Christians: Boycott Google Today

Google CEO and Thought-Controller-in-Chief Sundar Pichai
Just how politically correct has Google's corporate culture become? Check out this short piece by Todd Starnes, in which Starnes reveals that the company's Google Home device, their version of Siri, refuses to recognize the names "Jesus" or "Jesus Christ". Be sure to watch the embedded short video.

When called on this, uh, innocent lapse, they explain themselves this way: "The reason the Google Assistant didn’t respond with information about ‘Who is Jesus’ or ‘Who is Jesus Christ’ wasn’t out of disrespect but instead to ensure respect."

Uh-huh. Who believes this line? After the James Damore firing and what that revealed about company culture? We now have plenty of documentation of how the most seething PC extremism dominates everything that happens on the Google corporate campus and in their HR workshops.

Google is poison. Christians should drop Google Search, Google Chrome, Google Maps and Gmail ASAP. For search, I recommend moving to Bing or DuckDuckGo.

There are tens of millions of us Christians in the US. Why should we do business with a company that hates us? If enough of us left, it would hit these bigots where it counts: in their share prices.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Cathy Newman vs. Jordan Peterson: A Study in SJW Demagoguery

Newman's interview got within a millimeter of outright self-satire
I’m surprised the Atlantic actually ran this piece on Cathy Newman’s pathetic attempt to libsplain Jordan Peterson to himself. Perhaps the magazine's editors, after all the guffaws produced by their piece last year explaining how “the solar eclipse is racist”, have had second thoughts about the SJW bandwagon and decided they didn’t want the Atlantic to be known as the go-to magazine for high-brow infants.

In any case, the Peterson/Newman interview is already a broadcasting classic. Seriously. If you haven't watched it, you've missed one of the best verbal sparring matches ever aired on television. Click here and sit back for some serious entertainment.

I agree with the Atlantic writer that one can find Newman's style of verbal demagoguery on both left and right. But who are we kidding? The "left" now never leaves this mode. Compare Newman here with the typical Tucker Carlson interview. Carlson doesn't put words in his guests' mouths: he draws them out with questions, often simple Yes/No questions, until they reveal the ugly implications of their positions. Very different from Newman and Co.

And of course Peterson is not really a figure of the right, and certainly not of the Alt-Right to which his enemies desperately try to link him. You can only place Peterson on the right if your idea of the left is Maoism. Which, in terms of cultural issues, is exactly where our left "liberals" now sit. They are identity-politics-Maoists-cum-pro-corporate globalists. Our 21st-century left manages to combine the worst of both worlds. And to hell with them. Peterson, a strong antidote to their nonsense, is a true liberal in the best 20th c. mode. We're lucky to have him.

#SmashThisFakeLeft #JordanPeterson #antiSJW #ConorFriedersdorf

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

Read Rimbaud: Do It Now

Arthur Rimbaud, c. 1871
One of the sharper young folks I know is taking up Rimbaud. And bravo to that. Rimbaud was an extraordinary figure in almost every way. To read him is to realize it immediately. A 19th century French teenager from a small-town backwater who basically reinvents shamanism from scratch. On his own. And his linguistic genius, there's nothing else like it in English or French: the cussed sharpness of it, the fact that this is basically a kid from farm country who's read the whole town library and seriously intends to remake the world through language. The fierce oddity of it; the seriousness of the project--and most important, how in many ways one gets the sense that he almost pulled it off.

My friend laments that Rimbaud didn’t write more. I don’t. There’s already a wealth of material. It fits, of course, in a single volume. In English either the Wallace Fowlie translation or Paul Schmidt translation will do. And for a good biography, Graham Robb’s is very well done, though his readings of individuals poems often miss the boat, I find. No matter.

As for Bruce Duffy’s book, Disaster Was My God, it really is extraordinary. Graham Robb may be the best of Rimbaud’s biographers, but his grasp of Rimbaud’s poetics isn’t that strong. Duffy gets it, and writes a searing fictionalized account of the life besides.

For me the key question is this: What would language have to be for Rimbaud’s project to make sense? I’ve some writing on this problem myself, stored away, and hope to get back to it someday. Rimbaud, and later Max Jacob, very different figures, are the reason I took up French on entering university.

E.M.

42 other important public service announcements can be found in my book Idiocy, Ltd.