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Category Archives: Political Correctness

Gibbon was right about the NSA wiretapping

June 10, 2013, From a Pew Research poll.

A majority of Americans – 56% – say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a substantial minority – 41% – say it is unacceptable. And while the public is more evenly divided over the government’s monitoring of email and other online activities to prevent possible terrorism, these views are largely unchanged since 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

1781, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the unsubstantial visions of liberty and greatness.

Leftist don’t like this blowback

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks the leftist newspaper were filled with articles and opinions on how the those attacks were a justifiable blowback because of the US foreign policy, Western imperialism and the usual grab-bag of pet leftist causes. Now it seems the blowback from Woolwich attacks is unacceptable to the same leftist.

Woolwich murder sparks anti-Muslim backlash

Attacks on Muslims spike after Woolwich killing

What exactly did you expect? Did you really expect everybody to fall in line with the following views of a toff?

If you’re thinking of getting steamed over all that, don’t. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times of London, cautioned against “mass hysteria” over “mundane acts of violence.”

Einstein, NYT and lies

Albert Einstein once noted in a letter that “You see that I have retained my black humor despite Palestine, corrupt American politics and daily reading of the N.Y. Times which doesn’t even lie honestly but distorts the truth with malicious intent.” Perhaps he had the following in mind when referring to the NYT.

When Jonathan Weisman first put his story up on Friday following more Congressional testimony, this is what the headline  and the opening sentence looked like:

Now, notice what Weisman did here: in the HEADLINE and in the OPENING SENTENCE he revealed the MAJOR NEWS that came out of that day’s testimony.  The IG directly contradicted the Obama administration’s claim it had no idea anything was wrong at the IRS or that certain groups and citizens were being targeted for harassment due to ‘incorrect’ political beliefs.

In other words, WEISMAN DID WHAT A REPORTER IS SUPPOSED TO DO.  He led with the news and made it easy to see.

Well that really bothered somebody higher up, who decided that Weisman’s piece was ‘incomplete’ and needed some ‘massaging’ to bring out the REAL STORY.

Take a look at what Weisman’s original piece was turned into after it was helpfully ‘edited’ by Jeremy W. Peters:

Hello! I’m Jeremy Peters, the Political Morale Officer
here at the NYT’s!  I see Jonathan left the real news out of his article!
No problem, I can fix that!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/us/politics/irs-scandal-congressional-hearings.html?_r=0

As you can see, Jeremy W. Peters knew EXACTLY what Weisman’s article needed; the real story is about the REPUBLICANS trying to use this breaking scandal for their own political benefit.

So how could Weisman have left out the word ‘Republicans’ in the headline? How could he have not inserted Republican attempts to enlarge the scandal to score political points against the White House in the very first sentence?  Well Peters made sure those were the very first things that got changed.

Peters must have also wondered: Hey Johnathan, WTF? Why are you LEADING with the IG’s testimony that he informed top administration officials of the scandal back in 2012?  Don’t you realize this directly contradicts what Obama & the administration spent all this week claiming? Why the bloody blue hell would you make THAT the lede?  Are you seriously trying to give your readers the sense there’s a REAL scandal here instead of just another political witchhunt?  No man, you gotta BURY that crap and  hide it way further down in the story like this: 

Weisman’s original opening sentence:

What Peter’s butchered it into way down in the 9th paragraph:

See Johnathan? THAT’S how it’s done, bro!  You change it from ‘senior Treasury officials’, which reveals a bunch of top Administration people knew, to just the ‘Treasury’s general counsel’, a single person.  It’s important to give the present administration as much cover as you can! Are you taking notes, bro?

In the USSR’s military, there was the military commander and then there was the ‘Morale Officer’ which is a kind way of saying Communist Party hack.  The military commander would make decisions and then would have to run them by the Morale Officer first for approval.  That often meant sound military decisions were changed and suborned to stupid party ideology.

How is what Peters did to Weisman’s article any different?  Sound reporting was ‘massaged’ until it reflected Party Ideology.  There is no way anybody can call that revised article anything but propaganda.

