This document is part of an archive of postings on Political Correctness Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
My Home Page. Email John Ray here. My other blogs: "Tongue Tied" , "Dissecting Leftism" , "Australian Politics" , "Education Watch International" , "Immigration Watch" , "Greenie Watch" , "The Psychologist" (A summary blog). Those blogs are also backed up. See here for details
With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
This page is a backup. The primary version of this blog is HERE
29 February, 2024
Ultraprocessed foods are 'harmful to EVERY part of the body'
The academic journal article behind this report is
https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-077310
Its title is:
"Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses"
The BMJ tends to be rather opinionated
I suppose I should see this report as a brave endeavour but I am instead inclined to find it hilarious. It is a meta-analysis of meta-analyses. The big flaw with meta analyses is what is excluded. In one analysis of a topic that I had often written on, only two of about 100 of relevant papers by me were included in the analysis. Which two? The only ones that had something favourable to say about the conclusions the authors drew! Huge bias towards confirmatory research is well known. I am glad that I have survived to age 80 so that I can continue to point that out
And the present report quite properly admits that they gave more weight to some reports than others. But to which reports did they give most weight? Ones that they found most "convincing". So the selection of what to rely on had a clear and admitted subjective element. And since their conclusions are very congenial to the conventional wisdom about diet, we can be pretty sure that they were more easily convinced by reports that were congenial to the conventional wisdom about diet. They simply joined the crusade about the evils of highly processed food. Their article probably tells us more about what they believed than what is the case.
For many years I have had the pernicious habit of reading journal articles right through rather than adopting the academic vice of relying only on the abstract. And it is amazing how often the conclusions correspond much more closely to the initial hypothesis than to what was actually found as reported in the "Results" section. Reports relying on extreme quintiles for their analysis are almost all suspect of that.
So a wagon of sodium chloride could well accompany any reading of this report
Diets high in ultra-processed food may be harmful to every part of the body, a major review of research found.
Eating a lot of foods such as ready meals, sugary cereals and mass-produced bread is linked to an increased risk of 32 health problems including cancer, type 2 diabetes and mental health disorders.
Often high in fat, salt and sugar and low in vitamins and fibre, researchers found 'convincing' evidence higher consumption was associated with a 50 per cent greater risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke.
In the biggest analysis of evidence to date involving 10million people, researchers found those eating the most had between a 40 and 66 per cent increased risk of dying from heart disease.
They were also significantly more likely to be diagnosed with obesity, lung conditions and sleep problems.
Likening it to tobacco, they said 'public policies and actions are essential' to curb intake and called on public health officials to urgently develop guidelines and 'best practice' for ultra processed foods.
In a linked editorial, they suggest foods are clearly labelled when 'ultra-processed'.
UPFs refers to items which contain ingredients people would not usually add when they were cooking homemade food.
These additions might include chemicals, colourings, sweeteners and preservatives that extend shelf life.
Restrictions should be placed on advertising and sales 'prohibited in or near schools and hospitals,' they say.
Governments need to adopt national dietary guidelines recommending varieties of minimally processed foods, they say, while taking steps to make freshly prepared meals cheaper and more accessible to all.
The UK is the worst in Europe for eating ultra-processed foods, making up an estimated 57 per cent of the national diet.
They are thought to be a key driver of obesity, which costs the NHS around £6.5billion a year.
Often containing colours, emulsifiers, flavours, and other additives, they typically undergo multiple industrial processes which research has found degrades the physical structure of foods, making it rapid to absorb.
This in turn increases blood sugar, reduces satiety and damages the microbiome - the community of 'friendly' bacteria that live inside us and which we depend for good health.
Food additives like non-nutritive sweeteners, modified starches, gums and emulsifiers also seem to affect the microbiome, levels of gut inflammation and metabolic responses to food which may also increase risk of heart attack and stroke.
An umbrella review conducted by academics in Australia analysed 14 review articles published in the last three years which associated consumption with poor health outcomes.
Evidence was graded as convincing, highly suggestive, suggestive, weak or no evidence.
There was convincing evidence higher intake was linked to a 50 per cent greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease, a 12 per cent greater risk of type 2 diabetes, and a 48-53per cent greater risk of developing anxiety.
There was 'highly suggestive' evidence that eating more ultra-processed foods can increase chances of dying from any cause by a fifth, according to findings published in the BMJ.
This was also the case for when it came to obesity, type 2 diabetes, sleep problems and dying from heart disease, which all showed between a 40 to 66 per cent heightened risk.
Researchers from Deakin University, Australia, also found a 22 per cent greater risk of developing depression and a 21 per cent greater risk of death from any cause.
The evidence between UPF intake and asthma, gastrointestinal health, some cancers, and intermediate cardiometabolic risk factors remains limited, they said.
In an accompanying editorial, academics from Sao Paolo, Brazil said: 'Overall, the authors found that diets high in ultra-processed food may be harmful to most—perhaps all—body systems.'
They wrote: 'No reason exists to believe that humans can fully adapt to these products.
'The body may react to them as useless or harmful, so its systems may become impaired or damaged, depending on their vulnerability and the amount of ultra-processed food consumed.'
They added: 'It is now time for United Nations agencies, with member states, to develop and implement a framework convention on ultra-processed foods analogous to the framework on tobacco.'
Further research to determine the different mechanisms by which these foods impact health is also vital, they said, but should not delay policymakers from making urgent changes.
Scientists said there were limitations to the study, including inconsistent data collection methods in the original research.
Commenting on the findings, Gunter Kuhnle, Professor of Nutrition and Food Science, University of Reading, said: 'Many studies also show that people who consume a lot of ultra-processed foods also have an unhealthy lifestyle and therefore a higher risk of disease.
'Although many studies attempt to adjust for this, it is virtually impossible to do so completely.'
A government spokesperson said: ‘We are taking strong action to encourage healthier food choices and to tackle obesity – recognising that it is the second biggest cause of cancer and costs the NHS around £6.5billion a year – while respecting the importance of individual choice.
‘We have introduced calorie labelling on food sold in restaurants, cafes and takeaways to empower people to make informed personal choices about their lifestyle, and thanks to our salt reduction programme, the amount of salt in food has fallen by around 20 per cent.
‘Pre-packed foods are required to set out a variety of information to aid shoppers – including a list of ingredients and nutritional data.’
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Why is the BBC not telling the full truth about a trans cat-killing murderer?
Given that the BBC places great store in having a ‘Verify’ unit to root out fake news emanating from other outlets, one might expect the corporation to be merciless on itself when it comes to sticking to the facts. Yet the roughly two million viewers who tuned into BBC1’s flagship lunchtime news yesterday were at risk of being deceived by misinformation every bit as disturbing as any of the stuff that Marianna Spring and colleagues unearth on far-right websites.
The item involved the story of what experienced BBC news anchor Ben Brown introduced as a ‘woman who livestreamed herself’ killing and dissecting a cat ‘before fatally attacking a man and leaving him to drown’.
She was called Scarlet Blake, he informed us. Brown then handed over to the equally experienced Duncan Kennedy outside Oxford Crown Court, where Blake was due to be sentenced. Kennedy regaled viewers with more details of the terrible things that ‘she’ had done. He reported that the prosecution had outlined how ‘she was obsessed with murder and sexual gratification’. Kennedy added that ‘she thought she’d got away with it’ but that a former partner had dobbed her in to police two years later. And that was that. A not insubstantial report lasting a minute and thirty-eight seconds came to an end.
On initial hearing, I thought I remembered the case as having involved a transwoman, i.e. a biological male, but figured this could not be the case because even the BBC would have clearly included that fact at some point in their broadcast report. They couldn’t possibly have left viewers believing that an adult human female had committed foul crimes when in fact a biological male had done so.
Yet a few seconds of online searching was sufficient to reveal that is exactly what the BBC had done. And remember, this was not on a fringe offshoot or late-night regional outlet staffed by young novices who might be at heightened vulnerability to falling into the grip of extreme ID politics. This was prime BBC1 lunchtime news staffed by some of the best editors, producers and reporters on the corporation’s books.
For the record, Scarlet Blake was born a male in China
For the record, Scarlet Blake was born a male in China, and went by the name Fangze Wang earlier in life. Perhaps given the depravity of the crimes committed it would have been reasonable to withdraw any presumption of good faith when reporting this person’s pronouns post-conviction and simply use male ones.
In any event, it beggars belief that at no point did either Brown or Kennedy flag up to their viewers the basic biological facts relating to Blake. A woman did this, they told us. But a woman did not murder Jorge Carreno or livestream the dissection of a cat. A biological male in the grip of typically male forms of violent criminal deviancy did all that.
For a broadcaster which seems more and more to be locked into an unwarranted messiah complex these days the lesson should simply be: BBC Verify, go and verify yourselves.
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The Church of England should stop distracting itself with ‘racial justice’
When they've got archbishops who don't believe in God, why should they waste time on that fuddy-duddy "salvation" stuff?
Churches are emptier than ever since Covid. Fewer clergy have more and more parishes to look after; the buildings themselves are falling down, with little money available to repair them. In the face of these existential problems, what high-profile subject was discussed over the weekend by the General Synod of the Church of England? Encouraging more worshippers, perhaps, or possibly improving finances? Not quite. You’ve probably guessed the answer: racial justice.
The Synod ran what can best be described as a consciousness-raising session to cheer on the work of the Archbishops’ racial justice commission. It’s aim, it seems, is to push race towards the top of the ecclesiastical agenda.
St Paul would have had little time for identity politics
After the Archbishop of York started proceedings by describing the promotion of racial justice as ‘how we are the body of Christ’ and demanding a ‘compelling agenda for racial justice and racial change in the Church,’ it was the turn of the Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin. She was uncompromising. On race, she said, being ‘woke’ was not only acceptable but necessary:
‘The racial justice mandate flows not from identity politics, but from our primary identity in Christ. The gospel calls us to prophetically address head-on the evils in our society, indeed in our world, which leave some parts of humanity dehumanised.’
Others spoke in similar vein. Synod members nodded sagely and approved the proceedings. Parishes will now be encouraged to draw up ‘race action plans’.
Neither the vote, nor the speeches that preceded it, have any legal force. Any thinking Anglican, however, has good reason to be depressed about this episode, for both practical and theological reasons. The latest intervention on racial justice isn’t a one-off. The Archbishops’ racial justice commission, set up three years’ ago and headed by ex-Labour minister Lord Boateng, used its latest report in February to call for racial justice to ‘be a regular and compulsory topic in all relevant deliberations and decision making processes on all levels of Church organisation.’
Is this really necessary? After all, distracting from the Church’s primary work of saving souls and ministering to individual spiritual needs is hardly a good way of attracting new worshippers. Nor does this particular focus do much to persuade existing ones not to forsake it, whether in favour of other churches or simple Sunday laziness. When it comes to lectures on political theory or managerialist solutions to problems of inequality, there are plenty of capable organisations already out there. Why the church hierarchy should think that people will sit in chilly pews to hear it done less well by those whose proper business lies elsewhere is a mystery.
The racial justice being promoted in the Synod appears to involve a demand for jobs in the church, whether in parishes or in the organisation’s increasingly top-down management, to reflect the racial make-up of this country. Not only is this idea likely in principle to drive away many of the faithful. It also cuts across the fact that the church is a people (or at least souls’) business. Parish incumbents must be congenial to their congregations, however unenlightened the latter may be in the eyes of church bigwigs; and senior ecclesiastics must be able to attract and inspire the clergy under them. Regarding the appointment of priests and prelates as an exercise in managerialism and the need to correct perceived power imbalances between racial identities may please intellectuals and church administrators: but it is a sure-fire way to remove any lingering affection between the ordinary worshipper and the church they frequent.
There must also be doubt about this as a matter of theology and doctrine. True, deliberately devaluing someone because of their colour or origin is un-Christian: it flatly contradicts the shining Gospel message that Jesus died for all of us, Jews or Gentiles, and that Christ offers grace quite indiscriminately. It also ignores Jesus’ decision to deliberately associate with different people, such as the woman of Samaria described by St John, not to mention assorted publicans and sinners.
But when St Paul wrote to the Galatians that, for him, there was neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, this suggests he would have had little time for identity politics, or for seeing people as anything other than souls to be saved. For that matter, Jesus himself, when asked why he had not addressed head-on the evils in Judaean society (in particular his arrest by the chief priests), had a simple response. ‘My kingdom,’ he said, ‘is not of this world.’
The General Synod, and anyone who wants the Church of England to remain a national institution rather than degenerate into a dwindling sect of activists increasingly irrelevant to anyone other than those administering it, could do worse than ponder these words.
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Australia: Why we need more CEOs to speak up for profits
Coles’ Leah Weckert issued an important reminder to corporate Australia: Profit is not a dirty word.
Weckert’s comments have come right at the tail end of a resilient earnings season, and the newish Coles boss has cut through with a reminder about the purpose of her business: To look after shareholders through delivering the sharpest value to her customers.
Supermarkets and Woolworths boss Brad Banducci in particular, have been in the firing line around profits they make.
The big two retailers have become an easy target for claims around price gouging and anti-competitive behaviour while Australia is in the midst of an inflation bubble.
This has now spiralled into a Greens-led Senate inquiry and a year-long Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Review into the supermarkets. These will be highly distracting for management and, like the previous ACCC review into supermarket pricing a decade ago, will probably amount to little.
Everyone else is jumping on board with the ACTU and Queensland’s Steven Miles demanding their own probe. The claims are easy to make and always missing from the barbs is what should be the right level of profit for a business to make. No one is willing to go there and nor should they.
Still the attack on profit from all sides of the political spectrum is a worrying trend. Businesses exist to make profit and reward shareholders. In doing so they invest money into the economy and create jobs. The trick is in the balancing act to make sure the pursuit of profit is sustainable over the long run and businesses keep one eye on their social licence to operate.
Banducci, who this month announced his retirement, has struggled to cut through with a simple message on this point and his trainwreck interview on ABC TV only fanned the flames.
Banducci is the architect of Woolies much-needed cultural transformation and this month conceded to The Australian he was the first to get upset with himself when he doesn’t represent his company accurately.
In the middle of the anger, Woolworths triggered some big non-cash writedowns of its business, tipping the retailer into a heavy bottom-line loss.
Commonwealth Bank boss Matt Comyn is the only other boss who is prepared to issue a spirited defence of profits. Comyn regularly points out his bottom-line returns go to millions of shareholders as well as generate the crucial capital so funds can be lent back out to grow the economy.
Weckert, promoted to the top job in May last year, delivered her numbers on Tuesday which included a 3.9 per cent dip in December half net profit to $594m. The numbers show Coles is selling more, with revenue up nearly 7 per cent, but costs are crimping profit margins. Where Weckert draws the line is criticism of the windfall dollars.
“Profits are an essential thing for any business,” Weckert says. “They enable us to continue to operate and for us that means we get to employ 120,000 people. We get to support thousands of suppliers. We pay a very large tax bill every year.”
Coles has more than 460,000 shareholders and many of these are retail investors – the so-called mums and dads. There are millions more who benefit indirectly from the dividends through their super funds.
The simple message Weckert will take to next month’s Senate inquiry that begins in Hobart is that Coles generates $2.60 for every $100 spent by customers.
This is “less than 3c on the dollar,” she says, and points to her profit margins now being stable for at least the past five years, including through an inflation spike. Nor is food inflation unique to Australia, she adds, It’s are often driven by a surge in input costs such as fertilisers or wheat. Indeed, many developed economies, particularly the UK and in Europe, have seen food prices rise at a faster pace.
Weckert says Australian supermarkets are facing more intense competition than ever as offshore giants Aldi, Costco and Amazon make big inroads. Wesfarmers’ Bunnings and Priceline, along with Chemist Warehouse, are making inroads into the non-food sector.
Meanwhile, supermarket customers are trading convenience over value and are using local specialists from butchers to bakers.
The numbers show Coles now has the momentum in the sales race against its rival, Woolies. It can be argued Woolies is more distracted than it has been in years with problems from New Zealand, Big W and its looming leadership transition.
Coles’ supermarkets sale jumped 4.9 per cent in the first eight weeks of the calendar year, while Woolworths delivered 1.5 per cent growth over the first seven weeks. This helped back a near 6 per cent jump in Coles’ shares.
Coles says it is getting on top of the jump in theft rates it experienced last year as it invests more in checkout technology.
This could make a big difference to its earnings line in coming halves as it continues to get theft rates down further.
Australia’s housing and building shortage is now becoming a force on the ASX, although it has taken global players to recognise the value.
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28 February, 2024
“White” is a Way of Life
There is a story under the above heading by Sangeeta Kalsi, who is a lady of Indian origins
https://medium.com/fourth-wave/white-is-not-a-color-3a639be326e7
The article is too long-winded for me to reporoduce but her claim is in essence simple. She claims that brown perople like her are treated suspicously and as inferior by whites in the Western world. They are discriminated against because of their skin color and other differences.
She also says, however, that they can come to be treated as whites with a suntan if they behave similarly to whites.
From my observations, that is true. So skin color is not the key factor in how they are treated. It is how they behave. And that is her basic point. She gives Nikki Haley as a brown person who came to be treated as white by behaving as one. Haley was a governor of South Carolina as well as making a strong bid for the GOP presidential nomination -- so that is a good example
What Ms Kalsi seems unaware of is that she has described a basic human process that affects us all, not only Indians. We all judge others by how they behave towards us and we all get on best with people who are similar to us. It is often noted in assortatative mating, where men and women who form relationships with one-another tend to have a lot of background factors in common.
There is actually a large literature in psychology on impression formation and stereotyping and its universal conclusion is that our judgment of others changes as we get to know them. When we first get to see a person we judge him/her according to the physical characteristics that we see. And the initial reaction will be a standoffish one but that can rapidly modify as we get to know more about the person. If a person speaks in our accent and uses our slang, an easy and accepting relationship will normally result. Such a person will seem "like us" and the barriers between us will just be normal interpersonal ones.
I have summarized some of the findings of the academic psychology literature below:
http://jonjayray.com/scots.html
http://jonjayray.com/stereo.html
So Ms Kalsi would be wise to stop "kicking against the pricks, as St Paul advises us, and accept that what she is seeing is just basic humanity
JR
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‘Christian Nationalism’: Scaremongering Left’s Newest Red Herring
Hollywood director Rob Reiner’s new documentary “God & Country,” released in theaters last weekend, warns Americans of an impending “Christian nationalist” takeover of the country.
The Associated Press declared Saturday, “Many believe the Founders wanted a Christian America. Some want the government to declare one now.” On Tuesday, Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla warned in Politico, “Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration.”
Such manufactures represent “a coordinated effort” to stoke fear before the 2024 elections, declared Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice, guest host of “Washington Watch” on Wednesday. Their purpose is not just “to rally the Left but, probably even more so … to intimidate and silence Christians who embrace a biblical worldview,” he said.
The purpose of Reiner’s yellow journalism is more concerning than its aim. The Left’s “definition of Christian nationalism … tends to be a coat that is cut to fit whatever it needs to fit at any given time,” Regent University professor A.J. Nolte said on “Washington Watch.” As with donkeys and tails, it gets harder to pin the scare on the elephant after you’ve been blindfolded and spun in circles.
Some leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” have little in common with Christianity. Take Reiner’s perspective, “The idea is that America was a born as a white Christian nation, and these people are virulent about returning to that, and they’ll do it at any means necessary, including … violence. And we saw this happen on January 6th.”
Most Christians would have difficulty recognizing themselves in this description. For starters, Christianity knows no ethnic barriers (Revelation 7:9); Christians are commanded to submit to the government (Romans 13:1); and violence disqualifies a man from Christian leadership (1 Timothy 3:3).
Reiner’s definition wasn’t particularly concerned with scriptural accuracy, as the entire documentary really served as a “Trojan horse for progressive ideology,” wrote Southern Seminary professor Andrew Walker. His documentary painted institutions as disparate as The Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, and Hillsdale College with the same broad brush, even though the first two aren’t sectarian, and the third isn’t political.
Reiner “gives the game away when he talks about ‘white’ Christian nationalism,” Nolte noted, a mistaken “conflation of white ethnic nationalism with Christian nationalism.”
Some leftist definitions simply equate “Christian nationalism” with social conservatism. Nolte described a book titled “‘Taking America Back for God,’ by two scholars named Perry and Whitehead.” In the book, “They took six questions, which are generally good questions if you’re trying to measure social conservatism” and used them as “measures for Christian nationalism.” These measures included support for prayer in schools, opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, and an acknowledgment of Christian principles in America’s founding.
“So, what you often find is that Christian nationalism is basically just … social conservatism, sort of relabeled,” Nolte concluded.
This definition becomes increasingly unrealistic as left-wing extremism puts more and more Americans on the “Right” side of social and cultural policy disputes, particularly where transgender ideology is at play. The coalition opposed to pornographic books in school libraries, for instance, includes not just Christians, but also Jews such as Ben Shapiro, Muslims like the parents in Dearborn, Michigan, or Montgomery County, Maryland, and agnostics like Jordan Peterson.
The term “Christian nationalism” approaches meaninglessness when used to describe people who are not Christians and might not even be nationalists.
Some leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” combine biblical positions with non-biblical ones. Thus, Przybyla (co-author of the Politico piece mentioned above) stated Tuesday, “We’re talking about here not just isolationism, immigration. We’re talking about ending same-sex marriage, abortion, reducing access to contraceptives, but also surrogacy, no-fault divorce, sex education in public schools.”
But not so fast! Those are “two separate issue sets,” Nolte pointed out. Opposition to immigration and an isolationist foreign policy are the preferred policies of a populist segment of the contemporary American Right, but they shouldn’t be lumped together with what Nolte called “family-oriented, social conservative policies.”
Even if both sets of positions are found on the political Right, they are espoused by “two separate groups of social conservatives,” Nolte explained. Again quoting Perry and Whitehead, Nolte said, “Among regular church attenders, they actually found less hostility toward those of different racial groups, toward immigrants … but there was more opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion,” while “among those who were socially conservative, but did not attend church, what they found was the exact opposite.”
At the risk of committing an overgeneralization, one might say there was an inverse relationship between the depth of a person’s Christian walk and their espousal of “nationalist policies.” Does that sound like “Christian nationalism”?
Some leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” simply mean that it’s bad for Christians to be involved in politics. For instance, “They’re all after Speaker Mike Johnson for his Christian faith,” said Hice. “He’s a Christian statesman who is certainly influenced and guided by his faith,” but “that’s no different from the liberal Left being guided by their secular, or whatever, worldview that they embrace.”
“This really galls the Left, [that] Mike Johnson has the unmitigated temerity to be a fairly conventional Southern Baptist,” Nolte agreed, with a touch of sarcasm. “Yes, he’s quite conservative on family issues. … But, as a conventional Baptist, he also stands [with] an over 200-year tradition of Baptists supporting religious liberty.” (Make that nearly 400 years in America since Baptist minister Roger Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island as a haven for freedom of conscience.)
The point is, “If somebody is truly committed to religious liberty, you never have to worry about them imposing Christianity,” Nolte argued. “They want to protect your freedom to believe or not believe as you choose.”
Yet no leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” acknowledge its presence on the political Left. Follow along, if you will, with this thought experiment Nolte set forth:
Imagine a situation in which a Republican president goes to a church—a church that has been prominently associated with Republican politics in the past—on a federal holiday, and gives a speech where he talks about how New Testament principles ought to be the basis of our politics here in America. Would the media label that as Christian nationalism, do you think?
Over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend in 2023, President Joe Biden spoke from that man’s onetime pulpit in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, declaring that certain passages of the New Testament described “the essence of the American promise” and inspired his vision to “redeem the soul of America.” Yet, according to the propagandists now loudly decrying Christian nationalism, “that, somehow, was not considered Christian nationalism,” Nolte observed.
So, when defining the term, “it kind of depends on who is using the New Testament and whether the media outlets in question like the use to which the New Testament is being put,” he said.
Nolte suggested the entire project was political. His dissertation had examined how secularists in Turkey, France, and other countries have used “extreme fear language” about “religious reactionaries” to “mobilize constituencies that supported … secularism.” He warned that this strategy backfired in Turkey, where it “generally pushed most of the Islamic believers in Turkey more toward radicalism.”
Nolte argued leftists in America have made a “deliberate attempt” to craft a similar narrative. In particular, he pointed to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a tailor-made scarytale “that’s going to appeal particularly to secular educated women who do not attend church and are not familiar with Christian belief.” Nolte criticized the way it twisted Scripture to depict a “misogynistic, theocratic society” that has nothing in common with the policy goals of socially conservative Christians in America.
Ultimately, fearmongering about the slur “Christian nationalism” says far more about those who wield it than those they aim to describe. In the “Red Scares” of the 1920s to 1950s, allegations that there was a communist under every rock, tree, bush, government desk, and movie script did little to inform the American public about which people really were communists. But they did inform Americans that the accusers were anti-communists. Similarly, accusations of “Christian nationalism” don’t inform Americans about which politicians, if any, wish to establish a theocracy; but they do help Americans understand that the people making the accusations are anti-Christian and anti-nationalist.
One final accusation lobbed against Christianity came from University of California at Riverside professor Reza Aslan, a Christian apostate. “The biggest sin, if you will, of Christian nationalism, is that it sees pluralism as a weakness, and not what it is: the foundation of what it means to be American,” Aslan insisted.
The irony in this inverted statement is so thick you could ice it and slice it. Not only did Aslan overlook the Christian origins of American pluralism, but he also missed the fact that American Christians are still pleading for a pluralistic society, “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 2:2).
It is totalitarian leftists who seek to de-pluralize American public life by banishing Christians from the public square—and scaremongering about “Christian nationalism” is simply their latest attempt to do so.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/23/leftists-propagandize-christian-nationalist-scare/
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What Is DACODAI?
The Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion (DACODAI) was formed in 2022. The committee’s website says it is to “examine and provide recommendations to improve racial/ethnic diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity within the DoD [Department of Defense], with a primary focus on military personnel.”
Sounds innocuous. However, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology promotes a radical, un-American belief system. DEI promotes extreme ideas like America is a racist nation, that racism and white supremacy are widespread today, and that whites are oppressors and minorities are oppressed. The committee itself is not diverse. However, the need for DACODAI is questionable, as the DOD’s 2022 demographics report shows the military is extremely diverse, at or above national demographics for race and ethnicity. DACODAI’s own data publicized in December 2023 shows rates on all types of discrimination complaints are tiny fractions of a percent. Examples of military adoption of DEI:
$114.7M in FY2024 for military DEI, a substantial increase from 2023.
In ongoing litigations against USMA and USNA, both admitted to using admissions practices that consider race and ethnicity. Specific practices of one or both include (1) reserving vacancies for racial “diversity” applicants, (2) using candidate composite score (only a small fraction of which is standardized test score) thresholds that differ by race when making admission decisions, and (3) using out of order of merit selection to achieve racial diversity. Better-qualified white and Asian applicants, some having much higher candidate composite scores, are not selected to make room for lower-scoring “diversity” applicants. These practices unarguably violate constitutional equal protection of the law, deny equal opportunity to hundreds of higher-scoring but non-selected applicants, demean minorities who gain admission based on merit, and, combined with other poor policy choices, lower standards for about 10%-20% of the entering class. These practices have been concealed from Congress and the American people for decades. The result: Warfighters are not always getting the best-qualified leaders.
DOD websites and recruiting emphasize DEI. DEI training is continuous and ubiquitous.
In 2022, the chief of staff of the Air Force set a goal of no more than 67.5% white pilots. Currently, 90%+ of AF pilots are white.
2023 Navy selection board guidance overtly allows the use of race in selections.
Based on their personal experience or those of their children, thousands of current and former military members objected to DEI’s dilution of merit. These voices represent thousands of years of service. They are the voices of experience, and they warn that the path we are on now leads to disunity, division, lower morale, recruiting and retention problems, and, eventually, failure. These testimonies are at STARRS. Meanwhile, zero data shows diversity improves performance, lethality, or readiness.
Col (Ret.) Bill Prince, U.S. Army Special Forces with 11 combat deployments, quotes the USMA’s Chief Data Officer, Col. Paul F. Evangelista ‘96, in commenting on attempts to measure the effectiveness of DEI, “We don’t have the data.”
BG (Ret.) Ernie Audino, U.S. Army, nails the issue precisely, saying: “If generals are right, i.e. that racial diversity in our officer corps is a 'national security imperative,’ then the services would at least track racial percentages in their mandatory assessments of unit combat readiness, but they don’t. Racial diversity is not included and never has been.”
CDR (Ret.) Phil Keuhlen, USN, is a former commanding officer of a nuclear-powered attack submarine. His analysis of Task Force 1 Navy’s claimed diversity benefits shows the Navy misrepresented source applicability, extended conclusions beyond the data, and ignored source conclusions that gains were due to factors that degrade military effectiveness. His detailed analysis is at RealClearDefense.
Col (Ret.) Bing West, USMC, is one of the most decorated combat veterans in our nation’s history. His article, “The Military’s Perilous Experiment,” ought to give our military leaders pause in their headlong pursuit of diversity. He writes: “Inside the military, however, another criterion has taken central booking: diversity. The focus has shifted toward emphasizing gender and racial equality, particularly in leadership positions. Diversity has replaced lethality as the lodestone for the military. … As a Marine veteran, I find this disconcerting. From boot training on, Marines are taught to put aside diversity, not to emphasize it.” The article can be found at the Hoover Institution.
DACODAI met in DC on December 14-15, 2023, and invited public comment. The input submitted by multiple public interest organizations was ignored. This behavior by DACODAI is most disconcerting. To ensure DACODAI will have various ideas, STARRS collaborated with leaders of Calvert Group, Veterans for Fairness and Merit, Flag Officers 4 America, the MacArthur Society, and Take Charge Minnesota in producing recorded, public testimony about DEI’s adverse impacts on the military. This powerful public testimony is available at the STARRS website. It deserves DACODAI’s attention and substantive response. Warfighters know it needs both.
DACODAI will meet again in early May. Americans interested in preserving our military’s unity, cohesion, and readiness to defend us against our enemies are urged to tell them what they think about DEI in our military.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104506
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Kudos To Mr. Nuzzo for Taking on the Feminist Status Quo
It is refreshing to find Mr. Nuzzo, a lone warrior willing to call out the feminist claptrap throughout the academic world.
There’s a four-year gap in life expectancy in Australia between men and women. So how come our peak science funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), in 2022 allocated over six times more funding to research on women’s health compared to men’s?
This glaring bias in research funding attracted the critical gaze of a Perth-based academic with a keen interest in men’s health.
James Nuzzo is an exercise scientist, currently affiliated with Edith Cowan University, who has been busily churning out academic articles on topics like exercise neurophysiology and physical fitness testing.
But he’s become increasingly concerned to see his discipline infiltrated by gender ideologues whining about women missing out while totally ignoring the health outcomes of boys and men.
He’s calling out their bias and poor scholarship in a hard-hitting series of blogs on Substack (The Nuzzo Files) and podcasts.
For instance, Mr. Nuzzo points out that we hear constant allegations about the widespread exclusion of women in clinical trials.
In America, complaints about the neglect of women in health research led, in 1990, to the Office for Research on Women’s Health being established within the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Since then, annual reports from the Office reveal that women constitute 55-60 percent of all participants in NIH-funded clinical trials each year. Thirty years later, the Office is flourishing, pouring out funding for women-only projects.
Similarly, Australian governments are falling over each other to prove their commitment to improving health outcomes for women and girls—and the NHMRC funding simply reflects that consistent anti-male bias.
This is simply one more example of the feminist claptrap now seeping throughout our academic world.
I hear regularly from principled researchers grinding their teeth at this blatant ideology and poor scholarship. Most don’t dare put their head above the parapet.
It is refreshing to find Mr. Nuzzo, a lone warrior willing to call it out, despite being well aware he is likely to implode his academic career in the process.
Another Small Victory In the Bag
Mr. Nuzzo’s most recent public skirmish in this territory involved an article in Sports Medicine written by mainly female exercise physiology students from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) claiming that “gender-based violence is a blind spot for sports and exercise medical professionals.”
The UNSW scholars devoted their entire article presenting women as the only victims of interpersonal violence (IPV)—the single mention of men referred to their “socially determined privilege,” an alleged cause of violence against women.
No mention of young male victims of abuse by coaches or fellow athletes, of which there have been plenty, nor of lesbian perpetrators of abuse (lesbians top the chart of rates of IPV). And not one word about the decades of research showing men and women are victims of IPV at roughly equal rates.
Mr. Nuzzo set out to put them straight, seeking to get the true facts published in a response letter in Sports Medicine. And he succeeded, but only after nearly a year of back and forth with the journal. It helped that he combined forces with Deborah Powney, the University of Central Lancashire psychologist doing work on male victims of coercive control, and John Barry, from the Centre for Male Psychology in London.
Sports Medicine took the unusual step of submitting the letter to peer review, but the three reviewers all concurred with the critique by Nuzzo and his co-authors. Ultimately the letter was published—one small victory for proper scientific inquiry.
Their published comment proved it was the UNSW academics who had the blind spot, by providing a summary of some of the best research showing equal gender rates of IPV victimization, which also applied in sports environments.
Storm in a teacup, you might conclude. Perhaps. But it is a telling example of how the feminist take-over of our universities is playing out.
The Next Generation
We now have increasing numbers of radical young female academics and students, probably indoctrinated back in their school days, all keen on displaying their feminist credentials in their so-called scholarship.
Increasingly, they are forcing this sludge into diverse disciplines, right across all academia.
Worryingly, these are the teachers of the next generation, intent on convincing young women they are set for a life of persecution, abuse and discrimination.
They are teaching our future bureaucrats who’ll be setting key policies, the future lawyers, judges, social workers, and the politicians who will be deciding where the dollars are spent.
Their goals are transparent and the process is unfolding before our very eyes.
Kudos for James Nuzzo for having the courage to take them on, in published articles, blogs and podcasts. It’s infuriating to read his research and discover how much we’ve been hoodwinked.
The Big Two Globalist Agencies
Another of Mr. Nuzzo’s published articles concerned bias against men’s issues in the U.N. and WHO. He conducted a content analysis showing consistent promotion of women’s issues whilst men are ignored. The U.N.’s sustainable development goal on “gender equality” is exclusive to females.
The organisation observes nine International Days for women’s issues/achievements and one day for men. They operate 69 Twitter accounts dedicated to women’s issues and none for men. And so it goes on.
DAVIA (the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance) has launched a petition that calls on groups to “suspend their funding of the United Nations until all U.N. agencies fulfill their pledge to respect the ‘dignity and worth’ of all persons and assure the ‘equal rights of men and women.’” That’s a worthy goal.
It’s also a pleasant change to find someone looking for the good in men.
Mr. Nuzzo recently wrote a blog on Men: The Martyrs of Medicine. He’d unearthed a 1929 medical journal article listing the names of male doctors and researchers who died as a result of acquiring the disease they were studying or medical technology they were developing.
Brave men who gave their lives trying to save others from yellow fever, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases.
It was quite a story and a welcome change to see the risk-taking, now so often labelled as ’toxic,' being promoted as valuable, even inspiring.
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27 February, 2024
Are Leftists narcissists?
The Mayo definition:
"Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them. People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence, they are not sure of their self-worth and are easily upset by the slightest criticism"
The Mayo clinic is America's leading hospital
Narcissism seems to be getting a lot of press these days. In particular, women are often being advised to be wary of relationships with narcissist men. I think there is no doubt that the term is over-used. Normal selfishness should not be confused with mental illness, where a mental illness is a loss of reality contact
Nonetheless something like narcissism can be observed in some people who have a reasonably good grasp of what the world around them is like. They are selfish and have a high opinion of themselves but not to a disabling degree. They are not blind to where they stand with other people. They are within the psychological normal range.
A related concept is need for approval. The academic psychology literature on that is large and goes back a long way. In that literature it is generally seen it as weak and something to be overcome.
I see something like narcissism and need for approval in Leftists. But to avoid implications of mental illness I have mostly avoided those terms and instead made use of the Greco/Latin term "ego" ("???"), which simply means "I" in both languages. Freud popularized the word to refer to the conscious self and it has now passed into common use in roughly that meaning. I say that Leftists have "excess ego" or "weak ego", implying that they are people who have a high opinion of themselves but that opinion is weakly held and needs a lot of propping up, similar to what we see in true narcissists
It is excess ego that they badly want to be seen as kind and wise and noble. So it is akin to narcissism but is not as unrealistic. The stances they adopt generally WILL gain them approval.
A classic example that is rather politically hot at the moment is rent control. People advocating it present themselves as "caring" about poor tenants and the policy does at first glance seem beneficial to tenants.
I am not going to give a lesson in economics here but suffice it to say that the policy in fact works out very badly for tenants before long. It reduces the number of places being offered to tenants and makes then pay HIGHER rents for what they get
But the Leftist gets immediate credit for "caring" and that is what they want. The conservative who points out the adverse long-term consequences tends by contrast to be seen as uncaring
I give many more case studies of Leftism in action here:
http://jonjayray.com/leftex.html
So ego need is certainly pernicious. It causes Leftists to advocate policies that sound good even when they are not. An exceptionally moronic example of that in some American cities in recent years has been the cry "defund the police". Most defunders by now have become refunders but the damage done in the meanwhile has been considerable
So, Yes. Leftist ego need is a low grade form of narcissism. It is not a clinical condition but it still does a lot of harm
It should be noted that some care is needed in talking about narcissism among non-clinical populations. Freud's seminal article on narcisissm claimed that traits of grandiosity and vulnerability covaried and that is obviously confirmed in the definition drawn from clinical experience by the Mayo clinic.
But it should not be assumed that the same is true in the population at large. The findings of Paul Wink in particular show that in the general population, not all vulnerable peope have feelings of grandiosity and not all people with grandiose views of themselves also have feelings of vulnerability. Wink found that the two traits formed independent Varimax factors.
http://academics.wellesley.edu/Psychology/Wink/Two%20faces%20of%20Narcissism.pdf
But within Wink's sample, there was a subset of respondents in which the two factors DID go together and it is such people whom we can reasonably describe as sub-clinical narcissists. Such people will be at least strongly inclined towards Leftism. Whether people who are simply vulnerable or simply grandiose are drawn to Leftism is at this stage unknown
My claim that Leftists are people with large but weak egos in an inference extracted from what Leftists do. It explains what they do. But there is also some general population survey research showing that strongly Leftist views are associated with narcissism. See the two U.S. studies by Krispenz & Bertrams below
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-023-04463-x
I make no claim that ego need is the whole of Leftist motivations. As I have discussed elsewhere, there are many influences which may lead to Leftism. See
http://jonjayray.com/leftism3.html
Chief among them would appear to be a tendency to anger. The great outpouring of rage and hate that greeted the election of Donald Trump leaves no doubt about that. Never before has hatred been so openly expressed by so many people. Krispenz & Bertrams also found an association between Leftism and antagonistic attitudes. They conclude that Leftist activists "use political activism to endorse or exercise violence against others to satisfy their own ego-focused needs".
JR
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NZ Realtor Faces 5 Year Ban for Rejecting ‘Woke’ Training
A real estate agent in New Zealand is at risk of having her 30-year career cut short after rejecting a compulsory course on Maori culture and customary behaviours.
Janet Dickson is seeking to challenge the New Zealand’s Real Estate Authority (REA) in court after the regulatory body allegedly threatened to cancel her licence for five years for refusing to take the course, according to the advocacy group Hobson’s Pledge.
Under current regulations, real estate agents need to complete 20 hours of continuing professional development each year to maintain their licence, including two hours of mandatory topics and eight hours of elective topics.
Ms. Dickson was concerned that the REA overstepped its power by forcing real estate agents to complete courses that had little to do with their jobs, especially on contentious topics.
In a Facebook post, Ms. Dickson called REA’s alleged practice of imposing compulsory courses as “woke madness” and vowed to fight to ensure that other people would not be subject to the same fate.
Ms. Dickson is seeking a judicial review in New Zealand’s High Court to challenge the REA’s power to impose compulsory courses, believing that it is essential in addressing the alleged overreach, and could set a precedent for other professional organisations.
“The ramifications of this case extend well beyond the realm of real estate. Similar mandates have detrimentally affected a wide array of professions, including doctors, teachers, and lawyers,” the webpage of her campaign read.
“The imposition of these mandates, infringing upon the fundamental freedom of conscience, requires immediate action.
“This (the judicial review) is essential not only to rectify the excessive use of authority in the present case but also to establish a precedent that will guide and inform the conduct of other professional regulatory bodies.”
