JK Rowling is 'spreading disinformation' about Scotland's new hate crime laws says Scottish First Minister after Harry Potter author slammed his 'bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism'
As ever, the Devil is in the detail. What constitutes "stirring up hatred"? Does any criticism count? Leftists are prone to claim that it does. So critics of the law have good reason to be suspicious of it.
And the Scottish First Minister is therefore in full damage-control mode, pushing a very narrow definition of "stirring up hatred". It does seem that his very narrow definition is being adopted by Police Scotland so the actual effect of the law may be small
Harry Potter author JK Rowling and other critics of Scotland's new hate crime laws must stop 'peddling misinformation', Scotland's First Minister has said.
Humza Yousaf strongly defended the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act against claims it would hamper freedom of speech after it was introduced earlier this week.
JK Rowling criticised the Scottish Government's hate laws while posting pictures of 10 high-profile trans people and ridiculed their claims to be women.
Speaking at Glasgow's Prestwick Airport on Saturday, Mr Yousaf said: 'There's deliberate misinformation being peddled by some bad actors across Scotland - it's hardly surprising the Opposition seek to do that.
'What we've got is a piece of legislation that in the actual Act itself, explicitly in black and white, protects freedom of expression, freedom of speech.'
The SNP leader went on: 'At the same time, it makes sure that it protects people from hatred being stirred up against them, and that is really important when we have far too many incidents of hatred that can be because of their age, disability, sexuality or religion.'
'There's no place for that in Scotland, and you have to send a really strong signal that the law will protect you.'
Rowling's comments were reported to Police Scotland as alleged hate crimes.
The force found she had committed no crime and also said it would not record a 'non-crime hate incident' against her.
She also said that most Scots were 'upset and offended by Yousaf 's bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism', following the introduction of the legislation on Monday.
Rowling wrote on X/Twitter: 'Most of Scotland is upset and offended by Yousaf's bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism, but we aren't lobbying to have him locked up for it.'
Asked what his message to critics such as JK Rowling would be, the Nationalist MSP said: 'I would tell them to stop spreading disinformation. It isn't going to help anybody.
'This is a piece of legislation that was passed by every single political party in Scotland, minus the Conservatives.'
He said: 'It's a ludicrous suggestion. Actually JK Rowling's tweets are a perfect example of how the law actually works.
'JK Rowling produced some tweets that were offensive, that were insulting - but of course the law does not deal with offensive.
'The law is dealing with new offences, criminal behaviour that has to be threatening or abusive, intent to stir up hatred. Hence why she was not arrested.
'That's not a surprise. Anybody who actually read the Bill will not be surprised that she did not get arrested. The threshold for criminality is extremely high.
'So anybody suggesting that the Bill deals with simply people having their feelings hurt, being offended, being insulted, I'm afraid that is not what the new offences are concerned with.
'There are very explicit in black and white protections for people's freedom of expression and indeed of freedom of speech.
'The Bill has got the balance right between protecting people from hatred and protecting people's fundamental freedoms.'
Mr Yousaf also shared his views in an opinion article in The Courier newspaper, urging politicians and public figures to create a debate rooted in 'reality'.
He said false claims the law makes it a criminal offence to make 'derogatory comments' based on the characteristics covered in the Act was 'simply untrue'.
The First Minister wrote: 'As a father of two girls, and blessed with a baby on the way, I feel an even greater obligation to work as First Minister to help make Scotland even better for the next generation.
'Critics of this law shouldn't exaggerate its impact with false fears. Equally, its proponents shouldn't pretend that it can of itself eradicate hatred and prejudice from our society.'
Yousaf was also reported to police about an alleged hate crime over a speech he made at the Scottish Parliament four years ago.
Like Rowling, police confirmed it was not a hate crime and said no 'non-crime hate incident' would be recorded against his name.
Adam Tomkins, a law professor and a former Scottish Tory MSP who voted against the Hate Crime Act, previously told STV News that 'misgendering' someone was not a crime under the law.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act consolidates existing hate crime legislation and creating a new offence of stirring up hatred against protected characteristics.
Those characteristics are disability, religion, sexual orientation, age, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics.
