Australian College principal defends teen thugs who attacked tradesmen

Comment from a social work reader:

"And the school principal calls his thugs “vulnerable” and “broken babies”.

I expect he is a soppy leftie, and maybe worse, a cunning and manipulative one.

"I worked with leftist forensic psychs who would justify crim’s crimes, coach them into believing they were victims of society’s artificial expectations, so they would continue to be crims after release, by telling them things like there is no truth, just perception and feelings, no right or wrong, just social expectations, and if you feel it, it’s true for you, and in another society you would not be in jail, you would be considered a good citizen, even a hero….

I would not be surprised if the principal and a number of his teachers are of the same sort of character as those psychs, committing crime by proxy through manipulating dumb thugs and crims, all the while acting themselves as if they are caring and wise"

A school principal has thrown his support behind the gang of thugs filmed savagely beating tradies during a wild rampage earlier this week.

The saga began on Tuesday, when two tradesmen arrived at SMYL Community College in Rockingham, southwest Perth, to fix a broken fire hydrant.

But soon after their arrival at the school for at-risk teens, a group of up to 10 students began surrounding the men and verbally abusing them, with footage of the incident livestreamed to Instagram.

The incident soon escalated, with around six teens seen throwing punches at the men while they are trapped in a corner, amid shouts of “bomb him, bomb that motherf …” and “keep going”.

Teachers soon arrived in an attempt to break up the attack, but as the incident was unfolding, another teenager was seen smashing the front windscreen of the tradesmen’s work vehicle after jumping on the bonnet and yelling “let’s smash his car”.

The attack made headlines across Australia and shocked the country – but despite the “appalling” violence, college director Sam Gowegati has defended the perpetrators, describing them as “broken babies” who needed help.

“The reason these kids are sent here is because they’re disengaged from mainstream education,” he told The West Australian.

“These kids are already vulnerable … and they do dumb stuff, that’s why they’re here, closed off in this area so we can manage that process.”

Earlier this week, Mr Gowegati told The West Australian some students had been suspended following the brutal attack.

“It is an atypical event. We’re just trying to figure out what happened and what triggered it,” he told the publication.

“A number of students have been currently sent home to decide what their futures are going to be.”

Mr Gowegati’s comments come after the publication reported that some staff were so concerned by student behaviour that they were “petrified” of going to work, with one teacher telling The West Australian some staff were “scared for their lives”.

According to the school’s website, SMYL Community College aims to “ provide an inclusive and supportive learning community that offers an alternative approach to education and training for young people aged 14 to 17 years of age who are at risk of missing out on opportunities due to their home life, health and other issues.”

https://www.news.com.au/national/western-australia/smyl-community-college-principal-defends-teen-thugs-who-attacked-tradies/news-story/a1997203dd2dd6a82fb621e3b4341639

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Venezuela Goes Private After Socialism

Early in 2007, after winning a second six-year term as president, Hugo Chávez announced his plan to nationalize Venezuela’s largest telecommunications company, CANTV, hinting at wider nationalization plans to come.

“All that was privatized, let it be nationalized,” announced Chávez, who had run under the banner of democratic socialism.

Nearly a decade and a half later, on the brink of mass famine and a growing energy crisis, Venezuela is now moving in the opposite direction.

According to Bloomberg News, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro has quietly begun transferring state assets back into the hands of private owners in an effort to reverse the country’s economic collapse.

“Saddled with hundreds of failed state companies in an economy barreling over a cliff, the Venezuelan government is abandoning socialist doctrine by offloading key enterprises to private investors, offering profit in exchange for a share of revenue or products,” write Caracas-based journalists Fabiola Zerpa and Nicolle Yapur.

The transfer, which was not announced publicly but was confirmed by “nine people with knowledge of the matter,” reportedly includes dozens of coffee processors, grain silos, and hotels that were confiscated as part of Venezuela’s widespread nationalization that began under Chavez.

Venezuela’s Collapse

In some ways, Venezuela’s plight is the most unlikely of stories.

In 1950, Venezuela was one of the most prosperous nations in the world. It ranked among the top 10 in GDP per capita and had a labor force with higher productivity than the United States.

