Category Archives: Political Correctness

Harley Quinn makes you think that its a no-holds-barred comedy series. Between the swearing, the jokes, and the gore, youd think that it was just the case. But no, instead they totally censor their humour. There are bleeps, there are blurs, and, honestly? The show is funnier for it. The death of comedy is not political correctness, but humorous brutality. Some jokes, you dont want to be clubbed on the head with. Harley Quinn keeps the humour alive and well by pruning out the jokes we dont need.

Take Doctor Psychos (Tony Hale) big moment. In the middle of a battle with Wonder Woman, he insults Wonder Woman (Vanessa Marshall). Its a word bad enough for the r-rated show to bleep out. Now, Doctor Psycho may be a killer, a madman, and a member of the Legion of Doom, but calling Wonder Woman THAT is a step too far. Its a joke in itself, as everyone is shocked into a stunned silence that for a moment, makes the world stop turning (literally).

Its a joke that wouldnt have worked as well if Doctor Psycho hadnt been bleeped. Harley Quinn viewers need to suspend a certain amount of disbelief to appreciate the supervillains-as-celebrities approach that Harley Quinn takes. Murder, theft, world domination are taken for granted as part of the supervillain gig, but a more relatable scandal like the public use of a misogynistic word is something that needs to be called out. The shows rating meant it could very well have left the word unbleeped, so the choice to do so says something. In this case, it appears to say that while the show is perfectly fine with hyperviolence, for instance, purely misogynistic language is off-limits.

Another facet of censorship as humour comes with Maxie Zeus (Will Sasso) appearance - or, at least, the appearance of Mini Zeus. Maxie Zeus too-short toga is used to full effect as he comes on to Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco). The moment is somehow made all the gross by the strategically blurred pixels, which act both as an emphasis for the supervillains-as-celebrities theme as well as heightening his grossness by leaving things to audience imagination.

Harley Quinn can be a cruder, grosser show - it appears to have the freedom to do more or less what it wants to.

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'Harley Quinn' self-censors its own crudeness and is a stronger show for it - MEAWW

Prime Minister Boris Johnson's landslide victory in the United Kingdom's elections is a warning for Democrats hoping to defeat President Trump next year, according to Joe Biden.

Youre also going to see people saying, 'My God, Boris Johnson, who is kind of a physical and emotional clone of the president, is able to win,' Biden, 77, told donors in San Francisco late Thursday.

Johnson, 55, delivered the Conservative Party a 161-majority in the House of Commons, thrashing the Labour Party and giving the Tories their largest margin in the British Parliament's lower chamber since Margaret Thatcher's majority of 102 in 1987. Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, 70, announced he would eventually quit as leader after a period of reflection regarding the "disappointing" results, his party's worst showing at the polls since the 1930s. Corbyn, a socialist, addressed criticism in his concession speech over his failure to stamp out anti-Semitism in his ranks and his alienation of traditional Labour voters by pushing the party to the left of the political spectrum.

Meanwhile, Johnson, who was appointed prime minister in May after Theresa May stepped down, now has a mandate to take Britain out of the European Union, vowing to "get Brexit done" by the end of January. The New York-born former mayor of London and ex-foreign secretary is often compared to Trump, who endorsed Johnson in his bid to replace May earlier this year. The pair, who share a similar light blond, coiffed hairstyle, both have a propensity for chaffing with establishment politicians given their distaste for political correctness and populist beliefs.

Biden, a moderately center-left top-tier aspirant for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, said Thursday, "Johnson is winning in a walk." The 36-year Delaware senator predicted news headlines would read, Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so, so far to the left. It comes up with ideas that are not able to be contained within a rational basis quickly.

The two-term vice president added Democrats would place a premium on bipartisanship and an ability to unite the party as Iowa's opening caucuses on Feb. 3 near.

Presidents are supposed to be able to persuade and work something out, he said.

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Biden: UK prime minister 'physical and emotional clone' of Trump - Washington Examiner

Read: Russias twin nostalgias

In his landmark 1981 book, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, Paul Hollander wrote of the hospitality showered on sympathetic Western visitors to the Communist world: the banquets in Moscow thrown for George Bernard Shaw, the feasts laid out for Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag in North Vietnam. But his conclusion was that these performances were not the key to explaining why some Western intellectuals became enamored of communism. Far more important was their estrangement and alienation from their own cultures: Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels.

Hollander was writing about left-wing intellectuals in the 20th century, and many such people are still around, paying court to left-wing dictators in Venezuela or Bolivia who dislike America. There are also, in our society as in most others, quite a few people who are paid to help Americas enemies, or to spread their propaganda. There always have been.

