Category Archives: Political Correctness

Such a deliberate use of words can diffuse a tense situation and lead to more self-awareness, understanding, and positive change.

Unfortunately, as we mature and understand words better, the use of words can lead to more conflict if the words themselves are transformed into weapons. How many times have you heard someone say that it is not what you said but how you said it? The delivery and interpretation of words can change their meanings dramatically.

Words matter, but the meanings of those words matter even more.

Mastering the many meanings of words is critical to understanding others, especially in the world of politics. It is within political discourse where we find the most significant use of wordsmithing. Here is where people are constantly jockeying for ideological position in their attempts to find a clear path to victory.

In the generation before this one, the phrase political correctness was originally meant to signify that someone was sensitive to language and actions that were racist, sexist, or homophobic. If you were being politically correct, you were trying to use labels that made people feel better about themselves, reduce discrimination, and promote equity. The change from firemen, policemen, and mailmen to firefighters, police officers, and mail carriers, for example, was considered a politically correct adaptation to the fact that many more personnel in fire, police, and postal departments were women.

While seemingly harmless and even positive, the meaning of the phrase political correctness was soon changed to a pejorative term by people who opposed this process of sensitivity. They relabeled the concept as "PC." This new meaning claimed that a PC person was someone who wasted their time trying not to offend anyone by watching every word they said. It is claimed that PC people are part of the cancel culture because they want to change the longstanding behavior of others through the excessive, constant, and annoying manipulation of our language.

This partisan evolution of the phrase political correctness demonstrates how the meaning of words can be changed to, in effect, weaponize them as tools against those who originated them.

Today, this same weaponization process has been applied to the concept of woke.

Originally, woke was a concept that came out of African American communities in the United States during the 1930s. It was a term used to help people become more aware of racial prejudice and discrimination that affected African Americans. Folks were encouraged to stay woke, or aware, of such disparities and to fight to change them.

In the last few years, though, woke has been used by many political groups fighting for equality. This broadening of the term has been quite expansive. Calls to stay woke can now be found at protests involving LGBTQ+ issues, womens rights, immigrant rights, environmental protection, economic inequality, funding for the arts, and many other social-justice issues.

The basic meaning of woke has become more of a general awareness of all forms of prejudice and discrimination and the need to defeat them.

The opponents of woke took this expanded meaning and twisted it to apply to anyone who they feel hates America and has declared war on our culture. They claim that woke activists push their identity politics so forcefully that they are destroying the unity of our nation. They demonize well-intending woke by saying they have no respect for tradition and that they wish to wipe out our collective history.

As adults, we have learned to use our words. Unfortunately, we have also learned to misuse other peoples words. When we weaponize words that were intended to do good, we undermine the goodness of those respective movements.

It is time to grow up as a society. We need to stop attacking those promoting social justice because we have become frustrated and fearful of change. We need to diffuse the current tense situation in our society by taking our clever word-power abilities and using them to promote more self-awareness, understanding, and positive change.

Dave Berger of Plymouth, Minnesota, is a retired sociology professor who taught for nearly three decades at Inver Hills Community College. He also is a regular contributor to the News Tribune Opinion page.

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Local View: Stop weaponizing 'woke,' other words of adversaries - Duluth News Tribune

By Donald B. Smith

Like most Americans I have been watching the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan with horror and dismay. Last Thursdays suicide bombings outside Kabul airport, which killed 13 U.S. servicemembers as well as killing and wounding scores of Afghan civilians, was a tragic and meaningless act of violence. It may also be a harbinger of future such attacks.

After 20 years of success in keeping terrorists at bay and thwartingattacks against our American homeland, we now leave Kabul in control of the very people who gave Osama bin Laden safe haven. This debacle will make America less safe for a generation or more, just as defeat in Vietnam did.

The American people only support putting our sons and daughters into harms way if U.S. national security is truly threatened. This was certainly the case in the wake of the horrific September 11, 2001, attacks.

However, many Americans grew weary of 20 years of commitment in Afghanistan and believed it was time to bring all the troops home. This was understandable, but the alternative should not be allowing Afghanistan to again become a breeding, training and staging ground for international terrorist groups who hate the United States, our values and way of life.

Unfortunately, our political leadership placed politics over our national security and the safety of the American people. Not only was the decision completely to withdraw from Afghanistan flawed, but the way this withdrawal or more properly retreat has been executed has become an international embarrassment.

We made mistakes that were unworthy of a global superpower. For example, announcing the withdrawal with a date certain that was not condition-based. Or not coordinating the pullout with our coalition partners. Or giving up our major military airbase at Bagram early in the withdrawal instead of as the final move, thus denying our forces and those of our Afghan allies the air support necessary to stave off the Taliban advance.

Furthermore, we abandoned Bagram Air Base in the dead of nighton July 6 without any prior coordination with our NATO allies or the Afghan commander, thereby undermining the confidence of the Afghan forces in American support.

