‘PC’, official lies and the perils of modern ‘democracy’

Posted on 19 April by Peter Senior

Many politicians and bureaucrats systematically cause delays and unnecessary expenditure, and ignore reality.  Even worse, many from the ‘Left’, progressives, Cultural Marxists and activists keep trying to stymie democracy with their shrill, often illogical and ideological views. The following articles provide evidence.

More previous articles are linked below the most recent three.

Once Upon A Time, A Long, Long Ago, Truth Was Important

Once Upon A Time, A Long, Long Ago, Truth Was Important  By Paul Craig Roberts, via Zerohedge, 19 April 2018

I wonder how many people, not just Americans but those in other countries, have come to the conclusion that the United States today is a less free and less aware society than the societies in the dystopian novels of the 20th century or in movies such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta.

 

 

Just as people in the dystopian novels had no idea of their real situation, few Americans do either.

What are we to make of the extraordinary war crimes committed by the United States in the 21st century that have destroyed in whole or part seven countries, resulting in millions of dead, maimed, orphaned, and displaced peoples? Consider, for example, the latest Washington war crime, the illegal attack on Syria. Instead of protesting this illegality, the American media egged it on, cheering impending death and destruction.

During the entirety of the 21st century, Israel, Washington’s only ally—as contrasted with the European, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese vassal states of Washington’s empire—has continued with Washington’s support, protection, and encouragement the genocide of the Palestinian people. Essentially, all that is left of Palestine is a ghetto concentration camp known as Gaza which is routinely bombed by Israel using weapons and money supplied by Washington. When a bombing of Gaza is announced, God’s Chosen People take their lawn chairs and picnics up on a hill overlooking Gaza and applaud as the Israeli military murders women and children. This is America’s only ally.

The crimes committed by the US and Israel are horrific, but meet with little opposition. In contrast, an alleged attack in which 70 Syrians are alleged to have died sets in motion the wheels of war. It makes no sense whatsoever. Israel routinely bombs Syrian targets, killing Syrians, and the US arms and supports the “rebels” that the Obama regime sent to overthrow Assad, resulting in large numbers of dead Syrians. Why all of a sudden do 70 Syrians matter to Washington?

According to the Washington authorities, or to the presstitutes’ reports of their statements, two or three alleged Syrian chemical weapons facilities were destroyed by Washington’s missile attack.

Think about this for a minute. If Washington bombed or sent missiles into chemical weapons facilities, a vast cloud of lethal gas would have been released. The civilian casualties would be many times higher than the claimed 70 victims of Assad’s alleged and unsubstantiated chemical attack used as the pretext for the Trump regime’s war crime against Syria. There is no evidence whatsoever of these casualties.

Had there been casualties, Washington’s attack would obviously be a far greater crime than the chemical attack that Washington used as cover for its own crime. Yet the American presstitutes are crowing over the lesson that America has taught Syria and Russia. Apparently, the American media consists of such immoral or moronic hirelings that the presstitutes are unable to comprehend that an attack by Washington on Syrian chemical weapons plants, if such actually existed, is the equivalent of an attack on Syria with chemical weapons.

As I wrote yesterday, when I was a Wall Street Journal editor, if Washington had just announced that it had bombed the chemical weapons facilities of another country in punishment for that country’s alleged use of a chemical weapon, the Journal’s reporters were sufficiently intelligent to ask where are the victims of Washington’s chemical attack on that country?

Are there thousands of dead people from the chemical gas released by Washington’s attack? Are the hospitals of the country over-filed with the injured and dying?

If a reporter had brought to us a story that was nothing but a Washington press release claiming obviously impossible happenings, we would have told him to go look again and ask the obvious questions. Today the NY Times and Washington Post put the unsubstantiated report on the front page.

Today reporters no longer have to check sources, because there is no longer journalism in America. When the Clinton regime in compliance with the Deep State that made the Clintons super-rich permitted 90% of the independent and diverse US media to be concentrated in the hands of six political companies, that was the end of journalism in America. All we have now is a propaganda ministry that lies for a living. Anyone in American journalism who tells the truth is either immediately fired or in the case of Tucker Carlson at Fox News is set upon by outside presstitutes in an effort to force Fox to replace him. I wonder how long before some woman pops up and claims Tucker Carlson sexually harassed her.