But in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America. And their motives are curiously familiar. All around them, they see degeneracy, racial mixing, demographic change, political correctness, same-sex marriage, religious decline. The America that they actually inhabit no longer matches the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America that they remember, or think they remember. And so they have begun to look abroad, seeking to find the spiritually unified, ethnically pure nations that, they imagine, are morally stronger than their own. Nations, for example, such as Russia.

The pioneer of this search was Patrick Buchanan, the godfather of the modern so-called alt-right, whose feelings about foreign authoritarians shifted right about the time he started writing books with titles such as The Death of the West and Suicide of a Superpower. His columns pour scorn on modern America, a place he once described, with disgust, as a multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual universal nation whose avatar is Barack Obama. Buchanans America is in demographic decline, has been swamped by beige and brown people, and has lost its virtue. The West, he has written, has succumbed to a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicidethe displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.

This litany of horrors isnt much different from what can be heard most nights on Fox News. Listen to Tucker Carlson. The American dream is dying, Carlson declared one recent evening, in a monologue that also referred to the dark age that we are living through. Carlson has also spent a lot of time on air reminiscing about how the United States was a better country than it is now in a lot of ways, back when it was more cohesive. And no wonder: Immigrants have plundered America, thanks to decadent and narcissistic politicians who refuse to defend the nation. You can read worse on the white-supremacist websites of the alt-rightdo pick up a copy of Ann Coulters Adios America: The Lefts Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellholeor hear more extreme sentiments in some evangelical churches. Franklin Graham has declared, for example, that America is in deep trouble and on the verge of total moral and spiritual collapse.

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The False Romance of Russia - The Atlantic

The politics of language is affecting art institutions, from honoring Ancient Roman same-sex relationships to reckoning with an imperialist legacy.

When it comes to history, language matters. And nowhere is that more prevalent than in museums. When we wander through the corridors of bygone eras, the bespoke guides formed from layers of information weve drawn from books and cultural references and tales help us to picture of lives before us. Transporting ourselves into the shoes of entire civilizations is an impossible task, the dead and buried graced us with limited fragments to help us conjure an entire wealth of customs, social norms, and attitudes. At times unrecognizable, theyre the only foundations we have to understand our own beginnings.

Its why, left to our own devices, objects and artworks can feel like alien relics; demanding we tease out leftover knotted fragments into a fully formed textural picture. And while a little bit of guidance goes a long way, it can also spark a war over semantics.

Earlier this year, The Amsterdam Museum announced it wasnt going to use the phrase the Golden Age anymore. The phrase Gouden Eeuw frames the Netherlands colonial past as a heyday, a tranquil time when no wars were fought, intellectual musings dominated the countrys psyche, and political influence radiated overseas. In truth, the only benefits tallied up during this period were those accrued by the Dutch; peak behind the sunshine exterior and youll see the slavery, poverty, and brutal labor keeping the whole operation afloat.

Walking the fine line between historical accuracy, using language everyone understands while also making it compelling takes nimble feet and delicate balance.

Language is inherently political. The altercation of verb, noun, or adjective can create the sort of uproar that high profile, publicly funded intuitions trying to curry favor with philanthropists want to stay well clear of. In 2016, when the National Gallery of Denmark decided to review all the titles for the artworks in their collections, it caused the biggest media storm the museum had ever witnessed. Inspired by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, who had begun replacing bigoted terms from their descriptions with neutral phrases, the Danish museum decided to follow suit and start the process of removing offensive and political loaded words like Negro and Eskimo. Never before in the museums history did we experience such massive attention, says Dorthe Aagesen, Chief curator at the gallery. The museum was accused of political correctness and falsification of history by art professionals and politicians alike.

As the social lexicon evolves, the pressure to keep pace can feel like a juggling act of trying to stay on step ahead of the game or falling to the last in line. In most intuitions, the decision to include, omit, or change a single word is a collective process. Aagesen said although her team will only contact external experts with an acute knowledge of a subject, inside the walls of the museum, the modern-day use of out of date terms gets banded about between researchers, scholars, curatorial and educational staff each one referencing their own school of thought. Walking the fine line between historical accuracy, using language everyone understands while also making it compelling takes nimble feet and delicate balance.

Head of interpretation at the British Museum, Stuart Frost says that the ongoing conversation at times goes beyond the confines of academia. Sometimes a member of the public might raise an issue and we respond to that.

