Thursday, April 02, 2015



Multiculturalist caught on CCTV striking his partner 15 times 'like a human punchbag' in front of their young children
 



Jason Edwards, 36, cornered his partner in the lift at Westfield Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, before launching an assault on her.

The attack, which lasted around two minutes, took place in front of the victim’s three children, who are all under the age of 13.

When the lift doors opened, Edwards was greeted by a security guard but managed to flee the scene before police arrived.

The victim, who has not been named but is from north west London, did not attend hospital following the attack and refused to press charges or inform the police of her partner’s identity.

However, an investigation was launched by detectives at the Community Safety Unit in Hammersmith and Fulham and Edwards was tracked down days later on February 16.

He admitted assault occasioning actual bodily harm at magistrates’ court the following day and has now been jailed for two years at Isleworth Crown Court, Greater London.

Following his sentencing, detective sergeant Damian Ash, of the Metropolitan Police, said: ‘Shockingly, Edward’s attack has been compared to a boxer relentlessly cornering and punching his opponent on the ropes.

‘For nearly two minutes he struck his partner as if she was a human punch bag in front of her three children who were helpless to stop it.

‘Despite reluctance from the victim in revealing the identity of her partner and attacker, we were able to progress the investigation quickly using the CCTV and intelligence available to us’

He added: ‘This case is testimony to our commitment in bringing violent offenders to justice, whatever the circumstances are, even when there is no victim statement provided at court.’

SOURCE






Female venture capitalist loses Silicon Valley sex discrimination case

Jury says gender was not a substantial factor in Kleiner Perkins' decision not to promote Ellen Pao, in case that has gripped Silicon Valley

A female venture capitalist has lost a high-profile sex discrimination case that shined a spotlight on the "boys' club culture" of Silicon Valley.

Ellen Pao, who worked as a junior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, had accused her former employer of passing her over for the position of senior partner while her male colleagues were promoted.

After more than two days of deliberation, the jury of six women and six men on Friday found that Kleiner Perkins had not acted unfairly or unlawfully and that gender had not played a part in the company's decision not to promote her.

Ms Pao said she filed the case as she "wanted something to change" in the industry, where sexism has become so pervasive it has been likened to the Wall Street of the 1980s.

The 45-year-old told the San Francisco Superior Court how she was excluded from an all-male dinner with Al Gore, former US vice president, and felt “very uncomfortable” hearing male guests of the firm talking about pornography on a private jet.

She was given menial tasks to do that were below her pay grade, “in order to embarrass her”, her lawyers had argued.

She also testified that one male partner was “relentless” in his pursuit of her and cut her out of email chains and meetings when she ended the affair upon discovering he was married.

After the verdict, Ms Pao told the courthouse that people around the world had reached out to her and told her that they had stories similar to her own.  "If I've helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it," she said.

The San Francisco Chronicle too was hopeful the case would spur change, writing in an op-ed: “Even in defeat, Pao’s courage in challenging the underside of Silicon Valley culture could help pave the way for a more enlightened era."

Ms Pao, a small-framed woman of 5'4", took to the stand in the last week of the month-long trial, cross-examined by the razor-tongued defence lawyer Lynne Hermle, and watched over by senior Kleiner Perkins management staff who had taken up most of the front-row seats.

She listened as she was told by one senior partner that it was “just not in her genetic makeup” to be an investor, while others accused her of being a liar, a money-grabber and a “chronic complainer”.

Her lawyer, Alan Exelrod, disagreed with their assessment. “Ms Pao generated more revenue for Kleiner Perkins than any of the men who were promoted in 2012,” he said in his closing arguments. “As of the decision to promote in 2012, Ellen Pao drove the returns. The men received the promotions.  "They ran Kleiner Perkins like a boys’ club," Mr Exelrod concluded.

Lynne Hermle, the lead lawyer for Kleiner Perkins, told jurors however that Ms Pao was never qualified, or cut out, to be a general partner in its funds.

Venture capital "is a very tough profession,” she said. “Few people do it, few people do it very well and very few people do it long term.”

Despite having won, the storied firm, which was an early investor in Google, Amazon and AOL among others, will be smarting from the very public scrutiny that could well harm the reputation it has spent the last 40 years building.

