Month: February 2020

Rounding Errors Found In 30% Of Iowa Caucus Worksheets, Could Flip “Significant Number Of Delegates”

Rounding Errors Found In 30% Of Iowa Caucus Worksheets, Could Flip “Significant Number Of Delegates”

After an app created by a Democratic digital firm botched the Iowa caucus results, the 1,678 precincts across the state resorted to awarding delegates using a “Caucus Math Worksheet,” causing significant delays in reporting.

The worksheet requires caucus workers perform basic multiplication and division, and then round the results up or down.

Unfortunately, Iowa Democrats are apparently terrible at math and rounding, as journalist and co-founder of Smart Elections, Lulu Friesdat, reveals that 30% of the worksheets she examined contained errors.

The kicker, “If 30% of 1678 precincts have an extra delegate assigned this way, it could be approximately 500 delegates. Buttigieg is currently leading Sanders by 18 delegates.”

We’re sure Sanders will say nothing and ‘let it happen’ as he tends to do, though former Vice President Joe Biden may have a thing or two to say after his monumental defeat.

At present count, former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigiegand Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) are virtually tied at 26.2% and 26.1% respectively, with 97% of precincts reporting.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 02/06/2020 – 06:32

Tags
Politics

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Did China’s Tencent Accidentally Leak The True Terrifying Coronavirus Statistics

Did China’s Tencent Accidentally Leak The True Terrifying Coronavirus Statistics

Ten days ago, shortly after China first started reporting the cases and deaths associated with the coronavirus epidemic, a UK researcher predicted that over 250,000 Chinese would be infected with the virus by February 4. And while according to official Chinese data, the number of infections has indeed soared in the past two weeks, at just under 25,000 (and roughly 500 deaths), it is a far cry from this dismal prediction, about ten times below that predicted by the epidemiologists.

Is this discrepancy possible? Is the epidemic truly far less serious than conventional epidemiological models predicted? Or is China merely hiding the full extent of the problem?

After all, it the WSJ itself reported in late January , China was explicitly manipulating the casualty number by listing pneumonia as the cause of death instead of coronavirus. Subsequent reports that Wuhan officials were rushing to cremate coronavirus casualties before they could be counted did not add to the credibility of the official data.

But the biggest hit to the narrative and China’s officially reported epidemic numbers came overnight, when a slip up in China’s TenCent may have revealed the true extent of the coronavirus epidemic on the mainland. And it is nothing short than terrifying.

As the Taiwan Times reports, over the weekend, “Tencent seems to have inadvertently released what is potentially the actual number of infections and deaths, which were astronomically higher than official figures“, and were far closer to the catastrophic epidemic projections made by Jonathan Read.

According to the report, late on Saturday evening, Tencent, on its webpage titled “Epidemic Situation Tracker”, showed confirmed cases of novel coronavirus (2019nCoV) in China as standing at 154,023, 10 times the official figure at the time. It listed the number of suspected cases as 79,808, four times the official figure.

And while the number of cured cases was only 269, well below the official number that day of 300, most ominously, the death toll listed was 24,589, vastly higher than the 300 officially listed that day.

Tencent screengrab as of late Feb 1, showing far higher infections.

Moments later, Tencent updated the numbers to reflect the government’s “official” numbers that day.

Screengrab showing higher numbers (left), chart showing “official” numbers (right). (Internet image)

This was not the first time Tencent has done this: as Taiwan Times notes, Chinese netizens have noticed that Tencent has on at least three occasions posted extremely high numbers, only to quickly lower them to government-approved statistics.

This is where it gets even more bizarre: contrary to claiming that this was just a “fat finger” mistyping of data, observant Chinese netizens also noticed that each time the screen with the large numbers appears, it shows a comparison with the previous day’s data which demonstrates a “reasonable” incremental increase, much like comparisons of official numbers.

This led many in the mainland to speculate that Tencent has two sets of data, the real data and “processed” data.

In short, two camps have emerged: one, the more optimistic, speculates that a coding problem could be causing the real “internal” data to accidentally appear. The other, far more pessimistically inclined, believes that someone behind the scenes is trying to leak the real numbers, as “the “internal” data held by Beijing may not reflect the true extent of the epidemic.”

Indeed, as repeatedly pointed out here and according to multiple sources in Wuhan, many coronavirus patients are unable to receive treatment and die outside of hospitals. Furthermore, a severe shortage of test kits also leads to a lower number of diagnosed cases of infection and death. In addition, there have been many reports of doctors being ordered to list other forms of death instead of coronavirus to keep the death toll artificially low.

