Everything the Left disapproves of is "hate"
Which is a superb example of seeing your own faults in others
We in the West are living in a world that more and more lacks any shared moral goalposts. There is no consensus at all on a range of issues from the desirability of quotas based on group identity, to abortion, to who can marry, to the worth of inculcating patriotism in school, to believing in the very notion of merit, to religion, to whether life in today’s West is the best that’s ever been on offer or a repository of the fruits of past evil-doing, all the way over to matters having to do with the need for strong borders and the nation state. Heck, big chunks of today’s population in the West purport not to know what does and doesn’t make someone a woman. The problem here is not just that people divide on all these issues and more. And it’s not just that the divisions seem to cleave countries ever closer to half-on-one-side and half-on-the-other carve ups. And it’s not even that one side on these debates has managed to capture most of the cultural institutions – the national broadcaster, the universities, the teaching profession, the vast preponderance of the legacy media and its journalists, the top public servants, most of the judges and even the upper echelons of the big corporations.
All that is are true, and lamentable. But the bigger problem than all those might be that there are no longer any shared first principles that allow people to debate such issues and try to resolve them. A legal philosopher friend of mine in the US suggests that this is why the language of ‘hate’ has become so pervasive. It’s because the notion of a sort of undefined hate, and of its being a bad thing, is one of the few remaining first principles that virtually all of us sort of accept. So one of the few remaining ways of winning arguments, or at least of keeping those on the other side quiet, is to throw around the charge of hate with gay abandon. (I don’t say most others would put the point exactly in those terms, but hey, I’m old-fashioned in my choice of phrases.)
Here’s the idea. If Jill is against transgender biological males – with all the massive advantages a male puberty, years of testosterone coursing through the body, muscle twitch speed, etc. give them – competing against biological females and ruining women’s sports, well don’t argue with her. Call her a ‘hater’. Or if Jack objects to quotas for good jobs or university places, even under today’s insidious guise of ‘diversity and equity’, well he must be a ‘hater’ too. Ditto anyone who wanted to stop self-styled refugees coming here by boat. And so on.
And wouldn’t you know it? One of the biggest threats to free speech in the West – and by that I mean the free speech of any of us who are not possessed of a progressive, inner-San Francisco set of sensibilities – is Big Tech and its incredible censorship of anyone to the right of, well, them. So if you hold, say, 90 per cent of the views that JFK held, or Bob Hawke held, or even Eleanor Roosevelt held, these Big Tech guys will feel free to censor and cancel you. Ending this pseudo-corporate oversight of speech has to be the biggest goal of any incoming Republican administration and Senate and House after the 2024 election. (And yes, I say this knowing our Prime Minister laughably does not believe free speech ever created a single job and hasn’t quite got his mind around such notions as ‘the presumption of innocence’.)
Now as some people think it is perfectly fine for Twitter to hush up the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and to have cancelled indefinitely the account of former president Trump (and congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene, and writer Alex Berenson, and the Project Veritas organisation, and James O’Keefe, the list goes on and on but only on the right side of politics I assure you) while leaving open those of such upstanding figures as the mullahs in Iran and the despots in China, let me point to a different example. Take the very funny US website Babylon Bee. It’s a conservative Christian site (full disclosure, I’m conservative but also an atheist, albeit one who read the whole King James Bible and loved parts of it). Not only is this site vastly funnier in a day than anything you’ll see or hear on the ABC over a ten-year period, it deals in biting irony and spoofs.
When the USA Today newspaper recently named Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health, the transgender Dr Rachel Levine, as one of its ‘women of the year’, the Babylon Bee the next day named Levine its ‘man of the year’. Funny, right? And if it offends someone, well that’s part and parcel of life in a vibrant democracy. I can attest to being called a lot worse things than that, over many years. But if you’re some San Francisco Big Tech employee this is just too much. Twitter immediately locked the account of Babylon Bee, despite its huge audience. Why? It was hateful said Twitter. Babylon Bee refused to apologise or take down its tweet. It remains banned. When Charlie Kirk noted that Levine spent 54 years of his life as a man and had had a wife and a family that too was deemed hateful and a violation of Twitter rules warranting censorship. When Tucker Carlson pointed out that what Kirk said was 100 per cent true, well, you guessed it. Hateful. Also suspended. This is bonkers, right? These jumped-up sanctimonious little twits on the US West Coast running Big Tech, hipsters who haven’t met a person since high school with political views to the right of Bernie Saunders, are willy-nilly censoring and cancelling people because of legal protections put in place a few decades ago to let the internet expand and grow. These have to be changed. There are plenty of options from amending or repealing Section 230 to forcing old phone company-type ‘common carrier’ rules on them to, well, nationalising them all. (Bad for efficiency and innovation, yes, but then at least the 1st Amendment would apply and the censoring would stop, a net win I think.)
