Imagine that you’re playing a game of chess. However, in this game, something is going wrong: your pawns are moving on their own. On any turn that they move, you can’t make your intended move. But it gets worse: your pawns are making terrible strategic moves, and you can’t do anything about it. Your pawns could very well cost you the game.

That should give you an idea of what it’s like to be on Joe Biden’s campaign.

BLM’s latest mis-move would be rioting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in response to police shooting an armed assailant. Immediately after the shooting, Lancaster police acted transparently, releasing body-cam footage of the attack, leaving no doubt that the police response was justified.

Considering BLM’s history of ignoring facts, they responded as predictably as sunset. But in an interesting twist, the rioting quickly gave way to infighting, as many in BLM insisted that their white members go on the frontline, while others in the group understandably disagreed.

Lancaster, PA is not a large city. One can walk from the west boundary of the town to the east boundary in about a half-hour. After that, you wouldn’t have to go far to find cows and Amish buggies. The difference in culture just miles outside of town is jarring to the point that many tourists might find themselves checking their GPSs to reorient themselves, and to make sure they’re in the right place.

Now little historic Lancaster, which enjoyed a brief one-day stint as the nation’s capital, is the latest battleground in a cultural conflict that’s been fought in major cities across the country.

Which brings up an interesting question: Where do you have to go to be safe? The current generation of left-wing rioters are busy making it dangerous to live in cities, and they’re now pushing into suburbs for little other reason than to ensure that no one feels safe anywhere. Suburban areas have historically enjoyed relative safety from the hard-left marauders, but they’re now hard at work to make sure you can’t simply ignore them. What’s a person supposed to do?

There’s an answer, and it has to do with why it’s such a bad idea for rioters to meander into suburbs. People in suburbs own guns. Not only that, they’re well-motivated to defend what’s rightfully theirs. If you’ve been a single guy living in a city, stewing over class warfare and how the system did you wrong, you’d do well not to underestimate the passion of those who have families. These are the people who have procreated, and their willingness to defend their progeny is a passionate drive. Rioters have already taken to the suburbs, and for some of them, it was their final trip. Obviously, it’s a poor move, and in the context of the chess allegory above, it’s like a stupid move that leads to a piece being taken that cannot be recovered.

But it gets worse. While the media has been working diligently to cover for the rioters, the conduct of the rioters is rendering their endeavor borderline impossible. On top of that, Kamala Harris has set up a fund to bail out violent rioters, making the Biden campaign look even worse. This enables the Trump campaign to take a more advantageous position as the law-and-order candidate.

While Biden recognizes that the rioting is wrong, it’s not lost on the electorate that the rioters are bearing the Democratic party’s pet ideology. This has resulted in the lunchroom discussion tilting away from the Democrats, and more towards Trump and the Republicans. If you’re among those whose job survived the Democrat’s coronavirus response, you’ve likely noticed this phenomenon in your own workplace’s lunchroom. It’s symptomatic of what happens to public opinion when the left can’t reign in its own, and the mayhem increasingly hits close to home.

Having lived in Lancaster county before, I still find it hard to answer the question of why the small city makes national news. But considering that the event this time around was a violent incident, the part of the city that it took place in wasn’t a surprise at all.

If it’s the intention of Antifa or BLM to get Trump reelected, in their own ironic way, they are on the right track. They couldn’t have done more to get Trump reelected if they voted for him, themselves.

So, this time, it’s Lancaster, PA. Are we sick of this, yet?

Above is the first episode of a series of comics in which a stand-in for intersectionalism joins a complex table-top game (possibly Dungeons and Dragons). Currently, the series is up to four installments. As the series progresses, the blue-haired woman imposes more and more demands on the other players, and (as a commenter points out) the art style gets more chaotic as the situation gets progressively tense.

You can read the comic on Twitter. The artist is GPrime85.

One of the readers offered to translate the episodes to the Japanese language, and the artist granted him permission. Then something interesting happened: the comic started trending in Japan.

Intersectionality has had a few brushes with Japanese media, wherein intersectionalists have made demands of anime and manga to bring the forms of expression more in line with the sensibilities of the most sensitive people the western world has to offer (the intersectionalists themselves). Japanese content creators have responded with various flavors of rejection, including scorn and even ridicule. Intersectionalists didn’t take this well. But then, they aren’t known to accept any response that isn’t immediate unconditional compliance with profuse grovelling.

Obviously, Japanese culture is not the same as western culture. As I’ve pointed out before, the Japanese consume media with more mature themes because the Japanese are generally more mature as people. The Japanese are great at distinguishing fantasy from reality, and aren’t obsessed with the idea that entertainment media must teach ideals. They know that things like cartoons and comics are just made-up stuff, and that what fictional characters do might not actually work in real life.

Even though the Japanese have media that doesn’t suit intersectional tastes, the Japanese are still a well-behaved people. Japan remains among the most civil societies, and is among the safest to live in. That’s something for intersectionalists to think about as they attempt to justify their efforts.

