Science and Religion

It strikes me Western society in the post-Enlightenment was far less devout in enforcing the belief in
Christianity than it is now in enforcing the belief in racial and sexual equality.

But it's really in the nature of our new quasi-religion. You didn't have to accost your fellows at work, school, or on the street to demand their views. Your church may have compelled you, but your government and other institutions weren't accosting you at various points to ask you the equivalent of "tell me why you're passionate about social justice". Our new order is closer to a pre-Enlightenment model, replacing the Church with the Narrative.

You were left alone for the most part by Christianity.

It's in the nature of the new quasi-religion, in the fact that it isn't a coherent faith but a jumble. One of my crackpot pet peeves is the difference between myth-based religious faith and the post-religious order that displaced it: believing such as the creation myth is far less onerous to liberty than believing such as racial and sexual equality, as there are daily, practical implications to believing the latter.

The creation myth imposed no impossible requirements on society; Equality does in every aspect.

The Wrath of Kwon

This is a remarkable video.



Gastonbury of the Faith & Heritage website transcribed the thing entire and compiled the highlights

[Presbyterian minister Duke] Kwon isn’t some nobody – he’s a highly respected minister. Duke Kwon preached at the worship service at the PCA’s most recent General Assembly, meaning that he represents mainstream thought in the Reformed world. 

 Here are some of the things you’ll learn today:

 Blacks are the “prophet people of God.” 

 It’s time to start “speaking the truth in love” about the urgent need for whites to start paying reparations to blacks. 

Ephesians 2-4 is all about the need for reparations to blacks. 

The story of Zacchaeus is all about the need for reparations to blacks. 

Whites who disagree are “fools,” “trolls,” and “enemies.” 

White people are “the oppressor.” 

It seems the Presbyterian Church is on a mission to become multi-ethnic (and "multi-spiritual", says Minister Kwon) while putting black identity politics forefront. Indeed, placing black rights forefront seems to be the point, despite a lot of censer-smoke about "diversity" and a "multi-ethnic" church.
Gastonbury:

The talk begins at at 5:42. Kwon opens by declaring that his black and brown brothers and sisters in Christ are wonderfully made in the image of God, specifically excluding the many white people in the audience. In the last sentence of the sermon, Kwon calls blacks “the prophet people of God.”

Kwon:

[racial justice] might include a denomination setting aside a more radical amount of money to subsidize its cross-cultural or specifically African-American ministries. Again, the idea is that of repairing and recovering what was lost by the historic exclusion of African-Americans from our churches.
And so, ecclesiastical reparations might also include new approaches to leadership and polity that isn’t simply more inclusive of African Americans, but that centers on their gifts and abilities. [Lots of crowd approval] 

It would involve a restructuring of community practices, say, amplifying minority voices, rewriting our liturgies, reconsidering come contours of our confessional theology, rearranging our hymnody, all guided by a repentance imagination that pictures what ecclesial life might have been like today, had African-Americans been part of our churches for the last 300 years. [Crowd loves this] 

Mimicking the dulcet tones of the black Church he learned, kind of like Barack Obama, during an apprenticeship in the Community (DC, where he now has his own church) Minister Kwon praises "black and brown" as made in the image of God [conspicuously excluding whites], and as he will explain throughout, blacks exist as a sort of primus inter pares among this blessed group, with whites excluded but for their responsibility to support this scheme. But it really is all about Black and White, Who and Whom, despite and attested to by Kwon being Asian. Kwon is happily assimilating to black America, almost with a smirk.

It's important to follow the money, and power, to see what's ultimately at work here. Sure, Minister Kwon et al may actually believe their nonsense, or not (Kwon was in management consulting before being called), it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they sit down in secret and map it all out. Incentivization expresses the will of the elite, and the Church, like virtually every other American institution, is undergoing a transfer of power, under the guise of "equality", via heavy incentivization.

The point here is to take over the Church, using its white history as condemnation--which is of course the broader "civil rights" movement as a whole, essentially, using whites' "racist" past to condemn them to handing over their civilizations while quietly expiring.

