Introducing the "pre-post" concept - UN edition

This is where the blogger knows not a lot about a subject but it's one regular sources have thrown up and it needs ferreting to find out about.  Whatever can these two chaps be referring to?

No, Not Everything Is 'Racist'...

Yes, I'm broadly in favour of working from home, not least because it's annoying all the right people, could save money and is giving it to the transport unions good and hard without benefit of lube... 

But that doesn't mean I'm bound to agree with this nonsense:

A group of Apple employees have accused the big-tech giant of racism over its push for corporate workers to return to the office, saying that the shift back to an in-person model will make the company 'younger, whiter, [and] more male-dominated.'

Errr, what..? 

Although Apple will 'likely always find people willing to work here,' the group wrote, the shift back to working in the office will 'change the makeup of [the company's workforce].'

It's already changed once, what you seem to be worried about is it might change back.  

'It will lead to privileges deciding who can work for Apple, not who’d be the best fit,' the group wrote. 'Privileges like “being born in the the right place so you don’t have to relocate”, or “being young enough to start a new life in a new city/country” or “having a stay-at-home spouse who will move with you."'

All things that apply to any job, anywhere. 

'And privileges like being born into a gender that society doesn’t expect the majority of care-work from, so it’s easy to disappear into an office all day, without doing your fair share of unpaid work in society. Or being rich enough to pay others to do your care-work for you.'

Wait, what the hell is 'your fair share of unpaid work in society' supposed to mean? Didn't anyone else notice what they slipped in there?

How about this side of the pond?

All right, the FBI has always been this way, both in reality and in US lore:

There [are] a number of very troubling things that are happening in the FBI ... Project Veritas appears to be a victim of political undertakings, which is where this agency [the FBI] has gone. The file that you're talking about is background on the Project Veritas investigation that resulted in the search warrant at your premises. We don’t see a lot of investigations into news organizations, it’s not common. To see a criminal investigation, particularly one categorized the way this is, is alerting and surprising based on the public information that is provided. 

And it’s not just a handful of rogue Leftist agents who are running wild. The whistleblower confirmed that these decisions are decided by the top brass at each FBI field office. Whistleblower: “So, SIM is a classification. That means it’s a ‘sensitive investigative matter.’ Because it’s sensitive it could be a political figure, it could be a news organization.”

Right, so that's under scrutiny and coming out.  Fine.  Now ... GCHQ?  Media Matters?  Any scrutiny of them going on?

The Identity Politics Gravy Train Needs To Hit The Buffers Hard...

Council chiefs have advised staff to omit the word ‘family’ when sending Christmas greetings so as not to offend those who have no relatives.

Surely sending Christmas cards instead of 'Winterval' cards is offensive enough in the first place, to the people likely to kick up a fuss..? 

One section of the 42-page document (Ed: 42 pages! What a waste of trees...) advises workers to steer clear of linking specific attributes to chronological age’ and rather than use phrases like ‘a young and vibrant team’, should consider ‘a team made up of people in the early stage of their careers’.

Yeah, that one just trips off the tongue, doesn't it? Trust a local council penpusher to suggest using thirteen words rather than five... 

It recommends avoiding phrases such as ‘women who are pregnant’ and ‘expectant mothers’ and to instead use gender-neutral phrases like ‘people who are pregnant’ and ‘expectant parents’.

By way of elaboration, the guide also states: ‘Not everyone who is pregnant is a woman – people who are non-binary or trans men can also be pregnant.’

I'll stop you there - if you're pregnant, you're a woman. This isn't sci-fi. Normal biology applies. 

Greenwich council said: ‘Our inclusive language guide is advisory only and was designed to encourage staff to reflect on the use of language in the workplace and how it might impact their colleagues.’

Why on earth should this be necessary? Or even part of staff induction? Burn it all and salt the earth.  

