Monday, June 17, 2019
Bet you gave up on me, didn’t you!
1. Unforeseen consequences. Medical journal site BMJ notes,
“Bystanders may be concerned about performing CPR on a woman and removing clothing for defibrillator use, for fear of being accused of sexual assault. Further education around CPR in women and the use of female manikins may be the first step”.
Conservative feminist blogger Amy Alkon ,says, archly,
If I’m unconscious, I give my permission for a total stranger to engage in that sexy-wexy act of vigorous CPR….Are there really pervos out there marching the streets waiting for somebody to pass out from cardiac arrest so they can cop a feel?
That’s not the right question, though.
The right question is,
“Are there really vicious, toxic-masculinity, rape-culture obsessed, anti-male #MeTo-ers who would gladly accuse a male Good Samaritan of sexually molesting an unconscious woman to advance an agenda?”
Absolutely.
2. Nice. How woke policies let the assholes in society rule our lives.
The rest of the story (as Paul Harvey would say),
Near my neighborhood, Washington, D.C. sends out environmental inspectors to guarantee that restaurants are not handing out the Earth-destroying straws. Santa Barbara passed an ordinance that decrees that a second infraction of the law could result in a maximum fine of $1,000 and up to six months in jail.
So many environmental regulations are made by people who care less about human beings than they do about abstract beliefs and virtue-signaling. Spare me the “ablest” crap. If someone requests a straw, you give it to them, and for a government that threatens waitresses and establishments for being kind and accommodating threaten the planet as much as floating balls of plastic. At least.
[Pointer: Twitchy, Ed Driscoll]
3. Article? What article? Here is the David Garrow essay, “The Troubling Legacy of Martin Luther King.” which I wrote about here.
It concluded,
Come on, Pete Buttigieg! Let me see you thread this needle. You said that the Democratic Party shouldn’t honor Thomas Jefferson. Explain why it should honor King. Go ahead, you’re supposed to be brilliant. Can you avoid choosing between #MeToo and Black Lives Matter?
So now its time to decide, you historical air-brushers, you public censors, you Soviet-style designators of non-persons, you grandstanding, virtue-signaling, arrogant, power-seeking presentists and statue-topplers. Your move. What do you want to do now?
What they want to do now is pretend the article doesn’t exist. I haven’t seen more than fleeting mentions of it in the news media since the Washington Post assembled a group of historians who were clearly more interested in attacking Garrow than in considering the implications of his research.
4. “When They See Us” ethics. I’m watching the Netflix real crime drama “When They See Us,” the dramatization of the Central Park Five fiasco. It tells the story of how five young African-American teens were wrongly convicted of a horrific rape and beating of a young woman in Central Park. The series is well cast, scripted and acted; it is also shot through with the politics of the writer/director, African-American civil rights activist Ava DuVernay, and pretty obviously, too. The five defendants are portrayed so positively that it strains credulity. The white D.A., Linda Fairstein, is portrayed (by newly minted college admissions scandal felon Felicity Huffman) as a racist, bullying, over-zealous prosecutor. The series even indulges in some gratuitous Trump-bashing.
It’s good television; I am pretty certain that it isn’t accurate or fair. The series has an agenda, and real stories tend to be far grayer and more nuanced. Fairstein insists that it is full of fabrications; of course, she has her own agenda.
What is undeniably wrong, though, is that people are treating this work of historical fiction as literal fact. Fairstein, who has been thriving as a crime novelist, speaker and commentator, now has been dropped from several corporate boards she sat on. Speaking engagements have been cancelled in response to the social media mobs; her publisher dropped Fairstein’s latest book. This is all based on her portrayal by an actress, based on the script and direction of of an activist who views the American justice system and prosecutors as intrinsically cruel and racist.
I have long felt that movies and dramatic presentations on TV and stage that portray portraying contemporary events involving living persons too frequently do terrible damage, confusing the public, spreading false narratives, and warping reputations and legacies. I’m only on episode two of “When They See Us,” but it seem to be a perfect illustration of the problem