Hate Crime Hoaxes

I've written before about the phenomenon of hate crime hoaxes, in which people fake attacks on themselves or their favoured group in order to drum up sympathy for themselves and hatred for their ideological enemies.

Yet another high profile example in the United States has occurs. The interesting thing about this case is that people in internetland have been pointing out for months that it was an obvious hoax, while the established media was still cluelessly citing it as an example of right wing hate.

When they keep falling for the same trick you have to wonder whether there is some kind of agenda.....

Sometimes It's Hard To Be A Woman.

Take a look at the Guardian's page of columnists, which features all the regular writers along with their latest columns.

If you break down the demographics there are 12 males and 8 females.

Of the dozen males the topics covered varies from sport to conspiracy theories to the economy. There is quite a substantial range of topics. In contrast the eight female writers cover a slightly different range of subjects:

• Hadley Freeman complains about the unfair burdens women in show business have to put up with.
• Barbara Ellen says about the sexist treatment of Andy Murray's mum and the unfair burdens that women in sport endure.
•  Zoe Williams writes about the royal family- while noting that "that squeamishness around discussing the female pudenda is rooted in a deeper hatred of women"

So three of the eight writing about how hard it is to be a woman.

On the front page of the Guardian's Comment Is Free section there are ten articles by women, including the one by Hadley Freeman. Others include:

•  Rhiannon Cosslett on the unfair burdens of a female royal.
• Ellie Cosgrave on sexual assault (an admittedly more serious issue than the other).
•  Nancy Cohen on women voters and the "Tsunami of anti-woman legislation".

Two of the other pieces are by ethnic minority women talking about the unfair burdens of being black.

So out of 17 different female writers, 6 are writing about sexism and 2 about racism. It seems that almost half the output of female columnists is self obsessed identity politics.

Go Away, 'Batin.

A few years ago I parodied the last government's determination to ban things with a proposal to ban masturbation. David Cameron is trying to make this a reality- with moves to make people apply with their full name and contact details as they ask their ISP if the can watch pornography. Not child porn, but consensual adult porn.

Forcing people to make details of their private sexual behaviour known to their broadband providers is intrusive to an extent that is hard to overstate.

Cameron says it's about protecting the children, but his obsession with stopping teenage boys having a wank looks positively Victorian and is downright creepy. At least the Victorians turned their anti-masturbation zealotry to invent good stuff like Cornflakes.

Justice In A Tribal Society.

The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case fascinates me because it shows how fragile the rule of law is even in an advanced democracy.

 There was quite clearly no evidence that George Zimmerman was guilty of a crime and he was found not guilty, but even so the fact that he was tried at all and the US government is still investigating him is an affront to justice.

The fact that so many people are willing to publicly denounce the verdict despite not actually being able to explain what evidence the prosecutors presented that showed that Zimmerman was a murderer is also shocking. It seems that the US Department of Justice is still trying to lynch Zimmerman by making it a civil rights case, despite a complete lack of evidence for any racial bias on the shooter's part.

What makes so many people lose their minds, lie shamelessly and dispose of the rule of law?

Tribalism.

By turning a tragic event into a racial issue- despite the fact that there is a lot of evidence that Zimmerman is no racist- the media have ensured that the question wasn't "did Zimmerman kill Martin" but " are you on the side of Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and Rosa Parks or are you a KKK sympathiser".

It's not an approach that is likely to uncover truth but is sells papers and enables idiots to preen self righteously and pretend to care about a dead kid (although not enough to actually look at what actually happened).

Liberalism Versus Democracy

The protests in Egypt as well as Turkey are a symptom of a wider struggle between the modernism and reactionary Islamism. Both Morsi and Erdogan are pushing an authoritarian Islamic agenda despite the objections of more liberal factions in society.

However both of them won free and contested elections in order to obtain power. They have democratic mandates. There is a similar clash between authoritarian populists and a liberal middle class in other countries in Thailand and Russia.

In other words liberalism and democracy are in direct opposition rather than being bedfellows as is widely assumed. In the west we have developed a system of more or less pluralistic, liberal democracy but we only got here hundreds of years of a slowly widening franchise-. If we had enjoyed full democracy from the 17th Century onwards when the country was populated by superstitious peasants then we probably would not have that.

"A 19th Century Barbara Cartland."

A couple of articles by feminist writers have criticised the likely appearance of Jane Austen on Bank of England notes in the near future and the general lack of women on the notes.

