‘Men’s Rights are Human Rights:’ Theme for Human Rights Day on December 10

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights unequivocally declares, “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, [or] sex.”

(1) Each year, this historic document is celebrated on Human Rights Day, observed around the world on December 10. Accordingly, the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance (DAVIA) is calling on lawmakers and civil society groups this year to highlight the theme: “Men’s Rights are Human Rights.”

During the days leading up to Human Rights Day, nine separate editorials from around the world highlight a range of human rights concerns of men, especially in regards to domestic violence policies that falsely stereotype males as abusers

(2): Globally, men are disadvantaged, compared to women, in at least five areas: Life expectancy, treatment by the criminal system, child custody, false allegations of abuse, and college enrollments, according to one analysis (3).

In Canada, Janice Fiamengo noted that “men are the preferred targets of accusation, blame, and hatred,” and tartly concluded, “men are rightly tired of being told they must take responsibility for acts of violence they have never committed and which they are powerless to stop.”

(4) In Europe, Stephen Baskerville argued that the Istanbul Convention, which denies the very existence of male abuse victims, is “unnecessary, dishonest, and dangerous.”

(5) In Bermuda, families reportedly are being harmed by domestic violence policies that do not recognize the fact that “Studies show that men suffer equally as women from domestic violence.”

(6) One editorial from the United States argued, “The systemic exclusion of boys and men’s issues from public policy conversations around equity, equality, and human rights is one of the reasons it is so important the legislature creates a commission on boys and men.” [emphasis in the original]

(7) Carl Roberts commented that “Extensive experience reveals a fundamental problem with the family court, child support, child welfare, and domestic violence systems is an unsupported bias and belief that men are less safe than women,” which contributes the problem of fatherlessness

(8). Regarding the global problem of sexual abuse, A Hidden Right of Men Worldwide revealed that “most countries have tended to ignore that males are victims of sexual abuse perhaps as much as females, and certainly to a much greater extent than is reported or recognized.”

(9) Two commentaries urged the United Nations to accord greater emphasis to the human rights of men:

In India, an editorial charged that men often are denied “equal rights, equal justice, equal government facilities, equal benefits, [and] equal say,” and called for the United Nations to establish a UN Men agency

(10). One article highlighted the pervasive role of gender ideology at UN Women, referring to its “16 Days of Activism Against Gendered Violence” campaign as an exercise in virtue signaling

(11). On September 5, 1995, Hillary Clinton gave a historic speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in which she uttered the words, “Women’s rights are human rights.” Twenty-seven years later, the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance urges that Human Rights Day observances declare a parallel principle: “Men’s rights are human rights.”

http://endtodv.org/pr/mens-rights-are-human-rights-theme-for-human-rights-day-on-december-10/

***************************************************

Pre-Musk Twitter: The Multibillion Dollar Marxist Political Operation Masquerading As A Business

The revelations in the Twitter corporate document dump reported by Matt Taibbi last week raised a firestorm on the Right and generate a mass call for a congressional investigation once Republicans takeover the House in January.

Much of the well-justified outrage centered the apparent FBI, DHS and Biden campaign influence behind Twitter decisions to ban or delete content and accounts that undermined Joe Biden’s chances of winning the 2020 election or contradicted the official government narrative on COVID origins and vaccine efficacy.

"Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly," Taibbi wrote. "By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: 'Handled.'"

Perhaps the most disturbing part of Taibbi’s revelations is that they aren’t that surprising. Everybody knew that Twitter covered up a story that may have harmed Joe Biden. It’s just now we can see the evidence — and for that we should thank Elon Musk.

The focus on “outsiders” contacting Twitter executives to manipulate speech is understandable, but it misses a larger and we think more important point – for a long time, maybe even since its inception, Twitter hasn’t been a business, it has been a political operation.

In 2021, Twitter's annual net loss amounted to 221 million U.S. dollars. Overall, this is a significant decrease from the previous year, in which the micro blogging and social network company saw losses of almost 1.4 billion U.S. dollars. Twitter has been losing money big-time, and the picture was not improving prior to the Elon Musk acquisition. After losing a total of $2.3 billion from 2013 (the year it went public) through 2017, Twitter only booked profits in 2018 and 2019.

