Amnesty International UK is ‘colonialist and institutionally racist’, damning inquiry concludes
Many years ago I joined Amnesty because of the work they did helping victims of dictatorships. When I saw instances of anti-semitism among them, I resigned, however. And that was a long way back -- maybe 40years
Amnesty International UK is “institutionally racist”, “colonialist” and faces bullying problems within its own ranks, a damning inquiry has concluded.
Initial findings of Global HPO’s independent inquiry into the charity were published in April but now the scale of the organisation’s issues with race have been laid bare in their final report.
Released to Amnesty staff members on Thursday, the 106-page document explains that equality, inclusion and anti-racism are “not embedded into the DNA” of the organisation.
“White saviour”, “colonialist”, “middle class” and “privileged” were among the words most used during the testimony and focus groups to discuss Amnesty.
Diversity was also found to be a major problem within the charity itself, with white applicants more likely to be appointed to roles within the charity than all other groups – and black people least likely to be given a job.
Examples of racist incidents that left black and Asian staff uncomfortable include:
Being regularly mistaken for other colleagues with similar skin tone
Negative comments about fasting during Ramadan
Treating black skin, hair and appearance as matters of fascination and touching hair without consent
Rude comments about minority celebrities, politicians or events
“Our view is that ‘white saviour, middle class and privileged’ is a perception that forms an important part of the AIUK narrative about its history and legacy,” the inquiry found.
“A perception that has not been addressed and as such manifests in the negative cultural paradigm of exclusion and racism at AIUK. There is a need for the impact of this legacy to be acknowledged and addressed as part of the transition to becoming anti-racist.”
Recommendations for improvement include refraining from collating diversity data into one homogeneous black, Asian and minority ethnic (Bame) group and providing training to improve equality monitoring.
“Dysfunctional internal activism” – in which staff view anti-racism and fair treatment as “unwinnable” endeavours – also needs to be addressed, the report adds.
Particular attention should paid to the employment and retention of black African and black Caribbean staff at AIUK , the inquiry ruled, as these groups fare the worst within the charity.
Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said: “It is critical in the change that we need to make at Amnesty UK that we acknowledge that this report makes abundantly clear the scale of the transformation we must make to change lots about Amnesty UK as a place to work.
“GHPO have helped us to identify where we must make changes and we will not shy away from this work, especially as it is clear it is long overdue.
“I am glad that the inquiry team have recognised that some improvements have started here in the last year, but that doesn’t in any way diminish the seriousness of the findings nor should it make us at all complacent about the task ahead of us.
“But I do believe that with a transformation we can make Amnesty UK an example of a cause-driven organisation with an excellent working environment and culture for all colleagues.
“That should be our goal, and it is our duty not just to our colleagues but to our hundreds of thousands of supporters that we deliver it.”
The independent inquiry conducted by Global HPO was commissioned by a joint group drawn from different parts of Amnesty UK, including the Section Board, Amnesty activists, the staff trade union shop, management and former staff, in October 2021.
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Liz Cheney and Jan. 6 Committee Demonstrate How Hate Makes You Stupid
Hate is a dangerous emotion for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it interferes with, often even destroys, your ability to think rationally. It can turn your personality inside out to such a degree you will spend your life regretting what you did.
And it all will have been for nothing.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo., for now) is an object lesson. Cheney comes from a rich conservative tradition. Her mother Lynne wrote an estimable biography of James Madison. Early in her career, Liz herself consistently voted for and advocated for conservative causes.
Then, along came Mr. Hate.
The instigator: Donald Trump said mean things about her father, blaming him for the Iraq War. I will admit that Trump’s statements were a tad excessive since Dick Cheney, although clearly a key player, was far from alone in supporting that ill-conceived war. An extraordinary percentage did, including most of Washington, the pundit class (yours truly included), and, on occasion, Trump himself.
We were hoping the war would turn Iraq into Denmark. We couldn’t have been more wrong. Trump used that as a lynchpin in his 2016 campaign, attacking Dick Cheney, among others, but Liz reacted to Trump with a level of hate out of all proportion to the situation. A political campaign was underway, the likes of which she had participated in since childhood, and like it or not, insults were part of Trump’s political style. The businessman had insulted all sorts of people, many of whom (like Sens. Rubio and Cruz) now play ball with him on a regular basis.
Not Liz. She made an alliance with people whose views she considered anathema for all of her previous life just to get Trump. It was hate taken to the nth power.
As it turns out, those people she made an alliance with—the Jan. 6 Committee of Democratic Reps. Bennie Thompson, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Zoe Lofgren, and so forth—themselves also permeated with the most obvious hate— have failed miserably at their endeavor and now have abruptly postponed their third Show Trial telecast. The previous telecasts were a ratings disaster and, in some cases, they got caught lying. (“Adam Schiff lie?” Mon Dieu!)
