Wednesday, February 05, 2020


Explosive Leaked Confession of Domestic Abuse of Johnny Depp Turns #MeToo Upside Down

A leaked audio conversation between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard is blowing up Hollywood. The audio reveals Heard confessing to committing physical violence against Depp. After BuzzFeed published photos of Heard with bruises and accusations of abuse against Depp, his life fell apart. Depp was implicated in the #MeToo movement and branded as a wife-abuser. He was dropped from "Pirates of the Caribbean" in 2018 and many speculate it was because of the allegations.

On Sunday, a taped conversation between Depp and Heard was posted online. In it, Heard admits to "slapping," "hitting," and throwing objects at him. Her biggest frustration with Depp appears to be that he tries to get away from her when she turns violent. Depp is heard saying, "There can be no physical violence," and Heard replies, "I can't promise I won't get physical again."

Heard spends a lot of time on the audio berating Depp for running away from her when they are fighting and not engaging with her when she's in a violent rage. At one point Depp says, "I'm not the one who f***ing throws f***ing pots and whatever the f*** else at me."

Heard doesn't deny it and replies, "That's different...one does not negate the other. That's irrelevant. Just because I throw pots and pans does not mean you don't come and knock on the door," equating him walking away from a violent encounter to throwing pots at someone's head.

Later in the audio Heard admits to slapping and hitting him and justifies that it's okay because she didn't punch him. "I'm sorry I didn't hit you across the face in a proper slap, but I was hitting you. I wasn't punching you," she said. "You didn't get punched. You got hit...but you're fine. I did not hurt you."

The privilege that women have when they accuse a man of abuse is widely known. Whole movements, like the #MeToo scam, spring up to attack the accused man and destroy his career. Phrases like "believe women" are printed on bumper stickers and t-shirts, but no one stops to wonder if the woman is telling the truth. In this case, it appears that Heard was lying. If a man claims he is abused, no one wants to hear his story. When Heard accused Depp of abusing her, he fought back and claimed that he was the one suffering physical abuse. Hardly anyone believed him. As a result, Heard's Hollywood star rose while Depp lost jobs.

Now that this audio is out, #AmberHeardIsAnAbuser and #JusticeForJohnny are trending on Twitter. Suddenly, the world realizes that women aren't always truthful or trustworthy. This is a subject that I wrote an entire book about after the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, where half the country believed a Supreme Court nominee was guilty of rape or something because a mentally fragile woman accused him of a drunken grope 30 years ago that no one could recall and for which no evidence existed.

History is full of stories of duplicitous and scheming harpies who destroyed the lives of men over false accusations. I detail many of them in my book, Believe Evidence: The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo. Pick it up today on Amazon. And the next time some woman comes forward with a salacious story about a man, instead of labeling her "brave" and "courageous," check her facts and evidence. Men have been and continue to be abused, raped, sexually assaulted, and murdered by women. Their voices should not be silenced by the #MeToo hags who can't understand reality and human nature.

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Kobe Contradictions: Why #GirlDad Isn't Reality in Black America

Many woke black people seek to live vicariously through the lives of the rich and famous.

Patrick Hampton
 
The world is numb, saddened, and in mourning for the tragic loss of basketball superstar Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna, as well as the other passengers and pilot who also perished in the helicopter crash in Calabasas, California. In memoriam, the Twitter-verse is filled with heartfelt tribute for the basketball legend and his 13-year-old child, with posts shared under the now-viral hashtag #GirlDad. Among those sharing photos and telling stories are black socialites and #PretendParents — my term for parents who only exist to brag on children they didn’t raise. These groups band together to celebrate fatherhood in light of this devastating incident. But is a horrible event like this what it really takes for us to praise the value of having a father in the home?

First, let’s define what a #GirlDad is. In summary, a #GirlDad is a father who is actively raising his daughter into womanhood. But how many #GirlDads are there today?

I’m not here to question Kobe’s parenting abilities. It’s clear that he was as present as any celebrity athlete can be for his family. Instead, I call into question the false pride among the African-American community, which has clearly shown that fatherhood is no longer a priority. Statistics suggest that greater than 70% of black people are born to single-parent (mother) households.

