Tuesday, October 24, 2017



Canadian court finds Arab NOT guilty of raping his wife as he genuinely believed he could have sex with her whenever he wanted

What happened to "ignorance is no defence"?

A man has been cleared of raping his wife after a judge ruled that he did not know his behaviour was criminal in Canada.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Smith said prosecutors had failed to establish that the man knew it was against the law to have sex with his wife without her consent.

Justice Smith explained: 'I find that the accused probably had sex with his wife on many occasions without her specific consent, as both he and she believed that he had the right to do so.'

The case related to an alleged assault in 2002, when the Palestinian woman - who became the man's wife in an arranged marriage in Gaza - claimed he pulled her pants down and had sex with her despite her asking him three times to stop.

According to the Ottawa Citizen, she testified that she considered it her obligation to have sex with her husband and did not know it was a crime.

She said she did not consent to sex on many occasions but both of them were under the impression that he was within his rights.

But when she heard from a police officer years later about the true nature of the law, she brought forward a case about the 2002 incident.

The ruling, issued earlier this week, came after a five-day trial in June.

Smith explained in his ruling: 'Marriage is not a shield for sexual assault.

'However, the issue in this trial is whether, considering the whole of the evidence, the Crown has proven the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.' 

It has left campaigners furious, with the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women calling the ruling 'disappointing'.

Carrolyn Johnston, the organisation's acting executive director, said: 'Any sexual contact without explicit and ongoing consent is sexual assault — regardless of the relationship.

'He may have believed that he had a right to have sex with her as her husband, but Canadian sexual assault law is clear and was amended to include sexual assault against a spouse in 1983.'

The Sexual Assault Network and rape crisis centres in the city said they are now promoting public education campaigns to ensure the concept of consent is fully understood.

Children in Canada are already taught about consent from Grade 7.

The couple separated in 2013.

The husband denied ever having sex with his wife without consent and also specifically denied the 2002 incident. His defence was that during the period of the alleged incident, he had been told to abstain from sex after having a hair transplant.

But the judge dismissed it, explaining there was no evidence to show it was standard medical practice to abstain from sex in such cases.

The judge also said the husband was argumentative as a witness and said his defence was unbelievable. 

SOURCE




Feminism’s Experiment Against Common Sense

It demands a culture of restraint while tearing down morality and modesty.

In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, the commissars of feminism are policing ideological infractions with increased vigor. Several women in the entertainment industry have had to apologize abjectly to the commissars for daring to suggest that women seek protection from a salacious, pawing Hollywood culture by not participating in it.

“Big Bang Theory’s Mayim Bialik Publishes Irresponsible Essay On Sexism In Hollywood,” ran a headline in Newsweek, capturing this atmosphere. Bialik had merely allowed herself a brief aside in the New York Times reflecting on the prudence of modesty in an industry of creeps:

I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy. I am entirely aware that these type of choices might feel oppressive to many young feminists. Women should be able to wear whatever they want. They should be able to flirt however they want with whomever they want. Why are we the ones who have to police our behavior?

In a perfect world, women should be free to act however they want. But our world isn’t perfect. Nothing — absolutely nothing — excuses men for assaulting or abusing women. But we can’t be naïve about the culture we live in.

The commissars decreed this an impermissible thought (in spite of its dubious caveats deferential to feminism) and demanded that Bialik prostrate herself before them, which she has duly done in a teary confession note: “I am truly sorry for causing so much pain, and I hope you can all forgive me.”

Fashion designer Donna Karan is also promising to re-educate herself after she asked: “How do we display ourselves, how do we present ourselves as women, what are we asking? Are we asking for it, you know, by presenting all the sensuality and all the sexuality?” Karan blamed her remark on a lack of “sleep” and is prepared to submit to whatever abasements the feminists have in mind in order to erase her “horrible mistake.”

In these pitiful purges, one sees the intensity of feminism’s rejection of common sense, all in the service of a fantasy that ends up hurting women and empowering boors. The Harvey Weinstein scandal didn’t happen in spite of feminism in Hollywood but in part because of it, insofar as feminism encouraged women to plunge into a culture of immodesty without warning them of its costs and dangers.