As far as I can tell, the United States is now a police state in which all information is controlled and the population is trained to believe the propaganda or be accused of lack of patriotism and consorting with terrorists and Russians.

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Forced PC as governments follow Orwell’s 1984

Forced PC as governments follow Orwell’s 1984  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 15 January 2017

It is something of a paradox that the closing of the Western mind has taken place during the information age. As though afraid of uncertainty, the Left introduced a range of measures to regulate speech as the West began to ­realise the idea of open society. During the late 20th century, left-wing parties codified state censorship in discrimination law. In Australia, section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act was justified by appeal to protecting ­minority groups from words deemed offensive. A new form of censorship is developing in the 21st century. We are witnessing the birth of an Orwellian political phenomenon: forced speech.

The West is moving into a post-censorship age where the state suppression of free speech will be complemented by a regime of forced speech. The state will require not only the suppression of truth that offends its designated minority groups, but the public expression of untruths that reinforce the politically correct party line. As with the earlier transition from free speech to political censorship, the state will use minority politics as an instrument to justify forced speech.

The Northern Territory Labor government announced plans to reform the Anti-Discrimination Act in a recent discussion paper. The text reveals a party well-versed in PC ideology. Take the following definition of sexuality: “Sexual orientation is a person’s sexual orientation towards ­persons of the same sex, persons of a different sex, or both persons of the same sex and persons of a ­different sex.”

As well as confusing straights, gays and bisexuals, “modernising” discrimination law apparently involves rewriting biological fact. Labor wants to replace sex with gender identity in the act so “people of diverse gender are protected” and NT law is aligned with federal legislation. But the party goes further: “Sex is based on traditional notions that all people can be classified as male or ­female.”

Birth sex is not a “notion”. It is a biological fact. The act could be modified to ensure people born with intersex biology don’t suffer from discrimination and people aren’t treated unfairly simply because they are gender atypical.

However, the proposal to replace sex with “gender identity” as a protected attribute is problematic. The denial of biological reality could become a legal requirement if discrimination law is altered to protect gender identity. NT Labor’s mooted reforms could include vilification provisions applying to its protected attributes such as gender identity and sexual orientation.

While race was used to justify state suppression of free speech, gender is emerging as the rhetorical instrument used to justify coerced, or forced speech. The British Medical Association has published a guide outlining trans-inclusive language. Consider the text on pregnancy: “A large majority of people that have been pregnant or have given birth identify as women. We can include intersex men and transmen who may get pregnant by saying ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘expectant mothers’.” Alternatively, we could state biological fact by refusing to say “pregnant people”. I don’t care if you’re a PC hipster, “in transition” or running the asylum, you’re not pregnant unless you have a womb and if there’s baby in there, you’re an expectant mother.

When last in office, federal Labor attempted to create a vast regime of state censorship using minority politics and corrupted human rights to justify the assault on freedom. It proposed a media meta regulator. It introduced a human rights and anti-discrimination bill that listed a range of attributes to be protected from unfavourable treatment, defined as “conduct that offends, insults or intimidates”. Opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus has indicated that a future Labor government could consolidate all federal anti-discrimination legislation and establish “a standard about speech generally”.

The post-censorship age will be defined by a significant transition in which forced speech is introduced to complement the state censorship of politically incorrect thought. We will have to demonstrate submission to the party line by stating PC ideology is truth. We will have to reject even the traditional Marxist idea of a scientific society by denying biological fact. In the words of Orwell’s 1984protagonist Winston Smith, we will have to agree that “two and two make five,” if the party says so.

A recent case in Canada illustrates the problem. At Wilfrid Laurier University, teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd played a televised debate on the introduction of transgender pronouns such as xie instead of he or she. An academic argued requiring their use was a form of “compelled speech”.

