The primary version of "Political Correctness Watch" is HERE The Blogroll; John Ray's Home Page; Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Greenie Watch, Dissecting Leftism, Education Watch, Gun Watch, Socialized Medicine, Recipes, Australian Politics, Tongue Tied, Immigration Watch, Eye on Britain and Food & Health Skeptic. For a list of backups viewable in China, see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing). See here or here for the archives of this site.


Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!

Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.

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31 August, 2011

Soft justice: Thousands of career criminals spared prison in British Coalition's first year

The number of career criminals being spared jail has soared since the Coalition took office.

An astonishing 4,000 offenders have been handed community sentences, despite each totting up at least 50 convictions.

The figure for 2010 – the year Ken Clarke took over as Justice Secretary – was 17 per cent higher than 2009’s and treble that of 2002.

Incredibly, 408 criminals dodged jail last year even when being sentenced for what was at least their 100th offence.

Earlier this year, the Daily Mail revealed that the percentage of all convicted criminals sent to jail had fallen since the Coalition took over last May.

Rapists, drug-dealers, muggers, drink-drivers and thugs caught with knives and guns were all more likely to receive soft community sentences.

If the sentencing standards of 2009 had been applied last year, more than 2,000 extra criminals would have gone to jail.

Critics of the criminal justice system say pressure is being put on courts by Mr Clarke to jail fewer people because prisons are close to overflowing.

The Justice Secretary wants to scrap most terms of under six months and replace them with community sentences – meaning more repeat offenders will be let off.

Conservative MP Priti Patel said: ‘Clearly when you have got serial criminals and repeat offenders causing such harm the Government has got to start addressing the issue.

‘It is not acceptable that these people are being given community sentences when they should be locked up. The Government needs to tackle this situation; these are people who need to be locked away in prison to keep the public safe.

‘If there is a need for more prison places then we need to build more prisons. Prisons are about protecting people on the outside from the vile criminals who are being kept behind bars.’

The latest figures show that the proportion of offenders escaping jail with 50 convictions or more has risen from 0.5 per cent in 2002 to 1.5 per cent last year.

Some 3,898 criminals fell into that bracket in 2010, compared with 3,333 the year before and 1,238 in 2002.

Last year the Daily Mail revealed that the worst of the repeat offenders to be spared jail had a 50-year criminal record and 578 previous convictions or cautions.

These included 300 offences of theft as well as burglary, robbery, assault, possessing offensive weapons and public order crimes.

Conservative MP Philip Davies, who uncovered those statistics, said: ‘This shows that the criminal justice system has become a joke. It shows that despite what Justice Secretary Ken Clarke would have us believe, we have too few people in prison, not too many.’

Criminologist Dr David Green, director of the Civitas think-tank, said: ‘This rise in the number of career criminals escaping jail has been caused by political pressure from the Government to reduce the prison population. Judges and magistrates are failing in their basic duty to protect the public.

'If someone has been convicted even three or four times, jail should be considered. But these are people being convicted 50 or 100 times. It should be obvious that for these people, this is how they make a living.

‘And we should remember that not all crimes are detected. The Home Office admits that for every conviction, the offender has committed five more. So someone being convicted 50 times has in fact carried out at least 300 – and I think that’s an underestimate.’

Mr Clarke wants to replace sentences of six or fewer months – given to around 50,000 criminals a year – with ‘tougher community sentences’.

Last year he claimed: ‘Simply banging up more and more people for longer without actively seeking to change them is not going to protect the public. ‘I do not think prison is, or should be, a numbers game.

‘The army of short-term prisoners we have at the moment, who have a particularly bad record of reoffending within six months of being released, is too big and we’ve got to find some sensible community sentences.’

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: ‘Sentencing in individual cases is rightly a matter for the courts to decide.’

SOURCE



Australia: 'Second-chance crime wave' in Victoria as 884 offenders freed and then commit 4177 crimes

VICTORIA Police is concerned that suspected violent criminals are being freed by the courts - despite facing serious charges - and then allegedly committing murder, rape and armed robbery.

An investigation by the Sunday Herald Sun has revealed 6096 suspects were granted bail last year and then went into hiding, missing the date of their court hearing. And, before arrest warrants for failing to appear in court were executed, 884 of them went on to commit an alleged 4117 new offences.

But Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius said there were "clear expectations" on officers to remand anyone in custody who posed a risk to society or was a risk of absconding and he was "confident" this was done in all police cases. "Ultimately, it's the court's decision and sometimes the courts don't go our way," Mr Cornelius said.

"There are times when we are concerned because of the risk to the public. There are plenty of cases where it might be said they've (the courts) got it wrong."

But Chief Magistrate Ian Gray hit back, suggesting police may have let some of the bail-jumpers go. "Offending while on bail is a serious issue and the decision to grant bail is made carefully," Mr Gray said. "It's not clear from these figures how many of these are police bails or court bails - but where it's shown in court that an offender poses an unacceptable risk of reoffending bail will be denied.

"Courts are obliged to apply the law. There is a presumption in favour of granting bail unless an accused needs to show cause or show exceptional circumstances."

Mr Cornelius cited the release of captured drug kingpin Tony Mokbel, who subsequently fled to Greece while on bail and was on the run for more than a year before being rearrested and extradited back to Melbourne. "I hope that Mokbel would be one case that would provide a source of reflection for our judicial colleagues," he said.

The statistics were obtained under Freedom of Information requests over several months. Police would not reveal the identities of the alleged murderer and other criminals who reoffended while at large.

Mr Cornelius revealed a newly published six-month performance report flagged outstanding warrants as an issue and that police statewide would now be conducting regular operations. "If a suspect has made a decision to skip bail and not turn up to court it's likely they have also made arrangements to go to ground and not be found," Mr Cornelius said, explaining why suspects were not located straight away.

"The volume of warrants is going up because courts are dishing out more each day, while we are still trying to find the ones we already have. It's on our radar. Our focus is on outstanding warrants and we need to pay a great deal of attention to it."

All officers are notified of a warrant if they happen to stop a person for any reason and run a check on their name.

The police's job becomes harder if the suspect moves to another suburb, interstate or even overseas. "The impetus and motivation is very much there to catch everyone who is wanted on a warrant," Mr Cornelius said. "For every crime there is a victim and if we don't have the accused there is a victim out there not getting justice. "The 4117 figure is a number that serves a reminder to Victoria Police to pay attention to this matter."

The Justice Department refused to comment on the issue this week after being asked on Wednesday.

SOURCE



Bank of Gay America

Mike Adams writes to the Bank of America about new persecution of Dr. Turek

Dear Mr. Moynihan:

I want to bring to your attention a recent decision made by your HR team that I think does not reflect your leadership of Bank of America. Dr. Frank Turek was fired as a vendor for his political and religious views, even though those views were never mentioned or expressed during his work at Bank of America.

By way of background, Dr. Turek is an eight-year veteran of the United States Navy, and he and his wife have two sons serving in the United States Air Force. He has conducted leadership, teambuilding and other training programs for Bank of America on several occasions since 1995. His programs have always earned high marks, hence the repeated invitations.

In late May of this year Dr. Turek was hired to present at a meeting of your Global Business Management & Analysis Team within Global Wealth and Investment Management. The title of his presentation was called “Why Can’t You Be Normal Just Like Me?” The presentation helps participants adapt to diverse personalities to improve productivity and relationships—the essence of inclusion and diversity. The meeting was scheduled to take place at your Merrill Lynch facility in Pennington, New Jersey on June 17.

Three days before the event Dr. Turek was abruptly fired by an HR representative. Why? She explained that someone Googled his name and discovered that he had written Correct, Not Politically Correct: How Same-Sex Marriage Hurts Everyone. Marriage was not the topic of his presentation, nor has it ever been in all his years of working with the bank. Moreover, as his book reveals (although no one at the Bank is likely to have read it), Dr. Turek treats all people with respect, whether he agrees with them politically or not. Nevertheless, in the name of “inclusion” and “diversity,” he was immediately excluded for his political and religious viewpoint. Mr. Moynihan, please answer this question: Do you have to have certain political or religious views to work at Bank of America?

I know you cannot really believe that free speech and religion rights vanish when one works with Bank of America. I know that you cannot believe that all political conservatives, Jews, Christians, Mormons and Muslims should be fired for their deeply held beliefs. But that is how the Bank of America policy of “inclusion” was applied to Dr. Turek. He was fired because of his personal political and religious beliefs—beliefs that are undoubtedly shared by thousands of your very large and diverse workforce. Or is it really diverse?

I assume the intent of the Bank’s value of “inclusion” is to ensure that people in that diverse workforce will work together cordially and professionally even when they inevitably disagree on certain political, moral or religious questions. Dr. Turek agrees with that value and was demonstrating it. He was being inclusive working with the Bank. But your Bank of “America” was being exclusive by refusing to work with him, even though his viewpoint was never discussed during work.

If you deny that your culture is dramatically tilted toward political correctness, I ask you to consider this: What action would have been taken by your bank had Dr. Turek written a book in favor of same-sex marriage but a conservative employee had complained? Got a bit of a double standard? Or is that somehow “different”?

My purpose in writing is two-fold. First, I ask you to move to correct your culture of exclusion, which is falsely advertised as a culture of inclusion and diversity. Dr. Turek has been excluded now from earning a living with your company. Moreover, I am concerned about the thousands of conservatives, secular and religious, who are employees of the Bank. In my view, such totalitarian political correctness is immoral and un-American, and I doubt it engenders a climate of diversity and collaboration you champion.

Second, this story will be told beyond the confines of Townhall.com. I want to give you the opportunity to respond before it is.

I thank you for your attention to this matter and look forward to your prompt reply. I can be reached at adams_mike@hotmail.com.

Respectfully,

Dr. Mike Adams

For those readers who recall Dr. Turek being fired as a vendor by Cisco for the same reason earlier this year, you may be wondering how these two cases are related. Since Bank of America fired Dr. Turek two days before I broke the Cisco story in my June 16 column titled “The Cisco Kid,” they could not have learned about Dr. Turek from me. It just seems that we have two bigoted California-based companies that independently seek to “out” those who believe what reasonable people have always believed—that the primary reason the government endorses marriage is not because two people of any sex love one another, but because only heterosexual unions can procreate and best nurture the next generation.

Unless Mr. Moynihan stops his company’s unreasonable and un-American politically correct witch-hunt, I’m closing my Bank of America account. Unreasonable, un-American bigots should not be handling my money. They simply cannot be trusted.

SOURCE



Can't Even Go to the Park

The same people who say I shouldn't impose my morality on them, are imposing immorality on me and my children to the point that I literally have a hard time even leaving my home anymore to do something as simple as visit the park. And this is freedom?

I am a Catholic stay-at-home mother of seven, and I live in the state of Massachusetts where "gay marriage" has been legal for seven years and it's just one aspect of the larger secular agenda. Because we have so many little children, it takes a phenomenal effort to go anywhere. We have only filled our truck with gasoline twice this entire summer vacation. We go to Mass and we go two miles up the road to a small outdoor swimming pool. That's pretty much it.

At the pool this summer there were homosexual couples with children and, while I was polite as my own young daughters doted on the baby with two "mommies", I also held my breath in anticipation of awkward questions - questions I'm not ready to answer. My young daughters are all under the age of eight and they are not old enough to understand why a baby would have two women calling themselves "mommies".

When there were two men relaxing at the side of the pool unnaturally close to each other, effeminately rubbing elbows and exchanging doe-eyes, I was again anxiously watching my children hoping they wouldn't ask questions. They don't see Daddy do that with anyone but Mommy. We haven't been back to the pool for a couple of weeks, except once but it rained. The truth is, now I don't really want to go back.

So what am I harping about?

Today we decided to go to the park. We live near a nice park that is safe, clean and quiet. Two of my daughters were in the sandbox, one on the slide, the other on the swings, and as I lifted the baby out of his stroller I looked up to see four women laughing at a baby boy as he was swinging in one of those bucket baby swings. That seems harmless enough, but I'm so sensitized to the strangeness in my community that I've developed this ever-present jumpiness whenever I'm in public. Sure enough, two of the women, so happy to see a baby boy laughing, embraced and remained standing there rubbing each other's back in a way that was clearly not just friendly affection.

This is my community. I find myself unable to even leave the house anymore without worrying about what in tarnation we are going to encounter. We are responsible citizens. We live by the rules, we pay our taxes, we take care of our things. I'm supposed to be able to influence what goes on in my community, and as a voter I do exercise that right. But I'm outnumbered. I can't even go to normal places without having to sit silently and tolerate immorality. We all know what would happen if I asked two men or two women to stop displaying, right in front of me and my children, that they live in sodomy.

So now I go on a rant.

Our taxes are being used to fund contraception, abortion and IVF already. That offends me in ways that are inexpressible. I read last December in the Wall Street Journal how two men near us are raising two assembled daughters after announcing to the world how they killed two other siblings in surrogate mothers in India. Let me guess? I shouldn't offend them though, right? And what's next at the park? A needle exchange drop-box for heroin users? No joke. These things are not isolated, it is all the same issue at a fundamental level. We're being pushed to accept immorality and it's not just on TV and in Washington D.C. It's right in front of us too.

We fund a lot of illegal immigrants here (just ask the President about his auntie) and helping people who really need help is not something I'd ever oppose. But it's still haunting me that just this week I learned of an illegal immigrant who killed a young man innocently out for a ride on his motorcycle. The illegal immigrant, who didn't have a license, was so drunk he didn't notice when he hit a motorcyclist and then dragged the 23 year old college graduate a quarter of a mile while people were yelling at him to stop. When he finally did stop, the young man was still alive until the drunk driver put the car in reverse and backed up over him before driving away. He's charged with vehicular homicide and "reckless conduct creating a risk to a child." He had a six year old in the car with him.

Do you think knowing this happened about seven miles from my home makes me afraid to leave the house? You bet it does. But that just adds to everything else I'm being asked to tolerate. Seriously, is this freedom?

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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30 August, 2011

Abortion undercover: Journalist posed as a vulnerable pregnant woman at six counselling services

Her findings raise disturbing questions

Regardless of your moral stance, deciding whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy must surely rank as one of the most difficult dilemmas a woman can face.

At a time when a woman feels at her most confused and vulnerable, it is vital she has access to clear, impartial advice, so that she can reach a decision which, either way, will stay with her for the rest of her life.

For years, campaigners have expressed fears that pregnant women have only been able to seek advice from abortion providers, who are running profit-making businesses, or from pro-life groups, who tend to encourage keeping a baby, no matter what the circumstances.

But can the current situation really be that bad? To find out, I posed as a terrified pregnant young woman unsure of what to do, and sought counselling. What happened next left me confused and traumatised — and I’m not even pregnant. I discovered that vulnerable women are being given advice that is both biased and manipulative — and could easily make them feel pressured into making a decision they will regret later.

At present, a woman seeking an abortion must simply undergo a medical consultation. She is not required to have counselling, but can seek it if she wants it.

The leading private abortion clinics Marie Stopes International and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) both provide such counselling, but are paid per abortion, which hardly promotes independence. On the other hand, charitable and religious services have been accused of manipulating women into keeping their babies.

I made appointments at six centres using the same story: I was 26 years old, 12 to 16 weeks pregnant, I hadn’t told my boyfriend and I couldn’t decide whether to have an abortion or keep the baby.

So, what kind of service should I have been offered? According to Phillip Hodson, of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), it is essential that pre-abortion counselling is ‘freely available, independent, unbiased and ethical’. But, he adds: ‘Counsellors should never give advice. Pressuring a client to a particular course of action is fundamentally unethical and a contradiction of our profession.’

My first call was to Marie Stopes, a nationwide network of sexual health clinics that provide private and NHS abortions. They claim to allow women ‘access to comprehensive, impartial and non-judgmental information’ and all counsellors are members of BACP.

On the phone, the operator repeatedly tried to book me in for a medical assessment, the first step to getting an abortion — despite me stressing that I hadn’t yet made up my mind. I felt bulldozed into starting the termination process and had to insist on having counselling. In real life, a worried woman might have gone along with whatever she was told.

When contacted later, a Marie Stopes spokeswoman admitted their adviser was ‘slower to understand the client’s needs than we would have liked, but we are pleased that after contacting our One Call service, face-to-face counselling was provided’.

That counselling session took place the next day in Bloomsbury, central London. It cost £80 for just 30 minutes, but would have been free had I been referred by my GP.

It quickly became apparent that my counsellor, Temi, was quite happy to influence my decisions. Her overwhelming advice was that I ‘must’ tell my boyfriend, even though there is no legal requirement to do so. She was openly disapproving when I said I hadn’t spoken to him, and seemed reluctant to talk about any option other than termination. ‘There’s a huge danger to your relationship,’ she said. ‘If you did have an abortion without telling him ..... you could end up resenting him for something he knows nothing about.’

Questioned about the size of the foetus, or the risks of infertility caused by abortion, she said ‘You’ll have to talk to a nurse about that’, or ‘I don’t have the exact statistics’.

Nevertheless, the message seemed very much to be that abortion was the best option. ‘It goes against our very nature to have an abortion,’ she said. ‘But we do things every day that go against our very nature.’ This was followed by: ‘You want what you want ....... is it worth having a child because you don’t want to deal with a bit of guilt?’

I asked about medical abortions (taking pills which encourage the foetus to be miscarried). She said they could leave a woman ‘in agony’ — but did not point out that, as a private clinic, Marie Stopes are not able to give a medical abortion after nine weeks.

The session came to an abrupt end after 29 minutes and I left not knowing the medical or emotional side-effects of abortion. Keeping the baby was not seen as an option at all. I thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t scared and pregnant for real.

Much more HERE



British abortion rules to be tightened in biggest shake-up for a generation

The Department of Health is to announce plans for a new system of independent counselling for women before they finally commit to terminating a pregnancy. The move is designed to give women more “breathing space”.

Pro-life campaigners suggest the change could result in up to 60,000 fewer abortions each year in Britain. Last year, 202,400 were carried out.

The plan would introduce a mandatory obligation on abortion clinics to offer women access to independent counselling, to be run on separate premises by a group which does not itself carry out abortions.

Critics of abortion clinics claim that the counselling they offer is biased because they are run as businesses — a claim denied by the clinics.

But abortion charities said they feared the proposals would prolong the period before an abortion took place, and that the motive was simply to reduce the number of terminations and was not in the best interests of women.

The proposed change comes ahead of a Commons vote, due to take place next week, on amendments to a public health Bill put forward by Nadine Dorries, a backbench Conservative MP.

The amendments would prevent private organisations which carry out terminations — such as Marie Stopes and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) — from offering pre-abortion counselling. Women would instead be offered free access to independent counsellors.

The vote would be the first on the laws around abortion since the Coalition took power. A previous attempt to change the law — to reduce the time limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks — was defeated in a free vote in 2008. Ministers appear keen to avoid another such vote. They believe that announcing the consultation on independent counselling will prevent it going ahead.

The plan does not mean pre-abortion counselling will be mandatory — something which is vehemently opposed by pro-choice groups and which has been a flashpoint in parts of the United States.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “We are currently developing proposals to introduce independent counselling for women seeking abortion. These proposals are focused on improving women’s health and wellbeing. Final decisions on who should provide this counselling have not yet been made.”

Proposals under discussion would involve withdrawing payments made by the taxpayer to abortion clinics for counselling women.

Mrs Dorries, a former nurse, claims abortion providers are not independent because they have a vested interest in conducting abortions. Last year, Marie Stopes and Bpas carried out about 100,000 terminations and were paid about £60 million to do so, mostly through the NHS.

Mrs Dorries said she had hoped that her proposed amendments to the health Bill would prompt the Government into taking the kind of action which it has now done.

Frank Field, a Labour MP, said: “I’m anxious that taxpayers’ money is used so that people can have a choice — we are paying for independent counselling and that’s what should be provided.”

Ann Furedi, the chief executive of Bpas, said if her organisation was prevented from advising women about terminations it could be impossible to gain informed consent, as the independent counselling was not compulsory.

SOURCE



Why Are We Surprised With the Push for 'Pedophile Rights'

Many Americans have been shocked by reports about a recent pro-pedophilia conference in Baltimore in which psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, representing institutions like Harvard and Johns Hopkins, sought to present pedophilia in a sympathetic and even positive light. But why should this surprise us?

Academic articles in scholarly journals have been presenting pedophilia in a sympathetic light for years, and, as Matthew Cullinan Hoffman noted, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) released a report in 1998 “claiming that the ‘negative potential’ of adult sex with children was ‘overstated’ and that ‘the vast majority of both men and women reported no negative sexual effects from their child sexual abuse experiences.’ It even claimed that large numbers of the victims reported that their experiences were ‘positive,’ and suggested that the phrase ‘child sex abuse’ be replaced with ‘adult-child sex.’” Others have coined the more disgusting term “intergenerational intimacy.”

The APA’s report was so disturbing that it drew an official rebuke from Congress, yet the pro-pedophile (or, pro-pederast) push continues. In fact, some psychiatric leaders, like Dr. Richard Green, who were instrumental in removing homosexuality from the APA’s list of mental disorders in 1973, have been fighting to remove pedophilia as well.

Consider, for example, this statement from the late John Hopkins professor John Money: “Pedophilia and ephebophilia [referring to sexual attraction felt by an adult toward an adolescent] are no more a matter of voluntary choice than are left-handedness or color blindness. There is no known method of treatment by which they may be effectively and permanently altered, suppressed, or replaced. Punishment is useless. There is no satisfactory hypothesis, evolutionary or otherwise, as to why they exist in nature’s overall scheme of things. One must simply accept the fact that they do exist, and then, with optimum enlightenment, formulate a policy of what to do about it.”

Now, go back and reread that paragraph, substituting the word “homosexuality” for “pedophilia” and “ephebophilia.” How interesting!

To help flesh this out, let’s picture a homosexual man making his case to a heterosexual man:

1) My homosexuality is not a sexual preference but a sexual orientation, just as much as your heterosexuality is not a sexual preference but a sexual orientation.

2) My homosexuality is just as normal as your heterosexuality.

3) Since my behavior is genetically determined and is not a choice, it is intolerant and hateful to suggest that it is wrong. And to call my sexual behavior illegal or immoral, or to refuse to legitimize same-sex relationships, is to be a moral bigot of the highest order.

4) I deeply resent your attempts to identify areas of my upbringing and environment as alleged causes for my homosexuality.

5) I categorically reject the myth that someone can change his or her sexual orientation. Rather, such statements only add to the anguish and suffering of gays and lesbians, and attempts to change us often lead to catastrophic consequences, including depression and suicide.

Now, let’s turn this around and have a pederast making his case to a homosexual, substituting the words accordingly (thus, “My pederasty is not a sexual preference but a sexual orientation, just as much as your homosexuality is not a sexual preference but a sexual orientation.”)

In point of fact, all the principal arguments commonly used to normalize homosexuality have been used to normalize pedophilia and pederasty, as I documented in painstaking (and painful) detail in A Queer Thing Happened to America, where I also made clear that I was not equating homosexuality with pedophilia but was instead comparing the arguments used to normalize both.

Here are the eight principle arguments, all of which (in modified form) are commonly used in support of homosexuality:

1) Pedophilia is innate and immutable.

2) Pederasty is richly attested in many different cultures throughout history.

3) The claim that adult-child sexual relationships cause harm is greatly overstated and often completely inaccurate.

4) Consensual adult-child sex can actually be beneficial to the child.

5) Pederasty should not be classified as a mental disorder, since it does not cause distress to the pederast to have these desires and since the pederast can function as a normal, contributing member of society.

6) Many of the illustrious homosexuals of the past were actually pedophiles.

7) People are against intergenerational intimacy because of antiquated social standards and puritanical sexual phobias.

8) This is all about love and equality and liberation.

But none of these arguments should surprise us. After all, the age of increasing sexual anarchy in which we live is a fruit of the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, and the seeds of sexual anarchy were sown already by Alfred Kinsey in the late 1940’s, as Prof. Judith Reisman has tirelessly documented. And it was Kinsey, after all, who relied on the research of pedophiles to document the sexual responses of infants and children.

All this, to be sure, is utterly unspeakable. But it should certainly come as no surprise. In fact, we should expect this and more.

SOURCE



Australia: Leftist elder statesman calls for end to Charter of Human Rights

FORMER NSW Labor Premier Bob Carr has warned that retaining the Victorian Charter of Human Rights could liken the state to the UK, where public servants are too scared to enforce the law in fear of being taken to court.

Speaking at a meeting calling for the repeal of the charter yesterday, Mr Carr said British public servants were so afraid of breaching the European charter of human rights, they were scared into inaction.

"I'm very worried, as my friends at British Labour Party are, that the term human rights is becoming a bad term, because of the way the European charter is invoked. It's become a term of abuse," he said.

Mr Carr said older people in working class electorates in the UK feared criminal behaviour was not dealt with by police because the culprits would claim their human rights had been infringed.

"They say the police won't do anything about it because it'll be against their human rights," Mr Carr said.

"The cases they refer to are the gypsies, or the travellers as we should call them, who go on to private property and camp there and when the police are asked to remove them, threaten to take action in the courts under the human rights charter. "So the police do nothing."

Mr Carr said having a charter of human rights affected and shaped the behaviour of public servants.

"Public service employees will opt for the easiest course," he said. "They don't want to be smacked over the knuckles by an auditor general or an ombudsman or a parliamentary public accounts committee, but they certainly don't want to be dragged into court, even more they don't want to be dragged into court and embarrassed by action invoked under a rights charter."

Mr Carr said the resources put into enforcing Victoria's human rights charter could be better spent on child protection.

But President of the Law Institute of Victoria Caroline Counsel said Mr Carr's argument was "misinformed and illogical".

"The charter should be self perpetuating, if we all do the right thing by our citizens, lawyers won't need to be involved, courts won't need to be involved, it will just happen that we all act in accordance with what is appropriate in terms or implementation of human rights," she said. [Wow! Just who is it who is being "misinformed and illogical"?]

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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29 August, 2011

Homosexual marriage bad for children

A BIGOT is someone who refuses to see the other point of view. Articles by Peter van Onselen and James Valentine in The Weekend Australian smeared opponents of gay marriage as bigots, yet both men refuse to see the other point of view -- and that means the point of view of the child.

Marriage is fundamentally about the needs of children, writes David Blankenhorn, a supporter of gay rights in the US who nevertheless draws the line at same-sex marriage. Redefining marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would eliminate entirely in law, and weaken still further in culture, the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child.

Here is the heart of opposition to same-sex marriage: that it means same-sex parenting, and same-sex parenting means that a child must miss out on either a mother or a father.

Marriage is a compound right under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; it is not only the right to an exclusive relationship, but the right to form a family. Therefore gay marriage includes the right to form a family by artificial reproduction but any child created within that marriage would have no possibility of being raised by both mother and father.

Obviously there are tragic situations where a child cannot have both a mum and a dad, such as the death or desertion of a parent, but that is not a situation we would ever wish upon a child, and that is not a situation that any government should inflict upon a child.

Yet legalising same-sex marriage will inflict that deprivation on a child. That is why it is wrong, and that is why all laws are wrong that permit single people or same-sex couples to obtain a child by IVF, surrogacy, or adoption.

Take Penny Wong, for example, as van Onselen did. She is an effective politician, but she can never be a dad to a little boy. She and her partner tell us they have created a baby who will have no father, only a mother and another woman. Their assertion is that a dad does not matter to a child.

As ethicist Margaret Somerville wrote in these pages, such assertions force us to choose between giving priority to children's rights or to homosexual adults' claims. Yet trivial arguments frame the gay marriage debate solely in terms of the emotional needs of adults, ignoring the child's point of view.

Such adult-centred narcissism raises the wider question: if gender no longer matters in marriage, why should number? If marriage is all about adults who love each other, by what rational principle should three adults who love each other not be allowed to marry? Academic defenders of polyamory are asking that question, and no doubt van Onselen will soon be slurring opponents of polyamory as binary bigots.

While warm, fuzzy writers such as Valentine can imagine no possible harm to society from gay marriage, the serious minds behind the movement occasionally let us glimpse their wider purpose. US activist Michelangelo Signorile urges gays to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely. He sees same-sex marriage as the final tool with which to get education about homosexuality and AIDS into public schools.

Sure enough, we now have empirical evidence that normalising gay marriage means normalising homosexual behaviour for public school children.

Following the November 2003 court decision in Massachusetts to legalise gay marriage, school libraries were required to stock same-sex literature; primary school children were given homosexual fairy stories such as King & King; some high school students were even given an explicit manual of homosexual advocacy entitled The Little Black Book: Queer in the 21st Century, which the Massachusetts Department of Health helped develop. Education had to comply with the new normal.

Beyond the confusion and corruption of schoolchildren, the cultural consequences of legalising same-sex marriage include the stifling of conscientious freedom. Again in Massachusetts, when adoption agency Catholic Charities was told it would have to place children equally with married homosexuals, it had to close. As Canadian QC and lesbian activist Barbara Findlay said, "The legal struggle for queer rights will one day be a showdown between freedom of religion versus sexual orientation". Blankenhorn warned, "Once this proposed reform became law, even to say the words out loud in public -- every child needs a father and a mother -- would probably be viewed as explicitly divisive and discriminatory, possibly even as hate speech."

Our parliament must say these words out loud, because they are bedrock sanity, and must accept that the deep things of human nature are beyond the authority of any political party to tamper with.

Marriage is not a fad to be cut to shape according to social whim. The father of modern anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, called marriage a social institution with a biological foundation. Marriage throughout history is society's effort to reinforce this biological reality: male, female, offspring. All our ceremonies and laws exist to buttress nature helping bind a man to his mate for the sake of the child they might create.

Not all marriages do create children but typically they do, and the institution exists for the typical case of marriage. Homosexual relations cannot create children or provide a child with natural role models; such relations are important to the individuals involved, and demand neighbourly civility, but they do not meet nature's job description for marriage.

As van Onselen notes, homosexual couples now enjoy equality with male-female couples in every way short of marriage. It must stop short of marriage, because the demands of adults must end where the birthright of a child begins. Marriage and family formation are about about something much deeper than civil equality; they are about a natural reality which society did not create and which only a decadent party such as the Greens, so out of touch with nature, would seek to destroy.

SOURCE



Australia: Victorian Police have power to demand Muslim women remove face veils

VICTORIAN police have the power to demand that Muslim women remove face veils, the State Government has ruled. And anyone who refuses to show their face can be arrested, a review of the Crimes Act has found.

The Herald Sun revealed in July that the Baillieu Government was seeking legal advice following a move in NSW to introduce special laws which meant people refusing to remove a burqa at police request faced up to a year in jail.

Police Minister Peter Ryan sought advice on the state of the current law from the Victoria Police and Department of Justice - finding police are already empowered to issue the order.

The ruling means Victorian police may make the demand of motorists when checking licences, or of those suspected of crime. There are no exceptions in the law for niqabs or other religious garb, balaclavas or motorcycle helmets.

"The Victorian Government has decided that the current laws are adequate and there is no current need for proposed changes to legislation," spokeswoman Justine Sywak said yesterday. "The Victorian Government will monitor the NSW legislation once it comes into effect."

The review came after a Sydney judge quashed a six-month jail sentence given to a burqa-wearing Sydney mother of seven, Carnita Matthews, who falsely accused a policeman of forcibly trying to remove her headdress.

A summary of the Victorian Government's legal advice, seen by the Herald Sun, shows that the law requires the face to be seen to verify identity.

"Current broad Victorian legislative powers are sufficient to allow police to request a person remove headwear for identification purposes," it says.

Under the Crimes Act, if a person is suspected of committing a crime, police may ask for name and address details. In order to be able to identify the person at a subsequent court appearance, the police officer needs to see the person's face once.

"This would therefore require a person to remove their headwear," the summary says. "If a person refuses to reveal their face, the police currently arrest the person until they can prove their identity."

The same rule applies to motorists. "Police must establish that the person whose name and image appear on the licence is in fact the person holding the licence," the summary says.

SOURCE



Australia: Leftist antisemites meet opposition

PEOPLE brave enough to venture out into the wet at Brisbane's South Bank yesterday found themselves caught in the crossfire of very abusive protesters.

What started out as a protest against chocolate store Max Brenner turned into a heated face-off with those who turned out to support the company.

Pitted against each other outside the chocolate shop, the two opposing groups screamed at each other for 45 minutes before police moved one of the groups on.

The aim of the protesters, made up of the Socialist Alternative and the Justice for Palestine groups, was to highlight the support of Max Brenner's parent company, the Strauss Group, for the Israeli military and its sale of provisions to it.

Chanting "Max Brenner, come off it; there's blood in your chocolate", the group held up placards accusing Max Brenner of supporting apartheid.

The counter-protesters, made up of students, Israeli community members and politicians, screamed at their opponents: "Go home, Nazis!"

Logan City councillor Hajnal Black was repeatedly restrained by police as she pushed through the barricade line yelling: "We don't want Nazis in this country!"

There was a big police presence at the protest yesterday after a demonstration outside a Max Brenner store in Melbourne last month led to 19 arrests and three police officers being injured.

A law student, Danielle Keys, organised the student contingent of counter-protesters on Facebook after seeing footage of the Melbourne protest.

"I don't have a particularly strong opinion either way on Israel or Palestine. What's more important is dealing with freedom of enterprise and freedom of association and freedom of religion in this country," Ms Keys said.

"This is really about the innate anti-Semitic attitudes of extremist groups like the Socialist Alternative. We're all turning up to say, 'No, in Australia we support tolerance.' "

The Queensland Liberal National Party senator, Ron Boswell, said Max Brenner was a popular and "legitimate business" that should not be targeted in this way. "I think it's absolutely outrageous," he said. "I don't mind if people don't want to buy Max Brenner chocolates, but there shouldn't be pickets and intimidation and rallies to stop people.

"I think people that are trying to hit it with a boycott and picketing it, particularly a Jewish business, reminds me of some of the things that happened in the early 1930s."

The Socialist Alternative website says protesters will target Max Brenner Chocolates because it is owned by the Israeli-based Strauss Group.

It says the corporate responsibility section of Strauss Group's website – since amended – pledged the company's support to the Israeli army, including providing soldiers with food for training and missions.

The Socialist Alternative says the company has supported a platoon "infamous for its involvement in the 2006 invasion of Lebanon and other atrocities".

Senator Boswell, who spoke about the boycotts issue in Federal Parliament last week, said the protest was driven by the "super-left".

He said anyone wishing to protest on the issue should do so outside the Israeli embassy. "But don't pick on someone that comes to a chocolate shop; seriously, that's petty," he said.

SOURCE



Why is evil paedophile 'The Beast of Sligo' free to roam British streets despite being jailed for 238 years?

One of Britain's most notorious paedophiles - dubbed the Beast of Sligo- is back on the streets and free to mingle with children and families. Irishman Joseph McColgan, 69 was spotted among families at a car boot sale in Plymouth, Devon

Evil McColgan was jailed for a record 238 years for repeatedly raping and beating his own children. He served just nine years before he was released. But in June 2010 when he was locked up again for 30 months for possessing child pornography. He has now been released early on licence before serving even half of his latest sentence.

McColgan is staying at the Lawson House bail hostel in Plymouth - directly opposite one of the city's main colleges. But he was tight lipped about his future and whether he would be staying in Devon - where he lived for some time after being released from Dublin's Arbour Hill jail. He said: 'I cannot talk about it. I am on parole. 'I don't know where I will live. I cannot talk to you.'

Among other offences, McColgan attempted to force his then nine-year-old son to have sex with his seven-year-old daughter. He also abused all four of his children with cattle prods and burning them.

But the evil paedophile was seen happily chatting to youngsters and adults at the car boot sale. He spoke with one young man as he tried to buy some spanners for his old bike and looked at stalls selling children's toys. Shoppers looking for a bargain were unaware of McColgan's notoriety as he potted around on his own before cycling back to the bail hostel.

Before his latest jail term handed out at Exeter Crown Court in June 2010, McColgan had been living in a small block of flats in the seaside town of Exmouth, east Devon. His home was yards away from a primary school and his immediate neighbours were unaware of his vile past - along with parents of young children who played in the street nearby. They were shocked when they discovered who he was and his horrific offending.

When Judge Graham Cottle jailed him at Exeter, he told McColgan: 'You are quite clearly a very dangerous man. 'You are a danger to children and upon your release I very much hope that you are supervised to the highest possible level by the authorities. 'If that is not put in place then children will continue to be at serious risk from you and your activities.'

Detective Constable Steve Harris, of Devon and Cornwall police, said McColgan was an arrogant man who could not accept his offending.

Yesterday McColgan was true to form branding those who made claims against him that he was grooming or watching children as 'liars'.

A National Offender Management Service spokesperson told the Mail Online today:'Sex offenders who are released from prison on licence will be supervised by the Probation Service and police in the community, such offenders are subject to strict licence conditions and can be recalled to custody if they breach their licence conditions.'

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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28 August, 2011

British counter terrorism officer sues London cops over De Menezes 'cover-up'

It is a disgrace that nobody was found guilty of anything in this matter. This gives hope that the truth may finally come out.

I have a pretty good idea what is involved. The openly Lesbian and rather aptly-named Cressida Dick was in charge of the operation. Her incompetence at controlling it caused the disaster. But because she is a "minority", she must be protected.

She was clearly promoted beyond her level of competence on "affirmative action" grounds so those who promoted her also need protection.

In my observation, Lesbians tend to be overconfident and often give the impression that they are more competent than they in fact are -- leading to others having to bail them out when they get it wrong. Exactly that would seem to be going on now

A Christian counter-terrorism officer involved in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes is suing the Metropolitan Police over allegations that senior officers tried to cover-up vital evidence.

He says his faith compelled him to blow the whistle and he is now claiming thousands of pounds for loss of overtime pay and promotions after Special Branch bosses allegedly sidelined him.

One allegation involves anti-terror officers perverting justice by replacing a chief inspector with another to give more favourable evidence at the 2008 inquest into de Menezes’s death.

An inquest jury returned an open verdict into the shooting of the 27-year-old Brazilian who was mistaken for a suicide bomber in 2005 – rejecting the police view that he was killed lawfully.

The detective sergeant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, first made his concerns known after he gave evidence under a codename at the inquest.

Two more serious concerns were reported about issues within the Met Police’s counter-terrorism department, known as SO15, last December that form the main part of his tribunal case.

He is also suing for religious discrimination and loss of earnings.

A senior source said: ‘The allegations are about such a sensitive subject that top brass are very worried about what could come out in a tribunal.’ ‘As this has been going on for such a long-time he was moved to another department and believes that his career was stalled because he spoke out.’

Mr de Menezes was shot seven times in the head at Stockwell Underground Station in South London after police mistook him for bomber Hussain Osman.

He was killed on July 22, 2005, the day after Osman and three fellow terrorists had gone on the run after trying to bomb the Tube in a follow-up attack to the July 7 London bombings which killed 52 and injured 977.

The jury at the inquest on the Brazilian electrician rejected the account of police marksmen, branding them ‘liars’, and sided with Tube passengers who said the officers failed to issue a warning before opening fire.

They returned an open verdict, which was the most strongly critical option available to them after the judge instructed them there was insufficient evidence to rule that de Menezes was unlawfully killed by police.

The Crown Prosecution Service ruled out criminal charges against anti-terror officers in 2006 and after the inquest in 2009. The Met was instead fined £175,000 under health and safety laws.

The Independent Police Complaints Commision has investigated one of the detective sergeant’s claims finding no evidence to support the allegation.

An IPCC spokesman said: ‘We received a referral from the Metropolitan Police Service on 4 January 2011, as a result of an allegation made by a detective sergeant to the Directorate of Professional Standards in December 2010. The allegation had also been the subject of employment tribunal proceedings.

‘The IPCC independently investigated the allegation, examining statements given to the Employment Tribunal and interviewing key people involved. The decision to call the DCI was made by counsel on the basis that he was better able to answer the questions. ‘The investigation found that there was no evidence to support the Detective Sergeant’s allegation.’

A Met spokesman said: ‘The Metropolitan Police Service can confirm that it has received two employment tribunal claims from a Detective Sergeant lodged at London Central employment tribunal offices.’

SOURCE. (Via Wicked Thoughts)



The Tea Party Moves to Ban Books (?)



"Much easier to deal with a stupid and authoritarian Right than with a freedom-loving Right"

So says the headline in The Guardian, but I’ve read the accompanying article three times, and I’m blowed if I can see where the headline comes from. The writer, Amanda Marcotte, says some disobliging things about the Tea Party (”they’re the most Bible-thumping-est part of the rightwing base as well as the most racist – these things tend to go together”), and then mentions that a high school in Missouri has banned a novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Banning books is, of course, always and everywhere a bad idea, but there is no suggestion that the Missouri parents are Tea Partiers or, indeed, part of any wider movement.

What interests me here is not one jejune article, but the almost desperate insistence by Lefties that the Tea Party is not, in fact, what it claims to be, viz a protest against big government. On both sides of the Atlantic, Tea Partiers are portrayed in broadcast and print media as a gaggle of stump-toothed Appalachian mountain men who can’t get used to the idea of a mixed race president. So far, though, the US electorate has refused to fall for it. To most American voters, the proposition that levels of taxation, spending and borrowing are too high seems remarkably moderate.

The book-banning trope is an old favourite. When Sarah Palin was chosen as a Vice-Presidential candidate, bogus emails about the books she had supposedly banned from Alaska’s libraries surged around the web, often finding their way into the MSM. At the same time, commentators leapt on her statement that CS Lewis was her favourite author. How typical, they sneered, that a small-minded Christian should enjoy children’s books. Never mind CS Lewis’s corpus of work on English literature and philosophy, never mind his adult fiction, never mind, indeed, the extraordinary quality of the books he wrote primarily for children. Lefties were smug in their certainty: their ignorance established Palin’s ignorance.

In Britain, we get the same line from our state broadcaster. In Beeb-world, “Right-wing” means something along the lines of “dim-witted xenophobe who has opposed every progressive reform since the Catholic Emancipation”. The idea that Rightists might in fact be libertarians who are sick of being bossed, nannied and expropriated by self-serving bureaucracies is simply too difficult. Much easier to press conservatives into the template of misogynist, anti-gay etc.

Still, the awkward fact remains that, in Britain and the US, levels of government spending and borrowing are way beyond what even Left-of-Centre parties would have considered acceptable as recently as four years ago. Most voters know it. Sooner or later, the MSM are going to have to engage with that argument.

SOURCE



Leftist antisemites in Australia too



It may be a popular haven for chocolate lovers but the Max Brenner store at Brisbane’s South Bank will also attract anti-Israel protesters today.

A Queensland senator last night branded a planned rally outside the Israeli company-owned chocolate cafe as “absolutely ridiculous”.

The Socialist Alternative and the Justice for Palestine groups are among those urging protesters to march to the store at 1pm, highlighting the parent company’s support for the Israel military which campaigners accuse of human rights abuses.

The website of the Socialist Alternative promotes the Max Brenner protest with the title: “Boycott Apartheid Israel! Boycott Max Brenner!”

Queensland Liberal National Party Senator Ron Boswell said Max Brenner was a popular and “legitimate business” that should not be targeted in this way. “I think it’s absolutely outrageous,” he said. “I don’t mind if people don’t want to buy Max Brenner chocolates but there shouldn’t be pickets and intimidation and rallies to stop people [visiting freely]. “I think people that are trying to hit it with a boycott and picketing it, particularly a Jewish business, reminds me of some of the things that happened in the early 1930s.”

The Socialist Alternative could not be reached for comment yesterday. A phone number listed on the website was not working and an email to the Brisbane office went unanswered yesterday.

However, the Socialist Alternative website says protesters will target Max Brenner Chocolates because it is owned by the Israeli-based Strauss Group. It says the corporate responsibility section of Strauss Group’s website – since amended – pledged the company’s support to the Israeli army, including providing soldiers with food for training and missions.

Socialist Alternative says the company has supported a platoon “infamous for its involvement in the 2006 invasion of Lebanon and other atrocities”.

In a statement issued earlier this week, Justice for Palestine activist Kathy Newnam said the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement aimed to bring an end to occupation of Arab lands. “When people know the truth then they will support the BDS Movement, just as people in Australia supported the boycotts and sanctions against apartheid South Africa,” she said, backing the Max Brenner protest.

Senator Boswell, who spoke about the boycotts issue in Federal Parliament this week, said the protest was driven by the “super-left”. He said anyone wishing to protest on the issue should do so outside the Israeli embassy. “But don’t pick on someone that comes to a chocolate shop; seriously, that’s petty,” he said.

Max Brenner Australia’s media relations company was contacted for comment, but did not provide a response.

The Brisbane store opened late last year. It is understood a Brisbane conservative student leader is organising a counter-protest in support of Max Brenner today.

It is not the first time Max Brenner’s chocolate cafes have been targeted by protesters complaining about Israel’s human rights abuses. A protest outside a Max Brenner store in Melbourne last month reportedly led to up 19 arrests and three police officer injuries.

The Victorian Government asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to examine whether the protest breached federal laws, causing “substantial loss or damage” to the Max Brenner business.

Proponents of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel say it is designed to make a legitimate political point about human rights.

But the issue has caused tensions within the Australian Greens. New NSW Senator Lee Rhiannon supports the campaign but Federal Greens leader Bob Brown says the federal party does not officially back it.

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd last month sat down for a coffee at Max Brenner Melbourne to voice his opposition to the boycott. “As an individual citizen - that is me, K. Rudd - I am here because I object to the boycotting of Jewish businesses,” he said at the time.

SOURCE



Australia: Federal politicians unlikely to support homosexual "marriage"

THE mounting evidence is that the Greens-led "bandwagon" strategy to introduce same-sex marriage backed by wide sections of the Labor Party has provoked strong resistance and is unlikely to prevail in the current parliament.

In a conspicuously under-reported event this week 30 MPs reported to parliament on the earlier motion moved by Greens MP Adam Bandt for community consultation, with 20 signalling their rejection of same-sex marriage and only seven MPs giving support to change the marriage law.

While it cannot offer a definitive guide, the omens are apparent. The same-sex marriage campaign is running into heavy weather guaranteed to get worse. Senior Labor ministers pledged to the same-sex marriage cause concede it is most unlikely to pass this term. This means further polarisation around the issue with Greens spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young telling The Weekend Australian she will proceed next year with her bill and aims to get a co-signatory from both Labor and Liberal.

The battlelines are now entrenched. The Greens will not cease their campaign from one parliament to the next and have made this cause pivotal to their identity. The Labor Party is dangerously divided, probably for the long run, over same-sex marriage, with a strong push at the coming ALP national conference to change policy to a conscience vote.

And Tony Abbott, in response to questions, said he viewed the issue as a policy matter. That means the Coalition will vote against same-sex marriage on policy grounds without a conscience vote (individuals have the right to cross the floor). Abbott's is the critical decision.

Frankly, it is hard to see parliament legislating same-sex marriage while Abbott is Liberal leader. Hanson-Young said she believed the new law "is achievable this term" but her proviso was a Coalition conscience vote.

Parliamentary sentiment at present would be opposed, with enough Labor MPs joining the overwhelming numbers on the Coalition side to vote against same-sex marriage. Despite the bandwagon effect driven by the gay lobby, the Greens, Get Up! and media organs led by the ABC and The Age arguing that religious prejudice is the main roadblock, a parliamentary majority may prove more difficult into the future than many assume.

There is, however, no doubt that opinion has moved and moved fast. This week's reports to parliament reveal strong backing for same-sex civil union recognition, notably from the Coalition side. This was simply not the case several years ago. The reality is that civil union recognition is there for the taking, but what was once seen as a significant advance for the same-sex cause is now largely dismissed as inadequate because the over-arching ideological goal has become same-sex marriage. Only time will tell whether this constitutes a serious tactical blunder.

Consider the position of former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull, one of the most socially progressive Liberals in the parliament. He is sympathetic to the same-sex cause, repeatedly urges his constituents to push for civil unions but stops short of advocating same-sex marriage.

The politics are long familiar but rarely learned: with the Labor primary vote less than 30 per cent this issue, like the republic or indigenous recognition, can be carried only by winning some conservative support. Yet the campaign from the Greens, Get Up! and much of the same-sex lobby only alienates conservatives. Anybody who doubts this should read this week's speeches from a range of Liberal, National and Labor MPs. These people, having voted in recent years to remove more than 80 items of discrimination against same-sex couples and being willing to back civil unions, are unimpressed at being branded as homophobic or religious nuts because they think marriage is a union between a man and a woman.

Within the Labor Party, the dawn of political realism is arriving. The past year has seen a succession of journalists and celebrities telling Labor as a "no-brainer" to back same-sex marriage. Indeed, a number of state ALP conferences have called for the ALP at the national level to change its policy. It is now obvious, however, that same-sex marriage is a flammable issue for a weakened Labor government. Julia Gillard has been aware of this from the start.

The first risk for Labor is that it will be seen, yet again, as following the Greens agenda, a perception now poison in the electorate. The second risk is that Labor would elevate an issue on which the party is irrevocably divided. How smart is that? If the ALP national conference backed same-sex marriage, as many want, the Labor Party would split because a significant number of MPs would not accept such direction on their vote. In addition, this policy switch would constitute such a repudiation of Gillard's declared personal opposition to same-sex marriage that it would shake her leadership. The idea is political madness. That it has been entertained for so long within so much of the Labor Party and its forums is a commentary on its present malaise.

The conscience vote alternative will anger both sides but its sponsors, such as senior minister Anthony Albanese, a backer of same-sex marriage, seek to defuse and manage Labor's divisions while striking a formula that can be presented as allowing the parliament to legislate same-sex marriage in future years. An interesting feature of the debate is that the Labor Left, like the Greens, has moved beyond civil union recognition and will accept only same-sex marriage as the goal.

This week Bandt said the "report back" debate was a "very important step along the road to full equality". He said the universal sentiment in feedback to him was: why shouldn't someone marry the person they love?

Yet sentiments reported by MPs varied widely according to the disposition of the local member and the electorate with huge differences, for example, between Melbourne and Bundaberg. Bandt said yesterday with only 30 MPs involved the numbers were "not necessarily an accurate poll" of parliament's stand.

More HERE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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27 August, 2011

Another false rape claim from Britain

Such claims never seem to stop in Britain. At least they have the benefit of undermining feminist claims that women should always be believed about such things. Good that Britain puts them in jail too. The accusations are so heinous that they should in fact get the same sentence that the man would have got if convicted



Two friends who falsely claimed they were raped were jailed yesterday because the suspect had photos of them all having a threesome. Jennifer France, 24, and Kelly Weston, a 27-year-old mother, posed for saucy snaps on Enes Gozalan’s bed after meeting him in a pub.

A court heard they later made the false allegations because both had long-term boyfriends and were ashamed of what they had done.

Their 30-year-old victim was arrested and kept in custody for 18 hours because the pair claimed they had been raped multiple times.

As soon as Mr Gozalan was arrested, he produced his mobile phone and told officers he had photos to prove his innocence. He later told detectives: ‘The photographs show the girls were having a good time. I do not understand why they would make up something so nasty.’

Carolyn Branford-Wood, prosecuting, told Southampton Crown Court that Weston attended a police station two days after the alleged attack. ‘Miss Weston had been out with her brother’s girlfriend, Miss France, for a family meal,’ she said. ‘During the course of the evening they met two Turkish men. The four of them had been in a pub together and left together. ‘Miss Weston went on to claim that she had been raped by one of these men at his home. 'The following day Miss France also informed the police that she too had been raped by the same man.’

But she said Mr Gozalan’s phone showed ‘not only him engaged in sexual activity, but the two women too’. He was released on bail following his arrest on October 18 last year and later informed no further action would be taken.

Weston and France were arrested in January on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. In two interviews, Weston maintained she had been raped but, in a third, she broke down when she was shown the photographs.

Miss Branford-Wood added: ‘She said she had gone to Mr Gozalan’s house and had consensual sexual activity with both him and Miss France. In police interview Miss France said she had made up the account to cover up the fact she had had sex with someone who was not her boyfriend.’

In a statement read to the court Mr Gozalan said the incident had ruined his life. He added: ‘I was shocked when I was arrested for rape. My first thought was that I was pleased I kept the photographs, which showed the girls were having a good time. ‘I have faced threats of attack following the allegations and have had sleepless nights.’

France, of Southampton, and Weston, of nearby Eastleigh, each admitted a count of perverting justice. They were jailed for 20 months.

The court heard Weston accepted she had done wrong and feared going to jail because she wanted to look after her two children. Natalie Wood, defending France, said she had felt guilty about having sex with Mr Gozalan because she too had a boyfriend.

Passing sentence, Judge Peter Ralls QC told the pair: ‘The allegations you have made are of the most serious kind and were entirely false. ‘Although there had been sexual activity between you and Mr Gozalan and between you together, there was no force and it was consensual. ‘By supporting one another with these wicked allegations, you have aggravated matters. This man was at serious risk of being imprisoned for a long period of time, perhaps ten years, perhaps indeterminately.’

