Your Shirt Offends Me

Lampooning PC excesses is like shooting fish in a barrel… with a Ma Deuce. However, “>this case is emblematic.

University of Maryland student Mia Lazarus recently went to buy some chips and juice at the Maryland Food Collective. The clerk at this grocery and sandwich shop in the student union read her t-shirt’s “Baltimore Zionist District” and “I Stand for Israel” slogans and then declared, “Your shirt offends me. I won’t ring you up.”…

Coop employees told the Post’s Fisher that “no one should have to have contact with people whose views they find hurtful.”

Mia used another cashier. But the problem is with the mindset. As you go through life, you will be confronted by people whose views may not just differ from yours; they may even be repugnant. For example, Moonbats hold the regular anti-war rallies near where I live. I have to pass those clowns on the way to get a paper. You know what? I walk by them (albeit with sneers and glowers). PC makes people unable to deal with it and walk past. The universities have churned out a perpetually affronted generation to whom everything is personal. Of course it never occurred to the cashier that he or she was the offensive one.

Personally, I would have threw the bottle on the ground and ripped open the bag before storming out. Well, I hope I would have. Probably I would have left the stuff there at least.

Radio Free Europe

In Sweden the elites debate what is important to them (HT, Instapundit). The public has other priorities, of course. The same would be true in the USA, but because of the free market, we have what I call the counter media. The Murdoch empire, conservative/libertarian/contrarian blogs and talk radio fill the void created by a craven MSM. So, while publications seen only in dentist offices display their pieties and priorities, talk radio and the blogosphere worry about topics the MSM would rather not deal with or in a different manner than the MSM cares for. The most glaring one is illegal immigration. Except for the war, this is the topic that dominates talk radio. It affects flyover country and the working class far more (and far more negatively) than it does those ensconced in red brick buildings in Cambridge, K Street offices and glass towers in Manhattan and LA, . No wonder why the influence of the MSM is imploding. That and the MSM is staffed by bozos.

Back to Europe which could use a Rush Limbaugh… seriously. Take the UK. The most powerful media institution in the UK is the BBC- a tax fed a liberal monoculture staffed by ‘Grauniad’ reading commuters. And they drive the debate as they wish, ignoring inconvenient opinions. What if, instead there was a talk show host who aimed for, well, the Daily Mail readership (I know the DM’s rep, but work with me on this one). Maybe they’d start talking about things the BBC would rather ignore or downplay.

Of course that would never happen. The media elites believe the need to control the debate. For the greater good, of course. Give the working class a media platform unsupervised by their betters, they’ll store coal in it. Besides, look at America. The country took a very large rightward tilt when Punch Sulzberger and Walter Cronkite stopped controlling the discussion and that horrible Rush Limbaugh and his ilk came forth. At least Congress seems to be wisely reconsidering.