The religion of peace at work
What a misnomer for Islam! As we see below. Their inability to get on well with women shows what pathetic creatures these barbarians are. Women give Western men problems too but almost always we at least live with them if we don't adapt to them. I am at present in a relationship with a woman from a totally different culture from mine but it is a warm relationship because we are big enough to tolerate our differences and enjoy what we have in common
A shocking video has shown an Iranian man grinning as he walked through the streets clutching the severed head of his 17-year-old wife, after he allegedly decapitated her in an “honour killing,” the New York Post reports.
The gruesome footage shows Sajjad Heydari strolling through a neighbourhood in Ahvaz, a city in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, on Saturday with Mona Heydari’s head in one hand and a blade in the other, East2West News reported.
Mona, who was also Sajjad’s cousin, had been forced to marry him when she was just 12 years old, according to the Women’s Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
She reportedly suffered domestic abuse but was pressured to stay in the marriage for the sake of their three-year-old son.
Mona did manage to escape to Turkey, but her family brought her back, Iran International reported.
A few days later, Sajjad and his brother allegedly tied her hands and decapitated her. Her body was dumped before her husband was seen walking through the streets holding her severed head.
A police official said the motive for the murder was “family differences”.
The two men have reportedly been arrested, but it was unclear what punishment they are likely to face.
Abbas Hosseini-Pouya, prosecutor general of Ahvaz, the provincial capital of Khuzestan, said Mona had sent photos of herself to her husband from Turkey that had fuelled his “negative emotions,” according to Iran International.
The Women’s Committee said that “not a week goes by without some form of honour killing making headlines.
The regime’s failure to criminalise these murders has led to a catastrophic rise in honour killings.
“In a report published in 2019, the state-run Sharq daily newspaper wrote that an annual average of 375 to 450 honour killings are recorded in Iran,” the resistance council said.
“The catastrophic rise in honour killings in Iran is rooted in misogyny and the patriarchal culture institutionalised in the laws and society,” the group continued.
“Although the father, brother or husband holds the knife, sickle or rifle, the murders are rooted in the medieval outlook of the ruling regime.
“The clerical regime’s laws officially denote that women are second-degree citizens owned by men,” it said.
Meanwhile, the state-run news agency Rokna was reportedly shut down after it published the shocking video.
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On Collectivism
Les Bates
Many of the things taught to American children are simply wrong. American children are taught to fear firearms.
This is simply wrong.
American children are taught the doctrine of Collectivism.
This is simply wrong.
The doctrine of Collectivism has been shown to be wrong over and over again. In all forms of the doctrine of Collectivism an Individual is a form of property and may be used as such. All forms of the doctrine of Collectivism justify the use of coercion. I once attended a folk music concert held at the Cedar Art Center. The Cedar Art Center was built in the closed single screen Cedar Theater. One thing I remember was that the snack bar was proudly serving Nicaraguan coffee. At the time the nation of Nicaragua was under the rule of Collectivist Sandinista Regime. In effect the production of the coffee required the use of coercion to produce.
American children are also taught that right is wrong and that A is non-A.
This is clearly wrong.
The SS-Totenverbande believed they were the good guys with their victims and opponents being evil.
This was clearly wrong.
We’re seeing the same phenomena. Collectivist groups such as Anti-FA and BLM believe they’re the good people. They believe that their victims and opponents are evil. The fact is that Collectivist groups like Anti-Fa and BLM are evil.
https://otherles.livejournal.com/2022/02/08/
******************************************Top US economist Larry Summers hits back at MMT
Larry Summers, one of America’s top economists, has blasted Modern Monetary Theory as the US braces for another month of record inflation and debate heats up over the controversial idea governments shouldn’t worry about budget deficits and soaring debt.
Stephanie Kelton, the queen of Modern Monetary Theory, whose book The Deficit Myth shot to the bestseller lists worldwide in 2020, said on Monday MMT had “obviously proven correct”, in the midst of the biggest US inflationary spike in 40 years that critics say arose from excessive deficit spending.
