From the New York Times:
Syracuse school staffers put on leave for wearing ‘No Lives Matter’ shirts
Two Syracuse school employees were placed on leave after a photo showed them wearing “No Lives Matter” shirts as Halloween costumes, the district said.
The t-shirts worn by two unidentified female employees said “No Lives Matter” and had images underneath of two horror movie villains, “Friday the 13th” killer Jason Voorhees and “Halloween” masked murderer Michael Myers, Syracuse.com reported.
“We believe Black Lives Matter in the Syracuse City School District,” the district said. “The ‘costumes’ are racist, insulting and offensive and not consistent with our core beliefs and values. We hold our employees to a higher standard and expect them to model appropriate behavior for our students.”
That shirt is funny. But being a Progressive means having no sense of humor and taking everything as life-or-death serious.
This punishment had to happen because taking Black Lives Matter even the slightest bit unseriously, even on Halloween, is blasphemy.
I am reminded of this quote by Ayatollah Khomeini:
“Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”
This could be turned into a Progressive quote with minimal effort:
“The aim of being Woke is for humankind to be put to the test through allyship and self-reflection. A Woke regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in being Woke. There is no humor in bing Woke. There is no fun in being Woke. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”
Woke really is a radical, oppressive, medieval, atheistic religion.
It should be noted that the Ayatollah said that after issuing his fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
In the spirit of the Ayatollah, after these two staff members were caught making jokes at the expense of the holy scriptures of Black Lives Matter, a fatwa was issued against them.
What really needs to happen, and it would only happen during a Trump administration, is the Federal DOJ work with people like these staff members to sue the shit out of the district for violating their Frist Amendment rights.
We must push back. Low-level bureaucrats and administrators cannot be allowed to create a Woke fundamentalist state that is repressive of free speech.
Dammit, I thought I was the only one to think of “No Lives Matter”. I was going to make a shirt.
This is bullshit. It’s not “racist”. It may be OFFENSIVE, but it’s not “racist”. That word has an actual definition, and that is not it. Making light of anything related to black people does not mean “racism”. It’s also perfectly true; the idea that lives “matter” is strictly a human construction. In the universal scheme of things, no, nobody’s life matters. We all live in a cosmic microsecond, and die without making the slightest of impact on the universe as a whole, which has been around for billions and billions of years and has seen cataclysms and forces beyond anything that the human mind can even comprehend. The entire human race from start to finish, our entire evolution and extinction won’t make the slightest impression on the universe, or even the planet earth as a whole. It’s all relative. Humans have decided our lives matter to US, in order to comfort ourselves over the seeming fleeting and meaningless nature of our existence; people love to spout platitudes about how “every life has value and meaning”, and yet worldwide tens of thousands of people die every day, and it is physically impossible for liberals in the United States to ACTUALLY value the lives of 150 Africans killed in a suicide attack they never heard of. They cannot actually feel the loss of 5 people shot in a few hours in Chicago; they express the appropriate feelings they think they are supposed to express, but it doesn’t go any deeper than lip service. It’s a form of virtue signalling. You cannot actually care about a person you’ve never met, not beyond a kind of mild, speculative caring, and you certainly cannot feel the pain and loss it would require for the death of thousands of strangers who are nothing but numbers on paper. Human lives only have value to themselves, and to those they personally know and care about. Anything else is people convincing themselves because they have been trained that that’s what they are supposed to think.
Freedom of speech is totally dead.
[Y]ou certainly cannot feel the pain and loss it would require for the death of thousands of strangers who are nothing but numbers on paper.
“A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” — Apocryphally attributed to Joseph Stalin
I’ve attempted in the past — and still occasionally try — to see the numbers on paper as individual human lives, with all the opportunities that will never be found, potential that will never be realized, loves and losses that will never be experienced, contributions to their societies that will never be made, etc. No doubt some of them were highly intelligent and motivated people; who knows what they could have accomplished?
If you value human life at all, pondering even a handful — say, a weekend in Chicago — this way quickly becomes overwhelming.
Millions? Tens of millions?
It’s been said that every death is a loss to humanity. If that’s true, then socialism — responsible for ~168 million humans killed by their own governments in the 20th century alone — is the single most costly concept ever to stain our collective history.
Try to ponder that, in terms of individual lives. You cannot; your mind won’t allow itself to feel the pain and loss on anything even approaching that scale.
And yet, the Left claims they can, and that all those lives mattered … while they support the exact same policies that caused all the deaths to begin with!
The only difference is, they assume they’ll be the ones left alive and in control. They never learned what happened to the “useful idiots” that supported the government, once they ceased being useful and were deemed “inconvenient”.
The truth is, the bureaucracy in government is on nobody’s side. Not the Left, nor the Right, nor the center. It is its own beast, out for its own agenda, which doesn’t include you or I or anyone. The Founders realized this, and crafted strong limits on government power.
The Left toys with removing those limits at their — and our — own peril.
Unless they wore them TO WORK, this shouldn’t be an issue.
It’s long past time for employers — public and private — to declare that, barring criminal prosecution, off-time behavior is not their concern.