THE PSYCHOLOGIST : UK: Pub landlady defies police orders and puts five golliwogs back on display to applause from lunchtime drinkers just days after six officers seized 20 dolls in 'hate crime' probe

UK: Pub landlady defies police orders and puts five golliwogs back on display to applause from lunchtime drinkers just days after six officers seized 20 dolls in 'hate crime' probe

An old controversy. It is a bit odd, though. There is no doubt that the dolls are a caricature of Africans. So the do-gooders are actually demonizing African features?

There is a history of the Golliwog here. It was in fact an American invention. Excerpt: "Childhood toy, lovable rascal, cheeky jam mascot; how can anything that innocent be regarded as racist? That is certainly the view of many who were brought up with golliwogs"

Incidentally, Derek Laud is a black British political speechwriter who is quite happy with his nickname as "Golly" (The usual abbreviation of "Golliwog") . But Mr Laud and his friends are conservatives. Unlike the Left, they have a sense of humor

I had a golliwog myself when I was a little kid and regarded it with some affection. Was that wrong of me?

Benice Ryley proudly placed five of the controversial dolls behind the bar of The White Hart pub in Grays, Essex, which she has run for the past 17 years with her husband Chris.

The couple, who are in their 60s, had six officers enter the pub last Tuesday and take away 20 dolls displayed on a shelf behind the bar after an anonymous complaint was made against them.

They also seized an assortment of golliwog badges and magnets that adorned the bar.

As she placed some of them on a shelf, she told MailOnline: 'The whole thing is ridiculous. It's political correctness gone out of control. I'm not going to let the authorities intimidate me and I'm proudly putting my other gollis back on display in the pub.

'I'm still shocked that six officers came to my pub last week, surrounded me and took away my collection of golliwogs. I've not committed any crime and haven't set out to offend anyone. These gollis are a part of the pub, the customers love them, and they are reminder of our childhood.'

Ms Ryley also posted a notice at the entrance to the pub warning customers that golliwogs are on display inside and that they should not enter if this will offend them. The sign declares: 'We have golly dolls displayed inside on our shelves. If you feel offended. Please do not enter.'

She added: 'The police took 20 of my golli dolls but I've got plenty more of them upstairs. If people don't like them and feel offended by seeing them then they don't have to come into my pub. It's as simple as that. I'm not going to give into this crazy political correctness. We have customers at this pub from all different races and none of them have ever complained about seeing my gollis on display. Why did the police get involved in this?'

The White Hart pub is located on the edge of a council estate in Grays notorious for crime and drug dealing.

Ms Ryley and other regulars fumed that police rarely attend when called out for 'real' crimes and slammed the presence of six police officers who removed the golliwogs from the pub.

Two others waited outside while their colleagues placed the dolls in plastic bags to take them away.

Her husband was away in Turkey at the time with police informing her that they wish to question him for a 'hate crime' when he returns as he is the licensee.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman is said to have been furious about the approach, and has told Essex Police that bosses should be focusing on catching real criminals rather than seizing toys.

The issue of whether the dolls are racist or not often sparks fierce debate. The golliwog was created by Florence Kate Upton in 1895 in her book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwog', where it was described as 'a horrid sight, the blackest gnome'.

After the author created the golliwog, it became a favourite for collectors and was popular in the UK as the mascot of Robertson's jam.

But by the 1980s, it was increasingly seen as an offensive racist caricature of black people.

Some people hark back to fond childhood memories of the dolls, whereas others argue golliwogs are a racist icon of a bygone age.

In a YouGov poll last year 53 per cent of respondents said they thought selling or displaying golliwogs was 'acceptable' compared to 27 per cent who did not.

Asked if it was racist to sell or display a golliwog doll, 63 per cent of respondents said it was not, while 17 per cent did.

Ms Ryley said: 'Surely the police have better things to do. If they arrest my Chris when he gets back, I promise you, the world will know about it.

'I totally agree with the Home Secretary. The police need to focus on real crime and not worry about what dolls people are displaying.'

Pub regular Sue Payne, 57 said: 'It's absolutely stupid and a complete waste of police time and money. You can get stabbed or mugged around here and the police won't come or if they do, it'll be after ages. But somebody complains about some dolls and six officers turn up. You couldn't make it up.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11957405/Pub-landlady-defies-police-orders-puts-five-golliwogs-display.html

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

UK: Pub landlady defies police orders and puts five golliwogs back on display to applause from lunchtime drinkers just days after six officers seized 20 dolls in 'hate crime' probe

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