“It’s big claim was that massive deficits would not lead to runaway interest [rates] via bond vigilantes or insolvency. Huge win,” she said on Twitter, prompting a barrage of criticism and support.
Mr Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary in the 1990s and former President of Harvard University, hit back, calling the idea the equivalent of “fad diets, quack cancer cures or creationist theories”.
“I am sorry to see the New York Times taking MMT seriously as an intellectual movement,” he added, referring to a recent article in the New York-based journal about Kelton’s ideas titled “Is this What Winning Looks Like?”
MMT, which has been derided by central bankers including Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe and former Bank of England governor Mervyn King, posits that governments can and should spend without limit using newly created central bank money until economies reach full employment.
It’s had a frosty reception from traditional economists. “Modern monetary theory has a record of failure that only left-wing intellectuals, politicians, or journalists could be bamboozled by,” Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University, told The Australian.
High inflation, which reached 7 per cent in 2021 after hovering above 5 per cent for 9 months in a row, has become Americans’ number one economic worry, according to surveys, and a political headache for the Biden administration, which has blamed pandemic “bottlenecks” and profiteering by big companies.
In a series of stimulus packages, the Trump and Biden administrations spent US$5.1 trillion on largely cash handouts to families since March 2020 from funds created by the Federal Reserve, whose balance sheet has more than quadrupled since the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2009, to almost US$9 trillion.
“It would be valuable for the Senators to verify that Fed nominees are not in the thrall of MMT,” Mr Summers said, referring to Joe Biden’s as yet unconfirmed three nominees for the Federal Reserve Board, including Lisa Cook who will make history as the first black member of the powerful interest rate setting committee.
Economists expect annual consumer price inflation to rise to a new high of 7.3 per cent in January, including “core inflation, which strips out volatile energy and food items, of 5.9 per cent, a level that would be highest since the early 1990s.
The US jobless rate dropped to 4 per cent in January, almost back to where it was in January 2020, following a year of record jobs creation as pandemic restrictions eased. American wages grew 4 per cent in 2021, the fastest pace in two decades, fuelling concerns the economy, pumped with record stimulus was overheating.
“Macro policies that push demand well past the economy’s capacity, do not just lead to inflation but rather to increasing inflation,” Mr Summers said. “Super tight inflationary labour markets like the ones we have now are like driving 100 mph. Great while it lasts, but imprudent and dangerous”.
Andrew Luboski, a bond trader in New York for Citi, suggested it was too quick to condemn MMT, pointing out 10 year US government bond yields, currently around 1.9 per cent, were still at “historically low levels despite huge levels of government spending”.
“The picture is likely to become complicated as the Fed starts to unwind its balance sheet via Quantitative Tightening, as well as if inflation doesn’t fall quickly”.
The Federal Reserve, which slashed the federal funds rate to zero almost two years ago to bolter an economy crippled by government lockdowns, is set to embark on up to seven interest rates increases this year, according to some analysts, to bring inflation back to the central bank’s 2 per cent target.
“For whatever reason, when it comes to MMT, people will literally just make stuff up,” Ms Kelton tweeted, dismissing criticism that a core tenet of MMT – that politicians should raise taxes to snuff out inflation – was politically naive.
Record and rising inflation isn’t solely a US phenomenon. The Bank of England lifted its benchmark interest rates to 0.5 per cent in December for the second time in a row, predicting consumer price inflation, 5.4 per cent over the year to December, would rise above 7 per cent this year.
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Why This Feminist Is Taking the University of Bristol to Court
Raquel Rosario Sánchez
Next week, I am taking my university to court. To my knowledge, it is the first time an academic institution has been forced, at trial, to justify why it prioritises trans rights over women’s rights. The other party in the case is the University of Bristol, which one might suppose to be an unlikely defendant given its distinction as the first higher-education establishment in England to have admitted women on an equal basis to men. Unfortunately, the university has more recently become known as a hotbed for anti-feminist militancy.