Ms. Dickson’s campaign seeks donations of up to NZ$50,000 (US$31,000) from the public to cover part of her NZ$150,000 legal fee.
Response from Other Parties
Don Brash, the former Reserve Bank of New Zealand governor and Hobson’s Pledge’s founder, criticised REA’s “draconian” rules, saying it was an attempt to impose a particular worldview that was not in line with the majority of New Zealanders. “It’s inappropriate for the REA to force people to do a course that’s not relevant to their work,” he said, as reported by the New Zealand Herald newspaper. “We don’t want a particular view of the world forced on anybody.”
Meanwhile, Bernie O’Donnell, a Poutaki M?tauranga Maori adviser at the University of Auckland, said it was necessary for real estate agents to understand Maori due to the nature of their business.
“You can’t go into that profession blindly in Aotearoa ... it’s important they understand the history of their country,” he said, noting that it was a shame that some people didn’t want to go through that step.
“Maori are the indigenous people of this land, and in this new world, we have to start making an effort to understand their worldview.
“And even though there’s a huge history to this land, people just want to get down to business.”
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Indigenous people sue over alleged Canadian secret medical experiment
An MRI is just a scan. It doesn't do anything to you
Members of a First Nation in Canada have launched a lawsuit alleging they were subjected to a secret medical experiment without their consent that left them feeling “violated and humiliated”.
The class-action lawsuit, which was certified by the Nova Scotia supreme court in early February, revives the painful history of Canada conducting medical experiments on Indigenous peoples and the persistent discrimination they continue to face within the country’s healthcare system.
In a statement of claim, Chief Andrea Paul, the lead plaintiff, says she and 60 other members of the Pictou Landing First Nation participated in an MRI in 2017 for a medical research project administered by the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds.
But after the test finished, staff at the hospital in Halifax kept her for a second test.
“As she lay inside the claustrophobic MRI chamber, holding her breath, and cringing from the loud banging sounds around her, the MRI scans generated data that revealed intimate medical information about her body without her knowledge or consent,” reads the statement of claim. “She had been singled out for the one reason – she was Mi’kmaq.”
A year later, Paul, who also serves as regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations in Nova Scotia, learned that two radiologists had allegedly used the second procedure to conduct MRI elastography to study the livers of Indigenous subjects, without their knowledge or consent.
The class-action lawsuit has named the radiologists Robert Miller and Sharon Clarke as defendants. According to the claim, Miller met with Paul in 2018 and told her the MRI had been used for a broader research project titled “MRI Findings of Liver Disease in an Atlantic Canada First Nations Population”. Miller, an associate professor at Dalhousie University’s faculty of medicine who previously served as president of the Canadian Association of Radiology, allegedly told her the findings had been shared with a radiology conference after initially denying disclosing the test results.
Neither researchers with the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds nor the plaintiffs were given the results of the test.
Canada has a dark history for its treatment of Indigenous peoples under the guise of healthcare, with the deadly effects of systemic racism persisting into the present day.
In the 1940s, nearly 1,300 Indigenous children across Canada were starved for studies about the effects of malnutrition as part of a government-run study. Indigenous women have also been sterilized against their will, leading human rights groups to call for an end to the practice.
“Knowing the long history of subjecting Indigenous people in Canada to cruel medical experiments … and to confirm the Indigenous right to own and control research data of Indigenous people, Chief Andrea felt powerless, vulnerable, and discriminated against because she was Mi’kmaq.”
The claim also asserts that Indigenous people “have been reluctant to participate in health research and receive treatment from non-Indigenous doctors, health centers, and hospitals” because of a legacy of mistreatment and abuse.
“There is an historically and evidentiary based mistrust at the healthcare system,” the claim reads. Paul says in the claim she had worked to persuade community members to participate in the initial MRI test and the actions of the two radiologists is emblematic of the mistrust held by Indigenous communities.
Paul and 60 members of Pictou Landing are seeking a declaration from the defendants for invasion of privacy, unlawful imprisonment, negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, breach of contract, charter breaches and damages. They also argue the tests amount to assault and battery because the MRI scan procedures “amount to a medical procedure that was performed on [the plaintiffs] without their knowledge or informed consent”.
A lawyer for the two radiologists has said neither will provide comment. None of the allegations have been tested in court and no hearing dates have been set.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/26/medical-experiment-indigenous-canadians-lawsuit
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Australia: Fact checkers fall out
The ABC has ended its partnership with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) FactLab, with which it has operated the ABC RMIT Fact Check project for the past seven years.
On Tuesday afternoon ABC news director Justin Stevens notified staff via email that the national broadcaster would replace the partnership with an internal fact-checking team, known as “ABC News Verify”.
Stevens said Verify would be a “team of specialists with the ability to scale up to support our special coverage in times of crisis. It will be part of the Investigative Journalism and Current Affairs team led by Jo Puccini.”
“In parallel with our decision to establish our own specialist verification team we have also taken the decision to not extend our current participation in ABC RMIT Fact Check when our current agreement expires in the middle of the year,” he wrote.
Crikey understands RMIT management felt blindsided by the decision from the ABC, with sources saying it appeared that the ABC had concerns over pressure from fact-checking politicians.
One source told Crikey that the relationship between RMIT and the ABC had become one-sided in recent years, with the university taking a lot of criticism from conservative media over the Fact Check project.
It comes as the partnership and the ABC have come under significant pressure in recent months over accusations of bias following the Voice to Parliament referendum. In May, RMIT FactLab published a fact check of itself, refuting claims that the organisation was being “used” by proponents of the Yes campaign to “rig the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum”.
The organisation’s participation in Meta’s fact-checking program was briefly suspended last year after its accreditation with the International Fact-Checking Network lapsed.
The Australian reported last year that the ABC had spent $165,000 a year on the RMIT partnership since 2020, according to figures released in Senate estimates.
In budget estimates this year, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts asked ABC managing director David Anderson about the make-up of ABC RMIT Fact Check in relation to the Voice referendum.
Anderson responded on notice that of the 17 articles published between June 1 and September 29, RMIT ABC Fact Check published two articles focusing on claims made by the Yes campaign or proponents, 10 on the No campaign or proponents, and five on claims made by proponents of both sides.
Anderson said “checkable claims more frequently surfaced from proponents of No arguments than from proponents of Yes arguments” in the ABC’s media monitoring process.
“When a Yes claim surfaced which was checkable and important to the national debate, Fact Check made sure it was covered in a timely manner.”
A spokesperson for RMIT said in a statement that the university was “proud of the long-standing partnership” with the ABC.
“The partnership between RMIT and ABC will conclude at the end of the current agreement [on June 30, 2024]. RMIT is committed to upholding the integrity of public information and will continue to do this through a range of activities,” the spokesperson told Crikey.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/21/abc-rmit-fact-check-partnership-abc-news-verify/
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26 February, 2024
The biggest enemy of Gazans is HAMAS
Hamas launched a big terrorist strike into Israel in the full knowledge that Israel always hits back proportionally at attacks on it. It was a deliberate provocation motivated by their undoubted hatred of Israel.
Most Muslims are antisemitic. Their prophet tells them to be. But HAMAS are Islamic extremists. So they start out with religious hatred and add to it envy over Israel's notable success in most ways. Its success is an offence against the lowly place of Jews according to Muslim teachings
Helmut Schoeck has written eloquently about how dire in general it is to be envied and there is no doubt that Israel suffers in just the way that he predicts
https://www.amazon.com/ENVY-Theory-Behaviour-Helmut-Schoeck/dp/0865970645
And the Leftist "protesters" who claim to be speaking for Palestinians ignore the fact that Gazans are a small minority of Palestinians. Large numbers of Palestinians live in Jordan, the West Bank and Israel itslf. And they live peacefully with Israel.
It is HAMAS that the Left would be demonstrating against if they has any real concern for the people of Gaza. Without HAMAS, peace already reigns between Israel and Palestinians.
It should be noted that there is no clear agreement about who is a Palestinian. The name Palestine as a geographical term goes back to Herodotus but has never denoted a place with any clear boundaries. In ancient times generally, however, terms similar to it do seem to have mostly denoted the central or Southern part of the Levantine coast. So the term Palestine would seem to refer pretty well to what we now know as Eretz Israel. In that case some Jewish Israelis are Palestinians.
By courtesy, however, the term is usually reserved for Arabs with some ancestral attachment to the area. The vagueness of the term does however make it difficult to say precisely how many Palestinians there are in any particular place. If we include members of the Palestinian diaspora, Gazans are a really tiny fraction of the total Palestinian population
JR
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‘Good’ girls, ‘bad’ boys? That’s no way to make progress
Nikki Gemmell says boys in the West are angry. They want power and control, she says, pointing to a Gallup poll that apparently shows young men “flinching into conservatism” while young women are embracing and facilitating social reform.
The impetus for girls is fairness and equality, she says, a natural step for the educated. It’s why “the Taliban wants to stop females from being educated”, she wrote on the weekend.
The impetus for boys, says Gemmell, is to preserve what they had. She claims they are hurting, raging and lost.
Let’s put the Taliban to one side, given that in Australia girls are educated, they work, dress as they wish, vote, run companies, and become prime minister.
Lumping girls in the good column and boys in a bad one is not helpful. The world can’t be summed up so simply. Let’s dissect two claims – one about politics, the other about gender, at the centre of Gemmell’s thesis.
Having followed politics for a long time, I can safely say the world is more complicated than saying that conservative equals bad and progressive equals good.
If “progressive” meant only good things, we would do away with elections right now, and make Adam Bandt leader for life. In fact, the Greens are not genuinely progressive. For starters, they harbour anti-Semites.
This word, “progressive”, is often a crock. The progressive Greens are economic dunces; they’d wreck the economy overnight with their taxation and spending policies. We know from experience that being progressive on immigration – in other words, handing over control of our borders to people-smugglers – led to thousands of deaths at sea for desperate people.
So-called progressive policies can be wickedly regressive. When a bunch of elites thought that granting special rights to one group of Australians was such a good idea it should be enshrined in the Constitution, the response from Australians was an overwhelming “no”.
That No vote was the height of social and political equality: it was progressive and liberal.
When I hear claims that “progressive” is all sweetness and light, and comes in the shade of teal, it pains me to point out that most of the teals are frauds.
For all their kvetching about the need for more integrity in politics, and attacking low-hanging fruit such as pork-barrelling, they haven’t shown any interest, on behalf of taxpayers, in getting to the bottom of why the federal government handed over $2.4m to Brittany Higgins. Not a single injured veteran is able to secure that amount of money, no questions asked. How’s that for political integrity.
Nice-sounding words can’t hide poor outcomes. When diversity translates into discriminating against men, the result is neither fair nor equal.
Earlier this year, Caroline Overington reported on a bookshop owner in Melbourne who was concerned that while she had shelves of great women’s fiction writing, “positive stories with men and boys are almost missing from the mix”. We reported that women filled seven of the top 10 places in fiction writing last year. It was the same internationally.
Women coming out on top is great news, so long as it’s not manufactured by booting men out of the mix. Sadly, it’s seen as “progressive” to do precisely that.
Gender quotas are routinely used to fill board seats, sidelining merit. It’s easy to predict what flows: boards end up reflecting a political monoculture comprising people who think quotas make sense. That’s not genuine diversity.
When I wrote extensively many years ago about the importance of phonics when teaching young kids to read, I discovered phonics was described by its opponents as a conservative plot to entrench the political status quo. What on Earth? We’re talking about giving the kids the building blocks to read, a necessary step so they can learn, expand their horizons, think for themselves.
Back then, progressives believed kids learned to read by osmosis, by being exposed to words, and most schools bought their magic pudding. The steady stream of poor literacy results for Australian students reveals how regressive that progressive project has been for kids. Talk about being mugged by reality.
According to a piece in The Financial Times about the Gallop survey, the #MeToo movement is the trigger for women moving to the progressive side of politics. Gemmell repeated the claim. So, let’s look a little closer at this recent progressive movement.
The #MeToo movement has helped women feel empowered to report sexual assault and call out bad behaviour that falls short of assault. But not everything about #MeToo is positive. For example, the oft-repeated mantra that we must “believe all women” can only serve to undermine the presumption of innocence. That’s a dangerous path for a society committed to fairness, let alone fair trials.
There are other, less serious, but equally boneheaded responses to the #MeToo movement. One of Sydney’s most prestigious boys schools told boys in an assembly not to use the word “moist” because it offends girls. That school and others are going co-ed because apparently boys will become civilised human beings by sharing a classroom with girls.
The boys I know aren’t angry about sharing power, let alone classrooms. They’re not hurting, or raging, or lost, as Gemmell suggests. They weren’t born to be at the top of the tree. Nor are they hankering for cosy arrangements to continue. If I had to guess, what annoys both boys and girls – along with some of their parents – are evidence-free anti-male messages that go unchallenged.
Sky News contributor Daisy Cousens says the MeToo movement’s celebrity activists do not actually care about…
Young men and women in Gen Z are entering a world where labels and slogans are routinely used to dumb down society. Just as people are complex, so too are political philosophies.
For those interested in learning about conservatism as a political philosophy, there are plenty of books I could suggest. But let’s cut to the chase: being conservative means looking at what people did before us, holding on to what works and, yes, changing what doesn’t work.
Conservatism is rooted in lived experience, to coin a phrase from the progressive zeitgeist, not crossing your fingers, closing your eyes and saying a little prayer that good intentions will translate into good outcomes.
Now to another point about boys and girls. Gemmell claims Gen Z is “split” and living in “two separate worlds”. I looked at the Gallop results. In the US, Gallop’s news website says “a widening of the ideological gaps between men and women over time has been due to women becoming more liberal at a faster rate than men, rather than women and men moving in different ideological directions”. So, let’s take a breather.
I must live in a different part of Australia to my colleague. Having young men and women waft through our homes for many years, I can vouch for relationships forged above politics and social movements.
These young men and women befriend, work with, partner and marry people who have different views. The reason is simple: in most workplaces, pubs and homes, politics need not be a morality contest; ergo progressive doesn’t mean good, and conservative doesn’t mean bad. Or vice versa.
Perpetuating a myth that girls are progressive social reformers, while boys hanker for the good old days when men ruled the world, will only help to make the world more, not less, polarised.
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A complete Leftist nutcase
The co-founder of a Black Lives Matter chapter has slammed Taylor Swift fans as 'racists' and referred to Kansas City's Super Bowl victory as a 'right-wing, white-supremacist conspiracy' in a series of posts on social media.
Melina Abdullah, 51, a professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State University Los Angeles, took to X, formerly Twitter, to unload her opinions on the pop singer and her athlete boyfriend over the course of two weeks.
'Why do I feel like it’s slightly racist to be a Taylor Swift fan?' Abdullah wrote on February 11, the day of the Super Bowl.
'I said FEEL, not think,' she continued when another user asked her to elaborate. 'Kind of like that feeling I get when there are too many American flags.'
Hours later, after the Kansas City Chiefs were declared the winners, Abdullah wrote: 'Why do I feel like this was some right-wing, white-supremacist conspiracy?!?! Booooooo!!!!'
As her posts drummed up attention from other users, Abdullah doubled down on her stance. 'Folks think they’re attacking me by asking why I think everything is racist…I’m not offended,' she wrote. 'Virtually everything is racist.'
In response to one commenter, the advocate clarified: 'And I’ve also decided to work with all my might and in a community of committed people to upend racism and oppression.'
On February 23, Abdullah returned to social media to post a voice message sent by a man who blasted her as 'a joke,' 'ignorant,' and 'what's wrong with this country.'
'How dare you throw out the racist ideas you throw out on a daily basis?' shouted the man, who identified himself as Ethan George from Texas, before proclaiming that he wished she would 'die.'
'If this is what a tweet about Taylor Swift fans being “slightly racist” brings, I’ll edit myself…Y’all are full-fledged violent white-delusionists,' Abdullah wrote.
The 51-year-old is also a co-director of BLM's advocacy wing, Black Lives Matter Grassroots.
She sued the Los Angeles Police Department in 2020 after they descended on her home during a reported swatting incident.
On August 19, 2020, the LAPD received a 911 call from someone who claimed he had taken people hostage in Abdullah’s Crenshaw home.
In court documents filed with California Superior Court, the mother of three said she feared LAPD SWAT officers would fire their weapons into her home and hurt her children.
She accused the LAPD of failing to contact her beforehand despite having her that contact information and claimed the department staged the incident in ‘retaliation’ for her activism.
She added that police did not actually believe the claims of an ongoing hostage situation.
As proof, Abdullah cited an instance where police allowed her security guard, whom officers did not know, to pass through a perimeter and enter the home as they staged around it.
Two neighbors were also permitted to enter the home to check on her and walk alongside her as she walked out to speak with officers, the lawsuit claimed.
Abdullah deemed the response 'an attempt to put down protest, to target me as someone who's been very visible and vocal in protesting LAPD.'
She was swatted twice more after the lawsuit was announced.
In a separate legal battle, Abdullah and BLM Grassroots accused Black Lives Matters Global Network Foundation Inc. of raising donations off the work of city-based chapters and subsequently leaving activists out of decision-making.
BLM Grassroots is comprised of two dozen BLM chapters across the country, who argued that they were entitled to tens of millions of dollars from the national foundation.
However, the case was thrown out by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge last year after the activists failed to prove they were entitled to the funds among other unsubstantiated claims.
Abdullah said the group was 'stunned and dismayed' by the court's dismissal order.
'As always, the work of Black Lives Matter continues, regardless of the court ruling,' she vowed in a statement.
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Why it’s a mistake to deny the science of sex
In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. For decades after her claim, feminists have championed the idea that social conditioning is what creates differences between the sexes.
As little girls we are encouraged by our parents to play with dolls. As we get older we are encouraged to be decorative. From the clothes we wear to the interests we pursue, thousands of tiny interactions with the world mould us into the women we are.
But advances in neuroscience are throwing at least some of this conventional wisdom into question. While we have known for a long time that sex may have some subtle influences on the brain (how could it not?), a study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests such influences may be more expansive than previously thought.
The landmark study, conducted by Stanford professor Vinod Menon, and with Srikanth Ryali, PhD, and academic staff researcher Yuan Zhang, PhD, took a large sample of fMRI brain scans from 1500 young adults between 20 and 35, and then tested whether deep neural networks (AI models) could detect their sex. They could.
The AI models looked at many brain images from each person taken at different times (the brain scans were also taken from people in different regions). It found complex patterns that predicted if a brain was male or female with over 90 per cent accuracy.
The AI could not only tell if a brain was male or female, but the researchers also created explanatory models to predict cognitive abilities based on their images. Because male and female brains are so different, separate models were needed for each sex.
I contacted Professor Menon to ask what this meant. He told me “there were no gender differences (found) in the general intelligence factor, but response inhibition and reward sensitivity were higher in males than females”.
There are a multitude of implications in these findings. Male brains having higher reward sensitivity and variable response inhibition may explain why males tend to be more vulnerable to addiction and ADHD, for example.
The finding that males and females are different may strike many as intuitive and hardly worthy of journalistic attention, much like the observation that water is wet.
One might argue quite reasonably that anyone who spends any time around children knows girls and boys are different, and that these differences are not superficial. Nevertheless, in the world of academia, simple intuition does not go very far. In the scientific fields at least, empirical claims have to be proven with data.
Not only that, but there has been significant hostility from some quarters towards the idea that male and female brains differ at all. This hostility has been grounded in the fear that any discovery of differences will be used to reify gender stereotypes and justify discrimination against women – something female academics are naturally attuned to. Writing in Quillette in 2019, veteran neuroscientist Larry Cahill wrote: “Senior colleagues warned me as an untenured professor around the year 2000 that studying sex differences would be career suicide.”
But sexism does not need any scientific justification to exist. The odious Andrew Tate, for example, uses social media to spread his noxious misogyny and, as far as I am aware, is not relying on any findings from neuroscience in doing so.
Republicans in the United States are restricting women’s reproductive rights – including abortion and even IVF – on theological rather than scientific grounds. And I am not aware of the Taliban subscribing to Neuroscience News.
In truth, sexism flourishes wherever scientific progress is suppressed, not where it is advanced.
And ignorance about the influence of sex on the brain harms, rather than helps, women. For decades, basic research was only conducted on male cells, male animals and male clinical trial participants. Yet we know the incidence of many neurological conditions, from migraines to Parkinson’s disease, manifest differently according to sex. The failure to study how sex influences out of fear it will contribute to sexism means women miss out on having medical treatments tailored to their needs.
The fear of acknowledging sex differences has also, ironically, given rise to another form of anti-female prejudice. Today the denial of biology has metastasised into the denial of sex itself. Trans activists argue that one can literally change biological sex, and that biological males have no physiological advantage over women in sports.
Women are being denied the right to single-sex spaces such as bathrooms and change rooms, and new mothers are insultingly described in government-mandated protocols as “chestfeeders”. This is Simone de Beauvoir’s argument on steroids – this time used to erase womanhood altogether.
Refusal to grapple with biological realities has hampered progress in a way that has helped no one. Indeed, the denial of sex differences has not eradicated sexism but instead has led to the neglect of women’s health needs and the emergence of new forms of prejudice unimaginable just a decade ago.
While there may be some risks associated with new discoveries in neuroscience, these risks are outweighed by the potential benefits. As Larry Cahill has quipped: “The potential to misuse new knowledge has been around since we discovered fire and invented the wheel. It is not a valid argument for remaining ignorant.”
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25 February, 2024
Alabama hospital puts pause on IVF in wake of ruling saying frozen embryos are children
There are really two issues here: The failure to implant and the failure to thrive after implantation. As the father of an IVF son, I am acutely aware of the issues.
My wife undertook 10 IVF treatment cycles with only one embryo implanting. And it grieves me to this day that many of my children went down the drain. I would have loved them all. But to me there was no fault by any person involved. It is just nature's way that many embryos are lost during menstruation. Though I suppose that an argument could be mounted that taking any part in IVF is willingly creating life that will mostly not survive. You are both creating life and extinguishing it
In the abortion debate it has to me always seemed nonsenense to say that a "fetus" is not a human being. It is clearly just a human being at an early stage of growth. So I do have some understanding of the Alabama ruling. And I am an atheist so there is no religious issue involved in my case.
But there are clearly many adverse consequences of the ruling so I would say that a fertiized egg that is never implanted has never begun the process of developing so should not be regarded as a human person. A ruling to such an effect may be needed to allow IVF and its great blessings to continue
A large Alabama hospital has paused in vitro fertilisation treatments as health care providers weigh the impact of a state court ruling that frozen embryos are the legal equivalent of children.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham said in a statement Wednesday that its UAB Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility has paused the treatments "as it evaluates the Alabama Supreme Court's decision that a cryopreserved embryo is a human being."
"We are saddened that this will impact our patients' attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments," the statement emailed by spokeswoman Savannah Koplon read.
The ruling by the all-Republican Alabama Supreme Court prompted a wave of concern about the future of IVF treatments in the state and the potential unintended consequences of extreme anti-abortion laws in Republican-controlled states.
Patients called clinics to see if scheduled IVF treatments would continue. And providers consulted with attorneys.
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ADL Gives Head-Scratching Reason for Excluding Nashville Transgender Shooter From ‘Extremist Murders’ Report
Nashville Transgender Shooter Not a Left-Wing Extremist Because She Called Victims ‘Faggots,’ ADL Says
The Anti-Defamation League claimed that right-wing extremists committed “all” the extremist-related murders in 2023, discounting the apparent extremism of Audrey Hale, the transgender shooter who killed three adults and three students in March at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.
Conservative commentator Steven Crowder released three pages of the shooter’s manifesto, which police confirmed were legitimate, in November.
Hale, a white female, reportedly identified as male and went by the name “Aiden.” Her manifesto expresses hatred for white people, whom she refers to as “crackers.”
“Kill those kids!!! Those crackers. Going to private fancy schools with those fancy khakis and sports backpacks with their daddies mustangs and convertibles. F— you little sh—s,” she wrote. “I wish to shoot your weak ass d—s with your mop yellow hair, wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little faggots with your white privileges. F— you faggots.”
These remarks echo the Left’s ideological talking points on “white privilege” and reveal a disdain for others based on their skin color. This hatred of white people echoes the Marxist claim that America is institutionally racist, so justice demands stripping whites of their “privilege” and elevating racial minorities rather than securing a level playing field for all races.
Yet the ADL told The Daily Signal that Hale’s case does not show “clear evidence of extremism.”
“The case of Hale does not appear in the report, as we did not find clear evidence of extremism,” the spokesperson said. “Hale left some writings, not released by police, that they described as lacking any specific political or social issues. Three pages of a document were later leaked that contained hateful epithets directed at white and LGBTQ+ people, which did not provide evidence of any particular extremist ideology, but rather primarily resentment and grievance at students from the shooter’s former school perceived to be better off than the shooter was.”
“If additional information comes to light, this determination may change,” the spokesperson added.
The ADL appears to have considered Hale’s decision to condemn her targets as “faggots” to be an example of “epithets directed at … LGBTQ+ people,” thus muddying any potential left-wing extremism as a motivating factor.....
The ADL noted that “although our statistics determined that all extremist-related murders in 2023 were perpetrated by far-right extremists, as ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt made clear upon the release of the report: ‘Last week’s sickening attempted mass shooting in Houston by a woman who had praised Islamist terrorist groups reminds us we cannot stand idly by as hateful extremists continue to threaten our security from across the ideological spectrum.’”
The ADL has claimed that Fox News host Tucker Carlson endorsed a racist antisemitic conspiracy theory when he claimed that the Democratic Party is attempting to “replace the current electorate” with “third-world voters” by keeping the southern border open.
The ADL’s Center on Extremism has flagged critics of gender ideology, attacking conservative figures like Chaya Raichik, the Jewish woman behind the influential Libs of TikTok X account.
The ADL has even alerted law enforcement to conservatives who have criticized transgender orthodoxy, such as Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Chris Rufo and conservative commentator Matt Walsh.
The ADL has faced harsh criticism for adopting many of the Left’s favored causes, often in the name of fighting antisemitism.
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Bandy Lee is back
One of Korea's gifts to the USA, she behaved unprofessionally and gave an invalid dagnosis by passing judgment on a person she had not interviewed. She is a disgrace to her profession
The psychiatrist who led efforts in 2017 demanding a 25th Amendment ouster of then-President Donald Trump said she does not have the same concerns about President Joe Biden, despite a Justice Department report last week that said Biden has “diminished faculties.”
Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist who edited the 2017 book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” told The Daily Signal and the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project that Biden’s case is different.
Asked about special counsel Robert Hur’s report, she, “Cognitive decline is a normal part of aging.” But she concluded, “The 25th Amendment question, therefore, is even more relevant to Trump, as long as he wishes to be president again, but neither appropriate nor relevant for Biden at this time.” (Her full comment can be found below.)
The 25th Amendment allows for the vice president and a majority of Cabinet members to determine whether a president should be temporarily removed from office if he is deemed unfit to serve. It would require two-thirds majorities of both houses of Congress to permanently remove the president under the amendment.
The report Hur released on Feb. 8 said Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen” at his home and office. However, Hur said he would not seek charges because Biden would appear to a jury to be an “elderly man with a poor memory” and because his “diminished faculties” make it less likely he intentionally violated the law.
The Hur report says Biden “did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended … and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began.” The report also stated: “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
After the report, several Republican lawmakers called for using the 25th Amendment to remove Biden from office, just as several Democrats pushed for using the amendment to remove Trump from the presidency
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NYC law that would have allowed 800K non-citizens to vote struck as unconstitutional by appeals court: ‘Enacted in violation’
A controversial New York City law that would have allowed 800,000 non-citizens, but legal residents, to vote in municipal elections was struck down as unconstitutional by a state appeals court Wednesday.
“We determine that this local law was enacted in violation of the New York State Constitution and Municipal Home Rule Law, and thus, must be declared null and void,” Appellate Judge Paul Wooten wrote in the 3-1 majority decision.
Wooten said the state constitution broadly refers to only citizens having the right to vote in elections, municipal as well as statewide or for state legislative offices.
“Article IX provides that the elected officials of `local governments’ shall be elected by “the people, which incorporates by reference the eligibility requirements for voting under article II, section 1, applying exclusively to `citizens,'” the judge wrote.
The decision upholds a lower court ruling issued by Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio in June of 2022, which Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council had appealed.
Writing for the Appellate Division’s 2nd Department, Wooten said if non-citizens are allowed to vote, it stands to reason they could also run for mayor.
He ruled such a dramatic change violated the Municipal Home Rule Law, saying the council and mayor had failed to put the issue on the ballot for voters to decide.
Judges Angela Iannacci and Helen Voutsinas concurred in the ruling.
Judge Lilian Wan issued a dissenting opinion.
“The majority, by deeming the noncitizen voting law invalid, effectively prohibits municipalities across the state from deciding for themselves the persons who are entitled to a voice in the local electoral process,” she wrote.
“The majority’s determination also disenfranchises nearly one million residents of the City, despite the fact that its people’s duly elected representatives have opted to enfranchise those same residents.”
Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella was the lead plaintiff in the case along with Assemblyman Michael Tannousis (R-Staten Island), among others.
“During a time where nearly 200,000 migrants have flooded our city and streets, disrupting the public and attacking our police officers, my colleagues and I have worked tirelessly to protect our voting laws which were created for citizens of the United States,” Tannousis said.
“Democracy always wins and I am proud to say it was delivered yet again today.”
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island) was also among the lawmakers who applauded the decision.
“We determine that this local law was enacted in violation of the New York State Constitution and Municipal Home Rule Law, and thus, must be declared null and void,” Appellate Judge Paul Wooten wrote in the 3-1 majority decision.
“There is nothing more important than preserving the integrity of our election system, and in today’s age, the government should be working to create more trust in our elections, not less,” the congresswoman said.
“The right to vote is a sacred right given only to United States citizens. It is my hope that left wing lawmakers stop pushing these unconstitutional and reckless measures that dilute the voices of American citizens,” she added.
A city Law Department spokesman said, “We’re reviewing the court’s decision and evaluating next steps.”
https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/us-news/nyc-non-citizen-voting-law-struck-down-as-unconstitutional/
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22 February, 2024
Black privilege
One day in my ninth-grade year at my private day and boarding school, I heard shocking news: A student whose last name adorned one of our dormitories would be kicked out of school. His crime? Breaking the school’s alcohol and drug use policy. I went home that day and told my parents, dismayed at what had just happened: The child of one of my school’s biggest benefactors was being expelled. For many years, I had believed that certain students with important last names would be above the rules. But I was wrong. My high school tried its best to apply rules equally to students. Going into university, I suspected that I would similarly find this equal application of school rules. But I was wrong again.
At Northwestern University, I would not be surprised if the progeny of mega-donors experience leniency when it comes to breaking the rules. What does surprise me, however, is how another group of students receives preferential treatment thanks to a different immutable characteristic: their race.
This past month, news came out that the pair of students who copied our campus newspaper’s designs would be facing Class A misdemeanor charges. The newspapers featured a headline accusing Northwestern of complicity in the supposed genocide of Gazans and poked fun at Jews who take their birthright. When news of these charges circulated campus, there was enormous public backlash. Why? The Student Publishing Company (SPC), which oversees The Daily Northwestern, supposedly engaged in clear discrimination by pursuing these charges because they happened to be against black students. In accordance with the university’s values of anti-racism, there was no other conceivable explanation for the SPC’s decision to press charges aside from its deep-seated hate of Northwestern’s black community.
Unfortunately, the SPC obsequiously bent the knee to students’ demands that the charges be dropped and decided to intercede with the state attorney. The SPC issued a letter, saying: “It’s only been in the last four days that we learned more information about the people charged: that they are students; that they are Black. Some may disagree, but these facts matter to us.”
This recent incident is not the only one in which a particular group experiences preferential treatment because of its melanin content. This past spring, our student government announced the distribution of $29,000 with $11,000 of it going to a single student group: For Members Only, Northwestern’s premier Black Student Alliance. On a campus with hundreds of student organizations, one group receiving over a third of distributed funds is blatantly unfair. But such complaints about fairness raised by a single courageous ASG senator were dismissed by declaring that lowering FMO’s funding would be the real unfair action. And what was FMO spending this money on? A spring break trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to “learn about and engage with a landmark of Black history.”
I have now learned that it is not just mega-donors’ children who experience a double standard of justice; groups that are the subject of white guilt do as well. Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald has summed this up in two words: black privilege. I repeat this phrase with great trepidation, however. It is clearly not true that all blacks experience preferential treatment or double standards. But when one attends an elite university, the privileges that were once exclusively bestowed upon extraordinarily wealthy WASPs are now being granted to particular racial groups.
The creation of a quasi-racial spoil system in academia is emblematic of a much larger problem facing The Great American Nation: the absence of an individualistic spirit that tempers the collectivist desire to favor some at the expense of others. Given that the university serves as a harbinger of intellectual fads that eventually trickle down to the masses, a change in society’s attitudes about race will be limited by the extent to which universities move away from this new spoil system and toward a universalist framework that does not put group identity at the forefront of decision-making and discipline.
Still, as bad as things sound, I hold a lot of hope that eventually the tide will turn and the university will be made great again.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104536-academias-new-wasps-2024-02-20
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“London is Not London Any More, I Literally Feel Unsafe”: Jewish Father Reveals “Horrendous” Pain at Discovering Home Office Staff “Defaced” his Baby’s Birth Certificate
A Londoner whose baby’s birth certificate was “defaced” by Home Office staff no longer feels safe in the U.K. as cases of antisemitism continue to rise across the country. The Mail has the story.
Israel, a father-of-three who lives in Edgware, North London, and his wife Dorin, 29, were left in disbelief when they found five-month-old baby Ronnie’s identification papers had been tampered with.
The certificate, returned from the Passport Office, had been ripped and her father’s place of birth – which was Israel – had been scribbled out with a biro pen, leading the Home Secretary to launch an investigation into the case.
“I felt horrendous when I saw it for the first time,” the 32-year-old engineer said. “It took me a few more times to look at that and understand what’s going on.”
Ever since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on October 7th, the family have been living in fear and have started to feel “unsafe”.
“The situation here is not good,” Israel told Sky News. “To be Jewish in the U.K. is very hard. And it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse and worse.
“I think my daughter, in 20 years, that’s her future, because London is not London any more, and I literally feel unsafe.”
Yesterday Israel, who is also father to eight-year-old Adiel and five-year-old Ella, told MailOnline his family felt like a “target” as if they were living in 1930s Germany where Nazis would put notes on Jewish people’s documents.
“[My wife] found it was ripped half way through and my place of birth – which was Israel – had been scribbled out with a pen,” Israel, who did not want to reveal his surname, told MailOnline.
“We felt as if we had been taken back to 1930s Germany where the Nazis would put notes on Jewish people’s documentation.
“It is completely warped and it hurts my heart that my daughter is not even six-months-old and she has already been discriminated on in the worst way.”
“The Home Office is in charge of our safety as a minority in the U.K. and they deal with our most private documents but instead of sending us back the certificate in the right way someone within their system has scribbled out Israel because they have hostile feelings,” Israel added.
The shocked family were advised to contact the Campaign Against Antisemitism who approached the Home Office on behalf of the family to raise the issue.
The birth certificate was returned to the family with a tear on the right hand side, while the birth place of Ronnie’s father’s was scratched out in what appears to be a biro pen. Her mother’s birthplace of Israel, however, was left untouched.
As the certificate has been defaced it is no longer valid and the family will need to wait for the Home Office to re-send the document.
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Australian public broadcaster host Paul Barry slammed by Jewish leaders over war coverage ‘analysis’
That squinty "host" above is a Leftist, has always been a Leftist and will always be a Leftist. And Leftists are feline predators that do not change their spots. And from Karl Marx on, Leftists have always despised Jews
Jewish leaders have expressed outrage at claims made by the ABC’s Media Watch program that the public broadcaster has been the only news outlet to “give equal coverage to both sides” in the Israel-Hamas war.
On Monday night’s episode of Media Watch, host Paul Barry referenced “preliminary analysis” by the Islamophobia Register that showed the ABC was the only news organisation to have provided impartial coverage of the conflict.
The analysis, by academic Susan Carland for the Islamophobia Register, was based on an undisclosed number of Instagram posts by media outlets.
The research found that the social media posts by The Australian and 9News “all humanised Israeli victims but not Palestinians”, according to Media Watch’s interpretation of Dr Carland’s report.
“So, what do we conclude from all this? Well, simple, really,” Barry told viewers.
“The big Australian newspapers we looked at have failed to cover the Gaza conflict fairly, in terms of giving equal weight to the victims on each side, with the Nine papers (The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age) not too bad, but The Australian failing in spectacular fashion.”
The Media Watch host praised other news sources, including Al Jazeera (which is funded by the Qatari royal family), for covering “human stories of Palestinian suffering”.
But when contacted by The Australian, Dr Carland said her report clearly stated the research “should not be taken as, a definitive analysis of Australian media bias against Palestinians”.
“As this research is limited to the Instagram posts of the six outlets, this report is also not a definitive account of the outlets’ reporting on the Israel-Gaza war, and does not comment on fairness or equality found in any of their other stories on the Israel-Gaza war on their other platforms,” the report says.
Asked if she felt that Media Watch had misrepresented her research, Dr Carland told The Australian: “I cannot comment on the intentions of Media Watch. That would be a question best posed to them.”
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip told The Australian that the Media Watch story was “a joke”.
“If the subject matter wasn’t so serious, Media Watch’s report would have simply been parody,” Mr Ossip said. “Relying on sources such as the rabidly anti-Israel Al Jazeera and other highly partisan publications as evidence of the purported bias of legitimate news publications doesn’t pass the sniff test.”
Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, said: “It’s no surprise that an ABC program like Media Watch finds The Australian’s coverage of the Israel/Hamas war to be appalling, given that much of the ABC seems to think the story of the war should be told overwhelmingly from a Palestinian perspective.
“It’s also predictable that Media Watch neglected to mention failings by much of the Australian media to the detriment of Israel, such as the failures to cover the links between journalists and Hamas, or UNRWA and Hamas, (stories) that were highlighted by The Australian, which was typical of its overall balanced, comprehensive and factually accurate coverage.”
Media Watch’s executive producer Tim Latham said in a statement: “We stand by our story and what we put to air.”
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Australia: Stop treating child criminals like ‘little angels’, says NT Labor MP Marion Scrymgour
Youth justice laws need to stop treating [Aboriginal] criminal minors as “little angels” and start applying “tough love” to lawless children, the [black] federal Labor MP representing Alice Springs has declared.
In an extraordinary intervention against her own party’s handling of the Northern Territory youth crime crisis, Marion Scrymgour says authorities need to stop “pussyfooting around” on juveniles, that the decision to raise the age of criminal responsibility is not working, and that it is time for parents to be held accountable for their children’s actions.
It came as NT Chief Minister Eva Lawler said in a “perfect world” she would not have children in detention facilities, and linked her opening of a new youth justice centre in Alice Spring on Wednesday to the British sending convicts to Australia in the 18th century.
After revelations in The Australian of children as young as 10 driving stolen cars around the streets of Alice Springs, Ms Lawler said that young people had been in criminal trouble for “the whole history of Australia” and that the nation’s history was built on the convict system.
The NT Police Association on Wednesday alleged crime statistics in the territory were “not being reported properly” and Alice Springs locals said children were getting more out of control.
Ms Scrymgour – the federal MP for Lingiari – had her own home broken into while she was sleeping last month, and said governments needed to make serious changes to NT youth justice laws.
“There’s got to be a rethink of how we deal (with youth crime) … a bit of tough love never hurt anyone and I think that’s what needs to come into this equation,” she told The Australian.
“We’ve got to stop thinking we’re dealing with little angels here … When you look at those photos they’re laughing and smiling, they think it’s a joke, and it’s not, because they could have an accident and one of them could get killed.
“We’ve got to stop pussyfooting around here and thinking that these kids are going and they’re being taken home to a responsible adult because in a lot of these cases there isn’t a responsible adult there and the reality is these kids don’t listen.”
Ms Scrymgour did not directly call on NT Labor to reverse its decision to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12 – the highest in the country – but said the policy was not working to bring down crime and that Alice Springs residents needed immediate action.
“At the moment, obviously lifting the age of criminal responsibility isn’t working,” she said.
“The government was saying they’d done this co-response team between police and territory families. Obviously, it’s not working, if we’ve got these kids out on the street and there’s still this issue; obviously, we’ve still got problems.
“Labor is talking about a review of the Youth Justice Act, there are some critical areas in the Youth Justice Act which can be done now … it doesn’t need to be put off for 12 months.
