Social Justice, Inc,. presents the 2015 White Guilt calendar.

EJI is proud to announce the release of our 2015 calendar, A History of Racial Injustice. This full-color wall calendar expands on EJI’s previous calendars with new historical entries and short essays highlighting historical events and issues in our nation’s racial history.

The 2015 calendar is part of a series of reports and educational materials that explore (America’s) legacy of … slavery, racial terror, and legally supported abuse of racial minorities.

Then again, this calendar may not be for you guys, because some elements of the Racial Justice Movement have decided that Gays are the Oppresor.

We can no longer sit idly by as you, mainstream LGBT organizations, center your movements and advocacy work on some within our varied communities but not others. We are no longer OK with the mainstream LGBT organizations among you who signal your complicity in anti-Black violence through your loud silence and deliberate ignoring of the types of systemic, institutionalized forms of anti-Black racism that negatively impact Black queer and trans people (and all Black people), disallow Black well-being, and deaden us.

Imagine the dillema now faced by Chris Lemon, Michael Sam, and RuPaul.

This could be satire, but considering that the Feminist Left has already gifted us with “Micro-aggresions” and California’s affirmative consent law, is anything too ridiculous to doubt that Progressives won’t make it a thing.

HotAir pointed out yesterday that “Consistent liberals” are most likely to block others on social media for disagreeing with them politically.

Hence, my question. I’m honestly divided. In this complicated world, we’ve all known some lefties who are plain jerks, while some other lefties may be fairly nice people – apart from their never wanting to hear or know of any information that could make them question their prejudices.

I ran into the second kind of person just the other night, at my dad’s. “Cynthia” is a highly-educated neighbor in his retirement community, very nice in terms of watching out for my dad’s disabled girlfriend, and with a pleasant demeanor. So far, “not a jerk.”

But narrow-minded. As one example, she’ll dismiss (as in, will not hear) any information of Sarah Palin being anything other than a total dummy. Which is funny because the prominent Obama supporter and former “green jobs czar”, Van Jones, has now admitted in essence that the Left lied to people about Palin in the 2008 campaign:

“Sarah Palin .. people forget. She had the Democratic party shaking in our boots in 2008. She came out, she gave that speech at the convention. That was, hands down, one of the best convention speeches – not by a woman, by anybody in 2008. People were running for the hills…

Now it can be told! Now it can be told! We were scared!”

It must help the Democrats that their most officially ‘educated’ supporters are among their most dogmatically-gullible supporters. The Democrats can lie to such people and they won’t even care. For another example, we have President Obama’s recent admission that the Democrat candidates who are staying distant from him this year are engaged in a lie:

Well look, here’s the bottom line. We’ve got a tough map. A lot of the states are contested this time are states that I didn’t win. And so some of the candidates there – it is difficult for them to have me in the state…

The bottom line is though, these are all folks who vote with me. They have supported my agenda in Congress…These are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me, and you know, I tell them, I said, ‘you know what? You do what you need to do to win.’

Dogmatically-gullible people: They enable the Democrats to get away with it. Some of them are jerks, some of them are nice – but narrow-minded.

Apple, Facebook will pay for female employees to freeze their eggs:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc and Facebook Inc will help pay for female employees to freeze their eggs…

From January, Apple will pay both full- and part-time employees up to $20,000 for procedure and storage costs for female employees to freeze their eggs.

“We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended maternity leave policy, along with cryopreservation and egg storage as part of our extensive support for infertility treatments,” Apple said in a statement.

I’m pretty sure that Apple already covered its employees’ *medical fertility problems*. (If that’s mistaken, please correct me in the comments.) Something else must be new here. What is it?

Could it be, a benefit for egg-freezing as a pure career move? Let’s see:

“We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families.”

NBC News reported on Tuesday that Facebook recently began covering egg-freezing for non-medical reasons…

Egg freezing is a pricey but increasingly popular option for women. It enables women to delay child bearing…

A sign of the times. Now that Facebook/Apple woman can freeze her eggs at 30, work years of 80 hour weeks, and then at 50 when she’s pulling 300K a year (and naturally infertile), pay a surrogate to do that other part of her life for her – you know, having kids from her eggs.

Honestly, I see nothing wrong with it – if she’s doing it all with her own money. The issue I see here is, Apple and Facebook are choosing to engage in a form of discrimination against their employees who don’t make (or shall we say, don’t need to make) that particular, optional choice.

Remember, the money comes from somewhere: the overall “employee comp” budget. Rather than pay tens of thousands of dollars for a hugely *optional* procedure for a special category of employee, why would Facebook/Apple not raise all employees’ bonuses by (say) a thousand dollars? That would empower far more women (and men, and transgenders) and be much more fair.

The free market will (or should) ultimately decide if Apple and Facebook have done the right thing here. In the meantime, some people appear not to grasp that freezing your eggs – purely as a career move – is optional:

“Egg freezing gives women more control,” said Jennifer Tye, marketing lead for Glow, a mobile application aimed at helping women avoid pregnancy or conceive.

“When I turned 30, I had this notion that my biological clock was ticking, but I didn’t know what my options were,” said Tye.

Really? At 30, she didn’t know what her options were? I hope she was misquoted; if not, it’s mind-boggling stupidity.

Social media have allowed us to interact and connect in ways not possible just a decade ago.  They have made it easier for us to track down long-lost friends and to  learn about their present doings.  Even as I write this, I am chatting on Facebook with an Australian gay man who, like many of our readers, differs from the norm of our community; he reached out to me after discovering the blog.

Facebook has also allowed me to see a phenomenon I first witnessed when I came out in the 1990s, of the loneliness of many gay men, perhaps a loneliness paralleled among our straight peers, but one which, at times,seems unique to our particular situation.  And Facebook magnifies it.  Some men seek solace in identifying with a political group, fearing to differ in one iota from its ideology, lest their peers cut them off.  Others relate the most mundane items of their day, as if that will help link them to the outside world.

Here we have this means of instant (virtual) connection and yet all too many of us aren’t really connecting.

These observations have caused me to revisit some (somewhat) dormant ideas about loneliness — and that too human hunger for real connection, for friends who see us we are and in whose presence we feel part of the universe because to truly feel part of the universe, we must, all of us, feel some connection to our fellow man.  And not just the connection of their physical presence, but a meaningful bond where they delight in our idiosyncrasies — and they in ours.

Understanding that, I found it very hard to watch the 1964 Bette Davis movie Dead Ringer, a film where the screen siren plays twin sisters, with the less financially fortunate Edith Phillips murdering her more wealthy sister Margaret in order to assume her identity and live in luxury.  As soon as Edie commits the crime, then puts on her sister’s clothes and goes to her house, all I could think about was how miserable her new life would be, no longer able to spend time with the Karl Malden‘s Jim Hobbson, the cop who truly appreciates her–cut off not just from him, but from her friends in the bar she manages.

I just couldn’t believe that anyone, well into middle age, with real friends would want to give them all up for a chance at riches.  And yet some people do.

After all, what is wealth if you have no one with whom to share it? (more…)