He says one of the biggest areas of significant change is how they talk about male relationships in ancient Rome. I think theres been a big change over the last 10 or 15 years, around sexuality and gender, he tells me. Frost uses the example of when a member of the public queried the use of homosexual in one of their texts: It was a reference to modern, exhibition that was looking at the history of Germany and the persecution during the Nazi era, and so homosexual is the word that was used at the timesit was an appropriate use of the word. But certainly, in later eras, we use the word gay or something that was more appropriate.

But for the most part, the job of unraveling and decoding language is a never-ending process for the institution.

Understanding recent history and its surviving wealth of people, artifacts, and documentation is one thing, but trying to get to grips with ancient civilizations is another. If we were doing an exhibition about ancient Greece, and there is an object that relates to love and desire between men we describe it as same-sex: in a male same-sex scene. In the Roman world, there isnt there isnt a Latin equivalent term for homosexualityits an anachronistic idea. So we try to use terms that dont impose anachronistic views onto the past.

But for the most part, the job of unraveling and decoding language is a never-ending process for the institution. Its usually driven internally, Frost explains. As a museum, each member of staff, are linked in to that this global network of scholarship. So when an issue arises, and theres a debate, theyre obviously aware of whats going on, and the implications of that are then discussed.

Museum are the gatekeepers to our collective culture and the weight of how we perceive them rests on their shoulders. They have to constantly revise, reframe, and update their collections if we stand any chance of deciphering what came before us. Contemporary audiences need contemporary touchstones, acting as the Babel fishes whispering clues in our ears to help us understand the past. Its an interaction that will have to keep up so long as language refuses to sit still.

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Why museums are on the front lines of discovering the boundaries between semantics and substantive change - Document Journal

Theres an aphorism I like, that we are entirely new people from one day to the next, let alone a year or a decade. Whether, say, a novelist writes their critical scene on Tuesday or Wednesday could make a world of difference. Our minds change by absorbing images and things people say. We float back and forth between what choices are best the human race wears a shade of gray most of the time.

That piece of wisdom has come to top of mind lately as I cover the 2020 presidential race. The beginning of this decade was also the still-early days of the tenure of Americas first black president. Barack Obamas victory was made possible in large part by winning the Iowa caucuses; by clinching an early victory in the lily white state, his campaign proved to the rest of the party, and to black voters in particular, that white America was ready to vote for a black man. The decade is ending as a Democratic presidential primary begins, and though the field has been historically diverse, the contest looks more and more likely to produce a white nominee. Democrats seem to have changed their minds about something in the last decade. They absorbed new words and images (often pretty ugly ones) that made them think the country isnt in the place to have a person of color in the White House. (Or at least none running in 2020.)

In the summer of 2017, seven months after President Trump was sworn into office, I wrote about something Id observed among Democrats since his election. While there was talk about promoting candidates that share the life experiences of the voters of color who anchor the Democratic base, the politicians who were actually seeing real momentum were youngish white men. Among the rising stars that I singled out was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, who had made waves with his run for DNC chair in the months following Trumps election. There seemed to be two distinct sides to the debate over how to win back the presidency: appeal to whites who voted for Obama and later Trump, or turn out those who stayed home in 2016, namely black voters. The former strategy seemed to be winning out, given the safeness of the young male candidates. They had fashioned themselves rhetorically after Obama, but their whiteness made them inherently less threatening to Trump voters. For what its worth, black turnout in the 2018 midterm elections was up 11 points from where it was in the 2014 midterms.

Two years later, it strikes me that Democrats are in the midst of an even deeper moment of preoccupation with white America. The partys voters have expressed a preference for the most electable candidate, which has become a euphemism for a moderate who could win back Obama-Trump voters, many of whom are white. And you can see why.

Wisconsin, the tipping point state in the 2016 election, is 86 percent white. Whites make up over 76 percent of the countrys total population. And the Democratic Party bled white voters during the Obama years: In 2007, Pew Research found that whites were just as likely to identity as Democrats as they were to identify as Republicans. By 2010, a year into Obamas tenure, whites were 12 points more likely to call themselves Republicans. The inflection point is hard to miss. Democrats have looked to states with large minority populations like Georgia and Arizona as a way to change their Electoral College fortunes, but forging a new path is never a sure bet; the old blue wall states filled with white voters must seem within grasp to many Democrats, if only they could find the right candidate with the right kind of campaign.

Sen. Kamala Harris was not that candidate and did not have that campaign. Her exit from the race last week was met with some surprise; in the wake of her announcement, Sen. Cory Booker and Julin Castro, imperiled but still in the running, raised the alarm about the potential for an all-white field.

