Has political correctness made everyone — most particularly our city and provincial politicians — lose all shred of common sense?
It seems so, considering Black Lives Matter TO is not only set to be honoured at the July 3 Pride parade but has also been selected to receive City Hall’s William P. Hubbard Award for Race Relations — one of five yearly Access, Equity and Human Rights awards given to leftist activists selected by other leftists who make their livelihood largely off government grants.
The world is looking at Britain and asking: What on Earth just happened? Those who run Britain are asking the same question.
Never has there been a greater coalition of the establishment than that assembled by Prime Minister David Cameron for his referendum campaign to keep the U.K. in the European Union. There was almost every Westminster party leader, most of their troops and almost every trade union and employers’ federation. There were retired spy chiefs, historians, football clubs, national treasures like Stephen Hawking and divinities likeKeira Knightley. And some global glamour too: President Barack Obama flew to London to do his bit, and Goldman Sachsopened its checkbook.
And none of it worked. The opinion polls barely moved over the course of the campaign, and 52% of Britons voted to leave the EU. That slender majority was probably the biggest slap in the face ever delivered to the British establishment in the history of universal suffrage.
Mr. Cameron announced that he would resign because he felt the country has taken a new direction—one that he disagrees with. If everyone else did the same, the House of Commons would be almost empty. Britain’s exit from the EU, or Brexit, was backed by barely a quarter of his government members and by not even a tenth of Labour politicians. It was a very British revolution.
Donald Trump’s arrival in Scotland on Friday to visit one of his golf courses was precisely the metaphor that the Brexiteers didn’t want. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee cheerily declared that the British had just “taken back their country” in the same way that he’s inviting Americans to do—underscoring one of the biggest misconceptions about the EU referendum campaign. Britain isn’t having a Trump moment, turning in on itself in a fit of protectionist and nativist pique. Rather, the vote for Brexit was about liberty and free trade—and about trying to manage globalization better than the EU has been doing from Brussels...
It’s an old concept I grant you, but nonetheless worth restating. If you want to know what people really think and feel about an issue, have them vote on it, have a referendum. It’s a principle we might want to hang on to in Canada, if it comes to changing how we vote. But for now the most firm illustration of its wisdom is the just-known results of the Brexit referendum.
The often-ignored, sometimes quite rudely deplored British people have spoken and, to the horror of enlightened opinion, respectable party leaders, the ever-guiding liberal intelligentsia, have decided they don’t want “in” the European Union. The vote comes as a mighty shock to broad-minded continentalists and supranationalists everywhere, but particularly the high elites of British politics. The Guardian’s readership will need special help — grief counsellors are already overwhelmed.
The EU vote is the most dramatic illustration to date of how the “guiding elites” of many Western countries have lost the fealty and trust of their populations. Of the gap between ordinary citizens, facing the challenges of daily life, and the swaddled, well-off and pious tribes of those who govern them, and increasingly govern them with a mixture of moralistic superiority and witless condescension...
President Barack Obama has suffered a crushing defeat over immigration at the Supreme Court that will leave the next US president to decide whether to deport or protect millions of unauthorised immigrants. The US’s top court maintained a freeze on what Mr Obama hoped would be a central part of his legacy, a plan to remove the deportation threat hanging over some 4m people in the US illegally. The fate of his plan, which affected immigrants whose children are US citizens or lawful permanent residents, will not now be decided until a new president is in the White House. The result reignites immigration as an issue in the bitter presidential campaign between Donald Trump, who has railed against illegal immigrants, and Hillary Clinton, who called the Supreme Court result “unacceptable”. Mr Obama decried the result...
...Modern identity politics came of age in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the Left was losing faith in communism. Over the last two generations, Marxism has reinvented itself through offshoots of environmentalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-globalization, and generic anti-capitalism. In furtherance of these causes, our intellectual class has seized, somewhat desperately, on the idea of Indigenous peoples as possessing special, even mystical, powers that permit them to resist the free market and industrialization. They have become a prop for white activists who seek to summon up a world that is more pure, more green, more altruistic than the soulless humdrum of post-industrial global capitalism...