Conversely, intersectionality in the U.S. has resulted in long riots that have had the effect of making cities more dangerous, what with all the violence and destruction. Which, I admit, is quite an effective way to demonstrate the effects of your virtues.

This can be filed under “no kidding”, but a study from the American Psychological Association has determined that people who virtue signal are more likely to have one the “dark triad” of unsavory traits, which are manipulativeness, narcissism, and psychopathy.

I’ve pointed out before that Democrats have virtue signaled on race issues from a position of guilt, having skeletons in their closets. I suspect that projection may be at play, with them making assumptions that other people have the same flaws. It’s kind of like the awkward male feminist who, as it turns out, has a history of behaving like a creep towards women, or the antisocial at WalMart who views new people as child abuse waiting to happen, but actually has done just that.

But now, as the study points out, virtue signaling is a new vehicle with which those with unsavory traits procure something of value, either material or not, that they’d otherwise have to earn through more merit-based endeavors. So yeah, it’s little more than stuff that people post to social media in an effort to look good.

“Check it out, internet! I nicknamed a bunch of throwaway pokemon to make the world a better place!” -Armchair activists

In light of the George Floyd riots (remember that guy?), virtue signaling has taken on a whole new motive: now it’s a way of telling the world, “I’m on your side, so please don’t loot my business or invade my home!” Or course, the motive isn’t genuine, it’s from a threatened position of self-preservation.

However, we’re now coming to the point that virtue signaling no longer has its intended payoff. An excellent example of virtue signaling backfiring can be seen in the June ratings plunge of ESPN to the lowest point in the network’s 42-year history. How did they bring this about? By turning their programming into racial politics. This might not have been a big deal if the network were CNN, MSNBC, or any other flavor of thinly-veiled leftist propaganda, but there’s something that people expect when they tune in to ESPN.

Sports. People tune into ESPN for sports.

So when people tune in to a sports network and the programming is about some form of activism, people will naturally change the channel and watch something else, thinking something like “Maybe I’ll come back when they get back to sports.”

But there’s something else that virtue signalers such as ESPN didn’t account for: politically-charged content and virtue signaling tend to make people feel uncomfortable. Maybe people wanted to watch sports to get away from the world’s problems, not for another reminder of those problems, which are becoming increasingly trivial to find.

This is something to keep in mind if you have a podcast or a YouTube channel, or otherwise have a media outlet focused on non-political content, because while you might have been wound up into thinking that activism is something you’re obligated to do by some social justice platitude that was specifically-designed to recruit you, the fact is, your viewership might just go somewhere else for the content that they were looking for.

And you can’t count on them to come back.

As the study points out, people who virtue signal tend to be manipulative and narcissistic. Yet another simple observation made by normal people has been validated by yet more rigorous observation on the part of researchers. It sounds superfluous. But hey, yet another officially-published weapon to use against the forces of stupidity and ignorance.

“If you haven’t done anything wrong, do not apologize.”
-Jordan Peterson

Kellogg’s has made a new breakfast cereal as a vehicle for publicity, called Kellogg’s All Together Cereal. The pretext is that Kellogg’s wants to express through one of their products that they are inclusive of the LGBT movement, but when it comes to corporate entities like Kellogg’s, the intention is usually self-serving.

Normally, a breakfast cereal doesn’t look like crap until it’s been processed by the digestive system. Mixing several boxes of breakfast cereals sounds like an idea that a child would think up, and it wouldn’t occur to them why it wouldn’t be appetizing until after they had already ruined a cupboard full of what was intended to be the whole family’s breakfast for an entire week.

In a prolonged, awkward moment of inhibited clarity, a higher-up at Kellogg’s decided to go through with such a cereal, and tack on a message about aberrant sexual identity. As is often the case when it comes to things like this, anyone at Kellogg’s who saw this for the insanity that it is was afraid to speak up.

Always tell your boss the truth, even if you think he wouldn’t take it well. It’s better to be fired by a moron than to work for one.

Companies like Kellogg’s love to virtue signal, but when it comes to living up to any message of inclusiveness, they usually fail miserably. Companies like Kellogg’s run production facilities that operate 24-hours-a-day, nearly every day in the year. One person I know attempted to work at such a plant, but requested accommodation for a weekly Biblical observance. Even though people that request accommodation in such a manner are protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the company proceeded to pressure the employee into using their time off until they ran out, then wrote up the employee when he didn’t come in on days that they had long advance notification of. This continued in spite of the fact that the employee presented them with legally-binding notification that he did belong to a Church that held a weekly observance. Eventually, facing termination and a permanent mark on his employment history, the employee gave in to pressure and quit.

Interestingly, the same plant had material posted on a bulletin board about Purim, an annual Jewish observance that celebrates the deliverance of the Jewish people from a Persian maniac who sought to wipe them out. Companies like Kellogg’s say that they’re about inclusion and diversity, but the moment it becomes slightly inconvenient for them, they proceed to undermine the civil rights legislation that they pretend to champion.

But as for making a breakfast cereal that virtue signals acceptance of the LGBT movement, that’s something they can really get behind because it involves producing something that people can spend money on.