Thursday, April 19, 2018



It’s not just Starbucks: White fear is an American problem

By Renée Graham, who is black and who writes in the Leftist Boston Globe. 

She is perfectly correct that white fear is an American problem and her essay below gives examples of the bad effects that white fear has on blacks.  But in typical leftist style she tells only half the story. She thinks it is sufficient to describe a problem only.  She makes no attempt to examine WHY that problem exists. 

I suppose it would be impossible for her to say so but the problem is created by blacks. The enormous incidence of violent crime among blacks is the cause of the fear.  For their own safety, American whites have to be wary of any black they do not know personally.  When one third of black males spend some time in jail during their lifetime, the probability that a random black is a criminal is high.  So white fear is a black problem.  They cause it.

I live in Australia and the few Africans we have here are also often very violent.  But is that a result of white oppression?  Hardly.  They came here as refugees.  They should be grateful for being given refuge from Africa's wars. Australia has been nothing but good to them.

Our big minority however is the Chinese.  They have a very low rate of criminality. They don't bother anyone and nobody bothers them.  It is no problem for them to be driving while Chinese, to be shopping while Chinese, to be out walking while Chinese or to be sitting in a coffee shop while Chinese.  As the Bible says:  "As ye sow, so shall ye reap" (Galatians 6:7)

The high incidence of black criminality is a sad fact for blacks who are not criminal. They get judged as likely to do things that they do not intend to do.  They are born unlucky.  But there are all sorts of people who are born unlucky.  They just have to learn to deal with it.  The writer below has learned to deal with it.  She just resents having to do so.  But she should turn her resentment towards the lawless blacks who originate the problem rather than being critical of whites.



DRIVING WHILE BLACK. Walking while black. Shopping while black. Selling CDs while black. Listening to music in a car while black.  Asking for directions while black. Sitting in Starbucks while black.

To be black is to always be in the wrong place at the wrong time because, in America, there is never a right place for black people.

Several recent events again drove home that point like a stake through the heart. Two black men in Philadelphia were arrested at a Starbucks for being two black men in Starbucks. They hadn’t ordered anything and were waiting for a friend. This was enough to make a Starbucks employee call the police.

Not long after several officers arrived, the men were perp-walked off the premises in handcuffs. Hours later, they were released without charges.

Three years ago, the coffeehouse chain launched its quickly aborted “Race Together” campaign to spark conversations about race. Now it’s in the piping-hot center of another debate about racial profiling. A video of the incident has been viewed more than 9 million times, and the story is now a national headline.

For black people, this video has been viral forever. This is what we live with every damn day.

This isn’t a Starbucks problem. It could have been a fast food restaurant, a mall — or a street in Cambridge. Last Friday police responded to a report of a naked man on Massachusetts Avenue. A video shows Selorm Ohene, a black 21-year-old Harvard student, being struck several times after he was already pinned to the ground by three Cambridge police officers and an MBTA transit cop. Cambridge Mayor Marc C. McGovern called the incident “disturbing.”

Everything black people do is weighted by irrational white fear. It’s mentally exhausting to always be on guard, even during mundane moments like waiting in a coffee shop – or asking for directions.

Last week, Brennan Walker, a 14-year-old African-American, had to walk to his Rochester Hills, Mich., school after missing the bus. When he got lost on his four-mile trek, Walker went to a house and knocked on the door, hoping to get directions. The woman who answered accused him of trying to break in — then it got worse. A white man, wielding a shotgun, ran at the teen. His shot missed Walker, who took off as soon as he saw the gun.

Jeffrey Craig Zeigler, 53, has been charged with assault with intent to murder and possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony. Walker said he chose that house because he saw a neighborhood-watch sticker and thought it would be safe.

Years ago when I was dating a white woman, I used to half-joke that being with her meant that if we got lost in a predominately white area, she could be the one to ask for directions. Before GPS, I would often opt for squinting at maps and driving miles out of my way rather than ask for help. Even with my lousy sense of direction, I wouldn’t run the risk of ending up in jail or dead because someone criminalized my blackness.