Fatherless homes

This is not my usual field and yet I've stumbled upon it and here it is, with some notes below it from me:

Notes

#  'Fatherless homes' is not just physically no father there but also fathers there but not doing a lot ... or else doing nasty things.  Mine was fairly remote, I can't claim any abuse but there was not a lot of the other side of things ... maybe that's just my nature that caused it.

#  One factor is the judgment of of the female/wife ... we know about 80% of women going for 20% of men, there is also the bad boy factor mixed in with that, the naivety of thinking he can be changed.  Also female is the pretty dreams of how she'd like it to be ... and it almost never can be like that.

#  Coming back to the men, some should never have progeny in the first place ... whatever would possess a girl to go with a monster ... or does she create the monster?  Jury's out.

#  Then there's the unfortunate factor ... you know, chap goes off to war, illness or some other uncontrollable thing ... we'll leave that aside in the argument perhaps for now.

#  Then we come to the stepfather. Assuming the woman is not putting it about with various men, assuming she genuinely is looking for a 'good partner' and seems to have found one, how does that go down with the children?  And it seems different to me for girls or for boys.  A boy most certainly needs a friendly man there to kick the ball around with now and then.

#  Penultimately, seems to me there needs to be a lot more care taken by the woman who does the accepting or not.  Yes, it's a lovely thought that both men and women should be mature and interactive on this but it's not always the case and in the final analysis, it's her who makes that decision.

#  Lastly, seems to me that the aspiring mother needs a lot of good advice, not from Planned Parenthood or similar, not from Woke teachers, but from her grandmother and mother respectively.  Once that nexus is broken, it's all downhill across society after that. And it would help if she had a good father figure herself to model her choice of man on.

We Know What You Really Mean By 'The Most Vulnerable', 'Guardian...

The Home Office has placed immigration officers in child social services and dozens of other local authority departments, in an arrangement that has raised concerns​...

That there's not enough?

...about the ability of the most vulnerable to seek support, the Guardian can reveal.

Why would it? Unless, of course, by 'most vulnerable' you mean illegals and overstayers. Still, any new initiative would be welc...

Oh! 

The on-site immigration officer service was reported by the Observer in early 2019.

So it's been running for three years? 

The revelation that the Home Office was “hiring out” immigration officials to enforce the government’s hostile environment policy was met with outrage from critics, leading many local authorities to eject the officers, and the Home Office to remove information about the service from government websites.

Any local authority that did this should have gone straight to the back of the queue for any government funding... 

However, the service has continued to operate. Records released in response to FoI requests reveal that at the end of 2021, 12 local authorities plus HS2 and TfL still had immigration officers working within them on behalf of the Home Office, including five where officers had been placed specifically in children’s services. 

The OUTRAGE! in the article is led by shadow minister for immigration, Stephen Kinnock, Mary Atkinson, campaigns officer at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and Colin Yeo, an immigration law barrister.

Do they bother to ask Mr or Mrs Average in the street whether they think it's a good idea? Reader, they do not. 

They just expect them to pay eye-watering levels of tax to fund every Tomazs, Dhama and Harsimer who comes ashore at Dover...

Whither the unWoke English blogosphere in 2022?

I chose that designation 'English', not from any home country animosity but because of the home bases and/or the perspectives of said bloggers. 

In short, there seem precious few left, compared to 2010, say.  After reading that Tim Montgomerie had gone to Unherd, then departed, looking at Mick Hartley, and various blogs on my rolls, unWoke English blogs such as TCW do seem pretty sparse across the ether.

This below, from Laura Perrins, now seemingly under the TCW umbrella, is about how Andrew Neill turned out to be the great letdown for everyone and one hot topic was his attitude to the treatment of poor refuseniks:

In fact, families with loved ones who died or suffered severe side effects after receiving the Covid vaccine say they are being ignored. More than 1,200 claims have been made to the Vaccines Damages Payment Scheme (VDPS), which should award up to £120,000 if a causal link between vaccination and severe reaction, culminating in injury or death, is proved. To date, the government is yet to pay out any form of compensation for affected individuals. Some applicants have been waiting nearly a year, despite families having medical confirmation that vaccination was responsible for the death of their loved ones. 