The message from the White House to the free Afghans was clear and deadly: you are on your own. The government in Kabul was told plainly not to expect any of the air, materiel or intelligence support their forces had always depended on from the U.S. and NATO. Facing the brutal reality of being abandoned by their patrons, is it any wonder the Afghan troops collapsed in front of the determined and well-supported Taliban? We now face a humiliatingdefeat that has diminished U.S. credibility and threatened global stability.

It did not have to be this way. Even sustaining a minimal commitment would have bolstered Afghan morale, kept the Taliban guessing and ensured stability in Afghanistan as it has for two decades.

The irony is that even before the White House set the withdrawal deadline the United States had mostly already pulled back from Afghanistan. Since 2018 our missionunder the leadership of General Scott Miller transitioned to an air support, training, logisticsand leadership role with limited U.S. troops. We reduced American forces in Afghanistanto 2,500 troops, and many military leaders believed this would have been enough to maintain the status quo. There were also more than 10,000 NATO and allied troops from 38 nations supporting the effort. Despite disparaging comments from President Biden, the Afghan military was doing the bulk of the frontline fighting and taking almost all of the casualties.

The 2,500 support troops in Afghanistan allowed us to maintain our intelligence capabilities, have an embassy on the ground and secured access to Bagram Air Base. This modest deployment of troops had a more direct impact on our national security and the safety of the American people than the current 39,000 troops in Japan, 35,000 troops in Germany, 24,000 troops in South Korea, 6,300 troops in Kuwait and 5,500 troops in Bahrain, just to name some.And before the Kabul airport bombings the United States had not had a combat death in Afghanistan since February 2020.

But now we are faced with a meltdown reminiscent of the endgame in Saigon 46 years ago. Make no mistake, this is not a military defeat but a political calamity, just like in Vietnam. And now Afghan War veterans will experience the same deep frustration we Vietnam vets felt, that after decisively defeating an enemy on the battlefield, politicians have squandered our victory.

The more than 2,400 Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan deserve better. As a nation, we must finally learn this hard lesson and never again let politics drive our national and homeland security strategy.

As we watch a third rate, ragtag military force dictate the terms of our withdrawal and force a weak president to adhere to their chosen timeline, we must pledge that we will return to a policy of Peace Through Strength including all the elements of national power, whether economic,diplomatic, military or intelligence. And we must also restore the power of moral leadership not hampered by progressive notions of political correctness unconnected to national security.

We cannot afford to allow defeat in Afghanistan to return our country to the hollow forces of the 1970s. This tragedy should inspire a new commitment to build the best equipped, best trained, and very importantly, the best-led military in the world. And never to let politicians throw away another military victory again.

Retired Brigadier General Donald B. Smith is a veteran of the Vietnam War and is former sheriff of Putnam County.

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Learning the Hard Lessons of Vietnam Once Again in Afghanistan - The Examiner News

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a guide last week for "Inclusive Communication," cautioning against using words like prisoner, smoker, illegal immigrant, disabled or homeless, which the agency says could imply blame or stigma.

The guide's opening line says, "We must confront the systems and policies that have resulted in the generational injustice that has given rise to health inequities." The CDC is now about fighting injustice, not disease.

The agency says instead of gender-specific pronouns like him or her, use "they," even when referring to one person. And talk about "parents" or "expectant parents" instead of mothers or fathers.

After making the hundreds of language changes the CDC recommends, who has time to defeat COVID-19?

CDC'S 'INCLUSIVE' LANGUAGE GUIDE DISCOURAGES SAYING 'ALCOHOLIC,' 'SMOKER,' 'UNINSURED,' 'ELDERLY'

The CDC's got mission confusion. With parts of the U.S. considering more COVID lockdowns, Americans don't need language lessons on political correctness. They need scientific information on how to reduce the risk of being infected by this virus indoors. That's key to reopening workplaces and returning to normal.

Numerous new technologies are said to destroy airborne viruses, including ionization, dry hydrogen peroxide, far UV light and others. But school administrators and office building managers don't have a clue which ones actually work. They're flying blind.

The CDC's thousands of scientists could provide guidance. Not that they should endorse specific brands, but they can assess competing technologies. The CDC flatly refuses. Instead, it cautions against using them because they lack "an established body of peer-reviewed evidence."

What planet is the CDC on? Peer-reviewed evidence can take years. Here's the process: An academic journal sends a submitted article to scientists around the world for review and suggested changes. Once that input is received and the article is approved, the wait goes on because many of these journals only publish four times a year.

TEXAS SCHOOL SYSTEM CLOSES AFTER 2 TEACHERS DIE OF COVID-19

Glacial slowness doesn't work in a pandemic. That's why former President Donald Trump designed Operation Warp Speed for vaccines. The CDC's timetable isn't warp speed. It's warped. The CDC's tacit premise that yesterday's technology is good enough will doom us to failure.

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told the Washington Post last week that the CDC has the wrong mentality to respond to a crisis. "Their mind set is we should polish it, vet it, peer-review it."

The result is the CDC offering 50-year-old information: Open windows, space desks apart and use HEPA filters where possible. HEPA filters were devised for gas masks during World War II, and commercialized for buildings in the 1950s.

