UK Police Live Out A Monty-Python Skit

Make-Work Police Stupidity in the UK

There is something terribly wrong with the Police force in the United Kingdom.  One hopes that the Orwellian overreach gets exposed and then uprooted from the Force.  

Here is the problem: 

Police officers in the United Kingdom are spending time and resources on logging tens of thousands of “hate incidents” every year, even though the offences are not crimes.

Over the past five years, police in England and Wales have recorded over 87,000 ‘non-crime hate incidents’, using the same system that logs real crimes, the result of which can lead to the offences appearing on an individual’s background check despite not committing a crime.  [Kurt Zindulka, Breitbart London] 

At the same time as this piece of "make work" is consuming more and more police time, the police hierarchy is complaining that they are overworked.

Me and Julio Down By the School Yard

The Differences Between Left and Right Are Cosmetic

Historian Richard Overy argues in his monumental comparison of Stalin and Hitler that between these two men and their respective regimes there was far more held in common than difference.  Hitler, of course, represented the Right.  Stalin was one of the most extreme Leftists of all times.  It turned out that in practice they were kissing cousins.  Their ideological differences amounted to little more than superficial, minor variants. 

This should mean that we treat ideological differences with a great deal of scepticism.  In the end, the ideologues of Left and Right shared a common ambition: power--absolute power--over their subjects. 

This reality is often not well understood.  Dorian Lynskey has written a biography of Orwell, entitled The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984.  It has been reviewed by George Packer in an essay published in The Atlantic.  The review is entitled Doublethink is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined: What 1984 Means Today. 

After reviewing the cultural impact of 1984 over the last forty years or so, reviewer Packer asks:

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Oppression Worse Than North Korea Will Destroy China

New ‘Social Credit System’ is a Dystopian Nightmare


By Steven W. Moshe

May 18, 2019
New York Post


Imagine calling a friend. Only instead of hearing a ring tone you hear a police siren, and then a voice intoning, “Be careful in your dealings with this person.”  Would that put a damper on your relationship? It’s supposed to.  Welcome to life in China’s “Social Credit System,” where a low score can ruin your life in more ways than one.

Say you arrive at the Beijing airport, intending to catch a flight to Canton 1,200 miles south. The clerk at the ticket counter turns you away because — you guessed it — your social credit score is too low.  Not only are you publicly humiliated in the ticket line, you are then forced to travel by slow train. What should have been a three-hour flight becomes a 30-hour, stop-and-go nightmare.

All because the government has declared you untrustworthy. Perhaps you defaulted on a loan, made the mistake of criticizing some government policy online or just spent too much time playing video games on the internet. All of these actions, and many more, can cause your score to plummet, forcing citizens onto the most dreaded rung on China’s deadbeat caste system, the laolai.

And the punishments are shocking. The government algorithm will go as far as to install an “embarrassing” ring tone on the phones of laolai, shaming them every time they get a call in public.  But an embarrassing ring tone, flight bans and slow trains are just the beginning of the dystopian nightmare that is now daily life in China for tens of millions of people.

A low social credit score will exclude you from well-paid jobs, make it impossible for you to get a house or a car loan or even book a hotel room. The government will slow down your internet connection, ban your children from attending private schools and even post your profile on a public blacklist for all to see.

According to Australia’s ABC News, the government has produced a “Deadbeat Map” via an app on WeChat, which shows a radar-style graphic identifying every laolai in the vicinity of the user.  “Tapping on a person marked on the map reveals their personal information, including their full name, court-case number and the reason they have been labeled untrustworthy. Identity-card numbers and home addresses are also partially shown,” ABC reported.

There are reports that those whose social credit score falls too low are preemptively arrested and sent to re-education camps. Not because they have actually committed a crime, but because they are likely to.  Elements of the system are in place throughout China, as the government refines its algorithm, and the final rollout is scheduled to be in place nationwide by 2020.

The government claims that its purpose is to enhance trust and social stability by creating a “culture of sincerity” that will “restore social trust.”  What it will actually create, of course, is a culture of fear and a nation of informants.  This is because one of the ways that people can improve their own social credit score is to report on the supposed misdeeds of others.

Individuals can earn points, for example, for reporting those who violate the new restrictions on religious practice, such as Christians who illegally meet to pray in private homes, or the Muslim Uyghurs and Kazakhs in China’s far west whom they spot praying in public, fasting during Ramadan or just growing a beard.

Of course, as the state progresses ever closer toward its goal of monitoring all of the activities of its citizens 24 hours a day, seven days a week, society itself becomes a virtual prison.  Western criticism of the new system has been intense, with Human Rights Watch describing it as “chilling.”

In response, Chinese Communist Party publications scoff that Westerners are simply too unsophisticated to understand the wonders of the new system.  In the words of China’s Global Times, “The hypothetical theories of the West are based on their ignorance.” The massive social credit system, it goes on to say, is simply “beyond the understanding of Western countries.”

But I think we understand what is going on all too well.  It is China’s ancient totalitarian impulse — the absolute rule of the god-emperor over his subjects — brought into the modern age. It is George Orwell’s prophetic “1984” come alive.

China’s already formidable police state has been upgraded using big data, machine learning, face recognition technology and artificial intelligence into a fearsome cyborg of state control. The Chinese Communist Party has given birth to the world’s first high-tech digital dictatorship.

Not content to incarcerate its own population in a virtual prison, China is busily hawking its creation to like-minded socialist dictatorships. Maduro’s Venezuela was China’s first customer.

Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order,” out now.

