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With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
This page is a backup. The primary version of this blog is HERE
29 August, 2024
Trumpenomics: The implications of a second Trump term
David Pearl
As we know, Trump has a powerful – and seemingly debilitating – psychological effect on the great majority of commentators. Very few seem capable of detached, balanced and nuanced analysis.
Many of my fellow economists, the vast majority of whom are politically to the left of centre, have fallen over themselves to denounce Trump’s economics. In June, sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, issued an open letter arguing that Joe Biden’s economic agenda (which no doubt will be replicated by Kamala Harris, if elected) was ‘vastly superior’ to Donald Trump’s.
A second Donald Trump presidency, they asserted, risked ‘reigniting’ inflation given his commitment to raise tariffs and cut taxes, conveniently ignoring the alarming surge in inflation on Biden’s watch. Bizarrely, the laureates suggested that Biden has lowered ‘long-run inflationary pressures’ by subsidising wind and solar energy, which as we know is a proven strategy for raising, rather than cutting, power prices.
Australian economists have been no better, predicting variously that Trump will destroy the international trading system, take control of the Federal Reserve and even, according to one, refuse to leave office once his term is up. (The idea of Trump assuming direct responsibility for monetary policy – and therefore interest rates and inflation – is ridiculous. He may be a lot of things, but he is not stupid).
While the outlines of Trump’s likely agenda are well known, his plans for trade and illegal immigration have received almost all the attention.
Economists have seized on his intention to impose an across-the-board 10-per-cent tariff on US imports, and tariffs of up to 60 per cent on goods from China. While this is understandable, they have typically ignored the bigger policy picture.
Trump is a committed tax reformer, and will want to extend his 2017 personal income tax cuts due to expire in 2025 (these narrowed deductions and lowered rates across most brackets, with the top rate set at 37 per cent). He is likely to call for a further reduction in the corporate tax rate.
And if elected, Trump will comprehensively deregulate the US energy sector, including: removing regulatory restrictions on oil production, natural gas, nuclear power and clean coal; scrapping car emission and electric vehicle mandates; and, once again, pulling the US out of the Paris climate change accord.
How should we characterise Trump’s economic philosophy? His critics have usually described it as populist and protectionist. Sympathisers have characterised it as nationalist-conservative, suggesting Trump favours a big and intrusive government, but dedicated to right-wing instead of progressive causes. In truth, none of these labels fits the bill, or at least not entirely.
While I agree that Trump is no classical free trader, his support for lower taxes and energy deregulation is firmly in the Reagan tradition. True, Reagan deregulated the US finance sector, not energy (although, he famously removed the solar panels his Democrat predecessor Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House roof), but there are parallels between these agendas.
In the 1980s, the economic costs of financial regulations (many dating back to the Depression era) became crushing for the US and other Western economies, raising the cost of capital, misallocating resources on a vast scale and limiting growth. Today, it is the extensive network of energy regulations, designed to force cheap and reliable fossil fuels out of the market, which is doing the most economic harm.
The positive supply-side impacts of Trump’s energy deregulation plans, if realised, are likely to dwarf any negative effect of his tariff agenda. (Remember that for large economies like the US, the costs of protection, while not trivial, are far lower than they are for smaller economies like Australia.)
Fiscal policy provides another parallel between Trump and Reagan. Reagan cut taxes but did not touch entitlement programs, securing the support of millions of working class Democrats.
Trump plans to do the same thing. Before we reach for the smelling salts, we should keep in mind that the US’s international creditors, with China at the forefront, have been only too happy – through their continued purchases of US government bonds – to finance its budget deficits.
Should Australians fear or be optimistic about a second Trump presidency? Leaving aside the simplistic view of his haters, it will be a mixed bag.
While Trump is a protectionist, Kamala Harris is as well (judging by the record of the Biden administration). So there will be broad continuity here. And let’s not panic about Trump’s sabre-rattling on China trade, which in my view is more about positioning him for a bilateral deal than anything else, a two-step strategy he followed during his first term. Back then, of course, Trump exempted Australia from higher steel and aluminium tariffs. Given the weakness of its economy, I have no doubt China will be ready to negotiate.
If trade, under either Trump or Harris, presents some risks, the big policy shift will come in the area of energy. Trump’s plans in this area, if realised, will undermine, perhaps fatally, the global – in truth largely Western – emissions reduction crusade. By delegitimising wind-and-solar ideology, it may free Australia to pursue more rational energy and climate change policies.
This all said, it would be foolish to over-analyse what a second Trump presidency might bring. After all, the Covid pandemic, which arguably cost him the 2020 election, came out of the blue. And with the election still months away and recent polls tightening, Trump is no certainty to take office.
It is intellectually lazy, and an insult to the millions of Americans who will vote for him, to dismiss Trump as a fool or would-be dictator. He is neither.
But nor is he a political messiah. He is flesh and blood, a singular politician to be sure, but a politician nevertheless. His plans on tax and energy, if realised, will deliver enormous gains to the US economy and set a positive policy example for Australia.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/trumpenomics/
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Are Greedy Corporations Really to Blame for Higher Prices?
Certain politicians have recently stated that Americans are paying more for what they buy because greedy corporations are hiking prices to fatten profits at their expense. Is this so? Legislation that governs the securities industry requires companies to disclose financial statements to ensure honesty and fair play. These financial statements should tell us whether companies are profiting at the expense of ordinary Joes.
Take the fast food sector. Nothing says “Americana” more than jumping in the car and heading to the drive-thru to grab some burgers to eat in the parking lot. Consumers are paying more for fast food. Prices at Burger King and Wendy’s have risen 55% over the last 10 years; McDonald’s prices have doubled, or risen more than 7% per year, much more than the 2.8% that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported in annual inflation over the same period. Do higher prices translate into fatter profits for burger joints?
As shown in Figure 1, operating profitability at fast food chains has remained fairly constant over the past five years. In other words, the higher prices restaurants charge have not resulted in greater profitability. This, in turn, means that restaurants are simply passing higher input costs onto final consumers.
Figure 2 shows that the main burger inputs, beef (to the extent that patties actually contain beef) and bread, have risen 41.4% and 44.2%, respectively, over the past five years, or 7.2% and 7.6% annually, a level consistent with McDonald’s price increases and far more than Burger King or Wendy’s have hiked prices. Even electricity prices have risen 28.1% (5.1% per year), to say nothing of labor and other costs.
Furthermore, in the absence of barriers to entry or government interference in the marketplace, if fast food joints were arbitrarily hiking prices to boost profits, someone would enter the market and sell burgers for less, taking away market share and forcing incumbent players to lower prices to stay in business. This is the essence of our capitalistic system. The lack of new entrants shows that existing burger joints are not earning above-average profits.
We must look elsewhere for the answer to why prices are rising.
Over the past several years, the federal government has been spending considerably more than it collects in tax revenue, running massive deficits. In the early years of this century, deficits were a few hundred billion dollars, which was not a good fiscal situation but manageable. As Figure 3 reveals, federal deficits have exploded recently and look to be permanently fixed above $1 trillion, or over 6% of U.S. GDP, a staggering amount.
Much of this spending is wasteful, on programs that certain politicians want but the public does not want and programs not demanded by the market. Furthermore, since there is a limited pool of funds to lend, government borrowing crowds out private borrowing, which could be used to finance more productive projects that are demanded by the market. Such projects would do more to expand the U.S. economy and increase Americans’ well-being.
To accommodate the federal government’s irresponsible spending, the Federal Reserve has ballooned the money supply from $4.7 trillion at the start of this century to $21 trillion today, an increase of 347%! Over the same period, U.S. GDP has risen 108%. As money in circulation increases faster than the production of goods and services does, the price level must rise. In other words, the dollar’s value relative to goods and services it can buy continues to decrease.
To make matters worse, the Federal Reserve has been buying debt issued by the federal government, allowing the latter to continue its out-of-control spending habit. The Federal Reserve has expanded its balance sheet to over $7 trillion and is now by far the largest holder of U.S. federal debt.
Thus, the massive spending of the federal government, far beyond the revenue it collects, is the root cause of inflation. The Federal Reserve aids and abets the government by purchasing securities, a process tantamount to printing money. As a result, the value of the dollar declines, or the nominal prices of goods and services purchased for dollars increase, aka, inflation. Corporations, facing higher input costs, have no choice but to hike final prices. As we have seen, corporate profit margins have not expanded during this period of reckless fiscal and monetary policy.
The solution is to reign in deficits, preferably by reducing the size of government by eliminating unnecessary, inefficient, non-market programs, rather than raising taxes. To the extent that price controls or other forms of government intervention in the free market will lower prices, they will be accompanied by shortages, rationing and a thriving black market where the true price, determined by supply and demand, will be revealed.
History is replete with examples of government intervention, including price controls, that had disastrous results. The recent experience of Cuba and Venezuela should be enough to convince policy makers not to head down this dark path.
The United States prevailed over the Soviet Union in the Cold War largely due to the latter’s command economy, where not only were prices fixed by the government, but also what to produce and in what quantities, ignoring the will of the people and market demand. US policy makers would do well not to repeat these mistakes, since the results are likely to be disastrous for the US economy and Americans’ well-being.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/08/22/are-greedy-corporations-really-to-blame-for-higher-prices/
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California Makes Theft a Crime Again
Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a package of laws he claims to be “the most significant legislation to address property crime in modern California history.” Embattled Californians might regard the measures as a delayed reaction to a primary cause of the crime hike.
The 2014 Proposition 47, titled the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” by then-Attorney General Kamala Harris, made thefts of up to $950 a misdemeanor, but there was more to it. Harris’ summary failed to note that the measure restricted the collection of DNA from criminals, who took the measure as a license to steal. Cars became a primary target.
In 2015 and 2016, reported vehicle break-ins were up 21 percent and 27 percent, and in 2017, vehicle break-ins surpassed previous records, with a 24 percent increase above 2016 levels. The targets included the contents of vehicles, which in short order jumped from 16,000–17000 to 19,000–20,000, and also vehicle parts.
Under Proposition 47, thefts of catalytic converters soared. In 2019, the city of Davis reported nine thefts in one week, with the Toyota Prius a primary target. Costs to replace a catalytic converter can easily exceed $1,000. Thieves targeted one couple three times in four months, and arrests were rare. That is because to make a misdemeanor arrest, an officer must have witnessed the crime.
As Robert Greene of the Los Angeles Times notes, “How likely is it that a police officer or sheriff’s deputy just happens to be standing by when a suspect grabs an item worth less than $950 off the store shelf?” Under Prop 47, shoplifting soared, and commercial burglary and robbery also increased dramatically.
From 2019 to 2022, Fresno, Los Angeles, and San Francisco saw commercial burglary ramp up by 38 percent, 29 percent, and 26 percent. Over the same period, commercial burglary rose 64 percent in Alameda County and 54 percent in Orange County.
In San Francisco, where Newsom once served as mayor, nearly 50 percent of Union Square stores have closed. In the state capital Sacramento, the city attorney threatens to charge Target stores with “nuisance calls” for reporting retail theft. Residents have a right to wonder why Newsom failed to take action sooner. It could have something to do with the November election, and a crucial episode in state history.
Back in 1978, California voters approved Proposition 13, the People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation. Gov. Jerry Brown denounced the measure but when it passed in a landslide acted as though he had written it. Brown proclaimed himself a “born-again tax cutter” but on his watch California became a high-tax state, from which people and businesses fled.
In the spirit of Proposition 13, California’s Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act gave voters the final say on future tax increases imposed by state and local governments. The measure gathered nearly one million signatures and qualified for the Nov. 5 ballot, but Newsom teamed with recurring governor Jerry Brown to have the measure taken off the ballot. The Democrat duo took power from the people, who still have a way to punch back.
Proposition 36, a measure to amend Proposition 47, has qualified for the November ballot, as Katy Grimes of the California Globe explains, despite “Gov. Gavin Newsom’s attempts to kill it.” Grimes believes state Democrats and the governor don’t want “the people” or Republicans to get credit for overturning a “dystopian hellscape ballot initiative.” Under current conditions, that is hardly a stretch, and as the election awaits, the people have plenty to ponder.
Those who approve of Proposition 47 seem to believe that enabling crime somehow promotes “social justice.” They might take a look at Is Social Justice Just?, which explores the concept in detail. “Property crime,” which Newsom claims his raft of bills will address, could also stand examination.
The tsunami of thefts, burglaries, and robberies launched by Proposition 47 affects the people who created the merchandise, the people who sell the merchandise, the people who buy the merchandise, and the entire community. If the people thought the time has come to junk the “property crime” designation altogether, it would be hard to blame them.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15042&omhide=true&trk=title
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28 August, 2024
Australia should heed Robert F Kennedy’s health policy deal with Trump
There is good evidence that ultra processed foods are NOT bad for you:
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/05/fresh-health-warning-over-ultra.html
But RFK's view is popularly accepted so should win votes
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr decided to pull out of the US presidential race he approached the Democrats to do a deal. The backing of the great Kennedy name would have probably locked in a Kamala Harris victory.
But the Democrats rejected Kennedy so he turned to Donald Trump and they made an incredible deal that means that if Trump wins, the global food industry and US health will be transformed. Australia will follow.
Kennedy was called a traitor by the Democrats but, according to the opinion polls, the Kennedy support has put Trump back in the presidential race although, as Paul Kelly points, out he has been campaigning badly.
The presidential race in the US is too close for an Australian business commentator to fpredict the outcome. But Down Under we can pick up potentially world changing events in the campaign that get missed in the frenzy of US political reporting.
The Kennedy-Trump deal is one such event.
The Kennedy campaign received high levels of support in some states because he was backed by a massive team of volunteers. Kennedy has agreed to use that team to campaign for Trump in the five key US swing states led by Pennsylvania.
And what makes Kennedy so dangerous to Harris is that his team will concentrate on one issue – the food processing deal Kennedy secured with Trump.
Kennedy has a passion about the health of Americans and believes his Trump deal, if implemented, is a key to improving US health. To illustrate the passion he will take to the electorates I will use his words to describe what is happening on the US health scene and what he will do about it.
Australia has similar problems.
Kennedy: “Today, two-thirds of American adults and half of children suffer chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, the number for children was less than one per cent.
“In America, 74 per cent of adults are now overweight or obese, and close to 50 per cent of children. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is three per cent.
“Half of Americans now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
“There’s been an explosion of neurological diseases that I never saw as a child. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s, narcolepsy, ASD, and Asperger’s.
“In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally, and 1 in 22 in California. The screening has not changed. Nor has the definition. The incidence has changed.
“About 18 per cent of teens have fatty liver disease, a disease that primarily used to be found only in late-stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79 per cent.
“One in four American women is on an antidepressant medication: 40 per cent of teens have a mental health diagnosis. Today, 15 per cent of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children are on SSRIs.
“So what’s causing all this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First is ultra-processed foods. About 70 per cent of American children’s diet is ultra-processed – industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.
“Lab scientists concoct thousands of other ingredients to make these foods more palatable, more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago, and humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in America’s processed foods.
“The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The assault on a child’s cells and hormones is unrelenting.
“It is crippling our nation’s finances. When my uncle was president, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is mostly for chronic disease, and it is double the military budget. And it is the fastest-growing cost.
“The good news is that we can change all of this, and change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that we need to do three things. First, root out the corruption in our health agencies, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations.
“Second, change the incentives of the healthcare system. And third, inspire Americans to get healthy again.
“With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding. We will make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.”
Back to my words.
If Trump wins and honours the deal (highly likely) allowing Kennedy to transform US food products we will also change because most of the food processors in Australia are foreign owned and follow US patterns.
Like most Australians I am greatly concerned at the health issues that are emerging in our youth. I don’t know whether the Kennedy remedy is the answer but he may be right.
Meanwhile Kennedy will also use his heritage and words skill to add power to his health campaign.
“My uncles and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days,” he said.
“This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?
“My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world,” Kennedy concludes.
There is lots more to come in this US election campaign.
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Death of the Instagram face: Gen Z embracing unique over perfection
It’s a face that’s become ubiquitous. And it’s at the edge of our fingertips. A quick scroll of social media shows a constant stream of the same face. High cheek bones. Pillowy lips. A dainty nose. A youthful complexion with not a pore, wrinkle or imperfection in sight.
What was once the privilege of an elite few, either by pure luck of the genetic lottery or the financial means to pay for it, is now commonplace. So much so, that it even has a name: Instagram face.
“People don’t even know what a normal person looks like anymore,” says 24-year-old Sydney-based influencer Tilly Whitfeld.
Changing how you look, or age, used to be reserved for celebrities. Getting work done was serious business. It often involved surgery for procedures like breast implants, face lifts or nose jobs. It cost tens of thousands of dollars.
And then came the advent of injectables: anti-wrinkle products can reduce muscle movement, while dermal filler adds volume and can change the shape of facial features.
Kylie Jenner and the power of social media – so those in the industry say – are responsible for popularising such treatments. In 2015 Jenner had her lips injected with dermal filler, aged 17.
It filtered down from celebrity to influencer. And we were taken along for the ride, with our favourite social media stars broadcasting cosmetic injection appointments to their thousands of followers.
Jenner’s famous new features, with the influencers who copied, created a seismic shift, sending droves of young women to their nearest clinic, trying to emulate Instagram face.
It now takes just a lunch break to plump a perfect pout and erase any semblance of the passage of time, sans the price tag or recovery. And without us realising, many women started to resemble each other, asking for the same “work” to be done.
Cosmetic Physicians College of Australasia president Dr David Kosenko says what was once spoken about in whispers has become far more widely accepted thanks to social media.
“There was a trend where people would come in and get their lips done every six months, whether they needed it or not,” Kosenko says.
“And there has certainly been major growth in the younger age groups.”
How many young women are following the trend is unclear, as it’s not a requirement in Australia for clinics to keep a record of demographics.
However, a study conducted last year reports 70 per cent of women aged 18-29 would consider or have had cosmetic treatments.
Whitfeld was one of them. After she appeared as a contestant on Big Brother in 2021, she found herself part of the influencer social scene.
“All of a sudden, the people on my social media were now in my friendship circle. I saw so many people around me doing it (injectables) so I thought I’d do it,” she says.
“I had every second filler company in Sydney sending me messages. To be transparent, I didn’t pay for anything,” Whitfeld reveals.
Instagram was the wild west. Young women, most under 30, were offered hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of work for free. All they needed to do was share their experience.
Nina Vecchio believes she was easily influenced by social media when she started getting anti-wrinkle injections over a decade ago, aged 26. The Sunshine Coast resident estimates she’s spent more than $10,000.
“As soon as I saw a wrinkle, I was straight in getting dermal filler. Not being able to frown was my thing, I didn’t want to frown, “she says. “Social media was just getting big at the time.”
“What I’ve seen mainly over the last 10 years is (social media promotion) gone from information to an entertainment type of advertising,” Kosenko says.
Until now, with the industry in the midst of a shake-up.
Earlier this year, the Therapeutic Goods Administration updated its guidelines so clinics are no longer allowed to use the words dermal filler and anti wrinkle fillers.
In fact, practitioners aren’t even allowed to mention the words “anti-wrinkle” or “dermal filler” without the risk of being fined.
It also means clinics and influencers sharing popular “before and after” photos of their face is a thing of the past. It’s going further with a growing number of young people sharing their journeys of reversing said features on social media.
The #dissolvingfiller has more than 80 million views on TikTok. None of the faces look over 40 and most are women.
Medical professionals are also sharing anecdotes on the rising number of people coming in to have cosmetic treatments reversed as the trend of “cheeks and lips feels mundane”.
I reached out to an influencer who’s shared several videos on TikTok which illustrates her lips shrinking. She didn’t want her name included in this piece, but told me “we are witnessing the death of Instagram face”.
For Whitfeld, the decision to reverse her treatments came after she went under the knife for breast augmentation surgery in August last year.
She says she started to experience side effects immediately. “It was like my body was rejecting the implant,” she recalls.
Whitfeld had explant surgery last month and, despite not having any issues with her other cosmetic work, she’s made the decision to stop all injectables.
“It’s not just me. Five years ago the trend was getting filler in your lips and cheeks. I feel like that’s all changing. Although I do think people are still getting stuff done, they’re just going for a more natural look now,” she says.
She’s in the process of dissolving her filler.
“I’m on my fifth session of trying to remove the filler. And I still have to go back. People don’t realise, you get told it will last six months but it really lasts years and years,” she says. Kosenko agrees, “There have been studies now that show you can see dermal filler still several years later. And it can move, it can migrate.”
Is that why the face we literally saw everywhere is disappearing?
Another theory is it’s generation Z defying the beauty industry.
While gen X and millennials desired and chased perfection, gen Z is destroying it and embracing being unique. And in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, who can afford to display their wealth on their face anymore?
Vecchio, now 37, says she became more confident in her own skin as she aged.
“I look back at photos from when I was younger and I look ridiculous, what was I thinking? I don’t know where my head was at. I am happy with what I see in the mirror now,” she says.
She’ll never get injectables again because, “I worry about the image I’m setting for my son. I want him to see women who look normal. So, I am trying to be more natural now.”
While some say Instagram face is dead, the allure of anti-wrinkle and dermal filler injections remains strong.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency estimates the non-surgical cosmetic industry was worth $1bn in 2023, and it’s increasing.
People are still using injectables, they’re just making it less noticeable.
“Previously, the most common requests centred around more invasive procedures known for their dramatic results,” a doctor working in the field says.
“However, there has been a significant transition towards more subtle enhancements.”
Whitfeld says she’s getting “so many more compliments now I don’t have anything done. My engagement (on social media) has been far higher now I’m posting the health side of things.
“That’s because you can tell when someone is happy inside, they have a glow about them.’’
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Dark Night of Tyranny Descends on Europe. Could We Be Next?
“The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States, and yet lands only in Europe.”
That was author Tom Wolfe way back in the 1970s. He was talking about this curious dynamic in which we hear repeatedly from left-wing commentators and media that America is on the precipice of fascism—but tyranny ends up coming to Europe instead.
Tyranny appears to be again descending on Europe. Unfortunately, in the globalized, interconnected world of the 21st century, I wouldn’t be quite as sure that it won’t land here, too.
Social media have become a “third wave of journalism” as Titus Techera, the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation, wrote Friday in Law & Liberty. The technology has allowed the average citizen and nontraditional journalists to step around institutions and cover stories that might be buried because they didn’t fit a favored narrative.
But our various, interconnected institutions are fighting back and increasingly using government power in coordination with private sector and nonprofit organizations to crack down on unapproved news and opinions.
That appeared to be the case over the weekend when French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the messaging app Telegram, outside a Paris airport on Saturday.
According to NBC News, French prosecutors cited “complicity” in facilitating a whole host of illegal activities. The charges included soliciting fraud and illicit drug sales plus 11 other charges that seem like they could be aimed at most other social media platforms, as well.
French President Emmanuel Macron insisted that there had been a lot of false information spread about Durov’s arrest and that France was still “deeply committed” to freedom of expression, despite the appearance of a political motivation.
“The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation,” Macron said in a statement posted on X—ironically, another social media platform. “It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”
Frankly, when any European leader hollers that they are for free speech it’s about as believable as when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who prosecuted former President Donald Trump for obviously political reasons (while letting all kinds of criminals walk free), claims nobody is “above the law.”
Maybe there is something to the charges against Telegram. Certainly, there have been serious issues with child pornography and other horrible things being facilitated by social media. But it’s hard not to see this as simply an escalation of what we’ve seen from European governments in recent months, in which free speech has been relentlessly attacked in one nation after another.
Earlier this month, the U.K. government began arresting citizens for posting memes on social media.
That was in response to protests and riots that erupted in Southport, Merseyside, after an 17-year-old son of Rwanda immigrants allegedly stabbed and killed three girls and wounded 10 others at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance workshop on July 29.
It wasn’t enough for the U.K. to repress its own citizens, it tried to reach out “across the pond” and silence Americans, too.
London’s Metropolitan Police chief issued a threat to those posting memes abroad.
“We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said in an interview with Sky News.
Thank God for George Washington and the Continental Army, and for the framers of the Constitution, who included the First Amendment to explicitly protect our free speech rights.
While we should be thankful for the patriots of 1776, the European Union and European censorship regimes are nevertheless trying to reach into our country and chill speech anyway.
During the U.K. protests, a former Twitter executive argued in the Guardian that X CEO Elon Musk should be threatened with arrest if he doesn’t control speech on his platform.
EU authorities seemed eager to oblige.
French politician and EU official Thierry Breton—from that land so “deeply committed” to free expression—threatened Musk with siccing the EU Commission on him using the Digital Services Act.
Musk essentially told Breton to get bent. Various free speech groups rebuked Breton, and even other EU officials said that he never received approval to send the letter. Even Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who represents parts of Silicon Valley in California, came out in support of Musk and free speech. Good for him.
But that doesn’t mean the threat wasn’t real.
European countries don’t have the First Amendment, and clearly don’t have much interest in defending free speech. The shallow rhetoric of their politicians means little in the face of authoritarian actions by their governments that increasingly resemble the purer tyrannies of Russia and China.
Unfortunately, many people who hold power in our increasingly ideologically captured American institutions clearly find these European methods of threatening speech in the name of “tolerance” quite appealing.
Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was a witness at the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, also seemed gleeful at the thought of Musk being persecuted.
After Durov was arrested, he warned Musk that he could be next.
“While Durov holds French citizenship, is arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter,” Vindman wrote on X. “There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be nervous.”
Ah, yes, “accountability.”
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was thrown into a gulag for questioning the Soviet regime, that was just appeasing the appetite for accountability, right?
Keep in mind that the bureaucratic agencies that represent the real power in Washington are filled with people like Vindman. You don’t think that if they could use the government to stomp on speech they dislike that they would restrain themselves?
If you think it’s improbable that our federal government wouldn’t arrest and imprison someone for posting memes, well, it’s already happened.
Would a Biden-Harris administration use diplomatic pressure to prevent their domestic political opponents from being threatened by censorship from abroad? They seem to be quite happy to use it here.
Western Europe is fast headed toward tyranny and that certainly serves as a dire warning. As thankful as I am for the First Amendment, it remains what founder James Madison called a “parchment barrier” to repression only as strong as the people and institutions willing to defend and maintain it.
The Constitution may buy us time, but the ultimate marriage of American-style wokeness with European-style censorship would mean the end of liberty in the West if it isn’t derailed
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/27/how-european-censorship-regime-threatens-american-liberty/
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‘Dreams Are Being Crushed’: Gen Z Voter Explains How Biden-Harris Admin Policies Have Caused Young Men To Back Trump
Twenty-two-year-old Gen Z voter Jahmiel Jackson explained Tuesday on Fox News that due to Biden-Harris policies affecting issues like wages and housing, young male voters are shifting toward supporting former President Donald Trump for the November election.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released on Saturday shows men aged 18 to 29 strongly favor Trump over both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. On “The Story With Martha MacCallum,” Jackson, who is a Trump supporter, stated Biden had “crushed one of his biggest dreams” with the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and noted how his friends now struggle to find jobs, earn more money and afford a family and a home.
“My reaction is — well first, when I think about that, I think of when President Biden was first in office when there was a honeymoon period until he tried to pull out of Afghanistan. That’s when he crushed one of my biggest dreams, which was serving in the military right after I graduated college,” Jackson said.
“So then I look at a lot of the friends that I have who are males around my age — they want to have homes, they want to start families, they want to make a lot of money,” Jackson continued. “We all have these individual dreams, and then we start to see that it’s becoming less and less possible. I have guy friends who have finance degrees who are now baristas because they can’t find a job.”
Jackson continued, stating that compared to Trump’s administration, Biden and Harris’ policies have “crushed or hindered” the dreams of many young male voters.
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27 August, 2024
Harris Plays Coy on Child Gender Transitions, But Far-Left Groups Endorsing Child Sex Changes Have Her Back
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has avoided addressing whether she supports transgender surgeries for minors—a far-left position that most Americans do not support. Yet a number of LGBTQ groups that endorse attempted gender transition procedures for children are eagerly backing Harris and her running mate Tim Walz.
A few of these top LGBTQ groups are the American Civil Liberties Union, GLAAD, Advocates for Trans Equality, and the Human Rights Campaign. These organizations, which did not respond to requests for comment, warn against “anti-LGBTQ” legislation, citing fears that Republican politicians will protect children from transgender procedures, classroom discussions of gender and sexuality, and inappropriate drag performances.
Though Walz, as governor of Minnesota, signed an executive order establishing a “right” to trans hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries, the Harris campaign has thus far refused to tell The Daily Signal whether it supports transgender surgeries for minors. The White House referred The Daily Signal to the Harris campaign on the matter.
It’s a question fraught with peril for a campaign closely tied to far-left groups, given the fact that most Americans do not support hormonal or surgical transgender interventions for kids.
The White House, which has previously embraced “medical care” for trans-identifying kids, appears to be aware of this. In early July, the White House flip-flopped on the topic, first telling news outlets that the Biden-Harris administration did not support transgender surgeries for children, before reaffirming support for irreversible procedures for minors after “intense pressure” from LGBTQ groups.
The flip-flopping followed reports that the top trans-identifying leader in the Department of Health and Human Services, Rachel Levine, successfully pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to remove age requirements for minors to get irreversible transgender procedures.
Levine’s office has said that “early” transgender surgeries, hormone treatment, and affirmations are “crucial” for the health of kids and teens who identify as transgender, arguing that if these procedures are not made available to trans-identifying youth, they are at risk of self-harm or suicide.
Research has found that, contrary to those activists’ claims, so-called gender-affirming care increases the likelihood that youth will attempt suicide. According to one April study, “Gender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide-attempt risks, underlining the necessity for comprehensive post-procedure psychiatric support.”
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DEI must DIE
The bullet that whacked Donald Trump’s right ear was by no means the first shot in the hotting-up revolt against the current corporate/bureaucratic ‘woke’ fad of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – the scheme, justified by George Floyd’s 2020 murder, that gives priority to disadvantage and ethnicity over merit. But Donald’s ear has given top-level added momentum to Elon Musk’s rallying battle cry: ‘DEI must DIE’, with Musk declaring that DEI’s supposed anti-discrimination initiatives are a form of discrimination and must end. This was part of Musk’s broad attack on political correctness and ‘woke’ culture that is now being partnered by increasing volumes of concentrated fire at DEI’s woke ally, ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) which denies the primacy of shareholder-owners of corporations in favour of ‘stakeholders’.
With leaders of this revolution among some of America’s previously supportive corporate heads, it is not only political conservatives now manning the barricades to oppose DEI’s assault on merit. And the campaign is not confined to America; the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA), the partly government-funded six-million-dollar ‘charity’ (claiming 1,300 members covering 20 per cent of the Australian workforce) that promotes DEI is concerned about the local consequences.
While Trump’s Republican party has long been a warrior against DEI (with many Republican states banning it in their administrations and the US House of Representatives disbanding its Office of Diversity and Inclusion), Donald’s ear has added a new dimension. When he regained his feet (if not his shoes) after falling to the ground, it was clearly established that the short female Secret Service agents were simply unable to provide adequate physical protection for a tall former (and potentially future) president; his head and upper torso remained a potential target. Then the revelation that this security blunder resulted from the Secret Service having imposed a 30-per-cent female requirement on its hiring criteria raised the inevitable backlash against this DEI dogma; the prime criterion should be suitability for the job, not sex, race or religion.
The campaign against DEI got its major boost in last year’s US Supreme Court majority ruling that the use of affirmative action in university admissions was unconstitutional. While not directly addressing corporate diversity programmes, the decision unleashed a wave of legal actions, including from former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Consumer-facing companies such as Target, Kellanova (formerly Kellogg’s) and Starbucks were targeted, resulting in many US companies stepping back from DEI, while major corporations like Amazon and Nike have been cutting back on their DEI executives and others are ‘quietly quitting’.
The Financial Times has reported that accounting firm PwC dropped some of its diversity targets in the US and ended race-based eligibility criteria. Others, including pharma group Pfizer, opened up diversity fellowships to people of all races. It quoted Professor Yoshino at NYU School of Law, saying, ‘It used to be thought that DEI was above the law. But now the law has come crashing down on that entire enterprise, so we have to think of this as a newly regulated space’. This has generated fears from the Society for Human Resource Management, that this new legal landscape – combined with the continued need for companies to comply with laws preventing workplace discrimination – will prompt a retreat from efforts to foster workplace diversity.
Those fears are being realised. Just a couple of weeks before Donald’s ear highlighted DEI, what Forbes magazine described as a ‘firestorm of controversy’ broke out when Tennessee-based Tractor Supply Company, the nation’s largest rural lifestyle retailer, announced it was pulling back its ‘woke’ policies that it said were unpopular with its customers, after facing weeks of backlash on social media. The farm supply retail chain is eliminating all diversity, equity and inclusion roles and ditching its carbon emissions goals as it moves to sharpen focus on rural America priorities like animal welfare and veteran causes, and stop sponsoring Pride festivals and voting campaigns. Forbes, a continuing backer of DEI and critic of Tractor Supply’s actions, lamented that their withdrawal from the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, came just as ‘Pride Month festivities were dialling down’.
Just a few days after Trump’s ear, the groundswell against DEI received yet another boost when farm machinery giant Deere & Company publicly responded to customer criticism by backing away from its diversity policies. Citing a need to ‘prioritise internal policies that more closely align with our business strategy’, the maker of Deere tractors and other equipment said it would no longer take part in ‘social or cultural awareness’ events, and would audit company-mandated training materials ‘to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages’, leaving the company to ‘exclusively’ focus business resource groups for employees on professional development, mentoring and talent recruitment, ‘rather than race or sexual identity’.
Implications for Australia? DEI was never as dominant in Australia as in the US. Earlier this month, its leading supporters here were reported acknowledging that while a large number of Australian companies ‘are advanced in the DEI space and want to go further, some companies are reducing their investment’. They lamented the ‘backsliding, lip service and even a private backlash’ by sections of corporate Australia, with the rejection of the Voice referendum ‘causing some senior managers to tone down their support for diversity and other social issues’. The ‘politicisation and weaponisation’ of DEI in the US has led to a backlash that has ‘emboldened some Australian executives and leaders who didn’t really believe in DEI to begin with, and giving them a platform and more conviction to steer away from it’.
Nevertheless, this month the CEO of DCA, Lisa Annese, told the media that she remained ‘optimistic about the future of diversity and inclusion in Australia’, including the half-a-million dollar RISE (Realise. Inspire. Support. Energise) project fully funded by the Albanese government Office for Women. This is aimed at ‘implementing organisational change interventions that will help address systemic and organisational barriers for culturally and racially marginalised (CARM) women and to assist organisations in supporting women in middle management to reach senior leadership positions within their organisations. ‘We use the term CARM to refer to people who are not white’, says DCA, confirming its assistance is colour-based.
As its critics assert, efficiency, competitiveness and excellence are antithetical to the social engineering of DEI. In a competitive world, DEI must DIE.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/business-assassination-etc/
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The Islamists want to silence music the way they have free speech
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack on Friday at a festival in Germany that left three people dead and many more wounded. In a statement they said one of their ‘soldiers’ carried out the attack ‘as revenge against Muslims in Palestine and everywhere’.
