Posts Tagged ‘free speech’
Lars Vilks, Mohammed cartoons and Batley is missing a teacher
Swedish artist Lars Vilks has died in a car crash. Vilks achieved an unenviable sort of fame – having sketched the Muslim Prophet Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body in 2007, he was subjected to death threats. Al-Qaeda in Iraq offered a $100,000 (£73,692) reward for his murder. The BBC responds to his death by asking: “Why does depicting the Prophet Muhammad cause offence?” It’s an interesting reads, and includes a few words about the British teacher who as far we know remains in hiding and in fear of his life for showing a class in Batley, West Yorkshire, an image depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad:
In Kirklees borough, where Batley Grammar School is located, the syllabus says children should be “give[n] reasons why visual representation of God and the prophets is forbidden (haram) in Islam,” by the end of Key Stage 2.
Pupils should also understand “key religious values including democracy, human rights, rule of law, secularism, freedom of expression and tolerance” – this is taught in Key Stage 3.
If they teach that, why then was the teacher suspended?
Is it everyone’s duty in a country that values free speech to cause offence – not to be rude for the sake of it, but to try to expand the human experience and challenge convention through a free and fair exchange of views?
Image: Pallbearers carry the casket of Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, decorated by friends and colleagues of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, at the city hall of Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015
Stephen Pinker on the closing down of rationality and open minds
In the Times, Professor Stephen Pinker, an experimental cognitive scientist, is talking about the rationality and its death on college campuses. He’s a new book out. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters?. He tells the paper:
The good news is that we need not rely on our individual brains. We can outsource the work to institutions and professions we trust to be collectively rational. The bad news is that such trust is low and, Pinker believes, our institutions are uninterested in earning it back.
“Science is completely oblivious to that,” he says. “I found my fellow scientists, our scientific societies, for example, pretty much parrot the politically correct boiler plate on race, on inequality, on crime. You get no sense from the National Academy of Sciences or Science magazine that these are impartial arbiters of social issues. Their positions are indistinguishable from The New York Times and The Guardian, and this is a failing because it’s branding the institution of science as part of the elite, left-leaning establishment. It’s inviting people on the right to reject them.”
Views are so polarised now that debate is akin to trench warfare. No longer do we debate in pursuit of truth and then go out for a drink together. He hunker down and find like minds to point at them and sneer.
Posted: 23rd, September 2021 | In: Broadsheets, News | Comment
Survey finds people are too easily offended by speech
Are you bothered by political correctness? Do you watch what you say in public for fear of causing offence? A Pew Research Center survey says most people in the UK, US and France think people today are too easily offended.
In the UK, 53% of us believe people are too easily offended; France – 52%; US – 57%.
It’s quite a close split:
In all three European countries surveyed, respondents are closely divided over whether people today are too easily offended or whether people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others. However, only four-in-ten Americans think people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others, with a majority (57%) saying people today are too easily offended by what others say.
“I think people get scared to be passionate about being British these days because you get labeled as being a racist.”
–Man, 40, Birmingham, Right Leaver
Those ages 65 or older in France and Germany are more likely than those ages 18 to 29 to say people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others, while in the U.S. and UK there are no significant age differences…
In the UK, those who identify as Remainers are much more likely than those who identify as Leavers to say people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others (53% vs. 27%, respectively).
Older and wiser?
British Police warning: being offensive is not an offence unless it is, which it isn’t
Police on Merseyside say “BEING OFFENSIVE IS AN OFFENCE”. But it isn’t. Superintendent Martin Earl reminds us of that in a statement. He says the earlier statement made by police on big billboard in a public place “although well-intentioned was incorrect”. Good to know the law when it’s your job to uphold it. Otherwise it looks more like a threat or a whim. Says Martin:
Offended?
Beneden school discovers black history with confused results
Off to speak to the gels at their posho school. Why do children from wealthy families bother to attend? It’s not for the need to get good scores in maths, work and gain employment, surely. Terribly vulgar all that CV writing. It’s abut social modelling, belonging to an elite and breeding the next genertion of Beneden gels and Eton toffs. So we’re off to Kent, to listen to the headmistress of Beneden explain and apologise for talking about black people:
The headmistress at a top boarding school has “unreservedly apologised” for using the word “negro” in an assembly as a wave of protests by black pupils against “white privilege” sweeps across schools at the end of Black History Month.
Samantha Price, 46, headmistress at Benenden, the Kent girls’ boarding school where Princess Anne was a pupil, was explaining to pupils the origins of the month in 1926. At the time it was, according to Wikipedia, called “Negro History Week” in America, she said.
Some of the senior girls protested about her use of the word, fearing that other pupils would think they were also entitled to use a word some find as offensive as the n-word.
The senior gels think the younger gels will hear the word “negro” and think it’s ok to use it? The n-word is now more noticeable by its rarity of use – its what makes it newsworthy – that it’s use in everyday parlance, especially to demean and abuse.
Note: Samantha Price is not black. But she is studying the matter.
Je Suis Charlie: Charlie Hebdo republishes Mohammed cartoons
Remember all that ‘Je Suis Charlie’, the outpouring of solidarity after the deadly attack by Islamists on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The mag published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. On January 7 2015, in response Islamists murdered 12 people. This week Charlie Hebdo republished those cartoons, all 12 of them. “Tout ça pour ça,” says the headline – “All of that for this.”
Very soon 14 people will go on trial accused of helping the two Islamist attackers carry out their massacre. Hebdo has honoured the victims in the best way it can, by championing free speech and the right to cause offence – by mocking oppressive piety in all its guises, showing us how dumb humanity can be and that what we revere might just be another human with an active imagination. That does not mean you can be gratuitously offensive and rude. You need to make a point about shared humanity for satire to work best.
Too many who marched beneath the banners “Je Suis Charlie” are less champions of free thought and speech than they are against Muslims, possessed of monocular vision and the ugly inability to treat people are individuals, lumping all Muslims as something uniquely other and wrong.
