Camila worked for Ristretto Roasters, my husband Din’s coffee roasting company in Portland, Oregon, for five years. She received regular promotions and by 2016 was earning a mid-five figure salary. In October of last year, Camila resigned. The end.
Or, the end until last month, when she sent an email to more than two dozen former and current Ristretto Roasters employees, alerting them to the YouTube series, #MeNeither Show, that fellow journalist Leah McSweeney and I launched in December 2018. In three half-hour episodes, we had discussed, among other topics, celebrities who have exploited the #MeToo movement, and the difference between sexual predators and those swept-up in the excesses of the current moment. The show’s “about” page reads, “#MeNeither is an almost-weekly conversation about the cultural issues of the day, and an attempt to create a space where people can find ways to think out loud through uncomfortable topics.”
In her email to Ristretto employees, Camila described our show as “vile, dangerous, and extremely misguided” and announced her intention to “take this information to [local newspapers] Willamette Week and The [Portland] Mercury.” She went on to explain that, “it could be really powerful to have a formal letter singed [sic] off by as many RR employees as possible so that the community at large knows that the people who actually keep RR running do not stand for this.”
The letter Camila circulated to the local press read in part:
We believe it is a business owner’s responsibility to create a safe and supportive working environment for their employees. Invalidating assault survivors throws into question the safety of Ristretto Roasters as a workplace and has the potential to create a demoralizing and hostile environment for employees and customers alike. This cannot be tolerated.
The career-destroying potential of the internet mob immediately snapped into action. Articles appeared in at least four newspapers and on innumerable websites. People on social media hurried to declare that they would never again spend a penny at Ristretto and were rewarded with approval from like-minded peers. A college-age girl walked into one of the cafes screaming, variously, that the baristas were in danger, and that working for Ristretto somehow posed a threat to the community. Employees who had previously been secure in their jobs became jittery and quit. One of Din’s managers suggested that he sell the company and that I offer a public apology before it was too late.
This was within 48 hours of the first news reports appearing.
The mob did not seem to notice (or mind) that Camila’s email had created precisely the kind of “demoralizing and hostile environment for employees” it was ostensibly intended to prevent. Young staff now worried that maybe the next crazed college girl would do more than scream; that they’d lose their jobs (and health insurance) if Ristretto were forced to close; that I—a person with whom they’d heretofore had a perfectly congenial relationship—might be a secret monster.
“Once you’ve gone through the looking glass, it’s like, I knew, but now it’s crystal clear,” said Heather Heying when we first met. “Also, deeply confusing and unsettling.” Heying and her husband Bret Weinstein were tenured professors at Evergreen State College in 2017 when the mob came for them. A small and increasingly agitated group of students accused Weinstein of being a racist after he objected to a requirement that white people absent themselves from school for a day. The campus devolved into mayhem, and the faculty and administration lost control of the situation, finally acquiescing to a vague set of demands for “equity and inclusion.” Heying and Weinstein chose to leave instead, writing later in the Washington Examiner that, “Evergreen handed [the students] temporary power, an intoxicating thing, rather than establishing and legitimately empowering them with insight and wisdom.”
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein. Photo: Andy Ngo
Heying contacted me on day four of the Ristretto maelstrom. We met at one of the cafes, where a barista I had never met eyed me warily. This was very strange. Although I no longer worked with Ristretto, I had helped my husband build his business, at various times doing everything from the baking to the books to filing liquor license applications. I had no bearings to be seen as a threat by young people I might have joked with a week before.
I told Heying I’d been labeled a “rape culture apologist,” that my work was “not journalism—this is privilege talking.” “It’s all on-script,” she replied. “They respond with the right words—fighting racism, transphobia, internalized misogyny—and build a group of believers who go out and do the work for them. They’re like the puppeteer. The fundamental difference between your situation and most others is that you’re facing real financial ruin.” This is true, and a prospect about which Camila seems sanguine. “If it happens,” she informed one publication, “it would just be a result of their actions, and at least the people who support them will know the truth.”
Camila had evidently been nursing this truth for a while. In a blog post published a couple of months after she quit, she complained that Din had accepted her resignation with undue haste given her years of service, and pointed out that when a male colleague had resigned a year or two previously, he had been allowed to serve out his notice. She confessed that she could not explain why she had been treated differently, but that it was nevertheless clear that it was “based in a deep and abiding misogyny.”
The explanation is, in fact, more prosaic. Camila was the operations manager, overseeing staff at four cafes and, over the summer of 2018, she had become increasingly difficult for my husband to work with. At weekly management meetings, she would recommend operational changes beyond her purview. She wanted Ristretto to host a “Reparations Happy Hour,” which would involve stationing white people at the front door to buy patrons of color a coffee. She hired someone for a key management position without Din having met or okayed the person, and sought to push the company in directions he saw as neither feasible nor useful. In short, the working relationship between Din and Camila had become dysfunctional and both parties knew it. Days before Camila handed in her resignation, Din told me he was going to let her go before the end of the week. Her resignation relieved him of the trouble. Camila was ready to move on, and Din was ready to ask her to do so. Such things happen in small businesses all the time.
But instead of moving on, Camila has embroiled Ristretto, its staff, and my husband and me in a hugely damaging public row, the meaning of which continues to elude me. If Camila really believes that my opinions are creating a dangerous environment for Ristretto’s female employees, why did she work there for five years? And why was she affronted by being asked to leave without serving out her notice? And why, ten months earlier, did she successfully petition for one of her closest female friends to be employed as Ristretto’s wholesale manager? That friend also recently quit and is now, we’ve been told, working hard to amplify Camila’s campaign against us.
These former employees seem to have fashioned whatever resentment they are carrying into a credo meant to rally the troops. The cost of this onslaught seems disproportionally severe. For all the allegations about female safety, since the company’s founding in 2005, there has never been an internal sexual harassment incident. Most of Din’s hires are and have always been women. He pays his employees competitively, offers paid vacation, and engages in Direct Trade with many coffee farmers. In a matter of weeks, all this is hanging by a thread. Ten days after Camila’s opening salvo, Ristretto lost its biggest wholesale account, with which it had enjoyed a long and mutually beneficial relationship. This resulted in Din having to layoff one of his best employees. There will be more layoffs as other accounts peel away.
Many of them have not even taken the time to check what exactly they are attacking. Below one of the various Instagram posts drumming up a boycott of Ristretto, a woman wrote of #MeNeither, “I clicked, paused, down voted, then reported on YouTube that it violates community guidelines: hateful … I didn’t listen but it’s one way to make that shit go away.” This kind of virtual attack on something she hasn’t bothered to watch, to assess on her own, strikes me as childish—it is the behavior of a toddler whose tantrum brings a dinner party to a halt until it can be placated with the attention it seeks.
I have invited my critics to speak with me; the whole point of #MeNeither is to provoke discussion. Only one woman took up my offer. It is evidently easier for some random guy on Facebook to send me the message, “You are scum. Rot in hell you dirty bitch.” Those with a bit more ambition have taken to phoning all my husband’s purveyors and telling them to discontinue their relationships with Ristretto. There is purpose here; there is drive; there is, maybe, a sense of triumph at a business being eradicated. “Yes, the delight in the potential destruction of others,” agreed Heying. There had, she added, been “total dismay in some corners” when she and her husband had survived.
Dismay seems to be the very sustenance of these campaigns. The digital activists swarm like locusts, descending and leaving the earth shorn before moving on to the next field. But what lasting satisfaction can there be in forcing a small business to close and its employees out of work? Do the people leading these crusades picture themselves as admirable figureheads? If so, they seem to be steering into perpetually unhappy waters, full of hazards real and imagined, with the pervasive fear that everyone and everything might harm you so you must harm them first.
“Exhausted is a big word with this crowd,” remarked Heying. “They’re just so tired of fighting. What they’re fighting are their own shadows.” The fight against Heying and her husband, and me and my husband, all but obviated personal inquiry and interaction. Why risk having uncomfortable conversations? Why challenge your beliefs—such as the notion that only you are entitled to free speech—when you are convinced your cause is entirely just and that your opponents are evil? What these campaigners call progressivism strikes me as fundamentalism.
“It’s totally regressive,” said Heying. “An actual backwards regressive ethos.” But why do they want to go backwards? Why are they scared of everything? I’d asked my nephew, a recent graduate of Hampshire College, if it were true that students are taught that all men are potential rapists. He said, “Yes.” Will young people who actually believe this be able to trust enough to fall in love? What does this portend when they turn 35 or 40? Will they look back and realize they had no foundation in cultivating joy? It seems like an impoverishment of the soul.
I thanked Heying as she left, and then I approached the wary barista and introduced myself. “I know who you are,” she said. She looked as though she was about to cry. I gave her a copy of my new book. The whole encounter felt very weird but I thought it went okay. I was wrong.
“Don’t go into any of the cafes,” my husband said. “It didn’t go so well last time.”
How can I know the barista found my speaking with her unnerving if she chooses not to speak her mind to me, or speak at all? If Camila, who had spent a good deal of time with me over the years, shows neither the will nor the curiosity to contact me directly? Had she said, “Nancy, I think the views you express on the show are garbage and I want hash it out and it might get messy,” I would have told her to name the place and paid for the drinks.
Dialogue does not seem to be part of the outrage culture playbook. Communication has been replaced by the antagonism of the mob. Watch the VICE video of what happened at Evergreen and you will see young people scream epithets at Weinstein. You will see him ask if they want him to answer their questions, to which they shout, “No!” You will hear students demanding that any speech they perceive as potentially harmful to their ideas and existence be shut down. “I don’t care what happens to Bret anymore,” one young woman says. “He can go and be racist and be a piece of shit. Hopefully long-term we can just weed out people like Bret.”
The person who started this campaign against my husband’s business may not have known what sort of assault she was initiating, or maybe she did and did not care. For Camila, and for the people who answered her call to arms, ideology is prioritized over the lives and welfare of individuals. Maybe it is because young people do not yet have much to lose that they struggle to empathize with those who do. Maybe the rush of feeling part of something, or of bending others to one’s will, proves irresistible. Maybe calling all of my husband’s vendors and telling them to drop Ristretto feels like progress—but to where, and for whom?
A Northwest Portland location of Ristretto Roasters closed this week while the wife of the coffee shop’s owner continues to publish episodes of her controversial YouTube show and podcast called “#MeNeither,” The Portland Mercury reports.https://t.co/dHFKZkMnzt pic.twitter.com/DYJe9pV8gK
— The Oregonian (@Oregonian) February 7, 2019
After Ristretto lost its biggest wholesale account, Din asked to come in and speak with the management. The meeting, I am told, was civil. When Din told the manager what had happened, from his point of view, the manager appeared concerned. Din’s version of events did not match what he had heard. He was sympathetic when Din told him Ristretto would, without this account, need to lay off key employees, and agreed to Din’s suggestion that they revisit the relationship in six months. Dialogue proved enlightening and led to a positive possible outcome, and one I might look forward to. Only, as of this writing, it is unknown whether Ristretto can survive that long.
Nancy Rommelmann is a journalist. She is the author most recently of the book To the Bridge, a True Story of Motherhood and Murder. You can follow her on Twitter @NancyRomm
Feature photo by Andy Ngo.
I suppose this will only get worse as the culture that is prominent on campus inevitably moves into the business world.
It won’t survive the business world. It never has.
Sometimes terrorist tactics succeed in the business world. Look at how Bill Gates elbowed out better competitors and maneuvered everyone to have MSDOS and then Windows 3.1 on their computers. He’s now one of the world’s richest people.
But usually these people get their comeuppance. It would be good to have the names of these people who were such dangerous employees so that others might choose not to hire them. But I guess that’s risky legally to release.
This has been the fate of “Camila” from the article. Her new job was working for Ristretto’s accountant, who promptly fired her, which she went on to complain about in one of the local papers.
I am no fan of Microsoft and Bill Gates. They got a foot in the door with a poor quality copy of better product and once they were established ruthlessly exploited their position to become dominant. They skirted the edge of and arguably crossed the edge of legal business practices. In doing so they created an expectation and depresssed the level of software quality and reliability to a state that was pathetically low and far beneath previous industry norms and this lasted for decades. However what they did was not terrorism but was business, was not politically motivated and did not target individuals and their reputations.
The comparison is not a fair one.
That’s what business is all about…
“Look at how Bill Gates elbowed out better competitors and maneuvered everyone to have MSDOS and then Windows 3.1 on their computers. ”
Please, don’t be a patsy. IBM bought DOS from Microsoft, because it was better than what they had. Windows 3.1 brought Windows computers up to the same level as early Apples. Certainly Microsoft was aggressive, but do you think the world would be a better place if IBM’s OS had been the standard for PCs?
Actually, it’s worse than that. Microsoft bought MS DOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000 and then licensed it to IBM.
Microsoft was working with IBM to develop and promote O/S2. This was actually a good operating system (based on DOS) with the ability to mulitask – I know that was so, I used it with glee after being told by MS that “you don’t need multitasking” (well, I did and I used O/S2 for this as I had the DOS programs already).
Quite suddenly, MS dropped O/S2 and brought out Win 3.0. To this day, I do not know what happened or why. O/S2 languished and died while Windows went to NT then XP without the capability O/S2 had even at first.
Gates will never be forgiven for deliberately pushing us back those 10 years.
The battle wasn’t between MS-DOS and Windows, it was the between IBM’s OS2 and a version of Windows that didn’t exist yet. Gates marketed what we at IBM called “vaporware” for almost 2 years before his product was ready. Gates and Ballmet worked skillfully with OEM’s to preinstall Windows on new machines.
Please explain how “Bill Gates elbowed out better competitors” and how those tactics were terrorist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt#Software_producers
Or the other way around: the business world won’t survive it.
“It won’t survive the business world. It never has.”
That is unspeakably naive. Read some 20th century history.
The local business world in Portlandia may be a bit different from the outside world in terms of obedience to the SJW mob, based on what I have been reading about the city in recent years.
Not that other places are not obedient to PC culture – but maybe Portlandia is quicker to cave than most ?
I’m a left leaning Portland resident, and I think it is primarily the problem of the internet and young people. My peers tend to be in the 35-45 age range, and, when in person, I find it relatively easy to have open discussions about these topics without things getting heated, and I think many of them would enjoy reading Quillette. It’s the 22 year olds who spend all day feeding off each other’s internet anger who start these fires.
Sadly, when they are your HR contact ( which is exactly where gender studies majors end up) they are very much surviving in business – and better than you, maybe, because they influence your career track…
Have you seen how the business world is behaving lately? I think you overestimate their intelligence and under-estimate their will as these National Socialists take over marketing orgs worldwide.
Unfortunately, it is invading HR departments etc. Often it is under the label of “diversity and inclusion”. Meaning people who differ by immutable characteristics but have the same point of view. (same with inclusion). It has nothing to do with diversity of abilities or opinions or experience. I have seen the seeping in of the banning of certain words and phrases (such as “having a brown bag lunch” is forbidden. sack lunch is okay. Certainly, the common bad words such as the N word and the ilk are appropriately wrong, but we are going too far. Context matters. If I had young sons I might say my boys are good at games, but I would not use the term boy in reference to a person of color. (ever)
It will simply teach potential business owners that there is ultimately no value in treating your well, unless of course you already have a nest-egg waiting for you when the fit hits the shan. It’s no different than the lesson employees have learned about being loyal.
