Here come the word police!!!!!!!!!

Your friend’s new fuchsia fedora might be hideous. But don’t call it gay, or you might get a language lesson from the conversation cops.

Students at Queen’s University who sprinkle their dialogue with an assortment of “homo” or “retarded” could find out the hard way that not everyone finds their remarks acceptable.

The Kingston university has hired student facilitators to step in when they overhear homophobic slurs, remarks bashing women or racially tinged insults, along with an array of other language that could be deemed offensive.

That means tête-à-têtes in the residence hallways may no longer be just between friends.

“If people are having a conversation with offensive content and they’re doing it loud enough for a third person to hear it … it’s not private,” said Jason Laker, dean of student affairs at Queen’s.

“If you’re doing anything that’s interfering with what other people need to be doing, that’s not cool.”

The initiative, believed to be the first of its kind in Canada, is part of a broader program begun at the school this fall to foster diversity and encourage students to think about their beliefs.

But the move is sparking fresh debate over the line between politically correct behaviour and freedom of expression. Some students fear the university’s program borders on oppressive.

“Having a program like this in place could stifle public discussion if people are worried their private conversations are being monitored,” said Angela Hickman, managing editor of the Queen’s Journal, a campus newspaper. “For a lot of people, their opinions get formed in conversations and so stifling that is dangerous.”

The newspaper published an editorial last week criticizing the program as a “lacklustre” attempt to deal with social issues that could actually create hostility among students.

But Mr. Laker said the new “intergroup dialogue program” focuses on respectful, non-confrontational discussions that don’t impede freedoms.

“This is difficult work. It needs to be done very respectfully,” Mr. Laker said. “There’s really no interference.”

Under the new program, six student facilitators live and work within campus residences. Their mission is threefold: to engage students “spontaneously” by talking to them about an issue that has arisen, for instance, on campus or in the media; to hold movie nights, book readings or discussions on a range of social issues; and to step in when conflicts arise.

And if students become uncomfortable when a facilitator calls out someone on an offensive slur, it shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing, Mr. Laker said. It means they’re forced to think about their choices.

“That is an acceptable tension to have,” he said. “I would go further. I would say it’s a beneficial tension.”

But some students wish it would remain a discussion between friends, rather than a dialogue with a university-appointed facilitator.

If the facilitators jump into a group conversation, “they risk hostility from students who don’t want to be approached in what they consider private social settings,” said the editorial published in the campus newspaper.

Intergroup dialogue programs are well established at many universities in the United States. But many of those consist of credit courses taught by faculty members or student facilitators who have received rigorous training over several semesters in a classroom environment.

The Queen’s facilitators went through an intensive 11-day training course that touched on a variety of social issues and possible scenarios.

Patricia Gurin, professor emeritus of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, is one of the founders of the intergroup dialogue concept.

While she didn’t comment specifically on the program launched at Queen’s, she warned that such activities could backfire if they are not carried out by highly trained individuals who have experience with a variety of conflicts and social issues.

“It takes a lot of skill to do this work,” Ms. Gurin said in an interview yesterday.

She said that facilitators who haven’t been trained properly could end up reinforcing defence mechanisms of privileged students.

“White males say ‘This is more white-male bashing.’ What are they learning from that? Reinforcement of defensiveness rather than opening up and exploring is the consequence.”

Daniel Hayward is one of the six student facilitators who began their work at Queen’s in August. A graduate student, Mr. Hayward said the group received extensive training and has already had success talking to students about a variety of social issues.

He said much of their work is passive and done on a casual level. For instance, they had a poster campaign on campus earlier this year using the phrase “That’s so gay” to grab attention and then to point out why it’s offensive to some.

“It’s helping to create an atmosphere of inclusivity,” Mr. Hayward said.

*****

Watch your language

A sampling of some behaviour that could warrant attention from university-appointed student

facilitators, tasked with policing students’ offensive language

at Queen’s:

If a student uses the phrase “That’s so gay” in conversation.

If a student calls someone or something “retarded.”

If a student writes a homophobic, racist or other derogatory remark in a public space, such as on a residence poster or classmate’s door.

If a student avoids a classmate’s birthday party for faith-based reasons.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081119.wlanguage19/BNStory/National/home

‘WRONG’ COLOUR COTTAGE WAR

*More lovely UK news.*

A WOMAN who painted her idyllic cottage a subtle shade of blue has been ordered to repaint it bright yellow or face prosecution.