People have asked the magazine to republish the images. And many doubtless just delighted in poking Islam and would be upset where their own beliefs caustically lampooned. But, as the magazine’s editorial says, the time was not right. There was no point.
“We have always refused to do so, not because it is prohibited – the law allows us to do so – but because there was a need for a good reason to do it, a reason which has meaning and which brings something to the debate,” it says. “To reproduce these cartoons in the week the trial over the January 2015 terrorist attacks opens seemed essential to us.”
Lead image: Pallbearers carry the casket of Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, decorated by friends and colleagues of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, at the city hall of Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015
Cancel Culture is killing democracy
If you don’t like it, you don’t need to watch it. This idea of voting with your feet, or eyeballs, works well in a country like the UK, where there’s lots to watch. But from Jeremy Corbyn’s calls to regulate the wrong kind of media to demolishing monuments and airbrushing troublesome actors from films, the unifying cry of the knowing tells us that the public cannot be trusted. Only censorship can save them and deliver the truth. But once the censorship begins, no one is immune from curtailments on free expression as panicky Cancel Culture holds sway:
Cancel culture is spreading for one simple reason: it works. Instead of debating ideas or competing for entertainment dollars, you can just demand anyone who annoys you to be cast out of polite society.
Way back in the mists of time, say five years ago, if you didn’t like a TV show or movie, you wouldn’t watch it. Now you can ensure that no one watches it, just by slinging some outrage on social media.
Our woke mentality is America’s new Puritanism. Instead of a handy list of sins written thousands of years ago, modern sins are ever-changing. A joke that was deemed progressive a decade ago is retroactively condemned as hate speech.
“If you say the wrong thing,” [Sarah] Silverman said, “everyone is, like, throwing the first stone. It’s a perversion. It’s really, ‘Look how righteous I am and now I’m going to press refresh all day long to see how many likes I get in my righteousness.’ ”
When the mob has burned one witch, they tighten the buckles on their hats and pore through old YouTube videos for their next victim.
Compliance is all.
Sarah Silverman fired for making jokes in blackface in 2007
Who need context in the age of offence taking? American comic Sarah Silverman told listeners to The Bill Simmons Podcast about how the knowing came for her. She once posed in blackface on The Sarah Silverman Show. She might be a victim of “offence archaeology”: digging into someone past in the hope of finding evidence of wrong thinking. It matters not a jot what happened in the intervening years. The offence is an indelible stain.
“I recently was going to do a movie, a sweet part, then, at 11pm the night before, they fired me because they saw a picture of me in blackface from that episode… I think it’s really scary and it’s a very odd thing that its invaded the left primarily and the right will mimic it…
“It’s like, if you’re not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once, everyone is, like, throwing the first stone. It’s so odd. It’s a perversion. It’s really, ‘Look how righteous I am and now I’m going to press refresh all day long to see how many likes I get in my righteousness.'”
Context be damned:
“It was like, I’m playing a character, and I know this is wrong, so I can say it. I’m clearly liberal. That was such liberal-bubble stuff, where I actually thought it was dealing with racism by using racism. I don’t get joy in that any more. It makes me feel yucky. All I can say is that I’m not that person any more… There’s a still of me on Twitter in blackface and it’s totally out of context and I tweeted it when Twitter was new and the people who followed me watched that show and it was from that show,” she said. “Now it’s forever there and it looks … it’s totally racist out of context and I regret that.”
Everyone, stay in your lane or else.
Posted: 13th, August 2019 | In: Celebrities, News | Comment
After New Zealand: Tom Watson calls Mark Zuckerberg ‘wicked’ and blames Facebook for massacre
Forty-nine people are known to have been murdered as they prayed in a New Zealand mosque. The killer live-streamed the massacre on Facebook. On LBC Radio, Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson used his hosted show to call Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, “wicked”. Watson said he “dreams of the day” when he no longer has to use social media.
Watson sounds like the intro to 1970s TV show Why Don’t You?, which advised British children tuning in to turn the telly off and get a life – but only after they’d finished watching this show, which was more pure than all the other shows. So by all means use Twitter and Facebook, but only listen to people who advocate “decency”, like Tom Watson.
The Daily Telegraph calls the slaughter the first social media terror attack. The Sun calls the killer the ‘FACEBOOK TERRORIST”. The Mail says it’s the “MASSACRE SHAME ON FACEBOOK”. The mood is clear: more censorship is required to prevent a repeat of this. But is that how you stop a disease from spreading? And who gets to decide what we, the impressionable masses, get to see?
You can argue about what kind of person seeks out a video of people being murdered, and why anyone not involved in psychopathic studies would want to spend a muon of their time reading the killer’s long manifesto. But should things be banned?
Maybe context is key? In France, the odious Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally, is being investigated for her tweets. Her response to suggestions that the Far-Right has much in common with jihadism was to tweet the pointer “This is Daesh” and a series of gruesome photos. She thought it useful to show her followers images of a man being burned alive in a cage and decapitated US journalist James Foley. Le Pen has been charged with “circulating violent pictures liable to be seen by children”. “Sharing is caring,” says the blurb beneath social media icons. Not always it isn’t.
So, who else be blamed?
The Hill:
“New Zealand Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooter’s Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video,” Mia Garlick, Facebook’s director of policy for Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement. Facebook is “removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as we’re aware,” Garlick added.
A caller to Watson’s show said words heard in any video can be transcribed by machine learning. If the broadcast features a word on the banned list, then the video is flagged. So, for instance, a video of Tom Watson talking about “porn” and “white supremacy” would be flagged and blocked at the gate. The problem with that approach is clear. No platforming words and ideas diminishes us all.
What to do? Well, a word from Waleed Aly is worth listening to:
Posted: 16th, March 2019 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Tabloids, Technology | Comment
Kate Price and MPs agree: mocking the disabled is a hate crime (what isn’t?)
