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 or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or 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.
This is a backup copy of the original blog
With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
29 January, 2021
Prominent black Accused of Killing 3-Year-Old Adopted White Daughter
Victoria Smith
Given the propensity to violence among blacks, this surely calls into question any practice of putting young white children into the care of blacks. I think the story below makes the case for a hanging
Ariel Robinson -- a former teacher, stand-up comedian, and winner on the Food Network show "Worst Cooks in America -- is accused of killing her three-year-old, white adopted daughter.
Robinson and her husband are facing homicide charges following the death of their adopted three-year-old daughter, Victoria Smith. According to reports, the black couple allegedly inflicted a "series of blunt force injuries" upon the child.
The Simpsonville Police Department in South Carolina said in a statement, reported by the Los Angeles Times, that Victoria Smith was admitted to Prisma Health Richland Hospital earlier this month after authorities found the three-year-old child unresponsive. A subsequent investigation concluded the victim’s death had been "the direct result of physical abuse." The couple is currently being held without bond and, if convicted, face prison sentences of 20 years up to life.
Journalist Andy Ngo described Ariel Robinson as a BLM advocate and found a tweet by Robinson published earlier this month in which the accused mother claimed her "white children get treated the same as my black children." Let's hope that isn't true.
Recalibrating the Use of Race in Medical Research
Ioannidis is a distinguished medical commentator so his article (with colleagues) below carries some weight. But he is working against a lot of bias so his conclusuion that race does have some role in medical research is very cautiously stated
Race was originally introduced in US medical curricula in 1790 by Benjamin Rush, who asserted that blackness was a particular kind of leprosy. In 1857 Josh Nott characterized slaves as a biologically appropriate phenotype for hard labor under trying conditions. In the 1870s, the Jim Crow era of race exclusion from most societal venues reinforced medical segregation. This sordid history, although painful to recite, is the underpinnings of race in medicine, including its use in medical research.
Race as a variable in medical research has long been a contentious issue.1 It is widely accepted that race is an indistinct construct that is not always measured accurately and standardized. In 1999, the Human Genome Project emphasized race as nonbiological with no basis in the genetic code. What, then, does race define?
Race is a poor surrogate of social constructs and even more so, if not abjectly, of biology. Differences observed in research studies between “races” may result from the multifarious consequences of long-entrenched and continuously transformed racism. As the crisis of coronavirus disease 2019 has revealed once again, long-standing effects of racism have tremendous effects on the propagation of inequalities and injustice at all levels, including health and health care. Racism, tragically, remains a chronic and acute problem of modern societies, and the use of race in medical research and practice is now being brandished as a surrogate for racism. Eradicating racism should be a moral imperative in medicine.
However, is any progress addressing inequities possible if race as a measure is banned? Is there still some room for using race variables? How much would be lost if these variables were eliminated? Is there a better tool in research and policy efforts? Are there some situations in which race variables remain valuable? What strategy would generate research that diminishes rather than increases inequalities and injustice? The time has come to recalibrate the use of race in medical research.
The call to entirely abandon race from medical research endeavors began several decades ago but is a simplistic solution to a complex set of concerns.2,3 Dislodgement of race from research may hide still-evident and often egregious episodes of health disparities. If for no other reason than the further exposition of health inequities and systemic racism, the use of race should for now persist in medical research. But the imperfectness of race as a tool is problematic.
One school of thought asserts that because race (and ethnicity) is so weakly measured and even more poorly analyzed and reported, efforts should focus on trying to strengthen measurement, analysis, and reporting. A series of initiatives, including self-identification, especially in clinical trials and registries and in specifications of requirements for publicly funded research, ensured that more attention would be given toward obtaining more data on racial minority populations. However, empirical evaluations show that race information can be fragmented, inconsistent, and eventually not very usable.
The medical literature that uses or discusses race is vast, but is it really informative? On December 21, 2020, a search of PubMed with “race OR ethnicity” yielded 518 842 items, whereas one with focused terms such as “African American” and “Hispanic OR Latino” yielded 44 674 and 61 933 items, respectively. However, a recent evaluation4 of a random sample of 1000 Cochrane systematic reviews on various medical interventions showed that only 14 (1.4%) had proposed to perform race- or ethnicity-based subgroup analyses for treatment effects. Only 1 of those 14 analyses was completed but yielded noninformative results.4 Despite the poor performance of race as a measure, numerous passionate, burgeoning health professionals, many of whom are underrepresented in medicine, have been attracted to biomedical research, lured by life experiences to study with enthusiasm the interrelation of race and ethnicity with social and biological factors. Their work should go forward.
A second school of thought argues that race is a painful historical relic and lost cause. With this approach, race as a measure should be abandoned, and efforts should be diverted toward finding variables that are more robust and informative, both for the biological constructs (eg, genetic ancestry) and the sociologic ones (eg, discrimination, deprivation, socioeconomic status) for which race has failed to provide useful, reproducible insights. Does scientific theory support this approach?
On the frontiers of biology, the rapid advent of genetics has transformed the concept of ancestry. A spectrum of genetic granularity through whole-genome sequencing makes the surrogate of traditional races potentially obsolete. However, genetics, despite its tremendous accuracy of measurement and massive information, has been sluggish in making much progress in yielding useful medical tools for everyday practice and for improving patient and population outcomes that matter to many. If anything, genetics may be contributing to worsening inequalities, especially when most genetic architecture databases overrepresent people of European ancestry (88% of genome-wide data had European ancestry as of 2018),5 when genomic tools are too expensive to use for race-based research, and when both biological scientists and social scientists default to White as a reference standard to which others are normalized.6
Race may well be a surrogate, albeit imperfect, for sociologic constructs. However, the most important sociologic variables (eg, social determinants of health) and, in particular, differential opportunities (eg, good access to and quality of care) fail to associate with sufficient precision when race is used as the placeholder. A long list of variables has emerged that try to capture socioeconomic aspects, access to care, health insurance, discrimination, deprivation, geography and place, perceived identity, opportunities, social interactions, financial mobility, health behaviors, and more. Although many of these variables probably come closer to causal relationships than race, they too are still largely nonstandardized, are often crudely measured, and unfortunately do not fully explain differences by race. Limited translational potential and transferability ensue.
Perhaps it is possible to find a middle ground between these 2 schools of thought, improvement vs elimination, in navigating this conundrum. The research corpus can be separated into 2 components: past research investigations in which race has been incorporated in medical textbooks, clinical algorithms, guidelines, recommendations, and other evidence that may or may not be applied in practice; and future research investigations.
For past investigations, a large amount of research involving race variables has been, in hindsight, pedestrian and arguably lies among the greater waste of spurious, nonusable biomedical evidence. However, there are examples for which race variables have become part of the norm of accepted medical knowledge and practice. This applies to both therapeutics (incorporation of race to identify clinically meaningful treatment effect modification for various interventions, as in hypertension or heart failure)7-9 and other clinical tools (incorporation of race to improve diagnosis or prognosis in, for example, calculation of kidney function or pulmonary function).10 Expert specialty medical societies and methodologists should jointly systematically reexamine evidence involving race that is already accepted as core knowledge. For some applications, race may continue to be the best variable to capture the influence on health; quick dismissal or normalization of values to the majority group may worsen outcomes, especially for the most disadvantaged populations. For other situations, it may be realized that these race variables have become obsolete: what they were supposed to presage when they were first proposed may no longer be relevant in the current social and biological science landscape. Alternatively, perhaps some race variables continue to offer incremental, useful information, including the further elucidation of health disparities. However, other, better variables should be developed to replace race per se. Such replacements need to proceed with rigorous validation practices, ensuring the generalizability of the results and solidifying that whatever changes are made will help reduce, rather than exacerbate, existing inequalities.
For future investigations, it is important to think carefully about the fundamental question. Why should race variables be used, if at all? Consider 4 steps: (1) execute a systematic review of prior research because race may have been exhausted as a tool and is futile to study again, or may offer insight for how a new study may best leverage past work, or create novel hypotheses; (2) if race measurements are deemed appropriate, carefully consider collateral, explanatory biological and sociologic variables appropriate to include in the same investigation, and how standardization, accuracy, and relevance may be enhanced in explaining race-based signals; (3) in any comparative analyses, investigators should consider whether White race should be the reference standard because normative values are reasonable, but normal designations that characterize some humans as aberrant are problematic; and (4) carefully consider the potency of any race-related research and gauge a holistic portfolio of clinical and social consequences, including the amelioration or aggravation of existing inequalities.
In a volatile social landscape, it may not be possible to determine exactly how race-specific research efforts may lead to a better, more fair world. At a minimum, however, medical research should not aggravate already embedded gaps between the privileged and the disadvantaged. Just as the lens of science was used to establish a flawed premise of biological race-based differences, so should science now focus on illuminating that which is represented by race and become a trailblazer toward better health equity.
Why Biden’s Immigration Policy Will Harm Americans and Migrants Alike
Joe Biden says he’ll “advance racial equity” by making “bold investments” in “Affordable Housing,” aiding “businesses owned by Black and Brown people,” establishing an “Equity Commission,” etc.
Gosh, that’ll do it.
Others demand reparations for slavery, more social programs, and defunding the police.
Yet, economist Thomas Sowell says, “I haven’t been able to find a single country in the world where policies advocated for Blacks in the United States lifted any people out of poverty.”
Sowell’s a black man who grew up in poverty. His father died before he was born, and his mother died soon after.
“We were much poorer than the people in Harlem and most anywhere else today,” he reflects. “But in the sense of things you need to get ahead, I was enormously more fortunate than most Black kids today.”
That’s because he discovered the public library. “When you start getting in the habit of reading when you’re 8 years old, it’s a different ballgame.”
Exploring Manhattan, he saw disparities in wealth. “Nothing in the schools or most of the books seemed to deal with that. Marx dealt with that,” says Sowell. He then became a Marxist.
What began to change his beliefs was his first job at the U.S. Department of Labor. He was told to focus on the minimum wage.
At first, he thought the minimum wage was good: “All these people are poor, and they’ll get a little higher income. That’ll be helpful,” he reasoned. But then he realized: “There’s a downside. They may lose their jobs.”
His colleagues at the Labor Department didn’t want to think about that. “I came up with how we might test this. I was waiting to hear ‘congratulations!’ [but] I could see these people were stunned. They’d say, ‘Oh, this idiot has stumbled on something that would ruin us all.'”
Once he saw how government workers often cared more about preserving their turf than actually solving problems, Sowell rethought his assumptions.
He turned away from Marxism and became a free market economist, writing great books like “Basic Economics,” “Race and Culture,” and my favorite title, “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.”
Today’s self-anointed leaders talk constantly about how America’s “systemic racism” holds black people back.
“Propaganda,” Sowell calls it. “If you go back into the ’20s, you find that married-couple families were much more prevalent among Blacks. As late as 1930, Blacks have lower unemployment rates than whites.”
But if systemic racism was the cause of inequality, he says, “All these things that we complain about, and attribute to the era of slavery, should’ve been worse in the past than in the present.”
Sowell says the bigger cause of black Americans’ problems today is government welfare initiated in the 1960s. The programs encouraged people to become dependent on handouts. “You began to have the mindset that goes with the welfare state,” Sowell says. “No stigma any longer attached to being on relief.”
Sowell concludes that government programs that are supposed to help minorities do more harm than good. Affirmative action, for example.
In 1965, he took a teaching position at Cornell. The college, he said, had lowered admission standards to diversify the student body, and most students admitted under affirmative action did not do well.
“Half of the Black students were on academic probation,” he wrote, later adding, “Something like one-fourth of all the Black students going to MIT do not graduate. [There is] a pool of people whom you are artificially turning into failures by mismatching them with the school.”
Saying such things makes Sowell an outcast in academia, and now most everywhere.
Sowell writes, “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules … that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/22/what-thomas-sowell-can-teach-us-about-standing-up-to-the-mob
Federal Court Upholds Conscience Protections for DoctorsAmid a flurry of activity and controversy with the incoming Biden administration, there was still a major victory for religious freedom and conscience protection last week.
On Jan. 19, a federal court, citing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, upheld conscience protections for physicians and struck down the transgender mandate that ordered doctors to perform transgender interventions when doing so violated the provider’s sincerely held religious beliefs.
The case, Sisters of Mercy v. Azar, is hardly well-known, but no less newsworthy. The plaintiffs are an order of Catholic nuns, a Catholic university, and Catholic health care organizations. They sued the government, challenging Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which forced doctors to perform transgender interventions against their sincerely held religious beliefs or even sound, medical advice.
The U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota ruled that: “Absent an injunction, [the religious plaintiffs] will either be ‘forced to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs’ by performing and covering gender-transition procedures ‘or to incur severe monetary penalties for refusing to comply.’”
The court also said: “An injunction will also advance the public interest because the protection of constitutional rights is ‘always in the public interest.’”
The legal organization Becket represented the plaintiffs and successfully argued, according to its press release, “that sensitive medical decisions should be kept between patients and their doctors without government interference, and that no one should be required by law to disregard their conscience or their professional medical judgment.”
In a statement, Luke Goodrich, senior counsel at Becket, underscored the importance of religious freedom within the medical community: “The court’s decision recognizes our medical heroes’ right to practice medicine in line with their conscience and without politically motivated interference from government bureaucrats.”
While this ruling should be applauded, this lawsuit should not have been necessary in the first place. Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment, religious providers should not have to give care in a way that violates their beliefs, but lawsuits suggesting otherwise challenged that concept.
In 2017, for example, Evan Minton sued Dignity Health, which operates dozens of Catholic hospitals. These include the one that refused to perform a hysterectomy sought by Minton after learning that Minton scheduled the treatment as a transgender intervention, not for health purposes. Minton is a biological female who now lives as a transgender male.
“I was denied health care because I am transgender. The justification, according to the hospital, was that religious doctrine permits them to refuse transgender patients, just because of who we are,” Minton says on the American Civil Liberties Union’s website.
Minton, the ACLU, and other similar organizations often argue that conservatives perpetuate LGBTQ discrimination under the guise of religious liberty.
Minton’s case, and the Sisters of Mercy v. Azar decision, demonstrate this is not exactly the case. In fact, it’s often the opposite.
The plaintiffs in the case are “devoted to works of mercy and purposely work at religious-based hospitals whose missions are to help the underserved,” according to the court’s ruling. Yet they are told that despite beliefs that motivate them to serve others, they must also provide care that violates those very mores.
This issue—discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity—will be one of the most controversial and important issues with which the Biden administration and conservatives will tangle. It is now present in every major sphere of public life: from schools and bathrooms to sports and hospitals.
While the Trump administration issued the “refusal of care” rule through the Department of Health and Human Services to aid religious people in abiding by their conscience, the Biden administration has already started to unravel such measures.
Given this federal court’s ruling in Sisters of Mercy, it’s clear the new administration and the judiciary will be addressing discrimination and religious liberty.
For now, doctors in at least one district court jurisdiction can continue to lawfully practice medicine while maintaining their beliefs.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/25/federal-court-upholds-conscience-protections-for-doctors
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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28 January, 2021
Caller on a prime time NZ radio show claimed Maori men are 'genetically predisposed to crime' and naturally do badly in school
Nobody seems to care whether the comments were true or not. The fact that Maori are greatly over-represented in NZ jails, the fact that most Maori carry the violence gene monoamine oxidase (specifically the AGCCG haplotype, coupled with the 3-repeat allele of MAO-A30bp-rpt) and that the average Maori IQ is 94, are all ignored. But not offending people is the overarching aim these days.
That such an aim is a disastrous dead-end is shown by the American experience. Mention of the low average African IQ has long been verboten there. So what is the outcome? Has the expected racial harmony happened? Far from it. It has just left lots of angry blacks wondering why they do so badly in all sorts of ways. Because they are not told the truth of the matter they believe false explanations which say that their disadvantage is all due to invisible white racism. And they express their anger about that by repeated rioting and widespread destruction in major American cities. Avoiding the truth is a recipe for long-term disaster, nothing else
A major radio network is facing a huge backlash after broadcasting profoundly racist views during a live talk-back show.
A Magic Talk Radio caller in New Zealand described Maori people as 'genetically predisposed to crime, alcohol and under performance educationally' as well as being 'stone-age people' in a highly offensive on-air rant.
Magic Talk presenter John Banks, a former Auckland mayor and MP, didn't stop the rant on Tuesday.
Instead, Banks thanked the man for his call, before saying 'if their (Maori) stone-age culture doesn't change, these people will come through your bathroom window'.
The exchange was posted on social media site TikTok by a horrified listener, before quickly spreading to other social media platforms.
By Wednesday, outraged social media users were petitioning Magic Talk advertisers to pull their support of the station.
Telecommunications giant Vodafone and TradeMe, a major online sales website, responded by saying they would boycott the station.
Magic Talk holds the rights to broadcast Black Caps matches, and New Zealand Cricket also said they were 'disgusted and appalled by an indefensibly racist' exchange.
NZC suggested it could walk away from its ongoing broadcast deal, saying 'should strong action not be taken NZC reserves its right to review its relationship with Magic Talk'.
A third major sponsor, Kiwibank, said it was 'removing our ads from the Magic Talk website and we'll be talking directly with (station owner) MediaWorks on how they could better encourage a diverse and inclusive NZ'.
Following a 30-year political career including two stints as a cabinet minister, Banks is well known in New Zealand for his right-wing views.
Banks, 74, later said he 'wasn't racist' in a grovelling on-air apology, before admitting his views 'could have been misconstrued as racist'.
'I didn't pick it up at the time, here when you're broadcasting, you're talking to producers, you're talking to bosses,' Banks said.
'I spoke to people later in the show who disagreed with the man and I picked it up then, however this wasn't enough to demonstrate that his comments were wrong and racist.'
Magic Talk announced on Wednesday they had since dumped Banks as an on-air presenter.
The show had been discussing Orange Tamariki, New Zealand's Ministry for Children, and its new all-Maori board of advisors.
'The talkback environment can be robust and opinionated, however we recognise comments broadcast yesterday during a call discussing the departure of Oranga Tamariki’s CEO were hurtful,' Magic Talk wrote on Twitter.
Bridgerton’s woke vanity whitewashes the struggle
Once again moviemakers cast blacks in roles that they did not occupy or rarely occupy in real life. It prioritizes propaganda over reality. That must surely limit its appeal. And people will undoubtedly see through the propaganda so it's not even good propaganda. It's just tedious
At best it’s extravagant virtue signalling. At worst it’s the cinematic love child of agitprop and cancel culture. There can be no argument, however, that Bridgerton trivialises the political history of race and colour.
Episode four of new Netflix period romp and bodice-ripper Bridgerton begins with a visit to court filmed in the gilded interior of Lancaster House. Lady Violet Bridgerton and her winsome daughter Daphne stroll past flocks of sumptuously dressed multicultural dukes and duchesses — African, Caribbean, Indian. The climax of the scene is an encounter with Queen Charlotte, the putative black monarch.
So much froth and bubble. Let’s consider the facts.
English court society in the early 19th century was a white elite atop a multiracial empire. The hereditary aristocracy was morally censorious and ethnically narrow. It owed its wealth to inherited property and the profits made by slavers, plantation owners and commercial entities such as the British East India Company that were busy ransacking India. Edmund Burke, the father of British conservatism, regarded his campaign against the company’s plunder of India the “cause on which I value myself the most”.
Nor is there any solid evidence that the German-born Queen Charlotte was black. That’s really just a genealogical theory prosecuted by amateur Portuguese historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom. It has been pinballing around the internet and has met with scant scholarly support — but hey, it’s good enough for Netflix.
Bridgerton’s Queen Charlotte appears to be a formidable and manipulative monarch, but in reality she was restricted to the care of her husband, the mad King George III, and her many children, her influence on matters of state being indirect and in the form of recommendations.
From the moment of the king’s incapacitation, the British Empire was ruled by the ostentatious and famously corpulent future George IV as prince regent, and Queen Charlotte’s world — though not her skin colour — manifestly darkened. The Regency era began in 1811. Bridgerton opens in 1813, when it was in full swing.
The costumes are gorgeous, the backdrops magisterial — but Bridgerton offers a weak-headed, saccharine, shallow and partial vision of Regency society. Central to this vision is the notion of a multicultural aristocracy in which the exploited races become not only the beneficiaries of imperial exploitation but members of the exploitative class: the ruling elite. Imagine a World War II film in which a cast of Orthodox Jews plays Hitler’s henchmen. It’s that degree of nuts.
At one point in the series the Duke of Hastings (played by English-Zimbabwean actor Rege-Jean Page) and Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) add some conceptual depth to the largely visual picture of a benign multicultural aristocracy. Remarks Lady Danbury: “Look at our queen, look at our king. Look at their marriage, look at everything it is doing for us, what it is allowing us to become. We were two separate societies, divided by colour until a king fell in love with one of us.”
Nice idea. But the king fell in love with a German princess. The black queen theory, wild as it is, asserts only that Charlotte’s line, five centuries earlier, was linked to a woman of Moorish — though not necessarily African — descent. To put it another way, if Charlotte were African then so, too, was her son, the prince regent. And nobody has ever seen evidence of that.
This seems to be Bridgerton’s logic: by injecting people of colour into the upper echelons of Regency society, we perform an act of historical redress or restitution. Turn the apex of British society in the Regency era into an overdressed version of the crowd you might encounter today at a bar in Kensington or Soho, or maybe Paddo in Sydney, and tolerance is magically normalised. It no longer seems like a historical exception.
However, by denying the reality of racial and social injustice, the series erases historical reality: real people have struggled and died for a more tolerant and equal world. It’s a whitewash.
The writers of the Bridgerton series and the popular novel on which it is based claim these distortions are legitimised because the historical vision is at heart a fantasy. That’s bosh. Game of Thrones is a fantasy; it could never be mistaken for a real time or place. Bridgerton goes to extraordinary lengths to immerse its viewers in the architecture of the Regency period, the dress codes of the period, its hairstyles, social customs, mores, values, mating rituals, even its diction and speech patterns. It is, by and large, historically accurate. Its fantasies are restricted to two contemporary political pieties: race and gender.
I suppose pieties have their place. Colourblind casting worked quite well in the 2019 comedy-drama The Personal History of David Copperfield, based on Charles Dickens’s most autobiographical novel. But that film, with Dev Patel as Copperfield, fixes a sharp eye on the cruel realities of class and the treacherous snakes-and-ladders game of social opportunity that its eponymous hero is forced to play.
Bridgerton, to the contrary, conflates class and race to create a fantastical multicultural gentry that serves only to erase politics, erase history and erase memory.
At best it’s a form of extravagant virtue signalling. At worst it’s the cinematic love child of agitprop and cancel culture. But it trivialises the political history of race and colour. And it’s decidedly off-colour.
How Civil Rights Vernacular Was Hijacked
For centuries black Americans debated how to overcome racism—but they always emphasized human agency and individual responsibility
The civil-rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. , helped deliver America from the historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow by forcing the nation to confront the full humanity of its black citizens. King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound and revealing its redemptive promise. Yet today many black leaders have lost sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.
The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency, sought liberation, and rejected despair.
First, there were the recolonization or “back to Africa” movements championed by the likes of Marcus Garvey. These movements sought an exit from America.
Second, there were the insurrectionists of the 19th century, who believed that black Americans should engage in armed rebellion or vocal opposition so that they might find a home in this country. Here lie Nat Turner and, later, W.E.B. Du Bois. They wanted to have their resistant voice heard in America.
Third, there were accommodationist movements of the sort undertaken by Booker T. Washington, who thought that loyalty to America was the best course…
https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/01/18/hijacked-civil-rights/?omhide=true
Narrative Before FactsWhen will the media acknowledge their role in spreading false and inflammatory stories about police shootings?
When officer Rusten Sheskey shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back last year, the media wasted no time establishing the standard narrative: another unarmed African-American shot by racist police.
In a CNN segment on August 25, anchor Jake Tapper said, “Video shows police shoot unarmed black man.” The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, Buzzfeed, Vogue, and several other outlets referred to Blake as “unarmed.” The day after the shooting, David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, asserted, “It’s nearly impossible to imagine any way that his shooting was justified.”
Democratic politicians and celebrities jumped on the story, too. Joe Biden tweeted, “Once again, a Black man—Jacob Blake—was shot by the police. In front of his children. It makes me sick. Is this the country we want to be?” Kamala Harris declared that “the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.” Naomi Osaka, the highest-paid female athlete in the world, tweeted to her more than 800,000 followers condemnation of the “continued genocide of Black people at the hand of the police.”
But as Blake himself admitted in a television interview with ABC News last week, he was not unarmed. “I realized I had dropped my knife, I had a little pocketknife, so I picked it up,” Blake told Michael Strahan on Good Morning America. More critically, Blake admitted his actions at the time were wrong: “I shouldn’t have picked it up . . . considering what was going on. . . . At that time I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
Blake’s astonishing admission came days after Kenosha County District Attorney Mike Graveley announced that his office would not charge Officer Sheskey, based on the results of an investigation by former Madison police chief Noble Wray.
During a press conference, Wray emphasized that he, too, had been “emotionally troubled” after seeing the initial video of the police encounter in August, and that it had been a “stressful endeavor” to work in policing for several years as an African-American man. However, his 25-page report definitively concluded that the shooting was “justified” because Blake consistently did not comply with the officer’s orders and motioned toward him with his knife.
Further, according to the report, Officer Sheskey did not retreat for reasonable fear of the children in the car being “harmed, taken hostage, or abducted by Blake.”
For those who deemed the seven shots fired at Blake excessive, Wray’s report clarified that officers are trained to shoot dangerous suspects until the threat to their safety has subsided, according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s DAAT standards.
The tragic outcome of Blake’s error in judgment is that he will likely never walk again. But the false story fostered by politicians, media, and celebrities produced tragic outcomes, too. The ensuing riots in Kenosha destroyed several businesses and cost millions of dollars in damage to public property. In a heart-rending interview, the owner of a destroyed car dealership stated, “I’m a minority too. I’m a brown person. I have nothing to do with this. . . . This is not the America I came into.”
All of this pain, damage, and suffering certainly could have been averted had Blake obeyed the officer’s commands when he was first approached. But the irresponsible and ideologically framed coverage of this and other police shootings has also played a part in creating a dangerous feedback loop of mistrust of police, noncompliance with their lawful instructions, tragedy, and public outrage. (Blake also said in his Good Morning America interview, “I didn’t want to be the next George Floyd.”)
The most damning detail in this story, however, is that the victim himself, Blake, has expressed more honesty and remorse for his actions than the media and political elites who pushed an inflammatory, racialized narrative before all the facts were in.
https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-media-role-narrative-before-facts
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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26 January, 2021
UK in danger of becoming 'failed state' if 'massive inequalities' not addressed
What utter tripe. Britain has always had massive inequality, including during the glory days of its empire
The United Kingdom is in danger of becoming a "failed state", Gordon Brown has warned, with people in some parts treated like "second class citizens".
The former prime minister told Sky News the COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the "massive inequalities" between the different parts of the union that need to be addressed.
And he hit out at the Scottish National Party's push for a second referendum on Scottish independence, saying now is not the time for a "divisive" vote.
"I want a reformed state, not a failed state," Mr Brown said, explaining his call for reform.
He continued: "There is dissatisfaction, not just in Scotland, but right round the regions and in Wales and Northern Ireland.
"People don't feel that over the virus, over the lockdown, over the quarantines, over the business support...people in the regions don't feel they're being properly consulted or listened to.
Mr Brown, who was PM from 2007 to 2010, said "trust is breaking down in Boris Johnson" and there should be a review of the UK's constitutional settlement to see what is working and what is not.
He said the goal should be to "repair relations between all the different parts of the United Kingdom and have a more inclusive United Kingdom in future".
"There are massive inequalities between the regions - they've got to be addressed," Mr Brown added.
"The government admits it when they talk about levelling up. But that will need new powers of economic initiative - in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol and so on.
"I think we've got to consider this, as well as considering the future of Scotland and Wales."
But he added that simply devolving more powers away from Westminster would not be enough.
Urging the government to "rebuild the relationships between the centre and the outlying communities", Mr Brown said the House of Lords should be reformed to offer representation for the UK's nations and regions.