Amnesty International, ostensibly a human rights organization which is frequently accused of hypocrisy and anti-western bias, has given ammunition to its critics by appointing a new Communications Director who has expressed support for a senior al Qaida leader and an antisemtic Islamic cleric who advocates suicide bombings of Jews.
Osama Saeed had previously been communications head for Qatari-based news network al Jazeera, which has been described as al Qaida's press agency. As of last week, Saeed assumed that role for Amnesty International. However, in a blow to Amnesty International's shaky credibility, it has emerged that Saeed has previously written his support for Anwar al Awlaki, a senior al Qaida recruiter who planned a number of terrorist operations, claiming the terror mastermind "preached nothing but peace," and was being "hounded" by the US. According to Saeed, the treatment of al Awaki, who has been linked to a number of terror attacks in which dozens of people were murdered, was "further evidence of what a crock the war on terror is." Another figure linked to terrorism who has Saeed's support is the extremist Egyptian cleric Yusuf Al Qaradawi, who issued a fatwa supporting suicide bombings in Israel. Qaradawi is a supporter of Adolf Hitler who said that the Nazi leader exacted God's punishment on the Jews. However, Saeed has written glowing praise about that antisemitic Egyptian Imam.
A Briton who tried to grab a police officer's gun at a Donald Trump rally in Las Vegas said he wanted to shoot the US candidate, court papers say.
Michael Steven Sandford, 20, did not enter a plea when he appeared before a judge in Nevada and was remanded in custody until a hearing on 5 July.
He is charged with an act of violence in a restricted area.
He had reportedly tried to seize the gun after saying he wanted Mr Trump's autograph at Saturday's rally.
He said he had been planning to try to shoot Mr Trump for about a year but had decided to act now because he finally felt confident enough to do so, court papers say.
Have you ever imagined a future where you plausibly could have a threesome with Cleopatra and Jayne Mansfield?
I didn't until last week, when Canadian media innovator and impresario Moses Znaimer got me to consider that possibility.
For each of the last 17 years, Znaimer has put on a 3 day conference called Ideacity, in which speakers talk about a wide variety of subjects with a particular focus, as the name suggests, on ideas that have or may come to have big influences on our lives.
It took place this year between June 15 to 17, and had a number of speakers who spoke about conventional subjects in a very interesting way. In that vein, Globe and Mail writer Ian Brown gave a hilarious, yet morbidly pessimistic talk about the perils of aging, and Soulpepper Theatre founder Albert Schultz provided compelling, intriguing insights into Soulpepper's unique and very successful artistic and business models.
But not everything at Ideacity is conventional.
Znaimer vets most of the speakers himself, and reflecting his intellectual, eclectic, and often esoteric interests, the topics range widely and in some cases, a little weirdly. And in other cases, very weirdly.
Science always plays a big role at Ideacity, since nothing changes the way humans live more than scientific discoveries and inventions. Nobel laureate physicist Art McDonald spoke about a neutrino observatory and geneticist Josef Penninger discussed the discovery of what appears to be a cure for osteoporosis and breast cancer. However, there was also some very weird science discussed.
This year's Ideacity included a very serious debate about whether realistic Sex Robots should be banned. Really.
Why you may ask, of all the topics in the world, is use of sex robots something to be worried about? Even after listening to the debate, I have no good answer to that question. But it was a reminder that there there are some people, often sarcastically referred to as "Social Justice Warriors," who seem to live for no other reason than to find new ways to take the fun out of people's lives.
No, I'm not worried about someone taking away my sex robot. Not only do I not own a sex robot, I didn't even know they'd been perfected yet. You stop reading Tech News for a couple of days and the next thing you know, you miss out on all kinds of great stuff. At least that's how it felt while I was listening to Kathleen Richardson, the head of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, passionately debate David Levy who is an advocate for the use of sex robots.