Look, the US Pew Survey last month (and it is no friend to conservatives) found that 3 per cent of Americans sent 90 per cent of tweets. Under 8 per cent of the country is active on Twitter, and these people lean Democrat by a whopping +15 points. Worse, 92 per cent of all tweets were/are sent by 10 per cent of users. These active users lean left or Democrat by an incredible +43 points.
That’s two or three standard deviations to the left of the US’s political median voter, a bit like the crowd that votes for the mayor of Berkeley or the dean of a university’s women’s studies department. That’s the sewer of Twitter; that’s the outlet that scares our idiotic conservative politicians so witless (or more witless I suppose, to be accurate). And if you object to having lefty lunacy rammed down your throat? Apparently you’re a hater my friend. My advice? Embrace the term. Laugh at these morons.
And start fighting back, including by electing those who will.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/morality-through-the-lens-of-hate/
************************************************More on the conservative victory in the Hungarian election
The opposition laid the groundwork for its defeat in the final weeks of its campaign, latching onto claims of gerrymandering and voter fraud as pre-emptive strikes to invalidate its impending loss. The gerrymandering complaint, which says a 2012 redrawing of the electoral map favours Fidesz, would have been a bone of contention if the total number of votes won by the two sides had been remotely similar – but they weren’t. And rage about how a first-past-the-post constituency system, accounting for just over half of the seats in parliament (the rest are allocated via proportional representation) leaves Fidesz with a disproportionately high share of MPs forgets that this is an inevitable result of first-past-the-post. The system favours Fidesz, as the party with the largest and most evenly distributed voter base, in much the same way as it did the Tories in Britain at the last election.
More concerning are allegations of voter fraud, with photos reportedly showing burnt bags of opposition postal votes from Hungarians in Romania sweeping through social media last week. The allegations will need to be investigated, although it should be remembered that Orbán opened up postal voting to ethnic Hungarians in Romania precisely because his long-time championing of their rights means most support him.
Instead of complaining that the game is unfair, perhaps the United Opposition should consider whether the fault for defeat lies with themselves. Coalition partners are already tearing each other to shreds, with the ire rapidly focusing on their leader, Márki-Zay. This is unfair: gaffe-prone he may be, but when I met Márki-Zay last year, I was also impressed by his eloquence and conviction.
As I wrote here in January, the opposition’s biggest problem always lay in the fact that it was united only by hatred for Orbán and presented no positive alternative vision for Hungary. Its only clear policy proposal was ‘loyal’ alignment with the EU in an attempt to ‘restore democracy.’ An inability to see any problems in a pro-democracy movement affirming that there was only one correct democratic choice was depressing to witness.
Yet in the closing weeks of the campaign, the opposition hit on its most disastrous campaigning ploy of all, portraying Orbán’s relative ambivalence over the Ukrainian conflict as evidence of his ‘Putinisation’ of Hungary. Orbán’s feet-dragging on Russian energy sanctions and refusal to send arms to Kyiv led to suggestions that Hungary under his rule is a pro-Kremlin ‘Trojan horse’ in the EU.
The tactic backfired because most Hungarian voters know that although Fidesz manipulates the press to its own ends, Hungary isn’t Russia. Opposition politicians bewail their impression that rural voters ‘only receive government propaganda,’ as though it’s not possible for anyone in Hungary with internet access to find various anti-Fidesz media outlets with a single click online. And Orbán clearly enjoyed the even-greater polarisation brought on by references to Russia and Ukraine, saying in his victory speech that ‘we have never faced so many opponents at the same time,’ listing Brussels bureaucrats, international media, ‘and the Ukrainian president too,’ after president Zelenskyy openly criticised his stance at a recent EU Council meeting.
