Wednesday, July 31, 2019



Another false rape claim from a British female

When they regret getting their legs up the night before, they often claim it was rape

A British teenager who claimed she was gang-raped by 12 men in Ayia Napa is facing a multimillion-dollar damages claim after it emerged she made the story up.

The 19-year-old, who cannot be named, had told police she was attacked in a Cyprus hotel room, and the Israeli men were then rounded up by police and held in custody for nine days.

But they were all dramatically released after she tearfully told cops she had invented the story because she was annoyed some of them had filmed themselves while having consensual sex.

There was also reportedly no DNA evidence linking them to the alleged attack.

A law enforcement official said the woman had withdrawn her claims during questioning over the weekend, saying there had been sexual contact with the suspects but she wasn’t raped.

Earlier today she was taken to a court in Famagusta, Cyprus, for a remand hearing, but the case was postponed until tomorrow after her lawyer failed to show up.

TV pictures showed her arriving for the hearing with a jacket over her head handcuffed to a police woman. Her mother was said to be at court.

The 12 who are all now back in Israel celebrated their release on arrival at Tel Aviv airport, and social media footage showed them chanting, “The Brit woman is a whore”.

Yona Golub, who was among those initially held and then released, confirmed he would seek damages from the woman, who claimed she had been attacked at the Pambos Napa hotel in Aya Napa earlier this month.

He said: “We will sue her for the anguish caused and for libel. I am walking in the street and people are calling me a rapist.

“I was with two friends who were arrested and they straight away arrested me too. I know my friends were in the room, but I wasn’t. I don’t know the girl.

“The truth is out. I told myself, today finally this nightmare ends. I went through tough days.”

Defence lawyers representing some of the group, Yaniv Habari and Nir Yaslovitzh, confirmed they intended to sue the young woman on behalf of those she accused.

Mr Habari told The Sun: “We will proceed with legal action against the individual that made the false allegations, for damages, for every day and every moment they were in prison falsely.

“The claim against her is being drafted at the moment by my clients who are still all very traumatised by what they have been through. They will be suing for loss of earnings, defamation and the suffering that was caused to them by her claims.”

A legal source close to the men added: “There are 12 cases to be heard and this will be a very expensive case for her. The claims will run into millions for the suffering she put them through.”

A Cyprus police spokesman said the woman had been charged with “public mischief” and had been remanded in custody until her hearing today.

He added, if convicted, she faced a prison sentence of up to one year and a maximum fine of £1000 ($A1771).

A spokesman for Cyprus Police told the Sun Online the identity of the woman would only be revealed if she is found guilty.

SOURCE 







The president's criticism of Baltimore is actually right on the money    

Once again, President Donald Trump lit another social-media firestorm on Saturday as he blasted Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) over his bullying behavior. “Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of [the] Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA…” Trump wrote. He then defended the Border Patrol’s work on dealing with the border crisis, noting, “As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded.” Trump then described the Baltimore district Cummings represents as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” before declaring, “If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

Cue the leftist outrage machine, which appears to have become little other than a broken record repeatedly screeching “racist” each time Trump lands a well-placed political jab. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asserted, “Donald Trump, once again, is a racist who makes ever-more outrageous, racist remarks.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, who back in 2015 called Baltimore a “Third World country” with “hundreds of buildings that are uninhabitable,” derided Trump as “a racist president who attacks people because they are African-Americans.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) waved the race canard as well, lecturing, “We all reject racist attacks against [Cummings] and support his steadfast leadership.”

Unfortunately, once again there were some members of the conservative media who couldn’t help but bemoan what they saw as racism in Trump’s message. So accurately highlighting the horrible living conditions of a longtime Democrat-run urban poverty plantation like Baltimore equates to racism if those elected officials responsible are minorities? When exactly did speaking the truth become “racist”? Evidently, Baltimore’s own black Democrat mayor must be a “racist” as well. Just last year, when touring the city’s violence-riddled, trash-filled neighborhoods, she was caught on camera expressing her disgust: “What the hell? We should just take all this s—t down. … Whoa, you can smell the rats… You can smell the dead animals.”

Getting down to brass tacks, Trump has effectively responded to undeserved and politically motivated attacks by Cummings against Border Patrol officials who are simply trying to do the best they can while they receive nothing but condemnation and ridicule from Democrats and the Leftmedia. As the commander-in-chief, Trump is clearly unwilling to sit on the sidelines and let Democrats like Cummings grandstand with their vacuous virtue signals at the expense of these Border Patrol officials’ reputations. So Trump stepped in, redirecting the Left’s arrows toward himself, and in so doing he effectively exposed to the American people who the Democrats really are.

As with the Gang of Four flap two weeks ago, Trump has successfully brought into the light the fact that the Democrat Party has sold out to the extreme Left. He has shown that Democrats are now fully invested in transforming the U.S. into a socialist state at the cost of the Constitution and individual Liberty. Trump has also laid bare the fact that the vast majority of the mainstream media has become the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party. Trump is a brawler, whose seemingly wild verbal swings effectively hit the target more often than many within the Washington Beltway realize or understand

SOURCE 






This Lawsuit Over ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender Identity’ Will Have Sweeping Implications

“I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. I was just gasping for air.” That’s how Nancy Rost recalls the moments after her husband, Tom, walked through the door of their home six years ago this month.

In his hand, Tom held a letter from a longtime employee. On his face, the easy confidence Nancy had seen from Tom every day since they met each other as children was missing, replaced by a palpable sense of anxiety.

Immediately, Tom and Nancy knew that the contents of the letter had the potential to devastate R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, which Tom’s grandfather had established in 1910 to serve grieving families throughout Detroit.

As it stands now, Tom’s five-generation family business is in the hands of the Supreme Court, with oral arguments scheduled for Oct. 8.

No doubt, his case will have sweeping implications across American life.

So, what was in the letter?

Anthony Stephens, a biological male employee who had agreed to and followed the funeral home’s sex-specific dress code for more than six years, intended to show up to work—as well as to the homes of grieving families—dressed as a woman.

For years, Tom’s company had required employees to agree to and abide by a sex-specific dress code that aligned with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requirements. The regulation-consistent policy ensured that family members of a deceased loved one could focus on processing their grief, not on the funeral home or its employees.

Over the next two weeks, Tom carefully considered his situation. Tom was concerned for Stephens—a longtime, valued employee—and for Stephens’ family. He also had to consider the rest of his staff, including an 80-year-old female employee, who would be sharing the women’s restroom facility with Stephens.

Finally, Tom pondered the impact on the funeral home’s clients.

In the end, Tom decided that he could not agree to Stephens’ proposal. That decision was fully in line with federal law. Yet, in a matter of months, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the funeral home.

Later, following the commission’s urging, a federal court of appeals effectively redefined the word “sex” in federal law to mean “gender identity.”

Enacted by Congress in 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act has long protected women, along with racial and religious minorities, from unjust discrimination in the workplace.

Redefining the term “sex” in that law to mean “gender identity” would create chaotic, unworkable situations and unjustly punish business owners like Tom while destroying important gains women and girls have made over the past 50 years.

Indeed, Tom Rost’s case, in which Alliance Defending Freedom represents the funeral home, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Blurring the legal differences between male and female forces women and girls to endure unequal treatment because some men and boys believe that they are women.

In Connecticut, for instance, two boys competing as girls have set state records in 15 events over the past two years, while costing girls like Selina Soule over 50 chances at next-level races.

In Anchorage, Alaska, city officials have weaponized gender ideology to argue that a women’s shelter must allow a biological male to sleep 3 feet away from women who have been victimized by rape, sex trafficking, and domestic violence.

Refusing even to discuss these and other issues that result from redefining “sex” to mean “gender identity,” Democratic lawmakers have put forward the paradoxically named Equality Act that would institutionalize these harms under federal law.

While that bill has stalled in the Senate, federal courts like the one that ruled against Harris Funeral Homes have acted to effectively change the law on their own, imposing their own policy preferences and punishing business owners who were simply acting in compliance with the law Congress actually enacted.

In R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Supreme Court has a golden opportunity to affirm that changing the law is only something Congress can do, particularly in a context as complicated as changing the meaning of “sex” itself.

SOURCE 






Australia: There was no "welcome to country" at this weekend's WA Liberal conference, with the leader saying it's not meaningful to 'tick a box' to be politically correct

Just because Aborigines once lived in a place, why does it mean that we have to keep mentioning it?  It achieves nothing.  It is just Leftist virtue signalling that costs them nothing

West Australian opposition leader Liza Harvey has trotted out a "tired, lazy argument" in defending her party not starting its annual state conference with a welcome to country, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Ben Wyatt says.

Asked if it was a good look for the WA Liberal gathering on Saturday to omit the Indigenous ceremony, Ms Harvey replied: "It is what it is".

"I think the worst thing you can do is for the sake of political correctness, engage in welcome to countries that aren't meaningful," Ms Harvey told reporters on Sunday.

"Where it's appropriate, there are welcome to countries, for example the City of Stirling at their citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day," Ms Harvey said.

"It's fantastic - I'm a big fan of that but I don't think we should do these things just because you've got to tick a box.

"It needs to be meaningful and respectful."