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America's 'capital of woke' decriminalised drugs and became a hellscape of open-air fentanyl markets which even addicts admit was a mistake... leading to a humiliating U-turn
This is Leftist destructiveness coming and going. "Decriminalization" gives the worst of all worlds. What is needed to save lives is complete legalization. Drugs could then be bought over the counter in pharmaceutically pure form. It is mostly drugs "cut" with all sorts of other things that kill
After three years in which its streets became a hellscape of open drug use, rocketing fatal overdoses and rampant crime, Oregon has learnt a painful lesson. And hopefully so has everyone else who believes that the best way to deal with the menace of deadly drugs such as fentanyl and heroin is to decriminalise them.
Oregon governor Tina Kotek this week reversed large parts of a controversial 2021 law known as Measure 110 and restored criminal penalties for possession of hard drugs and court-ordered treatment for offenders. From September 1, drug possession in the West Coast state will be punishable by up to six months in prison.
The U-turn brings an ignominious end to America's most radical experiment in Left-wing drug policy — a supposedly humane and enlightened policy of de-fanging the oppressive criminal justice system, allowing drug abusers to indulge their addiction in peace.
Suffice to say, it has been nothing short of a complete disaster. The real puzzle for many Oregonians — particularly inhabitants of its drug-battered city of Portland — is why it took their leaders so long to accept defeat.
Portland is a bastion of progressive values in the Democrat state where voters decided, by a comfortable majority, in November 2020 to become the first U.S. state to decriminalise the possession of personal amounts of all hard drugs. These include the likes of heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl. (It remained a criminal offence to sell the substances, although police would complain that decriminalisation made it much harder to distinguish dealer from buyer).
As anyone who visited Portland, as I did last October, will know, the situation was both desperate and farcical. So much so that even the hopeless addicts I spoke to — men and women who were cooking up fentanyl on city-centre pavements as commuters and children passed by — admitted that they couldn't understand what had ever possessed their politicians to think decriminalisation might work.
'The truth is that addiction rates and overdose rates skyrocketed,' said Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, a Measure 110 enthusiast who is now attempting to save face by insisting that it would have worked if proper treatment services had been put in place.
Such an attitude, say experts, flies in the face of an essential truth about drug addiction that the decriminalisers fail to appreciate — that very few addicts will try to break their habit if they aren't pressured to do so. Getting high feels good (at least in the short term) while drug withdrawal is fiercely difficult — so of course they need an incentive, which is often the threat of punishment.
Instead, supporters of ideas like Measure 110 — including those in the UK, where the Scottish government is pushing to decriminalise all drugs for personal use in order to tackle Europe's worst overdose rates — argue that criminalising possession unfairly stigmatises addicts.
Measure 110 was hailed as a compassionate solution to America's addiction nightmare.
It all proved hopelessly naive. Accidental fatal overdoses from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl — a drug that is tearing through America — increased by 500 per cent in four years in the Portland area. No other state saw anything like the same upsurge.
In the week I visited, eight young people died on a single night in a local park. Police said the victims had snorted cocaine which they were unaware was laced with fentanyl.
As drug users flooded into a state where they could do largely what they liked unmolested, and where charities plied them with free drug paraphernalia such as clean needles and smoking pipes to make taking the narcotics 'safer', open-air drug markets flourished and crime soared as addicts did whatever it took to feed their addiction.
Street addict after street addict confided to me that there was next to no chance of them seeking to get off drugs now that the one big obstacle to using them — being locked up in prison and forced to enrol in a treatment programme — had been removed.
Under Measure 110, instead of arresting hard-drug users and pushing them through a court system that often makes them get treatment, police hand addicts a ticket imposing a $100 fine that is cancelled if they phone a treatment referral hotline and agree to participate in a health assessment. The system proved useless — more than 95 per cent of tickets went ignored. Of 4,000 drug-use citations issued during the first two years of Measure 110, only 40 people phoned the hotline asking about treatment. As a result, it was calculated that each call cost taxpayers $7,000.
Even the New York Times, a habitual cheerleader for relaxing anti-drug laws, conceded that Portland had been turned into a 'drug-user's "paradise" ' since Measure 110 came into effect in February 2021.
Out on the streets on a weekday morning, it was painfully easy to find addicts who agreed.
I encountered Donna Pinaula and her husband 'Utah' at one of Portland's busiest street intersections, pushing around a shopping trolley stuffed with drugs and drug-taking handouts. Only two hours earlier, the pair had been booked by police for taking fentanyl openly. They grinned at my foolishness when I asked if they intended to seek treatment or pay the fine — they never did either, they said — and proceeded to prepare another fentanyl hit for themselves in full view of passers-by.
