News and Views from around the World
Policing 'hate speech' is just the latest
method of enforcing left-wing orthodoxy
Non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) sound like something out of
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the writer who deserves the
most credit for anticipating them is Philip K. Dick, who came
up with the concept of "pre-crime" in Minority Report, his 1956
novella that later became a film starring Tom Cruise. In Dick's
nightmarish society of the future, specially trained telepaths
are able to foresee serious crimes and a division of the police
is tasked with arresting the "perpetrators" before they have a
chance to commit them.
NCHIs are a form of "pre-crime", with the idea being that if
you put the frighteners on someone guilty of saying something
"hateful", but which isn't against the law, you deter them from
taking the next step, which would be to commit a hate crime.
Excerpt from Toby Young, The Daily Telegraph (UK),
November 17, 2024.
URL: Telegraph.co.uk
Easier to come out as 'gay'
than as Christian in UK
Some young people feel that "it is much more difficult now to come out as an evangelical Christian in school than it is to come out as LGBT."
That is according to David Smyth from the Evangelical
Alliance Northern Ireland (EANI).The Evangelical Alliance is
a Christian organisation which represents a range of churches
and individuals.
Excerpt from Robbie Meredith, BBC News, November 7,
2024.
URL: BBC.com
San Francisco wrecked by leftist policies
Over the years, policies enacted by the city's ever more extreme progressive leaders slowly destroyed San Francisco. I lived in and around the city for almost 25 years, starting in 1992, and saw the decline happen in real time. It broke my heart.
Today, the city is a wreck. The commercial hub of San Francisco, a huge shopping mall at Fifth and Market, anchored by a beautiful multi-storey Nordstrom, imploded after the department store closed last year. Union Square, once the pride of San Francisco, with high-end retail stores, now sees many empty storefronts. Drug bazaars operate openly, enabled by city employees who hand out free drug paraphernalia.
Homelessness abounds. Old men ride bicycles around the
city naked. There is so much human excrement in the streets that
maps have been created to warn people where not to walk. What
was once a world-class city has become a lifestyle calamity.
Excerpt from Wesley J. Smith, National Review (New York),
November 30, 2024.
URL: NationalReview.com,
Family-centric thinking the answer
to population decline
For almost any nation today, addressing the contemporary birthrate challenge necessitates a fundamental transformation of societal and, we would argue, cultural thinking out of the shadows of the 20th century.
In the East, the communist worldview largely rejected the nuclear family unit, seeing it rather as an economic unit that ideologically furthered capitalist interests. In the West, a notion emerged in the latter 20th century that largely views prioritising family as limiting individual autonomy and self-fulfilment. We are the inheritors of societies that have been profoundly shaped by one or both worldviews.
Today's reality is the culmination of several long decades and thus it is naïve to think we can shift societal thinking in mere years or strictly via public policy.
A key part of addressing this challenge is shifting longheld
societal attitudes that undervalue families. Societies must
move away from viewing children and families as sacrifices or
obstacles to individual autonomy and instead recognise them as
the foundation of strong, stable, and thriving communities.
Excerpt from Peter Csillag and Samuel Duncan, The
Hungarian Conservative, December 3, 2024.
URL:HungarianConservative.com