Tried and true methods are not necessarily wrong. But the public deserves the latest science, too.

Eighteen months into the pandemic, giant employers like Apple and Amazon again are delaying reopening workplaces. They need help. Only 33% of U.S. office workers are back, according to Kastle Systems. New York City is far worse off, with only 22% back. That kills retail stores, coffee shops and restaurants that serve workers.

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If it were possible to get back to normal without technological breakthroughs, it would have happened already. Eric Adams, the city's likely next mayor, needs scientific information on how to reduce aerosolized COVID-19 virus in transportation hubs, public buildings, offices and schools.

Citing the importance of speed in a pandemic, Gottlieb has been urging the FDA to establish a fast-track way of determining what works and what doesn't. The CDC should be doing the same using its own scientists.

As for schools, the medical journal Lancet's COVID task force has chastised the CDC for focusing on masking and social distancing instead of air quality.

A CDC study of 169 Georgia K-5 schools found COVID cases were reduced more by improving air quality than any other intervention. Mandating masks for students produced no statistically significant improvement.

A Kaiser Health News headline in June read: "More than 100 Missouri Schools Have Bought 'Often Unproven' Air Cleaning Technology." The words "often unproven" come from CDC guidance. If school districts are rushing in desperation to buy equipment without enough information, blame the CDC, not the school administrators.

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A spokesperson for the company that sold ionization equipment to Missouri schools explained that peer-reviewed research on its equipment doesn't exist yet. That is why CDC scientists should get to work assessing new technologies themselves instead of writing speech manuals.

If the CDC wants to be politically correct, it can call its new air quality guidance "Indoor Environmentalism." That almost sounds green.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM BETSY McCAUGHEY

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Betsy McCaughey: The CDC is now focused on fighting injustice, not disease. How will it beat COVID? - Fox News

Our day and age seems to involve one contentious topic after another, including pandemic protocols, social justice responses, and political correctness. Adding to the chaos is the ability of anyone and everyone to add their own voice and opinion, each trying to be heard and each claiming to be correct.

Amid this war of words, whom do we trust? Even more importantly, why do we trust them?

New research from Crucial Learning (formerly VitalSmarts), a leader in corporate learning and development, sheds light on trust today and how individuals, groups, and organizations can maintain or regain confidence in their words and actions.

When asked what has happened to their trust in different groups over the past year, 41 percent of the 1,374 surveyed stated their trust in family members increased a lot or some, the highest of any other group. Friends came in second at 36 percent, and co-workers landed in third at 31 percent.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a whopping 77 percent responded that their trust decreased a lot or some in their national political leaders. Sixty-three percent said it decreased in their local political leaders, and an additional 44 percent claimed the same for their employer.

How have political and corporate leaders lost so much trust? Top answers from respondents included:

All three of the above-mentioned traits have a common themewhat we say can quickly damage our trustworthiness, which requires action to regain trust.

Trust has two components: motivation and ability, said Joseph Grenny, leading researcher at Crucial Learning and coauthor of Crucial Conversations. Without pure motives and practicing what you preach, gaining and keeping trust is impossible. But when motives, words and actions are aligned, a mutual understanding and confidence is formed and relationships flourish.

How can leaders develop this mutual understanding and confidence and cultivate trust between themselves and their employees? To do so, respondents in our survey emphasized that these behaviors were most important:

Conflict in society is nothing new. In fact, healthy disagreement is vital to organizations and communities. Its how we discuss issues that matter and practice what we preach.

So, stop living in suspicion and build trust! Here are four tips to get you started:

1. Show regard to interests beyond your own. Acting selfishly breeds distrust. Conversely, when we invite all viewpoints and strive to find a mutual purpose, trust follows.

2. Be consistent in messaging and behavior. Nothing kills trust faster than being a hypocrite. Ask any politician who issued pandemic guidelines and was then caught breaking those same guidelines. Our words must match our actions.

3. Invite collaboration. When we treat others as friends to work with rather than enemies to subdue, trust is built even when opinions or beliefs differ.

4. Keep commitments. To gain trust, we must not only speak; we also must act. The extra effort involved in backing up our words with our deeds shows our dedication.

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How to Build Trust in an Untrustworthy World - ATD

by Slavoj Zizek

Theres a surprising similarity between the Talibans stance on protecting women from their soldiers aggressiveness and the politically correct vision on the protection of women from sexual assaults causing delayed traumas.

The Taliban has suddenly changed its stance toward women in public and working places. Their spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, said at a news conference on Tuesday that working women should stay at home for their own safety, undermining the Taliban's efforts to convince international observers that the group would be more tolerant toward women than when they were in power in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.

Mujahid added that the guidance would be temporary, and would allow the Taliban to find ways to ensure that women are not treated in a disrespectful way or God forbid, hurt. He also said that the measure was necessary as the Taliban's soldiers keep changing and are not trained. This is why, he said, the new Afghan government asked women to take time off from work until the situation gets back to a normal order and women related procedures are in place, then they can return to their jobs once it's announced.

