Why is it still considered OK to be ageist?
Lucy Kellaway does well below to set out the problem of unreasonable discrimination against old people. I am 78 myself but retired early from the workforce to concentrate on business so have had none of the problems described below.
Lucy does however ignore the elephant in the room when she looks at the cause of ageism. She is right in saying that older people do tend to have handicaps such as poor memories and discomfort with new technology but ignores a major problem: Appearance. Youth is the beauty ideal in our society. And that has its reasons. Our health is best in our youth and it is undoubtedly an exciting time with intimate relations. I had a ball for many years.
So for whatever reason, the physical appearance of the old counts against them A young person is felt to look better and more desirable as company. And that counts. Appearances count, and can count very heavily.
A graphic realization of that is the desperate attempt by many women to retain their youthful looks. Cosmetic empires are built on that. It's a reasonable recognition of the relevance of physical appearance in our society. People don't like an aged appearance and don't want it around themselves
In my own case my looks deteriorated at the expected pace but I was still doing well into my 60s. The crunch came in my 70s. When a long relationship came to an end, I had difficulty finding a new one.
So I don't think that rebelling against the limits of the aged will do much good. The aged themselves have to promote and demonstrate the assets they do have. And they are many. Some are mentioned in passing below. We have so many that it is rather churlish to rail against areas in which we have handicaps. We should be grateful for a life well-lived instead. And if our life was not well-lived we should look at why and accept what cannot now be changed -- JR
In September 2018 Ian Tapping, a project manager at the Ministry of Defence, called a meeting with HR. He had been in dispute with his employer and wanted to make a bullying and harassment claim. In the course of the conversation his HR manager asked when he intended to retire — Tapping, who was in his early sixties, subsequently quit and sued the MoD for age discrimination.
Last month he won his case. A judge ruled that it is illegal to ask someone about retirement plans unless they have raised the subject themselves, which had not happened in this instance. Such a question was ageist, said the judge, as it would not have been put to a 30-year-old.
The verdict was duly reported in the Daily Mail and the paper’s readers, who like nothing better than a spot of outrage, were well and truly disgusted. This country has gone mad, they exclaimed.
Given that the average Mail reader is only a couple of years younger than Mr Tapping, the hostility was odd. Ageism is so rampant that they are likely to have been the butt of it themselves. A 2021 World Health Organization survey found that every second person holds ageist attitudes, while according to the National Barometer of Prejudice and Discrimination, a 2018 study undertaken for Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, 26 per cent of people experienced age discrimination in a year.
Survey after survey establishes the same things: people over 50 find it harder to get job interviews (unless, perhaps, they are applying to be president of the US) and are more likely to be eased out of existing jobs.
The ruling last month seems an obvious case of progress. It rightly puts retirement on a par with pregnancy — over the past couple of decades, employers have learnt not to ask a young woman when she plans to have a child, unless they want to end up in court. Now it turns out that the same principle applies to older workers.
This may require quite some adjustment, as that sort of question is asked all the time. When I discussed the case with a 56-year-old friend, she said her boss at the world-famous consumer goods company where she works had that very week asked: “Am I correct to assume you intend to be on the organisational chart at the end of 2022?” Which was a fancy way of implying he would not be sorry if the answer was no.
Not only will employers have to adjust, they will need to do so snappily, as there are so many more older workers about. In 2012, a quarter of the UK workforce was over 50 — by 2050 it will be over a third. On average, men in the UK now work till 65, two years longer than in 2000. Women now retire on average at 64, up from 61 20 years ago.
Although ageism is everywhere, few victims choose to do a Tapping and take their employers to court. Even though it has been illegal in the UK to discriminate on the basis of age since 2006, such cases make up only a negligible percentage of the overall workload of employment tribunals. “It’s still under the radar,” says Lyndsey Simpson, founder of the employment website 55/Redefined, “because people don’t want to go on the record. They think they’ll be attacked and they think it will be career-limiting. I’ve lost count of the number of men who are turned down for jobs and are told: you are overqualified, or you don’t meet our diversity requirements.”
Last month, when 62-year-old Adam Boulton left his post as political editor of Sky News, he told the Times it was by “mutual decision” and that the channel was concentrating on “the next generation”. He added: “Television is very sensitive to the idea of diversity.” There seemed to be no irony in his remark — the thought that true diversity should also include age had not occurred either to him or his employer.