An Australasian Disease

Free Speech, Or Orwellian Groupthink

Freedom of speech is under attack in New Zealand.  In one significant instance a university, led by its Vice-Chancellor, prevented students from listening to Dr Don Brash.  Once again the issues involved alleged climate change.  Dr Brash speaking also, allegedly, would have resulted in students and academics at the university feel uncomfortable, challenged, and threatened.  Hence, Brash's speech was shut down and Brash was told to shut up.  This is Free Speech in NZ in 2018.  

Thankfully there was a backlash from those who are a bit more sophisticated than the common herd. 

It did not escape notice at the time that the Vice-Chancellor of Massey University, Professor Jan Thomas was an Australian import.  It seems that Australian Universities may well be riddled with those who believe that only officially sanctioned views be promoted by staff. 

The most recent case to hit the headlines (again) is that of Professor Peter Ridd, formerly of James Cook University.

Orwellian China And The Sino-Stalags

Denial 

A Million Muslim Uighurs Held In Internment Camps

The country is responding to concerns raised by a UN committee about a crackdown and strict controls in Xinjiang region.


Muslims pray at a mosque during Ramadan in Urumqi, Xinjiang


By Greg Heffer, news reporter
Sky News

China has rejected claims one million of its mostly Muslim Uighur minority are being held in internment camps, while it has also insisted "there are no such things" as re-education centres.

The country responded to concerns, raised by a member of a UN human rights committee, that its Xinjiang region has been turned into "something resembling a massive internment camp, shrouded in secrecy, a sort of no-rights zone".

Human rights expert Gay McDougall, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, last week highlighted reports that more than one million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities are being held in counter-extremism centres.  Another two million "have been forced" into re-education camps for "political and cultural indoctrination", Ms McDougall had claimed, as she cited the work of rights groups.

Totalitarianism and Orwellianism in the UK

What’s Changed in Britain Since Same-Sex Marriage? 

David Sergeant
The Spectator, Australia

Four years ago, amid much uncertainty, 400 British members of parliament voted to redefine marriage in the United Kingdom.  Then prime minister David Cameron announced that, despite having made no mention of the issue in his party’s pre-election manifesto, it would be MP’s who decided the fate of marriage.

Now, it’s Australia’s turn to choose. There’s one key difference. Unlike in Britain, it will be the people who decide.  Everyone agrees, whether they admit it or not. This is a decision of enormous significance.  Therefore, it seems sensible to analyse the consequences of the potential change, within nations in which redefinition has previously been carried out.

In the United Kingdom, it has become abundantly clear that redefinition has affected many people, across many spheres. At first glance, these spheres appeared distinct from marriage redefinition. However, subsequent changes, have proved that they are entirely intertwined.

Gender: 

Current Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, has revealed proposals to abolish the need for any medical consultation before gender reassignment.

The Growing Degradation of the West

Pharaoh Has Lost All Memory of Joseph

We live in a mad, mad world--at least in the West.  Homosexuality and gender-bending is tearing the social fabric apart.  We came across a recent case in the United Kingdom illustrating the madness of our condition.

A ‘transgendered’ convicted double rapist, who is biologically male, has been put in isolation in prison after being moved to an all-female jail, where it is claimed they made advances on female prisoners.  [Liam Deacon, Breitbart London]

Apparently this rapist is a particularly nasty piece of work.

Sarah Callaghan, 44, who fell pregnant with Winfield’s first child when she was just 15 (below the age of consent) and they were in their 20s, branded the sex attacker “a danger to everyone around him”.  She said: “It seems the only person who ever gets any help is Martin – not all the people who have suffered because of him.

Another one of their victims described the fact her attacker was given a free sex change as “diabolical”. She said: “There are not enough words to describe him and the evil he has done.  “It is diabolical they have allowed him to have a sex change and diabolical that he could be freed this year. He may have changed physically but his brain is still the same.” 

Yes, you read that right.

Orwellianism Stalks the Land of the Free

Prejudiced Ignorance

Kirsten Powers has written an important expose on the reign of intolerance in college campuses across the United States.  However, she begs a number of questions, which she does not address.  

1.  Why has this happened?

2.  What does it represent?

3.  What is the right tactical response?

4.  What is the right strategic response?

We will endeavour to deal with these questions below Powers's piece.

How Liberals Ruined College

College should be a place of new ideas and challenging views. Instead, liberals have made it a place of fear and intimidation.

Kirsten Powers
The Daily Beast

The root of nearly every free-speech infringement on campuses across the country is that someone—almost always a liberal—has been offended or has sniffed out a potential offense in the making. Then, the silencing campaign begins. The offender must be punished, not just for justice’s sake, but also to send the message to anyone else on campus that should he or she stray off the leftist script, they too might find themselves investigated, harassed, ostracized, or even expelled. If the illiberal left can preemptively silence opposing speakers or opposing groups— such as getting a speech or event canceled, or denying campus recognition for a group—even better.

The Glories of Post-Christian Britain

Multi-culturalism, Orwellianism, Censorship and Neo-Criminalism

James Bloodworth

The Independent

Thursday 1 January 2015

At some point saying “offensive” things online stopped being a social faux pas and became a potentially criminal act.

Dare to be rude about the wrong person or group and, in a bad parody of Erich Honecker’s East Germany, you could hear the knock on the door in the middle of the night and be dragged off to some dreary police cell for questioning.

I exaggerate of course, but not much: around 20,000 people in Britain have been investigated in the past three years for comments made online, with around 20 people a day being looked into by the forces of the law, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The overused Orwellian cliché has finally become the reality: Big Brother in the form of an overzealous and under regulated police force really is watching you. As Police Scotland terrifyingly informed us this week, “Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media and any offensive comments will be investigated.”