Tuesday, October 18, 2016


The Social Media Thought Police

Policing thought is, unfortunately, one of the realities of social media. We’ve detailed the censorship and bias of Facebook, but it’s hardly alone. Recently, Twitter suspended University of Tennessee law professor and blogger extraordinaire Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit) over a “controversial” tweet about Black Lives Matter protesters. He was restored upon appeal, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. This week, Twitter also suspended the account of conservative activist James O'Keefe. This time, it has to do with guns.

O'Keefe had just captured former Sen. Russ Feingold on camera saying, “Well, there might be an executive order” on gun control. A major Hillary Clinton donor also said, “Hillary wants to shut it down. If we can get guns away from everyone in this country, she’ll close the loopholes, she’ll get rid of assault weapons, she will get rid of being able to buy you know, unlimited bullets, she’s gonna make all that stop.”

Think Twitter didn’t want to suppress that? Ostensibly, this is about photos or videos without the subject’s consent, but O'Keefe has a habit of breaking inconvenient stories.

Meanwhile, YouTube has gotten in on the anti-conservative act. Prager University, which was created by conservative radio host Dennis Prager and offers short educational videos on a variety of topics from a Judeo-Christian perspective, has charged that Google-owned YouTube has been censoring a number of its educational videos by classifying 21 of them as “restricted.” Video titles such as “Are the Police Racist?,” “What ISIS Wants,” “Did Bush Lie About Iraq?” and “What is the University Diversity Scam?” have landed under YouTube’s “restricted mode.”

YouTube will restrict videos if they contain inappropriate or objectionable adult and sexual content. In doing so, the ubiquitous video sharing website is making it particularly difficult for students to gain access to their videos as most schools prevent students from accessing restricted content. Elisha Krauss, director of outreach at PragerU, said, “Based on our review of YouTube’s policies and user guidelines, none of our videos meet the requirements of being inappropriate, sexually explicit, or hate speech.”

For several months PragerU has communicated with YouTube over removing the “restricted mode” status from the videos to no avail. In fact, the number of PragerU videos being restricted has increased. In response, PragerU has created an online petition calling for YouTube to stop censoring its videos with the “restricted mode.” So far the petition has collected over 30,000 signatures.

As Facebook, Twitter and Google illustrate, social media giants are putting a finger on the scale, discriminating against conservative content.

SOURCE






Free Speech Champions Fight Back Against OSCE 'Islamophobia' Industry

The ‘Islamophobia' industry's all-out assault on free speech was on full display at the recent annual meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM) in Warsaw, Poland. The Center's VP for Research and Analysis Clare Lopez and Senior Fellow Stephen Coughlin attended the 26-27 September 2016 session, along with Debra Anderson, ACT! For America Chapter leader in Minnesota, Dave Petteys, ACT! Chapter leader from Colorado and key European colleagues Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolf from Austria, Henrik Clausen from Denmark, and Alain Wagner from France.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is a 57-member regional security organization with representatives from North America, Europe and Asia. It describes itself as a ‘forum for political dialogue on a wide range of security issues' whose approach encompasses ‘politico-military, economic and environmental, and human dimensions'. The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) is an office within the OSCE that claims to be dedicated to democratic elections, respect for human rights, rule of law, tolerance, and non-discrimination.

Their stated overall objective is helping governments protect and promote human rights, fundamental freedoms and tolerance and non-discrimination, as well as to improve and strengthen democratic practices and institutions. Except that the actual theme of the two-day proceedings had a lot more to do with countering ‘hate crime,' criminalizing ‘hate speech,' and demonizing ‘Islamophobia' and ‘Islamophobes' than it did with genuinely championing the right to believe, live, and speak freely.

Of course, the campaign to shut down free speech when it's about Islam is very much in line with the top agenda item of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation), which is to achieve the criminalization of criticism of Islam in national legal codes. Gagging criticism of Islam is also what the UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 tries to do. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked hard to make that happen in the U.S. and around the world when she promoted the Istanbul Process. The idea is to use existing laws against ‘incitement to violence,' but in a novel way that applies a so-called ‘test of consequences.' That is, if someone, somewhere, sometime decides what somebody said somewhere, sometime is offensive and then launches a ‘Day of Rage,' or goes on a lawless rampage destroying property, injuring or killing people, guess whose fault that would be? Under the ‘test of consequences' speech code, that would be the speaker.

Notably, though, the Islamophobia crowd seemed to be very much on the defensive at this OSCE meeting. Their crouch-and-whine posture most likely had to do with the accelerating numbers of horrific Islamic terror attacks, whose trail of carnage and destruction is splashed across screens around the world for all to see. Along with those visuals comes increasing awareness on the part of more and more ordinary people that when they yell ‘Allahu Akbar,' it doesn't mean ‘Hail to the Redskins': it means they are committing that attack in the name of Allah and Islam.