And he urged the PM to forcefully make the case for the Union.
"We've got to show that what we provide as a United Kingdom is to the benefit of all parts of the United Kingdom and I don't think the government is doing that at the moment."
Twitter launches fact-checking program called Birdwatch where ANY member can flag a tweet they think is misleading or inaccurate
Twitter has unveiled a feature aimed at bolstering its efforts to combat misinformation by permitting users to add fact-check notes to tweets they believe are false in - but critics say it will target legitimate commentary and enable users 'to take down anything they don't agree with'.
The pilot program unveiled Monday, called Birdwatch, adopts a Wikipedia-like ‘community-driven’ approach to fact-checking, and will first be rolled out as a standalone section of Twitter, for a small, pre-selected set of US-based users.
It will allow regular users, called ‘Birdwatchers’, to identify tweets they think contain inaccuracies or false information and write notes on those tweets to provide ‘informative context’.
Under Birdwatch, no account or tweet is exempt from annotation, meaning users will be able to add ‘context’ to tweets posted by news outlets, reporters and elected officials.
In a press release Monday, Twitter Vice President of Product Keith Coleman said: ‘We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable.’
However, critics of the new feature have been quick to point out the risk that such a system could be abused to target legitimate commentary.
‘So basically a group of ideologically aligned people can get on here [and] take down anything they don’t agree with,’ Twitter user wrote Ryan Ashe.
Twitter did not specify whether users would face any disciplinary measures - such as posts being removed or accounts being banned - for either those whose tweets are frequently annotated, or those who repeatedly annotate posts in bad faith.
It did say, however, that it wants both experts and non-experts to write Birdwatch notes. It cited Wikipedia as a site that thrives with non-expert contributions.
Birdwatch will allow users, called 'Birdwatchers,' to identify tweets they think have misinformation and write notes to provide 'informational context', which is similar to Wikipedia.
Anyone can apply to be a Birdwatcher, and the only requirements are a valid phone number, email and no recent violations of Twitter’s rules. Birdwatch notes will appear beneath a tweet.
No account or tweet is exempt from annotation, meaning users will be able to add ‘context’ to tweets posted by news outlets, reporters and elected officials.
To prevent people using the service in bad faith, Birdwatcher will be able to rate the effectiveness of each note, impacting its ranking.
The program is currently a pilot, and is only available via a separate website to a select number of users.
During the pilot, Twitter said it wants to focus on making Birdwatch ‘resistant to manipulation attempts and ensure 'it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors.’
Twitter did not specify whether users would face any disciplinary measures for either those whose tweets are frequently annotated, or those who repeatedly annotate posts in bad faith.
‘In concept testing, we’ve seen non-experts write concise, helpful and easy-to-understand notes, often citing valuable expert sources,’ the company wrote in a blog post.
Twitter, along with other social media companies, has been grappling how best to combat misinformation on its service. Despite tightened rules and enforcement, falsehoods about the 2020 election and the coronavirus continue to spread.
During Birdwatch's piloting stage, the San Francisco-based company said it want to focus on making the service ‘resistant to manipulation attempts and ensure it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors.’
To help weed out unhelpful or troll-created notes, for instance, Twitter said it plans to attach a ‘helpfulness score’ to each one and will label helpful ones ‘currently rated helpful.’
The company said Birdwatch will not replace other labels and fact checks Twitter currently uses — primarily for election and COVID-19-related misinformation and misleading posts.
The program will start with 1,000 users and eventually expand beyond the US.
‘If we have more applicants than pilot slots, we will randomly admit accounts, prioritizing accounts that tend to follow and engage with different audiences and content than those of existing participants,’ Twitter wrote.
The program is currently only available via separate website, but Twitter says it hopes to eventually expand Birdwatch to appear for all users on its native site.
‘These notes are being intentionally kept separate from Twitter for now, while we build Birdwatch and gain confidence that it produces context people find helpful and appropriate,’ Coleman said.
‘Additionally, notes will not have an effect on the way people see Tweets or our system recommendations.
‘Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.’
Speaking to Fox News, Twitter said that Birdwatch is not a ‘true or false tool’, or a ‘fact checking’ feature, but instead a way of adding context to posts.
Participants will be able to annotate any tweet once. They will have the option to cite source material in their annotation, including from news outlets.
This means users can annotate one news outlet’s tweets by citing other news outlet’s tweets.
The company said while it acknowledges the pilot might be ‘messy and have problems at times’, they believe ‘this is a model worth trying.’
‘We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this,’ Coleman said, referencing any potential bad actors. ‘We will be focusing on these things throughout the pilot.’
Twitter's staff software engineer Jonah Grant said Birdwatchers, upon signing up will learn of the tool’s ‘values’, which are to ‘contribute to build understanding, act in good faith, and to be helpful, even to those who disagree.’
‘We want people to write for a different audience than they do on Twitter,’ Grant clarified. ‘We want people to be helpful, even for those who disagree.’
Coleman concurred, adding that on a Twitter, a user’s audience is their followers, which are ‘typically people who agree with you’.
‘Birdwatch is a different mindset,’ he told Fox, adding that a user is ‘contributing to everyone … [including those] who may not share the same perspective.’
Twitter has taken a more aggressive approach to misinformation on its platform in recent months. Aside from removal, it has relied on labeling, or adding context below tweets that spread misinformation.
In March, amid a spread of misinformation at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Twitter began removing ‘misleading and potentially harmful content’ about COVID.
Two months later, it introduced labels to attach to tweets containing unfounded conspiracies about the origins of the virus and fake cures.
In the final two weeks before the election, Twitter said it labelled some 300,000 tweets for ‘disputed and potentially misleading’ content.
It then took the unprecedented step to permanently suspend former President Donald Trump from the platform, after the company said he violated their policies in relations to the Capitol riots.
The move provoked the ire of some who claimed conservative speech was being censored by the tech giant.
Similar criticisms were reignited on Monday, amid concerns Birdwatch could be abused to target legitimate commentary from a minority view.
Talk show host Dana Loesch was among those voicing such a concern. ‘Let’s be real: Birdwatch will be mainly progressives gaslighting center and right-of-center stores,’ she tweeted Monday afternoon.
One follower agreed, writing of Twitter: ‘Today we’re introducing @Birdwatch, a community-driven approach to censoring anything that doesn't support the left woke narrative.’
Others came out to push back against the concerns, with one user writing: ‘Fact-checking isn't taking something down. I don't understand why people are actually opposed to facts.’
In response, a user hit-back: ‘If they appointed Sean Hannity to pick the gatekeepers, you'd see the problem. The leftist editors who already infest Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia etc. constantly censor facts, including some they admitted were true after the election. That's the point, in fact.’
Denmark sets a target of ZERO asylum seeker applications to protect 'social cohesion'
A more effective policy would be to ban all Muslims from applying. With their supremacist religion, they are largely unassimilable.
Denmark's prime minister today set a target to drive down the country's asylum seeker applications to zero to protect 'social cohesion'.
The country is already seeing the lowest number of asylum seekers since 1998, with 1,547 people applying in 2020. By comparison, applications in the UK were 32,423 last year.
'We cannot promise zero asylum seekers, but we can set up that vision,' Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in parliament.
'We need to be careful that not too many people come to our country, otherwise our social cohesion cannot exist.'
The low number of applications last year can be partly explained by the Covid-19 pandemic but it is less than a tenth of the figure in 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe.
Denmark's figure of 21,300 applications in 2015 was only about an eighth of the number in neighbouring Sweden.
Denmark, a country of 5.8 million inhabitants, makes no secret of its desire to discourage people from seeking refuge.
Immigration Minister Mattias Tesfaye said yesterday the country's strict immigration policies were to be thanked for the low number of applications.
'Very many of those who come here have no need at all for protection,' he also claimed in the statement.
Among the country's strict policies was the planned deportations of Syrian refugees announced in 2019.
After an assessment by the Danish Immigration Service, the government ruled that some migrants could be sent back to Damascus. They concluded the capital, and its surrounds, were no longer dangerous enough for asylum to be automatically granted.
Asylum was rescinded for some Syrian refugees. Deportations, however, were limited due to a reluctance on the part of the Danish government to negotiate with the Assad regime.
Tesfaye said that similar repatriation difficulties for refused asylum seekers made it all-the-more important to curb the number of arrivals.
'Fewer asylum seekers means, all other things being equal, lower spending on processing applications, accommodation and deportation of those whose claims for asylum are rejected.
'We can spend that money on more welfare at home and on persecuted people in local regions [near to conflict zones, ed.],' he said.
In 2017, as leader of the Social Democrats Frederiksen presented a plan to send all 'non-Western' migrants back to so-called reception centres in North Africa and the Middle East.
In September, Copenhagen appointed an ambassador for migration to speed up the creation of one or more migrant camps outside the European Union as part a new European asylum system.
The figures announced yesterday aren't a true reflection of the actual number of asylum seekers to arrive in Denmark. They include individuals who travelled without asylum and some who were approved, for reasons including family reunification.
President Biden Signs Executive Order Prioritizing 'Gender Identity' Over Biology
President Biden signed a host of executive orders on Wednesday, including one that takes aim at gender and sex-based discrimination. The newly-minted president said that his administration hopes to ensure that Americans receive “equal treatment under the law” without gender or sexual orientation as a factor.
The order goes hand-in-hand with a Supreme Court ruling from June of 2020 in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the the high court held that workplace discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation,” Biden wrote on Wednesday. “These principles are reflected in the Constitution, which promises equal protection of the laws. These principles are also enshrined in our Nation’s anti-discrimination laws, among them Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended (42 U.S.C. 2000e et seq.). In Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. ___ (2020), the Supreme Court held that Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination ‘because of . . . sex’ covers discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.”
The president’s order would allow subjective gender identity to take priority in schools, and the administration said that children should not be concerned about “being denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” In turn, the order would allow biological males to compete with biological females, for the sake of gender identity.
In his quest for "unity" Biden is expected to sign even more executive orders during the first days of his administration.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2021/01/21/biden-eo-title-ix-n2583491
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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25 January, 2021
Parents can take control of gaming. Screen time isn’t as bad as we fear and there are benefits to children playing online games
School’s almost starting and parents might be looking for strategies for their child to get the most out of their schooling. One thing I’d suggest is to perhaps let them play video games a little. Why, you ask?
Well, there’s been important recent research on the links between screen time and NAPLAN results by Drs Islam, Biswas, and Khanam, at UNSW and USQ.
Their somewhat surprising findings were that a small amount of video gaming on weekdays and weekends for children aged 11- 17 was associated with better reading and numeracy scores than no gaming at all.
Obviously, not endless amounts of time. More than four hours gaming a day was associated with poorer results. But one to two hours a day on school days, and two to four hours Saturday and Sunday, seemed to be the sweet spot.
These results didn’t astonish me. I know that many parents won’t let their child use computers for fun at all through the week, and sometimes weekends too. And I certainly understand the good intentions of these rules. But clinically, I see some benefit in children having access to internet games. Why? Four reasons.
Imagine you were heading to work tomorrow but had already been told that when your official workday is over, you have to come home, do more work, eat, shower and then go to bed. Feeling despondent? I don’t blame you.
It’s understandable that children want to have a bit of down time to look forward to. To have to finish their homework to be able to play games will give them a little bit of an incentive to do it all. Internet games also give them downtime from often busy days.
Computer games have a bad reputation but not all are bad.
Many teach or improve co-ordination, memory, speed, visuo-spatial and multi-tasking skills. Games also typically involve reading and understanding complex rules.
Of course, you have to monitor content. The government and some gaming providers have done the hard work of analysing and rating games, so parents can dictate what age children need to be to get particular rated games.
I know you’d prefer them to have the childhood you had, exploring the neighbourhood with the local kids in the afternoon. But things just aren’t like that anymore. Online gaming is how a lot of children communicate with their friends now. It’s never as good as in person, but it is a good way to stay in contact with peers occasionally.
Playing something for a time-limited period teaches children essential self-regulation skills – by stopping a current pleasure for future gain – which will help them in their studies.
Enabling them to learn this self-control will be better than not allowing them the opportunity. Some parents might be worried that once they let their child on, they will never get off.
I have to say, for these parents, the problem is not necessarily the game but more their child’s compliance skills.
You should be able to give an instruction and your child follow it. In these instances, I’d prefer parents to establish good control through using effective discipline rather than take away things that may cause trouble. Get professional help if this is an issue.
As one of the study’s authors noted, asking if the internet is good or bad is the wrong question, but instead we should consider “when, how, and how much young people are using technology”. Maybe 2021 is the year to do this.
Youths torch Dutch Covid testing centre and an effigy of Danish PM goes up in flames amid fiery anti-lockdown protests across Europe
Youths torched a Dutch Covid testing centre and an effigy of the Danish Prime Minister was set alight in fiery anti-lockdown protests sweeping across Europe.
The testing facility in the village of Urk in the Netherlands went up in flames on Saturday night with its burnt-out shell remaining cordoned off on Sunday.
Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, Denmark, an effigy of Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was set on fire in as anti-lockdown sentiment erupts across the continent.
The Netherlands appeared to be bearing the brunt of the unrest on Sunday as authorities use water cannons and dogs to quell demonstrations in Amsterdam. Hundreds of protesters gathered to demonstrate against a curfew that began on Saturday.
In Eindhoven in the country's south, police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of several hundred protesters while a number of vehicles were burned and businesses at the city's central train station looted, local media reports.
Police said there were at least 30 arrests.
It's John Brennan's Authoritarianism That Threatens Democracy
Every time former CIA Director John Brennan appears on cable news to warn America about some new “insidious threat to democracy,” I am reminded again that he deserves to be in federal prison. In this corrupt media environment, however, the official who oversaw an illegal domestic-spying operation on the legislative branch of the United States government, who tried to cover it up and blame innocent Senate staffers when discovered, and who then brazenly lied about it to legislators and the American people — this man is held up as a paragon of civic virtue.
We still don’t even know what role Brennan played in spying on his political opponents during the 2016 campaign. We do know he went on TV for years after, alleging to have insider knowledge of an unprecedented seditious criminal conspiracy against the United States. Never once was he challenged by his hosts. And when an independent multimillion-dollar investigation couldn’t pull together a single indictment related to those claims, Brennan shrugged it off by saying that he may have “received bad information.”
Brennan was back on MSNBC yesterday, contending that American intelligence agencies “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”
Even a former Communist such as Brennan surely understands that there is nothing prohibiting Americans from being religious extremists, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists or even libertarians. It’s definitely none of his business, or that of intelligence agencies, to define what those terms mean. (And the idea that libertarians, who can’t get a minyan to agree on anything libertarian, are marshaling forces for a national insurgency is nonsensical.)
As Brennan is a congenital liar, this may well be another one of his convenient fictions. Yet, considering his history of abusing power — Samantha Power, no lightweight on this front herself, once warned that it wasn’t a “good idea to piss off John Brennan” — we shouldn’t entirely dismiss the idea that his allies are ferreting out thoughtcrimes.
Finding those who illegally threaten others with violence is well within the bailiwick of the government. But the Capitol riot has given authoritarians such as Brennan the pretext to advocate the chilling of speech and censorship. It has become normalized, even celebrated. Networks such as CNN employ full-time anti-speech advocates who pump out cynical content meant to shame tech carriers into taking their competition off the air.
“Extremists exploit a loophole in social moderation: Podcasts on Apple, Google,” reports Tali Arbel at the Associated Press. Are Americans who express their political views on the internet really abusing a “loophole,” or are Big Tech companies who censor them at the behest of the powerful abusing a “loophole” in the First Amendment? Only in the kicker of the fearmongering piece does Arbel quote Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who warns that the tide of censorship “is against the speech of right-wing extremists … but tomorrow the tide might be against opposition activists.” The problem is that censors never believe they’ll lose power, and maybe this time they’re right.
Those who rationalize state censorship almost always expand their definition of “extremist” to include their political opponents. The Washington Post’s columnist Max Boot, for instance, welcomed regime change by imploring the Biden administration to regulate those who supposedly incite radicalism, including Fox News.
Yesterday, Nicolle Wallace, Brennan’s MSNBC colleague, called for forcing Republicans to offer “the truth” before they are “allowed” to say anything else. As we protect people from “counterfeit bills,” she explained, we can protect them against “fake news.” What made Wallace’s comment especially surreal — aside from the fact that’s she apparently never read the Constitution — was that her guest was Ben Rhodes, the former Obama administration official who once bragged to The New York Times that he’d duped a bunch of dimwitted reporters into becoming his disinformation operation. Now Rhodes, too, seems interested in importing Iranian-style censorship with a “firm and brutal” “detox” of bad ideas, achieved through the “national security” and “Homeland Security” officials.
I’m old-fashioned. I’d rather have a bunch of nuts ranting on podcasts all day than one John Brennan deciding what we can say. To my ears, Rhodes, Brennan, Wallace and Boot are the ones who sound like a threat to “democracy.”
Progressive group riots resume in major cities despite Biden inauguration
Fox News contributors Ari Fleischer and Donna Brazile weigh in on illegal immigration policy in the Biden administration and the National Guard deployment to Washington, D.C. ahead of the inauguration.
President Biden was officially sworn in on Wednesday, but riots of the kind that had been blamed on Trump erupted anyway, damaging property and federal buildings.
Police departments in Portland and Seattle reported damage as a result of gatherings near federal buildings, while anti-fascist protesters burned American flags in Denver.
The riots took place on the same day as Biden’s Inauguration, which bore an "America United" theme.
Trump has been accused of inflaming divisiveness throughout the U.S., a narrative that Biden recognized during his campaign for the presidency.
During the lead-up to the 2020 election, then-candidate Biden released an ad that said he would be looking to "lower the temperature in this country, not raise it" like Trump had.
Biden has previously condemned violence of any kind, whether it is perpetrated by people identifying with the left or the right.
He has suggested that Trump’s unwillingness to do the same put lives in jeopardy.
"Donald Trump has been president for almost four years," Biden said in response to deadly violence in Portland over the summer. "The temperature in the country is higher, tensions run stronger, divisions run deeper. And all of us are less safe because Donald Trump can’t do the job of the American president."
But even after Election Day, violence and protests have continued.
On Jan. 6, a group of pro-Trump extremists stormed Capitol Hill and laid siege on Capitol buildings, an insurrection that resulted in fatalities. It was undertaken in protest of the election results, encouraged by a baseless narrative woven by Trump that the election had been "stolen" from him.
More recently, progressive protesters who appear to be frustrated with the Democratic Party have taken action.
As previously reported by Fox News, about 150 rioters in Portland damaged the Democratic Party headquarters on Wednesday.
Some in the group of about 150 people smashed windows and spray-painted anarchist symbols at the political party building. Police said eight arrests were made in the area. Some demonstrators carried a sign reading, "We don’t want Biden, we want revenge!" in response to "police murders" and "imperialist wars." Others carried a banner declaring "We Are Ungovernable."
Portland has been the site of frequent protests, many involving violent clashes between officers and demonstrators, ever since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Over the summer, there were demonstrations for more than 100 straight days.
In Seattle, the local police department posted pictures of a courthouse with shattered doors. People were also reportedly throwing objects at cars and reporters said demonstrators were protesting against President Biden and law enforcement, and carried a sign reading, "Abolish ICE."
A small "anti-fascist" crowd gathered in Denver where American flags were burned and two people were arrested for weapons violations. Those demonstrations were against Trump, Biden, police violence and racial injustice, according to The Denver Post.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-trump-left-wing-riots
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
22 January, 2021
Left-Wing Journalists Suddenly Have a Problem With Free Speech
As President Joe Biden took office Jan. 20 with calls for unity, his allies in the mainstream media are beating the drum for squashing political dissent, large or small, and keeping it from being heard by the American people.
It’s amazing how “Resist”—once the proud motto of progressive activists—has instantly been turned on its head with the changing political winds.
It seems that “resistance” is now “insurrection,” to be smashed by any means necessary. And these calls are being led not just by liberal activists, but also by journalists, people who should be expected to be champions of free speech.
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace suggested, without irony, that perhaps more needs to be done by tech companies to suppress news outlets that peddle content that—and here she was quoting New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—“divides and enrages” over “more authoritative news sources.”
“If we can protect against counterfeit dollar bills, we should be able to protect against fake news that we now know has the potential to kill people,” Wallace said.
To say that using the government in this way would be a threat to the First Amendment would be an understatement.
Oliver Darcy, a journalist at CNN, wrote in a column that news outlets such as One America News Network, Newsmax, and the Fox News Channel should have their plugs pulled by cable companies for “disseminating disinformation about the November election results to audiences of millions.”
Calls to effectively silence media competitors is seemingly becoming commonplace at CNN.
“We are going to have to figure out the OANN and Newsmax problem,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook, told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday. “These companies have freedom of speech, but I’m not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and such bringing them into tens of millions of homes.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to see a big tech executive call for suppressing speech. After all, a cabal of social media companies effectively erased then-President Donald Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6 rioting at the Capitol.
Not only that, but they effectively shut down Parler, a Twitter alternative, for what they said was a violation of their terms of service. That may be so, but it’s hard not to see these actions as a heavy-handed attempt to crush even the slightest opposition to their control of the messages the American people can see and hear.
As I wrote at the time, the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol is being used as an excuse to call for muzzling political opposition and to label all supporters of Trump—and right-leaning Americans in general—as a danger to the republic.
It’s bad enough to see powerful companies use such methods, but it’s even more disconcerting to see journalists cheerleading them on.
And some in the media weren’t just calling for private companies to eradicate conservative speech.
Washington Post columnist Max Boot—another CNN commentator—not only echoed those calls for cable companies to shut down speech he doesn’t like, he floated the idea of using government power to do it.
“CNN (where I’m a global affairs analyst) notes that the United Kingdom doesn’t have its own version of Fox News, because it has a government regulator that metes out hefty fines to broadcasters that violate minimal standards of impartiality and accuracy,” Boot wrote. “The United States hasn’t had that since the Federal Communications Commission stopped enforcing the ‘fairness’ doctrine in the 1980s. As president, Biden needs to reinvigorate the FCC. Or else the terrorism we saw on Jan. 6 may be only the beginning, rather than the end, of the plot against America.”
The so-called “fairness” doctrine that Boot is suggesting is a throwback to the last time Democrats held control of both Congress and the executive branch after the election of President Barack Obama in 2008.
The Reagan administration, as Boot wrote, ended the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s, paving the way to the explosion of conservative talk radio.
Clearly, there was a huge audience waiting to hear a different message than what the mainstream media were delivering. To the left, that was intolerable.
After Obama’s election, left-wing commentators and political leaders made an aggressive push for the FCC to effectively silence talk radio, a medium that conservatives continue to dominate.
The Fairness Doctrine, a relic of the New Deal era, forced radio stations to give equal airtime to both sides of the political spectrum. There might have been some justification for the law when radio was the primary medium of mass communication, but from the very beginning, the Fairness Doctrine was used as a stealthy way to suppress political dissent.
It was particularly telling that those calling for a return to the Fairness Doctrine wanted it to apply specifically to talk radio, and not, say, the media the left dominated.
And what would giving “equal time” to views even look like in 2021?
The progressive elite’s idea of political balance is giving some airtime to nominal “conservatives” like Boot and his fellow Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who use most of their time telling their readers why conservatives and Republicans are bad.
When Democrats tried to revive the Fairness Doctrine in 2008, the naked attempt to neuter conservative talk radio was as thinly veiled as the “robe” worn by the fabled emperor with no clothes. The movement fizzled out as conservatives were roused to oppose it, and Democrats were crushed in the 2010 midterm elections, in which they lost 63 House seats and six in the Senate.
That effort to muzzle speech failed more than a decade ago, but would a renewed and more ruthless attempt to silence critics really be a surprise? The media landscape has changed since 2008, with social media and other online platforms becoming even more dominant.
The result of this is that many media gatekeepers feel even more threatened by their loss of control of the “narrative” and their waning credibility in the eyes of many Americans.
This time, it might not just be conservative talk radio on the chopping block, but all other forms of right-leaning or generally anti-establishment media, too.
It’s a disturbing, albeit predictable, trend unlikely to bring more unity to a deeply divided nation.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/20/left-wing-journalists-suddenly-have-problem-with-free-speech
The Left's Fascist COVID-19 ResponseIn my last column, I offered a handy, pocket definition of fascism as exhibiting three main traits: extreme nationalism, authoritarianism, and a state-run economy. Basically, I was laying a foundation for this essay, in which I argue that the Left’s response to COVID-19 is literally fascist.
Several readers wrote to suggest additional markers of fascism, like disdain for individual rights, obsession with security, suppression of information, and glorification of the military. Most of those are either subsumed under my original list or else characteristic of all totalitarian regimes, or both. After all, fascists have no monopoly on nationalism or authoritarianism. Just ask the ChiComs.
Perhaps that’s because fascism is close kin to both socialism and communism, the third of Karl Marx’s hideous ideological offspring. Like those other evil –isms, it is based on a collectivist approach to governance that puts the interests of the state ahead of those of the citizen. That, of course, is in direct conflict with the liberal (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) belief in the sanctity and sovereignty of the individual, which is the foundation of Western culture going back at least to ancient Greece.
In a fascist economy, however, rather than owning the means of production (as in communist countries), the state “merely” controls the means of production by dictating to the ostensible “owners” what they can and can’t do. Essentially, under fascism, the government picks economic winners and losers. Authoritarianism then arises naturally from the fact that people don’t like being dictated to, as is historically the case with all forms of leftist state control. Leaders can exercise unchecked power over an economy — which is to say, over people — only, ultimately, by force.
Using my definition, then, under which the American and European left meet at least two of the three criteria — a lust for state control over the economy and a penchant for authoritarianism — their response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a textbook example of fascism at work.
First, as implemented by Democrat governors across the nation — and as promised by our newly-installed president — leftist COVID-19 policy has been undeniably authoritarian, with forced lockdowns, mask mandates, church closures, limits on family gatherings, etc. In fact, in many locales (although thankfully not where I live), those measures have crossed the line from merely authoritarian to actually totalitarian. Witness the fines, arrests, and calls for neighbors and family members to rat each other out — all conditions you would expect to find in a communist or fascist dictatorship but not in the United States of America.
But of course, it’s all for our own good, right? Maybe. Personally, I’m not convinced any of those extreme measures actually have much benefit — and the real science appears to bear me out, as the highly-credible, impeccably-credentialed authors of “The Great Barrington Declaration” make clear. Even the leftist media suddenly appears to be at least entertaining the idea that lockdowns might not work. Hmmm. Why the sudden about-face?
But I digress. More to the point, everything dictators do has always been “for the greater good,” at least according to them — although the millions slaughtered as a result of their “benign” policies in Nazi Germany, the USSR, China, Cambodia, and Cuba might disagree.
Beyond that, the left’s COVID-19 policy is demonstrably fascist in that it exerts government control over our economy, decreeing which businesses can stay open and for how long, which ones must close, how many customers they can serve, and when. Essentially, under the guise of protecting us from a disease most of us won’t get, much less die from, left-leaning pols and unelected bureaucrats are gleefully sorting out economic winners and losers.
And who are the big winners in the COVID-19 sweepstakes? Why, those businesses whose leaders have made it clear that they are totally onboard with leftist rule: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Walmart. The losers, meanwhile, are small businesses that tend to be more conservative and in any case don’t have the clout to promote favored policies.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
https://townhall.com/columnists/robjenkins/2021/01/19/the-lefts-fascist-covid19-response-n2583309
Free Speech Is Hard. Its Alternative Is WorseIt’s hard to hear ideologues spouting ideas you know are fully wrong, even harder when you know that the implementation of such ideas would hurt people, including you. Hardest is listening to a message full of hate, vitriol, and name-calling, especially when it’s directed against you personally.
It’s therefore natural to declare that there is no place in a civil society for such ideas, and shut them out for our own and others’ protection.
Yet America’s Founders, having just concluded a contentious, violent, and most uncivil revolutionary war, marked by high feelings and powerful propaganda on both sides, recognized the power of their superior ideas in building support for their cause, and concluded that suppression of free association and free speech poses an existential danger for a free society. They thus enshrined protection of both in the First Amendment that was a necessary condition of the ratification of a Constitution conferring powers in government—therein also ranking an armed citizenry as the second-best defense against tyranny.
