Wednesday, January 31, 2018



The Man The Delusional Left Calls A #NAZI

▶️ Recognized Jerusalem As The Capital Of #Israel

▶️Cut Funds To The #PA For REFUSING To Recognize The Right Of #Israel To Exist

▶️ Honors Millions Of Murdered #Jews On #HolocaustMemorialDay








And the award for most sexist, misogynist bunch of vile hypocrites goes to… the Grammys!

There was no doubting the highlight of last night’s Grammys.

It came when Kesha gave an emotional performance of her single “Praying”, about the alleged sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her former producer ‘Dr Luke’ Gottwald.

She was introduced by Janelle Monae who delivered a powerful speech to the star-studded audience. ‘We say time’s up for pay inequality, discrimination or harassment of any kind,’ Monae declared, ‘and the abuse of power.’

Then Kesha appeared on stage with a host of other female stars including Cindy Lauper and Camila Cabello.

They all wore white, the theme colour for the night, along with the wearing of white roses, to show support and solidarity for the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements.

When Kesha finished singing, she burst into tears, as did many of the audience.

But Kesha didn’t actually win an award. In the category for which she was nominated, Best Pop Solo Performance, Ed Sheeran won, for a song – as enraged Twitter swiftly pointed out - about getting a woman drunk and taking her home to have sex with her.

This was the perfect embodiment of the gigantic problem the Grammys has in proudly joining the charge for better treatment of women.

Because let’s be perfectly frank: it’s the single most sexist, misogynist and abusive awards show of them all, celebrating many of the most sexist, misogynist and abusive people in an amoral industry of spectacular proportions.

If you thought Hollywood’s bad, it’s got nothing on the record business, particularly in the worlds of hip-hop and rap.

Take Big Sean, a rapper whose lyrics are littered with misogynistic and homophobic material. In the video for his single ‘I Don’t F*ck With You’, the Detroit rapper talks about ‘stupid ass b*tches.’

He collaborated last year on a song with Eminem which included lyrics about ‘urinating on Fergie’ and raping Conservative talk show host Ann Coulter ‘with a Klan poster, a lamp post, a door handle and a damn bolt cutter.’

He doesn’t just write about treating women badly, he acts on it too.

In 2011, Big Sean was arrested in New York for sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment and forcible touching of a 17-year-old girl after a concert. Some charges were dropped after he accepted a guilty plea for unlawful imprisonment of the girl, a fan.

This would have led to him being banned from continuing to work in almost any other job. But not the music industry. This year, Big Sean was nominated for a Grammy.

Hip-hop and rap stars like him have made millions from writing music and making videos that depict women as prostitutes, sexual objects and ‘b*tches’.

One of the biggest winners last night night was Kendrick Lamar, whose most recent album is riddled with graphic sexually-charged lyrics and repeated references to ‘hoes’ and ‘b*tches’.

One song, Loyalty, has the line: ‘Girl, you look so good, it’s to die for, Ooh that p*ssy good, it’s to die for.’ In another, Humble, he says: ‘Girl, I can buy yo’ ass the world with my paystub, Ooh that p*ssy good, won’t you sit it on my taste bloods?’

It continues: ‘I’m so f***ing sick and tired of the Photoshop.. show me somethin’ natural like ass with some stretch marks. Still will take you down right on your mama’s couch in Polo socks.’

In Lust, he says: ‘Pop you a pill, call up your b*tches, have ‘em waitin’ on you, go to the club, have some fun, make that ass bounce.’

If Lamar worked in the media or film industry right now, he’d be hung, drawn and quartered for speaking that way in public. But because he’s a rapper, he was rewarded with an array of Grammys.

As for any pretense at gender equality, only 17 of the 86 Grammy awards last night went to women or female-fronted bands.

Towards the end of the show, Hillary Clinton, the High Priestess of Hypocrisy, popped up to read Trump-mocking extracts from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury. She received wild applause.

It seemed perfectly fitting that the liberal music world’s heroine on a night of tearful endorsements about abuse of power and sexual harassment, should be someone who it emerged this week had protected a campaign advisor’s job during the 2008 presidential race after he was accused of…. sexual harassment.

SOURCE





Feminists hate attractive women

In Britain, it is a tradition that attractive women accompany players to the playing position

SUPER-sensitive snowflakes have been taking aim at everything we love, from James Bond to Are You Being Served. And moaning millennials have now scored a bullseye after darts chiefs opted to ditch walk-on girls in case they offend women.



“Nothing is safe from this army of the easily offended. These snowflakes think everything that offends them is fair game for their fury. “They want to crush any idea, image or pastime that doesn’t slavishly conform to their worldview.

“It’s time we told them to do one.

“Barely a day passes without reports of someone or something being “called out” by these jumped-up Joe Stalins.

“In recent days, they have turned their authoritarian attention to the beautiful women who walk on at the darts.

“Under pressure from broadcasters desperate to be PC, the Professional Darts Corporation says it will no longer employ these gorgeous women. “Apparently, getting women to do such things is “inappropriate” in the 21st century. It has all of a sudden been deemed 'inappropriate'

“This is such a sad story. “Darts is a wonderful sport, but God knows it needs glamour and is made much more attractive by these women.

“But they’re gone now, erased from public life by people who have decreed that glammed-up women are “offensive”.

“This means the young working-class women who made an easy buck at the darts will no longer be able to do so. It is a weird feminism that chortles as women lose their jobs.

SOURCE







ANGER as multiple properties in London are only offered to Muslim occupants for rent

London’s secret Muslim only accommodation has been exposed thanks to Rebel Media and the Daily Star. Hundreds of property adverts on websites such as GumTree were only available for those who are Muslim or of Asian descent.

It’s unbelievable that in this day and age, ‘white people’ or anyone who is not Muslim is discriminated against getting living accommodation. The Star reported:

“Our reporters discovered hundreds more across the UK, including signs for “Asian only” and “Polish only” tenants.

The ads echo those of the 1950s and ’60s when landlords hung “Whites only” signs in windows. There are fears the discrimination scandal is fuelling a ghetto culture in our towns and cities which could be exploited by far-right groups.

In Woolwich, south-east London, tensions have been running high since Army drummer Lee, 26, was murdered by extremists last year.

At nearby Jash News, one small ad read: “Room to let for £400 in Plumstead… ONLY FOR ASIAN FAMILY.

Similar notices were discovered in ethnically diverse areas of east London such as Mile End and Whitechapel.

On a short walk along a busy high street five adverts were spotted in three newsagents windows saying “Muslim only” tenants and “Bangladeshi only”.

We also uncovered around 200 property adverts on websites such as Gumtree, specifying Muslims.”

According to experts, landlords who discriminate are breaking the law.

Could you imagine the massive uproar if ‘white Christian’ refused to let Muslims or Asians live in their property…it would be all over the news!

A Facebook user has posted an image showing four separate housing classified adverts in London and the West Midlands that appear to only be accepting Muslim tenants.

The post from a user on the Brexit HQ group, if genuine, proves that such advertisements are effectively ‘slipping through the net’ when it comes to ensuring that equality rules are not broken.

There will naturally be people out there who feel that these landlords and homeowners aren’t doing anything wrong on Gumtree, but at the same time there is one very important question that needs to be asked.

What would happen if the word ‘Muslim’ was changed for another faith group?

We’re not saying this to be Islamophobic in any way – far from it – we are just using this as an example to highlight what we feel is an example of the powers that be picking and choosing what they allow to be posted.

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, January 30, 2018



Jordan Peterson interview fallout: It’s little wonder men don’t know where they stand

Peterson is a professor of psychology, previously at Harvard, now at the University of Toronto. He is 54, he has a gentle manner and — I hope it’s still OK to say this — he is easy on the eye.

Peterson’s latest book, his second, is called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, but books aren’t why he’s getting attention. Peterson is famous for what he says on his YouTube channel, particularly about the role of men in modern society. He says men in the West are suffering a crisis of masculinity because they are encouraged from birth by an apologetic culture to believe that traditionally masculine qualities — strength, aggression, self-reliance — are negative and destructive, while feminine qualities — willingness to co-operate, for example — are the way forward for the human race.

This, he says, is so stupid “it’s hard to know where to begin”. Forcing men to become more agreeable, less competitive, will be the death of them, and all of us.

That’s not all he says. Peterson touches every button: he thinks social justice warriors are mostly faking it, and he can’t abide virtue-signallers. He thinks intellectuals are mainly arrogant.

He is not fond of humanities courses. He blames left-wing academics for the mumbo-jumbo that infects public life. He can’t see the point of women’s studies, and he believes that universities are obsessed not with “intelligent conversation … instead, we are having an ideological conversation”.

He’s also Christian. He takes seriously the idea that God made the rules and that human beings are programmed to feel wretched when they break them.

There is hunger for his message. Peterson’s YouTube channel has 600,000 subscribers. As of last week, he had 10 of the top 10 higher education podcasts on iTunes. He makes $40,000 a month from the crowdsourcing website Patreon and reckons his audience is 90 per cent male.

The left is naturally furious with him, which brings us to the interview he did last week, as part of his book tour, with Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4.

She did a really poor interview, which is a shame because it meant people didn’t get to hear what Peterson says in his book...

I can help with that. It’s aimed at young men. He encourages them to free themselves, as quickly as possible, of the burdens of their childhood, to accept the failings of their parents, who probably did their best, and take control of their lives, because when you’re carrying a burden or living a lie, you’re suppressing who you really are, and so much of what you could be will never be forced to come forward.

Everyone’s favourite line has to do with how life is going to kill you, so you might as well go do the most magnificent thing you can think of.

