Tim Allen slams 'alarming' political correctness, saying comedians shouldn't have to censor their material for the 'thought police'

Actor and comedian Tim Allen has criticized political correctness, saying the 'thought police' holds him back during his routines.

The Last Man Standing star, 66, who has previously faced a backlash for advocating using the N-word in his standup, said it was 'alarming' that comedians have to censor their material so as not to offend their audiences.

He told ABC's The View: 'What I've got to do sometimes is explain, which I hate, in big arenas, and this is a thought police thing and I do not like it.

'When I use these words, this is my intent behind those words.'

The Toy Story actor added: 'As long as you understand my intent, I still get people: "Well, just don't say it", and I said, "I'm not going to do that".'

Co-host Joy Behar, who is also a comedian whose career started at a similar time to Allen, said that PC culture makes it 'really hard' for comedians, and that their jokes are often taken out of context and posted on social media.

She said: 'I think my act, if I ever brought that old act back, I'd be driven out of town.'

Later in their conversation, Allen indicated that political correctness was 'an alarming thing for comedians.'

Several standups have fallen victim to the trend of cancel culture, which sees them blacklisted or deplatformed for controversial remarks.

Kevin Hart stepped down from hosting the Oscars after previous jokes which were deemed homophobic were unearthed.

While Allen's fellow Republican comedian Roseanne Barr had her eponymous sitcom cancelled after facing a backlash for a tweet which was deemed racist.

Later on in the interview, Allen, who has previously voiced his support for President Trump, said a part of his act where his family mocks Democrats gets a different reception in different parts of the country.

In 2013, Allen, who spent two years in federal prison for drug trafficking in 1978, faced condemnation after saying in an interview that he uses the N-word in his standup routine and maintaining that white people should not be afraid of saying it - so long as it's not being used as a racist slur.

He used the word several times in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times and said he strongly disliked the phrase 'the N-word' - which is often used in its place.

'If I have no intent, if I show no intent, if I clearly am not a racist, then how can 'n*****' be bad coming out of my mouth?'

He also expressed support for Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. He said the billionaire businessman 'might be able to do the stuff that really needs fixing'.

In an interview last year with Indiewire, Allen said it was fun to mock liberals. He said: 'Liberals have a very small window of sense of humor about themselves, so I love poking at it.

'If you don't agree with them, if you don’t agree with that position, then you hate women, and you hate gay people, and you hate pro-choice people, whatever.'

SOURCE 






The Victims of Race-Focused Liberals Are Blacks

Walter E. Williams

Former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said that racism in America is “foundational” and that people of color were under “mortal threat” from the “white supremacist in the White House.” Pete Buttigieg chimed in to explain that “systemic racism” will “be with us” no matter who is in the White House. Sen. Cory Booker called for “attacking systemic racism” in the “racially biased” criminal justice system.

Let’s follow up by examining Booker’s concern about a “racially biased” criminal justice system. To do that, we can turn to a recent article by Heather Mac Donald, who is a senior fellow at the New York-based Manhattan Institute. She is a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author.

Her most recent article, “A Platform of Urban Decline,” which appeared in Manhattan Institute’s publication Eye On The News, addresses race and crime. She reveals government statistics you’ve never read before.

According to leftist rhetoric, whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks. Mac Donald says that may have once been true, but it is no longer so today. To make her case, she uses the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics 2018 survey of criminal victimization.

Mac Donald writes:

According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent.

That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.

There are other stark figures not talked about often. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting for 2018, of the homicide victims for whom race was known, 53.3% were black, 43.8% were white, and 2.8% were of other races. In cases where the race of the offender was known, 54.9% were black, 42.4% were white, and 2.7% were of other races.

White and black liberals, who claim that blacks face a “mortal threat” from the “white supremacist in the White House” are perpetuating a cruel hoax. The primary victims of that hoax are black people. We face the difficult, and sometimes embarrassing, task of confronting reality.

Mac Donald says that Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day speech in Chicago would be seen today as an “unforgivable outburst of white supremacy.” Here’s what Obama told his predominantly black audience in a South Side church: “If we are honest with ourselves,” too many fathers are “missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.”