Yet, as Judge Napolitano observed in his recent column “Trump’s Speech Is Protected Speech,” even these men fell prey, just ten years later, to our natural inclination to silence those by whom we feel threatened. Congress in 1798 passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, among which
made it a crime to utter ‘false, scandalous, or malicious’ speech against the government or the president, or to utter speech in opposition to the government’s efforts to shore up defenses from a war with France that never came about.
Subsequently fearing that their political opponents might use the Acts against them, Congress repealed them before Jefferson took office. (Today’s statesmen might take heed that power granted to your friends remains available for the use of your foes, and think twice before granting sweeping new powers to rulers.)
Fast forward to the midst of World War I, and Congress’ passage of the Espionage Act. It was brought to bear against five Russian anarchists living in New York who had published and distributed anti-capitalist pamphlets—the Facebook and Twitter of the day—exhorting workers in armaments factories to lay down their tools, and for the American public to withdraw their support of the war.
Convicted, the men appealed to the Supreme Court on the basis of Free Speech. The court upheld the conviction in Abrams et al. v. United States, observing
the plain purpose of their propaganda was to excite, at the supreme crisis of the war, disaffection, sedition, riots, and, as they hoped, revolution, in this country for the purpose of embarrassing and if possible defeating the military plans of the government in Europe.
In his dissent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:
the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
And therein lies the rub: while we all enjoy the benefits of competition, letting us choose what we like best among many alternatives, we don’t much like it for ourselves. It’s so much nicer not to have to face the threat of someone else being chosen for our job; someone else coming along with a product that people like better than our own; and worst of all, the pain of hearing hateful or dangerous ideas antithetical to ours.
Protecting against each threat means having to work harder: making sure we stay on top of current knowledge and training to perform our jobs as best possible, paying attention to our customers to make sure we continue to meet their needs well, and honing our own thoughts and expression of our ideas in compelling and effective means.
Writing about today’s college “cancel” culture, ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Lee Rowland observes in “We All Need to Defend Speech We Hate“:
Our Constitution protects hateful speech, yes—but on the theory that truly free speech means the best ideas will win out. We need students trained to really listen to ideas they hate—and respond with better ones.
Today’s suppression of social media accounts, and threat of legislation that would censor the expression of ideas deemed “dangerous” and the people who hold them are nothing but the result of decades of Americans too lazy to study and defend—or deprived of a proper educational grounding in—the principles and ideas of a free society.
As Benjamin Franklin observed and has been oft repeated, especially in our 21st century aftermath of the USA PATRIOT Act:
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Glenn Greenwald, among others, is sounding the alarm against today’s calls to deplatform Trump and other “ideologues,” pointing out that in the aftermath of the Capitol incursion, “every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism.” Further:
That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies. They are eager for tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike but to remove entire platforms from the internet. They want to imprison people they believe helped their party lose elections, such as Julian Assange, even if it means creating precedents to criminalize journalism.
Our best defense against such authoritarianism is codified in our very First Amendment. Free speech for all is our most essential liberty. Suppressing it secures only those who feel superior to and thus want to be unaccountable to us: Politicians and their Big Tech bedfellows.
https://blog.independent.org/2021/01/17/free-speech-is-hard-its-alternative-is-worse/?omhide=true
FBI asked to review role of Parler in Capitol attackWashington: The House Oversight and Reform Committee on Thursday, local time, asked the FBI to investigate the role Parler, a social media website and app popular with the American far right, played a role in the violence at the US Capitol.
Representative Carolyn Maloney, who chairs the panel, cited press reports that detailed violent threats on Parler against state elected officials for their role in certifying the election results before the January 6 attack that left five dead. She also noted numerous Parler users have been arrested and charged with threatening violence against elected officials or for their role in participating in the attack.
Reuters reported this week that Parler partially resumed online operations with the help of a Russian-owned technology company after being shut down by Amazon Web Services, which said it had failed to moderate violent content effectively.
The FBI and Parler did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Maloney asked the FBI to review Parler's role "as a potential facilitator of planning and incitement related to the violence, as a repository of key evidence posted by users on its site, and as a potential conduit for foreign governments who may be financing civil unrest in the United States."
Maloney asked the FBI to review Parler’s financing and its ties to Russia after she noted the company had re-emerged.
Maloney cited Justice Department charges against a Texas man who used a Parler account to post threats regarding the riots that he would return to the Capitol on Jan. 19 "carrying weapons and massing in numbers so large that no army could match them."
The Justice Department said the threats were viewed by other social media users tens of thousands of times.
More than 25,000 National Guard troops and new fencing ringed with razor wire were among the unprecedented security steps put in place ahead of Wednesday's inauguration of President Joe Biden.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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21 January, 2021
Parler Is Back Online Thanks to Russian Tech Company
Social network Parler has partially returned with the help of a Russian-owned technology company, Reuters reported. The website and app were forced offline last week when host Amazon Web Services (AWS) suspended access.
Popular among right-wing extremists, Parler (not to be confused with "social talking app" Parlor) was also removed from Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store following Donald Trump's recent ban from most major social media platforms. In response to the AWS suspension, Parler CEO John Matze told users the network would be offline for up to a week as the application is "rebuilt from scratch." "We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business," he wrote in a tweeted statement.
The social network appears to have found that provider in DDos-Guard, an internet infrastructure services provider known for working with companies hosting controversial content, including 8kun (previously 8chan); it also supports Russian government sites, according to Reuters. DDoS-Guard's web page lists an address in Scotland, under the title Cognitive Cloud LP. But, as infrastructure expert Ronald Guilmette told the news outlet, it's actually owned by two men in Rostov-on-Don, Russia.
Parler's Triumphant Return?
"Hello world, is this thing on?" Matze wrote on Friday, in the first update since the site relaunched. A note at the top of the page promises Parler will "resolve any challenge before us" and hopes to welcome users back "soon"—as early as February, if Matze has his way.
"I'm confident that by the end of the month, we'll be back up," the CEO told Fox News over the weekend. "Every day it changes wildly, but I feel confident now. We're making significant progress."
Conservative commentator and Parler investor Dan Bongino returned to the social network on Monday, promising that "We will NEVER stop fighting. NEVER. This fight is bigger than me, and it's bigger than Parler. If they're allowed to silence us, they can silence anyone. It stops now. Please stand with us in this fight for liberty, truth, and freedom."
The company's chief policy officer, Amy Peikoff, also took to the site on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, quoting the civil rights leader and suggesting that "this be the year that all of us, regardless of political belief, become extremists for freedom of expression and privacy."
"Our return is inevitable due to hard work, and persistence against all odds," Matze added. "Despite the threats and harassment not one Parler employee has quit. We are becoming closer and stronger as a team."
Biden Pushes Leftist Sexual Ethic With HHS Pick
In an obvious nod to the radical identitarian Left, Joe Biden named Pennsylvania’s Health Secretary “Rachel” Levine as his new assistant secretary of health. Levine, formerly known as Richard, openly identifies as “transgender” and has been a member of the ironically named “Equality Pennsylvania,” an LGBT activist organization. Clearly for conservatives, there are serious problems with putting a demonstrably mentally ill science denier in the nation’s top healthcare position.
Levine, a pediatrician, was appointed as PA’s physician general in 2017 by Democrat Governor Tom Wolf, making him one of the few openly “transgender” individuals in public office.
In announcing his choice, Biden made it clear that he was motivated primarily by an agenda to push the Left’s sexual “ethic” into being accepted and adopted nationally. He stated, “Dr. Rachel Levine will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability — and meet the public health needs of our country in this critical moment and beyond. … She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health efforts.”
This perfectly underscores the Democrats’ radical agenda, which seeks to undercut the very fabric of truth. Levine may be a skilled pediatrician, but he clearly is suffering from serious mental delusions. In the recent past, placing an individual with such a serious mental issue in such a position of authority would have been unthinkable. Yet today it is not only celebrated, but anyone who dares to object is vilified as a bigot.
How long before Democrats further attack Americans’ right to free speech and their religious liberty by proposing legislation to “protect” those demanding that everyone acquiesce to delusional demands for preferred pronouns? How long before those of us who dissent and believe in God-designed science are charged with engaging in “hate speech”? It’s already happened on social media. And it will be coming to the federal government.
As a footnote, The Washington Free Beacon reports that Levine is also a hypocrite: “Levine directed Pennsylvania nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients — even as she pulled her own mother out of a longterm-care facility over pandemic concerns.”
Black Lives Matter Goes After WHITE Reporter… They Didn’t Know The Camera Was LIVE!
Black Lives Matter is a national disgrace that has demonstrated over and over again that only SOME black lives matter – the ones they deem worthy. The movement’s actions clearly demonstrate that in their opinion some lives are simply more equal than others.
The movement was spawned by the Michael Brown shooting by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Built upon the mantra “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” that was later revealed to be one of the biggest lies of 2015. A Department of Justice investigation into the incident found the “Hands up, don’t Shoot” claim was not supported by the evidence. What the DOJ did find was the physical and forensic evidence supported Wilson’s account of events in that Brown reached into Wilson’s SUV and grabbed and punched the officer, tried to grab Wilson’s gun, and then, in the final moments of his life, charged at Wilson as Wilson shot him.
Yet the Brown family was granted $1.5 million dollars in a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Ferguson and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” has been used to perpetuate the execution of police in New York City, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and other places.
After a grand jury chose not to indict Officer Wilson, Brown’s stepfather incited protesters and rioters to “Burn this motherf—er down” and “Burn this b–ch down.” At least 14 people were injured and twelve buildings set on fire in the ensuing violence. Compensating people for legitimate harm done to them is one thing. Paying them $1.5 million for actions precipitated by Brown and inciting violence on his behalf raises serious questions.
Black Lives Matter continues to perpetuate the ideology that this is a race issue. As evidenced by cases like Kelly Thomas and more recently Justine Damond in Minneapolis this is a people issue, not a race one. It is a clear case of demanding that police and government officials be accountable for their actions at perhaps even a higher level than the average citizen. With great power, comes great responsibility.
Racism is ugly no matter what color does it. To choose to hate someone for their particular shade of melanin without knowing the character of the person you are judging is the height of ignorance. No one chooses their skin color. You do choose whether you will be a person of character and integrity.
Yet members of Black Lives Matter chose to assault a reporter from Fox News. He asked her a simple question, “Why are you protesting police and why are you here?” The woman screams at him at times almost incoherently, “Get the F*ck out of here! We don’t want you here! You are a white supremacist!”
All because he dared ask her what her premise was. It seems that when given a platform and the opportunity to factually present her case as to what the movement represents and WHY she felt so strongly about it? She reacted incoherently with emotion and anger making herself look like the racist individual rather than the person she was so violently flinging accusations at.
It seems she forgot the camera was rolling the entire time.
Racism is ugly no matter what color does it. To choose to hate someone for their particular shade of melanin without knowing the character of the person you are judging is the height of ignorance. No one chooses their skin color. You do choose whether you will be a person of character and integrity.
Why the Left Has to Suppress Free Speech
Let us begin with this fact: The left always suppresses speech. Since Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, there has been no example of the left in control and not crushing dissent.
That is one of the important differences between liberal and left: Liberalism and liberals believe in free speech.
(The present leftist threat to freedom in America, the greatest threat to freedom in American history, is made possible because liberals think they have more to fear from conservatives than from the left. Liberals do not understand that the left regards liberals as their useful idiots.)
The left controls universities. There is little or no dissent allowed at universities.
The left controls nearly every “news” medium. There is little or no dissent in the mainstream media—not in the “news” sections and not in the opinion sections.
The left controls Hollywood. No dissent is allowed in Hollywood.
That is why we have “cancel culture”—the silencing and firing of anyone who publicly dissents from the left, and even “publicly” is no longer necessary.
The National Association of Realtors has just announced that if you express dissenting views (on race, especially) in private, you may be fined and lose your membership in the organization—which effectively ends your career as a realtor.
So, we return to the opening question: Why does the left need to crush all dissent? This is a question made all the more stark because there is no parallel on the right: Conservatives do not shut down dissent or debate.
The answer, though the left will not acknowledge it, is the left fears dissent. And it does so for good reason. Leftism is essentially a giant balloon filled with nothing but hot air. Therefore, no matter how big the balloon—the Democratic Party, The New York Times, Yale University—all it takes is a mere pin to burst it.
Leftism is venerated by intellectuals. But there is little intellectual substance to leftism. It is a combination of doctrine and emotion. The proof? Those with intellectual depth do not stifle dissent; they welcome it.
That is why universities are so opposed to conservatives coming to speak on campus. One articulate conservative can undo years of left-wing indoctrination in a one-hour talk or Q&A. I know this from personal experience on campuses. You can, too.
Watch the speeches given by any conservatives allowed to speak on a campus—many of these talks are still on YouTube—and you will see large halls filled with students yearning to hear something other than left-wing pablum. Look at their faces, filled with rapt attention to ideas they never heard that are clearly having an impact.
Universities are entirely right to fear our coming to speak. We come with the pin that bursts their $50,000-a-year balloon.
That is also why it is so hard to get any of them to debate any of us. In 35 years of radio, I have never mistreated or bullied a guest. I was unfailingly polite to an icon of the left, Howard Zinn, the America-hating author of the America-hating “A People’s History of the United States.”
I even invited a UCLA political science professor and violinist, one of seven members of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra who refused to play when I conducted the orchestra in a Joseph Haydn symphony in the Disney Concert Hall—solely because I’m a conservative.
Despite his public letter, in which he accused me of holding “horribly bigoted positions” and wrote, “Please urge your friends to not attend this concert, which helps normalize bigotry in our community,” I nevertheless invited him on my national radio show. He agreed.
I had him in studio for an entire hour and treated him and his wife (who accompanied him) with great respect, despite my contempt for his false accusations and his advocacy of the cancel culture. Every American should hear that hour.
Unfortunately for the emotional and intellectual health of our society, he, Zinn, and a few others were anomalies. Of the 100 or so left-wing authors, professors, and columnists invited to appear on my show, almost none has responded in the affirmative. They prefer NPR, where they are never challenged.
The opposite, however, is not true: Every conservative intellectual I know says yes to every one of the (very few) left-wing invitations we receive. Of course, we are almost never invited. We regularly invite leftists. Leftists almost never invite us.
They claim it’s because we are not up to their intellectual level and they have no desire to waste their time. One would think that the opportunity to publicly show how vapid we conservatives really are would be too good to pass up.
Leftists do not debate us or appear as guests on our shows and prevent us from speaking whenever possible, because they (correctly) fear conservatives.
Race-baiters such as Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates or “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo would never debate Larry Elder, for example.
Why won’t they? Because they would be shown to be the intellectually shallow purveyors of hate they are. Deep down, they know it. Elder is one of many conservative black intellectuals who left-wing blacks (and whites) refuse to debate.
Now you know why the left suppresses free speech: because it has to. If there is free speech, there is dissent. And if there is dissent, there is no more left.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/19/why-the-left-has-to-suppress-free-speech
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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20 January, 2021
Pandemic rules empower petty tyrants
Recently, a group of friends and I visited a local grocery store to stock up on emergency supplies. While walking around the rather large and open warehouse, a store employee approached us, lecturing us about wearing our masks properly. Her eyes filled with this gleeful sense of authority. It was almost as if she looked forward to the encounter.
Unwilling to budge until we complied, I put on a mask, only for it to break. Already prepared, the employee pulled out a new mask for me to wear. I put that on only for it to also break. The now irritated drill sergeant then pulled out her PA radio and called another employee to request a face shield. She would have been any store manager's dream, but people like this are a nightmare in the midst of this pandemic.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and desperate people sometimes fall into one of two camps — childlike and seeking comfort and entertainment, and authoritative tyrants who embrace paternalism, rules, and regulations to maintain power. The latter is what I've encountered quite frequently. As a man who loves Liberty and practices it liberally, I am the very threat that these tyrants look forward to each day. Liberty-loving people are target practice to these "Masketeers."
The people who have a tendency to become tyrants are typically without power themselves. But once bestowed with a new role — be it through new workplace rules or because the TV said so — these individuals feel empowered by a false sense of control. All of this is in response to perceived fear. In this case, the China Virus (and its low rate of death for most populations) has fueled the paranoia that created every tyrant standing in front of businesses ordering people to put on their masks. From receptionists to restaurant workers, now everyday people can feel like they've done their part — for society's sake, they claim.
It doesn't just stop at deathly glares and accusations of killing Grandma. Videos are going viral in which noncompliant people are being pursued and followed by Masketeers. Angry masked drivers roll down their windows to shout expletives at random people who are enjoying their God-given fresh air.
Another incident that comes to mind was my one trip to a music store. Maskless, I entered the shop, browsing the merchandise and making selections. Eventually I was tracked down by a manager who confronted me and ordered me to comply with the mask mandate. I chose not to cower to her demands, resulting in the police being called. By this point, all of the customers were ordered out of the store, even as they were checking out. Soon the police officer arrived, and when the manager shared what happened, the officer rolled his eyes and saw us off.
The situation left me thinking this: What did the manager hope would happen to me? Did she expect for me to serve jail time over her misappropriated fear of a virus? Did she enjoy the idea of a fellow citizen being handcuffed and carried away? Would seeing that grant her the satisfaction she needed to feel like everything is under control?
What America is witnessing is canon to the Marxist playbook. This notion that gives power to the people comes packaged with a police state enforced by the very people it oppressed. Desperate for life to return to normal, these tyrants will do anything to offer atonement to the state, including putting down their fellow countrymen. This terrifying notion is growing like a cancer. It's an infection that has made America very ill. The diagnosis is the deprivation of freedom from within. The cure? A return to the one who is truly in control of our health and well-being: God Himself.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77060-power-to-the-people-in-the-pandemic-2021-01-16
House Democrats’ Tax Agenda for ‘Equity’ Would Hurt (Not Help) Economic OpportunityHouse Ways and Means Committee Democrats recently released their framework to “make our nation a more just and equitable place.”
The goal of lifting more “people onto career ladders” and providing more robust economic opportunities for American families is admirable. But the committee’s framework simply expands tax programs that have for decades failed to meet those goals.
Instead of a long list of complicated new and expanded federal programs, American workers would benefit more from an agenda that keeps taxes low, constrains spending, and removes regulatory barriers to work and employment.
Federal Development Subsidies Fail to Lift People Up
As part of a strategy to invest in underserved communities, the framework proposes expanding two federal programs with a long history of poor results. Similar federal development initiatives have left people worse off.
Wide-ranging surveys of past attempts at community development find that the initiatives produce few positive results for the intended recipients. Historically, residents of targeted communities don’t see increased wages following the aid, but they do experience rising rental costs.
Higher living costs without higher wages resulted in a lower standard of living for the communities the politicians were trying to help.
Specifically, the framework highlights the New Markets Tax Credit, which is ineffective at meeting its goals of increasing community investment and development. A study of the program found that the incentives primarily relocated existing projects, rather than spurring new community investment.
Similarly, the proposed expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is another well-intentioned policy that fails by every metric. Designed to subsidize up to 70% of the cost of new low-income housing, the program is rife with corruption and artificially inflates the cost of new projects by about 20%.
One study estimates that as much as three-quarters of the subsidy’s cost is captured by developers, investors, lawyers, and accountants, instead of the intended renters.
Subsidies from Washington can leave communities poorer than when they started because they fail to address the underlying barriers to opportunity, such as lack of educational choice, limitations on worker freedoms, and regressive regulatory restrictions.
Tax Subsidies Don’t Promote Work
Government programs are not effective at improving work opportunities for disadvantaged workers.
Programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Work Opportunity Tax Credit often garner bipartisan support as seemingly easy solutions to poverty, but they have a shaky record when it comes to improving work outcomes.
The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the government’s largest means-tested cash benefits and functions as a wage subsidy for parents with children. The framework proposes expanding the tax credit’s benefits for non-parent workers and would lower the eligibility age.
Two recent experiments with increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit to childless workers in New York City and Atlanta showed very small or no impact on employment, no increases in earnings, and the larger benefits did not impact other crucial indicators of well-being.
Similarly, a recent reexamination of the employment impacts of the program found the tax incentive “has not had any clear effects on labor supply.”
The Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which is intended to encourage hiring of disadvantaged workers, is poorly targeted and also has been shown repeatedly to have no sustained effect on wages or employment.
In a survey of 60 businesses that claim the credit, just one said the tax credit affected hiring decisions.
The welfare state already costs the taxpayer $1.1 trillion a year. Instead of expanding it, policymakers should start by targeting assistance to the most disadvantaged and require the able-bodied to work for benefits.
Pro-growth policies that keep taxes low and allow businesses to expand are essential to support sustainable job creation and wage growth as Americans experienced before the current coronavirus-induced economic crisis.
No Mention of How to Pay for It
Nowhere in the framework does the committee outline a key campaign pledge of the Democrats; namely, to increase taxes. Nor is there a mention of how they plan to cover the hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax and spending proposals.
This framework and other proposals in Congress make it unlikely that the free-spending consensus in Washington will come to an end anytime soon.
In the absence of spending cuts—the opposite of what is being proposed—taxes will have to increase. And not just tax increases on the “rich.” Across Europe, funding big government means high taxes on everyone.
In fact, it is mathematically impossible to pay for significantly larger government with only tax increases on high-income earners. That’s why a lower-income European earning $40,000 pays $6,000 more in taxes—an extra 15% of their income—than they would in America.
Proven Solutions for Economic Opportunity
Before the pandemic and following historic tax reform and regulatory restraint, American workers experienced the largest wage gains ever recorded.
In 2019, real household income reached an all-time high by growing $4,400 (a 6.8% one-year increase). The income gains were largest for minorities and lower-income earners, and as a result, income inequality declined.
If Congress wants to help more Americans find jobs and economic opportunity, they should focus on keeping taxes low and continue to remove regulatory barriers to increase worker freedom, investment, and employment.
The committee’s tax framework instead relies on programs that have failed for decades and obscures the fiscal reality that its agenda will require taxes that increase costs and decrease wages for all Americans.
Some Realtors Fear Association’s ‘Hate Speech’ Ban Is Built on a Slippery Slope
In what some consider one of the most far-reaching social-policy moves in the corporate world, the National Association of Realtors—called the nation’s largest trade organization—has revised its professional ethics code to ban “hate speech and harassing speech” by its 1.4 million members.
Under the new policy, real estate agents who insult, threaten, or harass people based on race, sex, or other legally protected characteristics can be investigated, fined, or expelled. Its online training sessions offer a glimpse at how difficult the rules can be to enforce.
The sweeping prohibition applies to association members 24/7, covering all communication, private and professional, written and spoken, online and off. Punishment could top out at a maximum fine of $15,000 and expulsion from the organization.
Mary Wagner, a Buffalo, N.Y., real estate agent who is white and lesbian, says the move, announced in November, fits her vision for creating a fairer society. She predicts thousands of complaints this year, given the Realtor association’s enormous size and the overheated climate of social media.
“I was thrilled to hear it,” Wagner said in a phone interview. “I think it’s long overdue.”
Does Vagueness Risks Censorship?
The National Association of Realtors’ decision, allowing any member of the public to file a complaint, has alarmed other real estate agents, and also some legal and ethics experts, who say the hate-speech ban’s vagueness is an invitation to censor controversial political opinions, especially on race and gender.
While that’s not the association’s stated intention, the skeptics say their fears are justified by the hyperactive “cancel culture” online that has jettisoned hapless workers for posting “all lives matter” and objecting to gay marriage.
“The dam has broken, and other organizations will look at this,” predicted Robert Foehl, a professor of business ethics and business law at Ohio University.
“If this is good for real estate agents, why not attorneys? Why not doctors?” Foehl said. “They’re going to be pressured to do what NAR has done. And that pressure is going to be very real, because what organization wants to argue they should allow ‘hate speech’ by their members?”
A week after the association approved the ban, its president, Charlie Oppler, profusely apologized for NAR’s historic role in housing discrimination and redlining, the former practice of denying loans to buyers in certain neighborhoods based on their race, during an online fair-housing summit.
The National Association of Realtors is still a predominantly white organization, where African Americans account for just 6% of members.
The association’s hate-speech policy is noteworthy, because it sweeps up 1.4 million people under an ethics standard that explicitly places limits on private speech, to be adjudicated through formal procedures. The organization’s new policy provides an avenue for the association to investigate, fine—and potentially expel—real estate agents who insult, threaten, or harass people or social groups based on race, sex, gender, or other legally protected characteristics.
“It is taking something that’s been happening on a kind-of informal and occasional basis—indeed, people do sometimes end up losing jobs because of their political expression—and shifting it to something that’s institutionalized, that’s bureaucratized, and that’s being enforced through quasi-legal tribunals,” said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who specializes in the First Amendment.
Volokh said such policies pose significant risks for abuse and should be assessed not for their good intentions, but for their potential to misfire.
‘A New Blacklist’
“What we’re talking about is a new blacklist,” he said. “One of the things that’s troubling about the National Association of Realtors’ position is that it is trying to deploy the organized economic power of this group in order to suppress dissenting political views among members.”
In the current climate of “cancel culture” and vigilante justice on Twitter, where a single misdeed can become amplified into the defining act of one’s life, some real estate agents fear the new speech code will be used to censor agents who express disapproval of affirmative action, gay marriage, transgender pronouns, Black Lives Matter, undocumented immigrants, or other politicized issues.
Such concerns were validated last month by a federal judge who struck down an anti-discrimination speech code imposed on Pennsylvania lawyers, saying that the ban’s vagueness amounted to open season on politically unpopular opinions.
The National Association of Realtors’ speech code has sowed such confusion and anxiety among the rank and file that the association plans to issue “case interpretations” this year to reassure its members and offer guidance on what is and isn’t allowed.
Among those caught up in the uncertainty are real estate agents who are Christian preachers or Sunday school teachers, or anyone who expresses traditional religious views on gender and sexuality that are out of vogue in some circles today.
“We’re getting a lot of people asking about whether or not they can say that they are against gay marriage,” National Association of Realtors staffer Diane Mosley said during an online training session on Nov. 30. “Specifically, if they can back it up with Scriptures, or say it in a sermon.”
The association’s speech code is still being hashed out, and in a very public way, thanks to Zoom. While the initial debate and votes by its Professional Standards Committee and board of directors were conducted in secret, the National Association of Realtors’ subsequent monthly online training sessions offer a glimpse at how such rules come into being, how difficult they can be to interpret and to enforce—and what other corporations and organizations can expect if they follow the association’s example.
“Are we worried about losing members? We may, but I’m certainly not losing sleep over that,” said Matt Difanis, the Champaign, Ill., broker who chairs the National Association of Realtors’ Professional Standards Committee, in a Dec. 16 training session.
“We want being a Realtor to mean something,” Difanis stated, “and if somebody says, ‘I feel so strongly about continuing to have access to hate speech on demand that I don’t want to be a Realtor anymore’—OK.”
The association did not make Difanis, who is white and serves as its point man on the new speech code, available for an interview. All his comments in this article were taken from two hourlong training sessions and one eight-minute explanatory video available online.
In those recordings, Difanis makes an impassioned plea to the nation’s Realtors, citing the moral debt he says the real estate industry has incurred as a leading participant in the perpetuation of racism in the 20th century.
“Colleagues, remember: We quite literally drew the color lines. Our fingerprints as Realtors are all over the redlining maps, which decades—52 years—after Fair Housing became the law of the land, those Fair Housing maps still scar our landscape by continuing to define color lines in our residential housing patterns,” he said.
British media regulator wants to No Platform trans-sceptics
Speaking before parliament’s digital, culture, media and sports committee in December, Melanie Dawes, chief executive of broadcast regulator Ofcom, said it was ‘extremely inappropriate’ for broadcasters to seek to ‘balance’ the views of transgender people by also giving airtime to the views of ‘anti-trans pressure groups’.
Ofcom has now followed through on Dawes’ comments by expanding its definition of hate speech to include intolerance of transgender issues and ‘political or any other opinion’. As a result we can now expect many critics of trans ideas, from feminists to gay-rights campaigners, to be denied airtime.
