This is Karren Brady's point about women being defined solely by gender in football. Nobody would link all male referees in the same way. If Gray held a dim view of Mike Riley, for instance, he would not have presumed the same of Mike Dean, purely because he was also a man called Mike.Huh? I liked these guys better when they just called everyone Hitler. As it is, this analogy doesn't even make sense on its own terms.
Tom Logan, professor of complicated issues at Reading University, said: "Baroness Warsi may say these are cultural rather than religious values and these countries are behaving in a way that is not truly muslim. But they say they are and it's reasonable to assume they know as much about Islam as she does.Hey, maybe we should try claiming we are Islamophobic, but only that other Islam, the one with all the murders.
"When someone says 'it's okay, they're not very muslim' they're not saying 'it's okay, they'll have a sneaky glass of cider' they're saying 'it's okay, they're not very supportive of imprisoning women who have been raped'.When Islam claims that it goes dark at night becuase the Sun goes into a muddy puddle at the end of the world, that's either right or wrong. Let's spin it round: why don't people like Kirkup try applying the same scepticism to the Religion of Muddy Pools that they do to Christianity?
"A lot of people have a problem with rape victims being jailed, particularly on religious grounds. That doesn't make you a Nazi. It actually makes you the opposite of a Nazi."
Without the patronizing mantra of “quiet desperation,” what does the left have? Nothing. Only the realization that their own conformity and inability to feel and express joy is their own fault and not someone else’s. Specifically not the fault of an American way of life that for two hundred years has disproved and laughed in the face of the left’s arrogant belief in their own superiority.
[Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC] also praised the teenager's mother for encouraging him to give himself up to police after he was pictured by media organisations during the rioting.Yes, indeed: after having his picture plastered over every newstand in the country for five days, she encouraged him to turn himself in, as opposed to disappearing into Sherwood Forest and living off nuts and berries, presumably.
The judge said: "It is deeply regrettable, indeed a shocking thing, for a court to have sentence a young man such as you to a substantial term of custody.It's shocking to sentence a violent thug to custody? Isn't that kind of the point of the whole 'courts' thing? And no, it's not a substantial term by any kind of historic or global standard.
The judge also said he took into account the defendant's age, his guilty plea at the earliest opportunity and the fact that he had no previous convictions.Yes, he pleaded guilty after his crime was shown live on national TV.
Before sentencing, the judge retired for 15 minutes and Woollard, who has 10 GCSEs, was given a chance to speak to his relatives.They probably do the same in Newcastle Crown Court, right? Right after they've heard the guilty party explain that he wasn't aiming a bottle at someone's head, he was aiming it with their head.
It informed the car’s owner that her Volvo estate had been sighted by officers and added that officers needed to speak to her as soon as possible to ‘confirm that you have not committed any offences.’...At which point the ghost of Matthew Hopkins has just slapped himself atop the head shouting 'why didn't I think of that'?
We’ve been told for years that suicide bombers who blow themselves up in civilian areas in Israel are “freedom fighters struggling against Israeli occupation.” Does that mean that this Muslim blew himself up to protest against the Swedish occupation of Stockholm?
Sweden has no colonial history, at least not outside of northern Europe. It is a self-appointed champion of Third World countries and has virtually surrendered its third-largest city to immigrant mobs and substantial chunks of other cities, too. Swedish authorities are using the most extreme methods imaginable to suppress any dissent among the native people, who are being ethnically cleansed from their own land. The authorities always side with immigrants against the natives in the case of conflict. Muslims in Sweden can harass the natives as much as they want to and have access to all kinds of welfare goodies and a much higher standard of living than they would have in their own countries. In short, they have no imaginable, rational reason to complain, yet they still blow themselves up.
In Sweden, all the traditional excuses employed by Multiculturalists and Leftists throughout the Western world, fail. This leaves just one possible explanation, the only one never mentioned in Western mainstream media: That Muslims and their culture are fundamentally incompatible with our values and societies.
By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousnessKablooey!
However the FSA has neither the time nor the powers to extract the relevant testimony from Barclays. So we won't get it.But how about that Balen Report anyway? Any chance of extracting testimony about that? Especially since, unlike Barclays, the BBC really does take billions of pounds of public money.
PS. Barclays (no surprise here) is keen for me to point out that the value of its offer for ABN was significantly lower than that made by the RBS consortium. And Barclays was mainly offering shares, rather than precious cash. So its board behaved less recklessly than RBS's.So, his report was perfectly accurate, except for the factual bits. It's the unique way they're funded, y'know....
But Barclays does not dispute that it should probably say a little prayer of thanks more-or-less every waking minute that it did not end up as the owner of ABN.
