Greek and Roman Mythology now too upsetting for students at Columbia, as the “trigger warning” game jumps a dozen flaming sharks.

The next person who attempts the “trigger warning” game in my presence will receive a heaping helping of verbal macroaggressions. Their abuse of psychological jargon had already gone way too far, but they’ve gotten away with it because the rest of us were socialized into Western Civilization. No more for me.

The difference between real triggers and “shutting up anyone you disagree with” is that real triggers are specific, as any therapist will tell you. I know, because for several years after my apartment building burned down in the middle of the night, and I had to run toward the fire to safety, the smell of burning wood sent my heart-rate through the roof. But only at night, only when it was unexpected, only when I was home.

There’s still a faint twitch when it happens, well over 20 years later, so whenever I fire up the smoker, I’m careful to throw the clothes in the washer and take a shower before bedtime. And I always pay attention to the sound of fire trucks and the smell of neighborhood grilling.

But I love to grill and smoke, and I love to watch a fireplace. You can’t trigger me by talking about fire or showing me pictures of a house burning. Or by making me read about Prometheus.

I love it when this happens. Someone wrote a careful, reasonable article about how it’s impossible to even mention facts that contradict the “social justice” narrative on any issue, and the first comment is from just-registered user “brutalism apologist” and reads “This is not a good article.”

If they were self-aware, they wouldn’t score so many own goals.

I won’t even try to excerpt Ace’s epic rant.

The latest bullying by gay activists is being led by Apple CEO Tim Cook, demonstrating once again that tolerance isn’t good enough: they demand praise. They’ll gleefully punish any photographer, baker, or florist who refuses to affirmatively support gay marriage, and now they’ve moved on to shunning an entire state for an unexceptional law that might allow photographers, bakers, and florists to escape from their angry mobs.

Maybe someone should send Tim Cook a nice White Sheet Cake.

[Update: that pizzeria in Indiana that said they (hypothetically) wouldn’t cater a gay wedding? Closed, possibly permanently, due to death threats. Extra credit to the high-school coach that solicited accomplices for arson. And of course the thousands of people who harassed them on Twitter and Yelp would be offended if you called them hate-filled intolerant bigots.

Reporter Alyssa Marino was sent out to create a fake news story, and she and her editor willfully destroyed the lives of people whose only crime was honestly answering a hypothetical question about an extremely unlikely event, while at the same time affirming that they had never discriminated against gay customers in the past and had no plans to start. Alyssa Marino is not the one being threatened by strangers around the country. She’s not the one whose livelihood was taken away from her by fear of retaliation. She’s also, apparently, without regret or shame.]

…not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Based on my experience of walking in SF, I suspect the actual percentages were 6.2% LGBT, 81.3% straight, and 12.5% “gimme a dollar!”.

From the comments over at According to Hoyt, a simple, elegant statement about Our Would-Be Overlords:

"A multiculturist would bring bring marshmallows to a suttee."
---Timid1

Please stop handing packages over to USPS. Two-day shipping is now four if I’m lucky, on a package that will be completely useless to me soon, since they didn’t even try to deliver on Monday, and then (allegedly) showed up at my office today at 6:04pm and found the front door locked.

It turns out that Rolling Stone has all the honesty and integrity of Penthouse Letters. Or perhaps less.

I hope no one was surprised.