Tuesday, May 13, 2014



FARAGE: 'DO NOT EVER CALL US A RACIST PARTY'

UKIP wants Britain out of the EU and is also critical of immigration

The media is already trying to downplay it: last night's UKIP rally in London was raucous, glorious, and dare I say... electric. Even a lot of the hecklers in the room left without saying a word – such was the impact. UKIP promised a political earthquake in the UK on May 22nd. It delivered an earthquake in London last night.

Speaking to a capacity crowd at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, speaker after speaker took the main UKIP platform tonight to issue a plea. It was simple, but it wasn't patronising. It was specific, but it wasn't quota-orientated. Tonight, UKIP was out to prove that it wasn't a racist party.

The audience, it must be reported, was still predominantly white, and older. But as Nigel Farage said during his speech, today was UKIP's Clause Four moment, as in amongst the rows of expected UKIP supporters were dotted many younger faces, many more brown faces, black faces, female faces. The 2011 census showed that London was 60 percent white, 18 percent Asian, 13 percent Black, 5 percent mixed, and 3 percent 'other'. Last night's London audience was not far away from being perfectly that.

And Farage was not even the star of the show, not by a long shot. He joked himself about feeling like the supporting act.

Steven Wolfe, Suzanne Evans, Amjad Bashir, the house-rocking former boxer Winston McKenzie, and more. These crowd-pleasers of ethnic extraction grabbed the last remaining weapon of UKIP's opponents and proceeded to do with it what Average Joe's did to Globo-Gym in the cult classic film Dodgeball: smack them around.

Lulled into a false sense of security over its one and only attack line life, the political and media establishments have been digging up stories for weeks on UKIP candidates. Some have some terrible things, others have inadvertently taken the opposition bait. Last night's line-up of speakers were tasked with one job: crush the myth.

In the beginning there was Steven Wolfe, who after being heckled by protestors issued a warning about how such people, mainly from the Socialist Worker Party, called him a "fake" and a "racist". He responded emotionally telling the crowd how he himself was "called a n***er at the age of 5 years old". Wolfe did not censor his own comments to the room, and was met with applause for his handling of the situation.

Paula McQueen, a London-born grandmother of Jewish and Black extraction told the crowd, "We are libertarians, we believe in individual freedom, and we want the government to interfere less in people's lives."

Evans quoted Thatcher to great cheers from the crowd: “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

But the real star of the show was Winston McKenzie, the former champion boxer who took to the stage and almost shouted his way through an entire 10 minute speech. He had the crowd in hysterics with his jokes, and wolf-whistling at his key line: "I'm black and I'm proud and I shout it out loud!"

"Why is it only at election time that we get this [racist] nonsense?"

McKenzie tore into David Cameron, Ed Miliband, and Nick Clegg, "The three little pigs... are running scared!"

"I'm tired of seeing these tragedies", McKenzie said, holding up a newspaper front page showing one of London's latest victims of knife crime – a young boy. "Didn't [Boris] Johnson say knife crime and gun crime were his priorities?"

Farage was even somewhat of an after thought considering the gravitas of the earlier speakers. He delivered his stump speech, crediting Nick Clegg with UKIP's ascendency, and blaming "a bunch of college kids... who have never done a day's work in their lives" for running and ruining the country.

"Huge sections in the mainstream media defended their friends in the so-called 'main parties' or as we prefer to call them, the legacy parties.

"I don't care what you call us," he said, "You can call us right wing, left wing, you can call us small-minded, I don't care what you call us. But from this moment on, please, do not ever call us a racist party. We are not a racist party".

Outside the event, protesters from the Socialist Worker Party and other hard-Left organisations gathered in their dozens, shouting, "UKIP, No Way! Immigrants, here to stay!" Various protesters abused those queuing to get into the UKIP event, with one man calling this reporter, "a faggot" for wearing a pink shirt

SOURCE





Spain going Fascist again?

Parents take note: Spain is cracking down on its sulky teenagers.

And not before time, some argue.

Under a draft bill approved in the Spanish Parliament, under 18s will be legally obliged to do chores and be 'respectful'.

If it is passed, children in the country will have to help out with the housework 'in accordance with their age and regardless of their gender'.

They will also have to 'participate in family life' and respect 'their parents and siblings', Spain's ABC newspaper reported.

The Child Protection Bill children would also have to 'respect school rules' and 'study as required'.  More generally these children 'will have to maintain a positive attitude about learning'.

At the same time, will also have to 'respect their teachers and other staff at education teachers', as well as their fellow students.

The draft law doesn't set out penalties for children who fail to fulfill these requirements, but marks a new shift in the legislation with its focus on the responsibilities of children.

SOURCE





Can you still speak your mind in today's America?

 John Stossel

Last week, when the NBA banned racist team owner Donald Sterling, some said: "What about free speech? Can't a guy say what he thinks anymore?"

The answer: yes, you can. But the free market may punish you. In America today, the market punishes racists aggressively.

This punishment is not "censorship." Censorship is something only governments can do. Writers complain that editors censor what they write. But that's not censorship; that's editing.