The case has gripped Silicon Valley - in part because of its rare insight into the cloak-and-dagger venture capital world, and in part due to the rarity of such gender discrimination cases making it this far in the legal system.

For the past four weeks, spectators and reporters alike have crowded into the small San Francisco courtroom to watch the David and Goliath battle play out. Even former Yahoo! president Sue Decker brought her daughter along to hear the case’s closing statements.

Ms Pao had become one of the only women in venture capital to publicly stand against the billionaire kingmakers of the startup world.

The loss will be felt by two other women who filed discrimination claims in recent weeks against Twitter and Facebook for their “tap-on the-shoulder” promotions practice they say favoured men.

The Pao lawsuit had also shined a light on the gross underrepresentation of women in the technology and investment sectors and had led some companies to re-examine their cultures and practices even before the verdict.

Freada Kapor Klein, a top diversity consultant, said she has recently been contacted by more than a dozen companies asking her how they can improve the environment for women.

“People understand that the issues raised in this trial are about company culture in general,” she said

SOURCE






AR: Senate panel backs “conscience protection” measure

 An effort to prevent Arkansas government from infringing on someone's religious beliefs was revived Tuesday, with a state Senate panel advancing a bill that critics have called a thinly veiled endorsement of discrimination against gays and lesbians.

The legislation approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee would ban state and local government from taking action that would burden someone's religious beliefs unless a "compelling governmental interest" is proven. The bill, if enacted, would strengthen any case of a person suing the government if that person could prove their religious beliefs were infringed upon. The Senate could take up the bill as soon as Wednesday.

The lawmaker behind the proposal said he didn't view the measure as anti-gay, and said it was aimed at giving Arkansans more protections for their religious beliefs and practices.

"It's pro-religion, the ability for someone to carry out their beliefs without the state bugging them about it," Republican Rep. Bob Ballinger of Hindsville told the panel. "That's what this is."

The legislation is patterned after the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 19 states have similar laws and several states are currently considering them.

The same measure stalled before the panel last month on a 3-3 vote after retail giant Wal-Mart said the proposal sent the wrong message about its home state and Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he had reservations about the bill. The panel advanced the measure Tuesday on a 5-3 vote, with Democratic Sen. David Burnett joining the committee's four Republicans in support.

"This is a shameful outcome for a shameful bill," Kendra Johnson, the state director of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. "The fight now turns to the full Senate, where all fair-minded Arkansans must stand together to halt this destructive legislation that undermines the core values of this state."

Democratic Sen. Linda Chesterfield of Little Rock, who voted against the measure, called it "terrible."

"There is something very, very wrong when you allow religion to be the excuse for discrimination," Chesterfield said after the vote. "That is exactly what we've allowed here to happen."

The bill is another setback for gay rights groups, a month after Hutchinson allowed separate legislation to become law that bans local governments from expanding anti-discrimination protections to include sexual orientation or gender identity.

Hutchinson had expressed concerns about that bill infringing on local control, but allowed it to become law without his signature — a move governors have used to express displeasure with legislation without prompting a veto fight with lawmakers. It takes a simple majority to override a governor's veto in Arkansas.

The governor has stopped short of saying whether he'd sign the "conscience protection" measure if it reaches his desk. On Tuesday he said he supported changes made aimed at addressing his concerns about unintended consequences.

"I will continue to monitor any additional changes and how this proceeds through the legislative process," he said in a statement released by his office.

SOURCE

UPDATE: The bill has been passed but was sent back for revision by Governor Asa Hutchinson. He appears to have been freaked by the attacks on the Indiana bill.





Freedom of Speech and Tanya Cohen

by Sean Gabb

I have been directed to this article, published today: "Australia Must Have Zero Tolerance for Online Hatred", by Tanya Cohen of something called The Australian Independent Media Network. It is a very long article, and I will begin my response by quoting the passages I find most objectionable.

1. “…it’s just common sense that freedom of speech doesn’t give anyone the right to offend, insult, humiliate, intimidate, vilify, incite hatred or violence, be impolite or uncivil, disrespect, oppose human rights, spread lies or misinformation, argue against the common good, or promote ideas which have no place in society. We all learned this in school, and it’s not something that’s even up for debate. Hate speech is not free speech….”