Shepherd said that she had remained neutral in the class. However, university officials required her to attend a meeting after students filed a complaint. During the meeting, academics and staff from the diversity office cited human rights, students’ feelings, and a “gendered violence, gender and sexual violence policy” to argue against her presentation of the debate. Shepherd was admonished for violating policy on gender-based violence, transphobia and “causing harm to trans students by bringing their identity as invalid (sic), or their pronouns as invalid — potentially invalid”.

Note the categorical errors ­required to make PC fiction seem reasonable; free speech is equated to harm, dissent from the PC line is equated to violence, and pronouns are categorised as an expression of identity politics.

Forced speech is not a feature of free world politics. It is, however, a chief feature of totalitarian society. Survivors of communism recounted gruesome re-education programs that concluded only when dissenters demonstrated submission to the party by public recitation of communist state ­doctrine. In The New York Review of Books, Ran Yunfei, a Chinese intellectual who was held under house arrest, said: “The CCP created a parallel language system that is on an equal basis with the language of truth.”

In 1984, the Inner Party official O’Brien explains to the politically incorrect protagonist Winston: “Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.”

An old friend asked why, after years of voting Labor, I left the Left. I considered justifying myself again with the chronology of exodus. But the truth is plain and blunt. Why did I leave the Left? Because two plus two equals four.

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In a PC world, don’t dare criticise what you can’t understand

In a PC world, don’t dare criticise what you can’t understand  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 11 January 2017

When Bob Dylan sang “Come gather ’round people wherever you roam and admit that the ­waters around you have grown”, he wasn’t singing about global warming and rising sea levels. He was alerting the world to an ­unstoppable civil rights movement aimed at achieving for African Americans equal access to, and opportunities for, the basic privileges and rights afforded to all other citizens. It was a grassroots movement determined to rectify a self-evident injustice.

Dylan advised his followers to get on board. “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’,” he intoned.

Now, 50 years on, the tide has turned. The noble principles ­behind the civil rights movement are in retreat. Masquerading as minority oppression, victimhood is a thriving industry. Whether well-meaning or a sinister exercise to divide society according to ethnicity, colour, gender, religion, sexual orientation and social status, self-identifying minorities are demanding, and receiving, preferential treatment.

While ordinary Aussies have yet to be told to sit at the back of the bus, they watch in bewilderment and with rising anger as they see their national identity ­replaced by a patchwork of incoherent foreign values. Should they complain, new government agencies and statutes are there to keep them in their place and to ensure they keep their whiteness and cultural and ­religious values to themselves, lest they ­offend others. Rather than oppress ­minorities, we pander to them. Complaining about a discriminatory “indigenous only” computer room can, at great personal cost, land you in court, as Queensland University of Technology students found.

Some minorities shamelessly exploit this obsequious regime. Centrelink refuses to collect data on polygamous marriages under Islamic law, despite the fact when claiming welfare, some families involve a domestic relationship with more than one wife. We indulge the tiny transgender, ­intersex “community” with gender-neutral toilets paid for by taxpayers and businesses.

To placate minorities, Victoria Police has regularly baulked at calling Middle Eastern crime by name and played down the dangers posed by violent Sudanese criminals, notwithstanding they are 44 times more likely to bash, rob and invade homes. When Victoria’s Premier Daniel Andrews ­referred to “out-of-control South Sudanese youth”, The Age ­accused him of making “unpleasant and inflammatory” comments to provoke “a predictably base ­reaction from those sensitive to immigration on racial grounds”.

Perhaps this is why Victoria Police told media before interrogating Saeed Noori, the accused driver who allegedly mowed down Christmas shoppers in Melbourne’s Flinders Street, that the attack was not terror-related. Noori later spoke of Allah and the mistreatment of Muslims. Police had similarly played down an Islamist angle after the siege in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton last June, despite the offender’s links to known terrorists.

Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore was quick to dismiss Man Haron Monis, the gunman who laid siege to the Lindt Cafe, in which two innocents died, as a terrorist, despite him displaying an Islamic State-like flag in the cafe window and having affiliated himself with the terrorist group.