As soon as news broke of Friday’s attack in the town of Solingen, fifteen miles east of Düsseldorf, seasoned observers of Islamist extremism knew who to blame.
Despite the risible posturing of western governments in recent years that far-right fanatics pose as great a threat to our way of life as Islamic extremists, the people aren’t fooled. It’s not the far-right who have murdered priests, police officers, schoolteachers, journalists and Jewish children. Nor have they targeted music venues which is clearly the new strategy of Islamist terrorists.
It began in 2015, when an Islamic State terror cell massacred 130 people at the Bataclan theatre in Paris, where they had gathered to watch a heavy metal band.
Two years later a suicide bomber killed 22 people, mostly youngsters, in Manchester as they danced to the American singer Ariana Grande.
In March this year, Islamic State gunmen murdered 137 people in Moscow as they attended a concert by the rock band Picnic. In the wake of that attack, some western journalists linked the targeting of Picnic to their support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Islamic State slaughtered 145 people in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall for the same reason they did in the Bataclan and for the same reason they planned to at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna earlier this month.
Acting on information provided by foreign intelligence services, Austrian police arrested three young men described as ‘ISIS sympathisers’, who were preparing to launch a suicide attack during the concert.
Islamic extremists consider listening to music a sin. When the Islamic State established its caliphate in Iraq and Syria a decade ago it banned the sale and the playing of music. ‘Stringed instruments and songs are forbidden in Islam because they distract from the evocation of God and the Koran, and are a source of trouble and corruption for the heart,’ they said in a statement.
Claiming that music is illicit is also a means for Islamists to reinforce the ‘them’ and ‘us’ narrative in the west; in taking responsibility for the attack in Paris in November 2015, Islamic State described France as the ‘capital of prostitution and obscenity’.
Their strategy is working. In December last year an extensive survey about French Muslims and their relationship with religion and secularism found that 49 percent of Muslim pupils in French schools absented themselves from music lessons on religious grounds.
Claiming that music is illicit is also a means for Islamists to reinforce the ‘them’ and ‘us’ narrative in the west
What the Islamists hate (and fear) most is music from the mouths of young liberated women who are free to wear and say what they like. Taylor Swift, who has built a huge army of many millions of fans around the world – known as ‘Swifties’ – embodies this emancipation.
In an interview with Elle magazine in 2019, Swift said that the Manchester bombing two years earlier had left her ‘completely terrified to go on tour’. Not just for own safety, but the millions of fans attending her shows.
Austrian police may have averted a catastrophe this month but in a sense the Islamic State can still celebrate a victory; Swift’s three concerts in Vienna were cancelled so they silenced the music.
This is what the Islamists ultimately want, to rid or at least restrict music in Europe. They will be encouraged by the success they have had in restricting freedom of expression in the ten years since they murdered the staff of Charlie Hebdo. ‘Je suis Charlie’, cried Europe as one in the immediate aftermath, but who now has the courage to criticise Islam?
‘We have to live bravely in order to truly feel alive, and that means not being ruled by our greatest fears,’ said Swift in 2019.
The Islamists know that Europe is not a continent brimming with courage. Teachers, journalists and politicians now self-censor to avoid causing offence and endangering themselves. How long before musicians and music teachers pack away their instruments for good?
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Doctors quit British Medical Union over ‘woke’ transgender stance
Doctors are leaving the British Medical Association in revolt at its opposition to the Cass review, amid claims that the union has been taken over by an ideologically driven “vocal minority”.
Hundreds of members, including NHS clinical leaders and former presidents of medical royal colleges, have gone public with their “dismay” at BMA leaders for voting to reject the Cass review into the care of transgender children and reverse a ban on puberty blockers.
Some have resigned from the union after up to 50 years as members, and others said that the BMA’s “abysmal” leadership was “increasingly bonkers” and “ideologically captured”.
The rift began on July 31 when the BMA announced that it would lobby against the implementation of the Cass review, a four-year review which recommended an end to the practice of prescribing sex hormones to children with gender dysphoria on the NHS.
The rest of the medical establishment and the NHS have fully accepted and supported the review by Hilary Cass, a paediatrician, but the BMA has said that it will set up a group to “publicly critique” the review.
The union’s council, an elected policy-forming body of 69 members, was asked to vote on a motion rejecting the Cass review at a meeting described by critics as “secretive and opaque”. The motion passed, making it formal BMA policy, although the breakdown of votes has not been made available and the BMA’s membership base of 195,000 doctors was not consulted.
The motion was tabled at the BMA council by Tom Dolphin, a consultant anaesthetist in London, and Vassili Crispi, a junior doctor in Birmingham who has said that “rejecting the Cass review is one of many steps we need to take”.
It was backed by Emma Runswick, deputy chair of the BMA council, who is the ringleader of a left-wing and pro-strike coalition of junior doctors elected to the leadership body in 2022. Runswick has described the ban on puberty blockers as a “terrible decision” and repeated a debunked claim that it had led to more suicides.
Some other senior members of the BMA council were perplexed that they were being asked to vote on the issue at all and said that it did not reflect the views of the wider membership.
Jacky Davis, a consultant radiologist and member of the BMA council who opposed the motion, said: “The BMA council contains a vocal minority who have an anti-Cass agenda. They are driving policy in a direction that the membership have not been consulted on and do not agree with.
“This minority has voted to block the implementation of Cass, an evidence-based review which took four years to put together. They have no evidence for their opposition. The Cass review is not a matter for a trade union. It is not our business as a union to be doing a critique of the Cass review. It is a waste of time and resources.”
Davis said that the motion should have been debated at the BMA’s annual representative meeting in June, rather than being put straight to a vote at the council. “We are a membership organisation and members deserve to be consulted and to know what happens at council. At the moment there is no accountability and transparency about what has gone on,” she said.
Hilary Cass’s recommendations have been accepted by the rest of the medical profession. One member of the BMA council said that the minority who had voted to block implementation of the review had ”no evidence for their opposition”
The Cass review is the biggest ever carried out into the treatment of children struggling with their gender, with a team at the University of York reviewing data from 113,000 children. The BMA has argued that there are “weaknesses in the methodologies” used by Cass and that its recommendations are “unsubstantiated”.
More than 1,400 doctors, 900 of whom are BMA members, have signed an open letter calling for the BMA to drop its opposition to Cass. The letter criticises the union’s leaders for “going against the principles of evidence-based medicine and against ethical practice”. The letter has been signed by high-profile figures, including nearly 70 professors and 23 former or current presidents of medical royal colleges.
Comments left by signatories include dozens saying that they are resigning or considering resigning their membership. Many doctors criticised members of the council, with one calling for a “vote of no confidence in BMA leadership”, another saying that it was “an abysmal failure of leadership” and another commenting that “activists appear to have been allowed to take over”.
Professor Philip Banfield, chairman of the BMA council, said that a “task and finish” group set up to evaluate the Cass review would report on progress at the end of the year. He said: “The process necessitates debate, scrutiny and methodological rigour, and we will go to great lengths to ensure that the BMA task and finish group, taking on this important work, will utilise the expertise of the professional body that has been the cornerstone of the association since its inception in 1832.”
The BMA’s stance has had no impact on the NHS’s commitment to implement the recommendations of the Cass review, including only prescribing puberty blockers in clinical trials. The NHS said that it had “full confidence” in the Cass report.
A spokesman for the Cass review said: “The systematic reviews undertaken by the University of York, which underpin the review’s findings, are the largest and most comprehensive to date. They looked at 237 papers from 18 countries, providing information on a total of 113,269 children and adolescents.
“All of the University of York’s systematic review research papers were subject to peer review, a cornerstone of academic rigour and integrity to ensure that the methods, findings, and interpretation of the findings met the highest standards of quality, validity and impartiality.
“As stated in the final report, while open and constructive debate is needed about the findings of the review and its recommendations, everybody should remember the children and young people trying to live their lives and the families/carers and clinicians doing their best to support them. All should be treated with compassion and respect.”
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26 August, 2024
The cults that rule us
A salient feature of the last decade or so has been the steady rise of bizarre cults with legions of fervent true believers, even though we have virtually zero rational grounds for believing in the central tenets of these secular religions. The weirdest thing about these cults is the way in which their true believers ardently sacrifice the very things they claim they wish to save. Consider the following:
1). COVID-19 illness presents close to ZERO risk to healthy children, but this hasn’t stopped the Vaccine Cult from demanding that children receive the dangerous, experimental shots that are neither effective nor safe. The most spectacular irrational outcome is the high incidence of vaccine-induced myocarditis among young athletes from whom COVID-19 posed zero risk.
2). Wind turbines are extremely inefficient producers of electricity that kill hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, wreak havoc in the marine environment when they are placed offshore, and ruin the physical beauty of the landscape. Nevertheless, the bizarre Climate Cult insists that wind turbines are a key weapon in our arsenal for reducing carbon emissions, which the Climate Cult fervently believes to be causing a rise in the earth’s temperature. Destroy nature in order to save it!
3). A human male will obviously have an unfair advantage over a female in almost all competitive sports. And yet, in their fervent proselytization of the bizarre Transgender Cult, votaries have largely succeeded in destroying women’s sports and the dreams of the girls and women who train for them.
4). Importing legions of young men from Arab countries into European countries in which these young men struggle to integrate and find gainful employment has resulted in a marked reduction of public safety in European cities, especially for young women. Yesterday here in Vienna, I had lunch with the former chief of police, who told me that stabbings are indeed much higher in certain districts of Vienna than they ever were in the past. The perpetrators are almost always young males who came to Vienna during the 2015 European migrant crisis.
And yet, the Diversity Cult persists in its bizarre, fetishistic belief that racial diversity per se is necessarily a good thing. Yesterday evening, while pondering the irrationality of the Diversity Cult, I saw the news that a young, foreign-born man stabbed 11 people and killed three at the "Festival of Diversity" that was underway in Solingen, Germany. Diversity will purportedly strengthen and revitalize Germany in the 21st century, even when it results in mass homicide.
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/destroying-villages-in-order-to-save
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An Israeli hostage deal with Hamas only guarantees future atrocities
by Jeff Jacoby
IN FEBRUARY 1862, Union troops commanded by General Ulysses S. Grant attacked Fort Donelson, a major Confederate position. When the officer commanding the fort realized he could not prevail, he sent word to Grant offering to discuss a surrender. To his astonishment, Grant refused to negotiate.
"No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted," Grant replied. "I propose to move immediately upon your works."
That terse battlefield reply made Grant a national hero, and it foreshadowed the war's final outcome, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.
During World War II, the Allies adopted Grant's position. At the Casablanca Conference in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared that the war could end only with the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis powers.
Some conflicts end through negotiation. But with some enemies, the only acceptable defeat is unconditional defeat. The slaveholding American South was such an enemy. So were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And so is Hamas, the genocidal terrorist regime in Gaza that unleashed such savagery on Israel on Oct. 7.
It has been more than 10 months since waves of Hamas-organized killers launched an unprovoked invasion of southern Israel, slaughtering nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 251 hostages. In the war that erupted that day, Israel has frequently reiterated that total victory over Hamas is the goal.
Yet even as the war proceeds, Israel is engaged in negotiations with Hamas to secure the release of hostages, 109 of whom are still in captivity. On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in the region for the ninth time since Oct. 7, pressed Israel's leaders to seize what he called "maybe the last opportunity" to negotiate a cease-fire and the hostages' release. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted the latest American proposal. But Hamas has already rejected it, which means pressure on Israel's leaders to make ever-deeper concessions in order to get its hostages back will continue.
Much of that pressure is internal: Nearly two-thirds of Israelis are in favor of a hostage deal along the lines being discussed. That means they support the release of up to 1,000 Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorist activity and other security offenses. At least 100 of those prisoners are murderers serving life sentences. Everyone in Israel knows the price being demanded is steep. But so all-consuming is the national yearning to bring the hostages home, and so intense the empathy for the suffering of their families, that most Israelis are prepared to accept even exorbitant terms in order to end the pain.
But a hostage deal won't end the pain for long. It will only guarantee more of it.
Over the decades, Jerusalem has repeatedly agreed to release scores, hundreds, even thousands of terrorists and jihadist prisoners to buy the freedom of a handful of Israeli captives — or, in many cases, the return of their corpses. By now the pattern is so well established that Israel's enemies take it for granted. "What we have in our hands," a top Hamas official gloated to Al Jazeera on Oct. 7, "will release all our prisoners." Last November, Israel agreed to a temporary cease-fire and the freeing of 240 Palestinian terrorists in order to bring 105 hostages home. Now Hamas demands another 1,000 militants be turned loose as the price of freeing the remaining Israeli captives.
Israel is a democracy. If a majority of its citizens are prepared to support such lopsided deals, then it's all but certain Israel's government will comply.
Yet it is also all but certain that the result will be more innocent Israelis killed, wounded, and kidnapped in future atrocities — atrocities carried out by some of the very terrorists Israel releases. That has been the outcome of every such deal Israel has agreed to in the past.
In 1985, for example, the Jewish state set 1,150 Palestinian security prisoners free in exchange for three Israeli captives. Dozens of those freed prisoners returned to terrorist activity. Among them was a Muslim Brotherhood activist named Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas a few months later, launching an unimaginable train of slaughter and savagery.
In 2011, to liberate a kidnapped soldier named Gilad Shalit, Israel released 1,027 imprisoned terrorists. Among them were two prominent Palestinian murderers, Yahya Sinwar and Rawhi Mushtaha. Today Sinwar is Hamas's senior commander and Mushtaha (until he was killed last month) was among his closest confidants. The Oct. 7 nightmare, in other words, was planned by terrorists who were released in the Shalit deal. Israel was overjoyed when Shalit was freed, but the price of that freedom has been unspeakable: thousands of Israelis murdered, raped, and kidnapped, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Palestinian lives lost in the current fighting.
Israel will never have peace as long as it keeps negotiating such deals. The only terms Hamas should be offered are unconditional surrender. As Israel and its allies must know by now, anything less will mean more horror and bloodshed, for Jews and Arabs alike.
https://jeffjacoby.com/27992/an-israeli-hostage-deal-with-hamas-only
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‘Affirmative action has led to reverse racism’, says Scott Galloway
New York University marketing professor, best-selling author and business podcaster Scott Galloway has told an audience of Australian business professionals that affirmative action policies have failed and given rise to reverse racism.
Speaking in Sydney at the ADMA Global Forum on Tuesday, Professor Galloway said diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives, such as affirmative action in the US, had created a situation where policies are advantaging 76 per cent of the population and discriminating against 24 per cent.
“I think any race-based affirmative action in the corporate world, or in universities, causes more problems than it solves at this point,” he told the room via video link from the US.
Professor Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, argued that the policies, introduced in the US by president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, began with the right intentions but were no longer effective in contributing to equality.
“In 1960 there were only 12 blacks at Princeton, Harvard and Yale combined. That was a problem, race-based affirmative action and DE&I made a lot of sense. This year 51 per cent of Harvard’s freshman class is non-white. The problem is 70 per cent of those come from dual-income, upper-income homes.
“We advantage women. Women have taken a tremendous amount of shit, they have made less, they deserve some advantage. Well, what about non-whites, right? They’ve consistently gotten a raw deal. What about the gay people? We persecuted gay people. What about Japanese? We interned them in camps.
“Where it’s gotten to is now DE&I offices in affirmative action roles at corporations and universities are now advantaging 76 per cent of the populace and we are damaging 76 per cent of the populace. You’re not advantaging anybody, you’re discriminating against the 24 per cent.
“We’ve ended up in a weird spot where the snake is eating its own tail, and we have a certain amount of reverse racism, and these departments can’t be questioned or you’re called a racist.”
Professor Galloway said the systems created around affirmative action and DE&I policies and initiatives had become self-serving and were supported by “fake metrics”, which are tolerated but ignored by CEOs who “continue to make choices around shareholder value”.
He believes affirmative action is still needed in universities but should be based on income level, rather than gender, race or sexuality. And he said businesses should be responsible for making more diverse hires. “Corporations should do a better job of hiring non-certification, not-elite-college graduates, and creating on-ramps for people from lower-middle income backgrounds.”
The serial entrepreneur, who has served on the board of directors of The New York Times Company, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Panera Bread and Ledger, also talked about the crisis of masculinity, a subject he is writing a book about, and the need for more action.
“People can feel something is going on with young men and at the same time no one is doing anything about it. So into that void of concern slipped some really unproductive voices in ‘the manosphere’ with this thinly veiled misogyny … whenever anyone was advocating for young men … there was a gag reflex that this is just another thinly veiled misogynist.”
He juxtaposed his comments by highlighting the “march upward” young women were making. “I want to be clear that we should do absolutely nothing to get in the way of women’s march upward, the problem is we need to have an honest conversation around the nadir, with women horizontally and up, men horizontally and down.”
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It’s a bad day for biology
Sall Grover, founder of The Giggle for Girls app, has been ordered to pay $10,000 in compensation plus legal costs after losing to transgender individual Roxanne Tickle. This falls a long way short of the $200,000 originally sought.
Sall Grover reacted to the decision on Twitter:
‘Unfortunately, we got the judgement we anticipated. The fight for women’s rights continues.’
Rachael Wong added:
‘I am sitting here reflecting on this morning’s verdict in Tickle v Giggle and flipping between being outraged at the fact that women and girls have no sex-based rights in Australia, are not even recognised as a legal category anymore in Australia, and sort of being like well we’ve already known this for some time.’
Roxanne Tickle, who was born male but has identified as a woman for many years, was excluded from the female-only app back in 2021. This exclusion, it was argued, constituted gender identity discrimination.
Justice Robert Bromwich said of the decision:
‘The indirect discrimination cases succeeded because Ms Tickle was excluded from the use of the Giggle app because she did not look sufficiently female according to the respondents.’
Effectively, this means that gender identity is superior to biological sex when it comes to discriminating against individuals in sex-segregated spaces.
‘What is a woman?’
The once simple question has now become a complicated matter of what the law determines a woman to be.
‘We’re with you all the way,’ said Victorian MP Moira Deeming, to Sall Grover.
Those who continue to fight for sex-based rights – in law – insist that biology is immutable, regardless of gender-affirming surgery or legal actions such as the changing of gender on a birth certificate.
This sits fundamentally at odds with the transgender movement which leans heavily into ‘Self ID’ where individuals assert their preferred gender based on a variety of actions that may or may not include physical alterations. In some cases, a declaration of gender identity is all that is required.
Where does this leave women’s rights for biological women?
Is there such a thing as a sex-segregated space in Australia?
These are the questions being asked in the aftermath of this case, particularly on the hashtag #IstandwithSallGrover which has been trending around the world.
‘[This is] a major step forward for the freedom and equality of all women,’ said Jackie Turner from Trans Justice Project.
Not all women agree.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/biology-bows-to-gender-identity/
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25 August, 2024
Does the Bible say that Israel is the land of the Jews?
Dr. Naomi Wolf says not, although she is herself Jewish:
I reproduce her comments below. My rejoinder first:
She has a point. In Genesis 12: 6, later amplified in chapter 15, God (Yahweh) says that Abraham and his descendants ("seed) were given ownership of the land of Israel due to their covenant to worship him and obey his commandments. And that was a "covenant" or contract. They got the land as part of a deal, the deal being that they worship and obey Yahweh, the Hebrew God. There were lots of Gods around at thetime so which one you worshipped was important and significant.
But Ms Wolf is right that other people could become covenanters (part of the deal) by also worshipping Yahweh and doing his bidding. So being a genetic descendant of Abrahan was significant but not crucial to being part of the covenanters and gaining their rights.
So outsiders could become adopted into the covenanted people but that did not in any way reduce the Yahweh-given rights of Abraham's "seed" to the land of the Canaanites.
And even the descendants of Abraham could lose their rights by stopping worship of Yahweh.
But that people could be both kicked out of and adopted into the Abrahamic family still left that family with inherited rights to the land concerned
Ms Wolf is correct in saying that behaviour matters in who is bound by and affected by the covenant but WHICH behavour is the point. And it is worship of Yaweh that is the key, not just generally doing good
And that the descendants of the original covenanters and their "seed" continued to regard the land concerned as theirs we see throughout the rest of the Bible. They continued to live there and returned there after both their sojourn in Egypt and after their Babylonian exile.
So if nothing more, it is an historical fact that the Yahweh-worshipping descendants of the Abrahamic covenanters continued to live in what we now call Israel for many centuries after the original covenant.
But perhaps Ms Wolf does us a favour by noting that the people concerned were NOT racists. Genetic descent was important but others could be welcomed into the tribe by worshipping their god and following his rules. And Israel to this day honours that.
But her saying that ownership of the land is "NOT ABOUT A CONTRACT" is a blatant lie. She must not know the meaning of the word "covenant"
"Okay, so I was challenged below: "Read the Bible! God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people."
"So....I may get crucified for this but I have started to say it -- most recently (terrified, trembling) to warm welcome in a synagogue in LA: Actually if you read Genesis Exodus and Deuteronomy in Hebrew -- as I do -- you see that God did not "give" Israel to the Jews/Israelites.
We as Jews are raised with the creed that "God gave us the land of Israel" in Genesis -- and that ethnically 'we are the chosen people." But actually -- and I could not believe my eyes when I saw this, I checked my reading with major scholars and they confirmed it -- actually God's "covenant" in Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy with the Jewish people is NOT ABOUT AN ETHNICITY AND NOT ABOUT A CONTRACT. IT IS ABOUT A WAY OF BEHAVING.
Again and again in the "covenant" language He never says: "I will give you, ethnic Israelites, the land of Israel." Rather He says something far more radical - far more subversive -- far more Godlike in my view. He says: IF you visit those imprisoned...act mercifully to the widow and the orphan...welcome the stranger in your midst...tend the sick...do justice and love mercy ....and perform various other tasks...THEN YOU WILL BE MY PEOPLE AND THIS LAND WILL BE YOUR LAND.
So "my people" is not ethnic -- it is transactional. We are God's people not by birth but by a way of behaving, that is ethical, kind and just. And we STOP being "God's people" when we are not ethical, kind and just. And ANYONE who is ethical, kind and just is, according to God in Genesis, "God's people." And the "contract" to "give" us Israel is conditional -- we can live in God's land IF we are "God's people" in this way -- just, merciful, compassionate. AND -- it never ever says, it is ONLY your land.
Even when passages spell out geographical "boundaries" as if God does such a thing, it never says this is exclusively your land. It never says I will give this land JUST to you. Remember these were homeless nomads who had left slavery in Egypt and were wandering around in the desert; at most these passages say, settle here, but they do not say, settle here exclusively. Indeed again and again it talks about welcoming "zarim" -- translated as "strangers" but can also be translated as "people/tribes who are not you" -- in your midst. Blew my mind, hope it blows yours"
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The procrustean Kamala
Kamala Harris keeps telling us she wants ‘equity’ not ‘equality.’ What does she mean? She is using ‘equality’ to means ‘equality of opportunity’ while (for her) ‘equity’ means ‘equality of outcome’. Harris has said repeatedly that what she wants is for everyone ‘to end up in the same place’. And that means, she says, that some people (the disadvantaged) will need more help (positive discrimination) and others will need less. She sometimes calls this ‘social justice’.
But there’s the problem. Justice normally means unequal outcomes. In most court cases, when justice is done, one side wins and the other side loses. The person charged with a crime is found to be ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’. If the prosecution wins, then the defence has to lose. If a complainant sues a plaintiff in a civil case the court will find for either the complainant or the plaintiff. One side wins and the other loses. They don’t ‘both end up in the same place’.
The justice system provides equality of opportunity (to present evidence, to argue their case, etc.) but never provides equality of outcomes. And ‘equality of outcome’ can only work in a society if some (the hard working, the talented) are cheated, and others (the lazy, the dull) are given an unfair advantage. Society is ‘unjust’ in the same way the 100-metres sprint is unjust—only one person comes first, others come second or third, or fail to finish in a place.
And that outcome is ‘fair’ because they have different abilities. To force them all to ‘end up in the same place’ (all come first, simultaneously) would be unfair. That’s why so-called ‘equity’ (equality of outcome) is a con, a cheat, and damaging to society.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/language-123/
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UK: Yvette Cooper’s chilling crackdown on ‘harmful’ beliefs
Brendan O'Neill
Why is there not more disquiet over Yvette Cooper’s promise to crack down on ‘harmful’ beliefs? To my mind it ranks as one of the most chilling political pledges of the modern era. The thought of a Labour government, or any government, imperiously decreeing which ideas are ‘harmful’ and which are benign leaves me cold. It’s a first step to tyranny and it needs to be walked back.
A war on ‘harmful’ beliefs would give the government a blank cheque to demonise views that are old-fashioned, possibly unpopular or just not very PC
The Home Secretary has commissioned a rapid review of ‘extremist ideologies’ as part of a new government counter-extremism strategy. She has vowed to come down hard on people who push ‘harmful or hateful beliefs’. The aim is to tackle head-on any online or offline activity that ‘promotes violence or undermines democracy’. Her mission has acquired a new sense of urgency, it seems, following the recent riots, which were in part fuelled by misleading or outright bigoted blather online.
No one aside from a handful of nutters will oppose feeling the collars of people who promote violence. Inciting violence is illegal. If you do it you’re in trouble. But Cooper’s other categories of ‘harmful’ thought are flabbier and more troubling. Consider her promise to tackle ideologies that undermine democracy. What does this mean?
I hate to relitigate the recent past – really, I do – but would it mean that Remainers who tried to block the enactment of the largest democratic vote in the history of these isles might get a knock on the door from Cooper’s crusaders against extremist thought? Perhaps Cooper will pop over to No. 10 itself and have a stern word with her boss, Keir Starmer. After all, as shadow Brexit secretary under Jeremy Corbyn he was forever agitating for a second referendum, which would have entailed voiding the first vote. Was that ‘harmful activity’ that threatened to ‘undermine democracy’?
Of course, Remainers are going to be fine. Cooper is hardly about to crack down on her own dinner-party set, is she? And therein lies the entire problem with censorship, with entrusting officialdom to sort ideas into boxes marked ‘acceptable’ or ‘unutterable’. It gives government the awesome and terrifying power to shape public discourse to its own ideological tastes. Censorship is always dolled up as a heroic effort to protect the public from ‘harmful’ ideas, but in truth it is about ensuring the public is primarily exposed to ideas the government approves of.
I have no doubt that in the eyes of Cooper’s Home Office, ‘undermining democracy’ is when a couple of thousand far-right oafs gather in Whitehall, not when a hundred thousand nice people from leafy suburbs march to say ‘Stop Brexit’. It is a short step from ‘countering extremism’ to countering ideas the government dislikes while signal-boosting ideas it does like. Whatever their lofty social promises, crusades against problematic speech have a terrible tendency to empower official narratives at the expense of dissenting ones.
Ask yourself: what is a ‘harmful’ belief? And more to the point, who gets to decide? It is a mere three years since Starmer thundered that it is ‘not right’ to say only women have a cervix. That is ‘something that shouldn’t be said’, he cried after one of his MPs – the heroic Rosie Duffield – committed that very blasphemy of stating basic biological facts. Are we seriously expected to trust a government led by this man to rule on what is a harmful belief and what is an okay belief? Given he once thought basic biology was ‘something that shouldn’t be said’, who knows what perfectly normal, scientifically correct belief he might rebrand as ‘harmful’ in the near future.
In this era of hyper-fragility, people claim to be ‘harmed’ by words all the time. Say ‘I’m not sure about same-sex marriage’ or ‘I don’t think biological males should box women at the Olympics’ and you will inevitably trigger a million right-on saps crying, ‘Stop erasing me!’ If the government sends the signal that ‘harmful’ beliefs are unacceptable under its watch, we will witness of orgy of grievance-mongering as all sorts of social groups agitate for the crushing of beliefs that make them feel uncomfortable or just sad.
Indeed, I can envision entire belief systems being reimagined as ‘harmful’. Some already have been. Traditional Catholics, for example. They think marriage should only be between a man and a woman, that sex is determined by God not scalpel-wielding gender surgeons, and that only followers of Christ get to Heaven. That’s homophobic, transphobic and Islamophobic, right? In other words: harmful. Shut them down!
A war on ‘harmful’ beliefs would give the government a blank cheque to demonise and shush views that are old-fashioned, possibly unpopular or just not very PC. Labour would do well to remember that one man’s ‘harmful’ belief is another man’s heartfelt moral conviction. To the aloof operators of Yvette Cooper’s Home Office, angry public bristling against mass immigration or impassioned agitation against gender ideology might appear ‘harmful’ – but to many others it is legitimate, important commentary.
The harms of censorship outweigh the supposed harms of controversial speech every single time. I would far rather be exposed to a ‘harmful’ idea than have my eyes and ears covered by Cooper and her fellow paternalists in Whitehall. At least my autonomy and self-respect would remain intact.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/yvette-coopers-chilling-crackdown-on-harmful-beliefs/
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UK: Top cop's mic grab sets a dreadful example to other police officers
A Sky News reporter having his microphone grabbed and dropped to the ground might seem like a trifling story right now, given everything that’s happening in the country. But when the mic-grabber is none other than Sir Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, it’s a different matter. A very different matter. In a democracy, cops don’t treat journalists in such a dismissive, degrading fashion.
It was outside the Cabinet Office that Sir Mark outrageously interfered with the property of a reporter. The man from Sky News asked him if he was going to ‘end two-tier policing’. And instead of answering – or not answering, if he wants to be a big baby about it – Sir Mark yanked Sky’s mic and seemed to push it to the ground. As he then arrogantly strutted to his car, the reporter could be heard saying: ‘Did he just do that?’
Yes, he did. And it was beyond inappropriate. For the most powerful cop in the country to manhandle an instrument of journalism, to try to physically prevent a reporter from recording something, sends a terrible message. Will Sir Mark’s lower-downs now behave likewise? Will they take their cue from the big man and grab and discard the kit of any journalist who asks them a pesky question?
It felt like a mask-off moment. It seemed to reveal a haughty disregard on the part of Sir Mark, and perhaps the Met more broadly, for the right of reporters to interrogate people in power. Rowley didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. His lunging for the mic and his puffed-up demeanour said it all: ‘I’m not speaking to a lowlife like you.’
It was the physicality of the encounter that truly rankled. What if Sir Mark had broken that mic? I can see the global headlines now: ‘Chief British Police Officer Smashes Journalist’s Equipment.’ There was a palpable authoritarian undertone to Sir Mark’s gruff behaviour. It felt like more than exasperation – it felt like intolerance. Intolerance for the freedom of the press to ask questions that make officials feel uncomfortable.
In this case, it seems to have been the reporter’s query about ‘two-tier policing’ that pushed the Met boss over the edge. I’ve noticed an extreme defensiveness on this question. Keir Starmer, too, bristled at the suggestion that cops are treating the current rioting mobs more harshly than they did other recent acts of brutish disorder. It’s a ‘non-issue’, he said. Leftists online are as one with Sir Mark and Sir Keir, furiously denouncing all talk of two-tier policing as a ‘conspiracy theory’.
Is it possible they protest too much? To many it seems at least plausible to ask whether the current riots are being policed and condemned more ferociously than the Harehills riot in Leeds last month was. And didn’t Sir Keir take the knee in the fashion of Black Lives Matter in August 2020 when the BLM protests were at their height? Some on the left described the England riots of 2011, with all their arson and looting and death, as an uprising against austerity. Yet now street violence horrifies them. It all has at least the whiff of a double standard, no?
Regardless, the point is that reporters must have the right to ask such questions, even if they irritate the top dog of the armed wing of the state. In recent years, both the political class and the police have too often been disdainful of press freedom. Yet without that freedom, we’re screwed. Reporters holding officialdom’s feet to the fire is what keeps a nation free and informed. Sir Mark must apologise to Sky News and make it clear that none of his officers should ever meddle with the property or the liberty of a journalist.
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22 August, 2024
Eating just two slices of ham per day could raise diabetes risk
Rubbish! Another meta-analysis! You can prove anything you want by a meta-analysis. What you include and exclude is the key. And the "finding" here is totally predictable -- being a confirmation of a popular belief
Journal article here:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(24)00179-7/fulltext
Note that the finding was observed "in North America and in the European and Western Pacific regions" only. And note that the only confounders allowed for appear to have been age, sex, and BMI
Eating a ham sandwich a day could increase the risk of type 2 diabetes by 15 per cent, a study has found.
The team, from the University of Cambridge, found that processed meat and unprocessed red meat significantly increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the next decade.
The researchers found that just 50 grams of processed meat per day - equivalent to two slices of ham - increased the risk by 15 per cent. Consuming red meat every day had a similar effect: those who had just 100 grams, the equivalent of a small steak, had a 10 per cent higher risk of diabetes in the next ten years.
The team also tested whether the consumption of poultry had the same effect, but found that this was minimal when controlling for factors such as age, gender and health-related behaviours, including smoking and drinking alcohol.
Professor Nita Forouhi of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, a senior author on the paper, said: “Our research provides the most comprehensive evidence to date of an association between eating processed meat and unprocessed red meat and a higher future risk of type 2 diabetes.
“It supports recommendations to limit the consumption of processed meat and unprocessed red meat to reduce type 2 diabetes cases.”
The research, published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, used data from 31 different previous studies. Figures came from the InterConnect Project, which meant that researchers could analyse the data of the individual and not the results of the previous research as a whole. Data came from about two million participants across 20 different countries.
Professor Naveed Sattar, from the University of Glasgow, said: “The data suggest cutting red and processed meats from diets may not only protect people from heart disease and stroke but also from type 2 diabetes, a disease on the rise worldwide.
“Furthermore, a considerable part of the latter link may be weight gain but other mechanisms may be possible. Food systems should be adapted accordingly for the benefit of planetary and public health.”
Previous research, published last year, has also found that eating red meat only twice a week significantly increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
The research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that those who ate at least two portions of meat each day - such as bacon for breakfast then a ham sandwich for lunch - were 62 per cent more likely to get diabetes than those who limited themselves to two servings of red meat a week.
Diabetes occurs when a person’s blood sugar becomes chronically high as the body stops producing or responding to insulin. Most cases are type 2 which can be linked to poor diet and obesity. Cases have doubled over the past two decades and last year 4.3 million people in Britain were living with a formal diagnosis, while about one million adults are living with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes.
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Scarcity by Decree
Despite recent decreases in overall inflation, grocery prices continue to strain American budgets. Even in Denver, where inflation is a full percentage point lower than the national average, food costs remain a significant concern. As we move deeper into election season, the persistent issue of high grocery prices has thrust price gouging into the spotlight of policy debates.
A recent policy speech by Democratic nominee Kamala Harris suggests her administration would aim to combat price gouging on grocery items at the federal level. While this policy offers a tempting quick fix to voters burdened by high food costs, it risks doing harm in the name of doing good. Such price control measures, however well-intentioned, are unlikely to achieve their desired outcome and may even exacerbate the problem.
