Thursday, August 17, 2017



What is a Leftist to do when his opponents are NOT white supremacists?

Easy.  Interpret what the opponent does say to mean what the Leftist wants it to mean.  See below.  His opponents all speak in code, apparently.

There may have been a few actual white supremacists at the Charlotteville rally but all the actual protests heard were about the preservation of an historic statue and the subjugation of American cultural traditions to political correctness.  The marchers were seeking only liberty, not to subjugate anybody -- but Leftists refuse to see that.

It just gives them a huge thrill to think that they are opposing white supremacists.  That would make them the good guys.  They in fact are the supremacists -- Leftist supremacists. They want to put us all into a regulatory straitjacket of their devising -- as the Obama period showed.

Note below that they do not even attempt to show that their opponents are white supremacists.  They just assert it. If there really were white supremacists at the rally, how come that they can't quote anybody there saying clearly one single white supremacist thing?



The coded language of the white supremacist playbook has been displayed in abundance since the Charlottesville, Va., rally exploded in violence Saturday, sowing confusion for the public and masking the sentiment behind some of the responses.

Trump’s initial, vague statement — and even some elements of his more specific denunciation Monday, two days after the protests horrified the nation — heartened extremist groups, who are adept at weaponizing ambiguous language and who cited Trump’s language as vindication.

A prime example of the groups’ rhetorical tactics: a “Free Speech Rally” that may take place Saturday on Boston Common with scheduled speakers who have espoused white supremacist views.

The feel-good title of the rally is intended to divert attention from its purpose of sowing racial discord, said Ian Haney Lopez, a racial justice professor at University of California Berkeley’s law school who has written a book on racial “dog whistles.”

“When you use a phrase like ‘free speech’ to mobilize those who are racially fearful, it switches the conversation. It pretends that the conversation is about the right to express unpopular views — which is a quintessential American value that is enshrined in our Constitution — when in fact, the dynamic is about the expression of ugly views of racial prejudice,’’ Lopez said.

Trump has previously been criticized for repeatedly talking about violence in “inner cities” and his multiple warnings about “thugs,” coded words often used to invoke stereotypical images of black men.

On Saturday, when he first addressed Americans in response to the Charlottesville rallies, he told the country to “cherish our history,” which some took as code that he was weighing in on the side of preserving Confederate memorials.

“That was a very interesting comment,” white nationalist Richard Spencer, a founder of the “alt-right’’ movement told the Times of Israel. “I think there is reason to believe he wants an America where we can look back upon the Civil War as a deeply tragic event, but we can honor great men, like Robert E. Lee.”

Spencer told reporters Monday, after the president’s recent round of remarks, that he did not believe Trump had repudiated white nationalists or the “alt-right’’ movement, which combines elements of nationalism, racism, and populism.

“I don’t think he condemned it, no,” Spencer said. “Did he say white nationalist? ‘Racist’ means an irrational hatred of people. I don’t think he meant any of us.”

Hate groups have long worked to mask their views behind traditionally accepted language, in an attempt to make them more palatable to the public. Instead of denouncing America’s increasing ethnic diversity, they created the phrase “reverse-racism.” The term “alt-right” was born to rebrand white supremacist ideology as Internet friendly and cutting-edge.

The use of dog whistles — a cloaked political message that can only be understood by a particular group, much as dogs can hear whistles of certain frequencies that humans cannot — has become more common.

American politicians have a bipartisan history of deploying coded words to dance around the topic of race. Lee Atwater, the Republican political consultant and former confidant to Ronald Reagan, had his infamous “Southern Strategy,” which he explicitly said was created to disenfranchise black Americans without being called racist.

Reagan, during his presidential campaign of 1976, pushed a narrative that some black women were lazy and manipulating government aid. Hillary Clinton blasted youths in gangs as “super-predators.”

Where Trump stands out, however, is the specific way he emboldens white nationalists, said specialists who study racism in America. Trump “eradicates distinctions” by being uniquely obtuse and coded about his racial messaging, said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California Berkeley’s School of Information.