Why any of this should be controversial is beyond me, but Peterson has faced the usual revolt: campaigns to stop him speaking publicly; campaigns to stop him getting university funding, and so on. And here’s something truly bizarre: the same week that his book came out to howls of outrage, pretty much every English-language newspaper in the world published at least a summary of a cruel account by an anonymous woman of a private sexual encounter she didn’t enjoy with US comedian Aziz Ansari.

In case you missed it, she met Aziz at a party and made a beeline for him. He took her number. She had a text message from him before she even made it home. They flirted on the phone for a week. He asked her out for dinner and paid for the meal. He asked her back to his apartment. She agreed to go upstairs, where so-called “bad sex” happened.

He popped her up on the kitchen bench and took her knickers off. He gave her oral sex, and she reciprocated. They moved around a bit — to the couch, then over to the big mirror — and played around a bit more, but she wasn’t up for sex. He put on an episode of Seinfeld, poured some wine, eventually called a car to take her home. He texted her the next day to say how much he enjoyed her company and she replied angrily, saying she’d felt pressured. He apologised.

It’s hard to know for certain, but from her vicious description it seems like she didn’t want to be his one-night stand, she wanted to be his girlfriend; and she seems to believe that her hurt feelings justify his public shaming. They don’t. What she has done is revenge porn — in words, not pictures. It is an unforgivable breach of trust to share private, intimate moments, especially under circumstances in which she gets to stay anonymous, and which for him must be excruciating.

She’s OK to do that, but our visiting professor is not OK to say that men could do with a little manning up? No wonder so many are hankering for his world and not hers.

SOURCE






The deceptive language of the Left

Cultural Marxist academics, their sycophant students, and the main stream media are at war with America—a war of violent Marxist ideology and a war of cleverly chosen words and euphemisms that appear time and time again in many college courses, high school classes, in propaganda literature, newspapers, conferences, and in the manufactured news. Cultural Marxists are regular guests on all the alphabet soup networks masquerading as real news, spewing their hatred, their disdain and disrespect for our President, and their calls to renewed violence in the streets through their masked Black Shirts.

As David Horrowitz said, “Worse yet, this is the dominant culture in our universities, in our media, in our judiciary, in government, in unions, and in the shadow political universe of non-profits, with billions of tax-free dollars at their disposal.”

Language is a powerful tool of discourse, mass political indoctrination and agitation. Marxist Democrats are quite adept at using inflammatory language and deceptive euphemisms to suit their nefarious political ends.

In any kind of ideological and political war, the first victim is truth, replaced with lies, dressed cleverly by rhetoric, obfuscation, and intentional debasement of language.

George Orwell wrote an essay in 1946, “Politics and the English Language,” focusing on language which “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Such language, often vague and meaningless, concealed the oppressive ideology.

Taking private property from farmers and other owners is thus called “transfer of population” or “rectification of frontiers.” The process of sending people to gulags to die becomes “elimination of unreliable elements.” “Pacification” attempted to defend the indefensible acts of bombing and driving out locals from their ancestral lands and giving the land to a population protected by the intentions of the elites.

Orwell pointed out that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” The less sincere the speaker or writer is, particularly politicians and journalists, the more they “disguise their intentions behind euphemisms and convoluted phrasing.”

Academic writing is resplendent with “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words.” According to Orwell, “In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.”

The Prevention of Literature

Concurrent with “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell published “The Prevention of Literature.” The two essays reflect his alarm over the victimization of truth in the distorted use of language. Orwell pointed out the “deliberate use of misleading double-talk language among those he identified as pro-Soviet.” He predicted the type of literature under a future totalitarian society—“formulaic and low grade sensationalism.”

Analyzing some of the euphemisms conceived by today’s progressives, and I only scratched the surface, we realize that Orwell’s words from sixty years ago are still true.

“Undocumented worker” is an obvious mischaracterization of illegal aliens who are invading our country with the approval of corporatist elites in both Democrat and Republican parties. These individuals do have documents from their countries of origin and have broken the law by crossing our borders illegally. Not only are they not repatriated, they are given equal rights with Americans so that corrupt politicians can stay in power in Democrat states like California. These people become illegal voters even though they do not speak the language, do not understand our laws, our Constitution, and do not care that they are helping transform our country into the hell hole they’ve fled. So long as they get undeserved welfare and Social Security benefits, they will vote Democrat in perpetuity.

“Our core values” is Democrat double-speak for demographic and cultural suicide. We allow every unvetted flotsam and jetsam from around the world into our country, disregarding the interests of the American public, their safety, health, and well-being under the guise of “that is not who we are as a nation.” The Democrat Party and the leftist agenda are now making the decision of who we are as a nation and as people, without bothering to consult the rest of America.

If we want to uphold law and order, our borders, language, and culture, we are “bigoted.” The meaning of “bigoted” has been stretched and bastardized to now mean pretty much anything the left wants it to mean. Yet it seems that leftists are truly intolerant toward those holding different opinions. They often turn their intolerance into violence, silencing the opposition and their right to free speech especially in the bastions of liberal academia around the country.

Additionally, if you disagree with any goals of the leftist agenda, you are “racist.” The real meaning of “racism” as described in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities, and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race,” has been lost in the leftist double-talk.

If you want legal immigration and national borders, safe from criminals, gangs, disease, and jihadi intrusions, you are a “xenophobe.” All foreign-born individuals who are now proud American citizens and prefer that immigrants follow the rule of law just like they did, are accused of xenophobia, “undue fear of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin.”

If you condemn militant jihad, hijra, and Islamic violence, you are an “Islamophobe.” That word silences the opposition so that the liberal goal of unrestricted Islamic invasion continues.

Liberals call themselves “progressives” even though their goals have nothing to do with progress but with regression to a totalitarian and oppressive communist society which has failed everywhere it has been tried. Liberals are repackaging the Bolshevik effort t by saying that communism was not implemented the right way.

“Liberalism” does not really represent the meaning of the Latin word, “liber” (free). Liberalism is disguised incremental socialism that will eventually lead to global communism. “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But under the name of “liberalism” they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

People accept the word “global citizen” without ever asking themselves what it entails. A “global citizen” is an individual who lives in a country that is no longer a state; it has no borders, no sovereignty, no national identity, no passport, and no national history. Yet most schools and colleges advertise that their students have been brainwashed and prepared for global citizenship.

On campuses around the country, “snowflakes” are cowering and hiding in their “safe spaces” in fear of reality that contradicts what they’ve been told and taught since they were born and led across a stage and given participation trophies.

The word “inhumane” (without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel) has been trivialized to excuse any breaking of the law without punishment and repercussions. In the mentally disordered liberal brain, suffering the consequences of bad choices, decisions, and subsequent criminality has become cruel and “inhumane.”

The word “diversity” is no longer used as being diverse and different; it is now a liberal code word for perversity which must be acknowledged by the other side, encoded into law, and enforced by the courts.

Homosexuality hides behind the word “gay” which previously meant “happy.” Different types of deviance are disguised behind the words “cross-dressers.” “Gender fluidity” can be interpreted as any sexual anomaly and psychological confusion—anything flows.

“Multiculturalism” is the code word for the Cultural Marxism agenda and the transformation of your country into a tower of Babel of illegal immigrants who have no intention of assimilating or accepting the invaded culture, its laws, its history, and its language. It is considered “inhumane” to force such illegal aliens to assimilate and contribute to society in a meaningful way.

Liberals force their ideas, plans, and global agenda on the rest of us in the name of “civil society.” This represents the globalist elites backed by power, influence, and money to socially engineer our lives any way they wish because they know best what is good for billions of people around the globe and the faux science backing them “has been settled.”

The laws and cries of “equal opportunity” coming from various special interest groups are not really asking for “equality,” they are asking for preferential treatment. And “social justice” is not asking for justice, it is asking for government sanctioned stealing, taking private property and money from those who worked for it and earned it, and giving it to those who did not earn it and are not entitled to it.

Social Security is not an “entitlement,” it is money that people have earned and contributed into a fund for decades in order to provide them with income in retirement. It is theft when Social Security money is given to illegal aliens as soon as they set foot on our soil.

Liberals created special and protected categories for some races and ethnic groups such as calling Hispanic women “Latinas.” To my knowledge, Latium was a region in the former Roman Empire, thus those people could be called Latinas and Latini. Black people are now “African Americans” even though most of them have never set foot in Africa nor were they born there. Caucasians don’t call themselves European Americans. There are Africans who are American citizens and have every right to call themselves African Americans, including Caucasians from South Africa. These special categories are not necessary; they are divisive and counterproductive, treating the special group as a group that cannot survive without the force of government.

It seems that liberalism is not really freedom; it thrives on divisiveness, separation, and inequality. They use deceptive language, euphemisms, and lies to implement their goals and policies in the name of “democracy” even though we are not a democracy, we are a constitutional republic. But liberals count on their blind followers to be ignorant of history and civics.

SOURCE





The Sex-Change Revolution Is Based on Ideology, Not Science

Twenty-eight years ago, the release of “When Harry Met Sally” highlighted one big debate: whether men and women could really be just friends.

That question may still be up in the air, but now we are being forced to confront a more fundamental debate: whether men can really become women.

America is in the midst of what has been called a “transgender moment.” In the space of a year, transgender issues went from something that most Americans had never heard of to a cause claiming the mantle of civil rights.

But can a boy truly be “trapped” in a girl’s body? Can modern medicine really “reassign” sex? Is sex something “assigned” in the first place? What’s the loving response to a friend or child experiencing a gender identity conflict? What should our law say on these issues?

These shouldn’t be difficult questions.

Just a few years before “When Harry Met Sally” hit theaters, Dr. Paul McHugh thought he had convinced the vast majority of medical professionals not to go along with bold claims about sex and gender being proffered by some of his colleagues. And as chair of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, McHugh put a stop to sex-reassignment surgery at Hopkins.

Once the elite Johns Hopkins did this, many medical centers across the nation followed suit.

