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]

"""Word choices can have many functions apart from direct communication, and an obvious one is to convey the status of the speaker or author"". Never, ever, happens on here - FACT."

[BRANDED]

"On reflection, such confusion was easily predictable — and not just for non-native speakers. The Census asked: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?” Even assuming you successfully parsed its off-putting syntax, a number of serious ambiguities remain. Is a “gender” a grammatical category, a synonym for maleness or femaleness, a set of sociocultural meanings, or a psychological identity? According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, it could be any of these. So, whether or not you “identify with” a gender (or, even more clumsily, have a “gender you identify with”) will partly depend on what you think “gender” is. It also partly depends upon what you think “to identify with” means, since this is hardly an everyday term. And then there’s the awkward fact that, if you are an immigrant without a birth certificate, you may not take yourself to have a “sex registered at birth” at all. One might ask why the statisticians at the ONS got this so wrong, given that one of their main jobs is to design survey questions that don’t invite false positives. By the ONS’s own admission, the trans question was trialled by means of “community testing at LGBT History Month events”, which is a bit like gauging atheists’ understanding of the Catholic Mass by means of community testing at the Vatican. Why didn’t those in charge anticipate that a question couched in obscure genderese might stump noninitiates, even if it would please their Stonewall overlords? The most obvious hypothesis would be that the ONS was cajoled, guilt-tripped, befuddled and emotionally blackmailed into linguistic compliance, like many a fellow national institution before it. Maybe so, but a wider explanation is also available: that those who designed the question didn’t even realise it was couched in obscure genderese. They took their own standards of linguistic apprehension to be universal and binding. This is a tendency that extends well beyond transactivism. Word choices can have many functions apart from direct communication, and an obvious one is to convey the status of the speaker or author. Now that many of us spend our days sitting around scrolling emails and timelines, reading snippets and writing things with our thumbs, word choices are one of the main opportunities to socially signal. Slang, jargon, abbreviations and buzzwords are all ways to imply that you’re in a particular crowd. Belonging also requires knowing what words not to use. As social animals, we can’t help but practise what linguistics expert Deborah Cameron calls “verbal hygiene”: trying to purify language of socially problematic word choices. If you’re a well-off Tory, you’ll want to avoid terms such as “toilet”, “lounge” and “settee”. If you’re a well-off Lefty, you’ll want to avoid phrases such as “ladies and gentlemen”, “cancel culture” and “lab leak”. The Right dislikes grammatical solecisms, especially when committed by Angela Rayner; the Left is much more concerned with moral solecisms. Either way, though, it’s at least partly a way of indicating who’s in and who’s out. Many of us practise verbal hygiene simply in order to have an easier life. Some enjoy throwing the rulebook at others as a means of social control. Still more hubristic individuals — usually with PhDs — try to rewrite the rules altogether, inventing new lexical standards out of the blue and then associating any deviance from them with a suspect character. In certain circles, serious disagreement about meaning is cast as linguistic violence, and semantic power grabs are attributed to everyone but oneself. They want to “create divides” ,“police” categories and “colonise” minds and vocabularies. We are simply building a better world from our book-lined offices, one enforced redefinition at a time. https://unherd.com/2023/04/how-the-trans-census-fooled-britain/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=fd5d71c105&mc_eid=bfcce9fb42"

[BRANDED]

"Last weekend brought surprising news: an unprecedented spike in the number of West Ham fans identifying as trans. According to the 2021 Census, the London borough of Newham has the highest proportion of trans people in England and Wales, coming in at a staggering 1.5%. Meanwhile, the “trans-friendly” city of Brighton and Hove languishes in the rankings at a lowly 20th, a bit like the UK at Eurovision. Marvellous as it is to imagine the Cockney heartlands full of Paris Is Burning re-enactments, a more plausible explanation is that many of those Newhamites answering “yes” to the trans question didn’t understand what they were saying. Newham, after all, has relatively high numbers of immigrants and non-English speakers; and as an investigation by academic Michael Biggs has revealed, the strongest predictor of trans identification within a local authority is the proportion of people whose main language is not English. Once this was pointed out, the Office for National Statistics acknowledged it was “possible” that respondents misinterpreted the question, and confirmed it would investigate the findings."

