one another, they have never met any children.

Even dumber of course (ooooh, dumb is a taboo word too!) is that Fleming's James Bond books are getting the treatment. For the love of all that is good, if you're an adult and you can't handle a seventy-year-old spy novel, you ought to go back to singing "Baby Shark" and let the adults talk. 

The American Library Association is useless, as always. They love to prance around with their so-called Banned Books Week in the fall. Altered Books Week is never going to happen, though. They're all for it. You might hope that the dead authors' estates would fight against this nonsense, but they couldn't care less, as long as the money keeps rolling in. 

Lately I find more of the companies I work for employ sensitivity readers, people whose entire job is to go off like a smoke detector if a bad word comes up. Not bad as in obscene, blasphemous, or grotesque, but bad as in possibly offensive to one of the many grievance farmers out there working the fields. Words like dumb (insults the deaf), insane (insults the crazy), handicapped (insults the handicapped), fat (covered above), hooker (insults sex workers), mumbo-jumbo (I think this is cultural appropriation), addict (insults bums), grandfather (as verb, from its relation to Jim Crow laws), master bedroom (because only plantations had master bedrooms?), and anything that might suggest masculinity, like fireman or congressman. Also any possible use of black in a negative sense (as in a black mood), or any use of white in a positive one (which will be a bummer to the saints in Revelation 7, who "came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb"). And you'd better not have a character wear moccasins. Although they have been a style in the shoe industry for more than a hundred years, now they're culturally insensitive.

Sensitivity readers have to keep coming up with new words to ban, if they're to justify their phony-baloney jobs.

We need more insensitivity readers. Speech is supposed to be free in this country, and we need to toughen the hell up. I was rereading a 98-year-old book by an Englishman and was surprised to find an incidental use of the old N-word. I'm an adult; I can that the author was using the term in a reflection of the attitudes of colonialists, whom he firmly opposed. But I dare not tell you what book or author it was, lest the Kancel Kops come for him next.   

One word that the sensitivity Nazis ignore, of course, is Jesus in a perjorative sense. It's peachy with them that some readers will be offended over that. It's ducky. No problemo. I've heard it said that Christians are the only religious people who consistently use the name of their Lord in vain, and that's probably true. But not all of us. However, that's not something a sensitivity reader worries about. 

After all, it's not like saying a simple scientific sentence like "Flowers contain male sex organs called stamens and female sex organs called pistils." That could get you fired. Who are you to assume that flower's gender?

De-meme-ing! Part 2.

As I noted yesterday, my friend Philbin (if that is his real name) was unable to post this hilarious meme of mine on Facebook. It was cited by the FB cops for violating community standards. Yesterday I tried to explain the joke, just in case any Facebook representatives were standing by.

Philbin protested the ban in the same way, arguing to the faceless Facebook police that this is a victimless joke and inoffensive to anyone who understands it. That cuts no ice with the idiots who man the barricades at Facebook. But to his credit, Philbin then decided to push the issue, risking time in Facebook prison, to find out what problem the idiots at Facebook have with this meme. 

Was it the template?

The template is a picture of conservative comedian and podcaster Steven Crowder, who appeared on a college campus with a sign saying "Male Privilege Is a Myth / Change My Mind". Crowder is a happy warrior, ready to take on anyone. After he posted this picture in 2018, it immediately became a meme, with all kinds of challenging statements, like "A Hot Dog Is a Sandwich/Change My Mind". People who never heard of Steven Crowder have used it. Others have made anti-Crowder statements with it. It's a meme; that's how they work. 

Is it offensive just on its face? My friend posted another, even more anodyne gag with the same meme to see what would happen. 

He did not get an angry warning about this one. However, he also did not get a response from his FB buddies, not even a mercy like. He checked his feed and discovered that the joke had mysteriously disappeared. Was it an accident... like a Russian window fall accident, hmm?

So he put this one together and posted it.

That did it.

You can disagree with the decision on one hand, and crap in the other, and see which fills up first.

Okay, so what is the problem? Do they hate Crowder? Many people on the left do. He makes fun of them, often in childish ways. Only leftists are allowed to make fun of people, especially in childish ways. 

Once more into the breach! Philbin made and posted this one: 

You can't get more Crowder than that, and yet it was allowed to stay.

We put our heads together (clunk ouch!) and decided that the "Change My Mind" meme has somehow gotten flagged as is at FB, regardless of how it's worded, either because people were using it for genuinely offensive content or (more likely) because it was being used to actually challenge people's beliefs, and that gave people the bad feels. It's hard to tell, but from all the information coming out about the willingness of Silicon Valley to censor "enemies" and how what most Americans believed in 1983 would put them on the "enemies" list now, I think it's safe to say Facebook is ceding to the usual crybullies on the left over this. And many of their employees are the crybullies on the left. But that's all just conjecture.  

