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Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!
Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.
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31 July, 2008
British Sikh girl beats anti-religious ban
With good British hypocrisy, the ban was not overtly anti-religious but there is little doubt that that was part of the underlying motive
A Sikh teenager excluded from school for breaking a "no jewellery" rule by refusing to remove a wrist bangle which is central to her faith was a victim of unlawful discrimination, a judge ruled today. The victory in the High Court for Sarika Watkins-Singh, 14, means that she will be returning to Aberdare Girls' School in South Wales in September - wearing the Kara, a slim steel bracelet. Her lawyers had told Mr Justice Silber that the Kara was as important to her as it was to England spin bowler Monty Panesar, who has been pictured wearing the bangle.
Sarika, of mixed Welsh and Punjabi origin, of Cwmbach, near Aberdare, was at first taught in isolation and eventually excluded for refusing to take off the bangle in defiance of the school's policy, which prohibits the wearing of any jewellery other than a wrist watch and plain ear studs. Today, the judge declared that the school was guilty of indirect discrimination under race relations and equality laws.
After the judgment, Sarika's mother, Sinita, 38, said: "We are over the moon.It is just such a relief." Afterwards, a spokeswoman for the family hailed it as a "common sense" judgment. Sarika said: "I am overwhelmed by the outcome and it's marvellous to know that the long journey I've been on has finally come to an end. "I'm so happy to know that no-one else will go through what me and my family have gone through." She added: "I just want to say that I am a proud Welsh and Punjabi Sikh girl."
Anna Fairclough, Liberty's legal officer who was representing the Singhs, said: "This common sense judgment makes clear you must have a very good reason before interfering with someone's religious freedom. "Our great British traditions of religious tolerance and race equality have been rightly upheld today."
Source.
It's certainly difficult to see what harm she was doing. I wonder whether this will prevent bans on Catholics wearing crosses too? Very annoying that the "purity ring" case was not similarly decided. The British government claims to be concerned about teenage promiscuity and pregnancy but Christian efforts to combat it were disallowed in that case! That Left-run Britain is an anti-Christian country is however now rather well-established.
Film unmasks Bush as the real Batman
By Andrew Bolt
FINALLY Hollywood makes a film that says US President George W. Bush was right. But director Christopher Nolan had to disguise it a little, so journalists wouldn't freak and the film's more fashionable stars wouldn't walk. So he hides Bush in a cape. He even sticks a mask on him, with pointy ears for some reason. Sure, when the terrified citizens of Gotham City scream for Bush to come save them, Nolan has them shine a great W in the night sky, but he blurs it so it looks more like a bird. Or a bat, perhaps. And he has them call their hero not Mr Bush, of course, or even "Mr President", but . . . Batman.
And what do you know. Bush may be one of the most despised presidents in American history, but this movie of his struggle is now smashing all box-office records. Critics weep, audiences swoon - and suddenly the world sees Bush's agonising dilemma and sympathises with what it had been taught so long to despise.
Well, "taught" isn't actually the exact word. As this superb Batman retelling, The Dark Knight, makes clear, its subject is a weakness that runs instinctively through us - to hate a hero who, in saving us, exposes our fears, prods our weaknesses, calls from us more than we want to give, or can. And how we resent a hero who must shake our world in order to save it, or brings alive that maxim of George Orwell that so implicates us in our preening piety: "Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
(Alert! Alert! Spoilers ahead. Do not read on if you plan to see the film.)
This is The Dark Knight's theme. See how Bush - oops, I mean Batman - must time and again compromise his values, and ours, to save his city from far greater evils. And see how Nolan, who wrote the with his younger brother Jonathan, empathises with him every time - as does the audience in the wide-eyed dark.
How many examples do you want? There's the scene at the police station in which Batman tortures Heath Ledger's sensationally vivid Joker - trying to cave in his face rather than simply, say, waterboarding him, as the CIA did to three of al-Qaida's most senior commanders. The audience understands. Batman has resorted to the last hope to make this terrorist squeal, because only the Joker has the information the police need to save two goodies who have just minutes left to live.
Of course, Batman is considerate enough to first jam shut the cell door with a chair, which means Commissioner Gordon and the police - who were watching through a one-way window - can rush to stop this terrible infringement of a prisoner's human rights yet still conveniently fail to break in. This helps them to preserve their purity while still getting from Batman the addresses they so gratefully grab with their clean hands. Note well this detail. We can pose as pure because harder men do what we need to keep safe - so safe, that we can afford to later despise them for it.
See it again when Bush - damn, I did it again - Batman, I mean, bugs every phone in the city to identify the whereabouts of the Joker, hoping to stop him before he blows up a shipload of civilians. His techno-whiz, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), is almost as horrified as a New York Times reporter told that Bush wants to wiretap the international calls of terror suspects. "This is wrong," he editorialises. "Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job de ion." What a wonderful conscience. How brightly that man's halo will shine when the fighting is done, and the human rights seminars begin in the campuses of cities made secure.
But, of course, even Lucius, thrust not into a newspaper office but into a position of responsibility where he must choose urgently between moralising or saving lives on a ticking time-bomb of a ship, chooses to help Batman bug just seconds after declaring it "wrong". For the record. It's the choice the audience always knew he'd make, and would have despised him for dodging.
But the residents of Gotham? They soon end up hating Batman. If he hadn't gone after the Joker so hard, they cry, maybe the Joker wouldn't have blown up their hospital, or planted bombs on ships, or killed so many soldiers, or flown aeroplanes into office towers, or blown up a Bali bar, or . . . sorry, have I confused fact with fiction, again? Anyway, the citizens hate Batman, especially once they are safe, for disturbing their sense of order, and violating their nice rules for defining their goodness - rules that are less useful for defying the evil of men who, Batman's philosopher-butler Alfred says, "just want to watch the world burn".
And they hate him also as many Europeans hate Bush, for showing that what protects their world are not ultimately the laws they pass, but a violence that intimidates them, because they cannot match it. They hate him as many once hated Ronald Reagan for defying a Soviet Union they feared would fight back. They hate him as Melbourne University's hand-washing Professor Tony Coady, for one, can now afford to hate the men who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, deploring this war-ending attack as "an act of terrorism far greater than any single act of terrorism since by non-state actors".
This hatred is the burden that Batman accepts - and which The Dark Knight explains better than the comics did. When Batman doubts the good he had done, Alfred urges strength: "Endure, Master, endure. Take it. They'll hate you for it, but that is the point of Batman. He can make the choice that no one else can make - the right choice."
Batman does not need, and cannot get, the soaring opinion polls and flattering media coverage of a hero. He must instead be not only the citizens' saviour, but its scapegoat for its anxiety over what it took to save them. As Commissioner Gordon says, in reluctantly branding Batman an outlaw: "We'll hunt him because he can take it. Because he's not a hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector . . . a dark knight."
Mind you, the same excuses for violence, and for defying the public's will, is used by vigilantes and tyrants. And Nolan is so careful to sugar his pill that some critics, and not only of the Left, have taken his film as an attack on Bush instead. Take Variety.com's deputy editor, Anne Thompson, who seizes on the scene in which the Joker taunts Batman: "What would I do without you? You complete me . . . To them (the public) you're just a freak. Like me." Concludes Thompson: "The film-making suggests the Joker has, like a Shakespearean fool on PCP, hit on a harsh truth: Batman has more in common with his killer-clown foe than with the normal people he means to protect. So should we conclude The Dark Knight argues that Bush and bin Laden are two sides of the same coin?"
Answer: are you kidding? In fact, the Joker is saying that without Batman's great good to oppose, his great evil would never be realised in its horrific glory. It would be like Hitler being allowed to exterminate nothing more than mosquitoes. Who'd care? What's more, Batman clearly has more in common with the people he tries to protect than does the Joker with people he tries to destroy, or the audience wouldn't be cheering him, and the next film in the series wouldn't be Batman III but The Joker II.
No, the cinema audience understands what the Gotham citizens do not - Batman's dilemma and the awesome imperatives of responsibility. And they are with him, not his critics.
So why don't Americans in particular leave the movie cheering Bush as they cheered Batman? Because in leaving the cinema they stopped being that audience and re-entered their own real Gotham City - with a real Batman they once more feel driven to hate for all the hard things he's had to do to protect them. They have become the citizens of Gotham they were watching just minutes before with contempt. But Bush would understand. As Alfred says: "He's not being a hero. He's being something more."
Source
"Unhealthy" to display the flag of England in England??
A retired teacher says she was banned from waving her Cross of St George flag during a Proms performance on health and safety grounds. A steward told Rosalind Hilton to put the five foot flag away during the Last Night of the Halle Proms event at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall.
She and sister Susan Stanyard were preparing to hoist the flag above their heads for Land and Hope and Glory in the rousing finale, having unfurled the flag over the balcony by her seat. She was later told it could have been a danger to those below. Mrs Hilton, 58, from Chester, said: "Every year I always go with my sister Susan. We make a real deal of it and dress up in red, white and blue. "Every year I take the flag which is quite large. There are English, Scottish and Welsh flags and towards the end, when they play Land of Hope and Glory, everyone stands up and waves them around. It's a fantastic atmosphere. "But in the second half after about five minutes a steward arrived and asked me to take it down. She said: 'You can't have that flag up.'
"When I asked the manager why, he said it was policy in the Bridgewater Hall that you can't have anything hanging from the sides. I told them they were just being kill-joys." Ridiculing the assumption that dangling flags were dangerous, she plumped the furled-up standard on the manager's head and asked him: "Would that really hurt if it fell on your head?"
She said the interruption last Saturday "ruined the whole evening" and commented: "Who wants to get up and sing, 'Britons never, never shall be slaves,' when the health and safety Nazis are making a mockery of our freedom?" Her party was offered eight-inch plastic Union Jacks instead, leading her husband Keith to conclude: "They are trying to suppress us using the English ensign." Mrs Hilton has vowed to get an answer on why her flag was banned: "I have asked them to look in their policy document and send me a photocopy of where it says you can't hang flags."
Popular anthems from the Last Night of the Proms include Thomas Arne's Rule Britannia and Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1.
But such flag-waving patriotism has come under attack before. In March Margaret Hodge, the culture minister, criticised the BBC Proms for not being multicultural enough. She said the BBC Proms, which run from July to September at the Royal Albert Hall, did not do enough to encourage a British sense of "shared identity". She said: "The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I'm thinking in particular of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this." Her comments were roundly condemned. Gordon Brown's spokesman said: "The Prime Minister's position on this is quite clear - he thinks the Proms are a good institution."
Nick Reed, chief executive of the Bridgewater Hall, said: "No-one was refused admission to the concert because of a flag, and flags were in abundance as they always are at proms concerts. "We do not allow large flags to be draped across the balconies in case they fall on patrons below and we take exactly the same approach with coats, bags and other items. "The Halle proms concert was enjoyed by a capacity audience and we received no other comments."
Source
University makes unfounded allegations and then grovels to a racist black woman
Says the inimitable Mike Adams:
Contrary to popular opinion, the case of Keith Sampson at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) is not over. An article by the Associated Press seemed to imply that the case was resolved. But, having done some thorough research on the case - more thorough than the AP, I believe - I respectfully dissent. And, today, I am calling for an investigation of university Chancellor Charles Bantz as well as university spokesman Rick Schneider.
Keith Sampson is really a rare kind of student. First of all, he was willing to take a job as a janitor to help pay for his college education. But, even more impressive, he spends his break time reading scholarly books on subjects such as American history. But, when he decided to read a book on race relations - one describing how students at Notre Dame defeated the KKK in the 1920s - all hell broke loose.
A black female co-worker at IUPUI decided to charge Sampson with racial harassment. This matter should not have been hard to resolve since the book, which Sampson checked out from the IUPUI library, was ively anti-Klan and anti-racist. The only difficult part of the case should have been deciding the fate of Sampson's accuser. Had she intentionally leveled the false claim of racial harassment, she should have been fired. Had it been accidental, she should have been sent to sensitivity training to get over her obvious prejudice against white people.
But, of course, this happened in a university setting, which means that common sense never had a fighting chance. Sampson was told last November that his conduct constituted racial harassment. The affirmative action officer (Lillian Charleston who is now retired) stated "You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading this book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black co-workers." Such ignorance is by itself a good argument against affirmative action.
But, fortunately, the ACLU - like the blind squirrel that occasionally finds a nut - found out about Lillian Charleston who is obviously a nut, and more than a little squirrelly. With pressure from the ACLU, Charleston exuded sheer eloquence in later telling Sampson "There is no university policy that prohibits reading (scholarly books) on break time." Too bad she's retired. This woman is obviously brilliant.
But of course this was not good enough. Remember that in November Charleston had said "We conclude that your conduct" - of reading a scholarly book in front of a black woman - "constitutes racial harassment." But after the ACLU got involved in February the university informed Sampson that no disciplinary action would be taken because they were unable to determine whether Sampson's conduct was intended to disrupt the work environment. But, of course, the work environment was disrupted by a hypersensitive black female with a distorted view of the "typical white person" - and what a good thing this bigot isn't running for President of the United States! So, I took the time to call Rick Schneider to ask him about the uncertainty of the university's findings.
Regrettably, Rick Schneider was the most evasive, stammering, and uncertain administrator I've ever spoken to (in the six years I've been investigating university speech codes). For example, I asked him whether the charges leveled against Sampson were ively false and he could not answer. When I asked him whether he even believed in the existence of ive truth and falsity, he replied "I do not wish to get into a general philosophical discussion with you." I swear I'm not making this stuff up. And I do believe in ive truth. But, finally, I did get a direct answer from Rick Schneider. When I asked whether he was aware any other acts of racial harassment by Sampson he stated unequivocally "No." And this is very important.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Wall Street Journal recently asked someone from media relations at IUPUI the same question. The media relations person replied that Mr. Sampson had engaged in other racially insensitive conduct and that Mr. Sampson was aware that he had. And this is why we need an investigation of Mr. Schneider. If Rick Schneider was not the person who made those statements to The Wall Street Journal it is very good news for him. But, of course, that only means that someone else should be sued for defaming the character of Mr. Sampson whose personnel file is clean and who has never engaged in any racially harassing behavior (despite the university's pathetic attempt to smear him). But the Chancellor must also be investigated in order to explain this statement made in an email sent by Rick Schneider:"The chancellor has sent letters of apology to Keith Sampson, to the co-worker of Keith Sampson who filed the complaint, and to two co-workers who were interviewed as part of the investigation of the complaint. In these letters, the chancellor said he regrets this situation took place and believes this matter could have and should have been handled differently."The public has every right to see that letter in order to ascertain the reason why a university president would apologize to an obviously racist black woman who disrupted the IUPUI work environment with an ively false accusation of racial harassment. Keith Sampson has suffered a good deal of grief although not as much as the lacrosse players at Duke University. But at least Duke's chancellor didn't apologize to the stripper.
Source
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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30 July, 2008
Madness: British appeals court outlaws hitting delinquent children in custody
Someone should confine these judges to one of the "training" centres concerned. They would soon change their tune
Controversial methods of disciplining young people in custody have been abolished by the Court of Appeal today, only a year after they were introduced by the Government. Three judges ruled that the Secure Training Centre (Amendment) rules - which included advice to hit unruly children on the nose or ribs, or bend back their thumbs to distract them if they were disobedient - breached human rights.
Sally Keeble, Labour MP for Northampton North, who has been campaigning for a change in the law over physical restraint methods since 15-year-old Gareth Myatt died in custody in Northamptonshire four years ago, said she was delighted at the ruling She said: "This court victory is absolutely stunning. The Government has ducked and dived and refused to recognise the fact that these holds are barbaric and have no place in the British system."
Ms Keeble said that at their peak, the holds, which included a karate chop to the nose, were used up to twice a day in the four secure units in England and Wales run by private companies on behalf of the Department of Justice "These inhumane methods should be withdrawn and a new, safe system introduced for managing behaviour of young people in detention," she said. [Like what?] "There also needs to be a proper training system for staff, better monitoring and oversight by the Ministry of Justice of what happens in these privately-run secure training centres."
Adam Rickwood, 14, was on remand in Hassockfield Secure Training Centre in Co Durham in 2004 when he became the youngest child in Britain to die in custody. He hanged himself with his shoelaces shortly after being restrained for the first time. Gareth Myatt, 15, who weighed six and half stone, was asphyxiated whilst being restrained by three members of staff. He was three days into a six-month sentence at Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre in Northamptonshire. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, which has been involved in a test case about physically restraining young people in custody in the wake of the two deaths, said today that the inquests had showed that staff at the STCs employed restraint as a way of maintaining order.
Yet despite grave concerns about the two deaths, the Ministry of Justice had chosen in 2007 to extend the use of restraint at Oakhill, Hassockfield, Medway and Rainsbrook STCs. Until June 2007 staff at STCs were only permitted to use physical restraint when it was necessary for the prevention of escape, damage to property or injury. The new rules, brought in after the deaths, allowed restraint when it was thought necessary to ensure good order and discipline.
Source
The Deobandi Fatwa Against Terrorism Didn't Treat the Jihadi Root
By Walid Phares
Many in the West and in other regions of the world were impressed by the issuing of a fatwa (Islamic theological edict) condemning Terrorism by one of the leading religious centers in the Muslim world, the Darool-Uloom Deoband in India. An Islamic seminary said to have 'inspired' the Taliban has, according to the said document denounced "terrorism" as against Islam, calling it an "unpardonable sin."
Hoping for a major change in ideology, international counter terrorism authorities and policy makers have been asking experts to determine if the Deobandi declaration will help counter the calls for violent Jihad by al Qaeda and its ilk around the world. In the war of ideas with the Jihadists, many Western architects of strategic communications look for any sign that hearts and minds may be changing course and sympathies. From Washington DC to Brussels and beyond, bureaucrats tasked with exploring the Muslim world for new trends, shop around for what they call "counter-narrative against extremism."
The Deobandi School, a classical third branch for Salafi Islamism (along with Wahabism and Muslim Brotherhood), has significant weight in the South Asia Theater. Its teachings based on a strict interpretation of Islamic law have reached many countries, including Afghanistan and Britain, where they are said to have indoctrinated the Taliban. "If they change course, al Qaeda and the Taliban are finished," I heard in Europe and the United States. So the question now is have they changed doctrinal direction and is this fatwa the evidence?
I regretfully conclude that it is not the case yet. It looked good at first. Tens of thousands of clerics and students from around India attended a meeting at the 150-year-old Deoband, north of New Delhi, and declared that they stand "against acts of terrorism."
"There is no place for terrorism in Islam," Maulana Marghoobur Rahman, the older rector of Deoband, told Reuters. "Terrorism, killing of the innocent is against Islam. It is a faith of love and peace, not violence." Rahman said it was unjust to equate Islam with terrorism, to see every Muslim as a suspect or for governments to use this to harass innocent Muslims.
"There are so many examples of people from other communities being caught with bombs and weapons, why are they never convicted?" said Qazi Mohammed Usman, deputy head of Deoband. The meeting defined terrorism as any action targeting innocent people, both Muslim and non-Muslim, whether committed by an individual, an institution or a government.
These statements could be seen as impressive when quoted by news agencies rushing to break the good news, but to the seasoned analysts of Salafism, the solid doctrinal roots of Jihadism were kept untouched. Here is why.
Much more here
Arrogant European Bureaucracy Runs Amok
The European Commission is an unelected bureaucracy that is slowly but surely seizing powers to govern member nations. This is bad news for national sovereignty and jurisdictional competition, but it also leads to crazy regulations, including proposals to prohibit the British from using acres instead of hectares, banning the traditional preparation of Peking Duck and detailed rules about the proper size and shape of vegetables.
But regulatory overkill is just the tip of the iceberg. Far more troubling is the effort to subvert democracy in order to further centralize power in Brussels. The EU Constitution, which would have expanded the powers of the European Commission, was rejected by the voters of France and the Netherlands a few years ago. Rather than shelve the proposal, the European elites renamed it the Lisbon Treaty and said that it no longer was necessary to let the people vote. Fortunately, Ireland still has the rule of law and held a referendum - and the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty was decisively rejected. The French President has since asserted that the Irish should vote again (and presumably again and again) until they reach the "right" decision.
But perhaps the most Kafkaesque reaction came from a French bureaucrat, who was quoted in Le Figaro stating, "It isn't about putting pressure on the Irish. We well understand that they have expressed themselves democratically. But so have the other 26!"
Only the French could deny their people the right to vote and then claim their voters (and the disenfranchised people in the European Union's other 25 nations) had somehow expressed their views.
Source
Economics Does Not Lie
Though economics as a discipline arose in Great Britain and France at the end of the eighteenth century, it has taken two centuries to reach the threshold of scientific rationality. Previously, intuition, opinion, and conviction enjoyed equal status in economic thought; theories were vague, often unverifiable. Not so long ago, one could teach economics at prestigious universities without using equations and certainly without the complex algorithms, precise (though not infallible) mathematical models, and computers integral to the field today.
No wonder bad economic policies ravaged entire nations during the twentieth century, producing more victims than any epidemic did. The collectivization of land in Russia during the twenties, in China during the fifties, and in Tanzania during the sixties starved hundreds of millions of peasants. The uncontrolled printing of currency destabilized Weimar Germany, facilitating the rise of Nazism. The nationalization of enterprises and the expulsion of entrepreneurs ruined Argentina during the forties and Egypt a decade later. India's License Raj--requiring businesses to obtain a host of permits before opening their doors--froze the country's economic development for decades, keeping millions impoverished.
On an even larger scale, the century witnessed a war between two economic systems: state socialism and market capitalism. In the socialist system, property was public, competition forbidden, and production planned. In the market system, property was private, competition encouraged, and production determined by entrepreneurs. Faced with the choice of which system was superior, nations hesitated and economists remained divided.
The state of affairs today is entirely different. When the Soviet Union crumbled, the socialist model that it embodied imploded, too--or, more precisely, the Soviet Union fell because the socialist economic system proved unworkable. Now only one economic system exists: market capitalism. Virtually everywhere, the public sector has given ground to privatization; currency has escaped state control, to be governed by independent central banks; competition has taken wing, thanks to the deregulation of markets and the opening of borders; taxation has become less progressive, so as to encourage entrepreneurs and create jobs.
The results have been breathtaking. Opening economies and promoting trade have helped reconstruct Eastern Europe after 1990 and lifted 800 million people, many of them in China, Brazil, and a now-license-free India, out of poverty. Even in Africa and the Arab Middle East, nations that have embraced capitalism have begun to escape from the terrible underdevelopment that has long plagued them.
Behind all this unprecedented growth is not only the collapse of state socialism but also a scientific revolution in economics, as yet dimly understood by the public but increasingly embraced by policymakers around the globe. The revolution began during the sixties and has finally brought economists to a broad, well-founded consensus about what constitutes good policy. No longer does economics lie; no longer would Baudelaire be able to write that "economics is a horror." For the mass of mankind, on the contrary, it has become a source of hope.
If economics is finally a science, what, exactly, does it teach? With the help of Columbia University economist Pierre-Andre Chiappori, I have synthesized its findings into ten propositions. Almost all top economists--those who are recognized as such by their peers and who publish in the leading scientific journals--would endorse them (the exceptions are those like Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, whose public pronouncements are more political than scientific). The more the public understands and embraces these propositions, the more prosperous the world will become.
1. The market economy is the most efficient of all economic systems. Adam Smith's eighteenth-century take on market efficiency was metaphorical, nearly metaphysical: he said that it seemed to be guided by an "invisible hand" that produced outcomes beneficial to society. In the mid-twentieth century, Friedrich Hayek observed that no central-planning institution could possibly manage the huge quantity of information that the market organized automatically and spontaneously by pricing resources. More recently, Berkeley economist Gerard Debreu has used computers to demonstrate that the spontaneous order that Hayek postulated does indeed exist in a mathematical world.
Market mechanisms are so efficient that they can manage threats to long-term development, such as the exhaustion of natural resources, far better than states can. If global warming does become a real problem, for example, price mechanisms or a carbon tax would easily encourage a more efficient use of energy. It's worth recalling that during the 1970s, when an excess of sulfur in the atmosphere was sometimes producing acid rain harmful to North American forests, the U.S. government didn't ban sulfur emissions outright. Instead, it created a market in which companies could buy and sell the right to pollute above a certain amount or "cap," pricing emissions so that factories had a financial incentive to turn to non-sulfurous technology, which was already available. Over time, companies shifted to cleaner technology and the acid rain disappeared--to the dismay of many green activists, who tend to prefer doomsday discourse to efficient market solutions.
Some economists favor free markets not only for their efficiency in allocating resources but for political reasons as well, fearing that central planning or excessive bureaucratic controls could, in the guise of rationality, stifle individual freedom. Markets leave us "free to choose," wrote Rose and Milton Friedman, and society is the better off for it--though not all economists embrace their libertarian political vision.
2. Free trade helps economic development. As Smith observed when his native Scotland began to benefit from free trade, it is through access to the world market that poor nations become rich. They never do so by trying to become self-sufficient. Free trade also makes rich countries richer, economists agree. By importing less expensive goods made in low-wage nations like China, wealthy nations effectively increase their own citizens' income--and the main beneficiaries are poor and middle-class people, who can buy cheaper clothes, electronics, and myriad other goods. In addition, importing cheaper components--computer chips, say--lowers the cost of equipment in wealthier economies. In fact, economists have long understood the law of comparative advantage: whenever differences in the cost of producing goods exist between two countries, both will benefit from free trade, a mechanism that allocates their resources most effectively.
Free trade not only generates the greatest possible growth; it tends to distribute it widely, both within nations and among them. For evidence, consider the emergence of vast middle classes in all free-market societies, as well as the economic convergence among nations that have embraced capitalist economics. After less than 20 years of market-driven growth, Brazil, China, and India--whatever their injustices--are closer to the Western level of development than they were before that growth got under way.
This does not mean, as some observers fret or gleefully predict, that the United States is about to stop leading the world economically. Other nations may draw closer to it--Western Europe in 1950 had a per-capita income half that of the U.S.; now it's 80 percent--but the American economy has remained the world's most vigorous for more than a century because of its superior efficiency, demographic dynamism, and innovation (today, for example, the U.S. is the world leader in the hugely promising fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology). One might add that no globalization, with all its economic benefits, could take place without a global security framework to protect shipping from piracy and to contain border conflicts. Today the U.S. military provides that security, just as the British navy once did.
Much more here
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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29 July, 2008
The disgusting British police again: They say they have no duty to protect anyone
The anger and frustration felt by people who are the victims of crimes to which they have already alerted the police can be imagined. But when a loved one is murdered because the police failed to act in time, despite warnings that something terrible might be about to happen, the feelings of relations and friends can only be guessed at. Spare a thought, then, for the parents of Giles Van Colle, who will on Wednesday learn if a legal battle they have waged since he was murdered nearly eight years ago has been successful. If it is, the implications are profound. Irwin and Corrine Van Colle sued the police for failing to protect their son, who was a witness in a court case.
However, this is not a story of gangland intimidation: Mr Van Colle, 25, was simply preparing to do his duty as a responsible citizen in what should have been a straightforward case of theft. But it was to turn into a nightmare - and the police did nothing to stop it unfolding. Mr Van Colle was an optometrist with his own business, GVC Opticians, in Mill Hill, north London. He had employed as a laboratory technician an Iranian whose real name was Ali Amelzadeh, but was known by the alias Daniel Brougham. He had obtained the job using a false CV and when he was challenged about his National Insurance number and the disappearance of equipment from the clinic, he left. Subsequently, stolen property, including glasses and frames belonging to Mr Van Colle, were found at Brougham's home and he was charged with theft.
Mr Van Colle was asked to identify the property as a court witness. Until now, this was fairly unexceptional case. However, Mr Van Colle began to receive threats to his life and his family from Brougham, to which the police were alerted. Then his car was set ablaze outside his home. Yet nothing was done to protect him. In November 2000, two days before the trial was to start, Brougham lay in wait for Mr Van Colle as he left work and shot him three times at close range.
Most murders happen out of the blue and there is always a danger of accusation by hindsight. But that was not the case here. A witness in a court case was specifically threatened on a number of occasions by the man against whom he was giving evidence. It should have been relatively straightforward for the police to have offered him protection or to have revoked Brougham's bail.
Since Brougham lived in Stevenage, that job fell to Hertfordshire constabulary and specifically Det Con David Ridley. At a disciplinary tribunal in 2003, he was found guilty of failing to perform his duties diligently, failing to investigate thoroughly the intimidation of witnesses, and failing to arrest Brougham. He was fined five days' pay.
Mr Van Colle's parents considered it was important to establish where the duties of the police lay and invoked the European Convention on Human Rights, claiming a violation of Article 2 - which enshrines the "right to life" - and Article 8, which guarantees everyone's right to respect for their home and family life. In the High Court, Mrs Justice Cox awarded them $100,000 in damages against Hertfordshire Police. She said that, had Mr Van Colle been placed in a safe house or given other protection after Brougham threatened his life, there would have been "a real prospect of avoiding this tragedy". The award was reduced in 2007 to $50,000 by the Court of Appeal; but the judgment against Hertfordshire Police was upheld. This is where the case stands.
The chief constable appealed to the Law Lords, who will rule on whether the police can be sued for failing to carry out their duties properly to investigate a crime. The police say that unless it is overturned, they - and other public services - will face a flood of similar claims. But is that true? Are they simply not being required to do their job properly? After all, Mr Van Colle's case is not an isolated one.
Alex and Maureen Cochrane died and their daughter, Lucy, was seriously injured in an arson attack on their home in Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester, in 2006. The attack had been preceded by an incident at the Cochranes' home in which a fluid was poured on to the front door and a tree uprooted in the garden. Police, who were aware of a feud with another family subsequently convicted of the killings, failed to act. Last year, an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) found Greater Manchester Police guilty of "individual and systemic failings" over the tragedy.
Scotland Yard is investigating complaints that it failed to respond to threats made against a schoolgirl a few weeks before she was killed. Last year, the same force apologised for doing nothing to protect a young father shot dead after confronting a gang in the road where he had been stabbed just months earlier.
Wiltshire Police were strongly criticised by the IPCC for failing to protect Hayley Richards, a pregnant woman who was murdered by her boyfriend a week after he attacked her. Even though police were told where he was, officers who could have responded were dealing with a report of a dog locked in a car.
In all these cases, the police say that the murderous intent of the killers could not have been foreseen. But that is not the point. It is the fact that they did nothing that is so appalling. People can understand if, despite their best endeavours, some dreadful criminal act occurs; but it is the first principle of policing to prevent crime, not investigate it after it has happened.
In the Appeal Court, Sir Anthony Clarke, the Master of the Rolls, said the duty of the police to protect Mr Van Colle was "not an onerous one"; and nor was he persuaded that the court's ruling would "threaten police resources" or "open the floodgates to baseless claims against the police". "They should have done everything that could reasonably have been expected of them," added the judge. That is all that Mr and Mrs Van Colle, and the rest of us, are asking.
Source
So wrong, so often, for so long, Yet it's Europe we should copy?
If anyone suggested that Tiger Woods should try to be more like other golfers, people would question the sanity of whoever made that suggestion. Why should Tiger Woods try to be more like Phil Mickelson? If Tiger turned around and tried to golf left-handed, like Mickelson, he probably wouldn't be as good as Mickelson, much less as good as he is golfing the way he does right-handed.
Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans. If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies' patents and profits, then we should do the same. Some justices of the U.S. Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.
Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the U.S. has been doing better than Europe for a very long time. By comparison with most of the rest of the world, Europe is doing fine. But it is like Phil Mickelson, not Tiger Woods.
Minimum wage laws have the same effects in Europe as they have had in other places around the world. They price many low-skilled and inexperienced workers out of a job. Because minimum wage laws are more generous in Europe than in the U.S., they lead to chronically higher rates of unemployment in general and longer periods of unemployment than in the U.S. - but especially among younger, less experienced and less skilled workers. Unemployment rates of 20% or more for young workers are common in a number of European countries. Among workers who are both younger and minority workers, such as young Muslims in France, unemployment rates are estimated at about 40%.
The American minimum wage laws do enough damage without our imitating European minimum wage laws. The last year in which the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate in the U.S. was 1930. The next year, the first federal minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act, was passed. One of its sponsors explicitly stated that the purpose was to keep blacks from taking jobs from whites. No one says things like that any more - which is a shame, because the effect of a minimum wage law does not depend on what anybody says. Blacks in general, and younger blacks in particular, are the biggest losers from such laws, just as younger and minority workers are in Europe.
Those Americans who are pushing us toward the kinds of policies that Europeans impose on pharmaceutical companies show not the slightest interest in what the consequences of such laws have been. One consequence is that even European pharmaceutical companies do much of their research and development of new medications in the U.S., in order to take advantage of American patent protections and freedom from price controls. These are the very policies that the European imitators want us to change.
It is not a coincidence that such a high proportion of the major pharmaceutical drugs are developed in the U.S. If we kill the goose that lays the golden egg, as the Europeans have done, both we and the Europeans - as well as the rest of the world - will be worse off, because there are few other places for such medications to be developed. There are a lot of diseases still waiting for a cure, or even for relief for those suffering from those diseases. People stricken with these diseases will pay the price for blind imitation of Europe.
It must be a bitter disappointment to those in the media and in politics who have been dying to use the word "recession" that, for the second quarter in a row, there has been no downturn in the economy, though growth has been slow. Alarmists have been reduced to quoting other alarmists on the supposedly impending recession, but that is still not the real thing. The definition of a "recession" is very clear and straightforward: Two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We have not yet had one consecutive quarter of negative growth....
Some of the people who are most adamant against outsourcing economic activity from the U.S. to other countries often seem to think we should outsource our foreign policy to "world opinion" or act only in conjunction "with our NATO allies." Like so many things that are said when it comes to public policy, there is very little attention paid to the actual track record of "world opinion" or of "our NATO allies."
Often there is a blanket assumption that European countries are just so much more sophisticated than American "cowboys." But there is incredibly little interest in the track record of those European sophisticates whom we are supposed to consult about our own national interests - including, in an age when terrorists may acquire nuclear weapons, our national survival.
In the course of the 20th century, supposedly sophisticated Europeans managed to create some of the most monstrous forms of government on earth - communism, fascism, Nazism - in peacetime, and to start the two World Wars, the bloodiest in all human history. In each of these wars, both the winners and the losers ended up far worse off than they were before these wars were started. After both World Wars, the U.S. had to step in to save millions of people in Europe from starving amid the wreckage and rubble that their wars had created. These do not seem like people whose sophistication we should defer to.
Between the two World Wars, European intellectuals - more so than ordinary people - completely misread the threat from Nazi Germany, and were urging disarmament in France and England, while Hitler was rapidly building up the most powerful military force on the continent, obviously aimed at neighboring countries.
During the Cold War, many European intellectuals once again misread the threat of a totalitarian dictatorship - in this case, the Soviet Union. When they finally recognized the threat, many saw the question as whether it was "better to be red than dead." They were no more prepared to stand up to the Soviet Union than they had been ready to stand up to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Worse yet, much of the European intelligentsia ed to America's standing up to the Soviet Union. Many of them were appalled when Ronald Reagan met the threat of new Soviet missiles aimed at Western Europe by putting more American missiles in Western Europe, aimed at the Soviet Union.
Reagan, in effect, called the Soviet Union and raised them, while many of the European sophisticates - as well as much of the American intelligentsia - said that his policies would lead to war. Instead, it led to the end of the Cold War. Are we now to blindly imitate those who have been so wrong, so often, over the past hundred years?
More here
World's Most Successful AIDS Prevention Programme in Uganda "Sabotaged" by Western "Experts"
Western advisors used their control of international funding to force a change in direction to condoms and casual sex
While the US Senate considers a proposal to allocate US$50 million more for AIDS prevention programmes, one Ugandan expert says it will be wasted money if the attitudes of the Western AIDS prevention community towards AIDS transmission do not change. In a column appearing in the Washington Post on June 30, one of Uganda's leading AIDS prevention experts called on the Western "experts" to "Let my people go." "We understand that casual sex is dear to you, but staying alive is dear to us. Listen to African wisdom, and we will show you how to prevent AIDS."
Sam L. Ruteikara wrote in the Washington Post that efforts to maintain the world's most successful AIDS prevention programme was "sabotaged" by precisely those Western "experts" who insisted that only condoms would work. Ruteikara is the co-chair of Uganda's National AIDS-Prevention Committee. He wrote in a column in the Washington Post on June 30, "AIDS epidemics in Africa are driven by people having sex regularly with more than one person." The Western experts, dedicated to the exclusive promotion of condoms, were incensed when Ugandan AIDS rates plummeted with this "ABC" method that left condoms as a "last resort".
The success of the Ugandan programme, Ruteikara said, did not sit well with those international experts and advisors, sent to Uganda to oversee the spending of international relief funds, who are devoted to the condom as the first and last answer to the AIDS epidemic.
Despite the official line that Western "advisors" were to work within local programmes, these experts, Ruteikara asserted, actively stonewalled the Ugandan committee's recommendations. The Western advisors ed that the programme was an attempt "to limit people's sexual freedom" and they used their control of the international funding to force a change in direction.
"Repeatedly, our 25-member prevention committee put faithfulness and abstinence into the National Strategic Plan that guides how PEPFAR [President's Emergency Plan for HIV-AIDS Relief] money for our country will be spent. Repeatedly, foreign advisers erased our recommendations. When the document draft was published, fidelity and abstinence were missing."
More insidiously, Ruteikara says that a "suspicious" statistic appeared in reports that claimed a significant increase in rates of AIDS among married couples. The claim was that 42 per cent of married couples were infected, a rate twice that of prostitutes. Repeated requests for the origin of this statistic were ignored. Domestic surveys done by Ugandan health officials found that only 6.3 per cent of married couples are infected, lower even than rates among widowed and divorced Ugandans.
Since the Ugandans were forced to change their programmes, surveys have shown that the percentage of sexually active men with multiple partners has more than doubled, undoing earlier declines, and the AIDS rate has begun to climb again.
The Ugandan success story is one of the most impressive in the fight against AIDS. Between 1989 and 1995, the number of men having three or more sexual partners in a year dropped from 15 to three per cent and HIV rates plunged from 21 percent in 1991 to 6 percent in 2002. At the same time, Western nations brought more than 2 billion condoms on Africa and the epidemic continued in nations that went along with the condoms-only approach.
The motive for opposing the Ugandan initiative, Ruteikara said, was financial as well as ideological. "In the fight against AIDS, profiteering has trumped prevention," he said. "AIDS is no longer simply a disease; it has become a multibillion-dollar industry."
Ruteikara's assertions are supported by Dr. James Chin, a former top AIDS epidemiologist at the World Health Organization, who said, "Easily preventable diseases are still killing millions of children each year, while billions of dollars are being squandered annually by AIDS programs."
Robert England, head of the charity Health Systems Workshop said in the British Medical Journal, "Although HIV causes 3.7 per cent of [worldwide] mortality, it receives 25 per cent of international health care aid."
Ruteikara concluded, "Telling men and women to keep sex sacred -- to save sex for marriage and then remain faithful -- is telling them to love one another deeply with their whole hearts. Most HIV infections in Africa are spread by sex outside of marriage: casual sex and infidelity. The solution is faithful love."
"We, the poor of Africa, remain silenced in the global dialogue. Our wisdom about our own culture is ignored."
Source
Justice Department Bureaucrats May Set Risky Precedent with Extra-Territorial Tax Persecution
Bush Administration appointees involved with issues such as the Iraq war and coercive interrogation of suspected terrorists probably don't spend much time thinking about international tax policy, but they may rue the day that the Justice Department decided to persecute Swiss banks and Swiss bankers for obeying Swiss law and protecting the financial privacy of customers.
What's the connection? By going after Swiss banks and Swiss bankers in hopes of finding a few Americans who might be hiding money from the IRS, the Justice Department is embracing the notion that governments should not be constrained by national boundaries and national laws. Richard Rahn already has an excellent piece explaining why this is an absurd policy but let's consider some of the broader implications. What if John Yoo or Donald Rumsfeld travel to Europe in the near future for business or personal reasons and some European government decides to throw them in jail for violating "international law"? This may sound fanciful, but German authorities already have moved in this direction and it doesn't take much imagination to foresee politically ambitious officials from other nations grabbing the baton.
The Wall Street Journal report does not cover these broader implications, but it is a good summary of the Justice Department's fishing expedition:The Justice Department, in an unprecedented move against a foreign bank, is seeking to force UBS AG to turn over the names of wealthy U.S. clients who allegedly used the giant Swiss bank to avoid taxes. .U.S. authorities have been holding discussions for several weeks with UBS and Swiss banking authorities to identify the U.S. account holders. People familiar with the talks say UBS officials floated the possibility that the U.S. could obtain the names through a request to Swiss regulators. Monday's federal court filing instead puts the bank in direct conflict with the U.S. government. .The filing is the first against a non-U.S. bank by the Justice Department using what it calls a "John Doe summons," a maneuver typically used to investigate tax fraud by people whose identities are unknown. The move could spark a major legal battle because the Justice Department is essentially gambling that courts will bless the move when it's directed at a company with extensive U.S. operations but that isn't based in the U.S.Source
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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28 July, 2008
Guns, Foreign Courts, and the Moral Consensus of the International Community
In a landmark decision that will impact the future of gun regulation in the United States, late last month the Supreme Court struck down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C. In District of Columbia etal. v. Heller (No. 07-290) a slim 5-4 majority found the D.C. ban to violate the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reads, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Over the last few years observers of the Supreme Court have noticed a trend among some of the justices to cite the decisions of foreign courts as part of the relevant precedent in deciding the cases before them. In 2005, justices Scalia and Breyer engaged in a rare public conversation on this very topic, "Constitutional Relevance of Foreign Court Decisions." In the recently-decided D.C. v. Heller neither of the two dissenting opinions, written by justices Stevens and Breyer respectively, make substantial reference to foreign court decisions. But the growing phenomena of reference to foreign judgments as precedents raises the question of what the justices might have found if they had consulted such materials.