The predictable Western reaction to this statement was that we now see how false and hypocritical the Taliban's assurance that womens rights to education and work will be respected: now they are showing their true colors...

But the reality is more complex.

We dont need direct accusations of lies and hypocrisy to understand the shift in the Talibans position.

The soft attitude toward rape in Muslim countries is based on the premise that a man who raped a woman was secretly seduced (provoked) by her into doing it. Such a reading of male rape as the result of a woman's provocation is often reported by the media.

Here we stumble upon what I take the risk to call the ideological unconscious: an ideological edifice implies and relies on a set of claims which are necessary for its functioning, but which should not be stated publicly.

Back in 2006, Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, Australias most senior Muslim cleric, caused a scandal when he compared women not wearing a scarf to raw meat. Reportedly, his comment was made shortly after a group of Muslim men were jailed for gang rape in Sydney.

If you take uncovered meat and place it outside on the streetand the cats come and eat it whose fault is it the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem, he said.

The explosively-scandalous nature of this comparison distracted attention from another, much more surprising, premise underlying al-Hilalis argument: if women are held responsible for the sexual conduct of men, does this not imply that men are totally helpless when faced with what they perceive as a sexual provocation, that they are simply unable to resist it, that they are totally enslaved to their sexual hunger, precisely like a cat when it sees raw meat?

In contrast to this presumption of the complete lack of male responsibility for their own sexual conduct, the emphasis on public female eroticism in the West relies on the premise that men are capable of sexual restraint, that they are not blind slaves to their sexual drives.

In a debate years ago, an Australian Muslim woman emphatically claimed that Islam is the most feminist of all religions. Now we can understand why: Islam at least in its fundamentalist version is obsessed with the idea of protecting women. But protecting them from what? From aggressive men? Beneath this public justification it is easy to discover its (mostly) hidden truth: not from men the true fear is that a woman might enjoy being sexually mistreated and used by men. Beneath the desire to protect and control women, there is thus lurking a much more ambiguous mixture of panicky fear and of the deep distrust of the moral composure of men themselves.

Is all this simply a remainder of the oppressive Muslim tradition?

Reading about life in Kabul these days one should take a minute to look at some of the images from Afghanistans capital in the 60s and 70s that are easy to find on the internet. We see young women there walking around in miniskirts, modern record stores, dancing clubs, university halls full of women, etc. Yes, there were conservative Muslim communities in the countryside, but they peacefully coexisted with other religions and with elements of contemporary secular culture. There is no direct continuity between this past and the Taliban: precisely in what appears as its most archaic features (very narrow interpretation of Sharia, using state power to prohibit modern secular life like playing music in public), the Taliban is a product of modernity, a reaction to the enforced modernization of Afghanistan first by the Soviet and then by the Western occupations.

The ultimate proof of this secret link between the Taliban and modernity is the surprising similarity between the militant groups stance on protecting women from male aggressiveness and the politically correct vision of women threatened by male aggressiveness which can cause life-long delayed traumas even if it wasnt directly experienced as traumatic. This vision elevates sexual experience into the ultimate trauma, talking about sexual assault survivors who hide their trauma even from themselves. How, then, can such a brutal act as rape be unacknowledged, i.e., not experienced as what it is?

It happens when, during a sexual encounter, deep down I knew that what had happened had felt violating, degrading and not what I signed up for Yet it took me a whole decade to realise what had really happened: I had been sexually assaulted.

Why did it take such a long time, till the rise of #MeToo movement, to get it was a sexual assault? My limited understanding of consent and sexual violence at that time, and my overall sexual inexperience, meant I believed I was to blame for what had happened, that perhaps I just didnt know how sex usually is. Only when, more than a decade later, a therapist said thats trauma, hearing these words gave me permission to feel the weight of what I had endured at 19, to understand why anxiety lurked close to the surface of my body. A voice inside my head finally said: That was sexual assault. At 33, I know that now. So it can take years sometimes decades for some survivors to realise or accept that their experience amounts to sexual assault or rape.

Such things definitely happen: it is easy to imagine a young woman who feels uneasy and abused in sex, but dismisses this experience as the result of her naive notion of what sex is under the influence of prevailing ideology, she decides to endure her suffering. So we should not denounce the idea that a trauma can be recognized a decade later as a ridiculous PC retroactive projection. When new higher standards of what womens rights and freedoms become the norm, we have the full right to read past events through this new frame. One should absolutely reject false historicism here, the idea that, in previous eras, oppression of women, racism and slavery were considered normal and we should not judge them by todays standards.

There are nonetheless some further observations to be added here.

First, the case described above is not a case of repression in the strict Freudian sense: it is a fully conscious feeling of disgust and humiliation kept at bay because of (male chauvinist) social values. So what would or could be really repressed and traumatic here? The most obvious answer is: the exact opposite, i.e., the true trauma was that the woman secretly enjoyed being mistreated, and was absolutely not ready to admit it. Her being disgusted and feeling humiliated was already fake, a cover destined to obfuscate this disavowed enjoyment, a fact much more traumatic than her mistreatment by the sexual partner. To avoid a misunderstanding: this in no way implies that the mans mishandling was justified (since the woman enjoyed it, so she got what she wanted) quite the opposite. We all have secret dirty fantasies, and perhaps the most humiliating experience is to get what we secretly dream about brutally imposed from outside. This is why an extreme example a woman who secretly dreams about being raped will be much more traumatized when raped in reality than a strong autonomous woman.