SOURCE



Homosexuals killing their partners in Massachusetts

The recent homicide of Casey Taylor has rocked the LGBTQ community. Winthrop resident, John Lacoy, stands accused of killing Casey Taylor in his bedroom and then hiding the body beneath his porch for weeks. The murder is Winthrop’s first known domestic violence homicide in recent memory. Taylor’s body was found Tuesday August 9th at 429 Winthrop Street. Lacoy and Casey were reported to be in a relationship that was described by Assistant District Attorney Ursula Knight as both "intimate and volatile.” Lacoy, 47, allegedly killed his 36-year-old partner and then sent a text message saying that Taylor "won’t be able to leech off me anymore.” Lacoy is being held without bail and is due to return to East Boston District Court on September 9th. Lacoy’s defense says that the plaintiff did not murder the victim, but rather killed him in self-defense. Attorney John Tardif claimed that there was "a violent struggle" during which Lacoy was compelled to kill the other man in order to preserve his own life.

Taylor’s murder marks the third known gay male domestic violence homicide in 5 months in Massachusetts and gay men now constitute 20% of all known confirmed/suspected domestic violence homicides in Massachusetts in 2011 to date. In March, 41 year-old Malden resident Michael Losee turned himself over to authorities in the wake of the stabbing death of his husband, 55 year-old Brian Bergeron. In April, James Costello was arraigned on charges of assault and battery with a deadly weapon for the murder of David Walton, both lived in the same building in the Taunton area while the murder was committed at a campground in Provincetown.

Domestic violence advocates have identified at least 7 known confirmed/suspected LGBTQ domestic violence-related homicides in Massachusetts in the past 17 months, including Taylor. In August 2010, Eunice Field of Brockton confessed to killing Lorraine Wachsman, who she blamed for breaking up Field’s relationship with her (Field’s) former girlfriend. In February 2010, a jury convicted Nicole Chuminski of setting fire to her girlfriend Anna Reisopolous’s apartment in South Boston, killing two of Reisopolous’s young children.

Still under investigation is the death of Annamarie Rintala of Granby whose body was found in March 2010 in the basement of the home she shared with her wife Cara Rintala and their child. She had been strangled and suffered blunt trauma to the head. Cara Rintala had been arrested in 2008 for punching Annamarie Rintala in the back of the head.

Advocates agree that these numbers are likely to be lower than the actual number of LGBTQ domestic violence-related homicides. “Because so many LGBTQ individuals feel compelled to hide their sexual orientation and/or gender identity just to get by, homicides that were actually domestic violence related may have been erroneously reported as being committed by a roommate or friend,” said Toni Troop, Director of Communications at Jane Doe Inc.

More HERE



Outrage Over Religious Leaders’ Exclusion From 9/11 Memorial

As New York City’s ceremony to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11 draws closer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg made headlines Wednesday when his office confirmed no religious leaders would be allowed to participate in it.

The announcement drew particular outrage from Rudy Washington, who served as deputy mayor under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and organized an interfaith service at Yankee Stadium in the wake of the attacks. “This is America, and to have a memorial service where there’s no prayer, this appear to be insanity to me,” Washington told the Wall Street Journal. “I feel like America has lost its way.”

New York City Councilman Fernando Cabrera, a pastor at a Bronx church, said he was similarly shocked and disappointed that clergy would be excluded, feeling like it was “wiping out the recognition of the importance that spirituality plays on that day.”

But despite the fresh controversy, Bloomberg‘s position isn’t anything new. Religious leaders have never been included in the city’s official memorial. The Wall Street Journal reports:

"The mayor has said he wants the upcoming event to strike a similar tone as previous ceremonies. “There are hundreds of important people that have offered to participate over the last nine years, but the focus remains on the families of the thousands who died on Sept. 11,” said Evelyn Erskine, a mayoral spokeswoman.”

Still, Bloomberg critics have pointed out that the mayor has hardly taken a hands-off approach regarding religion. He was a vocal supporter of the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” and earlier this month said he thinks religious symbols should be allowed at the 9/11 museum, even as an atheist group mounted a legal challenge to block the inclusion of a cross formed from steel beams found in the World Trade Center rubble.

The flap over religious leader participation is just the latest fall out regarding the ceremony. Last week, The Blaze reported this story about the decision not to allow 9/11 first responders to attend the ceremony. The mayor’s office gave a similar reason at the time as well, saying first responders have not been invited to any of the previous nine services, but critics said this was the first year they were specifically barred from attending at all.

SOURCE



Joey Vento: An Assimilation Warrior

Michelle Malkin



Blunt. Brash. Bold. Politically incorrect. Unapologetically patriotic. Philadelphia cheese-steak king Joey Vento was all that and a side of freedom fries. The 71-year-old owner of Geno's Steaks died of a heart attack this week, but he reignited a national debate over radical multiculturalism that will burn for years to come.

Five years ago, Vento garnered national headlines when a local newspaper profiled his outspoken views on customers who couldn't speak English. He hung a sign in his order window that read: "This is America. When ordering, speak English." Though he never turned anyone away, the grandson of Italian immigrants informed hungry patrons that he reserved the "right to refuse service" to those he couldn't understand.

No menus in 10 different languages. No dumbed-down pictographs for the idiocracy. The choice at Geno's is simple: Sink or swim. Learn English or eat somewhere else. "If you can't tell me what you want, I can't serve you," Vento told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "It's up to you. If you can't read, if you can't say the word 'cheese,' how can I communicate with you -- and why should I have to bend? I got a business to run."

Vento's refusal to coddle triggered a tsunami of complaints from self-appointed civil rights leaders. The ululations of the aggrieved resounded from sea to whining sea.

For exercising his constitutionally protected free speech, both the Philadelphia City Council and Philadelphia Human Relations Commission launched political inquisitions against Vento. Yes, it really happened in the home of Independence Hall. Members of the government bodies demanded that Vento remove his bald eagle-adorned sign and threatened to revoke his business license. After 21 months of investigation, a marathon seven-hour hearing and hysterical testimony likening his innocuous 4-inch-by-9-inch sign to "Jim Crow laws," he was cleared of discrimination charges.

Plainspoken as ever, Vento understood full well why the multi-culti mob wanted to gag him: "I say what everybody's thinking but is afraid to say."

As a fellow Philly-born loudmouth, I cheered Vento on for years during his battles with the anti-assimilationists. He weathered the same old slings, arrows and accusations of being a "racist," "xenophobe," "nativist" and immigrant-basher -- despite the fact that generations of assimilated immigrants and naturalized Americans agree with him. The vast majority of Americans support English as the official language of the United States. Latino parents in California revolted against "bilingual education" mandates that stuck their kids in Spanish-only classes.

Generations of successful immigrant families in America know English is the language of success, not the language of oppression. Yet, politicians in both parties have pandered ceaselessly to the language-Balkanizers.

The Clinton administration gave us Executive Order 13166, effectively requiring all government agencies to provide translations into any language on demand. Rather than rescind the order, the Bush administration went after localities and forced them to provide foreign language materials. In 2004, the Bush administration ordered Harris County, Texas, to provide all voter registration and election information and supplies, including the voting machine ballot, in Vietnamese, as well as English and Spanish.

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Justice threatened to cut off federal funding to the state of Oklahoma over a state constitutional amendment proposal to designate English as its official language. The Obama DOJ also has ordered my home state of Colorado to protect the interests of "language minority populations" by funding free translators for any foreigners -- legal or illegal -- who sue in civil cases here. In the same vein, the Philadelphia Human Rights Commission that tried to silence Vento distributes pamphlets asking "Are you a victim of discrimination?" in seven languages.

"Progressive" politicians pandering for votes treat non-English speakers as hopeless victims of white hegemony, instead of beneficiaries of the American dream. By contrast, small-business man Joey Vento promoted a common culture, a common tongue and common sense. We need more assimilation warriors like him to challenge the infantilizing Babel Lobby.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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26 August, 2011

Liberal leader pledges to defend British human rights laws

Nick Clegg has opened up a new rift in the Coalition by pledging to resist Conservative attempts to change human rights laws in the wake of this month’s riots.

The Deputy Prime Minister said it is a "myth" that Britain’s human rights laws are harmful and insisted that they must not be abandoned. Mr Clegg’s argument, set out in a newspaper article, is at odds with David Cameron’s views.

In the wake of the disturbances in London and other English cities earlier this month, the Prime Minister signalled a fresh move to challenge the Human Rights Act, declaring that he would not be restrained by "phoney human rights" concerns.

The legislation, which enacts the European Charter on Human Rights, is blamed by many Conservatives for problems in the criminal justice system. Critics say that over-zealous application of the law leads the police and other authorities to put too much emphasis on the rights of criminals and suspects, and not enough on the needs of victims.

Without naming Mr Cameron, Mr Clegg criticised people who have allowed "a myth to take root that human rights are a foreign invention, unwanted here, a charter for greedy lawyers and meddlesome bureaucrats."

He added: "This myth panders to a view that no rights, not even the most basic, come without responsibilities; that criminals ought to forfeit their very humanity the moment they step out of line; and that the punishment of lawbreakers ought not to be restrained by due process."

This is not Mr Clegg’s first dispute with Mr Cameron over human rights laws. The Deputy Prime Minister has an ongoing disagreement with his Conservative colleagues over the issue of votes for prisoners. After a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights – which oversees the charter – Britain is obliged to let prisoners vote in general elections. A majority of MPs have opposed that change, and Mr Cameron has said he will listen to the Commons.

However, Mr Clegg – supported by Kenneth Clarke, the Conservative Justice Secretary – is insisting that Britain has no choice but to accept the court judgement and allow at least some prisoners to vote.

Mr Clegg accepted that some aspects of the court must be changed, but insisted that there is no question of the UK pulling out of the convention.

Some Conservatives want the UK to pull out of the convention, but Mr Clegg said that must not happen: "As we continue to promote human rights abroad, we must ensure we work to uphold them here at home. We have a record we should be proud of and never abandon."

The Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights have been "instrumental" to protecting British civil liberties, he said.

SOURCE



Abject failure of Australian Federal government's policies concerning native blacks

Nobody seems to have thought of treating them exactly the same as everyone else

THE head of the Productivity Commission, Gary Banks, has backed a Finance Department finding that the $3.5 billion the Commonwealth spends on indigenous programs each year yields "dismally poor" returns.

The Finance Department strategic review, released this month under freedom-of-information laws, found strong commitments and large investments of government funds had "too often" produced results that were "disappointing at best and appalling at worst".

Launching a biennial report that says results have deteriorated in seven of 45 measures monitored by the commission, Mr Banks said "plenty" of policies were not working. "A recent finance department strategic review of indigenous expenditure has made that clear," he said. "I don't think we should be too critical - it is a very hard area to get right. But the key is to be open about failure and to learn from it."

The report found a widening of the gap in the rates of child abuse between indigenous and other Australians, and that the imprisonment rate for Aboriginal men soared 35 per cent over the decade; for women it rose 59 per cent.

The Productivity Commissioner, Robert Fitzgerald, said one of most important things the government could do would be to ease overcrowding in indigenous homes.

The proportion of indigenous houses with more than twice as many people as bedrooms has remained unchanged at 27 per cent for five years. In the Northern Territory the proportion exceeds 60 per cent.

"What is absolutely unquestionable is that easing overcrowding helps educational outcomes, health outcomes, the home environment and makes communities safe," Mr Fitzgerald said.

SOURCE



Australia: Abhorrent crimes cloaked in official euphemisms

By negligent bureaucrats

CHILD abuse creates the darkest of shadows. The shadows enveloping the brief life of Felicia (The Weekend Australian, August 20) are perhaps the blackest imaginable.

According to Michael McKenna and Rory Callinan's reports Felicia, aged just 15, had been repeatedly sexually assaulted but not protected. In an extraordinary, almost unbelievable sequence of events, she was briefly removed from home but then returned to be assaulted again. Even after being admitted to hospital with marks around her neck, she was not protected from the crimes.

It is reported that in desperation, as she was about to be assaulted again, she secretly used her mobile phone to record the crime. Imagine being so desperate to be believed that you record yourself being assaulted and are prepared to allow others to hear the resultant degradation.

Even then, after what must have been the most humiliating of experiences, she was not made safe. The shadows must have appeared even blacker. She hanged herself on the veranda a day after her 16th birthday and just weeks after her friend Zoe had killed herself. She left a long suicide letter.

There is a great deal we must learn from Felicia's tragedy, if we have the courage to peer into the darkness. Her brief tortured life reminds us that, for some, being forced to live with abuse is worse than death.

This reflects a large theme from our research with children and young people who had been abused. They spoke of their helplessness, their inability to escape. Some described becoming hostages to the perpetrator, controlled by a terrorist, of having to submit in order to survive.

In spite of what we know of adult survivors of Stockholm syndrome, for example, how difficult it is for them even when free to confront the perpetrators, we fail to acknowledge the pain child victims of abuse suffer. Felicia did what many adults cannot do. She reported the crimes repeatedly. Even then she was not heard.

Crimes against children derail development, black out all hope. Yet many of our responses serve to minimise the seriousness, disguise the offences, and thus undermine the victim. Offenders committing crimes in circumstances similar to Felicia's might be charged with "maintaining a sexual relationship with a child". Yet if the perpetrator repeatedly raped his wife, it would be called rape.

Language that rewrites the crime, hiding the horror, may be a major contributor to the short sentences serious sex offenders receive. Only last month, the Queensland Attorney-General expressed his concern about such minimalist sentencing to the Sentencing Advisory Council.

The law is but one of the serial offenders. Psychiatry and psychology are littered with archeological remains of Greek words. Someone who rapes children may be called a pedophile, originally meaning "a lover of children". Countless hours are wasted, millions of dollars distributed to expert witnesses, while courts debate whether the child rapist is, was, or may temporarily be a pedophile. This from a discipline that, until recently, accused children of lying, fantasising, even being seductive.

The latest word of Greek origin to dominate child protection and minimise the damage done, is trauma, as in "children traumatised by abuse". Trauma means wound, injury. Toddlers may suffer injury when they fall over. As Felicia's short life shows, in many cases child abuse destroys childhoods, blows worlds apart. Of course, the meanings of words change. Unfortunately for children all the changes are aimed at reducing the seriousness of the problem. There are words of Greek origin that more accurately describe the destruction caused by child abuse. Catastrophe is one.

Weasel words also overwhelm child protection, where parents' rights to another chance to be a parent repeatedly take precedence over a child's only chance of childhood. The talk is about vulnerable families not vulnerable children. Children are not assaulted but "at risk". Such words corrupt. Try to find the words assault, violence and crime in child protection documents. Perhaps this is why, in Victoria, it was reported by the Ombudsman that children were recorded as having been seen when workers had merely telephoned the parents and why, in the Northern Territory, the Ombudsman reported "dummy" assessments on children.

There is much more to learn from Felicia's terrible death. Her sad story should remind us that not all the child abuse fatalities involve brutal murders of babies and toddlers, as with Dean Shillingsworth in NSW, the recent case of Hayley in Victoria, or Baby Peter in Britain.

Many child abuse deaths occur later in life. Many young people and adults who commit suicide were the victims of abuse as children. These suicides are not limited to women. There are calls for an inquiry into the Catholic Church in Victoria after Robert Best was sentenced to 14 years and nine months' jail for the abuse of 11 boys. At least 25 victims in the Ballarat area are reported to have killed themselves.

Another poignant theme is apparent in the opening paragraph of Felicia's suicide letter: "Dear everyone, I'm sorry it had to be like this. If there is any chance I can be [forgiven] I will much appreciate it." As our research has shown, children take responsibility for everything that happens, blaming themselves for the rapes and violence, for the problems that result. Felicia actually apologised to everyone for the trouble she had caused.

We need to apologise to her. We failed to protect Felicia when she was alive. We must not fail to respect her in death. Felicia's letter shines some light into the appalling darkness. What she wrote, what she suffered, the mistakes that were made, should not be buried with her.

SOURCE



Some things worked better in the past

Lawrie Kavanagh comments from Australia:

I GET a big laugh when I hear or read of today's intellectuals and dumb lefties screaming blue murder when they hear oldies like me calling for much tougher court penalties for young criminals, and the reintroduction of corporal punishment in schools.

You see, I happened to grow up in those long-gone, terrific days when the punishment fitted the crime . . . well most of the time . . . with me at least, anyway.

I'll tell you about those early days in a moment, but let me first make a suggestion that could curb a lot of youth violence and serious crime in this great state of ours. It's called National Service - or as we knew it back in the 1950s, "Nasho".

National Service taught a lot of us young blokes right from wrong, particularly where it concerned respect for other people.

You see, most of the blokes I served with at Wacol in Brisbane's outer southwest in the first intake of 1954 were pretty apprehensive about becoming Nashos. They didn't know what to expect.

This was particularly so in my hut because, whereas I had arrived at Wacol with a bunch of Maryborough mates, including my older brother, Marty, I was separated from them because I was taller than my mates, and put into a hut with tall blokes, mostly from north Queensland.

I had no worries about going into national service, because I'd been in the cadets at my school, St Brendan's College, Yeppoon, and even had a couple of weeks of army training in Sellheim Army Camp, west of Townsville, with heaps of other young blokes from all over the state.

So I was pretty surprised to hear my new Nasho mates expressing a bit of trepidation about being forced into army service for three months first up, then two weeks each year for the next two years.

But all that changed after the first few weeks of army training under a lot of very tough, but very fair, professional soldiers.

Things weren't going so well in the hut next to us, in A Company, because in that hut there was a very big and very aggressive bully who simply took what he wanted from the other blokes in the hut. You might be sitting on a stool polishing your uniform brass work or cleaning your SMLE .303 rifle, maybe with some food or soft drink beside you, and this jerk would just pick up your biscuit or sandwich and eat it, then grab your bottle of soft drink and swill it down. If you objected he would give you a push and walk off.

That went on for the first few days of the camp before one of the blokes came up with a brilliant idea. He had one of his hut mates sitting down polishing his brass work, with a half-full soft-drink bottle beside him, when the big bully walked up, grabbed the bottle and swigged down a couple of mouthfuls before turning red and almost spewing the fluid out of his mouth and all over the hut.

Why, you ask? The bottle was half-full of urine, placed there to bring the bully into line.

And as for those blokes who expressed trepidation in the early days of the camp, most went home with many happy memories of being in Nasho.

As far as corporal punishment at home and at school is concerned, for God's sake, bring it back. I copped it in both places and deserved it most of the time. A couple of times I didn't, but that was mainly from a young Irish nun, who hated being in Yeppoon and took a lot of that hatred out on me because I couldn't spell and was a very poor reader. Still am.

She once hit me on the head and the knuckles with a blackboard pointer stick for bad spelling. I had a big lump on my head but it was nowhere near the size of the swelling on my knuckles.

She sent me outside crying and while I was sitting on the steps still crying, another nun, Sister Laurence, who saw what had happened, came out and sat beside me. She put her arm around me and started crying too. I was about seven or eight at the time.

I sometimes got the cuts from other nuns, once for swimming in the nuddie with a couple of mates in a creek behind some houses from which people saw us and complained. Why swim in the nude? Because Mum and Dad wouldn't let us go swimming unless we had an adult with us, so they would hide our togs.

One time I was playing with some mates, swinging on a crane in the Yeppoon railway yards when it gave way, flinging me on to the railway line.

The station master, who had been talking to the local cop on the platform, trotted over, picked me up and led me by the ear over to the cop. The cop gave me a swift kick on the bum then dragged me across the road to the Railway Hotel, where he knew my old man was the manager. He told Dad I had broken the crane. Dad took off his leather belt and gave me what for.

The Christian Brothers at St Brendan's were pretty good, but if you stepped out of line it would really hurt because, unlike the nuns who used canes, the Brothers used leather straps with about six leather strips stitched together and about 30cm long. You either got those cuts on the open hand or, even worse, across the bum.

How did school punishment change my life? Well, after 76 years I have never had any trouble with the police except for that time at Yeppoon railway station. I've never been in jail or court.

I truly believe today's crime rate would tumble if they brought back National Service and re-introduced corporal punisment at school and at home. But I sure ain't holding my breath.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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25 August, 2011

Muslims have become too much even for the tolerant Dutch

The Dutch government says it will abandon the long-standing model of multiculturalism that has encouraged Muslim immigrants to create a parallel society within the Netherlands.

A new integration bill (covering letter and 15-page action plan), which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, reads: “The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society.”

The letter continues: “A more obligatory integration is justified because the government also demands that from its own citizens. It is necessary because otherwise the society gradually grows apart and eventually no one feels at home anymore in the Netherlands. The integration will not be tailored to different groups.”

The new integration policy will place more demands on immigrants. For example, immigrants will be required to learn the Dutch language, and the government will take a tougher approach to immigrants to ignore Dutch values or disobey Dutch law.

The government will also stop offering special subsidies for Muslim immigrants because, according to Donner, “it is not the government’s job to integrate immigrants.” The government will introduce new legislation that outlaws forced marriages and will also impose tougher measures against Muslim immigrants who lower their chances of employment by the way they dress. More specifically, the government will impose a ban on face-covering Islamic burqas as of January 1, 2013.

If necessary, the government will introduce extra measures to allow the removal of residence permits from immigrants who fail their integration course.

The measures are being imposed by the new center-right government of Conservatives (VVD) and Christian Democrats (CDA), with parliamentary support from the anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV).

As expected, Muslim organizations in Holland have been quick to criticize the proposals. The Moroccan-Dutch organization Samenwerkingsverband van Marokkaanse Nederlanders, which advises the government on integration matters, argues that Muslim immigrants need extra support to find a job. The umbrella Muslim group Contactorgaan Moslims en Overheid says that although it agrees that immigrants should be better integrated into Dutch society, it is opposed to a ban on burqas.

But polls show that a majority of Dutch voters support the government’s skepticism about multiculturalism. According to a Maurice de Hond poll published by the center-right newspaper Trouw on June 19, 74 percent of Dutch voters say immigrants should conform to Dutch values. Moreover, 83 percent of those polled support a ban on burqas in public spaces.

The proper integration of the more than one million Muslims now living in Holland has been a major political issue ever since 2002, when Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated for his views on Muslim immigration, and since 2004, when Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death for producing a movie that criticized Islam.

Muslim immigration to the Netherlands can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s, when a blue collar labor shortage prompted the Dutch government to conclude recruitment agreements with countries like Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. In the 1980s and 1990s, Muslims also arrived in the Netherlands as asylum seekers and refugees, mainly from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia.

There are now an estimated 1.2 million Muslims in the Netherlands, which is equivalent to about 6 percent of the country’s overall population. Moroccans and Turks comprise nearly two-thirds of all Muslims in the Netherlands. Most Muslims live in the four major cities of the country: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.

As their numbers grow, Muslim immigrants have become increasingly more assertive in carving out a role for Islam within Dutch society. For example, a documentary aired by the television program Netwerk in June 2009 reported that Dutch law was being systematically undermined by the growth of Sharia justice in the Netherlands.

In December 2004, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior published a 60-page report titled From Dawa to Jihad. Prepared by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD, the report says that the Netherlands is home to up to 50,000 radical Muslims whose key ideological aim is to target the Western way of life and to confront Western political, economic, and cultural domination.

SOURCE



Cameron’s cure will make British society sicker

The PM's post-riots promise of more intervention into troubled families is mad – it is precisely such intervention that devastated parental authority

In Britain, they start very young these days. An 11-year-old girl who has not yet started secondary school recently pleaded guilty to causing criminal damage. Nottingham Magistrates Court heard she had been seen on the streets of the city, 25 kilometres from home, hurling rocks at shop windows. Her father, in his daughter’s defence, explained: ‘She is going through a bad time at the moment and just ran away from her foster place. She has got a sister going through care.’

Numerous children between the ages of 11 and 14 participated in the looting of shops and the destruction of property that made news around the world. It signifies that childhood has gone astray and that adult authority has been tragically eroded.

Policymakers, politicians and opinion-formers point the finger of blame at parents. British prime minister David Cameron claimed the collapse of families was the principal driver. ‘The question people asked over and over again last week was “Where are the parents?”’, he asserted. Either ‘there was no one at home’ or ‘they didn’t much care or they lost control’.

Reading between the lines, policies designed to ‘improve’ parenting are likely to be one of the main government responses to the rioting. Cameron has promised to put ‘rocket boosters’ under efforts to turn round 120,000 troubled families and has warned that his government will be less sensitive to claims that its intervention was ‘interfering or nannying’. In reality, his policy represents a continuation of New Labour’s failed strategy of early intervention in family life. This was the great idea of former prime minister Tony Blair, who wrote at the weekend that the conclusion he reached while in government was that ‘we had to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage’, in order to prevent children from turning into criminals.

Cameron’s call to turn around 120,000 troubled families is an excellent example of what can most accurately be described as a fantasy policy. It is based on the delusion that governments and bureaucracies are capable of solving intimate family problems. But parenting is not an institution that can be reformed through state intervention. Parenting is a cultural accomplishment that is cultivated through decades of interaction in communities. That is why the billions of pounds spent so far on family intervention has failed to realise government objectives.

Worse still, the intrusion of officialdom may be partly responsible for the inability of many parents to control the behaviour of their children in the first place. For more than three decades, policymakers and the child-protection industry have sought to stigmatise and criminalise parents who punish bad behaviour. Official early-intervention programmes discourage parents from disciplining their children and often inadvertently undermine parental authority.

Campaigns against smacking put many parents on the defensive about exercising any form of restraint. Ironically, as politicians complain that parents don’t control their children, parents are lectured that discipline is repressive and results in dysfunctional children. The term ‘discipline’ now carries connotations of an abuse of power. A well-deserved smack on the wrist is represented as a crime against humanity.

The implicit objective of a no-smacking campaign is to restrain the exercise of parental authority. The wider agenda of influential anti-smackers is to undermine the right of parents to discipline their children at all.

No-smacking advocates believe that parents who withdraw affection as an alternative to smacking may cause even more damage to a child, and that punishments designed to make children feel uncomfortable or undignified are just as emotionally dangerous as the physical kind. The main outcome of their crusade is to undermine the capacity of parents to control their youngsters.

This problem is mirrored in the classroom. Many teachers are frightened of exercising their authority and find it difficult to maintain classroom discipline. Last week Brian Lightman, the leader of Britain’s head teachers’ union, said there were some ‘hard questions and ‘uncomfortable truths’ for parents to confront in the aftermath of the riots. Following politicians, he blamed dysfunctional parents who fail to draw boundaries for the looting and rioting. Sadly, he misses an important point – which is that teachers are no less responsible then parents, and more importantly that hard questions need to be asked of adult society as a whole.

Many parents of children arrested during the riots argued that they were not responsible for the violence. One mum of a 13-year-old Manchester boy who appeared in court exclaimed: ‘You can’t say what your child’s doing 24 hours a day, no matter what a good parent you are.’ Her statement was the cry for help of a mother who is all too conscious of the fact that she lacks the means to contain the misbehaviour of her child.

To put it bluntly, adults have become estranged from the task of taking responsibility for the younger generations. Yet the assumption of adult responsibility is critical for the conduct of community life and for the socialisation of children. It is our obsessively protective parenting culture that is responsible for the erosion of intergenerational relationships. Adults feel awkward and even anxious about interacting with other people’s young children. A crying five-year-old is no longer picked up and reassured by a nearby adult. A six-year-old boy who misbehaves will not be reprimanded by grown-ups passing by.

Children will always test the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. And that’s how it should be. However, today children’s behaviour is no longer contained and controlled through the response of adults. Childcare has become entirely privatised. The neighbour, the shopkeeper, the child’s friend’s father, and in many cases even the child’s aunt no longer have a role in the upbringing of a child.

Today, the real damage begins when children are as young as seven or eight. Ironically, the breakdown of adult solidarity, which is driven by the paranoid imperative of child-protection policies, leads to a situation where young people’s behaviour is uncontained by the intervention of responsible grown-ups. A long time before they become teenagers, children know they face no sanction from anyone other than their parents. Is it any surprise that a minority of teenagers will come to regard the absence of adult intervention as an invitation to bad behaviour?

The reluctance to restrain the conduct of youngsters really means evading the task of socialising younger generations. The failure to communicate a community’s traditions and values leads to its slow disintegration. Children, who have not been taught to take seriously the prevailing norms and values, are unlikely to feel strongly about adhering to a community’s conventions.

The display of destructive and anti-social behaviour during the riots is the inevitable outcome of the failure of socialisation. The fault lies not with parents, but with the failure of society to give meaning to adult authority.

One final point. It is important to emphasise that the origins of the weakening of parental control, the erosion of adult authority and the problem of socialisation, are not to be found within the affected communities. Government intervention in family life has done for the self-esteem of its target population what welfare payments have done to the recipients of its largesse. Tragically, well-intentioned social engineering and government policies have systematically devalued the right of parents to discipline their children. When the erosion of adult authority has undermined the capacity of grown-ups to socialise children, it is not surprising that far too many English children, who have little respect for their elders, also have little esteem for the law and the property of others.

If Cameron really wants mothers and fathers to become more effective childrearers, he should challenge all the petty laws and conventions that force parents on the defensive. He could do worse than launch a campaign to restore adult authority, and most importantly he needs to resist the temptation to try to colonise family life.

Constructing community life through fostering adult responsibility for the young is the only way forward for England.

SOURCE



Apologies

Last June, Missouri Congressman Todd Akin made a speech in which he said that liberalism involved “hatred of God.” Needless to say, the professionally touchy were inflamed, and the Congressman was quick to issue an apology. Some local pastors weren’t satisfied with that, however, and sought a face-to-face meeting with Akin at his office. Maybe an apology doesn’t take the first time, or maybe being a follower of Jesus today means never saying anything to offend. Is that what Jesus did?

I don’t know exactly what Akin meant by comparing liberalism with “hatred of God,” but perhaps he was thinking of the liberal penchant for seeing all problems as social, with a liberal government providing solutions, justice, prosperity, etc. In other words, a liberal government replaces God as the source of all blessings. And do we not read in Scripture that those “who are not with Me are against Me?” So maybe Akin’s thinking was along those lines. Maybe not. I’m not losing any sleep about it. What bothers me is not what Akin said, but the fact that he seemed to feel it necessary to apologize for it.

It’s easy to make an off-the-cuff remark that offends someone, and in that case, an apology may, or may not, be in order. Akin’s remarks, as I understand it, were given in a radio interview, and thus were, to some extent, spontaneous. But Akin is a politician, and not likely to deliberately insult possible constituents. If his comment caused offense to some, so what? In recent years, it has become routine for public figures to say things that they subsequently apologize for, as though it were an offense against good manners and etiquette to express ideas which some people don’t like. There’s a significant difference between deliberately insulting someone, or some group, and then apologizing, and stating your beliefs, which may annoy or irritate some sensitive souls. In the latter case, why should an apology be necessary? For a politician, especially, to never utter a word offensive to anybody, would require him to speak nothing but the most banal platitudes. Come to think of it, that would offend me! Apologize!!

So to simplify matters, I have produced the following statement, which any public figure is free to copy and hand out after any public utterance that could conceivably hurt someone’s feelings. Feel free to modify it to suit your own situation as needed.

I (name), speaking for myself or anyone associated with me or acting on my behalf, or on behalf of any organization with which I have ever had any connection, do hereby offer the most sincere and abject apologies for anything that I, or we, say, have said, or might say in the future, that anyone, or any group, anywhere, at any time, might, under any circumstances, find offensive, annoying, irritating, irksome, or distressing. We also abjectly apologize to any who are psychically or emotionally wounded by our failure to say something they think we should have said, as well as to those who find our apologies offensive and hurtful. Our remarks--or maybe the lack of them--were inappropriate, and we are really, really, sorry.

SOURCE



Where but in France could a chauvinist sexual predator still be feted as the nation's saviour?

Poor Dominique Strauss-Kahn! He lost his job as head of the International Monetary Fund and his chance to be President of France all because a New York chambermaid made a false accusation of rape. Now that he has been released he can pick up the pieces of his political career again.

This about sums up the views of many members of the oh-so-sophisticated French political class, particularly in the Socialist Party, to which the enormously wealthy Mr Strauss-Kahn (or ‘DSK’, as he is affectionately known) belongs. They talk of him as a victim who has just emerged from a nightmare not of his own creation.

His close friend Martine Aubry, a leading Socialist candidate for the Presidency, describes his release as ‘great news’, and says he remains ‘useful to France’.

Her main rival, Francois Hollande, says he is ‘delighted’. The release, he added, came ‘after three months of an unbearable ordeal’. This ordeal, by the way, was mostly spent in a £35,000-a-month New York townhouse, to which fancy restaurants delivered expensive delicacies to sustain poor DSK in his agony.

It is probably too late for him to throw his hat into the ring as a Socialist Party candidate for next year’s Presidential election. More likely, he will be a kingmaker. Should the Socialists win, he may end up in the Cabinet. Should they lose, he could be their candidate next time around.

In other words, there is a general feeling, especially among his colleagues, that although his paintwork may be a bit chipped in places, Mr Strauss-Kahn is ready and fit for action. Generous souls who are not parti pris say that, as he has not been convicted of any crime, it is only right that he should be allowed back into the fold.

But is it? As the wonderfully superior French newspaper Le Monde conceded yesterday, the decision not to prosecute was not a declaration of his innocence. A sexual act, as the phrase goes, took place. DSK claimed it was consensual; the chambermaid, Guinean-born Nafissatou Diallo, said it was rape. It was his word against hers.

Unfortunately — or fortunately for Mr Strauss-Kahn — Ms Diallo’s reputation for veracity was somewhat undermined by her having mentioned monetary gain in a taped conversation with a ‘fiancé’ who happened to be languishing in a detention centre in Arizona. When seeking asylum in the United States she had told a story of being gang-raped in Guinea that turned out to be untrue.

Who, other than the two people involved, can say what really happened in that hotel suite, for which the ever-frugal socialist DSK reportedly paid a mere $3,000 a night? I hope it is not unbearably prudish of me to suggest that, if it was not rape, neither was it pleasant: cursory and possibly exploitative sex with a woman he had met only a few moments before.

Nor was this a fleeting aberration. Mr Strauss-Kahn’s general attitude to sex seems to be that of a rutting bear. We have read stories — many of them previously suppressed by the self-censoring French media — of prostitutes in Paris and New York, of multiple extra-marital liaisons, and of habitual visits to a ‘swingers’ club’.

More seriously, a writer called Tristane Banon alleges that DSK tried to rape her when she interviewed him as a 22-year-old journalist in 2003. Her difficulty in making the charge stick may be lack of evidence after so long a period, though she did make the allegation without naming him during a television programme in 2007.

Ms Banon’s mother, a socialist politician called Anne Mansouret, says she persuaded her daughter not to press charges at the time for fear it would tarnish her career. Now, the mother has the bit between her teeth. It turns out that she once had a fling with Mr Strauss-Kahn — a consensual encounter on this occasion in which, so she suggests, he behaved with the ‘obscenity of a soldier’. What do they see in him?

A word should be said about his (third) wife, Anne Sinclair, who is even richer than him. If she were English she would long ago have cut off his suit sleeves, if not something much more important to him. As a French woman she tolerates his serial and sometimes brutal infidelities because that is what French women of her class and background are usually supposed to do.

Here we come to the nub of the argument. The supposedly sophisticated French elite regards Anglo-Saxon attitudes to sex as repressed and judgmental, and our newspapers in particular as prurient. The French believe themselves to be liberated, and far more advanced.

But isn’t it the French who are in fact more primitive, indulging and even encouraging chauvinist monsters such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who treats women as though they were chattels, to be consumed, despoiled and discarded? Almost his only vocal critics in France have been younger feminists who do not go along with the old notion that men — and in particular rich and powerful men — can do what they like in private in the certain knowledge that French newspapers will not write about their abuses.

DSK may like to see himself as a modern-day Don Juan, albeit an elderly and portly version. In Mozart’s version, the libertine is a pitiless seducer, a nobleman who thinks he can have whatever he wants, and is not even superficially attractive. He finally gets his comeuppance.

Whether Mr Strauss-Kahn will ever do so is much more doubtful. He is being hurriedly rehabilitated by the political class. His financial acumen and experience are celebrated by his defenders. France has need of DSK, is their message. It can’t do without his great brain.

Well, I don’t care how intelligent he is. If I were French, I would not trust this man in any matter to do with politics or money or life. I think he is greedy and unscrupulous, and I don’t believe those defects are restricted to the bedroom.

Some people say that at least parts of the French media regret that they concealed his behaviour for so long. A few even suggest that in future French newspapers will not be so indulgent, and that their cosy and protective relationship with the political class is coming to an end. I wonder. It will take a cultural revolution to bring about such a transformation.

All I can say is that I am glad to live in a country where a man like Dominique Strauss-Kahn would not be cosseted for years by the media, and then almost instantly forgiven by the political class. I’m sure that we may sometimes produce such politicians, I’m sure they exist, yet I don’t believe they would be allowed to thrive in Britain.

But I am also perfectly aware that there are some people — some politicians, some judges, some of the rich and powerful — who only wish that our newspapers were as accommodating and compliant as the French ones, and who are in the process of doing their utmost to bring that about.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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24 August, 2011

Almost Everything We're Taught Is Wrong

John Stossel

We grow up learning that some things are just bad: child labor, ticket scalping, price gouging, kidney selling, blackmail, etc. But maybe they're not.

What I love about economics is that it can show that what seems harmful is actually good for society. It illuminates what common sense overlooks. This is all covered in the eye-opening book "Defending the Undefendable" by economist Walter Block.

Most people call child labor an unmitigated evil. David Boaz of the Cato Institute and Nick Gillespie of Reason.tv say that's wrong. "If we say that the United States should abolish child labor in very poor countries," Boaz said, "then what will happen to these children? ... They're not suddenly going to go to the country day school. ... They may be out selling their bodies on the street. That is not an improvement over working in a t-shirt factory."

In fact, studies show that in at least one country where child labor was suddenly banned, prostitution increased. Good economics teaches that as poor countries get richer and freer, capital investment raises the productivity of labor and child labor diminishes. There's no shortcut through government prohibition -- unless you like starvation and child prostitution.

What about price-gouging? State laws attempt to prevent people from charging "unconscionable" prices during emergencies.

"If I'm in the neighborhood of Hurricane Katrina," Boaz said, "what I want is water and ice and generators. ... If you are in Kentucky (and) you've got 10 generators in your store, are you getting up at 4 a.m. to drive all day to get to Louisiana to sell these generators if you can only sell them for the same price you can sell them for in Kentucky? No, you're going to go down because ... you can sell them for more."

Also, if prices rise during an emergency, that's a signal for people to buy only what they most need. That leaves more for everyone else. If the price remains low, an incentive to conserve is lost.

Ticket scalpers are seen as sleazy guys who cheat you by marking up the price of tickets. Profits go to middlemen instead of the performers. What good could they possibly do? "I like to think of ticket scalpers as the guy who stands in line so that I don't have to," Gillespie said. Time spent in line is part of the ticket cost. Scalpers let you pay entirely in money, rather than partly in valuable time.

Most people say that selling body parts is wrong. "It also seems wrong to have people dying because they can't get a kidney," Boaz said. Some 400,000 Americans are on a waiting list now for a new kidney, and they are not allowed to pay for one. "We sell hair. We sell sperm. We sell eggs these days." Boaz added.

Gillespie added, "The best way to grow the supply and allow more people to live is to allow the market to price those organs."

Maybe the most counterintuitive position argued on my show was that blackmail should not be a crime. Blackmail (unlike extortion) is the demand for money in return for withholding information. Robin Hanson, a George Mason University economist, defends blackmail.

"The thing you're threatening when you're threatening blackmail (is) gossip," Hanson said. "If it should be all right to tell people, it should be all right to threaten to tell people." What we don't like, however, is the blackmailer saying, "Pay me to keep quiet." "But the effect of that is to make people behave," Hanson said. "If we (allow) blackmail, people behave even more because they are even more afraid of what might happen if they don't."

Maybe Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff would have been caught earlier? "That's right. ... Blackmail is actually a form of private law enforcement." Also, since gossip is free speech, blackmail is simply selling the service of not engaging in free speech. Why should that be outlawed?

I subtitled my last book, "Everything You Know Is Wrong." I was exaggerating, of course, but many things we're taught are fallacies. That's why I like economics. It explodes fallacies.

SOURCE



I Think Therefore We Should

Mike Adams

The most dangerous ideas in contemporary political discourse are easily identified. While they often take hours to explain they are usually introduced in a conversation beginning with these four words: “I think we should.” If you do not yet know what I am talking about then a brief example is warranted. The following comes from a recent conversation I had with a self-identified liberal:

“I think we should provide all of our citizens with national health care. I think we should continue to provide financial security for the elderly. I think we should also have national day care. And I think we should provide a free college education for every American.”

What I have come to refer to as “I think we should” morality is not a completely bad thing. But it is, quite literally, a half-bad thing, which means it is also a half-good thing. The good half of “I think we should” morality is the “I think” part. Let me illustrate with a few examples:

* When a person says, “I think providing citizens with health care is a good idea,” there really isn’t anything wrong. The person can always find someone who needs health care. And he can take the needy to the doctor if he so desires. In fact, he can take as many of them as he wants as long as they are willing to go.

* When a person says, “I think providing financial security for the elderly is a good idea,” there is no problem. The person who says this undoubtedly knows someone who is elderly. And he is certainly free to take out his check book and write a check to that elderly person. In fact, he can take care of as many elderly people as he wants as long as they are willing to accept his generosity.

* When a person says, “I think providing day care is a good idea,” there is no problem at all. The person who says this undoubtedly knows someone who has children. And he is certainly free to take care of his friends’ children whenever he perceives that they have other responsibilities to which they must attend. In fact, he can take care of as many of his friends’ children as he wants as long as their parents are willing and have trust in his supervision.

* When a person says, “I think providing free college education is a good idea,” there is no problem at all. The person who says this undoubtedly knows someone without a college degree. And he is certainly free to send that person to college if he would like. In fact, he can spend his life savings sending other people’s kids to college if he has none of his own. I know of a woman in Mississippi who did just that. She lived modestly - largely because she scrubbed toilets for a living. But she found a way to give.

The problem with all of these wonderful sentiments is not that they begin with “I think.” The initial thought is not the problem. It is that the initial thought is followed by the two words “We should.” This is problematic because the word “we,” in reality, means “you.” In other words, the proponent of “I think we should” morality is less interested in doing charitable things than he is in forcing you to perform his charitable acts for him. And so it is appropriate to ask these two questions of anyone any time he begins to lecture you with a sentence beginning with the four words “I think we should”:

1. What are you presently doing to alleviate the problem?

2. Why should the government force others to do things you are unwilling to do yourself? It is unlikely that the person will be able to identify anything he is doing to alleviate the problem. And his answer to the other question will be that no one will do these things unless compelled by the government. In other words, he will have admitted that, in his view, government, not God, must redeem man and save him from his sins of omission.

Confronting “I think we should” morality is a good way of getting liberals to admit that they favor legislating morality. It is also a good way of getting them to admit that there is a crack in the “Wall of Separation” between Church and State.

SOURCE



Yet more false sex allegations in Britain

Daughter of racehorse trainer at centre of custody battle was coached to claim her father had sexually abused her

A former jockey and racehorse trainer at the centre of a child custody scandal lied that her former boyfriend was a paedophile, a High Court judge said yesterday.

Vicky Haigh made up the allegations and even coached her seven-year-old daughter to repeat the claims, he added.

Sir Nicholas Wall, the country’s most senior family judge, said that Miss Haigh should be named and shamed and her former partner, David Tune, freed from the false smear that he is a child abuser.

He made the damning remarks as he jailed another woman, Elizabeth Watson, who acted as an ‘investigator’ on Miss Haigh’s behalf, sending ‘aggressive and intimidating’ e-mails and internet postings about social workers involved in the case.

Watson was given a nine-month sentence for contempt of court. The ruling was the culmination of a long-running row involving Miss Haigh which started with her allegations about her boyfriend and social workers.

Initially the secrecy of the family courts meant the public were not allowed to know any of the facts of the affair.

But John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP who named Ryan Giggs in the commons as a footballer with a privacy injunction to hide an affair, named Miss Haigh using Parliamentary privilege.

The MP said Haigh had been unfairly put under threat of imprisonment by Doncaster Council for speaking to a Westminster meeting about family law issues. It led to sympathetic portrayals of the then heavily pregnant Miss Haigh.

But yesterday that changed when Sir Nicholas made his judgement public and ordered that Miss Haigh, 40, could now legally be named, as could Mr Tune, and that Doncaster council be identified as the employer of the social workers in the case.

The judge ordered that the seven-year-old girl’s identity must remain secret and she can be known only as ‘X’. Sir Nicholas said: ‘Allegations of sexual abuse were first made by the mother and not by X. These were false and the mother knew them to be false. X was coached by the mother to make allegations of sexual abuse against the father.’

He added that two judges examined the case at previous High Court hearings and both found that Mr Tune was not a paedophile and had not sexually abused his daughter.

Sir Nicholas said: ‘The child’s mother is wholly unable to accept the court’s verdict and, with the misguided assistance of Elizabeth Watson has unlawfully and in breach of court orders, put into the public domain via email and the internet a series of unwarranted and scandalous allegations about the father and others.

‘She has repeated the untruth that the father is a paedophile and – without a scintilla of evidence - has attacked the good faith of all the professionals who had had any contact with the case.

‘These proceedings have had a serious effect on the life of the father and have threatened the stability of the child. Her mother’s actions are wholly contrary to her interests.’ The judge said that Watson had identified parties in the case in defiance of court orders and had criticised social workers and police.

He said she had referred to ‘social disservices’ and ‘abductees’ who ‘snatched children’ and ‘tortured innocent parents’.

Sir Nicholas said: ‘You have seriously breached an order and seriously compromised the well-being of a child. There is no question of misunderstood. You knew exactly what you were doing – writing the most aggressive, intimidating emails calling everyone in sight corrupt.’

He added: ‘She thought herself above the law. That will not be tolerated.’

SOURCE



Australian mother explains why she made her son wear 'I'm a thief' sign

A MUM has ignited a national debate after making her 10-year-old son stand in a busy park wearing a sign saying, "Do not trust me. I will steal from you as I am a thief".

The mother, who confessed to having a criminal past when she was young, said it was to ensure he did not follow in her footsteps, the Herald Sun reported.

"I have lived a life that most people would not dream of and I am trying to stop my child from going down the same road as I did, because even though I have sorted myself out, it took me 10 years to do," said the single mother of three children.

The woman said she had tried everything to stop her son shoplifting and stealing - visits to courthouses, chats with police, visits to police cells and even a trip to a youth detention centre.

Finding a stash of chocolates in her son's drawer after a trip to the corner shop to buy milk last week was the last straw.

"I have put him into courses, I have had counselling done, I have done everything I can," she said. "I think he has learnt his lesson. I think that hour (in the park) is enough for him to go: 'I don't ever want to do this again'. "I did the same thing as my son, shoplifting as a teenager, and then it escalated because I didn't have a mum there to teach me right from wrong."

The woman said her son had been stealing since he was seven.

The mum's actions made headlines, becoming the No.1 story on websites and dominating talkback radio from Melbourne to Townsville, where the family live. Her parenting style simultaneously appalled and inspired parents around the nation.

A surprisingly large number of people praised her and called for the cane to be reintroduced. Many also sympathised with her.

But Queensland University parenting director Prof Matt Sanders said the "shame and humiliation" approach was unlikely to have the desired effect. "There's almost no evidence that I'm aware of that this kind of shame and humiliation approach to kids is effective, and it can very easily backfire," he said. "If it doesn't work, what's your back-up? You've already pulled out the big guns."

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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23 August, 2011

Australia: Do-gooders attack a responsible parent



A MOTHER made her child sit in public with a sign pinned to his shirt that said: "Do not trust me. I will steal from you as I am a thief."

The boy, thought to be aged about 10, was also wearing Shrek ears and writing lines in what appeared to a form of public punishment, according to dozens of witnesses who contacted the Townsville Bulletin.

The boy spent almost an hour on Sunday near a popular waterpark in Townsville while his family ate lunch nearby, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Diane Mayers was so "horrified" when she saw the boy she contacted Child Safety Services to intervene.

Ms Mayers, who worked with the department in the past, said any long-term effects of public humiliation would have been much worse than physical abuse.

"The boy just kept his head down and was staring at the ground," she said. "The parents had gone to all the trouble of printing two copies of the sign - one for the back and one for the front - and laminating them. A lot of work had gone in to it.

"A lot of people walked past and were laughing at him, including boys who would have been his age.

"At one point the boy had taken off the Shrek ears. My daughter walked past and heard the mother say, 'Put them back on or I'll smack your head in'."

SOURCE



Smacking Down Progressives of Pallor

Michelle Malkin

Is there anything more condescending than a porcelain-skinned Hollywood liberal who attempts to show her presumed solidarity with minorities by referring to them as "people of color"?

Yes, there is: Two porcelain-skinned liberals attempting to show their allegiance to "diversity" by attacking "people of color" who happen to disagree with their radical politics.

Such an exchange took place on a little-watched television show on Al Gore's obscure cable network Wednesday night. I am spotlighting the diatribe for you not because the speakers involved hold any sway with the American electorate, but because paternalistic racism is so prevalent among the media-entertainment elite.

And it's about time someone knocked these self-appointed Saviors of the Oppressed off their high horses.

Actress Janeane Garofalo -- a former comedian turned Republican-bashing sourpuss -- appeared on the Current TV talk show of disgraced former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Because she has no actual career achievements or noteworthy projects to discuss, the pair turned to one of their favorite topics: bashing the tea party movement, with an ample dish of vast-right-wing-conspiracy-mongering on the side.

Garofalo singled out GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, a black businessman and grassroots favorite, because he is a "person of color." According to the starlet, Cain launched his 2012 bid "because he deflects the racism that is inherent in the Republican Party, the conservative movement, the tea party certainly. (In) the last 30 years, the Republican Party has been moving more and more to the right, but also race-baiting more."

She certainly knows about baiting. For the past six years, with gritted teeth and throbbing veins, she has indiscriminately attacked Republicans as "racist," "rednecks" and "partisan hacks who are always on the verge of punching somebody or always behave as if they've just been cut off in traffic." Projection for breakfast, anyone?

From the safety of her Tinseltown cocoon, she has lashed out bitterly at tea party activists as "teabagging rednecks" and assailed their fiscal conservative activism as "f***ing redneck d**chebaggery. Unmitigated d**chebaggery" -- all while complaining about the lack of civility in politics. In 2009, Garofalo ignored a personal invitation from Texas tea party activist Katrina Pearson and other black conservatives to attend one of their rallies and meet reality.

The last thing progressives of pallor want to deal with, you see, are "people of color" who think for themselves, refuse to be hyphenated Americans and reject left-wing orthodoxy on everything from entitlements to bailouts to Big Labor, immigration, social issues and racial preferences.

All of Garofalo's and Olbermann's non-white friends and colleagues (however few that may be) think the same slavishly homogenous thoughts they do about preserving the welfare state, coddling union thugs, opening up the borders and whitewashing the eugenics-grounded abortion racket. There couldn't possibly be minority conservatives who think otherwise. And if they do, the progressives of pallor comfort themselves, such aberrant creatures must only be able to embrace free-market principles because they were brainwashed, paid off or born stupid.

Thus did Garofalo float her nefarious theory that Cain "is being paid by somebody to be involved and to run for president so that you go, like, 'I love that, that can't be racist. He's a black guy, a black guy asking for Obama being impeached.' Or 'it's a black guy who's anti-Muslim. It's a black guy who is a tea party guy.'" What puppet-master could have engineered Cain's candidacy, according to Garofalo? "The Koch brothers or Grover Norquist or any anything. It could even be Karl Rove."

Er, never mind that Beltway establishment King Rove has trashed self-made outsider Cain and belittled him as a mere "talk radio guy."

Garofalo forged ahead with her identity-politics smears: "There may be a touch of Stockholm syndrome in there, because anytime I see a person of color or a female in the Republican Party or the conservative movement or the tea party, I wonder how they could be trying to curry favor with the oppressors."

I've heard more than 20 years of this oppressive windbaggery from do-gooder liberals who treat my unhyphenated American brothers and sisters and me as treacherous puppets for The Man. Their smug refusal to acknowledge free will, individual choice and true diversity of thought confirms that race-obsessed liberals remain the most unrepentant and odious racists of all.

SOURCE



Airport Security vs. The Constitution

Government critics deserve their day in court

You wouldn't think Aaron Tobey and Donald Rumsfeld have much in common. Tobey is the guy who stripped down to his shorts at the Richmond, Virginia airport last December. Rumsfeld is the former Defense Secretary under George W. Bush. Tobey, who was protesting the invasive airport screening practices that have outraged a good portion of the traveling public, is a stickler for constitutional rights. Rumsfeld? Not so much.

The two of them, however, are united by a common case: Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. The other day a federal appeals court said two Americans who claimed to have been tortured by U.S. armed forces in Iraq can sue Rumsfeld for violating their constitutional rights. The court relied on the Bivens precedent. Bivens just happens to be the hook Tobey is hanging his hat on in his lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole.

Basically, the 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Bivens says you can seek monetary damages for the violation of your constitutional rights. That's what Tobey is doing, with the help of the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute.
To paraphrase Kevin Bacon in A Few Good Men: These are the facts of the case, and they are almost entirely undisputed:

On Dec. 30 last year, Tobey was in pre-flight screening when he was directed toward one of those special imaging machines that can see through clothing. Tobey paused to strip off his T-shirt and sweatpants. On his torso he had written: "Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated."