What is the truth?

We leave it up to readers, but keep this in mind: on Jan 29, Zeng Guang, the chief scientist of epidemiology at China’s CDC, made a rare candid admission about why Chinese officials cannot tell people the truth in an interview with the state-run tabloid Global Times: “The officials need to think about the political angle and social stability in order to keep their positions.“

And then, on Monday, none other than China Xi’s called on all officials to quickly work together to contain the Coronavirus at a rare meeting of top leaders, saying the outcome would “directly impact social stability in the country.”

Well, if China is mostly concerned about social stability – as it should be for a nation of 1.4 billion – it is easy to comprehend why the entire political apparatus in China would be geared to presenting numbers which seem somewhat credible – in light of the barrage of videos of people dying on the street – but not so terrifying as to cause a countrywide panic.

Then again, if China indeed had over 154,000 cases and almost 25,000 deaths as of 5 days ago, then no attempts to mask the full extent and true severity of the pandemic have any hope of “containing” the truth.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 02/06/2020 – 04:40

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The War on Porn Is Back

“If you want better men by any standard, there is every reason to regard ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle,” declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a 2018 column bluntly headlined “Let’s Ban Porn.”

In this, as in many things, Douthat was ahead of the conservative intellectual curve by a year or two. And in this, as in many things, he was dangerously wrong.

In due course, Douthat has been joined by the folks at the Christian journal First Things, who have taken up the anti-pornography banner as part of their peculiar subvariant of a resurgent interest in nationalism among traditionalist conservatives. In last year’s manifesto, “Against the Dead Consensus,” a clutch of First Things friends and familiars reject “economic libertarianism” and “the soulless society of individual affluence” and add that they “respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism.” Which makes it all the more disconcerting when they turn around and immediately kneel before the scolding ghost of Ed Meese.

As attorney general, Meese sought to deliver on Reagan’s 1987 threat to “purveyors” of obscene material that the “industry’s days are numbered.” It was Meese who pulled together the first National Obscenity Enforcement Unit. (One surprising and familiar name also crops up in the tale: then–assistant attorney general and recent Libertarian Party vice presidential pick William F. Weld, who was given the task of bringing together various agencies for the task force.)

Meese’s bill of grievances against the relatively constrained pornography of his day—which he credited in a speech to a report from a federal Commission on Pornography convened the previous year—will sound alarmingly familiar to readers of Douthat and First Things. He asserts “that violence, far from being an altogether separate category of pornography, is involved with almost all of it; that there are empirically verifiable connections between pornography and violent sex-related crimes; that the pornography industry is a brutal one that exploits and often ruins the lives of its ‘performers’ as well as its consumers, and that the ‘performers’ often include abused children and people plied with hard drugs; that whether or not it is directly imitated by those who consume it, pornography has a deleterious effect on what its consumers view as normal and healthy.”

The effort was, in some sense, successful. By 1990, the Department of Justice had managed to use obscenity statutes to force seven national porn distributors out of business. But the decades that followed were boom times for porn as the industry moved into new forms of distribution, so the success was far from permanent.

In a rare moment of sanity in 2011, the Justice Department shuttered what had come to be known as the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, resulting in the delightful Politico headline “Holder accused of neglecting porn” and a harrumph from peeved conservatives, who vowed to reverse the Obama administration’s decision as soon as they could.

In December, four Republican congressmen wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr asking his Justice Department to do just that by prioritizing obscenity prosecutions.

“The Internet and other evolving technologies are fueling the explosion of obscene pornography by making it more accessible and visceral,” they wrote. “This explosion in pornography coincides with an increase in violence towards women and an increase in the volume of human trafficking as well as child pornography. Victims are not limited to those directly exploited, however, and include society writ large.”

Like herpes, the war on porn flares up when the body politic is compromised or stressed. Both in the 1980s and today, cherry-picked social science write-ups purposely conflate “addicts” and users, assert connections between porn and violence at a time of increasing porn consumption and decreasing violence, and offer terrifying but unsubstantiated stories about brain damage and erectile dysfunction in the nation’s young men. Such coverage fuels the porn panic even as the predicted hairy-palmed decline of the U.S. fails to materialize.

The proposed crackdown fits nicely with the nationalist agenda, which is focused—as nationalists tend to be—on purity. As has too often been the case historically, a campaign for moral purity can slide awfully smoothly into efforts to preserve ethnic purity, as Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown documents in her cover story on the current panic over Asian-run massage parlors.

