Displaying posts published in

October 2018

New British TV Show about a ‘Trans Child’ Is Deeply Irresponsible By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/transgender-focused-british-television-show-deeply-irresponsible/

When dealing with subjects of life-altering (even life-ending) gravity such as sex-changes and suicide, and especially when exploring how they affect children, what might an appropriate narrative be? Surely a cautious, evidence-based one?

But that’s not the narrative by the creators of Butterfly, a new TV drama in the U.K., which tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy who wants to become a girl. In the TV show, Max who believes himself to be Maxine slits his wrists and declares that a transgender identity the only solution to his misery. His family supports his decision to transition.

There is compelling evidence to suggest that the uptick in gender dysphoria in youth may be partly due to social contagion. Similarly, “suicide clusters” are also well recognized as having a social-psychological component. Two very good reasons to be cautious when broaching such subjects in mainstream media, then.

Understandably, therefore, Butterfly has sparked considerable protest from many parents and specialists who consider such a storyline to be deeply irresponsible. Indeed, the National Health Service’s only gender specialist clinic has expressed concern, calling the story “not helpful” and pointing out that it “would be very unusual for a child of that age to attempt suicide.”

Nevertheless, certain transgender campaign groups, such as Mermaids U.K., who were heavily consulted during the making of the series, prefer to throw caution to the wind. Mermaids, incidentally, receive considerable public funding: £35,000 from the Department for Education and £128,000 from Children in Need. They also provide mandatory training for teachers on how to help “transgender youth.”

Meanwhile, many parents are now asking themselves how it is that such a radical propaganda is cropping up on their TVs and in their schools.

French city won’t honor hero police officer slain by ISIS over concerns of offending Muslims

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2018/10/french-city-wont-honor-hero-police-officer-slain-by-isis-over-concerns-of-offending-muslims/

A French police officer who heroically saved a hostage from an ISIS terrorist will not be honored in public over fears of offending Muslims.

Arnaud Beltrame, a police officer from Marseille, France, negotiated with an ISIS terrorist during a Mar. 2018 hostage situation in which he traded himself for a female hostage and was later stabbed to death. Attempts to name the city’s 15th district after Beltrame were recently rejected over concerns of offending the Muslim community, Voice of Europe reported Saturday.

Stephane Ravier, Marseille’s 7th district National Rally mayor, said that the proposal was refused during a Marseille town council meeting.

“Leftist elected officials, socialist and communist, refused that a place in the 15th district be named after Arnaud Beltrame, in the first time, they’ve said, under fallacious pretext, that this place wasn’t prestigious enough, before telling the truth in these terms: we are on the field, we witnessed that the population has changed and if we give the name of Arnaud Beltrame in this district, the population will take that as a provocation,” Ravier said.

The 15th district in Marseille, much like the overall city, has a wide population of immigrants, many of whom are practicing Muslims. The area is also said to contain a large population of jihadists. The attack that ended Beltrame’s life took place just five months after an ISIS terrorist killed two women in the same area.

Radouane Lakdim, 25, stole a car and opened fire on police before entering a supermarket on Mar. 24, 2018. There, he fatally shot two patrons and took hostages, CNN reported at the time. He was armed with a handgun, a knife, and three bombs, and shouted “Allah Akbar” while committing the murders.

Beltrame, a lieutenant colonel with the National Police, successfully negotiated a trade of himself for a female hostage. He entered the supermarket with his phone on so authorities could overhear the terrorist’s communication and activities.
When gunfire was heard inside the supermarket after a three-hour standoff, police stormed in. The gunman was killed and Beltrame was fatally stabbed.

Hal G.P. Colebatch Trump Derangement Syndrome (Part II)

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/10/trump-derangement-syndrome-spreads-part-ii/

A Florida woman took a huge loss rather than sell her home to a Trump supporter, yet one more indication how deep the lunacy has spread. After Obama, when the Left thought it had won once and for all, bitter disappointment has spawned a sweeping, often violent and ominous hysteria.