Indeed, according to the logic of feminism, which holds that all female choices are good ones (provided they deviate from traditional paths), the women who submitted to Weinstein are as honorable as the actresses who resisted him. Feminism, if anything, encouraged a culture of mutual exploitation in which men and women proved their equality by making identically immoral choices.

As all of the protections of women — chivalry, modesty, traditional morality, religion, and so on — dissolved over the years, the feminists cheered. They marked progress in society not by the presence of protections but by their absence. For decades, feminists clamored for the exposure of women to the horrors of war. They thought it a great advance that men no longer hesitated on the battlefield before the prospect of women taken captive and that women would one day serve on the front lines. Women don’t need special protections, they insisted.

Yet the rhetoric heard in recent days belies this insistence. Feminists, while still denying biological difference, assert that women face special dangers in Hollywood and deserved closer protection. At the same time, they don’t want the old protections restored. And so they look elsewhere for protection, to “systemic change,” whatever that means. They, of course, exclude themselves from this “industry-wide” failure to protect women and continue to dole out bad advice to them while castigating anyone who offers sensible counsel.

In the end, feminism will always prioritize ideology over the protection of women. Just look at its loud support for “all genders bathrooms,” the kind that now exist in in the tony New York City hotels Weinstein patronizes. Woe to anyone who brings up the risks of that arrangement for women.

And for all of its talk about the “objectification of women,” it refuses to break with women who define themselves according to it. Feminists defend and celebrate women who turn themselves into sexual objects, then forbid men from treating them as ones. Feminism calls for men to “control themselves,” but reserves the right to maintain an outrageously immodest culture — and to send out its commissars to crush anyone who notices the contradiction.

SOURCE





Anti-establishment party led by billionaire wins Czech election

Prague: An anti-establishment party founded by a billionaire oligarch overpowered the Czech Republic's long-standing, mainstream parties Saturday, making the blunt-talking, enigmatic tycoon almost certain to become prime minister in a coalition government.

ANO, the party formed by Andrej Babis, 63, had nearly 30 percent of the vote with 99 percent of ballots counted. The Social Democrats, who have been at the centre of Czech politics for a quarter-century and had finished first in the previous election, came in a distant sixth with just 7 percent. The Communists were fifth. And the Christian Democrats, another party that traces its roots to the country's founding, got less than 6 percent, perilously close to the cutoff to qualify for seats in Parliament.

ANO was not the only anti-establishment party to do well. The extreme right-wing Freedom & Direct Democracy, with 10.7 percent, doubled its proportion from the previous election. That was just a fraction of a percentage point behind the youth-oriented Czech Pirate Party, an anti-establishment movement from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

In the previous parliamentary election in 2013, Mr Babis stunned the political establishment by drawing the second highest number of votes, just one year after founding his party. That was enough to make ANO part of the ruling coalition with the Social Democrats and the smaller Christian Democrats, with Mr Babis its finance minister. He was able to maintain his anti-establishment credentials by focusing on corruption and economic reforms.

In recent months, as polls showed his rise to prime minister becoming likely, Mr Babis became the target of an investigation into possible tax crimes and was fired as finance minister. This month, he was indicted on what he called politically motivated charges of misusing European Union subsidies. Opponents called on him to step down as his party's candidate for prime minister. He refused.

"I am happy that Czech citizens did not believe the disinformation campaign against us and expressed their trust in us," Mr Babis said in his victory speech at ANO headquarters. "We are a democratic movement, we are a pro-European and pro-NATO party, and I do not understand why somebody labels us as threat to democracy."

Often compared to President Donald Trump, Mr Babis has mixed such nationalist themes as opposition to immigration with a promise to use his business skills to streamline government, reduce red tape and fight corruption. With mainstream parties in decline, as they have been in recent elections across Europe, Mr Babis' promise to upend the political establishment found a receptive audience.

"The image of politics is corrupt," said Otto Eibl, a political scientist at Masaryk University in Brno. "It is quite easy to offer an alternative. When you say, 'All those old politicians are bad and I will be good,' most people want to believe you."

Mr Babis drew wide support from older Czech voters, fed up with corruption scandals and unfulfilled promises, who were willing to overlook their candidate's own legal issues.

"His opponents are just trying to tarnish him, and people don't care about these political games," said Petr Sebor, 70, who was escorting his 91-year-old mother, Zdenka, to the polls Friday, the first of two days of voting.

