The Grenfell effigy and the fall of liberal Britain - spiked - "He has narrowly escaped prison for distributing an offensive joke, in private. Bussetti says he had no hand in making the effigy and he sent the video to private groups. It is unclear how it ended up on YouTube. Still, he was arrested and later found to have breached Section 127 of the Communications Act, which criminalises the distribution ‘by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive’. In 21st-century Britain, being offensive – sorry, grossly offensive – is an offence. And yet Bussetti’s case has come and gone with little comment. Some of the news headlines seemed almost disappointed he wasn’t actually locked up. ‘Man who made “abhorrent” video of Grenfell Tower effigy on bonfire spared jail’, said the Independent, which once upon a time was Britain’s liberal newspaper, before it became an ad-crippled, clickbaity blog. We have become numb to cases like this. Last year, two men were actually jailed over a racist video, a rant about Priti Patel. The man who made it and sent it to some friends in a private Snapchat group got 10 weeks. His dopey mate who sent it on to another closed group got six weeks. Then there’s the Scot who narrowly escaped jail earlier this year for celebrating the death of Captain Tom Moore. These are just a few examples of the estimated nine people arrested in Britain each day under Section 127. That’s thousands every year. All of these men sound like prize dickheads. But it shouldn’t be a crime to be a prize dickhead. And there are plenty of people who have been caught in the net of British state censorship in recent years for statements that were far less outrageous, or were just puerile jokes. Take the case of Count Dankula, the Scottish YouTuber fined for making a skit about his pug turning Nazi. In 2014, a 20-year-old builder from Lincolnshire was fined £400 for taking a photo of a police officer and drawing two penises on top of him in a Snapchat post. And that’s just the Communications Act. Britain has many more legal restrictions on what really should be considered protected speech. Broadcaster Darren Grimes was investigated by the police in 2020 for a possible offence under the Public Order Act, all because of comments made by historian David Starkey on Grimes’ YouTube show. Then there’s the more than 120,000 Brits who have had so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’ recorded against their names in recent years – an Orwellian police practice only recently struck down by the Court of Appeal as an unlawful interference in free speech. This all amounts to an extensive regime of state censorship. And yet it goes on and on and on in supposedly liberal Britain. It is presented to us as benign censorship, as caring censorship, as censorship aimed at the hateful or offensive, rather than the dissident or blasphemous. But there is no simple distinction between these things. One man’s hate preacher is another man’s dissident. And while we no longer arrest those who defame Christ, we happily arrest those who ‘misgender’ trans activists. A truly liberal society would not trust the state to decide what is true or false or right or wrong in this way. But that is no longer the case here in Britain. State censorship has become a crazed form of virtue-signalling, and a symbol of our warped priorities. We prosecute a man for mocking a tragedy like Grenfell, while those responsible for helping bring that tragedy about continue to walk free... Britain is fast becoming a warning to the Western world. If you allow state censorship to take root, even with the supposed best of intentions, then even nominally liberal nations will do deeply authoritarian things – like locking people up for telling offensive jokes. Left unprotected, free speech can so swiftly go up in flames."
From 2022
The culture war is destroying equality before the law - spiked - "This process of prioritising certain crimes above others has been seen in Scotland, where violent crimes have been downgraded while hate crimes and cases of domestic abuse, even where no violence has taken place, are prioritised. The policing of domestic violence, for example, has been accompanied by an overzealous and interventionist approach to people’s private lives. But few if any criticisms are publicly raised about these police practices which have, at times, impacted badly on both the accused and the alleged victims. Reach for the Scottish police training manual and you will not find a booklet that prioritises an understanding of law, order or even crime. Police Scotland’s Initial Training Course Manual 1 starts with a 50-page explanation of ‘Diversity Awareness’. Those who are not ‘aware’ are the people we are now meant to be concerned about, the people the newly educated cops know all about – the deplorables. The deplorables, in the British context, can be summed up by the put-down terms ‘Sun reader and ‘Daily Mail reader’, or as Fintan O’Toole put it, the ‘people with tattooed arms and golf-club buffers’. These are the imagined bigots that make up white Britain, the ‘White Van Man’ coupled with his more middle-class compatriot