In doing this, it seems that Ofcom is now using the long-standing campus tactic of No Platform for the mainstream media.
This is extremely worrying. No Platform is a National Union of Students policy that dates back to 1974. It involves the banning – or No Platforming – of certain figures and their viewpoints from public meetings on campus. Originally targeted at the far right, No Platform attempted to soften accusations of censorship by using the language of harm prevention. So racist individuals, the NUS argued, were not merely expressing reactionary opinions; they were potentially encouraging those listening to harm ethnic minorities. Depriving such figures of a platform therefore reduced the potential for harm against certain individuals and groups.
Today, the NUS does not just apply the logic of No Platform to the far right. It also applies it to many others with whom it disagrees, including critics of transgender ideas. And this position, in which critics of transgenderism are unfairly grouped together with racists, now appears to be the position of Ofcom, too.
No matter how it is presented, No Platform is still a form of censorship. Not only does it prevent certain people from speaking, it also prevents audiences from hearing certain views and making up their own minds about them. No Platform advocates justify this tactic on the grounds that depriving certain people of a platform prevents their views from being considered normal or acceptable by the public. Such an argument reveals No Platform supporters’ predictably dim view of members of the general public, who they believe will fall prey to certain ideas as soon as they are exposed to them.
It is true open debate is unlikely to persuade many racists, fascists or Islamists out of their poisonous worldviews. An Islamist, for example, is unlikely to be convinced of the wisdom of secularism during a public argument. But the point of public debate is not to win over the opposing speaker — it is to win over the audience. That, after all, is the only way to defeat ideas you oppose – by winning over the hearts and minds of the public.
That is why No Platform-style censorship is never able to defeat the ideas it seeks to ban. Because while it silences such ideas, it does not discredit them in the court of public opinion. And it is only when ideas are publicly discredited that their influence in society starts to wither.
Take the claims of anti-vaxxers, for example. Silencing them neither has created nor does create a pro-science or pro-vaccination outlook among the public. That can only be generated by taking on and debunking the claims of anti-vaxxers, not hiding them from view.
Oddly, despite many No Platfomers calling on the authorities to censor political opponents, they will still insist they are not demanding state censorship. They point out that when university debating societies or students’ unions restrict public platforms, they are only doing so as private bodies exercising their right to freedom of association. This is disingenuous. They are still attempting to restrict an audience’s access to competing ideas and beliefs in a public forum. And they are still making a judgement on behalf of others as to what ideas they are allowed access to.
By attempting to stop critics of trans ideology from appearing on television debates, Ofcom is taking No Platform censorship to a different level. It is effectively denying the viewing public access to competing arguments over what are still highly contentious views on gender. And, in doing so, Ofcom is preventing citizens from coming to any clear consensus on the issues at stake.
Moreover, the categorisation of criticism of trans ideas as hate speech demonises entirely reasonable viewpoints. After all, many of those critical of trans ideas are feminist activists defending women’s rights, rather than, as Ofcom suggests, people promoting violent hatred.
In its attempt to No Platform trans-scepticism, Ofcom is demonstrating its contempt for the public. It assumes that people, merely having heard, for example, feminists questioning trans ideas, will want to attack trans women. And, more broadly, it assumes that audiences cannot be won over to one side or another without the silencing of opposing opinions. This demonstrates a lack of belief in the strength of one’s own arguments.
What Ofcom does not understand is that No Platforming views trans activists disagree with is a self-defeating strategy. It may be successful in censoring ideas that the activists oppose, but it won’t necessarily win deeper support in society for certain trans ideas. For it is only through open debate that people can develop a clear view on what they support and what they do not.
So, if we really want to develop a moral or political consensus on certain issues, or win support for certain ideas, we need to say no to No Platforming.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/06/ofcom-wants-to-no-platform-trans-sceptics/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
18 January, 2021
I refuse to be bullied into silence
PROFESSOR KATHLEEN STOCK was ostracised and denounced by 600 colleagues because she dared to challenge the trans orthodoxy sweeping Britain
Professor Kathleen Stock was given an OBE in the latest New Year Honours List
I was proud to be given an OBE in the latest New Year Honours List. I was delighted for my profession, too – it’s rare for philosophers to get much attention. It might sound strange, then, to say I felt a pang of anxiety when I first heard the good news towards the end of last year, and again when it was made public on January 1. I knew there might be a price to pay for getting such a public honour. And thanks to the trans lobby and its increasingly aggressive behaviour, I was right.
The OBE came as a result of my campaign for academic freedom and, in particular, the freedom to examine the demands of influential trans pressure groups such as Stonewall.
So it was no surprise when, just a few days ago, I opened my emails to find that more than 600 people had signed an open letter denouncing me.
These were not hardened campaigners or activists – rather, the letter had been signed by fellow philosophers who pronounced themselves ‘dismayed’ that the Government had chosen to honour me for my ‘harmful rhetoric’.
The letter accused me of ‘transphobic fearmongering’, of helping to ‘restrict trans people’s access to life-saving medical treatment’ and of serving ‘to encourage the harassment of gender-non- conforming people’.
It was incredibly distressing to see blatant lies promoted as fact. But the letter also demonstrates what a disastrous mess we are in when it comes to talking about sex and gender.
The effects of this lobbying can be seen everywhere. From placing trans women – some of them sex offenders – in female prisons, to the rise of ‘gender-neutral’ toilets and changing rooms, to trans women being placed on shortlists for women’s prizes and a rethink of women’s sport, the alterations have been rapid and seismic.
The Stonewall campaign group has been particularly influential with its simple and powerful message – that trans people are an intensely vulnerable minority and that to help them, we must recognise individuals’ ‘gender identity’, not biological sex, wherever possible.
Government departments, the judiciary, media organisations, schools and – most significantly for me – universities have embraced this message. I abhor discrimination against trans people but I also believe we should be free to examine the effects of changes, including any costs to women and the rights of gay people, and to the health of children wishing to change gender.
As a lesbian with teenage children, these topics are close to my heart. As an academic philosopher whose job it is to investigate truth, they are even closer. I believe we should be free to discuss these things in public.
Yet, as I’ve tried to explore the issues, I’ve faced complaints, disciplinary investigations, student protests and constant defamation from some colleagues.
This isn’t the first open letter against me from academics – there have been several others. I’ve also been no-platformed more than once – banned from public debate because I dare to step outside the narrow trans orthodoxy. Only a month ago, I had an invitation withdrawn from an international conference series because a fellow speaker claimed my presence (on Zoom, in a different session, to be given in a different month) made her feel unsafe.
A book of interviews was dropped from publication by Oxford University Press, partly because I was going to be included. And when I was asked to be a keynote speaker at the Royal Institute of Philosophy last year, 5,000 people signed a petition saying I shouldn’t have been invited. Happily the organisers stood firm.
In all such cases, my actual views have been severely misrepresented and my motives demonised.
All of this takes an intense personal toll. When academics make false statements about me, alleging that I’m a transphobic bigot, presumably they don’t care about the effects on my life.
Yet people believe what they read, especially when endorsed by seemingly authoritative academics.
I’ve stopped attending philosophy conferences as I can’t cope with the ostracism and dirty looks. I walk around my own workplace at the University of Sussex with a sense of dread.
Two years ago, I was shocked when the campus security manager advised me about the emergency phone system and arranged to have a spyhole put in my door.
When, at a later graduation event, I was taken aside by security and told the quickest way to get off the stage in an emergency, I was no longer shocked – the experience had become commonplace.
As had being told I was being ‘manipulative’ whenever I wrote or talked about the personal cost of the campaign waged against me. Hilariously, the authors of this latest open letter didn’t even seem to bother to find out what my views actually were, describing me as ‘best-knowm… for opposition to the UK Gender Recognition Act’.
In fact, I’m on record as saying that, although I think it is confusingly worded, I have no problem with the existence of the Act which gives trans people the possibility of a Gender Recognition Certificate. This means that, for legal purposes, people can have a new ‘acquired gender’ which is not the same as biological sex.
Nor, for that matter, have I any objection to the Equality Act’s inclusion of gender reassignment as a ‘protected characteristic’. I enthusiastically support it. Trans people deserve to live free of any violence, harassment or discrimination. My objections are against proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act and to the Equality Act in favour of something called ‘gender identity’, which, as described by Stonewall, is ‘a person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.’ One problem with gender identity, as described like this, is that it is supposed to be an invisible inner feeling. So, in my view, it becomes far too easy for anyone to say they have this inner feeling, and ‘identify’ their way into women-only spaces and resources.
Stonewall says that to be a trans woman, you don’t need to have surgery, take hormones, or have any outward appearances in particular – it’s just who you are inside. But as I explain in my forthcoming book Material Girls, I don’t think inner feelings are a good basis for legal protections.
Such detailed arguments were apparently irrelevant to my academic critics in their haste to make an example of me.
As my friend and sociologist at University College London, Professor Alice Sullivan said last week in an acerbic reference to 17th Century witch trials: ‘The important thing is not what Stock actually thinks but rather, whether or not she floats.’
However, the greater harm here is the chilling message sent to other academics and students: toe the accepted line or this will happen to you. Indeed, it is happening to other academics.
For having views like mine, Oxford historian Professor Selina Todd now has to have security for her lectures, and Alice Sullivan has been no-platformed from an event on data collection and the census.
Almost every week, I receive emails from frightened academics concerned about what is happening but who feel unable to say so. This sinister suppression affects all of us, not just those who work in universities. There is an obvious cost to democracy.
We have seen widespread changes to policies on women’s spaces and resources so that, now, gender identity is the official criterion of legitimate access.
Essentially, if you feel like a woman, you can now go into a woman-only space, however private. Such measures affect half the population but have been made without considering whether women consent to them or not.
There is also a threat to data collection. We are already losing crucial information about the impact of biological sex. This matters because being male or female influences a huge range of different outcomes, including medicine, employment and susceptibility to sexual violence. We need to track these differences.
And we are set to lose even more data if the census authorities stick to their current plan of interpreting ‘sex’ in the 2021 census as ‘gender identity’.
In truth, public understanding about science is at risk. It is mind-boggling to me that during a global pandemic which affects men and women differently and is notably more threatening to men, some schools are telling children that their feelings about gender identity matter more than facts about their sex.
This effect of such thinking is most obvious in women’s sport, where people with male physiology are now permitted to compete against females on vastly unequal and sometimes dangerous terms. Stonewall is currently backing the inclusion of trans women in women’s contact rugby, apparently oblivious to the risks posed to women players.
Yet another potential cost is to children’s health. This was recently indicated by the judicial finding that under-16s with gender dysphoria – a sense of distressing unease because they feel there is a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity – are unlikely to be capable of informed consent to so-called puberty-blocker prescriptions.
Until this finding, psychologists at the Tavistock Clinic in London had been dispensing puberty blockers to children since 2011, even telling them that such drugs act only as a harmless ‘pause button’ for puberty.
I believe that this worrying practice might not have been permitted for so long had normal levels of public scrutiny been allowed.
These are only a few of the risks we face when our institutions – be they medical, legal, sporting or educational – decide that gender identity is more important than biological sex without considering the consequences.
People such as me are going to carry on thinking and writing about these risks, even if many of our colleagues would prefer us to shut up.
I’m afraid we can’t afford to stop. The costs to the public are too large to do otherwise.
The Vile Racism of a Biden Nominee
When an atteMpt to valorize blacks tends to indicate the opposite. A black lady reveals herself as exceptionally ill-informed
Imagine if, in 2016, Donald Trump had put forth a nominee to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division whose body of work included the following statement:
Melanin endows whites with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Afrocentric standards.
Setting aside the scientific idiocy of the statement, it’s hard to see it as anything other than the very definition of racism. And had anything like this ever been put on paper by a Trump nominee, the nomination would’ve been pulled as soon as the outrageous utterance came to light. But swap out the word “whites” for “blacks,” and replace “Afrocentric” with “Eurocentric,” and we’re looking at a verbatim quote from a Joe Biden nominee — to head our nation’s powerful civil rights enforcement apparatus, no less.
Granted, Kristen Clarke coauthored these words back in 1994 as part of a letter to the editor of the Harvard Crimson. But she did so as president of the university’s Black Students Association. That’s her name at the bottom of the letter, and those are her words. And they’re repugnant.
The letter, in fact, is little more than a semi-coherent screed that thrashes around between racist pseudoscience and pathetic blame-whiteyism.
First the pseudoscience: “Some scientists,” they claim without attribution, “have revealed that most whites are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcification [sic] or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent, Asians 15 to 25 percent and Europeans 60 to 80 percent. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between Blacks and whites.”
Now the blame-whiteyism: “Liberal whites underestimate the damage which racism causes on the minds of Black children, and conservative whites know all too well how to enlarge that damage. No matter how rich or supportive a Black person’s home might be, by the time she is ready to take the SAT or apply to college, she has struggled far more extensively than any white person of the same social and economic background.”
As a student, though, Clarke wasn’t content to merely castigate whites generally. She seems to have had a heightened animus toward Jews. Indeed, she once invited a raging anti-Semite to speak at Harvard, a former Wellesley College professor named Tony Martin — a man who authored a manifesto called “The Jewish Onslaught.” When the criticism came down, she vigorously — albeit sophomorically — defended him: “Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”
Got that? He’s an intellectual. Incidentally, if you missed Tucker Carlson’s Monday night takedown of our nation’s would-be civil rights top cop, it’s worth watching:
Carlson covered Clarke again last night, but this time he focused on her obsession with skin color when it comes to hiring airline pilots and on her dishonest Wikipedia biography, which doesn’t have a peep about her racist past. It’s also currently locked, so no one can correct it. Clearly, the Left is circling the wagons.
Despite their best efforts, though, it appears that Clarke’s troubling past has caught up with her just in time for a contentious confirmation. As The Washington Free Beacon reports, “Though the incendiary statements are more than 25 years old, several of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees were grilled over comparatively tamer items they wrote as college students, prompting public apologies and even a withdrawal. If confirmed, Clarke would shape federal litigation strategies and lead enforcement of the nation’s civil-rights statutes.”
Are her quarter-century-old comments disqualifying, or is there a statute of limitations on black supremacy? Not according to Clarke’s own standards, as Paul Mirengoff points out at Power Line. Hey, what’s good enough for a Trump judicial nominee is good enough for a Biden civil rights nominee.
With a racist like Clarke at the helm, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division would once again count by race, once again weaponize our nation’s civil rights laws, and once again favor certain racial groups at the expense of others. For the sake of decency, let’s hope her nomination gets pulled or, better yet, goes down to bipartisan defeat.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77002-the-vile-racism-of-a-biden-nominee-2021-01-14
Politico Staff Revolts After Ben Shapiro Authors NewsletterPolitico is defending its decision to allow The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro to write Thursday’s Politico Playbook after staff spoke out against Shapiro.
“Opposition to impeachment comes from a deep and abiding conservative belief that members of the opposing political tribe want their destruction, not simply to punish [President Donald] Trump for his behavior,” Shapiro wrote.
“Republicans believe that Democrats and the overwhelmingly liberal media see impeachment as an attempt to cudgel them collectively by lumping them in with the Capitol rioters thanks to their support for Trump.”
His participation in Thursday’s Playbook sparked a backlash internally among Politico staff who said that Shapiro should not have been allowed to guest-write the newsletter.
The Daily Beast reported that one staffer said in a Politico company-wide Slack channel that Shapiro has a “long history of bigoted and incendiary commentary.”
“It has clearly generated a wave of negative attention, and I fear it’s already overshadowing a lot of great work being done by journalists across this newsroom,” the staffer said, according to The Daily Beast. Several dozen of this staffer’s Politico colleagues reportedly upvoted this comment.
Another staffer reportedly responded to this comment, saying, “This is especially confusing given the newsroom’s welcome efforts over the last year to cover issues related to race in a more intentional, elevated, thoughtful way.”
Politico defended its decision in a statement released Thursday.
“We have taken great care to assemble a roster of guest authors who are prominent thinkers and writers and represent a range of perspectives,” the statement said, according to Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple. “What sets Politico apart in this intense political and media moment is that we rise above partisanship and ideological warfare—even as many seek to drag us into it.”
“It’s a core value of the publication that is unchangeable, and that above all protects our ability to do independent journalism,” the statement continued. “It’s a part of our mission.”
Top editor Matt Kaminski also told staffers in a Thursday meeting that Politico stands “by every word in there,” noting that it was “very closely edited,” according to The Daily Beast.
“Mischief-making has always been a part of Politico’s secret sauce,” he added. “We were an upstart. Some of that sensibility is always going to be a part of this publication.”
Shapiro tweeted that the backlash over his appearance in Playbook proves his point on censorship.
“People losing their s— over me writing @politico Playbook this morning are pretty much proving my point,” he tweeted. “So keep at it guys, you’re doing great!”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/01/15/politico-staff-revolts-after-ben-shapiro-authors-newsletter
The paradox of ‘inclusive’ languageGender-neutral jargon is about signalling who is in the know and who isn’t.
In a blow for ‘progress’ that nobody asked for, politicians in the US are waging war on gendered language. As part of a ‘diversity and inclusion’ push led by Democrats, gender-neutral terms may soon be expunged from the rules governing the House of Representatives. Not only are phrases like ‘chairman’ and ‘seaman’ for the chop, it seems, so too are apparently all gender-specific nouns and pronouns.
After a backlash from Republicans, Democratic House rules chair Jim McGovern – who unveiled the proposals with House speaker Nancy Pelosi last week – slammed the ‘extreme right’ for making a big deal about proposals aimed at making the House more ‘inclusive’ and ‘succinct’. But while swapping ‘he’ or ‘she’ for ‘they’, as the new rules propose, would arguably streamline things a bit, the same can’t really be said for swapping ‘niece’ and ‘nephew’ for ‘sibling’s child’, or ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ for ‘parent’s sibling’, as is also proposed.
Once discussions about gender-neutral language centred on making sure everyday parlance wasn’t too sexist or presumptuous – saying firefighter rather than fireman, for instance, to avoid suggesting it is really a man’s job. Now, it seems, gender-neutral lingo is about expunging sex from our speech and interactions entirely, thus referring to everyone using catch-all and often ungainly phrases.
The proposed House rulebook has been talked up as more inclusive towards transgender people. That most transgender people would, presumably, prefer to be acknowledged as the gender they feel themselves to be seems not to have crossed Democrats’ minds. But then again, the new craze for gender-neutral language is not really about inclusiveness, as is so often claimed.
Many serious organisations have opened themselves up to mockery by making absurd pronouncements on language, when they really should be focusing on other things. Last spring, the United Nations put out a statement encouraging people to drop gendered terms, including ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, ‘if you’re unsure about someone’s gender or are referring to a group’. This, it said, would ‘help create a more equal world’.
Such prognostications were not that long ago mainly the preserve of students’ unions and campus officials. In 2017, it was reported that Cardiff Metropolitan University had issued a new code of practise, mandating PC alternatives to gendered phrases. If you’re wondering: ‘workmanlike’ was to be swapped for ‘efficient’; ‘manpower’ with ‘human resources’; and ‘right-hand man’ with ‘chief assistant’.
The embrace of such PC contortions by the political class is, at best, a bit stupid. Language does change over time, reflecting changing attitudes. But it is absurd to suggest that women’s liberation, say, will be tangibly advanced by memory-holing the phrase ‘mankind’. Plus, the trans people Democrats seem hell bent on ‘including’ probably have bigger things to worry about than if someone utters the dread word ‘aunt’ on the House floor.
Such proposals seem primarily to be about advertising the virtue of those making them; they will do nothing materially to improve people’s lives. But there is a nasty underside to this, too. Acts of ostentatious virtue-signalling kind of presuppose that everyone else isn’t virtuous – that we need to be hectored and have our awareness raised, from on high, whether we like it or not.
In this sense, ‘inclusive’ language is actually a social marker, distinguishing the woke from the unwoke. Indeed, the fact that so many gender-neutral terms are basically unpronounceable shows how exclusive they really are. Take ‘womxn’ and ‘Latinx’ – the trans-friendly, gender-neutral alternatives to ‘woman’ and ‘Latino / Latina’ respectively. Both of which look like typos to the vast majority of people.
In fact, these phrases are barely known about, let alone used, by those they are intended to apply to. According to the Pew Research Center, only 23 per cent of Hispanic Americans have even heard of the word ‘Latinx’, and only three per cent use it to describe themselves. While that word has become popular in activist circles, more than three quarters of ‘Latinx’ people have no clue it exists.
This is the paradox of inclusive language: it isn’t inclusive at all. It excludes the vast majority and bemuses those it is meant to ‘help’. And it speaks to how myopically, psychotically focused our political culture now is on language policing and performative virtue that it is even an issue at all.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/06/the-paradox-of-inclusive-language/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
17 January, 2021
Remembering the past
The author below moans that we rarely remember the mistakes of our ancestors or the social and economic plight of minorities, two things that he asserts are interwoven. That the most persecuted minority of all -- Jews -- flourish mightily in social and economic matters, he does not take into account
He notes that we do occasionally remember the war dead of our communities and wonders why we don't remember the past deaths and suffering of minorities too. He asserts that we have actively suppressed our memories of the latter.
I have a much simpler and less conspiratorial explanation for him: indifference. Most of us spend some time thinking about our own past but the past of people unrelated to us rarely gets a thought. We all have our day-to-day concerns -- with relationships, work etc -- and that is where our mental energies are directed. Even when we do take note of community history, it only happens as a formal ceremony lasting a few minutes a year. We have to be MADE to think about the pasts of others
The author below has an obsession with the past but I think he will have to come to terms with the fact that few others share his concerns. The plight of some minorities is no doubt a worthy cause but I can't generate any personal concern about it. As Jesus said: "Let the dead bury their dead" (Luke 9:60). Let minorities make the effort to uplift themselves. Most minorities in our countries do: Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Indians etc. Those four groups are in fact high income earners on average.
So why is the author below so concerned about the less successful minorities? That's easy. Its just part of the guilt trip that the Left are always trying to inflict on us. They are themselves hate-filled and want others to hate along with them. They are anti-patriots -- unhappy people who resent the success of others and the general flourishing of their countries They want other people to hate their country the way they do and plague us with tales about our evil past to that effect. It's a sad obsession
A bell rings, and the playground falls silent. Some of my classmates clasp their hands behind their backs in earnest attempts at commemoration; others glance around furtively. I stand like a toy soldier, crumpled cardboard poppy pinned to my lapel, trying to conjure memories of trenches in which I have never stood.
It’s the 11th of November—Remembrance Day in the U.K., Armistice Day in France and Belgium, and Independence Day in Poland. I’m only seven years old, but the nation in which I live wants me to remember the 20 million people, including over one million Britons, who died in the First World War.
Compared to this riot of remembrance, Europe is conspicuously silent about its colonial past. In the U.K., the dark history of the British Empire is overlooked in schools. There is no day of remembrance for those who died as a result of British colonialism. When Black Lives Matter protesters argue that “Silence is Violence,” this is what they mean: national memory, curated by the state, is tight-lipped about colonial atrocities—despite European colonialism claiming 50 million lives in the 20th century alone.
“There’s clearly a big gap in memory,” says Aline Sierp, Associate Professor of European Studies at Maastricht University, and co-founder of the Memory Studies Association. “And there’s this big problem of amnesia when it comes to the role European states and European people played in colonialism.”
“In World War I, it was clear who were the victims and the perpetrators. It’s the same with colonialism, but European states aren’t used to seeing themselves exclusively as perpetrators. We still don’t remember the colonial project as something inherently European, which came with blatant human rights violations.”
The scale of those violations is difficult to comprehend. Ten million dead in the Belgian Congo; 35 million in British India. The Spanish conquest of South America resulted in an estimated 56 million deaths, including several million from European diseases brought to its shores. Such suffering merits remembrance for the same reason we remember war: to ensure it never happens again.
So why does Europe remember casualties of war while forgetting deaths in its ex-colonies? Professor Santanu Das, author of India, Empire, and First World War Culture, is a leading voice in First World War studies, specialising in the memory of colonial troops. He believes it’s not possible to commemorate colonial deaths as we do for the war.
“Even though we accept the horrors of the war and the unprecedented loss of lives, the stories of camaraderie and endurance nonetheless have the power to inspire us— and so the images of the doomed generation come to us today with a sort of romantic glow,” he says.
“There is nothing of the sort in memories of colonialism. What we have are images of exploitation, and ideologies based on racist discrimination—and this retrospective embarrassment, awkwardness and anger.” If Europeans wish to commemorate colonial victims, the Remembrance Day framework of poetry, poppies and pan-European romance won’t work.
https://blendle.com/i/are-we-europe/stumbling-stones/bnl-areweeurope-20201224-a5ea1443660
A novel that promotes insurrectionThe novel was published in book form in 1978, with the neo-Nazi leader William Luther Pierce using the pen name Andrew Macdonald.The novel was published in book form in 1978, with the neo-Nazi leader William Luther Pierce using the pen name Andrew Macdonald.
In “The Turner Diaries,” a group of white supremacists attacks the National Capitol in an effort to overthrow the U.S. government. Dozens are killed in the assault, including members of Congress and their staffers. But in the insurrectionists’ view, the greater victory is symbolic.
“The real value of all our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not the immediate casualties,” the 1978 novel’s narrator, Earl Turner, writes in his diary. “They learned this afternoon that not one of them is beyond our reach.”
Since its publication by the neo- Nazi leader William Luther Pierce, “The Turner Diaries” has become one of the most influential texts among white nationalists and right-wing extremists. It has inspired dozens of acts of violence, and has been held up as a blueprint for how to enact a violent insurrection.
Last week, as rioters broke into the Capitol, incited by President Trump, some saw frightening parallels with the events described in the novel. Experts who track rhetoric on the far right say the book has long been a reference point for white supremacists who see the government as an oppressive force to be overthrown.
“Many of the ideas that are central to ‘The Turner Diaries’ have turned into memes and proliferated online in right-wing media,” said Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “There are books that are required reading for people who are enmeshed in the movement, and ‘The Turner Diaries’ is at the top of the list.”
On social media and in militant chat rooms on sites like 4chan, Telegram and Stormfront, some users celebrated last week’s violence and likened it to “the Day of the Rope,” a mass hanging that occurs in “The Turner Diaries.”
Some rioters who livestreamed the assault made references to hanging politicians, and strung up nooses and erected a gallows outside the Capitol.
“The turner diaries mentioned this. Keep reading,” one user posted on Telegram in reference to the attack on the Capitol.
On Monday, Amazon removed the novel from its website. It had previously been available for purchase with a disclaimer identifying it as “a racist, white supremacist fantasy” that had inspired domestic terrorists.
“As a bookseller, we think it is important to offer this infamous work because of its historical significance and educational role in the understanding and prevention of racism and acts of terrorism,” the note said. The book also disappeared from Abe Books, a usedand rare-books site owned by Amazon.
Amazon — which also removed QAnon products and books from its site and suspended Parler from its web service — declined to comment on why it had taken down “The Turner Diaries.”
Part of the book’s appeal to right-wing radical groups stems from its seemingly far-fetched plot, in which a small group of insurgents terrorizes the most powerful people in the world with attacks that rally other white people to the cause. Though it’s a work of fiction rather than an ideological treatise or tactical manual, many domestic terrorists have tried to emulate the attacks in the book.
Over the decades, the novel has been cited as inspiration in at least 40 terrorist attacks and hate crimes, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, according to J. M. Berger, a researcher and analyst who studies extremist activities in the United States.
“We see a lot of cases where people have taken some element of the book and tried to play them out,” Berger said. “‘The Turner Diaries’ is part of the background noise that created this moment.”
Fiction has often fed into rightwing propaganda movements, said Seyward Darby, author of “Sisters in Hate,” a book about women in the white nationalist movement. In addition to “The Turner Diaries,” influential rightwing novels include Jean Raspail’s “The Camp of the Saints,” a dystopian depiction of immigrants overrunning Europe, and “Hunter,” another novel by Pierce that valorizes a white supremacist who targets interracial couples and civil rights activists.
Bumble removes political preference filter after Capitol riots honeypot scheme
Women in the US are apparently using dating apps to track down insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol building last week to report them to the FBI.