[BRANDED]

"Last weekend brought surprising news: an unprecedented spike in the number of West Ham fans identifying as trans. According to the 2021 Census, the London borough of Newham has the highest proportion of trans people in England and Wales, coming in at a staggering 1.5%. Meanwhile, the “trans-friendly” city of Brighton and Hove languishes in the rankings at a lowly 20th, a bit like the UK at Eurovision. Marvellous as it is to imagine the Cockney heartlands full of Paris Is Burning re-enactments, a more plausible explanation is that many of those Newhamites answering “yes” to the trans question didn’t understand what they were saying. Newham, after all, has relatively high numbers of immigrants and non-English speakers; and as an investigation by academic Michael Biggs has revealed, the strongest predictor of trans identification within a local authority is the proportion of people whose main language is not English. Once this was pointed out, the Office for National Statistics acknowledged it was “possible” that respondents misinterpreted the question, and confirmed it would investigate the findings."

[The Ghost of Sven]

"Understand Mrs Gollywogs husband is the licensee & he is away at their holiday home at the moment ""Ryley denied that she or her husband were racist. “I’m not a racist in any form.” She confirmed that her husband had been photographed in a T-shirt from the far-right group Britain First. She said: “I don’t think Chris is a supporter of Britain First, he was just wearing that shirt because it was convenient at the time.” HA HA HA HA"

[joe royal]

Looks like some bacon pulled the race card and got trumped: https://amp.lbc.co.uk/news/laughing-at-someone-falling-over-work-not-harassment-judge-rules/

[arsene york-hunt]

MO Golliwog's Cakewalk

[Mike Oxsaw]

"Didn't Debussy have a premonition of this when he wrote the piece ""Golliwogg's Stake Out"" in 1908? Bet he loved (LOVED) marmalade, too. Like Sock, I recall the collecting of Robinson's marmalade labels and sending off for the badges. I also had a golliwog doll when I was young (and am lucky that very fact alone didn't force me into becoming a racist ladyboy when I grew up)."

[riosleftsock]

"Used to love the Robinson's Gollywogs, we used to collect the labels off the jars and send off to get our enamel badges and a cuddly gollywog that was always in my bedroom. Its a shame how these fucktards ruin everything. Everything Woke turns to shit. As a wise man once said."

[ray winstone]

"Used to go to The White Hart in Grays on a Sunday night many years ago to watch a great duo called Mick & Kiwi, fucking immigrant."

[eswing hammer]

"The landlady of that pub , The White Hart in Grays has put a load more up , l wonder what their response will be after Suella Braverman was said to be furious at the waste of police time and resources and that they should be focusing on real crime . Fantastic !"

[eswing hammer]

"The landlady of that pub , The White Hart in Grays has put a load more up , l wonder what their response will be after Suella Braverman was said to be furious at the waste of police time and resources and that they should be focusing on real crime . Fantastic !"

[BRANDED]

"""Maybe they should report a hate crime and 6 would turn up"" Good thinking, might do that with the car stealing nonsense around here."

[twoleftfeet]

"Essex police sent 6 offices to remove 15 golliwog teddie bears from a pub in Grays. 6 police offices, 6!!!!! My friend owns a garage and the police won't send anyone even if they have the suspect on the premises. Maybe they should report a hate crime and 6 would turn up."

[Nurse Ratched]

"What's the world coming to, with all this wokeness, when an Earth-based diety can't even get his tongue sucked in peace by a little boy? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/dalai-lama-apologises-kissing-boy-suck-his-tongue-video"

[goose]

The levels of violent crime in SF appear to be going through the roof!

[Manuel]