At first I thought the debate was some sort of joke. Listening to it in Toronto's Koerner Hall auditorium felt like being in a throwaway moment from a semi-serious futuristic movie, where a Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis-type hero would be chasing a sci-fi villain past a sex robots rights rally.
However Richardson was sincere if bizarre in her fervent opposition to a future in which people could have carnal relations with convincingly realistic automatons.
The most amazing thing I discovered during the great sex robot debate was that of all the issues affecting humanity, some "social justice" types can actually muster great amounts of time and energy to get worked up about and agitate against a masturbation aid that doesn't even exist yet.
That anyone would be advocating for sex robots seemed to me a rather odd use of time as well, but as an intellectual exercise, I suppose it's at least understandable.
But to organize and campaign on this ridiculous issue outside of a debate forum sounds nuts.
And yes, for reasons that don't make sense to me, the Campaign Against Sex Robots is, in 2016, a very real thing.
While the subject was fascinating, listening to the debate itself was frustrating.
As events played out, the mild mannered Artificial Intelligence expert was flayed alive by the emotional Ms Richardson's deceptive rhetorical tricks.
Poor Mr. Levy falteringly did his best to make the case for sex robots. He quite reasonably took the position that sex robots would reduce, if not eliminate sex traffic and exploitation, since there would be no need for human prostitutes if realistic, Blade Runner-type sex robots could provide the same service.
He also made the case that for those people who have trouble forming human relationships, sex robots could provide a level of companionship and comfort they would otherwise not be able to find.
Unfortunately for Mr. Levy, his communication style is better suited to discussion than debate, and he lobbed a softball right over the plate for Richardson. He made the stupid mistake, insofar as debating tactics go, to suggest that sex robots made to look like young children could be a substitute for the real thing for pedophiles. Levy was certainly advocating the protection of real human children and against, rather than for pedophilia. But understandably, because of our instinctive revulsion towards them, once someone makes a case in a public debate that seems to enable the desires of pedophiles, they've essentially slit their own wrists.
In response, Ms Richardson pulled out every trick in the book and invoked a plethora of non sequitur emotional arguments to paint Levy's position, and sex robots, at the epitome of evil.
Her first claim was that sex robots made to look like children would encourage actual pedophilia. In that she may be right, although her reasoning was flawed. She claimed that pedophilia is about "politics," not sex. However, for the sick minds who seek out children for sexual gratification dominating a weaker human is part of their degenerate pleasure.
Despite his saying that sex robots could be used by women as well as men, Richardson said realistic sexbots would encourage men to think of women as nothing more than sex objects. It's a ridiculous argument considering that if that were true, then dildos should lead women to consider a man as nothing more than a transport mechanism for a penis. Surprisingly, and perhaps unfortunately, it turns out very few women think of men in that way. But at the debate, it didn't occur to Mr. Levy to point any of this out.
Then Richardson went off on a wild, preposterous tangent, saying that black slave robots could be created, thus facilitating racism.
By the time she was done, she had the hapless Levy defending himself from charges of advocating for the facilitation of pedophilia, the subjugation of women, and racism.
All of which was nonsense, of course.
To suggest that sex robots would advance those evils is no more logical than to suggest we should ban toy puppies because it might encourage depraved sadists who like torturing animals.
Still, Richardson had equated being pro sex robot to being pro slavery, misogyny, racism, and pedophilia. It was like the joke that in political criticism, everyone you don't like is Hitler, which was pretty much the only disparaging analogy she left out. But why not go full Adolf? By bringing in something as extreme as Hitler, it shows how wrong Richardson is in her arguments.
What if an antisemite wants to make robot Jews and exterminate them? Wouldn't that be a terrible thing? Well, yes it would. But speaking with the advantage of hindsight, if the technology had existed, would it not have been immeasurably better if Hitler had made robot Jews and burned them in the ovens of Auschwitz instead of actual humans?! And wouldn't it have been better if robots had been used in the US south to do menial labor instead of plundering Africa for human beings who were enslaved, murdered, and abused for generations?