who lack not only the political but also the cultural and even emotional awareness of the metropolitan elite. These men and women are the targets of modern law and order. We can see this even in the popular depiction of crime itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, crime was a conservative, right-wing issue. It was street crime, muggers and robbers who captured the imagination and who were depicted in cop dramas. Crime was also politically linked to radicals and hedonists, to outsiders and militants – the ‘enemy within’, as Margaret Thatcher called them. Criminals were seen as lefties. Now, with TV programmes like The Good Fight, crime has been reconstructed through the minds of the modern liberal elite and has come to be associated with the deplorables, the racist, sexist bigots, who have become the new abusive ‘baddies’ responsible for all the crimes that matter. Deplorable football fans in Scotland have been severely criminalised and policed over the past decade. The Offensive Behaviour at Football Act (now repealed) was a law that specifically banned offensive language among football fans while ensuring the cultured types – your poets and artists – were excluded from the law. Here, what are depicted as ‘sectarian’ (ie, racist) fans have particularly been targeted with a variety of laws and initiatives to change their behaviour or their ‘culture’ – with the threat of up to five years in prison for their offensive behaviour... Even before the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act was passed, a man called Stephen Birrell was imprisoned for eight months for his online rants. His crime was to say he wants Celtic scumbag, Fenian tattie farmers to die. There was no threat of violence, simply an inane drunken rant. Sheriff Bill Totten explained that by arresting Birrell, he intended to ‘send a clear message that the right-thinking people of Glasgow and Scotland will not allow any behaviour of this nature, or allow any place in our society for hate crime’. It seems it was not enough for the right-thinking people of Scotland simply to disapprove of foul language – it had to be criminalised and Birrell needed eight months in a cell to help him to become aware. Online offences are being politicised and policed by the new elite. Facebook has a new board of censors filled with right-on individuals who approve of deplatforming deplorables... There also appears to be a scale of deplorability – the more right-wing a person is, the more they can expect the authorities and the law to interfere in their lives and activities. In 2012, for example, a pregnant mother of three, Toni McLeod, found that getting her children back from social services was at least in part dependent upon her giving up her friendship with people associated with the English Defence League... The culture war against the deplorables is not only a matter of who is being criminalised but also who is not being criminalised. We have seen, for example, the divergent attitudes to mass gatherings during the pandemic as well as to acts of vandalism and violence recently. This was previously clear in the case of Extinction Rebellion, which brought areas of London to a standstill and dug up or vandalised other parts of the UK with barely a raised eyebrow from onlooking police. We have also seen the numerous cases of grooming gangs, made up of largely British Pakistani Muslim men, who used and abused thousands of underage girls while authorities turned a blind eye and the media said little. Those who spoke up, like Labour’s Sarah Champion, were ostracised. Champion’s crime was to claim that Asian grooming gangs had been allowed to thrive because people are ‘more afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse’. As has been noted, this lack of concern for white working-class British girls appears to be because it did not fit the correct deplorable narrative. If the perpetrators had been Sun or Mail-reading types, one suspects a very different approach would have been taken and a very different level of outrage would have been expressed. The silence about the sexual abuse of underage girls also stands out in contrast to the #MeToo campaign which had an enormous impact on institutions across the UK. This involved largely middle-class professional women who rarely experienced anything like the levels of abuse that the girls in Huddersfield, Rotherham, Newcastle, Rochdale, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Oxford, Bristol and Keighley were subjected to. These cases are important because they demonstrate what is becoming increasingly clear – that there is a war going on, not just in culture, not just in politics, but in law and on the streets of Britain where PC police officers are helping to transform the nature of policing across the UK. Britain is becoming a country less of the haves and have nots than the chavs and the chav-nots – a country not only divided by cultural differences but also one that is becoming increasingly authoritarian as the new elite attempts to enforce its cultural values on the entire population with the threat of law, policing and ultimately prison."
