Change.org Removes Petition to Fire 'White Lives Don't Matter' Prof - "A petition to fire Cambridge professor Priyamvada Gopal, who was promoted after tweeting that “White Lives Don’t Matter. As white lives”, has been removed by Change.org after receiving over 20,000 signatures... More than 20,000 people had signed a Change.org petition calling for her to be fired for what it described as “racist and hateful” statements — before it was taken down. The professor had claimed she was “not personally especially fussed” by the petition — describing the comments attached to it as “a wonderful tale of white supremacy triggered”... The professor also appears in a list of users who ‘liked’ a tweet thanking her for for “taking the fight to the #patriarchy and the whites” and branding them “a disease that needs to be cleansed from the earth, starting with decolonising their books”... The legality of such messages in the United Kingdom, which does not enjoy the same constitutionally protected free speech rights as the United States, is questionable. There are several examples of people being convicted for sending messages deemed “grossly offensive” under the Communications Act of 2003 — with YouTube comic Markus Meechan, aka Count Dankula, being one of the most (in)famous. Thousands of people petitioned for a British Free Speech Act in 2018, but it was rejected by the Tory government — then led by Theresa May — on grounds that “freedom cannot be an excuse to cause harm or spread hatred.” Cambridgeshire Constabulary have indicated that it is their position that Professor Gopal’s tweet, specifically, “does not constitute an offence” — but they are “investigating all reports into the racist and threatening abuse that Professor Gopal has suffered”."
Black Lives Matter: Book judge axed over Twitter remarks - "The Western Mail's chief reporter has been asked to step down as a Wales Book of the Year judge over his comments about the Black Lives Matter protests. Literature Wales said Martin Shipton's "aggressive language" was "detrimental" to the organisation's values. Among dozens of tweets sent in response to several people, Mr Shipton asked why the demonstrations were being allowed to take place during lockdown. He said he was not asked to explain his comments. "After expressing my concerns about the Black Lives Matter protest in Cardiff, which undoubtedly broke the Welsh Government's prohibition on public gatherings of more than two people, I was subjected on Twitter to a vicious tirade of abuse and bullying that lasted for days," he said. "Many of the tweets questioned my right to express an opinion, called into question my credentials as a journalist and attacked me on the basis of my age... The disease, he said, had taken "many more lives than the Minneapolis police." "I just don't see what value there is in holding a demo in front of Cardiff Castle about the murder of a black man in Minneapolis," he tweeted. "It's politically naive and virtue signalling". Mr Shipton insisted in the tweets he was not condoning police brutality, but had "been demonstrating my membership of the awkward squad by taking on some woke, group-think dogmatists"."
From 2020
Pointing out left wing hypocrisy is dangerous. The only thing that got the left more excited than covid was racism
Left wingers complain about "harassment" when people disagree with them online. But when they abuse those they disagree with, this is just "accountability"
Stu Peters: Manx Radio presenter cleared over Black Lives Matter comments - "A Manx radio presenter who questioned the issue of "white privilege" in relation to Black Lives Matter did not break rules, the media regulator said. The Communications Commission said comments made by Stu Peters in a Manx Radio show could be deemed insensitive, but did not constitute a code breach. But similar incidents may be "viewed in a different light" in future, it added. Manx Radio managing director Chris Sully said the station would "learn" from the findings... Mr Peters was suspended by Manx Radio following a programme, broadcast on 3 June, in which a caller challenged him for writing "all lives matter" in an online forum. He told the caller that he had "had no more privilege in my life than you have", adding: "I'm a white man, you're a black man.""
From 2020
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "The moral panic is continuing to spread across brands. Bon Appetit magazine is apologizing for all the times it published and supported recipes that crossed cultural boundaries. As anyone whose tried ‘American BBQ’ in Europe can tell you, cross culture recipes can be an abomination but this world progresses when ideas are shared, adapted, and inspire. This idea that food, or any art, must be pure to the source is regressive and bigoted."