A Transportation Security Officer told Tobey he did not need to disrobe. Tobey said he wanted to in order to express his views. At that point, the TSO radioed for assistance. Two Richmond police officers arrived, cuffed Tobey, and hauled him away. Tobey isn't the only person who has gone through screening in his underclothes—but he is the only one who did it quoting the Constitution, and he is the only one who has been arrested for it.

He spent the next 90 minutes in handcuffs while police officers and FBI terrorism task-force agents questioned him, berated him, and threatened to tell on him by calling administrators at his university. They threw some of his personal belongings in the trash—his toothbrush and highlighter would be considered contraband in jail, they explained. Finally they issued him a summons for disorderly conduct before releasing him to catch his flight.

In court a few days later, prosecutors dropped the charge, recognizing that Tobey's peacefully taking off his T-shirt and sweats did not rise to the level of disorderly conduct. (Virginia law says such conduct must have a tendency to cause violence.) Now Tobey is suing over violation of his First, Fourth, Fifth, and 14th Amendment rights. Along the way he has picked up some notable supporters: the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, and civil-liberties champion Nat Hentoff.

Tobey claims his arrest was unjustified and unconstitutional, and the blame for it falls in part on Napolitano and Pistole, who put in place the policies that permitted it. The federal government naturally says otherwise. First, it says Tobey "disobeyed a command" to proceed through the scanner. That is questionable; Tobey claims he did as he was told.

The feds also say three other things: (a) The extent to which the Fourth Amendment requires probable cause to detain someone in Tobey's situation is a "novel question." Nevertheless, (b) nobody violated Tobey's rights, and (c) even if they did, Napolitano and Pistole are immune anyway.

For all those reasons, say the feds, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson should dismiss Tobey's lawsuit.

If the name sounds familiar, that's because it is. Hudson is the first judge to have ruled against ObamaCare's individual mandate—the provision that says Washington not only can tax your income but tell you how to spend what's left by forcing you to enter into a contract with a private insurance company. Hudson struck down the mandate Dec. 13, 2010—just two weeks and change before Tobey made his shirtless statement at RIC.

Hudson said he would rule on whether Tobey's suit can proceed within two weeks. That was last week. So the decision in the Rumsfeld case could not come at a better time. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Rumsfeld enjoys no immunity: "Plaintiffs [Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel] have alleged sufficient facts to show that Secretary Rumsfeld personally established the relevant policies that caused the alleged violations of their constitutional rights during detention."

As in Tobey's case, the federal government has argued that Rumsfeld enjoys immunity. The 7th Circuit says: No, he doesn't. That doesn't mean it has ruled in the plaintiffs' favor or found Rumsfeld personally culpable for the torture they claim to have endured. It merely means the case can go forward—just as it ought to.

Americans have cheered when foreign dictators in Romania, Egypt, and elsewhere have been made to answer for grinding citizens under their boots. It would be curious indeed if American officials were harder to hold accountable. Vance and Ertel will get their day in court. So should Aaron Tobey.

SOURCE



Family banned from having 'fire hazard' doormat outside their flat blast British council's 'ridiculous' elf 'n' safety rules



It can’t spray graffiti, shout at neighbours or play loud music. So a family were bewildered when their doormat was issued with an eviction notice.

The offending mat was covered in warning tape and plastered with a sign reading ‘move it or lose it’ after their housing association said it was a health and safety hazard.

The father of one said: ‘Someone is being paid to walk around and do this. It’s ridiculous. I can’t understand what they are thinking. It’s my doorstep and my doormat. ‘I need to wipe the soles of my shoes dry or I might fall over in my house, then that would be a health and safety issue.’

When an astonished Mr Reyes contacted Bedfordshire Pilgrims Housing Association, which runs the communal areas of his apartment block in Bedford, it said inspectors had ruled the mat was a fire hazard.

But Mr Reyes, a currency broker who shares the flat with his wife Luz, 42, nine-year-old daughter Annabelle and stepson Juan Libreros, 19, is refusing to get rid of it. He said: ‘It’s right at the end of a corridor so it’s not like people will be rushing past it.

‘It had “move it or lose it” written on it, that’s like a threat. ‘It’s like they are saying “don’t mess with us” – but it’s only a doormat. I was very shocked that they would act in this way for something as minor as a doormat.’

Marie Taylor, head of housing at BPHA, said: ‘Like all social landlords, BPHA is legally obliged to ensure all shared areas in its properties are free from items that might trip residents in the case of a fire.’

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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22 August, 2011

Intolerant women and male/female sex differences

Bettina Arndt is a good-humoured Australian lady who has been a sex columnist and counselor for many years -- both before and after her own happy marriage. Her husband died of a heart attack aged only 37 in 1981. She later remarried. She has elsewhere dealt with the problems of women whose husband has lost interest in sex but below she deals with the opposite problem: Men whose wives have lost interest in sex.

Faced with the misery of a lifetime spent dealing with the frustrations of monogamous sex-starved marriage, most men don't leave. On my website forum, there's a letter titled "Do I stay or do I go" from a 40-year-old married man who's gone for years without any sex in his marriage. The letter has attracted hundreds of responses, many from men urging him to go. He left, for a while, but then came back and is struggling on, trying to make his marriage work. Like most men who write to me, he loves his wife and children and feels he has too much to lose if he leaves.

We hear constantly about men in trouble over sex. Men in trouble for not keeping their trousers zipped, for groping and harassing women, men caught out looking at pornography, or gazing at women in the wrong way. But what we never hear about is men's restraint, the remarkable stoicism of current generations of heterosexual men who cop it sweet, despite their immense frustrations.

Last year The Sunday Age published a sweetly amusing story about men's sexual fantasies, written by a man who describes himself as a "respectable, married" man who has spent the last few years taming what he calls his "inner goat". There's no place for hidden sexual yearnings in his proudly reconstructed world - he boasts he keeps his goat firmly locked inside a concrete pen, tethered to a post. Yet he ruefully acknowledges that sometimes it manages to escape and he finds himself mentally undressing a woman as she walks past.

The online responses to his article were intriguing - the men who applauded his courage and the women who condemned him for expressing such thoughts. "Men, you could put your minds to much better use than fantasising about women you are never going to get … There's something you can do: you can respect women and learn to control your pathetic, primitive minds. Meditation helps," wrote one smug woman.

A male responder hit the nail on the head, summing up what's happened here: "While the feminists and soft men like to kid themselves that they are changing our nature, all they've really done is teach men to keep their mouths shut, while our minds still explore exactly the same topics they always have."

There's an interesting book - The Testosterone Files - written by a feminist writer who had a sex change and became a male. The author, Max Wolf Valerio, describes being blown away by the urgency of his newly acquired sexual urges, his constant sexual fantasies - sex is now food, he says. He cringes when he sees female audiences on talk shows pursing their lips, shaking their heads at sheepish male guests who are supposed "porn addicts" or "womanisers". He's shocked by women's ready assumption of moral superiority.

"How to explain this to women?" Valerio ponders. "There is this thing about men that they cannot completely know. Few people want to believe that there could be a real chasm, a chemically induced difference of sexual drive between the sexes. Few want to believe that there might be any difference at all that is not socially constructed.

"Now that I am Max, I see that this rift, this fundamental chasm between men and women's perceptions and experience of sexuality, is one that may never be bridged.

"There certainly can be no hope for understanding as long as society pretends that men and women are really the same, that the culture of male sexuality is simply a conflation of misogyny and dysfunction. That the male libido is shaped and driven primarily by socialisation, that can be legislated or 'psychobabbled' out of existence."

The strong male libido remains, even if the inner goat now must remain firmly tethered. Men live with up to 20 times the testosterone of women and that makes it very tough to cope with decades of monogamous marriage, particularly when sex is offered very reluctantly - "like meaty bites to a dog", as one man put it.

Yet most men are doing a remarkable job remaining true to their women. For all the talk about unfaithful men, most married men succeed at monogamy most of the time. Just look at the statistics. The Sex in Australia survey of almost 20,000 people found just 5 per cent of partnered men had strayed in the previous year. Now admittedly, these tiny numbers can add up over a long marriage or relationship, but while there are men who are compulsive philanderers, this wasn't the case for most of the men taking part in my research who admitted to having had an affair.

The overwhelming majority wanted to be faithful and were succeeding, even though there may have been a lapse along the way - a one-night stand at a conference, a few weeks of illicit pleasure, or even an affair lasting months or perhaps a year or two. But nothing compared with the many years of restraint.

In one of Dan Savage's amusing Q&A sessions with college students now available on YouTube, he argues men should get credit for this. "If you are with a guy for 40 years and he cheats on you three or four times, he is GOOD at monogamy! Not BAD at monogamy. We think of monogamy the way we think of virginity - it exists until you f--- someone and then it's gone forever. We need to think of monogamy the way we think of sobriety - you can fall the f--- off the wagon and still get back up."

All the evidence suggests the urge is hardwired - yet most men find ways of ignoring that itch, or diverting it into harmless pursuits like looking at pornography.

Harmless pursuits? That's not, of course, how porn is presented. We are subject to an endless stream of people, mainly women, warning of the dangers of porn. Witness the recent visit to Australia of British sociologist Gail Dines, who appeared on television panels and at writers' festivals describing in the most salacious terms the horrors of gonzo porn - gagging women, women whose anuses "literally drop off their bodies because of anal prolapses". She claimed mainstream porn was invariably vile, body-punishing, brutal, dehumanising and debasing.

Yet the truth is when men sit in the wee hours staring at their flickering computer screens, the big attraction is willing women, eager women, easy women - easy to bed and easy to please. "Images of women hungry for sex with us, possessed by desire for us. Receptive women who greet our sexual desire not with fear or loathing but with appreciation, even gratitude," wrote David Steinberg in an essay relating sexual scarcity to the male attraction for porn.

A research study looking at porn usage in Australia, published in The Porn Report, found most (98 per cent) of the best-selling porn videos are pretty white-bread and free of violence - in fact, the most popular mainstream internet sites are now the DIY amateur sites where thoroughly ordinary couples bonk for their webcams. My research suggests men turn to porn for good reasons: as a harmless outlet for their sexual curiosity; to control a sexual drive causing conflict in their relationships; to relieve sexual boredom; and as relief from the tensions of trying to please women in real-life sex.

I recently received an email from a 60-year-old woman talking about her "fabulous, amazing, caring, awesome, loving" husband who keeps harassing her to get involved in threesomes and group sex. She's an intelligent, thoughtful woman who is perplexed about how to negotiate this difference in their attitudes. "There is, I believe, a big difference between 'just saying yes' within the confines of a marriage, and agreeing to sexual arrangements that simply fly in the face of everything that you believe that sex is about."

Her husband grew up in a very liberal sexual environment and had previously enjoyed open relationships. He's convinced his desire for sexual experimentation is perfectly natural, but it holds no attraction for her. After much persuasion, she participated in a threesome with a male friend yet the pressure continues, with her husband seeking further get-togethers with other males and even sending a photo of her (clothed) to a potential partner. Naturally she was upset by this, but rather than rant about his behaviour, she wrote seeking simply to illustrate the difficulties of negotiating this divide between men and women.

I suggested she post the letter on my website forum, to generate discussion on this difficult issue. It attracted an immediate response from an angry woman: "NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY (not even hubby) has the right to pressure you into doing anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. A person who does this is not respecting OR loving his/her partner," she wrote, tearing strips off the man for his unseemly behaviour. "If that was my husband, and he continued to harass me over this, it would be grounds for separation and divorce. Red flags going off all over the place for me," she added emphatically.

Naturally that served to shut off any real discussion. Few men would dare venture an opinion after such a tirade. That's what happens all the time. Whenever anyone, man or woman, talks openly about how to accommodate male sexual desire, angry women close down the conversation. It strikes me as odd.

Of course women have a right to say no to such activities but shouldn't men have freedom to ask? Is it so very different from other areas where women feel perfectly free to try to persuade men into life-changing decisions - like buying a bigger house (involving him in an extra decade or two of mortgage payments) or persuading a new husband, a remarried father, to have more children?

A few months ago, ANU women's studies students held a demonstration protesting about a talk I was giving at their university. They objected to me even raising questions about sexual obligation in marriage, suggesting such talk is dangerous for young women.

What nonsense. Closing down the debate on the vexed business of accommodating male and female sexual needs doesn't solve anything. This is mighty tough stuff but it's a conversation we must continue.

More HERE



UK riots: It’s not about criminality and cuts, it’s about culture... and this is only the beginning

Condemned as a racist for his comments on 'Newsnight' following the riots, the historian David Starkey speaks out below against those who tried to silence him for confronting the gangster culture that has ruptured British society

What a week! It’s not every day that you’re the subject of direct personal attack from the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. On Tuesday, after he had spoken at his old school, Haverstock Comprehensive, about the riots, Ed Miliband was invited by a member of the audience to “stamp out” the now-infamous opinions I had expressed on the same subject on last Friday’s Newsnight.

Mr Miliband might have replied that he disagreed with what I said, but in a liberal democracy defended my right to say it since it broke no laws. Not a bit of it, I fear. Instead, Miliband – the son of a refugee who fled from Nazi Europe to preserve his life and freedom of thought – agreed enthusiastically with the questioner. Mine were “racist comments”, he said, “[and] there should be condemnation from every politician, from every political party of those sorts of comments.”

Strong words. But what do they mean? Well, the following statements are verbatim quotations of some of the principal points I made on Newsnight: “A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion.” “This sort of black male [gang] culture militates against education.” “It’s not skin colour, it’s cultural.”

“Disgusting and outrageous”, are they? In which case, those who agree with Miliband must believe the opposite of all these. They are therefore convinced that gang culture is personally wholesome and socially beneficial.

But how, then, to explain the black educationalists Tony Sewell and Katharine Birbalsingh defending the substance of my comments on “gangsta” culture, as well as Tony Parsons, who wrote in the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror that, “without the gang culture of black London, none of the riots would have happened – including the riots in other cities like Manchester and Birmingham where most of rioters were white”.

Even stranger is Miliband’s apparent notion that, far from militating against educational achievement as I suggested, “the gang culture of black London” must therefore be a seedbed for scholarship and sound learning. Odd, isn’t it, that Waterstone’s bookshop was the only business unlooted in the Ealing riots? And odder still that Lindsay Johns, the Oxford-educated mixed-race writer who mentors young people in Peckham, argues passionately against “this insulting and demeaning acceptance” of a fake Jamaican – or “Jafaican” – patois. “Language is power”, Johns writes, and to use “ghetto grammar” renders the young powerless.

“So why,” some of my friends have asked, “didn’t you stop there?” “Why did you have to talk about David Lammy MP sounding 'white’? Or white chavs becoming 'black’?” The answer is that I thought my appearance on Newsnight was supposed to be part of a wide-ranging discussion about the state of the nation. Central to any such discussion, it seems to me, are the successes and failures of integration in Britain in the past 50 years. And it was these that I was trying to address.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that my remarks on this subject produced especial outrage. I was accused of condemning all black culture; of using white and black culture interchangeably to denote “good and bad”, and of saying that blacks could only get on by rejecting black culture. Actually, I said none of those things and nothing that I did say could have been construed as such by any fair-minded person.

Instead, I was trying to point out the very different patterns of integration at the top and bottom of the social scale. At the top, successful blacks, like David Lammy and Diane Abbot, have merged effortlessly into what continues to be a largely white elite: they have studied at Oxbridge and gone on to Oxbridge-style careers, such as that of an MP.

But they have done so at the cost of losing much of their credibility with blacks on the street and in the ghettos. And here, at the bottom of the heap, the story of integration is the opposite: it is the white lumpen proletariat, cruelly known as the “chavs”, who have integrated into the pervasive black “gangsta” culture: they wear the same clothes; they talk and text in the same Jafaican patois; and, as their participation in recent events shows, they have become as disaffected and riotous.

Trying to explain why, led me to what all my friends agree was my greatest error: to mention Enoch Powell. Tactically, of course, they are right, as the “Rivers of Blood” speech remains, even 40-odd years after its delivery, an unhealed wound.

Unfortunately, the speech and still more the reaction to it, are also central to any proper understanding of our present discontents. For Powell’s views were popular at the time and the London dockers marched in his support. The reaction of the liberal elites in both the Labour and Tory parties, who had just driven Powell into the wilderness, was unanimous: the white working class could never be trusted on race again. The result was a systematic attack over several decades: on their perceived xenophobic patriotism, on symbols like the flag of St George, even – and increasingly – on the very idea of England itself.

The attack was astonishingly successful. But it left a void where a sense of common identity should be. And, for too many, the void has been filled with the values of “gangsta” culture.

Consider the converse. One of the most striking things about the England riots is where they did not happen: Yorkshire, the North East, Wales and Scotland. These areas contain some of the worst pockets of unemployment in the country. But they are also characterised by a powerful sense of regional or national identity and difference that cuts across all classes and binds them together. And it is this, I am sure, which has inoculated them against the disease of “gangsta” culture and its attendant, indiscriminate violence.

Scotland, Alex Salmond says smugly, is a “different culture”. It is indeed, since the Scots are allowed - and even encouraged - to be as racist as they please and hate the English with glad abandon.

I do not want a similar licensed xenophobia here. But an English nationalism we must have. And it must be one that includes all our people: white and black and mixed race alike.

Fortunately, there is a powerful narrative of freedom that runs like a golden thread through our history. “The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe in,” counsel declared repeatedly in Somersett’s Case, about the legality of slavery in England, in 1772.

We must focus on the righting of the wrong rather than the original wrong itself. The former heals; the latter divides. And we have had enough of division. There is a final point. If all the people of this country, black and white alike, are to enter fully into our national story, as I desperately hope they will, they must do so on terms of reciprocity. In other words, I must be as free to comment on problems in the black community as blacks are to point the finger at whites, which they do frequently, often with justice, and with impunity.

For the other pernicious legacy of the reaction to Powell has been an enforced silence on the matter of race. The subject has become unmentionable, by whites at any rate. And any breach has been punished by ostracism and worse. As the hysterical reaction to my remarks shows, the witch-finders already have their sights on me, led by that pillar of probity and public rectitude, Piers Morgan, who called on Twitter for the ending of my television career within moments of the Newsnight broadcast.

But the times have changed. Powell had to prophesy his “Tiber foaming with blood”. We, on the other hand, have already experienced the fires of Tottenham and Croydon. Moreover, the public mood is different from the acquiescent and deferential electorate of the Sixties. We are undeceived. We are tired of being cheated and lied to by bankers and MPs and some sections of the press.

We will not continue, I think, to tolerate being lied to and cheated in the matter of race. Instead of “not in front of the children”, we want honesty.

But this is only the beginning. The riots are the symptom of a profound rupture in our body politic and sense of national identity. If the rupture is not healed and a sense of common purpose recovered, they will recur – bigger, nastier and more frequently. Can we stop bickering and address this task of recovery and reconstruction – all together?

SOURCE



BBC praises Communist spy

Which tells you a lot about their attitudes: They're Britain's Kremlin

The Courtauld Institute was once the best place in Britain to study the history of art. But its director, Anthony Blunt, had, earlier in his life, spied for the Soviet Union. He was the "Fourth Man" in the ring with Burgess, Maclean and Philby. He confessed to the British intelligence services in 1964 (having repeatedly denied all the accusations over many years). The information was kept quiet, partly because he was Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. In 1979, he was publicly exposed, stripped of his knighthood and disgraced.

The Reunion brought together five distinguished people who had studied under Blunt. They included the director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor, the novelist Anita Brookner and the critic Brian Sewell. All five agreed what a wonderful chap Blunt was – brilliant, kind, civilised, terrific work on Poussin. And all said how appalling it was that Blunt had been attacked by the press after his exposure. Sue MacGregor (no relation of Neil, I think), who presented the programme, said that Blunt had been the victim of "public vilification"; she referred to the scandal as "what had happened to him".

We were told only in the thinnest outline what Blunt himself had done to others. In the mid-Thirties, he began working for the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB), and helped recruit other British agents for them. It is often alleged that people in the West at that time had no means of knowing what Stalin was up to. This was not the case. Malcolm Muggeridge, attacked on this programme for attacking Blunt, went to the Ukraine in 1933 and reported – in this paper's sister, The Morning Post – that millions were starving there as a deliberate act of Stalin's policy. There were many like him (though not nearly enough).

Much was made, particularly by Brian Sewell, of the claim that the threat of fascism was so great in the Thirties that Communism seemed the only way. This does great injustice to all those – the majority of the population – who detested both. If Sewell is right, why did Blunt, Philby, Burgess etc continue to work for Stalin after he made his pact with Hitler, which lasted from 1939 to 1941, the time of greatest danger for Britain? And why did Blunt continue to shelter Burgess, Maclean and Philby from discovery after the war, when Nazism had been defeated and the Soviet Union was the deadly enemy of the West?

As for Blunt's acts of spying, these were brushed aside by the programme on the grounds that there had been "very exaggerated estimates" of the number of people who had died as a result of his actions. His treachery, said another former pupil, Michael Jacobs, had been "a minor and ultimately irrelevant aspect of his life".

It is a good thing that people feel gratitude to their teachers. It is also true that Blunt's work on Blake, Poussin, Borromini and so on does not become bad because he turned out to have been a Communist spy. So it was difficult to blame the five for their loyalty to Blunt, even when they were talking rubbish.

What was disgraceful, though, was the structure of the programme. For many, The Reunion's version may be the first they have heard of the subject. It is the duty of the BBC to apply to history the impartiality on which its Charter insists. Yet, as with the same programme's treatment of the 30th anniversary of the Brixton riots (which this column criticised on March 28), the entire panel was on the same side. Blunt was a virtually innocent victim, we were told, and the only villain was the press.

Sue MacGregor explained that Blunt "made no secret of his Marxist beliefs". This was perfectly irrelevant. The issue in his story was not his beliefs, but his treachery, which, by definition, was secret. He pretended that he was a normal British citizen and, during the war, a loyal officer of MI5, but in fact he was working for a murderous tyranny. Almost the only censure in the entire programme came from Neil MacGregor. Blunt, he said, had been guilty of "a very serious breach of trust". This understatement was rendered powerful by its solitary splendour.

The breach of trust was made even worse by the "establishment" career which Blunt chose to pursue. At least Burgess, Maclean and Philby ended up, drink-sodden, in miserable Moscow flats supplied by the dictatorship they so admired. Blunt, however, stayed, advised the Queen about her pictures, was knighted and honoured in academe. For a quarter of a century, throughout which time he concealed what he had done, he lived in the Courtauld's grace-and-favour Georgian elegance in Portman Square. His entire (non-spying) career was constructed on principles in direct conflict with his Marxism.

And when he was finally unmasked, even his handling of the news reflected his love of the privilege which had always surrounded him. He had lunch at The Times (then the establishment paper) before the press conference, and restricted access to selected reporters.

The Reunion propagated the theory that spying for the Soviets in the Thirties and Forties was nothing worse than an excess of zeal. This is a shocking untruth. Hitler and Stalin were moral equivalents. Indeed, at the time when Blunt signed up for the Soviet Union, Stalin had actually killed far more people than Hitler because the Führer was only just getting into his stride. The BBC would (rightly) never dream of making a programme which sought to excuse traitors who worked for the Nazis.

In our generation, Blunt's equivalents are the intellectual apologists for Islamist extremism. No doubt it will turn out that some of them worked secretly for countries like Iran, and no doubt, in due time, the BBC will laud them too.

SOURCE



WA: Church to fight prohibited baptism in public park

An Olympia church is considering its legal options after the state of Washington denied its request to hold a baptism ceremony at a park on the grounds of the Capitol. Officials at Reality Church had wanted to hold a barbecue and baptism last Sunday at Heritage Park.

The park, located on the grounds of the state Capitol, includes a 260-acre man-made lake. Church members had wanted to use a portable baptistery, not the lake. The Department of General Administration, the state agency that oversees the park, turned down their request stating that the proposed baptism service was a violation of the state constitution.

“We approved their permit for the barbecue, but our state constitution does not allow public grounds or funds to be used for religious ceremonies so we got advice from our attorney general’s office and we denied their permit for the baptism,” GA spokesman Steve Valandra told Fox News Radio.

The American Center for Law and Justice filed an appeal with the state on the church’s behalf, but it was denied. ACLJ attorney Jordan Sekulow said the state of Washington is treating Christians like second-class citizens. “They’re basically saying the barbecue is just fine – but if you can’t baptize anyone,” Sekulow told Fox News Radio. “It’s an outrage.

GA (General Administration) is not precluding members of the Reality Church from exercising their First Amendment rights to express their religious beliefs or conducting a baptism ceremony at the church,” wrote acting director Jane Rushford. “However, the use of public property for the performance of religious worship, exercise or instruction is prohibited under the Washington State Constitution.”

Article One of the Washington State Constitution provides that “No public money shall be appropriated or applied to any religious worship, exercise or instruction, or the support of any religious establishment.”

Sekulow claims the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from suppressing or excluding speech of private parties. But the state refused to back down. “So now you’ve got a state saying this is too much religious activity so it’s not really speech anymore,” Sekulow said. “This violates the U.S. Constitution.”

“A baptism ceremony is a form of religious exercise and worship,” Rushford wrote. “And as such it would violate Article 1, Section 11 to authorize the use of state property for this purpose.”

Instead, the church held their baptism service at a local YMCA.

Sekulow said the state’s decision makes it “uncomfortable for Christians to use the facility in the future.”

“If they open up this property for people to use, they can’t ban religious groups from being able to access it and perform something like a baptism,” he said. He said the church will ultimately decide whether to sue the state but if they do, he predicted it could set a national precedent. “Who is the state to decide what is worship and what isn’t,” he asked. “The state of Washington has taken the extreme approach to banning religious.”

Valandra said he believes the state is on solid legal ground. “We feel we’re on good legal ground,” he said. “We have to abide by the state constitution.”

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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21 August, 2011

British black man discriminated against by liberal elitists because he speaks too correctly

Their racist stereotypes show. Black men must stay in their place



For as long as I can remember people have been mistaking me for a white man. Not in the flesh of course, but after speaking on the telephone. I have lost count of the times I have arranged business lunches with strangers, only to see them look straight through me as they scan the restaurant for a middle-class white gentleman who answers to the name of Ben.

When, eventually, they realise that I am he, the reaction is invariably one of barely concealed surprise. Conventional wisdom has it that my face and voice do not match. But look at it from my point of view. Why do people assume I am white? The answer is so depressingly obvious it exposes a fundamental prejudice at the heart of our society.

There is no way I could be a black man, the assumption goes, because I am well-spoken. Because my accent – instilled in me by my parents – is old-fashioned RP: Received Pronunciation. Quite simply, I speak with a degree of erudition beyond the ken of a black man.

We live in an age when class barriers have supposedly been torn down, yet the manner in which we speak is as important as ever. Every day people make assumptions based on our language and accent, and we ignore this fact at our peril.

As Britons we are blessed with a language of extraordinary depth and nuance – there is a reason so many other tongues steal from our own. It is almost criminal to witness the dismantling of our rich tapestry of expression by the next generation. Nevertheless, whites, Asians, blacks and children of all racial backgrounds are stampeding towards the low ground, stripping language down to a degree of banal, almost feral simplicity. It is homogenous nonsense, characterised by limited vocabulary and an absence of imagination.

In a sense, they can hardly be blamed. This nihilistic language is the fashion, and for teenagers that is an irresistibly powerful motivation. So it is that we find an entire generation speaking in the same peculiar slang. The Asian youth, the northern council estate boy, the South London gang member and the fashion- conscious public schoolboy all delving into the same preposterous manner of expression.

Poor language skills, epitomised by street talk, are holding back an entire generation. Interviews for jobs or further education places are never going to go well if the young person is incapable of expressing himself. Language is not a privilege of the few. It can be easily learned – just look at the Eastern European workers who quickly pick up the necessary skills.

The gift of self-expression can break down untold barriers and open up a world of achievement – Barack Obama gained the highest office on the planet due in a large part to the power of his oratory. We neglect language at our peril. More needs to be taught in our schools, as a matter of urgency, to instil a sense of justifiable pride.

People say I am an anomaly, that by rights I should be talking with the Jamaican patois so popular with young people today. Utter tosh, I would argue, given that my forebears hail from Barbados – more than 1,000 miles away from Jamaica – and my adoptive parents are from Teddington in Middlesex.

But never mind the prejudice against youngsters, with their ‘street’ language. In my experience the bias works equally powerfully in the opposite direction, in modern ‘liberal’ Britain. I have lost count of the number of white middle-class television producers who have rejected my voice because it is too posh. On one occasion I was told bluntly: ‘I’m sorry, you fit the bill perfectly but you’re not black enough.’

At auditions for acting roles I have been rejected because my pronunciation is too clear. Sir Alec Guinness must be spinning in his grave. Even on news programmes I have been deemed unsuitable to comment on black issues because my accent is ‘inappropriate’.

What a strange world we live in where being well-spoken and articulate is a burden.

SOURCE



NJ Bridal Store Refuses to Sell Wedding Dress to Lesbian

As a Lesbian, shouldn't she man up instead of blubbering?

This one’s sure to have gay marriage proponents buzzing. Here Comes the Bride, a bridal store in Somers Point, New Jersey, is feeling the heat after allegedly refusing to sell a wedding dress to a lesbian.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Alix Genter visited the store with six of her closest family and friends. After the woman tried on a number of dresses, she purportedly chose the one she wanted and placed an order for it.

But, when she filled out the associated form, she crossed out the word groom and wrote “partner” instead. Then, she wrote the name of her future wife on the document and left the store.

Later on, Genter was perplexed when the store’s owner, “Donna,” called her and said that Here Comes the Bride would not be providing her with a wedding dress. Consumerist has more:

“She said she wouldn‘t work with me because I’m gay…she also said that I came from a nice Jewish family, and that it was a shame I was gay. She said, ‘There’s right, and there’s wrong. And this is wrong.’ “

According to a Philadelphia Inquirer piece, written by Ronnie Polaneczky, Genter was extremely upset upon receiving this call. She said: “I was devastated. I was crying. I called her a bigot; I told her, ‘I am a happy person and you are a miserable person.’ Then she hung up on me.”

Apparently, there‘s also a voicemail from the store’s owner claiming that the wedding was not legal and that the store does not “participate in any illegal actions.”

The Inquirer piece essentially served as an apology letter to Genter. In composing the article, Polaneczky called the store’s owner to get her side of the story. But, rather than hearing a contradictory account, Donna allegedly validated Genter’s story. Polaneczky writes:

"You know what’s strange? When I called Donna yesterday to get her side of the story, she both confirmed your version of events and accused you of “stirring up drama.“ She said that your writing the word ”partner” was basically a provocation, evidence of a need “to show that she’s different.”

So, the store is sticking to its story — and its perspective — on serving homosexuals.

Public reaction to this incident has been noteworthy. On Yelp, the store’s rating has dropped to one star, as individuals have weighed in with their perspective on the matter. Also, people have been uploading images to the Yelp page that stand to support gays and lesbians.

This story is intriguing on a number of levels. One wonders what the legal ramifications of refusing service are, if any.

SOURCE



Foxy of the ADL promotes Sharia law in America

His job is to defend Jews; He's got Stockholm syndrome

Dear Mr. Foxman,

For centuries Vilna occupied a special place in the hearts and minds of Europe's Jewish communities. People celebrated the city as a study center, replete with libraries, schools, poets, playwrights, rich Jewish culture --- and especially, learned rabbis and Jewish legal intellects.

From Rabbi Samuel of Babylonia to Rabbi Gershom of Germany, scholars throughout Jewish history taught the people to adapt to their host nations --- and never demand the reverse. Rabbis also prized those students blessed with generosity and sufficient wisdom and humility to admit their errors and apologize to injured parties. No one is perfect, of course, but they correctly tutored Jewish men and women that those trying to achieve these charitable goals (among others) would at least reach goodness.

Alas, as a native of Vilna and child survivor of the Holocaust, none could have shouted more obstreperously than did your Aug. 10 JTA op-ed, headlined "Shout down the Sharia myth makers." Leaders do not shout. They speak, listen and continue to learn. Through off-key cheer-leading, you merely highlighted your own ignorance.

"The separation of church and state embodied in U.S. and state constitutions," you wrote, renders completely unnecessary, proposed "anti-Sharia bills" in several states. Our constitution already "prohibits our courts from applying or considering religious law in any way that would constitute government advancement of or entanglement with religious law."

Obviously, it would contradict every bedrock American principle to force any U.S. resident --- whether citizen, legal resident, or illegal alien --- to unwillingly comply with religious law. On this we agree. There, our agreement ends.

For you also allege that the bills --- addressing recently exposed U.S. state court outrages imposing foreign laws that infringed upon constitutional law and universal human rights alike --- were based not on reality or actual decisions. The bills rest on "prejudice and ignorance," you claim, advanced through "myth making ... about the threat of Sharia" in the U.S. These ills, you further assert, have effected "camouflaged bigotry" against Islam and Muslims.

Theoretically, American courts should strictly adhere to U.S. constitutional law concerning any and all religious practices, edicts or canons. But the record could not be more clear: they too often err on the side of foreign law --- and make no apology.

Criminal defendants asked U.S. courts, as I noted to you in March 2011, to substitute Islamic laws in lieu of domestic statutes. In Massachusetts, a federal court denied the motion of jihad-financiers to excuse their terror-funding tax fraud via First Amendment religious freedom guarantees, which they asserted to protect their rights to provide Islamically-mandated "charity." Based on sharia, however, a New Jersey court did absolve wife beating and rape before that state's appeals court reversed its ruling. And a Florida court similarly ordered parties in a civil dispute to follow Islamic, not U.S. law.

Face it, Mr. Foxman: for decades, U.S. courts have also miserably failed Muslim women and children on foundational precepts. On Mar. 24, 1986, for example, Laila Malak lost her 14-year old son and 9-year-old daughter when California's appeals bench enforced a Beirut sharia custody ruling --- given without her knowledge or participation, and allowing only 15 days from her post-facto notification to mount what would almost assuredly have been a futile "appeal."

Sharia courts always give custody of minor children to fathers, a fact mentioned in footnote 2 to the California's appeals bench decision. Married to Abdul in 1970 in Beirut, Laila in 1976 fled its bloody religious war with him and their son Fadi, and bore Ruha Jan. 25, 1977, in Abu Dhabi. In July 1982, without Abdul's permission (and therefore against Islamic law), Laila moved with her children to her brother's San Jose home, where she filed for a divorce and custody. Santa Clara county superior court denied three attempts by Abdul to enforce a Nov. 1982 Abu Dhabi sharia order that gave him custody, without due process, Laila's knowledge or court consideration of the children's "best interests."

Simultaneously, however, Abdul had secured a Beirut sharia custody order --- also without due process or the consideration of children's "interests" requisite in U.S. courts. Ostensibly, the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act (UCCJA) allows "comity" only for foreign rulings that hail from "legal institutions similar in nature" to U.S. courts --- with "reasonable notice and opportunity to be heard" for everyone. What should apply, however, does not always.

Sharia courts are not "similar in nature" to U.S. courts, Mr. Foxman. As strictly Islamic judiciaries --- neither secular nor civil --- these dictatorial forums often force religious law on unwilling victims without recourse. Likely, Laila Malak has never seen her kids again. By contrast, Jewish law would not allow this; nor would a Jewish Beit Din ask that its decision replace U.S. criminal, civil or secular law.

Laila Malak's tragic case could and would have been avoided had California previously adopted something like the American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) bills recently passed in Tennessee (May 2010), Louisiana (Aug. 2010) or Arizona (Apr. 2011). While the bills vary somewhat, none mentions sharia, contrary to your assertions regarding the Tennessee and Louisiana laws.

Since the 1970s, in dozens of similar cases, American courts nationwide applied sharia in lieu of constitutional laws. Albeit incomplete, a review of state courts and appellate benches produced manifold instances of "unconstitutional application of foreign and religious law in our judicial system." Whatever their total, one cannot accurately describe cases unearthed thus far, as "a proverbial solution in search of a problem," as you want us to believe. For the women and children affected they were life-destroying cataclysms.

No American, nor any Jewish leader, should accept that. You head an institution founded to defend and protect the Jewish people from anti-Semitism. Mr. Foxman, in Islamic nations, sharia laws implement institutional discrimination against Jewish people and other non-Muslims. Sharia demands and requires non-Muslim subservience. Who are you to defend it? How dare you?

With or without your unwarranted shouting, many courageous citizens, state and national legislators fortunately have acted, and will so continue, to prevent future travesties of justice.

Based perhaps on the experiences of your early life, Mr. Foxman, many long trusted and believed you to represent the American Jewish mainstream. Nevertheless, you lack an ounce of the humility evident in most great men. Via your intolerance of scholarship --- and declarations on subjects of which you know less than nothing --- you have unfortunately relinquished the right to trust, on any account.

SOURCE



Australia: Melbourne's multicultural experience again

Hospital Emergency department a gang battleground

GANGS carrying guns, samurai swords and knives are terrorising doctors and nurses at a suburban hospital. Conflicts between the heavily armed migrant gangs are spilling from the streets into the emergency ward at Sunshine Hospital. A whistleblower said staff feared for their lives and were demanding 24-hour security in the casualty ward.

Warring Asian, Sudanese, Somali and Pacific islander gangs had taken their battles into the emergency department.

The whistleblower said incidents included:

ASIAN gangs threatening to throw chairs at each other when two groups arrived at emergency seeking treatment for separate stab victims.

A GUNSHOT victim forcing the evacuation of the hospital's emergency department after a security guard took him inside, despite fears he had a gun.

POLICE being regularly called to disperse gangs who were milling out the front of the hospital waiting for one of their members to be treated.

AT least one gang member a month presenting at the hospital with stab wounds.

Insiders estimated that about 70 "code grey" security alerts, where staff and patient safety is put at risk, occurred at the hospital each week.

The whistleblower, who is related to a hospital worker, said more needed to be done to protect staff. He feared that sooner or later, a staff member would be seriously injured or even killed at work.

"People come into the emergency department with samurai swords, gangs turn up with bullet wounds, and nurses and doctors go to work and put up with those things because they are dedicated," the whistleblower said. "You would think the hospital would be prepared to provide a security guard to give them some sense of safety."

A Western Health spokeswoman said the security of staff in the emergency department was taken "extremely seriously". "From time to time, there are incidents that can be very frightening for staff," she said. "But this is a constant challenge for emergency departments across Australia and the world. "We are examining security and working with staff on additional safety measures."

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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20 August, 2011

Absurd English law-enforcement lies behind the riots

The most amazing thing about the reaction of English MPs to last week’s terrible violence was how surprised they were. For a country whose criminal law is invariably sympathetic to offenders, nearly always harsh on their victims, and unwilling to pay for adequate policing the surprise is that they were surprised.

Two stories hitting English papers during June and July provide a glimpse of current British law in action.

On June 23 around midnight a masked gang broke down the back door of a home in Salford, in northwestern England. The householder, 59, his son and the son’s girl friend called the police and tried to defend the home and themselves. They managed to stab one of the gang who died of his wounds. When the police arrived they arrested the householder, his son and the son’s girlfriend on suspicion of attempted murder.

On July 11, a headline in The Sun read “Shopkeeper, 72, nicked after `stabbing to death robber.’” Mr. Coley’s Manchester flower shop was closed and he was playing dominoes with a friend when two masked men armed with guns broke in. In the struggle that followed, Mr. Coley’s friend was injured but Coley managed to stab one robber, who later died, while the other fled wounded. The Manchester police are holding Mr. Coley for attempted murder.

Since at least 1953 the English government has insisted that citizens depend on the police for protection and not try to protect themselves. The Prevention of Crime Act of 1953 prohibited anyone carrying an article in a public place with the idea it could be used for protection if they were attacked. If discovered they are charged with carrying an offensive weapon.

Since 1964 self-defense has not been considered a good reason to keep a handgun, even if for those who lived in a remote area. Then in 1998 all handguns were banned. Toy or replica guns are also illegal. A man was arrested for holding two burglars with a toy gun while he contacted the police.

More recently knives with points have been made illegal. A list of prohibited weapons, possession of which carries a 10-year prison sentence, includes not only machine guns but chemical sprays and knives with a blade more than three inches long. An American tourist from Arizona who protected herself from attackers in the subway using her penknife was arrested for carrying an offensive weapon.

The government does not permit even someone who is unarmed from acting forcefully when attacked if his or her assailant is harmed in the process. If a citizen is attacked in the street he is to flee. If a citizen is attacked in his home he is not to injure the attacker beyond what a court later considers a reasonable use of force. If a citizen harms his assailant he will be accused of assault, or, as the cases cited above illustrate, murder or attempted murder should the attacker be killed.

Burglars can sue for damages and the police are careful to ensure they don’t get hurt. This past February the gardeners of Surrey were told they could not use wire mesh on the windows of their sheds because burglers might get hurt breaking in.

Tony Martin, an English farmer jailed for killing one burglar and wounding another with his shotgun during the seventh break-in of his home was denied parole because he would pose a threat to burglars. The career burglar he wounded was granted parole and sued Martin for his injuries. Worse, the burglar was given public funds to pursue his lawsuit.

While law-abiding citizens have been treated strictly offenders have not. Since the 1950s it is only under extraordinary circumstances that anyone under 18 is put in jail. Instead offenders are given a warning, a fine or community service. Since young offenders know they will not be incarcerated there is little to deter them from committing ever more bold crimes. One of those brought to court during the recent riots was an 18-year old who had been hauled before the courts 21 previous times but never jailed.

Sentences for adult criminals have been shortened and they routinely serve only half of these. In lieu of policemen on the beat the English have opted for surveillance cameras. These are much cheaper but all a potential offender needs to do is to wear a hood or mask to greatly diminish their value. English police now dealing with the riots boast they have 20,000 hours of footage.

Even offenders who have been apprehended tend to be let off with a caution or electronic bracelet. This saves money on prison but means they are back on the streets in short order. In 2009 70 percent of burglars the police managed to apprehend avoided prison.

The extent of the tolerance of criminality and refusal to allow law-abiding people to protect themselves has led to an atmosphere where gangs can operate with virtual impunity. The recent, widespread riots, apart from their scale, are not radically different from the violence that has been occurring for many years.

Let us hope the English politicians so surprised and angry at the lawlessness in their cities realize it is time for change, time to permit people to protect themselves and to bring some rigour into the punishment of offenders.

SOURCE



European model a wretched failure

IS this the way, then, that Europe will look from now? Anarchy and chaos in Athens one week? Cars beyond number burned in Paris in another season? And now this terrible, senseless, causeless violence in London and many other British cities?

And everywhere across western Europe, governments bankrupt or nearly so, living beyond their means, unable or unwilling to tell their people the truth about their finances.

And beyond this the strange, undemocratic and illiberal mechanism, vast and inescapable, but also creaking and slipshod and unreliable, of the European super state, unable to help anything but always able to interfere, taking decisions without any irksome recourse to democracy or national sovereignty, adding a new layer of illegitimacy to societies robbed of trust. London burning like the Blitz, and all of it inflicted by the pride of British youth.

There is nothing good in this for anyone. Surely even the angels weep to see that green and pleasant land so reduced.

There is no occasion here for schadenfreude. Europe's tragedy is a setback for all mankind, and especially for that strange entity that we call the West.

To think coherently of the West, you must conceive of it being led by the US, embracing Canada, central and western Europe, Japan and Australia. These nations are all meaningfully democratic. They are all rich, or relatively so. They all run mixed, capitalist economies. And they are linked in a common security network, NATO, or the US alliances with Japan and Australia.

They provide the lion's share of international aid and, though hopelessly outnumbered at the UN, they still provide most of what pass for international norms.

But this is a very poor season in the West. At no time since its core societies were stabilised after World War II has Europe looked so ratty, so impotent, so much at the end of its tether. It still lectures the world on everything from the correct label for cheese to the urgent need to impose more taxes, carbon or otherwise. But it can no longer run its own still fabulously rich societies with even a modicum of efficiency or legitimacy.

The European model right now is a wretched failure.

There is hardly an economist in the world who does not believe European nations that are members of the eurozone would not be much better able to deal with their economic crises if they had their own currencies and their own central banks. But no one in power in Europe can face up to this.

Proponents of the European model can still be heard justifying this mad, anti-democratic centralisation of power on the basis that it helps European nations avoid wars with each other.

This argument, which no one seriously believes, perversely relies on the notion that Europeans are somehow inferior to all the other nations, which avoid war without surrendering their sovereignty to supranational bodies such as the EU.

Of course, Britain is not a part of the eurozone. It still has its own currency. But socially it is part of Europe and in many ways it lives out the European model very faithfully.

You can describe the British version of the model in flattering or unflattering ways, depending how much credence you give its lofty ambitions as opposed to how unlikely you think the model is to fulfil those ambitions.

But the European model, and the British version of it, certainly include a lavish welfare state, multiculturalism, a high level of economic regulation, the eclipse of any special place for religion (especially Christianity), and political correctness.

The last is a shorthand term for a general sense of shame and guilt about the true inheritance of Western civilisation, of shame and guilt for British history, and of a postmodern desire to forever subvert the allegedly dominant narrative of the generation before the baby boomers.

There is no simple explanation of these riots and other nations, the US among them, have their riots too. But the destructive elements of the European model are interlocking and contribute mightily to the British problem.

A big welfare state combined with a regulated economy and labour market, exactly the combination that prevails in much of Europe, discourages marginal employment.

It may seem compassionate to give people money, but passive welfare over the long term is a disaster for the recipient's self-respect, motivation, general morale and ultimately their sanity.

A big welfare system also attracts the wrong kind of immigrants for the wrong kind of reasons. Instead of being attracted by the opportunity to work, some immigrants are attracted by the opportunity not to work but still to receive money for this.

This is especially so if the only part of its tradition a society has retained is its class distinctions, or some echo of them.

Western Europe is also perhaps the least religious society on earth. Christianity, in Britain as in much of Europe, is forever "subverted", which in truth means it is defamed, reviled and mocked.

This is another dimension in which Europe flatters itself as being ahead of the rest of the world, whereas in truth it is merely out of kilter with the rest of the world, with its own history and with the vast preponderance of human reflection.

Schools, universities, local councils and an endless array of quasi-government bodies preach a bowdlerised, ersatz morality, policing language for sexist anachronisms, censoring Enid Blyton, preaching a detached, sterile ideal of tolerance. But amid normal people these blandishments have no authority.

The secular mind may rejoice at the post-religious moment of Europe, and especially of Britain. But an unemployed youth, with no tradition and no real education, with enough money more or less but not many prospects, with no source of moral authority and no help in understanding any basis for right and wrong, nothing to control an impulse, and knowing nothing of British history except that it was shameful and sexist and racist -- how exactly does this youth become integrated and whole, and indeed happy?

Why exactly is it that he doesn't help himself to a night's entertainment attacking ambulance officers and stealing TVs?

The British malaise, the European sickness, have no single, simple cause and no obvious answer. But whatever it is that the gnomes of Brussels have been selling these past few decades, it doesn't work and it has toxic side effects, as Europe shows.

SOURCE



Judging, toleration, and libertarianism

It’s interesting discussing toleration. The ideas that people have about it are many and varied. One that comes up especially often, couched in a variety of terms, goes something like this: “toleration is a sort of wishy-washy multi-culturalist policy, but its basically a good thing because people should not judge others.”

There are 2 problems with this (at least).

1. Conceptually, we do not tolerate what we like or approve of. I don’t tolerate James Blunt’s music. I like it–alot. If I hear Britney Spears’ music or Rap music, by contrast, I can (with some effort) tolerate it. Given this, toleration is only possible where we at least have negative responses of some sort and there is no reason to doubt that in some cases, those responses will be fully formed judgements. I assume multiculturalists do not have such responses to the multiple cultures they seek to include in their dialogue.

2. The very idea that we should not judge others is itself odd.

Persons are rationally autonomous beings. As rational beings, we tend to evaluate things as we are exposed to them–at least the things that stand out to us (for whatever reason). That is what rational beings do. Rational beings do not, for example, merely sense the fallen tree in the road they are traveling on. They sense the tree and then evaluate the situation to determine what to do next. If they sense someone with a chain saw standing next to the tree stump, they are naturally prone to evaluating that situation–perhaps judging that this person must have either stupidly or maliciously caused the tree to fall onto the road. Persons, in fact, can’t fail to judge. Moreover, we want people to judge. I don’t want to read philosophy journals full of nonsense; I rely on the editors to judge the submissions they receive so as to only publish quality work. I most definitely want someone (not necessarily the state) to judge the ability of people claiming to be medical professionals. And legal professionals. And chefs. And … the list goes on. We don’t read things like Consumer Reports, Zagat’s or Angie’s List without reason. We want someone to have done the work of judging.

Conclusion: Toleration is not a multi-culturalist agenda from the left. To know if we can or should tolerate different cultures requires judging those cultures. Sometimes we will dislike or disapprove of those cultures and decide we must tolerate them. Similarly, we will sometimes dislike or disapprove of what other individuals say or do. In both cases, this involves judging them. In many cases (more cases then not, in my experience), we will have to tolerate them if we are genuinely committed to any reasonable version of libertarianism. We can, should, and will, judge. We may or may not say anything based on the judgment. Sometimes–perhaps often–it is wise, polite, or even morally correct, not to. But that is a different issue. And, of course, there will be times (hopefully many) when we like or approve of the person or culture we judge. In those cases, we don’t interfere with them, but we should not confuse the issue by saying we tolerate them.

(I also think we should be clear with ourselves when we judge others–individuals or cultures–about whether we are judging them on some idiosyncratic basis or against objective moral standards. I leave that for discussion on other occasions.)

SOURCE



Attacking press freedom in the name of privacy

"Having made private conduct central to politics, it’s a bit rich for MPs now to slate the press for being obsessed with private peccadilloes."

At the Edinburgh international Book Festival over the weekend, Sarah Brown, author of the Downing Street misery memoirs Behind the Black Door, had a veritable treat in store for her audience. A surprise guest. One can only imagine the anticipation before he made his appearance. And one can only imagine the deflation when he actually appeared, ex-prime minister Gordon Brown, the man with a rain cloud for a hat and a demeanour to darken even the most desolate of wakes.

But Brown is energised these days. He’s got a cause, a target. And he can see that finally, in light of the interminable phone-hacking furore, this target – the press – is on the defensive. Sunday was no different, as once again Brown rounded on journalists and their surfeit of freedom.

So when questioned by an audience member about the phone-hacking scandal, Brown renewed the attack he had made a few weeks ago in parliament. Then, his anger was matched by his rhetoric as he launched himself, figurative fists flying rather than clunking, into the ‘criminal media nexus’ of News International. He talked of the ‘wholly innocent’ men, women and children who had been treated as ‘public property’, and he described how ‘their private and inner most feelings and their private tears [were] bought and sold by News International for commercial gain’.

In Edinburgh on Sunday there was less rage in his attack, no doubt because he was attacking the press more broadly rather than just Rupert Murdoch’s outfit, but his target remained the same: the press’s relentless pursuit of people’s private lives, their willingness to rip an individual to shreds in the interest of a story. ‘In Britain’, Brown said, ‘what the press do if they want to really get at someone is try to challenge their motives and integrity, and try to suggest that they are not the person that they say they are… the way the press acts is that they try to doubt people’s motives and try to suggest we have a malign purpose, and they try to destroy people’s character.’ Brown proceeded to talk of the time when the Sun took photos of him praying at the 2007 Festival of Remembrance in the Albert Hall and claimed that he had fallen asleep during the sermon.

Specific anecdotes aside, Brown’s criticism is far from unfamiliar. In fact it echoes that of his New Labour frenemy Tony Blair, who in 2007, as outgoing prime minister, decided to criticise the ‘feral beast’ that the press had become, ‘just tearing people and reputations to bits’. In this reading, the press, especially its redtop contingency, is held responsible for nothing less than the degeneration of public life. In the words of a columnist at the respectable Guardian newspaper, the scandal-seeking, profit-driven tabloids have made ‘this a shallower, more selfish country’. Peter Wilby at the same paper prefers to talk of how the Sun et al have ‘coarsened British culture’.

If this narrative is to be believed, the press has not just coarsened and phwoarified British culture, reducing so-called watercooler discussion to celebrity and political sex scandals, but it has also degraded and trivialised our political and civic life. As Blair argued four years ago, the obsession with digging dirt, with seeing the venal motive in every public act, ‘saps the country’s confidence and self-belief’: ‘It undermines [society’s] assessment of itself, its institutions and above all, it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions, in the right spirit for our future.’ Where there was once trust, now just a corrosive cynicism prevails – and it is all down to the press.

This is not an accusation levelled solely against the redtops. The broadsheets’ increased interest in personality, character and scandal is equally as marked, something writ large in the diminution and sometimes absence of parliamentary reporting from their pages. Given that for most of the twentieth century, between 400 and 700 lines a day were dedicated just to reporting on parliamentary debates, the loss of interest (and lines) is notable (1). In a piece written in 2008 for the British Journalism Review, ex-BBC political editor John Cole wrote: ‘If you seek the reason parliament now stands so low in public esteem, do not look only at the quality of the speeches, which is doubtless as uneven as ever it was, but at the paucity of the coverage.’

