Douglas Murray drops bombshells during discussion of Western reparations and heirloom grievances: 'Some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping at closed wounds'

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Spectator columnist and author Douglas Murray recently dropped brass tacks on his fellow "Piers Morgan Uncensored" panelists, denouncing the ongoing efforts by opportunistic ideologues to simultaneously extort Western nations over the crimes of the long dead and ignore the cold reality of universal guilt.

Murray stressed that people no longer want to be enmired in divisive and destabilizing debates about historically remote grievances, particularly not when victimhood can invoked by anybody willing to look back far enough.

"Some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping at closed wounds and then crying about their hurt or their presumed hurt, because everybody could do this," said Murray. "Where would you end if you did that? The answer is that you couldn't end, because nobody is alive who has actually suffered the hurt, and nobody is alive who did the wrong."

"If we were to play this fairly, we would at least look at all of the countries around the world that engaged in the slave trade who are simply not interested in any form of reparations," continued Murray.

The Ottoman Empire, which has been whittled down to the Republic of Turkey, was among the guilty parties Murray cited as presently having no interest in assuming blame or responsibility for its history of violence, genocide, and slavery.

He also cited "all the Arab countries who not just traded far more slaves and across the Atlantic but castrated all the men so that there wouldn't be any more African slaves after them. They worked them to the bone. I see no interest across Africa in paying reparations for selling their brother and sister Africans into slavery or for working them to the bone to the present day. ... There is slavery across Africa today. In fact, there are more slaves in the world today than there were at the height of the transatlantic slave trade."

According to a September 2022 U.N. report, nearly "50 million people were living in modern slavery: 28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriages."

Extra to shared guilt, Murray noted that those presently fitted up as antagonists in today's "grievance competition" could similarly claim victimhood, as "a million Europeans were stolen by North Africans over the course of decades of the North African Barbary pirate slave trade."

The BBC indicated that in the first half of the 1600s, "Barbary corsairs — pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa, authorised by their governments to attack the shipping of Christian countries — ranged all around Britain's shores. In their lanteen-rigged xebecs (a type of ship) and oared galleys, they grabbed ships and sailors, and sold the sailors into slavery."

Between 1530 and 1780, as many as 1,250,000 Christian slaves were reportedly taken and held in Tripoli, Tunis, and various Moroccan towns, but predominantly in Algiers.

Murray's comments on Morgan's show echo those made in his 2022 book, "The War on the West," wherein he defended America and the rest of the Western world from various blood libels and acontextual accusations.

"The forgotten history of slavery, like colonialism, is not the history of what the West got wrong but the history of what the West got right," he wrote, noting that long after the English-speaking world banned slavery, various nations continued trafficking in human beings — including Middle Eastern and African nations where the slave trade survives today.

On the issue of reparations, Murray highlighted how the West's abolition of slavery and its global efforts to enforce that decision were not without significant cost, both in terms of blood and gold.

Just in the case of British abolitionism, "Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 African slaves. They also lost a huge number of personnel themselves. More than 1,500 men of the Royal Navy were killed in action during this period."

Even if equivalencies could be struck and balances owed properly determined, Murray pointed out the grievance competition would still have no end.

"If America were to find a way to pay reparations today, why would the same demands not rearise two centuries later, as they have done in relation to Britain? If the great reparations machine were to pour out money, why should it be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?" he asked.

"We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden eggs," Murray suggested in his book.

On Piers Morgan's show, he suggested that the very nations responsible for those "golden eggs" are the same "put through this struggle session."

"Britain, like America and France, are the most desired destinations for migrants worldwide and have been for centuries," he added. "It's not because we're racist but because we're better. It's because we're good. It's because when we see racism, we actually call it out and recognize it as a sin. Try finding that across Africa. Try finding that across the Middle East or in China. Nobody would hear."

— (@)

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'No justification for the number, no analysis provided': San Francisco reparations committee admits proposal that every black resident should get $5 million was arbitrary

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The San Francisco reparations committee proposed in its draft report last month that every eligible black resident should receive a $5 million lump-sum payment along with total debt forgiveness.

According to the Washington Post, the 15-member panel tasked nearly two years ago with calculating how much the pandemic-devastated city should dole out to residents didn't ultimately bother with mathematic formulas or actual calculations when arriving at the seven-figure sum.

Instead, the panelists charged with proposing how to spend other people's money embarked on a "journey" in pursuit of monetary symbolism.

What is the background?

TheBlaze previously reported that the committee is a 15-member panel that was created in May 2021. It is supposed to pitch its recommendations to the city in June.

The proposed $5 million sum, debt forgiveness, and guaranteed incomes ($97,000 as of last year and to be kept in synch with area median income annually for 250 years) are together meant to amend “for the decades of harms" black residents reportedly experienced.

While the proposal concedes that slavery was never legal in San Francisco or in the state of California, it held that “the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of Black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement.”

