Leftist bias and the Philadelphia Starbucks story

Foul Leftist bigot MICHAEL A. COHEN writes below.  He totally ignores the fact that the Philadelphia store has different rules from other Starbucks -- for good reasons.  So in the usual Leftist way, he leaves out half the story to feed his anti-white racism. The amusing thing about his self-righteous rant is that the woman he accuses of racism is in fact a far-Leftist. As a Leftist, Cohen "just knows" the truth without having to do any research.  He is a typical bigot


I’m a writer, which means I spend a lot of time in coffee shops. In fact, I’m writing this column in one right now. I’ve spent a good part of the past 20 years toiling away among other overly caffeinated workers, pecking away at my laptop.

More often than not, I buy a cup of coffee and something to eat. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes, particularly when I’m on the road, I sneak in to use the Wi-Fi. That’s especially true when it comes to Starbucks, which is a beacon of free and dependable Wi-Fi, comfortable seating, and a complete lack of scrutiny from its employees as to whether I’ve purchased anything.

My experience is not unusual. Never once have I been asked to leave and I’ve certainly never been arrested for trespassing in a coffee shop.

But then again, I’m a white person.

Last week’s arrest of two black men in a Starbucks in Philadelphia is a reminder not just of the endemic nature of racism in America, but also what the unstated yet sizable advantages of white privilege look like.

The two men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, were meeting a friend for an afternoon meeting. Nelson asked to use the bathroom but was told that it was for customers only. So he sat down, without purchasing anything, and waited.

What happened next could only happen to a black man in America. Two minutes after they arrived at the shop, the store manager, who is white, called 911. Six police officers arrived and asked Nelson and Robinson to leave. They refused and were immediately arrested for what the police called, and I’m not making this up, “defiant trespassing.”

This is such a perfect example of how racism works in America that it should be taught as a mandatory lesson in every school in America.

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Prisoners to Be Housed According to Gender Identity: New York Mayor

Wow! Fun and games for all.  Women who think they are men will be raped 24/7 and men who claim to be women will be having one long sex party with the real women there. More destruction of civilized standards from the Left in the guise of righteousness

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio has announced that prisoners in the city will be housed according to the gender with which they identify instead of biological sex.

"In New York City, we believe transgender rights are human rights. And we'll fight to protect those rights in city jails as well," he tweeted Monday.

"It's the city's responsibility to protect the rights and safety of all New Yorkers, and that means protecting transgender individuals in city jails as well," the mayor said in a statement, according to AM NY. "New York City is one of the first major cities to commit to taking this step, and it's crucial to ensuring all our facilities are welcoming and safe for all New Yorkers, no matter their gender identity."

Anne Rettenberg, a New York City-based psychotherapist and feminist is concerned about the safety of female inmates in light of the policy change.

She explained in a Wednesday phone interview with The Christian Post that she is familiar with these prison and detention facilities in the city, having gone to see clients there, and recounted that they are often violent places.

"It's not a safe place to put biological males in with females, biological males who, at the very least have been charged with a crime serious enough not to allow them to be released on their own recognizance. We're talking about potentially violent criminals," Rettenberg said.

Doing this is "just asking for trouble, it's a disaster waiting to happen, I think," she observed, adding that although it is hard to predict how many people will take advantage of the new policy "someone is eventually going to get raped, statistically it's going to happen at some point."

Yet Carmelyn Malais, who heads the city's Commission on Human Rights said that "respecting someone's gender identity or gender expression is key in making sure that everyone in New York City is living with dignity and respect," according to the New York Post.

"The fact that somebody's incarcerated or not doesn't really change that. "No one should feel unsafe for being who they are," she said.

Allowing transgender individuals in prison to self-report their gender and be accommodated accordingly was also "an important recognition of the unique challenges and vulnerabilities transgender and gender nonconforming individuals face in corrections facilities nationwide."

The Department of Corrections now has six months to implement the new policy and a DOC representative said that as of Tuesday, 26 individuals are presently in custody who identify themselves as transgender, and one who self-identifies as "gender nonconforming."

In 2016 Mayor De Blasio signed an order instructing all public schools, recreation centers and other city buildings that have single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms to allow people to use the facilities of the gender with which they identify.

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Is 'Old-Fashioned' Returning?
   
It’s a modern changing world
Everything is moving fast.
But when it comes to love I like
What they did in the past.

—The Everly Brothers, 1962

Call me old-fashioned — and I’ve been called worse — but do I sense the possible end to the sexual revolution, which exploded in the ‘60s and whose fallout continues today?

Women complain that men won’t commit, whether in a dating relationship or marriage. The #MeToo stories that have emerged since the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment of numerous women in Hollywood have also contributed to their frustration. Harassment victims feel used and abused by men who, apparently, were never taught that women are co-equals in the human race and thus deserving of respect, even honor. I know, that last sounds old-fashioned.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written about a new book by Joanna Coles, chief content officer of Hearst magazines and the former editor of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, titled Love Rules. The book focuses on avoiding unhealthy relationships in the digital age.

Coles spoke to Dowd about the young women she knows who feel “obligated” to have sex with men they don’t particularly like and what appears to be a growing “disillusionment with the hookup culture” at Middlebury College, as expressed by Leah Fessler in an article for the website Quartz.

What especially intrigued me about Dowd’s column was this line from Coles: “No one wants to go back to sock hops and going steady, but to attempt to separate emotions from sex is not only illogical, given that emotion intensely augments pleasure, but also impossible for almost all women.”