Not only is age the poor relation in diversity policies, it is still perfectly acceptable in polite society to be rampantly ageist. In The Atlantic last month was an article bemoaning the fact that America no longer generates big ideas in culture, science or business. One reason for this, said the writer (35), was that the people in charge were getting older — and older people were not so good at coming up with new ideas. If he had said that women were less creative, he would have been cancelled on the spot. But this aspersion, which he made little attempt to stand up, sailed through all checks and balances and, once published, caused minor grumbling rather than full-on fury.
Our blindness to ageism is particularly puzzling as it is a prejudice not against people who are different from us (other races, genders etc) but against our future selves. According to Ashton Applewhite, the US anti-ageism campaigner and author, this hostility is a product of fear. We dread getting old because we overexaggerate the risk that we will end up in an old people’s home, senile and smelling of pee.
Fear may be part of it, but there is something else going on too. The ageism against my generation — I am 62 — feels personal. We aren’t allowed to feel discriminated against because we’ve had it so good.
I mentioned this article to a 25-year-old friend at the school where I teach. She rolled her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just can’t feel bad for you boomers. You guys have got the pensions. You’ve destroyed the climate. I live in a rented flat with illegal cladding — you live in a huge house. All the power structures in society benefit you. How many top people in companies or politicians are under 30?”
I pointed out that 2m older people in the UK live below the poverty line. I said older people are expected to tolerate discrimination of a sort that other groups are belatedly being freed from. She scoffed; I challenged her to unload her view of boomers.
“Technophobes! Narrow-minded!” she began.
“Borderline alcoholics! Stuck in your ways! Terfs!” chimed in another twentysomething who shares the same office.
The first then added: “But it’s not all bad. You guys are useful for advice on mortgages.”
OK, I thought, age discrimination cuts both ways. “Snowflakes!” I yelled back at them. “Entitled! Lazy!”
In a way, the slanging match was fun and was a sign of how well we get on. These are my two best friends at school and mostly we seem to be a living example of why age diversity at work is good for everyone. We all agree that our differences make our working lives better (as well as being good for our students). But our debate made me uneasy and left me wondering if there is some ugly stuff lurking under the surface.
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Judge Deems WI Election Commission’s 2020 Election Behavior Unlawful, Drop Boxes Illegal
Ballot drop boxes don’t necessarily imply fraud, but they open the door to the possibility of fraud. The possibility of election fraud creates doubt in the integrity of the election process. It’s as simple as that.
The absentee ballot drop boxes widely deployed in Wisconsin during the 2020 election have been ruled unlawful by Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren, according to Just the News.
According to Bohren, the Wisconsin Election Commission overstepped its authority in issuing instructions to election officials concerning the use of drop boxes, sent out in March 2020 and again in August 2020.
The WEC guidance had enough potential impact on the election process to require approval by the state Legislature. The Legislature never got the chance to approve it. Bohren called the WEC’s move a “major policy decision that alter[s] how our absentee ballot process operates.”
The judge ordered the WEC to recant the instructions in a ruling that could have a large impact on Wisconsin’s midterm elections. The ruling will likely be appealed.
This isn’t the first time the WEC has found itself in hot water.
Racine County sheriff’s investigators found evidence of voter fraud at a local nursing home last year, according to Just the News. Sheriff Christopher Schmaling accused the WEC of not only allowing but encouraging nursing home staff to fill out ballots for residents.
It doesn’t end there.
The WEC, on its own authority, ruled that voters could invoke the status of “indefinitely confined” in order to cast absentee ballots. Because of this, 250,000 people were allowed to vote without adhering to standard voter ID requirements. The “indefinitely confined” status was rarely invoked until the WEC ruling.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court found that the WEC erred in allowing voters to invoke the “indefinitely confined” status if they did not, in fact, have a severe illness or disability.
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RNC Warns: Democrat Election Reform Essentially ‘Freedom to Cheat Act’
Republican leaders are warning against the left's push for federal election reform, declaring that the Freedom to Vote Act is essentially a ploy to cheat elections.
