I know it’s unfashionable to say anything positive about Scott Morrison but I fear he may be under-appreciated. But where can you find such sentiments expressed anywhere any more by someone who leads a government: Don’t give in to identity politics, Scott Morrison urges.
Scott Morrison has urged Australians not to surrender to “identity politics” and the forces that undermine the community, declaring freedom rests on “taking personal responsibility”.
In a speech outlining his values and beliefs, the Prime Minister on Thursday night launched an impassioned critique of the “growing tendency to commodify human beings through identity politics” and elevated the necessity of viewing “people as individuals — with agency and responsibility”.
Speaking at a United Israel Appeal NSW donor dinner in Sydney, Mr Morrison set out his vision of morality, community and personal responsibility in the modern world while warning that reducing individuals to their attributes would end in division and a broken society.
“We must never surrender the truth that the experience and value of every human being is unique and personal,” he said.
“You are more than your gender, your sexuality, your race, your ethnicity, your religion, your language group, your age.“
All of these contribute to who we are and the incredible diversity of our society, and our place in the world, but of themselves they are not the essence of our humanity.
“When we reduce ourselves to a collection of attributes, or divide ourselves on this basis, we can lose sight of who we are as individuals — in all our complexity and wholeness. We then define each other by the boxes we tick or don’t tick rather than our qualities, skills and character.
These were once merely boilerplate commonplace statements. Now they are radical arguments that we seldom any longer hear. Very happy to hear the PM say what really needs saying in these dark times.
I saw this yesterday and thought it may have been the most profound bit of meming I had seen in quite a while:
I don’t know whether we have gone about as far as we can go in pretty well every kind of technology, or whether we have instead reached what John Stuart Mill had described as the stationary-state, but my belief is that we have just stopped advancement and are stagnating. The mobile phone and the PC are pretty good and have been developing but over the past 30-40 years we live in the dreariest period of stagnation possibly in the last 500 years. It’s a pretty good life I suppose, and materially better than in the past. But this is where we are and are going nowhere else, except politically into a new age of feudalism since even politically we are going backwards.
Personal freedom and individual rights are disappearing, even as an ideal. Per capita wealth is on the decline with a fantastic shift in the distribution of income towards those already better off. Everyone else will either stay put, or more likely begin to slip backwards as time moves forward. Hardly anyone notices how their lives have been constricted, but they have been and weirdly near on half the population is grateful for their oppression.
White liberals are more prone to mental health disorders than individuals who identify as conservative or moderates, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
Sixty-two percent of Whites who classify themselves as “very liberal” or “liberal” have been told by a doctor they have a mental health condition, as compared to 26% of conservatives and 20% of moderates, the study found.
Young White people who identified as “very liberal” were almost one and a half times more likely to report mental health problems than those who considered themselves “liberal.”
Although the Pew Study was published last year, Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate, consolidated the data on Twitter, which sparked a column by news magazine Evie trying to dissect why this actually is.
Mr. Goldberg speculated the disparity may be because White liberals were more likely to seek mental health evaluations than other ideologies. This could be a simple, and true, answer.
Yet, there’s a lot of drawbacks to believing in liberalism.
The entire ideology “forces its followers to wallow in feelings of helplessness and victimhood,” Evie noted, as opposed to “building resiliency against hardship,” which helps combat depression.
Then there’s this about the left and the Chinese flu.
Other polls show liberals have bought into the mainstream media’s panic porn surrounding COVID-19 more than other ideologies, also causing them more stress and fear.
The vast majority of Democrats overestimate the probability of being hospitalized and dying from COVID-19, compared to other ideologies, a Gallup survey found. There’s only a 1 to 5% chance of somebody with COVID-19 having to be hospitalized, yet 41% of Democrats’ believe there’s a greater than 50% chance. Only 10% of Democrat respondents in the survey knew the correct answer.
With all of this misinformation, it’s not surprising why Democrats are afraid to take off their masks even after they’ve been vaccinated or are outdoors, and why liberal governors have been reluctant to reopen their states.
With this comment which speaks for me as well.
