That’s Not Funny! Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke.

Three comics sat around a café table in the chilly atrium of the Minneapolis Convention Center, talking about how to create the cleanest possible set. “Don’t do what’s in your gut,” Zoltan Kaszas said. “Better safe than sorry,” Chinedu Unaka offered. Feraz Ozel mused about the first time he’d ever done stand-up: three minutes on giving his girlfriend herpes and banging his grandma. That was out.

This was not a case of professionals approaching a technical problem as an intellectual exercise. Money was riding on the answer. They had come to Minneapolis in the middle of a brutal winter for the annual convention of the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA), to sell themselves and their comedy on the college circuit. Representatives of more than 350 colleges had come as well, to book comics, musicians, sword swallowers, unicyclists, magicians, hypnotists, slam poets, and every kind of boat act, inspirational speaker, and one-trick pony you could imagine for the next academic year.

For the comics, the college circuit offers a lucrative alternative to Chuckle Hut gigs out on the pitiless road, spots that pay a couple hundred bucks and a free night in whatever squat the club owner uses to warehouse out-of-town talent. College gigs pay easily a grand a night—often much more—and they can come in a firecracker string, with relatively short drives between schools, each hour-long performance paid for (without a moment’s ugliness or hesitation) by a friendly student-activities kid holding out a check and hoping for a selfie. For all these reasons, thousands of comics dream of being invited to the convention.

The colleges represented were—to use a word that their emissaries regard as numinous—diverse: huge research universities, tiny liberal-arts colleges, Catholic schools, land-grant institutions. But the students’ taste in entertainment was uniform. They liked their slam poets to deliver the goods in tones of the highest seriousness and on subjects of lunar bleakness; they favored musicians who could turn out covers with cheerful precision; and they wanted comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

To get work, a comic had to be genuinely funny—and also deeply respectful of a particular set of beliefs.

Two of the most respected American comedians, Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld, have discussed the unique problems that comics face on college campuses. In November, Rock told Frank Rich in an interview for New York magazine that he no longer plays colleges, because they’re “too conservative.” He didn’t necessarily mean that the students were Republican; he meant that they were far too eager “not to offend anybody.” In college gigs, he said, “you can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.” Then, in June, Seinfeld reopened the debate—and set off a frenzied round of op-eds—when he said in a radio interview that comics warn him not to “go near colleges—they’re so PC.”

When I attended the convention in Minneapolis in February, I saw ample evidence of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described, as well as another, not unrelated factor: the infantilization of the American undergraduate, and this character’s evolving status in the world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be constantly supported and championed. To understand this change, it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex. How do you do it? In part, by importing enough jesters and bards to keep him from wandering away to someplace more entertaining, taking his Pell grant and his 529 plan and his student loans with him.

But which jesters, which bards? Ones who can handle the challenge. Because when you put all of these forces together—political correctness, coddling, and the need to keep kids at once amused and unoffended (not to mention the absence of a two-drink minimum and its crowd-lubricating effect)—the black-box theater of an obscure liberal-arts college deep in flyover territory may just be the toughest comedy room in the country.

Via: The Atlantic

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The Future Costs Of Politically Correct Cultism: “I See No Other Alternative But Utter Conflict”

I rarely touch on the subject of political correctness as a focus in my writings, partially because the entire issue is so awash in pundits on either side that the scrambling clatter of voices tends to drown out the liberty movement perspective. Also, I don’t really see PC cultism as separate from the problems I am always battling against: collectivism and the erasure of the individual in the name of pleasing society. Political correctness is nothing more than a tool that collectivists and statists exploit in order to better achieve their endgame, which is conning the masses into believing that the group mind is real and that the individual mind is fiction.

Last year, I covered the PC issue in my article “The Twisted Motives Behind Political Correctness.” I believe I analyzed the bulk of the issue extensively. However, the times are changing at a pace that boggles the mind; and this is by design. So, it may be necessary to square off against this monstrosity once again.

In order to better examine the true insanity of what many people now term “social justice warriors,” I must study a few aspects of that strange movement separately. First, let’s take a brief look at the mindset of your average social justice circus clown so that we might better understand what makes him/her/it tick.

