Society's ChildS


Heart - Black

SOTT Focus: As Islamophobia Rises, Moral Values Decrease

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© Carlos Latuff"Islam is a religion that promotes death and violence!"
Sez who?
For years now in the U.S., and in European countries such as the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, and France, Muslims have experienced difficulty when it comes to finding a job, due to the ever-increasing Islamophobia. And that's not all, a 2006 report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, entitled "Muslims in the European Union: Discrimination and Islamophobia", concludes:
  • Regardless of their ethnic background and/or approach to religion, many European Muslims are facing discrimination in employment, education and housing.
  • Discrimination against Muslims can be attributed to Islamophobic attitudes as well as to racist and xenophobic resentment, as these elements are often intertwined. Hostility against Muslims must therefore be seen in the more general context of xenophobia and racism towards migrants and minorities.
  • It is evident that Muslims are experiencing Islamophobic acts, ranging from verbal threats through to physical attacks, even though data on religiously aggravated incidents is collected on a limited scale.
  • The available data on victims of discrimination show that European Muslims are often disproportionately represented in areas with poorer housing conditions, while their educational achievement falls below average and their unemployment rates are higher than average. Muslims are often employed in jobs that require lower qualifications. As a group they are over-represented in low-paying sectors of the economy.
  • Many European Muslims, particularly young people, face barriers to their social advancement. This could give rise to a feeling of hopelessness and social exclusion.
  • Racism, discrimination and social marginalisation are serious threats to integration and community cohesion.
Now that anti-Islamic sentiments have risen by 110% in France, and 'anti-Islamization' demos have been held in several countries, chances are high that the disadvantageous position Muslims already were in prior to the Paris attack will only get worse. Needless to say, this is far from fair, considering that the Muslim majority had nothing to do with the recent attack in Paris, just as they didn't have anything to do with the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. Yet they've become the very target of hatred, and it affects their daily lives quite significantly.

Heart - Black

Accused Vanderbilt football player blames gang rape on university's culture of 'sexual freedom'

Cory Batey
© FacebookCory Batey
A former Vanderbilt University football player is blaming peer pressure and the school's culture of "sexual freedom" for an incident in which he and several other men reportedly raped a woman's unconscious body, urinated on her and posted photos and video of the event on social media.

According to Gawker, Cory Batey does not deny that he took part in the dorm room assault on the unconscious woman, but his lawyers told Reuters that their client is not to blame, saying the assault was caused by "a campus culture of sexual freedom, promiscuity and excessive alcohol consumption."

The victim testified in court on Thursday that she did not know what had happened to her until she was shown video of the football players attacking her.

Comment: Here is a map of colleges that are under sexual assault investigations.




Newspaper

San Diego cop punished for objection to racist cartoon

SDPD racist cartoon
© KGTV-TVRacist cartoon used by San Diego police during training exercise
A San Diego, California police officer is suing his supervisors for allegedly punishing him after he objected to the use of a racist cartoon in training sessions for supervisors, KGTV-TV reported.

Sgt. Arthur Scott said in his lawsuit against the city that he was transferred out of his division against his will after he complained to assistant police chief Todd Jarvis about the cartoon - a crude depiction of the department's first Black officer - being shown to sergeants and lieutenants during a mandatory week-long event he attended last August. The suit also said that Scott was threatened with disciplinary action and passed over for a promotion.

Comment: The San Diego PD needs to upgrade their lingo: it's "freedom of speech" and "satire"! "Je suis SDPD!"


Stop

Sick bag alert: Clint Eastwood claims 'American Sniper' is 'the biggest antiwar statement'

Clint Eastwood
© cinemafestival / Shutterstock.com
In the wake of antiwar criticism from the left and pro-war praise from right about his film American Sniper, director Clint Eastwood told those gathered at Saturday's Producers Guild Award Nominees Breakfast that his film makes "the biggest antiwar statement any film can."

Eastwood insisted that the film was an "antiwar statement" because it depicted "what [war] does to the family and the people who have to go back to into civilian life like Chris Kyle did."

"One of my favorite war movies that I've been involved with is Letters from Iwo Jima," he continued. "And that was about family, about being taken away from life, being sent someplace. In World War II, everybody just sort of went home and got over it. Now there is some effort to help people through it. In Chris Kyle's case, no good deed went unpunished."

Comment: No mention of the dead and suffering victims of these wars. Disgusting.


People

'Wellfare not Warfare': Protest in London against £100bn nuke replacement plan

London protests
© Ruptly video
Thousands of CND campaigners wrapped the UK Ministry of Defence in a two-mile long 'peace scarf' to protest the imminent overhaul of the sea-based Trident nuclear defense system.

Protesters carried placards reading "Books Not Bombs" and "Climate Not Trident", as they loudly chanted: "Wrap up Trident, ban the bomb now!"

Quenelle

France: Je suis hypocrite?

power pencil
© Anthony Freda Art
In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, social media was filled with predictable tag lines, hashtags, and memes. It was the result of a general public who had briefly tuned in to current events or the fact that there was a country outside of their own expressing "sympathy and solidarity" with the victims of the terrorist attack. All this proved, however, was that the culture creation machine was well at work at producing feel good messages and that a simple Tweet was quite enough to make the majority of people contented that they had done their patriotic duty.