After Trayvon Martin was shot to death in 2012, the media became obsessed with “the talk” many black parents have with their sons about how to behave around white people, especially cops. I never got a version of that conversation. Still, I always knew not to reach into my bag in a store unless I’m in full view of the cashier or to leave the house without ID.

When you’re black, you just know. Just as the two men in Starbucks knew not to do anything that would further escalate an already ridiculous predicament.

On “Good Morning America,” Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson called what happened to those two black men “reprehensible” and plans to meet with them to apologize personally. GMA host Robin Roberts called this a “a teachable moment,” but I don’t believe that. This nation has had several centuries’ worth of teachable moments, and little is ever learned. Yes, there has been progress, but that’s slight solace when you can still be arrested simply for sitting in a coffee shop.

Nothing will ever change until a majority of white people in this nation stop perceiving black existence as sinister and suspicious. Talking about racism may hurt white people’s feelings, but their unchecked racism continues to endanger our black lives.

SOURCE






The Four Terrible Things That Are Destroying Boys In Our Culture

Our culture is very bad for boys. It's bad for girls, too. It's bad for everyone. But I think we fail to recognize and appreciate the unique struggles that boys face. Partly we fail to recognize it because we are too busy worrying about the Patriarchy's persecution of women. Partly we fail to recognize it because, collectively, we just don't care that much about boys. Partly we fail to recognize it because men are not as likely to talk about their own plight. And partly a man will not talk about it because everyone, even his fellow men, will only laugh at him and downplay the problem.

There are many factors at play, and they all lead to a pretty dire situation. Men are told about their privilege, but if you look at things honestly you will not see much evidence of this privilege. On the contrary, you will see several profound disadvantages suffered by men in general and boys in particular.

Here, I think, are the four biggest:

1) Our culture preys relentlessly on a boy's weaknesses.

Let's imagine the world the average 13-year-old boy inhabits. He has long since been exposed to hardcore pornography, and probably watches it regularly. Then puberty hits. His hormones are going haywire. His brain is hardwiring itself to focus obsessively on sex. He cannot really help it. He is now fertile, even as the girls his age, for the most part, are not. He feels the biological impulse to go out and find a sexual partner, though he does not understand this urge and his conception of human sexuality has been perverted and confused by the porn habit he developed in sixth grade.

The boy cannot escape sex. It is all over his computer. All over his phone. All over social media. All over the TV. All over the music he listens to. He goes to school and his female classmates are dressed like strippers. He goes anywhere and that's how the women are dressed. It seems that everyone is doing everything they can to make a degenerate and a creep out of him, even as they demand that he control himself. We ask for self-discipline and self-control from the boy while providing him with no tools to develop them. Rather than tools, we give him temptation. Non-stop temptation, everywhere he goes, all day, every day, right at the moment when his brain is least capable of overcoming it.

And even if the boy possesses the almost superhuman moral fortitude required to pursue chastity and purity in the midst of the sex-choked fog that engulfs him, he will only meet mockery and discouragement from our society. The very people who demand that he "respect women" and "control himself" will heap scorn on him if he tries to do exactly that. Again the boy will need to call upon his superhuman courage to ignore the jeers, just as he rejects the temptations, so that he can walk the path to virtue on his own, with no help from anyone.

Most boys do not have this courage. Most adults do not have it. Yet we expect of our boys a virtue that we do not possess and have never demonstrated.

2) There is a catastrophic lack of male role models.

17 million kids live in homes without fathers. In the black community, around 70 or 80% are fatherless.

Almost all kids have mothers. And they have mostly female teachers. They're even more likely to have grandmothers than grandfathers, as men die significantly earlier. A girl will have no shortage of female role models, which is a fact worth celebrating. It's also a profound advantage that many boys, with their "privilege," do not enjoy.

Even the boys who have dads may not have male role models. Very often, despite the father's physical presence, the mother is still the spiritual leader of the household. There are plenty of fathers who stick around but then refuse to take part in their children's moral formation. They are warm bodies taking up space, and perhaps bringing home a paycheck, but they neither lead their families nor provide a worthwhile example to their sons.