Should abusing the disabled be a crime? Katie Price thinks it should. The former glamour model has given evidence to the Commons Petitions Committee where she called for online abuse to be made a specific offence.
She wants social media to be policed. She wants new laws to ban vile words, punishing the berks and twats who abused her son Harvey’s disabilities. Harvey is partially blind, autistic and has the genetic disorder Prader-Willi syndrome. Anyone who mocks him for his illness deserves ridicule. Price says, “They know he hasn’t got a voice back and they mock him more… they find him an easy target.”
MPs on the Petitions Committee agree with Price. They want the government to give disabled people protection under hate crime laws.
“Social media is rife with horrendous, degrading and dehumanising comments about people with disabilities,” says Helen Jones, who chairs the committee. “The law on online abuse is not fit for purpose and it is truly shameful that disabled people have been forced off social media while their abusers face no consequences.”
But there are consequences. Laws exit if threats are made against the person. Hate crime is an attempt to outlaw offensive words. The Metropolitan Police website tells us what hate crime is: “A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender. Not all hate incidents will amount to criminal offences, but it is equally important that these are reported and recorded by the police.” No crime committed. No matter. And shouldn’t we be free to hate? Doesn’t this sectoring of society into potential victims and likely abusers weaken us? And since when has censorship worked for the common good – don’t abhorrent viewpoints have the right to be said? How you better understand rival views if you ban their discussion?
Teen Vogue beats CIA and other perverts: stick a plaster over your webcam
How can you prevent spooks and pervs from spying on you? Nicole Kobie has a tip for reader to Teen Vogue: stick a plaster over your Webcam.
However, there are others who could be watching through your webcam, and the stories of compromised cameras are genuinely terrifying: hackers taunting people and spying on women at home, blackmailing teens into sharing nude photos, and schools even keeping watch on their students. “This is a pretty invasive, targeted form of malware, but the consequences can be super embarrassing,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Such attacks require your computer to be tunneled into by hackers, creating a backdoor called a Remote Access Tool (RAT) — sort of like if someone added an unlocked window to your house that you didn’t know was there. There are also cases that allege computer repair staff taking control of cameras when you get a device serviced.
Don’t panic; this type of attack remains rare, notes Wheeler. “One or two instances of RATs and teenagers being hacked for video through their webcams creates a lot of media clicks and hysteria, but the truth is that you should be much more concerned about your personal data than your webcam or your phone’s front-facing camera (which no one covers with a sticker).”
Nicole Kobie
Now take a look at that Alexa box sat in the corner of your room listening to everything, and the Facebook Page that when it remains open can see all other sites you link to and maybe listen to your phone calls. And wonder what it is about adults that makes them so keen to eavesdrop on you? What did they hear? What did you do?
“With the right tools, in other words, almost anyone—from foreign governments to the creepy teenager down the street—could be recording you while you sit at your computer. All of this raises the question: Why don’t we just cover our webcams whenever they aren’t in use?”
– Slate
Felix Krause explains what happens when you allow an app access to your camera and microphone. The app could obtain:
- Access both the front and the back camera.
- Record you at any time the app is in the foreground.
- Take pictures and videos without telling you.
- Upload the pictures and videos without telling you.
- Upload the pictures/videos it takes immediately.
- Run real-time face recognition to detect facial features or expressions.
- Livestream the camera on to the internet.
- Detect if the user is on their phone alone, or watching together with a second person.
- Upload random frames of the video stream to your web service and run a proper face recognition software which can find existing photos of you on the internet and create a 3D model based on your face.
Criminals beware! This video shows how a film makers set up his phone and waited for it to be stolen. He then spied on the thief. But if you’re doing nothing wrong, then there’s nothing to worry about, right? Or maybe Big Government and Big Corp. are just gathering data for ads and marketing. However, should any rules change and you become a person of interest, they’ll be in touch. In the meanwhile, get a sticking plaster. It’s not a total solution – but it’s an easy fix.
Posted: 14th, January 2019 | In: Key Posts, News, Technology | Comment
Let’s make 2019 the year ridicule trumps being offended by rubbish
Naomi Firsht wants 2019 to be the year we stop being so easily offended. I’d argue that the feeling offended is bad enough but it’s more than that: it’s the whining and shrill extempore demands for validation that irk and demean us; the pursuit of victimhood and to be defined by it; the summoning of police and other instruments of State control to salve your ego and crush your opponent, or to use Twitter parlance “destroy” the other side; the confusion between free speech and plain rudeness; the willingness by police to portray themselves as therapists and come running, seeking out muons of criminal intent in the dust of the offence industry; and the narcissism that backs it all. If you want the State to intervene in everyday discussion, to tell you what you can and cannot see, to protect you from ideas other than those which give you a sense of unchangeable foundation in the complex, hypocritical and contrarian world of human relations, then you need to get a grip.
Firsht wants us to wise up:
The war on sexism was also behind a particularly mad policy that came out of the Scottish parliament before Christmas. Gingerbread men in the Holyrood café have undergone something of a transition and are now known as gingerbread persons, thus putting an end to the gendered biscuit tyranny. Our suffragette sisters would be proud…
Make no mistake, 2018 was a bumper year for invented problems and manufactured outrage. The year began with millennials moaning about how “problematic” the anodyne 90s sitcom Friends was, after Netflix added it to its library: apparently it was too white and had undertones of homophobia, transphobia and fat-shaming…
When did we become a nation of humourless, offence-taking whingers, eager to waste our time on this rubbish? My one wish for 2019 is that as a nation we rediscover the stiff upper lip and stop prioritising a few hurt feelings over common sense. This year, let’s call out superficial nonsense for what it is.
Well said. Let’s make 2019 the year we don’t take offence at nonsense – The Times.
