This Week In Doom — WMBriggs Podcast 18 May 2016

Joseph Umstatt

A look back at the past week in the worst that was in aural form, featuring the music of Joseph Umstatt, Antonio Vivaldi, Nicola Fiorenza, and Luigi Boccherini. And one Boogie Check. Bonus material only found on the blog!

You can be fined for not calling people ‘ze’ or ‘hir,’ if that’s the pronoun they demand that you use

The NYCHRL [New York City Human Rights Law] requires employers[, landlords, and all businesses and professionals] to use an [employee’s, tenant’s, customer’s, or client’s] preferred name, pronoun and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification…

Examples of Violations

a. Intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun or title. For example, repeatedly calling a transgender woman “him” or “Mr.” after she has made clear which pronouns and title she uses…

Napoleon

Remember what the argument used to be? That what people did in the privacy of their homes was nobody’s business. Now you are forced to say what people are doing in the dark is good. This is the true absence of freedom. Freedom rightly defined is the lack of restriction to do what is right. That has been removed by the state of New York—and by the Obama administration (recall last week’s toilet law-that-shall-not-be-called-a-law).

This is tyranny. It is not coming: it is here, now. It shall only grow worse. Proof?

Transgender Teacher Gets $60k After Co-Workers Won’t Call Her ‘They’. This is a woman who in her insanity thinks she’s not male nor female. “She says employees persisted in calling her hurtful terms like ‘Miss Soell,’ ‘lady,’ and ‘she.'”

…district officials agreed to pay Soell $60,000 in compensation for her emotional distress, and they also agreed to adopt a whole battery of new policies to make the district more transgender-friendly. Among other things, the new policy will require all teachers to refer to their co-workers by their preferred names and pronouns…Teachers who refuse to comply with the pronoun command may be fired, the school district warns.

Tranny Tyranny.

Boccherini

Paint that painting or go to jail. Used to be cakes. Now possibly art.

Concerned they may face incarceration over their conscientious religious objection to same-sex marriage, the owners of a Phoenix art studio that specializes in creating original art for weddings and other events has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit challenging Phoenix’s non-discrimination ordinance. The ordinance prohibits businesses and its proprietors from refusing services for same-sex weddings, and even forbids them from publicly stating their objections.

The discrimination ordinance states in part that public accommodations are prohibited from any distinction being “made with respect to any person based on…sexual orientation, gender identity or expression…in connection with the price or quality of any item, goods or services offered by or at any place of public accommodation.”

It goes on to prohibit businesses from publicly stating their objections:

It is unlawful for any owner, operator, lessee, manager, agent or employee of any place of public accommodation to directly or indirectly display, circulate, publicize or mail any advertisement, notice or communication which states or implies that any facility or service shall be refused or restricted because of … sexual orientation, gender identity or expression … or that any person, because of … sexual orientation, gender identity or expression … would be unwelcome, objectionable, unacceptable, undesirable or not solicited.

Once, the idea freedom of association meant a person could associate or not with whomever they liked. Not so now. Once, the idea that public speech on political matters could not be prohibited. Not so now.

This is—again—tyranny. It is here. Now.

Canada May Ban Anti-Transgender Speech With 2 Years in Prison

Vivaldi

Boogie check.

Boccherini

Sex roulette parties where one person is secretly HIV+ and nobody is allowed to use condoms are on the rise, warn doctors. More news linked here and here.

Spanish Clip

Spiritual exhaustion leads to spiritual death leads to orgies where one secretly hopes to become infected with a deadly disease. A variant of “bug hunting.” Suicide by sex. A terrific metaphor for the West!

A spiritually dead-but-still-living person cannot abide being told he is morally wrong about his suicide. He wants to take you along with him, or at least have you keep your mouth shut. Hence laws mandating your silence. More about suicide in a moment.

Now the CDC released a new report on the HIV epidemic in the states, concentrating on the south. Huge increase in HIV among blacks. This concerns, of course, mostly men who have sex with men, or MSM. The epidemic is, they say, “driven in part by unique socioeconomic factors. Income inequality, poverty”.

Also “Cultural factors may also play a key role. Issues such as homophobia and transphobia, racism, and general discomfort with public discussion of sexuality may be more widespread in the South”.

So, somehow, waves of poverty and racism vibrate the tissues of MSM and cause them to develop HIV. This is odd because most scientists have said AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus.

Anyway, there is not word one in that report about the best way not to contract HIV. You homophobe.

Vivaldi

When Euthanasia Combines With Organ Donation

Several Dutch and Belgian doctors have proposed legal reforms to increase the popularity of combining euthanasia and organ donation in the Netherlands and Belgium…

…there is “a persisting discrepancy between the number of organ donors and the number of patients on the waiting lists for transplantation” — which euthanasia patients could help to balance. The authors stress that euthanasia is not a cure-all for the organ shortage.