Further, if you believe that eventually, the truth comes out, and I do (mostly), sooner or later the supposed “insurrection” of Jan. 6 will be seen by a majority of our citizens as an FBI put-up job. Many do already.
Liz Cheney, whether she knows it or not, is headed for oblivion after the Wyoming Republican primary. She has no real political friends—does she think the likes of Raskin will support her after this is over? He’s politically closer to Pol Pot. And as of this moment, it looks as if Trump will still be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024 with a good chance of victory. Everything Liz did was for naught.
Still, the politics of hate is hard to resist. It is for people on both sides. I am often prey to it myself. When I watch MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow or CNN’s Brian Stelter on television, I want to tear my hair out—only I don’t have any.
But this is no way to create change. The lesson of the Jan. 6 Committee—built on hate—was that it hasn’t moved the needle at all. The public—smarter than the politicians—is inured to this nonsense. With inflation running at a reported 8.6 percent (probably well in excess of that), the stock market and people’s retirement in free fall, more illegals coming across the border in our history, bringing with them unheard-of levels of crime from human trafficking to massive amounts of death-dealing fentanyl, not to mention the appalling violence in all our big cities, who could be interested in the self-serving mouthing of these political hacks?
One other thing about the Jan. 6 Committee. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but what I think I saw was fear in their eyes. Somewhere, not so deep down, they all knew they were being fundamentally dishonest. They saw what was going on in our society, how things are falling apart at a rapid clip under the worst administration of all time. Unless they are extraordinarily willfully blind, it’s hard to miss.
At some point, it’s time to pick up your marbles and go home. Onward to November.
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More than half of Britons want trans women BANNED from female sports, poll reveals
Transgender women should not be allowed to compete in female-only sports, 57 per cent of respondents to a new poll have said.
The majority of Britons surveyed felt transitioned females are 'giving the other competitors a physical disadvantage'.
But every group questioned wanted there to be a way that trans women could be able to compete in the sport they loved.
Most raised the idea of having a separate or mixed category for trans athletes to take part in.
The controversial topic - magnified by cancel culture and social media storms - was examined by think tank More In Common.
Its survey of more than 5,000 people and 20 focus groups featured partly anonymised comments from those quizzed.
Lara, 38 from Pitney said: 'No one's saying they're not female in sports. It's just, they're saying that they're giving the other competitors a physical disadvantage. I don't think it's that they're being categorised as a male. It's just that physically they'd smash the shit out of the other side. It would be so unfair.'
Ian, 61, from Glasgow added: 'People can pick and choose their gender nowadays, or what and do what they want and dress as they want. That's absolutely fine.
'But when it comes to competitive sport, just looking at her, you get a substantial advantage with her build or strength. So she shouldn't be competing against genetic females. I just don't think it's... I don't think it's right.'
Only 19 per cent supported allowing trans athletes in women's sport.
It comes the week after as a fresh transgender row broke out after trans cyclist Emily Bridges laughed off claims she has a competitive advantage over biological women.
In a series of tweets, British Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies said Bridges is 'not a woman', called her inclusion in women's sports 'unfair' and claimed that she would be banned from competing if she had 'as much testosterone in my system as Emily Bridges is allowed'.
The former GB swimmer also posted: 'Emily Bridges has never been barred from sport or ever will be. EB was competing last year & earlier this year successfully in the men's category. Inclusion is being able to compete, its not getting an unfair advantage'.
And she added: 'If we get to the point where we can't talk facts because it might hurt someone's feeling where the hell is this going to lead us? How can we measure feelings? Why is one persons feelings more important than another persons feelings? See… feelings cannot be a measurement of truth.'
In March Labour leader Keir Starmer refused to say if a woman can have a penis during a debate about trans rights.
Starmer, appearing LBC radio for his regular phone-in, was asked about trans athletes and the success of Lia Thomas, a trans woman who won the 500-yard freestyle title at the women's NCAA championships.
The victory has sparked a debate around trans athletes taking part in competitive sport, with critics claiming they may have an advantage over other participants.
But Starmer said it is for 'sporting bodies to decide for themselves' who can and cannot be included in events.
Asked if a woman can have a penis, Starmer said: 'I'm not... I don't think we can conduct this debate with... I don't think that discussing this issue in this way helps anyone in the long run.'
Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury, has also told the BBC that her party still had a 'confused' position over the transgender debate.
She came under fire for her opposition to 'male-bodied biological men' being allowed to self-identify as female in order to access women-only spaces such as prisons and domestic violence refuges.
