Category Archives: Hypocrisy

Body Che

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Studying in Geneva I have occasion to cross paths with the sort of people who work in the supranational bodies headquartered here, including the various branches of the UN. They display a lofty air as they casually discuss their proposals on reshaping global society, dismissing the concerns of ordinary people as a simple matter of “lack of education”. Perhaps if the British had explained themselves more clearly they might still have an Empire? I blame the impenetrable provincial accents and a refusal on the part of uppity natives to learn from their masters.

Anyway, something I’ve come to realise is the more self-righteous and sure of their virtues a person is, the more likely they are to hold moral values ranging from questionable to despicable. I was therefore unsurprised to see this:


You can be sure the people who approved a flattering picture of Che Guevara for display in the United Nations building in Geneva make all the right noises in polite company regarding Donald Trump, Brexit, and gender equality. I have an opportunity to visit this place soon: I think I’ll pass.

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The Crying Game

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Yesterday I had occasion to read the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report. As you would expect it’s largely focused around climate change hysteria, but also warns of “large scale involuntary migration”. What is not mentioned is what I think is a far greater risk to the stability of whole nations: large scale voluntary migration. But what really made me laugh was this passage on page 14:

There has been a period of renewed politicization around gender, sexism and sexual assault in the United States. The #MeToo movement, which began in October 2017, continued in 2018 and has also drawn attention to—and in some cases amplified— similar campaigns against sexual violence.

That a middle class political protest movement, which was as much about who gets to set the Democrat party agenda as it was sexual assault, should appear in a report on global risks tells you much about the worldview of those who compiled it. Then again, they might have observed half a million screaming harpies in pussy hats and concluded humanity is doomed.

Beyond being directly targeted with violence and discrimination, women around the world are also disproportionately affected by many of the risks discussed in the Global Risks Report, often as a result of experiencing higher levels of poverty and being the primary providers of childcare, food and fuel. For example, climate change means women in many communities must walk farther to fetch water.

While the men are slaughtered on the front lines of bloody wars.

Women often do not have the same freedom or resources as men to reach safety after natural disasters—in parts of Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India, men who survived the 2004 tsunami outnumbered women by almost three to one.

Okay, but:

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), women are also more likely than men to have their jobs displaced by automation.

We’re probably not talking about the same women here, are we? The paragraph lurches between the fate of wealthy western women pushing a political agenda and the genuine hardship of those living in badly-governed countries in the developing world. The two should be dealt with separately, but they’ve been lumped together in order to paint a picture of women being under serious threat globally. They’re using the image of desperate African women having to walk miles for water to drum up sympathy for American women who will soon be replaced by the Samsung Powerskirt 3000. And I seem to recall Laurie Penny cackling with glee at the prospect of automation taking all the men’s jobs.

On top of reports like this, we also have gender diversity being rammed down our throats using unsubstantiated claims it produces better outcomes. In addition, despite being thoroughly debunked, the gender pay gap is still routinely cited as real and a result of discrimination. This is why I’m really not too bothered about stories like this:

Across the U.S. and in many places abroad, transgender athletes are breaking barriers in high school, college and pro sports and being embraced by teammates and fans. But resentments can still flare when transgender women start winning and dominating their sport.

And this:

Two male runners are continuing to dominate high school girls track in Connecticut.

High school juniors Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood took first and second place in the state open indoor track championships Feb. 16, The Associated Press noted in a report Sunday. Both Miller and Yearwood are biological males who identify as transgender girls.

…

Miller argued that female runners should work harder, rather than complaining about unfairness, when forced to compete against male athletes who identify as transgender.

On the face of it this is insane, and in a serious society this wouldn’t be happening. But this is just a continuation of what the hardcore feminists started when they launched a war on men. If a handful of politically-motivated extremist women can invent all sorts of garbage to justify upending society for their personal benefit, others will follow suit. Feminists now upset that strapping lads are cleaning up in girls’ high-school athletics can hardly complain about inconsistency, intellectual dishonesty, and hidden agendas, can they? That’s been their stock and trade for decades and it continues to this day backed by corporations, governments, and supranational organisations as part of an industry worth billions of dollars.

I feel a bit sorry for the non-lunatic women who carried no water for hardcore feminism and are looking on with horror at what the trans activists are doing, but it’s not really my fight. If and when I can go through a week without gender politics being rammed down my throat with men told they need to make sacrifices so that privileged women they don’t know can be relieved of imaginary problems while benefiting materially, I may pick up the cudgels on their behalf. Until then, I don’t see why I should care. Women created this mess; they can solve it. Maybe the World Economic Forum can help?

