bigotry – Page 4 – Prog Gold

Comment Of The Day

Published on July 22, 2008

Comes from the Guardian, to Polly Toynbee’s column on New Labour’s welfare reforms:

stillthinking

Jul 22 08, 10:18am (about 2 hours ago)

My brother (now 45) has chronic schizophrenia (inherited not drug induced). He is best cared for in the stress free environment of the family home. His interpersonal skills and levels of paranoia means he is best away from groups of people and their demands such as at work. He looks odd, is utterly naive and vulnerable and his personal grooming isn’t great. He would not last 5 minutes. Any changes to his routine trigger severe migraine and violent sickness. There is also the damping effect and other side effects of his miscellaneous necessary medication. He is tired, dopey and grumpy. When the doctors try messing with his medication to achieve a lighter touch he spirals downwards again.

I think there is more though because he also seems to be a little limited in intelligence (he was in several remedial classes as a child) and EEG for his headaches which he even had back then. My mother reports being told that it showed ‘a shadow on his brain’ though nothing more was ever said about this. He writes like a child. It pains me to say all this of my own brother.

I have watched him twice descend into complete psychosis and at other times hover on the edges. Seeing him forcibly hospitalised was a horrific experience. This is distressing in the extreme for him and for our family. I cried simply writing this at the prospect of him being put through this process of re-assessment which will unleash the terrors on him and potentially push him into another massive psychotic breakdown. So to those commentators advocating these measures go on get all muscular and tough about these so-called fraudulent long-term Incapacity Benefit claimants for this is the impact you will have on our family. Hope they will all be happy.

When interviewed on Channel 4 news, David Freud, a banker, who came up with the estimates for those he thought should not be on IB, could not give a convincing account of how he had arrived at the figures when repeatedly pressed. They were simply back of the envelope estimates. He seemed to be saying that he had taken the increase in the number of people on IB and the decrease in the number of people claiming unemployment benefit and read this directly across without any further evidence.

Hope the media commentators who affect to know what’s best for others can live with their consciences knowing the enormous harm that is about to be perpetrated on people like my brother.

This will totally finish my mother off. She is nearly 70 and also caring for her husband who is in the first stages of dementia. She will have to negotiate the system for/with him as well as deal with his inevitable mental health deterioration as a result of this extra pressure and she is just not up to it. He is a poor communicator, will not be able to take in what people are saying to him and is incredibly suggestible. The best thing for him is to be kept gently stable and shielded from unnecessary stress.

THE most important thing for managing my brother is to get him to take his medication and to see the professionals involved in his case. Start bombarding him with another set of professionals pressurising him -any professional asking him questions is a pressure- and you can see the problem here.

The terrible distress that is about to be visited on our family seems to be accepted as some kind of necessary collateral damage. I would suggest that there should be some facility to seek an exemption negotiated by their carers and professionals from the routine quizzing of people like my brother.

I have been staggered at the amount of vitriol towards benefit claimants out there on the comment boards. It is quite frightening.

Indeed it is frightening. But the commenters are merely following the lead of that nice young Mr Purnell, who wants to turn the poor disabled and mentally ill into slave labour for the state.

Anyone who has a disabling physical condition, even with a job, is teetering over a chasm of poverty, as they are only working at the whim of their employer and tend to be dependent on complicated, fragile and expensive support systems. Those who can’t work are only one housing benefit screwup or gas bill from complete and utter disaster. For an nunqualified operative of a private company to overrule your own doctor’s advice and withdraw your income with no effective avenue of appeal – that virtually guarantees disaster.

As for forcing non-working people to do ‘community service’ – community service is a judicial punishment imposed for having committed a crime.

Privately employed, unaccountable know-nothings will be given the power to impose the same punishment – with no judicial process – for the crime of being sick, addicted, inadequate in some way, or just plain out of a job, whatever the reason. The mentally ill are already treated as criminals; regularly jailed physically or chemically rather than treated like human beings and stigmatised by the tabloids as dangerous unpredictables to be avoided and shunned and now the same is to be done to the poor and/or unemployed.

