RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12427/populist-government-takes-power-in-italy

The new government has pledged to pursue a host of populist policies, including reclaiming national sovereignty from the European Union over issues ranging from border protection and immigration to economics and finance. For now, however, it has abandoned previous plans to hold a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro.

“The EU Budget Commissioner the German Oettinger says the markets will show Italians the right way to vote. If that isn’t a threat…” — Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega party

The continued patronizing by EU officials has contributed to the rise of populism in Italy and feeds popular support for the euroscepticism embraced by M5S and Lega.

Italy’s rival anti-establishment parties — the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) and the nationalist League (Lega) — have formed a “eurosceptic” coalition government.

The new government has pledged to pursue a host of populist policies, including reclaiming national sovereignty from the European Union over issues ranging from border protection and immigration to economics and finance. For now, however, it has abandoned previous plans to hold a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro.

The viability of a M5S/Lega government initially was thrown into doubt after Italian President Sergio Mattarella vetoed their eurosceptic choice for finance minister: Paolo Savona, an 81-year-old former industry minister who has called Italy’s entry into the euro a “historic mistake.”

M5S/Lega reached a compromised by nominating Giovanni Tria, an economics professor who holds politically correct views on the euro, to head the finance ministry. Fittingly, Savona will become Italy’s new Minister for European Affairs.

The new government, which was sworn in by Mattarella on June 1, will be headed by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a little-known law professor with no experience in politics, and two deputy prime ministers: M5S leader Luigi Di Maio, who also becomes minister for economic development and labor; and Lega leader Matteo Salvini, who also becomes minister of the interior. The cabinet will have 19 ministers in all.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12428/british-justice-poppycock

Instead of arresting rapists, the police, in at least a couple of cases, actually arrested people who had done nothing other than to try to rescue their children from the clutches of rapists.

So much concern – legitimately so – about the sacred right of the rapists to a fair trial, including the presumption of innocence and an opportunity to retain the lawyers of their choice – but so much readiness to excuse the denial of the same right to Robinson.

These decades of cover-ups by British officials are themselves unspeakable crimes. How many of those who knew, but who did nothing, have faced anything remotely resembling justice? Apparently none.

As any viewer of British TV news knows, a “trained professional journalist” in Britain observes all kinds of rules of professional conduct: he calls Muslims “Asians,” he describes any critic of Islam, or anyone who attends a rally protesting the unjust incarceration of a critic of Islam, as a member of the “far right,” and he identifies far-left smear machines as “anti-racist groups.”

The coverage here during the last few days of the Tommy Robinson affair in Britain appears to be having at least a small impact in certain circles in Merrie Olde England. Dispatches have come in from some of the tonier addresses in the UK explaining, in that marvelous tone of condescension, which no one from beyond the shores of England can ever quite pull off, that those of us who sympathize with Robinson have got it all wrong; that we simply do not grasp the exquisite nuances of British jurisprudence, specifically the kingdom’s laws about the coverage of trials – for if we did understand, we would recognize that Robinson’s summary arrest and imprisonment did not represent an outrageous denial of his freedom of speech, his right to due process, and his right to an attorney of his own choosing, but were, in fact, thoroughly appropriate actions intended to ensure the integrity of the trial he was covering. Those of us outside the UK who think that British freedom has been compromised and that the British system of law has been cynically exploited for ignoble purposes are, apparently, entirely mistaken; on the contrary, we are instructed, Britain’s police are continuing to conduct themselves in a responsible matter, Britain’s courts are still models of probity, and Britain’s real journalists (not clumsy, activist amateurs like Robinson) persist in carrying out their role with extraordinary professionalism and propriety, obeying to the letter the eminently sensible rules that govern reportage about court cases in the land of Magna Carta.

“It is true,” acknowledged one correspondent, “that in previous years the UK police wrongly hesitated to prosecute Muslim grooming gangs. And it was a shocking scandal, which the Daily Mail did much to expose and excoriate. But that has changed.”

Hesitated? Changed? Talk about English understatement. For decades – not years – police, social workers, local politicians, and journalists all over Britain knew that thousands of non-Muslim girls throughout the country were being repeatedly raped by Muslim gangs. The perpetrators were not arrested – partly because police and others in authority were apparently terrified of being called racists.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/putin-the-manager

On May 30, Russia Today (not to be confused with the RT television network) published an article by Srdja Trifkovic in Russian, “Putin is a manager rather than a far-seeing statesman who follows a long-term plan.” We bring you this piece in Dr. Trifkovic’s translation, a sequel to his article Putin’s Collapsing Credibility posted here a month ago.

It has been perfectly clear to me, since early spring of 2014 and Putin’s hesitating response to the crisis in Ukraine, that Russia does not have a serious strategy. An adequate response would have entailed prompt despatch of Russian forces to protect the Russian-speaking population, from Kharkov in the northeast to Nikolaev in the center and Odessa in the southwest, in accordance with the R2P doctrine. Instead, there was a consolation prize [Crimea], rather meager for the loss of 500 miles of strategic depth inhabited by a pro-Russian majority.

Russia experienced something similar with the regime-change operation in Tbilisi in 2003, when Shevardnadze was replaced by the unstable Mikhel Saakashvili. The Russians “protected” South Ossetia and Abkhasia, one-fifth of the country, but Georgia was lost to the pro-NATO regime. In Central Asia the Russians are losing ground to the Chinese. Their north-south geopolitical vector in the direction of Iran has been cut by the Chinese one, which extends from Xinjiang to the Caspian Sea. The Chinese are gaining ground with greater investment and soft power, which is also projected by Turkey throughout the region. This is aptly illustrated by the fact that Kazakhstan is replacing Cyrillic with Latin as its national language script.