Their self-reported tactics have already prompted one dating app to change its policies.
Bumble has removed its political preference filter temporarily, but claims it’s searching for Capitol rioters on the app and reporting them to authorities.
“How the f**k is reporting insurrectionists misuse, Bumble?” One Twitter user asked.
“Rest assured that we prohibit any content that promotes terrorism or racial hatred, and we’ve already removed any users that have been confirmed as participants in the attack of the US Capitol,” the company replied.
Bumble ordinarily allows people to give their political preferences (choosing between “conservative” and “liberal”, which can make it a confusing filter for Australian users given the name of our own dominant “conservative” party).
In the US, women have reported “friends of friends” using the filter to track down people who stormed the Capitol, or were at least willing to lie about it to try and impress them.
One popular Twitter account — a random but handsome user known as Caucasian James — shared a screenshot with his 1.4 million followers of a profile from a “patriot” telling “anyone who was at the Capitol ‘riots’” that they “have her heart”.
Some followers were quick to agree that it “can’t be real” and pointed to the circulating reports of “honeypotting”.
Others suggested that it was indeed the case that it was part of a honeypot style trap, while others told them not to reveal that if it is the case.
A “honeypot” is an investigatory and espionage tactic that tries to lure the target into a romantic or sexual relationship that could be used to compromise them.
Jennifer Lawrence provided a broad overview of the concept through her character in the truly awful 2018 film Red Sparrow, which is otherwise a complete waste of your time with no real redeeming features (although it did pick Ms Lawrence up an award for “Actress Most in Need of a New Agent” from the Alliance of Women Film Journalists).
The tactic is popular in spy-fiction because it looks great on screen, but has also been used by real intelligence agencies around the world.
In recent years the same name has begun being used for a cybersecurity technique, where an isolated part of a computer network is spoofed to look like it contains important data that would attract attackers and keep them there long enough to analyse and block them.
The FBI has charged dozens of people and arrested more than 100 so far in relation to the Capitol building incident and is expecting to charge more.
Why the woke will never be happy
Surely America has enough to worry about. There’s no shortage of distressing issues: 389,000 people dead from COVID; the Capitol coup in which five people died; yet another impeachment; or social media’s blocking of President Trump (while Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei still gets to tweet away).
But anger is raging over a far more unlikely controversy: Kamala Harris’ US Vogue cover.
The February issue was intended to portray the incoming Vice-President as “accessible”, according to the magazine’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
Instead the magazine has been slammed as “racist” and “sexist” for displaying Ms Harris – the first black person and first woman to be Vice-President – in what critics described as a disrespectful and demeaning way.
In the photograph a smiling Ms Harris wears a black jacket and tight jeans, with her trademark pearls and Converse sneakers that became her signature on the campaign trail.
Behind her is pink and green fabric in a tribute to the colours of her African-American college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha and the slogan reads: “By the people, for the people”.
The photographer was Tyler Mitchell, who was the first black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover (the amazing Beyonce shoot in 2018) and is known for his informal and muted pictures. The feature journalist and sittings editor were also both talented black American millennial women.
The image portrays Ms Harris (whose father is of Afro-Jamaican descent and mother is from India) how she normally is, not how people want her to be seen.
But despite this inclusivity and that Ms Harris chose and wore her own clothes, it wasn’t enough to satisfy the perpetually displeased woke who called it a “mess” and “trash”.
“The choice smacks of racism and sexism,” Mary McNamara said in the Los Angeles Times.
“The cover did not give Kamala D Harris due respect. It was overly familiar,” The Washington Post’s senior critic-at-large Robin Givhan said.
Anna Murphy in The Times said it was “downright blah” and said Ms Harris had a “slightly awkward in-the-queue-at-Starbucks stance”.
Online the negative response was worse, with commenters claiming she looks like a “tired soccer mom” and that is was “bizarrely horrible”. “It looks like what some kid who really wants to work at Vogue some day would slap together,” one person tweeted.
Others conspired that discrediting Ms Harris was Ms Wintour’s main motivation, ignoring the fact that the Vogue editor did not feature First lady (and former model) Melania Trump in Vogue in the past four years.
It’s also telling that Ms Harris is, according to a source, “extremely disappointed”.
Her team allegedly agreed informally with Vogue that a different image (Ms Harris in a powder blue suit) would be the cover, according to reports.
That with everything going on in the US, they bothered to address off the record this tempest in a teacup is worrying.
Isn’t saving democracy is more important than wading into yet another confected outrage by triggered moralisers searching for the next pile on?
It’s easy to dismiss this as petty and trivial, but it signals a significant toxic trend in society.
Everything must now be judged through a filter of race, colour and (to a lesser extent) gender and nothing will ever be allowed to succeed in satisfying the liberal progressives.
And that is what is so disappointing about the Vogue outcry is that no matter how Ms Harris would be styled and photographed it would be met with a petulant tantrum from the Left.
The same people enraged that she was photographed wearing sneakers would foam at the mouth if she was in a ball gown.
If she was wearing designer clothes there would be backlash for making her look disconnected in a pandemic, just as New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was ridiculed for her Vanity Fair cover.
Put her in a pencil skirt and high heels? That’s stereotyping a powerful woman.
Have her in bare arms and there would be the same uproar Michelle Obama got.
What Ms Harris looks like or wears should not matter. What she says and does is what counts.
But that means nothing to those people who actively seek to be outraged on behalf of others.
You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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16 January, 2021
White North Dakota lawmaker is branded racist for claiming black Americans are 'glad their ancestors were brought here as slaves' - but is backed by black Republican who says slavery was good for Africans who became Christians
State Rep Terry Jones, a Republican from New Town, has made the controversial statement while discussing his newly introduced bill that would allow residents to put down 'American' as their race on official paperwork.
House Bill 1333 would require state agencies to list 'American' as the first option on documents that ask for information on race.
Jones' remarks about slaves have been labeled racist by Fargo Black Lives Matter activist Jamaal Abegaz, who stressed that he is 'not happy that my mother's ancestors were stolen and brought here,' as first reported by The Forum.
But Michael Coachman, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate, who is black, has rushed to Jones' defense.
Coachman said that while slavery was terrible, he argued that it was good for Africans who converted to Christianity in America.
The controversy began unfolding after Jones introduced the bill on Wednesday, arguing that the legislation would help unite the country under a shared American identity, rather than allow race to divide people further.
Jones claimed that the American nationality qualifies as a race under a definition he offered as 'a group of people that has lived under common laws for mutual benefits.'
The US Census does not allow respondents to put down their nationality as their race.
Rep. Gretchen Dobervich, a Democrat from Fargo, rejected Jones' reasoning and said her colleague's bill would do nothing to heal the racial divide.
'I don't think [the bill] is meant to be racist, but the optics are not good,' Dobervich said.
Jones argued that people of all races and cultural backgrounds are proud to be Americans, including the descendants of slaves.
He added that his belief is rooted in a Reader's Digest article from the 1980s about a black doctor from the US who visited a war-torn African country and came away from the experience feeling grateful for slavery.
Fargo Black Lives Matter board member Jamaal Abegaz said Jones' comments are racist, crass and unrepresentative of the way many Black Americans view their ancestors' forced arrival on the continent. Abegaz, who is Black, emphatically said he's "not happy that my mother's ancestors were stolen and brought here."
'The unrelenting buffoonery of [Jones'] statement cannot be understated,' said Abegaz, a member of the Fargo BLM board, adding that his proposed legislation that would do away with racial identification on official forms is a 'piece of nonsense.'
But Coachman, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in November as a write-in candidate, and who has now emerged as Jones' supporter, said he believes questions requiring people to identify their race only sow division in the country.
Jones is a rancher and farmer with a wife and six children who was first elected to the State House of Representatives in 2016.
In the fall of 2020, state Democrats made a failed attempt to kick Jones off the ballot by claiming that he is a resident of Wyoming, where he operates several businesses.
Jones argued that he owns a home in New Town, pays North Dakota income tax, and has led a congregation at a Mormon church there for years.
In a ruling issued in September, the State Supreme Court ruled that Jones was eligible for re-election, which he won in November. His current term ends in November 2024.
Coachman is a retired Air Force veteran with a wife and three children who has run several statewide campaigns, including in 2018 when he made a failed bid for North Dakota secretary of state.
During his campaign for governor last year, Coachman criticized the state's response to the coronavirus pandemic and railed against restrictions, saying: 'we’re not free. We’re under bondage and being told to wear a mask when we don’t need to,' reported The Dickinson Press last October.
He also weighed in on race relations, which he described as one of the biggest problems facing the US.
'We the People of the United States ... Our Constitution says it best. We the People,' he said. 'It’s not We the Blacks, not We the Native Americans, We the Whites, We the Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Democrats or Republicans ... No, it’s We the People.'
Don't be a victim
Hugh Mackay
Victimhood is one of our favourite hiding places. Look what a hard life I’ve had! Look how hopeless my parents were! Look how badly I’ve been treated! If we allow ourselves to be consumed by self-pity, that may well turn into a hiding place, allowing us to settle for a superficial, reflexive victimhood rather than taking a deeper look at what we might yet become.
Having spent most of my working life sitting in people’s homes, listening to the stories of their lives and their views on every imaginable subject, I can say two things with confidence. The first is that everyone’s story is interesting: you have only to listen patiently enough to realise that. The second is that everyone has had their share of tragedy; everyone walks with shadows; everyone has been wounded, disappointed, wronged or misjudged. Everyone. And perhaps there’s a third thing, though it’s less universal: almost everyone resists the temptation to take themselves too seriously, or to fall into a trough of self-pity; almost everyone knows that there’s someone worse off than they are.
What you can never predict is how individuals might deal with misfortune and setbacks. Some of the most serene and gentle-seeming people turn out to be harbouring a seething resentment of “fate”. Some people who seem relaxed and charming turn out to be restless rogues or bullies constantly plotting revenge against real or imagined adversaries. (Indeed, I’m tempted to propose a law of human nature: charm is the preferred disguise of the rogue and the bully – that’s how they get away with it.) Others, whose experiences would move you to tears of sympathy for their loss, their sorrow or their tough luck, shrug their shoulders and look at you with a half-smile, as if to say: “What can you do? What can anyone do?”
Some people lead lives of quiet heroism – as carers for disabled children or parents with dementia, as visitors to lonely people in hospitals or nursing homes, as spouses who sacrifice their own career to support their partner’s aspirations or to raise their children – without even realising how heroic they have been. Others complain bitterly about the sacrifices they feel they have been forced to make.
Some people have experienced life-threatening illness and never once asked: “Why me?”; others have railed ceaselessly against the injustice of it all, throughout their illness and beyond. Some people have been bullied, harassed, abused or belittled by parents, teachers or people in positions of authority in the workplace, and maintained their dignity and courage; others have been discouraged and diminished.
All unpredictable. All part of the broad range of normal human behaviour. It’s unpredictable partly because of the crucial role played by luck in determining the trajectory of our lives. Yes, some of us can improve whatever situation we find ourselves in, through education, training and hard work. But some of us simply can’t do that because our genetic inheritance has left us with insufficient cognitive ability or emotional resources to rise above our difficulties, or because it has proved impossible to escape from a poverty trap or other crushing disadvantage. Unless we are irretrievably disadvantaged, being dealt this or that hand by the fates does not entail being defined by the hand we’ve been dealt. As Carl Jung put it: “I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become.”
Many people who experience illness or other misfortunes ranging from retrenchment or divorce to poverty or disability manage to display remarkable resilience, including a capacity to remain in touch with their essential loving self. But people who embrace victimhood in any of its guises tend to have an inflated sense of entitlement, are more likely to expect others to tolerate their rudeness, insensitivity or self-centredness, and are more prone to anger based on a sense of “the injustice of it all”.
What are such people hiding from behind that veneer of victimhood? What is it about portraying ourselves as victims that appeals to some of us? Given that the desire to be taken seriously is the most fundamental of all our social desires, is it that we believe victimhood to be the only way to get other people to take us seriously?
None of this is intended to downplay the misery of people trapped in the coils of tragedy or misfortune. Such people need all the sympathy, all the kindness, all the understanding and all the practical support we can muster on their behalf. But when they elect to play the victim role, that diminishes their capacity for self-reflection, as well as our capacity for sympathy: after all, if someone is wallowing in self-pity, it’s a bit hard to muster much additional pity to add to the existing swamp.
We sometimes adopt victimhood as a hiding place even when we are the architects of our own problems. We may complain about the inroads of IT into our life, as though “it’s nothing to do with me, I’m just the victim of all these messages I need to respond to”. Or, having crowded our lives with too many commitments, or failed to be strict or sensible about our priorities, we may sound just like a victim: “Oh, I’m so busy. I don’t know how I’m going to cope. People make so many demands on me!”
Sometimes, victimhood poses as martyrdom – not in the classical sense of a person dying for a cause they believe in, but in the more mundane, everyday sense of a person who has fallen into the trap of self-pity because of the demands being made on them. It might be the competing demands of work and family, or the burden of caring for (or even just worrying about) frail elderly parents, or the self-imposed stress brought about by taking on too much. By playing the martyr, we try to convince ourselves that there’s something heroic about our situation, that we are worthy of praise and admiration, and that people are not giving us sufficient recognition or sympathy. To perceive ourselves as having been martyred or victimised by our responsibilities to others is to have become deaf to the whispers of the soul.
There are a great many victims in our midst, all of them worthy of our attention and support: victims of natural disasters, of illness, of relationship breakups, of retrenchment, of prolonged unemployment leading to poverty and, yes, even of incompetent, neglectful or abusive parents. In whatever situation they find themselves, victims are entitled to expect compassionate responses from us. But the person who embraces the role of victim and wears it like a badge of honour is a person in need of a different kind of help.
The Coming Purge of All Things and People Trump
Around 3500 years ago in ancient Egypt, there lived a pharaoh who didn’t believe there were multiple gods ruling the universe. Pharaoh Akhenaten believed there was only one god — Aten the sun god. As you might imagine, this didn’t sit well with a lot of people. Priests who made a living assisting in the worship of other gods lost their livelihoods and since religion was a big deal in Egypt, a lot of important people connected to other gods lost quite a bit.
Akhenaten had sort of a co-regency with his son, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who also believed in the one god. After their deaths, the priests and those who worshipped other gods took their revenge on both of them. They systematically erased both pharaohs from history — literally. They scratched out their names on carvings, they chiseled over their names on stone tablets, they destroyed every scroll where their names appeared, they toppled any statues that bore their likenesses.
How effective was this erasure? When a bust was found of Akhenaten in the 19th century, nobody could figure out who he was.
Not even the Soviets, who became famous for scrubbing their history books of Communist leaders who had fallen out of favor, did such a fabulous job in erasing history. This is all relevant because Trump, and those even just tangentially associated with him, are about to be erased from history by those on both sides who see a political opening to destroy their opponents.
Senator Josh Hawley has been fingered as the scapegoat in the mob attack on the Capitol. It’s not exactly clear why. It could be that he was the most visible Senator who, in a completely legal and constitutional fashion, challenged the results of the Electoral College. You may believe he was right or you may think him crazy. Whatever your opinion, what he did was perfectly legal.
Hawley’s sin was they he didn’t sit down, shut up, and accept without question the verdict of authorities. He decided to legally challenge the Electoral College results. No one knows if he really believed the conspiracy theories about magic voting machines, altered votes, and a stolen election. It was enough that a picture of Hawley was published showing him outside the Capitol building shaking a clenched fist at the protesters in support of their demonstration — a demonstration which was peaceful until it wasn’t.
There were thousands of Trump supporters peacefully demonstrating in front of the Capitol — just like the majority of protesters last summer were peacefully demonstrating against the police. But there were those on Wednesday in Washington and across the country last summer who sought to use the peaceful protesters to disguise their intent to commit violence.
Of course, a few minutes later, some in the crowd breached the Capitol building and the insurrection was on. But trying to cancel Hawley for his legal challenge to the Electoral College or support for peaceful protests has nothing to do with standing up for democracy. Hawley and other Trump supporters will be purged from society not because they supported violence as some Democrats did last summer, but because a chasm has opened up in America and anything and anyone associated with Donald Trump will be thrown in it. On the left, it’s not enough to defeat your political opponents. They must be destroyed.
The same treatment given to Hawley will be given to other supporters of Donald Trump, including ordinary people who might have a MAGA bumper sticker on their car or a Donald Trump coffee mug at the office. How many will lose their jobs, be shunned by neighbors, or kicked out of organizations? This is not the way to protect democracy or defend the integrity of elections.
We are about to enter a very dark period in American history. It won’t be Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror.” Guillotines won’t be set up on the mall or gallows erected in Central Park. But there will be terror nonetheless. And it won’t be the Josh Hawley’s or political big shots who will be terrorized. It will be people with everything to lose who will fear being purged.
America, 2021.
CBP Chief Says Biden's Immigration Proposals Already Leading to Skyrocketing Numbers at the Border
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan says Biden's planned immigration changes are already contributing to an increase in new arrivals at the southern border.
Around 74,000 migrants arrived at the border last month, an 80-percent jump from the previous December. According to the outgoing Border Patrol chief, the uptick is the result of proposed policy changes by the incoming Biden administration.
"We’re already seeing the negative impacts of the proposed policy changes," Commissioner Morgan said on a call with reporters. According to Morgan, "cartels and human smugglers are spreading the perception that our borders will be open. In this case, they’re correct. They’re right: It’s not just the perception."
Joe Biden has pledged to dramatically increase the number of refugees permitted to resettle in the United States and roll back several Trump-era reforms.
"Halting construction of the border wall system, stopping deportations for 100 days, expanding DACA, ending MPP [Migrant Protection Protocols], providing free health care, providing amnesty to millions of individuals here illegally, and the list goes on and on. This isn’t an immigration strategy; it is an open-borders strategy," said Morgan.
The acting commissioner said he was reassured by Biden's decision not to immediately reverse President Trump's asylum restrictions in the midst of a pandemic, but equated the postponement of the policy change to simply kicking the can down the road.
"Mr. Biden himself said he’s not going to do what he promised on day one, because he knew that it would create a crisis — that was very good to hear, but it doesn’t alleviate the concerns that I have," Morgan said.
"It’s simply kicking the crisis can down the road. There’s got to be real reform to what their ‘open border’ strategies are."
With Democrats soon to be in control of both Congress and the White House, there is very little standing in the way of another amnesty.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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15 January, 2021
Conservative Commentator Says AIG Canceled His Insurance Over His Social Media Posts
The more this sort of thing goes on, the more conservatives will set up their own alternatives to restricted services. That is already happening with alternatives to mainstream social media. There are already several alternatives to Twitter and Facebook available.
The Left are not content to let that happen of course. They have already shut down Parler, a conservative-oriented alternative to Twitter but it seems unlikely that they will be able to shut down all the alternatives. Gab.com, in particular now seems to have its own servers.
And business generally will in time provide alternatives to other services. In the case at issue below, there will undoubtedly be other insurers willing to give cover to customers rejected by AIG
If the Left go full Fascist however and manage to shut down all alternatives to sites that they control, that will be a real red rag. It will invite retaliation that could be violent. Many Trump supporters are military or ex-military men. And as such they are usually trained marksmen. So if the Left are authoritarian enough, some of the oppressed may see that the gun is the only alternative left to them. Sniper attacks on major Leftist targets could be expected. Would anyone working at the NYT be safe?
At an extreme, a real-life dystopia could emerge, whereby all Democrat officials had to drive around in armoured cars for their own safety. And that is not as improbable as it sounds. One should not forget that, during the Obama years, it was guns that restrained the law enforcement response to Cliven Bundy's protest against loss of his traditional rights.
Conservative commentator and former baseball star Curt Schilling says that AIG canceled his insurance policy over his “social media profile,” a new level of deplatforming not yet seen.
“We will be just fine, but wanted to let Americans know that @AIGinsurance canceled our insurance due to my “Social Media profile,” tweeted Schilling.
“The agent told us it was a decision made by and with their PR department in conjunction with management,” he added.
While innumerable Trump supporters have lost their Twitter and Facebook accounts due to social media censorship and cancel culture, cases of individuals being cut off by banks and other financial services are now growing too.
The purge has gone beyond the realm of simply silencing people on major platforms for their opinions, but punishing them for expressing them by trying to make their lives unlivable.
Numerous respondents pointed out the obvious – that without insurance it’s impossible to mortgage a home or register a vehicle.
However, other leftists applauded the move and said that Schilling deserved it for his support of Trump. “You’ve definitely earned it,” remarked one.
“I mean…. capitalism right? They calculated the risk and decided your premiums weren’t worth the long term exposure?” added another.
Another White Liberal Busted for Peddling a Racial Hoax for Career Gain
I mean, how many times are we going to see this happen within the world of white liberals? Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Baldwin (not calling her Hilaria), and now some human rights lawyer who claimed to be Puerto Rican and Colombian but is really some white girl from Georgia. It’s the liberal America exception again, folks. It’s bad to culturally appropriate. It might be racist, and you should be shamed and destroyed for doing so, but if you’re a liberal and fighting for like-minded causes — it’s ok. You get a hall pass. Alas, the lack of principles at the core of American liberalism. It’s nothing but rot.
For a slice of the country that wants to get us all "woke" and change past racial and ethnic norms, there sure are a lot of these people who have straight-up lied to get ahead, huh? This is just as bad as putting "Native American" or whatever down on college applications. It’s a fraud. So, what’s this white woman from Georgia’s name? It’s Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, and she’s been claiming to be Hispanic for nearly a decade (via NY Post):
She serves senior counsel at the Latino Justice Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Records obtained by the site say Bannan’s family arrived in the United States from Ireland, Italy and Russia.
On Monday, Bannan, 43, clarified that she’s white in response to the report
“I am racially white, and have always said that. However my cultural identity was formed as a result of my family, both chosen and chosen for me, and that has always been Latinx,” the attorney wrote.
“My identity is my most authentic expression of who I am and how I pay honor to the people who have formed me since I was a child.”
And there it is. That’s the red flag. Only white liberals use "Latinx." Only white liberals think that’s a thing. It’s not. You cannot be Puerto Rican or Colombian if you don’t have a drop of blood running through your veins. I was raised by Italians and Irish. That’s not my cultural identity. I mean, it’s American, but I can’t say I’m full-blooded Italian. People would look at me as if I’m nuts — and they’d be right. The pretzels these clowns twist themselves into to justify stealing racial heritages to further their careers is some high-class white privilege, which again I was told was not good.
Recently, Alec Baldwin’s wife, who allegedly claimed to be from Mallorca, Spain, got busted for peddling a similar ethnic scandal. She’s a white woman from the greater Boston area. All five of her kids have Spanish names. She put on a fake accent. She was featured in the Madrid-based magazine Hola! For years, she was described as Spanish. She’s not. And any good public relations person would have pointed that out to her regarding this fake part of her biography. Why didn’t they? Maybe "Hilaria" didn’t think she’d be caught. I don’t know, but the evidence exposing this circus was both cringeworthy and flat-out hilarious.
Only in California: Where “Affordable Housing” Costs More than Five-Star Luxury
Have you ever dreamt about living in luxury on the beach in Maui? Sadly, this is just a dream for most of us because of its cost. But I am guessing you haven’t dreamt of living near the extremely busy I-680 freeway in Milpitas, California, at the local Extended Stay America, which consists of 300-square-foot units that include a kitchenette, a small living area, and one small bedroom and bathroom.
But buying the Extended Stay motel and flipping it into “affordable” apartments will cost you more per square foot than top-of-the-line digs on the shores of Hawaii. Santa Clara County, the county home of Milpitas, is paying about $725 per square foot for buying this property and flipping in into low-income apartments. Yes, this is outrageous, and there is no reason it needs to be this way. By accepting this insanity and failing to reform housing policies, California legislators are increasing California’s cost of living enormously and failing their constituents.
At this per-square-foot price point, Santa Clara County would need to spend close to $1 billion to satisfy the number of affordable housing units that the state is demanding of the county to deliver in the next two years. With an annual budget of about $8 billion, there is little chance the county will achieve this goal. And this also shows why Governor Newsom’s target of 3.5 million new housing units, one of his principal campaign promises, is a pipe dream. Even before COVID-19, California’s housing construction rate was 49th in the country.
“Affordable housing” is a myth in California, at least in areas near the coast, because a housing cost of $725 per square foot is anything but affordable. Building housing for low-income households at this cost means that taxpayers must enormously subsidize these projects.
Why is the cost so high? As always, the devil is in the details, so let’s look under the hood. There we will find that the costs of the small number of improvements that the state is planning on implementing are grossly overpriced, to the point that auditors—and taxpayers—should be taking a critical look.
The property in question sold in July for $14 million, which provides a realistic estimate for its value in its present condition. And as far as projects go, this isn’t much of a project, if one at all. According to a just-completed environmental impact report, the property and structures are in good condition and well maintained, without needing major renovations and repairs.
This property is a prime flipping candidate. Some paint, shampoo the carpets, a touch-up here and there, and we are good to go, yes? How much would this cost to flip if done by a private flipping specialist? About $20 per square foot, according to the evaluation tools provided by a private home flipper. Other flipping estimates are similar. And at $20 per square foot, this cost includes replacing carpet and hard flooring. But hey, this is California, where it costs more to do everything, so let’s double that $20 per square foot to $40 per square foot, which means a flipping budget of $1.5 million, and a grand total of about $15.5 million, give or take.
But the county’s budget to convert the Extended Stay into apartments is $29.2 million, nearly twice what it should cost. Where does that extra $14 million go? The answer to that question sheds much light on California’s housing crisis. And it is easily fixable, if policy makers are willing to do it.
The remaining items include building a laundry room and community kitchen, and outside, about 10,000 square feet would be used for a community garden, sports courts, a barbeque area with picnic tables, a dog park, and a pet washing station. Some units will also be converted into meeting rooms and into two larger manager units. Finally, there are reports—including a 222-page environmental impact report on a property that will be almost unchanged from its current usage—planning, permitting, and other administration costs.
Somehow, all this will apparently cost nearly $14 million. Scratching your head? I did as well, so I called a developer who specializes in apartments, and who lives outside of California, and asked him to guesstimate these costs at a “moderate” quality level if he were to do this project in his state.
His answer: $300,000. This includes plans, permits, overhead, and builder profit. The kitchen was the highest cost item, and he questioned why this was included in an apartment complex, given that each unit has an existing kitchen and that most apartment complexes do not have this feature. The laundry room was also expensive, but he noted that most apartment buildings cover these costs with currency-operated washers and dryers.
The extreme cost of this project is not a one-off. In San Jose, the cost of installing 8-by-10-foot tool sheds as temporary housing, along with a communal kitchen, meeting rooms, and a dog park, as in the case of the Extended Stay, costs about $700 per square foot. And, like the Extended Stay, it appears nearly all the cost is wrapped up in reports, administration, permits, and building a kitchen and laundry facilities. Almost entirely funded by taxpayers.
You must wonder why someone involved in this process doesn’t demand accountability, doesn’t say, “No more, this is nuts!” Perhaps this will happen one day, but all too often, the problem is that of people who spend other people’s money. As long as the owner of the checkbook doesn’t complain, checks just keep on getting written. It is much easier to do that than to rock the political boat, because there is so little for anyone to gain by doing that.
The fundamental problem with government is that there is no profit motive to impose discipline on spending and incentivize efficiency. Consequently, voters must constantly ride herd on elected officials. California voters don’t do this nearly enough. This is why California politicians spend $725 per square foot on down-market housing without batting an eye. And why they’ll continue to do this.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13378&omhide=true
Shopify Bans Trump Store. Marginalization of Trump Support gears upNot being familiar with either Shopify or the Trump Store and wanting to see what kinds of things it sold, I clicked on the link in Bloomberg’s tweet, only to get the notice that “This shop is unavailable.” Apparently the Trump Store website is run through Shopify, which describes itself as “the all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and grow a business,” unless, apparently, one’s political views are undesirable.