The business message is don’t hire workers unless you have to. They are a pain, and government tyrants as well as SJW tyrants work together to make employees less affordable and desirable step by step. Only the biggest companies can afford the legal hassles of these types of workers.
As a person with more than 45 years in business I can tell you what I would have done. I would have fired her with cause. She could then sue me. She would then have to prove damages. She could not.
I would destroy my business if necessary to counter her idiotic claims.
When we fear using the law to force proof of claim, we become hostages to people like ‘Camillia.’
Hostages is the right word. That’s what terrorists do, they take hostages. These people are social terrorists.
That really sucks. I’m sorry to read of the torment inflicted by a vengeful former employee and much of the larger community. I wish you luck riding this out.
I have invited my critics to speak with me; the whole point of #MeNeither is to provoke discussion.
It’s terrific you want have discussion, and I wish more people would do so instead of forming mobs, but the whole point of #MeToo was to listen and believe unquestioningly. Seems to me that the default was to exclude discussion because such things bring forth nuance that, when bouncing around in the noggins of the goose stepping woke, are likely to undermine unthinking zealotry. You can’t have the troops marching off to battle phantoms and bogeymen when their minds are filled with doubt.
Remember, today we have to #BelieveEveryInsaneAccusation.
Ha! Well said. Dialogue is life. Apparently “belief” is everything to the new kids. Knowledge is what I prefer. Best wishes to Nancy, Din and Ristretto. Blessings with freedom of thought and discourse.
Once you teach that nothing is real, it’s all made-up to keep you down…
An employee vengeful because her employer didn’t want to spend his money her way. Which made the owners worse than Trump. Anybody who hires that wacko and her friends are beyond stupid.
@tarstarkas
It seems to be a quintessential Portland problem. A friend of mine who started her business at the same time as did, told me harrowing tales of an employee who treated the business as it was his own, giving his own business cards with his own information on it instead of the owners and causing thousands of dollars of unncessary expenses, because he felt something had to be done. She fired him. So, yes, this happens over here.
I’m sure I don’t need to point out that the vengeful employee was/is a liberal whose agendas have been to stir up hate against authority, in this case her employer. I’m guessing you relate to Ms. Vengeful in that you hate the authority of our President Trump, whom I see instead s person that has accomplished amazing things for our country inspite of being harassed at every turn. Lower taxes for low to middle class, private doctors for vets that were dying waiting for appointments, abolished government regulations that strangled small businesses, bring back at least 12 industries & companies that ended up providing over a half million jobs for Americans, unemployment at its lowest among blacks & Hispanics since 1946. He had taken us out of dangerous regions in the Middle East, strengthening our ties tto Israel recognizing them to be our only ally against all Muslim countries that still declare us infidels. getting American prisoners away from the Middle East, our stock market higher than decades and our economy better than years. How can you not see or care about every one of these things that have impacted someone’s life in a positive way? I am running out of time, but I could go on & on
The real goal of #MeToo was to make sure that only a certain kind of voice got heard.
I have a hypothesis that there is too much information (i.e. opinion) available today provided by anyone with an opinion and plenty of opinion spreading bandwidth.
With such an opinion overload the mostly unconscious response is to pick one you like and then reject all counter opinion as worth less and then worthless.
And that is why ‘debate’ is polarised and some people double down into a mob mentality. There is no rational debate possible when personal opinions have been formed through non-rational means.
“90% of everything is crap.”
― Theodore Sturgeon
But the amount of ‘everything’ is much larger today than ever before.
Excellent observation, AC Harper.
Part of the problem with social media is that people you would never invite to your house keep wanting to barge into your room. Before social media, people didn’t know they weren’t wanted, and because they were ignorant, most didn’t care. Social media now causes tremendous anxiety in those with lousy personalities. To them, the internet is filled with places they are not a part of, and they go full spazzbot just thinking about it.
I would be willing to bet that after quitting, she filed for unemployment.
“Goose stepping woke” nailed it.
You know, all of these crazed young ideologues remind me of Mao’s Red Guards. I suspect that a psychologist who has studied the Chinese Cultural Revolution could point out similarities. The glee with which these Social Justice fanatics take in destroying other people’s businesses, dreams, and livelihoods is so disturbing.
You marched with Mao?
It would be wise to not broadcast your ignorance.
Dumbest post on the thread, Halifax.
You are far from the only one to have pointed out this similarity in regards to stories like this one. I have had older Chinese workers who personally witnessed both phenomena and remarked on the similarities – while noting the obvious differences in street violence ( antifa notwithstanding ).
Misery loves company.
See Mike Nayna’s youtube documentary on Evergreen College, especially the ‘canoe’. Commenters who have survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution have remarked upon its frightening similarity to the show trials, self-criticism and re-education.
I must say, it’s a surreal feeling to see my “local newspaper” place of employment show up in a Quillette article! And humorously enough, I’m also a patron of Quillette. I’ll probably be run out of town soon enough…
@PDX Heretic
No you won’t. We’re here to defend you (I live in Portland too)
I live in Portland too. I’ll be having tea at the NE Couch location tomorrow.
I just enjoyed a matcha latte at Ristretto. It’s a little surreal reading something on Quillette and then going there myself. I saw no evidence of controversy.
Unicorns of Portland Unite!
I got the double whammy from this article – a local issue and a tie in to my college (of long ago)…I, by the way, am pissed at New Seasons – a store I otherwise like – for no longer carrying Ristretto. Shitty move on their part.
Two profanities in 2 lines of text. What college was that?
The one where they don’t encourage you to be the kind of narcissist that puts “PhD” behind their name on internet comment boards, and call people out for mild cursing.
lol
Ugh – New Seasons was my favorite store in Portland, but I will no longer shop there. I am extremely disappointed that they decided to take a political stance on this issue. It’s obvious they did not do their research. I can not support a company who would take these actions.
I am an hour down the road and I will be stopping by for a cup of coffee next time I am in the NE.
I live in the deep South and told my coffee loving husband to buy Ristretto after reading this article…so he did! Imagine that! A southern woman who not only doesn’t have her vote controlled by her husband, I suggest what coffee he buys for himself, and he does it!
Who’d have thought the Bible Belt may become the most secure environment for public interface small business?
Lawyer up….there is a Civil Suit in this against Camille, and the media.
Jason, I hope you are correct. Litigious action could stem the mobs. This is scary stuff. I also know that the MAGA teens have sued broadcasters who smeared their good names.
The problem is finding a lawyer brave enough to take up the lawsuit. Doxxing, social media mobbing, and actual mobbing might be the least of their troubles for trying to defend these worse-than-Trumps.
@tarstarkas Nah, the real problem is that there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. What’s the point when there’s nothing in winning except perhaps a speech injunction — a laughably ironic result here, where everything flowed from the author exercising her right to freely express herself.
Suing over defamation is very hard to win, especially if the defamer isn’t rich and powerful…besides, there’s no money to be made from an unemployed, lousy, grumbling ex-worker.
There are times that even an East Texas Hardshell Baptist can seem like a laissez faire libertarian compared to these Red Guards types.
Intentional interference with business relations. Don’t know if that’s a cause of action in OR, but it might be. Worth checking out.
Yes, The Covington boys are showing the way. Of course the ex-employee is probably suit proof due to poverty,
One thing that I find most interesting about this case is that it treats you (a woman) as if you are no more than the property of your husband. You no longer work for RR. If the quest is to punish RR for the owner’s wife’s sins, then the implication is that the husband can and should control his wife. She is not a sentient being herself so much as a piece of him.
The attacks are blatantly misogynistic, and they actually support patriarchal ideas that they are supposedly opposing. It’s regressive to an extreme. Will they next call for your voting rights to be removed, because you are under the control of your husband??
Well said, Sighing.
Wow. you nailed it. I was feeling something, but you put it into words.
The entire point is, by overreacting in this way, to establish a culture of terror such that nobody will dare speak out. To the Left, anyone who opposes them is a wrongthinker and The Other. Thus it’s OK to use the worst techniques against them, because The Other isn’t human like you. Read more: http://archive.is/QRJ6m
^LOL sighing deeply. Are you serious? Thats a parody answer right? If so, funnily spot on.
@Heike & SJWSTFU
Progressive activists are playing with two sets of cards. On one hand, attacks like this are intended to shut people up and destroy the livelihoods of those who nevertheless speak out. They’re a form of public shaming, and while inflicting emotional harm just isn’t the same as physical damage, this is one of the most extreme forms. You have to be truly thick-skinned to just shrug it off, and throughout history, some of the people most vulnerable to it have committed suicides. On the other, if someone says this is cruel and excessive, it’s just calling people out. Just criticizing them so they can do better in the future. Why u so fragile, bro? Lol.
In addition to their impressive talents at doublethink, progressive left is also fiercely tribalist. Their group identity is just not based on things like race or religion, but on ideology which ironically stakes its claims of moral superiority on not Othering. “We are better than Them, because unlike Them, we don’t divide humanity into Us and Them.” I’m not saying here that Left is ‘the real tribalist’, but it’s way more hypocritical on this subject. Right’s hypocrisies are more about sexual morality – for example I doubt that politics correlate with the frequency of men cheating on their wives with other men, but if you’ve been banging the drum about Christian family values, hypocrisy is through the roof.
I was also going to link Scott Alexander’s “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup”, but Heike beat me to it.
That’s an interesting observation.
I have a half baked theory about this kind of dynamic I’ll now clumsily share. This goes beyond just progressives, you see it in all ideologies. I think it was detailed by some else but I can’t remember. There are two layers, one small radical group and surrounding them a larger less zealous group. The radicals strike out at an enemy and then when the enemy responds the larger less zealous group responds with incredulity. See, from the large groups perspective the radical groups a small extreme anomaly, “surely the ideology is not to blame, surely I’m not to blame”.
So the larger group dismisses any complaints bucks any responsibility and things stay the same. The two are symbiotic even if they arnt aware of the relationship between each other.
Also unrelated, the progressive meme of being “so tired” is something I noticed as well back when I used to buy into their rederic. It would appear when their argument got particularly thin and they needed the extra sympathy juice.
Plausible, but more probable is that Camile is just another terrorist and if a terrorist cannot harm someone enough directly, they will try to harm them by attacking their loved ones, assuming there will be great pain inflicted on the true target by them seeing their loved ones suffer.
Yes, Oregon has a massive problem with sexism and most people won’t acknoweldge it, which then causes all these shrill voices that spout out nonsense when people get exasperated and feel they aren’t being heard. Other than that, women (white women to be precise) are the enemy of SJWs, because they figured they could get to the (white) men through the women. It’s a coward’s way in.
That’s how it should read, but this is really nothing more than guilt by association. The husband’s proximity is all that’s required to render him guilty. That’s how McCarthyism works.
https://camilacoddou.com/author/camilacoddou/ “Concerned Lesbian”
Looks like the self-righeous brat was upset about her father illness at the time.
Thanks for the link, jimhaz. Tried to read her rant and, in my opinion, Camila is a terrible writer. I wonder if the real source of her angst is jealousy over Nancy’s obvious talent.
While not as blunt as you or as base, I do feel the article lacked some coherence and missed overall to clearly articulate the issues at hand or a counter argument to help understand what the “harmed” employees were taking issue with.
A lesbian. From Burlington. Who lives in Portland. And is full of rage.
Any other boxes to check?
From the concerned lesbian: “Many [employees] want to speak out but are scared of retribution, since their ability to pay bills and remain financially solvent is partially in the hands of Rommelmann.”
But you think a social media campaign to destroy the business is good for those employees, or that they are acceptable collateral damage in the war against the oppressive patriarchy? Or perhaps you didn’t think of that at all …
[chuckling @ “my 13 year coffee carreer”]
@Debbie
I noticed that too. And then this:
“Evidently, in legal paperwork I had never seen and had yet to sign, there was a clause stating that as her employee I wouldn’t slander any of her clients. This was a person with whom I had worked closely for years, always keeping a respectful and supportive business relationship. Her call and her declaration was hurtful and surprising, because rather than holding Rommelmann accountable for her Youtube channel to which people were reacting, she was punishing me for speaking out against problematic views. Furthermore, sharing true information about a public Youtube channel, which Nancy herself was promoting, is not slander. I didn’t make anything up, and any statements I made regarding the content of the videos was a matter of personal opinion.”
“A respectful and supportive business relationship.” She should have maintained the same with her employers too and not mixed personal with business. That people have personal lives that are none of their business is something these SJW people don’t seem to understand. Just because they want to bleed their whole lives into the social media void and can’t separate their private and professional lives, doesn’t mean others feel the same.
Intriguing link! Choice quote: “I get contacted by a new employer who had hired me to help with her independent business. Ristretto is one of her accounts and over the phone she explains that because I had slandered Ristretto she could no longer bring me on as an employee.”
She’s mystified that a potential employer is scared shitless about hiring here, fearing that anything could set her off – and a subsequent mobbing their company. Even as an old Leftie, I’d be dubious about hiring someone who organizes a destructive campaign against a company she worked at years ago just because the owner’s wife (?!) put stuff on Youtube she didn’t like.
Last time I checked, I’ve zero control over what my partner puts on youtube nor do I think I should or vice versa. Her opinions; her business, like Our Bodies; Ourselves.
This is sadly little more than Mean Girls tactics: “I don’t like you so everyone I know and everyone they know and everyone*they* know must shun you. Or be shunned in turn.”
so weird.. I read her blog post and when I read this part:
“I get contacted by a new employer who had hired me to help with her independent business. Ristretto is one of her accounts and over the phone she explains that because I had slandered Ristretto she could no longer bring me on as an employee. Evidently, in legal paperwork I had never seen and had yet to sign, there was a clause stating that as her employee I wouldn’t slander any of her clients. This was a person with whom I had worked closely for years, always keeping a respectful and supportive business relationship.”
.. I just got massive cognitive dissonance! So, she’s distressed because her new employer fired her for talking negatively about her formal employer’s non work related activities… because ‘this is a person I had worked closely with for years, always keeping a respectful and supportive business relationshiip’ – HELLO??? Isn’t this exactly the same thing your former employer might feel about you??? Any capacity for self awareness?? They promoted you, gave you rasies and you decided to take something they were doing unrelated to the business, social issues they felt important to speak to and then you tried to destroy them. wow. just wow.
It’s called “burning bridges”, Honey, and it’s a bad practice. When you grow up, you realize why it’s important to keep “a respectful and supportive business relationship” with ALL of your employers. Who the hell would want to hire someone so vindictive and mentally unstable? Any employer in their right mind will realize that Camila could decide in a month that her new employer is not woke enough and go on another crusade to shut them down. She may be in for a rude awakening.
Read several of her posts there, and she’s a classic example of what I’ve come to accpt as the defining criteria for SJWs: narcissism, a complete lack of any sense of responsibility, and the confusion of histrionics with empathy.