It's one front in what Steve Sailer calls the "scramble for America", the descent of opportunists such as Kwon, surfing the Narrative, upon the professions, institutions, even culture to seize as much as they can before the ruin runs out.
Kwon is not a controversial figure in the Church, despite his posturing as a revolutionary. The general assembly mentioned by Gastonbury above featured two other speakers along with him, both equally committed to the program.
It's important to remember conspiracy isn't necessary. All that needed to happen in the Church was for the displacement of its whites and history to be incentivized. Ambition in the aggregate will do the rest.

Kwon's sermon is a model of the Narrative itself. And what Divine providence! Minister Kwon's spiritual journey just-so-happened to land him gently in step with the latest Theory coming out of the universities and the political-culutral push to carve up and parcel out America's institutions to her enemies. I guess that means God's on the side of Social Justice after all.

After opening with the folk classic Numinous Negro routine, it's a laundry list of recent themes launched by the Left.

There's the Danger Black Bodies! theme, making the insane claim that black people are unsafe in such as a Presbyterian church. Kwon actually invokes "strange fruit", and the gasps suggest he's in trouble at first, but, like an aerobatic pilot pulling out of his dive in the nick of time before hitting the ground he flawlessly turns toward sky and, yes, they're right there with him.

There's the Just Imagine (last seen: "Just imagine if these sexist Internet giants had equal gender representation from the start"--the assumption being, in one instance, they'd be more profitable, in another I saw, that this would have saved us from Internet bullying) is employed, and whites are determined to be in a deficit against this presumed richer, better Church that would have existed, if they had only been better people when they were laboring to build the Church; now it is only about "...recovering what was lost by the historic exclusion of African Americans..."--turning that church over.

There's the Emotional Labor scam, by which it's asserted black people, in assailing white America for ever-more favor, are spending their emotional labor on behalf of us all (like slaves, get it?), for which they should be recompensed, maybe materially, and for which we should feel shame.
This is an important one. Kwon knows where black America's pleasure center is, its enormous self-pity:

10:51 Now some of you, understandably, you [black dialect for you’re] not so sure. It’s been an exhausting year, hasn’t it? You’ve heard it several times already, just a few minutes ago and throughout the weekend. Many of you are tyud [black dialect for tired]. The church’s ambivalence about its commitment to interracial solidarity has been unmasked. Divisions, especially across racial lines, have been exposed, EXPOSED, not created, exposed [lots of whooping and applauding from the audience] and amplified. 

Remember that Chris Rock punchline "want a cookie?"? He had no idea.

There's the Shut Up Whitey/Ally theme, where speech isn't controlled, but "prophetic":

First, limitations of prophetic speech, first, we must embrace the value of prophetic silence. There is a time not to speak. Oftentimes, it’s simple – that time is when you don’t know what you’re talking about. [Crowd goes nuts again, clearly understanding Kwon to be referring to ignorant white people] Some of y’all need to listen up. Sometimes I need to listen up. You don’t know what you’re talking about or you know you need more time to reflect and pray. Do you know you do not need to have an opinion on every racial issue and incident? And you do not need to immediately share your take on it all the time. Silence is not always proof of complicity; it can also be an expression of prophetic humility. 

Obeisance is not humiliation, but humility, you see. Upon which follows naturally what I would call Don't Engage or Don't Normalize theme, demanding no engagement with ideological opposition (they are, effectively, "Nazis"):

I mean the sort of person that Proverbs 26:4 is describing when it says, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you become like him yourself.”  That’s referring to the stubborn-hearted person, who’s speaking to you, but not really listenin’.  Who’s interrogating you but isn’t really interested in answers or, more importantly, in hearing God’s truth.
17:12 You know, so a person hears you talk about racism and then they respond by rolling their eyes and calling you a Marxist [loud agreement from crowd], refusing, REFUSING to engage the things you’ve actually said, and the places in Scripture from which you have spoken. Though you try and try and try, do you know that you have permission to walk away?  Beloved, you do not have to respond to every troll.  Jesus did.  Remember how he was silent on trial before Herod? There is a time to walk away. Practice prophetic silence. 

