Tag Archives: Socialism

News

Google now censoring conservative news, while giving leftist propaganda a free pass

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Google's new motto
Google’s new motto: be evil

Google is a radically leftist company that fires employees (e.g. – James Damore) who step outside of progressive dogma. And now they’re promoting leftist causes in their search engine – by censoring conservative news sources.

The Daily Caller explains:

Google, the most powerful search engine in the world, is now displaying fact checks for conservative publications in its results.
No prominent liberal site receives the same treatment.

And not only is Google’s fact-checking highly partisan — perhaps reflecting the sentiments of its leaders — it is also blatantly wrong, asserting sites made “claims” they demonstrably never made.

Here’s an example of the fact-checking that Google does:

The Robert Mueller fact check (pictured above) is a case in point for Google’s new feature.

Ostensibly trying to sum up the crux of the post, the third-party “fact-checking” organization says the “claim” in a DC article that special Counsel Robert Mueller is hiring people that “are all Hillary Clinton supporters” is misleading, if not false.

The problem is that TheDC’s article makes no such claim. Their cited language doesn’t even appear in the article. Worse yet, there was no language trying to make it seem that the investigation into the Trump administration and Russia is entirely comprised of Clinton donors. The story simply contained the news: Mueller hired a Hillary Clinton donor to aid the investigation into President Donald Trump.

The Daily Wire, another “fact-checked” site, has an example of how Google fact checked them:

For example, Google shows a result from Snopes.com with regard to a Daily Wire story about Barack Obama praising Jay-Z while remaining publicly silent on the Congressional baseball shooting. Snopes.com suggests that the story was false, because Obama privately called Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) — an exchange reported only by Flake, not Obama. But the entire premise of the story was that Obama had remained publicly quiet on the shooting.

Or, for example, Daily Wire’s story on race-based shootings in the United States. We reported — correctly — that police kill more white people than black people. Snopes.com ranked that claim “mixed.”

The Federalist is also being “fact-checked”. How good is Google’s “fact-checking” of The Federalist?

Consider the case of a woman named Eileen Wellstone. Out of many thousands of pieces published by The Federalist over the past four years, a single one mentions the name Eileen Wellstone. That article, detailing the sordid history of Bill Clinton, mentions her name exactly once: “Another woman, Eileen Wellstone, claimed Clinton raped her while he was at Oxford University in the late 1960s.”

For some reason, in this “reviewed claim” against The Federalist, Google sends the reader to a Snopes fact-check that argues that Clinton wasn’t expelled from Oxford over this alleged rape — a point I concede sounds completely accurate and is also an assertion that no one has ever made in this publication.

What should we think of this censorship ? Are people who work for Google stupid people? When you have no one to tell you when you’re wrong, you make mistakes. Confirmation bias causes even “smart” people to make mistakes.

Google is so intolerant of intellectual diversity that they’re now being sued by former employees who refused to goose-step along with their progressive dogma.

The far-left Washington Post reported on that:

James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired after distributing a memo questioning the company’s diversity policies, filed a class-action lawsuit Monday claiming that the technology giant discriminates against white men and conservatives.

[…]The suit by Damore, filed in Santa Clara, Calif., alleges discrimination by Google against men, people of the “Caucasian race,” and people with perceived conservative political views.  The suit says that Google employees who expressed views deviating from the majority at Google on politics or on employment practices, including “diversity hiring policies, bias sensitivity, and social justice,” were “singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google,” in violation of their legal rights.

Damore’s fellow plaintiff in the class action is another Google employee, a former software engineer named David Gudeman.

[…]Damore’s legal complaint filled over 200 pages and included screenshots of emails and other correspondence between Damore and Google employees, and anonymous complaints from current Google employees who hold conservative viewpoints. One screenshot showed an email from a Google engineer who wrote Damore, “You’re a misogynist and a terrible human. I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired.”

Another screenshot shows how a Google employee received a so-called peer bonus — in which a colleague can recommend another colleague for a bonus — for speaking out against the values in Damore’s memo.

The complaint described another Google event, the company’s weekly “all-hands,” in which Google executives “shamed” teams that did not have 50 percent women on staff.

“There’s a Lord of the Flies mentality there,” said Dhillon. “Where a person can be singled out, shamed, and fired.”