You don't need an economics degree to understand why price controls backfire—it's basic Econ 101. Today's rising prices aren't just greedy corporations pulling a fast one. It's not corporate greed emptying our wallets at the checkout counter—it's the government's monetary mismanagement inflating our grocery bills. Despite rising profits, even retail giants like Walmart still have profit margins less than 3%. Rising prices are the result of pandemic policies that pumped more money into people's pockets, coupled with tariffs implemented by the Trump administration and maintained under the Biden-Harris administration. When everyone's spending more, but supplies are constrained, prices naturally go up. That's exactly what we've seen play out over the last few years.
Imagine a world with federal price gouging laws. When demand surges, the government might cap price increases at 5% instead of the market-driven 10%. The result? Demand keeps climbing, but suppliers, constrained by artificial price limits, can’t justify increasing supply. This mismatch leads to shortages—remember the hand sanitizer shortages and rationing during the pandemic? That wasn’t just pandemic panic; it was retailers fearing price gouging penalties. Price controls don’t make goods more affordable; they make them scarce. Some voters might accept occasional shortages for the promise of lower prices. However, price gouging laws don’t eliminate higher costs; they merely shift them. While black markets can emerge, a more common scenario unfolds in plain sight: consumers spend more time and resources hunting for scarce goods.
Imagine your weekly grocery run during a toilet paper shortage. With prices artificially capped, you find empty shelves. You drive across town, perhaps making multiple trips, burning gas and time. Are you really benefiting from that lower sticker price? The extra fuel, wasted hours, and added pollution are real, often overlooked costs. Recent studies show this phenomenon occurs even during temporary, emergency price gouging laws, like those implemented during the pandemic.
Rising grocery prices are undeniably straining American households. However, price control laws are not the solution. They promise relief but deliver shortages, hidden costs, and economic distortions. We should all be wary of policies that sound too good to be true. Often, the most appealing promises can lead to the most disastrous consequences. Instead of embracing quick fixes, we should focus on addressing the root causes of inflation: expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, supply chain disruptions, and trade barriers. By tackling these issues head-on and thinking critically about proposed solutions, we can work towards genuinely affordable groceries without falling prey to well-intentioned but harmful interventions.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15033&omhide=true&trk=title
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How Joseph Stiglitz Tried to Legitimize Venezuela’s Dictatorship
Stiglitz again!
Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz is on a mission to smear free market economists as progenitors of “fascism.” After first making this insinuation in his recent book The Road to Freedom, Stiglitz has become even more brazen in charging “neoliberals” with steering the world toward dictatorship. In a new interview, Stiglitz charges:
It is evident today that free and unfettered markets advocated by Hayek and Friedman and so many on the Right have set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism made all the worse by advances in science and technology, an Orwellian authoritarianism where surveillance is the order of the day and truth has been sacrificed to power.
Note that he provides no evidence for his defamatory allegations against Hayek and Friedman, both of whom denounced fascism in their lifetimes. But there’s another problem with Stiglitz’s line of attack: his own lengthy track record of coddling undemocratic regimes and authoritarian dictators.
In 2007, Stiglitz traveled to Caracas, where he gushed over Venezuela’s Marxist leader Hugo Chavez, crediting him with poverty alleviation and economic reform. In reality, the Chavez regime ushered in a collapse of the Venezuelan economy that persists to this day.
Chavez’s handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro, refuses to leave office after losing reelection in a landslide last month. Maduro concocted his own forged election results to declare himself the victor and is now waging a brutal campaign of military suppression and arrests in a desperate bid to remain in power.
Although Stiglitz has been more cautious about Maduro in recent years, he left no doubt of his appreciation for the Chavez regime. Shortly after meeting with the Venezuelan dictator, Stiglitz became a vocal media advocate for Chavez’s proposed “Bank of the South.” Chavez created this initiative in an effort to induce other Latin American countries to withdraw from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Chavez’s speeches about his scheme sound eerily similar to Stiglitz’s arguments in his new book. They rant and rave about an “economic order dominated by the Neoliberalism” and present the Bank of the South as an “alternative” to free-market capitalism. Blending an overt socialist political agenda with economic development funding, he pledged to seed the project with Venezuela’s vast oil wealth.
Stiglitz previously served as the World Bank’s senior vice president and chief economist. By publicly endorsing Chavez’s competitor to the World Bank, he gave it credibility in the eyes of foreign governments and the international media. At its launch in late 2007, it became clear that Chavez intended to use the “bank” to prop up other regional leftist governments. Chavez recruited his counterparts Lula de Silva of Brazil, Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, and Evo Morales of Bolivia to the effort and rolled it out as a tool to inaugurate socialism across the continent.
In practice, the Stiglitz-backed scheme amounted to naught. Venezuela’s economy soon collapsed under the weight of Chavez’s policies, including its state-run oil sector. After over a decade of delays, the Bank of the South has yet to deliver on any of its promised development loans and appears to have settled into dormancy. Venezuela’s state-controlled media still touts it as an “accomplishment” of Chavez’s economics. Still, in practice, it has amounted to little more than another corrupt shell entity for cronies of the Marxist regime.
As of this writing, Stiglitz has gone silent about the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. He never mentions his own role in propagandizing Chavez’s economic schemes to the world or his visits to Caracas to advise Nicolas Maduro’s predecessor and personal mentor. Instead of projecting complicity in authoritarian regimes onto Friedman and Hayek, Stiglitz would be well-served to take a gaze in the mirror.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15028&omhide=true&trk=rm
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Democrats ramp up the gender politics in pursuit of the White House
“Donald Trump is going to find out the power of women in 2024,” Joe Biden roared earlier this week during his handover address at the Democratic National Convention.
If Kamala Harris becomes the 47th US president after the election in November, he won’t be wrong. But he could have been a bit more specific.
It might have been a nasty quip but Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s now notorious claim that “childless cat ladies” were running the country wasn’t far wrong, setting pet preferences to one side. The Democrats are in power and their strongest backers undeniably are women who have never married. If this large and growing group didn’t vote, the US electoral map would be a sea of Republican red.
Single women have become a powerful voting cohort, increasingly targeted by Democrats as they embrace sexual politics to maintain control of the White House. It is conventional wisdom in the US that men lean Republican and women lean Democrat – but not all women.
While clear majorities of men and married women favour the Republican Party, according to a survey of Americans by Pew Research, 72 per cent of never-married women back the Democrats.
And that’s before Harris – who’s being sold as a feisty “girl boss” one step away from breaking what Hillary Clinton in her convention speech called the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” – replaced the ancient Biden.
By the way, that ceiling would be news to most Americans, around 95 per cent of whom have told Gallup since 1999 they would readily elect a well-qualified woman, black or white, as president (up from below 60 per cent in the late 1950s). But sustaining or even fuelling the perception of massive and increasing sexism and racism has become essential to modern Democrat party politics.
Indeed, Vance’s 2021 comment was catnip, so to speak, for Democrat strategists seeking to manufacture outrage among women.
The Democratic National Convention was exhibit A. Practically every one of the 60-plus speakers at the party’s nominating convention on day one dwelled on the Democrats’ plans to “protect reproductive rights” – what some may consider a niche issue set against a generational, inflation-induced plunge in living standards, rampant illegal immigration, corporate cronyism and the prospect of World War III.
Democrat-aligned Planned Parenthood was spruiking offering DNC attendees free vasectomies and abortions, courtesy of a mobile health clinic parked nearby for the first two days of the convention.
The party has only one concrete policy: legislating abortion rights along the lines of Roe V Wade, the overturned Supreme Court decision that has become the motivating event of the party’s 2024 campaign.
Still, unmarried women aren’t the only group propping up the Democrats. The provision of gender-neutral bathrooms, and even a gender-neutral prayer room, should provide a clue to the other. Gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans have an ever greater preference for the Democratic Party: 83 per cent to 17 per cent, according to Pew.
From a strictly economic point of view, the Democratic Party platform would appeal to young single women, offering them greater choice: more taxpayer funded childcare; free healthcare, including of course the right to abortions; and welfare to support the rearing of children should they decide to have any.
“Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands,” American journalist David Samuels recently wrote in a lengthy piece, The March of Kamala’s Brides: Miserable Young Women are the Democrats’ Foot-soldiers. Brides of the State, he calls them.
Whether such policies have made women happier is less clear. “A startling 56 per cent of liberal American women aged 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental-health condition (the percentage for conservative women is 21 per cent),” Samuels writes.
Mental health problems have skyrocketed among young women, a trend typically blamed on social media, which doesn’t appear to have had the same impact on young men.
Understanding why the so-called LGBT community favours Democrats over Republicans is harder to explain. Often high income and childless, gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans shoulder a disproportionate tax burden and receive little in return, which might make them less inclined to support parties in favour of increased taxation to fund a cradle-to-grave social welfare system.
But politics is increasingly about values rather than policy, the vibe rather than facts. And Democrats talk the talk when it comes to LGBT and women’s rights, creating the perception they are under permanent assault by Republicans.
Democrat leaders are fond of invoking a unified America in their rhetoric, but in practice their strategy increasingly has been to divide by sex and race for political advantage.
The share of black Americans who say relations between whites and blacks are “very” or “somewhat” good has fallen steadily from 66 per cent in 2013 to 33 per cent last year, according to Pew Research.
And the #MeToo movement has clobbered gender relations too, as half of the population are unfairly cast as predators rather than a hugely diverse group of individuals.
More recently, Democrats and parties of the left throughout the West have even pushing for the creation of new groups, evidenced by recent obsession with the “trans community”, a group that has exploded from essentially zero to about 5 per cent of the US population according to another 2022 survey by Pew.
Political discourse has become so dominant and powerful, perhaps it can create groups as much as cater to them – and not necessarily for their benefit.
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20 August, 2024
Homosexual adoption
Like most conservatives, the adoption of chilren by male homosexual couples disturbs me. I have a strong feeling that all children deserve both a mother and father.
But that is to a degree ignoring rather a lot of reality. Many children grow up to be normal adults even though they have grown up with one parent only. And who is to say that a homosexual parent cannot be loving?
I was discussing that matter with a woman much younger than I am and found that she had no difficulty with children being brought up by homosexual parents. Her basic point is that anything can be bought these days, includng good childcare.
And I was reminded of the fact that the British aristocracy traditionally did not bring up their own children... that was dedicated to a nanny. And strong affectionate ties developed and remained between the children concerned and their nanny,
Winston Churchill was one of those. He was very supportive of his nanny into her old age and she had a lifelong devotion to him.
And step-parents and their stepchildren have often been known to develop and retain strong affectionate feelings beween them. I was such a stepfather myself to three children who grew up to be very well-functioning adults.
So I think we have to let rule us the big conservative principle that each case depends on its individual merits. It is only where there is evidence of some distress in the child that we are warranted to intervene. Parenting can be succesful under many different parental arrangements -- and excludng one arrangeent is dogmatic and can be tyrannical. -- JR
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‘Retaliation’: Nurse Who Blew the Whistle on Child Sex-Change Program Says Texas Children’s Fired Her
Former Texas Children’s Hospital nurse Vanessa Sivadge says that she has been terminated after blowing the whistle on the hospital’s alleged use of Texas Medicaid to cover attempted sex changes for children.
Texas Children’s has denied that it used Texas Medicaid to cover cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for minors, as Sivadge has alleged. The hospital did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s multiple requests for comment about the alleged termination on Monday afternoon.
In a written statement to journalist Chris Rufo, Sivadge shared that she submitted a religious accommodation request to her supervisor at the hospital on May 31, asking to be transferred out of the endocrinology clinic.
The day after Rufo had published Sivadge’s allegations against the hospital, in early June, the hospital allegedly called Sivadge and put her on leave citing “things shared publicly”—which she believes was a reference to the story—and her request to transfer.
“This past Friday on August 16, TCH fired me effective immediately,” she shared. “This is unlawful for two reasons: it is retaliation for my coming forward with information on TCH’s egregious pattern of deception and Medicaid fraud, and this action also illegally disregarded my request to transfer due to my belief that these procedures bring irreversible harm and lifelong regret to children confused about their sex.”
“I would like to challenge this in court, but my legal fees are mounting,” she added. “I am relying on the public who is generously supporting my legal defense through donations to my Give Send Go. Thank you for your continued support telling my story, which is saving children’s lives, and encouraging other whistleblowers like me to come forward.”
Rufo shared the letter in an “X” post, where he linked to Sivadge’s “Give Send Go” campaign. The campaign, which appears to have been started about 12 days ago, had reached about $23,000 as of 2 p.m. on Monday.
In a June statement, Texas Children’s emphasized that it “never condones any criminal act.”
“We welcome additional information that may help our internal investigation,” the hospital added in the statement. “It goes without saying that if we uncover any rogue or unauthorized criminal activity, we will take swift action to correct the issue.”
“To reiterate,” the statement continued, “our internal investigation to-date has found no basis to substantiate any allegations of Medicaid fraud. All services provided by Texas Children’s were permitted according to Medicaid billing and payment guidelines that were in effect at the time care was provided.”
Texas Children’s has also drawn increasing attention in recent weeks as the Justice Department targets whistleblower Eithan Haim, who exposed the hospital allegedly secretly performing attempted gender-transition procedures on children.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas announced in mid-June that it had indicted 34-year-old Haim for “obtaining protected individual health information for patients that were not under his care and without authorization.” If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 maximum possible fine.
Texas Children’s had publicly said in March 2022 that it would no longer perform attempted gender-transition procedures on kids. In May 2023, Haim provided Rufo with documents showing that Texas Children’s was “lying to the public about the existence of its transgender-medicine program,” as Haim later revealed in an explosive piece in January of this year.
“I worked at the hospital as a surgery resident, and I knew that these interventions didn’t stop,” Haim wrote. “Three days after the announcement, a surgeon implanted a hormone device in a healthy 11-year-old girl for gender dysphoria. Over the next year, the frequency of these procedures increased, and potentially hundreds more children received hormone interventions for gender dysphoria.”
Haim told The Free Press that before he gave Rufo any of the documents, he made sure that the patients’ names and identifying information were redacted (to protect himself from violating federal laws and to protect the patients’ privacy).
The very next day after Rufo published Haim’s (then anonymous) May 2023 expose, the Texas Legislature banned these experimental gender-transition attempts for minors.
A month later, two federal agents came to Haim’s home to speak with him. They told him that he was a “potential target” of an investigation into federal criminal violations related to medical records.
“It was clear to me that this was a political investigation. I refused to submit to an interview without an attorney,” he wrote in City Journal.
After that, Haim went public with his story.
“To these agents, the prosecutor, and their political handlers, I was a criminal because I had told the truth,” he wrote.
“None of this mattered, I believe, because I had exposed a truth that threatened their ideology,” Haim added. “This was the reason for their frightening show of force. The intent was to intimidate me. If I agreed to stay silent, though, I would be legitimizing their lies and sacrificing the truth. Instead, I decided to fight back.
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I’m a Palestinian American. Here’s Why I Can’t Support the Anti-Israel Protesters
Walking past Union Station in the nation’s capital, I recently was met with a heartbreaking sight. Vandals had defaced the Columbus Memorial Fountain with spray paint, writing the words “Hamas is coming” in big red letters.
Trash and signs discarded by anti-Israel protesters littered the ground. A burnt shopping cart stood off to one side with piles of ash beneath it.
Most depressing, however, were the three bare flag poles that had been robbed of their American flags. Protesters had burned the flags, the only remnant a charred piece of fabric atop another pile of ash.
This was the aftermath of the July 24 “pro-Palestinian” protests in Washington, D.C., organized in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address that day to a joint meeting of Congress.
As an American of Palestinian heritage, some expect me to cheer on these people. They expect me to condemn the U.S., hate Israel, and support Hamas, a terrorist organization dedicated to wiping out the Jewish state.
But these expectations don’t represent me, nor my family.
I inherit my Palestinian background from my mother’s side of the family; her parents emigrated to America from the Middle East. My grandma was born in Israel and later moved to Ramallah in the West Bank and eventually to Jordan.
After arriving in America in her 20s, my grandma worked hard to become a U.S. citizen. She learned the English language while raising my mother and uncle. She opened a restaurant with my grandpa, lovingly named the Chicken Pantry, in Hamtramck, Michigan. When that business closed, my grandma worked as a real estate agent before eventually retiring in the land of prosperity.
America brought my family prosperity. My grandparents taught my mother to “kiss the ground you walk on” because they knew what a blessing America is.
They passed this lesson on to me.
Although many seem to think that my Palestinian heritage should cause me to align with protests that supposedly are “pro-Palestinian,” it’s precisely because of my heritage that I cannot do that.
Israel went to war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip only after Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,200 and kidnapped about 250 in a rampage of rape, torture, and murder Oct. 7 in southern Israel.
About 10 months later, as pro-Hamas protesters march in this country to “free Palestine,” they call for the death of America. As they burn the American flag, they burn all that my family has worked to achieve.
As the protesters pledge their allegiance to Hamas, they encourage a group that my grandmother wouldn’t hesitate to call a terrorist organization that operates with a strategy of human sacrifice.
Think about it. Why are there no Hamas military bases in the Gaza Strip adjoining Israel? Because the terrorists hide behind their own people.
They dress like noncombatants in Gaza. They establish bunkers in hospitals. They commandeer ambulances for transportation.
These actions are all in direct violation of Article 18 of the Geneva Conventions, the international pacts that set minimum standards during armed conflict for the treatment of civilians, soldiers, and prisoners of war.
One example is Hamas’ use of Gaza’s most important hospital, Al-Shifa. According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hamas uses a bunker under the hospital as a base for military operations. This not only makes the hospital a target, but takes medical resources needed for the sick.
In contrast, the Israel Defense Forces have given civilians in Gaza opportunities to evacuate and warned of impending attacks. No other nation goes this far to protect enemy civilians.
How can I support pro-Hamas demonstrators who wish to end the nation that brought my family so much? How can I back a terrorist group that uses its own people as human shields? How can I hate Israel, when the IDF has worked to keep Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way?
I believe it’s important to point out that, contrary to popular belief, not all Arabs think the same. Some of us do see this conflict differently. And our thoughts and beliefs should not be snuffed out because they go against the “narrative.”
To some, perhaps our stance makes us walking oxymorons. But we are proud ones, nonetheless.
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Australia: Huge dispute erupts over plan to give a massive plot of land to a black minority
It's sheer racism to give to one racial group something that is not given to all
The future of a major open-cut gold mine in western NSW has been thrown into doubt after its owner said the project had been rendered unviable by a federal protection order.
ASX-listed Regis Resources said a decision by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to protect Indigenous heritage at the McPhillamys Gold Project, central-west NSW, would stop the mine going ahead.
The NSW Independent Planning Commission in March approved Regis's application to mine gold in the area despite opposition from some in the local Aboriginal community.
Regis chief executive Jim Beyer said the company was 'extremely surprised and disappointed' that, after nearly four years of assessment, Ms Plibersek had decided to effectively block the development.
'(This) declaration shatters any confidence that development proponents Australia-wide (both private and public) can have in project approval timelines and outcomes,' he said in a statement.
The minister's Indigenous-heritage protection declaration covers part of the Belubula River, which falls within the footprint for a proposed storage facility for cast-off material.
Regis has argued there are no other viable options for the facility and developing alternatives would require it to restart the lengthy assessments process.
'This decision does impact a critical area of the project development site and means the project is not viable,' it said.
Under the Regis proposal, an 11-year open cut mining operation would be set up in the Blayney-Kings Plains district, near Bathurst.
The project would create almost 1,000 jobs in the region, the company said.
The Association of Mining and Exploration Companies, an industry lobby group, said the government order 'lacks reason and commonsense'.
'(It) sets a truly terrible precedent for investment risk in Australia,' association chief executive Warren Pearce said in a statement.
Ms Plibersek had ignored the views of local traditional owners, the Orange Local Aboriginal Corporation, who did not oppose the project, he said.
'They could see the value and future prosperity that this project could bring to their people,' Mr Pearce said.
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18 August, 2024
"Where is the #MeToo outrage over this?"
Here are five things that happened in the UK and Ireland over the last six months.
First, in January 2024, an Afghan asylum-seeker named Abdul Ezedi threw acid on a mother and her two children, leaving them with ‘life-changing’ injuries. A few years earlier, Ezedi had been convicted of sexual assault and exposing himself. He was placed on the sex offender register for ten years. In 2020, after ‘converting’ to Christianity, a vicar testified for his asylum, which he was granted.
Second, in March 2024, a criminal gang led by Syrian brothers Omar and Mohamed Badreddin was prosecuted for grooming and raping a 13-year-old girl. The girl was raped repeatedly in her own home by the brothers, who moved to the UK as Syrian refugees. The girl was “groomed” with alcohol and cigarettes.
Third, in April 2024, asylum seeker Anicet Mayela pleaded guilty to raping a 15 year old girl in Oxford. Mayela, who had once campaigned outside a detention centre with a sign that read “migrants are not criminals”, had arrived in the UK illegally in 2004. He was due to be deported back to Congo a year later, but members of a cabin crew, who opposed the deportation, stopped the plane from taking off.
Fourth, last month, in July 2024, a 33-year-old male asylum seeker, who could not speak English, was charged with raping a woman at a leisure centre in Ennis, Ireland.
And then, also last month, asylum-seeker Adel Kerai was jailed after sexually assaulting a woman in public, who he had followed around Dublin city centre for thirty minutes. Kerai had only arrived five days earlier from Algeria, where he said he was being discriminated against because of his political beliefs.
What do all these things have in common, aside from having all taken place this year? They are horrific crimes that were committed against women and girls by men who are accustomed to sex-segregated societies, in which there is one rule for men and another rule for women —rules which oppress and objectify young women like me.
These men, put simply, do not subscribe to British values, which champion equality of opportunity between the sexes. And they clearly do not respect our way of life.
Most people in Britain champion these things —I know that most of my friends in Gen-Z certainly do. We are the most liberal generation in history, especially young women who over the last decade have been moving sharply to the cultural left.
We believe, passionately, that women have the same rights as men. We can wear what we like. And we can aspire to do what we like. Britain, in short, should be one of the best places in the world to be a woman.
But this ideal is now under threat. Why?
Because our extreme policy of mass immigration has brought with it a minority of men who have a forceful and very particular contempt for women.
The simple fact is that ongoing mass immigration from mainly Muslim countries is threatening the hard-won rights of women in Western liberal societies.
As others note, over the last fifteen years, nearly 4 million people have entered Europe illegally. Two-thirds of them were men and around 80% of all applicants for asylum were aged under 35 years old. Most came from Muslim states that have very different cultural values, attitudes, and ways of life to our own.
It should not be controversial to point out this basic fact. We should be able to talk openly and candidly about it.
And it’s a similar story in Britain.
Since 2018, the vast majority of the more than 131,000 people who have entered the country illegally, on small boats, are young men from predominantly Muslim countries, like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
Many of these asylum-seekers, obviously, reject violence and criminality. But it is also true that a significant number do not. Why do I say this?
Because, like those cases I mentioned above, there are now simply too many instances of asylum-seekers and illegal migrants sexually assaulting and raping women.
As a young woman who recently moved to London, I can tell you —I’m scared. And so too are many of my young female friends —even if they dare not voice their fears because they will be branded “racist” or “Islamophobic”.
There is now a low-level culture of oppression and intimidation, which we experience on an almost daily basis, on things like public transport and while walking through the most highly diverse neighbourhoods of our capital city.
And we are furious; furious because the elite class is not even willing to talk about it.
Every time another horrific sexual attack on a woman is splashed across the news, everyone – from politicians to police – appear genuinely shocked.
They lay wreaths and flowers. They condemn the violence. But they then do absolutely nothing to confront the nature of the challenge.
Upgrade to paid
One of the only people who has spoken openly about this problem is scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali, originally from Somalia, who herself received asylum in the Netherlands.
Her book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, is perhaps the only one in recent years to pull back the curtain to discuss this problem openly.
Hirsi Ali argues, convincingly, that not only have women in Europe faced a barrage of sexual harassment, rape and violence since the start of the migration crisis, in 2015, but now also have to navigate the “be kind” klaxon among liberals, whereby the elite class refuse to acknowledge the problem because of fears of being seen as “racist”.
In her own words, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:
“Talking about violence by Muslim men against European women is at odds with identity politics and its matrix of victimhood. Politicians, journalists and academics have been reluctant to acknowledge that the migrant sex-crime wave even exists. This is as much an issue of class as religion or race. Much of the crime and misconduct against women takes place in low-income neighbourhoods. Somehow in the era of #MeToo, their predicament arouses less sympathy than that of Hollywood actresses.”
The problem for the elite class is that there have been times when the problem has simply become unavoidable, when it has forced its way into media headlines.
Such as the wave of sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in Germany, nearly a decade ago —an event my friends and I followed on social media and found utterly shocking.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes, according to German police more than 1,200 women were assaulted, of whom 24 were raped.
Repeating what they call “the rape game” from their home countries, perpetrators operated in gangs, forcing women into concentric circles, and then raping them.
Of the 153 suspects in the city of Cologne, nearly all were foreign, including 103 from Morocco and Algeria. Sixty-eight were asylum seekers.
How exceptional was this?
It’s difficult to know because, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes, many governments in the West are now also working overtime to try and conceal data on the race and ethnicity of people who commit these crimes in their countries.
In Britain, for example, this data is simply not made available.
For young women like me, this is infuriating. If you don’t want people spreading “misinformation” then how about you start by making information available?
What are you scared of?
In the academic literature, too, the vast majority of studies that do exist look mainly at the impact of sexual violence on female asylum-seekers and migrants, rather than the impact on women in the receiving countries, which tells you a lot about the liberal bias that exists within the social sciences and humanities —they don’t want to look.
This makes it difficult to build a reliable picture of what’s going on.
But there have been some notable exceptions, almost all of which, like those examples above, suggest we have a major problem, albeit one that liberals routinely ignore.
Like the study which found that while an influx of refugees is not immediately followed by a surge in crime this does tend to follow one year later, including an upsurge of property crime and violent crime.
Or like the study of the Greek islands, which found that a 1-point increase in the share of refugees on the islands, compared to islands that did not receive any refugees, increased rates of crime —especially property crime, knife attacks, and rapes.
Or like the example of Denmark, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes.
“Denmark is unusual for making it relatively easy to distinguish immigrant offenders. Since 2015, the country’s share of immigrants from “non-Western countries,” excluding their Danish-born descendants, has risen from around 5% to 6%. Yet from 2015 to 2019 they have accounted for around 11% of convictions for sex offenses and 34% of convictions for rape.”
Or worrying data from Germany:
“… in 2017 and 2018, more than a third of the suspects … were non-Germans. For all sexual-abuse cases, the share of non-German suspects rose from 15% in 2014 to 23% in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and 21% in 2019 … In Germany’s crime statistics, the term zuwanderer, or “newcomers,” was used until 2016 to identify suspects who were asylum applicants, failed asylum seekers and illegal residents. This definition was expanded in 2017 to include successful asylum seekers. From 2017 to 2019, zuwanderer accounted for between 10% and 12% of sex-crime suspects, and around 16% of suspects for rape, sexual coercion and sexual assault in especially serious cases. It is unlikely zuwanderer accounted for much more than 2% of the population”
Or data from Austria:
“crimes or offenses against sexual integrity and self-determination increased by 53% between 2015 and 2018. Between a quarter and a third of suspects were foreign, but in 2018 only 19.4% of the population was foreign-born. Between 4% and 11% of the suspects were asylum seekers; the share of the population born in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria—among the largest sources of asylum seekers—was only 1.2%”
Or Sweden:
“In the absence of official statistics, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reviewed the gang-rape cases heard in Swedish courts between July 2012 and December 2017. Of the 112 men convicted, it found that three-quarters were foreign-born (almost all of those from outside Europe), and 30% were asylum seekers.”
Or Britain, where the tendency to downplay or ignore this issue was reflected in the appalling “grooming scandal”, which involved the industrial-scale rape and sexual abuse of thousands of young white girls by Pakistani men.
As Matt Goodwin has written on this Substack:
“The grooming scandal paints a very different picture of modern Britain —a place where members of a minority group oppress and exploit children from the majority, and where white liberals clearly have no interest in coming to save them.
From Rotherham to Telford, Oldham to Rochdale, Oxford to Peterborough, it’s the same story —social workers, councillors, teachers, politicians, and police ignoring or downplaying the scandal because of fears of being called ‘racist’, because they did not believe it, or because members of their community were implicated.
From one town to the next, the desire to not violate anti-racism taboos, to not be seen as politically correct and to conform to the elite consensus was routinely prioritised above ensuring the safety of children and, ultimately, upholding the law.
There has been widespread discussion about the fact that these crimes were not investigated because the police were concerned they would be accused of being “racists” if they were honest about the ethnicity of the male perpetrators.”
As a recent female graduate of one of the most elite universities in the country, my friends and I have listened to more #MeToo talks on consent and “toxic masculinity” than most people have had hot dinners.
But, sadly, I know, as many of my friends do, that violence, including sexual violence, against women and girls in Western democracies is now a huge issue.
Yet not one of my university professors or workshops ever addressed the enormous elephant in the room, which now faces women like me across the West.
This is the fact that many crimes are perpetrated by a specific demographic: male asylum seeker, often Muslim, who in the left’s identity politics matrix get a free pass.
We spent much of the last decade talking about the “#MeToo” movement. But today, shockingly, nobody in the elite class wants to talk about how mass immigration and illegal migration are undermining the rights of women and girls like me.
I don’t want to be called a “racist” or “Islamophobe” for pointing out the truth that’s staring us all in the face, that’s staring young women like me in the face.
And I don’t want to have to write an anonymous blog to be able to talk about these things —I should be able to say them out loud, and join a national debate.
The established class, on both Left and Right, have let me and my female peers down.
We have a right to feel safe in our own country.
The only question I would ask members of that elite class is this.
Are you even listening? And do you even care?
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/anonymous-zoomer-where-is-the-metoo
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Sanctuary Cities for Parental Rights? California City Aims to Protect Families from Radical Gender Policies
The mayor of Huntington Beach, California, is fighting for parental rights despite a recently signed state law requiring schools to conceal students’ gender transitions from parents.
Huntington Beach Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark introduced an ordinance Aug. 6 to make the Southern California beach town a “Parents’ Right to Know” city.
“The state of California is one of the most dangerous states to raise a child,” Van Der Mark told The Daily Signal.
The city’s legal department has until Sept. 3 to determine the details of how to best protect parental rights in light of the new California law allowing public schools to hide a student’s gender identity from his or her parents.
Van Der Mark wants to send a message to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Legislature that despite Newsom’s signing Assembly Bill 1955 into law last month, Huntington Beach will respect parents, the mayor said.
Van Der Mark also wants the “Right to Know” ordinance to help parents who want to sue the state to overturn AB 1955.
“One of the reasons people don’t sue is because the process is so tedious and so dysfunctional that they don’t know where to start,” Van Der Mark said. “It’s also expensive, so we want to do whatever we can to make it easier for the parents to fight for their parental rights.”
AB 1955 overrules any school board policies that require transparency with parents about their child’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Though Van Der Mark has no jurisdiction over the schools, she said the law affects her constituents and she wants to do what she can to help parents protect their children.
“There are schools that are pushing back,” Van Der Mark said, “and we want to help any parents who would like to push back on their end.”
The Anderson Union High School District and the Orange County Board of Education voted unanimously to join a lawsuit filed by the Liberty Justice Center challenging AB 1955.
“We all know that AB 1955 is unconstitutional,” Van Der Mark said. “So, if we can help in any way for parents who want to fight for their constitutional rights to raise their children however they see fit with their morals, their values, which should be allowed, then we want to help them.”
Long-standing U.S. Supreme Court precedent establishes that parents have the right to determine major issues affecting the education of their children, said Harmeet Dhillon, founder of the Center for American Liberty and managing partner at Dhillon Law Group Inc.
Dhillon told The Daily Signal she expects California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, to sue Huntington Beach and any other city or school district that challenges AB 1955.
“Whatever Huntington Beach passes that protects parents’ rights, we can expect the attorney general of California, like he has done in multiple other cases where clients of ours have been affected, to sue those school districts or those municipalities over these issues,” Dhillon said.
She said parental rights in education are not just a constitutional issue, but also a human rights issue.
“It’s a fundamental natural law issue, and so Huntington Beach is doing a brave thing,” Dhillon said. “They know they’re going to get sued, and they’re standing up for the rights of parents, and they’re right under Supreme Court precedent.”
Less than 20 minutes from Huntington Beach, Santa Ana public schools allow students to change their name, gender, and pronouns without parental consent.
“School personnel should not discuss information that may disclose a student’s transgender or gender-nonconforming status to others, including parents/legal guardians and other school personnel, unless legally required to do so or unless the student has authorized such disclosure,” Santa Ana Unified School District’s “Transgender, Non-Binary, and Gender Nonconforming Students” board policy says.
Van Der Mark wants to keep such policies out of Huntington Beach so parents feel safe to raise their kids there. She said the high cost of living makes it hard for working parents to monitor their children’s education as closely as necessary.
“They’re completely shutting out every single person who’s blood-related, who loves and cares for this child and knows them better than anyone, and they’re giving perfect strangers who are not trained, like teachers and counselors, the discretion to make decisions for this child,” Van Der Mark said.
Patti Pappas is a retired college professor of child development and educational studies and a Huntington Beach resident. Her grandchildren attend local public schools.
“Puberty is not easy, and the school can’t be the one guiding them,” Pappas told The Daily Signal. “The parent needs to know, so the parent has to have that right, and the parent can then guide them and work with them.”
Six of Van Der Mark’s children attended public schools in Huntington Beach. A stay-at-home mom, Van Der Mark decided to run for City Council after finding pornography in her children’s schools in 2017, she said. In Huntington Beach, City Council members take turns serving one-year terms as mayor.
“I’ve been home raising my children for the past 23 years,” the mother and grandmother said. “But because the community is so concerned with what’s going on, they have supported me to the point where now I’m the mayor of the city. Parents are concerned. They just don’t know how to fight back.”
“Now that my kids are adults, and they don’t need me, I’m going to dedicate every single day of my life that I can to fighting against this nonsense coming from Sacramento,” she continued.
Protecting parental rights should not be a partisan issue, Van Der Mark said.
“A lot of us have children, and this would be an issue to bring us all together,” the mayor said, “but once again, it became a four-three vote, where the four of us conservatives do support Huntington becoming a Parents’ Right to Know city and the other three do not.”
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No Room at ESPN for Women Defending Women’s Sports
Turns out defending women’s sports is a no-go if you want a long career at ESPN.
Samantha Ponder, host of “Sunday NFL Countdown,” has been fired, according to The Athletic. Supposedly Ponder, who was reportedly in a three-year, $3 million-plus contract, was axed “for financial reasons, as ESPN nears the conclusion of its fiscal year at the end of September,” the sports publication owned by The New York Times reported.
Yeah, right.
Just this January, ESPN put out a glowing press release about how “Sunday NFL Countdown” was thriving. The show “earned its most-watched regular season since 2019 and its second-best since 2016 … . The viewership marks a significant 8% jump from the 2022 season and was up 15% from the 2021 season,” the sports network boasted, noting additionally that “Sunday NFL Countdown” had increased its audience among women and young adults.