This tendency to invoke foreign jurisprudence is becoming more troubling as it becomes clearer that the moral consensus that once united Western nations has almost entirely broken down. A few years ago a pastor I know, as part of his duties as a representative of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), took part in an inter-church dialogue with a member of the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (GKN), a grouping of Reformed congregations in the Netherlands. The GKN sent what they considered to be a moderate pastor to participate in this conversation about moral issues. In the course of the discussion, the GKN moderate asserted that it was more evil to own a gun than to have an abortion. At this, the CRC representative was only able to respond that their discussion was effectively over. The CRC's official position on abortion is that the church "condemns the wanton or arbitrary destruction of any human being at any stage of its development from the point of conception to the point of death." As any rhetorician knows, argument can only proceed where there is some basic level of agreement, and the ethical opinion expressed by the GKN pastor was so far removed from the sensibilities of the CRC that there was effectively no point of contact for continuing dialogue. The GKN has since joined a number of other Protestant denominations in the Netherlands, including other Lutheran and Reformed denominations, to form the Protestantse Kerk in Nederland (PKN).
While this is a relatively minor anecdote, it serves well to illustrate the conflicting moral values placed on issues of life by the mainstream culture in Europe and the United States. No doubt there are those on either side of the Atlantic who would take issue with the dominant cultural judgment, but the national and international legal documents underscore the real differences. Where the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights singles out the right of the people to keep and bear arms, proposed European Union constitutional documents make no such mention. And as a recent Washington Times article relates, "many in Western Europe and Japan see U.S. gun ownership rates and gun violence as a clear mark of difference with other industrial countries."
But the difference has not always been so stark. Indeed, the preamble to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948, recognized the possibility of "rebellion against tyranny and oppression" as "a last resort," an option that ideally could be avoided by protections according to the rule of law.
On the question of abortion, part of what derailed adoption of the EU Constitution in 2004 was concern by nations like Poland and Ireland that the vague constitutional provisions about "dignity" and "integrity" of the human person would require the repeal of national anti-abortion laws. The Treaty of Lisbon, successor to the failed EU Constitution, was rejected by Ireland last month, in part over similar concerns by pro-life advocates that adoption of the treaty "would threaten the Irish constitutional protection for the unborn, given the almost universal acceptance and promotion of abortion at the EU level."
Upon reflection, then, the ethical judgment expressed by the GKN pastor seems to represent fairly well the mainstream EU attitude toward moral issues like guns and abortion. If part of what characterizes a civilization is a consensus on moral issues, then the idea of a unified Western civilization encompassing Europe and the United States is an illusion. A consensus that diverges on such fundamental questions of the right to life and responsibilities of self-defense is simply no consensus at all.
Source
The Far Left's War on Direct Democracy
A total of 24 states allow voters to change laws on their own by collecting signatures and putting initiatives on the ballot. It's healthy that the entrenched political class should face some real legislative competition from initiative-toting citizens. Unfortunately, some special interests have declared war on the initiative process, using tactics ranging from restrictive laws to outright thuggery.
The initiative is a reform born out of the Progressive Era, when there was general agreement that powerful interests had too much influence over legislators. It was adopted by most states in the Midwest and West, including Ohio and California. It was largely rejected by Eastern states, which were dominated by political machines, and in the South, where Jim Crow legislators feared giving more power to ordinary people.
But more power to ordinary people remains unpopular in some quarters, and nothing illustrates the war on the initiative more than the reaction to Ward Connerly's measures to ban racial quotas and preferences. The former University of California regent has convinced three liberal states -- California, Washington and Michigan -- to approve race-neutral government policies in public hiring, contracting and university admissions. He also prodded Florida lawmakers into passing such a law. This year his American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) aimed to make the ballot in five more states. But thanks to strong-arm tactics, the initiative has only made the ballot in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska.
"The key to defeating the initiative is to keep it off the ballot in the first place," says Donna Stern, Midwest director for the Detroit-based By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). "That's the only way we're going to win." Her group's name certainly describes the tactics that are being used to thwart Mr. Connerly.
Aggressive legal challenges have bordered on the absurd, going so far as to claim that a blank line on one petition was a "duplicate" of another blank line on another petition and thus evidence of fraud. In Missouri, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan completely rewrote the initiative's ballot summary to portray it in a negative light. By the time courts ruled she had overstepped her authority, there wasn't enough time to collect sufficient signatures.
Those who did circulate petitions faced bizarre obstacles. In Kansas City, a petitioner was arrested for collecting signatures outside of a public library. Officials finally allowed petitioners a table inside the library but forbade them to talk. In Nebraska, a group in favor of racial preferences ran a radio ad that warned that those who signed the "deceptive" petition "could be at risk for identity theft, robbery, and much worse."
Mr. Connerly says that it's ironic that those who claim to believe in "people power" want to keep people from voting on his proposal: "Their tactics challenge the legitimacy of our system." He's not alone. Liberal columnist Anne Denogean of the Tucson Citizen opposes the Connerly initiative, but last month she wrote that BAMN "is showing a disgusting lack of respect for the democratic process and the right of all Arizonans to participate in it." She detailed how members of this organization harass petitioners and film people who sign the petition, while telling them they are backing a racist measure. The police had to be called when BAMN blocked the entrance of a Phoenix office where circulators had to deliver their petitions. "BAMN's tactics," she concluded, "resemble those used by anti-abortion activists to prevent women from entering abortion clinics."
But BAMN proudly posts videos on its success in scaring away voters, or convincing circulators to hand over their petitions to its shock troops. "If you give me your signatures, we'll leave you alone," says a BAMN volunteer on one tape to someone who's earning money by circulating several different petitions.
What about voters' rights to sign ACRI's petitions? BAMN organizer Monica Smith equates race-neutral laws with Jim-Crow segregation laws and slavery. She told Tuscon columnist Denogean that voters are simply being educated that ACRI is "trying to end affirmative action . . . We let them know it's up on the KKK's Web site." Mr. Connerly has repudiated any support from racists.
Other opponents of Mr. Connerly deplore the blocking and name-calling. Arizona State Rep. Kyrsten Sinema told me that initiatives have been used to pass ideas such as campaign finance and redistricting reform often opposed by entrenched legislators. "People have a right to sign a petition, hear the arguments and then vote," she says. Ms. Sinema thinks Arizonans can be persuaded to vote down ACRI's measure, much as they voted down a ban on gay marriage in 2006.
The war against citizen initiatives has other fronts. This year in Michigan, taxpayer groups tried to recall House Speaker Andy Dillon after he pushed through a 22% increase in the state income tax. But petitioners collecting the necessary 8,724 signatures in his suburban Detroit district were set upon. In Redford, police union members held a rally backing Mr. Dillon and would alert blockers to the of recall petitioners. Outsiders would then surround petitioners and potential signers, using threatening language.
Mr. Dillon denied organizing such activity. Then it was revealed two of the harassers were state employees working directly for him. Another "voter educator" hired by the state's Democratic Party had been convicted of armed robbery. After 2,000 signatures were thrown out on technical grounds, the recall effort fell 700 signatures short.
Ever since voters in virtually every state with direct democracy passed term limits in the 1990s, state legislators have been hostile to the process. Now Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska and Colorado have all passed legislation to prohibit people from out-of-state from circulating a petition, and also to ban payment to circulators on a per-signature basis.
To his credit, Colorado's Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter vetoed such curbs. In March, a Sixth Circuit federal appeals court panel unanimously ruled that an Ohio law barring per-signature payment violated the First Amendment. Similarly, a Ninth Circuit panel just voted unanimously to strike down Arizona's residency law for circulators.
Some judges think the "blocking" of signature gatherers has gone too far. In 2006, Nevada Judge Sally Loehrers decreed a "civility zone" that barred opposing sides from coming within arms' length of each other at petition signing sites. "The blockers were off the streets within two days," says Paul Jacob, the head of Citizens in Charge, which promotes the initiative process.
Last year, Mr. Jacob was charged with conspiracy to defraud the state of Oklahoma in a bizarre prosecution that claimed he brought in out-of-state signature gatherers in violation of the state's residency requirement. Yet local public sector unions opposed to Mr. Jacob hired out-of-state outfits such as the Voter Education Project, an AFL-CIO offshoot that specializes in harassing signature drives.
Representative government will remain the enduring feature of American democracy, but the initiative process is a valuable safety valve. So long as elected officials gerrymander their districts and otherwise make it nearly impossible for voters to oust them, direct lawmaking will be popular. That's why attempts to arbitrarily curb the initiative, or to intimidate people from exercising their right to participate, must be resisted. It's a civil liberties issue that should unite people of good will on both the right and left.
Source
Did Colorado ban the Bible?
Social conservatives are in a fine lather over a Colorado law (PDF) signed by Governor Bill Ritter on May 29 that extends anti-discrimination protections to sexual minorities in matters of business and public accommodations. On its face, the law is the latest effort by our socially conscious lawmakers to force us all to be nice to each other under penalties of fines and imprisonment -- specifically, $300 or one year in jail per violation.
It's all just a bit too much like that old joke about the Soviet Union, in which the commissars express concern about the dreary, bleak attitudes of their subjects: "Everybody must be happy! Anybody not happy by noon tomorrow will be shot!"
Religious conservatives have also fretted that businesses will be forced to cater to people they find repugnant -- for instance, that wedding photographers will be compelled to take shots of same-sex ceremonies. That does, in fact, seem to be the intent of the authors. Rep. Joel Judd responded to just such an ion with the comment that, "If you choose to do commerce in Colorado you have to abide by these rules."
Uh huh. Good luck to the happy gay couple who hires a true-believing Roman Catholic shutterbug. May the record of your most-important day not be made up of 300 shots of the photographer's shoes.
Perhaps most troubling, the law's Section 8 restricts the sort of written material that businesses and landlords may publish and distribute. Supposedly, this provision applies only to statements of an intent to discriminate, but if that's what the authors intended, it's not what they wrote.SECTION 8. 24-34-701, Colorado Revised Statutes, is amended to read:Note that the law doesn't just say that you can't publish material that states you'll deny services to protected classes of people, it also says you can't make them feel "unwelcome." Hurting people's feelings is now a criminal offense.
24-34-701. Publishing of discriminative matter forbidden. No person, being the owner, lessee, proprietor, manager, superintendent, agent, or employee of any place of public accommodation, resort, or amusement, directly or indirectly, by himself or herself or through another person shall publish, issue, circulate, send, distribute, give away, or display in any way, manner, or shape or by any means or method, except as provided in this section, any communication, paper, poster, folder, manu , book, pamphlet, writing, print, letter, notice, or advertisement of any kind, nature, or de ion which THAT is intended or calculated to discriminate or actually discriminates against any disability, race, creed, color, sex, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, marital status, national origin, or ancestry or against any of the members thereof in the matter of furnishing or neglecting or refusing to furnish to them or any one of them any lodging, housing, schooling, or tuition or any accommodation, right, privilege, advantage, or convenience offered to or enjoyed by the general public or which states that any of the accommodations, rights, privileges, advantages, or conveniences of any such place of public accommodation, resort, or amusement shall or will be refused, withheld from, or denied to any person or class of persons on account of disability, race, creed, color, sex, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, marital status, national origin, or ancestry or that the patronage, custom, presence, frequenting, dwelling, staying, or lodging at such place by any person or class of persons belonging to or purporting to be of any particular disability, race, creed, color, sex, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, marital status, national origin, or ancestry is unwelcome or ionable or not acceptable, desired, or solicited.
Social conservatives that handing out the Bible or the Book of Mormon may be illegal under the new law. While I can't imagine the courts allowing that interpretation to stand, the text of the law is open to just such a reading. I have to think that legislators threw as much as they could against the legal wall, just to see what would stick.
Many socially conservative groups based in Colorado say they flat-out won't obey the law. As much as I despise their attitudes toward gays and lesbians, I can't blame them. Private individuals, businesses and organizations have the right to decide who they'll associate with and who they won't, and what ideas they'll express along the way, no matter how abhorrent or unpopular their criteria. If the law doesn't recognize that right, the law should be defied.
Lawmakers who set out to make society kinder and gentler through the use of force do violence to the whole idea of tolerance -- and to our liberty.
Source
Third of Britain's Muslim students back killings
Radicalism and support for sharia is strong in British universities
ALMOST a third of British Muslim students believe killing in the name of Islam can be justified, according to a poll. The study also found that two in five Muslims at university support the incorporation of Islamic sharia codes into British law.
The YouGov poll for the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC) will raise concerns about the extent of campus radicalism. "Significant numbers appear to hold beliefs which contravene democratic values," said Han-nah Stuart, one of the report's authors. "These results are deeply embarrassing for those who have said there is no extremism in British universities."
The report was criticised by the country's largest Muslim student body, Fosis, but Anthony Glees, professor of security and intelligence studies at Buckingham University, said: "The finding that a large number of students think it is okay to kill in the name of religion is alarming. "There is a wide cultural divide between Muslim and nonMuslim students. The solution is to stop talking about celebrating diversity and focus on integration and assimilation."
The researchers found that 55% of nonMuslim students thought Islam was incompatible with democracy. Nearly one in 10 had "little respect" for Muslims.
In addition to its poll of 1,400 Muslim and nonMuslim students, the centre visited more than 20 universities to interview students and listen to guest speakers. It found that extremist preachers regularly gave speeches that were inflammatory, homophobic or bordering on antisemitic. The researchers highlighted Queen Mary college, part of London University, as a campus where radical views were widely held. Last December, a speaker named Abu Mujahid encouraged Muslim students to condemn gays because "Allah hates" homosexuality. In November, Azzam Tamimi, a British-based supporter of Hamas, described Israel as the most "inhumane project in the modern history of humanity". James Brandon, deputy director at CSC , said: "Our researchers found a ghettoised mentality among Muslim students at Queen Mary. Also, we found the segregation between Muslim men and women at events more visible at Queen Mary."
A spokesman for Queen Mary said the university was aware the preachers had visited but did not know the contents of their speeches. "Clearly, we in no way associate ourselves with these views. However, also integral to the spirit of university life is free speech and debate and on occasion speakers will make statements that are deemed offensive."
In the report, 40% of Muslim students said it was unacceptable for Muslim men and women to associate freely. Homophobia was rife, with 25% saying they had little or no respect for gays. The figure was higher (32%) for male Muslim students. Among nonMuslims, the figure was only 4%.
The research found that a third of Muslim students supported the creation of a world-wide caliphate or Islamic state.
A number of terrorists have been radicalised at British universities. Kafeel Ahmed, who drove a flaming jeep into a building at Glasgow airport last year and died of his burns, is believed to have been radicalised while studying at Anglia Ruskin university, Cambridge.
Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, condemned the study. "This disgusting report is a reflection of the biases and prejudices of a right-wing think tank - not the views of Muslim students across Britain," he said. "Only 632 Muslim students were asked vague and misleading questions, and their answers were wilfully misinterpreted."
Some of the findings amplify previous research. A report by Policy Exchange last year found that 37% of all Muslims aged 16-24 would prefer to live under a sharia system. Baroness Warwick, chief executive of Universities UK, said: "Violence, or the incitement to violence, has no place on a university campus."
Source
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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27 July, 2008
Those charming feminists at work
All Desiree Carpenter wanted was a chance to succeed. As a young woman Ms. Carpenter (not her real name) had been subjected to repeated physical and sexual assaults, losing her eyesight during one attack. Her assailant did hard time, but now he was back on the streets and vowing to track her down. Her only hope was to flee to another state, assume a new identity, and start over. Washington was the best place to begin anew, since the state had passed tough anti-stalking laws. So she packed her bags and hopped on the train with her two children in tow, bound for Bellingham, a couple hours north of Seattle.
Being blind, she had come into a laptop computer with a screen reader that converts text to the spoken word. That's how Desiree and I exchanged information for this article. Arriving at the Bellingham train station, she expectantly called the Womencare Shelter, a group that bills itself as a "feminist organization working to end violence against women."
Desiree was told to go to the local MacDonald's to be interviewed by an intake worker. There she was scrutinized to make sure "I was acceptable," as Desiree later recounted. The staffer told Ms. Carpenter to detail her rape experiences while her children sat quietly and listened.
Admitted to the shelter, the staff removed her daughter's electronic homeschooling program, saying African-Americans spend too much time with rap videos. Desiree's television was padlocked and she was informed she could only watch TV on weekends. Like all residents, Desiree was assigned housekeeping chores. It's not that the tasks were menial, but asking a blind woman to clean toilets and sort broken glass seems a little cold-hearted. When the new resident questioned her duties, the staff urged her to become more "empowered."
The staff forbade the woman from making safety accommodations on the shelter's flat-top stove. So Desiree and her young children ate micro-waved meals and peanut butter sandwiches for the rest of their stay. When residents wanted to re-enter the facility, they typed in a security code. Desiree asked to have the keypad marked with Braille dots, leading her to be ridiculed as being disruptive and manipulative. At one point a resident confided to her, "The staff here acts worse than an abuser."
The shelter did help Desiree to secure the all-important name change. Of course that entailed losing all her educational credentials, job references, credit cards, and so forth. That was the sacrifice she knew she would have to make. Over the next two weeks things went from bad to worse, especially after Ms. Carpenter complained about the videotape that lectured residents why organized religion was "oppressive" to women. In desperation, Desiree contacted the Bellingham Adult Protective Services, pleading they dispatch a disability aide so she could cook her own meals.
But the Womencare director ordered "Nyet," claiming that would compromise the shelter's secret . Then the shelter staff began to suspect she was planning to file a complaint with the Washington Human Rights Council - of course that was forbidden by shelter rules. So that evening the director barged into Desiree's room and issued an ultimatum: "Either you drop your civil rights complaint or you're out of here!" When Desiree tearfully said she had only requested someone to assist with the necessities of life, the staff interpreted her claim of innocence to be further proof of guilt. That was reason enough to summon the police.
Within minutes a female officer dashed into the shelter, gun drawn, pulled the startled children out of bed, and ordered them out. The officer explained that even though Desiree had not violated any rules, the shelter was "exiting" her because she was unhappy with their services.
Then came the crushing blow - the shelter director blurted out Desiree Carpenter's previous name. The officer hastily entered both names, linked by a single report, into the National Crime Information Center database. In that moment, all the labors of the past month were undone, all her hopes of a life free of fear were dashed!
The staff then ransacked Desiree's room, stuffing her possessions, food, and legal documents into a black trash bag. Mother, son, and daughter were sent packing into the rainy night.
During her one-month nightmare at Womencare, Ms. Carpenter suffered too many indignities to recount in a single column - more details can be seen here. In the end, Desiree's daughter said she would rather die than ever again trust an abuse shelter.
Source
THESE ARE (STILL) THE GOOD OLD DAYS
Are you anxious? Dejected? Fearful? Why wouldn't you be, considering the barrage of rotten news assaulting you from every direction? "Everything seemingly is spinning out of control," moaned the apocalyptic headline on a recent Associated Press dispatch. "Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Airfares, college tuition, and healthcare border on unaffordable . . . Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets, or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world gone haywire."
Thanks in part to journalism of that caliber, consumers are more apprehensive than they have been in decades. Consumer confidence is at a 16-year low, while according to an ABC News-Washington Post poll, more Americans than ever, 84 percent, think the country is headed in the wrong direction. The New York Times devoted one-fourth of Saturday's front page to illustrating ways in which the economy is mired in "A Slowdown With Trouble at Every Turn" -- and continued the gloom for a full page inside.
Voices of reason keep trying to point out that conditions are not nearly as bad as they were the last time consumers were this despondent. That was in May 1980, during the final year of the Carter administration, when the "misery index" -- the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates -- hit an excruciating 21.9. Inflation was then at 14.4 percent; unemployment was 7.5 percent. The numbers today are 5 and 5.5 respectively.
But voters don't want to be told to buck up. When former senator Phil Gramm, an economic adviser to John McCain, said last week that America had "become a nation of whiners" and described the current slowdown as a "mental recession," the backlash was immediate. McCain repudiated Gramm's remarks and quickly issued a statement assuring voters that he "travels the country every day talking to Americans who are hurting, feeling pain at the pump, and worrying about how they'll pay their mortgage."
Well, that's politics. Politicians who want to get elected genuflect to what Bryan Caplan, in *The Myth of the Rational Voter* calls the pessimistic bias: the "tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the (recent) past, present, and future performance of the economy."
For a nonpessimistic view, hearken to W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, who in the current issue of The American ask "How Are We Doing?" -- and offer some useful perspective. The nation's present troubles, they argue -- rising oil and food prices, job losses, sluggish growth, the mortgage crisis -- "will turn out to be mere footnotes in a longer-term march of progress." The US economy, "a $14 trillion behemoth," remains without equal as an engine of growth and prosperity. However impolitic it may be to say so, when you take the long view it is clear that we have never had it so good.
Cox and Alm point to an array of reassuring trends. Americans on average work far less than they used to. Annual hours devoted to the job have fallen from 1,903 in 1950 to just 1,531 today. We start working later in life, retire earlier, and live much longer. Even including household labor, they write, "only about a quarter of our waking hours are consumed with work, down from 45 percent in 1950."
The material progress of recent decades has been extraordinary -- at all income levels. Forty percent of poor families own their own homes. For many goods (kitchen appliances, color TVs, air conditioners) ownership rates are higher among poor Americans today than they were among the general population in 1970.
On highways and in the air, we travel billions of miles more than we used to, yet death rates are at all-time lows. Healthcare is more expensive, true, but quality is much better. Real total compensation -- wages plus benefits, adjusted for inflation - has been climbing for generations. And if prices are calculated as a function of work-time -- how long one must work at the average pay rate to earn the price of something - a gallon of gasoline, even with the runup in pump prices, "still goes for less than 11 minutes of work."
Short-term troubles notwithstanding, Cox and Alm observe, the "data points add up to steady, continuing progress for average Americans." So no, everything is not spinning out of control. Alarmist headlines notwithstanding, we're doing all right. Buck up.
Source
Rejoicing in death. Why is the Left so full of hate for Lady Thatcher?
The Letters page of The Guardian, seldom the sanest of arenas, has this week descended to virulent venom. In place of the customary corduroyed bores calling for unilateral disarmament, rainbow-nation multiculturalism or celebrations of Castro's Cuba, there have appeared several letters which gloated at the prospect of Margaret Thatcher's death. Their vengeful tone, though hurtful about the still very much alive Lady Thatcher, has been instructive. It was a timely reminder that no one does viciousness quite like the Left. Far from the Conservatives being 'the Nasty Party', Labour's preachy brothers and sisters have long deserved that title.
The Guardian letters were sparked by reports that Lady Thatcher will be given the rare honour of a state funeral. Even to discuss such arrangements is, let us be honest, a difficult matter. The widowed, octogenarian Lady T is in fair health. Long may she remain so.
Some Guardian readers have taken a markedly less charitable line towards the former Prime Minister. Typical of the response was that of one Chris Gibson, who said that on seeing the headline about a state funeral for Lady Thatcher: 'I thought that the week had got off to the best possible start.' Charming. Another contributor, Chris Hardman, wrote: 'Just a couple of questions: 'Does that include the grave/dancefloor combo?' and 'When is it booked for?' Guardian reader Rob Watling suggested that the contract for any state funeral should be 'put out to compulsory competitive tender and awarded to the lowest bidder'.
On one level, these letters are merely the prattish words of small minds - people unable to accept that many of the battles of the Eighties were lost for good by Labour and that Lady T was a remarkable election winner whose titanic will reversed Britain's post-war decline and, incidentally, destroyed the class structure so loathed by the Left. But the fact such horrible letters were written, let alone published in a national newspaper, tells us something else. The vituperative tone was even less restrained on The Guardian's internet website, and those of other Left-wing publications such as The New Statesman.
It is all of a piece with other instances of shrill intolerance by the Left. Why is it that socialists, in contrast to their professed humanity and Methodist origins, are so remarkably malevolent? Why is the Left so mean?
Look at the way Labour hardliners reacted to the idea of Boris Johnson becoming Mayor of London. A moderate Tory, socially liberal, urban, pro-gay, generally pro-minority, he has more in common with middle-class London Labour than he does with old-fashioned provincial Tories. Yet the last days of his campaign saw near apoplexy among Left-wingers - not least with some ludicrously skewed coverage in The Guardian. Genial Boris was depicted as little short of a rapist and Ku Klux Klansman.
Look at the way Labour portrayed Edward Timpson, Conservative candidate in the recent Crewe and Nantwich by-election. A barrister specialising in family disputes, an area of the law which exposes practitioners to terrible examples of social breakdown, Mr Timpson is no goose-stepper. He is a well-informed Centrist from a family which has done much charity work in Cheshire. So how was he depicted by the caring, sharing Left? As an early 20th century fop, a political opportunist, a figure to be hated. A hit squad of hecklers was hired to pursue him. Labour spent thousands of pounds on negative campaigning.
Left-wingers like to talk of ' progressive politics', by which they suppose they mean open-mindedness, but historically they are far more dogmatic than the Right.
Factionalism and drunken intrigue were rampant in the trades unions of old. On immigration, Left-wingers have been exceptionally illiberal. Commentators and politicians who questioned the pro-immigration consensus were shouted down as racists. The thoroughly decent former Tory leader Michael Howard was cast as something close to a Nazi for daring to suggest that immigration was becoming a problem. His assailants were not shamed by the fact that Mr Howard is of Jewish emigre stock. He'd had the temerity to oppose the Left. He had to be destroyed.
Tony Blair's regime was infamously unpleasant to people who tried to stand in its way. Government scientist David Kelly paid for his independence with his life - suicide, we were told, although he was pushed into any such suicide by Labour-ordered briefings. Other refuseniks, from Cabinet ministers who refused to do grubby deals or military commanders who questioned bad orders, had their reputations traduced. Civil servants who did not 'fit' were sacked by Blair's thugs. Some people tried to claim smiling Tony's nastiest piece of work, Alastair Campbell, was no worse than Sir Bernard Ingham, Mrs Thatcher's press spokesman. But Ingham never wielded the power - or malevolence - of the spitting, table-thumping Campbell.
How depressing it is that even now Blair has gone, the Labour Government continues to show a vindictive streak. The treatment of General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of General Staff, is the latest example of a good public servant being shafted by rancorous Leftists, furious that an 'old school' figure should try to oppose their sway.
One of the Left's great propaganda achievements over the years has been the idea that it was somehow kinder to support Labour than to be Conservative. Think a little harder, though, and you may start to see that Left's attitude depends on the suppression of tolerance. It demands communal conformity rather than independent freedom. It seeks to dictate supply rather than allowing the market to find a level. It places the state above the citizen.
Here are the philosophical roots of the harshness of discipline which fuel the unpleasantness. Those Guardian letters spring directly from Left-wing orthodoxy. It is hard to imagine any Conservative worth that name rejoicing at the death of a Labour opponent. The Tory instinct does not work like that. When the then Tory party chairman, Theresa May, told her activists they were 'seen as the nasty party' she was probably right - even though it was unfair.
Labour's cleverness has been to hide its vindictive streak. If anything, the Tories have not been nasty enough. Let's hope it stays that way. I'd hate to think any of us would descend to the level reached by the Left - the REAL nasty party.
Source
"Useful Idiots" Convene in Madrid
The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, and the Custodian of Postmodern European Secularism, Spanish Prime Minister Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero, on July 16 opened the World Conference on Dialogue in Madrid. The aim of the event is to promote dialogue between the world's main religions, and, as some observers suspect, to establish a one-world religion based on Islam. More than 200 leaders of different religions [pdf], including Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Universalism, Marxism and Multiculturalism, are attending the three-day conference. Also attending are leading personalities specialized in dialogue and useful topics such as "life of human societies, international cooperation, human rights, security and peace and living peacefully together."
The conference is being organized by the Muslim World League (also known as the World Islamic League) following an initiative by King Abdullah, whose country is the birthplace of Islam, a religion of peace. The Muslim World League also happens to be the principal agent for the propagation of Wahhabi Islam in Europe. In 1987, it was elected as a "Messenger of World Peace" by the United Nations.
Saudi officials said Spain was chosen as the site for the gathering because of its historical symbolism as a place where Muslims and those Jews and Christians who paid the dhimmi tax lived in peace under Islamic rule between the 8th and 13th centuries.
The event will take place against a backdrop of tensions between the Islamic world and the West due to the intolerable intolerance of the latter. They range from restrictions on the use of the veil by Muslim women in some European countries to cartoons regarded as blasphemous by Muslims and the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The conference, which seeks to promote openness, consists of five closed-door round tables. They will be followed by a final communiqu to be issued on July 18. The first session, titled "Dialogue and Its Religious and Civilizational Foundations," will be chaired by the secretary-general of the Millennium World Peace Summit. The session will touch upon touchy topics such as "Dialogue in Islam" and "Dialogue in Christianity."
The second session is titled "Dialogue and Its Importance in Society." A president of the World Conference of Religions for Peace will present a paper on "Dialogue and Interaction of Cultures and Civilizations," while the president of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace, will speak on "Dialogue and its Impact on Peaceful Coexistence." Other lofty topics for discussion include: "Dialogue and Its Impact on International Relations" and "Dialogue in the Face of Calls for the Clash of Civilizations and End of History."
The third session, titled "Common Human Values in Areas of Dialogue," will be chaired by the secretary-general of the World Conference of Religions for Peace. Featured speakers are the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the secretary-general of the World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought in Iran; and the rector of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue at the Vatican.
The fourth session is titled "Evaluation and Promotion of Dialogue" and will be chaired by the secretary-general of the Jewish Congress in Latin America and the Caribbean. This session will cover topics such as "Muslim-Christian-Jewish Dialogue: Its Future & Horizons" and "Efforts of States and International Organizations in Augmenting Dialogue and Overcoming its Obstacles."
The fifth session is titled "Disseminating of Culture and Co-Existence of Dialoge." It will focus on topics such as: "Media and its Impact on Disseminating the Culture of Dialogue and Co-Existance." The final communique will be read out by the assistant secretary of the Muslim World League.
Saudi Arabia hopes the conference will prove that it is trying to: 1) shed its international image of harboring a xenophobic religious establishment; and 2) moderate clerical conservatism that even s to women driving cars.
According to Reuters, the conference offers Saudi Arabia a chance to declare its "openness and willingness to cooperate with the international community [.] It marks a new direction for Saudi Arabia, whose Wahhabi Islam has come in for criticism internationally" after 15 of the 19 Arabs who killed some 3,000 people in the September 11 attacks in the United States were Saudis.
Abdullah al-Turki, the head of the Muslim World League and conference organizer, says: "Saudi Arabia, on whose ground the global message of Islam was launched, affirms to the whole world its openness and cooperation with the world community." And then, just in case there was any doubt, al-Turki adds: "Islam requires Muslims to inform people about Islam as the final divine message that came after the previous prophets."
So why is the hyper-secular and hyper-tolerant Zapatero embracing one of the most theologically intolerant strands of Islam? And why is he turning Spain into a Saudi public relations rehab center? Zapatero (like his Saudi counterparts, but for different reasons) views Judeo-Christianity as public enemy number one because it is the main impediment to the realization of his vision for a socialist multicultural utopia in which everything goes. And he hopes his pact with Islam will accelerate Spanish history.
Zapatero and his socialist advisors believe Muslims are the "useful idiots" of the left. And Muslims believe Zapatero and his socialist friends are the "useful idiots" of Islam. Such is the future of Spain.
Source
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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26 July, 2008
The evil British police again
Grandmother arrested on race charges after telling rowdy Asian students to 'go home'
After being woken for the third time in one night by a group of drunken and noisy students, Jo Calvert-Mindell was at her wits' end. The former policewoman got dressed, went outside and shouted at them: 'Why can't you go back to where you come from and make some noise there? I bet your families and neighbours wouldn't put up with it. 'You don't care about us and do just as you like. What gives you the right to frighten my elderly neighbours, cause damage and keep us awake at night?'
She also reported the incident to police, who came and dispersed the eight students. The 51-year-old grandmother was astonished when four months later she was arrested and accused of being a racist. It turned out that two Asians in the group had complained to the police. In April, Miss Calvert-Mindell, who has never been in trouble with the police before, was charged with using racially aggravated threatening words or behaviour under section 5 of the Public Order Act. In May, she appeared at Folkestone Magistrates' Court in Kent, where she denied the charge.
The case hung over her until the Crown Prosecution Service decided to drop it last week, admitting there was little chance of conviction. Now she is filing a complaint about the way the police treated her.
Yesterday, Miss Calvert-Mindell, a Liberal Democrat councillor and community volunteer, said: 'The last thing I am is a racist. 'I have a totally inclusive attitude to different races and cultures - I don't care if you are black, white, green or a Martian. 'Their colour had nothing to do with it - it was their behaviour. 'I think there is something very wrong in our society when a resident can't go out and try and prevent crime and disorder and encourage the defendants to go back home and that they can then play the race card to completely absolve themselves of responsibility for that behaviour. 'The authorities today are so sensitive to being criticised for being racist that any claims of racism just raises their antennae, instead of using common sense.'
The incident that led to her court appearance happened in the early hours of November 8 last year on the Hales Place estate in Canterbury. Miss Calvert-Mindell, who has a daughter and three grandchildren, was woken three times by students from the nearby University of Kent, who were shouting drunkenly and kicking bins. Fed up after months of sleeplessness caused by noisy students she put her clothes on and went down to tell them to be quiet.
She said that when she shouted at the students 'all I meant was that they would not do that at their family homes wherever they had come from in England.' But one of the students said she was being racist. Two Asians in the group later complained to police.
Assistant district crown prosecutor Carol Chastney said: 'Following a review we decided to discontinue the proceedings against the defendant as there was no longer sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction.' Kent Police refused to apologise. Superintendent Chris Hogben said: 'An allegation was made that was fully investigated. A case was presented to the CPS and the decision was made to prosecute. 'If Miss Calvert-Mindell would like to discuss our response and the conduct of officers I would urge her to contact me direct.'
Source
British photography paranoia reaches new peak (1)
No photos of even EMPTY pools!
A council has apologised to two women after a worker ordered them to stop photographing a deserted paddling pool over fears about child protection. Southampton City Council said it was trying to safeguard youngsters on the city's common but added staff would now be advised to use more discretion. Betty Robinson, 82, and Brenda Bennett, 69, were taking pictures when they were ordered to stop by a female worker. Mrs Robinson said: "It's pathetic, bureaucracy gone mad."
"I said is it because we might be paedophiles? There were no children in the pool but she pointed to a man and boys in the distance and said we could come back later at 6pm when the park was closed. "We are just a couple of old ladies who wouldn't hurt children and we are certainly not paedophiles."
Mike Harris, head of leisure and culture at Southampton City Council, said in a statement: "I'm sorry if we have caused any offence on this occasion. "We have to walk a fine line between protecting the children who use this popular paddling pool and the interests of the community as a whole. "A lot of people are more concerned about the safety of their children these days so it is appropriate that our staff are aware of who is taking photos."
Source
British photography paranoia reaches new peak (2)
Must not photograph offenders -- is "assault"
A householder who took photographs of hooded teenagers as evidence of their anti-social behaviour says he was told he was breaking the law after they called the police. David Green, 64, and his neighbours had been plagued by the youths from a nearby comprehensive school for months, and was advised by their headmaster to identify them so action could be taken.
But when Mr Green left his $2 million London flat to take photographs of the gang, who were aged around 17, he said one threatened to kill him while another called the police on his mobile. And he claimed that a Police Community Support Officer sent to the scene promptly issued a warning that taking pictures of youths without permission was illegal, and could lead to a charge of assault.
Last night Mr Green, a television cameraman, said he was appalled that the legal system's first priority seemed not to be stopping frightening anti-social behaviour by aggressive youths, but protecting them from being photographed by the concerned public. Mr Green, a father-of-two, lives with his programme-maker wife Judy in a penthouse flat close to Waterloo station. He said: 'We've had problems with this group shouting abuse and throwing stones for months, and were asked to identify them. 'When I went to take photographs of eight of them throwing cans of Coke around, six of them ran away, one threatened to kill me, and another one started phoning the police.
'A couple of hours later, a Police Community Support Officer told me I had been accused of assault, though no such thing occurred, and told me I was not allowed to take photographs of teenagers on the street. 'I think it's wrong that when teenagers are running riot and the police are called, it's about me, and I'm treated like a criminal. 'In South London we all know how many stabbings there have been, and I think the police should be busy catching the real bad people.'
Mr Green said he handed his pictures to a deputy headmaster at the nearby Nautical School, and was promised the matter would be investigated. A Metropolitan Police spokesman said the force had no record of the incident.
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A Look Back at the New Age
BOOK REVIEW of "Farm Friends" By Tom Fels
While campaigning, Barack Obama has criticized the politics of baby boomers who are still "fighting some of the same fights since the sixties." Such a criticism must resonate with many Americans, who have grown weary of the boomer cohort's fondness for itself.
Tom Fels's "Farm Friends," although a 1960s memoir, does not really belong to his generation's self-celebratory tradition. It concerns a group of people who, in the manner of 19th-century utopian communities, lived on a communal farm in western Massachusetts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worked diligently to usher in the New Age -- living as self-sufficiently as possible (aided by the stealing of food and tools), sharing responsibilities and avoiding "the world of trauma outside." That world included the Vietnam War as well as American middle-class culture, with its apparent lack of interest in realities deeper than consumerism. Farm life would supposedly help create the kind of peace and harmony that the 1960s counterculture was so keen to find.
Naturally, the New Age did not arrive, and the farm members went their separate ways. But Mr. Fels is not intent on merely condemning the experiment or praising it. He shows an appealing resistance to sweeping philosophical explanations and to aphorisms disguised as existential truths, both favorites of the 1960s. In "Farm Friends," he describes life on the farm, interviews the commune members in later years and examines how their lives reflect (or do not reflect) the ideals they once espoused.
Dozens of people pop in and out of the narrative. We meet the prodigal daughter of a French admiral who, as Mr. Fels puts it, "believed that the world was in a stage of decadence, degeneracy, and decay comparable to Rome." Then there is a writer who begins as a chronicler of commune life and eventually composes a novel that he deems "the 'Godfather' of the stoned generation." The commune's founder, Marshall Bloom, is a frequent subject of conversation. He was an iconic figure of the counterculture who committed suicide in 1969.
Mr. Fels treats his friends with gentle skepticism but also respect, and he writes with considerable psychological insight. Still, he can be overly indulgent. He labels one commune member an "entrepreneur" even though the man's first business is drug dealing. In fact, drugs are a constant among the farm friends, who consume them with the same aplomb with which an earlier generation drank scotch and sodas. The taste in drugs tracks consumer trends -- pot and hallucinogens during the 1960s, cocaine a decade later.
But Mr. Fels seems determined not to pass judgment. He quotes without comment from one friend's 1970 book, "Total Loss Farm," an earlier commune memoir whose author recounts the militant radicalism that he came to reject: "We dreamed of a New Age born of violent insurrection. We danced on the graves of the war dead in Vietnam, every corpse was ammunition for Our Side." Mr. Fels writes of the admiral's daughter, apparently without irony: "On her thirtieth birthday, at the farm, she had changed her name to Lilly Stillwater and adopted the calm, organic lifestyle that ought to have gone with it, only to be deeply disrupted shortly after by the growth of a consuming passion for the music of Tina Turner."
Mr. Fels visits with one farm friend who has become a drug-taking hipster corporate attorney. "Isn't it great?" the man exults. "Corporate America is paying for this lifestyle!" Like other former radicals, he is eager to maintain the fiction that, even by joining "the system," he is somehow subverting it. Other farm friends take up social causes, like the anti-nuclear weapons campaign of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the campaign against nuclear power. One former commune member is arrested for toppling a weather tower that had been erected as part of a nuclear-power plant.
Still other farm alumni make no pretense to continuing the revolution but instead engage in the boomer habit of replacing youthful extremism with a middle-aged version: "We used to think money was the least important thing. Now I can see that it's the most important," says one former commune member, sounding like a budding Randian. "Money buys freedom."
Few of the farm friends are terribly likable or sympathetic -- with the notable exception of Tim, an "alienated citizen" of the farm while he lived there. Tim found the commune's group dynamics stifling. He wanted time to himself and was promised that he could build his own room and work space in the barn, but the ions of others to his solitary plans thwarted him at nearly every turn.
Of the farm's whole New Age mission, Tim remarks: "The error was, I think, imagining that there was somewhere new to go, someone new to be. It became increasingly clear that a closed system of myth did not jibe with the world as it really was." Looking later at the outside world, Tim saw "a system formed less from malice than from a kind of natural order, less from inordinate greed than from longings much like our own for privacy, comfort, individual freedom, and one's familiar or chosen way of life." Unfortunately, "Farm Friends" spends too little time with Tim.
In the last part of the book, Mr. Fels details his studies in art history and his career as an independent art curator. For all his memoir's moderate tone, he cannot resist a note of narcissistic complaint: "Have you noticed that . . . we have had to make compromises, find ways to support our visions, create a framework in this difficult world through which to live and to survive?" Usually, though, he leaves the self- involvement to others. "I'm still doing my thing," a friend tells the author in a typical passage, "such as it may be, and my thing goes on, and on, and on." We've noticed.
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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25 July, 2008
Being a Terrorist Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
By Barry Rubin
The number-one mistake people make trying to understand the Middle East is refusing to believe folks here think differently from themselves. Virtually every development in the Middle East should remind us of this reality. Yet as Captain Ahab hunted the white whale, as prospectors hunt for gold, as...well, you get the idea, so is the hunt for the great Arab moderate. There are Arab moderates, some very smart and brave people. The problem is none are in positions of power and all must shut up or face repression and being defined by fellows as enemies of the people.
The view of the Middle East held in much or most of the Western media, academia, intellectual circles, and large sections of governments is a fantasy having nothing to do with the region. One should work against dangerous extremists with the Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Moroccan, Kuwaiti, UAE, and Iraqi governments as well as the Lebanese pro-independence forces, though these all have multiple faults. But you must know the limits. And you can't work with the Iranian, Syrian governments, Hamas and Hizballah or Muslim Brotherhood, even against al-Qaida which is ultimately--despite September 11--a far smaller threat.