I'm sure the Bible, and not the Salon-o-sphere, is the wellspring of all this. But then again, as part of "reconsidering some contours" the Church, once Kwon is in charge he may well wish to consider including some of those theorists, maybe some Ta Ne'hisi Coates, in the Gospel. Presbyterians will lead us there.

The "LDR Weekend" sponsored by the "Leadership Development Resource Initiative", at which Kwon was speaking appears to be modeled on Maoist university conclaves. Their goal is--what else?--to bring more blacks into leadership positions and blacken the Church, so to speak.
This has a sort of secondary retconning effect: blacks may have been nowhere around when the Church was being built in reality, but they were there the whole time spiritually. Their physical absence (absence of "black bodies") is a moral and material deficit against a natural order that's been suppressed all this time by racism.

It's amazing how few, apparently, see this all as sinister. Spending his early effusions raising the black congregation above the white, Minister Kwon then demands our integration. What could go wrong?  I mean, other than the daily carnage we see on World Star Hip Hop and Colin Flaherty.

In his reliance on Christian kitsch he lays it all out a little too clearly. One, blacks are better than you because they have a profound, legitimate beef with you. Two, you will have to give them money. Three, you will have to live with them, on the terms outlined in One.

So once we've reformed the Church, everything will be cool?  What role can I, a penitent white ally, assume in this order?

The verse just after that Kwon uses to justify this hierarchy of color and shame, Ephesians 4:28 might provide guidance for us in our role as whites in the Church and, of course, in society: Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labor with his hands the the thing that which is good, that he may have to give to him that needs.

 I'd be willing to wager Minister Kwon read that one with a faint smile.

All NFL all the time, without the annoying ex-jocks or football

Strange New Respect is fleeting, and with regard to the NFL owners' remarkable commitment to "social justice" over profits or patriotism, the NYT is determined it shall have wide-receiver speed:

Beyond the appearance of unity, though, is a far different reality: The owners have done little to support players who protest to fight social injustice. A few owners have told their players that kneeling for the anthem is inappropriate.

The owners by and large are a white, conservative group of billionaires, several of them big-dollar donors to President Trump. They have generally discouraged their players, about three quarters of whom are African-American, from anything that overshadows throwing passes and making tackles.

All the talk about freedom of expression is a dodge around the fact it's black America calling out white America as racist, and--this is the real shock to the system--the not-quite subdued half of white America calling bullshit right back.

This thing needs to end quickly for both the NFL and the Narrative.
I think it's going to be the best season ever.

More on the NFL

The military has long used spectator sports to target mostly young white men for recruitment. This is coupled with a strong emphasis on patriotism in such as truck commercials--appealing to the fathers of those same young men. After 9/11 and through the second Iraq invasion this grew in intensity and became just one more reason, for me, to tune out. There is an obvious affinity between the military the violent sport of the NFL, which is probably second only to NASCAR in its patriotic effusions.

People have cited this in defense of the anthem protests, and if the anthem protests had anything to do with the anthem that would mean something. But that doesn't mean it's right. The militarization of sports hardly went unnoticed or unremarked upon, but it hasn't been much opposed.

Today's Washington Post reports:

A government oversight report released Wednesday by Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake offers new details about how the Department of Defense paid professional sports teams and leagues for patriotic displays honoring American soldiers.

The report expands on one that became public last May and resulted in changes to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2016, prohibiting the expenditures and calling on leagues and teams to donate the money to organizations that support the military, veterans and their families.

[Military tributes at game: True honors or hollow gestures?]

“What we take issue with,” wrote Flake, who, like McCain, is a Republican from Arizona, “is the average fan thinking teams are doing this on behalf of the military.”

Flake and McCain are objecting to the way the money was spent, treating it as a boondoggle for the most part, and the military does look to drive a very soft bargain:

In 2013, a roaring crowd cheered as the Atlanta Falcons welcomed 80 National Guard members who unfurled an American flag across the Georgia Dome’s turf. Little did those fans—or millions of other Americans—know that the National Guard had actually paid the Atlanta Falcons for this display of patriotism as part of a $315,000 marketing contract. 

