Sunday, January 02, 2022



"Right-wing"

My son and I recently had a discussion about being "Right-wing".  We agreed that I am.  But in what sense? 

Although they themselves -- from Karl Marx on -- are often antisemitic, Leftists today  use the term for anyone who has any group-denominated views. To the Left you can be a racist even if you express no views about any race. Opponents of vaccination mandates are, for instance, sometimes called racists even by mainstream voices of Leftism.  See for instance here

So there is a great need for more clarity of definition if any reasonable discussion of the matter is to take place.

So if Rightist implies racism, I am very clearly a Tory rather than a Rightist.  I think the individual is much more important than any group that he/she belongs to but, insofar as generalizations have some value, I think highly of both the Chinese and the Jews.  But I have a very low opinion of Muslims and blacks.

That latter opinion will produce immediate howls of rage from Leftists, but, in their usual way, that is bereft of context.  Am I a racist if I approve of some minorities and disapprove of other minorities?  The Left in their simplistic way do not even consider that matter.  To them it is just another opportunity for abuse and attack.

I would say that I am only a racist insofar as I think that group identity can sometimes make a difference.  I don't think that the astronomical rate of violent crime among black is coincidence, for instance. It does NOT mean that I approve of bad treatment of someone solely on the basis of their race. I actually agree with the statement in the United Nations charter that says each case should be judged on its individual merits.

And that is a Tory position, not a specifically Rightist one.  There are indeed Rightists who wish to persecute all members of some race, usually Jews, but I am not one of them.  

So let me allude to some famous Tories and their opinion of Jews.  In the 19th century, the British Conservative party (Tories) made an outspoken Jew their Prime minister -- Benjamin Disraeli.  

And the British Prime Minister  who declared war on Hitler -- Neville Chamberlain -- had some antisemitic views.  So conservatives can have some views about a particular group -- in this case Jews -- without wishing them ill.  You can even promote their cause -- as the Conservative Party did in the 19th century and as Neville Chamberlain did in the 20th.

Chamberlain

And the greatest Tory of all, Winston Churchill, voiced some very negative views of Muslims but pitied them rather than being hostile to them

So my position on racial questions is in fact a Tory one, not a Rightist one.  Leftists will of course be uninterested in that distinction.  It does not give them enough opportunity for abuse

The great irony of course is that Hitler is normally described as Rightist. The truth of the matter is that he called himself a socialist and had a broad range of sociaist policies -- including comprehensive party control of industry. His deeds have lasting relevance but they are relevant to Leftism, not conservatism. He is another example of the generalization that racial obsessions are mostly Leftist.

NOTE: I have recently revised and expanded the post above. The new version is here: https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/2022/01/right-wing.html

JR

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Did Ghislaine Maxwell’s love for Jeffrey Epstein drive her to her downfall?

I drew similar conclusions to the writer below recently JR

A fellow journalist warned me as I attended a pre-trial hearing for the US government’s case against Ghislaine Maxwell, “You will be shocked when you see her.”

I was - but not in the way my colleague had anticipated. I had expected to see someone emaciated and dishevelled, given the reported abuse and horrific treatment she has been subject to inside the jail she’s been held for the past 18 months awaiting trial.

But Ghislaine Maxwell looked better that day – and every day since in that courtroom, than she looked back in the 2000s. Admittedly she was masked and one couldn’t see all her face, but her hair was now shoulder-length and wavy and dyed black. It was a much younger, much less severe look than the pixie cut she sported for 20 years when I would run into her occasionally at parties in Manhattan, where we both lived. She was casually dressed in a turtleneck and pants, and she was also slim; not border-line anorexic as she used to be in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when her then boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein ordered her, according to a source in the room “lose weight.”

We heard plenty of evidence in the ensuing weeks, as to how Epstein shabbily mistreated Maxwell (apart, of course, from wiring her $30 million dollars). He cheated on her. He had the Palm Beach butler Juan Alessi remove photographs of her when he had other women to stay; he had her assistant send flowers to another woman behind her back… and so on. And yet, according to photographs that were displayed, she stayed… and stayed… for over a decade.

It was exactly as I had always heard since I started reporting on Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2002 (and found myself covering her, too). I was told by multiple people: 'she was in love with him but he was not in love with her and she seemed to be in denial about that.”

