Woke watch

[arsene york-hunt]

"There is a very good section on GB news where the ludicrous idiocies of Wokeness are looked at I thought we would should have one for WHO. I'll start with Baptiste on BBC: In Hungary,an ambassador's family are kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and carry out atrocities. At the end of the last episode Baptiste finds out that it is a false flag operation and conveniently, the real culprits are white supremacists who want to stop all immigration. Coronation Street ITV a gay black footballer is stopped by the police, because he is driving an expensive car. He is pushed to the ground during an altercation, and damages his leg threatening his career. Could have been written by Dawn Butler or a BLM activist."

[Mike Oxsaw]

"Where are all the sprogs that males have given birth to since all this bollocks started? ""They're being kept out of the public domain for their own benefit,"" or some other such response doesn't really cut much ice."

[mashed in maryland]

""" In reality she clearly believes all that bollocks and now is just pretending she never said it - despite the fact it's all on the record."" I respectfully disagree. Almost none of these people believe any of this shit. Women having willies and men getting pregnant is repeated *because* its bollocks. Anyone can tell the truth. It takes true loyalty to repeat an obvious lie."

[mashed in maryland]

"Apparently stating that men can't get pregnant ""opens up trans people to violence"": https://mobile.twitter.com/townhallcom/status/1546891281493811200?s=20&t=zYyKtYD9BqtGgWo6I_pNlw Is the woman in this video some fringe nutter? Some loon who runs a blog with no sway in the world? No, she's a professor at Berkeley University: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khiara_Bridges Five years ago ""men can get pregnant"" wasn't something law professors were saying. What's changed? Does anyone think she genuinely believes what she's saying? And why is the Indy writing articles praising her for saying this bollocks? https://www.indy100.com/politics/josh-hawley-men-pregnancy-twitter-reactions"

[Fifth Column]

"Branded Penny Mordaunt has now said that she knows what a woman is and took credit for the changes forced upon her by the Lords against her wishes. The level of two faced lying of the woman is remarkable. She could have just said ""I changed my mind, I was wrong"" which would have shown some sincerity. In reality she clearly believes all that bollocks and now is just pretending she never said it - despite the fact it's all on the record. I don't want any of the Tory candidates but if I had to choose it would be the ex soldier or Kemi Badenoch. I don't agree with their politics but they seem intelligent and appear to have some integrity (despite Badenoch's weird libelling of a journalist - but we all have bad days). Liz Truss and Braverman seem shallow, ghastly individuals, Sunak's family are tax dodgers and he sounds exactly like Blair in terms of how speech patterns (close your eyes when he speaks, it's remarkable how similar he is), Hunt is incompetent, Nadim Z is like a Bond villain and is being investigated by HMRC."

[BRANDED]

"In Greater: Britain After the Storm, a book she co-authored last year with Chris Lewis, an anti-Brexit writer who is now helping her campaign, Ms Mordaunt launches into a surprisingly fierce attack on various old British films and TV series. She complains that they promote the idea that “the past was so much better”. She puts David Lean’s films Great Expectations and Lawrence of Arabia in this category, as well as Michael Anderson’s The Dam Busters. She particularly dislikes David Croft and Jimmy Perry for the “nostalgic focus” of their “churned-out” sitcoms such as Dad’s Army and Hi-de-Hi! She describes It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum – their Second World War comedy set in India and Burma – as “a full-house bingo card of… casual racism, homophobia, white privilege, colonialism, transphobia, bullying, misogyny and sexual harassment”. No doubt Croft and Perry would not stand a chance in the present era of solemn disapproval, but most sensible Tory supporters try to resist the 21st-century suggestion that being funny is a crime. Tone-deafness towards the past is exactly what they dislike about wokery. Ms Mordaunt has also pronounced on trans issues. When she was the relevant minister, she piloted through Parliament a ministerial maternity leave Bill that referred only to “pregnant people”. The House of Lords noticed this and suggested that a Bill about maternity should acknowledge the existence of women. The Government eventually adopted a Lords amendment which deleted “pregnant people” and inserted “expectant mothers”. In accepting this, however, Ms Mordaunt added, gratuitously, that “trans men are men and trans women are women”. Her remark left people perplexed. Does she think that only biological women can be pregnant, or not? It is this issue about what a woman is which has left Sir Keir Starmer almost speechless. Do the Tories want a leader who is in the same pickle? Trans people are confused exhibitionists at best."