“I’m not left and I’m not woke, I just think we’ve got to hurry up and stop thinking that all of these measures are working, because they’re not.”
Ms Scrymgour’s comments come as Alice Springs locals say the rate of home invasions, incidents of violence on the streets and the theft of cars have “skyrocketed” rise despite Anthony Albanese’s visit to the area just over a year ago.
Locals say the children – who appear to be getting younger and younger – roam the streets late at night, when they breaking into the homes of residents and commit horrifying home invasions, stealing cars and ransacking for cash and jewellery.
Ms Lawler – who came to power only at the end of last year after her predecessor Natasha Fyles resigned, and faces an election in August – last Monday announced a review of youth justice laws as part of a public address into her priorities for 2024.
As she was opening a $32m detention centre for juvenile criminals on Wednesday, Ms Lawler conceded the crime crisis was a failure of government, but linked youth crime to colonial history.
“Overall, it would be the perfect world if we did not have a detention facility in the Northern Territory,” the Chief Minister said.
“Let’s not forget the history of Australia was built on us being colonised by a detention facility from England, so we have had young people, we’ve had people in trouble with the law for the whole history of Australia.”
NTPA president Nathan Finn on Wednesday morning claimed the Territory government was hiding crime statistics from the public as part of a “political campaign”, and that the work by police officers on the ground was “not being recorded” after the police force moved to a new $65m system.
“It’s a smoke-and-mirrors campaign as we lead into an election where crime is the biggest issue, policing is the biggest issue, safety and security of members in the public is a big issue … and the community and the police need to know this,” he told ABC radio.
Mr Finn said the new system was experiencing numerous glitches, including people being wrongly arrested, and that up to 200 domestic violence orders hadn’t been scheduled in court.
“That means possibly that there are 200 plus people out there who aren’t getting the protection they require right now.”
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21 February, 2024
What a Lot of Women Confided to Me Behind Closed Doors in HR, Especially the successful ones
Many women would be tradwives if they could
One particular VP visited me often because she had ongoing issues with two employees who were constantly at war with each other. But one day I could tell she wasn’t there to talk about her usual troublemakers.
At 35, she was the highest performing VP in her division and the highest compensated by far. She had worked hard and it had paid off handsomely for her. An inspiration for women and young girls everywhere.
But that day, I could tell something was wrong.
She wouldn’t look me in the eye as she said her next words. She turned her body to the wall and dropped her voice down low as if what she was saying was a profoundly shameful confession.
She did not want to be the powerful executive they were grooming her to be.
In fact, she did not want to be a VP at all. She secretly wished she was the department admin where all she had to do were expense reports, schedule meetings, and organize holiday parties. She wanted a job she could walk away from at 5 pm and forget about when she got home.
And if she were being really honest, she didn’t even want to work. She wanted to stay home and take care of the house and garden.
And yes, make dinner for her husband.
Like a Boiled Frog
Things started out well for her.
Early in her career, she got hired into an entry-level job that she excelled in, and she was promoted repeatedly. She was quickly rewarded for her hard work and business sense.
Her first job as a manager was fun at first. She dove into leadership training and learning how to be a good manager. She enjoyed taking the lead in the department operations, running team meetings and managing a group of people.
That changed quickly as she got settled into her role.
When 5 pm came, she kept working, and when she did finally go home for the night, work came home with her. The more she advanced in her career, the more she hated the politics, the pressure, the constant demands from senior leadership.
She couldn’t turn it off in her mind, and she found herself spending more time on PowerPoint presentations and prepping for meetings than she spent relaxing with her husband or friends. Her personal projects and passions, including redecorating the house and putting together a greenhouse, were neglected.
The job had grown into something that didn’t feel good to her.
She loved to cook but had little energy to do it. She loved hosting gatherings at their house — now she didn’t have it in her to do that either. She had dreams of redoing the entire garden — but never had the time or energy.
There were parts of her job that she enjoyed. She felt valued at work. She knew how to do the job well. And she liked how admired she felt.
But she was secretly miserable. And she couldn’t see an exit.
She wasn’t the only one
I have lost track of how many women have confided that they just wanted to be stay-at-home moms or work part-time.
This doesn’t mean these women want to stay in entry-level jobs. I’ve known many who would have loved to stay in a high-level job — if they could do it for 20 hours a week.
Priorities change for women as they age and their lives evolve. Some women want to have their afternoons at home with the family. Or they have personal pursuits they want to focus on such as writing or a side business.
While some women thrive in leadership roles and feel great personal fulfillment, it’s worth noting that it isn’t for everyone. And that’s okay.
Some women are most fulfilled by taking a more traditional role of being a stay-at-home wife or mother. Some women prefer to have a part-time job that allows them to care for the home and their family so they can be with their kids when they get home from school.
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Young Men Searching for Purpose on Valentine’s Day
For all the single ladies, it is Galentine’s Day. But what is it for the bachelors? To my knowledge, men do not band together en masse on February 14th to mix up fruity pink cocktails, watch chick flicks, and build solidarity in their singleness. In fact, bromances appear to be in decline, as 15% of men say they have zero close friends.
The male friendship recession is just one manifestation of the boy crisis, a crisis worth reflecting on especially today, the day of big romance. The boy crisis is widespread, impacting boys and men academically, economically, physically, and spiritually. On average, the IQs of boys are declining. The second leading cause of death for American men under 45 is suicide. Largely due to drug abuse and physical and mental problems, only 25% of men ages 17-24 qualified for military service in 2020. As the wages of those with a high school degree decline, some men are willingly checking out of the workforce altogether, so much so that male workforce engagement now matches the level it was during the Great Depression.All this adds up to millions of young men who have been left without purpose.
While our education system and the shift from a manufacturing to a global knowledge economy have done their fair share of damage, according to The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, (Farrell & Gray, 2018) the ultimate driver behind the boy crisis is dad deprivation. Approximately 40% of children are born out of wedlock; because of this and high divorce rates, as Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, states, “only about half of children will spend the duration of their childhood with both of their biological parents.” Moms and dads contribute in unique and essential ways to the raising of children, but boys especially need the modeled manifestation of what it means to be a good man, and their first model is their fathers.
Single parents, who have sometimes been unwillingly left behind by divorce, make valorous sacrifices for their children, and nonresidential fathers are doing a better job of staying involved. But the practical realities of fatherhood apart from marriage are often challenging. For example, according toThe Boy Crisis, “when unmarried couples live together when their child is born, by the child’s third birthday, 40 percent of those children will have no regular contact with their dad for the next two years—between ages three and five.” For this reason, if we want to get serious about addressing the boy crisis, we need to get serious about marriage. Understanding the purpose of marriage will help us fortify it.
Many now believe that romance is the cornerstone of marriage. Once it dissipates, the couple should part ways so that each individual can find that lovin’ feeling again. More frequently than in the past, couples are divorcing for less serious reasons. The dissolution of “low conflict” relationships is particularly detrimental for children, as they can experience more stress and more of a feeling of loss following separation.
Much of our culture reinforces such attitudes towards relationships. The radical autonomy of expressive individualism permeates our moral imagination. Expressive individualism, “involves growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs.” As Andrew Cherlin, a sociology and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, explains in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, under such conditions, “marriages are harder to keep together, because what matters is not merely the things they jointly produce—well-adjusted children, nice homes—but also each person’s own happiness.” And by happiness we mean pleasure and psychological self-actualization, not human flourishing grounded in virtue and obligation.
In truth, admirable marriages are replete with work and adventure. Their purpose is to provide a stable and loving environment for the rearing and education of children and to form the character of each spouse. Marriage is often not easy or comfortable. As human beings, we grow attached to our favorite vices, and letting them go can be painful. But it is also freeing. Ideally in marriage, rather than prioritizing his or her own emotional satisfaction, through choice and circumstance, each spouse sacrifices for the sake of that mysterious third entity: the marriage.
Our culture largely no longer promotes this understanding. Those Galentine’s Day favorites (excluding the incomparable work of ethicist Jane Austen) often don’t depict what it is that really matters when looking for a spouse. Indeed, it is no accident that many chick flicks end at the altar, perhaps because marriage occasionally falls short of being camera-ready. This is not to say that all romantic films are bad. Part of the reason they appeal to us is because they affirm how important relationships are for long-term happiness. The choice of a spouse is the decision of a lifetime.
Yet numerous singles today have been left confused about how to choose well. Many children of divorce grow up lacking a model of a solid marriage. As adults, such children can have a negative view of marriage, struggle to work through conflict in a healthy manner, and are unsure what characteristics to prioritize in a partner. Online dating makes this worse. After being bombarded with profiles, users end up thinking that they should be able to find someone who embodies all the features they dream they desire.
We need to shift our cultural conversation around marriage, to move away from pure romance toward the deep, abiding, and sacrificial love that husbands and wives offer each other and their children. Doing so will help end the dad deprivation that is the main driver of today’s boy crisis. And then, perhaps, our boys, too, will have valentines.
https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/young-men-searching-purpose-valentines-day
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'All Hell Breaks Loose': Harvard Professor Recalls One Study That Caused the Left to Implode
Harvard professor Roland Fryer conducted a study that was timely and thought-provoking at a time when officer-involved shootings have become a media beat that’s not interested in the truth but a way for over-educated pseudo commentators to offer lectures about white supremacy and police overreach.
Remember, these shootings are part of a covert genocide against black men. More often than not, the police’s use of deadly force turns out to be justifiable. Fryer opted to do a study on whether there were racial biases in these shootings.
His study suggested race was not a factor, which caused everyone to lose their minds. Being a thorough scholar, he redid the study and hired a new team of researchers. The results were the same.
Fryer has come back into the news after he sat down with former New York Times editorial writer Bari Weiss, who also fled due to her former place of employment becoming an illiberal cesspool. Fryer said his study would ruin his career. He was forced to obtain armed security due to the backlash. You could say Fryer was canceled after sexual misconduct allegations were lobbed against him, which caused him to be suspended and close his research department. Then-President Claudine Gay said of these allegations, "The totality of these behaviors is a clear violation of institutional norms and a betrayal of the trust."
He remains at Harvard, but his access to teaching remains limited. Gay was busted for serial incidents of plagiarism, which is the cardinal sin in the academic world.
So, karma is a bitch, as they say. Or, in the words of Fryer, “I hear it’s a motherf**ker,” an appropriate message to his former boss, who one could argue was an academic fraud. Fryer’s persecution also exemplifies what happens when Harvard and other higher education institutions opt to move away from legitimate fields of study because it might anger progressives’ snowflake attitudes about life and politics
(via Fox News):
A Harvard professor said that "all hell broke loose" and he was forced to go out in public with armed security after he published a study that found no evidence of racial bias in police shootings.
During a sit-down conversation with Bari Weiss of The Free Press, Harvard Economics Professor Roland Fryer discussed the fallout from a 2016 study he published on racial bias in Houston policing.
[…]
When Fryer claimed the data showed "no racial differences in officer-involved shootings," he said, "all hell broke loose," and his life was upended.
[…]
Fryer said people quickly "lost their minds" and some of his colleagues refused to believe the results after months of asking him not to print the data.
"I had colleagues take me to the side and say, 'Don't publish this. You'll ruin your career,'" Fryer revealed.
The world-renowned economist knew from comments by faculty that he was likely to garner backlash. Fryer admitted that he anticipated the results of the study would be different and would confirm suspicions of racial bias against minorities. When the results found no racial bias, Fryer hired eight new assistants and redid the study. The data came back the same.
Fryer recalled how he was shopping for diapers for his newborn daughter with an armed bodyguard, noting how insane that whole situation was. He did a study on officer-involved shootings, and the data didn’t align with the Left’s worldview, so some threatened to kill him. But it’s conservatives and Donald Trump who are the real threats to societal norms, right? Receiving death threats for a research-based study is all too common with today’s progressives.
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The Housing Crunch Is Causing Americans To Delay Marriage and Children
Failed public policies are undermining the institution of marriage in America. Rates of both marriage and child births have been trending down for decades, but the current cost-of-living crisis is poised to accelerate these declines. If you can’t afford a place to live, chances are you won’t get married and have kids.
That’s precisely the calculus for millions of young Americans today who can’t make ends meet despite a record number of them holding second or even third jobs. Sixty percent are living paycheck to paycheck. Americans have accumulated a record high $1.1 trillion in credit-card debt as many can’t cover even necessities.
But Americans aren’t just falling into debt—they’re falling behind on payments too. Defaults and delinquencies are rising at the fastest pace since the Great Recession when there was a mortgage meltdown and a global financial crisis.
The financial strain on American families explains why people view current economic conditions so unfavorably in polling. Perhaps nothing illustrates this pessimism better than the housing market.
The monthly mortgage payment on a median price home has doubled in the last three years. Unless your income has also doubled, you’re falling behind when it comes to buying a house.
The median price of a new home has shot up to a stratospheric $435,000. Even the median price of an existing home, at about $387,000, would have been inconceivable three years ago.
The typical family buying a home today will have a monthly cost of homeownership around $3,000. That’s about half the median household income—before income taxes. It’s no wonder that the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s homeownership affordability index is at a record low today.
The index even shows that the cost to own a median price home in several major metropolitan areas requires more than 100 percent of the median household after-tax income. In only a single metropolitan area with at least 500,000 people is the median price home affordable in America.
While homeownership is normally a great tool for building wealth, it is also often a precursor to major milestones in life, like starting a family. But with the American dream of homeownership having turned into a nightmare, nearly an entire generation of young people can’t buy a home and are delaying family formation because of it.
And this isn’t simply theory—empirical research published by Federal Reserve economists has already demonstrated that higher mortgage interest rates has a negative impact on the birth rate. That’s because those higher mortgage interest rates increase the cost of homeownership.
What caused this sad state of affairs? It was a deadly combination of impolitic public policies.
Since 2020, the federal government has been spending trillions of dollars it didn’t have, running massive deficits. The Federal Reserve covered these deficits by simply creating money for Congress to spend. That devalued the dollar, which fueled inflation as prices soared—including prices for housing.
But home prices got an extra boost from the Fed’s artificially low interest rates. What a homebuyer is really concerned about is the monthly payment on a home, not so much the home’s price. Lower interest rates allowed people to take on much larger mortgages for the same monthly payment, creating frenzied bidding wars for homes.
When interest rates finally rose to fight inflation, they pushed monthly mortgage payments through the roof, completely out of the reach of most Americans. It also trapped millions of Americans in their homes.
When a home is sold with a mortgage, the homeowner loses the loan and must get a new one, at current market rates. If someone bought a home just a few years ago, they are likely going from a 2-3 percent mortgage to a 7-8 percent one. That would cause their monthly payment to explode.
The options are to drastically downsize or not move at all—and millions have chosen the latter. That’s helped cause a severe shortage of homes for sale, the lowest level in decades. Consequently, home prices are staying high despite today’s higher interest rates.
While the failures of public policy are often measured in dollars, the unaffordability of housing today demonstrates that there can be even more far-reaching consequences: families never formed, and lives never lived.
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20 February, 2024
Partnership With ADL Compromises FBI’s Integrity and Fairness
The ADL is just a far-Left outfit these days. The only remnant of their original advocacy for Jews is their hatred of Christians
Most Americans recognize that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a far-left, dark-money behemoth with assets of nearly a quarter-billion dollars. The once-respected FBI is now viewed as being similarly politicized. Overall support for the agency has nose-dived to only 37% among the general public and a meager 17% among Republicans.
Yet few Americans realize how closely the ADL works with the FBI to advance their leadership’s political interests. This is a dangerous collaboration wherein the increasingly radical group provides ideologically driven guidance to people with the guns.
Right now, the FBI is pointing those guns at the political enemies of the far Left.
The ADL’s work covers the usual left-wing causes célèbres: fighting voting integrity measures, pushing for open-borders policies and amnesty for illegal aliens, and vigorously defending the Black Lives Matter riots, to name a few.
The group has now politically weaponized its charges of antisemitism, falsely smearing conservatives while excusing blatant antisemitism among its political allies. For example, the organization has groundlessly denounced Elon Musk, a powerful libertarian voice, as an antisemite in a baldfaced effort to drain his social network, X, of advertising revenue. Yet, when now-Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) came to the defense of his uncle for antisemitic remarks he made in the ’90s, the organization refused to condemn him.
Jonathan Tobin of Jewish News Syndicate traces ADL’s hard-left turn to its change in leadership from longtime leader Abe Foxman to Jonathan Greenblatt, a former staffer in the Clinton and Obama White Houses. Tobin writes, “Greenblatt has helped shift the ADL from its former stance as the nonpartisan gold standard for monitoring hate to being just another liberal activist group whose priority is helping the Democratic Party.”
Last month, The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project released an investigative report detailing an “Extremist Sitrep” email from the “ADL Law Enforcement” account to The Washington State Fusion Center, a collective of various law enforcement entities spanning from local to the FBI. The email advises law enforcement officers responsible for investigating domestic terrorists to focus their resources on the likes of Matt Walsh, Chris Rufo and Libs of TikTok. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Much like the FBI’s infamous anti-Catholic targeting memo, the ADL email suggests that law enforcement agencies—people with guns and the power to imprison and financially destroy enemies of the state-should concentrate their efforts on nonviolent citizens whose only “crime” is to have exercised their First Amendment freedoms in support of political viewpoints contrary to the authoritarian Left.
The goal here is clearly to punish the “thought criminals” and force adherence to the dogmas of the state.
What’s the big deal about such a problematic email? Law enforcement agencies must get all sorts of memorandums, requests and phony tips from every corner of the nation, right?
The problem here is that, according to former FBI agents, they are conditioned from the very beginning of their careers to be receptive to ADL propaganda. One of the first experiences of a new agent is an ADL-sponsored trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The ostensible purpose of the trip is to impress on new agents that they bear a tremendous responsibility that should never be abused.
That lesson should be salubrious. But former agents tell me the trip’s real purpose is to prepare agents to be receptive to the onslaught of propaganda and rewards that the ADL will be sending their way throughout the coming years. At the very beginning of an agent’s career, the FBI is sending the clear message that the ADL is a trusted partner.
The ADL and FBI partnership only grows from there. According to the ADL’s website, “We educate annually an estimated 15,000 law enforcement personnel from local, state and federal agencies.” Moreover, “in 2021 alone, the ADL Center on Extremism (COE) provided law enforcement with critical intelligence about extremism over 1,300 times and tracked over 7,300 incidents of hate on our online, interactive H.E.A.T. map.” The ADL even operates a school for executive-level law enforcement officials:
In 2003, the ADL founded the Advanced Training School, which has provided education on extremism and terrorism for senior law enforcement from more than 250 agencies across the U.S. This three-day course provides an examination of major types of extremist movements, case studies of recent terrorist acts presented by law enforcement leaders with firsthand experience, and guidance on the critical importance of protecting civil rights and liberties.
The very agency the feds trust to educate them on matters of “extremism” is producing politically driven, far-left reports on who counts as an extremist. Much like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADL writes and applies the definition they wish government to enforce. They take care to ensure that it predominantly captures those opposed to their ideology, while excusing their political allies.
Were these organizations to apply a neutral definition of hate or extremism, it would undercut the leftist narrative that so-called MAGA extremists and their ilk are the most clear-and-present danger to the United States.
Beyond orientation, training, and propaganda, the ADL provides FBI personnel with awards. Since 2010, the ADL has been handing out “ADL SHIELD Awards” to FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors for investigative and prosecutorial successes. It’s a brilliantly subversive tactic. The awards cost the ADL next to nothing, and in exchange, the organization receives a false veneer of legitimacy and builds a list of FBI executives and agents beholden to the ADL.
Conditioning FBI personnel to be receptive to ADL political propaganda and then doling out rewards to FBI leaders is beyond unseemly. With this incentive structure in place, is there any reason to doubt that the FBI would be more inclined to take in and act on slanted ADL material?
Small wonder that public confidence in the FBI is at record lows. One obvious remedial measure would be to end the partnership between the ADL and the FBI. It’s time to draw a bright line between dark, far-left operations and the most powerful law enforcement entity in the country and make sure that line is not crossed.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/16/time-end-fbi-adl-partnership/
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The feuding tearing apart the Royal Society of Literature
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the Royal Society of Literature (founded 1820) might be one of those institutions that chugs on benignly year in year out with nothing to disturb the peace of its members. But on Thursday morning, a letter in the Times Literary Supplement, got up as I understand it by Jeremy Treglown and signed by 14 more distinguished writers (among them Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Fleur Adcock), calls on the leadership of the RSL to refer itself to the Charity Commission. That is, as charitable foundations go, something like demanding that they turn themselves in to the cops.
Everybody is briefing everybody, furious letters are circulating about leaks, and the whole thing is adding to the gaiety of nations
It’s only the latest fusillade in what seems to be something barely short of civil war in this longstanding institution. Many longstanding Fellows of the Society are deeply unhappy with the current management – principally its director, Molly Rosenberg and its chair, the poet Daljit Nagra. Everybody is briefing everybody, furious letters are circulating about leaks, and the whole thing is adding to the gaiety of nations and the public stock of harmless pleasures for popcorn-chewing onlookers, while causing considerable distress to those directly involved.
‘It’s such a clusterfuck! It’s such a clusterfuck! Everyone is falling out with everyone else,’ said one RSL Fellow I spoke to this week, with the characteristic mixture of grief and glee that attends any feud between writers. ‘It’s just unbelievable how much everyone hates each other. It’s like one of those long marriages that seems to have been perfectly happy… and then suddenly you discover they’ve both been seeing other people and have called in the lawyers.’
This rather well captures the multi-dimensional quality of the warfare going on. It’s a slightly tricky row to unpick, as the charge sheet against the present management of the RSL consists of several unrelated (or only marginally related) disgruntlements, but here goes.
The first (and it’s what has kicked off the latest round of sniping, writing of open letters, thinly veiled legal threats and furious behind-the-scenes gossiping) is the suppression of the society’s own journal, the RSL Review, and the alleged summary firing of its editor Maggie Fergusson. I should say, incidentally, that Maggie is a friend of, and frequent contributor to, the books pages of The Spectator. The RSL Review was in final proof, just before Christmas, when the RSL’s director Molly Rosenberg apparently took exception to an article in it about writers in Palestine. The whole magazine was summarily pulled from publication and the editor (a three-decade servant of the RSL and a former director herself) was hoofed out.
The RSL’s version is that the magazine’s publication has merely been ‘postponed’ for editorial improvements, that Maggie Fergusson departed by mutual agreement, that she had always known that this would be the last issue she edited (both of which claims Fergusson flatly denies), and that all contributors to the postponed magazine have been kept informed as to the fates of their contributions. Far be it from me to call this a pack of lies. But it does seem that, using the unimprovable formula of the late Queen, ‘Some recollections may vary.’ At any rate, the signatories of the letter to the TLS clearly feel on firm ground saying: ‘The issues to be investigated would have to include the censorship attempt, which we are quite sure occurred and which plainly contravened fundamental literary values.’
The second issue, which strikes that one slightly slant, is to do with a change in the way that Fellows of the society are elected. The laws of the society have it that candidates must have at least two works of ‘outstanding literary merit’ to their name, be proposed and seconded by existing Fellows, and approved by the Council. In the interests of diversifying the membership – which does skew whiter and older than the population at large – and making the RSL an institution ‘for all writers’ (as its president Bernardine Evaristo has put it) some new methods of election have been put in place. Evaristo wrote in this week’s Guardian that in ‘some schemes, members of the public sometimes get the chance to nominate writers who might otherwise be overlooked because they are outside the elite London literary networks’.
There will be those who frame this as a woke-youngsters-versus-traditionalists ding-dong, in which a doddery and snobbish old guard seeks to defend the citadel of their white privilege from the younger, browner writers hitherto denied their due by the literary establishment. I don’t presume to take a view on how the RSL manages its affairs. It also seems fair to Bernardine to make clear that her role in the RSL is ceremonial, so she is not the prime mover behind the controversial changes. (If this was all about a ‘woke agenda’, incidentally, it’s surprising that the piece alleged to have been censored was one sympathetic to the Palestinian side in the conflict.)
I restrict myself to a couple of observations. One is that the idea of the RSL being ‘for all writers’ is questionable: as one person I spoke to pointed out, we already have an organisation for all writers, and it’s called the Society of Authors. The RSL is supposed to be an organisation for really good writers. Which is as much as to say that being involved with ‘elite… literary networks’ is sort of the point. And if the guiding principle is to have two works of ‘outstanding literary merit’ in print, you would expect it to skew a bit older. Many, perhaps most, writers go a whole career without getting even one ‘OLM’; you can expect the majority to take a decade or two to get two written. It’s not like football, where if you haven’t done it by 23 you’re finished: the longer you go at it, in general, the better you get.
On race, there is, no doubt, a pipeline problem here, too. If the publishing establishment has been reluctant until relatively recently to give writers of colour a fair shake (which I think you’d be a fool to dispute), the pool of candidates for Fellowship at this point will on average be whiter than maybe you’d like. There will be fewer writers of colour mid-career and with a belt full of OLMs, because 20 years ago fewer writers of colour were getting the chance to begin a career. You can take the view that this is a problem that time will solve – the fruits of today’s determination across the industry to platform diverse voices will be filtering through in the next decade or two – or you can put your thumb on the scales.
The third and final strand in the current row is the question of whether, and how, the RSL is to take a view on supporting writers’ freedoms and freedom of expression in general. Many Fellows were distinctly dismayed when a motion in Council to speak out in support of Salman Rushdie after an Islamist lunatic attempted to murder him was squashed. The reasoning, according to Evaristo, is that the RSL should remain ‘impartial’ in political matters. Let us say of this only that several writers, including Sir Salman himself, were not super impressed by this stance.
What unites these disparate threads seems to be a reluctance by the senior management to engage directly with the membership they ostensibly serve. ‘They’re treating us like enemies, rather than like colleagues,’ one Fellow told me. Complaints, queries, requests for explanations have, according to more than one Fellow I’ve spoken to, gone unanswered or been bureaucratically stonewalled. If Daljit Nagra does decide to bring the Charity Commission in (an option he seems to have at least countenanced in conversation with Treglown) that will at least be a step in the direction of clearing the air.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-feuding-tearing-apart-the-royal-society-of-literature/
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The problem with the ‘paraglider girls’ ruling
Leftists can do and say no wrong
Yesterday at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, three women were convicted of terror offences for wearing clothes or carrying signs that appeared to glorify Hamas – and they were let off virtually scot-free.
The leniency of this ruling raises yet more questions about judicial impartiality in this country
At a central London pro-Palestine march the week after the October 7 attack in Israel last year, Heba Alhayek, 29, and Pauline Ankunda, 26, had attached images of paragliders to their backs, while Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27, had attached one to a sign. Paragliders, as had been reported widely in the media, were how Hamas terrorists crossed the Gaza-Israel border to carry out their barbaric pogrom against Israeli civilians. The trio were found guilty of appearing to show support for a terrorist group after a two-day trial. The Judge said there was no evidence that the individuals were supporters of Hamas, but the CPS said displaying the images amounted to the ‘glorification of the actions’ of the terrorist group.
Convicted under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act, they faced a possible six months in prison. But district judge Tan Ikram said he had ‘decided not to punish’ the defendants, instead handing the trio a 12-month conditional discharge each.
From a purely free-speech point of view, this leniency is welcome. Any glorification of the slaughter of more than 1,200 Jews is of course grotesque. Yet as hateful as these kinds of sentiments are, it is generally better to have them out in the open and to know they exist than forcing them underground. Unless it is clear and direct incitement to violence, the best answer to vile speech is rarely punishment or censorship, but counter-speech.
But the leniency of this ruling raises yet more questions about judicial impartiality in this country. These are questions that have been hanging over the justice system more widely since 7 October, after what many saw as a soft-touch approach by the police toward the pro-Palestine marches last autumn.
It’s not as if this leniency toward the ‘paraglider girls’ is down to Britain being a haven for free speech. Quite the contrary: the British state has proven it will come down hard on anyone who seems to violate today’s ever-expanding progressive taboos. Ed West has recently detailed the many sorry examples, such as a woman interrogated by police after photographing a sticker on a trans pride poster; a teenager arrested for saying a policewoman looked like her ‘lesbian nana’; and a Conservative councillor arrested for an alleged hate crime after retweeting a video criticising police treatment of a Christian street preacher.
Indeed, the record of the judge in this case, Tan Ikram, has repeatedly sparked concerns that woke sensibilities may be distorting the British justice system. In an unprecedented ruling in 2022, he jailed police constable James Watts for 20 weeks for sharing racist WhatsApp memes mocking George Floyd, the patron saint of Black Lives Matter. Not only was this sentence extraordinarily harsh, last year Ikram appeared to act against judicial conduct guidance that says judges should not talk about their cases in public, when he publicly boasted about the sentence: ‘This was a police officer bringing the police service into disrepute,’ he told American law students. ‘So I gave him a long prison sentence. The police were horrified by that.’
If Ikram’s comments suggest he might hold a grudge against the police, his later rulings do not dispel that suspicion. In December, he gave six retired Met officers suspended sentences and community service for racist messages sent in a private WhatsApp group chat. This followed his extraordinary ruling that, though the messages were never intended to be seen by anyone else, they were nevertheless ‘offensive to many good people in this country and not only people who might be directly offended’. One of the officers had sent a boomer meme about parrots and was convicted by Ikram on the sole basis of its offensive ‘implication’.
That Ikram has handed down prison sentences for private memes makes his leniency towards the paraglider trio more difficult to swallow. Attempting to explain his decision not to punish the defendants for their support of a terror group, Ikram said the offences had taken place at a time of ‘much passion and polarisation’. ‘You crossed the line’, he said, ‘but it would have been fair to say that emotions ran very high on this issue’. But why should the fact that emotions were running high reduce the severity of the punishment? No less bizarre was his claim that the defendants’ ‘lesson has been well learned’ – despite them being let off by the court.
It is not quite clear which emotions Ikram referred to in his sentence. It is indeed fair to say that emotions were running high at that time. Many will have seen the alarm, shock and distress of British Jews – who first witnessed a barbaric pogrom in Israel, in which many lost friends and loved ones – and then the orgy of violent anti-Semitism it brought to the streets of London. But it seems that to a judiciary steeped in identity politics, it is only certain emotions that count.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-problem-with-the-paraglider-girls-ruling
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#MeToo has driven young men into an opposing stance of bullish conservatism
Feminism has driven men and women apart -- a loss for both
We have a problem. As a species. Particularly in the western world. An ideological divide is opening up in many countries that goes to the heart of the human race, the future of us. It is a problematic divide between girls and boys, a widening philosophical gap in terms of aspiration/outlook that’s having impacts in many arenas. Not least in our high schools.
Recent research shows that girls are becoming more progressive; boys, more conservative. The rift is demonstrated in a study from the Gallup Poll Social Series, which shows that political ideology for females aged 18-29 in countries such as the US, Germany, the UK and South Korea is veering towards a small-l liberal ideology, but boys, in opposition, are cleaving to conservatism.
So, Gen Z is split. Two separate worlds. Of increasingly aware girls not afraid to call it out, and frustrated boys trying to deal with the new voices roaring at them. What will the future be, for all of them, together? How will these findings affect marriage rates, birth trends, the politics of the schoolyard, workplace relations, societal harmony? The new dynamic is already being demonstrated in elections here – the rise of the Teals was thanks in large part to women. The trend will continue as females search for representatives who understand them, listen.
And ahead, an even more dramatically cleaved society. I watch, perturbed, feeling for both sides. The impetus for the girls is towards fairness and equality; a move away from subservience. A natural step for the educated, and why the Taliban wants to stop females from being educated at all. Ignorance keeps the female subjugated, in servitude to the male; it removes the threat of women with a voice.
The impetus for boys, understandably, is to preserve what they had. Which was power and control, for millennia. My heart goes out to males because so many are hurting, raging, lost. Imagine it. A person born to be at the top of the tree, who has expected this all their childhood, and who steps into adulthood wanting this cosy arrangement to continue. But girls are now digging in their heels, saying enough, we want those chances too. Life’s been unfair for usfor a very long time, and we’re just as competent.
Why all this now, so fractiously? A theory. The very loud #MeToo movement, which galvanised young women, has driven young men into an opposing stance of bullish conservatism. We all have to work through it, with compassion and sensitivity, until equality is normalised and young males don’t see this new way of being as a threat. But it will take many years. Generations.
What we have now is the fulcrum, the tipping point. Boys flinching into conservatism, into what’s been comfortable and known throughout history; conservatism by nature means a cleaving to traditional models, the status quo. Progressivism is about social reform. Embracing it, facilitating it. Which is where a lot of educated young women are now and there’s no going back from it. #MeToo and the first and second wave feminist movements before it are exploding the parameters that kept females in their place.
Meanwhile boys and girls retreat into their siloed worlds online, with little crossover. There’s a lack of tolerance for the “other” on both sides, a scorning and sneering at these divergent environments. Some boys find their Andrew Tates to cling to, while for girls the messaging all around them is that they can now be anything, do anything, and as well as the boys. Female teens are unstoppable and school boys have to concede some of their traditional power. But it’s messy. I feel for teachers in co-ed high schools right now, the cauldrons of this vast societal shift. What’s needed, urgently, is empathy and understanding. From both sides.
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19 February, 2024
Why I deplore Scottish nationalism
And other nationalisms like it. I was once instinctively for it but I was biased.
About my bias:
I do have some Scots ancestry; I was brought up to be pro-Scots; I have on occasions worn Highland Dress and very much enjoy that; I have been to Scotland more than once -- from Sauchiehall st to the Western Isles; I once married a bonnie Scottish lass and put on Scottish songs exclusively at our wedding reception; I have done extensive academic survey research in Scotland about Scottish attitudes. See:
http://jonjayray.com/scotland.html
From all that it should be clear that speaking ill of Scotland and the Scots pains me deeply. But it appears that I have to do so. The crux of the matter can be seen in this video
It's a prelude to a Scottish Rugby match at Murrayfiend stadium. The song is "Flower of Scotland", now accepted as Scotland's national anthem. The words are as follows:
Flower of Scotland
O Flower of Scotland,
When will we see
Your like again,
That fought and died for,
Your wee bit Hill and Glen,
And stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.
The Hills are bare now,
And Autumn leaves
lie thick and still,
O'er land that is lost now,
Which those so dearly held,
That stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.
Those days are past now,
And in the past
they must remain,
But we can still rise now,
And be the nation again,
That stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.
Flower of Scotland,
When will we see
your like again,
That fought and died for,
Your wee bit Hill and Glen,
And stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.
What they are singing about is the Battle of Bannockburn which took place in 1324. It is one of the few battles with the English that Scotland won. The song is however much later than the battle. It was composed in the mid-1960s by Roy Williamson of the folk group the Corries.
The thing that disturbs me about it is that it is hate-based. It is a song of hatred of the English. And you have to note above how devotedly it is sung by a whole stadium of apparently ordinary people. It is heartfelt among them. That they should be enthusiastic about antything that took place in 1324 is absurd. It is not that event which moves the singers in the video. It is hatred and contempt for their Southern neighbours that the event inspires.
The Left sometimes conflate nationalism and patriotism. It is part of their theory of "ethnocentrism". But that is typical of their slipperiness. All nationalists are patriots but not all patriots are nationaists. Nationalists dislike other nations. Patriots just like their own nation.
Americans are highly likely to be patriotic but nationalism among them is virtually unknown -- except for a regrettable period in the "progressive" era associated mostly with Theodore Roosevelt over 100 years ago. See
I have actually done some published survey research on patriotism and consistently found that liking for your own group did NOT imply dislike of "outgroups"
http://jonjayray.com/genrace.html
http://jonjayray.com/disutil.html
http://jonjayray.com/racethno.html
And Scottish hatred of the English has been disastrous for them. They lost many bloody battles. And hatred begrets hatred regardless of who "started" it. The Bhagavad Gita tells us that it is sometimes better to let our opponent win but the Gita has never had much of a following in Scotland. Matthew 5:38-40 has simlar advice but that too appears to have had no influence
I have personally experienced Scottish hatred of the English, as have many Australians. Scots cannot usually tell the difference between an educated Australian accent and RP, so when Australians go to Scotland, the Scots initially assume that we are English. They think we "sound like the TV", as one of my survey interviewees put it.
Wise Australians, however, hasten to undo that impression: "We are Australians, not English", we say. And the effect of that can be a wonder to behold. Scots see Australians as fellow "victims" of the English so the initial "dour" attitude towards us can immediately be replaced by a very warm one. We are suddenly friends and are treated accordingly. How sad that an accent can make such a diffrence.
So, as always, I can only deplore hatred. The current outpouring of hatred of Jews and Israel coming from the Left over Gaza shows how it can subvert all reason
JR
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Are blacks stressed by living among whites?
There is no scientific evidence for it but it suits the Left to believe it. For a REAL stressful environment try any city in Nigeria. If blacks can survive there, an American environment should be a doddle
In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While activist minister Jesse Jackson and health care leaders were decrying the crisis of “babies having babies” as a ghetto pathology, Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to urban poverty where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.
Although Geronimus’ claims gained little traction at the time, the concept she pioneered – “weathering” – eventually became a foundation for the social justice ideology that is now upending medicine and social policy. She has stated in interviews and in her writings that the term “weathering” was intended to evoke the idea of erosion and resilience.
A white professor at the University of Michigan whom The New York Times hailed last year as an “icon,” Geronimus has combined race theory with data and statistics to argue that the chronic stress of living in an oppressive, white-majority society causes damage at the cellular level and leads to obesity and other health conditions, resulting in shorter life expectancies for African Americans. In more than 130 published studies, she has expanded the weathering hypothesis from an explanation of poverty harming one’s health into a dystopian sociological worldview that identifies middle-class assimilation and professional striving within the “American Creed” of hard work as the silent killers of people of color.
“Living life according to the dominant social norms of personal responsibility and virtue is not universally health?promoting,” Geronimus wrote in a Harvard Public Health essay last year. “On the contrary: if you’re Black, working hard and playing by the rules can be part of what kills you.”
The subject of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and thousands of citations, the weathering hypothesis is now widely taught in public health schools and accepted as perhaps the most plausible scientific explanation of how American society grinds down black and brown bodies. And the weathering paradox – that “relatively young people can be biologically old” – is now influencing policy decisions at all levels of governance.
Geronimus’ hypothesis was the foundation of many of the policy decisions of the White House COVID-19 health equity task force. In New Hampshire, the governor’s COVID-19 Equity Response Team issued a report and recommendations in 2020, citing weathering (and “racial battle fatigue”) as documented and established realities of American life. Weathering was recently extended beyond American people of color and accepted as evidence in federal courts to win early release of non-white detainees, some as young as their 30s, who were deemed to be prematurely aged and therefore at higher risk for COVID complications.
Some critics are beginning to push back against what they see as the heavy-handed, COVID-era politicization of healthcare. Ian Kingsbury, research director at Do No Harm, a nonprofit that seeks to keep identity politics out of medicine, said the uncritical acceptance of the weathering hypothesis as factual science has created an aura of invincibility.
“Unfortunately, judges and other policymakers look to academic journals to be authoritative and trustworthy voices on what is evidence and what is science,” said Kingsbury. “And so you sneak this stuff in there and, unfortunately, as far as a lot of people are concerned, you’ve created knowledge.”
More broadly, Boston University public health dean Sandro Galea warned in a new book, “Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time,” that his profession has veered into overcorrection and revolutionary excess. Galea doesn’t name names in his book, but he rebukes public health advocates for favoring political narratives over empirical data, denying the reality of social progress, and fixating on a utopian quest “to create a world free of risk.”
Geronimus' research on weathering's damage to blacks in a white world: "It’s the physiological consequence of being vigilant all the time or what we also call ‘managing your social identity’ or code-switching: various ways you try to put on your A-game and do what you need for the people around you to respect you and not to fear you."
The rise and reach of Geronimus’ weathering hypothesis – a once obscure and idiosyncratic idea that is becoming conventional wisdom in medicine – provides a window into how activist rhetoric and social justice ideology pioneered by feminist, queer, and critical race theorists are recasting healthcare as a Machiavellian power struggle between the privileged and the oppressed.
The public health field has long focused on “social determinants of health,” such as one’s environment and socioeconomic status, as contributors to health outcomes. The weathering hypothesis takes political empowerment to the next level, by medicalizing social relations and politicizing medicine. Weathering prefigured the recent flood of medical research that centers race in public policy and supplies the rationale for such moves as 265 public authorities declaring racism as a public health crisis; health officials jettisoning colorblindness and prioritizing people of color for COVID vaccinations and heart treatment; and medical schools training future doctors in social justice activism.
