Thursday, July 09, 2020



The REAL 'Problem' in Minneapolis?

Minnesota's inner-city black families are being oppressed by Democrats.

Mark Alexander

Political analyst Paul Mirengoff challenged the assumptions of a recent Washington Post summary about the problems in Minneapolis, entitled “Minneapolis had progressive policies, but its economy still left black families behind.”

According to WaPo, although “taxes, for decades, have been redistributed from wealthy suburbs to poorer communities [in Minneapolis] to combat inequality … the prosperity fueled by the region’s Fortune 500 companies and progressive policies has not translated into economic equality.” Moreover, “The wealth gap between Minneapolis’s largely white population and the city’s black residents has deepened, producing some of the nation’s widest racial disparities in income, employment and home-ownership.”

WaPo further asserts, “Economists, lawyers and civil rights advocates in the Twin Cities say progressive tax policies could not make up for other aspects of structural racism, such as access to credit or jobs. Some say investments in affordable housing in low-income neighborhoods deepened segregation and poverty. Others argue for better enforcement of federal laws to combat discrimination in lending, employment and housing.”

But Mirengoff offers a different explanation: “It might be that, to a disproportionate degree, African-Americans in Minneapolis aren’t doing the things required to become successful. Things like finishing high school and college, not having children while in the teens, raising children in two-parent homes, avoiding drug use, and abstaining from crime. The Post never considers this possible explanation.”

Of course, WaPo studiously avoids any mention of personal responsibility, as that doesn’t fit the Democrats’ racial victimization narrative. Mirengoff notes, “Post reporter Tracy Jan dismisses [personal responsibility], quoting unnamed ‘civil rights and community leaders in the Twin Cities’ who say that a ‘focus on fixing things perceived to be wrong in the black community,’ instead of ‘fundamentally reshaping underlying inequities in society’ is what’s preventing ‘racial equity.’”

Ah, yes, it’s “systemic racism.” That’s the obstacle to “racial equity.”

Mirengoff concludes, “Jan herself equates the ‘delivering of racial justice’ with the elimination of the disparities in income, employment, and home-ownership she describes. In other words, for Jan there is no racial justice as long as a ‘wealth gap’ exists between Blacks and Whites. It doesn’t matter how much of the gap is explained by differences in behavior. This is an absurd account of ‘racial justice.’ Distributing wealth on the basis of race, without regard to merit, is the opposite of justice — any kind of justice.”

By way of my own conclusion, as I noted in a recent column, let me remind you of who runs Minneapolis: The mayor, all but one (Green Party) member of the city council, the police chief, the county prosecutor, and the U.S. House district representative (radical leftist Ilhan Abdullahi Omar) are all Socialist Democrats. In Minnesota, the governor, the state’s attorney general (radical leftist Keith Ellison), and both U.S. senators are all Democrats.

So what’s the matter with Minneapolis?

That was a rhetorical question, of course. The problem is that the failed policies of the so-called “Great Society” over the last 50-plus years have, in effect, enslaved generations of poor people on urban poverty plantations nationwide. But don’t expect Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer to offer any changes. Their political future is dependent on “black victimization,” which is why Democrats have allowed the recent racial unrest to fester in their states.

So where exactly does the change need to begin? Another rhetorical question…

SOURCE 







Nightmare in New York: How Covid-19, BLM protests and a liberal mayor are turning the city into a no-go zone as murders skyrocket, shops are looted and 500,000 middle-class residents flee

Two bullet-ridden bodies lay sprawled on bloodstained concrete steps. Alongside, relatives of the victims are wailing and collapse to the ground. In another part of the city, a gang of youths use spray paint to disable security cameras before robbing a corner store. Later, video footage captures police officers sitting helplessly in their patrol car as a baying crowd hurls glass bottles at them.

This is lawless New York – a city that was once America’s glittering crown jewel but which risks descending into mob rule.

Murder figures have skyrocketed and a combination of the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and weak political leadership is in danger of achieving what Osama Bin Laden never could: bringing the Big Apple to its knees.

The scenes described above took place last weekend. Chioke Thompson, 23, and his friend Stephanie Perkins, 39, had been gunned down on the steps of Chioke’s Brooklyn home. His schoolteacher mum Sophia wept as she said: ‘Even as he died, he was trying to shield her with his body. It makes no sense. Neither of them did anything wrong.’