Before my first collection of instances of Trump Derangement Syndrome had been published (Quadrant, September 2018) it had already been overtaken by a mass of new material, so virulent and widespread as to give the impression that the US and the Western world are in a kind of low-grade civil war.

The Trump Presidency has exposed deep and hitherto unsuspected levels of corruption, perhaps mere self-seeking, perhaps part of a larger, more treasonous agenda, in the “higher” Washington political class, including much of the media and parts of the Department of Justice and the FBI. Watching the current US political news brings to mind a passage in C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel That Hideous Strength: “Here was a world of plot within plot, crossing and double-crossing, of lies and graft and stabbing in the back … and a contemptuous guffaw for the fool who lost the game.”

Trump, for all his faults, appears to be standing against this, ripping up the established rules, speaking plain and simple truths—as he promised, draining the swamp—which accounts for some of the frenzied attacks on him. But there is more to it. Trump Derangement Syndrome appears in people who have no stake in the power game and when it is even contrary to their own interests.

It is easy to believe that a large number of Trump’s enemies, Republicans as well as Democrats, for all the loud professions of patriotism, are really opposed to him because they want his anti-Left program to fail. Their greatest and most permanent and decisive victory would be to have Trump impeached, notwithstanding the fact that more than two years of frantic searching has failed to discover any grounds for impeachment.

The activities of Left-fascist thugs, attempting to physically attack and silence Trump supporters and conservatives in general, are coming to bear a chilling resemblance to the political climate in the latter days of the Weimar Republic. This is emphatically not because the Sydney Morning Herald in October 2016 claimed that “Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler Have More in Common than Slogans”; rather, it is the institutionalisation and acceptance of violence and lies on the Left as an acceptable method of ideology making.

As Daryl McCann has pointed out (Quadrant, September 2018), Madeline Albright has called Trump, on no evidence whatsoever, “the first anti-democratic president in modern history”. This is not only false, but something like the reverse of truth. However, when it comes to the establishment attacking Trump, reason, logic and obvious facts cut no ice. A case could be made that he is hated, feared and despised by the media and other privileged denizens of academia, the “arts” and the political class, simply because he is democratic. He has better democratic credentials than all but a handful of presidents, and has ushered in an economic boom which has been of the greatest benefit to low-income-earners. This ignoring of fact and evidence for the sake of ideologically-based abuse seems to me to be itself a great threat to democracy and, in the long run, perhaps even to civilisation.

It appears to grow from overwhelming rage and fear on the part of the Left at seeing its overarching project for the socialist/communist transformation—or, for some, the destruction—of America and the West radically and effectively opposed for the first time since the Reagan Presidency. The fact that with the Obama Presidency it had looked as if the Left’s project was receiving a mighty boost towards total victory must have made Trump’s victory even more unbearable.

Writing in the Washington Post, the late Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by training, originally named the condition of Bush Derangement Syndrome—“the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush”. It has morphed into the more virulent and even more irrational Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Lionel Trilling’s Jewish Problem A leading light of the famous New York Intellectuals harbored deeply conflicted feelings about his own Jewishness, and exceptionally harsh views on Jews and Judaism. Edward Alexander

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2018/10/lionel-trillings-jewish-problem/

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was the grand master of America’s “Age of Criticism.” A renowned literary authority who taught for many years at Columbia University, Trilling was an influential member of the grouping that came to be known as the New York Intellectuals, a highly respected voice in public arguments concerning matters social, cultural, and political—and a Jew with (to put it mildly) conflicted views on Jews and Judaism.

While a full biography of Trilling remains to be written, he makes a central appearance in numerous studies of intellectual and political culture in mid-20th-century America as well as in memoirs by his wife Diana Trilling and by many friends, colleagues, students, and sparring partners. There is also a collection of his major essays, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (edited by Leon Wieseltier, 2000). And now, most recently, both the man and his work speak for themselves in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. The volume is edited by Adam Kirsch, an accomplished critic and poet and himself the author of an earlier brief study, Why Trilling Matters (2011).