In other words, its been another moment to talk about electability and who the best candidate to beat Trump might be. The good feelings about diversity and social progress that the initial field evoked more women than ever before, more nonwhite faces have soured. Candidates of color have struggled in the field, including with voters of color. Perhaps thats because Democrats are worried that candidates of color might put off white swing voters.

And yet, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out last week, there has been a narrative that wokeness often pejoratively used these days to mean an excessive focus on political correctness rules the roost of the Democratic electorate. Candidates of color, with their very presence, seem to evoke this sentiment. By Bouies judgement, though, the wokest candidates have left the race (Sen Kirsten Gillibrand, former Rep. Beto ORourke, now Harris) and the left-leaning Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders focus their progressivism on economic justice rather than social justice.

That the woke narrative has taken hold is unsurprising, though. First and foremost, there has been an actual movement of activists on the left seeking to shove the party to align with more progressive values on race, immigration and all manner of social reform. But theres perhaps another reason for all the attention paid to wokeness, and it might have to do with another shifting political aspect of white identity: the increasingly leftward tilt of college-educated whites. And not just any college-educated whites the ones that dominate the media.

A year into the primary race is as good a point as any to pause and reflect on the surprise we in the media have seemed to express about the strong showings of moderates like former Vice President Biden and Buttigieg. The media was prepped for a new kind of candidate a woman or a person of color perhaps but Democratic voters seem consistently behind white men. (Though Warren has seen her own strong showing at times in the race.)

Perhaps thats because the media is so white and so well educated. In 2018, Pew Research found that 77 percent of newsroom employees across newspapers and digital outlets were white. The overwhelmingly white industry is also largely college educated (though poorly paid).

If we use education as a proxy for social class (even though class is far more complicated than that), white Americans are in the midst of a radical political realignment along class lines. The conventional wisdom for much of the 20th century was that whites with a college education were more apt to vote Republican, and whites without a college education were more apt to be Democrats. But things have changed. Pew Research surveys show that as recently as 2009, white voters with a high school degree or less were evenly divided between Democratic and Republican affiliation. But in 2017, that same group was 58 percent Republican, 35 percent Democratic.

That realignment is discussed in Identity Crisis, John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreks book about the 2016 election. In it, they talk about the shifts of white America and argue it was informed by a greater awareness of the Democratic and Republican parties views on race. Trumps campaign, which centered around nationalistic immigration views, only helped accelerate white Americans ideas of which party their views on race fit into. Pew Research shows that in the past decade, white Democrats are far more likely to call themselves liberal than black Democrats, and that whites in general have rapidly gotten more liberal on issues of race. They got woke, in the non-pejorative, original sense of the phrase: They were awakened to the way racial disparities play out in American life.

Add all these factors together, and the medias surprise at the prominence of moderate white candidates in the race seems to make more sense; the changing world views of college-educated whites hold outsized sway because they occupy positions of power.

The 2020 Democratic primary wont be the end of voters and the medias preoccupation with what appeals to white Americans. The shifting racial consciousness of white Americans will perhaps dominate the next couple of decades of American political life. This may not be the 2020 primary that many in the Democratic establishment wanted, but it is the one that their voters have presented them with. A lot has changed since 2008.

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The 2010s Were A Complicated Decade For Democrats And White Voters - FiveThirtyEight

The Season 3 finale of Amazons popular car show The Grand Tour was titled Funeral for a Ford. The episode dedicated most of its run time to a documentary film about the history of the midsize Ford sedan. Its a mundane topic on the surface, but as the film showed in extensive and loving detail, mundane things like a family car can represent the way a society operates. And after decades of commanding the market, Ford was discontinuing its midsize sedan in order to concentrate on other models.

After the film, the show returned to the studioa large tent set up in the English countrysidewhere host Jeremy Clarkson tried (and failed) to hold back tears as he announced that The Grand Tours fourth season would feature a format change.

The week prior, The Grand Tour had devoted its entire program to a unique motoring challenge. Clarkson and cohosts Richard Hammond and James May were dropped onto the edge of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, with parts, provisions, and instructions. Their goal was to build a vehicle and drive it hundreds of miles off-road to civilization. Adventure and high jinks ensued.

This combination of engaging documentary-style programming and unscripted road trip movie/amateur engineering challenge has long been the backbone of Clarkson, Hammond, and Mays collaborations. But episodes had typically also included car reviews, celebrity interviews, short comedy segments, and studio banter. Now, with the shift in format, the longer documentaries and travel videos would constitute the entirety of The Grand Tour.