Mr Wyatt, whose relative Ken Wyatt is pushing for constitutional recognition, was unimpressed. "A welcome is about a modern, inclusive, respectful society," he tweeted.

"Even Colin Barnett understood that, which is why the parliament amended the WA constitution to recognise Aboriginal traditional ownership."

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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Tuesday, July 30, 2019





UK: Police Award Payout to Black Christian Arrested for Preaching

Scotland Yard has agreed to pay a Christian preacher £2,500 ($3,095) for wrongful arrest and humiliating treatment after the Metropolitan Police detained him last February, stripped him of his Bible, handcuffed him, and drove him several miles away where they left him.

The 64-year-old Pentecostal Christian, Oluwole Ilesanmi, said he welcomed the decision as a victory for freedom of speech. Mr Ilesanmi moved to the United Kingdom from Nigeria in 2010 as a Protestant missionary.

Two officers approached the former dentist last February as he was preaching outside Southgate Tube station in North London. Police reportedly had received a call from a passer-by accusing Mr Ilesanmi of hate speech.

A viral video of the arrest that has now been viewed over ten million times stirred up a public outcry and the advocacy group Christian Concern took up the man’s case, which eventually led to the decision to compensate the man for damages.

In their police report, the arresting officers said they had arrested Mr IIesanmi “to prevent a breach of the peace” yet video footage of the event shows no hostile or aggressive conduct by Mr Ilesanmi.

In the verbal exchange recorded in the two-minute video, one of the officers tells the preacher, “we are going to require you to go away,” or “I will arrest you for breach of peace.” “You’re causing problems; you’re disturbing people’s days and you’re breaching their peace,” the officer said.

To this, Mr Ilesamni replied, “I will not go away because I need to tell them the truth. Jesus is the only way, truth and life.”

“Nobody wants to listen to that,” the policeman replied.

The video also shows the police officer taking Mr Ilesanmi’s Bible away, to his visible distress.

When the preacher asks officers not to take his Bible, one of the officers, who is white, says: “You should’ve thought about that before being racist.” Mr Ilesanmi is black.

Ilesanmi admits that he described Islam as an “aberration” — seemingly the trigger for the racism allegation — but insists he was not denigrating Muslims but merely expressing his perspective as a Christian.

On Sunday, Mr. Ilesanmi told the Mail: “I believe God loves everyone, including Muslims, but I have the right to say I that I don’t agree with Islam – we are living in a Christian country, after all.”

“I was upset when they took away my Bible,” he said. “They just threw it in the police car. They would never have done that if it had been the Qur’an. Whatever happened to freedom of speech?”

The video was taken by Ambrosine Shitrit, who said she was passing by when she saw Mr Ilesanmi debating with a Muslim man.

“The preacher was fearless, but if I hadn’t started filming he would have been attacked,” Ms. Shitrit said. “He was not breaching the peace and in no way had he been Islamophobic. I would’ve been the first person to have said something if he had been.”

In early March, the Metropolitan Police directed its Professional Standards Unit to begin a review of the arrest in the face of extensive criticism.

According to Hounslow-based Sergeant Dave Turtle, this sort of heavy-handed approach to Christians is too familiar, adding that police officers need better training to understand the rights of street preachers.

Turtle called for a “fundamental review” of police training for faith issues since “we’ve had a number of situations across the country where street preachers have been arrested and then de-arrested.”

Observers have noted a strange discordance in that Muslims seem able to preach in London without being harassed by police, whereas Christians are often treated with hostility.

The £2,500 indemnification was awarded as “compensation for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment, aggravated damages for exceptional harm and humiliating and distressing treatment, and recognition for the potential psychological trauma experienced during the arrest,” the Mail reported.

Commenting on the case, Andrea Williams, chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “Despite laws that theoretically support the freedom to preach in public, in practice police officers are quick to silence preachers at the first suggestion that a member of the public is offended.

SOURCE 






Scarlett Johansson Bemoans 'Political Correctness' in New Interview

This week’s reason to roll your eyes at the Avengers’ star comes courtesy of an interview with As If magazine, a publication I’m not entirely unconvinced wasn’t conjured out of nowhere for the precise purpose of getting me mad this Monday morning.

In the interview, conducted by artist David Salle, Johansson — a white, cis woman who has received criticism for accepting roles that might perhaps be better suited for Asian and transmasculine actors — talks about “political correctness” when it comes to casting, adding that she “should be allowed to play any person.”

“Today there’s a lot of emphasis and conversation about what acting is and who we want to see represent ourselves on screen,” Johansson told Salle. “You know, as an actor I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job.”

Two years ago, the actress received flack for playing the lead role in the Ghost in the Shell, which many viewed as whitewashing a Japanese character. The cycle repeated in 2018 when she accepted the lead role of a transmasculine gangster in Rub & Tug, though she soon withdrew from the part following criticism.

“There are a lot of social lines being drawn now, and a lot of political correctness is being reflected in art,” Johansson continued. “I think society would be more connected if we just allowed others to have their own feelings and not expect everyone to feel the way we do.”

The actress issued a statement addressing the As If interview following backlash on social media, claiming that her comments had been taken “widely” out of context in order to produce “clickbait.”

“I personally feel that, in an ideal world, any actor should be able to play anybody and art, in all forms, should be immune to political correctness,” said Johansson, per The Advocate. “I recognize that in reality, there is a wide spread discrepancy amongst my industry that favors Caucasian, cis gendered actors and that not every actor has been given the same opportunities that I have been privileged to. I continue to support, and always have, diversity in every industry and will continue to fight for projects where everyone is included.”

SOURCE 





Political correctness warriors at Berkeley could end up criminalizing language

The modern usage of the notion of “political correctness” that emerged along with the American civil rights movement seems quaint considering the naked efforts at censorship in today’s world wielded by social justice frauds.

The latest shenanigans in the liberal bastion of Berkeley, California, don’t surprise anyone. The Berkeley City Council unanimously decided to eliminate gender from its law books, changing how the city interacts with its citizens.

This, like most actions taken by the left, can be excused as a well-meaning gesture, but it’s not. This is about training people to accept legal changes in language promoting and codifying a political agenda.

The moment you allow partisans to change language, you are unlocking the door to politicians and activists working together to control everything you say, and ultimately criminalize language itself.

The New York Times reported on Berkeley’s latest effort at language control. “Manhole will be replaced with maintenance hole. Sisters and brothers will be replaced with siblings and he or she will be banished in favor of they even if referring to one person,” The Times said. “The law would apply to traffic, health and safety regulations, garbage collection, environmental rules, construction permits, all of the business of the city.”

Berkeleyside, a local news site, reported on the city’s bizarre effort, “The rationale for this change states ‘amending the municipal code to include gender-neutral pronouns by illuminating any gender preference language within the municipal code will promote equality.’ ” This includes, by the way, referring to pregnant women now as “pregnant employees,” because “equality,” or something.

That, of course, is not true. Remember, the left usually tries to convince people to accept the absurd by inserting either “It’s for the children,” “It’s for the whales,” and the ubiquitous “It’s for equality,” because who can be against any of those things?

The left has always been desperate to make contradicting them bigoted at least and ultimately illegal. One would think they would be more interested in persuading people on issues that matter to them. But even they believe they can’t. The left cannot win discussions and debates on the issues, so their only solution is to silence non-conformists with assignments of bigotry and “hate,” hoping to silence and even ruin detractors.

How does the Berkeley ordinance explain itself?

“In recent years, broadening societal awareness of transgender and gendernonconforming [yes, they have that as one word] identities has brought to light the importance of non-binary gender inclusivity. Therefore, it is both timely and necessary to make the environment of City Hall and the language of city legislation consistent with the principles of inclusion,” CBS News reported.

We are assured by a representative for the city that Berkeley’s approximately 1,500 employees, according to The Times, “are not obliged to follow the new rules and conversation.”

And yet with this move, touted as something to make people feel more included, yet how safe would anyone in that environment feel simply using terms like “he” and “she?” Part of the conditioning of an act like this is to brainwash others to see a person using regular gender pronouns as a bigot, expanding the existential danger of using an unapproved pronoun.

We know the left wants to make it impossible to escape condemnation and punishment of whatever they’ve determined to be racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry in general, of everyone. And the only way to do that is to change the language and definitions.

The end goal of the left everywhere is to create an environment relying on fabricated language standards allowing for the arrest and/or ruination of those who use the wrong words or communicate in a way that someone finds offensive.

You think I’m going too far? It’s already happening. In England this past December, the Daily Mail reported that a mom was arrested for calling a transgender activist a man.

Kate Scottow was arrested in front of her children and locked in a cell for seven hours after calling a transgender woman a man on Twitter, said the newspaper.

“Three officers detained Kate Scottow at her home before quizzing at a police station about an argument with an activist on Twitter over so-called ‘dead naming.’ [as an example, if one were to refer to Caitlyn Jenner as Bruce]. The 38-year-old … had her photograph, DNA and fingerprints taken. … More than two months after her arrest … she has had neither her mobile phone or laptop returned which she said is hampering her studies for a masters in forensic psychology,” the newspaper reported.

