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Elites who appease the baying mob's apology addiction have stripped apology of all meaning

Frank Furedi
RT
Fri, 19 Jun 2020 18:42 UTC
jacob frey
© Getty Images / Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times
Jacob Frey, Mayor of Minneapolis takes at knee George Floyd's memorial service on Thursday, June 4, 2020 in Minneapolis , Minnesota
No sooner did Jacob Frey, the Mayor of Minneapolis, apologize to the black community for the killing of George Floyd than everyone felt they had to say sorry for the sins of their fathers, erasing the meaning of sincere apology.

I've stopped counting the number of apologies issued by public figures, business institutions and celebrities in recent weeks. It's sometimes difficult to avoid the conclusion that a public apology has become a public-relations exercise. Why else would the Greene King pub chain and Lloyd's of London apologize for the links to the slave trade - a historical event that occurred centuries ago?

Moral cowardice and the easy way out

Moral cowardice is another of the driving forces fueling the proliferation of public apologies. Apology has become weaponized to the point that very few politicians possess the strength of character to stand by their words. I remember when, last November, the Mayor of Middlesbrough, Andy Preston, apologized 'unreservedly' to the mental-health charity Mind for calling a Facebook commenter a 'nutter'. There's something truly scary about a world in which people wish to censor others for using a word the vast majority of human beings find unobjectionable. But what is even more chilling is that the mayor felt obliged to grovel and apologize.
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Handcuffs

Police op underway in Dijon, France after days of street skirmishes between Chechen and Maghreb gangs


RT
Fri, 19 Jun 2020 17:39 UTC
dijon police
© Twitter / Prefect of Bourgogne-Franche-Comte @Prefet21_BFC
French police are conducting an operation in the city of Dijon, which has seen several nights of gang violence in the past week.

Local law enforcement announced the operation in the neighborhoods of Gresilles and Chenove on Friday morning, tweeting photos of officers in action.


Some 150 officers were deployed to search the area for stashed weapons that could have been used in the gang confrontations, according to local media.

Comment: See also:

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Light Sabers

The birth of the culture wars

Frank Furedi
Spiked
Fri, 19 Jun 2020 17:20 UTC
churchill statue
© Getty
Many pundits and politicians seem to blame UK prime minister Boris Johnson for provoking the latest installment of the culture wars that now dominate Anglo-American public life. Sections of the media, from the New York Times to the Guardian, have claimed that Johnson wants to argue over statues to distract from his poor handling of the Covid pandemic. Others, such as Labour's David Lammy, reckon Johnson's defence of the statue of Winston Churchill, against those who would deface or dismantle it, was a deliberate attempt to stoke the culture wars, and deflect attention from the Tories lack of progress on 'racial injustice'.

These are massively disingenuous claims. After all, is it really surprising that a British prime minister would defend a memorial devoted to arguably the nation's greatest modern figure? Moreover, Johnson was not initiating anything. He was responding to a movement that has been directing its energy towards the destruction of the symbols of Britain's national history and culture. It takes tremendous bad faith to characterise Johnson's defensive response to an attack on British culture as an attempt to launch a culture war.
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NPC

About face: Ralph Northam is speaker for Virginia Dems even though they called for his resignation over blackface photo


RT
Thu, 18 Jun 2020 17:12 UTC
Ralph Northam
© REUTERS/Michael A. McCoy
Ralph Northam
Governor Ralph Northam is speaking for Virginia Democrats at an upcoming convention, a decision being blasted, because the same group had previously called for his resignation over a controversial blackface photo.

"We're honored to have @GovernorVA speaking at our virtual state convention coming up in just a few days!" the Democrat Party of Virginia wrote on Thursday, in a tweet that left many scratching their heads.

Virginia Democrats were one of many groups to call for Northam to resign only a year ago, after the governor was found to be in a photo containing one person in blackface - whom many suspect is Northam - and another in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
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Sherlock

Empty Coffins, Empty Hospitals: Brazilian MPs Expose Biggest Covid-19 Hoax Known To Date

Joaquin Flores
Fort Russ News
Fri, 19 Jun 2020 17:05 UTC
covid hoax
FRN brings the following major revelation:

Members of the Brazilian parliament decided to confirm suspicions and break into a hospital that claimed to have 5,000 infected & 200 deaths from COVID-19, and found that the hospital had grossly over-represented the cases and its claims. There was in fact not a single person, they report, and the hospital was entirely empty and was obviously still under construction.

Acting on a tip that something was going wrong at this hospital, five members of the Brazil parliament went to hospitals under encouragement by president Bolsonaro to break in & check to see the number of patients there.
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Take 2

Say what? UK Sky Cinema adds trigger warning for 2019 Aladdin remake for 'outdated attitudes'


RT
Fri, 19 Jun 2020 16:59 UTC
aladdin
© Twitter / @Unkle_Lee44
Sky Cinema in Britain has placed disclaimers alongside its descriptions of several popular motion pictures, claiming that some "attitudes" in those films may be outdated. But one of its 'trigger-warned' movies is only a year old.

Sky's movie service informed its viewers that 2019's 'Aladdin' contains "outdated attitudes, language and cultural depictions which may cause offence today."

Sky's "trigger warning" has drawn a predictable backlash online.


People were perplexed that a remake from only last year is now being called "outdated."

"Wait til they catch up with 'Hunchback of Notre Dame'! Banned by the end of the week!" Mansfield MP Ben Bradley tweeted.

Viewers claimed that absolutely no one has been offended by 2019's Aladdin.