Maybe the spike in viewers for the 2023 season was because Ponder was expressing popular views.
Ponder made waves in May of 2023 when she retweeted former collegiate swimming champion Riley Gaines, who competed against Lia Thomas, a biological male, and has since become an outspoken advocate of banning men from women’s sports.
“It is not hateful to demand fairness in sports for girls,” Ponder wrote on X. When a user accused of her being a “transphobe,” Ponder responded, “call me whatever names you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is inherently unfair for biological males to compete in female sports. It’s literally the reason they were separate in the first place + the reason we needed Title IX[.]”
But that wasn’t the end of the controversy.
USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour warned, “Don’t be fooled by the people who screech about ‘fairness’ to cloak their bigotry toward transgender girls and women … . This is, and always was, about hate, fear, and ignorance.”
It’s likely Ponder also received backlash from ESPN honchos for her posts. Her former colleague, Sage Steele, told Gaines her own social media posts about Thomas earned her a scolding. “I was asked to stop tweeting about it. I was asked to stop doing anything, saying anything about it on social media because I was offending others at the company,” Steele said in December, according to the New York Post.
Meanwhile, it’s not like ESPN was banning all talk about transgender participation in women’s sports. In March of 2023, the network honored Lia Thomas during a special on … Women’s History Month.
But it’s Ponder, Steele, and Gaines—not ESPN or Nancy Armour—who are expressing the view held by most Americans. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 69% of Americans believe that athletes should only be able to play “on teams that match birth gender.” In January, a poll by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 66% of Americans thought transgender girls should never or rarely be allowed to play on girls’ teams.
More recently, Ponder praised Italian boxer Angela Carini, who forfeited her Paris Olympics boxing match on Aug. 1 against Algerian Imane Khelif, who seems likely to have XY chromosomes, not XX chromosomes. “Proud of this woman,” wrote Ponder of Carini. (Khelif, meanwhile, went on to win the gold medal for women’s boxing in Paris.)
Earlier this year, Ponder also defended Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who came under fire from the Left for advocating, in a commencement speech at a Catholic college, traditional values and suggesting women would find fulfillment as wives and mothers.
In an Instagram story, Ponder decried a petition to fire Butker as “unamerican.”
“Personally, I agreed with a few things he said … especially that most women are more excited/proud of their families than their day jobs,” she wrote, although Ponder also noted some areas she disagreed with Butker on.
If the bosses at ESPN were wise, they’d realize that Ponder’s views are the same as those of many of their audience members. Firing Ponder, who has been with the network since 2011, sends a clear message that genuinely feminist sports fans aren’t welcome.
Sure, the network might point to football analyst Kirk Herbstreit, who recently shared his own views about transgender athletes. Responding to the question “Do men belong in women’s sports?” Herbstreit wrote, “Of course not.”
But while Herbstreit hasn’t been fired (yet), he’s also a man. Ponder, as ESPN executives probably realize all too well, is more compelling on this issue. “Ponder had emerged as the only female voice inside Disney since Sage Steele’s departure to speak out against ‘trans women’ (as in men) competing in women’s sports,” writes OutKick’s Bobby Burack.
So, Ponder had to go.
If ESPN was about making money, it’s unlikely the popular Ponder would be fired. But like too many companies these days, ESPN seems to be about forcing its values on all Americans, not making money. No doubt, Ponder will land at another outlet. But Americans shouldn’t forget that ESPN has effectively sided with the men who want to be in women’s locker rooms and stealing records and wins from hardworking female athletes, not the women who just want a fair shot to compete.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/15/espn-fires-sam-ponder-who-against-men-womens-sports/
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Women’s rights rally sparks pro-trans counter protest in Melbourne
It's not a protest. It's just the usual Leftist activism. They have no consistency. They can be pro-women one day and anti-women the next. There is no genuine feeling there at all -- just self-display
One woman has been arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer and several members of a pro-trans counter rally have thrown eggs and water balloons at speakers at a women’s rights demonstration in Melbourne on Saturday.
Activist organisation Women’s Action Group planned a ‘Women Will Speak’ event to take place at Victoria’s state parliament on the weekend, which was met with a pro-trans protest.
A police barricade was formed to separate the Women’s Action Group event and the pro-trans demonstration organised by Trans Queer Solidarity.
A large police presence, included mounted officers, was stationed at Spring St and Bourke St.
“Around 20 participants initially attended the event about 11am. About 150 protesters from another group also attended the rally, throwing eggs and water balloons at the speakers involved,” a Victoria Police spokeswoman said.
“A 36-year-old Brunswick woman was arrested at the scene for allegedly assaulting police. She has been released pending further inquiries.
“Victoria Police is disappointed with the actions of the group and while it supports peaceful protests it has a zero-tolerance policy for violence or disruptive acts which impact the broader community.”
Details of the Women’s Action Group were shared online, and in response a ‘Trans Liberation’ rally was scheduled to take place at the same location.
The group was formed in 2019 and the organisation state their motivation is to fight against “the ongoing erosion of women’s rights in Victoria and in all of Australia”.
“Humans cannot change sex. Men can never be women,” a speaker said at the Women’s Action Group event told the crowd on Saturday.
“It is our inherent right to exercise freedom of expression … and policy and legislation must reflect reality not ideology.”
Most of the speeches were barely audible as members of the Trans Liberation gathering blared loud music, banged drums and shouted cries such as “f*ck off fascist”.
Women’s Action Group co-founder Michelle Uriarau said the purpose of the counter rally was to intimidate women.
“We are there to to facilitate a platform for ordinary woman to come and speak, to listen and to be heard, and as seen yesterday, that is currently not allowed.” Ms Uriarau told The Australian.
“Some of the signs that they that they brought along with them, more or less was threatening us with death.
“Men who pretend to be women hate woman ... and they prove us right time and time and time again.”
Ms Uriarau said that everyone should be able to exercise their right to freedom of expression.
“They absolutely have a right to protest us. What they do not have a right to do is be violent and behave aggressive towards us,” she said.
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15 August, 2024
Californians Can Again Be Their Own Boss in the ‘Gig Economy,’ Also Known as the Free Market
In a unanimous decision last month, California’s Supreme Court upheld Proposition 22, approved by 58 percent of voters in 2020, allowing workers for companies such as Uber and Lyft to work as independent contractors. This decision was fallout from Assembly Bill 5, a virtual declaration against the independence of workers, and not just rideshare drivers and truckers.
The original measure, by Democrat Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, limited freelance writers to 35 submissions per year, less than one a week. The measure also restricted editors, videographers, and photographers and forced musicians to become employees of whichever club would take them on. As trumpeter Joe Mazzaferro of the Jazz Cooperative told reporters, musicians should have the right to negotiate their compensation and “it’s our right to work as we choose.” California Democrats, including AB-5 supporter Kamala Harris, don’t think so.
By 2020, the bill had affected more than one million independent contractor and freelance workers in California. As they struggled to earn a living, AB-5 also harmed the effort to counter the Covid pandemic. That was particularly true in rural California, where hospitals and clinics lack the patient loads to support full-time staff in some nursing specialties. Independent contractors can provide those services, but AB-5 backers were unyielding.
“Furloughed Californians stand on the verge of being wiped out financially because the law prevents them from working part time in a variety of indispensable positions,” read a letter from more than 150 of California’s leading economists and political scientists. “Blocking work that is needed and impoverishing workers laid-off from other jobs are not the intentions of AB-5, but the law is having these unintended consequences and needs to be suspended. Gov. Gavin Newsom declined to suspend the measure, but went on to violate his own rules on masks and impose a rigid lockdown on the people.
AB 5 fundamentally transforms independent workers into employees, where they can be dragooned into unions that faithfully fund Democrats. Trouble is, contrary to establishment media claims, unions do not represent “labor” in any meaningful sense.
According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, a full 90 percent of American workers are not union members. Only 10 percent of workers nationwide are union members. In California, according to the BLS, 84.6 percent of workers are not union members, with only 15.4 percent taking union membership.
Those numbers reflect the freewill choices of workers, who know that master doesn’t know best and want to be their own boss. AB 5 forces workers to go against their own best interests, and if any worker thought it was a totalitarian-style measure it would be hard to blame them.
Rideshare companies are now being portrayed as “gig companies” but the people should not be fooled. This is all about the independence of workers, from drivers to handymen to writers and musicians. They are living the life of their own choosing, according to their own values and needs. The upholding of Proposition 22 provides some relief but the vile AB 5 needs to be completely dismantled. For all but the willfully blind, the reason should be clear.
Politicians rail against the “gig economy,” which is really the free market, the greatest generator of goods, services and wealth. The more politicians leave the market alone, the more the state will prosper.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15024&omhide=true&trk=title
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UK crackdown on language turns free speech on its head
The British courts jailed a 61-year-old Sutton man, David Spring, for 18 months on Tuesday, according to Your Local Guardian, for yelling “who the f..k is Allah” and calling police officers the C-word at an anti-immigration protest near Downing Street in July.
It came out in court that the retired train driver, now mainly a carer for his sick wife, was contrite and embarrassed by his behaviour, but not enough to avoid jail time in what is a ludicrous, obscene infringement of what should be the man’s fundamental rights.
The riots and protests across Britain last month and this month that centred on extreme immigration have triggered a raft of shocking arrests and incarcerations of ordinary Britons for their opinions and social media posts, including of one elderly man who barely understood what he was being arrested for, in his home, by two police officers.
Geopolitics Expert Roger Gewolb says the underlying cause of riots erupting in the UK is 14 years of Tory rule that “didn’t take their electorate seriously”.
“You’ve made some comments that are offensive or obscene and people have made complaints,” the officer told him as she put her gloves to search him. You really have to see it believe it.
Even if some British people now feel safer (from hurt feelings?), it has been a deserved public relations disaster for Britain, especially in the US where mockery and condemnation of the UK have gone through the roof, particularly after one senior British police officer threatened to extradite Americans for posting offensive material.
“The fact that they’re comfortable with finding people who’ve said something that they disagree with and putting them in a f..king cage in England in 2024 is really wild,” Joe Rogan, a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Robert F. Kennedy, said last week on America’s most popular podcast.
X owner Elon Musk has urged his 189 million followers to “Support freedom of speech in the UK!” as part of a barrage of memes and mockery of British rough justice, echoed by countless influencers across the political spectrum. It is indeed shocking to see a country once at the vanguard of individual liberty so zealously arrest its own people over intemperate, rude or intolerant remarks, often made in their own homes, seen by relatively few people, and therefore falling far short of the “clear, present and imminent danger” required, in the US at least, for incitement to violence charges.
Earlier this year British pundit Konstantin Kisin told former Nationals leader John Anderson Britain had arrested more than 3000 individuals for online posts in a single year compared with 400 in Russia, which has about 2½ times the population.
Whatever the exact figures, it’s suggestive of how the West is becoming more censorious than even traditional authoritarian regimes. In China, online “wrong think” attracts a demerit from one’s social credit score; perhaps that’s where Britain is heading once its jails become too full of working-class “racists”.
Australia is surely on the same path, given it was legal to arrest a pregnant woman in her home in Victoria for posting on Facebook her understandable disdain for destructive multi-month pandemic lockdowns.e
The poorly written laws that permit such arrests in Britain – such as the 2003 Communications Act, which makes it illegal to send any message on an electronic messaging system, even among private chat groups, that is “grossly offensive or indecent, obscene or menacing, or false, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another” – have been around for some time.
A generation ago police and governments were wiser, realising that jailing or censoring people for their beliefs would only draw attention to the remarks and stoke further political resentment, which is what has happened in Britain. What has changed is the culture, an obsession among elite policymakers and some journalists with stamping out “misinformation” and “disinformation” – words that were barely heard a decade ago, when right, wrong, lying and propaganda were sufficient – and purifying public (even private!) debate of any remarks deemed politically incorrect.
This week a Washington Post reporter seriously asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ahead of Musk’s interview with Donald Trump: “What role does the White House or the president have in sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that (misinformation)?”
In a world where much of the mainstream media outlets are increasingly biased, it’s even more important that ordinary people can have their say unimpeded, despite the offence or “wrongness” they generate.
Even the elite California audience of US comedian Stephen Colbert burst out laughing this week when he told CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins: “I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is.”
“Is that supposed to be a laugh line?” she said awkwardly.
It wasn’t.
Many of us flippantly like to say “we’re a free country”, but increasingly that’s not so, despite all the well-funded human rights outfits.
Too few people realise democracies are capable, wittingly or unwittingly, of doing stupid, even evil things and trampling over rights that earlier generations have taken for granted. The idea governments, themselves often the biggest purveyors of misinformation, are well placed to police the truth or the limits to taking offence is egregiously wrongheaded.
Right and wrong are highly slippery concepts, best left to civil society to sort out. Let bigoted sentiments be called out by more and better speech.
Americans who don’t like what they see in Britain should beware a Harris-Walz administration.
“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Democrat vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz told MSNBC last week, in what ironically was itself misinformation: there most certainly is, as numerous Supreme Court verdicts have declared.
At least Britain’s spate of arrests for offensive statements and memes has drawn attention to the dwindling rights of the individual across Western nations, as an increasingly culturally remote ruling class seeks to impose its values on everyone else.
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Experts reveal the seven odd behaviors linked to a high IQ
I think most of this applies to me - JR
1. If you talk to yourself, you're not crazy. It may actually be a sign that you're smarter than the average person.
Even though this behavior is somewhat irrational, a growing body of evidence has suggested that it has big cognitive benefits - including better memory recall, confidence, focus and more.
In a 2012 study, a team of American researchers showed participants 20 pictures of various objects and asked them to find a a specific one.
Scientists found that people who talked to themselves while looking at the images were able to identify the object faster.
Another study, conducted in 2017 by UK researchers, discovered that our brains act much like those of monkeys when we stop talking to ourselves - activating separate visual and sound areas of the brain for each task.
In the experiment, researchers asked participants to repeat meaningless sounds out loud, such as 'blah-blah-blah,' while performing visual and sound tasks.
'Because we cannot say two things at the same time, muttering these sounds made participants unable to tell themselves what to do in each task,' Paloma Mari-Beffa, senior lecturer at Bangor University, wrote in The Conversation.
'Under these circumstances, humans behaved like monkeys do, activating separate visual and sound areas of the brain for each task.'
So the next time you're caught muttering to yourself, don't be embarrassed. That strange habit is helping you process information and stay sharp.
2. Staying up late
The early bird may get the worm, but evidence has suggested that night owls actually have higher IQs.
A study, published in January, analyzed data from 26,000 adults, finding those who stay up late scored significantly higher on cognitive tests than early risers.
Night owls scored about 13.5 percent higher than morning types in one group and 7.5 percent higher than morning types in another group.
Many brilliant minds have been known to have nocturnal habits, including Darwin and Marcel Proust.
If your mind is most active while the rest of the world sleeps, you may have a high IQ.
3. Daydreaming
Getting lost in daydreams is often perceived as absent-mindedness. But scientists have said that this is actually a sign that you're smart and creative.
'People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering,' said Eric Schumacher, a Georgia Tech associate psychology professor, said in a statement.
His research found that people who report more frequent daydreaming score higher on intellectual and creative ability tests.
MRI scans also showed that these people had more efficient brain systems.
This evidence suggests that daydreaming is actually a great workout for your brain. So if you find your mind wandering, that's a good sign.
4. Thriving in clutter
Some people can't stand a messy room or desk. But the highly intelligent don't seem to mind it - or perhaps even prefer it.
A team of researchers set out to determine why that is. They put study participants in either a messy or tidy office space and asked them to come up with new uses for ping pong balls.
Though both groups came up with a similar number of ideas, the researchers found that the participants in the messy room came up with more creative and interesting ideas.
'Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights,' said Kathleen Vohs, lead scientist behind the experiment, in a press release.
'Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe.'
So, leaving your space untidy may help you think outside the box.
5. Asking lots of questions
If you're constantly asking how things work, where they come from, and dozens of other questions that pop into your head, you're probably highly intelligent.
Curiosity is one of the most common signs of brightness. It's a sign that your mind is always seeking to understand the world around you.
It also means that you're always learning and storing new information. The more questions you ask, the more your understanding expands.
To some, it may seem annoying. But for people with high IQs, this insatiable curiosity is natural.
As Einstein once said, 'I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.'
6. Being introverted
Many geniuses have been known to hide themselves away to work or think in peace and quiet.
It makes sense - it can be difficult to focus while surrounded by the constant chatter and stimulation of a social environment.
Plus, studies have shown that introverts tend to engage in deeper cognitive processing than extroverts. They tend to think more thoroughly and critically, which can be associated with a higher IQ.
Introverts also tend to prefer activities that require concentration and sustained mental effort, such as reading and research, which can foster intellectual development.
7. Devouring books
Avid readers are constantly learning new information, vocabulary words, complex ideas and different perspectives. It's like a workout for the mind.
Additionally, reading helps strengthen mental focus, imagination and our ability to empathize with others.
People who read a lot are constantly developing their intelligence, which means they're more likely to have a high IQ.
Take business mogul and investor Warren Buffet for example. He spends almost eight hours a day reading.
So if you constantly have your nose in a book, you're actually getting smarter by the page.
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Britain's multicultural disaster
It’s as if a cultural wire has tripped, or a fuse has blown.
The murder last week of three little girls aged six, seven and nine at a school in Southport, in a stabbing attack by the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants which left several others injured, detonated the beginning of some of the most serious rioting seen in Britain for years.
Inflamed by false accounts spread on social media that the attacker was a Syrian Muslim asylum-seeker and that he was on an MI6 watch list, violent mobs in Southport rioted, attacked a local mosque and left more than 50 police officers injured.
Since then, increasingly violent clashes have ensued in around a dozen cities. Whipped up by agitators such as Stephen Lennon (aka “Tommy Robinson”) and other influencers, anti-immigrant mobs attacked mosques and horrifyingly tried to set fire to a hostel for asylum-seekers, with Muslim mobs in turn seeking out white people to attack. In Bolton, Muslim groups shouting “Allahu akhbar” clashed with anti-Muslim rioters. A mob in Middlesbrough shouted “smash the p—s” and “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack” while targeting the homes of migrants, while footage on social media from elsewhere in the city appeared to show groups of Asian men attacking white men.
This is the result of years of ignoring the incendiary twin developments of mass immigration and progressive Islamisation, which I wrote about in my 2006 book Londonistan and which have got so much worse since then.
There’s been a remorseless series of attacks by Muslim extremists. After the 7/7 London bombings that killed 52 people in July 2005, the attack in 2017 on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester killed 22 and injured more than a thousand. Eight people were murdered and 48 injured in the London Bridge attack a month later. In 2021, a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, went into hiding for his life after showing an image of Muhammad to his pupils in a lesson about the limits of free speech; he is still in hiding. In 2023, a 14 year-old autistic boy in Wakefield who dropped a copy of the Quran in the corridor of his Wakefield school during a prank received death threats and was harassed and demonised. Earlier this year, Muslim activists took London’s secular Michaela school to court in an unsuccessful attempt to get the school to kowtow to demands for a prayer room.
These and other such incidents are never discussed honestly. The issue of Muslim aggression that underlies them is ignored or censored. Problems with Islamic religion or culture are regarded as taboo; the issues are discussed in euphemisms. Anyone who does speak plainly about such matters is immediately hung out to dry as “right-wing” or “far-right”, the incoherent labels that are fixed onto anyone who contradicts left-wing dogma in order to stigmatise and silence them as social pariahs.
This is not to excuse what has happened in the current riots. The anti-immigrant violence has been appalling; the targeting of the Muslim community and asylum-seekers has been inexcusable and should be dealt with by condign measures taken against the perpetrators.
But this is a tinderbox that has been under construction for years by successive administrations, starting with Tony Blair’s government which set out to transform the country into a multicultural society through mass immigration.
Multiculturalism, for the benefit of those who have been asleep inside a cocoon for the past several decades, is not the template for a tolerant society. Tolerance of other cultures and ethnicities should be a given in any civilised country. Multiculturalism, by contrast, is a doctrine which says all cultures must be deemed to have values that are no better or worse than any other. Multiculturalism therefore makes it impossible for a western society to require new arrivals to conform to its precepts such as equality for women, freedom of speech and tolerance of minorities.
It is therefore a recipe for the destruction of the west — and indeed of society itself, since it effectively produces tribes warring against each other for power and supremacy, creating divisions which destroy a unified society. Far from producing racial harmony, multiculturalism is a formula for racial and ethnic hatred and worse.
For years, some of us warned that the wilful destruction of British and western culture, the deliberate concealment of what was happening and the denigration and harassment of anyone who objected would not only destroy social cohesion but risked a violent backlash from neo-Nazis, thugs and agitators of various stripes (and the rise of “populist” politicians) alongside ordinary people who had simply had enough. That’s what we’re now seeing playing out on the streets of Britain.
What’s driving people absolutely wild is the double standards that are on such egregious display. The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, speaks as if the only problem is “right-wing” thuggery. Certainly, that problem has been shockingly evident and should be dealt with. But so too should Muslim and left-wing thuggery. There have been numerous examples during these riots of Muslim mobs gratuitously attacking white people. Yet Starmer never calls these people “thugs”.
One of the incidents that sparked the current disorder took place at Manchester airport, where a police officer was filmed kicking the head of a Muslim man who was lying prone on the ground. That created understandable outrage and the officer was rightly pulled up on a disciplinary charge. But it took nearly a day before the rest of the video footage was released, revealing that the police had just been viciously attacked, and a female officer’s nose was broken, by a group of Muslim thugs of whom the kicked man was one.
It is the profound sense of injustice and double standards that has finally ignited the already combustible public resentment over race and immigration, and enabled neo-fascist and other agitators to exploit this situation.
Starmer’s strictures against “right-wing thugs” are in stark contrast to the solidarity he expressed with the Black Lives Matter anti-police, anti-west, anti-white rioters in 2020 who destroyed poor neighbourhoods in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere — and to whom he actually “took the knee” and proudly tweeted the picture.
The double standards go wider and deeper. During those violent BLM riots, liberal commentators earnestly asked what lay behind such black anger. Yet those liberals wouldn’t dream of asking what lies behind the anger of today’s white rioters.
Liberal commentators have claimed that demonstrators screaming for jihad, the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews on the weekly pro-Gaza hate marches are just a few extremists who shouldn’t tarnish the majority of those demonstrators who are all decent people marching for a worthy cause. Yet the same liberals claim that if any decent people are on the anti-immigrant riots, these are utterly compromised by the participation alongside them of the tattooed thugs performing Nazi salutes.
On those pro-Gaza hate marches, police arrested Jewish counter-demonstrators simply because their very presence was said to be a provocation to the Gaza supporters. Yet in the current disorders, Muslims aren’t being arrested on the grounds that their very presence is a provocation to the anti-immigrant mobs.
Here’s another connection. Some of the Muslim mobs who are supposedly organising in self-defence against anti-immigrant thugs are equipping themselves with … Palestinian flags. Why is this? Are we supposed to think that the Palestinian flag now represents British law and order? Or are the Muslim mobs perhaps motivated by something other than self-defence?
On social media, a video clip from the riots has gone viral of a Sky News reporter forced off air by a bunch of Muslim thugs — one of whom pulls up his motorcycle next to her and screams “Free Palestine”.
Those denouncing as “far-right” anyone who criticises the multiculturalism debacle claim that the comparison between the riots and the Gaza hate marches is spurious because the latter haven’t been violent. That’s actually untrue, since although these demonstrations haven’t set out to attack anyone (unlike the anti-immigrant mobs) they have resulted in many instances of violence. In addition, the harassment and intimidation perpetrated by many demonstrators and the calls on these marches for the mass murder of Jews and for the destruction of Israel are all against the law. Yet with few exceptions, there’s been relatively no police action against them.
All these things have created the widespread public impression of two-tier policing. Starmer has denied this; and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, became so enraged when a reporter asked him about it that he knocked the reporter’s microphone to the ground as he stormed off.
We can surely predict what will now unfold. Mass, uncontrolled immigration will continue, with an increasing collapse of social cohesion, escalating Muslim demands and intimidation and yet more double standards and demonisation of critics. This will create a further backlash which will include serious anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim thuggery and violence. The government and police will continue to enforce a one-eyed approach, acknowledging only such white violence and ignoring legitimate public concerns.
The issue of Muslim antisemitism, at eye-watering levels but already hard to discuss without being smeared as an “Islamophobe”, will become unmentionable. With the media and other liberals in sanctimonious support, Muslims will increasingly wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood and insist upon draconian moves against “Islamophobia”. This will lead to an increasing crackdown on anyone trying to draw attention to these issues, and will be used by the Starmer government as a useful weapon to silence its political foes.
Neo-fascists and other thugs and agitators may be piggy-backing on such tensions; but this social disaster now under way is owned by the west’s entitled liberals, whose arrogant disdain for the culture they have so wilfully ruined knows no bounds.
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14 August, 2024
‘Anti-fascist’ demonstrators have a troubling blind spot
A flyer calling for the expulsion of an ethnic group from parts of London was widely shared online yesterday. There were also reports of menacing chants being made outside a place of worship. Were the far-right thugs of riotous Britain up to no good again? Actually, this time the bigotry was coming from the other side, from the self-styled anti-fascists of the radical left.
I thought these protests were about riotous bigotry here at home, not conflicts in the Middle East?
Yes, it seems yesterday’s anti-racist gatherings may not have been entirely anti-racist. A group called Finchley Against Fascism shared a virtual leaflet inviting people to gather in Finchley in north London to show their opposition to the bigotry and chaos of recent days. We need to mobilise, it said, in order to ‘Get fascists, racists, Nazis, Zionists and Islamophobes out of Finchley!’
Wait – Zionists? Jews who believe their people have a right to a national homeland? To lump Zionists in with fascists and Nazis is bad enough. To then say Zionists must be driven ‘out of Finchley’ is horrendous. Finchley is one of the most heavily populated Jewish areas of the UK. Many of its Jewish residents are likely to identify as Zionists. Let’s be clear about this: expelling Zionists from Finchley means expelling Jews from Finchley.
Not surprisingly, the online flyer caused distress to Jews. Local MP, Sarah Sackman of Labour, herself a Jew, was contacted by ‘concerned residents’. The flyer is ‘clearly anti-Semitic’, many of them said. It is. Saying ‘Zionists out’ in Finchley is as bad as those awful cries of ‘P*kis out’ that we heard during the recent riots. In both cases, bigots were essentially calling for the ethnic cleansing of parts of the country.
Some people also reported hearing chants of ‘Free Palestine’ outside the synagogue by Woodside tube station in Finchley. I thought we’d all agreed that political agitation near places of worship is a bad thing? There were Palestine flags on many of the anti-racist gatherings yesterday, too, and spontaneous eruptions of the chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’.
Was this really necessary? I thought these protests were about riotous bigotry here at home, not conflicts in the Middle East? People on the left are well aware that the ‘river to the sea’ chant makes many Jews feel uncomfortable, because they believe it implies the erasure of the Jewish State from the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Could that chant not have been parked for one measly evening in the name of that ‘unity’ everyone was talking about?
It should concern the organisers of yesterday’s gatherings that some Jews reported feeling uncomfortable at them. Raymond Simonson, the CEO of JW3, a Jewish cultural centre in Finchley, said he attended the ‘huge anti-facist demo’ in Finchley to ‘show solidarity with refugees [and the] local Muslim community’. But he felt ‘uncomfortable’. There was a ‘real edge’, he said, knowing ‘there were people around who don’t like me’.
Could that chant not have been parked for one measly evening?
Sure, it was a small minority at yesterday’s protests who said – or at least thought – ‘Zionists out’. Yet the fact that anyone said it, the fact there was an ‘edge’ to these demos that niggled at some Jews, speaks to a blind spot on the self-styled anti-racist left. They are fast to spot prejudice and intolerance when its targets are Muslims or black people, but the blinkers seem to come down when it’s Jews being menaced.
Indeed, Britain’s Jews are well within their rights to ask why there weren’t anti-racist gatherings in protest at their persecution following 7 October. Over the past ten months, synagogues in the UK have been daubed in graffiti. They’ve had their windows smashed. One in St John’s Wood in northwest London was targeted by a ‘pro-Palestine’ mob. Just two months ago, a teenage Nazi was jailed for eight years for plotting to blow up a synagogue. This week, yet another ‘surge’ in anti-Semitic hate crime has been reported. Where’s the demo?
Every decent person agrees that the targeting of mosques by rioting mobs in recent days was disgraceful, pure bigotry in action. It is just a shame that the low-level, almost year-long targeting of synagogues by so-called ‘anti-Zionists’ has not provoked anywhere near the same level of anger among leftists. Unity is good, sure. But moral consistency is better.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/anti-fascist-demonstrators-have-a-troubling-blind-spot/
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The case for colorblindness is as compelling — and vital — as ever
by Jeff Jacoby
ON THE first page of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Coleman Hughes describes himself as a black person who always found race "boring." Growing up in New Jersey, he gave little thought to his racial identity or to those of his friends. "I didn't think of them as 'black,' 'white,' 'Hispanic,' and 'mixed race,'" he writes. "I thought of them as Rodney, Stephen, Javier, and Jordan."
Then he went to college.
"In four years at Columbia, hardly a week passed without a race-themed controversy," Hughes recalls. During orientation, students were directed to sort themselves by race and discuss how they "participated in, or suffered from, systemic oppression." The school newspaper promoted the idea that white supremacy was prevalent on campus. One professor was adamant that all people of color were victims of racial injustice, Hughes relates, "even as my daily experience as a black person directly contradicted that claim."
Though he still considered race itself boring, he was fascinated by the racial obsessions of American cultural elites, especially those who call themselves "antiracists." The more he explored those obsessions, the more convinced he became that the principle of colorblindness is the only ethical and workable basis for governing and living in a multiethnic democracy. That principle Hughes defines simply: "We should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives."
Hughes's book makes the case for that approach, and for rejecting the racial doctrines popularized by advocates like Ibram X. Kendi, the founder of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Kendi, like many on the left, contends that racism permeates American life and the only way to overcome it is with explicitly race-conscious policies. As he put it in "How to Be an Antiracist," his 2019 bestseller: "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
It is illogical to call such views "antiracist," since they are grounded in racial awareness and score-settling. Hughes's theme is that the only true antiracism is colorblindness — treating skin color as irrelevant, stigmatizing all expressions of racial hostility or superiority, and recognizing that when it comes to the requirements for human flourishing, all people are fundamentally more alike than unalike.
In progressive circles today, an insistence on colorblindness is anathema. When the University of California compiled a list of "microagressions" that instructors were to avoid, among the verboten phrases were articulations of colorblindness, such as "There is only one race, the human race." During an appearance on ABC's "The View" by the soft-spoken Hughes, cohost Sunny Hostin said disparagingly that he is considered "a charlatan" — for enunciating ideas that Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed.
But the notion that public policy should be steadfastly race-blind was for decades a central principle of the civil rights movement. The NAACP argued again and again that it was illegitimate for government or law to take race into account. "Classifications and distinctions based on race or color," Thurgood Marshall, the group's chief counsel, wrote in a 1948 brief, "have no moral or legal validity in our society."
In his compelling debut book, Coleman Hughes argues that the way to achieve justice is to refuse to focus on race.
In a chapter titled "The Real History of Colorblindness," Hughes demonstrates that this conviction was at the heart of the anti-slavery and civil rights movements. He quotes numerous abolitionists and civil rights champions who emphasized the colorblind principle, from Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass in the 19th century to Marshall, Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph in the 20th. As for King, his legendary 1963 exhortation to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin was no anomaly. Hughes fills a page and a half with quotations from King's speeches and writings that are wholly at odds with the idea that race is all-important. "Let us be dissatisfied," King said in 1967, "until that day when nobody will shout 'White Power!' — when nobody will shout 'Black Power!' — but everybody will talk about God's power and human power."
The belief that America is permeated with racial bigotry, conscious and unconscious, has become ubiquitous on college campuses, in media newsrooms, and in other left-of-center strongholds. Terms like "whiteness" and "systemic racism" appear far more frequently in published sources than they used to. How did such ideas spread so rapidly? And what happened to undermine what was until recently Americans' upbeat view of the nation's racial progress? Hughes reproduces Gallup Poll findings to show that for years after the turn of the century, more than two-thirds of both black and white Americans considered race relations good or even very good.
That era of good racial feelings took a nosedive after 2013. By 2021, the percentage of those who felt relations between racial groups were good had fallen to 43 percent among white respondents and 33 percent among black respondents.
"It's not an exaggeration to say that whatever happened after 2013 represents the biggest setback in American race relations in at least a generation," Hughes laments.
What could have caused such an abrupt collapse in racial optimism? Hughes rules out a major political development like the election of Barack Obama or Donald Trump. As he points out, the plunge didn't begin until five years into the Obama presidency and was underway three years before Trump took office. Nor was there any measurable increase in actual racism, such as a rise in white supremacist activity or police shootings of unarmed black people. According to all available data, both of those had been steadily declining.
Hughes suggests that what caused the change was — technology. It was around 2013 that the use of smartphones and social media reached a "critical mass," increasing by several orders of magnitude the speed at which information could be spread. And the kind of content most susceptible to being posted online — retweeted, blogged, and shared on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram — is "anything that appeals to our tribal identities, us-versus-them narratives, or historical grievances."
Thus, when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, the claim that a racist policeman had gunned down an unarmed an innocent black kid whose arms were raised — though largely untrue — circulated with turbocharged speed. The less incendiary facts of the case — Brown had punched the cop and tried to steal his gun, and his hands were not in the air — moved much more slowly. It isn't a new insight that the digital revolution has given dangerous misinformation a powerful boost. But Hughes is the first writer I know of to link that insight to the recent upsurge in racial pessimism.
There is much more to Hughes's calm and cogent book. Without ever raising his voice, he demolishes, one by one, the "antiracist" myths that have grown so voluble and defends the oldest and most honorable of all American values: the "self-evident" truth that all persons are created equal. We have yet to achieve the full flowering of that value. But this gifted young writer makes an elegant and persuasive case that the long-overdue embrace of colorblindness is the surest way to get there.
https://jeffjacoby.com/27975/the-case-for-colorblindness-is-as-compelling
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Leftist racism in Australia gets more subtle
Neil Brown
This is the story of the column I almost wrote, but which was overtaken by events. It all started a few weeks ago with a well-placed leak that the Albanese government was moving on from the disastrous result of its failed referendum on the racist Voice. The Voice was, of course, only Plan A of its triple-headed monster of Voice, Makarrata and Treaty. The entire plan was to elevate one race above all others, denigrate European settlement, vastly expand government spending on bureaucracy, consultants and conferences and give us a dose of enforced wallowing in grief and guilt about being born or having migrated here.
The leak, then, was that the government was going to move on to Plan B: the Makarrata, otherwise known as truth-telling. That should have given us due warning by itself. When governments and their lackies – in the Aboriginal industry and anywhere else – start talking about truth-telling, we know that what they actually mean is lying. As with the eponymous Department of Truth immortalised in George Orwell’s 1984, the plan was to set up another bureaucracy whose only role was to rewrite history, paint a story of false oppression and deny the immense value of settlement that has been given to Australia’s Aboriginals since its foundation.