In his 1987 speech, Meese was careful to limn the distinction between pornography and obscenity, acknowledging that only the latter is subject to prosecution per the Supreme Court’s clear instruction.

By contrast, at the end of 2019, Reason‘s Damon Root was compelled to publish a basic explainer about the First Amendment protections afforded to material that fails the three-pronged Miller test of obscenity. Too many would-be porn banners have simply ignored the legal guardrails the Court provided.

The porn-banning conservatives, though newly impatient with their former allies on the libertarian side of the spectrum, are often the same folks who were quite recently willing to fight bans on smoking, extra-large sodas, and trans fats to the death, and who would never entertain a return to alcohol prohibition.

There are people on the left, of course, who would forbid porn along with the rest of that list and much more as well, and Catholic writer Sohrab Ahmari would happily make common cause with them: “Conservatives must partner with anti-porn feminists. We won’t agree on everything, but imagine how powerful such an alliance could be,” he tweeted in December.

The utterly unfunny joke, of course, is that we don’t need to imagine such an alliance. It was indeed a powerful force in 1980s politics, with rhetoric crafted by feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon furnishing talking points for Reagan and Meese. In 1984, legislation defining pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights was passed with the support of conservatives on the Indianapolis city council and signed into law by a Republican mayor. (It was later struck down in the courts.)

Conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly borrowed from Dworkin in her 1987 book Pornography’s Victims: “Those who become addicted crave more and more bizarre and more perverted pornography, and become more callous toward their victims. Pornography changes the perceptions and attitudes of men toward women, individually and collectively, and desensitizes men so that what was once repulsive and unthinkable eventually becomes not only acceptable but desirable. What was once fantasy becomes reality. Thus conditioned and stimulated by pornography, the user seeks a victim.”

Douthat has noted that porn is “a product,” which he helpfully defines as “something made and distributed and sold, and therefore subject to regulation and restriction if we so desire.”

“We are rightfully skeptical of government overreach, but I think we take that skepticism so far that we’re skeptical of even using political power when we have it for ends that we think are valuable,” Hillbilly Elegy author and conservative golden boy J.D. Vance explained in a podcast episode taped following a July conference on national conservatism that brought together the new movement’s leading lights. “And I do think that we have to get over that, and we have to recognize that when people entrust us with political power to solve problems we should at least try to solve them.” Suffice it to say that in political rhetoric, as in pornography, everything before the but should be ignored.

To do as Ahmari wishes and “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good” will not eliminate vice, nor will it eliminate the production and consumption of porn. As with all prohibitions, a ban would discourage generally law-abiding and nonproblematic users while driving more committed or addicted users to darker places to find what they want. Meanwhile, more committed producers, taking on more risk, would likely produce more outré content. The new war on porn is a dangerous symptom of a recurring delusion on both the left and the right that men can be reshaped by the state into better versions of themselves.

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The War on Porn Is Back

“If you want better men by any standard, there is every reason to regard ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle,” declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a 2018 column bluntly headlined “Let’s Ban Porn.”

In this, as in many things, Douthat was ahead of the conservative intellectual curve by a year or two. And in this, as in many things, he was dangerously wrong.

In due course, Douthat has been joined by the folks at the Christian journal First Things, who have taken up the anti-pornography banner as part of their peculiar subvariant of a resurgent interest in nationalism among traditionalist conservatives. In last year’s manifesto, “Against the Dead Consensus,” a clutch of First Things friends and familiars reject “economic libertarianism” and “the soulless society of individual affluence” and add that they “respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism.” Which makes it all the more disconcerting when they turn around and immediately kneel before the scolding ghost of Ed Meese.

As attorney general, Meese sought to deliver on Reagan’s 1987 threat to “purveyors” of obscene material that the “industry’s days are numbered.” It was Meese who pulled together the first National Obscenity Enforcement Unit. (One surprising and familiar name also crops up in the tale: then–assistant attorney general and recent Libertarian Party vice presidential pick William F. Weld, who was given the task of bringing together various agencies for the task force.)

Meese’s bill of grievances against the relatively constrained pornography of his day—which he credited in a speech to a report from a federal Commission on Pornography convened the previous year—will sound alarmingly familiar to readers of Douthat and First Things. He asserts “that violence, far from being an altogether separate category of pornography, is involved with almost all of it; that there are empirically verifiable connections between pornography and violent sex-related crimes; that the pornography industry is a brutal one that exploits and often ruins the lives of its ‘performers’ as well as its consumers, and that the ‘performers’ often include abused children and people plied with hard drugs; that whether or not it is directly imitated by those who consume it, pornography has a deleterious effect on what its consumers view as normal and healthy.”