So while I was unable to discover what exactly the Trump Store sells, I rather doubt that it’s balaclavas, Molotov cocktail mix, and maps to the Capitol. The people who work for the Trump Store have nothing to do with President Trump’s claimed incitement of mob violence at the Capitol yesterday. They are now essentially being deprived of a livelihood, at least temporarily, because the political and media establishment would have us believe that anything associated with Donald Trump is irremediably tainted. Shopify and its ilk seem to be working from the assumption that allowing anything connected with Trump a platform is apparently tantamount to accepting and even propagating the noxious brew of racism, xenophobia and “hate” that is all support for Trump is about, as far as they’re concerned.
Shopify is clearly just the beginning. Also on Thursday, Rick Klein, political director at ABC, tweeted: “Trump will be an ex-president in 13 days. The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part. Cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.” Klein didn’t say how he proposed to “cleanse” Trump supporters. Special showers, maybe? Or is it just our brains that he wants to wash? In any case, Klein is just the latest prominent Leftist to call for the reeducation of Trump supporters, and it is worth noting that neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris, nor any other Democrat leader, has dismissed, much less condemned, this idea.
As David Horowitz has memorably put it, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out,” and at this point it’s clear: They’ve gotten out. The Left seems to be bent on criminalizing and thereby marginalizing all opposition to its agenda, and that will require pretending that every Trump supporter is the maniac redneck with a gun of Leftist fiction, just itchin’ to get inside that thar Capitol building and bag some Democrat varmints and then, power secured, go out and oppress blacks and women. It’s a lurid and ridiculous fantasy, of course, but Democrat leaders are today in no mood to treat opposition to high taxes and support for secure borders and protection of the First and Second Amendments as if they were any more reasonable. It is much easier to silence one’s opposition, and not be challenged in doing so, once one has succeeded in portraying him as evil in the eyes of the world — irrational, tending to violence, and well beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and behavior.
The Left has done this for years. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s hit list of “hate groups,” treated by the social media giants as an infallible index to what is lawful and what is prohibited, is a sophisticated, well-financed, ongoing exercise in defamation and libel, seeking to drive individuals and groups from public life and destroy them utterly without discussion or appeal, solely because they do not reflect the Left’s worldview, agenda, and goals. With all the certainty of medieval Churchmen burning heretics at the stake, and with less opportunity afforded them to respond to the charges and clear their name, the SPLC has become the Inquisition of our age, identifying heretics on the right and burning them accordingly.
But the SPLC’s activities have been restricted to a relatively small number of conservative groups and individuals. Now, with their Reichstag Fire of Trump supporters in Capitol building yesterday, the Left is moving quickly to expand the heretics list by about 75 million people. Once these thought criminals are identified, these new Inquisitors will duly destroy their lives, and thus ensure the purity of the new totalitarian order. And why not? There is nothing and no one who can stop them now.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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14 January, 2021
Censorship a weapon that must be taken out of Big Tech’s hands
Claire Lehmann
On January 6, a violent mob inspired by US President Donald Trump and his claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him stormed the US Capitol, smashing windows, pummelling police and chanting “Hang Mike Pence”.
In the wake of the riot, Big Tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Apple have mobilised to quash insurrectionist activity on their platforms. For breaching Twitter’s “Glorification of Violence” policy, Trump has been given a permanent suspension from its service.
The two incriminating tweets that led to the suspension include the following, on January 8, 2021:
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
And: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
The reasoning that Twitter has provided for the permanent suspension appears to be based on evidence that Trump’s supporters were using these two tweets in their planning of further violence.
Twitter’s press release stated: “Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.”
A day later, social media platform Parler, which is popular among American right-wingers, was banned from Apple’s app store and then swiftly removed from Amazon’s website-hosting service, AWS.
In addition to the social media bans, the Trump Organisation press email appears to be defunct, and its Shopify account has been taken down.
Almost all avenues of communication and commerce available to Donald Trump have been removed, virtually overnight.
Trump’s permanent suspension may well be supportable from a national security point of view, if these companies, in concert with US law enforcement, have credible evidence of further political violence. Yet the co-ordinated movement of these companies and their swift removal of Trump’s presence on the internet has chilled observers around the globe.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a “combative leftist”, decried the move by tech companies. “I don’t like censorship,” he told reporters. “I don’t like anyone to be censored and for them to have their right taken away to send a message on Twitter or on Facebook.”
Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was poisoned with nerve agent just last year, has made the observation that “this precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world”, and that “of course, Twitter is a private company, but we have seen many examples in Russia and China of such private companies becoming the state’s best friends and the enablers when it comes to censorship”.
America – and the world – now faces the 21st century equivalent of the railroad problem. Railroads of the 19th century were the industrial world’s first monopoly, and legislation that was passed in the 1880s became the world’s first anti-monopoly laws. Big Tech companies have essentially built the railroads on which 21st century international communication and commerce operate. With the flick of a switch they can determine whether an individual (or group) can participate in the global marketplace.
It is a mistake to think that these private companies act with any coherent ethical framework in mind. While Apple has just banned Parler from its app store for violating its app store user terms, the company has also lobbied to water down provisions in a recent bill aimed at preventing forced labour in China. Similarly, Twitter allows Iran’s Ayatollah Imam Sayyid Ali Khamenei to tweet repeatedly about Israel being a “malignant cancerous tumour” that has to be “removed and eradicated”.
Other threats of violence are commonplace.
When the US experienced its “race reckoning” of 2020 following the death of George Floyd – a reckoning that led to widespread rioting, billions of dollars worth of property damage and an estimated 25 deaths – there was no crackdown on accounts that encouraged looting, property damage or arson.
It is domestic political pressure that has led to the swift and permanent suspension of Donald Trump. And it is domestic political pressure that has led Amazon to remove Parler from its website-hosting service. In the absence of regulation that would help tech companies make decisions with transparency, and an appeals process, tech CEOs respond to public outcry with ad hoc censorship.
Tech platforms have unleashed powers that have started to become unwieldy and beyond the control of their masters.
No chief executive wants to have the responsibility of having to mitigate imminent political violence. But Americans, and the world, should not burden them with this responsibility. It is time for the era of unregulated monopolistic tech platforms to come to a close.
Is Truth Irrelevant?
Thomas Sowell
It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong -- when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year.
For too many people, especially in the media, what is right and wrong, true or false, depends on who it helps or hurts politically. Too many media people who are supposed to be reporters act as if they are combatants in political wars.
Someone once said that, in a war, truth is the first casualty. That has certainly been so in the media -- and in much of academia as well.
One of the most grotesque distortions growing out of this carelessness with the facts has been a removal of Abraham Lincoln's name and statues from various places, on grounds that he saw black people only as property.
Such criticisms betray an incredible ignorance of history -- or else a complete disregard of truth.
As a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln knew that there was nothing in the Constitution which authorized him or any other president to free slaves. But he also knew that a military commander in wartime can legally seize the property of an enemy nation. Defining slaves as property gave President Lincoln the only legal authority he had to seize them during the Civil War. And once they were seized as property, he could then free them as human beings.
But, if the Emancipation Proclamation had based its action on defining the slaves as human beings, with a right to be free, the Supreme Court of that era would undoubtedly have declared it unconstitutional.
Millions of human beings would have remained slaves. Would ringing rhetoric be worth that price?
As for the claim that Lincoln did not regard black people as human, he invited Frederick Douglass to the White House!
Gross distortions of history, in order to get Abraham Lincoln's name removed from schools tells us a lot about what is wrong with American education today.
Many schools are closed because of the coronavirus and the teachers unions. And many schools in minority neighborhoods failed to teach children enough math and English, back when they were still open. So it is incredible that school authorities have time to spend on ideological crusades like removing names and statues from schools.
Unfortunately, too many American educational institutions -- from elementary schools to universities -- have become indoctrination centers. The riots that swept across the country last year are fruits of that indoctrination and the utter disregard for other people's rights that accompanied those riots.
At the heart of that indoctrination is a sense of grievance and victimhood when others have better outcomes -- which are automatically called "privileges" and never called "achievements," regardless of what the actual facts are.
Facts don't matter in such issues, any more than facts mattered when smearing Lincoln.
Any "under-representation" of any group in any endeavor can be taken as evidence or proof of discriminatory bias. But those who argue this way cannot show us any society -- anywhere in the world, or at any time during thousands of years of recorded history -- that had all groups represented proportionally in all endeavors.
In America's National Hockey League, for example, there are more players from Canada than there are players from the United States. There are also more players from Sweden than from California, even though California's population is nearly four times the population of Sweden.
Californians are more "under-represented" in the NHL than women are in Silicon Valley. But no one can claim that this is due to discriminatory bias by the NHL. It is far more obviously due to people growing up in cold climates being more likely to have ice-skating experience.
This is one of many factors that produce skewed statistics in many endeavors. Discriminatory bias is among those factors. But it has no monopoly.
Yet who cares about facts any more, in this age of indoctrination?
https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2021/01/12/is-truth-irrelevant-n2582977
Why a White Mother Forced Her Children to Pray to Black Women on Social Media...It Didn't Go Over WellIt has to be said: white liberals are the worst. The ideology was already insufferable, but the antics of this annoying slice of America just makes everything more combustible. First, they think that their useless college degrees give them a badge to become the cultural appropriation police. Yeah, they get to be the protectors of communities of color in this regard because that’s not paternalistic, problematic, or wholly inappropriate at all right?
Second, the overreaction to everything within the ‘woke’ paradigm makes already annoying people seem like total aliens. The lengths to which these white people will go to prove that they’re not really ‘white’ within socio-political constructs is irrational and awkward. It’s a spectacle to watch for sure.
The best part is that activists who are in the black and Latino communities laugh at this stuff. They think it’s to all that helpful, which is true but also denigrating. This is a cause that’s dear to them. These white liberals are only doing this oddball stuff which I will get to in a second to increase social media presence.
On TikTok, some white mother forced her kids to pray to black women since Joe Biden is president and Donald Trump is no longer or something. This slice of America booted Trump, so pray, kids. Pray! Actually, it’s a bit more nuanced, lady. It was a combination of rich white liberals and white working-class voters coming out against Trump. The latter group was a marginal shift, but such shifts can land you in the political hurt box. Anyways, here’s more on this odd prayer circle, which later forced the mother to take it down after—shocker—a whole host of people found it insincere and problematic (via NY Post):
In a video liked more than 13 million times before disappearing from the platform, Justine Champion, dubbed @teenychamp on TikTok, drew both praise and criticism for her unorthodox dogma.
The footage, originally posted on Dec. 30, shows Champion with her four young sons on an outdoor play set. “Me teaching my white boys how to behave,” reads text on the clip.
“Black women are the reason Donald Trump is no longer gonna be our president,” she says, facing the camera while her sons bow amid giggles.
[…]
Not everyone found Champion’s sermon sincere.
“I’m a woman of color and agreed,” commented one TikTok user, according to Daily Mail. “But it’s annoying when people make these videos just for clout and not because they genuinely agreed.”
[…]
“I took it down after listening to some black women and their concerns,” she wrote. “Others want me to put it back up because they loved it. Either way I’m grateful they helped get rid of trump.”
These people are cancer. We haven’t even delved into the irony of the white liberal, which is that they overreact and overthink things they think are racist but really are not. They are the first to protest places engaging in so-called cultural appropriation but then are caught lying about their heritage for personal gain.
Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal, and Hillary Baldwin, Alec’s wife. We have three prominent liberal women who faked being a Native American, a black woman, and someone from Spain. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. Maybe it is. Only white liberals can peddle racial hoaxes and get away with it. Baldwin did. Warren is still a sitting US Senator. Dolezal was hurled into economic distress. It is the dichotomy race-based or more grounded in rich vs. poor, the latter of which impacts every one of all creeds and backgrounds. I don’t know. You can debate that among yourselves. Frankly, this post was merely to show that some white woman forced her kids to pray to black women as some ‘woke’ social media exercise only to have actual people of color call her out for it.
Why hello boomerang.
FDA Celebrates 10-Year Anniversary of a Food Safety Law That Hasn't Made Our Food Safer
In a week when hundreds of President Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as part of an effort to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election—the latter of which Congress subsequently confirmed was won handily by President-elect Joe Biden—you'd be forgiven if it escaped your notice that one of the country's worst food laws, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), just celebrated the 10th anniversary of its signing.
FSMA, which was signed into law on January 4, 2011, by President Obama, gave the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "more power to crack down on food-safety scofflaws and decrease the incidence of foodborne illness across the country," I detailed in a 2012 law-review article, The Food-Safety Fallacy: More Regulation Doesn't Necessarily Make Food Safer.
Before madness overtook the Capitol this week, the FDA was celebrating the law's birthday.
"It's not enough to respond to outbreaks of foodborne illness," said Frank Yiannas, the FDA's deputy commissioner for food policy, in a statement this week. "We must prevent them from happening in the first place."
That shift from a reactive to a proactive agency, Yiannas notes, was Congress's mandate to the FDA in passing FSMA, the most noteworthy update of agency food-safety enforcement in decades. So how's it going?
Yiannas describes what he sees as FSMA's key accomplishments, including that food businesses "are now taking concrete steps every day to reduce the risk of contamination" and that the law has caused a "bigger conversation about the importance of food safety," strengthened agency partnerships with business and civil society, "advanced food safety," and fostered "safer food in this country."
But has it really done that?
In 2011, before FSMA was implemented, the Centers for Disease Control, which tracks and responds to foodborne illness outbreaks, estimated that tainted food causes around 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths in the United States each year. Today, a decade on, those CDC estimates remain unchanged. Lest you think those CDC estimates merely haven't been updated in some time, the agency reported earlier this year that "[t]he incidence of most infections transmitted commonly through food has not declined for many years."
So if FSMA has not reduced cases of foodborne illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths, then what was it all for?
Well, it turns out the law wasn't really designed to reduce those illnesses, hospitalizations, or deaths. Indeed, the idea that FSMA would revolutionize the FDA by changing it from a reactive to a proactive agency always rang hollow. The FDA predicted that FSMA's best-case reductions in foodborne illness would be an annual decline between 3.7 percent and 5.4 percent. Even that didn't happen.
The FDA knows FSMA is failing to achieve its objectives. Consider that nearly any time the agency discusses FSMA, it refers to foodborne illness as "a significant public health burden that is largely preventable." In 2015, Dr. David Acheson, a former FDA associate commissioner for foods, rightly argued that the key marker for FSMA's success would be whether the law "drive[s] down foodborne illness" and yields "the public health gains that this is all about." But in 2018, a FSMA working group reported that using cases of foodborne illness to assess FSMA's efficacy is "a high bar to prove a relationship to the FSMA rules."
That may be true. But FSMA cannot be a success if overall foodborne illness numbers don't fall. Dramatically. And they have not.
To be fair, FSMA isn't all bad. The law did give the FDA one important power—the authority to order a recall of foods that are adulterated (tainted) or misbranded (labeled inaccurately), either of which could sicken or kill one or more persons. And though FSMA is a needless burdensome, clearly ineffective, and costly law that should be repealed forthwith, that's not to say all federal food-safety laws or programs are wrongheaded. They're not.
For example, I've explained previously that the CDC's PulseNet tracking program, which "prevents more than 275,000 cases of foodborne illness each year," is a smart and highly successful program for tracing, combating, and limiting foodborne illness outbreaks. It's also inexpensive and doesn't impose additional regulations on food producers.
Toward the end of Yiannas's statement this week on FSMA, he references a new FDA approach he's championing: the New Era of Smarter Food Safety.
That evolving approach, which I explained last year will "ramp[] up the use of technology to improve traceability and reduce the spread and impact of future cases of foodborne illness," is at odds with the proactive approach implemented under FSMA.
That fact alone makes the New Era of Smarter Food Safety sound both realistic and promising. And it reiterates—along with CDC data and other factors—that a decade on, FSMA has failed to meet the lofty food-safety goals its supporters argued it would achieve.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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12 January, 2021
The Western mind is different
Henrich is at his usual barrow below but his explanations are dubious. His central claim that the Catholic church disrupted traditional family relationships with its sexual restrictions seems implausible. It is true that the church restricted cousin marriage but restrictions on cousin marriage are ancient and and the church would seem to be about average in the degree of consanguinuity it allowed.
Cousin marriage is certainly endemic among Muslim populations but that is a consequence of the ease of divorce under Sharia law. There is nothing comparable elsewhere
So is there another explanation for the unusual Western mind? There is but it wades into politically dangerous waters these days. But let me go wading.
The plain fact is that the breakout of modern civilization that was produced by Western minds was not exactly Western. It would more accurately be described as a creation of German or Germanic minds. The seminal innovations -- from the printing press to the steam train were the product of minds in two Germanic nations -- Germany and Britain. In about 500AD Roman Britannia was conquered and subdued by Germans mainly from the West Baltic area and their genes are predominant in Britain to this day.
And the influence of both countries on nearby countries was great. To some extent German thinking was transmitted along with German technological innovations.
So why was German thinking different? I have written at some length on that elsewhere
The database that dominates our understanding of human psychology derives primarily – approximately 95% of it in fact – from populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (Weird), and these Weird populations turn out to be distinct in many ways.
Unlike much of the world today – and most people who have ever lived – Weird people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, guilt-ridden and analytical in their thinking style. They focus on themselves – their attributes, accomplishments and aspirations – over relationships and roles. When reasoning, Weird people tend to look for abstract categories with which to organise the world. They simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discrete elements and assigning properties – whether by imagining types of particles, pathogens or personalities.
Despite their seeming self-obsession, Weird people tend to stick to impartial rules and can be quite trusting, fair and cooperative toward strangers. Emotionally, Weird people are relatively shameless, less constrained by the eyes of others, but often wracked by guilt as they fail to live up to their own self-imposed standards.
Where did these psychological differences come from and why are European populations, along with their cultural descendants in places like North America, at the extreme end of these global distributions?
A growing body of research traces these psychological differences to the structure of families – what anthropologists call kin-based institutions. This work suggests that our minds calibrate and adapt to the social worlds we encounter while growing up. Until recently, most societies have been undergirded by intensive kin-based institutions built around large extended families, clans, cousin marriage, polygamy and many other kinship norms that regulate and tighten social life. These institutions persist in many parts of the world today, especially in rural areas.
By contrast, many European populations have been dominated by monogamous nuclear families – a pattern labeled the “European Marriage Pattern” by historians – since at least the end of the Middle Ages.
Testing this idea, analyses reveal that people from societies rooted in more intensive kin-based institutions show greater conformity, less individualism, more holistic thinking, fewer guilty experiences and less willingness to trust strangers. These patterns emerge whether we compare countries, regions within countries or second-generation immigrants from different backgrounds living in the same place. As the first and often the most important institution we humans encounter upon entering the world, the structure of our family networks plays a central role in explaining global psychological diversity.
But why do families organise themselves in such different ways across societies, and why were European families already peculiar by the end of the Middle Ages?
While the diversity of kin-based institutions found around the world has been influenced by many factors, the European Marriage Pattern traces primarily to a religious mutation. Beginning in late antiquity, the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church began to gradually promulgate a set of prohibitions and prescriptions related to marriage and the family. The Church, for example, banned cousin marriage, arranged marriage and polygamous marriage. Unlike other Christian sects, the Church slowly expanded the circle of “incestuous” relationships out to sixth cousins by the 11th Century.
Despite often facing stout resistance, this enterprise slowly dissolved the complex kin-based institutions of tribal Europe, leaving independent nuclear households as a cultural ideal and common pattern.
To test the idea that the medieval Church has shaped contemporary psychological variation, it is possible to exploit the unevenness of this historical process by tracking the diffusion of bishoprics across Europe from AD 500 to 1500. Analyses show that Europeans from regions that spent more centuries under the influence of the Church are today less inclined to conform, more individualistic and show greater trust and fairness towards strangers.
Globally, national populations with longer historical exposures to the Church not only show weaker kin-based institutions, but are psychologically “Weirder” today.
Most of us might prefer to think of ourselves as independent, rational thinkers. But how we think, feel and reason – including our inclinations toward conformity and preferences for analytical explanations – has been shaped by historical events, cultural heritages and incest taboos that stretch back centuries or even millennia.
Understanding how history has shaped our minds is part of exploring and embracing our diversity.
One of Big Tech's Own Lobbed a Punch Against Them... On Behalf of Trump
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is rarely, if ever, on the side of conservatives. In fact, they usually favor Democrats' policies and decisions. But now the civil rights organization is speaking out about Big Tech's decision to permanently ban President Donald Trump from their platforms.
According to the ACLU, Americans should be concerned about the "unchecked power" that social media platforms have.
"For months, President Trump has been using social media platforms to seed doubt about the results of the election and to undermine the will of voters," ACLU Senior Legal Counsel Kate Ruane said in a statement. "We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions – especially when political realities make those decisions easier."
The organization reminded followers and supporters that the same thing could happen to them.
"President Trump can turn his press team or Fox News to communicate with the public, but others – like many Black, Brown, and LGTBQ activists who have been censored by social media companies – will not have that luxury. It is our hope that these companies will apply their rules transparently to everyone," the statement concluded.
Conservatives have been concerned about Big Tech censorship for years. It's something we've all talked about in depth, especially with debates over Section 230 protection.
It's a breath of fresh air to see a left-leaning organization admit that what happened to President Trump and other conservatives could happen to anyone else. We never get that kind of admission from left-leaning figures. They know they're safe because their friends in Silicon Valley share their political views.
Free speech and a free press are important aspects of our society. Having a tech company decide who should and should not be allowed on their platforms – including the leader of the free world – is a dangerous thing. Yes, they're a private company and they have a right to do what they think is best. But maybe it's time to address the elephant in the room and admit that stifling content that goes against their narrative isn't healthy and only causes further division. And the only ones who can address this issue, in full, is Congress.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2021/01/09/the-aclu-is-coming-to-trumps-defense-n2582878
This Social Network is Gaining 10,000 Users Per Hour After Trump's Twitter BanThe CEO of Gab, a conservative-friendly social media site, claims it’s picking up 10,000 users an hour following Twitter banning President Trump.
“The traffic just keeps growing hang tight, even more servers on the way today,” Gab CEO Andrew Torba wrote on the site Saturday.
He also wrote: “500,000+ new users today. 18 million visits. You don’t need an account to use the site. The Silicon Valley Exodus has begun. Get in the Ark. The best is yet to come.”
Gab, which launched in 2016, calls itself a “social network that champions free speech, individual liberty, and the new free flow of information online.”
Following his permanent suspension, Trump used the official @Potus account to accuse Twitter of “banning free speech” and announced he is “negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED!”
“As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” the president tweeted from the @Potus account.
“Twitter may be a private company, but without the government’s gift of Section 230, they would not exist for long. I predicted this would happen,” he tweeted. “We will not be SILENCED! Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH. They are all about promoting a Radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely. STAY TUNED!”
Torba said he’s been in touch with Trump’s team.
“I’m going to be upfront with you: I am in the process of connecting with President Trump’s team as we speak,” wrote Torba in a message posted to his website. “The President’s Gab account is already reserved with hundreds of thousands of followers. We need to massively expand our server capacity and very quickly.”
Meanwhile, Parler, a social network that pitches itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter and Facebook, is being censored.
Psychologist reveals why boys and girls SHOULD be raised differently
This lady sounds a bit mixed up to me. She is rejecting the now rather old idea that males and females should be the same. But what she is advocating seems little different from that. She "believes both sexes must be taught to embrace masculinity and femininity"
A more traditional view is that men should be men and women will be glad of it. When one looks at media reports of romances between public figures such as sportsmen and movie stars it is very noticeable that attractive and very feminine women regularly team up with big, well-built and fit men -- often sportsmen -- who give no signs of anything feminine. The partners concerned could be almost a parody of traditional sex roles. Women with choices like real men, not wimps. A big fit body attracts and all the rest is incidental.
Some years back, I actually did some survey research into the androgyny hypothesis -- that it is healthiest for people to be big on both male and female traits. I found the opposite. The healthiest were those who rejected both male and female traits. They rejected stereotyped ways of behaving in favour of what they individually were
So boys should NOT be told to embrace femininity. They should be set free to become whatever is right for them. They should be given freedom to become themselves
A psychologist has revealed why 'boys and girls should be raised differently' in an era where calls for the two to be treated equally steadily grow louder.
Mother-of-two Megan de Beyer believes both sexes must be taught to embrace masculinity and femininity beyond the socially constructed roles they are conditioned to identify with.
The South African author, who in February published 'How to Raise a Man: The modern mother's guide to parenting her teenage son', says a healthy balance of the two traits is essential for developing independence and emotional intelligence.
Parenting should change at the age of 11, Ms de Beyer reveals, right before adolescence when the bulk of emotional maturing and the 'unfolding of masculinity' occurs.
'We need to become more conscious with our parenting and recognise the subtle but complex difference between socially constructed identities of boys and girls,' Ms de Beyer told Daily Mail Australia from her farm on the outskirts of Cape Town.
Her argument contrasts with the iconic activist slogan 'raise boys and girls the same way', widely used in the '#metoo' movement to discourage cultures of toxic masculinity and the wrongful protection of powerful perpetrators of sexual abuse.
The phrase - which has become synonymous with gender equality campaigns and is often emblazoned on T-shirts, posters and bumper stickers - calls for children of all sexes and orientations to be treated equally.
But Ms de Beyer believes instilling values typically associated with the opposite sex is the key to creating a more compassionate society that supports men and women in achieving their goals, whatever they may be.
Parents subconsciously raise boys to be strong, independent and less expressive of their emotions, Ms de Beyer says, which can leave them feeling 'disconnected and isolated' and prone to mental health issues.
In 2017 roughly 75 percent of Australians who died by suicide were men, according to figures from the Black Dog Institute.
Meanwhile Ms de Beyer said girls are instinctively brought up to be accommodating, understanding and less assertive, which can lead to insecurity and a lack of confidence in adulthood.
How to raise boys to be more in touch with their emotions
1. Self-awareness: Mothers must be clear in their own definition of masculinity.
They must understand the complex and multi-faceted nature of being a man, which involves softness and vulnerability as well as strength and leadership, if she wants to raise an emotionally mature son.
2. Let go of personal experience: Mothers must be aware of their personal experience with men and the situations they have faced during their lifetime.
3. Focus on humanisation, not emasculation: Mothers must strike a balance between the two to promote emotional intelligence and traditional male traits.
Ms de Beyer said parents - mothers in particular - must be clear in their own definitions of masculinity.
She believes mums must understand the complex and multi-faceted nature of being a man, which involves softness and vulnerability as well as strength and leadership, if they want to raise a son who is empathetic and emotionally mature.
'There are many ways to be a man, and we need to welcome all of them back,' the holistic parenting expert said.
Ms de Beyer insists mothers must be aware of their personal experience with men and the situations they have faced during their lifetime.
They should reflect on these to work through difficult emotions they may have faced in relation to domination, broken relationships and poor communication so they can teach their sons to be well-rounded individuals.
'Mums must heal their own wounds around masculinity so they don't bring that into their relationship with their sons,' Ms de Beyer added.
She said mothers with 'masculine wounds' can often overreact to displays of masculinity - such as aggression, territoriality and arrogance common in adolescence - in a bid to protect themselves from 'toxic masculinity'.
But Ms de Beyer admitted there is a 'fine balance' between emasculating boys and humanising them that is not always easy to strike.
'We need to make room for their emotional lives to let their inner voices shine through so they can reach their full potential,' she said.
Raising girls with healthy masculinity
Ms de Beyer believes parents must be clear with language and communication in order to encourage a healthy dose of masculinity in their daughters.
She recommends using phrases like 'do things that make you feel proud of yourself' and 'I love how independent you've become' to show young girls it is good for them to be strong and stand on their own two feet - traits historically applauded in boys.
Other statements that reinforce positive masculinity for girls include 'it's brave to do that' and 'you are behaving very honourably'.
Ms de Beyer believes use of this language will encourage girls to embrace their masculine side while they develop the classic - and equally important - feminine characteristics of collaboration, kindness, care and compassion.
She said it's vital to create a 'blend of the two'. 'Don't stop either, with boys or with girls,' she added.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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10 January, 2021
Pile On: Court Blocks Trump Administration's New Asylum Rules
Joe Biden's forecast for dark days ahead is turning out to be true, perhaps not in the sense that Biden predicted. The far-left cannot wait just a few short days until Biden's inauguration. On Friday, Democrats plotted an eleventh-hour impeachment, the fascists at Twitter banned the president, and a federal judge blocked the president's most sweeping set of Asylum restrictions. Dark days for the Republic indeed.