Venezuela’s economic growth began to stall in the mid 1970s, however, after it nationalized the petroleum sector, which resulted in a surge of government revenue and public spending. It’s estimated that Venezuela brought in $7.6 billion in 1975 alone from nationalization ($37 billion in 2021 dollars). This led to an unprecedented surge of public spending. John Polga-Hecimovich, a professor of political science at the US Naval Academy, said the Venezuelan government spent more from 1974 to 1979 than in its entire previous history.

Despite the growth in government spending, the political situation remained relatively steady. In the late 70s, University of Michigan political science professor Daniel H. Levine asserted that “Venezuelans have achieved one of the few stable competitive political orders in Latin America.”

However, Venezuela’s flirtation with socialism would eventually turn into a love affair.

In 1998, Venezuelans voted in Chavez, a populist and self-described Marxist. He was re-elected in 2000 (59.8% of the vote) and in 2006 (62.8%), at which point he began to nationalize various sectors of the economy—including agriculture, the steel industry, transportation, and mining—and confiscating more than a thousand companies, farms, and properties.

At the time of Chavez’s death, his socialist policies were heralded by Salon as an “economic miracle”—but in reality the Venezuelan economy was already in a free fall.

By 2014, with the price of oil collapsing, Maduro’s government admitted it was in severe recession and Venezuela was suffering from the highest inflation in the Americas. By January 2016, the country was on the verge of “complete economic collapse.” Not long after, the Venezuelan government abandoned any pretense of being a “democratic” regime.

A 2019 United Nations report concluded that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that” Maduro’s government had used special forces to kill thousands of political opponents in “extrajudicial executions.”

To date, it is believed that more than 5 million Venezuelans have fled the country to escape economic ruin and political oppression.

Privatization to the Rescue?

The collapse of Venezuela, once the most prosperous country in Latin America, is hardly a secret. But Maduro’s pivot toward private enterprise in an attempt to stabilize the collapsing country is a new revelation.

It’s not unprecedented, however.

“This process is similar to the privatization process in Russia in that assets are transferred to private local companies and to investors from countries allied to the government,” Asdrubal Oliveros, head of economic consultancy Ecoanalitica, told Bloomberg.

Rodrigo Agudo, head of the Venezuela Food Network, told the news agency that the regime instituted “a wild capitalism” by ceasing the collection of taxes on certain companies, liberalizing licensing on imports, and convincing military and other connected officials to invest in certain businesses.

Ramon Lobo, a lawmaker with the ruling socialist party and a former finance minister, said the arrangements tend to have time limits (usually less than 10 years) and work much like a concession. Companies are allowed to invest and manage the asset, with the government then taking a percentage.

“We believe this is positive because it is the synchronization of the public sector with the private sector,” said Lobo. “The state acts as a supervisor and receives compensation.”

Economic Fascism Is Not Capitalism
In one sense, the revelation of Venezuela’s privatization push is a clear positive development.

Maduro’s effort to quietly form private-public partnerships, a strategy that began in 2017, reveals the total failure of Venezuela’s command economy. Bloomberg points out, for example, that once-successful food processing plants have been “mostly idle” since being seized by the government, plants that could have been feeding a starving population.

This revelation is both tragic and infuriating, but it’s not surprising. By their very nature, command economies are doomed to fail because they lack the basic incentive and price structures that are present in a market economy.

“It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movements of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement,” the Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek wrote.

Many might be tempted to think that Maduro was just a bad or stupid person. But Ludwig von Mises reminds us that the quest to find the right person to run a command economy is a futile one for this very reason.

“It has not been realized that even exceptionally gifted men of high character cannot solve the problems created by socialist control of industry,” Mises observed.

It seems that after much pain and suffering, even socialist leaders in Venezuela have conceded that they cannot run an economy with enough efficiency to avoid economic ruin. But while returning enterprises to private owners is a step in the right direction, it’s hardly accurate to call Maduro’s strategy “capitalism.”

The Maduro government is still using everything from price controls on food to minimum wage hikes to currency manipulation to manage its economy, not to mention selecting which businesses get to participate in its privatization efforts (and who gets to invest). In terms of overall economic freedom, Venezuela ranked 179 out of 180 countries in 2020—one place ahead of North Korea and one behind Cuba.

At best, Venezuela’s current economic system is a form of fascism, which Sheldon Richman once described as “socialism with a capitalist veneer.”