If a boy wants to know how to be a man, he will have to depend on his mother to show him the ropes, or else he will turn on the TV and imitate whatever he sees on the screen. He will learn about masculinity from musicians and movie stars and superheroes. He will develop a hollow, cartoonish idea of manhood and he will become a hollow, cartoon man.

What else can we expect? It's hard to be a good man nowadays. It's nearly impossible if nobody has ever shown you how.

3) The eduction system is designed for girls.

There is a reason why girls outperform boys in school. Girls are not smarter, on average, but they have an easier time because the classroom is set up to reward the calm and organized demeanor more natural to them. Boys are more rambunctious; they have more physical energy; they are less able to sit still and less able to focus attentively on one dull task for a prolonged period of time. The typical classroom environment is torture for a boy. It penalizes him for being himself. It penalizes him for being a boy.

As a result, boys get lower grades. Boys are more likely to drop out. Boys are more likely to be expelled. Perhaps worst of all, boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. By high school, 20% of boys — 20% — are diagnosed. Yet we never stop to ask ourselves why boys are more susceptible to this mysterious mental condition. We never stop to consider that perhaps we are not so much diagnosing boys as we are diagnosing boyhood.

If the school system were not predicated on sitting still and memorizing things (and it need not be), there would be no ADHD. We have arbitrarily decided that every child must be the sort of child who thrives in that environment, even if we have to stuff pills in his mouth to force the issue. Girls are not drugged nearly as often because most of them are already the sort of people the school system prefers. The system may not prefer girls, but it does prefer people who have characteristics more common in girls, which is the same thing.

4) Masculinity is denigrated.

You might think we've already done enough to these boys. We've made our point. We've shoved sex in their face, deprived them of role models, and forced them into an education system that treats their personality as a disease. But we are not satisfied. Finally, in case any have survived the gauntlet, we attempt to bury them in self-loathing.

Femininity is attacked in our culture as well, but not nearly so explicitly or directly. Nobody would ever call femininity itself "toxic" or "fragile." Nobody talks about female "privilege," even though, as I have demonstrated, females enjoy many unique privileges. Nobody would label all women "dangerous" or "potential monsters to be feared." These are the special denigrations reserved only for manhood.

This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that boys are emerging from childhood already broken. They are in no condition to endure the anti-male onslaught. So, they will stay broken, and we will not acknowledge that they are broken, and we will not face the fact that we are the ones who broke them.

SOURCE






Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., aggressively questioned CIA Director Mike Pompeo about his views on Islam, marriage, and sexual acts

“Do you believe that gay sex is a perversion?”

Believe it or not, that question was posed—repeatedly—in a Thursday Senate confirmation hearing to Mike Pompeo, the CIA director now nominated to be secretary of state. The graphic question was put to him by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.

He also wanted to know exactly what Pompeo thought about same-sex marriage.

Booker’s line of questioning is simply astounding—and inappropriate. He presumes, almost out of thin air, to set a new non-negotiable standard for anyone who wants to hold executive office: You must be completely on board with same-sex marriage, you must affirm gay sex, and you must espouse these convictions openly.

This kind of thought policing is becoming a trend for politicians on the left.

Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., treated Russ Vought with similar hostility in his confirmation hearing to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Sanders asked Vought, a Christian, if he stood by his past statements about salvation and final judgment—then excoriated him when he refused to recant his orthodox Christian beliefs.

Booker treated Pompeo with the same inquisitorial attitude, perhaps confirming a sad new norm in the treatment of conservative nominees for executive office.

What is most striking is that Booker seems baffled by Pompeo’s refusal to accept the left’s views on sexuality. Yet, contra the attitude of the left that such views are normal, Pompeo’s views are the same as the ones countless Democrats and even President Barack Obama held until very recently.

Booker may be surprised to learn that opposition to same-sex marriage is still very much a mainstream view in America. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, about 1 in 3 Americans disagreed with same-sex marriage. That’s about 100 million people.