The ghost of Epstein hung over Maxwell’s trial, complicating the picture that he himself had created. He was there in almost every sentence. He was in almost every photograph. It was his massage table that was produced in the room. His flight logs that were discussed. His homes, his island, his employees.

In my conversations with Epstein in 2002, he went out of his way to obfuscate what Maxwell meant to him
In my conversations with Epstein in 2002, he went out of his way to obfuscate what Maxwell meant to him CREDIT: AFP
We never heard from Maxwell herself, and the big unanswered question that all the testimony raised remains: what did she really see in this monster that kept her moth-like to his flame for over a decade, helping him do unspeakable things to children?

Was it simply the money, as prosecutors alleged? $30 million (£23.7m) is a vast amount. And Maxwell had told people that after her father, Robert Maxwell’s death in 1991 she was quite suddenly a “leper.” She described her perfectly comfortable apartment as a “toilet.” So yes, she cared about money. A great deal.

Perhaps there was some deep-rooted psychological damage inflicted by her father, who I found, when reporting for Chasing Ghislaine, my podcast and docuseries, to be a sadistic, cruel man, including to his children.

Ghislaine was said to have been obsessed with her father, spending the months after his death watching old videos of him. And at times she herself was blatant about the connection between him and her boss/ boyfriend.

In the early 1990s, Epstein humiliated her by bouncing in to the office where she was working with another woman. A concerned onlooker gave her a hug and said, “You don’t have to do this.” She replied, yes, she did. “My father told me: you do whatever it takes to keep your man,” she said.

Whatever it took, according to the testimony in the courtroom, included satisfying Epstein’s criminal depravity. It meant participating in orgies, dazzling young girls, charming them, lulling them into a false sense of security around Epstein and normalising the horrific sex acts that then took place.

I was frankly astonished when I heard that Epstein and Maxwell shared a bedroom in Palm Beach, because a source told me how by the late 1990s Maxwell would worry aloud that she could never make weekend plans because she didn’t know which woman Epstein would want to accompany him there.

In my conversations with Epstein in 2002, he went out of his way to obfuscate what Maxwell meant to him. She was not a girlfriend. She was his “best friend” which, he claimed (falsely), meant more. “She’s the best at what I need,” he said too, and then, out of nowhere, the eeriest line of all: “She doesn’t find girls for me, by the way.”

Of course, it was all lies.

Maxwell most certainly did work for Epstein according to multiple witnesses who testified. She worked very, very hard, they said. She was in charge of all his properties: construction, decoration, staffing.

Interestingly, just like Epstein, she kept this on a need-to-know basis. I once asked her what she did. And she told me, “You could say that I’m a connector of people.” I wasn’t exactly illuminated. In hindsight, I suppose saying, “I’m a property manager for a rich guy I once dated” would have been plebian for a woman who’d been raised as an heiress.

I discovered in my reporting earlier this year that the only time she introduced Epstein to her brothers Kevin and Ian in late 1991, it was as “my boss.” For what it’s worth, her brothers didn’t like Epstein – and they didn’t meet him again.

Her sister Christine, however, reportedly had some inkling, around the early 1990s or so, of how miserable Epstein was making Ghislaine romantically, according to Christine’s nanny, Sydney Proctor.

Proctor emailed me in 2020 that she remembered a visit Ghislaine paid to her sister in California in the early 1990s: “Ghislaine and Christine were not close at all. Therefore, when Ghislaine showed up to the Oakland Hills home of her sister to lick her wounds after the break up, it was rather unexpected. She was in our house maybe 28 hours? She was much thinner than she had been in August of 1991, almost amorphous, no discernible female curves like boobs or hips left. She wore black leggings, an oversized grey cashmere sweater and black boots. She spent the majority of her visit staring at a jigsaw puzzle she started on our dining room table.”

Proctor continued: “When Ghislaine departed, Christine said that she had been there because she was feeling sorry for herself after her break up with that ‘arse,’ Jeffrey. Christine was livid on behalf of her sister because, to add insult to injury Jeffrey ‘made’ Ghislaine find his ‘girlfriends’.”