Make no mistake, this is where we’re headed — making it possible to ruin someone’s life for being rude.

Moreover, Human Events reported, “A British doctor has been sacked from his government job following his refusal to refer to a hypothetical person described as a ‘six-foot-tall bearded man’ with feminine pronouns. Dr. David Mackareth … alleges that the topic of transgenderism and gender fluidity came up in a conversation with a line manager who asked him: ‘If you have a man six foot tall with a beard who says he wants to be addressed as ‘she’ and ‘Mrs,’ would you do that? … Describing it as an “interrogation,” the doctor claims his boss told him that it was ‘overwhelmingly likely’ he would lose his job unless he complied.”

The doctor did not comply, was fired and is now suing, Human Events reported.

Refusing to allow the left to change the language doesn’t make you a bigot, it makes you someone who cares about the freedom in this country that all of us count on, especially minorities who rely on the government not being powerful, intrusive and controlling. That is our fight, especially as totalitarian control continues to be masked as “tolerance.”

SOURCE 






Dr. Charles Kesler: The left sees political correctness as 'established religion,' shuns dissenters

Left-wing Democrats have caused American politics to be dominated by political correctness and patrol those who dissent from their norms, according to Dr. Charles Kesler.

The left thrives on P.C. culture and uses it as a type of moral compass, Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont-McKenna College in California, claimed in an interview airing Sunday on "Life, Liberty & Levin."

"What you see in the phenomenon of political correctness -- which is so powerful -- in a way, it came from the universities, but now it is utterly dominating American politics too," he said.

"If you look at the Democratic presidential candidates, if you look at the 'squad' in Congress, their agenda is driven by political correctness, and political correctness means you hate and cannot tolerate the imperfection -- the moral imperfection -- of your fellow Americans."

Levin: Trump was addressing content of congresswomen's character, not color of their skinVideo
Nodding to Hillary Clinton's monikers for supporters of President Trump, Kesler claimed many liberals see "deplorables" and "irredeemables" as people, "who have not evolved."

"We're all supposed to be evolving together into a more perfect union -- as President Obama liked to say -- but the fact [is] that we're not," he said.

Many liberal Democrats, he added, are not receptive to the ideologies of conservatives and center-right moderates.

"The fact that there are these recalcitrant people who insist on ruling themselves [and] having a different kind of government, fundamentally, than the kind that we want and that we think history promises -- the left is not prepared for that," he told host Mark Levin.

"It's become kind of... a Medieval established religion. There's an inquisition, there's an index of forbidden books and forbidden thoughts which you're not supposed to read or think.

"There is a strict moral patrol to make sure that you are not caught thinking things you shouldn't be thinking or saying things you shouldn't say. And it's the antithesis of freedom."

However, Kesler claimed some classical liberals are looking at the leftward shift in the Democratic Party and not agreeing with what they are seeing.

They, "are looking around them and saying we don't recognize the America that these people are leading us towards. It doesn't seem to be a free country anymore."

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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Monday, July 29, 2019






The casual authoritarianism of the Europe-lovers

In 1945, Clement Attlee said referendums were ‘the instrument of Nazism and fascism’. In 1975, Margaret Thatcher, nodding to Attlee, said referendums are a ‘device of dictators and demagogues’.

These quotes have been dug out time and again since the EU referendum, by Remainers horrified by the result. They slot Attlee’s and Thatcher’s remarks into their own warped view that democracy equals fascism. People are so dumb and wicked, goes the thinking, that we’re just waiting to elect genocidal maniacs. Referendums are not democratic exercises because it is all too easy for demagogues to mislead the sheeple.

But if anyone has been trying to use nominally ‘democratic’ processes to authoritarian ends recently, who has been trying to use the language of democracy against democracy, it is the Remainer elite. And in recent days, two of the political leaders of the Remain outlook, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, let slip their authoritarian intentions.

Swinson and Lucas are among those calling for a second referendum on Brexit. But when pushed by separate BBC interviewers as to whether they would accept the result of another referendum if the country voted Leave again, they both said no. On BBC News yesterday, Swinson said ‘No’, adding that ‘I’m going to do what I was sent here to do’. On Politics Live today, Lucas was at least more direct: ‘Um, no I probably wouldn’t.’

These admissions explode the argument the so-called People’s Vote campaign is still trying to make with a straight face. That is that while the electorate voted for Brexit, we didn’t vote for any particular Brexit deal. We should therefore have a right to vote on the terms, and if we now want to change our minds – that’s fine too!

Clearly, this was always bollocks. A second referendum is not about us having a final say – it is a means to an anti-democratic end, and the result would also be ignored if it went the ‘wrong’ way.

Given the anti-democratic bile that has been been spewed from Remoaners these past three years, Swinson’s and Lucas’s slips are hardly shocking. But we need to make clear what they are saying here. They are saying they are only willing to accept the outcome of democratic votes if they win them. This is the attitude of autocrats, happy to hold an election but only if one party is on the ballot. They are willing to use the ballot box to bolster their position, but just as willing to reject the result if they lose.

It’s amazing how inured we have become to these kind of authoritarian Remoaner arguments. Remember when Donald Trump refused to say whether he would accept the result of the 2016 US election if he lost? Liberals lost their shit – and rightly so, for once. But when essentially the same attitude is voiced by two leading Remainers, it is deemed by commentators to be eminently sensible – the leadership Britain needs!

For all the pearl-clutching over Boris Johnson’s history of spicy statements, what Swinson and Lucas have said in the past 24 hours is far worse than anything our new PM ever dashed out on a deadline. And this casual authoritarianism has become worryingly mainstream among the chattering classes.

SOURCE 







Donald Trump Jr. announces book attacking ‘leftist elites’ and ‘political correctness’

Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of President Trump, announced that his first book will be released this fall.

“Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us” will be published by Center Street, a Hachette imprint. Trump Jr. announced on Twitter that the book is available for preorder, writing, “This is the book the leftist elites don’t want you to read!”

On a web page for the book, Center Street said that Trump Jr. “will expose all the tricks that the left uses to smear conservatives and push them out of the public square, from online ‘shadow banning’ to fake accusations of ‘hate speech.’ No topic is spared from political correctness.”

“Trump, Jr. will write about the importance of fighting back and standing up for what you believe in,” the publisher said. “From his childhood summers in Communist Czechoslovakia that began his political thought process, to working on construction sites with his father, to the major achievements of President Trump’s administration, Donald Trump, Jr. spares no details and delivers a book that focuses on success and perseverance, and proves offense is the best defense.”

Center Street is known for publishing books by conservative writers and supporters of President Trump. Its stable of authors includes Jeanine Pirro, Michael Savage, Newt Gingrich and Charlotte Pence, a daughter of Vice President Pence.

“Triggered” will be the first book from Trump Jr., who serves as executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, which his father owns. His sister Ivanka Trump is the author of two books, “The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life” and “Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules of Success.”

Trump Jr. was an influential advisor to his father’s 2016 presidential campaign and is known for his bombastic presence on Twitter, where he regularly attacks members of the press and critics of his father’s presidency.

In 2016, weeks before the presidential election, Trump Jr. posted a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to Skittles candy. “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?” the tweet read. “That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”

And in 2018, Trump Jr. retweeted a post from Roseanne Barr in which the actress falsely claimed that hedge fund manager George Soros, who is Jewish, was a Nazi collaborator.

In a 2017 profile of Trump Jr., Times journalist Barbara Demick wrote that the president’s son was a “virtual attack dog” and “his father’s fiercest champion.”

“Unlike Ivanka, who gives the impression of being torn between loyalty to her father and her own more liberal politics, Trump Jr. appears to be unequivocally behind his father’s agenda,” Demick wrote.

“Triggered” is slated for publication on Nov. 5, just under a year from election day in 2020.

SOURCE 






Most Still Say Political Correctness Kills Free Speech

Just 28% Think Americans Have True Freedom of Speech Today

President Trump and others are routinely accused of hate speech by political opponents, but for a sizable majority of Americans, political correctness remains the bigger problem.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 26% of American Adults believe Americans have true freedom of speech today. Sixty-eight percent (68%) disagree and say Americans have to be careful not to say something politically incorrect to avoid getting in trouble. These findings have changed little in surveying for the past several years. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The survey of 1,000 American Adults was conducted on July 15-16, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC.

SOURCE 






The balls now in feminists’ court

If a penis is female, does it enjoy human rights? A Canadian trans woman, Jessica Yaniv, who retains intact her boy bits, believes she’s entitled to a Brazilian wax. Rejected by 16 beauticians in Vancouver, including migrant women working from home with children, Yaniv trotted off to a human rights tribunal. Some of the beauticians paid money to make her go away, some still face the prospect of being branded hateful transphobes and ordered to pay fines.

Ignored by most mainstream media, this has Twitter transfixed as the #WaxHerBalls case. British comedian Ricky Gervais tweeted: “It’s a sad state of affairs when a lady can’t have her hairy balls waxed.” All of which gives the impression it’s nothing more than the latest grotesquery of social media. But Gervais has detected a fundamental question of principle that Victoria’s politicians — and Anglophone elites generally — seem mostly oblivious to.