Still, one must face the fact that the last half-century's most basic lessons have evaporated, partly due to Western policy mistakes--of excessive softness, not toughness--but mostly to the incredible power of the region's political and intellectual system.
What keeps the region crisis-ridden, extremist, undemocratic, and unstable is not merely a system imposed by evil regimes on an innocent public. Yes, regimes continue their self-serving Arab nationalist, semi-Islamist, anti-Western, anti-Israel, demagogic messages urging the masses to support their local dictator. But this is what the public wants to hear. Rulers would be in far more trouble if they told the truth.
The glorification of the terrorist Sami Qantar is widely seen in the West as showing something is deeply wrong in the Arabic-speaking world. Yet there's also much denial. The New York Times explained Qantar's attack had gone terribly wrong when he murdered Israeli civilians. In fact, this was the raid's purpose.
In another article, the Times intoned: "The United States, Israel and some of their European allies have begun to recognize that their policy of trying to defeat their enemies by isolating and vilifying them has failed." Yet it was Iran, Syria, Hizballah, and Hamas that dispatches the Qantars on missions against not only Israeli but also Iraqi and Lebanese civilians.
If the extremists should not be vilified should they be praised? If they should not be isolated should they be embraced? Is the correct policy the feting of murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Asad in Paris or parleying with the genocidal-oriented Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran? Why did the U.S. government welcome the Syria-Iran-Hizballah victory in knocking down Lebanon's moderate government? Who's the villain in Iraq, the United States or the terrorists?
Well, for the Arabic-speaking world, the true heroes are still the terrorists. What horrified me most is not radicals cheering Qantar but that most relative moderates feeling compelled to do so. At the airport to greet him were leaders of Lebanon's anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian Druze and Christian groups as well as the ambassadors from Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, and Morocco.
To avoid being discredited, relative moderates must affirm that anyone who murders Israeli children is a hero. That's the measure of how far--despite daily headlines to the contrary--the region is from Arab-Israeli peace.
Yet it's untrue the prisoner exchange has strengthened or encouraged the radicals. The truth is even worse: No matter what happens they'll do exactly the same things. If every operation and casualty is a victory, a profit-loss calculus doesn't apply. They'll kidnap if there's a prisoner exchange; they'll kidnap if there's no exchange. Triumph is continuing the struggle. Violence, death, and instability is cause for celebration.
Charles Harb, a Lebanese professor, claimed in the Guardian, "The Secret of Hizballah's Success" is that its ability to get back some prisoners and bodies or force Israel out of south Lebanon "is in stark contrast to what `Arab moderates' could show for in the same decade they spent negotiating with the Israeli state."
The Saudi-backed, London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat, however, reminded readers that Hizballah's success cost "$5.2 billion in losses and 1,200 dead" in the 2006 war. In addition, the south Lebanon war took almost 20 years, and Israel would have withdrawn far sooner if it had not been trying to block attacks against its territory.
The claim that Arab moderates have gained little through negotiation is also quite wrong. By negotiating with Israel, Egypt got back the Sinai, reopened the Suez Canal and western Sinai oilfields, and received about $60 billion to date in U.S. aid. The PLO got the Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank, putting more than two million Palestinians under its rule. Thousands of its prisoners were freed (more, of course, were taken because of its continuing violence), many billions of dollars in aid were obtained, and it could have had a Palestinian state if it so desired.
So who came out better, Egypt and the PLO (especially if it had really stuck to negotiating) or Hizballah? Psychologically, the Arabic-speaking world says Hizballah because the "honor" gained through fighting and not yielding the dream of total victory trumps material benefits. Better martyrdom than compromise, better resistance than prosperity.
As long as this is true, there's no hope for peace; even those who know better are dragged into shouting militant slogans. This doesn't fit Western concepts of pragmatism, expectations that militants are just aching to be transformed into moderates, or that settling grievances through concessions defuses hatred.
That's why policy pre ions based on those premises are disastrous. While the West concludes that trying to defeat enemies by isolating and vilifying them has failed, the other side concludes its policy of trying to defeat its enemies by violence, vilification, and intransigence is working. That means more of the same: many decades more of the same.
Source
Anti-Israel bias at the BBC again
Initial BBC and AFP headlines ignore the victims in second bulldozer attack
Less than three weeks after a Palestinian from east Jerusalem used a bulldozer to kill three people on a busy street in Israel's capital, another east Jerusalem resident attempted to replicate the attack. The second attacker rammed his bulldozer into a bus, then began flipping cars on the street, wounding at least 16 people.
When the first bulldozer rampage took place, we were stunned to see the BBC's initial headline focusing on the fate of the driver - who was shot by Israeli security - rather than the victims of his attack. The BBC subsequently changed its headline to make it more neutral, reflecting what appeared to be a better understanding of the incident and its significance.
Or so we thought. Despite a virtual repetition of the first incident, the BBC's initial response the second time was a headline questioning whether an attack had taken place at all. The headlines on the BBC's web page went from "New Vehicle `Attack' in Jerusalem" to "New Digger `Attack' in Jerusalem," then finally settled on "Israel Hit By New Digger Attack."
It is difficult to understand how the BBC ever saw the incident as anything other than an attack. The bulldozer driver rammed into a bus, then pushed into it several more times, shattering glass and throwing the passengers into a panic. He then zigzagged through the road to harm as many motorists as possible before he was stopped. This is how the bus driver described the incident to the Jerusalem Post.
"I was driving on the main road when suddenly the tractor hit me in the rear on the right hand side," said bus driver Avi Levy.
At first Levy thought it was a traffic accident, but then the attacker struck the bus over and over, causing pandemonium as passengers shouted: "God save us" and "escape, escape."
"He made a U-turn and rammed the windows twice with the shovel. The third time he aimed for my head - he came up to my window and death was staring me in the eyes," Levy said.
"Fortunately I was able to swerve to the right [onto a small side street], otherwise I would have gone to meet my maker," he said as he stood next to the badly damaged bus, whose left-side windows were completely blown out.
In the news story beneath the headline, the BBC does not put quotes around the word "attack." However, the headline writers make the first impression with readers and undermine what otherwise could be fair coverage of the incident. But the BBC was not the only media outlet that skewed the story with its initial headline. Agence France-Presse (AFP), the third largest wire service after the AP and Reuters, repeated the BBC's shocking error from the first attack, placing all of the emphasis on the driver instead of his victims.
Although the AFP changed its headline to "Palestinian Shot Dead After New Bulldozer Rampage," its first story on the incident was headlined, "Jerusalem Bulldozer Driver Shot Dead: Police." The headline leaves out any information about victims or a rampage, leaving the casual reader scanning headlines to believe that a construction worker had been killed without cause.
There is no excuse for such a misleading headline, even as an initial report. The first paragraph of that first story already acknowledges police sources saying that the driver was killed after injuring several people, so it is impossible to argue that the headline writers didn't have the facts available.
Source
The Fully Informed Jury Strategy
The "fully informed jury" strategy attempts to wedge the jury process as an obstacle between oppressive law and individual freedom. The strategy is based on the doctrine of jury nullification by which a juror can reject the law. That is, a juror can refuse to convict a defendant despite instructions from a judge if he believes either that the law is unjust or that its application is unjust. In essence, the jury renders a verdict on the law itself and not merely on the facts of a case.
Jury nullification has been established in common law since 1670 when an English jury refused to convict William Penn for the crime of preaching Quakerism. They were imprisoned for doing so. In a legal precedent, the English high court ruled that juries must be free to reach their own decisions without fear of punishment by the court. In 1735, jury nullification was affirmed in America when publisher John Peter Zenger was tried for printing "seditious libel" without first receiving the government's approval. The judge instructed the jury that no facts were in question since Zenger admitted the sedition. All that remained was the legality of his act and such "issues of law" were matters for the court to determine. The jurors were instructed to find Zenger guilty. Within ten minutes, they declared him not guilty.
Since then, the right and power of a jury to de facto overturn a law has been the subject of debate and inconsistent application. Advocates of individual rights tend to embrace jury nullification as a key aspect of trial by jury. 19th century individualists shared this tendency, with Lysander Spooner's treatise Trial by Jury often considered to be the definitive word. The first chapter of this work is entitled "The Right of Juries to Judge the Justice of Laws."
Nevertheless... ...an interesting debate on trial by jury erupted in the pages of a key 19th century individualist periodical, Liberty (1881-1908). The debate did not revolve around the usual controversies, such as the propriety of subpoena -- the so-called "right" of the state to coerce testimony. Instead, it addressed the propriety of trial by jury itself and, thus, by necessary implication, of jury nullification. The debate raised important questions that should be considered before accepting the strategy of fully informed juries.
Perhaps the first question is how a group of twelve people can claim any right unless an individual has assigned it to them. Can a "collective" right supercede individual ones? After all, it cannot be said that the defendant has relinquished his rights due to committing an aggressive act as this is the very finding that the jury has been convened to determine.
The 16th century classical liberal John Locke believed that the need to protect "life, liberty, and estate" in society led men to form government. In exchange for protection, men willingly relinquished the right to adjudicate their own disputes -- that is, the right to try their own cases in court. Locke also posited a form of tacit consent by which those who had not explicitly agreed were still bound to trial by jury. As long as a man remained in society, he consented to its jurisdiction, including its right to adjudicate disputes. Radical individualists in 19th century America generally demanded a more explicit transfer of authority from the individual to any collective entity. For them, how a jury had the right to sit in judgment on someone who ed to the process was a quandary.
In 1889, Liberty ran a series of articles by Victor Yarros collectively entitled "Free Political Institutions: Their Nature, Essence, and Maintenance." The series was advertised as "an abridgement and rearrangement" of Trial by Jury. Spooner's work had not addressed how juries acquired the right to try a case in any detail. But Yarros considered this issue to be so important that he repositioned text from Spooner's concluding chapter. Yarros' version began with a statement of what Spooner called "free government":
"The theory of government is that it is formed by the voluntary contract of the people individually with each other." From here, Spooner had contended that certain laws or conditions were so obviously beneficial that all members of society would explicitly agree to them. Spooner considered trial by jury to be one of these overwhelmingly beneficial conditions.
The debate in Liberty refuted Spooner's {2019} assumption. At least some people would not consent to trial by jury. Adolph Herben declared that he preferred trial by experts rather than by laymen who would be ignorant of technical matters that might be crucial to his case. He deemed it absurd to hang a person on the "mere opinion of twelve ordinary men." Spooner had anticipated the ion from "ignorance." He argued that juries should not be granted power on the basis of their wisdom, but because they were not as vulnerable to corruption as judge and other officials.
In another Liberty article, however, Steven T. Byington argued that juries would be corrupt, at least, in the form of being biased. He quoted from an editorial run by the Times of Natal -- a newspaper from an English speaking country in which racism made "trial by jury" for black defendants a mockery. Judgments simply could not be obtained against whites who committed crimes against blacks. Byington claimed that in the presence of such prejudices, "trial by jury" became an instrument of injustice. The prejudice did not even need to be widespread to have a disastrous impact on the integrity of the jury system. "If only ten per cent of the people were of this sort, more than sixty-four per cent of the juries would include one or more of these men to prevent a conviction. In order that there should be an even chance of twelve men taken at random being unanimously willing to judge according to certain principles, it is necessary that there be not so many as six per cent of the population who reject those principles."
Byington further ed to jury nullification due to "the need for certainty." He referred to laws "where it has been reasonably said that certainty is sometimes more important than justice." For example, publishers might well prefer a clear and consistently enforced standard of obscenity by which they could predict the legality of an article rather than rely upon the unpredictable decision of twelve men.
Perhaps the most interesting of Byington's ions was a practical one. He maintained that courts in a free society would arise in a free society would be unlikely to adopt the jury system because it was clumsy and expensive. Any free market court system that used juries might well operate at a distinct disadvantage by having to charge considerably more than its competitors. Thus, the modern form of a voluntary court -- arbitration -- does not include a jury. Byington speculated on how justice would be provided in a "society where things are done on a business basis." He wrote, "[D]efensive associations will have their judges, and their treaties as to the method of arbitration when two associations are on opposite sides of a case, and these tribunals of one or three professional judges will settle all cases where some one does not distinctly demand a jury. I suppose a case will almost never come before a jury except on appeal..."
Byington contended that trial by jury was a response to government and not a free market phenomenon. A court system that evolved within a "society where things are done on a business basis" would be arranged differently. In a free market evolution, the disadvantages of trial by jury would loom large: its expense, the unpredictability of its verdicts, the problem of dissenting defendants, the widespread tendency toward prejudice... For Byington, trial jury was not a "right" but a "wrong."
Conclusion: Trial by jury presents interesting problems for those who champion individual rights. In one particular instance, a jury may be an effective weapon against oppressive government. In another, it may be a vehicle for unjust prejudices. In both cases, it is necessary to explain how juries derive the right to judge those who to the process. How does a collective entity rightfully acquire such power over a dissenting individual?
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Given my druthers, I'd take Walmart
I went by the Great Satan the other day. Yes, I visited our local Walmart, the icon of hate from the Left. Let me tell you a bit about it. This Walmart was built in an area that was pretty much undeveloped. They used to be in the nearby city but the organized forces of resentment did their level best to drive them out. You heard all the nonsense about how Walmart was driving other business into bankruptcy. So Walmart found a new , built a larger store and moved. And the area they went to didn't really have any businesses to drive under.
As I drove past the I noticed lot of new shops being built in that stretch of road. This was in addition to the many new businesses which opened nearby already. The presence of Walmart attracted thousands of customers, per day, to a that had previously been pretty dead. The net result was that dozens of new shops and businesses are thriving there.
As for the town that didn't want Walmart --- not particularly attractive. I had some tire work one there and had an hour to spare and wandered around. Sure I spent some money there. I had a very mediocre lunch and bought some videos at 50 cents each at a thrift shop. There were lots o thrift shops but I've notice they tend to crop up in areas where business is dying. And the town itself is in very deep financial trouble.
No doubt Walmart will be blamed for the problems of the town. where they were not welcomed, and get no credit for the dozens of businesses created in their shadow. This doesn't mean I like everything Walmart does. I don't. Nor does it mean I like everything they sell. But compare Walmart to government.
Walmart has never been able to sell me a product that I didn't want. Government constantly forces me to pay for goods and services that I don't want. When Walmart gets my money it does so because I voluntarily pay them for something I value more than the cost. Government, on the other hand, has entire agencies of armed goons whose job is to make sure you pay over the money they demand. If I don't give Walmart my business they can't do anything about it. If I refuse to give government my money they send me threatening letters followed up by use of force. If I still resist they take my property, kidnap me, and hold me in shackles as an example to everyone else.
Even when government provides services that I might want, such as education, garbage collection, policing, they tend to do so at vastly inflated prices. Sure they sometimes hide the true cost by charging me less than the actual cost but they get the rest, and then some, via coercive taxation.
When I go to Walmart it is to buy things that I want or need. I'm happy when I can get a pair of jeans for $12. When I leave Walmart I have more money in my pocket than I would have, had I shopped someplace else. Walmart tends to put money in my pocket while government pretty much just takes it out. If Walmart has products I don't want, and they do, then I don't buy them. If government has services I don't want they make me pay for them anyway.
If I get really irrate with Walmart I can shop elsewhere. If I don't like their prices on clothes I can go to Target, or Macy's or Sears, etc. If I don't like the Department of Motor Vehicles, tough luck for me. I don't have a choice. If I don't like the way first class mail is delivered it is illegal for me to send a letter any other way.
Walmart expands my choices. Government restricts them. Walmart helps me save money. Government takes my money. Walmart can only sell me what I want. Government makes me buy what I don't want. Walmart has to offer me good prices, government pretty much charges anything they want.
I have freedom to maximize my well-being when it comes to Walmart. I have no such freedom when it comes to government. Even if I were to vote in every election my vote wouldn't change a damn thing. Every election would turn out just the same way. But I don't have to persuade the majority of Walmart shoppers in order to get the goods or services I want. I do have to persuade the majority of voters to give me the kind of government I want.
Every time I've been to Walmart the baskets of goods that I left with was different from the basket of goods that other shoppers left with. When I leave the voting booth I get the same government that everyone else gets.
And finally, whatever bad things you think Walmart has done they have never bombed anyone, never tortured anyone, and never executed anyone. The might use advertising but they don't use waterboarding. When I walk into their premises they greet me and welcome me. When I visit government premises I'm searched, identified and generally treated like a criminal. All in all I prefer Walmart.
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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24 July, 2008
THE TRUTH ABOUT AFRICA -- FROM IRELAND
That the problem with Africa is Africans and that aid won't cure it is a truth that almost everyone skates around. One compassionate Irish columnist has finally had enough of the prevarications, however, and has spoken out. Below in chonological order are three of his articles so far on the subject. H/T Hibernia Girl
Africa is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS
By Kevin Myers
No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.
So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count. One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . . Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.
There is, no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system; but I do not know what it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this. It will win no friends, and will provoke the self-righteous wrath of, well, the self-righteous, letter-writing wrathful, a species which never fails to contaminate almost every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority. It will also probably enrage some of the finest men in Irish life, like John O'Shea, of Goal; and the Finucane brothers, men whom I admire enormously. So be it.
But, please, please, you self-righteously wrathful, spare me mention of our own Famine, with this or that lazy analogy. There is no comparison. Within 20 years of the Famine, the Irish population was down by 30pc. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules, Ethiopia's has more than doubled.
Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts. Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.
This dependency has not stimulated political prudence or commonsense. Indeed, voodoo idiocy seems to be in the ascendant, with the next president of South Africa being a firm believer in the efficacy of a little tap water on the post-coital penis as a sure preventative against infection. Needless to say, poverty, hunger and societal meltdown have not prevented idiotic wars involving Tigre, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea etcetera.
Broad brush-strokes, to be sure. But broad brush-strokes are often the way that history paints its gaudier, if more decisive, chapters. Japan, China, Russia, Korea, Poland, Germany, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 20th century have endured worse broad brush-strokes than almost any part of Africa. They are now -- one way or another -- virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.
Meanwhile, Africa's peoples are outstripping their resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By 2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million: The equivalent of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley.
So, how much sense does it make for us actively to increase the adult population of what is already a vastly over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent country? How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.
For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed. It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating. If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what?I know. Let them all come here. Yes, that's an idea.
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Writing what I should have written so many years ago
By Kevin Myers
Last Thursday week, with famine approaching yet again, I wondered about the wisdom of forking out yet more aid to Ethiopia. Since the great famine of the mid-1980s, Ethiopia's population has soared from 33.5 million to 78 million. Now, I do not write civil service reports for the United Nations: I write a newspaper column, and I was deliberately strong in my use of language -- as indeed I had been when writing reports from Ethiopia at the height of that terrible Famine.
I was sure that my column would arouse some hostility: my concerns were intensified when I saw the headline: "Africa has given the world nothing but AIDS." Which was not quite what I said -- the missing "almost" goes a long way; and anyway, my article was about aid, not AIDS. Since dear old Ireland can often enough resemble Lynch Mob Central on PC issues, I braced myself for the worst: and sure enough, in poured the emails. Three hundred on the first day, soon reaching over 800: but, amazingly, 90pc+ were in my support, and mostly from baffled, decent and worried people. The minority who attacked me were risibly predictable, expressing themselves with a vindictive and uninquiring moral superiority. (Why do so many of those who purport to love mankind actually hate people so?)
We did more in Ethiopia a quarter of a century ago than just rescue children from terrible death through starvation: we also saved an evil, misogynistic and dysfunctional social system. Presuming that half the existing population (say, 17 million) of the mid 1980s is now dead through non-famine causes, the total added population from that time is some 60 million, around half of them female.
That is, Ethiopia has effectively gained the entire population of the United Kingdom since the famine. But at least 80pc of Ethiopian girls are circumcised, meaning that no less than 24 million girls suffered this fate, usually without anaesthetics or antiseptic. The UN estimates that 12pc of girls die through septicaemia, spinal convulsions, trauma and blood-loss after circumcision which probably means that around three million little Ethiopian girls have been butchered since the famine -- roughly the same as the number of Jewish women who died in the Holocaust.
So what is the moral justification for saving a baby from death through hunger, in order to give her an even more agonising, almost sacrificial, death aged eight or 13? The practice could have been stamped out, with sufficient political will, as sutti in India once was. And the feminists of the west would never have allowed such unconditional aid to be given to such a wicked and brutal society if it had been run by white men.
But, instead, the state was run by black males, for whom a special race-and-gender dispensation apparently applies: thus the two most politically incorrect sins of our age -- sexism and racism -- by some mysterious moral process, akin to the mathematics of the double-negative, annul one another, and produce an unquestioned positive virtue, called Ethiopia.
I am not innocent in all this. The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work.
In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability.
Am I able to rebut good and honourable people like John O'Shea, who are now warning us that once again, we must feed the starving Ethiopian children? No, of course I'm not. But I am lost in awe at the dreadful options open to us. This is the greatest moral quandary facing the world. We cannot allow the starving children of Ethiopia to die. Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.
Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored.
But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa. And of that saccharine, sickly shower, more tomorrow.
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Is this the tolerance that our thought-police take pride in?
By Kevin Myers
On the one hand, I expected some uproar in Ireland over my piece about Ethiopia on July 10. But there really wasn't any. On the other, I didn't expect an attempt to jail me by a state-sponsored body. Yet Denise Charlton, of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, has urged An Garda Siochana to investigate me under a special law, by which I could be tried and imprisoned for two years without even the benefit of a jury.
Oh, Denise, Denise, you silly, silly little girl: have you nothing better to do with your time and talents than to try to get someone jailed for saying something you dislike? So there we are. The apparatchiks of the equality industry merely have to contemplate the sector of their psyche wherein their self-righteous emotions reside: and if these are sufficiently overwrought, they decide that a hate-crime has been committed.
Actually, I hate no-one. Personal, political and racial hatreds are the most corrosive and ruinous of all passions. Why, I don't even hate Robert Mugabe, or his chum, the former Ethiopian dictator, the lovely Mengistu, who is hiding out in Zimbabwe, or the Emperor Bokassa, or Idi Amin, and any of those fine fellows who have brought such lustre to the name of Africa.
And so, not hating, I certainly don't want anyone to hate anyone else either. However, I know and feel and applaud measured hostility, the guardian of our civilisation, and the father of our laws. Measured hostility is what puts the gunman behind bars: it drives the mugger from the street and the burglar from our homes.
It also protects freedom of speech from those who would steal it from us -- most particularly in Ireland of today, the quango thought-police of doctrinaire liberalism, and single-issue vigilantes in the media. This latter group is most conspicuous in Metro Eireann, the magazine of full-time, professional immigrants: that is, immigrants who write about immigration. Gosh: what interesting and varied lives you people lead! METRO e-mailed me the following questions."1. Do you agree with the charges levelled against you by the Immigrant Council of Ireland (namely that the article can be seen as inspiring racial hatred?) Why/why not?So, "a lot of Africans" are "all very offended", are they? All of them? The poor dears. Well, if the countries on whose behalf they get so easily offended are so bloody marvellous -- Sudan? Rwanda? Zimbabwe? Sierre Leone? Congo? Somalia? Eritrea? Etcetera? -- why aren't they enjoying themselves back home? Why are they here, working for a magazine which cheerfully invites me to incriminate myself before our new thought-police? Or which thinks that journalistic balance consists of Lots of Offended Africans of Metro, plus anyone else they can enlist, versus little old me? If the countries on whose behalf they get so easily offended are so marvellous -- Rwanda? Eritrea? Etcetera? -- why aren't they back home?
"2. Do you agree that your article could be misunderstood in some quarters? If so then what is the main idea of it and what was it really trying to say?
"3. Do you agree that some of the statements you made could be offensive to people from Africa who live in Ireland? Did you think about them when writing the piece?
"4. It's definately (sic) not the first time that your writing offended somebody. Can you recall any other instances/ official complaints/death threats etc that you got from, say, the Irish republicans?
"That is all. It would be great if you could answer these questions or give your comment in any way you wish. I just want to add that there are a lot of Africans associated with Metro Eireann and they're all very offended. So we'll have to run comments from the African community, aid groups etc and it would be really great to have your comment to balance all of that."
And in that contest, by God, I know the sword whereby I stand: the measured hostility that comes from a Tolerant, European Secular Christian Order, the very one that allows Metro people come from all over the world to work here, and ask me stupid questions, and even be offended. Its origins lie in the Christian ore of our history. It was forged in its present form in Europe's evil wars of the 20th century, where it was tempered in the Holocaust and shaped against the anvil of communism. TESCO stands for personal freedom, unlike the new authoritarian "liberalism" that neo-Leninist state functionaries are now making into an official political orthodoxy.
ONE of these orthodoxies is that Africa's woes are the legacy of "colonialism". But Ethiopia (formerly Abyssinia, and far older than any European state) was never colonised. However, it was conquered by the Italians in 1936, and liberated in 1941 by a British army led by General Sir Allan Cunningham: a Dubliner, after whom a road in Addis Ababa is still named. This final titbit comes from one of a half-dozen Ethiopians who e-mailed me, supporting my attempts to broaden the discussion about Africa away from the grotesque pieties of simple victimhood.
Accepting criticism of one's own country, and from a foreigner like me, is not easy: so thank you, Oh gentlemen of Ethiopia, for truly embodying the principles of TESCO. Metro, please copy.
Source
British welfare reform coming?
Two of the benefit payments that underpin Britain's welfare state are to be abolished as part of a streamlined system that will remove the option of "a life on benefits", the Government said yesterday. People who are out of work for more than two years, and those caught abusing the system, will be forced to work. Incapacity benefit and income support will disappear.
Other moves to tighten the system include people having to work for six months, rather than four weeks, before they can claim benefits, and those unemployed for more than two years having to take part in a full-time activity such as community work. The unemployed will be required to take advice and learn new skills to carry on claiming, and drug users will have to seek treatment or face losing their benefits under the plans announced by James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary.
The extension of the qualifying period from four weeks to six months for those claiming benefits is aimed at those coming into Britain from the EU and Eastern Europe, it emerged. Immigrants will be told that they cannot claim incapacity benefit - which will soon become a new employment and support allowance - until they have worked for six months. Mr Purnell's Green Paper on welfare reform said: "This reform will help to ensure that access to the UK benefits system for workers from other countries, including nationals from other European Economic Area states, is limited to those who have a connection with, and have made a contribution to, the UK." Ministers want to address Britain's reputation as a soft touch for claimants.
The package has provoked a negative response from some Labour MPs, but the Conservatives - who claim that Mr Purnell was taking many of their ideas - promised to support it. Mr Purnell said he wanted to end the idea there was a choice between claiming and working. "Instead, the longer people claim, the more we will expect in return," he said.
Under the proposals, claimants will be required to intensify their search for a job and comply with a back-to-work action plan. After a year, an outside provider, possibly from the private or voluntary sector, will take over and be paid by results. Claimants will be required to work for their benefits for at least four weeks, or longer if the provider requires it.
Incapacity benefits will be scrapped by 2013 and income support will also be dropped to make way for a system based on two working-age benefits - the employment and support allowance (ESA), for those who have a medical condition that prevents them from working, and jobseeker's allowance (JSA) for those who are able to work.
Mr Purnell said the paper proposed a simpler system that rewarded responsibility, encouraged people to do the right thing and stopped people being written-off on benefits for life without any hope of getting the support they needed to get back to work. "We will help people find work, but they will be expected to take a job," he added. Everyone currently on incapacity benefit, and new claimants, will undergo a more rigorous medical assessment than at present. Doctors will be asked to make clear when the individual should be fit for work and people will be reassessed at that point.
People with severe disabilities will get more cash under ESA. Others, who may qualify initially for benefits but whose condition may improve, will be placed in a "work" category. They will then receive personalised back-to-work support. It will be made clear to this group that the ESA is a temporary benefit intended to help them return to work. Ministers also announced that child maintenance payments will not be taken into account when calculating how much out-of-work benefits a parent should get.
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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23 July, 2008
UN Committee Pushes Abortion on Slovakia, Lithuania, Northern Ireland
At the most recent session of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) meetings in New York, committee members pressed countries on abortion in the guise of talking about maternal mortality, family planning and contraceptive prevalence. Lithuania, Nigeria, Finland, the United Kingdom and Slovakia were all questioned on their abortion laws during their reviews by the committee.
While abortion is not mentioned in the treaty, in recent years the CEDAW Committee has questioned more than 60 nations on their abortion legislation. The committee has even gone so far as to create their own "general recommendation" that reads abortion into the text, even though the nations that negotiated the treaty made sure the controversial issue was never mentioned. Delegations often go along with the committees' line of questioning on abortion by providing data and answering queries on the subject during their reviews.
During Lithuania's review, committee members pressed the government delegation on access to contraception and on proposed legislation that seeks to defend prenatal life and would pose restrictions on access to abortion. Japanese committee member Yoko Hayashi stated that governmental restrictions on abortion "contradict the full enjoyment of women's reproductive health rights that are protected by CEDAW." The CEDAW document is, however, silent on "reproductive health rights."
The United Kingdom was similarly taken to task by the CEDAW committee because of concerns over access to abortion in Northern Ireland. In response to committee queries over whether there was a possibility of changing the abortion legislation, the Irish representative responded that abortion was a matter of criminal law and that no change in legislation could occur in Northern Ireland without consent from all parties.
One committee member fired back that the government was not adequately addressing the abortion issue and that not taking action on the matter is "incompatible with obligations under the CEDAW convention."
Sylvia Pimentel of Brazil took exception to Slovakia's concordat with the Holy See, particularly on the right of health care workers to conscientiously to performing or aiding in abortion. Pimentel claimed that it is "discriminatory to refuse to legally provide reproductive health services to women" and that CEDAW state parties "must refrain from obstructing women from pursuing their health goals."
While the rulings of the Committee are technically non-binding, abortion activists have brought litigation throughout the world citing CEDAW Committee rulings in support of overturning laws against abortion. Such arguments helped convince the Colombian constitutional court to liberalize that country's restrictions on the practice.
Under the topic of non-discrimination, CEDAW committee members questioned states on homosexual rights issues. During Finland's review, committee members questioned legislation that prevented lesbian adoption. Slovakia was questioned on medically assisted reproduction and "discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" against lesbian women who wanted to undergo the procedure.
At the end of the month, official representatives of States parties to CEDAW are scheduled to elect 11 members of the Committee that will serve from January 2009 to December 2012. The CEDAW Committee will next meet again in Geneva in October to review the reports from Bahrain, Belgium, Cameroon, Canada, Ecuador, El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Myanmar, Portugal, Slovenia and Uruguay.
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The AP's New Man on the 'Race and Ethnicity' Beat
The Associated Press just announced an important change in a high-profile news beat that's overseen by its national desk -- a beat called "race and ethnicity." AP's editors, perhaps sensing a racially charged presidential election at hand, picked a writer from 449 candidates they'd been considering for their new "race and ethnicity" writer. And last week, they named the lucky writer, a long-time AP staffer named Jesse Washington. Previously, the 39-year-old journalist was the "entertainment editor" at America's most influential news outlet, the source from which most Americans get their news from outside the areas covered by their local newspapers and TV and radio stations.
Earlier in his career, Washington was an editor at two prominent hip-hop magazines. And recently, he published his first novel: "Black Will Shoot," which is about America's hip-hop culture. Its cover jacket calls it a "compelling look at the most impactful (sic) and influential cultural movements of the past thirty years."
For AP's editors, the race and ethnicity beat is obviously important. An opening on the beat occurred due to the resignation of AP writer Erin Texeira. Interestingly, the AP gave no reason for her resignation. Among the headlines of some of her memorable stories: "Duke Rape Scandal Reopens Old Wounds For Black Women"; "Slavery Reparations Gaining Momentum" and "Black Men Fight Negative Stereotypes Daily."
So what does the AP's "race and ethnicity" beat mean for the type of news coverage Americans can expect? In the good old days of American journalism, reporting beats had pretty mundane names: police, city government, national politics, etc. But in the post-modern journalism world, beats like "race and ethnicity" have become popular. And in a sense, they often feed the perception -- the false perception -- that America's race relations are in the dire state that's usually portrayed in the mainstream media's stories.
How come? First, consider the very first bias that invariably creeps into a news story: It's that reporters and editors even choose to write a story about something; and in the case of a news beat, they have to produce stories on a particular issue on a regular basis. By itself, the decision to create a news beat says a lot; for it defines a particular subject as being an issue -- one worthy of news space and air time. And a news beat also places a certain onus on reporters and editors.
Those covering "race and ethnicity" beats, for instance, are expected to flesh out the basic elements of a story. And the very best stories, of course, invariably revolve around conflict and controversy. But what if no obvious conflict or controversy exist? Well, for clever reporters entertaining a certain worldview, it's usually easy to come up with something.
A beautiful sunset over an orderly middle-class suburb in Chicago or Los Angeles is not necessarily what it seems: It's merely the calm before a Perfect Storm of racial grievances. Basically, that's what's often going on at places like the AP and New York Times in respect to its ongoing and obsessive coverage of "race and ethnicity" in America.
And so then, the "news beats" created by editors say much about what those editors think is important, reflects the potential conflicts they believe are festering all around them. According to his memo on Washington's promotion, published at trade magazine Editor & Publisher, AP's manging editor of U.S. news, Mike Oreskes wrote:Few subjects permeate every corner of American life more fully than issues of race and ethnicity. So, few assignments have more potential to expand our understanding of America than writing about race and ethnicity. That is why we have conducted an extensive search for a new national writer to cover this important and complex territory. That search, ably led by John Affleck, brought in 449 applicants. There were many strong candidates.Does race in fact "permeate every corner of American life" as Oreskes claims? There is good reason to believe that it does not, at least not in the way Oreskes and his AP colleagues think it does. And certainly not in the way Barack and Michelle Obama may say or imply. And definitely not the way that's described by Obama's former hate-filled minister and spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright, who recently resigned as pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.
It turned out the top choice-and a very exciting one-was right here at home. I am very pleased to announce that our new national writer on race and ethnicity will be Jesse Washington, currently the AP's Entertainment Editor.
Put aside these issues for a moment, however, to consider some things about the AP's new "race and ethnicity" writer. No doubt, Jesse Washington was thanking his lucky stars upon hearing of his promotion. In recent months, after all, thousands of editors and reporters have lost their jobs as the newspaper industry has suffered its worst-ever downsizing bloodbath. Even top people at the New York Times and Washington Post are being shown the door.
Yet Washington, rather than considering himself a lucky insider, considers himself an outsider, at least if Oreskes' memo is anything to go by. The memo not only calls attention to Washington's considerable achievements, it portrays him as something of a scrappy contender - and even a victim. According to Oreskes' memo:Jesse brings to this new assignment more than just a resume of achievements. He has lived the subject of race and ethnicity every day of his 39 years. Son of an interracial marriage, Jesse is, as he puts it, "a kid from the projects who went to Yale and married a doctor. I'm a person who fits in everywhere and nowhere." He and his wife live in suburban Philadelphia with their four children.Given the AP's evident preoccupation with race and ethnicity, it's interesting that Oreskes' memo makes no mention of Washington's own racial or ethnic background; but a photo of him posted with the AP's online news release reveals what is all but obvious: he appears black.
But perhaps the failure of Oreskes' memo to mention Washington's race is consistent with some of the AP's news coverage. Recent AP articles about gang violence in the nation's inner cities, Chicago in particular, made absolutely no mention of the racial or ethnic background of the young thugs rampaging through city streets with high-powered weapons. It took a little Googling to learn that Chicago's gangbangers are part of the city's dysfunctional black culture.
Washington himself has been guilty of such oversights during the early part of his AP career in the mid-1990s. Writing in October, 1993, about Detroit's annual "Devil's Night" -- an arson spree occurring on Halloween -- Washington made no mention of the ethnic or racial backgrounds of the young thugs torching vacant buildings during a night of mayhem that "added insult to the city's already injured reputation." ("Detroit Hopes to Stifle Devil's Night Fires Again," AP, Oct. 1992.) Then again, maybe the story Washington submitted did mention such things, only to have them deleted by a politically correct AP editor.
According to a check of Factiva, the news archive, Washington wrote a variety of stories while assigned to the AP's national desk in the 1990s, the kinds of stories one might expect on the national beat -- crime, political scandals, etc. But he returned repeatedly to stories about race. And invariably, the stories on race that really "moved" on the wires (get picked up by lots of newspapers across the country), involved those that highlighted an earlier period of racism in America's history.
Washington wrote one such story in mid-July of 1991: "White schoolmarm challenged New England's anti-black stance." Reporting from Canterbury, Conn., he began:When a strong-willed white schoolteacher in 1833 opened New England's first academy for black girls, she was tormented by her neighbors, made an outlaw by the state Legislature and even jailed. Today, the clapboard house where Prudence Crandall operated her boarding school is a museum, a monument to one woman's courage and a reminder of a troubling episode in Connecticut history.Americans, of course, ought to reconsider their history and look back on their past. But in the post-modern journalism world, the approach to news coverage that does that inevitably has a cynical tone -- the equivalent of repeatedly tearing a scab off an old wound. And invariably, progress in the nation's race relations is never noted; it never stresses what America has accomplished, thanks to Americans of all colors working together. Instead, news stories are invariably about white Americans have done to black Americans; no matter if most white Americans today display little if any racial animus, an issue that Linda Chavez recently highlighted in a perceptive and lengthy piece in the magazine Commentary.....
More here
The financial irresponsibility of the British Left
Billions wasted
For an economic historian brought up in Kirkcaldy, Gordon Brown seems remarkably indifferent to the writings of that town's greatest son, Adam Smith: "It is the highest impertinence and presumption in ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense," Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations. "They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society." In his wildest dreams, Smith could not have imagined just how spendthrift they could be. UK public sector net borrowing for the first three months of the financial year was at $48.8 billion, the highest quarterly since records began in 1946.
When a country, like a household, is in financial difficulties, it has two options: to increase income or cut spending. Labour has decided to do the former by simply borrowing the money, which will make the necessary correction worse when it comes in the form of higher taxes (though presumably they think that will be the Tories' problem, a sort of economic scorched earth policy). What Labour is incapable of is the other option: cutting the spending - not just by paring back programmes that add nothing to the wealth of the nation, but by eradicating the mind-boggling waste.
It went almost unnoticed last week when the National Audit Office refused to sign off the annual accounts of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) because of massive losses on the tax credit scheme. These amounted last year to overpayments and fraudulent claims of about $3 billion. We have come to a pretty pass where a loss of $3 billion and the admonishment of the public auditor can be virtually shrugged off. Have we become so inured to waste on such a colossal scale that we no longer care? Or are the numbers too big for us to grasp? Add to that $3 billion the $8 billion bill the taxpayer may now have to pick up as a result of the inquiry into the shambles at Equitable Life.
Much of the blame for the shortfall in the funds of policyholders can be laid at the door of the society's board for running an over-generous, and ultimately unpayable, annuities scheme over many years. But Ann Abraham, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, was emphatic in her view that culpability could also be attached to the Government for its failure to regulate the company properly, not least when it was aware of what was happening in the late 1990s. At the time, the individual in overall charge of the regulatory system, indeed, the person who had established a new one under the auspices of the Financial Services Authority, was our old friend from Kirkcaldy (Mr Brown, not Mr Smith).
If we are generous, and say that one quarter of the eventual bill to compensate Equitable Life losers can be attributed to the regulatory failures on Mr Brown's watch, that's another $2 billion in the waste column. So, in one week, $5 billion went west. That is a sum equivalent to the fall in tax receipts over the first three months of this year. Over the same quarter, spending rose by $17.6 billion.
The tax credits losses for last year, however, are a drop in the bucket compared to the accumulated additional costs of the system, caused by poor political direction, shoddy administration and failed computer systems. The grand total wasted in overpayments, underpayments or fraud is at least $20 billion since they were introduced in 2003, again by the Kirkcaldy maestro. They were meant to subsidise poorly paid work through the tax system, remove the stigma of benefits, and make work pay. Yet within months of their introduction, they were the subject of more complaints to MPs, the Inland Revenue, the Ombudsman and citizens' advice centres than any public policy in history.
Years later and the system is still in chaos. The Parliamentary Ombudsman and Citizens Advice Bureaux continue to report an inundation of complaints. Though it was Gordon Brown's personal creation, he appears to have emerged remarkably unscathed from the botched implementation and the incessant, almost compulsive, tinkering.
Frank Field, the former welfare reform minister, once compiled a list of changes to the system made by the Kirkcaldy wizard: over a four-year period from 1999, the Government abolished family credit, introduced working families' tax credit, introduced the disabled person's tax credit, introduced a childcare tax credit, introduced an employment credit, abolished the married couple's tax allowance, introduced the children's tax credit, introduced a baby tax credit, abolished the working families' tax credit, abolished the disabled person's tax credit, abolished the children's tax credit, abolished the baby tax credit, introduced a child tax credit, abolished the employment credit and introduced a working tax credit. As Mr Field said: "It was like gardeners going round pulling up their plants all the time to see whether the roots are still there."
Last week, after the NAO refused to sign off the Inland Revenue accounts, ministers said the system was undergoing "teething problems". What? After five years? In any case, why take money off people to use to administer a system that gives them the money back; why not give them tax cuts to start with?
Given that the implementation of the policy was such a shambles, and payments were so erratic, that many of our poorest people were reduced to misery, how can it be considered anything other than a disaster?
Here was a classic example of an attempt by Whitehall to make things better that simply made them worse. It combined the micro-managerial, social engineering obsession of Gordon Brown with an ineffective IT system and conspired to cause hardship that was not there before. The scale of official error was completely unacceptable, yet nobody took the rap.
I don't know about you, but I am getting heartily sick seeing my hard-earned cash squandered on an almost daily basis without anyone responsible actually feeling any pain at all. It's time somebody did, and I think we all know who. A reckoning is due.
Source
Is African-America Awakening?
By Myron Magnet
The conversation about race that Barack Obama says America needs is already in full swing--and it is a conversation among blacks. Its spark was a speech that TV star Bill Cosby gave at the NAACP in 2004. In books and articles, on talk shows and in town meetings, at barbecues and barber shops, African-Americans have been arguing over his words ever since. Their impassioned discussion is the most hopeful development in race relations in years.