I’m not such a sceptic that I think the severity of our current winter weather disproves the global warming hypothesis, but it doesn’t exactly add to the credibility of the warmist lobby. The standard response to this is to point out that colder winters are compatible with the theory (see George Monbiot’s article entitled “The snow outside it what global warming looks like”). But that suggests something else, namely, that the theory isn’t wrong, but meaningless. If I recall my Karl Popper correctly, one of the conditions that a meaningful scientific theory has to satisfy is that it should be falsifiable. If heavier-than-average snowfall doesn’t constitute disproof of the theory, then it’s hard to imagine what would – and that, in turn, suggests the theory is meaningless.Indeed.
For those of you who haven’t seen “The English Patient,” just imagine what Satan would’ve done with “Casablanca.”
But you have to explain to the sensible public that you can’t give an absolute guarantee.And there you have it: if you disagree with Fat Ken you're stoopid!
The Ivy League and "meritocratic" elites are resented because they've failed...A good comment by Novaseeker too:
Outside of Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, both of whom left festering problems of Islamic terror, to crop up with later Presidents, nearly every President since Eisenhower has been nothing but an abject failure. Amiable dunces, lecturing and preening moralizers, devious compilers of enemies lists, or all three in the case of Obama. Jeff Zucker, Harvard University, ran NBC into the ground. The Sulzberger family has made the NYT a national joke, destroying shareholder value not seen since the AOL-Time-Warner deal.
Ordinary people have given about fifty years to the elites, and have nothing to show for it but a ruined economy, cheap Chinese electronic junk, declining real wages since the 1970's, mass immigration turning them into sudden (and discriminated against) minorities in their own country, and the prospect of even more of the same. Meanwhile, the elites have put up a "No Ordinary Whites Allowed" sign in the means to entry into the elites: the Ivies and near Ivies.
This blind spot may be what causes the left to dig its grave, politically. They simply do not *understand* the real source of rightist populism (instead labeling it as being based on fear, which it isn't ... it's based on resentment at some Ivy-League jackass telling them what to do, as if he is better than they are -- because he *isn't*, he just has a degreeActually, it cuts both ways. It isn't only that people don't respect a guy just because he has an Ivy League/Oxbridge degree, it's that these guys don't bring anything else to the table, and don't think they should even have to: they're super smart, what more do you need? Pay no attention to the wrecked nation behind the curtain.
[Americans] are stuck in a Profumo Scandal/Burgess and Maclean era, where gays are blackmailed by the Soviets into betraying their country. During the McCarthy witch-hunt, the “Lavender Scare” was a campaign to identify and prosecute gay politicians: homosexuals and Commies were often conflated, both perceived as subversive and immoral sub-cultures.See what I mean?
George Osborne – who was once a proud Eurosceptic himself – has rounded on the sceptic tendency within his own party. “I told you so,” he says sulkily, “is not an economic policy.”The thing is, if the Certified Super Geniuses keep screwing up, in what sense are they actually, y'know, smart?
Well, no but it’s a start. It is, in the present crisis, a necessary precondition for any realistic economic policy: we need some brutal honesty here about the staggering mendacity and utter stupidity of those who concocted this conspiracy against the peoples of Europe, this folie de grandeur which appeared to be based on ideological wishful thinking and economic illiteracy. Those of us who were pilloried and ridiculed by the political establishment of the day and its camp followers at the BBC are demanding apologies, not because we enjoy the sight of people on their knees (well, maybe we do in this case) but because we want definitive proof that the lessons have been learnt.
To a large extent we had more in common with each other across the bonds of nationality than with our fellow nationals at home. I became a member of a tribe which cut across my national tribal links.The flip side works as well. The idea that goofy projects like the EU are the product of elite super geniuses naturally leads to the corollary that those who oppose them are clearly dirty peasants and morons.
The problem I see now is that our new political class has little experience of life outside Westminster except in their homes in France and Spain, and no feeling for the mass of British people, so they are easy meat for the internatonalist dream which is reinforced by the doctrines of political correctness and the self interest of the international bureaucratic elite.Their supposed qualifications to rule are based on a tautology. Our governing elite is elite because they're members of the governing elite. That's their only qualification. If Cameron wasn't a politician, what would he be? What skills does he bring to the table that have any application outside the context of an utterly dysfunctional political culture?
Please let’s not make the argument that it’s government’s job to identify and provide “high culture” in the name of improving all of us. Haven’t we all learned that there are many cultures, all equally vibrant and valid? NPR is as monolithic in its taste as a 1950s Social Studies class
Yet Hartman's remark about Obama's "academic background" is revealing. Professors imagine Obama is one of them because he shares their attitudes: their politically correct opinions, their condescending view of ordinary Americans, their belief in their own authority as an intellectual elite. He is the ideal product of the homogeneous world of contemporary academia. In his importance, they see a reflection of their self-importance.All of which sounds strangely familiar.