So while applauding Venezuela’s small but important step, we should not lose sight of an observation from Nobel Laureate economist Vernon Smith, who in 2018 noted that prosperity would return almost at once to Venezuela if politicians repealed their harmful policies and unleashed the power of markets.

https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/02/23/bloomberg-venezuela-privatization/?omhide=true

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Wait, How Many Identify as 'LGBT'?

How much of the population would you say “identifies” as one of the “LGBT” categories? Ten percent? Twenty-five percent? Based on the adulating attention in news and entertainment this segment of the population commands, including cultivated Netflix movie listings and Hollywood quotas to go along with a whole dedicated “Pride Month” dutifully observed by businesses nationwide, you could be forgiven for thinking so.

But what if we told you the number of “LGBT” individuals in America was actually just 5%?

According to Gallup, that’s the case, and only because of a dramatic rise in recent years: “Gallup’s latest update on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender identification finds 5.6% of U.S. adults identifying as LGBT. The current estimate is up from 4.5% in Gallup’s previous update based on 2017 data.” Way back in the dark ages of 2012, it was just 3.5%.

The Rainbow Mafia will argue that the percentage is even higher, especially because Gallup says “7.6% do not answer the question about their sexual orientation.” They’ll say this is evidence that LGBT individuals are still oppressed and are afraid to come out.

We’d argue the exact opposite is the reason for the nine-year 60% surge in alternative identifications.

That said, young people account for the bulk of the surge, and the rebellious among them are especially susceptible to having a martyr complex. They gravitate toward forbidden behavior as a way to buck the system all while secretly reveling in whatever opposition they encounter. And, in this case, they’re lionized for it.

Beginning in the ‘60s, this manifested in the “free love” movement that could only take off because of prevalent birth control and then the legalization of abortion. Love “without consequences.” Now, of course, the rebellion du jour is gender dysphoria. Supposed oppression becomes the attraction.

LGBT individuals are by and large not the victims of discrimination, of course. Quite the opposite — they’ve become nearly sacrosanct.

Gays and lesbians who were “born this way” are encouraged to be their “true selves” and then are adoringly celebrated. So-called “transgendered” people who were not born that way are likewise revered as the very bravest members of society. Anyone who points to biological science is silenced.

The worst part of this is the predatory nature of the Rainbow Mafia. “Younger Americans are increasingly likely to consider themselves part of the LGBTQ community: Nearly 16 percent of Generation Z, those 18 to 23 in 2020, consider themselves something other than heterosexual,” reports NBC’s “Out News,” which of course thinks this trend is actually a marvelous revelation that this percentage has been true but suppressed all along. But don’t think for a moment that the Rainbow Mafia isn’t deliberately indoctrinating our children to increase its own ranks.

The purveyors of this sick-think are exploiting vulnerable young people, especially those without fathers and primarily through entertainment as indoctrination, to further the Left’s divisive identity politics for cultural and political gain. Young Americans — our children and grandchildren — deserve so much better.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/78011-wait-how-many-identify-as-lgbt-2021-02-25

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Relying on Authorities for information is a very slippery slope

Many people are hardwired to make quick decisions, often resulting in conclusions that are incorrect. This typically happens when their conclusions are reached on the basis of too little information or information that isn't factual. Unfortunately, taking the time to test information for accuracy requires more discipline than many people are willing to expend.

Since lots of folks think they are smart enough to correctly connect the least number of dots to reach a valid conclusion, this leads many of them to underrate complex issues and look for simple answers. As a result, their conclusions are often unsupportable. This is what happens when you hear clip-clopping in the dark and conclude that a horse is coming — but it actually turns out to be a zebra.

So, when we "connect the dots," what are the "dots" we try to connect? Most of them consist of information provided by other people. If we trust them, we tend to trust the information they provide. When a trusted source tells us it's a horse, we think, Yes, that seems to make sense, so it must be a true. Although that kind of reasoning is more or less logical (and sometimes even correct), it's still lazy and runs the risk of being seriously wrong.

This becomes even more problematic when we trust people we don't know, including television personalities, actors, journalists, and politicians. Lots of people trust these celebrities because they think they are important and believe important people tell the truth. This becomes an even bigger problem when a trusted source is only quoting someone else, or even many others. This can result in an intellectual echo chamber in which multiple voices reinforcing one another can all be equally wrong.