Comment: And when totalitarianism came, it was welcomed with open arms. The few dissenters were quickly taken care of - taken to a place where they would no longer be able to offend anyone. And since all of history was soon deemed offensive, soon there was no history. No art. No humanity.



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Eye 1

FBI used a Philly protester's Etsy profile, LinkedIn, and other internet history to charge her with setting police cars ablaze

Jeremy Roebuck
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Wed, 17 Jun 2020 16:55 UTC
U.S. DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA

U.S. DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA
As demonstrators shouted, fires burned outside City Hall, and Philadelphia convulsed with outrage over the death of George Floyd, television news helicopters captured footage of a masked woman with a peace sign tattoo and wearing a light blue T-shirt setting a police SUV ablaze.

More than two weeks after that climactic May 30 moment, federal authorities say they've identified the arsonist as 33-year-old Philadelphia massage therapist Lore Elisabeth Blumenthal by following the intricate trail of bread crumbs she left through her social media history and online shopping patterns over the years.

The path took agents from Instagram, where amateur photographers also captured shots of the masked arsonist, to an Etsy shop that sold the distinctive T-shirt the woman was wearing in the video. It led investigators to her LinkedIn page, to her profile on the fashion website Poshmark, and eventually to her doorstep in Germantown.

Their pursuit, described in court filings this week, sheds light on the extent to which the FBI and Justice Department have used news footage, online histories, and social media footprints to track down and identify demonstrators believed to be responsible for acts of violence or property destruction.

Comment: Those on the left who are going around cities committing arson, theft, and other anti-social acts would do well to keep in mind the abilities of law enforcement to use their extensive surveillance and investigative capabilities to track them down.

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Snakes in Suits

Thought control: 'Independent' Facebook fact-checker exposed as partisan smear factory packed with CNN alumni


RT
Fri, 19 Jun 2020 16:50 UTC
facebook and cnn
© Reuters / Dado Ruvic / Brian Snyder
Facebook fact-checker Lead Stories is a biased outfit bristling with ex-CNN staffers that presents itself as neutral, despite most of its employees having donated to the Democratic Party, a conservative outlet has revealed.

The National Pulse (TNP), whose story about supposed financial links between Black Lives Matter, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and fundraiser ActBlue was flagged as "partly false" by Lead Stories on Facebook, did some digging on Wednesday to find out who was behind the smear, after their efforts to contest the label were apparently stonewalled.

What they discovered was an organization staffed almost entirely by Democratic donors, half of whom had worked for CNN in the past. A quarter of the employees were recurring Democratic donors, TNP revealed, suggesting an egregious conflict of interest, given the story they'd flagged at the conservative outlet was about contributions to a Democratic presidential campaign.

Lead Stories founder Perry Sanders has donated over $10,000 to Democratic political campaigns, including Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's presidential runs, TNP showed, providing copious links to back up the laundry list of partisan affiliations it had stumbled across. Several other writers had Democratic contributions on their records too. One, Gita Smith, was listed in 99 separate small-dollar donations to various Democratic candidates, as well as some contributions directly to ActBlue and the activism group Indivisible.
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Attention

Alleged 'nooses' in Oakland park were actually exercise aids, man says


ABC News
Thu, 18 Jun 2020 21:19 UTC
Victor Sengbe
© KGO/CNN
Victor Sengbe said he put the ropes in the trees as exercise equipment.
Oakland's mayor said five ropes found hanging from trees in a city park are nooses and racially-charged symbols of terror but a resident said they are merely exercise equipment that he put up there months ago.

Mayor Libby Schaaf said Wedesday that a hate crime investigation was under way after a social media post identified a noose at the city's popular Lake Merritt. Police said they searched the area on Tuesday and found five ropes attached to trees.

The Police Department provided five photographs of trees, some of which showed knotted ropes and one that appeared to have a piece of plastic pipe attached to a rope, hanging from tree limbs.

They have been removed by city officials.

Victor Sengbe, who is black, told KGO-TV that the ropes were part of a rigging that he and his friends used as part of a larger swing system. He also shared video of the swing in use.

"Out of the dozen and hundreds and thousands of people that walked by, no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose. Folks have used it for exercise. It was really a fun addition to the park that we tried to create," Sengbe said.

"It's unfortunate that a genuine gesture of just wanting to have a good time got misinterpreted into something so heinous," he told the station.

Comment: All this over some exercise equipment and a makeshift swing. What a bunch of virtue signalling a**hats.



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Gear

The activist Left and the racism treadmill

Coleman Hughes
Quillette
Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00 UTC
racism america
The prevailing view among progressives today is that America hasn't made much progress on racism. While no one would argue that abolishing slavery and dissolving Jim Crow weren't good first steps, the progressive attitude toward such reforms is nicely summarized by Malcolm X's famous quip, "You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress." Aside from outlawing formalized bigotry, many progressives believe that things haven't improved all that much. Racist attitudes towards blacks, if only in the form of implicit bias, are thought to be widespread; black men are still liable to be arrested in a Starbucks for no good reason; plus we have a president who has found it difficult to denounce neo-Nazis. If racism still looms large in our social and political lives, then, as one left-wing commentator put it, "progress is debatable."

But the data take a clear side in that debate. In his controversial bestseller Enlightenment Now, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker notes a steep decline in racism. At the turn of the 20th century, lynchings occurred at a rate of three per week. Now, racially-motivated killings of blacks occur at a rate of zero to one per year.1 What's more, racist attitudes that were once commonplace have now become fringe. A Gallup poll found that only 4 percent of Americans approved of marriages between blacks and whites in 1958. By 2013, that number had climbed to 87 percent, prompting pollsters to call it "one of the largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history."
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