Austen is apparently not radical enough, a 19th century Barbara Cartland, whose place should be taken by someone more radical like George Elliot or Mary Wollstoncraft.

They've got a point, we need a more radical female on the £10 note than Austen. Someone who upset the apple cart, tore down gender barriers and accomplished more than most men in her position. We do of course need Margaret Thatcher on the tenner.

So....

I will post something soon.

Oh yes.

Unite Against Fascism- Inciting Murder Since....

This is an interesting turn up:

ITV News has uncovered a video showing Woolwich suspect Michael Adebolajo speaking at a demonstration at Harrow Central Mosque in 2009. The event was organised as a counter-rally against a planned protest by the English Defence League. 

We already know that Unite Against Fascism is a front group for the far left rape cult, the Socialist Workers Party, but their links with Adebolajo are new to me.

UAF were endorsed by various mainstream politicians including the prime minister even though their whole method is to illegally and violently stop people they oppose exercising their freedom of speech. They represent lawlessness and taking matters into your own hands. It's hard to be surprised that some of their friends have similar ideas.

Murderous Lunatics Will Always Find Motives To Kill.

There is nothing unethical about considering whether our foreign policy was responsible for motivating the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby. However it is complete bollocks as a theory. One of the killers* was filmed taking part in the infamous Islamist demonstration in London back in 2007 in which placards declaring "Behead those who insult Islam", "Freedom Go To Hell" and "Europe- Prepare for the real Holocaust". What foreign policy actions had offended them to the point where there were on the streets of London lost in a vicious mood calling for murder and genocide? Was it civilian deaths in Afghanistan? The unauthorised use of force in Iraq? No, it was some fucking cartoons. Foreign policy may matter at the margins of terrorism, but the underlying cause is an insane, ignorant and chauvinistic death cult which needs to be eradicated. * They haven't been convicted but seeing as they were filmed with bloody weapons telling everyone why they did it, it seems silly to say "alleged" killers.

Another Sex Gang.

Yet another "Asian" gang has been convicted of grooming and raping white girls. Most people outside Guardian towers now accept that political correctness and fear of being branded racist played a part in the decision to abandon the victims to the crimes. Personally I wonder whether the police would have let Asian paedophile gangs run wild before they were MacPhersoned. Two other points are worth making. Among a subset of British Pakistani men there is a deeply unpleasant attitude to women and to non-Pakistanis. I do not wish to imply that all British Asians are like this- no doubt Nazir Afzal, the prosecutor who did so much to expose these cases is far more typical of British Asian men than the convicted child molesters. However it is clear that a significant minority do basically look on white females as slags. The other cultural issue is among the majority population, that is to say white British people. How have we got to a situation where in such a varied array of towns- Oxford, Rochdale, Derby... there are significant numbers of young children who are wondering the streets on their own without any adult care? Perhaps family breakdown plays a part, although I've heard from someone who works with the CPS that in the Derby case at least, the parents of some of the girls had tried desperately to stop their daughters going out at all hours of the day and night but were powerless to do anything.

Romanian Immigration & Crime

Romanians and Bulgarians will soon be allowed to travel freely throughout the EU, including to the UK. A few years ago most of the rest of Eastern Europe was allowed to join the EU resulting in large scale immigration to the UK, especially from Poland.

A few years ago I worked out the incarceration rates by nationality in the UK, these are the figures for the number of people in prison in England per 100000 people, for various nationalities of Eastern Europe:

1. Romania- 829
2. Lithuania- 366
3. Czech- 185
4. Hungary- 183
5. Poland- 113
6. Bulgaria- 64
7. Slovakia- 48

Whether it is good or bad, Romanian immigration will be very different from that which we have already experienced.

Update: There is an interesting observation in the comments from Stelucia (who I assume is Romanian):

Romanians have already the right to travel freely without a visa in all EU countries. What they don't have yet are full workings rights within EU, which is something completely different.
This policy of restricting workings rights produced a negative selection: honest, hard working people remained in Romania.

If you imagined a country where they selected British emigrants in such a way as to mostly get criminals you'd end up with a situation where the emigrants were not typical of Britain as a whole. Come to think of it, I think that I have just described Australia.

Israel Bombs Syria

So what is going on?

Are the Israelis intervening on one side of the conflict? Although Syria does back Hamas and Hezbollah the regime surely poses less threat to Israel than a potential Islamist run Syria.

Perhaps they just want to destroy Syria's chemical weapons in order that the rebels don't get control of them or so the regime doesn't try to give any of the weapons to one of it's terrorist clients.

