Lifting the Veil of Political Correctness

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Americans are becoming aware of new behavioral and speech standards they must now observe or risk losing jobs, losing careers, receiving punitive penalties, and even losing their freedom.

Today thought crimes are being considered for possible prosecution and our First Lady encourages college students to spy on their parents and report incorrect actions and speech.

What is this totalitarianism we have encroaching on our freedom? It is called “Political Correctness” and its roots follow a progression of Marxist Theory.

Many of us laugh at the presumptions of political correctness; especially since the phrase originated in a comic strip and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious; actually, it’s deadly serious.

“Uncommon Differences”, The Lion and the Unicorn Journal

The term “politically correct” was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.

It is the great antithesis of freedom and it spreads like a disease; a disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, Eurasia, Russia, and China. A disease of ideology, political correctness is not funny: political correctness is a deadly plague being unleashed on Western culture.

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Examine political correctness analytically and historically, and it becomes obvious, political correctness is Cultural Marxism and Cultural Marxism is the product of expressing the economic theory of Marxism as a cultural theory or the rationalization of why the European proletariat of the WW I era went to war instead of overthrowing the capitalists of Europe. It is not a bastard child of the 60’s hippie culture and the peace movement, this deformed evil child was born as a result of explaining why Marx’s theory was wrong about World War I.

During the mid-19th Century, Karl Marx predicted, in his “Communist Manifesto”, a violent international worker’s revolution, led by the proletariat, if a major war broke out in Europe. Pre-1914 Marxist theory maintained that workers from different countries would reject the war and work together to overthrow capitalism in the industrialized countries of Europe and replace it with International Socialism.

When the workers of Europe marched with nationalistic pride to the trenches, instead of revolting against Capitalism, Marxist intellectuals were bewildered. Marxist Theory was incapable of being wrong; consequently, there had to be some other problem that wasn’t readily apparent. His disciples were desperate to find an excuse for the failure; Cultural Marxism became the rationalization and during the 60’s Cultural Marxism began to evolve into American Political Correctness. Slowly, this new Political Correctness eroded traditional Western values until society confronted the Age of Obama and political correctness became a malignancy, eating away at the heart of traditional Western Culture and our freedoms.

There was a ray of hope and excitement, when the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia, but why didn’t the workers of Europe follow the Bolshevik example?

Why were the workers of Europe fighting each other instead of the capitalists of the world?

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After the Armistice, two Marxist intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, developed similar rationalizations independently, at the same time.

Gramsci an Italian Communist, was arrested during the Fascist reign of Mussolini, in 1926. He was sentenced to twenty years for an alleged plot to assassinate Mussolini. During the trial, when Gramsci was arguing convincingly of his innocence, the prosecutor countered: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years.”

A weak man with deformities, Gramsci died in prison, but while serving his sentence, he clandestinely wrote “Prison Notebooks” and had his writings smuggled out of prison. The book is basically a tome instructing dedicated Marxists to alter the means or strategy they employ to achieve the Socialist/Marxist Utopia in Western countries. He described and advanced the term hegemony; a term popularized by other Marxists.

Wikipedia:

Hegemony (UK /hɨˈɡɛməni/ or /ˈhɨdʒɛməni/, US /hɨˈdʒɛməni/ or /ˈhɨdʒɛmoʊni/; Greek: ἡγεμονία hēgemonía, “leadership, rule”) is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others.[1][2][3][4] In Ancient Greece (8th century BCE – 6th century CE), hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states.[5] The dominant state is known as the hegemon.[6]

In the 19th century, hegemony came to denote the “Social or cultural predominance or ascendancy; predominance by one group within a society or milieu”. Later, it could be used to mean “a group or regime which exerts undue influence within a society.” Also, it could be used for the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country over others; from which was derived hegemonism, as in the idea that the Great Powers meant to establish European hegemony over Asia and Africa.

The Marxist theory of cultural hegemony, associated particularly with Antonio Gramsci, is the idea that the ruling class can manipulate the value system and mores of a society, so that their view becomes the world view (Weltanschauung): in Terry Eagleton’s words, “Gramsci normally uses the word hegemony to mean the ways in which a governing power wins consent to its rule from those it subjugates”.[9] In contrast to authoritarian rule, cultural hegemony “is hegemonic only if those affected by it also consent to and struggle over its common sense”.

Gramsci maintained that capitalism allowed the bourgeoisie absolute power; consequently, the working classes were dominated by the bourgeoisie, thus affecting their aspirations and identity.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/51DhvS9abyI[/youtube]

He stressed the need for the working class to develop its own culture and morality, and maintained that the oppressed and the intellectuals must identify with the proletariat to destroy the hegemony of the ruling elite.