The Stansted 15 and the right to protest – don’t cheery pick your causes
Wind your neck back to March 28 2017. Fifteen protestors are attempting to prevent a plane chartered by the Home Office to deport illegal immigrants from leaving London’s Stansted airport. The plane is scheduled to drop its human cargo off in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana. Some of the activists have chained themselves to the plane’s front wheel. The plane never did take off. Predictably nicked, the group were charged with the crime of aggravated trespass. No biggie. The Crown Prosecution Service thought it not big enough and escalated the offence to one of “intentional disruption of services and endangerment at an aerodrome” – see: 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act; a law passed in response to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that carries anything up to a life sentence. The CPS says the protesters “placed themselves, the flight crew, airport personnel and police at serious risk of injury or even death due to their actions on the airfield”. All 15 have been found guilty of this larger offence.
Ella Whelan argues that the Stansted 15 “were not intent on harming anyone at the airport. All they wanted to do was stop the plane.” What of the people aboard the plane? Well:
One man on that plane was going to miss the birth of his daughter due to his deportation – and he has since been granted permission to remain in the UK. As we saw in the Windrush scandal, the government’s approach to immigration control is chaotic and cruel: several of the people on board the plane were being deported under the ‘deport first, appeal later’ policy, which was deemed illegal shortly after the Stansted 15’s action.
To date, 11 of the passengers who were to be deported “have now been given legal status in the UK”, reports Sky News. So the criminals did good, then. They helped people and prevented injustice. We should now help them.
The Guardian calls the 15’s treatment “chilling”. The New Statesman calls the verdict “a particularly cold blast in the increasingly chill wind blowing against public dissent in the UK”. But does your view on the Stansted 15 hinge on whether or not you believe in the right to peaceful protest or if you just support their cause? The Guardian gives much space over to the nature of Home Office deportations:
The protesters were highlighting a harsh and punitive system with which many are rightly and increasingly ill at ease. In June this year, Virgin airlines said it would no longer help deportations. Relying on charter flights (in several cases from an RAF base, following the Stansted protest) only veils the issue.
Slugger O’Toole notes:
Over 300 public figures have signed the open letter including much of the Labour front bench, filmmaker Ken Loach, activist Owen Jones and writer Naomi Klein. It calls for the Stansted 15 to be spared prison and calls on “the UK government to end its inhumane hostile environment policies and to end its barely legal and shameful practice of deportation charter flights.”
That’s Owen Jones who tweeted: “The right to free speech does not give you a right to a platform.” That’s the New Statesman that told us of a “Kosher Conspiracy”. That’s Ken Loache who backs the censorious BDS movement. That’s the Guardian in which you can read the inane argument “No platforming is not a threat to free speech, it is only a threat to hate speech.” Championing free speech and free expression is something we should all support – but let’s not only do it when we agree with the persecuted and support popular ideas.
SOAS: dismal students ban the wrong kind of jokes at UNICEF fundraiser
SOAS University of London sent comedians invited to perform at a benefit gig a set of rules. This “behavioural agreement” censors them for talking about anything that is not “respectful and kind”. Konstantin Kisin was “genuinely shocked” to get the diktat. “I’ve performed at students unions many times before and never been asked to sign a contract,” he says. But this is SOAS , where comedy dies and right-on anti-Semitism thrives.
The best gags show us ourselves and our country in a spark of energy and wit. They are effectively offensive. They catch our prejudices and subvert them with a spiky punchline. SOAS wants children’s entertainers that merely show us what happens when you pull their finger.
Fisayo Eniolorunda, organiser from Soas’s Unicef on Campus society, sent Kisin and his fellow comics the rules “to ensure an environment where joy, love and acceptance are reciprocated by all”. Performers were “agreeing to our no tolerance policy with regards to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia or anti-religion or anti-atheism”. A night of cannibalism it is, then.
Furthermore: “All topics must be presented in a way that is respectful and kind. It does not mean that these topics can not be discussed. But, it must be done in a respectful and non-abusive way.”
Realising that SOAS had become the joke, a spokesperson for the students union opined: “The union believes fully in freedom of speech and the freedom to try to make people laugh.”
Haha. Good one. Student Unions only believe in their own power to control. why any student would join one is beyond me. I suppose it’s like being milk monitor at big school.
Kate Osamor: Fiona Onasanya, a mother’s love and Press freedom
Faced with journalists from the Mail and Times on her doorstep seeking answers to questions about her son’s conviction for intent to supply drugs, including cocaine, Labour MP Kate Osamor dialled 999. The Times says Osamor, your parliamentary rep for Edmonton, told its journalist to “fuck off”, ‘threw a bucket of water at him and then, in the presence of police, said she “should have come down here with a bat and smashed your face in”.’ Discuss.
The Times say Osamor has been accused of wasting police time, chiefly by Susan Hall, Conservative member of the London Assembly, whose given time and space to say: “It’s a bit rich of Kate Osamor to complain about police cuts at the same time as shamelessly wasting police resources. Dealing with media attention is all part and parcel of being a high-profile politician. If she is unable to cope with some probing questions from journalists, perhaps she’s in the wrong job.”
Michelle Stanistreet, the NUJ’s general secretary, is unimpressed by the language. “Journalists, like any other workers, need to be able to go about their work without fear of threats or assault,” she says. “It’s completely unacceptable to respond to legitimate press queries, however unwelcome they may be, with physical or verbal abuse. There is a disturbing and febrile international climate at the moment that is facilitating and legitimising the notion that it is open season on journalists – such insidious and dangerous beliefs, particularly when they emanate from public figures in positions of authority, have to be challenged at every turn.” Watergate, eat yer heart out.