Making Our Recipes Better | Bon Appétit
Tou Thao Sentence: Double Standard of Justice - "Appropriately enough, given the Aztec-priestly attitude of at least the American Left toward issues such as climate change (“Our foe-men are changing the weather!”), the U.S. just witnessed a human sacrifice. Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao, one of four sworn officers present during the May 2020 death of George Floyd, just received a 57-month sentence for “aiding and abetting” a felony crime — the restraint that led to Floyd’s death. The minority lawman gave a passionate and biblically loaded speech before the final verdict came down, refusing to admit to guilt, which he persuasively argued that he should not feel. However, the presiding judge — liberal Gopher State jurist Peter Cahill — remained unmoved, giving Thao the stiffest sentence received by any cop involved with the Floyd death other than Derek Chauvin himself. This was, objectively speaking, an extremely bizarre outcome, whatever one might think of the lengthy sentence in Chauvin’s own case. Even there, little doubt exists that the behavior of external players such as Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, who flew to Minneapolis during the policeman’s trial and demanded that he be found liable specifically for murder, had some impact on Chauvin’s unusual conviction for both murder and manslaughter. And relevant new details of that case have become public knowledge following distribution of the Hennepin County coroner’s report on social media. However, no one would describe Chauvin’s knee-neck-hold restraint of the heavily intoxicated Floyd as an example of ideal policing. Thao’s situation is very different. Thao quite literally never touched George Floyd. During the entirety of the fatal arrest, he was standing several yards away from Floyd and Chauvin, handling crowd control and directing traffic. The “abetting” charge reflects the fact that he did not physically force Chauvin — technically speaking, his superior officer — to stop restraining Floyd, or alternatively to allow unknown civilians into an active arrest scene to provide the arrestee with medical assistance. But it is difficult to imagine any on-the-job law-enforcement officer ever doing this. And, as noted, Thao’s sentence was longer than two of the three terms given to those cops who did restrain George Floyd — perhaps, one more than suspects, because of his defiant final speech to the bench. Thao does not stand, or sit in jail, alone. Per all data, quite a few high-profile recent legal cases (mostly, but not entirely, brought from the political left) strike most citizens as partisan kabuki shows. Most obviously, Donald J. Trump currently faces no fewer than 91 separate felony charges in several different legal jurisdictions. Some of these are serious enough, even potentially crippling for the Donald: He did have those damn papers, after all. But others, such as hyper-partisan New York City district attorney Alvin Bragg’s attempt to stretch a campaign-finance law far enough to cover a years-old five-figure payment from Trump to a porn-star lover, are correctly seen by taxpayers as partisan nonsense... This Chinua Achebe–style “failure of the trustworthy systems” is dangerous — imagine an actual conviction and jailing of Trump in NYC — and almost certainly a cause of the toxic “national divorce” talk citizens have heard for the past several years."
George Floyd and the revenge of the elites - "we have to consider two things: the murder and the mania. The killing itself and what happened afterwards. For while these things seem to be linked – the riots and the corporate virtue-signalling and the institutional self-flagellation were all a response to Floyd’s death, right? – they are actually quite distinct. The murder of Floyd served as a catalyst for a political agenda and a moral narrative that had existed long before Floyd and Chauvin’s fateful encounter. Floyd’s death was a double tragedy in this sense. There was the tragedy of the thing itself, and there was the tragedy of the way it was recklessly used to unleash political forces that are still having a destructive impact in the US and elsewhere one year on... How did understandable protests in response to an unjust killing acquire such an extraordinary and global momentum? The transformative element, the key, was the involvement of the elites. This is the most striking, and concerning, aspect of the past year of post-Floyd mania: the way the elites conferred legitimacy on the protests, even on the riots, helping to intensify and spread this strange and violent instability. It was extraordinary, and unprecedented