RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2020/06/when-the-facts-fade-to-black/

Anthony Dillon identifies as a part-Aboriginal Australian who is proud of both his Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ancestries. Originally from Queensland, he now lives in Sydney and is a researcher at the Australian Catholic University.

“Many times I have heard blactivists dismiss high rates of community violence and child abuse with the throwaway  line, ‘Walk a mile in our shoes before you criticize.’ Maybe they should try walking a few yards in the shoes of the police just to see what it’s like. They would likely discover that the last thing police need in pressure situations is some loud-mouth sticking a phone in a police officer’s face while shouting “I’m filming this!”

Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists and their sympathisers claim to care about all black lives, which prompts me to pose a question: Why are BLMers not protesting when blacks die at the hands of blacks? Instead, during the current eruption of outrage, they focused at first on Aboriginal deaths in custody, which demonstrated what a charade they were staging, given that Aboriginal people are less likely to die in custody than non-Aborigines. Such an inconvenient fact required a change of emphasis, hence the narrative’s switch to claims of systemic police brutality. The method? Cherry-pick examples and ignore context.

Consider a recent article by Australian activist Amy McQuire in the Washington Post. In regard to the alleged racist brutality of police and the justice system, she informs her US audience that “the violence is evident in the wounds on black bodies and in the life stories of Aboriginal people.” Actually, Amy, if it’s the wounds on black bodies you are interested in, I can take you to some remote communities where you will see all the wounded black bodies you want. The perpetrators are mostly Aboriginal, so you wouldn’t be interested in telling Americans about that, not when it is more fun, and wins you more attention, to slander an entire nation in the eyes of a wider world.

In a YouTube clip (below), Amy explains that while non-Aboriginal people regard police as protectors, “for Aboriginal people we see them as the aggravators, as the unjust people, as the people that you need protection from.” Really, Amy? When you speak of ‘Aboriginal people’, are you speaking on behalf of all Aboriginal people?

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24336/the-thin-blue-line

: http://goudsmit.pundicity.com  http://lindagoudsmit.com

There are good cops and there are bad cops. There are good doctors and there are bad doctors.

The 24/7 fake news media insists that the mob is tearing down statues, smashing windows, looting, and burning down cities because a bad cop killed a man. I don’t think so.

Does the mob burn down hospitals when a bad doctor kills a patient? No, why not? Because there is no advantage to the rulers of the mob in burning hospitals to the ground. The phrase “mob rule” is a misnomer because the mob is not self-ruled, the mob does not rule the mob, the mob has leaders. ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter (BLM) are racist, supremacist, anti-American domestic terrorist organizations. Their leaders advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government, reverse discrimination, and eliminating police departments.

In a civilized society there are lawful remedies to remove bad cops and bad doctors. It can be legitimately argued that it is difficult to remove bad cops and bad doctors because their unions and licensing boards are self-monitoring and self-governing. Police unions require too many infractions for removal, and medical doctors can simply move to another state and practice elsewhere without any limitation or public disclosure. In a civilized society, the remedy for these difficulties is changing the guidelines for removal, or even the structure of the governing bodies themselves.

So, why the violence and support of anarchy? Because the rulers of the mob are not looking for lawful reform to remove bad cops – the rulers of the mob want to remove the rule of law. There are no laws without law enforcement, only chaos.

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the largest fraternal organization of sworn law enforcement officers in the United States has over 330,000 members organized in 2,200 chapters (lodges) across the country. According to the FOP:

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/29/why-are-the-regressives-winning/

“As Power Line’s John Hinderaker recently noted, it’s puzzling “as to why America is allowing itself to be bullied by people who are at best ignorant and hateful, and in many cases not in full possession of their faculties.” Pushback is nearly unheard of. We’re planting the seeds of our own demise because we choose barbarism by default when we fail to stand for a civilized society.”

Columnist, farmer and classicist Victor Davis Hanson has cast the 2020 election as a choice between civilization and a return to primitivism. It’s unfortunate that we’ve come to that, but here we are.

“I don’t want to get political,” Hanson, also a Hoover Institution senior fellow, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson last week, “but this election no longer is about Donald Trump’s tweeting. It’s not about Joe Biden’s cognitive impairment. It has nothing to do anymore with a lockdown, the virus, the economy, foreign policy.