Maybe it’s time for the government to step in and break Google up into smaller companies so that they don’t have a monopoly in the search engine space? If they can’t respect people’s freedoms because they are so committed to being evil, maybe government needs to step in and make sure that we have more competition?

News

Canada’s prime minister explains why pro-life groups are not eligible for job grants

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Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau
Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau

First, the news story, and after we’ll see the prime minister explain his reasons for this policy in his own words. As you are reading, keep in mind that the federal government sells no products or services of value in a free market. They earn no money. All the money they have was confiscated from people working in the free (private sector) market.

The Calgary Herald reports: (H/T McKenzie)

In the name of “inclusion” and “tolerance,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government are excluding and being intolerant to faith-based social agencies and churches from even applying for the Canada Summer Jobs program that provides subsidies to hire summer students.

In so doing, Trudeau will hypocritically be harming the very people he claims to care for the most — youth seeking work experience and the poorest of the poor in Canada.

The new application for the Canada Jobs Grant requires that the organization’s core mandate respects “reproductive rights” along with other human rights, and unless that “attestation” is checked, the online application cannot be submitted. That means fewer students will be hired to help the most vulnerable in society.

Now why do you think that Trudeau, a secular left fascist, would do this? Could it be that he wants people to see the secular state as the sole provider of assistance to people in need, by attacking private Christian charities?

In the name of tolerance, the Trudeau government is being intolerant to a huge swath of society that does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to caring for the poor and vulnerable in Canada.

According to the report Religion, Participation, and Charitable Giving — written at the behest of Canadian Heritage, Statistics Canada, Health Canada and other organizations — author Kurt Bowen found that actively religious people are far more likely to give of their time and money to charitable causes — including secular charitable causes.

According to the 1999 report, “the religiously active are 32 per cent of all Canadians, but they are responsible for 65 per cent of all direct, charitable donations. Conversely, the 42 per cent of Canadians who are religiously inactive generate only 20 per cent of all charitable givings.”

Famous economist Thomas Sowell discussed a study by Arthur Brooks on who gives to charity in National Review. The study found that religious people give far more of their time and money to helping others than secular people. So, by attacking the part of the population that actually cares about morality, Trudeau is basically trying to cut off the poor from private-sector charity, so that they have nowhere else to turn for help except the secular government.

Now let’s hear Trudeau – a former substitute drama teacher, who was elected because of his looks and famous name – explain why taxing pro-lifers and then discriminating against them is a good idea.

Townhall reports: (H/T Sean McDowell)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke Wednesday about a new requirement in the Canadian summer jobs grant application that groups must indicate support for “the right to access safe and legal abortions” to be included in the program. Trudeau defended the requirement and called groups opposed to abortion “not in line with where we are as a government, and quite frankly where we are as a society.”

“If you’re pro-life then you are ridiculed and insulted, but if you’re pro-choice then you are praised,” a student told Trudeau at a town hall at McMaster University and was greeted with applause.

Trudeau replied that defending rights and freedoms “is at the core of who I am and, quite frankly, is at the core of who Canada is. … At the same time, we need to know that there is a difference between freedom of expression and acting on those expressions and beliefs.”

He went on to explain his issue with pro-life groups receiving the grant.

“An organization that has the explicit purpose of restricting women’s rights by removing rights to abortion and the right for women to control their own bodies is not in line with where we are as a government, and quite frankly where we are as a society,” he said.

He also clarified that while people can believe what they want, acting on those beliefs was problematic, in his view.

“Of course, you’re more than allowed to have whatever beliefs you like,” he continued. “But when those beliefs lead to actions determined to restrict a woman’s right to control her own body, that’s where I, and I think we, draw the line as a country. And that’s where we stand on that.”

You can have whatever beliefs you like, as you’re working hard to earn the money that will be spent by your secular leftist fascist overlords. You’re certainly good enough to work for money, you’re just not good enough to get anything from the government for it.

And this is why we need pro-lifers to realize that the government is not their friend when it comes to spending money. We should not be giving them any more money than they need to do their  Constitutionally-determined responsibilities. When you grow the government to meet every need, e.g. – health care, then you find out that their idea of health care isn’t what you expected. In Canada, abortion is health care. Pro-lifers pay taxes to the government, and the government takes those taxes and performs abortions with them. If you don’t like it, then don’t vote for the government to take over health care. We need people who are moral to understand what it means to trust a secular government to do the things that should be done by individuals, families, churches, and community organizations. And when those entities keep their own money, they can do more than the government can anyway.