An Andrews government bill allows a self-declared trans man or woman to go back in time and alter the sex on their birth certificates, even if they’ve had no surgery, no treatment, no change at all, apart from a stated wish to make their debut with a new pronoun. The bill is back before parliament next month.

“It’s seen as the next civil rights issue — oh, now we have gay marriage, on to the next thing,” says Holly Lawford-Smith, a young University of Melbourne philosopher and lesbian writing a book on radical feminism.

But there are stirrings of civil war in what’s called the LGBTI community, and angry sniping over who qualifies for an entry pass to women’s sport, toilets, dorms, prisons and, yes, the waxing studio. For the Yaniv case is seen not as an aberration but a logical extension of pick-your-own-gender into the anti-discrimination apparatus. If blokes can become official sheilas in the blink of an eye, what happens to the rights, protections and political culture inspired by feminists and gay activism?

In Australian sport, where hormone controls can complicate things, an awkward debate has begun but it is more advanced in Britain. Brits have a well-organised lobby, Fair Play For Women, and this week The Guardian surprised readers with an even-handed piece by sport blogger Sean Ingle, who declared: “No longer can men tell women, such as Martina Navratilova, that when they stick up for a separate women’s sport category that they are ignorant or prejudiced.”

It’s a question not only of competition but also trust and vulnerability. Troubled by the Yaniv case, National Review writer David French has warned that a proposed Democratic change to US law might expose schoolgirls to so-called “female penises” in toilets and locker rooms. As well, he said, “the very act of objecting to the sight (of a penis) could itself be considered to create a hostile environment for the trans girl”.

Meanwhile, sex is turning philosophy into fight club. This month Australia’s thinkers had their annual talkfest at Wollongong University. Lawford-Smith was booked to argue the case for excluding “all male people, regardless of gender identity” from female-only or lesbian-only spaces. Activist academics tried to “deplatform” her and student agitators girded their loins for a demo under the banner “F..k off Holly Lawford-Smith”. Their Facebook post said she was “not welcome to spew her disgusting discriminatory and exclusionary hate speech at our university”. They ignored her nuanced arguments, dismissing her as a TERF or “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.

The Australasian Association of Philosophy, the conference organiser, issued a statement acknowledging “serious concerns” about Lawford-Smith’s presentation. There followed a sprinkling of diversity-speak platitudes. No stated concern about the abuse and threats directed at Lawford-Smith, no defence of her academic freedom.

She felt “quite intimidated” going in to her talk, but the university had beefed up security and the protest was muted. Even so, this is not how philosophy is supposed to be. “It’s our bread-and-butter to really dig down into the details of things and have these really difficult conversations in a calm, dispassionate way,” Lawford-Smith says.

Like other “gender critical” feminists, she has been banished from Twitter. It’s supposedly “hateful conduct” to use pronouns in a way that tracks sex rather than gender identity. But this “progressive” platform allows #punchaterf as a trending hashtag, and trans activists can attack a TERF as a “c..t” or “bigoted piece of shit” with impunity. Anti-TERF tactics include campaigns to dislodge people from their jobs, smearing them as fascists, threatening harm to their families and, in one case, pissing on an academic’s office door. Nobody denies there are genuine cases of distress among trans people, and some gender-critical feminists may seem high-handed.

One Oxford don took to Twitter with the hashtag #transawaythegay, conjuring up a story that “Emmett wasn’t allowed to be a lesbian and had to wear skirts and makeup. But when he realised he was supposed to be a boy and started taking testosterone, his church accepted him. All better now!”

In March, activists successfully pressured 3:AM Magazine, a fearless online journal of radical philosophy, to pull an interview with Lawford-Smith because it touch­ed on the TERF war. Her remarks seem temperate: “My stance is that a person can’t change sex (not even with sex reassignment surgery), that ‘gender identity’ has no bearing on sex, and that with very few exceptions gender identity should have no bearing on a person’s sex-based rights.”

Things have got so unpleasant that 12 prominent philosophers from around the world, including Australia’s Peter Singer and Melbourne-based Cordelia Fine, felt moved this week to publish an open letter deploring the attempt to silence gender identity sceptics with “frequently cruel and abusive rhetoric”. The letter says: “Policymakers and citizens are currently confronting such metaphysical questions about sex and gender as What is a man? What is a lesbian? What makes someone female? Society at large is deliberating over the resolution of conflicting interests in contexts as varied as competitive sport, changing rooms, workplaces and prisons. These discussions are of great importance.”

This month Lawford-Smith interrupted the chorus of bland approval for Victoria’s law, which magically transforms the enduring truth of birth sex into the changeable wish of gender identity. In a Melbourne newspaper she wrote: “Despite the fact that this bill changes what it means to be a person of a particular sex in law, and despite the fact that sex is a protected attribute in both the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act and the Australian Sex Discrimination Act, the group that faces the most sex discrimination — namely female people — have not been consulted about the bill, and the implications of the bill on their legal protections, if any, have not been adequately acknowledged or explored.”

Might horrified fascination with Canada’s #WaxHerBalls case rouse our MPs to ask some hard questions? This week Vancouver-based writer Meghan Murphy (banned from Twitter) issued an “I told you so”. “(The Yaniv case) is precisely what feminists tried to warn politicians, the media, activists and the public would happen should we accept the notion that it is possible for men to ‘identify’ as female. How can we possibly protect women’s boundaries, spaces and rights if men can be women, regardless of their male biology? No woman should be bullied into touching a man’s penis against her will.”

Surprising things keep happening. Early this year at a free-market think tank in Washington, DC, radical feminists and political conservatives made common cause in a public debate on the trans conundrum. “Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected,” reports gay conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Some may feel schadenfreude recalling the feminist track record of denouncing mainstream research on sex differences as a patriarchal plot. And the anti-trans argument built on biology is a delicate one for gay and lesbian identity.

The whole agonising affair is a reminder that abstruse ideas on campus can turn the world on its head. Without postmodernism and its reality-busting offshoots, who could ever have imagined a troublesome “female penis”?

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

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


Sunday, July 28, 2019


UK: Boris Johnson Destroys Labour leader in Under Seven Minutes



Boris didn’t just see off Corbyn’s turgid pre-scripted neo-Communist  lines with ease, he thoroughly wiped the floor with him. Ranks up there with Gove’s demolition as the worst beating Corbyn’s ever taken in Parliament, with the added finesse of the inclusion of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Note that most of the Labour backbench rose to applaud Boris.  Many Labour MPs want Brexit






Mexico sets 1st half murder record, up 5.3%

Does America need a population like this?  We do know that Mexican gangsters are among the illegals already in the USA and we do know that just about the whole of Latin America is violent and corrupt -- with some central American populations being even more lawless than Mexico.

So it is clear that Latin America has an inferior culture by almost any criterion.  And the people from there are going to bring that culture with them. They are not about to become Episcopalians

And among the behavioural products of that culture are what we see described below -- behaviour that creates a very dangerous, unsafe and chaotic society.  Who wants that? Latin Americans are just NOT desirable immigrants.  Many of them may individually be of no concern but in the mass of them are many people that the USA could well do without



Mexico set a new record for homicides in the first half of the year as the number of murders grew by 5.3% compared to the same period of 2018, fueled partly by cartel and gang violence in several states.

Mexico saw 3,080 killings in June, an increase of over 8% from the same month a year ago, according to official figures. The country of almost 125 million now sees as many as 100 killings per day nationwide.

The 17,608 killings in the first half of 2019 is the most since comparable records began being kept in 1997, including the peak year of Mexico’s drug war in 2011. Officials said 16,714 people were killed in the first half of 2018.

In particular, drug cartel turf wars have become increasingly bloody in the northern state of Sonora, where the number of homicides was up by 69% in the first half of the year. But in Sinaloa, where the cartel of convicted drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is based, homicides declined by 23% so far this year compared to last.

Given cutbacks and a widespread reorganization of security forces under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, it is not clear who, if anyone, is doing the analysis and intelligence work to find out exactly which conflicts are causing the rise in homicides.

“I could give you 10 potential, plausible reasons, but the truth is we don’t know, and that is perhaps the biggest problem,” said security analyst Alejandro Hope. “There is very little systematic research that would allow us to conclude what is really happening.”

And other types of crime, like extortion, have become increasingly frequent and violent.

As if to underscore that, officials said Monday the five men killed Sunday at a bar in the resort of Acapulco were allegedly part of a gang of extortionists who shook down business owners for protection payments.

Guerrero state prosecutor Jorge Zuriel “we now know that the members of this gang met daily at this bar to coordinate charging extortion payments and to collect the daily take.”

One suspect has been arrested in the shootings, which left six people wounded. Zuriel said the killers were members of a rival gang.

SOURCE 







The Cultural Left Goes Berserk
    
You follow the antics of AOC and the so-called “Squad” of hers and you wonder if the left has lost its mind. Your instincts are correct. And if it’s any comfort to the left, it is not alone. In fact, there are even loonier elements loose among the elites.

On the East Coast, the Manhattan-based leftist Jesuit magazine America regularly produces copy that assaults the teachings of the Catholic Church. (Some Jesuits are born with that DNA.) But the magazine has outdone itself now, even by its standards. It has published an article titled “The Catholic Case for Communism” by its Toronto-based correspondent Dean Dettloff, who just happens to be a member of the Communist Party of Canada.