By Ms Richardson's reasoning, it could just as easily be argued that by wanting to ban sex robots, she's for genocide, the exploitation of women, slavery, and the sexual abuse of the real children that pedophiles will use instead of robots. Beyond that, by implying that it's only straight men who would use them, it could also be argued that her anti sex robot stance is homophobic and sexist. All of which would be as inaccurate as Ms Richardson's charges against Mr. Levy.
Ms Richardson did have a number of fans in the Ideacity audience. Her talking points got enthusiastic applause on quite a few occasions. But in scanning the crowd, I noticed that the people cheering for Richardson were all women of an identical age group and physical type.
Which is understandable. In a world where sexbots are just science fiction, heterosexual, middle aged, unsexy women can rely on some attention from middle aged men without better alternatives available to them. But if there were sex robots, they would be in about as much demand as a VCR in a world with blu-ray, PVRs, and video streaming. Another consideration that was absent from the debate is that one of the disparities of the male/female dynamic is that women seem to value and require emotion more than men.
Regardless of the unbalanced way the great sex robot debate at Ideacity played out, it did stimulate some fascinating considerations that weren't discussed. If the technology advances to the point of them being possible, then realistic cybernetic sex robots will get made, for a simple, obvious reason. They will generate huge revenues.
Demand drives commerce, and there are few things more always in demand than sex.
About 20 percent of revenue from the Internet is porn related, and it's because of online pornography that innovations like secure online purchases and video streams were developed.
The commercial potential of sexbots wasn't discussed at the debate, but it's one of the most fascinating considerations about the subject.
One thing that's a certainty is that if sex robots become reality, then celebrities will be licensing their likenesses for them. It's hard to imagine that if the technology for one existed, there wouldn't be Pam Anderson and Kim Kardashian sexbots, advertised as being as good as the real thing. Possibly better, because with a cybernetic Kardashian, it would only talk if you want it to.
But this concept opens the door to some really intriguing possibilities. There could be sexbots of anyone from history!
I could have a foursome with Raquel Welch circa 1968, a 1930 Greta Garbo, and Pam Grier as she looked in 1973. And what woman wouldn't want Cary Grant and Sean Connery simultaneously at her command. Gay men could have threesomes with James Dean and Monty Cliff. And what lesbian would pass the chance to find herself scissoring with Katherine Hepburn while Audrey Hepburn sits on her face? The options are endless.
There is a downside to sex robots in the potential damage it could do to human productivity and creativity. When people can have their fantasies fulfilled on demand, they're going to spend a lot more time fulfilling those fantasies instead of doing other things.
After all, if the technology currently existed where I had the choice between writing and getting a massage from robot Marilyn Monroe while being fellated by robot Halle Berry, you wouldn't be reading any of this now.
...Israel has never been defeated on the battlefield, and she must never be. But our enemies have devised other weapons, more sophisticated than rockets, with which to weaken her through isolation and vilification via the spreading of a false narrative that has become gospel in fashionable, politically correct circles.
A few weeks ago, I visited Haifa University. I met students and faculty from the Ambassadors Online program, who are engaged in designing creative and ingenious ways to combat BDS propaganda. Spending a few hours on this campus in one fell swoop lays waste the lie of Israel apartheid. Arab and Druze students make up about 40 per cent of the student body. In classrooms, in the cafeteria, on the grass, they mingle shoulder to shoulder with their Jewish counterparts.
So we forfeited the baseball game again today to another school that Coach O called a “Junior Varsity Team”. I was really excited to make Varsity as a sophomore, but losing 3 times in a row sucks. Coach O says it’s because “We’ve lost our focus”. But maybe it’s because he wouldn’t tell us who we were playing…
...In a press release on Tuesday, OCASI revealed, “The City of Toronto and OCASI are launching a Toronto public education campaign to address xenophobia, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiments.”