[BRANDED]

"The Church of England has said that there is “no official definition” of a woman. In a written reply to a question submitted to General Synod, a senior Bishop said that although the meaning of the word woman was previously ""thought to be self-evident"", ""additional care"" was now needed. The question was posed as institutions grapple with the ongoing debate surrounding trans rights and what defines ""a woman"". While the new stance has been welcomed by liberal wings of the Church, the comments have also provoked criticism - with gender-critical campaigners saying that “whether your starting point is biology or the Bible”, the answer to the question of what is a woman remains the same. Rev Angela Berners-Wilson, England’s first woman priest, said that she is “not totally happy” with the answer, but added that the issue is “sensitive”. Sensitive my fucking arse"

[Kaiser Zoso]

bruuuno 9:33 Sun Jul 10 Classic!

[Sydney_Iron]

Now the FA have decided to do a U turn on concerns from the England Ladies football team and the wearing of white shorts! I hope in the name of diversity and inclusion they offer the Men the same option and ask if they have any concerns about wearing White shorts as well.

[BRANDED]

üëçüèø

[bruuuno]

Any post by branded is too long

[bruuuno]

Any post by branded is too long

[BRANDED]

Progressive government aids corporate America to be woke. How fucking hard is it to read?

[nychammer]

good article on the wokification of Corporate America. Pretty terrifying when you think about it.

[Mad Dog]

Branded. FAR too long. Can you summarise it please.

[Mike Oxsaw]

"A link with a word count will suffice - no need to force what (only) you consider important on the rest of us by spamming up the site. We all then have the choice on whether to follow the link or not, rather than scroll through pages and pages of your flatulent drivel."

[BRANDED]

"Sometimes, somethings need a long read. Like a long shit."

[Mike Oxsaw]

"They will read it because it's been posted by a WHO face. They will, they WILL, THEY WILL."

[Far Cough]

"Branded, you could just give a brief synopsis, nobody is going to read all that"

[BRANDED]

If you have a short shit you could just hang around a bit longer. Just in case

[Hermit Road]

Vivek is fantastic and I like what he says a lot…… ….and even I’m not going to read all that! Maybe I’ll give it a go if I have a long shit later

[,]

"There must be others Branded, you are not alone."

[BRANDED]

Not everybody is an infantile retard

[,]

"Branded, you’ve killed this thread off because nobody will even begin to read your post."

[BRANDED]