But why? Why would New Labour stigmatise and even criminalise poverty?

The government itself is almost as insecure as an Incapacity Benefit claimant itself, and one more bank crash away from total implosion. Aid to the poor is being cut just as it’s most needed and it’s not co-incidental. Brown and Darling certainly see the depth and severity of the coming recession, their public optimism notwithstanding; hence their desperation to cut, cut and cut some more. Knowing how bad things may get the government has certainly been planning for some time for civil disorder and mass movements of people (this from the organisers of the Jarrow march). That’s why there are all those spiffy new laws restricting protest and why the police have been given handy new toys to contain and control potentially rebellious crowds. Now comes the propaganda painting the unemployed as lesser humans. It’s easier to accept police use of their new toys on chav scum and lazy scroungers.

To have Labour, Labour mark you, the supposed champions of the poor and oppressed, cynically whipping up such hatred is sickening, though hardly unexpected, given the events of the last 11 years. The only comfort to be had is the hope that Parnell, Brown, Harman and all the rest of the jumped up town hall clerks in government will soon themselves be on the dole, picking litter for peanuts, with their tabloid friends joining them as the print industry collapses.

Oh yes, and just as a matter of interest and to show just how these things work, one of the people set to benefit from all this is the wife of the Australian prime minister. Yes, really.

Question: Which Australian company under fire for its shabby treatment of workers in Australia fled overseas and is now in hot water for under-cutting its competitors bids by escaping employment conditions designed to protect staff?

Answer: WorkDirections UK, part of Ingeus, the multinational group founded and run by Therese Rein, wife of Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd.

Question: Which Australian company was found to have underpaid its workers by up to $4000 and was forced to repay them after shifting them from awards to common law contracts?

Answer: WorkDirections Australia, the Australian arm of the multinational group founded and run by Therese Rein, wife of Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd.

Question: Which Australian company sacked 300-400 workers after failing to meet the standards required by the Australian Government for employment agencies?

Answer: WorkDirections Australia, etc, etc. Now, before Rudd’s chief of staff, David Epstein, the Sultan of Spin, the Master of Muck, and former chief ANiMaLS operative arcs up and unleashes the full force of the ALP’s mindless army of bloggers and Howard-haters, let it be noted that the latest confrontation between Rein’s company and its staff was revealed in the pages of The Guardian, the principal Labour daily in the UK.

The details were not revealed by anyone from the Coalition’s non-existent dirt unit, despite what Rudd’s deputy, the strident Julia Gillard, might honk, or shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan might insinuate, or mud-slinger extraordinaire Anthony Albanese might bray, nor in some crypto-fascist neo-con sheet bankrolled by aged nazi war criminals. The Guardian is a left-wing newspaper which still believes in class war, like some in the Left of the ALP, and no doubt published its story to highlight what it believes is an attack on workers and their conditions.

Rein’s company won six of 15 contracts worth more than 85 million ($A196,560,000) from the British Government under a scheme which aims to get disabled people off welfare. According to The Guardian: `’Unions and charities are furious that Mr Hain (the work and pensions secretary) has handed over the lion’s share of the first tranche of privatised services to the Ingeus group under a deal which will not include union recognition and will not safeguard jobs on the same conditions as in Whitehall.”

The competitors, mainly charities, factored in the costs of TUPE staff benefits – which cover employees when their employers are taken over – into their bids. Rein’s company had legal advice it did not need to provide those benefits and was able to undercut its competition. Charitably, and with an enviable display of the sportsmanship associated with thugs from the Graham Richardson school of “whatever it takes” right-wing Labor politics, Rein’s UK manager William Smith said the charities were `’whingers”. `’Frankly its their own fault. They should have bloody read the questions and answers documents.” Indeed. If they hadn’t been busily looking after the handicapped, widows and orphans, they may well have employed a firm of smart lawyers to look for such an edge.