“It’s an existential question. A Manichean choice between whether you want civilization and you believe that America doesn’t have to be perfect to be good.”

Basement-bound Biden is the titular leader of America and the West’s regression from civilization. As the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, it’s a position he has no choice but to hold. His party is now controlled by elements bent on tearing down hundreds of years of progress. He could make a difference. But he won’t. It’s too easy to tread along with the wave.

So where are we in America in June 2020? Standing by while threats to “burn it down” are put into action

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/27/eric-hoffer-and-black-lives-matter/

Within the last month, events have propelled Black Lives Matter into a major cause, with a great deal of clout, both directly and indirectly. That influence and the anger it is associated with has also made it very risky for people to disagree with BLM even in limited ways, because of threats to objectors’ reputations, safety and livelihoods. That presents the public with a very biased conversation. As a result, perhaps only someone who has already passed on can safely air concerns.

There is one such person known for his insight into group movements – Eric Hoffer, who died in 1983. Known as the “longshoreman philosopher” for the manual labor he performed for most of his life, Hoffer wrote eleven books, beginning with 1951’s “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” which focused on the allure of a seemingly ennobling collective cause, and the coercive power which it puts in the hands of leaders and their discontented followers, in contrast with freedom, which is the only milieu in which creative individuals can flourish and find fulfillment.

Consider some of what the Presidential Medal of Freedom holder had to say about such causes:

The desire for freedom … says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities.

Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual.

https://spectator.us/end-history-george-floyd-civilization/

Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters:‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”’

The process of civilizational bankruptcy takes a similar course. Casual, seemingly isolated attacks on the fabric of civilization feel at first like so many harmless insect bites. A speaker is shouted down. A statue is vandalized or removed. A college course once deemed essential is rebaptized as offensive: first it is pilloried, then it is canceled. People start quoting Tocqueville’s warning that in a democracy, as large inequalities dissolve, small inequalities are magnified, growing both rancid and rancorous. Political posturing is everywhere. At first it seems effete and merely silly; then it grows muscles and claws. The posturing now comes with bricks, baseball bats and Molotov cocktails. Grievances blur and lose their specificity. Every slight becomes a pretext for boundless rage. The ‘system’ — ordered liberty and the rule of law — is rudely shoved into the dustbin of history. Civility itself — the social compact that makes society possible — is tossed aside as an impediment to justice.

Is this the precipice upon which we now are perched? HBO has pulled the movie Gone With the Wind because the classic Civil War story is a ‘product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society’. And while you get your mind around that nugget of politically correct virtue signaling, note that Cops, a TV show that depicts the police in a positive light, is being summarily canceled ‘amid nationwide anti police protests after Mr Floyd’s killing’, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Nidra is my dear friend- a fascinating woman and brilliant writer….rsk

* Nidra Poller (Paris) https://youtu.be/wHky3gPi0oA

Writer Nidra Poller discusses hanging out with James Baldwin and other African-American writers and musicians in 1970s Paris, the origins of the name Nidra, how her Japanese partner introduced her to Israel, and the position of women in the modern world.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

                                                                                                     George Orwell                                                                                                                

Statues and monuments are erected not just to honor an individual but as reminders we did not just appear, that we descend not just from our parents and grandparents but from a past and a culture that gave rise to the country in which we live. Despite nihilist messages from Black Lives Matter (BLM), we in America are fortunate. Most nations are not as free as this and none have seen so many “rags to riches” stories. Much of the world lives under totalitarian regimes, and the fact that global poverty has shrunk is (largely) due to the creative genius, entrepreneurial spirit and generosity of Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently Tweeted, “America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you.”   

Evolution is a slow process. Life, according to most scientists, began about four billion years ago, primates about a hundred million years ago and humanoids perhaps twenty million years ago. Over the millennia, evolution provided natural selection that allowed our ancestors to survive and gave us inherited traits that permitted us to develop as individuals. It took millions of years for man to live communally and even longer to reach the age of Enlightenment, when concepts of self-government, rule of law, equal justice and individual liberty emerged. Throughout most of history, man fought – generally over land or religion. Today, we are indebted, in terms of liberty, democracy and markets to men like Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Galileo, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Adam Smith. Their ideas, many based on the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans, developed in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The United States Constitution, when adopted in 1788, served as their laboratory. We are still being tested.

