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when your cake is so good, everyone keeps suing you to get some:
Lawyers for Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in suburban Denver, are suing to try to stop the state from taking action against him over the new discrimination allegation. They say the state is treating Phillips with hostility because of his Christian faith and pressing a complaint that they call an “obvious setup.”
“At this point, he’s just a guy who is trying to get back to life. The problem is the state of Colorado won’t let him.”
The Colorado Civil Rights Commission said Phillips discriminated against Denver attorney Autumn Scardina because she’s transgender.
Making U.S. Fire Departments More Diverse and Inclusive
To succeed as a firefighter, stereotypically masculine traits like brawn and courage are simply not enough.
...
Firefighters also need the intellectual, social, and emotional skills required to deliver medical emergency aid, support each other through traumatic experiences, and engage intimately with the communities they serve. In short, successful firefighters embody a complex mix of skills and traits. And yet, in my research on reducing gender bias and my work conducting training on general diversity and inclusion with fire departments…
…I find that, when evaluating fit and competence, firefighters tend to default to a reductive set of traits (physical strength evaluated through strict fitness tests, for example) that serve to maintain white men’s dominance in the fire service.
I would prefer my crew members to be emotionally sensitive to my needs if there ever comes a time when I'm trapped in a burning structure, rather than have the physical capability of busting in and dragging me out.
I would prefer my crew members to be emotionally sensitive to my needs if there ever comes a time when I'm trapped in a burning structure, rather than have the physical capability of busting in and dragging me out.
^^ THIS
It's always heartening to know someone is empathizing with you as you burn to death.
Literally everything is racist, including not being racist, because only white men have the privilege of not being racist, or something like that.
I'm waiting for the inevitable backlash which is going to follow this:
Someone, somewhere, is going to be offended by Popeye's making fun of their reliance upon an emotional support animal, and exploiting it for commercial purposes. Same as when Target was selling the sweater that said "Obsessive Christmas Disorder" and got dragged through the mud by snowflakes who were angered by their "making fun of a serious mental disorder" and "commercializing my illness."
PETA: Popeyes ‘Mocking Mental Illness’ By ‘Selling Boxes Of Dead Emotional Support Chickens For Holidays’
December 19, 2018 at 5:13 pm
According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Popeyes is responsible for the slaughter of millions of chicken each year. PETA took aim at the popular food chain after they released an “Emotional Support Chicken” Tuesday to “provide a good-hearted laugh most need to get through stressful holiday air travel.”
Travelers at Philadelphia International Airport can purchase their meal with the special “Emotional Support Chicken” carrier in Terminal C.
“We know holiday travel can be frustrating, and there’s no better way to ease stress than with a box of delicious Popeyes fried chicken and a good laugh,” said Hope Diaz, CMO of Popeyes. “We appreciate how comforting emotional support animals are and wanted to create our own version. The good news is that our emotional support chicken is permitted to fly without any restrictions – one less worry for busy travelers!”
But PETA isn’t laughing.
“#Popeyes is selling boxes of dead ’emotional support chickens’ for the holidays, proving they’re not above mocking mental illness AND animals who died gruesome deaths. This is what the box would look like if it told the truth about what goes into their food,” the organization tweeted on Wednesday.
I would prefer my crew members to be emotionally sensitive to my needs if there ever comes a time when I'm trapped in a burning structure, rather than have the physical capability of busting in and dragging me out.
Next on the chopping-block of "if you can't create, then destroy" public outrage: Disney films.
Disney trademarked ‘Hakuna Matata.’ A new petition demands the company drop it.
By Sonia Rao December 19 at 1:19 PM
“Hakuna Matata,” a song about having no worries, is now bringing Disney worries.
An online petition urging Disney to drop its trademark on the Swahili phrase attracted more than 57,000 signatures as of Wednesday morning amid anticipation for the company’s upcoming live-action remake of “The Lion King.” (Yes, the one starring Donald Glover, James Earl Jones and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.) The petition states that the phrase has long been used by Swahili speakers in many African countries — Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and more — so Disney “can’t be allowed to trademark something that it didn’t invent.”
Disney originally applied to trademark “hakuna matata” for use on merchandise in 1994, the same year it released the original “Lion King.” It was eventually granted the trademark in 2003, by which point American audiences probably associated the phrase with the Elton John and Tim Rice tune sung by an animated meerkat and warthog.