Dettloff concedes, “Christianity and communism have obviously had a complicated relationship. That adjective ‘complicated’ will surely cause some readers to roll their eyes.” Well, he’s right. It did. Communists have murdered millions of Catholics all over the world. Millions more in China, Cuba and elsewhere continue to be persecuted. “Complicated”? Programming a remote control can be complicated. There’s a better word for this communist-Catholic dynamic. It’s called “genocide.”

This communist argued, “though some communists would undoubtedly prefer a world without Christianity, communism is not simply a program for destroying the church.” Except that is precisely what communism has tried to do all over the world since its founding, and for good reason. Catholicism is its mortal enemy.

Rod Dreher wrote a devastating piece for The American Conservative titled “Jesuits Rehabilitate Communism.” He wrote how in Warsaw recently, he knelt at the grave of the Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, the chaplain of the Solidarity labor union movement, who the communist security forces beat to a lifeless pulp in 1984. In communist countries, faithful priests and believers weren’t just killed; they were tortured and forced to watch their beloved Christ and his cross be mocked in lurid and disgusting ways.

It wasn’t “complicated.” It was obscene.

So, do you think it can get any more intellectually incoherent than that? Let’s just mosey over to the West Coast now and see what we find there. Hollywood is about as left-wing as you can get, but you can never be left-wing enough if you’re on the left, and here Hollywood goes again.

Hollywood is facing intense pressure from the left to be more “progressive.” Now the left is targeting movies for children. What’s the problem there, you ask? Just read Esquire magazine and you’ll learn that Disney movies like “The Lion King” are unacceptably uber-capitalist.

Gabrielle Bruney acknowledges in her piece that this is a movie about animals, not humans. But that doesn’t matter. “The politics of a cartoon savannah shouldn’t be taken too seriously, of course,” she writes. And then she becomes instantly serious: “but regressive class messaging abounds in children’s films. A 2016 study of G-rated blockbusters found that nearly a third of all the main characters in the films were upper class, while another quarter were upper middle class. Just 20 percent of leads were working class or poor.”

You see, the lions are the rich, and this means their prey is somehow the poor. Bruney complains that the hyenas in the film are the villains, even though the lions also prey on animals. She writes: “The problem with the hyenas, then, appears not to be that they eat meat, but that they’re trying to eat above their station. In the class structure of Pride Rock, Disney pretty much made villains of the hungry poor, outcast animals who just wanted to literally eat the rich.”

Similarly, the Washington Post published a column by Dutch professor Dan Hassler-Forrest in which he denounced “The Lion King” as a “fascistic” film that portrays “a society where the weak have learned to worship at the feet of the strong.” He adds, “The hyenas transparently represent the black, brown and disabled bodies that are forcefully excluded from this hierarchical society.”

Holy smokes. Can you follow this nonsense? Then again, did we just say “holy” (slyly inserting religion) and “smokes” (we must support the tobacco lobby)?

Maybe, just maybe, there’s some hope here. Maybe the intolerant left will find fault with everything and one day, like a black hole, implode upon itself.

SOURCE 






Judicial Watchdog Submits Congressional Ethics Complaint Against Rep. Omar for Potential Perjury, Fraud

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a complaint with the House of Representatives’ ethics office asking for an investigation into possible crimes committed by Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar.

The possible crimes include “perjury, immigration fraud, marriage fraud, state and federal tax fraud, and federal student loan fraud,” according to the complaint filed Tuesday by Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton.

“The House of Representatives must urgently investigate and resolve the serious allegations of wrongdoing by Rep. Omar,” Fitton said.

“Substantial, compelling and, to date, unrefuted evidence” supports the allegations, he said.

The evidence developed against Rep. Omar was the result of a three-year-long investigation in both the United States and the United Kingdom by Mr. Steinberg and his investigative reporter colleagues Preya Samsundar and Scott Johnson. It is supported by information gathered from public records, social media postings, genealogy databases, computer forensic analysis, unaltered digital photographs, discussions between the investigative reporters and the subjects of the investigation themselves, and information supplied by confidential sources within the Somali-American community.

“Documented-based reporting by Steinberg, et al. has developed the following information: Rep. Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, a citizen of the United States, married her biological brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a citizen of the United Kingdom, in 2009, presumably as part of an immigration fraud scheme. The couple legally divorced in 2017,” Fitton wrote.

Omar gave birth to children fathered by another man, Ahmed Hirsi, both before and during her marriage to Elmi. Legal documents such as speeding tickets demonstrate that she lived with Hirsi during the entirety of her marriage to Elmi.

Omar requested a “default” divorce from Elmi in 2017, an unusual proceeding used where one spouse has disappeared and cannot be located.

To obtain a divorce, Omar filed papers with the Minnesota district court swearing under penalty of perjury that she last saw him in 2011 and had no clues about how to contact him through other people.

She swore that she didn’t know the name of a single member of her husband’s family, and that they didn’t have any friends or acquaintances in common who might know how to locate him, according to papers she filed with the Minnesota district court to secure a divorce.

She swore she tried to locate him through social media but could not, even though he had public profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Screenshots additionally show Omar continuously interacting with him on social media in the years since.

“The evidence developed by Mr. Steinberg and his colleagues demonstrates with a high degree of certainty that Ms. Omar not only had contact with Mr. Elmi, but actually met up with him in London in 2015, which is supported by photographic evidence,” Judicial Watch’s complaint says.

Of particular importance are archived photographs taken during a widely reported trip by Ilhan Omar to London in 2015, posted to her own Instagram account under her nickname ‘hameey,’ in which she poses with her husband/presumed brother, Ahmed Elmi. These photographs from 2015 are documentary evidence that in fact she met up with Mr. Elmi after June 2011 and before the date she signed the divorce document in August 2017, thereby calling into question the veracity of her claim that she had not seen Mr. Elmi since June 2011.

In Instagram screenshots, published by Powerline and conservative outlet Alpha News, and which appear to have been deleted, the two men are sometimes pictured together, and Elmi refers to Omar’s children as his “nieces.”

(The Daily Caller News Foundation has observed other social media posts published by [David] Steinberg and determined they were authentic and online at the time of publication. They were deleted soon after the article called attention to them.)

Lying on a sworn form is perjury and each charge carries five years in prison, according to Minnesota law. Questions have been raised about the accuracy of approximately six statements on the sworn form.

The substance of the reporting by Steinberg, Samsundar, and Johnson has largely been ignored by the media, but not refuted.

The journalists “have engaged in meticulous research and reporting over a period of years. They have demonstrated with a high degree of probability that Rep. Ilhan Omar has violated House Ethics Rules, federal, and state laws,” Fitton said.

Omar was fined by the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board for using campaign funds to pay for an accountant to amend her taxes after she filed taxes jointly with Hirsi while she was not married to him (filing joint taxes with a non-spouse is not permitted) and while she was actually married to another man.

Under federal law 26 U.S. Code & 7206.1:

Any person who willfully makes and subscribes any return, statement, or other document, which contains or is verified by a written declaration that it is made under the penalties of perjury, and which he does not believe to be true and correct as to every material matter … shall be guilty of a felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not more than $100,000 … or imprisoned not more than 3 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.

Fitton said investigators must examine Omar’s tax returns for other falsifications.

Fitton said the apparent sham marriage may have been motivated by student loan fraud as well as making it easier for Elmi to immigrate to the U.S. Elmi had British citizenship when he came from London, married Omar, and enrolled in North Dakota State University with her, Omar has said.

Despite Omar saying her short-lived husband was long-lost, he can be tied even this year to other members of Omar’s family.

Omar’s sister Sahra Noor, who ran a high-profile nonprofit in Minnesota, this year created a new consultancy in Kenya. Elmi, who works in digital media, appears to have created its Instagram account. Code discovered by Steinberg shows that Elmi’s name is in the source code of the website.

“She’s been unwilling to address any of these questions,” Kevin Diaz, the editor of the Star Tribune, told PolitiFact. “There was an undisputed instance of her filing her taxes improperly. And if you’re in Congress, you should explain that to your constituents.”

Judicial Watch wrote to the Office of Congressional Ethics: “We call upon the Office of Congressional Ethics to launch an investigation into Rep. Omar’s conduct immediately.”

The Office of Congressional Ethics is comprised of non-congressmen who intake complaints and, if they deem the complaints strong, publicly refer them to the House Committee on Ethics.

“Democrats don’t file ethics complaints against Republicans and vice versa because you don’t want the tables turned,” an expert on Congress with the liberal group Demand Progress, Daniel Schuman, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “They used to call it a Cold War detente: You don’t nuke the Russians and they don’t nuke you.”

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

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




Friday, July 26, 2019


Behind Bibi's longevity

Jeff Jacoby

AS OF this week, Benjamin Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in Israel's history. David Ben Gurion, the country's first prime minister and legendary founding father, held the office for a total of 13 years and 127 days. Netanyahu surpassed that milestone on Saturday. If he wins the upcoming election in September — and if he survives several pending corruption investigations — he could theoretically remain prime minister until 2023.