All of her journaling is about how she’s special, all her problems are inflicted on her by others, and how she supports others by being angry on their behalf. No real insight whatsoever.
The SJW responsible–she says she doesn’t consider that an insult–comes across as lacking any self-awareness. After causing a problem, she spends an inordinate amount of time declaring she didn’t cause it. She comes across as a sniffling kid who’s taking her ball and going home.
And who else but a child would “blame it on my Aquarian moon”?
Did you see the picture of this creature? The alien bleeding acid in Alien is less scary and dangerous.
We might chalk this all up to communication distributed at the speed of the internet, everywhere, recorded forever. People that have nothing to do with our lives now find their way to us. They are not only here, but they are deeply concerned with what we say. That permanent record of our last thoughts linger in their midst, and that cannot stand. Those thoughts must be usurped. If they aren’t, they will poke like needles in your back. And the social network/podcast/communication platform is not about your life, it is about my life. My worldview is correct. The internet should reflect my politics. For the internet has allowed the narcissist to build a virtual kingdom. We have raised generations of narcissists by diminishing virtue and valor and replacing these with an ideology of human destruction. We then give these denuded minds lives without physical hazard, historic levels of free time, and near-zero cost communication. A drug addict self-medicates with drugs, a tortured mind self-medicates by torturing others. Hyperbolic? Sure. But I still believe it. You can mix the mustard and the mayonnaise to finish your sandwich, but you can’t make them separate condiments again. This lunacy will not be appreciably marched back. It will be undone by its own success like yeast in wine, or it will be removed by the last stand of the courageous, fighting with greater alacrity for being backed into a corner. Rome’s end was in its beginning, and we are the progenitors of our own destruction.
F. the Great,
Preach it brother! Well said.
Next question: what do we do?
@ Frederick the Great – “like yeast in wine…” – I *like* that analogy; something that grows till its own effluent finally kills it. Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of that; so many liberals alienated by these puritanical fundamentalists.
Turna out RR caters to te market outside their physical locations. Are you in a coffee buying mood? https://rrpdx.com/products/midnight-cowboy-blend
Yes! Let RR feel the support from freethinkers everywhere!
Well in America at least. Looks like they don’t ship to Canada.
These little crusades against small businesses seem to be a common occurrence in Portland. What I wonder is, was there ever an ask? Has anybody approached you with a way to buy your way out of the problem?
The happen here in Sydney too.
@Chez
I live in Portland, Oregon, and yes we have a big problem with SJWs here. The cause of it is the old sunset laws that prohibited black people from staying in the state after sunset. I think those laws were still in place in the 1950s. So the city has now a need to atone for past sins and this is the modern way. On the other hand, it’s a minority of people who actually particiate in these kinds of actions and I’ve noticed lately that there is a real pushback against the more extreme forms. People are getting tired of it especially since over 90% of people are employed by small businesses; if the business they work for goes under, where are they supposed to go? I’m a small business owner and I’m waiting for the day someone comes and makes a big stink about me being white and selling Nordic items (being a native Swede/Finn/Sami). But if and when that happens, I won’t take it laying down. I will sue them for defamation and libel and I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t discriminate against anyone ever and I work hard to make sure my customers are happy, and I know most Portlanders do. So hopely we will see a change in the air soon.
Sami
Being an indigenous person, you have the can-do-no-wrong mojo, mate. You can slap them around silly, metaphorically of course.
@ga gamba
I actually have, lol. Only occasionally though. We want this nonsense to end, not give it more fuel.
Great krizo! keep up the good fight! Dont give an inch to their regressive secular religion…cuz thats what it is.
@SJWSTFU
It is a religion, and it was created by ex-evangelicals. I am myself one (I spent a decade deconstructing, most of these people left without ever doing anything to correct the errors in their thinking), and I can clearly see the influence of evangelicalism in their rhetoric. I blogged about it yesterday, so I won’t repeat everything I said here (you can go and read it, if you wish at http://www.susannakrizo.com/blog/how-ex-evangelicals-created-the-new-left). My point is that to get rid of this plague (and it’s a plague) we need to teach them how to think critically. Evangelicals engage in magical thinking (much like OCD people) and they are always anxious (because they believe the slightest of infractions will be punished). No one can live with such anxiety, hence they go after other people’s infractions The idea is that if they focus on other people, they don’t have to deal with their own innate feeling of worthlessness, because it is exactly what they feel: worthless, while being told they are right and everyone else is wrong. It’s a bizarre way to think and feel and it creates the kind of behavior patterns we see now (these kinds of things have been going on in the evangelical world for eons; people’s lives and reputations are regulary destroyed by the mob in churches). Once it becomes personal for them, when the mob turns on them, that’s when they usually wake up (which is ironic, since they talk about being “woke”). It’s going to be hard for them this around. They left the church and thought they found salvation in the intersectional cult and the left, and now they will feel doubly orphaned. Let’s just hope the extreme right doesn’t mop all of them up.
Susanna, I hope you are right. Sadly, it only takes a minority that everyone is afraid of to create true mayhem and destruction in a society. So many people are afraid of being called racist and sexist, that they would rather kowtow to the SJW mobs.
@Inverness
That is the problem, that people apologize and act as if there is something wrong with them. But I’ve noticed, it only takes a few brave ones to give the crowd strength to stand up for their own rights. I saw this in the church. I was vocal about women’s rights. At first no one dared to speak up around me, but after awhile people began to talk about their own experiences and question the man’s authority. And yes, the other side got mad as hell, but we used logic as our defense; logic and research. In the end they had to resort to bullying tactics to try to silence us and it revealed how empty their arguments were. The same is seen with SJW. When people stop apologizing and stop letting people bully them, the insanity will end. By now the word “racist” has lost much of its currency. It means little more than “I don’t agree with you,” and it’s such a shame, since racism is real and there are real racists out there that need to be stopped.
Take home message – don’t hire anyone under 40.
Do a careful job interview.
This sort of thing makes me reach for my coffee and knitting…Oh, wait!
@johnthsea
Lol, you win this one!
It feels like she was on the lookout for an opportunity to display her social justice values. The author provided her the perfect opportunity, and so now she’s gonna milk it for all it’s worth. But, RR is in Portland. I mean, isn’t that city kind of infamous for shit like this?
It kinda is. That can, in limited circumstances, be a good thing. There was a wonderful Thai restaurant here several years ago – an exceptional place – that was revealed to have been abusing foreign workers (taking passports, hours and hours of unpaid work, etc.). Even before legal sanctions could kick in, the public just abandoned them. Public disgust worked like it was supposed to, these restaurant owners were criminally oppressive assholes who did actual harm to people in a weaker position than themselves, and people voted with their feet.
Or it can turn into idiots mobbing white burrito cart owners as evil cultural appropriators.
“…it is the behavior of a toddler whose tantrum brings a dinner party to a halt until it can be placated with the attention it seeks.”
This nails it. I am convinced that narcissism is the heart and soul of these activists. They gain disproportionate power and influence over people, and make themselves the center of attention. As others have suggested below, you should sue them if you have even the slightest legit cause. It is time to hit back. I feel very sorry for you all, and wish you the best.
Lawsuits are expensive, not easily won (especially when grumbling about the free speech opinions of others you antagonize), and what money would this person even have?
You have to hire the most assertive lawyer you know (Not named Avenetti) and sue Camila to smithereens. Sue for damages real and imagined…put liens on her car, her cat, her apartment and any 401k or future wages.
If you don’t fight fast and fight hard..the Twitter Mafia will put you out of business.
I had an incident in an airport recently where 2 SJW’s attacked me for being racist for helping a young black family deal with an overly precocious 2 year old banging on the window of the plane for 90 minutes. I got right back in their face…told them to take their white privilege and shove it where the sun don’t shine…and get back in their lane. They cowered..afraid I was going to knock their head off..which I was if I heard the R word from a couple of porkly 250 pound white women in their mid 20’s.
@Erica
I completely agree. People need to begin to sue these people for libel and defamation. I’m glad to hear it’s exaclty what the Covington students are doing. There are laws in place to protect people from this kind of insanity.
Suing is easy; winning is hard, fraught with legal and financial peril.
I am so very sorry .it’s scary out there. I found Heyer’s assertion that “exhaustion” is a favorite word of the outrage mob, strange. Do they think they have to soldier on despite the futility of ruining people? I don’t get it. I thought they were fueled by it. It’s like a religious experience for them. You nailed it with “fundamentalist”.
We are about ready to leave the chaotic deteriorating urban area and seek out some common sense rural rednecks who know how to do “stuff” as neighbors. People are so angry.
I think this is not really religious zeal, but rather a kind of collective mob high. I call it an outrage orgasm. It costs nothing to paste into an internet tweet formulas like “racist, misogynist, sexist, victim, survivor” etc, and it feels so good.
So glad I sold my business years ago, this is exactly the type of thing I saw coming. It now only takes one disgruntled employee (I had my share of those) to go on a jihad against you to lose everything you’ve worked years to build.
NotPC: a sad commentary. These SJW’s destroy other people’s hard work. That looks like a beautiful coffee shop, dedicated to providing fair wages and decent coffee to the public. This is exactly the kind of entrepreneurial spirit a good society promotes. We need to fight back.
Or a bad worker does something stupid and then they sue you as the employer, as if your company policy was to do something stupid. Hiring human workers is a mistake, which is why you see less of it all the time. The more you can do without them, the better your business and life.
I’m so sorry this is happening to you. Dialogue doesn’t work on people like [redacted]; people like her only understand strength. Fight. Fight for all that you’re worth or [redacted] and her morally indigent army will roll you over.
OMG reparations happy hour. I am seeing this trend in Olympia of people demanding compensation for their oppressed status.
This article is hitting home what it is like and it is getting more and more chilling. In Olympia, people are very happy to see Bret and Heather gone. There are some circles I cannot say their name or I will not be welcome. They are seen as the devil. It is stunning really. I can vouch for their need to exile.
I have been meaning to pitch this Quillette, but in the meantime, here is a report from Olympia on a similar story.
In Olympia, we recently have had calls for boycotts of several local small DT businesses who have dared to complain about homeless people living in their vestibules and leaving feces and needles in their wake. We are a town of 62K people, small. We have several hundred people living in tents in our DT core and more throughout the woods. This is blamed on the housing shortage, which is true, but leaves out the addiction component and that we have been advertised on anarchist sites as a homeless sanctuary city citing our lax law enforcement (true). So in addition to being overwhelmed by our own citizens needs, we are also being inundated with people from outside the town.
There was also recently a 9th District Court ruling that says that municipalities cannot tell homeless people to move unless they have a place to go to. This has been interpreted very broadly by Olympia city government, which has allowed several city block size illegal campsites to sprout up. First there were a few tents, then 2 full blocks and several other locations have been taken over.
A good percentage of these people are mentally ill and or addicted and in dense concentrations violence is breaking out. The campers are also becoming very aggressive and entitled. The stories are too many to list, but serious and traumatizing. Yet these stories are dismissed as people just being “uncomfortable” w the homeless. These stories are not believed. People are gaslit and told they are not tolerant. A woman had a man with a knife wave it around her babies head. At the transit center a guy with a gun got on a bus that was empty except for a teen girl and he threatened to kill her. A woman cut her wrist and sprayed blood all over someone who did not give her money or a cigarette. Needles are being planted where kids play so that they will stab someone, there was an OD in front of a kids field trip.
But this is ok, these are oppressed people and hence they have a right to lash out, and if their actions are met with anything less than compassion, you are a really bad person. There is even the new slur “housie.” yes, we are being slurred for living in a house. The hypocrisy is so thick and it would be funny but that real lives are at stake.
But….the extremists in our town defend the homeless and called for a boycott of the small businesses that have spoken out. The businesses hired private security, and OlySol, an extremist group based out of Evergreen, or with very close ties, harassed them so much that the company canceled the contract. This included online, phone and in person physical intimidation. This group was defending the right of people to sleep in vestibules, rather than fight to get them housed etc. Many of the homeless resent their actions because they are making their lives worse by inculcating further backlash (as if the tent cities with bicycle chop shops have not already done the job quite well).
It used to be we on the left were anti corporate, but and pro local business. Now the inquisition has become so perverted that small local businesses, struggling to make it, are seen as evil and to be fought. The same businesses who have endlessly donated pizzas, books and gift certificates to pretty much every benefit we have, including a the main fighting homeless charity gala I recently attended.
It is so perverted and scary. I read stories like this and I just get chills. I really feel abandoned by the left. I want to keep my principles and moral compass intact. I spoke up against OlySol, and due to personal attacks for the first time I made my Facebook mostly private.
Jordan Peterson wonders what the line for the left is and I will argue it is tolerance for harm. They are beginning to tolerate harm to others. They are beginning to excuse violence in the name of the cause. I am fearing we are seeing only the beginning. These concepts started percolating here around 2010 and picked up steam around 2015 and with the election of Trump, have accelerated at a rapid pace. I am not seeing a whole lot of course correction, though I get lots of private messages of support, people are still afraid to be public.
Yet another victim of the Cloward-Piven strategy.
For those of you who dislike Trump, you have to admit that his election caused the intersectional progressives to reveal who they really are. It’s not pretty, is it? It doesn’t take much imagination to think about how much worse it’ll be if they get control of all three branches of government.
Indeed, racists from the left and right sure have made a re-appearance. Ignorance is the new “understanding.” Innuendo remains the gossip attraction it always has been.
I wouldn’t have thought I’d vote for Trump in a million years, but the thought of these nut jobs having complete power has changed my mind. I’ll vote for someone else if they run in the republican primary. If someone like Shultz runs, I may vote for them.
Small businesses have always been a bête noire of the Left. You’re just getting around to noticing? You were always on the chopping block. Now plans are being moved up.
This is the Left’s single value of harm reduction, magnified. The homeless are the workers and business owners are the kulaks. Eliminating the evil exploiting class will solve the problems the homeless are having. And everyone said that Evergreen was some weird outlier that had no significance.
The terrifying thing is that places like Olympia and Portland are just the tip of the iceberg, the poison will be spreading to the rest of America soon. As our once-proud culture is destroyed, it is cold comfort to know that the Leftists who enabled the rise of social justice are its first victims.
We are the point of the spear and that is what is so scary. And yes the homeless are the workers and the business are the kulak. That is how it is seen. They are the killjoys who are rejecting drug addiction destroying our town. We lived in a bubble of safety and it is now gone. I do not feel like it is hyperbole to say what is happening on the west coast is a reflection of the end game of this ideology. Again, a perversion of activism and core values. And I am from that group. I was invited to join the “security” team at Evergreen at the time. I am just glad I resisted, and am resisting. It is taking courage, in some ways, more courage than I have ever had to muster. But I feel some moral responsibility.
Small business owners are the new kulaks. In the USSR, many were thrown in the gulags. In the West, we just shame them out of their livelihoods, which I would argue is only marginally better.