Noam Chomsky describes Global Hegemony and the new elites who control our current elections and government. The audience doesn’t receive the Leftist pablum they were expecting.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/iebK7VVDayY [/youtube]

The dominance of the banking industry has produced our bourgeoisie or as Noam Chomsky refers to them, “Masters of the Universe”, i.e. Goldman Sachs and others, who control our elections and our politicians. They have gained more than a threshold of absolute power and with the unfailing support of the media complex, they intend to maintain control by using the strategy of the Cultural Marxist, Political Correctness. Our so-called Capitalist Free Market government has taken this bloody tool of Marxism and has turned it upon the workers to maintain control, and our own freedom-loving countrymen unwittingly make the daily effort to obey the tenets of political correctness and subjugate themselves to be the dupes of our elite bourgeoisie, while the ‘Masters of the Universe” obtain unimaginable wealth and rob the middle class of their wealth, their freedoms, and their future.

Gramsci stated that it depends on the coercion of the masses and resistance against this coercion, whether and when it will result in an application of force. Thus an equilibrium between consent and the application of state violence or force takes the form of corruption.

Gramsci wrote:
(… it is difficult to exercise the hegemonic function while the use of force presents too many dangers); that is, the procurement of the antagonist’s or antagonists’ debilitation and paralysis by buying, covertly under normal circumstances, openly in the case of anticipated dangers – their leaders in order to create confusion and disorder among the antagonist ranks.

Gramsci was well versed in history, popular literature, the ideas of intellectuals, Machiavelli, and the Italian Risorgimento (the overthrow of repressive regimes within Italy as a result of the Napoleonic Wars and the reorganization of Italy into a complete modern state).

Culture is redefined in Gramsci’s writing: culture and socialism come together, creating an environment for freedom of thought. Capitalism tends to alienate the working classes from culture, but Gramsci saw each person as a philosopher through participation in culture and through the medium of language. Socialism should embrace culture to nurture intellectuals, provide political education to the workers and further advance the struggle for freedom.

Gramsci defined the distinction between the illusion of justice and the truth of justice. The image justice creates is decadent; an outward flourish of concern, concealing the abuse of power.

Describing the historical insurrections of Europe, Gramsci maintained that modern states exist in an equilibrium. The bourgeoisie remains in power, when the proletariat finds the system flexible enough. Acquisition of power transforms the essence of power differently for the various social classes. The productive classes normally define politics in the traditional sense: the intellectual defines politics as a continuum of rationality. It is these differences in philosophical idealism that can be explained in terms of historic relations. The relevance of history, revolution, and political theory may be used to discern our immediate realm. A consciousness of history is required to create the present. Understanding the past is necessary to interpret our analysis of the present. Breaking the link between the past and the present leaves man unable to comprehend the processes of perception, extension, and revival.

Gramsci’s Cultural Revolution was not to take place through violence, but by education, and through the gradual erosion of the fundamental ideas that undergird western capitalistic societies.  Gramsci and others described a new form of “Social Research”.  The ideas and concepts of traditional Western Culture would come under attack: the family, marriage, religiosity and sexual norms, and many others. The goal was to destroy the traditions of western societies to achieve the non-violent revolution.  Gramsci, was not alone in describing the tactic for destroying Western Culture and in disseminating Cultural Marxism, but he laid the pathway.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/3rsJOsXm6ew[/youtube]

It was Lukacs, considered the most brilliant Marxist since the drunken Karl Marx himself, who said, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” Lukacs, like Gamsci wrote that the great obstacle to a Marxist Utopia is Western civilization.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/CvfogDIU2m8[/youtube]

Lucaks had the chance to test his theory in 1919, when the Hungarian Bolshevik party, Bela Kun, gained control. Lucaks was appointed deputy Commissar for Culture. He immediately introduced sex education into the Hungarian public school curriculum and almost single handedly lost the support of the Hungarian public for the short-lived Bela Kun Communist Party of Hungary.

In 1923, a think tank was initiated and later endowed as an institute, associated with Frankfort University in Germany, by Felix Weil, the wealthy son of a millionaire trader. Converting economic Marxism into Cultural Marxism became the primary goal of the institute. The original name of the institute was the Institute for Marxism, but the intellectuals decided it would be an advantage not to identify themselves as Communists and the institute became the Institute of Social Research. Political Correctness would not be so readily accepted by dupes, fools, and Useful Idiots, if they realized it was a form of Marxism.

Eventually, the institute became the even more innocuous Frankfort School.

Max Horkheimer, considered a renegade Marxist because of infusing Freud into the theory of Marxism, became the director of the Institute in 1930. Moscow declared the Frankfort School academics to be heretics, but Horkheimer managed to describe the evolution of Classical Marxism Marxism to Cultural Marxism and infused them with Freudian Theory. This matrix became known as Critical Theory and inspired radical feminism, women’s studies, gay studies, and black studies.

Of course, the theory lies in the methodology to bring down Western Culture by criticism. They have no alternatives; their argument is that they live under repression and no one can visualize a free society while living under the oppression of capitalism. Critical Theory champions victimology with Freudian Theory through unrelenting criticism.

There were several other members of the Frankfort School who became well-known heroes of the Left: Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce the sexual element into Political Correctness. Marcuse led interference with his unique societal concept of ‘polymorphous perversity’ his view of the future and he was writing of the need for sexual liberation. Fromm was writing of how masculinity and femininity were not reflections of essential sexual differences, as described by the Romantics, but merely differences in biological functions, in part determined by society. Sex and sexual differences are constructs of society.