But in recent years we have seen a resurgence of these drastic procedures—not in light of new scientific evidence, mind you, but as a result of a growing ideological movement. Such is our transgender moment.

The people increasingly in the spotlight of this moment are children.

In the past 10 years, dozens of pediatric gender clinics have sprung up throughout the United States. In 2007, Boston Children’s Hospital “became the first major program in the United States to focus on transgender children and adolescents,” as its own website brags.

A decade later, over 45 gender clinics opened their doors to our nation’s children—telling parents that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones may be the only way to prevent teen suicides.

Never mind that according to the best studies—the ones that even transgender activists themselves cite—80 to 95 percent of children with gender dysphoria will come to identify with and embrace their bodily sex.

Never mind that 41 percent of people who identify as transgender will attempt suicide at some point in their lives, compared to 4.6 percent of the general population. Never mind that people who have had transition surgery are 19 times more likely than average to die by suicide.

These statistics should stop us in our tracks. Clearly, we must work to find ways to effectively prevent these suicides and address the underlying causes. We certainly shouldn’t be encouraging children to “transition.”

Many psychologists and psychiatrists think of gender dysphoria as similar to other dysphorias, or forms of discomfort with one’s body, such as anorexia. The feelings of discomfort can lead to mistaken beliefs about oneself or about reality, and then to actions in accordance with those false beliefs.

The most helpful therapies focus not on achieving the impossible—changing bodies to conform to thoughts and feelings—but on helping people accept and even embrace the truth about their bodies and reality.

Operating in the background is a sound understanding of physical and mental health—proper function of one’s body and mind—and a sound understanding of medicine as a practice aimed at restoring health, not simply satisfying the desires of patients.

For human beings to flourish, they need to feel comfortable in their own bodies, readily identify with their sex, and believe that they are who they actually are.

In my new book, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” I argue that McHugh got it right. The best biology, psychology, and philosophy all support an understanding of sex as a bodily reality, and of gender as a social manifestation of bodily sex. Biology isn’t bigotry.

In my book I offer a balanced approach to the policy issues, a nuanced vision of human embodiment, and a sober and honest survey of the human costs of getting human nature wrong.

Despite activists’ best efforts to put up a unified front, Harry cannot become Sally. Activists’ desperate insistence to the contrary suggests that the transgender moment is fleeting.

SOURCE






Limits on Australian political donations

Crackdown on donations would destroy activist groups, GetUp says. The article below is from the Left so is unlikely to be the whole story but if it is right, it would seem that the government is on the right track.  Political agitators often support destructive policies and spoil the scene for people with real grievances and problems.

And the idea that an attack on them is an attack on "democracy" is another example of Leftist Newspeak (in Orwell's terms).  The whole point of these groups, particularly when they take to the streets, is to rule from the streets, not the ballot box.  The recent homosexual marriage "debate" in Australia showed how coercive and thuggish  these groups can be

And it is clearly the Left who abuse the opportunity to demonstrate.  The "Occupy Wall St" demonstrations of 2011 in NYC were very aggressive and trashed the location whereas the conservative "Tea Party" demonstrations were polite, civil and picked up their rubbish after them.

In my home State of Queensland under the Bjelke-Peterson administration of the '60s, Leftist demonstrations were heavily limited by the police, resulting in quite civil Leftist behaviour, when a demonstration was allowed.  I know.  I was there.  I think that should be the general pattern.  Leftist hate-fests should be carefully monitored and cancelled when they become aggressive

Leftists are rarely content with free speech. They want freedom to coerce and intimidate as well.  Non-coercive, non-obstructive, non-abusive demonstrations should of course always be allowed but a Leftist demonstration rarely even starts out that way, let alone ending that way



The activist group GetUp has criticised the Turnbull government’s proposed crackdown on foreign political donations, saying its legislation will destroy the revenue streams of grassroots groups and minor parties.

In a submission to the joint standing committee on electoral matters, which is holding an inquiry into election funding and disclosure, GetUp says the government’s bill contains an extraordinary requirement for not-for-profit organisations to obtain a statutory declaration from donors who give just $4.80 a week to political campaign organisations such as GetUp.
Fear 'rushed' foreign influence bill will harm freedom of speech
Read more

It says according to Sections 302L and 302P of the bill’s explanatory memorandum, buried on pages 43 and 45, the government makes it clear that if individuals want to donate $250 or more annually to an organisation they will have to declare they are an “allowable donor” and have a justice of the peace or a police officer witness their declaration.

GetUp says that would require organisations to monitor cumulative small donations in real time and, once the annual $250 ceiling is met, to refuse further donations until a statutory declaration is obtained.

Failure to comply with the law would result in 10 years’ imprisonment or a fine of $210,000.

“This hidden clause reveals the federal government’s true intention is to shut down anyone it doesn’t agree with,” Paul Oosting, GetUp national director, told Guardian Australia. “This will destroy grassroots groups’ and minor parties’ revenue streams.

“If brought into law, this would starve GetUp of more than half of our people-powered funding, essentially halting our ability to call on the government to save the Great Barrier Reef, demand corporations contribute a fair share to our local schools and hospitals and treat people seeking asylum in Australia humanely.

“You can get a passport or buy a house without a stat dec but now if you want to stand up for a cause you believe in you’ve got to line up at a police station and get a formal document signed and witnessed. It’s absurd.

“This bill serves the interests of the Turnbull government and no one else. It doesn’t stop the likes of Gina Rinehart or the Adani Corporation from cutting huge cheques to their favourite politicians but it forces everyday people to jump through absurd hoops just to have their say in our democracy.”

GetUp’s submission says the government’s bill is ostensibly a response to a series of scandals surrounding foreign funding of politicians and political parties, and the potential for undue foreign influence, but those scandals would not have played out any differently if the bill were enacted into law.

“The ‘foreign donors; namechecked in the media – Chau Chak Wing and Huang Xiang Mo – both hold or held Australian citizenship or residency at the time the donations were made and therefore would be allowable donors under the provisions of the bill,” GetUp’s submission says.

“Meanwhile, the bill not only prohibits many not-for-profits from receiving international philanthropy entirely, but imposes a large administrative burden for them to confirm the identity of all donors – as opposed to, for example, simply determining whether the donation came from a foreign bank account.

“This represents a near-impossible feat for community organisations that depend on the small donations of thousands of everyday people.

“There is also a reasonable concern that banning donations by reference to a person’s identity in the way currently drafted is unconstitutional. It is clear the Bill is not serving the interests of the Australian public, concerned about the recent slew of foreign donations scandals – which raises the question, what or whose interests does it serve?

“One clue is in what the bill omits. It misses by far the biggest risk for ‘foreign influence’ in Australia’s democracy: large multinational corporations.”

The Minerals Council of Australia, one of Australia’s biggest corporate lobby groups, has conceded that it makes political donations and pays to attend fundraisers to gain access to members of parliament.

In a submission to a separate Senate inquiry, the MCA said it made donations amounting to $33,250 in 2015-16 and $57,345 in 2016-17, which were declared to the Australian Electoral Commission. The majority in both years went to the Liberal or National parties and associated entities.

The frank admission – which reflects a commonly held belief about the role of money in politics – stuck out because major corporations and lobby groups by and large say they make donations to support democracy.

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, January 29, 2018





The lethal folly of calling Trump Hitler

We mustn’t forget, or forgive, the anti-Trump lobby’s Nazi comparisons

America is doing okay, isn’t it, considering it is run by a Nazi. Considering that for the past year it has been governed by a man who more closely resembles Hitler than any other living Western politician. Considering it is now borderline a fascist state in which, in the words of one British diplomat, there are ‘shades of 1933 Germany’. Twelve months into Donald Trump’s fascist experiment, one year on from his warping of the American republic with ‘fascist rhetoric’, America seems to be functioning well. The president’s political opponents haven’t been imprisoned, political debate remains free and open, no concentration camps have been opened, and the Constitution is intact. Maybe this Nazism thing isn’t so bad after all?

This is the lethal consequence of the Hitler-comparing hysteria that gripped the Western commentariat over the past year: it has demeaned the memory of the Nazi experience. It has made Nazism seem ‘not that bad’. It robs the horrors of mid-20th-century Europe of their uniqueness, their historical specificity, and makes them seem like things that happen all the time, which are always in the air, even in the free, open, peaceful air of 21st-century America. They normalise, and thus downgrade, the suffering under the Nazi tyranny. In calling Trump ‘Hitler’, these Hillary-supporting throwers of the loudest political hissy fit of modern times imagine they are landing a serious blow on Trump, but they are doing something else, too, something really bad: they are letting Hitler off the hook by misremembering him simply as a bad man, as a Trump-style blowhard, rather than as the great criminal of the 20th century whose like is found nowhere — nowhere — in America or Europe today.

It is important to remember, and to continue to criticise, the anti-Trump lobby’s reckless use of Nazi imagery and Holocaust comparisons. This cannot be allowed to pass smoothly into a history, chalked up simply as an angry outburst after their candidate lost to Trump. There’s too much at stake: historical memory, truth, reason itself. So we must look back at what happened a year ago, when Trump was inaugurated and when it became okay to throw around the f-word, even the N-word. ‘Donald Trump is a fascist’, declared a writer for the Washington Post in black and white. Even Barack Obama, in the words of one report, ‘made reference to the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s’ when he said a Trump presidency would damage American democracy. Peter Westmacott, who was British ambassador to the US until 2016, said the rise of Trump had ‘shades of 1933’.