When it comes to sentencing, the courts take The Age’s sensitive approach. Ibrahim Kamara, from Sierra Leone, received a suspended sentence of just over one year, with an 18-month good ­behaviour order, after admitting to five counts, including grooming and having sex with a minor. The ACT Supreme Court judge said “(Kamara) has tried to make a good start on his life in Australia”.

Sevdet Ramadan Besim planned to drive his car into a police ­officer performing duties on Anzac Day and then behead him to promote “violent jihad”. He ­received a minimum sentence of just 7½ years.

In NSW, an Islamic sect leader was the first person in Australia to be imprisoned over the genital mutilation of two sisters aged six and seven. Notwithstanding a 21 years maximum, the leader ­received 11 months’ jail, while his two accessories will serve a minimum of 11 months’ home detention. This sets a derisory bench­mark for future sentencing.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt refreshingly observes that “state courts should not be places for ideological experiments”. Yet they are. Judges have become politicians in robes and, like the police and other unelected authorities, selectively administer the law according to their prejudices.

Then there’s South Australia’s initiative to commit $4.4 million to commence indigenous “treaty” ­negotiations. It joins Victoria, which began similar Aboriginal engagement in 2016. An indigenous Referendum Council is pushing for a constitutionally elected indigenous body in federal parliament, a mechanism for treaty-making and a healing com­mission. There is talk of inserting a racial non-­discrimination clause in the Constitution and amending pro­visions allowing the common­wealth to make special laws for indigenous people on the basis of race, the very antithesis of American civil rights ideals.

Aboriginal broadcaster Stan Grant writes: “We don’t have to reckon with the treatment of ­Aboriginal people because they are invisible. Indigenous people become a postscript to Australian history.” When Australian taxpayers pay the equivalent of $43,000 a year for every First Australian, that’s some postscript.

In his Christmas message, Malcolm Turnbull told Australians we have much to be grateful for, not least that so many people of “so many different backgrounds, races and religions live together here in a harmony founded on mutual respect”. His sentiments are well intended and worthy but the multicultural policies he and Labor support have left us, in American commentator Pat Buchanan’s words, “irretrievably divided on separate shores”.

Australia no longer pursues the rapid assimilation of minorities. Rather, diversity is institutionalised. It would be foolish to believe profound and unpredictable consequences won’t follow as the silent majority reflects on its own segregation. Yet the louder it protests, the more it will be controlled. Civil liberties be damned.

It’s time to admit the safe ­waters around us are receding and we’re sinking like a stone.

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Previous articles

About Peter Senior

I'm a very experienced and pragmatic management consultant. I've reviewed and led the restructuring of many organisations - large and small corporations and Government Departments, much of the time as President of the New Zealand Institute of Management Consultants. Before that I was General Manager of a major NZ newspaper; earlier, an analyst for IBM UK. I gained an honours degree in engineering at London University, and studied management at Cambridge University. This wide range of experience has left me frustrated: I continue to see too many examples of really bad management. Sometimes small easily fixed issues; sometimes fundamental faults; and sometimes really tricky problems. Mostly these issues can be fixed using a mixture of common sense, 'management 101' and applying lessons from years of management experience. Unfortunately, all too often, politics, bureaucracy and daft government regulations get in the way; internal factors such as poor culture and out-of-date strategies are often evident. So what's gone wrong, and why, and most importantly, how to fix 'it'? I hope there are like-minded people 'out there' who will share their thoughts enabling 'us' to improve some significant management failures that affect the general public. If you just accept bad management, you don't have the right to complain! If you'd like to share thoughts on any aspects of management, send me an email to petersenior42@gmail.com . My latest project has the interim title 'You’ve been conned. Much of what you were taught and read is largely irrelevant, misleading or plain wrong – this is the REAL story of life: past, present and our possible future.' The working paper so far comprises 105 pages, many listing references and interim conclusions. The main problem is finding sufficient credible evidence, and realising the more Iearn, the more I realise I don't know!
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