Sunday, September 24, 2017



More Leftist bigotry and racism

A CANADIAN film director says he has received “racist attacks” and death threats over a plan to charge “white cis-straight able-bodied males” double the price to see his documentary.

Shiraz Higgins, 27, sparked uproar this week with the “justice pricing” policy, which listed tickets to the upcoming screening of his comedy film Building the Room as $20 for “cisgender” males and $10 for everyone else.

Cisgender is a word used to refer to a person “whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex”. As of 2016, it was one of 33 possible genders listed on the Australian Sex Survey alongside the likes of “genderfluid”, “genderqueer”, “non-binary” and “poligender”.

Building the Room is a behind-the-scenes documentary about a group of comedians developing a stand-up comedy show. Mr Higgins initially used the false name and email account “Sid Mohammed” when promoting the stunt to Canadian media because he was concerned about his safety.

“I’ve been wanting to have a layer of safety between me and angry citizens in order to keep the tension from being completely locked in on me,” he told The Canadian Press. “It’s clearly become very heated.”

He said the policy was not about “retribution or putting white men in their place”, but confirmed organisers were pushing ahead with a plan to charge white males more than others. “This is not a publicity stunt,” he said.“[We are] pushing forward because we believe it is an important piece of overall conversation that is happening in society right now.”

The Blue Bridge Theatre Society, owners of the Roxy Theatre which the director rented for the screening next week, distanced themselves from the controversy. “Blue Bridge was not at any time consulted regarding these policies and, had it been, would not have agreed, nor will it ever agree, to policies that are discriminatory towards any person,” a spokeswoman told The Canadian Press.

“While we deny any responsibility for the polices by the organisers of event, we are deeply regretful for any offence the polices may cause.”

Mr Higgins, who received $40,000 in funding for the film from internet TV service Telus Optik, admitted that the stunt to raise awareness of income inequality had gone further than he originally expected.

“It’s gone so far beyond what it was intended to be,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “It was never intended to be a national conversation. It’s a local screening, featuring an unknown cast of comedians, from an unknown director, in an little-known city. For some reason, the national media thought it was a story that needed to be run far and wide.”

On his blog, he called for the death threats sent to the “Sid Mohammed” email address to stop. “That kind of behaviour doesn’t solve any problems,” he wrote.

Publicity stunts attempting to draw attention to pay inequality are nothing new. Earlier this year, a vegan cafe in Melbourne introduced an 18 per cent “gender gap” surcharge, following a similar move by a travel insurance company. Last year a New York pharmacy introduced its own “man tax” to draw attention to price discrimination.

SOURCE 




UK: Father-of-five taxi driver was shunned by local Muslim community after student, 22, falsely accused him of groping her when he refused to accept her kebab-soaked £10 note


The nasty bitch herself. Good that the Brits do lock these menaces up

A father-of-five taxi driver who refused to accept a student's kebab-soaked £10 note for religious reasons has revealed he was shunned by his local Muslim community after she lied that he sexually assaulted her.

Sophie Pointon, 22, whose dream was to become a police officer, falsely claimed she had been groped in the back of the cab she had been picked up in after a night out in Leeds and has been jailed for 16 months.

She rang 999 in the early hours of April 22 this year and continued the deception by signing a statement, giving an account of the 'attack'.

Leeds Crown Court heard the driver, a father-of-five, was tracked down and kept in custody for six hours.

In a moving impact statement he described how the claims had left his life in tatters but her spurious accusations.  The Asian father-of-five told the court through a personal impact statement that he was a practising Muslim - and the accusations had caused him to be shunned. He was also banned from entering the homes of his colleagues and friends.

He said: 'I am now extremely reluctant to take lone females in case I am accused again. 'The girl who accused me is the same age as my own daughter - I cannot comprehend why she made this allegation. 'I feel religiously tainted from this, and no help from the police or the courts can help that. 'Friends stopped speaking to me and letting me in to their homes. People in my community do not even want to be seen with me.'  

But the case against him never even went to court, as a telephone recording of the incident, with his taxi firm, cleared him of any wrongdoing.

Pointon pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice and was handed a prison sentence yesterday.

Kate Bisset, prosecuting, said the driver was interviewed and said he could recall Pointon being 'extremely drunk' when she got into his car holding a kebab.