The striking aspect of such criticism is that at some level it resonates. The horizons of public life do seem limited. And what has often passed for politics over the past couple of decades does seem increasingly, achingly trivial. Whether it’s current PM David Cameron snapped drinking champagne at, er, a Spectator champagne reception or, way back in 2002, his predecessor Tony Blair supposedly trying to get a prominent position at the Queen Mother’s funeral, the press seem obsessed with appearances, or rather with politicians failing to keep theirs up. Politics seems to have been sacrificed for a forensic examination of personality.

And yet there’s something that really sticks in the craw seeing the political class – helped by a commentariat which thinks itself above tawdry story-grubbing – come together to condemn the press for diminishing public life, slamming it for reducing public virtue to little more than a parade of private vice. And that is because politicians are not the victims of a personality-obsessed press that has grown craven in search of dwindling profits. Rather, those politicians played a key role in making a public and political virtue of private conduct.

In fact, New Labour’s success was as a party more or less born from this elevation of private and personal conduct into the lingua franca of political life. At the time of New Labour’s rise, during the mid-1990s, its promotion of its members’ general decency was no doubt viewed as a pragmatic step. New Labour was seen as simply capitalising on the rot at the heart of the then Conservative government, whose private failings were manifest in the libel and perjury trials of Tory minister Jonathan Aitken and the ‘cash for questions’ imbroglio of his colleague Neil Hamilton between 1994 and 1996. But New Labour did not just take advantage of its parliamentary rivals’ misfortunes. It made being ‘clean’, being of unblemished character, being privately virtuous, into its political cause.

Such was the political importance now being ascribed to the character of politicians that New Labour’s key 1997 manifesto pledge was to ‘clean up politics’ and ‘reform party funding to end sleaze’. In place of the ‘the totalising ideologies’ of yore, as Tony Blair described left and right in 1996, stood politicians themselves (2). Shorn of grand, overarching political vision, what was important was personal conduct, being seen to be morally upstanding.

The problem with this elevation of private conduct into a public virtue is that it made private misconduct supremely newsworthy. If your electoral ticket is based on appearing as white as Martin Bell’s famously white suit, then any journalist worth his salt will try to seek out the stains. The exposure of hypocrisy becomes the objective. New Labour discovered this in the subsequent 13 years of its rule. From the numerous party-funding scandals to ‘peerages for cash’ right up to the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009, the cross-party obsession with appearing to be clean, with insisting upon being judged for what one is rather than what one stands for, drove the press to concentrate on what politicians are rather than what they stand for (if anything). And now, with the phone-hacking scandal tainting anyone it touches, even David Cameron, through his appointment of ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson, is having his private conduct scrutinised for, as Gordon Brown put it, ‘malign purpose’.

Yet rather than grasp the diminution and trivialisation of political life in terms of the diminution and trivialisation of politics, its political party-led reduction to character and private conduct, politicians, even fading ones like Brown, feel able to blame everything on the press. And worringly, given the current post-hackgate climate, few are taking Brown up on what looks and feels like an impending clampdown on press freedom.

It probably won’t seem like an assault on press freedom, of course. The talk will be of ‘raising journalistic standards’, of encouraging journalists to concentrate on the ‘public interest’, of becoming less ‘feral’. But take away the soft-soaping rhetoric and the curtailment of press freedom becomes clear: it is a demand that the press be respectable and pursue respectable stories. While stories about MPs’ expenses and ministers’ peccadilloes might not be edifying, better an unedifying but free press than a controlled one full of prescribed stories about how brilliant a carbon floor price is.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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19 August, 2011

Sick British police priorities

Greater Manchester Police have been rightly praised for their robust response to the riots. The courts in the North West are equally resolute in their determination to crack down on disorder.

In Warrington, magistrates had no compunction about sentencing two men to four years in jail for using Facebook to incite a riot.

Needless to say, the severity of some of the sentences has been roundly criticised by the usual conga-line of hand-wringers and ‘criminal justice professionals’. They protest that ministers have put undue pressure on the courts to hand down exemplary jail terms, and insist that sentencing should be left to the discretion of magistrates.

So I wonder what they make of the case of Christopher Heathcote, from Stockport, Greater Manchester, who has just been banned from driving for a year — against the wishes of local magistrates.

In April last year, he made five 999 calls when his cousin’s quad bike was stolen. It took the police 90 minutes to respond, by which time the bike was long gone. The next day, when there was a report that the bike was being driven in fields at nearby Wythenshawe, he set off in hot pursuit.

Spotting a police patrol, he stopped to ask officers for their help. But instead of joining the chase, they breathalysed Mr Heathcote and arrested him when the test showed he was over the drink-drive limit. He admitted he had drunk three pints of lager earlier in the day.

While he was being processed, the thieves made good their getaway. They’ve never been caught, and the bike has not been recovered.

The magistrates were sympathetic and refused to give him a mandatory 12-month driving ban because there were ‘special circumstances’.

The police were not satisfied with the verdict and referred it to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer. A High Court judge subsequently ordered the magistrates to disqualify 26-year-old Mr Heathcote for a year.

This week, the chairman of the bench, Alan Bodgers, reluctantly banned Mr Heathcote, while making it quite clear it was only because the magistrates had been overruled by the DPP and a higher court. He added: ‘You’re only a young man, you’re just starting off, and this is a bad lesson to learn. I’m not happy with the police.’

The ‘bad lesson’ Mr Heathcote will take from this case is one which millions of ordinary citizens have already absorbed. We can’t rely on the police to protect us or our property in normal circumstances, let alone in the event of a riot.

In this case, Mr Heathcote wasn’t even taking the law into his own hands, which the police hate. He had actually stopped to ask the officers for help. His only thought was catching the thieves and recovering his cousin’s stolen quad bike.

Let me say right here that no one is condoning drunk-driving. Mr Heathcote was over the limit, but, as the magistrates appreciated, there were ‘special circumstances’. If local courts are better placed to decide on appropriate sentences for rioters and looters, without political interference, why shouldn’t they also be able to use their discretion in cases like this?

Greater Manchester Police may have deserved the plaudits for their rapid response to the riots. But when it comes to everyday crime, they’re not quite so enthusiastic. A senior officer admitted that their target for responding to non-violent thefts and burglaries is four hours. As a result, every small-time crook in Manchester now knows that if they commit a crime, they will have up to four hours to make their getaway.

It’s not just inner city estates like Broadwater Farm which have been abandoned by the police, it’s city centres and suburbs, too. Not to mention vast swathes of the countryside.

A couple of weeks ago, it was reported that one in three reported crimes in Britain is never investigated. As many as 650,000 crimes, from cycle thefts to violent assaults, are ‘screened out’ because officers think there is no realistic chance of a conviction.

Little wonder, then, that they concentrate on easy collars like Mr Heathcote, a man with a previously unblemished record. Still, no doubt it got them off the streets for the rest of the shift.

If the police had done the job we pay them for, Mr Heathcote would never have climbed behind the wheel.

Why were the DPP and the High Court judge so determined to over-rule the magistrates? Simple: it’s because the criminal justice establishment operates a rigid closed shop. They think they own the law.

The independence of magistrates has been consistently undermined by rigid rules and soft sentencing guidelines imposed by the Guardianistas at the Home Office and the Ministry of Injustice to satisfy their own ‘liberal’ prejudices.

JPs are slaughtered when they reflect the public mood and sentence those who attempt to instigate riots to hard time. Yet they’re also over-ruled when they show justice and compassion, and refuse to impose a mandatory driving ban on a decent man like Christopher Heathcote.

Nothing of substance will change until we are allowed to elect our judges and police chiefs.

To add insult to injury, the insurance company has refused to pay out on Mr Heathcote’s cousin’s £2,000 quad bike because it wasn’t in a garage at the time it was stolen.

As for those poor little toe-rags sentenced to four years for inciting a riot, you can guarantee that they’ll be back on the streets by this time next year, if not sooner.

Before the last election, Call Me Dave promised he would be on the side of those who played by the rules, paid their taxes and tried to do the right thing.

If you’re Christopher Heathcote, or you’ve been burned out of your home and business while the police watched and did nothing, that must seem like a sick joke.

SOURCE



British Christians get more rights -- except if it affects homosexuals

The state equality watchdog yesterday set out a plan for a two-tier law for Christians. It said that Christians should be freed to display their faith by wearing crosses or pinning up Christian symbols at work.

But they should not be allowed to follow religious principles if they clash with gay rights, the Equality and Human Rights Commission said.

The decision means that the equality watchdog will back BA check-in clerk Nadia Eweida, who was banned by the airline from wearing a cross at work.

BA caved in during the row caused five years ago by the ban on Miss Eweida wearing a cross with her uniform, but she is taking her case to the European human rights court in Strasbourg to try to establish a right for Christians to wear symbols of their faith.

The Commission, which is headed by former Labour politician Trevor Phillips, will also give its support at the human rights court to Shirley Chaplin, a nurse removed from the wards at her hospital in Exeter because she refused to stop wearing her crucifix.

However the equality body will oppose any leniency towards Christians who asked to be excused from work which involved helping homosexual couples.

Documents released yesterday show that Mr Phillips’ lawyers will go to Strasbourg to oppose the claims of Lilian Ladele, a registrar in Islington who lost her job after she refused to conduct civil partnership ceremonies, and of Gary McFarlane, a Relate counsellor sacked for refusing to give sex therapy to gay couples.

The double standard for Christianity follows an admission from the Commission last month that British judges have failed to protect religious freedom. All four of the Strasbourg cases are under way because British courts and tribunals found against the rights of Christians.

But Christian groups yesterday accused Mr Phillips of backing down from the Commission’s declaration in July that ‘the way existing human rights and equality law has been interpreted by judges is insufficient to protect freedom of religion or belief.’

The Evangelical Alliance, which represents a million Christians from the evangelical wing of the Church of England and the major nonconformist denominations, said Mr Phillips had been bullied into backtracking by the gay lobby.

Alliance spokesman Don Horrocks said: ‘It seems pretty clear that the Commission has been successfully intimidated against proceeding as they initially announced. They appear to have changed their initial approach as a result of the outcry from those groups who wish to restrict freedom of religion and religious rights of conscience being recognised more fairly by the courts.’

Mr Horrocks added: ‘For many Christians wearing a cross is important, but these situations ought to be relatively easily accommodated by reasonable people on both sides in work related situations. However, being forced to be morally complicit in activities which directly violate people’s religious conscience involves seriously fundamental human rights principles.’

The EHRC is to run a two-week consultation to gather opinions from interested groups before giving final instructions to its lawyers on which line to take when the cases are heard in Strasbourg this autumn.

A spokesman said: ‘There is no change to the question we are asking: have the UK courts properly considered people’s right to manifest their religion?

‘There is a wide range of opinion on this issue and we have had helpful responses to our consultation from a wide range of mainstream religious groups. Our job is not to take sides in political arguments between activist groups, it is to make sure people do not face unjustified discrimination.’

Its consultation document said: ‘The accommodation of rights should not require the rights of one person to cancel out or trump the rights of another.’

SOURCE



Australia: Burqa law to be extended to jails and courts in New South Wales

NEW laws giving police the power to insist Muslim women remove their burqas so they can be identified will be extended to prisons and courts in legislation New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell will take to parliament next week.

Under the laws, police will not be able to forcibly remove a face-covering if the wearer refuses to do so. However, those who do refuse the request will be charged and face $220 fines. For motorists, the penalties will be even greater, with fines of up to $5500 or a year in jail. Refusing to remove a headcovering in a courtroom will carry a $550 fine.

The laws will also apply to helmets as well as to niqabs, masks and burqas according to The Daily Telegraph.

If the subject of a police roadside stop pleads cultural sensitivity as a reason for refusing to remove a head covering, they can ask to go to a police station to remove it.

The Ombudsman will review the laws in 12 months.

Mr O'Farrell will announce the changes to the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act today. Mr O'Farrell said that under the current laws, police could ask someone to provide identification but had virtually no powers to require someone to remove a face covering.

"Under the changes, police will be able to demand the removal of any face covering including a helmet, burqa, niqab, mask or any item of clothing when requiring people to prove their identification," he said.

"There will be strong safeguards to ensure that the new powers are used sensibly. "People will only be required to remove a face covering for as long as it takes to identify them.

"In other words, we want to ensure that identification occurs as quickly as possible and with privacy if the person requests it. At the same time, we are going to give police the powers ... to make a clear identification of those suspected of committing offences."

SOURCE



Can we have some diversity of opinion at Australia's major public broadcasting network?

LAST week's coverage of the London riots by our national broadcaster provides yet more evidence of the deep and damaging divide between mainstream Australians and the so-called intellectual class. The term "so-called intellectual class" is deliberate. Many of its apparently well-educated members are more ideologically blinded than they are intellectually curious.

Take PM, the ABC radio's premier political program. The program was abuzz with talk about the causes of the criminal mayhem, except the causes that fall outside the bounds of respectable Left-liberal orthodoxy.

We are used to being intellectually underwhelmed in Sydney by ABC local radio's Deborah Cameron. Her constant lightweight crusades are just that: they represent the unthinking Left.

Even former ABC chairman Donald McDonald has pointed to Cameron's morning stream of consciousness and asked why can't the ABC do better? Good question. A better question is this: aren't we entitled to expect more from PM, which describes itself as "one of the grand institutions of Australian public broadcasting"?

Sadly, the highbrow program let us down. Early in the week, PM's host Mark Colvin and London-based reporter Rachael Brown kept making comparisons with the race riots in the 1980s.

When it became clear that the riots were not political protests, but instead rampant, opportunistic crime, the program then canvassed every Left-liberal excuse for the shocking violence.

We heard about the hot weather, high unemployment, bad police communications, unfairness, inequality, austerity cuts, culminating in PM interviewing author Will Hutton, who blamed the crime wave on capitalism.

By Friday, not even the ABC could ignore another possible explanation: the poisonous cocktail of welfare dependency, broken schools, the absence of family authority and a vacuum of values that bind communities. Yet, even then, PM's interview with Theodore Dalrymple, a critic of the welfare system, looked like a token effort to placate a broadcasting charter that requires the ABC to present different perspectives. After all, why didn't the ABC's premier political program evince earlier and more genuine curiosity about the riots? Plenty of people have asked questions about the damaging role of welfare.

The journalists at PM could have spoken with Frank Furedi or Brendan O'Neill, to name just a few who have provided thoughtful analysis that challenges leftist sacred cows. If PM didn't want to take its cue from this newspaper, which featured both men, the program could have interviewed many others who reject the so-called progressive orthodoxy of welfare.

The term "so-called progressive" is also deliberate: the London riots have shown that decades of progressive welfare policies have not provided a path to progress for the people who need it most.

Colvin's evening political coverage could have included Katharine Birbalsingh, for example. The former state school teacher made headlines last October after her passionate speech about education to the Conservative Party conference attacking the deep "culture of excuses, of low standards and expecting the very least from our poorest and least disadvantaged".

Colvin's PM program could have explored what turned Birbalsingh from a self-described serious lefty who read Marxism at university and flirted with the Socialist Workers Party into a well-placed critic of a leftist ideology that has long since stopped helping children.

The 37-year-old teacher told the conference that when she tells a child who has caused trouble to repeat "I am responsible for myself, Miss", she is "fighting a generation of thinking that has left our education system in pieces".

From front-line experience, Birbalsingh blames the "well-meaning liberal" for the dumbing down of schools 'that even the children themselves know it", where the children are crying out for structure and discipline (one child pleaded with her: "Miss, I want to be in your class because I hear you're really mean").

In schools and in society, "we need high expectations; we need to instil competition among our kids and help build their motivation". A few days after saying these things, Birbalsingh was asked by her employers to work from home and she has since parted ways with the British state school system.

Perhaps PM will interview Birbalsingh when she comes to Sydney to speak at a Sydney Institute function next month. That they failed to cast Aunty's net of analysis wider during the London riots tells us much about the state of debate on important issues in this country.

This is a debate that requires some genuine curiosity and courage from the broader political class if we are to learn anything from the riots across London.

And there is plenty to learn. Lessons such as what happens when we fail to attribute responsibility to individuals for their actions, when we fail to lay down boundaries for behaviour, when there are too few expectations on people, when generations grow dependent on the state, when they have only a sense of entitlement to handouts rather than a sense of contribution to the community in which they live.

After all, people don't jump up and start demolishing their own community because benefits are cut back.

If the austerity cuts are to blame for the violence, then handing benefits back won't restore the moral values that were absent on the streets of England last week. The mentality that led to the riots was quietly brewing while public expenditure in Britain has skyrocketed for the past few decades.

Instead of using the riots to attack capitalism, we could relearn some basic economic lessons too. As Irving Kristol once said, it's true that a market economy creates inequalities of income and wealth but "there is simply no alternative to 'trickle-down economics' which is just another name for growth economics".

As Kristol said: "The world has yet to see a successful version of 'trickle-up economics', an egalitarian society in which the state ensures the fruits of economic growth are universally and equally shared" because this socialist ideal has never produced the fruits in the first place.

When the state grows bigger and more intrusive, assuming greater control over individuals, the other side of the equation necessarily gets squeezed. Individual freedom, accountability and responsibility for our actions as free agents diminish in equal measure.

Jed Bartlet, the fictional Democrat president on The West Wing, best described the consequences of not taking responsibility when he said: "We come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame so no one's guilty". In response to his wrongdoing, Bartlet said: "I'm to blame. I was wrong."

When governments and the broader political class, when schools and bureaucracies, and when parents raising children relearn the importance of individual responsibility, then we will see real progress for those who most need it.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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18 August, 2011

The ACLU hearts Sex Offenders

The Delaware American Civil Liberties Union has filed court papers to stop sex offenders from being evicted from a safe house that is located near a new day care center.

The ACLU, along with an attorney representing the safe house and three sex offenders, has asked a judge to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the city from evicting the residents.

“The state has asked the residents to leave, and if they don’t leave they will be arrested,” attorney Daniel Wolcott, Jr. told Fox News Radio. Wolcott is representing the owner of the safe house and three sex offenders.

“The safe house has been there for a number of years and has been accepting registered sex offenders who are prohibited from living within 500 feet of a school,” he said.

Wolcott said there are two safe houses in question. One house was operating before the day care center opened for business. The other one was not. However, he said police said any sex offenders living at both houses would have to leave or face arrest.

Kathleen MacRae, the executive director of the Delaware ACLU, told The News Journal that the pending eviction of the sex offenders seems “very unfair and very rushed by the city.”

She pointed out that the ACLU has questions over the actual distance between the homes and the day care center. The ACLU also questioned whether a day care center qualifies as a “school” under state law. The day care center reportedly began operating less than 500 feet from both homes in September.

“It is already difficult for men who have been convicted of a sex offense to find a place to live,” she told the newspaper. “State law should not force these men to move, or prevent facilities like the safe house from housing them, every time a private citizen decides to open a day care center.”

A city spokesman released the following statement to Fox News Radio:

“The City appreciates the predicament faced by the residents of the Harriet Tubman Safe House, but we are following the advice of the Attorney General’s Office and cannot comment further due to the pending court action.” Delaware Attorney General Bo Biden’s office said they will not comment on the matter.

The issue has stirred debate in Wilmington. The News Journal released an editorial that called the sex offender ban unfairly punitive.

“As offensive as the tenants' crimes are, they paid their debt to society and earned the right to purse law-abiding livelihoods,” the editorial read. “Their home predates the day care center by eight years. This is not to dismiss the fact that even with treatment a high percentage of sex offenders -- pedophiles particularly -- will recommit their crimes. But a carte blanche banishing of all sex offenders to be on the run every time they have found legally acceptable housing is vindictive, reactionary and no solution.”

SOURCE



Our prisons walls are too high to look over, moan terror suspects in Britain

Inmates complain limited view damaged their eyesight

Suspected terrorists are complaining about a fence around the exercise yard in their high-security prison which restricts their view of the horizon. The alleged extremists are locked up while the Government tries to remove them from the country.

But the inmates have complained the limited view is damaging their eyesight, a prison inspection report revealed.

And astonishingly, inspectors accepted their complaints, criticising the cladding put around the edge of the exercise yard because it stops the men seeing into the distance.

They men are being held in the detainee unit at Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire and are prevented from mixing with other inmates.

Some months ago, prison bosses offered to allow them to join activities involving paedophiles and rapists who are isolated from the rest of the prison for their own protection. But this was rejected because the terror suspects feared they would be ‘stigmatised’ by being seen with the sex offenders.

The report recommended removing the cladding so the prisoners have a clear view into the outside world.

Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick said: ‘While detainees’ treatment and conditions were satisfactory in some respects, too little attention was paid to their uniquely isolated and uncertain position.’

The report added: ‘For most of the time, detainees were confined to the unit and largely deprived of contact with the range of people that was possible for convicted prisoners in the main prison. ‘This had resulted in a feeling of claustrophobia.

‘The fence surrounding the exercise yard was clad, therefore preventing detainees from seeing into the distance. All detainee unit cells overlooked the inner courtyard and detainees therefore had no opportunities to see into the distance, and some complained of deteriorating eyesight.’

The high-security detainee unit at Long Lartin holds seven suspected terrorists. Three are foreign nationals whom ministers want to deport to their home countries. The other four are awaiting the outcome of legal challenges to extradition requests by the United States. They are thought to include Babar Ahmed, whose case is being considered by the European Court of Human Rights. Two of the men have been held for more than 11 years as they fight deportation, at a cost of more than £1.6million.

The average cost of a place in a high-security prison is £74,000 per year.

The report revealed the men are allowed out of their cells for nearly 60 hours a week. They also have access to gym equipment and their own kitchen, as well as prepared meals.

SOURCE



Dissent makes a smarter society

The Left once prided themselves on dissent. Now they try to suppress it. Comment from the editor of an Australian online magazine below

BY most measures over the past 35 years Australia has been an amazingly successful country. We've increased national wealth, become cosmopolitan, remained egalitarian, fight above our weight diplomatically and win more Olympic gold per capita than anyone else. But that success is under threat.

Openness has been the key. While openness in internal and external commercial markets has driven a big increase in wealth, the ability to capitalise on it has been driven by an open society that allowed new ideas, new structures and new entrepreneurs to bubble up to meet the challenges.

Now it seems that reform has reached its limit and the forces of reaction are trying to close up society and the economy, and while their goal may be partly to limit division in the community they are actually increasing it.

We've seen various legislative curbs on free speech, such as religious or racial vilification laws. These depart from traditional and legitimate curbs such as defamation in that they invent novel group rights and punish thought rather than action, often making the offence a subjective rather than objective one.

These are increasingly allied to overt attempts to enforce conformity of thought by a variety of state and non-state organisations and individuals, frequently amplified by the new media.

I'm not talking about legitimate rhetorical techniques used to convince people and change their minds, but coercive techniques to intimidate, silence and suppress.

Calls by political parties to investigate alleged media bias are the most recent front in this war....

Take the global warming debate. On one side we have the government, government-funded organisations such as the CSIRO, government appointees such as the chief scientist and various activists, non-governmental organisations and academics asserting that the science is settled and debate is over.

This reaches beyond the uncontested claim that CO2 is a greenhouse gas to demanding acceptance of any number of conflicting and widely varying modelled predictions and policies designed to mitigate their effects.

They've even invented a new type of science called "sustainability science" where if you can think of a threat large enough you are justified in dealing with it as a fact before you have experimental evidence to prove it.

Opponents are tagged as "deniers" or "denialists" in a clear attempt to demean scepticism as immoral and irrational, equivalent to holocaust denial, and the Prime Minister berates sceptical journalists telling them not to "write crap".

We even have high-profile academics such as ethics professor Clive Hamilton and federation scholar John Quiggin claiming that to even publish sceptical stories is evidence of bias.

On this basis Hamilton urged a boycott of my journal On Line Opinion, while Quiggin spends some of his time altering the Wikipedia entries of opponents to imply they are tobacco lobbyists.

If the government had been more open to entertaining contrary advice, and there are some from within its own ranks who could give it, it might not be facing a carbon tax rout that has some of the hallmarks of its very own Bay of Pigs.

And our collective problems do not stop there because dissent that is denied a legitimate place in debate can become explosively destructive.

An earlier outbreak of political correctness under Paul Keating led to the creation of Pauline Hanson. The most common reason I ever heard for people supporting Hanson was "I don't agree with everything she says, but I agree with her right to say it."

And that was before the internet. Now the new media make it easier for both the in and the out crowds to talk to themselves in an echo chamber amplifying their own group thinks.

While theoretically the internet brings all the online "thoughts" of the world within one click of each of us, it simultaneously breaks down the institutions that brought us face to face with challenging facts.

Now we can all get the "Daily Me" via Facebook, Twitter, email lists and favourite chat rooms, which reaffirms our world view.

More, the new media allow the potential for explosion to be organised via brown-shirt activism using flash mobs and new institutions like GetUp to target not politicians but innocent bystanders (as they did in the case of Harvey Norman), who may profit from a particular lawful pursuit that they disapprove of.

In this atmosphere a good government, rather than trying to delegitimise dissent, would be reaching out to institutionalise it, recognising that what's crap to one, may be fertiliser to another, and that institutions that foster dissent thrive.

SOURCE



Australia: Homosexuals a privileged class again -- legally free to discriminate against normal people

We can't discriminate against them but they can discriminate against us! And it's taxpayers' money they are using to do it

A CO-OPERATIVE of gay men has won the right to continue leasing their properties exclusively to homosexual tenants. The District Court's Equal Opportunity Tribunal yesterday granted House-One Co-operative Inc an exemption from the state's Equal Rights Act.

The exemption allows the group to provide secure, long-term, affordable accommodation to gay men who have experienced difficulty finding private rental properties.

Outside court, House-One chairman Darren Webb said it was a "positive move" for the group. "We're a community, we can talk to each other, help each other and support each other," he said. "Most people think gay men are rich ... that's not the case."

In court yesterday, Mr Webb said many gay men had negative experiences in the private rental market and most felt their sexuality was a factor.

House-One treasurer Bill Dell told the court he had once been evicted by a private landlord because a distant relative was returning to Adelaide who required the accommodation. Later checks by Mr Dell revealed that was not the case and that new tenants - a young, straight couple - had moved in after him.

The co-operative said gay men seeking accommodation with their partner found it especially tough. Some were encouraged to pretend to have a girlfriend or wife when applying for a lease.

House-One manages 16 Housing Trust SA homes, predominantly in the CBD. Under yesterday's ruling, the co-operative is now exempt from accepting any non-gay applicants via the register for their properties. Men who rent the properties can do so for renewable periods of six months, provided they become a member of the co-operative.

Judge Jack Costello said the wider public interest had prompted the tribunal to grant the exemption.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************



17 August, 2011

What’s happening to men?

The author below does touch on male motivation but she could be more frank. From the 60s on, men have been saying of women: "Why buy a book when you can join a library?" In other words, post-pill sexual liberation has removed a lot of incentive towards marriage or committed relationships generally. Sex is available with little or no committment involved. And that avaiability seems to be increasing, if anything. What would once have been condemned as "slutty" behaviour in women is now widespread.

And draconian laws about propery-sharing after divorce in fact make marriage an act of near-insanity for any well-informed male.

The end result is that men cruise while women have to look after themselves and their chidren by themselves. So no wonder women now take on the burden of a career and leave men free for a more self-indulgent life. It leads to the not uncommon claim nowadays that women's liberation was a racket devised for the benefit of men

Women today are entering adulthood with more education, more achievements, more property, and, arguably, more money and ambition than their male counterparts. This is a first in human history, and its implications for both sexes are far from simple.

You can see the strongest evidence that boys and young men are falling behind in high school and college classrooms. Boys have lower GPAs and lower grades in almost every subject, including math, despite their higher standardized testing scores.[1] They are 58% of high school dropouts.[2] In the mid 1970s about 28% of men had college degrees. Since then, that number has barely budged. Meanwhile, the percentage of women with a college degree increased from 18.6 to 34.2%.[3] Women now earn 57% of college degrees; predictions have them at 60% in the near future.

The success of young women has also been an international affair. Women are outperforming men in school and moving ahead in urban workplaces all over Europe and Asia. They are half or more of university students throughout Western and Eastern Europe, and have reached or are approaching parity in Japan, Korea, and Singapore.[10] As they move into cities, get their degrees, and join the workforce, women are delaying and even forgoing marriage and children.[11] In South Korea, for example, well over half of 30 year old women remain single, preferring to pursue more education and “self-development.”[12]

Their success is changing entrenched patriarchal attitudes. In the 1990s after sex-selective abortion became commonplace, Korea had one of the highest boys-to-girls ratios in the world. Now as younger Koreans reject the traditional preference for sons, the sex ratio is beginning to right itself. It’s probably only a matter of time before the same thing happens in China and India, both places where younger women are also becoming independent and successful workers. What’s causing the shift in women’s status? South Korea never had a vocal feminist movement—but it does have a vibrant knowledge economy.

All over the developed world, then, working women have been beneficiaries of the post-industrial economy. That leaves us with the question: why are men failing to keep up? There are two common answers. First, girls are “better at school” than boys, and are able to better compete for the higher paying, higher status jobs that require a college education. The reasons for this are highly disputed.

One possibility is that boys learn differently than girls and that the schools, where women do most of the teaching, fail to recognize boys’ particular interests and “learning styles.” Female teachers choose fiction, goes one example of this line of thinking, but boys prefer adventure stories and biographies. Another possibility is that girls possess noncognitive strengths that lead to greater school success. In a 2002 paper, “Where the Boys Aren’t,” Harvard economist Brian Jacob compared a large cohort of college grads who had been 8th graders in 1988. He found that while boys and girls scored similarly on cognitive tests, girls were better at paying attention in class, keeping track of homework, and collaborating with classmates.[13] Other studies have also found them to be more self-disciplined.[14]

The second and related theory about why men are falling behind has it that today’s labor market prizes female strengths more than male strengths. The manufacturing economy, the one that ironically gave women the household revolution that helped to liberate them, relied on physical strength and endurance. Perhaps there were women who could be men’s equals in the steel mills, on the auto line, digging in mines, building bridges, or laboring as lumberjacks, bricklayers, or roofers. But there weren’t many. Good jobs today are another breed. They rely on traits like organizational and planning skills, aesthetic awareness, an ability to collaborate, and what are called “people skills.”[15]

They also often require a consumer mindset, and despite their increasing time on the job, women remain the world’s dominant consumers. The noncognitive skills Brian Jacob found to be at the root of girls’ school success also serve them well in the office. Whether these qualities are innately feminine, culturally taught, or some combination doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this argument. The point is that today, with the important exception of the technical and financial sector, younger women (that is, childless women, an important caveat) have shown they can easily be men’s equals, and possibly even their superiors, in the knowledge economy.

I would add a third, more existential explanation, for the male problem. The economic independence of women and the collapse of marriage norms have deprived men of the primary social role that incentivized their achievement. Adult manhood has almost universally been equated with marriage and fatherhood. Boys grew up knowing that they had inescapable future demands on them. There were exceptions, of course. In polygamous societies, low status men often had neither wives nor children; in others some males became priests and some, warriors and soldiers. But in most human societies, men knew that they were expected to become providers. Why have men agreed to do all of those dangerous, boring, dirty, exhausting jobs? Because people were depending on them. Evolutionary psychologists would point out it’s not insignificant that many of those dependents shared their genes.

Beginning in the middle of 20th century, not coincidentally the same historical moment that great numbers of women were moving into the workforce and becoming economically independent, the universal assumption that men were essential to family life started to erode. Divorce and single motherhood began to rise; even today, though divorce rates have declined, 40% of American children are now born to single mothers. Close to half of those mothers are living with their child’s father at the time of birth, but within five years, 40% of those fathers have moved out and their contact with their children diminishes steadily.[16]

At first, the large majority of unmarried mothers were low-income women relying on a bundle of government benefits, particularly welfare, to support themselves and their children. More recently, however, high school educated women and those with some college have swelled the ranks of single mothers.[17] Thus far, high-income women have bucked the trend towards single motherhood, but there’s evidence that is changing. In a forthcoming paper, Lucie Schmidt, an economist at Williams College, found that the birthrate for unmarried college-educated women has climbed 145 percent since 1980, compared with a 60 percent increase in the birthrate for non-college-educated unmarried women. It’s a safe prediction that the college gender gap will cause these numbers to climb. By age 23, there are 164 women with bachelor’s degrees for every 100 men, and trends have been towards greater educational homogamy, because women show little interest in marrying “down.”[18]

What this means is that boys today are growing up in a culture that, unlike any before in civilization, is agnostic about their future familial responsibilities. The effect of this agnosticism on black men has been particularly dramatic. Social scientists generally point to the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs as the cause of high black male dropout and crime rates, poor college performance, and absence in the lives of their children. It could also be that black men and women were caught in a negative feedback loop. As the manufacturing economy declined, black men could not find the decent jobs they had once relied on. Black women chose to have children on their own. Sons grew up observing that men were of little consequence to family life, which in turn gave them less incentive to adapt to changes in the labor market or more generally to become reliably productive husbands and fathers. With little hope for finding suitable husbands, black women came to take single motherhood for granted. Today 72% of black children are born to unmarried women.

This existential theory, stressing the loss of men’s primary social role, is impossible to prove with any certainty. But there is some evidence that unmarried men are less motivated in the workplace. Married men work longer hours, earn more, and get more promotions than single men, including those who are fathers; indeed, their earnings rise after they marry.[19] This still could be a product of self-selection. The same qualities that make a man more productive in the work place may also make him a more reliable marriage partner. Several studies attempt to tease out the problem. Eric Gould at the Hebrew University in Tel Aviv looked at the schooling and career decisions of over 2,000 young American men between 16 and 39. He concluded that if there were no returns to career choices in the marriage market, “men would tend to work less, study less, and choose blue-collar jobs over white-collar jobs.” The findings don’t apply to the highest achieving men, but it does help to explain some of the behavior of men who straddle blue and white collar worlds.[20]

Consider another recent study by S. Alexandra Burt at Michigan State University. Burt followed 289 pairs of male twins for 12 years, between the ages of 17 and 29. More than half of the twins were identical. She found that men who had shown less antisocial behavior as adolescents were more likely to marry as they got older, which argues for self-selection. But she also found that a married twin had fewer antisocial behaviors—aggression, irritability, financial irresponsibility, and criminal involvement—than his unmarried brother. This suggests there is some truth to the very unfashionable idea that marriage helps to discipline men.

Aside from school reforms that could help keep boys more engaged, the new gender gap has no obvious solutions. The profound economic changes that have led to female success

SOURCE



British family's 18 months of hell after two children are taken away when blundering social workers wrongly accuse them of breaking baby's limbs

A couple were accused of child abuse after doctors failed to realise their baby son’s ‘injuries’ were caused by a genetic bone disease. Both parents were arrested and prevented from seeing their children unsupervised for 18 months before their innocence was finally acknowledged.

Yesterday Amy Garland said she and her partner had been treated like criminals after they took their six-week-old son Harrison to hospital when he was ill.

Initial tests proved inconclusive, but X-rays later showed that he had suffered eight separate fractures in his arms and legs. Social services accused his parents of child abuse and took the baby and his elder sister into care.

Miss Garland and her partner Paul Crummey were arrested and banned from seeing their children alone before anyone realised that Harrison actually had brittle bone disease, or osteogenesis imperfecta.

The rare condition is caused by a gene defect which impairs the production of the protein collagen, making bones fragile. Those with the disease can break their bones while being cuddled or even in their sleep. Around 40 to 60 babies are born with the disorder each year.

Miss Garland, 26, who lives near Bristol, said her family had been left in tatters after she and Mr Crummey split up over the stress caused by being separated from their children.

As soon as the fractures were discovered, social services were called in. The couple could not explain the apparent injuries and police arrested them.

Their daughter Bethany, then 20 months, was placed in the care of Miss Garland’s father. When the case went before Bristol County Court a judge ordered them to live in a family placement centre where their every move was observed. Miss Garland said: ‘The judge didn’t want to separate me from Harrison because I was still breast feeding. We were watched 24 hours a day and there were cameras in every room. It was like a prison.’

After three months, staff could find nothing wrong with their parenting skills and recommended that the family be allowed to stay together.

But social workers applied for an interim care order and the children were placed into foster care with Miss Garland’s mother. They were allowed contact with their parents for six hours a day, under supervision. This continued for more than a year until Miss Garland found an expert who said Harrison probably had osteogenesis imperfecta. Six months later, doctors agreed that this was a possibility and South Gloucestershire Social Services dropped the case.

Miss Garland told last night how Harrison had been in obvious discomfort in the weeks after his birth, but hospital tests found nothing. But when she got home she noticed his legs were swollen, and X-rays later showed he had several fractures in his arm, feet and legs. Miss Garland said: ‘We had no idea that this condition was in our family so when they asked us how they happened we didn’t know.

‘They said they needed to investigate it and we were happy for them to do that. The police and social services asked us a lot of questions. They asked me if there was any family history of violence. The police spoke to our neighbours asking what we were like. They went through our house. I was in absolute shock. I felt like a criminal.’

Even in hospital, she was not allowed to be alone with her son. ‘I wasn’t eating and I couldn’t sleep because I was worried they would take him from me,’ she said.

The strain caused the couple to split up two months after the children went into foster care. Miss Garland said: ‘It was horrible. When I went home at night and the kids weren’t there, I broke down. We took things out on each other.’

A month after the case was finally dropped two years ago, Harrison was officially diagnosed with osteogenesis imperfecta. Bethany, now five, was found to have a lesser type of the condition.

Harrison still has vitamin D injections to strengthen his bones and sees a physiotherapist to build up his muscles. Brittle bone disease is often confused with osteoporosis – thinning bones in women after the menopause – but the two are not the same.

Mr Crummey, 41, who recently lost his job as a civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, said: ‘All we wanted to do was help our sick child but we were treated like criminals. We’ve never received an apology from social services. It makes me feel very angry.’

A spokesman for South Gloucestershire Council said: ‘We have a legal duty to protect children and young people and we always put the welfare of the child at the heart of how we deliver our services.’

SOURCE



Why is a Virginia Pilot Program on ‘Multiculturalism’ Closed to the Public?

If the stated goal of a particular program is to reach out to people of all walks in an effort to encourage “multiculturalism,“ and better serve residents in the ”diverse” community, then why would that program be closed to the public? Seems a bit counterintuitve, doesn’t it?

Nonetheless, that seems to be the case with a pilot program created by Chesterfield County Virginia’s Multicultural Advisory Commission. The pilot, set to launch Thursday, is said to “improve county dialogue with its diverse communities.” The Richmond Times Dispatch states that the commission will hold a series of moderated focus groups across the county to address issues including education, public safety, health, housing and business development. And, it’s sure to be quite a melting pot…except that the meetings do not seem to include representatives from the Caucasian or Christian communities, respectively:

Imad Damaj, vice chairman of the commission, said representatives of Asian, Latino and African-American communities will attend the first focus group, along with a representative of a Muslim group. Nonprofits, including homeless organizations, are included in the discussion, along with government officials from the county’s fire, police and school system. Minority business owners have also been invited.

“This is the first effort where the county is reaching to these different community leaders,” said Damaj, a native of Lebanon and president of the Virginia Muslim Coalition. “We’re hoping to learn from these communities.

“What are the challenges for them in living in Chesterfield County? How can we serve them better?” he asked. “What do we need to do to make Chesterfield a better place for their business? Are we serving them in schools and social services well?”

According to the 2010 census, the county’s population is 21 percent black, 3 percent Asian and 2 percent multiracial. Seven percent of county residents are Latino, and 7 percent are foreign-born.

The goal of the commission, which reports to the Board of Supervisors, is to identify the concerns and interests of its minority communities. It also seeks to promote cultural understanding and inclusiveness of those groups within the county.

Dale District Supervisor James M. “Jim” Holland said the commission was formed, in part, so that the supervisors can make informed decisions about its various constituencies. He said as the county further diversifies, “it’s even more relevant.”

It seems many distinct communities are going to be represented in Chesterfield County, however, Christians, Jews, and Caucasians in general seem to be completely left out.

Chesterfield County does seem quite concerned about its Hispanic community, however. “That’s [Hispanic] a community we need to be aware of and communicate with and be attentive of,” Holland said.
He also alleged that it is important for the county’s diverse groups to have a place at the table when it comes time to make important important decisions. Holland’s stated priority is that “we are hearing them and their concerns are understood and addressed.”

“I’ve learned to appreciate the beautiful diversity we have and the significant asset it is in making our community have a really high quality of life,” Holland said. “It helps us be a far more globally educated community.”

All well and good, however, the meeting is also, apparently, not open to the public. Now doesn’t that basically defeat the purpose?

SOURCE



The Barbarians Inside Britain's Gates

All the young rioters will have had long experience with the justice system's efforts to confer impunity upon law breakers

by Theodore Dalrymple

The youth of Britain have long placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of venturing forth after dark than would peasants in Bram Stoker's Transylvania. Indeed, well before the riots last week, respectable persons would not venture into the centers of most British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights, for fear—and in the certainty—of encountering drunken and aggressive youngsters. In Britain nowadays, the difference between ordinary social life and riot is only a matter of degree, not of type.

A short time ago, I gave a talk in a school in an exquisite market town, deep in the countryside. Came Friday night, however, and the inhabitants locked themselves into their houses against the invasion of the barbarians. In my own little market town of Bridgnorth, in Shropshire, where not long ago a man was nearly beaten to death 20 yards from my house, drunken young people often rampage down one of its lovely little streets, causing much damage and preventing sleep. No one, of course, dares ask them to stop. The Shropshire council has dealt with the problem by granting a license for a pub in the town to open until 4 a.m., as if what the town needed was the opportunity for yet more and later drunkenness.

If the authorities show neither the will nor the capacity to deal with such an easily solved problem—and willfully do all they can to worsen it—is it any wonder that they exhibit, in the face of more difficult problems, all the courage and determination of frightened rabbits?

The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. "We're fed up with being broke," one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one's desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.

"There are people here with nothing," this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.

But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).

The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.

The icing on the cake, as it were, is that social charges on labor and the minimum wage are so high that no employer can possibly extract from the young unemployed Briton anything like the value of what it costs to employ him. And thus we have the paradox of high youth unemployment at the very same time that we suck in young workers from abroad.

The culture in which the young unemployed have immersed themselves is not one that is likely to promote virtues such as self-discipline, honesty and diligence. Four lines from the most famous lyric of the late and unlamentable Amy Winehouse should establish the point:

I didn't get a lot in class
But I know it don't come in a shot glass
They tried to make me go to rehab
But I said 'no, no, no'

This message is not quite the same as, for example, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise."

Furthermore, all the young rioters will have had long experience of the prodigious efforts of the British criminal justice system to confer impunity upon law breakers. First the police are far too busy with their paperwork to catch the criminals; but if by some chance—hardly more than one in 20—they do catch them, the courts oblige by inflicting ludicrously lenient sentences.

A single example will suffice, but one among many. A woman got into an argument with someone in a supermarket. She called her boyfriend, a violent habitual criminal, "to come and sort him out." The boyfriend was already on bail on another charge and wore an electronic tag because of another conviction. (Incidentally, research shows that a third of all crimes in Scotland are committed by people on bail, and there is no reason England should be any different.)

The boyfriend arrived in the supermarket and struck a man a heavy blow to the head. He fell to the ground and died of his head injury. When told that he had got the "wrong" man, the assailant said he would have attacked the "right" one had he not been restrained. He was sentenced to serve not more than 30 months in prison. Since punishments must be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime, a sentence like this exerts tremendous downward pressure on sentences for lesser, but still serious, crimes.

So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of crime.

David Cameron is not the man for the job.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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16 August, 2011

Starkey backed in furore over 'whites and black culture' claim

David Starkey was defended against accusations of racism yesterday after the outspoken TV historian said white youths involved in last week’s riots were imitating black gang culture.

A string of critics queued up to lambast Dr Starkey, who quoted Enoch Powell in a Newsnight debate and said white youths were adopting a ‘violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture’.

But other commentators rallied to Dr Starkey’s support, saying his arguments about gang culture were ‘indisputable’.

The row erupted after the historian spoke on Friday night opposite broadcaster Dreda Say Mitchell and left-wing author Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class.

Dr Starkey said: ‘I think what this week has shown is that profound changes have happened. There has been a profound cultural change. I have just been re-reading Enoch Powell.

‘His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense: the Tiber didn’t foam with blood, but flames lambent wrapped around Tottenham, wrapped around Clapham.

‘What has happened is that the substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.

‘Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England. ‘This is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.’

But author and commentator Toby Young defended Dr Starkey against charges of racism. He pointed out that Dr Starkey was not criticising black culture in general but a ‘particular form of black culture, the violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture associated with Jamaican gangs and American rap music’.

He added: ‘Had he been talking about these qualities as if they were synonymous with African-Caribbean culture per se, or condemning that culture in its totality, then he would have been guilty of racism. But he wasn’t. ‘He was quite specifically condemning a sub-culture associated with a small minority of people of African-Caribbean heritage. (Admittedly, he could have made this clearer.)

‘Rather than being racist, he was merely trotting out the conventional wisdom of the hour, namely, that gang culture is to blame for the riots. In addition, Starkey wasn’t linking this sub-culture to people of just one skin colour, but condemning working-class white people – chavs, as he put it – who embraced it as well.’

Conservative writer James Delingpole blogged: ‘The cultural point he is making is indisputable. ‘Listen to how many white kids (and Asian kids) choose to speak in black street patois; note the extent to which hip-hop and grime garage and their offshoots have penetrated the white mainstream; check out how many white kids like to roll like pimps or perps with their Calvins pulled up to their midriffs and their jean waistbands sagging below their buttocks. ‘Is anyone seriously going to try to make the case that this isn’t black culture in excelsis?’

A spokesman for Channel 4, for whom Dr Starkey made the Monarchy series, said: ‘We have nothing scheduled with David Starkey. ‘But we wouldn’t comment on this as Mr Starkey made his remarks during an interview with the BBC and not Channel 4.’

SOURCE



London riots: Metropolitan Police is more service provider than a force

Destroyed by political correctness

By retired senior police officer and crisis management specialist Peter Power

Back when I joined the force, every officer had to commit to memory the words of Sir Richard Mayne, the founder of the Metropolitan Police.

"The primary object of an efficient police," he said, "is the prevention of crime: the next that of detection and punishment of offenders if crime is committed.

"To these ends, all the efforts of police must be directed. The protection of life and property, the preservation of public tranquillity, and the absence of crime, will alone prove whether those efforts have been successful."

Judged by those standards, the quality of policing when things started to go wrong last week has, despite exceptional courage and dedication on the front line, fallen grievously short. So what went wrong?

Twenty years ago, I was involved both at the sharp end, confronting rioters, and then in trying to analyse what had happened and come up with new ideas on strategies and tactics.

This was a period when the police were moving – or rather drifting – from the cosy but unrealistic image of Dixon of Dock Green, towards a more answerable, but more politically correct, culture, initiated first by Lord Scarman in his report into the Brixton riots.

Many of Scarman's recommendations were sensible – yet their effect has been to turn a force into a service, leaders into managers, and criminals into customers.

To give just one example, Scarman insisted on the need for more regular liaison meetings between police and community. Those who want to indulge in wide-scale looting obviously have no interest in a cosy chat with the local coppers; so instead, a curious mix of enthusiastic but ineffective community representatives turned up.

During my time in Brixton, the chairman was the local vicar, presiding over attendees from such disparate groups as the Association of Jewish Ex Servicemen. Quite how that was to defuse future rioting, no one was really sure.

On one issue, Scarman did come down on the police's side, clearing the Met of "institutional racism". But in 1999, Sir William Macpherson conducted another major review, following the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and came to the opposite conclusion.

Among a series of sweeping changes, he set up "performance indicators" to monitor the future handling of racial incidents, and how satisfied different ethnic groups were with police behaviour.

The intention was noble – but the result of such constant self-criticism, and of other causes célèbres, such as the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 and the death of Ian Tomlinson in 2009, was a dispirited police force, dominated by a politically correct culture that all but extinguished the last flickering light of any esprit de corps. It had truly stopped being a force, preferring instead to now be a 'service provider'.

The consequence of such changes is that managers are promoted above inspirational leaders, and that the force is crippled by a devotion to community consent in a country that has become a patchwork of discrete and often intolerant communities. As P.J. Waddington says in his book 'The Strong Arm of the Law': "The legitimacy of the police in Britain has traditionally been founded not upon conformity to popular wishes, but upon impartiality." No senior police officer, fearing the heavy hand of the Macpherson thought police, would dare agree today.

This mentality helps explain what happened at the start of events last week - noting the streets were only recovered by the police when they at last returned to being a force.

The injuries sustained by many officers show that we have plenty of men and women prepared to be truly brave when needed. But it's not surprising that the officers in charge thought it safer to wait for orders from the top, rather than use their discretion to act swiftly to protect people and property. Many otherwise very competent and dedicated senior officers are hamstrung by the widely held doctrine that any use of force is only the very last resort – not an ideal philosophy to apply when confronting a riot.

Even when force is eventually resorted to, it has to be "reasonable". But what does that mean in such a context? How many blows of a truncheon can an exhausted constable, who might have spent the last few hours fearing for his safety, land on a rioter who refuses to obey his commands? One? Two? Three? What is the requisite level of disobedience or provocation before force can be applied? Should the officer have to issue a ticket inviting the culprit to complain?

The effective absence of police from the streets in the hours after that tragic shooting in Tottenham, and the spreading message that they took no interest, served to compound the view – held by many within the feral underbelly of our cities – that the police have become enfeebled and fearful of confrontation. Small wonder that a few months ago, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary discovered that fewer than 60 per cent of police services had properly tested their mobilisation plans for scenarios like this.

Worse, the legacy of the past week may yet be more damaging than the initial impact.

Not only will the middle classes feel they are no longer protected, but the temptation towards vigilantism based on geographic or faith communities will only exacerbate the problems already faced by the police. As for the officers themselves, the perception of a lack of support from government, threats to their pay, and a clutch of other fears, had already provoked widespread pessimism; in a recent poll of 42,000 personnel, 98 per cent admitted that their morale was low. That is hardly a recipe for the stability and security that the nation craves.

SOURCE



Defending the right to be anonymous online

We should be able to use the web as we want, even if those who hide their identities sometimes act childishly.

Ladyada, Doctor Popular, Grrlscientist and thousands of others with daft monikers were not happy pseudonyms last week. No sooner had they happily signed up and into Google’s fancy-dan new social networking tool, Google+, than they quickly found themselves in violation of Google+’s community standards procedures and promptly had their Google accounts suspended. Their violation? They had not used their real, offline names. And for this particular tool, you have to use your real, offline names, or at least ‘the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you’. Surely a lot of people known as ‘Dickhead’ will be signing up, then?

Google are not waging a war against internet anonymity alone, however. Facebook marketing director Randi Zuckerberg – yes, she is Facebook founder Mark’s sister – also called for an end to online anonymity so as to make people ‘behave a lot better’. ‘I think anonymity on the internet has to go away’, said Zuckerberg: ‘I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.’ It was a remark strongly reminiscent of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s 2009 retort to criticisms of his company from privacy campaigners: ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know’, Schmidt said, ‘maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’.

Where Google and Facebook are keen to go – a fully transparent, non-anonymous internet – Western governments have already been busy blazing a trail. Back in May, French president Nicolas Sarkozy was talking of ‘civilising’ the internet. ‘The universe that you represent’, he told digital leaders at the e-G8 forum, ‘is not a parallel universe which is free of rules of law or ethics or of any of the fundamental principles that must govern and do govern the social lives of our democratic states. Don’t forget that behind the anonymous internet user there is a real citizen living in a real society and a real culture and a nation to which he or she belongs, with its laws and its rules.’ In the UK, the anonymous, twittered smashing of a legal injunction that had been preventing the identity of philandering footballer Ryan Giggs from being revealed prompted similar governmental concerns about online lawlessness. UK culture, sport and media secretary Jeremy Hunt declared: ‘we need to get into a situation where regulation and legislation is up to speed with changes in technology’.

So, whether it is from digital companies or from national governments, the drive to further regulate internet users’ activities, chiefly by demanding full transparency on pain of losing access, is gathering momentum. This strikes at the very thing that has long drawn the idealising praise of internet evangelists, from its counter-cultural champions in the mid-90s to their cyber-geek successors in the Noughties, namely, internet freedom. The freedom, that is, to interact with others as one chooses, to express oneself as one sees fit, to behave in ways almost unimaginable in the offline world.

And it’s that freedom which is now deemed the problem. Not just for an authoritarian regime such as China’s, but for supposedly liberal democratic ones, too. This is the striking thing about calls for the reining in of the internet. From the vantage point of Western officialdom, the internet, awash with rambunctious, heavily populated social media, has become an image of what a largely unregulated social life might look like. And in the form of twitch-hunts, cyber bullying, let alone the hack-happy likes of Anonymous, it is not an appealing sight; it is a threatening sight. As far as Western authorities are concerned, this is what people are like if they’re let off the state’s increasingly short leash. They are rude and dangerously gossipy, not to mention libellous, and when the mood seizes a portion of them, liable to go lynching quicker than you can say Jan Moir. What is more, because a twitterer or a blogger or hacktivist can be entirely anonymous, too often, they’re unaccountable to the state. Hence the rein-them-in sentiment of government and digital companies alike, one captured best by Randi Zuckerberg’s urge to make people ‘behave a lot better’.