It quoted Councillor Joe Cressy of Trinity-Spadina saying “OCASI has an extensive history of working with refugees and understand the barriers they face to integration. We appreciate their insights.”
One of the first outcomes of OCASI’s “insights” was a poster that shows a white man confronting a black Muslim woman in hijab, telling her: “Go back to where you come from,” to which the black hijabi woman replies, “Where, North York?”
In one sweep the City of Toronto depicted every white man as a racist bigot and perpetuated the victimhood of Muslims, a goal of all Islamists worldwide who hate the West.
The question to Cressy is this: If you had to show a white male, then why didn’t you put your own face on the poster? Why leave it to an actor?...
Maybe he's right. I'm pro-gay and I love SpongeBob.
Or maybe he's a conspiratorial, homophobic idiot preaching the sort of stuff that is commonplace within Islam, and being gay is cool and SpongeBob is great fun. Or is that being gay is great fun and SpongeBob is cool?
From my extensive SpongeBob viewing, I don't recall sex of any sort in that cartoon series.
But at this point, I have a confession to make: I'm not really sure of any aspect of the sex lives of sponges.
...According to Fox News, a law enforcement source said: 'It is no coincidence that this happened in Orlando. Mateen was enrolled in (Robertson's online) Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary.'
Police believe that Robertson's Timbuktu Seminary is used to dispense his radical teachings, sources said.
Robertson, who was a former US Marine and undercover FBI agent before turning into a radical Imam, has previously been allowed into Britain, and preached at the Green Lane mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham, in 2010 - despite his violent criminal background, according to The Sun.
Many British ISIS fighters have described him as an inspiration, while videos of his lectures posted online show him rail against homosexuals and describe cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, as gay and a means to promote homosexuality to children...
...“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor said. Call it the Sotomayor principle: you’re better because you’re different. Elsewhere in that same address, she nailed the point even more strongly: “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences … our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”
This Sotomayor principle holds that ethnic and sexual considerations plainly offer an advantage, a superiority. The wise Latina woman, because she is a woman and Latina, would by the mysteries of identity, be a better judge, reach a “better conclusion,” than a “white male.” Something attaches inescapably to her biology and race, her personal sex and ethnicity, that lifts Sotomayor above, proves her as more competent or wise, than (the natural counterpoint and foil of all identity politics arguments) “a white male.”
If sex and race, in one instance, improve the judging mind that possesses the “right” combination, it is surely the case that in other circumstances, they will restrict and degrade it. To argue otherwise would be sexist and racist. Surely, the engine of “difference” doesn’t drive in one direction only, doesn’t belong to just one sex, or select ethnicities? Are we not then free, as Sotomayor was, to imagine a circumstance in which a “wise Caucasian male with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life. ” And if we are, her observations are null, since there is nothing “special” as such to any one race or sex.
The Sotomayor principle, an identity politics principle, is just a rephrasing of the blind theory that biology is fate, and geography, birthplace, is its handmaiden. It is a regressive principle, one that places unpassable frontiers on human understanding and empathy.
If someone does something and explicitly tells you why they did it, even if that something is unspeakably evil, when the reasons they give are verifiable and credible, then there's every reason to believe they are telling the truth.
When Hitler directed the murder of 6 million Jews, his motives were never in doubt. Fifteen years before the Holocaust began, Hitler wrote a book, most of which was devoted to expressing his hatred of Jews and his desire to eliminate them. When Nazis were on trial for their lives in the wake of World War 2, many of whom were convicted and executed for their roles in carrying out Hitler's policies of extermination, none of them made the claim, "it didn't happen." Their defense was always, "we were only obeying orders." It's only in the aftermath of those crimes that imbeciles and neo-Nazis, desperately trying to rehabilitate Hitler and Nazism, have denied the reality and the magnitude of the Nazi genocide.