Such longevity in office would be an extraordinary achievement in any parliamentary democracy, let alone one as contentious and competitive as Israel's, where the stakes are always high and the elbows always sharp. It is all the more remarkable in the case of Netanyahu, whose enemies are legion — and sometimes quite powerful, as in the case of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom tried to bring about his political downfall. Throughout his political career, Netanyahu has been bitterly resented by the left, both at home and abroad, and especially in the media. As he remarked tartly in a recent Time magazine interview, journalists have had "Netanyahu fatigue from Day One."

But Israeli voters haven't.

Netanyahu may be controversial, arrogant and infuriating, but he has also been successful. On his watch, Israel has grown stronger and more prosperous. Despite a rising tide of global antisemitism, the Jewish state is more secure than it has ever been. The "nation that dwells alone" has never been less isolated diplomatically. And while the Middle East remains a notoriously violent, unstable, and fanatical region, the decade since Netanyahu's 2009 return to power has been the most peaceful in Israel's history.

To be sure, there has been no resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians. The "peace process" is moribund, and Netanyahu has shown no inclination to move heaven and earth to revive it — not even to placate the Obama administration, which bitterly and intemperately blamed him for the lack of progress. Netanyahu has paid lip service to the eventual goal of a two-state solution, but he has also given voters his word that there will be no Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister.

The results speak for themselves.

For years, a large and vocal "peace camp" has insisted that Israel must reach a settlement with the Palestinians or be shunned as a pariah and targeted by global boycotts. Netanyahu has proven them wrong. His predecessor's dramatic attempts to end the conflict —Yitzhak Rabin's dramatic White House handshake, Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza, Ehud Olmert's offer of Palestinian statehood — ended up worsening Israel's standing in the world. The longer Israeli leaders clung to a policy of concessions and appeasement, the more respect Israel lost. Under Netanyahu, the appeasement has largely stopped — and Israel's international profile has risen dramatically.

Among Benjamin Netanyahu's gifts is great skill at communicating in English. He is one of only two foreign leaders to have addressed a joint meeting of the US Congress on three occasions (the other was Winston Churchill)

In recent years, Netanyahu became the first Israeli prime minister to visit Latin America. He has traveled four times to Africa and welcomed numerous African leaders to Israel. He has achieved "better relations with all the leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council than at any time since [Israel] was created," writes Aaron David Miller, a longtime State Department advisor and Middle East negotiator.

Most important, he has expanded and strengthened Israel's ties to Sunni Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which share Jerusalem's view of Iran as a deadly enemy. Last November, Netanyahu visited the Gulf monarchy of Oman, where he was warmly received by the sultan.

Complementing Israel's improved fortunes beyond its borders is plenty of good news at home, from the country's emergence as a world-class high-tech powerhouse to a steady decline in terrorist attacks. To the extent that such things can be measured, Israel is one of the happiest nations on the planet. The Netanyahu Era has been a good one, and Israelis have been in no hurry to end it.

When Netanyahu's first stint as prime minister ended in a 1999 election defeat, some made the mistake of writing him off as a political force. "He will be a footnote, if anything, in the history of Israeli prime ministers," gloated one prominent Israeli journalist. Israelis return to the polls in September, and Netanyahu is running hard in hopes of winning a sixth election. There are no guarantees; voters may decide his time is up. But whatever happens, Netanyahu will never again be mistaken for a footnote. He is no beloved Ben Gurion, but his place in Israel's pantheon is assured.

SOURCE 






What's Most Important for blacks?  Trump?

By Walter E. Williams

Let's think about priorities. Say that you live in one of the dangerous high crime and poor schooling neighborhoods of cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit or St. Louis. Which is most important to you: doing something about public safety and raising the quality of education or, as most black politicians do, focusing energies upon President Donald Trump and who among the 20 presidential contenders will lead the Democratic Party? The average American has no inkling about the horrible conditions in which many blacks live. Moreover, they wouldn't begin to tolerate living under those conditions themselves.

In Chicago, one person is shot every four hours and murdered every 18 hours. Similar crime statistics can be found in many predominantly black neighborhoods in Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis and many other large cities. It's not just an issue of public safety, for high crime has other devastating consequences.

Crime lowers the value of property. We can see some of this when housing prices skyrocket in formerly high crime areas when large numbers of middle- and upper-income people purchase formerly run-down properties and fix them up. This is called gentrification — wealthier, predominantly white, people move in to renovate and restore slum housing in inner cities, causing higher rental prices and forcing low-income residents out. Also, as a result of gentrification, crime falls and neighborhood amenities increase.

The high crime rates in many black neighborhoods have the full effect of outlawing economic growth and opportunities. Here's a tiny example of the impact of crime on businesses. In low crime communities, supermarket managers may leave plants, fertilizer and other home and garden items outdoors, unattended and often overnight. If one even finds a supermarket in a high crime neighborhood, then that store must hire guards, and the manager cannot place items outside unguarded or near exits. They cannot use all the space that they lease, and hence they are less profitable. Who bears the ultimate cost of crime? If you said black people, you're right. Black people must bear the expense to go to suburban shopping malls if they are to avoid the higher prices charged by mom and pop shops.

In low crime neighborhoods, FedEx, UPS and other delivery companies routinely leave packages that contain valuable merchandise on a doorstep if no one is at home. That saves the expense of redelivery and saves recipients the expense of having to go pick up the packages. In high crime neighborhoods, delivery companies leaving packages at the door and supermarkets leaving goods outside unattended would be equivalent to economic suicide.

Today's level of lawlessness and insecurity in many black communities is a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1950s, '40s, '30s and earlier times, people didn't bar their windows. Doors were often left unlocked. People didn't go to bed to the sounds of gunshots. And black people didn't experience anything like what's experienced in Chicago and other cities such as one person being shot every four hours and murdered every 18 hours. The uninformed blame today's chaos on discrimination and poverty. That doesn't even pass the smell test, unless one wants to argue that historically there was less racial discrimination and poverty than today.

Politicians who call for law and order are often viewed negatively, but poor people are more dependent on law and order than anyone else. In the face of high crime or social disorder, wealthier people can afford to purchase alarm systems, buy guard dogs, hire guards and, if things get completely out of hand, move to a gated community. These options are not available to poor people. The only protection poor people have is an orderly society.

Ultimately, the solution to high crime rests with black people. Given the current political environment, it doesn't benefit a black or white politician to take those steps necessary to crack down on lawlessness in black communities. That means black people must become intolerant of criminals making their lives living hell, even if it requires taking the law into their own hands.

SOURCE 






House Democrats Rebuke Anti-Semite 'Squad'

The chamber overwhelming passed a resolution rejecting the anti-Israel BDS boycotts   

Members of “The Squad,” the radical leftist collection of four young Democrat women, are driving Democrat leadership crazy. Back in May, after a flap over Rep. Ilhan Omar’s repeated anti-Semitic comments, the House was driven to a vote condemning such hatred — only it was watered down so much that even Omar voted for it. Last week, of course, President Donald Trump successfully united Democrats behind these radical socialists by attacking them. This week, the House ended up having to pass a resolution opposing an effort to boycott Israel — an effort pushed by Omar and her pal, Rashida Tlaib.

“The resolution puts the House on record opposing the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and its efforts to target U.S. companies that do business with Israel,” reports Fox News. “The movement has grown in recent years, and Israel sees it as a threat. Supporters of Israel view it as an attempt to delegitimize the Jewish state.”

Omar, Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were among 16 Democrats who voted against the resolution. In fact, in pushing for a resolution supporting boycotts like BDS, Omar and Tlaib each likened boycotting Israel to boycotting Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Omar did so — albeit without a specific reference to Israel — in the resolution itself. Tlaib echoed the resolution’s language on the House floor, saying, “Americans boycotted Nazi Germany in response to dehumanization, imprisonment, and genocide of Jewish people.”

Modern Israel exists today largely as a result of the Nazi Holocaust. Israel is by no means perfect, but, to grossly understate it, using one boycott to justify the other makes no sense. Yet here Democrats are, forced to reject this nonsense in a House vote.

What’s next? The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn writes, “The Democratic Party’s Thelma and Louise — Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — are taking their act to Israel. In a great gift to Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to let them in.” Tlaib is of Palestinian descent and has relatives in the West Bank. We fully expect the trip to be full of fodder for Trump to use against all Democrats.

Indeed, McGurn concludes, “The Squad is now in the driver’s seat of the Democratic debate. They are not letting go of the wheel even it means, à la Thelma and Louise, taking the whole car over a cliff.”

SOURCE 






Tourists defiant of coming ban on climbing Australia's Ayers rock



It's part of Aboriginal heritage but it's our heritage too.  It's basically a public property so why are we discriminated against in favour of one small religious group?  It's a major tourist drawcard so the ban will be a big hit on the tourist industry

A sign sits at the base of Uluru, imploring visitors to reconsider scaling Australia’s most famous natural landmark — an act that is deeply offensive to traditional landowners.

And yet day after day Australian and international tourists walk past the sign and scale the iconic rock, eager to tick the experience off their bucket lists before a total climbing ban comes into effect on October 26, this year.