But Disney wasn’t even the first to include the phrase in a musical number. Kenyan band Them Mushrooms featured “hakuna matata” in their popular song “Jambo Bwana (Hello Mister)” back in 1982.
The company has received similar criticism before. “Coco,” the successful Pixar collaboration released late last year, was initially titled “Dia de los Muertos” in reference to the Mexican holiday at the center of the film. Disney applied in 2013 to trademark the phrase, probably also for merchandising purposes, and backed down after backlash from the Latino community, led by Mexican American cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, known for his comic “La Cucaracha."
Pixar then hired Alcaraz and others to serve as cultural advisers on “Coco.” He now tells The Washington Post: “It was wrong to attempt to trademark ‘Dia de los Muertos’ for commerce, and it is wrong to attempt to trademark ‘Hakuna Matata,’ too.”
Perhaps even stranger, Disney sought out exclusive rights to “SEAL Team 6” just days after news broke of Osama bin Laden’s death. The name refers to the counterterrorism unit that captured and killed the al-Qaeda leader, and Disney eventually withdrew its application “out of deference to the Navy.” (Disney’s plans once again included merchandise and, according to a Wall Street Journal source, a potential show on ABC.)
Disney has not yet returned The Post’s request for comment on the “hakuna matata” petition, but we’d also like to ask another question: What on earth is going on with the live-action “Aladdin”?
The latest in the saga of "It turns out that progressive corporations, not government, are Big Brother enforcing Newspeak to stamp out thoughtcrime":
Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt
Having human moderators has changed users’ behaviors more than simply deleting accounts would, said Jacqueline Hart, left, head of trust and safety at the crowdfunding site Patreon.
Having human moderators has changed users’ behaviors more than simply deleting accounts would,
said Jacqueline Hart, left, head of trust and safety at the crowdfunding site Patreon.
By Nellie Bowles Dec. 24, 2018
Sam Harris, the polemical atheist neuroscientist known for his popular podcast “Waking Up,” was making tens of thousands of dollars a month from fans who donated to him through Patreon, a crowdfunding site.
That stopped this month. On Dec. 6, Patreon kicked the anti-feminist polemic Carl Benjamin, who works under the name Sargon of Akkad, off its site for using racist language on YouTube. That same week, it removed the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos a day after he opened an account.
The moves prompted a revolt. Mr. Harris, citing worries about censorship, announced that he would leave Patreon. He was joined in protest by about half a dozen other prominent members of the site, including the conservative-leaning psychologist Jordan Peterson and the libertarian podcaster Dave Rubin, who also earn money from Patreon.
“These recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias,” Mr. Harris wrote to his followers.The furor is a microcosm of the conflicts that are playing out across the internet as technology platforms try to limit the spread of hateful speech.
This year, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all drawn increasingly stark lines around what constitutes hate speech and are figuring out how to enforce those rules. In August, for example, Apple, Google and Facebook banned the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for violating hate speech rules, setting off a cascading effect.
But as tech platforms try to get a handle on the issue, they are stoking the ire of their content creators, many of whom brand themselves as free speech warriors. Some accuse the companies of censorship. Others say the tech sites are biased and that hate speech is an ambiguous term. Now the digital dissent is becoming increasingly widespread, upending even smaller websites.
Patreon, founded in 2013 by Jack Conte, a musician and disc jockey, is valued at $450 million and employs about 170 people in San Francisco.
“The concept of hate speech is irreducibly subjective and vague,” said Nadine Strossen, author of “Hate: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship.”
Patreon, founded in 2013 by Jack Conte, a musician and disc jockey, is valued at $450 million and employs about 170 people in San Francisco. Fans donate to the content creators on the site whom they enjoy, and Patreon takes a 5 percent cut of the income.While the site is relatively small, with a little over 100,000 creators and two million people donating monthly to those creators, it has become the de facto paycheck for a cohort of prominent self-styled internet philosophers who eschew or have been ousted from traditional bastions like universities or magazines.
Among Patreon’s hodgepodge of creators is the left-leaning podcast group Chapo Trap House, which makes more than $110,000 a month from the site, according to Graphtreon, which tracks Patreon activity. Mr. Peterson, a best-selling author, earns around $66,000 a month from the site. Sex-related content creators are also getting monthly subscribers on Patreon, and a Pokemon Go community is the top earner, making up to $500,000 a month, according to Graphetreon.