“We call it the Freedom to Cheat Act,” explained Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said of the Freedom to Vote Act during a call with reporters.
“It eviscerates state voter ID laws, which 36 states have passed,” she continued. “This bill eliminates states’ more secure voter ID requirements, replacing them with a process that is rife with fraud.”
Breitbart reports:
The sweeping bill would order states with voter ID laws to widen their accepted forms of voter identification to allow for several alternatives, including forms of identification that do not contain a photo.
The influential conservative thinktank Heritage Foundation, which has actively been lobbying states to tighten their election processes, deems “model” voter ID rules to be those that require voters to present a government-issued ID that contains a photo and makes clear that the voter is an American citizen when they go to cast their ballot. In December, Heritage scored states on this metric and found six states, including Georgia — a state that has become ground zero in the fight over election laws — received perfect scores in regard to voter ID laws specifically. Another 22 states received at least partial credit or more for their voter ID laws.
“Democrats don’t want free and fair elections. They want elections only Democrats can win," added National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Sen. Rick Scott.
“We’ve watched this last year, they’ve had a difficult time, the Democrats, passing their radical agenda so they want to change the rules,” he said. “They want to change the rules so they can ban voter ID, even though it’s very popular around the country.”
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Waukesha Massacre Undermined the Charlottesville Myth
The sound of screams replaced the music as a red Ford Escape slammed into the crowd, killing six people and wounding more than 60 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Nov. 21. Amid the bloodbath that evening were dead and dying victims as old as 81 and as young as 8. Their killer, Darrell Brooks, a 39-year-old black man and Black Lives Matter supporter, had deliberately driven into them. The Christmas parade slaughter was everything that the establishment claims Charlottesville was.
The Waukesha bloodbath fell out of the news and down the memory hole overnight, presumably because it recalled too vividly the events in Charlottesville during the 2017 Unite the Right rally, and suggested unwelcome comparisons. While Waukesha did not elicit ruling class outrage, Charlottesville has become part of our national mythology, a day of shame for millions of Middle Americans. It has been used to justify destroying historic American national symbols and to further empower the regime that dominates our lives, lest we repeat that awful day.
The most obvious difference between the two incidents is also the most inconvenient one for an establishment built upon political correctness. James Fields, who was 20 when he drove into a crowd at Charlottesville, did not, though troubled, have a previous criminal history. He is also white.
Brooks, however, boasts a formidable list of criminal acts spanning two decades and across multiple states. When he struck in Wisconsin, Brooks had an outstanding warrant related to a sex offense in Nevada. And, in a video unearthed on Twitter, he admitted to impregnating a minor and to being a child sex trafficker. That’s just for starters.
Documents obtained by the Daily Mail reveal that Brooks shot his nephew in July 2020 in the heat of an argument over an old cell phone. His bail was initially set at $10,000, but Milwaukee County judge David Feiss lowered it to $500. Brooks was out by February 2021. According to Fox News, three months later while out on bail, Brooks was arrested in Georgia after he savagely beat the mother of his child.
Six months later, upon his release by Georgia authorities, Brooks capitalized on the charity of the criminal justice system when, on Nov. 2, he punched and ran over the same woman, this time in Milwaukee. Brooks was booked the next day, but prison wouldn’t hold him long, even though the red flags were flying. A pretrial risk assessment dated Nov. 5 certified him as a severe public threat. Nevertheless, he posted a $1,000 bond on Nov. 11, the same day he was scheduled for a plea and sentencing hearing related to the July 2020 incident.
Less than three weeks later, Brooks plowed into the crowd of mostly white parade goers in Waukesha, purposely aiming for people and avoiding vehicles. The town’s black police chief, Daniel Thompson, who helped lead a protest in Waukesha during which his officers knelt before Black Lives Matter demonstrators amid the June 2020 riots in that city, told the local press he was unsure about Brooks’ motive.
However, the killer’s political views and Facebook posts provide unmistakable clues. Brooks had posted about “knocking out white people” and enslaving them. He explicitly supported Black Lives Matter, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Hebrew Israelites, a black supremacist group. Brooks even bragged about being a “terrorist” in one of his rap songs.