2. “…even right-wing libertarians were outraged that anyone would propose watering down laws against hate speech.”

3. “There are two sides to the free speech debate in Australia: the people who believe that all offensive or insulting speech should always be illegal (the vast majority of Australians), and the people who believe that only racial vilification or incitement to hatred should be illegal (the far-right, ultra-libertarian free speech fundamentalists).”

4. “You simply cannot call yourself a progressive in Australia unless you support the outlawing of all un-progressive speech. One of the most fundamental goals of the Australian progressive movement is ensuring that anyone who voices un-progressive ideas is aggressively prosecuted, and this is something that all Australian progressives firmly agree with.”

5. “What I propose is something called a Human Rights Online Act. This Act would not only make it a severe criminal offence on the federal level to publish, distribute, promote, or access hate speech online, but would also implement a federal Internet filtering system to protect Australians from being exposed to hate sites run out of the US. The Internet filter should block access to all hate sites, and anyone who tries to access any hate sites should be sent to gaol, much like people who access child pornography. In keeping with other human rights legislation in Australia – like the proposed Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill, which was unfortunately narrowly defeated by the efforts of the far-right – anyone accused of offending, insulting, humiliating, or intimidating other people should be required to prove their innocence or be declared guilty automatically, and this should also apply for anyone accused of publishing, distributing, promoting, or accessing online hatred. The principle of guilty until proven innocent is the only principle that really works when it comes to cracking down on hate speech….”

6. “Internet filtering should not just filter out hate speech. It should filter out anything that violates human rights and/or poses a danger to society. Our Australian Classification Board bans any film, video game, book, or other form of media if it offends against community standards, contains content harmful to society, or is demeaning to human dignity. If a book, film, or video game contains content that degrades human dignity, then it therefore constitutes a violation of human rights, since human dignity is a fundamental human right that all civilised governments are tasked with upholding.”

7. “All Australian websites should be required to register with the Australian Human Rights Commission in order to ensure strict compliance with human rights. If any websites contain content that opposes human rights, then they should be shut down immediately and their owners sent to gaol. In addition, all Australian websites should be required to promote human rights. Any website found to inadequately promote human rights should be shut down by the Australian Human Rights Commission, and the owner fined or sent to gaol.”


As I read through the article, I kept asking whether Miss Cohen really existed, or if this was a satire on the modern left. Quotation (4) – about banning anything “unprogressive” – does verge on the Swiftian. So does the indefinable but “fundamental” right to “dignity” that is given precedence over the traditional rights to freedom of speech and association and to the requirements of natural justice. Sadly, she does appear to exist, and this does appear to be an honest statement of what she believes.

This being so, you can take the quotations given above as part of her article’s refutation. Miss Cohen is calling for the censorship of any opinion that she and her friends find disagreeable. She wants to punish not only those who write and publish such things, but also those who read them. She believes in reversing the burden of proof, so that those accused of writing or publishing or reading shall be made to prove that they have not done as accused – to prove this out of their own resources against a prosecution with bottomless pockets and skilled lawyers. She also believes in licensing the media, so that disagreeable opinions will not be published.

There is nothing unusual about the substance of her demands. I first came across their like in the early 1980s, when I was at university. It struck me then as a scandalous misuse of words to make human rights of censorship and unlimited state power – me and the older lefties who had not caved in to the neo-Marxists. But that was then. We live today in a world captured and increasingly reshaped by Miss Cohen and her friends. All I find unusual now is the honesty of her demands. It may be that she really is a clever satirist. Or perhaps she is just stupid. But I am used to a more sophisticated defence of locking people away for their opinions, and without a fair trial.

I will deal with two of her specific claims. The first is that “right-wing libertarians” do not mind the banning of “hate speech.” The second is that “Hate speech is not free speech.”

I am undoubtedly a libertarian. I am probably a right-wing libertarian. I believe that people should, at the minimum, be free to say whatever they please about alleged matters of public fact. I am sceptical about the justice of the laws covering libel and confidentiality and copyright and official secrecy. But, so long as these are confined to achieving their traditionally stated ends, I will, for present purposes, leave them to one side. I will also leave aside photographic displays of sexual activity not limited to consenting adults. Yet, even at its minimal definition, the right to freedom of speech covers every class of utterance that Miss Cohen wants to censor. So far as libertarians, almost by definition, believe in freedom of speech, either she is mistaken about the meaning of libertarianism, or she is playing with the meaning of words.