With a 50 percent high school dropout rate and a 70 percent illegitimacy rate, with African-Americans committing half the nation's murders though only 13 percent of the population, black America--especially the poorer part of it--is in trouble. "We cannot blame white people," Cosby asserted in his incendiary speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board school desegregation decision. "It's not what they're doing to us. It's what we're not doing." As Jesse Jackson used to say, Cosby recalls, "No one can save us from us but us."
Sure, racism hasn't vanished, Cosby acknowledges in his 2007 book Come On People, a follow-up to his speech written with Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint. "But for all the talk of systemic racism and governmental screw-ups, we must look at ourselves and understand our own responsibility." Even with lingering discrimination, "there are more doors of opportunity open for black people today than ever before in the history of America," and "these doors are tall enough and wide enough" for just about all black people "to walk through with their heads held high." So while "there are forces that make the effort to escape poverty difficult," African-Americans are by no means merely the playthings of vast forces and helpless victims of racism. "When people tell you, 'You can't get up, you're a victim,' " Cosby warns, "that's when you know it is the devil you're hearing."
Why do so many blacks, especially men, find it so hard to grasp the opportunity that is theirs for the taking? Why are "so many of our black youth squandering their freedom?" Cosby and Poussaint's answer is that the social structure and culture of poor black neighborhoods distort the psychology of the children who grow up there, often shackling them in "psychological slavery." The authors zero in on the permanently destructive effects of fractured families and slapdash child rearing--much more slapdash than middle-class parents, with their years spent nurturing, encouraging, and cajoling their children, could easily imagine. "In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on," Cosby told the NAACP. "You have the pile-up of these sweet beautiful things born by nature--raised by no one."
Certainly their fathers aren't raising them. That 70 percent illegitimacy rate, troubling in itself, isn't evenly distributed but is concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where it soars above 85 percent and can approach 100 percent. "A house without a father is a challenge," Cosby and Poussaint write. "A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe." That's because mothers "have difficulty showing a son how to be a man," a truly toxic problem when there are no father figures around to show boys how to channel their natural aggressiveness in constructive ways. Worse still, the authors muse, "We wonder if much of these kids' rage was born when their fathers abandoned them."
To come into the world already abandoned by your father is damaging enough, but Come On People teems with children abandoned by their mothers as well. Many end up among America's half-million foster children, two-thirds of whom--more than 300,000 abused or cast-off souls--are black. We meet a Kentuckian born in a housing project and taken away from her jailed, drug-addicted mother at the age of six. After a string of foster homes and group facilities, she began doing "drugs, alcohol, shoplifting, gangbanging, hustling. I was in and out of jail," she says. "I was angry. I would fight at the drop of a dime." We hear of an eight-year-old smash-and-grab burglar abandoned even more abruptly. A cop tells the authors about catching him. The boy wouldn't say one word, beyond the address of his housing-project home. The officer drove the boy there, followed him into his apartment, and saw his mother on the sofa. The boy finally spoke. "She's dead, ain't she?" And she! was, with the needle that killed her lying on the floor. The boy calmly ate a bowl of cereal as he watched the cop deal with the body.
We hear of children abandoned emotionally if not literally. Another cop tells of a seven-year-old he picked up for bashing out car windows. "I'm very good at making these kids cry," the cop said. "But this one, I couldn't touch him." He drove the kid home to what looked like a shack. The boy opened the door, and there was his mother on a mattress on the floor, having sex. The boy walked past the couple "and sealed himself off behind a curtain." The man fled; the mother signed the form the cop held out to her, "pulled the covers over her head, and left her son standing mutely behind the curtain."
These are the extreme cases, but even among normal poor black single-parent families Cosby and Poussaint find child-rearing patterns that prime kids for failure. Since the authors believe that too many black adults "are giving up their main responsibility to look after their children," they make a portion of their book a child-raising handbook--an inner-city Dr. Spock--whose sound, simply stated advice makes clear what they think is going wrong in numerous ghetto families. Their optimistic, encouraging precepts, in spite of themselves, lift the curtain on a world of heartrending childhood sorrow and suffering, which ordinarily no one comes to help or comfort, and which leaves scars that never heal.
Above all, they counsel, spare the rod. "Many black parents use physical punishment--not just spanking, but also hitting, slapping, and beating kids with s," they report. Indeed, "many black parents have told us that physical punishment is part of black culture." But, Cosby and Poussaint warn, "when they beat their kids they are sending a message that it is okay to use violence to resolve conflicts," rather than helping them develop self-control and a sense of right and wrong. Too often, physical punishment turns into child abuse; too often, parents (or caregivers, especially the mother's boyfriend) "beat their kids, not to discipline them, but to exorcise their own demons. . . . They take their anger out on the child," who "serves as a 'whupping' for peevish adults. . . . These beatings often produce angry children who treat others as violently as they have been treated." The prisons are bursting with grown-up abused children.
In addition to physical abuse, Cosby and Poussaint observe, we've all cringed at hearing inner-city mothers abusing kids verbally as well, making them feel worthless and unwanted. "Words like 'You're stupid,' 'You're an idiot,' 'I'm sorry you were born,' or 'You'll never amount to anything' can stick a dagger in a child's heart." Single mothers angry with men, whether their current boyfriends or their children's fathers, regularly transfer their rage to their sons, since they're afraid to take it out on the adult males. "If they hear their mom say, 'Black men ain't worth s---,' the boys wonder whether that includes them. When their moms yell, 'You're no good, just like your father!' all the doubt goes away." When such racially tinged verbal abuse takes the form of " 'Nigger, I'll kick your f------ black a--,' " the child ends up ashamed of being black, as well--a danger anyway in a society where rumors of black inferiority still echo, if more faintly.
One of black America's most disabling problems, Cosby and Poussaint think, is this wounded anger--of children toward parents, women toward men, men toward their mothers and women in general. Some try self-sedation, whether by "wallowing in sedated victimhood," by music "loud enough to wake the dead," by "a lover or some crack or, if nothing else, a bag of burgers." Another way that "black men have tried to maintain their dignity and to keep control of their anger is by being 'cool.' . . . Many who feel abandoned by a parent protect themselves from being hurt by putting on a cool detachment." Trouble is, beyond becoming emotionally frigid, they too easily lose their cool and explode in violence. Still, their effort is better than the hotheadedness of today's young black gangstas, as touchy and ready to duel to the death as the Three Musketeers. "He dissed me so I shot him" is now a common ghetto refrain, Cosby and Poussaint report. Hence African-Americans account for 44 pe! rcent of U.S. prisoners; six out of ten black high school dropouts have been in prison before they hit the age of 40; and what Cosby and Poussaint call "a culture of imprisonment devastates black families and communities."
We are celebrating a great civil rights victory, Cosby told the NAACP. People actually present in the audience "marched and were hit in the face with rocks" so that black kids could get a decent education. But now? "What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants it?" What did those brave marchers achieve if, 50 years later, half of African-American kids drop out of high school and can't speak standard English--especially since all it takes to get started in today's more open America is a high school diploma and the ability to impress potential bosses as articulate, polite, and dependable?
This failure, too, is largely a failure of parenting. Yes, ghetto schools are bad, Cosby and Poussaint acknowledge, and parents can't fix them. "But you can make the best use of what you have to get the best you can for your child," they advise. You can make sure he does his homework and pays attention in class. And much of what a kid learns he learns at home, after all--especially in his crucial first five years. "Talking and reading to infants and children help lay down the physical structures in the brain to develop skills in language," the authors point out.
But many ghetto moms aren't imparting the language and cognitive skills without which children can't succeed once they get to school. "Teachers report that in poor neighborhoods children often begin school not knowing their colors or the letters of the alphabet," Cosby and Poussaint write. "Some have limited vocabularies and little knowledge of numbers. Some don't even know that sheep go 'Baaa.' " These deficits are hard to correct later on. Indeed, "sharp-eyed teachers can identify the children who will become high school dropouts the day they walk in the kindergarten door." The damage is already done.
Readers of Come On People and the thousands who waited for hours to hear Cosby press home his message in dozens of free town meetings nationwide will surely profit from his levelheaded advice. They, and thousands more like them, will talk to their kids (in standard English and in a tone that doesn't "sound like a prison guard"), listen to them, read to them, encourage them, discipline them with gentle firmness, limit their TV watching, and never give up on them. But these are the caring parents. The problem is the ones who don't care--who don't understand, as a California doctor tells Cosby, that "you have a choice as to whether to have children or not" and to "decide who gets to be your baby's daddy," and that once you've made that decision, "both of you are supposed to have something to do with that child for the rest of its life." The problem is the girls who view sex, in Cosby's terms, as "You see me. I see you. You want it. . . . We're both hot. Now let's do i! t"--the girls who have "five or six different children--same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever."
What will become of all these "kids with different fathers," who "compete, often unequally, for whatever attention is going around," so that (as with the offspring of polygamous sheikhs) "there is bound to be bad blood"? What can we expect from families with "grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them"? How much of the cultivation of civility and virtue, which makes strong families the building blocks of a strong society, can happen here? "When we see these boys walking around the neighborhood," say Cosby and Poussaint, "we imagine them thirty or forty years down the road wandering around just as aimlessly, and we want to cry." For they are lost.
Black conservatives have said such things for years, only to be unthinkingly ostracized as race traitors for breaking with orthodoxy. But no one could dismiss the lovable Cosby: African-Americans are proud of his success and admire his munificence to black charities. What's more, as Princeton prof and sometime rapper Cornel West put it, the TV star "is not in the right wing. He's not Clarence Thomas. He is not Ward Connerly." Nor could anyone dismiss National Public Radio's respected Juan Williams when he emphatically endorsed Cosby's views in a 2006 book, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It. When a longtime liberal like Williams embraces these ideas, something important is changing in the black mainstream--despite racial arsonist Al Sharpton's effort to demonize Williams as "the black Ann Coulter."
It requires explanation that black leaders don't mob Cosby with support, Williams points out, because he is so obviously right. Of course today's African-Americans have full civil rights and ample opportunity. Look at how immigrants from far-flung Ethiopia and Nigeria--no less black--succeed in their new land of opportunity. Moreover, notes Williams, Cosby's views mirror those of the civil rights greats of old. Booker T. Washington similarly urged education and self-reliance and cautioned that "we should not permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities." W. E. B. Du Bois, despite differences with Washington, shared his "goal of black self-reliance." Martin Luther King "said he wanted above all else to get black people to shed the idea that they did not control their destiny." And from the moment of emancipation, "education was a radical tool of liberation for black people so recently enslaved and purposely denied the chance to learn." From the founding of ! the Tuskegee Institute to Thurgood Marshall's Brown v. Board victory to James Meredith bravely entering Ole Miss in 1962, the right to education was central to the civil rights movement. As for out-of-wedlock childbearing, married couples headed 78 percent of black families in 1950, compared with 34 percent today.
In the 1960s, this can-do worldview changed. A vast transformation of American culture combined with the black-power movement and the War on Poverty to brew a toxic new orthodoxy among black leaders, who remain stuck in that era to this day. "Very few new ideas are allowed into this stifling echo chamber," Williams reports. Despite startling African-American progress in the intervening half-century, "the official message from civil rights leaders remains the same. Black people are victims of the system, and the government needs to increase social spending. . . . Even the most dysfunctional and criminal behavior among black people is not to be criticized by black leaders" but must "be denied and hidden in the name of protecting the image of blacks as disadvantaged, oppressed, and perpetually victimized." Dissent, and you're an "Uncle Tom and a sellout."
That half-century of progress, though, makes it hard to profess the orthodoxy in good faith. Some, such as Barack Obama's ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose "black liberation theology" is pure sixties black-power political radicalism preserved in amber, still spout it sincerely. But Williams's view of most of today's black leaders recalls Eric Hoffer's dictum that great causes often start out as movements but degenerate into rackets. Today's leaders have made lucrative careers out of preaching a crippling ideology that ensures that they will never run out of poor blacks to agitate for. As Cosby quipped in one of his town meetings, "There are people who want you to remain in a hole, and they rejoice in your hopelessness because they have jobs mismanaging you."
Williams presents a rogues' gallery of African-American leaders who harm the people they claim to serve by blinding them to the opportunity all around them and stoking resentments that serve as excuses for wrongdoing. Jesse Jackson, "the unofficial president of black America," takes pride of place, with Al Sharpton as runner-up. Williams "detects a smell of extortion" about them; their main business, he says, is "staging phony protest marches for money." What blacks has Jackson benefited, except for two of his sons, whom his pressure tactics helped win a multimillion-dollar beer distributorship? Sharpton, Williams thinks, is lower still: he took a campaign contribution from a GOP operative who aimed to weaken the Democrats by keeping so polarizing a figure in their 2004 presidential primary.
When black politicians actually have won power, their politics of victimhood has often proved a rationale for not even trying to help the black masses but rather for decrying the white racism that supposedly causes their plight. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, for instance, spewed charges of racism to block officials from reforming a dysfunctional (and now closed) Los Angeles hospital that had become a high-paying jobs program for some blacks but whose poor care was harming its many black patients. Mayors Sharpe James of Newark and Marion Barry of Washington, Williams says, "saw political opportunity in making themselves masters of large pools of black people dependent on state and federal poverty programs." The money flowed in, mayoral aides stole it and went to jail, the schools got worse, crime festered, and finally prosecutors nailed James himself for rigging the sale of city property to enrich his mistress. By contrast, Cory Booker, James's successor, is (so to speak) the Bill Cosby of urban governance, exemplifying the right way forward for African-American pols.
If black leaders really wanted to help the black poor, Williams argues, they'd combat the "cultural belief that being 'authentically black' does not allow for high quality intellectual engagement in school," as columnist Joseph H. Brown put it. They'd demand radical school reform, including vouchers. It's a hopeful sign, Williams thinks, that New York Times editorialist Brent Staples, normally part of black orthodoxy's amen choir, has declared that if the civil rights establishment doesn't push hard for real school reform, even if it "would discomfort the teachers among its supporters, . . . it will inevitably be viewed as having missed the most important civil rights battle of the last half-century."
If black leaders really wanted to help the black poor, they'd stop decrying "police brutality and the increasing number of black people in jail" and focus instead "on having black people take personal responsibility for the exorbitant amount of crime committed by black people against other black people" (which accounts for the exorbitant number of African-Americans in jail). But they don't. As Cosby pointed out to Williams, the NAACP has its headquarters in murder-ridden Baltimore, but "I've never once heard the NAACP say, 'Let's do something about this.' " Indeed, Williams notes, "they never marched or organized, or even criticized the criminals." Nor did they exhort poor black people to stop smoking crack.....
The debate raging throughout black America is the more historic because it is also raging within the soul of America's first black presidential nominee. Which Obama will prevail? The old-orthodoxy Obama, who sat for 20 years listening to Reverend Wright saying "God damn America" and claiming that the government purposely infected the ghetto with AIDS, who brought his daughters to hear him, and who named a book after one of his sermons? The Obama whose wife, in her grievances and resentments, her whine that America is "just downright mean," uncannily embodies the black bourgeois attitudes that Ellis Cose described 15 years ago as The Rage of a Privileged Class? Or will it be the Obama who will truly usher in the age of postracial politics, as he seemed to promise when he first emerged as so fresh and attractive a candidate? The Obama who marked Father's Day with a moving speech on black America's need for responsible fathers that Bill Cosby would cheer?
At the very least, his nomination, as he himself has said, shows how much progress black America has made. Let's hope the African-American majority will take the lesson to heart.
More here
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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22 July, 2008
Massive British surveillance plan is 'a step too far'
PLANS for a massive database snooping on the entire population of the UK have been condemned as a "step too far for the British way of life". The Government has proposed to record every phone call, email, text message, internet search and online purchase in the fight against terrorism and other serious crime. The privacy watchdog, Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, said the public's traditional freedoms were under serious threat from creeping state surveillance.
Apart from the Government's inability to hold data securely, he said the proposals raised "grave questions". "Do the risks we face provide justification for such a scheme in the first place? Do we want the state to have details of more and more aspects of our private lives?" he asked. "Whatever the benefits, would such a scheme amount to excessive surveillance? Would this be a step too far for the British way of life?"
It is thought the scheme would allow the police or MI5 to access the exact time when a phone call was made, the number dialled, the length of the call and, in the case of mobile phones, the of the handset to within an accuracy of a few hundred yards. Similarly for emails, it would provide details of when they were sent and who the recipients were. Police recovering a suspect's computer would then be able to trawl through hard drive records and recover messages.
Mr Thomas's warnings were backed by privacy campaigners, who claimed such Big Brother powers would give government agencies unprecedented abilities to trawl through intimate details of ordinary people's private lives at will. He used the launch of his annual report to speak out after ministers signalled their intentions in their program of legislation earlier this year, describing the move as "modifying procedures for acquiring communications data".
There are fears the data may be shared with foreign governments - such as the Americans demanding personal details of air passengers - accessed by internet hackers or lost by bungling civil servants.
Source
Reality of collateral damage
Below is an excerpt from the book "Running the War in Iraq" by Australian General Jim Molan
In counterinsurgency, the term collateral damage can prompt cynicism from the uninformed, who see it as military techno-speak sanitising the impact of war on ordinary people. Nothing could be further from the truth. For those who do not have the luxury of criticising without offering an alternative, the term collateral damage is practical and well understood. The process saves thousands of innocent lives: if the collateral damage estimate [CDE] was too high, we had the option of not striking the target.
(A CDE brought up the fundamental legal and moral considerations of proportionality, humanity, discrimination and necessity. The CDE told us the number of people likely to be killed in the strike. Specialists in Qatar and Florida produced a CDE for every target, based on many different factors.)
We did not employ the term to dehumanise what we were doing. In Iraq we were reminded of the consequences of our actions immediately: as we watched bombs hit, the computer screen, showing TV-like pictures brought down from an unmanned drone, would flare silently and the wind would slowly blow away dust clouds to reveal the wreckage.
Within an hour of the strike, some Arab network would broadcast pictures of the scene and assessments by so-called spokesmen in the local hospital, listing the number of women and children who had been "slaughtered by the crusaders". Of course the network commentary and the doctors did not criticise the terrorists or insurgents for holding their meetings in the midst of their own families or neighbours.
We did everything we could to avoid killing innocents. The coalition did not fight just for the sake of fighting. The coalition commander, US general George Casey, and his field commanders did not want to aggravate an already difficult situation, and their first guiding principle was often expressed as the old medical dictum: "First, do no harm."
There was a continual search for any approach that did not involve bombs and bullets. A bullet achieves its effect by transferring kinetic energy to a human body, something that does not go far in winning the heart or mind. In Iraq we searched for the non-kinetic approach: using anything rather than force, but it was not always possible. Examples of the non-kinetic were: buy weapons back from the population rather than conducting searches in homes that disrupt daily life and risk civilian casualties; rather than kill bomb emplacers, create employment to counter the insurgents who offer money to the unemployed to plant roadside bombs; use police rather than heavily armed soldiers to enforce the law; provide essential services to the people so they see some benefit from our occupation.
Nevertheless, when it comes to significant levels of combat, international law accepts that some innocents may be killed. As long as we apply considerations of proportionality, humanity, discrimination and necessity both legally and morally, the fault for the death of innocents lies with those who choose to wage war from the bosoms of their families. Even if I had a positive identification of a terrorist leader, I still did not have the right to just bomb him. I still had to consider proportionality, humanity, discrimination and necessity.
If our own morality and our own law are not enough to guide us, there is also self-interest. Every time we kill an innocent, we make more enemies for ourselves. Ironically, in the short term, this logic did not necessarily work against the insurgents, but in the longer term their illegality and brutality has started to earn them their share of enemies among the people of Iraq. The slaughter of innocents in the tens or hundreds of thousands is, to them, a tactic. They solve any resentment that may arise from their actions with more violence. They simply kill anyone that s.
I do not accept that there is any moral equivalence between what I did and what our enemies did. I was acutely aware of the consequences of our actions. It is not necessarily the process that makes time-sensitive targeting difficult, although that is difficult enough. It is being able to make decisions when you know their consequences.
Once I'd received the CDE, the military necessity of striking the target had to be weighed against the number of innocent people who might die. I used a standard set of criteria. One was the knowledge that a terrorist car bomb might kill hundreds of innocents and one terrorist technician was capable of producing any number of these bombs. Each enemy cell could attack the Iraqi population once or twice a week. A member of the leadership is capable of instigating even greater carnage by co-ordinating subordinates who can then kill and maim.
The decision to strike was never taken lightly but it had to be taken quickly. If a terrorist meeting looked as though it was about to break up before the official CDE was ready, I had to estimate a CDE and recommend a strike (or not). I was accountable for that judgment. In fact, the targeting team would be negligent if it missed an important target by taking the safe route and waiting for the formal process every time. This decision about collateral damage is no different in law from the decision made by a lieutenant platoon commander crouched down on the side of a road calling for an air strike on a position from which the enemy is firing at him and his troops. I just did it in a much more comfortable place.
Once we'd ironed out the early problems, the CDE would usually arrive promptly, comparing the impacts of 227kg and 450kg bombs with other weapons for the target in question. Sometimes the facts did not line up nicely. Intelligence may not have been convincing or the CDE was uncomfortably high at the time the attack was proposed. If a target was in a residential area, then the CDE would be high at night. If possible, we would wait until daytime to strike it. But of course for certain types of transient targets, such as leadership meetings, delay might mean losing the targets for days, weeks, even months.
As a staff officer, my decision was not technically a decision but a recommendation to my boss, Casey. Executive authority remained with commanders. So I would make my recommendation, then ring Casey and put the case to him as I saw it, normally without the detail. He then made his decision, approving the strike or directing his own course of action. If necessary, he went up his chain of command. Rarely did Casey reject my recommendation, but it did happen. And on occasions I differed with the taskforce commander about whether to strike. There were also threats of bypassing me and going directly to Casey. Once or twice that did happen.
The terrorists and insurgents might have subscribed to the old saying that "There are no rules in a knife fight." But there are rules; they just did not obey them. In fact they institutionalised the transgression of international law. My feeling was that the media did not scrutinise our adversaries' actions as carefully as the coalition's. For any faults we may have had, the US-led coalition represented the rule of law. It was right that we were held accountable. But so should the other side. My quarrel with the media was that, on certain occasions, the insurgents seemed to have been given licence to fight the way they did because they were fighting the US and the coalition or resisting an occupation. But barbarity is barbarity, no matter who perpetrates it.
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Opting out of government
A paper in an Australian policy journal has proposed letting citizens choose their degree of relationship to the State in proportion to the degree to which they intend to be dependent on its assistance or guidance. Recalling Ronald Reagan's famus dictum that `The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," ' the authors propose that people be free to choose either to declare their dependence on the state - in which case they may be told what to do - or opt to be relatively independent so that in most cases, the government would simply get out of their lives. The need is urgent, beause if something isn't done, an increasingly intrusive government will simply consume all available free energy.Every day that the federal parliament sits in Canberra, another hundred pages of new laws get added to the statute book. . if regulations keep growing at this rate, it will take a thousand removal trucks to house all our laws by the end of the twenty-first century.The sheer inexorable growth of the welfare state means that unless some means is found to stop its progression, it will, like the Blob, inevitably devour everything. "One hundred years ago, it took just over three weeks for Australians to produce all the wealth needed to pay for all the state and federal government services for a whole year. Today, this takes almost four months." What needs to happen before it takes taxpayers 12 months out of the year to pay for government, the authors argue, is to allow people who are willing to bear the risk to opt out of the nanny state.The present slim volume . explores the idea that we might `turn off' the government when there is nothing useful for it to do. I hasten to add that I do not mean we should turn it off completely. There is plainly a need for government to organize foreign affairs, chase criminals, enforce contracts, and provide indivisible `public goods' that the rest of us need but would not organize for ourselves if we were left to our own devices. .Most controversially the paper argues that those who voluntarily choose dependency should not have a full role in selecting the nation's government. "People who freely admit they cannot be trusted to run their own lives should presumably not be trusted to run other people's either. Dependent children have a right to be looked after, but they cannot claim the full range of freedoms that adults expect. Likewise, those who declare themselves incompetent to organise their own lives should not expect to exercise all the rights that autonomous and responsible citizens take for granted."
Some people really do need the government to provide them with an income, give them housing, medicate them when they fall ill, educate their children, and save money for them for when they grow old. . It is also true that some people need to be told what to do. Some people really do need the government to tell them-in minute detail-how to live their lives.
But the core premise of the essays that follow is that most people do not need all this support and guidance. Indeed, for the majority of Australians, the government now represents more of a hindrance than a help, and more of an irritant than a facilitator.In their essay, Dubossarsky and Samild suggest the main advantage of withdrawing the vote from people who declare themselves dependent will be to strengthen democracy by weakening the politicians' ability to buy votes.Disenfranchisement will not apply, of course, to those who are involuntarily dependent through accident or illness. Nevertheless the scheme will recall various historical multi-tier schemes of citizenship, such as the Roman, or the property qualifications for sufferage in the early American colonies. But before the Dubossarsky and Samild proposals are dismissed as retrograde, running contrary to the trend of universal sufferage, it's fair to observe that today's burgeoning welfare state is radically different from the minimalist governments of colonial America and may require a different political development. In a welfare state scenario the conflict of interest inherent in voters being able to elect those who would sign their welfare checks must be handled in some way.
The question is how. The other half of the argument is that "those who can" should be allowed to declare independence from government. And so, the argument goes, people who can paddle their own canoe should be able to opt for lower taxes in exchange for a smaller claim to government services. But there are two problems with this proposal: arithmetic and politics. How is welfare - which are transfer payments to those who have declared their dependence - going to be funded if independents are allowed to leave the system? Dependency only works if someone else is footing the bill. Voluntary dependents could conceivably simply hand over their entire paycheck to the state and live in a kind of communist enclave within an otherwise market economy, but it is doubtful that their economy would ever be self-supporting. Moreover, allowing independents to opt out implies that those who make more will pay less in taxes. At the extreme a billionaire might choose to pay the lowest tax of all, because he would be unlikely to need any government assistance except the indivisible public goods.
Is there any future for the "independents", those who wish to trade off a smaller claim on government benefits for less state interference? Given the arithmetic of welfare and politics what might actually happen is something less logically valid but more politically acceptable: independents may simply pay government more taxes in order to get off their back. In other words, they'll bribe the dependents to leave them alone. Here's the paper's vision of personal freedom.Self-declared independent people would also still be subject to the laws of the land-but only those laws that stop them from harming others, and stop others from harming them. These are the laws that must bind everyone if we are to live in a civilised and peaceable society. As independent adults, however, Humphreys proposes that those who declare independence should no longer be subject to the paternalistic laws that politicians put in place to stop us harming ourselves. Declaring independence means you no longer want or need the government to pass laws to protect you from yourself. It means you are happy to take the risks and bear the consequences of your own, freely chosen actions.In order to retrieve these freedoms, high income or risk taking individuals might simply pay to get their freedom back. In order to relieve government of liability and provide legal and political cover for their actions they may execute quit claims supported by private insurance. In either case, the concept is similar: here's some money, now leave me alone. While its's not clear the policy paper provides any definite answers, it certainly throws up interesting ideas about how a citizen might buy his freedom back from our new masters, the politically correct welfare state.
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BOOK REVIEW of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein
Review by Jonathan Chait. No Leftist understands much about how the real world works but Chait understands enough to see that conspiracy theorist Klein is living in cloud cuckoo land -- a veritable female Chomsky in her selective attention to the facts
It seems like a very long time--though in truth only a few years have passed--since the most sinister force on the planet that the left could imagine was Nike. In 2001, Time proclaimed that the anti-globalization movement had become the "defining cause" of a new generation, and that the spokesperson for the cause was the Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein. For puzzled outsiders grasping to understand why bands of youths had begun following the World Trade Organization wherever it went, brandishing oversize puppets and occasionally smashing up the local Starbucks, Klein was there to explain. She has always downplayed her place within the movement, but in fact her influence is as considerable as her press clippings proclaim. Her achievement, and it is no small feat, has been to revive economicism--and more grandiosely, materialism--as the central locus of left-wing politics.
From the time of Marx, and through the Depression, the left concerned itself primarily with economic inequality. The analysis of injustice in terms of class conflict and the forces of production was the canonical one. But the postwar boom--the authors of the Port Huron Statement famously described themselves as "bred in at least modest comfort"--turned the left's attention to foreign policy and national security in the Cold War, and to civil rights, and to feminism. By the 1980s, left-wing politics had withdrawn almost entirely into academia and other liberal enclaves, which it ruthlessly policed for any dissent from the verities of multiculturalist dogma and identity politics.
This evolution can be seen in Klein's own family. Her grandfather was a Marxist fired by Disney in 1941 for trying to organize animators. Her father fled the United States for Canada to avoid service in Vietnam, and joined Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her mother directed the anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. And Naomi Klein, like most campus leftists of the 1980s, directed her ideological energies toward the denouncing of various -isms within academia. (She later recalled, with admirable remorse, that she was known as "Miss P.C.")
By the 1990s, Klein had come to realize, like some other campus activists, that off-campus there could be found worse depredations than the canonization of Shakespeare and other dead white males. And the new enemy turned out to be an old one--the original one, in fact: the corporations, and more generally capitalism. Klein set to work on her book No Logo, which appeared in 1999. That book wove together much of the new economic activism springing up in the precincts of academia into a withering anti-corporate manifesto. Her indictment had two main counts. The first was that many corporations profited from the cruel treatment of Third World labor. This observation was undeniable, and the publicizing of these evils has produced reforms of which activists can rightly be proud. The second charge was that corporations have encroached upon and monetized every aspect of modern life and culture. Klein wrote that she could envision a future "fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests." This aspect of her argument needed a bit more thinking through.
The distinctive thing about Klein's style was that it was very Old Left. She had a classic Marxist-materialist analysis, arguing that economic conditions, rather than bigotry or ideology, are what shape the world. Her interest in culture and in actually existing life under capitalism was somewhat derivative of the Frankfurt School, though not as intellectually sophisticated. Yet she managed to make the old notions feel new, and to capture the ethos of what was being called "the New New Left." And her argument reflected the conviction of the new anti-globalization activists, the children of the "cultural left," that they themselves--and not just workers in Nike factories abroad--were the victims of international corporations.
The 1990s was, for all the obvious reasons, an intensely materialistic era, and Klein came along just in time to make its booms and excesses into fodder for some sort of revival of classical Marxist analysis, which had fallen into disrepair and even into disrepute after the collapse of communism. The publication of No Logo serendipitously coincided with the sudden rise of street protests, and the book became a surprise international best-seller. The dearth of leaders in the diffuse anti-globalization cause meant that Naomi Klein became the Tom Hayden of the movement. The Times of London deemed her "probably the most influential person under the age of 35 in the world." The National Post called her the "New Noam Chomsky," and the Guardian announced that "Naomi Klein might just be helping re-invent politics for a new generation."
And then came September 11. The Islamist attack on the World Trade Center may not have "changed everything," as so many Orwell-wannabes declared, but it, and the ensuing war with secular Iraq, certainly changed the orientation of the left. The locus of evil in the world, even more than during the Cold War, was once again American military power and its use beyond our borders. The new American adversaries were not corporations but individuals--George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz. And they were motivated not by profit, but by ideology. This was not a problem that could be addressed by making the streets of Seattle run brown with Frappuccinos.
But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. "I felt it emotionally," she told The New York Times, "before I understood it factually." Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was--guess what?--part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly. The left-wing labor economist Kim Phillips-Fein has written admiringly about Klein's role in seamlessly transforming the anti-globalization movement into the anti-imperialist movement:In the wave of panicked reaction that followed the disaster, suddenly it seemed that the movement might disappear once more.... Almost alone among political journalists, Klein has devoted herself to writing about the war against Iraq as a political project driven by neoliberal ideology and economic interest--a natural extension of the corporate dominance of the 1990s, instead of a radical break.So Klein went through the transition from intellectual guru of the movement against Starbucks to intellectual guru of the movement against the Pentagon, and came away as influential as ever. She remains the darling of the left in the United States, where she writes for The Nation and The Huffington Post, and abroad, where she is even more popular. A poll of readers of Prospect and Foreign Policy in 2005 ranked her eleventh on a list of the hundred most influential public intellectuals in the world.
And we can see the culmination of her intellectual synthesis in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The reception accorded this book has been staggering. It was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for distinguished prizes, a favorite of "best book" lists in the newspapers. It has even been made into a short film. It has been reviewed favorably in The New York Times, and hyperbolically elsewhere. In These Times called it "The New Road to Serfdom"--that is, the left-wing equivalent of the classic right-wing Hayekian tract. The San Francisco Chronicle said it "may have revealed the master narrative of our time." Not bad for a marginal dissenter.
The Shock Doctrine has a single, uncomplicated explanation for everything that ails us. It identifies the fundamental driving force of the last three decades to be the worldwide spread of free-market absolutism as it was formulated by Milton Friedman and the department of economics at the University of Chicago. The free marketers, Klein argues, understand full well that the public does not support their policies, which she summarizes as "the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending." And so they have decided that the free-market program can be implemented only when the public has been disoriented by wars, coups, natural disasters, and the like. The "shock doctrine" is the conservative plan to implement pro-corporate policies through the imposition and exploitation of mass trauma.
Klein cites a passage written by Friedman that "best summarizes the shock doctrine":Only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.Much of the moral weight of Klein's indictment rests upon the morbid pleasure her subjects appear to take in the immiseration that permits their success. Klein observes that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Friedman described the ruin of the New Orleans school system thusly: "This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the education system." On the very next page, she calls Friedman's plan "the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities." The reader is meant to recall Friedman's use of the word "opportunity," and forget his use of the word "tragedy." Reading Klein, you might almost conclude that Friedman devised the hurricane.
Klein repeatedly implies that there is something immoral about using crises to advance the right-wing agenda without explaining why this is so. After all, Friedman wanted to overhaul the New Orleans public education system because he believed, rightly or wrongly, that vouchers would work better. If you thought your house was horribly designed, and a tornado flattened it, would you rebuild it exactly as before?
The notion that crises create fertile terrain for political change, far from being a ghoulish doctrine unique to free-market radicals, is a banal and ideologically universal fact. (Indeed, it began its dubious modern career in the orbit of Marxism, where it was known as "sharpening the contradictions.") Entrenched interests and public opinion tend to run against sweeping reform, good or bad, during times of peace and prosperity. Liberals could not have enacted the New Deal without the Great Depression. Communist revolutions have generally come about in the wake of wars. The liberal economist Victor R. Fuchs once wrote that "national health insurance will probably come to the United States in the wake of a major change in the political climate, the kind of change that often accompanies a war, a depression, or large-scale civil unrest."
Fuchs did not mean that the public would never accept universal health insurance unless they had been brutalized into doing so. Nor was his observation evidence that he longed for disaster to befall the United States. Most American liberals today would admit that the sorry state of the American economy, foreign policy, and political life has created a golden opportunity for progressive reform. There is nothing odious about this. Yet Klein takes analogous observations from conservatives as proof that the right "prays for crisis the way drought-stricken farmers pray for rain."
Klein locates the beginnings of the shock doctrine in Chile, where in 1973 a military coup led by Pinochet displaced a democratically elected socialist government, and implemented economic policies urged upon him by Friedman and other Chicago School free-marketers. Chile offers the closest example of a case study that fits Klein's thesis. But even here the facts do not fit quite as tightly as she would like. Through most of her narrative, Klein depicts Pinochet as a pure puppet of Friedman. "For the first year and a half," she writes, "Pinochet faithfully followed the Chicago rules." But a half-dozen pages later, while explaining away the impressive economic growth that followed under Pinochet, she writes that "it's clear that Chile never was the laboratory of 'pure' free markets that its cheerleaders claimed." More generally, she seems incapable of understanding that authoritarianism of the sort represented by Pinochet may be as moved by a lust for power as by a lust for profits. They are not the same phenomenon.
From that starting point, Klein proceeds to interpret most of the events of the last thirty years as repetitions of the same inexorable pattern: elites forcing laissez-faire policies upon unwilling citizens. Her interpretive method is an extremely crude sort of Marxist economicism. The Tiananmen Square uprising, in Klein's telling, was not a pro-democracy movement so much as an explosion of opposition to privatization, and Beijing crushed the movement not in the service of autocracy but in the service of neoliberalism. "It wasn't Communism [Deng] was protecting with his crackdown," she writes, "but capitalism."
Klein's model leaves little room for the non-economic varieties of conflict, such as ethnic or sectarian strife. "Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era," she observes, "which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical freemarket 'reforms.'" One example Klein cites in her list is the U.S. intervention in Kosovo. But the human rights violation that she deplores was not the ethnic cleansing of Albanians, it was the American response. And what motivated the American attempt to stop the mass atrocity? Capitalism, of course: "The NATO attack on Belgrade in 1999 created the conditions for rapid privatizations in the former Yugoslavia--a goal that predated the war." (Klein assures her readers that economics was not the "sole motivator" for the war, but her analysis makes no room for any such complication.)
Almost nothing can confound Klein's cookie cutter. You might have thought that, say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in non-monetary things such as land, religion, security, and ideology. But it is not, as the doctrinaire Klein confidently explains. Israel made a peace deal with the Palestinians in 1993 because "Israeli corporations were tired of being held back by war," and thought that if Israel made peace, it would "be perfectly positioned to be the Middle East's free-trade hub." But then what changed? The answer is the Israeli economy: "the flipping of Israel's export economy from one based on traditional goods and high technology to one disproportionately dependent on selling expertise and devices related to counterterrorism." Klein takes an unusual view of the causal relationship. Rather than terrorism instigating the rise of Israel's counterterrorism sector, Klein sees the relationship working in reverse: "the rapid expansion of the high-tech security economy created a powerful appetite inside Israel's wealthy and most powerful sectors for abandoning peace in favor of fighting a continual, and continuously expanding, War on Terror." So Israel decided to provoke bomb blasts in its buses and pizzerias largely--again, she dutifully concedes that it was not the sole factor--because building blast walls and bomb detectors became more profitable than living in peace.
The heart of Klein's book is her analysis of the Iraq war, which she regards as the state-of-the-art application, the definitive demonstration, of the shock doctrine. In Klein's telling, the war is merely a forcible expansion of economic globalization. "The architects of the invasion," she instructs, "had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means." Why, then, did Bush settle on Iraq, as opposed to some other closed Middle Eastern economy? Klein argues that other targets were indeed considered, but Bush chose Iraq owing to its "good central for military bases," the American military's familiarity with the terrain from the Gulf war, and the fact that "Saddam's use of chemical weapons on his own people made him easy to hate."
Saddam's record of aggression of years of defying U.N. weapons inspectors does not make the list. "Saddam did not pose a threat to U.S. security," she writes, "but he did pose a threat to U.S. energy companies, since he had recently signed contracts with a Russian oil giant and was in negotiations with France's Total." Of course, Russia and France received contracts because they were working to undermine the sanctions regime and containment of Iraq. Why didn't Bush do the smart capitalist thing and simply make a deal with Saddam to drop the sanctions and cut American oil companies in on Iraq's oil reserves? Klein does not say.
It seems a little ridiculous to have to point out that Iraq is not exactly a new outpost of unfettered capitalism, with McDonald's and Exxon stations beckoning customers on every corner. The American master plan to transform Iraq into an "Arabic Singapore" has not worked out too well. But in full defiance of everything that we know about post-war Iraq, Klein proceeds to argue that what might superficially appear to be a total failure is, in fact, the successful culmination of the war's purposes. After the invasion, she explains, local democracy and inter-sectarian peace sprang out around the land. "Freedom," she remarks, "was becoming a reality." And from the perspective of the Bush administration, this was a problem. A truly democratic Iraq would never accept the laissez-faire economy that Washington wanted, and which was the entire purpose of the war. "So," Klein deduces, "Washington abandoned its democratic promises and instead ordered increases in the shock level."
Most critics of the war believe the notion of exporting democracy to a hostile Arab country was doomed in its conception. Some war supporters counter that the occupation could have succeeded, but bungling and incompetence caused it to fail. Klein is staking out a third, esoteric, highly original position. She says that the occupation could have succeeded, but the Bush administration did not want it to succeed. She is explicit about this:Had the Bush administration kept its promise to hand over power quickly to an elected Iraqi government, there is every chance that the resistance would have remained small and containable, rather than becoming a countrywide rebellion. But keeping that promise would have meant sacrificing the economic agenda behind the war, something that was never going to happen.Never? Ten pages later Klein concedes that, starting in December 2006, the Pentagon pulled a "dramatic about-face" and decided to re-open Iraq's state factories. Her cheerful insouciance in the face of such inconvenient facts points to an odd, slightly endearing quality of hers: she is conscientious enough to provide readers with facts that blow her thesis to smithereens, yet at the same time she is deluded enough not to notice the rubble of her thinking on the floor. So Klein makes a big deal about the comic but stillborn efforts by some Republican ideologues to transform Iraq into a flat-tax paradise, but she also notes that very little privatization actually took place in Iraq, and indeed that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had just three staffers devoted to privatizing Iraqi state industries. You would think this latter fact would undermine her belief that privatizing Iraq's economy was the central goal of the war. Alas, no. She thinks it just goes to show that "the CPA itself was too privatized to privatize Iraq."
So Klein attributes the failure to privatize Iraq to the CPA's incompetence, but she deems every other apparent failure to be a deliberate plan to foster chaos. To make this case, Klein runs through every one of the administration's post-war mistakes and explains why it was no mistake at all. Paul Bremer, the director of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance, decided to purge Baathists from the Iraqi government not because they were Baathists but because they were government employees. De-Baathification, Klein writes, "had little to do with anti-Saddamism and everything to do with free-market fervor." She further insists that the widespread episodes of looting in early 2003 "cannot be dismissed as mere oversights," but were part of the American plan to dismantle the Iraqi state.