Still, the authorities claim that Brooks was merely leaving the scene of his latest domestic dispute, although they admitted that police were not pursuing him at the time. They say he passed a side street which would have taken him around the parade, and that he intentionally penetrated barriers intended to stop traffic. Brooks showed no remorse after the slaughter.
In an open letter to the media, his mother blamed the system for his crimes. Brooks is mentally ill, she said, and should have received treatment, but instead got a “jail cell.” Had Brooks truly received what he deserved at the hands of Milwaukee County authorities, six people would still be alive and scores more would not have been seriously injured by Brooks’ Nov. 21 attack.
His mother’s statement also undermined Brooks’ appeals for sympathy. “Darrell did not come from a bad family like many people have said. He came from a loving Christian family and is the grandson of ministers,” she wrote. In other words, Brooks had been given every chance to succeed by his family and the justice system. Still, Brooks only pities himself. “I just feel like I’m being [made out to be a] monster—demonized” and “dehumanized,” he told Fox News Digital in his first jailhouse interview.
It took a slaughter of innocents for Court Commissioner Kevin Costello to slap Brooks with a $5 million cash bail, which the Milwaukee branch of Black Lives Matter attempted to raise to free Brooks. Costello assured the public that the “extraordinarily high” bail was warranted, as if he needed to explain himself for not giving Brooks his umpteenth chance, which is far more than what James Fields received.
Given Fields’ background, one would think he should have received the same compassionate touch with which the media has covered Brooks. In 1996, before Fields was born, a drunk driver killed his father. He grew up a quiet but troubled kid who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of six. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital twice by the time he was 10, diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder, and his social life was characterized by isolation and limited social interactions outside of his relationship with his disabled mother.
A high school teacher with whom he was close said Fields “was a very bright kid but very misguided and disillusioned.” He noted Fields’ flirtations with radical ideas: “I feel like I failed and that we all failed.” Fields’ mother reported fits of violence to the police when he was in the eighth and ninth grades. She told officers that he was on anger medication. But Fields quit taking those drugs when he learned that they would prevent him from joining the military—a recruiter reportedly explained that he needed to drop the medication.
After graduating in 2015, Fields managed to enlist but washed out a few months later. He worked as a security guard making $10.50 an hour when the Unite the Right rally was organized to prevent the removal of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville. Fields had been off his medication for two years by that time.
Skirmishes erupted on the first day of the rally, Aug. 11. The second and final day would be one of utter chaos, where right-wing protesters and left-wing counter-protesters were seemingly encouraged to fight. According to FactCheck.org, the ACLU of Virginia tweeted on the evening of Aug. 12 that the Charlottesville police had been ordered “not [to] intervene until given command to do so.” The president of a New York Black Lives Matter chapter told a CNN affiliate that the “police actually allowed” both sides to “square off against each other” while watching from afar. “It’s almost as if they wanted us to fight each other.”
In the aftermath, the city commissioned a report prepared by Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia, to review the mistakes made by law enforcement. It noted that on Aug. 12, just before Fields accelerated into the crowd of counter-protestors, the Charlottesville Police Department called medics to a parking lot where a militia member had been hit with a rock in the head. The police left the scene once the ambulance departed, and the militia members also prepared to leave as counter-protestors descended on them. “Aerial footage shows that one of their cars accelerated to flee the counter-protestors, nearly running one of them over,” the report states. “The crowd of counter-protestors reacted angrily, kicking and swinging objects at the car,” while others were seen “chasing on foot” as it sped away. The report mentions other instances of counter-protestors harassing rallygoers in their vehicles and blocking traffic while swarming the streets.
When Fields attempted to drive out of the area, he encountered a large crowd in the street between him and the intersection where two other cars were waiting. Footage of the incident shows Fields slowing down a bit on the approach, although a counter-protestor had previously confronted him with a rifle, which presumably had him on edge.
In a since-deleted Facebook post, Dwayne Dixon, a leftist UNC teaching assistant professor and an Antifa member, bragged: “I used this rifle to chase off James Fields from our block of 4th St. before he attacked the marchers to the south.” As Fields neared, the crowd appeared calm—until a counter-protestor hit the back of his Dodge Challenger with what appeared to be a baseball bat and Fields slammed down the accelerator. When the dust settled, one person would die alongside 35 wounded.