As a product of the sock-hop and going-steady generation, I rise to its defense.

So “no one” wants to return to a system that largely prevented the emotional, relational and, yes, physical problems encountered by modern lifestyles? Isn’t it the very definition of “insanity” when one expects different results while repeating the same behavior?

There were certain “rules,” way back when, about how men should treat women (though Hugh Hefner would later blow them up). The rules mostly worked for people who conformed to them. Yes, I know women experienced other problems then.

The societal wreckage caused by the hookup culture, easy divorce and co-habitation without commitment doesn’t need studies, though there have been some, chiefly by the late Judith Wallerstein, who spent 25 years studying the effects of divorce on children. She ultimately found that the pain from their parents’ breakup continued to cause them distress well into adulthood.

Common sense and experience also reveal certain things about human relationships, which work best and which don’t, especially for women, who mostly bear the burden when men don’t “love, honor and cherish” them until death they do part. For those of a certain age, that’s what couples used to pledge to each other when they married.

Dowd quotes Coles as saying modern sex is “bleak.” It doesn’t have to be. Millennials would do well to consult their old-fashioned and long-married grandparents. Or they can put on a “Golden Oldies” radio station and hear Don and Phil Everly sing:

I’m the kind who loves only one.
So the boys say I’m old fashioned.
Let them laugh, honey I don’t mind.
I’ve made plans for a wedding day for you and me.
That’s old fashioned.
That’s the way love should be.

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Social class in Australia

To advance economically in Australia, you are often told to get lots of education.  And it's true that the higher you go educationally, the better paid you will usually be.  But is it actually education at work?  The great predictor of educational success is IQ -- so those who go furthest through the educational system will be those with the highest IQ. So it is most probably your IQ that gets you that good job.  Education is just an IQ marker that anyone can read.

As a result of that, some thinkers say that the class system is  a series of IQ levels.  What we see as Upper class and what we see as lower class will be effects of IQ, and not much more.  That is why social mobility is so poor.  IQ is highly hereditary so if you are born into a poor family you are unlikely to have the IQ assets to rise above your parent's station.

A curious example of class characteristics in fact being IQ characteristics is from the findings about breast feeding. Affluent mothers make quite a point of breast feeding these days.  To put your baby on the bottle will get you scorned and seen as uncaring, ignorant and very low class. Yet We read, for instance, that "The mother's IQ was more highly predictive of breastfeeding status than were her race, education, age, poverty status, smoking, the home environment, or the child's birth weight or birth order". So it's all IQ.

So your eventual place on the socio-economic scale will be where your level of IQ places you, with education being a marker, not a cause.  And your IQ is essentially unalterable. So rising up socially will only happen if you are one of the unusual people who come from a humble background but are lucky enough to be born with a high IQ.  Your IQ will place you in the right social rank for your level of ability.

Toby Young sets out in more detail the case for society being invisibly ranked by IQ


Social class in Australia is a topic that often goes undiscussed — but if the response to our series on class is anything to go by, some of you are ready to start talking about it.

Some people got in touch to say they believe the archetype of Australia as the lucky country, where opportunity abounds, rings as true as ever.

But others told us the idea that hard work and application are the only barriers to social mobility is laughable.

What was constant is that everyone had an opinion.

The ABC's recent class quiz prompted a number of curious results.

More than a few people were surprised to find their tastes, according to data compiled as part of the detailed Australian Cultural Fields project, aligned them with middle or upper-class woman aged between 40-59.

Taste — whether you'd rather see a pub band than go to opera, for instance — only explains so much of course, and there are many other factors that help explain where we each sit within Australia's complex and confusing class structure.

Sue, a public servant from Darwin, describes herself as a "late baby boomer". She once lived in Sydney, but moved to the Northern Territory with her husband for his job in construction work. "I'm definitely a middle-class person," she said.

"Class in the NT looks much different to what it would in New South Wales. In terms of access to housing, education, employment, health outcomes — it keeps class very much at the forefront of your mind."

Julie wrote in to tell us about her family full of "shop-stewards, miners, railway workers, shipbuilders and plumbers".

"All politically aware, self-educated and proud of their working-class community solidarity," she said.

"My grandfather would say to explain wealth and class: 'Remember no-one is better than anyone else, it is just some people are better off'."

Education opens doors

A running theme through the conversations was the notion of education as being key to class mobility.

Greg, from Melbourne, comes from a working-class background.

"Education was the 'mobility enabler' for me. A beneficiary of Whitlam's education reforms in the 1970s, access to university was merit-based. It opened the door to me," he said.

Brisbane-based policy officer Chris believes his upbringing and education provided him with a platform that's not necessarily attainable for all Australians.

"I have relatively secure professional work and I'm paid reasonably well, I'm aware of my privileged position in the social hierarchy," he said.

"It was impressed on me that I should go to university, that I should improve myself intellectually, financially."

But education isn't always easily accessible.

Alice comes from a modest background and decided to go to university after achieving a UAI of 97.7.

Throughout her time at university, she has struggled to make ends meet, despite working multiple jobs.

"I'm safe for now. But should I choose to embark upon a Master's component, and my benefits are taken away … who knows where I'll end up. As an intelligent woman in her mid-thirties, I shudder to think that my future may very well lie in the streets as a homeless person, making me yet another uncomfortable statistic for everyone else to gawk at."

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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