Many Twitter employees vocally protested Mr. Musk’s involvement in the company since his investment was announced in early April, arguing that he would shift the company culture and damage its efforts to control problems like bullying, threats and misinformation on the platform.

Prince Al Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who described himself and the conglomerate he represents as one of Twitter’s largest and most long-term shareholders, said in a tweet that Twitter should reject the offer because it was not high enough to reflect the “intrinsic value of Twitter given its growth prospects.” Others said that the offer was sufficient but that Mr. Musk’s proposed changes could spark an advertiser exodus and hurt the value of the company.

“You’re not at some garage sale bidding on a lamp,” Brent Thill, an equity analyst at Jefferies told the New York Times. “It’s a service that is beloved by many throughout the world, and you can’t just make these quick actions.”

What each of the objectors to Elon Musk’s takeover seemed to be saying was they wanted the offer rejected because they don’t want to lose the power to stifle and manage the speech of others that management of Twitter bestowed upon them.

And what the Matt Taibbi reporting revealed was those employees who objected the loudest to the Musk takeover were among those exercising the power to stifle and manage the speech of others most vigorously.

Specifically regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, Matt Taibbi reported, "there’s no evidence - that I've seen" that the federal government had a role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story but that "the decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey.” Taibbi reported Twitter’s Far Left former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde played a key role in quashing the Hunter Biden story.

"'They just freelanced it,' is how one former employee characterized the decision. ‘Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it,’" Taibbi wrote, according to reporting by Joseph A. Wulfsohn of FOX News.

The implication of the statement “they just freelanced it” is, Leftwing Twitter executives killed the Hunter Biden laptop story simply because they could – they had the power to use assets owned by their employer’s shareholders to advance their own personal political agenda and they used it – without even informing the CEO of the company.

Remember, at the time the company was not making an operating profit, so the only payout investors were getting for the foreseeable future was appreciation in the value of their shares – and the power to control one very active and important corner of the public square.

Under its previous management Twitter wasn’t a business in the way entrepreneurs of the past thought of a business. It produced no products of value that could be monetized to make an operating profit for its shareholders – its only product was the power to establish and control political narratives – and from that perspective Twitter was never a “business” it was always a multibillion-dollar Marxist political operation. The fact that Elon Musk is dismantling that political operation is one of the most significant defeats the Left has suffered in generations and one that patriots should applaud and vigorously support.

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/pre-musk-twitter-the-multibillion-dollar-marxist-political-operation-masquerading-as-a-business

******************************************************

Elon Musk Exposes Real Reason Twitter Censored Former President Donald Trump

Journalist Matt Taibbi published the third volume of the so-called “Twitter files” on Friday, exposing the social media platform’s censorship and deplatforming of former President Donald Trump.

The latest disclosure revealed that Twitter executives used the platform’s formidable “visibility filtering” powers against Trump ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections and that engagement with the FBI intensified before Trump was permanently suspended.

Endorsed by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, the “Twitter files” have exposed the social media company’s censorship machine.

The new report, report titled “The Removal of Donald Trump,” is the first of three specifically examining the actions of Twitter executives during the period from October 2020 to when Trump was deplatformed on Jan. 8, 2021.

Internal Slack chats at Twitter reveal that engagement between the company’s executives and federal law enforcement and intelligence organizations surged during this period.

“Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import,” Taibbi wrote. “Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech.”

“Is this the first sitting head of state to ever be suspended?” one Twitter employee, whose name is redacted, asked in a Slack chat that day.

Banning Trump

The messages show that Twitter executives removed Trump in part because of what one executive called the “context surrounding” the actions of Trump and his supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

In a message to Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former head of legal policy and trust, one executive whose name is redacted provided a “quick take” formulated by internal researchers and external academics to help decide whether to censor a Trump tweet or use it “as a last straw” before banning him.

The executive said the “decision on whether to pull that particular tweet” or use it “as a last straw” for Trump depends on “the overall context and narrative in which that tweet lives.”

“Context matters and the narrative that [T]rump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly last 4+ years must be taken into account,” the executive said, according to a screenshot of internal messages.

Before Trump was banned, Twitter also created a new tool to censor the then-sitting president after the election when he was vocal with his claims of election fraud. Internally, executives referred to the tool as “L3 deamplication.”