Kloppenberg's thesis reminds us of another elaborate attempt at explaining Obama: Dinesh D'Souza's "The Roots of Obama's Rage." D'Souza, like Kloppenberg, imputes to Obama a coherent philosophy, in D'Souza's case "anticolonialism." It is a needlessly elaborate explanation for an unremarkable set of facts.
Occam's razor suggests that Obama is a mere conformist--someone who absorbed every left-wing platitude he encountered in college and never seems to have seriously questioned any of them. Kloppenberg characterizes Obama as a skeptic, not a true believer. We're not sure he has an active enough mind to be either one.
You brought them over here, not me. You supposedly need them to drive the cabs I don't take, and be the nannies I don't need and the housekeepers I can't afford, and run the restaurants only you get to eat in and run the shops you're too lazy or prissy to own yourselves...
.... they're just patiently waiting for the day that your spoiled, lazy children -- assuming you have children at all -- are working for their disciplined, accomplished offspring.
The day "corporate" pulls its sponsorship of Pride Month, and dumps its expensive, exquisitely useless "environmentally friendly" policies overboard, and quietly stops hiring spindly, neurotic, overeducated white women (who take way too much time off dragging their kids to endless appointments -- if they have children, that is.)
And there will be nothing you can do about it.
They're "minorities." You gave them all kinds of special rights. No one is allowed to criticize them. "It's their culture," remember?
This was all your idea, guys. Not mine.
Welsford now plans to sue the hospital claiming that the therapist abused him, reports The Sun.It's a Russian doll full of wrongness!
TV has given us the illusion that anarchy is people rioting in the streets, smashing car windows and looting every store in sight. But there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry—the upright citizenry—throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.
Think about it: if the average Joe expresses anxiety over Islamic fundamentalism, they’re called Islamophobes. But if an editor removes a comic in which Mohammed isn’t even present, that’s not honest to Allah Islamophobia?And the flip side works too: enough with the articles about the dangers of right-wing extremism when it's blindingly obvious that if the right really was as crazed as the MSM says, they'd be in full sensitivity overdrive.
Look, the media can’t have it both ways. They cannot criticize the public for concerns over Islam and then pull this stunt over a fear they may get stabbed in front of a Starbucks. If their governing principle in the newsroom is fear, then they should admit it and get the hell off our backs for feeling pretty much the same way.
After forty years of liberal rule in Hollywood it is nihilism that’s old-fashioned. It is moral relativism that is tired. It is political correctness, the always-noble people of color, the always-evil white guy, and the metrosexual that is clichéd. A film with a clear divide between good and evil is something new. A film that celebrates patriotism, heroism, sacrifice, freedom, and honor is something revolutionary. In 1955 300 would be old-fashioned. In 2007 it makes a counter-culture statement as strong as Easy Rider in its day.
It's a cliche, but it is true: justice needs to be done and it needs to be seen to be doneHello? We're having a whole inquest right here. We know exactly what everyone of the cops was doing during the siege.
These officers need to be held accountable - by nameHey, isn't it strange how it's always the right-on libs who are ready to throw the whole 'due process' thing overboard when they want to victimise someone?
The Government proposes to expand the use of restorative justice, in which offenders and victims meet to discuss the impact of the crime far beyond the rules of court....Do you see what he did there? Not only have the officers concerned not been so much as charged with any offences, the repulsive Saunders clan are only victims in so far as one of their number suffered from the delusion that their power and privilege extended so far as to allow him to aim a loaded weapon at a police officer without consequences.
In the case of this inquest, they should meet the friends and family of Mark Saunders and explain to them what they did and why they behaved as they did - and, most of all, hear first- hand the impact their actions have had.
Lawyers have always worried about such meetings, arguing that the police might feel obliged to apologise - and thereby open themselves up to litigation.Apologise for what exactly? Exercising their common law right as citizens to use reasonable force to protect themselves? That's all they did - no magic police powers required. If a maniac points a loaded shotgun at you, you're quite within your rights to shoot them with your pistol - or, at least you could if you had a pistol, but somehow I don't see the left using this case to push 'concealed carry'.
But I believe there should be qualified apologies, in which legal liability is set aside.
Peter Tatchell...contributed a chapter to the now notorious, out of print book [The Betrayal of Youth: Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenrational Sex, and the Social Oppression of Young People.]. His statement in the text that "not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful"In fact, the full quote is even worse:
[Tatchell] gave an example of a New Guinea tribe where ‘all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood’ and allegedly grow up to be ‘happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers’.By the way, that was in 1997, but apparently being on record talking warmly about child molestation is no bar to becoming the leader of the gay movement. Watch out for those Catholics though!
And he concluded: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.
‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’
[Cameron] intends to do more to outline his own political philosophy, which is best described as a realistic radicalism of the centre.Huh?