Why? Well, because “Most euthanasia patients suffer from cancer, which is a contraindication for organ transplantation.” Any mechanic knows you don’t install defective parts!

Furthermore, the authors say, public perception of this formerly abhorrent practice is increasingly positive: “transplant coordinators [what a term!] in Belgium and the Netherlands notice a contemporary trend towards an increasing willingness and motivation to undergo euthanasia and to subsequently donate organs as well, supported by the increasing number of publications in popular media on this topic.”

Right before spiritual death comes utilitarianism, sometimes called pragmatism or libertarianism. Life has no purpose except to be healthy and to discover pleasure. Those no longer useful to society had best kill themselves and donate their spare parts to the young.

Bocchernini

Demand Surges for Diversity Consultants

Not for the last time we learn there is nothing deadlier to sanity than the desire for Equality.

To promote diversity, many colleges turn to an outsider — a consultant who offers to help them remedy inequities or reduce discrimination…

Howard J. Ross, a founding partner of the firm, led three days of workshops focused on making administrators and faculty members more aware of any unconscious biases they might have…

Although colleges have been using diversity consultants for decades, demand for such services has surged in the past year, as a wave of student protests over racial or gender discrimination has generated awareness of how unwelcoming many colleges remain for much of society.

Mauricio Velásquez, president of the Diversity Training Group…predicted that demand for such services will grow in response to the animosities being laid bare in the current presidential campaign. “Trump has been fantastic for my business”…

Mr. Ervin says evaluations of policies, practices, and programs account for the largest share of consultants’ work at colleges — about 40 percent. The rest consists of education and training, research to help identify and eliminate bias in personnel or admission decisions, and campus-climate assessments, in which consultants examine the experiences of women or minority groups. Costs range from a few thousand dollars for a one-day workshop to $50,000 or more for a climate assessment in which a team of researchers spends weeks or months studying the institution.

TIME PERMITTING…

Mexican president proposes legalizing gay marriage. Adios, Me— No, wait. Not A Dios at all. Asatán, maybe.

Speaking at an event on the International Day Against Homophobia, Pena Nieto said he signed initiatives that would seek to amend the constitution and the national civil code.

Pena Nieto said he wants to change Article 4 of the constitution to clearly reflect the Supreme Court opinion “to recognize as a human right that people can enter into marriage without any kind of discrimination.”

TIME PERMITTING…

Buddhist monk hacked to death in Bangladesh

Bangladesh, an officially secular country with a Muslim majority, has seen a spike in gruesome murders in recent years, with seven in the past month alone. The victims have often been members of an ethnic or religious minority or atheists.

Golly.

TIME PERMITTING…

Hat tip to Nick Land for these next items. From Richard Fernandez comes the appalling realization of the elites, only now just awakening, that some of them won’t survive the fall which is to come.

Yet one can’t help feeling the needle has skipped out of the groove, the TV series has jumped the shark, the system is printing random garbage on the console screen. Jeffrey Sachs complains in the Boston Globe that the stars have left their age-old tracks. “Impunity,” he tells us, “is epidemic in America. The rich and powerful get away with their heists in broad daylight. … Our major institutions, the ones that should know better, are often gross enablers of impunity.”…

Yet the real alarm in Jeffrey Sach’s article is not that the elite cheat; but they are not above cheating each other. He complains that Harvard has proved willing to take donations ripped off of unwitting investors. Drug companies like Theranos are suspected of marketing faked treatments to the public. Hillary Clinton may have possibly provided “off-the-record favors for foreign governments”…The elites are discovering that they are not only at the table, but also on the menu.

People who actually matter are starting to become victims. That’s the shock.

And don’t miss him on the new Hoovervilles.

If you want a cheap metaphor, this is exactly like those sci-fi novels where a hubristic scientists creates a devastating virus which he is sure he can keep contained to the enemy, but which, as was foreseeable to the dimmest intellect, it destroys all. Paging Mary Shelley.

Der Spiegel, without the same awareness of Fernandez, understands what follows all democracies.

A right-wing populist brush fire has become conceivable.

But is there such a thing as an incorrect election result?…[Elections] express the will of the people and grant the majority the power to govern. That is the intention.

“Is it okay to question democracy?” journalist Jakob Augstein recently asked in his SPIEGEL column. He went on to quote the French philosopher Alain Badiou, who only wanted to accept election results if they suited him. Is that the right path? Abolishing democracy before it delivers unwanted numbers? Unwanted, in this instance, from the leftist perspective, but the right-wing populists are also feared by the Greens, the liberals and the conservatives.

One could, in other words, consider killing off democracy out of fear for the death of democracy. Well-meaning elites would assume power and tell the people what is good for them. That might even be what some people are dreaming of.

We were close in these once United States with Obama, but not as close as some feared. We’re closer with whoever we get next (almost surely Trump, as I predicted in January).

But until then…

Nicola Fiorenza