Having been a left wing liberal when I was young, I know first hand that much of what the PEW study stems from is cognitive dissonance. You’re passionately trying to believe in an ideology that real world facts don’t fully comply with it. So you fudge and reinterpret the facts but down deep you know you’re not being totally honest with yourself. The solution is to reinforce it all and the dissonance increases, surfacing as irrational behavior and dogmatic bluster.
I read this sentence which began the article and stopped right there. This, I said to myself, is the single most strikingly offputting statement that I have ever read that would ensure that from then on I would not trust a word of what follows. This was the sentence:
Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis,” in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth.
An authority on lying he definitely is having been one of the most grotesque liars in quite a long line of dishonest politicians, and not just in America. The article was, How physicist Steven Koonin became a climate truth teller.
The article is so empty of analysis that I am virtually unable to provide a brief example of its inanity. This will have to do.
Mr Koonin created the Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley that’s still going strong.
At Berkeley! Meanwhile the article is from the Wall Street Journal. The last thing I would look for in any of this would be something that might accurately be described as “truth”.
The existing scientific evidences challenge the safety and efficacy of wearing facemask as preventive intervention for COVID-19. The data suggest that both medical and non-medical facemasks are ineffective to block human-to-human transmission of viral and infectious disease such SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, supporting against the usage of facemasks. Wearing facemasks has been demonstrated to have substantial adverse physiological and psychological effects. These include hypoxia, hypercapnia, shortness of breath, increased acidity and toxicity, activation of fear and stress response, rise in stress hormones, immunosuppression, fatigue, headaches, decline in cognitive performance, predisposition for viral and infectious illnesses, chronic stress, anxiety and depression. Long-term consequences of wearing facemask can cause health deterioration, developing and progression of chronic diseases and premature death. Governments, policy makers and health organizations should utilize prosper and scientific evidence-based approach with respect to wearing facemasks, when the latter is considered as preventive intervention for public health.
OK. It’s an argument. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. But then this: Democrats Furious Over Stanford Study that Found Masks are Useless Against COVID. The results of studies like this should not be a politicised issue but it is. It would be one thing if I thought they were worried about bad science becoming generally believed, but that is the last thing I think Democrats (and the political left in general) worry about. They are worried that some of the political power that has accrued to them because of Covid might slip away.
Canadian police tried to shut down a POLISH church on Easter. The Polish have a PROFOUND understanding of totalitarianism (fascism, communism) and sent the police away! #COVID1984pic.twitter.com/TYMDYrujhC
— Geopolitics & Empire (@Geopolitics_Emp) April 3, 2021
This is how you handle police who enter a church without a warrant. They’re lucky they only got a tongue-lashing: s. 176 of the Criminal Code makes it a crime to disturb a church service. Those @CalgaryPolice thugs were breaking the law (and knew it). https://t.co/0XhAuwv0yg
I just thought that was because we are in Australia, but the question is not from an Australian source. It’s from this: What do you really know about the COVID Vaccine? There’s plenty more at the link which you should go to, including the interview above. However, this should on its own make you think.
Doctors and scientists from around the world are organizing, doing interviews, holding press conferences, suing their governments and doing all they can to expose the lies about COVID19, to reveal several effective treatments and to warn about the dangers of an untested “vaccine.” They are being suppressed, censored, targeted and maligned. Many point out that it is not really a vaccine by scientific definition. It is a new technology using messenger RNA that actually re-writes your human DNA. There has NEVER been a successful mRNA vaccine though they have attempted for 20 years to create one. In every case, animal trials were done and when the animals were later exposed to the virus they had a severe auto-immune reaction where their immune systems attacked their own cells and organs. There was a very high percentage of death. The COVID19 vaccine was rolled out prior to “FDA Approval.” It was only “allowed” due to an “emergency” based on the lie that no other effective treatments existed. By their own guidelines, an untested treatment may be used for “an emergency” if no other treatment exists.
The clinical trials for this mRNA COVID “vaccine” are not scheduled to be completed until 2023.
