Conservatives – praag.org

Tories’ repeal of Human Rights Act could spark constitutional crisis

Newly appointed Justice Secretary Michael Gove will push ahead with Conservative plans to repeal the Human Rights Act – a move experts warn could spark a constitutional crisis and blight Britain’s reputation on human rights worldwide.

Conservative Party sources, fresh from last week’s general election victory, told the Guardian the human rights reforms are imminent.

Civil liberty advocates warn the soon-to-be implemented measures would erode the right to life, the right to privacy, the right to a fair trial, the right to protest and the right to freedom from torture and discrimination.

Although the Tories were keen to push ahead with the legal changes during their last term in government, the move was blocked by the party’s ex-coalition partner the Liberal Democrats. But as a majority government, the Conservatives are now poised to push ahead with the reforms.

Central to the Tories’ election manifesto was a pledge to repeal the Human Rights Act (HRA) and significantly curb the power of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Britain. The legal reforms are expected to surface in PM David Cameron’s plans for his first 100 days, which will be outlined in the Queen’s Speech on May 27.

Under these changes, the Conservatives would replace the HRA with a Tory-styled British Bill of Rights. Britain’s Supreme Court would no longer be answerable to the ECHR, with the Strasbourg-based court losing the power to order changes to UK law.

The plans were drawn up in 2014 by then-Secretary of State for Justice Chris Grayling. At the time, Grayling proposed Britain withdraw from the ECHR if the Council of Europe rejects the Conservatives’ British Bill of Rights.

Constitutional crisis

Considerable doubt exists among experts that the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog responsible for ensuring the Convention is upheld, will accept the Tories’ proposals. As a result, it is widely believed Britain will disengage from the European Convention on Human Rights and undermine Europe’s’ civil liberties framework in the process.

Britain’s withdrawal from the ECHR has been strongly opposed by former Secretary of State for Justice Kenneth Clarke and the UK’s ex-Attorney General Dominic Grieve. Grieve has long condemned the proposal, warning its consequences would be devastating.

In December, he said the government’s threat to potentially abandon the Strasbourg court undermines international law and could fray the constitutional fabric that holds the United Kingdom together. Echoing grieve, analysts warn such a withdrawal would spark a constitutional crisis in the UK.

They suggest the move would be flatly rejected by Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and would mean the Conservative government has violated Northern Ireland’s 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

‘White conservatives behind SA’s rape epidemic’

One Bruce Gorton writes in Timeslive that white conservatives are the ones behind the South African corrective rape epidemic.

“Sure there are liberal rapists, but they aren’t doing it to people specifically for being gay,” Gorton says.

Consider this – before colonialism in Africa there wasn’t much of a tradition of homophobia. That is something that came in with the missionaries – but now it is the traditionalists, those who go on about African culture, who are most opposed to gay rights.

Meanwhile the white conservatives in South Africa are pretty much in agreement – it is the same thing from cultures that are supposed to hate each other.

Conservatives don’t give a damn about their culture, they care about excuses to make other people miserable.

In rural America, people who proudly self-identify as rednecks, are driving four-by-four trucks specially modded to belch out black smoke at the push of a button.

They spend $500 and $5,000 for these modifications, which actually reduce the power of their engines, so they can set out to “roll coal” on pedestrians, people ridding bicycles, and driving small cars on the highway.

Which is to say, congratulations America’s right wing, you are now real-world Captain Planet villains.

These are people who specifically foul the air with poison gas, in a way that reduces visibility for fellow motorists, because they don’t like clean air.

And they are the American conservative movement. That is what the American right wing is all about – simple, pointless spite.

The chief sin in conservative ideology is not hurting other people, it is being politically correct.

And conservatives will go to a special effort to be arsehole to other people in order to protest the idea that showing some consideration for other people is a good thing.

They don’t just roll coal on America’s highways.

Consider how Americans view the current president. I disagree with a lot of Barack Obama’s policies, I think he is way too comfortable playing Peeping Tom on everybody’s email, phone discussions and Internet usage.

But that isn’t what America’s conservatives criticise, no they claim he is a “Kenyan Muslim” – because they are all about bullying people for being non-white and non-Christian.

Wait, you express disgust at the basic xenophobia, religious bigotry and racism inherent in accusing a black man of being an African of another religion as if that is some sort of knock-down argument against his presidency?

Well now you’re just being politically correct.

That is American conservatism, and more than that, that is the conservatism of just about everybody else.

This is the heart of homophobia, of sexism, of racism, of all the other little hateful bits of shit that cling to the shoes of society – not ignorance but the pure, unadulterated wish to make the world worse.

The BNP don’t protest for a better Britain, they fight for the British value of bullying foreigners. Australia’s conservatives don’t want a better Australia, they want to ship refugees off to countries with laws very similar to the ones they were fleeing in the first place.

They’re all about just rolling coal over the rest of humanity.

Liberals have false sense of uniqueness

New research published in the scientific journal Psychological Science has found that people who identify themselves as liberals tend to underestimate the amount of actual agreement among those who share their political views, while people who are conservative tend to overestimate agreement among those who share their views.