What can we say for certain? That no one at Facebook has a genuine sense of humor or irony, and probably doesn't know anything at all that happened before 2010. That they don't believe in free political speech in any significant way, and think plugging up one meme is going to change anybody's mind. Irony alert! 

It's all just further confirmation that everything is the world is being run by the worst possible people. We have military brass who can't win a war, comedians who aren't funny, schools that can't teach, politicians who can't lead, singers who can't sing, corporations that can't make money, representatives who hate their voters, an entertainment industry that doesn't entertain, surgeons who mutilate patients, an energy sector that won't provide reliable energy, information technology that spews horse crap, religions without God, and social media that's antisocial. Everything must be sacrificed if it leads to that bright socialist future. 

That's a lot of gloom for one little meme-ban, I know, but it's hard to shake the feeling that everything is geared toward trying to make our lives harder, more expensive, more miserable, and definitely less funny.

De-meme-ing! Part 1.

A friend of mine (let's call him Philbin) wanted to post my super-hilarious and super-dated meme about Tommy Chong and Foster Brooks on Facebook. Much to our mutual surprise, Facebook's idiot censors rejected the post, saying it was offensive (violating "community standards," which would imply that the "community" is made up of drooling morons).

So, as a public service, I thought I had better explain this joke. I figured that they didn't get it. I have often said that dissecting a joke is like dissecting a frog, in that you can do it, but don't expect the frog to jump afterward. Nevertheless, since our Social Betters are A) stupid and B) ten years old and "literally know nothing," I thought I had better explain it from top to bottom. 

Don't worry, Facebook censors -- I am typing this slowly because I know you don't read very fast. Okay, here goes:

1) Tommy Chong:

Tommy Chong is a comedian and comic actor, best known as part of the duo Cheech & Chong with Cheech Marin. Chong was born in 1938, so he's not exactly some brash newcomer of whom Facebook could not be aware. Cheech & Chong were famous for drug-centered humor, as witnessed in their first comedy album, 1971's Big Bambu. They later made the most marijuana-soaked film ever, 1978's Up in Smoke. The movie was well-regarded among connoisseurs (my elder cousins) for gags like the pot-smuggling van made entirely of compressed marijuana and the drug-sniffing dog that gets killed just smelling it. Chong wasn't just kidding around -- he became a marijuana activist and longtime fighter for legalization. So Chong's connection to marijuana has been pretty well established for more than fifty years. 

2) CBD:

As has been recounted on this blog, CBD, or cannabidiol, is the magic compound in marijuana that doesn't get you high (that's Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC) but supposedly cures everything. Maybe some people really have found relief from these CBD products, but the few people I know who tried them thought they were disappointing. I begin to suspect it was just a means of promoting the agriculture of marijuana, as George Washington Carver developed more than 300 uses for peanuts to help peanut agriculture. The difference is, most of Carver's inventions were useful. Be that as it may, Tommy Chong went all in on this, promoting his line of hemp-based products, notably those containing the magic ingredient CBD. So it's no offense to anyone that this former star stoner is promoting CBD; it's exactly the truth.

3) Foster Brooks:

Foster Brooks (1912-2001) was a comedian who had one schtick, but he was exceptionally good at it: He was a drunk. He had the knack for coming across as a cheerful, befuddled drunken man trying very hard not to appear drunk, and would stumble over words and make unusual statements in a way much funnier than any real drunk. In reality, Brooks was not a drinker, or had not been for many years when he became famous doing this bit. 

4) O'Doul's:

O'Doul's is one of the first successful U.S. brands of nonalcoholic beer, or rather beer with trace amounts of alcohol in it. This Anheuser Busch product has an alcohol content of .4%; a regular Budweiser has an alcohol content of 5%. So to get the buzz from one lousy can of Bud, you'd have to drink 12.5 cans of O'Doul's. It's still not recommended for people in recovery from alcohol addiction, but you can imagine how insanely difficult it would be to get loaded on O'Doul's. 

5) The Punch Line:

The comparison, then, is a simple one, that of a famous stoner who sells marijuana products that don't contain THC to a famous drunk selling beer that doesn't contain alcohol. Both guys were comedians who made a lot of comic hay playing people whose addictions were way out of control but were still funny to watch. So the meme is challenging others to disprove that this is a valid comparison. (This could be done by pointing out that Chong is still using pot while Brooks was not using alcohol, for one thing.)

6) Facebook:

So what's the problem? Does Facebook just not have a sense of humor? Well, no, it doesn't, because it's run by SJWs, but is that the whole problem?

