Monday, October 11, 2021
BBC twists our history to smear decent people as stupid fascist dupes
The distortion of the past is getting out of control. The truth is available to only a privileged few with good memories or access to crumbling, forgotten archives. So you can say what you like.
The BBC’s new Sunday evening drama Ridley Road is a perfect example of this. At first sight it looks like a harmless paddle in the past, into the lost world of suspender belts and British- made cars.
But it is carefully designed to give viewers the impression that Britain in 1962 was menaced by a major Nazi-style movement, led by a man called Colin Jordan.
It begins with the on-screen claim that ‘public support across the country is on the rise’ for Jordan’s neo-Nazis.
Then the drama makes a deliberate effort to suggest that people living in the Britain of that time, who were distressed by major changes in their lives, were easy prey for Nazi recruiters from this movement.
Such people are portrayed as being rather dim and also as saying that they ‘want our country back’, in what looks to me like a crude and nasty attempt to make these fascist dupes sound like Leave voters of today.
As far as the makers of this series are concerned, if you’re at all conservative you’re really a Nazi.
There is lots of other rubbish in this programme. But the exaggeration of Jordan’s importance is ridiculous. He was a pathetic nobody and a national figure of fun, not a potential Fuhrer.
Newspapers of the time called his outfit ‘Britain’s tiny jackboot-and-swastika Nazi party’. His greatest moment of fame, portrayed but not properly explained in the programme, was a pro-Hitler demonstration in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, July 1, 1962. It attracted almost no support, but thousands of hostile counter-demonstrators.
The Times of July 2, 1962, reported: ‘Throughout the meeting the speakers, Mr Dennis Pirie, deputy secretary, Mr John Tyndall, national secretary and Mr Colin Jordan, leader of the movement, were continually shouted down and pelted with pennies, tomatoes and rotten eggs, by an overwhelmingly hostile crowd of some 2,000.
‘The few people who did raise their hands in an earnest Nazi salute looked distinctly nervous.’
The Daily Mail of the same date said: ‘Police struggled to keep the angry crowd, many of them Jews, away from the speakers. Hundreds of men and women chanted “Six millions! Six millions!”, a reference to the Jews who died under the Nazis.’
It is plain from the reports that Jordan had hardly any supporters then or later. In the end, one of his fellow Nazis was quite badly beaten, before the platform party fled in vans from the angry crowd. Jordan himself got away only because a phalanx of police protected him and blocked the entrance to the Underground while he escaped.
Eventually the High Court ruled that Jordan had broken the Public Order Act of 1936, by using insulting behaviour, which he undoubtedly had. By that time he was already in prison, making TV aerials, after being convicted of a ludicrous attempt to set up a private army. He had also lost his job as a teacher in a secondary modern school.
Later he embarked on a comic-opera marriage with the leather-clad madwoman Francoise Dior, niece of the great fashion designer. Francoise liked to wear a swastika pendant, even though this got her into difficulties with many London taxi drivers. One ripped it from her neck, and refused to ‘chauffeur a stinking Nazi’.
The pair held a ‘Nordic’ wedding at their unimpressive party HQ, not far from where Grenfell Tower now stands. While a crowd outside hurled bottles and eggs at the building, Jordan and his Nazi bride mingled dribbles of their blood in a grotesque ceremony, while listening to a record of the Horst Wessel song. It was not a happy or lasting union.
Not long afterwards Francoise denounced Jordan, saying: ‘I thought I was marrying a leader and a hero but found I had married a middle-class nobody.’ You can see why. Jordan, a dough-faced nondescript, lived with his mother Bertha in a suburban road in Coventry.
Nazism was not on the rise again in 1962. Jordan was not a major figure. British people, then as now, were sensible, level-headed and humorous. The law found plenty of ways of restraining Jordan and people like him. The whole basis of the BBC drama is rubbish. The blatant effort to link normal patriotic conservatives with bigots and Nazis in the public mind is low and dirty.
They tell these lies because they can and they want to use drama for propaganda. If the BBC will not stop doing this with public money, they do not deserve to survive.
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Tesla ordered to pay $US137 million to ex-worker over racism in rare verdict
Absurd. May not survive appeal
Tesla lost a case against a black former elevator operator and must pay an unprecedented $US137 million ($188 million) in damages for having turned a blind eye to racial taunts and offensive graffiti the man endured at the electric carmaker’s auto plant in Fremont, California.
Owen Diaz, a former contract worker who was hired in 2015 via a staffing agency, was subjected to a racially hostile work environment, a federal jury in San Francisco decided on Monday (US time). The award is among the most significant verdicts of its kind.
“I believe that’s the largest verdict in an individual race discrimination in employment case,” said David Oppenheimer, a clinical professor of law at Berkeley Law. “Class actions are of course in a different category.”
Tesla’s vice president of people, Valerie Capers Workman, sent an internal email late on Monday that the company subsequently published in a blog post on its website titled “Regarding Today’s Jury Verdict.”
