Things Just Keep Getting Dumber, Don’t They? – The American Spectator

It’s like there’s a multi-car pileup of stupid out there, in case you haven’t noticed. But this particular example, from late last week, you probably haven’t heard of.

This is a local story I ran across here in Louisiana, but of course as the stupid piled up the implications went global.

Anyway, it starts with a lawsuit that people you pay have filed. And if you have a certain class of industrial knowledge it should entertain you in an ironic and disgusted sort of way.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing ExxonMobil, alleging that the chemical company failed to take the necessary steps to stop racist harassment after five nooses were found over a four-year period at the company’s Baton Rouge facility.

ExxonMobil denied the accusation, saying it had investigated and found “no evidence to support allegations of discrimination.”

In a press release Thursday, the commission said the suit stemmed from an instance in which a Black employee discovered a hangman’s noose at his worksite in January 2020. At the time the employee reported the noose, ExxonMobil “was aware that three other nooses had been displayed at the Baton Rouge complex,” the commission said.

According to the lawsuit, nooses first began appearing on the property in April 2016, when an unidentified employee reported finding a rope “tied into a hangman’s noose hanging from a scaffold.”

Following an investigation, the company banned two contractors from the jobsite. However, the suit alleges ExxonMobil failed to take additional remedial measures to prevent further racial harassment, such as training, counseling or policy changes.

A second noose was later discovered at the complex by a contractor in March 2019. A supervisor reported the incident to ExxonMobil’s safety department, but Human Resources was never notified and a contemporaneous investigation was not conducted, the lawsuit alleges.

Five months later, in August, ExxonMobil conducted an investigation after a third noose was found, but was unable to identify the perpetrator, the document says. As a result of that investigation, the company’s report recommended “additional measures to remedy harassment in the workplace,” but not all of the measures had been completed by the time a fourth noose was discovered in January 2020.

Following the January incident, a fifth noose was allegedly found in December 2020, but the company again failed to properly investigate the claim, creating a “racially hostile work environment,” the EEOC said in its press release.

Many of you will read this and recognize immediately what this is and how stupid it is.

For those of you who don’t get it, here we go. From the post we did about this on Friday at my site The Hayride…

“Hangman’s nooses” attached to scaffolding at a large industrial plant like ExxonMobil’s refinery in Baton Rouge are pretty common, even though they aren’t exactly recommended as a safety measure.

And no, they’re not for intimidating black plant workers. They’re for pulling tools up and down the scaffolding.

It turns out that a hangman’s knot, a slip knot, is quite useful for hanging on to things being lifted up and carried around in midair, and it’s also easily loosened when one wants to remove the item from the knot’s grip.

But when the genius Marxists at the EEOC get involved, it’ll now be millions of dollars spent on a useless lawsuit alleging that there is a serial racist knot-tying villain leaving his Klan-inspired constructions all over the refinery.

There are special pieces of equipment — tool lanyards and so on — which are the preferred method of bringing tools up a scaffold while working at an industrial plant like an oil refinery. That’s why these racist skip-knots engendered writeups from ExxonMobil’s safety teams.

The company is screaming bloody murder about this stupid lawsuit, swearing up and down that there is zero evidence of anybody hanging KKK nooses on its scaffolds. And of course there isn’t. Just like there was no racism at the track at Talladega when Bubba Wallace pulled his clownish Jussie Smollett routine.

But we’re in a world so dumb right now that Idiocracy seems like a documentary from the good old days.

How dumb?

So our Hayride post goes up Friday morning, and the picture associated with it was a diagram of how to tie a slip knot that looks like a hangman’s noose, and as is our custom we shared it on Facebook.

This is what immediately popped up…

Facebook’s algorithm is so stupid that it thinks anybody showing pictures of how to tie a slipknot is suicidal and wants to hang themselves, and the people who run that app have decided they’d do interventions based on people posting things.

It isn’t even that Facebook is a bunch of woke Karens, though obviously they are. It’s that they don’t even have the faintest clue what they’re doing.

Of course, it would actually be better if the EEOC was that clueless. They do know what they’re doing — they’re out to harass every oil company they can, as many ways as they can. That’s why they’re pursuing “racist” nooses and making asses of themselves.

What’s sad is none of these idiots — like Rudy Sustaita, the $120,000-a-year hack lawyer at the EEOC who filed this stupid suit — will face any consequences for wasting your money on their bad behavior.

And that’s why the stupid pileup will only grow, and grow, and grow.

Image: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.