The ‘Islamophobia' industry has neither the ability nor actual wish to stop jihad but it sure does wish so many were not putting ‘Allahu Akbar' and Islamic terror together and then speaking out about it. The only recourse left to them is trying desperately to shut down free speech-including places like the U.S. where free speech is Constitutionally-protected. As CSP Senior Fellow Stephen Coughlin puts it:

This is a direct extraterritorial demand that non-Muslim jurisdictions submit to Islamic law and implement shariah-based punishment over time. In other words, the OIC is set on making it an enforceable crime for non-Muslim people anywhere in the world-including the United States-to say anything about Islam that Islam does not permit.

In other words, what they're trying to do is enforce shariah's law on slander - on us, on everyone, whether Muslim or not.

That effort at the Warsaw OSCE meeting went at it by various means: there was a great deal of emphasis on equating Islamophobia with ‘racism' (but a new kind - not based on skin color), ‘bigotry,' and violation of ‘human rights.' Pouty complaints were heard about ‘feeling discriminated against,' ‘marginalized,' and the object of ‘hard looks' because of wearing a hijab. When legal eagle Steve Coughlin and Danish defender Henrik Clausen demanded a specific legal definition of the term ‘Islamophobia,' they were assailed for...you guessed it, ‘Islamophobia'! Needless to say, there was no legal definition forthcoming (because ‘everybody knows what it means').

‘Islamophobia' hysteria reached peak during the OSCE's second day plenary session, where the Turkish General Secretary of the European Muslim Initiative for Social Cohesion (EMISCO), Bashy Qurayshi, came unglued with a plaintive wail that ‘Islamophobes' who'd been permitted to infiltrate the OSCE were "lying, ranting and attempting to spread hatred at this conference." He even threw in a reference to such ‘Islamophobes' as ‘Nazis,' at which point senior representatives at the OSCE head table actually broke into applause.

By way of counterpoint, however, it must be added that many delegates from Civil Society organizations throughout the OSCE membership area-including atheists, Baha'is, Christians, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons-firmly pressed the case for free speech. We know that they took encouragement from our presence and outspokenness, even as we did from theirs.

The ‘Islamophobia' crown went home from Warsaw in the sure knowledge that their attempts to silence free speech about Islam have stirred a gathering force of liberty's champions who will not be silenced.

SOURCE






No reasoning with PC bigots

Jennifer Oriel comments from Australia

Freethinker Bill Leak is a victim of prejudice so entrenched in our legal and political system it is spar­king anti-establishment ­revolt across the West. It is the conversion of the human rights movement into a bigot rights ­industry.

The principal victims of bigot rights are heterosexual men of Anglo-European descent whose advocacy of freedom, rationality and reason places them on the Right side of politics in the 21st century. The political repression of freethinkers by the bigot rights movement is calculated. PC bigotry is so comprehensive it engulfs the establishment whose members openly celebrate the structural oppression and public humiliation of those excluded from their state-sanctified system of privilege.

The Australian Human Rights Commission is handling a complaint over the Leak illustration that depicted a drunken man neglectful of his son. Some people have chosen to take offence ­because the inebriated figure was depicted as indigenous. So too, however, was the sober authority figure of the cartoon, the police ­officer reprimanding the drunken father. Whether intentional or not, Leak’s illustration revealed a well-documented empirical truth: that some men are alcoholics, some alcoholics neglect their children and some alcoholic men who neglect their children are ­indigenous.

In a rational world where politics were divested of ideology and politicians invested in truth, complaints about Leak’s cartoon would be dismissed. In the world of the bigot rights industry, however, feelings of offence have ­superseded empirical truth as the highest standard of Western ­jurisprudence.

The Racial Discrimination Act classifies acts that people feel offended about as unlawful if they choose to feel offended ­because of their race, colour, ­national or ethnic origin. Section 18C is anti-­enlightenment revolution codi­fied as law. It effects the erosion of truth, rationality and reason as the foundations of Western law by replacing them with ideology, feelings and a consequent culture of unreason.

Following the cartoon’s publication, Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane tweeted that people “shouldn’t endorse racial stereotypes of Aboriginal Australians ­— or, for that matter, of any other group”. Agreed. Nor should they endorse the censorship of truth to please the PC establishment. He wrote on Facebook: “If there are Aboriginal Australians who have been racially offended, ­insulted, humiliated or intimidated, they can consider lodging a complaint under the Racial Discrimination Act with the Commission”. A ­social media storm ensued in which PC bigots vilified Leak as racist.

The AHRC notified The Australian this month of its plans to ­investigate “allegations of racial hatred under the Racial Discrimination Act” regarding the cartoon. National chief corres­pon­dent Hedley Thomas has reported that documents provided by the commission indicate a single complaint alleging a woman has experienced racial ­hatred and discrimination as a ­result of the illustration. The AHRC has advised the newspaper that “sections 18C, 18D and 18E of the Racial Discrimination Act ­appear relevant to the complaint”.

The epicentre of the bigot rights movement is the UN’s human rights office. The founding mission of the UN was to seed global enlightenment by the establishment of universal human rights. It has been replaced by minority rights politics cham­pioned by socialists and Islamists.