With the gunman still on the loose and their families insisting neither victim had any links to drugs or gangs, the pair appear to be the latest grim statistics in a crimewave sweeping the city.

According to figures released by the New York Police Department, for the first six months of this year, there were 176 murders, an increase of 23 per cent on the 143 killed during the same period last year.

The number of shooting victims has gone up 51 per cent to 616 this year. In June alone, there were 250 shootings compared to 97 in the same month last year. Month-on-month, burglaries are up 119 per cent and car thefts up 48 per cent.

Many blame New York’s liberal mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has slashed police funding by $1 billion (£800 million), ended the NYPD’s controversial ‘stop-and-frisk’ policy (which allowed police to stop and search anyone solely on the basis of ‘reasonable suspicion’) and who last week vowed to paint a huge Black Lives Matter sign outside President Trump’s flagship Trump Tower.

De Blasio has also introduced criminal justice reforms, including changes to bail for dozens of offences, which has meant violent criminals released on to the streets.

An enraged Trump tweeted: ‘NYC is cutting police $'s by ONE BILLION DOLLARS and yet the NYC Mayor is going to paint a big, expensive, yellow Black Lives Matter sign on Fifth Avenue, denigrating this luxury Avenue.’

Referring to the police, the President added: ‘This will further antagonize New York’s Finest who LOVE New York & vividly remember the horrible BLM chant, “Pigs In A Blanket, Fry ’Em Like Bacon”. Maybe our GREAT Police, who have been neutralized and scorned by a mayor who hates & disrespects them won’t let this symbol of hate be affixed to New York’s greatest street. Spend this money fighting crime instead!’

Parts of Manhattan, famously the ‘city that never sleeps’, have begun to resemble a ghost town since 500,000 mostly wealthy and middle-class residents fled when Covid-19 struck in March.

New York state has suffered the highest death toll in America, with more than 24,000 dead, nearly 10,000 more than the second-hardest hit state, New Jersey, and eight times the number killed by terrorists on 9/11.

Streets once teeming with tourists are virtually empty. Shops and restaurants are boarded up to protect against looters. Hotels are closed. According to one resident: ‘New York has become a place where the soup kitchens are full and skyscrapers are empty.’

The Broadway theatre district sits in darkness, unlikely to open before next year. The subway, which once carried 750,000 commuters a day, is mainly deserted. In Times Square, a handful of street vendors offer hand-sanitiser and face masks in place of knock-off designer sunglasses and bags.

Joel Kotkin, a leading expert on urban trends, and a native New Yorker who now lives in California, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘This is an unprecedented crisis the likes of which New York has never faced. When 9/11 happened, it was a major disruption but the country and the world rallied in support and there was a great sense of solidarity.’

Back then, Rudy Giuliani was mayor and considered a strong leader. The city was shaken but it was back on its feet in weeks.

But Covid hit when New York had already been in decline. Kotkin says: ‘Under Mayor de Blasio, conditions were perfect for the pandemic to flourish. The subway was filthy. There was a huge disparity in wealth. The rich immediately fled to homes in the country or by the beach.

Millennials went home to their parents. That left poor people and immigrants living in incredibly crowded conditions with high levels of poverty and multiple generations in one household. Add to that the [BLM] riots and the protests and New York was a perfect storm of everything that could go wrong – and did.’

‘A city which is perceived as dangerous and dirty doesn’t hold any appeal. It makes sense to locate to suburban regions and smaller towns that are generally safer, cleaner and less expensive.’

Indeed, thousands of New Yorkers were already leaving for ‘safer’ cities such as Austin in Texas and Tulsa in Oklahoma, which offers newcomers in the tech industry a $10,000 (£8,000) welcome fee. It doesn’t help that NYPD commissioner Dermot Shea last week admitted: ‘You have a criminal justice system that is imploding. Imploding. That’s the kindest way to put it.’

Beleaguered police unions have accused de Blasio of being ‘anti-cop’. In the past month, 272 officers have applied for retirement, 49 per cent up from the 183 who applied during the same period last year.

‘We have a mayor who cares more about optics [how things look] than on-the-ground policing,’ one police officer said. ‘The NYPD is utterly demoralised.’

Police Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch said: ‘How can we keep doing our job in this environment? Of course, a neutered police force is exactly what the anti-cop crowd wants. If we have no cops because no one wants to be a cop, they will have achieved their ultimate goal.’