The effort was, in some sense, successful. By 1990, the Department of Justice had managed to use obscenity statutes to force seven national porn distributors out of business. But the decades that followed were boom times for porn as the industry moved into new forms of distribution, so the success was far from permanent.

In a rare moment of sanity in 2011, the Justice Department shuttered what had come to be known as the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, resulting in the delightful Politico headline “Holder accused of neglecting porn” and a harrumph from peeved conservatives, who vowed to reverse the Obama administration’s decision as soon as they could.

In December, four Republican congressmen wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr asking his Justice Department to do just that by prioritizing obscenity prosecutions.

“The Internet and other evolving technologies are fueling the explosion of obscene pornography by making it more accessible and visceral,” they wrote. “This explosion in pornography coincides with an increase in violence towards women and an increase in the volume of human trafficking as well as child pornography. Victims are not limited to those directly exploited, however, and include society writ large.”

Like herpes, the war on porn flares up when the body politic is compromised or stressed. Both in the 1980s and today, cherry-picked social science write-ups purposely conflate “addicts” and users, assert connections between porn and violence at a time of increasing porn consumption and decreasing violence, and offer terrifying but unsubstantiated stories about brain damage and erectile dysfunction in the nation’s young men. Such coverage fuels the porn panic even as the predicted hairy-palmed decline of the U.S. fails to materialize.

The proposed crackdown fits nicely with the nationalist agenda, which is focused—as nationalists tend to be—on purity. As has too often been the case historically, a campaign for moral purity can slide awfully smoothly into efforts to preserve ethnic purity, as Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown documents in her cover story on the current panic over Asian-run massage parlors.

In his 1987 speech, Meese was careful to limn the distinction between pornography and obscenity, acknowledging that only the latter is subject to prosecution per the Supreme Court’s clear instruction.

By contrast, at the end of 2019, Reason‘s Damon Root was compelled to publish a basic explainer about the First Amendment protections afforded to material that fails the three-pronged Miller test of obscenity. Too many would-be porn banners have simply ignored the legal guardrails the Court provided.

The porn-banning conservatives, though newly impatient with their former allies on the libertarian side of the spectrum, are often the same folks who were quite recently willing to fight bans on smoking, extra-large sodas, and trans fats to the death, and who would never entertain a return to alcohol prohibition.

There are people on the left, of course, who would forbid porn along with the rest of that list and much more as well, and Catholic writer Sohrab Ahmari would happily make common cause with them: “Conservatives must partner with anti-porn feminists. We won’t agree on everything, but imagine how powerful such an alliance could be,” he tweeted in December.

The utterly unfunny joke, of course, is that we don’t need to imagine such an alliance. It was indeed a powerful force in 1980s politics, with rhetoric crafted by feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon furnishing talking points for Reagan and Meese. In 1984, legislation defining pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights was passed with the support of conservatives on the Indianapolis city council and signed into law by a Republican mayor. (It was later struck down in the courts.)

Conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly borrowed from Dworkin in her 1987 book Pornography’s Victims: “Those who become addicted crave more and more bizarre and more perverted pornography, and become more callous toward their victims. Pornography changes the perceptions and attitudes of men toward women, individually and collectively, and desensitizes men so that what was once repulsive and unthinkable eventually becomes not only acceptable but desirable. What was once fantasy becomes reality. Thus conditioned and stimulated by pornography, the user seeks a victim.”

Douthat has noted that porn is “a product,” which he helpfully defines as “something made and distributed and sold, and therefore subject to regulation and restriction if we so desire.”

“We are rightfully skeptical of government overreach, but I think we take that skepticism so far that we’re skeptical of even using political power when we have it for ends that we think are valuable,” Hillbilly Elegy author and conservative golden boy J.D. Vance explained in a podcast episode taped following a July conference on national conservatism that brought together the new movement’s leading lights. “And I do think that we have to get over that, and we have to recognize that when people entrust us with political power to solve problems we should at least try to solve them.” Suffice it to say that in political rhetoric, as in pornography, everything before the but should be ignored.

To do as Ahmari wishes and “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good” will not eliminate vice, nor will it eliminate the production and consumption of porn. As with all prohibitions, a ban would discourage generally law-abiding and nonproblematic users while driving more committed or addicted users to darker places to find what they want. Meanwhile, more committed producers, taking on more risk, would likely produce more outré content. The new war on porn is a dangerous symptom of a recurring delusion on both the left and the right that men can be reshaped by the state into better versions of themselves.

