Society's Child
Ricky Gervais calls himself "a lefty liberal champagne socialist," but when he says, "I don't agree that feelings are more important than facts," he echoes Ben Shapiro. The point of intersection: Both men support speaking freely. This quality makes them somewhat courageous, though it shouldn't.
Another commonality is that both tend to elicit a lot of shock and dismay, or at least feigned shock and dismay. Gervais dismisses adverse comments on social media as the scribbles on "every public toilet wall in the world" in an important two-hour conversation that recently appeared on the podcast Making Sense with Sam Harris. Harris is a vigorous defender of the culture of free speech, and his interviews are always penetrating. This is one of his best.
The university publishes and maintains a guide instructing students on how to "reduce bias in language" and offers some tactics for responding to others who use language they find offensive. One of these tactics is to "say 'ouch!'" to others who utter "stereotypes, offensive or biased comments." The university asserts that saying "ouch!" in these situations is an effective tool "simply to convey what was said had a negative impact on you, regardless if it was directed toward you."
The university offered examples of language that may require such a response including phrases like "man and wife" or simply "wives," as well as "mothering. These phrases can supposedly "imply one group dominating over another group." The university suggests instead that students use phrases like "husband and wife," "spouses," and "parenting."
Comment: See also:
- Free speech matters, even when it's not protected by the First Amendment
- The demise of free speech: Truth telling in the shadows
- At odds with conservative pessimism regarding free speech on campus
- California university's speech code threatens to punish students for jokes
- Campus speech codes endangered by Supreme Court trademark ruling according to legal experts
- At University of Illinois, 265 bias complaints last year enforced by literal 'speech police'
A video was submitted to the Free Thought Project this week showing multiple Sacramento cops pull over Rudy Ornelas because his window tint was too dark. Ornelas was respectful and told the officers that he was just pulled over for the same thing and was issued a "fix-it" ticket to remove the tint.
In California, police officers who target people for extortion over window tint have the option of issuing those folks a fix-it ticket. These tickets give the owner of the vehicle a certain time frame in which to correct the supposed violation. Typically, you pay a smaller fee and then prove that you "fixed" the problem, like remove the window tint or fix a broken taillight.
For their unorthodox views, some physicians are being treated as medical heretics. Google's search engine algorithm has essentially ended traffic to their websites.
In Ray Bradbury's classic novel Fahrenheit 451, firemen don't put out fires; they create fires to burn books.
The totalitarians claim noble goals for book burning. They want to spare citizens unhappiness caused by having to sort through conflicting theories.
Comment: See also:
- Every minute 70,000 people Google health questions; alternative medicine content now vanishingly rare
- Google is taking censorship of health websites to the next level
- 'We are moving into a new, controlled society worse than old totalitarianism' - Zizek on Google leak
- Leaked Google documents link holocaust denial, Vatican-alien conspiracy, etc. with vaccine safety questions
- Report: Monsanto paid Google to bury unfavorable news
- 'Algorithms don't write themselves': Google whistleblower on Big Tech merging with politics
Pete Davidson on Monday night berated an audience at the University of Central Florida after some people in the crowd took out their phones.
Davidson was captured on video lambasting the crowd for more than a minute, saying he would leave if they did not act accordingly.
"I don't have to be here," said the Saturday Night Live castmember at the tour stop. "I can just give them their money back because I don't give a fuck."
Comment: It seems like more and more comedians are getting to a point where they've had enough with the PC spoiled brat culture calling them out because they can't take a joke. Davidson wasn't directly addressing the PC outrage, but was telling a bunch of spoiled brats to grow up. It amounts to the same thing.
See also:
- The 'Woke' crowd and the Nuremburg trials of comedy
- The New War on Comedy, and Free Speech, by the Intolerant Left
- Can anyone take a joke? The death of comedy in the age of outrage
- Hateful liberal derangement is killing comedy in the Age of Trump
- Mel Brooks: 'We have become stupidly politically correct, which is the death of comedy'
Three UK beaches have been on alert over a mysterious "toxic sea" incident, The Independent has reported, with emergency services in Essex summoned to Frinton, Walton, and Clacton on Sunday.
An investigation is currently underway after numerous incidents of beachgoers in Essex were reportedly left coughing and struggling to breathe after swimming, as people flocked to the seaside during a record-hot spell of bank holiday weekend weather. Authorities immediately issued a warning to families to stay out of the water.
The construction company set forth on a contract to replace a 46-mile section of border fencing with a taller bollard wall. The project is running from Columbus, New Mexico, to Santa Teresa along the border that separates the state from Chihuahua, Mexico, KVIA, ABC7 reported.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned a lower court's ruling that blocked the use of diverted funds, Breitbart News' Joel Pollak reported in July. The ruling freed approximately $2.5 billion for construction.

Annie Farmer had troubling encounters with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell when she was 16.
According to multiple accounts, Epstein had a network of girls recruiting other victims for his sexual appetite, all under the direction of his long-time 'Madam' and partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell - who remains uncharged and has denied any wrongdoing.
Shaw says the heavily disproportionate incarceration reflects a lack of faith in men, who are then adversely affected by the experience of prison and the social stigma they are forced to carry upon release. And "what leads us to blindly accept that our prisons are full of men?" she asks.
I think it's because we accept as dogma that men are naturally more criminal — particularly more violent — than women, thus they deserve to be incarcerated at higher rates. It's about time we question this assumption.As Shaw points out, men are overrepresented in prisons because they commit more crime than women and because, according to the FBI's statistics, they do so in nearly every category of violent crime. This is especially true when it comes to homicide. The statistics Dr. Shaw herself cites in her article bear this out:
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Global Study on Homicide in 2013, an astonishing 95 percent of homicide perpetrators and 79 percent of homicide victims were male.
This latest poll, conducted by NBC News/Wall Street Journal paints a picture of an angry America. But these Americans aren't angry at one another, they are angry at the political and financial establishment that continues to fleece them in the name of "Freedom."
This anger doesn't stem from Trump either as it's been there since before him.
"Four years ago, we uncovered a deep and boiling anger across the country engulfing our political system," said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, which conducted this survey in partnership with the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies. "Four years later, with a very different political leader in place, that anger remains at the same level."
As NBC points out, the poll finds that 70 percent of Americans say they feel angry "because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington." Forty-three percent say that statement describes them "very well."














Comment: Being offensive in the right context is a comedian's stock in trade. That's what makes them funny. The fact that the 'woke' crowd doesn't understand this, and thus has no sense of humor, could perhaps be the funniest part of all this (if it weren't so dangerous).
See also: