Funny events in anti-woke world

Chimpzy

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About that male-nurse-in-costume part, it's high time we'd go ultra mega woke and gender swap Sinterklaas, get in on that sexy Santa Claus thing those Anglos have been doing for a while now.
Yes, but only if we keep the beard
 

XsjadoBlayde

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Should note with most these cases of rich people being dramatically murdered, the perpetrator usually ends up being a disguised someone they already know or are related closely to, motivated by family feuds and/or money/inheritance. Have noticed an increase in rich-on-rich killing lately from the true crime/psychology coverage sphere, family annihilations and all sorts - there's a unique sense of despair behind a few where they've trapped themselves in a cycle of extreme luxury they cannot, will not let go of, so when bad financial choices and debts pile so high they cant be hidden any longer, they'd rather take out everyone in the vicinity they lied to, then themselves, than live with the shame of being seen as failure and having to live a more modest life. Or just target a family member for their life insurance, property or will/inheritance. In a way it kinda provides a crumb of relief as a poor, knowing I don't have to maintain a constant facade of success cos my bank account replaced personality and self-worth long ago, or fear my own sociopathic kids eying up the life insurance payouts.

Wtf was I going with this? Ah can't remember. Have a weird story about a mayor being killed in a police chase after he tried cutting their pay and they staged a public walkout/quitting of their jobs days earlier. The catch is the police claim he wasn't being chased for any wrong doing, they were only trying to, uh...protect him? lol.

 
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Casual Shinji

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Today in the hospital, I was visited by Sinterklaas accompanied by Black Pete, the latter wearing black make-up, thick red lips and a curly wig, because it's that time of year in Belgium again when there's blokes going around in blackface. This one was a woman tho, so it was also woke, cuz gender swapping.
That was the norm at my elementary school - 14 to 15-year old girls would walk around as black pete on December 5th. Quite a confusing scenario for a boy on the cusp of puberty.
 

BrawlMan

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Today in the hospital, I was visited by Sinterklaas accompanied by Black Pete, the latter wearing black make-up, thick red lips and a curly wig, because it's that time of year in Belgium again when there's blokes going around in blackface. This one was a woman tho, so it was also woke, cuz gender swapping.
Thank you for informing me and fuck anybody that celebrates this holiday.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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Mentioned here before but Tulsi Gabbard was home grown in a Hawaiian cult called science of Identity groomed to be a politician since childhood, still baffled why it doesn't make the news wtf



CEO Tried to Navigate Hate Incident By Telling Staff His Mentor Was a KKK Member

Recordings show that while he was the CEO of Digital Ocean, Yancey Spruill told staff that they should bend their values because "we love the company."

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More than 150 employees at the cloud services giant Digital Ocean protested last year after its CEO explained in an all-hands meeting that his former mentor was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which he said shows how employees can work together despite holding different beliefs. The CEO’s comments led to widespread outrage among employees on Slack, in a formal open letter, and in an employee walkout that has not been previously reported.

The all-hands meeting was intended to address the fallout of an employee posting an anti-LGBT meme on LinkedIn after the company changed its logo to be rainbow colored during Pride Month.

404 Media has obtained video of a July 2023 meeting in which the then-CEO of Digital Ocean, Yancey Spruill, tells employees that a company's "values," are not the same as an individual employee’s personally held beliefs. Digital Ocean is a huge, publicly traded cloud services and data center provider that has become particularly important with the rise of AI. Spruill has since left the company.

(Media only available on webpage)
An excerpt of Spruill's remarks

"Every time we leave our home we have to bend our belief system because we engage with human beings who are different than us in any number of dimensions. And this is really critical that beliefs are not our values, our behaviors. However, we all have to sign up for the [company's] values," Spruill said. "All the companies I’ve ever been in, I don’t remember the numbers, the EBITDA, the projects I worked on. What I do remember is—did that company live and honor its values? Did the employees?"

Spruill, who is Black, then tells an anecdote from his time working at a chemical company called Corning in the 1980s in which he came to be close with a colleague who was in the KKK.

"I worked in the electrical engineering, controls engineering group at this manufacturing plant in Wilmington, North Carolina, and not everyone liked that they were integrating Corning. And there was a particular person who I got off to a rough start with who had been at the company for 40 years in North Carolina. And our manager saw this and talked to him and he actually turned a corner and became a mentor of mine," Spruill said. "I had a great relationship with him. He never invited me to lunch, never invited me to have a drink, never invited me to play golf. We both loved golf. I came to find out this person was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and it was a very powerful message in learning for me that we sign up for values [of a company] because we believe in the opportunity. We love the company. We can bend as long as we don’t break our personal beliefs, it can work incredibly well. And I want us all to think about this because we all bring different belief systems to this place. And it can still work, it will work, as long as we understand that we’re not asking people to compromise their beliefs to the point that they break. We are asking you to compromise to the point where you accept our values."

Spruill’s talk was spurred by an incident in which an employee at Cloudways, a Pakistani company that DigitalOcean had just acquired, wrote "#SayNoToLGBT #ProudToBeMuslim" on LinkedIn, and crossed out a version of the Digital Ocean logo that had been turned rainbow for Pride Month. In the comments of that post, the employee wrote "LGBT is a disease not a human being thing according to science." The employee was not fired but left the company several months later, according to their LinkedIn.


(Media functionality stuck on source page)
Spruill's full remarks on the situation

Slack messages obtained by 404 Media from during and after the meeting included "Yancey I strongly recommend you stop talking right now," "are my ears broken? This can't be what I think it is," "holy shit," and the "This is Fine" burning room dog meme. Another employee said "perhaps I've misunderstood what I've heard, but management is using an example of the KKK as something that would be still acceptable for an employee to participate in, as long as they keep that disconnected from the company?" Three other employees then say that that is how they interpreted the comments, too. "We should accept A LITTLE dehumanization for the sake of the company," one worker said. Several employees, including some who are Muslim and queer, pointed out that the implication that Muslim employees would inherently not support LGBTQ is employees is itself bigoted.

Questions asked by employees at the all-hands included “To clarify your opening statement [about the KKK], are you saying that I should compromise on my own identity, to be able to work with coworkers who (for example) have said my existence is a disease?” And “Can you please clarify: Is it Digital Ocean’s official position that if we feel unsafe working with someone who would post ‘LGBT is a disease’ in a public forum next to DO’s Pride logo, then we need to seek employment with another company?”

Spruill left Digital Ocean in February and is now a director at Vista Equity Partners, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. Digital Ocean is a publicly traded company with more than a thousand employees. Digital Ocean and Vista Equity Partners did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Spruill told 404 Media that he later apologized for his remarks.

“There were several different follow up meetings with individual employees and an additional all hands where I apologized and clarified my remarks, including that I did not find out that the former colleague was affiliated with the KKK until several years after I left Corning, which was nearly 31years ago,” Spruill said. “I was trying to help the company navigate a challenging internal moment by sharing a deeply personal example from my own lived experience as a black man. My intention in sharing that story was to illustrate that employees from different backgrounds and beliefs can be successful in working together in a professional setting to achieve a common goal.”

“Even though this was a powerful personal experience for me, I recognize using this personal example to make a point in comparison in this context (or any context) was insensitive and inappropriate, and given the moment, I regret my clumsy delivery of this personal example,” he added. “I am sorry that my remarks were initially interpreted by some as suggesting we would tolerate or otherwise make space for any discriminatory or anti-LGBT+ conduct at the company. That was never my intention, and I worked hard to make that clear in subsequent conversations with employees.”

During a question-and-answer segment at the end of the meeting, Spruill brought up the KKK anecdote again after saying that changing the logo to rainbow colors during Pride Month "actually created risk, embarrassment, and ostracized a portion of our employee base." He says that changing the logo caused it to show up on the LinkedIn pages of employees in Pakistan—where being gay is technically illegal—"caused" the employee to denounce LGBT people on LinkedIn.