 

British Imam denounces political correctness in Islamic sex case

The Imam of an Oxford mosque, Dr. Taj Hargey, had some harsh words to say about members of an Islamic sexual exploitation ring and the culture that refuses to look at it.

But apart from its sheer depravity, what also  depresses me about this case is the widespread refusal to face up to its hard  realities.

The fact is that the vicious activities of  the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the  perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race,  because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to  regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases.

Indeed, one of the victims who bravely gave  evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted  white girls to abuse’.

But as so often in fearful, politically  correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to this  reality.

Commentators and poli-ticians tip-toe around  it, hiding behind weasel words.

We are told that child sex abuse happens ‘in  all communities’, that white men are really far more likely to be abusers, as  has been shown by the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile case.

One particularly misguided commentary argued  that the predators’ religion was an irrelevance, for what really mattered was  that most of them worked in the night-time economy as taxi drivers, just as in  the Rochdale child sex scandal many of the abusers worked in kebab houses, so  they had far more opportunities to target vulnerable girls.

‘As so often in fearful, politically correct modern  Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to the reality that their  actions are tied up with religion and race’

But all this is deluded nonsense. While it  is, of course, true that abuse happens in all communities, no amount of  obfuscation can hide the pattern that has been exposed in a series of recent  chilling scandals, from Rochdale to Oxford, and Telford to Derby.

 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2325185/The-Oxford-sex-ring-preachers-teach-young-Muslim-men-white-girls-cheap.html#ixzz2TTE35400 Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Islam, Islamist, Jihadist, Jihaddict

Daniel Pipes, for whom I have high respect, tried to distinguish Islam from Islamism, and tried to make the latter into some kind of modern political construct. He then attacked Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as “essentialists”, people who held that Islam, not some modern deviation from it, is the probblem. His is a well-argued position. I do not believe it for a moment. He writes:

Islamism accurately indicates an Islamic-flavored version of radical utopianism, an -ism like other -isms, comparable to fascism and communism. Aping those two movements, for example, Islamism relies heavily on conspiracy theories to interpret the world, on the state to advance its ambitions, and on brutal means to attain its goals.

Supported by 10-15 percent of Muslims, Islamism draws on devoted and skilled cadres who have an impact far beyond their limited numbers. It poses the threat to civilized life in Iran, Egypt, and not just on the streets of Boston but also in Western schools, parliaments, and courtrooms.

Our killer question is “How do you propose to defeat Islamism?” Those who make all Islam their enemy not only succumb to a simplistic and essentialist illusion but they lack any mechanism to defeat it. We who focus on Islamism see World War II and the Cold War as models for subduing the third totalitarianism. We understand that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution. We work with anti-Islamist Muslims to vanquish a common scourge. We will triumph over this new variant of barbarism so that a modern form of Islam can emerge.

1. I do not propose to make Islam my enemy; Islam has made me its enemy; I have no choice in my heretical and subordinate status under Mohammed’s religion.

2. While Islamist ideology is attractive to some 10-15% of Muslims, we do not know at any time which 10-15% are atracted to it. A man might go through his jihadist period and renounce it in later age, as he matures. Neither is the distinction denominational. Muslims do not segregate themselves into Islamist mosques and Islamic mosques. Even to say so exposes the fact that the distinction is something adjectival, something we feel the need to make, not something inherent in the religion.

3. I think we gain greater clarity about Islam when we frankly admit its doctrines call for our suppression, enslavement, and eradication. It is like rabies; where we know the population is susceptible but we do not know which of its victims has been bitten. We know for sure that, having joined the Party, so to speak, they are more inclined (statistically) to violent rejection of their non-Muslim surrounding society than others.

4. At a basic level of male behaviour, non-Muslims adolescent and young men go on a tear, wrap a car around a tree, drink themsleves into oblivion, rob a store, do drugs, join ludicrous protest groups, but, on the whole, do not seek to destroy the society around them with explosives and massacres. Muslim males have before them the ready-made excuse and legitimation of jihad.