Like Nazi-apologia, there is something very similar and strange happening in the wake of the monstrous mass murder that occurred early Sunday morning at an Orlando gay nightclub, where self-professed ISIS follower Omar Mateen slaughtered 49 club-goers with a semi-automatic rifle.
This is part of a familiar pattern when an act of vicious terrorism is committed by an Islamic terrorist who specifically states that he was inspired by his religious beliefs. Within instants, the left in media and academia commences twisting itself into pretzels to find ways of denying that Islam was a factor in a horrific crime motivated by Islamic teaching. The cognitive dissonance is so striking that they claim to know the killer's motives better than the killer himself.
If instead of being a Muslim, imagine what the media response would be had Mateen been a member of the demented, inbred, "God hates fags" Westboro Baptist church. Is there any doubt the media would have instantly indicted not just that minuscule, inbred cult with only 40 members, but all of "right-wing evangelical Christianity" for having provoked a mass murder?
Obviously most Muslims in the west are not violent terrorists. Most American and Canadian Muslims do not attend mosque with any regularity. But Omar Mateen was a regular mosque-goer, and there is a critical difference between Islam and Christianity or Judaism in its consideration of homosexuality.
All three Abrahamic religions originally considered homosexuality to be "sinful." But in practice, many Christian and Jewish denominations embrace gay congregants and have renounced condemnations of homosexuality. Except for a tiny minority, even conservative Christian and Jewish denominations that denounce homosexuality do not advocate harming, killing or persecuting gay people.
Within Islam, the case is completely different. The tolerant branches of Islam, the Ismailis, Druze, Sufis, Ahmadiyya, and Baha'i, are comparatively small sects which combined make up less than 5% of the world's Muslim population. Indeed, the Sufi, Ahmadiyya, and Baha'i communities are regularly persecuted by mainstream Sunni and Shia in Islamic countries, including Iran and Pakistan, where there is no separation between Mosque and State.
In many Muslim-majority countries, being gay means being guilty of a capital offense. In countries ruled under Islamic Sharia, such as Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and others, they routinely execute people for being gay.
But in the worldview of the left, mired in regressive, Marxist "Critical Studies" thinking, people are categorized as either oppressor or oppressed, with a particular hierarchy of victimology. In the leftist mind, all Muslims are automatically victims or western imperialism and racism, regardless of where they live, what they look like, or their economic status. This despite the fact that Muslim countries are the most repressive on earth, in which religious and ethnic minorities, gays and women hold fewer rights than in any western country.
But to admit that would mean admitting that their world view is mistaken. It means that people other than only Caucasians are capable of hatred, oppression and persecution. And the people dogmatically attached to their leftist worldview are as committed to it as ISIS recruits are to Islam. So rather than face reality, cognitive dissonance sets in, and they deny it.
All so leftists can congratulate themselves about how supposedly tolerant and progressive they are, and cling on to their twisted, cognitively-impaired worldview.
Omar Mateen had been investigated by the FBI following complaints by his co-workers about comments he made that indicated he was supportive of terrorists. However that investigation was called off because the FBI was afraid of appearing Islamophobic by pursuing it.
Iran is ruled by vicious, terror-supporting maniacs who have decreed that gay people can be killed and that women can be beatn and imprisoned for dressing "immodestly."
Justin Trudeau and his Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane "I don't understand the question" Dion want to take Iran off the terror list.
Sign the parliamentary petition sponsored by Tony Clement, MP to maintain Iran on the list of terror-supporting countries at THIS LINK.
...Obama’s response to the tragedy today was similarly limp-wristed. He made no mention of Islam or Muslims, instead condemning “hate and terror” and taking a brazen swipe at gun rights activists by noting “how easy it is to let people get their hands on a weapon.”
He didn’t even address the uniquely homophobic character of the attack. What a good liberal!
There’s no more room for equivocating. The Orlando shooting isn’t just the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. shores since 9/11. It is also, by far, the worst act of violent homophobia in the nation’s history and the deadliest mass shooting in America ever.