The remunerative militaristic patriotism of the NFL is perfectly consistent with its more genuine multicultural patriotism. Our wars have served an internationalist agenda at the expense of national interest since the first Iraq invasion. It's been especially gruesome watching this for the past decade, as that group to which globalism is overtly hostile--and, yes, those Christian-descended whites Jews like Peter Beinart find so enraging--is fed into its grinder.

It's in those godawful commercial breaks, combining the multicultural and feminist cheerleading with crude patriotic kitsch, that you see the contradiction. Do people see it?

But the point right now is this: that anthem might represent what the players hate--white America--but it's been used, for a long time now, as part of the disingenuous military recruitment of whites that is "paid patriotism", to advance a worldview and agenda that has been very, very good to them.
Of course, if you can't see the net benefit of being born in America versus being born in, say, West Africa, then you're never going to catch on to something as relatively nuanced as that.

A Note on the NFL

But for a shocking exposure to it last Thanksgiving, I haven't watched the NFL on television for years as part of a deliberate decision to cut spectator sports entirely out of my life, finally. Football was the last to go. Objectively I love the game, even in its perverse aspects: its violence, its physical specialization, with sumo wrestlers on the lines, sprinters at receiver, captain-archers at quarterback. It is the American sport, for good or ill.

It was the fans who drove me away at first. I found the hoopla, commercialism and what I would now identify as cuckery increasingly unbearable. Now it's the players who keep me away. Sometimes we have to spend time away from those we love to realize we hate them--and they hate us.

Watching football on Thanksgiving was bracing for me because of the commercials, which apparently have become endless iterations of multicultural, feminist and commercial pozzing, or conditioning.

One standard format television commercial now goes something like one I recall for a VR headset: we are treated to a series of families, each a different ethnicity with whites deliberately not prominent, enjoying the product to what is supposed to be heartwarming delight. Watching what was supposed to be the Muslim family I was repulsed by their very joy. Not because I'm ignorant--precisely because I'm not, and I understand the threat Muslims represent to me.

 It's a sick feeling, in part because their joy isn't any less human, isn't any less valid and does indicate a common bond. The effect on me is only to emphasize their role in replacing me; they will have grandchildren, they will experience joy, they will see the wonders the world we created produces. And we won't.

Because we will not be.

Am I alone in feeling this way?

24:44 I am master of my domain.

25:40 Frapping and the Single Goy

26:55 Phillip Roth

30:05 Hillary's Book

32:10 Regina Spektor song Laughing With



1:04:45 Make America White Again, after a fashion

1:08:50 Us, Us, Us, and Them, Them, Them...

Oregon Oddities

The hike around Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey in rural Oregon is fittingly peaceful and doesn't feel like the geography around the Columbia River Gorge where we've done most of our hiking this (very) warm season. It isn't dominated by the towering evergreens that are everywhere here. (Not so towering in our Gorge stomping grounds now, after a massive forest fire set off by a kid with fireworks took out tens of thousands of acres a couple of weeks ago.)

Apparently the monks are out there on riding mowers maintaining the broad lawns that buffer the retreat from the forest:

These fields would otherwise be tall, dry grass right now, so mowing them is probably a wise fire control measure. The effect is lovely either way:

We came upon something strange while we were there. Someone had set up a small camp/shrine of sports memorabilia, cut-out silhouettes of children and religious objects:

Inside the tin was a pristine copy of a sports magazine.



All this appeared to have been out there in the elements a while and was just off the trail. For some reason the monks allowed it and leave it alone. The effect is unsettling.

All I could think of was Ace Ventura: "Finkel, Einhorn, Einhorn, Finkel..."

Take my Culture, Please

Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles might be the funniest movie of all time, unfortunately. One of the more enduring anti-white, anti-American cultural tropes, the cool black guy (here leading a diverse gang in) outfoxing the dim white rednecks, around which the story is based, derives from this wellspring along with others. An enduring attitude can be seen taking shape in this movie. Now Brooks says his film couldn't be made today, and it seems undeniable.