I do not think there is much difference between me and Daniel Pipes in terms of actual measures we would take to suppress the jihaddicts, oops, jihadists in the world. But, my lingering concern with people such as Pipes is that they would seek to suppress frank discussion of Islam in the name of social peace.

Robert Spencer say it well.

And this is a key point: if Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (both, not incidentally, ex-Muslims) are right that there is a “consistency from Muhammad’s life and the contents of the Koran and Hadith to current Muslim practice,” and they most certainly are, as Daniel Pipes apparently acknowledges when he says that “certain continuities do exist, and Islamists definitely follow the Koran and Hadith literally,” then attempts to prescind from Qur’anic literalism in order to reform Islam and create a more peaceful version of the faith will always be challenged by the literalists (who are and have always been the mainstream in Islam) as heretics and apostates.

contemporary witches

I was going over the news today:

Detroit insolvent

Mayhem at Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans

Jason Richwine canned from Heritage Foundation for accurate descriptions of Mexican-American intelligence levels in a PhD thesis of years back

Obama regime considers forbidding Christians to proselytize within US Army,  and so forth;

as Western society drops its ideological and religious antibodies, declaring them to be racist, sexist, homophobic etc., and I wonder, what will fill the vacuum? Islam?

Here we are, making our societies deliberately less intelligent, and forbidding discussion of it; making our societies so tolerant we lose any sight of permanent moral realities; absorbing underclass behaviour and saying white people cause it through bad thoughts, rather than black people causing it through total lack of thoughts; dropping standards because they derive from European civilization, or because they are Christian, or because their existence implies that moral standards exist at all, or that they exclude people who would rather be ruthlessly intolerant, exclusivist, and hate-filled from full and equal participation in liberal society’s rich banquet.

Why are we doing this?

More relevant, perhaps, is the approach of the commentariat on those who would draw attention to the permanence and reality of racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and cultural divisions. The latter are the new witches. They cast spells of racism, sexism and homophobia, and much else besides. They must cause the underperformance or bad behaviour  of the groups they describe. Clearly, since all different outcomes are the result, not of any kind of innate or persistence differences among groups, but of social causes, then the people who draw attention to these moral standards, innate or persistent differences, and who refuse to believe in unqualified human equality must be causing the problem. Witches!Burn them!

The modern cultural marxist commentariat is reduced to believing in white witches, rather than change their thinking. Why should they, when the science is settled, there is only one politically correct view of anything, and they control the courts, the universities, and all the pulpits that matter.

 

 

It is not a free country

If ever you want to test the freedom of the United States or Canada, publish true things about racial or ethnic differences, and see what happens. The latest cave-in to the forces of cultural marxism is the case of Jason Richwine, recently of the Heritage Foundation, whose PhD dissertation from Harvard, approved by leaders in the field, argued that Hispanic immigrants had lower IQs that native-born white Americans and that their children would be similarly endowed. Hence importing lots of them through immigration would lower the average level of American intelligence. Heresy!

Discovery of this PhD thesis in the context of Heritage Foundation’s opposition to the immigration reform bill has led to his resignation from the Heritage Foundation.

The commentary on the Richwine case from Peter Brimelow’s Vdare concluded as follows:

Earlier this week, I was talking to a Harvard academic who is familiar with Richwine’s work. He commented that there were simply some subjects the study of which is incompatible with an academic career.

“That’s a remarkable thing in a free country,” I said.

“This isn’t a free country,” he replied.

Writing in American Renaissance, Jared Taylor said:

In yet another act of cowardice, a “conservative” institution has fired someone from saying something that is not only true, but that everyone knows to be true. This time the Heritage Foundation joined the ranks of the lickspittles by forcing out a senior researcher, Jason Richwine. Mr. Richwine, who co-authored the Heritage’s recently released report on the costs of amnesty, had written his Harvard PhD thesis on the implications of racial differences in IQ for immigration policy—and racial differences in IQ have such obvious policy implications that a “think tank” dare not think about them.

