Some socialist policing to inspire you

After 12 years of Leftist government, Britain's police no longer care about ordinary crime but if you call a homosexual something derogatory, you are sure to get a visit. The Australian State where I live has also been Left-run for a long time (since 1989 with one brief interruption) and they are even worse than the police in the story below. The Queensland police refused to take any interest when I handed them an ID card dropped by a person who had stolen my car. No "lack of evidence" excuse there. Their excuse was that the thief had "No form" (no criminal record). One wonders how anybody ever gets any "form" in that case. I am very familiar with the complete lack of police interest in crime reported by the woman below

A family have criticised a police force which claimed it could not investigate a theft at their home - even though they live just 70 yards from the local police station. Paula and David Whitfield, who works as a carer, were confident local officers would investigate after a pony cart, worth £500, was stolen from outside their house. But after reporting the theft and told not to disturb any potential evidence the couple waited in vain for officers to come round, take a statement and check for fingerprints.

Four days after the Whitfields' reported the crime they were stunned to get a letter from police saying they had closed the case. Exasperated Mrs Whitfield, 38, said: 'I couldn't believe they were disregarding a crime which happened on their own doorstep. 'We live so close to the police station that we can even hear the cell doors. Officers going to and from the station actually walk past our house. 'What's the point of them being there if they don't do their jobs?'

The letter from Hampshire Police said they had 'recorded' the theft at the Whitfields' home in the heart of New Forest. It added: 'Unfortunately we are unable to take any action. 'This is because there is not enough evidence available at this stage to make a case for prosecution and so your case has been closed.'

Mrs Whitfield rang police to complain when she received the letter on Saturday and was told an officer would visit. But when she had still not heard anything by Tuesday evening she walked around the corner to the police station but was told the relevant officer was in a meeting. Eventually Mrs Whitfield received a call from the officer but said she was still given no assurance that the theft of the cart would be properly investigated. She said: 'I got the impression from her attitude that she did not think it was important, that they would not trace the cart and that it would just be a waste of police time. 'A crime has happened in their own back yard and their attitude has been an absolute joke.'

Hampshire police have now said the letter was sent 'in error' and promised the crime would be investigated. However, their belated response has failed to impress the mother of four who plans to make a formal complaint to Hampshire police. She said: ''Some scenes of crime officers have been round but they say they only managed to get a partial fingerprint. 'That's hardly surprising because they finally came more than a week after the theft and it's rained a couple of times since then. 'They know they've mucked up and are attempting to cover their tracks. 'I'm 100 per cent convinced they've only decided to investigate the theft because the media have got involved. 'It makes me think I should try to investigate matters myself in future.'

Mrs Whitfield and her husband have abandoned any hope of being reunited with the cart, which they used to break in New Forest ponies. Despite being chained up it was stolen from a small garden beside their semi-detached house where their son Mitchell, 15, had spent several months rebuilding it. A police spokesman has since admitted the letter had been generated too early and sent in error. He said: 'When the crime was reported there weren't many lines of inquiry because the victims didn't see or hear anything. The theft will be investigated.'

Asked why police did not visit the couple the spokesman said the personnel involved did not work at that particular police station and had no way of knowing the Whitfields lived so close to the building. Chief Inspector Gary Cooper said: 'It is important to note that all incidents reported to police are dealt with in accordance with a grading system. 'Proximity to a police station does not qualify anyone for a preferential service. 'Upon receiving reports of the theft of a pony cart from an address in Lyndhurst, several unsuccessful attempts were made to re-contact the owners by telephone.'

SOURCE



Team of Researchers Blames Children's Films for Perpetuating "Heteronormativity"

Errr... How can I put this? Heterosexuality IS normal. Only a tiny minority are deviant from that

Researchers at the University of Michigan have concluded that the love stories told in classic Disney and other G-rated children's films - such as the Little Mermaid - are partially to blame for the pervasiveness of what they label "heteronormativity."

"Despite the assumption that children's media are free of sexual content, our analyses suggest that these media depict a rich and pervasive heterosexual landscape," wrote researchers Emily Kazyak and Karin Martin, in a report published in the latest issue of the Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) publication Gender & Society.

Kazyak and Martin said they studied the role of heterosexual relationships in several of the highest-grossing G-rated films between 1990-2005. The results, say the researchers, illustrate two ways that the children's films "construct heterosexuality": through "depictions of hetero-romantic love as exceptional, powerful, transformative, and magical," and "depictions of interactions between gendered bodies in which the sexiness of feminine characters is subjected to the gaze of masculine characters."

"Characters in love are surrounded by music, flowers, candles, magic, fire, balloons, fancy dresses, dim lights, dancing and elaborate dinners," the researchers observed. "Fireflies, butterflies, sunsets, wind and the beauty and power of nature often provide the setting for - and a link to the naturalness of - hetero-romantic love."

