Utopia, you are standing in it!

How far can the sanitizing of language go in the name of social justice? Well, sometimes the sanitizing is salubrious, but often it’s not. From the San Francisco Chronicle (click on screenshot) we have a particularly ludicrous example: changing the words used to characterize offenders in the criminal justice system. These guidelines were just adopted by the city’s Board of Supervisors, and they’re in a nonbinding resolution. Nevertheless, the Mayor and the city’s police department are considering the suggestions, while the district attorney’s office already agrees with them.

Here are some of the changes recommended in the article:

A “convicted felon” or someone released from jail is now a “formerly incarcerated person,” or a “justice-involved” person or simply a “returning resident.”

Parolees and people on probation are now “person on parole,” or “person under supervision.”

Drug addicts or substance abusers are now “a person with…

Heather MacDonald, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Long before the El Paso massacre, President Trump’s political opponents accused him of sowing “division” with his “racist language.” Mr. Trump “exploits race,” “uses race for his gain,” is engaged in a “racially divisive reprise” of his 2016 campaign, stokes “racial resentments,” and puts “race at the fore,” the New York Times has reported over the past several months.

I don’t know about you, but I had certainly heard the claims of Trump’s racism, but I didn’t hear the examples. The president doesn’t seem to use racial categories in his tweets, or in his speeches. (The article is may be behind a subscription barrier)

The Democrats and the Media certainly do. Ms. MacDonald wrote:

Yet Mr. Trump rarely uses racial categories in his speech or his tweets. It is the media and Democratic leaders who routinely characterize individuals and groups by…

The other day I posted a tweet containing a clip of Bill Maher calling out the BDS movement for hiding its real aim—to get rid of Israel. The relevant section goes from 18:55 to 20:03 in this video of his latest show.

But keep listening, at least until 23:00.  As the article below notes, “Maher added that he understood why Tlaib and Omar were banned, given their past statements.”

“Congresswoman Omar has said things like, ‘It’s all about the Benjamins,’ ‘Israel has hypnotized the world,’ ‘May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel,’ ” Maher said. “She apologized for it, but it’s out there: Jews control the world, control the money.”

Maher’s comments on BDS are appropriate since the purpose of the boycott, expressly avowed by its instigators, is to eliminate the state of Israel, largely through demanding the “right of return” of not…

We are wondering – here at Point of Order – which politician will go out to bat for the idea that all citizens of this country be accorded exactly the same voting rights they were given at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

To ensure nobody was denied those rights, all prisoners of all races in our prisons should be included in this entitlement.

We would like to think the Waitangi Tribunal might  consider endorsing this idea because today it has released He Aha i Pērā Ai? The Māori Prisoners’ Voting Rights Report in pre-publication format.

The tribunal says the urgency report addresses three claims that seek repeal of section 80(1)(d) of the Electoral Act 1993.  It looks at the level of advice provided to Parliament and the Law and Order Select Committee and the consequent ongoing effects of the legislation on Māori, including the individual…

By Richard Millett

As expected The Guardian published two full blown rants over the weekend concerning Israel’s refusal to allow congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to enter Israel due to their public support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).

The Guardian’s editorial called barring their entry “a bad day for Israel, and a worse one for the US” while Emma Goldberg called it a ploy “to quiet anti-occupation activism”.

So far, so Guardian.

However, a piece by Oliver Holmes explaining why Tlaib had rejected Israel’s humanitarian offer to visit her grandmother had a moment of unexpected clarity when Holmes writes:

“The BDS movement seeks to end the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories and discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who account for almost a fifth of the population. It also demands that Israel allow several million Palestinian refugees and their families to return to their…

An Article from Townhall.com

by Thomas Sowell

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/03/12/intellectuals-and-race-n1531068/page/full/

There are so many fallacies about race that it would be hard to say which is the most ridiculous. However, one fallacy behind many other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about different races being unequally represented in various institutions, careers or at different income or achievement levels.

A hundred years ago, the fact that people from different racial backgrounds had very different rates of success in education, in the economy and in other endeavors, was taken as proof that some races were genetically superior to others.

Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior that eugenics was proposed to reduce their reproduction, and Francis Galton urged “the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”

It was not a bunch of fringe cranks who said things like this. Many held Ph.D.s from the leading universities, taught at the leading…

Listeners to BBC Radio 4’s ‘The World Tonight’ are promised “in depth reporting, intelligent analysis and breaking news from a global perspective”. Here is what those listeners heard (from 03:39 here) in the news bulletin which opened the programme’s August 15^th edition. [emphasis in bold added]

Newsreader: “Israel has banned two US Democrat Congresswomen from entering the country because they’ve been critical of its policies towards the Palestinians. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar had been expected to begin a tour of the Palestinian territories later this week. Ms Omar has accused the Israelis of implementing President Trump’s ban on Muslims. Tom Bateman reports from Jerusalem.”

Bateman: “The Congresswomen – Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia and grew up in the US, and Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent – have both supported the movement to boycott Israel. They were due to visit the occupied West…

I loved Marc Morris’s History of the Norman Conquest because it gave such a thorough explanation of the background, build-up, events and consequences of the most famous moment in English history, so I was looking forward to reading this book and it is certainly good – but not as good as the Conquest one, and I spent some time, as I read it, trying to figure out why.

1. The long historical build-up to John’s reign

I think the main reason is that the central feature of King John’s reign (1199 to 1216) is the complete collapse of the huge and elaborate ’empire’ created by his predecessors – Henry I (his grandfather), the great Henry II (his father) and King Richard, his swashbuckling brother.

The pressures John faced trying to hang on to the south (Aquitaine), the middle (Anjou) and the north (Normandy) of France, along with the large and…

I can’t remember the last time a book made me feel this physically sick. About half way through another description of the murders, rapes, dismemberments, garrotings, hangings, torture and shootings carried out by members of the Force Publique which policed the forced labour system set up by King Leopold II in his colony in the Congo (1885 to 1909), I thought I might throw up.

Leopold II, king of the Belgians, and his genocide

If you like historical horror stories, you’ll love this book. It intertwines a biography of lonely unloved Leopold – aloof, shy king of the Belgians, ignored by his parents, separated from his wife – who conceived a great ambition to own a chunk of the dark continent, Africa, during the 1880s when it was being carved up by the the European powers.

Hochschild describes how, once he’d decided on the Congo to be his slice of…