With the pseudo-clarity of a conspiracy theorist, Klein dismisses out of hand the possibility of incompetence. There were memos warning the Army of looting, she ominously notes--scanting the possibility that bureaucratic lethargy, rather than conscious intent, prevented the memos' warnings from being acted upon at ground level. That widespread bungling and mismanagement also followed Hurricane Katrina strikes Klein as proof of intentionality. "The fact that exactly the same errors as those made in Iraq were instantly repeated in New Orleans," she remarks, "should put to rest the claim that Iraq's occupation was merely a string of mishaps and mistakes marked by incompetence and lack of oversight."
Like every conspiracy theory, Klein's account of the fate of the world finally lacks internal logic. She points to one instance of American soldiers dismembering Iraqi passenger planes, inflicting "$100 million worth of damage to Iraq's national airline--which was one of the first assets to be put on the auction block in an early and contentious partial privatization." If the point of the war was to hand control of Iraq's state assets to American corporations, wouldn't American troops be protecting those assets instead of destroying them?
But her most explosive charge is that Bush and his cabal are not merely the puppets of war profiteers, but war profiteers themselves. "Key Bush officials have maintained their interests in the disaster capitalism complex," thereby "allowing them to simultaneously profit from the disasters they help unleash." Klein provides two examples of such conflicts of interest. The first is that Donald Rumsfeld maintained his stock in Gilead Sciences, which holds the patent for Tamiflu, even while serving as defense secretary. Get it? Rumsfeld would stand to profit from a flu pandemic. But surely you don't have to be an admirer of Rumsfeld to doubt that he would engineer an outbreak of a deadly virus in order to fatten his stock portfolio. (Indeed, one suspects that even if Rumsfeld tried to pull off such a dastardly scheme, he would probably wind up creating a cure for the flu by mistake and render Tamiflu worthless.)
The other piece of data that Klein cites to support her charge that Bush administration officials profit from the disasters that they cause is Vice President Cheney's holdings in Halliburton. "When he leaves office in 2009 and is able to cash in his Halliburton holdings," she charges, "Cheney will have the opportunity to profit extravagantly from the stunning improvement in Halliburton's fortunes." This is a spectacular accusation--that the driving force behind the Iraq war stands to gain millions of dollars from it. You might wonder why John Kerry did not make this an issue in 2004, or why liberal pundits have not crusaded against Cheney's blatant self-dealing. The answer, of course, is that it is completely untrue. Cheney has signed a legally binding agreement to donate to charity any increase in his Halliburton stock. (Honest-- you can look this up on factcheck.org.) Lord knows Rumsfeld and Cheney have committed enough actual misdeeds not to need indicting with imaginary ones.
Klein's strength as a writer is her interest in the ground level of things. Free-trade advocates rely heavily on abstract theory, lecturing us on comparative advantage and the relative virtues of Portuguese wine versus English wool; but Klein, no armchair radical, jets off to wretched places in the Third World and paints a picture of the reality of free trade in chilling detail. That picture ought to give pause to the most committed free-trader, even if she is hardly the only one to have noted these consequences. Yet when it comes to the right-wingers who constitute her book's main subject, Klein's reportorial spirit is nowhere to be found.
Klein's relentless materialism is not the only thing driving her to see conservatives merely as corporate puppets. She pays shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas. She recognizes that neoconservatism sits at the heart of the Iraq war project, but she does not seem to know what neoconservatism is; and she makes no effort to find out. Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one breathtaking sentence:Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think-tanks with which [Milton] Friedman had long associations--Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute--called itself "neoconservative," a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.Where to begin? First, neoconservative ideology dates not from the 1990s but from the 1960s, and the label came into widespread use in the 1970s. Second, while neoconservatism is highly congenial to corporate interests, it is distinctly less so than other forms of conservatism. The original neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, did not reject the New Deal. They favor what they now call "national greatness" over small government. And their foreign policy often collides head-on with corporate interests: neoconservatives favor saber-rattling in places such as China or the Middle East, where American corporations frown on political risk, and favor open relations and increased trade. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has always had an uneasy relationship with neoconservatism. (Russell Kirk delivered a famous speech at the Heritage Foundation in which he declared that "not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.") And the Cato Institute is not neoconservative at all. It was virulently opposed to the Iraq war in particular, and it opposes interventionism in foreign policy in general.
Finally, there is the central role that Klein imputes to her villain Friedman, both in this one glorious passage and throughout her book. In her telling, he is the intellectual guru of the shock doctrine, whose minions have carried out his corporatist agenda from Santiago to Baghdad. Klein calls the neocon movement "Friedmanite to the core," and identifies the Iraq war as a "careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology" over which Friedman presided. What she does not mention--not once, not anywhere, in her book--is that Friedman argued against the Iraq war from the beginning, calling it an act of "aggression."
It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein's mistake exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism. Nor are the interests of corporations always, or even usually, served by war.
What makes Klein's thesis so odd, and so awful, is that in fact there is an unlimited supply of raw material, an abundant basis in reality, for the sorts of arguments that she wants to make. The last two decades certainly have seen the global spread of absolutist free-market ideology. Many of the newest adherents of this creed are dictators who have learned that they can harness the riches of capitalism without permitting the freedoms once thought to flow automatically from it. In the United States, the power of labor unions has withered, and prosperity has increasingly come to be defined as gross domestic product or the rise of the stock market, with the actual living standards of the great mass of the population an afterthought. Corporations, which can relocate nearly anywhere around the world, have used their flexibility as a cudgel against workers, who do not enjoy the privileges of mobility. Domestic policy has aggressively sharpened income inequalities, and corporations have enjoyed unfettered influence to a degree not seen in a hundred years. And the president did start a war without paying the slightest bit of attention to the country that he would be left occupying or how its people would react.
All these things are true. And all these things are enormous outrages and significant problems. It's just that they are not the same outrage or the same problem. And Naomi Klein's relentless lumping together of all her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense.
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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21 July, 2008
Batman is a neocon
The folly of the war in Iraq has been a defining theorem in Hollywood for the past few years, and the tenor of conservative complaint has become more frenzied as the movies have become more blatantly political and infuriating. One after another the dramas arrive, all bravely asserting exactly the same thing: Americans are epic bumblers with a corrupt and moronic leadership, and a security apparatus populated with bullies and monsters. Some, such as the Jason Bourne movies, have done very well. Moreand specifically those that have portrayed US fighting men and women as rapists, murderers, cowards and dupeshave failed. They have failed so utterly that only the bright burning certainty of righteousness on the part of an influential segment of the American movie industry could explain why they continue to go into production in the face of massive indifference if not hostility of audiences.
Never let it be said members of the ideological left in Hollywood are without principles. They back their shuddering discomfort with the United States and its defenders with their sweat and toil, reputations, and many millions of dollars. But as it turns out, defeatism and national chagrin arent so terribly popular in America or abroad. Conservative critics have spent a lot of time decrying, with justification, the anti-American movies and pleading for tales that address contemporary struggles in a dramatic, or even heroic manner.
The truth is, they are. Some of the most successful movies of the past few years have embodied values and themes that conservativesthough not only conservatives, of courseembrace. The trouble is, those themes are ded in fantasy and horror movies that more often than not evade serious critical scrutiny. A few examples:
A call to the men of the west to defend their civilization, the good in the worldthats worth fighting for is from the Lord of the Rings movies.
The revelation that, stripped of his uniform, the hero that stands between order and chaos is an unassuming young man is from Spiderman 2.
The most vigorous defense of exceptionalism (and how it might be crushed by political correctness, envy, and legal maneuvering) is found in The Incredibles.
The threat of rage infected fanatics overrunning England and Europe is explored in 28 Weeks Later. That movie also showed the American led NATO forces as brave and principled, and demonstrated the vital importance of suppressing facile compassion and following the rules.
The grandeur and sacrifice of protecting home and family is exemplified in 300; which though based on a historical event was filmed in a style that blended classical Greek art and modern comics.
Iron Man and Hancock both reform their dissolute ways dedicate themselves to protecting victims of crime and terror.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull resurrects the idea of a noble quest, and the quaint-yet-revolutionary-considering-the-source notion that communism is an all-consuming evil that in any form (human or alien) will destroy those who submit to it.
Of course, its not all confirmation of conservative ideas in the fantasy realm. Ghost movie Dark Water (directed by Walter Salles, whose previous effort was the Che hagiography Diarios de motocicleta) made the case for terrorist appeasement. In the latest incarnation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the assimilated become liberals and their return to individuality is met with the wistful regret of what might have been. George A. Romero has become ively pro-zombie in his last couple of movies. But of the above, only Romeros Land of the Dead was profitable, and his follow-up, Diary of the Dead, was a financial disaster.
A complete breakdown of blockbuster by ideology would be unwieldy, but let me focus on one in particular due to its boldness, its success, and the release of its sequel. I speak of the mighty Batman Begins.
When seeking to revive the Batman franchise, Warner Brothers studios pointedly looked for a darker version to supplant the garish mess director Joel Schumacher had left behind. Christopher Nolan was attached on the strength of his previous movies, which include the crafty and amoral Memento and The Prestige. Both are very dark, literally. Nolan is colorblind, so his films tend to emphasize texture and contrast rather than color. The subject matter is even darker, for Batman Begins is explicitly about conquering fear and administering justiceor if you prefer, a war on terror.
In Batman Begins, the boy Bruce Wayne suffers a fall down a well and is subsequently frightened by a storm of bats in the cave where he landed. Unnerved by the bat costumes in the opera he later attends with his parents, he asks his father if they could leave early. When they exit the theater, a mugger confronts and kills Waynes parents. The shame over the fear Bruce believes led to the murder of his parents, and the frustration he feels over the early release of the evildoer leads him on a quest to thoroughly understand criminals and to equip himself to fight them.
In Asia he is recruited by the League of Shadows and suspects they have an approach to justice similar to his own. When asked what he seeks, Wayne replies, the means to fight injustice and to turn fear against those who prey on the fearful. At the end of his training, however, he learns the Shadows are a) far more ruthless and lawless than he had imagined, and b) have targeted his hometown of Gotham City for destruction. He chooses to defend and reform it instead.
The liberals of Gotham, especially as personified by Waynes parents and his childhood friend Rachel Dawes, are nice, idealistic people. They are also so ill equipped to cope with evil and violence as to become a significant contributor to the citys decline. Waynes father, Thomas, abdicated running the business that was the lifeblood of Gotham to more interested men, although the economy is in depression and in need of jobs. Instead he gives gifts and endows a cheap system of trains to unite the city. Those trains will later be used by the terrorists in their attempt to destroy Gotham The demolition of the train system, much the worse for wear since Bruce rode to the opera on it with his sanctimonious parents, marks the salvation of the city.
When confronted by the mugger Joe Chill, Thomas responds with politesse. Take it easyits all right, he says to the armed man. Dont be afraid, he says to Bruce. He gives the man everything he asks for, and is murdered with his wife in front of his son because he appeased an aggressor. During Bruces apprenticeship with the League, his mentor Henri Ducard tells him, Your parents death wasnt your fault. It was your fathers fault. That assertion is never challenged.
The city prosecutors, of which Dawes is a member, seem to accommodate criminals as much as persecute them. When pleading Chills reduced sentence, the DA tells the judge (a stooge of the citys crime lord), His crime was appalling, yes, but it was motivated not by greed but by desperation. Dawes explains that because of the depression, people are susceptible to crime and drugs, which mitigates their moral responsibility.
She becomes outraged when Wayne tells her the justice system of Gotham is broken, although he is manifestly correct. Thats why he literally turns his back on Chills court proceedings. She does her ineffectual job and hectors Bruce with righteous platitudes, and the city gets worse and worse. As Ducard says, Criminals thrive on the indulgence of societys understanding.
That indulgence interfaces with criminal enterprise in the person of Dr. Jonathan Crane. Crane is a psychopharmacologist who gives sympathetic testimony in court to gain leniency for criminals who are then moved to his asylum. There, he experiments with the fear-inducing drug that is an integral part of the League of Shadows plot to destroy Gotham. As he sprays an expanse of the city with the drug, he shouts at the petrified victims, Theres nothing to fear but fear itself! He is an ace manipulator of liberal pieties and legal loopholes, and a superb front man for the League of Shadows.
The League of Shadows is a millennia old organization that uses terror to punish the decadent and the wicked. Like Dawes and her ilk, they believe justice is harmony, though the formers principles dictate near inaction, the League practice near annihilation. They are conservative in the worst sense of the word: inflexible, intolerant, and fanatical. Their history is one of destroying the villageLondon by fire, Rome though sacking, Europe with the plagueto save it.
So what is Batman? Hes too free with the rules for the political set and too much a squish for the League of Shadows. His affection for the former tempers his natural attraction to the latter. He is a compassionate conservative.
Bruce Wayne/ Batman is the scion of a wealthy Republican family (his home was used as part of the Underground Railroad). His father was a well thought of man who proved too weak to deal authoritatively with a looming threat, one that would later collaborate with a fundamentalist organization that sought to destroy the greatest city in America. With his British ally Alfred he opposes a terrorist enemy.
Although he has a reputation as a drunken playboy goofball, those closest to him recognize his core of decency and will. has respect for business and industry. He is a believer in personal redemption, having learned the lesson that we fall so we can learn to pick ourselves up. If Bruce Wayne, the League of Shadows, Dr. Crane, and the liberal members of Gothams political establishment bear a resemblance to certain contemporary figures and entitieswell, the credits claim its a coincidence. But we are free to draw our own conclusions.
And gloomy conservative moviegoers can lighten up about mainstream movies. We can despair over unpopular future curiosities which we may as well begin to forget right here, or we can remember we have Batman. And as Batman might have said, its not what the filmmakers are underneath, its what they do that defines them.
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Why is Nazism seen as so much worse than Communism?
Jonah Goldberg reports:
The suggestion that the Nazis were responsible for the launching of WWII (See here and here), and that's why Nazism is seen as more evil than Communism, elicited a lot of email. Here are a few:I think that communism would never be viewed as equivalent to evil as Nazism is even if the Reds had started WWII by attacking Germany. Much of the bien pensant reaction to communism is informed by a feeling that communists' hearts are in the right place. The Reds are trying to bring equality to the world and relieve the burden of oppression that weighs down the proletariat; the Nazis are concerned with the progress of the Volk. The intelligentsia does not see communism as fatally flawed but overzealous. (if they did, they would not be leftists).And:Re: The reader who says starting World War II was equal to the Holocaust in giving Hitler an evil reputation.And:
Yes, Hitler and fascism became synonymous with evil because the wars he started made it impossible for the world to ignore his crimes. Also, having our soldiers capturing some of his death camps made it that much harder to overlook what really happened. And his victims had more relatives in Western Europe and the US than Stalin's victims did.
This is an issue that has puzzled me for years, ever since reading Gulag Archipelago when it appeared in the mid 70s. In my childhood I got the impression from documentaries and stories on World War II that we had learned our lesson never to appease a murderous dictator. Then Solzhenitsyn shows how we kept on doing it to another one (Stalin) all the years we were fighting Hitler, and beyond. I suspect that appeasing and ignoring what a dictator does to his own people is the default behavior of most nations and peoples, even now. Zimbabwe comes to mind, and how George W Bush is demonized for the invasion of Iraq. It takes an unusually aggressive dictator (to neighboring countries) like Hitler to rouse other countries to overthrow him.I just caught up on the LF blog and wanted to comment on your reader's letter regarding Fascism's "evil reputation" vis a vis the relative pass that Communism/socialism get. Specifically, methinks its necessary to knock down the historical innaccuracies regarding the Soviet Union that he's perpetrating.And:
The Soviet Union bears just as much responsibility for starting WW2 as does the Third Reich. It was an ALLIANCE with Germany that "greenlighted" the Wehrmacht invasion of Poland, with the Soviet Union rolling in from the other border a few days later. The SU then proceeded to attack neutral nations without provocation, i.e. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Finland. We came pretty close to seriously aiding the Finns, had the geography been more favorable, there might very well have been "Flying Polar Bears" led by Chenault as well. Subsequently, the Soviet Union made a non-aggression pact and cleared the way for the Japanese to move ahead with their grand imperial designs. Of course, the "honorable" Soviets ditched that pact as soon as they were assured that they could be successful in their aggression.
The reason for the overarching villification of the fascism compared to socialism/communism is simply the convenience of history (SU on our side vs the Axis) and the wholesale obscuratisnism and revisionism undertaken by the Left that you've already identified in your book.Your reader who discounts the Holocaust in favor of starting World War II as the primary reason fascism is reviled while communism is (at least in those countries that did not experience it) is not, ignores one simple fact: the USSR as much as Nazi Germany is responsible for starting the war (at least its European phase, which is, let's face it, the only part that Europeans and Americans really care about). Without the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler could not have invaded Poland, or if he did, would have had to contemplate running headlong in the the Red Army coming to Poor Little Poland's "rescue". The Pact also allowed the USSR to occupy the eastern half of Poland, and gave Stalin a free hand in Finland and the Baltic states. In other words, Stalin was just as much a co-conspirator in the initiation of the war as Hitler (which, of course, raises the irony of Ribbentrop being hanged for war crimes after Nuremberg, while Molotov lived in peaceful retirement to a ripe old age).Source
I think the real reason for fascism's evil reputation vs. the relatively benign reputation of socialism, or even communism, has more to do with the adoption of the latter two as the preferred ideology of the intelligentsia in the liberal West, which permits them to engage in intellectual peregrinations to justify their beliefs despite the manifest results thereof. In their minds, fascism per se is evil (evil in its essence?), while socialism and communism are per se good-and only evil in their execution. The conceit allows them to think, "If only we had been running the show, things would have turned out differently". To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton's aphorism on Christianity, they believe "Communism has not been tried and found wanting. it has been found difficult and thus never tried". As long as the Left can engage in such sophistry, they will never have to confront the reality of their beliefs. And, from their perspective, a good thing, too.
The Big Easy Rebuilds, Bottom Up
Ordinary New Orleanians restore their city, avoiding lower Manhattan's master-planned debacle
Just two days after August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans, architectural wunderkind Daniel Libeskind was already overflowing with ideas about how to restore the city. Libeskind-he of the 1,776-foot "Freedom Tower" for New York's Ground Zero-compared New Orleans with postwar Berlin, which had "in a daring way developed . . . into the 21st century." As for a "theme" for a rebuilt New Orleans, Libeskind mused to the New York Times, "What could be more creative than jazz?"
Mercifully, New Orleans isn't erecting any saxophone-shaped skyscrapers as it recovers from the hurricane, which left 80 percent of its surface area-a swath seven times Manhattan's size-inundated with floodwaters and drove nearly all of the city's 455,000 residents from their homes. New Orleans has rebounded remarkably since then. As of January, it boasted 302,000 residents, with 2,000 more returning each month, according to data crunchers at GCR & Associates, an information-systems firm. (In early 2006, the city's official planners had figured that just 247,000 people would be home by September 2008.)
New Orleanians have achieved much of this success by doing what New Yorkers couldn't do after 9/11: ignoring the potentates and eggheads hankering to turn devastation into conceptual art. They've been building and rebuilding on their own or with small-scale help, rather than under top-down decree-and, in the process, showing that thousands of individual planners are better than one master.
True, a strong government role was necessary at first to set the stage for New Orleans's progress. Federal agencies, especially the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army Corps of Engineers, worked with contractors to clear millions of tons of debris from lawns and streets, unclog waterways, and provide trailers so that New Orleanians could live in their driveways while fixing their houses. They also repaired levees and are working on upgrading flood-control infrastructure in general-crucial steps in making homeowners more confident about weathering future hurricanes. But government, while critical for acute recovery, hasn't driven the long-term rebuilding work.
That's not to say that it hasn't tried. Just weeks after Katrina, the city unveiled a panel called Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB), charged with drawing up ambitious recommendations for everything from public transportation to schools. The panel comprised an equal number of black and white luminaries, from an archbishop to a famous jazz musician to a university president to a top real-estate developer. But it quickly became reviled for asking the city to prohibit rebuilding in low-lying neighborhoods-which are vulnerable to flooding-that didn't first "prove their viability." Still more infamous were its "green dots," markers on maps that seemed to suggest turning some low-lying areas where people already lived into parks. "There is a large green dot over our homes," one resident fumed at a crowded town-hall meeting in January 2006, according to New Orleans's Times-Picayune. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," promised another homeowner.
Nothing was wrong with encouraging New Orleanians to favor higher ground as they built and rebuilt. But trying to do so by government decree, rather than through gentler incentives as well as targeted infrastructure and public services investments, was a losing proposition. A few months later, Mayor Ray Nagin-looking toward reelection, cowed by public outrage, and stifled by his own administration's lack of follow-through-abandoned any huge effort to plan neighborhoods. "Rebuild at your own risk," he told citizens. As late as April 2007, Times-Picayune columnist Stephanie Grace was still lamenting the "curse of the green dot" as the cause of politicians' paralysis and pinning her hopes on a more modest second round of planning. But by then, it was too late: self-reliant New Orleanians had already taken Nagin at his word.
One of them was Father Nguyen The Vien, a Roman Catholic priest in a Vietnamese-American enclave of the badly flooded New Orleans East. Vien and his largely working- and middle-class parishioners showed that after a disaster, neighborhood and church connections can mean the difference between reconstruction and abandonment. "It's not the city that determines we are going to build," Vien says. "I can't ask the city to get everything lined up and [only then] I'll come home."
Stranded in Houston after Katrina, Vien racked up nearly $1,000 in cell-phone bills staying in touch with his 6,300 parishioners, and he held meetings in a Houston community center, where a grassroots plan was born. Starting in early October, after New Orleans's government reopened their neighborhood, Vien and his flock repaired their church's relatively minor damage and began using it as a base-a place to eat, sleep, and use restrooms as they tackled their own houses. Many even lived near one another in trailers on a property across from the church. Five weeks after the hurricane, Vien celebrated his first post-flood Mass, showing people worried about being the only family on the block how many residents were returning.
Vien also used numbers to lobby for public services. "I went to see Entergy," the electricity company, "on October 19, and told [the representative] `we need electricity,' " Vien says. "He said he needed to justify the load, because he couldn't take power from populated areas. He said, `Give me a list of households so I can go before the board and make the argument.' " Vien brought a list of 500-enough to get the power back on. By early 2008, he says, 95 percent of his parishioners were home and the trailers were gone. "We are done with recovery and [are now] working on development," says Vien, including launching a charter school and wooing hospitals to set up clinics nearby.
Lakeview is an upper-middle-class neighborhood that, like New Orleans East, rose in the twentieth century and is more vulnerable to flooding than older neighborhoods on higher ground. As Lakeview residents started to come back in early 2006 and rebuild homes ravaged by more than ten feet of water, they relied heavily on existing institutions. Martin Landrieu, an attorney, lifelong New Orleanian, and officer of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association, echoes Vien's outlook: "What's first is schools and churches."
Landrieu calls the opening of Catholic schools beginning in January 2006 "critical" because "the driving force for most families was getting kids into some semblance of order. People said, `If I can get my kids settled into a routine, I can work on other things.' " Evacuated neighbors, many living an hour or more away, also drew reassurance from Lakeview's First Baptist Church, which put up a map in early 2006 so that residents could stick a pin over their blocks to declare that they were committed to coming home.
When the hated green-dot plan spurred residents to "prove our viability," Landrieu notes, neighbors rose to the challenge, launching 72 committees on everything from grass-cutting to covering swimming pools so that citizens wouldn't feel that they were returning to abandonment. "People were coming out of the woodwork to see what they could do to help," says Landrieu. Saint Paul's Episcopal School also opened a resource center offering residents cleaning equipment and information on hiring contractors.
By the summer of 2006, people were returning in earnest. When Landrieu moved back into his home about a year after Katrina, he had five or ten neighbors in a three- to four-block area; six months later, the population had quadrupled. Today, 44 percent of Lakeview's population is back, according to GCR-a particularly significant accomplishment because so many of its properties were totaled, meaning that residents were returning not to recoup the value of houses but to build new ones from scratch.
An even higher success rate is happening in Broadmoor, a hard-hit neighborhood with more black residents than white and household incomes that range from poverty-level to the high six figures. There, over 70 percent of households have returned-partly because the great majority had flood insurance, partly because the neighborhood's historic houses hold up relatively well to storms, but also because of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, which worked tirelessly to contact displaced residents and convince them that they would have plenty of company and support in rebuilding. Broadmoor shows that neighborhoods with strong institutions don't have to be ethnically cohesive, like the Vietnamese-American pockets of New Orleans East, or wealthy, like Lakeview, to recover.
While small, neighborhood-based organizations have helped spur recovery in places like New Orleans East, Lakeview, and Broadmoor, larger institutions like New Orleans's Preservation Resource Center (PRC) are playing a big role, too. Dedicated to fixing up historic properties, PRC realized that its traditional mission took on new importance after the hurricane. "People were coming back to flooded, moldy houses," says executive director Patricia Gay. So a few weeks after Katrina, PRC began holding workshops on how to eradicate mold, providing free cleaning supplies and lists of contractors. The group also began bus tours to convince evacuees that damage was fixable, launched online groups so that returning homeowners could learn from one another, and started a "selective salvage" operation, working with FEMA to save historic doors, windows, and moldings from houses too far gone to fix. "I don't believe this city is disposable," says PRC's Kristin Palmer, who runs one of PRC's rehab programs.
PRC's pre-Katrina rehabilitation of low-income and elderly homeowners' historic houses assumed new urgency after the storm. So far, the effort has brought 72 families home. "We cluster homes, do three, four, five houses on the same street," says Palmer, in order to create confidence that historic neighborhoods are coming back. PRC also fixes up and resells vacant historic properties, which tend to be less vulnerable to storms, since they're sturdier than modern homes and are located in older neighborhoods that flood less regularly and drain more quickly than newer ones do. Last year, restaurant manager Heather Lolley moved from Lakeview to one of PRC's lovingly refurbished properties, a $132,000 house on the higher ground of historic Holy Cross. Her new home is made of "bargeboards," water-resistant wood planks that were once part of a boat that traveled down the Mississippi.
PRC hasn't entirely stuck to its pre-Katrina playbook, however, partly because of a stubborn economic fact: New Orleans's houses were cheap before the storm only because their construction was paid for long ago. Returning New Orleanians, including renters, need houses, but substantially rehabbing flooded properties or building them from scratch at $130 per square foot can be unaffordable for citizens of modest means. What to do?
PRC took a market approach, endorsing something that may sound unusual for a preservation group: "kit-built" houses. After Katrina, local firm Wayne Troyer Architects joined forces with architect Andr,s Duany to design five models of a "Katrina Cottage" that would fit into the long, narrow lots of comparatively high-ground Holy Cross. The cottages follow traditional New Orleans home designs, so as not to harm the neighborhood's historic character; meet 140-mile-per-hour wind-speed codes; and are made of materials resistant to mold, rot, and termites.
PRC has gotten on board, winning approval from New Orleans's Historic District Landmarks Commission to build the cottages, and it will break ground on the first four as City Journal goes to press. Thanks to PRC's volunteer labor and the low cost of materials for mass-produced kits, the organization hopes to build brand-new houses for under $70 per square foot. Pam Bryan, who runs PRC's construction program, notes that the kits are available at Lowe's home-improvement stores for $36,000 to $40,000, so that returning residents who aren't working with PRC can buy them, too.
Urban planners aren't wrong when they see in disaster an opportunity to try something new. Katrina has afforded local architects and their clients just such an opportunity, both in severely flooded areas and elsewhere. But they're seizing it with their own money and property, not with public funds.
More here
BRAZIL: Offend a homosexual ... Go to prison for 5 years
Teachers, pastors facing 'criminalization of homophobia'
Christians will face prison for speaking out against homosexuality if Brazil's Senate passes a bill approved unanimously by its House of Representatives. The measure is considered the country's newest attempt to promote homosexuality, disguised as an act to prevent discrimination, the Catholic News Agency reports. If anyone prevents actions of "homosexual affection" in public or private s open to the public, they could face up to five years in prison for doing so, the Association of the Defense of Life reports. The bill also seeks to penalize private and public school administrators with up to three years in prison if they refuse to hire openly "gay" teachers. According to the CNA, the measure will force prison time for any "moral, ethical, philosophical or psychological expression that questions homosexual practices."
The ADL claims the bill could spell disaster for churches and teachers. "[A] priest, a pastor, a teacher or even an average citizen who says in a sermon, a classroom or public conversation that homosexual acts are sinful, disordered or an illness could be denounced and detained," the association said.
Only weeks ago, WND reported the president of Brazil said "opposing" homosexuality makes you a sick person, and he believes such thoughts need to be criminalized. Brazilian chief Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who won a narrow re-election following a cash-for-votes scandals, held the First National Conference of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transvestites and Transsexuals to condemn the biblical belief that homosexuality is wrong.
Lulu, on June 5, not only officially opened the event to promote homosexuality across his nation but also issued a presidential sanction for the conference. Calling for "the criminalization of homophobia," he said opposition to homosexuality is "perhaps the most perverse disease impregnated in the human head." He said "prejudiced" people need to "open their minds and clean them." Other speakers encouraged homosexuals to claim to be part of a civil rights campaign that already has brought reforms for treatment of blacks, the elderly and the disabled. They also announced the nation's public hospitals soon would begin to perform sex changes on people.
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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20 July, 2008
British father branded a 'pervert' - for photographing his own children in a public park
When Gary Crutchley started taking pictures of his children playing on an inflatable slide he thought they would be happy reminders of a family day out. But the innocent snaps of seven-year-old Cory, and Miles, five, led to him being called a `pervert'. The woman running the slide at Wolverhampton Show asked him what he was doing and other families waiting in the queue demanded that he stop. One even accused him of photographing youngsters to put the pictures on the internet.
Mr Crutchley, 39, who had taken pictures only of his own children, was so enraged that he found two policemen who confirmed he had done nothing wrong. Yesterday he said: `What is the world coming to when anybody seen with a camera is assumed to be doing things that they should not? `This parental paranoia is getting completely out of hand. I was so shocked. One of the police officers told me that it was just the way society is these days. He agreed with me that it was madness.'
Father-of-three Mr Crutchley, a consultant for a rubber manufacturer from Walsall, West Midlands, was with his wife Tracey and their sons when the pleasant Sunday afternoon out turned sour. He said: `The children wanted to go on an inflatable slide and I started taking photos of them having a good time. Moments later the woman running the slide told me to stop. `When I asked why, she told me I could not take pictures of other people's children. I explained I was only interested in taking photos of my own children and pointed out that this was taking place in a public park.
`I showed her the photos I had taken to prove my point. Then another woman joined in and said her child was also on the slide and did not want me taking pictures of the youngster. `I repeated that the only people being photographed were my own children. She said I could be taking pictures of just any child to put on the internet and called me a pervert. We immediately left the show.'
Mrs Crutchley, 37, a teaching support assistant and qualified nursery nurse, said: `I was shocked by the reaction of those women. 'It is very sad when every man with a camera enjoying a Sunday afternoon out in the park with his children is automatically assumed to be a pervert.'
The slide was run by Tracey Dukes, 35, whose father Malcolm Gwinnett has an inflatables hire company. Mr Gwinnett, 58, a LibDem councillor in Wolverhampton, said: `Our policy is to ask people taking photos whether they have children on the slide. If they do, then that is fine. `But on this occasion another customer took exception to what the man was doing and an argument developed between those two people that continued without any further involvement from staff on the slide.'
Source
Massachusetts Senate fast-tracks same-sex marriage expansion
Voice vote moves plan to state House, guv's signature expected shortly after
A resurrected plan to expand homosexual "marriage" opportunities has been fast-tracked by the state Senate in Massachusetts with a vote that moves the proposal immediately to the state House, with the governor's signature expected before the end of this month. The proposal, previously put in a "kill" file by lawmakers, suddenly was resurrected today and given a voice approval by senators who did not even take a roll call vote.
Pro-family organizations say the plan will allow out-of-state same-sex duos to fetch drive-in "marriage" certificates in Massachusetts, then return home and create "havoc" by demanding their companies, cities, counties and states recognize them as married.
The conflict comes in that voters in 27 states already have approved state constitutional amendments limiting "marriage" to one man and one woman, and California is expected to vote on its similar plan in November. Brian Camenker, chief of Mass Resistance, watched his state senate in action and described it as "completely orchestrated" by homosexual activists. "It was horrible," he said. "It was as if the gays were playing them like a violin." The voice vote, "was just a sort of murmur and that was it," he said.
"I'll tell you there's no more democracy in Massachusetts, no constitutional government. They were completely being run by the homosexual lobby," he said. "The general population would never vote for that. The extent to which the state senate just rolled over for the homosexual lobby is absolutely breathtaking," he said. "You would have thought they would have at least had a debate," he said.
What the senators decided to do was repeal a 1913 law that bars out-of-state couples from marrying in the state unless their "marriage" would be legal in their home state. That has precluded a mass assembly of homosexuals to "marry" in Massachusetts because until this year Massachusetts was the only state where such "marriages" were recognized. California's state Supreme Court in May said it was unconstitutional in that state for officials to deny the status of "married" to homosexuals, and California does not have the same residency requirement imposed by Massachusetts.
Observers say the Massachusetts House likely will hold a vote later this week, and Gov. Deval Patrick is supportive of the change. Opponents of the 1913 law said it was racist, even though Massachusetts has allowed interracial marriages since 1843.
Camenker said his organization and others lobbied earlier this year and the state senators placed the idea into a "study," which effectively stopped its advance. Suddenly, how, however, it was resurrected. "The recent events in California have apparently energized the homosexual lobby. They apparently persuaded Sen. Robert Creedon (D-Brockton), Senate chairman of the judiciary committee, to take the unusual step of resurrecting it from the study to be voted on. Creedon, normally a pro-life, moderately pro-family senator, isn't running for re-election this fall. According to press reports, Sen. Diane Wilkerson (D-Mattapan), who led the charge to push for huge taxpayer-funding for homosexual programs in the schools, is the major force behind this also," Camenker said.
In California, however, same-sex "marriages" face an uncertain future, since a proposed constitutional amendment promoted by the ProtectMarriage.com organization already has been approved for this November's election ballot. The amendment reads: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."
And one of the followup questions would be: What happens to the "marriages" performed for same-sex couples between the time of the Supreme Court's opinion, and the possible veto of that opinion by the people of California. In fact, homosexual groups now are actively trying to prevent the California vote, saying the five majority justices on the state Supreme Court simply can change the definition of a traditional social institution by vote, but the people cannot vote to protect it.
In Massachusetts, the mandate for same-sex "marriages" does not face that same uncertain future. "This . would allow any homosexual couple in America to get 'married' here (in Massachusetts) - and cause havoc in their home states," Mass Resistance said. Such "couples" then would demand (using court challenges) that their home states legally recognize those marriages because of the US Constitution's 'full faith and credit' clause." "This would make Massachusetts a sort of Mecca for gay weddings, and there will be instability around the country," Camenker told WND.
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The British Labour party's heartland is rotten to the core and dying of welfarism
When one thinks of Glasgow East - and the lucky ones are those who have to go no further than just think - one is reminded of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St Paul's: si monumentum requiris, circumspice. If you seek Labour's monument, look at this hell-hole of a constituency. It is not merely in their heartland. It is not merely as devastated as it is after 11 years of Labour misrule. It is in a part of Britain controlled by Labour for generations, and serviced by epic amounts of public money since the invention, 30 years ago, of the Barnett formula for preferential funding of Scotland. And it proves two things.
First, that Labour's managerial incompetence is such that it not only cannot run anything, it cannot even ensure the survival of what passes for the normal social structures of the civilised world. Second, that throwing money at a problem, especially when the state is doing the throwing, is a guaranteed way of ensuring not only that it is not solved, but that it compounds and worsens.
The facts about Glasgow East have been much retailed, but a compendium is always useful, not least as a means of emphasising Labour's massive achievement in government. Its life expectancy for males is just about the lowest in Europe: 63, but in one ward, Calton, it is 54. Iain Duncan Smith, who has for years done what amounts to missionary work in the constituency on a heroic scale, has pointed out that the Calton figure ranks below the life expectancy of North Korea and Iraq.
In Glasgow, the weapon of mass destruction has been welfarism, and the removal of any incentive to work or to be enterprising. Heart disease is twice the national average, but alcoholism is a bigger killer either than the deep-fried Mars bar or tobacco: helped by the Government that brought us 24-hour boozing.
A half of the people in the constituency are unemployed. A half - possibly the same half - have no qualifications. Only a third of families own a car. According to Mr Duncan Smith, thousands of children in east Glasgow are heroin addicts. He has seen drug deals done in broad daylight, the police nowhere to be seen on streets so riddled with violent crime that they resemble a war zone. A local academic, Prof Ivan Turok, compares the area with South African townships: he should know, he is a United Nations adviser.
When Mr Duncan Smith talks of the role welfarism has played in the collapse of society in Glasgow East, he introduces a welcome moral dimension to the argument. Locally, the Roman Catholic Church has taken the moral dimension a step further, alerting its many communicants in the area to the lax views on abortion and embryo experimentation of some of the candidates: all part of the self-conscious "anything goes" attitude to ethics that has been fostered by the liberals who run the Labour Party these days, and which in its widest form has been the ruination of communities such as Glasgow East.
It cannot be stated strongly enough that Labour has created this morass. Its stranglehold on Glasgow politics for decades was widely recognised as corrupt and corrupting, yet no one - including many prominent Scots who ran the national party - bothered to do anything about it.
That three generations of some families in Glasgow East rely on welfare to survive shows how Labour's obsession with spending money entrenches poverty instead of alleviating it.
Nor was it the police who chose to turn themselves into a means of social engineering instead of fighting crime: the lead came from the Government. It is Labour's hopeless schools that turn out so many unqualified people, its so-called fight against "child poverty" that has bred new generations of poor children to poor families without providing the slightest ray of hope. And these people expect to be voted back on July 24, at the by-election.
Glasgow East is a peculiarly deprived and shocking place. We should not, though, allow it to become the sole focus of any attack on Labour and its failures. Most cities in Britain have evidence - less startling perhaps, but still bleak and depressing in the destruction it betokens - of Labour's utter inability to help what it patronisingly calls "our people". You give Labour your poor and your dispossessed, and by golly they stay that way. The lessons are clear. Welfare, as now administered, fails. Regulation fails. High taxation and high spending fail.
Think of what you personally have paid in tax since 1997, and think how little you have had for it. All over Britain, public services are failing because money is being wasted.
Even the most hardened cases of deprivation can be turned round, but the policies Labour has pursued towards the poor since 1997 have, manifestly, failed. So what can the Tories do? Mr Cameron picked up the Duncan Smith line on welfarism in Glasgow 10 days ago, as I noted last week. Last night George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, spoke of the need to reduce the demands on government in order to fix our "broken society". Are they at last getting it? No.
Any suggestions that they might were dispelled by Mr Cameron's dismal performance on the Today programme yesterday, in which he gave a flat "no" to a question about whether, in the light of the economic downturn, it was the right time to abandon his party's foolish promise to match Labour's spending policies. Because Mr Cameron has learned nothing and has forgotten nothing he even trotted out, without a hint of satire, the old claptrap about "sharing the proceeds of growth". This means always spending more public money, even though it is clear we already spend too much. If you can marry this philosophy to Mr Osborne's about reducing demands on the state, you're a better man than I am.
Then, talking to the CBI, Mr Cameron made his most economically ignorant observation yet, about making it easier for bad businesses to avoid liquidation. He really doesn't get it. The late Prof Hayek wasn't being a tease when he said that bankruptcies were good because they drove inefficiencies out of the economy. He meant it, and he was right. Mr Cameron takes us back to Heatho-Wilsonian socialism, propping up lame ducks and wasting valuable resources that ought to be put to more productive use.
Some of you get cross with me for being negative about Mr Cameron, but this is an lesson in why he isn't up to it. All around us is the monument to Labour's profligacy, its penal taxation and its addiction to welfarism. Mr Cameron holds out hope of a fourth New Labour term, only with himself as Prime Minister, continuing Labour's gluttonous public spending, coddling failed businesses and maintaining a massive state apparatus. Isn't Glasgow East proof enough of just how utterly poisonous that sort of thing is? Or does he seriously want us to have a lot more?
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Communist Loser: Eric Hobsbawm, revisionist
BOOK REVIEW of "On Empire: America, War and Global Supremacy", by Eric Hobsbawm. It may be of interest to note that Hobsbawn was born "Hobsbaum". He is originally from Germany and is one of the large legion of Jewish leftists. He has said that he would well have been a Nazi if he had not been Jewish. Despite his vicious loyalties he is still much respected in British intellectual circles
Yes, Eric Hobsbawm is still at it. The University of London professor, it should be remembered and endlessly repeated, was an early member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and perhaps the most prominent scholarly defender of the Soviet Union in the West. He remained a Party member even after the 1956 invasion of Hungary, when most of his colleagues quit in disgust, and stayed until the very end of the twilight struggle, when, rather than quit, he merely let his membership lapse. Asked by a television host if "the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified" to establish a communist utopia, he unhesitatingly responded: "Yes." He remains an "unrepentant communist" to this day.
While the fall of the Soviet Union may have chastened Hobsbawm about the practicality of communism, it has not tempered his disgust for the United States. Now 91 years old, he has recently compiled four brief essays about America and "imperialism" into a slim volume. Hobsbawm predicates his critique on "the strength and indestructibility of my own political convictions"-but an argument presented nearly 20 years after the end of the Cold War, by a man too stubborn to own up to the fatal contradictions of Marxism and his own role in justifying them, is bound to have many problems of its own.
Hobsbawm's vituperation at American "empire," "supremacy," and "hegemony" characterizes this angry little book. In the preface, he notes that his lectures were written during a period "dominated by the decision of the U.S. government in 2001 to assert a single-handed world hegemony, denouncing hitherto accepted international conventions, reserving its right to launch wars of aggression or other military operations whenever it wanted to, and actually doing so." Elsewhere he attacks American global hegemony as exceptionally malign and historically unique. September 11 produced a national trauma that "enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy"; these maniacs have carried out a "megalomaniac American policy," he claims. Hobsbawm does not appear to have marked the irony of such a passage's being written by an apologist for the Soviet Union.