As the deadline grows closer the pace of visitors is increasing with many insisting it is their right to climb Uluru and urging others to do the same.

In a number of Facebook groups, including those where backpackers look for farm work, tourists and Australians comment that people need to “chill out” about the rock and encourage others to make the climb.

In one post, a German tourist posted a picture of herself standing at the top of Uluru and said, “I would do it again if I could”.

Another person in the group said “climbing it is fun” and described the view as “fantastic”.

A man from Sydney also encouraged people to climb, attaching a laughing emoji to the end of his comment. “Climb it like every other rock on the planet,” he said. “People need to chill the f**k out, it’s like they’ve all given birth to this rock.”

Another tourist said they didn’t “give a s**t”. “Have climbed it and definitely worth it. I dont give a s**t,” they wrote.

In the same group, an Aussie described climbing the sacred rock as a “birthright”. “Australians have a birthright to climb Uluru. Regardless see ya there in 2020, ” he said.

Uluru senior custodian Sammy Wilson told ABC’s 7.30program on Monday night that tourists were increasingly aware of the cultural significance of the area to the indigenous people. “I’ve noticed more and more people are coming on tours to learn from us Anangu (the traditional owners),” Mr Wilson said. “I enjoy people asking about and wanting to learn about our country.”

Yawuru woman Shannan Dodson, who works as an Indigenous affairs adviser for Media Diversity Australia and is on the committee for NAIDOC week, told news.com.au that Uluru should have the same significance as other sacred sites around the world.

“The issue around climbing Uluru is that it is a sacred place and at the end of the day, when you see how much the world rallied around the destruction of Notre Dame and how significant that is, people understand there are sacred places based around culture and religion,” she said.

“The fact you can’t then translate that to Uluru having the same significance is undermining. “For me, it feels like Western cultures and values are always elevated above other cultures and values. It’s saying Aboriginal cultures and values are less important. It’s just a thinking that we’re less than them and that our culture and values don’t matter.”

In November 2017, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Board started the countdown to when the climb would be closed permanently.

The date of October 26, 2019 was put forward — a significant day for the Anangu indigenous community because it was that day in 1985 that the government returned ownership of the land to the traditional owners.

But since setting the date, the number of people climbing Uluru has skyrocketed.

Before park management announced it was closing the climb, about 140 people were climbing Uluru each day.

Since then, the number has doubled and at times tripled to 300-500 daily visitors.

In early July, a photo taken at the base of Uluru went viral after it showed hordes of tourists snaking up the rock face.

The Anangu traditional land owners say tourists are leaving rubbish bins overflowing, illegally dumping human waste from caravans along the roadside, and have made Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park the “busiest they’ve seen it”.

“There’s cars parked for one kilometre on either side of the road leading up to the carpark at the base,” an unnamed photographer who supplied the photo to the ABC said.

Traditional landowners are devastated by the masses rushing to climb Uluru before the cut-off date and ignoring the fact the act is deeply offensive.

“It makes me sick looking at this photo at the disrespect and disregard shown for the traditional owners’ wishes,” a spokesperson from the Darug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation said.

“Not only do people climb it but they defecate, urinate and discard nappies and rubbish on it.

“I for one cannot wait for the climb to be permanently closed and our sacred lore, culture and traditions to be acknowledged and respected.”

At least 35 people have died while attempting to climb Uluru, and many others have been injured. From 2011 to 2015, the climb was closed 77 per cent of the time due to dangerous weather conditions or cultural reasons.

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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Thursday, July 25, 2019


America, Google and Me: My Senate Speech

Dennis Prager
    
Last week, at the invitation of Sen. Ted Cruz, I spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Google’s having placed more than 60 Prager University videos on its restricted list. Any family that filters out pornography and violence cannot see those particular videos on YouTube (which is owned by Google); nor can any school or library.

This statement is as much about what I and PragerU stand for as it is about Google. Those interested in viewing the presentation can do so here:

It is an honor to be invited to speak in the United States Senate. But I wish I were not so honored. Because the subject of this hearing — Google and YouTube’s (and for that matter, Twitter and Facebook’s) suppression of internet content on ideological grounds — threatens the future of America more than any external enemy.

In fact, never in American history has there been as strong a threat to freedom of speech as there is today.

Before addressing this, however, I think it important that you know a bit about me and the organization I co-founded, Prager University — PragerU, as it often referred to.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My late father, Max Prager, was a CPA and an Orthodox Jew who volunteered to serve in the U.S. Navy at the start of World War II. My father’s senior class thesis at the City College of New York was on anti-Semitism in America. Yet, despite his keen awareness of the subject, he believed that Jews living in America were the luckiest Jews to have ever lived.

He was right. Having taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, written a book on antisemitism and fought Jew-hatred my whole life, I thank God for living in America.

It breaks my heart that a vast number of young Americans have not only not been taught how lucky they are to be Americans but have been taught either how unlucky they are or how ashamed they should be.

It breaks my heart for them because contempt for one’s country leaves a terrible hole in one’s soul and because ungrateful people always become unhappy and angry people.

And it breaks my heart for America because no good country can survive when its people have contempt for it.

I have been communicating this appreciation of America for 35 years as a radio talk show host, the last 20 in national syndication with the Salem Radio Network — an organization that is a blessing in American life. One reason I started PragerU was to communicate America’s moral purpose and moral achievements, both to young Americans and to young people around the world. With a billion views a year, and with more than half of the viewers under age 35, PragerU has achieved some success.

My philosophy of life is easily summarized: God wants us to be good. Period. God without goodness is fanaticism and goodness without God will not long endure. Everything I and PragerU do emanates from belief in the importance of being a good person. That some label us extreme or “haters” only reflects on the character and the broken moral compass of those making such accusations. They are the haters and extremists.

PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime ministers, four Pulitzer Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.

Do you think the secretary-general of NATO; or the former prime ministers of Norway, Canada or Spain; or the late Charles Krauthammer; or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.

Yet, Google, which owns YouTube, has restricted access to 56 of our 320 five-minute videos and to other videos we produce. “Restricted” means families that have a filter to avoid pornography and violence cannot see that video. It also means that no school or library can show that video.

Google has even restricted access to a video on the Ten Commandments … Yes, the Ten Commandments!

We have repeatedly asked Google why our videos are restricted. No explanation is ever given.

But of course, we know why: because they come from a conservative perspective.

Liberals and conservatives differ on many issues. But they have always agreed that free speech must be preserved. While the left has never supported free speech, liberals always have. I therefore appeal to liberals to join us in fighting on behalf of America’s crowning glory — free speech. Otherwise, I promise you, one day you will say, “First they came after conservatives, and I said nothing. And then they came after me. And there was no one left to speak up for me.”

Thank you.

SOURCE 






An epidemic of literal-mindedness

Commentators seem to be so thick that they take jokes and figures of speech literally.

Telling jokes on Twitter is a risky affair. Comedian Kevin Hart was pressured to withdraw from hosting the Oscars because of arguably homophobic gags he posted online many years ago. James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy film series, has only recently been rehired by Disney after he was sacked for tweeting jokes about paedophilia. Justine Sacco, a PR executive, became the top trending story worldwide after tweeting to her 170 followers from Heathrow airport: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!’ By the time she landed in Cape Town, her career was over.

Anyone familiar with social media knows that at any given time there are armies of offence-seekers, poised over their laptops, perspiring with glee at the prospect of ‘calling out’ those who blaspheme against the Holy Church of Wokeness. The other day I posted a screenshot of an extremely improbable result from ‘The Political Compass’, a website that measures an individual’s political temperament against economic (left-right) and social (authoritarian-libertarian) axes. It wasn’t my result at all, but that of an extreme far-right tyrant. The image was captioned: ‘Turns out I’m more left-wing than I thought.’ Within two hours, my daft joke had been quoted back to me as evidence of my right-wing beliefs.

I suppose I should have known better. All comedians are accustomed to varying reactions to their material, whether that’s online or in the white heat of live stand-up. There’s no such thing as a universally successful joke because of the inherent subjectivity of humour. But for any routine to work, we have to assume that the audience is sufficiently comedy-literate to understand that gags are not literal expressions of the truth. Those who fail to appreciate the distinction tend to be those who also argue that comedians should take great care not to cause offence. Ricky Gervais has a joke about an audience member who thinks it’s all about him. ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’, he asks. ‘Well hey dude’, comes the furious reply, ‘my chicken died yesterday’.

I can’t be alone in observing that this kind of self-obsessed literal-mindedness is far more common now than ever before. I’ve written previously about an experience at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe where an outraged audience member interrupted my show because she had decided to take one of my jokes at face value. I can’t help but think that this sort of behaviour is connected to the low regard in which stand-up is held. How often do punters heckle during productions of Titus Andronicus because of Shakespeare’s problematic endorsement of rape, dismemberment and cannibalism? Should we be concerned that Angela Lansbury is so often in the vicinity when murders take place? Is it true that Shakira’s hips are incapable of deceit?