Rebel Without A Legitimate Cause

I spent several years (up until 2004, when I woke up from the false paradigm madness) as a Democrat. And before anyone judges that particular decision, I would suggest they keep in mind the outright fascist brothel for the military-industrial complex the Republican Party had become at that point and remains to this day. Almost every stepping stone that Barack Obama is using today to eradicate the Constitution was set in place by the Bush dynasty, including the Authorization Of Military Force, which was the foundation for the National Defence Authorization Act and the legal precedence for indefinite detention without trial of ANY person (including an American citizen) accused of terrorism by the president of the U.S., as well as the use of assassination by executive order and the implementation of mass electronic surveillance without warrant.

But, hell, these are real issues — issues that many of my fellow Democrats at the time claimed they actually cared about. Today, though, liberal concerns about unconstitutional actions by the federal government have all but vanished. Today, the left fights the good fight against flags on the hoods of cars from long-canceled television shows and battles tooth and nail for the “right” of boys wearing wigs and skirts to use the girl’s bathroom. Today, the left even fights to remove the words “boy” and “girl” from our vocabulary. Yes, such noble pursuits as these will surely be remembered as a pinnacle in the annals of societal reform.

Maybe I realize the ideological goals of the social justice machine are meaningless on a surface level; and maybe you realize this, too. But these people live in their own little universe, which doesn’t extend far beyond the borders of their college campuses, the various Web forums they have hijacked and a trendy Marxist wine-and-swinger party here and there in New York or Hollywood. They actually think that they are on some great social crusade on par with the civil rights movements of the mid-1900s. They think they are the next Martin Luther King Jr. or the next Gandhi. The underlying banality and pointlessness of their cause completely escapes them. The PC cult is, in many respects, the antithesis of the liberty movement. We fight legitimate threats against legitimate freedoms; they fight mostly imaginary threats and seek to eradicate freedoms.

Don’t get me wrong; sometimes our concerns do align. For instance, liberty proponents fight back against the militarization of police just as avidly as leftists do, if not more so. But our movements handle the problem in very different ways. Look at Ferguson, Missouri, where anyone with any sense should be able to admit that the government response to protests was absolutely a step toward tyranny, ignoring violent looters while attacking peaceful activists. Leftists and PC cultists decided to follow the Saul Alinsky/communist playbook, busing in provocateurs from Chicago to further loot and burn down businesses even if they belonged to ethnic minorities. In the meantime, the liberty movement and Oath Keepers sent armed and trained men to defend those businesses REGARDLESS of who owned them and defied police and federal agents who tried to stop them.

The left gave the police and government a rationale for being draconian, while we removed the need for police and government entirely by providing security for the neighborhood (killing two birds with one stone). Either their methods are purely ignorant and do not work, or their methods are meant to achieve the opposite of their claims. In the end, the PC movement only serves establishment goals toward a fully collectivist and centralized society.  Their publicly stated intentions are otherwise pointless.

Your average PC drone does not understand the grander plan at work, nor does he want to. All he cares about is that he has found a “purpose” — a fabricated purpose as a useful idiot for power brokers, but a purpose nonetheless.

People Must Be Forced To Bake Gay Cakes

I personally do not care if two people of the same gender want to be in a relationship, but I do find the issue of gay marriage (and marriage in general) a rather odd conflict that misses the whole point. Marriage has been and always will be a religious institution, not federal; and I find government involvement in this institution to be rather despicable. When the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage came down, I felt a little sorry for all the joyfully hopping homosexuals on the marbled steps of the hallowed building, primarily because they essentially were fighting for the state to provide recognition and legitimacy for their relationships. Frankly, who gives a rip what the state has to say in terms of your relationships or mine? The state is an arbitrary edifice, a facade wielding illusory power. If a relationship is based on true and enduring connection, then that is all that matters, whether the Supreme Court dignifies it or not.

The only advantage to solidifying gay marriage in the eyes of the state is the advantage of being able to then use the state as an attack dog in order to force religious institutions to accept the status of gays in the same way the government does. And unfortunately, this is exactly what the PC cult is doing.  What they do not seem to understand is that recognition by the state does not necessarily translate to recognition by religious organizations, nor should it.