In her 2023 book, “Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society,” Geronimus sweeps across time and space, omnisciently diagnosing celebrities and public figures with weathering. She claims it explains why Martin Luther King Jr. had the damaged heart of a 60-year-old when he was assassinated at age 39 and why Fannie Lou Hamer died of breast cancer and complications of hypertension at age 59. She asserts that the trauma of being black in America is one reason why tennis greats Serena Williams had life-threatening blood clots at age 36, and why Arthur Ashe had a heart attack at age 36.
“Success comes at a spectacularly high health cost for those who have to fight the hardest to achieve it in the context of a society that doesn’t value them,” Geronimus stated in her book. “Structural violence is insidious, pervasive, and fateful. It is the fundamental cause of weathering, and it is entirely ignored in the age-washing narrative.”
It is amply documented that African Americans of all social classes have worse health outcomes, earlier onset of chronic diseases, and average life expectancies reported as five to six years less than whites. Weathering science, as Geronimus calls it, measures various biomarkers of what is presumed to be psychosocial stress – such as cortisol levels, telomere lengths, cytokine storms, and allostatic loads – to make the case that on average black adults are as much as 10 years older biologically than white people of a comparable chronological age.
But the data is complicated, requires interpretation, and doesn’t always add up. For example, in a 2021 study, a gerontology scholar at the University of Southern California assessed 13 measures of epigenetic aging. It found that some of the measures indicate accelerated aging among African Americans, while others indicate slower aging for African Americans. Epigenetics refers to the way genes function or malfunction under environmental stress and cultural conditions; most of these “epigenetic clocks” associate accelerated aging with obesity and lifetime smoking. This research, noting “the lack of expected effects of race and ethnicity,” suggests that there is no gold standard for measuring premature aging, and that weathering research is highly sensitive to the variables and measures that researchers select.
Nevertheless, Geronimus compares the African American experience of living and working among white people to the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush of a prehistoric human fleeing a cheetah – except, she says, that a 21st-century black person in a majority white society is trapped in that high-stress mode all day, every day, without reprieve, resulting in a flood of stress hormones that dysregulate the body.
Fluent in the language of social justice activism, Geronimus describes American society as a relentless onslaught of “microaggressions,” “othering,” “existential insults,” “daily indignities,” “voice erasure,” “identity threat” and other forms of “cultural oppression” that lead to early death. In response to those ever-present dangers in “the privileged space known as whiteness,” black people are constantly forced to adopt “high effort coping strategies” that Geronimus describes as “identity management” and “identity safety.” In a 2015 study titled “Black Lives Matter,” Geronimus and her co-authors estimated that racism and weathering caused 2.7 million “excess black deaths” in the United States between 1970 and 2004, a death toll of genocidal proportions.
This one-dimensional way of analyzing social relations has the effect of privileging the stress of those presumed to be oppressed, said Stanley Goldfarb, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and founder and chairman of the Do No Harm nonprofit.
“The problem with the theory is that these hormones and these stress responses don’t know what skin color you have,” Goldfarb said. “The point is: What’s unique about their stress? The point isn’t that stress is bad. The point is you decided that your stress is unique and different from everybody else’s stress.”
Still, weathering is an attractive explanation to researchers because the link between psychosocial stress and physical wear and tear is consistent with lower life expectancy for African Americans and lower-income people.
Moreover, the hypothesis is “very intuitive” to economists because of its similarity to modeling health depreciation, and to social scientists who seek explanations of differential outcomes, said economist Robert Kaestner, a University of Chicago public policy professor who co-authored a weathering study with Geronimus in 2009.
However, weathering studies do not actually measure stress or racism, but only correlate biological metrics back to the weathering hypothesis. The scientific conundrum is that the same biological evidence that supports weathering could also be “consistent with a lot of other things,” Kaestner said in a phone interview. “It’s always a measurement problem.”
“Weathering is a hypothesis, still in search of definitive evidence,” Kaestner said. “I’ve never seen one [study] – including my own – where it’s a definitive study that this really is a smoking gun that racism or prolonged psychosocial stress causes adverse health outcomes.”
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Teachers Sue Gavin Newsom Over Policy Forcing Them to Lie About Student’s Transgender Status to Parents
Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, two teachers at Rincon Middle School in Escondido, sued the Escondido Union School District in April, alleging violations of their First Amendment rights. They allege that the school district’s “Parental Exclusion Policy” prevents teachers from disclosing “the fact that a student identifies as a new gender, or wants to be addressed by a new name or new pronouns during the school day.”
The teachers added Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta to the lawsuit last month.
“The governor is the boss,” Paul Jonna, the lawyer representing Mirabelli and West, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. Newsom “has ultimate responsibility for setting education policy for those under his supervision,” Jonna, special counsel at the Thomas More Society and partner at the firm LiMandri and Jonna LLP, added.
“Rincon Middle School and the Escondido Union School District do not operate in a vacuum,” he noted. “The California Constitution provides that education is ultimately a matter of state responsibility.”
The lawsuit alleges a school district procedure titled the “Parental Exclusion Policy” prevents teachers from disclosing “the fact that a student identifies as a new gender, or wants to be addressed by a new name or new pronouns during the school day.”
The legal nonprofit Thomas More Society, which is representing Mirabelli and West, claims that “the district outright refused to exempt the teachers from the Parental Exclusion Policy—compelling them to systematically deceive the parents of their students.”
In August 2022, the teachers received an email with a list of students, including their preferred names and pronouns. The list included directions on whether teachers could disclose the names and pronouns to the students’ parents or guardians. Mirabelli reportedly received an email with a list of students like this: “[student name]: Preferred name is [redacted] (pronouns are he/him). Dad and stepmom are NOT aware, please use [redacted] and she/her when calling home.”
Mirabelli and West claim the policy violates their First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of religion.
In September, a U.S. district court judge granted a preliminary injunction preventing the school district from enforcing the Parental Exclusion Policy on Mirabelli and West.
Judge Rodger T. Benitez called the policy a “trifecta of harm:”
It [the policy] harms the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse. It harms the parents by depriving them of the long recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children. And finally, it harms plaintiffs who are compelled to violate the parent’s rights by forcing plaintiffs to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students—violating plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.
In January, the educators added Newsom and Bonta to the lawsuit, claiming that the school district is acting under their direction in attempting to enforce “state and federal anti-discrimination law.”
The California Department of Education has interpreted the law to require school districts to hide students’ transgender identity from certain parents on pain of state education funds.
The amended legal complaint also says that “according to the attorney general, the State of California will sue any school district who fails to adopt these policies.”
Bonta “has been threatening school districts to adopt policies to conceal student gender incongruity from parents and legal guardians, pitting students, parents, and schools against each other,” Jonna, the teachers’ lawyer, said.
He said Benitez’s order deemed those policies unconstitutional, and the attorney general has shown no willingness to follow it.
“Bonta’s actions have demonstrated the state of California is not taking any actions to comply with Judge Benitez’s orders, so he will now be made to,” Jonna said.
Jonna says his clients are also desiring “a declaration that the parental exclusion policies violate parental rights because they cannot be forced to break the law.”
When asked to respond to Newsom’s arguments about such policies, Jonna said, “The policies are not needed to protect students—they harm students.”
“When teachers are forced to lie to the parents who have entrusted a child into their care – that is unconscionable,” he added.
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Scranton Joe and the Temple of Doom Spending
Millions of young Americans seem to have given up on their economic future, turning instead to “doom spending.” Rather than save up for a house, to start a family or for retirement—which they view as fruitless—they’re spending more than they earn without a plan to get ahead.
That’s the upshot of a recent study by Intuit, the company that makes TurboTax. It shows Americans, especially the young, are spending beyond their means to alleviate stress. But like the dieter who thinks progress is impossible and gives up trying to lose weight, these doom-spenders are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and digging the very financial abyss they fear.
The problem is becoming systemic. The study found that 96% of Americans are concerned about the economy today. (The remaining 4% are presumably politicians and their donors.) In response, 27% of Americans, about 90 million, have simply given up and turned to doom spending.
Even among those who haven’t thrown in the towel, things look bleak: Almost 60% of respondents are living paycheck to paycheck and lack sufficient savings to pay for an unexpected expense, like a major appliance breaking down. About a quarter of Americans—roughly 80 million—have zero savings.
And things aren’t improving, with half of respondents saying economic conditions have deteriorated further in the last six months. Pessimism is concentrated among the young, with more than 70% of Millennials and Zoomers reporting financial anxiety. A full quarter of Zoomers, those just entering the workforce, cannot even find decent-paying jobs.
That explains why more than one-third of these young Americans are doom spending, as are more than 40% of Millennials. Consequently, adults under 30 are moving back in with their parents at rates not seen since the Great Depression, giving up on the American dream of homeownership.
What used to be the most common age to start a family—mid to late 20s—is now the exact point Americans instead give up and resign to living for today.
Like many problems, this one started in Washington, D.C.
To finance perpetual government deficit spending, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates artificially low for almost two decades, creating money for the politicians to spend. That devalued the dollar and imposed a hidden tax of inflation, which sapped the value of savings and gutted the real return on investment, while simultaneously incentivizing spendthrift behavior.
It also grossly distorted prices and created misallocations of capital. Take the construction of densely packed apartments instead of homes. This drove up home prices, helping make homeownership the exclusive purview of the wealthy. Meanwhile, those same interest rates that drove inflation suckered people to go into debt for worthless college degrees while racking up more than $1 trillion in new credit-card debt that now has an average interest rate of over 21%.
At this point, horrendous fiscal and monetary policy have created two whole generations of Americans who have largely given up. They don’t believe it’s possible to ever afford their own homes and to afford the lifestyle in which they themselves were raised. They live only for today.
The tree of big government has born its noxious fruit of inflation, and those who have tasted it have contracted hedonism.
After all, why scrimp and save for something in the future when the real value of those savings is taxed away through inflation? If with each passing year as home prices climb faster than incomes, an adequate down payment will be forever out of reach, leaving the young to rent with roommates for life or move back in with their parents.
Instead of running to exhaustion on this treadmill, young Americans have thrown up their hands. The end result is a broader cultural decline where family formation, community stability and the perpetuation of American ideals have lost value in the minds of our youth. They become abstract, unattainable, old-fashioned luxuries for a previous generation.
This assault on the young continues with Bidenomics, which has added another $6.5 trillion to the national debt, created 40-year-high inflation, and produced record costs of home ownership. So long as the uniparty in D.C. keeps spending like there’s no tomorrow, America’s youth will believe there’s no tomorrow for them.
https://www.heritage.org/markets-and-finance/commentary/scranton-joe-and-the-temple-doom-spending
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18 February, 2024
America's Hostile Overclass
What does America's overclass think of the rest of us? The short answer is "not much." They think ordinary people's splurging on natural resources is destroying the planet and needs to be cut back forcefully. And that the government needs to stamp down on ordinary people enjoying luxuries that, in their view, should be reserved for the top elites.
These are the implications of the results of two surveys of elite people conducted by pollster Scott Rasmussen by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, an organization that supports low tax rates and low government spending. The surveys covered not large swaths of the population but were confined to the top 1% of society.
One survey, the Elite, included only respondents with postgraduate degrees, household incomes above $150,000 and residents in a ZIP code with more than 10,000 people per square mile. Another, Ivy League graduates, included adults who attended Ivy League or other selective private colleges such as Chicago, Duke, Northwestern or Stanford.
You probably won't be surprised that the large majority of this Elite feels economically well off. Nor, if you've kept up with recent changes in party identification, will you be much surprised that 73% of these elites identify as Democrats and only 14% as Republicans.
What is surprising is the extent to which this American overclass would deprive its fellow citizens of things they have taken for granted. Half of these groups, 47% of Elites and 55% of Ivies, say the United States provides people with "too much individual freedom."
More than three-quarters favor, "to fight climate change, the strict rationing of energy, gas, and meat," a proposition rejected by 63% of the public. Again, "to fight climate change," between half and two-thirds favor bans on gas stoves (a recent target despite demurrals of Biden bureaucrats and New York state Democrats), gasoline-powered cars (heavily disfavored by Biden Democrats and California rules) and SUVs, "private" air conditioning and "nonessential air travel."
The ascetic economist Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 book "The Theory of the Leisure Class," argued that the rich engaged in "conspicuous consumption" activities such as golf, polo and art collecting, for which ordinary people had neither the time nor the money.
A century and a quarter later, America has rich people hoping to deprive ordinary people of "conspicuous consumption" activities they can afford and where they clutter up the airports, interstate highways and high-end malls.
For generations, Democrats have liked to portray themselves as the tribune of the little man, the defender of policies that enable ordinary people without special advantages, or with many disadvantages, to live comfortably, securely and in dignity. There may be some condescension in this posture, but also a considerable element of respect.
This survey shows that today, this 1% of the public, which includes virtually all elective and appointive Democrats in Washington and states like California, New York and New Jersey, tends to see the bulk of its fellow citizens as selfish and destructive, in need not just of discipline but deserving of harsh restrictions on their freedoms.
This attitude is echoed by the wider group of Democratic voters. A 2023 Pew Research survey shows that while 31% of Republicans, even with their party out of power, think America "stands above all other countries in the world," only 9% of Democrats do so.
It's an unstable and dangerous situation when a largely one-party elite looks, with fear and loathing, across what Rasmussen describes as a "Grand Canyon gap" between it and its multiparty fellow citizens. It's reminiscent somehow of the "let them eat cake" French royalists in 1789 or Russian nobles in 1917. An overclass this disconnected and contemptuous risks disruption.
A better approach comes from an undoubted member of America's elite, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Speaking to CNBC at Davos last month, Dimon recounted a bus trip to Spokane and Boise and Bozeman: "People are growing. They're hungry to grow. They're innovating. It's everywhere. It's not just Silicon Valley."
Perhaps aware the Mountain West votes Republican, Dimon, who calls himself a centrist Democrat, conceded that former President Donald Trump "wasn't wrong about some of the critical issues" and was "kind of right" about NATO and immigration and "grew the economy quite well."
Of elite Democrats' contempt for Trump supporters, he had less to say. "The Democrats have done a good job with the deplorables, hugging their Bibles and their beer and their guns. I mean, really? Can we stop that stuff and actually grow up and treat other people respectfully and listen to them a little bit?"
It's a question other members of our dysfunctional overclass might ask themselves.
https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2024/02/16/americas-dysfunctional-overclass-n2635314
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Understated by Feds, Through-the-Roof Housing Inflation Is Crushing Would-Be American Homeowners
Business headlines say that inflation is down, yet countless Americans are struggling, particularly with finding somewhere affordable to live.
How do we reconcile these seemingly contradictory notions? First, lower inflation means prices are rising slower, but still rising. Second, housing inflation is being undercounted by official government metrics as much as 4-to-1.
The consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is designed to measure the cost increase of a common basket of goods. Surprisingly, though, it doesn’t include the cost of housing.
The CPI tries to capture consumption, but not anything considered an investment, which would include a home and any improvements to it, like installing a swimming pool. Similarly, things like the chlorine tablets used to maintain the swimming pool are also excluded since they’re considered part of an investment.
This isn’t a trivial fact, because when the price of those tablets skyrocketed more than 200% in 2022, that increase was nowhere to be found in the CPI. This is just one example of how the index undercounted the increase in the cost of living for many Americans.
While it doesn’t directly measure the cost of homeownership, the CPI does try to estimate it by looking at renter surveys. Basically, the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses the responses in these surveys to estimate not only the change in the cost of renting, but also the change in the cost of homeownership through a category called “owner’s equivalent rent.”
If the cost of rent increases at the same rate as the cost of homeownership, then this methodology should theoretically create an accurate measurement of the increased cost of housing overall. The problem today is that the cost of homeownership has risen much faster than rents over the past three years.
Although rents are at a record high today, the premium to own a home vs. renting one has never been so large before. According to the CPI, rents have gone up 19.5% over the last three years, and the more-encompassing shelter component of the CPI has risen 19.4% over the same time.
According to the National Association of Realtors, however, the median sales price of existing homes is up 23.7% in the past three years. And interest rates on mortgages have more than doubled in that time, increasing the monthly mortgage payment even more.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta compiles a monthly homeownership affordability index, which estimates the cost to own a median-price home and compares that with the median household income. The index looks at not just how much a homeowner would need to pay in principal and interest, but also homeowners’ insurance, taxes, and personal mortgage insurance.
In January 2021, the median price of a home was just under $300,000, while the interest rate on a 30-year mortgage was 2.7%. All in all, it costs $1,600 a month to afford a home, which is 28% of the median household income. That’s one of the most affordable ratios since the Atlanta Fed started keeping track of this metric in 2006.
By November 2023 (the most recent period for which figures are available), things had deteriorated. In just under three years, the price of a median home shot up to $363,000, while interest rates were 7.4%. Taxes and insurance also skyrocketed, helping drive the monthly cost of homeownership to an eye-opening $2,831.
That’s a 77% increase in just three years or four times the increase in rent counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It now takes 43.9% of the median household income to afford a median-price home. But note that this is before-tax income. After taxes, it takes well over half of the median household income to own a median-price home.
The stratospheric cost of homeownership has led many American families to cut corners wherever possible. That’s why 18 million Americans today are doing without homeowners insurance. The untenable cost of living has forced them to roll the dice on their financial futures.
But neither the exorbitant cost of owning a home, nor the drop in insurance coverage is incorporated in the CPI. This undercounting of inflation is a key reason why so many people disapprove of the economy despite the official metrics improving. Flawed statistics won’t help cover your unaffordable mortgage.
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Oakland restaurant owner says city needs more cops, crime problem ‘worst I’ve ever seen’: ‘It’s scary’
Stories about high-profile companies in Oakland closing shop or hiring extra security have made grim headlines in recent months.
But it’s not just corporations that are feeling the crunch of increased crime in the Bay Area.
One local Oakland restaurant owner bluntly told Fox News Digital that the city where she’s spent nearly all her 45 years is “the worst I’ve ever seen it.”
Target closed its downtown Oakland location last year after police responded to more than 100 smash-and-grab thefts and similar incidents in 2023.
In-N-Out recently announced its sole Oakland burger joint was closing, the first time in the company’s history it had to make such a decision, due to rampant burglaries, property damage and armed robberies in the area.
A Denny’s also closed down last month because of the crime epidemic.
Then there’s Blue Shield, Clorox, and Kaiser Permanente, the largest employer in Oakland, who have issued warnings to employees, hired security guards or taken other actions in response to a crime surge in the city.
Weyanti Ahmed, who runs Y’s Choice restaurant in the city’s Jack London district near the waterfront, says the developments show Oakland won’t begin to thrive until it makes serious changes.
The neighborhood has been beset by rising crime, forcing local hubs to close or raise prices in response.
“It’s scary for business owners,” she told Fox News Digital.
“It’s scary for even a citizen just walking down the street. It’s just not comfortable. You’re always on guard, and it’s absolutely affected my business tremendously.”
She described one particularly terrifying incident in December when a shooting occurred near the restaurant while she had customers inside.
She has seven employees, and she says she no longer allows them to use public transportation if they don’t have their own vehicle.
“There’s just not enough police presence in Oakland,” she said. “Especially in our area, like downtown, Jack London, it’s a tourist attraction. So it only makes sense for a lot of the crimes to happen there, because they know a lot of tourists are down there.”
One woman told local outlet KTVU last year the once-vibrant district was turning into a “ghost town,” recounting seeing cars broken into in broad daylight while she walked her dog.
Another man said, “this could be a vibrant community but it ain’t right now.” “Defund the police? That don’t work,” he said.
Ahmed says she and her fellow business owners in the neighborhood do their best to look out for one another, but they’re limited in what they can do.
She’s been forced to rely more on delivery apps like DoorDash and Grubhub because people don’t feel comfortable dining at her restaurant, which specializes in soul and seafood.
She also said she’s considered closing down her own location because of how many dine-in customers she’s lost.
“So when you’re going to have dinner or lunch or whatever it is, and then you go outside and your car’s broken into, that $30 meal has now cost you over $230,” she said.
“Would you go back? Probably not… The whole dining experience in Jack London, it’s just not going to happen because no one is comfortable to sit down and eat.”
Oakland is the county seat of Alameda County, whose District Attorney Pamela Price has faced criticism for being perceived as soft on crime with her progressive policies, including such measures and efforts as not trying juveniles as adults, seeking lower sentences and probation for more crimes, and doing away with special-circumstance sentencing enhancements.
Oakland is also without a permanent police chief at the moment, and Ahmed said she’s “fed up” and disappointed with Democratic Mayor Sheng Thao and the City Council.
https://nypost.com/2024/02/16/business/oakland-restaurant-owner-slams-citys-crime-problem/
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They do hate us
They are trying to destroy America, of course, because Leftist ideology is built upon power and control of others, regardless of how many people they must kill, maim, torture, imprison, enslave, terrorize, or otherwise oppress and cower into obedience. Liberty is the enemy of power. Thus, true American values are the enemy of Leftism and totalitarianism, thus the enemy of the Democratic Party. That the political party largely established by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison has become such a hater of America and freedom is one of the saddest tales of history.
To repeat, true American values—those so proudly proclaimed to the world in our Declaration of Independence—are the enemy of Leftism and totalitarianism. The United States is not, has not been, and never will be a perfect country because we have been, are, and always will be composed of imperfect human beings, of which modern-day Democrats are the worst America has ever produced. But, despite its faults, this America has also done countless good deeds in its history, without which these modern-day hate-America Leftist hypocrites would not be able to do what they do and are trying to do, i.e., destroy the very country that has given them the freedom to make the very attempt at the destruction they are making.
Which nation was it, in the 20th century, that fought two world wars that were really none of its business but had to fight because it was brutally attacked by freedom-loathing, totalitarian regimes who wanted power they had no right to have? Great Americans—twice—in two world wars shed their blood to save Europe and the world. If it wasn’t for America, how many extra people on earth today would be speaking German or Japanese? I told more than one Chinese when I lived there, “If it wasn’t for America, you’d be speaking Japanese now.” It was a thought they had never contemplated because their Leftist, freedom-hating, murderous, totalitarian government wouldn’t allow them to.
Further, which country was it that led the world in defeating the most horrible, homicidal philosophy—atheistic communism led by the Soviet Union—mankind has ever seen? At one point, half the world’s population lived under a despotic communist regime. Who stopped that? Who put an end to it? The United States of America did, thank you, and especially, thank you, Ronald Reagan. We probably could save a billion and half more people from communism today if only we had a President who believed in something other than the perversion of perverts, who truly cared about human rights and prosperity, and who didn’t love China and hate his own country.
And speaking of human rights, which country was it that announced the sublime truths, “all men are created equal, that their Creator endows them with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”? Which country was it that led itself and the world out of thousands of years of human bondage and slavery? Which country was it that pointed the world to freedom and gave all its citizens equality under the law? Which country was it that has been the most prosperous, richest nation in human history, so wealthy that its current government has wasted countless trillions of dollars on useless projects, at home and abroad, and its people are STILL the wealthiest the world has ever seen?
I’ll tell you, for you Leftists who know nothing about true American history—the United States of America, the greatest country the world has ever seen, the country YOU are trying to destroy, did all of that. It’s still a magnificent country, even with Biden, Pelosi, Obama, Schumer, and McConnell plaguing it. And they are plaguing it ONLY because America IS a magnificent country. Do you think the Soviet Union or communist China would allow Uniparty politicians to do to THEM what they are trying to do to America? Nancy, believe me, you would have been in a gulag a long time ago, but only if the Cheka or KGB hadn’t first put a bullet in your empty, hypocritical skull or Xi Jinping hadn’t cut your guts out. They eat their own, too.
America remains a great country because there remain some great people in it. People akin to those who were willing to die in two world wars and fight godless communism to save the world from tyrannical, power-hungry, murderous, megalomaniacal Leftists. People who truly believe that “all men are created equal”—TRULY believe it, not like Leftists—and who hate slavery and human oppression and never want to see it anywhere, ever again. People who still believe in God and “go and sin no more” and who are willing to allow their hard-earned tax dollars to be given to innumerable people, at home and abroad, who don’t deserve a penny of it. But they are willing to do that because those are the kinds of people they are and the sacrifices they are prepared to make for America.
But, honestly, we ARE getting a wee bit weary of it. And we are getting tired of it, Leftist, because of people like you who are the exact opposite of true American greatness.
We know you want to bring down and destroy the greatest country the world has ever seen. We aren’t blind anymore; we can see it now. And we are going to fight you every step of the way. You’ll destroy America, the world’s only hope, over our dead bodies.
And don’t think we won’t take a whole lot of you with us. We fought to save Europe, Asia, and the world. We’ll certainly do whatever is necessary to save America.
America is still the greatest country in the world. It has been since July 4, 1776. Oh, Leftist, July 4, 1776, is the day America became independent. You probably don’t even know that.
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15 February, 2024
‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point
Once again this destruction can be traced to the Left. If "there is no such thing as truth", why not put out false claims about global warming, vaccine safety, sexual mutilation of minors and all the rest. No credibilty without replication must now be the watchword
Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.
Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.
“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”
The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations – known as “paper mills” – began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.
The practice has since spread to India, Iran, Russia, former Soviet Union states and eastern Europe, with paper mills supplying fabricated studies to more and more journals as increasing numbers of young scientists try to boost their careers by claiming false research experience. In some cases, journal editors have been bribed to accept articles, while paper mills have managed to establish their own agents as guest editors who then allow reams of falsified work to be published.
“Editors are not fulfilling their roles properly, and peer reviewers are not doing their jobs. And some are being paid large sums of money,” said Professor Alison Avenell of Aberdeen University. “It is deeply worrying.”
The products of paper mills often look like regular articles but are based on templates in which names of genes or diseases are slotted in at random among fictitious tables and figures. Worryingly, these articles can then get incorporated into large databases used by those working on drug discovery.
Others are more bizarre and include research unrelated to a journal’s field, making it clear that no peer review has taken place in relation to that article. An example is a paper on Marxist ideology that appeared in the journal Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine. Others are distinctive because of the strange language they use, including references to “bosom peril” rather than breast cancer and “Parkinson’s ailment” rather Parkinson’s disease.
Watchdog groups – such as Retraction Watch – have tracked the problem and have noted retractions by journals that were forced to act on occasions when fabrications were uncovered. One study, by Nature, revealed that in 2013 there were just over 1,000 retractions. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.
Of this last total, more than 8,000 retracted papers had been published in journals owned by Hindawi, a subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, figures that have now forced the company to act. “We will be sunsetting the Hindawi brand and have begun to fully integrate the 200-plus Hindawi journals into Wiley’s portfolio,” a Wiley spokesperson told the Observer.
The spokesperson added that Wiley had now identified hundreds of fraudsters present in its portfolio of journals, as well as those who had held guest editorial roles. “We have removed them from our systems and will continue to take a proactive … approach in our efforts to clean up the scholarly record, strengthen our integrity processes and contribute to cross-industry solutions.”
But Wiley insisted it could not tackle the crisis on its own, a message echoed by other publishers, which say they are under siege from paper mills. Academics remain cautious, however. The problem is that in many countries, academics are paid according to the number of papers they have published.
“If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivised to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm,” said Professor Marcus Munafo of Bristol University. “That is exactly what we have now.”
The harm done by publishing poor or fabricated research is demonstrated by the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. Early laboratory studies indicated it could be used to treat Covid-19 and it was hailed as a miracle drug. However, it was later found these studies showed clear evidence of fraud, and medical authorities have refused to back it as a treatment for Covid.
“The trouble was, ivermectin was used by anti-vaxxers to say: ‘We don’t need vaccination because we have this wonder drug,’” said Jack Wilkinson at Manchester University. “But many of the trials that underpinned those claims were not authentic.”
Wilkinson added that he and his colleagues were trying to develop protocols that researchers could apply to reveal the authenticity of studies that they might include in their own work. “Some great science came out during the pandemic, but there was an ocean of rubbish research too. We need ways to pinpoint poor data right from the start.”
The danger posed by the rise of the paper mill and fraudulent research papers was also stressed by Professor Malcolm MacLeod of Edinburgh University. “If, as a scientist, I want to check all the papers about a particular drug that might target cancers or stroke cases, it is very hard for me to avoid those that are fabricated. Scientific knowledge is being polluted by made-up material. We are facing a crisis.”
This point was backed by Bishop: “People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science and could end up running scientific institutes and eventually be used by mainstream journals as reviewers and editors. Corruption is creeping into the system.”
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Why progressives don’t face real consequences
One of the most tedious and repetitive observations made in the often tedious and repetitive discourse around cancel culture is the notion that ‘freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences’. This slightly sinister cliché is the progressive version of ‘well, think on, you wouldn’t have been shot if you hadn’t been trying to escape’. It is usually offered forth as if it is somehow a seismic statement.
Some clumsy clots – the hapless Graham Norton last year, for example, when discussing JK Rowling – have even tried to frame cancel culture as ‘accountability culture’ or ‘consequences culture’. But it strikes me that there is a shadow image of cancel culture that we might call ‘no consequences culture’.
As I write, the story of Azhar Ali, the Labour candidate in the Rochdale by-election, is still developing. Ali was recorded spouting the conspiracy theory that the Israeli government had deliberately allowed Hamas to rape and massacre its citizens on October 7th. This is a modern version of the ancient blood libel against the Jews.
Ali made a quick apology. And bish bash bosh, all was forgiven by the Labour party, which stood by him until Monday evening. Even then the party only withdrew its support for the candidate after ‘new information about further comments’ made by him came to light. Ali may well still become an MP – who votes with Labour in the Commons – if he is elected. It is, apparently, procedurally too late to switch him off the ballot, so he will still be the Labour candidate in the by-election.
Frontbencher Lisa Nandy was campaigning right alongside him on Sunday, after the revelation. (In a grim irony this was at a ‘women’s Q&A session’.) Another frontbencher, Pat McFadden, looked even more android-like than usual as his speech circuits informed Trevor Philips on Sunday that Ali’s ethnic conspiracy was ‘totally wrong’ but that he would remain the Labour candidate in Rochdale.
This is a model illustration of where cultural and political power actually resides in modern Britain. Racism is supposedly our biggest taboo. Labour are planning to bring in a Race Equality Act. But you can spout the nastiest racial conspiracies about Jews, drop a quick apology, and the party will rush to your defence.
Diane Abbott and Kate Osamor have both had the Labour whip removed, for lesser though still egregious, outbursts. But the party was perfectly able to come to Ali’s aid. As Lord Frost tweeted before the suspension, ‘The only possible explanation is that (Labour) fear (dropping Ali) will have worse consequences within their party than doing nothing and hoping it all goes away.’
This is just the latest example of no real comeback for serious lapses. Here are some more. Nancy Kelley, the disastrous former CEO of Stonewall, described lesbians as ‘sexual racists’ if they refused to entertain the idea of having sex with ‘trans women’ and suggested gender-critical groups were akin to anti-Semites. A pretty spectacular slip, you’d think, for the head of a gay rights charity. But somehow this bizarre outburst didn’t beleaguer Kelley at all, and she is now part of the team leading Lesbian Visibility Week. Then we have the tube driver who led a ‘free Palestine’ chant on his train – slapped wrist, back on duty. We don’t even know who it was that authorised or facilitated the transfer of Scarlett Jenkinson to a new school and neglected to inform them that she had poisoned a classmate at her old one. This person or persons, whose actions put children directly in danger and led to the horrible murder of Brianna Ghey, has been totally forgotten. Nobody seems even to be asking who they are, or how to ensure such a situation cannot happen again.
Whereas, as we know, there are ‘consequences’ galore for trivialities, bad taste, gaffes and opinions expressed that aren’t a part of the ‘progressive’ package.
It might be said that when an apology is forthcoming then good manners and Christian forgiveness should mean a transgressor is given a second chance. But a grovel and a touch of the forelock only works if you are on the correct side. It is inconceivable, for example, that a parliamentary candidate who had said what Ali did about any other ethnic minority and then apologised would be backed by a mainstream political party.
There are no real consequences for such people because they are progressives, and their progressive confreres control all of the institutions. Most of the press and broadcast media don’t even notice their transgressions and they slip quickly off the media and down the memory hole – who even remembers that actress Maxine Peake spouted a bizarre anti-Israel conspiracy about the death of George Floyd? Who even remembers that Lisa Forbes, former Labour MP for Peterborough, said ‘I have enjoyed reading this thread so much’ under a Facebook post that claimed Isis was created and funded by Israel?
There’s one law for progressive and non-progressive alike, but the punishments differ.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/why-progressives-dont-face-real-consequences
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The Lord is with Gen Z! Catholic core sweeps TikTok as devout youngsters share their advice for wearing veils, show off their rosary beads and embrace the full Latin mass
From Madonna's Like a Prayer video featuring stigmata and a kiss with a saint to Lady Gaga as Mary Magdalene going clubbing with Jesus in her son Judas, Catholic iconography has long been deeply embedded in popular culture.
But Gen Z are taking it one step further with so-called Catholic core sweeping Tiktok, and rather than just borrowing the aesthetic, 18 to 25-year-olds are fully embracing religion.
From showing off their rosary beads to 20-something priests asking their followers to rate 'their fit' on vestments, many are sharing their love of God online.
The beliefs, it seems, as are important as the aesthetic, with people sharing clips of pretty churches, Catholic statues and even church 'OOTD' (outfits of the day), including lace mantillas.
Many sharing their faith online weren't raised Catholics but are converts to the religion.
Maya, 22, who grew up as a 'feminist with purple hair' in Czechia, which she describes as an 'atheist country', has built up a following online going by the 'veiled convert'.
She wears a lace mantilla because she believes 'covering her hair gives all her glory to god', having built up more than 40,000 followers sharing Bible passages and pictures of religious candles, paintings of Saints and rosary beads in her home.
Maya says that she converted after suffering with her mental health during the pandemic and meeting a 'scientist' who was also a convert.
Elsewhere, Gen Z It girl Sabrina Carpenter - rumoured girlfriend of actor Barry Keoghan - recently filmed her video for hit single Feather in a Catholic church, which caused a furore.
Maya, 22, who grew up as a 'feminist with purple hair' in Czechia, which she describes as an 'atheist country', has built up a following online going by the 'veiled convert'. Pictured before and after converting
Monsignor Jamie J Gigantiello issued a grovelling apology and was sacked as church administrator after the former Disney star turned sex siren cavorted in the apse of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Brooklyn.
His furious bishop Robert Brennan was 'appalled' at the video for Feather which has now attracted 11 million views online, sprinkling the altar with holy water as he forced Gigantiello to conduct a 'Mass of Reparation'.
The video shows Carpenter, 24, arrive provocatively dressed at the church in a pink hearse for the 'funeral' of former boyfriends in front of an altar decorated with their pastel coffins, one of which includes the inscription 'RIP B****'.
'I offer my sincere apologies for this shameful representation which I whole-heartedly denounce,' Gigantiello told his parishioners in a letter posted on Facebook.
The priest, who has served at the Victorian church for 29 years said he granted permission for the video in a bid to 'further strengthen the bonds between the young creative artists who make up a large part of this community'.
The church originally claimed Carpenter's team 'failed to accurately represent the video content'.
But that did not wash with his Bronx-born bishop who concluded that he was told enough to know the video would feature 'inappropriate behaviour unsuitable for a church sanctuary'.
Elsewhere, Aussie TikTok star John is Catholic, 20, has racked up more than 100,000 TikTok followers for sharing videos about religion.
In one clip he uses cricket to explain the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism.
John's priest is Father Sam French, 30, who shares very Gen Z friendly clips. In one, he asks his followers to rate his fit, asks people to 'hmu' (hit him up) after mass, and says religious references in songs are 'fire'. He's racked up nearly a million views on TikTok for the fun videos.
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National Collegiate Athletic Association Official Resigns Over Transgender Takeover of Women’s Sports: This Is ‘Massive … Authorized Cheating’
Whatever hopes people had for a new day at the NCAA have officially died out. A year into Charlie Baker’s reign and the wildfire threatening to burn down women’s sports still rages—no thanks to the unsympathetic man at the helm.
If anything, Mark Emmert’s successor has proven to be coldly indifferent to the plight of collegiate women, refusing to even meet with victims of his transgender policy until Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., demanded it.
Now, in a stunning turn of events, Baker—a former Republican governor of Massachusetts—is facing rebellion in his own ranks, as a longtime NCAA committee member resigns in protest.
William Bock, a former general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, quit his post at the NCAA on Friday, blaming the organization’s stubborn refusal to protect girls’ sports. Bock’s departure, after eight years, is already sending shock waves through the sports ranks.
With more than a year left in his current term, Bock says he could no longer stomach the radical policy.
“Although I may not have agreed with the wisdom of every rule in the NCAA rulebook,” he wrote in his letter, “I believed the intent behind the NCAA’s rules was competitive fairness and protection of equal opportunities for student-athletes. This conviction has changed as I have watched the NCAA double down on regressive policies, which discriminate against female student-athletes.”
The Washington Examiner, first to obtain the letter, details Bock’s objections to the current requirements, which are based on reduced testosterone levels, not an athlete’s passage through puberty. While a growing number of international sports bodies recognize that hormones are just one part of the problem, the NCAA stubbornly refuses to adopt tighter restrictions.
It’s puberty, Bock argued, that gives men such a biological advantage.
“… [T]hose changes that you get through development—they don’t go away,” Bock said. “And you’re going to reduce performance by a small amount if you reduce testosterone levels, but you’re never going to bridge the gap between men and women. And so, it’s a ruse to say that testosterone suppression, it’s a level playing field, so it’s not true.”
As someone who’s worked against doping, he insists his mere presence in a “sport integrity role” is compromised when “there’s massive, essentially authorized, cheating taking place and dramatically harming women.” Bock decided that he didn’t want to help the NCAA project this lie of fairness and equity.
“… [I] needed to resign with the hope that maybe [it] will cause other people to look at the issue more closely,” he wrote.
Just this past week, a biological boy literally leapt over the girls’ teams in New Hampshire’s high-jump championship, robbing young women of their place on the podium. His winning jump, people point out, was 10 inches lower than the boys’ highest mark—but it was enough to trash real girls’ dreams.
No wonder New Hampshire is racing to join the other 25 states that have protected women’s sports.
Frankly, Baker should have seen the wave of pushback to this agenda and responded, Concerned Women for America’s Doreen Denny insisted on “Washington Watch.” But, unfortunately, “the NCAA is a coward,” she pointed out. It was a coward under Emmert, it’s “a coward to institutions that are woke. It’s a coward to the culture that wants to convince us that males can take women’s places, because they’re now female—and we know that’s just a farce.”
In the meantime, they should all be taking Bock’s resignation seriously, Denny said, because “his reasons come from his own expertise.”
“He was a part of the U.S. Doping Agency that litigated Lance Armstrong and the testosterone doping scandal that happened. And he said [that] even Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal … pales in comparison [to] the advantage that males have in women’s sports.”
To see someone like Bock step down should prompt some major “soul searching,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins suggested.
“His expertise is the wisdom that NCAA leaders should heed, but instead have rejected,” Denny agreed in a conversation with The Washington Stand. “From the start, NCAA’s policy for participation of trans-identifying male athletes in women’s sports has had no justification in law or science. In fact, it is nothing short of institutional discrimination against female athletes. It’s time for the NCAA to admit this and repeal its wrongheaded policy that is robbing collegiate women of equal opportunity in their own sports.”
“We need more people to take a stand and be courageous,” she urged. “And we just have to keep working.”
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14 February, 2024
Dating Crisis Fuels Marriage Crisis
Katrina Trinko (below) is right. When I became single in 2021 it took me nearly a year to find a new partner. I met many possibles but only one ever wanted me. But I am 80 so maybe that figures
I can see no remedy for what she describes. Both men and women say, "There's no-one out there". Almost the whole singles population is invisible. The characteristic Leftist dissatisfaction with everything seems to have spread. Christian thankfulness for our blessings would be a healthier attitude. Selfishness is self-defeating in the end.
I think dating sites have spread Leftist dissatisfaction attitudes. They have made both sexes too critical and too fussy. Realism and tolerance are in short supply.
If you’re not looking to date this Valentine’s Day, be grateful. It’s a disaster out there.
Pair the lingering effects of the sexual revolution, of a world where too often sexual pleasure is prioritized over relationships founded on love and giving, with Big Tech’s noxious dating apps, where algorithms seem far better at perpetuating singledom than finding people soulmates, and you’ve got a hellscape.
Yes, conservatives—and all Americans who value the family—rightly fret over the state of marriage in the United States.