The new tool was announced on Dec. 10, 2020, when “Trump was in the middle of firing off 25 tweets saying things like, ‘A coup is taking place in front of our eyes,'” Taibbi wrote.

On Thursday, The Free Press editor Bari Weiss, another reporter handpicked by Musk as a conduit for releasing the files, published her report on the extent of Twitter’s tools for censorship, revealing the social media company’s secret blacklists. Her report noted that executives refer to “shadow banning” as “visibility filtering.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/elon-musk-exposes-twitters-censorship-of-former-president-donald-trump_4915308.html

*****************************************************

Parks Australia: when bureaucracy turns racist

Imagine telling a Brit of migrant origin that they’re forbidden from visiting the White Cliffs of Dover because they are a spiritually important geological feature – or that anyone with the wrong skin colour looking at them would cause distress and offence. What about if all non-white tourists were banned from Stonehenge because those who aren’t indigenous to the area are somehow violating the spirit of traditional ownership and tarnishing the land with their presence? How about a ‘welcome to country’ to all migrants every time they enter a public hall?

Yeah, I can hear the court cases and media outrage already. What unbelievable racism!!! White supremacy!!! How dare you offend migrants!!! They are just as British as anyone else!!! The press would cry, and they would be right, yet the conversation is identical to what is taking place in Australia.

White Brits are the Indigenous owners of the UK, but they’d be laughed at if they asked for special consideration surrounding their culturally sacred sites. There’s an assumption that Brits – or anyone of European descent – aren’t entitled to a connection to the land or their ancestral places. They’re stuck in racial purgatory because they – alone of all conquering civilisations – must suffer the loss of their identity as penance for dragging the world into the modern era. It doesn’t matter how terrible the sins are of other nations (plenty of which make Europe look like a panda petting zoo), the collectivists want to destroy Western dominance and they’ve decided to use imagined race politics to do it.

For a nation to maintain civil peace and cohesion, there is an understanding that all citizens are equal. Public spaces – such as National Parks – are the property of citizens to be funded by, looked after for, and enjoyed by everyone. Australians are entitled to feel a spiritual connection to their homeland, regardless of the colour of their skin. To suggest otherwise is outright racism and shame on the Liberal Party for failing to stand against Labor and the Greens on this issue that will see the children of this country ranked like a Bunnings paint chart. A sensible person would expect parents to be horrified at their children being saddled with the crimes of people who share their skin colour, but plenty of inner-city affluent families see the sacrifice of their children’s innocence as some kind of social purification. They love watching their children being punished.

The argument that a person’s DNA defines their affinity to the land is nonsense. A ‘white’ person born in Australia, who works the land and spends their whole life in the bush, will have a deep spiritual affinity. They will not have some kind of mystic connection to a country in Europe that they’ve never been to simply because, five generations ago, a distant relative was born there. It makes about as much sense as claiming Aboriginal Australians have a spiritual connection to Africa (instead of Australia) because Africa is the true origin of their genetic ancestry and a place where their elders spent millions, rather than tens of thousands, of years. After all, if we want to play the idiotic game of counting ancestors, all of us spent more time together in Africa than in any other place in the world.

Race politics is a political weapon brought out by the worst regimes as a way to divide society and scam money or power from whichever ‘race’ is being demonised. If our political class had any moral strength, this sort of behaviour would qualify as a crime.

Parks Australia was set up as a benign organisation to take care of national and marine parks, but recently they have turned into the Race Police, locking Australians of the wrong colour out of their publicly funded shared environments.

As an organisation, they have already been savaged by people old enough to remember how much better Australia’s parks did when they were open to the public and managed properly. The ‘lock up’ policies remain widely blamed by people who live around national parks for being the true cause of huge bushfires (that politicians wrongly attribute to climate change) due to poor maintenance of fire trails, the banning of grazing animals, prevention of farmers managing burn offs, and general poor upkeep by park rangers. Of course, Parks Australia gets really nasty when they are criticised by the public, but tough luck – they deserve it. Coastal areas in particular have seen the loss of their native wildflower fields due to management failing to maintain the regular burn-offs required to preserve the habitat with political concerns for ‘koala habitats’ drowning out any reasonable discussion.