My response to this proposed twaddle, in the column I was going to write, was to issue a challenge to oppose the Makarrata: to get ready to fight against this unwarranted expansion of the powers of the federal government; get ready to argue against the coming waste of vast sums of money and, above all; to reignite the argument that had been so successful in the anti-Voice campaign, that we simply do not want our public policy based on race, we do not want more power being given to unelected officials and we do not want any more denigration of non-Aboriginal Australians.
But, lo and behold, the leak has miraculously faded away and it is now clear that Albanese has got cold feet about setting up a Makarrata as the next step on from the Voice. How ironic it is that his foray into truth-telling should begin with a lie! His cringe-making speech to the Garma festival tells us that after all the hype, after all the promises to implement the whole Uluru Statement word for word, as he promised on the very night of his election, we are not going to have one Makarrata, or at least not yet, and that what we will have instead is a series of little ones, mini-Makarratas, where there will be lots of coming together, broad concepts and lots of dialogue. Or, as one of his more trenchant Aboriginal critics put it, a ‘vague vibe (and) casual conversations’. The vibe, apparently, is Albanese’s next big thing.
This new proposal is a threat that has to be opposed and defeated. In fact, it is a far more substantial threat than the Voice, as it will be set up simply by government fiat and will not be subject to approval by the people at a referendum, which saved us from the Voice. Moreover, at least with the Makarrata, there was going to be a body that you could identify and where the wild allegations and re-writing of history that would inevitably be made would be open to cross-examination and competing evidence. But the mini-Makarattas will not be subject to any such restraints. They will essentially be private meetings where federal officials will agree to newly funded programs, new powers for so-called representatives of the Aboriginal people and more symbols and ceremonies, if there could possibly be any more than we already have, and where we will continually be reminded that we live under a justly deserved cloud of guilt and shame.
And when you get down to the details that Albanese has condescended to give us, it is even more ludicrous. And closer to being a giant fraud. He says, first, that corporate Australia will have to step up and link arms with the Aboriginal movement. We all know what that means: compulsory and tokenistic appointments of Aboriginal directors and shareholders who will force companies into making decisions that favour only one race.
Next, Aboriginal enhancement will magically be advanced, he claims, by the government’s policies on climate change and the environment, policies that are in reality designed to stop industrial progress and development. First up, you can kiss good-bye to any hope of ever getting Woodside’s Browse gas field up and running.
Thirdly, we are told, the new mini-Makarratas will have to work in with the government’s new Nirvana of ‘Made in Australia’; surely every Australian would want to buy Australian, but what on earth will be the Aboriginal contribution to quantum computers, solar panels and AI and why, like everything that Albanese touches, does it have to be defined by race?
What, then, would be a better policy on Aboriginal affairs than Albanese’s racism? Here are a few policies that are not only based on sound principle, but (Liberal party, take notice!) would be very popular with the electorate:
– a National Declaration that we are one nation, not a collection of rival camps and tribes;
– the sole objective of Aboriginal policy will be better outcomes and results;
– an end to race-based policies and funding;
– no treaties between the nation and its own citizens;
– no more empty gestures like comedic public welcome to country and smoking ceremonies;
– we will celebrate Australia Day on 26 January;
– one Australian national flag, the one we already have;
– the ABC will use the real and official names of cities and regions, not Dreamtime fantasies, as the source of news;
– and the one guiding principle that will influence all government decisions from now on will be to encourage the strength of individual Australians of whatever race or colour, and provide them with real incentives to improve their standard of living. And their happiness.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/brown-study-294/
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Viral reaction as US moves to ban gym ‘scam’
This is long overdue -- JR
One of the most hated things about gym membership could soon be history — in the US at least.
With the November US election approaching the Democrats have come up with a new policy, allowing people to cancel memberships with a single click.
The new consumer law, proposed by the White House, would require businesses to give people the option to easily end contracts.
For years, companies such as gyms have been accused of delaying the process to cancel a service, or making it extremely onerous.
A White House spokesman said: “Americans know these practices well: it’s being forced to wait on hold just to get the refund we’re owed; the hoops and hurdles to cancel a gym membership or subscription; the unnecessary complications of dealing with health insurance companies; the requirements to do in-person or by mail what could easily be done with a couple of clicks online; and confusing, lengthy, or manipulative forms that take unnecessary time and effort.”
The new Time is Money initiative will essentially make it easier for people to get refunds, cancel subscriptions and submit forms.
It will also require businesses to make customer service representatives available, rather than chatbots.
Additionally, the law will crack down on “doom loops” — where customers are shuffled around through a “a maze of menu options and automated recordings”.
Other changes include: ending airline runarounds by requiring automatic cash refunds and allowing health claims to be submitted online.
The announcement was received well online and quickly went viral with one post racking up 200,000 likes in just two hours.
“Could be the first good law passed in years,” one person wrote.
“Gym membership “contracts” have ALWAYS been a scam,” another added.
Carrie goes public with secret 20-year battle
“Actually thank goodness THANK YOU!!!!! If I have to yell at a robot to talk to a human 6 times till they transfer me again!!!!! LMAO,” a frustrated person chimed in.
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13 August, 2024
British 'tradwife' who submits to her husband like it's the 1950s reveals she's deleted social media and moved to Australia for a more private life
This idea of the woman "submitting" to her husband seems dubious to me. When I had a tradwife we just came to unforced agreements about things and during my childhood it was definitely my father who submitted to my non-working mother.
I think you can have a traditional marriage as long is there is broad agreement in favour of traditional roles, but after that the detailed arrangements are whatever suits the individual personalities involved. "Submitting" sounds a very unhappy thing to me and and a husband who kept making his wife unhappy would either be a fool or out of love with her
A British woman who became famous as one of the UK's first 'trad wives' has revealed she's moved to Australia after the 1950s-inspired movement 'became a monster'.
The tradwife movement, which blew up in the UK in 2020, says that wives should not work, and rather spend their days cooking, cleaning, wearing modest and feminine dress, and practice traditional etiquette, being submissive to their husbands and 'always put them first'.
Alena Kate Pettitt, 38, originally from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, who is a self-proclaimed tradwife, tried to showcase the idea in Britain.
But she has since revealed how she's stepped away from the limelight, deleting her Instagram account and moving to Australia to live a more private life, because it's become 'politicised' and due to receiving 'unwanted attention from men'.
She 'stepped away' from her social media page last year, despite it boasting nearly 40,000 followers, and said on her blog that she is 'embarrassed' that she used to take part in the social media fad.
Alena, who started up a 'femininity finishing school' called The Darling Academy, also felt that the tradwife movement had lost its way, becoming more of a superficial trend which had lost control of it's core values.
Speaking to the New Yorker she said: 'It's become an aesthetic, and then it's become politicized. And then it's become its own monster.'
She worried new generations of tradwives are getting 'younger and younger, and more polished than realistic.'
Another reason she ditched her account was because of the 'vile messages, the hatred, the passive-aggressive comments and unwanted attention from men.'
This all fed into the reason why Alena decided to delete her Instagram, however she revealed on her blog that she still upholds her traditional values, only more privately this time around.
Writing on The Darling Academy, she said: 'I tried. I thought that speaking to the media and using a platform with so many users would be a wonderful way to promote the brilliant work of the housewife.
'But as with all kinds of positive activism, good message, or wholesome idea, it will in time become hijacked by the opposite of what you stand for and believe in.'
It appears Alena also decided to take a hiatus from her blog for nearly a year to create 'certain boundaries' which she said were put in place by her husband, Carl, and members of her family.
However the former Marketing Manager recently returned to the platform saying she 'sought permission' from her husband to announce that they are now living in Australia.
Alena explained that the big move across the pond was always on the cards for them, however it came a little bit sooner then they had anticipated after their home address in England was shared online which made her feel 'unsafe.'
Writing on her blog she said their 'hearts were no longer in England', even though they almost bought a 'doer upper' house back in Gloucestershire.
She revealed the house would of been 'too much work' and with her husband working full time the renovations would of been 'painfully slow'.
The mother-of-one added that their privacy and safety was also 'ultimately violated' on a gossip forum when their previous address was shared and the new home was just down the road, saying it didn't have 'enough distance' for her to feel safe.
Describing 2023 as an Annus Horribilis, Latin phrase that means a horrible year, she revealed that she also lost friends after stepping back from social media.
She said it was 'disappointing to feel used', but a 'relief to be free of taking pictures ''for the gram''. '
Sticking to her true traditional values, Alena revealed she is going to blog and write like it was in the 'early days' before social media.
She claimed her content will still be centred around homemaking but with 'healthy boundaries' this time around.
Alena was one of the earliest and best known in the movement of women who spend their days taking care of their homes and families and documenting their activities on social media.
She wrote two books, where she set out her Christian beliefs and principles of womanhood, which her husband helped her to self-publish.
In 2016, she published what turned out to be something between a guidebook to traditional womanhood and a memoir of self-transformation through faith. Pettitt called the book Ladies Like Us. Her next book, English Etiquette, followed in 2019.
Speaking to the BBC in 2020, she explained of her blog: 'I talk about etiquette, feminine lifestyle, homemaking, and being a traditional housewife.
'I wouldn't expect my husband to come home after a long day at work and cook for me. My job is essentially being a housewife.'
Alena gets a monthly allowance for the food shop, along with a buffer for her to 'spend something on myself' so she's not always 'asking him for money'.
Admitting that she didn't enjoy growing up in the nineties era where the emphasis was on breaking glass ceilings, Alena says she was 'born to be a wife and mother'.
Alena enjoyed shows from the 1950s and 1960s, and remembered how her single mother worked full-time, with the house becoming a 'huge burden', which became the turning point for her when she realised she 'didn't want the same life'.
Revealing that her husband also believed in the same traditional values and offered to 'look after her', she admitted meeting him was the moment she felt complete. 'It's almost like the fairytale came true', she said.
Alena says she was a 'career girl' in her twenties and followed messages from hit show Sex and The City, which she interpreted as telling women working was 'liberating and they should follow their sexual desires'.
Not identifying with this persona, she then turned to shows like the Real Housewives, but found the wives were 'too rich to do their own cleaning and everyone was cheating on each other'.
She then went online and discovered an underground movement of other women who felt the same, explaining they craved the sense of 'belonging, home quaintness and tradition'.
Alena, who strongly believes your husband should 'always come first and should know this', said some feminists believe her movement is throwing their work for equality back in their faces.
Revealing her take on feminism, she explained: 'My view on feminism is that it's about choices. To say you can go into the working world and compete with men and you're not allowed to stay at home - to me is taking a choice away'.
Distancing herself from the movement's right-wing links, she argued: 'Being a tradwife is investing in your family and being selfless. So I would say the opposite of that is someone who is selfish and just takes'.
Along with blogs and vlogs dedicated to the movement, which is also taking Brazil, Germany and Japan, by storm, an array of books from the fifties and sixties 'teaching' women how to be the perfect housewives become popular again.
One of the movement's pin-up girls is Helen Andelin, the American author of the 1963 'Fascinating Womanhood' book, which teaches women that subordination is the 'key to a happy marriage' and has regained popularity.
And, a century after the first wave of feminism ended, and sixty years after the women's liberation movement, Helen Andelin's daughter Dixie Andelin Forsyth has launched a worldwide 'femininity class' with 100,000 followers.
Speaking to Stylist, she claimed: 'The movement's rising because women have had enough of feminism in the UK and elsewhere. We say to feminists: thanks for the trousers, but we see life a different way'.
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Now Even Viewpoint Diversity Is ‘White Supremacy’
Do you want a perspective other than the stifling woke orthodoxy being imposed on society through classrooms, TV shows, and corporate boardrooms? Tired of seeing “LGBTQ” this and “BIPOC” or “AAPI” that? Do you want a discussion of ideas without constant identity politics?
You just might be a white supremacist.
That’s essentially the message of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest attack on the mainstream conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom. You see, ADF had the gall to launch a “Viewpoint Diversity Score” to broaden the discussion in corporate boardrooms beyond the Left’s sacred cows.
The SPLC can’t stand for that, so it’s reaching for the tired old “white supremacy” card once again.
The SPLC gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy, but it weaponized that reputation to smear mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits. It publishes a map plotting parental rights groups; religious freedom organizations, including ADF; and pro-immigration enforcement groups alongside Klan chapters, suggesting that all sorts of conservative causes are driven by “hate.”
The SPLC’s annual report describes all groups on the map as part of the “organizational infrastructure … upholding white supremacy in the United States.”
What Is White Supremacy?
“White supremacy” once meant the idea that white people are superior to others and that society should be restructured to give them maximum power. Since the 1950s, this racism has rightly been pushed to the fringes of American public discourse, racial minorities have gained equal rights, and Americans have rejected race essentialism.
The Left, however, has embraced critical race theory, a Marxist worldview that attributes any racial disparity to racism and uses claims of systemic racism as a pretext to impose more government control.
Simultaneously, increasingly desperate leftist groups like the SPLC have realized that branding conservatives “racist” has lost its bite because Americans know it’s false—so, now they use an even more inflammatory term, justified by the false premises of CRT.
Under CRT, the SPLC can brand any conservative a supporter of “white supremacy” because it claims that American society is systemically racist. As such, anything short of a radical “anti-racist” restructuring of society amounts to donning a Klan hood.
The Human Rights Campaign index pushes LGBTQ activism in corporate boardrooms, and its influence helps explain why Target promoted “tuck” swimsuits making males appear female and why a transgender influencer gave Bud Light the kiss of death. The Corporate Equality Index is a key part of the environmental, social, and governance movement pushing companies to adopt leftist positions on abortion, climate, and gender.
The Viewpoint Diversity Score from the Alliance Defending Freedom
The ADF version pressures companies to provide breathing space for dissent from this woke orthodoxy. The Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index urges companies to “meaningfully respect customers, employees, shareholders, and other external stakeholders who hold diverse religious and ideological beliefs [and] foster viewpoint diversity in their workplaces.”
The ADF index isn’t trying to bully corporations to adopt its positions on political issues. Instead, it’s urging them to return to neutral, to recognize that not all Americans want to wear rainbow-flag pins and shout their abortions. Business should be about treating customers, employees, and shareholders well, regardless of what they believe.
It’s All About Power
The SPLC takes umbrage with this because it prefers the woke takeover of corporations. Scratch the surface of any woke complaint about “racism” and you’ll find an obsession with power underneath. The Viewpoint Diversity Score is calling out the Left’s tactics to dominate corporate boardrooms, and the SPLC can’t stomach it.
So the SPLC’s R.G. Cravens claims that “ADF’s public relations and legal crusades are intertwined with Christian supremacist and white supremacist ideologies.” According to Cravens, ADF’s efforts responding to diversity, equity, and inclusion “appear to resonate with white supremacist rhetoric that characterizes DEI policies as a form of ‘anti-white racism’ and a threat to white people brought about by ‘woke’ ideology.”
Yet anyone remotely familiar with criticism of DEI knows that Asian Americans, not whites, often find themselves most disfavored by “equity” practices that prioritize meeting racial quotas. Asian Americans cheered the Supreme Court’s overturning of racial preferences in college admissions not because they are secretly white supremacist, but because they value merit over “racial equity.”
Nowhere did Cravens provide a quote directly from ADF to demonstrate that the Viewpoint Diversity Score has anything to do with helping white people—because it doesn’t.
The SPLC just doesn’t have anything else to say.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/12/now-viewpoint-diversity-white-supremacy-splc-says/
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Elon Musk Brands Humza Yousaf a “Super Racist Scumbag”
Yousaf is a former Chief Minister of Scotland of Pakistani heritage
Elon Musk has slammed Humza Yousaf as a “super racist scumbag” and dared him to sue, amid reports that the former First Minister is mulling legal action over their escalating social media feud on X. The Telegraph has more.
On Sunday, Mr. Musk effectively branded Mr. Yousaf a “dangerous race baiter” in response to the former SNP leader sharing an article in the Sunday Mail claiming that he was “considering all options”, including going to court.
The exchange came two days after Mr. Musk described Mr. Yousaf as a “super, super racist” and claimed that he “loathes white people”.
The comments were a response to an attack the ex-SNP leader had launched on Mr. Musk at the Edinburgh Fringe.
He described Mr. Musk, one of the wealthiest people in the world, as “one of the most dangerous men on the planet” and accused him of attempting to stoke civil wars in Europe.
The allegations of racism against Mr. Yousaf by Mr. Musk date back to last year, when he responded to a three-year-old speech Mr. Yousaf gave at Holyrood at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The then-SNP justice secretary had pointed out that a succession of figures in Scottish public life were white.
Mr. Musk has repeated the racism allegation over recent days in response to Mr. Yousaf’s widely reported comments in the Scottish capital. …
On Sunday, Mr. Yousaf shared the report on X that had raised the prospect of him taking legal action. He accompanied the link to the news story by calling Mr. Musk a “dangerous race baiter” adding that “his billions won’t stop me calling out his support for the far-Right.”
Mr. Musk responded by agreeing with a comment in which another social media user told Mr. Yousaf it was he who was a “dangerous race baiter who must be held to account for your actions”.
Mr. Musk later added: “He’s obviously super racist against white people. I dare that scumbag to sue me. Go ahead, make my day…”
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/08/12/elon-musk-brands-humza-yousaf-a-super-racist-scumbag/
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Australia: Warning on attempts to reduce the level of proof required for a rape conviction
Australia’s peak legal body is challenging a movement to reshape the administration of rape trials in the wake of #MeToo, declaring that the presumption of innocence and the rule of law must remain sacrosanct, as the country’s law reform commission looks to overhaul legal frameworks governing sexual violence.
In extraordinary comments amid a Labor-led push to improve outcomes for rape victims, the Law Council of Australia says that, while some fundamental principles underpinning the criminal justice system may have “some impact” on complainants, any reforms must protect critical rights of defendants.
The Law Council, in its submission to the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into justice responses to sexual violence, proposed reforms including better funding community legal services and implementing “early intervention strategies and services” including consent education.
“All law reform proposals must be carefully considered and critically evaluated to ensure they do not undermine key safeguards of the criminal justice system,” the submission reads.
“The presumption of innocence, the right to silence, the right to a trial by jury, the burden of proof resting on the prosecution, and the criminal standard of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) are all essential to the integrity of the criminal justice system.”
Other submissions tendered to the inquiry, predominantly written by sexual assault advocacies, have called for a “civil” approach to rape cases – with a different standard of proof – to be introduced, and a crackdown on “inappropriate” defence questioning.
There have also been suggestions that “bad character” evidence relating to a defendant, such as the fact that they are a heavy drinker or use illicit drugs, could be admitted, and an accused person’s right to silence be “reviewed”.
Some members of a “lived-experience” sexual assault advisory group set up by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to speak directly with the commissioners of the inquiry have also called for prerecorded evidence for complainants to be allowed, and for the introduction of specialist sexual assault courts.
The Law Council – representing all state and territory bar associations and law societies, and advocating for more than 100,000 lawyers across the country – said that, while protecting the presumption of innocence might “have some impact upon complainants”, it is “a cornerstone of our criminal justice system” that should not be diminished.
“The criminal justice system was developed at a time when the impacts of trauma upon complainants and victim-survivors were not well understood,” the submission reads. “Improved understandings of the impacts of trauma require that trauma-informed practices and principles are embedded within the court system, legal profession and police practices.
“The criminal justice system has a responsibility to protect the fundamental rights of an accused person. There is also a responsibility – however complex this may be – for justice systems in each Australian jurisdiction to better support complainants and victim-survivors whilst upholding fundamental criminal justice principles to ensure a fair trial.”
Two long-term judges presiding over the review – Australian Law Reform Commission president Mordecai Bromberg and part-time commissioner Marcia Neave – said in June the inquiry would investigate the “non-engagement” of rape victims with criminal solutions, and examine whether alternative civil remedies could bring them justice.
The Law Council said it supported “strengthened access to alternative pathways to the criminal justice system including restorative justice and civil compensation”.
In a statement accompanying the submission, it affirmed the “importance of adopting an approach that centres on the experience of complainants and victim-survivors”.
It also said it held “grave concerns” about “the persistent inadequate funding” of legal aid services, and supported “the operation of support services and other initiatives that assist victims navigate and understand the criminal justice system and mitigate re-traumatisation”.
“We consider that victim-survivors and complainants are more likely to be re-traumatised and to experience adverse impacts resulting from unmet legal needs in the context of a chronically underfunded justice system,” the submission reads.
One of the Law Council’s core focuses is on “early-intervention strategies and services” including consent education, family support services, behavioural-change programs for offenders, and “fully resourced representation for complainants and victim-survivors at certain stages of the criminal process”.
In regards to “inappropriate” defence questioning, the Law Council “generally considers existing safeguards, for example, rules with respect to disallowable questions, to be adequate”.
“However there is scope to continually improve the application of such rules,” the submission reads.
“The Law Council notes that a primary function of the trial judge is to control questioning that could jeopardise a fair trial and that their judicial authority, independent of objections raised by counsel, requires them to ensure that counsel observe accepted standards in the manner in which evidence is elicited.”
The Law Council said it did not support prerecorded evidence for adult sexual-assault complainants becoming the norm, saying it could cause delays and be ineffective. However, it acknowledged that prerecording evidence could “reduce the re-traumatisation of vulnerable persons” by ensuring they do not have to give evidence multiple times.
The Law Council does not support the introduction of specialist sexual assault courts, saying it could “exacerbate existing disparities” for people who live outside metropolitan areas, and could “create significant risks of ‘burnout’ and trauma for staff consistently working in such courts”.
“Instead, we support greater focus on raising standards of trauma-informed and culturally safe practices across all criminal courts,” the submission reads.
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12 August, 2024
An amusing mental somersault: Is "harnessing the power of government" the answer to authoritarianism?
Prof. Stiglitz (below) is undoubtedly a good economist but his Leftism occasionally draws him into failures of logic. Much of what he says below has some truth. There are undoubtedly large inequalities of wealth in society.
But he makes no effort to understand the psychological and sociological causes of that He simply asserts that "neo-liberalism." is the culprit. He says that it has "set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism"
So what is his solution to that? It is "harnessing the power of government" to redistribute resources. So his cure for authoritarianism is more authoritarianism! He is himself a Fascist! Mussolini would approve of his ideas
So for all his pretence of profound analysis he is in the end just an old-fashioned Leftist with old-fashioned Leftist policy prescriptions. Rather pathetic, really
I have previously pointed out another failure of logic in a Stiglitz defence of Leftism:
https://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2023/04/is-cost-of-living-leap-caused-by.html
If you know the Leftist position on anything, you know what conclusion Stiglitz will come to, no matter how many dubious twists and turns it takes to get there. Even his Nobel prize work led to an advocacy of government interventions in the market
How would you define the "good society"?
It's a question Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is asking everyone, in this fraught moment in history.
His new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, takes a deep look at the question.
"My ultimate objective in this book is to understand what kind of an economic, political, and social system is most likely to enhance the freedoms of most citizens, including by appropriately drawing the right boundaries on freedoms, constructing the right rules and regulations, and making the right trade-offs," he writes.
"The answer I provide runs counter to more than a century of writings by conservatives.
"It is not the minimalist state advocated by libertarians, or even the highly constricted state envisioned by neoliberalism.
"Rather, the answer is something along the lines of a rejuvenated European social democracy or a new American Progressive Capitalism, a twenty-first century version of social democracy or of the Scandinavian welfare state," he writes.
If you haven't heard of Professor Stiglitz, he's credited with pioneering the concept of "the 1 per cent."
That refers to the modern phenomenon of the top 1 per cent of Americans (or more precisely, the top one-tenth of 1 per cent) that have accrued so much wealth and power in recent decades that it's imperilling the US political system.
In 2011, 13 years ago, he explained how the severe growth in wealth inequality, if left unchecked, would keep feeding on itself and drive further inequality and division in politics.
The next year, in 2012, he published The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (which became a best-seller) to warn of what was coming.
"As our economic system is seen to fail for most citizens, and as our political system seems to be captured by moneyed interests, confidence in our democracy and in our market economy will erode along with our global influence," he warned.
"As the reality sinks in that we are no longer a country of opportunity and that even our long-vaunted rule of law and system of justice have been compromised, even our sense of national identity may be put into jeopardy."
Today, he has returned to that theme in his new book, but from a different angle.
He takes as his starting point the extreme social, political and environmental problems besieging some societies in this age of polycrisis, and wonders how Americans (and citizens of other countries) can reverse the destructive growth in wealth inequality and rebuild a better and healthier society in coming decades.
"The challenges to — and attacks on — democracy and freedom have never been greater in my lifetime," he warns.
What does your ideal society look like?
We may not know it, but when we complain about a new policy, or tax settings, or housing, or our health and education systems, or the rate of population growth, we're often engaging in political philosophy.
Why? Because if we're arguing that some policy isn't good, we must have an idea (whether conscious or unconscious) of what a better policy would be, and that means we're comparing it to some ideal we have in mind.
For example, what's your view on gun ownership?
Should Australians be allowed to have access to guns in the way people in the United States do?
Your answer to that question will say a lot about your conception of "the good society."
Do you think Australians would be freer and happier if the countryside was awash with guns? Would our schools be safer? Would our politics improve?
That's the type of exercise Professor Stiglitz engages with in this book.
He spends a lot of time talking about the economic freedoms that are required for the majority of people to flourish.
He talks about the importance of someone's "opportunity set" — the set of options available to someone during their life, given the resources at their disposal — and how it determines their freedom to act, and what can be gained by good economic and social systems that provide someone with the freedom to live up to their potential.
"People who are barely surviving have extremely limited freedom," he writes.
"All their time and energy go into earning enough money to pay for groceries, shelter, and transportation to jobs … a good society would do something about the deprivations, or reductions in freedom, for people with low incomes.
"It is not surprising that people who live in the poorest countries emphasise economic rights, the right to medical care, housing, education, and freedom from hunger.
"They are concerned about the loss of freedom not just from an oppressive government but also from economic, social, and political systems that have left large portions of the population destitute," he writes.
He reminds us that economic rights and political rights are, ultimately, inseparable.
"When you understand economic freedom as freedom to act, it immediately reframes many of the central issues surrounding economic policy and freedom," he says.
The lies we were told?
To that end, a big chunk of his book is dedicated to arguing why we've been fed a lie by "neo-liberalism."
He says the neoliberal political project has made millions of people in the United States and elsewhere less free, as it's destroyed the US middle class (and severely threatened it in other countries) while enriching the pockets of the ultra-wealthy and undermining democratic institutions.
"The system that evolved in the last quarter of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic came to be called neoliberalism," he writes.
"'Liberal' refers to being 'free', in this context, free of government intervention including regulations. The 'neo' meant to suggest that there was something new in it.
"What really was new was the trick of claiming neoliberalism stripped away rules when much of what it was doing was imposing new rules that favoured banks and the wealthy.
"For instance, the so-called deregulation of the banks got government temporarily out of the way, which allowed bankers to reap rewards for themselves. But then, with the 2008 financial crisis, government took centre stage as it funded the largest bailout in history, courtesy of taxpayers. Bankers profited at the expense of the rest of the society. In dollar terms, the cost to the rest of us exceeded the banks' gains.
"Neoliberalism in practice was what can be described as 'ersatz capitalism', in which losses are socialised and gains privatised," he says [his italics].
The title of his book is an explicit reference to The Road to Serfdom, which was published by the famous Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek in 1944.
Professor Hayek was one of the leading figures of the post-war neoliberal political movement.
He wrote the Road to Serfdom to warn people of the threat posed to freedom, as he saw it, by governments in the 1930s and 1940s that were increasingly willing to intervene in the market system to plan, or direct, some economic activity for the masses.
He spent much of his life trying to rid the world of the influence of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose policy prescriptions inspired governments in countries such as Australia and the UK to pursue "full employment" policies after the war (policies which, coincidentally, supported the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism from 1945 to the early 1970s).
Professor Stiglitz argues that the conception of "freedom" pushed by Professor Hayek and other neoliberals, including Milton Friedman, led us down another wrong path.
"They talked of 'free markets', as if imposing rules and regulations results in 'unfree markets'," he writes.
"They relabeled private enterprises — companies owned by private individuals — as 'free enterprises', as if giving them that appellation would bestow a reverence and suggest that they should not be touched and their freedom should not be curtailed even if they exploit people and the planet.
"[And] the Right claims that governments have unnecessarily restricted freedom through taxation, which constrains the budgets of the rich and thereby … reduces their freedom to act.
"Even in this they are only partially correct because the societal benefits of the expenditures financed by these taxes, the investments in infrastructure and technology, for instance, may expand their opportunity sets (their freedom) in more meaningful ways," he writes.
Professor Stiglitz was born in 1943. He's 81 years old.
He knew some of the people he writes about in the book and had a ringside seat to the "market turn" that occurred in the 1970s.
He's seen the impact that that market-turn had on the US middle class during the past 40 years.
One can easily imagine that the supporters of the vision of "freedom" that's been promulgated by neoliberalism will find plenty of problems with his book, in both its historical analysis and its policy prescriptions.
But Professor Stiglitz takes no backward step. "Unfettered, neoliberal capitalism is antithetical to sustainable democracy," he concludes.
"It is evident today that free and unfettered markets advocated by Hayek and Friedman and so many on the Right have * set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism * made all the worse by advances in science and technology, an Orwellian authoritarianism where surveillance is the order of the day and truth has been sacrificed to power."
Ultimately, he says we must start using the economic system to provide millions more people with meaningful freedom, and that means * harnessing the power of government * to make it easier for people to access the resources that will enlarge peoples' "opportunity set" and improve their economic and political freedoms.
"We are in a global, intellectual, and political war to protect and preserve freedom," Professor Stiglitz warns.
"Do democracies and free societies deliver what citizens want and care about and can they do it better than authoritarian regimes?
"This battle for hearts and minds is everywhere. I firmly believe that democracies and free societies can provide for their citizens far more effectively than authoritarian systems. However, in several key areas, most notably in economics, our free societies are failing.
"But — and this is important — these failures are not inevitable and are partially because the Right's incorrect conception of freedom led us down the wrong path.
"There are other paths that deliver more of the goods and services they want, with more of the security that they want, but that also provide more freedom for more people."
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‘George Floyd moment’ for Britain’s white working class
A strange silence has descended over Britain. The noise and riotous mayhem of the past few weeks have given way to an unsettling stillness. As I write this, all I hear is the patter of rain and the distant whirr of a police helicopter. Yes, the state watches over us from the sky, on the lookout for suspicious movements of people.
In part, the silence is an expression of relief. We’re glad it’s over. We’re glad the riots that rocked the nation following the murder of three girls in Southport at the end of July seem to have run out of steam.
There’s shock, too. Many Brits seem almost dazed, dumbfounded by the fire and fury that swept our towns and cities. After all, just a month ago we were downing cold beers and cheering England in the Euros Football Championship. We were welcoming a new government (well, some people were) as Keir Starmer strode into Downing Street following 14 years of Tory rule. All the talk was of a “new era”. The “sunlight of hope” is shining on our great nation once more, said Starmer. Behold the “age of national renewal”, he said. The “grown-ups” are back in power, the broadsheets sang.
“Is it just me but suddenly everything feels … normal?” tweeted former MP Anna Soubry when Starmer became Prime Minister. “No more psychodramas and scandals,” she said. Instead, the nation felt “safe”.
A mere three weeks later, no one felt safe. Buildings were in flames, cops were fighting pitched battles with fuming youths, and looting, not football, was the national sport.
The “sunlight of hope” had been overshadowed by a vast black cloud of violence. The promise of “national renewal” was smashed by the reality of national mayhem.
The speed with which the Starmerite “new dawn” turned into a grim week of violence was extraordinary. From fevered media talk of a shiny post-Tory era to the worst street fighting we’ve seen in years – rarely has the thinness of the line between order and chaos been so starkly illustrated.
That some Brits are now going about in a state of stunned silence is not surprising. For many of the illusions of our society have just shattered before our eyes.
We now know that just beneath the surface of this “grown-up” country our new leaders love to gab about, there lurks a discontent so deep and teeming that it can erupt into violence at any minute.
We now know that our elites are so divorced from reality that they can clink their champagne glasses over their brilliant “renewal” of the nation while out there, in towns they would never deign to visit, violent discord was brewing.
We Brits have had a vision of the gaping moral chasm that separates the rulers and the ruled in the 21st-century West. So if we seem a little sensitive, please bear with us.
But there is something else to the post-riots silence, too. Something more sinister. The uncanny quiet reveals a refusal to talk about what might have caused the riots. A reluctance to ask that most basic, fundamental question of why.
Why did towns blow up, everywhere from Sunderland in the north of England to Plymouth in the south, from Belfast on one side of the Irish Sea to Liverpool on the other?
No one wants to pose this question, far less make a go of answering it. Instead, all you’re meant to say about the riots – all you’re allowed to say – is that it was a bunch of far-right racists making trouble. And now they’re going to jail. The End.
It’s not good enough, is it?
We know for sure what the trigger for the riots was: the horrific massacre of girls in the town of Southport, near Liverpool.
On Monday, July 29, a teenager with a knife invaded a Taylor Swift dance class and visited unholy violence on its young attendees.
Three girls were killed, others were badly injured. The suspect is Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, 17, born in Cardiff to immigrants from Rwanda.
The nation’s horror at the slaughter in Southport quickly boiled over into fury. The first riot was in Southport itself. Gangs of men broke away from the vigil for the girls and started smashing things up. As a result of misinformation swirling around social media, which wrongly said the stabber was a Muslim, some of the rioters laid siege to Southport mosque. It was the most dreadful act of that violent night, with Muslims having to barricade themselves inside their place of worship to escape the vengeance of a throng drunk on fake news.
Over the next few nights the violence spread. In Manchester, Leicester, Leeds, Bristol, Blackpool, Birmingham, Middlesbrough and other towns, mobs came out to shout and fight and set things on fire. There were nasty scenes of bigotry. Not only were mosques surrounded but hotels housing asylum-seekers were invaded and in one case set alight. Mercifully, no one was killed. To call such violence inexcusable is a profound understatement.
Yet we will do our nation a disservice, surely, if we write off the riots as nothing more than a far-right freakout. If we chalk up this week of anarchy to the supposed fascistic urges of “pleb” communities. Alarmingly, that is what is happening. The political climate in post-riots Britain is stifling. There’s a McCarthyite vibe.
Wonder out loud about the grievances that might have propelled so many communities to violence and you risk being damned as an apologist for fascism. You must simply condemn and move on. Wag your finger but don’t engage your brain.
That must make these the first riots, in my memory anyway, where social analysis is all but forbidden. After the London riots of 2011, when urban youths engaged in arson and looting for five long nights, the media did a deep dive into the “social conditions” behind the disorder. Might it have been “cuts to social services” that caused the kids to go wild, wondered the Guardian?
Just two weeks ago there was a small riot in Leeds. Most of the rioters were immigrants. Maybe it was “economic pressures” that made them violent, said the left-wing magazine Prospect.