The number of 40-year-old Americans who never have been married is higher than ever at 25%, according to Pew Research Center. The number of births per woman has plummeted to 1.6. Nor is that because women want fewer children: Almost half of women want three or more children, according to Gallup.
For conservatives, who rightly view the family as the foundation of society, these numbers are horrifying—and a siren that our culture is languishing, our social ties dissipating. Loneliness is on the rise, and unsurprisingly, so are addiction rates and suicide rates.
But as an unmarried woman in my 30s, I also realize there’s no quick fix to this situation—and that married Americans are often unaware of how bleak the current dating landscape can be. Ultimately, if we’re going to have more healthy marriages, we need to change our dating culture.
Take this new lawsuit, which highlights just how insane the current dating world is.
The plaintiff, Nikko D’Ambrosio, alleges he was defamed in a private Chicago Facebook group for women, called “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups with this name began sprouting up in 2022, allowing thousands of women to swap information—rarely of the flattering variety—about local single men.
Although this seems like a recipe for idle gossip, it was also a way for women to warn other women of the bad behavior of particular local men so they could avoid them.
D’Ambrosio says he was defamed in the Chicago Facebook group, but was unable to join it to defend himself or get the moderators to remove the posts about him. In one post mentioned in his lawsuit, a woman wrote: “Very clingy very fast. Flaunted money very awkwardly and kept talking about how I don’t want to see his bad side, especially when he was on business calls.”
Another woman wrote: “I went out with him a few times just over a year ago—he told me what I wanted to hear until I slept with him and then he ghosted … I’d steer clear.” (The term “ghosted” refers to when a romantic interest stops responding to all forms of communication without announcing a breakup or an end of contact.)
These Facebook groups of women who warn each other about bad men are hugely popular: Over 200 such groups with 3.5 million members exist worldwide, according to a GoFundMe by Paola Sanchez, the founder of this network of groups (and a defendant in the lawsuit).
The groups’ wild popularity is just another sign of the desolate dating landscape in modern times. Online dating apps promise a world of romantic fulfillment and the ability to find a soulmate who shares your values, lives locally, and may be contacted from your living room.
But instead of romantic fulfillment, online daters are finding disappointment—and betrayal. According to a 2023 study, co-authored by Stanford University professor Elias Aboujaoude, almost two-thirds of Tinder users are either married or in a romantic relationship. (Tinder, an extremely popular dating app known for promoting casual flings, disputes the findings of the survey.)
Even when would-be partners aren’t married or hiding a girlfriend, it doesn’t mean they’re exactly pure of heart, seeking to find meaningful romantic relationships. Online dating has spurred a plethora of phrases to describe bad behavior.
In addition to “ghosting,” there’s “lovebombing,” which refers to a man or woman being effusively romantic and/or discussing a long-term future, before abruptly and suddenly withdrawing contact. There’s also “breadcrumbing,” which is when a person tries to keep a romantic interest engaged by sending very occasional messages without committing more fully.
Or there’s also the awful experience of being sent, to use a popular crude term that aptly describes it, a “dick pic.” According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 56% of women and 25% of men ages 18 to 49 say they’ve received an unsolicited, sexually explicit image or message.
Bring on the wedding bells, am I right?
It’s no wonder that millions of women are trying to avoid emotional pain and find out whether other locals on Facebook can speak to a man’s character. (Although men have formed some groups of their own to judge women’s character, those groups appear far less popular.)
But of course, it’s not that women are necessarily always being fair or honest, either: Are the men they are bashing on these groups always guilty? Is crucial context being left out?
The outcome of D’Ambrosio’s lawsuit isn’t certain. (In the interim, D’Ambrosio was convicted for tax fraud.) And although I don’t think that that these women’s Facebook groups are the answer to today’s dating woes, I do think they highlight just how awful things are right now.
But even if two people are able to find each other and start dating, it’s a more complicated path to marriage these days. Searching for monogamy? You might be surprised by a romantic partner’s desire to explore polyamory—after all, a third of singles have been in a nonmonogamous relationship, according to a 2023 survey by the dating site company Match.
Nonmonogamy isn’t the only way the zany ethics of the sexual revolution continue to infect romance. Pornography is changing men and women and what they sexually desire.
In her 2022 book “Rethinking Sex,” columnist Christine Emba recounted attending a holiday party and being asked by another woman, whom she hadn’t met before, what she thought about choking during sex. The woman was struggling because she liked everything else about the new guy she was seeing—he was attractive, had a good job, and was smart—but she couldn’t seem to shake the unease she felt about being choked during sex, even though she had consented to it.
Nor is this woman alone in her quandary. A fifth of women said they’ve been choked during sex. You know what wasn’t in the fairy tales I read growing up? A discussion between Cinderella and her fairy godmother about whether she should overlook the fact that Prince Charming could be turned on only by acting violently toward her.
Yet, in our porn-saturated world where men (and yes, some women) seem to need more and more extreme and horrific sexual actions to feel pleasure, this is where we’re at.
Of course, I’ve sketched a bleak picture—and to be fair, some singles are still finding love and pursuing marriage in today’s world. Among adults who are married or in a serious romantic relationship, 10% of them met that person online, according to Pew Research Center.
Yet overall, the dating landscape desperately needs improvement if we want to improve marriage rates.
For instance, even for singles who reject dating apps, the apps still have infected today’s dating world. Online and app dating has made it less likely that a young adult will approach another young adult who is a stranger; after all, the norm increasingly is that you meet someone online, not in real life. Approaching someone in real life can be seen as being “creepy”—which is unfair and awful, but I understand why some are reluctant to do it.
If you are living in a “Benedict Option” world, as writer Rod Dreher advocates in his popular book, there’s no guarantee of finding a spouse. In religious circles, women tend to outnumber men.
As former Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican known for championing family values, said during a recent Heritage Foundation panel on working-class Americans: “I wish I had a nickel for every young woman I know who’s just amazing—in their 20s and 30s and they can’t find a marriageable man. It’s pathetic. It’s awful. We’re just destroying our own culture, and we don’t talk about it. We as conservatives don’t talk about it.”
We don’t.
Of course, based on anecdotal evidence, marriageable single men are out there, but they can be hard to find—and, frankly, are too few.
Furthermore, religious men and women aren’t immune from the temptations of porn and other scourges of modern life; it’s not clear, even if such people are single, whether they are in a state to be a good spouse.
Of course, none of this is to claim that every single person is perfect and has zero responsibility for remaining single. Some are too picky. Some women, no doubt, place too much emphasis on height and income, while some men place too much emphasis on looks.
Both sexes struggle with the Hollywood-popularized idea of soulmates. It’s easy to think, particularly with the seeming abundance of matches on dating apps, that someone out there has the perfect personality, body, and temperament that will make you optimally happy. This is a noxious myth that forgoes the real joys of marriage for a fantasy of happily ever after.
And of course, there’s also a noble tradition in Christianity of being single for the sake of leading a life more focused on God. While marriage is a good for many, I’d never claim all people should strive to get married.
So where does this leave us?
As conservatives look to advocate marriage, it’s not enough to talk about its importance. We need to talk about healthy marriages. We need to talk about how porn warps imaginations (and hearts). We need to look at the bruised, wounded singles of today and not say, “Why aren’t you married?” but “Is there a way I can help?”
Maybe it’s married couples setting up mutual friends. Maybe it’s all of us praying. Maybe it’s helping a friend who is struggling become a better person—which will benefit the culture whether he ultimately gets married or not. Maybe sometimes it is, if asked for advice by a single friend, to gently nudge them away from excessive pickiness. Maybe it’s married couples with decades of success mentoring younger couples, helping them learn how to communicate and love in a healthy way.
Maybe it’s criticizing the dating landscape of today and saying, who is happy? Can sexual pleasure really be worth all this? Maybe it’s showing there can be a different way where you prioritize a selfless love, not just sexual pleasure. Maybe it’s more recently married couples, who survived today’s dating landscape, sharing how they kept hope and persisted.
Maybe it’s married couples being more honest about what each has compromised on for a spouse instead of furthering the soulmate myth with gauzy social media photos and holiday cards. Maybe it’s them talking more vulnerably about dating, about how sometimes an amazing love story starts not with fireworks, but with a slight interest that then blossoms into something greater—and perhaps more enduring than fireworks.
We don’t want people to slap a ring on it just because they hear marriage is good. We’re not looking for more divorces and lonely marriages and toxic marriages. We’re not looking to bring children into bad situations.
Instead, we need to present something more compelling: an alternative vision. Not talk of marriage as it is in fairy tales and in Hollywood movies, but as it is in real life. We need to talk about the beauty and the growth in a marriage where each spouses prioritizes the other one, where they tackle real challenges by honest conversations and genuine goodwill. We need to talk about how sexual pleasure is often found more in marriages and relationships that follow traditional norms, not in sleeping around.
And we need to build up singles who are trying not to cave into the wretched norms of the 2020s and yet who perhaps feel they are looking at never getting married as a result.
It’s so, so ugly out there in dating today. That’s a tragedy—and it’s going to take more than singles to fix it. If we want a culture with more and better marriages, we need to work together to make dating better.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/13/want-more-marriages-make-dating-less-brutal/
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The Left and Chaos
Dennis Prager
It is impossible to understand what is happening to America—and to the rest of the West—without understanding the most dynamic ideology of the last hundred years: leftism.
We need to begin with the understanding that leftism (or “progressivism”) and liberalism are not only not the same ideologies, they are in fact opposed to each other on virtually every major issue.
Leftism and liberalism have only two things in common:
One is belief in big government, which, given that individual and societal liberty decline as the state grows, is a significant similarity.
The other Left-liberal commonality is antipathy to the Right. This is even more important than commitment to big government because it explains why liberals vote for the Left despite the fact that liberals differ with far more left-wing positions than with conservative positions.
Unlike the Left, most liberals love their country. Unlike the Left, most liberals do not believe that there are more than two sexes/genders; that prepubescent boys and girls who claim they are members of the other sex should be given hormone blockers; that girls under 21 should be allowed to have their breasts surgically removed; or that men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. So, too, liberals do not believe that capitalism is evil, that America is systemically racist, that all whites are racist, that Israel is the villain in the Middle East, and that Zionism is racist.
So, then, given that those leftist positions are as destructive as they are absurd, how are we to explain leftism?
This question has preoccupied me all my adult life. It is why I was one of fewer than 10 graduate students in all of Columbia University to major in what was called “Communist Affairs.” (I was a fellow at the Russian Institute at Columbia’s School of International Affairs.) In other words, I have studied the Left all my life.
Early on, I recognized that the Left opposes liberty—the clearest example being that wherever the Left gains power, whether at a university or in society as a whole, it suppresses free speech—and that it destroys everything it touches. But while I (and many others) have always understood that the Left (again, not liberalism) has always, everywhere, been a force for evil, I needed to understand why.
How can people believe that men give birth; that a country to which more than 4 million black people have emigrated and which twice elected a black president is systemically racist; that the freest country in the Middle East, one in which millions of Arabs live as equal citizens, is the villain, while its barbaric enemies are worthy of support?
Here are some answers:
Throughout their history, Americans have had three great providers of meaning: family, religion, and patriotism. Leftists lack the latter two (indeed, they seek to get rid of them), and increasing numbers of them lack the first.
Since human beings cannot live without meaning—it is as great a need as food, and even greater than sex—they seek meaning elsewhere. So they create new meanings through creating secular religions: socialism, communism, feminism, environmentalism, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), “anti-racism,” anti-Zionism, LGBTQIA+ pride, and trans activism, among others.
All these are united by one overarching aim: destroying the institutions of Western civilization (e.g., religion, art, music, the nuclear family, moral norms, schools and universities, free speech, capitalism, even medicine).
Those of us who appreciate Western civilization and wish to preserve it (while, of course, correcting its flaws) cannot understand why anyone would want to destroy it. That is a major reason it is so difficult for non-leftists to understand the Left.
After decades of mulling this over, I think I have discovered one answer that is not obvious even to all leftists.
What opened my eyes are the Left’s beliefs that men can become women and women can become men; men give birth; there are more than two genders/sexes; men who say they are women should be placed in women’s prisons, women’s colleges, and women’s shelters; men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports; and children should be taken to drag queen shows.
All these positions represent … chaos.
The Left’s trans-positions are the most obvious areas of Left-induced chaos, but there are many others. These include the Left’s contempt for the ideal of the nuclear family (i.e., a married mother and father and children); its support for defunding police; its raising the dollar value of stolen goods that qualifies as a felony, which can only incentivize theft; and its support for progressive district attorneys.
Fighting crime represents order; crime represents chaos.
And why does leftism seek chaos? Because the Left hates the opposite of chaos: order. And order ultimately represents a religious view of life. Order represents divine order.
The proof is that no religious people say, “Men give birth.” Not all secular people believe men give birth, there are more than two sexes, men can compete in women’s sports, children should be exposed to drag queen shows, or children should be given hormone blockers if they claim to be a member of the other sex. But only secular people believe those things. Virtually no one who believes in the Bible and the God of the Bible believes them. We believe in a God-created social order.
Chaos is the normal state of the world. The second verse of the Bible states that the world was in a chaotic state. God then made order. Which is why the Left is undoing it.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/13/the-left-and-chaos/
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‘Gender-Based Political Violence’: Former Lawmaker Targeted for Calling a Man Who Identifies as a Woman a Man
Mexican authorities convicted civil society leader and former Mexican Congressman Rodrigo Iván Cortés of “gender-based political violence.” His crime? Criticizing a man who identifies as a transgender woman.
Cortés drew fire over posts on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, that referred to a trans-identifying Mexican congressional representative as a “man who self-ascribes as a woman,” according to ADF International, the organization representing him.
That trans-identifying lawmaker, who goes by the name Salma Luévano, filed a complaint against Cortés, arguing that his social media posts constituted a “denial of identity” and violated Luévano’s right to be “acknowledged as a woman.”
Luévano, asked via X if those who called him a man should be punished, responded: “Of course they should be punished. It’s hate speech, and hate speech is the precursor to hate crimes.”
In an interview with The Daily Signal, Cortés described how he was punished by the government for speaking up in defense of biological sex, his ongoing legal battle, and how he listened inside his home as assailants arrived and smashed his car.
Cortés warned that Americans should be “very worried” about whether such punishments for speech will soon become common in the United States.
“What is happening, in plain sight, before our eyes, the freedom of speech has been canceled,” he explained. “I cannot say even the truth in my country. The religious freedom is canceled. And they want to make the Christian teachings and the Bible itself as a hate speech.”
“I’m Catholic, and I believe that Christian teachings are important,” he said, when asked whether he regrets speaking up. “It’s not that I’m glad to say it, but I feel confirmed, because you must be sure that you are in the good fight, so at least that I feel that I am in the good fight.”
“They are taking things to upside down—principles, values, laws, terms,” he added, “I think I must give my testimony. I don’t know if I’m going to win. So far, I’m not, but at least I am saying the truth.”
The former lawmaker appealed, unsuccessfully, to Mexico’s Electoral Superior Chamber. And after he was convicted of “gender-based political violence,” the Superior Chamber imposed a fine of $19,244 Mexican pesos on him (the equivalent of about $1,000). The court also ordered him to “publish the court ruling and a compelled apology written by the court and imposed verbatim on Cortés, on his social media accounts, daily, for 30 days,” ADF International said.
“They sentenced me to deconstruct myself,” he told The Daily Signal, laughing. “How could I do that? How could I deconstruct myself?”
He also was ordered to take a “gender-based political violence” course and was entered into the National Registry of Sanctioned Persons for Violence Against Women in Politics—meaning that he cannot hold any public position at the municipal, state, or federal level, Cortés said.
ADF International filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in January on behalf of the former lawmaker, pleading that the commission will take his case and “hold Mexico to its duty to respect the fundamental right to free speech and expression,” Kristina Hjelkrem, ADF International’s attorney on the case, said in a statement.
“Disagreement is not discrimination, and peaceful dissent is not violence. Cortés spoke out, peacefully, in support of self-evident truth, and for that, he has been convicted as a violent offender and subjected to onerous punishments,” said Hjelkrem. “The Mexican government’s continued censorship of its citizens violates their international human rights obligations to uphold freedom of speech.”
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Dissecting ‘Gender-Affirming Care’
As this author has mentioned again and again, “gender-affirming [read: gender-denying] care” is a treatment method without sufficient or even credible scientific evidence for people who claim they have gender dysphoria. It seems more and more obvious that it’s only in the U.S. and Canada that this treatment method is doggedly defended as a “right” for “transgender” people. Europe is largely starting to abandon this model.
To recap, the “gender-affirming” model of treatment starts with the psychologist validating the patient’s delusion that he or she is, in fact, the wrong gender. That typically leads the person who is under such a delusion down an ever more extreme treatment path: social transition, puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones, and then ultimately bodily mutilation. These individuals are encouraged throughout this process in the fruitless effort to be something they are not, wasting time and money and causing mental anguish. It’s the opposite of affirming gender.
The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak has now reported on even more evidence that “gender affirmation” or the “Dutch Protocol,” as it is known in Europe, is baseless and an illegitimate form of treatment. The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) and the legal group that represents it have analyzed 60 studies regarding probably the most crucial aspect of this entire debate: Does the process of “gender affirmation” actually improve the mental health outcomes of these gender dysphoric individuals, particularly youth?
Their findings have several important factors. First, none of these studies that support the notion that “gender affirmation” is effective has any data tracking patients’ mental health beyond a year after “transition.” European doctors have sought to remedy this, and their findings aren’t good for suicidality three to five years post-transitioning.
Other important analysis found that many people who have the rapid-onset/social contagion variety of gender dysphoria tend to attract those with dark tetrad personality traits, or were autistic, or had serious underlying mental illness comorbidities.
Perhaps the biggest bombshell of all is that the justification for “gender-affirming care” and thus transgenderism — i.e., if you don’t allow your child to transition they will commit suicide — is a lie. The Heritage Foundation had already conducted a study that disproved the lie of decreased suicidality post-transition. However, the ACP itself analyzed several studies.
Rosiak writes: “When activists cite studies that state that affirmed transgenders do better than non-affirmed ones, a look at the actual available data show[s] that the slight difference in suicidality between the two groups is far less notable than how unacceptably high the figure is for both groups. For example, in one study billed as promoting how essential it was to give puberty blockers to youth, 42% of those who received care still tried to kill themselves.”
Rosiak also points out: “A study using Denmark’s national database, reviewing 6.6 million individuals over four decades, found that transgender people were 3.5 times more likely to kill themselves compared to normal people. If accommodating and supporting transgender people was a sufficient treatment, then that disparity shouldn’t exist.”
It’s not a matter of society treating gender dysphoric people badly that leads to suicidality. Rather, it’s preexisting mental illness that is being masked by the gender dysphoria diagnosis or having dark tetrad personality types that contribute to this level of suicidality. One could also argue that the claims of suicidality, particularly among young people, are a socially constructed manipulation that preys on the fact that minors don’t actually understand what they are threatening to do when they say they are suicidal. They have no concept of long-term planning because their prefrontal cortexes aren’t fully developed until age 25. Moreover, they don’t fully understand that death is final and that they are being fed this storyline (one that all too many try to follow through with) in order to manipulate the adults in their lives into submission.
On a side note, political pundit Matt Walsh made the astute observation in a podcast earlier this week that threatening to commit suicide unless you give someone what they want in any other circumstance would cause people to classify that person as dangerously narcissistic and emotionally abusive. Transgenderism uses that threat as a political weapon. It’s probably not a coincidence.
The ACP is the conservative answer to the political American Academy of Pediatrics. Though the arguments that the ACP is trying to combat deals with children, its analysis is applicable to the greater transgender population. Its findings couldn’t have had better timing if it tried. Just last week, a story broke that the entirety of the justification possessed by the Department of Health and Human Services for its long-held stance that “gender affirmation” is the way to treat people with gender dysphoria was a two-page-long PDF brochure written by HHS itself. No long-term medical evidence, and certainly no specifics.
The only reason “gender affirmation” has so much power over our children and the medical establishment is because it’s a political, financial (hello life-long patients), and social fad. Transgenderism’s “gender-affirming care” model is a pernicious and destructive one that is going to leave behind a string of broken people and ultimately help no one.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104350-dissecting-gender-affirming-care-2024-02-13
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13 February, 2024
DeSantis Stands Up for Statues — And History
As values change, it is reasonable to expect leading lights of the past to be less respected. But decisons to remove monuments should be made by community consensus, not the hatreds of some minority
Good for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The move to take down Confederate monuments was trying to infect Florida, and there is now a move in the state legislature to put an end to this madness. The governor has had the sense to stand up and say taking down these statues ain’t going to happen on his watch.
As reported in Florida Politics, DeSantis said:
I’m 100 percent against removing the monuments. I think it’s just gone too far…. I have not seen the legislation, but I’ve been very clear ever since I’ve been Governor, I do not support taking down monuments in this state.
Florida Politics reported:
The Governor said calls for the removal of “some Civil War general or whatever” have evolved into other forms of historical erasure, such as “taking down Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt and (Abraham) Lincoln, taking (George) Washington’s name off schools.”
“I think it’s totally appropriate for the Legislature to say we’re going to stop the madness,” DeSantis said.
He then referred to a local activist calling to take down the city’s Andrew Jackson statue downtown.
“What are we going to do: rename the city? I mean, come on, we’ve got to stop doing this and I think that it’s just, it’s not something that’s going to end up working out well for us and especially it’s like, you know, who’s next?” DeSantis said.
“You’re already up to, like, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, you’re going to go on and on there because … if you’re going to apply some type of hyperwoke 21st century test to pass people, you going to run into turbulence with MLK Jr., you’re going to run into turbulence with a lot of people.”
The governor went on to discuss the recent renaming of U.S. Army military bases, focusing on what is now “Fort Liberty” in North Carolina. It was originally named Fort Bragg, after Civil War Confederate General Braxton Bragg.
Said DeSantis:
Here’s what I said with respect to Fort Bragg is, that’s an iconic base in this country. I didn’t even know it was a Civil War general…. I don’t think most people knew it was a Civil War general. You just know you’ve been to Bragg, right? And they’re changing it for political correctness reasons. And so I don’t believe in doing it for political correctness reasons and that’s just kind of how we’re going to roll on it. And here’s the thing, you know, you learn from history, you don’t erase the history.
Bingo. The governor gets it. The move to take down Confederate statues is, among other things, decidedly about erasing history.
It is a serious fact of history that in the Left’s desire to erase Confederate history they are, not so coincidentally, trying to erase the hard fact that the Democratic Party was founded by slave owners, not to mention the fact that the party was run by die-hard segregationists following the Civil War. Republicans, the Party of Lincoln, were not standing up for slavery and segregation.
The Florida Politics columnist A.G. Gancarski, taking note of DeSantis’ position, added:
He then referred to a local activist calling to take down the city’s Andrew Jackson statue downtown.
“What are we going to do: rename the city? I mean, come on, we’ve got to stop doing this and I think that it’s just, it’s not something that’s going to end up working out well for us and especially it’s like, you know, who’s next?” DeSantis said.
Bingo again.
The idea of renaming Jacksonville, Florida, because it is named for the slave-owning Andrew Jackson raises another, similar question outside of Florida.
History records that New York is named for one James Stuart, the Duke of York who later became King James II. Before taking the throne, the duke was the governor of the Royal Trading Company — and the largest commodity the Royal Trading Company traded was, yes indeed, African slaves. Which is to say, New York is named for a major slave trader.
Thus the obvious question for all those tearing down statues of Confederates. Will they now be demanding that New York — New York City, New York State, and everything else bearing the slave-trading Duke of York’s name — be renamed?
Noticeably, there is silence on this.
In the current case, the statue issue is in Gov. DeSantis’ hands, and he has decidedly stood up for not hiding the facts of history by tearing down statues or renaming a major Florida city. In this case, statues that remind of the ties between slave owners and the creation and running of the Democratic Party.
https://spectator.org/desantis-stands-up-for-statues-and-history/
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Ethnicity and crime
The internet is currently awash with the video of four youths of Somali/Sudanese appearance leaving a car. Police want to talk to them in connection with the alleged murder of a 71-year-old woman in Brisbane. At the time of writing, three of the group have been arrested. While the police and the ABC are making no comment on the ethnicity of the group, keyboard warriors are certain that the four youths should be ‘sent back’ to East Africa. How the police and the press discuss the ethnic identity of criminals is fraught with Woke obstacles.
In London six years ago, a car ploughed into a group of people outside a museum. One journalist, Katie Hopkins, leapt to the conclusion that the attack was Jihadi terrorism and published a statement to that effect. The police refused to release the name of the driver of the car, and initially declined to provide an opinion as to whether or not it was a terrorist incident. The driver of the car was arrested and subsequently released as the police did not believe the incident was terror-related. The left-wing British press jumped on Ms Hopkins, accusing her of racism.
With characteristic delicacy, Rod Liddle weighed into the controversy, noting that the police had not released the name of the driver. If, Rod argued, the name of the driver ‘turns out to be John Christian Whitechap’ one can accept the police’s interpretation of the cause of the crash. However, if the name of the driver ‘was something more like Muhammed al Kafarkilla’ then Rod would be inclined to accept Ms Hopkins’ interpretation of the incident. He also noted that if the driver does have an Arabic name, and, if the BBC reports the story, ‘they will almost certainly describe the man as “Norwegian” because he spent a few months in Bergen’. Rod argued that ‘the BBC and the filth do not quite tell us the truth and instead feed us soma’. (Blame the grownups for the safe-space tribe.)
More recently Lionel Shriver made a similar claim when discussing the recent riots in Dublin following the refusal of the Garda to release the name and nationality of a man who had stabbed a woman and three children. ‘The Garda Siochana’s refusal to release the nationality of the man who triggered the unrest … has been worse than coy: try contemptuous. Were the culprit a native-born Irishman, his nationality would have been released in a heartbeat.’ (Fatalism is a bad way to run immigration policy.)
The same strange cosy alliance between the Police, ABC, and the left-wing press exists in Australia. Recently the Sydney ‘Snoring’ Herald published an article about human trafficking in Australia by Clare Sibthorpe and Perry Duffin (Human Trafficking on Rise and ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’.)
Clare and Perry claimed that, ‘Child trafficking, sexual servitude, forced labour, and exit trafficking – when a person is forced to leave Australia against their will – all marked significant increases in reporting since 2018-19. Forced marriage is consistently the most common type of human trafficking, making up 90 of the 340 reports of 2022-23.’
They told the story of ‘Ayra’ who ‘was one of an unknown number of mostly young women taken from Australia by their own family to be married off against their will’. We were not told where Ayra was taken nor the ethnicity of her parents. I wrote to the authors to ask why, in an article trying to educate the public about human trafficking, sexual slavery, and forced marriages, they could not mention the details of which countries are involved in this activity. There was no reply.
Apparently an ‘increase in public awareness’ cannot extend to identifying the countries involved in human trafficking and forced marriage. Thus the public has no way of knowing whether we should be watching out for concupiscent Scandinavians trying to abduct innocent Aussie sheilas, or peace-loving Islamic fathers trying to ensure that their daughters don’t marry infidels.
We see the same tendency towards obfuscation when the authorities release data discussing social problems within Aboriginal communities. Recently the ABC published a story stating that ‘Alcohol-related instances of family violence were 49.8 times higher outside metropolitan areas in Western Australia and there were 18.8 times as many calls for police assistance’. (Derby Wiluna top list of WA towns where police want hard-line liquor restrictions to fight alcohol-fuelled violence.) It failed to mention that the violence was mainly in Wiluna’s Aboriginal community.
Wiluna sits on the edge of the Western Deserts which were the home of the Martu people who, in the 1960s, who were among the last Aboriginal groups living a traditional way of life and had never seen a white person. In 1964, travelling in ‘rocks that moved’, white patrol officers began contacting the remnants of Martu people and moving them to settlements in places like Wiluna. The inevitable result was complete societal collapse from which the Martu culture, like all other Aboriginal cultures, will never recover. With the best will in the world Aboriginal social structures, cultural traditions, and beliefs, the initiation ceremonies, and above all, traditional law, cannot survive in the face of the fatal impact of Western Civilisation.
A similar reserve is evident in the ABC’s coverage of criminal activities among the young in rural areas of Queensland and the Northern Territory. We are told there is an epidemic of break and enter, car theft, and vandalism but when reporting these daily events we are never told the ethnicity of the criminals. They are simply referred to as ‘youths’. Should an Aboriginal be a victim of a crime or an assault we can be sure that the headline will be ‘Aboriginal boy/man/girl assaulted/robbed’.
We know that there are massive problems within Aboriginal communities due to the complete destruction of traditional culture. I happen to believe that there are no solutions at the present time. For the foreseeable future drunken Aboriginal men will continue to beat up their wives and put them in hospital. Aboriginal kids will continue to steal cars and anything else they can get their hands on. Above all, alcohol will continue to create chaos and ensure the continuance of poverty within Aboriginal communities.
And, also for the foreseeable future, the ABC will continue to present a hopelessly shallow, dishonest account of the causes and consequences of the destruction of Aboriginal culture. Presenting such inadequate accounts of problems in minority communities helps no one.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/ethnicity-and-crime
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Woke ideology and totalitarianism
We all know by now that society’s Adventures in Wokeland are never-ending. Thankfully, these sagas have become so annoying that their abusive tsunami of evil has caused many ordinary people to wake up and resist.
Examples of Wokeism and reactions to it are legion. Drag queen story time for toddlers has become a common activity, fiercely defended. Note the lengthy and laborious legal battles involving those public figures who have raised objections. It is a nightmare for them, even when they win. More recently, the ABC has advertised at least one drag show in a library for kids aged 3-5. Thankfully, it was cancelled after a huge outcry from a concerned public.
Deflowering the innocence of very young children via these sorts of events is bad, of course, but some would argue it is not as bad as real acts of tyranny and despotism.
Yes… But both are under-girded by ideology.
The Leninist with his rifle and the sexual militants with their costumes are driven by the same ideology: the urge to remake the world in their image – no matter how much it must be razed to the ground along the way.
Ideology is the root, while the usual isms – communism, Nazism, and Wokeism – are all its fruit. We must recall what the great minds have said about this type of ideology. Consider the famous lines of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from his The Gulag Archipelago:
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory that helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honours.
Thanks to ideology, the 20th Century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.
Many others have helped us to see this ideology for what it is. One incredibly inspiring person who long battled the totalitarian temptation, whatever its latest label and current appellation, was the late Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020). He was fighting Woke totalitarianism well before the term was being used, and he fought it on both sides of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
Think of his work in Prague in 1979 with members of Charter 77, including Vaclav Havel, and his ongoing work with Eastern European dissidents in the 1980s for example. After the Wall came down, he was still taking on the totalitarians, this time at home.
He discussed all this quite often, including in his 2019 article, Battling the same Thought Police behind the Iron Curtain and in today’s Britain. Many of his books could be appealed to here. Given that I recently revisited his 2006 volume, A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism, let me offer a few choice quotes to show how fully aware he was of where things were heading in the West – now so heavily submerged in Woke ideology.
Chapter 8 of the book looks closely at ideology, especially the Marxist variety. He asked how Marx and his heirs could so well corral the power of ideology, arguing that Nietzsche’s idea of resentment explains much. He is worth quoting at length:
Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalise resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others: institutions like law, property, and religion which create hierarchies, authorities, and privileges, and which enable individuals to assert sovereignty over their own lives. To the resentful these institutions are the cause of inequality and therefore of their own humiliations and failures. In fact, they are the channels through which resentment is drained away. Once institutions of law, property, and religion are destroyed – and their destruction is the normal result of totalitarian government – resentment takes up its place immovably, as the ruling principle of the state.
For the resentful, there is no such thing as authority or legitimate power. There is only pure power, exercised by one person over another, and diagnosed through Lenin’s famous questions: ‘Who? Whom?’ Once in power, therefore, the resentful are inclined to dispense with mediating institutions, and erect a system of pure power relations, in which individual sovereignty is extinguished by central control. They may do this in the name of equality, meaning thereby to dispossess the rich and the privileged. Or they may do it in the name of racial purity, meaning thereby to dispossess the aliens who have stolen their birthright. One thing is certain, however, which is that there will be target groups. Resentment, in the form of it that I am considering, is not directed against specific individuals, in response to specific injuries. It is directed against groups, conceived as collectively offensive and bearing a collective guilt.
In every totalitarian experiment, therefore, you will find that the first act of the centralised power is to single out certain groups for punishment. The Jacobins targeted the aristocracy, later expanded to the ubiquitous ‘emigrés’, whose invisible presence licensed the most arbitrary murders and exterminations. The Nazis singled out the Jews, on account of their material success and because their apartness was both real and hidden. The Russian communists began with the bourgeoisie, but were fortunate in having to hand another and more artificial class of victim: the kulaks, a class created by the state, which could therefore easily be destroyed by the state. One function of the ideology is to tell an elaborate story about the target group, showing it to be less than human, unjustly successful, and intrinsically worthy of punishment. Nothing is more comforting to the resentful than the thought that those who possess what they envy possess it unjustly. In the worldview of the resentful success is not a proof of virtue but, on the contrary, a call to retribution.
That explains why totalitarian ideologies invariably divide human beings into innocent and guilty groups…
All this so nicely describes where we are now with the current plague of Wokeism, progressivism, identity politics, and victimhood narratives. In messianic fashion, these activists and militants have perfected the art of finding recalcitrants and naming and shaming enemies – real or perceived. And as so many of us have long known, it is done with full religious fervour and fashion. Says Scruton:
Now it is my contention that totalitarian ideologies always have that character. They legitimise the resentments of an elite, while recruiting the resentments of those needed to support the elite in its pursuit of hitherto inaccessible advantages. The elite derives its identity from repudiating the old order. And it casts itself in a pastoral role, as leader and teacher of the people. Its theories and visions have the status of revelations, conferring authority on the priestly caste. But they also identify a collective enemy, and in the destruction of this enemy the people can cheerfully join. The elite justifies its seizure of power by referring to its solidarity with those who have been unjustly excluded. Henceforth they will still be excluded, but justly – since they will be excluded in the name of the people, and therefore in the name of themselves.
Whether it is the ubiquitous drag queen story times, the pulling down of statues (as we just again witnessed in Melbourne, or something even darker and bloodier, the ideology of the Woke mob is the ideology that we can trace back at least to 1789. It really is the ideology of the guillotine.
Which is why we must continue to resist it.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/woke-ideology-and-totalitarianism/
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Australia: Cross-party MPs back Jewish community push to outlaw doxxing
A cross-party group of federal MPs is backing a push from the Jewish community to criminalise doxxing – the publication of people’s identifying information to shame, harass or intimidate them – in response to the mass outing of Jewish writers, artists and academics who belonged to a private chat group.
Liberal MP Julian Leeser and independent Allegra Spender, who have previously condemned the targeting of Jewish people and businesses since Hamas’ October 7 atrocities and Israel’s war in Gaza, gave their support to the idea of anti-doxxing laws, while Labor MP Josh Burns declared social media the “new frontier” for antisemitism.
The support came as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned last week’s co-ordinated doxxing of 600 members of the J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and academics WhatsApp group by pro-Palestinian activists.
“The targeting of people because they happen to be Jewish is just completely unacceptable,” Albanese said. “It has got to stop. It must stop.”
The push for anti-doxxing law reform is being led by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Anti-Defamation Commission. Under a proposal from the council, a provision explicitly prohibiting the practice would be added to the section of the federal Criminal Code which covers telecommunication offences.
Leeser, a Liberal MP who relinquished his position on the opposition frontbench to campaign for an Indigenous voice to parliament, urged Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to move quickly to ban doxxing.
“Whilst this attack is aimed at Jewish Australians, the tactic of doxxing can hurt anyone perceived to be involved in Australian public life, from the home addresses of public servants and police to local branch members of a political party, or the details of family members of a public official,” he said.
Spender, whose Sydney electorate of Wentworth takes in one of Australia’s largest Jewish populations, said she supported an ongoing Victoria Police investigation into last week’s doxxing and consideration of whether further legal protections were necessary.
“We are all deeply concerned by the tragic and horrifying events in Israel and Gaza, but recklessly publishing details of fellow Australians to provoke division will not have any positive impact on peace in the Middle East,” she said. “It simply tears at our social fabric and brings enormous distress to fellow Australians.”
Burns, whose electorate of Macnamara includes the Melbourne suburbs of Balaclava, Caulfield and Elsternwick, which have large Jewish communities, said the doxxing of Jews had led to death threats and vilification and, in extreme cases, forced people into hiding.
“Social media is the new frontier for antisemitism and attacking Jewish people,” he said.
“I completely understand that people are distressed about the conflict in the Middle East, but this is no excuse to target Jewish Australians at home. This activism is misdirected and dangerous.”
There is already a provision within the Criminal Code which makes it a criminal offence, with penalties of up to five years’ jail, for someone who uses a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence.
The proposed anti-doxxing provision would take the law one step further and make it possible to prosecute not just those who harass people online, but those who facilitate and encourage the harassment by disseminating the names, workplaces, contact details and social media accounts of those being targeted.
Doxxing emerged in the 1990s as a form of online attack by computer hackers, where documents or “docs” containing people’s private information were uploaded and disseminated. It became a potent weapon within the anti-fascist movement, which has used doxxing to expose the identities of neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.
‘The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.’
In the US, the state of Washington last year passed an anti-doxxing law with bipartisan support. However, that law makes it a civil offence, rather than a criminal one. Washington is the most recent of a dozen US states to prohibit doxxing to varying degrees, but there are no federal laws in place.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion, KC, said that since Israel’s war against Hamas began, Jewish people living in Australia have felt unprecedented levels of fear and anxiety about their physical safety and livelihoods.
“In the last few days this has been caused by the publication of lists containing the names, faces and other personal information of hundreds of individuals, whose only common trait is that they are Jewish,” Aghion said.
“This has been done with co-ordination and with malice, in many cases resulting in harassment, death threats directed to named individuals and their children, professional and financial loss, vandalism of premises, and extensive psychological harm.”
Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich said pro-Palestinian activists had declared “open season on our community” in publishing a “hit list” identifying all members of the WhatsApp group. “We know that people are often inspired to do crazy things when they are radicalised online and this doxxing is dangerous and will have real-world consequences,” he said.
“The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.”
Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni said that rather than worry about doxxing, the Australian government should respond to the escalating crisis in Rafah, in southern Gaza, where the Israeli government has issued its latest evacuation order.
“We implore the Australian government to immediately end its ‘friendship’ with genocidal Israel, cut ties with the regime and to do all it can to stop the slaughter,” Mashni said.
This masthead last week reported that pro-Palestinian activists had published links to a spreadsheet containing the names, occupations and social media accounts of hundreds of members of the J.E.W.I.S.H WhatsApp group and separate documents containing their images and a leaked transcript of their group chat.
The transcript revealed that some members of the WhatsApp group wrote letters to broadcasters, media companies and publishing houses raising concerns about pro-Palestinian writers, journalists and presenters.
One of the presenters targeted by the group, Antoinette Lattouf, was stood down by the ABC for breaching the broadcaster’s social media policy after she shared a Human Rights Watch post on the Gaza conflict. She is suing the national broadcaster for unlawful dismissal.
Victoria Police confirmed it was examining whether charges could be brought against people who had doxxed Jewish people and businesses in Melbourne.
“Police are investigating following reports that a number of people who belong to a private social media chat group appear to have been released online,” a spokesperson said.
The mass doxxing prompted Liberal senator David Sharma, a former Australian ambassador to Israel, to write to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus urging him to request a federal police investigation.
“We would not accept such silencing or intimidation of any other group of Australians, and nor should we accept or condone it for Jewish Australians, no matter how strongly people may differ in their political opinions over this conflict,” Sharma wrote in his letter.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton last week called for greater leadership from the federal government to tackle antisemitism and said he would support any changes needed to “beef up” the current laws.
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12 February, 2024
A fire wreaked havoc and left thousands of people homeless — but it barely made the news
The Rohingya are certainly in a bad way but what is not mentioned below is that they largely have themselves to thank for it. Under British rule in Burma, many Indians migrated to Burma for economic reasons. When Burma became independent, however, the Muslim Rohingya minority began to make nuisances of themselves in the usual Muslim way.
The Burmese are however Buddhist so have hit back at their rebellious Rohingya residents. So many Rohingya have returned to their ancestral India, to Bangladesh in particular. India is however poor and already heavily populated so has no room for them. If they were smart, the Rohingya would convert to Christianity, a much less troublesome religion than Islam. Missionaries Ahoy!
During the early hours of January 7, inside a sprawling community of around 1 million people, a fire started. It jumped from one structure to another, quickly becoming a massive blaze that engulfed hundreds of properties.