It's important to note what's happened: the film contributed about as much as a film can to the shaping of the present cultural and political milieu. And that milieu is one in which it could never possibly be made.

When Harvey Korman's villain sends a motley horde of Bad Guys (bikers, Nazis, pirates, etc) forth to "stamp out runaway decency in the West" I can't help but find it ironic, now.

Mel Brooks was never a guy you suspected of malice. He went after what was essentially the pc of his time. And that pc ain't nothing like our pc. Our pc rules. With an iron fist.

Brooks likes to tell the story of how he got away with simply ignoring the studio's instructions to edit out certain scenes. When the film was released and became a hit, no one at the studio so much as mentioned it.

Today if he somehow got it past the studio in the first place, the industry as a whole would come down on him, along with polite society, cable news, militant protesters and an outraged Jewish community. Moral and financial shake-downs would ensue. The term "political correctness" really does indicate something fundamentally different from the usual restrictions on expression a society and culture might impose on opposition.

This is a whole new world. Virtually all of Hollywood now is on board with the presumed objections to a Blazing Saddles in the Current Year. More remarkable: Blazing Saddles' Current Year equivalent could not occur to the well-conditioned mind of any Current Year Mel Brooks.

We shouldn't lose the narrative thread: cultural-sexual revolution assails prevailing order through free artistic expression, becomes prevailing order, restricts artistic expression.

It was already cool in the Seventies to look down your nose at your "racist" white parents; but they were still in charge, too. That's why comedy was still possible:

The 1974 comedy western starring Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder featured a black sheriff in a racist town. Brooks said it was the racial prejudice portrayed within the film that was the mechanism behind its cultural significance.
"Without that the movie would not have had nearly the significance, the force, the dynamism and the stakes that were contained in it,” he said.

Presumably the setting-up of the white fall guys as bigots would be too much now--a grandmotherly type, for instance, greeting the black sheriff with an unexpected "up yours, nigger" certainly wouldn't fly. Making light of lynching. Anything that might disturb white liberals, er, black folk. None of this would be allowed. The film's essential message, summed up by Gene Wilder's description of frontier settlers as "...people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons”, is safe. It would have to be magnified, perhaps. There would be issues around casting maybe. The routine about the busty secretary...are you kidding?

What Brooks is (or should be) getting at here ultimately is that comedy requires a shared point of view between audience and performer. Shared frames of reference, assumptions, language, culture. Comedy is bias. Drama too relies on these shared biases.

Blazing Saddles skewered "racism" but it was made when the country was overwhelmingly white and even in its transgressions assumed a point of view that was white American. And that's precisely the part that would make the film so objectionable now.

Basically, take out the point of view, the bias, the prejudice, the identity of the audience really. We're left with empty gags and sentimental kitsch with nothing to latch on to.  Instead of shared values we have shared cliches.

The film has its own dynamic narrative. It began as an impulse in the same narrative that will (if left unchecked, I assert) eventually require its censoring. Gotta love it.

Mr Brooks shouldn't feel bad. Yes his work would be rejected now. But that's only possible because of his work.

[title lifted from a Bumbling American tweet]

Next stop Chi Town, Lido put the money down...

They're building the Barack Obama library on Chicago's South Side where he started out as a community organizer. The project is being challenged by community organizers.

They're seeking some sort of comprehensive agreement of set asides for local activist groups. This common practice is something the Obama Administration effected from above when in office. Barry's enthusiasm for the practice has waned.

Obama opened the door to the backlash when he appeared on a video at the foundation's first public meeting last week and said flat-out that there would be no community benefits agreement.
Such a legal document, he said, would force the foundation to side with certain activist groups and leave others out. And, he added, it would open the door for other groups to step up and start making demands.

Some things are too important to be bogged down by every one with a gripe. Sure, let them line up to carve up Silicon Valley, the Ivy League, corporate America, but this is the One's legacy here!
Furthermore, they only have a half a billion dollars to build something for which no one has any real expectations.