Why, given her enormous rolodex and intellect, didn’t she just go out and get a job? Why stick with Epstein?
Why, given her enormous rolodex and intellect, didn’t she just go out and get a job? Why stick with Epstein? CREDIT: PA Media
And yet, Proctor, wrote to me, it was after this that Maxwell went to work for Epstein as his “decorator.”

These past few weeks, we’ve seen picture after picture of the two of them sticking together through the years, arms flung around each other. Why, given her enormous rolodex and intellect, didn’t she just go out and get a job? Why stick with Epstein? It speaks to an inner insecurity that is ghastly. For a woman who had everything, the reality was, she also had nothing, because apparently she had no inner belief in herself.

The most startling and almost upsetting moment for me during the trial was when a document was shown on a screen purporting to be something the user “gmax” (which was her email handle) wrote on a computer in October 2002 about her relationship with Epstein.

It said: “Jeffrey and Ghislaine have been together, a couple for the last 11 years. They are, contrary to what many people think, rarely apart – I almost always see them together.

“Ghislaine is highly intelligent, and great company with a ready smile and an infectious laugh who always puts one at one’s ease, and always makes one feel welcome.

“Jeffrey and Ghislaine share many mutual interests and they have a lot of fun together. They both have keen searching and inquisitive minds. She grew up amongst scientists and in an academic and business environment.

“Jeffrey and Ghislaine complement each other really well and I cannot imagine one without the other. On top of being great partners, they are also the best of friends.”

It was written during the exact time period I was reporting on Epstein for Vanity Fair - when he was busy telling me how unimportant Maxwell was to him. She was his “friend,” he said, putting a distance between them.

I wonder now if she, or one of her staff, was making talking points for me. It seems highly likely. Based on everything I’ve reported, the pitifulness is that those statements are complete fantasy, given the date. They were certainly not, in Epstein’s mind, a couple, at that point - nor were they “never apart.”

Whatever the intended purpose of the words, one presumes Maxwell never imagined they’d be turned against her in court.

But then again, one also presumes she never imagined that acting on her father’s maxim - “You do whatever it takes to keep your man” - would see her going to prison for the rest of her life.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/31/ghislaine-maxwells-doomed-love-drove-toxic-tale-abuse-power/

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The new segregation

It began with fear... then coercion and now we live with "soft" apartheid. Everything looks the same but nothing is really what it used to be.

Over the weekend, I attended another freedom rally in my city. The crowd was a large one and there were many young families present. While I was queuing for some food later, I had an extended exchange with a father in his 70s and his adult daughter about the state of things related to Covid. It was a long wait and there was time to go down a few rabbit holes.I was impressed yet again by how well-informed this new fledgling community is. Again I questioned the effectiveness of these gestures of resistance afterwards but I, in part, like to think I'm doing something to draw the line somewhere. Do I have the courage of my convictions to make the effort? At the very least, I can't be party to the official narrative nor should I resign myself with an attitude of despair and passivity.

The next day at church, someone mentioned that they had gone to the same rally and then later on made their way to restaurants nearby for a bite, two of which refused them entry because they didn't have the "right" documentation.

Now that living under segregation has finally sunk in, I've only just begun to see with my own eyes how insidious it is. It isn't just the messaging and the deception. What's really hit home is how the powers-that-be deploy your community (or the people you thought were your community) to apply peer pressure to achieve conformity. First it's the conversations to make you feel your place as "the outsider". Then comes the gaslighting ("conspiracy theories", "misinformation", "we should just follow the experts"). Finally the threat of being ripped apart from one's nearest, dearest and immediate community can be enough to pressure someone into acting against their conscience. The entire process has undoubtedly subtle and incremental. It's come right out of the totalitarian playbook and it's evil.

Whenever I think of how they've managed to split the Christian community over this, I am ashamed. We haven't learnt anything from history.

I observed something similar while watching Terrence Malik's A Hidden Life (a 3 hour long biopic of Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian Catholic farmer who became a conscientious objector during WW2). His entire village turned against him first before he ended up in Tegel Prison experiencing routine beatings by his Nazi captors. There's a startling scene in which the audience is positioned in Jagerstatter's point of view as he's receiving blows from the prison guards and witnessing first-hand the inhuman brutality being meted out. One recoils in horror as if one is the target of the attacks.