Workman wrote she was “at the defence table for Tesla every day during the trial because I wanted to hear firsthand what Mr. Diaz said happened to him.” The post said that “the Tesla of 2015 and 2016 (when Mr. Diaz worked in the Fremont factory) is not the same as the Tesla of today.”
Diaz’s case marks a rare instance in which Tesla, which typically uses mandatory arbitration to resolve employee disputes, had to defend itself in a public trial. The company almost never loses workplace arbitrations, though it was hit with a $USUS1 million award in May in a case brought by another ex-contract worker that was similar to Diaz’s.
The trial could embolden shareholder activists who have pushed Tesla’s board, so far without success, to adopt more transparency about its diversity goals and use of arbitration to resolve complaints regarding sexual harassment and racial discrimination. Tesla’s annual meeting is scheduled for October 7.
In court, Tesla argued that it never intended to disregard the rights and safety of African-American workers placed by the staffing agency at the plant and that all incidents reported by Mr Diaz were investigated and resolved.
In her closing arguments to the jury, Tesla attorney Tracey Kennedy said “Mr. Diaz’s story simply doesn’t make sense” in light of his encouragement to his son and daughter to take up jobs at the company. She also said Diaz’s claims weren’t supported by the evidence.
J. Bernard Alexander III, a lawyer for Diaz, told jurors that “as opposed to a zero-tolerance policy, Tesla had a zero-responsibility policy.”
The “n-word” was “pervasive and virtually everywhere,” Alexander said. He finished his closing remarks by citing some phrases from The Hill We Climb, a poem by Amanda Gorman, the 23-year-old poet who moved the nation at the inauguration of President Joe Biden in January. “Being American” is about stepping into the past and “how we repair it,” Alexander said. Diaz himself testified that be suffered “sleepless nights” and weight loss as he lost his appetite.
“Some days I would just sit on my stairs and cry,” he told the jury.
The jury’s award included $US6.9 million for emotional distress and $US130 million in punitive damages, according to Diaz’s other attorney, Larry Organ. Tesla is the world’s most valuable automaker with a market value of around $US783 billion.
Organ said he hopes the ruling encourages Tesla do so “some reevaluation” so none of its other black workers have to endure similar treatment. “The jury verdict sends a message to one of the wealthiest companies in the world that it must treat all its employees with dignity and respect,” he said.
Organ was also on the legal team representing Melvin Berry, a black former worker who won the $US1 million arbitration award over claims that the company failed to stop his supervisors at its Fremont plant from calling him the “n-word.”
Tesla faces yet another case making similar accusations that is proceeding as a class action in California state court in Oakland.
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British Police chiefs continue to give officers 'nonsensical' unconscious bias training including lessons on 'white privilege'
Police chiefs have been lambasted over training officers in 'nonsensical' unconscious bias courses including lessons on 'white privilege' and how jokes can lead to genocide.
Officers across the country continue to be trained in unconscious bias despite government calls to scrap the courses after a review found that it was 'not associated with changes in behaviour'.
Last year it was announced the training would be phased out of government departments while ministers encouraged other 'public sector employers to do likewise'.
But police forces, led by the College of Policing, have vowed to continue with the training which is designed to help identify in-built biases affected by race, sexuality or gender.
Now a Freedom of Information request to forces by The Mail on Sunday has revealed the 'bizarre' training materials used to teach officers and staff about unconscious bias.
They include Merseyside and Cleveland Police where officers are taught the 1950s 'Allport's scale' of prejudice which describes how jokes can lead to genocide, originally designed to explain events leading up to the Holocaust.
Critics have argued police have at times adapted this theory to controversially persecute people for making jokes under hate crime guidance.
Meanwhile Merseyside's officers are taught that using words such as 'husband', 'wife', 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend' in the workplace can leave colleagues feeling excluded if they are of a different sexual orientation.
Training materials from West Mercia Police, among other forces, show that officers are asked to consider the 'halo vs horns effect' which states people can unfairly form opinions about a person based on one distinctive character trait.
An example often cited as part of this bias training is judging a person is unsuitable for a job because their appearance is 'scruffy'.
They are also told to 'avoid taking part in workplace gossip' with colleagues, while remembering to 'find a common interest', 'keep a professional distance' but that 'banter can be bullying'.
At North Wales Police officers have been taught in media bias with slides on newspaper stories which even included a spoof Daily Mail front page featuring Joseph Goebbels and Prime Minister David Cameron with a Hitler moustache.
Conservative MP Tim Loughton, of the Home Affairs Committee, said: 'If the police were nearly as creative and energetic about catching criminals and keeping the public safe as they are with appearing woke and pursuing a politically correct agenda then people might feel police were doing the job they were paid for. They should be focusing on real threats.'
A senior Tory source said: 'Our police officers should be on the streets catching criminals, not spending hours in workshops led by clowns.'
Harry Miller, a former officer who won a High Court case against Humberside Police over his alleged 'transphobic' tweets and set up campaign group Fair Cop, said of the training: 'This needs to stop.