The Sun guns for Osamor
Back in the Times, we learn that Scotland Yard sent six officers over to Osamor’s home in just 24 hours to answer “emergency calls” about her son and parliamentary aide, Ishmael, 29, and what she knew of his arrest. Is that a lot? The Times smells the air:
The Times revealed on Saturday that Ms Osamor, 50, had written to the judge in her son’s case to appeal for leniency before he received a community sentence on October 19. The disclosure of his mother’s intervention contradicted earlier accounts from Labour that she had only heard about the case when the media began asking questions on October 26…
Ms Osamor’s differing accounts of her son’s case, her continued employment of him in her Westminster office and her threats to the journalist have led to questions about her fitness to be an MP.
Kids, eh. Who’d be a parent? It’s emotive stuff. The Press are excited. The Sun says “Ms Osamor has denied wrongdoing in the row over her son” and then values her home and questions her right to live in it. The i can’t even be bothered to identify the MP correctly. Instead of Osamor, the paper used a picture of the Labour whip and Peterborough MP Fiona Onasanya, supplied by a news agency. “Jeremy Corbyn with Kate Osamor, who is accused of threatening a reporter,” says the i. Whoops!
Osamor has resigned her post as… anyone..? Anyone…? Yep. Shadow international development secretary.
Anyone know who her replacement is? And have they hired their kids..?
Posted: 4th, December 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Spiked v Monbiot: seeking conspiracy in the face of reason
Spiked pulls back the magic curtain and show us how journalism works in the age of public shaming and a continual need for validation. In an article entitled ‘The New McCarthyism is ruining public life’, (aka the death of autonomy) the site’s editors deal with a request from Guardian columnist George Monbiot. He wants to know how Spiked is funded. Spiked senses that Monbiot is not looking to invest in the magazine and thus support free speech and independent journalism, rather he wants to find a whiff of something questionable and fan it into our faces until we turn away in disgust. Advocating free speech and free thought are too mundane. There must be more, something bigger at work. Editor Brendan O’Neill gives Monbiot the side-eye:
Who put them up to it? Who are they a front for? What’s the hidden agenda? Do they know someone or get funding from someone and might this explain why they hold the views they hold? What is the story – the true, dark, shadowy story – behind their points of view and their political activity?
It is, O’Neill reasons, the mainstreaming of the conspiracy. Conspiracy theories let you preserve beliefs in the face of uncertainty and contradiction. They protect you from having your beliefs and ideas challenged or disconfirmed. Conspiracy theories are the products of a safety first approach to knowledge that seeks to satiate anxiety and affirm control. Bad things and life not going as you want it to can be explained not by small acts, but as the work of hugely powerful malevolent forces. The conspiracy theorist feels empowered in knowing, well, nothing for certain. The effect is that an adherence to conspiracy theories is utterly disempowering. That for later. For now, O’Neill adds:
One of the leading practitioners in Britain of the New McCarthyite style is George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist. In recent years, spiked has found itself on the receiving end of a few spiteful campaigns about our ‘real’ agenda. We have had the misfortune of being targeted by both far-right and left-leaning conspiracy theorists, the former convinced that we are doing the bidding of powerful Jews and Zionists, and the latter convinced we are a stooge for corporate Dark Money. Mr Monbiot has spearheaded a couple of those latter campaigns. And he is at it again. He is once again seeking to expose the alleged ‘dark forces’ behind what we do.
spiked recently received a number of questions from Mr Monbiot for an article he is writing. We reproduce his questions below and our response to them.
You can read them all on the site. And you can read Spiked’s reply, which is forthright and wholly honest.
The Civilian Action Trining Program protects Snowflake police from bad words and thoughts
Objects in the mirror are more heavily armed and prone to ruin your life than they appear
When men and women are added to the every-growing list of “protected characteristics” that can make you the victim of a hate crime, we wondered if every group was now deemed special? Like the cosseted child of helicopter parents, our governments see us as victims-in-waiting, vulnerable and in constant need of their supervision, direction and protection. (How they fear us.)
And now you can add police to the list. The State’s enforcers are sensitive types who can be triggered by you thinking and saying mean things. Compliance is all. Officer Snowflake demands it.
To Texas, then, where the “Civilian Interaction Training Program”, a project of the Texas Commission On Law Enforcement, is teaching children how to be nice to police. As Boing Boing says, “Reviewing these training materials is mandatory for anyone hoping to receive a diploma from a Texas high school.” Compliance is all in the era of total control:
Meeting Buddah the Nazi dog
When Buddah the pug was outted as a recreational Nazi, his owner, Count Dankula (aka Markus Meechan), was arrested and found wanting. Dankula was found guilty of being ‘grossly offensive’, which is the kind of branding all the cool kids can only dream about achieving. No Jews were hurt. Buddhists have not taken offence and declared religious war on Count Dankula. Buddha is not barking for a final solution at the pigeons in the precinct.
Andrew Doyle went to Glasgow to meet the self-styled peer of the meme:
Next week: meet the parrot who can recite the entire Nuremberg address in French, the chameleon that displays a Swastika on its rump on the command “Juden raus!” and Mohammed the stick insect who can play Frank Zappa’s We’re Turning Again on the bongos.
Gay Cake bakers rejoice: Supreme Court say bakery was right to refuse to make gay wedding cake
Gay cake haters are cock-a-hoop, moreover Gay Cakes R Us, which can now own the market in gay cakes. The UK supreme court has sided with the bakers in a row over their right to refuse to decorate a cake with a pro-gay marriage – a political message – for a customer who wanted them to. Things kicked off in 2014 when Ashers, a Belfast bakery run by evangelical Christians, declined gay man Gareth Lee’s request to produce a cake carrying the order “Support Gay Marriage”.
Belfast county court and the Court of appeal had earlier ruled that Ashers discriminated against Lee on the grounds of sexual orientation. In 2016, Lee, a gay-rights activist, was supported in his case by the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. Ashers was no longer a private business providing non-essential goods and services, a family-run store free to discriminate in its private choices, but a public cause. In the new hierarchy of ideas and morals, sexual orientation held more sway than religious conviction.