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From the Balls of Montezuma

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Staying on the topic of Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez, this amused:


It’s funny how the narrative of Europeans wiping out the natives and their descendants living on stolen land stops at the Mexican border. Presumably some think the indigenous peoples of central and south America were already speaking Spanish when the Conquistadors showed up and had names like, well, Ocasio-Cortez.

I have a theory that everyone wants to be an imperialist overlord, but criticism is reserved for those with the competence to actually carry it out. See this exchange, for example:


The Irish spend half the time moaning about British imperialism and the other half demanding Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, and the Falkland Islands be annexed by their neighbours against the wishes of the population. The irony in the case of Ocasio-Cortez is most Puerto Ricans are wishing the US would hurry up and annex them properly.

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Diversity for thee

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You hear a lot of this sentiment these days:

The country’s top judge says her colleagues must become more diverse in order to better represent the public.

Lady Hale addressed the issue as she marked the centenary of the act that enabled women to enter profession.

The first female president of the supreme court called for the judiciary to increase its diversity to avoid the risk of being seen as ‘from another planet’.

This would include greater balance in gender representation at Britain’s highest court and quicker promoting for ethnic minorities and those from less privileged backgrounds, the Guardian reports.

A couple of months back I was at a seminar in which several ageing men on the stage signaled their virtue to the audience by bemoaning the gender balance of the panel, which was around 7:3 in favour of men. About a year ago I listened to another bunch of ageing men on a stage, this time in the auditorium of an oil company, saying they need to do more to promote women into senior positions. My immediate thought was, if these people considered the matter so pressing, why don’t they resign and hand their position to a more deserving female? Similarly, if pasty-white Lady Hale believes Britain’s judiciary should become more ethnically diverse, what better way to kick-start the process by replacing her with a minority?

You can be sure that anyone who has wormed their way onto a panel at a seminar, climbed the greasy pole up to executive management in an oil company, or backstabbed their way to becoming Britain’s top judge has only one person’s career in mind: their own. At every step of their career they would have sandbagged and outmaneuvered anyone who represented competition, be they white, brown, yellow, male, or female. When they were middle managers somewhere eyeing their next promotion they weren’t harping on about the need for greater representation or increased diversity. No, they were promoting themselves. But now the top job is securely under their belt and retirement is on the horizon, they want other people to sacrifice their career ambitions on the altar of diversity politics. The correct response is to either ignore their self-serving virtue-signaling, or to draw attention to their hypocrisy and mock them mercilessly.

Next time you hear someone calling for increased diversity in their organisation, you should ask why they haven’t resigned yet.

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One rule for thee…

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Back in the early 2000s, Italy, Portugal, and Greece were being chastised and threatened with fines by the European Commission for breaking the Stability and Growth Pact, which aimed to limit the fiscal deficit of member states’ budget to 3% of GDP. Then something happened around 2001 which caused the French and Germans to blow their budgets and go on a borrowing spree, and all of a sudden the Stability and Growth Pact didn’t matter (see this chart for historical deficits). It became quite obvious that EU rules are only to be enforced against certain countries, and exceptions made when it came to France and Germany; those less charitable thought it quite obvious that the EU was run for the primary benefit of those two member states.

Fast forward 17 years and we had the European Commission refusing to approve Italy’s budget because it breaks the Stability and Growth Pact. Then a short time later French president Emmanuel Macron, with his back to the wall facing the might of the gilets jaunes, decided to throw an €8bn – €10bn bung at them in the hope of saving his presidency. France’s budget was already perilously close to the 3% limit, and this pushed it over the edge. So the European Commission is going to take action, right?

Heh:

The EU will accept a French budget deficit above the EU’s 3 percent ceiling in 2018 “as a one-time exception,” Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger said in an interview published Thursday.

Now there’s a surprise, eh? If you follow the link and translate from the German, you find out why:

President Macron has lost authority with his budget for 2019, which exceeds the deficit limit of three percent. But he remains a strong supporter of the European Union.

Of course. The rules don’t matter provided you are France or Germany and you are a strong supporter of the EU. What a wonderful club. I can’t think why Britain voted to leave.

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Conflicts of interests

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Nothing in this report surprises me:

A rift was growing between Britain and key allies yesterday as European diplomats pushed back on calls for a firmer response to Russia’s weekend naval clash with Ukraine. The fracture in the Western alliance sets the stage for tense exchanges when European, US, and Russian leaders meet at a G20 summit in Argentina later this week.

Anyone want to guess where the fault lines lie? Here’s one side:

Britain, Poland, and the Baltic States have urged other members of the EU 28 to impose extra measures when existing sanctions against Russia are renewed in December.

The calls have been backed by the US.