Messianic messaging about ‘restoring democracy’ and turning away from Russia was a bad choice because Hungarians – like most central Europeans – don’t want to be saved by their politicians. Twentieth-century communism left people in this region deeply suspicious of utopian political ideals. Most don’t want a socialist utopia, or a utopia of ‘European values’: they want pragmatism, positivity, and respect for tradition. Fidesz offers these by the bucketload. The United Opposition offered confusion, negativity, and a desire to sacrifice traditional social policies on the altar of EU liberalism. As long as it continues to do so, Orbán will keep winning.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/why-viktor-orban-keeps-winning/
******************************************************Trans rights extremists destroyed my career, friendships and marriage — but I will never give in
Multi-BAFTA-winning writer Graham Linehan can barely hold himself together. He tells me he hardly slept last night.
There are times he has 'howled in pain' and times he has 'raged'. Mostly, though, the genius behind the comedy series Father Ted and The IT Crowd is, he says, 'befuddled'.
For Graham, a vocal defender of women's rights, has lost everything he holds dear in life because he dared to challenge a 'subculture' of trans activists over the 'insane' (his word) belief that a person with a penis can be a woman.
He began to share his views with his 800,000 Twitter followers five years ago and the fury of the Left rained down on him.
Today his marriage is over, his once glittering career has been laid low and he is, as he says, 'thoroughly cancelled'.
Graham is giving his first interview about what he has endured in the same week a brave group of women's rights campaigners launched what they call 'the most significant female movement since the Suffragettes'.
In mobilising voters to quiz politicians about their stance on women's rights with the slogan 'Respect My Sex if you want my X', they are determined to put a simple and very direct question to our elected representatives: 'Can a woman have a penis?'
Indeed, such is the toxic nature of this febrile transgender debate, few want to be drawn into it, including Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who this week refused to say if a woman can have a penis as he floundered during a trans rights debate on LBC radio.
'It's mad,' says Graham. 'Politicians can't answer simple questions because these people [trans activists] have persuaded them it's complicated and difficult. It's not. All you have to do is stick to the principles we all know: the birds and the bees.
'People are terrified of getting into the debate, terrified of saying something wrong. If you disagree with them — if you say it denies biology or that it [the right to self-identify] is a gift to sex offenders and conmen who are able to completely erase any mention of who they previously were — they will try to destroy you.
'I'm not talking about trans people. I'm talking about trans rights activists. They tried to destroy me. They have taken everything from me.
'They took my family, my ability to earn a living. I haven't considered suicide but that's what I believe they want me to do.
'You know, I'm so cancelled that there were two shows called Cancelled and I wasn't asked to appear on either of them.'
Graham attempts humour but there is nothing funny about what has happened to this decent man.
During the five-year campaign waged against him, Graham, 54, has been condemned as a bigot, accused of harassment and Twitter has shut down his account. He has been reported to the police on three occasions.
Officers have turned up at his home twice. Family members have been attacked by trolls. His wife of 18 years, Helen, with whom he created the hugely popular comedy series Motherland, was threatened and her address released online. They separated during lockdown.
'It puts you under so much stress that you don't have room for anything else in your life. You don't have room for love or anything like that.
'You're just under attack all the time. I was f*****g bullied and beaten for years. I've been smeared by Pink News, The Independent and The Guardian — none of whom have ever asked for an interview, by the way.'
On one occasion, two years ago, after trans activist Dr Adrian Harrop accused Graham of transphobia, Graham and Helen awoke to find police at the door.
Dr Harrop has recently been suspended by the General Medical Council for sending offensive tweets to some of those who challenge transgender ideology online.
'We were lying in bed on a Sunday morning. I opened the door and let the policeman in. I said, "This is the guy who abuses women online. He threatens them and he's using you to intimidate me." The policeman shook hands and went off.
'My wife and kids were still in the bedroom. I just shook it off but my wife was incredibly upset. She was horrified the police had come to her house. It was confusing for her — and is for anyone close to victims — because she just didn't know if I was doing anything wrong.'