I turn to her claim about the nature of “hate speech.” The term is designed to bring into mind ideas of inarticulate screams, or of simple orders to kill or to hurt. In fact, every act of “hate speech” I have seen punished or denounced has involved the same combination of propositions and inferences I see anywhere else.

Let us, for example, take these two cases:

1. Bearing in mind differences of population and wealth, the Great War was less destructive to England than the civil wars of the seventeenth century. Proportionately, fewer men were killed, and the economic costs were lower. Yet the physical effects of the civil wars drop out of view after 1660, and those of the Great War were a national obsession until 1939, and are now widely seen as the greatest single cause of our national decline. Therefore, anyone who accepts the consensus view of the Great War as a catastrophe is mistaking symptoms for causes. Whether or not going to war was an error, a fundamentally healthy nation could have shaken off the losses of the Somme and Passchendaele in a decade at most. That we did not indicates that there was already something wrong with us by 1914.

2. There are measurable differences between racial groups. Some of these are of intellectual capacity. Others are of propensity to crimes against life or property or both. Even otherwise, there are differences of outlook that show themselves in how the members of one group relate to each other and to members of other groups. These differences have been uncovered and confirmed by more than a century of research. They have also long been accepted as matters of common sense. Therefore, racially homogenous countries are well advised to keep out immigrants of other races. Where a country is already mixed, it makes sense to segregate each racial group so far as possible, and to govern each by different laws, or to apply the same laws with different effect to each group.

I give no opinion on the truth of these cases. The first I have just made up. The second I have distilled from my reading of various nationalist blogs and journals. Whether they are true is beside my present point. My point is that each case begins with factual claims, from which inferences are then drawn. If you disagree with either, it seems obvious to me that the proper mode of disagreement is to show that the factual claims are untrue, or that the inferences are not validly drawn. Calling in the police is at best unlikely to advance our understanding of the world.

I suppose Miss Cohen would argue that the first case, if accepted, will have no obvious effects on what is done in the present, but that the second, if accepted, will lead to ethnic cleansing or apartheid. She would infer from this that laws against advancing the second case are needed to stop a great evil from being committed.

I agree that, if we accept the racial nationalist case, difficult questions come onto the agenda. In the same way, however, if my gold crowns wear out this year, I shall not be able to afford a family holiday. The unpleasantness of the apodosis has no bearing on the truth of the protasis. Suppose the racial nationalists are right. Suppose that what they advocate is the lesser of evils in the long term. Or suppose that they are right in their factual claims, but that there are alternative and less alarming inferences to be drawn from these.  This would surely be worth knowing. I say that, once a case has been stated with any show of evidence, and certainly once it has gained any body of support, it needs to be contested in open debate, not silenced by the State.

Furthermore, where written arguments are concerned, readers are generally alone and have ample time to think before taking action. This must be considered a new intervening cause in any course that leads from the communication of ideas to actual violence. If Miss Cohen wanted laws against street agitators, she might have a case. Censoring the written word is plain suppression of debate.

The main focus of Miss Cohen’s article is on those who dissent from the present discourse on race and immigration. Looking at Quotation (6), though – “Internet filtering should not just filter out hate speech. It should filter out anything that violates human rights and/or poses a danger to society.” – we can see that she wants to shut down debate on every leftist claim. She would not allow any dissent on the nature and extent of climate change, or on what is happening in the Middle East – she is a pro-Palestinian, not that I think better or worse of her for this – or on how dangerous drinking and smoking are to health. Indeed, we seem to be at the beginning of a change in the consensus on diet and health. For about forty years, we have been told that fat is bad for us, and that we should eat a lot of carbohydrate. It may be that we are about to be told that fat is good for us, and that sugar is the main cause of obesity and diabetes. Had her proposed law been in place across the world, this debate would have been flattened by claims of “social danger.”

I could say more, but will not. I will conclude by suggesting that you should read Miss Cohen for yourself. You decide whether she is a satirist of genius, or an embarrassment to the modern left by virtue of her blundering honesty.

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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