The prospect of companies forcing people to forgo anonymity when using the internet is clearly not something to be applauded if you support people’s freedom to act and speak as they see fit. And the thought of the state finding it even easier to feel a few offline collars simply because of what someone’s said, all in the name of ‘civilising’ the internet, is truly worrying.

Yet, a defence of our freedom, online and offline, does not mean you automatically have to venerate specific manifestations of internet freedom. From the anonymous @superinjunction twitter account responsible for outing Ryan Giggs and countless other naughty celebs, to the website defacing, ‘denial of service’-attacking Anonymous crew, a lot of what passes for the exercise of internet freedom is simultaneously infantile and cowardly. It is as if the online world has become the inverse of its censorious, offline parallel world. The paternalistic, you-can’t-say-that culture that has so permeated our real lives, reducing adults to children uncertain of what they can and can’t say, has generated its reaction online. Here, internet users kick, child-like, against offline authority, saying all the things that they have been told not to.

That some users do so anonymously, writ large in the form of Anonymous, makes sense given the legal repercussions of some of their actions. But more often than not it just reinforces the impression of groups of kids acting up – the virtual equivalent of tippexing a penis on to a teacher’s car. Of course, anonymity has been used by the likes of Ben Franklin and Voltaire so that they could express their views without the British or French state being able to prosecute them. But in the West today, this tactic, a subterfuge rendered historically necessary by the absence of freedom of speech, has been turned into a virtue, an end-in-itself to be rigorously defended.

The ideal of freedom of speech, this freedom above all liberties as John Milton called it, is not realised in today’s censorious, offline climate. But neither is it realised in its infantile online kickback. To defend freedom of speech is to defend the freedom from having to hide your views. That’s the point. You want to be able express yourself, to give vent to your opinion, because what you’re saying matters to you. You want to be able to stand by your utterance, not leave it to its own devices in the twittered, networked parallel world of the internet. One doubts that those spreading gossip about celebrities, and sometimes colleagues, are desperate to stand by their words.

SOURCE



Australia: Small-town Orchid Society told it needs bouncers on door of annual conference



In a case of bureaucracy gone mad, the genteel and ageing members of a flower club were told they needed bouncers on the door for their annual conference. The Bowen Orchid Society had more than 200 people from across the country show up for the event in June. Most of the attendees were of an age where pushing up the daisies was more likely to occur than an assault with a deadly petal.

Bowen Orchid Society member and former president Vince Smith said the group was shocked when they were told liquor licensing laws required them to hire some muscle. "Most of them were like me, old and crippled," Mr Smith said.

Club treasurer Pat Tracey said she spoke with the local police and then contacted liquor licensing. "We had to pick three people from our group to be designated security for the night. We were hardly hellraisers," she said.

The orchid conference organisers were also told they could only sell spirits and beer in cans, no glasses - a condition typical of a major race meet.

Queensland Hotels Association membership consultant Steve Aylward said the Office of Liquor and Gaming Regulation had adopted "a one-glove-fits-all approach". "(OLGR) doesn't seem to recognise the difference between a Hells Angels' reunion and an orchid show," he said.

OLGR said each application was risk-assessed and considered on a case-by-case basis. Applicants were encouraged to contact the office if they believed further consideration was needed.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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15 August, 2011

Widow takes on BBC over its anti-Israel bias

The BBC's secrecy rather speaks for itself: A media organization that fights to COVER UP information??

For six years, Steven Sugar pursued a one-man legal battle against the BBC in an attempt to force it to disclose a secret report.

He was trying to get the corporation to publish an internal assessment off its coverage of the Middle East conflict, which he believed would reveal bias against Israel.

Mr Sugar won an appeal for a full court hearing but when he died of cancer in January at the age of 61 it appeared his mission was at an end. Now, his widow, Fiona Paveley, has taken up the fight to reveal the contents of the 20,000-word document and the case is to be heard at the Supreme Court.

Mr Sugar’s lawyers told Mrs Paveley that she could represent him and she believes it is her duty to continue his battle.

The BBC has spent more than £270,000 on legal fees to prevent the public from seeing the report, written in 2004 by Malcolm Balen, a senior journalist, for Richard Sambrook, then BBC director of news. But a defeat for the BBC could cost the corporation even more because it could weaken its ability to deny requests made under the Freedom of Information Act.

Mr Sugar lost at the Information Tribunal, the High Court and the Court of Appeal, but his legal team - who have waived their fees - are hopeful of success in the Supreme Court.

Mrs Paveley said: “I used to tease Steven about his obsession with fighting this so I think he would have a wry smile that I’m carrying it on, but I couldn’t let it drop.”

Mr Sugar, a solicitor, first asked the BBC to publish the Balen Report in 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act and refused to accept the BBC’s argument that it was outside the Act’s scope.

The corporation successfully argued in the past that the report should not be released because it was held for “the purposes of journalism, art or literature” and, as such, was exempt. It was commissioned to analyse the BBC’s coverage of Middle East issues and make recommendations for improvement.

Mrs Paveley, a 48-year-old clinical psychologist, was approached by her husband’s lawyers after he died. They explained that the case could only continue if he was represented at court.

“I knew immediately that I wasn’t going to abandon it,” she says. “It would have almost felt like a betrayal to let all his hard work go to waste. He never gave up, so why should I?”

Mrs Paveley said that she and her late husband saw an anti-Israeli bias in the reporting of Orla Guerin, the BBC’s former Middle East correspondent, who was accused of anti-Semitism in 2004 by the Israeli government.

Mrs Paveley said: “Steven thought that reporting should be balanced. As a publicly-funded body, it seems wrong that the BBC is afraid and reluctant to be more transparent.”

Another reporter, Barbara Plett, was found by BBC governors to have “breached the requirements of due impartiality” after she said she cried as a dying Yasser Arafat left the West Bank in 2004.

More recently, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, was also found to have breached rules on accuracy and impartiality in two reports about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

A BBC spokesman said: “If we are not able to pursue our journalism freely and have honest debate and analysis over how we are covering important issues, then how effectively we can serve the public will be diminished.”

A Supreme Court spokesman said: “This is an interesting case which the Justices have decided raises an issue of general public importance. “It will effectively establish the test for what constitutes a document held for journalistic purposes.”

SOURCE



Riots the predictable result of the Leftist values that now rule Britain

WHEN I was a student, I took a course in the sociology of deviance. After weeks reviewing theories about the causes of law-breaking, the lecturer announced that we were asking the wrong question. "The real question," he said, "is not why some break the law. It is why we don't all break the law."

Following last week's riots in Britain, politicians and commentators have similarly been asking the wrong question. What caused thousands of (mainly) young males to torch buildings where they live, loot local shops and attack fellow citizensis a no-brainer. Kicking against authority is exciting. Being in the thick of the action when the television cameras are rolling makes you feel important. And the chance to grab some designer clothing and a widescreen plasma TV is too good to pass up.

Yet many people did not riot, and they are the interesting ones. Why didn't everyone cash in on the anarchy? The answer lies in external and internal constraints.

External constraints have to do with the likelihood of getting caught, and the consequences if you are. Last week, many people calculated, correctly, that they could mask their faces, join a mob, and act with relative impunity. Police resources were desperately overstretched, and it soon became clear that even if the police arrived in substantial numbers, they would do nothing. The images that shocked middle England most were those showing the police standing watching as young hoodlums ran around breaking into shops and setting light to buildings. There was, for a while, no law, and no serious attempt to maintain order. Shopkeepers and householders were left to defend themselves.

Police chiefs accept they made a strategic mistake, that had they acted sooner and more firmly, the rioting may have been contained or quelled altogether. The perception that you could join a riot and get away with it undoubtedly fuelled the violence. But why were the police so inert?

The answer is that, for many years, they have been accused of being too heavy-handed. Had they acted earlier, and more firmly, we would today be hearing familiar complaints about brutality, excessive use of force and institutional racism. By doing nothing, the police ensured there could be no damaging images on YouTube and no inquiries arising from their conduct. The Brits have neutered their police and last week they saw the consequences.

The calculation by many rioters that they were unlikely to get arrested was reinforced by the knowledge that it wouldn't matter much if they were. There is a widespread belief in Britain that the criminal justice system is weak and ineffective. Blair's ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) became a joke and are being scrapped; community service orders are often disregarded; and Justice Secretary Ken Clarke insists prison doesn't work and sentences should be cut. Little wonder youngsters are unconcerned about the possibility of a criminal conviction.

So the external constraints have withered. Even so, most people did not join in the rioting. The reason is they knew it was wrong. And this points to the crucial importance of internalised constraints. Internalised constraints are the product of early socialisation, in which we learn the basic norms and values of our society. The process starts from the moment we are born, so that by the time we reach the rebellious years of adolescence, basic notions of right and wrong are deeply ingrained and almost instinctive.

Hormones and peer group pressure might tempt us from the straight and narrow in the teenage years, but a nagging conscience drags us back again.

The key agencies of socialisation are families and schools. In Britain, both are in a state of disarray, so many youngsters grow up without a strong moral framework to guide their actions.

In the schools, there has been a 40-year revolt against structure. Gone are the rows of desks, all facing the front. Gone is the concern for spelling rules, the rote learning of arithmetic tables, the laborious phonic reciting of the alphabet. Teachers in jeans emphasise creativity, self-esteem and child-centred learning, which means students' desires are paramount. In place of the last-resort threat of physical punishment, trouble-makers are excluded, which means they are passed around schools, repeating their mischief-making while attracting no meaningful response.

Those fortunate enough to be raised by committed parents may come out of this system relatively unscathed. Commentators have recently noticed the remarkable success of Indian and Chinese youngsters growing up in Britain. They easily outperform white and Afro-Caribbean kids in school, and they also have much lower crime rates (I saw few Indian or Chinese kids running riot on the streets last week). The explanation is that they are raised in strong, aspirational families.

At the opposite extreme, about one-third of British children grow up in single-parent families, most of which are female-headed. Despite repeated protestations to the contrary, this is not a viable or desirable way to raise children, especially boys.

The problem has little to do with money. A middle-class friend who is a single mum told me last week how she is finding it impossible to control her 14 year-old boy. He recently called her a "f . . king whore" and threatened to knife her when she attempted to punish him. She is a teacher. Boys need adult male role models, and (although it is unfashionable to say it) paternal authority.

It should come as no surprise to learn that societies that fail to socialise their young properly become unhappy, chaotic places. French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned of the dangers of anomie weakness of normative regulation back in the 1890s.

Nor is there any secret about where to search for solutions: more effective enforcement of rules by authority (including the police and the schools) is needed to maintain a predictable sense of order and renewed support for strong, cohesive, traditional families is needed to sustain the conditions required for effective, moral upbringing.

The trouble is, most Brits don't want to hear this. They recoil against the language of rules, structure, authority and personal responsibility. They want the government to do something, but they are unwilling to examine their own codes of living. I suspect things are going to get a lot worse before public opinion resolves to do something effective to reverse the rot.

SOURCE



Leftist laws prevent British children from being disciplined

In another shocking example of middle-class children being involved in the riots, the father of a teenage looter said parents were powerless to punish their children because of the nanny state.

The ‘heartbroken and ashamed’ cameraman, who has helped make BBC and Channel Four documentaries on policing and justice, said that parents cannot discipline their offspring properly for fear of being reported to police or social services.

His 16-year-old daughter appeared at City of Westminster magistrates’ court on Saturday charged with stealing a £500 iPad during rampant violence last Monday.

The father of five said: ‘I am heartbroken and totally ashamed that she got caught up in all this. ‘Basically I feel this is the end product of a society that tells you that you can’t discipline your children. ‘They say, “If you hit me, it’s physical assault and if you shout at me, it’s verbal abuse”. ‘These children are a little bit out of control at the moment.’

‘Children now have the power over their parents, not the other way around. There is no respect as their rights are prioritised above parental authority. ‘When I was young, I was given a good clip round the head by my mother if I stepped out of line – now no parent can do that.

‘My daughter could go to jail for this. I hope it’s the wake-up call she needs.’

SOURCE



Crime report from a black city

In one day, 15 people were shot in Detroit. Six of them died.

Between 6 a.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Saturday, there were shootings at nine locations, the Detroit Police Department said Saturday. Two of the incidents had multiple victims.

But this kind of violence isn't new. As of Monday, there had been 215 homicides this year, up from 183 during the same period in 2010, according to Detroit police statistics. But that's a drop from 241 homicides during that time period in 2009, according to statistics that were released as part of a quarterly report to citizens. Shootings are the leading culprit.

Those shot in this recent spree range in age from 14 to 46. Nine are younger than 21.

In one case, five victims -- ages 16 to 19 -- were shot during a backyard welcome home party on the 200 block of West Greendale in northeast Detroit for a person recently released from being incarcerated in connection with an assault with intent to murder crime, police said. During the celebration, shots were fired. One of the 16-year-olds died.

"Persons at this gathering are not providing information on the shooter(s)," police wrote in a synopsis of the shooting incidents.

Other situations included an attempted robbery; men, who were gambling, shot during an altercation; a 20-year-old shot walking to a basketball court, and a 15-year-old, who told police he was walking, heard a shot and felt pain, but who investigators believe shot himself.

A 40-year-old man, who died, was discovered to have been shot after he crashed his vehicle into a pole and tree at Warren and St. Antoine.

In addition to these shootings, a 14-year-old was fatally shot at about 6 p.m. Saturday when a gun went off while an 18-year-old man was playing with it, police said, adding that all parties associated with the incident are being interviewed by the homicide section.

Highlighting what police are dealing with, between 6 a.m. July 29 and 6 a.m. Aug. 1, there were at least 20 people shot, based on information in major crime reports released by the department.

This includes a multi-victim shooting on July 31. According to police, a backyard party on the 18000 block of Bradford was shot up and five people injured. Also that day, a 56-year-old man was found fatally shot on the 12000 block of Rutland.

After a 3-year-old was shot and killed in July when a bullet pierced the front window of her family's apartment, Godbee said there has to be outrage in the community. Aarie Berry was killed after a daylong neighborhood fight.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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14 August, 2011

A police perspective on the London riots

Brian Paddick was one of London's highest-ranking police officers. How would he tackle looters?

It would be hard to find a better-qualified candidate to sort out the looting and policing crisis than the former inner-city commander who helped revive relations between public and police in Brixton after the 1981 riots.

"I would have certainly been in my element," nods Paddick. "I would have been in Tottenham on Saturday night or first thing in the morning on Sunday. For Boris Johnson to turn up three days late brandishing a broom is not the sort of authority needed in these circumstances – in my humble opinion."

After 30 years in the Met, he still constructs his sentences with the pedantic care of a sergeant entering a crime into a little black notebook. Alongside this slightly circuitous precision, however, he also has a police officer's attractive habit of answering questions very directly.

As the riots spread across London at the start of the week, police tried to contain disturbances and arrest afterwards using CCTV evidence. Was this wrong? "Yes," says Paddick. "The reason we've seen such widespread rioting is simply because people believed they could go out there, do what they want and get away with it. If the police had acted robustly and quickly on Saturday night then we might not have seen the copycat violence all over the country."

Four years retired, Paddick remains remarkably relevant to the Met's current predicament. The grandson of a policeman, he climbed the ranks to become commander of Lambeth, south London, where he famously initiated a pilot in which officers cautioned, rather than arrested, those in possession of cannabis. Despite falling victim to untrue tabloid stories and probably having his phone tapped, Paddick became deputy assistant commissioner, the most senior gay police officer in the country. His rise was halted when he revealed, five hours after Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by armed police at Stockwell tube in 2005, that senior officers had known he was carrying a Brazilian passport, and was therefore unlikely to have been a suicide bomber.

The police's release of misleading tales to the media following the death of an innocent man has become a familiar pattern. It was repeated when newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson died after being shoved to the ground by a police officer during the 2009 G20 protests. Then, nine days ago, when Mark Duggan was shot dead by police in Tottenham, police accounts told of a shootout with Duggan, and an officer's life freakishly saved when a bullet lodged in his police radio. There was a wearying inevitability about the Independent Police Complaints Commission announcing this week that in fact the bullet in the radio was police issue, and a non-police weapon retrieved from the scene was not fired.

Paddick "completely" agrees these inaccurate accounts disastrously undermine public confidence in the police. "There is still this belief among some senior officers that it's better to cover up than own up. The trouble with that is usually people find out, and then it looks twice as bad," he says.

How do you tackle that culture? Is it institutional? "Well, if it's institutional it didn't persuade me. I told the IPCC exactly what I knew on the day of the shooting of de Menezes, and as a consequence I was sidelined and eventually pushed out. That's what happens with people who aren't institutionalised."

Paddick seems scarred by his experience in the Met hierarchy and, unsurprisingly, has no friends left there. Witheringly critical about former boss Ian Blair, Paddick believes he was briefed against by the Met's communications chief Dick Fedorcio. Blimey, I say, the Met sounds like a box of snakes. "Absolutely. It is," nods Paddick.

Paddick does not think the power vacuum created by the resignations of Met commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson – an appointment he presciently criticised – and assistant commissioner John Yates over the phone hacking scandal contributed to a failure to combat looting. But his critique of the boss class is more fundamental than simply pinpointing tactical failures and an inadequate use of Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger. Public order policing is not part of an officer's routine duties, but volunteered for. And the rank-and-file have stopped volunteering in droves, says Paddick, "because they felt if they did go in and do what the public wanted, which was pretty tough policing, they would end up under investigation or subject to complaints". He does not accept the rightwing critique that our rights-based culture means troublemakers have lost fear of the police, but believes ordinary officers worry "they would not be supported by their bosses when it came to complaints. So it's a loss of confidence in the hierarchy more than anything."

There is a tension between loss of faith in the police and the desire for tougher policing expressed this week. It is a hard time to be liberal. Paddick declares he is, none the less: "I agree that providing people don't harm other people, they should be allowed to do more or less what they want. The people on the streets this week were hurting a lot of people, and that puts them in play. Even though I'm a liberal, the police should've gone in much harder."

There is always "a fine line between robust police action and reasonable force and unreasonable and criminal assault", he says – but reasonable force for Paddick is not what you might expect of a liberal Lib Dem. Like former Northern Ireland chief constable Sir Hugh Orde (Paddick's choice for next Met commissioner), he has no time for the idea that unwieldy water canons could confront a mobile mob. It would be "like an elephant with a bucket of water". But Paddick has argued in favour of kettling and, most controversially, believes plastic bullets would quickly stop the rioting looters. "These are people who, if you say 'Boo' to them loudly enough, will run away. If you've got a crowd intent on looting and someone levels a plastic baton-round gun at them, they'll run a mile. That is upping the ante to a level where they don't want to play any more," he says.

SOURCE



Multiculturalism = Racism

by Phyllis Chesler

The civilizational war that Jean Raspail once envisioned in his brilliant, dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints is now fully underway. What Raspail once only imagined has come to pass. People of color from many formerly colonized countries have created "no go" zones all across Europe; ambulances and the police enter there at their own risk.

The "youth," the opportunistic criminal elements, the proto-jihadists (all of whom survive on the European dole), are torching cars, looting stores, battling the police.

Even as I write, black Brits are killing Muslim Brits and rioting against the police. Muslim Brits are threatening to kill whatever and whoever.

Have Europeans traditionally been racists? Yes, of course they have. Remember the Holocaust against the Jews. They learned no lessons.

More recently, did European governments allow immigrants to stay because they were willing to do work Europeans refused to do? Yes they did.

Are Europe's "multicultural" policies—which allowed immigrants, up to the third generation, not to integrate, not to westernize—also really racist policies? Yes, of course they are.

All you anti-racists: Now hear this. Multicultural relativism and multicultural policies have failed not because they are too indulgent but rather because they are essentially racist policies which have one standard for ethnic Europeans and another standard for immigrants of color.

Are there immigrant, class, faith, and color issues that need to be resolved in Europe? Absolutely—but due to the nature of jihad-via-satellite and jihad-via-internet the violent rioters in England resemble the violent rioters in Gaza or on the West Bank, or the violent rioters all across the Arab world.

The ski masks and keffiyas most resemble Arabs participants engaged in an "intifada," or uprising. It does not matter if the European participant is an African-Caribbean-Brit or a south east Asian Brit. The model of nihilistic insurrection is Arab and "Palestinian" in style.

Non-violent demonstrations (and there have been many in Europe, certainly in England), about college tuition, housing, and employment, do not look like this—although, 'tis true, many European, allegedly pacifist political demonstrations have turned ugly in jihadist-like ways.

These issues are not confined to Europe nor are they confined to European immigrants. The underlying, perhaps intractable problems are simmering and boiling in a new kind of "non-melting pot" stew in which all standards have been lowered, both by Western government employers, unions, educational institutions, and the media.

The solution? In terms of Europe and the chosen Intifada template: The same world that allowed the Arab terrorists to practice their diabolical arts mainly on Israelis and Jews have now reaped the whirlwind. May God have mercy on us all.

SOURCE



Anti-prejudice programs may backfire

Educational programs designed to persuade people to be unprejudiced may often backfire and actually stoke racial hostility, a study has found. Its authors are advocating a more positive approach in which educators stress the benefits of tolerance rather than moralizing or threatening.

"People need to feel that they are freely choosing to be nonprejudiced, rather than having it forced upon them," said Lisa Legault of the University of Toronto Scarborough, coauthor of a report on the findings to appear in the journal Psychological Science.

Organizations and programs have been set up worldwide in the hopes of urging people to end racism and prejudice. Legault and colleagues conducted two experiments which looked at the effect of two types of motivational intervention: a "controlled" form of telling people what they should do, and a more "personal" form explaining why being nonprejudiced is enjoyable and personally valuable.

In the first experiment, college students were randomly assigned to read one of two brochures about a new initiative to reduce prejudice. The first, designed to take a gentler approach, declares that "social justice is the vital ingredient in a free, fair, and peaceful society." The harsher second brochure notes that the law "prohibits discrimination in employment" and that "teachers and students displaying racist attitudes and behavior can face serious consequences." A third group of student participants was offered no motivational instructions to reduce prejudice.

The authors found that those who read the "controlling" brochure later demonstrated more prejudice than those who had not been urged to reduce prejudice. Those who read the brochure designed to support personal motivation showed less prejudice than those in the other two groups.

In the second experiment, participants were randomly assigned a questionnaire, designed to stimulate personal or controlling motivation to reduce prejudice. The authors found that those who were exposed to controlling messages regarding prejudice reduction showed significantly more prejudice than those who did not receive any controlling cues.

The authors suggest that when interventions eliminate people's freedom to value diversity on their own terms, they may actually be creating hostility toward the targets of prejudice.

"Controlling prejudice reduction practices are tempting because they are quick and easy to implement," Legault said. "They tell people how they should think and behave and stress the negative consequences of failing to think and behave in desirable ways." But it may not work, she warned.

SOURCE



Catholic nurses use Equality Act to protect their pro-life beliefs

Two Roman Catholic nurses have won the right not to work in an abortion clinic after they accused the NHS of breaching equality laws. The case is believed to be the first in which the Equality Act has been used successfully to defend a “pro-life” position as a philosophical belief and could have implications for other Christian medical staff.

The nurses, who are both from overseas and do not wish to be identified, were moved from their normal nursing duties at a London hospital to work once a week at an abortion clinic.

They were required to administer two drugs to pregnant women - Mifepristone and Misoprostol - to cause an induced miscarriage. The process, known as “early medical abortion”, is an increasingly common method of terminating a pregnancy and does not involve surgery.

When the nurses discovered that they were participating in abortions they objected but were told by managers that they must continue with the work.

One hospital manager allegedly told the pair: “What would happen if we allowed all the Christian nurses to refuse?”

However, the hospital later backed down after the Thomas More Legal Centre, which specialises in religious discrimination cases, took up their case.

After receiving a letter from the centre, the hospital initially told the nurses that they would be excused from administering the abortion-inducing drugs but would have to remain working at the clinic.

The nurses’ lawyer, Neil Addison, wrote again to the hospital stating that the nurses would still be “morally complicit in abortion” if they continued to work in the clinic as nurses in any capacity. The hospital eventually conceded and the nurses were allocated to other duties.

Mr Addison, director of the Thomas More Legal Centre, argued that the NHS had wrongly denied the nurses their right as conscientious objectors not to take part in abortions, which is set out in the 1967 Abortion Act.

He also invoked the Equality Act 2010. In a move that is believed to be a legal first, Mr Addison claimed that the nurses’ belief in the sanctity of life from conception onwards was “a philosophical belief” protected under the Equality Act. Therefore any attempt to pressure them into working in the clinic would be illegal.

“This particular interpretation of the Equality Act has never, to my knowledge, been argued before,” Mr Addison said. “However since the courts have accepted that the philosophical belief in global warming is protected under equality legislation, there seems no reason why belief that human life begins at conception should not be equally protected.”

By invoking the Equality Act, the nurses would be given greater protection, as it carries the potential threat of discrimination, victimisation, or harassment action at an employment tribunal.

Mr Addison said he felt “privileged” to have represented the “brave” nurses.

“Taking the stand they did took immense moral courage and I am delighted that they have been successful,” he said.

The case marks a rare example of equality laws being used to protect the rights of Christians. Previously judges have been criticised for interpreting equality and human rights legislation in ways that allegedly “marginalise” religious beliefs.

Last month, the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that the courts had failed to protect religious freedom by ruling against Christians who wanted to wear the cross at work.

The watchdog said judges had interpreted the law “too narrowly” and must be more willing to accept that staff who have been prevented from expressing their beliefs have suffered discrimination.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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13 August, 2011

Legacy of a society that believes in nothing

For many years now British schoolkids have been told by their Leftist teachers that "There is no such thing as right and wrong". We should not be surprised that some of the kids now believe that

Raw with grief, in a voice steady but tight with emotion, his appeal for calm on Wednesday was a beacon of hope amid the tumult and carnage of a horribly dark week for Britain.

Hours before he spoke, Tariq Jahan had lost his 21-year-old son Haroon, murdered in the Winson Green area of Birmingham by [black] thugs who drove at him in their car in what appears to have been a racist attack.

No one could be more aware of the simmering racial tensions between Asians in his neighbourhood and those of Caribbean ancestry.

Yet Mr Jahan had the dignity, the compassion and the common sense to demand an end to the violence that had shattered his life. ‘Blacks, Asians, whites — we all live in the same community,’ he said. ‘Why do we have to kill one another? Why are we doing this? Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home — please.’

There was no mention of feral rats or of the sickness in our society. There were no calls for revenge. If he had screamed for retribution, if he had chosen the emotional occasion of his son’s death to denounce whole swathes of the community, there could easily have been an unspeakable outbreak of racial violence.

Instead, Mr Jahan made an open and straightforward declaration of his faith. ‘I’m a Muslim. I believe in divine fate and destiny, and it was his destiny and his fate, and now he’s gone,’ he said. ‘And may Allah forgive him and bless him.’

It was a solemn, peaceful message that will make everyone who stereotypes Muslims as terrorists and fanatics feel ashamed of themselves. Tariq Jahan is a deeply impressive man, and like the great majority of Muslims in this country, he is hard-working, clean-living, guided in his conduct by religious belief, and unshakeable in his devotion to the ideal of family life.

In London at the height of the riots, we saw another clear expression of faith when more than 700 Sikhs lined up to defend their temples from potential arsonists in the suburb of Southall to the west of the capital. The Sikhs have a proud tradition of valuing each human being, male and female, as equal in God’s eyes. Theirs is a religion in which family is paramount.

We do not know the size of the bank balance of those Sikhs, any more than we know how wealthy are the Muslims of Winson Green. From looking at the streets and houses where they live, and the shops where they buy their food, it is safe to assume that they are not rich.

It is probable, too, that their teenagers would like to have large-screen televisions and fashionable trainers and BlackBerries.

But you can pretty well guarantee they would not have been among the looters. Instilled into them would have been the importance of working hard for money to buy these things, rather than hurling a brick through a shop window to help themselves.

Paramount among their moral values would be concern for others, a sense of altruism that could not be more different from the sense of self-entitlement that been so grotesquely on display this week. The reason for this is that they are from religious families.

All the main religions are unshakeable when it comes to self-evident truths about right and wrong; about stealing, harming others, coveting goods, instant gratification and so on.

‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me’. So wrote the greatest philosopher of the 18th-century, Immanuel Kant, in 1788 in his work of moral philosophy, the Critique of Practical Reason.

It was in 1991 — and the memory is still vivid — that I interviewed Immanuel Jakobovits on his retirement as Chief Rabbi in Britain, and he told me that it was on the basis of Kant’s quotation that his father had named him Immanuel.

During that interview, Rabbi Jakobovits — who died in Israel in 1999 and was said to have been Margaret Thatcher’s favourite clergyman — stressed the absolute centrality of family life to our learning the paths of virtue.

His parting message as he retired, not only to the Jewish community but also to the British people, was that marriage and family life need to be learned; that if necessary we should have classes for young people, teaching them the importance of family life, of how to bring up children, how to discipline them kindly but firmly, and how to instil the sense of that moral law within.

Without that sense, human life falls into absolute chaos, anarchy, and unpleasantness. Yet in our secular age — an age in which, tragically, the Church of England appears to do little more than wring its hands as congregation numbers plummet — this moral bedrock is being steadily eroded.

Today, we live in a society where religion is something for which apologies must be made.

A Christian woman working for British Airways who wears a cross round her neck is asked to remove it for fear of offending other people. A nurse who prays with a patient in hospital is committing an almost criminal act. Catholic adoption agencies which disapprove of gay adoptive parents on religious grounds have their licences taken away.

And all the while, our governing classes and academics and teachers chip away at the fundamental truths of the great religions — truths that have stood the test of time for thousands of years — in their arrogant certainty that there are no moral absolutes and that the human race can make up the rules as it goes along.

At the nuttier fringes of the chattering classes there are those, like the geneticist Richard Dawkins and the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who actually believe that religion is a mental poison responsible for all the evils in the world.

The misguided and vacuous thinking of these so-called intellectuals is compounded by a sordid celebrity-culture which holds up role models who should be despised rather than admired.

Amy Winehouse, a pathetic drug-infused alcoholic girl of very modest talent, is held up as great diva; and when she died, her house was surrounded by fans, laying empty vodka bottles as a ‘tribute’.

Jade Goody, the foul-mouthed, racist daughter of a pimp and drug-pusher who died of a heroin overdose in the lavatory of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, appears on Big Brother and becomes a heroine despite — or because of — her ignorance and tendency to strip off in front of the cameras.

Fornicating footballers, who swagger through public lives dripping with gold and jewellery, parading the vulgar acquisitions of their vast wealth — whether it is fleets of fast cars or call girls, are venerated by generations who have never so much as heard of the very real heroes of history.

In the absence of a moral law, we see a decline in standards in all walks of life. Bankers continue to fill their boots even after they have brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy; politicians fiddle expenses and see no reason to resign when they have committed wrongdoings; town hall fat cats pay themselves ever greater salaries as Britain slips further into debt.

By contrast, every day, Muslim men like Tariq Jahan go to the mosque and fall prostrate before the mystery which Immanuel Kant knew lay at the heart of existence.

The Sikhs likewise build temples because they feel awe at the starry heavens above them and the moral laws within their hearts — laws which all men, women and children can recognise when they reflect deeply and in silence.

The catalogue of the great men and women in the past hundred or so years — from Leo Tolstoy in Russia, to Mahatma Gandhi in India, from the Lutheran student Sophie Scholl executed by guillotine aged 22 for her part in a resistance movement to Hitler, to Archbishop Tutu presiding over the peaceful Truth and Reconciliation committees in South Africa — has been the same.

All these people have held fast to values which they believed ultimately to be eternal and God-given.

Go back 100 years to Winson Green, to Southall, and to Wolverhampton, and to all the other scenes of urban violence scarred by horror in the last week.

The years before and after World War I were marked, for the people who lived in these places, by very great economic hardship. The poverty endured by the inhabitants of Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham and the poor parts of London led to great programmes of political and social reform.

But the crime rate among the people themselves was much, much lower than it is today. All sorts of reasons have been adduced for this. But there is surely a very simple one that towers over all the others. In each of these places, there were chapels, often Methodist, which kept alive the human capacity for awe at the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

Not everyone attended the services, though thousands did. Nearly everyone, however, in these communities, whether church or chapel, subscribed to the idea that Good and Evil are given things, not human inventions.

The Jewish religion of Lord Jakobovits told the story of the Law of God being written in stone on the mountain-side of Sinai, and delivered to Moses. Some people choose to believe this happened literally as an historical event.

In a memorable episode of Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, over 20 years ago, historian David Starkey (an atheist) ribbed Rabbi Hugo Gryn about this. The Rabbi took the teasing in good part of course, but as someone who as a child had been interned in Auschwitz, he knew what a society could be like if it embraced the motto of Milton’s Satan, ‘Evil be thou my Good’.

He knew that whatever the historical truth about the Sinai story in the Book of Exodus, there was an absolute truth in the words Thou Shalt Do No Murder, Thou Shall Not Steal, and Honour thy Father and thy Mother. He’d lived in a country ruled over by a satanic Nazi dictator who thought you could disregard moral truth.

I suspect that when time passes and we look back on this week, it is the religious sincerity of Tariq Jahan that we shall remember. All of us — Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Hindus, Christians — have a rich religious inheritance.

At the core of this inheritance is a sense of right and wrong. And in all these religions, the school where we learn of right and wrong is the family. Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Hindus have all, very noticeably, retained this twin strand of family structure and ethical teaching.

Faith in Christianity itself began to unravel long ago, and the majority of those whose forebears were Christian are now completely secular. They would not even recognise simple Bible stories.

The events of the past week have shown the enormous value of a living religious faith.

Not only was Tariq Jahan more impressive than any of the commentators or politicians who spouted on the airwaves this week. He was more human.

By his religious response to his son’s death, he humanised not only the dreadful and immediate tragedy. He showed us that without a religion we are all less than human.

SOURCE



Historian Starkey says: Enoch Powell was right with infamous 'rivers of blood' speech


"As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood" -- E. Powell, 1968

Historian David Starkey sparked outrage last night by claiming that Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech had been right and blaming ‘black culture’ for the riots. He said white youths had adopted a black culture which promoted the violence and looting.

Mr Starkey claimed Powell’s infamous 1968 speech had been right in one sense, but it wasn’t inter-communal violence that was the problem.

‘The substantial section of the chavs have become black, the whites have become black,’ he told Newsnight on BBC 2. ‘A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become fashion, and the black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together. 'This language is wholly false. It is a Jamaican patois that has intruded in England, which is why so many of us have this sense that we are literally living in a foreign country. ‘It is about black culture, that is the enormously important thing, it is not skin colour, it is culture.’

When challenged by fellow guest Dreda Say Mitchell, a black author and broadcaster, Mr Starkey defended his comments by saying: ‘At these times we need plain speaking.’

Within minutes of the broadcast, Twitter was flooded with comments accusing the historian of blatant racism. One tweet said: ‘“The problem is that the whites have become black”, David Starkey tells #newsnight – close to inciting racial hatred. Awful!’

Another commented sarcastically: ‘I don’t hate David Starkey, some of my best friends are racist historians.’ A third added: ‘This week has brought the boggle eyed racist nut in certain people spluttering out.’

Powell fuelled controversy as a Tory MP in 1968 when he warned about apocalyptic consequences if immigration was allowed to rise unchecked. Although the phrase ‘rivers of blood’ does not appear in the speech, it does include the line, ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.

Acid-tongued Mr Starkey has been dubbed the ‘rudest man in Britain’. He once described the Queen as a housewife who ‘lacks a serious education’ and called Scotland, Wales and Ireland ‘feeble little countries’.

SOURCE

Starkey might have noted that the initial riots in London seem to have been almost entirely by blacks



The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom

David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.

But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.

I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the “north-south divide”, which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.

Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It is a bible. I’d guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.

Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.

I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.

Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?

Our politicians – standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday – are just as bad. They have shown themselves prepared to ignore common decency and, in some cases, to break the law. David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet. Take the example of Francis Maude, who is charged with tackling public sector waste – which trade unions say is a euphemism for waging war on low‑paid workers. Yet Mr Maude made tens of thousands of pounds by breaching the spirit, though not the law, surrounding MPs’ allowances.

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

The Prime Minister showed no sign that he understood that something stank about yesterday’s Commons debate. He spoke of morality, but only as something which applies to the very poor: “We will restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility – in every town, in every street and in every estate.” He appeared not to grasp that this should apply to the rich and powerful as well.

The tragic truth is that Mr Cameron is himself guilty of failing this test. It is scarcely six weeks since he jauntily turned up at the News International summer party, even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations. Even more notoriously, he awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that “everybody deserves a second chance”. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters.

These double standards from Downing Street are symptomatic of widespread double standards at the very top of our society. It should be stressed that most people (including, I know, Telegraph readers) continue to believe in honesty, decency, hard work, and putting back into society at least as much as they take out.

But there are those who do not. Certainly, the so-called feral youth seem oblivious to decency and morality. But so are the venal rich and powerful – too many of our bankers, footballers, wealthy businessmen and politicians.

Of course, most of them are smart and wealthy enough to make sure that they obey the law. That cannot be said of the sad young men and women, without hope or aspiration, who have caused such mayhem and chaos over the past few days. But the rioters have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society. Let’s bear in mind that many of the youths in our inner cities have never been trained in decent values. All they have ever known is barbarism. Our politicians and bankers, in sharp contrast, tend to have been to good schools and universities and to have been given every opportunity in life.

Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain. If we are ever to confront the problems which have been exposed in the past week, it is essential to bear in mind that they do not only exist in inner-city housing estates.

The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.

SOURCE



The Fire This Time

"You've damaged your own race," said Mayor Michael Nutter to the black youths of Philadelphia whose flash mobs have been beating and robbing shoppers in the fashionable district of downtown.
"Take those God-darn hoodies down," the mayor went on in his blistering lecture. "Pull your pants up and buy a belt, 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt."

And the mayor had some advice for teenagers looking for work. "You walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back and your shoes untied and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you?" "They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy."

Nutter is African-American and the first leader to speak out about the racial character of the flash mobs attacking people in one American city after another. And where are our other leaders?

At the Iowa State Fair last August, black thugs beat a white man so savagely he was hospitalized. Police only began to look into the possibility of a racial attack and hate crime after fair-goers said the thugs were calling it "Beat Whitey Night."

After Memorial Day, Chicago cops had to close a beach when a flash mob formed, attacked people and knocked cyclists off bikes.

In Miami Beach, there were beatings and shootings that same weekend. In D.C., flash mobs of black youths have turned up a half-dozen times in stores to loot clothes and merchandise and flee.

The media almost never identify the race of the thugs. Their reticence would disappear were a white mob in some Southern city to be caught beating up on black shoppers at a mall.

But the flash mob scourge hitting U.S. cities has been eclipsed by the pillaging and burning of London and other British cities in the worst violence visited on that nation and its capital since Goering's Luftwaffe executed the "Blitz."

Thousands of hoodlums, thugs and criminals have firebombed buildings, looted stores and stripped, beaten and robbed people for no reason other than that they were white.

Overwhelmed cops virtually surrendered the city for three days. By the fourth night, the rampage had taken on a multiethnic caste as Asians and white trash appeared to join in the festival of criminality.

Asian and black store owners, too, are victims. In Birmingham, three Pakistani men defending their neighborhood were run over and killed by a truck reportedly driven by a black rioter.

In a country-and-gospel tune recalled often in the '60s, the one that gave James Baldwin the title of his polemic, this couplet appears:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

No more water, the fire next time

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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12 August, 2011


‘You’ve Damaged Your Own Race’: Philly Mayor Blasts black Flash Mobs

“You’ve damaged yourself, you’ve damaged another person, you’ve damaged your peers and, quite honestly, you’ve damaged your own race,” Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said in a fiery address before his congregation Sunday. “You damaged your own race.”

Nutter, who is African American, targeted so-called flash mobs of black youths who’ve been caught on video attacking people in downtown Philadelphia. “If you want…anybody else to respect you and not be afraid when they see you walking down the street,” he said from the pulpit at Mount Carmel Baptist Church, “then leave the innocent people who are walking down the street minding their own damn business. Leave them alone

Nutter’s chastisements—which didn’t spare parents, either—included:

“Take those God darn hoodies down, especially in the summer. Pull your pants up and buy a belt ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt. Nobody.”

“If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ’cause you look like you’re crazy!”

“The Immaculate Conception of our Lord Jesus Christ took place a long time ago, and it didn’t happen here in Philadelphia. So every one of these kids has two parents who were around and participating at the time. They need to be around now.”

“Parents who neglect their children, who don’t know where they are, who don‘t know what they’re doing, who don‘t know who they’re hanging out with, you’re going to find yourself spending some quality time with your kids in jail.”

To fathers: “If you’re not providing the guidance,and you’re not sending any money, you’re just a sperm donor.”

Nutter announced yesterday that the certain areas of center city Philadelphia are now off limits to minors after 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. As for the rest of the city, the curfew remains 10 p.m. if you’re under 13; midnight if you’re under 18.

SOURCE



London: Doling out excuses for the inexcusable

In trying to identify the causes of the London riots, we could start by reflecting on the comments from former Greater London Council police advisor Lee Jasper in analysing the mindset of the youths on the streets.

In a finger-pointing monologue on The 7.30 Report on Tuesday, Mr Jasper argued that the one group of people who should definitely not be blamed for the riots were the rioters themselves.

“We’ve seen huge levels of austerity cuts in many inner city areas that are leading to a great deal of anxiety and concern,” stated the one-time advisor to former London Mayor “Red” Ken Livingstone. “Unemployment continues to rise and there is a sense of anxiety but also a sense of moral crisis in the country. I think because of the MPs scandal, the corporate tax dodging issue of huge multinational companies, the News International corruption cases with the metropolitan police and phone hacking, there is a kind of failure really of people in power to uphold the kind of moral standards that we all aspire to. And as such, this has had an effect around the country.”

The first notable feature of Mr Jasper’s comments is that they afford a remarkably high level of current affairs knowledge to some of the dumbest and most disengaged people on the face of the earth. In the interviews this week none of the hooded hooligans were telling reporters that they had taken to the streets after reading the Telegraph’s expose of the House of Lords perks scandal – which happened four years ago anyway – or that they picked up a brick in frustration after watching James Murdoch’s evidence to the House of Commons inquiry on the BBC.

Second, Jasper’s comments sought to lend an activist quality to a civil disturbance which is campaigning for absolutely nothing, other than a free television and a shiny pair of sneakers.

This wasn’t a poll tax protest, it wasn’t a show of solidarity with the coal miners or the sacked printers, it wasn’t a G20 riot. At least burning down McDonalds outside a conference promoting free trade makes a crude kind of point.

This was simply an act of mass theft, violence and vandalism by people who, almost to a man, said that they were doing it for fun. It was the first bludger uprising the world has ever seen.

Thirdly, Jasper’s comments have at their centre a belief that, in this case, we are looking at a failure of government to do more. In reality these riots represent a failure of government to do less.

While there is enough material from the four days of rioting to sustain years of sociologists’ conferences, the key issue seems incredibly simple. If you tell several million people that they are under no obligation to work, to learn, to become socialised, and if your laws and your frazzled police and your packed courts don’t treat low-level crimes as crimes at all, you run a pretty obvious risk of ending up with the scenes that we saw this week. If you tell people that life is all take and no give then some of them will end up literally taking things off shop shelves.

One of the first priorities of David Cameron’s relatively new Tory Government has been to rein in the explosion in the British welfare system. Remarkably, one of the central proposals is to stop households receiving unemployment benefits which exceed the average weekly household wage. Remarkable in that things were ever allowed to get that out of hand, with such an enshrined disincentive towards work.

Cameron is a moderate conservative and his welfare overhaul is not extreme. One of his many fair-minded measures is that if you are able-bodied and offered a job but turn it down for no reason, you will be kicked off the dole for three months. This has been denounced as an act of brutality by the welfare lobby, in a country where the number of Britons in employment has fallen by 550,000 since 2004.

In a report on the reforms in The Daily Mail, the newspaper profiled a family in Anglesea, North Wales, Peter and Claire Davey, who have seven children aged two to 12 and receive £815 (AU$1288) a week in benefits. Mr Davey quit his job as an administrator after realising he and his family would be better off living on handouts. On the numbers it makes a sad kind of sense.

Within the welfare sector there is an unusual metric which holds that increases in government outlays on the dole and the pension are the best indicator of success in the portfolio. You see it here in Australia every year – if state or federal governments cut welfare spending in their budgets, even with the corresponding introduction of schemes to get people into work, groups such as ACOSS fire off accusations of heartlessness. These same groups have a broadly left-wing social agenda yet seem completely indifferent to the concept of the dignity of work, which was actually what Karl Marx spent his entire intellectual life working to achieve.

And then there are the likes of Lee Jasper playing the role of random excuse generator, handing out absurd alibis to those too dim to devise one for themselves. The perpetrators are the victims and government should have done more, when the mayhem created by these welfare-funded ratbags shows government has done far too much already.

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Tough sentences? Forget it. These teen yobs will be treated as if THEY'RE the victims

David Cameron may have sounded tough this week, promising night curfews, tougher sentencing and new police powers in response to the outbreak of almost untrammelled anarchy in several of our cities.

Police leave has been cancelled and a crackdown on gangs announced. But the Prime Minister is sorely mistaken if he really thinks the rioters will be punished and made to pay for what they've done.

Why? Because the criminal justice system in this country is broken. From my experience as a youth offender worker, little, if anything, will happen to the young people who participated in the riots around the country this week. And what's worse — they know it.

One 15-year-old looter quoted in yesterday's Mail summed up the defiance: 'They can't touch me, I'm still a kid.... what is the worst they can do? Give me a caution or a curfew I won't obey.'

Sadly, he's absolutely right. While magistrates yesterday did seem to be cracking down on adult offenders, some of whom will get custodial sentences, almost everyone under 18 will end up with the ultra-soft, kid-gloves treatment I've seen being handed out on a daily basis.

Figures released so far suggest that could apply to as many as half of those appearing in magistrates' courts this week.

In an extraordinary perversion of justice, those underage rioters will be treated as if they are the victims of the very crimes they have committed.

Only a few will be given custodial sentences. The whole ethos of the youth justice system is to avoid incarcerating offenders — not least because there isn't the physical capacity to house them all.

Even those who are imprisoned will spend their days watching TV and playing video games. A colleague working in a youth detention centre recently told me he is no longer allowed to call their rooms 'cells' because it infringed their human rights. And these were offenders who'd done very bad things, including sexual assault and extreme violence.

The other underage rioters will be sent on an Intensive Surveillance and Supervision Programme (ISSP) — the laughable sentence that is the most rigorous non-custodial punishment young offenders can receive. It's designed to take them from their criminal environment and show them they can have a future on the straight and narrow.

What they'll actually do is spend the majority of their 'sentence' escorted by youth workers — whose wages are paid by the state — to gyms, adventure centres and even DJ-ing courses. Already this week, we've read about a group of offenders like this who were taken on a day trip to Alton Towers.

These violent youths will have their lunches bought and paid for, and even be given bus fares to attend their 'punishment'.

The surveillance element is worthless. Some offenders will be tagged and under curfew. If a tag is broken, a private security firm alerts the youth offender service, which alerts the police. In the time that takes, the offender can have carried out any number of crimes.

ISSPs are also supposed to involve community service, but often there is none at all. I know people in the Manchester Youth Offending Team who were reduced to driving offenders around for hours to fill up the time, because no community work had been arranged.

Instead, the programme usually amounts to no more than enforced leisure: football and tennis on Monday, boxing and squash on Tuesday.

One day, we took ten offenders to an indoor rock climbing centre. Each of them had a conviction for burglary — in effect, we were just improving their breaking and entering skills.

On another occasion, we drove a group to a youth club with a music studio. There they spent the morning listening to hip-hop, posing as gangsta rappers. When they got bored, they amused themselves by playing pool or being rude to the staff.

At lunchtime, the offenders gave individual orders for takeaways from a chip shop. Once the food arrived — delivered by a member of staff as though he were their butler — they fell on it like ravenous wolves, without the slightest restraint or manners, screeching foul abuse if their order was wrong. They then spent the afternoon on PlayStations or playing on Nintendo Wii games consoles.

Occasionally, these activities will be broken up by classroom exercises in a youth centre, pointless sessions where offenders' 'needs' are assessed — where they are viewed as children, as opposed to people who have done something very wrong.

'How are you feeling?' they're asked. 'Are you feeling better?'

Who cares how they feel? The offenders I saw had broken into old ladies' houses. What about the feelings of the decent, predominantly working-class victims of this new criminal underclass? The victims of the looters and arsonists this week, for example, who may have seen their livelihoods or homes destroyed.

Sometimes the offenders will hijack the classroom exercises themselves. In a recent session on homophobia, several members of the class were causing disruption. Eventually, the frustrated youth worker asked the ringleader to come up to the front and take over the class.

With relish, the chief culprit launched into an offensive comic routine about different types of homosexual. Afterwards, the youth worker boasted to me that the lesson had been a great success because the class was 'engaged', despite surrendering her authority.

I'm not an enthusiast for excessive punishment, particularly not for young offenders — who often hail from deprived backgrounds or dysfunctional families. But what I have experienced shows that the current, ultra-lenient approach is a disaster. It is hopelessly unbalanced, providing neither discipline nor boundaries.

The appalling message to juvenile criminals is they have nothing to fear from the courts or penal bodies. Far from being made to pay for their crimes, they are often rewarded.

I have escorted a 16-year-old, unemployed, criminal teenager by taxi from his home to the benefits office so he could sign on for the dole, even though he lived only ten minutes away by foot. He was from a large Albanian family of Romany gypsies who had come to Britain seeking asylum, but each had ended up involved in criminal activities, including violent muggings and burglary.

Despite his criminal conduct — because of it, in fact — the local youth offending team was desperate for him to claim as many benefits as possible, even laying on transport.

The bizarre logic, as it was put to me, was that poverty was the cause of his illegal actions (a trite and misguided argument trotted out this week by bleeding heart liberals in defence of the looters).

In the words of the youth worker: 'We need to work with him to remove the underlying causes of his criminal behaviour', by ensuring he received 'all the benefits that are entitled to him, his partner and future baby.' (He had got his Bulgarian girlfriend pregnant.)

My colleague's worry was that, if this support, including the taxi service, were not provided, the Albanian would slide back into a life of crime; even though she knew, from his expensive clothes, that he earned so much from crime he didn't even need those benefits.

Some of this week's rioters, having been processed by the courts, will end up doing 'poster work', where they will draw and colour in examples of criminal behaviour — just in case they're not aware that torching local businesses and throwing masonry at the police, fire brigade and passers-by are criminal acts.

One recent offender made a mockery of the programme by producing large drawings of cannabis joints. He received no punishment.

Is it any wonder we have such high rates of recidivism among more serious young criminals? Many of the rioters you saw on the streets will have been through the system already. They know that there are no real consequences for their actions.

Some of the young thugs who've been interviewed said they did it because the Government and the police couldn't stop them. And they are dead right. There are no boundaries to their actions, with or without any supposed crackdown by David Cameron. And so they will riot again.

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When social mobility meant something

Encouraging social mobility has become a watchword of the political class for the past 15 years or so. Whether it is bribing working-class teens to stay on at school or making internships ‘open to all’, everybody wants to help ‘the poor’ to help themselves. The death this week of English novelist Stan Barstow is perhaps a reminder of when and why social mobility had real meaning in British society.

Barstow, who died aged 83, belonged to a pioneering set of working-class writers who chronicled new opportunities available to working-class youth in the late 1950s. Alongside his peers Alan Sillitoe, John Braine and Keith Waterhouse, Barstow was successful enough to avoid factory sweat and toil in the process as well. It led arch conservative Evelyn Waugh to complain about ‘these grim young people coming off the assembly lines in their hundreds every year and finding employment as critics, even as poets and novelists’ (1). It seems social mobility wasn’t always encouraged by the well-to-do after all.

Barstow was born in Horbury, a railway town on the outskirts of Wakefield in West Yorkshire. His father was a coalminer and the household was barely literate – not exactly the most promising background for an aspiring writer. Nevertheless, Barstow had already managed a modicum of social mobility through attending grammar school and becoming a draughtsman in a nearby engineering firm. As a result, he quickly experienced a tension and resentment between his new-found middle-class occupation and his working-class background – a tension brilliantly explored in his most famous novel, A Kind of Loving.

Set in West Yorkshire in the late 1950s, A Kind of Loving follows the ‘shotgun wedding’ and marriage between draughtsman Vic Brown and company typist Ingrid Rothwell. At the time, its frank depiction of sex and marriage among the northern working class made it a literary breakthrough. It was also subtle and complex enough to stand out within the slightly over-crowded ‘kitchen sink’ genre. Whereas Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning crackled with an incoherent rage against the post-war consensus, and Joe Lampton in Room at the Top rails against white collar ‘zombies’, Vic Brown appears pragmatically happy with what postwar Britain has to offer.