According to the murderer’s father, his son became angry after he saw two men kissing in the street. “This had nothing to do with religion,” said the father, Seddique Mateen. “He saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry” — as if that was some kind of excuse.
In what is probably not coincidental, only a couple of months ago, an Imam called for the death of gays at an Orlando mosque. Preaching hatred towards gays and calling for their killing is a regular aspect of preaching in many mosques. Some of the most prominent Islamic scholars, even those living in civilized western countries including Canada, call for the murder of homosexuals.
The survey of 2,000 people by ORB found that 55 per cent believe the UK should leave the EU (up four points since our last poll in April), while 45 per cent want it to remain (down four points). These figures are weighted to take account of people’s likelihood to vote. It is by far the biggest lead the Leave camp has enjoyed since ORB began polling the EU issue for The Independent a year ago, when it was Remain who enjoyed a 10-point lead. Now the tables have turned...
Sex acts with animals are legal in Canada, so long as there is no penetration involved, according to a surprise ruling issued by the Supreme Court.
The determination stemmed from a case involving a British Columbia man convicted of 13 counts sexually assaulting his stepdaughters - including one count of bestiality. But the man, identified only as "DLW", was acquitted of the bestiality count with the new ruling. DLW's attorneys argued that bestiality linked to "buggery" - or sodomy - with animals beginning with an 1892 criminal code. Bestiality was first used in a 1955 code, but still was not defined to encompass every sex act with animals.
"Although bestiality was often subsumed in terms such as sodomy or buggery, penetration was the essence - 'the defining act' - of the offence," the court said.
Before Donald Trump gets a chance to call another press conference like last week’s—in which he excoriated reporters as “sleazy,” “extremely dishonest,” “unfair,” “not good people” and so on—can we get something straight? Far from wanting to declare a war on the press, as the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman, Dan Rather, Nat Hentoff and others would have it, can we all agree on what’s really going on—that Trump actually loves the press?
Granted, Trump has been expressing his love in a gruff way since the campaign began. “You know, you’re a nasty guy. You’re a really nasty guy,” Trump said to a Washington Post reporter last month who grilled him about his donations to veterans’ groups. He threatenedPost owner Jeff Bezos, who runs Amazon, with an antitrust case after he wins the presidency. He’s vowed to “open up” the libel laws to make it easier to sue publications like the Post and the New York Times when they “write purposely negative and horrible and false articles.” Reporters are “slime,” he’s said. “Dishonest slime.” His staff has denied POLITICO reporter Ben Schreckinger (and others) accreditation, effectively banning them from his rallies. Then there’s all that Megyn Kelly history. Trump’s favorite press target today is NBC News’ Katy Tur for having the temerity to criticize his campaign’s structure. But the reporters who cover Trump and his daily hyperbole should know better than to read so much into these insults and vendettas. When Trump praises things—usually things associated with himself—he overdoes it, using words like the “best,” the “greatest,” the “biggest,” “tremendous” and “spectacular” where a less excitable person might use “good” or “fine.” When he criticizes things (or people) he displays no patience for making the subtle point, reflexively describing them as “disgusting,” the “worst,” “weak,” “clueless,” “scum,” “crooked,” “ridiculous,” “unfair,” “bad,” “false” or “lies” as a compilation of Twitters insults he has issued shows. When expressing himself, Trump knows only paradise and disaster, giants and dwarves. It’s a worldview that rarely reaches beyond the binary. When Trump calls a reporter a sleaze or claims he’s going change the libel laws—something that is beyond a president’s powers—we should put no more stock in those words than we do when he promises his forthcoming U.S.-Mexico wall will be “beautiful.”
Some journalists—dare I say it?—are overreacting to Trump’s bile and bluster. It’s not that his outbursts are merely for show. He obviously gets steamed at direct, prodding questions that he can’t evade. But his eagerness to insult the press—it was by his choice that the press-damning press conference went on for 40-minutes—perversely signals his passion for the labors of the fourth estate. The Trump vs. the press story is like a rom-com sit-com, only it airs on the news channels!