Instead of overtly criticizing then-President Barack Obama’s race, Nunberg said, Trump peddled the myth that the first black president was born in Kenya. On Saturday, Trump embraced a false equivalence between the bigots and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, condemning violence on “many sides.”

“There’s a cultural battle that’s going on that Trump is engaged in — and part of that is a redefinition of what is factual,” said Sam Fulwood, a fellow on race at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington. “If they can redefine racism as what’s against white men . . . then they’re able to impose their will on society.”

Even in his stronger statement Monday, Trump denounced the Klu Klux Klan along with neo-Nazis and “other hate groups,” which he did not define. Combined with the fact that it took him days to address the criticism, experts said, this is the type of ambiguity that the extremist groups rely upon.

Many people posting in online forums, which often serve as testing grounds for the white nationalist ideology, said they saw hope in Trump’s statements. They pointed to his phrase “other hate groups,” which they interpreted as a nod to their main targets: civil rights organizations who advocate for nonwhites.

“He left the door open,” wrote one user on Reddit.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights organization based in Alabama that has tracked extremists groups for years through its blog “Hatewatch,” said extremists groups see Trump as a “champion.”

Part of this is the language he and his close advisers used on the campaign trail and on Twitter, including the sharing of popular white nationalist memes and using phrases such as “cuckservative,” a term combining cuckold and conservative that is used to describe Republicans seen as traitors.

In a post on its home page, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen, said Trump’s responses to Charlottesville will be interpreted by the “alt-right” as a nod of approval, a license that allows them to become more emboldened.

This also happened when Trump, during the 2016 campaign, took days to denounce the endorsements of David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, and the Klan at large.

Cohen said extremist groups saw that and took heart. And he said they would be encouraged again, after the president’s response to Charlottesville.

“I’m sure white supremacists remain reassured,’’ he wrote, “that they have a friend in the White House.”

SOURCE






Left’s wonky moral compass on Trump

Janet Albrechtsen comments from Australia

The US President routinely uses Twitter to slam all manner of people, from Democrats to Republicans to televisions hosts, in 140 characters or less.

His early tweets last weekend lacked their usual clarity when 20-year-old Ohio man James Alex Fields drove his grey Dodge into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a woman and injuring 19 others. Donald Trump should have mustered some fire and fury against the white supremacists, members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis who marched on the weekend to anti-Semitic chants and homophobic rants in Charlottes­ville.

While criticism came from both sides of the political aisle, the left’s hysteria over Trump’s response to the Unite the Right rally packs no punch because the eagerness to label evil doesn’t stretch far beyond white supremacists. When it comes to putting a name on Islamic terrorism, the ­reaction is very different. It’s a case of what Mark Steyn calls tilty-headed wankerishness. No naming evil here, only candlelit vigils, hashtag campaigns and inclusive interfaith dialogues.

In March, after 52-year-old Briton Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, the Dean of Westminster, John R. Hall, announced that the nation was bewildered.

“What could possibly ­motivate a man to hire a car and take it from Birmingham to Brighton to London, and then drive it fast at people he had never met, couldn’t possibly know, against whom he had no personal grudge, no reason to hate them, and then run at the gates of the Palace of Westminster to cause another death? It seems likely that we shall never know,” Hall said soon after the attack.

Except we did know. But when it comes to Islamic terrorism, labelling evil gives over to mumbling, fumbling dissembling. It’s a curious lapse in moral clarity given that Islamic terrorists have no time for Christianity, let alone religious freedoms or women and the feminist cause, or homosexuals, let alone LGBTI rights.

The thundering hysteria against Trump after Charlottesville is another case of the left’s wonky moral compass.

CNN hosts censured Trump for not immediately condemning the white supremacists spoiling for a fight last weekend. But the faces of CNN didn’t rally to label evil when an Islamic terrorist ploughed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, or when another Islamic terrorist rammed a truck at a crowd at a Berlin Christmas market, or when an Islamic terrorist mowed down pedestrians on a promenade in Nice on Bastille Day last year.