Now the five judges on the Supreme Court have decided that Asher’s were not bothered by Lee’s homosexuality. That’s not why they refused to fill his order. There was no discrimination on those grounds.
“It is deeply humiliating, and an affront to human dignity, to deny someone a service because of that person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation or any of the other protected personal characteristics,” Judge Hale said in the judgment. “But that is not what happened in this case and it does the project of equal treatment no favours to seek to extend it beyond its proper scope.”
The court pointed to freedom of expression, as guaranteed by article 10 of the European convention on human rights, which says we have the right “not to express an opinion which one does not hold”. Hale says “nobody should be forced to have or express a political opinion in which he does not believe. The bakers could not refuse to supply their goods to Mr Lee because he was a gay man or supported gay marriage but that is quite different from obliging them to supply a cake iced with a message with which they profoundly disagreed.”
It’s a triumph for tolerance, then. We can reject ideas. But it might not end there because Lee is reportedly considering appealing to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg. And I’m off to the kosher deli to order my ‘Holohoax’ almond ring.
Hate crime: Julia Hartley-Brewer defiled sacred safe space at Labour conference
You don’t have to like Julia Hartley-Brewer to be on her side in a story about safe spaces. Disability News Service (DNS) says Labour Party members want the LBC presenter disciplined by her employers and banned from future events because she criticised safe spaces. Labour says Julia Hartley-Brewer’s opinion that safe spaces are for “snowflakes” “caused considerable distress” to Labour delegates. She posted a video of her sat in a safe space “put aside for disabled people and others who need a quiet area for impairment-related and other reasons”. She said “boo” when a colleague with a camera entered the room. Hartley-Brewer then tweeted: “Comrades, if you’re feeling triggered at the Labour Party conference, don’t worry, we’ve found the official #SafeSpace…”
Comrades, if you’re feeling triggered at the Labour Party conference, don’t worry, we’ve found the official #SafeSpace… #Lab2018 @talkRADIO pic.twitter.com/ssoJRpfvrJ
— Julia Hartley-Brewer (@JuliaHB1) September 24, 2018
This mocking of safe spaces – places for contemplation that used to be called the toilet cubicle, stationery cupboard, library or car – left one delegate feeling “humiliated and violated”. She approached the Disability Labour stand and “just burst into tears, shaking with anger and rage”. She intends to report the incident to the police “as a potential disability hate crime”. A campaigner calls it “nothing less than a hate crime against disabled people”. Disabled people who have fought hard to be seen as resilient, spirited and capable might recoil at this portrayal of them as needy and fragile, reliant on the police and censors to counter different opinions. Another says Hartley-Brewer defiled the safe space, which can no longer be called a safe space, presumably because infidels have touched the sacred ground.
Hartley-Brewer adds in a tweet: “I’m told that this ‘safe space’ at Labour conference is meant for people with autism and other disabilities. The sign doesn’t say that. For the avoidance of doubt, there was no intention to upset disabled people, but every intention to upset snowflakes. Hope that clarifies.”
All it clarifies is that a woman voiced an opinion some other people don’t like, and now seek to turn into a crime – an actual criminal offence as dictated by a society defined by a desire to find and coset the victim in each of us.
Posted: 28th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment
Police investigators need to be whiter than white in deciding if ‘whiter than white is racist’
Is “whiter than white” racist? Moreover, does saying “whiter than white” make you a racist? A senior Scotland Yard policeman who used the phrase “whiter than white” in an internal briefing to colleagues is being investigated. Surprisingly, the copper was not being sarcastic when he said police carrying out inquiries needed to be “whiter than white”. He did not tap his nose. But someone didn’t like it. They complained to the Met. And the Met being scalding hot on all kinds of thought crimes, passed it onto the police watchdog for investigation.
The senior copper is now on restricted duties while the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) investigates the matter. It can take anything up to 12 months. They should then investigate why Star Wars baddies are on the ‘Dark Side’, how Labour “whitewashed” it’s antisemitism and how Snow White was a bigot.
The IOPC states: “I can confirm that as part of Operation Embley into allegations of serious corruption and malpractice within the Directorate of Professional Standards a notice of investigation has been served on an officer informing them we are investigating the alleged use of language deliberately intended to offend and that had racist undertones. A notice is issued to inform an officer at the earliest opportunity following an allegation and to safeguard their interests. It in no way indicates that misconduct proceedings will take place.”
Operation Embley is being called the “largest police corruption inquiry since Operation Countryman in the late 1970s”, which wanted it so that the Met “catches more crooks than it employs”.
The Times explains:
Three Met whistleblowers have approached the IOPC to allege that the unit, known as the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS), has shielded police officers who faced allegations of child abuse, grooming, fraud, physical assault, racism — and, in the case of one police officer, intentionally driving a motorcycle into a member of the public.
Senior Met sources said the DPS had long been suspected of covering up corruption in an attempt to protect colleagues and prevent reputational damage to the force.
The investigation, codenamed Operation Embley, will attempt to bring successful prosecutions in the murkiest area of policing, popularised in the BBC drama Line of Duty.
If we trust no-one and everyone is a suspect, are we pulling up an armchair and wondering why the “whiter than white” case is news now, when the investigation began in June? Is the aim to present us with the most absurd case and thereby ridicule the whole thing? If it is like Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty, whose writing the script..?
Free speech loving Labour purges Israel supporters and censors the media as Joan Ryan is voted down
The purge is underway. As Jeremy Corbyn is labeled an anti-semite and the party twists and turns over its attitude towards Jews, Labour Party members called for a vote of no confidence in Labour MP Joan Ryan, The Enfield North MP, who just so happens to chair Labour Friends of Israel. She has been a vocal critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of anti-Semitism in the ranks.