Life in Culture, a kind of epistolary biography, consists of 270 letters culled from the thousands available. All of them but one were written by Trilling himself; there is none by his interlocutors, though Trilling does frequently quote passages from their letters in the course of grappling with their thoughts. Kirsch helpfully identifies these interlocutors, but the book lacks a glossary, and Kirsch’s own annotations are minimal—a possible obstacle for readers unacquainted with the persons, the issues, or the circumstances being addressed.

Trilling was a prodigious correspondent, who once estimated that he wrote about 600 letters a year. That he was also a generous correspondent I can testify as a former student whose letters he never failed to answer (and for whom he also performed two remarkable acts of personal kindness). Nor did he fastidiously decline to respond to non-literary people asking for advice about “writing” from a famous English professor; to the contrary, as Life in Culture demonstrates, they would get wise and feeling replies.

Many of the letters in Kirsch’s book are copious, and some are of enormous length, especially when Trilling is engaged in argument and quoting his adversary in full or near-full. From Kirsch’s selections, three major themes emerge: Trilling’s politics; his ambivalence about his own literary vocation (is he a critic, or a novelist?); and his permanently uneasy relation to Jews and Judaism. For our purposes here, I’ll focus only on the last.

In his magisterialintellectual biography (1939) of the great Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, begun as a Columbia doctoral dissertation, Trilling gave a detailed account of the strident opposition mounted by Arnold’s father, a prominent educator and liberal church leader, to the admission of Jews to London University. Thomas Arnold could not countenance a scheme that would mark “the first time that education in England was avowedly unchristianized for the sake of accommodating Jews.”

Lionel Trilling: America’s Matthew Arnold Edward Alexander

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7269/full

The recent publication of a selection of letters by Lionel Trilling — 270 chosen out of thousands available to an editor in the archives — affords an opportunity to reflect on the importance of this grand master of the Age of Criticism in the middle of the last century. Trilling rose to prominence in 1950 with the publication of his third book, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. It sold in numbers unprecedented for a book of criticism — 70,000 copies in hard cover, and 100,000 in paperback — and made Trilling the most influential mind in the culture of the Fifties.

But Trilling’s importance in the development of American literary culture and the place of Jews in that culture goes back to the time when he was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University in New York and to a now unremembered predecessor there named Ludwig Lewisohn. Lewisohn, a Berlin-born Jew who made himself into a southern Christian gentleman in Charleston, had to leave Columbia in 1903 without his doctorate because he was, in the eyes of Columbia’s English Department faculty, irredeemably Jewish. Like many a Jewish student of English after him, Lewisohn was told that he should not (or could not) proceed in his studies because the prejudice against hiring Jews in English departments was insuperable. Two decades later, reflecting on the appointment of a number of Jewish scholars in American colleges, he noted that in one discipline alone the old resistance remained firm: “Prejudice has not . . . relented in a single instance in regard to the teaching of English.” Perhaps this was because the study of English, unlike that of science or philosophy, was intimately bound up with the particularities of culture, for it was precisely the study of the mind of Western Christianity. What Bernard Berenson called the “Angry Saxons” who ran English departments were determined to protect Tennyson’s “treasure of the wisdom of the West” from barbarous Eastern (European) invaders. (I heard the very same story of rejection decades later from Irvin Ehrenpreis, who recovered sufficiently to become the consummate biographer of Jonathan Swift, but never got a PhD in English.)

Almost nothing of this part of Trilling’s story appears in this volume of letters (Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35, edited by Adam Kirsch). But Trilling did tell it, and very sardonically, in his notebooks of April and May of 1936, when Columbia’s English faculty tried to discontinue his appointment. “The reason for dismissal is that as a Jew, a Marxist, a Freudian, I am uneasy. This hampers my work and makes me unhappy.” His colleagues would undertake to cure his unhappiness by dismissing him before he could complete his degree and thereby strengthen his claim on a tenured position.