In defence of colourblindness - spiked - "the goal of a ‘colourblind’ society is in itself a racist idea. Contrary to past anti-racist arguments, many today argue that we should judge people by their race, emphasise racial difference and think along racial lines. And no, this isn’t just the far right – this is what is being put forward by a toxic strand of the new left, woke identitarianism. This illiberal, intolerant ideology is at odds with the universalist, humanist goal of a colourblind society. It is a disempowering, backward-looking movement. ‘Woke identitarianism’ is an ideology that has accelerated over the past 10 years. It is strongly influenced by critical-race theory, standpoint epistemology and intersectionality. The thread that underpins all of these ideas is the notion that every aspect, every facet and every detail of our lives, history and culture are explicitly or implicitly complicit in racism. According to this view, there are hierarchies of victimhood in which the more claims to real or perceived victimhood status you have, the more authentic and morally superior you are. This worldview rejects dialogue between different groups because different people can never ‘truly understand’ each other’s experiences. As James Lindsay, co-founder of New Discourses, has pointed out, many woke identitarians even argue that ‘science, reason, and evidence are a “white” way of knowing’. He rightly concludes that this hurts everyone, especially black people. It renders dialogue pointless. It denies that black people can be individuals with agency. And it denies that we can make any progress towards equality. It is important to understand how toxic the identitarian worldview is. And yet it has become incredibly influential. We have now arrived at a situation in which public debate has almost entirely broken down. History, society and white people as a whole are being recast as inherently racist. In order to make these kinds of claims, woke identitarians have to ignore inconvenient truths, such as the existence of high-flying, patriotic and successful ethnic minorities, or the fact that white working-class boys are among the most disadvantaged groups in Britain today. Britain certainly has its flaws, like all countries, but overall we are tolerant and welcoming. A 2019 survey commissioned by the EU ranked Britain the least racist of the 12 western European countries it studied. We mustn’t allow a fact-free picture of Britain to drive our thinking... if we cannot communicate freely and openly, we will not be able to understand one another and foster empathy. It is minorities – ethnic or otherwise – who benefit from free speech the most, because the views of the majority are already backed up by popularity and power. Woke identitarians generally fear freedom of speech because their intellectually vacuous worldview is in danger of collapsing under even the slightest bit of scrutiny... The current obsession with race often means we are missing the true dynamics in society. Class, for instance, plays a major role in social outcomes, but discussion of it is rare. There are many white working-class people, particularly in the provinces, who do not feel they have benefited from ‘white privilege’. Indeed, they would argue that they are far from privileged. Do their ‘lived experiences’ count? Interestingly, white working-class boys face very similar social challenges to British Caribbean children. In contrast, the situation for British Nigerian, Indian and Chinese children is vastly more positive. These differences suggest that race alone cannot explain social outcomes... It also cannot be overlooked that some of the most ardent proponents of woke identitarianism are some of the most privileged, most significant beneficiaries of the status quo: corporations, the political, cultural and media establishment – and even the royal family. Far from challenging the establishment, wokeness has become a means through which the establishment reinvents itself. Corporations and public figures can gain woke points by engaging in superficial gestures which win social validation and accumulate capital, while real social issues remain unsolved.The woke worldview has merely repackaged racial essentialism for a new age. We must reject it."
Micro-aggressions could give people of colour heart disease, Bank of England tells staff - "The Bank’s slide deck suggests workers should report or confront colleagues for “micro-aggressions” such as asking to touch someone’s hair and whether their family owned a shop. Managers are told they have a “responsibility” to “intervene or escalate” in response to such incidents. These are said to include when a member of staff tells a colleague from an ethnic minority that they “speak well” or asks them where they are “really” from. Another example of a micro-aggression provided in the slides is someone telling a colleague that they “don’t act like other black people”. The Bank references a blog post on the website of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which in turn cites two studies published in United States academic journals around a decade ago. One study, published in 2014 in the American Journal of Public Health, surveyed 3,105 adults in Chicago and found that “racism-related vigilance” may result in chronic stress that contributes to hypertension. It concluded: “Vigilance may represent an important and unique source of chronic stress that contributes to the well-documented higher prevalence of hypertension among Blacks than Whites; it is a possible contributor to hypertension among Hispanics but not Whites.” Another study surveyed 218 Native American people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes about their “micro-aggressive experiences in healthcare settings” and was published in 2015 in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. “Micro-aggressive experiences undermine the ideals of patient-centred care and in this study were correlated with worse mental and physical health reports for American Indians living with a chronic disease,” it concluded... The Bank’s review cited data showing its staff from ethnic minorities were more likely to report being interrupted when talking in meetings than their white colleagues, based on a survey of its employees. The review went on to say that “disproportionately more minority ethnic colleagues believed that managers never or rarely held colleagues to account for non-inclusive behaviours or micro-aggressions.” It recommended that the Bank took steps to “embed a culture of feedback and positive behaviour change” and “improve reporting mechanisms and accountability”."