Should an individual, organization or business be allowed to refuse service to anyone for any reason? Should the state be allowed to force people into servitude to one group or another even if it is against their core values?

PC champions desperately try to make these questions a matter of “discrimination” alone. But they are more about personal rights and personal property and less about “hate speech.” Under natural law, as well as under the constitution, an individual has every right to refuse association with any other person for ANY reason. If I do not like you, the government does not have the authority to force me to be around you or to work for you. But this line has been consistently blurred over the years through legal chicanery. As I’m sure most readers are familiar, the issue of gay cakes seems to arise over and over, as in cases in Colorado and Oregon in which religiously oriented business owners were punished for refusing to provide service for gay customers.  Keep in mind, these businesses did not refuse outright service to gays.  What they did refuse, was to make gay wedding cakes.  To do so would have been in outright conflict with their religious principles.

Punishments have included crippling fines designed to put store owners out of business and have even included gag orders restricting the freedom of businesses to continue speaking out against the orientation of customers they have refused to do business with.

In order to validate such actions, leftists will invariably bring up segregation as a backdrop for the gay cake debate. “What if the customers were black,” they ask. “Is it OK for a business to be whites only?”

My response?  Yes, according the dictates of individual liberty, yes it is okay.

First, to be clear, I am talking specifically about private individuals and businesses, not public institutions as in the argument explored during Brown v. Board of Education. Private and public spaces are different issues with different nuances. I personally believe it is ignorant to judge someone solely on the color of his skin, and sexual orientation is not necessarily an issue to me. But it is equally ignorant for someone to think that the state exists to protect his feelings from being hurt. I’m sorry, but discrimination is a fact of life and always will be as long as individualism exists. The PC cultists don’t just want government recognition of their status; they want to homogenize individualism, erase it, and force the rest of us to vehemently approve of that status without question. This is unacceptable.

Your feelings do not matter. They are not superior in importance to the fundamental freedom of each individual to choose his associations.

If a business refuses to serve blacks, or gays, or Tibetans, then, hey, it probably just lost a lot of potential profit. But that should absolutely be the business’s choice and not up to the government to dictate. And in the case of “gay discrimination,” I think it is clear that the PC crowd is using the newfound legal victim group status of gays as a weapon to attack religiously based organizations. Make no mistake, this will not end with gay cakes. It is only a matter of time before pressure is brought to bear against churches as well for “discrimination.” And at the very least, I foresee many churches abandoning their 501(c)(3) tax exempt status.  Again, marriage has been and always will be a religious institution.  The PC crowd will not be happy with government recognition alone.  They want to force recognition from everyone.

If a group wants fair treatment in this world, that is one thing. I believe a gay person has every right to open HIS OWN bakery and bake gay marriage cakes to his little heart’s content. I believe a black person has every right to dislike white people, as some do, and refuse to associate with them or or do business with them if that’s what he/she wants. I also believe that under natural and constitutional law, a religious business owner is an independent and free individual with the right to choose who he will work for or accept money from. If he finds a customer’s behavior to be against his principles, he should not be forced to serve that person, their feelings be damned.

This is fair.

What is not fair is the use of government by some groups to gain an advantage over others based on the legal illusion of victim group status. PC cultists want us to think that choice of association is immoral and damaging to the group. I have to say I find them to be far more intolerant and dangerous than the people they claim to be fighting against, and this attitude is quickly devolving into full bore tyranny under the guise of “humanitarianism.”

Via: 

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[VIDEO] Problem solved, TV Land: Here’s your new, politically correct Dukes of Hazzard

The amazing thing about this is that it was made six years ago - when it was funny enough to imagine liberals trying to PC up the Dukes but still not to the point where you could actually imagine a major cable network pulling it because it isn’t. Hats off to Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy for actually having the prescience to see this coming.

Trying to remember: Was the gay rainbow flag sufficiently recognized back in 2009 for that to be the likely meaning of the rainbow atop the General Lee? Or is it just combined with the unicorn to signify something more like the whole peace/love/dope thing that’s now taking the form of fascist speech restrictions?