Trilling, never one to avoid a fight, confronted his professorial “accusers,” indeed “made date to annihilate [them],” and particularly his dissertation supervisor Emery Neff, who reportedly complained that Trilling had “involved himself with Ideas,” that he was overly “sensitive,” and didn’t really “fit [in] because he was a Jew.” This was not the last time that Trilling’s mentor would abandon him. Twenty-three years later, after Trilling had given a famously “heretical” lecture about Robert Frost’s poetry that aroused a storm of controversy, he wrote to me as follows: “Since we speak of teachers and scholarship, you will readily understand that the startling — and grotesque — part of the incident was that my old teacher Emery Neff, who taught me most of what I know about scholarship, denounced me with no knowledge of the text of what I had said.”

New This Fall: The Preschool Hijab! By Bruce Bawer

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-this-fall-the-preschool-hijab/

The U.K. these days is full of recalcitrants. Take all those rabble who, ignoring the wise counsel of the entire British establishment, had the audacity to vote for Brexit. Or the countless peasants who took to the streets this summer to show their support for that loathsome blackguard Tommy Robinson. Or all those troublemakers who criticize Islam online, forcing the poor police to send officers around to knock on their doors and order them to cut it out.

In this disobedient atmosphere, one institution stands out for its fealty to contemporary British values. Marks & Spencer, the giant retail food and clothing chain, has been around since 1884 but has striven admirably to stay up to date. A few years ago, for instance, in the wake of “consultations with religious groups,” M&S gave Muslim employees permission to deny service to customers buying alcohol or pork products. (By contrast, the official guidelines issued by another major chain, Sainsbury’s, said “there was no reason why staff who did not drink alcohol or eat pork for religious reasons could not handle the goods,” while yet another big chain, Tesco, “said it ‘made no sense’ to employ staff on a till who refused to touch certain items for religious reasons.” Islamophobes!)

Now M&S is being harassed again for showing proper deference to Islamic norms. Among the items it is hawking as part of its selection of “essential” school supplies are hijabs for young girls. How young? Different media report different figures. The Telegraph says that the hijabs are designed for girls aged nine and up. The radio station LBC says they fit girls as young as three. So does “secular Muslim” activist Maajid Nawaz, who in a tweet accused M&S of “facilitat[ing] medievalism.” The question of just what age the smallest of these hijabs are intended for was taken up, but not decisively settled, in an article in Metro, although an exchange of tweets between customers and helpful M&S employees made clear that the “large” size hijab — they come in “large,” “medium,” and “small” — is meant for “a 6-8 year-old,” and the Express noted that “online reviews suggest a ‘medium’ would fit a four-year-old.” CONTINUE AT SITE

FBI, Hazmat Team Descend on Sen. Susan Collins’ House in Bangor After Ricin Letter Threat By Debra Heine

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fbi-hazmat-team-descend-on-sen-susan-collins-house-in-bangor-after-ricin-letter-threat/

A hazmat team was called in to Senator Susan Collins’ home in Bangor, Maine, Monday after her husband received a threatening letter that may have been contaminated with poison. A number of other law enforcement groups descended on the Collins house, including the Bangor Criminal Investigation Division, the Bangor Fire Department, and the FBI, Bangor Daily News reported.

Police shut down a road adjacent to her house for several hours Monday afternoon.

“Senator Collins’ husband, Tom Daffron, today received a threatening letter that the writer claimed was contaminated with ricin, a highly hazardous substance which was used in a previous attack against the United States Senate,” Collins’ spokeswoman Annie Clark said in a statement Monday night. “Mr. Daffron, their dog, and parts of their home were quarantined while the crime lab undertook an analysis of the premises. The affected areas have now been cleared, and Senator Collins and Mr. Daffron will be able to remain at home tonight.”

Preliminary test results indicated there was no threat to the public.

Collins, a Republican, was not at home Monday afternoon while local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including a Hazmat team from Orono, investigated her West Broadway residence. Sgt. Wade Betters of the Bangor Police Department referred questions to the U.S. Capitol Police, the primary investigating agency.

Police had no comment on whether they had identified a suspect, who would probably face federal charges.