The SWS press release on the research blamed what they called the "old ideals" of romantic relationships, specifically those found the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, which in many instances inspired the films' storylines, for "such heavily gendered depictions and glorified portrayals of heterosexual relationships."

The team says the results point to heterosexuality achieving a "taken-for-granted status" "because hetero-romance is depicted as powerful." "Both ordinary and exceptional constructions of heterosexuality work to normalize its status because it becomes difficult to imagine anything other than this form of social relationship or anyone outside of these bonds," they concluded. "These films provide powerful portraits of a multifaceted and pervasive heterosexuality that likely facilitates the reproduction of heteronormativity."

The SWS press release concluded: "President Obama may have declared June to be Gay Pride Month, but entertainment for children therefore continues to perpetuate a less inclusive message, leaving those outside its confines with little to build their own dreams of happily ever after."

Sexuality expert Dr. Judith Reisman told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) yesterday that the "politically correct" study reveals "the growing dominance of Heterophobia within academia and the spread of heterophobes among female professionals."

"Now, if the Ladies of the Sociology Society think pornography is becoming the heteronorm and that Disney is contributing to that form of what is really Heterophobia, they might have an argument," Reisman noted. "However, the Ladies of the Sociology Society appear to favor Homoerotic child propaganda, as the current academic party line dictates."

SOURCE



Why women need a high-income husband

(Such as a plumber, electrician or a government "consultant")

The latest edition of the Jean Hailes Foundation magazine came out yesterday and it has a really good article, called “Great Expectations”, dealing with all the ridiculous stuff that women push themselves to achieve and which ultimately don’t matter at all. (I hope that sentence makes sense). Their resident psychologist, Mandy Deeks, answered some “typical” questions, and one in particular struck a chord with me:

“Question: Trying to work and raise a family is pushing me to breaking point! At work I feel guilty for not being with my children, and by the time I get home, I’m so drained that I don’t have the energy to interact with the kids. Who are these women who ‘have-it-all’? Answer : Many women try to ‘have-it-all’ but end up feeling torn and not good enough. Ask yourself these questions:

• Do I have realistic expectations of myself?

• What is important to me? (e.g. relationships, family, career)

• What values are important to me? What kind of mother, partner, worker or friend do I want to be?

• How do I want to look after my health?

Answering these questions can help give you some direction and highlight where you may need to make changes.”

Whilst I’m lucky enough now to work from a home base, and largely dictate the hours that I work to fit around school/young child requirements (which, translated, means that I do as much work as ever but now do a fair portion of it in the early am hours), this time last year I was working a 9 – 5 (plus some evenings) office-based role and trying desperately to juggle work commitments around daycare opening and closing times. All the while I was wondering whether my three children were better off being emotionally scarred from days spent with non-family carers, or better off being denied toys, travel and the education experience of childcare. Despite being a financial planner that was one equation that I just couldn’t perfectly solve.

Giving up work to look after the kids sounds wonderful as a concept, but for many of us it isn’t financially practical. Even if it is financially achievable by selling the house or taking no holidays for the next ten years, it’s often still not attractive - swapping work stress for financial stress doesn’t necessarily make us happier. But then getting home late at night, tired and snappy isn’t a perfect outcome either. Talk about neverending parental guilt!

Personally, I’ve sacrificed some income to work part-time, figuring that that will give my kids the best of both worlds.

SOURCE



The Malice of Mondoweiss

Argument by example has no status in science or logic -- except as an illustration of an already clearly established generalization. You can find examples to "prove" just about anything you like. But such constraints don't bother Leftist agitators. Their motivation is hate and hate is blind to logic

On June 4, Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana released on the Internet, via Mondoweiss and The Huffington Post, their now infamous video “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem.” The video presented a visual compendium of college-age, drunken Jews, in restaurants and on the street, spewing undeniably and phenomenally ignorant, ugly, and racist comments about Barack Obama. All of the young men and women shown ought now be committed to spending a healthy measure of their coming adulthoods to overcoming the shame of their outing as dimwitted bigots.

The video received mostly negative attention, though it was roundly praised by the Israel-hating commenting community at the Mondoweiss blog. Some people tried to account for the awful behavior by offering the bogus, distracting excuse for the students that they were drunk. Serious criticisms of the video itself, however, were that the young people in the video could hardly be considered representative, of anything – while the clear intent, later expressly confirmed both by Blumenthal and Mondoweiss’s co-bloggers, Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz , was that it did, indeed, represent something characteristic – and that the video seemed to be intending a criticism of Israel (the raison d’etre of Mondoweiss) while the students were all, in fact, not Israelis, but American Jews.