It’s all the rage right now for progressives and their allies to call anybody who doesn’t toe the party line of Black Live Matter a “racist,” or worse, a “white supremacist.” Even better is to hurl the accusation that the entire American country is “systemically racist.”

And yet, as I repeatedly note on this blog, all you need to do is look at a little data, and you quickly realize that the jurisdictions most firmly in progressive control and for the longest time — the solidly Democratic big cities with Democratic mayors, City Councils, Congresspersons, and state governors for decades on end — are the places that have the worst outcomes for their African American citizens on every metric you can find. Ask where in this country you can find the highest rates of poverty, the highest income inequality, the highest crime rates, the most murders, the most expensive housing, the worst housing shortages, the most homelessness, the highest energy costs, and so on and on — all of this impacting disproportionately on African Americans — and time after time the answer is, in the big Democrat-run cities.

But what does the dynamic that brings about these disastrous results look like on the ground? Certainly part of it is massive government “anti-poverty” bureaucracies that may have been well-intentioned at the outset, but in practice exist today only to fight to increase their staffs and budgets and never raise a single person out of poverty. But then there is also the perverse progressive mindset that demands special treatment for African Americans, somehow without realizing that that often inherently means treating African Americans as inferior..

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-room-where-it-happens-indeed/91173/

As the House readied its vote to make a new state out of the District of Columbia, the Speaker went before the press to dilate on injustice of what has obtained for the past 230 years. Mrs. Pelosi called the District “an affront to our democracy.” She noted that its residents pay taxes, serve in the military, and contribute to the “economic vitality” of America but lack for representation. “How could it be? Whose idea was that?”

It turns out that we know exactly whose idea it was. That’s because it was hatched at the very dinner party that, among other things, is now being immortalized anew in the Broadway blockbuster “Hamilton.” The dinner took place in 1790 at New York. It was no cabal of counter-revolutionary cads. The three persons in the room where it happened were Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.

Jefferson, then secretary of state, was the host. He had famously encountered Hamilton outside President Washington’s office at lower Manhattan. Hamilton, Jefferson later wrote, looked “somber, haggard, and dejected.” That was owing to Congress having just rejected his plan for the federal government to assume the states’ debts from the Revolutionary War. So Jefferson offered to host a dinner with Madison.

The repast took place on June 20. The deal they struck was that Madison would support Hamilton’s plan to federalize the debt, while Hamilton would agree to putting the American capital at a spot along the Potomac. By the end of July, the House and Senate had passed the legislation. They acted under the constitutional grant to Congress of the power to accept such a district as ceded to the federal government by the states.

And to exercise over it “exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever.” Madison, in 43 Federalist, addressed the logic of this. He called the Congress’ “complete authority at the seat of government” an “indispensable necessity.” Without it, he reckoned, “public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity.” Plus members of the government might develop a “dependence” on the local state.

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24330/face-masks-the-radical-leftist-symbol : http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

: http://lindagoudsmit.com

Masks have been a part of societies for 9,000 years. The earliest masks were used for rituals and ceremonies. Later, they were used in hunting, feasts, wars, performances, theaters, fashion, sports, movies, and then as protection against medical and occupational hazards. Masks have become symbols for their various functions. 

Different masks worn by different people have different motives. A masked bank robber is very different from a masked Halloween trick-or-treater. Masks are coverings that can also disguise messages. So it is with political masks.  

The two most controversial political masks in America today are the Muslim niqab and the COVID19 face mask. What do these seemingly disparate face coverings have in common? Both are marketed as protective face coverings with the connotation of safety, both are worn with pride by their adherents, and both disguise a powerful political message of submission. The mask is the message.

Muslim women following supremacist, Islamic religious sharia law are subservient to their fathers, husbands, and brothers no matter where they live in the world, and no matter how protective equal rights laws for women are in the country where they reside. Sharia law does not recognize the authority of the United States Constitution. 

Muslim women who embrace sharia law wear their niqabs with pride. They value their submission and, for them, wearing the face-covering is virtue signaling. For most Americans, the face mask worn by Muslim women is a detestable symbol of submission that violates American principles of equality and freedom. It is almost incomprehensible for Americans to understand these Muslim women without understanding that sharia law teaches the supremacy of Islam.