Friday, March 24, 2017



This Is What It’s Like To Be Wrongly Accused Of Being A Paedophile Because Of A Typo By Police

With any allegation of sexual impropriety, you are guilty until proven innocent, according to the British police. After 13 years under Tony Blair, the British police evolved from being a generally admired body of men and women to become a collection of politically correct lazybones with little or no concern for decency, justice or community service. That their pursuit of the innocent has repeatedly been thrown out by the courts seems to have produced no penitence in them whatsoever

One extra digit added to an IP address saw Nigel Lang wrongfully suspected of being a paedophile. Speaking about his ordeal for the first time, he tells BuzzFeed News how the mistake ruined his life.

On a Saturday morning in July 2011, Nigel Lang, then aged 44, was at home in Sheffield with his partner and their 2-year-old son when there was a knock at the door.

He opened it to find a man and two women standing there, one of whom asked if he lived at the address. When he said he did, the three strangers pushed past him and one of the women, who identified herself as a police officer, told Lang and his partner he was going to be arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.

He knew he was innocent but was powerless to prevent what happened next, as over the coming days, weeks, months, and years, through absolutely no fault of his own, events took place that would cost him his health and his career, and put serious strain on his relationships with those he loved the most.
Lang described the arrest, and what followed, as “the most horrendous and horrific time of my life.”

What makes Lang’s ordeal all the more shocking, BuzzFeed News can now reveal, is that his wrongful arrest, and all the consequences of it, stemmed from what police called a “typing error”.

He was told that when police requested details about an IP address connected to the sharing of indecent images of children, one extra keystroke was made by mistake, sending police to entirely the wrong physical location.

But it would take years, and drawn-out legal processes, to get answers about why this had happened to him, to force police to admit their mistake, and even longer to begin to get his and his family’s lives back on track.

Police paid Lang £60,000 in compensation last autumn after settling out of court, two years after they finally said sorry and removed the wrongful arrest from his record.

Much more HERE





How far will the violence go?

By Ben Shapiro

Two weeks ago, political scientist Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute went to speak at Middlebury College. There, he was quickly surrounded by protesters chanting: "Racist, sexist, anti-gay. Charles Murray, go away!" On his way out of the venue, a violent throng surrounded him and his security, as well as one of the university professors. She ended up in a neck brace. The same week, supporters of President Trump held a rally in Berkeley, California, and anti-Trump protesters threw smoke bombs and began punching people.

This sort of political violence is becoming more and more common around the country. I've personally been smuggled onto and off the California State University, Los Angeles campus during a near-riot caused by one of my speeches. When a fellow guest on CNN's HLN grabbed me by the back of the neck on national television in 2015, leftist commentators celebrated. In Berkeley, we saw Antifa rioters run roughshod through the town in honor of an upcoming visit by provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. During the presidential campaign, we saw a Trump event in Chicago shut down by leftists who were intent on causing havoc, and we saw Trump supporters beaten in the streets in San Jose. Meanwhile, we saw Trump himself encouraging supporters to punch protesters and vowing to defend those who followed through from legal charges.

When despicable white supremacist Richard Spencer was punched on a city street in Washington D.C., the media quickly began asking whether it was OK to punch a Nazi. And many Americans concluded that it was fine. After all, Captain America did it!

Here's the problem: Once we start punching one another, there are only two ways such violence ends. First, an overarching powerful government could step in to stop the violence, to the cheers of the group represented by it. Second, one of the sides could literally club the other into submission. Both solutions are anti-American and frightening.

Not all ideas are created equal. Some are terrible and should be dismissed. But that's not the same thing as banning ideas or treating them with violence. In fact, the irony of those who claim to be doing political violence in the name of freedom is that political violence between citizens never ends in freedom — it nearly always ends in tyranny.

The rise of the Nazis was preceded by heavy violence in Weimar Germany between communist bands and brownshirts. The two sides would go to each others' rallies and speeches and launch into serious bloodbaths in which people were killed. Brownshirts deliberately started violence with communists in order to draw supporters to their cause. They used that violence to create martyrs (Horst Wessel was the most famous) and prey on the reality of communist violence to seize power.

America isn't Weimar. Law and order still prevails. But if we want America to remain a free country, we're going to have to back away from violence, condemn it roundly on all sides and kill the notion that ideas must be fought with fists rather than other ideas.

SOURCE





Germany moved to deport two terror suspects born in the country Wednesday in a first of its kind landmark case

The duo — a 27-year-old Algerian and a 22-year-old Nigerian — were arrested in February in connection to a “potentially imminent terror attack.” Police found a gun and an Islamic State flag in their homes, but the men were never charged with any crimes.