Photos and videos of the inferno show people desperately trying to save homes, using the limited equipment on offer.
But, as advocates point out with a mix of frustration and sadness, most people around the world didn’t notice.
Because this fire happened in a Rohingya refugee camp.
“It’s been really heartbreaking,” says Noor Azizah, the co-founder and director of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network.
In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, scores of Rohingya refugees continue to live in ever-worsening conditions.
But the passage of time combined with a string of other international crises has seen the world turn its gaze from the Rohingya, with the latest fire receiving little, if any, media coverage in Australia and elsewhere in the world.
“It occurred at a time when people were deeply asleep,” says Mohammed Aziz, a Rohingya refugee who lives in nearby Camp 1.
Rows of cramped, makeshift shelters were soon ablaze, with families, elderly people and children making panicked escapes.
“The fire spread and got bigger so fast that most of the people couldn’t save any of their belongings,” Mr Aziz says.
Rohingya refugees photographed the January 7 fire as it jumped from shelter to shelter. Supplied: Mohammed Kayas via UNHCR
He describes how the camps’ lack of proper firefighting resources and bad roads meant the fire could “continue its devastation” into the night.
“Because of the camps’ congested infrastructure, fires pose a big danger.”
It burned for two to three hours and, according to UNHCR, around 800 shelters were destroyed and 7,000 Rohingya left homeless.
In a statement, the UNICEF Representative in Bangladesh Sheldon Yett said 3,500 children were impacted, with 20 learning facilities destroyed in the fire.
Advocate Ms Azizah has a close connection to these communities — she’s a Rohingya refugee who fled Myanmar (also known as Burma) with her family and resettled in Sydney in 2003.
She’s visited the Cox’s Bazar camps and says the dire conditions mean they’re a tinderbox when a fire starts.
“The shelters are made out of wood and the roofs are made out of plastic … [There can be] families of 10 living in one small tent.”
And the January blaze is the latest in a series of major fires, including one in March 2023 that left around 10,000 people homeless.
A Bangladesh panel investigating the March 2023 fire found it was a “planned act of sabotage” and there are suggestions the January fire could also be arson — indicative of how lawless and unsafe the camps have become.
The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim ethnic group who have lived in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar for generations.
For decades, they have faced extreme persecution there. A 1982 law denied them citizenship, and wave after wave of violence has meant many Rohingya have fled across the border from Myanmar to Bangladesh.
In 2017, the Myanmar military enacted a brutal crackdown against the Rohingya in Rakhine state, which multiple countries including the US have labelled as genocide.
The violence saw hundreds of thousands of Rohingya flee to Bangladesh in what the International Crisis Group called “one of the most catastrophically fast refugee exoduses in modern times”.
A sprawling Rohingya community formed over the Myanmar border in Cox’s Bazar, with the temporary living conditions largely unchanged over the years.
When asked about the dangers in the camp aside from fires, Mr Aziz provides a long list. This includes “natural disasters … landslides, floodings, cyclones”, along with the “health concerns” that accompany these threats.
Then there are “man-made disasters” like “the state of being overcrowded and congested, limited access to clean water, gangs, conflicts, murders, criminal activities, corruption and arbitrary arrests”.
Without the right to work in Bangladesh, the Rohingya are reliant on humanitarian funding, which has been cut as other international crises have occurred.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-12/rohingya-refugees-fire-coxs-bazar-january/103415134
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Mail-In Ballot Fraud Study Finds Trump ‘Almost Certainly’ Won in 2020
A new study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election concludes that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail.
The Heartland Institute study tried to gauge the probable impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots cast for both then-candidate Joe Biden and his opponent, President Donald Trump, would have had on the overall 2020 election results.
The study was based on data obtained from a Heartland/Rasmussen survey in December that revealed that roughly one in five mail-in voters admitted to potentially fraudulent actions in the presidential election.
After the researchers carried out additional analyses of the data, they concluded that mail-in ballot fraud “significantly” impacted the 2020 presidential election.
They also found that, absent the huge expansion of mail-in ballots during the pandemic, which was often done without legislative approval, President Trump would most likely have won.
“Had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected,” the report’s authors wrote.
The new study examined raw data from the December survey carried out jointly between Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports, which tried to assess the level of fraudulent voting that took place in 2020.
The December survey, which President Trump called “the biggest story of the year,” suggested that roughly 20 percent of mail-in voters engaged in at least one potentially fraudulent action in the 2020 election, such as voting in a state where they’re no longer permanent residents.
In the new study, Heartland analysts say that, after reviewing the raw survey data, subjecting it to additional statistical treatment and more thorough analysis, they now believe they can conclude that 28.2 percent of respondents who voted by mail committed at least one type of behavior that is “under most circumstances, illegal” and so potentially amounts to voter fraud.
“This means that more than one-in-four ballots cast by mail in 2020 were likely cast fraudulently, and thus should not have been counted,” the researchers wrote.
A Heartland Institute research editor and research fellow who was involved in the study explained to The Epoch Times in a telephone interview that there are narrow exceptions where a surveyed behavior may be legal, like filling out a mail-in ballot on behalf of another voter if that person is blind, illiterate, or disabled, and requests assistance.
However, the research fellow, Jack McPherrin, said such cases were within the margin of error and not statistically significant.
What Are the Implications?
In addition to reassessing the likely overall degree of fraudulent mail-in ballots in the 2020 election, Heartland analysts calculated the potential impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots might have produced in the six key swing states that President Trump officially lost.
This, then, was used to determine the impact of potentially fraudulent mail-in ballots on the overall 2020 election result.
First, the researchers analyzed the electoral results for the six swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—under the 28.2 percent fraudulent mail-in ballot scenario that they estimated based on the raw survey data.
Then they calculated the electoral results in the six states under the different scenarios, each with a lower assumed percentage of fraudulent ballots, ranging from 28.2 percent all the way down to 1 percent.
For each of the 29 scenarios that they assesses, the researchers calculated the estimated number of fraudulent ballots, which were then subtracted from overall 2020 vote totals to generate a new estimate for vote totals.
Overall, of the 29 different scenarios presented in the study, the researchers concluded that President Trump would have won the 2020 election in all but three.
Specifically, they calculated that the only scenarios that would affirm the official 2020 election result, namely that candidate Biden won, were mail-in ballot fraud levels between 1 and 3 percent of ballots cast.
Mail-in ballot fraud rates higher than 3 percent would, according to the study, mean more fraudulent Biden votes that should be subtracted from the total, putting President Trump ahead.
For example, the adjustment to the vote tallies under fraud percentage rates between 13 and 6 percent would mean President Trump would have won Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, though he would have still lost in Michigan and Nevada.
Under such a scenario, President Trump would have won 289 Electoral College votes compared to candidate Biden’s 249.
In scenarios of 5–4 percent fraud, each candidate would have received 269 Electoral College votes, but President Trump would likely still have won because Republicans controlled more state delegations and, under a tie scenario, Congress would have voted based on the number of delegates.
However, the researchers expressed confidence in their overall assessment that the level of mail-in ballot fraud was over 25 percent, indicative of an actual Trump win.
“We have no reason to believe that our survey overstated voter fraud by more than 25 percentage points, and thus, we must conclude that the best available evidence suggests that mail-in ballot fraud significantly impacted the 2020 presidential election, in favor of Joe Biden,” the paper’s authors wrote.
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Unforeseen Consequences of ‘Defund the Police’: High Crime, Low Morale, Hiring Woes
M. Douglas Scott
Having served as the chief of police for three suburban law enforcement agencies just outside of Washington, D.C., I have watched with concern—though not surprise—as crime in the nation’s capital has skyrocketed over the past year, even as the number of police officers serving with the city’s Metropolitan Police Department has dropped to a half-century low.
Amid that alarming backdrop, it’s no wonder that D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. Council have changed their tune since the start of the “defund and defame the police” movement in 2020—just like so many other politicians in cities nationwide.
The knee-jerk reaction in the District of Columbia and in most other major cities after George Floyd’s death in May 2020 was to cut police funding, demonize the officers serving, and enact soft-on-crime policies. In its aftermath, crime has soared to levels not seen in decades, and we now have the fewest number of police officers in America per resident than at any time in more than 25 years.
Now, with the public in an uproar, those same elected officials in the District and elsewhere are reversing course. They now want more officers who are properly equipped and trained, and they want tougher penalties for criminal behavior.
In other words, they want things the way they were before the “defund and defame the police” movement.
Better late than never, I suppose. But, for retired law enforcement leaders like me who were sitting on the sidelines while our profession was being vilified and scapegoated over the past few years, it was easy to be bitter and frustrated.
In 2019, our nation had never been safer. The violent crime rate had steadily and dramatically declined since peaking in 1991. The policing ranks were full. Our officers were well-qualified. They were better educated, better equipped, and better trained than ever before. Policing had earned a reputation of trust and professionalism, and the prevailing philosophy among law enforcement leaders was “we want to do even better.”
Before 2020, I know from experience, there was great pride in wearing the badge, and officers knew they had the support of the public, their elected leaders, and police officials. Now, after more than three years of “defunding and defaming,” I am afraid law enforcement’s rank and file are suffering from an understandable crisis of trust and confidence.
Most rightly feel they are on an island when it comes to political, media and, yes, even internal scrutiny of any serious use-of-force case. They not only worry about potential internal sanctions, they fear criminal prosecution for simply doing their job.
One officer who left the profession explained it this way: “We are one bullet away from death and one mistake away from indictment.”
We have all seen rogue, unqualified prosecutors winning local elections based upon promises not to get tough on criminals, but to more aggressively prosecute police officers.
It’s no wonder that we saw a 47% increase in officer resignations from 2019 to 2022, along with a 19% rise in retirements during that same period.
According to a Police Executive Research Forum survey, the number of sworn officers dropped nearly 5% between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2022. That’s a loss of some 40,000 officers nationwide.
The police shortage crisis that we are now facing is the most glaring unintended consequence of the “defund the police” movement, and it’s jeopardizing public safety and placing added stress on a police workforce already stretched thin.
To fill vacancies, police chiefs have convinced elected officials of the need for hiring bonuses—some as high as $75,000.
Meanwhile, many agencies have significantly reduced—or even eliminated—their hiring standards to attract a larger applicant pool. The latter is both reckless and dangerous. While desperate times require desperate measures, we must be careful that only those who are committed to policing and fit for the job are given a badge.
I have been told by police academy instructors and field training officers that they basically cannot “fail” a poorly performing recruit. And veteran officers understandably do not want to work side-by-side with a new officer that is substandard and incapable of making split-second life-or-death decisions.
The future of our profession—and public safety—is at a crossroads. Increased police funding and tougher penalties for criminal acts will help right the ship. But if we fail to reestablish clear and strong support from the public, our police leaders, and our elected officials for officers who want to do their job without fear of wrongful condemnation, termination, and prosecution, we will lose many more of the good men and women needed to serve and protect our communities.
The stakes are high. It’s time to wake up to this crisis of trust and confidence within policing.
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Women prefer flings with muscular men, but they don't want to marry them
My own experience reflects this. I have always been physically average but, like most high IQ people, I have a very lively sense of humour. I was always a bit peeved to hear women say that they want someone who makes them laugh. Is the ideal partner a clown? But I was a beneficiary of it so I didn't complain. So the article below is right in noting how attractive to women that is. Over the last 60 years, I have had many relationships with fine women, including four marriages
They say nice guys finish last, but it turns out the truth might look a little different. New research shows that while women are more attracted to muscular men for short-term flings, traits like kindness and humour are more important for long-term relationships.
When it comes to pop culture and societal norms, it’s a well-known truth that certain appearances are deemed more desirable than others.
Men with large muscles, and women with large breasts, are often ranked at the top of the physical pecking order – and those who fit the mould are seen as the model for who we should aspire to be, and aspire to date.
By and large, this not-so-subtle marketing works; it influences purchasing decisions, social hierarchies and dating app swipes, and it’s been more or less the same for the last hundred years.
However, a new study shows that while these archetypes are attractive on a surface level, we may be drawn to them when it comes to steamy flings and short-term affairs – what we want changes significantly when we’re looking for a long-term partner.
Professor Mitch Brown from the University of Arkansas was curious about the correlation between physical attributes and dating and surveyed 384 heterosexual women about their thoughts on dating.
The research, published in the Personality and Individual Differences academic journal, showed that when it came to a short-term physical relationship like a one-night stand or casual hookup, women were more inclined to prefer a man with a muscular physique, over their lankier counterparts.
This is not altogether surprising, as the pro-muscle mentality is drilled into us on a daily basis online and in brand marketing everywhere. But it’s also an evolutionary instinct too that harks back to our animal brains – females are biologically drawn to males who look like they can protect and provide.
However, where the research gets interesting is what we look for in long-term relationships, and how our bucket list for a perfect partner changes when longevity is involved.
When searching for a life partner, women were more inclined to prioritise other traits like kindness, humour and the willingness to contribute to a family.
“Women associate muscles with being fit and healthy,” said Brown in the report. “However, in a long-term context, it was important to find a kind person who will support his family” – in more than just a physical sense.
Humour was one trait that rose significantly in importance, though only if the jokes aren’t at the woman’s expense.
“Nice guys who make friendly jokes can actually finish first when it comes to attracting a woman looking for a long-term relationship,” said Brown.
Turns out all we want is to be with someone who doesn’t make us feel like crap. Wild.
The study builds upon a 2007 piece of research by the University of California, Los Angeles that examined the number of sexual partners for muscular versus thinner men. The results concluded that the more physically large men “were twice as likely to have over three sex partners than their less-muscular peers”, per the New York Post.
One of the study’s authors, David Frederick, said “Most research is focused on what men find physically attractive in women…Much less research is devoted to what women find attractive.”
It’s great to see that 16 years on, that research has been carried out. And the results? At the end of the day, when it comes to lasting love, we don’t care so much about looks. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.
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11 February, 2024
Tucker Carlson and his Putin Interview
This interview does confirm that it is in fact Volodymyr Zelenskyy who is holding up a ceasefire. But hatred of Russia runs deep in Ukraine so Zelenskyy probably has his people behind him. Sad that the deaths have to continue, though. An armistice ended WWI, why not one in this war?
In his post-interview video, Carlson noted that “Putin is not someone who does a lot of interviews.” In fact, his last interview with an American journalist came in October 2021, when he spoke with CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at an energy event in Moscow.
“He’s not good at explaining himself,” Carlson observed. “He’s smart, there’s no question about that. But he’s clearly spending a lot of time in a world where he doesn’t have to explain himself.”
Carlson concluded, “He didn’t lay out his case very coherently.”
Reflecting on Putin’s answers, Carlson noted that the Russian leader became animated when discussing the United States and the West’s approach toward his country.
“He’s very wounded by the rejection of the West,” Carlson said. “The U.S. government doesn’t like Russia. And like a lot of Russians, he expected the end of the Cold War would be Russia’s invitation into Europe.”
Yet despite this tension, Carlson said it was “striking” that Putin admitted he wanted a peace deal.
“Maybe he’s lying in ways I didn’t perceive, but he kept saying it. I don’t know why he would say it if he didn’t mean it,” Carlson said.
During the interview, Putin accused former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson of scuttling previous negotiations, “saying it was better to fight Russia.”
Russia’s Aims
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted worldwide condemnation, yet Putin brashly accused Ukraine of starting the war in 2014 and claimed Russia was attempting to stop it.
Asked by Carlson if Russia had achieved its aims, Putin said, “No. We haven’t achieved our aims yet because one of them is denazification. This means the prohibition of all kinds of neo-Nazi movements.”
The Russian leader then turned his ire on the United States, saving some of his harshest criticism for Biden.
“I talked to him before the special military operation,” Putin told Carlson. “And I said to him then, by the way, I will not go into details, I never do. But I said to him then, ‘I believe that you are making a huge mistake of historic proportions by supporting everything that is happening there, in Ukraine, by pushing Russia away.’”
Carlson pressed Putin on why he wouldn’t call Biden today.
“If you really want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons,” Putin replied. “It will be over within a few weeks. That’s it. And then we can agree on some terms before you do that, stop. What’s easier? Why would I call him? What should I talk to him about? Or beg him for what?”
The conversation about Ukraine dominated the two-hour interview, including a revelation that Putin suspects the CIA is responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline attack in 2022. Putin also praised his “friend” Xi Jinping of China, and boasted about the growing cooperation between the two countries.
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Team Biden Told Banks to Surveil Republicans
Americans have long suspected their in-store and online transactions are being monitored by companies to aggregate and adapt to our shopping trends and preferences.
After all, who hasn’t had an Amazon ad pop up on their screen to peddle a product they were looking at earlier that morning or talking about a couple of days ago? It’s a little creepy and somewhat invasive, but what’s the harm of an algorithm luring us into buying a new Keurig?
Until recently, we often dismissed so-called conspiracy theories that access to our shopping habits would be useful to Big Brother, but now we know for a fact that the federal government is not only tracking our spending but monitoring our political beliefs. As The Daily Wire reports: “Documents obtained by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government showed that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) had flagged the terms as part of its investigation related to the January 6 riot. Banks were also told to look at transactions involving the purchase of religious texts and outdoor sporting goods stores like Cabela’s.”
Because, you know, people who shop at Cabela’s might be insurrectionists, right?
It might be funny if it weren’t such an outrageous and dangerous overreach of government power to keep track of citizens’ political leanings. Imagine if President Donald Trump, the guy Democrats think is a threat to our sacred democracy, had allowed FinCEN to generate a list of the limousine liberals who shop at Whole Foods.
You guessed it. There would be calls for impeachment, which they did anyway. Twice.
Now, if you buy a MAGA coffee mug online or dare go into Dick’s Sporting Goods to look for a compound bow, you might end up on a growing list of extremists compiled by the federal government.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, for one, is taking this very seriously. Scott, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, penned a letter with Kentucky Representative James Comer to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in which they wrote: “Federal government efforts to target individuals and entities based on their political views is a blatant and egregious violation of our Constitution.
Additionally, reported actions like these disrupt confidence in federal law enforcement and raise significant questions regarding the independence of federal financial regulators.”
More specifically, they highlighted Treasury’s role in instructing financial institutions to monitor financial transactions that included specific keywords or search terms. The Treasury Department reportedly searched through Zelle transactions to look for terms such as “MAGA,” “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” and “Trump.” Even more chilling, it identified people purchasing religious books or other materials considered extreme.
Scott also refreshed Yellen’s memory about how this all started when then-President Barack Obama used the powers of the Justice Department and “Operation Choke Point” to pressure financial institutions from providing services to businesses with political positions the Obama administration opposed.
Over in the House, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan wrote a letter to Noah Bishoff, former director of the Financial Crimes Network (FinCEN), stating, “In particular, your testimony will help to inform the Committee and Select Subcommittee about federal law enforcement’s mass accumulation and use of Americans’ private information without legal process.”
Jordan has already written a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray about information indicating the intelligence organization’s personnel had contacted Bank of America with specific search terms in its customers’ financial transactions.
During a House hearing this week, Missouri Republican Ann Wagner asked Secretary Yellen if the Treasury had directed financial institutions to monitor purchases in order to identify what might be considered extreme viewpoints or whether FinCEN or the FDIC had pressured financial institutions to do the same. Yellen’s response was evasive: “Well, we received the letter from you, I believe, on this topic, and we intend to investigate and to respond.”
Don’t expect Yellen to come back anytime soon and admit an egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and their freedom to choose their political candidates without fear of retribution. And while the letters from Scott and Jordan are a good first step, it’s not enough.
As our own Nate Jackson wrote recently, “Jim Jordan’s a great guy and a tenacious former wrestler, but sternly worded letters and dour lectures for the cameras in a congressional hearing aren’t going to fix this problem.”
Our only hope is that the GOP holds onto the speaker’s gavel in the new Congress. Because if Democrats wrestle back control of the House this November, they will have gotten away with another Orwellian abuse of power.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104281-team-biden-told-banks-to-surveil-republicans-2024-02-09
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Medical malpractice lawsuits on behalf of detransitioners harmed by experimental treatments euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care” will yield multimillion-dollar judgments, a lawyer filing such suits predicts.
Ron Miller helped found the law firm Campbell Miller Payne, which represents people who formerly identified as transgender, underwent medical alterations, then rejected their transgender identities, and now lament the harm done to their bodies.
These detransitioners are suing their doctors and medical providers for damages in a novel kind of medical malpractice claim.
“A troubled youth—typically with either a bad family life or suffering from several psychological comorbidities, such as autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, anorexia, dissociative identity disorders … will show up to a practitioner stating that they’re uncomfortable with their body or [that] they have odd feelings,” Miller tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
These troubled young people may find “the wrong practitioner,” one who is “focused on this transgender ideology,” he explains. “After 30 to 45 minutes in the first visit, they will diagnose and issue a prescription.”
For a girl, a doctor would prescribe testosterone “at an unusually high dosage because they have to counteract the body’s own production of estrogen in a female, or they’ll issue the testosterone in addition to a ‘puberty blocker’ that will stop the production of estrogen.”
“Doing this, obviously, after only a 30-minute visit, means they have not ruled out any other potential avenue,” Miller notes. “Doing so obviously ignores the fact that maybe this child was suffering from depression, anxiety; maybe this child is just suffering from normal teenage angst that accompanies puberty.”
The practitioner “never presents psychotherapy as an option” in Miller’s cases, the lawyer notes. Instead, doctors rush patients “straight to the prescription of the drugs and then eventually on to surgeries.”
These medical interventions don’t just change a person to resemble someone of the opposite sex, they carry long-term side effects, the lawyer notes. Even when a person rejects a transgender identity after only receiving cross-sex hormones, that person will still need to receive injections of the hormones his or her body would naturally produce, because the intervention interrupted initial growth.
“You’re looking at lifelong medical issues that are going to require pharmaceutical drugs and therapies and treatments that just will never end,” Miller says.
Of a female detransitioner, he says, “She’s going to have bone-density issues because she went through a period of her development where her bones were just affected by a cross-sex hormone that just did not work with her body [in its natural development]. That creates long-term development issues that will have to be treated by specialists and medications. So, you’re looking at a lifelong medical bill, but then you’re also looking at consequences like … infertility.”
“How do you assign a value to the pain and the lost opportunity to have a child?” the lawyer asks.
“It’s a really difficult thing to predict,” and juries will have to settle the matter, he notes. “What is it worth to a person to have that taken from them? Our court system, unfortunately, is limited in only being able to provide compensation for these kind of injuries in the form of dollars, and so, every jury has the very difficult task of translating these kind of intangible, lifelong injuries into a monetary figure that could compensate.”
When pressed to assign an approximate dollar figure, Miller says, “It would be in the millions, I think, for sure. I would say, based on our research, we expect a jury verdict to come back anywhere from $10 [million] to $20 million.”
Medical malpractice law varies from state to state. In some states, a detransitioner would have to bring a lawsuit one year after the harmful activity, and “often the detransitioner isn’t even aware of the deception that they were subjected to within this one-year period,” the lawyer says. For this and other reasons, legislatures will have to alter the law to enable detransitioners to sue for medical malpractice.
Typically, a malpractice plaintiff will have to “establish that some medical standard of care was not followed or was neglected or was ignored in providing the medical treatments that ultimately caused the client harm,” Miller explains.
Yet, “there really is no agreed-upon standard of care nationwide or in any of the states,” the lawyer notes. The pro-transgender group the World Professional Association of Transgender Health has released “standards of care,” but WPATH admits that document is merely a set of guidelines for doctors to follow. Even WPATH encourages doctors to wait at least one year before medicalizing patients.
Miller says he relies on “the general standard of care … , which is to ‘first, do no harm,’ and second, do what’s in the patient’s best medical interest.” In most cases his firm takes up, the practitioners failed to satisfy either of those basic standards.
Miller says he was a commercial litigator before founding Campbell Miller Payne. He describes himself and his partners as “believers” seeking to help “the least of these,” as Jesus suggests in Matthew 25:40.
“When a person decides to pursue this course, they become transgender,” he explains. “Now, they’re already a societal outcast to some degree. But when they choose to detransition, now they’re leaving that already ostracized group. So, they’ve become the smallest and most ostracized of either group.”
He describes detransitioners as “the most alone” kind of people.
Miller says his firm is representing detransitioners such as Prisha Mosely and assisting with the case of Chloe Cole, perhaps the most well-known detransitioner.
When medical practitioners face malpractice suits, they often claim that putting minors on the experimental “treatments” immediately was necessary to prevent them from committing suicide.
“Our clients are living proof that’s just not the case,” Miller says.
When his firm represents a detransitioner, it only charges a contingency fee.
“The clients never pay for any of the cost expenses or any of the attorney fee time that’s put into the case until any award is received from the outcome of the case, whether by settlement or by verdict,” he explains.
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What Is Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria and Why Does It Matter?
Studies have suggested that the number of young people who identify as transgender has exploded in recent years. While activists claim that these people are just discovering a latent truth suppressed by society, some scientists have set out to question what lies behind a phenomenon they term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.”
Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has worked with Lisa Littman, a doctor who first coined the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria and laid out her hypothesis in the medical journal PLOS One. Sapir joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to break down what ROGD is, why some activist scientists have failed to disprove it, and what he and Littman have done to advance the theory.
“Gender dysphoria” refers to the condition of persistently and painfully identifying with the gender different from one’s biological sex, and “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” refers to a new, third form of gender dysphoria. Current literature recognizes adult and childhood gender dysphoria, but ROGD refers to a form of gender dysphoria that often emerges in adolescence and may be a social contagion.
Sapir explains that the phenomenon emerges among “adolescents who do not have a childhood history of gender nonconformity or gender distress or issues with their sex.” These people “don’t have issues with being boys or girls, and these problems seem to develop only in adolescence.”
“They have co-occurring mental health problems, anxiety, depression, autism, [obsessive compulsive disorder], eating disorders, history of trauma, you name it,” he adds. “They are predominantly, although not exclusively, but predominantly female, right, and they belong to peer groups where some of them are male or female. The kids come out as trans in clusters.”
Sapir describes these facets as “indicators of symptoms” that have emerged “in the medical literature in the last few years.”
He does not claim that ROGD is “settled science,” but he insists that it is a scientifically rigorous hypothesis to explain the jump in transgender-identifying youth in the past few years. The hypothesis suggests that therapy, rather than invasive medical interventions often referred to as “gender-affirming care,” might be the proper path forward for youth who struggle with gender-identity issues.
Sapir and Littman recently defended the ROGD hypothesis against an attack from Dr. Jack Turban, an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco. Turban and others published a January 2023 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health claiming to debunk ROGD by analyzing the U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015.
Sapir and Littman responded with a December letter to the editor in Archives of Sexual Behavior and in an article on Sapir’s substack, Reality’s Last Stand.
Sapir tells “The Daily Signal Podcast” that Turban didn’t come close to disproving the ROGD hypothesis, and he explains how Turban tried to manipulate the data to suggest that people cannot get rapid-onset gender dysphoria because transgender people do not reveal their identities right away, but keep them secret for years.
“They did a lot of gymnastics” to suggest that teens today do not have rapid-onset gender dysphoria, Sapir explains.
Sapir says the 2015 study asked people who identify as transgender three questions: (1) at what age did you start to feel that your gender was different from your sex?; (2) at what age did you begin to feel that you were trans, even if you didn’t have a word to articulate it?; and (3) at what age did you disclose a trans identity to a family member or somebody else in your life?
Rather than relying on question No. 2 as a proxy for when people realized they were transgender, Turban chose question No. 1. Sapir says that question is more subject to “recall bias,” when a person reinterprets a memory of feeling a certain way early on, in order to reaffirm their identity and choices in the present.
“So, why wouldn’t Turban use question No. 2?” Sapir asks. “Well, we dug down into the data. We did some analysis, and it turns out if he had used question No. 2, the median time from realization to disclosure would have been one year, and a one-year time from realization to disclosure supports the ROGD hypothesis.”
Yet the biggest problem with Turban’s analysis is timing, the Manhattan Institute fellow says.
The ROGD hypothesis is “that this phenomena really started to emerge in the late 2000s and picked up speed in the 2010s,” Sapir notes. “The sample, a survey of adults from 2015, cannot possibly pick up on ROGD phenomena if that’s what Turban and his colleagues are trying to investigate.”
Furthermore, the survey only includes adults who currently identified as transgender, not anyone who stopped identifying as transgender, he explains, and Turban and his co-authors have no control group to compare with the survey.
Sapir admits that it is unlikely researchers are “going to get a study that will definitively resolve the ROGD debate.” Yet, he predicts that “we are going to have piecemeal evidence that comes out as a trickle confirming aspects of the ROGD hypothesis.”
He emphasizes that the burden of proof rests with those who advocate for experimental transgender medical interventions, not with critics who study ROGD.
“Because what’s riding on this debate is the legitimacy of a medical intervention that can cause severe, irreversible lifelong harm and suffering, the burden of proof here is on those arguing that anybody who says, ‘I’m trans,’ is eligible for medical intervention. They face the burden of proof, not us,” Sapir adds.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/07/transgender-series-part-1-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria
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8 February, 2024
Woke is revoked: The mass awakening against leftism has begun
Anthony Morris KC makes some good points below but I think he is a tad optimistic if he expects Leftism to fade way. The impetus to Leftism lies deep in the personlity of the Leftist so will never vanish. Leftists are like snakes. They cast off their skin only to reveal a new but similar one underneath.
The latest skin is furious antisemitism, worn undr the guise that they are "Pro-Palestinian". That most Palestinians live at peace with Israel both in the West Bank and in Israel itself is invisible to them. Self-deception that deep obviously serves personal needs and, as such, is beyond any hope of rational correction
When the time to write the history of the 21st Century finally arrives, the initial 23 years will pose two questions which historians yet to be born will find unanswerable. First, why did the people of our era allow all social, political, and intellectual discourse in the Western world to become shackled and perverted by the phenomenon, initially known as ‘political correctness’, and latterly given the more catchy soubriquet of ‘wokeness’? And secondly, how was this scourge eventually extinguished – how was ‘cancel culture’ cancelled?
To the first question, no simple answer is apparent. But the answer to the second becomes almost self-evident once the presumption is jettisoned that profound changes in social mores are invariably the result of Earth-shattering or cataclysmic events. Ironically, the simple explanation (often the best) is that people eventually began waking up to the fact that wokeness offers nothing more than a vacuous, intellectually dishonest, stultifying, and ultimately counterproductive constraint upon any society where it takes hold.
For Australia, this mass awakening coincided with the Voice referendum. When the Voice eventually croaked, it was because a majority of Australians nationwide, as well as a majority in every state of the Commonwealth, recognised that they did not have to support a radically stupid proposal merely because the chattering classes told them it was the right thing to do. Challenged to use their innate common sense and wisdom, Australian voters made the only sensible decision, and they did so despite being told by the wokest of the woke that opposition to the Voice was explicable only by ‘racism’ or ‘sheer stupidity’.
For the UK, the pivotal moment came in January 2023, when Isla Bryson (originally Adam Bryson), a 31-year-old Scot from Clydebank who had been convicted of raping two women, was incarcerated in a women’s prison, having ‘transitioned’ to identify as female following the rapes but before conviction. Blown out of all proportion, the resulting furore focused on the Scottish Parliament’s (yet to take effect) Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, and was a factor in the downfall of long-serving Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon.
If there was an equivalent turning-point in the United States, it was surely the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay. A person more profoundly unqualified to lead one of the world’s premier academic institutions would be hard to imagine. Within days after her Congressional appearance concerning Harvard’s response to antisemitism on campus – a performance which even the in-house Harvard Crimson labelled as ‘disastrous testimony’ – she found herself compelled to issue an apology. Even then, all she found to apologise for was not having ‘the presence of mind to … return to my guiding truth’ (whatever that means), and combined this feigned mea culpa with the demonstrable falsehood that ‘calls for violence against our Jewish community … at Harvard … will never go unchallenged’.
It later came as little surprise when it emerged that Gay’s pitiful academic credentials appeared to be based largely on plagiarism. What stuck in the craw was not merely that Gay may well be an academic cheat, but that the issue of her alleged cheating was handled with a level of indulgence that no undergraduate could hope for or expect. To this end, the Harvard Corporation even invented a new euphemism – ‘inadequate citation’ – to downplay the extent and seriousness of Gay’s plagiarism.
Gay was the archetypal product of the ‘DEI’ (diversity, equity, and inclusion) agenda: not only was she a clear and supremely undeserving beneficiary of DEI; she was also a staunch proselytiser, notably using her tenure as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to secure increased racial diversity among both students and teachers, regardless of merit. Her ignominious fall from grace was a timely reminder why appointments based on merit are more reliable.
Yet it would be unfair to give Claudine Gay sole credit for the demolition of the DEI agenda, let alone the woke movement generally. The backlash had been festering for some time, in a variety of different fields of activity, unrelated except through a growing consciousness that ‘reverse discrimination’ – that is, discrimination against the best qualified, brightest, most skilful, most competent and most successful – is unsustainable. In the academic world, reverse discrimination has traditionally been practised for the benefit of minority black students, but became increasingly controversial as it emerged that the real victims of this discrimination were not the white hegemon, but another ethnic minority, Asian Americans. That was until the landmark 2023 case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the US Supreme Court held that race-based affirmative action in college admissions violated the ‘equal protection’ clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The participation of transgender people in competitive sports had, meanwhile, become a lightning-rod for anti-LGBT activists in the United States. It was a well-chosen battleground, as there is a strong case that, due to differences in human physiology that are not fully reversed by transgender hormone therapies, transgender women who have experienced male puberty have an unfair advantage over biological women, and may present a physical danger to them. Wokeists derided this debate as a ‘stalking horse’ to conceal the real agenda of activists motivated by personal, moral or religious philosophies or by base transphobia. Even so, the argument achieved significant traction, including among a wide range of biologically female athletes, and led to partial or complete bans on the participation of transgender women in international female swimming, track and field, boxing, and Rugby events, as well as local competitions in countless sports.
But perhaps the biggest threat to wokeism in the US has been economic: specifically, the discovery that a consumer boycott – whether spontaneous or organised – can be enough to prevent big business from pursuing woke corporate ideologies that have not (yet) been accepted by their customer base. This is an interesting variation on a well-known theme.
Consumer boycotts, sometimes masquerading as ‘ethical consumerism’ – along with the ‘de-platforming’ of speakers and performers on ideological grounds – has long been the Left’s weapon of choice, especially for the promotion of woke mantras. Businesses have repeatedly been the targets of such campaigns against (alleged) discrimination on the grounds of race, sex or LGBT orientation; for participation in the defence (particularly nuclear), tobacco and alcohol industries; for (alleged) involvement in environmentally harmful activities, the production of fossil fuels, or the use of merchandise produced by child, forced or underpaid labour; and for doing business in countries of which the boycott organisers disapprove, such as Apartheid South Africa, and more recently Israel.
In 2022, Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature enacted the Parental Rights in Education Act, which actually did no more than outlaw discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity within public schools ‘in kindergarten through grade 3’, or otherwise ‘in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards’. The Walt Disney Company initially refrained from making public comment, but the release of a statement attributed to ‘the LGBTQIA+ employees of Pixar, and their allies’, and a further statement from Marvel Studios which ‘denounce[d] any and ALL legislation that infringes on the basic human rights of the LGBTQIA+ community’, compelled Disney’s CEO, Bob Chapek, to state the company’s official position (Pixar and Marvel are both Disney subsidiaries). He condemned the legislation, and hoped the legislation would be repealed or struck down. The reported cost to Disney was the loss of over two million subscribers to the streaming service Disney+, as well as special concessions and privileges that the State of Florida had previously granted to the Orlando-based theme park, Walt Disney World.
Since then, things have gone from bad to worse for Disney. In 2023, Disney’s box-office flops included the movies The Little Mermaid, Strange World, Lightyear, and Elemental: four movies with one thing in common, the blatant promotion of woke ideologies. In its annual report, Disney candidly admitted that the loss of over $1 billion reflected a ‘misalignment with public and consumer tastes and preferences’. But Disney’s biggest woke disaster is yet to come, in the form of a live-action remake of the 1937 animated classic, Snow White, which is reported to include an actress with Latin heritage in the title role of a German princess with ‘skin as white as snow’, and seven ‘magical creatures’ standing in for the original seven dwarves. Latest reports have the release date deferred by 12 months, as Disney attempts to reintroduce some of the politically incorrect features of the much-loved original.
Le dernier cri of anti-woke boycotts was the Bud Light fiasco, triggered by the engagement of transgender actor and TikTok ‘influencer’ Dylan Mulvaney to promote what had for over two decades been America’s most popular beer. The result was a slump in sales estimated to be as high as 26 per cent, loss of Bud Light’s premier position in the US beverage market, and a drop of 20 per cent in the stock price for Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (ultimate holding company of the Budweiser brand) representing a $27 billion loss of market capitalisation.
After the Disney and Bud Light debacles, the retail market became ‘spooked’. Target US decided to downplay its line of Pride Month merchandise, withdrawing some items from stores in southern US states and from their website, and relocating their ‘Pride displays’ from entrance areas to the backs of other stores. Victoria’s Secret – which underwent a significant rebranding in 2021, engaging a more diverse range of models, and featuring plus-size and transgender models in advertisements – back-pedalled on these initiatives which reportedly cost the business a multi-billion dollar decline in revenue; the company then announced that it will return to a focus on ‘sexiness’, stating that ‘sexiness can celebrate the diverse experiences of our customers and that’s what we’re focused on’.
To quote US-based author and political researcher, Steve Soukup:
‘It’s not that Target is left wing. It’s not that Bud Light embraced left-wing values. It’s not that Disney is liberal. They are, in fact, but that’s not the point. The point is that people are tired of having politics shoved down their throat at every possible occasion.’
The smart money in America has learnt this lesson. Australian businesses are not so quick on the uptake. But it may be anticipated that our most woke corporations – such as Woolworths, with its in-store public announcements backing the Voice and its ban on Australia Day merchandise, and Qantas, with its ‘out and proud’ support for gay marriage and the Voice – have little commercial alternative.
Nor is anti-woke economic pressure always a bottom-up phenomenon, starting with the customers. The most recent examples show how it can operate top-down, with employers declining to hire staff whose woke bias is detrimental to the firm’s policies or market objectives. In October 2023, two of the world’s largest international law firms – Davis Polk of New York and Winston & Strawn of Chicago – withdrew offers of employment to students from Harvard, New York, and Columbia Universities who had signed or approved anti-Israeli public statements asserting that ‘Israel bears full responsibility’ for the Hamas attacks of 7 October. A similar stance has been foreshadowed by other employers, including restaurant chain Sweetgreen and lifestyle company FabFitFun.
In this context, as in many others, the Achilles heel of woke activism is its stark hypocrisy. There is nothing uniquely woke about criticising the overwhelming ferocity of Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks: many people of conscience, who hold no truck with other aspects of woke ideology, have found good cause to argue that Israel’s response is excessive. But they do so without excusing Hamas terrorism for initiating the current conflict, and they do so without chanting for the freedom of Gaza ‘from the River to the Sea’ (ie., the complete annihilation of the State of Israel). Moreover, people of goodwill will be among the first to acknowledge Arabic and Muslim bloodshed in the Gaza Strip in the context of other anti-Arabic or anti-Muslim atrocities, whether it be the Turkish genocide of the Kurds, the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China, or the slaughter of Muslims by their co-religionists in Syria, Yemen, Iran, and elsewhere.
For woke activists, however, it is not enough to acknowledge one wrong among many. Not a single woke voice will be heard against China’s reintroduction of ethnoreligious concentration camps for the first time since the fall of Nazi Germany; nor against a butcher’s bill of Muslim-upon-Muslim atrocities in the Middle East which well overtops the entire population of the Gaza Strip; nor (of course) against Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, the PLFP, or any other terrorist organisation which targets Israelis. Israel is roundly criticised for closing its borders to Gaza, but the wokeists have nothing to say against Egypt steadfastly maintaining the closure of its own border with Gaza. According to the hypocritical woke worldview, there is room to denounce only one threat against people of the Islamic faith, and that threat needs must take its inspiration from the apocryphal Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
At a global level, arguably the Russo-Ukrainian War finally turned the tables on wokeness, challenging many of the Global Left’s most cherished shibboleths. The collapse began with a defenestration of the Left’s conviction that Russia and its fellow dictatorships are morally sound, while the liberal-democratic West is the source of all evil. This conviction became difficult to maintain when daily footage showed Russia as clearly the aggressor; Putin, Lavrov, and their flunkies advancing palpably nonsensical excuses – as well as outright falsehoods – to justify this aggression; and the carnage and wanton destruction being inflicted on Ukrainian civilians by the Russian military, supported with weapons from other totalitarian states like Belarus, Iran, North Korea, and (most probably) China.