We must remember the era and the concurrent rise of the the National Socialists. All of the Frankfurt School members were Marxists and they were all Jews. The Nazis gained control in 1933 and the Frankfurt School was closed. The members fled to New York and the Frankfurt School was reestablished with help from Columbia University in 1933. The focus of the Frankfurt School shifted from Critical Theory and destruction of German culture to Critical Theory and destruction of American society.

After the advent of WW II, some of these intellectuals started working for the government. Herbert Marcuse became a prominent figure in the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, and others, including Horkheimer and Adorno begin working in Hollywood.

The student unrest of the 60’s and the Vietnam War allowed a quantum leap for the Frankfurt School’s strategies of Critical Theory and Political Correctness. The Frankfurt School provided the logic behind draft resistance. Das Kapital was beyond the grasp of the majority of students, but Marcuse provided the impetus for the student rebellion in the form of a book that could be read and understood by intellectual lightweights, “Eros and Civilization”. This book became the bible of the SDS and other reactionary groups. It is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but it is covertly based on Marx. The citizen is repressed and plagued with neuroses and other problems because his sexuality is repressed. The libido and eros must be liberated if we are to realize a utopia in the future.; destroy the oppression and we exist in a world of “polymorphous perversity” where you can “Do your own thing,” without the need to work, and play as much as you want.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/2pzfy2izu44[/youtube]

Make Love Not War

The Baby Boomer generation was coddled and pampered by a generation that had lived through the horror of WW II. They were never supposed to worry about anything and grow up to college educated, and prepared to step into the corporate world, but a wrench was thrown into the gears and they raised a generation led by lazy malcontents and skim milk revolutionaries.

Marcuse appealed to those who were willing to shake off their pampered upbringing and adopt the persona of the homeless hippie: “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good, do it,” and “Make love not War” (Marcuse’s personal contribution) became the mantras for those who were incapable of reading Marx and gullible enough to follow Marcuse. Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance of anything from the Right and complete acceptance of everything from the Left.

We are currently experiencing Obama’s transformation of America into an ideological totalitarian state. Political Correctness has become a governing factor as the Useful Idiots of the Left and the government directed media chastise anyone who speaks out against any of the causes of the Left. We can no longer laugh off Political Correctness as the silliness of effete Liberals or Communists who call themselves Progressives; Political Correction was responsible for the deaths of millions in Russia, China, and Italy, but the prepared Marxists have an answer to these tragedies, their leaders were “imperfect Communists”; unfortunately, the millions who were killed, under the guise of Political Correctness, will find little solace in this meaningless rationalization that hardly qualifies as a platitude.

Educational institutions have become the vehicles of indoctrination of
the orthodoxy of the cultural Marxists; the imposition of Marxist thought and behavior with the student accepting totalitarianism unknowingly and becoming a useful Idiot of the Marxists. Today in America, Marxists have recruited tens of millions of Marxists who struggle daily to become more politically correct and even more tragic, we have teachers who take their indoctrination of students through political correctness as a serious duty without the slightest clue that they are Marxist revolutionaries.

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General George Casey, America’s Top Army Officer

“Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,” Casey said.

Epilogue: Saul Alinsky, the political hero of both Obama and Hillary Clinton wrote the play book or strategy to implement Cultural Marxism, “Rules for Radicals”. His strategy is being used without resistance because our politicians and the public is afraid to speak out with the truth.

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Excellent presentation of a movement that has become so broad and pervasive that our media neither grasps it, nor reacts to it. Well done, Skook.

PC and liberalism is founded in self-hatred. It seeks to destroy a way of life is does not understand, while having no moral foundation, so it squirms — an amorphous sludge with no guiding light. All it is capable of is the destruction of lives — leading to America’s ruin . . . as evidenced in cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, etc., etc.

Yes Skook it is true, the whole world as you knew it is crumbling before your eye. Americans have chosen a different direction one that does not meet your approval.
But at least you have see that we are now becoming serfs to our Goldman Sachs/Koch/Walton overlords who are awash in so much money ( but don’t try and tax it !) that in the Koch instance their yearly increase in wealth +- 10 billion is 3 times the amount that BOTH political parties may spend on the 2016 POTUS election.
Does your new political consciousness come because of the drought in CA and its effect on farming ?

Great read, and it’s easy to see why Herbert Marcuse was so despised by Ayn Rand.

You’ve made it easier for me to understand why all these deaths of Christians, Africans and Muslims just don’t faze Obama at all.
He is more than willing, like his commie predecessors, to break more than a few eggs to make his omelet of transformed America.

What you disparagingly call “cultural Marxism” has been a blessing. It has allowed gays, ethnic minorities and other oppressed groups in American society to reach out for their rights.

And your presentation of America as a place where people aren’t allowed to criticize certain things without losing their jobs or even their freedom is just wrong. Try living in China, and you will understand what censorship means.