Underneath it all, though, Brown wrestles with his conscience: between wanting to uphold traditional values (getting married) and new-found sexual freedom (extra-marital affairs); between loyalty to working-class communal mores and the desire to broaden his horizons. Brown’s contradictory feelings for Ingrid – one minute infatuated, the next minute infuriated – reflect the pull of these new and alien social influences. In an earlier period, marrying such a gorgeous girl as Ingrid and having kids would be as good as it gets in West Yorkshire.

Barstow’s skill as a writer was to shed light on the confused inner world of the ambitious working classes of the period and, in the process, highlight broader social changes. In particular, the tortuous contradictions of class identity that Brown experienced anticipate such preoccupations for the ‘affluent worker’ that became sociologically documented in the early 1970s. A Kind of Loving was also fortuitous in recognising how despised the aspirational working-classes would eventually become. Not only is Vic Brown an effete draftsman, but he is also passionate and knowledgeable about classical music and literature. For his dreadful mother-in-law, Mrs Rothwell, this is a transparent ‘affectation’ and ‘our Ingrid’ doesn’t need to put on such ‘airs and graces’. She scornfully says the ‘airs and graces’ phrase so often that Vic wearily ends up repeating it for her. Far from Vic ‘not being good enough’ for Ingrid, these pretensions and ambitions mark him out as being ‘unworthy’. Fifty years on from Mrs Rothwell’s ethos of ‘know-your-place’, disdain for working-class aspiration has a surprising degree of cultural and political resonance today.

Barstow eloquently explored these themes with equal conviction in Watchers on the Shore (1966) and, a decade later, The Right True End. All three novels were adapted for a Granada TV series in 1982 starring Clive Wood and 17-year-old debutant Joanne Whalley. A trilogy set in the 1940s, Just You Wait and See (1986), Give Us This Day (1989) and Next of Kin (1991), appeared without generating much literary interest, but Barstow’s name was still instantly recognisable.

Barstow came of age long before Sure Start, education maintenance allowance (EMA) or patronising sermons from the political class on facilitating social mobility. Going to university wasn’t presented then as a life-or-career-death ‘option’ in the way it is now. What you did have, though, was a broad acceptance of the value of learning and high culture, reflected in the autodidacticism that influenced Barstow and his novels. Today, no amount of official ‘aim higher’ initiatives can compensate for the demise of such social and individual aspiration. You only have to re-read A Kind of Loving to understand that.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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11 August, 2011

Australia: Wong is wrong

I couldn't resist that headline -- in the tradition of one Arthur Augustus Calwell -- a former leader of the Australian Labor Party best known for enlivening a debate about Chinese immigration with the sage comment: "Two Wongs don't make a white"

NEW South Wales conservative Christian MP Fred Nile says federal Finance Minister Penny Wong is setting a bad example by having a baby with her female partner.

Senator Wong today announced her partner, Sophie Allouache, is due to give birth in December after falling pregnant through IVF.

NSW Christian Democrats leader Mr Nile is opposed to same-sex relationships and children being raised by gay couples.

"I'm totally against a baby being brought up by two mothers - the baby has human rights," the upper house MP said. "It's a very poor example for the rest of the Australian population.

"She needn't have made it public - it just promotes their lesbian lifestyle and trying to make it natural where it's unnatural. "The only reason she's made it public is to make a statement to the Australian people."

Mr Nile, who has led prayers vigils during Sydney's annual gay Mardi Gras parade, called on Prime Minister Julia Gillard to have a "talk" with her cabinet colleague about her decision to publicise the impending birth. "She should have a serious talk with her," he said.

But he also had words for the prime minister's unmarried status. "Because of her own life, that puts her in a weaker position than if she was traditionally married herself," he said.

Mr Nile said he was surprised Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop had congratulated Senator Wong. "I'm surprised she's done that. She's treated this as if Penny Wong is in a traditional relationship," he said.

The NSW parliament last year passed legislation giving same-sex couples the right to adopt children.

SOURCE



Racial tensions flare after five days of rioting across Britain

Black thugs and useless police

WITH police overwhelmed, a desperate attempt by Birmingham Muslims to protect their properties and mosque has turned to tragedy with three men mown-down. The Muslims of Dudley Road armed themselves with bricks and stones, clubs and cricket bats to fend off carloads of marauding gangs.

Their vigilante stand may have saved a humble row of family-run shops and a red-brick mosque from the looters' grasp - but at a terrible cost.

A carload of rioters sped into a fleeing crowd of shop defenders, witnesses said, hurling three young men into the air and killing amateur boxer Haroon Jahan, 21, and brothers Shazzad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31. Police have since detained the alleged driver of the car, charging him with murder.

"We all had stones in our hands. But we had no defense to stop a car. They revved their engines and drove right at us as fast as they could," Mohammed Ibrahim, 23, told The Associated Press. "These black men deliberately tried to kill us all."

Wednesday's 1 a.m. slaughter has laid bare racial tensions underlying this week's riots in Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city and its most ethnically diverse. A fifth of the city's 1 million "Brummies" are Muslims, most commonly of Pakistani origin. About 7 percent are black, mostly Caribbean, in background.

While the riots that have swept England this week have involved looters of every creed and hue, the street anarchy also sometimes has exposed the racial fault lines that run beneath the poorest urban quarters.

Resident after resident of Dudley Road and its surrounding Winson Green district commented that the attackers were black and accused them of targeting Muslim shops.

The passions echo streetfights from previous years, such as in 2005, when a neighbouring Birmingham district suffered two nights of violence between Caribbean and Asian gangs over unsubstantiated rumours that a gang of Pakistani men had raped a 14-year-old Jamaican girl. Two men were stabbed to death, firefighters faced machete-wielding mobs, and Muslim graves were desecrated during those clashes. The west side also suffered riots in 1981, 1985 and 1991 fuelled by minority hatred of white police and black resentment of the Asians' dominant position as shopkeepers.

"We'll hunt down these black men, cut off their heads and feed them to our dogs," said Amir Hawid, 20, who lives just a hundred meters from the killing scene and heard the screams of the crowd at the moment of impact.

As forensics specialists combed the bloodied, rock-strewn pavement for clues, hundreds of local Muslims and Sikhs - some wearing ceremonial daggers at their waists - packed into a community hall Wednesday to confront three white police commanders who had come seeking to calm tensions. Twice as many Muslims, many in robes and kufi caps, stood outside.

Speaker after speaker complained that they had pleaded by phone for police protection the previous night, when black gangs raided local markets and chased bar staff onto the roof of one pub, yet police failed to respond. Some argued that the police had warned them not to attempt to defend their own streets, yet had offered no alternative.

The three dead men "did nothing wrong! They died because they were doing the job of protecting our community. The job that you lot should have been doing!" one speaker shouted, jabbing an accusatory finger at the police panel.

Detective Superintendent Richard Baker, commander of the 60-strong police team hunting the killers, said they already had arrested the suspected driver and 11 others potentially linked to the shop attacks on Dudley Road. He pleaded for locals to overcome their antipathy to the police, give eyewitness statements and hand over amateur camera footage.

"I will deploy whatever it takes to get justice for this community," Baker said above a din of muttered heckles and shouted accusations, dozens of men trying to speak at once.

Baker and the local commander, Superintendent Sean Russell, defended their force's response to the killings - which Russell admitted he could see from the police control centre on a closed-circuit surveillance camera - because gangs were attacking shops in the city centre. That triggered angry cries that police cared more for protecting downtown shopping centres than Muslim communities.

Russell said it took officers 10 minutes to arrive; locals insisted it was a half-hour and the officers arrived in riot gear thinking the Muslim crowd might pose a threat. The officers said they had to be cautious.

Afterward, a chastened Baker said it had been the toughest community meeting of his life. In quiet one-to-one conversations, he offered his cell phone number to local residents and pleaded for them to find eyewitnesses.

"We really want to help you, but you need to help us too," he told one man, who said he'd been afraid to speak up and express moderate views during the meeting.

And a local black resident, who didn't want to be identified by name because of fears for his safety, pleaded outside with the departing Muslim crowd not to start targeting blacks in retaliation.

"Don't take your anger out on everyone. Don't keep saying it's black, black, black, black. Don't take this too far," he declared, street preacher-style, after abusive comments were directed at him. "I've lived and worked here seven years alongside you. I don't want to be afraid to walk down that street now. Don't make me afraid, because I didn't do it, man."

Several witnesses outside the hall, who like the dead men had taken up crude arms and manned the sidewalks in hopes of keeping the invaders at bay. None expressed confidence that the police would bring justice.

"We will avenge our brothers. This is a tight community, and someone in their group will brag about how they attacked the Muslims," said Waseem Hussain, 24, who joined the defense of the shops.

Hussain said several carloads of would-be shop raiders began casing Dudley Road, driving cars up and down the road before midnight, as scores of locals were still in the mosque observing the night's final Ramadan prayers.

He said one carload stopped at the local gas station and convenience store - which had been ransacked the night before and was now closed with metal shutters - and asked a few youths whether there was "anything new to rob."

He said locals threw stones and bricks at the cars, whose occupants had their windows rolled down. The two sides traded verbal abuse as the cars repeatedly passed, Hussain estimating at least a dozen times. The Muslim crowd grew as prayers concluded around 12:30 a.m.

After the cars canvassed the crowd once again under a hail of rocks, Hussain said, one of the occupants shouted a threat at them: "Are you asking for it?"

Two of the cars did a U-turn at the top of the road, he said, and gunned their engines, shifting their gears rapidly as they reached a speed he estimated at 110 km/h.

"The first car cut extremely close to the crowd but didn't hit anyone. We all were running for cover, but there were too many people and nowhere to go," he said.

"Some people didn't see the second car coming. It went deeper into the footpath and struck these three men, all standing in the same spot," he said. "They must have flown 20, 30 feet. One, Shazzad, was dead when he hit the ground. All of them were bloody and unconscious. They never had a chance."

SOURCE



British rioters the spawn of a bankrupt ruling elite

Theodore Dalrymple

THE riots in London and elsewhere in Britain are a backhanded tribute to the long-term intellectual torpor, moral cowardice, incompetence and careerist opportunism of the British political and intellectual class.

They have somehow managed not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country's young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.

Unfortunately, while it is totally lacking in self-respect, it is full of self-esteem: that is to say, it believes itself entitled to a high standard of living, and other things, without any effort on its own part.

Consider for a moment the following: although youth unemployment in Britain is very high, that is to say about 20 per cent of those aged under 25, the country has had to import young foreign labour for a long time, even for unskilled work in the service sector.

The reasons for this seeming paradox are obvious to anyone who knows young Britons as I do.

No sensible employer in a service industry would choose a young Briton if he could have a young Pole; the young Pole is not only likely to have a good work ethic and refined manners, he is likely to be able to add up and -- most humiliating of all -- to speak better English than the Briton, at least if by that we mean the standard variety of the language. He may not be more fluent but his English will be more correct and his accent easier to understand.

This is not an exaggeration. After compulsory education (or perhaps I should say intermittent attendance at school) up to the age of 16 costing $80,000 a head, about one-quarter of British children cannot read with facility or do simple arithmetic. It makes you proud to be a British taxpayer.

I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty, from my experience as a doctor in one of the areas in which a police station has just been burned down, that half of those rioting would reply to the question, "Can you do arithmetic?" by answering, "What is arithmetic?"

British youth leads the Western world in almost all aspects of social pathology, from teenage pregnancy to drug taking, from drunkenness to violent criminality. There is no form of bad behaviour that our version of the welfare state has not sought out and subsidised.

British children are much likelier to have a television in their bedroom than a father living at home. One-third of them never eat a meal at a table with another member of their household -- family is not the word for the social arrangements of the people in the areas from which the rioters mainly come. They are therefore radically unsocialised and deeply egotistical, viewing relations with other human beings in the same way as Lenin: Who whom, who does what to whom. By the time they grow up, they are destined not only for unemployment but unemployability.

For young women in much of Britain, dependence does not mean dependence on the government: that, for them, is independence. Dependence means any kind of reliance on the men who have impregnated them who, of course, regard their own subventions from the state as pocket money, to be supplemented by a little light trafficking. (According to his brother, Mark Duggan, the man whose death at the hands of the probably incompetent police allegedly sparked the riots, "was involved in things", which things being delicately left to the imagination of his interlocutor.)

Relatively poor as the rioting sector of society is, it nevertheless possesses all the electronic equipment necessary for the prosecution of the main business of life; that is to say, entertainment by popular culture. And what a culture British popular culture is!

Perhaps Amy Winehouse was its finest flower and its truest representative in her militant and ideological vulgarity, her stupid taste, her vile personal conduct and preposterous self-pity.

Her sordid life was a long bath in vomitus, literal and metaphorical, for which the exercise of her very minor talent was no excuse or explanation. Yet not a peep of dissent from our intelllectual class was heard after her near canonisation after her death, that class having long had the backbone of a mollusc.

Criminality is scarcely repressed any more in Britain. The last lord chief justice but two thought that burglary was a minor offence, not worthy of imprisonment, and the next chief justice agreed with him.

By the age of 12, an ordinary slum-dweller has learned he has nothing to fear from the law and the only people to fear are those who are stronger or more ruthless than he.

Punishments are derisory; the police are simultaneously bullying but ineffectual and incompetent, increasingly dressed in paraphernalia that makes them look more like the occupiers of Afghanistan than the force imagined by Robert Peel. The people who most fear our police are the innocent.

Of course, none of this reduces the personal responsibility of the rioters. But the riots are a manifestation of a society in full decomposition, of a people with neither leaders nor followers but composed only of egotists.

SOURCE



Wisconsin cops say blacks who targeted whites will not be charged with "hate crimes"

West Allis, WI police have released a statement saying that incidents at the Wisconsin State Fair, where many witnesses say large groups of black men attacked white fair patrons, will not be prosecuted as “hate crimes.” TMJ 4 reports on the new information released by police:

“The police department issued a statement with details of arrests, saying ‘None of these incidents possessed elements that would compel the pursuance of a ‘hate crime’ prosecution.”
Witnesses reported attacks on the opening night of the fair that seemed to be racially motivated with young African Americans beating up white fair goers, but police say at this point there is not enough evidence to support such claims.”

The Blaze reported Friday on the mayhem that ensued at Wisconsin State Fair on Thursday night. Here are some accounts of what witnesses claim to have experienced:

“I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn’t do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody’s windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it.”

“I saw them grab this wide kid who was probably 14 or 15 years old. They just flung him into the road. They just jumped on him and started beating him. They were kicking him. He was on the ground. A girl picked up a construction sign and pushed it over on top of him. They were just running by and kicking him in the face.”

The Justice Department defines hate crime as the “violence of intolerance and bigotry, intended to hurt and intimidate someone because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious, sexual orientation, or disability.”

“The purveyors of hate use explosives, arson, weapons, vandalism, physical violence, and verbal threats of violence to instill fear in their victims, leaving them vulnerable to more attacks and feeling alienated, helpless, suspicious and fearful. Others may become frustrated and angry if they believe the local government and other groups in the community will not protect them. When perpetrators of hate are not prosecuted as criminals and their acts not publicly condemned, their crimes can weaken even those communities with the healthiest race relations.”

Do you think police made the right call in interpreting the motives of attackers at the Wisconsin State Fair Thursday night?

SOURCE



Australia: Some discrimination is OK, apparently

Gay and lesbian retirement village goes ahead at Ballan in Victoria

AUSTRALIA'S first gay and lesbian retirement village is being built on Geelong's doorstep at Ballan in Victoria.

The 120-unit complex for over 55s is being built on the Ballan-Geelong Rd, and it will include an indoor heated spa, bar and croquet lawn.

Work is expected to start on the complex early next year, and interested people will be able to buy units off the plan in two months time, the Geelong Advertiser said.

Developer Peter Dickson has billed the $30 million Linton Estate retirement village as a haven for the gay, lesbian and bisexual community.

Mr Dickson said he had expressions of interest from 226 people from across the world including Turkey, England and the United States as well as from Victoria and interstate.

He also said there had been some interest from people in Daylesford, 20 minutes up the road, which has a sizeable gay and lesbian population.

The retirement village, at the junction of Old Melbourne and Ballan-Geelong roads, will be built in five stages.

Ballan newsagent Ian Ireland said the retirement village would be a welcome addition to the town, which was experiencing rapid growth.

Mr Ireland said the area in question along the Ballan-Geelong Rd was formerly farmland which had been subdivided into large allotments of about 12 hectares. "They are just semi-rural properties," he said. "It should be good, it will mean having more people around it's growing anyway so this is no different. "It's virtually a retirement-style village development and there's nothing wrong with that."

The State Government recently confirmed it would be funding an upgrade of the Ballan Hospital to the tune of $2 million.

Moorabool Shire Council granted a planning permit for Linton Estate retirement village in 2008, but a project redesign has delayed construction.

Mr Dickson said they had hired an engineer and were now meeting with potential builders.

A spokesman for Moorabool Shire Council said the project was first mooted some years ago and he could not recall there being any objections.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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10 August, 2011

Britain's underclass lashes out

BRITAIN'S riots show what happens when we underestimate the underclass. Or when we even more stupidly import one. Three days of arson, looting and violence started, not surprisingly, in Tottenham, coyly described as "very diverse". That means it has a large population of people of African and Caribbean descent, and is poor, crime-riddled and sullen.

This time the flashpoint was the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, which led family, friends and locals to protest outside a police station.

There they were joined by yobs summoned by SMS and Twitter, the technology of the mob.

Duggan actually best symbolised fault lines which have yawed open in Britain. He was black, although barely a single report dared say so, so irresponsibly timid has been the reporting.

He had three children with his girlfriend and another with someone else. Thus does the underclass ape the destructive freedoms too lightly flaunted by the more monied.

And he'd the adopted the culture that makes a rabble puffed with pride. He was a crook with a gun, a nightclubber who gave a finger to the camera. He was trash, blinged as success.

Yet to the mob at the police station he was a martyr, allegedly "executed" by a police force seen as an invading army, yet only too eager to apologise for its largely invented "racism".

And it was on. Over the next three days, the riots spread over London, and on to Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. And they spread to tribes of every colour, as ferals celebrated the freedom to dominate and to steal.

One video I've seen shows a black man gently helping a badly bleeding Asian to his feet, so a white thug could zip open his backpack and steal everything in it.

Animals. Just animals in a mad pack.

We're now told that this is not a "race riot" like all those others Britain has suffered. Yet race may indeed be a factor, not least for adding to the bonfire -- and for helping to make the born-right-there trash feel even more unmoored in their own country

Large-scale immigration, much of it of people who'd struggle to fit in, has given Britain even more of the poor and marginalised, with no ownership of their new home and its institutions. Are you surprised that most gun violence in London comes from its black minority?

The multiculturalists long reassured Britain, as they have Australia, that with each generation such fault lines would blur, as if culture didn't repeat itself.

But most of these rioters seem young enough to have been born there, just as were the university-educated Islamists behind the 2005 London bombings.

Yes, the many white rioters prove race alone cannot explain this frenzy. Britain has a white underclass, too, and one dangerously loosened from the soft ties of tradition, religion and class.

How it's been made overmighty in this aggressively egalitarian age by being taught to take pride in the feral, to honour hate in its music, to plead the victim to the welfare officer, to not fear the police, and to owe no duty to the families they form, then forget.

And see how they can be reduced to yet another contending ethnic class, fighting newly introduced ones for scarce jobs and government patronage.

Then comes the multicultural lobby, stupidly trashing their own culture and traditions, not realising there's little else to inspire the loyalty of the mob.

Do I sound too pessimistic? Then look at London burning and ask from where came the people to light those fires and to rob even the maimed by their light.

SOURCE



Naming the real context of the riots in Britain

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are shattering their own communities represent a generation that has been suckled by the state more than any generation before it. They live in urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state during the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well-off people's existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain "mentally fit", has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention.

The most striking thing about the rioters is how little they care for their own communities. You don't have to be a right-winger with helmet hair and a niggling discomfort with black or chavvy yoof (I am the opposite of that) to recognise that this violence is not political, just criminal. It is entertaining to watch the political contortions of commentators who claim the riots are an uprising against the evils of capitalism, as they struggle to explain why the targets have been Foot Locker sports shops and why the only "gains" made by the rioters have been to get a new pair of trainers or an Apple laptop. In the Brixton race riots of 1981, looting and the destruction of local infrastructure were largely incidental to the broader expression of political anger, by-products of the main show, which was a clash between a community and the forces of the state. But in these riots, looting and smashing stuff up is all there is. It is childish nihilism.

Many older members of the urban communities rocked by violence have been shocked by the level of self-destruction exhibited by the rioters. Some shop owners have got together to defend their property, even beating up rioters who have turned up with iron bars. In one video, a West Indian woman in her 50s braves the rubble-strewn streets to lecture the rioters: "These people worked hard to make their businesses work and then you lot wanna go and burn it up. For what?" On Twitter, the hashtag #riotcleanup is being used by community members to co-ordinate some post-riot street-cleaning, to make amends for what one elderly Tottenham resident described as "the stupid behaviour of the young".

But it is more than childish destructiveness motivating the rioters. These are youngsters who are uniquely alienated from the communities in which they grew up. Nurtured in large part by the welfare state, financially, physically and educationally, socialised more by the agents of welfarism than by their own neighbours or local representatives, these youth have little moral or emotional attachment to their communities. Their rioting reveals not that Britain is in a time warp in 1981 or 1985 with politically motivated riots against the police, but that the tentacle-like spread of the welfare state into every area of people's lives has utterly zapped old social bonds, the relationship of sharing and solidarity that once existed in working-class communities. These riots suggest that the welfare state is giving rise to a generation happy to shit on its own doorstep.

This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one's own community. And as a left-winger I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly adverse affect on working people's lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, this welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, it is worth remembering Marx's colourful description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of how that French ruler cynically built his power base among parts of the bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpenproletariat, so that "ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars and from this kindred element Boneparte formed the core of his [constituency], where all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation". In very different circumstances, we have something similar today where the decadent commentariat's siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, "the labouring nation", look on with disdain.

There is one more important part to this rioting story: the reaction of the cops. Their inability to handle the riots effectively reveals the extent to which the British police are adapted to consensual rather than conflictual policing. It also demonstrates how far they have been paralysed by the politics of victimhood, where virtually every police activity gets followed up by a complaint or a legal case. Their kid-glove approach to the rioters only fuels the riots because, as one observer put it, when the rioters "see that the police cannot control the situation, [that] leads to sort of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria". So this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and intensified by the discombobulation of the police state. The riots tell a very interesting story about modern Britain.

SOURCE



Rudderless Met crippled by liberalism

While London was ablaze and looters raged through the streets with impunity, Sir Paul Stephenson – the police officer best equipped to deal with this carnage – was sitting at home, his vast experience going unforgivably to waste.

Caught in the grip of the political class’s lust for media blood, former Commissioner Sir Paul – acknowledged by all in the police service as a ‘good copper’ with an iron will – was driven from office over a link to the phone-hacking scandal.

He had employed an ex-News of the World executive – which, in sane times, would have earned him nothing more than a modest carpeting.
Many Londoners would have wanted Sir Paul Stephenson at his desk during the riots

He also accepted free hospitality at a luxury health spa that also employed the said executive, Neil Wallis – but it must be noted that this was while recovering from surgery to remove a pre-cancerous tumour.

Ask residents of Croydon, Enfield, Tottenham and Lewisham if they would rather have had Sir Paul at his desk during the mayhem of this week, and it’s not hard to guess the answer.

Undoubtedly, the Met this week got its tactics shockingly wrong, from its ineffective handling of the initial Tottenham riot last week, to standing off while the fires burned on Monday.

For all his good intentions, the less experienced acting commissioner, Tim Godwin, cannot have the authority of Sir Paul, who showed his mettle after his officers blundered over the handling of last year’s student riots.

In the wake of those disturbances, Sir Paul ordered a full review of tactics, which led to police being far more aggressive, using snatch squads to drag troublemakers from crowds of protesters at subsequent demonstrations.

In April this year, he returned early from sick leave – after the operation to remove the pre-cancerous growth – to mastermind security for the royal wedding.

Anarchists had been threatening to wreck the event but, due to tough police tactics – including pre-emptive arrests of known troublemakers – the day was entirely peaceful. It was considered a huge policing success.

Contrast it with this week, when officers sent on to the front line were wondering how much force they could deploy to protect property, not to mention life and limb. They know that the stopgap Mr Godwin will not be in charge to cover their backs if recriminations over their actions, or inactions, begin to fly in the coming months.

To make matters worse, the same officers are burdened by decades of political correctness, which began with the Scarman inquiry into the race riots of the early 1980s, and culminated with the Macpherson report into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

The appalling handling of the heinous murder of Stephen was born out of incompetence, yet the Macpherson inquiry branded the police ‘institutionally racist’ – and they have been doing their jobs with their hands tied behind their backs ever since, especially in situations like this week’s riots where large numbers of the protagonists are black teenagers.

Use stop and search to check for weapons or drugs and they are accused of racism. Use strong force against rent-a-mob rioters – whose own actions are not subject to the same levels of scrutiny by a Left-wing establishment determined to undermine the police – and they will be hammered for alleged brutality.

Meanwhile, the controversy over the G20 riots of two years ago – during which newspaper-seller Ian Tomlinson died after being struck by a policeman – and the use of the tactic of ‘kettling’, where protesters are confined to a small space, has left the police terrified over what level of force to use, if any.

Thus, while undoubtedly courageous, this week they felt forced to stand behind riot shields while teenage thugs in hooded tops bombarded them with missiles, set fire to family businesses, smashed through store windows and burned down homes.

A final disturbing thought is that the other senior officer forced out over hacking, John Yates, was in charge of counter-terrorism operations. He was highly rated by security officials, who considered him first-class at his job – keeping this country safe from terrorist attack. We can only pray that he will not be as badly missed as Sir Paul has been in recent days.

SOURCE


Sikhs show the importance of a sense of community

Armed with swords and hockey sticks, Sikhs defend their homes and temples against rioters



Some armed with swords, some carrying hockey sticks, defiant Sikhs stood guard outside their temples last night. More then 700 men, some in their 80s, took to the streets to protect the homes, businesses and places of worship in Southall, West London.

The locals rallied to keep the rioters at bay following reports of a planned attack on the area. It is just a few miles from Ealing, which was targeted on Monday night. Each of the Sikh temples was guarded by around 200 men.

Amarjit Singh Klair from nearby Hounslow, who helped rally the men, said: ‘We are working along side the police, they’re doing what they can but they are stretched. ‘Why shouldn’t we defend our homes, businesses and places of worship? This is our area. There’s lots of talk about it kicking off here. But we’re ready for them.’

Hooded youths could be seen scouting the area but appear to be have frightened off. Only a handful of police could be seen patrolling the area.

The Sikh community were running a military style operation to protect themselves after almost 100 rioters tried to attack the heart of the area early on Tuesday. With few police around, elders at London’s largest Sikh temple in Havelock Road resorted to telephoning male worshippers for help.

Last night groups of Sikh men stood guard at different parts of the town, keeping in touch via their mobiles.

One man in his 20s said: ‘They caught us off guard last night but we still managed to get people together to protect the area. We saw them putting on their balaclavas preparing to jump out of three cars but we charged at them and managed to chase them off.’

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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9 August, 2011


Freedom of speech as an aid to certainty

by Sean Gabb

When I review the contents of my mind, nothing ever strikes me so forcibly as the fact of their insignificance. I am approaching the end of a long and expensive education. I have open access at my university to libraries which contain all human knowledge. I read quickly and retain what I have read. Nor is my reading confined to one language. And yet, the more I read and perhaps learn, I only become more aware of my own immense ignorance. There is so much that I not only do not know but that I never shall know, that what little knowledge I do have seems as nothing set against it.

The greater part of this ignorance is, of course, inevitable. I have at the most only another 70 years or so to live, and possibly much less. Ten times that long would be too short for me to know all that there is to be known. Let me therefore concentrate on knowing one or two small disciplines, and with that ambition let me be contented. No one - not even a great genius - could despise me on account of this.

Yet there is another side to my ignorance which, though equally inevitable, is not always so readily excused. For there was a time when I used to sneer at the credulity of past generations - at how people once accepted the wildest nonsense as infallible truth; at how when any ray of genuine truth entered their minds, their normal response was to shut it out again. Today, however, I feel rather less superior… and I know that, like any mediaeval man in church, I believe often without proof, and sometimes even without understanding.

I believe, for example, that the world is round. Yet how, on what I presently know, could I prove this if required? I have the evidence of my senses - from when I look at the horizon. But I know from other instances that my senses often deceive me - as when I look at a straight stick that appears bent when put half in water. Why should the horizon not equally be an optical illusion? I have the elegant little proof of Eratosthenes, who took simultaneous measurements at Alexandria and Syene, and found the intervening distance to form an arc of one great circle. But while I understand the reasoning behind his proof, I have never once felt inclined to demonstrate it. I believe that the world is round because I was told so at school, and because all my geographical books and informants tell me, or indicate, the same. I hold this truth, therefore, on authority and might well be embarrassed if ever seriously asked to justify it.

The same applies regarding the world’s place in the universe. I have no sensation of its doing other than stand still while objects in the sky rise and set. I have never personally watched the retrograde motion of Mars, nor looked through a telescope at the phases of Venus. As I write, I am absolutely unable to argue on a scientific basis that the earth orbits the sun and not otherwise. I found my cosmogony in books, and uncritically accepted it.

Elsewhere in physics, I learn of some particles which only exist for 10-^17 seconds, and of others which have no mass. Looking at the jumble of numbers and Greek letters which take up page after page in the more advanced textbooks, and at the peculiar names and terms in the main text - Quarks, Charmed Quarks, Anti-Charmed Quarks, Gypsy Particles, etc - I despair. I feel happier with the dogmas of the Hypostatic Union than with this mass of nonsense. Yet I would never dream of sneering at it. I can imagine no new Voltaire poking fun at these modern mysteries. Insofar as I have any opinion regarding them, I accept them without question. The men of science have spoken. Who am I to say against them?

Now, I accept opinions on authority, and confess that I do without shame. Yet I also accept that my authorities have not always a single voice. Indeed, like a path through a great forest, truth is often more easily seen by those who follow than by the pioneers. We return to the instance of cosmogony. When the evidence is examined rather than merely taken for granted, perhaps there is no question now that the Copernican improves on the Ptolemaic theory. Tycho Brahe, however, the most eminent astronomer of the 16th century, thought otherwise. On the one hand, Copernicus had assumed a circular orbit for the earth, and not, as Kepler did later, an elliptical one. Brahe, quite honestly on this account, found the new theory scarcely more reliable for prediction purposes than the old. On the other, he argued, if the earth truly were moving through space, this motion would have to be apparent to us from the shifting of the planets relative to the more distant stars. It was again only in the next century that astronomical distances were revealed, so allowing this parallactic shift to occur, but not perceptibly without sensitive measuring instruments. Quite possibly, much that I now accept on trust is mistaken, and much that I scorn by example is the truth. Bearing this in mind, what is it that separates me from the mediaeval man in church, who subscribed to or recited anathemas against doctrines which were to him strings of words without overall meaning? What is it that saves me from the charge of being an uninformed bigot?

The answer is simple: Free Speech. When I believe without proof, I do so confident that someone else has not believed without it - that someone will have conceived an idea, and published it for the inspection of other experts in the relevant fields of study. It may quietly be accepted as a useful advance, or pointedly ignored as not worth refuting. It may stir up the wildest and most prolonged controversy. Of one thing, however, I can be sure This is that the idea will have been examined by those whose chief immediate object is the finding of truth, and who, if drawn away from that search - by desire to flatter some prejudice, or gain some worldly advantage - will be quickly exposed as frauds by the more honest majority. Certainly, what emerges from this process may not always be the truth. Human reason is fallible, and does not become perfect when collected in a large mass. But, if not always the truth, what emerges will at least, in the opinion of those best qualified to know, have the balance of probability in its favour. There is, in the modern West, no question of one side using against the other the compelling arguments of the torture chamber and the auto da fe - nor, to come into the present, of the labour camp and the firing squad. The coercive authority of the State, whenever it extends into argument, can only destroy my confidence. For it turns a contest of reason against reason into one of reason against power. It allows me no longer to assume that what is written is probably right, but makes me wonder when I read what interest is being served by the writer.

Freedom in commercial matters encourages a division of labour. To be exact, it lets me have shoes without my being a cobbler. It does much the same in the realm of knowledge. It assures me whether the races really are equals in intellect without my being an anthropologist, what pollution is doing to my surroundings without my being a government scientist, whether cigarettes or heroin really are bad for me without my being a doctor. It gives all of us the confidence to believe more than we could ever have time or aptitude to find out with our own unaided intellects.

And, while I still live in a country that allows freedom of speech, I never need be ashamed of admitting to this kind of ignorance.

SOURCE




Apologists for these thugs should hang their heads in shame: A stinging rebuke from an inner-city youth worker

The riots in London over the past three days may have been shocking, but much of the response to these appalling events has been all too predictable.

As the smoke clears over the wrecked buildings and the torched vehicles, a growing army of apologists has indulged in an orgy of excuse-making for the widespread violence. We are told the rioters have been motivated by their rage at inequality, deprivation and unemployment. Some have blamed police brutality; others have wailed about ‘Tory cuts’ or the closure of youth clubs.

But such explanations are as misguided as they’re immoral. In reality, there is no justification for the outbreak of carnage that’s gripped the capital. What we witnessed was despicable. Far from representing a political act, it was nothing more than a mixture of mindless criminality and opportunistic materialism. There was no 'legitimate grievance' behind the mass thuggery, only feral mob rule which should have no place in a civilised society.

Those hand-wringing over today’s riots would have us believe the explosion of savage behaviour represents the modern cry of a disaffected people, struggling in the inner city under the yoke of economic and state oppression.

The shrill defence of the rioters is an affront to the thousands of people who live in straitened circumstances in the inner city, yet who did not loot or set vehicles ablaze or hurl missiles at the police.

Indeed, the biggest victims of the frenzied mayhem are the law-abiding, hard-working citizens — black, white and Asian — of the areas including Tottenham, Brixton, Hackney, Lewisham and Streatham (where I live) who have been made homeless, had their businesses destroyed or their livelihoods ruined in these senseless and disgusting attacks. They are the ones who have suffered the greatest injustice, not the bullying youths rampaging through the streets.

There are, of course, concerns about the incident in Tottenham which triggered the riot, when a man who had a reputation as a gang leader and drug dealer was shot dead in a clash with the police. An investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission is under way.

The anguish of the dead man’s family is understandable, but what is deplorable is that local speculation about the conduct of the police has spiralled so wildly out of control.

This combustible hysteria has no sense of proportion, no moral imperative. Why has the same fury not been displayed over the mounting catalogue of black-on-black knifings and shootings in our cities? Why were the police the target of loud demands for vengeance, while gangland killers are rarely the subject of such outrage?

Tragically, young black people are using guns to kill each other with alarming regularity, but very few people ‘in the community’ — save distraught relatives — kick up a fuss. Yet when the police kill an alleged crack-dealing gangster, the so-called ‘dispossessed’ of our inner cities go crazy.

This is by no means to downplay the tragedy for the dead man’s family, but the eagerness of community leaders to focus all indignation against the police, while ignoring the lethal realities of gang feuds, displays a warped double standard which is hindering the acceptance of moral responsibility.

In truth, the rioting has nothing to do with any concept of justice and everything to do with a twisted sense of power and spirit of brute materialism.

There is no rationale that can legitimise the desire to set a bus ablaze or smash in shop windows. The portrayal in some quarters of the rioters as idealistic heroes striving for the rights of their community, as though they were latter-day followers of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, is as preposterous as it is blatantly untrue.
Thuggery knows no colour. We have seen plenty of white youths joining in the looting, too.

These young people wholly buy into a shallow culture of instant gratification. Oblivious to traditional ideas of hard work and social obligation, they seek to grab what they want, whether it be a new set of trainers from JD Sports or a flat-screen TV from Currys.

For all such condemnation, however, it is important to maintain a sense of perspective. The police may have made more than 100 arrests in the past couple of days, but most youths in the inner city have no involvement with violence whatsoever. The thuggery is confined to a hard-core minority.

In my spare time, I work as a volunteer mentor in Peckham, an even more deprived neighbourhood than Tottenham. Most of the young people in my scheme wear hoodies, but all are fine, upstanding citizens. Not one is in a gang or involved in criminal activity, and all are seeking to better their lives through education. Unlike the rioters and looters, all of them have a fully functioning moral compass.

We should also recognise that this kind of mindless aggression, masquerading as protest, is not confined to the world of inner-city black youths. Over the past year, we have witnessed disgraceful scenes on the streets of the capital, where the perpetrators have largely been white, privileged middle-class students.

Charlie Gilmour, son of a millionaire rock star, is a symbol of this pattern, having been jailed for 16 months following his conviction for violence during the tuition fees protest last December. Gilmour’s swinging from a Union Jack on the Cenotaph was just as great an insult to public decency as Saturday night’s looting in Tottenham.

Nor is vicious materialism by any means solely the preserve of black youth culture. Thuggery knows no colour. We have seen plenty of white youths joining in the looting, too.

In fact, we see this nasty, self-centred mentality all round us — reflected in the greed of bankers over their bonuses or MPs over their expenses. The pernicious spirit of instant gratification and ruthless entitlement transcends race and class, undermining the codes of morality that once built our civilisation.

That is why these riots are different to the unrest that gripped Britain in the early Eighties, epitomised by the flames of Toxteth and Brixton. Then, there were justified grievances about social exclusion and police heavy-handedness. But none of that applies today. Things have vastly improved for ethnic minorities since then. Job and educational opportunities are far greater. Contrary to what the Left claim, public resources have been poured into the inner cities.

After the Brixton riots in 1985 there were several regeneration schemes and today Peckham has a state-of-the-art library and new art gallery. The quality of the social housing stock has been transformed.

Attitudes among the police are also much better, as shown by Operation Trident, a highly successful community-driven initiative to combat gun crime within the black community.

But none of these changes will help if the worst aspects of youth culture are not tackled. Too many young people will never reach their potential if they are allowed to remain in their mental ghettoes. Education unequivocally provides the best path for young people out of the ghetto, both geographical and mental. That also means providing guidance and discipline, rather than pandering to their shallow teenage whims.

It is our own politically correct cowardice that has been the greatest force behind their marginalisation.

SOURCE





“In the public interest?” Yeah, right

A motley crew of left-wingers is using the fallout from recent scandals to grab a bit of influence for themselves

Taking advantage of Hackgate and the banking and MPs expenses crises, a section of liberal thinkers is vying for greater influence by launching a campaign against the straw man they dub the ‘feral elite’. Worst of all, they are doing it under the façade that they are representing the interests of the public, who it’s clear they hold in contempt.

They may call their campaign In the Public Interest. They may be calling for ‘a new jury of people to put the public interest first’. But it’s evident from the outset that In the Public Interest supporters have no interest in reflecting what the public is actually interested in. Because, surely, if you were going to randomly select a panel of 1,000 members of the public to act as a ‘jury’ of what’s in the public interest, the first, most glaringly obvious thing you would do is ask them what social and political issues concern them?

That’s far from obvious to this campaign, established by the left-wing pressure group Compass. After all, they already know what’s in the public’s interest. How could the issues that most concern the public be anything other than those In the Public Interest has already determined the public jury will examine? These are media ownership, the role of the financial sector in the crash, the selection and accountability of MPs and policing. Surely such a choice is self-evident given, in the words of the campaign’s founders, the ‘waves of extraordinary public horror’ in reaction to Hackgate and other incidents?

Far from it. In reality, there was no such collective sense of horror among the public after Hackgate. As Frank Furedi has observed previously on spiked, it was instead confined to a ‘narrow stratum’ of British society: ‘People in the pub or on the streets are not having animated debates about the News of the World’s heinous behaviour. Rather it is the Twitterati and those most directly influenced by the cultural elite and its lifestyle and identity who are emotionally drawn to the anti-Murdoch crusade.’

The same can broadly be said about the MPs’ expenses scandal and the financial crash, neither of which invoked the public outcry opportunist members of the media and political classes often claim it did. And, following the knockout blow the public gave to the electoral-reform lobby in the referendum on the Alternative Vote earlier in the year, how ‘selection of MPs’ is seen to be a burning issue among the populace is simply baffling. ‘Policing’ is simply added to the list without explanation, as if this was self-evident.

Not wanting to leave anything to the public to decide in this proposed jury, In the Public Interest has even helpfully pinpointed the cause of all this ‘horror’ the public are experiencing, something they dub the ‘feral elite’: the ‘politicians, bankers and media moguls [who] share a common culture in which greed is good, everyone takes their turn at the trough, and private interest takes precedence over the public good’.

They even go so far as to dictate the outcomes of their proposed initiative, which would be ‘a new public-interest test with ethical procedures for the corporate world… and the proper treatment of national assets, services and utilities; and the outlawing of excessive concentrations of elite power in places like banking or the media’. Offending members of the ‘feral elite’ would also be mandated to attend public hearings – just like the Murdochs did in parliament - where members of the public can grill them on issues that In the Public Interest has ordained are relevant.

Astoundingly, this clique of campaigners is actually attempting to masquerade as the public. In an open letter to the Guardian – where else? – a gaggle of luminaries claim: ‘Only we, the public, can hold power truly to account by testing whether what happens is in the public interest.’

‘We the public?’ There is not a single shred of evidence of a groundswell of public support or demand for such an initiative. In fact, if you click to see who their supporters are on their website, the only signatures you can view are figures deemed ‘influential’ enough. Either public support is lacking, or they don’t want to sully the petition with the names of insignificant, irrelevant plebs who might put their name to it. Or both.

In an article outlining their intentions, the campaign’s founders are at least a little more forthright, admitting: ‘There is an irony in that this call is coming from another group of the self-appointed and self-righteous. But in today’s celebrity world, this is the only way left to draw attention to an issue; and the issue is, letting the public decide.’

For people who claim to have faith in the public’s ability to decide, their complete disdain for the ability of the public to be able to draw attention to an issue of concern to them is simply breathtaking. The only way the interests of the feeble demos can be heard, it seems, is if a few celebrities bang the drum loud enough for the little people to be given a platform.

It is true, however, that it’s a bit ironic – and, many would likely add, more than a bit rich – that this campaign is being undertaken by ‘another group of the self-appointed and self-righteous’. What we have here is nothing more than a left-wing section of the liberal elite, emboldened to the point of atrocious arrogance, jockeying for greater power and influence as the hollowed-out condition of the right becomes apparent. They are, it should be noted, already making a complete hack job of it, managing to alienate swathes of groups and individuals who would, if the campaign had been approached differently, likely have proven enthusiastic bedfellows.

But this new self-appointed and self-righteous clique is actually far more insidious than even the most caricatured version of the coterie of ‘greed is good’, Gordon Gecko types they claim to be calling to account. Not just due to their slippery, underhand attempts to cloak their own special interests in democratic garb, but also because of their contempt for the idea that the public is capable of engaging in democratic activity without the help of a carefully-managed ‘public jury’. Individuals can make their own minds up without being spoon-fed about what their interests actually are and without having ‘celebrity’ campaigners getting their concerns heard for them.

In truth, the In the Public Interest campaign is about as far from being in the interests of the public as you can get.

SOURCE







Mining boss slams 'soft' Australians

A workforce dominated by soft, satisfied idealists is "pissing away" Australia's position of economic strength and taking the nation backwards, according to the head of a Chinese-controlled mining company with multiple projects in Australia.

Andrew Michelmore, the head of MMG, which has headquarters in Melbourne but is dominated by China, said Australia was suffering from "rich country's disease" and would devolve into a welfare state unless workers rediscovered a hunger for excellence.

Addressing the Australian-British Chamber of Commerce, Mr Michelmore, the former head of Western Mining Corporation, lamented the immobility of the Australian workforce and the resulting skills shortage in remote areas like Western Australia's Pilbara region.

"People can't be bothered moving 25 kilometres to get a job because they will live off social welfare instead, and it's a real worry for me watching Australia have a luxurious time at the benefit of our relationship with China," he said.

More older people and women should be returned to a workforce which was dominated by people with "airy fairy", "idealistic" and "altruistic" attitudes.

"We need to get the grey hairs back into industry and working, we need to get more women involved in work," he said. "We need to get some hunger and drive back into this country, we are becoming soft."

A lack of workers has long frustrated the resources sector as it tries to develop billions of dollars worth of projects over the next decade.

MMG has its headquarters and three mines in Australia, one each in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania.

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's national president, Tony Maher, rejected Mr Michelmore's comments. He said they were "a trojan horse for a Chinese labour debate".

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************



8 August, 2011

Black ‘Mobs’ Attack White Patrons Outside Wis. State Fair

“It looked like they were just going after white guys, white people.” That’s how Norb Roffers described the scene outside the Wisconsin State Fair on Thursday night to Newsradio 620 WTMJ in Milwaukee. “They were attacking everybody for no reason whatsoever,” he added.

Roffers and others painted a grim and detailed picture of what unfolded during the first day of the fair. “It was 100% racial,” claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran who told the station that young people beat on his car.

WTMJ sums up their accounts: “Witnesses’ accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday night.”

Milwaukee Police confirmed to WTMJ that officers responded to “complaints of battery, fighting and property damage due to a large, unruly crowd.” However, since reports of injuries were still coming in, police could not give a detailed account of what happened. Here is just some of what the witnesses claim to have experienced:

“I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn’t do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody’s windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it.”
[...]

“That rated right up there with it. When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, ‘There’s not enough cops to handle this.‘ There’s no way. It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road. They were knocking people off their motorcycles.”
[...]

“As we got closer to the street, we looked up the road, and we saw a quite a bit of commotion going on and there was a guy laying in the road, and nobody was even laying there. He wasn’t even moving. Finally a car pulled up. They stopped right next to the guy, and it looked like someone was going to help him. We were kind of stuck, because we couldn’t cross. Traffic was going through. Young black men running around, beating on people, and we were like ‘Let’s get the heck out of here.’ The light turned, and I got attacked from behind. I just got hit in the back of the head real hard. I’m like, ‘What the heck is going on here?’ I heard my bell ring.”

Roffers further described what witnesses said happened to the man who was lying in the street.

“People were saying he was on a bike. They tore him off his bike and beat on him. We were walking to the west on Schlinger. I was watching behind me a lot more diligently, making sure there wasn’t anybody coming to get us anymore.”
[...]

“I saw them grab this white kid who was probably 14 or 15 years old. They just flung him into the road. They just jumped on him and started beating him. They were kicking him. He was on the ground. A girl picked up a construction sign and pushed it over on top of him. They were just running by and kicking him in the face.”

Then, Eric talked about trying to get out of the car to help the victim.

“My wife pulled me back in because she didn’t want me to get hit. Thankfully, there was surprising a lady that was in the car in front of me that jumped out of the car real quick and went over there to try to put her body around the kid so they couldn’t see he was laying there and, obviously, defenseless.

Her husband, or whoever was in the car, was screaming at her to get back into the car. She ended up going back into the car. These black kids grabbed this kid off the ground again, and pulled him up over the curb, onto the sidewalk and threw him into the bushes like he was a piece of garbage.”

Eric claimed that the victim in that beating was by himself, and that there was a split of white people on one sidewalk and black people on the other.

“There was nobody else around to help him. There were no other white people, period, on that side of the street. They were going in the opposite direction because, those people who were coming out of the fair that saw these people coming, they either went back into the fair or took off running south on 84th Street.”
[...]

“The thing that irritated me, the State Fair Police, the State Police, were down by the Pettit entrance to get in there,” said Eric. “There was probably 5 or 6 officers down there. That’s where all these kids came from. They came out of the Midway, across the front of the Pettit. They were still filing out of there. The State Fair Police, they knew this was going on. They knew these kids were beating these guys in between that exit and Schlinger at the next gate.”

“They were stopping traffic, and I said ‘What in the hell,’ excuse my language, ‘what are you guys doing directing traffic when there are 300, 400 black kids up the road beating the hell out of everybody, pushing people off of motorcycles?’ I was livid. I could not believe they were directing traffic.”

SOURCE




Call to scrap 'useless' equalities watchdog which costs taxpayers millions

Britain’s embattled human rights quango should be scrapped, a report says today. It claims that the Equality and Human Rights Commission contributes ‘very little to meaningful equality’ despite costing the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds a year.

The Civitas think-tank says that abolition would come at ‘no obvious cost to the public’.

The report is scathing of the pay and expenses of the Commission’s most senior staff, including chairman Trevor Phillips who receives £112,000 a year for working three and a half days a week. It also criticises the quango’s ‘illogical’ use of statistics and ‘narrow approach’ to social policy.

The report is a fresh blow to the quango which has suffered a series of financial scandals and high-profile resignations, culminating in a scathing Government review which found it had failed to do its job and had cost too much money. It is now facing large-scale cuts in its Whitehall funding.

The report found ‘serious flaws’ in the way that the EHRC demonstrates inequality in Britain. It says the Commission is quick to blame unfairness in society while ignoring other important influences which could explain the differences between social groups.

It says that, for example, the EHRC points to differences in life expectancy between British-born women (80.5 years) and women of Pakistani origin (77.3) as a sign of unfairness. However, it fails to draw attention to the much larger difference in life expectancy between Pakistani women living in Britain (77.3) and women living in Pakistan (67.5 years).

Jon Gower Davies, the report’s author, says the Commission’s goal of equality is unrealistic as it wishes that ‘life outcomes be entirely divorced from health limitations, cultural practices and lifestyles’.

A Civitas spokesman said: ‘Abolishing the EHRC would not just be a cost-saving exercise. It may well be an opportunity to channel resources into pertinent issues holding back equality and fairness.’ Mark Hammond, chief executive of the EHRC, said: ‘There are many reasons why people experience different levels of prosperity, health and happiness, but in some cases this can be because of discrimination and unfairness.

‘No one blames Britain for that, but it’s our job to start a debate on issues where we could see better outcomes for people suffering unfair disadvantages.’

SOURCE





Having a satellite dish 'is a human right,' says European court

It is regarded as a luxury that allows people to watch top sport and blockbuster movies from the comfort of their armchairs. But owning a satellite dish is actually a human right, according to unelected European judges.

In an extraordinary ruling, lawmakers in Strasbourg have warned that banning dishes on listed buildings, social housing and even private homes could breach the right to freedom of expression by preventing people from practice religion.

The judgement is a huge blow to campaigners who have fought to stop the large metal dishes blighting the brickwork of historic buildings and rental properties.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Britain’s discrimination watchdog, has now published new guidance warning that landlords could be at risk of being sued if they try to stop their tenants putting up a satellite dish.

Housing Minister Grant Shapps said that the ruling, under the Human Rights Act, threatened to drive ‘a horse and cart’ through planning laws.

The quango issued the guidance following a recent case at the European Court of Human Rights. Two tenants in Sweden took their government to court after they were evicted by their landlord in a dispute over a dish. The couple installed one of the dishes on their rented property but the landlord ordered them to take it down. They refused and were later thrown out of the property.

But European judges ruled that the Swedish government had failed in its obligation to protect the couple’s right to receive information. It found that satellite dishes come under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In its guidance, Britain’s equalities watchdog suggested that a disabled tenant who received transmissions of religious services held overseas would have their rights to freedom of religion breached if their landlord banned satellite dishes.

The European Commission’s Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein said: ‘The right to use a satellite dish [is] one of the many concrete benefits for European consumers of the free movement of goods and services within the internal market.

‘Satellite dishes are an increasingly popular tool for receiving multiple services via satellite: they facilitate mutual exchanges between our various cultures by overcoming national borders, and familiarise the general public with the new remote communications technologies. Their use must therefore be free from any unjustified obstacle.’

SOURCE






Australian church says spanking is OK, opposes push to ban corporal punishment

MUMS and dads could face court for smacking their children, a major church has warned as it resists the push to ban corporal punishment in the home.

The 600,000-strong Presbyterian Church fears that parents could be stopped from using corporal punishment as yet another state moves to ban smacking.

Under a controversial human rights charter, Victoria will join NSW in outlawing the use of corporal punishment. Under Queensland law, parents are allowed to use "reasonable force" when disciplining their children.

In a submission to a Victorian parliamentary inquiry, the church said that the charter could be used to dump the common law right to smack children provided force wasn't unreasonable or excessive. "Many Australian families use reasonable physical discipline from time to time," the church said. "There is a significant body of research confirming its utility in raising children well."

But Australian Childhood Foundation chief executive Dr Joe Tucci yesterday said it was never right to hit children and NSW's lead should be followed. "If parents are really angry or frustrated at the time that they're doing it they could inadvertently hurt kids and that's our concern about it," he said. "More and more parents are moving away from physical punishment because it's not effective."

However, adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg said it was ridiculous to legislate against smacking. "I don't think we should be criminalising people who, when their children run across the road, they give them a tap on the bum," he said.