Then-Sen. Obama went on to say, “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”

White liberals deem that any speaker’s references to personal responsibility brands the speaker as bigoted. Black people cannot afford to buy into the white liberal agenda. White liberals don’t pay the same price. They don’t live in neighborhoods where their children can get shot simply sitting on their porches. White liberals don’t go to bed with the sounds of gunshots. White liberals don’t live in neighborhoods that have become economic wastelands. Their children don’t attend violent schools where they have to enter through metal detectors.

White liberals help the Democratic Party maintain political control over cities, where many black residents live in despair, such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago.

Black people cannot afford to remain fodder for the liberal agenda. With that in mind, we should not be a one-party people in a two-party system.

SOURCE 






We want freedom, not freebies

UK political parties want to give us 'free' stuff while undermining our fundamental rights.

The main UK political parties are competing with one another on how many ‘free’ (taxpayer-funded) things they will provide to the public if they win a majority in next month’s General Election. Free broadband, free university tuition, free childcare, and, no doubt, free cheese, too. Whether any of these ‘promises’ will actually be delivered remains to be seen. However, what is striking is the main parties’ deafening silence regarding freedom itself.

Over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen a significant erosion of our fundamental rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. Yet few political parties seem to consider this erosion of freedom a problem. This is not surprising, as both main parties have long sought to drastically expand the scope and power of the state at the expense of individual liberty. In my opinion, a society that promises ‘freebies’ without defending our fundamental rights is one that has lost its way.

In recent years, it has become unfashionable to discuss civil liberties in the public domain. When the issue is raised, it is quickly met with concerns about terrorism and the threat of the far right. Yet there is no evidence to show that the curtailment of civil liberties, in and of itself, counters terrorism or militates against the rise of far-right extremism.

In fact, all the curtailment of our civil liberties achieves is the further erosion of the freedom of everyone. It does very little to tackle the root causes of threats and problems. In the case of neo-Nazis and Islamist extremists, for example, online censorship actually makes the problems worse. It pushes prejudiced views underground, where they persist and develop, unchallenged, in echo chambers. Censorship is the equivalent of a doctor attempting to treat the symptoms while leaving the underlying health condition unaddressed. Far-right and Islamist extremism are complex problems that require equally multifaceted solutions. Censorship has not meaningfully tackled either.

Take the police’s new crusade against hate crime. Never mind that ‘hate’ is a poorly defined and entirely subjective concept. What is more disturbing is how this crusade has been pursued. A whole host of people have been accused of committing a ‘hate crime’, such as the Christian preacher arrested for calling Islam an ‘aberration’, or the man investigated for retweeting a transgender limerick. These cases may be extreme, but they are also the logical result of giving the state the power to arrest people on the grounds that they have expressed hatred. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police’s £2million Online Hate Crime Hub has investigated 1,612 cases (and facilitated six convictions) in just two years.

We used to be told that ‘sticks and stones can break your bones, but words will never hurt you’. Now it seems words do hurt you. We are increasingly being told that disagreeable speech is akin to violence. This contention is absurd and dangerous. Offence is taken, not given. Freedom of speech is our most powerful tool for advocating for change and raising awareness of wrongdoing. We must end this baseless moral panic over hate speech and encourage resilience, passionate debate and the free exchange of ideas.

Both the Tories and Labour disagree with this, it seems. The Tory government’s Online Harms White Paper was published for consultation earlier this year. It wants to tackle ‘online content… that harms individual users…or threatens our way of life in the UK’. The definition of ‘harm’ is so vague and ambiguous that one can only imagine the chilling effect it would have if it actually becomes law. I consider state regulation of the online world to be a bigger threat to ‘our way of life’ than, er, Pornhub.

The government has made little secret of its intention to expand state powers. The Investigatory Powers Act (aka the Snoopers’ Charter) increased drastically the powers of the intelligence services. According to Liberty, ‘The Snoopers’ Charter allows the state to hack computers, phones and tablets on an industrial scale, and collect the content of people’s digital communications. It also allows the creation and linking of huge “bulk personal datasets”.’ Liberty added: ‘The government failed to provide evidence that this was “necessary to prevent or detect crime”.’ Article 19, a freedom-of-expression campaign group, concluded that the Snoopers’ Charter ‘offers a template for authoritarian regimes and seriously [undermines] the rights of its citizens to privacy and freedom of expression’. The Chinese Communist Party even pointed to the Snoopers’ Charter as a defence of its own surveillance tactics.