@Candy Mercer
I hear your pain, we have the same situation here in Portland, Oregon. But since we have the second largest homeless population in the whole country, the effect is spilling into the more affulent areas and now we’re hearing “Something needs to be done.” People tolerate things that don’t come their own front yards. As soon as its there, it needs to go. I’m hearing even the most liberal people are now seeking for other solutions.
If there were junkies shooting up in the hallways of their dorms, stealing, screaming stuff at all ours, crapping on the floors, leaving needles in the showers, many of these activists would come up with more nuanced views about what should be done, something about not here.
Susanna, that reminds me of a recent study that tested the attitudes of people in wealthy neighbourhoods towards illegal immigration. Placing just two Hispanics in public places increased the tendency of people to say illegal immigration was a problem.
This is VERY different from Nancy’s situation. This is a public safety hazard and I agree with you. The public space has to balance the rights of everyone and government is involved. In Nancy’s case, it’s just people choosing where to put their money. It’s sort of the same with the businesses, but the fact that the government is not doing something is a completely different issue. I doubt the people in Oly who would boycott Lemongrass or something would be super numerous. But I do hear that the street kids in Oly are completely insufferable. I LOL’d at “housies” — hadn’t heard that, yet. 🙂
Candy and Susanna – who pays the salaries of the do nothing cops? Who is paying for all the free needles, free medical care for overdoses, cleanup of the feces and used needles? Isn’t there a chamber of commerce representing the businesses that actually pay taxes who can muscle the city government that can put those over-priced cops to work and start enforcing drug, vagrancy, disturbing the peace, unlawful camping, trespassing, and littering laws? And if the chamber or city isn’t responsive to these ideas, it truly is a lost cause and a sign to get out of the People’s Republic of Portland/Olympia before the whole area economically collapses.
@Coffee Klatch – I do not know how successful the boycotts were, but posters were circulated labeling them economic terrorists, and naming names. People are avoiding DT in serious numbers though due to the real safety threats, and this is hurting businesses, all of them. But yes, there were a sizeable number of people approving of these boycotts.
@E. Olson, we do have a DT Alliance who have worked on the issue for years, but the political power of the activists are greater. The cops WANT to do something, and I have heard rumors of deep resentment at the leadership level because of the stand down orders. I have also heard that working cops are frustrated as well. The city council is coming around but is severely lacking in leadership….when the water treatment plant sent a letter to the city asking for help, attaching a hundred + item list of incidents (the planted needles and the OD I cited above were part of that) that was costing them over 100K a year in additional security, the mayor wrote back suggesting that the plant might consider opening their own homeless camp. I am not making this up.
The situation currently is that the city has opened a 100 person mitigation camp site on the site of one of the former illegal camps. So now there is a place where homeless can be sent, and they have commenced removing the major camps DT, some of which had plywood structures built at this point. The plan is to open a second mitigation site and clear out of DT. This is being met with a lot of howling from activists who see the camps as being too exclusionary based on the rules set, and that the camps are traumatizing, and that serving the camps in the woods etc by providing garbage and sanitation is the best call. It is very complicated, in that we are having a housing crisis.
But I have lived poor all my life as an artist, as has most of my friends. We always found ways to stay housed, we never would have considered living in tents. We moved to sketchy neighborhoods, lived with multiple roommates. It is hard to fathom why people are not still able to do this, why these tent cities exist. My hypothesis is the level of drug addiction that is tolerated here, in that many of these people have lost all support networks due to drug use, and do not have the networks we had, even though we had drug use in our circles, that use did not fracture us at these levels.
To the people who are saying that it is only now that it is in other areas that liberals are waking up, or that if it were in the dorms people would revolt but I am not sure that is solid here, in that the homeless are treated with great sympathy, as are the addicted. I am not arguing that should not, but that there is not a fair balance of stakeholder needs. It is more that homeless/addicted rights are being preferenced over the safety of the whole of the community. And if you do not agree, you are an asshole. If you ask for any sort of responsibility or accountability for harm, you are heartless. So resistance is suppressed.
But I see the tide turning a bit, in that more citizens are getting a voice. We have a person who has been photographically documenting the sites and this seems to be waking people up. There is a facebook page where people have been complaining. More people are coming to city council meetings. But there is a very large group that just will not listen or consider that the situation is not helping anyone, including the unhoused. But yes, hundreds of thousands of dollars are going to people who are basically just taking advantage of our generosity.
On a related note. We had two black men shot here in 2015 that was a pivotal moment in the timeline of what happened with Weinstein and Heying at Evergreen. Everyone was #FTP – FUCK THE POLICE. Hardcore. (I reported on that story, and I do feel the officer was in the wrong.) They hypocrisy comes out this summer when a black woman died under suspicious circumstances. THE SAME PEOPLE who were FTP and now like “Where are the police? Why are they not investigating? They are racist!” So there are double standards that simply can never be reconciled. They do not even see the irony. Sigh.
Thanks CM for the sad answer to my question.
My daughter and her husband made a recent west coast trip from New York City. They thoughts conditions in Portland were horrible and would recommend avoiding Portland at any cost.
“Why are they scared of everything? I’d asked my nephew, a recent graduate of Hampshire College, if it were true that students are taught that all men are potential rapists. He said, “Yes.” Will young people who actually believe this be able to trust enough to fall in love? What does this portend when they turn 35 or 40? Will they look back and realize they had no foundation in cultivating joy?”
This, so much. It captures what I find so sad and unnerving about the entire SJ movement. These are basically naive kids who have been molded into narrow-minded ideological soldiers. You only have to talk to them a short while to realize how deeply unhappy they are, because sustaining that level of anger at the world is exhausting.
There are many people who use activism in a selfish and opportunistic way, to increase their own status, but many others have really internalized those ideas. And as time goes on it will have a greater and greater negative impact on their mental health. Women are told to distrust and fear men, which leads to men fearing and distrusting women. Long-standing resentments between races are continually fanned and inflamed instead of being allowed to heal. Etc. etc.
And because most people are some mix of “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes in this worldview, it means that no one really wins, because everyone is a victim and everyone is a potential target. There’s just this pervasive climate of fear and misery, with everyone racing to tear each other apart before they can be torn apart.
I try to remind myself that these zealots are still a very small percentage of the population. But as this article shows, they have the power to do damage disproportionate to their actual numbers.
I agree on most counts here, but I do think SJW’s grow in numbers by the day, and make up the majority of some workplaces and communities, so I think their numerical strength is not to be discounted.
I also think they actually fell-ass backward into a correct observation that all men are potential rapists. Given the evolutionary history of homo-sapiens, systematic rape of women who were in a conquered tribe appears to be almost a universal phenomenon prior to the advent of civilizations (and you could see why natural selection might favor men who reproduced this way when given the opportunity). I think as civilizations have erupted in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, our behavioral evolution hasn’t had time to adjust to the fact that everyone in the world is obstensibly in your tribe or coalition now. Absent the constant combat and rape-opportunity that defined human existance until the past few hundred years, I think civilizational norms and potential judicial costs are not enough to keep some men in check, and they revert to their most base and disgusting instincts. This only explains stranger-rape, but I think the implications for date rape on natural selection are so obvious I need not explain. And indeed this only applies to men and not women because historically the cost of child birth/rearing is born (no pun intended) exlusively by women, so they have little incentive to copulate against someone’s will (not to mention its difficult given physical dimorphisms)
I knew officers in the USMC who used to talk about this all of the time, that they know their troops just want to “rape and pillage”, and that winning modern warfare means you have to counter those urges in your troops. (in the wake of political insanity I have noticed they have stopped being so honest about it)
that is not to defend rapists (I think there should be no limit to punishment if guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, as norm enforcement is important). I also think telling men in your culture that you constantly suspect them of being rapists risks a sort of living down to expectations that you see in Islamic communities treated constantly as potential terrorists.
So SJW’s are not interacting with that observation in a productive way, but I think they are nonetheless correct in that singular observation
The #meneither show is pretty toothless. It comes across as two women gossiping about celebrities they don’t know.
As for ristretto being Nancy’s husbands company, she apparently signed paychecks, gave raises, had the authority to switch vendors…She is more than an ancillary character in the business.
That isn’t a reason to attack the business for a lame podcast, but it’s dishonest in the presentation of her story.
It was a true pleasure to discover the MeNeither videos a month or so ago. I have seen 3 and don’t know if more have been made. They are refreshing and life-empowering. That this has happened is pure evil. An earlier commenter says it reminds her/him of the Red Guards. It reminds me of them, too, but also of Pol Pot’s followers. This should be called out for what it is as a said before: evil.
This seems vaguely related to the women who opened a taco stand up there in Portaland and were forced to close it becuase of idiotic claims of cultural appropriation.
This bodes ill.
It really might be the wisest thing for businesses to be on the sharp lookout for SJWs when they are hiring. It wouldn’t be hard: just keep an ear out for the buzzwords. Or see how violently they react to “patriarchal” jargon, like “freedom”, “integrity”, “forgiveness”, and “sense of proportionality”.
The real question is, once hired, how do you fire someone like that?
That would be a good idea: develop a set of questions with words that SJWs would know, but the rest of society would be baffled by. Then if the applicant answers with SJW language, that’s the sign to quietly decline. You can’t have a mole like that infiltrate your company and attempt to ruin it after she’s left.
That’s what you get for hiring a lesbian lol
What is it with these lefty wankers? Why are they so afraid of words? Are they not capable of presenting a better argument against a statement with which they disagree?
It would seem that in fact the lefties have realised that they are wrong about everything and the only way they can hope to get their inane ideas accepted is by demonising other ideas.
It isn’t going to work lefty fools. The more you try to block out commonsesne human views the more you lose the war.
Racism, homophobia, sexism, islamophobia, etc are all in your minds. The linds of utterances and behaviour you describe in those terms are all in fact absolutely normal and morally upright.
So if you want to debate, bring it on. But if you just want to lie and cheat by attempting to claim that words you don’t like are ”violence”, then you can get ready to have your metaphorical arses kicked.
@Peter from Oz
There is so little real violence out there directed at them so they need to create violence to remain relevant, for if they actually managed to create the world they say they want (a world without violence), they would be rendered obsolete.
Susanna
Exactly right. Fighting for a cause is so much more thrilling than having to do a real job of work. If the goal could ever be achieved Mr or Ms activist then becomes a plain, boring pleb again. Such people are never, shall we say, in the top drawer when it comes to fending for themselves in the market.
Yawn. The market is already adapting to all of this. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and say something racist or sexist at work and see what happens. If anybody complains, just tell them it’s all in their mind and your behavior is normal and morally upright.
Come on, man. “The lefties have realised that they are wrong about everything.” Wrong about everything? So that means you’re correct about everything? Only a demented person would ever think something like that.
Oh, Quillette. I want to like to, I really do, but this shit is ridiculous.
You know, what is said in Quillette comments isn’t really “Quillette”, right? It’s pretty much anyone who comments. By the way, your shtick is kinda tired, too.
Serious question: just who do you think you’re fooling? Yourself, perhaps?
Yakatomi
What you don’t understand is that being racist or sexist in the eyes of a a cry bully is not being sexist or racist at all.
Of course, no-one considers that it would be a great idea to make gratuitously bigotted remarks in the workplace. However, as in this case it is clear that there was no sexism involved. A nasty person has determined that it is somehow ”unsafe” to buy coffee from a coffee shop because the proprietor’s wife
I think that, maybe, Jay & Silent Bob had the right idea…
Dear Nancy,
You know, instead of responding to this like a wimp and asking for dialogue, offering to buy drinks for a woman who’s out to destroy you, how about you show some balls/survival instinct. Has life in a liberal utopia trained that out of you? Why haven’t you gone on the offensive, calling Camila out for hateful POS that she is? Why haven’t you attacked her cry bully claims that your podcast might somehow make some hypothetical rape survivor feel unsafe in your cafe? Why haven’t you just come out and said that anyone who can be made to feel unsafe by a podcast is a wimp who deserves to live in their little shell and that women like Camila are joyless c***s whose only purpose in life is to make others as miserable as she is?
These things would alienate some of your customers but guess what? They’d also make other customers more loyal to you in gratitude as well as drawing new customers to you. And your customers are already leaving. Are you afraid to polarize your customers? Guess what, Camila’s already doing that. Has it occurred to you that you’re losing customers not because they think you’re a rape apologist but because they’re turned off by what wimps you and your husband are? And that more of them would stick around if you fought for yourselves? Wouldn’t it be nice to alienate all the customers who fall for her bs, so that you’re no longer financially beholden to them? I know that’s easy for someone with no economic stake here to say, but you’re making the same mistake that all these other victims of Social Justice have been making, the same mistake Weinstein made, talking like a milquetoast to people who are after your scalp. The same mistake Republicans make, with the exception of Trump, who has never apologized to these people while pursuing his agenda. The more he pisses these people off, the more it rallies the troops. Try taking notes.
Why are you not burning this woman’s house to the ground (at least metaphorically)? Your lack of an offense is your failing, not hers. Instead of writing whiny articles like this where you try to make yourself sound reasonable and gentle, how about you and your husband grow a pair and hit back? Because guess what: you have nobody’s sympathy, especially not your own community. So how about getting their respect.
A little harsh, but I agree with the overall idea. Showing some backbone and going on the offensive seems to work.
Song for the Death
I agree.
The best way to win a battle is to fight it on terrain of one’s own choosing. The author of this article needs to turn this into a campaign against the cry bullies.
I’m sure that the vast majority of customers would be so grateful that the shop would flourish.
The fightback starts now
It’s clear you’ve never spent a year or two on the west slope of the Cascade Mountains in the great Pacific Northwest. Over the last 30 years, from Seattle to Eugene, the malignants have won the hearts and minds of the electorate. They have controlled the schools for a generation and now the kids don’t know anything else.
Most of the people, realizing that they are living with the wolves, have long ago learned how to howl with the wolves.
I’ve visited the region enough times to know what’s up. She can either go down swinging or she can go down offering to buy the bitch who’s destroying her business drinks. Which would you do?
What do you think this article in Quillette is?
SFTD – good suggestions and far more effective than trying to sue a crazy woman with no money and no assets in a totally Leftist jurisdiction that will probably rule against the sane party.
I live in Portland (unhappily- I’m looking to leave) and I’m familiar with this matter and the attention it’s received. I certainly sympathize with Ristretto and believe the company is being treated unfairly and illogically.
However I remember another similar social justice mob action a couple years ago against a new restaurant that opened up called Saffron Colonial. The SJWs were outraged that the owner was celebrating “colonialism”. They organized a boycott and picketed the restaurant.
Ristretto Roasters was one of the local purveyors that severed ties with Saffron Colonial as a result. They stopped selling Saffron Colonial’s baked goods at their coffee shops.
Only in Portland (I hope) Get me out of here.
https://pdx.eater.com/2016/3/23/11293364/saffron-colonial-bakery-controversy-colonialism-ristretto-roasters
@Dan
This is a revelation. Maybe small businesses will become smarter now that they don’t know when they will themselves be targeted. Also, the hype wasn’t as bad in 2016, or maybe it was. I don’t know. I was in Chicago then. Karma is a hard thing to deal with.