And here’s the other:

France and Germany, which brokered a ceasefire and tentative peace accord between Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Petro Poroshenko, the leader of Ukraine, in 2015, are understood to fear such a move could split the bloc and further inflame tensions.

So much for solidarity over the Skripal poisoning, then. One of the most bizarre spectacles in recent times has been the European media and its gullible consumers portraying Merkel and Macron as standing up for Europe against the Putin bogeyman, while Trump is portrayed as a Russian puppet. Yet whenever it comes to actual policy, Germany and France fall over themselves to avoid anything which might damage the commercial interests of their major firms in Russia, and the same media utters not a peep.

Regardless of what the correct approach to Russia is, the double-dealing on the part of Germany and France – saying one thing, doing the other – is inexcusable. Last week Macron was saying he wants an EU army to protect against, among other things, Russian aggression. Merkel’s approach to NATO, Trump, and Russia requires contortions which are seriously impressive for a woman of her age. The hypocritical, self-serving behaviour of France and Germany who, when it suits them, demand ever-more cooperation and integration from smaller EU states is one of the strongest arguments in favour of Brexit.

On that subject, I’m reminded of something I wrote in a post in April last year:

The Baltic states are completely reliant on Nato to keep the Russians out, which in this case means the United States. However, in diplomatic terms (and probably  a token military one as well) it also means the Brits. If we can imagine a scenario in a few years time when the Russians are massing tanks and troops on the borders of Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania on some pretext and revving the engines noisily, Britain will be one of the countries they will be pleading with to intervene (meaning, persuade the United States to intervene). How Britain responds ought very much to depend on how the Baltic states behaved during the Brexit negotiations.

I’ve noticed that Estonians and Lithuanians have said very little during the Brexit negotiations, and the Latvians have been urging caution. I’m sure it’s occurred to them that with Britain out of the EU they suddenly become a lot more vulnerable to malign Russian influence, be it commercial or even military.

This is why I think the EU will ultimately fail. The European continent, and the islands off it, do have genuine shared interests and concerns but the EU is structured along very different lines. These conflicts are now coming to a head, and at some point in the near future people are going to be asked hard questions as to which alliances matter most to them. I expect it will take some pretty ugly scenes before they find an answer.

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Some More Equal Than Others

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There’s a certain irony about this tweet:

I have no idea what a gender equality breakfast entails, but I wasn’t surprised to learn this particular one featured a commencement speech by Canadian man-child Justin Trudeau. I also don’t know what the purpose of the tweet was, but many responses believe it shows Trump, by arriving late, is a misogynist who has no respect for those present. Which is probably true, especially that last bit.

The irony, though, is that extremely privileged and wealthy men and women in positions of great power and influence held this breakfast in the name of gender equality. Now I would have thought the very presence around the table of Theresa May, Angela Merkel, and Christine Lagarde would have rendered the entire purpose moot, but apparently not. If there is an inequality that needs addressing in most if not all the societies represented at the G7 it is that which exists between the ruling classes and everyone else. Nowhere is this yawning chasm better demonstrated than by Christine Lagarde herself; she is the woman with the pink handkerchief in her blazer in the photo above, and head of the IMF. Here’s an article from 2016:

International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde has been convicted over her role in a controversial €400m (£355m) payment to a businessman.

French judges found Ms Lagarde guilty of negligence for failing to challenge the state arbitration payout to the friend of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Yes, that’s right: she has a criminal conviction after passing a bung.

The Court of Justice of the Republic, a special tribunal for ministers, could have given Ms Lagarde up to one-year in prison and a €13,000 fine.

But they didn’t. Instead:

The 60-year-old, following a week-long trial in Paris, was not given any sentence and will not be punished.

Oh. How fortunate for Ms Lagarde!

I remember when this happened, and the authorities were almost apologetic in their treatment of this pillar of the French elite. It explains why the charge was one of negligence and not the more serious corruption, and why she walked away scot-free, smiles and handshakes all-round despite having been found guilty. And here she is, this convicted criminal whose privileged position allowed her to evade punishment and even keep her job at the IMF, hosting an “equality” breakfast.

Let me ask, if it were you or I who’d done what she’d done, do you think we’d have kept our jobs and be attending breakfasts at jamborees? Or would be languishing in a jail somewhere? Equality, indeed.

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Quelle Surprise

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This amused:

“This is astonishing!” say people in the responses underneath. Sure, a French-Bulgarian academic studying liberal arts in Paris in the 1970s turning out to be a die-hard lefty working for the communists is just incredible, isn’t it?

Now I have no idea who this woman is and perhaps she did or said things which had everyone believing she was a loyal follower of Hayek, Adam Smith, and Ayn Rand but I doubt it. Shit, even today it’s a fair bet most academics on Paris’ left bank are hardcore lefties if not out-and-out communists mourning the day the Eastern Bloc collapsed.