Guess what Prospect said about the post-Southport riots? Not that. No, these were “ugly riots”, “horrifying” unrest, driven by nothing more than the “foul virus” of misinformation.
There’s a palpable strain not only of hypocrisy but of snobbery too. It seems the moral rule is that when people of colour riot, it’s understandable, maybe even sympathetic. But when the white working classes riot, it’s basically Nazism.
The truth, as always, is more complicated. It was in the very poorest parts of Britain that the riots of the past week played out most fiercely. The violence blew up in “left behind” communities – those parts of the country that have been neglected economically, socially and culturally by the rich, witless inhabitants of the Westminster bubble.
That the fuse for the riots was an act of mass murder is revealing, too. Some are referring to the Southport killings as a “George Floyd moment” for Britain’s white working class. Just as the killing of Floyd enraged African-Americans, reminding them of their vulnerability to police violence, so this obscene assault on girls in a seaside town infuriated “left behind” Brits.
Why? I think because, for many, it felt like a brutal manifestation of all the crises in modern Britain they’re forever being warned not to talk about. Mass immigration, the crisis of integration, the scourge of knife crime, the terroristic imagination – the Southport massacre touched on it all.
And because they have so few outlets for discussing these things – and in fact will be damned as xenophobes if they even try – it seems some folk just exploded.
It wasn’t fascism that drove them, it was their pent-up anxieties about the state of the nation.
It was their tiring of being silenced – of being told it’s racist to worry about immigration, childish to be concerned about knife crime, Islamophobic to fear radical Islam, and so on.
When you put people in a straitjacket of political correctness, eventually they’ll try to break out of it. That’s what the riots were: the brutish cry of a silenced people, the rage of the dispossessed.
Does it excuse what they did? Absolutely not. The rioters alone are responsible for their wickedness. Jail is their just punishment.
And yet, if we want Britain to be truly safe, to bask in that “sunlight of hope”, surely we need to listen to people’s concerns as well as punishing their misdeeds?
Reprimanding the rioters is the easy bit. Fixing the ills that inflamed the rioting is harder – and more important.
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The most concerning element of tradwife bashing
I enabled a tradwife 40 years ago and she is looking after me to this day when I need it in my old age -- JR
Virginia Tapscott
When it comes to ridiculing and dismissing mothers who work in the home it seems we are becoming increasingly inventive and venomous. At first it was the term housewife that garnered negative connotations and became a derogatory slur uttered with disdain. Next, the stay-at-home mum became the punching bag.
Now it’s the tradwife. New name, same axe to grind.
What is a tradwife?
Google search trends show searches for tradwife – derived from the phrase traditional housewife – began ramping up in 2018 in line with the rise of Instagram influencers role-playing as traditional housewives. They dress up in vintage clothes, make food from scratch and care for their children.
The aesthetic they create ranges from saccharine through idyllic to satire. Sometimes they are religiously motivated; some have breadwinner husbands who “lead the household”; and some have opted out of contraception.
All of this would be unremarkable except they post all of it on social media and have amassed millions of followers.
I’m calling it role-playing because these women do not find themselves in the original set of circumstances that led to many traditional housewives having no genuine choice, such as no access to contraception, little education and no prospects other than child-bearing and homemaking.
Tradwives emulate certain romantic features of this existence by choice and without the harmful reality of necessity, scarcity and oppression. These social media tradwives often are backed by generational wealth and extremely lucrative, successful careers as social media influencers, among other things. Their tech, design, content production and culinary skills are enviable. They also happen to look like bikini models. In short, they have options that our grandmothers most certainly did not.
The tradwife trend is a protest against hustle culture and modern expectations that women will run back to the office a few weeks after giving birth so they can start to be productive again. They rebel against fast food, commercialised care, mass-produced rubbish and rushed days.
Call it an extreme form of protest, but if it’s their choice, if it makes them happy and if they aren’t hurting anyone, who cares? A lot of people, as it turns out.
At first feminists and career women felt only personally attacked by the tradwife trend and hoped it would remain in an obscure corner of the internet. But as the tradwives rose to stardom, the feminists’ private pain quickly erupted into public outrage. After all these years of controlling the message, holding centre stage and blithely dismissing the work of the humble housewife, they did not appreciate the tradwife trend one bit.
From housewife to tradwife
Feminists were alarmed by the sheer number of followers these women attracted. After so carefully and painstakingly constructing the narrative that housewives were sad, unfulfilled, backward and unnecessary, the tradwives shot it to pieces overnight with their intelligence, professional accomplishments, seriously handy skills and, god forbid, their happiness in looking after their kids.
Tradwives hit a nerve with feminists because they directly challenge the idea of career women as the gold standard. Caregivers rarely, if ever, have been able to publicise themselves in the same way career women could until now. Before tradwives, caregivers and movements that sought to include them in women’s liberation struggled to curry favour with the public because care work and unpaid labour have an image problem. It’s not glamorous work. It’s laborious and messy and often lonely, invisible work. It doesn’t pay the big bucks and it goes on in private.
Before the age of social media, the likes of Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson – the latter of whom popularised the term domestic goddess – made their fortunes through giving womanhood and homemaking broad marketing appeal. Tradwives are kind of like the Martha Stewarts of social media, a bunch of women with undeniable business acumen who knew they could monetise their image and tear down the tired housewife perceptions in an instant.
Tradwives are disingenuous, of course, but so is everyone posting on social media. So are the women who pose as effortlessly “having it all” while battling the emotional and physical turmoil of juggling paid work with carrying, birthing and rearing children.
There are countless career women on social media guilty of virtue signalling and sharing the minutiae of their day-to-day lives. All that has changed here is that housewives decided to do it too. They are defending their choice by fighting fire with fire.
Feminists realised they needed to turn public favour against tradwives and position them as the new bogeyman – the enemy of modern women. The term traditional wife, what tradwives occasionally had called themselves, sounded too distinguished, so it quickly was truncated to tradwife, which sounds far less appealing and is quicker to spit out in disgust. We know this change in terminology did not originate with tradwives themselves because they rarely, if ever, refer to themselves as tradwives.
Mainstream media outlets and women’s media platforms have been absolutely committed to making sure the tradwife label sticks. This makes sense because the media obviously is over-represented by women who are actively engaged in careers and are likely ideologically opposed to tradwives. The articles describe the tradwives as “self-harm for millennial mothers”, cult-like, and victims of oppression and abuse.
Mainstream feminism is seeking to take back control of the housewife narrative by repackaging women who work in the home by choice as representative of something dangerous.
They argue that tradwives “romanticise oppression”, are victims of internalised oppression and are setting a dangerous example for young girls. They argue every which way that any woman in her right mind wouldn’t actually choose this. They dangle tradwives threateningly as what could happen if women let their guard down and assume caregiving roles.
The controversy behind Ballerina Farm and Hannah Neelman
Perhaps the biggest and most recent take-down of a tradwife was mounted by reporter Megan Agnew in The Times.
Agnew visited Hannah Neeleman – known as the “queen of the tradwives” because of her almost 10 million Instagram followers – Neeleman’s husband Daniel and their eight children on Ballerina Farm in Utah. The reporter claimed to have witnessed certain dynamics – after spending all of a single day with the family – that concerned her. Based on her own apparent spidey senses, Agnew set about framing Neeleman as a sad victim of coercive control and “baby trapping”.
The quotes in the article fail to support Agnew’s conclusions, but it’s obvious to any reader that Agnew’s agenda was decided before she set foot in Neeleman’s home. Her preconceived ideas about caregivers and housewives prevented her from seeing Neeleman’s life as a choice. She deliberately reduced Neeleman to an overworked, unhappy wife dominated by her husband, apparently regardless of what Neeleman actually said, because that’s the only image of mothers in the home that Agnew is interested in creating.
Neeleman herself later flatly denied the claims in the profile, but many women seem deaf to her. It’s a stark example of tradwives being oppressed only by other women.
Feminists are right to argue that tradwives are promoting a choice that would render most women vulnerable and financially insecure. However the problem isn’t actually women and the work they do, it’s how this work is viewed and supported by society. The problem is lack of paid leave, work flexibility and carer support measures. Instead of fighting for societal change and policy that would better support unpaid care work and labour, feminists remain focused on problematising women such as tradwives and their choices.
The same women who are up in arms about wealthy tradwives also conveniently ignore the elitist elements of career women. Middle and low-income families often do not have the same luxuries as high-income families who can pick and choose high-quality, boutique childcare centres or take advantage of generous parental leave packages in their high-paying jobs. They promote a choice in which they are buffered from the pitfalls.
For the record, I am not a tradwife. The only time I want my husband to lead me is if I have failing sight. I’d love some freshly baked bread if someone else could be in charge of that. Contraception is absolutely critical at this point for our family and I can’t bring myself to wear an apron. I’ll gradually increase my paid work hours as I see fit. I don’t have a name for what goes on in our house and my role in it, but it has been great and it has been my choice. I’d wish that for anyone, including the tradwives.
I may not be a tradwife but I have been called one in wholesale attempts to undermine my ideas, identity and character. The term is being weaponised against everyday caregivers for doing something as simple as growing veggies or baking muffins. Caregivers who are called tradwives out of spite often then wrongly assume the identity and unwittingly perpetuate the campaign to ridicule and dismiss work in the home.
The definition is slowly expanding to include a much larger subset of caregivers than the original handful of social media personalities in unique circumstances. Girls growing up today will possibly recoil at the possibility of being labelled a tradwife if they take extended parental leave or engage in caregiving on a long-term basis.
Perhaps the most concerning element of the tradwife bashing is the clear attempt to equate people in caregiving and unpaid labour roles with victims of abuse, coercive control and subservience. Not only does this detract from important issues of abuse and coercive control, which occur in all kinds of relationships regardless of your vocation or employment status, but it paints all caregivers as people without agency and unable to advocate for themselves.
The tradwife episode just proves that some women will stop at nothing to find novel ways to tear down mothers who work inside the home. We continue to be our own worst enemy.
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Award-winning playwright Andrew Bovell calls for rethink on trigger warnings in wake of ‘cannibalism’ claim
Leading playwright Andrew Bovell felt “upset”, “confused” and “physically shocked” when he went to a production of his internationally acclaimed play, When The Rain Stops Falling, and heard a recorded trigger warning state the work portrayed cannibalism.
“I object to my work being depicted as something it isn’t,’’ Bovell said. He added that he found the warning – which revealed “all of the play’s secrets and reveals” just as the show was starting “absurd” and “extreme”.
The Edge of Darkness and Lantana screenwriter joked ruefully: “Maybe they should have issued a trigger warning about the trigger warnings.’’
Yet when the award-winning South Australian writer raised his concerns with the Flinders University Performing Arts Society, which staged his play in July, it “stood by (its) choice to associate the play with cannibalism’’.
The controversy concerns a scene in which a grieving character mixes the dead ashes of her lover into her soup and consumes them. In the foreground, a mother learns about the death of her son.
Bovell said that scene “is a beautiful image and speaks to the poetics of the moment’’ and symbolises the lover’s deep grief.
“All the more worrying, then, that this moment is now described as an act of cannibalism.’’
The Weekend Australian revealed to a startled Bovell that the same cannibalism content warning was used by Brisbane community theatre company Brisbane Arts Theatre, which also staged When The Rain Stops Falling this year.
Brisbane Arts Theatre describes itself as an “iconic, independent theatre company” and its warning about the drama said: “This play contains sensitive and disturbing themes including murder, cannibalism, and child sexual abuse. Viewer discretion is advised.’’
Bovell was told it was likely the Flinders University production copied that content warning, despite the fact that murder and child sex abuse are not directly depicted in the play.
When The Rain Stops Falling, a multi-generational family saga about secrets, betrayal and forgiveness, premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2008. It toured nationally and to London and New York, where it won five off-Broadway excellence awards and Time magazine named it the best new play of 2010.
Bovell said that despite the claims of the two content warnings, “we don’t see an act of child abuse (in the play). A key character is revealed as being a pedophile. We don’t see any child murdered but there is an insinuation that a child was killed. This (the recorded Flinders University warning) was a premature reveal of a shocking moment and its warnings went on (with) themes of child abandonment and so on … it was so absurd.’’
Bovell stressed he was otherwise happy with the Flinders production and has no interest in pursuing a generational dispute with younger theatre workers.
However, he felt it was time for theatre writers to “push back” against the escalating trigger warning trend in theatre, because such warnings were often inaccurate, contained spoilers and could damage a play’s reputation.
Bovell’s objections come as leading arts figures have spoken out about the escalating trend in Australian and UK theatre. The Weekend Australian recently reported how trigger warnings have been slapped on everything from a fake moth dying on stage to the Nazism theme in the family musical The Sound of Music.
Leading director Neil Armfield said they were a “pet hate’’, while Australian Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett said the growth of such warnings reflected “a lack of mutual respect” between artists and their audiences.
Bovell said he feared such warnings would “infantilise” audiences. He said that in future he may have to “check the trigger warnings before I agree to issuing the rights’’ to theatre companies.
The man who wrote The Secret River stage script was “heartened” by the overwhelmingly supportive response he received to a Facebook post outlining the dispute. On Facebook, actor and writer Noel Hodda said trigger warnings were “anti-theatre” while Rachel Healy, former co-director of the Adelaide Festival, told him: “I would definitely encourage you to push back (against the two content warnings).”
Director Merrilee Mills, who has directed When The Rain Stops Falling, said she was “horrified” by Bovell’s experience, while singer Bernadette Robinson asked: “What’s the point of going to theatre if not to be exhilarated … shocked, challenged? Really, I’m against (trigger warnings).’’
But Brisbane Arts Theatre president Paje Battilana said the drama company puts it content warning on its website and on signs in their venue because “we, like all businesses in our current world climate, do everything we can to ensure the safety of our audiences; this includes mental and emotional safety.”
Asked if the company consulted playwrights about content warnings to ensure they were accurate, Battilana replied: “Unfortunately we rarely have access to playwrights, as plays’ rights are acquired through distributors.’’
Even though The Weekend Australian informed the company about Bovell’s concerns on Thursday, the contentious content warning remained on its website on Friday.
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11 August, 2024
Trump turns the tables on identity politics
The moronic Left failed to see that by favouring minorities they insulted the majority. Creating division instead of unity is their pernicious legacy
Identity politics is something usually associated with the left. Vice President Kamala Harris is often mocked by the right-wing commentariat as an identity pick.
Donald Trump’s choice of running mate – a working-class white man from a heartland state – was meant to underline the point, until Harris herself countered by selecting another working-class white man from the heartland. Senator Vance and Governor Walz spent last week in an amusing “hillbillier-than-thou” spat. “The hillbillies I grew up with didn’t go to Yale,” said Walz of Vance.
The American scholar Francis Fukuyama, in his 2018 essay Identity, traces the origins of identity politics to the mid-20th century evolution of Marxism from a theory in which social relationships are dictated by economic power in a society stratified by class, to a broader theory of inequality in which considerations other than purely economic ones determine relative power. Left-wing politics was no longer just about empowering the working class. Other disempowered groups – women, ethnic minorities, gays and other minorities – came increasingly to be its focus.
What started as an attempt – originating in particular with intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse and, later, Michel Foucault – to renovate Marxism, quickly moved into the political mainstream, as the aspirations of groups such as women’s liberation, the civil rights movement, Stonewall and others were embraced by liberal opinion. Identity politics became a liberal cause.
The social change that, in less than half a century, saw greater equality and better life chances for women and minority group members came, though, at an unexpected cost. As the claims of the previously disempowered were increasingly satisfied, working-class people – who were not thought of as members of a minority group – began to feel forgotten, as their traditional champions pursued equality for identity-based groups. As Fukuyama writes: “[t]he problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalised in specific ways.”
As the empowerment of minorities enjoyed ever-greater success, so people from low socio-economic groups, with poorer educations and fewer life chances, came to feel abandoned. Not defined by a discrete identity, who spoke up for them in the Babel of minority voices? Meanwhile, they saw their traditional values ridiculed, their lifestyles scorned, their religious faith insulted. As the left celebrated inclusiveness, poorly educated working-class whites were mocked as rubes and rednecks. The Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel once described this as “the last acceptable prejudice”.
And so the narrative of victimhood – one of the main tropes of identity politics – came to be adopted by the right. To quote Fukuyama again, “Trump has played a critical role in moving the focus of identity politics from the left, where it was born, to the right, where it is now taking root ... What is notable ... is how the right has adopted the language and framing of identity from the left: the idea that my particular group is being victimised, that its situation and sufferings are invisible to the rest of society, and that the whole of the social and political structure responsible for this situation [read: the media and political elites] needs to be smashed.”
In his recent memoir Chasing Hope, the celebrated New York Times columnist Nick Kristof – a paladin of the liberal establishment – recounts visiting the poor rural community in Oregon where he grew up, and reflects on the conceit of the liberal elite: “[J]ust as it’s reprehensible for conservative Christians to stereotype gay people, it’s wrong of liberals to stereotype or mock people of faith ... Even before Trump, many rural people felt neglected and condescended to. They were poor, but what they wanted most of all wasn’t a redistribution of wealth but a redistribution of respect. They didn’t see why elite lawyers, investment bankers, professors and senators – or New York Times columnists, for that matter – should be looked up to, while farmers, truck drivers and factory workers who actually did tangible and important work should occupy a lower social tier.”
These are Trump’s people. As the Democrats abandoned the working class, the MAGA Republicans embraced it. The language of the Trump campaign is the selfsame voice of protest as that of the old left – a cry not just for equality, but for respect.
It shows how far the Republican Party has moved from being the party of Wall Street that at its convention last month, for the first time it gave a keynote speaking slot to the president of the Teamsters Union.
Disrespected and scorned by coastal elites now dominated by members of yesterday’s marginalised minorities, who have in many cases overtaken them in wealth and influence, the new Republican coalition is based on people who feel that they are the new disempowered. As they defend a shrinking political and cultural space, they have adopted the attitudes of identity politics: grievance, defensive self-consciousness, victimhood.
Trump is their champion because he poses as the victim-in-chief. The more his enemies throw at him, the better that pose works. Mithridates-like, every hostile occasion makes him stronger. Vance, introducing Trump at a rally a fortnight ago, said: “They couldn’t beat him politically so they tried to bankrupt him, they failed at that so they tried to impeach him, they failed at that so they tried to put him in prison; they even tried to kill him.”
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‘He Did It To Himself’: Retired Command Sergeant Major Slams Tim Walz For Misleading On Military Service
Retired Minnesota National Guard Command Sgt. Maj. Thomas Behrends slammed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate on the 2024 ticket, Saturday on “Fox and Friends Weekend” for misleading voters about his military service.
Walz’s claims about his military service and the timing of his 2005 retirement have come under fire since Vice President Kamala Harris announced him as her running mate Tuesday. The Harris-Walz campaign website has since corrected its original language calling Walz a “retired command sergeant major” to saying he “served as a commend sergeant major.”
Behrends ripped into Walz for being an “unforgivable coward” and quitting before his unit was deployed to Iraq.
“I would liken this to a coach coaching a team for 25 years, and then you’re finally in the Super Bowl. And then the Super Bowl is coming, and the coach says, ‘No, I’m out. I’m done.’ What does it say, what message does it send to a unit when a command sergeant major — I mean, command sergeant majors are a big deal. They block the sun. They’re the most important enlisted member of that unit. When a command sergeant major bails on a deployment beforehand, what kind of message does that send?” Fox News co-host Pete Hegseth asked.
“The message that it sends to me is, you know, turn around and run and just keep running. I mean, go crawl under a rock. Get the Hell out of here. Nobody even wants to mention your name again. You’re soiled, basically a traitor. You’re a deserter at that point,” Behrends said.
“The knowledge that you have at that point is very good because, I mentioned that with my family, this is like training for the Super Bowl. And then you’re one game away, and Tom Brady says, ‘Uh, sorry. I don’t wanna get hurt in this game, so you go play for me.’ It’s just absolutely ridiculous,” Behrends told Hegseth.
Walz retired in May 2005, two months before the unit received mobilization orders, according to the Minnesota Public Radio.
Behrends told Hegseth approximately 98-99% of those who were deployed after Walz departed echoed his feelings.
“A couple out there that have spoken out, saying ‘How could you do this to the guy’ and whatever. But he did it to himself,” Behrends said.
“All I am is the messenger. He made the message,” he continued. “And I just happened to be the one that God said, you know, you’re too dumb to keep your mouth shut, so go spread the word.”
Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, the GOP nominee for vice president, accused Walz of “stolen valor” at a Wednesday campaign event. Vance cited comments Walz made about carrying weapons of war in a war from a video posted Tuesday by Harris’ campaign headquarters on X.
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Israel Confirms Airstrike On Gaza School That Reportedly Killed Dozens, Says It Was Hamas Command Center
Israel confirmed an airstrike Saturday morning on what it claims was a Hamas command center “embedded” inside a mosque in a school compound.
Palestinian authorities, who were using the school as a shelter, said the airstrike killed 40 people, according to Bloomberg. Israel Defense Forces said an intelligence investigation confirmed the strike eliminated “at least 19 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists” and emphasized “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians” before the attack.
“These terrorists operated in order to advance and carry out attacks against IDF soldiers and the State of Israel from inside the compound,” IDF said in a statement on X. “The strike was carried out using three precise munitions, which, according to professional analysis, can not cause the amount of damage that is being reported by the Hamas-run Government Information Office in Gaza. Furthermore, no severe damage was caused to the compound where the terrorists were situated.”
The White House is “deeply concerned about reports of civilian casualties” from the strike, National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett said in a statement Saturday. (RELATED: Kamala Harris’ Team Rushes To Downplay Claims That She’s Open To Discussing Israel Arms Embargo)
“We are in touch with our Israeli counterparts, who have said they targeted senior Hamas officials, and we are asking for further details,” Savett said. “We know Hamas has been using schools as locations to gather and operate out of, but we have also said repeatedly and consistently that Israel must take measures to minimize civilian harm.”
The strike “underscores the urgency of a ceasefire and hostage deal,” Savett said.
Local residents said Palestinians displaced by the war were using the school as housing, as the neighborhood was one of few remaining in Gaza City that was not destroyed, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“The mosque and the first floor were targeted,” said 22-year-old Amro Selim, who lives next to the school, according to the WSJ. “I saw dead bodies over each other, body parts everywhere. A lot of them were children and women.”
Fadel Naeem, director of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital, told the Associated Press that the hospital “received some of the most serious injuries we encountered during the war.” Another witness, Abu Anas, told the AP the attack happened while people were praying before sunrise.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/08/10/israel-confirms-airstrike-gaza-school-hamas-command-center/
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US Women’s Soccer Team Silences Politically Incorrect Player
It's not mentioned below but I suspect that there is a strong lesbian element in women's soccer
For years, the U.S. women’s soccer team has been seen as a bastion of wokeness, perhaps most famously when Megan Rapinoe feuded with then-President Donald Trump.
But one new player suggests the team finally might be getting some ideological diversity.
Korbin Albert, a 20-year-old picked to be a midfielder for the women’s team for the Paris Olympics, is no Rapinoe, who was infamous for publicizing her woke views.
On her Instagram account, Albert’s bio proclaims “Jesus is [king],” using the crown emoji. Her main photo shows her with an American flag, and one of her pinned posts shows her and another young woman dressed in patriotic colors, holding up cowboy boots, and has the caption, “Dreamin’ in red, white, and blue”
She’s already proved herself in the Olympics, successfully scoring a goal during the Olympics match between the U.S. and Australian women’s soccer teams July 31. The final score was 2-1, the winning goal scored by Albert, who previously played for the University of Notre Dame and now plays for a Paris-based soccer team.
But Albert’s admission to the Olympics seemingly came at quite a high cost.
To use the language of the woke, she wasn’t allowed to speak her truth.
When Albert scored her winning goal, NBC commentator Jon Champion highlighted the “controversy” surrounding her. “For the all the pre-tournament controversy that surrounded her, team mates rush to her to share a memorable moment,” Champion intoned.
He’s not the only media figure to slap the “controversial” label on Albert.
The Associated Press reported in April about “a controversy over midfielder Korbin Albert’s social media posts,” while the New York Post headlined a June article, “Controversial USWNT star Korbin Albert named to Olympic team.” USA Today dutifully noted, “Albert became the center of controversy in March …”
So, what exactly did this young woman do? Well, the word “controversy” became glued to her when it emerged that Albert … held Christian beliefs.
The athlete reportedly liked a politically incorrect social media post and shared another one.
Albert also posted a video during the 2023 Fourth of July weekend on TikTok “showing her family taking turns stating that ‘their pronouns are U.S.A.’” according to The Athletic, a sports news site owned by The New York Times.
The soccer star reportedly also shared a video on social media of a person, seemingly in a church and wearing a “Jesus wins” shirt, discussing with regret how he had pursued same-sex attractions and a transgender life.
An X user claimed that Albert had liked a meme taking aim at Rapinoe, who had been injured early in her final game before retirement. “I’m not a religious person or anything, and if there was a God, like, this is proof that there isn’t,” a disappointed Rapinoe said about her injury at a press conference last year, according to Fox News. “This is f—ed up.”
The meme Albert allegedly liked said, “God taking time off performing miracles to make sure Megan Rapinoe sprains her ankle in her final ever game.” (If you’re keeping score, note it was Rapinoe who first decided to make her injury a chance to share her religious views.)
Albert’s social media activity drew notice, and a social media post from Rapinoe ranting about “the people who want to hide behind ‘my beliefs.’” Subsequently, Albert deleted some content and posted an apology that read in part, “Liking and sharing posts that are offensive, insensitive, and hurtful was immature and disrespectful, which was never my intent.”
But the apology didn’t appear to satisfy her critics.
Which says a lot about where we’re at in 2024.
For years, players in the U.S. women’s soccer team have been openly political.
Just to recap: Rapinoe refused to stand for the playing of the national anthem, citing solidarity with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick; said she would never go to the White House and feuded with Trump; and argued for the inclusion of trans players in women’s sports—a curious stance, given that the U.S. women’s soccer team lost to high school boys in a 2017 scrimmage.
She is gay and open about it, and when she was required to stand in later years for the national anthem, she refused to sing along or put her hand on her heart.
Nor was Rapinoe alone in her advocacy. In a 2022 game in Texas, about the time Republican Gov. Greg Abbott was taking action to protect kids from experimental medical treatment, “several USWNT players wore athletic tape around their wrists with the message ‘Protect Trans Kids,’” The Athletic reported.
Later in Florida, another state that has worked to protect kids, The Athletic reported that “[t]he players wore tape on their wrists again, this time with the words ‘Defend Trans Joy.’” In 2023, Becky Sauerbrunn, another player on the team, wrote a passionate opinion column for the Springfield News-Leader in Missouri advocating against a state bill that aimed to ensure only girls and women were playing in women’s sports.
Yet it is Albert whose apology tour has never really ended.
Fresh off her winning goal, Albert dutifully praised coach Emma Hayes’ “tough love” in remarks. Hayes in turn told the media, “We all know that she’s been through a lot with her actions, and she’s someone who is truly sorry for what she’s done … She’s had to do a fair bit of growing up.”
The message is clear: There’s no room on the U.S. women’s national soccer team for anyone who espouses different views on LGBTQ+ matters.
So, just to be clear, aside from the alleged liking of a social media post making fun of Rapinoe (whose comments about God also had arguably been offensive), Albert has never been accused of targeting any teammate or saying something to any individual deemed offensive. There’s no suggestion she was ever less than professional and polite to her fellow soccer players.
But she dared to think for herself.
And that can’t be allowed, apparently.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/09/korbin-albert-silenced-to-get-chance-to-play-womens-soccer/
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8 August, 2024
BPA plastic chemicals in the womb have been found to be linked with higher levels of autism
Another vastly over-hyped headline in pursuit of the jihad against BPA. The article itself (below) is moderately sane, with large reservations expressed. e.g.:
“I do want to stress it’s not the cause of autism,”
"if the BPA-autism link was causal in nature"
"may be consistent with autism spectrum disorder,”
And in the journal article we read that effects were observed
"only in males with low aromatase genetic pathway activity scores"
So there is NO evidence that BPA is generally harmful in humans
The journal article is:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48897-8
Boys with lower levels of a key brain enzyme who are born to mothers with higher levels of plastic chemicals in their wombs are six times more likely to develop autism by the time they are a teenager, a world-first Australian study has found.
A decade-long study by the Florey Institute has for the first time established a biological pathway between the plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA), which is found in food and drink containers, cosmetics and packaging, and autism spectrum disorder.
“BPA can disrupt hormone-controlled male fetal brain development in several ways, including silencing this key enzyme, aromatase, that controls neurohormones and is especially important in fetal male brain development,” study co-author Anne-Louise Ponsonby said. “This appears to be part of the autism puzzle.”
BPA is ?a chemical that is added to plastics to make them more malleable and durable. It is virtually impossible to avoid in daily life.
Several previous studies have posited a link between it and autism, but the Florey study is the first long-term research incorporate human studies to examine the interplay between prenatal BPA, aromatase function and the development of autism in a large cohort of mothers and babies.
Florey researchers have found evidence of higher levels of the plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA) in pregnant mothers who gave birth to sons with autism. Research published in Nature Communications, led by Florey scientists Dr Wah Chin Boon and…
The peer-reviewed Florey research, published in Nature Communcations, found that the link between BPA in mothers and autism in children was particularly evident in the top quarter of boys in the cohort with an inherent vulnerability to the endocrine-disrupting properties of BPA plastics – those with lower levels of the enzyme aromatase.
The researchers studied 1770 children over 10 years from two cohorts of mothers and children in the Barwon Infant Study in Australia and the Columbia Centre for Children’s Health and Environment in the US, finding that boys in this group who were born to mothers with higher urinary BPA levels in late pregnancy were 3½ times more likely to have autism symptoms by the age of two, and six times more likely to have a verified autism diagnosis by age 11.
“I do want to stress it’s not the cause of autism,” Professor Ponsonby said. “Autism is a multi-factorial disease, and it’s going to have a range of genetic and other drivers. So this is a contributing factor in some cases.”
In the two large birth cohorts studied, it was established that higher BPA levels in pregnant mothers were associated with epigenetic changes, or gene switching which suppressed the aromatase enzyme. As well as establishing the link in humans, Florey scientist and co-author Wah Chin Boon was also able to establish for the first time the biochemical pathway in which BPA suppressed aromatase in laboratory mice studies.
“We found that BPA suppresses the aromatase enzyme and is associated with anatomical, neurological and behavioural changes in the male mice that may be consistent with autism spectrum disorder,” Dr Boon said.
“This is the first time a biological pathway has been identified that might help explain the connection between autism and BPA.”
Autism affects between 1 and 2 per cent of all children in Western countries and the prevalence is on the rise.
Professor Ponsonby said that the findings indicated that among boys in the general population with a greater inherent vulnerability to the effects of endocrine disruptors, about 10 per cent of autism diagnoses may potentially be able to be prevented by BPA avoidance if the BPA -autism link was causal in nature.
Aromatase has been described as “a master controller of steroid hormone-directed brain development” and is responsible in the brain for converting the hormone testosterone to neuroeostrogen.
“Aromatase is more important in male brain development,” Professor Ponsonby said. “These finding may explain some of the male excess observed in autism.”
In lab studies, the Florey has also for the first time identified a possible “antitode” to this process – a type of fatty acid that when injected in mice was found to reverse the disruption of aromatase.
The scientists posited that the fatty substance, which is a major lipid component of the royal jelly of honeybees, may be able to correct a deficiency in aromatase-dependent estrogen signalling in the brain. They say this potential antidote warrants further study.
BPA is a chemical used in the lining of some food and beverage packaging to protect food from contamination and extend shelf life. Small amounts of BPA can migrate into food and beverages from containers. Tiny amounts of the chemical can enter the skin via clothes and cosmetics, and it can also be inhaled in things like paint fumes.
In 2010, the Australian government announced a voluntary phase-out of BPA use in polycarbonate baby bottles.
Food Standards Australia New Zealand recent said that when food safety authorities around the world reviewed BPA “they have generally concluded there are no safety concerns at the levels people are exposed to”.
However, last year the European Food Safety Authority published a re-evaluation of the risks to public health from the presence of BPA in food.
It concluded the tolerable daily intake for BPA should be substantially reduced from the temporary value it had previously established in 2015.
Australia’s regulator says it has “considered EFSA’s re-evaluation of BPA and has reservations about the approach taken”.
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Do women vote for women, and do Cat Ladies vote for Mamalas?
The US Democrats have made a high-stakes bet on securing the female vote by choosing Kamala Harris as their candidate. But is this how voting preferences work?
A week since Kamala’s nomination, US politics has revolved around diversity and a gender-focused narrative.
Kamala has tried to appeal to diversity and, most importantly, her identity as a woman. Almost immediately after her endorsement, she aligned herself with various women-led political groups such as the National Organisation for Women (NOW), the National Women’s Political Caucus, She Should Run, Higher Heights, Run Sister Run, Women for American Values and Ethics (WAVE), and Her Bold Move, Win With Black Women, the list goes on.
Kamala has gone out of her way to appeal to particularly left-leaning women. She even participated in a ‘white women’ Zoom call, despite not being white herself. This call was mockingly dubbed ‘Karens for Kamala’ by actress Connie Britton. Adding to Kamala’s gender narrative, a video from May has surfaced showing Drew Barrymore almost begging Kamala to be a ‘Mamala’ of the country.
If Kamala’s only offering against the Trump-Vance team is her gender, the outlook for her election is grim. A large body of academic research from the UK, Europe, and the US showed that women would not vote for women merely based on gender.
Kamala’s initial instinct to appeal to similarities between herself and the electorate was correct. Indeed, voting preferences are better explained by the match in socio-economic characteristics. For example, individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds tend to prefer candidates who also grew up in tougher conditions.
However, this logic does not apply to gender. Analysis of voting behaviour published by British scientists shows that the impact of gender is either mixed or non-existent. European researchers who looked into the so-called gender voting gap indicate that women voted slightly more conservatively before the 1970s and slightly more left afterwards. These studies also note that this gender gap in voting is more accurately explained by socio-economic characteristics.
There is no solid evidence that women vote for women simply because they are women. In reality, successful college-educated women, whom Kamala desperately tries to appeal to, have more in common with Vance than Kamala. Vance is self-made, and ambitious, and went first to Ohio University and then to the prestigious Yale. Hence, they are more likely to vote for the Trump and Vance team.
Whether Kamala reconsidered her strategy on the female vote or decided to double down on gender politics, her next move was to portray Vance as someone who hates women. She tried a similar tactic with Trump, claiming she knew ‘his kind’ from her work as a prosecutor but quickly shifted focus to targeting Vance to destabilise the team.
The Democrats have had to dig back three years to find something remotely controversial about Vance. His comments about ‘cat ladies’ became a political bombshell. CNN’s political commentator SE Cupp went so far as to suggest that Vance wanted to ‘punish’ childless women and not just hate them.
What Vance had actually said was that a disproportionate number of decision-makers in the Democratic party do not have families, which is unrepresentative of the American population. He questioned whether it is appropriate for so many politicians to lack family values. This will be a campaign point in the contest between the Trump team and Kamala Harris.