@jixiang: Try refusing to bake a wedding cake for homosexuals.

Cultural Mariam was defined by the leading Communist intellectuals of the Twentieth Century. I assume you read the article.

The “Implicit Association Test” is a simple task that helps illuminate various biases our subconscious minds harbor. Many such tests are available online:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html

The basic IAT works as follows:
1) Two categories are placed on the right side of the screen and 2 are placed on the left side of the screen,
2) A series of words and pictures, each belonging to one of those categories, is flashed in the middle of the screen.
3) The program measures how much time it takes the participant to put a word or picture into the correct category (by pressing the “I” key to put it in a category on the right and “E” for a category on the left).

I’ve long been aware of these tests, but hadn’t ever tried them. In preparing to respond to this artical, I just took the “Race IAT”. In this variation, the flashed words are either “Good” words (like Happy, Laughter, Glorious, Friendly, etc) or “Bad” words (Evil, Nasty, Horrible, etc) and the flashed pictures are photos of either white or black faces.

In the first round, the “White” and “Good” categories were on the left hand side of the screen, and “Black” and “Bad” categories were on the right hand side. As words/photos began appearing, I found categorizing them to be pretty easy. In fact, once I got a rhythm going, I was going so fast that my fingers seemed to hit the correct keys before I even consciously registered what picture/word had been flashed.

However, the next round was different. The setup was almost identical, but there was a night and day difference in my performance. In this next round, the only change was that “White” and “Bad” were on the left, and “Black” and “Good” were on the right. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t have the hardest time doing what had just been so easy for the first round. I could quickly discern the photos as black/white, but kept forgetting which side each category was on. I’d stare at a word like “Glorious” and could almost feel the slow/grinding cogs of my consciously mind “Ok, yeah, that’s a “good” word… and “good” is … oh, yeah, over on the right, which means I press… E!”.

Over all 4 rounds, this pattern held: Give me one key to categorize “white” and “good” and another for “black” and “bad”… piece of cake. But force me to use one key for “white” and “bad” and the other for “black” and “good”? We’re talking full-on mental gridlock. My final score was “Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American.” but I really didn’t need the score to sense what was going on in my brain.

What, you may be asking, does this have to do with Skook’s article?

Here’s the thing: I never asked to be racist and I don’t want to be racist. In fact, consciously at least, I do my damnedest be as not-racist as I humanly can. I also didn’t ask to be raised in a white-washed community or by “I’m not racist I just tell it like it is” parents”. But I was. And because I was so-raised, and because my brain is an artifact of its upbringing; quite evidently, my brain has a strong knack for associating black faces with bad/negative connotations (and gets all kinds of confused when challenged to associate them with good/positive connotation).

To my mind, and to my values, this is a problem. And it’s not just my problem – research shows the vast majority of people raised in the US have the same conditioned bias against blacks. Worse, follow-up tests show that people’s IAT-bias scores are strongly correlated with their real-world assessment of and treatment of others. People with scores like mine are more likely to:
* give higher ratings to resumes with white names than to identical resumes with black names
* find suspects more likely to be guilty than not in mock trials, when told in advance the suspect was black vs white
* consider identical excuses for late assignments more plausible when coming from white students than when coming from black students

It does not take much to connect the dots:
* Something in our culture is establishing and reinforcing this mental conditioning
* This mental conditioning (if unchecked) causes us as individuals to give preferential treatment to whites than to blacks. Specifically, we are more inclined to reward people’s positive characteristics and less inclined to condemn their negative characteristics if they are white vs if they are black.
* When almost everyone in a society is biased in that way, the cumulative effect is going to play a huge role in the chances at success for any given white individual vs. a black individual (even given otherwise identical character and behavior).

You may call this “Useful Idiot” thinking, but I think this is a problem we need to fix. I don’t our society to be the kind which allows such systematic injustice to flourish. And I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that swapping derogatory racist jokes over the family dinner table makes the problem worse (yes, even if it’s “tactfully” done only when all the black people are out of ear-shot).

Will my “not telling racist jokes” fix my personal conditioning? Of course not. Will my socially-awkward and ill-received mandate that friends/relatives of mine not make racist jokes in my (or my children’s) presence fix it? Again, of course not. But you’d have to be some kind of idiot to suggest that it isn’t a step in the right direction.

I would fight alongside the most racists asshole on the planet to be able to spout out whatever racist tirade he’d choose, should there ever be a hint of state-based sanctions against his speech. I feel the best way to counter hate-speech is with more (anti-hate) speech… whether spoken with words against bigotry, wallets that don’t buy from bigots, or full-on disassociation from hateful bigots. Plus, as an atheist, I’m LOATHE to trust our government with any power to sanction people for opinions they express… incredibly, we STILL have anti-blasphemy laws in some states.