The video’s content is so ugly and pathetic, the rationale for it so wrongheaded and dishonest, that within hours Huffington Post removed it from the site. Reported Blumenthal later about the decision: “I don’t see that it has any real news value,” the administrator told me. “For me it only proves that one can find drunk people willing to say just about anything. Especially drunk, moronic people.” YouTube followed suit.

A couple of days later, Blumenthal justified himself on Mondoweiss, declaring himself to have been “censored” by Huffington. This kind of puerile and disingenuous posturing is typical of all the actors involved. They all do much serious chest puffing about being “journalists,” but still Blumenthal feigns that a publisher’s choice not, in fact, to publish something, or its decision to correct a publishing error, is something other than editorial judgment at work – the kind of judgment by which journalists and other writers are regularly denied publication. No legal authority blocked public access to the video. Blumenthal is free to contract with whoever is willing to show his work. The video is visible in snippets, still, all over the Internet. The rapper 50 Cent posted it on his website, where it reaped the predictable whirlwind of counter racist scatology back. But characterizing Huffington’s decision as “censorship” – like a high school student newspaper editor denied the subversive wish to publish this week’s issue in virtual-cow-shit Smell-O-Vision – is representative of the hysterical vocabulary and devious propagandizing of Blumenthal, Weiss, and Horowitz.

All throughout Blumenthal’s defense of himself, and that offered by Weiss and Horowitz four days later, the low, dishonest confusion of categories continues. Israeli is elided into Zionist, Zionist into American Jew supportive of Israel’s existence, that category into American Jew who attends Yeshiva, into one who makes aliyah to Israel, into one of the dopes in the video. Blumenthal wants to undermine the moral legitimacy of Israel and he attempts it by substituting American Jewish students on drunken holiday. The intellectual rigor is awe inspiring, the journalistic method beyond reproach. Read Israeli blogger Yaacov Lozowick’s description of the area where the video was shot.

Said Blumenthal, “I do not and have never claimed that the characters that appeared in my video were representative of general public opinion in Israel. They reflect only a slice of reality, which is reality nonetheless.”

One can never be sure whether the arguments are consciously deceitful or the product of remarkably unconscious prejudice – or if these guys aren’t, one must say, really, very smart. The whole intent of the video is to stain the Israeli nation, and beyond that the Zionist belief in the need and justness of a Jewish state that is the basis of an Israeli nation. Of course, Blumenthal is claiming representativeness. The video is otherwise purposeless. And he does it by substituting some American Jews for Israel and never understands that the difference matters. The “slice of reality” – which isn’t, anyway, by that virtue alone significant – is deceptive. Blumenthal cannot see this. All of the cultural, sociological, and political distinctions are meaningless. The students are all Zionists. Enough said.

The obvious reality, historically demonstrated far more forcefully than Blumenthal’s petty propagandistic distortions, is that if one sought it out, one could find the same vile bigotry voiced by (non-Jewish) whites against blacks, French and Dutch against Algerians and Muslims, Italians against Albanians – oh, dear, need I go on? And dare I say – Palestinians against Jews? (One small example, via Jeffrey Goldberg, from the late Nizar Rayyan: “I asked him if he believed, as some Hamas theologians do [and certainly as many Hezbollah leaders do] that Jews are the ‘sons of pigs and apes.’”)

What we see in the video are, according to Blumenthal, “the painful consequences of prolonged Zionist indoctrination.” (Indoctrination – that’s a good loaded word. Nothing, I’m sure, that Blumenthal would imagine going on anywhere in Palestinian schools, let’s say. Nothing, theologically, I don’t know, about, say – pigs and apes?) It is all “the disturbing spectacle of young Jews behaving like fascist soccer hooligans in the heart of the capitol of Israel and the spiritual home of the Jewish people,” where “vitriolic levels of racism are able to flow through the streets of Jerusalem like sewage” and “the grandsons of Holocaust survivors feel compelled to offer the Shoah as justification to behave like fascist street thugs.”

Gracious. Where to begin when a journalist uses words so carelessly, so maliciously? The increasingly ubiquitous “fascist” we can take here as merely a synonym for the then redundant “thugs,” which I guess is a little weightier in menace than “hooligans,” though aren’t those “soccer hooligans” usually prone to riot and violence? Don’t believe I saw any behavior like that anywhere in the video. And the racism flows “through the streets of Jerusalem like sewage.” (straight from the United States, actually, but shh!) All this occurring before the delicate, we know, Jewish nationalistic and religious sensibilities of Blumenthal, in the – hear the deflation of the poor man’s will – “heart of the capitol of Israel and the spiritual home of the Jewish people.”

Oy, what a thespian. And fraud. Think Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman.

Much 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, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. 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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