The Votes Are In

The results of the voting should be taken very seriously by the government.

Despite being ridiculed in the media and generally being treated as nothing more than a set of overexposed tits with no real substance, the country has shown a real appetite to support the outsider with backing being won in the North, the South and the Midlands.

So congratulations to Helen Flanagan on being voted the sexiest woman in the UK.

The Politics Of The Street

Six Asian Muslim men have pleaded guilty to charges of planning a terrorist attack on an English Defence League* march in Dewsbury.

However violently attacking the EDL when they exercise the right to protest is tacitly supported or at least tolerated by many in the mainstream society. The organisation "Unite Against Fascism" has repeatedly launched violent attacks on the EDL yet that didn't stop the likes of David Cameron lending his support to this Socialist Workers Party front group.

Once people start romanticising street brawling as a means of opposing movements that you oppose it seems harsh to jail people for taking the idea half a step further.


* I'm not under any illusions about the EDL, which does include many out and out fascists. Fun EDL anecdote- I was in Penzance a few months ago for work reasons and briefly spoke to someone managing a pub.

He asked where I was from and when I replied "Northampton" his follow up question was "what do you think of all the blacks?", I mumbled a polite reply.

He then told me that his mate Chris, who was a shopfitter from Weston Super Mare, had founded the EDL before being marginalised by someone called Tommy from Luton who spent all the EDL's money on cocaine. Chris had now launched a secret breakaway group called the "English Volunteer Force".

Time To Cut VAT?

Keynesian theory suggests that public spending ought to be counter cyclical- so during a recession we should run deficits to keep up public spending whereas when the economy grows we should run a surplus.

Most self proclaimed Keynesians only support the first part of that equation and also favoured ever rising public spending during the boom years. When Gordon Brown during the first four years as Chancellor, ran a surplus he berated by pundits and politicians in his own party for being stingy (after 2001 he turned into the spendthrift idiot we know and love).

However despite the political difficulty of running a surplus during a boom the basic theory makes sense. Which is why I am beginning to wonder whether it is time for a cut in VAT* to pump up the economy.

A cut in VAT would not undermine the ongoing project of reducing the rate at which government grows- but it would have an immediate effect in terms of boosting consumer spending.

* Of all the proposed stimulus methods, only a tax cut makes sense to me- as Barack Obama found during his stimulus programme- there are no "shovel ready" government programmes that can be started quickly enough to boost growth.

New Meme- Immigration Reduces Crime.

In an otherwise very interesting article about declining crime rates in the UK and the West more generally the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley discusses possible explanations:

More immigrants. (Immigrants are less likely to commit crime than the indigenous population.). 

This is in fact the opposite of what actually occurs. Foreign nationals make up about one seventh of the UK prison population which is far greater than their percentage in the population. That doesn't even take into account those immigrants who are now UK citizens. In some European countries foreign nationals make up an even higher percentage of the prison population. So unless our justice system is racist on a scale that makes Apartheid South Africa look like paradise his claim cannot be true.

What I suspect Andrew Rawnsley has done is either import a meme from the USA (because in the States immigrants do have a lower crime rate than the population at large.) or he has swallowed misleading propaganda from the likes of ACPO.

Tweet Cops

The police are investigating more tweet crimes, including those of a blogger and those of a former youth crime commissioner. Tweet crimes are like normal crimes except they occur on Twitter, don't cause any harm to anyone and the police don't need to get off their arses to investigate them.

The commissioner is Paris Brown who wrote some tweets that "could be considered offensive" when she was 14 or so. One would have thought if there were likely to be incite crime then that would be evident in the years since she wrote them. The blogger is "Old Holborn" who was trolling Liverpudlians with comments about the Hillsborough disaster. They took it very badly- no one thought to tell them to "calm down, calm down!". However no one was harmed by his tweets.

The police have no business regulating petty insults and drunken boasts and it is worrying that they are unable to realise this.

Criminalising Terrorism- A Thought

The death of Margaret Thatcher has brought the IRA hunger strikes back into the news, with a lot on the far left of British politics and the far right of Irish politics blaming her for their deaths.

What the hunger strikers wanted was to be granted political status- not to be treated simply as common criminals.

Yet when after 9/11 the United States refused to treat captured terrorists as criminals but instead granted them a special status- in Guantanamo Bay- many people were outraged, and that includes almost all those on the far left who blamed Thatcher for letting the hunger strikers do the decent thing.