Historians cast sense and decorum to the wind in their rush to be part of the panic about the return of Nazism. Republicans, said Timothy Snyder, are like ‘1930s German conservatives’ who were overcome by the ‘radical right’ — that is, by Hitler’s Nazi movement. Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler, said Trump was working from ‘the playbook [of] Mein Kampf’. Politicians got in on the Nazi-talk. British Labour MP Dennis Skinner spoke of Trump in the same breath as ‘fascist dictators Mussolini and Hitler’. Labour’s Yvette Cooper drew a link between Trump’s ban on migration from certain Muslim-majority countries and the events of the Holocaust. As did the Guardian. It said Trump’s presidency was a ‘slap in the face’ to those who promised to learn from the Holocaust. Trump is a ‘fascist authoritarian’, said Salon. He combines the ‘bullying and threats’ that also defined the Hitler era, said another observer, as if Nazism was merely politicians being mean.

The use and abuse of the Holocaust era, the exploitation of the Nazi experience to dent Trump’s legitimacy, was widespread. It could be seen on demos against Trump, too, on which placards depicted him in a Hitler moustache or warned us against ‘a repeat of the 1930s’. On a London march, one group of people held placards showing Trump dressed like Hitler alongside the words: ‘We’re history teachers — we know how this ends.’

Let’s hope these people aren’t teaching your kids. For it is hard to think of anything more historically illiterate, and more dangerously cynical, than the casual branding of Trump as Hitler and the widespread hints over the past year — the predictions, even — that his rule would end the same way Hitler’s did: with death camps, presumably, and millions dead, and global war, and the absolute destruction of liberty, political freedom and the rule of law. None of that has happened, of course. The Hitler talk was so much steam, with observers rummaging around in history for the strongest political terms with which Trump might be branded and condemned. This has made it more difficult to see what is new and different and, yes, problematic about Trump’s administration. The unhinged Nazi talk discourages reasoned analysis in favour of chasing the cheap thrill of yelling ‘fascist!’ at someone you don’t like. It is profoundly anti-intellectual.

But it does something worse than muddy the present and harm rational debate about politics today; it also ravages the past; it relativises the Nazi experience and, unwittingly no doubt, dilutes the savagery of the Holocaust through comparing that immense crime with what is simply an elected American administration many people don’t like. This might not be Holocaust denial, but it is certainly Holocaust dilution. It is Holocaust relativism. And as some historians have been pointing out since the 1970s, Holocaust relativism, the treatment of the Nazi era as just a wicked brand of politics that crops up every now and then, including now, is the foundation stone of the vile prejudices that underpin actual Holocaust denial. It ‘minimises Nazi atrocities’, as one guide to the Holocaust put it, which in turns fuels the conviction of many Jew-haters: that the Holocaust and the events that nurtured it were not that a big deal. Calm down, Jews.

This is why we cannot forget or forgive what they said about Trump — not because we need to protect Trump from insult, but because we need to protect historical memory from destruction. This is the terrible irony of the worst outbursts of anti-Trump hysteria over the past year: it presented itself as a challenge to an ascendant neo-Nazism, yet its casual, thoughtless use of the Nazi spectre promoted a history-rewriting view of the Nazi era that benefits no one except neo-Nazis.

SOURCE





Sex addiction IS an illness, doctors insist... but furious critics say that they're just making excuses for predators

Calls to classify sex addicts as ‘mentally ill’ have triggered a row among doctors and campaigners helping victims of predators like Harvey Weinstein.

Eleven senior specialists, in a letter to the World Psychiatric Association, are pressing for compulsive sexual behaviour to be recognised as a mental disorder in its own right.

But the proposal was last night condemned by those who fear it will allow sexual misconduct to be blamed on a medical condition. Rachel Krys, from the charity End Violence Against Women, said: ‘We absolutely object to anything that condones harmful sexual behaviour to others, mainly women.’

And Dr Harriet Garrod, a consultant psychologist from Bexhill in East Sussex, said: ‘This could allow those in question to evade full responsibility for their actions by saying they were “ill” at the time.’

There has been a fierce debate within the psychiatric community over whether compulsive sexual behaviour should be recognised as an illness.

The condition is defined as being unable to control intense sexual impulses or urges and engaging in repetitive sexual behaviour for six months or more that ‘causes marked distress or impairment’ to sufferers and those around them.

Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey and golfer Tiger Woods – who had a string of extra-marital affairs – have sought treatment for so-called sex addiction at a £25,000-a-month rehab centre. But the American Psychiatric Association has refused to recognise it as an illness.

The letter to the World Psychiatric Association was signed by nearly a dozen leading lights in the profession, including Dr Valerie Voon, a neuropsychiatrist at Cambridge University.

It demands that sex addiction be included in the next edition of the International Classification Of Diseases, a ‘bible’ of recognised conditions that is used by doctors all over the world.

The letter states: ‘Growing evidence suggests compulsive sexual behaviour disorder is an important clinical problem with potentially serious consequences if left untreated.’

SOURCE





For once Mr Baggy Eyes has a point

Billionaire investor George Soros launched a scathing attack on tech giants at the Davos summit on Thursday, calling them monopolies that could be manipulated by authoritarians to subvert democracy.

During an annual dinner he hosts at the World Economic Forum, held this week in the Swiss alpine resort, Soros turned his sights on a host of subjects including US President Donald Trump and the speculation frenzy surrounding the bitcoin cryptocurrency.

But much of the Hungarian-born financier's ire was reserved for the tech giants of Silicon Valley who, he argued, needed to be more strictly regulated.

'Facebook and Google effectively control over half of all internet advertising revenue,' the 87-year-old told diners during a speech.

'They claim that they are merely distributors of information. The fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access.'

'The exceptional profitability of these companies is largely a function of their avoiding responsibility for — and avoiding paying for — the content on their platforms,' Soros said.

He predicted that tech giants would 'compromise themselves' to access key markets like China, creating an 'alliance between authoritarian states and these large, data rich IT monopolies.'

'This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,' he warned.

Predicting governments would start to more heavily regulate the sector he said: 'The owners of the platform giants consider themselves the masters of the universe, but in fact they are slaves to preserving their dominant position. Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered. Regulation and taxation will be their undoing.'

Soros warned that at its current rate, Facebook will run out of new users to join its platform despite it currently growing in size.

'The distinguishing feature of internet platform companies is that they are networks and they enjoy rising marginal returns; that accounts for their phenomenal growth. The network effect is truly unprecedented and transformative, but it is also unsustainable. It took Facebook eight and a half years to reach a billion users and half that time to reach the second billion. At this rate, Facebook will run out of people to convert in less than three years.'

Known for his legendarily successful currency trading, Soros dismissed bitcoin as a 'typical bubble'. But he said the cryptocurrency would likely avoid a full crash because authoritarians would still use it to make secret investments abroad.

He described Russia's Vladimir Putin as presiding over a 'mafia state' and called Trump a 'danger to the world'.

But he predicted that the US president's appeal would not last. 'I regard it as a purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in 2020 or even sooner.'

But the investor's traditional Davos predictions do not always pan out.

Last year in Switzerland he warned that the stock market rally would end after Trump's election and that China's growth rate was unsustainable.

China's growth has continued while US stocks are regularly hitting record highs.

SOURCE






Why men are being wrongly accused of rape

The definition of rape has become very broad

Oliver Mears (pictured) spent two years on police bail having been charged with rape. Last week, the 19-year-old Oxford student had the case against him dropped following a review of evidence. A couple of days earlier, Samson Makele’s trial was halted after his defence team found more than a dozen images of him and his accuser cuddling in bed. In December, Liam Allan, aged 22 and a law student, had his rape conviction thrown out of court when new evidence came to light. A text message from the complainant to a friend stated she had had sex with Liam, but ‘it wasn’t against my will or anything’. Scotland Yard currently has 30 rape cases under review.

Various explanations have been put forward for the spate of wrongful arrests. Most prominent is the claim that the police lack the resources needed to sift through considerable evidence. In addition, as Luke Gittos has written on spiked, the systemic failure ‘is a symptom of a police force that has been told over many years that its job is to facilitate successful prosecutions, rather than investigate objectively’.

But before a victim can be believed, before an arrest can be made, a woman must allege that she was raped. False accusations are neither new nor unique to rape cases. But the severity of the potential punishment and the damage to the accused’s reputation mean false rape accusations deserve to be taken seriously. We need to ask why these cases were brought to the police in the first place.

An easy answer is that women maliciously make false rape accusations, perhaps to cover for a consensual sexual encounter or to exact revenge against a man. But research suggests that only four per cent of cases of sexual violence reported to the UK police are found or suspected to be false, and in the majority of these cases no specific perpetrator is named. False allegations are mainly identified early and often through an admission from the complainant.

The process of going to trial and giving evidence in a rape case is not an easy option. Yes, a ‘believe the victim’ culture means women are shielded by anonymity and are dealt with sensitively in court. They can give their evidence from behind a screen, be addressed by their first name, and ask for judges to remove their wigs. But if revenge is being sought, there are surely far easier and less time-consuming ways to extract it.

A false allegation is an accusation that the complainant knows never actually occurred. But, as Professor Phil Rumney details, there may be false allegations that fall outside this definition, such as ‘non-malicious allegations from people with particular medical conditions who genuinely believe they are victims of rape or other sexual offences, but who are mistaken’. For some women, then, a false accusation may be founded upon a genuine belief that they were raped. Additionally, as Rumney points out, a person may allege rape without understanding what the legal definition of rape entails.

We are unlikely to know what drove the women making false accusations against Allan, Mears and Makele. But the #MeToo movement has brought to light a great deal of confusion around the meaning of rape. An Everyday Feminism article titled ‘How do I know if I’ve been raped?’ begins by stating: ‘There are a lot of lies out there that can make it hard to know if you were raped.’ But the difficulty of knowing whether or not you are a victim of a crime suggests the crime itself is now vaguely and subjectively defined.