He said Pointon threw £10 note at him when they reached the Hyde Park area but he refused to accept it as it was covered in oil from the kebab.

The driver said Pointon, who graduated this summer with a BA Honours in criminology from Leeds Beckett University, then became abusive and ran around the car opening doors.

The prosecutor said: 'He did not think much of it at the time because such incident with people who are intoxicated are not unusual.'

A recording of a conversation between the driver and a phone operator at his taxi office supported his account.

The court heard a GPS tracker fitted to the car also revealed Pointon's description of the taxi journey to be untrue.

Pointon broke down in tears and asked if she could drop the charges when her account was challenged by police.

She pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice. Denise Breen-Lawton, mitigating, said Pointon, from Manchester, had been studying in Leeds at the time. 

She grew up in a £250,000 semi-detached home, owned by her parents, in a Victorian suburban street.

She said her hopes of becoming a police officer were now ruined. Yesterday, she was jailed for 16 months.

Judge Christopher Batty told her: 'Your malicious complaint has done a huge disservice to those seeking justice through the police and courts.'

The driver was stripped of his taxi licence for four weeks during the investigation into the claims.

He described in a statement how the false allegation had caused him to suffer from stress.

SOURCE





White Supremacists Under The Bed

"White supremicist" is the new all-purpose term for anybody with whom a Leftist disagrees

by TOM MCLAUGHLIN

"That's so bourg," said one of the Saul Alinsky community organizers I was working with forty-five years ago in Massachusetts. Though I didn't know what "bourg" meant, I got that it was a pejorative. "Bourg" meant "bad." Only later did I ask the full meaning. It was short for "bourgeois," she said, as if that explained everything.

I still didn't understand but the word sounded familiar and I knew its spelling so I looked it up. Bourgeois meant "middle class," but I was still perplexed. I saw myself as middle class and still do. What was so bad about middle class?

 Well, just about everything, I guess. At the ultra-progressive, ivy-league University of Pennsylvania, a law professor named Amy Wax is being vilified as "racist" and "bigoted" by students, faculty, and alumni for daring to write that bourgeois values exemplified in 1950s America are superior to those prized in today's progressive America. She asserted in a Philadelphia Inquirer  op-ed that in the 1950s people believed you should:

"Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime."

The last straw came when Wax dared criticize mores in sacrosanct sub-cultures:

"the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white' rap culture of inner-city blacks; [and] the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants." Wax asserted those were, "destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans."  

UPenn took all that as a declaration of war and several scorching columns appeared in UPenn's daily newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. One, signed by fifty-four faculty and doctoral students declared that Wax's bourgeois culture:

"stem[s] from the very same malignant logic of hetero-patriarchal, class-based, white supremacy that plagues our country today," and "These cultural values and logics are steeped in anti-blackness and white hetero-patriarchal respectability, i.e. two-hetero-parent homes, divorce is a vice, and the denouncement of all groups perceived as not acting white enough i.e. black Americans, Latino communities, and immigrants in particular."

Forty-five years ago bourgeois culture was still acceptable but today it's anathema to the progressive left which rules media and academia. Above her original op-ed, Wax included a picture of actor John Wayne from Director John Ford's 1956 film: The Searchers, the film was depicted as reinforcing bourgeois culture and further enflaming the UPenn establishment.

Other symbols of the bourgeois 1950s like "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It To Beaver" are often derided by progressives. Must we now regard Jim Anderson and Ward Cleaver as hetero-patriarchal white-supremacists? Were baby boomer minds corrupted by their propaganda? Do we need reeducation and sensitivity training? To remedy this, perhaps there could be another remake of "Leave It To Beaver" in which Lumpy Rutherford marries Eddie Haskell. Maybe Whitey Whitney can renounce his white male privilege and transition into a woman. Maybe June Cleaver can organize a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood.

NBC's Chuck Todd invited Dartmouth's Chris Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook onto the August 20th "Meet The Press." Bray argued for Antifa's use of violence in opposition to fascist white-supremacists. Arguing against was Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Then Dartmouth President Phil Scanlon denounced Bray's remarks, only to be himself condemned by 100 active Dartmouth faculty. Sounds a lot like UPenn's antics.