Sheila New decided to spruce up her 230-year-old property by splashing out on a new colour scheme.

But council officials say the blue paint she used breached planning regulations because the building is Grade II listed.

They have now warned her to return the house to its original garish colour or risk a fine of up to £1,000.

But defiant Sheila, 70, who has lived in the cottage for two-and-a-half years, is determined to fight the ruling.

She said: “This is like the Nazis. They had rules and forced people to do things they didn’t want to.

“I have spoken to dozens of people in the village and they all say how nice the cottage looks and how ridiculous the council is being.

“It’s such a dreary town I don’t know how they can stop anybody trying to bring a bit of colour to brighten it up. Common sense never comes into it with these council pen pushers. They just come along with their clipboards and tick boxes.”

Sheila paid £500 to have the front wall of her cottage in Crewkerne, Somerset, painted earlier this year. But six months later, Crewkerne Parish Council sent her a letter demanding she change it back again.

Sheila applied for retrospective planning permission but her bid was rejected.

In a report, planning inspector Colin Ball said the blue paint had caused “considerable detriment” to the historic home. He ordered that the cottage be returned to its original earthy colour in keeping with other Hamstone buildings in the village.

Sheila, who has now been threatened with an enforcement order, said: “I don’t think the blue paint takes away from the area at all. The colour is very pale and I’m sure it will fade in time anyway. The old yellow colour was horrible.”

But a spokesperson for South Somerset District Council said: “The colour doesn’t fit with local policies so we have to ensure it returns to the original yellow colour or the golden browns and beiges that characterise the local area.”

http://new.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/68220/

Think China is a police state? Look at Britain!!!!

Beijing seems to have been turned into one giant Potemkin village. Everybody smiling, everybody happy. The universally joyful welcome has already drawn gasps of admiration and astonishment from visiting British sports journalists. The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, who speaks Mandarin, took the trouble to roam further afield, to a village near Guangzhou, where farmers three years ago had protested about the seizure of their land by local Communist Party officials. He was speedily surrounded by what he described as “a phalanx of young men with cropped hair, who followed me wherever I went”.

Wingfield-Hayes reported that “Whenever I tried to talk to the locals, they moved in close, a look of menace in their eyes. The locals stared back, defiant but silent. They knew what talking to a foreign journalist would bring.” Indeed, they did: China still has a network of labour camps and “psychiatric wards” to teach political dissidents how to love Big Brother.

So we should bear all this in mind when we watch the collective rictus of fixed grins at the Olympic Games opening ceremony today. In four years’ time, however, it will be our turn to come under the scrutiny of the international media, when they arrive en masse in London to report on the Games of the Thirtieth Olympiad.

I wonder how free a country they will be visiting, and what they will make of it. The good news is that they will be reporting from a democracy, in which incompetent or merely unpopular governing parties are kicked out of office via the ballot box.

They will not find any psychiatric wards in which the “patients” are given electric shocks for the invented condition of “political monomania”. However, if things continue to develop as they have done over the past few years, they will also find a country whose people have become increasingly pestered and persecuted by a distended and inflexible empire of officials.

In one week alone, there have been several reports of such behaviour, which would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Exhibit one: on 18 July it was reported that Mrs Jayne Jones was told that she had to stop accompanying her 14-year-old son, Alex, in his journey to school in a council-financed cab, until she had been “cleared” by the Criminal Records Bureau.

Alex, who is severely epileptic, has frequent convulsions, and her mother insisted that, nice as the cab-drivers are, they did not have her ability to give the boy the necessary medication if he had fits while in transit.

Merthyr Tydfil council defended their actions as follows: “For the protection of the council and all vulnerable persons in its care it is essential all those endowed with an authority, implicit or explicit, should meet the security requirements within the transport contract provisions.” Ah, the language of compassion: perhaps it sounded better in the original Welsh.

Exhibit two: on 23 July it was reported that Julie Maynard, her husband and their 12-year-old son, Joshua, found their car surrounded by 10 police officers at the Channel Tunnel entry in Folkestone. For reasons which have never been explained, they were accused of “trafficking” their son – who has cerebral palsy and is autistic.

Ms Maynard and family were then taken to a detention room and warned that they could be held for nine hours under “section 7 of the Terrorism Act”. They were released after “only” two hours, still with no satisfactory explanation. Subsequently, Kent Police have apologised and have paid a “substantial sum” to Joshua’s school – which at least shows contrition not usually associated with bureaucracies.