Its easy to understand why Clarkson was so emotional. Though the show itself would continue, the door was closing on a formula that the three men had followed for 17 years and more than 200 episodes. But car culture, and the world in general, has changed dramatically over that time. Powersliding a Lamborghini around a racetracklong a staple of The Grand Tour and its predecessor, Top Gearis no longer as socially acceptable as it once was, and car shows have to adapt to this new reality. The tweaked format was a necessary but nonetheless dramatic reinvention for a show that had sometimes been obstinately resistant to change. Now, as Season 4 premieres on Friday, the program has an opportunity to catch up to the contemporary automotive and media landscape. It remains to be seen whether the hosts will embrace it.

In 2002, the BBC rebooted its long-running car show, Top Gear, around Clarkson and Hammond, interspersing sensible car reviews with studio discussions, celebrity interviews, and segments about top-end performance cars. May joined the cast for the second season, and the show began to take on a life of its own.

Celebrity guests who visited would sit down for an interview with Clarkson, then take a used compact car around the shows test track. The best times were posted on a leaderboard, and that competitive nature ultimately attracted the likes of Tom Cruise and Will Smith to the set. Nowhere else on television could you see Helen Mirren and Usain Bolt thrashing the same used Chevy around a British airfield.

The consumer advice segments of the old Top Gear remained when the BBC relaunched the show, but with an increased emphasis on humor and pizzazz. For instance, Clarkson issued a loving review of the Ford Fiesta by re-creating the shopping mall car chase scene from The Blues Brothers and participating in an amphibious landing exercise with the Royal Marines. In another review, he drove a Skoda Yeti, a small family SUV, while a helicopter landed on the roof.

The flashiest and most popular segments involved all three hosts choosing a car within a given categoryfrom top-end supercars to good first cars for teenagersand then either undertaking an international road trip or completing a series of challenges in them. They sailed an amphibious pickup truck across the English Channel, attempted to build police cars for 1,000, and entered a 24-hour endurance race using biodiesel theyd grown themselves.

Eventually, interest in cars stopped being a necessary prerequisite for Top Gear viewers. As the hosts rode motorcycles across Vietnam and drove to the North Pole, it became known as a tremendously popular travel show that was occasionally interrupted by HD helicopter shots of half-million-dollar sports cars, segments on esoteric topics like the history of Italian carmaker Lancia, or hilariously weird stunts in rusted-out econoboxes. It was like putting Anthony Bourdains travel shows, Mythbusters, and a lighthearted 60 Minutes segment all in the same program. And it was immensely successful.

At its height, Top Gear was rebroadcast in dozens of countries and watched by tens of millions of viewers. The shows greatest strength was its three hosts, who had an easy repartee and boundless knowledge of and enthusiasm for their subject matter. Whatever the topic, its very easy to watch people who like each other doing something they enjoy doingwhich is probably why this edition of the show lasted for 22 seasons.

But ultimately, those same hosts also became the shows greatest weakness. Clarkson, in addition to being a very funny, knowledgeable guy, is a 59-year-old conservative millionaire with a teenagers fascination with edginess. He never veered into overt shock humor, but he seems to delight in finding and pushing against the boundaries of polite conversation.

Clarkson is a larger-than-life onscreen presence. He stands 6-foot-5 with a booming baritone voice, and his cohosts have spent nearly 20 years poking good-natured fun at his oversized personality and occasional bouts of physical clumsiness. Somewhat fittingly, his attempts at subtle, edgy humor are anything but. (The mere existence of a Top Gear controversies Wikipedia page would be problematic even if it werent as long as it is, with four different bullet points for Cultural mockery.)

In 2014, actress Somi Guha sued Clarkson and the BBC over a racist joke the host made during a special set in Thailand that year. In the episode following that special, the trio drove through Patagonia and Clarksons Porsche featured a license plate that was viewed as a reference the Falklands War. The plate so outraged locals that they literally chased Top Gear out of Argentina before the conclusion of the planned road trip. It was the second time Top Gear had beaten a hasty retreat with a mob in pursuit, after a badly executed bit nearly got them stoned at an Alabama gas station in 2007.

Three months after the Patagonia special aired, the BBC fired Clarkson for attacking a producer because he was unsatisfied with the shows catering arrangements. Top Gear went on hiatus, and when Hammond and May quit the show shortly after Clarksons firing, Amazon snapped up the trio and rebooted them under the title The Grand Tour, which is essentially Top Gear with the serial numbers filed off and a new paint job.