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via IFTTT

A New Space Race? US, China, Russia, & Europe All Plan For Moon Bases

A New Space Race? US, China, Russia, & Europe All Plan For Moon Bases

Authored by Aaron Kesel via TheMindUnleashed.com,

One year ago in January, a Chinese robot landed on the dark side of the moon. Since then, the Chang’e 4 probe and the Yutu-2 rover it carried onboard have been busy photographing and scanning minerals, growing yeast, hatching fruit-fly eggs, and cultivating cotton, potato, and rapeseeds in the moon’s low gravity, according to the Daily Beast.

Now, China’s National Space Administration is quietly planning to launch yet another probe into space. Chang’e 5 could blast off as early as this year.

Last year, TMU reported that the Yutu-2 rover came across a strange “gel-like” substance which the Chinese began to study extensively.

The Chinese space agency has continued to work on its Tiangong 3 space station and is planning on testing a new manned spacecraft for deep-space missions. That permanent station will reach orbit aboard the country’s new Long March 5B rocket in the first half of 2020, AFP reported. The mission will not be associated with the International Space Station.

It is worth noting that China and Europe both planned on building a moonbase together in a move of “international collaboration” back in 2017. Europe and Russia are also eyeing plans to send a probe to the dark side of the moon to determine if they should build a moon base on the far side of the lunar surface.

And the U.S. hasn’t been quiet when it comes to the space race either with the introduction of Space Force and plans of its own for a joint base with Russia.

For the U.S., this space race to build a moonbase is nothing new. A project known as Horizon was supposedly a plan drawn up in the 1950s that seemingly depicts the blueprints for a base on the moon. Project Horizon sought to establish a stationary Army control base on the moon by 1966 but the operation was allegedly shut down and canceled and the idea never materialized further.

It was reported in a joint announcement by NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities that the U.S. and Russia wanted to build a “moonbase” the same year that Europe and China announced their cooperation. However, the current plan with Russia resembles another previous proposal called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) which ironically was suggested during the Cold War. Russia and the U.S. now seek to revive that plan with a base that will orbit the moon similar to how the International Space Station moves around Earth.

The MOL ran from December 1963 until its alleged cancellation in June 1969. Its mission was to use an elite corps of secret U.S. astronauts to gather intelligence on the Soviets during the Cold War.

NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos stated the partnership was for human exploration of the moon and deep space. Both agencies signed a joint statement on the collaborative effort. It all stemmed from NASA’s “deep-space gateway” concept, a mission architecture designed to send astronauts into lunar orbit by 2020.

“This plan challenges our current capabilities in human spaceflight and will benefit from engagement by multiple countries and U.S. industry,” NASA officials said in a statement at the time.

NASA also had plans leak last year showing that they wanted to develop their own lunar surface base, which is now being threatened by a U.S. House panel.

The status of plans between Russia and the U.S. as well as China and Europe are currently public and either could be canceled for reasons of political tensions or something else before they see the light of day.

“China, the United States, Russia and Europe are all discussing whether to build a research base or a research station on the moon,” Wu Yanhua, deputy chief commander of China’s Lunar Exploration Program said.

The bigger worry isn’t space exploration – it is weaponizing space. The New York Times reported in 2015 that space could be the next war zone, warning about the implications of weaponizing space in an opinion piece literally titled “Preventing A Space War.”


Tyler Durden

Thu, 02/06/2020 – 05:00

Tags
Environment

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Trump Admin “Threatened Me” After Rejecting Peace Plan: Erdogan

Trump Admin “Threatened Me” After Rejecting Peace Plan: Erdogan

We noted that immediately after President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s roll out of the ‘deal of the century’ Mideast peace plan on January 28, Turkey was the first country to condemn it internationally, and just days ago Erdogan’s director of communications, Fahrettin Altun, called it “a declaration of war, not a peace plan”.

In a stunning revelation Wednesday, Bloomberg now reports that President Erdogan says the US is threatening him and Intelligence Chief Hakan Fidan over Turkey’s rejection of the plan.

“Turkey rejected U.S. Middle East plan, which stands for occupation of Palestine and usurping Jerusalem. I talked to Mahmoud Abbas over the phone and met Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh face to face in Istanbul” Erdogan said in Ankara, as quoted by Bloomberg.

Presidents Trump and Erdogan file image.

