Tag: political correctness

FEMA Doesn’t Care About Helping Americans After A Disaster, It Cares About ‘Disaster Equity’

What’s the point of a federal disaster agency if the chief priorities of said agency are not to save Americans from disaster?

In September last year, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell joined the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to sign the “Agreement to Advance Equity in Disaster Resilience.”

According to an NAACP press release, the group’s “Emergency Management Task Force … will meet regularly with FEMA leadership to advance progress on equity within disaster preparedness and resilience.”

“The signing comes on the heels of an Intergenerational Climate Resilience Roundtable recently hosted by NAACP and FEMA during NAACP’s Climate Week NYC activations,” the release read. “The roundtable focused on disaster preparedness, climate resilience and instilling equity in emergency management.”

FEMA’s website characterized the roundtable as a forum where “presenters shared their wealth of knowledge and information gleaned from their areas of expertise and personal experience regarding the intergenerational impacts of climate change and how disaster resilience can be improved.”

“At a time when we are experiencing some of the worst natural disasters, we need effective collaboration, communication and transparency of resources to help Black communities,” said the NAACP’s director for Environmental and Climate Justice.

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New Zealand’s Lesbian Navy Captain Loses $100M Naval Ship in Peacetime Disaster – Ship Runs Aground, Catches Fire, and Sinks, Unleashing Oil Spill off Samoa Coast

New Zealand’s navy has suffered its first peacetime ship loss since World War II when the $100 million multi-role support vessel HMNZS Manawanui ran aground off the southern coast of Upolu Island, Samoa, caught fire and eventually sank—triggering an environmental disaster in the process.

With all 75 passengers and crew evacuated, the vessel’s loss brings fresh scrutiny to the leadership under its openly lesbian commanding officer, Commander Yvonne Gray.

The Manawanui, originally built in Norway and repurposed for New Zealand’s Royal Navy with a substantial $103 million investment, was conducting a seabed survey mission when it hit a reef, according to maritime news outlet gCaptain.

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FEMA’s DEI Crippled Hurricane Helene Response

“I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides that they are experiencing right now,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell protested to CBS News.

The ravages of Hurricane Helene had left parts of Asheville, North Carolina underwater, but it wasn’t just the homes and roads that were underwater, but FEMA’s botched response..

Criswell, who had been appointed to head FEMA by the Biden-Harris administration as a reward for coordinating New York City’s horrendously botched response to the pandemic, posed in a starched FEMA blouse and gold necklace on a morning show even as private volunteers were once again having to step in because the Federal Emergency Management Agency had failed.

FEMA was unprepared for the flooding because under Criswell, a DEI hire whose resume included being “the first woman commissioner of New York City Emergency Management”, the agency had shifted from disaster management to DEI disasters.

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The Folly of Criminalizing “Hate”

Many people were shocked when over 1,000 protesters were arrested in the UK and jailed for various offenses including “violent disorder” and stirring up racial hatred. Most shocking were the cases of those arrested for posting social media comments on the riots, despite not being present at the scene and there being no evidence that anybody who joined in the riots had read any of their comments.

In societies which uphold the value of individual liberty, the only purpose of the criminal law should be to restrain and punish those who commit acts of aggression against other people or their property. The criminal law should not be used to prevent people from “hating” others or to force them to “love” each other. In announcing yet another raft of laws “to expand the list of charges eligible to be prosecuted as hate crimes,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that “During these challenging times, we will continue to show up for each other. We are making it clear: love will always have the last word in New York.” To that end, she introduced “legislation to significantly expand eligibility for hate crime prosecution.”

Attempts to promote love between different racial or religious groups in society, for example, by charging people with stirring up “hate” when they protest against immigration, misunderstands the role of the criminal law. Threats to public order entail violating the person or property of others—as happens in a violent riot—not merely the exhibition of “hate” towards others. Yet increasingly, public order offenses are linked to hate speech or hate crimes.