I suspect citizen Obama won't be doing a lot of interaction with the Community, and that it will be of the alienating type as his video remote. Obama will likely lose his sainted status with black America with surprising speed because of the very same furious, militant state his eight years left it in. Black America's anger isn't waning any time soon.

Indeed, Obama's long demagogy ensured two things: Donald Trump's rise and the violent reaction to it. Barack Obama will likely live to see his own image thrown into the fire from which he's drawn so much warmth.

At a community forum Wednesday night, a discussion about the proposed agreement morphed into a shouting match over whether Obama actually loves black people. One man in the audience yelled, “No,” while others said he wasn’t necessarily “their brother.” 

 Hip-hop artist and community activist Che “Rhymefest” Smith tried to defend the president — but only to a point.  

 “I’m not saying he understands everything ... I believe the brother is reasonable,” Smith said. “When you marry a black woman and have black children ... she is going to talk to her man and say we have got to do something.” 

 While Smith said he doesn't believe Obama has ill intentions, he said South Siders have to hold him accountable.  

"Not as a God, but as a politician," he said. "Not as a king, but as a politician."
That's a hard concept for a lot of African-Americans to grasp. But it's time for blacks to accept the truth.

The truth comes a lot easier when it doesn't cost anything. Barry is going to learn that the "inheritance" in his "race and inheritance" comes with a tax, and it grows, over time. First off, don't even think about divorcing Michelle...

Torah Time

1994

The lineup for something called the JoCo Cruise does not inspire.

Torah Tomorrow

I'll face the Jew again tomorrow for Torah Talk with Luke Ford via Google Hangouts, where you can log in and ask questions. 9:00 AM Pacific.

Harry Dean Stanton, 1926 to 2017

Harry Dean Stanton in 1978's Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman (spoiler):

 

Built like a brick temple

It's taking them longer than planned to demolish the United Workmen Temple in downtown Portland, also known as the Tourney Building, built in 1895.

They had to bring in a bigger crane to take down the elevator shaft I believe. I think I saw it arrive this afternoon. They've been picking away at her innards in the meantime.

The building behind it is the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, 1992. I know nothing of architecture, but to me this suggests brutalist style tempered by the slightest postmodern whimsy:

I have no idea what the conning tower like thing is supposed to represent. It's a little unsettling at this historical point that progressive Portland has a Stalin-esque courthouse.
The federal building is even less reassuring. It evokes secrecy and opacity, facing off against City Hall directly across from it, it's literally shrouded from view by a confusing array of what look like wrought-iron shutters:

United Workmen Temple

A post shared by Dennis Dale (@eladsinned) on Sep 11, 2017 at 4:05pm PDT

A post shared by Dennis Dale (@eladsinned) on Sep 11, 2017 at 4:07pm PDT

Torah, Torah, Torah

Luke opens with a funny news item about a rabbi turned real estate hustler that is totally lost on my goyishe kopf.
At 4:20 I reveal my ethnicity to the Jew.
Luke sets himself up for a Holocaust joke at 4:40
Goy v goy at 5:50
At 9:20 I am propositioned by the Jew.
At 16:30 we talk about art.
At 21:50 I report on recent Orc sightings.
24:40: I tell a tale of a Lyft ride from hell and a social justice three-way that cannot be unheard.
At 28:05 Luke wonders if the coming Diversitopia will be Good for the Jews.
At 33:30 I congratulate a woman on her "beautiful white baby".
44:00: "What kind of Becky are you?"
46:20: The Pet Rock of Social Justice and other great ideas.
1:05:05: Pretty girl blows me off.
1:24:15: The Torah is anti-Diversity

Shabbos Goy, of a sort

I'll join Luke Ford again this Sunday for his weekly Torah Talk, at 9:00 AM Pacific Time, live-streamed here, on Twitter and at Luke's.