Clark said Monday night that the threatening letter was “the latest in a series of threats against Senator Collins, her loved ones, and her staff.”

Collins has had to endure vicious attacks from the left both before and after she cast a decisive vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, including protests in front of her house.

The senator arrived home from Washington, D.C., in the early evening, after most police had cleared the scene, Bangor Daily News reported.

“We are very grateful for the immediate and professional assistance that we received from the Bangor Police Department, the Maine Crime lab, the Maine State Police Department, the Capitol Police, the FBI, the Orono Hazmat Unit, the Bangor Fire Department, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service,” Collins said in a joint statement with her husband on Twitter.

“We are also truly appreciative of the many well wishes that we received today. Our friends and neighbors have been incredibly kind and have even offered to open their homes to us. We feel blessed to live in such a supportive community,” the statement continued. CONTINUE AT SITE

Spain: Islamic State Recruiting in Prisons by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13117/spain-prisons-islamic-state

The group — which Spain’s Interior Ministry described as a jihadi “Prisons Front” (“frente de cárceles”) — was engaged in recruiting, indoctrinating and radicalizing other inmates, as well as in plotting new jihadi attacks.

“We want to prepare ourselves for the jihad for Allah. I have good news: I have created a new group, we are willing to die for Allah at any moment. We are waiting to be released from prison so that we can begin working. We have men, we have weapons and we have targets. All we need is practice.” — Mohamed Achraf, in a letter written from prison to another inmate.

“The majority of the individuals being investigated, far from being deradicalized, have not only remained active in jihadi militancy, but have become even more radical during their incarceration.” — Spanish Interior Ministry.

Spanish police have dismantled a jihadi network operating inside and across more than a dozen Spanish prisons. The network, allegedly linked to the Islamic State, was established and operated by one of the most implacable jihadis in the Spanish prison system — apparently under the noses of prison authorities.

The network’s existence has called into question not only the effectiveness of security procedures in Spanish prisons, but also of Spanish “deradicalization” programs, which are aimed at “rehabilitating” Islamic militants for eventual “reinsertion” into society.

The group’s core members included 25 jihadis in 17 different prisons (accounting for more than half of the 30 Spanish prisons equipped to house jihadi convicts), according to the Interior Ministry, which provided details of the counterterrorism operation on October 2.

The group — which the Interior Ministry described as a jihadi “Prisons Front” (“frente de cárceles”) — was engaged in recruiting, indoctrinating and radicalizing other inmates, as well as in plotting new jihadi attacks.

The network’s members included convicted jihadis as well as common inmates who were radicalized in prison. Among them were several Spanish citizens who are converts to Islam. Some members were nearing the end of their sentences and were waiting to be released from prison.

Global Zero and Its Nuclear Globaloney by Peter Huessy

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13124/global-zero-baloney

According to the Princeton University disarmament group, Global Zero, an agreement on “No First Use” would be in a new treaty — one in which everyone “sincerely vows” never to use nuclear weapons first.

If warheads were actually removed from both submarine- and silo-based missiles, however, it would take months to put them back on the missiles, assuming the storage facilities used for the warheads were not destroyed in a preemptive Russian or Chinese attack. Talk about painting a bull’s-eye on your nuclear forces.

The Princeton University disarmament group, Global Zero, has released a new 107-page report — “The End of Nuclear Warfighting: Moving to a Deterrence-Only Posture” — that calls for the unilateral disarmament of more than two-thirds of the US nuclear deterrent and the adoption of a Chinese deterrent strategy including placing most US warheads in storage bunkers far removed from the missiles that could carry them.

The report’s conclusions are as follows:
US Deterrent Policy

China and Russia have no incentive to attack the United States, so the US can cut in half its nuclear arsenal — unilaterally — as the US no longer has to worry about the size of the Russian nuclear arsenal in measuring its own deterrent.

A reserve fleet of 40 nuclear bombers, but not readily available for use, is proposed, as opposed to the 75 B52 and 100 B21 bombers for both conventional and nuclear missions in the Trump administration plan. Bomber weapons would be kept in storage only to be used in emergencies.