Perhaps Booker can be forgiven for his ignorance of this large segment of the nation, though, since so few social conservatives speak up about their views in public these days.

But more to the point of Thursday’s hearing, Pompeo’s views on marriage are completely irrelevant to the job that he seeks. At least, they should be irrelevant. Foreign policy should have nothing to do with promoting a vision of sexuality abroad, particularly one that is novel and offensive to many cultures.

Of course, this is quite separate from standing up for the basic human rights of those overseas who identify as LGBT. Some countries punish people simply because of their sexual orientation, and the United States must never condone such actions.

But unfortunately, the U.S. government has gone far beyond standing for basic human rights and has sought to advance a liberal LGBT agenda abroad.

A New Cultural Imperialism

In early 2015, the Obama State Department created a special envoy position to promote LGBT and intersex “rights” abroad. Keep in mind that at the time, same-sex marriage was not even federally recognized in the United States (Obergefell v. Hodges changed that a few months later).

This envoy’s impact abroad has not been negligible. Randy Berry, who held the post from 2015 to 2017, visited dozens of countries where he reported having “frank conversations” with leaders, pressing them to adopt more liberal laws on sexuality and marriage. He took credit for several changes in foreign countries, including Vietnam allowing a change of sex in official documents and Nepal’s new constitution adding sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes.

Astoundingly, the Trump administration has opted to keep this envoy position in place, even as the State Department is undergoing a massive restructuring. (Berry has, however, transitioned out of the position.)

This envoy is a most egregious form of cultural imperialism, made even more illegitimate by the fact that it misrepresents American values to the world. Same-sex marriage is an extremely recent phenomenon in American life.

It also remains an ongoing source of controversy as LGBT activists seek to wield it as a cudgel against the rights of religious Americans. We are just beginning to grapple with the consequences of same-sex marriage—so what is the State Department doing exporting it abroad?

The Purge at Home

Just as LGBT activists now seek to punish religious Americans in courts of law, liberal politicians like Booker seek to purge the remaining dissenters from polite society. In the world of Cory Booker, there is no place for Mike Pompeo—except perhaps, in a re-education class. Certainly not in the Cabinet.

This sort of social ostracization and occupational discrimination was coming, but liberals long denied it. They assured us that same-sex marriage would make the world more tolerant, that conservative holdouts would have nothing to fear, and that the progressive future would have a place for everyone.

Indeed, some liberals of yesteryear would have flinched hard at Booker’s rigid questioning of Pompeo over something as seemingly peripheral as gay sex. These liberals either failed to see just how coercive their movement would become, or they knew better and were just placating America while cultural changes gained steam—and then jumped on board the train.

Justice Samuel Alito was very prescient in his 2015 dissent to the Obergefell decision: “I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.” And, we should now add, senators.

Breaking the Public Monopoly

It is not Pompeo who went after Booker, and it is not conservatives who are going after liberals. Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war. They introduced the values of sexual libertinism that so many, like Pompeo, would prefer not to imbibe—yet somehow find the audacity to demand conformity to those values as the price of admission into mainstream institutions.

This form of coercion—and it is coercion, by public shaming—is only necessary when an idea is truly vulnerable to rational critique. The truth is, the left needs conservatives to stay silent on this issue. Booker needs Pompeo to keep his head down and at least feign approval of the left’s sexual orthodoxy. Because silence feeds the regime.

The left’s monopoly on this issue ends when conservatives, like Pompeo, begin refusing to hide their views and in fact speak up in the public square.

One-third of Americans still hold to traditional marriage. If one-third of Americans start speaking up about their views, we may find the winds of history don’t always blow in one direction.

SOURCE






How Treasury found that immigrants make Australia money

This is an old chestnut that in typical Leftist style ignores the main issue.  Immigration overall has always be known as a  positive.  The receiving country gets new workers without the expense of bringing them up from babyhood.

The big issue, however, is WHICH migrants do we take in.  Most countries have categories of migrants that they take or do not take.  Requiring at least a High School graduation in an intending migrant is a common stipulation.  So categorization of migrants is nothing new.