In Belarus the situation is fluid. The relations between Moscow and Minsk are worse than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Poor personal rapport between [Belorussian president Alexander] Lukashenko and Putin has morphed into a very visible weakness of that alliance. In Armenia, the Russians were faced with a routine regime-change operation directly copied from Gene Sharp’s textbook. Unlike Georgia and Ukraine, let it be noted, Armenia is both a member of the Eurasian Economic Union and of the Collective Security Treaty Organization [ODKB, founded in Moscow in 1992].

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/second-coming-karl-marx/

One thing young people are very unlikely to learn—not from our education system anyway—is that no simple concept can ever hope to explain all of human history, or even most of it. Denied this insight, the notion that history has been determined by class struggles is an easy sell.

Most readers of Quadrant would have expected the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx on May 5, 1818, to go largely unnoticed. Today, most would think Marxism a philosophy that died at the end of the Cold War and is now well and truly relegated to the dustbin of history. However, our mainstream press still found adherents who not only marked the anniversary but took an upbeat position. Professor John Buchanan of the School of Business at the University of Sydney declared: “Marx was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. His work Das Kapital is still referred to and used in discussions of the modern economy.” In his interview, the Sunday Telegraph observed:

As Western democracies confront such global capital Goliaths as Facebook and Google, the Australian banking royal commission and business pressure to reduce wages by cutting penalty rates and employing casual labour, Buchanan says Marx’s complaints of social inequality under capitalism are increasingly relevant. Marx’s key arguments were that society was the history of class struggles, between property or capital owners, and those without capital.

In London and New York the anniversary was even more newsworthy. Some major newspapers responded as though Marxism was enjoying an intellectual revival, on the verge of the secular equivalent of a Second Coming.

The New York Times headlined: “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right”, and endorsed Marx’s alleged “originality and profound importance as a philosopher”, claiming:

Today the legacy would appear to be alive and well. Since the turn of the millennium countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age … Educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis—that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit—is correct.

In London, the Independent also declared Marxism was on the brink of something big: “The world is finally ready for Marxism as capitalism reaches the tipping point.” It said Marx had predicted that the centralisation inherent in globalised, capitalist economies would give birth to a post-capitalist society. Socialist ideas, the Independent asserted, remain celebrated throughout the world, especially among younger generations:

Socialism does not carry historical baggage for a younger generation left behind by the iniquities of capitalism. A Harvard study found that a majority of millennials reject capitalism and a third are in favour of socialism. This is what might be called the revenge of Marx; the rehabilitation of one of the world’s historical philosophers.

The notion of a Marxist revival explains the otherwise difficult to comprehend electoral appeal to young people of those two aged white male socialists, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.

https://pjmedia.com/parenting/australia-audits-childrens-books-to-make-sure-gender-isnt-labelled/

Australian officials are combing through children’s books — and toys — in kindergartens, schools, and libraries, aiming not just to promote “gender neutral” options but to avoid “gender stereotyping” of any kind.

At least two city councils in the Australian state of Victoria — Manningham and Melbourne, specifically — have started “auditing” children’s books, ultimately considering a kind of ban on the terms “boy” and “girl.”

The effort follows research from the Australian National University showing that children were influenced by “gender stereotyping.” The research suggested that educators should “minimise the extent to which gender is labelled” and avoiding telling children what girls and boys should do, News.com.au reported.

In seeking to undermine “gender stereotypes,” activists seem willing to promote confusion among children, undermining the important discoveries kids make about gender early in life.

Parents were none to pleased to hear the news.

“For goodness sake, this is social engineering gone crazy,” Marie Hardwick wrote on Facebook. “Leave kids alone to be kids. Stop trying to destroy kids’ childhoods.”

Sarah Lovejoy, mother of a 2-year-old daughter, responded to a video on the Australian TV show Sunrise’s Facebook page.

“This needs to stop. I’ve got a two-year-old daughter (yes I picked her gender based on what genitals she was born with) and she plays with cars, trains, tractors, Barbies, dolls and uses her imagination and pretends she’s cooking food or being a doctor,” Lovejoy argued. “Let’s just let kids be kids.”

“Banning the availability of anything, or taking choice away, is definitely the wrong way to go about making classrooms gender neutral,” Billie Deborah Chin wrote. “It should be about making everything available to everyone.”

Defenders of the idea cited studies showing that girls and boys develop gender preferences early in life and that toys are becoming more gender stereotyped. “The research is actually very interesting,” commentator Cath Webber said. “What they’re telling people to do is … don’t tell girls they have to play with Barbies and don’t tell boys they have to play with Lego.”

Webber insisted that the female deficit of interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) may trace back to the idea that Legos are for boys. Lego actually makes a broad range of toys — for boys and girls — and it is arguably likely that boys generally gravitate toward objects more and girls generally gravitate toward people.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Taube noted, Australia’s social justice warriors attempted to maintain calm, assuring parents that their kids’ Winnie the Pooh and Thomas the Tank Engine books were safe. Tania King, one of the authors of the recent paper on minimizing gender “labelling,” argued that the entire hubbub emerged from one line misquoted from her 40-page literature review. CONTINUE AT SITE