After an Islamic terrorist detonated a bomb and murdered teenagers at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in May, London mayor Sadiq Khan didn’t condemn Islamic State — even though the terrorist group claimed responsibility. It was the same in June after three Islamic terrorists mowed into pedestrians on London Bridge before going from bar to bar, stabbing and slicing at patrons with 30cm hunting knives. Not even a clue from one of the ­Islamic terrorists, who shouted “This is for Allah” before stabbing a woman more than 10 times, helped Khan name the evil.

A fortnight ago, after Australian security authorities foiled an alleged plot to bomb an Etihad Airways flight out of Sydney, Islamic Council of Queensland spokesman Ali Kadri lodged a complaint when Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin described the evil plot as “Islamic-inspired terrorism”.

Why wasn’t the Muslim group condemned by opinionated hosts at the ABC for refusing to name the alleged evil given their eagerness to condemn Trump for the same error of judgment this week? For the same reason three days after the violence in Charlottesville, the ABC was still leading its news bulletins with Trump’s reaction yet it can barely bring itself to say Islamic or even Islamist ­terrorism; truth in labelling is an ad hoc business on the left.

When Man Haron Monis held hostages at gunpoint in Sydney’s Lindt cafe in December 2014, many on the left rushed to suggest he was mad, not bad. The coroner found otherwise, but it’s a standard response when violence is committed in the name of Islam. No one suggested the 20-year-old driver in Charlottesville was mad, not bad.

When Islamic terrorists strike, we are correctly reminded not to tar all Muslims with the actions of a few. The same may be said of those who marched in Charlottesville. Not all of them are anti-­Semitic nutters or Klansmen or neo-Nazis. Not all of them drove a car into the crowd. But no one warned against tarring everyone at the Unite the Right rally.

Instead, a determined ignorance defines the modern left. Charlottesville mayor and Democrat activist Michael Signer said: “I place the blame for a lot of what you’re seeing in America today right at the doorstep of the White House.” They also could lay the blame for the widespread illiberalism and violence erupting across American campuses at the feet of the divisive identity politics ­fuelled by Democrats such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

It’s a hard truth for the left that the Obama presidency begat the Trump presidency. Rather than blame Trump, it’s worth exploring how the rise of white supremacist groups is an inevitable consequence of identity group politics where groups vie for prominence on the basis of skin colour, race, creed, gender and sexuality.

Writing in The New York Times last year, self-described liberal Mark Lilla concluded that American liberalism had become a flawed movement based on the politics of moral panic about ­racial, gender and sexual identity that prevented it from being a unifying force.

Last week Lilla added to his compelling critique in The Wall Street Journal: “There is a mystery at the core of every suicide, and the story of how a once-successful liberal politics of solidarity became a failed liberal politics of ‘difference’ is not a simple one. Perhaps the best place to begin it is with a slogan: The personal is the political.” As Lilla says, the phrase coined by feminists to unite people has been turned on its head to mean the political is the personal, where the “forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits into smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and practising rituals of ideological one-upmanship”. The result is a movement that divides people rather than bringing them together.

What’s left of the left is a marketplace of outrage where emotion and politics trump intel­lectual honesty and moral clarity. From blinkered feminists who refuse to focus on real misogyny in the Middle East to human rights activists who mock free speech, from same-sex marriage advocates who trample on tolerance to those who demand that only white supremacists, not Islamic terrorists, be named and shamed, the left has become a hollow shell of hyperbole and hypocrisy.

Claims against Trump and his supporters will have real clout and credibility when the needle on the left’s faulty moral compass stops swinging so feverishly in one direction.

SOURCE





Royal Dutch Airlines failed hilariously when tweeting support for homosexuals, proving the opposite point



Royal Dutch Airlines attempted to show support for homosexuals with a tweet this week saying, “It doesn’t matter who you click with. Happy #PrideAmsterdam.” Unfortunately, it included the above picture — which only reinforces the opposite point that there’s just one way nature intended.

The first two seat belts in the picture obviously would not function. Or, as Jim Treacher put more humorously, “Only one of these seat belts will perform the intended function. I realize that noticing this means I’m bigoted against the LGBT community.”