The lump sum is, therefore, not intended “to remedy enslavement, but to address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco.”

The panel’s proposal stated that eligible applicants must be at least 18 years old and have identified as black or African-American on public documents for at least 10 years.

Additionally, they must satisfy two out of eight other criteria, such as being born or having migrated to the city between 1940 and 1996 with proof of residency for at least 13 years, being a personal or direct descendant of someone “incarcerated by the failed War on Drugs,” or being a personal or direct descendant of someone enslaved before 1865.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, black Californians may be due $569 billion for housing discrimination between 1933 and 1977 alone.

Critics have noted that if even a fraction of the city's nearly 55,000 black residents satisfied the eligibility criteria, the budget might be sapped, granted San Francisco's annual city budget is $14 billion, reported the Washington Post.

A math-free journey to a seven-figure sum

The $5 million figure appeared in the December 2022 draft report without an estimated cost of the reparations or a concrete accounting for the amount. It now appears that at least in the case of the latter, there wasn't one.

Eric McDonnell, chair of the reparations committee, told the Post, "There wasn’t a math formula. ... It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed."

John Dennis, chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party, suggested that reparations may indeed be owed certain residents, but in the way of efforts to start a conversation about starting points, this wasn't a serious one.

Dennis told the Post, "This is just a bunch of like-minded people who got in the room and came up with a number."

"You’ll notice in that report, there was no justification for the number, no analysis provided. This was an opportunity to do some serious work and they blew it," Dennis added.

William A. Darity Jr., an economist similarly sympathetic to the underlying endeavor, having long advocated for reparations, suggested that the demand for a $5 million payout "by a local government undercuts the credibility of the reparations effort."

However the figure is arrived at, Darity suggested it should be "somewhat realistic."

American civil rights attorney Leo Terrell told Fox News the proposal was "outrageous, it's unlawful, it's unconstitutional, it's racist, but it's not surprising it came from California."

Second thoughts

Members of the same city board of supervisors that first unanimously approved the committee are now uncertain whether the proposal is tenable.

Supervisor Joel Engardio (D) told the Chronicle last month that the direct payments "may not be feasible under current budget restraints."

Another city Democrat, supervisor Hillary Ronen, said, "I wish we had this kind of money in San Francisco’s general fund, but if we want to maintain the services that exist today, we do not."

Supervisor Dean Preston (D) suggested that San Francisco, which ranks 2 out of 100 on Neighborhood Scout's crime index (with 100 being the safest), could slash the police budget to free up money to "fund some of the committee's recommendations."

Supervisor Shamann Walton (D) suggested that it may be worth considering using the city's cannabis business tax as a funding stream for reparations. The Chronicle noted that the tax could raise $10 million annually.

A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 68% of respondents opposed reparations. Whereas 77% of black adults said the descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, 18% of white Americans said the same.

San Francisco ponders reparations for Black residents youtu.be

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NYU prof fired after his students complained they couldn't hack it warns not to 'coddle students for sake of tuition'

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New York University students successfully petitioned to have a chemistry professor fired last month because they found his pre-med course too challenging. That professor is now speaking out about students' inability to "take responsibility for failure" and the danger of appeasing juvenile demands to be coddled.

Fired for expecting competency

84-year-old Maitland Jones Jr. is a professor of chemistry. Prior to teaching at NYU for fifteen years, he taught at Princeton University from 1964 until 2007, where he worked on over 200 papers, monographs, and books. According to Princeton's Office of the Dean of Faculty, the lab in which he experimented "was an incubator of scientific and cultural exchange at all levels."

Jones has a reputation as an academic who "teaches the very knowledge he creates" and whose classes, at least at Princeton, received rave reviews. As recently as 2017, he was celebrated as one of the "Coolest Professors at NYU."

The New York Times reported that last spring, 82 of his 350 undergraduate students signed a petition against Jones, claiming that his "high-stakes course" was too hard, going so far as to personally blame Jones for their poor test scores.

The petition said, "We urge you to realize that a class with such a high percentage of withdrawals and low grades has failed to make students' learning and wellbeing a priority and reflects poorly on the chemistry department as well as the institution as a whole."

According to the Guardian, the petition did not explicitly demand for Jones to be fired. Nevertheless, NYU deans terminated Jones' contract in August ahead of the fall semester.

Jones later wrote that the "deans never revealed the contents of the petition to me so I was unable to refute it in any way. After several months of silence on their part, on Aug. 2 the deans fired me over the objections of the chemistry department. The administration summarily dismissed the grievance I filed."

Paramjit Arora, a fellow chemist and colleague of Jones', told the New York Times, "The deans are obviously going for some bottom line, and they want happy students who are saying great things about the university so more people apply and the U.S. News rankings keep going higher."

