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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds
Is this satire? Lefty thinking is shallow and bullying. Corporate capitulation is disgusting. Walmart deserves it.
STEPHEN KRUISER:
“…Our friends on the left, alas, aren’t so carefree and fun-loving. We’ve discussed the permanently aggrieved nature of the modern progressives before. As I am often accused of never having anything nice to say about the other side, let me try something new here: I frequently find myself marveling at their ability to continue to surprise me, especially with their ability to concoct outrage and/or resentment in almost any given situation.
Take, for example, the young women’s rights writer for The Guardian, who finds the Starbucks policy of asking for people’s names a trigger for resentment.
Never mind that she doesn’t even go so Starbucks, which she readily admits at the top of the article. One doesn’t need something as mundane as firsthand experience to take offense to things that aren’t really offensive in the first place:
I do not drink the coffee in Starbucks because it doesn’t taste good. But even if I did, I wouldn’t, for another reason: my name. Because if you’re a half-Turkish, half-Iranian second-generation immigrant like I am, it means you have a name that few can pronounce, and which even your parents can’t agree how to spell. (My father spells it with a Sh, my mother with an Ş. In their defence, they don’t agree on much.)
When your own parents can’t agree on the spelling of your name, and beloved co-workers continue to get it wrong after years of gentle admonishing – well, I’d rather not have to go through the rigmarole of painstakingly spelling it out to a barista.
My daughter has an unusual name — it’s Polish — and she loves Starbucks. Never once have they gotten her name right and never once has she been offended or traumatized by the experience.
Because she was raised by sane people…”
I like Tony Blair. I don’t always agree with him on issues, but he is reasonable. I am surprised that he is anti-brexit. I did not know that. I think it is further evidence of the western elite’s drift. They seem to think that citizens of democratic countries are not capable of deciding issues, only the governing elite can do that. When the citizens decide contrary to elite opinion, you simply redo the vote, over and over, until the citizens decide the issue correctly. I am inclined to agree with his analysis in this case with respect to Jeremy Corbyn. I am saddened to see what an elitist he has become.
Victor Davis Hanson:
“…Most of us who came of age in the 1970s revered the university—even as it was still reeling from 1960s protests and beginning a process that resulted in its present chaos and disrepute.
Americans of the G.I. Bill-era first enshrined the idea of upward mobility through the bachelor’s degree—the assumed gateway to career security—and the positive role of expanding colleges to grow the new suburban middle classes.
Despite student radicalism and demands for reform, professors had been trained in the postwar era by an older breed of prewar scholars and teachers. As stewards they passed on their sense of professionalism about training future scholars and teachers—and just broadly educated citizens. In classics, I remember courses from scholars like British subjects like H.D. Kitto and Michael Grant, who lectured on Sophoclean tragedies or the late Roman emperors as the common inheritance of undergraduates.
Overwhelmingly liberal and often hippish in appearance, American faculty of the early 1970s still only rarely indoctrinated students, or bullied them to mimic their own progressivism. Rather, in both the humanities and sciences, students were taught the inductive method of evaluating evidence in hopes of finding some common explanation of natural and human phenomena…”
