The cults that rule us
A salient feature of the last decade or so has been the steady rise of bizarre cults with legions of fervent true believers, even though we have virtually zero rational grounds for believing in the central tenets of these secular religions. The weirdest thing about these cults is the way in which their true believers ardently sacrifice the very things they claim they wish to save. Consider the following:
1). COVID-19 illness presents close to ZERO risk to healthy children, but this hasn’t stopped the Vaccine Cult from demanding that children receive the dangerous, experimental shots that are neither effective nor safe. The most spectacular irrational outcome is the high incidence of vaccine-induced myocarditis among young athletes from whom COVID-19 posed zero risk.
2). Wind turbines are extremely inefficient producers of electricity that kill hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, wreak havoc in the marine environment when they are placed offshore, and ruin the physical beauty of the landscape. Nevertheless, the bizarre Climate Cult insists that wind turbines are a key weapon in our arsenal for reducing carbon emissions, which the Climate Cult fervently believes to be causing a rise in the earth’s temperature. Destroy nature in order to save it!
3). A human male will obviously have an unfair advantage over a female in almost all competitive sports. And yet, in their fervent proselytization of the bizarre Transgender Cult, votaries have largely succeeded in destroying women’s sports and the dreams of the girls and women who train for them.
4). Importing legions of young men from Arab countries into European countries in which these young men struggle to integrate and find gainful employment has resulted in a marked reduction of public safety in European cities, especially for young women. Yesterday here in Vienna, I had lunch with the former chief of police, who told me that stabbings are indeed much higher in certain districts of Vienna than they ever were in the past. The perpetrators are almost always young males who came to Vienna during the 2015 European migrant crisis.
And yet, the Diversity Cult persists in its bizarre, fetishistic belief that racial diversity per se is necessarily a good thing. Yesterday evening, while pondering the irrationality of the Diversity Cult, I saw the news that a young, foreign-born man stabbed 11 people and killed three at the "Festival of Diversity" that was underway in Solingen, Germany. Diversity will purportedly strengthen and revitalize Germany in the 21st century, even when it results in mass homicide.
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/destroying-villages-in-order-to-save
*****************************************************An Israeli hostage deal with Hamas only guarantees future atrocities
by Jeff Jacoby
IN FEBRUARY 1862, Union troops commanded by General Ulysses S. Grant attacked Fort Donelson, a major Confederate position. When the officer commanding the fort realized he could not prevail, he sent word to Grant offering to discuss a surrender. To his astonishment, Grant refused to negotiate.
"No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted," Grant replied. "I propose to move immediately upon your works."
That terse battlefield reply made Grant a national hero, and it foreshadowed the war's final outcome, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.
During World War II, the Allies adopted Grant's position. At the Casablanca Conference in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared that the war could end only with the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis powers.
Some conflicts end through negotiation. But with some enemies, the only acceptable defeat is unconditional defeat. The slaveholding American South was such an enemy. So were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And so is Hamas, the genocidal terrorist regime in Gaza that unleashed such savagery on Israel on Oct. 7.
It has been more than 10 months since waves of Hamas-organized killers launched an unprovoked invasion of southern Israel, slaughtering nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 251 hostages. In the war that erupted that day, Israel has frequently reiterated that total victory over Hamas is the goal.
Yet even as the war proceeds, Israel is engaged in negotiations with Hamas to secure the release of hostages, 109 of whom are still in captivity. On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in the region for the ninth time since Oct. 7, pressed Israel's leaders to seize what he called "maybe the last opportunity" to negotiate a cease-fire and the hostages' release. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted the latest American proposal. But Hamas has already rejected it, which means pressure on Israel's leaders to make ever-deeper concessions in order to get its hostages back will continue.
Much of that pressure is internal: Nearly two-thirds of Israelis are in favor of a hostage deal along the lines being discussed. That means they support the release of up to 1,000 Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorist activity and other security offenses. At least 100 of those prisoners are murderers serving life sentences. Everyone in Israel knows the price being demanded is steep. But so all-consuming is the national yearning to bring the hostages home, and so intense the empathy for the suffering of their families, that most Israelis are prepared to accept even exorbitant terms in order to end the pain.
But a hostage deal won't end the pain for long. It will only guarantee more of it.
Over the decades, Jerusalem has repeatedly agreed to release scores, hundreds, even thousands of terrorists and jihadist prisoners to buy the freedom of a handful of Israeli captives — or, in many cases, the return of their corpses. By now the pattern is so well established that Israel's enemies take it for granted. "What we have in our hands," a top Hamas official gloated to Al Jazeera on Oct. 7, "will release all our prisoners." Last November, Israel agreed to a temporary cease-fire and the freeing of 240 Palestinian terrorists in order to bring 105 hostages home. Now Hamas demands another 1,000 militants be turned loose as the price of freeing the remaining Israeli captives.
Israel is a democracy. If a majority of its citizens are prepared to support such lopsided deals, then it's all but certain Israel's government will comply.
Yet it is also all but certain that the result will be more innocent Israelis killed, wounded, and kidnapped in future atrocities — atrocities carried out by some of the very terrorists Israel releases. That has been the outcome of every such deal Israel has agreed to in the past.
In 1985, for example, the Jewish state set 1,150 Palestinian security prisoners free in exchange for three Israeli captives. Dozens of those freed prisoners returned to terrorist activity. Among them was a Muslim Brotherhood activist named Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas a few months later, launching an unimaginable train of slaughter and savagery.
In 2011, to liberate a kidnapped soldier named Gilad Shalit, Israel released 1,027 imprisoned terrorists. Among them were two prominent Palestinian murderers, Yahya Sinwar and Rawhi Mushtaha. Today Sinwar is Hamas's senior commander and Mushtaha (until he was killed last month) was among his closest confidants. The Oct. 7 nightmare, in other words, was planned by terrorists who were released in the Shalit deal. Israel was overjoyed when Shalit was freed, but the price of that freedom has been unspeakable: thousands of Israelis murdered, raped, and kidnapped, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Palestinian lives lost in the current fighting.
Israel will never have peace as long as it keeps negotiating such deals. The only terms Hamas should be offered are unconditional surrender. As Israel and its allies must know by now, anything less will mean more horror and bloodshed, for Jews and Arabs alike.
https://jeffjacoby.com/27992/an-israeli-hostage-deal-with-hamas-only
***************************************************‘Affirmative action has led to reverse racism’, says Scott Galloway
New York University marketing professor, best-selling author and business podcaster Scott Galloway has told an audience of Australian business professionals that affirmative action policies have failed and given rise to reverse racism.
Speaking in Sydney at the ADMA Global Forum on Tuesday, Professor Galloway said diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives, such as affirmative action in the US, had created a situation where policies are advantaging 76 per cent of the population and discriminating against 24 per cent.
“I think any race-based affirmative action in the corporate world, or in universities, causes more problems than it solves at this point,” he told the room via video link from the US.
Professor Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, argued that the policies, introduced in the US by president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, began with the right intentions but were no longer effective in contributing to equality.
“In 1960 there were only 12 blacks at Princeton, Harvard and Yale combined. That was a problem, race-based affirmative action and DE&I made a lot of sense. This year 51 per cent of Harvard’s freshman class is non-white. The problem is 70 per cent of those come from dual-income, upper-income homes.
“We advantage women. Women have taken a tremendous amount of shit, they have made less, they deserve some advantage. Well, what about non-whites, right? They’ve consistently gotten a raw deal. What about the gay people? We persecuted gay people. What about Japanese? We interned them in camps.
“Where it’s gotten to is now DE&I offices in affirmative action roles at corporations and universities are now advantaging 76 per cent of the populace and we are damaging 76 per cent of the populace. You’re not advantaging anybody, you’re discriminating against the 24 per cent.
“We’ve ended up in a weird spot where the snake is eating its own tail, and we have a certain amount of reverse racism, and these departments can’t be questioned or you’re called a racist.”
Professor Galloway said the systems created around affirmative action and DE&I policies and initiatives had become self-serving and were supported by “fake metrics”, which are tolerated but ignored by CEOs who “continue to make choices around shareholder value”.
He believes affirmative action is still needed in universities but should be based on income level, rather than gender, race or sexuality. And he said businesses should be responsible for making more diverse hires. “Corporations should do a better job of hiring non-certification, not-elite-college graduates, and creating on-ramps for people from lower-middle income backgrounds.”
The serial entrepreneur, who has served on the board of directors of The New York Times Company, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Panera Bread and Ledger, also talked about the crisis of masculinity, a subject he is writing a book about, and the need for more action.
“People can feel something is going on with young men and at the same time no one is doing anything about it. So into that void of concern slipped some really unproductive voices in ‘the manosphere’ with this thinly veiled misogyny … whenever anyone was advocating for young men … there was a gag reflex that this is just another thinly veiled misogynist.”
He juxtaposed his comments by highlighting the “march upward” young women were making. “I want to be clear that we should do absolutely nothing to get in the way of women’s march upward, the problem is we need to have an honest conversation around the nadir, with women horizontally and up, men horizontally and down.”
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It’s a bad day for biology
Sall Grover, founder of The Giggle for Girls app, has been ordered to pay $10,000 in compensation plus legal costs after losing to transgender individual Roxanne Tickle. This falls a long way short of the $200,000 originally sought.
Sall Grover reacted to the decision on Twitter:
‘Unfortunately, we got the judgement we anticipated. The fight for women’s rights continues.’
Rachael Wong added:
‘I am sitting here reflecting on this morning’s verdict in Tickle v Giggle and flipping between being outraged at the fact that women and girls have no sex-based rights in Australia, are not even recognised as a legal category anymore in Australia, and sort of being like well we’ve already known this for some time.’
Roxanne Tickle, who was born male but has identified as a woman for many years, was excluded from the female-only app back in 2021. This exclusion, it was argued, constituted gender identity discrimination.
Justice Robert Bromwich said of the decision:
‘The indirect discrimination cases succeeded because Ms Tickle was excluded from the use of the Giggle app because she did not look sufficiently female according to the respondents.’
Effectively, this means that gender identity is superior to biological sex when it comes to discriminating against individuals in sex-segregated spaces.
‘What is a woman?’
The once simple question has now become a complicated matter of what the law determines a woman to be.
‘We’re with you all the way,’ said Victorian MP Moira Deeming, to Sall Grover.
Those who continue to fight for sex-based rights – in law – insist that biology is immutable, regardless of gender-affirming surgery or legal actions such as the changing of gender on a birth certificate.
This sits fundamentally at odds with the transgender movement which leans heavily into ‘Self ID’ where individuals assert their preferred gender based on a variety of actions that may or may not include physical alterations. In some cases, a declaration of gender identity is all that is required.
Where does this leave women’s rights for biological women?
Is there such a thing as a sex-segregated space in Australia?
These are the questions being asked in the aftermath of this case, particularly on the hashtag #IstandwithSallGrover which has been trending around the world.
‘[This is] a major step forward for the freedom and equality of all women,’ said Jackie Turner from Trans Justice Project.
Not all women agree.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/biology-bows-to-gender-identity/
**************************************************My my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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