Sex and relationships classes at school, university consent classes, and now the #MeToo coverage teach young women that sex without consent is rape and that consent must be preferably verbal and enthusiastic and definitely freely given and ongoing. Sex that is not accompanied by explicitly sought and given consent is rape. Unwanted sex is rape. This means that after a sexual encounter, perhaps weeks later in conversation with friends, a woman can reach the conclusion that she did not give enthusiastic and ongoing consent and was therefore raped. By this logic, neither text messages declaring enjoyment nor photos of post-coital cuddles rule out the possibility of rape.

What’s missing from the definition of rape as unwanted sex is the perpetrator’s knowledge of the absence of consent. Women – and men – might have sex when they don’t want to for all kinds of reasons: to please a partner, to sustain a relationship, or because it’s easier than saying no. But they have only been raped if they make clear to their partner that they don’t want to have sex and their partner continues regardless.

It’s possible that some false rape accusations may not be malicious but may occur when a woman is convinced she has been raped. When, subsequently, the police knock on the door of the accused, he may quite genuinely have no inkling of having done anything wrong. A man who has committed a rape would hardly be likely to have his photo taken with his victim or continue to phone and text.

Wrongful rape convictions are terrible for men who face the very real threat of imprisonment. They are also bad for women, convinced they are victims and unable to move on with their lives. To stop this, police need the resources to investigate crimes fully and we need to challenge the ‘believe the victim’ culture. But we also need to tell women that drunk sex, regretted sex and unwanted sex are not rape. For a rapist to be convicted he must know that his victim did not consent or was unable to consent to sex. Consent classes and the #MeToo movement risk presenting women as passive, fragile creatures lacking all capacity to tell men to remove wayward hands or that they do not want to have sex with them. This can only lead to more rape trials and more lives ruined in the future.

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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Sunday, January 28, 2018



Presidents Club: 'The easy moral outrage of the online mob'

I agree with Brendan O'Neill, below, that there has been a recent explosion of intolerance for a type of sexual behaviour that has long been seen as fairly normal.  So he sees the much publicized activities at the President's Club dinner as undeserving of the condemnation they have received. 

He seems to have missed an important point nonetheless.  The waitresses hired for the occasion were ordered to wear fairly titillating garb -- short skirts, black high heels and corset-like belts etc.  So the men can hardly be blamed for taking that as a cue.  Nonetheless the behaviour was ungentlemanly and discourteous in some instances so I deplore that



Another week, another explosion of moral outrage.

Another moralistic hissy fit online, as the Twitterati, commentariat and other new-fangled guardians of decency once again fume against people for behaving badly or thinking differently.

This time the target of their long fingers and seemingly inexhaustible fury has been the Presidents Club.

For those Brits who live under a rock — lucky you — the Presidents Club is an annual get-together of rich and well-meaning men to raise money for charity.

It is in its 33rd year. It takes place in plush, posh venues like the Dorchester in Park Lane. And as befits a coming together of the filthy rich and exclusively blokeish it is not, shall we say, PC.

Yes, surprise, surprise, these moneyed men full of expensive plonk get a little debauched.

Worst of all, at least in the prudish eyes of the media class, young women are employed at these events to serve drinks and flatter the men's fat egos.

The Financial Times, taking a break from blaming Brexit for literally everything that has gone wrong in Britain over the past 18 months, sent some undercover reporters to the Presidents Club.

They fed back that the men sometimes say untoward things to the young women and even proposition them. Perhaps next week these reporters will stake out a forest in Canada and confirm to the world that, yes, bears really do defecate in woods.

The fallout from the FT's pearl-clutching exposure of the utterly unsurprising and completely legal behaviour at this charity-friendly event has been bonkers.

Twitter went into meltdown. Labour MP Jess Phillips talked about the Presidents Club as if it were a 21st-century form of slavery. Great Ormond Street Hospital gave back the money it got from the event.

And now, the Presidents Club has announced that it is folding.

The morally outraged, the weirdly prim and angry mob that lives online and loves nothing better than to rage against people or institutions that don't share it values, will be delighted.

Yet as a result of their rage, less money will be raised for charity. Well done, guys. What does money for kids' medical equipment matter in comparison with your sense of self-satisfaction at having toppled another thing that displeases you?

What comes next? Surely all the men who ever attended this event — yes, including you, David Walliams — must now be paraded through the streets so that we can hurl rotten tomatoes, or at least angry tweets, in their repulsive direction.

This destruction of a charity event by gangs of the easily offended tells us a depressing story about modern Britain.

It confirms how empowered online mobs are. Through pooling their individual anger into a mass conformist cry of 'NOT OK' — the 21st-century equivalent of crying 'blasphemy!' 500 years ago — they can extract apologies from politicians, shame celebs out of public life, and bring charity do's crashing down.

These often time-rich, well-connected people are chilling public life, making it clear to everyone that if we say or do anything they find offensive, they will hunt us down.

It also confirms the ascendancy of a stiff, middle-class moralism on sexual matters.

First we had well-to-do female journalists making a national scandal of the fact that some male politician once put his hand on their knee.

Now we have the well-educated ladies of the FT expressing horror that young, largely working-class women sometimes use their looks to make money.

But why should the cushioned, increasingly sex-fearing smart set get to define what is acceptable in public life? Believe it or not, there are people out there — many people — who don’t think come-ons are harassment or that hands on knees are on a spectrum with sexual assault.

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, the Presidents Club scandal shows that modern feminism is very often anti-women.

The way the media are talking about the working women who served booze and massaged egos at these events is nothing short of disgraceful.

These women have been infantilised, treated as poor, pathetic, brainwashed creatures in need of rescue by their more switched-on sisters.

Even as some of the women who worked at the Presidents Club say they didn't feel abused, still the saviour feminists insist they were.

In other words, these working women don't really know what’s in their best interests. They are overgrown children, to be chastised or improved by FT reporters, Guardian columnists, and Labour politicians.

SOURCE






Dear Feminists: If You Want a Real Man, Act Like a Woman

We are witnessing the emergence of a new conversation about sex. The devolution of the #MeToo movement and, more recently, the Babe article about “Grace” and Aziz Ansari, have highlighted a fatal flaw in the logic of feminism.

The original intent of the #MeToo movement — that rape, workplace harassment, sexual assault, etc. ought to be unacceptable in our country — has been superseded by the idea that any type of sexually-charged encounter that makes a woman feel bad is the same as rape. And, while many modern-day feminists (I have no idea what “wave” we’re on and I don’t actually care) vehemently defend this notion, others have begun to call foul, pointing out that this kind of thinking promotes the very type of victim mentality that feminism was intended to protect against.

Recently, I pointed out that this new victim mentality stems from the feminist lie that men and women are supposed to have the same attitude towards sex. So, even though what women really want from men is love, connection, intimacy, and protection, they have to act like they’re okay with having meaningless sex on the first date. Which is how women like “Grace” end up, of their own free will, naked in a man’s apartment and feeling terrible about it.

A recent article on Scary Mommy by popular blogger Samara (apparently she has only a first name) illustrates this idea perfectly (if unintentionally). The article is called “Sometimes I Want to Be Held By A Man, Naked, Without Having Sex – Is That Okay?” and it simultaneously makes the point that women need intimacy in their lives (which is true) and that they should be able to expect it from the random guys that they go out with one time (which is not).

See, intimacy is something that comes with time. It happens when two people get to know one another, feel comfortable with each other, and allow themselves to be vulnerable with one another. You can “get intimate” with someone you met an hour ago, but you can’t “have intimacy” with him.

“I dread the idea of having to make constant compromises. Relationships are hard, and if introducing a partner into my life is going to create drama and pain, I’d rather be alone,” Samara writes. Instead, she longs to find “intimacy” with the random people she dates. “I’m a highly sexual person,” she continues, “and I like kinky sex as much as the next wanton woman. Sometimes, though, I just want to lie next to someone who will hold me. This never happens.”

Of course it doesn’t. Samara’s weird sexual preferences aside, she — and many other women including, perhaps, “Grace” — have been duped by a nonsensical philosophy into believing that engaging in hook-up culture (as if they were men) will get them the intimacy they crave (because they are women).

“Until I have a boyfriend or a husband,” writes Samara, “I will not be entitled to lay next to a man, skin on skin, and simply be held.” Well . . . duh. Samara wants us to believe that this is a bad thing. That she ought to be able to expect a man she just met and took off her clothes with to assume that she doesn’t want sex. But the man is a man. Which is why Samara needs to keep her clothes on until she knows the man well enough to be intimate with him (in every sense of the word). Not because all men are rapists, but because — unless she changes her mind and says no — the only thing you can really get from being naked with a total stranger is meaningless sex. Intimacy comes with time — and effort.

If women want intimacy (and love, and respect, and protection) from men, they have to act like women. Don’t go up to his apartment and take off your clothes on a first date. Not because men are animals who can’t control their urges, but because, by guarding your virtue, you’re telling him that you want more than sex. Don’t have sex on a first date just because you worry he won’t stay interested in you if you don’t. If he doesn’t stay interested in you, he’s not the kind of guy you’ll be able to build intimacy with.

Look, if you want to have meaningless, no-strings-attached sex with some random guy (and that’s really all you want) go for it. But if, like Samara and “Grace,” you’re looking for intimacy and connection, you’re going to need to do things a little differently. In many cases, men have stopped being chivalrous because women have stopped being feminine. Want a real man? Act like a woman.

SOURCE






Where Swedish "tolerance" has led

The latest news from multicultural and oh-so tolerant Sweden are grim, as the country’s Prime Minister has said the government is ready to take desperate measures, including deploying the military on the streets to mitigate the gang-related crime wave that’s spreading like wildfire.

Following a massive influx of so-called refugees, mostly from North Africa and the Middle East (Muslim majority countries incidentally), parts of Sweden have become true no-go zones, where grenade attacks are nothing to write home about and migrant teens can be seen roaming the streets armed with AK-47 rifles.