It’s as if many woke black people seek to live vicariously through the lives of the rich and famous, but they never work to acquire and redeem any virtues of their own. They tune into Hollywood’s depiction of wealthy, powerful, and successful black families and are satisfied with just watching. The black family has been in television for generations, so how did we end up with fatherless homes at all? I estimate that to these woke black people, seeing their own in television, in headlines, is good enough.

This type of laziness is hard to tackle. For little effort is given because the notion of collectivism prevails. “One black person succeeds, so we all are succeeding,” some people believe. One strong tidal wave lifts all boats.

Sadly, this approach to living keeps black families lacking and unable to realize success for themselves. While Kobe may have had a wonderful relationship with his daughter, this hardly means that all black families are healthy and whole, and no amount of retweets and hashtags will make it so.

#GirlDad doesn’t address an alarming abortion rate among blacks.

#GirlDad doesn’t speak to the staggering crime rates for black men compared to other races.

#GirlDad does little to resolve the educational challenges present in today’s public schools.

#GirlDad says nothing about a culture of hateful mothers who pin their daughters against their dads.

#GirlDad hardly challenges the judicial biases against men who truly want to be good fathers.

With black families among those pressed up against these obstacles, the last thing we need is another useless #hashtag movement. Generations of television and film depicting a wholesome, successful black family didn’t do it, and neither will this. It’s time we turn away from the computer screen and face the mirror. Looking at ourselves, we must ask if we truly value family.

SOURCE






Thinking for ourselves — precious and threatened

Seventy-five years ago, as the war raged with unrelenting ferocity, Australia’s daily papers reported, typically in a snippet at the bottom of page 4, that on what is now Australia Day a “terrible concentration camp” had been captured at Oswiecim, in southwestern Poland.

According to Reuters, “tens of thousands of people were tortured” in the camp, while “thousands more were shot”.

In reality, 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz, of whom 960,000 were Jews. But the scale of the horror only began to become apparent months later, as other camps were liberated and the first newsreels were released, including a film, showing piled corpses and gaunt survivors, projected throughout Australia in May of that year.

Worldwide, the shock was enormous, including to those who had no illusions about the Nazi regime.

“We expected anything from that bunch,” Hannah Arendt, who had narrowly escaped deportation to the death camps, told Gunter Grass in an interview on German television in 1964. “But this was different. It really was as if an abyss had opened.”

Suddenly it became evident “that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufactured right here on Earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction”.

“We had the idea that amends could somehow be made for just about everything. But not for this. Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can.”

At first, in trying to make sense of the incomprehensible, Arendt thought that perhaps Kant was right; perhaps there lurks, within the human mind, a capacity for “radical evil”, which acts with a diabolic force that can neither be explained nor understood by the conventional “evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice”.

But as she reflected on the sheer scale of what had been done, Arendt found Kant’s account unsatisfactory. There were, for sure, plenty of monsters among the murderers; but vicious hatred was far less evident than might have been expected among the tens of thousands of people implicated in the killing machine. “At every level, the Nazis produced more evil, with less malice, than civilisation had previously known.”

That “banality of evil”, she argued, was only possible because so many Germans had suspended their sense of judgment: the capacity, when the accepted norms have evaporated and the guidance of tradition has broken down, to think critically for oneself.

The faculty of judgment “will not find out, once and for all, what ‘the good’ is” but “when the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope, and everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in”, the criterion it imposes — “whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to reflect on my deeds and words” — is all that stands between humanity and catastrophe.

And it was the courage to act on that criterion, and the conviction that their actions, however modest they might be, would form part of “the enduring chronicle of mankind”, that prompted ordinary people, such as Wehrmacht sergeant Anton Schmid, to risk their own lives to save those of others.

A devout Roman Catholic, Schmid hid Jews in his apartment, obtained work permits to save Jews from massacres, transferred Jews to safer locations, and aided the underground. It is estimated that he saved as many as 300 Jews before he was arrested, tortured and executed.

“The moral of such stories,” wrote Arendt, “is simple and within everybody’s grasp: it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

Whether, if tested, we would live up to that standard, we cannot know, and hopefully will never need to learn. Nor can we know what new and dreadful evils mankind, in its infinite inventiveness, reserves for the future.