Contemporary minority politics is the progeny of Herbert Marcuse. As I have demonstrated previously, Marcuse reversed the idea of equality by advocating a politics founded on the principle of “not equal, but more representation of the Left”. In short, the foundational principle of neo-Marxism — the ideology of the 21st century Left­ — is that ­inequality engineered to produce the silencing of conservatives is the constitution of equality.

The Marxist dictatorship of the prole­tariat has been replaced by the neo-Marxist dictatorship of man­u­factured minorities. It is unsurprising that the perversion of universal human rights by bigot rights activists has been codified in race discrimination and affirmative action laws. In the late 1970s, law schools became ground zero for the neo-Marxist revolution against formal equality and human rights. Critical legal theory emerged as the activist successor to black letter law. ­

Kimberle Crenshaw, a critical race theorist, recounts that critical legal theory was organised by “neo-Marxist intellectuals, former New Left activists, ex-counter-culturalists”. It emerged, in part, because “civil rights lawyers found themselves fighting and losing rearguard attacks … particularly with respect to ­affirmative action and legal require­ments for the kinds of ­evidence required to prove illicit discrimination”.

Critical legal theorists attack objective inquiry, empirical truth and logical reasoning as the basis of Western law and evidentiary standards. They decry enlightenment thought and contend ­instead that subjectivity, feelings and emotions are a valid basis for legal judgment. Thanks to the radical bigotry of neo-Marxists and their determined hostility to reason, we are forced to brook the absurd proposition underlying PC gag law that feeling offended about something indicates an ­unlawful act has taken place.

Leak is entering a bastion of Left politics engineered to produce his silence. Far from correcting their agenda of inequality, bigot rights activists are pursuing it with increased irrationality and anger. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, recently demonised conservative politicians of eight countries for opposing his agenda. The UN has endorsed a new campaign to classify dissent from its open border policy as “xenophobia” and “intolerance”.

Just as Leak is vilified as racist for depicting truth, so will dissenters from UN ideology be branded xenophobic and intolerant to justify their public humiliation and censorship.

I don’t know what advice to give Leak because he is neither the problem nor the solution. Labor and the Greens will continue to defend 18C because it is their PC bigotry made manifest. So too the minority groups who receive ­unearned privileges via discrimination law and affirmative action, as well as protection under 18C from ideas that offend them. The governing Coalition should champion free speech and formal equality but it rejected Cory Bernardi’s recent call to amend 18C.

However, there is a growing grassroots movement to return the West to the path of enlightenment — a kind of counter-revolution to ­restore universal human rights and secure the sovereignty of free world states. Whether you like it or not, Bill, you’re an idea whose time has come.

SOURCE




Foolish Aboriginal model wants acceptance as a model only.  Is the Nordic ideal of beauty changeable? 



She hasn't got a hope.  The worldwide standard of female beauty is Nordic -- narrow faces, fine features, white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair.  Even some Japanese ladies blond their hair.  To blacks, a white wife is a trophy.  The unfortunate Magnolia has no Nordic attributes at all.  If her skin were white she would be ugly.  She has received acceptance only because many people want to be kind to Aborigines.  She is an "affirmative action" model.

We may deplore the Nordic standard but saying that people should adopt other standards for females that they like to look at is pissing into the wind.  It won't happen.  It will have zero influence.  Brown hair can be accepted in lieu of blonde but that is the only variation to the top standard.  Mr Trump has plausibly claimed that he can have any sort of lady that he wants. He can have the top standard.  So see the picture of Melania below.  Compare and contrast.



I am sure I will be called a Nazi, a white supremacist and much else abusive for saying what I have just said but I am in fact simply pointing out the obvious.  The attractiveness of Ms Maymuru is very much of a piece with the Emperor's new clothes

So why am I pointing out such obvious truths?  It's because that is what I do.  I attack popular fairy stories.  I think truth serves us best.  A full and frank discussion of beauty standards might even help a black girl to be thankful for what she's got, rather than pining for the impossible.



It's been mere months since the Northern Territory model, Magnolia Maymuru, shot to fame after becoming the first Indigenous woman from a traditional community to become a finalist in Miss World.

But already, the 19-year-old has become something of a role model for countless women and girls around Australia.

Speaking to Sydney Morning Herald, Ms Maymuru said she wants to go above and beyond merely being seen as 'an Indigenous model'.

'I am about breaking down barriers and stereotypes,' she said.  'And I want to get to a place where I'm not described as an Indigenous model but simply as a model.'

So far, things are going pretty well for the girl who was discovered on a Darwin street in 2014 by her now manager, Mehali Tsangari.

At the time, Ms Maymuru was working as a sports and recreation officer, before she entered Miss World Australia and had the opportunity to represent the Northern Territory.

The 19-year-old has since landed her first major gig as the face of the Melbourne shopping centre, Chadstone. She has also recently been the ambassador for this year's Darwin Art Fair.

Magnolia Maymuru, whose real name is Maminydjama Maymuru, recently said that she never believed she would have a career in fashion. Describing herself as an outdoorsy sort of girl, who was into hunting and camping, she didn't have any experience within the fashion industry.

However, these days the model's glamorous Instagram account is testament to the fact that she is as at home on the catwalk as she is outside at home.

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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