‘I feel sympathetic to the majority of protesters, who are peaceful,’ one woman said. ‘But there is a small minority who use protests as a shield for rioting and looting. I’ve boarded up my business but I’m terrified they will break in. Insurance doesn’t cover looting. I’m in a constant state of stress and fear.’

SOURCE 






The Left's "social justice" crusade is really rooted in fomenting a Marxist revolution

Last week, Columbus, Ohio, removed a 16-foot statue of its namesake, Christopher Columbus, following an order by Mayor Andrew Ginther who declare that “for many people in our community, the statue represents patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness. That does not present our great city.” The statue, a gift from the people of Genoa, Italy, had sat in front of city hall for over 65 years. And it’s not just Columbus’s statue that may go the way of the dodo — the state capital is also mulling a name change. A petition trumpeting “Flavortown” has garnered 118,000 signatures.

The University of North Carolina recently released its new directives that include the requirement that all students be trained in the right-think tenets of leftist ideology. As explained in an email from UNC chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, it’s part of the school’s effort to fight “structural racism. This fall we will implement an online diversity, equity and inclusion training, similar to our required Title IX awareness and violence prevention training, for every person in our community to learn new concepts, broaden perspectives and allow us to work from a common set of terms.”

The list of resources for this indoctrination include such dubious works like the New York Times “1619 Project,” “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” “Me and White Supremacy,” and “75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice,” to name a few.

These are merely two examples of a growing trend now sweeping the nation, which is calling for the expunging of everything that may have been “offensive” and “oppressive” regarding our nation’s history. It’s cancel culture — the divisive and false notion that removing any evidence of that which “offends” will lead to a better, “safer,” and more “inclusive” society. In reality, cancel culture is the battle cry of revolution.

This revolution is fundamentally anti-American. It may have started with seemingly cogent complaints over Confederate statues and monuments, but it has quickly expanded into condemning all America’s past leaders and now our nation’s Founders.

Most tellingly is the unmitigated arrogance and self-righteousness exuded by this young generation leading this cancel-culture revolution. Seeing themselves as more virtuous than those who came before them, they are unwilling to actually learn from and appreciate the real and significant accomplishments of these historical figures they so easily and vociferously condemn. This cancel-culture generation is boiling down every American leader to their most base components of gender and race … and all their accomplishments are being erased on account of the common “failings” of the era in which they lived.

Ironically, these leftist revolutionaries idolize and lionize some of history’s most diabolical and despicable individuals. As Power Line’s John Hinderaker observes, “[Columbus] was a prince of a fellow compared with, say, the psychopathic mass murderer Che Guevara. Or the serial killers on an industrial scale, Lenin, Stalin, Castro and Mao, all of whom are A-OK, apparently, with American liberals.”

The end goal of this effort is all too clear — bringing an end to the greatest and freest nation the world has ever known. Unfortunately, those mind-numbed masses caught up in the “woke” mob don’t realize they are destroying their own future.

SOURCE 






Australia: Diversity comes in many colours but we’re stuck on shades of grey

I had to report this week on some young writers who quit The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald to protest against their own whiteness.

To explain: the parent company, Nine Entertainment, had received some money from the Copyright Agency and the Judith Neilson Institute to hire some “emerging critics” for the arts pages. They chose five people, and all were white.

Two promptly quit, saying: “Our resignation is in opposition to the lack of diversity in the ­selection, which resulted in an all-white group of peers.”

A third, Tiarney Miekus, described the whiteness of the group as “completely appalling and shameful”. She did not quit but will give up some of her salary to encourage Nine to hire more writers who are BIPOC — that’s black, indigenous or people of colour.

A white critic, Cassie Tongue, is “in discussions” to do the same. The fifth, Chloe Wolifson, has not shown her hand.

Nine now has had to readvertise the positions, with the emphasis on “diversity”.

I was reading the comments on the story — yes, of course we read the comments! — and I saw one reader who said: “I am over 70 and would like the fifth still employed young critic to resign in protest against Nine not hiring enough older Australians. This is entrenched ageism. I am of course available for the position and could do with the grant as well.” I think she was being facetious but it’s actually fair enough.

There is a diversity movement under way but it’s a narrow definition of diversity being employed here. Why shouldn’t Nine hire a dynamic woman in her 70s to be an emerging art critic? Women of a certain age make up a goodly proportion of theatre-goers and art lovers. Women over 50 fill the seats at literary festivals and they buy most of the books.

