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The Seattle public school system has adopted a rather, um, comprehensive definition of “racism” as part of its diversity program, including warnings against individual racism, active racism, passive racism, cultural racism, and institutional racism. Most interesting is the definition of “cultural racism:”
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers. [emphasis added]
There you have it. If you don’t have the right alleles, you are incapable of doing things like planning for the future or being an individual. It’s good that the Seattle Public Schools cleared that up for us.
ECRI [European Commission against Racism and Intolerance] deeply regrets the fact that the police are still very reluctant to register complaints of racist statements and to investigate and press charges under Article 266 b) of the Criminal Code, partly due to the fact that freedom of speech is given priority consideration in Denmark.
Do I even need to comment that this is completely in character for the EU?
Liberalism entered the 1960’s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.
[…]
there can be no doubt, either, that an event from the early 1960’s — namely, the assassination of Kennedy himself — contributed heavily. As many observers have noted, Kennedy’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders — Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro among them — came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history. By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of extreme causes.
It is one of the ironies of the era that many young people who in 1963 reacted with profound grief to Kennedy’s death would, just a few years later, come to champion a version of the left-wing doctrines that had motivated his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. But why should this have been so? What was it about mid-century liberalism that allowed it to be knocked so badly off balance by a single blow?
Read the article to find out the answer. It’s worth the time.
TONY BLAIR risked a fresh clash with the legal establishment yesterday when he targeted a “distant” justice system that most believed let people get away with breaking the rules.
In his latest assault on the criminal justice system and human rights laws, the Prime Minister rounded on those who failed properly to supervise drug offenders and criminals who have been given community punishment.
Do you suppose that Blair means criminals like this?
A mum-of-two who agreed to look after a gun for an ex-boyfriend has been jailed for five years.
[…]
Julius Capon, prosecuting, said police stopped Edwards on January 13 when she was driving home from taking her two children to school.
He added: “They explained that they had information that she had a gun. She immediately volunteered that she had been asked to look after a weapon and she gave a name.”
Officers went to her then home in Silverleigh Road, Thornton Heath, and she took them to an upstairs bedroom.
Mr Capon told the hearing: “She pointed out a roll of green cloth, under which was a carrier bag containing a semi-automatic handgun wrapped in a white bandanna.”
It was in a poor state of repair, could not have been fired and no ammunition was discovered.
James Cartwright, defending, said an expert had described the gun as unusable.
“For the first time in the history of English law a minimum sentence has been introduced and judges should look very closely at any circumstances which could be exceptional.”
Judge Stow told Edwards, who admitted a charge of possession of the blank firing pistol: “The gun was not owned by you and was supplied to you by others who asked you to store it for them. It was in a poor state, with missing parts.
“You are not inherently a criminal person. You have been completely frank with the police right from the start and you pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity, but I have come to the conclusion that none of these features either collectively or singly constitute exceptional circumstances.”
Yow, way to nail the dangeous people wandering the streets!
Last month, I received an invitation to testify before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about affirmative action and diversity in U.S. companies. The testimony was scheduled for today, and I was asked to share my written statement to the commission beforehand, last Thursday, which I did. Late Friday afternoon I received a phone call from the commission, telling me that because of what I had to say, my invitation had been withdrawn by its chairman, Cari M. Dominguez.
I urged the commission to reconsider this decision because it would put the commission in general and the chairman in particular in a bad light. Yesterday I was notified that the entire meeting—not just my panel, but two others—has been “indefinitely postponed.”
The problem is that my testimony told the unwelcome truths that (a) American companies, in their “celebration of diversity,” frequently discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity and sex, (b) this violates the law, and © the EEOC is not doing anything about it. I was told that it would lead to a “mutiny” among the career people at the commission if I was given a “platform” to say such things. It might even turn the proceedings that morning into a “circus,” and Ms. Dominguez, I was told, did not want the EEOC “to look like the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights back when Mary Frances Berry headed it.”
The irony is that the effort to silence a witness because of his political incorrectness is exactly the sort of thing that Ms. Berry might have done. Actually, it’s worse. Ms. Berry, whatever her considerable shortcomings, actually did allow me to testify on more than one occasion.
But that can be done in the shadows instead of in front of a media spotlight, as Ms. Berry liked to be.
I would just note that this kind of political pandering / capture is the inevitable fate on all direct government economic interventions. It is the reason to oppose this kind of thing on general principle, no matter how compelling the case of the moment looks.