This war has confronted some of the basic tenets of woke ideology. From the beginning, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took the archaic attitude that, although women, children, and the elderly were free to take refuge in other countries, men of military age must remain to defend their homeland; astonishingly, nary a single feminist has protested. The fact that Russia’s covert military conscription fell most heavily on ethnic minorities – combined with the panicked exodus of the more well-heeled young Muscovites and St Petersburgers – only served as a reminder that the post-Communist Russian Federation is (like the Soviet Union that preceded it) not quite the model of an egalitarian paradise which its Western apologists claim.
On the first day of hostilities, the troops defending Snake Island responded to surrender demands from two Russian warships with the memorable riposte, ‘Russian warship, go fuck yourself’. As the war continued, the brawny machismo of the Ukrainian Armed Forces came to represent the type of people whom WE would wish to have defending OUR country in similar circumstances; not the gaunt, hen-pecked, acne-pocked youths of the Russian army, whose open mouths silently betray a lack of familiarity with the most basic advances in dental hygiene, even as the same mouths vociferously display a complete dearth of learning, knowledge, or even intellectual curiosity.
The unyielding morale and extraordinary resourcefulness of Ukraine’s defenders is a reminder of two incontrovertible truths that wokeists would prefer that we forget. The first is that the free-thinking citizens of a liberal democracy will always overmatch the enslaved automatons of a dictatorship. And the second is that there remain some areas of human endeavour in which the best person for a job may sometimes, possibly, be a biological male. Once these truisms are acknowledged, the rest of the woke ideology crumbles away.
If there be any doubt that the end of wokeism is nigh, here are two items of proof positive.
First, check out the most percipient students of societal attitudes: not political scientists; certainly not commentators on the ABC’s endless panoply of ‘talking heads’ programs; but, rather, successful professional comedians. Of all social pundits, comedians have to be inherently attuned to what people in the street are thinking and saying; they depend on it for their daily bread. View any recent stand-up performance by the UK’s Ricky Gervais (winner of seven BAFTA Awards, five British Comedy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards), or any recent broadcast by the USA’s Bill Maher (nominated for 41 Primetime Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and various Producers Guild of America and Writers Guild of America Awards). And what you will see is the same message, albeit projected humorously in two very different styles: woke is revoked.
Finally – if you remain unconvinced – take a look at the sanctum sanctorum of woke virtue signalling: the annual round of Hollywood awards. In recent years, people whose sole talent is the (alleged) capacity to entertain paying audiences have chosen to use the ‘acceptance speech’ – is there such a thing as a ‘refusal speech’? – to do the diametric opposite. Rather than providing a masterclass in divertissement, the world’s most amusing celebrities preferred to berate audience for failing to embrace whichever trendy cause the mindless luvvie has most recently read about in one of the educational magazines intended to provide intellectual stimulation in the waiting rooms of the local salons de beauté.
Then … all of a sudden … nothing! Come the 2024 round of awards, there is no virtue remaining to signal: not the terror of climate change; not the horrors of #MeToo; not the heinous treatment of so-called ‘first nations’ peoples; not demands for reparations (payable, not by the worst culprits, but exclusively by prosperous countries) for the obscenity of slave trading. It seems that Hollywood opulence has even forgotten the ultimate fall-back conceit, a piteous entreaty on behalf of the world’s poor, underprivileged, diseased and starving populations. Unless the MAGA movement has recently enjoyed a hugely successful recruiting drive within the most expensive boutiques and Michelin-approved eateries of Beverly Hills, the only possible alternative conclusion is: woke is revoked.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/woke-is-revoked
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A Deep Dive Into Disinformation
“If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim,” writes author Jacob Siegel in his 13,000-word treatise on the subject, “it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind.”
That’s the animating principle of what Siegel rightly calls “The Hoax of the Century,” namely, the Trump-Russia collusion scam. Siegel then goes on to explore the subject of disinformation from 13 angles, “with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.”
It’s not an easy read, but it’s a rewarding one. As independent journalist and free-speech pit bull Matt Taibbi writes, “Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.”
Siegel is a former Army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest. His article, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: 13 Ways of Looking at Disinformation,” was published last March but is every bit as relevant today — perhaps more so, given that we’re in an election year — as it was last year.
As Siegel writes: “Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a ‘whole of society’ effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.”
The first step in this massive undertaking would be to connect our national security and intelligence services to Big Tech and social media — Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google, for example — where this borderless war would ultimately be waged.
This is how one of those deep-deep-deep-state agencies — The Global Engagement Center, founded in 2016 and nestled within the Bureau of Global Public Affairs at the State Department — spelled out the so-called war against disinformation in a 2018 memo: “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”
Consider the enormity of the enterprise and ask yourself: How could no one have ratted out the entire scam?
Answer: Because no one believed it was a scam. On the contrary, as Siegel writes: “This is how the government-created ‘war against disinformation’ became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation ‘a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.’”
And what of the mainstream media — the, uh, guardians of our democracy? It was, as Siegel says, “hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.”
Thus, as Siegel brilliantly puts it, “Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.”
Speaking on a podcast with Taibbi about what Siegel calls “the anti-disinformation complex,” Taibbi asked him about the catalyzing role that California Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff played in his awakening to the idea of disinformation. Siegel, who’d begun to notice that Schiff seemed to be consistently near the center of the storm regarding the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, had this to say: “Really, on a very fundamental level, in terms of my unquestioned premises, I was not capable of believing that an American national elected official could lie that brazenly, or that the intelligence agencies, which I knew to be corrupt and inefficient in a billion different ways, could be involved in a grand sort of conspiracy. It seemed too farfetched. Adam Schiff is a weird guy to be responsible for lifting the veil because he’s such a schmuck. But realizing that he just kept lying over and over, something clicked for me.”
Siegel laments that while the public reaction to his massive essay on disinformation has been “overall very positive,” it’s also been somewhat siloed. “Broadly speaking, it’s gotten a great response, but it certainly hasn’t penetrated the liberal intelligentsia yet. It hasn’t penetrated the liberal mainstream at all.”
Asked by Taibbi why the disinformation wars have been turned into a partisan issue, Siegel paused, then waded in fully:
There’s no political explanation; no strictly rational explanation. One of the most damaging and dangerous things about this kind of runaway government secrecy — and this is something that people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan were warning about 50 years ago — is that it fosters a kind of derangement in the public. When the government is generating pseudo-events and operating through a convoluted and byzantine secrecy apparatus, it leads people to become suspicious of reality and, therefore, vulnerable to top-down narrative control. They’ve been spun around and are dizzy and, therefore, more susceptible because they’re desperate for something to orient them. At an even deeper and an even more fundamental level, once you involve people in a conspiracy — once you get them to go along with it — they will go along with it. Not because they want to be conspirators but because they’re convinced that they’re on the side of good. If you convince them that Donald Trump is a Russian agent, the reason why they then attack Trump is because they think they’re doing good. … Once you involve them in that, you’ve now made them co-conspirators. To get them to abandon that is to get them to admit that they’ve been made fools of; that they themselves were involved in an enormous deception. And I think that’s very difficult for people.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104203-a-deep-dive-into-disinformation-2024-02-07
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Trump Called 'Racist' for Saying 'Invasion' -- Is it Still Racist When Sharpton Says It?
When former President Donald Trump during his time in office called the massive influx of illegal immigration an "invasion," the media denounced him as "racist."
Consider this headline in The Atlantic: "Why Trump Uses 'Invasion' to Describe Immigrants."
The article ripped Trump's "racist language": "If you want to know the roots of the 'immigration invasion' rhetoric that President Donald Trump has championed time and again -- and which was echoed in the racist manifesto linked to the man held for the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, last weekend -- you can find them in the anti-Chinese diatribes that circulated on the West Coast a century and a half ago."
CNN wrote: "Trump Shocks with Racist New Ad Days Before Midterms": "The Trump ad also flashes to footage of the migrant caravan of Central American asylum seekers that is currently in Mexico, which Trump says is preparing an invasion of the United States, implying that everyone in the column of people fleeing repression, poverty and economic blight is bent on murder and serious crime on US soil."
A Time Magazine headline read: "Donald Trump's Anti-Immigration Rhetoric is Rooted in Racism. Trump's Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Was Never About Legality -- It Was About Our Brown Skin."
But in a recent interview, MSNBC's Al Sharpton, a left-wing flamethrower with impeccable Trump-hating credentials, pulled out the "I word." Speaking to a stunned Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), one of the authors of a proposed immigration bill, Sharpton went full Trump: "You are seeing an influx of migrants all over the country that, frankly, have people outraged. ... Why are you allowing this to continue? ... I mean, we're looking every day at the invasion of migrants, and they are playing a time game with politics on this?"
Neither The Atlantic, CNN nor Time slammed Sharpton for his "racist rhetoric."
On illegal immigration, many Democrats used to sound like Trump before Trump. In a 1993 speech, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid said: "If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn't enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides. And that's a lot of services." Reid later apologized.
In 2005, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama said: "We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country."
In 2009, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said: "First, illegal immigration is wrong. And a primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration. ... People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the U.S. legally." Goodness, didn't even say "undocumented."
December 2023 set a record for monthly illegal entries at 371,000, an average of nearly 12,000 a day. In 2019, President Barack Obama's former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said: "And I'd look at [the numbers] every morning, it be the first thing to look at ... My staff will tell you if it under 1,000 apprehensions the day before, that was a relatively good number. If it was above 1,000 it was a relatively bad number and I was going to be in a bad mood all day."
The top issue during the Iowa caucus was immigration. "60 Minutes" just ran a segment on illegal aliens using TikTok for a step-by-step guide on where and how to enter the country illegally. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott deployed his state's National Guard to defend its border. Several migrants beat up NYPD cops. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who once brazenly said, "our borders are not open," barely dodged impeachment. And now, even Sharpton calls the unprecedented number of illegal entries an "invasion."
Is Trump still a "racist"?
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A Libertarian President!
Argentina actually elected a libertarian president. Javier Milei campaigned with a chain saw, promising to cut the size of government.
Argentina’s leftists had so clogged the country’s economic arteries with regulations that what once was one of the world’s richest countries is now one of the poorest.
Inflation is more than 200%. People save their whole lives—and then find their savings worth nearly nothing.
They got so fed up, they did something never done before in modern history: They elected a full-throated libertarian.
Milei understands that government can’t create wealth. He surprised diplomats at the World Economic Forum this month by saying, “The state is the problem!”
He spoke up for capitalism: “Do not be intimidated by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state. … If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution.”
Go, Milei! I wish current American politicians talked that way.
In the West, young people turn socialist. In Argentina, they live under socialist policies. They voted for Milei.
Sixty-nine percent of voters under 25 voted for him. That helped him win by a whopping 3 million votes.
He won promising to reverse “decades of decadence.” He told the Economic Forum, “If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade, and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.”
Right.
Poor countries demonstrate that again and again.
The media say Milei will never pass his reforms, and leftists may yet stop him.
But already, “he was able to repeal rent controls, price controls,” says economist Daniel Di Martino in my new video. He points out that Milei already “eliminated all restrictions on exports and imports, all with one sign of a pen.”
“He can just do that without Congress?” I ask.
“The president of Argentina has a lot more power than the president of the United States.”
Milei also loosened rules limiting where airlines can fly.
“Now [some] airfares are cheaper than bus fares!” says Di Martino.
He scrapped laws that say, “Buy in Argentina.” I point out that America has “Buy America” rules.
“It only makes poor people poorer because it increases costs!” Di Martino replies. “Why shouldn’t Argentinians be able to buy Brazilian pencils or Chilean grapes?”
“To support Argentina,” I push back.
“Guess what?” says Di Martino, “Not every country is able to produce everything at the lowest cost. Imagine if you had to produce bananas in America.”
Argentina’s leftist governments tried to control pretty much everything.
“The regulations were such that everything not explicitly legal was illegal,” laughs Di Martino. “Now … everything not illegal is legal.”
One government agency Milei demoted was a “Department for Women, Gender, and Diversity.” Di Martino says that reminds him of Venezuela’s Vice Ministry for Supreme Social Happiness. “These agencies exist just so government officials can hire their cronies.”
Cutting government jobs and subsidies for interest groups is risky for vote-seeking politicians. There are often riots in countries when politicians cut subsidies. Sometimes politicians get voted out. Or jailed.
“What’s incredible about Milei,” notes Di Martino, “is that he was able to win on the promise of cutting subsidies.”
That is remarkable. Why would Argentinians vote for cuts?
“Argentinians are fed up with the status quo,” replies Di Martino.
Milei is an economist. He named his dogs after Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Lucas, all libertarian economists.
I point out that most Americans don’t know who those men were.
“The fact that he’s naming his dogs after these famous economists,” replies Di Martino, “shows that he’s really a nerd. It’s a good thing to have an economics nerd president of a country.”
“What can Americans learn from Argentina?”
“Keep America prosperous. So we never are in the spot of Argentina in the first place. That requires free markets.”
Yes.
Actually, free markets plus rule of law. When people have those things, prosperity happens.
It’s good that once again, a country may try it.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/01/libertarian-president/
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7 February, 2024
American Psychological Association claims ‘hiring the most qualified candidate’ could be ‘unfair’
This was once a respectable professional organization. I was accepted as a member on Jan. 30, 1975. They even in 1996 put out a statement that blacks had lower average IQs.
https://differentialclub.wdfiles.com/local--files/definitions-structure-and-measurement/Intelligence-Knowns-and-unknowns.pdf
Now, however, they are trying to enforce the Leftist "all men are equal" absurdity
The American Psychological Association claimed that “hiring the most qualified candidate might be unfair” based on one of its recent studies.
The study, titled “Can Selecting the Most Qualified Candidate Be Unfair?,” examined people’s perceptions of merit-based hiring after learning more about the socioeconomic status of potential workers.
While previewing the results, it argued that hiring the most qualified candidate could contribute to more inequality.
“Fairness heuristic theory suggests that, as long as people consider selection processes such as hiring and promotion to be meritocratic and fair, they may continue to accept ever-increasing levels of income inequality. Yet, in reality, inequality and merit-based decisions are deeply intertwined,” the study noted.
It explained, “Socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages early in life can have profound influences on educational achievement, test scores, work experiences, and other qualifications that form the basis of ‘meritocratic’ selection processes. Yet the near-universal support for meritocracy suggests that most people may not give much weight to unequal advantages and disadvantages.”
The study was conducted across five different experiments. Each experiment found that respondents across the political spectrum were more likely to support “social class diversity” after being told about the economic advantages or disadvantages of candidates.
“In our work, we show that it does not take much for people to update their fairness perceptions of meritocracy and be more supportive of polices that foster social class diversity in organizations,” the study read.
One of the study’s authors, Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, PhD, concluded from the findings that “managers should learn about the effects of socioeconomic inequalities” to properly promote “equal opportunity.”
Goya-Tocchetto also noted that the experiments did not include race as a factor out of concern for “defensiveness among White conservatives,” but suggested that the study could be used to address racial inequality as well.
“Members of marginalized racial groups tend to experience socioeconomic disadvantages more often than members of privileged racial groups, and the negative consequences of these disadvantages can be even worse for racial minorities,” she said. “Focusing on socioeconomic considerations could garner more support and still help address racial inequality.”
Though both the APA and Goya-Tocchetto’s study questioned whether this proved that hiring the most qualified candidate was “unfair,” the findings did not examine any real-world effects of merit-based hiring vs. “fair” opportunities.
Fox News Digital reached out to Goya-Tocchetto for a comment but has yet to receive a response.
The APA has come under fire for pushing what some considered to be biased conclusions. In 2019, the organization claimed that “traditional masculinity” could be mentally damaging.
“The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful,” it claimed in a press release
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Christian Nationalism Benefits All Americans
It is not hard to detect almost a sigh of relief amidst the left-wing panic over the supposed attempt by so-called “Christian nationalists” to return American to a more religious time. At just the moment when progressivism is experiencing a political backlash for its anti-Semitic sympathies, its opposition to controlled immigration, and its costly net-zero agenda, the idea that a group of white, right-wing extremists are plotting a theocratic revival of the country must seem like … well … a Godsend.
[T]he Christian nationalist measures the welfare of a nation by the extent to which its people are allowed to serve God’s will as they understand it.
The left’s handwringing over this alleged conspiracy actually dates back to just before Covid. Ever since late 2019, America Magazine, the Center for American Progress, the New Yorker, NPR, and other liberal opinion makers have been breathlessly reporting every conceivable sign that the Christian right has mobilized to reverse the secular progress made possible by the New Deal and the Great Society. (READ MORE from Lewis Andrews: Fix the Economy and Conservative Values Will Follow)
But the paranoia really kicked into high gear last November when the leftist press began claiming that Republican representative Mike Johnson’s ascension to the post of House speaker had been engineered by a secret network of Christian activists. If the election of a seeming unknown comes as a surprise to the larger world, the Nation warned its readers, it does not to the oil barons and other fundamentalist power brokers on the right: “They’ve been grooming Johnson for this position for many years.” And in a piece for Salon, former Playboy White House correspondent Brian Karem declared that the new speaker, working secretly with Christian nationalist allies, constituted a “bigger threat to America than Hamas could ever be.”
More recently, we have the December announcement from liberal filmmaker Rob Reiner that his latest documentary, tentatively titled “God and Country,” will be released to theaters in February. Describing his production as a look “at the implications of Christian nationalism,” Reiner promises audiences it will show “what happens when a faith built on love, sacrifice, and forgiveness grows political tentacles, conflating power, money, and belief into hyper-nationalism.”
The timing of the documentary’s release is likely not a coincidence. Having argued that the Republican party is under the influence of Christian nationalists and having identified the shadowy cabal’s agenda as returning the U.S. to a more explicitly and repressively religious era, Democrats clearly plan to hype the joint claims as much as possible before the November elections.
The left is right about one thing: Christian nationalism does exist. Which is to say that it always has been, and continues to be, an important intellectual movement in U.S. history. But for Democrats to suggest that the heirs to this tradition would want to impose a more religious form of government today ignores the fact that even in more religious times Americans never had, or wanted, such a government.
Early American Christians were sufficiently versed in the history of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) to know that any effort to make their Constitution and Bill of Rights overtly theological could well prompt an ugly struggle among the country’s various denominations to dictate the final draft. Even worse, it might produce the very kind of European state religion which had prompted so many religious minorities to seek freedom of worship in the New World. That is why, for the three centuries from the founding of Harvard until World War I, the Protestant clergy running nearly every U.S. college and university never used their influential platforms to advocate for a more overtly Christian government.
Down though American history, the goal of Christian nationalists has always had much less to do with forcing the state to echo their religious convictions than with minimizing the ways the state might compel them to compromise those convictions. They especially wanted to make it possible for a Christian to serve or to work in government without having to violate his or her faith.
The current progressive demonization of Christian nationalism would clearly have baffled those non-Christians in times past.
Probably the best-known result of such efforts is the body of law surrounding conscientious objection to war. As far back as the American Revolution, states such as Pennsylvania allowed those who believed any killing immoral to avoid joining local militias in return for paying a fine equal to the time they would have spent drilling. During World War I conscientious objectors were permitted to serve the armed forces in noncombatant roles, such as ambulance driver, and eventually to become either auxiliary farmhands in the U.S. or relief workers in war-torn parts of Europe. (READ MORE: Progressivism Is Aggravating America’s Mental Health Crisis)
With the Second World War came the option to join the Civilian Public Service (CPS) as a firefighter, mental health worker, conservationist, or in some other socially needed capacity. Religious civilians who objected to funding combat by buying war bonds were provided alternative savings vehicles.
Today, the spirit of Christian nationalism is very much alive in events like last October’s sixth annual conference on “Christianity and National Security” in Washington, DC. Sponsored by the Institute for Religion and Democracy, it brought together Georgetown professor Matthew Kroenig, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs, former U.S. Special Envoy J. Peter Pham, and other experts to discuss the intersection of Christian ethics and American foreign policy. Among the topics they addressed were how to live one’s faith while representing the U.S. government in a country with different values, what policymakers can learn from the Christian concept of a “just war,” and what individual Americans can do to help other peoples displaced by war.
Because of their desire to preserve the believer’s ability to express his or her sense of God’s calling, no matter how it may differ from what is most convenient for the state, Christian nationalists generally share in social conservatism’s advocacy of small government, free markets, and traditional morality. But whereas the social conservative tends to stress the need for large institutions to reflect and promote that morality, the Christian nationalist places a greater emphasis on the simple freedom to go wherever the spirit leads, regardless of what others might believe.
Just as the seventeenth-century Puritan radicals understood that everyone’s life has the potential to help incarnate a better — if unforeseeable — world, so the Christian nationalist measures the welfare of a nation by the extent to which its people are allowed to serve God’s will as they understand it. A very old idea in American history, indeed the one idea that all the early Christian colonies would have either subscribed to or at least respected, despite their denominational differences.
The current progressive demonization of Christian nationalism would clearly have baffled those non-Christians in times past who understood that the freedoms it created in the U.S. could not only be enjoyed by citizens of all faiths but even guide other countries in how to better reconcile religion and government. When it was learned, for example, that First Dutch Reformed Church pastor and U.S. Congressman Julius Hawley Seelye would stop in Bombay on his 1872–73 around the-world tour, educated Hindus prevailed upon him to deliver a series of lectures which were published widely throughout India.
Twenty years later, Chicago hosted the World’s Parliament of Religions as the centerpiece of its four-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the New World, in part to satisfy the growing curiosity about Christian nationalism in places as far away as China. The event attracted seven thousand participants representing faiths from every part of the world and was covered for seventeen days on the front pages of U.S. newspapers from coast to coast.
In our own time, the journal Providence carries on the Christian nationalist tradition of seeking ways to maximize spiritual freedom in the political realm, both at home and abroad. Its contributors include journalist Fred Barnes, who most famously appeared as a regular panelist on TV’s McLaughlin Group, and the Wall Street Journal’s Global Views Columnist, Walter Russell Mead. (READ MORE: Meet the Suburban Parents)
All this is not to say that Christian nationalism has ever represented some kind of one-world philosophy or followed the Enlightenment tendency to see all religions as the same. Self-declared Christian nationalists are, and always were, Bible believing followers of Jesus. But unlike their current progressive attackers, they have long understood that it is far more dangerous for government to command a better society than to allow its citizens to build it by their own lights.
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Why You Should Rethink Flying United Airlines
Dennis Prager
In 2021, United Airlines released the following statement: “Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.”
In the past few weeks, a 2021 interview with United CEO Scott Kirby, in which he promoted United’s pilot-training policies, went viral.
The bottom line is clear: It will no longer be merit alone that determines who half of United’s pilots-in-training will be, it will be race and sex (or “gender,” as the Left prefers to call it). Despite The New York Times and the rest of the Left defending United, there is no other honest conclusion to draw.
As one who flies about 100 times a year, often on United, this worries me. Until now, I rarely worried about safety issues. I have certainly never feared flying.
But this is troubling enough that, although I will probably have flown a million miles on United by the end of 2024, and I am at the second-highest level available to United Airlines flyers (Premier Platinum), I will now do my best to avoid flying United.
I am also giving up my United Visa card.
And I am asking all Americans who have a choice in airlines and a choice in credit cards to do the same. If you don’t fight this battle, you have no right to complain about the demise of our society, let alone of United or any other airline adopting similar policies.
You have an opportunity to make a difference. United may be willing to compromise about safety, but it isn’t willing to compromise about its bottom line.
United is a particularly woke company. As one left-wing observer of the airline industry and defender of United, Gary Leff—writing on viewfromthewing.com—put it: “United was out way ahead of the Biden administration with vaccine mandates. This angered many pilots.”
It is important for me to note that until now I could not care less if my pilot was black, white, male, or female. I have flown on planes with black pilots and female pilots, and I slept equally well on board. Those of us who oppose United’s affirmative action do not do so for race- or sex-based reasons.
To cite a medical example, people of every color sought Dr. Ben Carson if they needed one of the country’s best neurosurgeons for their child. But if people know that a hospital was hiring surgeons using affirmative action criteria, they might well think twice before undergoing surgery with a minority surgeon.
Here’s a good test of whether opposition to United’s affirmative action for pilots is racist or not: Ask a black friend or colleague if he or she would prefer a pilot (or surgeon) who was chosen on merit alone or by also using affirmative action criteria.
We already know that colleges engaged in affirmative action have not helped black students succeed. Why should it work in the cockpit? Would anyone respect the decision of an NBA team to diversify its players by using affirmative action to hire more white players?
The woke DEI notion of companies, physicians, and cockpits having to “look like” the rest of the population is as absurd as it is dangerous. In fact, I can think of no area of life where this matters to anyone who is not on the Left.
How, exactly, have all the black mayors, congressmen, and even a black president, helped blacks in any way? Has the virtual absence of Indian American, Taiwanese American, Filipino American, or Pakistani American mayors, congressmen—or pilots, for that matter—hurt any members of these groups in any way? Those four groups are the top-earning ethnic groups in America (Census Bureau, 2021).
The notion that the cockpit or the mayor’s office has to look like the rest of the population is just foolish—as foolish as the idea that professional athletes have to look like the rest of the population. It is an idea, like most stupid ideas, that appeals primarily to college graduates.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/30/why-you-should-rethink-flying-united-airlines/
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Australian Surf Brand’s Wipeout Over Transgender Surfer Shows Fed-Up Americans Are Winning
It’s been a week to forget for surf company Rip Curl, the latest brand to risk consumers’ wrath with a pro-transgender marketing campaign.
Its January post urging people to meet “waterwoman” Sasha Lowerson, a biological man in a bikini, lit a literal fire under fans, who took to the internet to burn everything from surf booties to boards. Days after deleting the reel, with international outrage at a peak, headquarters decided to do something that Bud Light still hasn’t: apologize.
In a revealing move, management issued a mea culpa late Wednesday night, just five days into the dust-up. “Our recent post has landed us in the divisive space around transgender participation in competitive sport,” a spokesman told Shop-Eat-Surf late Wednesday night. “We want to promote surfing for everyone in a respectful way, but recognize we upset a lot of people with our post and for that, we are sorry. To clarify, the surfer featured has not replaced anyone on the Rip Curl team and is not a sponsored athlete.”
If Americans want to know who’s winning the war with corporate bullies, look no further.
A reversal like this is majorly significant—not only because of how intense the backlash was, but how quickly executives responded. If anything, the wave of corporate pushback that was sparked by Bud Light has only intensified over time. In fact, it’s so powerful that even the media is starting to admit that the grassroots may actually be winning this fight. “Big corporates may finally be learning that ‘Go woke, go broke’ is real,” commentator Nicolle Flint pointed out.
“ … [T]he once iconic Australian surf brand is living proof that women are finally fighting back against companies using transgender women to promote products for women and girls,” she wrote. “What is most significant about the Rip Curl campaign featuring Sasha Lowerson that was removed from Instagram just five days after being posted, is that this is the first time a major brand has responded to female backlash. … Whether the company ‘woke up’ soon enough to the fact that the backlash from women was serious and potentially financially damaging remains to be seen.”
That’s a blow to the company’s relatively new CEO, who, pre-Bud Light, told The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia when she was hired in 2021 that her goal was to drift left. “You still want to be cool enough to recruit that next generation,” Brooke Farris said, “but I think by approaching it from a place of inclusivity, people will be attracted to that.”
Turns out, people were not attracted to that—and willing to sink her brand to prove it.
Meanwhile, Bethany Hamilton, the courageous face of Rip Curl from 1999 to 2023, is surely looking on with satisfaction. A year into her renewed contract with the company, the two sides abruptly parted ways last year, almost certainly because of Hamilton’s opposition to the new rules allowing biological men to compete in women’s surfing. The devoted Christian and shark-attack survivor, whose comeback story inspired the world, reiterated her stand at the height of the Rip Curl controversy, posting, “Male bodied athletes should not be competing in women’s sports. Period.”
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6 February, 2024
Why does Dawn Queva hate Jews?
I am personally philosemitic and have been so since I was in my pre-teens. The church I was born into told me that the Jews were God's chosen people and that Israel was their God-given land. And I believed that. I am no longer religious but I still believe the Jews live in Israel as of right. And I admire the success they have made of their return there.
I offer that context to explain why I have been a student of antisemitism for many years. Listening to antisemitc speech could not disturb me but it did seem curious that some people had such views. So I in fact sought out antisemities in an effort to understand them. I published my findings in Jewish journals.
Ray, J.J. (1972) Is antisemitism a cognitive simplification? Some observations on Australian Neo-Nazis. Jewish J. Sociology 15, 207-213.
Ray, J.J. (1973) Antisemitic types in Australia. Patterns of Prejudice 7(1), 6-16.
And in an odd turn of events, I did up until recently have a furiously antisemitic girlfriend
So I thinkI am in a good position to comment on the hate-filled Dawn Queva .
The first thing to note about her beliefs is that they are not the result of careful enquiry but instead contradict at many points the conclusions a spirit of sober enquiry would lead to. And most antisemitic people speak similarly. I have heard them many times. The speakers concerned make no effort to offer careful proof of what they say. They simply assert without proof a range of derogatory claims about Jews and Israel.
So from an academic viewpoint, there is nothing to argue about in what they say. Their words are a performance, not a set of examinable claims. They are empty assertions.
So where does the impetus for these statements come from? It comes from one of the oldest human follies: The tendency to believe what you want to believe rather than what the evidence shows. And that is a quintessential Leftist habit. Leftists do it all the time. They believe that things like rent-control are beneficial to tenants when all experience shows that rent control hurts tenants. Facts and evidence have no power to change their views.
And we see that Ms Queva comes from a Leftist environment -- the BBC -- and that it took a lot of pressure for the Beeb to fire her.
But not all Leftists are antisemites as far as we can tell so there remains something to explain. In answer, I think it is a matter of extremity. Moderate Leftists retain enough reality contact not to respect all the wild claims about Jews. They have enough balance to see that Jews are just people like us who happen to have a slightly different religious background.
So why do extreme Leftists hate Jews? Easy. Israel embodies all that Leftists hate. It is prosperous and influential. It is a top dog that sends its enemies packing with ease, not the underdog that Leftists favour. Israel is assertive instead of humble. It is the powerhouse of the near East. It is exactly what Leftists want to tear down. Israel's success negates all sympathy for it. So Leftist protesters have turned out in their usual droves with Israel being the new focus of their hate. So that explains recent demonstrations etc.
But antisemitism existed long before the present State of Israel. Whence that?
The answer is religious in two different forms. The simple form is Muslim antisemitism. In both the the Koran and the Hadiths, Mohammed attacked Jews. So among Muslims, antisemitism is simply pious. They are following their prophet
Its a bit more complex among Christians. For centuries Christians reviled Jews for killing Christ. But they were also told in their Bibles that Jews were God's chosen people. Problem: How could they revile God's chosen people?
There is only one way out of that. They had to deny that Jews were descendants of the Israelites of the Bible. It was a matter of history that Jews WERE descendants of people who had fled Israel in Roman times but that did not matter. All sorts of improbable stories were made up to give alternative and derogatory origins for the Jews. Ms Queva repeats many of them.
And over the centuries those stories became embedded in the folk wisdom of "Christian" lands. They were traditionally passed down among family and friends and are believed by many to this day. They became part of the culture. World War II discredited them to some extent but below the surface they were and are still believed, even among many Germans. And it is those stories that antisemites regurgitate to this day. Their historicity does not matter to believers. They WANT the stories to be true so they are believed without need of proof. Assertions are enough.
Dawn Queva, a BBC scheduler, has been fired after sharing 'horrific' anti-Semitic social media posts
Ms Queva, 55, described the Holocaust as a 'holohoax', prompting calls for the BBC to take action
One post by Dawn Queva claimed that 'being JewISH has zero to do with ethnicity' and suggested Jews were from the 'Synagogue of Satan'
In the messages, she refers to 'AshkeNazis', a slur that is a play on 'Ashkenazi' – Jews who descend from those who lived in central or eastern Europe.
One message claims the Ashkenazi Jews are 'a bunch of subcontinental European melanin recessive CaucAsian japhetic AshkeNazi who have no None zero zilch blood connection to the land of Palestine or Israel historically'.
Another brands Jewish people an 'invader coloniser species'. Ms Queva also allegedly described white people as 'barbaric' and 'bloodthirsty'. In other posts, she referred to the UK as the 'UKKK' – a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
Ms Queva, 55, a senior scheduler and playout planner for BBC Three, posted under the name Dawn Las Quevas-Allen. She previously worked in scheduling for A+E Networks, UKTV and Disney.
She doubled down on her remarks after they came to light, challenging her critics to 'come at me... my shoulders are broad'.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13045017/BBC-Jews-invader-SACKED-dawn-queva.html
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UK: Labour’s ‘trans inclusive’ conversion therapy ban will be a disaster
Keir Starmer has a reputation for changing his mind. But on one issue at least, the Labour leader remains worryingly consistent. Addressing an LGBT+ Labour meeting in Parliament this week, Starmer declared, ‘Labour governments and the LGBT+ movement have a history of achieving incredible things together.’ His own contribution to this long march of progress has already been determined. Starmer yet again pledged that a Labour government will outlaw all forms of conversion therapy.
Sir Keir is adamant that, on his watch, a conversion therapy ban will be ‘trans inclusive’. In other words, it won’t just outlaw attempts to turn homosexuals straight but, crucially, it will most likely make it illegal to try and change someone’s gender identity. Under a Labour government, facts be damned. If a man thinks he is a woman, it will be against the law to try and persuade him otherwise.
There is no evidence that gay people are being routinely subjected to conversion therapy
This trans-inclusivity matters to the Labour party because without it, there’s little to justify calls for a ban on conversion therapy. The days of chemical castration and electro-shock therapy are, thankfully, long gone. A handful of unhappy adults might seek out a vicar to pray with them, but there is no evidence that gay people are being routinely subjected to conversion therapy.
If it doesn’t include transgender people, Starmer’s proposed ban is pointless. But even here, evidence of coercive practice is scant. The latest government commissioned research into the scale of conversion therapy included only six trans or ‘nonbinary’ people who said they had been offered conversion therapy in the past three decades. Such small numbers suggest this is hardly a crisis. Starmer’s trans-inclusive conversion therapy ban might then be less about reality and more about sending a message, but it should trouble us nonetheless.
The line between ‘conversion therapy’ and plain old ‘therapy’ is vanishingly thin while the consequences of transitioning are monumental. Take two young adults. One has a relationship with someone of the same sex before changing her mind and deciding she is boringly straight after all. She goes on to get married and have children. Her youthful experimentation is nothing more than a happy memory.
The second woman thinks she might actually be a man. She socially transitions, changing her name and pronouns. She goes on to take cross-sex hormones and has surgery to remove her breasts. At this point, still unhappy, she decides to detransition. But the physical changes to her body are irreversible. She faces potential infertility, permanent scarring and lifelong changes to her voice and appearance.
No humane society should let someone put themselves through this without first making sure they are fully aware of the consequences. It might not be what a transgender person wants to hear, but it is necessary to point out that no amount of hormones or surgery can actually change a person’s sex. And, in some instances, advising against medical transition might be the best course of action. Yet for Sir Keir, these conversations, far from being compassionate, are ‘psychologically damaging abuse’.
His proposed ‘full, trans-inclusive ban on all forms of conversion therapy’ is particularly concerning for children. There has been a shocking rise in the number of children, particularly teenage girls, who claim to be transgender. Their first recourse is most likely parents or teachers; informal conversations often determine what happens next. Loving reassurance that the best thing is to wait and see gives children time to grow up and potentially change their minds. Yet banning conversion therapy casts a glare of suspicion over such reassurances. Rather than responding from the heart, parents and teachers will worry about being criminalised. A trans-inclusive conversion therapy ban threatens the intimacy of family relationships.
Many gender-confused children grow up to be happily homosexual. Ironically, a future ban on conversion therapy could send these youngsters headlong down a path to medical interventions that will ‘trans away the gay’. The most gruesome forms of medical conversion therapy might have had their day. But, under a future Labour government, young lesbians will be able to get their breasts cut off and become straight trans men while gay men can be transformed into hormone-pumped trans women. This is conversion therapy on steroids. Or, more accurately, on testosterone.
Labour’s allegiance to the rainbow flag means the party will plough on with banning conversion therapy despite the risk such legislation poses to vulnerable children. In his speech to LGBT+ Labour, Starmer also announced plans for tougher hate crime legislation and a promise to ‘modernise the Gender Recognition Act’.
Sir Keir’s flip flopping eventually brought him to a place where he can say that 99.9 per cent of women do not have a penis. But, it seems, this insight will do nothing to stop Labour making it easier for gender-confused children to be pushed towards medication and surgery and for men to enter women’s spaces. For the sake of family life, children’s health, lesbian and gay rights and women’s safety, it is vital Starmer’s conversion therapy plans are thwarted long before he gains the keys to 10 Downing Street.
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Why is the British civil service being given lessons on ‘microaggressions’?
Civil servants are being given lessons instructing them not to roll their eyes or look at their mobile phones while dealing with members of staff. Such behaviour can be deemed evidence of sexual or racial discrimination, examples of ‘microaggressions’.
As the Times reports today, more than £160,000 has been spent by the government since 2021 on hiring public sector consultants to train staff to recognise ‘perceived slights’ in the form of microaggressions. Complaints of microaggressions are even being brought to employment tribunals after Acas, the arbitration service, decided to include them in its guidance against discrimination. Elsewhere, in the same time period, the Education and Skills Funding Agency has spent more than £1,000 per worker on microaggression training for a small number of staff.
There is no conscious way to know we are making a microaggression and so no way to prevent ourselves from making one
A microggression, an idea derived from the school of Critical Race Theory, is the concept that someone might innocently or unconsciously display a dismissive or hostile attitude through unwittingly made minor gestures. The word was coined in 1970 by the psychiatrist Chester Pierce; and the psychologist Derald Wing Sue has since described microaggressions as ‘brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership’.
One class of British civil servants has recently been taught the following definition: ‘Microbehaviours are tiny, often unconscious gestures, facial expressions, postures, words and tone of voice can influence how included (or not included) the people around us feel.’ The definition pointed to examples such as ‘insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate unfriendly, critical or negative messages’. Elsewhere, Berkshire Consultancy, which has been teaching staff from the Competition and Markets Authority (which has spent over £60,000 on lessons), explains that microaggressions ‘are usually delivered by well-intentioned individuals unaware that they have engaged in harmful conduct toward a socially devalued group.’
There is of course one glaring contradiction inherent in the idea of teaching people how not to make microaggressions: you cannot avoid making an unconscious gesture. The unconscious by its very definition is unknowable to the rational mind. There is no conscious way to know we are making a microaggression, and consequently, no logical manner to prevent ourselves from making them. Furthermore, the consequential offence that they might generate is all in the eye of the beholder, beyond the ken of those putatively causing the offence: it is entirely subject to the interpretation of anyone sensing – or seeking – offence.
No wonder the fruits of such lessons have been disappointing, to say the least. ‘Feedback from trainees after one series of lessons was scathing,’ reports the Times. ‘Most respondents said that the training did not meet their objectives, did not enhance their knowledge, they did not feel they could apply what they had learnt to their work and would not recommend the sessions to others.’
Nevertheless, the whole notion of microgressions chimes with the times. They resonate with a culture that places a premium on feelings and subjective interpretation above dispassionate objectivity. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay wrote in their influential 2020 book Cynical Theories, one of the most significant shifts in culture at the end of the twentieth century was that ‘the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted.’
In the wake of the 1999 Macpherson inquiry, our legal system came to enshrine such subjectivity into the definition of a racist incident, which is now described as ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim’. Now it’s not the intention, conscious or not, of a word or action that matters, but the subjective perception of it.
We have witnessed the corresponding elevation of feeling in the radical trans movement, which holds that so long as one believes oneself to be of another sex, or ‘identifies’ oneself as such, that belief should be respected or even enshrined in law. The Scottish government may be have been thwarted in December in its plan to make it easier to change one’s sex by law, basically by basing it on a personal decision, but it captured a zeitgeist that is enthral to subjectivity or. to put it less charitably, irrationality.
Microgressions resonate, too, to ‘woke’ ideology, and one of its central tenets: that power is exerted in an invisible, not obvious fashion – hence the presence today of such similarly nebulous and unverifiable concepts as ‘unwitting racism’ and ‘implicit bias’. Allied to this is the belief that those exerting power are invariably white and male and those at the receiving end are those categories who have been historically oppressed. This conceit has ostensibly been borrowed in its entirety by the civil service, who have made it the assumption that any microgression must be racial or sexual in its nature. As if a sensitive white male like me can never perceive a slight.
So far, the success of lessons on microaggressions in the civil service seem to have been limited. But don’t expect to hear the last of them. They are very much of our era.
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Australia: Antisemites fall out
Anti-Israel activists have fallen out bitterly over claims there are too many white people advocating for Gaza in a peak lobby group and that the use of a former Israeli soldier to back the Palestinian cause is wrong.
Block the Dock Melbourne, which targets Israeli shipping interests, has savaged Free Palestine Melbourne, claiming the umbrella campaigning group has been overrun by white people who do not speak for the people directly affected by the Middle East conflict.
The groups are two of the highest profile pro-Palestinian groups in Australia, often campaigning together to highlight their opposition to Israel’s response to the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel last October.
But the groups are at odds, with Block the Dock declaring publicly it was opposed to the lack of Palestinian people involved in FPM’s campaigning and against using a former Israeli soldier to promote their cause on behalf of those opposed to the Jewish state.
“What an embarrassment to the Palestinian community,’’ Block the Dock posted on social media. “We don’t need Palestinian killers in our community.
“90% of FPM is run by white people. White people do not speak for all Palestinians.’’
The weekend post by Block the Dock provoked a strong response across the anti-Israel lobbying sector, with some calling for it to be taken down and others stridently backing it.
The division came as Greens leader Adam Bandt declared at a Melbourne rally that the Albanese government should change course on its position on Israel, flagging his party would move a motion for such a change.
He said it was beyond doubt that the “far right-wing cabinet of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu’s is intent on slaughter and dispossession’’.
“And it is time for Labor to change course,’’ he said.
Block the Dock is a radical left-wing group that has been camped at the Melbourne port, an engine room of the national economy, to try to disrupt Israeli-owned boats.
Israel’s ZIM is a global shipping line that activists accuse of helping the pro-Israel military cause.
The group has had only scattered success, but has received favourable coverage in some foreign media backing Gazans.
The entry to the dock has been defaced with anti-Semitic stickers, one declaring a picture of a Jew saying: “If I don’t steal it someone else will.’’
It was printed by the anti-Israel group @freepalestineprinting, which also has played a key role in the campaign against Israel and Jewish interests in Australia.
The anti-Israel groups have relied heavily on social media to further their cause, with Sunday’s rally in Melbourne live-streamed.
The Block the Dock post provoked a mixed reaction, with one woman saying the campaigns should be run by Palestinians.
‘’I think it’s only a problem if whites are running the organisations, we can be involved as allies,’’ she wrote.
“Palestinians should be the main people running the cause, with other groups as allies – especially First Nations as they’ve suffered similar.’’
Another respondent defended FPM: “They do have Palestinians in their organisation. I know them. And like all good and decent organisations in Australia it is an inclusive and multicultural space for activist who support Palestine. It is not closed to anyone.’’
Melbourne’s pro-Palestinian rallies are heavily backing First Nations causes, with Aboriginal activist Robbie Thorpe a lead speaker at the Melbourne rally.
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5 February, 2024
Made "by" or "through"?
Maybe Iam flogging a dead horse but there are still a couple of translation issues in John 1 that I think deserve comment.
Verse 2 of John 1:
????? ?? ?? ???? ???? ??? ????.
(The same was in the beginning with God)
This verse makes the meaning of verse 1 crystal clear. The "theos' of verse 1 is said here to be a beginning with THE God -- "ton theon". So John makes a sharp distinction between "theos" Jesus and THE God ("ton theon")
Being aware of Greek usage of the definite article really helps us to get clear what John was saying. He was in fact contrasting Jesus with the supreme God
Verse 3 of John 1
????? ??? ????? ???????, ??? ????? ????? ??????? ???? ??. ? ???????
(All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.)
The older Bible translations (e.g. KJV and Douay) render "di" above as "by". But "dia" is the normal Greek word for "through" and most modern versions (including the NKJV) render it correctly as "through". So all things were done "through" Christ rather than "by" him. So Jesus was a conduit of the supreme God's will. He did not do things on his own initiative. Once again his separateness from the supreme God is emphasized by John
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Leftists Protest the Stores They Put Out of Business
When a store closes in your neighborhood, you might express sympathy for the owner and the workers. In Roxbury, a section of Boston where a Walgreens closed Wednesday, they protested.
Demonstrators chanted “Hell no, Walgreens!” and criticized the business for putting “profits over people.”
The pharmacy stayed open an additional two weeks but the signs and chants otherwise made no difference. The closure marked the fourth Walgreens shuttering in Boston in the last two years.
“When a Walgreens leaves a neighborhood, they disrupt the entire community and they take with them baby formula, diapers, asthma inhalers, life-saving medications, and, of course, jobs,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley said on the floor of the House. “These closures are not arbitrary and they are not innocent. They are life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination.”
Pressley’s contention that Walgreens closed not because it wanted to stop losing money but because of its deep hatred of racial minorities and poor people suggests not only a profound misunderstanding of how businesses work but reflexive thinking, which is no thinking at all. Discrimination as the default criticism and protest as the default response shows the degree to which ideology puts brains on autopilot.
One reason Walgreens and other stores close in high-crime areas involves retail theft. Walgreens reported theft losses at 2.5 percent of sales in 2023’s fourth quarter, a number actually heading in the right downward direction but still crippling when one considers the fine line between profits and losses.
At a Walgreen’s in San Francisco, they chained up the freezer and placed gum, toothbrushes, and nuts behind a plexiglass protector. In Chicago, a store unveiled a new layout with two display aisles and kiosks to order products fulfilled by workers in a backroom that keeps all the goods away from all the customers, paying and otherwise.
Why did it so recently devolve to where stores lock up not just high-priced items such as razors and Red Bull but toothbrushes?
It turns out the people pointing the biggest fingers at Walgreens bear a massive share of the blame.
Take Ayanna Pressley. Even prior to the summer of George Floyd, she came out with something called the People’s Justice Guarantee, which posited that “the American legal system duplicates and maintains systems of oppression that can be traced back to slavery.” Her solution, outlined in a congressional resolution containing 62 whereases, involved ending bail, mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing laws, and “dramatically increasing diversion opportunities, community service, restorative justice programming, and treatment options that minimize court involvement and result in no prison time for most offenses where the person does not cause or intend to cause harm.”
Stores abandon urban areas not because their owners hate people of color or poor people but because many cities embrace the basic tenets expressed in Pressley’s People’s Justice Guarantee. By not prosecuting so-called petty crimes, ending bail for most offenses, and putting habitual offenders on the streets and not in a cell, criminal justice systems in many cities incentivize theft.
Just as Pressley fails to grasp that economic incentives and not protests dictate whether stores stay in business, she does not understand the predictable consequences of removing consequences for shoplifting. The same activists who pushed for the abolition of bail and not punishing violators of certain offenses should protest themselves instead of the stores they helped put out of business.
Ayanna Pressley might ponder what Walt Kelly’s Pogo once noted: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
https://spectator.org/leftists-protest-the-stores-they-put-out-of-business/
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Christian, Jewish Leaders Condemn Ongoing Political and Spiritual ‘Persecution’ of Paivi Rasanen
Finland is a very Left-leaning place so intolerance in the name of tolerance is to be expected of them. They see nothing paradoxical in being intolerant of intolerance. They should look in the mirror more. They are in fact more intolerant than those they criticize. They condemn as "hate" simple disagreement with them. So who are the real haters?
An interfaith coalition has offered prayers of solidarity to two evangelical Christians facing their third trial for declaring that homosexuality violates the Bible, a position prosecutors call “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Despite two unanimous acquittals, Finland’s state prosecutor has taken an elderly member of Parliament and a Lutheran bishop before the Supreme Court to answer for their traditional Christian beliefs on sexuality.
Dr. Päivi Räsänen, who has served in Parliament for 29 years, and Bishop Juhana Pohjola of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, are facing “spiritual persecution” for upholding the Scripture, said a letter signed by dozens of Christian and Jewish leaders.
“Once again, you face unjust charges. For almost half a decade, you have confronted targeted legal harassment for simply living out your Christian faith, the direct result of not just political persecution but also spiritual persecution,” says the letter, which was led by Advancing American Freedom and released today.
“Now, despite twice being unanimously declared not guilty at the Helsinki District Court and the Helsinki Court of Appeals, the prosecutor has filed another appeal, potentially forcing a third trial at Finland’s Supreme Court.”
Authorities have centered their legal case on a 5-year-old social media post made by the member of Parliament, a member of the Christian Democrats Party, asking why her Lutheran church body would take part in an LGBT “Pride 2019” event. The post on X, formerly Twitter, included a photo of Romans 1:24-27, which clarifies that homosexual behavior is sinful.
Two years later, in April 2021, prosecutors charged Räsänen and Pohjola with “agitation against a minority” under the nation’s law against “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Police arrested Räsänen and subjected her to 13 hours of police interrogation before her trial. Prosecutors dubbed the Bible verses in her tweet, a booklet the two wrote in 2004 expounding on biblical doctrine titled “Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual Relations Challenge the Christian Concept of Humanity,” as well as comments Räsänen made on the radio in December 2019 as “hate speech.”
Räsänen and Pohjola were first acquitted by the Helsinki District Court on March 30, 2022. The three-judge panel ruled that prosecutors had violated the Christians’ right to freedom of expression contained in Section 12 of the Finnish Constitution, as well as noting the thorny legal questions posed if secular judges begin ruling on matters of religious doctrine.
“It is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts,” the court declared.
But within days, then-Prosecutor General Raija Toiviainen appealed the charges. Räsänen then faced a two-day trial last Aug. 31-Sept. 1. The Court of Appeals unanimously acquitted Räsänen and Pohjola on Nov. 14. Under the law, social media posts must be intended to offend, and “there must be an overriding social reason for interfering with and restricting freedom of expression,” it ruled. The judges ordered the state to pay both defendants’ legal fees.
Finland’s current state prosecutor appealed the dismissal once again earlier this month.
“It is shocking that the Finnish state prosecutor has decided to target MP Räsänen for a third time, because she politely expressed her religious beliefs in public,” Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council—and who signed the letter—told The Washington Stand. “So far, the Finnish courts have been clear in affirming Räsänen’s right to express her religious beliefs. However, the process of being dragged through court is often the punishment itself.”
The effort to continually prosecute the grandmother of 10 exposes the government’s intolerance and malice toward traditional Christian viewpoints, said Paul Coleman, executive director of ADF International, which is supporting Räsänen’s legal defense. “Dragging people through the courts for years, subjecting them to hourlong police interrogations, and wasting taxpayer money to police people’s deeply held beliefs has no place in a democratic society,” said Coleman. “As is so often the case in ‘hate speech’ trials, the process has become the punishment.”
The U.S. letter offers “prayers and encouragement” to the embattled pair “on behalf of the millions of Americans who support freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”
The letter assures them that “you do not stand alone,” because “each one of us stands alongside you,” note its writers. “We are watching, and we are praying for you. The world is watching, and the world is praying for you.”
The signatories hope their fellow believers, and all those who value freedom of conscience and expression, will make that promise real as the West falls progressively under the sway of illiberal secular repression.
“Christians around the world should continue to pray for and voice their support for MP Räsänen,” said Del Turco.
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New Research on ‘Conversion Therapy’ Turns LGBTQ Narrative on Its Head
Twenty-seven states and Washington, D.C., have banned efforts to change sexual orientation, commonly but mistakenly referred to as “conversion therapy,” for minors on the premise that therapies seeking to mitigate or resolve unwanted same-sex attraction are inherently harmful and increase the risk of suicide.
Father Paul Sullins, a Roman Catholic priest, senior research associate at The Ruth Institute, and former sociology professor at Catholic University, found that the opposite is true, however.
Not only is there no evidence that efforts to change sexual orientation, which Sullins refers to by the acronym SOCE, increase the risk of suicide among those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. There also is evidence that such efforts actually decrease the risk of suicide or thoughts of suicide among them.
“What we’re left with is a situation where we’re being fed a lie that somehow attempting to change sexual orientation is going to fail all the time and it’s going to cause harm, and the truth is just the opposite,” Sullins tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Sullins analyzed the data from a study conducted in 2020 by University of Southern California health researcher John Blosnich. The study, “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Suicide Ideation and Attempt Among Sexual Minority Adults, United States, 2016–2018,” published in the American Journal of Public Health, used data collected by the Gallup Organization.
Gallup called over 330,000 Americans to screen about 3,000 who identified as LGB and then collected 1,500 interviews on the issue, yielding what Sullins described as “very precise data on this particular question.”
“With that data, they correlated the amount of suicide ideation—thinking about suicide and other suicidal behaviors,” such as making a plan to commit suicide or suicide attempts, Sullins explains. “They correlated those with whether a person had ever been to SOCE and found that person who had been to SOCE had over twice the rate of suicidal thoughts and were 1 .7 times as likely to attempt suicide.”
“On the basis of this, calls for banning SOCE were moved forward, and we got into the situation we’re in today,” the sociologist explains.
Yet it seems the researchers made an elementary mistake in analyzing the data; Sullins caught the mistake because Blosnich and his colleagues published the interviews along with the study.
“I got the data and looked at it and I found that they had ignored one very crucial question, which was, ‘When did you think about suicide?'” Sullins recalls.
When he read the interviews, he looked to see “whether the suicide activity happened before or after the person went to SOCE, and what I found, somewhat to my surprise, was that most of the suicidal behavior happened before the person ever went to SOCE. Two-thirds of the thoughts of suicide happened before they ever went to SOCE.”
“Now, you know, it’s logical that if someone engages in a behavior and then goes through an experience, later, that that experience could not have caused that preexisting behavior,” Sullins explains. “Things don’t work backward in the space-time continuum.”
“So I published a firm rebuttal to that study finding not only that did SOCE not increase suicidal behavior, it decreased it,” he says.
Critics attempted to silence his study’s findings.
“Even if my study was true, they claimed it was unethical to publish it because it implied that somehow people needed to be fixed, and it would impede the cause of gay rights,” Sullins says.
Although Sullins is Roman Catholic and believes same-sex activity to be sinful, he says he doesn’t encourage lesbians, gays, or bisexuals to try to change their sexual orientation unless they feel uncomfortable about that orientation. He says that sexual orientation change efforts don’t always work, but his studies find that they do succeed, to some degree.
“I’ve done other studies that show that when people attempt to change sexual orientation, it is fully successful in my studies about 17 to 20% of the time,” he recalls. “Most persons who undergo it, meaning about 60 to 65%, report that they are less caught up in homosexual attractions and behaviors and activity.”
Sullins noted that about 30% of the 1,500 lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in Blosnich’s study said that they have tried to change their sexual orientation, and about 10% said, “If I could be completely heterosexual, I would want to do that.”
“So there is a minority of the gay population who wants to change, is not happy with living the way that they’re living, however you want to say that, and wants to change,” Sullins notes. “Those are the ones who ought to have the option for counseling and therapy if they want it.”
The sociologist also says that his studies show sexual attraction is variable and complex.
“If you measure those things separately, you’ll find that across the range of humans, variation, there are a number of people who have moderate to high levels of same-sex attraction and moderate to high levels of opposite-sex attraction that coexist,” he explains.
“What often happens when persons go through SOCE or attempt to what we call change their sexual orientation is that—not so much that the same sex attractions diminish, that can happen—but it’s much more common that those don’t diminish or diminish very much, but the opposite-sex attractions become more salient and a person is able then to live more out of their opposite-sex-attracted side, we might say, than the same-sex-attracted side,” Sullins says.
The sociologist goes on to describe how some in the scientific community have attempted to stifle his research.
“In a way, I find it an encouragement and a compliment when a study of mine is being suppressed,” he says. “Because if they had an argument against what I was publishing, if they found a flaw in it, they would make that note. But the fact [is] that they don’t do that, instead they want to suppress citations, as you can do in the scholarly world, or they want to make sure it doesn’t get published in journals that are read more widely.”
Sullins also describes having a venue cancel a presentation on his research.
“When they canceled like that, it says to me that they don’t really have an argument on the other side,” he says. “They want to control us by censorship and by controlling the way that we think. Well, as an American, I don’t take well to that kind of control.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/31/new-research-conversion-therapy-turns-lgbtq-narrative-head
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Go woke, go broke
The furore over certain organisations trying to ignore Australia Day is just part of a major trend in developed countries where time and again very smart, driven executives of major companies have fallen for the trap of thinking that the vast bulk of consumers of their company’s products share the concerns of tiny but extremely noisy groups with woke agendas.
Perhaps the least costly of these many errors is that of senior executives at bodies as diverse as Woolworths, Cricket Australia and the Australian Open trying to avoid mentioning Australia Day or acknowledge the national holiday celebrations, only to be forcefully reminded that the vast bulk of consumers and sports-watchers are quite happy with the day as it is. They do not want it ignored or re-labelled ‘invasion day’ or ‘oppression day’ as activists have demanded.
After receiving three thousand emails and having opposition leader Peter Dutton call for a boycott against his supermarket chain, Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci admitted he had misread the political climate over his decision to drop Australia Day merchandise. He also insisted that his decision was due only to last year’s poor sales of such merchandise and that he would celebrate the day himself.
The Australia Day furore, however, is just a bad day at the barbecue compared to the errors costing billions committed by executives of major companies overseas, including those in charge of the iconic US magazine Sports Illustrated. Like all magazines, Sports Illustrated has been struggling to find its place in the digital age, with online sites eating into its core readership, but attempts to reverse this by applying woke obsessions made things far worse.
Sports Illustrated featured articles on subjects such as the lack of ethnic diversity in major sports – an issue in which the vast bulk of its readers had no interest – and even attempted to block advertisers who did not demonstrate a commitment to female equality. But most ludicrous of all was a woke revamp of the magazine’s annual swimsuit issue, a major seller with the publication’s overwhelmingly hetero, male readership.
Instead of using the mainstays of previous years such as a busty Kate Upton, svelte Canadian model Kate Bock or the full-figured girl-next-door-type Myla Dalbesio with a strategically cut t-shirt, the magazine featured transgender men in bikinis and fat women. To the surprise of no one but hard core activists this did not work and the company producing the magazine has all but closed the title, laying off the bulk of the staff. As the magazine rights are owned by another company, Sport Illustrated may yet reappear in another form but at the time of writing nothing has been announced.
The layoffs at Sports Illustrated are, in turn, part of a string of mass sackings at other iconic publications. In January the Los Angeles Times newsrooms announced that it would layoff at least 115 people or about one-quarter of its journalist staff less than a year after a round of major redundancies. Billionaire owner Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong declared that the paper could not continue to lose $US30-40 million ($A46-61 million) a year without increasing revenue and readership. The New York Times and the Washington Post have also announced major lay-offs.
All sorts of reasons can be found for the shake-out at these major newspapers, with the Covid pandemic and the long-running actors strike undoubtedly affecting the LA Times. But online media commentators, openly gloating over the problems of their print competitors, also pointed to the apparent obsession the traditional media has with subjects such as gender and identity politics and climate, as well as its marked cheer-leading for the left. The journalists on those publications, commentators say, have completely lost touch with the concerns of the bulk of their readers.
Even the Disney Corporation usually closely attuned to what its consumers want has been fooled by woke concerns into making what can only be described as strange decisions, notably over the Star Wars franchise which the corporation acquired along with Lucas Films more than a decade ago. Films in this franchise regularly earn more than $US1 billion in ticket sales. But after producing a series of other films that flopped at the box office, Disney decided to revamp the corny space opera and adventure brand by introducing woke themes such as female empowerment.
However, the corporation’s decision to hire a Canadian-Pakistani director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy to direct the next Star Wars film, a political activist known for her work in films that highlight gender inequality, resulted in an enormous backlash from fans.
The fans were, in part, reacting to a comment made by Obaid-Chinoy many years ago that she ‘liked to make men feel uncomfortable’ that resurfaced around the beginning of the year. However, online comments indicate those fans see Obaid-Chinoy’s appointment as further evidence of the general decline in the brand since Disney took it over, and that they anticipate that the new film scheduled for release in 2025 will be a ‘woke disaster’. They also point out that Princess Leia was taking on bad guys and fending off Hans Solo back in the 1970s, so why does the brand have to be made more female now?
Another woke disaster was an attempt by fashion brand Victoria’s Secret to atone for past sins, including an unfortunate connection with serial abuser Geoffrey Epstein, by dumping its usual catwalk show of supermodels parading in the brand’s signature Angel’s Wings, including South African Candice Swanepoel and Australia’s own Miranda Kerr, for models who were plus- sized, transgender and disabled.
The result was a £1.1 billion (A$2.13 billion) fall in sales between 2020 and 2023, with the fashion brand announcing at the end of 2023 that it would, as various commentators noted, ‘bring sexy back’.
Fashion is, well, subject to changing fashions, but even hard-headed car industry executives have swallowed woke/climate nonsense, including activist assurances that electric cars will dominate the car market. As noted in this publication (‘EV Speed Bump’, 2 December) car makers such as General Motors and Ford are discovering for themselves after spending billions what non-activist commentators have been telling them all along, that the broad middle class of consumers owning just one cheap car that they need to get to work or take the kids to school have little interest in expensive electric vehicles.
Every week there’s a fresh disaster. This week, Aussie surf brand Rip Curl was forced into damage control after using a transgender surfer to replace a woman. But the real question is why smart, experienced executives let themselves be fooled into spending billions to please perhaps one per cent of the public, who might not even buy their company’s products, while ignoring or alienating almost all their customer base.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/model-business
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4 February, 2024
Woman falls for "Hi Mum" scam
I once received the "Hi Dad" version of that scam. I have however always insisted that even the littlies call me "John", so I knew immediately that it was a scam. And anybody who tried to impersonate my brother would have a problem too. We still address one-another by our childhood names, which are nothing like our normal names. So crazy customs have their uses
A loving mother fell victim to cruel scammers who stole thousands by posing as her daughter, even sending love heart emojis to make the messages more convincing.
Victorian mum Nina Merrilees, who lives near the state's border with NSW, did not think twice before sending $11,600 after receiving a seemingly innocent text from her daughter.
The message that appeared on Ms Merrilees' phone via WhatsApp read: 'Hi Mum, my phone is broken, this is my new number'.
Ms Merrilees, a mother-of-two, said that this type of message from her daughter, who lives in New Zealand, was not out of the ordinary.
The person posing as Ms Merrilees' daughter asked her to make some urgent payments as the phone was new and didn't have a banking app installed.
Once more this did not strike Ms Merrilees as anything out of the ordinary. 'I'm not sure about other parents, but we quite often make payments for our kids and they always pay us back straight away,' she said.
The mother-of-two sent the sums of $3,450, $3800 and $4,350 using online payments system Osko while the person poising as the daughter promised to pay it all back promptly the next day.
During the text conversation the scammer maintained the facade by peppering the messages with love heart and smiley face emojis.
Despite sending the money Ms Merrilees felt uneasy about the transaction and emailed her daughter straight after.
Her daughter immediately called Ms Merrilees using her previous phone number.
'As soon as I saw that number flash up I just knew I had been scammed out of $11,600 and just felt physically sick,' Ms Merrilees said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13032661/text-message-scam-Nina-Merrilees-hi-Mum.html
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Canadian authoritarianism
In their latest bout with the Leviathan, Canada’s little guy and gal came away with a victory: Judge Richard Mosley ruled last week that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 2022 use of emergency powers to break up protests against Covid-19 restrictions and mandates was unjustified and “infringed” on the constitution. Truckers 1, Nanny State 0.
But don’t break out the Molson yet. The government says it will appeal, and the case could end up at the Supreme Court. As clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor emeritus Jordan Peterson can attest, that doesn’t augur well for Canada’s Forgotten Man.
If not for the wide latitude the high court has given the administrative state across Canada, an Ontario regulator wouldn’t have the power it’s now using to punish Mr. Peterson for his political beliefs. As Bruce Pardy, executive director of Toronto-based Rights Probe and a professor at Queens University in Kingston, explained in an August op-ed for the National Post, “judicial deference grants control not to a monarch but to a professional managerial class.”
That “broad discretion in the hands of administrative bodies,” Mr. Pardy wrote, “has become the foundation of our modern system of government.” The Peterson case is only the latest example of creeping Canadian authoritarianism.
Mr. Peterson hasn’t seen patients since 2017. He makes a living as speaker, author and podcaster. He calls himself an “online educator.” He has five million followers on Twitter. He is, in a word, influential.
He’s also controversial in that he bucks the academy. According to Ontario court documents, he’s been the subject of complaints since 2018 about his public statements “on topics of social and political interest, including transgender questions, racism, overpopulation, and the response to COVID-19, among others.” The complainers—none of whom seem ever to have been his patients—mainly tweeted their objections to the provincial licensing board known as the College of Psychologists of Ontario.
The board’s job is to regulate for competence, not for political views. Nevertheless it assigned a committee to investigate the complaints. In March 2020 the committee recommended no action, though it said Mr. Peterson’s “manner and tone” were of concern.
The griping continued. In August 2022 the board wrote to Mr. Peterson on behalf of its panel of investigators about his “demeaning, degrading and unprofessional” public statements and the “harm” they could cause people. He could solve the problem, the bureaucrats said, if he would agree to attend a re-education camp of its choosing.
Mr. Peterson declined the offer—though he wrote in a letter to the board that he had turned to people in his life he trusts for advice and counselling. The board said failure to be re-educated its way “may constitute professional misconduct.” This is all the more surprising because there was no disciplinary hearing, a necessary step in a judgment of misconduct.
Mr. Peterson took the board to the Ontario Divisional Court, which ruled against him in August. Earlier this month the Ontario Court of Appeal said it wouldn’t hear his case. That’s the end of his legal road. Either he agrees to provincial rehabilitation or he might lose his credential.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s Mr. Peterson’s worldview, not his delivery, that has gotten him into trouble with the authorities. After all, online snark isn’t yet a crime in Canada. Court documents cite instances of name-calling politicians and his refusal to use pronouns other than those that correspond to biological sex. In May 2022, court documents say, “he commented on a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover with a plus-sized model, tweeting: ‘Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.’ ”
In his willingness to fight back, Mr. Peterson may be an outlier. Many Canadians undoubtedly prefer self-censorship to the risk of getting crosswise with the Red Guard or being reported to human resources. But Mr. Peterson is a polemicist who is unafraid. This makes him a problem for the mob and a danger to a system that relies on cultural repression to advance its agenda.
It isn’t necessary to decide whether Mr. Peterson is correct in his views, or in the way he expresses them, to decry this bullying from on high. In a free society there is a right to be wrong. Sardonic commentary is an age-old rhetorical weapon. Mr. Peterson is entitled to his politics as much as the butcher or the baker.
If only Mr. Peterson’s treatment were an exception to the administrative state’s modus operandi. In 2018 the law societies of Ontario and British Columbia refused to credential Trinity Western University’s law school because the university makes students take a vow not to engage in sex outside marriage, traditionally defined. This would seem to be a matter of religious freedom. But the court said the regulator was acting in the public interest.
A court that cancels liberty has lost its way and the nation can’t be far behind.
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New Jersey Dad Sues School Over Daughter’s Secret Gender Transition
More tyranny from the Left
A father is suing a Garden State school district after his daughter’s gender transition was allegedly kept a secret from him.
The father, who is remaining anonymous to protect his daughter’s identity, found that New Jersey’s Delaware Valley Regional High School had been calling his daughter by a male name and male pronouns for at least two months, after a pro-LGBT student club’s staff adviser—who is not licensed to practice either medicine or psychology, according to the lawsuit—asked teachers and other school staff, faculty, and administration to refer to the girl by a male name and male pronouns and not to tell her father.
“I was devastated,” the father said. “If a kid gets a headache in school, they have to call the parents to give them Tylenol, but they’re going to choose to allow them to identify as something?”
He said that his wife died when his daughter was only 4 years old, and his daughter has been in treatment for depression and anxiety since 2022. She has also been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and borderline personality disorder, prompting her doctors to agree to a “cautious approach” regarding her gender-identity confusion.
The father says he only learned of his daughter’s social transition when a neighbor and fellow parent accidentally told him. The neighbor referred to the girl by her male name, and the father asked, “What the hell are you talking about?”
The father removed his daughter from DVRHS and began homeschooling her. He said that LGBT activists in the school system showed her a “fantasyland” version of transgenderism, and once he showed his daughter photos and videos of the reality of gender-transition surgeries, she began crying.
Last month, the father met with DVRHS staff to inform them of his daughter’s mental health history, but was told that the school district would continue to use a male name and male pronouns for his daughter unless she requested that they stop. The girl’s therapist and doctor both approved of removing her from DVRHS.
In comments to The Washington Stand, Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for education studies, said, “These cases are becoming more and more common. And while some of the details are the same, the overall situation is still shocking.”
She explained, “Children who have their names changed at school by teachers and are treated as the opposite sex or an imagined gender are not able to consent to these therapies. Social transition is made to seem harmless and reversible by school counselors and gender activists, but it’s neither of those things.”
Last summer, a poll showed that a majority of New Jersey voters—including a majority of Democrats—support mandatory parental notification policies for students’ attempted gender transitions in schools. Another poll found that parental notification requirements were supported by a majority of Americans nationwide.
But New Jersey Department of Education’s official guidelines say, “There is no affirmative duty for any school district personnel to notify a student’s parent or guardian of the student’s gender identity or expression.” Although the guidelines are not state law, lawyers say that they are enforced by state anti-discrimination laws.
According to an updated list from Parents Defending Education, nearly 1,100 school districts across the U.S. have policies in place prohibiting teachers from telling parents about students’ gender-transition attempts. The majority of those school districts are in California, where Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, has actually sued school districts for keeping parents informed.
The U.S. is increasingly alone in its support of gender-transition procedures for children. Last month, the U.K.’s Department of Education introduced new guidelines not only demanding that parents be notified and involved in students’ social gender transitions, but also that teachers wait a period of time before agreeing to even consider a student’s request to be called by a new name or pronouns, in order to ensure the decision is made after careful consideration over time.
A report last summer also declared the U.S. an “outlier” among Western nations, where gender-transition procedures for minors were concerned. A number of liberal nations have backed away from the subject—including France, Sweden, Finland, and the U.K.
The New Jersey father’s lawsuit names the DVRHS Board of Education, Superintendent Scott McKinney, School Counselor Ashley Miranda, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, acting Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education Angelica Allen-McMillan, and other school staff and administrators. The case will be heard by the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
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Ohio Pastor Fights Back After City Attempts to Shut Down Church’s 24/7 Outreach to Poor, Homeless
After seeing the needs in his community, Pastor Chris Avell made the decision to keep the doors of his church open 24/7.
“We’re called to reach the lost, 24/7,” Avell says, adding that that includes the “the hurting, the broken, the least of these.”
Avell’s church, Dad’s Place, in Bryan, Ohio, is “a place they can come if they’re weary and burdened and find rest and true rest for their souls,” the pastor says. Bryan, a town of some 8,600 people, is located about 64 miles southwest of Toledo.
Some people in the community, whether those struggling with mental health issues, addiction, or physical needs, began frequenting the church and even sleeping there if they needed a place of shelter. But several months after the church opened its doors wide with round-the-clock help for the needy, the city told Avell he had to stop.
“According to the city,” First Liberty attorney Jeremy Dys explains, “Dad’s Place has converted itself from being a church and into a homeless shelter, which they believe is a change of use from the approval that the city had previously given for them to be a church. Well, of course, that’s not true,” he says.
“This is a church, and they’re doing church things,” Dys says of Dad’s Place, adding that churches throughout history have kept their doors open 24 hours a day in order to fulfill the biblical mandate to serve the needy.
Avell, along with Dys, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain how he’s fighting to continue doing the work he and the congregation at Dad’s Place feel called by God to do
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Team Biden Targets Peaceful Pro-Life Activists
Equal justice under the law is supposed to be enshrined in our Constitution. Furthermore, Joe Biden and his administration love to prattle on about their concerns for promoting equality and equity. But, as the Good Book states, "You will know them by their fruits."
What fruits might those be? While the Biden administration pays lip service to "equity" and "justice," their actions belie the fact that they are motivated by no such altruistic concerns. Rather, it's all about promoting their political agenda and selectively applying the law when it suits them. A case in point is the Biden administration's targeting of pro-life advocates and activists with the dubious and likely unconstitutional Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
Six pro-life activists who conducted a peaceful sit-in at an abortion clinic in Nashville were prosecuted by Biden's DOJ on charges of violating the FACE Act. They were subsequently found guilty, and they face a sentence of up to 11 years in federal prison.
But it's not just a selective and targeted application of the FACE Act; it's also the DOJ's needless application of heavy-handed tactics when charging and arresting these individuals.
For example, one of the pro-life activists charged is Paul Vaughn, whom the FBI swooped down upon with guns drawn, pounding on his front door and shouting at him as if he were American gangster John Dillinger. At the time of his arrest, with which he fully cooperated, Vaughn was simply getting ready to take his kids to school. These types of dramatics and needless escalation are solely intended to bully and intimidate.
The Thomas More Society, which is representing Vaughn, has called on the DOJ to drop the case, citing unequal application of the law. The filing states, "Defendants submit that the government has engaged in selective and/or vindictive prosecution motivated by an intent to punish defendants for the content of their viewpoints and their protected expressions thus making this case an unconstitutional application of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act."
The filing also argues that "FACE is an unconstitutional content-based regulation of speech; as applied, it violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as well as the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment; and this court lacks jurisdiction because, especially after the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, FACE is an invalid exercise of Congress' Commerce Clause authority."
Other pro-life activists and advocates that the Biden administration has targeted using the FACE Act include the leftist group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, whom the Thomas More Society is also representing, and Mark Houck, who was acquitted by a jury after he was ridiculously charged by the DOJ of violating the FACE Act for defending his young son from an aggressive pro-abortion activist. The FBI used heavy-handed tactics against Houck as well when agents raided his home and arrested him.
Meanwhile, the FBI has hardly raised a finger to investigate — let alone prosecute — a myriad of instances of violent actions and clear violations of the FACE Act against pro-life facilities and churches. Indeed, it has been pro-life centers, facilities, and churches that have most often been the target — not to mention the threats pro-abortion activists have leveled against Supreme Court justices.
Regarding the Biden administration's selective enforcement of the FACE Act, journalist Greg Price observes: "A grand total of zero people have ever been arrested for protesting outside the houses of Supreme Court justices after Roe was overturned, which is a federal crime. But peaceful pro-lifers now face 11 years in jail for praying outside an abortion clinic."
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104053-team-biden-targets-peaceful-pro-life-activists-2024-02-01
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New York father loses legal battle to stop his son, 8, from taking puberty blockers to change gender
New York family court officials have denied a father the legal right to stop his eight-year-old son taking life-changing hormones that would begin his medical transition to a girl.
Dennis Hannon, 32, a senior software engineer from Buffalo, has been locked in a 'nightmare' legal battle with Erie Supreme Court spanning seven years, fighting to retain his fundamental parental rights.
He claims that the boy's mother 'pushed' their child's transition, and says the boy himself was not distressed about living as a boy.
What's more, a year after the court's ruling, the young child, Matthew*, reverted back to his original male gender and is now 'a regular little boy.'
However, the father has lost any say in medical decisions about his son and sees him for just a few hours every week.
He cannot afford to appeal to regain full custody. 'It's been a nightmare,' Mr Hannon told DailyMail.com. 'It's completely destroyed my life.'
It comes days after DailyMail.com revealed that a Montana family had lost custody of their 14-year-old daughter after refusing to let her transition to a boy.
Child Protective Services (CPS) turned up at the family's home in Glasgow and later determined that their daughter, who suffered mental health difficulties, needed to transition to 'get better'.
She was sent to a mental health institute where she was allowed to live as a boy called Leo, shave her head and wear a chest binder.
Mr Hannon claimed his ex-wife began dressing his son in girl's clothes when he turned three, in 2017 - two years after he had split from his child's mother.
Mr Hannon saw his son twice a week and every other weekend, while his ex-partner had custody for the remainder of the time. 'When I was picking him up, he was a boy named Matthew*,' he said. 'And I didn't realize that when he was in his mom's care, he was actually a girl named Ruby.'
In 2019, mother sent him to a 'transgender affirming' therapist and sought puberty blockers to stop the production of male hormones, according to court documents seen by DailyMail.com
But Mr Hannon only discovered this information in 2020, when he took his ex-wife to court to find out what had been going on.
And a year before that, Mr Hannon had received a letter from his son's kindergarten addressed to 'the parent or guardian of Ruby Rose Hannon' - which used she/her pronouns.
'I thought they had mailed it to the wrong address,' he said. 'I was the last to know [about the transition]. He was on the fast track to puberty blockers.'
No official diagnosis of gender dysphoria was ever made by medical professionals.
This is the condition experts refer to when person expresses a sense of unease because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. This distress or dissatisfaction may be so intense it can lead to depression and anxiety and have a harmful impact on daily life.
Now, following last year's court ruling, Mr Hannon has only visitation rights, no joint custody or medical authority, meaning he has no say in any medical decisions. He gets his son every other weekend and for a few hours in the week.
By age nine, Matthew was no longer identifying or dressing as a girl.
Gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors is available in New York, unlike other states.
What's more, the city enables those travelling from other states where it is banned to access it.
Social transitioning, such as changing a child's name and appearance, remains a gray area of the law.
In 2020, a court order was issued for Matthew to be enrolled in counselling with a mental health counsellor in Buffalo, New York.
'Even though he never had a diagnosis, I was court ordered to take him to a gender therapist that didn't accept insurance. It was $145 out of pocket every week,' Mr Hannon said.
'He went there for a year and a half. And there was still no diagnosis of gender dysphoria... If I refused, they would say that I was interfering with essential medical treatment, and they would remove my custody.'
Mr Hannon decided he had had enough, and terminated the child's counselling.
When Mr Hannon requested his son be discharged, the therapist wrote to the courts, and he lost medical authority of Matthew.
His ex-partner then sought treatment for Matthew with Ms Andrea Binner, a self-described 'transgender affirming' therapist.
Ms Binner had also referred Matthew to a pediatrician called Dr Tran Ngoc.
'Over a 45 minute phone call with the mother only, Dr Ngoc said my son sounded like he persisted with gender dysphoria and they recommended the potential for puberty blockers when he was nine,' Mr Hannon said.
In February 2020, Mr Hannon's ex partner filed an Enforcement of Custody Petition, used when a co-parent is not following a custody order. The petition referred to Matthew using 'they/their' pronouns.
'Since approximately Matthew's third birthday... They have expressed, unprovoked, that They are a girl,' it said.
'Over the past four years, Matthew has been insistent, consistent and persistent that They are a girl.'
In Mr Hannon's response, he said this was 'a delusion that the defendant is trying to force on our son.'
Over the seven years, the court process has cost Mr Hannon $150,000. 'I spent every dime of my retirement,' he said. He was also ordered to pay his ex-wife's attorney fees.
Mr Hannon said while he is desperate to regain custody of his son, he cannot afford the appeals process.
As for the effect on Matthew, 'it's been awful,' Mr Hannon said.
'He uses a Chromebook for school and he has access to his previous grades, and there are things that pop up with the name Ruby on it still... that's something he's going to have to live with. It's been hard on him.'
Mr Hannon said: 'It's very clear to me that it was all about pushing a narrative. Nobody wanted to question the agenda, or even question whether or not somebody actually had gender dysphoria, it was just, because she said that he was confused about his gender, it must be true.'
When looking for therapists for Matthew, Mr Hannon said his ex-wife 'would get an answer that she didn't want to hear from one therapist, and she shopped around until she found the answer that she wanted to hear - somebody that would work with her to socially transition and ultimately, physically transition my son.'
Now, Mr Hannon said: 'My son is a regular little boy, he goes by Matthew. His mother still tries to influence him by using they/them pronouns, and still calls him B, which is short for Ruby.'
'It was very difficult for him in school because... one year he was a girl named Ruby, wearing dresses and makeup and the hair.
'Then the next year, he's a boy named Matthew. Kids in school will ask him, "Weren't you a girl?" That's hard for a child.
'At three years old, how can he identify as a girl? He never showed any indication to me at all.
'I was looked at as just a conservative who didn't want to accept my son's gender.
'I could very easily be passed off as a bigot for wanting to simply question why and understand how they came to this conclusion or how they could. It was totally weaponized against me.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13030699/gender-transition-custody-battle.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
<> http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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