What I hear a lot of from conservatives has an air of hypocrisy. Their wailing out about the horrors of evolving social norms (aka Political Correctness) strikes me as whiny complaints that there are social ramifications for voicing opinions that a lot of other people deem hurtful/harmful. The hypocrisy lies in how they clamor for free speech for themselves, wanting the freedom to spout off whatever follow-up to “A black guy walks into a bar…” strikes them as most amusing. But what they seem not to want is the same freedom of speech for those around them. To the conservative, telling the racist joke is free speech. But responding to a racist joke with “Wow, that’s a shitty thing to say.” is different. To the conservative, giving a negative response to a racist slur or sexist joke is not simply somebody *else* exercising *their* free speech. Heavens no! Those responses are persecution! They’re creating an ideological tyranny! They’re establishing Cultural Marxism! They’re doing nothing short of feeding the amorphous monster called “Political Correctness”, a monster that has killed millions before and will certainly do so again!

Anyway, as I said, I don’t think curtailing racist jokes is *THE* fix for racial problems. It’s more akin to wiping away the coat of dirt on the windshield of a broken-down 67 Chevy Impala you intend to restore. No, that alone won’t restore the car, but it’s as good a place as anywhere to start.

To that end, once I tracked down Michelle Obama’s actual words, I found myself nodding in agreement; most of her advice seemed right up the same alley (i.e., “you want to fix this car up? why not start by wiping the dirt off the windshield?”).

“Maybe that starts simply in your own family, when grandpa tells that off-colored joke at Thanksgiving, or you’ve got an aunt [that] talks about ‘those people,’” she said. “Well, you can politely inform them that they’re talking about your friends. Or maybe it’s when you go off to college and you decide to join a sorority or fraternity, and you ask the question, how can we get more diversity in our next pledge class?” she added. “Or maybe it’s years from now, when you’re on the job and you’re the one who asks, do we really have all the voices and viewpoints we need at this table? But no matter what you do, the point is to never be afraid to talk about these issues, particularly the issue of race.”

Spot on. Seems like great advice. I’d grow about 2 feet taller if I saw my kid interrupt a racist joke with, “Hey. You’re talking about my friends with that joke.”

Skookum, I’m okay with you taking issue with Obama’s advice; maybe you think kids ought to sit in respectful silence as “Uncle Jeb” tells his favorite racist jokes at the dinner table. I’d be happy to have that debate. But honestly, this paragraph of yours is so detached from her actual words that I’m hard-pressed to see it as anything but a straight-up lie:

Today thought crimes are being considered for possible prosecution and our First Lady encourages college students to spy on their parents and report incorrect actions and speech.

??? Where did Michelle Obama request that the students “report” these things? To whom were they told to report? Are we talking about the same speech here?

@Kevin Kirkpatrick: Kevin, here’s the trouble with your test:

In the first round, the “White” and “Good” categories were on the left hand side of the screen, and “Black” and “Bad” categories were on the right hand side. As words/photos began appearing, I found categorizing them to be pretty easy. In fact, once I got a rhythm going, I was going so fast that my fingers seemed to hit the correct keys before I even consciously registered what picture/word had been flashed.

Change what happens in the first round and you never reach these conclusions that you’re a ”racist.”
START with Black & Good on one side while White & Bad are on the opposite side and you train yourself to get correct picks quickly just as you did.
BUT then change it around and your training stands in your way.
It has nothing to do with racism.

@Nanny

Good point. From the FAQ:

Could the result be a function of the order in which I did the two parts?
This is a very common question. The answer is yes, the order in which you take the test does have some influence on your overall results. However, the difference is very small. So if you first pair gay people + bad and then pair gay people + good, your results might be a just a tiny bit more negative than they would be if you had done the reverse pairing first. One way that we try to minimize this order effect is by giving more practice trials before the second pairing than we did before the first pairing. It is also important to know that each participant is randomly assigned to an order, so half of test-takers complete gay people + bad and then gay people + good, and the other half of test-takers get the opposite order.

Which makes sense – it’d be pretty easy to set up a test for this effect, i.e. using neutral-category tasks (i.e. state vs city names & dog vs cat photos) to measure the influence of learning the first pairing on performance with the second pairing. Presumably, this has been done and found to be negligible and accounted for by giving sufficient “practice” on whichever pairing comes second.

Of course, one could still argue that perhaps such neutral pairings are more easily learned/unlearned/relearned than the tested pairings like race/gender/sexuality. So, far more compelling to me is the simple fact that participants are randomly assigned the order in which they receive the pairings when tested. Given that these tests have been administered to millions of people, even the faintest effect of pairing-order would stand out (a coin with just a 1% bias toward heads would show a statistically significant & measurable effect after a few thousand tosses).

NannyG says the following:
“He is more than willing, like his commie predecessors, to break more than a few eggs to make his omelet of transformed America.”

She is dead on on this assessment as is Skook in his epilogue.

Th Alinsky rules are being followed almost verbatim by this President and far to many on both the right and left, protected by a compromised media and yes, all under the veil of “Political Correctness”.

For what it’s worth, my slant on Political Correctness is simple. Political correctness in its entirety is simply another avenue that leads to exactly what Kruschev said all those years ago. “We will bury you. We will bury you from within” Political correctness is in fact a simple Alinsky tool that in the end is meant to take away the freedom of thought and more from the individual and mold his or her mind to accept the thoughts of the collective. It is everything our fore fathers fought against and worse.