Hobsbawm goes on to argue that the nostrums of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia "were formally denounced by President Bush in 2002, namely that, in principle, sovereign states, acting officially, respected one another's borders and kept out of one another's internal affairs." It boggles the mind that a renowned international historian could maintain that the past 400 years of human history were marked by the existence of a widely agreed upon, not to mention respected, system of nonintervention in sovereign states' internal affairs that America somehow destroyed at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It's even more remarkable that an unreconstructed Marxist and defender of the Soviet Union could make such an observation-consider the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Brezhnev Doctrine, and Soviet-funded insurgencies from Angola to Nicaragua, to name just a few of international communism's manifold acts of aggression against free peoples.
Hobsbawm's hatred for capitalism is evident in his suspicion of unchallenged American power. "The currently fashionable free-market globalization has brought about a dramatic growth in economic and social inequalities both within states and internationally," he complains. He doesn't much care for the enormous benefits that capitalism has brought mankind in terms of economic productivity and quality of life; rather, it is the persistence of "inequalities" that matter most. Fine, he's a Marxist. But Hobsbawm doesn't let his criticism of capitalism end there. "This surge of inequality, especially in the conditions of extreme economic instability such as those created by the global free market in the 1990s," he explains, "is at the roots of the major social and political tensions of the new century." What about militant Islam, many of whose funders, ideologists, and practitioners are hardly lacking in purchasing power? Amazingly, there is no mention of jihadism in these lectures, a remarkable omission in a book that seeks to explain the twenty-first-century international order. More proof that Marxists really don't understand the importance of religion.
On Empire is not an explicit apologia for the Soviet Union, though it might as well be. Hobsbawm grieves for the loss of the Soviet empire less for the glories that it might have bestowed upon the world than for its ability to check the rapacious United States. After the fall of the great European empires, international communism was the last obstacle to America's present-day "global supremacy," he writes. International competition between the two superpowers "kept at bay both the danger of a global war and the collapse of large parts of the globe into disorder or anarchy." But there was a great deal of "disorder" and "anarchy" during the Cold War, inspired by Soviet meddling in all corners of the globe. And whatever "order" existed at the time came with a price for the peoples living under Soviet rule. Yet that price is one that Hobsbawm, like any good apologist and revisionist, doesn't care to discuss.
Western Cold Warriors should at least appreciate the Soviet Union for the stability that it provided and realize that its disintegration is the major cause of today's "world disorder," Hobsbawm argues. For instance, he notes the dramatic increase in the "number of independent states" in the world but laments that "a number-probably a growing number-of these political entities appear incapable of carrying on the essential functions of territorial states or are threatened with disintegration by secessionist movements." This is true, but it's hardly a reason to bemoan the end of Soviet imperialism. It should not come as a surprise that Hobsbawm opposed NATO intervention to prevent the wholesale slaughter of innocents by Slobodan Milosevic in the postcommunist Balkans. In this book, he describes that crisis not as an attempted ethnic cleansing on the part of a racist, expansionist thug, but as a "rebellion against Serbia of an extremist minority group among Albanian nationalists in Kosovo." The Gulf War, presumably, was nothing more than an insurgency against Iraq among fringe Shiites, Kurds, and Kuwaitis.
The last lecture in the book, entitled "Why America's Hegemony Differs from Britain's Empire," seeks not only to distinguish between the British Empire and the alleged American one, but also to show why the latter is demonstrably worse. What makes our global hegemony so bad is that "unlike Britain and all other European states, America never saw itself as one entity in an international system of rival political powers." Hobsbawm asserts that "Britain certainly had a strong conviction of its superiority to other societies, but absolutely no messianic belief in, or particular desire for, the conversion of other peoples to the British ways of government." American democracy promotion abroad-which, predictably, Hobsbawm sneers at-is worse than British imperialism, because our latter-day raping and pillaging of the world makes a pretense of goodwill whereas the British were, at least, less sentimental about their intentions. But this isn't accurate, either; the British may not have wanted to "convert" Kenyans or Indians to parliamentary democracy, but they certainly had altruistic justifications for their foreign exploits.
Like all totalitarians, Hobsbawm abuses language. For reasons that go unexplained, "peace" and "order" never existed within the British or American "empires," yet somehow they flourished within the Soviet realm. Hobsbawm adds obligatory scare quotes to the words "tyranny" and "freedom." He concedes that American military bases abroad exist at the behest of their host governments-unlike British bases during the Empire's heyday-yet he doesn't seem to understand how this consensual relationship might discredit use of the word "empire" in describing America's global posture. And if America is an "empire," then what does that make China, with its economic exploitation of Africa and suborning of the mass murder of Sudanese, Zimbabweans, and Burmese? Or Russia, which seeks once again to dominate Eastern Europe?
Hobsbawm is no doubt a prodigious and prolific writer. But after reading his latest effort, I'm reminded of something that David Pryce-Jones observed in a review of Hobsbawm's 2003 memoir, Interesting Times: "Lifelong devotion to Communism destroyed him as a thinker or interpreter of events."
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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19 July, 2008
The Declining Reputation Of Affirmative Action
Post below recycled from Discriminations. See the original for links
Missouri, you will recall, is the state where obstructionism by the Democratic Secretary of State and Attorney General, later declared illegal, and thuggish intimidation of petition signers succeeded in keeping the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative off the ballot this year.
It is easy to understand why supporters of racial preferences were so afraid to give citizens the opportunity to enshrine the "without regard" principle of colorblind equality into their state constitution. Racial preferences are so unpopular that there is no doubt about how citizens would vote, if allowed to by their Democratic office-holders.
Indeed, as I have commented before, racial preferences are so unpopular thats the term "affirmative action," usually thought to be more appealing (because it obscures the actual nature of preference policies) is itself rapidly coming into disrepute. As I noted (here) last month: The Kansas City, Kansas, Community College (KCKCC) is launching a new program to hire minorities, but for some reason it is reluctant to call this program "affirmative action."Kansas City Kansas Community College announced this week they would actively seek qualified minorities to fill open positions at the college.... However, college staff stopped short of referring to the plan as "affirmative action." "We can only hire individuals for these jobs if vacancies are available," said Leota Marks, dean of human resources at the college. "We are not setting quotas and we're not planning to hire someone who is qualified just because they are a minority or female. But we know we have to take some affirmative steps and develop a diversified workforce."Dean Marks, it seems, defines "affirmative action" as a program that sets quotas to hire people "just because they are a minority or female" for openings that do not exist. And people wonder why it's unpopular....
Lest you think the above view of affirmative action (by someone who both practices and supports it) is unique, note than now another official at another Missouri college has taken great pains to deny that his affirmative action policies are ... affirmative action policies. In doing so he once again unwittingly reveals the growing perception of what "affirmative action" entails. Lincoln Scott, Assistant to the President for Diversity and Equal Opportunity at Southeast Missouri State University, has been in charge of recruiting more minority faculty.At conferences and through existing faculty, Scott identified people who would be good fits. He spent hours on the phone. Eventually the university paid to fly in five people. They were shown the community and introduced to faculty members. "I don't want to use the expression `wine and dine,' but I gave them a good time," Scott said. The participants were encouraged to apply. Four out of five were hired....Scott thus lets slip that an "affirmative action position" is one where no real vacancy exists; it is created in order to allow the hiring of a minority. Another reason Southeast Missouri's new faculty were not "affirmative action" hires is that they were all "qualified." That says volumes about how "affirmative action" is now understood, even by its supporters.
Scott is quick to point out the none of the filled faculty positions were affirmative action positions. "We had jobs, we needed them filled, and we hired qualified people," he said.
When talk is not cheap
At the end of the week, Saeed Jalili, Iran's nuclear negotiator, is scheduled to arrive in Geneva for yet another round of talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. It is unclear what the two have to discuss.
On July 4, the Iranians sent their written response to the West's latest offer to appease them. In and of itself, the offer, made by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany and communicated to Iran by Solana, constituted a major achievement for the Iranians. It promised civilian nuclear power plants, economic assistance, new airplanes, agricultural assistance, hi-tech transfers and a freeze on the expansion of economic sanctions against the nuclear-weapons-seeking mullocracy. In exchange for all of that, the Iranians weren't even required to end their uranium enrichment activities. To get the ball of concessions rolling, all the Iranians needed to do was promise not to expand their current enrichment activities.
If Iran were ever even remotely interested in reaching a deal with the international community, this was the deal it would have taken. For the unspoken subtext of the agreement was that the international community is willing to accept a nuclear armed Iran in exchange for the mere appearance of Iranian willingness to bow to international pressure. As David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, explained to Newsweek last week, at their current, known level of uranium enrichment the Iranians are producing 1.2 kg. of enriched uranium a day. And at this enrichment level, they will be able to produce a nuclear bomb by next year. So the international community's willingness to accept continued Iranian uranium enrichment at current levels is a clear signal of the international community's willingness to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.
And yet, that offer still wasn't good enough for the Iranians. Their written response didn't even discuss the issue of uranium enrichment. They just asked for more concessions in exchange for nothing. And now they believe that their "counterproposal" should form the basis of this week's round of discussions.
As Iran submitted its response to the offer, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dispatched his foreign policy adviser Ali Akbar Velayati to the media to discuss Iran's interest in accepting the West's offer. The Western media and some EU officials were so thrilled by the gesture that the immediate coverage of Iran's response lent the impression that Iran had in fact accepted the offer.
IT WAS only two days later, after those same officials sat down and read what the Iranians wrote that they realized that they had been tricked. And just to be sure that there was no residual optimism, senior Iranian leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Foreign Minister Manoushehr Mottaki stated clearly that they would never accept any deal that places limitations on their uranium enrichment.
After verbally snuffing out all hopes for an agreement, Iran proceeded to show off its military prowess by testing ballistic missiles last week and augmenting those tests with verbal threats to destroy Israel and attack all US bases in the Middle East.
And still despite all of this, Solana looks forward to his meetings this Saturday with Jalili with hope for an accommodation. After Iran rejected a deal that effectively offered it acceptance as a nuclear-armed state, he still believes that the best way to deal with Iran's clear intention to acquire and use nuclear weapons is to offer it membership in the World Trade Organization.
Solana's unshakeable faith that Iran can be appeased is to be expected. After all, Solana was on the first flight to Teheran to begin negotiating with the mullahs the minute that Iran's nuclear program was exposed five years ago. And he's been running the talks ever since - first for France, Germany and Britain, and then starting last May, for the US as well. Solana cannot acknowledge that the talks have failed. He is too personally invested in them to admit that Iran has been using him as the diplomatic fig leaf behind which it has pushed forward with its nuclear bomb program.
SOLANA IS a perfect example of why the oft repeated policy mantra "there's never any harm in talking" is incorrect. The basic idea behind that assertion is that negotiations can never cause damage, they can only do good - by resolving a conflict without being forced to resort to force. But they can and often do cause tremendous harm - and to the wrong side.
If Europe's initial justification for negotiating with Iran was that it wished to convince Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, over time that justification gave way to a more basic justification - to deny that the talks had failed. That is, after it became clear that the talks would not succeed in engendering a change in Iran's behavior, the parties involved changed their focus from Iran to themselves. The talks were about them. And if the talks failed, it wasn't because Iran refused to listen to reason. It was because the West hadn't given it a good enough offer. So just by engaging Iran and its ilk, these Westerners were transformed from Western representatives to the Iranian regime to advocates of the Iranian regime in the West.
As a result it has become nearly impossible to have coherent discussion about the Iranian nuclear program. For when the "experts" are called to tell us how to proceed in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, they instead exhort us to engage at ever higher levels with the Iranians in order to show them our good intentions toward them.
And of course, it isn't only Iran that is benefitting from the West's false belief in the harmlessness of negotiations. Iran's proxies in Syria and Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are also prospering thanks to the West's belief that negotiations can only do good.
THE LATEST display of this Western preference for the pomp of accommodation over the responsibility of confrontation was French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Mediterranean summit in Paris this week. The purpose of the parley, which Sarkozy has been trying to organize since entering office last May, was to project himself as a global leader in international affairs and to project France as an important country in Europe and throughout the world.
Although the summit - like the Barcelona and Madrid summits before it - was officially focused on building economic cooperation among the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea and Europe, its actual purpose was to propel France to the position of peacemaker between Israel and its neighbors, and specifically between Israel and Syria. And to do this, the success or failure of the entire conference was contingent upon Syrian President Bashar Assad's willingness to participate and sit in the same room as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
To bring Syria on board, Sarkozy was compelled to accept the Assad regime as legitimate. And to do this, he needed to ignore the nature of the new Lebanese government, Syria's role in establishing it, Syria's support for terrorism, its feudal relationship with Iran and its role in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and a host of anti-Syrian Lebanese parliamentarians and journalists over the past three years.
Last Friday, just ahead of the Paris summit, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora announced that he had formed his new, Hizbullah-controlled government. Saniora was compelled to abdicate control over Lebanon to Iran's foreign legion as a result of Hizbullah's violent takeover of the country in May. And Hizbullah justified its coup by noting that Saniora's pro-democracy March 14 movement in the Lebanese parliament had failed to elect a new president to replace Emil Lahoud, who completed his term last November. Of course, Saniora only failed to elect a new president because Syria and Hizbullah had murdered so many March 14 movement members of parliament that he no longer had enough votes to elect a candidate without Hizbullah's approval.
After Saniora announced his new Iranian-controlled government, Assad was quick to announce that he would be opening a Syrian embassy in Beirut for the first time ever. Assad's announcement was greeted with glee in the Elysee Palace and throughout the West. It was perceived as Syria's first acknowledgement of Lebanese sovereignty. But this is a false perception.
Syria's announcement was not a sign of moderation by Damascus but a sign of radicalization. Syria has not accepted Lebanon's sovereignty. It has accepted Iranian dominion over Lebanon. And in accepting Iran's control of Lebanon, Assad effectively acknowledged that today Syria is nothing more than Iran's Arab vassal state.
Rather than stand up for Lebanon in its hour of need, Sarkozy joined forces with the Bush administration and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government and pretended that Saniora and his pro-democracy forces are still in charge of the country. He pressured Israel to give Mt. Dov to Iranian-controlled Lebanon in spite of the fact that the territory is both vital to Israel's security and is part of the Golan Heights. And rather than boycott Syria for its role in destroying Lebanon, Sarkozy chose to embrace Assad as a peacemaker.
By doing all of this, Sarkozy argued he would place himself in a position of acting as an honest broker in talks between Israel and Syria. But of course like Solana in his constant struggle to find the right mix of concessions to convince Iran to only enrich small quantities of uranium, so Sarkozy's concessions to Syria served only to embolden Assad still further.
Assad agreed to come to Paris. But he refused to have anything to do with Olmert. And then, once he arrived in Paris, he gave an interview to Al-Jazeera explaining that he wouldn't sign a peace treaty with Israel even if it gives him the entire Golan Heights. As far as he is concerned, Israel has no right to expect him to normalize relations. And of course Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah al-Islam and all the rest of the terror groups living in Damascus are simply "resistance" groups and perfectly legitimate. And by the way, Iran, he assured us, is not developing nuclear bombs to the best of his knowledge.
So in exchange for recognizing the new Iranian-controlled regime in Lebanon and embracing Syria to the bosom of civilized nations, Sarkozy provided Assad with an international bullhorn to oppose everything that Sarkozy claims to be interested in achieving. But now that he's embraced engagement as his chosen strategy for dealing with Syria and Lebanon, he can do nothing but proceed with what he started. And so he committed himself to paying a state visit to Damascus by September.
Neither Sarkozy nor Solana are at all unique. Their associates in Europe, Olmert and his ministers, the State Department and most US political leaders support negotiating with rogue regimes that refuse to agree to anything except the West's need to make more concessions to them. And all of them, at a certain point, have claimed that those negotiations mustn't be endangered by more confrontational policies that might actually have a chance of advancing their national interests.
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CA voters given chance to ban same-sex 'marriage'
CA black robes say proposed constitutional amendment will be on ballot
The state Supreme Court in California is allowing voters this November to consider a plan to define marriage as one man and one woman, a move that could overturn that same court's ruling in May that same-sex duos should be recognized as "married."
Jennifer Kerns, communications director for Protect Marriage.com, which collected more than 1.1 million signatures on petitions in support of the vote, confirmed that the high court today simply dismissed the pending challenge to having Proposition 8 on the ballot. "Obviously, the Supreme Court decision delivers a significant blow to our opponents," she told WND. "It does send a very strong message to our opponents that they won't be able to evade democracy which is what they've been trying to do by going to the court system. "They've been trying to keep the ballot issue away from the people of California," she said. "The people of California, back in 2000, by more than a 61 percent majority, upheld the definition of marriage [as one man and one woman]. I believe they will do so again."
Last month Liberty Counsel filed a motion to intervene in the case, asking the court to let the people vote on the marriage amendment. Liberty Counsel represents the Campaign for Children and Families and several individuals. The court action had been brought by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal and several other groups against California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who already had certified the amendment for the ballot.
The amendment states: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," and if it is passed, it will nullify the 4-3 ruling of the California Supreme Court issued on May 15 and would ban same-sex marriage in California.
According to Liberty Counsel, "The same-sex marriage advocates were seeking to remove the amendment from the November ballot, erroneously arguing that 'the rules for revising the California Constitution were not properly followed.' Their brief claimed that an initiative was not enough to put the amendment on the ballot, since it must also be approved by two-thirds of the legislature. The suit also alleged that petitions for the initiative, which were circulated prior to the ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, were misleading because they stated the amendment would not change existing law and would not have a financial impact on the state."
"If the people have an opportunity to participate in the democratic process, they will vote for marriage as one man and one woman," said Mathew D. Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. "Those who push for same-sex marriage are willing to destroy both marriage and democracy to achieve a selfish result. Marriage between a man and a woman is best for our children and for our country."
California voters, long pushed by homosexual activists to legalize same-sex "marriage," in 2000 voted to establish the definition of marriage being between one man and one woman. However, the state Supreme Court opinion in May overturned that vote of the people - which was established only in law, not in the constitution. The actual "ceremonies" between same-sex duos were launched in June. But the new amendment would establish the one-man-one-woman definition in the state constitution, beyond the reach of activist judges.
Staver told WND earlier those who opposed the issue being presented to the people were out of line. "They're suggesting the Supreme Court can rewrite the entire institution of marriage, but people can't amend the Constitution to go back to its historical definition," Staver said. "It's absolutely ridiculous to argue that courts can turn society upside down in 30 days, but the people have no right to define it."
Ron Prentice, chairman of the ProtectMarriage.com Executive Committee, previously told WND, "The people's overwhelming support to protect the longstanding meaning of marriage as between a man and a woman has been staggering. The California Marriage Amendment will allow the people of California, not politicians or judges, to reaffirm the definition of marriage by placing it in the Constitution."
Of 28 states where such an amendment has been considered, voters in 27 states - all but Arizona - have passed the amendment. A Los Angeles Times poll recently reported 54 percent of Californians polled supported the amendment, while 35 percent opposed it. A simple majority of the vote is needed to add Proposition 8 to the California Constitution.
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Western society's war within is well advanced in Britain
It may begin with a chuckle, but it could easily end in tears. At least, if we are not careful. One may be tempted to scoff at the demand to legalise polygamy made recently by Khalil Chami of Sydney's Islamic Welfare Centre. But with the recent announcement by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams that the adoption of sharia law in Britain seems unavoidable, the joke may turn out to be on us.
Britain provides an instructive lesson on the interaction between increasingly radicalised sections of the Muslim diaspora community and its Western host society. From Dundee to Dover, traditional British values, already weakened to the point of collapse by a decades-long elite infatuation with mushy multiculturalism and cultural relativism, cannot provide resistance against the growing tide of extreme demands by radical self-styled community spokesmen.
The same way that the claim of racism has been used to shut down any debate on cultural identity, immigration and social cohesion, so is Islamophobia increasingly used to silence dissent. To merely raise certain issues is to give offence, and offending sensibilities is a hanging offence in our postmodern times.
While radicals agitate, a politically correct establishment, at pains to prove how enlightened and tolerant it is, even if it means tolerating the intolerance of others, usually stands on the sidelines, if not actively cheering on another challenge to the ostensibly oppressive, hegemonic Western culture and polity.
In January last year, Britain's Channel 4 television broadcast a documentary on jihadi incitement in mosques throughout England. The material revealed by this undercover investigative report was quite incendiary in nature. One Saudi-trained imam called for British Muslims to "dismantle democracy" by "living as a state within a state" until they are "strong enough to take it over". Another Islamic radical praised the Taliban for killing British soldiers and argued that women who declined to wear the burka should be beaten into submission.
After the program was aired, British authorities wasted no time springing into action. The West Midlands Police lodged criminal charges, not against the extremist imams but against the TV network. Responding to a complaint by the Muslim Association of Britain, the police accused Channel 4 of inciting racial hatred by means of an ostensibly distorted documentary that demonised Islam. When the Crown Prosecution Service ultimately declined to pursue the matter, police referred the complaint to the British government broadcast oversight agency, OFCOM.
Earlier this year, an officer from the Wiltshire Police ordered a motorist to remove England's flag of St George from his automobile because it was "racist towards immigrants".
Stand-up comedian Ben Elton recently asserted that fear of "provoking the radical elements of Islam" caused the BBC to censor jokes about Muslim clerics. "There's no doubt about it," Elton said, "the BBC will let vicar gags pass but they would not let imam gags pass."
This comes on the heels of a legion of other examples of often pre-emptive surrenders to yet unvoiced radical demands, such as some British banks withdrawing toy piggy banks or public institutions turning Christmas into an amorphous Winter Festival, all for the fear of offending Muslim sensibilities.
All this is rather ironic, since under the twin dogmas of multiculturalism and cultural relativism, all cultures and beliefs are meant to be equal. Like George Orwell's animals, however, some seem to be more equal than others. Commitment to cultural diversity all too often seems to disguise contempt for the dominant national culture that historically bound the society. No wonder such large sections of the British establishment don't offer any resistance to the claims of fundamentalist radicals.
The case against Channel 4 was ultimately dismissed and the broadcaster won a $200,000 civil judgment against the West Midlands Police. But even if sanity prevailed after much time and expense, the totalitarian echoes of this affair clearly have a chilling effect on freedom of expression. While a TV network has the requisite resources to wage a vigorous legal defence, less well-heeled victims of the thought police would be in real strife.
All this is worrying to the silent majority of Muslims who are not interested in political agitation but simply want to rear their families in peace, freedom and prosperity, so often lacking in countries where they or their ancestors have come from. It's hard to blame the moderates within the Muslim community for not speaking out more against the extremists when they see the establishment and the authorities so often and so easily buckling to radicals.
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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18 July, 2008
Christian doctrine offensive to Muslims, says Archbishop of Canterbury
Key elements of Christian doctrine are offensive to Muslims, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said in a letter to Islamic scholars. Dr Rowan Williams also spoke critically of the violent past of both religions and Christianity's abandonment of its peaceful origins. His comments came in a published letter to Islamic leaders, intended to promote closer dialogue and understanding between the two faiths.
However they come just months after Dr Williams was forced to clarify comments in which he said some parts of Islamic law will "unavoidably" be adopted in Britain. The comments are also made as the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference begins in Canterbury. Up to a quarter of bishops are boycotting the event, as the Anglican Church faces continuing division over the issues of women bishops and homosexual clergy.
The wide-ranging letter, which covers difficult issues including religious freedom and religiously-inspired violence is in response to a document written last year by Muslim scholars from 43 countries. Discussing differences between the religions, Dr Williams acknowledges that Christian belief in the Trinity is "difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims". The Trinity is the Christian doctrine stating God exists as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and conflicts with Islamic teaching that there is one all-powerful God.
Speaking about the history of the two religions, Dr Williams said they had been too often confused with Empire and control. He said: "Despite Jesus' words in John's gospel, Christianity has been promoted at the point of the sword and legally supported by extreme sanctions; despite the Qur'anic axiom, Islam has been supported in the same way, with extreme penalties for abandoning it, and civil disabilities for those outside the faith. "There is no religious tradition whose history is exempt from such temptation and such failure." He goes on: "What we need as a vision for our dialogue is to break the current cycles of violence, to show the world that faith and faith alone can truly ground a commitment to peace which definitively abandons the tempting but lethal cycle of retaliation in which we simply imitate each other's violence."
The 17-page letter, called A Common Word for the Common Good, is in response to a letter from Muslim leaders written last September. That letter, A Common Word Between Us and You, was signed by 138 Muslim scholars to declare the common ground between the two religions.
Dr Williams described the Muslim document as hospitable and friendly and added: "Your letter could hardly be more timely, given the growing awareness that peace throughout the world is deeply entwined with the ability of all people of faith everywhere to live in peace, justice, mutual respect and love." His own dense and meticulous letter did not mention sharia Islamic law at all. He received widespread criticism from politicians and other clergy for his comments in February and later told the General Synod he took responsibility for his "unclarity" and "misleading" choice of words.
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Self defence now legally permitted in Britain
Home owners and "have-a go-heroes" have for the first time been given the legal right to defend themselves against burglars and muggers free from fear of prosecution. They will be able to use force against criminals who break into their homes or attack them in the street without worrying that "heat of the moment" misjudgements could see them brought before the courts.
Under new laws police and prosecutors will have to assess a person's actions based on the person's situation "as they saw it at the time" even if in hindsight it could be seen as unreasonable. For example, homeowners would be able stab or shoot a burglar if confronted or tackle them and use force to detain them until police arrive. Muggers could be legally punched and beaten in the street or have their own weapons used against them. However, attacking a fleeing criminal with a weapon is not permitted nor is lying in wait to ambush them.
The new laws follow a growing public campaign for people to be given the right to defend themselves and their own homes in the wake of a number of high profile cases. In 2000, Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer, was sent to prison for manslaughter for shooting an intruder in his home. Earlier this year, Tony Singh, a shopkeeper, found himself facing a murder charge after he defended himself against an armed robber who tried to steal his takings. During the struggle the robber received a single fatal stab wound to the heart with his own knife. The Crown Prosecution Service eventually decided Mr Singh should not be charged.
Until now people have had to prove in court that they acted in self defence but the changes mean police and the Crown Prosecution Service will decide on cases before this stage. Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, said that people would be protected legally if they defend themselves "instinctively"; they fear for their own safety or that of others; and the level of force used is not excessive or disproportionate. He added the changes in law were designed to ensure the criminal justice system was weighted in favour of the victim.
Mr Straw - and other Labour ministers - have previously repeatedly blocked attempts by opposition MPs to give greater protection to householders. In 2004 Tony Blair promised to review the existing legislation after he admitted there was "genuine public concern" about the issue. But his pledge was dropped weeks later after the then Home Secretary Charles Clarke concluded that the current law was "sound". Two Private Member's Bills on the issue were tabled by the Tories around the time of the 2005 general election, but both were sunk by the Government. In 2004, a Tory Bill designed to give the public the right to forcibly tackle burglars was also rejected.
The new self defence law, which came into force yesterday, is contained in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 and was announced by Mr Straw last September. He is understood to have decided new laws were necessary after he was involved in four "have-a go'' incidents, which included chasing and restraining muggers near his south London home. Opposition leaders said it offered nothing new and was merely the latest policy designed to appeal to core Tory voters.
In practice, householders are seldom prosecuted if they harm or even kill an intruder but the Act will give them greater legal protection. Nick Herbert, the Shadow Justice Secretary, said: "This is a typical Labour con - it will give no greater protection to householders confronted by burglars because it's nothing more than a re-statement of the existing case law."
Mr Straw said: "The justice system must not only work on the side of people who do the right thing as good citizens, but also be seen to work on their side. "The Government strongly supports the right of law abiding people to defend themselves, their families and their property with reasonable force. This law will help to make sure that that right is upheld and that the criminal justice system is firmly weighted in favour of the victim.
"Dealing with crime is not just the responsibility of the police, courts and prisons; it's the responsibility of all of us. Communities with the lowest crime and the greatest safety are the ones with the most active citizens with a greater sense of shared values, inspired by a sense of belonging and duty to others, who are empowered by the state and are also supported by it - in other words, making a reality of justice. "These changes in the law will make clear - victims of crime, and those who intervene to prevent crime, should be treated with respect by the justice system. We do not want to encourage vigilantism, but there can be no justice in a system which makes the victim the criminal."
It came as it emerged that homeowners could have to wait up to three days after reporting a crime to see a police officer, according to a leaked draft of the Policing Green Paper. It sets out new national standards for local policing for all 43 forces cross England and Wales. Callers to the police will be given set times within which officers will attend an incident. The paper says that this will be "within three hours it if requires policing intervention or three days if there is less immediate need for a police presence." However, the Home Office would not comment on the plans.
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Depressing Poll (And Pollsters) On Racial Divide
Post below recycled from Discriminations . See the original for links
The most recent CBS/New York Times poll on the racial divide in the U.S. (actually, more like a chasm) is depressing, as is the NYT's article about the poll. You'll need to read the article/poll for yourself. They stop just short of portraying a stark racial divide on absolutely everything. Thus, almost surprisingly, no evidence is presented showing a racial disagreement over whether the sun rises in the east. I will leave it to others to analyze the poll's techniques and methodology, with one exception: the question on affirmative action was maddeningly, although not unexpectedly, obfuscatory and slanted:55. In order to make up for past discrimination, do you favor or oppose programs which make special efforts to help minorities get ahead?44% of whites favor this version of "affirmative action"; 48% oppose. 80% of blacks favor; 13% oppose. 73% of Hispanics favor; 21% oppose. In addition to being misleading, and thus producing misleading results, this formulation of the question is quite odd, inasmuch as special treatment of minorities "[i]n order to make up for past discrimination" has been regarded as unconstitutional, at least in higher education, ever since Bakke (except in cases where such treatment has been allowed as a remedy for proven discrimination by a specific defendant).
In addition, asking people whether they favor or oppose "programs which make special efforts to help minorities get ahead" is too broad a question to reveal anything useful. Almost everyone would favor at least some "special efforts," and similarly almost everyone would oppose some other "special efforts." Most people, if they thought about it, would need to know some details about the "special efforts" at issue in order to say anything meaningful about whether they favored or opposed them.
Based on other polls, I believe it's clear beyond cavil that changing "special efforts" to "preferential treatment based on their race" would have produced a substantial majority in opposition. On the other hand, if the question concerned support for non-discriminatory "special efforts," the majority in favor would be equally substantial. Good evidence for the above assertion can be found in the answers to the question that immediately followed the one on affirmative action:56. Do you favor or oppose programs that make special efforts to help people get ahead who come from low-income backgrounds, regardless of their gender or ethnicity?Whites favored such policies by 82% to 14%; blacks by 93% to 4%; and Hispanics by 85% to 10%. By using such a mealy-mouthed term as "special efforts" in its question on affirmative action, the CBS/New York Times poll has disguised, whether on purpose or not, the pervasive unpopularity of most of what is actually done under the rubric of "affirmative action," which is providing preferential treatment to some individuals based solely on their race or ethnicity.
No nonsense about Muslim taxicab drivers in Queensland, Australia
Company fires them if they to dogs -- unlike the constipated proceedings in the USA
Some Muslim taxi drivers are refusing to carry blind and disabled passengers with guide dogs - because their religion tells them the animals are "unclean". Brisbane's Yellow Cab Company has been forced to sack drivers over their conduct towards passengers with assistance dogs. Bill Parker, general manager of the firm, said the behaviour would not be tolerated and penalties will be imposed if drivers disobeyed. The company has produced a booklet informing drivers of their duty towards blind and disabled customers with dogs.
Islamic Council of Queensland president Suliman Sabdia said dogs were considered a health risk for Muslims but "to use religion as a reason to refuse blind and disabled passengers is unjustified".
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Wow! Reformation Christianity still lives in Sydney, Australia
It's just sentimentality on my part (although my own background is Protestant fundamentalist, I am an atheist and brought my son up as a Catholic) but I must admit that I still do enjoy smelling a whiff of the old fire and brimstone in the article below by immensely-influential Sydney Anglican clergyman Phillip Jensen. Beliefs such as his have transformed the world
Roman Catholicism is a very diverse thing and what you see in the Philippines is not necessarily what you see in the streets of Sydney. It has a Protestant face in the Protestant world. Recently we've been getting into the Stations of the Cross here in Sydney with World Youth Day in 2008, but not all 14 Stations of the Cross are going to be done, only I think eight of the Stations of the Cross - I can't remember the exact number.
The ones that are going to be done are the ones that are in the Bible, but the extra ones, like Veronica, well they're not in the Bible. They're not going to be done in the streets of Sydney. Now in one sense it is because they haven't got time, space and energy to do all of them, and in one sense it is out of courtesy to Protestants that they choose to leave out the ones that are not in the Bible.
But if Martin Luther came into Sydney and saw Roman Catholicism and its Stations of the Cross, he'd say, "Ah, they've cleaned up their act." So there are certain aspects of Catholicism in the Protestant world which are much more acceptable to where Luther would have been.
But no. Things are actually worse than in Luther's day because since Luther's day the Roman Catholic Church not only calcified itself explicitly against justification by faith alone, or the authority of the ures alone, or salvation by grace alone, etcetera; not only calcified itself against that back at the Council of Trent but since then you've had the Vatican I Council in 1870, which clarified the idea that the Pope can speak infallibly.
A faithful Roman Catholic would say, "Well, they're just saying what we've always believed," but in fact it was not until 1870 that it was ever said that this is really what the belief is. Since then we're not too sure how often the Pope has spoken infallibly but the one occasion on which everyone agrees he did was in the 1950s when he declared that Mary had been bodily assumed from the grave. Well, that's not in the Bible anywhere. And why would she be bodily assumed from the grave? It's all part of the Maryology that has come in. It has also identified the immaculate conception of Mary; that is, that Mary was without sin. Well, that's nowhere in the Bible.
So since the Reformation we've had the infallibility of the Pope, the sinlessness of Mary, the bodily assumption of Mary. These things show you that Roman Catholicism has moved since the Reformation - but it has moved further away from us, not closer to us.
NOW in Vatican II there was an opening up - people were "separated brothers" and things like that - but with all due respect to the genuineness of their attempts to be more ecumenically open - and certainly I'm appreciative of the sense of which we can live in a tolerant acceptance of each other - it was only a year or two ago that the Pope made quite clear that the Anglican Church, Presbyterians, are sects, cults; we are not the true church.
So you can't get salvation through us; you are moved into fairly serious deviation. And so Protestants can be very warm and fuzzy towards Roman Catholicism but it's not actually reciprocal. We are not really seen as God's people in Christ Jesus because the Pope is seen as the vicar of Christ. Now from a Bible-believing point of view, that is an appalling blasphemy because the Holy Spirit is the vicar of Christ.
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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17 July, 2008
"Tension monitoring" i.e. snooping on local communities in Britain
The Hazel Blears the NuLabour former Home Office Minister who introduced so much counter productive bureaucratic red tape and form filling when she used to be in charge of Policing, Crime Reduction and Counter-terrorism, is at it again, now that she is inflicting a new Community Snooping policy onto Local Government.
She has just published a poisonous document entitled: "Guidance for local authorities on community cohesion contingency planning and tension monitoring" This seems to envisage the gathering of political intelligence on local communities, and on "individual troublemakers", not just by the Local Authorities and the Police, but by a whole host of public sector employees turned into Government spies:37. The most effective way to do this is through establishing a multi-agency tension monitoring group, led by an officer/s from the local authority and/or the local police force. This should include key partners from the statutory sector (e.g. housing, community safety, education, fire service, health, probation/youth offending team, community workers, neighbourhood wardens and police community support officers, National Asylum Support Service), and relevant representatives from the voluntary, community and faith sectors.The sort of data which Hazel Blears wants to collect and share :Relevant pieces of intelligence might include:Why does a dispute between two neighbours suddenly constitute "community tension", requiring reporting back to a Central Government Department ?
quantitative data (e.g. police crime statistics and intelligence reports)
qualitative community intelligence from neighbourhood wardens, community workers, casework by local councillors and feedback from local community meetings and organisations
racially or religiously motivated offences or incidents
details of new arrivals, refugees and asylum seekers, and Gypsy and Traveller communities in the local area
gang and turf conflicts
neighbour disputes
What is the definition of "political extremism" ? Anybody who disagrees with the Labour government ? It would be a disaster, of Northern Irish "Troubles" proportions, if the local police force were to be seen to be involved in party political or religious monitoring or discrimination, but that is exactly what they are being drawn into with this scheme. So is every Local Authority now going to waste money setting up its own "media monitoring unit" ?
This whole scheme appears to give the impression that the Labour government only appear to be willing to listen, and then to apply propaganda resources and other "community" investment, once there have been demonstrations, protests and violent incidents - peaceful lobbying and dialogue is ignored.
If you look at the sample "Tension Monitoring Form", it is obvious that such forms, or the central database of such forms, will not have enough detailed information to give a full, true picture of each "incident", but there will be sufficient details to create "guilt by association" and to stereotype a particular area unfairly, and to blacklist any individuals who might be directly or indirectly identifiable.
Note that there is no mechanism for error correction or appeal, and no sanctions against abuse of power by officials, who will be trying to use the exemptions under the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act to keep this all secret from the public.
The Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act are only cited, so as to advise how the rights of citizens might be curtailed through the use of exemptions e.g.59. There are a number of exemptions from disclosure under the FOIA which could be applicable if a local authority wished to consider refusing disclosure. You may wish to take into account the possible damage which disclosure would do by identifying areas at risk of disturbance. If the identity of an area became known sections of the media might publicise this. This could in turn create an expectation of disorder.Despite claiming that "personal data" should, ideally, not be collected, they neglect to mention that "personal data" includes data about a person who can easily be identified via a cross-check on another database or system.54. As far as possible, the data provided under tension monitoring arrangements should not be 'personal data' ie it does not identify individuals and could not be used to identify individuals in conjunction with other information.How can this possibly work in practice ? If there are "reports" of say, "inflammatory preaching" , how difficult is it going to be to associate those reports with known priests or imams at local churches or mosques?
The enemies appear to be, in part , "the media", and Hazel Blears and her minions are actually advising secrecy and coverups, and spin, rather than transparency and media and public friendly openness.
More here
The British nanny state again
Small shops are to be given some protection against competition from out-of-town supermarkets, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, said. She added that this would help independent shops survive the credit crunch. Planning guidance is also to be changed to help prevent "clone towns" from developing with identical shop fronts. In future new shops will have to pass a "diversity" test to ensure that not all high streets look the same.
Under the new guidelines planners will be able to reject applications for large-scale, out-of-town shopping developments if they are likely to have a damaging impact on nearby high streets.
However, rural campaigners and the Conservatives have attacked the plans, saying that they could backfire, and end up damaging town centres.
The Competition Commission has been investigating the effects that powerful supermarket chains such as Tesco are having on towns. The commission found that many areas lacked proper competition between supermarkets, giving consumers a poor deal. It said the change in the planning guidance proposed by Ms Blears would be helpful and suggested a new competition test in the planning system to ensure more choice for consumers.
The Government will formally respond to the commission's recommendations, including the competition test proposal, in the next few weeks. One of Ms Blears' aides said: "Our priority is to ensure we do not see more and more stretches of the nation's high streets turned into bland 'every towns' where every high street has the same shops, the same look, and the same sterile feel. "We plan to give councils more scope to curb 'clone town Britain' and to block large out-of-town developments. We know there are currently tougher times on the high street."
The rule changes would remove the "simplistic" planning test that judged only if a need existed for an out-of-town supermarket. It will be replaced by a general-impact test that assesses the risks and benefits of new businesses on existing small shops and the town centre.
The guidance would require local authorities to promote consumer choice and retail diversity and recognise that the planning system can help to support small shops and the identity of town centres. It also keeps a "sequential test" that requires developers to seek the most central sites first.
However, the Tories and the Campaign to Protect Rural England warned that the loss of the need test could backfire and could further fuel the dramatic decline of greengrocers, butchers, bakers and fishmongers.
Graeme Willis, a CPRE campaigner against supermarkets, said: "These plans could take away the rights of local authorities to resist large supermarkets on the grounds of need. The replacement - a new impact test - could shift power from planners who could say 'no' to developers who could say 'why not?'"
The Conservatives' planning spokeswoman, Jacqui Lait, said: "These changes are being driven by Gordon Brown and will ultimately hit small retailers and worsen the problem of 'ghost town Britain'. A surge in out-of-town development will not be environmentally sustainable and will hinder urban regeneration."
Speaking at the annual convention of the Royal Town Planning Institute, Ms Blears said: "Town centres are the hearts of our communities. I want to see our town centres and independent shops busy and thriving. "I believe that the strengthened rules will guide future town centre development by giving councils the tools to attract investment, and protect and promote their high streets."
In relation to the debate over proposed "eco-towns", Ms Blears has been warned by MPs on the Communities Select Committee that it would be an "act of folly" not to spend some money on investigating the mistakes made with post-war new towns in the past.
Squeezed out by the big boys
Since it first opened its doors in 1946, residents of Withernsea, in East Riding of Yorkshire, bought most of their groceries from Proudfoot, the family-owned supermarket in the centre of town. As the "big four" supermarkets expanded their grip upon Britain's towns more and more independent shops went under but trade at Proudfoot remained brisk.
Then in 2004 Tesco came to Withernsea. Its first move was to send more than 6,000 residents vouchers offering an $16 discount for every $40 spent in the local Tesco store. Proudfoot responded with its own discounts but could not match Tesco. Sales at Proudfoot in the year following Tesco's arrival in town fell by 35 per cent.
The Proudfoot family were so outraged by what they believed was Tesco's "predatory pricing" policies that they tried to take the company to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). Ian Proudfoot, who, with his brother Mark, runs the family stores, said at the time: "It is... an attempt to squash competition and dominate the catchment area." The OFT decided that Tesco's actions were not deemed "anti-competitive".
The store struggled on for another two years before finally folding when Aldi offered to buy them out. Mark Proudfoot thought it best to concentrate on the four other Proudfoot stores they still owned across the region. Since April, their stores have been reduced to three after Tesco took over the store in Barton-Upon-Humber.