News

How well is socialized health care working in Britain?

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The National Health Service is government-run socialist health care
The National Health Service is government-run socialist health care

Back in 2009, a radical leftist named Paul Krugman wrote about the health care system in Britain. As a leftist, it’s his view that government-run health care is better than free market health care. Basically, he thinks that people get better health care if it’s run like the US Postal Service is run, instead of how Amazon.com is run.

Let’s see what he says in the far-left extremist New York Times:

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false. Like every system, the National Health Service has problems, but over all it appears to provide quite good care while spending only about 40 percent as much per person as we do. By the way, our own Veterans Health Administration, which is run somewhat like the British health service, also manages to combine quality care with low costs.

And what about the people who say that the NHS doesn’t provide quality health care, despite getting a huge portion of the all the taxes that are collected in Britain?

At this point, all that stands in the way of universal health care in America are the greed of the medical-industrial complex, the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and the gullibility of voters who believe those lies.

Every bad story that you’ve ever heard about socialized health care is a lie, and you’re gullible if you believe those lies.

Well, see, now I’m confused. Because if I turn the page of the New York Times from an editorial to a news story, I read this:

At some emergency wards, patients wait more than 12 hours before they are tended to. Corridors are jammed with beds carrying frail and elderly patients waiting to be admitted to hospital wards. Outpatient appointments were canceled to free up staff members, and by Wednesday morning hospitals had been ordered to postpone nonurgent surgeries until the end of the month.

Cuts to the National Health Service budget in Britain have left hospitals stretched over the winter for years, but this time a flu outbreak, colder weather and high levels of respiratory illnesses have put the N.H.S. under the highest strain in decades.

The situation has become so dire that the head of the health service is warning that the system is overwhelmed.

[…]“The N.H.S. waiting list will grow to five million people by 2021,” Mr. Stevens said in an impassioned speech to health care leaders in November. “That is one million more people, equivalent to one in 10 of us, the highest number ever.”

Over the past week, hospitals have increasingly declared “black alerts,” an admission that they are unable to cope with demand, the health service confirmed, without releasing numbers. Most hospitals have been unable to meet emergency-ward targets of seeing patients within four hours because of a shortage of beds and staff.

Britain spends billions and billions of pounds on health care every year, but it’s never enough. And British citizens already pay far more in taxes than Americans, who get much better care.

Sometimes, statistics are not as good as a good horror story…  On this blog, I’ve written about dozens of NHS horror stories. But Paul Krugman says they are all lies, including this one from the same New York Times article:

“There’s no real system or order; it’s a jungle in here,” said Nancy Harper, who had accompanied her 87-year-old grandmother, who was lying down and complaining of excruciating pain in her lower back.

“It’s been more than five hours,” Ms. Harper said. “We get to the front of the queue and then someone more ill comes in and we get pushed back. It’s outrageous.”

The UK Telegraph had some more information about the NHS health care system:

Every hospital in the country has been ordered to cancel all non-urgent surgery until at least February in an unprecedented step by NHS officials.

The instructions on Tuesday night – which will see result in around 50,000 operations being axed – followed claims by senior doctors that patients were being treated in “third world” conditions, as hospital chief executives warned of the worst winter crisis for three decades.

[…]Trusts have also been told they can abandon efforts to house male and female patients in separate wards, in an effort to protect basic safety, as services become overwhelmed.

50,000 scheduled surgeries canceled. If this were private sector health care, then the patients would have some recourse. But when the government is running health care, good luck trying to sue them for pain and suffering. They’ve already got your money from taxes, too – you can’t get it out to go somewhere else for surgery.

Although this seems horrifying to Americans, this is pretty standard all year round for Canadians, who have a true single payer health care system. According to the Fraser Institute, the average Canadian family pays about $12,000 in taxes for their free health care. And when they need things like MRIs or knee replacements, they have to wait for months. The average wait time there for “medically necessary treatment” is 21.2 weeks. Medically  Necessary Treatment. When I ask for an MRI in America, I get in the same week that I call.

When conservatives like me oppose government-run health care, it’s because we have looked carefully at government-run health care as it exists in comparable countries, and we have decided that it does not work. Progressives need to take a look at reality in countries like Britain and Canada. How well does it work? How much does it cost? It’s no good making policy decisions with feelings instead of facts.