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You noticed the urinal homage to Marcel Duchamp on that top lobster? Of course you did. Possible homage to Van Gogh with the sunflowers and Warhol with the soup? And Yayoi Kusama with the polka dots?
Colbert's website: "I became an artist when I became a lobster."
requently exploit” the grooming gangs scandal — described as “alleged group-based sexual abuse” — to promote anti-Muslim sentiment.
It recommended that the UK’s approach to tackling extremism should no longer be based on specific ideologies such as Islamism or the far right but “on behaviours and activity of concern”. This is because of the “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see”, it added.
A set of "sweep it all under the table" recommendations, in other words.
And the good news.
After the details of the report were leaked, Dan Jarvis, the security minister, said he and the home secretary had rejected the report’s recommendations despite having commissioned the review.
It's the Home Office. The Civil Service. It's how they think. Fortunately the government doesn't seem to agree.
The report, first obtained by Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank, and seen by The Times, contained 38 recommendations to better combat extremism in the UK, including an increase in the police recording of non-crime hate incidents. It proposed reversing the code of conduct introduced by the previous government that ordered police to record non-criminal hate incidents only if there was a serious risk of harm.
Yep, that should do the trick. More police recording of non-crime hate incidents. Of course.
Other recommendations included forcing social media companies to proactively remove any content that encouraged rioting or violent disorder and adding more aggravating factors to hate crime laws to ensure those convicted get longer sentences.
I imagine a strengthening of laws against "Islamophobia" would also go down well.
Policy Exchange warned that the changes proposed would play down the threat of Islamic extremism. The Home Office document itself cited the head of MI5 stating that its counterterrorist work remained three-quarters focused on Islamist extremism and a quarter on extreme right-wing terrorism.
Paul Stott and Andrew Gilligan, of Policy Exchange, warned in their report on the leaked document: “This new approach risks swamping already stretched counterextremism interveners and counterterror police with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of new cases, making it more likely that dangerous people will be missed.
“Some of the definitions of extremism also threaten free speech, defining aspects of normal and legitimate political debate as extremist.”…
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said it was draconian to describe those making claims of two-tier policing as extremists. He said: “Commenting on police response to incidents is not far-right. We live in a democracy and people are entitled to debate the way we are policed. That’s not far-right; that’s part of legitimate debate in a democracy. You can agree or disagree with these views but freedom of speech means they have the right to express them.”
In the next few days we will hear a lot “But, but, but what will replace UNRWA?”
My answer?
Simple: Palestinian Responsibility. https://t.co/4FE2DemOa7— Dr. Einat Wilf (@EinatWilf) January 28, 2025
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See here for more from Einat Wilf on UNRWA.
Upsetting the French is surely a core function of the Royal Navy https://t.co/pBxAldpHWX
— Sam Ashworth-Hayes (@SAshworthHayes) January 27, 2025
Male athletes are so talented! We see their triumphs frequently in women's cycling, but they're also super good at women's track & field.
Sadie Schreiner had a poor start and his spikes almost fell off, but he still won on Friday!
Those @NCAA DIII women need to train harder. pic.twitter.com/zmTfwnBWov
— 🚲 (@i_heart__bikes) January 26, 2025
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And the Democrats wonder why they lost.
Howard Jacobson at the JC on remembering Auschwitz:
I don’t expect everybody to agree that the only real subject of art since 1945 has been the genocide – I mean the actual genocide of the Jews, not the politically manufactured genocides of which Jews are now routinely accused – and the only testing philosophical question, “How did that ever happen?” But if we thought we’d had enough – and I often told myself I had – the return of Jew-hate to the streets and campuses of Western cities is a harsh reminder that we need to restart the conversation. Not from wherever it was we left off, but from the beginning. That repeated mantra – “never again” – appears a fatuous hope in the face of the widespread callous ignorance as to what it was the first time round.
It has been said often enough that Holocaust denial takes many forms, from the brute mathematics of those who jotted down the dimensions of Auschwitz to prove that it was no bigger than Butlin’s, and probably more fun, to historians who claim to have found evidence that Jews had done it to themselves to justify invading Palestine. Of all forms of denialism, the worst minimises the slaughter by arguing that Jews were always just Nazis in waiting anyway, thereby forfeiting in advance the world’s pity, first by showing none themselves, and then by claiming what we might call “Shoah exemption”.
I have yet to meet a Jew in real life – as opposed to on a panel or at a literary festival – who believes that what was done to his grandparents in Bergen-Belsen gives him the right to murder children in Gaza, but this passes as psychology in some quarters, especially where Jews of a certain over-educated sort get together and squirm whenever Jews without degrees and from the wrong side of the tracks make a dog’s dinner of defending Israel. […]
One way or another, the lesson of the last 15 months is that the greatest calamity to have befallen a people – to have befallen the Jews, anyway – remains unknown or disbelieved, no matter how often we recount it or how many schlock Holocaust novels people read. The Chartered Accountant of Auschwitz might while away a tedious hour, but it hasn’t brought knowledge or enlightenment.
The true story cannot be told often enough – not only as history of terrible events we are duty bound to commemorate, but as an honest reckoning with the aftermath. And we Jews have to stop being apologetic about repeating it.
How different from our own freedom-loving universities!
This from Andrew Sullivan (via) reinforces the point made by Justin Webb yesterday about the sense of exhilaration in the US now after the moribund Biden years, and making America normal again. Yes, it's Trump…but:
To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs.
But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad.
On this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a note that the foundational idea that made it necessary for the Nazis to carry out the Holocaust, was the ancient and dangerous idea that between this world and the utopia and salvation of a clean world stands the collective Jew. pic.twitter.com/DmSa3uXho3
— Dr. Einat Wilf (@EinatWilf) January 27, 2025
GatesIsaPyscho/status/1883506192989008318?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>January 26, 2025