And that’s not a joke either.  Last week, Sweden started distributing 4.7 million leaflets, warning the population about the probability of a war with…well, Russia, a manual of defense of sorts, covering threats such as “climate change”, cyberattacks and terrorism. But it definitely looks like the real threat is domestic.

This is a serious admission that something is very wrong in Sweden.

At the time, Sweden’s Prime Minister  Stefan Lofven said that the army may be deployed on the streets to end gang violence, as police is overwhelmed and powerless, thanks to the migrant crisis brought upon Sweden by its left-wing/globalist/no borders government. Lofven was quoted as saying:

“It’s not my first action to put in a military, but I’m prepared to do what it takes to ensure that the seriously organized crime goes away. But it is also obvious that there are social problems. Last year 300 shootings occurred, 40 people were killed. The new year has begun with new launches. We see criminals with total lack of respect for human life, it’s a terrible development I’m determined to turn around”

The Swedish government just talked about the possibility of putting the army on the streets to deal with the no-go zone criminal gangs. We might be heading for some kind of "civil war" in Sweden.

The leaders for all 3 biggest political parties in Sweden have today talked about war in parliament.  Specifically about a war with the criminal gangs from the no go zones.

These comments arrive in the aftermath of a wave of gang related murders, including the shooting from last week in Malmo, when a 21 year old male was shot in the head; also last week, a 16 year old was found shot near a bus stop and died in the hospital. On January 3rd another 22 year old male was shot in a district of Malmo, a city plagued by gangs composed of so-called refugees/asylum seekers, whom the Sweden’s politically correct mainstream media always describe as Swedish nationals.

“In Malmö, where a fifth of the 340,000 inhabitants are under 18, children as young as 14 roam the streets with Kalashnikov assault rifles and bulletproof vests. The average age of gang members is 22, the vast majority of them hailing from migrant families.

The crime wave affecting Sweden is so severe, the police gave up investigating rape cases, due to the huge backlog of gang-related crime/murders. Basically, the cops are forced to choose between the 2 evils. Last Wednesday, a police station in Rosengard (a district of Malmo) was attacked with a hand-grenade and police was put on high-alert, yet no arrests were made:

There have been 34 grenade attacks in Sweden in 2016 and “only” 10 in 20017.

Back in April 2017, three female cops were beaten and humiliated while trying to take into custody a violent “refugee”:

During the 2013 riots, many police stations in Stockholm were targeted by violent Muslim refugees who attacked cops and burned down a police station:

The peaceful “migrants” even attacked a “60 Minutes” crew that was filming a segment on…well, migrants. This happened in 2016:

According to a police report from last year, powerful weaponry (read anti-tank missiles) was found in a 36 year old man’s basement, who is suspected of smuggling guns (automatic weapons, grenades) to Sweden’s no-go areas.

Seems like handgrenades is not enough for them anymore. These people are literally storing heavy duty military weaponry in their homes in Sweden.  Are they preparing for war?

It looks like Sweden’s feminist/ultra-liberal/pro open borders government was doing a magnificent job by allowing unvetted immigration from third world countries. Sweden saw 306 shootings last year, which resulted in 41 deaths. Meanwhile, Swedish officials and their lapdog mainstream media are blaming Islamic terrorism on their own citizens, i.e. white power is the problem.

SOURCE





Can You Trust American Red Cross with Donations?

Because of their history of antisemitism, I never give to the Red Cross

The past year, with major hurricanes in Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas, has once again cast light on the activities of the American Red Cross. As in the past, there are questions one needs to know about the Red Cross that are hard to answer. Is the organization doing a good job? How could the Red Cross do a better job? Should donors feel confident that their gifts are being used effectively?

This year, the Red Cross has been subject to a barrage of criticism. But that criticism ultimately springs from one source: a series of articles that ProPublica has been writing on the Red Cross’s effectiveness, sometimes in collaboration with National Public Radio. I wrote about these articles at Philanthropy Daily three years ago. But ProPublica has continued their work and it is long past time for an update.

For what it’s worth, I should note that ProPublica is a left-wing outfit. In fact, Justin Elliott, who is the lead reporter on Red Cross stories does other things: his most recent piece, about getting the logs for people who met with Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney, manages to mention two groups the left can’t stand—Opus Dei and the Koch brothers—in the same headline.

But I don’t know what the difference is between the “left-wing” or the “right-wing” position on the Red Cross. Surely everyone who gives to that organization, regardless of their politics, wants their donations to be used effectively and that their money to help victims, not pay high salaries for bureaucrats in Red Cross headquarters or expensive public relations campaigns.

In addition, the American Red Cross is not a completely private organization. It is quasi-governmental. I think the term of art is that the group is “a congressionally chartered instrumentality of the United States.” I’m willing to accept that the nonprofit is 85-90 percent private. But because it is quasi-governmental, and the only nonprofit that has a place at the table in national disaster planning, it deserves as much scrutiny as any other government agency.

ProPublica has done many stories on the Red Cross since 2014. Their longest one, by Justin Elliott and NPR reporter Laura Sullivan, was a 2015 piece about the Red Cross’s efforts rebuilding Haiti after a 2010 earthquake.

They found that the Red Cross had collected hundreds of millions for the earthquake—and used the money to build six homes.

Parachuting into Haiti, the American Red Cross had many problems. They didn’t have enough workers fluent in French or Creole. Haiti has an archaic system of land registration that makes it hard to know who owns a particular piece of property.

But the Red Cross claimed that it helped 4.5 million people—in a nation that has a population of ten million. Jean-Max Belleville, prime minister at the time of the earthquake, said that it was “not possible” that the Red Cross had helped so many Haitians.

Many Red Cross projects backfired.

One home-building effort in the town of Campeche resulted in no homes built and many complaints from Haitians about the high salaries paid expatriates. Another $30 million home-building project, in collaboration with the U.S. Agency for International Development, failed, in part because the groups couldn’t buy land.

Finally, the Red Cross said it would take nine percent for overhead and spend 91 percent of every donor dollar on Haiti. But much of the money went to other nonprofits, such as the International Federation of the Red Cross, and these nonprofits took their own overhead bite. Elliott and Sullivan calculate that only 60 percent of donor dollars actually went to Haitian projects.

Most recently, Elliott, Jessica Huseman, and Decca Muldowney say that emergency management officials in some Texas counties have complained about the Red Cross’s sluggish response to Hurricane Harvey. In DeWitt County, Emergency Management Coordinator Cyndi Smith emailed a Red Cross official on September 9, saying “Red Cross was not there as they were suppose(d) to be with the shelter.”

Officials in other small counties said that the Red Cross’s response was late and sluggish. A contractor who was supposed to direct people to the nearest available shelter didn’t do a good job because of technical glitches. Finally, a Red Cross program where they were supposed to give $400 to every disaster victim via a website was delayed for some time because of various problems, while another website to accept donations functioned flawlessly.

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin told ProPublica that he ran into American Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern in a parking lot several days after the hurricane and said he had gotten many complaints about the Red Cross’s performance. He said that McGovern told him, “Do you know how much we raised with Katrina? $2 billion. We won’t even raise hundreds of millions here.”

Martin responded, “Really, Gail? That’s your response to me?”

The Red Cross issued a lengthy response that said it had 2,100 Red Cross employees on the ground in the Houston area, and had distributed 3.7 million meals. It said that it “had authorized” distribution of $148 million via the $400 payments, but did not say that the funds had been distributed. It said the fluctuating opening and closing of shelters made it hard for its contractor to steer people to the nearest shelter.

Finally, the Red Cross said it understood Councilman Martin’s frustration, but they did not dispute what Gail McGovern said.

In the Weekly Standard, Grant Wishard offers a defense of the Red Cross. He notes that the organization is the only one mandated to “prepare for and respond to disasters everywhere” and that it is frequently the framework by which smaller, nimbler organizations can give relief. He quotes Indiana University philanthropy professor Leslie Lenkowsky, who headed the Corporation for National and Community Service during the George W. Bush Administration, as saying “the Red Cross will create the framework which those other groups of first responders are working in.” Lenkowsky adds that “if we didn’t have an organization like the Red Cross we’d have to invent it.”

Of course, the American Red Cross will always be the largest and most important charity dealing with disasters. But it shouldn’t be the only one. A staff-written piece ProPublica produced in 2015 about how to give to groups that help in disasters offers sensible suggestions: do your research. Give locally. If you are so inclined, give cash to groups like GiveDirectly.

The Red Cross can do better. One way it can improve is if there was more of a competition for donor dollars for disaster relief.

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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Friday, January 26, 2018



Are We Free to Discuss America's Real Problems?
   
By Amy Wax, University of Pennsylvania Law School

There is a lot of abstract talk these days on American college campuses about free speech and the values of free inquiry, with plenty of lip service being paid to expansive notions of free expression and the marketplace of ideas. What I’ve learned through my recent experience of writing a controversial op-ed is that most of this talk is not worth much. It is only when people are confronted with speech they don’t like that we see whether these abstractions are real to them.

The op-ed, which I co-authored with Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego Law School, appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on August 9 under the title, “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.” It began by listing some of the ills afflicting American society:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

We then discussed the “cultural script” — a list of behavioral norms — that was almost universally endorsed between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These norms defined a concept of adult responsibility that was, we wrote, “a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.” The fact that the “bourgeois culture” these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s, we argued, largely explains today’s social pathologies — and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.

In what became perhaps the most controversial passage, we pointed out that cultures are not equal in terms of preparing people to be productive citizens in a modern technological society, and we gave some examples of cultures less suited to achieve this:

The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.

The reactions to this piece raise the question of how unorthodox opinions should be dealt with in academia — and in American society at large.

It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate — to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life — something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.

What those of us in academia should certainly not do is engage in unreasoned speech: hurling slurs and epithets, name-calling, vilification, and mindless labeling. Likewise we should not reject the views of others without providing reasoned arguments. Yet these once common standards of practice have been violated repeatedly at my own and at other academic institutions in recent years — and we increasingly see this trend in society as well.