"Woke Inc Long article but worth reading. Throughout his childhood, Vivek Ramaswamy’s Brahmin-caste parents, immigrants from Kerala to Cincinnati, Ohio, took Ramaswamy and his brother back to the family home in the village of Vadakkanchery, which – in the 1990s – still lacked air conditioning, indoor flush toilets or proper refrigeration. These trips were uncomfortable at first for an American kid, but proved vital. For it was in the caste-inflected India of his childhood that Ramaswamy, 36, “fell in love with capitalism”, a system that allocated respect and resources based not on birth but on merit. “Capitalism was the first ideal I really loved, the first time I’d ever loved a system. Capitalism brought people together; the caste system kept them apart,” he writes in Woke Inc, his whistleblowing New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, published last year. Ramaswamy’s argument – made through shocking examples and tight, hefty analysis – is that in their embrace of woke “religion” and the pursuit of trendy social agendas over simple shareholder satisfaction, business titans are increasingly dictating not just which goods and services rise to the top, but which social and political ideas do too. As he tells me cheerily over Zoom from Columbus, Ohio, businesses using “economic force as a bludgeon to implement political or social agendas” pose “a threat to democracy and free expression…so great that every citizen bears a civic duty to take a personal risk” in order to fight back; for some, this may mean being fired or walking away from their jobs if that’s the result of “actually express[ing] yourself openly”. For others, it means speaking up at your children’s school, or anywhere else where the right to critique ideas has become unacceptable. ‘My family gave me a deep-seated superiority over the 'riff-raff kids'’ Ramaswamy – a biotech entrepreneur with an estimated wealth of £500m –  is one of those people you really only encounter in America: so overachieving it makes the ordinary Briton’s head spin, and dedicated, with total, optimistic earnestness and patriotism, to fixing his beloved, but broken, country. On graduating, both he and his brother achieved the highest marks at their Jesuit private high school; Ramaswamy was also a nationally-ranked junior tennis player before going on to Harvard, where he came top in biology, with a precis of his award-winning senior thesis on human-animal chimeras published in The Boston Globe and The New York Times. What, I ask, is the secret of people like him, people who have “come top in every class I’ve ever been in”? Was his mother a “tiger mom”, a term popularised by his friend Amy Chua in her bestseller of the same name? Not really, he says. But as immigrants, the family’s culture was utterly excellence-oriented. “There’s this paradoxical pairing of two qualities that [immigrant] parents instil in their children,” says Ramaswamy. On the one hand, his parents brought with them “a deep-seated insecurity” which led to “a hard work ethic...which is [about] defence first, protecting the family.” But as well as the insecurity and the anxiety about making ends meet, “there’s this other side of your brain that has a deep-seated superiority, to see these, average mediocre Joes running around you knowing that you’re destined to be so much better than them because you’re wired to work harder. [That sense that] we’re not just one of them who just goes home after school and goofs off.” There’s a word in Keralan vernacular for kids like that, he says, that means “riff raff kids”. “My parents were both quite academically accomplished in India,” he continues. “But I think that the idea of being the best in your class wasn’t something that they drove us to. It was just obvious… there was no other way.” Ramaswamy joined investment group QVT in 2007, and then – while a partner and manager of the firm’s biotech portfolio – became interested in the relationship between law and political philosophy, and so did a law degree at Yale on the side. In 2013, he founded Roivant, a biopharmaceutical company which worked on a drug for Alzheimer’s (which failed), before developing one, Relugolix, used for prostate cancer. In 2015, he took Roivant subsidiary Axovant public with the biggest IPO in biotech history, raising $315 million with a valuation of $2.8 billion. He was just 29. But that was the old Ramaswamy. The new one – amazingly genial and relaxed-looking for a Monday morning (he meditates three times a week), and in tennis whites (he still plays competitively) – is a political philosopher and activist, with another book called Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence to be published this autumn. Escaping the ‘cultural bubble’ A consummate entrepreneur, he also runs Strive, an asset management company he founded last year. Its seed money came from investors including pro-free speech billionaires Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale. Ramaswamy is now in the business of literally putting his money where his mouth is. Choosing to do it in Ohio rather than Manhattan or California is part of the picture – if unusual, especially given the size of his profile since the release of Woke Inc. But he and his wife, Apoorva, a throat specialist and assistant professor at Ohio State University’s medical centre, decided they didn’t want to raise a family (they have a three-year-old son) in a coastal “cultural bubble”. And Ramaswamy’s commitment to “writing about and serving as a voice for the everyday citizen” made central Ohio a better option. “You can go a 50-mile radius of where I’m talking to you from today and you have a cross-section of the entire US.” So how did “biotech’s boy wonder”, as Forbes described him, end up so involved in political questions that he abandoned the company he had founded? Ramaswamy tells me that he spent his first six years at Roivant “laser focused… exclusively on the business of developing drugs. I mean, I was a molecular biology undergrad. I was a biotech investor for seven years”. However, by the start of last year, Ramaswamy found himself consumed by social, not just biomedical questions, and an “itch” to not “just describe the world as it is, but to describe the world as it should be. To offer a competing vision for the world as it should be. We developed a number of medicines [for cancer], but I grew more interested with what I saw as a cultural cancer that no medicine was going to address, one that would require a cultural and societal thoughtfulness that was lacking and that I felt I had something to add to. I quickly discovered that I couldn’t do both of those things at the same time”. The sense that something had gone wrong in the intersection of capitalism and politics had been brewing for a while. Ramaswamy had watched with unease as the Government bailed out banks in 2008, and then as those banks, instructed to repay the taxpayer, actually ended up using “a sizeable chunk of the £11 billion earmarked for ‘consumer relief’” paying vast sums to “nonprofits picked from a list created by the federal government… a lot of them were liberal favourites [that] use their funds for liberal priorities like voter registration and lobbying state, local, and federal government”, he writes in Woke Inc. ‘It’s easier to post a black square on your Instagram account than condemn China’ Ramaswamy writes about spine-chilling instances of corporate wokewashing to distract from serious questions about companies’ business practices. Examples include Unilever positioning itself as “the corporate leader in the fight to empower women” while facing a lawsuit from female Kenyan tea plantation workers “who claimed it had failed to protect them from rape”, or Nike pledging $40 million to “the black community” while flogging trainers to inner city black kids who “can’t afford to buy books from school”. He shows in his book how some of these companies, such as Airbnb, Disney, Marriott and Apple, snuggle up to dictatorships such as China and Saudi Arabia all while trying to indemnify themselves with virtue through the woke racket. To Ramaswamy, it’s a “scam”, plain and simple. “It’s easier to post a black square on your Instagram account [as users did to support the Black Lives Matter movement] than it is to condemn human rights abuses committed against, say, Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province. But when corporations speak out about ‘microaggressions’ in America while staying silent about true ‘macroaggressions’ in places like China, that creates a false moral equivalence and erodes our greatest asset of all – our moral standing on the global stage.” In the wake of the George Floyd murder, a tsunami of businesses, including Delta, Starbucks and Nike, amped up their diversity measures and political interventions. Coke’s post-Floyd edict made it sound “more like that of a Super PAC than a soft drink manufacturer”, he adds. By 2021, the woke rubber had hit the business road with such velocity that Ramaswamy says it left him with no choice. Floyd’s murder made “demands on me as a CEO” to “say things that either were inauthentic… to say the thing that made everyone feel better, which is the carbon copy statement that every other CEO was making in late May or early June 2020”. Staff pressured him to “do more to address systemic racism” and the pressure to publicly support BLM “began to weigh on me”. His doubts only grew. “I joke that BLM stands for Big Lavish Mansions – since that’s apparently how the leadership of the organisation has been spending its money,” he tells me. “I favour ‘All Black Lives Matter’ – BLM’s concern for black lives ends when it comes to doing the actual things we need to do to empower black Americans, such as educational empowerment, advancing family stability, or curbing urban violence.” At the time, despite unease, he wrote a letter to staff urging them to seek support from the company in these difficult times, and caused even more offence, that he was “tone-deaf” and exhibiting his “privilege”. He began to suspect that maintaining his personal integrity was no longer compatible with doing what was best for the company. But “the thing that pushed me over the edge” was the reaction to an article he wrote in The Wall Street Journal, published a week after the Jan 6 2021 Capitol Hill riots, “that reflected some of my views as a citizen and legal scholar”. It argued that Silicon Valley technology companies “co-opted” by Congress to “do through the back door what the government cannot directly accomplish under the constitution” should be treated as state actors. As such, they violated the first amendment in banning certain forms of speech. “That caused three advisers to my company to resign within 48 hours of that piece being published, and to me that was my final wake-up call to make a choice, and