Exhibit three: on 24 July it was reported that a painter and decorator called Gordon Williams was given an on-the-spot fine of £30 by Ceredigion council officials, after they observed him smoking a cigarette in his blue Suzuki van. You see, the officials had determined that this van was his “place of work” and therefore Mr Williams was breaking the new law banning all smoking in the workplace. Mr Williams protested that “I decorate houses, not vans”, but nonetheless paid up, having been told that the fine would be doubled if he didn’t comply swiftly.

This made me realise that, as a responsible citizen of New Britain, I should report our cleaning lady to the authorities for smoking in our home: it is, after all, her place of work. Or perhaps I should turn myself in as well, as a delinquent employer in breach of health and safety regulations.

Exhibit four: on 25 July it was reported that Haringey council officials had fined a boutique owner called Sangita Ibrahim for putting out her rubbish in black bin bags, rather than the grey sacks required by the council. The officials fined Ms Ibrahim £300 – made up of four fines of £75, one for each offending bag of the offending colour. Nicole Rosbrook, who works at the boutique, told the London Evening Standard: “The two guys who came in were incredibly rude to us – and to the customers. We were shocked, especially when they turned on the customers.”

She added that “We had repeatedly asked the council for a delivery of grey bags, but it never came, so we had to use ordinary black bags. The two men actually went through the bags, leaving them open and rubbish strewn all over the pavement.”

Haringey council commented that: “The notice was lawfully issued by our enforcement fly-tipping patrol who followed proper procedures.”

This is known as the “we’re only doing our job” defence-just one step up from “I was only obeying orders.”

A friend of mine got a similar response when she was queuing at a British airport a few weeks ago and was shocked to see a security officer at the hand-luggage scanning device rudely ordering an old lady in a wheelchair, who was wearing surgical boots, to “take yer shoes off”. Even if he did believe that the frail old woman might have been smuggling nitroglycerine or some other implement of terrorism in the base of her boots, this was still a repulsive way to talk to her.

When my friend remonstrated with the BAA security man, he responded, naturally, with “I’m only doing me job.” The sad thing is, he was; but perhaps the outburst by another passenger might cause him to do it more politely in future.

The trouble is that, increasingly, it is only the law-abiding who are frightened of the police and other security officials; awareness of this fear encourages the enforcers of petty regulations to behave even more truculently.

So when the Olympics come to London, I hope that the international press let the world know what sort of officialdom they have encountered. Probably, however, they will be hoodwinked Beijing-style, as the great bureaucratic armies of the state smile sweetly at foreign journalists, while continuing to scowl and snarl at the captive domestic population.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-if-you-think-china-is-a-police-state-just-look-at-us-in-britain-888223.html

Typical Tactics of the Disinformation Crowd

The first tactic that is employed by members of the crowd is to make sure you adhere to the politics of “the party.” The party does not matter, it is immaterial. Be it democrat, republican or whatever, your first priority is to pledge your allegiance to the political cause. Being that everything is mixed up, and the line between democrat and republican is severely blurred, your allegiance has become mandatory to either Barrack Obama or John McCain.

The second tactic is use the ad-hominem attack. The most damning thing you can do in this day and age is to call someone a racist or an anti-Semite. This tactic has become quite efficient and effective. Careers, critical thinking and the like have been destroyed by this travesty. You cannot question the status quo, to do so is suicide. Thinking has become passe. In this climate of “thought crimes”, the last thing you wish to do is give them a REASON to brand you with their labels. It is very important that you realize that the individuals that use these attacks are perpetuating the problem, and are the most vile creatures on the face of the earth.

The third tactic is to attack the credibility of the source. If one uses a source “outside” the mainstream, one that is not AP, CNN, etc, then the entire source is tainted in the eyes of the agent and sheeple. This also employs the very source of the second tactic, involving branding of the individual as crazy or of the “stormfront” crowd. This is probably the most effective tactic of them all, as most people are brainwashed to believe that the mainstream media is honest and only pursuing the best interests of the populace. This is the way the government and political parties are able to hold control, via entertainment and media.

There are more tactics, but if you observe carefully, these are the three big ones. They are all over the place, and more than willing to show themselves at any opportunity. We must be willing to fight these monsters and show OURSELVES at every opportunity.

HL