A week ago, Graham moved from a rented 'box' into the modest two-bedroom flat in Norwich where we meet after finally accepting that his 18-year marriage is over. There are photographs of his children on the wall but little else.
He used to live in a house filled with the stuff of family life, in the days when his comedies earned him a small fortune each year and he thought the good times 'were going to last for ever'.
'Basically what happened with my wife is I wouldn't shut up,' he says. 'They couldn't shut me up. I refused. I thought 'this is too important'. We're talking about women's rights.
'So they started going for her. They released her address online. They tried to get her animated children's series taken out of an animation festival in Ireland.
'They just turned their attention to her and, you know, it's frightening. The stress has its effect. You're losing opportunities, losing work, losing commissions, losing friends.'
He was once firm showbusiness friends with Matt Lucas and David Walliams — but not any more. Executives at leading production companies who used to fall over themselves to wine and dine him in London's swankiest restaurants won't so much as take his calls.
Then, earlier this year, he was offered £200,000 to 'walk away' from Father Ted The Musical by Hat Trick Productions, which produced the comedy series.
'It was going great. Neil Hannon [the Irish singer songwriter] has written some brilliant songs. We'd rehearsed it twice. Then they're saying I have to walk away from it and offering me £200,000.
'I was really close to taking it because I could use the money, but they're saying I can't even have any creative involvement. I can't even go to rehearsals. What the **** is going on?
'These people, I thought, were my friends. They were saying they won't be able to get financiers for it unless I step away. I don't think that's true. I think the truth is that, like every other company, they are being ordered about by their under-35s who all seem to believe this s**t.
'I've been called a bigot for years and no one stood up for me. Not Matt Lucas or David Walliams, who I made very famous. I directed the Little Britain pilot and they only got the meeting at the BBC because of me. Neither of them has had the guts to say "I know Graham Linehan and he's not a bigot".'
A few weeks ago, Graham heard the mother of one of the swimmers competing against Lia Thomas — who identifies as a woman but is a biological male — talking about how her daughter had said she didn't know what she was allowed to do if Lia came into the dressing room.
'She was in tears, saying she had to explain to her that she didn't have to put up with anything like that. She couldn't believe she had to have that conversation with her daughter in 2022.
'I heard that and thought, '**** it. I'm not walking away. This has nothing to do with my toxicity and getting people to fund the show, it's about women's rights. There's a huge failure of the celebrity class. If only one or two big names said something, it would change the whole debate. They're cowards. Despicable cowards.'
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Biden’s Regulatory Blitz a Massive Tax, Especially Harming Seniors and Low-Income Americans
Public attention is understandably focused these days on the inflationary effects of massive government spending, which has increased the national debt by $7 trillion in the past two years. No less dire are the repercussions of the Biden administration’s radical regulatory agenda.
The president’s 2022 regulatory to-do list includes 2,678 “active” actions, which exceeds by 35% the number of rule-makings in the Trump administration’s second-year agenda.
Some 200 of the regulations are designated as “economically significant”—i.e., regulations that are each expected to have an annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more. These include more stringent standards on the “housing environment” of chickens, rear seat belt reminder systems, and the use of “healthy” on food labels, as well as new restrictions on medical insurance options.
None of more than 450 federal agencies track regulatory costs either cumulatively or in the aggregate. The most widely cited estimate pegs the annual private sector cost of compliance as exceeding $2 trillion.
Just the paperwork burden of red tape currently totals 10.6 billion hours annually. This bureaucrat-driven paper shuffling costs taxpayers nearly $80 billion annually—up from $25 billion in 2000.
Despite their enormous costs, few, if any, of the thousands of looming rules are necessary or beneficial. For example, the Biden agenda is brimming with global warming dictates that will have absolutely no effect on climate. Just this week, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed requirements for publicly owned companies to disclose purely speculative “climate risks.”
Also in the works are more than 100 other regulations governing the design and functioning of appliances. Household items that will be affected include refrigerators and freezers; clothes washers and dryers; furnaces and boilers; ceiling fans; pool pumps and heaters; air compressors; light bulbs; water heaters; dishwashers; battery chargers; televisions; ice makers; air conditioners; dehumidifiers; electric motors; pre-rinse spray valves; and air cleaners.