One might respond, of course, that unreasoned slurs and outright condemnations are also speech and must be defended. My recent experience has caused me to rethink this position. In debating others, we should have higher standards. Of course one has the right to hurl labels like “racist,” “sexist,” and “xenophobic” without good reason — but that doesn’t make it the right thing to do. Hurling such labels doesn’t enlighten, inform, edify, or educate. Indeed, it undermines these goals by discouraging or stifling dissent.

So what happened after our op-ed was published last August? A raft of letters, statements, and petitions from students and professors at my university and elsewhere condemned the piece as racist, white supremacist, hate speech, heteropatriarchial, xenophobic, etc. There were demands that I be removed from the classroom and from academic committees. None of these demands even purported to address our arguments in any serious or systematic way.

A response published in the Daily Pennsylvanian, our school newspaper, and signed by five of my Penn Law School colleagues, charged us with the sin of praising the 1950s — a decade when racial discrimination was openly practiced and opportunities for women were limited. I do not agree with the contention that because a past era is marked by benighted attitudes and practices — attitudes and practices we had acknowledged in our op-ed! — it has nothing to teach us. But at least this response attempted to make an argument.

Not so an open letter published in the Daily Pennsylvanian and signed by 33 of my colleagues. This letter quoted random passages from the op-ed and from a subsequent interview I gave to the school newspaper, condemned both, and categorically rejected all of my views. It then invited students, in effect, to monitor me and to report any “stereotyping and bias” they might experience or perceive. This letter contained no argument, no substance, no reasoning, no explanation whatsoever as to how our op-ed was in error.

We hear a lot of talk about role models — people to be emulated, who set a positive example for students and others. In my view, the 33 professors who signed this letter are anti-role models. To students and citizens alike I say: don’t emulate them in condemning people for their views without providing a reasoned argument. Reject their example. Not only are they failing to teach you the practice of civil discourse — the sine qua non of liberal education and of democracy — they are sending the message that civil discourse is unnecessary. As Jonathan Haidt of NYU wrote on September 2 on his website Heterodox Academy: “Every open letter you sign to condemn a colleague for his or her words brings us closer to a world in which academic disagreements are resolved by social force and political power, not by argumentation and persuasion.”

It is gratifying to note that the reader comments on the open letter were overwhelmingly critical. The letter has “no counterevidence,” one reader wrote, “no rebuttal to [Wax’s] arguments, just an assertion that she’s wrong… . This is embarrassing.” Another wrote: “This letter is an exercise in self-righteous virtue-signaling that utterly fails to deal with the argument so cogently presented by Wax and Alexander… . Note to parents, if you want your daughter or son to learn to address an argument, do not send them to Penn Law.”

Shortly after the op-ed appeared, I ran into a colleague I hadn’t seen for a while and asked how his summer was going. He said he’d had a terrible summer, and in saying it he looked so serious I thought someone had died. He then explained that the reason his summer had been ruined was my op-ed, and he accused me of attacking and causing damage to the university, the students, and the faculty. One of my left-leaning friends at Yale Law School found this story funny — who would have guessed an op-ed could ruin someone’s summer? But beyond the absurdity, note the choice of words: “attack” and “damage” are words one uses with one’s enemies, not colleagues or fellow citizens. At the very least, they are not words that encourage the expression of unpopular ideas. They reflect a spirit hostile to such ideas — indeed, a spirit that might seek to punish the expression of such ideas.

I had a similar conversation with a deputy dean. She had been unable to sign the open letter because of her official position, but she defended it as having been necessary. It needed to be written to get my attention, she told me, so that I would rethink what I had written and understand the hurt I had inflicted and the damage I had done, so that I wouldn’t do it again. The message was clear: cease the heresy.

Only half of my colleagues in the law school signed the open letter. One who didn’t sent me a thoughtful and lawyerly email explaining how and why she disagreed with particular points in the op-ed. We had an amicable email exchange, from which I learned a lot — some of her points stick with me — and we remain cordial colleagues. That is how things should work.

Of the 33 who signed the letter, only one came to talk to me about it — and I am grateful for that. About three minutes into our conversation, he admitted that he didn’t categorically reject everything in the op-ed. Bourgeois values aren’t really so bad, he conceded, nor are all cultures equally worthy. Given that those were the main points of the op-ed, I asked him why he had signed the letter. His answer was that he didn’t like my saying, in my interview with the Daily Pennsylvanian, that the tendency of global migrants to flock to white European countries indicates the superiority of some cultures. This struck him as “code,” he said, for Nazism.

Well, let me state for the record that I don’t endorse Nazism!

Furthermore, the charge that a statement is “code” for something else, or a “dog whistle” of some kind — we frequently hear this charge leveled, even against people who are stating demonstrable facts — is unanswerable. It is like accusing a speaker of causing emotional injury or feelings of marginalization. Using this kind of language, which students have learned to do all too well, is intended to bring discussion and debate to a stop — to silence speech deemed unacceptable.

As Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, we can make words mean whatever we want them to mean. And who decides what is code for something else or what qualifies as a dog whistle? Those in power, of course — which in academia means the Left.

My 33 colleagues might have believed they were protecting students from being injured by harmful opinions, but they were doing those students no favors. Students need the opposite of protection from diverse arguments and points of view. They need exposure to them. This exposure will teach them how to think. As John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

I have received more than 1,000 emails from around the country in the months since the op-ed was published — mostly supportive, some critical, and for the most part thoughtful and respectful. Many expressed the thought, “You said what we are thinking but are afraid to say” — a sad commentary on the state of civil discourse in our society. Many urged me not to back down, cower, or apologize. And I agree with them that dissenters apologize far too often.

Democracy thrives on talk and debate, and it is not for the faint of heart. I read things every day in the media and hear things every day at my job that I find exasperating and insulting, including falsehoods and half-truths about people who are my friends. Offense and upset go with the territory; they are part and parcel of an open society. We should be teaching our young people to get used to these things, but instead we are teaching them the opposite.

Disliking, avoiding, and shunning people who don’t share our politics is not good for our country. We live together, and we need to solve our problems together. It is also always possible that people we disagree with have something to offer, something to contribute, something to teach us. We ignore this at our peril. As Heather Mac Donald wrote in National Review on August 29: “What if the progressive analysis of inequality is wrong … and a cultural analysis is closest to the truth? If confronting the need to change behavior is punishable ‘hate speech,’ then it is hard to see how the country can resolve its social problems.” In other words, we are at risk of being led astray by received opinion.

The American way is to conduct free and open debate in a civil manner. We should return to doing that on our college campuses and in our society at large.

SOURCE







Feminism’s clay feet exposed on British television

By Bettina Arndt

British journalist Douglas Murray said he'd never seen a television interview more catastrophic for the interviewer. Others are naming TV journalist Cathy Newman's grilling of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson as a pivotal moment exposing modern feminism's clay feet. Within three days of the 30 minute Channel 4 interview being posted on YouTube it had attracted over 2 million viewers and Newman's performance was greeted by widespread hilarity on the twittersphere.

Channel 4 now seems to have woke up to the self-inflicted damage the interview is doing to one of the station's stars and is in damage control with Newman playing the victim role claiming she's receiving "vicious misogynistic abuse." Station management is employing extra security to deal with what they claim are threats to Newman's safety. Whilst there is no evidence the flood of online criticism of Newman constitutes any threat, Peterson has responded by telling his supporters to constrain their comments.

Ironically the major gotcha moment in the interview was all about freedom of speech. Newman decided to grill Peterson about the reason the Canadian psychology professor had first attracted international attention – namely his refusal to use manufactured gender pronouns now mandated under law in his country. After a series of ill-informed, aggressive attacks failed spectacularly to disconcert her calm, reasoned guest, Newman asked Peterson, "why should your right to freedom of speech trump a trans person's right not to be offended?"

The good professor responded: "Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive. I mean, look at the conversation we're having right now. You're certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth. Why should you have the right to do that?" he said, acknowledging her attacks had made him rather uncomfortable but that was fine. "You're doing what you should do, which is digging a bit to see what the hell is going on…But you're exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me, and that's fine. More power to you, as far as I'm concerned."

His answer left Newman totally floundering. The good-natured Peterson smiled sweetly and said: "Ha, gotcha!"

But it was on the classic feminist issues that Newman was exposed as a vapid ideologue incapable of defending her cherished beliefs. Peterson's rational, fact-based responses to questions about women's achievements in the workplace went totally over her head. Newman responded to evidence with anecdotes, claimed he'd made statements he hadn't. Their discussion on the gender wag gap started like this:

Peterson: Multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicate that it doesn't exist

Newman: But that's just not true, is it. That nine per cent pay gap, that's a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women. That exists.

P: Yeah but there's multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender but it's not the only reason. If you're a social scientist worth your salt you never do a uni-variant analysis. You say, well, women in aggregate are paid less than men, then we break it down by age, occupation, interest, personality.

N: But you're saying basically it doesn't matter if women aren't getting to the top, because that's skewing that gender pay gap, isn't it. You're saying that's just a fact of life.

P: No, I'm not saying it doesn't matter. I'm saying there are multiple reasons for it that aren't being taken into account.

N: But why should women put up with those reasons? Why should women be content not to get to the top?

P: I'm not saying that they should put up with it, I'm saying that the claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong, and it is wrong, there's no doubt about that. The multi-variant analyses have been done." And so went on, with Newman incessantly straw-manning, niggling, attacking and wilfully refusing to listen to Peterson's responses.

Many, like British sociologist Nicholas A Christakis, found themselves in awe of Peterson's cheerful, reasoned responses. "This man Jordan Peterson is preternaturally calm and composed in the face of a hostile interviewer who also had simply not thought adequately about her ideas and approach. Facts and reason are powerful allies," he tweeted.