The couple showed off their drugs to me: blue pills or 'blues' for her, which are a mix of fentanyl and some other ingredients they couldn't remember, and a white 'rock' of pure fentanyl for him.
The pieces of silver foil they heat the drugs on and the glass pipes they smoke it with had both been provided, free of charge, by a local charity committed to the principle of 'harm reduction' — a controversial strategy that seeks to prevent accidental overdoses and infectious disease transmission. Critics say that it simply fuels drug-taking — which, in the case of Oregon, appears to be true.
Donna and Utah made no effort to hide their drug abuse. They said police rarely bother to hand out tickets to open drug-users and only intervened that morning because they were smoking fentanyl next to a road crossing that children were using to get to school.
As local police officers later confirmed to me, their hands were tied by Measure 110 — they could only confiscate drugs they actually saw and couldn't search users.
As for the starry-eyed claims of Measure 110's backers that, free from the threat of arrest and imprisonment, addicts would all rush off to seek help — if only they'd spoken to Utah first.
'It has made it worse,' said the 33-year-old ex-forklift truck driver, when asked about drug abuse in Portland since Measure 110.
'Don't get me wrong, it makes it better for me as I don't have to worry, but getting the police off our backs and giving us free pipes and foil to do our drugs is not going to get us off the streets.'
Down the street, another addict named Eric 'Irish' James agreed. Did he and his fellow fentanyl addicts really want to get off the drug? 'No,' he said bluntly.
Measure 110 rose from the ashes of the ferocious anti-police protests and riots that followed the killing of George Floyd by officers in 2020.
The attempt to take police out of the equation when it came to drug addiction backfired spectacularly badly as crime — particularly violent crime — soared as the dealers moved in.
Parts of Portland's once attractive and vibrant downtown area became a tent-covered no-go zone where addicts who were clearly deeply mentally troubled would walk around screaming their heads off — and locals wouldn't bat an eye.
Police chiefs complained that Measure 110 severely hampered their ability to keep order on the streets. Shootings rose from 413 in 2019 to 1,309 in 2022, leading to shops closing and residents leaving. The city was especially ill-equipped to cope, as it had already suffered a steep decline in police numbers when many officers responded to the wave of 'defund the police' hostility — which, in right-on Portland, involved nightly violent clashes with 'anti-fascist' militants that went on for months — and left the department. Recruits have hardly been rushing to replace them.
Instead, businesses have had to pay armed private security guards to patrol after dark, but they have next to no training and virtually no power to enforce the law. They can certainly do little about the drug dealers who circulate unmolested, carrying their supplies in backpacks.
The drug crisis also crippled the other emergency services. Fire crews were having to spend much of their time dealing with overdose cases, and there was a shortage of ambulances available to respond to non-drug-related medical emergencies.
For all the Left-wing complaints about heavy-handed policing, the officers I met couldn't have been less aggressive towards the addicts as they rode around on bicycles and gently checked that the drug users were still alive and in reasonable condition.
'People round here want addicts to go to rehab but they didn't think they'd be smoking fentanyl in front of pre-schoolers,' said officer Eli Arnold. He said he and his colleagues now spend much of their time reviving the same addicts after overdoses again and again.
Portlanders pride themselves on their liberal instincts but locals had clearly had enough of Measure 110 long ago.
Businessman Andy Munson described it as a 'disaster', telling me: 'People had the best of intentions but this law has fallen flat on its face. And two years of protesting and tearing the cops apart hasn't helped.'
Synthetic opioids are so powerful that it was 'absurd' to think addicts would volunteer to get off them, he said.
Alice Heller, a recovering addict and clothing designer, said the proponents of Measure 110 had twisted what it means to be a liberal. 'It's not liberal to help people take drugs,' she said. 'They don't know what to do so they feed the monster — it's inexcusable.'
Liberal-minded Oregonians have long boasted of the fact that theirs was the first U.S. state to decriminalise cannabis back in 1973. Being first to do the same with fentanyl and heroin is unlikely to be remembered with anything like pride.
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Protect kids: Break the grip of transgender extremism
The United States persists in being an outlier nation when it comes to OKing drugs and surgery on tweens and teens despite the growing evidence that for most kids gender-confusion is simply a phase.
Much of Europe has moved away from the junk science surrounding gender transition, especially pediatric gender transition.
Yet transgender extremism has a tight grip on the US medical establishment, cultural elites, progressive politicians — and school boards.