"The company violated our values, not unknowingly, when we changed the logo during Pride Month, which we’re proud to do. We didn’t realize that that would be attributed to individuals who are linked to our company’s private social media channels," he said. "So a big learning in this is we’re going to have to think about, as we’re global, how do we support our various employees and their communities in a way that does no unintentional harm. We did this here, which is what sparked this incident. We catalyzed this incident. An individual didn’t catalyze it, we did it by our actions."

He then said "we bend our beliefs, we don’t bend who we are as human beings. To the point that if people can’t bend their beliefs to the point where they can work with someone. As I mentioned earlier, me working with someone from the Ku Klux Klan, who ended up being a great mentor and coworker of mine who actually helped me enormously, even getting [me] into the stock market. He was into the stock market, we’d go into the lab, we’d be talking about stocks, he actually sparked my interests in a career that’s transformative to my entire existence and yet when we went home from work at night, we had very different beliefs about the way the world should work."

The incident and, specifically, Spruill's comments at the all hands, caused more than 150 employees to sign a letter of solidarity with queer workers at Digital Ocean and a company walkout several days later, according to sources at the company and a copy of the letter obtained by 404 Media. The letter notes that "during the all-hands today, leadership messaging was borderline hostile, and included "Yancey telling us a story about how he got along with a KKK member at a former job, and using the story as an example of the type of behavior he expects from us."

A month after the all-hands meeting, in August 2023, DigitalOcean announced that it was conducting a search for a new CEO, but did not say why. Spruill remained in the position until February of this year. Spruill said the remarks had nothing to do with why he left DigitalOcean.
 
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Chimpzy

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Thank you for informing me and fuck anybody that celebrates this holiday.
Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing folks still do that shit. And even more embarrassing a bunch of folks, usually right wingers, clamor each year about how the blackface should be kept because it's "an old tradition" and "part of out history and folklore". That kind of sentiment may be familiar to you. Even though that "tradition" of Sinterklaas having a black servant, or any servant at all, didn't exist before the 19th century. Aka colonial times aka a really fucking racist time, and gee, I wonder if that could've had some influence.

Saw them walk in and I was like "Ugh, really? Ok, if it's gonna be that way, let's get this over with"

Got some cookies and a tangerine, so that was at least something.
 

Phoenixmgs

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I wasn't relying on a thinktank to make my argument for me-- i only even cited one because you insisted i do so.

I made some arguments myself. Budgets desperately need money, and centimillionaires have more than enough. Wealth accrued through share price increases 1) requires no work, and 2) even when subject to capital gains, is taxed lower than wages, so it's only fair to target it. And if we rely solely on capital gains, our yearly budgets rely on the whims of the rich to sell, which is unreliable. Increasing share price is currently the only method of accruing vast wealth that incurs no tax. They even use it as collateral, so it's not as if it's not actively helping them. So make them fucking pay.

All these arguments have already been made and you've not addressed a single one. Your objections (that it forces people to sell, or disadvantages US citizens) are both false.
You've barely made any arguments. An unrealized capital gains tax would be a volatile source of revenue for the government. The government waste tons of money already, why don't you fix that? Over half the US GDP goes towards healthcare in some fashion, fix that because that's the reason the US can't do public healthcare.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Over half the US GDP goes towards healthcare in some fashion, fix that because that's the reason the US can't do public healthcare.
The reason the US can't do public healthcare is that our politicians are invested in healthcare companies. Can't do anything that would hurt the bottom line of their investments!

Which dovetails directly into

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Casual Shinji

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Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing folks still do that shit. And even more embarrassing a bunch of folks, usually right wingers, clamor each year about how the blackface should be kept because it's "an old tradition" and "part of out history and folklore". That kind of sentiment may be familiar to you. Even though that "tradition" of Sinterklaas having a black servant, or any servant at all, didn't exist before the 19th century. Aka colonial times aka a really fucking racist time, and gee, I wonder if that could've had some influence.