But unfamiliar territory for feminists who are rarely confronted with this type of evidence, particularly in public. UK conservative politician Paul Weston points out that what's so extraordinary about the Peterson interview is that it managed to refute the ideological claptrap which holds sway throughout much of the mainstream media. As he says in a YouTube video posted this week, the anointed liberal elite which controls the media knows it doesn't represent popular opinion but "works tirelessly to make damn sure no one's allowed anywhere near the media bubble to propose a learned valid legitimate opinion."

Yet Peterson slipped through and Newton and her team were shown up for not doing their homework to discover why it is that this formidable man attracts literally millions of followers online. Journalist Tim Lott, writing last year in the Spectator UK, said that after listening to hours of Peterson's videos, he concludes the man is "one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years." As Newman discovered to her peril.

SOURCE





Progressive Critics of Trump’s HHS Are Sliming Christians for Enforcing the Law

Efforts to undo the Obama administration’s unconstitutional subversion of Congress are welcome and long overdue.

This morning, Politico made me laugh, opening an article about the Trump administration’s department of Health and Human Services with this incredibly misleading paragraph:

"A small cadre of politically prominent evangelicals inside the Department of Health and Human Services have spent months quietly planning how to weaken federal protections for abortion and transgender care — a strategy that’s taking shape in a series of policy moves that took even their own staff by surprise"

The reality is that the Trump HHS has issued a notice of a proposed rule (essentially, a draft regulation for public review and comment) that will empower the agency to robustly enforce multiple statutes passed by Congress and signed by presidents from both parties — statutes that the Obama administration had unlawfully and unilaterally revised or undermined.

In other words, the Trump administration intends to enforce the law as written, creating a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the civil-rights office of HHS.

The only scandal here is the enduring (mainly progressive) idea that the executive branch can or should possess the authority to ignore or change laws passed by Congress.

The religion of the Trump officials is irrelevant. Only their actions matter.

The background is simple. For many, many years Congress has included within various statutes a series of conscience protections for health-care providers who work at federally funded health-care facilities. These conscience protections mainly prohibit doctors and nurses from being forced to participate in abortions, sterilizations, and assisted suicides. They’re found in the so-called Church Amendments, the Coates–Snow Amendment, the Weldon Amendment, the Affordable Care Act, and multiple other pieces of the United States Code. They have been passed by Democrat- and Republican-controlled Congresses, and signed by Democratic and Republican presidents.

It would be difficult for the American people to speak more clearly through their elected representatives. In a nation that still functioned according to its constitutional design, the executive branch would be obligated to robustly enforce these laws. Instead, ideological bureaucrats have all too often taken the view that enforcement is optional. Sometimes these same bureaucrats will take it upon themselves to functionally rewrite the statutes.

The Obama HHS, for example, both dragged its feet on enforcement and passed regulations that actually undermined the intent of the law as written by Congress. In fact, it issued a rule that quite literally changed a statute. Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability” in federally funded health programs, HHS health programs, and “Health Insurance Marketplaces.”

In its regulations, however, Obama’s HHS unilaterally expanded the nondiscrimination categories to include “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy.” Thus, the Obama administration on its own created a rule that would require, for example, surgeons to amputate healthy organs as part of a gender “transition.”

It undermined statutory conscience protections for Christian doctors under the guise of preventing “discrimination” against women seeking an abortion. It created a minefield of potential conflicts between its regulation and multiple federal statutes.

On December 31, 2016, a federal judge enjoined enforcement of the Obama administration’s rule on the basis that it “contradict[ed] existing law” and “likely violate[d] the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

As of today this injunction is still in force. If anyone actually “weakened” Obama-era “protections for abortion and transgender care,” it was a federal judge interpreting federal statutes, not the “prominent evangelicals” at Trump’s HHS.

Oddly enough, you can read the entire Politico article and not find a single reference to this court opinion. Nor do you find any serious discussion of HHS’s statutory obligation to protect rights of conscience regarding abortion, sterilization, and assisted suicide. Instead, you’ll find a lengthy discussion of the religious beliefs and backgrounds of various Trump administration HHS officials. You’ll find critics’ claims that HHS is “blurring the lines between church and state.”

The Obama administration perfected this art, justifying a series of unilateral actions with the claim that it was “forced to act” because Congress was “broken.” Examples are legion. Congress didn’t pass the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, so the Obama administration re-interpreted existing federal nondiscrimination statutes to include prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Congress didn’t rewrite the nation’s drug laws, so the Obama administration issued a series of memoranda that dramatically slowed down enforcement of statutes prohibiting the cultivation, sale, and use of marijuana.

Congress didn’t alter the due-process rights of college students, so the Obama administration issued a “letter” that transformed the legal landscape on campuses from coast to coast.

Congress didn’t reform the nation’s immigration laws, so the Obama administration implemented DAPA and DACA, two programs that together potentially impacted millions of illegal immigrants. In fact, this weekend’s government shutdown was a result of Obama’s unlawful DACA program.

The Trump administration rightly terminated the program, which didn’t even pretend to go through Congress or any sort of rulemaking process. If Trump let such a flagrant violation of the Constitution stand, there would be no shutdown. It’s that simple.

According to the modern progressive political project, any branch of government can make law. Yes, Congress can pass statutes, but Congress is controlled by Republicans, so it’s “broken.”

If Congress doesn’t pass a statute, then the president can simply re-interpret existing laws or exercise “prosecutorial discretion” to create entirely new legal protections or government programs.

If a later GOP president attempts to restore actual statutory standards, then he’s — to borrow Politico’s phrase — “weakening federal protections” for favored identity groups. Then, of course, the courts exist as a backstop, even to the point of telling President Trump that one president’s memorandum binds the presidencies that follow — if, that is, the judge in his infinite wisdom believes that the next president is “arbitrary” or “capricious.”

The subversion of the fundamental constitutional structure of our government is an extraordinarily consequential matter — far more consequential than the fact that there are now a bunch of icky Christians in HHS who are — gasp — enforcing a series of federal statutes passed by both parties.

Read the rule proposed by Trump’s HHS. It is fundamentally and essentially a recitation of the department’s clear statutory mandate to protect rights of conscience.

Progressives who have a problem with these protections need to take their case to Congress, not slime Christians for enforcing the law.

SOURCE





California dreaming again

But not in a good way.  In CA everything is bad for you -- including both potatoes and coffee

A California state judge is poised to declare coffee cancerous in the coming months.

A law passed in the state in 1986 requires business and public places to post warning signs if anything on the premises is found to be potentially harmful.

Research findings on coffee range from fully in favor of its preventative effects to utterly opposed to it.

The lawsuit over the beverage has similarly split Californians, some of whom say the warning is part of the state’s health-conscious transparency, while others say the signs and labels are so ubiquitous that they have lost their meaning.

California passed proposition 65, the Safe Drinking water and Toxic Enforcement Act, in 1986 after forceful campaigning by citizens, including Jane Fonda.

Under the measure, the state has to publish and update (at least once a year) a list of chemicals that have been found to cause cancer, birth defects or to harm reproductive health.

In the last 30 years, that list has grown to a whopping 900 chemicals, including acrylamide.

Acrylamide is a byproduct of some foods when they are cooked by methods that require very high temperatures, such as frying, roasting or baking, according to the US Food and Drug Administration.

Research has found particularly high levels of acrylamide in fried potato products, including French fries and potato chips.

The chemical also forms when coffee beans are roasted, leading the American Cancer Society to advise people to reduce their intakes of coffee, as well as grains and potato products.

Acrylamide contributed to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) classification of coffee as a carcinogen more than 25 years ago.

In 2016, however, the international agency eased up its warnings against the drink, instead advising that all ‘very hot’ drinks are carcinogenic.

Now, a court rather than a health organization is set to determine coffee's risks.

'The fact that a court is trying to establish causality between coffee and a disease is a tough thing to do,' says Dr Robert Shmerling, who has reviewed literature about coffee in his writing for Harvard University.

He says that some studies that have found cancer risks to coffee are later discredited.

'If you look at enough possibilities, you might find one even if there's not truth to it because of the way that statistics are set up...to find an 95 percent chance that something won't happen by chance,' Dr Shmerling says. 

In some studies on cancer and coffee 'this is that five percent,' chance of coincidence, he says

But that hasn’t stopped the Council for Education and Research on Toxins (CERT) from bringing its case against dozens of coffee companies, including Starbucks and Keurig, neither of which replied to requests for comment.

The group is represented by Long Beach attorney Raphael Metzger and gained national attention in 2011 for suing McDonald’s and Burger King over claims that their French fries have dangerous levels of the same chemical, acrylamide.

Acylamide turns into a compound that can damage and cause mutations in DNA, raising risks for cancers in animal studies, according to the National Cancer Institute.

However, ‘a large number of epidemiological studies…in humans have found no consistent evidence that dietary acrylamide exposure is associated with any type of cancer,’ the institute’s site says.

That hasn’t stopped warnings to become nearly ubiquitous in California, to the chagrin of some residents, like Twitter user Jake NotTapper, who said ‘everything is known to the State of CA to cause cancer: mattresses, coffee, chemo and other cancer drugs (yes, really).’

New standards for Proposition 65 warnings will come into effect in August and will require companies to attach labels specific to their particular products and whatever substance in them is linked to  cancer.

Coffee may be included, depending on the outcome of the current lawsuit, but everything from parking garages to raw wood will now have to come with explanation of their carcinogens.

It is unclear how effective these warnings are at communicating risks, let alone changing behavior.

In 2014, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard University conducted a broad review of research on the effectiveness of disclosures on psychology, and concluded flatly that 'disclosure requirements appear to have been less effective in changing recipient behavior than their proponents seem to assume.'

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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