The Biden administration is dedicated to canceling the commonsense regulatory reforms instituted by former President Donald Trump, who reduced the volume of new regulations by 74.9% compared to the Obama administration (within the same period).
Among President Joe Biden’s targets: Trump’s long-overdue modernization of permitting procedures. Undoing that would drive up the costs of repairing the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, and railways.
Dozens of the Biden regulations will encroach on state and local affairs, including how Americans fuel our cars and heat our homes, educate our children, zone our communities, and construct our roads. The feds are even prescribing qualifications of state employees who provide services to farmworkers and the criteria for evaluating career training programs.
Such excessive federal interference inhibits policy competition among states and subordinates the relative transparency and accountability of state- and local-level regulation. It also impedes the ability of both citizens and businesses to escape flawed policies by crossing state borders.
In introducing its regulatory plan, the White House boasted that federal agencies will “build on significant progress the administration has already made advancing our priorities and proving that our government can deliver results.” But this conceit about the federal government’s efficacy and beneficence is deeply misguided.
Regulations shift labor and capital away from innovation and job creation to compliance activities, including the purchase of equipment, process and product reengineering, retraining, and loads of legal advice. There are also indirect costs such as deferred research and development, heightened barriers to competition, and diminished job creation.
While a burden for all, regulatory overreach harms low-income families and fixed-income seniors the most. The billions of dollars in compliance costs translate to higher consumer prices that exhaust a relatively larger share of their household budgets.
Biden’s expansive regulatory agenda represents a massive tax. It is the worst course possible at any time—but particularly now, when regulatory escalation will exacerbate runaway inflation and inhibit recovery from the COVID-19 lockdown.
More broadly, this unconstrained federal power grab is antithetical to the limited government of America’s founding, its constitutional framework, and its republican ideals.
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Faulty domestic violence messaging: Australian study
Focusing on attitudes to women misses other factors leading to abusive behaviour. The abusers tend to be men who are violent offenders generally. So precise targeting is pointless. Violent behaviour in general needs to be targeted. And the only way of doing that is by heavy penalties -- mostly in the form of long and onerous prison sentences. About a third of ex-prisoners do learn from it and cease to offend
New research published in international journal Homicide Studies suggests there could be little difference between men who murder their partners and other killers.
But policymakers continue to place emphasis on behaviours and circumstances that “may not be as important as we think”, the study found.
Men who kill their female partners have long believed to be fuelled by gender factors like “power and control” and “entitlement”.
However, the report’s co-author Dr Samara McPhedran said socio-economic factors, upbringing and education played just as great a role — and were too often overlooked.
“Attitudes [towards women] are important; but have we reached a point in policymaking that we are so focused on addressing men’s attitudes to women that we are overlooking all these other factors that occur alongside that?” Dr McPhedran said.
The study — designed to get to the nub of Australia’s shocking domestic violence epidemic which sees a woman slain by her partner each week — used data from the Australian Homicide Project that interviewed more than 250 men convicted of murder or manslaughter.
She said traumatic experiences in childhood, including abuse and neglect, a lack of education, socio-economic differences were just as prominent.
“All these factors are very well known to contribute to homicide and are present with intimate partner homicides as other forms of homicide,” she said.
“When you look at the dialogue that’s been unfolding around intimate partner homicide, it has become very much focused around things like coercive control. And that’s important because, yes, coercive control is a part of this, but not to the exclusion of everything else. We were really surprised with the results that we got. And particularly what surprised us was just how similar in attitudes the different groups of men were.”
Dr McPhedran said the study findings should prompt an urgent education rethink.
“Have we focused too heavily on one set of responses at the expense of others? Because what our work is really suggesting is there is no one theory of men killing people that’s going to fit everyone. There’s no theory of men’s violence against women that’s superior,” she said.
Dr McPhedran said there was a danger of Australians dying who could have been saved.
“We want to maximise our chance of reducing violence or preventing homicide against women,” Dr McPhedran said.
Chief executive of Full Stop Australia Hayley Foster said there were a lot of generalised offenders who were responsible for “high repeat” incidents.
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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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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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