WOW. That illustrates the situation perfectly. Today you’re denouncing the “bad” one and severing ties, tomorrow you’re on the chopping block wondering what happened. There is no pleasing the mob, you either fight it hard or bend over for the rest of your days.
wow
thats some hypocrisy if true. I hope not.
I remember this as well and was disgusted by it. I began avoiding ristretto over the whole thing. Now I’m wondering if maybe I got it wrong, and the former employee had something to do with that decision.
Maybe Nancy Rommelmann can shed some light on this.
The awful Lizzy Acker played a role in fanning the flames of both controversies. She was a columnist at Willamette Week in 2016 and wrote the articles calling attention to the Saffron Colonial name. She’s now with the Oregonian -where she mostly writes click bait regurgitating Internet best/worst lists-and was all over the more recent Ristretto story.
Good info. This whole outrage thing is poison
First they came for the small business owners
and I did not speak out
because I was not a small business owner.
Then they came for the MAGA hat wearers
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Trump supporter.
Then they came for the racist knitters
and I did not speak out
because I was not a knitter.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
‘Following the controversy, Ristretto Roasters, a local roaster with three locations, has severed ties with Saffron Colonial Bakery. According to WWeek, Ristretto Roasters will no longer sell baked goods from Saffron Colonial Bakery, and Ryan Cross, Director of Wholesale for Ristretto, said, “Since they released their colonial branding, we’ve been in the process of dealing with the repercussions of it.”‘
Sounds like hypocrisy and karma indeed, and a waste of our time and indignation. Next horror story please.
Could the ex-staffer who is attacking RR have been the one responsible for this in 2016?
Small businesses, you live by the virtue signaling, you die by the virtue signaling.
I found the same article. Be careful of your bedfellows. I have somewhat less sympathy for her now.
Once they run out of real enemies, all revolutions have a habit of eating there own.
@Dan
Wow, I’ve never felt sympathy evaporate so quickly. This detail changes the story radically. “I was the mob until the mob came for me” sob stories are annoying. If what you say is true, these people are getting exactly what they deserve.
” these people are getting exactly what they deserve.”
I don’t think anyone deserves to have their livelihood and entire future destroyed over ideological differences. Period.
Once you get into the whole “they deserved it” schtick, it is relatively easy to “justify” why whoever the current target is “deserves” if based on the fact that not one human is a blameless saint. For some examples, look to the ever increasing number of prominent people taken down for things they said/did 20, 30, 50 years ago. In some cases even for admitting they said/thought/did something wildly inappropriate ages ago that they now feel embarrassed/ashamed about.
My sympathy to the author and her husband (and innocent employees who suffer collateral damage).
A few years ago I lost two jobs (of little value, fortunately) in a dysfunctional wine company here in Vancouver (Canada) as the direct result of an unhinged SJW weirdo who became obsessed with trying to discredit and slander me (baselessly) as a “homophobe.” That was my wake-up to these sociopathic Millennial Maoists and what they’re capable of.
For what it’s worth I just watched the first #meneither Youtube video and it was very entertaining. I plan to watch the rest. Lots of fun.
Good luck to the author and her husband. Is there an end in sight to these life-ruining tales?
I can’t help but think this comes from lack of purpose and being raised on the notion that they could do no wrong. It’s hubris and rage coming from people that don’t have real problems to solve or any real purpose. Like one candle lighting another the rage is transferred and the adrenaline rush comes from being connected to a group united in a feverish purpose. A jihad that requires no contemplation and no real effort. A confusing mix of consuming jealousy and self loathing.
Have you read the typical Quillette comment? This sounds like a self-diagnosis.
@ Nakatomi: Name one person who’s ever had their livelihood threatened, lost their job, or been assaulted by a mob that sounds like Quillette commenters.
James Gunn.
@ Linda Booth
that’s a really interesting point, they are on a secular jihad.
I for one am appalled at the lynch mob tactics being deployed against you. Judging by the capsule description I may or may not agree with the views you express but the correct response is clearly to listen and then respond thoughtfully with words, not histrionically exhort a mob to bring the torches and pitchforks. This is insane. I resolve to buy Ristretto next time I buy coffee, where can I find it. Stay strong!
I just watched the Vice YouTube link.
I’m gobsmacked, it’s scary and hilarious at the same time.
The head of the school is a weak excuse for a human being, his appeasement to the students is part of the problem.
The students attitude is what I would expect from 14 year olds with limited education. I suspect they are a bit older than that.
Is this America now? It’s not like in the movies anymore.
The second Civil War will be one based on economic terrorism using tactics like this to destroy people’s lives.
Oh, Nancy!
There’s so much to say here, I might as well make a list.
1. The main thing in common between you and Weinstein was that neither of you were good at calculating risk versus reward before you took a contrarian position in a public forum on controversial topics, while forgetting who butters your bread.
2. You have traveled in libertarian circles. Rule number what — three — after keep your hands off my shit and the NAP is — freedom of association. Those who have chosen not to hand your family money after hearing your shit opinions just means the system works.
3. You were not fired. Every single actor in this exchange is using their free will. You decided to double-dumb with the clothier on YT for frunsies, people decided not to buy your family’s coffee.
4. You are trying to turn this into a grift and it’s the stupidest grift of all the grifts. Your rhetoric surrounding this — you were shopping JRE and Unregistered within days — is highly annoying. And look where you are, right now — the National Enquirer of race science! This could have literally blown over two weeks ago. You’re not helping your husband’s cause. Maybe you’ll get paid back in dumbdollars on Patreon, though!
5. The podcast sucks. It was totally not worth it.
A wild social justice phaggot appears.
People have a right to do all kinds of dumb and harmful things. I can go piss into a transformer. I can spew paragraphs of hateful BS about Jewish conspiracies. I can even whip up a boycott of a café run by black couple in a white neighborhood. I’m sure you have no problems with any of these, because hey, I’m just using my free will, and those boycotting the hypothetical café have the right to freely associate as they wish.
All these things are equally legal, harmful and stupid. You might claim that their skin color has no relevance to how well their shop is ran, but neither does a podcast run by owner’s wife. You might claim that a healthy neighborhood doesn’t exclude people based on race, but in healthy academy you can debate controversial subjects without sending administration and students into hysterical fury.
Pity about points 4&5. You actually had an argument going until then. Not a very good one, but argument nonetheless. Then you just blew it by calling Quillette the National Enquirer of race science, asking why she makes you keep hitting her (learned that one at school, did you?), and capping things with the final straw that all losers clutch: “U suck.”
4/10 for effort though.
You’re absolutely correct. It is all free will. And as we watch Kaep became unemployable even with all the backing he has in the public eyes with the full mainstream support, keep in mind, that there is not going to be any payoff in it for the poor Camila.
WTeverlovingF?
Never, never, never hire a feminist. She might damage your business. Or you personally with fake MeToo allegations.
Exactly. Camila’s a lesbian POC. What did they think would happen when they hired her?
It’s as if Mai’s Cultural Revolution had come to America. Sorry, but any ideas of sending my sons to college in the US are gone.
Ah, America. But before we strap ourselves into this or that outrage bus, let’s remind ourselves of the widespread Christian boycotts of Target, Walmart, Disney, Starbucks, Amazon, Nike, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy etc etc etc.
It was the Right that pioneered this strategy, although it has never seemed to work for them. Some on the Left seem more successful but certainly not invariably – I don’t see Chick-fil-A filing for bankruptcy.
Outrage aside, however, it’s worth pointing out that if you are running a business, it doesn’t pay to alienate a potentially big chunk of your customer base by publicly backing this or that contentious position on this or that social or political issue.
Here in Australia, Coopers brewery found that out very quickly when they seemingly endorsed a conservative view of same-sex marriage. This was an obvious mistake given the popularity of their products amongst young, progressive-minded people, and they soon found themselves back-tracking and profusely apologising.
There’s nothing unfair about consumers voting with their wallets and taking their business where they feel it’s welcome.
“It was the Right that pioneered this strategy…”
No, it really wasn’t. Economic boycotts – aka taking your business elsewhere – are neither left nor right.
You know, you could easily look up the etymology of the word boycott – it’s kind of an unusual word that doesn’t suggest anything of an economic action of refusing to do business with the targeted party.
It’s a surname of a land agent, i.e. a rent collector. The tenants demanded a 25 per cent rent reduction, Boycott’s employer countered with 10, and an impasse was reached. An attempt to evict those eleven who refused to pay their rent was made, but because the notices couldn’t be served due to the constabulary being attacked, the tenants remained. Soon many people were shunning and refusing to do business with Boycott and his employees. Anyone who failed to ostracise Boycott was also shunned and threatened.
Does this pioneering action strike you as something originating from the right?
You are correct that the right uses them too, and they seem to be less successful. They are more successful by responding to patronise businesses targeted for boycott, for example Chick-fil-A.
“Ah, America. But before we strap ourselves into this or that outrage bus, let’s remind ourselves of the widespread Christian boycotts of Target, Walmart, Disney, Starbucks, Amazon, Nike, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy etc etc etc.”
Two wrongs do not make a right. And all the companies you list are huge corporations, not small local businesses.
No, we didn’t pioneer it. You’re justifying you liberals’ shitty behavior. You guys have pioneered all the political tactics that are turning society against itself. We don’t have activists studying these things and making careers out of them, you guys do. There’s a reason this sort of thing only happens in predominantly liberal places like Portland or Seattle. Please stop acting holier-than-thou while justifying your side’s acting like sacks of shit.
AFA, Southern Baptists and others were boycotting Disney in the 1990s, because of their gay-friendly employment practices.
These are typical Right-wing “culture war” tactics, long predating the lefty fight-back. But for the Right at least, their boycotts never seem to work, because right-wing militants are a small minority and corporations don’t care what they think.
Nonetheless, I defend anyone’s right to boycott any company, for any reason. What exactly is your objection to consumers choosing where to spend their money?
Uh, the Left were doing boycotts in the 60s.
But you’re right, corporate America ignores conservative boycotts because corporate America is run by Left-wingers.
But they also ignore conservative boycotts because the Right doesn’t have a horde of semi-employed or unemployed losers who can spend their afternoons picketing and organizing like the Left. Gotta hand it to you guys, you know how to put resentful losers to work and we don’t. That’s been our Achilles heel.
Bubblecar – the objection to boycotts is mainly about whether the rationale is based on truth and whether the boycott target is actually at fault. Some crazy loon woman protesting a video done by the wife of her former employer, which offers a reasonable point of view on the rape crisis myth is wrong on both counts – the video isn’t anti-woman, and the coffee shop target did not post or sponsor the video. As a result, Portland is likely to lose a tax paying business, several employees will lose their jobs, and rape culture will still be a myth (except in certain Muslim neighborhoods and the Clinton residence).
The rationale can be based on whatever the person holding the dollar bills in their hands wants. In this case, it’s clear that Nancy’s video stakes out a rather de rigueur contrarian opinion. It’s a position, frankly, we’re already familiar with — and the video adds absolutely nothing new or interesting to the conversation. It’s just not good. This part is easy to critique, even if you do or don’t disagree with her. And she chose to film herself pontificating on it — no one forced her. And everyone has to calculate collateral damage when staking out a position — everyone. To those boycotting RR, the collateral damage is people getting fired. For Nancy, the collateral damage was potentially draining her family of income.
The more I read of the SJW movement, the more it sounds like a deliberate act of war. If you wish to defend yourselves you must first identify your enemy. Is there a well-camouflaged actor pulling the strings, supplying finance and other support to the ‘warriors’? Which entity is most likely to benefit from a USA paralyzed by this social poison? In order to defend yourselves, it should be relatively simple to identify SJW warriors by name and address. Just pay someone to trawl through any suspect blogs, posts etc., and make a list. Circulate the list among other potential targets and politely suggest people on the list be shunned, nothing more. Accumulate detailed knowledge of who they are, where they congregate, where they were educated – learn everything you can about them. I am minded of an interview with a RED TAIL pilot who was shot down fighting for USA in the last big one. He said his interrogator knew his name, address, schools attended, his parents names, where they lived what their interests were – it was quite unnerving. Use this sort of knowledge to protect yourselves. Warfare costs money. Have you thought of crowd-funding? I think it a good idea to retain lawyers who will use every legal method to stymie this malicious scum. Be ruthless. Don’t stroke the tiger and hope it will purr.
I wouldn’t go to that extreme, but checking social media accounts of the potential employee would be a place to start. And then refusing to hire for some perceived thought-crime that was discovered in their postings. Easy as pie.
Great plan. Yea, we need to frame this as an act of violence and mobilize. We need to closely monitor people, tracking their behavior so we can punish them when they act out against us. We’re going to need a bunch of money and lawyers to engage in this cultural warfare. We need to be ruthless and uncompromising. But we’re totally on the side of freedom and democracy, not like those Maoist pigs on the other side.
Holy shit, the irony is insane. This has to be a joke, right? This batshit crazy, stupid-ass shit is a joke. It has to be.
” Yea, we need to frame this as an act of violence and mobilize.”
Mobilise by all means but do NOT frame this as an act of violence. It is not violence. Redefining non-violent things as violence is part of the problem of false or unreasonable outrage at ordinary actions. Speech even, hateful damaging, unjustified speech is not violence. Without going and looking I am sure sone of those enraged by #MeNeither claimed it was ‘violence’. We do not defeat nonsense with more nonsense.
It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Things are spiraling towards the point where both sides get locked into a series of mutual defections, and that of course means that both sides lose big. It’s just that one of the results is even worse for you. It’s the one where you cooperate (play by the rules in this case) and the other defects (plays underhanded hardball).
This is not a case of “look what you made me do”. Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. It’s not even “you did it first”, because that’s the kind of argument that little kids on playgrounds make. It just looks to me that people are faced with the choice of losing more and more, or throwing away their moral high ground. Lots of folks will pick the latter. I just hope they refrain from violence.
@AJ and NP
It is NOT an act of violence to prepare a defence against malicious damage.
I don’t understand why this comment is directed at my comment. My comment is against characterising things as violence when they are not. This is part of a rhetrical stragey to inflate the negative nature of things of towhich you are opposed. It is deliberately misleading and manipulative and in the long term undermines the usefulness and clarity of the language.
Your comment seems to be aligned to my view.
SJW warriors don’t care about democracy, that is, government by conversation. It is not in their nature to be fair and balanced, to consider the other person’s point of view. They just want to inflict emotional and financial damage on people they oppose. If you don’t like the strategy I proposed to defend yourselves, how DO you intend to do it? Or will you spend the rest of your lives whining?
Move away from Portlandia. If your clients are the type that I imagine, you are done. It’s a bit like the NFL, players bend the knee but the clients (the supporters) don’t like it. At the end of the day if you want to have a business you need to know your clients. Portland coffee drinkers are SJW delicate flowers. If you had a coffee shop in the Vatican would you hang a painting on the wall of the Pope with a condom on his nose? I don’t think so. I believe you, and I think you are right but after being financially ruined , being right is of little comfort.
It’s pointless to try to reason with fanatics. You have lost the battle.