Interestingly, The Guardian quoted angry and disappointed officials from two interested parties, the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations and the Public and Commercial Services Union, in its article about Rudd’s wife’s company. Stephen Bubb, the volunteer groups’ representative, said he intended to ask the UK Government whether it had decided there was no future for voluntary organisations in delivering services. PCSU general secretary Mark Serwotka said: `’Not only has the voluntary sector been used as a Trojan horse by the private sector but the Government has handed a large chunk of work to a firm which is failing and mired in controversy in Australia. The Government is giving a green light to a company who we fear will try and circumvent TUPE regulations.”

Ingeus has been given nearly half of the British governments contracts for privatised benefits. There’s more on Pathways To Work and the theft of tax money that should have gone to the poor by a government who’s handing up to 120 billion quid of it to the Aussie PM’s wife, here.

Christian Voice breaks the ninth commandment

Published on July 20, 2008

the Mattel Black Canary doll in question

In an unsurprising display of hypocrisy, UK “Christian” hate group “Christian” Voice has broken the ninth of the ten commandments, the one about not bearing false witness against your neighbour”, a commandment often broken by those socalled Christian groups more inspired by hate than love. This particular group has been best known for going nuts about Jerry Springer: the Opera, where they managed to convince the cancer charity Maggie’s Centres to decline a four-figure donation from the proceeds of a special performance of the opera. In a rare display of karma, their head nutcase, Stephen Green then sued the makers of the opera for blasphemy, lost the court case, was ordered to pay the legal costs of his opponents and now is in danger of going bankrupt. Couldn’t have happen to a nicer guy.

Nevertheless this hasn’t stopped “Christian” Voice from making a nuisance of themselves, this time being offended by something very important indeed: a Barbie doll! Said Barbie doll, being part of a range of figures modeled on famous DC comics superheroines, is dressed in the costume of Black Canary, a heroine with a pedigree going back to 1947. The “Christian” Voice activists however insist that this is a “S&M Barbie” and “pure filth”, which in my book is definately bearing false witness to both Mattel and DC.

As you can see from the picture, only a loon would describe this as a “S&M outfit”, but of course if Christian Voice told the truth and said they were disgusted with a mildly sexy dressed Barbie doll even more people would laugh at them than they do now. By breaking the ninth commandment they at least get their press release in The Sun, which is always in for a bit of moral panic, even if their regular page three feature hardly confirms with the kind of morals “Christian” Voice allegedly supports.

and hey, what’s more important: actually attempting to abide by some of the most important commandments of your religion, or getting your name in the papers?

Faradiddles and Fairytales

Published on April 10, 2008

Have you heard the one about the jihadi on the No. 81 bus? What about the apparently professional people who believe in witches and demons?

But first the jihadi on the bus.5 Chinese crackers illustrates how an Islamophobic urban myth is slipped into general currency:

Urban myths and Muslim bus drivers praying

[…]

I thought something might be fishy when I saw ‘Get off my bus, I need to pray’ in the Sun last week. Having pictures or even video of a Muslim bus driver praying on his bus does not prove that the driver made his passengers get off so he could pray.

Via Islamophobia Watch, we can have a look at this article from the Slough and Windsor Observer, ‘Bosses defend Muslim who stopped the 81 bus to pray’, which explains:

London United Busways say they have carried out a full investigation after driver Arunas Raulynaitis rolled out his prayer mat to perform his daily prayers, facing Mecca on the number 81 bus in Langley.

Bosses have analysed evidence, including CCTV footage, and say the driver was actually on his 10-minute break when the incident took place at around 1.30pm on Thursday.

They added that the control room had in fact radioed Mr Raulynaitis to terminate the bus outside Langley Fire Station in London Road because it was running late due to road works. Passengers were asked to leave the vehicle while they waited for another bus to pick them up to complete their journey.

[…]

But a 21-year-old passenger – who was hoping to join the bus before it terminated – told the Observer: “People were fuming because they said the driver had asked them to leave so he could pray.

