A Statement from Human Rights Watch, 12 January 2023:“Human Rights Watch Issues Damning Verdict for UK. World Report 2023 Says UK Policies Raise ‘Grave Human Rights Concerns”
The United Kingdom government repeatedly sought to damage and undermine human rights protections in 2022, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2023. “In 2022, we saw the most significant assault on human rights protections in the UK in decades,” said Yasmine Ahmed, UK director at Human Rights Watch. “From your right to protest to your ability to hold institutions to account, fundamental and hard-won rights are being systematically dismantled.”
Features presented in the book VOLUNTEERS fROM CEYLON (2022) … supplemented by additional tit-bits from Richard Dickie Hermon of Trinity College who is now resident in Melbourne, Australia
Michael Patrick O’Leary, aka Padraig Colman, presenting an essay that did not make the top grade
To help me through these troubled times, this sordid age, I have been bingeing on the oeuvre of the Divine Plum, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.
The Age of Aquarius has long departed. We are now living in the Age of Ukridge, a time of fact-free posturing. This is the Age of Systemic Deceit, the post-truth era. Once a lie finds a sympathetic ear, rebuttals, facts, will not persuade people that it is not true. To believe anything else would create a sense of cognitive dissonance. Memories of corrections fade rapidly, but the memory of the original lie remains. Goebbels had something to say on this subject. Media scholar Caroline Jack coined the phrase “unintentional amplification”, which in turn leads to another phenomenon which she identifies as “inadvertent legitimisation” – the act of giving credibility to “strategic lies” simply by repeating them. In Truth and Truthfulness, his last published book, philosopher Bernard Williams focused on what he identified as the “virtues” of truthfulness, Accuracy and Sincerity. We can’t get along without trust (human flourishing creates a “need for cooperation” (b) but trust requires truthfulness, and (c) truthfulness presupposes that there are (at least some) truths. For Williams, lies are pernicious for at least two reasons: (1) the liar betrays the trust of the dupe; and (2) the liar exerts power over the dupe, manipulating his or her beliefs and thus (potentially) his or her choices. Today, all citizens are taken for dupes and patsies, marks in the great political confidence trick.
Fair Dinkum, in an EMAIL COMMENT which Thuppahi has presented to the world with his okay … with highlighting added
Here the UK’s 800 millionaire PM Rishi Sunak declares that the UK police have his full support to clamp down on illegal protests, and that he plans to introduce new laws to give police greater powers to clamp down on protestors. Meanwhile, at the same time , he calls on China to respect the right of Chinese people to protest as a fundamental human right, as evidence emerges of direct British interference into China to provoke protestors into fermenting chaos.
Michael Patrick O’Leary, in his web column where the title runs thus:“Out of the Blue”being a review of thethe Liz Truss biography authored by Harry Cole & Richard Heale ………. A shorter version of this article was published in the Sunday Island on November 6 2022 …. https://island.lk/?s=out+of+the+blue
Ref to the subject, each year on 11th November, Britain and the Commonwealth countries remember their war dead in a formal manner by laying Poppy wreaths at their respective national war memorials and war graves related to those fallen in battle and those who died while in service during the two World Wars. 11th November 1918 is the day WW1 came to an end with the signing of the Armistice. Hence this day is considered as the remembrance day.
Volunteers sort food into food parcels at the Rumney Forum community charity on November 8, 2022 in Cardiff, Wales. © 2022 Matthew Horwood/Getty Images