 

There is no need to repeat the things that have been said by Mr. Richwine’s attackers. They are just as gloatingly idiotic as you would imagine. It is far more important to point out that Mr. Richwine had important defenders—but Heritage still folded. And what makes its behavior particularly revolting is that the people who run it knew about Mr. Richwine’s dissertation ever since they hired him two years ago. It is hard to imagine more craven behavior.

Elspeth Reeve in the Atlantic attempts to explain why Richwine is wrong, and not merely racist.

The idea that Latinos won’t assimilate because they’re doomed to low IQs for generations is offensive. But so what? More important, it’s wrong. At least half of the variation in IQ is inherited, The Wall Street Journal explained in January, but scientists haven’t figured out which genes affect IQ. And even more important for today’s political debate, Latinos are assimilating. The New York Times‘s David Leonhardt explained in April that Latinos are assimilating at about the same rate as earlier immigrant groups — they’re “the New Italians,” he said. As with Italians, a huge wave of Latinos immigrated here poor, poorly educated, and culturally different. But they become richer and better educated with each generation. RAND Corporation economist James P. Smith found that the average Latino immigrant has a junior high education, but the average Latino immigrant’s kid goes to college for almost a year, and the average Latino immigrant’s grandkid stays in college longer.

Reeve misses the point in three important ways. First, the argument of Richwine is not that Latinos will not assimilate, it is that they are less intelligent, and therefore will be less productive in the long run than, say, immigrants of higher average intelligence. As a matter of fact, Richwine was proposing intelligence test for immigrants be part of the criteria for acceptance into the United States, so that no one would be discriminated against because of racial or ethnic averages. Second, the notion that scientists have not figured out which genes affect intelligence, if true, is wholly beside any point being made by Richwine or any one else. Third, the fact that half of intelligence is hereditary, aside from underestimating the proportion attributable to genetics (it is about 70-80%), means that, over time, increasing the proportion of Latinos in the American mix will lower the average intelligence as opposed to what would happen if immigration policy favoured people of higher intelligence, such as north Asians, or people of average intelligence, such as whites.

No American I know who has experienced Latino working habits has a bad word to say about Latinos. They show up, they work hard, and they keep their families together. Again, that is not the point anyone is making. We are talking about immigration policy, which determines who your neighbours will be in thirty, forty, or fifty years.

Once more it has been made dangerous to your life and livelihood to say true things based on indisputable statistical facts.

It is not a free country.

An email to York Regional Police chief Eric Jolliffe

This was sent in relation to the threats issued by York regional police to a rabbi threatening bad things if Pamela Geller was allowed to speak at a conference at his synagogue.

Sir, if I understand correctly, your police service forced its chaplain to cancel a completely legal event under threat of dismissal after pressure from one segment of your community. If so, you have made an extremely bad decision. As a police service, you have demonstrated quite effectively just whom you intend to serve and those rights and freedoms you have decided not to protect. In doing so, I believe you have created the conditions for serious problems in the future which your service will have no choice but to confront. But you may find your officers meeting those challenges with much less support than they might otherwise expect. Good luck to them.

Blazing Cat Fur published a letter from the Canadian academic Salim Mansur on this absurd capitulation to Islamic sensitivities.

Marathon bombing and political correctness

It is becoming increasingly clear that the US government was given adequate warning about the Tsarnaev family. The NYT reports the following.

In March 2011, the Russian security service sent a stark warning to the F.B.I., reporting that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “a follower of radical Islam” who had “changed drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to Russia’s turbulent Caucasus to connect with underground militant groups. Six months later, Russia sent the same warning to the C.I.A.,,,The Russian warnings to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. also raised questions about Mr. Tsarnaev’s mother, Zubeidat, according to two senior American officials.

With ample and clear warning why did the FBI not follow up on this? For that you have to go back to US Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on May 13,2010 where he refuses to use the term “radical Islam.” The whole youtube video is worth watching to see the tap dance.

This kind of muddled thinking of course percolates down to the rest of the bureaucracy and it is no wonder that FBI training manual in 2011 purged references to the terms “al Qaeda”, “Muslim Brotherhood”, or “jihad.” How can one analyze threats when the corresponding lexicon doesn’t even exist?