Something short of a lawsuit that can take the wind out of adversaries is to serve them with a preservation of evidence demand (AKA a spoilation notice). This is what the Covington teen’s law firm did recently. This is a notice with real legal teeth that is done before filing a lawsuit to make sure the defendants keep their email and SMS data. It’s extremely menacing and scary coming from a law firm. They’ll lose sleep. You could just stop right there in most cases. It may be hard to find a law firm that would agree to just send these demands if no lawsuit is anticipated, but, hey, you could tell the law firm you changed your mind about the lawsuit after the demands go out.
Does anyone remember Mao in China? The history lesson would do us good.
The lesson here is don’t hire activists.
@Scott
I get the impression that every barista who worked in that coffee shop was a member of that mob.
That and don’t start a business in places like Portland.
Scott you’re right but when your entire customer base is made up of lefties, any little thing could put you in the hot seat. So a better strategy would be – don’t make nut jobs your bread and butter clients. In other words, don’t start businesses in lefty hot bed areas. But what am I saying, we don’t want them moving to Texas…
This is a story as old as “The Red Guard” and the “Salem Witch Trials”
I think a place to start for all the small employers in the lefty areas would be checking the prospective (or current) employees social media accounts and preemptively firing the most energetic ones for the posts perceived “problematic” saying them that may “reflect poorly on the company image”. I’m sure with the foul mouths they are there sure shouldn’t be any problems finding stuff.
Please, Please, Please…
Can we get Nancy to weigh in on RR’s decision to drop Saffron Colonial’s baked goods because of perceived “cultural appropriation”? RR appears to have a history of SJW virtue signalling themselves. This certainly changes the flavor of this article.
@Nate D.
I just Googled Saffron Colonial. I hadn’t heard this story before.
Couldn’t find a reference to RR, though, so if you happen to know a link that connects the two firms, I’d appreciate it.
@ Morgan Foster
Originally posted by Dan, above.
https://pdx.eater.com/2016/3/23/11293364/saffron-colonial-bakery-controversy-colonialism-ristretto-roasters
@Nate D.
Thanks, you and Dan both.
That’ll teach me not to read every comment.
Poetic justice. So the title of the article should be change to “SJW violence is bad when it happens to me”
Regressive for this and many, many, more reasons…
““It’s totally regressive,” said Heying. “An actual backwards regressive ethos.” But why do they want to go backwards? Why are they scared of everything? I’d asked my nephew, a recent graduate of Hampshire College, if it were true that students are taught that all men are potential rapists. He said, “Yes.” Will young people who actually believe this be able to trust enough to fall in love? What does this portend when they turn 35 or 40? Will they look back and realize they had no foundation in cultivating joy? It seems like an impoverishment of the soul.””
The rage is caused by inadequacy. Those who undertake STEM degrees or study Latin, Greek or Asiatic languages and play sport at university at university spend their waking hours studying or training. Engineering is about solving problems which requires vitality, skills, resolution, resourcefulness and learning from mistakes. Mistakes and overcoming them causes a person to accept humility which is required to achieve wisdom. Failure at sport teaches humility. By overcoming problems, obstacles and failure the body, mind and above all the spirit are strengthened.
Achievement due to prolonged hard work in overcoming problems, obstacles and failure produces a sense of wellbeing serenity and calm.
When something is created or a musician or sports player is at the top of the game they produce a sense of grace . In engineering it said what looks good is good; the Spitfire would be an excellent example.
The massive affluence created by the Enlightenment from 1700 and especially post 1945 has produced vast numbers of spoilt effete impractical mediocre middle and upper class people who are inadequate. These people are irrelevant to founding or maintaining any civilisation. The Enlightenment has enabled people to fulfil their potential through competence and hard work; it removed superstition and rigid hierarchies based upon birth.
The problem is that when so many affluent people have so many opportunities for achievement and they create nothing worthwhile, they become full of hate, spite, resentment and self pity which is directed towards those who are achievers. The Kulaks were the successful farmers who 60 years before were serfs. When the Communist Revolution occurred, the communists used the resentment of less successful farmers to kill the Kulaks who were blamed for their inadequacy.
Keir Hardie ,a miner and a founder of the British Labour Party said Samuel Smiles book ” Self Help ” was manual of socialism. Another book by Smiles was ” The Lives of the Engineers ” which described the lives of some of the founding engineers of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrialists and Engineers gave physical form to the ” The Enlightenment “. Brindley who designed the first canal and doing so reduced the price of coal by 50-75% once walked 25 miles to study a mill and then back again when he was an apprentice. Many of the engineers and industrialists came from poor backgrounds and even risked death ( I Brunel nearly drowned once ). The achievements of the Industrialists and Engineers made our present day life comfortable.
However those people who consider themselves SJW lack the skills of Bindley or Norman Borlaug( Green revolution) . If they wanted to improve the quality of lives of the World’s poor they could improve sanitation, water treatment, soil fertility, breed disease resistant crops which can cope with low fertility soils, drought and salt and provide higher levels of protein and vitamins; reduce cost of road ,rail and reservoir construction; reduce cost of energy production etc, etc. However this would require the study of STEM subjects and work in in some arduous and uncomfortable environments.
I agree with you. SJW culture is not about accomplishing anything, aside from promoting chaos and mayhem. It is truly pathetic, and an example of the destructive nature of resentment. Little wonder the post-modern professors denigrate logic, and the scientific method. Both tools, when applied, can lead to genuine achievement.
Interesting, Charlie. And amen about the Spitfire. It’s eliptical wings were only slightly more efficient than the quadrilateral wings of the Hurricane and other planes, but ‘slightly’ is often the difference between the good and the best. Truly, we all stand on the shoulders of giants!
Newton said the same ” if I can see so far it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants “. Newton was referring to Galileo, Copernicus and Ticho Brahe “. It is worth noting that those who achieve greatness often have a degree of humility and acknowledge they are in debt to others.
The more I study Marxism, Cultural Marxism and Post Modernism I consider it is a matter of character. Malcom Muggeridge described the Chekists and Marxists as an urban culture who comprise people who have a grudge against their fellow man and civilisation. Orwell described middle class Marxists as thin necked or boiled rabbits who despise patriotism physical courage, British culture, only capable of carping criticism, have a shallow self righteousness, do not like the poor but hate the successful. and have a totalitarian streak .
In short Ms, CMs and PMs are effete brittle impractical spoilt middle and upper class types who fail to succeed in life because they lack the resourcefulness, resilience, robustness, fortitude and responsiveness to make use of opportunities provided by the Enlightenment. Consequently these types have a grudge against those who succeed. These types are irrelevant to civilisation and to it’s maintenance ( any civilisation ) and feel spite and resentment to those who in effect house, feed and clothe them and drown in their tears of self pity , self loathing and self disgust.
so you’re a college freshman?
This is terrible and distressing. I’m so sorry this is happening to you and your family. I listened to #meneither and found it refreshingly sane and reasonable. I am going to place an order with Ristretto now and encourage others to do the same.
In this political climate, one unbalanced person who decides to target their vemon on you can do a hell of a lot of damage. It’s frightening and destructive and beyond time for the vast majority of people to step up, as they would not support any of this at all if they: 1) took the time to learn and think about it seriously, and 2) were willing to act and speak with courage and determination (within reasonable bounds, of course, since, as your case shows, it’s dangerous. But there would be growing safety with growing numbers).
Hang in there, stay strong, and know that lots of people admire and support you.
It’s always eerie how history repeats itself. Solzhenitsyn describes a scene where he argues with an orthodox communist professor in the Archipelago in Volume 2 of the Gulag Archipelago, page 338-341,and describes his conclusion on why it was always a pointless exercise to argue with these types of people.
I won’t repeat the whole exchange, but his thoughts on it’s ending are worth repeating.
“He is imperturbable. He speaks in a language which requires no effort of the mind. And arguing with him is like walking through a desert.” page 341.
It’s a description of ideologues that I think still holds up well.
Ok, but SJWs are not communists. Not even socialists.
Daniel, you missed his point. SJW’s are ideologues, as incapable of thinking for themselves as a Bolshevik.
I got so caught up in the story I forgot one of my self-imposed rules, which is to do an independent check on the author before commenting.
You know … to get the rest of the story. Or some of it, anyway.
My thanks to those who remembered this and where to find it: https://pdx.eater.com/2016/3/23/11293364/saffron-colonial-bakery-controversy-colonialism-ristretto-roasters
Any personal sympathy I had for Nancy and Din is gone. Yes, what happened to them is awful.
What they did to Saffron-Colonial is awful.
@Morgan Foster
Damn. But thanks. Once again the woke eat the woke and are eaten in turn.
My sympathy is reduced as well. Nancy and Din fed the alligator and now the alligator has turned on them.
I visited Portland 25 years ago and liked it. It now sounds like it’s determined to seize the title of craziest left-wing loony bin away from San Francisco.
So this article said that Camilla was the operations manager before she quit in a hissy-fit. I wonder who was responsible for the decision to sever ties with Saffron Colonial. The answer to that question will have an effect on the moral authority of Nancy and Din in this whole debacle.
“…She confessed that she could not explain why she had been treated differently, but that it was nevertheless clear that it was “based in a deep and abiding misogyny.”
On the one hand she can’t explain it, but she is CERTAIN its basis is steeped in misogyny. Yeah, Camile. Sure.
This type of modern day witch burning is reprehensible. However, Nancy and Din struck my as the kind of people who considered witch burning to be socially acceptable, as long as the people being burned were people they disliked or disagreed with. Nancy and Din willingly participated in the witch burning of Saffron-Colonial, but now that they have been denounced as witches themselves, they object to mob justice. They Heyings fall into the same category. Everyone, regardless, of political affiliation should oppose these modern day witch burnings, currently, running rampant in America. Mob justice is a threat to our freedoms and the rule of law. How many leftists will have to be burned at the stake, by their friends, before they understand this?
Camila is jealous that she’s not a writer, not published, and that she has to support herself.
But seriously, Nancy, it is inconceivable you were unaware that your #MeNeither videos wouldn’t invite the mob … in Portland, of all places? Isn’t that like chugging Everclear before going to the party at the date-rape dorm, or swimming with hungry sharks? If you didn’t foresee this then shame on you.
Not saying it’s right, but it’s reality.
So, Nancy was asking for it? Skirt too short?
Nonsense.
@Strelnikov Haha – Exactly! #MeNeither
This is right up there with the bored young ladies of Salem screeching,”Witch! WITCH!!!” at anyone in town who’d ever given them the stink eye. The vast majority who don’t spend every waking moment searching the ‘net for manufactured “outrage” will never even hear of this of this tiny tempest and happily come in to buy their coffee. Next week, on to the next thing. Really: People need to stop confusing the human equivalent of gnats crashing into a light bulb with anything of lasting consequence.
“The person who started this campaign against my husband’s business may not have known what sort of assault she was initiating, or maybe she did and did not care. ”
Time to stop giving these Red Guards the benefit of the doubt. They are evil. Their intention is to hurt as many people as they can, it gives them a rush. Camila is motivated entirely by malice and revenge. Period. The mob is propelled only by it’s lust for it’s own power and by a taste for blood. At some point they will be selecting victims at random. They say that at the height of The Terror, you could go to the guillotine for addressing someone as ‘Monsieur’ instead of ‘citizen’ then eventually it was sufficient that someone pointed to you and shrieked ‘ennemi de la révolution’. Happy times.
Nancy hurt herself. The boycott is because of the podcast, not because of the activist.
Well no, the boycott is because she made the mistake of hiring a hate-filled, self-righteous douchebag much like yourself.
@Song For the Deaf
I wasn’t going to say anything. People really can believe that. But you could fight dirty and say that Coffee is Blaming The Victim. It reminds me of the final liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto — the Jews dared to resist, so naturally it vas zer own fault.
This ends when, as a condition of either matriculation or employment or both, an individual waives the right of social media complaint in lieu of a structured complaint process. Then failing to do so would be a breach of said contract and would be actionable. The “movement” will die within days. Especially if an applicant is known to have participated in any sort of internet mob “social action” call-to-arms in the past. It would make them permanently unemployable.
@Jon Galt
I completely agree with you.
Instead of imposing a structured complaint process, one that may not be adhered to with the person crying publicly s/he is “being silenced which gets the media and activists involved, it may be simpler to refuse to hire anyone with a studies degree and by also scrutinising their social media history. Certain colleges and universities have a well-established reputation for churning out activists, so an employer could also filter graduates of those schools out from consideration.
If it becomes known that some degrees and graduates of some schools are finding it much tougher to find employment than others, it may undermine both the departments and the schools.
This stuff is surreal. I don’t even know how to really combat it, especially when patrons and suppliers of this company just take the safe route and cut business ties or stop their patronage to avoid being shamed or screamed at by insane outrage mobs snapping their pictures as they enter and then labeling them “racists” or “misogynists”. For every accusation they make, it takes a paragraph of explanation to debunk it. I’d say that in today’s culture, linking your name in any fashion to your job through social media opens you up to complete character destruction to psychos like Camila.
I guess I am missing it, I thought part of running a business (she is formally listed as manager in filings) is being palatable to the public. Yahoo wanted to host porn and users got angry, etc. This is how we maintain our own moral standards and those of businesses. This is a good thing about capitalism. Capitalism does not have to mean “no moral standards apply” to your shopping. And to call the majority of people “locusts” is dehumanizing and to me reveals supporters of this views are– not ethical at all.
But they deserve to be dehumanized.
Of course they’re not ethical! Have you stuck around to read the comments here? It deplora-land on three continents through a wormhole — and the English — man, when they get their Thomas Ass-quinas quills out, they can rip a screed qua the Magna Carta qua Opus Dei qua yr philandering pastor qua Goebbels — it’s quite impressive — whilsts being flung about while the sun rises on the 1800s. So clever, so butthurt.
You don’t like the views of the business owner? Fine. Don’t patronize the business. Spend your money elsewhere. If enough people agree with you that those views are unpalatable, the owner will be punished. But that’s not enough for you miserable, self-righteous crybullies. You have to actively try to destroy the livelihood of those who disagree with you. You would have fit in very well in colonial Salem during the witchhunting days.
Seems insane of the author to think she could do a youtube show like that while her income was derived from a restaurant in Portland, Oregon. How else could this have been expected to go? Still sucks, though.
Tortious interference. The former employee, with clear motivations of spite and revenge, interfered with longstanding contracts by slandering Ristretto to Reistretto’s wholesalers. Former employee also engaged in public defamation of Ristretto through her online posts orchestrated harassment campaign of the business predicated on demonstrable lies.
SUE SUE SUE. Make an example out of this horrible person.
I’m a Portlander and I made a special plan to visit this place and buy coffee from them. Told a bunch of my friends as well. Hopefully you’ll get new customers out of this because you can count me as one one of them.
