“Peak Woke”

Of all America’s pin-ups, from Rita Hayworth to Pamela Anderson, Jessica Rabbit may be the most unusual. The redheaded femme fatale is tall, sultry and spectacularly curvaceous. She is also a cartoon.

Now the nightclub singer from the 1988 comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit is again breaking a mould, this time as the latest symbol of cultural revisionism in Walt Disney’s worldwide theme parks.

Last week the Walt Disney Company announced that it was updating the Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin ride at Disneyland in California to reinvent Jessica as a lead character with an agency of her own rather than a slinkily dressed victim of male violence. She will no longer be the louche character Kathleen Turner breathed into cinematic life with the immortal line, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”, but a female detective cleaning up a weasel crimewave in 1947 Los Angeles — much as the late Bob Hoskins’s private eye character Eddie Valiant did in the original film.

Strange that it is not only the Taliban who are destroying children’s books, but also our liberal wokes.

The Taliban took control of the Norwegian embassy in Kabul and destroyed bottles of wine and children’s books. It was the Norwegian ambassador to Iran, Sigvald Hauge, who revealed what happened in the Norwegian embassy in Kabul, abandoned during the August escape of those from Western countries.
Nothing strange, no surprise, unless you believed that the “Taliban have changed”, as so many idiots with a certain weight in the press have repeated for weeks.

Strange, however, that it is not only the Taliban who are destroying children’s books, but also our Tolerants.

In recent days, in Canada, Asterix, Tintin and Lucky Luke were set on fire in Ontario schools (Hergé’s “Tintin in Congo” has become virtually unobtainable in America). These are the imposters of Progress who have just destroyed 5,000 children’s books in a “purification ceremony”.

The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced.

Dear Provost Susan Jeffords,

​​I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.

Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.

A book burning held by an Ontario francophone school board as an act of reconciliation with Indigenous people has received sharp condemnation from Canadian political leaders and the board itself now says it regrets its symbolic gesture.

None have read a book on history?