Laws prohibiting hate speech and hate crimes typically define “hate” as hostility based on race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or religion. Often, hostility is understood simply as words that offend others. For example, in the UK, the Communications Act 2003 prohibits sending “a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.” The Online Safety Act 2023 targets illegal content online including both “inciting violence” and the publication of “racially or religiously aggravated public order offenses.” Conduct online includes writing posts or publishing blogs or articles on websites.

Given that inciting violence is already a crime—“conduct, words, or other means that urge or naturally lead others to riot, violence, or insurrection”—there seems to be no discernible purpose in adding the concept of “hate” to such crimes. To give an example, writing “burn down the store” on social media might be seen as inciting violence, but writing “burn down the Muslim store” in the same circumstances would be categorized as a hate crime. Arson (actually burning down the store) is a crime, but based on the racial or religious identity of the store owner arson is deemed to be a “worse” crime—a hate crime—even though the harm in both cases and the loss suffered by store owners who are victims of arson does not vary based purely on their race or religion.

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Woman Attacked By Migrant Lectured By Police Over HER ‘Offensive’ Language

A woman who accused a migrant of attacking her in the street was subjected to a lecture from police about her use of politically incorrect language in the aftermath of the incident.

Footage shot by the woman shows three Metropolitan Police officers questioning her on Kings Road in London.

She told the officers that a “filthy migrant” had confronted her and spat at her.

While the officers said they were willing to investigate the incident, they appeared more concerned with policing the woman’s language, telling her “we have a duty to challenge that language, because we are police officers and that is the law.”

“You’re saying the two things together, which is offensive isn’t it?” one of the male officers stated, referring to the woman’s words.

“We can’t not challenge that language because people in the public might find that offensive,” the officers further told the woman.

“So you find my language offensive?” the woman asked, to which the female officer responded “Yes I do actually.”

“I’m not interested in a PC lecture,” the woman told the officers, prompting one to respond, “we’re not here to give you a lecture.”

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Higher Cognitive Ability, Less Concern for Political Correctness – Study Finds

Britain’s elite cultural institutions – the BBC, universities, the national trust – are dominated by the woke. Since smart people tend to get ahead in life, you might assume the woke would have higher intelligence. Not so, according to a new study.

Louise Drieghe and colleagues surveyed 300 North Americans adults using the platform Mechanical Turk. To measure participants’ cognitive ability, they administered the Ammons Quick Test, which involves correctly assigning words to pictures. Previous studies have shown that people’s scores on the test correlate strongly with their scores on more comprehensive IQ tests, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.

The researchers also assessed participants’ support for free speech and concern for political correctness. To measure the former, they constructed a 9-item scale, comprising items such as “Every individual has the unalienable right to express their thoughts freely,” and “Censorship of speech leaves little room for debate and diverse points of view”.

To measure the latter, they used a 7-item scale developed by two other researchers. It includes items such as “I get mad when I hear someone use politically incorrect language,” and “I try to educate people around me about the political meaning of their words”.

Drieghe and colleagues’ key finding is shown in the first column of the table below. The values are correlation coefficients – a way of quantifying how strongly related two variables are.

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‘White Fragility’ author Robin DiAngelo accused of plagiarizing minority scholars in Ph.D thesis

Robin DiAngelo, the author and “anti-racism consultant” who rose to fame and made a fortune scolding white people for their inherent bigotry, has been accused of ripping off the work of two Asian American scholars in her 2004 doctoral thesis.

A complaint filed with the University of Washington and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon outlines 20 examples of alleged plagiarism in the “White Fragility” author’s dissertation, “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis.”

Among the examples cited are two paragraphs reproduced almost entirely from Northeastern University’s Thomas Nakayama — who is Asian-American — and coauthor Robert Krizek, in which DiAngelo fails to provide adequate attribution.

Another example in the complaint shows DiAngelo allegedly playing fast and loose with a paragraph written by Asian-American professor Stacey Lee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In it, rather than clearly delineating that Lee had summarized the work of scholar David Theo Goldberg, the information was presented in such a way to appear as though DiAngelo herself was providing the summary herself.