This is not just confined to Twitter users, either. Politicians and media commentators appear to exercise an almost wilful ignorance of the basic concepts of metaphor and hyperbole. This week Robert Rowland, a Brexit Party MEP, sent the following tweet: ‘We are behind all our fisherman [sic] and the restoration of sovereignty over our waters. 200 miles of exclusion zone with any foreign fishing vessel given the same treatment as the Belgrano!’ The Independent reported that Rowland had ‘called for the Royal Navy to sink EU fishing vessels’, assuming that his reference to the ill-fated Argentine cruiser was a direct endorsement of a policy that ‘would see EU boats as far away as France’s Bay of Biscay attacked by British warships’. The Liberal Democrat MEP Chris Davies claimed to feel ‘sick to the stomach’ after hearing that Rowland was ‘calling for fishermen from another nation to die in our waters’.

Are these people genuinely as stupid as they seem? Can it be possible to achieve a successful career in politics or the media without being able to understand the difference between hyperbole and open calls for violence? Perhaps Rowland is truly as ‘evil’ as his political rivals claim, although it’s far more likely that they are seeking to discredit him by intentionally misinterpreting his comment. In any case, it would be far more effective simply to criticise him for his undiplomatic language, rather than pretending that he yearns for the destruction of fishermen’s boats like some kind of demented latter-day Poseidon.

We have become so used to accepting the media’s literal-mindedness that we rarely question it, particularly when it confirms what we’d like to believe of our opponents. I myself have made jokes at the expense of Boris Johnson for his use of offensive language about black people without bothering to check the context. It’s only recently that I actually read the original article in which he describes ‘flag-waving piccaninnies’ and ‘tribal warriors’ with ‘watermelon smiles’. And although I’m no fan of Johnson, I have to concede that the article in question is quite plainly using colonial rhetoric in order to mock Tony Blair for his international saviour complex. Perhaps Johnson does harbour racist feelings, but this attempt at satire cannot, if we’re being honest with ourselves, be cited as incriminating evidence.

I’m reminded of a tweet by the comedian Andrew Lawrence: ‘Given that about 80 per cent of suicides in the UK last year were committed by men, if feminists truly wanted equality, they’d kill themselves.’ This resulted in an online petition which urged the BBC to ban him from any future shows on the grounds that he was willing ‘to incite others to take their own lives’. Again, if we accept that those who signed the petition are being honest, we must also accept that they lack the basic capacity to understand a joke. I would have far more respect for those who admit that they simply want jokes they find offensive to be banned, in spite of my contempt for such authoritarian instincts.

It’s so much easier to think we’ve won an argument if we ignore context, nuance and the figurative nature of language. But if we are serious about the battle of ideas, we should insist that we fight each other on a level playing field. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that political disputes are best resolved through hand-to-hand combat on horizontal terrain typically reserved for competitive sporting events.

Although given the intellectual stupor of so much of the commentariat, perhaps that’s not such a bad idea.

SOURCE 






Attacks on Conservative Speech Take Many Forms
    
Looking over the frenzied political landscape in America today, one marred by constant clashes between right and left, a single issue rises above the rest. In many areas of public life, conservatives, their words, their views, and values, are under assault. Conservative speech is under direct attack by ultra-left, radical activists who are methodically expunging conservative speech and conservative ideas from public discourse.

This threat to the First Amendment and to the sharing of viewpoints held by roughly half of all Americans is taking many forms but is often paired with harsh threats and actual acts of violence directed at conservatives. Brutal physical assaults on conservative men and women are waged by an increasingly radical subsection of our society that is growing in power and bravado.

Andy Ngo, a reporter for Quillette, was viciously attacked by masked Antifa thugs while exercising his First Amendment right to free press. The video of his attack was seen by millions, and his subsequent article in The Wall Street Journal prompted a response from Capitol Hill. However, while most on the conservative side condemned the attack on a member of the press, most progressives — those who supposedly carry the torch of free speech — were conspicuously silent on the issue.

Meeting speech with violence is completely unacceptable and directly opposite of the American model of the free exchange of ideas in pluralistic society. But leftist activists often get away with labeling anything they disagree with as “hate speech,” and they work hard to silence the messenger. The violence committed against Mr. Ngo placed him in the hospital and was justified by street thugs simply because Ngo is a “conservative” who “unmasked Antifa.”

Fortunately, some organizations are working to stem this violent, hateful tide.  A new legal defense group, Publius Lex, founded by Harmeet Dhillon, works to preserve justice in a system that seems all too hesitant to investigate and prosecute violent Antifa activists. It has taken Mr. Ngo on as their first legal case.

A more systematic problem of bias against conservative free speech exists on many college campuses around the country. Thoroughly reported by Campus Reform and The College Fix, progressive students enabled by agenda-driven professors and college administrators regularly harass conservative students. Some incidents of suppression manifest in the destruction of property. More subtle cases have been documented such as professors marking down the grades of conservative students for no reason other than those students’ traditional values.

Many universities are also limiting conservative speech via unaccountable administrative tribunals (bias response teams) that make conservative students appear before panels of school officials to answer for comments made in a classroom or elsewhere on campus. Complaints lodged against conservative students are usually anonymous, and these accused students often have no legal representation or due process. In addition, many college campuses foster environments where conservative students are shouted down and discriminated against for their views or values. Many students are now afraid to share their ideas of views that challenge prevailing liberal doctrine.

A new organization is meeting head-on these threats to the First Amendment on college campuses. Speech First is dedicated to protecting students’ speech rights on campus through advocacy, litigation, and other means. Speech First has filed federal lawsuits against the University of Michigan, University of Texas-Austin, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign seeking to restore freedom of speech on campuses and ensure that college students attend classes and participate in activities that promote open discourse. 

Many social-media platforms are blatantly discriminating against conservatives with Silicon Valley executives openly expressing their disdain for conservative ideas. The de-platforming and banning of prominent center-right voices and conservative thought leaders has touched off accusations of bias and targeting. Twitter now has a policy saying anyone using an incorrect gender pronoun or wrong first name of someone else could be banned. Twitter has effectively shut down hotly contested debates on subjects such as gender identity, with these bans almost always going against conservative thought. 

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, recently rolled out a new “feature.” It will utilize artificial intelligence to read every single comment or post, and if the algorithm deems the content of the post to be offensive in any way, Instagram will ask you to confirm your post. It’s not difficult to imagine how this algorithm could be manipulated to flag and suppress conservative speech.

The Media Research Center is now monitoring online bias against conservatives. TechWatch documents conservative bias and fights against online censorship of conservatives on various social-media platforms. Its online blogs document the onslaught of offensive Silicon Valley has committed against conservatives, as well as how conservatives feel about Big Tech.

Preserving free speech in America and maintaining respect for one another — no matter what political opinions or religious beliefs we may have — is essential to the survival of our nation. What’s more, our First Amendment rights are not labeled Republican or Democrat. Public streets, campus classrooms, and online forums should be centers of robust, mutually respected debate.

Sadly, that is no longer the case. Those who are engaging in the fight to preserve conservative values and the unfettered expression of conservative speech deserve our respect and our full support.

SOURCE 





Australia: Devastated junior football team has all their competition points stripped because they are TOO GOOD

This absurdity springs from the Leftist obsession with  equality.  But people are not equal and never will be.  It's grossly unjust that people are arbitrarily denied the fairly won fruits of their efforts. Australia is not the Soviet Union yet

It would be different if the competition was unfair.  That does happen. St. Joseph's college at Nudgee in Brisbane in 2010 tried to pull a fast one on those lines.  They recruited a substantial number of Polynesian students using scholarships.  Polynesians tend to be rather large.  They then fielded a Rugby football team that was mainly comprised of Polynesians, who were markedly larger than the Caucasian players from other schools. 

Such matches were swiftly stopped for the safety of the players in the other teams. Some teams refused to field with them at all. Another prominent Catholic college threatened to ban their students from playing Rugby altogether. So Nudgee's attempt to gain an unfair advantage just disrupted the fixtures and earned them scorn for bad sportmanship.



A junior football team has been stripped of its shot at a premiership because its players are too good.

The West Australian Football Commission has stripped South Coogee Junior Football Club's Year 10 A division team of all of its premiership points and given them a $500 good behaviour bond.

This was reportedly in reaction to five of the six A team players refused to move to a B division team, which has been struggling to win its league matches.

The means any team playing against the South Coogee A team in the remaining six games is automatically awarded a win - with a victory margin pre-set at 60 points.

The WAFC's attempt to even the competition has left players and parents devastated.

'It is just a shame because these are just young boys who want to play footy yet they are forced to face the politics that goes on behind the scenes, at such a young age,' a club source told WAtoday.

'And the WAFC and other officials wonder why so many are turning their back on footy to play other sports like soccer.

'The reality is, both teams will probably leave and not play next year because of all of this.'

The football team was split after South Fremantle junior competition director Mark Brookes moved a proposal to WAFC in February this year.

The permission was granted on the condition that both teams need to be competitive.

South Coogee's A division team was selected with those who wanted to advance to a higher level and the B division team had players 'who just wanted to play the game with their mates.'

Initially, the teams were supposed to play in A and C divisions, but South Coogee had to field its 'second' team in division B after another football club Willeton withdrew from division C.

The C division team was forced to play in the B division.

WAFC and officials from South Coogee Junior Football have been contacted for their comments.

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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