A U.S. District Judge in San Francisco, an Obama appointee, sided with advocacy groups who argued that acting Homeland Security secretary, Chad Wolf, lacked the statutory authority to impose asylum restrictions, the Associated Press reported.
(Via the AP)
The new rules had been set to take effect Monday. The ruling has limited immediate impact because the government has largely suspended asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border during the coronavirus pandemic, citing public health concerns.
Still, letting the rules take effect would have been felt by some who can still claim asylum and make it significantly more difficult for all asylum-seekers once pandemic-related measures are lifted.
...
It was not immediately clear if the Trump administration would make an emergency appeal.
The rules sought to redefine how people qualify for asylum and similar forms of humanitarian protection if they face persecution at home. The restrictions would have broadened the grounds for a judge to deem asylum applications “frivolous” and prohibit applicants from ever winning protections in the U.S.
...
The rules would narrow the types of persecution and severity of threats for which asylum is granted. Applicants seeking protections on the basis of gender or those who claim they were targeted by gangs, “rogue” government officials or “non-state organizations” would likely not be eligible for asylum.
Immigration judges would be directed to be more selective about granting asylum claims and allow them to deny most applications without a court hearing.
In March, the Trump administration instituted emergency coronavirus measures that effectively expelled around nine out of every 10 border arrivals. The administration also implemented its Remain in Mexico measure requiring asylum seekers to do just that while their asylum claims are adjudicated.
Joe Biden has vowed to undo the Trump-era immigration reforms, but recently announced he would hold off on doing so for "probably the next six months" to prevent a flood of migrants at the border, according to the AP. In Biden's mind, six months from now will be the perfect time for a flood of immigrants. Border arrivals are already skyrocketing in anticipation of Biden's leniency.
In December, a federal judge reinstated the Obama-era DACA amnesty program after similarly ruling that acting Secretary Chad Wolf lacked the statutory authority to terminate the program. The logic goes that Wolf, like Kevin McAllenan before him, unlawfully filled the vacancy left by the departure of Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in 2019.
Mindless bureaucracy takes a hit
As the fear of coronavirus swept the world, panic buying went into full swing. Suddenly, toilet paper and hand sanitizer became hot commodities that were difficult to find. The high demand for these products, and limited workforce availability because of the virus, resulted in severe shortages as companies were unable to meet the increased demand.
Fortunately, the United States is home to thousands of breweries and distilleries that had the ability to turn alcohol originally meant for consumption into a usable denatured hand sanitizer. When demand for hand sanitizer skyrocketed, several distilleries stepped up to the plate and implemented novel processes to mass produce the much-needed sanitizer. Virtually overnight, these companies produced, packaged, and delivered thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer to the American people.
For their patriotic efforts, this is how these companies were thanked: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released new regulations and fees for organizations operating as “monograph drug facilities” – producing over-the-counter drugs. This includes the hundreds of distilleries that stepped up, putting profits aside to mass produce hand sanitizer. For the fiscal year of 2021, the FDA fees for hand sanitizer producing facilities is $14,060.
Keep in mind that many of these companies disregarded their own bottom lines and instead produced sanitizer at cost or donated it. Without these companies producing the amounts of hand sanitizer they did in an efficient manner, our nation could have been far worse off. Even if the distilleries donated the product they produced, these companies would still be on the hook for the $14,000.
Let’s not forget that the government shutdowns resulted in thousands of small businesses closing their doors, while big box stores remained open. According to one estimate, 60 percent of businesses that shut down due to the pandemic are now permanently closed. Imagine being a business owner, trying to keep your business afloat, and instead choosing to forgo profit for the greater good by producing sanitizer the country needs. These company leaders deserve medals, not government fees.
Fortunately, FDA realized their blunder after public opposition to the outrageous fees. FDA did reverse the decision and revoked the fees on distilleries that voluntarily served communities during the pandemic.
According to Health and Human Services Chief of Staff Brian Harrison, "Small businesses who stepped up to fight COVID-19 should be applauded by their government, not taxed for doing so. I'm pleased to announce we have directed FDA to cease enforcement of these arbitrary, surprise user fees. Happy New Year, distilleries, and cheers to you for helping keep us safe!"
Clearly, FDA did the right thing by revoking the fees on distilleries that helped during the pandemic. However, FDA’s penchant for overregulating is a problem that exceeds this situation. Had FDA implemented the ill-advised fees on the distilleries, it is extremely unlikely that private businesses would be as willing to help in future emergencies.
In the future, FDA ought to think about the long-term consequences of petty decisions to raise revenue by penalizing businesses that are simply trying to do the right thing.
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/fda-backtracks-on-hand-sanitizer-fees
The Supreme Court Will Hear Donor Privacy CaseThomas More Law Center (TMLC) is a nonprofit organization based in Michigan that defends and promotes religious freedom, moral and family values, and the sanctity of human life—issues that can be quite contentious in our current social climate
In fact, TMLC’s supporters, clients, and employees have faced intimidation, death threats, hate mail, boycotts, and even an assassination attempt from ideological opponents.
Understandably, TMLC wants to make sure their donors’ private information stays protected and secure.
But a policy in California threatens this privacy by requiring nonprofits to hand over the names and private information of nonprofit donors to its Attorney General’s Office—an office with an unfortunate history of leaking confidential information. TMLC told California “no,” and filed a lawsuit against the state to challenge its unconstitutional policy. And in August 2019, TMLC asked the United States Supreme Court to take up its case.
Today, the Supreme Court has announced that it will hear TMLC’s case.
This is good news for anyone who donates to a nonprofit organization.
TMLC has been fighting to protect its donors’ private information since March 2012, when the Attorney General’s Office suddenly began to harass TMLC and demand the names and addresses of its major supporters. TMLC had fundraised in California for years without incident and never disclosed its donors before. But the California Attorney General’s Office changed its policy to force any nonprofit that fundraises in the state to hand over the names and addresses of its top donors.
This policy wouldn’t just affect California residents. It would affect anyone across the country who gives to any nonprofit that asks for donations in California, the nation’s most populous state.
Federal authorities like the IRS may have a decent record of keeping donors’ information secure. But California’s Attorney General’s Office isn’t one of them. In 2009, employees mislabeled nearly 1,800 confidential Schedule B tax documents as “public.” In a separate incident, all of the Registry of Charitable Trusts’ confidential documents were available on the internet and anyone could access them simply by altering a single digit at the end of the document’s URL.
The likelihood of California Attorney General’s Office making donors’ confidential information publicly available is great, and there are no punishments for even willful and malicious leaks. In today’s social climate, that could put supporters and their families at risk.
Every American should be free to support causes they believe in without fear of harassment or intimidation. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will rule in favor of TMLC and put an end to California’s blanket demand for nonprofit supporters’ private information.
https://www.adflegal.org/blog/supreme-court-will-hear-important-donor-privacy-case
The Sovietization Of CaliforniaI am writing this column upon returning home to California after five days in Florida. For the first time since my first trip to Los Angeles in 1974 and moving there two years later, I dreaded going to California.
That first trip, as a 25-year-old New Yorker, I experienced the palpable excitement looking at the American Airlines flight board at JFK airport and seeing “Los Angeles.” For most Americans, the very name “California” elicited excitement, wonder, even envy of Californians, and most of all … freedom. While America always represented freedom, within America, California exemplified freedom most of all.
Yet, here I am, sitting in a state where corruption reigns (one of the leading Democrats of the last half-century told me years ago that politicians in California are window dressing; the real power in California is wielded by unions) and where, for nine months, normal life has been shut down, schools have been closed and small businesses have been destroyed in unprecedented numbers.
During these last five days in Florida, a state governed by the pro-freedom party, I went anywhere I wanted. First and foremost, I could eat both inside and outside restaurants. At one of them, when I stood up to take photos of people dining, a patron who recognized me walked over and said, “I assume you’re just taking pictures of people eating in a restaurant.” That’s exactly what I was doing. I even took my two grandchildren to a bowling alley, which was filled with people enjoying themselves playing myriad arcade games as well as bowling.
None of that is allowed almost anywhere in California. It is becoming a police state, rooted in deception and irrationality.
Restaurants have been shut down (except for takeout orders), even for outdoor dining, for no scientific reason. After ordering Los Angeles county restaurants closed, the health authorities of Los Angeles county acknowledged in court that they had no evidence that outdoor dining was dangerous; they ordered restaurants closed, even to outdoor dining, solely in order to keep people home.
The Left’s claim to “follow the science” is a lie. The Left does not follow science; it follows scientists it agrees with and dismisses all other scientists as “anti-science.”
Science does not say that eating inside a restaurant at least six feet from other diners, let alone outside a restaurant, is potentially fatal, but eating inside an airplane inches from strangers is safe.
Science does not say mass protests during a pandemic (when people are constantly told to social distance) are a health benefit, but left-wing scientists say they are — when directed against racism. In June, Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted: “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” She cited the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden: “The threat to Covid control from protesting outside is tiny compared to the threat to Covid control created when governments act in ways that lose community trust. People can protest peacefully AND work together to stop Covid. Violence harms public health.”
Even The New York Times, in July, acknowledged the double standard: “Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism.”
Science does not say, “Men give birth” or, “Men menstruate.” But the Left routinely argues that “science says” such things and that “science says” there are more than two sexes, many more.
The last time I felt I was leaving a free society and entering an unfree one was when I visited the communist countries of Eastern Europe. As a graduate student majoring in communism, during the Cold War, I would travel through the countries known as Soviet satellites: Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. In the middle of my trips, I would stop in Austria to breathe free air.
Never did I imagine I would ever experience anything analogous in America, the Land of the Free, the land of the Statue of Liberty and of the Liberty Bell. But I did yesterday, when leaving Florida and returning to California.
There is no question that America is becoming, if it hasn’t already become, two countries: one that values liberty, from small businesses being allowed to operate to people being allowed to say what they believe, and one that has contempt for liberty, from eating in restaurants to free speech.
I am asked almost daily by friends around the country and by callers to my national radio show whether I intend to stay in California. Were it not for all the close friends who live here and the synagogue I and a few friends founded, the answer would be no. But at a given point, I am sure that I will leave this Soviet satellite for a free state. The bigger and far more important question is: How long will the Soviet states of America and the free states of America remain the United States of America?
https://www.dailywire.com/news/prager-the-sovietization-of-california
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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6 January, 2021
Cops not charged over shooting of dysfunctional black in Wisconsin
I cannot see how shooting someone in the back is self-defence. So the verdict is very stretched. But why was it stretched?
The cops clearly fired to prevent an escape by a known villain. But shooting to prevent an escape is against the law. Preventing escape is not an allowable reason for firing potentially fatal shots at anyone.
But the offender in this case was weilding a knife so any attempt to lay hands on him would have risked the life of a cop. They had already used a taser so firing was the only option left. And bringing to book an obnoxious offender was clearly in the public interest.
So in recognition of that the cops were exonerated via a legal fiction. What this all shows is that the law should be amended to allow shooting at a fleeing offender in at least some cases
US prosecutors have cleared a white police officer over last year's shooting of Black man Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during an incident that prompted street protests and inflamed racial tensions in the United States.
Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley found police officer Rusten Sheskey acted in self defence, and said he would not issue any charges in connection with the incident.
The decision not to prosecute Mr Sheskey or the two other officers on the scene could incite more demonstrations, which have frequently broken out in the United States in recent years after police have been cleared of wrongdoing in shootings of African Americans.
During a police intervention in a domestic dispute that was captured on a phone video, Mr Sheskey shot at Mr Blake's back seven times from close range as Mr Blake opened the door of his car.
The bullets struck him four times and paralysed him from the waist down.
Officials said Mr Blake was armed with a knife and refused police commands to drop it, which Mr Graveley said gave Mr Sheskey the right to self defence.
"It is absolutely incontrovertible that Jacob Blake was armed with a knife during this encounter," Mr Graveley said, adding that Mr Blake admitted several times to investigators he had the knife.
The police who were called to the scene had been told there was a felony arrest warrant against Mr Blake for domestic abuse and sexual assault, Mr Graveley said.
The officers attempted to detain Mr Blake and stop him with a taser multiple times, but Mr Blake withstood the use of force to avoid arrest, he added.
The knife was not clearly visible in the video, which also began after the previous attempts to arrest Mr Blake, Mr Graveley said.
Radical-Left Prosecutors Continue to Upend the Concept of 'Justice'
New Washtenaw County, Mich., prosecutor Eli Savit has declared an end to cash bail. “I pledged during the campaign that we would not be seeking cash bail, and I’m proud to make good on that promise today,” Savit said in a statement. Savit, whose office serves liberal Ann Arbor, apparently hasn’t been paying attention to what’s happening in New York City, Chicago, and other cities that have outlawed cash bail.
In those cities, crime has skyrocketed, including crimes committed by recently released defendants. It became so obvious that the new approach was a failure that New York rolled back most of its reforms just a few months after they were imposed. Other cities have also sought to make changes after prisoners, dedicated to a life of crime, not unexpectedly continued to commit crimes when allowed to leave jail instead of remaining incarcerated.
But Mr. Savid is one of the new breed of left-wing prosecutors supported by George Soros’s Real Justice PAC, which has doled out millions in campaign contributions to local prosecutor campaigns. These so-called “reformers” are being elected largely because opposition to their radical policies is disorganized and scattershot.
But these radicals know exactly where they’re going and what they’re doing.
The Appeal:
Prosecutors don’t set bail themselves, but their recommendations and motions weigh heavily on what judges do. Over the last few years, prosecutors elected on progressive platforms have reformed the use of cash bail, including Kim Gardner in St. Louis, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and Rachael Rollins in Boston, especially for lower-level offenses. Studies have found that jurisdictions that have experimented with bail reform have not seen an increase in crime.
“We know from our almost 16,000 bailouts, including in Washtenaw County, that when a defendant’s financial needs are met, when they have rides, text message reminders, child care, they show up to court,” said Asia Johnson, a communications associate at the Bail Project.
Showing up for their court appearance is an entirely different issue from whether or not they commit crimes that they ordinarily would have been prevented from committing if they were unable to post bond. The whole point of incarceration is to protect society from predatory criminals. New York found their no-bail policy was leading to increases in crime and sensibly changed the law.
Savit swears his no-bail law doesn’t mean that those charged with a violent crime will go free. But that’s not been the real-world experience of jurisdictions that “reform” bail laws in this manner.
Savit’s prosecutors can also choose to recommend the denial of pretrial release for some serious offenses, including murder, armed robbery, and repeat violent offenses. Advocates worry that asking prosecutors to decide who presents a safety risk before they have been afforded a trial poses problems, especially when those determinations are made with algorithmic tools that researchers say are faulty and racially biased. Savit, however, is avoiding the algorithmic tools, and told the Political Report he “consciously chose not to go down that route” because he “read the studies and knows those can often reinforce human and racial biases.”
Washtenaw prosecutors will still be permitted to request nonfinancial conditions for pretrial release like drug and alcohol testing, GPS tethers, and in serious instances, oversight by a “responsible” member of the community, though Savit will encourage his staff to articulate specific reasons for seeking such conditions.
Savit refuses to use the algorithm because numbers, as we all know, are “racially biased.” When you use outcomes to determine what is or isn’t racist, a whole host of things become “racist.”
But in the end, “criminal justice reform” is the simple effort to make fewer things illegal — especially activities enjoyed by the underclass. The “reforms” are also designed to decrease the penalties for those laws still on the books — all because of who is being convicted rather than what they’re convicted for.
The right doesn’t have the money or the organization to counter this left-wing onslaught on the justice system. There is no leadership at the local or national level to concentrate resources to combat this attack on justice. Until there is, the left is likely to continue winning.
Leftist Thugs Show Up at Senator Hawley's Home. Terrorize Wife and Newborn Baby
Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who announced earlier this week he will object to the certification of the 2020 presidential election during a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, has revealed disturbing news about his family.
Tonight while I was in Missouri, Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel. They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door. Let me be clear: My family & I will not be intimidated by leftwing violence
And didn’t have the guts to do it in daylight, but only under cover of darkness so you could hide. You’re scum. And we won’t be intimidated
Shortly before the incident, Hawley explained his decision to object during an interview with Fox News.
"This is about the integrity of our elections and I this is about taking a stand where you can take a stand," Hawley said. "I suppose you can say 'nothing I do will matter. It won't matter if I object or not so I'll sit by and do nothing.' I mean, that's one approach, but I can tell you the people of my state they won't understand that and they shouldn't. They say, 'You have the opportunity to stand up and be heard and to object. You have the opportunity to try and force change and you should.' And that's what I'm going to do."
'I don't think J. K. Rowling is transphobic': Genderfluid Eddie Izzard defends author amid 'people who menstruate' row and calls for critics to read explanations in her blog
Last June, J.K., 55, was accused of transphobia after making a controversial comment about menstruation, two years after she liked a tweet which referred to transgender people as 'men in dresses'.
The author denied claims of transphobia as she insisted she 'respects every trans person's right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.'
Eddie, 58, who last year asked to be called a 'she', after previously refusing to be pinned down on gender, told the Daily Telegraph: 'I don't think JK Rowling is transphobic. I think we need to look at the things she has written about in her blog.'
Eddie went on: 'Women have been through such hell over history. Trans people have been invisible, too. I hate the idea we are fighting between ourselves, but it's not going to be sorted with the wave of a wand.
'I don't have all the answers. If people disagree with me, fine - but why are we going through hell on this?'
J.K. was accused of transphobia last year when she reacted to an online article titled 'Opinion: Creating a more equal post COVID-19 world for people who menstruate.'
''People who menstruate.' I'm sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?', the award-winning writer told her 14.2million followers.
Disappointed fans and other users of the micro-blogging site branded the screenwriter's remarks 'anti-trans' and 'transphobic', as transgenders, non-binary and gender-nonconforming individuals can also menstruate.
The producer stood by her tweet as she later insisted: 'If sex isn't real, there's no same-sex attraction.
'If sex isn't real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn't hate to speak the truth.'
The media personality insisted she 'respects every trans person's right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.'
J. K. elaborated: 'The idea that women like me, who've been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they're vulnerable in the same way as women - ie, to male violence - 'hate' trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences - is a nonsense.
'I'd march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it's hateful to say so.
'I've spent much of the last three years reading books, blogs and scientific papers by trans people, medics and gender specialists. I know exactly what the distinction is. Never assume that because someone thinks differently, they have no knowledge.'
With Congress Killing American Business, One Media Company That Liberals Hate Took Action
Congress has failed. That’s not hard task for the idiots we have working on the Hill. Dare I say, democracy has failed, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole. As the nation deals with the coronavirus outbreak, thousands of businesses have been destroyed, specifically bars and restaurants. Initially, I get why there was a stay-at-home order, now there are raw numbers that show these establishments are not the main source of spread. In New York, one of the states hardest hit by the virus, new data shows that bars and restaurants account for only 1.4 percent of COVID spread. Also, schools are not sources of so-called “super spread.” Reopen the damn schools and resume indoor dining.
For months, businesses have needed aid. Families have needed assistance. Unfortunately, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats had other plans. You see they knew COVID relief packages helped Trump. They wanted him gone, so they admitted to nuking past negotiations in order to better the chances of Joe Biden winning the election. And now, after months of economic disruption and bills stacking as high as Everest, they’re going to give struggling families $600. My eyes cannot roll hard enough.
Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports, a media company that liberals hate for all the obvious and idiotic reasons, decided to do more than Congress has done in months to help Americans save their dream. His rants on social media about how politicians are trying to kill our right to earn a living are must-watch material. I think even the most ardent Trump hater would agree that if Americans were given a choice of getting COVID or seeing their businesses destroyed because of a virus that has a 90+ percent recovery rate, I think you know that most, if not everyone, would pick the former. Anyways, Barstool has established a relief fund that’s probably going to raise close to $10 million helping businesses have a few more weeks of oxygen, which is more than Congress is doing right now (via Fox Business):
Dave Portnoy, founder of media company Barstool Sports, has raised $ 6.3 million for 18 small businesses as of Saturday morning.
Portnoy launched the fundraising effort with the nonprofit 30 Day Fund for small businesses impacted by COVID-19 called "The Barstool Fund" last week and contributed $500,000 of his own money toward the effort.
"It was certainly humbling and a little embarrassing," Kerry Counard, owner of Abbey Bar in Wisconsin -- which Portnoy chose as one of the initial six restaurants to receive funds -- told Fox Business. He expressed empathy for the "thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of small businesses" still struggling amid lockdowns.
Outstanding work. And Stoolies are a loyal and dedicated bunch who will mobilize for good causes like this. In fact, everyone is like that here; we’re the most charitable nation on earth when it comes to giving. It just shows you that this axiom will remain constant for all time: non-government entities do more to help the poor, the afflicted, and those, in general, need better than government ever could. Look, I’m not the most religious person, but I’m not going to deny that religious-based charities have done eons more to help the inner-city poor than Pelosi and her group of Democratic Party gangsters. Good on El Prez for launching this effort.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/12/28/barstool-emergency-relief-fund-n2582198
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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5 January, 2021
Woman 'disgusts' Twitter after claiming that 'short women' are only attractive to men because they look like they are easier to 'physically dominate and CONTROL'
In my observation, there is an element of truth in this. Weak men do seem to go for short women and I think ease of control is what they hope for. But there are many things that create attraction and height is surely only one thing.
I must confess that I am one who IS influenced by the height of women. I like them tall. My most recent marriage was to a 5'11" lady. I was 5'10" at the time. But the lady I have been in love with for the last 15 years is only 5'4" tall, so I am more strongly influenced by other things
It bears noting that the short ladies themselves are often responsible for height mismatches. Short women usually like tall men and they often get one
And the idea that a short woman is a pushover is a bit of a laugh. I have come across some pretty feisty ones
An American writer has infuriated Twitter users after she proclaimed that one of the main reasons men are attracted to short women is because they seem to be easier to dominate and control.
Feminista Jones made the bold claims on Twitter this week, phrasing her tweets in a way that seemed to mock short women for 'not knowing' that this is why men liked them.
It wasn't long before other Twitter users began criticizing the thread — and while the backlash has led Feminista Jones to delete her account, the criticism is still coming.
'Do short women not know how much of their attractiveness to men is related to perceived controllability?' she wrote in the now-deleted thread. 'Is that thing y'all aren't aware of? Lol cute,' she mocked.
'Ask any woman over 5'10" how harshly men regularly speak to and treat or how rarely she is treated with softness and tender gestures outside of being in a relationship... and even then lol,' she went on.
'A smaller woman can more likely be physically dominated and controlled, like a child,' she added.
'Shorter women don't feel like "mommy." Slimmer women don't feel threatening. The smaller a woman is the younger she appears and that's attractive to many men.'
Jones' thread has been met with swift and furious backlash from Twitter users who point out that it's not very feminist to body-shame or gang up on a group of women for their physical attributes.
'Wait now people are mad at short women on here?' wrote writer Rachel Syme.
'Owning misogynists by exactly replicating their behavior and treating small women like children who need to be controlled and patronized since they’re too infantile and weak-minded to realize the more grim terms of their existence,' wrote another Twitter user.
'Love that she frames this as the fault of short women,' tweeted another.
Yet another agreed: 'So being short makes me... easy to control by men, but I should feel bad about this cause tall women don’t like it? Please give some constructive advice as to how I’m supposed to fix this.'
'I just don’t understand what short women are supposed to do about weirdos that are attracted to them, literally how is that my problem at all,' said one more.
'Why do I feel like you’re lecturing short women rather than creepy men? The “lol cute” here is so condescending,' added another.
Others have disagreed with her assessment of men's behavior.
'I have definitely heard men say c***py things about why they prefer shorter women, and I have also been asked to step on a bug by a guy I was not dating, because he had some kind of fetish related to tall women ... stepping on things,' wrote one.
'Short women do not look like children. They look like short women,' another tweeted. 'Stop trying to infer that being attracted to them is exploitative or some other infantalising c***, you absolute f***ing melts.'
'It is entirely possible to have a discussion about your personal experience as a tall woman without outright saying short women are exclusively f***ed by pedophiles!' complained another.
While several more pointed out that her characterization of women as seemingly easy to dominate doesn't line up.
'“Short women are easy to dominate” have you ever met a short woman??? The rage is concentrated into a lil package??? Human espresso?' wrote one.
'I've dominated every relationship I've ever been in and I'm only 5'3". My 6'4" boyfriend does think that I'm cute, but also tells others than I am the "mean one" and that if we were to get into a fight that "she would murder me". It's all about balance,' said another.
Rowan Atkinson says cancel culture is a 'medieval mob looking for someone to burn'
The star of Blackadder and Mr Bean has long advocated for free speech and has campaigned against legislation he believes stifles expression.
Atkinson, 65, is fearful of the online practice of silencing unpopular opinions by calling out those who hold them and making them pariahs. He has compared the trend to medieval societies rooting out heretics to burn at the stake.
The actor believes this culture of "cancelling" individuals is a threat both to the victims of the online mob and to the future of free speech.
"It's important that we're exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion," Atkinson told the Radio Times. "But what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn."
Activists and advocates have argued that concerns about free speech are a "fantasy" that serve to perpetuate hateful and discriminatory behaviours, language and institutions with the main proponents being well-resourced, established figures of cultural authority who have no risk of being "cancelled".
Was 2020 the year we finally broke our culture?
Beginning in 2005 with a campaign against hate speech laws in the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, Atkinson has publicly opposed legislation thought to dampen freedom of expression.
In 2009 he argued against homophobic hate speech clauses in UK laws; in 2012 against "insulting" behaviour being a criminal offence; and last year he spoke out against the Scottish National Party's Hate Crime Bill over fears it could lead to censorship.
Atkinson has now said that online witch hunts are "scary for anyone who's a victim of that mob". He said: "The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society. It becomes a case of either you're with us or against us. If you're against us, you deserve to be 'cancelled'."
The star added that the popularity of the largely mute Mr Bean may be down to the character being verbally unable to offend those with "greater sensitivities", and said this could explain his success in "Muslim countries" and places with "stricter creative regimes".
Despite the huge popularity of Mr Bean, Atkinson has decided not to have an online presence, saying that social media is "a sideshow in my world".
The actor has followed his former Blackadder co-star Tony Robinson, who played Baldrick, in criticising cancel culture.
Robinson told The Daily Telegraph last year that calling out and censoring unpopular opinions "is walking the path of the devil".
The actor and presenter said he was passionate about free speech, adding: "It defends our liberty, and I'm very unhappy with the idea that, just because someone is offended by what I say, I shouldn't be allowed to say it."
Never Give Up
David Limbaugh
I have long believed that the radical left represents an existential threat to the republic. Indeed, my last book, "Guilty By Reason of Insanity: Why the Democrats Must Not Win," was based on that premise. So now what?
Since it appears that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will take office in less than three weeks, my deepest fears should only be intensifying. Right?
We needn't carry on this disingenuous debate about whether Biden is a centrist, because his growing mental incapacity makes it a moot point. As long as he is titular president, some invisible committee, one of whose central members is likely former President Barack Obama, will be orchestrating his every move.
But it will be shocking if Biden, once sworn in, remains in office very long. In one of his unforced gaffes, he casually acknowledged having told "Barack" that, while he and Harris agree on most things, if a disagreement on moral principle arises, he will "develop some disease" and resign.
The Democratic power brokers pulling the strings in this Manchurian horror show achieved a double coup. They managed to arrange Biden's out-of-nowhere victory over the popular -- but unelectable in a general election -- Bernie Sanders, and they snuck in the wildly unpopular Kamala Harris as vice presidential candidate under the Biden cover.
The liberal media conspired in this ruse, presenting Biden as an affable and honorable centrist, shielding his frailty and corruption while ignoring Harris' undeniable extremism. Never mind that Biden has a long history of plagiarism and lies -- and now a history of graft -- and that he was anything but conciliatory when he falsely cast President Donald Trump throughout the campaign as a racist.
