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18 Jul 08

Toddlers who dislike spicy food racist, say report - Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk/...y-food-racist,-say-report.html - Preview

political correctness toddlers political_correctness

The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from
Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and
nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among
youngsters in their care.
This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in
response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.
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- Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their
  local council. The guide added: "Some people think that if a large
  number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the
  institution. In fact, the opposite is the case."

23 Jun 08

Timothy Birdnow -- The Progressive Road to Hell

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political_correctness liberal welfare poverty political correctness

work for a large ``scattered site`` property management company in St. Louis, and often visit the sleazy underbelly of the city as part of my duties. This job is not for the meek or squeamish; we occasionally find dead bodies, we ALWAYS find roaches and spiders, we go into dilapidated buildings full of mice droppings, etc.
The building looked long abandoned. Every window on the first floor had been broken out, and all of the back doors were standing open; the vandals had succeeded in cutting through the plywood we had used to secure them. There was a huge hole in the wall on the side of the building where vandals had tunneled through the bricks. (It was obvious that they had thrown the bricks they removed from the wall through the windows of the building.) Trash was strewn throughout the yard, and the fence had been pulled down.
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- We went through the vacant units methodically. Inside was pure filth, with trash, dried food, used cotton balls and Q-tips and used condoms on the floors. It was obvious that people were using drugs and prostituting in this horrible place. (I cannot, in my wildest dreams, imagine performing a sex act inside this disease-riddled place!) Walls were down to bare studs in spots, or had food or human discharge on them. I feared accidentally sticking myself with a used needle.
- While we were talking to our squatter, the one remaining tenant came down to speak to us. She had been living in this apartment with no heat, since she couldn`t pay her gas bill. She had two school-aged children, who never seem to be in school, living in this hell-hole. Since the theft of her water lines (thieves steal them for copper) she had been without water, and hadn`t bothered to call us; she had continued to use the toilet, and the feces had formed a cone which rose above the toilet seat, forcing them to defecate standing up. When they grew thirsty, they walked two blocks to the nearby gas station and bought a bottle of water.
- The plight of those children really struck me; they are the walking dead. The boy was undoubtedly going to join a gang in a couple of years and would either be dead or imprison by the time he was 17. The girl would probably become a drug addict (as I`m sure is true of her mother) and would go enter the family prostitution business. She would probably die of some easily treated illness after first spitting out a couple of children of her own, thus perpetuating the cycle. I see nothing but coffins in their futures.
- Many of our tenants receive rental assistance and can live better, yet frequently even those we think will be good default on rent and damage the apartments. Why? Often we find drugs, pornography, or evidence of criminality (guns, etc.). Strangely, many of these tenants will have Bible tracts left amidst their debris, tracts referencing prosperity theology. What they are taking from their readings of the Bible is a kind of pseudo-Christianity, a primitive magical belief that God can be made to give them things through invocations and spiritual practices. They miss the whole point of Salvation, that it is a spiritual gift given freely by God for our souls and not some method of squeezing material things from the Divine by ritualistic practices..
- To many such, a trip for groceries is a major undertaking, necessitating most of their day be devoted to the journey. They must obtain medical care from a free clinic, or the hospital emergency room, and frequently have civil judgements from the Fire Department because must take an ambulance to get there. Their lives are restricted to the few paltry blocks surrounding their homes; they get their food from gas stations.
- Utilities are hit-and-miss; when their bill becomes unpayable they transfer service to another name (often a child). If they cannot find someone to sign for them, they do without. It`s amazing how many tenants in such areas use candles for light, or kerosene heaters to keep warm, or electric space heaters. Blankets are tacked to the doorframes to keep heat in one room. If they can afford pagers, they can walk to local pay phones to return calls-otherwise they are unreachable.
  