Others on Twitter had a field day mocking the unfortunate pic. “I suppose for the top two options, you should just tie the ends together around your waist in an emergency,” tweeted Jim Geraghty.

Another tweeted an imaginary conversation: “Hello, Stewardess? My seatbelt doesn’t work”

“It doesn’t matter who you click with!”

“But… I could die in an accident.”

“Homophobe.”

That about sums it up for this week’s winner of the Non Compos Mentis Award.

SOURCE





James Damore: aftermath

Lubos Motl below discusses a video conversation between two people who reject the claim that all men are equal

Prof Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux (both from Canada) are two main individualist YouTube pundits who have previously interviewed James Damore, the former $162,000-a-year Senior Google engineer who became a hero of freedom. So in this discussion, they talked to each other. They covered a lot of ground. You may see that their thinking and values are close enough to each other. But you may still see that they're individualist and they want similar audiences to dedicate time to their videos, so to some extent, this insightful debate still sounds like a competition of a sort.

They discussed optimistic specifics of this Damore story. Damore hasn't backed off, he preferred to talk to independent media such as themselves over the mainstream media. The New York Times wrote a story urging Google to fire its anti-freedom-of-expression CEO Mr Kunda Píča.

Many events were so similar to those after the 2005 speech by Larry Summers about women in science. But many events were so different. Even though James Damore is basically a shy boy, his public reactions were more self-confident than those of Larry Summers. A part of it may be due to Damore's having received some recommendations from pundits: Don't back off. He could have received such recommendations because the independent media such as Molyneux's and Peterson's talk shows are far more powerful now than they or their counterparts were in 2005.

As they happily noticed, their videos generally get many more views than analogous videos by the "mainstream media". So these very labels – who is really mainstream – is finally getting complicated.

They discussed the harm that Google has done by having fired Damore. I agree with that entirely. Consumers may start to doubt the trustworthiness of Google. And potential stellar employees may be afraid of accepting a job at Google. These are potentially serious problems. And it's possible that not only some centrist and right-wing technology experts could choose a different occupation because of the occasional defective atmosphere in the company that may have grown into the "culture" of censorship and harassment. Some left-wing candidates who are left-wing in a "wrong way" could do the same.

I am personally not going to boycott Google's products because of these matters. I would feel like one of those left-wing childish activists who never really succeed, who abandon meritocracy in favor of ideology, and I am just too conservative. Even if some products were equally good or better than Google's, I have tested Google's products sufficiently to be certain. But I think that if you aren't constrained by these things, you should try alternatives. You should try the Czech Seznam maps instead of Google maps. And you should try Seznam's search engine and Seznam's superfast browser, too! Those products may be better than Google's alternatives. Seznam's owner Mr Ivo Lukačovič has denounced efforts to politically profile ads in his company and vows to keep his company apolitical.

As a consumer, I would actually be afraid of some Google products that are too physical, such as self-driving cars. If writing a totally sensible analysis about women in tech was enough for the Google CEO to fire the engineer, maybe writing bit more right-wing texts than Damore's could be enough for a Google boss to schedule a car accident for your car. They could cover it by exactly the same excuses as now – corporations have the right to trample on the employees' freedom of speech much like they have the right to push the accelerator pedal in your car in front of an abyss – both the employee and the consumer have signed some contract allowing these things, haven't they? Note that it is not the artificial intelligence of the self-driving car that is dangerous for you; it is the malicious humans who may try to hide their crimes behind the artificial intelligence.

According to a common sense understanding of the freedom of speech, the firing of Damore was an unacceptable violation of the basic Western values and the "accelerator push" of a Google self-driving car would be a murder at least informally.

Molyneux and Peterson have discussed lots of things about the growth of wealth since the 1870s, the increasing inequality and decreasing poverty, the Left's self-contradicting attitudes to many good and bad processes and conditions in the society, the correlation of the IQ and success, whether the IQ may be modified by training (no), whether people with the IQ beneath 83 are useful for the U.S. army (no), and many others. It was a very stimulating intellectual discussion and I really recommend you to watch it in its entirety.

I would subscribe at least to some 95% of the things that they have said.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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