Efforts to produce a more thoughtful, sensitive program in The Grand Tours first three seasons were always undermined by the sense that the hosts were conceding to political correctness, rather than genuinely attempting to avoid repeating past wrongs. A Season 3 trip to Colombia nearly foundered under an overwhelming tide of lazy jokes about the drug trade and a positively shocking antigay running gag about Clarksons Jeep.

By seasons end, it was painfully obvious that something needed to change, but the last two episodes served as a reminder of the heights the trio could achieve when they celebrated their shared passion for cars first and foremost, and directed their humor at themselves, rather than people who couldnt fight back. (It helped that the Mongolia specials very premise precluded human contact, leaving Clarkson and crew with no unfamiliar culture to other and gawk at.)

During the interregnum between seasons 3 and 4, Clarkson once again made headlines by calling climate activist Greta Thunberg an idiot in an interview with The Sun, and accusing her and her generation of killing the car show.

Clarkson is no longer the climate change denier he once was; in 2008, Grand Designs host Kevin McCloud was the celebrity interviewee on Top Gear. Clarkson magnanimously told the environmentally minded McCloud that he was welcome to express concern over impending planetary disaster and not be killed in any way. (The next episode featured a collegial interview with newly elected London mayor Boris Johnson alongside the memorable Fiesta review.) But the idea of environmentalism killing the car show, as if thats a valid consideration when faced with the destruction of the only known habitable biosphere in the solar system, is worth exploring.

The Grand Tour, and Top Gear before it, espouses a very particular brand of car enthusiasm, but there are many other types. In fact, the two shows have a history of exploring these different car cultures; May has gone spinning with local gearheads in Johannesburg, learned Finnish folk racing from Formula 1 world champion Mika Hakkinen, and driven Neil Armstrongs Corvette in a film about the peculiar automotive enthusiasms of early NASA astronauts.

In other words, while certain rich, older white men might find modern environmentalism threatening to their worldview, it isnt killing the car show, or car culture. For every gearhead who loves muscle cars, theres one who loves four-cylinder hatchbacks. Some car enthusiasts tune up their cars to go racing, while others obsess over aerodynamics and drying style in order to maximize fuel economya subculture called hypermiling. While fending off boos during his Top Gear appearance, McCloud offered an environmentalist justification for maintaining old cars: Keeping an older car on the road, even a less efficient one, has a lower environmental impact than the mining and pollution required to construct a modern car from scratch. Car culture, like any other kind of culture, is merely changing to fit the times.

The question now, which Amazon seems to be asking rather pointedly with the format change, is whether Clarkson and his cohosts can change quickly enough to avoid being left behind. The Grand Tours Season 4 premiere, which drops Friday, features Clarkson, May, and Hammond piloting boats down the Mekong River from Cambodia to Vietnam. And while there are some slightly cringey fish-out-of-water moments, it manages to run 90 minutes without veering into overt racism. More than that, though, its a genuinely informative and fun travel program, defined by gorgeous scenery, funny pranks, and enough local history that it feels like something more than empty calories.

This refashioning does, however, seem like the last chance for Clarkson, May, and Hammond, who have earned countless last chances in the past because theyve come to define the genre. The very first moments of the Season 4 premiere sum up their predicament. As they go to pick up their boats, they find that the Mekong River has gone dry at their planned meeting point thanks to climate change and Chinese dam construction upriver. So they hop on bicyclesa form of transportation Clarkson in particular has complained about in the pastand ride to their new staging point.

We are in tune with the times, though, May said.

Exactly right, Clarkson said in response. There is global warming, there is climate change, and if you hosted a car show now, I think youd feel foolish.

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Can a New Format Save Amazons The Grand Tour in Season 4? - The Ringer

What is it about environmentalists, or just your eco-friendly neighbors, that so many people love to hate? Think: drivers of EVs and hybrids, cyclists, vegans, people who compost, and so on. Does even a small part of your brain murmur "Yuck, those preachy, self-satisfied poseurs"?

Q: How do electric car owners drive?

A: One hand on the wheel, the other patting themselves on the back.

The sentiment is so commonplace that a new term, "virtue signaling," has been coined. The Brit who popularized the phrase, a writer named James Bartholomew, says that it describes "the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous. ... One of the crucial aspects of virtue signaling is that it does not require actually doing anything virtuous."

Two psychologists writing in the New York Times characterize it as "feigned righteousness intended to make the speaker appear superior by condemning others." Wikipedia succinctly defines it as "the conspicuous expression of moral values."