The reader’s comment got quite a bit of support: “Totally agree … staggering that these grants go solely to the younger, less qualified, less experienced candidates … ageism is strangely a huge prejudice that the left overlooks.”

The Australian Human Rights Commission has done a report on this subject, and it says companies show a reluctance to hire older workers. And by older, I should tell you, it means over 50.

Diversity can’t mean only racial diversity, and there was a time when it didn’t. Back when I was starting out, it meant gender. Most firms were under pressure to hire more women, and most of the emerging critics were women, but that work is apparently done. We used to think also about diversity in age, and also — and here’s a subject that’s near untouchable in Australia — class.

What if some of the group had been working-class kids from state schools? Could they have then stayed? What if some had been same-sex attracted? And what about diversity in education, meaning fewer people who haven’t been able to go to university? It was fairly common a few decades ago for young people to start their careers straight out of school — famously, you’d get a burger flipper such as Australian Charlie Bell running McDonalds, or a former teller such as Ralph Norris running the Commonwealth Bank.

Now the focus is solely on race, with the aim, we are told, of creating a workforce that more accurately reflects the Australian community. But if we in fact insisted on that, how would the workforce look?

Well, the uncomfortable truth for many activists is that you’d end up with a lot of employees who are older, white, conservative — that’s ­diversity of political opinion — and Christian. Because that’s Australia, too.

According to the 2016 census, about two-thirds, or 67 per cent, of the population was born right here. Asked about ancestry, the English dominate, at 36 per cent; Australians are next at 33 per cent, then come the Irish (11 per cent), Scottish (9 per cent) and only then do we see the first Asian nation, the Chinese, at a tiny 5.6 per cent. Then come the Italians, the Germans, the Greek and the Dutch. Those identifying as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander comprise 2.8 per cent. Some people like to make a big deal about how we’re being “overrun by Muslims”, but Muslims make up a only 2.6 per cent of the population.

The reason you see a lot of white people in the workforce in Australia, in other words, is because there are a lot of white people around.

That said, if individual white people want to cancel themselves with the aim of creating a racially diverse workforce, well, they should, of course, be allowed to do it.

What troubles me is the cancelling of others. It has been happening for a while now: this actor or that person’s work being “cancelled” for being racist, sexist, homophobic and so on.

Here’s another example, from last week. There is in NSW a small, dynamic literary magazine called Verity La. It’ s run by a not-for-profit organisation that receives NSW government funds, through Create NSW, to pay writers $100 for each piece. In May, it published a piece of “creative nonfiction” called About Lin, about a white Australian male who travels abroad to sexually exploit a Filipino woman.

The writer was Stuart Cooke of Griffith University. He is a distinguished, experienced, award-winning, well-travelled, multi­lingual poet whose awards include the Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Porter and New Shoots poetry prizes, the BR Whiting Fellowship, and an Asialink Fellowship to The Philippines. He has translated a variety of ­indigenous and non-indigenous Australian and Latin American poets.

Cooke’s essay caused outrage in the Filipinx community — people of any gender, including non-binary, gender-queer and gender-fluid people from The Philippines — whose members described it as “narrow minded” and “dumbass”, racist, and misogynist, fetishistic and disablist.

In the face of early criticism, Verity La put a trigger warning on the piece, saying it aimed “to publish work that is strong, bold and provocative. At times, this approach runs the risk of us publishing pieces that some might find offensive.”

Cooke put up a note, too, saying: “I believe it is important to talk about these issues, rather than edit them for the sake of portraying a more palatable form of masculinity.”

They were determined to hold their nerve, in other words. But not for long.

Having endured a week of fierce criticism, Verity La in a statement on Monday apologised unreservedly for the piece, which it now describes as “grossly offensive. We acknowledge that it caused deep harm … We failed badly.” It also cancelled itself — or as the statement put it:“Verity La is taking a break from publishing so we can reflect on the ways in which the journal has been complicit with systemic racism, sexism and disablism … We can do better.”

We are now one literary journal down.

The contretemps left me, and probably others, intrigued to read the piece. What had Cooke said about Australian men who go to The Philippines to abuse local women? What would a reader learn about the cohort of men who do this?

Well, we don’t know.

“We made a grave error in leaving the piece on the journal’s website after that harm had been drawn to our attention,” the journal’s statement continued. “It has been removed from the website and will not be republished by Verity La in any form.”

And so, now, nobody can read it. And so, what do we learn? Nothing. And what does this achieve? I just don’t know.

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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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