What will be interesting is whether these revelations will see her hounded out of polite society. I highly doubt it. She’ll be given a sympathetic interview with softball questions and with a smile and an airy wave of the hand the entire thing will be dismissed as happening a long time ago and it was all a bit of a giggle anyway. I doubt this will dent her social and professional standing one jot, at least in the west. The Bulgarians might think a little differently however, especially those who lost family members at the hands of the Bulgarian communists.

Whatever the case, she ought to be grateful she only collaborated with the security services of a brutal communist regime since the age of 30, and wasn’t a teenager working a telephone exchange when the Nazis were in town.

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Breast Practices

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This story amused me:

A transgender woman has been able to breastfeed a baby in the first recorded case of its kind, researchers say.

…

The woman had been on hormone replacement therapy for six years, but had not gender reassignment surgery, when she approached doctors with the aim of breastfeeding the child.

Before the baby was born, doctors put her on a three-and-a-half-month course of treatment to help her artificially produce milk, usually given to women who have adopted babies or who have them via surrogates.

This included breast pumping, taking hormones produced by biological mothers, a drug which can stimulate milk production and a male hormone blocker.

For some time now, breastfeeding mothers have been nagged into monitoring very carefully what they eat and drink, telling them that any nasties they consume will be passed onto their infant child via the breast milk. I suspect this is largely propaganda aimed at frightening mothers into adopting puritan lifestyles, but it has been very effective. I have met several breastfeeding mothers who will not even have a glass of wine, certain that to do so will harm their baby, and women who drink while breastfeeding receive disapproving looks and remarks from prodnoses nearby.

Yet here we are celebrating the fact that a man, having been pumped full of chemicals in the hope that his body will start mimicking a woman’s, is breastfeeding. I’ve always known consistency was an early casualty of the progressive cause, but it’s not always stated as plainly as this.

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More on the Protests in Iran

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The protests in Iran are still going strong, and the government is threatening to crack down heavily if they continue. Only their Arab counterparts tried that in their own various uprisings and it turned the protests into full-on revolutions. There are videos on Twitter showing huge crowds embracing policemen while hurling rocks at Revolutionary Guards, suggesting any such crackdown won’t be so easy. And it seems young men are at least having a go.

Thankfully, the Iranian Mullahs have plenty of folk in the western world on their side. Consider the BBC article I linked to:

Three days of demonstrations erupted over falling living standards.

But a Revolutionary Guards commander said the protests had degenerated into people chanting political slogans and burning public property.

Funny how the BBC pours scorn on every word Trump utters, but quotes Revolutionary Guards commanders uncritically.

Brigadier-General Esmail Kowsari told the ISNA news agency: “If people came into the streets over high prices, they should not have chanted those slogans and burned public property and cars.”

Iran’s interior minister has also warned the public that protesters will be held accountable.

Presumably the BBC are on board with this. It is only later we’re told:

BBC Persian correspondent Kasra Naji said a common factor in all locations has been protesters’ demand for an end to clerical rule in Iran.

There is also anger at Iran’s interventions abroad. In Mashhad, some chanted “not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran”, a reference to what protesters say is the administration’s focus on foreign rather than domestic issues.

CNN went one further, saying little about the actual protests but giving front-page coverage of pro-government demonstrations:

Some people, including this cretin from the Huffington Post, have gone full retard:

The normally sensible Cathy Young hasn’t covered herself in glory, either:

Presumably Saint Obama siding with the Mullahs is preferable to Trump backing the protesters because The Messiah did so with “dignity”. What’s ironic is Cathy Young is originally from the Soviet Union so one would have thought she’d be a little more aware of the importance of the US president’s words on such matters, regardless of the perceived moral character of the speaker. But then, I have noticed that a lot of Russians flee to the US and start complaining about the way things are run when they get there. Max Boot is another example.

A lot of people have also noticed the silence and hypocrisy from America’s so-called feminists:

Others have noted the deafening silence from the EU on the protests. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, it’s a weekend in holiday season: bureaucrats aren’t going to check their emails just because there’s a revolution brewing in Iran. And Juncker will be drunk anyway. Secondly, as we saw in Catalonia, the EU elites don’t much like anti-government protests which is why they’re so keen on getting an EU army established. Finally, certain large EU member states have been sucking up royally to the Mullahs since sanctions on Iran were eased, positioning themselves as reliable European partners in contrast to the Great Satan, hoping to cash in when the country finally opens up. They will oppose any regime change in Iran for the same reason they objected to the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps I’m forgetting something which could also explain the EU’s silence? Yes, I am: cowardice. This tweet sums it up nicely, I think:

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