These paradoxes already indicate the way emancipation should take place. Men should not be portrayed as brutal oppressors but as weak beings whose macho exterior covers up their frailty and impotence. And women should learn to treat men like that. A strong man is the only true feminist he doesnt need to oppress women in order to assert himself.

Slavoj Zizek is a cultural philosopher. Hes a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.

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Can the Taliban have anything in common with 'political correctness'? - Sri Lanka Guardian

In recent years, the classic TV shows that remain in heavy syndication to this day have undergone a reevaluation. Stereotypes or certain language that may have been seen as acceptable decades ago has been flagged or removed; even several episodes of The Muppet Show were recently slapped with a disclaimer on Disney+, warning viewers that they include negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures.

In many cases, the disclaimers are warranted; its important to acknowledge that comedy and, truthfully, society as a whole evolves over time and what was once considered funny is now recognized as offensive. But the latest example of this trend has taken it too far. Comedy Central has reportedly pulled the Diversity Day episode of The Office from its airwaves, skipping it over in a recent start-to-finish marathon of the series.

Its true that Diversity Day, which originally aired on March 29, 2005, includes a lot of stereotypes and other cringey, insensitive material. But as anyone who has actually seen the episode can tell you, the whole point is to poke fun at those stereotypes and offensive behavior and the way corporate America clumsily tries to tackle them without taking a hard look at their own biases. In the episode, Michael Scott (Steve Carell) forces the employees at Dunder Mifflin to attend a diversity seminar. And while his intentions are good sort of he winds up playing into all the ugly stereotypes hes trying to combat, reciting a snippet of a Chris Rock stand-up routine that no white person should feel comfortable reciting and doing an exaggerated Indian accent at one point that prompts Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling) to slap him and walk out.

That slap, along with the dozens of uncomfortable glances to the camera from the other Dunder Mifflin employees, should clue us in to the fact that the show is not endorsing Michaels behavior. Were clearly supposed to be laughing at him and how clueless he is, not with him. As Bobby Burack of The Outkick recently pointed out, The brilliance of comedy is that it not only makes us laugh but its powerful. Diversity Day doesnt promote racism. Instead, it mocks the wrong-mindedness of racism.

Context is important, and to pull any episode of television that contains racism without any consideration to how that racism is presented is foolish. We cant pretend that we live in a world completely devoid of racists (or sexists, or homophobes), and to completely erase any material that reminds us of them only brushes it under the rug. We need to tackle these ugly beliefs head-on, but we cant do that without shining a light on them. Diversity Day shouldnt be lumped in with other examples of casual racism when its a thoughtful critique of said casual racism.

Of course, Comedy Centrals decision to pull the episode has led to many cries of cancel culture and political correctness run amok. And while the networks choice to pull the episode is, in fact, a silly one, its important to note that theres a difference between facing consequences for your actions (like say, if someone in real life were to lose their job for making some of the same racially insensitive jokes that Michael Scott did) and falling victim to PC culture. If anything, Diversity Day advocates for more political correctness in the workplace all the more reason that yanking it makes no sense whatsoever.

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There's Absolutely No Reason to Pull the "Diversity Day" Episode of "The Office" Off the Air - InsideHook

September will feature the premieres of several high-profile series. Scenes from a Marriage, a remake of the famous Ingmar Bergman television series, which was created by Hagai Levi (who made BeTipul and The Affair), stars Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac and will start running in Israel on September 13 on Cellcom TV, Yes VOD, Hot HBO, Hot VOD and Next TV, and on Yes TV Drama and Sting TV on October 5. HBO will not allow any reviews yet, but I can say that this version, which Levi created at the behest of the Bergman family, is very different from the Swedish miniseries that inspired it.

The compulsively watchable American Crime Story series has tackled the O.J. Simpson case and the murder of Gianni Versace, and its third season, called Impeachment, will focus on the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton scandal. It will be shown here starting on September 29 at 9 p.m. on Yes TV Drama and on Yes VOD, although it will begin airing on September 7 in the US. Lewinsky herself was a producer on the series and it features Beanie Feldstein as Lewinsky, Clive Owen as Bill Clinton and, in a particularly inspired piece of casting, Edie Falco, best known for playing Carmela Soprano, as Hillary Clinton.

If you miss the mixture of silly and smart humor on 30 Rock and who doesnt? you will want to check out Girls5eva, a new comedy series on which 30 Rocks Tina Fey was one of the producers. It will be shown on Yes VOD starting on September 2 and Yes TV Comedy on September 4 at 7:05 p.m., and on Hot 3 at 10:15 p.m. from September 2 and on Hot VOD and Next TV.