The US target list to be destroyed in a hypothetical retaliatory strike should only be Russian industry and leadership, including electrical facilities, banking and communications, with 50% of the targets able to be destroyed with conventional weapons and cyber-attacks, further eliminating the need for nuclear weapons.

No Russian conventional or nuclear military targets need to be destroyed. As Russian infrastructure does not “move,” there is no need to destroy it quickly.

Global Zero says the US should unilaterally adopt China’s nuclear strategy, with most of America’s nuclear warheads not on alert but stored elsewhere; a deterrent of no more than 200-300 warheads deployed and in reserve (compared to 3,800 today); and a posture of no first use of such weapons.

Global Zero advocates a submarine-based MONAD deterrent, as opposed to the current US three-legged Triad of bombers, submarines and land-based missiles. Only 260 warheads would be at sea under this deterrence-only plan; at first, total deployed warheads would be 5 submarines x 16 missiles x 8 warheads per missile — or 640 warheads, but then declining after that to under 300.

What Multiculturalism Hides by Jan Keller

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13128/multiculturalism

Prof. Jan Keller is a Czech Social Democrat Member of the European Parliament, sociologist, analyst, commentator and author of more than 30 books, including Sociology of the Organization and Bureaucracy (2007) or The Three Social Worlds (2011). He studied at the universities of Bordeaux (1985), Aix-en-Provence (1988) and Sorbonne (1992) in Paris. He has lectured sociology at the University of Lille, Poitiers, Trento, Lodz and Barcelona.This article is based on a speech delivered at the seminar, “Is Mass Immigration a Condition for Prosperity of Europe?” held by the Institute Vaclav Klaus in Prague on March 19, 2015 and is published here with the kind permission of the author. It was translated into English by Josef Zbořil.

The policy of multiculturalism, which emphasizes the benefits of cultural diversity for society and the state, is an example of the exploitation of others based on a fantasy of virtue. Those at whom the sweet talk of multiculturalism is aimed, can see that it has done nothing to improve their lot, and are now realizing that their future is bleak.

If we bring in highly qualified immigrants to our workforce, we would be taking away from poorer countries the best they have to offer, and the situation in those countries will further deteriorate. The result will be an even greater flow of unskilled migrants escaping those countries.

The proponents of the new multiculturalism want to share their welfare states with masses of refugees who — through no fault of their own — will be unable to participate in financing themselves for a long time to come.

Multiculturalism is not a manifestation of Europe’s generosity, or some noble embodiment of love and truth. Multiculturalism is what remains after mass migration reveals itself as a threat, rather than a benefit, to the economies of European countries.

Take, for instance, the example of France. After the Second World War, when France underwent a boom of economic growth, waves of migration were viewed favorably: there were many job opportunities for unskilled and medium-skilled laborers, and the native French population aspired to work in the tertiary sector, which offered more qualified, better-paid jobs. From the end of the war until the mid-1970s, foreign workers tended to come to France temporarily, without their families, and return to their countries of origin. These workers were generally recruited from former French colonies to do menial and low-paying jobs — not in order to enrich the culture of the host country.

At the end of the 1970s, that situation changed. Foreign workers began coming to France with their families and also having children after arriving in the country. At the same time, however, there were changes in the economy that ended up leaving descendants of the recruited workers hopeless. While their parents had experienced some upward mobility, they themselves — even those with a higher level of education than their parents — were left with fewer job opportunities and became a surplus on the labor market; they also did not have another place to go. In other words, they had been born in a country that suddenly had nothing to offer. The only thing that the government could come up with was a rationale for the dire situation — a mission for these children of migrants: that they should enrich themselves culturally in the country to which their parents had migrated. This new policy of multiculturalism, which emphasizes the benefits of cultural diversity for society and the state, is an example of the exploitation of others based on a fantasy of virtue. Those at whom the sweet talk of multiculturalism is aimed, can see that it has done nothing to improve their lot, and are now realizing that their future is bleak.