Critical thinking? Not necessary.

Within hours of the attacks, social media was flooded with "I stand with Free Speech" and "Je suis Charlie." Americans, unaware of anything that happens outside of their own borders (or within) were happy to retweet and share familiar sounding memes while the French were happy to indulge themselves in the fantasy that they are a free people.

Comment: See also:

France's arrest of Dieudonné shows the sham of its free speech celebrations

Paris: March of the hypocrites

The moral hysteria and blindness of Je suis charlie


Attention

Supreme Court justices consider routine use of drug dogs during traffic stops

Supreme Court building
© Daderot/Wikimedia Creative Commons

Some Supreme Court justices question whether Fourth Amendment intrusions during traffic stops have gone too far.


Should police have the power to order a driver out of his car while a search is conducted with a drug dog -- even when there is no reason to believe the motorist has done anything wrong? That was the question posed to the US Supreme Court during oral arguments on Wednesday in the case of Dennys Rodriguez.

Rodriguez was stopped on March 27, 2012 after a Nebraska police officer saw him briefly swerve. On a hunch, the officer decided to call for a drug dog. After about half an hour, the dog alerted, and Rodriguez was arrested and found guilty of possession. The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld his conviction last year (view appellate decision).

Shannon P. O'Connor, public defender for Rodriguez, argued that the sniff should be suppressed because it was conducted after the officer completed writing the traffic ticket. Once the underlying reason for the stop is complete, O'Connor insisted, there is no justification to detain a motorist further. Some justices were not convinced that the act of writing a ticket ends the stop.

Comment: Thanks, Supreme Court justices, for doing your jobs and upholding the law!


Eye 1

If you question authority, or show above average creativity, you are mentally ill

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Only the Sheeple Are Sane


This post is about an issue that is by now a bit dated (though the topic as such certainly isn't), but we have only just become aware of it and it seemed to us worth rescuing it from the memory hole. In late 2013, the then newest issue of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) defined a new mental illness, the so-called "oppositional defiant disorder" or ODD.

As TheMindUnleashed.org informs us, the definition of this new mental illness essentially amounts to declaring any non-conformity and questioning of authority as a form of insanity. According to the manual, ODD is defined as:
[...] an "ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior," symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.
In short, as Natural News put it: According to US psychiatrists, only the sheeple are sane.

Every time a new issue of the DSM appears, the number of mental disorders grows - and this growth is exponential. A century ago there were essentially 7 disorders, 80 years ago there were 59, 50 years ago there were 130, and by 2010 there were 374 (77 of which were "found" in just seven years). A prominent critic of this over-diagnosing (and the associated over-medication trend) is psychologist Dr. Paula Caplan. Here is an interview with her:


Comment: Stefan Molyneux' views are too extreme: There certainly are mental illnesses. The question is how we treat them. Pharmacological treatment is now a $76 billion industry.

But recently the scope and breadth of mental illnesses has been constantly widened, so that former "personality traits" are now considered a mental illness - mainly for control and financial reasons.

For further information see: For more information about "authoritarian followers" see:


Book 2

The better you know the Bible, the worse you do in college

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Researchers have long studied and documented the influence religion has on social groups; however, few have examined the role it plays in education. LSU Sociology Professor Samuel Stroope recently penned a research article that examines the relationship between religion and educational attainment in the U.S. The article, titled, "Social Context and College Completion in the United States: The Role of Congregational Biblical Liberalism," will be published in the upcoming edition ofSociological Perspectives.

Using data from the U.S. Congregational Life Survey, a national sample of religious congregations and members, Stroope and his team, composed of two researchers from Hope College and Baylor University, measured the dependent variable of college completion and the independent variables of individual biblical literalism and congregational biblical literalism.

The team found that in accordance to their expectations, individual biblical literalism is negatively associated with college completion and congregational biblical literalism is negatively related to college attainment. In contrast to their expectations, they found that as congregational literalism increases, the odds of completing college decreases more sharply for non-literalists than for literalists.

Stroope joined LSU's Department of Sociology in 2013. The primary goal of his current research is to better understand how geographic and social contexts shape health and health disparities.

Newspaper

"As above, so below": Miss Israel muscled her way into Miss Lebanon's selfie

Saly Greige
© AFP Photo/Anwar AmroSaly Greige waving after being crowned Miss Lebanon 2014, on October 5, 2014. She is now in trouble for appearing in "selfie" photo with Miss Israel
Miss Universe contestants are keen to proclaim their desire for world peace, but this year's Miss Lebanon has declared war after claiming Miss Israel muscled in uninvited during a group "selfie."


Comment: This is blaming the victim. It was Miss Israel who muscled her way into the picture, uninvited, and she should be called out for violating Greige's privacy, for unprofessional behavior, and a total lack of manners.


Saly Greige took to her Facebook page to declare that Israel's Doron Matalon had pushed her way into a now widely-circulated photo showing the Middle Eastern beauties with Miss Japan and Miss Slovenia.

"Since the first day of my arrival to participate to Miss Universe, I was very cautious to avoid being in any photo or communication with Miss Israel (that tried several times to have a photo with me)," Greige wrote in English on her page.

"I was having a photo with Miss Japan, Miss Slovenia and myself, suddenly Miss Israel jumped in, took a selfie, and put it on her social media."