Since then, Parks Australia have progressed from locking Australians out of public land due to ‘wildlife protection’ and are engaging in race-based lockouts justified by ‘honouring spiritual connections’ to the land by small Indigenous groups.

These public parks are paid for – and previously enjoyed by – all Australians, but now places like Mount Warning have been locked down. Closed during the pandemic (for reasons that are obviously complete nonsense), the park never re-opened to the public and has been renamed. Not only are people of the wrong race forbidden from walking the previously public track frequented by 120,000 people a year, but Australians are also banned from taking photographs – photographs! I bet Google Maps isn’t stopped from taking satellite imagery of the park.

As one person wrote on Facebook, ‘The whole of Australia will be deemed cultural land before too long, and we won’t be able to climb any mountain or cross any river. Disgrace.’ This sentiment was repeated by another who wrote, ‘My culture says I will climb that mountain whenever I feel like it. Sick of this over-regulated country … time to start giving the finger to authority.’

There are plenty of other similar comments. One might say that Parks Australia is one of the chief bodies responsible for sparking racial tension between Australian citizens by actively discriminating against them.

People are, quite rightly, asking why they should fund the upkeep of public parks if they are not allowed to enjoy or even photograph them. Why should a racist level of bureaucracy receive a single cent of public money?

Mount Warning is a natural geological feature. It was not built by a single Indigenous hand. As such, it is the joint property of all Australian citizens – a shared ancestral land for all who call themselves Australian. That was why national parks were set up in the first place. Any group that claims it is culturally unsafe or offensive to allow another person to visit due to their race – is racist. It is a sentiment that cannot be justified and should instead be openly shamed by all decent and moral people. Imagine if someone banned Indigenous people from climbing the Harbour Bridge because it would be ‘culturally unsafe’. Those times are gone, and allowing Indigenous groups to resurrect racism for political privilege and money is – as one Facebook user wrote – a farce.

Which brings us to what we might hope is the last straw.

Recently, Parks Australia sent out a letter of demand to the Herald Sun wanting them to remove a cartoon of Ayers Rock (Uluru). The cartoon by Mark Knight showed Ayers Rock looming over Parliament to symbolise the coming Voice to Parliament referendum.

Parks Australia attempted to say that drawing the national (and natural) geological feature violated its media guidelines surrounding ‘sensitive and sacred sites’ without a permit.

‘These artworks do not have media permits and breach media guidelines. To comply with the EPBC Act, media guidelines, ICIP (Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property) laws and show respect for Anangu land and culture, we ask that you remove any artwork breaching these conditions and showing Uluru.’

A permit. To draw Ayers Rock. Most Australians were outraged to discover that such a ridiculous guideline existed and demanded Parks Australia explain itself.

To be frank, most people told Parks Australia to ‘get f—d’ or some variation on the theme of unprintable outrage.

The permits were meant to ‘protect Anangu against inappropriate use and benefits to others from the commercialisation of their Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property’. What, like the decades of Tourism Australia ads that dug the regional community out of poverty? That kind of commercialisation? Before commercialisation, no one cared about locking people out of Ayers Rock because there was no guilt-money in it. If anything, the actions of Parks Australia is a form of commercialisation by gate-keeping licenses to draw the rock.

The Herald Sun met Parks Australia with a few scary looking lawyers and pretty quickly, Parks Australia replied:

‘Staff sent Mr Knight an email about the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa media guidelines which was not appropriate. It isn’t a request that should have been made and we apologised for the error.’

An error or an embarrassment? Legal demands are rarely sent ‘by accident’. Someone made a conscious decision to draft it, pen it, approve it, and hit ‘send’.

Telling a cartoonist that they cannot draw Ayers Rock is pretty close to banning images of Mohammad. Roping off sections of culture for ‘special groups’ is not just a slippery slope – it’s a nightmare cliff that ends in division, hatred, and animosity.

‘It made me feel like I had done something wrong. I thought it was a very nice image and low and behold, ironically, I was asked to take it down,’ said Mr Knight.

That’s the point of race politics. Australians are being made to feel like they’ve done something wrong by enjoying an afternoon on their favourite walking track – or taking a selfie in the middle of the bush. It’s the art of creating outrage out of nothing and then shaking the collection bucket for reparations.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/12/parks-australia-when-bureaucracy-turns-racist/

****************************************

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)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*****************************************