in modern times. Vast swathes of the political class, the establishment media, the academy, social-media oligarchies and influencers throughout the West essentially gave a green light to an explosion of destructive rage and identitarian regression. We saw this in the way that many American politicians refused to condemn the rioters. In the way that establishment media outlets made excuses for looting, depicting it as a necessary expression of anger. In the way corporate giants – from Apple to Nike to Instagram – lined up behind Black Lives Matter. In the way that even the world of finance – step forward, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon – gave its knee-bending approval to the post-Floyd fury. And in the way that leading British politicians took the knee to BLM, and by extension to its divisive and pro-rioting ideologies. Consider this bizarre political and historical anomaly – the leader of the British Labour Party bowed down to a movement whose warped worldview was at that very moment stirring up the worst rioting America has experienced in decades. Nothing about this was normal. The elite legitimation of the post-Floyd mania was significant for many reasons. It allowed the rioting to continue for longer than it might otherwise have done. It helped to globalise the destabilising dynamic. And it injected the violent fallout from the killing of Floyd with a certain political momentum, too. This is why the supposedly radical street uprisings in response to the killing of Floyd – as some romantic leftists depicted it – actually came to be infused very quickly with the concerns and ideologies of the new clerisy. The tumbling of statues; the attempt to rewrite the past by erasing problematic individuals and cultural artefacts; the obsession with ‘white privilege’ and ‘black victimhood’; the cancellation of blasphemers against BLM; the obsession with correct-think and with punishing crimes like ‘cultural appropriation’ – all of these swirling post-Floyd activities have their origins not in the street culture of Minneapolis or Atlanta or Seattle, but in the rarefied climes of the academy, Silicon Valley, the think-tank world and the increasingly self-loathing cultural institutions of the West. However it started, the post-Floyd violence soon became the militant wing of the woke elites, a violent expression of the prescriptive, authoritarian ideologies of the new, anti-democratic Smart Set... Fury is easy to unleash, far more difficult to rein in. Having green-lit a culture that looks with horror upon modern Western history, which demands that every institution self-flagellate for its presumed moral errors, and which threatens and cancels anyone who refuses to submit to the tyranny of right-think, the new establishment might soon find that such violent censure can go in directions that it cannot control. Consider the assaults on Jews dining outside in Los Angeles or New York or the way in which BLM and pro-Palestine youths have brought schools to a halt in the UK. These are the grim wages of the militarisation of identity politics that has occurred since the killing of George Floyd. It turns out that demonising Western history, undermining cultural authority and inflaming identitarian tensions is a recipe for social conflict and violence. Who could have guessed?"
Prescient, given the anti-Semitism following Hamas's October 2023 attack
Meme - "r/relationship_advice
My husband tried to kill me tonight
My (22f ) husband (24 m) tried to kill me tonight. I'm just really at a loss of words right now. This is the love of my life and my whole other half my best friend who I adore so so much. He had a bad day at work and came home, a fight sprung out after some tension (maybe it was my fault for pushing an argument knowingly that he had a really bad day at work) but the argument began to become more and more heated and suddenly I start crying because he pushed me and shoved me against the wall, pulled my hair hard, pinned me down the ground with his body weight on top of my back and continued to call me a fucking cunt and to leave his house. Every time I let out a cry because as I said his entire body weight was on my back he continued to shove my face into the carpet and when I got the strength to crawl away for the door he stepped on my hand crushing my fingers and grabbed my body and threw me once again against the wall I let out an even louder cry, at this point a screm and he begins to cover my mouth and nose with"
"Call the police now"
"I would rather refrain from getting police involved because he is black and that would just be a death sentence for him. I am looking into shelters however."