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It is about four women who were in a girl group that had one hit decades ago and who reunite when that song is sampled (used in the background) by a hip-hop star. Most of the jokes are about how dumb the group was in its heyday and how much they have or have not changed since then.

They are played by Sara Bareilles, a real singer who has had more than one hit but who is best known for Love Song; Busy Philipps (Cougar Town); Paula Pell, a comedy writer who played Paula Hornberger on 30 Rock; and Rene Elise Goldberry, a Tony-Award winning Broadway actress and singer who played Geneva Pine, an aggressive prosecutor, on The Good Wife.

Philippss character, a materialistic airhead who auditions to be on a Real Housewives series, is a bit too easy a target to be funny, but Goldberry is the standout as Wickie, who barely makes a living but has an Instagram account that suggests that she is still living the high life and hanging out with celebrities such as the Dalai Lama. It makes fun of many aspects of pop music, as well as various trends and excesses of contemporary life, such as the phenomenon of precocious, lonely only children of older parents, and there are quite a few musical numbers in each episode. The characters are appealing and its fun.

NETFLIXS THE CHAIR, about Ji-Yoon Kim, a newly appointed chairperson of the English department at a small, liberal-arts college, stars Sandra Oh of Greys Anatomy in the lead role. A single mother who lives with her elderly Korean-speaking father, she has to pick up the pieces when her colleague and friend, Bill (Jay Duplass), goes on one bender after another following his wifes death.

The personal stories are a little predictable, but the series has the most energy and passion when it is skewering both political correctness on campus and the entitlement of the traditional older professors. The old guard are pitted against their younger, trendier colleagues in a Darwinian struggle for dwindling resources, and Kim finds herself in the middle. Someone involved with writing the show has clearly spent a lot of time on campus recently and it has paid off in some really incisive humor about the absurdities of campus life. The excellent supporting cast features Bob Balaban (Gosford Park, Seinfeld), David Morse (Treme, 12 Monkeys) and Holland Taylor (Two and a Half Men).

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Promising premieres, girl groups and aggravating academia - The Jerusalem Post

There has been no shortage of bad takes on the crisis in Afghanistan, from both sides of the political aisle. But one that stood out last Thursday, even as reports came in of a deadly attack in Kabul on U.S. troops and Afghan civilians, was this contribution from Manhattan Institute fellow and anti-wokeness crusader Christopher Rufo blaming the collapse of the American mission on too much woke ideology:

One neednt be a fan of Robin DiAngelo, the diversity guru and White Fragility author whom even progressives mock these days, or of other woke efforts to be skeptical of Rufos glib explanation. For one thing, while the Biden administration certainly bears major responsibility for the Afghanistan debacle, it was the unwoke Trump administration that set the withdrawal of American troops in motion and entered peace talks with the Taliban. (Of course, one could always argue that the withdrawal would have been handled much better if Donald Trump were still Presidenta perfect and beautiful exit, no doubt.) For another, there is absolutely no evidence that wokeness in the military had anything to do with the American failure in Afghanistan. And, finally, the gender programs on which the United States spent close to $800 million between 2002 and 2019 had very little to do with woke feminism or gender studies.

But Rufos entry in the Worst Tweets on Afghanistan sweepstakes was par for the course for the documentary filmmaker-turned-activist, who gave a candid explanation of his strategy against the woke left a few months ago:

To Rufos detractors, this is a self-incriminating admission of dishonesty and bad faiththe Twitter equivalent of the movie scene in which the villain explains his dastardly plan. Rufo himself has defended these comments to the Washington Post as a description of normal political tactics. Either way, the comments provide useful context for the tweets about our woke defeat in Afghanistan: This is Rufo trying to annex an Afghanistan exit widely seen as a fiasco into the general category of postmodern progressive racial and gender politics.

Unlike many critics, I think Rufo makes some perfectly valid points about wokeness and even critical race theory. (He vastly overuses CRT as a catch-all term for various progressive ideasapparently as a deliberate branding tacticbut critical race theory and its offshoots actually do have more linkage to these ideas than many of Rufos detractors admit.) He first caught my attention last year with genuinely alarming and fairly well-documented reports about the excesses of anti-racism training in schools and workplaces, including organizations funded with taxpayer money. One such find was a Seattle city government program where white staffers were herded into race-segregated struggle sessions requiring them not only to examine how they and their families benefit from the system of white supremacy but to recall and reflect on a recent incident in which they may have caused harm to a person/people of color at work. Another was a school exercise in San Cupertino, California in which third graders had to map their identities and state which aspects were privileged and which oppressed. (The program was tried in the classroom only once and was suspended due to parental outcry.)