“Most people ended up waiting for 15 minutes and weren’t happy. I was late for work so I got a lift with my friend. But it was a hassle I didn’t need.”

So, the driver was told to stop the bus because it was behind schedule, and he decided to pray at that point because it was time for him to take his break. Not really worth reporting in a national newspaper. Unless you make dodgy assumptions about the guy’s motives.

It’s exactly this sort of story that led the passengers on the bus to believe that the driver had told them to get off so he could pray. If you’re primed to think a particular group are arrogant and prone to demanding other people bend to their whims to accommodate their needs, you’re far more likely to conclude that anything a member of that group does that you don’t like has been done for that reason.

We visited friends in Langley (close to Slough) quite recently and I was surprised – hardly any of the locals were noticeably Moslem or even non-white, oddly so considering it’s so close to Heathrow. Other than at Heathrow itself and in Tesco in Slough did I once see a hijab or a brown face. (Though to be fair, we were only there two days. Perhaps it was the weather.) Funny how these kinds of stories emanate from mostly all-white enclaves, though.

That said, I don’t think anyone should get prayer time at work anyhow, no matter what their religion and/or job is. Do it on your own time and if your prayer schedule doesn’t fit the normal working day, or your Sunday is sacrosanct, then you should look for work that will specifically accomodate that, or be self-employed as many religious do, quietly and with no fuss. But some religious make a hell of a fuss and think their religion should be the way of life for everyone, regardless of their beliefs or lack of them, and many of them are Christians.

Perhaps the media might choose to report on that, or on the increasing stridency of religious people in secular life generally? What about reporting on the government-funded, class and race-based faith schools, currently institutionalising religious sectarianism and embedded privilege into yet another divided generation? The situation can only worsen once this ghettoised cohort of British children gets into the workforce.

As it is a Christian doctors’ association has already pressured the doctors’ ruling body, The General Medical Council, to release new guidelines that allow them, the religious, to refuse treatment to patients for conditions which they find personally morally suspect, on the grounds of a vague all-encompassing ‘conscience.’

The lobby groups, some funded by spiritual/political mentors in the USA, are triumphant, having already successfully bullied UK pharmacists over the matter of refusing contraception and particularly the morning-after-pill.

even that isn’t enough for some religious:

David Jones, a Roman Catholic professor of bioethics at St Mary’s University College, London, said that doctors with a strong objection to abortion may feel like “an accessory to murder” if they directly referred patients to other doctors for the procedure, as the GMC suggests. “How this guidance will be implememented is crucial,” he said.

Jafer Qureshi, a co-founder of the Islamic Medical Ethics Forum, which advises Muslim doctors on issues including medical euthanasia and organ transplantation, added that medical students had recently complained about a “climate of intolerance” to their beliefs.

But where are the lurid red-top headlines about medical missionaries and foreign fundies interfering in the NHS and policing our morals?

If I saw the tabloids campaigning against fundamentalism generally – if only in defence of Page 3 stunnas – and there were a few more disapproving (and true) stories of fundamentalists of other religions than just Islam interfering with the rights of others, then I’d be less inclined to think this Langley item is a made-up story designed specifically to appeal to the average BNP voter.

Fundamentalists of all types seek to overcome their own weakness and ultimate lack of faith by imposing on us. Many (and they’re usually the most visibly pious) secretly lack the ability or the will to hold to the tenets of their religion or to live a right life acording to their chosen beliefs; they know they are weak and it’s so much easier to comply when all the discipline comes from outside.

So they seek to construct a society in which to sin is impossible, a place where they won’t have to try at all and can just go along with the rules, parrot the right words, and be saved with no exertion at all. Which slightly misses the point of the spiritual life, which is all about the personal effort.

But to get back to the way the media treats fundamentalism and the religious; Islamic fundamentalism is demonised because of the way many Moslems look. Many British Moslems are non-white, an artifact of postcolonial immigration patterns. But Christian fundamentalism is nothing to worry about, the media think; after all it’s homegrown, sort of, and mostly practiced by whites (though becoming less so, witness the influence of African evangelicals and EU Catholics). Nevertheless the tabloid news equation can be ultimately reduced to Moslem=non-white=bad, Christian=white (ish)=good.

