THE PSYCHOLOGIST : JK Rowling is 'spreading disinformation' about Scotland's new hate crime laws says Scottish First Minister after Harry Potter author slammed his 'bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism'

JK Rowling is 'spreading disinformation' about Scotland's new hate crime laws says Scottish First Minister after Harry Potter author slammed his 'bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism'

As ever, the Devil is in the detail. What consitutes "stirring up hatred"? Does any criticism count? Leftists are prone to claim that it does. So critics of the law have good reason to be suspicious of it.

And the Scottish First Minister is therefore in full damage-control mode, pushing a very narrow definition of "stirring up hatred". It does seem that his very narrow definition is being adopted by Police Scotland so the actual effect of the law may be small

Harry Potter author JK Rowling and other critics of Scotland's new hate crime laws must stop 'peddling misinformation', Scotland's First Minister has said.

Humza Yousaf strongly defended the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act against claims it would hamper freedom of speech after it was introduced earlier this week.

JK Rowling criticised the Scottish Government's hate laws while posting pictures of 10 high-profile trans people and ridiculed their claims to be women.

Speaking at Glasgow's Prestwick Airport on Saturday, Mr Yousaf said: 'There's deliberate misinformation being peddled by some bad actors across Scotland - it's hardly surprising the Opposition seek to do that.

'What we've got is a piece of legislation that in the actual Act itself, explicitly in black and white, protects freedom of expression, freedom of speech.'

The SNP leader went on: 'At the same time, it makes sure that it protects people from hatred being stirred up against them, and that is really important when we have far too many incidents of hatred that can be because of their age, disability, sexuality or religion.'

'There's no place for that in Scotland, and you have to send a really strong signal that the law will protect you.'

Rowling's comments were reported to Police Scotland as alleged hate crimes.

The force found she had committed no crime and also said it would not record a 'non-crime hate incident' against her.

She also said that most Scots were 'upset and offended by Yousaf 's bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism', following the introduction of the legislation on Monday.

Rowling wrote on X/Twitter: 'Most of Scotland is upset and offended by Yousaf's bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism, but we aren't lobbying to have him locked up for it.'

Asked what his message to critics such as JK Rowling would be, the Nationalist MSP said: 'I would tell them to stop spreading disinformation. It isn't going to help anybody.

'This is a piece of legislation that was passed by every single political party in Scotland, minus the Conservatives.'

He said: 'It's a ludicrous suggestion. Actually JK Rowling's tweets are a perfect example of how the law actually works.

'JK Rowling produced some tweets that were offensive, that were insulting - but of course the law does not deal with offensive.

'The law is dealing with new offences, criminal behaviour that has to be threatening or abusive, intent to stir up hatred. Hence why she was not arrested.

'That's not a surprise. Anybody who actually read the Bill will not be surprised that she did not get arrested. The threshold for criminality is extremely high.

'So anybody suggesting that the Bill deals with simply people having their feelings hurt, being offended, being insulted, I'm afraid that is not what the new offences are concerned with.

'There are very explicit in black and white protections for people's freedom of expression and indeed of freedom of speech.

'The Bill has got the balance right between protecting people from hatred and protecting people's fundamental freedoms.'

Mr Yousaf also shared his views in an opinion article in The Courier newspaper, urging politicians and public figures to create a debate rooted in 'reality'.

He said false claims the law makes it a criminal offence to make 'derogatory comments' based on the characteristics covered in the Act was 'simply untrue'.

The First Minister wrote: 'As a father of two girls, and blessed with a baby on the way, I feel an even greater obligation to work as First Minister to help make Scotland even better for the next generation.

'Critics of this law shouldn't exaggerate its impact with false fears. Equally, its proponents shouldn't pretend that it can of itself eradicate hatred and prejudice from our society.'

Yousaf was also reported to police about an alleged hate crime over a speech he made at the Scottish Parliament four years ago.

Like Rowling, police confirmed it was not a hate crime and said no 'non-crime hate incident' would be recorded against his name.

Adam Tomkins, a law professor and a former Scottish Tory MSP who voted against the Hate Crime Act, previously told STV News that 'misgendering' someone was not a crime under the law.

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act consolidates existing hate crime legislation and creating a new offence of stirring up hatred against protected characteristics.

Those characteristics are disability, religion, sexual orientation, age, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13278903/jk-rowling-disinformation-scotland-hate-crime-law-humza-yousaf.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

JK Rowling is 'spreading disinformation' about Scotland's new hate crime laws says Scottish First Minister after Harry Potter author slammed his 'bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism'

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