She lost the vote. Ryan called the 94-92 result “hardly a decisive victory”, adding in a statement: “It never occurred to me that Trots Stalinists Communists and assorted hard left would have confidence in me. I have none in them.”
Later she tweeted: “I fought the hard left to a virtual draw… This was about anti-Semitism in the Labour party and those of us who have stood by the Jewish community and said ‘enough is enough’. I made no apologies last night for that and I make no apologies now.”
You can see the vote on Press TV, which filmed and live tweeted the vote. Press TV is the Iranian State broadcaster banned from broadcasting in the UK since 2012. On it you used to be able to watch such presenters as George Galloway, Yvonne Ridley (this might be her discussing an anti-semitic mural with Corbyn) and, of course, Corbyn, the Labour Party leader who reportedly received up to £20,000 for appearing.
Just to be clear I will not be resigning. I am Labour through and through and I will continue to stand up and fight for Labour values. https://t.co/VEp2ZEDBrN
— Joan Ryan MP (@joanryanEnfield) September 6, 2018
Siddo Dwyer, chair of the Enfield North CLP, plans to lodge a complaint against Press TV. He says: “No press was allowed to be in that room, nor members of the public, or registered supporters, you had to be a fully paid up member of the Labour party. Photo ID was taken as well as Labour party cards. Everyone was checked and double-checked, but the process isn’t bullet proof.”
Perhaps the Press TV reporter is a Labour Party member? After all, it only cost £3 to join, and look at the mayhem you can cause.
And isn’t banning Press from political meetings foolish? It’s almost impossible to implement. But Labour HQ showsw us its clean hands and says: “Filming of local Labour Party meetings is not permitted, and Enfield North will be reminded of this fact.” Only a few days ago, Labour was stating its commitment to ‘free speech’. Admittedly, it was hard to hear the noble cry over Corbynistas calling for Israeli musicians, speakers, actors, artists, medics, scientists and politicians to be no platformed.
Meanwhile, here’s an argument for an uncensored media from Press TV. See if you can spot the lie:
We have documented an amazing amount of Jewish support for Jeremy Corbyn over the past week.
Both at the #NEC debate on #IHRA and at the Enfield North #JoanRyan vote.
The idea that @jeremycorbyn is unliked by British Jews is void of reality. https://t.co/1E3HnC5hgs
— Press TV UK (@Presstvuk) September 7, 2018
Posted: 7th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
Free speech powers the baby Trump blimp flying over London
Owen Jones is such a wag really, isn’t he? Apparently flying a hot air balloon that looks like a caricature of Trump over London during his upcoming visit is going to say something. Even that it will upset, possibly shock, Americans.
Well, no, not really:
That blimp will be the perfect mascot for the mass demonstrations that will form Donald Trump’s welcoming party next week. Trump is hoping to use Britain as a perverse PR exercise, to show that he has indeed made America “great again”, that the country is now respected. Instead images will be broadcast across the globe of thousands of the citizens of America’s closest ally ridiculing the most powerful man on Earth, accompanied by a giant balloon of the president in a nappy.
You see, the Americans have that First Amendment to their Constitution. And they believe in it, they really believe:
A giant balloon dubbed “Trump baby” has been given the green light to fly near parliament during the president’s UK visit.
London mayor Sadiq Khan’s Greater London Authority has approved a request for the flight after thousands signed a petition and a crowdfunding campaign raised more than £16,000 to get the six-metre inflatable off the ground.
Strict rules are in place for the flight from Parliament Square Gardens, with the balloon being tethered to the ground and restricted from floating higher than 30m (98ft).
That First Amendment giving an absolute right to free speech. They’ve even got a system of determining what is free speech that is unlimited and what can be limited for reasons of security – causing a riot isn’t something anyone wants for example – called the Supreme Court:
Campaigners raised almost £18,000 to pay for the inflatable, which they said reflects Mr Trump’s character as an “angry baby with a fragile ego and tiny hands”
Trump baby blimp is ‘biggest ever insult to a sitting president’, Nigel Farage claims
I used to work for Nigel but will disagree with him here. He and I have said far worse about Obama to each other for example.
And Americans really, really, believe in that free speech stuff. It was noted that burning the American flag is likely to cause a riot – and it is, it’s their equivalent of trying to grope the Queen or something. You’ll not survive trying it unharmed. But the Supreme Court considered it – there was a law banning flag burning sa a result of the likely outrage of doing it – and decided that burning the flag is political speech. Which it is of course. And as such people were free to do it. And to accept the consequences of doing so as well.
And again, Americans really, really, believe in free speech. Sure, what you can say is limited by the libel laws. Politicians aren’t protected by the general libel laws. They’ve got to prove malicious libel – not just that what you said is untrue, that it’s untrue and damaging, but also that you said it to deliberately harm them. A tough set of tests to pass.
By American standards a balloon of Trump in a nappy is small beer indeed. Actually, the likely response is for them to say :
“Gee, These Brits, they too have this free speech thing. They’re almost as free as us I guess. Almost.”
Posted: 8th, July 2018 | In: News, Politicians | Comment
Lily Madigan: Labour, women and a terf war
Lily Madigan was once Liam Madigan. Lily is now the women’s officer for the Labour Party branch in Rochester and Strood in Kent. She’s been in the news before. In October 2016, “Brave Lily” (Kent Online) received an apology from St Simon Stock Catholic School, Maidstone, for sending her home for “wearing the wrong uniform” and “preventing her from using the girls’ toilets and changing rooms”.
Said Lily, who threatened to sue the school: “I decided to come in dressed in the girls’ dress code, which basically meant I was wearing a top instead of a shirt. It made me feel so happy, until I was sent home.”
Lily, 19, was born male but identifies as a woman. The Times explains how her new job works:
Labour Party rules state that “the women’s officer must be a woman”.
Why? Can only women understand and represent women? Do you need to have been a girl to know womanhood?
Ms Madigan said it was “misguided” to suggest she could not fulfil the duties of the role, simply because she was born male.