Until recently I've generally believed in the efficacy of vaccines. I'm more highly vaccinated than most I imagine because I've made trips to remote areas in third world countries. These days, I'm much more sceptical about vaccines in general just because it's been shoved down our proverbial throats with impunity. As a result I've gone to places and read things I didn't used to. Robert F. Kennedy Jr's book, The Real Anthony Fauci started that ball rolling and since then I've seen information in various places casting doubt on the glorious history of vaccines as a medical miracle.

Incompetence is no longer a sufficient explanation for what's going. It hasn't for a long time. When the levers of power are actively suppressing useful information and narrowly promoting a single therapeutic without concern for real human lives, this can't be chalked up to stupidity or mere mishandling. There has to be something far more sinister at work.

https://thinkspot.com/discourse/VnuLlw/post/urban_lily/life-under-segregation/zntAr2k

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What Governor Abbott Just Did Will Kill Vaccine Mandates Dead!

The old adage, “don’t mess with Texas” still stands true today with what Governor Abbott just did.

The freedom-loving governor just loves to tweak the power-hungry left with his staunch protection of Texans’ rights protected by the constitution. Over the last several months, Abbott has stood in the way of the federal government and their draconian COVID mandates that have been attempting to usurp state rights.

Abbott has NOT been afraid to go toe-to-toe with Joe Biden’s administration and has become a hero among American’s all over our nation.

Just yesterday, Abbott went another step further with protecting the rights of Texans by issuing an executive order stating that no entity in Texas can compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccination by any individual, including an employee or consumer, who objects to such vaccination for any reason of personal conscience, based on a religious belief, or for medical reasons, including prior recovery from COVID-19.

Governor Abbott also sent a message to the Chief Clerk of the House and Secretary of the Senate adding this issue as an item to the Third Special Session agenda. The executive order will be rescinded upon the passage of such legislation.

https://dailyheadlines.net/what-governor-abbott-just-did-will-kill-vaccine-mandates-dead/

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The great purge rolls on

By Bettina Arndt, writing from Australia:

“Like Fresh Meat: Detailing Rampant Sex Harassment in Australia’s Parliament.” This was the lurid headline in the New York Times this week, describing a report into harassment and bullying in Australia’s parliament. “A sweeping report lays out a cloistered, alcohol-fueled environment where powerful men violated boundaries unchecked,” claimed the Times.

Typical biased NYT reporting. And just plain wrong. Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins’ cooked-up survey revealed 61 per cent of the bullying was actually done by women. And there wasn’t that much difference between male and female sexual harassment rates - 42% of victims were women vs 32% men. The vast majority of people (75%) who were sent the survey didn’t bother to respond. Only half of the self-selected people who participated reported experiencing any bullying or harassment, and 1% claimed actual or attempted sexual assault.

As always, there’s blatant fudging of the data. The survey used the broadest possible definition of sexual harassment which included staring, leering and loitering, sexually suggestive jokes/comments and repeated invitations to go on a date. The supposed toxic parliamentary environment covered incidents occurring when people travelled for work or attended after-work drinks – far from the parliamentary workplace. Pretty disappointing to only have a third of people claim harassment after casting such a wide net, eh?

The sexual assault questions include events the participants had “witnessed or heard about” rather than personally experienced. The report quoted an example of a woman claiming an MP “grabbed me and stuck his tongue down my throat.” Unpleasant, unwanted behaviour, indeed. But classic of the new expanded definition of sexual assault being used to create the rape crisis narrative - a long way from Brittany Higgins’ lurid tale of being ravished on the Minister’s couch, which led to Kate Jenkins’ latest boondoggle.

This whole pantomime stemmed from a desperate attempt by Scott Morrison to throw the dogs a bone, after being savaged by the feminist mob stirred up by the Higgins’ story. The media is dutifully promoting Jenkins’ demand that all her 28 recommendations must be accepted in full. We’re talking here about some very big asks, like a new Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission to police sexual misconduct rules. Sound familiar? Oh yes, we’re talking about yet another kangaroo court, with authority to impose sanctions on people deemed to have broken their rules.

And then there’s the new quotas to achieve gender targets amongst parliamentarians, part of a “ten-year strategy to advance gender equality, diversity and inclusion”. The justification for this leap into broader social engineering? The report simply claims lack of diversity contributes to a “boys’ club culture and bullying, sexual harassment and assault.” They mouth the usual feminist mantra and it is taken as gospel.