Unlike Brooks, Fields was immediately denied bail. Though he and much of the GOP have remained silent about Waukesha, South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott declared the Charlottesville crash “an act of domestic terror” within three days. Since Fields had no criminal record, the prosecution relied heavily on his political views and social media posts to establish motive—all things that have been deemed out of bounds in assessing Brooks’ motives.
Nor did Fields’ documented history of mental illness matter, though it has become central to the Brooks narrative. During Fields’ trial, as reported by The Hill, prosecutors stated, “In sum, any mental health concerns raised by the defendant do not overcome the defendant’s demonstrated lack of remorse and his prior history of substantial racial animus.” Mental illness is for violent nonwhites; peckerwoods are diagnosed with “white rage.”
In the end, Fields, a young first-time offender, received two life sentences without the possibility of parole and an additional 419 years on top of $480,000 in fines. A jury also found the rally organizers liable and put them on the hook for more than $25 million in damages.
Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm, the man who admitted that Brooks’ bail was set “inappropriately low,” had, some years earlier, conceded that someday his liberal policies would get someone killed. “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet,” Chisholm told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. According to TMJ4 News, in 2021 alone, 10 other domestic abusers tried by Chisholm had cash bonds set at $1,000 and subsequently went on to commit additional felonies while awaiting trial, just like Brooks. A complaint to remove Chisholm was filed by Milwaukee County taxpayers in mid-December, which Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers promised to review.
Every society has myths that underpin its religious, moral, and social regulations. They explain why we must speak, think, and act a certain way. The myth of Charlottesville is intended to brand ordinary Americans with a mark of shame. It is by way of such shaming that the ruling elite gains power and legitimacy. A little thing like the Waukesha massacre cannot be allowed to undermine that.
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/waukesha-massacre-undermined-the-charlottesville-myth/
********************************************Liberal City Gets Dose of Reality After Raising Minimum Wage to $19.50/Hour
I’m not quite sure if it’s the majority position among conservatives when it comes to minimum wage, but my opinion is that there should be no minimum wage.
Whatever an employer offers and whatever an employee accepts as wages should be between them and the government should have no say whatsoever.
It’s not that I believe that workers should be paid less, I think they should be paid what they’re worth and what they mutually agree upon. If a guy is willing to work for a lesser wage because the job doesn’t require much effort and he just wants that easy sort of life, then so be it. He can always say no and go somewhere else, but someone might be happy with that.
So often I’ve seen job postings in which they don’t mention what the pay for the position is. This seems like an absolute waste of time. What sort of employee are they looking for?
I think businesses should be upfront about what they’re willing to pay and the people who come to apply for that job has that expectation that this will be how much they earn.
That said, the left believes that the minimum wage should be higher. In some cases, they think it should be much higher. I’ve seen some people say that the minimum wage should be upwards of $20-$30 per hour. This is pure insanity and would bankrupt businesses and destroy our economy completely.
One city, however, had a taste of what that looks like after the minimum wage shot up to $19.50 per hour.
According to The Blaze,
Portland is currently under a citywide COVID state of emergency, something the City Council had an opportunity to repeal last month, but refused. That failure meant the state of emergency would still be in effect come Jan. 1, which was the date that the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ordered the city’s hazard wage to take effect.
Because Portlanders demanded a minimum wage hike and their City Council refused to take responsibility and repeal the city’s state of emergency, every employer in town was suddenly forced to pay workers at least $19.50 per hour. And they would have to continue to do so until the council got its act together.
Thankfully some business owners and their supporters were willing to make a stink over the whole ordeal.
The Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce made its voice heard, telling its members to let the City Council know what they thought.
“Large chains will be able to absorb the added costs of a $19.50 minimum wage, but small businesses in Portland will not be able to absorb these costs without direct increases in prices or cuts to services and staff,” the chamber said, according to the Press Herald. “This strikes directly at our local economic self-reliance and makes it just that much harder for local organizations to compete.”
Some business owners expressed concerns and said that minimum wages of $19.50 per hour would mean they would have to leave Portland because that just becomes unsustainable.
Eventually, the City Council voted 8-1 last week to lift the state of emergency and thereby cut the minimum wage by $6.50 to $13, effective Jan. 13 or Jan 14
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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