Getting Our Minds Right

Post lifted from Gates of Vienna . See the original for links

Fjordman has coined the term "Glossocracy" for the systematic alteration and debasement of language by the Marxist and Multicultural ideologues who control most of the public institutions in the West. When you make it difficult to describe the world except in terms that are ideologically pre-defined, you also make it difficult to think in any other way.

At the same time, ordinary citizens are conditioned not to publicly express their unacceptable ideas. When "hate speech" can cause you to lose your career, or your pension, or even land you in jail, you become very careful of what you say.

It doesn't require the full repressive apparatus of a totalitarian state to effect these conditions. What Fjordman calls a "soft totalitarianism" will do just as well. Soft totalitarianism has already come to maturity in the European Union, and it is well underway here in the United States.

Finland's Ombudsman for Minorities is a case in point. for KGS from Tundra Tabloids has translated the Finnish version of Mikko Puumalainen's interview on today's Finnish state TV news website, in which the Ombudsman discusses the need to school Finnish law enforcement personnel and the judicial and prosecuting services in the use of the country's anti-racism laws.

KGS points out that there is also a version of the story in English, Ombudsman: Anti-Racism Laws Not Used Effectively, at the same website. The English version is shorter and has a different emphasis

To recap the highlighted portions of the article:

* "What the differences in the statistics tell of the justice department's indifference towards racism has yet to be researched."

* Even so, "it can be assumed that only two percent of racism-related crimes go reported."

* And, most importantly, "part of the basics in crime investigation is to find out the motive of the suspect."

Try to get your mind around what's being said here.

1. If only 2% of reported "racism crimes" result in judicial action, it proves that there is systemic racism, or at best an ignorance of the law, within the criminal justice apparatus. It does not mean that 98% of the accused were innocent of the crimes.

2. We will act on the conclusions from #1, even though we officially acknowledge that we don't know the reason for the statistical discrepancies.

3. Knowing what's in the mind of a criminal is part of the basics of crime investigation. And when the crime is "racism", there is no crime other than what is in the mind of the putative criminal.

The adjective "Orwellian" does not even begin to describe this pernicious process.

The average, normal, commonsensical person loves his homeland, prefers people who speak the same language, and feels an affinity for his own people. That's not racism; it's normal human nature. It shouldn't be a crime to say, "I'm glad I live in Finland. I'm proud to speak Suomi. I think Finland is better than other countries. I think that people who come to live here should learn to be like us." There's nothing wrong with that.

But we've all been trained for the last forty years or so to instinctively feel that there is something wrong with it, to feel a twinge of guilt if we even think it. That's how well the Glossocracy has done its job. First you are made afraid to speak the simple truth, and then you are subjected to absurd lies, over and over again. You have to pretend to believe them. You have to repeat them in school. You are subjected to them at work. You hear your government officials assert them as established facts.

Taken to an extreme, this kind of indoctrination destroys the sense of self and can derange your cognitive processes. The Soft Totalitarians aren't just interested in how you behave; they're after what's in your mind. They want to make sure that you get it right.



Proof of Racism: Asians Make More Money

I've already explained (many times) why these arguments don't make sense, but people are still making them: `Gaps' in income and education between `racial groups' prove that America is still racist. It's `institutionalized racism' (whatever that means, which is probably nothing) because they can't find enough actual evidence of racism to say that it is still a problem. Oh well. They make the arguments. But they are inconsistent. According to the Census bureau:

12% of hispanic adults have college degrees.
17% of black adults have college degrees.
30% of white adults have college degrees.
49% of asian adults have college degrees.
Median income for black households: $30,939
Median income for hispanic households: $36,278
Median income for white households: $50,622
Median income for asian households: $60,367

Racism against whites?

According to the "Look, a disparity!!" argument, educational and income disparities are evidence of racism. So it should follow that blacks and hispanics suffer the most from racism, followed by whites given the fact that asians are, on average, doing so much better. And it's not an insubstantial difference either - in fact, the gap between asians and whites in terms of college degrees is bigger than the gap between whites and blacks or whites and hispanics. So if we buy the income/education gap argument, then whites can join the ranks of the victims of racism in America.

Source



Japan rejects meddling with family life

Plans to urge Japanese mothers to breast-feed and sing lullabies to their babies and for families to turn off the TV during meals have been scrapped, Kyodo news agency reported. Mothers were urged to look into their baby's eyes while breast-feeding in a draft of a report by a government panel that was due out this week. It had also warned that the internet and mobile phones give children a "direct connection with the evils of the world".