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The Selfish Californian
We hear plenty of reasons for the perfect storm that imploded California. One-party, progressive government, of course. Decades of unchecked illegal immigration, without doubt. Years of mass flight out of state of the productive middle classes, certainly.
But perhaps the most important, but overlooked, reason has been the infusion of trillions of dollars of mostly tech capital into the state. Unimaginable sums of market capital warped politics and led to a top-down, feudal society, run by progressive elites who are shielded from the ramifications of their own toxic ideologies.
More specifically, the common denominator was the emergence in California of a selfish, monied, left-wing political class. In concrete terms, it cared little for others but masked that unconcern with abstract leftism, emulating medieval penance and indulgences to assuage guilt over its enjoyment of sheltered and very good lives.
California’s recent premier politicians at the local, state, and federal levels—Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, and Nancy Pelosi—all enjoyed wealth and power, whether by inherited money and family brand names, through marriage, or using their positions to leverage lucrative family and personal business with the Chinese.
Their lifestyles before, during, and after office-holding reflected both their privileges and the vast material differences between their own lives and the millions of Californians who suffered enormously from their utopian bromides. Yet a world away from their homes in Grass Valley, Kentfield, Lake Tahoe, Napa, Pacific Heights, or Rancho Mirage, the rest of the state’s residents who voted for them currently cannot afford a house, a full tank of gas, a chuck steak, or an air-conditioned afternoon.
At least the Church of the 15th century offered formal contractual indulgences and personal penance manuals for the guilt-ridden elite eager to abort their earned inferno-to-come. In California, however, to enjoy affluence and leisure without guilt or recriminations, left-wing power elites virtue signaled their progressivism, even as it wrecked the lives of distant others.
If it were a question of drilling more oil while transitioning to clean power or shrugging that nobody José Martinez in Sanger would pay $6.50 a gallon to commute to work, it was a no brainer: Mr. Martinez was simply out of sight, out of mind collateral damage.
So too all of California’s poor and lower middle classes who could not afford to flee and now cannot afford shelter, food, fuel, and safety, due to decades of policies that zoned away new home construction, strangled the gas, timber, and mining industries, taxed and regulated gas and diesel to the point of unaffordability, neglected the needs of the state’s once rich farming industry, and loved fish far more than people. Apparently, these well-educated and self-declared Socrateses believed that Californians could drink Facebook, eat Google, drive Twitter, and live on Snapchat.
The far-left Atlantic’s various contributors for years have been cheerleading most of the policies adopted by the Bay Area elite—defunding the police, decriminalizing an array of crimes, appeasing homelessness, ignoring dangerous drug use and dealing, and urging more redistributive taxation and entitlement.
But now Atlantic essayist Nellie Bowles warns us that San Francisco is a “failed city.” And she is correct in that the city is increasingly medieval. Its downtown is emptying, filthy, toxic, dangerous, and pre-civilizational—perhaps an unfair term since it was rare in pre-Roman Gaul or nomadic North Africa for tribal residents to sleep in the village pathways, fornicate and defecate openly among children, and violently attack random passersby.
In truth, the implosion of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and California more broadly is no accident. Destroying all the bounty that was inherited from far better and far-seeing generations was the logical result of deliberate policies—reflecting the self-interest of a few million rich, educated professionals. They apparently decided that their genius and superior morality had transcended worries over ancient challenges of food, water, shelter, transportation, and received law and custom.
California’s anointed enjoyed safe neighborhoods from Malibu to Presidio Heights. They inherited or purchased beautiful coastal corridor homes worth $1,200 a square foot, from La Jolla to Berkeley. They drew income from the trillions of dollars invested in Silicon Valley and the new globalized and Asia-centric economy that opened markets of multibillions of consumers for entertainment, media, finance, law, academia, corporations and the accompanying credential professional classes.
And so, they grew hubristic and stupid. In their arrogance and ignorance, they began to feel their own bounty and leisure were birthrights. Free from worries about who brought them their water, food, safety, energy, and shelter—or how—they were liberated to institutionalize their own visions of 21st-century-correct living to less fortunate others, albeit from a properly segregated distance.
Freeways were obsolete ideas. The fewer built, and the even fewer maintained, the more likely the clueless could be crowded into cost-effective, clean, and safe mass transit.
So, a $15 billion high-speed rail disaster arose and remained inert like Stonehenge monoliths. Meanwhile, thousands of the poor on the obsolete Highway 99 continued to die and were maimed in daily accidents on a Road Warrior-esque obstacle course. The nearby Amtrak trains still sat delayed on side-tracks, for want of a simple, 19th-century two-track rail. How strange that bankrupt 21st-century visions came at the cost of easy 20th-century solutions.