Source
Imaginary Courage
On business trip to Europe, while sharing a drink with a co-worker in the lobby of our Vienna Hotel the conversation was disrupted by a steadily rising thump of bass notes from the street outside. A minute or two later we could hardly hear each other over the staccato techno-beat and decided to investigate. Lo and behold we emerged outside to find the Vienna's first annual "March Against Racism and Discrimination."
Parading past on the historic RingStrasse were an assortment of unshaven grubby men, and their liberally pierced and tattooed ladies, stretching back as far as the eye could see. Huge vans filled with sound equipment pumped a deafening concoction of manic dance beats interspersed with otherworldly screeches and wails.
Blazoned across the front of these traveling discotechs were signs reading; "Say No to Fascism!; No Racism/No Discrimination!; with an occasional anarchy symbol tossed in for good measure. The protesters marched, enveloped in this sonic tidal wave, filled with self-congratulation for the righteous stand that they had taken racism in Vienna.
Meanwhile back in the lobby, Middle Eastern men, comfortably attired for the summer weather in shorts and tee shirts, stood next to their wives dressed in full length, jet-black burqas. Still an unusual site in America, women in this attire are relatively commonplace in many European capitals. I'm sure these enlightened fighters of discrimination marched past several of these ladies who silently watched them through the narrow slit in their garment.
And what did they think -- if they bothered at all? Probably something about tolerance and diversity, a rainbow of cultures, etc., etc. The idea that this subjugating half the human race to cover their entire body so that their connection to the world is reduced to dimensions of a mail slot somehow didn't register as "discrimination" in their minds.
Standing up to Islam, or more precisely the strain of Islam that traffics in burqas, honor killings, and compulsory marriage of teenagers, is a messy fight. It's a fight where the opponent sometimes swings back, occasionally with deadly accuracy. No, better to combat battles like segregation and apartheid; injustices like making black musicians stay in a different hotel than their white bandleader; or disgraceful bans on inter-racial marriage.
Except -- and here's the bitter pill for all my leftist friends to swallow -- those fights have ended. Sorry you were too young at the time. I know the movies and documentaries make it all look pretty exciting, but it's over.
Of course there are groups in the world that still segregate and discriminate on the basis of gender, religion and nationality. They say things like, "Israel is a one bomb state", or "Behead those who defame the prophet!" They terrorize Jewish students at public schools in Paris, they throw deadly riots on the basis of satirical cartoons, they even go so far as to summarily execute innocent people and publicize the event on the Internet.
How's that for an enemy of tolerance? How's that for a fight worth fighting? How's that for a stand that takes some guts and moral courage? But in the end these questions are drowned out in a wall of dance music and the good feeling that comes from taking an irrelevant stand against something that virtually everyone already condemns.
In reality, what the Left defines as discrimination is largely extinct and what constitutes real discrimination today is - thanks to their morally relative worldview - is off limits to even discuss. Meanwhile, back on the sidewalks of Vienna, ladies in burqas walk obediently behind their husbands, sweating in the warm summer sun, thankful for the fact that everyone is so "tolerant" of their unique cultural heritage.
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The new Jews, and how we must defend them
We hear increasingly that Muslims are "the new Jews." Muslims are not "the new Jews." In Western Europe all of the non-Muslims, both the indigenes and other non-Muslim immigrants, are "the new Jews," -- though it must also be added that for the moment it is especially Jews in Western Europe who are "the new Jews."
For the most powerful current carriers of antisemitism in Europe are Muslims. 50% of the antisemitic attacks in Western Europe have been attributed to Muslims, who make up less than 5% of the population. And of course Arabs have many times shown pro-Nazi sentiments -- from Rashid Ali in Iraq, who staged a pro-Nazi coup, to Anwar Sadat, who was jailed by the British for his pro-Nazi plotting (while Nasser's brother-in-law distinguished himself after the war by publishing an Arabic edition of Mein Kampf), to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who met with Hitler, expressed his enthusiasm for the Endloesung and, what's more, helped raise an S.S. brigade of Bosnian Muslims.
Muslims have been allowed to settle in every country of Western Europe, because of the ignorance, negligence, and simple-minded belief of the political and media elites that "everyone is essentially the same and wants the same thing." The people pay first for that madness; the elites will pay later on. Those Muslims do not accept the legal and political institutions of the countries to which they come, although those countries are far more advanced and better-run, in every respect, than the Muslim lands they come from -- lands whose failures, political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual, are a direct result of Islam itself. No, they come, essentially fleeing that Muslim disarray and misrule. But unlike those who fled the Nazis, or the Communists, they are not grateful. And what's more, they bring with them, undeclared, in their mental baggage, the very thing that was the main cause of the failures of their own societies, with their despotisms, and their inshallah-fatalism, and their encouragement of mistreatment of women and all non-Muslims, and everything else that makes Islam, in practice, what it is, and what we Infidels, though we may not quite understand the relationship of Islam to the behavior and attitudes of Muslims, recognize as the hideous mess that it all is.
In Great Britain, as in every other country of Western Europe, it is the Muslim immigrants alone -- not any others -- who pose a problem that is permanent, that will not go away, no matter how much tender solicitousness is shown them, no matter how much money is thrown their way, or how much bending-over-backwards to accommodate the most outrageous demands, or if not to accommodate them, at least not to treat them openly as outrageous, when everywhere those demands are made, and keep being made. They range from special hours at public pools so that men and women may not be together, or that even non-Muslim men may not contaminate a pool when Muslim men are swimming, to demands for prayer-rooms at airports, at taxi stands, in schools, at workplaces. They include demands for special treatment, that is, for Muslim workers (time off for prayers, or not being required to touch certain products, or not having to do this, or do that), and Muslim students.
They include attempts, successful in some places, to rewrite textbooks so that the history of Islam is not merely sanitized, but turned into an appealing and glorious tale, while the history of Christianity becomes one of monstrously exaggerating, and misstating, the history of the limited-in-time-and-space-and-goals Crusades. And when it comes to Jews, in ignoring or limiting the study of what has come, a bit too glibly I'm afraid, to be called "the Holocaust." Muslim students in France have refused to study this subject, just as they refuse to study the history of France itself, claiming it is of no importance to them -- mere Jahiliyya.
The point out these claims -- you can supply your own list, an ever-growing list -- is that even where the authorities sometimes come to their senses and deny those Muslim demands, the demands will never end, because Islam and non-Islam are not compatible in the Muslim view. The ideal of Shari'a flatly contradicts not only the American Constitution, but all of the major principles and achievements of advanced Western democracies, including the rights of individuals to free speech and freedom of conscience.
Look at Muslim attempts to limit any critical discussion or comments on Islam. Several translators of Salman Rushdie were attacked; at least one was killed. Theo van Gogh was killed. A member of the Dutch Parliament, Geert Wilders, and an Italian journalist, Magdi Allam, and the celebrated apostates Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan, are all living with Muslim death threats, threats that require them to change their lives, and for some of them to live in permanent hiding under permanent armed guard. The entire population of Denmark was threatened with death if the government of that country did not violate the most solemn right, the right to free expression, and punish those who had drawn, and those who had published, some cartoons of Muhammad. The entire Muslim world threatened to boycott Danish goods, as they have Dutch goods because of the appearance of a fifteen-minute film made by Geert Wilders, that save for a single question that he added, consists entirely of excerpts from the Qur'an and the Hadith, with not a word changed for effect, over accompanying videos from news stories showing Muslim behavior that corresponds to, and was no doubt prompted by, those very texts -- and hundreds of others just like them.
It is disgusting for Muslims to claim to have been victimized by this film and the cartoons, when it is they who have made it their mission in the Middle East to destroy Israel, and to kill, or expel, or reduce to the status of permanent dhimmis any Jews who remain. It is they who in the countries of Western Europe have been the main carriers and promoters of anti-Semitism. It is they who also have been quick to exploit the pre-existing antisemitism to further their misrepresentation of the Jihad against Israel and Israel's attempts to merely defend itself from a malevolent, inexhaustibly vicious and cruel enemy.
There is no other an immigrant population -- not Hindus, not Chinese Christians or Confucians, not Vietnamese Buddhists, not non-Muslim (or casually syncretistic) black Africans, not Andean Indians, not Siberian Tunguz from the frozen North nor Aborigines from the sun-baked South -- that poses the same problem. It is a problem that cannot be remedied or diminished, as the immigrants who are Believers in Islam are members of the "Umma" to which, they are taught, they must owe their sole loyalty.
Some, a very few, of those who call themselves "Muslims" but merely mean by this that they are not going to openly identify themselves as apostates but reject the ideology of Islam, and have no intention of attempting now or ever to change Infidel institutions, or to be hostile to Infidels, may -- but only "may" (because we never know when awareness of that "identity" may spur an embrace, a return, to what Islam inculcates) -- not represent a threat themselves. Nonetheless, and this is unpleasant to state but true, even those who may be the "moderate" Muslims of the only kind of "moderation" that could conceivably be of value to Infidels -- that is, those who exhibit a real and deep rejection of the tenets of Islam that support Islamic supremacism, and, therefore, support mistreatment of Infidels -- can nonetheless, by their very existence, that is by swelling the ranks of those who, in democratic societies, are assigned to the category of Muslims, may by that fact increase the power of the real Muslims by helping them, those real Muslims, exaggerate their numbers and therefore their ability to make pusillanimous politicians, the kind unwilling to see Islam as the permanent threat that it is to the laws and customs of an advanced society, to art, and to science, and to individual autonomy, but all too willing to bend to the dictates of those who are perceived to vote as a bloc, promote the goals of Islam.
And if Muslims all over the countries of Western Europe are a menace to the Infidels among whom they have settled in a way that no other group of immigrants has been, and do not cease to be a menace in the second or third generations but, rather, become ever-more militant (as has been seen in Germany, in France, in Great Britain), it is also true that Muslims have for decades enjoyed great favor in official circles. See, for example, Exhibit #1 in Great Britain, which is not The Guardian nor papers like it but, rather, the BBC, especially the BBC World Service. The BBC employs a very large group of Arab and Muslim staff members, and of non-Muslims who have, for ideological reasons -- antisemitism or leftist political views, or both -- been willing collaborators in the effort to present the Muslim view of things, above all in the misrepresentation of the Jihad against Israel. This bias had its effect. And elsewhere in the British press, and radio, and television, the apologists for Islam (who ordinarily overlap with the anti-Israel brigade) have been much in evidence, as they have in other countries of Western Europe.
The failure of Israel and of its supporters to recognize this has of course contributed to the steady blackening, over the past few decades, of Israel's image. That has had consequences for Israel, obviously, but has also helped to confuse the understanding of those Infidels who have been steadily misinformed about the Arab and Muslim Jihad against Israel. This has helped it to be accepted as a "nationalist cause" by these soi-disant "Palestinians," rather than as what it not only is, but always has been and always will be: an attempt to deny a non-Muslim people a state of their own, whatever its size, and whatever its inoffensiveness or even repeated demonstrated willingness to aid the economic well-being of its neighbors, as if that would somehow overcome what even successive Israeli governments did not realize cannot be overcome in such a way, not now, and not ever.
Every single country in Western Europe, whether it be ruled by the Common Law (Great Britain) or by Civil Codes, whether it have a long tradition of enshrining easygoing Tolerance as a kind of state religion (The Netherlands, Denmark), or possibly have become so solicitous of human rights because of a keen awareness of a fascist or quasi-fascist past (Germany, Spain, even Italy), has had the same problem with its Muslim population, differing only in intensity and scale, but in nothing else. Muslims who believe in Islam do not and cannot accept the political and legal institutions of non-Muslims. It is not what Islam teaches. It is not what Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, prescribed long ago -- and what he prescribed long ago, 1350 years ago, remains valid for all time and for all places.
Surely the people of Europe, despite their governments, and despite the Esdrujula Explanation -- the timidity and stupidity and rigidity and cupidity of their ruling elites -- have to act on this now, and not later. Either they will preserve their own ways, their own superior ways, their free and skeptical inquiry, their modes of artistic expression, either they will preserve, protect, and defend all of the material and spiritual achievements of their own civilization, against those who have only contempt and even hatred for that civilization (without knowing quite why, but knowing in some cases only that, as "Muslims," they must have such contempt, must act on such hatred), that is, either they will defend the civilizational legacy that they have so far done so little to deserve, or they will not. And if they do, they are going to have to recognize that the main threat is not "qitaal" or open warfare, but the slow and steady stillicide that drop-by-drop of Muslim demands, based on an unopposed and growing Muslim presence, that works away at, eats away at the foundations of Europe....
To sum up, as has been done a hundred times before, with the exact same sentence: "The large-scale presence of Muslims in the countries of Western Europe has led to a situation, for the indigenous Infidels, that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without such a large-scale presence."
Though long, that oft-repeated sentence is meant to be lapidary. But the stone on which it is meant to be inscribed is that which should hang in public places all over Europe, or in the mental equivalent of such public places, so that something effective will at long last be done -- implacably, relentlessly.
There is another sort of stone, however, on which the same lapidary sentence might be written, and then read, in quite another spirit, a spirit of triumphalism, by not Infidels but by Muslims, at some future date. For as a famous writer once began a novel, there is "plenty of space on a gravestone, bound in moss" to "contain" -- well, to contain all sorts of things, including that would-be lapidary sentence above.
One hopes that such a sentence would not have to be placed on the tombstone of Western civilization, a civilization that could be undone by the initial indifference and ignorance and negligence of its political and media elites, and then further undone by the failure of the governments and peoples involved to do what they need to do, coute que coute, in order to defend and protect their own civilizational legacy, out of stupidity, or timidity, or cupidity, or rigidity, or some, or all, of this mnemonically-sdrujula'ed list. Numbers, "mere numbers," alas, do count. Demography turns out be a very large part of Destiny.
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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16 July, 2008
The penny drops: British equality laws `are now holding women back'
Maternity rights damage chances of hiring and promotion
The radical extension of maternity leave and parents' rights is sabotaging women's careers, according to the head of the new equalities watchdog. Nicola Brewer said that it was an inconvenient truth that giving women a year off work after the birth of each child - soon to be paid throughout - was making employers think twice before offering a job or promotion. The chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission was speaking to The Times on the eve of a speech in which she will call for a significant rethink of family policy.
Ms Brewer said that generous maternity benefits had entrenched the assumption that only mothers brought up children and failed to hasten a social revolution where both parents were equally responsible for caring for their family.
British fathers have the most unequal rights in Europe, entitled to only two weeks of leave compared with 52 for mothers. At the moment, nine months of maternity leave is paid, but this will rise to a year by the end of the current Parliament.
Ms Brewer said that calls to the commission's helpline from women who had lost their jobs after becoming pregnant suggested that they were paying a heavy price for their new rights. She said that her fears deepened earlier this year when the entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar claimed that many employers binned the CVs of women of childbearing age. Business leaders have criticised the new maternity laws, saying that they are a headache for employers and that it is difficult to plan the workforce if parents go part-time. But this is the first time that a criticism has come from an organisation that campaigns on behalf of women.
Ms Brewer said she feared that plans to extend the right to request flexible working hours until children were 16 could hamper women's employment prospects further. Of the one million parents who have made use of flexible hours so far, the overwhelming majority are women. "There has been a sea change on maternity leave and flexible work and we welcome that," she said. "But the effect has been to reinforce some traditional patterns. The Work and Families Act has not freed parents and given them real choice. It is based on assumptions, and some of the terms reinforce the traditional pattern of women as the carers of children." She added: "We have come a long way but after winning all these gains it is worth asking: are we still on the right track? The thing I worry about is that the current legislation and regulations have had the unintended consequence of making women a less attractive prospect to employers."
Although the latest legislation allows for the last six months of maternity leave to be transferred to the father if the mother goes back to work earlier, but that misses the point, she says. "The way it is framed means it is up to the women to transfer the leave to the man. It is not his right," she said. Ms Brewer said that it was not a case of taking away the new rights from mothers but of extending them to fathers. In her speech today she will ask why men should not be entitled to 12 weeks of leave on 90 per cent of their earnings following the birth of a child - the same as women.
She questioned the way in which the Government and opposition parties always tried to make a business case for each piece of family-friendly legislation. "Of course, there is a business case for these changes and many companies are going further," she said, "but this is a social argument as well as an economic one. There may well be a cost [to business], but as a society we are already thinking in terms of wellbeing as well as take-home pay."
Officials at the commission say that they are studying research from Sweden that has found that fathers who take up to two years off work after the birth of a child are 30 per cent less likely to get divorced. A six-month consultation exercise is to be launched today through the online chat rooms Mumsnet and Dad.info.
Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality between women and men, said that she shared the commission's concerns about the effect of legislation on women's careers. "Under EU law employment rights once given cannot be taken away, so there is no point regretting past decisions," she said. "The Government should both better protect pregnant workers and introduce paid parental leave that supports mums and dads to share care."
The commission has in the past been accused of courting controversy. Trevor Phillips, the chairman, said in April that a lack of control over immigration had led to a "cold war" between rival ethnic communities. He also criticised the Archbishop of Canterbury for saying that Sharia should have a role in the legal system.
Source
U.N. scheme to make Christians criminals
Sharia-following Islamic nations demanding anti-'defamation' law
Dozens of nations dominated by Islam are pressing the United Nations to adopt an anti-"defamation" plan that would make Christians criminals under international law, according to a United States organization that has launched a campaign to defend freedom of religion worldwide.
"Around the world, Christians are being increasingly targeted, and even persecuted, for their religious beliefs. Now, one of the largest organizations in the United Nations is pushing to make a bad situation even worse by promoting anti-Christian bigotry," the American Center for Law & Justice said yesterday in announcing its petition drive.
The discrimination is "wrapped in the guise of a U.N. resolution called 'Combating Defamation of Religions,'" the announcement said. "We must put an immediate end to this most recent, dangerous attack on faith that attempts to criminalize Christianity."
The "anti-defamation" plan has been submitted to the U.N. repeatedly since about 1999, starting out as a plan to ban "defamation" of Islam and later changed to refer to "religions," officials said. It is being pushed by the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference nations, which has adopted the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, "which states that all rights are subject to sharia law, and makes sharia law the only source of reference for human rights."
The ACLJ petition, which is to be delivered to the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, already had collected more than 23,000 names in just a brief online existence. The ACLJ's European division, the European Center for Law & Justice, also has launched its work on the issue. It submitted arguments last month to the U.N. in opposition to the proposal to institute sharia-based standards around the globe.
"The position of the ECLJ in regards to the issue of 'defamation of religion' resolutions, as they have been introduced at the U.N. Human Rights Council and General Assembly, is that they are in direct violation of international law concerning the rights to freedom of religion and expression," the organization's brief said.
"The 'defamation of religion' resolutions establish as the primary focus and concern the protection of ideas and religions generally, rather than protecting the rights of individuals to practice their religion, which is the chief purpose of international religious freedom law."
"Furthermore, 'defamation of religion' replaces the existing ive criterion of limitations on speech where there is an intent to incite hatred or violence against religious believers with a subjective criterion that considers whether the religion or its believers feel offended by the speech," the group continued.
Interestingly, in nations following Islam, the present practice is to use such laws to protect Islam and to attack religious minorities with penalties up to and including execution, the brief noted. "What should be most disconcerting to the international community is that laws based on the concept of 'defamation of religion' actually help to create a climate of violence," the argument explained.
For example, just two months ago an Afghanistan court following Islam sentenced to death a 23-year-old apprentice journalist who had downloaded an article from an Iranian website and brought it to his class, the ECLJ said. Other instances include:
Award-winning author Mark Steyn has been summoned to appear before two Canadian Human Rights Commissions of vague allegations of "subject[ing] Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt" for comments in his book, "America Alone," the group said.
In Pakistan, 15 people were accused of blasphemy against Islam during the first four months of 2008, the organization said.
Another Pakistani man sentenced to life in prison for desecrating the Quran was jailed for six years before being acquitted of the charge.
In Saudi Arabia a teacher was sentenced to three years in prison plus 300 lashes "for expressing his views in a classroom."
In the United Kingdom, police announced plans to arrest a blogger for "anti-Muslim" statements.
In the United States, a plaintiff sued his Internet service provider for refusing "to prevent participants in an online chat room from posting or submitting harassing comments that blasphemed and defamed plaintiff's Islamic religion."
The ECLJ said, "The implementation of domestic laws to combat defamation of religion in many OIC countries reveals a selective and arbitrary enforcement toward religious minorities, who are often Christians. Those violations are frequently punishable by the death penalty."
The newest "anti-defamation" plan was submitted in March. It specifically cites a declaration "adopted by the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers" at a meeting in Islamabad "which condemned the growing trend of Islamophobia and systematic discrimination against adherents of Islam."
It also cites the dictates from the OIC meeting in Dakar, "in which the Organization expressed concern at the systematically negative stereotyping of Muslims and Islam and other divine religions." It goes on to cite a wide range of other practices that "target" Islam, but does not mention any other religions, and urges all nations to provide "adequate protection against acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from the defamation of any religion."
According to published reports, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights' 53 members voted to adopt the resolution earlier this year, with opposition from the United States and the European Union. At the time, Cuba's delegate, Rodolfo Reyes Rodriguez, said: "Islam has been the subject of very deep campaign of defamation."
"They're attempting to pass a sinister resolution that is nothing more than blatant religious bigotry," the ACLJ said in its promotion of its petition. "This is very important to understand. This radical proposal would outlaw Christianity . it would make the proclamation of your faith an international crime."
"In his recent dissent on the Supreme Court's ruling on Guantanamo Bay, Justice Scalia said, 'America is at war with radical Islamists.' Never has this rung more true than today. Never have Christians been more targeted for their religious beliefs. And never have we faced a more dangerous threat than the one posed by the OIC," the ACLJ said.
On the Grizzly Groundswell blog, the author described the situation as, "The United Nations: 160 cannibals and 17 civilized people taking a majority vote on what to have for dinner."
The U.S. State Department also has found the proposal unpalatable. "This resolution is incomplete inasmuch as it fails to address the situation of all religions," said the statement from Leonard Leo. "We believe that such inclusive language would have furthered the ive of promoting religious freedom. We also believe that any resolution on this topic must include mention of the need to change educational systems that promote hatred of other religions, as well as the problem of state-sponsored media that negatively targets any one religion."
Source
Foreign Courts Take Aim at America's Free Speech
By ARLEN SPECTER and JOE LIEBERMAN
Our Constitution is one of our greatest assets in the fight against terrorism. A free-flowing marketplace of ideas, protected by the First Amendment, enables the ideals of democracy to defeat the totalitarian vision of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. That free marketplace faces a threat. Individuals with alleged connections to terrorist activity are filing libel suits and winning judgments in foreign courts against American researchers who publish on these matters. These suits intimidate and even silence writers and publishers.
Under American law, a libel plaintiff must prove that defamatory material is false. In England, the burden is reversed. Disputed statements are presumed to be false unless proven otherwise. And the loser in the case must pay the winner's legal fees.
Consequently, English courts have become a popular destination for libel suits against American authors. In 2003, U.S. scholar Rachel Ehrenfeld asserted in her book, "Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It," that Saudi banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz helped fund Osama bin Laden. The book was published in the U.S. by a U.S. company. But 23 copies were bought online by English residents, so English courts permitted the Saudi to file a libel suit there.
Ms. Ehrenfeld did not appear in court, so Mr. Bin Mahfouz won a $250,000 default judgment against her. He has filed or threatened to file at least 30 other suits in England.
Fear of a similar lawsuit forced Random House U.K. in 2004 to cancel publication of "House of Bush, House of Saud," a best seller in the U.S. that was written by an American author. In 2007, the threat of a lawsuit compelled Cambridge University Press to apologize and destroy all available copies of "Alms for Jihad," a book on terrorism funding by American authors. The publisher even sent letters to libraries demanding that they destroy their copies, though some refused to do so.
To counter this lawsuit trend, we have introduced the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008, a Senate companion to a House bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Pete King (R., N.Y.) and co-sponsored by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.). This legislation builds on New York State's "Libel Terrorism Protection Act," signed into law by Gov. David Paterson on May 1.
Our bill bars U.S. courts from enforcing libel judgments issued in foreign courts against U.S. residents, if the speech would not be libelous under American law. The bill also permits American authors and publishers to countersue if the material is protected by the First Amendment. If a jury finds that the foreign suit is part of a scheme to suppress free speech rights, it may award treble damages.
First Amendment scholar Floyd Abrams argues that "the values of free speech and individual reputation are both significant, and it is not surprising that different nations would place different emphasis on each." We agree. But it is not in our interest to permit the balance struck in America to be upset or circumvented by foreign courts. Our legislation would not shield those who recklessly or maliciously print false information. It would ensure that Americans are held to and protected by American standards. No more. No less.
We have seen this type of libel suit before. The 1964 Supreme Court decision in New York Times v. Sullivan established that journalists must be free to report on newsworthy events unless they recklessly or maliciously publish falsehoods. At that time, opponents of civil rights were filing libel suits to silence news organizations that exposed state officials' refusal to enforce federal civil rights laws.
Now we are engaged in another great struggle -- this time against Islamist terror -- and again the enemies of freedom seek to silence free speech. Our legislation will help ensure that they do not succeed.
Source. One can only wish Godspeed to the legislation concerned
There they go again, stifling free speech
Congressman Michael Capuano probably means well - and Big Government enthusiasts always try to sound like they really do - but I've never met the man, so I don't know for sure. What I do know for sure - because the Massachusetts Democrat said so himself - is Capuano thinks the rest of us are too stupid to figure out that a YouTube video of him or one of his esteemed Capitol Hill colleagues is not an endorsement of the commercial products or political candidates being sold in ads nearby on the site.
But don't take my word for it, here's what Capuano said: "Maybe they don't care if an official video appears next to a political advertisement for Barack Obama or John McCain, creating the appearance of an endorsement."
Capuano's "they" was the pack of howling Republicans protesting last week that, as chairman of the Congressional Commission on Mailing Standards, he was trying to turn his panel, which oversees official use of the congressional franking privilege, into an Internet censorship board. It wasn't just GOPers speaking out, as conservative bloggers and non-partisan transparency advocates like the Sunlight Foundation were also up in arms.
The brouhaha was sparked after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked Capuano and his fellow commissioners (two other Democrats and three Republicans) to look into the issue of what congressmen can and cannot post on the Internet in their official capacities. Capuano reported back with proposed new rules (not supported by the three GOPers, by the way) that he said would require :
* "Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;
* "To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House's content guidelines."
Two things are crystal clear regarding Capuano's proposal. First, it all depends on how "official content" is defined and by whom. Second, said official content is barred from all Internet sites except those accepted as "in compliance." And somebody has to decide which sites comply. This has all the earmarks of a classic Washington power grab. Somebody identifies a problem and asks Congress to do something about it. After the problem is "studied closely," new rules are proposed.
But new rules have to be interpreted, so congressional staffers - AKA as legislative bureaucrats - get expanded authority to administer the new rules. Then special interest groups line up to game the new rules for political advantage and executive branch empire builders seek their cut of the action. And so goes another expansion of the dead hand of government regulation.
Since Capuano worries most about apparent commercial and political endorsements, here's a better solution: Remember those "Warning: The FBI will come take you away if you violate our copyright" screens that briefly appear at the beginning of rented movie DVDs?
Instead of a new congressional Internet censorship regimen, how about simply requiring all internet video posting of official content by congressmen to include a 30 second screen warning: "This video is NOT an official endorsement of any product or candidate."
Don't hold your breath waiting for such a simple solution, though, because the default position of most politicians in both political parties is to expand government. It makes them more powerful and important. Oh, they have lots of clichd rationalizations to obscure their expansionistic egos. My favorite is the one that we need more bureaucrats, higher taxes and increased red tape because the world is getting so complex. Does nobody ever wonder if maybe that's because politicians keep making it so?
Reminds me of Ronald Reagan's great question from his first inaugural: "But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"
Source
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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15 July, 2008
New British Knife Rules Include Customer Screening
Post below recycled from Interested Participant . See the original for links
(London, England) Expected today, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will announce new knife control rules in an attempt to reduce the crisis in knife crime throughout the United Kingdom.Ms Smith has written to police chief constables to highlight their powers under the Violent Crime Reduction Act to crack down on licensed premises that could be at the centre of unruly and criminal behaviour. The police are to force pubs and clubs associated with knives or guns to search people on entry, under threat of losing their licences.So, before a person can enjoy a pint and a game of darts, he/she will have to be searched. Business-owners are being forced to frisk their customers for fear of losing their licenses to operate.
Home Secretary Smith expressed shock at the tragedy of knife crime and has vowed to "increase the visibility of sentencing" for knife crimes. However, she rejects the idea of sending knife criminals to jail, saying it's too simple a solution.
I'm perplexed. No, better yet, WTF! It sounds like Jacqui Smith wants to make it more well-known that knife criminals don't go to jail. Does that make a lick of sense to anybody?
Frankly, I believe there are people in Britain who would like to outlaw knives completely, as was done with guns. Unfortunately, there is one seemingly insurmountable hurdle to the banishment of all knives. It's called "the kitchen."
Something Is Ironic In The State of Denmark - Listen Up, America!
Another Independence Day comes and goes, with the usual fireworks, parades and patriotic tunes. Seems to me that we should be the happiest people on earth, given being blessed with living in the greatest nation the world has ever seen. However, a recent study found that Denmark is the happiest nation on earth, and America is 16th. A closer look at the study, the results and the two nations noted is interesting, amusing and revealing, to say the least.
The Study and Results
The study in question, headed up by University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, will be published in the July 2008 issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Going back an average of 17 years in 52 countries and involving 350,000 people, its results surprised scientists who have long believed that relative happiness among societies is stable over time. In fact, 40 of the 52 nations saw a rise in happiness, contradicting what most scientists who study happiness believe.
Inglehart's team speculate that this rise in happiness is tied to those nations' enhanced economic situations; greater democracy; a sharp rise in gender equality and a greater tolerance of ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians in developed societies. Controlling for variables, Inglehart concluded that the happiest societies are those that allow people to choose how to live their lives.
If freedom, democracy and greater tolerance are strong factors in societal happiness, why was America 16th on that happiness survey? Part of the answer may be found in a recent Pew Research Center public opinion poll that found that 81% of Americans believe that their country is on the "wrong track," which is the most negative response in 25 years. Apparently, most Americans believe that this country has lost its way and is headed in the wrong direction.
Now, common sense dictates that if people think we are going in the wrong direction, the correct direction is where we have come from, which is the America that gave us the kind of patriotism, determination, assertive spirit, love of country, courage, integration, and international leadership of the past. Believe it or not, there was a time when the entire world looked to America for leadership, resolve, excellence and a blueprint for success. The America of that time did what was right, took the steps necessary, made the tough decisions and showed assertive resolve like few nations have ever done in history. It welcomed immigrants with friendly arms yet merely expected loyalty, contribution, respect and unselfish participation from them in return which, given the beautiful gift of living here, was a reasonable and generous offer.
What direction has this nation taken in the past decades? It is increasingly handcuffed by political correctness, emasculated by a pathetic need to be loved throughout the world no matter what and tragically hypnotized by a habit of ignoring its own greatness while blaming all of the world's ills on itself.
No wonder most Americans are unhappy. Half of them are dismayed to see their once great nation turned into a sheepish, confused, inconsistent and morally bankrupt free-for-all. The other half, in turn, are vulnerable sheep easily intoxicated by the mainstream media's anti-America poison. Lost in all of this is the simple fact that, despite America's relative "unhappiness," it is still the greatest nation on earth, despite its twisted self-perception.
The Two Nations
I was amused by the finding that Denmark was the happiest nation studied, and that the study then tied the relative happiness of societies to perceived freedom, tolerance and economic prosperity. While Denmark is a relatively successful industrialized nation, it is presently embroiled in a great struggle over immigration. It seems that many Danes feel threatened by a 4.8% immigrant population experiencing somewhere between 65% and 81% unemployment. Many Danes see these immigrants as welfare cheats who care little about the country that has taken them in.
So great is this concern that Denmark has seen some of the strictest immigration legislation in Europe, leading to charges of racism. These charges were not appeased by the infamous cartoons offending Muslims, or by a 60 Minutes report which practically depicted Denmark as a racist and intolerant society. So, you see, my friends, something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark, but it is not racism. It is, simply, the same debate that has swept all industrialized nations. Namely, how do these nations deal with their immigration population in a manner that is compassionate, considerate and welcoming as well as reasonable, fair and protective of the nation itself?
Despite the cries of many in this nation who depict America as an evil monster which eats foreigners for lunch, history tells a different tale of the most welcoming, open and tolerant nation the world has ever seen. Such truth, however, is not popular among those who hate to give America its due and prefer to blame it for everything from world hunger to world pollution. America, they say, is arrogant, selfish, insensitive and intolerant. As usual, fools ignore history to serve their mindless, pathetic purposes. Sadly, the lazy listen to the fools most often because their rhetoric and drivel is most available, requires the least analysis and is served in the brightest plates for consumption.
Conclusion
As we pass yet another birthday for this great nation, we must ask how the great gap between its greatness and its perceived greatness developed. Why do so many so blessed people believe so fervently that they are so unfortunate to live in this great land, despite the evidence to the contrary?
One answer may lie in previous happiness research, which has found that relative happiness is an inherited trait. At one time, Americans inherited a tradition of pride, patriotism, resolve, personal responsibility, loyalty and love of country. Tragically, increasing numbers of Americans are now inheriting a negative, twisted, pessimistic, victimized, insolent, ungrateful, defiant and destructive perception of the place they call home.
Another possible answer may lie in a simple approach to life which is increasingly lost in this society. As God, flag, family and personal responsibility have increasingly been pushed aside in favor of a diluted, rationalized and arrogant insolence; this nation has stumbled from the path that fed its greatness. Like a pompous drunk lost in the woods, it boasts of its ability to play God and play with fire, completely oblivious to the mess it makes along the way.
The greatest irony is that precisely those who wail how wrong this country is are the ones who are leading it off a cliff. America's greatest gift to each of us is the freedom to see our lot as an opportunity or a prison; it is our choice and our path.
Happy Birthday, America. Land of the free, home of the brave and zip code of the ungrateful.
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European windbags
On the day the Colombian military freed Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other long-held hostages, the Italian Parliament passed yet another resolution demanding her release. Europe had long ago adopted this French-Colombian politician as a cause celebre. France had made her an honorary citizen of Paris, passed numerous resolutions and held many vigils.
Unfortunately, karma does not easily cross the Atlantic. Betancourt languished for six years in cruel captivity until freed by a brilliant operation conducted by the Colombian military, intelligence agencies and special forces -- an operation so well executed that the captors were overpowered without a shot being fired.
This in foreign policy establishment circles is called "hard power." In the Bush years, hard power is terribly out of fashion, seen as a mere obsession of cowboys and neocons. Both in Europe and America, the sophisticates worship at the altar of "soft power" -- the use of diplomatic and moral resources to achieve one's ends.
Europe luxuriates in soft power, nowhere more than in l'affaire Betancourt in which Europe's repeated gestures of solidarity hovered somewhere between the fatuous and the destructive. Europe had been pressing the Colombian government to negotiate for the hostages. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez offered to mediate.
Of course, we know from documents captured in a daring Colombian army raid into Ecuador in March -- your standard hard-power operation duly denounced by that perfect repository of soft power, the Organization of American States -- that Chavez had been secretly funding and pulling the strings of the FARC. These negotiations would have been Chavez's opportunity to gain recognition and legitimacy for his terrorist client.
Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, a conservative and close ally of President Bush, went instead for the hard stuff. He has for years. As a result, he has brought to its knees the longest running and once-strongest guerrilla force on the continent by means of "an intense military campaign (that) weakened the FARC, killing seasoned commanders and prompting 1,500 fighters and urban operatives to desert" (Washington Post). In the end, it was that campaign -- and its agent, the Colombian military -- that freed Betancourt.
She was, however, only one of the high-minded West's many causes. Solemn condemnations have been issued from every forum of soft-power fecklessness -- the EU, the U.N., the G-8 foreign ministers -- demanding that Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe stop butchering his opponents and step down. Before that, the cause du jour was Burma, where a vicious dictatorship allowed thousands of cyclone victims to die by denying them independently delivered foreign aid lest it weaken the junta's grip on power.
And then there is Darfur, a perennial for which myriad diplomats and foreign policy experts have devoted uncountable hours at the finest five-star hotels to deplore the genocide and urgently urge relief.
What is done to free these people? Nothing. Everyone knows it will take the hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them. Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy -- Europe specializes in providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about -- the only solution is foreign intervention.
And who's going to intervene? The only country that could is the country that in the last two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its latest endeavor -- the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most barbarous tyranny of all, and its replacement with what is beginning to emerge as the Arab world's first democracy -- and having earned near-universal condemnation for its pains, America has absolutely no appetite for such missions.
And so the innocent languish, as did Betancourt, until some local power, inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets it done -- often with the support of the American military. "Behind the rescue in a jungle clearing stood years of clandestine American work," explained The Washington Post. "It included the deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces ... a vast intelligence-gathering operation ... and training programs for Colombian troops."
Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to God and the Virgin Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France and Colombia and just about everybody else. As of this writing, none to the United States.
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Death-wish values in Oregon
I am on the MAX Red Line light rail car going from downtown Portland to the Airport. Some things socialists do better. Among them are public transportation, recycling, French poetry readings, yoga, coffee, artisan food and arthouse cinema. Would it that the counterscale were not so much more loaded.
We are leaving Zinnlandia, after all - that great land of the Pacific Northwest, rich in good wine, including zinfandel, and other bounties of nature. Howard Zinn and his doppelg,nger, Noam Chomsky, are to the coastal zones of this blessed land what St. Patrick is to the Emerald Isle. And, like Finlandia, Jutlandia and Hollandia, Zinnlandia too has much Northern European DNA. Zinnlandia is in Amerikka - that racist, capitalist land of injustice, sexism, specieism, lookism, theism, militarism and homophobia. As a material and cultural Marxist, and skillful propagandist, Zinn - a master of sieving American history for its worst nuggets - is the perfect avatar for the self-flagellating white inhabitant of this land.
A Zinnlandian I met on this trip, a WASP physician endowed with the best education much money can buy, told me that he does not celebrate July 4th because the Declaration of Independence had been written by a slave owner and signed by other slave owners. He was just as hotly critical of the "racism" of Americans in dealing with the growing Muslim immigrant minority. The conversation unfolded over a bottle of Oregon Vino Pinko, with the likeness of a notorious Cuban mass murderer on the label.
Besides the pervasive lefty obtuseness as to the true nature of Che Guevara, there is one central paradox in this Zinnlandian, as there is in all of them. In the case of the good doctor, he donates his time and money to schools and clinics in Tanzania, where he has visited several times. And Tanzania, particularly Zanzibar, is a living memorial to the horrors of slave trafficking by Moslem Arabs and black Africans -- far larger and crueler than the slave trade that soiled the New World, preceding it by a thousand years, evident still in the 1960s, and ended only due to Western insistence.
So we have here a mind twisted into self-contradicting loops designed to screen out everything good about "us" and everything bad about "the other." This particular dhimmi-in-training has managed not only to block out all the greatness and goodness of the American Founding Fathers, and the merits of the nation that they launched, but also to overlook that his favorite country, Tanzania, exemplifies the horrors he purports to abhor and that, unlike America, it has hardly any countervailing merits.
Behavioral psychology has names for various information perception and analysis biases, but at least fifteen of those would have to be added to encompass the depth and width of the Zinnlandian's - let's not beat around the bush - craziness. Take, among others, the Bias Blind Spot, add some Omission Bias and Selective Perception, leaven with white racial guilt propaganda. Whip that into a mixture of Belief Bias, Selective Memory, Bandwagon Effect, Deformation Professionnelle and Disconfirmation Bias. Pour the mixture into a pie shell made of Neglect of Probability, My Side Bias, Optimism Bias and Positive Outcome Bias, and bake for 30 years in an oven designed specifically by mainstream media and the educational system to make that kind of dough rise. Voila!....
Of the 26 riders in my light rail car, three seem Latino. One, who looks illegal to me, sleeps sprawled over a fat, natural blonde. The other two are more established, judging from their new shaves and clothes and their $150 Timberland boots. This in contrast to the rest of the passengers, all lower middle class whites, half of whom wear flip-flops. Such flimsy footwear on people who will soon be shuffling in long security lines and dragging heavy suitcases through crowded airports bespeaks of thoughtless insouciance. These people cannot imagine a hard heel stepping on their exposed toes, let alone a soft "diversity," voluntarily imported, rising to stomp on their faces, one day.
Starting right here, in this car. "An assault by five teenagers on a North Portland MAX train this week revived worries about mass transit safety since several high-profile incidents last winter," reads the opening paragraph in The Oregonian's news today. The story goes on, "Teenage boys and girls punched, used racial epithets and stole the purse of a 28-year-old Vancouver woman who was taking her first-ever MAX ride early Monday evening. The woman, who is white, had just had a conversation with the teens, who are African American and were harassing another woman".
It's uncharacteristic for the progressive press of this progressive town - just what are they progressing toward? - to disclose the racial identity of violent perps, since this could dent the very foundation on which Zinnlandia and all postmodern Western civilization are built on: that all people, and all racial, ethnic, gender and national groups of people, are equal in their proclivities, abilities and merits, and are equally deserving of uncritical acceptance. They just have different "narratives," you see. But it's interesting how gingerly the racial identity is mentioned, when it is, with what curious, for a newspaper, waste of words. The story could have opened, after all, "An assault by five black teenagers on a North Portland MAX train this week. etc".