Prosecutors dropped the case due to a lack of evidence suggesting the men planned an attack. A federal court in Lower Saxony still moved ahead with a deportation order despite a legal bid to overturn it. The suspects will now be barred from the country indefinitely.

“We are sending a clear warning to all fanatics nationwide that we will not give them a centimeter of space to carry out their despicable plans,” Boris Pistorius, Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister, said after the ruling, according to Deutsche Welle. “They will face the full force of the law regardless of whether they were born here or not.”

Australia recently stripped the citizenship of an Islamic State fighter who left the country for Syria. Australian legislation allows the government to revoke passports of dual citizens who are suspected or convicted of engaging in militant acts

The Netherlands passed similar legislation in 2016.

SOURCE







Political correctness kickstarted populism in the West

Melanie Phillips

For several years now, Trevor Phillips has been on a political journey. Originally a fully paid-up member of the metropolitan liberal set, the former chairman of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission has been regularly denouncing some of the shibboleths to which he previously subscribed.

On Friday (AEDT) he will take this further. In a documentary on Channel 4, he will blame political correctness for the rise of populism throughout the West.

The reason nobody saw the people’s revolt coming is that political correctness is too easily dismissed. At best it is viewed as a kind of idiocy that takes the avoidance of giving offence to absurd lengths; at worst, as the unpleasantly assertive politics of identity and group rights.

Phillips appears to understand that, far more damagingly, it has corroded the very basis of moral accountability. “It was a clear statement,” he observes, “that some groups can play by their own rules.”

Those PC rules derive from secular ideologies such as anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, feminism, multiculturalism, moral relativism and environmentalism. All these and more are based on the idea that the white, male-dominated, Judeo-Christian West is the embodiment of oppressive global power — the political source of original sin.

So white Western men or Christians can never be offended or hurt because they are themselves innately offensive and hurtful, while “powerless” women or minorities can only ever be their victims. In other words, such victim groups are given a free pass for their own questionable behaviour.

The reason these secular and utilitarian ideologies are unchallengeable is that, in a pattern going back to the French Revolution, they are held to represent not a point of view but virtue itself.

Therefore, anyone who opposes them must be bad. This creates a moral imperative to drive dissenters out of civilised society altogether. For daring to question multiculturalism, Phillips found himself accused of being a fellow-traveller of the far-right British National Party.

Reason has thus been supplanted by a secular inquisition, complete with an index of prohibited ideas. It is in effect a dictatorship of virtue, drawing upon the doctrine first promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of forcing people to be free.

Of course it’s not freedom at all but a form of moral extortion: extracting permission to behave badly or questionably under threat of character assassination and social opprobrium.

Phillips may not appreciate the comparison but my own experience echoes his journey. For nearly two decades I wrote for The Guardian and The Observer, from which Eden I was eventually driven out by the disgrace of my political heresies.

From the late 1980s, I followed where the evidence led me to challenge one politically correct doctrine after another. Lifestyle choice, I argued, was by and large a disaster for the children involved in such fractured families.

Multiculturalism would dissolve the glue that held society together. National identity, far from being xenophobic, was essential for democracy and the defence of liberal values.

I was appalled that women, ethnic minorities and the poor were being infantilised and even dehumanised by being treated not as grown-ups with responsibility for their own behaviour but as helpless victims of circumstance.

Racism was supposedly endemic in every institution. Social-work staff were reduced to tears when told their refusal to confess to racism was itself proof they were racist. Any curb on immigration was racist. To me this was absurd, oppressive and culturally suicidal.

The understanding that education involved a transmission of the culture was regarded as an attack on a child’s autonomy. When I supported a retired head teacher who protested that teachers were no longer guiding children but abandoning them to ignorance and under-achievement, I was denounced as “ignorant, silly, intellectually vulgar, vicious, irresponsible, elitist, middle-class, fatuous, dangerous, intemperate, shallow, strident, reactionary, propagandist, simplistic, unbalanced, prejudiced, rabid, venomous and pathetic”. All that over just one article.

Nor did it stop at name-calling. I found myself in a kind of internal exile. There was no more cosy camaraderie round the tea trolley or invitations to supper. I lost work and was blacklisted by every major publishing house.

As Phillips says, the social infrastructure of advancement, rewards and status depends entirely on having politically correct views. If not, social and professional ostracism follows.

People have finally had enough of this institutionalised attack on accountability, natural justice and freedom. It turns out that what I’ve been arguing for decades is supported by millions throughout the West.

Now those millions are being vilified in turn as neo-fascist, racist and too stupid even to know what they’ve voted for. Their uprising is being called populism.

I call it a return to decency and reason.

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

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