What the ascent of Babis and ANO — which means "yes" in Czech and is also an acronym for Action of Dissatisfied Citizens — will mean for the Czech Republic's relations with Brussels and Moscow remains unclear.

But there is concern he could join a nationalist bloc with Poland and Hungary and deepen the rift between the European Union and many of its eastern members. He has promised to protect Czechs from overreach by Brussels, but also to remain an active partner in the European Union. He has stressed that Prague needs to develop closer ties with all potential trading partners, including Russia.

The first indication of his direction will come when he announces which parties will become partners in the new coalition government.

Among the biggest surprises in the election was the strong showing by Freedom & Direct Democracy, the extreme right-wing party of Tomio Okamura, of mixed Czech and Japanese descent, who has lived in the Czech Republic since he was 6. Such right-wing parties, which have taken root elsewhere in Eastern Europe, had been largely inconsequential in Czech politics. But now, in a tight race for a distant second with the Civic Democrats, Mr Okamura will become a larger force.

Analysts had warned that the most recent polls may have understated Mr Okamura's base as some voters were reluctant to acknowledge support of the controversial party. Okamura attributed the discrepancy to inept polling.

Mr Okamura said he opposed the country's mainstream parties and political establishment because its message is "pro-Brussels, pro-multiculturalism and pro-Islam," while he sees Brussels as an adversary, Islam as an ideology rather than a religion and multiculturalism as a threat to Czech culture.

"We want to keep the Czech Republic we remember from our childhoods," he said in an interview earlier this month. "What is wrong with that?"

Mr Babis had said he would not ask either the Communists or Mr Okamura's party to join his coalition. Karla Slechtova, the minister of regional development and an ANO member, said the party would like to discuss a coalition with the Social Democrats, though they alone would not be sufficient.

"The elections have confirmed the downfall of traditional parties," said Milos Gregor, an analyst at the International Institute for Political Science. "With as many as nine parties in the government, we will most likely face a turbulent four years."

SOURCE





Inglorious Ingrate

What can you call a man who, with some but not a great deal of athletic ability, is able to overcome all the obstacles and failings that mortal men encounter, and become a football star?  A hero?  A man among men? A role model?  Well, if you're talking about Colin Kaepernick, the answer is inglorious ingrate.

Why?  Abandoned - in the strictest sense of the word - by his biological parents when he was an infant, Colin was adopted by an white, middle class family who made it possible for him to participate in the grand American Dream, which he most probably would not have enjoyed otherwise.  As a black man in a white middle class family, Colin went through school, found his athletic ability, and parlayed that into an eventual professional football career.  With that came wealth, fame and prestige.  Wow!  What a life.  What opportunity was afforded him.  What grace of providence was shown upon him.

But that wouldn't do for our budding social justice warrior.  As his hate for white America grew, he converted to Islam over a year ago.  And as his disdain manifested itself more and more, his athletic prowess faded proportionately.  And so did his playing time on the field.  From the bench, Kaepernick vented his displeasure at America, siding with Black Lives Matter, and anti-police sentiment.  He decided to become a free agent.  He played less and less.  Nobody wanted to play with him.  Or hire him.  Angry black men are no fun to be around.  Then he took the infamous knee during the national anthem.  How bold.  How brave.  How insightful to disrespect the country, the fans, the league and the very game that gave him fame, wealth and prestige.

And so the cancer spread.  Other players - mostly black - emulated the "protest."  Then coaches and owners.  The talking heads on ESPN thought it was marvelous. 

But then came the backlash.  Fans booed.  ESPN subscriptions dived.  Fans turned off the set, or changed channels when NFL games came on.  Ratings plunged.  Even the President weighed in.  At this writing sentiment seems to have swung in the opposite direction. The end result is an entire once popular industry is in decline.

The talking heads label him the Man Who Started a Movement.  I doubt that.  This is a parable like some  ancient Greek myth.  The hero rises from obscurity to wealth and power, only to bite the hand that feeds, and is destroyed by his own hubris.  With Kaepernick however - never the sharpest knife in the drawer - the irony is lost on him. 

He's far from a man who started a movement.  He's merely an inglorious ingrate.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here

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