So the progressive media and all other forces who dogged Trump for four years and concealed the extremism of the Democratic presidential ticket have enabled a certain radicalization of the American presidency for the next four years. By all rights, American patriots can't be blamed for being scared out of their wits about what appears to be coming.
I believe every word I wrote in my book about the dangers that the national Democratic Party represents for the nation.
I stand by this paragraph from chapter one: "?Well-meaning people say Republicans and Democrats have the same fundamental goals but different ideas and strategies for achieving them. I've always regarded this as wishful thinking, but if it were ever true, it no longer is today. The two parties, as presently constituted, have distinctly different visions for America based on conflicting worldviews. Some will object that all Americans want everyone to be prosperous, safe, free, and to live in harmony, but I'm not sure that's even true anymore, given the left's anti-Americanism, its intolerance and authoritarianism, its romance with socialism, its hysterical environmentalism, its preoccupation with identity politics, its radicalism on race and gender, its attempts to erase our borders, its culture of death, its devaluation of the Constitution, its hostility to Second Amendment rights, and much more."
But no matter how bleak things look to all who have a clear-eyed understanding of the radicalism of the Democrats' agenda, there are some reasons for optimism.
President Trump showed that an outsider actually can win the presidency and advance a constructive agenda against nearly overwhelming resistance. He single-handedly transformed the Republican Party into a far more efficient and effective policy vehicle. His very presence smoked out the radicalism, authoritarianism, corruption, destructiveness and utter meanness of the left. Leftists loathe him so thoroughly that they showed the entire country how far they're willing to go to silence their opponents and eradicate Americans' liberties.
Trump presented a template for how the Republican Party should and can expand its base, and how it should push its own agenda every bit as aggressively as the Democrats do theirs, without the cheating and lawlessness.
He inspired tens of millions of Americans with his unflagging patriotism, with his defense and promotion of this country and its interests. The enthusiasm at his rallies was no accident, and it will not diminish but rather surely increase.
Though temporarily dispirited, our side is fired up like never before, and the Republican Party will likely remain the party of Trumpism, even when Trump ceases to lead it. There will not be another Trump -- but there doesn't need to be, as long as the next GOP president largely follows his policy agenda (apart from spending, which we desperately need to rein in), adopts his template for fiercely fighting for that agenda, and continues to expose and proactively fight against the tyranny of leftist media and social media.
So much rides on the U.S. Senate elections in Georgia. If Republicans can hold the majority, we can mitigate much of the planned Biden-Harris mischief.
I also choose to see a dim silver lining in the rampant presidential election corruption: that going forward, Republicans could use it to fuel election reform and scrutiny. If nothing else, people's eyes are now wide open and will remain so.
Heading into the new year, let's do our best to not be dejected and pessimistic but committed and resolved to redoubling our efforts to reclaim America's greatness from those who are on a mission to eliminate it. Never give up!
https://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2021/01/01/never-give-up-n2582351
Grease is 'racist, rapey, homophobic and slut-shaming' and should never be shown on TV again, say woke snowflakesTaking a light-hearted show seriously is dumb. But Leftists are that dumb
It was one of the highest-grossing films of the 1970s and has been delighting audiences ever since.
But now the hit musical Grease has become the latest target of ‘woke’ critics who have condemned it for racism, sexism, homophobia and ‘slut-shaming’.
Outraged detractors have called for the story of Sandy and Danny’s rollercoaster high-school romance to be cancelled – and never shown on TV again.
When BBC1 screened the movie on Boxing Day, 42 years after its cinema release, youngsters took to social media to label it ‘rapey’ and misogynist for showing how strait-laced Sandy, played by Olivia Newton-John, transformed herself into a vamp to bag the man of her dreams, Danny Zuko, played by John Travolta.
In the film’s final scenes, student Sandy ditches her good- girl image for skin-tight PVC trousers and takes up smoking so she can impress Danny.
It prompted one outraged Twitter user to write: ‘Grease is far too sexist and overly white and should be banned from the screen. It is nearly 2021 after all.’
Another furious viewer complained: ‘Grease sucks on so many levels and the message is pure misogyny.’
A third user agreed, saying: ‘Grease is just the most sexist piece of s***.’
One scene that caused particular offence to youthful viewers was when Putzie, one of Danny’s friends in the T-Birds gang, positioned himself on the floor to look up the skirts of two female students at the fictional Rydell High School.
Other viewers complained about the lyric ‘Did she put up a fight?’ in the hit song Summer Nights, when Danny describes seducing Sandy.
‘So turns out Grease is actually pretty rapey,’ wrote one aghast viewer, while another said: ‘Misogynistic, sexist and a bit rapey.’
Sensitive viewers also targeted female characters for criticism.
Rizzo was accused of being a bully when she ridiculed Sandy’s good-girl image as she sang Look At Me I’m Sandra D in front of her friends in the Pink Ladies gang at a slumber party.
Others were angry that Rizzo was ‘slut-shamed’ for sleeping with various men, particularly when she had sex with T-Bird Kenickie without a condom.
After thinking she might be pregnant, Rizzo was ostracised, prompting the character, as played by Stockard Channing, to sing about the reaction: ‘There are worse things I could do than go with a boy or two.’
The ‘snowflakes’ were also unimpressed with Vince Fontaine, the radio announcer who hosted the dance-off at Rydell High.
As the character flirted with Pink Lady Marty, he told all dancers that there were no same-sex couples.
The film is, after all, set in 1958 – 45 years before homosexuality was universally decriminalised across the United States.
Nevertheless, the glaring lack of LGBT awareness angered one young Twitter user, who complained: ‘All couples must be boy/girl? Well Grease, shove your homophobia.’
Another simply wrote: ‘Grease peak of homophobia.’
The lack of non-white faces in the cast angered some.
One went so far as to question the broadcaster’s decision to air the film and expressed surprise that it was shown without a disclaimer.
One viewer wrote: ‘I caught the end of Grease, the movie, and noticed there were no black actors or pupils at the high school.’
Another added: ‘Watched Grease on the BBC, surprised they let it go, full of white people.’
When Grease was released in 1978, film censors gave it an A rating, the equivalent of today’s PG, commenting only about some of the near-the-knuckle language.
The film still carries a PG rating with a warning of ‘frequent mild sex references and mild language’.
Ms Newton-John has previously dismissed claims of sexism, saying: ‘It’s a movie and a fun story and I’ve never taken it too seriously.’
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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3 January, 2021
New York Times: Tiki Bars Need 'Reclaiming' Because Racism
What a tedious, wearisome thing it must be to have to live the modern American progressive lifestyle. They truly believe that everything is awful, despite the fact that by almost every objective measure Americans are living pretty good lives even here in 2020.
One of the biggest drags on their collective psyche is the fact that they see racism EVERYWHERE. I will concede that modern American society still has some problems with racism if you look at the things that are actually, you know, racist. There is still enough of that floating around out there that nobody should have to contort themselves to see racism in places where people would normally never think to look.
Like tiki bars.
The New York Times:
"It is an unquestionably difficult time for the hospitality industry. Every day, another restaurant shutters, one more bar pulls its steel gate down for good. Since its invention, one kind of watering hole has seen America through its most grueling times: the tiki bar.
Decorated with bamboo and beach-y lights, with bartenders in Aloha shirts serving up mai tais, tiki bars were a booming part of America’s hospitality industry. “Put down your phone and put on this lei,” say the tiki bars. “Here’s something delicious in a silly mug.” They offer an intoxicating escape from the weight of the world.
But the roots of tiki are far from the Pacific Islands. A Maori word for the carved image of a god or ancestor, tiki became synonymous in the United States and elsewhere for gimmicky souvenirs and décor. Now a new generation of beverage-industry professionals are shining a light on the genre’s history of racial inequity and cultural appropriation, which has long been ignored because it clashes with the carefree aesthetic. Let’s peel back the pineapple leaves to examine the choices that created a marketing mainstay"
See? The writers even acknowledge what lighthearted fun tiki bars are, which means that they had to put in some extra effort to find something problematic.
Oh yeah, this was such an important topic that the Times had two writers involved. Their names are Sammi Katz and Olivia McGiff, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the problem isn’t that they are Pacific Islanders who are personally aggrieved.
The problem Katz and McGiff have is that the two California entrepreneurs who made tiki bars wildly popular were white guys. A lot of predictable social justice warrior filler follows. “Cultural appropriation” and “imperialism” get mentioned. Apparently “tiki” can be a trigger word too. That’s probably something that no one would know — or even believe — had this article not been written. The feature image for this post is from a bar that’s about a mile from me (I have no idea why we had it in our AP Photo archives) and I never even think of the word “tiki” when I go by there.
The article is one of those tortured modern liberal things where you can tell that they were enjoying something too much so they had to find a way to feel guilty about it:
"At its heart, tiki is about fun, creative drinks in a transportive environment. A new wave of industry professionals is reimagining these delicious contributions to cocktail culture, looking to shed the appropriation and racism that have accompanied tiki since its inception. We spoke to a few of them about the ways they’re working to shake up the biz for the better"
Read that again. The paragraph is nonsensical. It’s either really about fun or it’s really about racism. Pick one.
Food and drink don’t really need to be tied to history. I can enjoy some strudel and not be a Nazi sympathizer. I’m not saying that there may be some historical truths in the Times article, I’m saying that the popularity of mai tais isn’t responsible for problems in the region with which they’re associated.
Illegal Immigrants in Virginia to Get ‘Driver Privilege’ Cards
Illegal immigrants will be able to apply for driver privilege cards in Virginia starting Jan. 1, 2021, according to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.
Advocates of the permits claim the issue is in the interest of public safety, NBC Washington reported. Virginia’s General Assembly, which has a Democratic majority, passed the legislation allowing the cards in March.
Noncitizens will be able to apply for driver privilege cards if they are a resident of Virginia; if they have reported income from Virginia sources in the last year or were claimed as a dependent; and if their driving privilege is not suspended or revoked in Virginia or elsewhere, according to the DMV.
The state-issued driver privilege cards cannot be used for entering federal buildings or boarding flights since they are not REAL ID compliant, according to the DMV. Applicants are also not eligible to receive commercial driver’s licenses or formal identification cards.
Driver privilege card applicants must provide two forms of identification and two proofs of residency in Virginia, according to the DMV. Applicants also have to show proof of their Social Security number or their taxpayer identification number and their tax return documentation.
Applicants must pass a vision test and some will need to take a two-part road knowledge exam and driving test, according to the DMV. The exams are only given in English, so applicants are allowed to have a translator present.
The driver privilege card is valid for two years and the application fee costs $50, according to the DMV.
Supporters of the permits are concerned the identification will make illegal immigrants more susceptible to detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers during traffic stops, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
Meanwhile, Federation for American Immigration Reform spokesman Matthew Tragesser previously told The Daily Caller News Foundation: “Giving any form of driving privileges to illegal aliens not only undermines public safety but national security as well.”
“Providing these cards incentivizes more illegal immigration, rewards law-breakers, and jeopardizes our national security, ” Tragesser continued.
The cards look slightly different than normal Virginia licenses and provide information about the illegal immigrants to the DMV.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/12/28/illegal-immigrants-in-virginia-to-get-driver-privilege-cards
The BBC's Lie of Biblical ProportionsJew hatred is alive and well in Britain
In the year of the pandemic, it's no wonder that horrible things continue to come back in ways that are threatening and objectively wrong. This year, maybe because of the virus and people being stuck at home with nothing better to do, a gross lie has resurfaced as it does every year at this season, undermining truth and the foundation of Judaism and Christianity.
Each year around Christmas, efforts to propagate this malicious lie get stronger and more brazen. It’s part of a slanderous campaign of deception, whose end goal is to erase Jewish history from Israel, and Israel from the map. Denying and trying to erase the centrality of Judaism to Israel, and the State of Israel, is bad, and ridiculous, enough. But doing so also denies the origin of Christianity, and is why Jews and Christians should be alarmed and concerned.
This year, the ante was raised as the lie was spread by none other than the BBC. Yes, the British Broadcasting Corporation, a global media entity that seems to never miss a good opportunity to spread lies and malice about Israel, since the days of the good ol’ British occupation.
The BBC’s recent lie is a libel—of biblical proportions. So, what did the BBC do that was so egregious? In two different programs this month, they referred to Jesus as a “Palestinian.” It’s a lie and complete distortion of reality.
The New Testament is unambiguous, and rich with accounts of Jesus being a Jew. It describes his lineage, his participating in countless Jewish rituals, debating and preaching Jewish law, participating in worship in the Temple, and the Last Supper being a Passover seder. When one propagates the lie of Jesus being a “Palestinian,” it is not just historically inaccurate, but denies the very foundation of Christianity.
That really should be enough to disprove and dispel the lie, and prevent what one would think of as rational people from spreading it. But there are no shortage of people who have no compunction about undermining Christianity, much less advocating any hateful story about the “Palestinians,” especially if its one that discredits and blames others for all their problems.
So, if the New Testament account were not good enough to dispel the lie of “Jesus the Palestinian,” historically there’s irrefutable evidence as well. The fact is that it wasn’t until a century after the crucifixion of Jesus, in the year 132, when the Jews fought Roman occupation (known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt), that the term "Palestine” was applied to the Land of Israel. Only after the Romans defeated the Jews in 135, did they rename the Land of Israel “Palestina” to punish and humiliate the Jews. The Romans hijacked the proper Jewish (and biblical) name, Judea, replacing it with the name of an ancient enemy of the Jews as if to complete the vanquishing of the Land and the People.
So, if the name “Palestine” only came into being 100 years after his crucifixion, it is not possible that Jesus was a “Palestinian.” Period. Not only that, Jesus never would have even heard that term.
What made the BBC think that this was true, or maybe even knew it was a lie they could get away with? The reality is that since the birth of the PLO, marking the beginning of the Palestinian national movement 56 years ago this week, hijacking of truth (as well as used in terrorism) has become part of the “Palestinian” tradition. It’s also an appropriate tradition that this lie is peddled around Christmas which is also the week of the PLO’s birth in 1964.
The successor of the PLO that grants “legitimacy” to their national aspiration, the Palestinian Authority, gives voice to their national aspiration, like the PLO, not by building their own society, but by undermining Israel and its legitimacy. Accordingly, there’s very little that the PA does from inciting, celebrating, and funding terrorism, to promoting the myth of Jesus as a “Palestinian” that is not meant to undermine Israel. Over the years, Palestinian Arab leaders and the PA itself have referred to Jesus as: “the first Palestinian,” a “Palestinian messenger,” “the great-grandfather of the Palestinian people,” and perhaps most egregiously, “the first Palestinian martyr (shahid).”
I’ve written about this before, but the BBC piling on to the “Palestinian Jesus” myth brings the lie to a new low. If Palestinian Arabs (and the PA) want to be taken seriously, and equally seriously aspire to build a culture and society of their own, they would be well advised not to base their claims on fundamental lies that only serve to take down another society, not to mention the two original, and biblically based, monotheistic faiths and their adherents.
People of faith and good conscience need to use every means and media possible to debunk the lie of the “Palestinian Jesus.”
'A Direct and Severe Violation': Court Strikes Cuomo's COVID-19 Orders on Churches, Synagogues
On Monday, a panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction against Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D-N.Y.) COVID-19 orders placing strict limits on houses of worship in hot spots. The 2nd Circuit panel agreed with the Supreme Court that Cuomo’s order likely does not satisfy the high standard of strict scrutiny and therefore violates the First Amendment.
“No public interest is served by maintaining an unconstitutional policy when constitutional alternatives are available to achieve the same goal,” Judge Michael Park wrote in the opinion. “The restrictions challenged here specially and disproportionately burden religious exercise, and thus ’strike at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.’ Such a direct and severe constitutional violation weighs heavily in favor of granting injunctive relief.”
In the 3-0 decision, the panel upheld the claims of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, the Orthodox Jewish group Agudath Israel of America, and two synagogues. The ruling enjoined Cuomo’s October 6 order capping attendance at “houses of worship.”
Cuomo capped attendance at either 10 people or 25 percent capacity, whichever is lesser, in “red” zones, and 25 people or 33 percent capacity in “orange” zones, even in buildings that seat hundreds.
While previous rulings had supported Cuomo’s order, the Supreme Court granted an injunction against the order by a 5-4 majority.
“In light of the Supreme Court’s decision, we hold that the Order’s regulation of ‘houses of worship’ is subject to strict scrutiny and that its fixed capacity limits are not narrowly tailored to stem the spread of COVID-19. Appellants have established irreparable harm caused by the fixed capacity limits, and the public interest favors granting injunctive relief,” the 2nd Circuit panel ruled.
In the opinion, Park noted that Cuomo “has not asserted that his categorization of businesses as ‘essential’ or ’non-essential’ was based on any assessment of COVID-19 transmission risk.” He also argued that Cuomo did not use data or compare religious worship with “essential” activities.
Cuomo has claimed that the Supreme Court’s ruling had no practical effect because some restrictions were lifted as COVID-19 outbreaks eased.
Avi Schick, a lawyer for Agudath Israel, said Monday’s decision “will be felt way beyond the COVID context. It is a clear statement … that government can’t disfavor religious conduct merely because it sees no value in religious practice.”
Randy Mastro, the diocese’s lawyer, said the diocese was “gratified,” and will welcome parishioners to mass “under strict protocols” that keep them safe.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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2 January, 2021
Boston removes statue of freed slave kneeling before Lincoln
A statue of Abraham Lincoln with a freed slave appearing to kneel at his feet has been taken down in Boston.
The Emancipation Memorial was removed from its perch near Boston Common early on Tuesday morning.
The optics of the statue had drawn objections for some time, and the national reckoning with racial injustice and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement hastened action.
While some saw a Black man rising up and shaking off the broken shackles from his wrists, others saw him kneeling before the president, his white emancipator.
Officials had agreed in late June to take down the memorial, a copy of a monument erected in Washington, DC in 1876. The Boston version was put up in 1879 as its creator Thomas Ball was from the city.
Mayor Marty Walsh acknowledged in June that the design made both residents and visitors “uncomfortable”, despite its originally intended meaning. The Boston Art Commission voted unanimously to remove the statue.
The mayor said: “After engaging in a public process, it's clear that residents and visitors to Boston have been uncomfortable with this statue, and its reductive representation of the Black man's role in the abolitionist movement. I fully support the Boston Art Commission's decision for removal and thank them for their work."
The original was created to celebrate freedom from slavery, and paid for by freed Black donors, while the Boston version was financed by Moses Kimball, the white politician and circus showman.
The freed slave depicted was based on Archer Alexander, a Black man who escaped slavery, helped the Union Army, and was the last man recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Act.
Both versions are inscribed with the words: “A race set free and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors.”
Biden Pledges to End Religious Liberty
It’s not often that a presidential candidate openly attacks and campaigns against one of America’s founding freedoms, but that’s exactly what Joe Biden is doing. One of the most disturbing items listed on Biden’s platform is his pledge to pass the Equal Rights Amendment within his first 100 days. The Equal Rights Amendment codifies sexual “identity” as a human right and as such provides special protected classification to prevent “discrimination.” In short, the Equal Rights Amendment is a direct assault on the First Amendment’s protections of religious liberty and freedom of speech.
Last Wednesday, Biden reiterated his promise as he decried faith-based organizations that hold to orthodox Christian beliefs regarding human sexuality. Using the disingenuous and false bigotry trope, Biden said, “It’s wrong to deny people access to services or housing because of who they are or who they love.”
Biden then accused President Donald Trump of having “deliberately tried to gut protections for the LGBTQ+ community by creating broad religious exemptions to existing nondiscrimination laws and policies that allow businesses, medical providers, and adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.” He then insisted, “We need to root out discrimination in our laws, institutions, and public spaces. Religion should not be used as a license to discriminate, and as president I will oppose legislation to deny LGBTQ+ equal treatment in public places. I will immediately reverse discriminatory practices that Trump put in place and work to advance the rights of LGBTQ+ people widely.”
As usual, Biden’s rendition of Trump’s actions is more fiction than fact. Specifically regarding the military, Trump sided with science in his order stipulating that soldier admission be based on biological sex and not gender identity. This was in no way a “ban” against “transgenderism” — it was acknowledgement of the truth of biological reality. Just because some people may claim and believe in their minds that they’re a unicorn does not make them one.
The word “discrimination” is a term leftists love to manipulate to rubber-stamp their own discrimination. They use “discrimination” as a shield against any who would dare object to their social agenda, specifically when it comes to sexuality. But to oppose religious liberty is in fact being discriminatory by definition.
Furthermore, Biden is not merely pledging to support equal public access (protections that already exist) for those who identify as homosexual; he’s demanding that all Americans be forced to accept and embrace the homosexual lifestyle as an immutable identity and state of being that trumps all religious beliefs. He’s demanding that Americans’ religious convictions and consciences bow before the alter of sexual preference.
Biden is promising to do to all Americans what Colorado, California, and Washington have done to Christian bakers, wedding photographers, and florists — discriminate against their religious liberty. In short, Biden has no tolerance for those whose religious convictions don’t align with his political and social worldview.
Make no mistake, a vote for Biden is a vote against religious liberty and freedom of speech. It’s a vote against tolerance. It’s a vote against the core ideal of religious liberty upon which America was built. A vote for Biden is a vote against America.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/74598
A Supreme Court Decision May Cause Democrats' Sanctuary Policies to BackfireDemocrat-run states and cities have declared themselves sanctuaries for illegal immigrants and implemented various policies to thwart ICE law-enforcement activities. This includes everything from refusing to honor ICE detainers to the Mayor of Oakland, Calif., issuing a public warning about planned enforcement actions by ICE. Leaders were hopeful these policies would prop up their census counts and assist states in maintaining their seats in the House of Representatives. They went to the Supreme Court to ensure they could.
On December 18, the Supreme Court blew this strategy right out of the water. SCOTUS vacated two lower court decisions preventing the exclusion of illegal immigrants from congressional apportionment. They cited the speculative nature of the claims being made by the jurisdictions opposing the president’s directive.
The memorandum from President Trump to the secretary of Commerce requires two counts—the full census numbers and a second number that excludes illegal immigrants. Because Chief Justice John Roberts did some outrageous judicial gymnastics in an earlier case regarding a citizenship question on the census, the second count will rely on other agencies’ administrative records. That information was collected under an Executive Order issued following the decision on the census question.
The president’s reasoning for requesting that illegal immigrants be excluded from apportionment is clear:
Increasing congressional representation based on the presence of aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status would also create perverse incentives encouraging violations of Federal law. States adopting policies that encourage illegal aliens to enter this country and that hobble Federal efforts to enforce the immigration laws passed by the Congress should not be rewarded with greater representation in the House of Representatives.
In the memorandum, the president noted that a single state (which he did not identify) is estimated to be the home to more than 2.2 million illegal immigrants. Current congressional districts in that state each have about 700,000 residents, so the illegal population would apportion approximately three additional seats. The president points out that this is not consistent with the principles of representative democracy. Providing political influence based on the presence of non-citizens reduces the representation of citizens and legal residents.
The plaintiffs alleged that the exclusion of illegal immigrants from the apportionment would impact federal funding. SCOTUS did not find that this conclusion could be made and determined there was no actual controversy and said it was not a dispute that could be resolved through the judicial process.
California attorney general, and candidate for HHS Secretary under Joe Biden, Xavier Becerra, is unhappy with the ruling. California is a sanctuary state—and likely the state singled out by President Trump in the memorandum. While there has been speculation that California would lose one seat due to unprecedented outmigration from the state’s failed urban centers, it now has the potential to lose three.
In a statement, Becerra said:
A complete, accurate census is about ensuring all our voices are heard and that our states get their share of resources to protect the health and well-being of all of our communities. We remain committed to the core principle that everyone counts. Here in California, we’ll continue to stand up for each and every person who calls our state home.
The memorandum explicitly states that it does not apply to functions of the director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals. It is narrowly construed to address only the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. It would appear Becerra’s premise is moot.
However, it would be nice to insert a bit of federalism here. California voters elect the leaders that implement the policies to encourage illegal immigrants to reside in the state. One could assert that voters in other states that do not have sanctuary policies are under no obligation to provide resources for the decisions of California voters. Sometimes paying for bad decisions helps people make better ones.
5 Arguments Against 'America Is a Racist Country'
America is, in fact, the least racist multiracial, multiethnic country in world history.
The left-wing charge that America is a racist country is the greatest national libel since the Blood Libel against the Jews. America is, in fact, the least racist multiracial, multiethnic country in world history.
Neither the claim that America is a racist society nor the claim that it is the least racist country can be empirically proven. Both are assessments. But honest people do need to provide arguments for their position. I have found every argument that America is racist, let alone “systemically” racist, wanting. For example, the police almost never kill unarmed blacks, and on the rare occasions they do (about 15 times a year), there is almost always a valid reason (as in the infamous 2014 case in Ferguson, Missouri); police kill more unarmed whites than blacks; the reason there are proportionately so many more blacks in prison is that blacks disproportionately commit violent crimes; and so on.
There are very powerful arguments against the charge that America is a racist society.
I offered one in my column last week:
No. 1: If there is so much racism in America, why are there so many false claims of racism and outright race hoaxes?
I offered 15 recent examples. Moreover, there were probably no racist hoaxes when America really was racist, just as there were no anti-Semitic hoaxes in 1930s Germany, when there was rampant anti-Semitism. You need hoaxes when the real thing is hard to find.
No. 2: The constant references to slavery.
If there were a great deal of racism in America today, there would be no reason to constantly invoke slavery and the Confederacy. The very fact that The New York Times, the leader in racist dishonesty, felt it necessary to issue its “1619 Project,” which seeks to replace 1776 as the founding of America with 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in America, is a perfect illustration of the point. The fact that “The 1619 Project” was labeled false by the leading American historians of that era (all of whom are liberals and at least one of whom led a campaign to impeach President Donald Trump) adds fuel to the argument. Even regarding the past, the promoters of the “America is racist” libel need to lie to paint America as bad as possible.
No. 3: The reliance on lies.
“The 1619 Project,” which will now be taught in thousands of American schools, is based on lies. All Americans who care about America and/or truth should inquire if their children’s school will teach this and, if so, place their child in a school that does not.
Two of the biggest lies are that preserving slavery was the real cause of the American Revolution and that slavery is what made America rich.
Even the charge of endemic racist police brutality is a lie. There are undoubtedly racist police, but racism does not characterize police interactions with blacks.
No. 4: The large African immigration to the United States.
Nearly 2 million black Africans and more than 1 million blacks from the Caribbean have emigrated to the United States in just the last 20 years. Why would so many blacks voluntarily move to a country that is “systemically racist,” a country, according to the promoters of the “America is racist” libel, in which every single white is a racist? Are all these blacks dumb? Are they ignorant? And what about the millions more who would move here if they were allowed to? How does one explain the fact that Nigerians, for example, are among the most successful immigrant communities?
No. 5: The preoccupation with “microaggressions.”
According to the University of California’s list of racist “microaggressions,” saying, “There is only one race, the human race,” is a “racist microaggression.” This is, of course, Orwellian doublespeak. Anyone who believes there is only one race is not, by definition, a racist. If everyone in the past had believed there was one race, the human race, there would never have been racism, let alone a slave trade based on racism.
The very fact that the left came up with the intellectual farce known as “microaggressions,” like the race hoaxes, proves how little racism there is in America — because the entire thesis is based on the fact that there are so few real, or “macro,” aggressions.
The race riots, the ruining of people’s careers and lives over something said or done at any time in their lives, the ruining of professional sports (especially basketball and football), the tearing down of America and its history, the smearing of moral giants like Abraham Lincoln — all of this is being done because of a lie.
As I wrote in a column three years ago: “The Jews survived the Blood Libel. But America may not survive the American Libel. While the first Libel led to the death of many Jews, the present Libel may lead to the death of a civilization. Indeed, the least oppressive ever created.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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For the notes appearing at the side of the original blog see HERE
Pictures put up on a blog sometimes do not last long. They stay up only as long as the original host keeps them up. Some newsapers keep their published pictures online for as little as a week. I therefore keep archives of all the pictures that I use. The recent archives are online and are in two parts:
Archive of side pictures here
Archive of this year's pictures in the body of the blog. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and reflects the date on which the picture was posted. See here
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