Another problem is the exaltation of anxiety in these young people. They view anyone who doesn’t experience anxiety as strange, threatening; they have too much “privilege,” they must be made to feel anxiety too. Camilla writes how the moment he saw the #MeNeither video her whole body responded with a massive amount of anxiety, which then needed an outlet. I’ve seen tons of ads around Portland that say, “(Name), busy professional, parent, artist, lives with anxiety.” The whole city feeds into this idea that if you don’t have anxiety there is something wrong with you. The other problem is this thing called “vulnerability.” These people believe they have to express their anxiety in every possible way, for not to do so is to be a inauthentic. And the one thing they want to be is authentic. The irony, of course, is that they are being “authentic” in the virtual world rather than in the real world. In the real world they use mod tactics to destroy people who don’t “understand” their anxiety. We’re having a mental health crisis in this country, that much is certain.
Elsewhere in this thread people have said that they noticed things seem to have changed dramatically about 2015. I noticed that, too.
My initial observation was that mau-mauing the flak catchers in first tier universities like Brown, Yale and Harvard always seemed to involve PoCs and feminists versus the university administration. My hypothesis was, and still is, that after the global financial crisis of 2008, the cohort born after 1990 realized that the last gravy train from college station had left a few years ago and that their chances of landing a comfortable sinecure with only their Ivy League BA had decreased dramatically; in fact, it had decreased to near zero for the run of the mill graduate.
So, the first round of denouncing what they called “white supremacy” or “patriarchal oppression” was simply aimed at using affirmative action to put themselves first in line over their white and male counterparts in the cut-throat competition of the spring job interviews.
However, for a generation and more the US had been using subsidies for college education to keep the unemployment rate down because, in the US, if you are not looking for a job you are not unemployed and those in college were not looking for jobs.
Now, almost everyone graduating with a liberal arts degree is in the same position as the Ivy League PoCs and feminists were about 2010. These people quite correctly see they have incurred $30-100,000+ of debt for a credential that has no intrinsic value. Further, whether or not they are a PoC or feminist with some claim to affirmative action preference, they may well see that they, like their expensive credentials, are simply excess to the needs of the economy and society and can see no future; things being the way they are. Accordingly, they are easily radicalized.
I contrast this with myself. I was born under the now unimaginably lucky stars of the early Boomers. We couldn’t make any mistakes. Fate had determined that, on average, we would prosper far beyond our individual merit. That seems to have been a once in a millennium sort of thing for those of us born in the Anglo-sphere, particularly for those of us born in the US for whom WW I was almost inconsequential and WW II was like winning the lottery.
This is a revolutionary environment that is not going away. But we should recognize that the generation born after 1990 is being driven chiefly by envy, fear and despair, not hate. We should also recognize that our politicians simply refuse to see that there is a problem. In their minds it will always be 1960 when all was possible and success with almost no effort and even less thought was guaranteed.
I’m not optimistic. I’m pretty sure the US hegemony will collapse in the same way the Soviet Union did after 1990. After that, the deluge.
You vastly underestimate the value of an Ivy degree.
Sounds like NYC Woody Allen era, redux . . . so, why don’t we start calling out “pathetic?”
It’s because the northwest is ground zero for that indie/alternative culture that romanticizes self-loathing and despises people who aren’t in the same boat. It’s the same crowd (and their children) who valorized Kurt Cobain for being depressed and committing suicide, or who took validation from the emotionally unstable rejects of the riot grrl scene. Only the botched are interesting, everyone else is Barbie and Ken. Cobain felt the same way.
This is a culture that’s been around for decades, we’re only now seeing its fruits now that it’s the mainstream.
You might be on to something. It’s all about being a beautiful loser. And losers do not run successful small businesses. So, there is resentment against the successful.
yes. the links are there. yes. i grew up with this ideal, and it is fucked up and it has not served me well.
This is why companies want to replace people with robots.
Once I get the ex employees real name she’s going straight on my employment blacklist, circulated to my friends.
@David Wall
Certainly, any employer in Portland needs to know who she is, and what she’s done.
Her name is Camila Coddou.
I live in Portland, OR. I can tell you there is zero point in fighting against the SJ movement here. I wont even go into examples, as they are too numerous and would require a Quliiette-PDX sister site just to get started documenting the toxic self-harm that Portland engages in on a daily basis.
What would be helpful would be some sort of Portland Underground Railroad system where conversation could go beyond bellyaching and achieve something. For example, I’m a white heterosexual male, the most unhireable demographic in Portland, regardless of my resume. This ideology benefits no one other than the PR dept, not to mention that my expertise goes to waste.
If I had children, I certainly wouldn’t want my babysitter telling my kids that gender isn’t real or that because they are white, they’re guilty of some crime. Or any variation of the nonsense I see children subjected to every day. The list goes on and on.
It would be nice to have a pool of sane people to hire, do business with, exchange data and resources with etc. Fighting against the norm here in Portland is pointless, but we could be helping each other out in more effective ways.
@Drew Wiltsey
You want to caucus and network with other heterosexual white males. You want heterosexual white male employers to look out for and set aside jobs for other heterosexual white males.
Well, black people do that. Gay people do that. And heaven knows, women do that.
So why shouldn’t you?
But you’re right about it needing to be underground because it is surely illegal. You’ll have to meet in private homes in small groups. Bribe government watchdogs to look the other way.
It can be done, but it will be a long, weary road.
(I’m actually serious about this. I’m not taking the piss.)
Ha ha! I never said anything about wanting to network with white hetero males. I certainly said ”sane” people though.
I’m hoping that the definition of “sane” still includes a wide net of different people.
There are same people in all groups but the majority in the groups he mentioned are tribal and act accordingly. He’s suggesting you do the same.
Hey, Din and Nancy: Welcome to the Republican Party.
There is a reason why there is a popular comedy sketch show satirizing the SJW and progressive kooks of Portland.
Btw, this doesn’t mean boycotts don’t work. The 1970s boycott of Nestle brought much needed change to the company’s business practices and stopped (at least momentarily) the campaign to convince women to choose formula over breast milk that caused infant mortality rates to soar. But the boycott has to be based on business practices, not personal beliefs. A person can be a blazing homophobe in private as long as it doesn’t cause the person to illegally discriminate against actual customers. Everyone’s beliefs are contrary to someone else’s and if private beliefs become the litmus test, we migh shut down all businesses right now, but then what?
Why not just dox her? They have all her contact info.
This would be a great time for RR to address this comment by a Portland resident, if true and if the author wanted to:
Dan
February 19, 2019
I live in Portland (unhappily- I’m looking to leave) and I’m familiar with this matter and the attention it’s received. I certainly sympathize with Ristretto and believe the company is being treated unfairly and illogically.
However I remember another similar social justice mob action a couple years ago against a new restaurant that opened up called Saffron Colonial. The SJWs were outraged that the owner was celebrating “colonialism”. They organized a boycott and picketed the restaurant.
Ristretto Roasters was one of the local purveyors that severed ties with Saffron Colonial as a result. They stopped selling Saffron Colonial’s baked goods at their coffee shops.
Only in Portland (I hope) Get me out of here.
https://pdx.eater.com/2016/3/23/11293364/saffron-colonial-bakery-controversy-colonialism-ristretto-roasters
Lucy!!! You got some ‘splaining to do!!!
@George G
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Good one. Ya gotta laugh.
Wow. To think my wife and I considered moving to Portland at one point. Portland may be boom-town right now, but my question is why would any business person think of starting a new business there? Venezuela here we come….
@George G
I did. Not everyone is after everyone. There are good people here too, and of course not having employees helps too. I saw the same mob mentality in Chicago too, and there the landlords were less than honest too, making it a much harder place to have a business. But I do hope that the younger generation begins to start their own businesses soon and when that happens, they will hopefully realize this isn’t a viable mode of existence for anyone.
Reparations Happy Hour. OMG. Life imitates parody.
Camila is jealous of Nancy—Camila wants to be a writer but can’t get published.
Lol
So it turns out Ristretto are liberals who helped put another company out of business in order to kowtow to the social justice fascists. In that case, this article isn’t a tragedy, it’s a comedy. These people always do this to each other, and Nancy and Din would have done it to any one of us.
Sorry, Nancy, no sympathy! This is what you get for siding with people like Coffee Klatch in the first place. 🤷🏻♂️ Now go whine somewhere else.
@Song For the Deaf
I think we need to create a list of businesses that have publically shunned other businesses to placate the SJWs so when it happens to them, there will be no fake tears (not that this mob mentality is okay in the first place).
Good idea.
Not a bad idea. I suggest we call it, “Susanna’s List.”
@Song For the Deaf
I know what you’re referring to, but you got your metaphors mixed up here. Schindler saved people from the pulverizing machine, these people are bowing to the forces that are out to destroy people. I think even you can see the difference.
You made public videos, and you got your public response. End of story.
Reading the comment by “Song for the Deaf ” just above me (no time to read the 200+before him/her) reminds me why I don’t much read comments below the fold anymore. Never commented here before. The original post by Nancy R. concerning the assault on her and her husband by online bullies was awful to read, and I wanted to wish the two of them well in seeing this through.
And then the Deaf spits out more unsubstantiated garbage – anonymously, of course.
Uh, hey genius, if you’d bother to pull your head out and follow the comments, you’d know people have been posting links to articles about Ristretto helping kill off another business that was attacked by the same SJW crowd that are now trying to kill off Ristretto.
If you’re not going to follow the comments, then don’t comment on them.
No, your contribution was a sufficient reminder that most people’s comments aren’t worth the time to treat with respect. A word of advice: If you’re going to attack people, try including authentic URLs that might stand a libel suit test – or failing that – continue to comment anonymously and cowardly, m’kay?
Tfw some guy with a fake name calls you a coward for posting anonymously. Okay, internet tough guy.
So are you going to stop reading the comments now or what?
Actually, my name is not fake, although it’s not one known to you. But the more relevant point is that if I was inclined to attack the author of this piece, I would not do so with a pseudonym; I’d give my full birth certificate name. Try doing that, mmh?
Consider: twice now you’ve called me names – “genius” and “tough guy” – and here you are telling others to be more sensitive to the feelings of others?
It’s really weird that someone with such an unlikely name is asking me specifically to doxx myself, claiming that only then will I be credible as a poster (great logic), when everyone else here is talking about the same story.
So which one are you, Nancy or Din?
Hey Quillette editors:
Commenters here have raised the germane issue that Ristretto Roasters once joined a pitchfork mob and stopped supplying to a Portland eatery that found itself on the wrong side of unhinged SJWs for no other reason than its name.
The author really ought to comment on this. It speaks directly to everything she’s complaining that Millennial Mini-Maoists are doing to her now. Without more information, readers are left with the feeling that karma bites [plus, there’s a suggestion for the name of a new Portland café right there].
A droll comment, Sydney. When can we expect “News at Eleven” ? – which is to say a You Tube featuring Nancy R. and/or her husband holding pitchforks (metaphorically speaking) outside said eatery? No time to plow through all the earlier comments on this thread, but I keep an open mind.
Or is John Henry Coffee Klatch in disguise? Seems more likely.
The name is “johnhenry”, or are you blind as well as deaf ? No offence. Indeed, I remember, with affection, Doc Holliday, whose first and middle names – as well as the mythic “steel-driving” man’s – corresponded to your spelling with two upper case letters. Have a good sleep.
Regarding Ristretto Roasters joining the outrage mob against Saffron Colonial, to what degree was that motivated by the same coercion and bullying now being used against them?
Gin up a mob, bully others into boycotting a business, and get them to do it on record.
Later, gin up another mob, and bully others into boycotting one of those businesses. Then exploit the earlier statements and actions of the target to undermine support for him, by pretending they were voluntary and enthusiastic rather than done under the same duress now being wielded against his own suppliers to do it to him.
Whip up a lather, rinse, repeat.
I don’t care if Ristretto took part in an earlier instance. They have my support (and a purchase) simply because I understand the tactics being applied here.
Oh okay, John. Sorry for not believing you. Anyway, I’m Paul. Paul Bunyan. I know, what a coincidence that my real happens to be the same as an old American folk hero, but it is what it is. Don’t judge.
So now that I’ve given you my real name, do I get criticize you — err Nancy, now?
@Song For the Deaf
You’re fighting a troll with more trolling Song, try to keep your standards up. This little exchange you are having with johnhenry serves no purpose, you’re just trying to have the last putdown. Resist the urge and let’s hope he goes away. Remember, rule #1 in a forum like this is: ‘Don’t feed the trolls’
This seems to be a clear case of harassment, libel and extortion. There also seems a conspiracy to deprive the owners of their civil rights. I suggest suing Camila and those who have publicized your supposed “evil”, and if there was any collusion on their part, or (particularly) financing by any outside organization, adding RICO to the mix.
These folks certainly seem to be nothing more than mobsters, regardless of their lack of monetary interest (though some of the organized stuff is certainly funded). They deserve nothing less than a mobster’s fate.
(And, yes, “fundamentalist” is right. The incarnation of progressivism inculcated in these children is nothing less than a full-blown religion, with cries of “Heretic!” and “Witch!” being transformed into “Racist!” and “Misogynist!”)
@GWB
But does Camila have enough money to justify the $50,000 a lawsuit would cost? And note that as usual Camila’s defamations have involved nothing more substantial than in effect denouncing RR as Heretics. Since the charge is nonsense, not a matter of substance, can the law even engage with it? For example, if I call you a thief and cannot substantiate that in court, I’m libelous, but if I call you a heretic, what can be either proven or disproven? Can you disprove that you are a heretic? What can be asked of Camila as to proving that you *are* a heretic? If I was the judge, I’d throw my hands up.
“Without more information, readers are left with the feeling that karma bites “
There’s more than a hint of open vengefulness to this idea. “Oh, you did this bad thing in the past, so I’m just going to sit back and let this bad thing happen to you in the present.”
That’s not how a civil society works.
There is only one way, and it shouldn’t be hard: be tolerant. Be fair. Don’t join mobs, whether they be virtual mobs or mobs in real life. Justice by mob sure as hell isn’t as fair or as safe as justice through the traditional channels.
Okay, so I went and read Camilla’s blog and I can now see where she’s coming from. She used to live in the East Coast, had some issues (lots of anxiety), sought therapy, didn’t work, moved to Portland (she doesn’t explain why), sought more therapy and the new therapist told her she was closed off emotionally (it’s all there in her blog) and she needed to become more vulnerable. She spends also a lot of time talking white supremacy and how as a queer Latina she feels the effects of it and what she can and should do about it. So basically, she experienced a panic attack of some sort (I don’t know, I’m not an expert) when watching the #MeNeither thing and it all snowballed from there. I think this is the tragedy in this whole thing. The Intersectional cult has taught young people that their anxiety is something they should air in social media instead of dealing with it privately. So when they have anxiety attacks, or whatever it is they experience, they should tell the whole world what upset them instead of dealing with it with therapists and their family and friends. And while they are doing it, they are destorying people’s reputations and businesses they themselves depend for employment. It may be an unintended consequence. I don’t get the feeling that Camilla wanted the business to go under; I think she thought her actions would cause them to cease the #MeNeither thing, that’s all. The trouble is that these young people have no experience in the business world. They don’t know how it all works. They think every business owner is rolling in cash and can weather it out; they can’t always. So they end up hurting their friends and likeminded followers of the Intersectional cult who depend on the jobs these businesses provide. I hope we can begin to have more reasoned dialogue about this. At some point something has got to give.