While Kamala is a stepmother of two, she has no children of her own.
While Kamala campaigns on being a ‘woman’, the Republicans it seems will campaign on motherhood.
Ironically, Kamala’s campaign might play into the Republican’s hands. It is the left who often shame stay-at-home mothers and any female life choices other than prioritising career over family. It is the left that allows men into female changing rooms and other safe spaces. Anyone questioning this state of affairs is subject to being cancelled and labelled an intolerant misogynist, regardless of gender. The real question is not whether Kamala wins the female vote, but whether women win by voting for Kamala.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/do-women-vote-for-women-and-do-cat-ladies-vote-for-mamalas/
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Thousands of police on standby as UK riots spread
Brits do NOT like the flood of third-world immigrants into their country-- and some are un-British enough to make that clear
Thousands of riot police have been put on standby in the UK as violent far-right protests spread across the country.
Nightly riots, during which mosques and migrant targets have been attacked, have erupted in English towns and cities since three children were murdered on July 29.
Police were steeling themselves for more than 100 demonstrations linked to the disorder on Wednesday night local time, including possible counter-protests by anti-fascist activists. Courts have ordered jail terms for offenders as authorities seek to head off new troubles.
Immigration lawyers and buildings hosting asylum seekers are primary targets for far-right agitators, according to posts on messaging app Telegram leaked to the British media.
The government has said 6,000 specialist police are on standby to deal with the disorder, which has seen almost 430 people arrested and at least 120 charged, according to latest police figures.
The violence broke out after girls aged nine, seven and six were killed [by a black] and five more children critically injured during a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, northwest England.
False rumours initially spread on social media saying the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker. The suspect was later identified as 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, born in Wales. UK media reported that his parents are from Rwanda.
Despite the police statement, initial disturbances in Southport centred around a mosque, and widespread violence has rocked England and Northern Ireland since.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned anyone involved will face “the full force of the law”, including those inciting violence online.
Starmer, a former chief state prosecutor, has pledged “substantive sentencing before the end of this week” for the rioters.
Scores of accused, including teenagers, have already appeared before judges. – ‘Tip of the iceberg’ – On Wednesday, a man was jailed for three years after he pleaded guilty to violent disorder and assaulting an emergency worker in Southport.
Two other men received sentences of 20 months and 30 months for participating in violence in Liverpool on Saturday.
“The three men sentenced today are the tip of the iceberg, and just the start of what will be a very painful process for many who foolishly chose to involve themselves in violent unrest,” said prosecutor Jonathan Egan.
Britain’s worst unrest since the 2011 London riots, has led a number of countries to warn citizens about travelling in the UK.
The rioting has seen demonstrators throw bricks and flares at police officers, burn cars and attack mosques and at least two hotels that have been used for asylum seekers.
The government, only one month old, has vowed to take a tough line on the unrest and has freed up an extra 500 prison places.
Police have blamed the disorder on figures associated with the now-defunct English Defence League (EDL), a far-right Islamophobic organisation founded 15 years ago, whose supporters have been linked to football hooliganism.
EDL founder Tommy Robinson has been accused by authorities of stoking tensions, and police in Cyprus, where he was reported to be on holiday, said Wednesday they were ready to assist UK police if needed.
However, Robinson later wrote on the X social media platform: “Lucky I’m not in Cyprus then”.
The rallies have been advertised on far-right social media channels under the banner “Enough is enough”.
UK politicians have accused social media sites of fuelling the violence. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has angered the government with a series of provocative tweets, including that a British “civil war is inevitable”.
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Tim Walz’s Church Doesn’t Like To Call God ‘Him,’ Supports Reparations And Pride Parades
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz attends a church that preaches beliefs related to gender, race and sexuality that many Christian denominations strongly oppose.
Walz, who is the governor of Minnesota, identified Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul as his parish during a 2020 briefing on the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials published by Pilgrim Lutheran Church instruct parishioners not to refer to God using male pronouns, push congregants to support reparation funds, encourage them to celebrate Ramadan and include a modified gender-neutral version of the Lord’s Prayer, among other liberal practices.
Pilgrim Lutheran Church is part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), a mainline protestant denomination that has been criticized by some conservative Christians for ordaining transgender and lesbian bishops as well as for its embrace of LGBT ideology. (RELATED: Kamala Harris Announces Tim Walz Will Be Running Mate)
“The ELCA is, broadly speaking, a liberal American mainline Protestant denomination,” Jonah Wendt, a policy adviser for Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom and a member of the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They reject the inerrancy of scripture, ordain women to the pastoral office [and] hold what many would believe to be unbiblical views on abortion and homosexual behavior.”
Pilgrim Lutheran Church in 2015 approved “guidelines for language in worship” wherein the congregation asserted that “a patriarchal culture gave birth to the writing of scripture and the selection of the canon” and, to rectify the purported injustice, committed to using gender-neutral language to describe God. Members of the church, for instance, are encouraged to “choose non-anthropomorphic language” like “hen” or “baker” to refer to God, and urged “not to limit these by following them with male or female pronouns.”
The guidelines instruct parishioners to refer to God using titles that signal actions but don’t imply gender, like “advocate” or “healer.” Walz’s church also uses a modified version of the Lord’s Prayer, beginning with “Our Guardian, Our Mother, Our Father in heaven” instead of the traditional “Our Father who art in heaven.”
“This approach certainly runs contrary to scripture,” Wendt told the DCNF. “Throughout the Bible, God chooses to use male pronouns and we should take God at his word. I’d hope that any Christian, Lutheran or not, would flee from a pastor or church body that decides to change how they represent who God is to fit their own political agenda.”
During the racial unrest following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Walz’s church encouraged its parishioners to hit the streets and protest for racial justice, according to a social media post from Pilgrim Lutheran. The church directed its members to vigils and marches to protest the death of Floyd as well as to “come hear community updates on uprising/riots, how we can support our neighbors and how to pray particularly for our neighborhood.”
Walz faced criticism over his handling of the Floyd riots as he failed to deploy the Minnesota National Guard to Minneapolis the day its mayor and police chief requested help to quell the intensifying looting and arson that was racking the city, the New York Times reported. Damages in Minneapolis from the riot totaled $107 million, with over 1,000 buildings being burned or damaged, according to the Minnesota Reformer.
“It was obvious to me that he froze under pressure, under a calamity, as people’s properties were being burned down,” Republican Minnesota State Senator Warren Limmer recently told the NYT.
Racial justice is a major focus of Pilgrim Lutheran Church, with the congregation also pushing its members to donate to a reparation fund housed by a local nonprofit to provide housing stipends to black residents in St. Paul so that the predominantly white congregation could “atone” for their role in systemic racism.
“We white citizens and congregants have been complicit in the systematic exclusion of Black, Indigenous, Immigrant and other People of Color from full participation in and benefit from the common good,” a statement from the church reads. “We lament the suffering caused by our racism. We endeavor to live more fully a Gospel commitment to love our neighbors as ourselves by listening well, changing our hearts and partnering with our neighbors in building an antiracist community of justice where all may thrive.”
Walz signed a bill in 2023 that sent money to communities purportedly harmed by marijuana criminalization, the Star Tribune reported. A Democratic state legislator who sponsored the bill called it “a form of reparation.”
The Pilgrim Advocates for Racial Equity team was responsible for drafting the church’s reparations program. A similar team, the Pilgrim Racial Justice Task Force, hosted a two-part forum on “white privilege” in October 2019, according to a social media post.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a campaign rally. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Walz’s church has also promoted dozens of pieces of leftist literature to help its parishioners become “antiracist.” The 1619 Project, which teaches that America is fundamentally racist, was among the titles highlighted.
Pilgrim Lutheran Church also takes a liberal stance on issues of sexuality and gender by sending its members to march at gay pride parades, working to amplify the “voices of women and nonbinary/gender non-conforming individuals,” having gender-neutral restrooms and celebrating “coming out day,” among other initiatives.
Walz signed a bill in April 2023 that empowered the state of Minnesota to revoke custody from parents who deny their children sex changes, hormone replacement or cosmetic surgeries, among other interventions.
Pilgrim Lutheran Church, much like Walz himself, positions itself as an ally of the Islamic community by encouraging its congregants through its now-defunct Twitter account to attend meals celebrating the Muslim holy day of Ramadan and by providing them signs to paste in their windows wishing those around them a “Blessed Ramadan.”
Walz regularly attends Muslim religious meals and has spoken at events hosted by local chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, according to the National Catholic Register.
“Satan wants to do everything in his power to separate Christians from the one true faith,” Wendt said. “Many mainline protestant denominations in America have fallen prey to the spirit of the age and are willing to make any concession necessary to stay in line with an ever changing culture.”
Walz’s office, the Harris campaign and Pilgrim Lutheran Church did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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7 August, 2024
‘Patently Anti-Religious’: Tim Walz’s History of Restricting Faith-Based Institutions
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has faced multiple lawsuits accusing him of infringing on religious liberty during his six years as Minnesota governor.
Walz encountered legal challenges for COVID-19 lockdown policies that religious organizations argued were discriminatory, placing stricter requirements on churches than businesses. He also encountered pushback after signing a law that stripped faith-based schools of funding for a program that offers free college credits to high school students.
[Vice President Kamala Harris, now Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, tapped Walz on Tuesday to be her running mate.]
Walz determined in a May 13, 2020, executive order that retailers would be allowed to reopen at 50% capacity, but he left religious gatherings capped at 10 people. After Catholic and Lutheran churches in Minnesota announced plans to resume meeting in person regardless of the governor’s order, he negotiated to allow religious groups to operate at 25% capacity, according to the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune.
Two churches nevertheless moved forward with their lawsuit over discriminatory treatment. Walz settled in May 2021 after the state’s motion to dismiss was denied, agreeing to treat religious gatherings the same as “the least restricted secular business regulated by the order.”
Three churches backed by the Thomas More Society also filed a lawsuit in August 2020, arguing Walz violated their religious liberty by mandating masks, limiting capacity, and requiring social distancing.
“Governor Walz, a former teacher, gets an F in religious liberties,” Thomas More Society special counsel Erick Kaardal said in a press release at the time.
In May, the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld Walz’s declaration of a peacetime emergency in response to COVID-19, according to the Upper Midwest Law Center.
Walz also faced a lawsuit in May 2023 after he signed into law a bill barring schools that require students to affirm a statement of faith from receiving funding from Minnesota’s Post Secondary Enrollment Options program, which allows high school students to earn free college credits. Minnesota agreed not to enforce the law while the lawsuit is ongoing.
Becket senior counsel Diana Thomson called the state’s decision to exclude faith-based schools “patently anti-religious.”
Walz did sign legislation in May that clarified religious exemptions from the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on categories such as race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.
Republicans pushed for the bill after the state Legislature added “gender identity” as a protected class but didn’t add a religious exemption, according to the Minnesota Reformer.
In April 2023, Walz signed a bill into law that banned “conversion therapy,” defined as any practice that seeks to “change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity,” for clients under 18. At the same time, he signed a bill to make Minnesota a “trans refuge” state, which allows state courts to assume “temporary emergency jurisdiction” if a child has “been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care.”
The Harris campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Walz’s record on religious liberty.
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Arab Taxi driver rampages through Cologne, smashing into two groups of women before hero manages to apprehend him
A taxi driver went on a rampage through Cologne's old town, running over two groups of women before a hero managed to apprehend him.
The Jordanian, 44, from Velbert, reportedly raced his car down a street in North Rhine-Westphalia shortly after 10pm where he hit two women - aged 22 and 23 - head on.
He then sped on in his Volkswagen Passat towards the Rhine River where he hit two more women as a fifth woman managed to save herself by jumping to the side, BILD report.
German reports suggested the act was 'deliberate', and a 27-year-old woman has been left seriously injured.
A waiter, 34, from the brewery in front of where the crime took place - near to Alter Markt - was described as a 'hero' after he managed to detain the driver until the police arrived.
A police statement read that the man 'gave chase on foot', putting himself in grave danger, after the taxi came towards him without breaking.
The outside mirror was said to have touched his upper body after he jumped to the side.
After the Jordanian driver exited his vehicle at Alter Markt, the waiter held the driver until police arrived.
It is said that a similar incident occurred in Essen around an hour earlier, where a pedestrian suffered life-threatening injuries from a crash.
Cologne police are investigating whether it is the same driver as the one in Cologne.
Both cocaine and cannabis were found in the 44-year-old's car after he was detained, and a blood test was ordered
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Raising the Criminal Age Only Sweeps Youth Crime Under the Carpet
The Victorian state government has committed to raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 years old to 12, and to 14 years old by 2027 in an effort, it says, to avoid young people entering the criminal justice system early.
Yet, the recent case of a 14-year-old, who is on bail and had more than 380 charges, struck out because of his age.
He has been described by a magistrate as “causing terror” in the community, which sums up all that is wrong with plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility.
Not holding young offenders accountable for their actions will not halt the issue of youth crime.
If anything, it will likely reinforce the sense of impunity many young offenders already feel, and will do nothing to stem the number of home invasions, thefts, assaults, and robberies that have skyrocketed post-pandemic.
The Victorian Crime Statistics Agency reveals the number of alleged offences committed by young people aged 10 to 14 has increased 37 percent over the last five years. In 2024, there were over 6,800 alleged offences committed by this age group.
However, according to data released by the Productivity Commission, only 15 young people aged 10 to 13 were incarcerated over the 2022-23 financial year.
These figures show what happens when you do not punish or seek to rehabilitate young offenders. Little wonder many youths gleefully plaster their crimes across social media, underscoring their contempt for the law.
The government’s justification for raising the criminal age limit is that children belong in schools rather than the criminal justice system, this is unlikely to alter their mindset.
Not only would this teach young offenders that they can evade the consequences of their behaviour, but it also provides a dangerous opportunity for older offenders to recruit younger people to commit crimes on their behalf, safe in the knowledge that these children will not be prosecuted.
Lack of Options for Judges
Further, the debate around the age of criminal responsibility is driven by the assumption that entanglement with the criminal justice system inevitably means jail time for children.
This reveals a key problem with existing arrangements—namely the lack of deterrents available to judges when sentencing young people.
It is widely recognised that detention can be harmful for young offenders and should be avoided where possible.
Instead, many offenders, particularly non-violent offenders, are handed light non-custodial sentences that fail to address the factors behind their behaviour.
There must be punishments available to judges that are appropriate for those offenders not serious enough to be incarcerated, but whose conduct—and the decision-making behind it—requires intervention.
There’s a Model to Copy
Sentencing reform should begin with adopting practices successfully implemented in the United States. Rancho Cielo in California has established a successful program for non-violent offenders on probation and at-risk youth, with a focus on rehabilitation and providing skills for life.
Youth offenders are sent to the ranch as students, where they receive a high school education while also being enrolled in workshops that teach practical and employable skills.
The ranch operates at just a quarter of the cost of local prisons and has reduced youth reoffending rates from 40 percent to 15 percent over two decades.
Such programs not only take the offender away from social groups encouraging offending, but also stop youth offenders heading down the wrong path.
The most dangerous offender is one with nothing to lose. Giving young offenders hope and opportunity to build a career gives them something to lose.
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Australia: Sacking antisemitic employee will achieve nothing
Sacking the Officeworks employee at the centre of last week's brouhaha would turn her into a poster child for the anti-Semitic left, writes Janet Albrechtsen:
If Officeworks sacked the young woman at the centre of last week’s storm for refusing to serve a Jewish man, that might satisfy some people – particularly the noisy ones on social media.
A dismissal could demonstrate a serious consequence for an egregiously offensive action.
But it will, most definitely, also turn her into a martyr, a poster child for the anti-Semitic left. So, let’s pause and think.
If anyone thinks sacking this employee will settle this issue, they haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in schools and homes, universities and workplaces, and courtrooms too.
Caught on camera, the young woman’s language is a clue. The staff member, in her early 20s, can be heard telling the Jewish customer who wants to laminate a page of The Australian Jewish News featuring his trip to Israel, that she is pro-Palestinian and “I’m not comfortable doing that”. She says it’s company policy that she doesn’t have to do a job that makes her uncomfortable.
There is an opportunity here to consider something fundamental: how does a woman in her early 20s come to think that because she feels “uncomfortable” she has a right to refuse service to a Jew? Answering that question is much harder than issuing a dismissal notice.
Harder because blame extends well beyond this deluded young woman. It reaches into management ranks of Officeworks, into the boardroom of its owner, Wesfarmers – and into every company where workplace codes routinely use touchy-feely language that may lead an employee, especially a young one, to imagine that if something, or someone, makes them feel uncomfortable they can object.
Officeworks’ Print and Copy Terms and Conditions state that a customer must not provide material to an employee that “is unlawful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, invasive of privacy, vulgar, obscene, profane or which may harass or cause distress or inconvenience to, or incite hatred of, any person”.
Officeworks employs thousands of young people. How do they determine what is “threatening, abusive, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, profane”?
Why was this young woman empowered to decide what material might “harass, cause distress or inconvenience to, or incite hatred” to “any person”?
This is not to defend this young woman – refusing to serve this Jewish customer was abhorrent. But let’s not forget that Officeworks has a policy that this woman believes empowers her to act in this abhorrent manner.
It’s a big enough ask expecting young employees to fairly determine what is incitement to violence when courts have offered no clue because prosecutors are loath to use the existing provisions that ban such actions.
At the other end of the spectrum, what are inexperienced employees to make of the legal free-for-all when it comes to subjective feelings such as “causing distress or inconvenience”?
Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi is suing Pauline Hanson under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act claiming Hanson offended her. Faruqi has threatened action against this newspaper’s Johannes Leak, too, again claiming she was offended by a cartoon. Jewish groups are considering using 18C to prosecute words that they say offend and insult them.
Why are we outraged that a member of a generation raised in the shadow of the legal system that put a person’s feelings at the centre of laws to punish people for causing offence might think that their feelings trump all too?
We could have altered this offence trajectory. Instead, moves in 2017 to rein in the “offence and insult” part of section 18C went nowhere. Liberal MP Julian Leeser – who in recent days called for Officeworks’ chief executive to “hang his head in shame” – celebrated when feelings remained central to 18C. So did Jewish groups.
Politicians, poorly named human rights activists and Jewish groups still insist that we keep feelings at the centre of laws that can be used to punish people for causing offence. The young woman at the centre of the Officeworks brouhaha has simply moved the feelings bar a tad further down the line from actions that “offend” to those that make her “uncomfortable”. And why not, given that Officeworks policies do it too?
As a society, we can hardly pretend we didn’t see this coming. We have spent the past few decades turning a young generation into a fragile one. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and lawyer Greg Lukianoff wrote about this 10 years ago. Their essay in The Atlantic, The Coddling of the American Mind, laid out what was happening on American campuses. It’s little different in Australia.
Haidt and Lukianoff wrote about the frailty of university students raised by over-protective parents, where the “flight to safety” happened at school too when playgrounds became risk-free. These “social-media natives” cocooned in silos might be different, the authors said, “in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts”. They need only look around to see a legal system where being offended provides an entry into a courtroom to make someone pay for hurting their feelings.
In September 2015, Haidt and Lukianoff warned that “attempts to shield students from words, ideas and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for students”. They warned that it would be bad for workplaces, too, when students stepped into the real world, inevitably confronting what they were shielded from on campus.
It would be bad for democracy, too, the authors predicted with laser-sharp accuracy. “When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as wilfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.”
Ten years on, we can remove “campus”, “college” and “university”, and “students” from The Coddling of the American Mind thesis and insert “workplace” and “employees”. We have reaped as we have sown.
To turn this around, Haidt and Lukianoff said it was critical to “minimise distorted thinking” so that those who felt discomfort “see the world more accurately”.
Maybe, then, sacking this Officeworks staffer is too easy – and also misguided. Maybe visiting the Melbourne Holocaust Museum is a better way to challenge this young woman’s distorted thinking. Her scheduled visit there (agreed after an earlier complaint) took place after the one caught on camera. If learning some history, gaining an insight into a deeply complex problem made her feel uncomfortable, all the better.
It’s certainly preferable to turning her into an unemployed martyr for the left.
This doesn’t get Officeworks or Wesfarmers off the hook. They need a new set of terms and conditions to make clear that just because something might cause distress – or discomfort, as this woman called it – that is no reason to refuse service.
Parents, politicians and universities have some important work to do, too. Complicit in raising a coddled generation, a good place to start is reminding kids, students, and adults that, as Haidt and Lukianoff wrote, “subjective feelings are not always a trustworthy guide; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong”.
Oh, and we should repeal section 18C.
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6 August, 2024
Passing the torch
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I got pregnant after detransitioning my gender - but the damage done to my body has made me feel like a monster and put my baby's life at risk
Childbirth and the first few weeks with your baby are meant to be the most magical moments for a new mother.
But Prisha Mosley, 26, 'feels like a monster'. Her breasts were cut off at 18 after she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, meaning she cannot feed her new son naturally.
In fact, her entire chest area is numb, robbing her of the sensation of cradling her son — who she has not named publicly — and forming that essential skin-to-skin contact that helps fuel the mother-baby bond.
Ms Mosley was born female. But the hormone drugs she was prescribed as a teen blocked her natural puberty and put her at risk of being sterilized indefinitely.
To her amazement, she became pregnant with her son last year. But the drugs stunted the growth of her hips and vagina, making them dangerously narrow for childbirth.
Her son's shoulders became stuck in the birth canal and Ms Mosley had to undergo an emergency C-section to get the baby out safely.
Ms Mosley, who is also an ambassador for the Independent Women's Forum, told DailyMail.com: 'I had to take this medication to stop my body producing milk that also suppresses a hormone linked to bonding with my baby.
'It makes me feel like a monster, it makes me feel like a bad person. But I didn't have a choice.'
Ms Mosley is one of a growing number of so-called detransitioners, those who transitioned to a different gender but then returned to their original one.
During her childhood, she struggled with mental health issues and claims doctors told her that transitioning to be a boy would solve her problems.
But nearly a decade later, Ms Mosley changed her mind and decided to detransition — saying what she had really needed was therapy all along.
Now, she is dealing with the repercussions of the hormone therapy and surgery that have irrevocably changed her body, put her son's life at risk during birth and severely limited the way she can care for him as a new mom.
In an interview with this website, Ms Mosley revealed how her now two-month-old boy could have suffocated during birth.
She also said how after birth she was deprived of the first crucial skin-to-skin moments between mom and newborn that bond them because the top surgery had left her chest numb and left her unable to breastfeed.
Ms Mosley said: 'I feel nothing there. The nerves were completely severed.'
She added previously: 'I know he'll feel me, but my chest isn't soft and pillowy the way it's supposed to be. And when he's there, I won't feel anything.
'I try not to but I think a lot about the fact that if I held my baby or if I set myself on fire, it would feel like the same exact thing. Nothing.'
The World Health Organization recommends skin-to-skin contact between mother and baby as soon as possible after birth and for eight to 24 hours per day thereafter.
Previous studies have shown that it boosts the survival chances for babies with a low birthweight or who were preterm, and suggest that it helps the mother and infant bond with each other.
The breast tissue that does remain in Ms Mosley has swelled with milk since the birth, making her chest appear like it has small rocks underneath it.
In places, the swelling is so severe that scars have opened up, revealing raw skin underneath.
Ms Mosley gave birth to her son June 3, 2024, and he weighed 7lbs 5oz.
He was scheduled to be delivered in early June but Ms Mosley went into labor early and was rushed to the hospital.
She was in labor for four hours before doctors ordered a C-section, saying her son's head was not in the proper position and that without it, he would have suffocated.
The C-section had been pre-planned because of her smaller hips, but was meant to take place a day later.
Ms Mosley was anorexic from the age of 12 years, meaning her hip bones had not developed and widened properly before she started to take testosterone injections — which could have further disrupted her growth.
Her vagina has also atrophied as a result of the testosterone injections, or shrunk, and is now 'small' leaving her struggling to use normal tampons. There were concerns over whether it could have also accommodated a baby.
The female pelvis reaches its full shape to accommodate a child between the ages of 25 and 30 — though this may be disrupted by gender-affirming care, which messes with hormones and disrupts development.
The University of California, San Francisco, says online that testosterone from masculinizing hormone therapy can cause fat to shift from the hips and thighs to the abdomen.
The institute also said that those who start the therapy in their late teens or early twenties may see subtle changes in bone structure in their face, suggesting the hormones can also cause changes to the pelvic bone.
Because so few people have detransitioned, there is limited conclusive evidence as to what starting and stopping testosterone does to the female body.
Ms Mosley told DailyMail.com her baby was 'sick' when he came out and was coughing excessively because his lungs were full of amniotic fluid.
During natural childbirth, this is normally forced out by the contractions of the uterus which compress the babies chest.
Because the new mom did not have breasts, she could not feed her newborn and the baby refused to drink formula milk, repeatedly throwing it up.
It was 24 hours before the panicked new parents were able to secure donated breast milk.
Doctors recommend beginning breastfeeding as soon as a baby is born to help with bonding between mother and baby and to stimulate milk production.
Ms Mosley's remaining breast tissue became swollen after birth as her body naturally tried to feed her baby.
But the tissue is not connected to her nipples, which she described as decorative, meaning there was no way to get the milk to him.
She said: 'I had milk that I couldn't give to my baby that came every time he cried and screamed, that was trapped under scar tissue.
'And it is the worst pain I've ever experienced in my life. I could see [the swelling] with my own eyes, and my boyfriend could see it, and it was so bad, it was like rocks under my skin. And some of my scars tore and there was dark red under them.'
Her little boy is now being fed on a combination of formula and breast milk donations.
Ms Mosley said that while she understands why some women only use formula, she was upset that she was not able to make this decision for her own child.
Her son now also has to use a pacifier to strengthen the muscles in his jaw, which usually comes from suckling during breast feeding.
She also spoke about the heartbreak of not feeling her son when he was pressed against her chest because of the top surgery, which she said damaged her nerves. The medication she took to stop milk production, called cabergoline, also numbs the chest.
'Last night, I kept pressing my fingers in really hard into my chest, I eventually did it so hard that it hurt my rib bones,' she said.
'But I didn't know I was doing it. I feel nothing.'
Doctors say it is essential to have skin-to-skin contact after delivering a baby, which is scientifically proven to boost bonding between mother and child.
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Google has a monopoly on search, US court finds
A US judge on Monday handed Google a major legal blow, ruling in a closely-watched anti-trust case that it has a monopoly with its dominant search engine.
The landmark decision against a “big tech” giant could alter how the sector operates in future.
District Court Judge Amit Mehta found that Google maintained a monopoly for search and for text ads through exclusive distribution agreements that made it the “default” option that people were likely to use on devices.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his ruling.
The internet behemoth “has a major, largely unseen advantage over its rivals: default distribution,” he added.
The anti-trust trial pitting US prosecutors against Google ended in May with a two-day hearing.
The case was the first of five major lawsuits by the US government to reach trial, with Meta, Amazon, Apple and a separate case against Google also heading for federal courtrooms.
Held in Washington, the trial was the first time the US Department of Justice has faced a big tech company in court since Microsoft was targeted more than two decades ago over the dominance of its Windows operating system.
Mehta presided over several months of testimony late last year that saw Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other top executives take the stand.
At the heart of the government’s case was the massive payments made by Google to Apple and other companies to keep its world-leading search engine as the default on iPhones, web browsers and other products.
Court testimony revealed that these payments reach the tens of billions of dollars every year to keep its prime real estate on Apple hardware or the Safari and Mozilla browsers.
The Department of Justice lawyers argued that Google achieved and perpetuated its dominance -- and strangled rivals -- through these default deals that also expanded to Samsung and other device makers.
Mehta concluded, however, that Google’s violation of the Sherman Act did not have “anticompetitive effects.”
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” US District Court Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his ruling.
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Australia: Queensland LNP Vows ‘Adult Crime, Adult Time’ for Young Offenders
Juveniles convicted of serious crimes will be treated as harshly as adult offenders in Queensland, under a major Liberal-National Party (LNP) pre-election promise.
Opposition Leader David Crisafulli addressed the party faithful at the annual LNP state convention on Sunday and spruiked his plans for government, 111 days out from the election on Oct. 26.
He focused on tougher punishment for youths who commit crimes.
Under his plan, youths found guilty of crimes such as murder, manslaughter, grievous bodily harm and dangerous operation, and unlawful use of a motor vehicle would be sentenced as adults.
“If you make the choice to commit adult crimes, you should know we have made the choice to ensure there are consequences for that behaviour,” Mr. Crisafulli told the convention in Brisbane.
“We will restore consequences for actions for young criminals—adult crime, adult time.”
The Labor government’s management of youth justice and crime has been in the spotlight following a serious of violent incidents involving young people, fanning concerns that youth crime is rising across the state.
However, the LNP leader’s plan could prove controversial amongst legal and children’s rights groups.
Mr. Crisafulli said the state government was “cuddling young criminals” and if he became premier the LNP would fund individual 12-month post-release plans to keep young offenders on the straight and narrow.
“We can’t just release a young offender into society,” he said.
“We'll partner with the community sector to work with young people in detention, in partnership with their youth justice caseworker, to develop a relationship which can be maintained when they are released.
“That will be an intensive post release supervision to keep them on the straight and narrow.”
According to an Australia Bureau of Statistics crime report published in February, there were almost 11,000 offenders aged 10 to 17 in the state in 2022/23, up 6 percent from the year before.
The most common offences were acts intended to cause injury (23 percent of the total) and theft (17 percent).
Premier Steven Miles called the proposal as “just another slick slogan” from Mr. Crisafulli.
“The fact is that we want to intervene early and prevent crimes before they occur, and that’s why we have a comprehensive community safety program,” Mr. Miles told reporters.
In health, the LNP leader promised to provide live hospital data within 100 days, if the opposition wins government, after federal Coalition Leader Peter Dutton criticised Labor’s record on services at the convention on Saturday.
“Four years ago, the term ambulance ramping didn’t really register with the Queensland public, and yet today, ambulance ramping is at a record 45 percent,” Mr. Dutton said.
The Liberal leader endorsed Mr. Crisafulli as a thoughtful and practical leader who had a demonstrated plan to “end Queenslanders’ despair” and revitalise the state.
“The LNP’s policies are not only practical, they offer hope for Queenslanders that better times are ahead,” Mr. Dutton said.
“We can achieve government because they respect a leader who has not only demonstrated a plan to end their despair, but a leader who has a vision to revitalise Queensland.”
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4 August, 2024
Drinking from plastic bottles can raise blood pressure due to microplastics entering the bloodstream, study suggests
"Suggests" is the word. The study was based on the responses of only EIGHT people and there was NO measurement of microplastic intake at any point. So no evidence that microplastics caused the differences observed. And the results were highly variable with men mostly not affected. What a heap of steaming manure! The journal article is
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8929/3/3/26
Drinking from plastic bottles can raise blood pressure as a result of microplastics entering the bloodstream, a study suggests.
Microplastics have also been found in fluids in glass bottles, according to other research, and experts say the associated higher blood pressure can lead to an increased risk of heart disease.
The latest study found blood pressure went down after participants stopped all fluid intake, including water, from plastic and glass bottles, and drank only tap water for two weeks.
Researchers in the department of medicine at Danube Private University in Austra said: 'We concluded, after extensive research, that beverages packaged in plastic bottles should be avoided.
'Remarkable trends were observed. The results of the study suggest, for the first time, that a reduction in plastic use could potentially lower blood pressure, probably due to the reduced vol-ume of plastic particles in the bloodstream.
'The changes we observed in blood pressure suggest that reducing the intake of plastic particles could lower cardiovascular risk.'
Research shows that microplastics – microscopic fragments that are the result of plastic degradation triggered by UV radiation or the result of a bottle being knocked about – are ubiquitous.
Microplastics have been found in saliva, heart tissue, the liver, kidneys and placenta. Several studies have found high concentrations in water in plastic bottles.
In the new study, reported in the journal Microplastics, the researchers had eight men and women get their daily fluid intake from tap water and told them to abstain from drinks stored in plastic or glass bottles.
Several blood pressure measurements were taken at the start and during the study. The results showed a statistically significant decline in diastolic blood pressure – the pressure in the arteries when the heart rests between beats – after two weeks.
The researchers said: 'Based on the findings, indicating a reduction in blood pressure with decreased plastic consumption, we hypothesize that plastic particles present in the bloodstream might contribute to elevated blood pressure.'
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JD Vance versus Kamala Harris: He is the Real Deal
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Since this week’s announcement that Donald Trump has chosen J. D. Vance as his running mate, media outlets have been speculating about the 39-year-old hillbilly prodigy. In spite of his candid – and hugely popular – memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (2016), a certain mystery surrounds Vance. At only 39, with a history of criticizing Trump (not uncommon among Republican politicians), Vance has not yet created a stable image for himself. One thing is clear, however. He is quite different from the more establishment Republican alternatives Trump might have chosen to be his prospective Vice President.
We’re going to build factories again … together, we will protect the wages of American workers and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.
Vance’s friends and intellectual influences include several figures of the “Online Right.” He has cited the influence of Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, Catholic convert and journalist Sohrab Ahmari, “neo-reactionary” thinker Curtis Yarvin, and Catholic philosopher René Girard, among others. Girard in particular is important, for he not only educated Vance through his books, but is a favorite of Vance’s billionaire backer Peter Thiel, who studied under Girard during his time at Stanford. Vance’s conversion to Catholicism in 2019 is an important aspect of his political character, which blends conservative intellectualism with advocacy for Middle Americans. In an article written for the Catholic magazine The Lamp, he quotes St Augustine’s City of God, the philosopher of religion Basil Mitchell, and Girard: “Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.”
Put briefly, Vance encountered this understanding of Christianity in the work of Girard, and then proceeded to look at his own flaws. He soon found that he had lost touch with virtue in his ambitious quest to leave behind the poverty and addiction which shaped his Ohio hometown:
I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.
Vance’s memoir secured him a following more among intellectuals seeking to understand Trump’s popularity than among the people he grew up among. But it is the latter’s interests he now champions: the industrious factory-workers whose jobs were exported to China, and whose sons and brothers were killed, wounded or traumatized in “global war on terror” after 2001. In this respect, Vance is the anti-Kamala Harris. He was not picked simply because he checks certain boxes. He was picked despite the fact that he was “another white guy.” A living breathing example of the American Dream, Vance can be held up as a role model for children – regardless of their skin color or gender – exemplifying that the circumstances of your early life don’t need to be your destiny.
Kamala grew up in comfort. Her parents were academics, her father a Jamaican economist, her mother an Indian biologist. Her political career was not distinguished. Yet, thanks to the prevailing identity-based DEI mindset prevalent within the Democratic Party, she was picked as Biden’s running mate because “he wanted to make history by picking a woman of color…” If we want children – of every race – to aspire to hard work and virtue, Vance is the ideal role model. If we want to teach children – of every race – to play the grifting game, Kamala is the Platonic form of the DEI hustler.
