Thursday, January 28, 2021


Caller on a prime time NZ radio show claimed Maori men are 'genetically predisposed to crime' and naturally do badly in school

Nobody seems to care whether the comments were true or not. The fact that Maori are greatly over-represented in NZ jails, the fact that most Maori carry the violence gene monoamine oxidase (specifically the AGCCG haplotype, coupled with the 3-repeat allele of MAO-A30bp-rpt) and that the average Maori IQ is 94, are all ignored. But not offending people is the overarching aim these days.

That such an aim is a disastrous dead-end is shown by the American experience. Mention of the low average African IQ has long been verboten there. So what is the outcome? Has the expected racial harmony happened? Far from it. It has just left lots of angry blacks wondering why they do so badly in all sorts of ways. Because they are not told the truth of the matter they believe false explanations which say that their disadvantage is all due to invisible white racism. And they express their anger about that by repeated rioting and widespread destruction in major American cities. Avoiding the truth is a recipe for long-term disaster, nothing else


A major radio network is facing a huge backlash after broadcasting profoundly racist views during a live talk-back show.

A Magic Talk Radio caller in New Zealand described Maori people as 'genetically predisposed to crime, alcohol and under performance educationally' as well as being 'stone-age people' in a highly offensive on-air rant.

Magic Talk presenter John Banks, a former Auckland mayor and MP, didn't stop the rant on Tuesday.

Instead, Banks thanked the man for his call, before saying 'if their (Maori) stone-age culture doesn't change, these people will come through your bathroom window'.

The exchange was posted on social media site TikTok by a horrified listener, before quickly spreading to other social media platforms.

By Wednesday, outraged social media users were petitioning Magic Talk advertisers to pull their support of the station.

Telecommunications giant Vodafone and TradeMe, a major online sales website, responded by saying they would boycott the station.

Magic Talk holds the rights to broadcast Black Caps matches, and New Zealand Cricket also said they were 'disgusted and appalled by an indefensibly racist' exchange.

NZC suggested it could walk away from its ongoing broadcast deal, saying 'should strong action not be taken NZC reserves its right to review its relationship with Magic Talk'.

A third major sponsor, Kiwibank, said it was 'removing our ads from the Magic Talk website and we'll be talking directly with (station owner) MediaWorks on how they could better encourage a diverse and inclusive NZ'.

Following a 30-year political career including two stints as a cabinet minister, Banks is well known in New Zealand for his right-wing views.

Banks, 74, later said he 'wasn't racist' in a grovelling on-air apology, before admitting his views 'could have been misconstrued as racist'.

'I didn't pick it up at the time, here when you're broadcasting, you're talking to producers, you're talking to bosses,' Banks said.

'I spoke to people later in the show who disagreed with the man and I picked it up then, however this wasn't enough to demonstrate that his comments were wrong and racist.'

Magic Talk announced on Wednesday they had since dumped Banks as an on-air presenter.

The show had been discussing Orange Tamariki, New Zealand's Ministry for Children, and its new all-Maori board of advisors.

'The talkback environment can be robust and opinionated, however we recognise comments broadcast yesterday during a call discussing the departure of Oranga Tamariki’s CEO were hurtful,' Magic Talk wrote on Twitter.

Bridgerton’s woke vanity whitewashes the struggle

Once again moviemakers cast blacks in roles that they did not occupy or rarely occupy in real life. It prioritizes propaganda over reality. That must surely limit its appeal. And people will undoubtedly see through the propaganda so it's not even good propaganda. It's just tedious

At best it’s extravagant virtue signalling. At worst it’s the cinematic love child of agitprop and cancel culture. There can be no argument, however, that Bridgerton trivialises the political history of race and colour.

Episode four of new Netflix period romp and bodice-ripper Bridgerton begins with a visit to court filmed in the gilded interior of Lancaster House. Lady Violet Bridgerton and her winsome daughter Daphne stroll past flocks of sumptuously dressed multicultural dukes and duchesses — African, Caribbean, Indian. The climax of the scene is an encounter with Queen Charlotte, the putative black monarch.