Dr Carr-Gregg said he didn't believe smacking was the solution to bad behaviour, but attempts to ban it had not worked.

A recent [bogus] study said that parents who smacked their children could be depriving them of the skills they needed to cope with school and even with adulthood.

The Presbyterian church submission said Australia was being pressured to ban corporal punishment by a United Nations committee overseeing implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************



7 August, 2011

Black ‘Mobs’ Attack White Patrons Outside Wis. State Fair

“It looked like they were just going after white guys, white people.” That’s how Norb Roffers described the scene outside the Wisconsin State Fair on Thursday night to Newsradio 620 WTMJ in Milwaukee. “They were attacking everybody for no reason whatsoever,” he added.

Roffers and others painted a grim and detailed picture of what unfolded during the first day of the fair. “It was 100% racial,” claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran who told the station that young people beat on his car.

WTMJ sums up their accounts: “Witnesses’ accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday night.”

Milwaukee Police confirmed to WTMJ that officers responded to “complaints of battery, fighting and property damage due to a large, unruly crowd.” However, since reports of injuries were still coming in, police could not give a detailed account of what happened. Here is just some of what the witnesses claim to have experienced:

“I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn’t do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody’s windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it.”
[...]

“That rated right up there with it. When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, ‘There’s not enough cops to handle this.‘ There’s no way. It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road. They were knocking people off their motorcycles.”
[...]

“As we got closer to the street, we looked up the road, and we saw a quite a bit of commotion going on and there was a guy laying in the road, and nobody was even laying there. He wasn’t even moving. Finally a car pulled up. They stopped right next to the guy, and it looked like someone was going to help him. We were kind of stuck, because we couldn’t cross. Traffic was going through. Young black men running around, beating on people, and we were like ‘Let’s get the heck out of here.’ The light turned, and I got attacked from behind. I just got hit in the back of the head real hard. I’m like, ‘What the heck is going on here?’ I heard my bell ring.”

Roffers further described what witnesses said happened to the man who was lying in the street.

“People were saying he was on a bike. They tore him off his bike and beat on him. We were walking to the west on Schlinger. I was watching behind me a lot more diligently, making sure there wasn’t anybody coming to get us anymore.”
[...]

“I saw them grab this white kid who was probably 14 or 15 years old. They just flung him into the road. They just jumped on him and started beating him. They were kicking him. He was on the ground. A girl picked up a construction sign and pushed it over on top of him. They were just running by and kicking him in the face.”

Then, Eric talked about trying to get out of the car to help the victim.

“My wife pulled me back in because she didn’t want me to get hit. Thankfully, there was surprising a lady that was in the car in front of me that jumped out of the car real quick and went over there to try to put her body around the kid so they couldn’t see he was laying there and, obviously, defenseless.

Her husband, or whoever was in the car, was screaming at her to get back into the car. She ended up going back into the car. These black kids grabbed this kid off the ground again, and pulled him up over the curb, onto the sidewalk and threw him into the bushes like he was a piece of garbage.”

Eric claimed that the victim in that beating was by himself, and that there was a split of white people on one sidewalk and black people on the other.

“There was nobody else around to help him. There were no other white people, period, on that side of the street. They were going in the opposite direction because, those people who were coming out of the fair that saw these people coming, they either went back into the fair or took off running south on 84th Street.”
[...]

“The thing that irritated me, the State Fair Police, the State Police, were down by the Pettit entrance to get in there,” said Eric. “There was probably 5 or 6 officers down there. That’s where all these kids came from. They came out of the Midway, across the front of the Pettit. They were still filing out of there. The State Fair Police, they knew this was going on. They knew these kids were beating these guys in between that exit and Schlinger at the next gate.”

“They were stopping traffic, and I said ‘What in the hell,’ excuse my language, ‘what are you guys doing directing traffic when there are 300, 400 black kids up the road beating the hell out of everybody, pushing people off of motorcycles?’ I was livid. I could not believe they were directing traffic.”

SOURCE




Call to scrap 'useless' equalities watchdog which costs taxpayers millions

Britain’s embattled human rights quango should be scrapped, a report says today. It claims that the Equality and Human Rights Commission contributes ‘very little to meaningful equality’ despite costing the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds a year.

The Civitas think-tank says that abolition would come at ‘no obvious cost to the public’.

The report is scathing of the pay and expenses of the Commission’s most senior staff, including chairman Trevor Phillips who receives £112,000 a year for working three and a half days a week. It also criticises the quango’s ‘illogical’ use of statistics and ‘narrow approach’ to social policy.

The report is a fresh blow to the quango which has suffered a series of financial scandals and high-profile resignations, culminating in a scathing Government review which found it had failed to do its job and had cost too much money. It is now facing large-scale cuts in its Whitehall funding.

The report found ‘serious flaws’ in the way that the EHRC demonstrates inequality in Britain. It says the Commission is quick to blame unfairness in society while ignoring other important influences which could explain the differences between social groups.

It says that, for example, the EHRC points to differences in life expectancy between British-born women (80.5 years) and women of Pakistani origin (77.3) as a sign of unfairness. However, it fails to draw attention to the much larger difference in life expectancy between Pakistani women living in Britain (77.3) and women living in Pakistan (67.5 years).

Jon Gower Davies, the report’s author, says the Commission’s goal of equality is unrealistic as it wishes that ‘life outcomes be entirely divorced from health limitations, cultural practices and lifestyles’.

A Civitas spokesman said: ‘Abolishing the EHRC would not just be a cost-saving exercise. It may well be an opportunity to channel resources into pertinent issues holding back equality and fairness.’ Mark Hammond, chief executive of the EHRC, said: ‘There are many reasons why people experience different levels of prosperity, health and happiness, but in some cases this can be because of discrimination and unfairness.

‘No one blames Britain for that, but it’s our job to start a debate on issues where we could see better outcomes for people suffering unfair disadvantages.’

SOURCE





Having a satellite dish 'is a human right,' says European court

It is regarded as a luxury that allows people to watch top sport and blockbuster movies from the comfort of their armchairs. But owning a satellite dish is actually a human right, according to unelected European judges.

In an extraordinary ruling, lawmakers in Strasbourg have warned that banning dishes on listed buildings, social housing and even private homes could breach the right to freedom of expression by preventing people from practice religion.

The judgement is a huge blow to campaigners who have fought to stop the large metal dishes blighting the brickwork of historic buildings and rental properties.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Britain’s discrimination watchdog, has now published new guidance warning that landlords could be at risk of being sued if they try to stop their tenants putting up a satellite dish.

Housing Minister Grant Shapps said that the ruling, under the Human Rights Act, threatened to drive ‘a horse and cart’ through planning laws.

The quango issued the guidance following a recent case at the European Court of Human Rights. Two tenants in Sweden took their government to court after they were evicted by their landlord in a dispute over a dish. The couple installed one of the dishes on their rented property but the landlord ordered them to take it down. They refused and were later thrown out of the property.

But European judges ruled that the Swedish government had failed in its obligation to protect the couple’s right to receive information. It found that satellite dishes come under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In its guidance, Britain’s equalities watchdog suggested that a disabled tenant who received transmissions of religious services held overseas would have their rights to freedom of religion breached if their landlord banned satellite dishes.

The European Commission’s Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein said: ‘The right to use a satellite dish [is] one of the many concrete benefits for European consumers of the free movement of goods and services within the internal market.

‘Satellite dishes are an increasingly popular tool for receiving multiple services via satellite: they facilitate mutual exchanges between our various cultures by overcoming national borders, and familiarise the general public with the new remote communications technologies. Their use must therefore be free from any unjustified obstacle.’

SOURCE






Australian church says spanking is OK, opposes push to ban corporal punishment

MUMS and dads could face court for smacking their children, a major church has warned as it resists the push to ban corporal punishment in the home.

The 600,000-strong Presbyterian Church fears that parents could be stopped from using corporal punishment as yet another state moves to ban smacking.

Under a controversial human rights charter, Victoria will join NSW in outlawing the use of corporal punishment. Under Queensland law, parents are allowed to use "reasonable force" when disciplining their children.

In a submission to a Victorian parliamentary inquiry, the church said that the charter could be used to dump the common law right to smack children provided force wasn't unreasonable or excessive. "Many Australian families use reasonable physical discipline from time to time," the church said. "There is a significant body of research confirming its utility in raising children well."

But Australian Childhood Foundation chief executive Dr Joe Tucci yesterday said it was never right to hit children and NSW's lead should be followed. "If parents are really angry or frustrated at the time that they're doing it they could inadvertently hurt kids and that's our concern about it," he said. "More and more parents are moving away from physical punishment because it's not effective."

However, adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg said it was ridiculous to legislate against smacking. "I don't think we should be criminalising people who, when their children run across the road, they give them a tap on the bum," he said.

Dr Carr-Gregg said he didn't believe smacking was the solution to bad behaviour, but attempts to ban it had not worked.

A recent [bogus] study said that parents who smacked their children could be depriving them of the skills they needed to cope with school and even with adulthood.

The Presbyterian church submission said Australia was being pressured to ban corporal punishment by a United Nations committee overseeing implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************



7 August, 2011

More multiculturalism in Britain

TWO police cars were set on fire overnight as hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of north London to protest the fatal shooting of a young father by police.

Trouble flared after a crowd of around 300 gathered in the Tottenham area, with some hurling missiles and smashing shop windows as the unrest threatened to spiral into a riot.

It followed a march, involving around 120 people, from the Broadwater Farm area to Tottenham police station demanding "justice" for the shot man named locally as Mark Duggan. The black father-of-four, 29, died on Thursday, allegedly after he exchanged fire with police officers.

Shortly after dark last night, two police cars parked around 180 metres from the police station were set on.

A spokesman for London's Metropolitan Police said officers have been dispatched to disperse the crowd. He could not confirm that those responsible for the trouble were connected to the protest.

Local resident David Akinsanya, 46, said several store windows were smashed and a second police car was also torched. "It's really bad," he said. "There are two police cars on fire. I'm feeling unsafe. It looks like it's going to get very tasty. I saw a guy getting attacked."

The Broadwater Farm area was the site of a notorious riot in 1985 that followed the death of an African-Caribbean woman who suffered heart failure during a police search of her home.

Police Constable Keith Blakelock was brutally stabbed and beaten to death in the ensuing unrest.

SOURCE





Prison drug taking in Britain is so bad that even the wardens are getting stoned... on the fumes

Solution? Improved ventilation!

Prison officers have complained to the Government’s health and safety watchdog that staff are getting ‘high’ from cannabis fumes escaping from prisoners’ cells. The warders’ union says its members suffer headaches and sickness because inmates smoke pot. It raised fears that this is affecting officers’ mood and performance.

The Health and Safety Executive has asked the Prison Service to carry out a risk assessment, which might lead to improved ventilation.

The Prison Officers’ Association (POA) says the use of cannabis is widespread among the 80,000-strong population of British jails, where inmates are allowed to smoke tobacco in their cells because they are exempt from the ban on smoking in business and office premises.

The union claims that the drug is being brought into prisons more easily because of staffing cuts.

Brian Traynor, the POA’s health and safety chairman, said that while serving at Walton Jail in Liverpool he felt giddy and that night had to lie down while gardening. ‘I am convinced I was stoned because of the passive effect of the drugs smoked by prisoners,’ Mr Traynor said. He warned that officers could be driving home unaware they were under the influence of cannabis.

At Wandsworth Prison in South London, POA branch secretary Stewart McLaughlin said: ‘It is outrageous that we are exposed to cannabis smoke. We are the only members of the emergency services to have fitness tests in a smoke-filled environment. It could not be more upside-down.

He said prison officers at Wandsworth – one of Britain’s toughest jails – were complaining of vomiting and headaches. POA deputy general secretary Mark Freeman said: ‘The Government knows that this is going on in prisons all over the country but they are doing nothing about it. ‘After a 12 to 15-hour shift breathing in the fumes from cannabis, our members won’t be driving home. They’ll be flying home.’

Mr Freeman claimed that even though jails were experiencing high levels of drug use – including heroin, cocaine and cannabis – the Government planned to reduce daily cell inspections in an effort to reduce costs.

A spokeswoman for the HSE said: ‘Our expectation is that Her Majesty’s Prison Service should carry out an assessment of the risks posed to staff and, in consultation with those working in affected areas, devise some reasonably practicable control measures.

‘This might include some of the same measures identified for controlling smoke from cell fires, such as improved ventilation and mobile ventilation units.’

A Prison Service spokeswoman said yesterday: ‘We work hard to keep illicit drugs out of prison, using a range of security measures to reduce drug supply, including working closely with police forces and carrying out random mandatory drug tests. ‘Targeted cell searches are undertaken in all prisons on a risk-assessment basis, with daily searches in Category A prisons.

‘Prisoners are allowed to smoke tobacco in their own cells. No smoking is allowed in communal areas. ‘There has been no change to the staffing level during visits at HMP Wandsworth.’

SOURCE





First they came for the anarchists



The clipping attached comes from the City of Westminster police’s “Counter Terrorist Focus List” (PDF, H/T to Liberal Conspiracy). I’m not quite an anarchist – although some of my best friends are, and the works of people like David Friedman (PDF) and Georgetown legal philosopher John Hasnas (PDF) make me unsure. But saying that "anarchists should be reported to your local Police" is a pretty extraordinary command that should worry everybody. Disliking the state is now enough for your neighbours to report on you, and for plod to take notice.

Instead of a legitimate request for information about people who might be violent at riots (who quite incorrectly call themselves anarchists while demanding more state spending), the police have targeted people who believe something to spy on. The reason, in the police’s own words, is that anarchists:

consider the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society.

Heaven forbid that anybody think the state might be harmful. Where could they have gotten that idea from? Fortunately the police are on their way, and they’re here to help.

The thinking behind this is, at best, a misunderstanding of the police’s role. They police are supposed to protect people from harm – not the state from peaceful change. Thinking that the police should protect the state from peaceful reform is more akin to 20th century totalitarianism than modern liberal democracy. Let’s not fall for the myth that a small group of violent thugs somehow implicates other people who share some of their beliefs. Nobody should be considered a criminal because of their opinions. If the police are getting involved, actions are what count.

We should be profoundly disturbed by this development, and not because it’s people who mistrust the state that are being targeted. The police section that released this piece is probably incompetent. But they’re incompetents who have the power to throw innocent people in jail, and they're sniffing around people who've had "bad" thoughts.

No, this isn’t East Germany, where you’d be thrown in jail (or worse) for holding unusual political opinions. But, when the police investigate people for thoughtcrime, it’s not the England that most people think they live in either.

SOURCE






Sao Paulo council calls for Heterosexual Pride Day

Homosexual privilege resented

The city council of South America's biggest city has adopted legislation calling for a Heterosexual Pride Day to be celebrated on the third Sunday of each December.

Sao Paulo Mayor Gilberto Kassab must sign the legislation for it to become law and has said only that he is studying it. His office declined Wednesday to say whether he supports the proposal.

The legislation's author, Carlos Apolinario, said the idea for a Heterosexual Pride Day is "not anti-gay but a protest against the privileges the gay community enjoys."

As an example, he mentioned how Sao Paulo's huge gay pride day parade is held every year on Paulista Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in this city of 20 million people, while the March for Jesus organized by evangelical groups is not allowed on the same avenue.

"I respect gays and I am against any kind of aggression made against them," Apolinario said. "I have no trouble coexisting with gays as long as their behavior is normal."

The Brazilian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Association criticized the legislation, saying it could provoke homophobic violence.

"How many LGBTs will be attacked because of the message that only heterosexuality makes someone a moral person and a good citizen," the association said in a statement.

"The celebration of heterosexual pride is inappropriate because it belittles the just cause of the LGBT community," the statement added. "Unlike homosexuals, heterosexuals are not discriminated against simply for being heterosexuals."

In a recent report, the gay rights group Grupo Gay da Bahia said 260 gays were murdered last year in Brazil, up 113 percent from five years earlier.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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6 August, 2011

How are the self-righteous fallen! Journalist at "The Guardian" admits phone hacking

THE British phone-hacking saga deepened as it was revealed that the assistant editor of The Guardian - the newspaper that originally uncovered the scandal - admitted hacking into telephone messages and getting a "thrill" from it.

In an article written for the media section of the newspaper in 2006, David Leigh said he hacked into private voicemails in order to explose "bribery and corruption," not "witless tittle-tattle."

Leigh, a Guardian executive, wrote the article after News of the World (NotW) royal editor Clive Goodman pleaded guilty to phone hacking, a crime for which he was later jailed. He wrote, "I've used some of those questionable methods myself over the years. I, too, once listened to the mobile phone messages of a corrupt arms company executive - the crime similar to that for which Goodman now faces the prospect of jail."

The journalist said the trick was "simple" as the businessman in question had left his voicemail pin code on a print-out.

Leigh added, "There is certainly a voyeuristic thrill in hearing another person's private messages. But unlike Goodman, I was not interested in witless tittle-tattle about the royal family." He also admitted to blagging - pretending to be someone else on the phone - to get stories and added, "As for actually breaking the law? Well, it is hard to keep on the right side of legality on all occasions."

The article came to light as it emerged that several alleged victims of phone hacking will soon file lawsuits against a second newspaper group, Piers Morgan's former employer, Trinity Mirror. The victims' lawyer, Mark Lewis, said the claims would be filed in a few weeks but did not disclose his clients' identities.

So far, the phone-hacking scandal centered on Rupert Murdoch's News International newspaper group, leading him to shut down the NotW.

SOURCE




Another false sex claim from Britain

A businessman has been awarded record costs of £100,000 against a former employee who made false allegations of sexual harassment. Debbie Smith claimed she was forced out of her job after Tim Watts, chairman of the Pertemps recruitment agency, called her a ‘sexy nurse’ as part of a stream of ‘degrading and offensive’ comments.

Mr Watts, 62, said: ‘These vexatious spongers have to be taught a lesson. And she has been, big time. ‘Like many others, Debbie Smith no doubt thought she could secure an easy bung. Most companies, even when they are in the right, which I would submit tends to be the majority of the time, settle such disputes because of the spiralling cost of fighting them. ‘Not me. I have never taken a backward step in my life. My reputation means everything to me, and I wasn’t having it. I wanted the truth to come out. And it did.’

Mother-of-three Mrs Smith was sacked as the £90,000-a-year managing director of a subsidiary of Pertemps, P Investments, after it lost £250,000. She sued for sexual harassment, sexual discrimination and victimisation.

Mr Watts maintained there was no truth in the allegations, which he said were made in ‘pique and anger’ following Mrs Smith’s dismissal, and the claims were branded ‘vexatious and frivolous’ by a Birmingham tribunal in March.

It ruled that 50-year-old Mrs Smith had been ‘out to get’ Mr Watts, and said she made her allegations to try to force a payout after the ‘catastrophic’ failure of the subsidiary venture.

Last month the tribunal ordered Mrs Smith to pay P Investments £100,000. Mr Watts had initially claimed £250,000, but settled for less than half that rather than see his accuser go bankrupt. The previous highest costs award is thought to be £67,000.

Mr Watts, whose fortune is estimated at £35million, said small firms and charities were ‘groaning under the burden of complying with employment law that encourages employees to misrepresent themselves as victims of discrimination whenever their poor performance or behaviour is tackled’. He added: ‘The Debbie Smiths of this world should never get to the starting block.’

SOURCE





Victory for common sense in Britain

Girl paralysed after diving into her friend’s swimming pool loses £6m damages claim after judge says owner 'didn’t need warning signs in his own home'

A teenager who was paralysed in a swimming accident at a late-night party lost her £6million compensation bid yesterday. Kylie Grimes was left paralysed from the chest down after hitting her head diving into a pool at a friend’s house when she was 18.

A High Court judge said she had suffered ‘catastrophic’ consequences from the misjudged dive, but ruled it would not be fair to allow her to sue the pool’s owner – her friend’s father – for £6million in compensation.

Mrs Justice Thirlwall said: ‘She was an adult. She did something which carried an obvious risk. She chose, voluntarily, to dive when, how and where she did, knowing the risks involved.’

Miss Grimes, now 23, hit the bottom of the pool with such force that she broke a vertebra below the base of her neck. She has lost the use of her arms and legs and is confined to a wheelchair. An ‘accomplished swimmer’ before the accident, she had drunk three or four small glasses of wine before the dive, but was not drunk.

Other teenagers at the party, at the home of businessman David Hawkins, were jumping and ‘bombing’ into the 30ft heated indoor pool, the High Court in London was told.

Mr Hawkins, who runs a forklift truck business, and his wife were not at home on the night of the party in August 2006. They had given permission for their 18-year-old daughter Katie to invite two friends to stay the night, and later said another two friends could stay. But around 20 teenagers ended up at the house in an exclusive area of Farnham, Surrey, after Miss Hawkins met up with friends from her sixth-form college at a nearby pub. Miss Hawkins insisted she had only invited five people she knew well and told the court: ‘Everyone else just turned up.’

Some of the youngsters had been drinking, and there was a ‘party atmosphere’ at the house, worth an estimated £1.5million.

The court heard that Miss Hawkins had handed a bikini top and tracksuit bottoms to Miss Grimes so she could go swimming.

The teenager, a keen horse rider and school athlete, swam for around 30 minutes before getting out, then re-entered the pool in a ‘shallow racing dive’. The judge said the dive must have been steeper than she thought, as she hit the bottom and immediately told friends her legs were not working properly.

Miss Grimes was taken to hospital but despite doctors’ efforts she was left tetraplegic. She can only move with the aid of a specialised wheelchair.

Miss Grimes sued Mr Hawkins claiming he was negligent because there were no signs warning against diving. Her lawyers said the combination of a teenage party and an unlocked swimming pool was ‘a recipe for disaster’.

But lawyers for Mr Hawkins said there was no legal requirement for such signs on a private pool and that other people, including his own teenage daughters, had dived there safely. Mrs Justice Thirlwall threw out the negligence claim, saying: ‘It would not be fair, just or reasonable.’

She said diving into a pool always carried an inherent danger, adding: ‘Every adult of normal intelligence knows it. The claimant in this case knew it.’

Miss Grimes has also launched legal proceedings against Frimley Park Hospital NHS Trust, which has admitted breach of duty over her treatment but denies that its actions made her injuries worse. That case has yet to be heard.

SOURCE





A Swedish riposte to the politics of paternalism

From the 1940s moral panic around dancehalls to today’s attempts to ‘nudge’ us into good behaviour, Mattias Svensson’s new book shows the shifting faces of killjoys in Sweden and beyond

An early memory of mine from growing up in Sweden is when the ‘fluorine lady’ came to my school. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, ‘fluorine lady’ visits were compulsory and involved pupils being instructed in how to take care of their teeth, being told that sweets are bad for you, and so on – before lining up to gargle a shot of fluorine. I recall the fluorine lady picking out my toothbrush for special attention – it had seen better days - to demonstrate to the other kids how you know when it’s time to invest in a new one. She ended her visit with an admonition to my parents whom I should tell, she said, to get me a new toothbrush ASAP.

A few years ago, after the publication of research showing that there are ‘signs of deteriorating dental health’ among Swedish teenagers, the Swedish National Dental Health Service announced a return of fluorine ladies, who are now referred to as ‘dental hygienists’. Special attention would be given to early intervention in ‘at-risk areas’ - that is, immigrant-dense suburbs.

In many ways, the demise and re-emergence of the fluorine lady sums up the paternalistic streak that has characterised the cradle-to-grave welfare state and that has survived the demise of social democracy. Backed up by statistics, executed by public officials, targeted especially at non-affluent sections of society, and justified as being in our own interest, officialdom’s intrusions into the private sphere may be well-meaning. But behind these interventions, with the state standing in loco parentis for both children and adults, it is clear that the government believes the nation’s citizens are not adequately discerning and that the authorities must secure society’s well-being through correcting individual behaviour.

Critiques of such paternalism are few and far between, but with his new book Glädjedödarna (The Killjoys), Swedish writer Mattias Svensson offers a rebuke to the contemporary impulse among politicians, policymakers, various experts and moralisers to intervene in the personal sphere, to moralise, legislate and politely ‘nudge’ us into acting in particular ways. Svensson’s book is a plea for valuing not just the big freedoms – freedom of expression, freedom of association and so on – but also small ones that may appear trivial but are in fact also essential for upholding autonomy.

‘Paternalism’, Svensson writes, ‘is when the state and politicians, in our presumed self-interest but without respect for how we act and what we believe, steer and regulate our everyday lives, our private lives and our pleasures. The personal sphere where we, as John Stuart Mill said, ought to rule unhindered.’

The Killjoys (not yet available in English) starts off in 1940s Sweden when a moral panic around dancing swept the country. An unholy alliance of priests, politicians, doctors and teachers formed to condemn dancehalls where young people were swinging and jitterbugging the evenings away. Other forms of new youth entertainment, like cinema and weekly magazines, were also seen as major social problems and the killjoys of the time did everything in their powers to steer young people away from them.

Today, that may all seem very naive and overly puritanical, but since the 1940s Sweden, and the Western world more generally, has been swept by a string of moral panics around everything from comic books and heavy-metal music to video games and pornography. And in Sweden, dancing has actually retained its reputation as a dark, corrupting force. In the 1990s, the Stockholm police formed a ‘rave commission’ which raided clubs that did not have a special ‘dance permit’. In effect, this amounted to techno music being outlawed in public places. And the war on dancing has continued into the Noughties. Police inspecting a Stockholm nightclub in 2006 remarked that there was a ‘loud atmosphere’ there and that ‘dancing occurred outside the designated dance floor’. The club was threatened with having various licences withdrawn.

Regulating pleasures does not just hit children and young people. Instead, the wars on drugs, alcohol, tobacco, ‘junk food’, conspicuous consumption, non-green habits and so on are carried out with prohibitions, admonitions and stigmatisations that affect us all. In other words, adults are treated as children by the powers that be.

Today, clampdowns on the freedom to choose our own lifestyles and pastimes are generally not carried out in a heavy-handed and overtly authoritarian way but through what the American academics Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have termed ‘libertarian paternalism’. As Svensson explains, the idea is that ‘since people are irrational and seldom have strong, consistent and clear preferences, there is the potential to take decisions on their behalf that will increase their well-being’. Sunstein and Thaler’s idea that people ought to be ‘nudged’ in the right direction (in other words, to be encouraged, through friendly pointers and psychological tricks, to make particular choices) has gained a hearing across the political spectrum.

In effect, our options become limited as politicians and moralists of various creeds use ‘nudges’ to decrease our potential to take decisions that go against their view of what’s right. Moreover, the expanding ‘politics of the brain’ that Sunstein and Thaler have become the poster boys for - the idea that our minds are malleable, that we are irrational beings whose desires and passions must be contained and re-focused - is highly manipulative and authoritarian.

Today, when old certainties have crumbled, when religion does not wield a strong influence and when political leaders appear more like managers who are estranged from the masses, moralism is still a strong feature in the West. Now, however, it tends to be backed up by scientific research, which is time and again wheeled in to lend an air of authority and objectivity to what are in fact intrusive measures to ‘correct’ the behaviour of the masses.

Svensson’s book is a welcome intervention because it goes against the grain of what has come to be seen as commonsensical by various authorities, interest groups, do-gooders and rulers: that we need to be helped by them to make the right choices, for our own good. Let’s hope that The Killjoys will inspire more people to tell today’s paternalists, who want to have a say in everything from our gums to our dance moves, to back off and mind their own business.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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5 August, 2011

Something that "multiculturalism" has done for Britain

Shaking hands in celebration on a bus, thugs who had just hunted down a schoolboy, 16, like a pack of animals and stabbed him to death


I wonder what they all have in common?

Leaning across the bus seat, these teenage killers shake hands in a sickening moment of self-congratulation. One is heard to say to another: ‘You’re the new young boss.’

Just half an hour earlier they had been among a vicious gang who hunted down a schoolboy ‘like a pack of wild dogs’ before knifing him to death.

The gang are now behind bars. They were jailed for a total of 74 years yesterday over the killing in broad daylight in a busy shopping street of 16-year-old Nicholas Pearton.

The teenager was pursued across a suburban park by his attackers, many of whom were still in their school uniform, before he was stabbed through the heart and collapsed in a shop doorway in front of his mother, Kim.

As the gang fled, they waved their knives in the air and shouted the name of the gang ‘triumphantly’.

Another member Joseph Appiah, then 15, carried out a head count to make sure none of the gang – known as Shanks and Guns (shanks being slang for knives) – had been arrested after the attack in Sydenham, South London, in May last year. Other gang members had abandoned an armoury of weapons including knives and wooden poles in the park.

Lamarr Gordon was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years for his role
Dale Green was identified as the person who did the stabbing

The Old Bailey heard that Nicholas, who was training to be a carpenter, was ‘in the eyes of his attackers’ involved with a rival gang, the Sydenham Boys. It was a rivalry, the court was told, fuelled by a threatening video posted on YouTube.

Yesterday the victim’s father Vince Pearton, 43, and mother Kim Whoolley, told of how their family had been torn apart by the death of their son. Lucy Kennedy, prosecuting, read an emotionally-charged statement from the parents.

In it, Mr Pearton said his son’s murder had ‘broken the chain that bonds our family together and we will be forever incomplete. Our loss and accompanying feeling of emptiness is an all-consuming and inescapable daily torment for us’.

The gang were all from South London and aged between 15 and 17 at the time of the attack. They were unmasked yesterday as judge Anthony Morris lifted a ban on reporting their names.

Passing sentence, the judge said the gang was responsible for the ‘senseless and tragic loss of a young life’. ‘This case involved gratuitous violence in public places, which seriously discourages law-abiding citizens from walking the streets,’ he said. ‘The group was like a pack of wild dogs hunting down its prey. ‘This was a particularly cowardly attack, as all the defendants knew he was alone and unarmed.’

Green, 17, of Catford, Gordon, 17, of Bromley, and Appiah, 16, described as a talented athlete of Lewisham, had denied murder but were convicted. They were all sentenced to life with Green jailed for a minimum 15 years, Gordon 14 years and Appiah 12 years.

Four others, Terell Clement, 18, of Deptford, Claude Gaha, 17, of Bromley, Edward Conteh, of Peckham, and Demar Brown, 16, of Hither Green, were jailed for a total of 33 years after being convicted of manslaughter.

SOURCE





Rule change may allow British GPs to ask for divine help with patients and not risk disciplinary action

Family doctors could be allowed to pray with their patients without facing the threat of being suspended. The General Medical Council is to have another look at its rules which mean doctors can face disciplinary action for discussing their religion during appointments.

Earlier this year a Christian GP, Dr Richard Scott, was handed an official warning by the GMC for suggesting a young man under his care could find comfort in Jesus. The patient told his mother about the appointment, who complained to the GMC claiming the doctor had ‘pushed religion’ onto her son.

Dr Scott, from Margate, Kent, is fighting to have the warning removed from his unblemished record, insisting he acted professionally and within the guidelines.

Two years ago a nurse was suspended after offering to pray for an elderly patient during a home visit.

Several GPs, specialist doctors and nurses have since expressed concern that even simply mentioning the topic of religion with patients could lead to them being suspended.

Now the head of the GMC, Niall Dickson, has said he will look at the rules on praying. He told Pulse magazine that GPs should be able to pray or discuss religion as long as the patient was comfortable or ‘receptive’. But he stressed that patients do not go and see their doctor to be ‘converted’ to Christianity or any other faith and that a doctor’s prime responsibility was treatment.

He said, however, that should a patient want to discuss religion or pray with their doctor they should be able to do so regardless if a family member later took offence. He added: ‘The fact the person drawing it to our attention is a relative, friend, or another professional is not important. What is important is what actually happened, what is the evidence behind the complaint and the doctor’s explanation?

‘How does the patient and their relatives view the situation? What are they each bringing to the GMC in terms of evidence for us to consider? ‘Clearly the patient themselves will have a direct experience to tell and therefore will provide stronger evidence than somebody who wasn’t there.’

In 2009 nurse Caroline Petrie was suspended by North Somerset NHS Trust for offering to pray for an elderly patient during a home visit. She has been allowed back to work on the grounds that she offers to pray for patients only after she has asked them if they have any ‘spiritual needs’.

SOURCE





U.S. Air Force Suspends Christian-Themed Ethics Training Program Over Bible Passages

The Air Force has suspended a course that was taught by chaplains for more than 20 years because the material included Bible passages. The course, called “Christian Just War Theory” was taught by chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and used Scripture from both the Old and New Testaments to show missile launch officers that it can be moral to go to war.

But the watchdog group, Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said the course violated the constitutional separation of church and state and filed a complaint last Wednesday on behalf of 31 missile launch officers – both instructors and students.

David Smith, the spokesman for the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command, said the main purpose of the class was to help missile launch officers understand that “what they are embarking on is very difficult and you have to have a certain amount of ethics about what you are doing to do that job.”

He said the class was suspended the same day the complaint was filed. The class is currently under review by Air Force officials who will determine whether or not to revise the material or end the class.

“In an effort to serve all faiths, we try to introduce none in our briefings and our lectures,” Smith told Fox News Radio. “Once we heard there were concerns, we looked at the course and said we could do better.”

Smith said the inclusion of the Bible verses was an “inappropriate approach” in a “pluralistic society.”

“The use of Bible passage and other elements was just inappropriate,” he said. Mikey Weinstein, the president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, hailed the military’s decision to suspend the course. “We’re very pleased that the Air Force did it,” Weinstein told Fox News Radio. “Had they not done that, we would have filed an immediate class-action lawsuit in federal court to force their hand.”

Weinstein said the officers who complained are Protestant and Roman Catholics, noting the class was simply “unconstitutional training.”

“The United States Air Force was promoting a particular brand of right-wing fundamentalist Christianity,” he said. “The main essence was that war is a natural part of the human experience and it’s something that is favored by this particular perspective of the New Testament.

Weinstein said he was particularly concerned about a passage of Scripture that was taught from the New Testament book of Revelations. The passage, chapter 19, verse 11, describes Jesus as a mighty warrior, Weinstein said.

But David French, senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, said there is no violation of the Constitution. “Just-War theory has been a vital part of American military history for the last several hundred years,” French said, dismissing the complaints as what he called “another attempt to cleanse American history of its religious realities.”

“It’s about cleansing religion from the public square and building a completely secular society and military, said French. Commander Daniel McKay, a retired U.S. Navy Chaplain, agreed, telling Fox News Radio he was deeply concerned by the military’s decision.

“Why is it inappropriate to give our people guidelines that have withstood the test of time – to give us moral guidance,” McKay asked. “I think there are certain segments within our society who are making concerted efforts to take us away from our Judeo-Christian values, principles and morals,” he said.

“History will prove that if you stay true to God’s wisdom, it will serve us well and it has served us well.” McKay said it’s possible that parts of the military are trying to play “all sides of the fence – trying to take a middle-of-the-road approach.”

That, he said, is a mistake. “If you stay in the middle of the road, you become road kill,” McKay said, urging the military to stay true to what the Founders established.

“You need to take a stand.” The Air Force and Weinstein denied that political correctness had anything to do with the suspension of the class. “Everyone in the military takes an oath to support and defend, protect and preserve this United States Constitution, which absolutely separates church and state,” Weinstein said.

“The military is made up of people from all walks of life, all faiths,” Smith said. “It’s most appropriate to let folks practice their faith on their own and not try to introduce something else to them.”

SOURCE






Muslim World still anti-Western Despite Obama

President Obama entered office promising a new dawn in America’s relations with Muslim nations. He reached out to the Muslim world, offering apologies and a warm embrace. The theory was that, by showing more understanding of Muslim grievances, they would respond in kind.

It didn’t turn out that way. A recent Pew Research Center survey of opinions in the Muslim world shows America’s image there has not improved. In Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan - Muslim nations with which the U.S. maintains close relations - views are more negative today than a year ago. Most Muslims disapprove of how Mr. Obama has responded to the Arab Spring.

If anything, paranoia about the U.S. is worse today than it was a few years ago. Most Muslims surveyed by Pew in March and April do not believe that Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, the survey found no Muslim public in which even 30 percent accept the fact that Arabs conducted the attacks. Particularly depressing, Muslims in Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey - again countries with historically good ties to the West - are even less likely to believe it today than in 2006.

A paradox emerges in these findings. The more Westerners try to accept blame for bad relations with the Muslim world, the more the Muslim world blames Westerners. Almost 30 percent of Americans hold themselves responsible for bad relations with the Muslim world. Muslims mainly blame Westerners. Majorities in six of seven Muslim nations believe Westerners are mostly to blame. That figure goes as high as 75 percent in Turkey and 72 percent in Pakistan.

Which raises a question: If Muslim people are anti-Western because they believe, incorrectly, that Westerners are largely anti-Muslim, what can we do about it? Their grievances are so entrenched that very little of what Americans say or do will change their opinions because they are based not on reality, but on imagination.

Most Muslims also blame the West for their economic ills, even though their own economically oppressive governments are the root of the problem. America’s support of Israel is a huge negative in their eyes, but so, too, is our support for the regimes that rule over them. This may be understandable, but I doubt that a wholesale U.S. condemnation of regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Arab states would make Muslim publics any less anti-American. After all, the U.S. actually went to war to remove genocidal regimes in Bosnia and Iraq, and all we got for our trouble was widespread condemnation in the Muslim world, not to mention assertions that we did so mainly to kill Muslims.

Here’s the rub: The U.S. can try to do the right thing like removing genocidal regimes and abandoning oppressive authoritarians such as former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, but it does little or nothing to change Muslim views of America. Muslims claim to want more democracy, of which America is the standard bearer, but their anti-American complexes and grievances are so huge that they are forever trying to find some third Muslim way that ignores hundreds of years of historical experience, born mainly in the West, of what works and what doesn’t.

This is not about who’s right or wrong. We can argue with Muslim nations all day long about our support for Israel, but it won’t make any difference. In fact, Israel could disappear tomorrow, and we would still have a problem. The root of the problem is a great historical divide, going back centuries, which will not be easily manipulated by public diplomacy programs or expressions of good will.

This is a problem to be managed, not solved. No amount of Obama-like engagement will change Muslim public opinion about America and the West. They hold their views for historically complex reasons, which more often than not are reflections of their internal problems rather than objective reactions to what we do.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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4 August, 2011

Lying science reporting: "Spanking can scar kids for life"

Read the rubbishy article below and then look at what the research actually found -- appended below the article:

Parents who smack their children could be depriving them the skills they need to cope with school - and even adulthood - international research has revealed.

Young kids exposed to physical punishment have far less "self control" than those spared punitive discipline, the study of children aged three to six years found. They also fall short when it comes to verbal communication, decision-making and resisting temptation.

Lead researcher Professor Kang Lee said "the ability to control behaviours, to switch from one task to another, and to plan actions" were all stronger in children raised under "positive parental control". "All these skills are essential for a child to succeed in school, as well as outside school, for example in sports, and of course in the future in many job situations," he said.

The study, published in the journal Social Development, compared the performance of children at overseas schools practising physical and non-physical discipline.

While corporal punishment is banned in all Australian government schools, Prof Lee said the principles also applied to home discipline. "If parents mete out corporal punishment regularly for various transgressions, big and small . . . then I think it is likely that the kids from such homes will have a long-term deficit in the ability to control behaviours," said Prof Lee, from the University of Toronto.

He warned that smacking could also backfire on parents, because some children could view it as "a reward, not a punishment" because kids saw it as the attention from mum or dad that they craved.

SOURCE

The original academic journal Abstract follows:

Few studies have examined the influence of environmental factors on children's executive functioning (EF) performance. The present study examined the effects of a punitive vs. non-punitive school environment on West African children's EF skills. Tasks included a ‘cool’ (relatively non-affective) and ‘hot’ (relatively affective/motivational) version of three EF tasks: delay of gratification; gift delay; and dimensional change card sort. Children had more difficulties with the hot versions of the tasks than the cool versions, and older children outperformed younger children. After controlling for verbal ability (Peabody picture vocabulary test-third edition), a consistent pattern of interaction between school and grade level emerged. Overall, kindergarten children in the punitive school performed no differently than their counterparts in the non-punitive school. However, in grade 1, children in the punitive school performed significantly worse than their counterparts in the non-punitive school. These results point to the need to consider interactions among discipline style, age, and internalization processes of self-regulation to better understand environmental influences on EF development.

I hardly know where to start: Out of two grade levels they considered, the asserted superiority of the "no spanking" school applied in only one of them. In the other year there was NO DIFFERENCE between the two types of school! They have cherry-picked the result that suited them and ignored the result which did not! How can you generalize from conflicting results? Who knows what would apply in other years?

Other qustions: Would West African findings generalize to an affluent environment? WHY were there different practices followed at the two types of school? Were the kids from different social backgrounds, for instance?

So we have a totally inconclusive study that is grossly overgeneralized and grossly misreported!




From working class to incapacitated class

How radical activists in Britain shifted from viewing the working classes as powerful to pitying them as pathetic

Criticisms of the government’s ‘fit for work’ welfare tests betray a view among radical campaigners that, far from having the capacity to forge a living for themselves or even change the world, many working people are only fit for a sickbed.

Official UK government statistics released yesterday showed that, of the 1.3million Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) – formerly Incapacity Benefit – claims made between October 2008 and November 2010, only seven per cent of people attempting to claim incapacity benefits were actually deemed too ill to work. A further 17 per cent were categorised as fit for ‘work-related activities’ and a total of 39 per cent were deemed to be fully capable of working.

Many on the left have reacted strongly to these findings. The general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) Brendan Barber argued that this ‘much tougher’ test is cynically ‘designed to save the government money by excluding more people… These figures certainly don’t suggest that thousands of disabled people are suddenly “trying it on”’.

The vast majority of claimants probably weren’t ‘trying it on’. Following advice from government officials, many were undoubtedly led to believe they were genuinely incapable of working. And, without question, a proportion of them suffer from conditions that prevent them from doing so. But Barber’s comments assume that the individuals being ‘excluded’ from state support are all genuinely disabled and unable to work. This fails to explain why, over a period of decades, the number of people claiming incapacity benefits has rocketed in a way that can’t possibly be explained by increasing numbers of people becoming ill.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the numbers of men claiming incapacity benefits rose sharply, increasing almost every single year, from 463,000 in 1981 to 1,276,000 in 1999. Tellingly, a significant proportion of these claims came from areas of the country which had seen a hollowing out of productive industries, and the jobs that they provided. As observed previously on spiked, it’s not feasible that so many people have actually fallen ill. Rather ‘the welfare state was cynically soaking up these people, desperately attempting to offset their potential political anger at being unemployed by inviting them to view their predicament as a health-based problem instead’.

Instead of being seen to be deprived of work by social and economic factors – such as factories closing down and the government lacking a strategy for economic growth - the jobless were instead recast as physically or mentally incapable of working. It’s understandable that some, not least those who have been led to believe they are incapacitated, now find it jarring to hear the government backtrack on this and redefine what it is to be incapacitated. But the extent to which some on the left have reacted to welfare reforms, viewing the unemployed as suffering from health-related problems, incapable of surviving without state help, jars even more.

As Guardian columnist John Harris wrote recently, our ‘flexible labour market and increasingly brutal welfare system are now so constructed that even if you are doing well, it is perfectly possible that you could fall ill’. We are all potentially vulnerable individuals who would face a nasty, brutish and short existence under the new system of welfare support. Riffing on the National Lottery slogan, Harris claims we are all fragile and potentially facing a life of ‘terror’ under the benefits system: ‘it could be you’.

This sense of utter dependency on the state for support is exemplified in the recent protests held against Atos Healthcare, the French-owned private company contracted by the government to carry out tests to see if someone should receive ESA. They carry banners declaring that, by deciding some people on benefits are actually capable of working, Atos is effectively committing murder, undertaking ‘unlawful killings’, ‘making money out of misery’ and depriving people of their ‘freedom’. Atos’ very name, according to one MP, generates a sense of ‘fear and loathing’ among those applying for benefits.

Although there are aspects of Atos’ bureaucratic ‘computer says no’ approach to assessing whether people are deserving of benefits that have been rightly criticised, the hysterical casting of Atos as ‘killers’ reveals an underlying attitude toward the people who are being assessed. Since when did people gain ‘freedom’ by demanding that the state support them? When did it become the role of progressives to emphasise the incapacity of working people?

Historically, working-class people were seen as active, decent, strong and capable of running their lives and of changing society. Now they are instead seen as incapable and in need of defence from harm and harassment. If the state doesn’t offer sufficient support and protection, so the protesters argue, then it’s leaving helpless working people for dead.

In other words, working-class people are weak and are in need of big, strong defenders like the trade unions. Once upon a time, the workers were seen as a force that could seize control of society; now, the working classes are increasingly seen as in need of nursing.

SOURCE







Can Islam Be Reformed?

Dennis Prager

The question is in no way meant to be provocative, let alone insulting. But the world, including vast numbers of Muslims, needs this question answered.

After having studied Arabic at college and lectured on comparative religion for decades, and having devoted years to writing my upcoming book comparing American values with leftist and Islamist values, I have become convinced of two things regarding Islam: It must be reformed, and it can be reformed.

Both suppositions are highly controversial. Few believing Muslims think that Islam needs to be reformed; the suggestion would strike most religious Muslims as absurd, if not insulting and ultimately blasphemous. And it would strike many non-Muslim critics of Islam as naive. As Lord Cromer, British consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, put it in a quote known to all Western students of Islam, "Islam reformed is Islam no longer."

Let's deal first with the question of whether Islam needs reforming. The case for it is compelling. Here are a few reasons:

-- Majority-Muslim and Islam-based countries are not, and have not been, free societies. According to the 2010 Freedom House "Freedom in the World" survey, of the world's 47 Muslim-majority countries, only two are free, 18 are partly free, and 27 are not free. There is no honest explanation for this nearly total absence of liberty in Muslim countries that does not reflect in some way on Islam.

-- Muslim treatment of Jews and Christians in places like medieval Spain was morally far superior to the treatment of non-Christians by European Christians during the same period. But in the modern period, nowhere that Islam has controlled has afforded non-Muslims anywhere near the equality that non-Christians have taken for granted in the Christian world.

-- There was a burst of intellectual and scientific creativity in the Muslim world for a few hundred years, but then the opponents of reason came to dominate Islam, and with it came a loss of scientific and intellectual curiosity.

How could it have been otherwise? The dominant Muslim view was that the natural world had no laws. Everything that occurred did so solely because Allah willed it. If an arrow hit its target, it was not because of the archer's ability or wind patterns or laws of physics; it was because Allah willed it.

According to a United Nations report written by Arab scholars, the Arab world's lack of interest in the non-Arab and non-Muslim worlds is so great that in any given year comparatively tiny Greece translates more books into Greek than all the Arab countries combined translate into Arabic.

-- Regarding women, one cannot name a culture or religion in which the status of women is as low as it is in many Muslim societies. Moreover, the status of women has actually declined in many Muslim societies in the present generation. For example, the veil is more common in Egypt today than it was a hundred years ago.

-- In nearly every Muslim country in which non-Muslims live (usually Christians) -- from Nigeria to Egypt to Iraq -- they suffer persecution.

-- A very small percentage of Muslims are terrorists. But nearly every international terrorist is Muslim. And according to every poll I have seen, at least 70 million of the world's more than a billion Muslims support Islamist actions and theology.

-- Every state that calls itself an Islamic Republic and rules according to Islamic law is a totalitarian state, and it is usually a bloodthirsty one. Saudi Arabia is an example of the first; Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Iran and Islamist Sudan are examples of both.

So, yes, Islam needs to be reformed. This is no insult to Muslims. Judaism and Christianity have undergone major changes. And needed to.

Can Islam be reformed? I do not agree with Lord Cromer. I believe it can. What is necessary is that Muslim reformers:

1. Honestly acknowledge the Muslim moral record -- i.e. the lack of liberty in Muslim nations, the killing of large numbers of non-Muslims, the low status of women, etc. This does not necessitate rejecting the Quran or Islam.

2. Eschew incorporating Sharia into state law and oppose the establishment of any Islamic theocracy (which is not, in any event, Quran-based, according to moderate Muslims).

3. Publicly and unambiguously condemn all violence in the name of Islam, including violence against Israel.

4. Express a deep appreciation of the moral record of America, including its superb treatment of both its Muslim citizens and Muslim immigrants, along with a complete rejection of the Islamist notion that America is hostile to Muslims.

5. Fully accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and distance themselves from the Muslim/Arab obsession with Israel.

At this very moment, there are Muslim reformers who believe and express all five of these propositions.

Examples include University of Delaware Professor Muqtedar Khan, who runs www.ijtihad.com: "American Muslims really have no reason to feel they are victims of anything ... ." The Muslim American community is thriving, proof of "America's benevolence and tolerance of Islam."

Another is Ahmed al-Rahim, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia: "The most important message is that we condemn all kinds of hate speech, including anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, and that we come out as boldly as possible against violence committed by Muslims in Iraq, in Israel ... . "

Regarding the Muslim obsession with Israel, Khan has written: "It is time the leaders of the American Muslim community woke up and realized that ... Islam is not about defeating Jews or conquering Jerusalem. It is about mercy, about virtue, about sacrifice and about duty. Above all, it is the pursuit of moral perfection."

Zainab Al-Suwaij, a refugee from Saddam Hussein's Iraq and executive director of the moderate American Islamic Congress, publicly declared that America "has given Iraqis the most precious gift any nation has ever given another -- the gift of democracy and the freedom to determine its own future."

And Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a physician in Arizona whose parents fled Syria in the 1960s, is the founder and chairman of the board of the moderate American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD). A believing and practicing Muslim, Jasser advocates American values, promotes a Quran-based life to be practiced by the individual Muslim and never imposed by the state. He is courageous in confronting the Islamist Muslim groups that the mainstream media in the Western world have promoted to appear as the spokesmen for Western Muslims.

As Jasser says of organizations such as CAIR and other so-called Muslim civil rights organizations, "There was more concern with hate crimes against Muslims, which I think were relatively low; there was more focus on that than actually looking at the violence and the hate speech that has been committed in the name of Islam."

Islam is too important to deny its need to reform. And it is too important to deny its ability to ever reform.

And if it does reform, Muslims who have embraced America and American values will lead the way.

SOURCE





Mad march of political correctness

By Janet Albrechtsen, writing from Australia

MARK Twain knew a thing or two about political correctness when he said: "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."

It's tempting to think of the PC crowd as just a bunch of busybodies who are having us on. Early episodes of Sesame Street carry adults-only warnings. Enid Blyton has been cleared of all golliwogs. And last year a Seattle school renamed Easter eggs "spring spheres" so as not to offend children by alluding to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Political correctness seems to march to an imbecilic beat.

But of course, we know the PC crowd is not having us on. These are smart people who really mean it. Smart because the PC virus has infected so much of what we do, what we read, how we live and how we think. It's the thinking part that should trouble us the most. By telling us what to think, political correctness is a heresy if we are truly committed to liberalism. And it seeps into so many parts of society, so often without us even paying attention to the aim.

Over the past few weeks, some on the Left have claimed that those of us who have raised questions about multiculturalism, immigration and the relationship between Islam and modernity have blood on our hands for the mass murder in Oslo. Here, murder is used as a muzzle to close down free speech. And this is just the latest addition to a growing list of tactics to curb free speech, and even worse, to stifle genuine inquiry.

Consider the other tricks in recent years. To close down discussion about, say, immigration or border control, you call your opponents racists and point to xenophobia in the community. Opponents are not just wrong, they're evil. Their views should not be aired in a civilised society.

But remember this: the stifling political correctness that rejected an open debate about immigration in the early 1990s helped fuel the emergence and popularity of Pauline Hanson.

Another ruse is the victim game. We now live in an age when "feelings" are treated as a measurement of moral values. We live in what author Monica Ali calls "the marketplace of outrage" where groups vie for victimhood status, each claiming their feelings have been hurt more than others.

We have witnessed a familiar opera of Muslim oppression used to shut down debate. It starts with a book called Satanic Verses. Or a silly Danish cartoon. Or a film called Submission. Or a cheeky episode of South Park sending up the fact that Mohammed is the only guy free from ridicule. Then we hear that great aria of all accusations: Islamophobia.

The final act sees the West capitulate, muttering about hurt feelings and preferring the path of least resistance to launching a staunch defence of freedom of expression. And we are left with a new norm of anticipatory surrender and self-censorship.

The victim game works so well because it is augmented by the apparatus of the state. Legal prosecutions are mounting: politician Geert Wilders in Holland, writers Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant in Canada. And in Australia, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt is defending a claim by a group of Aborigines that he "offended, insulted and humiliated" them in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act.

The PC crowd is clever. They know there are no useful legal tests about hurt feelings and inciting hate. They enact nice-sounding laws, build bureaucracies and wait for them to blossom and bludgeon free speech. They have effectively co-opted Islamic-style oppression to prohibit debate; be it about Islam or anything else they wish to fence off from free speech.

The other trick is to quietly exclude certain people from the national discourse. It is best summed up by a German word: totschweigtaktik. To be totsched is to be subjected to death by silence: books, ideas, people that challenge the status quo are simply ignored.