French DIY chain in woke row over advert on Right-wing website - "France’s favourite DIY chain Leroy Merlin has been accused of capitulating to “woke” pressure after it pulled its online advertising from a Right-wing magazine. The controversy erupted after a Left-wing online activist group publicly alerted the chain that one of its adverts had appeared on Frontiรจres, which it denounced as a “despicable website” that is “obsessed with immigration”. The swift response by Leroy Merlin, which has more than 140 stores across France, has unleashed a torrent of fury from Right-wing politicians and online commentators who argue the company risks alienating “millions” of its conservative customers. Frontiรจres has recently been targeted by the Sleeping Giants collective, a group that campaigns to cut advertising revenues for outlets it deems “hateful”, “extremist” or “racist”. The campaigners took issue with the magazine selling a T-shirt bearing what it described as a “xenophobic” slogan... The magazine alleged that NGOs, lawyers and Left-wing journalists were “profiting” from migration – allegations that human rights groups insist are defamatory. Just hours later, Leroy Merlin announced that the site had been “immediately added” to the company’s advertising blocklist... Others bemoaned the politicisation of everyday life. “Soon we won’t go to the butcher’s because he votes for the National Rally, or to the hairdresser’s because she votes for LFI... This is madness, guys!,” wrote one user."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on X - "Sweden wanted to become a moral superpower but is now a moral basket case. This is the umpteenth warning to the West. Do not appease intolerance. It does not buy you peace or quiet it only emboldens the aggressors."
Helen on X - "When a mosque had it's paint damaged, Starmer and Mahmood rushed to visit and give them £10M for a lick of paint..... Meanwhile Ilyas Akhtar has pleaded guilty to an arson attack on St Peter's Church in Slough."
Freedomain - with Stefan Molyneux, MA on X - "90% of modern politics is just people pretending to be helpless/sad/angry so that single women will vote to ‘mother’ them with other people’s money."
Meme - Clownworld Chronicles: Ultra Maga: "Cool story bro, now try flying the Union Jack or the St. George's Cross"
"A van displaying a meme of JD Vance has been driving around the UK village where he is currently vacationing. The stunt was organized by a group to "prove" that the UK does have free speech."
An American tells a Russian that Americans have freedom of speech and that he could go to the White House and shout: “Go to hell, Ronald Reagan!”. The Russian answers: Oh, I too can go to the Kremlin and shout: “Go to hell, Ronald Reagan!”
A thorny history of race-based statistics - "Twenty-six years ago, a staff inspector by the name of Julian Fantino — future Toronto police chief — sat in a small committee room and delivered a slew of explosive race-based crime statistics focused on the Jane-Finch neighbourhood. Fantino, then head of 31 Division, told North York’s committee on community, race and ethnic relations that, while blacks made up 6 per cent of the Jane-Finch population, they accounted for 82 per cent of robberies and muggings, 55 per cent of purse-snatchings and 51 per cent of drug offences in the previous year. The Star’s Royson James was apparently the only reporter present. He duly filed a story that appeared on the next day’s front page. All hell broke loose. Police in Ontario were forbidden to compile race-based crime statistics. Solicitor-General Joan Smith, responsible for law enforcement in the province, castigated Fantino for collecting and releasing data that “accomplishes nothing useful.” Black activist groups and social agencies condemned Fantino for fueling existing prejudices. Police chief Jack Marks insisted the force did not keep race stats. Fantino maintained the data had been collected at the request of the aforementioned committee. Its chairman disputed the claim. That scandal clung to Fantino for the duration of his cop career and launched decades of angst-ridden discussion of when it might be justifiable to collate or analyze race-based data, particularly in a policing context. The short answer: Never. I thought that was the wrong answer then, the easy cop-out. Information is power. We need to know facts, interpret complex realities, evaluate trends. And try to fix the problem... Fast forward to Monday’s page-one story by the Star’s Wendy Gillis about the black hole of information surrounding visible minorities killed by Toronto cops. No such thing. Black males might get carded excessively, but, nope, the information you’re seeking doesn’t exist. The provincial police watchdog, the Ministry of Community and Correctional Services, Toronto Police Service, not even Statistics Canada will touch the stuff. An attempt by the Star to match known fatal confrontations with contemporaneous media reports left too many gaps, because race of the victims wasn’t included in those stories. And that, I’m certain, harks back to an era when the Star vigilantly eliminated race details from news coverage... we’re left with a dearth of knowledge. And now some of the very people who most passionately demanded the abandonment of race statistics decades ago — because of the clear harm caused — are advocating for that information to be collected and accessible."