  Life is especially Hobbesian; poor, hard, brutish, and (mercifully) short.
- This is what ``progressive`` social policies and good intentions have wrought! (What is paved with good intentions?) Feminism, welfare, and the sexual revolution, along with the explosion of narcotics, have completely destroyed the black family. This woman had a father, who was probably a drug addict or alcoholic and who likely lived on welfare. In another time, he would have been poor and uneducated, but would have worked and cared for his children. Thanks to the compassion of the Left, he was freed of any responsibility and could destroy himself and everyone around him at his leisure. Because more children mean more government largesse, poor women frequently become baby factories, spitting out more hopeless welfare recipients and keeping our prisons full. These children will grow up sitting on their front stoop, waiting for drug customers or johns, just as their mother sat on hers, her mother on hers, and their children will sit on theirs. It becomes an endless cycle of si
  tting and waiting, waiting to die.
- Those children deserve better. They deserve an education, a clean home, hope. The nanny state steals hope. It offers the easy path at the expense of self-esteem and upward mobility. Sloth is the hallmark of the welfare state, and sloth leads to ignorance and despair.
- The physical environment is not the problem, but rather a symptom of a deeper malady. It is, as Dan Quayle said, a poverty of values. Secular Humanism and progressivism have taken personal responsibility and familial bonding out of the equation, and the very poor are left to their fate. They have been told they are animals, ugly and ruled by their lusts, incapable of raising themselves beyond their station. They have substituted the government for the father, have excused drug abuse and other destructive behavior in the interest of tolerance, have assured these people that institutional racism and greedy capitalism have conspired to rob them of a better life. Is it any wonder that a poor youth turns to crime, when he looks around and sees apathy, poverty, and despair, and hears that it is the fault of wealthy white men?
- That`s where multiculturalism comes in; the Left encourages pride in one`s faults, demands the right to continue a morally impoverished lifestyle. Multiculturalism and Moral Relativism produce practices and beliefs that are ultimately highly destructive to society as a whole and to the poor in particular. The concept of ``blackness``, the idea that crime, drugs, and violence are authentic to the African-American experience, prevents an honest look at public policy-and how we deal with the poor. It has become chic to live in squalor.
- Unfortunately, many have a vested interest in maintaining this racial plantation; the worst racism in America comes from people who claim to champion the African-American community-civil rights leaders, compassionate liberals, etc. They steal more than money, they steal hope.
- As a result, crime, drugs, illiteracy, poverty, and hopelessness curse many African-Americans. Nothing is done because those who should be acting have nothing to gain; Bill Cosby was right when he chastised the Black Community for separatism in the name of ``Blackness``. They have to take responsibility for what is happening to their poor.
- There is absolutely no reason for these places to exist; they are a monument to the insanity that is Liberalism. Without decades of leftist social experimentation this place would never have existed, and everyone would have been the better for it. Those children are living a nightmare, a demonic version of the American Dream.

20 Jun 08

Crunchy Con - Rod Dreher, Conservative blog, Beliefnet conservative politics and religion blog

Ms Pisani should know better than most, having spent the best part of ten years within "the industry". As such her analysis inevitably extends beyond the practicalities of HIV prevention to touch on matters of more universal significance, confirming, regrettably, the common prejudice that the corruption and incompetence of international aid agencies are a major impediment to solving the problems that are ostensibly their raison d'être.

blog.beliefnet.com/...the-wisdom-of-whores.html - Preview

social entrepreneurship aid political_correctness corruption

She thinks that two great forces have distorted international attempts to control the AIDS epidemic in Africa and Asia: political correctness and religious fundamentalism. Political correctness has inhibited unequivocal official recognition that AIDS is spread by certain sexual practices and the injection of drugs, which means that efforts at prevention are often directed at people who are not at risk in the first place, while neglecting those who are. Religious fundamentalism has prevented or obstructed practical solutions, such as the distribution of condoms, in favour of utopian goals such as sexual abstinence.

27 May 08

Why the presidential candidates won't talk about Israel | csmonitor.com

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israel propaganda political_correctness politics

Since its birth, Israel has received at least $114 billion from the US in direct foreign economic and military aid, says Shirl
McArthur, a retired US diplomat who periodically updates his Israel cost estimates for the Washington Report on Middle East
Affairs (WREMA), a magazine often critical of US policy toward Israel.
The late Washington economist Thomas Stauffer did that calculation several years ago. He found total official aid to
Israel, up to 2002, came to $247 billion. He added other costs of US support of Israel (interest on debt, higher oil prices,
etc.) to reach a highly controversial total of $1.6 trillion.
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- In March, a Memorandum of Understanding from the White House to Congress urged an additional $30 billion in military aid to
  Israel, a sum spread at about $3 billion a year through fiscal year 2018. Currently, Israel ranks as the top recipient of
  American foreign aid ($2.4 billion in 2007 by an official calculation) if reconstruction money for Iraq is excluded. Next
  are Egypt ($1.8 billion) and Afghanistan ($1 billion).
- To Findley, the "most powerful instrument of intimidation" used by pro-Israel groups is the charge of "anti-Semitism." The
  meaning of that term has been expanded. It used to be applied to those hostile to a race or faith, that is, against Jews or
  Judaism. Now it's often applied to critics of Israel or US-Israel policy, says Findley.
- Another fear of politicians involves the campaign contributions of pro-Israel political action committees (PACs). Last week
  WREMA reported that more than 20 of these PACs have contributed $1.1 million to Washington politicians in the 2007-08 election
  cycle. That amount is dwarfed by what the three presidential candidates have raised for their campaigns.
- Since Israel now has a relatively prosperous per capita national income comparable to Cyprus or Slovenia, direct US economic
  aid to Israel has been replaced gradually by military aid. Since money is fungible, that would make little real economic difference
  to Israel as its government pays its high military bills. In fact, Congress allows Israel to use 26 percent of the aid it
  receives to buy arms outside the US, thereby helping build up its own weapons industry. "We are thus shooting ourselves [the
  US weapons industry] in the foot," charges Janet McMahon, managing editor of WREMA.
- Professor Walt maintains he's pro-Israel. The US refusal to put pressure on Israel to settle with the Palestinians on a two-state
  solution, he argues, is not helpful.
  
  "Giving any country unconditional backing encourages irresponsible behavior," he says. It could lead to an apartheid state,
  or as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it, Israel facing "a South African-style struggle."