What we do know is that the moral strength to think for ourselves remains as precious and as threatened as ever.

To say that is not to suggest that the dangers we face are in any way comparable to those braved by Schmid and the other “Righteous Among the Nations”. However, it is undeniable that the pressures to bow to mass opinion grow stronger every day, as does the hysteria that assails those who dare question the self-images of the age.

Those pressures do not come from the fear of disappearing into the “Nacht und Nebel” (night and fog) the Nazis promised their opponents. But as Alexis de Tocqueville warned nearly two centuries ago, it is rarely the thug who says “you will think as I do or die” who poses the greatest threat to liberal democracy.

Rather, it is the voice that proclaims: “You are free not to think as I do; but from this day forth you shall be a stranger among us. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they too, be shunned in turn.”

No doubt, our democracy will find a way of coping with those pressures, as it has with so many others. Whatever their defects, Australians retain a down-to-earth practicality that has always inoculated them both to promises of a Second Coming and to claims of an impending apocalypse. And they still have that sardonic sense of humour that has made them notoriously unreceptive to humourless, conceited ratbags and tinhorn demagogues.

But each people must win their liberty every day afresh — a liberty to which nothing is more inimical than the godlike certainty that muzzles the voice of others, stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to an ant heap.

Seventy-five years after its liberation, Auschwitz’s last survivors are passing away; each anniversary, the commemorations become more of a diplomatic formality, in which ritual replaces memory.

Inexorably, the morning hangings, the specially designed benches on which inmates were whipped until every bone was broken, the cages in which prisoners were starved to death, the operating theatres where children were deliberately infected with disease, the gas chambers and crematoriums, are fading into history. For the sake of our common humanity, the lessons must not.

SOURCE 






Andrew Bolt returns to the fake history issue

Bruce Pascoe is just a fantasist

HOW can we trust Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt, when he sacks an adviser who's told him the truth? Incredibly, Wyatt has sacked whistleblower Josephine Cashman, who'd told him "Aboriginal historian" Bruce Pascoe was not actually Aboriginal, which actually seems obvious.

Pascoe is the author of the bestseller Dark Emu, which already makes him hard to believe, given Pascoe cites false sources to claim Aborigines were actually farmers, living in towns of 1000 people.

True, some people want to believe this so badly that Pascoe won the Indigenous Writers Prize at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards and the ABC will give him a two-part series this year.

But surely harder to swallow is Pascoe's claim to be Aboriginal, descended from the Yuin from NSW, Victoria's Boonwurrung and a tribe from Tasmania. Genealogical records uncovered on dark-emu-exposed.org show all Pascoe's ancestors are of British descent.

Sure, there could be a mistake and I've twice asked Pascoe to
explain it He won't and refuses to release the birth certificates he claims prove he's Aboriginal.

Yet people from the three tribes or areas Pascoe says he's connected to don't think he's Aboriginal either. Michael Mansell, head of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, says "he has no Aboriginal heritage and his claim is absurd". Jason Briggs, chairman of the Boonwurrung Land & Sea Council, says "we do not accept Mr Bruce Pascoe as possessing any Boonwurrung ancestry at all".

And there's Cashman, an Aboriginal businesswoman and inaugural member of the Prime Minister's Indigenous Advisory Council. Cashman says Pascoe is not Yuin either, although a few welcomed him into the tribe and she demanded the Morrison government investigate his Aboriginality.

That triggered a federal police inquiry which last week cleared Pascoe of any Commonwealth offence, reportedly leading Wyatt to conclude Cashman now had to be sacked from the advisory group advising Wyatt on — ironically —reconciliation. Never mind that the Australian Federal Police admitted it hadn't actually checked if Pascoe was indeed Aboriginal.

On Tuesday, Wyatt told Cashman: "Your membership of the Senior Advisory Group is no longer tenable for the collaborative and consultative approach needed to progress the important codesign process for an Indigenous voice." Seriously? An Aboriginal woman who says a white bloke isn't Aboriginal can't work on an Aboriginal body? Don't we expect more respect for truth from a Minister?

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 30 January, 2020

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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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