The university’s Victoria Rooms once served as ground zero for suffragettes in the city of Bristol, and in the larger southwest area of England surrounding it. Beginning in 1908, the Women’s Social and Political Union branch of the suffrage movement would host its meetings on campus. The University also hosted leading lights of the British feminist movement, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, her daughter Christabel Pankhurst, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.
All of this history will provide an ironic backdrop to next week’s legal proceedings, in which the university stands accused of sex discrimination and negligence for failing to protect a feminist scholar. I will argue that the University of Bristol has engineered a number of practices and policies that prioritise the demands of trans activists over women’s legal rights. This institution-wide pattern, I allege, includes a failure to properly investigate complaints of bullying, harassment and intimidation committed by trans activists on campus, even while targeting feminists who defend sex-based rights, such as myself.
My ordeal began with an action so benign that is seems laughable. I agreed to chair a meeting held by the campaigning organisation Woman’s Place UK, which featured a discussion of proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004, a UK law. These changes would have allowed any person’s biological sex to be trumped, without any checks, delays, or safeguards, by their own gendered self-identification. Woman’s Place UK’s concern over such amendments is rooted in its mission, which is to ensure the availability of “reserved places, separate spaces and distinct services” on the basis of biological sex.
My participation should have been entirely unremarkable, as Gender Studies have been my academic field for the past decade—right up to my PhD work at the University of Bristol’s Centre for Gender and Violence Research. Outside of academia, all my professional experience has been in the women’s sector, mostly working in shelters and refuges for women and children escaping male violence. People shouldn’t need this level of experience to voice an opinion on the sex-and-gender debate. But to the extent the question was, “Is she qualified to speak on this?,” then I don’t think the answer was in much doubt.
But the radicalized activists who denounced me don’t seem to care much about facts. The moment that details of the meeting were announced in late January 2018, I was denounced as a TERF (a term of abuse that signifies “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”). In response, I filed a complaint with the university on February 1, 2018, as I believed that the school’s stated anti-harassment policies were clearly on my side. But university officials dragged their feet on my case for the next two years and, in late 2019, dismissed it entirely. I was invited to leave the university and my PhD programme.
When we go to court next week, I expect that university lawyers will argue that the school did nothing wrong, and that any impact the bullying and harassment had on my health and academic studies were my own fault because I am, as they see it, a deficient student who is being dishonest about her state of health. My legal team will argue otherwise.
Anyone who has followed this issue will know that I am hardly the first female academic to be bullied in this way. In the UK, women’s legal rights remain rooted in sex, not self-declared “gender identity,” and sex is considered a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. This means that single-sex services, facilities, and spaces are legally permitted, even if they exclude biological men who demand full treatment as women. Yet many institutions—including, apparently, the University of Bristol—believe that they may put these laws to one side as a matter of political expediency, so that they may appease a tiny, but often aggressive, constituency.
Consider the “women-only gym sessions” that the University of Bristol launched in April 2021. In the press statement introducing this policy, the school declared:
In 2019, our two-hour female-only #ThisGirlCan ‘gym takeover’ was attended by 230 students. Feedback from session attendees identified that the women-only environment provided a “safe” and a “non-judgmental” space for women, with many reporting feeling “intimidated” when using the gym at other times. It has also been acknowledged that members of our #WeAreBristol community, for religious and cultural reasons, require a women-only space for exercise.
In fact, these gym sessions weren’t restricted to females, but rather were open to anyone who announces, with no further elaboration, that they “self-identify” as female. And so while female students who attend the sessions may believe they will be entering a female-only space, that’s not what they may find on any given day. It’s an insult to women who desire safety, privacy, and dignity.