Did Black Lives Matter Save Black Lives? - "Given how many words have been written about the Black Lives Matter movement, it is remarkable how rarely BLM’s actual effects on society have been empirically measured. Leaving aside questions about BLM’s suspicious finances and organizational structure, there are two obvious questions to ask about the anti-policing movement. First, has it worked? That’s to say, has BLM advocacy for undoing what was presented as a plague of unjustified police shootings reduced the rate at which U.S. citizens are shot by police—or, for that matter, reduced crime overall as trust in police officers has increased? Second, whatever the answer to the first question, what does improve police performance? In other words, are there police departments whose officers kill or shoot notably fewer civilians than apparent peers, and are there variables that explain why? The first question has received some attention in the popular press merely because reporting on crime statistics is a long-standing journalistic practice. And the answer seems simply to be no. There is little if any evidence that rates of police shootings of citizens have declined since the 2014–15 beginning of the BLM movement... the rate of police-citizen violence actually increased slightly in recent years... Meanwhile, overall crime has soared through the roof during the BLM era... Jason Johnson, researcher and president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund... attributes (as we do) rising crime to the BLM-affiliated Defund the Police and Police Pullback movements, noting that deadly violence in America’s major cities rose “as engaged policing fell.” Cities that slashed policing budgets, says Johnson, “often saw the largest drop in active policing and…increases in homicide.” The data largely support this position: The homicide surge in New York City, in particular, followed a decrease in police stops and a remarkable 38 percent decline in officer-initiated arrests... The pattern here is not novel. During an earlier wave of BLM activism, a memorable 2016 headline on the Chicago page of the DNAinfo news site read: “Police Stops Down by 90 Percent as Gun Violence Skyrockets.” More broadly, Mona Charen and others have argued that the remarkable surge in U.S. violent crime between 1963 and 1993 (when murders increased from roughly 8,600 to 24,500) can be attributed almost entirely to policies such as more lenient criminal sentencing and the down-road effects of the Miranda and Escobedo cases, which mandated enhanced rights for accused criminals... Many police departments do excellent work... What accounts for high-quality urban policing? Distinct trackable variables, which curious people can readily measure. While it might seem obvious, most departments that perform well in terms of not shooting civilians dedicate time and energy to teaching nonlethal combat and the use of nonlethal weapons such as tasers... Most high-quality police departments also tend to get very good at tracking data in real time, using tools such as COMPSTAT to observe when and where crimes happen, and then sending action-ready officers directly into these identified “hot zones.” On an individual-department basis, specifically designated powers also help a given leadership team improve policing. NYPD commissioners, in particular, have long had an unusual level of internal power that almost any boss would envy... Another factor in good policing is the presence of a professional internal-affairs unit to investigate police misconduct... Even paperwork, the bane of every civil servant’s life, plays a role in the improvement of policing. An amusing finding from one of the rare works of social science that does study how to reduce police shootings was that simply requiring officers to file a lengthy paper-copy report every time they draw (not fire) their duty weapons tends to reduce police-involved shootings... the best way to assess the reforms and ideas pushed by Black Lives Matter is to consider them against a backdrop of hard numbers. If you do, you’ll find a record of failure that tragically undermines the movement’s chief goal of saving black lives. This explains why, until now, data-driven scholarship on the topic has been virtually nonexistent. For many in liberal-leaning academia, Black Lives Matter, as a passion and a cause, felt too just to fact-check. But this unquestioned sense of righteousness has come at a steep cost, and social scientists have abnegated their roles. Police departments across this great country certainly could do more to protect black—and all—lives, and scholars should help them do better."
So much for ACAB. The crowd which is usually against "stereotyping" loves to "stereotype" and blame all police and claim they're all bad
BLM is not really about saving black lives, so
Glenn Loury on X - "This week at TGS @JohnHMcWhorter and I speak with the filmmakers of the new documentary, "The Fall of Minneapolis" (on the death of George Floyd and its aftermath). Here's they state the heart of their case."
Wilfred Reilly on X - ""George Floyd was not murdered, and the country panicked over nothing" seems a fair summary of their thesis."
Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 on X - "3 teens beat a 53 year old father of 3 to death. A witness describes them as “laughing and enjoying themselves” while fatally stomping, kicking, and punching him. They continued to beat him even after he was down. They were stopped by an armed Good Samaritan but it was too late for the father. He later succumbed to his injuries."
Ian Miles Cheong on X - "If the races were swapped this would be a national outrage. The perpetrators would be facing as much media scrutiny as Derek Chauvin."
The Meme Policeman | Facebook - "The Palestinian movement has a lot in common with BLM, which is why there’s a lot of overlap between the two now. BLM takes what could be a legitimate complaint, that police are sometimes too violent against minorities, and creates an obsessive and toxic ideology around it that ends up making the problem worse.
Nearly every time a minority is killed by police, the BLM movement tries to turn them into a martyr and start protests/riots before any facts are known. Ancillary violence is ignored or excused by its members. Nearly every time, it then turns out the martyr was a violent low life and the police action was justified in the context.