"Did anyone know of this young fella, murdered for nothing by the looks of it, obviously extremely wealthy and a father. What a waste. The founder of multibillion-dollar tech company Cash App, Bob Lee, was fatally stabbed near San Francisco city centre on Tuesday, his family has said. Police found a 43-year-old man with stab wounds and treated him before he later died in hospital. His father, Rick Lee, confirmed his son - who was also the ex-chief technology officer at Square - had been killed. San Francisco officials have been criticised for their response to a wave of violent crime in recent years. The latest crime data suggests the city is one of the most-dangerous in the US. 'I lost my best friend' Police officers responded to reports of the stabbing on Tuesday at around 02:35 local time (10:35 BST). The San Francisco Standard viewed CCTV footage that shows Mr Lee walking down a deserted alleyway, seemingly looking for help. Mr Lee is seen stumbling towards a parked car and lifting up his shirt to reveal his wound, but the vehicle drives off before the tech entrepreneur falls to the ground. Police found Mr Lee unconscious in the Rincon Hill neighbourhood with two stab wounds to his chest, and started to administer aid before rushing him to hospital, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Mr Lee's father posted a message on Facebook on Wednesday saying: ""I just lost my best friend, my son Bob Lee when he lost his life on the street in San Francisco early Tuesday morning."" Mr Lee was living in Miami, Florida, but he was visiting San Francisco for a leadership summit and was staying on to see friends, according to BBC's US partner, CBS News. Tim Oliver Lee, Mr Lee's brother, also posted on Facebook: ""He really was the best of us. I was so fortunate to grow up with him, and I feel like I've lost part of myself."" At his time of death, Mr Lee was the chief product officer of the cryptocurrency company MobileCoin. ""He was a generous decent human being who didn't deserve to be killed,"" said Bill Barhydt, CEO of Abra, a cryptocurrency company, on Twitter, noting that Mr Lee also was a father. Cash App is a smartphone-based payment app that allows person-to-person money transfers and is now worth $40bn (£32bn), according to Forbes."

[BRANDED]

"The playwright Martin McDonagh has said theatres have refused to revive his work because he would not allow changes to the language. He blames ""petty outrage"" for some venues wanting to make his plays more ""palatable"". It is a ""major problem"", he told BBC Radio 4's Today, and a ""dangerous place"" for writers. McDonagh's film The Banshees of Inisherin was nominated for nine Oscars earlier this year. His 2003 play The Pillowman, which concerns a writer imprisoned by a totalitarian state, is being revived in June on London's West End starring Steve Pemberton and Lily Allen. The free speech charity PEN International has launched a partnership with the production to support ""many of the values we promote such as the need for tolerance, critical thinking and informed debate""."

[Hermit Road]

"True, what’s that got to do with the price of cod?"

[BRANDED]

Women have always loved an unthreatening poofy bloke however he likes to present himself. They don't like rapey ones so much.

[Mike Oxsaw]

"The Mail Online reminds me of a weekly periodical that was circulating in the 1960s called ""Reveille"". The content, gravity of said content and the relevance to the week's news stories are about the same level - as are the pictures of scantily clad women plastered all over the place for...err...err... so the women readers can keep up with the latest (man-attracting) fashions."

[Hermit Road]

"bruuuno 2:28 Thu Apr 6 There's a lot of truth in this. There is also the completely inconsistent line of people like JK Rowling who want to go along with the trans ideology exactly until it reaches the point when she doesn't want to go along with it. She will happily use a trans person's chosen pronouns and then raise the fence when the logical extension of that is for the newfound 'she ' to be treated as a she. Then you have the vast majority of women in my experience who are fully on board with this nonsense. I am giving less of a shit about men taking women's rights mainly because if women aren't going to stand against it, why should I. I sympathise with the minority who do but they are a small minority. I won't use a person's chosen pronouns because I will not be coerced into their lie. If they want to lie to themselves and society, so be it, I don't have to go along with the deceit. As for this Dylan geezer, he makes me chuckle a bit and is only able to make a fortune advertising women's products because millions of women warm to him doing it"

[SurfaceAgentX2Zero]

"FO Yes, I agree with all that, especially your identification of the Mail's main readership. I think what I meant by 'unconscious' is that the Mail's younger journalists and subbies will have been infected with this guff and will have used 'feminists' instead of 'women' without even thinking about the distinction. The Mail Online is barely even a news site any more. It's all articles about Tommy Fury and Love Island as far as I can see. Indistinguishable from The Sun."

[Lee Trundle]

"I've been watching a couple of Matt Walsh's videos on YouTube, where all he asks to shims is ""What is a woman?"" Pretty much every single reply of theirs is ""A woman is someone who identifies themselves as a woman"". They never explain or describe what, in their head, a woman actually is. These weirdos literally have no idea what they're trying to identify themselves as."

[Lee Trundle]

"I've been watching a couple of Matt Walsh's videos on YouTube, where all he asks to shims is ""What is a woman?"" Pretty much every single reply of theirs is ""A woman is someone who identifies themselves as a woman"". They never explain or describe what, in their head, a woman actually is. These weirdos literally have no idea what they're trying to identify themselves as."