Another protected characteristic under the Equality Act is “pregnancy and maternity.” But ideological puritans staffing the university’s Diversity and Inclusion office have sought to erase virtually any term that communicates the reality of female biology. I know this because I have been contacted by several female employees facing career implosion after they expressed support of sex-based rights, including one who’s responsible for writing family policies for staff members. She had already been pressured to remove all references to words such as “woman,” “she,” and “her” from the maternity policy. But over time, she was instructed that even this was not enough. According to this whistle-blower:
In a recent meeting, the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion team required further changes. Among other things, they were arguing that the word “maternity” itself is exclusionary and problematic. In the meeting, I stated, “you have to have a uterus to give birth.” I said it worried me that the word “maternity” is deemed problematic in a maternity policy. I said we had a duty to consider the needs and rights of women accessing the policy, and not only the transgender community. As a result, a written complaint was made to the senior HR team accusing me of transphobia and abuse.
As ridiculous as this may sound, she was in fact investigated, and forced to apologize for standing up for the reality of human biology, and for the letter of UK law as it now stands.
In some ways, British feminists are more fortunate than their counterparts in other countries, because the backlash against hardcore gender ideologues began earlier in this country. The public has started paying attention to battles that once played out only in college classrooms and gender clinics. And in almost every part of the UK, it seems, the tenets of gender orthodoxy (not to mention the unsettling strongarm tactics used to advance them) have been shown to be at odds with public opinion. Several figures within this resistance movement have now become well-known figures, including former University of Sussex philosopher Kathleen Stock, writer Helen Joyce, litigant Keira Bell, and educator Debbie Hayton. And so, even as I have been bullied and isolated at my university, I have been able to find kindred spirits who could offer support and brainstorm about the best way to fight back at gender radicalism on campus.
These include Nicole Jones, co-founder of the youth-led XX Feminist Network, whose members believe that “freedom of assembly, association, opinion and expression are fundamental principles of women’s liberation.” Like many young women at university, she became baffled by the disconnect between the postmodernist-infused theories presented to our generation as feminism and what she knew to be day-to-day material reality. Nicole told me:
I first became aware of this issue through reading second-wave [feminist] texts, and finding mainstream feminism to be increasingly in conflict with the materialist analysis of women as a sex class. I was then alarmed to see the women attempting to address the questions raised by this conflict being aggressively silenced and smeared. Intelligent, thoughtful, and evidence-based contributions to the discussion were being shut down in favour of meaningless mantras and ideological conformity.
Nicole knows first-hand what it feels like to want to escape your female body as you’re overwhelmed by the pressure associated with feminine expectations. But sharing these feelings earned her no sympathy from trans activists. Just the opposite:
The worst aspect has probably been the social isolation. I have been threatened, refused service, and subjected to dehumanising comments, all on the basis of my feminist beliefs. I found that the solution to this treatment has been to withdraw and keep to myself, but this has taken an intense personal toll and impacted my university experience. I’m an art student and find myself avoiding speaking to peers, participating in group shows, and fearful to make contributions in class…I’m careful to avoid situations where there might be conflict. But this has meant lost friendships, networks, and opportunities. The silence from the art world on these issues has meant that these opportunities now only seem to exist outside of what I originally intended to do with my life. When you’re young and at the start of your career, there is less that can immediately be taken from you, as you have yet to build what the backlash might seek to destroy. Instead, it feels like a series of doors closing.
But rather than sulk and cry, Nicole began organising on a grassroots level, co-creating a national network for female students concerned about the takeover of gender-identity theory in academia. “Stop waiting for permission to challenge the new orthodoxy,” she told me. “It won’t come. [But] organising with the XX Feminist Network has shown me that the so-called ‘generational divide’ is a myth: plenty of young people share these concerns, and are willing to have these conversations. We just need to create the space for them.”
Although the majority of people advocating for sex-based rights are female, there are some male academics in this fight as well. And things can be similarly grim for them as well. At the University of Oxford, Michael Biggs, a sociology professor, has found himself at the centre of controversy for expressing opinions critical of gender identity, including such basic propositions as the idea that one “can’t actually change from a boy to a girl.”
https://quillette.com/2022/02/06/why-im-taking-the-university-of-bristol-to-court/
****************************************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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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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