Another great read Skook. Well researched and full of the one thing liberals and worse are afraid of the most, facts!

The other shoe is dropping on churches that prefer not to perform same-sex weddings.
This is odd because many of these same churches have refused to wed pregnant women on their property.
But insurers are refusing to cover any costs IF any church gets sued for not performing a same-sex marriage on their property!
http://c6.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/French%2C%202015-7-9.pdf

http://www.brotherhoodmutual.com/index.cfm/resources/legalassistance/legalqanda/questions/us-supreme-courts-decision-regarding-same-sex-marriage/

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420928/churches-gay-marriage-insurance

Jesus was right.
His word is a sword that divides off the believer from the unbeliever.
Soon, we will see which churches are willing to take the loss of all things for the Christ and which ones will compromise and follow the devil by tickling the ears of their followers and performing same-sex weddings just for the tax-free money.

Nancy G, you used plural “insurers” and gave 3 links, but the first and third deal with the same company and the second doesn’t have any references that I could see about insurers not covering lawsuits related to same-sex-marriages. That said, it’s telling to look at the one example you did provide, which you surmised thusly:

But insurers are refusing to cover any costs IF any church gets sued for not performing a same-sex marriage on their property!

That’s a rather duplicitous way to phrase what the insurance provider actually said:

The general liability form does not provide any coverage for this type of situation, since there is no bodily injury, property damage, personal injury, or advertising injury. If a church is concerned about the possibility of a suit, we do offer Miscellaneous Legal Defense Coverage. This is not liability coverage, but rather expense reimbursement for defense costs. There is no coverage for any judgments against an insured.

In short, the insurance company offers coverage for lawsuits related to bodily injury, property damage, personal injury, or advertising injury. It is a business and those are the products it sells. Your complaint that the company “refuses to cover churches sued over same-sex weddings” is like me complaining “Pizza Hut refuses to serve Big Macs to atheists” (technically true, but obviously phrased in a misleading way).

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if predatory insurance companies do start offering policies to protect all the Chicken-Little pastors/congregants from the non-existent threat of being sued for refusing to conduct same-sex weddings. It wouldn’t be much different from scam insurance companies offering killer-robot insurance to vulnerable elderly people who have lost their ability to discern actual threats from imagined ones. As an atheist, I can probably find a dozen churches in a 10-mile radius who would’ve refused to conduct my wedding… want to guess what the odds are of me successfully suing them for religious discrimination? I’d more expect to be counter-sued for frivolous litigation than to win so much as a dime.

@Nanny G #12:

“Jesus was right.
His word is a sword that divides off the believer from the unbeliever.
Soon, we will see which churches are willing to take the loss of all things for the Christ and which ones will compromise and follow the devil by tickling the ears of their followers and performing same-sex weddings just for the tax-free money.”

Who, exactly, do you think this country belongs to?
Just the Christians?
Not the Jews, the agnostics, the atheists, etc., as well?

Jesus’ words are but one of many “swords” that divide this country.
The challenge is to find a fair accommodation of ALL beliefs, not just the Christian ones.

Read Kevin’s #13 again, but pay special attention to the part about not indemnifying “judgments against the insured.” If you drink and drive, you’re breaking the law, and when you hit somebody, your insurance doesn’t cover you BECAUSE YOU BROKE THE LAW. Your insurance only covers you so long as you DON’T break the law. An anti-discrimination law is just as much a law as an anti-DUI statute, and if you break one, you’re on your own.

Nice job showing the connection between PC and Marxism. It’s amazing when you tell a leftist that they are a Marxist how they deny it. It has happened on FA more than once. They advocate re-distribution of wealth, as did Marx. They advocate a heavy, progressive tax system, as did Marx. They advocate that the plant worker should make just as much as the owner who used his/her own money to establish the business, as did Marx. They advocate centralized government control of just about everything including communication and education (here is where PC comes in), as did Marx. They believe your money isn’t yours until the government takes out taxes, as did Marx. They supported the government (Obama) taking control of a private company (GM) from its owners and giving it to the unions, as did Marx. All those similarities and yet, they aren’t a Marxist. Either they are lying to themselves or never read Marx’s manifesto. What’s the old saying about if something quacks like a duck?

@George Wells:
George, I wasn’t talking about the country, but the churches inside this country.
American Christians have a choice to make.

They can stand on principle and lose their tax-exempt status
OR
they can compromise their principles so as to enjoy their tax-exempt status.
IF…….and this is only a possibility at present…..if same-sex couples start suing churches that refuse to perform weddings inside their properties for them.

@Nanny G #16:
Then by your own admission you are shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater in which there is no fire.
To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a successful case brought against a church that refused to perform a wedding. Such cases may have been litigated, but the Constitution and the SCOTUS’ vast history on this question have ALWAYS been settled in the Churches’ favor, and such a mountain of precedence is irresistibly compelling. In spite of your nervousness, you have nothing to worry about. Gay activists may make a lot of noise, but no church will ever be forced to marry anyone they don’t want to.