Patreon takes a highly personal approach to policing speech. While Google and Facebook use algorithms as a first line of defense for questionable content, Patreon has human moderators. They give warnings and reach out to talk to offenders, presenting options for “education” and “reform.” Some activists hope this will become a model for a better and kinder internet.
“There are no automated takedowns,” Mr. Conte said. “As a creator myself dealing with these big tech platforms and getting an automated takedown notice, there’s no appeals process. You can’t talk to a human. And I never want to do that.”
Jaqueline Hart, Patreon’s head of trust and safety, said her team watches for and will investigate complaints about any content posted on Patreon and on other sites like YouTube and Facebook that violates what it defines as hate speech. That includes “serious attacks, or even negative generalizations, of people based on their race [and] sexual orientation,” she has said.
If someone has breached Patreon’s policy, the company contacts the offender with a specific plan, which usually involves asking for the content to be removed and for a public apology.
Ms. Hart said around 10 percent of Patreon employees were dedicated to her trust and safety team.
The conversations with creators can quickly become complicated, nuanced, and, well, human, she said. Among other challenges, Patreon has to decide what qualifies as a sincere and thorough apology. Still, having human moderators has changed its users’ behaviors more than simply deleting accounts would, Ms. Hart said.
“We hand-hold creators, and we work with them one on one, and nearly every creator reforms — and so it’s quite a successful process,” she said.
The work takes up a large amount of resources. Ms. Hart said around 10 percent of Patreon employees are dedicated to her team.
This month, the site’s moderators received a complaint about Mr. Benjamin, who had risen to fame railing against diversity and feminism during the GamerGate movement in 2014. Mr. Benjamin used the N-word and anti-gay language during an interview posted to YouTube on Feb. 7, Patreon found.
On Dec. 6, the company told Mr. Benjamin that it would freeze his account and that he could appeal. Mr. Benjamin objected and said the video in question should not fall under Patreon’s rules because it was on YouTube.
For Mr. Benjamin, the timing was surprising. “My brand has been politically incorrect for years,” he said in a video he later posted to his YouTube channel called “The Patreon Witch Trials.”
Mr. Benjamin, who did not respond to requests for comment, has 870,000 subscribers on YouTube and had more than 3,000 subscribers on Patreon, from which he had been making around $12,000 a month. Many of his videos show just a static cartoon or a series of images, with his voice speaking against movements for gender equality.More recently, Mr. Benjamin has moved from the fringe toward the heart of the new right. In October, he posted an hourlong interview with Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist. Patreon’s definition of hate speech includes “serious attacks, or even negative generalizations, of people based on their race [and] sexual orientation.”
Mr. Benjamin did not respond to attempts to engage him in the reform process, Ms. Hart said.
“His response to us when we told him about the reform process was to nitpick and say, ‘I was being anti-****,’” Ms. Hart said. “You cannot say those words on our platform. It doesn’t matter who you’re directing them at.”
His removal from Patreon immediately stirred up others on the site.
“I think the most likely outcome, if this continues, is that all contentious speech or behavior will put the speaker or actor at risk of serious financial and social sanctions, and strip them of all defense,” Mr. Peterson wrote in an email.
Mr. Rubin and Mr. Peterson said they plan to start their own version of Patreon, which will be less censorious. Mr. Peterson said his Patreon subscriptions had dropped to around 7,500, from about 10,000 over the summer, according to Graphtreon.
It’s unclear how effective Mr. Peterson’s and Mr. Rubin’s efforts will be. Alternatives to mainstream sites, such as the white supremacy-oriented Hatreon, have largely been failures.
And while many internet creators argue that Silicon Valley is trying to censor free speech, what the companies are doing is legal, said Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy and technology project. “The First Amendment right is on the side of the company,” she said.
Those quitting Patreon in solidarity with Mr. Benjamin may have other motives behind their sudden outrage, Mr. Conte said. As content creators using the site grow more famous and their income more significant, the 5 percent cut that Patreon takes of their donations may have begun to seem cumbersome, he said. Other large creators
“You can use a press debacle like this to drum up your community and rile people up and get them to support a cause,” Mr. Conte said. “We welcome competition.”
In his exit note from Patreon, Mr. Harris, who gathered his fan base as a pugnacious atheist and fierce critic of Islam, wrote that he wanted his business interests to be freed from the site. He singled out Ms. Hart’s team.