Well yes, plus many other unWoke topics we need to blog on but dismayingly, as I go to various sites' own blogrolls and sample, we really do find a lot of cuckery going on.  The Slog's still mostly good, our Julia, Longrider does his thang, Legiron has slowed to a crawl, Dick Puddlecote's gone, some of our numbers have died, Samizdata is left-leaning.

I'm just wondering if there are still some unsung unWoke England based blogs around.

Mothers' Day in some parts of the world

A political post will be coming up a bit later in the morning.

Killing The Competion Again, RSPCA?

Your reminder of what drives the RSPCA these days:

Roger Musselle, who has run Roger’s Wildlife Rescue in Woodingdean for 56 years, has been visited by the RSPCA, who he says took his pigeons away. The 77-year-old, who runs the rescue centre in Downs Valley Road with his wife Fleur, said the stricter rules and regulations left him no option but to shut down the centre.

“Due to excessive rules and regulations that are now being forced upon us who rescue wildlife, our facilities are no longer acceptable in the 21s century,” he said. “The RSPCA doesn’t consider our hygiene up to their standards. We have plastic cages instead of metal or steel cages.”

The horror, the horror! 

“We at Roger's Wildlife Rescue have worked with other wildlife centres and veterinary surgeons successfully for many years and I am sorry for the extra pressure my decision to stop will put on you all.

“Wildlife and nature has always been and always will be my passion and I am still happy to continue giving out wildlife advice to anyone needing it.

“I will continue to work for the good of wildlife, but will not in future be taking in wildlife casualties at our home, as we have done for all those years.”

Who loses? The wildlife. Of course. It always does, doesn't it? 

A conversation between a jabbed and an unjabbed

Attempting to take a neutral stance for this post, just to try to describe the situation, let me make clear that this stricture does not apply to commenters here and it most certainly does not apply - neutrality - among our gang at t'other place.  But I'll try to be neutral here today.

The Daily Sceptic has a very clear view on it all and their former name - Lockdown Sceptics - gives their line away.  They were not so much anti-vaxx as anti-lockdown.  This is today's headline:

Indian Supreme Court Rules Vaccine Mandates Unlawful as Courts Around the World Push Back Against Pandemic State Overreach

For my own reasons, I was in voluntary lockdown long ago - I told my GP that in late 2019 and she gave me a curious smile at that statement.  Did she know something was in the wind?

Didn't help as I went down with something I thought was flu for the regulation two week run in Jan 2020 and that was that.  Still semi-blogged.  I do have my own concoction of tonic and lemon I sip at times through the day and who knows but it seemed to work for me in winter 2021.

About the sanest conversation I had was with a taxi driver taking me to my one shopping per week. He said he'd had the shots [two at that point I think it was] but he understood why I had not. I said that in my case, I can't, I personally get close to death's door every single flu jab I'd ever had but now I was in worse general health, so I was a prime jab-death demographic.

He took the view that that was his choice in his case, plus mandated for his work, but my choice was best for me.  He appreciated that I'd put on a mask in the back of his car out of respect for his request.  I said that I do wear them where shops get strident but I would anyway close to people so that the usual close up exchange of whatever does not occur ... not virus but just in general, plus it was a layer of clothing for winter. 

Well what's everyone's issue then, he asked.  Issue was, said I, the compulsion, simply that.  Both sides, medically, have strong feelings but only one side tries to force the other to their view, takes their jobs away, prevents others seeing loved ones, sneaks in stealth jabs without saying ... and so on.  Why?

Well, he explained, they feel that with us not doing the same, we threaten their health.  So the non-jabbed must be forced, I asked?  Held down and jabbed or taken from our home to camps?

No, said he, I don't hold with that at all.  But, said I, that's what the unjabbed are getting.  He repeated that he did not hold with that ... and we arrived at my stop.