In other words, she’s a Victim.
There used to be a time when people were callous towards victims, indifferent to their suffering or ignorant of its effects. Then we moved to a time when people sympathized with victims, did what they could to help, etc. Now we’ve moved to a time when people like Camila use claims of victimhood to tyrannize over others. These people are all on the Left, because the Left has spent the last 60 years valorizing and privileging victimhood. Victims are morally superior to non-victims.
The next phase in the evolution of victimhood is rule by victims, call them Victimocrats, who use “anxiety” and “it made me feel unsafe” to marginalize everyone they hate. Our cultural moment is proof of Nietzsche’s observation that self-identified victims, ie the resentful, are shitty human beings and should not be allowed anywhere near the corridors of power. Their own behavior demonstrates.
Maybe the next front for conservatives in the culture wars should be the delegitimization of victims as such. They really are being given way more influence than is healthy for a society.
@Song For the Deaf
Victocracy would seem to be the next step. Unfortunately if we ever do manage to push back, there will be some real victims who will be caught in the crossfire. You know, I remain a socialist at heart, I care about the unemployed and the ‘marginalized’ and the poor. Is this all a Grand Conspiracy to force people like me to the right so as to get away from the SJW lunatics and in the process destroy any support for the sane left?
@Ray
You’re always going to have real victims caught in the crossfire. But now we have all kinds of people claiming victimhood or using victims to justify their motivated reasoning for marginalizing conservatives. Hell, they even do it to other Left-wingers, like Ristretto, Brett Weinstein, et al. Time to delegitimize it.
In any case, as much as I like Larry Elder, I like ‘victimocrat’ better than ‘victocrat.’ It combines ‘victim’ and ‘democrat’ in a way that perfectly identifies who’s pushing the program.
@Song For the Deaf
“You’re always going to have real victims caught in the crossfire.”
Ok, but let’s keep it to a minimum. Retaining our own humanity is the coming years is not going to be easy. I’m already starting to hate — really hate — people in such a way that I could want to see them suffer.
“It combines ‘victim’ and ‘democrat’”
Hmmm …. ‘victemocrat’ perhaps?
@Ray
It’s certainly right to sympathize with victims and treat them with respect. It’s not like we on the Right don’t do that. But it’s also important not to validate their victimhood or else you risk them turning into people like Marina or Camila (and they are almost always female).
There used to be a long distance between, “I’m sorrry that happened to you, is there anything I can do?” and “Your words just made some rape victim somewhere feel unsafe.” That distance gets shorter every day.
Doesn’t matter how you spell victimocrat, just as long as ‘democrat’ is in the pronunciation. Could make a great sticky word if we could spread it.
Diagnosis— anal retention since an early age.
First of all: Even though Ristretto is your husband’s company, you played a role in the operations. Your ideals & the company are therefore inexplicably intertwined.
It came to light that you hold views that many, many people find problematic and unsafe. No matter what, that discovery will create a shift in the work environment and have negative implications. There was a moment where you decided to post this shit online. This was your choice. You can’t play the victim because someone decided to shine a light on the opinions you shared in the public domain.
I wouldn’t want to work for or with a company after learning this about my employer. There are plenty of cafe jobs out there with owners that don’t suck.
Portland isn’t losing much by losing Ristretto.
Marina “shit” “suck” can’t you get through a couple of paragraphs without bringing scat and sex into it?
You mean that the next time i go to a supermarket, I should first check out the owners for the correctness of their opinions and that of the owners of the companies that make every product I buy to make sure that they don’t offend the prejudices of every lunatic adolescent with grotesquely right-on opinions? Do you do that?
The woke have discovered Quillette. Gemme outa here.
@Help me God
Steady! We will trigger them with our patriarchal logic and they will flee back to their safe spaces. Besides, it is good to see specimens of their mentality every now and then.
@marina. How are ideals and serving coffee intertwined (serious question)
I agree, once you put your personal opinions out there, you have to own them and their consequences. I disagree ,however, that ideas you may disagree with qualify as unsafe. You’ll have to make that connection in a concrete way for it to mean anything, because as it’s stated in your comment, I fail to see how yours or anyone else’s safety is at risk.
Also, going above and beyond a personal boycott to organize a concerted effort to take down a business for ideas you disagree with is bordering on an authoritarian mindset. I don’t think you can justify ruining someone’s livelihood over a disagreement.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
@Ike
I see you are still using the older meaning of the word ‘unsafe’. It is now unsafe to be in the presence of someone who’s opinions are different from one’s own.
Left-wingers who unironically use the word ‘unsafe’ make me feel unsafe.
Seriously. When somebody talks about feeling unsafe, it’s a red flag telling you they’re a fascist using the rhetoric of victimhood to screw you over. They need to be slapped repeatedly until they no longer feel unsafe.
Totally agree. I haven’t lived in the USA for quite a while now, but boy things have gotten crazy! Really the coastal cities have become nightmares (I’m from Seattle, last time I was there DT was just plain scary….)
Fascist detected.
Sorry, but I listened to the first part of your me neither video and found it to boring and banal to continue. Talking about someone’s reaction to or blaming them for a significant other’s suicide and ones own personal interaction with a celebrity is just so tasteless. If you want to be a martyr, find a more substantial cause.
Nevertheless it doesn’t seem to warrant a boycott, unless the price of a cup of coffee is being forced to listen to that drivel.
If you want to discuss stuff that really matters — how to balance forgiveness vs discouraging abusive behavior and protecting victims and stakeholders against corrupt leaders vs victimizing people for petty grievances –then that gets more interesting
You cannot make yourself the victim by changing the narrative. You lost customers not by your youtube account and your opinions, but your personal assault on the people who have a different opinion. You lost customers because of your actions not because of your opinions. It wasn’t the youtube account that stopped me going there it was the personal assault using the shop’s twitter account.
@dave. I get that you don’t want to support somebody with beliefs you disagree with, but how do you assault someone on Twitter?
Maybe you don’t know what that word means.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault
Your welcome.
@Ike
No Ike, no. The language has progressed. Assault now means making it known, or ever having made it known, that one holds an unwoke opinion on any subject. For example, were it woke that our favorite color is black and were it to be the case that you discovered that my favorite color is green, you would assaulted. See?
@Ray
“The language has progressed”
The thing that’s striking about all this is how Orwellian it all is. And I know that’s a cliche at this point but I’m not talking about language that means the opposite of its stated meaning.
I mean, Big Brother was obsessed with language. He worked overtime making new definitions, outlawing old ones, etc. Who does that today? The Left. The liberal arts and humanities professors who spend all their time talking about freedom and equality. They’re obsessed with transforming the language.
So I’ve come up with a new rule of thumb. Call it SFTD’s Rule of Politics #1: The side that obsesses over language and likes to “problematize” words is by definition the side of fascism.
@Song For the Deaf
It’s is a mercy that Orwell is dead. He had intended 1984 to be a warning, but it has become a how-to manual. We already have a dozen important words who’s meaning has been 180 reversed. racism is the opposite of Racism. discrimination is the opposite of Discrimination.
@Ray
“It’s is a mercy that Orwell is dead. He had intended 1984 to be a warning, but it has become a how-to manual.”
What would really have blown Orwell’s mind is just how whiny and feminized the modern totalitarian movement is. Instead of a militaristic Big Brother grinding everyone down in factory jobs, we have Big Sister wearing pussy hats and howling in endless outrage.
Hey @Dave, then I recommend you stop hanging out with Intersectionals since they personally “assault” anyone and everyone who disagrees with them on Twitter.
Am I naively hopeful if I speculate that this odious “woke” ideology that has been festering in academia since the 60s and is now in full poisonous bloom like a corpse flower in mainstream culture will eventually tear itself apart and people on the left will come to their senses?
Or will sane people have to start migrating to other parts of the country to get away from this lunacy?
Can our country survive like this longterm?
@Ribb Rotgut
But where? There had been talk of a white redoubt, but even a decade ago Oregon would have been part of it. Now, as we see, Oregon is lost to wokeness. Or at least Portland is. A very nice city not too long ago.
@Ribb
It’s never going away because there’s no incentive for it to. They’ve taken over academia (the Ressentiment Studies departments, which are the least intellectually rigorous out there, now dictate to all the other departments) and there is an endless supply of angry, botched teens out there just waiting to believe that their social and emotional failings can be fixed through communism or anarchy.
The Left has no incentive to stop acting this way, and that’s our fault because we haven’t given them one. It’s only going to get much, much worse and I don’t see any reason why it should get better.
#MeNeither? Are you serious? Just that title alone would make me never buy Ristretto coffee again.
Perhaps if this woman wasn’t a terrible human being none of this would have happened. Actions have consequences, folks. If you want to call sexual assault survivors liars and then make videos about it, spewing insanity about “the dark web” (cuckoo!), you best be ready for a backlash. Are you a member of QAnon, as well? 🤦🏻♀️
Portland may be liberal-leaning, but there are many, many cities where this same scenario would have played out. Because women have had enough and they’re standing up for themselves.
I applaud New Seasons and any other company that disowns Ristretto. Be good people, treat other people and your employees well and you’ll do just fine. Otherwise, like I said, actions will certainly bring consequences.
Rape victims suck lol
@None-aya Bidness Try looking up the word ‘alleged’ and integrating it into your vocabulary. Here, I’ll help you out with an example.
“There happen to be some ALLEGED sexual assault ‘survivors’ who think it’s fun to extort powerful men for money and fame.”
There. See how that word works now? You’re welcome.
Oh by the way, men have had enough and we’re standing up for ourselves as well…alongside the many, many, many women who love us, find us to be valuable at home and in society, and are sick of the duplicitous, sketchy, puritanical, extrajudicial witch hunt that #MeToo has become.
“Portland may be liberal-leaning”
You spelled radical Left leaning wrong
Also, I might add, Ms. McSweeney looks increasingly bored, uncomfortable and unprepared in the progression of #MeNeither episodes. She literally side-eyes Nancy like WTF all the time. Nancy makes noises like what I would imagine a hummingbird would make were it lick-tickled by a fuzzy piglet. You can sample them and play them over and over. The whole thing is terrible, objectively.
@none-aya bigot
“#MeNeither? Are you serious? Just that title alone would make me never buy Ristretto coffee again.”
Then you are a ideological coward.
Nothing else you lexicographically vomited is worthy of a intellectual reply.
Toodles, hun.
There is something about feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, #MeToo and pro choice groups that drive the right wing anti-feminists crazy.
Meanwhile the rest of us of a more moderate political ideology sit in wonderment what this is all about.
I just popped over to Ristretto Roasters and ordered 24 oz of coffee. If you are a coffee drinker, you might consider doing the same. I think it’s incredibly important for them to survive, not only for their sake, but to send a message.
https://rrpdx.com/
I agree! What’s being done to this company is what some call “social terrorism.” We cannot allow it to win. Ordering now.
The fact that Jeff used the term “witch hunt” lets me know all I need to about him and clearly neither he or saw file have ever been sexually assaulted. Women don’t come forward and put themselves through this nightmare for fun. It is a hard, painful process that they resign themselves to in order to heal and hold their assaulter accountable. That you make light of it or insinuate that it’s done for money is disgusting.
Your stance is wrong. Period. And until you’ve walked a mile in a sexual assault victim’s shoes, you have zero to add about it. ZERO.
I know people who worked for this asshole, and she is in fact, an asshole.
Like I said, actions have consequences. That’s the way of life. Be an asshole and it’s going to come back around on you. Just like it is for ol’ Nancy here. She’s single-handedly destroying her husband’s business for her political ideologies. Not the mark of a very stable or smart person.
You get what you give.
With all respect to your point, what Nancy is doing “for her political ideologies” is going on YouTube and saying things that are hurtful to many. That, in and of itself, is not “single-handedly destroying her husband’s business.” Instead, the outcry (that Nancy does not participate in) against Nancy’s political ideologies has been channeled not against Nancy but against her husband’s business — which ironically provides a livelihood for a number of the very people who are hurt by the things Nancy says — and that is what is destroying her husband’s business.
It’s scorched earth without regard for who’s on the earth: only burn the fields when you won’t need to feed yourself after the battle.
Quit with your little woe be me woman crocodile tears. My first wife beat on me for 4 years, while I tried in every way to help her get better. I only left when I finally figured out she did not want to get better. I took it in the shorts in many ways, including literally, during that time. But I moved on, and put it behind me. Life sucks at times, and bad things happen. But that is no excuse for going through life with a chip on your shoulder, and spreading your choice to lead a miserable life on others. Get a life.
If you think women are so saint they won’t talk shit on the Internet to hurt someone they hate then you are nothing but naive, to put it nicely..
They seem to have a talent for building a good and successful business. They should just move it to a truly liberal city (aka – a conservative city). Conservative/libertarians are the true liberals of today. We would love to have a place like theirs to sit and discuss our disagreements in good cheer. Unfortunately, where I am (central PA) does not have the the population to support such a business, but there are many places around the country that can. Let the mob rot in their regressive hell. Move on.
Pingback: Outrage-Junkies get their hit | Nerdcore
There are sooo many things wrong with this situation! Most importantly, Nancy has the right, something known as the freedom of speech in this country, for her view on the MeToo movement. It is her right and her own thoughts, not her husbands. Anyone putting the blame and exacting revenge on him just lacks common sense and decency. Camila action is shameful, hiding behind the movement and showing such poor judgement. If she has a problem with Nancy’s YouTube, address it with her. Taking it out on her husband is simply wrong.
I happen to agree with Nancy. The MeToo movement’s intention is completely being ignored. It is out of control. We have become an unforgiving society. Anything anyone can recall of what we’ve done in the past is brought to question and denounced as criminal. Are we all so perfect? Are we not allow to grow and mature to be better humans?
The MeToo movement is meant to empower women but it is actually being used by the mass to bully, to seek revenge, to exercise vengeance, and to give themselves permission to act without common sense and reason.
What happened to Din is a crime.
Whoa. I just finished an article on abusive coercive behavior in relationships and the pattern of these “locusts” is eerily similar-yelling, physical assault, ( e.g.-of MAGA hat wearers by libs ) refusal to communicate-sheesh! They ARE the very personification of that which they purport to abhor.
I wish you the best of luck in staying solvent through this ordeal.
I did not read all the comments here. However, of those I did read, I saw none that offered a real idea as to how to counteract these witch-hunting mobs. I am no longer in need of either analysis of this problem or indignant ranting about it. I want to know how it can be effectively stopped. We are up against a moral panic the likes of which I have never seen – and I have lived long enough to recall the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1953. THIS is worse. We had better figure it out.
Here here ! What can we do about this craziness ?
Put the filthy streets of Portland in your rearview mirror – it is beyond salvation. Fortunately there remain pockets of rationality elsewhere in this great albeit imperfect country of ours.
Really sorry to read this. I used to read and comment on your blog back in the day, when Ristretto was young. I’m appalled by this vicious, hateful behavior. I hope you ride out the storm. Heading over to the RR site to order coffee.
Pingback: Fashionable madmen – words not made with lungs