That part at least sounds right.
Teresa Murray, Medway councillor and vice-chairwoman of the executive committee of Rochester and Strood CLP, says “Lily will have to work very hard to convince other people that her very presence there is not going to undermine them”. Adding: “Someone who is an accountant would probably make a better treasurer initially, but that doesn’t mean we should only give the role to an accountant.”
Accountants are born for the job, of course. It’s not something you can learn. It’s something in you. It defines you. You’re just built that way. Accounting is in the genes. But that’s not to say others don’t think accountancy more representative of their true selves. If they want to dress in grey suits, part their hair to the side and carry a briefcase, then that is their right.
Ella Whelan has more background:
Madigan hit the headlines after arguing that Anne Ruzylo, a Labour Party women’s officer in a different constituency, should be sacked for being ‘transphobic’. Ruzylo, a lesbian, feminist and trade unionist, had criticised the sanctification of the trans movement. For this, she was labelled a ‘terf’ (trans exclusionary radical feminist) and was harassed by transgender activists online. Eventually, the executive committee of Ruzylo’s local Labour branch resigned in protest at her mistreatment.
“I feel quite violated,” Ms Ruzylo told The Times. “I’ve worked as a trade unionist for 30 years and I’ve never been shut down in this way. It’s disgusting… Debate is not hate. If we can’t talk about gender laws and get shut down on that, what’s next? What else are we not allowed to talk about? We’re going back to the days of McCarthyism. It is disgraceful.”
“I don’t care if I get called a transphobe, says Whelan adds, “Lily Madigan is not a woman. At 19, he is barely even a man.”
Ouch.
One thing is certain: if you cannot express yourself, we are all the worse off for it.
The transgender teenager at the centre of a Labour Party row has applied for the Jo Cox Women in Leadership programme, angering and dismaying party members…
The leadership programme was started last year in memory of the murdered MP Jo Cox, with the specific aim of encouraging more women into politics.
Critics say that it defies the whole point of the scheme, which attracted more than 1,000 applications for 57 places in its first year, to include people who are biologically male or who have lived part of their lives as men.
What price equality?
“Women in the party are fuming,” said one Momentum activist who accused the leadership of quietly redefining the meaning of “woman” without consulting the membership.
Good grief.
Posted: 25th, November 2017 | In: Broadsheets, News, Politicians | Comment
Josh Rivers: Gay Times editor’s only crime was to be unfunny
Today’s hate figure is Josh Rovers, editor of Gay Times magazine, now suspended for tweeting things between 2010 and 2015. Examples of Rivers’ tweets are many. One mocked women and the fat:
“I’ve just seen a girl in the tightest white tank & lord help me if she’s not pregnant, she should be killed. #gross.”
And, of course, there’s always the nastiness about Jews:
And:
“I wonder if they cast that guy as ‘The Jew’ because of that fucking ridiculously larger honker of a nose. It must be prosthetic. Must be.”
In the Guardian LGBTQ rights campaigner Peter Tatchell is aghast: “His history of grossly offensive tweets is such a letdown. It undermines whatever good he was planning to achieve in the magazine.” Looks like equality rules: LGBT people can be every bit as nasty as the rest of us. Who knew?
Want some more examples of Rivers’ tweets? Of course you do. Here goes:
By way of background, it turns out that Rivers is not a person: he’s a walking box-ticking exercise. The Guardian notes that Rivers “is the first BME editor of a gay men’s magazine, and took on the role with a mandate to promote inclusivity and diversity.” And you thought he was just the best person for the job on account of his editing abilities and cutting-edge wit.
Outed and suspended from the post he only got in October, Rivers has issued an apology, the language of which might be a better reason than the lame tweets to dislike him:
To every single person who is hurt, offended and disappointed: I’m sorry. pic.twitter.com/XAwz7llKxc
— Josh Rivers (@_joshrivers) November 15, 2017
The apology is terrific, isn’t it. It’s not about you, it’s about him. Josh, an arch narcissist, is now on a therapeutic journey, taking “steps” to self-discover a better him, to be the kind of wonderful person he truly is and knows he is. After guffing about “pivoting” and “empowering”, Rivers – he used to work in marketing, natch. – co-opts us all into his ugliness, hoping that “we” can “grow”, “heal” and move “forward”. It’s a journey. Get on the bus. You too, fatso.
But I’ll pass. I’m okay, Josh. You’re the berk, not me, the dick who thought it clever to make jokes about Jews, women, Asians and pretty much anyone not just like you.
Rivers’ sentiments expressed in his tweets are pathetic, puerile and horribly unfunny. He appears to be aiming at waspish humour, a snarky, offensive, live-it-loud gay laugh-in where anything goes. He fails miserably. Josh Rivers is not like his namesake Joan Rivers, the caustic, tough-talking American who wielded a comic stiletto with gusto and precision. Josh’s attempts at humour are every bit as wet as his name suggests. And he’s a fool. Rather than explaining it all as misplaced banter, stupidity, letting off steam and the result of his over-arching vanity, Rivers tells us that the tweets actually explain him, each presenting an insight into his mind. To wit, he was a racist, sexist, anti-Semitic misogynist. Those tweets weren’t just idiotic. They really meant something.
Let’s not trivialise Rivers’ tweets, but remind ourselves that Rivers has committed no crime. He’s apologised and that should be an end to the matter. He can hold the most abhorrent views on Jews, women, Asians and more but if he keeps them to himself, or else voices them to an audience more sympathetic to his prejudices – just as many of us have down in the privacy of our own homes and amongst friends – I’m fine with it. Shocked? Offended? “Oh, grow up!” as the aforesaid Joan advised.
Josh Rivers’ offence wasn’t to hold childish and nasty views; it was to voice them in the wrong context. Now, back to work. But time for a quick survey: anyone out there actually read Gay Times?