@George Wells:

Gay activists may make a lot of noise, but no church will ever be forced to marry anyone they don’t want to.

No, they won’t. Their pastors will be sentenced to a year in prison instead.

“Proctor, VT — According to NBC News, a pastor at the Christian Proctor Church in Vermont, has been sentenced to one year in federal prison after refusing to marry gay couples. This comes shortly after the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision ruling that states must allow gay-marriage.

The Christian Pastor, 56-year-old Paul Horner, had his lawyer speak to reporters on his behalf.

“We are currently disputing the guilty verdict and I am confident my client will be a free man here shortly,” said attorney Tom Downey. “Horner was just using his best judgement according to his rights and religious freedom in this country.”

The Honorable Myron Danus handed down the harsh sentence.”
http://nbc.com.co/christian-pastor-in-vermont-sentenced-to-one-year-in-prison-after-refusing-to-marry-gay-couple/

Queers getting their hate on, which was always the intent.

#18:

I would expect that this pastor will have that sentence voided by higher court. And I would HOPE that he will seek punitive damages for wrongful imprisonment – and he should be awarded such damages. The First Amendment is clear on that subject, no matter what some radical leftist judge in Vermont has to say about it.

If I was that pastor, I’d play this travesty of justice for all it’s worth. He could get YEARS of speaking engagements from conservative groups dying to hear all about the guy that beat the gay marriage Juggernaut.
Don’t you think?

@George Wells:

You have been prattling on about how religious freedom will not be abridged due to the First Amendment. Now here we have clear proof of exactly what you queers are all about; forcing acceptance of your sodomite life style on everyone else.

That’s what it was always about and you are too dishonest to admit it mumbling something about the ruling being overturned.

#20:

” mumbling something about the ruling being overturned.”

You know damned well that this ruling won’t stand.
You KNOW it’s unconstitutional.
I know it, too.
So what’s your beef?
Does it piss you off that we both agree on this?
Religious freedom WON’T be “abridged,” certainly not by one idiot Judge in Vermont. And you know that too.
If the ACLU defends that judge, it will lose.
The SCOTUS has NEVER decided differently, and it won’t this time, either, should the case get that far.
Perhaps you should concentrate on things that we both DISAGREE on if you want an argument….
(Yawn)

I have to disagree with George Wells here, though I think his real mistake was in assuming Retire05 had given an honest rendition of the case. From the article, the key point of the case (conveniently elided from retire05’s synopsis): “The church is also registered as a for-profit business…”

[Let’s leave aside ideological differences for a moment, retire05. Why did you leave that point out?]

With all facts in place, this story is pretty simple. Mr. [Pastor/Businessman] Horner:
1) Read all the stipulations that come with acquiring a license to run a for-profit business in Vermont.
2) Accepted those stipulations (as well as the penalties for violating them) in order to receive that license and begin operating his for-profit business.
3) While running his for-profit business, broke the law by violating the stipulations to which he’d agreed.
4) Was given due process (defended by an attorney in court), was found guilty of breaking the law, and has been sentenced accordingly.

In this story, I don’t see a pastor being persecuted for his religious beliefs (that ship sailed the day he decided he’d rather operate a for-profit business than lead a church). I see a profit-seeking businessman being prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced for the crime he knowingly committed.

Am I missing something here that’s supposed to garner sympathy? I mean, other than the fact that he broke the law in an effort to prevent homosexual couples from accessing a service they’re lawfully entitled to (and which he’d happily offer to any other couple that shared his sexual orientation)?

@Kevin #22:

Oh, THAT case.
I thought that it had passed into the obscurity of legal history and was no longer being litigated in the court of public opinion.
Yeah, you are correct in your analysis. ALL of these for profit businesses who choose to discriminate are on thin ice. In this case, it would be VERY difficult for the courts to ultimately side with the accused, given the particulars of the case. The SCOTUS might STILL overturn the Vermont ruling, but it would be a terribly conflicted decision. The point of my view is that it applies to religious institutions and the people who run them (or work in them) but not public accommodations. There IS a difference. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if the SCOTUS agrees with me.

@Kevin Kirkpatrick:

I have to disagree with George Wells here, though I think his real mistake was in assuming Retire05 had given an honest rendition of the case. From the article, the key point of the case (conveniently elided from retire05’s synopsis): “The church is also registered as a for-profit business…”

[Let’s leave aside ideological differences for a moment, retire05. Why did you leave that point out?]

There could be many reasons for why the church refused to register as a 501(c) group. The Johnson Amendment only applies to 501(c) groups.

Also, I am not familiar with Vermont law on how a church obtains an operating permit if it is not a registered 501(c). Are you? If so, then by all means, inform the rest of us.

And what’s the big deal about a church not being a 501(c)? Isn’t that the goal you left wingers have, to remove that benefit from churches?