Labour is no better. Its proposal to introduce a ‘free’, state-controlled internet service will only bolster our existing Big Brother-style surveillance state. Labour has even announced that it plans to make misogyny a hate crime.

Defenders of proposals to increase the surveillance and regulation of our everyday lives will often say that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. But many good people do have something to hide, such as whistleblowers or people trying to discover what powerful institutions do not want them to know. More importantly, the UK government, especially under its Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, has wrongfully investigated numerous individuals on the basis of what they were reading online. People, that is, with nothing to hide but plenty to fear.

I am sympathetic to plans for the state to provide its citizens with basic necessities. But without promising to protect our fundamental rights, such ‘freebies’ threaten to be part and parcel of the broader assault on liberty.

SOURCE 





PIERS MORGAN: Most terrorists don't change their evil spots so it's time Britain stopped going soft on hate-filled jihadis to please the PC hand-wringing brigade and does what Americans do - lock them up forever

What does it take these days for a nihilistic terrorist to get locked up in prison for the rest of his life?

In America, that's a relatively simple question: if you're a convicted Al-Qaeda or ISIS operative, you're led to a small cold foreboding window-less cell and you don't come out again. Ever.

Well not back into society, anyway.

That's your punishment for deciding to align yourself with the worst terror groups in modern history - responsible for mass murder and carnage on a grotesque, heinous scale.

Americans take the view that if you're part of an organization that beheads aid workers, throws gay people off roofs, sets victims on fire in cages, or flies planes in to sky-scrapers, then you're unlikely to rehabilitate to an extent where you can be trusted not to carry on doing such diabolical things.

But in Britain, we take a rather different approach.

If you're a convicted Al-Qaeda terrorist in my country, then you get to walk free after just eight years, without anyone even bothering to check if you're still dangerous.

Sounds insane, right? Well that's because it IS insane.

And to illustrate just how insane it is, the Al-Qaeda terrorist I am referring to committed an appalling act of terror in London last Friday, murdering two brilliant young Cambridge-educated people in their 20s, and wounding three others, during a violent rampage that only ended when heroic members of the public stopped him with a fire extinguisher, whale tusk and their fists before police arrived to shoot him dead.

The horrifying attack came less than a year after the terrorist was released.

And by cruel irony, his victims were trying to help ex-prisoners like him at a rehabilitation conference when he mercilessly stabbed them to death.

The murderer was a man named Usman Khan. And it's worth examining exactly who he was and what he did prior to his deadly attack.

Khan was a British-born son of Pakistani immigrants.

When he was just 14, he used to walk around his school, Haywood High in Stoke-on-Trent with a photo of Osama Bin Laden attached to the front of his exercise book, and he was spotted laughing at videos of the 9/11 attacks in a café.

Later, he began preaching Islamic extremism on the streets, on behalf of infamous hate preacher Anjem Choudary's banned terror group al-Muhajiroun.

Khan, who called himself Abu Saif, was photographed waving an Al Qaeda flag as he ranted into a megaphone. He distributed disturbing extremist literature until it attracted the attention of anti-terror cops who raided his family's home when he was 17.  'I ain't no terrorist,' he insisted.

And the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to press criminal charges due to lack of hard evidence that he was.

An emboldened Khan vowed: 'We are going to carry on until the last breath, because we believe this to be true.'

He spoke at a conference about why Britain should adopt Sharia law and campaigned to stage a march through a military town where British soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan were honored.

Khan became a member of Islam4UK, another of Choudary's banned extremist groups, which led to security services launching a second covert surveillance operation against him in 2010.

And that's when his real nefarious intent was uncovered.

Bugs installed in his home recorded Khan talking how to make a pipe bomb after seeing a 'recipe' in an Al Qaeda magazine. He was heard calling non-Muslims 'dogs' - and talking about buying weapons and attacking pubs and clubs with explosives.

He and two other jihadists from Stoke made contact with other extremists in London and Wales, and the nine of them met up to discuss how to train terrorists in a camp, embark on letter-bomb campaigns, blow up civilians, and attack targets including London's Stock Exchange, the US embassy in London and Britain's new Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

When they were arrested, Khan pled guilty to planning a terror camp, advised he would get a reduction in sentence by doing so.