So much froth and bubble. Let’s consider the facts.

English court society in the early 19th century was a white elite atop a multiracial empire. The hereditary aristocracy was morally censorious and ethnically narrow. It owed its wealth to inherited property and the profits made by slavers, plantation owners and commercial entities such as the British East India Company that were busy ransacking India. Edmund Burke, the father of British conservatism, regarded his campaign against the company’s plunder of India the “cause on which I value myself the most”.

Nor is there any solid evidence that the German-born Queen Charlotte was black. That’s really just a genealogical theory prosecuted by amateur Portuguese historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom. It has been pinballing around the internet and has met with scant scholarly support — but hey, it’s good enough for Netflix.

Bridgerton’s Queen Charlotte appears to be a formidable and manipulative monarch, but in reality she was restricted to the care of her husband, the mad King George III, and her many children, her influence on matters of state being indirect and in the form of recommendations.

From the moment of the king’s incapacitation, the British Empire was ruled by the ostentatious and famously corpulent future George IV as prince regent, and Queen Charlotte’s world — though not her skin colour — manifestly darkened. The Regency era began in 1811. Bridgerton opens in 1813, when it was in full swing.

The costumes are gorgeous, the backdrops magisterial — but Bridgerton offers a weak-headed, saccharine, shallow and partial vision of Regency society. Central to this vision is the notion of a multicultural aristocracy in which the exploited races become not only the beneficiaries of imperial exploitation but members of the exploitative class: the ruling elite. Imagine a World War II film in which a cast of Orthodox Jews plays Hitler’s henchmen. It’s that degree of nuts.

At one point in the series the Duke of Hastings (played by English-Zimbabwean actor Rege-Jean Page) and Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) add some conceptual depth to the largely visual picture of a benign multicultural aristocracy. Remarks Lady Danbury: “Look at our queen, look at our king. Look at their marriage, look at everything it is doing for us, what it is allowing us to become. We were two separate societies, divided by colour until a king fell in love with one of us.”

Nice idea. But the king fell in love with a German princess. The black queen theory, wild as it is, asserts only that Charlotte’s line, five centuries earlier, was linked to a woman of Moorish — though not necessarily African — descent. To put it another way, if Charlotte were African then so, too, was her son, the prince regent. And nobody has ever seen evidence of that.

This seems to be Bridgerton’s logic: by injecting people of colour into the upper echelons of Regency society, we perform an act of historical redress or restitution. Turn the apex of British society in the Regency era into an overdressed version of the crowd you might encounter today at a bar in Kensington or Soho, or maybe Paddo in Sydney, and tolerance is magically normalised. It no longer seems like a historical exception.

However, by denying the reality of racial and social injustice, the series erases historical reality: real people have struggled and died for a more tolerant and equal world. It’s a whitewash.

The writers of the Bridgerton series and the popular novel on which it is based claim these distortions are legitimised because the historical vision is at heart a fantasy. That’s bosh. Game of Thrones is a fantasy; it could never be mistaken for a real time or place. Bridgerton goes to extraordinary lengths to immerse its viewers in the architecture of the Regency period, the dress codes of the period, its hairstyles, social customs, mores, values, mating rituals, even its diction and speech patterns. It is, by and large, historically accurate. Its fantasies are restricted to two contemporary political pieties: race and gender.

I suppose pieties have their place. Colourblind casting worked quite well in the 2019 comedy-drama The Personal History of David Copperfield, based on Charles Dickens’s most autobiographical novel. But that film, with Dev Patel as Copperfield, fixes a sharp eye on the cruel realities of class and the treacherous snakes-and-ladders game of social opportunity that its eponymous hero is forced to play.

Bridgerton, to the contrary, conflates class and race to create a fantastical multicultural gentry that serves only to erase politics, erase history and erase memory.

At best it’s a form of extravagant virtue signalling. At worst it’s the cinematic love child of agitprop and cancel culture. But it trivialises the political history of race and colour. And it’s decidedly off-colour.