Unfortunately for those of us who believe these cultural insanities do need to be exposed, Rufo is an extremely flawed messenger. He has done impressive work getting internal documents from whistleblowers, but his reporting is often compromised by exaggeration and cherry-picking. Thus, he has claimed that white male employees in a 2019 seminar at Sandia Labs (a government-funded nuclear-technology research center in New Mexico) had to write letters of apology to women and people of color. Yet of the ten worksheets photographed by Rufos source and posted on his site, only one had an explicit Im sorry, while a couple of others had vaguely apologetic statements about white privilege. (Other messages included We should have mutual agreement that it is OK if we disagree with each other.) More recently, Rufo announced in a Twitter scoop that one author of Californias proposed ethnic studies curriculum had called for a countergenocide against white Christians in a book the curriculum repeatedly cites. Yet a look at the sources, including Rufos own City Journal article on the story, makes it obvious that the book used countergenocide to mean resistance to the genocide of native populations by white Christians, not genocide in response to genocide. There are plenty of good reasons to criticize the curriculum, but Rufo turns valid complaints into breathless hyperbole and white genocide innuendo.

There is also the fact that in the fall of 2020, when he first gained visibility, Rufo overtly and aggressively hitched his activist wagon to Donald Trump. After Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlsons Fox News show in September 2020 to discuss critical race theory in government-funded diversity training and urged Trump to ban the practice, Trump promptly issued an executive order doing just that. He delivered, Rufo exulted on Twitter, praising Trumps order as the first successful counterattack against critical race theory in American history. Rufo also brushed aside critics who were sympathetic to the goal but skeptical of the strategy (such as myself) as snobs who would rather write another thinkpiece explaining why wokism is bad than wield actual power. After Trumps defeat, Rufo channeled his quest for power into advocacy of anti-CRT state laws. Yet a number of strong critics of woke ideologyincluding the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a leader in the fight against progressive censorship in academiahave decried these laws as likely to infringe on free expression and the exchange of ideas.

If Rufos crusading against wokeism and critical race theory at least has valid concerns behind the hyperbole, his typically grandiose Critical Afghanistan Theory tweets dont even have that distinction. Yes, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, angered conservative activists in June by defending anti-racist teaching in the U.S. military, including a seminar on white rage (with voluntary attendance) at West Pointand particularly by linking white rage to Trump supporters attack on Congress on January 6. This hardly means that U.S. military brass focused on white rage and wokeness while ignoring the looming crisis of Afghanistan. In March, Milley was somehow able to take time out of his busy schedule of Robin DiAngelo book clubs to make an impassioned plea for keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan at a National Security Council meeting.

Even more absurd is Rufos claimalso made by others on the right, including Carlsonthat the United States tried to export woke postmodernism to Afghanistan. For instance, the idea that now-former Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani is woke because he taught at Johns Hopkins University thirty years ago and did a TED talk (actually two TED talks: How to Rebuild a Broken State in 2005 and A Vision for the Future of Afghanistan in 2020) is simply bizarre.

But Rufos identification of U.S.-sponsored gender programs in Afghanistan with extreme and nonsensical woke ideology is especially insidiousas well as factually wrong. It is worth noting that the bulk of the money the United States spent on gender-focused projects in Afghanistan$627 million, out of a total $787.4 millionwas spent on programs addressing the needs of women and girls in 2003-2010, that is, mostly under the notoriously radical feminist Bush administration. Many of these programs had to do with such issues as maternal mortality, health care, and access to education for girls and young women. They certain didnt, as Carlson suggested in his segment, traffic in such flights of gender theory as the idea that men can become pregnant (that is, that biologically female transgender persons who identify as male should be regarded as pregnant men). While there were some educational programs intended to change attitudes toward male and female roles, such projects hardly amount to inane wokeism in a society where wife-beating and child marriage have been traditionally viewed as normal. Carlson has sneeringly (and approvingly) remarked that the people of Afghanistan dont think of masculinity as toxic, but its hard to think of a more toxic version of masculinity than the Taliban.

One can discuss whether American gender programs in Afghanistan alienated parts of the population by trying to do too much, too soon. (The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction suggested in a report that these programs could have been more attuned to the Afghan cultural context, but it does not mention any significant popular backlash.) But the notion that they had something to do with woke feminism or postmodernism is laughable. For what its worth, the Women, Peace, and Security Act codifying American gender-related programs in Afghanistan was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Trump in 2017.

It wasnt long ago that right-wing outlets such as Breitbart decried left-wing failure to condemn radical Islamist misogyny as a stark example of political correctness gone mad. Now, we have right-wing culture warriors like Carlson and Rufo scoring political points by suggesting that basic human rights for women in Afghanistan are a pernicious attempt to export woke postmodernist ideology.

The other day, after seeing a couple of Rufo exposs on what sounds like genuinely awful (even discounting for the usual hyperbole) social justice training at Verizon and Bank of America, I wondered if I was being too uncharitable to the guy. Then, he posted those ghoulish Afghanistan tweets exploiting a tragedy and attacking womens rights to promote his crusade. The question answered itself.

Here is the original post:

Chris Rufo and His Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Afghanistan Take - The Bulwark

Alabama's faithful haven't dealt with much adversity since coach Nick Saban arrived prior to the 2007 season. But for all the Crimson Tide's trophies and talent, there'd beenone stigma to its name, the one even Saban hadn't been able to rid the program of, the absence of a former player who'd sustained a starting quarterback gig in the NFL.