The problem arises when normal filters are bypassed for some reason -- usually for humanitarian reasons.  And what happens when those filters are bypassed strongly validates the wisdom of the filters.

Australia bypasses most of its filters to admit refugees.  And refugees are rarely like other migrants.  Where selected migrants soon get a job and put little strain on the social security system, refugees tend to be heavily welfare dependant. 

Additionally, black and Muslim refugees are more violent.  Africans everywhere are very prone to crime and violence and Muslim refugees subscribe to a religion that both forbids  assimilation and encourages "jihad" against the host nation. 

So the article below is a red herring.  the issue is not WHETHER migration but WHICH migrants.  Readers are supposed to infer that ALL migrants are beneficial, which is not at all the case.



Immigrants consume less in government services than they pay in tax, making the federal government billions over their lifetimes, a landmark Treasury analysis has found, even when their expensive final years of life are taken into account

But the research, published by Treasury and the Department of Home Affairs, has come under fire from some population experts who believe it glosses over the link between migration and higher home prices, congestion, and strain on the environment.

The landmark study found in total, permanent skilled migrants deliver the federal government a profit of $6.9 billion over their lifetimes, temporary skilled migrants a profit of $3.9 billion, and family stream migrants $1.6 billion.

Treasurer Scott Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton have had the report for some time. Fairfax Media unsuccessfully tried to get a copy under freedom of information rules late last year.

Although the report was prepared by officials from Treasury and Home Affairs, it was Mr Morrison who decided to release it on Tuesday amid debate inside the Coalition over whether Australia's permanent and temporary migration program should be cut.

The government is expected to maintain migration of 190,000 per year in the May budget, despite the internal push for a reduction.

Australian National University demographer Liz Allen said the report makes it "very, very clear that migrants are not to blame" for infrastructure failures.

"Migrants make a net contribution to the Australian economy," she said. "If we are concerned about the failings of infrastructure such as those in the road network and rail network and housing, the issue is not migrants. The issue is the way that infrastructure funding and policy have failed to keep up with what is necessary, even to meet the population growth we would have had without migrants."

While concerns were often expressed about population-induced infrastructure pressure in cities where immigrants settled, the Treasury and Home Affairs study said there were benefits to population growth occurring in capital cities rather than regions. It said a higher population in the same geographical space increased the number of people that would benefit from a project, and could make a previously unprofitable infrastructure project viable.

University of Queensland emeritus professor Martin Bell said the report presented the “conventional conservative Treasury view,” focusing on the economic benefits of growth while paying less attention to the potentially negative effects.

“It’s important to give attention to the negative impacts as well, and the public perceptions of people in their 20s and 30s who are attempting to bid for houses,” he said.

“The report focuses on what Treasury thinks ‘might’ happen in the long term. The experience for a certain segment of the community right now is that there are negative redistributional effects as a result of high levels of migration.”

Scott Morrison has shut down suggestions from Tony Abbott, that the government should lower its immigration levels.

“There also seems to be faith in immigration as a solution to multiple issues. We are told that it generates the financial resources to meet the long-term demands for infrastructure and for the needs of an aging population. It's not going to do both.”

Mr Morrison on Tuesday said Australia’s natural population increase of around 150,000 a year had been falling as a proportion of the total. Permanent immigration was little changed. It was the rise in temporary migration that had fuelled population growth.

“You’ve got to understand what's driving the population pressures, but in addition to that you have to plan for the growth, which is what our budget is doing," he said.

The report found humanitarian migrants cost the budget $2.7 billion, with one third the result of resettlement in the first five years, including the cost of education, and the other two thirds the effect on the budget of earnings and tax too low to cover the cost of the services they consume.

Around 11 per cent of working age migrants earn no income, compared to just over 7 per cent of the working age population.

The Treasury said the higher figure most likely reflects the time it takes to acclimatise to a new country and labour market. The income of migrants grows after additional time in Australia, with substantial improvements over the first three years of roughly four times the average annual wage increase.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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