Tangled up in Who

We're long conditioned to social and political questions being decided by identity, not action. It isn't who did what but who's who. That conditioning is considerable. Witness the divide between true-believing media elites and the public over the "appropriateness" of President Trump's remarks on Charlottesville. Media types seemed genuinely oblivious to the clear narrative emerging from their cacophony: on one side you had Nazis (ffs!), on the other, not; it doesn't matter who did what!

We still use the language of objective universal rights, but, politically and culturally, the question of who's right (and who has rights) is a Sailerian who, whom calculation increasingly complicated by the growing number and diversity of America's grasping aggrieved.

Critical theory's "intersectionality" is an attempt to manage these inevitable conflicts and stresses like a system of traffic lights, while harnessing its energy--anger--like a power utility. It appears inherently unstable.

Good people are grappling with the problems of intersectionality. That's why you have to so often read between the lines in news reports and analyses, sometimes to find a thing represented as its opposite.
If the only two words you read in a news report was"Islamophobic backlash", for instance, you'd confidently guess that article to be about an attack by Muslims on others.

 That's why you have to suss out with some effort what the subject of this Washington Post article really is:

When Kate Ross first came out, she would go to lesbian bars and parties by herself. She didn’t exactly get a warm welcome. At the lesbian dance party She Rex, which used to pop up at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room, she says a fellow partygoer took one look at her high heels and long hair and called her a “confused straight girl.” 

“I shaved off all my hair and had a mohawk,” she says. “No one questioned me after that.”

Well, looks like we got us quite a story about discrimination, intimidation, conformity even, within the underground lesbian dance scene (is there a more depressing phrase?). Great! Not so fast.

Moments such as those led the 33-year-old, who works in small-business management, to help found the Coven, a safe space that has expanded to include a monthly dance party, a book club, theater trips and panel discussions over the past few years. Though the concept has gotten backlash on college campuses for potentially threatening free speech, safe spaces have become increasingly important at bars and nightclubs, activists say, particularly in the aftermath of last year’s attack at the LGBT nightclub Pulse in Orlando.

I suspect what used to be called a "lipstick lesbian"--straight-looking--is increasingly unwelcome in the lesbian club scene (perhaps as it hardens around a more militant identity in the post-Obama era) and this Ross woman created an alternative "safe space" free of violence and intimidation where one isn't expected to look (or act) like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver to be safe.

Mentioning the college safe space phenomenon and the Pulse massacre (with the automatically implied inference it constitutes the threat of "homophobia", not Islamic terrorism) are deliberate obfuscations of the reality that the butches are intimidating the bourgeois.

But what constitutes a safe space isn’t the same for everyone, and organizers such as Ross — who seek to welcome all, regardless of sexual orientation, ethnicity or gender identification — are facing resistance, including from the very community they’re trying to welcome. Critics have accused Ross’s parties of not being “really queer,” raising the question of whether safe spaces must be exclusive to be truly “safe.” For some, it’s a requirement; for others, a space can’t be safe if it isn’t exclusive to the audience it represents.
For everyone, it seems to be a conversation in progress. [bold added]

If by "conversation" a progressive means sit still while I dictate my terms, then "conversation in progress" has to mean those terms are fluid and subject to whim.
Reporting these internecine squabbles is trouble for the Narrative. Freedom of association is anathema to it, yet the divisions it produces as a necessity produce ever more fissioning of groups into hostile camps.
The same heated demagogy dividing whites from blacks, straights from gays, men from women, and on, can only have some collateral negative effect on relations between these favored identity groups, straining already alliances that are far more conceptual than real (such as between blacks and gays).

Goy and Yid, God forbid...

Alt Right Torah Talk is live with Dennis Dale, working class hero! The goy perspective vs the Jew perspective: https://t.co/YdlvjMqogY

— (((Luke Ford))) (@lukeford) September 3, 2017

I joined Luke Ford for his weekly Torah Talk broadcast. We discussed this week's Torah reading, Deuteronomy 26-29:8, and how it relates to the present.

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"Get out there, enjoy the view..."

Goy, hi!

I'll be on Luke Ford's weekly Torah Talk this Sunday at 9:00 AM Pacific Time.