Well, Philbin continued to investigate, and what he turned up is shocking! Tune in tomorrow for the revelation -- it's amazing! And if you disagree, change my mind! 

The patron saint of the canceled.

Yesterday was the feast of St. John of God, a Portuguese born in 1495, of whom many interesting stories are told. By some accounts he went to war in the army of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, fighting the French and later the Turks. He fell away from his childhood piety and lost his moral bearing. Eventually he decided to mend his ways, and went all in for the Lord, devoting himself to helping the poor and the sick. 

There was one story about him that made me think he would be a wonderful patron saint for those facing public cancellation in these strange and wicked times. We are supposed to be a society of the free, but as you well know, making a public statement of a sort that everyone believed a decade ago (such as, riots are bad, men can't be women just by wearing a dress, all lives are important) can get you fired from your job, blackballed from your industry, doxxed, attacked at your home, blacklisted from "social" media, and if some asshat is feeling particularly asinine, maybe SWATted while you sleep. 

My use of the term "blackballed" just now might be enough to do me in, but fortunately I'm a nobody and I don't use Twitter. If I were to get the attention of the social justice orcs, I would know better than to apologize -- apologies are never accepted by the mob, and just motivate them to keep burning and pitchforking.

Modern mob justice has no interest if its victim even really did anything wrong. It just likes to collect heads. If I offend in this blog, it's probably a joke, and if they don't like it, the humorless dweebs should try telling a joke themselves; if I say something true that they don't like, I'm not apologizing for the truth. Of course, we know for the mob, truth is never a defense. 

According to the Catholic News Agency, John of God did not make a secret of his often disreputable past: 

The Bishop of Granada approved his work, and gave him the name “John of God.” A group of volunteers came to accompany him in his work, many of whom had first come to him while in dire need themselves.

      Others, who resented his work, assaulted John's reputation by focusing on his past sins – but John, unfazed in his humility, would acknowledge the truth of what was said, as a testament to God's grace in his life. He once offered to pay a woman to tell the entire city what she had been saying about him in private.

And that's why I suggest John of God would be a good patron for those who have come under attack by Internet mobs. He was repentant of his past, and he did not apologize to those who tried to ruin his reputation. He had already repented to the One who mattered, so he knew the truth wouldn't hurt him. If others attacked him anyway, he was humble enough to take it and man enough to see it through.

St. John of God, pray for us! The whole world's gone batty and everything is upside down. Help us be humble and faithful enough to endure, help us be brave, and help us not to apologize for telling the truth. 

Gab grab bag.

Parler is fighting for its life now after being cut off at the knees by Google, Apple, and Amazon, fearing that the president of the United States (for two more days) will flee to that platform. So I've established a profile with my handsome Vitamin Fred icon on Gab's site now. 

As I wrote when I joined Parler back in October, "I always entertain hopes that my blog might entertain others, and maybe even entice them to try one of my novels," and I thought that the site might help me do that without enduring the firehose of horror that is Twitter.  

Now it's become more than that, though. For years I desired to keep this blog free from political content beyond some light satire. I never intended to write fiction for political purposes, hoping to entertain any reader. I would prefer to write funny stuff about food and dogs and middle-class life and post goofy cartoons every day. But I was raised by libertarians and conservatives and liberals to love free speech, even when I don't like the content, and the cancel culture that's gripping the West is an abomination to everything for which our nation stands. Books are being forced out of publisher's lists or literally out of stores; persons are not only attacked but their families and livelihoods threatened. The only law these victims have broken is the law in some dillweed's imagination that says YOU CAN'T SAY THAT, although everything in our culture and history is meant to say we can. Meanwhile, our totalitarian enemies around the world smile.

The weird thing is, the Left used to garb all kinds of things as political speech -- comedy, obscene music, getting naked in public -- as political speech to prevent its being banned. Now the very speech they most seek to ban is political speech, and of course everything is political when you look at it through blood-colored glasses. The kind of speech that conservatives are apt to censor is very narrowly defined -- obscenity, threats, slander and libel (especially of private citizens) -- but if you remove all that I think half of the world's Tweets would disappear.

This all makes it sound like I'm using Gab for firebrand purposes, but no -- I just want to help support a free-speech centered company that believes in the user's privacy and doesn't support the Leftist mobs. A lot of people feel that way, and the Gab servers are being somewhat overwhelmed as I write this. I'm sure it will all settle down soon, and when Gab becomes popular enough to pose a threat to Facebook, the tech oligarchs will come after it as well.

Meanwhile, should you decide to join up, look for your friendly Fred Key on the site and let's have a gabfest. Hey, talk is not only cheap -- it's free.