Jones stated that while his "reputation as a chemist and educator has not been seriously damaged," barring "fair-minded support from departmental and university leadership," teachers will no longer be able to "transfer their knowledge and experience to the next generation of students and teachers."

Appeasing the complainers

The New York Times noted that extra to firing Jones, NYU officials tried to appease his former students, enabling them to withdraw from his class retroactively — in what Mark E. Tuckerman, the chemistry department's chairman referred to as a "one-time exception" — while also offering to review their grades.

Marc A. Walters, director of undergraduate studies, wrote to Jones ahead of his termination, indicating that NYU would "extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills."

Jones seized on this remark among others in a recent opinion piece he penned for the Boston Globe.

The veteran academic suggested that such interventions on behalf of students unwilling to confront their test score-illuminated shortcomings have a "chilling effect ... on teaching overall and especially on untenured professors."

Jones suggested that untenured faculty won't dare to "give real grades" and risk their careers "at the peril of complaining students and deans who seem willing to turn students into nothing more than tuition-paying clients."

The problem, in Jones' estimation, is not just the confrontation-adverse administrators who he indicated think of students chiefly as clients. The students complaining have also themselves to blame.

In his op-ed, Jones claimed that, during the pandemic when in-person classes were interrupted, he "commissioned and paid for a series of 52 videos to substitute for canceled in-person lectures. Students rarely watched them. They performed abysmally on exams that would have seemed too easy only a few years ago."

Despite failing to prepare and execute, many students who evidenced their need for help didn't seek it, certainly not by attending zoomed office hours.

Zacharia Benslimane, a Ph.D. student at Harvard who previously worked as a teaching assistant in Jones' course, told NYU, "I have noticed that many of the students who consistently complained about the class did not use the resources we afforded to them."

The incompetence amongst students was not, however, universal, just as the signers of the petition did not come close to achieving a majority.

Jones reported that while single digit scores became common "and we even had zeros on exams ... 60 percent of my students still got As and Bs this past semester."

While underperformers bottomed out, top students were allegedly performing better than ever.

'Tough love'

Concerning the underperformers, Jones wrote, "Everyone hits limits at some point, and it is a vital life skill to use 'failure' to overcome and improve. Failure should become a class 'teachable moment.'"

The pandemic may have exacerbated the problem of incompetence and the refusal to address it, but, according to Jones, the problem goes back at least a decade.

"About 10 years ago, I noticed that students were increasingly misreading exam questions," Jones wrote. "My careful attention to the wording or problems did not help much. Exam scores began to decline, as did attendance in the traditional large lecture section of the course."

The solution, argued Jones, isn't appeasement but "tough love."

"Deans must learn to not coddle students for the sake of tuition ... They must join the community in times of conflict to generate those teachable moments," wrote Jones.

In addition to adults remaining resolute in upholding high standards, Jones emphasized that students "need to develop the ability to take responsibility for failure. If they continue to deflect blame, they will never grow."

Teachers' union refuses to defend dues-paying teacher threatened by school because he criticized CRT-like training



A local chapter of a prominent national teachers' union has, without explanation, dismissed a grievance filed by a teacher who claimed he was targeted by his school after he criticized a woke training session.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, John Grande, a gym teacher for Hartford Public Schools in Hartford, Connecticut, who has taught for 30 years, claimed that his school threatened to fire him or force him to attend further "sensitivity" training after he criticized a mandatory "privilege" training.

Grande said that he filed a formal complaint against the district back in July but that American Federation of Teachers Local 1018 dismissed it without explanation.

"Our employee handbook explicitly states that no employee of the Hartford public school system will be disciplined for exercising their right to free speech," Grande told the Free Beacon. "When asked for my reaction to the training, I expressed my disagreement and was punished for doing so."

Images captured at the training and obtained by the Free Beacon show that teachers were forced to reflect upon the privileges they supposedly enjoy because of their race and sexual orientation, assumptions often made in critical race and gender theory.

"I can choose blemish cover or bandages in 'flesh' color and have them more or less match my skin" and "I can go home from meetings, classes, and conversations without feeling excluded, fearful, attacked, isolated, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, stereotyped or feared because of my sexual orientation" are just two example statements that trainees were supposedly required to consider.

Grande said that he expressed his frustration about the training both in his feedback and in conversation with two of his colleagues, who then reported his criticisms to the district.

While Grande filed the complaint shortly after his school threatened to fire him, he had no means of forcing the district to address it since AFT 1018 has the exclusive power to arbitrate grievances with the district, and it has the power to determine which cases it will take.

Grande believes that the union rejected his case to retaliate against him for not joining the union fully. He does pay dues earmarked for contract negotiations with the district, but he is not a full union member so as to avoid paying dues that will then be donated to politicians and political causes he doesn't support.

"Officials are refusing to represent him simply because he isn't a member," said Nathan McGrath, president of the Fairness Center. "John is just asking the union to do its job so he can continue doing his."