Aqueducts, reservoirs, dams? These were likewise relics of previous delusional generations. That the coastal corridor’s water came from aqueducts across vast distances was mostly unknown by those who crowded into one of the most naturally unsustainable regions on the North American continent—a coastal strip mostly dry and bereft of an aquifer to sustain its tens of millions.
So, the state stopped building water storage. More often, it released snowmelt and runoff water into the ocean rather than to farms and to replenish aquifers.
Fires? Let forests of evergreens burn as they had in primordial times, better to burn to provide mulch for worms and birds—and scare away the deplorable foothill folk who had no business living in the mountains, anyway.
The elite now dreamed of returning to a half-million person California of the 19th century, reputedly with lush riverbanks from the sea to Sierra, with salmon runs to the mountains. They recoiled at the very idea that a 40 million-person state of mostly poor immigrants—over a quarter of the state’s population was not born in the United States—might need water for their towns or for the farms they worked.
How ironic that millions fled Mexico and Central America to enter, often illegally, the once golden California, land of plenty. They were welcomed by the state’s business and political elite but not to be housed, fed, and schooled as were the elite. Their directive was to vote correctly for their supposed betters and to supply janitors, landscapers, nannies, cooks, and housekeepers for those who welcomed them in—on the condition that they not dare demand the state’s green resources for good homes, affordable gas, or a nice lawn or long shower.
Let them instead eat a solar farm, bike path, or Tesla.
And so it went, each carefully placed brick in the once sturdy long wall of California, laid carefully over the past 150 years—to ensure a naturally fragile state with affordable food, energy, security, housing, transpiration, schools, and education—was ripped out, mocked as obsolete, and written off an embarrassment to the present.
Californians who look at their aging dams, their granite classical civic buildings, and their large municipal parks, are like Dark-Age Greeks who stumbled around the ruins of Mycenaean palaces and walls, wondering who were the demi-gods who built such things that now were impossible to emulate. So, too, we are bewildered at Balboa Park or the California aqueduct, or rather saddened that simply copying them is beyond our moral power or expertise.
The state was once rich and secure in gas and oil, nuclear power, cutting-edge freeways and airports, water storage, law enforcement, a topflight public school system, and an effective higher education triad. All these resources have become either politicized or taboos that are neglected, dismantled, or destroyed by a class that commuted little, was nonchalant about their power bills, put their kids in private schools, and enjoyed neighborhoods whose zip codes and private security patrols bounced away revolving-door felons and homeless far distant to the haunts of the middle class and poor.
Rich leftists quote the Gini coefficient chapter and verse, oblivious that they have created a state of affairs in which California ranks second to the bottom—below even New York—in such calibrations of inequality. The Silicon Valley motto should be, “I create inequality by hating inequality.”
We have not built a major mountain reservoir outside of Los Angeles in over 40 years even as the population has soared. The main north-south laterals of the state—the 101, I-5, and 99—often narrow into four-lane deathtraps. SFO and LAX are among the more nightmarish airports in the nation. California’s test scores rank in the nation’s bottom 10 percent of schools.
Over one-fifth of the state lives below the poverty rate. Urban geographer Joel Kotkin recently noted that African Americans and Latinos in California suffer among the lowest real incomes in the nation, 48th and 50th respectively. How could that be true in the land of Mark Zuckerberg, Nancy Pelosi, and Jerry Brown?
One-third of Americans on public assistance live in California. To drive through the rural center of the state is to revisit the 1930s world of the Joads. Ramshackle farmhouses now house 20 or some immigrants. Many of them reside here illegally, in trailers, shacks, and illegal add-ons. A state famous for regulating the life out of the middle classes simply ignores systemic flagrant violations of sewage, water, power, and building codes, in the manner of the exemptions given the homeless: out of sight, out of mind.
California’s mid-size cities nudge out other blue-state metropolises to rank among the nation’s leaders in property crimes. The nation’s highest gas taxes, income taxes, and near highest sales taxes either do not mitigate the above pathologies or perhaps help fuel them.
If our liberal political elites lived in crime-ridden Stockton, San Bernardino, or Modesto, had two children in the Los Angeles City public schools, commuted daily on the 99 from Delano to Visalia, flew weekly commercial out of LAX, tried to buy a California home on their salaries as public officials, rode BART to Oakland each evening home, or depended on a business supplying the state with lumber, gas or oil, food, transportation, or construction—the stuff of life—then they might fathom how assuaging their left-wing guilt in the abstract destroyed the lives of those they never see and never wish to see.
So, in a word, California’s debacle was the work of the self-absorbed.
The self-declared most caring, virtuous, and moral in the end proved the most narcissistic, selfish, and self-centered. Yes, the rich left-wing California elites are many things, but utterly selfish explains what they do unto others.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/12/the-selfish-californian/
****************************************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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