From the "identity politics inevitably winds up eating its own" file:Houston Rockets sneakers and other merchandise were pulled from several Nike stores in major Chinese cities amid the furor surrounding a tweet from the team’s general manager in support of anti-government protests in Hong Kong.Managers at five Nike stores in Beijing and Shanghai told Reuters during visits on Thursday they had been told in recent days via a memo from management that all Rockets merchandise had to be removed. Reuters was unable to view the memo.Although Rockets general manager Daryl Morey has since apologized for his tweet last week, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver further angered authorities when he said the league backed Morey’s right to exercise his freedom of expression.Despite the controversy, the NBA was pressing ahead with an exhibition game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Brooklyn Nets in Shanghai on Thursday night. Promotional events earlier in the week had been canceled.
A group of minority rights activists are challenging the anti-climate change movement’s unquestioning embrace of sixteen year old Greta Thunberg and calling support for Thunberg over “woker” eco-spokespeople “racism,” and evidence of “white supremacy.”A New Zealand news outlet reports that activists who push for greater rights for indigenous peoples — some of the very same activists who are at the forefront of the global anti-climate change movement — are concerned that putting a young, white teenager at the helm of a movement that largely affects the third world sends the wrong message, especially since indigineous people have been pressing the same message for decades.
The activists took to social media to express their distaste in light of Thunberg’s recent appearance in front of the United Nations.
“Y’all need to ask yourselves why you find it so much easier to hear from white people, regardless of age, when it comes to the violence they have caused across the world,” one tweeted. “Our GOBAL climate is in CRISIS. We need EVERYONE to care about this & take action. With that said, it is high time that the very people who have caused such problems STOP getting praised & recognized for finally doing the RIGHT THING.”
“It is a SYMPTOM of global white supremacy that certain people are HEARD & given a platform, certain people have access to the RESOURCES to be the HEROES that the world will pay attention to,” said another.In 2016, James Shupe became the first legally recognized non-binary person in post-America. By 2018, he was having misgivings, and went back to being a male. He now thinks all the gender fluidity business is a dangerous delusion. Nicole Russell at The Federalist has an interview with him.
I resonated with Dominic Green's essay at Spectator USA entitled "Who Killed The American Arts?" Longtime LITD readers know that my position, which is also Green's, is that post-American culture is rotten through and through. He goes so far as to say that we've descended into barbarism, which, as I think about it, I really cannot argue with.
There are two Florida businessmen, Lev Parnas and and Igor Fruman, who have a company called Global Energy Producers. They also raise lots of money for Republican political candidates. They also are buds with Rudy Giuliani. They also introduced Giuliani to three former and current Ukrainian prosecutors, with whom Giuliani discussed getting dirt on the Bidens.
A heart-wrenching series of tweets from FNC's Jennifer Griffin:
I just spoke to a distraught US Special Forces soldier who is among the 1000 or so US troops in Syria tonight who is serving alongside the SDF Kurdish forces. It was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever taken. "I am ashamed for the first time in my career."
Which makes the VSG's smart-ass remark about the Kurds and D-Day all the more vomit-inducing:
Great Steve Berman essay at The Resurgent entitled "Trump Can't Deliver The Goods He's Promised." It's a good summation of the VSG's foreign-policy failures, including China, North Korea, Russia and Turkey.He shrugged off the likely escape of ISIS fighters from Kurdish prisons, essentially saying it is Europe's problem, not his. "Well, they're going to be escaping to Europe, that's where they want to go," Trump said. He added that "we have no soldiers in the area."Trump downplayed the alliance with the Kurds, 11,000 of whom died fighting to help the US mission against ISIS. "They didn't help us in the second World War, they didn't help us with Normandy for example," Trump said. "They're there to help us with their land, and that's a different thing." Normandy is an area of France, not the US.
It’s all a show to Trump. None of this is “real” except his ratings and what he sees on late-night Fox News shows. He cares much more for what CNN and MSNBC are saying than what he should say on a phone call to a foreign leader.
Trump treats friendly nations like he treated contractors bidding for work on a new resort hotel. But hostiles are handled with kid gloves. If anything were impeachable conduct, it’s that, not asking Ukraine for dirt on Hunter Biden.
Don’t talk to me about other nations paying their “fair share.” Of course, we want that. But not at the cost of letting tyrants, communists, and criminal regimes enjoy carte blanche while America holds the door for them.Apropos the delusion discussed in the above-linked Federalist piece, Fauxcahontas, the liar who says Daren Wilson murdered Michael Brown, would have male felons suffering from that delusion serve their sentences in women's prisons.
"Pynchon is no starry-eyed old hippie (or not entirely) but his novels ache with a kind of thwarted nostalgia for alternative Americas that never came to pass: the hippie dream of the Sixties, the hopeful utopianism of the nascent American republic, the libertarian dreams of the Western frontier or the vistas of democratic self-expression proffered by the early Internet. It’s too late for these utopias by the time they show up in Pynchon’s fiction: someone is always moving in to make a fast buck on them. "There is no avoiding time," Pynchon writes in Inherent Vice: "the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever."https://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/inherent-vice/how-thomas-pynchon-novels-can-change-your-life/
ReplyDeleteSounds like good stuff.
ReplyDelete"What went wrong? The usual suspects are mass production and homogenization — capitalism, basically."https://spectator.us/killed-american-arts/?fbclid=IwAR1Hei6zL95XWRrFcH7DrLrw8UyXtRjrBJusNp1PDKWXFuK1wtpuyjSdjj0
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