Now the game continues, with the government considering the recommendations – a process they will try to string out until the forthcoming election. The usual suspects in the media already bleating that nothing is being done and the Opposition will use the lack of action to beat up the government. People everywhere know this is all a lot of hogwash, a desperate attempt from a struggling government to keep the feminist mob at bay.

It reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s famous story of the audience at the Soviet Communist Party conference not daring to be the first person to cease clapping after the speech honouring Stalin. On and on they clapped, fearing that the first to stop would be sent off to the Gulag – which is exactly what happened.

There are sinister echoes in Australia today to the world Solzhenitsyn describes where people don’t dare challenge the ludicrous dogma being promoted by the Party. Endless denunciations and show trials are used to warn of the risks of not siding with the pack. Groupspeak becomes the only safe option.

Look at this headline, used for a news.com.au article this week, reporting on a survey about attitudes towards gender equality in the workplace: “Survey reveals insane thing half of Aussie men believe”.

The “insane thing” that 50% of Australian men believe, is that “reverse discrimination is occurring in the workplace, with women being boosted up the career ladder simply because of their gender.” How’s that for unbiased reporting? All the major media covering the story went to strenuous lengths to belittle men’s experience. They know they must keep clapping.

In The Australian this week, Janet Albrechtsen exposed another stunning example of our forced compliance to false dogma. She wrote about a report from Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, a thriving feminist propaganda unit receiving nearly $6M annual government funding. The Agency has made a submission to a review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 which Albrechtsen suggests provides enough evidence of “misleading and deceptive conduct” to justify the government putting the whole thing out to pasture.

Naturally the Agency’s submission was all about the need to close “the gender pay gap,” which as usual is blamed on men, oppression and discrimination. As Albrechtsen points out, “more honest analysis of the gender pay gap would point to the economic consequence of the aggregate of all the differences that exist between men and women – their physiology, different skills and interests, different choices made about education and jobs, how hard and how long they choose to work and under what conditions.” As Christina Hoff Sommers put it – “Want to close wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering.”

Albrechtsen explains that the only way you can close the gender pay gap is by paying women more than men even though some women have less experience, skills and commitment to the workplace. “That means demanding privilege, not equality for women,” says Albrechtsen. Good to see this lone conservative voice has stopped clapping but the applause from the media for this feminist fabrication rolls on.

The final week of this bumpy year in parliament included a very telling moment where Greens senator Lidia Thorpe was forced to apologise for saying to a female liberal Senator “at least I keep my legs shut.” This was during a Senate debate on disability – apparently Thorpe was suggesting that would have ensured her colleague avoided having a disabled child.

Can you imagine if a man was to make such a remark? But Thorpe’s intersectionality credentials are impeccable, as one of the first Aboriginal women in parliament and a domestic violence survivor. So, her violation of parliamentary boundaries will have no serious consequences.

Then came the show trial. Education Minister Alan Tudge has been stood down from his Cabinet post whilst the latest allegations from his former staffer Rachelle Miller are investigated. Miller is a married mother who acknowledged last November that four years ago she’d had a consensual affair with her boss - after ABC’s Four Corners blew the whistle on their relationship.

Cheered on by the feminist leftists keen to impose maximum damage on the government just prior to the Christmas break, she’s gone public with a new story claiming this was an abusive relationship. Miller says she’d been drinking with Tudge, ended up totally pissed, naked in bed with him, unable to even remember if she’d had sex with him. She claims to have been woken by a phonecall from a breakfast television producer but when she took the call, Tudge yelled at her and kicked her out of his bed.

That a married woman would choose to go public with such a story defies belief. “Has she no shame?” a friend blurted out, a thought which echoes across the nation even as the compliant media runs with her sob story that she suffered a “power imbalance”. No one dares point out to the poor pet that’s what happens when you bonk your boss.

Just as Stalin ultimately came unstuck as his policies proved disastrous, scepticism about the imposed feminist narrative is surely growing every day. We can only hope sanity returns soon.

https://thinkspot.com/discourse/2RuBVn/post/bettina-arndt/the-great-purge-rolls-on/bvZtjy

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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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