Fox is free to fire me if they don't like what I say. That's the market in action, reflecting preferences of owners and customers.
It's fine if the NBA -- or any private group -- wants to censor speech on its own property. People who attend games or work for the NBA agreed to abide by its rules. Likewise, Fox is free to fire me if they don't like what I say. That's the market in action, reflecting preferences of owners and customers.

But it's important that government not have the power to silence us. We have lots of companies, colleges and sports leagues. If one orders us to "shut up," we can go somewhere else.

But there is only one government, and it can take our money and our freedom. All a business can do is refuse to do business with me, causing me to work with someone else. Government can forbid me to do business with anyone at all.

Of course, government never admits it's doing harm. Around the world, when government gets into the censorship business, it claims to be protecting the public. But by punishing those who criticize politicians, it's protecting itself.

That's why it's great the Founders gave America the First Amendment, a ban on government "abridging the freedom of speech."

But I wonder if today's young lawyers would approve the First Amendment if it were up for ratification now.

There is a new commandment at colleges today: "Thou shalt not hurt others with words."

Students are told not to offend. At Wake Forest University, for instance, students cannot post any flyers or messages deemed "racist, sexist, profane or derogatory."

The goal is noble: create a kinder environment. But who gets to decide how much "hurt" is permissible? Recently, a fourth-grade teacher in North Carolina was ordered to attend sensitivity training after teaching students the word "niggardly." When the power to censor lies with the people most easily offended, censorship never stops.

A few years ago, I asked law students at Seton Hall University if there should be restrictions to the First Amendment. Many were eager to ban "hate speech."

"No value comes out of hate speech," said a future lawyer. "We need to regulate flag burning ... and blasphemy," said another. One student wanted to ban political speech by corporations, and another was comfortable imprisoning people who make hunting videos.

Only when I pulled out a copy of the Bill of Rights and slowly wrote in their "exceptions" did one student finally say, "We went too far!"

So does free speech mean that we must endure hateful speech in the public square? No.

I'll fight it by publicly denouncing it, speaking against it, boycotting the speaker. That's what the NBA's employees and customers demanded, and quickly got.

What convinced me that almost all speech should be legal was the book "Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought" by Jonathan Rauch. He explains how knowledge increases through arguments.

Rauch is gay. In an updated afterward to his book, he points out how quickly the world has changed for people like him. Twenty years ago, "gay Americans were forbidden to work for government, to obtain security clearances, serve in the military ... arrested for making love, even in their own homes ... beaten and killed on the streets, entrapped and arrested by police for sport."

This changed in just two decades, he says, because there was open debate. Gay people "had no real political power, only the force of our arguments. But in a society where free exchange is the rule, that was enough."

Fight bigotry with more speech.

SOURCE





How Hawaii (Legally) Discriminates Against Non-Native Hawaiians

Some senators are trying to push through a bill that would re-authorize the discriminatory housing policies implemented in Hawaii by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which provides special benefits for “Native Hawaiians.”  Native Hawaiians are defined as “any descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778.” According to the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands’ website, this means “you must have a blood quantum of at least 50 percent Hawaiian.”

S.1352 has a seemingly innocuous provision, Section 503, which simply re-authorizes the Native Hawaiian Home-Ownership Act through 2018.  You have to dig into the existing federal law to find out that, under 25 U.S.C. §4223(d), Hawaii is exempt from the nondiscrimination requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act when it is distributing federal housing funds made available by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to “Native Hawaiians” or “a Native Hawaiian family.”

This exemption means the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands can discriminate in favor of “Native Hawaiians” and a “Native Hawaiian family” and against others such as whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians.  In other words, the federal government is authorizing Hawaii (and providing it with taxpayer funds) to engage in blatant discrimination by providing government benefits for some of its residents and denying federally funded benefits to others based solely on their ancestry and “blood quantum.”

The Equal Protection Clause of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment specifically was intended to stop laws that singled out Americans based on ancestry and blood quantum.  Yet Hawaii, with the approval of the federal government, has engaged in such reprehensible conduct for years.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a highly critical report in 2005 saying that Hawaii was “in a league by itself” when it comes to officially sanctioned discriminatory conduct. As the Commission pointed out, Hawaii administers a huge public trust worth billions of dollars that provides “benefits exclusively for ethnic Hawaiians.”  In discussing the proposed Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005 (S.147), the commission recommended against “any other legislation that would discriminate on the basis of race or national origin and further subdivide the American people into discrete subgroups accorded varying degrees of privilege.”

S.1352 would re-authorize the Native Hawaiian Home-Ownership Act for another four years, specifically approving Hawaii’s official discrimination and exempting it from the requirements of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. No federal funds of any kind should be distributed in a manner that directly authorizes discriminatory conduct against American citizens based on their ancestry, race, or “blood quantum,” an appalling legal concept that was used by slave-owning Southern states prior to the Civil War to determine the legal rights (or lack of rights) of its residents.

As we mark the 50th anniversary this year of the Civil Rights Act, nothing could be a greater betrayal of that law than to revoke its protections for many residents of Hawaii and exempt Hawaii’s state government from its mandate that all Americans be treated equally under the law.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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