As to the "several high-profile incidents last winter," the story is less forthcoming. The reader is reminded that "a 16-year-old boy" was just sentenced to 91/2 years in prison for pounding a 71 year-old man with a baseball bat at another stop of this rail system. The account does not mention that the "boy's" name was Abel Chavez-Garcia and his smashing the old (and white) man, Laurie Lee Chilcote, to pulp was also accompanied by racial taunts. One has to fish through another article to find out about the hoodlum that he is an illegal alien. And it takes yet another, much earlier article to find out that Mr. Chilcote, whom the savage "Hispanic" punk has gifted with, among others, partial paralysis, double vision, dimmed hearing and a speech impediment is so brainwashed, good Oregonian that he is, that the only question he voiced after the attack was "what would make a teenager swing a baseball bat at an elderly man." (1)
The story then goes on to remind the reader that "Weeks after the beating, a 19-year-old man was stabbed in the chest at the Rockwood Transit Center, and on Christmas Eve a woman was groped at a MAX stop in Gresham." Curious about the identity of the stabber and the groper I do a little research on my laptop, soon after arriving at the Departures lounge of the PDX Airport terminal.
The groper - and it was a full-fledged assault - was a Mario Santiago-Montelongo. More extensive research, later, reveals that Santiago-Montelongo, who got 22 months in prison for this assault, is a Mexican illegal immigrant (2).
I cannot find anything more about the stabber, though the report implies that the police are in possession of such information (3). But a paragraph mentioning this crime also informs that four days after this stabbing "Thaymon Earl Watson, 19, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for stabbing to death a 19-year-old in December 2006 at a Gresham transit station." So we have here another activist minority, though this one homegrown.
In the course of my 15-minute visit with Google, I also find out that on January 08, 2008 a Mr. Mynor Guerra Perez, 29, tried to force a woman into the trunk of an automobile and stabbed her in the stomach and left chest. The stabbing caused a lockdown at three Beaverton schools. Also on the same date, in the same supersprawling Latino magnet town, a 46-year-old woman was assaulted in her bed by a night invader. Although the man has fled, his sketch, based on the woman's de ion, leaves little doubt as to the wonders of the great mosaic of our strength in diversity.
A few months earlier, a 40-year-old was stabbed in the stomach on a crowded bus of the same transit system. Although it's certain that witness testimony was recorded as to the race of the stabber, the news report prefers to avoid a "sensitive subject," but still tips off the knowing by noting that the perp was wearing a white do-rag. The same television station reports of a fight on another TriMet bus: "When police showed up, they saw several people running from the bus and heard several shots fired." There must have been something else the police noted about the fleeing perps, but it's not disclosed.
And in Hillsboro, "police are looking for two teenagers who attacked a Gresham man near a MAX station last week. The teens reportedly followed him and beat him with their fists, rocks and chunks of concrete. The suspects are described as teen males, 16 or 17 years old." No, they must have been described otherwise too. And it's far from irrelevant. Also in Hillsboro, a "16- and 15-year-old" were arrested for attacking two boys near a MAX station. One of the victims had a fractured skull after being hit on the head with a hammer. Could there have been a common denominator for the attackers other then their teen age?
It seems endless. "Sixteen-year-old Joe Crane is afraid to ride Portland's MAX light-rail. Four years ago he was attacked on a MAX platform near the Lloyd Center. And recently he was jumped at night by three men, who pulled him off the MAX, kicked him in the head and stole his wallet, cash and cell phone." At the end of the story, there is a reference to surveillance camera footage "as pictured above." What's "pictured above" are three young black men pouncing on Joe Crane like beasts of prey on a cornered doe.
The article goes on to blame the transit police for its insufficient presence. Such arguments are now ubiquitous in the Portland media's editorials, demanding more funding, more TV cameras, better lighting, better inter-agency cooperation. Everything is discussed, everything is noted - except for the 10-ton rhinoceros wearing a tutu and, balanced on his horn, spinning pirouettes right in the middle of the room. For what is required is a better populace, not better lighting. And to have a better populace, its rotten part must be clearly identified, watched, and punished for every crime committed, to the full extent of the law. Punished and cordoned off from society, rather then left to the "compassionate" ministrations of the social saboteurs proliferating among the ruling, clueless and cowardly Western elites.
And inasmuch as young blacks and `Hispanics' in America produce a widely disproportionate number of criminals, a normal people would demand of its quisling leaders that police and security forces employ crime profiling - including by race, gender, nationality and religion - and that Hispanic criminals be headed off a lot more effectively at the border, rather than courted by US presidential contenders once they have jumped the fence. But we are still in denial relative to even the first part of the solution, identification. The media are either staying clear of the issue or engaging in its active camouflage. Mute white politicians, police chiefs and judges are being attacked vociferously for the disproportionate number of blacks in prison, as though that, per se, were proof of pervasive white racism rather than of pervasive black criminality.
America's presumptive president, BH Obama, and all black political leaders and TV talking heads distort every possible crime statistic, with no national politician, even from the allegedly "conservative" wing of the Republican Party, putting them on the spot for it. The black demagogues, and their enablers such as Mr. Obama, shift blame from black criminals onto white "racism," faults in the law and its application, society etc. The racial "healing" and coming together Mr. Obama sells on the stump is a veiled promise that inconvenient truths will no longer be tolerated, and a trillion dollars more will be dumped down the drain for a "cure" of the willfully imaginary social "causes" of black and brown crime.
For black and Hispanic crime is not the result of poverty or of racism. One is safe walking among the poor in Thailand, the disfranchised Ainu in Japan, or the downtrodden Jews still living among Moslems. Until the crazies took over Islam again, for the nth time in history, a white person could walk - and this author did walk- through the poorest sections of Arab cities without fearing for one's life. One may sometimes suffer violence at the hands of unemployable young sociopaths in white-only precincts of Birmingham or Bratislava, but murder and serial rape are not a feature of everyday life there.
Everyday, in the U.S., in Great Britain and elsewhere in the West, there are headlines attesting to barbarity, reflexive violence, lack of any moral restraints and grave societal danger posed by large numbers of blacks, Mexicans and Central Americans, Albanians and other Moslem immigrants living among people of Euro-Christian ancestry. When one reads a headline, "Pack of cigarettes ignites 200-person ruckus at Fort Myers gas station," it no longer matters whether the race is mentioned or the photos shown, because everyone knows. Or does he?
Two young white men in Dallas are locking up their fledgling recording studio. The men and the studio are devoted to Christian causes. Two young black men drive up and ask for a cigarette. A conversation develops that lasts 30 minutes. With this man, who then pulls out a gun and executes the white innocents for a take of $2.
For white Westerners born in the last 50 years are all honorary Zinnlandians. They have grown up indoctrinated to squash their own survival impulses, to be ashamed for preferring their own people and culture, to admire the "authentic" and "noble" savage.....
Perhaps the time has come to give more attention to the existential AIDS that has disabled the immune system of the West. There is nothing intrinsically worse about Moroccans, Mexicans or Memphis blacks than there was in 1950. What has changed is the cultural immune system of the Euro-ethnics around the world. The Moroccan in 1950 did not live in Amsterdam, and the Mexican did not in Portland. They wouldn't and couldn't. The black was in Memphis then and now, but in 1950 he had the church if he was a good man, and long-term, harsh prison if he was not. Nowadays such institutions grate on the Zinnlandian sensibility.
Opportunistic infections do not penetrate but decaying organisms. Non-discrimination as the central organizing principle of Western society does to a body politic what AIDS does to a living body.
More here
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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14 July, 2008
Why I Feel Absolutely No White Guilt
Father Pfleger epitomizes those Caucasians who regard their history with scorn. Here's why I don't join in the self-flagellation
by Bernard Chapin
Like practically everything else involving Barack Obama, outrage over his association with Father Michael Pfleger quickly dissipated. The subsiding furor over the incident evidenced once again that the mainstream media loves the Democratic frontrunner in an unsavory fashion. It also illuminates the way in which Obama's past clashes resoundingly with who he claims to be. To our elites, forgiveness is the perpetual rule in regards to the Illinois senator. They may soon dismiss those who mention the clergymen's demagoguery with charges of "that's so May 2008? or "get a life."
Well, most of us have a life but for those who have "moved on," please recall Father Pfleger's sweltering Memorial Day weekend sermon at Trinity United Church, with theatrics so unusual that they got posted all over the internet. His antics appeared to have long-term implications as they led to Obama parting ways with his racialist church. Additionally, they resulted in a suspension for the St. Sabina's pastor. This sounded promising initially but the hierarchy of the Catholic Church soon reinstated him. Once again there are "no restrictions" on his speech. The Chicago Sun-Times effused - in a peppy and triumphant dispatch - over the priest's return to his congregation. The reporter covering the event compared him to Rocky, celebrated his "pugilistic resistance," and concluded that "what didn't kill him seems to have made him stronger."
Alas, if only that were true for his fellow citizens. The racism of Pfleger and his ilk debilitates the nation on a daily basis. Independent of his link to Obama, the Pfleger imbroglio remains topical because it highlights the sick phenomenon of Caucasians regarding themselves and their history with scorn. Journalists scrutinized only his derogatory comments about Hillary Clinton and ignored the more inflammatory portions of his spoken word performance. In the sentences that preceded the well-known segment, Pfleger lobbied for universal white guilt:. honest enough to address the one who says, "Well, don't hold me responsible for what my ancestors did." But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did and unless you are ready to give up the benefits, throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the money you put into the company you walked into because your daddy and your granddaddy and your great-granddaddy, unless you're willing to give up the benefits then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation cause you are the beneficiary of this insurance policy! We must be honest enough to expose white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head. I said before I don't want this to be political because, you know, I'm very unpolitical.Of course, practically every word of the diatribe was false, but it is essential for white Americans to respond to calumny and vindicate their names and heritage. Those who do not take Pfleger's brand of defamation seriously are doomed. The left has gained the moral high ground, perception-wise, over the last forty years due to the right having vacated it. The lies disseminated about conservatives are completely specious; however, a multitude of voters believe these falsehoods due to the Republican Party's ineffectual responses.
The GOP will be very dead should their politicians continue to deem themselves "above" the fray. To succeed in politics one must do battle and emerge victorious. Turning the other cheek allows pseudo-liberals to write a societal narrative wherein we are the scourge of humanity and the eternal enemies of "social justice," the ecosystem, and civil rights. We must defend ourselves.
Therefore, there's no reason to move on in regards to Father Pfleger. His entire monologue consisted of nothing more than slander. Obviously, had my ancestors committed wrongs I would not be responsible for them, but, as is true for millions of my fellow citizens, my antecedents oppressed no one. Before 1910, more than four decades after the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment, not one relative of mine dwelled on these shores. Thus, the priest's allegations are not only absurd but are no more applicable to me than a directive from the head of the Lindsay Lohan fan club.
Just as with countless readers, my ancestors were thoroughly impoverished in Europe, which caused them to trade in their trinkets and buy passage to the new world. Had the old world esteemed my family members then they would have never boarded those boats.
One of my grandfathers migrated to Detroit in the 1920s from Ireland via Canada. His hands were needed in the fields so he became a second-grade dropout. The woman he married was the brains of the family because she was fortunate enough to have received nine years of formal education. She bore him eight children as he toiled at Ford Motor Company. Granddad never accepted promotion because he feared losing his union membership. My mother was the only of his offspring to attend college. Her enrollment was made possible by a marching band scholarship rather than dividends from a trust fund. Upon death, my grandfather left medical bills as opposed to ownership in a company or the riches of a 401k account.
My other grandfather hailed from Russia. Unlike American blacks who, before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, received a segregated and inferior education, my father's father received no education whatsoever. He never attended a day of school in his life. He passed through Ellis Island and maintained a thick Russian accent until dying at age 88 (he attributed his longevity to giving up cigars at age 75). When I was a kid my grandfather used to send me birthday cards with a signature alone affixed to them. How literate he was I cannot say. When he passed away he left my father absolutely nothing. Over the course of his life, his economic output was inconsistent and often illegal. He married three times and departed the earth as financially barren as he was upon entering it.
In lieu of our antecedents, from what insurance policy did my mother and father benefit? The one person who definitely cannot answer that question is Father Michael Pfleger. When he gazes upon his countrymen he sees only theoretical constructs in a lowbrow postmodernist parlor game that he assembled. Did Pfleger ever meet any men like my grandfathers? Does he even know that such people existed?
He is wrong about everything as there is no "white privilege" in the United States of America. If there were, programs like affirmative action would never have received the imprimatur of the state because they teach the young that discrimination is totally acceptable should it oppress the right kind of citizen - white citizens as of 2008.
Further, political correctness would have no power or sway were Caucasians to be truly advantaged. PC involves treating "the other" as a holy relic and deferring to them; conversely, the majority population is regarded as former functionaries of the Khmer Rouge. Lastly, we know that white privilege is a lie because Asians outperform Caucasians on almost every single measure of societal success.
Both of my grandfathers would have found the notion of white privilege very perplexing. That they shared the same skin color as upper-class WASPs meant nothing in 1920. The Brahmins of our society wanted nothing to do with either of them. My Russian grandfather was such a low-status male that he changed his overly ethnic name to match one held by a local celebrity. Regardless of elite opinion, both men enjoyed their lives and felt indebted to their new homeland. They lived in the present and did not dwell on crimes of the past which English kings or Russian tsars may have committed against them. Resentment was not a language they could comprehend.
Yet it is resentment that allows Father Pfleger to ascend the rungs in society's vile church of victimology. It is a disgrace that the Catholic Church - via their employment and protection - continues to enable his race warfare. According to his supervisors, Father Pfleger has served his penance, but should Barack Obama become our next president it will be the general population's turn to serve.
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Crime pays: Getting away with terror at British taxpayers' expense
Pictured: Smiling preacher of hate Abu Qatada enjoying an 800,000 pounds home and a life of benefits
The Daily Mail refers to Abu Qatada, the "preacher", as Al-Qaeda's "ambassador to Europe." As if al-Qaeda was a diplomatic service. You're looking at Bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe.
Of course he's smiling. Look at what he's getting:
1. He can't be extradited to Jordan "because his human rights would have been breached."
2. He lives in a $1.6 million house.
3. He receives $100,000 in (British) government benefits.
4. He's under house arrest but meanders freely.
5. Supposedly he's on disability receiving $300/week for a back injury but can carry a knapsack in public. He's not worried that anyone would jail him for fraud.
6. His "45-year-old wife is said to be entitled to child benefits, income support, housing and council tax credits which exceed 800 each week." (that would be approx. $1600.) Plus, "The family is also said to pick up around 210 in income support."
7. AND he gets a tax break: "the couple is exempt from paying the 2,283 yearly council tax bill on their home."
This photograph of the smiling al-Qaeda operative telescopes to the rest of the world the message that the UK officially has signed a suicide pact.
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Jungle beasts
It's never too late to get a real job, so here's one that the Reverend Jesse Jackson should consider in the wake of his embarrassing anti-Barack Obama moment: city lifeguard. A spate of violence - in one case lethal - has wracked the public pools in Los Angeles's Watts area this summer. Trying to keep order from his lifeguard station, Jackson would have a splendid opportunity to test his claim that what inner-city black youth need is more "government-based policy," rather than fathers who stay around long enough to raise them.
Watts public pools have a history of anarchy. Last year, Los Angeles city officials hired armed guards and installed video cameras at the 109th Street Swimming Pool in order to protect children and pool staff from out-of-control youth. The 109th Street pool lies between two infamous housing projects and the warring gangs which control them. Many neighboring families avoid the recreational facility, driven away by the local gangbangers' aggression.
But the usual disorder turned even scarier on the second day of the pool season this June. The pool manager had had the temerity to ask swimmers to clear the pool for cleaning, its water having been rendered dangerously dirty by people jumping in with their clothes on or refusing to shower before entering. In response, up to 30 young men went on a rampage. They overpowered two armed guards and six pool workers, punched the manager as he was trying to escape to his office to call 911, and threw the manager, a lifeguard, and locker attendant into the water. This was not a case of adolescent hijinks: The men were in their twenties and thirties. They were simply unable to tolerate any authority over their own. The police reaction was delayed as officers responded to a report of a man with a gun at another city pool, a report that this time proved unfounded.
The 109th Street pool stayed closed for the next two days, depriving local children of watery recreation during a heat wave. It reopened only after the Los Angeles Police Department agreed to station two armed police officers there, and the city recreation department hired six residents, mostly ex-gang members, to help patrol the pool. Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks observed the charming modus operandi of these community peace-keepers: one "lightly . . . whacked" a boy on the head who did not get out of the pool quickly enough. After the pool had closed and the security force had gone home, teens and kids were still jumping into the filthy water with clothes and shoes on, Banks reported.
A nearby Los Angeles County pool facility saw an even more egregious outbreak of violence last Saturday. Three men tried to rob a 60-year-old man who was sleeping outside the pool at the Ted Watkins County Park, which borders Watts. They beat James Hurst unconscious with a blunt ; he died the next day in a hospital from his injuries. In reaction, the county will station eight additional county police officers at pools in South Central Los Angeles ten hours a day through the summer.
It is striking how quickly elected officials in the inner city call on the police when things go wrong. These are the same "racial profilers" who, according to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and a host of local loudmouths, pose as much threat to the black community as criminals. Turns out that the threat from the allegedly racist police disappears from view whenever they are needed to protect inner-city residents from the real danger in their midst - criminal males. Jackson was one of the first publicity hogs to fly down to Jena, La., the site of a trumped-up media fable about a supposedly racist criminal justice system and its victims - six black high-school students who without provocation viciously beat a white student unconscious. Had Jackson been a guard at Watts' 109th Street Pool or the Ted Watkins County Park, the chances are high he would have dialed 911 for the cops as desperately as anyone there.
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Moscow Hangover: Soviet Communism no longer enslaves Russia, but the West has yet to exorcise Lenin's ghost
by Peter Hitchens
What a pity it is that there will be no new Cold War. How useful it would be for the cause of freedom if we could once again hang the Kremlin and the Gulag round the radical Left's neck. But we cannot. The Kremlin is now swept clean of dogma, the Gulag is gone, and Russia is just another sordid despotism.
And so, freed from embarrassing associations with Lenin, Stalin, five-year-plans, purges, famines, and the KGB, the world's radical reformers are far stronger, and far harder to resist, than they used to be. As long as the words "progressive," "Communist," and "Socialist" brought to mind images of Soviet oppression, Soviet shortages, and Soviet intolerance, millions of people were inoculated against them.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to complain that the Iron Curtain kept everything out of Russia except what he called the "liquid manure" of Western trash culture, which somehow seeped beneath the barriers. In a strange and subtle way, it also prevented the spread of revolution in the advanced world.
It is an interesting lesson in real power to see how much mightier left-wing ideas and movements have become since they lost the support of all those Russian tanks. Far from helping the revolutionary cause, the columns of T-72s showed to the dimmest observer that socialism is not a gentle, kindly thing but an arrogant, ironclad, goose-stepping bully, which answers doubts with bayonets as soon as it has the power to do so. There was never any need to ask how many divisions the Communist Party had because it was so anxious to show them to us.
I watched the last proper Soviet tank parade as it thundered across Red Square on Nov. 7, 1990. There were red flags, rigid salutes, slanted faces, jackboots, and lush, totalitarian music. Just behind me and to my right, a shifty and diffident Politburo huddled on top of Lenin's tomb in the harsh wind. The thing they were uncertainly celebrating was called the Glorious October Socialist Revolution, that colossal failure that would have killed idealism off for good if we ever actually learned anything from history.
They were not enjoying themselves much because they knew just how bad everything was and suspected their days were almost over. I was enjoying it immensely because, in those days, I harbored the vain idea that the world might learn something useful from the unmitigated disaster of the Soviet Utopia. For thousands of miles in every direction, undeniable and no longer denied, lay the rusting, leaking, sagging evidence that this revolution had failed and that international socialism was a discredited, bankrupt idea.
A couple of months later, I saw some of the same tanks snarling down a midnight highway in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, which was then battling to regain independence from Moscow. I was in a group of journalists following them, until they swung their barrels toward our taxi in a way that seemed to lack a sense of humor. Earlier that day, Soviet soldiers had opened fire on civilians, so we thought it wise to drop back. We caught up with them later and also with the corpses they had caused, officially classified as "traffic accidents." They were part of a little known and failed attempt by Mikhail Gorbachev to seize control of the city while the world was distracted by the first phase of the recapture of Kuwait.
I saw the tanks for the last time in August 1991, when a squadron of them trundled up my Moscow street in the early morning sunshine, part of a fumbled KGB putsch against Gorbachev. The drunken collapse of this coup ended the Soviet Communist Party forever. All over Moscow, the trashcans were full of half-burned Communist Party membership cards. This was not a temporary setback but the death of an ideology. Soviet Communism had made a fool of itself and had gone. After that, of course, there could be no more Red Square parades, no more anniversaries of Glorious October, though they had one more excursion, in 1993, shelling the Russian parliament on behalf of Boris Yeltsin.
Oddly, the Communist Party, or rather its bewildered true believers, survived. No normal person continued to belong, but these rather touching, rather serious old people-far from contemptible, often incorruptible and serious, frequently decorated veterans of war-could not abandon the faith they had been brought up with. For one brief moment, when millions had their savings wiped out and were thrown out of their jobs, they seemed about to recover. But it passed, and now they linger as a sort of echo, useful to the regime as a harmless, impotent opposition.
Then it was announced that the tanks were coming back. As part of the inauguration of President Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian army would once again be allowed to drive its armor through Red Square. Had the clock really been turned back 18 years? There had been-and still is-much chatter of a return to the old hostilities.
Russia has certainly discovered that it can use its energy power to threaten its neighbors and buy Western politicians. It snarls, with good reason, over the West's strange anti-Serb policy in Kosovo. It intervenes blatantly in the politics of Ukraine. It menaces former Soviet republics, now nervously independent, on the Baltic coast and in the Caucasus.
And Vladimir Putin, now prime minister, has effectively suffocated political and press freedom, suppressing serious dissent in parliament, banning unwelcome independent candidates from running for office, and creating a creepy mass youth movement and a creepier personality cult.
The mysterious murder of independent journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the still stranger murder of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, and the rigged trial and imprisonment of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkhovsky are seen by most people as signs of the ferocious intolerance of the new regime, which officially maintains that Khodorkovsky's trial was fair and denies any connection with the two deaths....
Partly thanks to us, partly thanks to the horrible moral consequences of totalitarian socialism and the near extermination of God by systematic commissars, the new Russia is a lawless snake pit. It is dominated and populated by men stripped of morality by more than 70 years of cynical Leninism. But though the new rulers are the products of Marxism, they lack its driving purpose-or any real purpose except the gaining and keeping of wealth and power.
So Moscow, once the sacred heart of world Communism, has become a sort of Babylon, the most exhilarating, tasteless, and expensive city in the world, where you can procure anything for money and the nasty negative charisma of gangsters and spivs is on constant display. I cannot think of any other advanced capital in which you can see, side by side, all the manifestations of modern civilization and the symptoms of anarchy-ostentatious bodyguards, fenced-off compounds.
As a former resident from 18 years ago, I view the transformed city with seriously mixed feelings. It is thrilling to see the restored beauty of the churches and monasteries, sparkling with gold leaf and carefully tended, when all too recently they were semi-ruins, deliberately desecrated as reformatories for teenage louts or tatty warehouses for unwanted junk. It is a delight to stroll in the 19th-century lanes just south of the river, painted and cherished for the first time in 90 years, revealing a gracious and light-hearted Russian streetscape that was previously only visible in old prints and faded photographs.
The cleanliness of the air, compared with the brownish substance that we used to have to breathe, is another joy. Windows are washed, sidewalks are free of sudden chasms and open manholes, rats no longer sport around the entrances to the railway stations. The ambulances are no longer encrusted with dried blood, and the police, though still menacing, manage to be a little less slovenly. Even the great gloomy Stalinist skyscrapers, scrubbed and floodlit by night, seem to have turned into truthful historical monuments of the era that conceived them.
On a fresh May morning, surrounded by all these pleasures, it is hard to remember that a squalid and repressive state is in charge, that corruption is commonplace, and that one chilly pygmy-in spirit as well as in actual size-has just been succeeded by another as president....
But there is one huge, important difference. Private life is now free. You may say and think what you like and nobody will put you in a camp or claim that you are insane and pump you full of mind-altering drugs. Only if you offer a direct, open challenge to authority will you be troubled-and then generally by the tax police or the fire authorities who would rather put you out of business than into jail....
And I remembered coming back to the West, full of optimism, in 1992. And then I remembered seeing, year by year, in my own country and the U.S., new versions of all these subtle horrors: the "children's rights" movement that encourages denunciation and sets children against their parents, the shoving of infants into daycare from an incredibly early age, the need for two salaries to pay the basic bills, the epidemic of divorce, the pandemic of abortion, the growing spiteful rage against faith. I saw all around me the construction of a system of thought that dismissed conservative, individualist points of view as intolerable and pathological. I saw public servants, academics, and broadcasters having their careers ruined-and in Britain being questioned by the police-for expressing incorrect opinions. Private life, in the modern West, is now becoming significantly less free than it is in post-ideological Moscow.
I have begun to suspect that the bacillus of revolution, once confined inside the borders of the USSR, did not die with Communism. On the contrary, it adapted itself and escaped in a new form. Now it rages busily in a world where, instead of storming the Winter Palace, the post office, and the railroad station, the enemies of freedom infiltrate the TV studio, the college campus, and the school. There is a new Cold War after all, but it is being fought inside our borders, without tanks or missiles.
More here
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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13 July, 2008
The evil British police again
Retired Briton arrested for chasing away youth gang
A pensioner who used a piece of wood to chase away a gang of teenagers who had been throwing stones at his home is facing a jail term after being arrested and charged with possessing an offensive weapon.
Sydney Davis, 65, a father-of-two, dialled 999 when his home in the Pinehurst area of Swindon, Wilts, came under attack. But when police failed to turn up over the next two hours he decided to take action himself. He grabbed a section of wood from a broken-up sofa lying in his front garden and chased the youths down the street - just as police officers finally arrived.
Mr Davis, a retired builder, was astonished when police arrested him while allowing the gang to run to safety. The householder now faces a court appearance and a potential prison term of six months if convicted. Mr Davis, whose windows have been smashed five times in the last eight months, branded the law "a colossal ass". He went on: "This is Britain gone mad. Just what in the world is this country coming to when the police arrest people like me for protecting their own property?
"The police say they want to reduce crime, yet they let evil little toe-rags like this off. Then they prosecute hard-working, upstanding residents like me. "There is simply no way we can shake off this problem of 'Yob Britain' if the legal system fails to protect the everyday person".
Mr Davis' difficulties began on July 2 when a gang started throwing stones, stick, mud and eggs at a number of homes. His wife, Pauline, 42, and their sons, Peter, seven, and James, five, cowered behind the sofa as the windows were hit by a flurry of missiles. "My wife called the police at 6pm, but they just kept on throwing stones through my back gate. "I left the back door open to stop them smashing it. Suddenly a really big rock came crashing into the kitchen. I just grabbed the wood, which was the nearest thing I could find, and chased them off. "The police turned up just as I was chasing them. As a result I was arrested, but they didn't arrest any of them."
Mr Davis was handcuffed, taken to a local police station and later charged. Wiltshire Police confirmed both the charge against him and the fact that no one else had been arrested in connection with the incident. The householder is expected to appear before local magistrates later in the month.
Source
British mother prevented from taking own son to school because of criminal record checks
A woman was prevented from taking her own son to school because she hadn't been screened for a criminal record. Jayne Jones had been escorting 14-year-old severely epileptic Alex each day by taxi, taking specialist equipment with her in case he had a fit. But the mother-of-two was told she would not be allowed to continue doing so until her details had been run through a Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) check..
The case came to light only days after it emerged that hundreds of innocent people were branded criminals by the CRB, which was set up to vet people working with children. Figures seen by The Daily Telegraph showed that in the year to February 2008, 680 people were issued with incorrect information on their background checks by the CRB.
Last week a woman who was wrongly labelled a violent alcoholic and drug addict by the CRB was told she would have to allow police to take her fingerprints if she wanted to clear her name. Amanda Hodgson, 36, a law-abiding mother-of-three, learned of her "criminal past'' when applying for a post as a welfare assistant at her local primary school. She was told she had a criminal record stretching back 18 years, including three convictions for assaulting police officers, and the only way to clear her name was to get her fingerprints checked against every unsolved crime in the country.
Mrs Jones, from Aberfan in south Wales, said stopping her taking her son - who has cerebral palsy - to school was "political correctness gone mad". "It's crazy that I have to be CRB checked before I can ride in a taxi with my own son," she said. "I have to be checked to go in a taxi with him, but if I was able to drive him myself they wouldn't care and even offered to pay me expenses. "The taxi company is great and they carry Alex's medication but they won't use it and they wouldn't know how to put him in the recovery position if needs be."
Alex, who takes a combination of 32 anti-convulsant tablets a day, is currently travelling to his special needs school five miles away in Merthyr Tydfil with no one trained to cope if he has an attack. He has been fitted with the Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) therapy system under the skin, which works like a pacemaker to help control electrical signals which can malfunction and cause him to seize. But his parents are the only ones trained to use and understand the therapy. His 42-year-old father Malcolm has a full-time job and Mrs Jones is the boy's full-time carer.
A spokesman from Merthyr Tydfil Council said: "The CRB checking is a requirement of our transport provisions in relation to adults travelling on home-to-school transport in the capacity of an escort. "This is a standard requirement and has been for several years. "Any adult acting as an escort will, in the public gaze, be viewed as acting with the full acquiescence of the council and hence with its implied authority. "For the protection of the council and all vulnerable persons in its care it's essential all those endowed with an authority, implicit or explicit, should meet the security requirements within the transport contract provisions."
Source
When They Came for the Philadelphia Christians: Marcavage update
Tyranny is a lot like cancer. Early detection is a great thing.Stopping cancer and tyranny in the early stages can prevent a world of hurt, pain and death down the road. In America, we enjoy a measure of freedom. However, we are not nearly as free as we think we are. Our liberty is under assault from multiple directions every day. This assault is not being waged by some dorko in a cave in Afghanistan and his scary brown minions. Rather, it is being waged by our own government. Already, "the land of the free" has the world's highest incarceration rate. There is so much creeping tyranny and so little time to address it all. And millions of Americans are in total denial.
On October 6, 2007, Michael Marcavage, who heads up a group called Repent America (RA), was arrested right in front of the Liberty Bell Center in downtown Philadelphia while preaching. Park Ranger Alan Saperstein approached Marcavage and asked him if he had a permit. Marcavage replied that, under the First Amendment, no such permit was required. Saperstein then issued Marcavage a "verbal permit" and demanded that he relocate to a "free speech zone" some distance away. Marcavage continued to preach and was led away in handcuffs. Watch the YouTube video of the arrest right here. The following is from the RA press release detailing Marcavage's arrest and conviction."Under the direction of Ian Crane, chief ranger of Independence National Historical Park, supervising ranger Alan Saperstein repeatedly approached Marcavage to demand that he and the ministry team move to a 'free speech zone' on the other side of the Liberty Bell Center, which was nowhere near those entering or exiting. Adding insult to absurdity, Saperstein stated that in the future that RA would need to obtain a written permit to even speak in the 'free speech zone,' but given a 'verbal permit' to go there for the day, which Marcavage refused, citing that constitutional protections were sufficient. When it became apparent that Marcavage was not going to yield to the unconstitutional demands, Saperstein arrested Marcavage and ordered the other members of the ministry team off the public sidewalks. Ironically, Marcavage was then physically escorted into the Liberty Bell Center for questioning and charged with violating the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 36, 1.6 Permits (g)(2), which states that he violated the terms and conditions of a 'verbal permit'-a permit that Marcavage never accepted, nor is such a permit even listed under the regulations. Subsequently, Marcavage was issued a citation nearly six months later by certified mail concerning the same matter for violating the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 36, 2.32 (g)(1) + (2), which states that he was 'interfering with agency functions' by preaching and ministering to people on the public sidewalk.A German proverb states that "Freedom dies in little pieces." When someone else's liberty is attacked, your liberty is placed at risk. I recently did a mass e-mailing urging people to oppose the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. You don't have to agree with Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. I certainly don't. You just have to realize that the same First Amendment that protects them protects you and me.
"On June 13, 2008, Judge Rapoport found Michael Marcavage 'guilty' on both charges under the Code of Federal Regulations. Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Goldberg argued that Marcavage's defense was 'propaganda' and that he was a 'clear and present danger' and asked the judge to send a message not only to Marcavage, but to anyone who would dare stand on public property and share their beliefs without government permission. In response, Judge Rapoport fined Marcavage $445, including costs, and placed him on probation for one year, which restricts his travel to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and bars him from entering the park or being on the public sidewalks surrounding the park for any reason without first notifying park authorities. He also cannot return to engage in free speech activities without first obtaining a permit, and only then in the designated 'free speech zone'. Directly following the trial, Marcavage was escorted by U.S. Marshals to be booked for his 'crimes'.
And if Uncle Sam can get away with violating Michael Marcavage's God-given and constitutionally protected rights, then he can get away with violating anyone's rights anywhere. And it isn't just the rights of evangelical Christians. The "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment protects the rights of Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Shintoists, New Agers and believers in Mungabunga. It protects atheists too.
The Old Testament prophet Daniel was thrown into the lion's den for defying the decree of King Darius against praying to any god other than King Darius-Daniel 6. I once heard someone say that way too many contemporary preachers would respond such a decree by saying things like "you can still pray in your heart" or "it is only for 30 days." Indeed, the Bible is full of civil disobedience. Daniel knew what so many contemporary Christians refuse to acknowledge: when you give your government an inch, they take a mile.
America is not Nazi Germany. At least not yet. However, millions of people are in total denial about their vanishing liberty. The case of Michael Marcavage is not an isolated incident. Indeed, in 2004 RA activists were threatened with 47 years in prison under a "hate crimes"statute for publicly preaching against homosexuality.
There is a big fat lie going around nowadays about how Romans 13 commands blind obedience to secular authority. NO IT DOES NOT! (1) This is America. Power does not lie in Washington or Harrisburg or in the whims of every petty functionary sporting a badge and leeching off of your and my tax dollars. The "supreme Law of the Land" is the Constitution. Under our Constitution power resides in "We the People." As John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison, "All laws repugnant to the Constitution are void of law."
Actually, America has two constitutions. One was ratified in Philadelphia in 1787. The other resides in the hearts and minds of the people. And if "We the People" are nonchalant about our liberty, our written Constitution becomes just a piece of paper. We can either act now in defense of Michael Marcavage when the cost is quite minimal. (2) Or we can act later when the stakes will be much higher. Marcavage is appealing the discrict court's decision. Always remember the words of Pastor Martin Niemoller:"When the Nazis came for the communists, I did not speak out because I was not a communist. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Catholics, I did not speak out because I was a not a Catholic. When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out because I was a not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."Are you going to remain silent because they are coming for the Christians and you are not a Christian? Are you going to remain silent because Michael Marcavage is a Philadelphia Christian and you are, say, a Colorado Christian? I hope not.
Source
Muslim woman deemed too submissive to be French
It seems that at least in France there are some remaining shreds of respect for their own identity
France has denied citizenship to a veiled Moroccan woman on the grounds that her "radical" practice of Islam is incompatible with basic French values such as equality of the sexes, a legal ruling showed on Friday. The case will reignite debate about how to reconcile freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the French constitution, and other fundamental rights, which many in France feel are being challenged by the way of life of some Muslims.
Le Monde newspaper said it was the first time a Muslim applicant had been rejected for reasons to do with personal religious practice. "She has adopted a radical practice of her religion, incompatible with essential values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes," said a ruling by the Council of State handed down last month and sent to Reuters on Friday to confirm a report in Le Monde. The Council of State is a judicial body which has final say on disputes between individuals and the public administration.
Married to a French national, the woman arrived in France in 2000, speaks good French and has three children born in France. She wears a black burqa that covers all her body except her eyes, which are visible through a narrow slit, and lives in "total submission" to her husband and male relatives, according to reports by social services. Le Monde said the woman is 32. The woman's application for French nationality was rejected in 2005 on grounds of "insufficient assimilation". She appealed to the Council of State, which last month approved the rejection.
In the past, nationality was denied to Muslims who were known to have links with extremist circles or who had publicly advocated radicalism, which is not the case here.
VIRGINITY ROW
The ruling comes weeks after a heated debate over whether traditional Muslim views were creeping into French law, prompted by a court annulment of the marriage of two Muslims because the husband said the wife was not a virgin as she had claimed to be.
In the case of the Moroccan woman, Le Monde suggested the Council of State had gone to the opposite extreme by rejecting the woman's beliefs and way of life rather than accommodating them. "Is a burqa incompatible with French nationality?" the newspaper asked.
The legal expert who provided a formal report on the case to the Council of State wrote that the woman's interviews with social services revealed that "she lives almost as a recluse, isolated from French society," Le Monde reported. "She has no idea about the secular state or the right to vote. She lives in total submission to her male relatives. She seems to find this normal and the idea of challenging it has never crossed her mind," Emmanuelle Prada-Bordenave wrote.
Le Monde quoted Daniele Lochak, a law professor not involved in the case, as saying it was bizarre to consider that excessive submission to men was a reason not to grant citizenship. "If you follow that to its logical conclusion, it means that women whose partners beat them are also not worthy of being French," Lochak said.
Source
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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12 July, 2008
Victory for British Christian registrar who refused to carry out queer `weddings'
A Christian registrar who was harassed and discriminated against after she refused to carry out same-sex civil partnership ceremonies has won a key legal battle. Lillian Ladele, 47, said that she was treated like a pariah by colleagues at Islington council in North London after she said that she could not carry out the ceremonies as a matter of religious conscience.
An employment tribunal found that the council showed no respect for Ms Ladele's rights "by virtue of her orthodox Christian beliefs". Employment lawyers said that while the case set no binding legal precedent, it would make councils much more likely to give weight to the religious views of employees. The decision outraged gay rights campaigners, who said that it "sanctions the right of religious people to discriminate".
Ms Ladele, who had held her $62,000-a-year job for almost 16 years, could receive thousands of pounds in compensation at a further hearing in September after the tribunal found that the behaviour of her colleagues had "the effect of violating Ms Ladele's dignity, or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment". The tribunal decided that gay rights should not be allowed to "trump" the rights of those with religious beliefs and said that the council's other registrars were able to provide a "first-class" service to same-sex couples without Ms Ladele's involvement.
The ruling said that Islington council "placed a greater value on the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual community than it placed on the rights of Ms Ladele as one holding an orthodox Christian belief".
Ms Ladele, who is now expected to return to work, wept as she told the tribunal that her bosses ordered her to perform the ceremonies or face dismissal for gross misconduct. She said: "I felt harassed and victimised. I was being picked on on a daily basis." She added: "This is a victory for religious liberty, not just for myself but for others in a similar position. Gay rights should not be used as an excuse to bully and harass people over their religious beliefs."
She was applauded last night by the Christian Institute, a Newcastle-based charity that funded her case, and the Evangelical Alliance. Don Horrocks, head of public affairs at the alliance, said: "This decision underlines that, despite some recent claims to the contrary, freedom of religious conscience must be protected by law in the same way as any other human right. "We would call on local politicians to take note and live up to the challenge of this benchmark decision."
Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the gay rights group Stonewall, said: "Public servants are paid by taxpayers to deliver public services. They shouldn't be able to pick and choose who they deliver those services to. Doubtless 40 years ago there were moral ions to mixed-race marriages. Quite rightly such ions would no longer be entertained." Peter Tatchell, the human rights campaigner, said: "Lillian Ladele claims she was won a victory for religious liberty. No, she has not. She has won a victory for the right to discriminate."
Source
Foolish Muslim pandering in Britain
Rebel the puppy only ever caused offence with his ill-timed calling cards and habit of stealing the window cleaner's chamois. Now, the German shepherd is at the centre of a political-correctness row. Rebel is the nearest thing Dundee has to a celebrity since Danny Wilson split up. His popular training "blog" details mishaps like bringing down the firearm squad's computer system by chewing a cable. It was no surprise when he appeared on a campaign postcard for a new helpline nestled inside a police hat. He is the fluffy face of the force, with lashings of the "awww" factor.
But not everyone found his floppiness irresistible. A Labour councillor called Mohammed Asif suggested the campaign would "not be welcomed by all communities because there was a dog on the cards". He didn't say Muslim communities - but that is what he meant. The headlines were all about how "Muslims were outraged" by the picture and Tayside Police apologised.
Responses ranged from exasperation at "barking mad" political correctness to anger: "If Muslims don't like dogs then they should go and live where there are none! We must stop bending over backwards to please these people, they certainly wouldn't do it for us - enough is enough!"
Inevitably, many asked why Pakistani shopkeepers, who profit from the sale of pornographic magazines, streaky bacon and alcohol, could then to a postcard intended to inform the public. But so far as I can see, the only outraged Muslim was Mohammed Asif. His ill-judged intervention has done as much - perhaps more - to damage community relations than the hapless terrorists and their burning Jeep last year. They can attack our airports, but leave off our puppies!
There is no law against pet dogs in the Koran. The Hadith, or tradition, says they are unclean, you should not keep them in the house and must wash after contact with them. I have a few friends who share that view, but who are not religious in the least. They are probably correct when it comes to hygiene. But they don't avert their eyes from doggy pictures because they dislike canines, and neither do Muslims. The real issue here is the oversensitivity of the authorities. Their apology has whipped up more hatred than Rebel could if he'd nipped Mr Asif's ankle.
The apology is symptomatic of a general jumpiness. Today we report an absurd recommendation by the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland that sniffer dogs wear slippers when searching Muslim homes for drugs and explosives. Who came up with this? Everybody knows you take your shoes off when entering a Muslim home so as not to bring in anything unclean. That would presumably apply to the dog's muddy slippers. So shouldn't the handlers put clean ones over their paws once they cross the threshold, just to be sure? It rather interferes with the element of surprise. By the same logic, handlers should take their boots off and waste more time. And are we to ban female officers from raiding Muslim homes, because they are wearing police-issue trousers (sexy!) or simply because they are women?
It is all so unnecessary. Iran, not a country known to be slipshod in its adherence to Islamic doctrine, uses sniffer dogs from France to tackle drug-smuggling. Dog teams were flown to Pakistan from around the world to search for survivors trapped in rubble after the 2005 earthquake.
Official bodies desperate to show their politically correct credentials succeed only in sowing division with such silliness. In March, a CD-Rom version of the Three Li