As Karol Markowitz notes, a major, 15-year Dutch study just confirmed that transgenderism among children is largely a fad.
Researchers in the Netherlands found that most teens experiencing gender dysphoria eventually “outgrew” it (with many resolving larger mental-health issues) and felt adjusted by early adulthood.
Federal rules issued under President Barack Obama told doctors they couldn’t decline to perform gender reassignment surgery on kids if it’s recommended by a “mental health professional.”
The nationwide order went out despite Health and Human Services medical experts noting that gender-transition procedures can themselves be harmful to minors.
These drastic procedures include puberty-suppression drugs, cross-hormone therapy and radical plastic surgery that increase lifelong risks of heart diseases, type 2 diabetes, cancer, loss of bone density and other serious side effects — not to mention sterility and the irreversibility of most surgeries.
Adding to the madness are leaked documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health revealing that some doctors oppose disclosing potential risks despite privately acknowledging the devastating and permanent side effects.
Locally, the Equal Rights Amendment on the New York ballot in November would write this dangerous madness into the state Constitution: Though painted as protecting abortion rights, it could permanently eliminate parental rights to veto their kids undergoing transgender surgery or going on puberty blockers.
The hard truth is that activists rushed to false conclusions about what’s best for these kids, the global medical establishment initially caved and is only now realizing the truth is far more complicated.
Cries of “bigotry” may still have US institutions (and much of the media) cowed, but it’s beyond insane to lock terrible junk science into law.
https://nypost.com/2024/04/05/opinion/protect-kids-break-the-grip-of-transgender-extremism/
****************************************************Is this the silliest hat a woman has ever worn?
Women seem to specialie in silly hats but to me that one takes the cake
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Believe data, not activists: Transgenderism among kids is mostly a fad
Is transgenderism among kids largely a fad? It certainly looks that way.
Researchers at the Netherlands’ University of Groningen recently released the results of a landmark 15-year study of 2,700 children starting at age 11.
They tracked the gender non-contentedness of these children over the years and found: “In early adolescence, 11% of participants reported gender non-contentedness. The prevalence decreased with age and was 4% at the last follow-up (around age 26).”
The researchers concluded, “Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.”
In other words, most of the children in the study who were feeling gender dysphoric in their awkward teenage years had shaken that off and adjusted by early adulthood, and their dysphoria was associated with bad self-esteem and mental-health problems.
This is fully at odds with the policy pushing its way through American schools and medical institutions: Kids who declare themselves transgender, no matter the age, need to be “affirmed,” an idea that sometimes leads to children taking hormone blockers or getting surgery to attempt gender transition.
These interventions can have lifelong consequences, but some doctors aren’t even sure if the child should be informed before they take action.
Leaked documents last month from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health found some doctors don’t think disclosing potential risks is necessary.
As The Post reported, practitioners believe telling a 14-year-old about possible fertility consequences is like talking to a “blank wall.”
A child psychologist said it’s “out of their developmental range to understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.”
If children can’t understand the medical consequences of an entirely elective procedure that isn’t necessary to benefit their health or save their life, perhaps it’s best not to do it?
This shouldn’t be controversial.
Yet we’ve gotten to a place where anyone who doesn’t jump at the chance to “affirm” a child in his or her quest to change genders is a transphobe or worse.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis banned such medical interventions for Florida kids, headlines like Rolling Stone’s “Ron DeSantis Just Took Two Big Steps to Make Trans Lives Illegal” were common.
Reuters noted the law “escalates a Republican political strategy to pursue bills restricting transgender rights.”
Many news stories called it a ban on “transgender treatment” because it banned puberty blockers and hormone therapy for children.
Laws like this are necessary to stem the hysteria that has developed around the topic and to protect mostly girls.
The University of Groningen study found that girls were being hardest hit by this gender dysphoria.
The report notes, “Individuals with an increasing gender non-contentedness more often were female and both an increasing and decreasing trajectory were associated with a lower global self-worth, more behavioral and emotional problems, and a non-heterosexual sexual orientation.”
Abigail Shrier was among the first to identify the social contagion of transgenderism, specifically among teenage girls, in her 2020 book “Irreversible Damage.”
Her latest book, “Bad Therapy,” looks at therapy culture that indulges teenagers in any bad idea they may have.
Perhaps the answer is to not simply accept the words of children.
The “gentle parenting” being pushed right now that makes good parents consider putting their kids on drugs to help them achieve an unattainable sex change needs to run up against tough love and fast.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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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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