Local examples of the phrase abound, including in this newspaper's online forum, Town Square. Here is a sampling of the comments.

About cyclists:

"You sound like a very affluent Palo Altan that likes to virtue signal by bicycling and condemning the avarice of your somewhat less affluent neighbors who need a car and still have to work for a living."

About Tesla drivers:

"I agree that Climate Change as a priority is both a distraction and a feel good item for those impressed by virtue signaling. ... Virtue signaling is the top priority for most Palo Altans. The town is becoming overrun by Teslas."

About Caltrain riders:

"For the younger set, wanting to virtue-signal green, Caltrain is just a fashion accessory."

About recyclers:

"I wonder what it is that drives Palo Altans to engage in such constant and extreme virtue signaling. 'Zero waste' is a myth. As long as we live abundant lives we will always generate more waste."

About Palo Alto's City Council:

"The problem is that they are ... always virtue signaling and spewing drivel about greenhouse gases and whatnot. This method can't possibly help the environment. No matter how many laws they come up with, it won't stop climate change."

About the Cool Block initiative:

"That being said, as an exercise in yodeling our moral superiority without actually doing anything beneficial, while wasting taxpayer money and creating much-needed opportunities for graft, it sounds like a winner. And when it comes to pointless virtue-signaling, the comrades of Palo Alto yield to no one."

The term is used to disparage more than environmental actions. A cursory look on Town Square found it applied to people saving the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park, renaming schools, complaining about police behavior, and advocating for the homeless, gun control or minimum wage. It was even used against Stanford, with the claim that the general-use-permit campaign "essentially amounts to virtue signaling aimed at convincing the outside world how good the university is."

The thing is, I get it. Who likes to be preached to? Who likes to be judged? And yet, as a blogger on environmental issues for PaloAltoOnline.com, I believe it is important for us to develop inclusive and positive attitudes to being environmentally friendly. It's difficult enough to engage on climate change without worrying about embracing or evading claims of moral superiority. We need to find a way to collectively welcome changes that reduce emissions and help us to adapt to the changing climate.

In my view, these labels of virtue signaling are lazy, cynical and (at best) unproductive jabs at those who may be taking genuinely motivated if imperfect steps to improve a situation. Can it possibly be true that unless you are driving a gas-powered car to get around town, you are intentionally flaunting your eco-credentials? Or could it be that the "virtue signaling" taunt says more about the accuser than the accused?

What makes this shaming particularly problematic is that it can negate the otherwise effective social norms that would positively influence others. As someone commented: "All the virtuous people doing the right thing simply creates a backlash against "political correctness." Fear of appearing judgmental can be a powerful disincentive. Says yet another commenter: "I typically don't mention it (the efficiency work I've done on my house) because the global impact is minimal and I don't want to engage in virtue signaling." Argh. You should not feel embarrassed to share that you drive an EV, enjoy eating veggie burgers, turn down your thermostat in the winter, or bike to work!

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis writes in the December issue of The Atlantic: "Cynicism is cowardice. ... Cynicism fosters a distrust of reality. It is nothing less than a form of surrender. It provokes a suspicion that hidden malign forces are at play. It instills a sense of victimhood. It may be psychically gratifying in the moment, but it solves nothing."

Consider that people being derided as virtue signalers may be aiming, in however small a way, to improve our future. Their actions may not be perfect, or even adequate, but what they are doing is a start. Rather than deride their efforts, use your energy instead to take it upon yourself to lead by example.

Sherry Listgarten writes the "New Shade of Green" climate blog for Embarcadero Media. She can be reached at sherry@newshadeofgreen.com.

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Guest Opinion: Tired of all the virtue signaling? - Palo Alto Online

Tory MP Philip Davies.

Anti-LGBT+, anti-feminist Conservative MP Philip Davies, who single-handedly delayed regulations to make LGBT-inclusive education mandatory, has increased his majority in Shipley, Yorkshire.

In yesterdays general election (December 12), the MP held onto his seat and increased his majority by 1,561 votes.

Earlier this year, Davies objected to the government motion that codifies new LGBT-inclusive guidance for relationships education in primary schools, and relationships and sex education in secondary schools.

Under Parliamentary rules, a single MP can hold up approval on the measure, stalling its passage.

In his speech he claimed that the culture of political correctness led to sexual abuse and he linked sex education, which he has called a tyranny, to a rise in teen pregnancies.

He said: One day everybody will have to conclude that what we need is less sex education, or even better, none I hope this Bill goes absolutely nowhere.