But the release of the report by an education reform panel was called off at the last minute in an apparent response to criticism that it went too far in meddling with people's private lives, Kyodo reported.

Improving education has also been a priority in efforts to boost Japan's faltering birthrate. The fertility rate - the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime - hit a record low of 1.26 in 2005. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged when he took office last year to reform Japan's education system by reviving patriotism in the nation's classrooms.

The education system came under fire earlier this year after a series of student suicides linked to bullying, and parliament enacted a law in December aimed at encouraging schools to teach patriotism.

Source



Australia's public broadcaster presents Leftist propaganda as history

Bastard Boys, the story of the 1998 waterfront dispute, screens on the ABC tomorrow and Monday. It's well made and should get a good audience in an election year where industrial relations is again an important issue. There has been extensive publicity about the series, and its makers have been keen to stress its impartiality. These claims are nonsense. The series is the most blatant union propaganda. It's a very strange use of public money by the ABC and the other government agencies involved: the Film Finance Corporation, the NSW Film and Television Office and Film Victoria.

Simple mathematics suggests the scale of bias. The miniseries is divided into four equal segments, each told from the viewpoint of one participant. Two are union officials (the then Maritime Union of Australia national secretary John Coombs and the ACTU's Greg Combet), one is a Labor lawyer, and one is Chris Corrigan, the head of Patrick Stevedores. The Corrigan segment contains far more from the union perspective than from his. So about 80 per cent of the story is told from the union point of view. Impartial?

What makes it worse is that a lot of time is devoted to the private lives of the union characters, with many scenes of them falling in love or reading to their children. So they emerge as warm, fully rounded people. All those images of Combet racing to pick up his daughter from child care will do him no harm with female voters in his new political career. In contrast, Corrigan is portrayed as a gawky and ridiculous loner without friends, or even associates. We often see him being driven around in the back of a dry-cleaning van (for security) but we never see him talking to his board of directors. The treatment of his family life is perfunctory. Almost the only time we see anyone on his side is when they're ratting on him. He is a man without context, implausible as both a human being and a successful entrepreneur.

In the opening minutes of the show, just after paramilitary figures with dogs rush onto the wharves, Combet introduces Corrigan as an "evil genius". Corrigan then explains what he was doing when the members of the Maritime Union of Australia were thrown off his docks. "I was asleep," he says. Indeed, he was dreaming "about this mad old Hungarian refugee I worked for as a kid. He employed a lot of local kids - well, we were cheap, of course - and he'd get us out in his market garden at 3am in the Mittagong winter freezing our balls off, cutting celery. He used to say, 'Work a little harder, bastard boys.' " Clearly, given the show's title, this is meant to compare Corrigan with the mad market gardener and the wharfies with the wretched Mittagong child labourers, with all the irony implied by such a comparison. But this is madness.

In 1998 the members of the Maritime Union of Australia were the aristocracy of the working class, earning in the top 5 per cent of all employees. They were also among the laziest waterfront workers in the world, with their all-important crane lift rate among the lowest in the OECD. The series doesn't go into this. It doesn't give us any sense of the years of failed efforts by Corrigan to make the wharfies see reason. We don't see the MUA, backed by the union movement and the Labor Party, assuring the public that crane lift rates could not be lifted from 18 to 25 an hour. (They reached that level two years after the dispute ended.) Without such context, this is poor drama and also poor history.

A voice missing from Bastard Boys is that of the many Australians affected for decades by the laziness and corruption on the wharves. We hear a lot in the series about the glorious traditions and history of the union. We hear nothing of its notorious record in undermining the war effort during World War II, all the looting, the go-slows and the strikes. We see unionists being kind to small children but hear nothing of how they held the country to ransom for decades. One example: a man I know well used to bring in containers during the 1970s. They took longer to clear the dock in Sydney than they did to travel from Germany by sea, until he started to bribe the wharfies.

For balance, Bastard Boys might have replaced one of its main union characters with one of the workers who briefly replaced the wharfies. These were often farmers driven off the land by economic reforms. Some sold their houses in the country and moved to the city to work on the wharves, then found themselves unemployed again when the courts ordered Patrick to reinstate the members of the MUA. These men and women, portrayed in the series as "scabs", suffered more than anyone else in this conflict.

Like the biopic Curtin, another piece of Labor hagiography recently screened by the ABC, Bastard Boys is bound to be used by schools to teach history for years to come. It continues the film and television industry's use of public money to remove the non-Labor view from Australian history. I believe the protestations of the makers of Bastard Boys that they did their best to achieve impartiality. The most interesting thing about the result is not that they failed but that they seem completely unaware that they failed.

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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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