Myself I’m much more concerned about the GP who’s goes all ecstatic and happy-clappy on Sundays and who thinks dominionism is no bad thing, or the cabinet minister who shirks his duty to his constituents in order to appease an archbishop, than I am about a tired bus driver taking a restful little contemplative break on his own time.

UPDATE: Now see, this is exactly what happens when you give any public ground to the religious.

“I think Martin has suffered terribly at the hands of the Guardian”

Published on December 3, 2007

caricature of Martin Amis

Martin being Martin Amis, the quote being from his writer pal Ian McEwan, refering to Mart’s growing reputation as a racist and/or Islamophobe, because of remarks like these:

“What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational. It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?”

McEwan, who is slightly but not much less nuts than Amis on this subject seems to blame the Guardian for publishing articles like the age of horrorism rather than Amis for opening his gob in the first place, which seems a bit unfair. The man himself meanwhile has hit back at his critics with a spectacularly incoherent piece in, you guessed it, the despised Guardian itself:

I want to talk about the discourse, and about the kind of public conversation we should be hoping to have. But before I do that, I will pay my Islamic readers – and I know I have a few – the elementary courtesy of saying that I DO NOT “ADVOCATE” ANY DISCRIMINATORY TREATMENT OF MUSLIMS. AND I NEVER HAVE. And no one with the slightest respect for truth can claim otherwise.

Has he read his earlier remarks quoted above, or does he think that if he denies them hard enough they will go away? Because, you know, that blaming of an entire population for the acts of a few seems awfully close to racism to me, especially considering the context. Ever since the September 11 attacks Amis has left no opportunity unused to discuss his disgust at the ideology behind it and over time he has done so in increasingly general terms, culminating in that awful “Age of horrorism” article which came very close indeed in blaming all of Islam for the misdeeds of September 11.

So is Amis a racist? Not in the sense that he’ll be sticking burning crescents on the council estates of Birmingham perhaps, but at the very least he’s an arrogant, self-absorbed ignorant blowhard who mistakes his regurgitation of whichever book he last read for insight. Very telling indeed in this context is the second paragraph of his “I’m no racist, honest” piece, which begins with “When I was five or six years old, my father took me to meet a black man.” That’s the level of self-absorption we’re dealing with here.

Comment of the Day: On James Watson’s latest embarassment

Published on October 17, 2007

James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA shows that being a good scientist does not mean you cannot be an idiot by saying that “people who have to deal with black employees” just know they aren’t as intelligent as white folk and going on to the usual pseudoscientific nonsense on difference in intelligence between races and all that.

Over at James Nicoll’s Livejournal, commenter vito_excalibur imagines the boot on the other foot:

Regarding his groundbreaking new study, respected New England researcher Dr. Alec Dote commented, “I couldn’t believe it either. After decades – no, centuries – of firm widespread belief that white men were simply the top of the evolutionary pinnacle, this study unearthed the fact that most – perhaps all – of the apparent discrepancy in achievement is actually due to white men benefiting from, taking advantage of, taking credit for the work of, and occasionally simply killing and taking the property of, women and other minorities. Why, this very study was made possible by the tragically underpaid work of my female graduate students, and do you think they’re getting their names on this publication? Over my dead body!”

Dr. Dote added, “This study is expected to have a terrible effect on the psychological well-being of old white men, on whom our economy used to popularly be thought to depend. I myself am so shaken that I almost shut up for a second the other day.”

The study concludes on a note of hope, however: although the evidence that old white men are more intelligent, emotionally stable, just, or wise than the rest of the world has been thoroughly discredited, Dr. Dote suggests as a hypothesis for future research that the fact that this imposture has lasted for so long is evidence that old white men are, at least, the most cunning people in the world.

Also more examples of James Watson’s foot in mouth syndrome