That's not really news, either, considering how often Alabama fans have been ribbed about it since Hall of Famers Joe Namath and Ken Stabler laced 'em up one last time in the pros.

What is news, though, is how quickly the dynamic has shifted, and how within two or three years the perception of the Alabama quarterback has changed dramatically, save for the same 'ol clich of, "But, but, look who they're throwing to."

Let's think about it. Let's really consider the likelihood, if only in 2017, of then-current Crimson Tide quarterbacks Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, and Mac Jones all starring in the crimson and white then being named starters in the NFL within 12 months of each other.

Tagovailoa of the Miami Dolphins arrived to Tuscaloosa with the most expectation, Hurts of the Philadelphia Eagles arrived to Tuscaloosa with the most mystery, and Jones of the New England Patriots arrived to Tuscaloosa with the most, rather the least of anything relative to those two.

Yet here they are, after each having been announced the starting quarterback, the on-and-off field 'CEO' of their respective pro franchise.

And no disrespect to AJ McCarron or Greg McElory or John Parker Wilson or Jake Coker, partially because of the run-first, rigid schemes they operated, but pre-2017 was there ever a thought of Alabama football producing three starter-worthy quarterbacks to the NFL?

Um, no, nor did that thought coincide with the probability of all three, Jones, Hurts, and Tagovailoa, sharing the same locker room for two seasons.

Prior to, the most productive pro Alabama had produced at the position was Richard Todd of the New York Jets, from 1976-83, and that's back when bellbottoms were not only in-vogue but imperative to the audio experience of The Four Seasons.

More than anything, though, the development of those three is indicative of Alabama football's offensive evolution in its dynastic reign under Saban.It's the same Crimson Tide team, just one now that favors deep-bombed touchdowns through the air over hard licks in a cramped box of muscular defenders all in the name of winning more games, thanks to overall trends of the game.

And subsequently, its offensive-dominate ideological shift favors the development of its quarterbacks, the players pro teams formerly viewed as future-coach-types with as illuminated IQs as shortcomings for the sake of political correctness.

Those days are now gone and, as crazy as it sounds, even though three NFL starting quarterbacks from one college roster likely won't be duplicated, the rise and perception change of the position at Alabama is as stark to its previous plight as anything I've seen in sports.

Enjoy it, Crimson Tide-rs ... you've earned it.

Alabama's faithful haven't dealt with much adversity since coach Nick Saban arrived prior to the 2007 season. But for all the Crimson Tide's trophies and talent, there'd beenone stigma to its name, the one even Saban hadn't been able to rid the program of, the absence of a former player who'd sustained a starting quarterback gig in the NFL. Subscribe for full article

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H2 For You: Even Alabama football fans couldn't have dreamed this scenario - Bama Maven

With a new and rebooted Saints Row on the way, now's a good time to check out the silly GTA-esque sandbox murderzone series for free. Saints Row: The Third Remastered is free for keepsies this week on the Epic Games Store, offering a fancied-up version of the third game plus honestly more DLC than you need. I think 3 is the awkward midpoint in the series between gritty and tomfoolery but hey, it's fun - and free.

Saints Row: The Third debuted in 2011, then scored a remaster in 2020. Yeah, it wasn't really old enough that it needed a remaster, but it was touched up and did wham in all the expansions and DLC packs and bits. That's a whole lot of crimes.

I do like SR3 fair enough, I'm just less keen in the context of the series. Saints Row 2 was a decent daft take on GTA, then The Third veered too far into wacky for me while removing a load of thigs I liked in 2, before 4 steered hard into wacky and kept on going until it punched other side as full-on delightful superhero nonsense.

Alice Bee wasn't wholly enthused in her Saints Row: The Third Remastered review either.

"If it sounds like I'm struggling to describe any standout hilarious bits, or muster much excitement, that's because I am," she said last year. "For all the bravado and bombast, playing Saints Row The Third in 2020 felt dated. Not in an 'Ooh, you couldn't get away with that now! Political correctness gone mad!' way. The explosions, the tits, the hilarious dildo... all of it just washed passed me. I felt like a teacher staring wearily into space as, around her, her charges throttled each other and shat on the desks. It was weirdly anaemic. The guns all felt the same, the missions all blurred into one. Exploding a bunch of alien spaceships seemed no different to punching a pedestrian in the face."

But for free? Yeah, well worth a look if you enjoy sandbox murder and big set pieces. You have until 4pm on Thursday, September 2nd to grab SR3R free to keep from the Epic Games Store. Oh, also free this week is food-making assembly line puzzler Automachef.

As for the Saints Row reboot announced this week, it sounds like it's going in a direction I might dig.

"The impression is that this new Saints is cleaving more closely to the original, back when it was less wacky and more obviously trying to compete with GTA," Alice said in her preview yesterday. "A little less Professor Genki, a little more action please, as Elvis would have sung about his favourite third-person, run-and-gun crime game franchise."

It will still have jokes and wingsuits and hoverbikes and hoverboards, mind. Grand.

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Saints Row: The Third Remastered is free on Epic right now - Rock Paper Shotgun