Saw them walk in and I was like "Ugh, really? Ok, if it's gonna be that way, let's get this over with"

Got some cookies and a tangerine, so that was at least something.
I love the excuses of 'No, it's not blackface, it's soot from the chimney'. Ignore all those iterations of the character during the 90's on TV when he spoke with a thick Surinamese accent. Many prominent TV personalities did this at the time - people who would've never considered themselves racist, but did it anyway. And very likely they WEREN'T racist (actively at least), but the tradition of Sinterklaas totally normalized this act. I mean, I didn't think it was weird as a kid, and even far into my adult years... but then you look back on it - on all those children done up in blackface for the holidays, like it's racist Halloween aaaaand... yeah.
 

Schadrach

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Just saw a "meme" about how Skyrim modders can make hotter khajiit/cat person thing than the developers of Avowed.

So has the anti-woke crowd gone full circle with making furries cool, or have they just always been furries 🤔
Skyrim modders creating arbitrarily "hot" (for specific definitions of the word) versions of every race has been a thing for a long time. Many of those mods are even allowed on Nexus, and commonly downloaded. CBBE is one of the older ones traditionally used as an example.

It doesn't hurt that Bethesda artists have apparently never seen another human being and so are consistently bad at modeling them.

Speaking as not having seen the meme, my instinct tells me that the difference between them is probably that the Skyrim khajiit - who is innocent of this crime - probably look like anthropomorphised cats (think Zootopia or Kung Fu Panda) and the modded version more likely looks like an anime catgirl (think Felicia from Darkstalkers, or the harem from shows like Cat Planet Cuties) which trend more towards sexy woman with cat ears and a tail who occasionally acts cat-like.
You would be broadly incorrect. I mean, they exist, but much more common are things that are very recognizeable as Cathay Khajiit. As opposed to the Ohmes or Ohmes-Raht Khajiit from Arena and Daggerfall that you could hypothetically take in a more anime catgirl direction and still be more recognizeable. Or the Suthay-Raht you saw in Redguard and Morrowind that have digitigrade legs or the Alfiq and Alfiq-Raht that literally just look like housecats. Or any of the others out of the 17 furstocks of the Khajiit.

Just search for something like CBBE UNP Khajiit and you should be able to find examples, including ones that have varying degrees of furriness and numbers of nipples. It's easier to find furry, 8 nippled female Khajiit skins than it is to find male Khajiit models that appropriately have the barbed cat penis (which is explicitly canon and is mentioned in The Real Barenziah, volume 2 in the games before the passage was censored by the Temple).
 

Schadrach

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I spent last weekend in Sugarcreek, FWIW. Dutch Host Inn, they have a great little package deal for most of the year. Hotel itself is nothing special, but can't beat the deal. And OH Amish country has way better food than PA Amish country. Every time we go up there we also make a point of grabbing something from Esther's Bakery which is right beside the clock.

be kept because it's "an old tradition" and "part of out history and folklore".
Clearly the answer is to reach into older traditions and either discard Black Pete in favor of Krampus or go further back all the way to Saturnalia.

Which dovetails directly into
To quote Ministry: "A trigger happy finger solves a problem not a prayer. " - Ministry, End of Days (Part One)
 

Silvanus

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You've barely made any arguments. An unrealized capital gains tax would be a volatile source of revenue for the government.
Currently, capital gains is volatile for two reasons: firstly the amount depends on share price fluctuations, and secondly the realisation and timing both depend on the personal decisions of the owners to sell. Unrealised gains tax still has the first element, but completely negates the second. So it's definitively more reliable than capital gains.

The government waste tons of money already, why don't you fix that?
"What about X other issue??"

Irrelevant distraction.
 

Chimpzy

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Clearly the answer is to reach into older traditions and either discard Black Pete in favor of Krampus or go further back all the way to Saturnalia.
We never had Krampus, that's from the Alps. Pretty much every region has its own variation of St Nicholas helper/dark foil, some older than others.

But if we're going all the way back we could probably unearth some kind of proto-indo-european winter solstice ritual.