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Diversity Is A False Religion To Destroy America

This week, the National Association of Scholars (“NAS”) and the Heritage Foundation are sponsoring a panel discussion on diversity ideology in higher education. A number of reports have recently been published on the topic, with most documenting monies spent by state universities on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (“DEI“). The Maryland affiliate of the National Association of Scholars released the most recent such report this summer, but the Virginia affiliate issued one last year, while Idaho, North Carolina, Maine, and Tennessee produced similar documents before that.

The Maryland report reminds state officials that “diversity” is usually a cover for race-based practices that are now likely illegal under the 2023 United States Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (or “SFFA”). That opinion found that racial preferences in university admissions were a violation of federal civil rights laws and also the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. SFFA means that any race-based practice in college is presumptively unlawful. As the Court said, “Eliminating discrimination means eliminating all of it … distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their nature odious.”

Virginia’s report is similar to the others with its focus on money, asking Should Virginians Pay for University “Diversity” Leftism? It found that DEI expenditures at Virginia’s state universities have exploded with the University of Virginia (UVA) probably the worst offender. In 2020, for example, UVA spent $4,149,732 on DEI programs with 38 DEI administrators; but within one year, both those figures had nearly doubled. In 2021, UVA spent $6,924,279 on DEI and had 77 DEI administrators. Incredibly, more recent findings show that UVA’s DEI expenditures have skyrocketed even more, with over $20 million spent in 2023 including for 235 DEI employees.

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The New Archaeology Wars:How Cancel Culture and Identity Politics Have Corrupted Science

NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act)1 is a federal law that requires skeletal remains and certain artifacts (such as grave goods and sacred objects) from past populations to be turned over to culturally affiliated present-day Native American tribes. The cultural affiliations can be determined through a variety of means including scientific, historic, and oral traditions, but the determination of affiliation should be by a preponderance of evidence, which means that half or more of the evidence should support the link between the past and the present peoples. All federally funded institutions in the U.S., such as universities and museums (even private ones that accept federal funding) are required to follow NAGPRA. This includes the requirement that they create inventory lists so that Native American tribes can request repatriation of previously discovered and curated items.

In 2017, I decided to reach out to now-retired attorney James W. Springer to see if he’d like to co-author a book on the topic of repatriation that took a critical perspective on the law and the ideology behind repatriation. Jim and I, though never having met face-to-face, had corresponded over the years based on our mutual concern that NAGPRA and similar laws would seriously hinder our ability to accurately understand the past—including the intriguing and ongoing mystery of how the Americas were first peopled.

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How the Regime Captured Wikipedia

In 2019, a scandal ripped through the Wikipedia community when a Wikipedia admin who goes by the handle Fram was handed a year-long ban from the site. While known to few outside the tight-knit but feverishly active collective of Wikipedia contributors, the affair was part of a far-reaching, partisan shift at the open encyclopedia with widespread implications for the future of media, technology, and politics around the world.

Although contributor bans are not uncommon on Wikipedia, this case was different. Instead of coming from the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee (Arbcom), the panel of editors empowered to make such decisions, the ban was handed down directly by Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the NGO that owns the site.

Little more than 12 hours after the ban’s announcement, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales publicly intervened to help quell the storm by publicly assuring the community he was reviewing the situation, and later saying he’d “raised the issue with WMF.” A week later, two Wikipedia bureaucrats — high-ranking editors who can assign admin rights — and 18 admins — editors with enhanced rights — resigned in protest. Arbcom released a searing statement saying the top-down ban was “fundamentally misaligned with the Wikimedia movement’s principles of openness, consensus, and self-governance.”

At its lowest resolution, the controversy was born from the tension between the decentralized Wikipedia site and the highly centralized Wikimedia Foundation. In reality, the ban and subsequent backlash were tied to a massive culture shift at Wikipedia, precipitated by the rise of a new social-justice-minded power structure at Wikimedia Foundation.

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