Instead of focusing on the toxic culture in inner city minority communities that leads to a continual cycle of violence, BLM focuses on blaming “systemic racism” and more broadly, American capitalism and Western Civ. They end up turning criminals into the victims and seek to destroy the entire core of what’s made us civilized and relatively free.
Thus, whenever elements of BLM end up with autonomy over cities, things get worse. In particular, worse for minorities, who they claim to want to help. Just look at the spike of violence and deterioration of inner city schools after 2020, when BLM policies and culture were implemented in most major cities.
The Palestinian cause is similar. They take what could be a legitimate grievance, create a toxic ideology to address it instead of criticizing and improving their own culture, and to the extent they are given any autonomy they turn their society into a cesspool and hurt the people they claim to help. The main difference is the Palestinian cause excuses and embraces violence to a much greater degree."
As America Falls Apart, Profits Soar - "Rittenhouse in other words became a symbol of so many things to so many people that the specifics of his legal case have ceased to be relevant. There seems to be no such thing as an editorialist who has negative feelings about, say, Rittenhouse posing with Proud Boys, yet also believes that incident can’t be evidence since it happened after the shooting. Everyone picks a side and stays there. Pundits are telling us that any opinion on how the jury should rule can only be understood as a reflection of racial attitudes. “If you’re defending Kyle Rittenhouse, you might be a white supremacist. Just sayin,” is how Tweeter-with-beard and sometimes-journalist David Leavitt puts it... Compared with how often you heard pundits rage about the “insurrection,” how regularly did you hear that billionaire wealth has risen 70% or $2.1 trillion since the pandemic began? How much did you hear about last year’s accelerated payments to defense contractors, who immediately poured the “rescue” cash into a buyback orgy, or about the record underwriting revenues for banks in 2020, or the “embarrassment of profits” for health carriers in the same year, or the huge rises in revenue for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, all during a period of massive net job losses? The economic news at the top hasn’t just been good, it’s been record-setting good, during a time of severe cultural crisis. Twenty or thirty years ago, the Big Lie was usually a patriotic fairy tale designed to cast America in a glow of beneficence. Nurtured in think-tanks, stumped by politicians, and amplified by Hollywood producers and media talking heads, these whoppers were everywhere: America would have won in Vietnam if not for the media, poverty didn’t exist (or at least, wasn’t shown on television), only the Soviets cuddled with dictators or toppled legitimate governments, etc. The concept wasn’t hard to understand: leaders were promoting unifying myths to keep the population satiated, dumb, and focused on their primary roles as workers and shoppers. In the Trump era, all this has been turned upside down. There’s actually more depraved, dishonest propaganda than before, but the new legends are explicitly anti-unifying and anti-patriotic. The people who run this country seem less invested than ever in maintaining anything like social cohesion, maybe because they mostly live in wealth archipelagoes that might as well be separate nations (if they even live in America at all). All sense of noblesse oblige is gone. The logic of our kleptocratic economy has gone beyond even the “Greed is Good” mantra of the fictional Gordon Gekko, who preached that pure self-interest would make America more efficient, better-run, less corrupt. Even on Wall Street, nobody believes that anymore. America is a sinking ship, and its CEO class is trying to salvage the wreck in advance, extracting every last dime before Battlefield Earth breaks out. It’s only in this context that these endless cycles of hyper-divisive propaganda make sense. It’s time to start wondering if maybe it’s not a coincidence that politicians and pundits alike are pushing us closer and closer to actual civil war at exactly the moment when corporate wealth extraction is reaching its highest-ever levels of efficiency. Keeping the volk at each other’s throats instead of pitchforking the aristocrats is an old game, one that’s now gone digital and works better than ever. That might be worth remembering after the coming verdict, and ahead of whatever other hyper-publicized panic comes down the pipeline next."