'It's totally bizarre and I don't know why they do it.
'They're seeking to separate us from one another by politicising every slight, insult, preference, joke, bit of banter, casual chat and turning it into something it's not.
'The police do this because it's easy, while failing to solve burglaries or knife crime - it's a smokescreen to distract from their pitiful record. 'We are calling for the closure of the College of Policing, because it's from there that all this nonsense flows.'
Fiona Eldridge, of the College of Policing, said: 'It is important police officers and staff are aware that bias, including unconscious bias, exists and as such, the subject will continue to form part of the national curriculum.
'We have developed the national policing curriculum which informs the training and development designed and delivered locally by forces and this includes references to bias, but always within an operational policing context rather than being covered as a subject in isolation.'
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Australia: Immigrants will probably trust new conservative Premier - it’s inner-city folk whose values are "progressive"
The appointment of former NSW treasurer Dominic Perrottet to the role of Premier provoked an outcry this week. It was a deeply weird reaction. Perrottet’s assent has been described as “scary” and “troubling”. He makes one writer, who is “a woman and a supporter of LGBTQIA+ communities” particularly “nervous”. A social media activist was concerned that his conservative religious and family values drive “attitudes and often policies that may be severely at odds with the central demands of democracy”.
The idea that holding conservative, faith-based family values is aberrant is very weird. Weird in the sense coined by evolutionary psychologist Joseph Henrich in his book on “how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous”. Henrich tracks how the rules laid down in European Christianity’s “marriage and family program” replaced intensive kin-based institutions with an institution that expanded trust relationships beyond the family. The universalism it fostered created the Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Developed (WEIRD) world, Henrich argues.
Australians are individually among the WEIRDest. Whether or not we are now religious, our views have been shaped by the social structures our religious ancestors built, which encouraged individualism, independence, the notion that strangers have the same inherent human value as those related to us, non-conformity, resistance to tradition and a number of other characteristics which you might instantly recognise as positive, even aspirational, and which you probably believe you possess. Some of us are so non-conforming that we have talked ourselves out of religion entirely. We believe that you can be moral, spiritual and good without attending religious ceremonies or worshipping a higher being.
We are also open to other peoples and cultures and Australia’s immigration intake has made Australia the diverse, multicultural and multi-faith society it is today. Since the middle of last century, the overseas-born population has risen from one-tenth to one-third. This has increased the proportion of non-WEIRD to WEIRD people, as more people come to Australia from countries such as India, China, the Philippines, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
These countries tend to be more religious, more family-oriented and less individualistic than societies which have been WEIRD for a very long time. The people from them bring their cultural dispositions with them and, Henrich has found, generally these values are also held by their descendants over a couple of generations. These communities are more socially conservative, family-oriented and religious than your inner-city WEIRDo.
These communities now hold quite a lot of electoral power. That is not, of course, why the new Premier holds the values he does. But Henrich reports that immigrants from different countries living in the same country show higher levels of trust in people of faith, even if it’s a faith different to their own. The Premier’s values make him more trustworthy among the less WEIRD new Australians.
In retail political speak, Perrottet can connect with voters from many religions because he shares their values. But then so can NSW Opposition Leader Chris Minns, who is also a family-oriented Catholic. Both men are focused on the needs and aspirations of non-WEIRD Western Sydney, in which the next state and federal elections could be decided.
By now the WEIRD people who are terrified of Perrottet should be waking up to a shocking discovery. Australian public life doesn’t revolve around their values. ABC Religion and Ethics presenter Andrew West wrote thoughtfully about the lessons of the 2019 federal election won by the Liberals, in which religious freedom played at least some part, observing that “Labor, and the broader left, need to understand that you cannot celebrate multiculturalism without supporting religious freedom”.
West points out that while no one expects politicians to adopt a fake religious identity, they do expect them to respect their rights “to believe, to manifest these beliefs in private and public, and to educate their children according to these beliefs”.
This means also respecting that people may have different views on social issues, such as same-sex marriage, abortion, gender and voluntary assisted dying. WEIRD people see these things as about individual choice. Less WEIRD people believe that individual choices affect the collective and so they may be more cautious about changing the social fabric. We should be able to disagree and debate such issues with respect, understanding that there are no objectively right or wrong answers on culture.
That might weird you out, but it is part of the tolerance that a multicultural society demands. Conservative governments have sometimes worried that such tolerance could go too far and have attempted to protect the progressive principles of our culture with a statement of Australian values. Progressives have often labelled these attempts as racist.
There could be another shock for the weirdos next week when the voluntary assisted dying bill is presented to NSW Parliament on Thursday. Minns opposes it. If he allows a conscience vote, many Labor MPs will also vote against the bill, including Hugh McDermott, the member for Prospect in western Sydney.
The inner-city WEIRDos have had the cultural power for a very long time. At least in NSW that might be changing. That is not “at odds with the central demands of democracy” but a WEIRD expression of it.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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