Health care professionals have shown that known, simple, inexpensive and extremely effective treatments are being used successfully and they are being censored. Furthermore, we are being told that even after “vaccination” we must still wear masks, practice social distancing and maintain lockdowns.
Does this really make any sense to anybody?
Which ends with the question asked as the title of the post. But there’s more, as I say, so go to the link! Especially this on Total Deaths in the US per Year by All Causes.
Unfortunately you have to already be able to see what this is saying to see it, but there you are. But watch it through, if for no other reason than to see Joe Biden say (at 3:55):
“There’s not a single thing a man can do that a woman can’t do as well, not a single thing.”
We just went to see New Movie Looks Through the Eyes of the Man Who Killed Israel’s Prime Minister. In Israel, the film is called Yamim Noraim which has a religious meaning, but in English is it titled, “Incitement”. This is an interview with its director followed by some passages from the above-linked article.
At the core of “Incitement” (“Yamim Noraim” in Hebrew) is an artistic decision that will cause the Israeli viewer’s heart to skip a beat: The decision to turn Yigal Amir, the man who murdered former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, into a cinematic hero. This is a choice that appears, at least at first, to be completely unreasonable if not outright mad. After all, Amir, in the eyes of most Israelis, is the number one enemy of the Jews – not a national hero. He is the man who crossed the line that nobody crossed before him. We thought that a Jew doesn’t kill a Jew. But Amir did. And he even found a justification based on halakha (Jewish religious law) for it.
Is it ethical to discuss Yigal Amir’s motives? Is it ethical to decipher his personality, to give him volume and feelings?
Twenty-four years after he committed murder, Amir has become the hero of a full-length feature film which was screened earlier this week at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be released in the coming weeks in Israeli movie theaters. The very idea of watching such a film causes great unease. We have become accustomed to loathing him, to regarding him as an abomination.
What happens when we suddenly see him as a well-rounded character, like the medium of cinema requires? Is it ethical to discuss Yigal Amir’s motives? Is it ethical to decipher his personality, to give him volume and feelings? What happens if we identify with him? What happens if the sharp and clear boundary we have drawn between ourselves and the murderer for the past 24 years begins to fade? Will we find ourselves understanding Yigal Amir?
The plot of “Yamim Noraim,” directed by Yaron Zilberman (who also wrote the script with Ron Leshem) begins about two years before the assassination. Amir, portrayed well by Yehuda Nahari Halevi, is a law student at Bar-Ilan University, who participates with his friends in stormy demonstrations against the Oslo Accords and then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
And the issue is not whether you agree with the policies adopted by Rabin. The issue is whether there are circumstances when the assassination of a political leader is legitimate. A fascinating film that had me gripped the whole way through since following the logic of the debate is what it is about.
Should Hitler have been assassinated? By1945, the answer was easy. But any such assassination would have had to occur in 1933-37 to have mattered. History just unfolds with all of its might-have-beens that can never be answered. I will say only this. That a political leader with a majority of 61-59 in Parliament should not attempt such divisive policies. And for more on that, there is this article to consider: Religious Zionism and The Rabin Assassination.
Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an Orthodox Jew, a student in the law school at Bar Ilan University, and a graduate of Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, two of the most prominent educational institutions of Religious Zionism. Amir claimed religious justifications for his act, quoting halakhic arguments widely discussed in rabbinic circles of Religious Zionism at the time. He determined that Rabin’s policies endangered Jewish lives, which placed Rabin in the category of rodef (pursuer), whom one is permitted to kill. It has not been determined whether Amir had specific rabbinical approval for his act. He has denied it, saying that the permissibility of the assassination was sufficiently clear that he could act on his own. His brother Hagai, who was convicted as an accomplice to the assassination,
has repeatedly asserted that there had been rabbinical approval, although
he has not mentioned a name. In the broader community there remain strong suspicions that Yigal Amir’s actions were approved by many Religious Zionists, including rabbis, even though only a small fringe has openly said so.
But religious approval is also not a justification for murder. The movie however does go through the various considerations that went into the assassination, as well as the personal circumstances that surrounded Amir. It tries to explain why he did what he did, not in any way to justify what he did.
Law of Markets 