At his trial, the judge singled Khan out from the others. Justice Wilkie, sentencing him to just 16 years in prison, wrote that Khan's 'ability to act on a strategic level' and to plan terror attacks meant he should only be released if and when a parole board was convinced he was no longer a threat.

Wilkie warned that the nine jihadis, including Khan, 'would remain, even after a lengthy term of imprisonment, of such a significant risk that the public could not be adequately protected by their being managed on license in the community.'

Yet just eight years later, Khan was released on license into the community.

How the hell did this happen? It started when the cunning terrorist began playing the deradicalized card immediately he was imprisoned.

'I don't carry the views before my arrest,' he said, 'and can prove at the time I was immature, and now want to live my life as a good Muslim and a good citizen of Britain.'

His strategy worked, and a year later, three Appeal Court judges led by Sir Brian Leveson inexplicably concluded it was wrong for him to have received such a 'tough' indeterminate sentence and gave him a determinate one instead that meant he would automatically be released after eight years.

So, last December, Khan was let out of prison without any formal assessment of his potential risk. He was just electronically tagged and ordered to report twice weekly to a parole officer.

He was able to hoodwink everyone into believing he was a changed man, even joining Learning Together, a program run by Cambridge University, that rehabilitates prisoners. And it was at their conference on Friday that he carried out his barbaric attack. Khan had been given a day-release to attend the event without any escort.

His victims, Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23, were two young people working with the ex-cons that day who cared passionately about criminal justice.

'Jack was an intelligent, thoughtful and empathetic person (who) lived by his principles,' said his family.

'Saskia was a funny, kind, positive influence... and was generous to the point of always wanting to see the best in all people,' said her family.

My heart breaks for them both and their poor families.

I can't imagine anything worse than losing a child in such disgusting circumstances.

Although actually, I can. Imagine hearing your child had been stabbed to death by a convicted Al Qaeda terrorist who'd served just eight years in prison and not even seen a parole board before his release to properly assess his current danger levels?

The British justice system is a hot, shameful mess.

The prisons are over-crowded and woefully under-staffed.

The probation service is also creaking at the seams and totally incapable of keeping up with all the serious criminals they are charged with keeping an eye on.

Police numbers have been drastically and disastrously slashed in recent years.

And supine politicians who predictably raced to score cheap, petty and utterly insensitive points against each other after Friday's attack, have all conspired to substantially reduce our capacity to defend the country from murderous jihadists.

As I write this column, there are 73 other convicted terrorists who've been released early back onto the streets of Britain. One of them was re-arrested after the London Bridge attack because police found new evidence he may be planning a terror attack.

Another 400 battle-scarred Al Qaeda and ISIS fighters have returned from war zones like Iraq and Syria to also freely roam around.

And police estimate there may be a further 20,000 jihadists in Britain, brainwashed and radicalized.

Who are they?

Where are they?

What danger do they pose?

The most shocking and disturbing thing about those questions is that the authorities don't seem to really know.

What we do know is that releasing Usman Khan after just eight years proved to be a bloody fiasco.

And it was always going to be a bloody fiasco.

As Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party, said: 'Nobody apologizes for the fact the liberal elite have given us a ridiculous sentencing system. I don't care if you were in prison for six years or 12 years, if you have committed mass murder or planned to commit mass murder, you are not just an ordinary criminal, you have got the virus of jihadism. I don't think these people should ever be let out of prison unless we are absolutely convinced they do not have a jihadi virus. But political correctness stops us doing that.'

I agree with him.

It's not like we don't already do this for some violent offenders.

There are currently 74 prisoners in Britain who've been given 'whole life' sentences, meaning they will never come out.

They include serial killers like Peter 'Yorkshire Ripper' Sutcliffe, murderous pedophiles, and a far-right fanatic named Thomas Mair who assassinated female Member of Parliament Jo Cox in 2016.

Yet extraordinarily, Usman Khan and his Al Qaeda mates were not deemed to be in that category. They'd only plotted to commit mass murder, to train terrorists, to assassinate politicians, to kill and main civilians in pubs and clubs – and were caught before they got the chance to do any of it.

So Khan gets out after eight years, and of course, then gets the chance to do what he had craved for many years. It's an absolute disgrace that he was released.

SOURCE 

******************************

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. 

************************************