To test this, 300 different participants were given a series of political (ex: “I support unionization”) and non-political (ex: “I like juice”) statements, and were told to respond with either agreement or non-agreement. They were then asked how much they thought other people who shared their political views would agree with their answers to the previous questions; by doing this, researchers could see how much consensus each person thought there was within their ideology.

The results?

Liberals showed what the researchers call ‘truly false uniqueness,’ perceiving their beliefs as more divergent from the beliefs of other liberals than they actually were. Moderates and conservatives, on the other hand, showed evidence of ‘truly false consensus,’ perceiving their beliefs to be more similar to those of other members of their political group than they actually were.”

Scientists hypothesize this has to do with the fact that in general, liberal desire uniqueness more than conservatives.

Chadly Stern, a psychological scientists from NYU who led the research, hopes that these findings will help us to understand the emergence of social movements:

Liberal social movements might struggle to develop solidarity and formulate shared goals within their ranks, both because liberals want to maintain unique beliefs and because they underestimate the amount of agreement among their members… Conservative social movements might initially capitalize on perceiving agreement to galvanize their ranks, but their inaccurate perceptions could impair group progress when actual agreement is necessary.”

Ann Coulter’s Mugged, a review

Many in the Dissident Right/ Right Opposition have criticized Ann Coulter as the epitome of the cable news partisanship. However, next to Pat Buchanan, she probably speaks more taboo truths than anyone else with Main Stream Media [MSM] access.

Coulter calls for cuts in legal immigration, ending birthright citizenship, speaks frankly about the Bell Curve, defends groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens (with some qualifications), and even quotes VDARE.com and Peter Brimelow .

So I was excited when I heard of her latest book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama.

But, as she began promoting it, the controversy seemed to be limited to her attacking liberals and the Democrats for racism and indifference to blacks.

So I got worried that the book would be more partisan Jonah Goldberg-type “Democrats-are-the-real-racists, Martin Luther King-is-a-conservative” platitudes than an actual, much-needed indictment of racial demagoguery.

Fortunately, however, the vast bulk of Coulter’s book focuses on exposing liberal and black hysteria and lies about race.

Coulter notes several actions that now inspire accusations of racism in the Age of Obama:

“not electing Obama president”
“requesting documents from Attorney General Eric Holder” in Fast and Furious
“references to Obama playing basketball”
“the word ‘the’”. The last charge, she notes, was inspired by Donald Trump referring to “the blacks.”

Her book’s subtitle is Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, and Coulter systematically documents racial demagoguery from the 1970s on. She does a great job telling the true story behind supposed acts of racism such as the justified Rodney King beating, the tragic (but not racist) shooting of Amadou Diallo, and the Willie Horton Ad. She exposes the little-known fact that Jim Jones People’s Temple mass suicide was led by a fanatical left-winger driven by “anti-racism” and Marxism, who also had close ties to the Democratic Party.

Perhaps the best part of Coulter’s book is her discussion of hate crime hoaxes. She devotes an entire chapter, amusingly titled “Hey, whatever happened to that story…” to hate crime hoaxes and how the MSM always accepts the lies, only to deep-six the stories when they prove false. In addition to rehearsing well-known hoaxes such as the Tawana Brawley case, she goes into great detail about lesser-publicized frauds, like the non-existent epidemic of black church burnings during the Clinton years. More importantly, she notes that many of these fake hate crimes stirred up actual hate crimes against whites—which were all ignored by the MSM.

Coulter covers the Duke Lacrosse mess later in the book. This is one of the few Hate Crime hoaxes that most people still remember, but Coulter brings up facts often ignored (outside of VDARE and a few other sources) that put it in perspective. She reports DOJ crime statistics noting that there has not been a single case of an actual white-on-black gang rape, while thousands of black-on-white rapes (including gang rapes) occur each year. As Coulter barbs:

If there were a single unequivocal example of a white on black rape in modern times, a lesbian folk singer would have written a song about it and won an Oscar for the accompanying documentary.

There are, however, a few areas where I believe Coulter’s partisanship gets in the way of her otherwise excellent analysis. Like many Conservatism Inc. publicists, Coulter argues the Democrats are in fact the real racists, and that the Republican Southern Strategy was non-racial.

Coulter has occasionally made some statements suggesting that she is sympathetic to Bell Curve arguments. [See her column Murdering The Bell Curve, June 27, 2002 at 2:50 PM]But she concludes her book by asserting

if all black people woke up tomorrow morning with the cultural predilections of Korean Americans, all sociological disparities—income, crime rates, out of wedlock births—would vanish within ten years.

Coulter’s general point that most of the problems in the black community will only improve through cultural change is no doubt true. But the unfortunate fact of average genetic differences means that most of those disparities will never vanish.

These quibbles aside, Coulter’s Mugged ranks with Jared Taylor’s Paved with Good Intentions and Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed as one of the best indictments of American minority and liberal hypocrisy and hysteria on race. – Alexander Hart, VDARE.com