Another problem is that the dots we rely on are words and failing to recognize that the same words can have very different meanings for different people. For example, take the words "white privilege." The meaning of "white" is clear enough in this context, but "privilege" is anything but. It is defined as "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group." The term "white privilege" suggests a zero-sum assertion that some benefit is explicitly granted to white people while being intentionally withheld from all others. It eliminates the possibility that other variables can be involved; things like education, experience, value systems, cultural imperatives, and so on. It defines whole populations in the abstract while asserting collective outcomes that are specific. Actual white privilege was far more common in the past, and it may even operate in some instances today. But there is no evidence that it is currently "systemic" (whatever that means). Therefore, to generalize from the exception to the whole, especially in formulating policy, only creates problems.

Finally, there's the problem of proactive inhibition. This happens when you're forced to accept the rival meaning of something out of fear that if you don't, you will be punished. A good example is in the area of gender identification. The word "gender" was originally used as a term in grammar and had nothing to do with sex. It is now used to denote a range of sex "identities" that are not limited to male and female. It imposes different social meanings on what has been historically and genetically determined as binary. Failure to accept this new social meaning now leaves the user open to criticism and even retribution. It even requires a reformulation of language to alter grammatical gender, resulting in linguistic confusion.

Sadly, sometimes it's just simpler to throw logic and truth to the wind and give up. For too many folks, it's easier to accept that a zebra is just a horse of another color.

Many people are hardwired to make quick decisions, often resulting in conclusions that are incorrect. This typically happens when their conclusions are reached on the basis of too little information or information that isn’t factual. Unfortunately, taking the time to test information for accuracy requires more discipline than many people are willing to expend.

Since lots of folks think they are smart enough to correctly connect the least number of dots to reach a valid conclusion, this leads many of them to underrate complex issues and look for simple answers. As a result, their conclusions are often unsupportable. This is what happens when you hear clip-clopping in the dark and conclude that a horse is coming — but it actually turns out to be a zebra.

So, when we “connect the dots,” what are the “dots” we try to connect? Most of them consist of information provided by other people. If we trust them, we tend to trust the information they provide. When a trusted source tells us it’s a horse, we think, Yes, that seems to make sense, so it must be a true. Although that kind of reasoning is more or less logical (and sometimes even correct), it’s still lazy and runs the risk of being seriously wrong.

This becomes even more problematic when we trust people we don’t know, including television personalities, actors, journalists, and politicians. Lots of people trust these celebrities because they think they are important and believe important people tell the truth. This becomes an even bigger problem when a trusted source is only quoting someone else, or even many others. This can result in an intellectual echo chamber in which multiple voices reinforcing one another can all be equally wrong.

Another problem is that the dots we rely on are words and failing to recognize that the same words can have very different meanings for different people. For example, take the words “white privilege.” The meaning of “white” is clear enough in this context, but “privilege” is anything but. It is defined as “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.” The term “white privilege” suggests a zero-sum assertion that some benefit is explicitly granted to white people while being intentionally withheld from all others. It eliminates the possibility that other variables can be involved; things like education, experience, value systems, cultural imperatives, and so on. It defines whole populations in the abstract while asserting collective outcomes that are specific. Actual white privilege was far more common in the past, and it may even operate in some instances today. But there is no evidence that it is currently “systemic” (whatever that means). Therefore, to generalize from the exception to the whole, especially in formulating policy, only creates problems.

Finally, there’s the problem of proactive inhibition. This happens when you’re forced to accept the rival meaning of something out of fear that if you don’t, you will be punished. A good example is in the area of gender identification. The word “gender” was originally used as a term in grammar and had nothing to do with sex. It is now used to denote a range of sex “identities” that are not limited to male and female. It imposes different social meanings on what has been historically and genetically determined as binary. Failure to accept this new social meaning now leaves the user open to criticism and even retribution. It even requires a reformulation of language to alter grammatical gender, resulting in linguistic confusion.

Sadly, sometimes it’s just simpler to throw logic and truth to the wind and give up. For too many folks, it’s easier to accept that a zebra is just a horse of another color.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/77980-is-it-a-horse-or-a-zebra-2021-02-25

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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