Thus is political polarization exacerbated. Antifa uses violence not only against real white supremacists, but imagined ones as well. The Marxist left, which seems now to control of the Democrat Party, sees anyone who opposes it as white supremacist.

So when Antifa beats up Trump supporters, capitalists, readers of Ann Coulter's columns, and anyone it considers conservative, leftist Democrats either cheer them or keep silent, recent remarks by Nancy Pelosi notwithstanding.

Perhaps observing how Maine's rural 2nd District where I live went for Trump in 2016, former Trump campaigner staffer Mark Braynard is bringing his "Look Ahead America" organization to New Hampshire. Interviewed on WMUR-TV, Braynard said he identified 15,000 to 100,000 disaffected rural voters he'll try to register. In response, NH Democrat Party Chairman Ray Buckley called these disaffected citizens "white supremacists."

Who knew there were so many white supremacists in NH? Might these disaffected citizens also consider themselves middle class? Bourgeois? Whereas the late Senator Joseph McCarthy saw communists under his bed and everywhere else in the 1950s, it appears today's Democrats are seeing white supremacists everywhere now.   

SOURCE






The Emerging New World

by HERBERT LONDON

It is clear that the free exchange of opinion that once characterized university life is now being challenged. The avatars of social justice have arrogated to themselves the role of arbiter in the university curriculum. But it hasn't stopped there. Now monuments of the past are being put through the probity of present standards as one statue after another is in jeopardy of tumbling. Here is a foreshadowing of a "new America", one in which the evils of the past are to be redressed by the self-appointed czars of the moment.

Where this ends isn't clear, but I have a strong belief that the revolutionaries in our midst are intent on altering the Constitution converting it into a Red Book of acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

After all, for many the First Amendment is in tatters already. Free speech no longer exists for unpopular speech or "hate speech," even though it is precisely unpopular expression that the Constitution protects. Hate speech is loathsome, but it is protected speech precisely because any line drawn against it is arbitrary and subject to the will of the censors. Like many, I was appalled at the anticipated Nazi march through Skokie, Illinois (which never happened), but I defended the right of these barbarians to do so as First Amendment expression. As I see it, the danger of censorship was greater than the psychological damage of ugly expression.

For many Americans, the Second Amendment protecting citizens to bear arms must be modified or erased. In the minds of these revisionists guns are the problem fomenting violence in our cities. Despite the obvious point that a gun isn't a weapon in the hands of St. Francis, but is dangerous if wielded by a felon intent on criminal behavior, gun baners rarely make distinctions.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees that due process will accompany legal charges, indictments or the sequestration of property; in other words life, liberty and property cannot be arbitrarily denied without a legal process that assures the rights of the victim. However, at many universities the due process clause is only honored in the breach. It is often sufficient for an allegation of rape or sexual abuse to be made before the accused is found culpable. Reputations are sometimes destroyed on the basis of empty allegations, but kangaroo courts of this kind have proliferated throughout higher education.

The Tenth Amendment gives to the states the powers that remain without enumeration in the other Amendments. Hence education is one such area that accrues to the state governments. Unfortunately, teachers' unions want to consolidate power through national organizations and have been pressing in recent years for authority to be vested in the Department of Education exclusively. It is a clear and undeviating attack on federalism which has central and state governments sharing power. For extremists, the mitigating influence of the states is unnecessary.

In the aggregate these reforms and reformers constitute a revolutionary force. Their goal is to shift the organs of national power. They intend to use the vulnerability of the moment to espouse a newly created nation from the political graveyard of the past. America's Red Guard will determine what one can believe and what is unacceptable. The Color Guard will carry the black flag of revolution and the Founders will be interred for their regressive ideas.

Welcome Comrades to the New World. You have nothing to lose, but your chains. Of course, there are chains you will wear that will be dispensed by the Party. Those who resist will be relieved of all they love. For even love itself is retrograde; either one believes, or one is ostracized. Tolerance is weakness, hate is intensity and good will is cowardice.

The world will be turned upside down with many wishing they were facing downward. For those who have seen signals of the New World, it is a dark place bereft of an enlightened Constitution.

SOURCE

*************************

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.  Email me (John Ray) here

***************************

No comments: