Utopia, you are standing in it!

This well-argued Spectator piece by Brendan O’Neill is behind a paywall, but I’ve put some excerpts from it below.  His argument, with which I happen to agree, is that the singling out of Israel among all states for special opprobrium by the Left reflects anti-Semitism constantly disguised with the euphemism “anti-Zionism.” As you’ll see in the excerpts below, O’Neill answers some Leftist arguments for why Israel deserves to be singled out, and, at the end, he argues that the hysterical anti-Israel sentiment of the Left may be responsible for the rise in anti-Semitism in the West.

Some excerpts:

Airbnb has taken the extraordinary decision to stop advertising homes for rent in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It is extraordinary because Airbnb still advertises places to stay in Tibet, a place many Tibetans consider to be unjustly dominated by China. And in Crimea, recently annexed by Russia. And in Northern…

What a week it has been in the Courts.

A 14 year old was sentenced for murder. A recidivist drink driver was sentenced to home detention. A 39 year old woman was sentenced for a brutal and violent home invasion. All crimes committed against more innocent victims!

Without exception in all of these cases, justice has not been done! Our Justice System has once again failed the Victims.

Gavin Hawthorn was sentenced on his 12th drink driving charge. He received a pitiful sentence of 6 months home detention, 180 hours community service and disqualified from holding or obtaining a license for 2 years.

Hawthorn has a long history of horrendous offending. He has more than 60 prior convictions including burglary, assault and disorderly behaviour. But the worst offences, and something vitally important is that he is responsible for the death of 4 innocent victims.

An opinion piece written by Paul…

Although  the  rest of the  country may  still be fingering the  results  of  their  Black  Friday  shopping,   no  such  luck  for the   politicians  as  they  move into the  final phase of the  parliamentary  year.

Each of  the  main parties  is  desperate  for a spark  to lift  performance  (and perhaps polling).

PM  Jacinda  Ardern  is taking a shellacking  for   her silence on  China, its  human rights  offences, its cyber-bullying and in particular the  Professor Anne-Marie  Brady  affair. And then,  for  reasons no-one can guess at, she has turned a blind eye  to the disgraceful performance   of   Immigration Minister  Iain Lees-Galloway in  handling  the  issue of  deporting  Czech  drug smuggler   Karel Sroubek.

Is  Jacindamania  fading?  Perhaps not  yet,  but  it soon  will, at this rate.

If you had any doubt that the New York Times is going the way of Authoritarian Leftism, which includes whitewashing the nasty bits of Islam, have a look at the two articles that appeared this week—in the same op-ed section.

The first is by Haroon Moghul (click on screenshot below), described as “a fellow in Jewish-Muslim relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and the author of ‘How to Be a Muslim: An American Story’.”

Moghul recounts a time in his youth when he was on the verge of atheism, since he couldn’t personally connect with his faith. Then he took a trip to Medina with his brother, and there he had an epiphany that brought him back to Islam:

In Medina I realized I actually believed all the stories about him. That he buried the least loved of his fellow Arabs with his own hands. That…

In my previous post, we took a look at the claim that trans people “have always been here” in the numbers at which they’re now emerging, and found it wanting.

Now, I’d like to turn our attention to the fact that the trans rights movement has clearly undergone significant changes in the last two decades.

Twenty years ago, trans people were not making the claim that they had “always been” their preferred sex. They knew biological sex existed, and the idea of a non-transitioned, non-passing trans person entering into opposite-sex spaces was absurd.

Today, things are very different. Online trans activists are brash and bold with their claims that biological sex doesn’t exist and neither should sex-based protections. They also seem to share a belief unique to transgender people that they must be recognized as their preferred sex in order to exist at all.

When women notice…

The Supreme Court issued its decision inH v Lord Advocate (pdf) in 2012. The decision has been virtually ignored by constitutional scholars, but we believe it may be of great constitutional significance. In this post we explain why, starting with some background about constitutional statutes.

Commentators have lately considered how constitutional statutes should be interpreted (for example Tarunabh Khaitanon this blog), and what exactly makes a statute ‘fundamental’ or ‘constitutional’ (for example David Feldman in the latest issue of LQR). A third issue, and our focus here, is how a constitutional statute can be repealed.

In the well-known 2002 case of Thoburn v Sutherland City Council, Laws LJ (with whom Crane J agreed) claimed that a constitutional statute is susceptible to implied repeal in a much narrower range of circumstances than an ordinary statute. At first Laws LJ put the point categorically: ‘Ordinary statutes may be impliedly…

The issue of select committee powers has received renewed interest during the 2010-15 Parliament, culminating in a report from Liaison Committee on Select committee effectiveness, resources and powers (in October 2012); and, subsequently, a report by the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege in July 2013 (and a Government response later that year).

Although parliamentary select committees are frequently described as being powerful and influential, questions have arisen about their ability both to summon witnesses and punish those who are guilty of contempt or perjury.

In relation to the latter issue, the Government’s Green Paper on Parliamentary Privilege (Cm 8318, 2012), which preceded the Joint Committee’s report, had noted that:

The Houses’ power to punish non-members for contempt is untested in recent times. In theory, both Houses can summon a person to the bar of the House to reprimand them or order a person’s imprisonment. In addition, the House of Lords…

I’ve just finished reading a book that’s closely connected with many of our interests: Greg Lukianoff and Jon Haidt’s new volume, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon site:

The issue is why so many students in American colleges and universities are behaving differently from in past years: they’re now ridden with anxiety and depression, demanding accommodation to their demands, protesting initiatives for free speech (or speakers they don’t like), constantly feeling “unsafe”, and making professors feel intimidated about speaking their minds. We know about these trends, but Lukianoff (head of FIRE, or the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Haidt (a moral psychologist at NYU) document some of them with statistics.

Their worry is that students have absorbed what they call the Three Great Untruths, and these…