@retire05:

A church is a group of people who chip their money in to
1) buy some property and construct a building where they can meet up and do their religious stuff
2) pay some people to look after the building, run the meetings, and provide religious instruction/guidance

For the record, yes, some churches allocate a portion of their facilities and funds to provide food and shelter for those in need. I’m 100% okay with all expenses and property dedicated to such charitable endeavors being tax-exempt (per the same standards of other organizations seeking 501(c) status).

But – agree or disagree on this – can you at least understand how I’m less than enthusiastic that the rest of us shoulder the tax burden of people shirking their taxes for funds they use to build/maintain their religious meet-up facilities? How I don’t see why I should pay more property taxes on my housing so they can duck property taxes on their religious meet-up buildings? How I don’t appreciate the increase in everyone else’s income tax burdens, so that people paid to run religious meet-ups can evade their fair share of income taxes (e.g. “parsonage exemptions”)?.

Yeah, you’re right, crazy left-wing-nutter that I am, I’m not a huge fan of blanket granting of 501(c) exemptions to churches. They’re permission-slips that allow religious citizens to fund their meet-ups while passing huge swaths of their share of taxation onto the rest of us.

News headlines like “The local XYZ Church has lost it’s tax-exempt status” do not translate to “PERSECUTION!”; so much as “Oh, good, the people who choose to spend their income on their religious meet-ups are going to start paying the same fair share of income taxes that I do.”

IMO, a truly ethical church would operate by the same guidelines I’d use if I chose to build a facility for myself and others with similar interest to engage in any other common hobby: We’d buy some property, we’d hire some people to run it (compensating them for their time and expecting them to take full responsibility for paying their self-employment income taxes on their pay), and our facility would remain operational for as long as we collected sufficient funds to cover its on-going costs (including property taxes).

But that isn’t what this story is about. In the story at hand: yes, a group of people got together and built a church. But, instead of using it simply as a (tax-free) religious meet-up facility (funded through tax-exempt donations/tithings/offerings), they took things in a different direction. Perhaps sensing an opportunity to make a few bucks (or at least offset a little of that operational cost), they chose to obtain a license to allow them to use the facilities to operate a for-profit business.

Then they broke the law: they knowingly refused to adhere to the legal stipulations that came with operating for-profit businesses in that jurisdiction.

What am I missing here? What aspect of Mr. Horner running a business, and being held accountable to the same laws as other business-owners, do you feel merits outcry?

@Kevin Kirkpatrick: What am I missing here?

We had a huge bunch of cases in CA (when I lived there) concerning church meetings taking place in tax-paying homes. the neighbors insisted that’s what church buildings were for.
Not homes.
The church-goers tried car-pooling, parking off-site, even staggering their arrival/departure times to accommodate these angry neighbors.
All to no avail.
So, these new Christians opened tax-exempt churches and built meeting places and thereafter meet tax free.

There are huge problems with allowing political correctness to dictate policy.
One of those big problems is unequal enforcement, picking enemies and friends.
For instance what about Muslim cab drivers stopping traffic on busy streets in downtown NY and Minn/StPaul 5 times a day so they can pray?
Shouldn’t they, too, be forced to take all their cabs to a mosque parking lot, go in and pray there? http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130321/east-village/cabbies-clogging-streets-outside-east-village-mosque-locals-say

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2068796/The-fancy-Manhattan-block-Islamic-center-grinds-halt-prayer-time-Muslim-taxi-drivers-blocking-street.html
Seems equally fair.
Tickets don’t faze them at all.

Another big problem with being led by the politically correct nose ring is that emotion rather than reason and precedent force decisions.
See how the bakers are being treated, even their money donated through GoFundMe is being held up by PC crap.

So, the damning of certain religious groups is noticeable.
The excusing of other religious groups, while not getting much coverage, is damnable in the double-standard exposed.

@Nanny G #26:

“So, the damning of certain religious groups is noticeable.”

Something tells me that Jews worldwide wouldn’t have been persecuted for the past how many thousands of years had their religion not INVENTED the claim that ITS god was better that the gods of other religions. Nobody likes being told that sort of nonsense.

Similarly, something tells me that certain Christian groups would not be coming under the angry glare of the PC inspector’s eye had they not worked so hard for so many years to prevent gays from getting equal rights. Some of those same Christian hate groups are still over there in Africa helping countries like Uganda make homosexuality a crime punishable by death. Their hate-mongering besmirches by association other Christian groups that have less malignant motives. And with the likes of the Westborough Baptist Church spreading its vile message as far as its many benefactors can afford – HERE IN AMERICA – it’s no wonder that Christian interest groups get more than their fair share of scrutiny. If they stopped trampling OTHER people’s rights, maybe their OWN would be more secure.

To borrow a line from a “RAMBO” movie, “They drew FIRST BLOOD.”

Shook, . . . just revisited this article of yours from July, and had to comment, . . . it’s an excellent piece of work. Great construction, explanation and presentation of a pervasive force that has infected our whole sociopolitical construct.

“Trump” may well be the result of a visceral, likely unconscious, reaction to this infection.