Harris has recently been the subject of online mockery after a video compilation was released which shows her repeating the same asinine, grammatically dubious phrase on dozens of different occasions: “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” DEI hides mediocrity, but only to a point. She went to law school at University of California Hastings. By contrast, Vance got into Yale Law School as an Appalachian white male veteran – without a doubt the worst thing a person could possibly be if one wanted to appeal to the New Haven Diversicrats. Yale Law, for all its faults, is the most competitive in the nation; Hastings, while perfectly respectable, comes in 85th.
As he has progressed from autobiography to the Senate and now to the brink of the second-highest elected office in the land, Vance has been supported by his good friend, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel. This, coupled with his endorsement by Elon Musk, has caused some to doubt the sincerity of Vance’s brand of “Maganomics.” One of Vance’s most striking policy aims is to shift the U.S. economy away from the big tech companies, whose wealth is highly concentrated along the coasts, and to reinvigorate the “real economy” of manufacturing. However, a closer look at Thiel’s work reveals that there is no tension between Vance’s vision of a revitalized Middle America and his close partnership with Thiel. As Vance writes in The Lamp:
[Thiel] argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better – those in biology, energy, and transportation – and too much on things like software and mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other, or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied the planet.
Thiel even “defied the social template I had constructed – that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists.” Having experienced conversion myself, I can’t stress how important it is to abandon this stereotype of Christianity.
It can be difficult for the adult convert not to compromise on the tenets of his new faith by holding onto secular platitudes and liberal pieties. Vance’s pro-life stance, which seems considerably stronger than that of Trump himself, reflects his genuine belief in the sanctity of life. By contrast, Harris, who is a Baptist, has insisted without justification that “to support a woman’s ability – not her government, but her – to make that decision [to have an abortion] does not require anyone to abandon their faith or their beliefs.” This ignores that the General Board of American Baptist Churches officially opposes abortion as a means of evading responsibility for conception, and that many Baptists, especially those in the Southern Baptist Convention, do not believe in its permissibility at all. But then, argumentative rigor is not Harris’s strong suit. Another of her incomprehensible statements made the headlines recently: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
The divergence of the two likely vice-presidential candidates on the question of America’s place in the world is perhaps the most political important difference between them.
Harris’s recent “forceful case” for American interventionism is a typical expression of liberal interventionism. I have no trouble imagining her sending Vance’s friends in rural Ohio abroad to fight in ruinous misadventures until the trans flag flies over Tehran. (Look out for my upcoming article on Iran for more warnings about the difficulty of dealing with that problem.) Nor can we expect competence, if the scattered, lurching withdrawal from Afghanistan a few years ago is any indicator.
Admittedly, it does remain true that the democrats did take U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. No, not well. No, not prudently, nor at the right time, nor with the right preparations. But they did it. On the other hand, the Biden-Harris administration has not shied away from intervening indirectly in foreign conflicts, even if the aid it has given to Ukraine and to Israel has been too little to give those countries victories in their wars against, respectively, Russia and Iranian proxies.
Trump and Vance offer something different. There are two foreign policy futures one could reasonably foresee under a Trump-Vance administration. The first is blockheaded isolationism and geopolitical naïveté. Today’s Republicans leaders are not likely to blunder into any stupid “forever wars,” but they do risk abandoning Europe to Putin, the Middle East to Islamism, and East Asia to an ascendent China.
America has real enemies, and they cannot be ignored. That is why Vance must never repeat his comment about how he “doesn’t really care” what happens in Ukraine. If something bad enough happens there, it won’t stay in Ukraine, and he should know better.
But if you look more closely at Vance, it seems likelier that the new Republican Party will uphold America’s role as a great power, but do so more wisely than the Democrats have since 2020. Vance, in his acceptance speech, railed against the Chinese fentanyl coming up through Mexico, where there was once a border before Biden destroyed it. Vance understands deeply the threat posed by an aggressive China, particularly economically: “We’re going to build factories again … together, we will protect the wages of American workers and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.” That is not the rhetoric of someone who is going to abandon our Taiwanese allies (and their crucial semiconductor factories) to China. It’s the rhetoric of someone who understands Chinese subversion.
It was Trump, not Biden, who imposed tariffs on key Chinese goods, and it will be Trump, not a Democrat, who will keep their poison out of American heartlands by restoring a well-policed southern border. Vance, whose own mother suffered terribly with drug addiction, understands the importance of supporting Trump in this fight.
The Democrats deserve some limited credit for supporting Israel’s fight against Hamas, albeit haltingly and grudgingly. Vance, in a telling CNN interview, does much better, for he would let the Israelis take the lead without constantly fiddling with the flow of necessary American aid: “I think that our attitude vis-a-vis the Israelis should be, look, we're not good at micromanaging Middle Eastern wars, the Israelis are our allies, let them prosecute this war the way they see fit.”
Finally, we can cautiously hope that worries about Trump or Vance abandoning Ukraine are overblown. The terrible war there has revealed Putin’s many weaknesses. The Russians have repeatedly embarrassed as well as incriminated themselves. Vance is less concerned about Eastern Europe than East Asia or the Middle East, but he says himself that he has no intention of abandoning Europe. My hope is that he approaches the Putin problem seriously. Some of what he says indicates that he will:
https://www.restorationbulletin.com/p/jd-vance-versus-kamala-harris-he
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How supporting Trump became cool
For the past decade, the basic lines of conflict in American public life seemed clear. Donald Trump was pitted against the establishment, the ‘basket of deplorables’ who supported him against the elites. The reality was more complicated. Yes, plenty of rich and powerful Americans supported Trump and plenty of poorer Americans on the fringes of society were against him. But in a certain section of society the disdain for Trump was unequivocal. Among the country’s elite – at Harvard and Stanford, at Google and Goldman, near the beaches of the Hamptons and the mountains around Aspen – anyone who defied the anti-Trump consensus could expect swift consequences for their social standing.
There have been constant melodramas over this form of social ostracism. Two years ago, Alan Dershowitz – a formerly pro-Democrat lawyer who went from representing Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson to arguing a key case for Trump – complained bitterly that the Chilmark Library on Martha’s Vineyard had failed to invite him to deliver a talk to well-heeled local vacationers, something he’d done annually for decades. ‘I’ve been cancelled, basically, by the Chilmark Library,’ he lamented to the New Yorker.
Zuckerberg called Trump’s reaction to the assassination attempt ‘one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen’
Supporting Trump could also have consequences far more serious than upsetting local librarians. As the tech publication the Information recently acknowledged, it could cost careers too: ‘It wasn’t so long ago that being a supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in Democrat-leaning Silicon Valley – or even having a loose affiliation with him – was the kind of thing that earned you dirty looks, a pink slip from an employer and stern advice to rethink your life choices.’
Yet this seems to be changing. If a number of American commentators are to be believed, the country is undergoing an unexpected ‘vibe shift’. Coined in 2022 by Sean Monahan, a self-described trend forecaster, the idea of a vibe shift originated in the fashion world. It was meant to denote the confusing and often unexpected transition from one paradigm of cool to another. One day, smoking and wearing plaid shirts may be seen as fashionable but – vibe shift! – a few months later the inverse becomes true.
Of late, commentators argue, a political vibe shift is under way: suddenly, supporting Trump seems to be much more socially acceptable than before – in some elite circles, perhaps even a little cool.
Take Silicon Valley. The biggest tech entrepreneurs and the hordes of programmers and HR professionals at large firms like Google and Meta were once staunchly progressive. Yet this year, a growing number of the tech world’s rich and famous, from Elon Musk to David Sacks, the founder of a large venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, are endorsing Trump. Even longtime Democrats are suddenly on the fence; Mark Zuckerberg said he wouldn’t endorse either candidate in a recent interview, and called Trump’s reaction to the assassination attempt ‘one of the most badass things I’ve seen in my life’.
The transformation on Wall Street may be just as consequential. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan, for example, has been outspoken in his criticisms of Trump in the past; this year, he used the annual global elite gathering at Davos to signal he’d changed his mind and intended to support Trump’s re-election bid. Dimon isn’t alone. There’s also Bill Ackman, a Democratic donor and notable hedge-fund manager. This year, he picked a series of fights with university presidents who, in his estimation, weren’t sufficiently protective of Jewish students on campuses; a few weeks ago, he announced he’s supporting Trump.
Even some celebrities from traditionally left-leaning fields are donning proverbial – or literal – MAGA hats. 50 Cent, the New York rapper, recently said ‘many black men identify with Trump’. After Trump’s attempted assassination, he tweeted a picture of one of his albums, featuring lyrics about being shot, with Trump’s face replacing his own. Others who’ve publicly embraced Trump include the influencer Amber Rose and singer Azealia Banks.
The vibe shift goes beyond America’s wealthy, extending to many groups once viewed as solidly Democrat. As polls show, non-white voters, especially young black and Latino men, have rapidly moved towards the Republicans. And they’re increasingly vocal in their support. Some of the most fulsome arguments I’ve heard for Trump recently came from a Puerto Rican cleaner and a Mexican-American Uber driver.
Even now, polls show Trump remains deeply unpopular among most Americans; according to a New York Times poll, about 55 per cent of registered voters hold a negative view of him. But the same poll suggests the intensity of that unpopularity has diminished in recent years; the number of Americans who have a ‘very unfavourable’ opinion of Trump has declined by five percentage points since the summer of 2022.
This isn’t a huge swing. But I wonder whether even those Americans who continue to have an unfavourable opinion of Trump have come to fear him less than before. In my own social circle, concerns over his presidency were palpable in 2016 and many actively opposed his campaign. This year, the same people think Trump is likely to win, claim they would be extremely worried about him getting a second term but shrug in embarrassed resignation when I ask what they’re doing to stop him. The dislike for Trump might run deep. But the palpable concern about what he might do – and, with it, the social taboo against his supporters speaking their mind – is diminishing.
Political scientists like to say American public opinion is thermostatic – it moves in the opposite direction of policy. It would be tempting to think the assets of the presidency – with its political power, giant bully pulpit and ability to influence a press obsessed with access – would help the incumbent move public opinion towards their own views. But presidential influence has historically done the opposite. If the incumbent is liberal, American political opinion becomes more conservative (and vice versa). This helps explain why America moved right when Barack Obama was president; why it tacked to the left after Trump’s 2016 victory; and also, perhaps, why it’s been trending in a conservative direction since Joe Biden won in 2020.
This thermostatic swing has been reinforced by Biden’s declining mental acuity. Biden remained sufficiently salient in public for voters to blame him for their frustration, from inflation to the growing influx of illegal migrants, whether he was responsible or not. But once his team felt forced to hide him away, he couldn’t defend his record. Consequently, public views on topics such as border security have moved right.
What’s more, the cultural progressivism that conquered America’s institutions, including the Democratic party, inspired a thermostatic response of its own. This includes popular disaffection with a constant emphasis on equity; with attempts to punish anyone perceived of committing some ill-defined form of political wrong-think; and with the smug and pretentious linguistic register which characterises much of public life today.
Take a recent example of the progressive sensibility overreach. When SpaceX successfully launched a rocket into space a few weeks ago, the New York Times responded with a breaking news alert pushed to millions of phones. Rather than celebrating the historic launch, the article attacked Musk’s company for not sufficiently protecting birds’ nests it might damage. Leaders in Silicon Valley – many of whom have long felt personally aggrieved that they have become the whipping boys of their former allies in the left-leaning establishment – were furious.
If one part of the story behind the vibe shift is about a growing rebellion against the progressive ecosystem most Democrats inhabit, another part of the story is about how Trump’s image has changed – starting with the way in which his temporary absence from mainstream platforms helped divert popular attention away from his failings.
If I had been advising Trump in January 2021, I’d have told him to go to Mar-a-Lago, stay off Twitter, give Biden a chance to screw up and let Americans forget about how much they blamed him for the violent assault on the Capitol. Trump is far too enamoured with the limelight to heed such advice. But because Twitter banned him in January 2021, and major TV channels made a concerted effort not to platform him, he was effectively forced to adopt this strategy.
As the memories of Trump’s presidency recede, public revulsion at him has subsided. This process was speeded along by two sets of developments that played into his hands. First, the only judicial case against him that led to a conviction was weak. Other cases would have addressed very serious misconduct, such as his alleged attempts to pressure election officials to do his bidding. The case successfully brought by the elected Manhattan district attorney, however, used an unusual legal theory to punish him for the tawdry – but ultimately inconsequential – decision to pay a porn star he slept with for her silence.
Then there was the attempted assassination and Trump’s courageous response. After he survived, Trump shrewdly claimed he was a changed man, promising in an acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that he would demonstrate his desire to heal political divisions. The first minutes of the speech emphasised the need for national unity in tones that could have been uttered by Ronald Reagan, or even Obama.
For the next hour of the speech, however, Trump went beyond the lines on his tele-prompter, returning to soundbites that work brilliantly at campaign rallies – extreme statements and partisan barbs against opponents. In other words, Trump isn’t a changed man. And yet his position on many policy issues – which partially explain the intensity of the revulsion against him in 2016 – has softened. There have been no hostile calls to ban Muslims entering the US.
There’s a final reason why a vibe shift has been taking place – and why it could end as quickly as it began. Most Americans believed Biden was too old. Kamala Harris, who is set to succeed Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate, is also deeply unpopular. Her vulnerabilities, personal and political, are real. But she seems with it, at least. She should be better able to motivate the Democratic base, and will likely spend much of her campaign prosecuting a rhetorical case against Trump. If she succeeds, claims of a political vibe shift may turn out to be premature. But that remains a big ‘if’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/how-supporting-trump-became-cool/
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What did you expect? Britain's protests reflect DECADES of elite failure
Matt Goodwin
I am angry. I am upset. And I am deeply disillusioned with the direction of Britain.
I’m writing this post after a horrific mass stabbing at a children’s dance group in the town of Southport, which left three children dead and another eight injured.
These poor children thought they were going to a Taylor Swift themed dance class; they ended up being murdered.
And who murdered them? The son of immigrants from Rwanda.
I’ve thought about many things since.
But the one thought that keeps coming back to me is this.
When a nation cannot protect its own children something has gone terribly wrong.
And something has gone terribly wrong in this country.
We can all see it, we can all sense it, even if we dare not say it out loud.
The creeping sense of lawlessness. The overwhelming sense of hopelessness. The now inescapable conclusion that we’ve simply let too many people into our country who hate who we are.
And a growing sense of desperation, rooted in the knowledge that nobody in power has any serious control over the country —over its streets, borders, future.
This is why many ordinary people are now taking to the streets to vent their anger and frustration over not only the senseless murder of children but over the general direction of the country, with some —wrongly in my view— taking this anger out on police officers and emergency service workers
In response, these protestors are being widely criticised by much of the media and political class as ‘far right agitators’, ‘violent thugs’, and ‘extremists’ who have been swayed by ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, and irresponsible ‘populists’.
And I certainly have no doubt there will be violent thugs among them. I will say again —violence against police is never justified.
But here’s my question. What did you expect? Seriously?
What do you expect ordinary British people to do given the deeply alarming things that are now unfolding around them, in their country, on a daily basis?
Just look at what’s unfolded in the last month alone.
On July 4th, at the election, several Muslim MPs were elected to the House of Commons after a campaign of abuse, harassment, and intimidation, displaying zero respect for our political institutions and ways of life.
On July 11th, the new Labour government announced it would release 5,000 prisoners early in September, with most having served 40% of their sentence.
On July 15th, we learned London’s Metropolitan Police had not solved a SINGLE petty crime -burglary, car theft, phone theft- in three years, across 166 areas.
On July 17th, it was reported that a Jordanian refugee, Mustafa al Mbaidan, who had assaulted a female police officer in Bournemouth, was spared community service on the grounds that he cannot speak English.
On July 18th, two asylum seekers, Yousef Garef and Amin Abdelbakar, who stole a Rolex worth £25,000 from a tourist, were spared jail.
On July 18th, that same day, mass rioting in minority communities broke out in Harehills after social services took four Romani children into social care.
On the same evening, rioting broke out in East London’s Bangladeshi community, following political unrest in Bangladesh, with rocks thrown at police officers and cars smashed in communities that are majority Muslim.
On July 23rd, it was announced that Anjem Choudary, Britain’s most famous Islamist, was to be sentenced for directing Islamist terror on Britain’s streets.
On the same day, a British Army Officer was repeatedly stabbed outside his home by Anthony Esan, a member of a minority community.
On July 26th, protests broke out after footage emerged of Greater Manchester Police taking action against Fahir and Amaad Amaas —two brothers who were later revealed to have severely assaulted armed officers.
On July 27th, six arrests were made after a drive-by shooting in the town of Watford.
On July 29th, reports emerged that a man had been stabbed to death, with two others injured, following a knife fight in a park in East London.
On the same day, there was the mass stabbing and murder of children in Southport.
On July 30th, a mass brawl involving machetes erupted on the streets of Southend.
On the same day, it was reported that a homeless Kurdish migrant had pushed a man onto the tracks at a London Underground station after feeling ‘disrespected’.
And, also on the same day, it was reported that another 3,000 migrants have entered Britain illegally on small boats since Labour took power less than a month ago, taking the total number of crossings by mainly young male migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sudan, and Syria to around 130,000.
What do you expect?
When we see individual stories like this, in isolation, there is a very real risk that we become desensitised and accustomed to them. It becomes the ‘new normal’.
It’s a classic case of boiling the frog. If you want to boil a frog in hot water, as the saying goes, then start by turning the temperature up slowly. Get it right, and the frog won’t even notice it’s getting boiled.
But when you see all these stories together, side by side, the sheer scale of the lawlessness, the chaos, the breakdown of social order, and the glaring loss of control becomes impossible to ignore.
And all this against the backdrop of many other things that reflect the fact that the country is not really a country that we recognise anymore.
A string of Islamist terrorist attacks.
The murder of an MP, police officer and soldier by radicalised Islamists.
The mass grooming of young white girls by Muslim gangs up and down the country.
The imposition of mass immigration.
The total collapse of our borders.
The rise of double-standard policing, where ever since October 7th radicals and extremists who hate who we are, who hate the West, have been allowed to parade up and down the country while anybody from the white working-class who dares to do the same is automatically branded a ‘far right extremist’.
Again, what do you expect?
Two or three decades ago, these shocking incidents would have sparked a national conversation about the declining state of law and order and how to regain control.
But now, amidst a new ruling class that can no longer tolerate any criticism of the elite consensus, they either pass us by or are reframed so that the ‘real’ story is never actually about the real story.
It’s about ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘populism’, ‘racism’, or anything other than the actual cause.
And in the days ahead, after Southport, we will watch this playbook unfold again.
As after the Manchester Arena bombings and the murder of Sir David Amess, when atrocities committed by outsiders were ridiculously repackaged as warnings to ‘not look back in anger’ and ‘be kind on social media’, the national conversation will be managed and steered to focus on everything and anything except what this is about.
We will hear platitudes about diversity being our greatest strength.
We will be told to be kind and come together, to not look back in anger.
We will read about people joining together to clean up streets.
And we will be told that millions of our fellow citizens, the ones who are protesting, the ones who have had enough, do not represent the ‘real Britain’ or ‘our values’.
But whose values are we talking about, exactly?
Whose values are imposing mass immigration, segregation, communalism, and a broken model of multiculturalism on the rest of the country?
Whose values are eroding free speech, silencing dissent, and stigmatising everybody and anybody who does not rally behind this broken elite consensus?
Whose values are seemingly fine with having no serious control over our own national borders while asking the British people to pay billions for this disaster?
The values of an elite minority.
The values of no more than 15% of the country.
An elite minority that is now visibly losing control of the country and which, in the era of Twitter/X, YouTube, Substacks, and new media, is now also struggling to maintain its dominance over the national conversation.
This is exactly why —as I said last night— millions of Brits feel so concerned about what is unfolding around them. It’s not just about the issues; it’s their growing awareness that the new ruling class has no serious interest in changing direction.
We are now all stuck in the same car, with the doors locked, hurtling toward a cliff-edge with the hands of an irresponsible, unpredictable radical on the steering wheel.
This is why many people feel they are losing their country –their identity, values, rule of law, ways of life, and can seemingly do nothing about it.
To make matters worse, they cannot voice their concerns because, if they do, they too will be branded ‘far right’, ‘racist’, and ‘misinformed’.
Join a protest in your capital city to flag your concerns about what’s happening? That’s far right. Protest after the murder of children? Far right.
Suggest we leave foreign courts so we can actually control who comes in and out of the country? Far right. Call for lower immigration? Far right.
Vote for a party that calls for an end to mass immigration? Far right. Sing a song about England? Far right. Fly the flag? Far right.
In today’s world, where terms like ‘far right’ have been massively expanded by radical progressives to enforce groupthink and stigmatise anybody who does not get on board with the values of an elite minority, it is quicker to list the things that are not far right than list the things that are.
So, to be clear, what’s happening on the streets of Britain right now, in the aftermath of those hideous murders, is not about a single piece of ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation’, some rogue tweet, or a video by a populist politician.
It is the culmination of decades of disastrous policies by our ruling class, the same class that’s now rushing to discredit anybody and everybody who points this out.
The policy of mass immigration which the vast majority of people in this country neither asked for nor voted for.
The complete breakdown of our borders, allowing tens of thousands of unvetted and often dangerous migrants from high-conflict societies into our country.
And the complete disinterest in thinking about how to sustain a cohesive, integrated, high-trust society.
For decades now, the very same politicians who are lining up to denounce much of the rest of the country as ‘far right’ have been pushing soft-on-crime policies while subjecting the British people to porous borders and mass migration from third-world countries where violence, disorder, and misogyny are the norm.
So, is it any wonder that our social fabric is now disintegrating before our eyes? Is it any wonder that mass immigration and the elite obsession with diversity —as academics warned twenty years ago— are now producing a low-trust society with spiralling crime, social atomisation, and growing division?
Is it any wonder that growing numbers of people are staring at their television screens and smartphones, wondering what is happening to the country they love and whether other people out there are thinking the same?
And is it any wonder that, having watched an assortment of radicals and extremists take to Britain’s streets to sing songs about how much they hate the West and Israel, a minority of British people are now doing the same, trying to exercise their voice in a system that no longer appears remotely interested in it?
No, of course it’s not. What did you expect?
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/what-did-you-expect-britains-protests
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1 August, 2024
Paris: degeneracy, depravity, and diversity
Senator Ralph Babet
I will not be watching a single minute of the Olympic Games. Not even the highlights. Don’t get me wrong, I love sport. But you cannot tell me the Olympic movement is only about sport after watching the degeneracy they served up during the opening ceremony.
Artistic director Thomas Jolly claimed the four-hour extravaganza was aimed at promoting ‘diversity’. This included, apparently, a man exposing himself.
We once would have called a recreation of the Last Supper using lesbians and men wearing woman face an act of blasphemy. But today, the International Olympic Committee expect us to applaud and call it inclusive.
Should I laugh, or should I cry?
What I know for sure is that I have way too much self-respect to fall in line with their degeneracy. And you should too.
These people, with agendas that can only be called evil, count on us to simply shrug off the garbage we saw during the opening ceremony and keep watching as if nothing happened.
Sitting through some satanism before the swimming and tolerating some degeneracy before the discus is now expected of us.
But to agree to shake hands with the devil is to normalise evil and to ensure it continues. How, in good conscience can we do that?
I know some people will react to my use of the phrase ‘satanic agenda’, but what else would you call it? Art?
Since when does parading transgenderism and denigrating Jesus Christ constitute enlightenment?
When you mock Christianity, ridicule Western Civilisation, and promote gender confusion to the entire world – all the while insisting it’s a virtuous act of diversity and inclusion – you are evil.
The most astonishing thing is that they were not even attempting to hide it.
People around the world sat with their children to watch the opening ceremony only to be confronted by three gender neutral looking weirdos alluding to having a threesome, or as the French like to say, a Ménage à trois.
Not exactly what mum and dad had promised the kids.
Throw in a near-naked pornographic Smurf symbolising Dionysus, the pagan god of drunkenness and Bacchanalian orgies.
A bearded man masquerading as a woman cavorting like a cat on heat dancing and gyrating in front of the table where the Last Supper blasphemy occurred.
A self-described ‘fat, Jewish, queer, lesbian’ who played the part of Jesus and who labelled the performance as the ‘New Gay Testament’ on Instagram.
The head of a golden calf – a direct reference to the historical account in the book of Exodus where the Israelites, having grown tired of God, created a cow from their gold and worshipped it.
I might add that Moses, when he discovered what the people had done, made them melt the golden calf and drink it.
A pale horse – alluding to the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelation. The pale horse represented war, death, and hell.
Using drag queens as torchbearers… God only knows what drag queens have to do with sporting prowess.
On and on it went. Not exactly the display of cultural magnificence you hoped your children would enjoy.
That they then raised the Olympic flag upside down was entirely fitting since the entire ceremony was an inversion of all that is good, wholesome, and normal.
I love sport, and I love our Australian athletes. I hope they perform well, but I cannot be party to this event.
We need to be vocal about our refusal to partake in it. Enough is enough.
If decent people don’t stand up now, when will we?
The organisers of the Games, and those that share their sordid ideology of decadent nihilism, are literally destroying the West in real-time right in front of our eyes.
The Paris Games opening ceremony was not a celebration of sport and nor did it bring the world together.
Instead, Woke elites, in true fashion, ruined the opening celebrations.
If good people do not find their voice and push back on this, then I fear our civilisation will soon be lost.
We entrusted the French to hold an event that would bring the world together and that would promote everything wholesome. Instead, they used their privileged position to spread satanic bile, and to ridicule the Christian faith.
That performance should not be rewarded with our attention.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/paris-degeneracy-depravity-and-diversity/
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The ‘Ballerina Farm’ Hit Piece
The UK’s The Times interview with social media influencer Hannah Neeleman, also known as Ballerina Farm, went viral for many reasons depending on what side of feminism you are on. Feminists were quick to deem Hannah as oppressed and beholden to her husband’s desired lifestyle.
The author of the article, Megan Agnew, tries to be neutral but is ultimately unsuccessful. Instead of getting the scoop on how Hannah really feels, she inevitably tells her audience how she feels about the Neelemans’ lifestyle.
Agnew complains about not getting the opportunity to interview Hannah alone because she is tending to her eight children. She describes Hannah’s husband, Daniel, as an “all-American steak guy” and goes on to state that Hannah’s baby “will not leave [her] chest for the four hours we’re together.”
What baffles Agnew the most is that Hannah left a successful career as a ballerina to become a dedicated wife and mother. Hannah describes the sacrifices that both her and her husband made to live their desired lifestyle.
Agnew writes, “I look out at the vastness and don’t totally agree. Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.”
Agnew seems to imply that Hannah has sacrificed the most because she left a successful career to live out her husband’s dreams. This is a common belief that feminists hold. They ignore the sacrifices that men make to provide and care for their families and portray the wives as the victims who sacrifice more.
Throughout the article, Agnew continues to portray Daniel as a husband who imposes his beliefs on his wife and doesn’t let her speak for herself. This is made clear when she writes, “I can’t, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child. Usually, I am doing battle with steely Hollywood publicists; today I am up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.”
While the article goes into other details, such as Hannah’s decision to have unmedicated, physiological births and her stance on birth control and abortion, the author gives us plenty to discuss already.
To feminists, the idea that a woman will leave her career to fully embrace motherhood is not only foreign but dangerous because women have been indoctrinated to believe that breaking the glass ceiling is more fulfilling than raising children. Feminists have also been indoctrinated into believing that any man who has a vision for his family’s lifestyle is oppressing his wife and beholding her to the patriarchy.
Fortunately, though, many women are waking up to the lies they have been sold by feminism.
Podcaster Ellen Fischer’s most recent episode is about women who awakened from the feminist deception of careerism; women who built an empire but now long to leave it all behind to dedicate themselves to motherhood and homemaking.
Fischer speaks about her own journey and asks Suzanne Venker for advice on how to leave it all behind. The truth is that most mothers don’t want to be a “girl boss,” they don’t care to climb the corporate ladder, and they really just want to give their all to motherhood. But in a culture where feminism is worshipped, these mothers are shamed for wanting to stay at home.
Women are told that their knowledge and skills are better served at a computer in a cubicle than at home with their children.
This is how Megan Agnew feels about Hannah Neeleman and her beautiful family. She cannot fathom why a beautiful mother like Hannah would leave the world of professional dance behind to put her soul into motherhood. But it doesn’t have to be like this.
Thankfully, women are waking up to the lies feminism once made them believe.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/108921-the-ballerina-farm-hit-piece-2024-07-31
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California dad is granted full custody of four-year-old son after boy's mom tried to raise the child non-binary
A California dad has been granted full custody of his now four-year-old son after the boy's mother tried to raise him non-binary and forced him to wear dresses and make up.
Harrison Tinsley announced his victory in the years-long legal battle with his ex-girlfriend to gain full custody of his son, Sawyer, in an update on his online fundraiser for legal fees on July 18.
The father-of-one described how he felt like he was 'watching a miracle' when he found out he would be the boy's full-time caregiver.
'It definitely is a pretty wonderful feeling to fight for something so hard and to actually achieve it,' Tinsley told The Daily Signal.
Tinsley explained that he had always wanted to be a father and was 'ecstatic' when his girlfriend told him in 2019 she was pregnant.
'Unfortunately that excitement turned to pain when his mother, who suffers from serious underlying mental health problems, abruptly ended our relationship and prevented me from seeing Sawyer,' he wrote in the fundraiser.
Tinsley was only able to meet his son when Sawyer was 15 months old, and the two quickly bonded.
'Sawyer is not only my best friend, he is the most amazing, greatest blessing of my life,' he said.
But the boy's mother had begun a same-sex relationship and started to identify as non-binary - treating Sawyer as non-binary as well.
'She calls him "they" and puts him in dresses, girl diapers and makeup,' Tinsley wrote.
'She threw Sawyer a girly-themed party for his second birthday party where she made him wear a dress donned with a sheriff's badge.'
At another time, he told The Daily Signal, the mother brought Sawyer to Disneyland - but would not let him go on the rides unless he wore the princess shoes she got him.
But Sawyer fought back against his mother, Tinsley wrote. 'Sawyer says his mother tells him he is both a boy and a girl, but Sawyer is fully aware he is a boy,' he said.
'Thankfully, he has my rebellious spirit and fights back whenever his mother gaslights him.
'However, I am certain this is confusing him and emotionally traumatizing. He is not old enough to even be thinking about this ideology, but his mother is coercing him into it.'
Tinsley then filed a motion for custody of the boy last year, after he learned that Sawyer's mother was arrested for felony child endangerment and subsequently discovered she slandered and defamed him.
He said he 'presented eight hours of police body camera footage, 800 pages of documentary evidence and psychological studies showing Sawyer's health, safety and well-being were jeopardized by his mother, her mental health problems and political ideology.'
But the judge at that time ruled against him.
By December 2023, Tinsley's appeal had begun, and he recently told The Daily Signal that a settlement had been reached in which he was granted full custody and the final say if there are any disagreements between him and the boy's mother.
That settlement came after Child Protective Services did an investigation and recommended that Tinsley get full custody of the boy - and that the boy's mother undergo full drug and alcohol testing.
Over the course of the investigation, Tinsley said the boy's mother tried to paint him as 'some right-wing hillbilly from Mississippi or something, even though I had nothing to do with the investigation - and that shouldn't matter anyway.
'In reality, I'm just some California dude with long hair and skinny jeans, and that's ridiculous to make that up about me.'
It is unclear what prompted Child Protective Services to investigate the mother, but Tinsley said he is grateful to the investigator.
'It was extremely favorable for Sawyer and me,' he said in the recent podcast with The Daily Signal. 'And I'm just so grateful that CPS and San Francisco, California put politics aside and did what they felt was best for the child.
'It was divine that I got the CPS worker I did and they really did their job - they did not care about politics,' he added, noting that he believes the mother's mental health issues and the 'scary situations' they caused contributed to the CPS recommendation.
'It's sad, though, that it had to get so severe,' Tinsley said, arguing that he believes anyone who pushes gender ideology on young children 'have to have some underlying serious mental health issues.
'It's madness,' Tinsley said. 'Kids don't care about sex or identity or all these fake, weird concepts. They just care about having fun and getting to spend time with their parents - and it's insane that we're even considering this as a possibility to talk to children with.'
Tinsley said he wants to help other parents who may be dealing with a similar situation - calling gender ideology 'one of the greatest evils we've ever done' as he compared it to lobotomies.
As for Sawyer, Tinsley said the boy has been in his custody for about four-and-a-half months and 'he's thriving'.
'He's doing so good in every way, socially, he has less tantrums now and it just seems like his overall well-being is just dramatically improved having that constant stability, and I'm just so thankful to be a part of it,' the proud father said.
Tinsley went on to say he is 'just so excited to making a brighter future for him, to watch him grow'.
The proud dad said: 'It's just going to be amazing. Sawyer's going to have a great life.'
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The Controversy Surrounding Microdosing Chocolate Bars
California-based company Diamond Shruumz was once one of the premier providers of microdosing products in the US. Providing “artisanal chocolates… designed for creative souls,” Diamond Shruumz offered chocolate bars, ice cream cones, gummies, and other sweets with trace amounts of psilocybin- the psychedelic found in magic mushrooms.
Now, Diamond Shruumz is under intense scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration. Over the past two months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collected 74 reports of illnesses across 28 states associated with consuming Shrummz’s edibles. Reportedly, 38 hospitalizations and possibly one death are also linked to these products (this would arguably be the first confirmed death caused by psilocybin in US history).
Unsurprisingly, Diamond Shruumz’s products are being recalled. Until an investigation is complete, the FDA is urging patients to avoid these products and report retailers who still sell them.
How long will this investigation take? Good question.
Early suspicions suggest elevated amounts of muscimol (a psychedelic agent) in the products could have caused illness. However, tracing illnesses reported across dozens of states becomes complicated and time consuming. The FDA also has over 350 products on its recall list and has been bafflingly sluggish with its recent investigations. It could easily be years before Diamond Shruumz’s products return to shelves.
Another vital question is how these recalls will affect recent efforts by the FDA to incorporate as a medication to address severe mental illness.
Well before Diamond Shruumz recalls and microdosing became a social activity, the FDA began small-scale and heavily monitored clinical trials on the use of psychedelics to help treat severe mental illness. The results were so effective that the FDA granted breakthrough therapy status for two forms of treatment. About a year ago, the agency drafted an extensive outline to start an approval process to begin testing- and ultimately approving- other psychedelic treatments.
Will recent recalls make the FDA shy away from the work it has done to make psilocybin-based treatments more accessible for those with severe mental illnesses? They easily could.
The FDA approved four cannabis-based treatments last year. Yet it only recently began questioning the DEA’s Schedule 1 designation for marijuana, which states it has no known medicinal uses. In late 2020, the agency decided to establish an advisory board to review two Covid-19 vaccines after they already passed the guidelines it helped to establish.
Sadly, there are plenty of examples of the FDA standing in the way of pioneering medical science and novel treatments. Typically, all the agency needs is an excuse to act on its own overly cautious tendencies. Recalling microdosing edibles provides this avenue, and that is deeply concerning for the nearly five percent of Americans with chronic and severe mental illnesses.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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