Meme - "The Bee Explains. How to Identify a Peaceful Protester
Peaceful slogans: "Kill all cops"
Peaceful scowl of justice
Screams words of peace at everybody
Graciously serves free beverages to police *Molotov cocktail*
Tattoo of Russian symbol for peace *Hammer and sickle*
T-shirt with favorite peaceful dictator *Che Guevara*
Hands peacefully covered in other people's blood
Massive pile of peace-spreading bricks
Has liberated many HDTVs (for peace)"
Imperial College London’s Cancel Campaign Against Its Own Founders - "Imperial College London was founded in 1907. It is one of the top 20 universities in the world, and among the leading technical universities in Europe. Two individuals were central to its foundation. The first is 19th-century English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who became known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” due to his singularly strenuous advocacy of Charles Darwin’s ideas... The second main founder is Alfred Beit, a German Jew who made his fortune from diamond and gold mining in South Africa... Up to October 26th, 2021, when the Imperial History Group published a report aimed at examining “the history of the College through its links to the British Empire, and to report on the current understanding and reception of the College’s legacy and heritage in the context of its present-day mission,” Huxley had been revered by the College... The generosity of Alfred Beit, and the continuing generosity of the Beit family up to the present time, has been gratefully acknowledged at regular intervals... And yet, despite no new pertinent facts emerging, the History Group suddenly has proposed, among other things, that Imperial College disown its two main founders... A university that repudiates its founders raises the question of whether its fundamental purpose has changed... a comprehensive history of Imperial written by Hannah Gay for the centenary in 2007 was free of any such controversy. Other universities have recently cancelled prominent figures who are central to their institutional history. These include David Hume at Edinburgh University, Robert Millikan at Caltech, and Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, with each of these cases focusing somewhat narrowly on particular actions or writings of the individuals concerned. A very different approach was taken by Yale in considering whether to rename Calhoun College, whose vice-presidential namesake, John C. Calhoun, was an adamant defender of slavery. In 2016, Yale President Peter Salovey set up a committee, chaired by law professor John Witt, to examine the issue of renaming in a general way, without reference to a particular individual or controversy, and to recommend principles that could be applied to any case that might arise. There is a distinct advantage to this approach, in that it is likely to channel a more objective view... the purpose of a university is to discover and disseminate knowledge; that erasing a university’s history is antithetical to the spirit of the institution; that history’s memorialisation of the past serves to express values that may change over time; that change is indispensable in a university; and that the genuine inclusion of all groups is necessary to ensure that a university maintain its stature as a centre for research and teaching in years to come... a general recommendation that emerged is that historical figures should be judged according to the times in which they lived, and that modern observers should focus on a person’s principal legacies, because no one is perfect. The idea was to create a decision framework that itself would stand the test of time, and would not simply be brushed aside in the future. The report warned that “hubris in undoing past decisions encourages future generations to disrespect the choices of the current generation.”... Huxley... fought against dogmatism and unquestioned authority, and he always challenged assertions unsupported by evidence. Second, he fought for the right of all people to receive the same treatment, and to have the same opportunities to reach their potential, whether they be working class, women, slaves in the United States, or freed slaves in Jamaica. Today, we would describe this as promoting inclusion... Concerning race, Huxley was an active slavery abolitionist. Despite the fact that two sons of his favourite sister Lizzie were fighting for the pro-slavery Confederate side in the US Civil War... “In Europe and the United States one would be extremely hard pressed to find anyone in the sciences, not to mention the society at large in the nineteenth century, that did not have a hierarchical view of the races.” The issue dividing society at the time was not whether there were differences between races, but whether such differences justified unequal treatment... The History Group rejected Desmond’s analysis, and has condemned Huxley for scientific racism. It has also judged that Huxley’s views fell “far short of Imperial’s modern values,” meaning that it has elected to judge Huxley by the standards of today rather than the standards of his time. Since Huxley’s views on this subject were entirely mainstream in 1865—and became, as Desmond wrote, more progressive than average with the passage of time—this amounts to condemning nearly every member of every 19th-century Western society... Imperial College was quite happy to receive donations from the Beit family for over 100 years, before now suddenly being poised to repudiate it, even though no new facts have emerged. If such repudiation should occur, a moral imperative of reimbursement arguably applies. By way of comparison, one notes that the History Group report was published in the same year that Imperial College accepted a donation of £2.4m pounds from Max Mosley, and one is led to inquire whether his history measures up to “Imperial’s modern values”."