I've been reading some of the stuff on Scott Adams'
(the guy who created the "Dilbert" comic) blog about his opinion
of Trump's methods and it's really quite interesting. Adams has been pissing
off a lot of lefties and Democrats for predicting Trump will win in a landslide
and praising his technique of persuasion.
This one called "Clown Genius" is quite good, and keep in mind Adams wrote it back
in August 2015, almost a year ago, and it was very prescient.
If Adams is right, and he's persuaded me that he's at least
got some insight into things, then Trump's attacking the media like no other
national politician has before falls into the plan. The media is obviously
going to be highly critical of Trump, much more than Clinton, both for the
obvious reason that there is plenty of crazy talk that comes out of Trump's
mouth, but also because of the inherent leftist bias in most mainstream media.
So Trump repeating that the media are sleazy, that they are liars, that they
can't be trusted, and pointing out some of the errors and biases of specific
reporters is not just lashing out, but part of a thought-out plan to neutralize
media criticism by instilling distrust of them. To an extent, it's working,
because a number of the subjects of those attacks by Trump have had to go on
the defensive to try to establish their criticism isn't based on bias but them
"just doing their job."
...If Clinton successfully pairs Trump with Hitler in your mind – as she is doing – and loses anyway, about a quarter of the country will think it is morally justified to assassinate their own leader. I too would feel that way if an actual Hitler came to power in this country. I would join the resistance and try to take out the Hitler-like leader. You should do the same. No one wants an actual President Hitler.
So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.
As I have often said, I have no psychic powers and I don’t know which candidate would be the best president. But I do know which outcome is most likely to get me killed by my fellow citizens. So for safety reason, I’m on team Clinton...
...While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.
With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run. The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist “exploitation,” shouldn’t it? But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists’ exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries. Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the Left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated. When Senator Sanders cries, “The system is rigged!” no one asks, “Just what specifically does that mean?” or “What facts do you have to back that up?”...
Nonetheless I challenge the notion that accepting a more broadly based committee qualifies as “backing down.” It should be read only as less arrogant than what they have been doing on this subject up to now.
The clamour for electoral reform is far less loud and vigorous than professional politicians and their many-handed managers would like you to believe. The system we’ve long had, the dreaded first past the post (FPTP) does not alarm people. It’s not a coffee-shop topic. It is surely not the “undemocratic,” “unrepresentative” and “unfair” system that those with a partisan interest in “fixing” it claim.
In essence, those most offended by the system are those to whom it awards the least success. The Greens, for example, would like to bundle all the dribs and drabs of votes they get in every riding into a single number and claim more seats on that basis.
The other strong motive for change comes from a party that has been successful under FPTP, believing it could even be more successful under some more complex arrangement. Or, and this amounts to the same thing, their main rivals would do worse. They foresee a structural advantage in a changed system. That’s the Trudeau government’s motivation.
This is Rihanna and her titty pierce, not Titi Pierce
A Georgia woman is suing Ellen DeGeneres after mispronouncing her name to make a breast joke during her daytime talk show. Titi Pierce, 35, name is pronounced “Tee Tee … as grammar dictates”, she said in the lawsuit. But DeGeneres called her “titty Pierce”, reading one of the real estate agent’s adverts during a segment called “What’s Wong With These Ads…. and These Signs?” “In all of her 35 years of life, no one has ever referred to Ms Pierce as “titty” until the Defendant did so on February 22, 2016 on national television,” the lawsuit reads, adding that it led to “immediate ridicule”...
William Shatner said that when he nearly died once, he heard music. One of the songs was Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. So this is what heaven will be like:
There's plenty about Donald Trump to criticize, but when the Bernie Sanders' Brigade turns up to protests him and display their outright hatred for America in the process, it helps convince people to vote Republican.