How Civil Rights Vernacular Was Hijacked

For centuries black Americans debated how to overcome racism—but they always emphasized human agency and individual responsibility

The civil-rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. , helped deliver America from the historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow by forcing the nation to confront the full humanity of its black citizens. King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound and revealing its redemptive promise. Yet today many black leaders have lost sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.

The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency, sought liberation, and rejected despair.

First, there were the recolonization or “back to Africa” movements championed by the likes of Marcus Garvey. These movements sought an exit from America.

Second, there were the insurrectionists of the 19th century, who believed that black Americans should engage in armed rebellion or vocal opposition so that they might find a home in this country. Here lie Nat Turner and, later, W.E.B. Du Bois. They wanted to have their resistant voice heard in America.

Third, there were accommodationist movements of the sort undertaken by Booker T. Washington, who thought that loyalty to America was the best course…

Narrative Before Facts

When will the media acknowledge their role in spreading false and inflammatory stories about police shootings?

When officer Rusten Sheskey shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back last year, the media wasted no time establishing the standard narrative: another unarmed African-American shot by racist police.

In a CNN segment on August 25, anchor Jake Tapper said, “Video shows police shoot unarmed black man.” The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, Buzzfeed, Vogue, and several other outlets referred to Blake as “unarmed.” The day after the shooting, David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, asserted, “It’s nearly impossible to imagine any way that his shooting was justified.”

Democratic politicians and celebrities jumped on the story, too. Joe Biden tweeted, “Once again, a Black man—Jacob Blake—was shot by the police. In front of his children. It makes me sick. Is this the country we want to be?” Kamala Harris declared that “the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.” Naomi Osaka, the highest-paid female athlete in the world, tweeted to her more than 800,000 followers condemnation of the “continued genocide of Black people at the hand of the police.”

But as Blake himself admitted in a television interview with ABC News last week, he was not unarmed. “I realized I had dropped my knife, I had a little pocketknife, so I picked it up,” Blake told Michael Strahan on Good Morning America. More critically, Blake admitted his actions at the time were wrong: “I shouldn’t have picked it up . . . considering what was going on. . . . At that time I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Blake’s astonishing admission came days after Kenosha County District Attorney Mike Graveley announced that his office would not charge Officer Sheskey, based on the results of an investigation by former Madison police chief Noble Wray.

During a press conference, Wray emphasized that he, too, had been “emotionally troubled” after seeing the initial video of the police encounter in August, and that it had been a “stressful endeavor” to work in policing for several years as an African-American man. However, his 25-page report definitively concluded that the shooting was “justified” because Blake consistently did not comply with the officer’s orders and motioned toward him with his knife.

Further, according to the report, Officer Sheskey did not retreat for reasonable fear of the children in the car being “harmed, taken hostage, or abducted by Blake.”

For those who deemed the seven shots fired at Blake excessive, Wray’s report clarified that officers are trained to shoot dangerous suspects until the threat to their safety has subsided, according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s DAAT standards.

The tragic outcome of Blake’s error in judgment is that he will likely never walk again. But the false story fostered by politicians, media, and celebrities produced tragic outcomes, too. The ensuing riots in Kenosha destroyed several businesses and cost millions of dollars in damage to public property. In a heart-rending interview, the owner of a destroyed car dealership stated, “I’m a minority too. I’m a brown person. I have nothing to do with this. . . . This is not the America I came into.”

All of this pain, damage, and suffering certainly could have been averted had Blake obeyed the officer’s commands when he was first approached. But the irresponsible and ideologically framed coverage of this and other police shootings has also played a part in creating a dangerous feedback loop of mistrust of police, noncompliance with their lawful instructions, tragedy, and public outrage. (Blake also said in his Good Morning America interview, “I didn’t want to be the next George Floyd.”)

The most damning detail in this story, however, is that the victim himself, Blake, has expressed more honesty and remorse for his actions than the media and political elites who pushed an inflammatory, racialized narrative before all the facts were in.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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