“I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon’s ‘Trust and Safety’ committee,” Mr. Harris wrote. He added a link to his own website, where fans can enter their credit card information and choose a monthly contribution.
Now this is interesting... An editorial written in support of some forms of censorship, and submitted to the publication / website "Being Libertarian." And, rather disturbingly, the points which the author makes actually seem kind of reasonable insofar as the ends which he proposes to achieve.
Interesting, they chose to publish it, seemingly as a demonstration of anti-censorship. A publication which opposes censorship making the decision not to censor an article which espouses censorship. The ***** are still spinning in my head on that one. Anyway:
The Case for Censorship By IR Watteau - December 22, 2018
Remember when Kanye West said “President Bush does not care about black people” while standing next to a distraught-looking Mike Meyers? That was a simpler time.
Remember the music that came out during that same era? So many artists denounced the Bush administration. Both Linkin Park and Nine Inch Nails created albums annoyingly political in nature. And yet, that was a simpler time.
Remember when you watched Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD before it became overtly political? The final straw for me was when an African-American character stated, “and I thought my mother was bad when she started watching Fox News.” No black man would say that about his mother. But alas, that was a simpler time.
Fast-forward to today, and we find ourselves living in a reality where Democrats have adopted Antifa’s tactics. I’ll never forget seeing Kavanaugh’s daughters rushed out of his hearing as paid protesters stood up and shouted their nonsensical statements during what should have been an otherwise benign affair. A good man was tarnished and attacked for no reason because these are trying times in which we live.
President Donald Trump is no Kavanaugh, though. He has skeletons in his closets. And thanks to the GOP losing the House, it can be safely assumed that the next two years will entail nonstop investigations. Once these baseless inquiries start issuing their subpoenas, men and women inside the Trump administration will undoubtedly disappear into a haze of legal bills. Combined with Robert Mueller’s trophy hunting, friends and colleagues of Trump will continue to fall by the wayside or morph into Democrat songbirds for the purpose of avoiding bankruptcy or jail time or both. General Flynn, for example, should have never been treated as poorly as he was.
The lack of civility shown in today’s politics borders on outright cruelty. You would think it would reach a saturation point, but it hasn’t. Progressive bannermen like Don Lemon will ensure the message of malevolence furthers onward toward newer and greater heights. And recently, I have noticed such an achievement.
Most outlets actively portray Trump and his supporters as unhinged white supremacist neo-**** xenophobic blah-blah-blah nationalists. For instance, one could infer Trump is the new Grand Wizard of the KKK with the way he is discussed in Ebony.
The views expressed in this article do not qualify under Being Libertarian’s editorial requirements, however, in the interests of open debate and in view of the author’s past contributions, it has been published.
– The Editor
The level of vitriol writers and talking-heads have against this man makes me wish Trump would enact a new version of the Alien and Sedition Act if only for the sake of calming down the rhetoric. After all, it wasn’t that long ago a group of GOP representatives had 70 rounds of ammunition shot at them on a baseball field.
Furthermore, you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to conclude the constant drumbeat of negativity against the Trump administration and his allies will trigger another act of violence. Free speech is good so long as it is sincere and true. But that is not the case with today’s national dialogue. Today, we are living in the world of 1984. Everything is doublespeak and party-line platitudes. And our media is no longer in the business of telling the truth. All of this feels like the second act of a very macabre play. Therefore, in my ever so humble opinion, the beast we call free speech… needs tempering.
I don’t know what the answer is to cure or curb the nonstop word vomit that is our national dialogue. I know Big Tech is isolating the wrong crowd by banning the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes, and our benevolent national broadcasters are canceling the wrong shows like Last Man Standing and Roseanne.
At this point, I wonder if China isn’t right to censor its people. For instance, their nation moves forward because no one can look back at the Tiananmen Square incident. How much better off would we be as a nation if similar black marks in our history could be forgotten? No more slavery… civil war… civil rights… Tuskegee Trials… everything and everyone could just… heal.
Prove me wrong; but how is constantly revisiting the worst parts of American History doing us any favors? The way I see it, we’re just supporting and nurturing future social justice warriors.
This article represents the views of the author exclusively, and not those of Being Libertarian LLC.
The answer is not to have an elite that decides what is good for us to hear, but to re-Instill critical thinking so that we , as individuals can sort truth from fiction, and respond based on thought, rather than emotion.
12-20-2018, 09:18 AM
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