From 2015. Left wing strategy: refuse to collect data then accuse others who point out the truth of spreading misinformation
FIRST READING: B.C.'s public school teachers told to 'queer' outdoor education
OneBC presses BC NDP over “queering outdoor education” article pushed on teachers - "B.C.’s minister for education nearly broke down in tears after being asked if kindergarteners should be “queering the outdoors” after OneBC MLA Tara Armstrong read from a BC Teachers’ Federation article that she says frames the “birds and the bees” as a colonial, white supremacist narrative. During question period yesterday, Tara Armstrong read directly from a BCTF article that claims colonialism shaped ideas about nature, gender, and biological reproduction. The article argues that the common phrase “the birds and the bees” reflects “binary pseudoscience” tied to “white supremacy culture.” Armstrong asked Education Minister Lisa Beare whether she supports teachers’ unions promoting these ideas to young children. “What happens when left wing fanatics take over the union representing the province’s teachers?” Armstrong said. “You get ‘queering outdoor education,’ the latest module made by the BC Teachers’ Federation for kindergarten students. The birds and the bees are racist now. Does the minister agree that kids should be queering the outdoors?” Beare did not address the article’s content, instead accusing Armstrong of using her “place of privilege” to “bring children down.” Beare said the government is focused on making all students feel welcome and supported, then delivered an emotional response about vulnerable youth... The BCTF article, published earlier this month by a Vancouver teacher, promotes drag pedagogy, anti-colonial activism, and the rejection of biological categories in outdoor education. Teachers are encouraged to question whether describing animals as male or female reinforces “cis-heteronormative assumptions.” The article also urges educators to view biological reproduction as a political narrative rather than a scientific fact. Armstrong said only a small minority of activists believe these ideas, yet they continue to shape curriculum materials. She argues that politicians, parents, and teachers need to “say loudly and clearly that the indoctrination of our children must end.”... Armstrong said she has heard from teachers who feel they cannot speak openly and parents who have been punished for objecting. “There was a parent on Vancouver Island banned from her own child’s school for posting criticism online,” she said. “It is out of control.”"
Craig Kelly:๐ฆ๐บFoundation for Economic Education on X - "Is anyone surprised that eSafety Karen has given X’s leftist competitor BLUESKY an exemption from the under-16’s social media ban ?
A fundamental principle of a free democratic society is that laws have to apply equally. In contrast, neo-fascist authoritarians & totalitarians are happy apply different standards for different groups. The fact that eSafety Karen has one rule for X and other for the leftist BLUESKY when they are direct competitors and have identical operating platforms - tells us everything we need to know about eSafety Karen. She is a dangerous ideologue who is completely unfit to have any power."
Dries Van Langenhove on X - "For seven years now, my lawyer and I have been asking the judges what exactly I am supposed to have said or done that forms the basis of their prosecution. "Where and how, exactly, did I incite to hatred?" It is still completely unclear to this day. Judge Mieke Butstraen (Court of Appeal) finally iresponded to this in the ruling. She only did so because she was obliged to do so due to the ๐ฐ๐ฃ๐ด๐ค๐ถ๐ณ๐ช ๐ญ๐ช๐ฃ๐ฆ๐ญ๐ญ๐ช objection we raised in our written submissions. Judge Butstraen wrote: “It is not the case that it must be specified which concrete material acts the accused is precisely alleged to have committed.” Well, if even ๐๐๐๐ isn’t required anymore, what is your ๐ซ๐๐ฅ๐ ๐จ๐
๐ฅ๐๐ฐ still worth then? What does such a ruling even mean anymore? Absolutely nothing! The 30th of December, the Supreme Court will decide wether this ruling, that convicted me to a prison sentence, holds."
Jonatan Pallesen on X - "This case is bonkers. It is against the European Convention of Human Rights to not be told what you are accused of. Specifically, Article 6 part 3 says: "Everyone charged with a criminal offence has the following minimum rights: to be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause of the accusation against him" So that should apply to the Dries van Langenhove case. But perhaps the European human rights law only applies when it prevents punishment of rapist foreigners?"
Leading Report on X - "BREAKING: Support for same-s*x marriage in U.S. falls to 54%, per YouGov poll."
Adam Zivo on X - "Support for gay rights has been eroding ever since radical activists replaced “love is love” with “queer as in fuck you” in the late 2010s. Normal gays tried to warn them that this would blow up in their faces, but were ignored and even vilified."
Amala Ekpunobi on X - "Leftist says white people deserved to be “side-eyed” and judged when they are in asian grocery stores and predominantly asian spaces. These people are nuts."
Lauren Chen on X - "If this Asian hates seeing white people in "Asian spaces," I know this great place she can go where there are barely any white people at all. It's called Asia."