Oh, by the way, some of you who still shriek about “book burning” - which you imagine conservative Christians to be undertaking in an assault on subsersive books - would you mind explaining to me why that is an affront against all that’s good and decent, but banning the Duke boys over a flag on a car is perfectly OK?

I can’t wait to hear this.

Via: Canada Free Press

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[SPECIAL REPORT] The Culture of Smugness History is written by the PC victors.

Whether or not South Carolina retains a Confederate flag on state grounds is clearly a matter for the state to decide. But the media couldn’t permit GOP presidential candidates to limit themselves to that position. It had to hector the candidates into support for the flag’s removal. On all matters racial, the media polices not only sins of commission but sins of omission. By the media’s estimate, insufficient enthusiasm for the flag’s removal is evidence of a troubling racial attitude.

The hate on display in the controversy is coming not from the flag’s defenders but from a smug liberal elite that can’t rest until every inch of America conforms to their liberal prejudices. Jon Stewart’s supposedly anguished remarks about the Charleston horror seemed more like childish pouting and sophomoric South-bashing, with the glib host demanding that even the streets of the South be renamed: “In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate Generals who fought to keep black people from driving freely on that road. That’s insanity. That’s racial wallpaper. You can’t allow that.”

Like French Revolutionaries, the liberal elite wants American culture to begin from scratch, built on nothing more than the conviction that the past is wicked and the present good. Even as the moral refuse of modern life grows higher and higher, its spokesmen can still peer down from it to denounce the past pitilessly. Americans can trot off to Walmart to pick up an abortifacient, but its clerks, the company announced, will no longer let customers purchase a Confederate flag. “We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer,” the company explained. That hasn’t stopped the store from selling sex toys over the objections of parental groups, but it feels that it has to draw the line somewhere. The company has concluded that the flag under which Robert E. Lee fought is too corrupting for its customers.

For years, Southerners, without any connection to slavery or segregation and without the slightest racial intent, have flown the flag out of regional pride and ancestral respect. Little did they know that they were following in the footsteps of Hitler’s acolytes.

“The only argument you can make against having this flag be as spectacularly shown as it is around the South is the Nazis,” said actress Whoopi Goldberg. “It would be like having the swastika flag flying [at] your next-door neighbor’s [house].” HBO host John Oliver said, “The Confederate flag is one of those symbols that should really only be seen on T-shirts, belt buckles and bumper stickers to help the rest of us identify the worst people in the world.”

Such is the moral nuance of the American Left. Instead of challenging the crudeness of these remarks, pols of both parties appear ready to enshrine them into law by banishing the flag from all public places save obscure museums.

South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley, did make a few tactful remarks about the supporters of the flag but it is unlikely that her words will survive the flag’s banishment. She said that the “hate filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag,” which doesn’t “reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it.” Yet the law that she seeks to pass will have the effect of stigmatizing those people and vindicating the Left’s interpretation of the flag as inherently racist.

Via: The Spectator

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Is the Tide Turning against PC?

Has the contemptible Laura Kipnis Affair incensed the worm into turning? Our own David French certainly hopes so. “Feminists from Jezebel to The Nation have expressed concern about Kipnis’s treatment,” French wrote on Monday, “and Jonathan Chait has discussed her ordeal as part of his recent campaign against PC.” Indeed,” he continues, “there is a growing wave of leftist dissent against campus intolerance.

” The latest froth in the wave comes today, from “Edward Schlosser,” a teacher “at a midsize state school.” “I’m a liberal professor,” Schlosser writes over at the “explainer” website Vox, “and my liberal students terrify me.” Why? Because a considerable number of them have bought hook, line, and sinker into a worldview in which “the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed,” and, in consequence, any accusations of misconduct that are leveled at academics have become too subjective to be dispassionately analyzed. Chagrined and alarmed by the burgeoning number of inquisitions, Schlosser has been left fretting that were he to be hauled in front of a disciplinary committee, he would likely stand no chance:

Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness (or even acceptability) of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the student’s emotional state. As I cannot speak to the emotions of my students, I could not mount a defense about the acceptability of my instruction. And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow. In March of this year, Schlosser issued a similar lament, albeit in less family-friendly language. “Personally,” he wrote regretfully, “liberal students scare the shit out of me.”

Via: National Review

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