13 Apr 08

Jerusalem banned by politically correct clergy - Telegraph

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ethics religion political_correctness enlightenment blake poetry

The pseudo-scholarly clergy don't like that line because they deny the Glastonbury legend about Jesus coming to England with Joseph of Arimathea. This shows a numbskull literal-mindedness.
When I preach the Resurrection on Easter Day, I try to evoke the Lord's appearances around Galilee, and on the walk to Emmaus, as if they had happened in my beloved Yorkshire Dales.
Blake didn't think Jesus came to England, either. He was a poet and his lines are the stuff of imaginative allusion. But imagination is a bit beyond the reach of the polite mechanicals among the modern clergy.
Christians in England are redeemed by Christ, as surely as the first disciples were redeemed by him in Galilee. Blake's magnificent poem is a way of bringing this home to us, building the truth of the experience into our hearts and minds by using homely, national imagery.
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- What the modern clergy can't stand is the powerful evocation of England. When they see the word "England" they don't hear the music of ancient Albion. They see patriotism and national pride, which to them are the next worse things to fascism and expansionary imperialism.
  But, as Chesterton said, if a man won't love his country, it is difficult to believe he loves anything. Blake's hymn was a prelude to Milton, and he knew that Paradise Lost, the Fall of Man, happens down the Old Kent Road as definitely as anywhere else.
- Odd, the trendy clergy's preference for abstractions and internationalism when it was abstracted international communism under Stalin and Mao which slaughtered millions more even than the über-nationalists in the Third Reich.
  There is nothing abstract or theoretical about Blake's hymn. He wasn't writing a report for the General Synod. As a poet of genius, he knew that the way to convey spiritual realities is to incarnate them in things: swords, chariots, clouded hills, mountains green.
- Now, at last, we are getting close to understanding this sour prejudice against Jerusalem among so many clergy. For Blake is attacking them - those who, though they promised at ordination to challenge the follies of the age, actually aid and encourage them.
- If Blake could hear for five minutes these people banging on about their true preoccupations, the follies of the age - anti-racism, gender egalitarianism, compliance, the foreign aid industry and the paranoid fantasy of global warming - he would sing all the more loudly against this lot: "Bring me my bow… bring me my arrows… bring me my sword…"

25 Mar 07

The Dubliner || Justin Keating

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anti-semitism anti-zionism censorship israel media political_correctness

Three days after the magazine went on sale, David Golding, the press officer at the Israeli Embassy, wrote an email to express his disgust at what he called Keating’s “anti-semitic article.” “I am amazed,” he wrote, “you let this offensive and hurtful rant go in to what was up to now quite a decent magazine.” Had I missed something? I re-read the article several times. There was nothing in it that might warrant such a charge, and I was angry that Golding had conflated the terms anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic. So I sent him a terse reply: “It's called freedom of speech, David, and it’s one of the things that distinguishes a democracy from a dictatorship.”

“Does that,” he responded, “apply to Holocaust deniers as well?”

Instead of debating the substance of Keating’s argument, his accuser was throwing insults around, like a child hurling toys from a pram. But these weren’t toys; they were powerful, shocking words, and suddenly I sensed that something was very, very wrong.

A few hours later we started to receive abusive and often vulgar emails from people all over the world. Within the next seven days we received over 2,000 such letters. Some of the correspondents attempted to refute Keating’s arguments, but most just levelled the same lazy charge of anti-Semitism. Some even suggested that I also hate Jews, because I published the article. (At this point I should probably reveal that Justin Keating has Jewish children. And my own father is Jewish.)

10 Mar 07

Has telling the truth become sackable? | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph

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anti-semitism blair corruption political_correctness politics uk-politics

I'd never joke about anti-Semitism, not least because my
Jewish friends tell me increasingly about the "civilised"
or "respectable" version of it that they find creeping
into everyday life - notably, it seems, in the BBC's coverage
of the Middle East, which appears to uphold the view that Israel is
evil and an international Jewish conspiracy is trying to take over
the world (Adolf Hitler, q.v.).
But can it be right that Lord Levy is being "hung out to
dry" in the cash-for-honours case because, as his rabbi has
said, he is Jewish? I very much doubt it. You might think there are
all sorts of reasons why Lord Levy deserves to be locked up and the
key thrown away that have nothing to do with his ethnicity - his
invention of Alvin Stardust being principal among them. The main
reason most of us know Lord Levy is Jewish is that he has made such
a big deal of telling everyone what a prominent member of the Jewish
community he is: he can't have it both ways.

Has telling the truth become sackable? | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph

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military political_correctness racism uk-politics

No one is suggesting that Col Mercer is a racist - not Dave, and
not, more to the point, any of the black soldiers who have since the
sacking revealed how happy they were to serve under such a fine
officer. No: Col Mercer has lost his job merely for describing life
in the Army as it is: a subject on which, since he gave 25 years
distinguished service to his country, he might conceivably know more
about than his obsessively politically correct and obviously quite
unworldly party leader.