so I made that choice.” He couldn’t speak out on issues he now felt were urgent while also doing right by his company. It was a case for his own argument: business and pleasure may mix; business and public politics do not. ‘Corporations prey on the moral insecurities of an entire generation’ The Woke Inc argument, then, is a dual love letter, first to capitalism, and then to democracy, which, as he argues, needs to be protected from capitalism. This makes Ramaswamy’s position sophisticated – too sophisticated for that purist capitalism of the 1980s. Yet at a time when the Right seems to have abandoned any clear defence of the free market at all, I had hoped Ramaswamy might offer it. He does, but not in the old-fashioned way. “If you’re a free marketeer, reciting free market slogans without a willingness to take up that political cause, you are a relic, you are a dinosaur. You are irrelevant, in my view, which is what most of the free marketeer crowd is today. I believe in the free market, in the spirit of the market. That is different from our role as citizens in a democracy. This is the beautiful tension at the heart of the American identity… individualism and liberty, capitalism and democracy. America isn’t one of those things. It is both of those things at once.” How to repair the breach between the two, yanking capitalism back from the heart of democracy? First we need an understanding of how we got here. Ramaswamy argues that in America – though the same can easily be said of Britain –  the passing of much-needed anti-discrimination laws following the 1960s civil rights movement led to a corporate “deep state”, or “deep corporate apparatus”, to make sure those laws were being followed. This entrenched a “managerial class, a sort of politburo, the human resources department and so on” and today, it’s this strata of the workforce that ensures that the mandates of the woke – a post-modern, post-civil rights doctrine – are not only followed but permeate throughout the company. Ramaswamy also thinks that woke ideology emerged in part to serve the psychological needs of elite millennials, including many of his classmates at Harvard and Yale, who wanted to offset their guilt through pat explanations of privilege. In a post-religious, post-duty world, they were also searching for meaning. “I think a lot of corporations prey on the moral insecurities of an entire generation by telling them they could satisfy their moral hunger by going to [super woke] Ben & Jerry’s and ordering a cup of ice cream with a couple of morality sprinkles on top. But the satisfaction that you get from fast food starts to wear off quickly.” And here he turns to solutions. First, to “smoke out lurking state action” and “the laws and legal frameworks that created the conditions for cultural totalitarianism. I think this is as true in the UK as it is in the United States, where many everyday workers, their experience of citizenship, is to have to choose between speaking their minds freely and putting food on the table”. Policy should also be tweaked to recognise political beliefs or expression as a “civil right”, he says. On an individual level, those “everyday workers” need to do two things: bring lawsuits  – Ramaswamy has made numerous legal arguments against woke in the workplace, including arguing that woke counts as a religion and therefore it is illegal to sack those who don’t buy into it  – and “speak freely and without fear”. His most far-out solution is the introduction of national service, rolled out as mandatory “civic service” for all high schoolers in their summer break, which he says would offer “a sense of shared purpose and experience” that will make “better citizens” and “less flimsy capitalists”. Getting pupils to use a portion of their summers teaching or working with charities, the police, fire service or army would, he thinks, bolster a sense of duty to higher things, helping to replace wokeness as a framework for meaningful action and morality. With America riven by terrifying social and political fissures, especially since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade (“in technical terms, it’s clear that Roe v Wade was one of the most poorly reasoned constitutional law cases”), I ask Ramaswamy if he despairs of the country his parents came to 40 years ago. “I think the experience of looking back and saying this was not the country that my parents came to is in some ways… internal to the American experience. Nations don’t die the way that people do. They’re constantly reborn as something else. And we’re in one of those cycles of reincarnation now. The fact that we’re free and able to recognise that is actually part of what leaves me optimistic.”"

[Hermit Road]

"I’m partial to a good drag act. From the double entendres of the pantomime dame to the more adult version for ….adults. This extremely recent phenomena of getting hyper-sexualised drag perverts to read books to young children while flashing their crotch, along with the (so extremely perverse that people reading this will think I’m making it up) new practice of getting young children to dress in drag, perform imitation strip shows in gay clubs while being fed money in their clothing from nonces, is so sickening that you would expect it to lead to a long queue of sex cases for the woodchipper but has instead been promoted as morally good with anyone against being labelled a hateful bigot."