In Quadrant last year, Shelley Gare wrote that those who are totsched find "their efforts left to expire soundlessly like a butterfly in a jar". When Orwell wrote his 1938 classic Homage to Catalonia, which addressed Stalinist Russia's involvement in the Spanish Civil War, the left-wing literati simply ignored it. By the time Orwell died in 1950, barely 1500 copies had been sold. As Gare traces, the same death by silence was used to ignore Australian writers such as Chris Kenny, who challenged the secret women's business behind the Hindmarsh Island affair. It was used when author Kate Jennings aimed her fire at the sisterhood, postmodernism and women's studies.

It's used by those who tell us that climate change will destroy us all if we do not act immediately. The sceptics are being totsched. Opposing views? What opposing views? Governments have their own tactics. Those with poor ideas and even worse policies resort to something best described as the bipartisanship racket. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd called for bipartisanship on indigenous policies. In fact, Rudd sought supine obedience to the rollback of the NT intervention. If you disagreed, you were charged with politicising an issue. Just imagine if similar calls from those defending the status quo had managed to shut out the ideas from people such as Noel Pearson. The very last thing we want is bipartisanship when it is used so blatantly to stifle dissent and vest moral authority in one voice.

A similar trick, the consensus con, emerged from Canberra last year. Treasury boss Ken Henry, touting the emissions trading system and the ill-fated super profits tax on mining companies, said he supported the "contest of ideas" but then said there were "occasions on which economists might, at least for a period, put down their weapons and join a consensus".

It sends shudders up your spine. But Henry lost that debate. And that's the point of free debate. It is the single most effective mechanism for disposing bad ideas. Ideas are not finessed through consensus or bipartisanship. If we are serious about defending free speech, vigilance demands that we look out for the tricks and that we test the trickery against first principles. The alternative means more moral disorientation and a weird Western death wish.

The principles are clear enough: free speech is not a Left-Right thing as Mark Steyn said. It's a free-unfree thing. You don't get to cry in favour of free speech just to defend those with whom you agree. And free speech must include the right to offend. If we prosecute offensive opinions, we just encourage ever more ridiculous claims to protection. We fuel that marketplace of outrage. And we end up shutting down the true genius of modern Western civilisation: the contest of ideas.

SOURCE






No job is lonelier than defending freedom of speech on Australian government TV

Brendan O'Neill

ABE Fortas, the US Supreme Court judge, once said that judging was the loneliest job in the world, "in which a man is, as near as may be, an island entire". I can think of a lonelier job: defending freedom of speech on ABC1's Q&A.

It used to be uncontroversial, even popular, to argue journalists should be free to write what they believe to be true, and newspapers should be free to propel it into the public arena.

Not any more. As I discovered on Q&A on Monday, these days defending the ideal of a free press will win you bemused looks from chin-scratching audience members, narrow-eyed stares from liberty-allergic politicians and a tsunami of tweets asking if you have gone completely mental.

Two freedom-of-the-press issues came up on Q&A: whether right-wing commentators bore responsibility for the actions of the Norway nutter Anders Behring Breivik; and the question of whether, post-phone hacking, it was time to tame and possibly break up the "Murdoch empire".

My answer to both was no.

No, you cannot blame the grotesque murder of 77 Norwegians on the fact Mark Steyn or Keith Windschuttle once wrote a column bemoaning the decline of Western culture. And no, we should not invite the state to dismantle Rupert's regime.

Instead, if you really don't like what his papers have to say, you should set up your own post-Murdochian, pot-stirring paper. That's one of the great things about press freedom: anyone with the nous and the know-how and a fundraising sidekick can press their own ideas and offer them up for public consumption.

I may as well have been calling for Stephen Fry or some other modern-day national treasure to be put in the stocks and pelted with rotten oranges, such were the looks of horror shot my way by my co-panellists. Especially by Labor Minister for Human Services Tanya Plibersek who, according to one blog report, spent the whole show with "narrowed eyes, casting daggers at her tormentor" (that's me). In the discussion on the Norwegian killer, Plibersek seemed outraged when I suggested right-wing writers, however much we might disagree with some of them, were not "the cause of all violence and horror in the world".

Indeed, my suggestion made Plibersek sick to her stomach, she said. "I cannot understand that you think that it is fine for people to go out and say we should kill all Muslims . . . and that that has no real effect in the world," she said.

Even after I pointed out that the right-wing columnists being fingered as intellectual accessories to the worst crime in peacetime Europe did not call for all Muslims to be killed but simply expressed disagreements with the ideology of multiculturalism, still Plibersek seemed convinced that their words were wicked, the moral equivalent of weapons.

"What you're saying is that there is no responsibility if you preach hate for what happens when you preach hate," she said, once again mixing up "making legitimate criticisms of multiculturalism" with "preaching hate". She said public debate should be "more courteous", which really means more boring.

It is, of course, unsurprising to hear a politician who gets her fair share of flak from shock jocks and uncouth columnists express an inner desire to defang tabloid-style commentary, even if she has to rather shamelessly hijack the Norway massacre to do it. It is more surprising to hear it from journalistic entrepreneur Stephen Mayne, another Q&A panellist.

Firmly elbowing aside the modern, enlightened belief that writers should not be held responsible for how others chose to act on their words, Mayne also bought the idea that words caused violence.

He cited Alan Jones, Sydney's rowdiest radio presenter, and the fact Jones once said, in Mayne's words, "that Julia Gillard should be put in a bag and thrown out to sea". Surely that kind of commentary should be restricted, right? When I said no -- first on the basis that I trusted Jones's listeners knew he was making a joke and not issuing an instruction, and second because if any of those listeners did put Gillard in a bag and chucked her in the ocean then they were responsible for their actions, not Jones -- the audience guffawed. I mean, really, how can we expect the brain-dead bogans who suck in Jones's over-the-top orations as they drive their utes to work to know the difference between a jokey comment and an instruction to assassinate the Prime Minister of Australia?

That is the implication of Plibersek and Mayne's discomfort with provocative discourse: that the little people's minds are so putty-like that one shrill comment from an un-PC loudmouth might be enough to push them over the edge towards murder.

Q&A confirmed that, post-Norway, we're witnessing the rehabilitation of "media effects" theory, the stubbornly unproven idea that words directly cause carnage.

In the old days, that theory was promoted by the stuffy, conservative, purple-rinse lobby, who wanted to ban video nasties and saucy movies on the basis that they might turn men into psycho-killers or rapists. Now it is the so-called "progressive" sections of society who cling most tightly to "media effects" theory, believing that newspaper articles can make men into mass murderers.

The censorious implications of the idea that heated or experimental words and ideas provoke murderous behaviour are profound. Maybe we should ban J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye? After all, John Lennon's killer cited it as his inspiration. "Media effects" theory lets killers off the hook. It forgets about a little thing called free will, the existence of which should mean that no writer is held accountable for what another free agent does after reading his words.

The second press-related discussion on Q&A confirmed that anti-Murdoch schadenfreude has reached such dizzy heights that people such as Plibersek and Mayne are incapable of recognising its likely impact on press freedom. So when I suggested Britain's post-News of the World inquiry into the ethics and morality of the press was not a good thing, representing the first time in nearly 400 years that the British state had barged back into the world of journalism, my co-panellists looked at me as if I had lost the plot.

They seemed to forget that, throughout modern history, democrats and progressives fought tooth-and-catapult to eject the authorities from the sphere of the press. As 17th-century English poet John Milton put it in his impassioned plea for the freedom to print: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Surely even my scrappers on Q&A can agree that abandoning that liberty today is too high a price to pay for the fleeting joy of seeing Murdoch squirm?

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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3 August, 2011

Blaming Righty in Oslo

By Robin of Berkeley

A madman a continent away in Norway mows down almost 100 innocent people in cold blood. The shooter, Andrers Breivik, grew up a child of divorce, estranged from his father, in a liberal home in a liberal country.

And yet when the press starts pointing fingers, guess which direction they point. Do they gesture leftward, towards a liberal culture that belittles family and religion? Is atheist Europe the culprit for spawning a homicidal maniac? On the contrary...the media chooses the Usual Suspects, that vast right-wing conspiracy.

This is no surprise. Last year, the actions of a lone shooter in Arizona were twisted and distorted to indict conservatives. Jared Loughner, a devil-worshiping fan of the Communist Manifesto, somehow became linked to Sarah Palin and Rush.

And yet which is the political movement more aligned with violence? I offer this pop quiz to test your political IQ.

Question one: Which movement is the offspring of communism, which, as you may recall, led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people last century?

a. The left, or
b. The right?

Question two: Who popularized the phrase, "Through any means necessary"?

a. Malcolm X, or
b. George Will?

Next: Which political group bombed ROTC buildings, police stations, and courthouses in the '60s, murdering and maiming officers and other innocent people? Was it:

a. The Weather Underground, or
b. The Young Republicans?

Which '60s group kidnapped Patty Hearst, beating and raping her until she robotically committed crimes? Was it:

a. The far-left Symbionese Liberation Party, or
b. The Ayn Rand Society?

As for the spanking New Black Panthers, did they wield billy clubs at election sites in support of

a. Barack Obama, or
b. Mitt Romney?

The next question is a tough one.

The Unabomber, the environmentalist who tried to save the earth by rubbing out a bunch of people, had a well-read book in his shack. Was this book by:

a. Al Gore, or
b. William F. Buckley?

Another environmental activist, Ira Einhorn, was the mastermind behind Earth Day. Where is he currently residing?

a. In Hawaii, where he swims with the dolphins, or
b. In a federal penitentiary for beating his girlfriend to death and stuffing her body in a trunk.

And now for some bonus points, try your hand at this vexing question: Is it the left or the right that is aligned with radical Islam, with its burqua, genital mutilation, beheadings, and stoning?

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Now, liberals will scoff at my little test, pointing out that the right has been violent as well. True, there have been violent conservatives, such as the lone gunman who murdered abortion doctor George Tiller. But as for creating mob terror and mayhem, and activating evil, the left has no close competition.

Liberals will insist: what about Timothy McVeigh? Isn't the Oslo bomber another example of that most threatening of creatures: the conservative, angry, white male? No, according to reporter Jayna Davis. Through extensive research, ignored by the mainstream media, Davis ties the Oklahoma bombers to radical Islam, whom she calls the "Third Terrorist."

Given all of the evidence to the contrary, why are conservatives continually viewed as unhinged killers-in-the-making? Why, given that the ultimate demon, Hitler, headed the National Socialist Party, are conservatives continually targeted? And why, for God's sake, are conservatives now under fire for the actions of an evil man in Norway?

For one, it's politically expedient for the left to blame and shame the right. What else can they do? With the economy in free-fall, and nuns being groped at airports, liberals sure can't rest on their laurels.

And it's not hard to convince the gullible masses that conservatives are culpable whenever and wherever violence erupts. The left has done a spectacular job of brainwashing Americans to believe that conservatives are coarse and subhuman. Simply consult your nearby thesaurus for evidence: here are some synonyms for "conservative": reactionary, right-wing, redneck, unadventurous, rigid, intransigent, and square. And for "liberal": tolerant, unprejudiced, broad-minded, abundant, and generous. Oh, and of course, "progressive."

Since conservatives are the designated enemy, liberals don't blink an eye when the government, Soviet-style, tars opponents as "racist" and "Nazi." Even when Obama comports himself as a king, spending extravagantly and forcing legislation and executive orders down people's throats, this is no problem for liberals. They'll happily chuck the Constitution in order to suppress conservatives, that purported enemy within.

But there's a more profound explanation about why liberals embrace the delusion that conservatives are the enemy, not Ahmadinejad, not Chavez, not that home-grown terrorist down the block. It has to do with secularism, and how it strips people of ultimate truth.

Every human being has an innate knowledge deep inside that good exists -- but so does evil. Historically, people had turned to their Bibles, and churches, and synagogues for lessons on how to escape evil's clutches.

But postmodernism teaches that there is no good or evil, that we simply create our own reality. With man on center stage, God is optional and Satan is dead and gone.

Is it any wonder that people cling to all sorts of false teachings to braille themselves to safe ground; and that as they hunt for the true monster under the bed, they turn on each other? By weeding out the evildoers, they themselves do evil.

But they do not just do evil: they become evil itself. Whether it's in Norway or Madison, Wisconsin; whether it's a bombing in Bali or a mob attack in Atlanta, it's all the same process. It's people, insane with hatred and drunk with power, becoming precisely what they hate.

And in the process, they aid and abet the Enemy, the real one, who is not dead at all, but is alive and well and living abundantly off of those who have turned their backs on God. And of this most deadly foe, everyone, of every color and stripe, should be exceedingly afraid.

SOURCE





Muslim fanatics killing millions of other Muslims

An excellent reason NOT be ruled by Muslims, it seems to me

The famine in Africa's fragile Horn of Africa region has been caused by climate change and a collective failure to end the Somali civil war, the head of the African Development Bank says.

The two regions in southern Somalia where the UN last month declared a famine are controlled by rebel groups, including the al-Qaeda-linked Shebab.

Shebab is ""playing with lives"" by barring foreign aid from reaching starving people in drought-hit Somalia, Kaberuka said.

A famine declared last month in two southern Somali regions controlled by the Shebab rebel movement has grown to huge proportions and now threatens millions in the Horn of Africa with starvation and malnutrition, Kaberuka said.

Ten million people in the Horn of Africa are now in need of food aid, two million children are malnourished and half a million people are in danger of starvation, he added.

The international community should ""get in and help"" parts of Somalia that do work, namely Somaliland and Puntland in the north of the country, and give logistics aid to the African Union force, AMISOM, deployed in Somalia to try to stabilise the country.

""No one is saying they should put in soldiers from abroad - Africans are capable of doing that - but they need logistics support,"" Kaberuka said, citing things like food rations, transportation and helicopters.

More HERE






Shocking hypocrisy from a bunny hugger

A leading animal welfare expert has been practising the opposite of what he so insistently preaches. Chris Laurence is veterinary director of the politically tinged charity Dogs Trust. He used to be chief vet at the RSPCA, another outfit that has become distinctly political.

In animal rights circles, Mr Laurence MBE is a top dog. He is a trustee of the Feline Advisory Bureau. He frequently lobbies British and European parliamentarians and has appeared on telly.

One of the issues on which both Dogs Trust and the RSPCA have pressed politicians is electric fences for pets. These devices are, to my mind, practical and humane. I wrote a feature article about them recently. Many (though not all) readers agreed.

Last year they persuaded the Welsh Assembly to ban such devices. Using one in Wales could now cost you £20,000 in fines or six months in prison. Last week, a pet owner was left £3,000 worse off after such a case. Serves him right, Dogs Trust said.

But hang on. Information comes my way that Mr Laurence is himself an enthusiastic user of these electric fences. Can it be true? After some sucking of gums, Dogs Trust said: 'Chris Laurence does have a containment fence which can be set up to emit electric shocks. 'However, he has never used the fence in this way with his dog and the electric shock component on his dog's collar is permanently turned off.' Believe that if you will.

But what about cats? Pause. Then came a further admission. The charity said that Mr Laurence had indeed used the shock aspect of the fence to stop his cat straying into the road. 'Chris's personal opinion is that for cats this system can be the lesser of two evils. This does not reflect the view of Dogs Trust,' growled the statement.

'Dogs Trust will continue to lobby government in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland to ban electric shock devices.'

So a charity, some of whose staff seem to hold an anthropomorphic view of pets, is campaigning for the criminalisation of a device — even though its chief expert himself uses one. What hypocrisy.

SOURCE






What about our human right to a common language?

A 54-year-old Indian woman has launched a human rights challenge in the High Court to overturn a new immigration rule, introduced by Home Secretary Theresa May, that bans her husband from coming to the UK from India because he can’t speak English.

Needless to say, we’re footing the bill for this preposterous case, since she’s funded by legal aid.

And it won’t be cheap — Rashida Chapti is represented by one of our leading human rights lawyers. She claims the law violates her right to a family life under the Human Rights Act.

Mrs Chapti, who has lived here for six years and can hardly speak English herself — she needed a translator when she appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme this week — says her 57-year-old husband, Vali, will be ‘a valued member of society’.

But how can a person who cannot speak English possibly be a meaningful member of British society?

Isn’t it time we ended all this nonsense? This case goes to the heart of the debate over what a nation is and what it is that holds us together. And central to that debate is a shared language. It’s got nothing to do with human rights, or the subjugation of minority cultures.

In isolation, Mrs Chapti’s sounds a pitiful case. What difference would the arrival of one middle-aged Indian man make, even if he can’t speak English?

But we can’t treat this case in isolation. Unless we insist that people arriving here speak our common language, we can’t operate as a harmonious society. If those who arrive on our shores can’t communicate with us, how can they expect to work and contribute? How can they avoid being a leech on others?

The great multicultural experiment failed precisely because it encouraged incomers not to sign up to our common culture. It has resulted in ghettos and isolation.

Communities that do not integrate are breeding grounds for anger, joblessness and welfare dependency. They often have an appalling record for women’s rights and, at worst, give rise to home-grown terrorists.

Mrs Chapti says her husband has no intention of learning English even if he is allowed to join her. And why should he? There will be plenty of interpreters on hand — whom we pay for — to help him complete his benefit forms when he fails to get a job.

She claims her husband can’t learn English, as he lives too far away from the nearest school. Yet she’s been able to afford to fly to and from India in the past five years — on her machinist’s salary in a clothes factory — so surely she could stump up the bus fare he needs to get to the school. And how long do you think it will be before her six children decide they want to join her in the UK as well?

This case reminds us how hollow is David Cameron’s promise that the despised Human Rights Act would be replaced by a British Bill of Rights.

SOURCE






Rational argument is the only response to Norway

An editorial in "The Australian"

THERE is a diabolical symmetry between the slaughter of 76 people in Norway last week and the terrorism of Islamist extremists.

Anders Behring Breivik and terrorists such as 9/11 bomber Mohamed Atta choose violence to express their rage against globalisation and employ a messianic justification for their actions. Their atrocities serve no rational political purpose and it would be useless, not to say unconscionable, for civilised people to offer appeasement.

While it is reasonable to draw a moral equivalence between the acts committed, it is entirely unreasonable to presume a moral equivalence in our response to the murderous rampage in Oslo and Utoya Island and 9/11. The organised nature of Islamist terrorism, the scale of the atrocities, the preparedness of rogue nation-states to bankroll their operations and their ability to exploit the anti-modern fears of hundreds of millions of people puts the Islamists in an entirely different league from the lone operator in Norway.

Yet the horror of the killings last week has been employed by some commentators to slander their cultural and political opponents and delegitimise views that do not conform to their own narrow code. They suggest that because Breivik was troubled by modernity, everyone who expresses concerns about radical change in Western society in recent decades is implicated in his crimes. They seek to appropriate the event to further unrelated, progressive political causes here. Some have used the attack to smear anyone on the Right of politics and call for opponents of the government and the Greens to back off.

It is not the first time. Earlier this year, there was a similar effort to blur and slur when a madman shot a US Democrat congresswoman and killed six people in Arizona. Commentators blamed the attack on strident right-wing political rhetoric but were silenced when it was revealed the gunman's politics, such as they were, came from the Left, and that his grievances were beyond reason. In Breivik, these political opportunists have found their right-wing perpetrator.

The instinct to close down debate by conflating evil with a desire to question is a worrying phenomenon, and not restricted to devastating events such as this one. We have seen in this country in recent months the development of a febrile atmosphere in which people at extremes of the ideological spectrum feel empowered to attack their opponents or even their questioners, with scant regard for civility or rational argument. It is difficult to pursue genuine public debate about important social, political and cultural issues without being accused of running an agenda. Yet rational debate has never been more necessary at a time where virtually everyone has access to free, unfiltered publication of their views.

Each day brings new cases of illiberalism. On Monday, the Greens deputy leader, Christine Milne, was applauded on national television for citing The Australian's opinion pages as reason to exercise parliamentary oversight on media bias. On Thursday, former Labor leader Mark Latham went into print to urge the government to "strike hard" against "the evils of Murdoch journalism" while the activist organisation GetUp! announced it would try to force the hand of the broadcasting regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, to censure a prominent radio host for stating his view on climate science. For the record, we believe the radio host in question, Alan Jones, was wrong on this occasion and his rhetoric sometimes crosses the boundary between strident and offensive. But we respect his right to say what he thinks and note that he gives voice to many Australians excluded from the debate by many other media outlets.

The disintegration of our national conversation into a blogging, tweeting, cacophony is an unfortunate development in a civil democracy. Yet it is pouring fuel upon the fire to respond to the illiberalism of one's cultural opponents with equal intolerance. An ad-hominem tweet, or inflammatory invective on talkback radio, will never win the argument, but that is not what their authors intend. It takes effort to assemble a rational, logically sound argument; it is easier to intimidate and shame your opponent into silence and thereby, in the manner of Steven Bradbury, triumph by being the last man standing.

Many fair-minded Australians hold legitimate concerns about the effects of globalisation and are troubled that the nation and the patriotic values they hold dear are threatened by an influx of people from different cultures. They are concerned, as we are, that government policy that celebrates difference and ignores the values that bind us together is bad for the nation. They are concerned that we are surrendering the values implicit in our succinct but effective de facto bill of rights: the fair go. To hold these opinions may be unfashionable in some circles, but they are not a crime, and the correct response is to reason, not to censor.

This newspaper has always supported Australia's open-migration policies. We believe the mix of people from different ethnic backgrounds is a national strength but that does not blind us to the complexities of change and the need for a common set of public behaviours and values. We believe, too, that most Australians are not racist, regardless of their views on immigration or asylum-seekers. It is wrong to assume that those who object to boatpeople are doing so on grounds of race. Their argument is with asylum-seekers jumping the queue and with people-smugglers. Maintaining the order of the system underpins community support for immigration.

In the shock of Islamist-inspired terrorist acts, the faith of Islam has been served a grievous injustice. Terrorists who claimed to act in the name of Allah have damaged the reputation of a noble religion. But that does not justify a similar denigration of Christianity in this case. News reports, including in this newspaper, have claimed Breivik is a fundamentalist Christian. Whatever his churchgoing habits, it is wrong to smear Christians generally with this appalling crime. It is people, not religion, who are to blame for evil acts.

If any encouragement can be drawn from this tragic, dispiriting week, it is in the work of people such as former British prime minister Tony Blair who are prepared to stand against the tide of rampant secularism to declare that interfaith dialogue may indeed be the answer to fractured globalisation.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2 August, 2011

Dyspepsia and American Atheism

Mike Adams

Every now and then there is a lawsuit that really defines the desperation of a failing social movement. The recent decision of one of America’s most intolerant religious organizations, American Atheists, provides a prime example. This group of anti-Christian zealots has filed a lawsuit they will surely lose. But they will suffer an even more resounding defeat in the court of public opinion. Put simply, the lawsuit will demonstrate that atheism is largely the result of emotional inferiority rather than intellectual superiority.

If you think my claims are over-stated, just read the following excerpt from their civil (actually it is quite un-civil) legal complaint:

“The plaintiffs, and each of them, have suffered, are suffering, and will continue to suffer damages, both physical and emotional, from the existence of the challenged cross. Named plaintiffs have suffered, inter alia, dyspepsia, symptoms of depression, headaches, anxiety, and mental pain and anguish from the knowledge that they are made to feel officially excluded from the ranks of citizens who were directly injured by the 9/11 attack and the lack of acknowledgement of the more than 1,000 non-Christian individuals who were killed at the World Trade Center.”

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, you heard it right. The American Atheists are suing over the two giant World Trade Center beams that remained standing and formed a cross at Ground Zero on 911. The cross, which gave comfort to millions, is now in a taxpayer-funded museum. And the atheists are hoping to exploit it for millions.

When I read about these allegations on the American Atheists website it made me break wind, cry, and toss and turn in bed for the next several nights. I’m just kidding. I don’t get gas or get emotional when exposed to other points of view because I’m a grown man. That is why this lawsuit is so embarrassing. Almost all of the plaintiffs are grown men. They are mostly grown white men who have easy lives – at least until they see a cross and start barfing and farting and crying and lying awake at night.

American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) attorney David French recently noted that anti-establishment plaintiffs have for decades simply claimed that they were “offended observers” of religious displays or, I would add, “offended listeners” to public prayers. But, according to French, federal courts are increasingly rejecting such arguments.

French also notes that anti-establishment plaintiffs have also made “offended taxpayer” arguments on the grounds that their tax dollars sometimes fund such displays. But federal courts are increasingly rejecting that argument, too. And that is only common sense. Every taxpayer is offended by something. I’m offended by the I.R.S.

So the American Atheists have been forced to make an argument with more substance than the simple claim that they are “offended.” And, in all likelihood, the atheists have simply concocted all of their wild stories of physical suffering and mental anguish. In other words, these atheists are probably liars rather than mere sissies. But the atheists don’t have to worry about the eternal consequences of lying. They reject the Ten Commandments. Hell, they even reject eternity!

Speaking of rejection, the American Atheists’ lawsuit should be rejected in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion. Christians should reject these atheists because our nation was indeed founded on Christian principles. Among those principles is the notion of religious tolerance – the idea that we should be tolerant of atheists who do not share our views. But that does not mean Christians must retreat from the public square because atheists claim that we make them sick to their stomachs – figuratively or literally. That would amount to rewarding intolerance.

Secularists should also reject the claims of the American Atheists. And they should do it with equal enthusiasm. To grant them the authority to trump speech because of their own confessed weaknesses would interfere with naturalistic evolution. It would promote the survival of our least physically and emotionally fit citizens. It would also result in the promotion of our silliest ideas.

So, in a nutshell, I think it’s time for American Atheists to start carrying their own crosses. And they should do it without the help of American judges. After all, Christian tax dollars help fund their salaries. And that offends some of us.

SOURCE





Gender Quotas Spread in Europe, Mandated for Corporate Boards

After Norway adopted gender quotas for corporate boards — requiring companies to have boards of directors comprised of at least 40 percent women — large numbers of inexperienced people ended up as corporate directors. “A study by the University of Michigan found that this led to large numbers of inexperienced women being appointed to boards, and that this has seriously damaged those firms’ performance.”

But this didn’t stop other European countries such as Spain and France from following Norway’s example and mandating 40 percent quotas (Spain’s quota requirement is already in effect, while France’s law goes into effect in 2017). Italy’s Parliament recently passed a 30 percent quota requirement after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who had previously opposed such quotas, endorsed them (perhaps as a way of attempting to defuse public outrage over his sexual escapades and his patronizing remarks towards women). The European Parliament has recommended that all member countries adopt such quotas in their national laws.

The Economist recently opposed such quotas in an editorial. (Corporate law scholars such as Stephen Bainbridge have previously criticized these proposals.) As The Economist later noted, Europe’s race towards quotas is at odds with company practice and legal norms elsewhere in the world:

Hans Bader, a senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, compares the situation in Europe with that of America: “From an American legal perspective, laws mandating quotas for women on corporate boards in European countries seem utterly bizarre. In America, such quotas would be struck down as a violation of the right of male directors to equal treatment. The Supreme Court ruled in its 1989 Croson decision that quotas violate, rather than promote, equality, calling it ‘completely unrealistic’ to expect groups to be represented in each field or activity ‘in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population.’ American courts have struck down quotas and gender-balance requirements for boards and commissions in cases such as Back v Carter. They have allowed companies to challenge quotas on behalf of their male or white employees in cases such as Lutheran Church Missouri Synod v FCC. And they overturned government-mandated preferences for female business owners in the Lamprecht case.” . . . Ranko Bon, writing from Motovun in Croatia, thinks it is lucky that the idea of female quotas is catching on in Europe only: “America is largely free of it, and much of Asia is still blissfully unaware. As Europe is increasingly irrelevant in world business, the damage will be limited and perhaps even tolerable.”

Defenders of these quotas argue that quotas are good for business because companies with more women on their boards do better. But even if this is true, it confuses cause and effect, and puts the cart before the horse, as studies like the University of Michigan study illustrate. With each passing year, the percentage of female business professionals in Europe rises, as does the percentage of female college graduates. The pool of female qualified applicants in a company for a directorship naturally rises over time. So a company that is not growing and hires few new people will naturally have less women in its ranks than a company that is growing and hiring new people. The company’s growth does not occur because of the increase in women in the company; rather, the increase in women in a company occurs because of the company’s prior and pre-existing growth.

This is also why growing companies in the U.S. tend to have more Asians, Hispanics, and women on their boards than companies that aren’t growing: the percentage of each graduating class that is Asian or Hispanic grows each year. It’s not because affirmative action helps company performance — it doesn’t. Rather, it’s because growing companies hire new blood, and new blood is more heavily Asian and Hispanic (and female) than the older generation, among whom business people are overwhelmingly white men. My brother’s investment firm was much more heavily minority than the ranks of the company its principals came from (DeutscheBank), and the financial industry as a whole, but it did not practice affirmative action, and would have regarding doing so as bizarre. The reason for its high minority percentage was because the company’s managers were young, and young people as a group are more heavily minority and more heavily non-white than their elders, due to immigration (immigrants are disproportionately non-white) and a higher non-white birthrate.

SOURCE





Muslim extremism in Britain



They must be the first teenage boys in history to take offence at the sight of a scantily-clad Playboy model. Most young men would salivate over a poster of a voluptuous Kelly Brook pouting provocatively while thrusting her ample bosom in their direction.

But when Mohammed Hasnath and Muhammed Tahir encountered the image of the model/actress/whatever on the side of a bus shelter in East London they were horrified.

The sight of Miss Brook dressed as an angel in a Lynx deodorant advert was too much for their religious sensibilities. So they painted a burka over her. They said it was a ‘sin’ for a woman be uncovered in public.

This poster was just one of a number the pair defaced on decency grounds. At Thames Magistrates Court, in Tower Hamlets, they admitted six counts of criminal damage, were ordered to pay £283 each and given a 12-month conditional discharge.

Hasnath and Tahir, both 18, told police that the way the women had been photographed was against their religion. Hasnath said: ‘If someone was to look at our wife or mother or daughter with a bad intention, we would not like it, so we were just trying to do good.’

There will be some sympathy for them — and not just from other Muslims. Plenty of people, especially those with young children, are uncomfortable with the proliferation of sexually-explicit advertising in public spaces.

You don’t have to be a purse-lipped prude to believe there’s far too much gratuitous nudity and hard-sell soft porn on daily display.

On one level, Hasnath and Tahir are no different from those Victorians who insisted on covering table legs lest they unleash pent-up male passion. It would be easy to dismiss them as harmless eccentrics.

But their actions come against a backdrop of growing militancy among young Muslim men and attempts to impose Islamic Sharia law on whole areas of Britain.

The most serious incident of religious intolerance in Tower Hamlets came back in April. I brought you the story of a 31-year-old Asian shop assistant in fear of her life because she refused to wear a headscarf.

Islamist hardliners first threatened to organise a boycott of the chemist’s where she worked and then, when she still wouldn’t cover up, told her: ‘If you keep doing these things, we are going to kill you.’

Up the road in Waltham Forest, which is home to one of the country’s largest Muslim populations, extremists have taken to the streets and declared the area a ‘Sharia Controlled Zone’.

As Sue Reid reported in Saturday’s Mail, stickers have appeared on walls, lamp-posts and in shop windows proclaiming ‘no alcohol, no gambling, no music or concerts, no porn or prostitution, no drugs, no smoking’.

Militants say they will patrol the streets to enforce the Sharia code. It will come as no surprise to discover that one of the prime movers behind the Sharia Zone is Ram Jam Choudary, the jihadist formerly known as Andy.

While at college he was fond of a drink, a spliff and casual sex before he underwent a religious conversion and teamed up with Captain Hook at the Finsbury Park mosque.

Somehow he manages to stay just inside the law. I’ve always assumed that’s because he is a paid MI5 informant. There’s no other good reason why he hasn’t been banged up.

Whether it’s beheading enthusiasts screaming abuse at British troops, burning poppies on Remembrance Day, or celebrating the mass murders on 9/11 and on the London Underground, Ram Jam’s never far away.

His partner in jihad, Abu Izzadeen, styles himself ‘Director for Waltham Forest Muslims’ and was recently released from prison after serving a term for funding terrorism. Izzadeen (real name Trevor Brooks from Hackney) is especially keen on killing homosexuals and segregation of the sexes.

Mainstream Muslim leaders are outraged at the activities of these extremists and denounce the likes of Ram Jam and Trev (sorry, Abu) as ‘small-minded idiots’.

Small-minded they may be, but they think big. There is a tendency towards complacency in the face of their blowhard threats.

Of course they are not representative of wider Muslim opinion. But if someone tells me he wants to kill us if we don’t covert to Islam and embrace Sharia law, I’m prepared to believe him.

What I fail to understand is why the authorities continue to indulge them. Both Ram Jam and Izzadeen are able-bodied and in the prime of their lives but they live on benefits. Izzadeen even boasts that his weekly stipend from the state is his ‘jihad-seekers’ allowance’.

Ha, bloody, ha.

Yet both of these jokers are heroes to young Muslim men of a certain mindset. I would hazard a guess that Mohammed Hasnath and Muhammed Tahir are among their admirers.

There are plenty of sexually-confused, impressionable young Muslim men ready to rally to the extremists’ flag. Hasnath and Tahir would seem to exemplify them. Brought up in Britain, they have the appearance of any other young man of their generation.

Hasnath may subscribe to a medieval philosophy when it comes to women, but he is pictured wearing 21st century iPod headphones. What’s he listening to, I wonder — Adele or a podcast of the latest rantings from some preacher of hate?

There seems to be no shortage of frustrated foot-soldiers in the scramble to impose Sharia law. But the Government has just quietly shelved an inquiry into the spread of Sharia courts because no one would co-operate.

And except in the more extreme cases there’s a reluctance not only to prosecute but make any connection between extremism and Islam itself.

Hasnath and Tahir were originally charged with ‘religiously-aggravated’ damage. The religious bit was dropped when they agreed to plead to common or garden criminal damage.

But their actions were religiously motivated. The same philosophy underpins both painting a burka on Kelly Brook and issuing death threats against a woman shop assistant who refuses to wear a headscarf.

Let’s hope these two young men have learned their lesson and can now grow up and channel their energies in another direction. Getting a girlfriend might be a good start.

SOURCE





Some reduction of red tape in Britain

Rules which ban the sale of liqueur-filled chocolates without an alcohol licence and demand permits for selling toilet cleaner are just some of the laws ministers will tear up as part of a war on red tape. Around two-thirds of the 257 regulations imposed on retailers are being repealed or revised as part of the coalition’s ‘red tape challenge’.

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, will abolish 130 pieces of red tape and simplify a further 30 rules which apply to the retail sector.

The Cabinet minister said some of the most ridiculous regulations he discovered included the poisons licensing system, which makes retailers hold £35 licences for selling products such as fly spray or bleach.

The legal age for buying Christmas crackers will also be dropped from 16 to 12 – the minimum in the European Union.

Redundant laws such as the war-time Trading with the Enemy Act, which restricts trade with the old USSR, Germany and Yugoslavia – a country that no longer exists – as well as other nations, will also be repealed.

The requirement on shops to notify the licensing authorities when people buy new TVs will be scrapped. Officials insisted it would not drive down collection of the TV licence fee.

Mr Cable conceded that governments had announced repeated crackdowns on red tape with little action, but he said the latest scheme would tear up legislation quickly to make it easier for firms to do business. He said: ‘We have struck a balance between keeping regulations necessary to protect consumers, the workforce and the environment, while rolling back the number of rules and regulations our businesses have to deal with.

‘We have heard these promises by successive governments before, but these first proposals from the red tape challenge show that we’re serious and we are making real progress.’

Mark Prisk, the Business Minister, said: ‘Every 30 minutes a business somewhere has to fill in a form. We have four million businesses in this country – that is a lot of productive time lost.’

Sunday trading laws will stay in place after employees made representations to the Government over being able to spend time with their families.

Business groups met the announcement with scepticism, calling on the Government to tackle the bigger regulatory burdens rather than tinkering with less important rules. David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: ‘There is no doubt that scrapping some of these specific regulations will have a positive effect on some firms in the retail sector. ‘But we question how these incremental changes will deliver real change on the ground at a time when the Government is introducing more big ticket regulation, for example around parental leave and flexible working.’

John Walker, chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: ‘It is evident that hefty regulatory changes in pensions, flexible working and maternity and paternity are still going to hit small firms hard.

‘Some of these regulation cuts being announced today will have no tangible impact on small firms at all as they are outdated and unused anyway.’

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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1 August, 2011

Tolerance is a religion too

The following is an excerpt from a longer article on education by Australian theologian Joel Hodge. It's always been obvious that Leftists use "tolerance" in an intolerant way but the remarks below cut to the heart of the "tolerance" cult

Tolerance: it is argued that Australia is a multi-religious, multicultural society that should not impose certain religious beliefs on people, but should be tolerant of different beliefs, with the implication that different religions should be studied alongside each other. The first point that one should note about this argument is that it is a belief: tolerance is a belief and value that structures how we see and behave toward each other.

No-one can scientifically prove tolerance to be a valid or fool-proof way of running a society. Certain facts can be argued in its favour, but in the end, it can only be believed as a good and fruitful way of relating and acting (as it is in the West, though not necessarily in other places). I personally believe that tolerance can be a positive force in some circumstances, though it is not enough to have a successful society. Tolerance often sounds more like forbearance to me, rather than real acceptance of and engagement with the other.

The second point that one can notice about modern tolerance is that it is a belief that subjects other beliefs to it. In other words, it equalises different beliefs or social forces by subjecting them to its form of belief. In the case of "religion", it subjects the more prevalent forms (such as Christianity) to itself in order to control them, and then, equalise them with smaller forms. It may just to give smaller belief systems a chance to profess what they believe. This is not what modern tolerance is only about, however. It involves a power-play by the dominant elite to subject those social movements and beliefs to itself.

This second point, then, leads to my third point: tolerance is usually not real tolerance in our society, and because of this, we apply tolerance selectively for particular gain. For example, in the realm of sport, we allow many different sporting expressions in Australian society, however we do not reduce the more dominant forms, such as AFL, to the level of the less popular forms, such as bowling or synchronised swimming, by giving them the same media exposure or forcing children to learn and play them, out of tolerance. If we did, we would probably have widespread civil unrest.

Real tolerance is not subjecting everything to the same playing field, but allowing different religious and cultural forms to exist in their own way. Do we really do this in Australian society? Do we really allow different religio-cultural forms, such as New Zealanders, or Hindus, or Arabic cultures, to exist in their own form? No, because there's an existing culture, language, belief system, and way of life in Australia to which other cultural forms adapt themselves.

Therefore, for the religious education debate, the argument about tolerance can be seen as a ruse to subject a certain dominant belief system (Christianity) to another, atheist secularism. Modern secularism has no great respect for different religious forms, but wishes to equalise and subject all of them to its agenda.

SOURCE




Hatred, smears and the liberals hell-bent on bullying millions of us into silence

By Melanie Phillips

The baleful effects of the recent attacks in Norway, where Anders Breivik bombed Oslo’s government district and then gunned down teenagers at a Labour party camp, murdering at least 77 people, have not been limited to that horrific carnage.

For the atrocity has produced a reaction among people on the political Left in Britain, Europe and the U.S. that is in itself shocking and terrifying.

Former Norwegian prime minister and current chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize committee Thorbjorn Jagland has said that, in response to the violent attacks, David Cameron and other European leaders should use a more ‘cautious’ approach when talking about multiculturalism.

Cameron has said multiculturalism (the doctrine that gives the values of minorities equal status to those of the majority) has failed, and has also talked about ‘Islamist extremism’ as a cause of terrorism. Jagland, however, said leaders would be ‘playing with fire’ if they continued to use rhetoric that could be exploited by extremists such as Breivik.

This is because Breivik’s so-called manifesto shows that he is violently against mass immigration, multiculturalism and Islamisation — and that he wants the forced repatriation of Muslims from Europe and the murder of all who have promoted multiculturalism.

But to connect such abhorrent ravings with Cameron’s comments is simply grotesque.

Yet the former Norwegian premier is treating Breivik as if he is a political terrorist whose words have the authority of a sane and coherent creed.

Even if he was motivated by hostility to multiculturalism and Islam, it is perverse to suggest that no one should write about these things because some deranged person raving about such ideas has run amok.

It’s a bit like saying no one should express concern about late abortions or animal cruelty because it leads straight to the firebombing of abortion clinics or animal-testing laboratories.
Breivik's so-called manifesto shows that he is violently against mass immigration, multiculturalism and Islamisation - and that he wants the forced repatriation of Muslims from Europe and the murder of all who have promoted multiculturalism

Breivik's wants the forced repatriation of Muslims from Europe and the murder of all who have promoted multiculturalism

Multiculturalism and Islamic extremism raise entirely legitimate and very serious concerns about defending a culture from attack both from within and from without.

Jagland seems to be cynically exploiting the murder of more than 70 innocents to make a connection which is as obnoxious as it is opportunistic in order to bully into silence those who express such legitimate democratic concerns.

Shockingly, he is merely one of many who are doing so. As soon as the atrocity happened, people on the Left saw a heaven-sent opportunity to smear mainstream conservative thinkers and writers by making a grossly distorted association between Breivik’s attack and their ideas.

They claimed that anyone on ‘the Right’ who had spoken out against multiculturalism or Islamic extremism was complicit in the atrocity and therefore had a moral duty to stop writing about such things. To my stupefaction, I have become a principal target of this incendiary witch-hunt, being smeared for having helped provoke the Norway massacre.

One of the first out of the trap was British blogger Sunny Hundal, who delt at length upon two of my articles which had been quoted in Breivik’s purported manifesto and gave the impression that I was a major influence on Breivik’s thinking.

But in Breivik’s 1,500-page diatribe, I was mentioned precisely twice. The first time was a quote from an article in this newspaper about family breakdown. The second was another article about the revelation by a former civil servant that the previous Labour government had kept the public in the dark about a covert policy of mass immigration. Breivik made no mention of anything I had written about Muslims, Islamic terrorism or Islamisation.

Moreover, he also mentioned dozens of other conservative or liberal writers and thinkers. Among others, he quoted: Winston Churchill, George Orwell, Mahatma Gandhi, the Labour MP Frank Field, Tory Nicholas Soames, philosopher Roger Scruton, Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson and Swedish thriller writer Lars Hedegaard. Oh, and William Shakespeare, as well as the fathers of English liberalism John Stuart Mill and John Locke.

So the fact that Hundal singled me out like this while failing to mention these others (apart from a brief reference to Mr Clarkson) was an egregious smear — which was soon circulating and building up hatred on Twitter and the internet.

Soon, others joined in the hate-fest — even across the Atlantic. In the Toronto Star, columnist Heather Mallick wrote that unlike ‘almost everyone else praised by the killer’, I had not said I was horrified by the atrocity in Norway. Not only that, but whereas everyone else had wept at the murder of schoolchildren, ‘she [Phillips] spits’. But, on the contrary, I had written on my own website in terms far stronger than many other writers that there could never be any excuse for mass murder.

And the quote from my writing on which she based her ‘spitting’ claim was actually not about the atrocity at all, but about the people using those murders to foment just this kind of hatred.

Then there was Seumas Milne in the Guardian — who tried to make the smear stick by insisting that my criticism of the secret policy of using mass immigration to destroy British identity was ‘Breivik’s feeling precisely’.

But the truth is that the outrage at that policy is shared by millions of decent British people. So Milne was in effect smearing not just me, but all those millions by implying that their opinions also formed a ‘continuum’ with Breivik’s actions.

As one Guardian reader commented following Milne’s contemptible attack, the fact that he had deliberately blurred the distinction between reasonable political opinions with which one might disagree and the actions of a terrorist meant he was creating hysteria and polarisation. Indeed, the result of such incitement has been a veritable tsunami of electronically-generated mob hatred.

No, it is those who under the cover of accusing me of incendiary writing are themselves inciting hatred.

The claim that ‘blood is on my hands’ can so easily translate into someone seeking my own blood. Heaven forbid that should happen — but if it did, there would be a direct causal link with those who have whipped up this wicked firestorm.

Indeed, those who have exploited the killing of innocents in Norway to provoke such an eruption of distortion, demonisation and irrationality should disgust and alarm all decent people everywhere.

More HERE





The Myth of White Privilege

By Selwyn Duke

Something must be wrong. My finances are in shambles; mainstream newspapers won't publish my pieces; and, no matter how much I try to convince Fox News that they need male eye candy as well, they just won't give me a show. Then I gaze into the mirror at my alabaster complexion and say, "What's wrong with this picture? I'll have to address this at the next White People's Meeting."

Of course, it isn't really true that all we Caucasians get together in a big conference hall somewhere and, rubbing our hands together with devilish glee, conspire as to how we're gonna get ourselves some'a that there white privilege. Yet you wouldn't know it listening to egghead academics, media mouths, and uncivil rights agitators.

Put "white privilege" into a search engine and no small number of results will be for ".edu" URLs, which means that our mental institutions of higher learning are busy teaching "critical race theory" and ideas such as "Whites are taught not to recognize white privilege" and that, as this University of Dayton site informs, white persons have a "special freedom or immunity from some [liabilities or burdens] to which non-white persons are subject[.]"

There is also something called "The White Privilege Conference" and a website devoted to it (I actually had to log on to make sure it wasn't a spoof site, but truth is stranger -- and stupider -- than fiction). And American Thinker recently wrote about an event called "Erasing White Privilege," during which whites sat around in a room confessing their collective oppressor sins while "people of color" discharged rage, "yelling at them" and "preaching." Ain't Obama's post-racial America grand?

Of course, I don't imagine there are many plumbers, supermarket workers, or forklift operators at such meetings -- and not just because they actually have to work. It's also because they know something:

White privilege is a myth.

Let's look at the facts. Because of the fashionable discrimination known as affirmative action, whites (males especially) are often untouchables in the job market. And examples are legion. Talk-show host Michael Savage has often mentioned that after he earned his Ph.D., he had trouble finding a job in his chosen field and was told in so many words that "white men need not apply."

I could also mention a junior-high-school friend of mine whose test score was too low to qualify for the specialty high school I attended and the black student who gained admission with the exact same score. Or read this essay by Professor Louis Pojman, who cites the case of a brilliant Ph.D. philosopher who was denied a tenure-track position because the university in question had to hire a "woman or a Black." Then there is the Dayton, OH police department, which recently discarded its recruit exam and the scores of 748 people who passed it because not doing so would have resulted in too many whites being hired.

And there is social discrimination as well. While black comedians can use derogatory terms for whites such as "cracker," white comedians who use corresponding anti-black racial epithets risk career destruction. A racial slur isn't even necessary for a white person to incur the thought police's wrath. Sportscaster Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder lost his job in the 1980s for, while tipsy at a restaurant, offering an unsophisticatedly stated opinion as to why blacks are great athletes.

Even more ridiculous, Washington, DC mayoral staffer David Howard was pilloried and had to resign his position (he was later rehired) for using the word "niggardly," which is of Scandinavian origin and means "cheap," during a staff meeting. Golf commentator Kelly Tilghman was suspended for two weeks for innocently using the term "lynch" when describing what young players might have to do to beat Tiger Woods. And university student Keith John Sampson was charged with "racial harassment" for reading a book about the Ku Klux Klan in the presence of black colleagues. It didn't matter that it was an anti-KKK book.

There is also a trove of government programs designed to aid minorities -- such as those geared toward minority-owned businesses -- but no corresponding help for whites. And, as whistleblowers recently revealed, our Department of Justice has long been ignoring voting-rights cases when the victims have been white.

This is where the white-privilege propagandists may say, "But, wait, whites are wealthier than other racial groups and occupy most positions of power and prestige. Why do you think that is?!" This is the same reasoning leftists use when claiming that the large number of blacks in prison proves discrimination in the criminal/justice system. But let's see how valid this circumstantial argument really is.

The median income of Jewish Americans is approximately twice that of their non-Jewish countrymen. Additionally, while only about 40 percent of high-school graduates attend college, the rate among Jews is 85 percent. Jews also occupy positions of power at a rate greatly in excess of their two percent of the population. Yet should we speak of "Jewish privilege"? It would be more instructive to note a secret of Jewish people's success: They place great emphasis on education and workplace achievement.

And what about blacks' dominance in mainstream sports? Wouldn't it be ridiculous to talk about "black athletic privilege"?

Group-specific success isn't just an American phenomenon, either. As Professor Walter Williams wrote:

"[D]uring the 1960s, the Chinese minority in Malaysia received more university degrees than the Malay majority - including 400 engineering degrees compared with four for the Malays, even though Malays dominate the country politically. In Brazil's state of Sao Paulo, more than two-thirds of the potatoes and 90 percent of the tomatoes produced were produced by people of Japanese ancestry."

So while we could prattle on about Chinese privilege in Malaysia or those privileged Japanese boys from Brazil, it would be wiser to accept a simple truth: There is simply no evidence that all groups can succeed equally in every endeavor.

And this brings us to the real prejudice at work here. Whether it's Jewish Nobel Prize-winners, blacks in the athletic arena, or something else, we generally give credit where it is due.

Except when the relatively successful group is white people. Then they are guilty -- of discrimination, oppression, and victimization -- and will never be proven innocent. Their success just must have come at the expense of others, no matter what the facts say.

As for oppression, what is the endgame here? Many foreign nations have enacted hate-speech laws predicated on the idea that expressing negative sentiments, true or not, about a group can ultimately lead to its persecution. Well, another privilege whites don't have is a dispensation from the laws of man's nature. And when they are constantly and unfairly maligned as deserving not their successes but only contempt for being the source of the world's woes, it's not hard to figure out what the consequence will be.

SOURCE




Men allege sexual discrimination at Swedish police academy

Dozens of men have filed sexual discrimination complaints with Sweden's Equality Ombudsman (DO), after being denied admission to Sweden's National Police Academy.

The ombudsman has received around 80 complaints from men alleging they weren't admitted to police training programmes because of their gender.

The complaints come on the heels of an initiative by the Centre for Justice (Centrum för rättvisa) examining suspicions that police academy recruiting efforts put male applicants at a disadvantage relative to female applicants.

According to the Centre, there may be "thousands" of cases of sexual discrimination.

In its analysis, the Centre found that, for several years in a row the police academies have admitted the same number of men as women, despite the fact that fewer than 40 percent of applicants were women and that they generally performed worse on the language and physical parts of admissions tests.

"Men have had a much more difficult time than women getting in to the final interviews and have therefore had a much harder time gaining a spot in the programmes," Clarence Crafoord, head of the Centre for Justice, said in a statement.

"There is much to suggest that illegal discrimination occurs widely when it comes to admission to National Police Academy."

The men want the ombudsman to look into whether or not it's legal to deny male applicants a spot to train to become a police officer in favour of female applicants, even if the men outperform women on entrance tests.

"If they don't have the right to make that choice, it's really wrong," Mats Hedin, who was denied a spot at a police education programme at Linné University, told TV4.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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Examining political correctness around the world and its stifling of liberty and sense. Chronicling a slowly developing dictatorship


BIO for John Ray


Sarah Palin is undoubtedly the most politically incorrect person in American public life so she will be celebrated on this blog


I record on this blog many examples of negligent, inefficient and reprehensible behaviour on the part of British police. After 13 years of Labour party rule they have become highly politicized, with values that reflect the demands made on them by the political Left rather than than what the community expects of them. They have become lazy and cowardly and avoid dealing with real crime wherever possible -- preferring instead to harass normal decent people for minor infractions -- particularly offences against political correctness. They are an excellent example of the destruction that can be brought about by Leftist meddling.


I also record on this blog much social worker evil -- particularly British social worker evil. The evil is neither negligent nor random. It follows exactly the pattern you would expect from the Marxist-oriented indoctrination they get in social work school -- where the middle class is seen as the enemy and the underclass is seen as virtuous. So social workers are lightning fast to take chidren away from normal decent parents on the basis of of minor or imaginary infractions while turning a blind eye to gross child abuse by the underclass


Gender is a property of words, not of people. Using it otherwise is just another politically correct distortion -- though not as pernicious as calling racial discrimination "Affirmative action"


Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!


Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.


Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."


The Supreme Court of the United States is now and always has been a judicial abomination. Its guiding principles have always been political rather than judicial. It is not as political as Stalin's courts but its respect for the constitution is little better. Some recent abuses: The "equal treatment" provision of the 14th amendment was specifically written to outlaw racial discrimination yet the court has allowed various forms of "affirmative action" for decades -- when all such policies should have been completely stuck down immediately. The 2nd. amendment says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed yet gun control laws infringe it in every State in the union. The 1st amedment provides that speech shall be freely exercised yet the court has upheld various restrictions on the financing and display of political advertising. The court has found a right to abortion in the constitution when the word abortion is not even mentioned there. The court invents rights that do not exist and denies rights that do.


Consider two "jokes" below:

Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?

A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"

Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:

Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?

A. They are both religious fundamentalists"

The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".


One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.


It is widely agreed (with mainly Lesbians dissenting) that boys need their fathers. What needs much wider recognition is that girls need their fathers too. The relationship between a "Daddy's girl" and her father is perhaps the most beautiful human relationship there is. It can help give the girl concerned inner strength for the rest of her life.


The love of bureaucracy is very Leftist and hence "correct". Who said this? "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything". It was V.I. Lenin


On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Germaine Greer is a stupid old Harpy who is notable only for the depth and extent of her hatreds