“Turkey’s strong reaction forced some Arab countries to step back from their support for the plan. Unfortunately now, U.S. threatens me and my intelligence chief. In addition, some financial institutions in Turkey under threat. Do whatever you can, you won’t succeed,” Erdogan said, underscoring the nature of it as a direct personal threat. 

For any proposed peace plan past or present it’s always been crucial that leading Arab nations in the region like Egypt or Jordan be on board. President Trump had initially initially touted support from some Gulf Arab states like Bahrain and United Arab Emirates. 

But the Arab League on Saturday declared its official rejection of the plan as bragged about by Erdogan this week. 

The pan-Arab bloc said as a result of the emergency session that it “rejects the US-Israeli ‘deal of the century’ considering that it does not meet the minimum rights and aspirations of Palestinian people.” Mahmoud Abbas also announced in a scathing speech before the assembly of Arab leaders that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is cutting all ties with the US and Israel.

From the start both the PA and Hamas indicated the plan would be dead on arrival as they were not even privy to negotiations related to key components of the plan, especially the crucial part of the White House plan giving Israel ‘annexation’ rights over at least 30% of West Bank territory.

Erdogan had previously called the plan “absolutely unacceptable” and was quoted in CNN Turk as saying “Jerusalem is sacred for Muslims. The plan to give Jerusalem to Israel is absolutely unacceptable. This plan ignores Palestinians’ rights and is aimed at legitimizing Israel’s occupation.”


Tyler Durden

Thu, 02/06/2020 – 04:15

Tags
Politics
War Conflict

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French Teenager Forces Free Speech Debate Over Her Calling Islam A “Religion Of Hate”

French Teenager Forces Free Speech Debate Over Her Calling Islam A “Religion Of Hate”

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here and here). A teenager has sparked a national debate about blasphemy in France after an Instagram post calling Islam a “religion of hate”. Indeed, France has emerged as one of the greatest threats to free speech in the West and we continue to face calls for European-style speech crimes, including calls by its President on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Now a teenager in France has triggered a debate over its plunge into speech crimes and regulation after characterizing Islam as “a religion of hate.” She can now be criminally investigated for hate speech under the notorious French speech law.

On a January 18th live broadcast on her Instagram account, Mila, 16, was called a “dirty lesbian” by a Muslim commenter. She responded by saying “I hate religion. The Koran is a religion of hate” and using vulgarity against the religion. She added “I am not racist. You cannot be racist towards a religion. I said what I thought, you’re not going to make me regret it.”

Despite receiving death threats and being forced to forego school, she refused to back down and said that she “wanted to blaspheme”. She apologized if she was vulgar and said that she did not want to insult people who practice their religion “in peace,” but “I have absolutely no regrets about what I said, it was really my thought.”

When French justice minister Nicole Belloubet denounced this as an attack on religion and was “an attack on freedom of conscience”.

This is the inevitable result of speech codes and speech crimes. There is an insatiable appetite to use the criminal justice system to punish those who hold opposing views.

These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion.

For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti. “He said ‘dirty whore’ at least a thousand times,” she explained out loud.

In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly”. A French mother was prosecuted because her son went to school with a shirt reading “I am a bomb.”

As I have previously discussed, the sad irony of France leading efforts to curb free speech is powerful.

Once the bastion of liberty, France has now become one of the greatest international threats to free speech. It even led a crackdown on the free press with criminal investigations. Mila has vividly shown how France has replaced its rallying cry for liberty with a demand for conformity. Perhaps this teenager will awaken enough citizens to the scourge of speech codes and crimes.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 02/06/2020 – 03:30

Tags
Social Issues
Religion Belief
Human Interest
Law Crime

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A Quarter Of Brits Get Annoyed By A Foreign Conversation

A Quarter Of Brits Get Annoyed By A Foreign Conversation

YouGov has released a somewhat disturbing poll highlighting levels of xenophobia and intolerance in post-Brexit Britain.

The survey involved 1,461 adults and, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, it found that more than a quarter of them would be very or fairly bothered by hearing people from a non-English speaking country talking to each other in their own language.

Infographic: A quarter of Brits get annoyed by a foreign conversation | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

Among those who voted to remain in the EU, 14 percent would be bothered in some fashion by conversation in a foreign language while 83 percent couldn’t care less.

Intolerance is high among leave voters, however, with 55 percent of those polled stating that a foreign conversation would get on their nerves while 41 percent would not be bothered by it.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 02/06/2020 – 02:45

Tags
Social Issues

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