He has aggressively opposed LGBT-inclusive education, claiming in 2017 it introduces very young children to concepts, such as homosexuality and transgenderism, at an age where these cannot be critically assessed.

In 2015, he claimed that same-sex marriage discriminated against straight people. He said: You can have civil partnerships and marriage for gay people. You can only have marriage for heterosexuals. Its not equality.

On top of his anti-LGBT+ rhetoric, he has also previously said that black people are more likely to be murderers, and that disabled people should work for less than minimum wage because they are more of a risk to employers.

He was inexplicably elected to parliaments Women and Equalities Committee twice, despite describing its creation as the most depressing thing to happen recently and calling for it to change its name to exclude women.

Davies said the result of yesterdays election was a victory for blue collar conservatism.

According to the Yorkshire Post, Shipleys Labour candidate, Jo Pike, said: It would have been an absolute privilege to have represented Shipley.

Philip Davies really doesnt know how lucky he is to be in that position because it is just the best constituency, the best communities, they have just been fantastic.

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The Tory MP who single-handedly delayed LGBT-inclusive education has increased his majority - PinkNews

Michael Roth will discuss his new book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatists Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses at a Books & Bagels event at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek, 55 East Kings Highway, Chester on Sunday, Dec. 8 at 10:30 a.m. The event is free and open to all.

Roth, president of Wesleyan University, takes a pragmatists path through the thicket of serious issues todays colleges and universities face. He envisions college as a space in which all students are empowered to engage deeply with a variety of ideas, including those that are disturbing. In such a spacesafe from debilitating harm but not from the discomfort of intense debate and substantial disagreementstudents can develop a sense of who they are, what matters to them, and what they hope to make of their lives, he says.

He suggests it is difficult and altogether possible to create a space that is safe enough for diverse and unpopular perspectives and where no idea is protected from reasoned challenge. Considering cases from around the country and drawing on decades of firsthand experience as a college administrator and professor, Roth offers realistic and concrete solutions to provide a rigorous, bracing, and genuine education to all college students.

Light refreshments will be provided. Copies of the book will be available for sale and for autographing after Roths talk. More information is available at http://www.cbsrz.org or by calling 860-526-8920.

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Michael Roth Speaking on Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness - Zip06.com

To the Editor:Notwithstanding the proof of bribery, blatant obstruction of justice, and shameless abuse of power by President Trump and his sycophants in Congress, lit up in neon lights by the testimony of Fiona Hill and Stephen Holmes on Nov. 21, the Democrats can lose the 2020 election to Trump if they dont curb their hypocritical tendency toward political correctness.

Im using the expression political correctness as an umbrella term to cover oversensitivity to impoliteness, crudeness, blunt criticism, lack of respect, including some of the excesses of the Me Too movement.

Why do we often hear unnecessary and effusive apologies by members of the liberal news media when one journalist, attorney, or foreign-affairs expert has the audacity to disagree with another member? Why not, I couldnt disagree more with you on?

This is what attorney and legal expert Neil Katyal said to NY Times Columnist Michelle Goldberg on an MSNBC panel regarding her criticism of Democrats for their strategies in challenging Donald Trump. Ari Melber, the host, said he would let Goldberg respond since she looked uncomfortable with Katyals blunt criticism.

This hypocritical, phony courtesy is often unnecessary and inhibits panelists from saying what they really mean. Unfortunately, this is mostly a problem for Democrats. Republicans go way too far the other way, led by Trump, who goes beyond crudeness with his racism, xenophobia and misogyny.

Those in the Me Too movement who refuse to clearly differentiate between inappropriate conduct of a minor nature, like that of former SNL comedian and Senator, Al Franken, and the drug rapes of Bill Cosby or the casting couch sexual abuses (if not rapes) by Harvey Weinstein, are not promoting fairness and justice, but are indiscriminately destroying careers and lives for their political, personal and financial reasons. This is primarily a Democratic problem.

Democrats should put on a thick skin, say what they really mean, and stop the politically-correct nonsense and hypocritical oversensitivity. Like Fiona Hill, if someone lights your pigtail on fire, put it out with your hands and get on with the work to be done.

This will be an election about who is tough enough to fight the Trump Republicans and control the quibbling Democrats. Obama had a little of the iron hand in the velvet glove, and that helped his career. The Democrats better find someone who can be tough on Republicans and Democrats if they want to win this presidential election.

Editors note: The writer is a retired NYPD Lieutenant and an attorney.

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Dems, Stop Being Defensive | Letters to the Editor - The Chief-Leader