How bad are hate speech laws in the UK? Saying "it's OK to be white" can result in a harsher sentence than child pornography.
@abigailandwords found numerous cases in which UK judges jailed thought criminals while letting actual criminals off the hook.
The list is shocking.🧵
Judge Benedict Kelleher sentenced a man to 18 months in prison for chanting "who the fuck is Allah?" He gave a lighter sentence to a man who physically assaulted a police officer.
Judge John Temperley gave a man 12 weeks in prison for a racist Facebook post. He did not impose any prison time on a man with 46 indecent images of children.
An incendiary Facebook comment earned a man 20 months in prison, in part because his lack of privacy setting was taken as evidence of incitement.
But 8,000 images of child porn? That will only get you a six month sentence from Judge Kearl.
Judge Rupert Lowe sentenced a man to nine months in jail for shouting racist comments at a football player. Lowe gave no jail time to a doctor who ejaculated into a cup of coffee and gave the cup to a woman.
NEW: Amy Wax told UPenn last week that she will sue the university for race discrimination if it does not drop the sanctions against her.
She's arguing that by punishing speech that offends racial minorities—but not speech that offends Jews—Penn violated civil rights law.🧵
Penn has until December 19 to "conclusively disavow" the penalties. "Should you fail to do so," her attorney wrote in a letter to Penn, "Professor Wax will file suit against the University."
Because Penn promises its professors academic freedom, the letter argues that the school breached its contract with Wax by punishing her for protected speech. It notes that Penn took no action against professors who spewed anti-Semitic bile after the October 7 attacks.
NEW: The top neuropsychology organizations in North America may soon adopt training guidlines that call on clinicians to use "social justice frameworks," fight "systemic oppression," and pursue "equitable and just scientific knowledge."
Board certification is on the line.🧵
The guidelines are the product of two years of meetings between the field’s main professional groups and could reshape the entire discipline.
Neuropsych is the branch of medicine that diagnoses brain injuries, including concussions, by administering tests of cognitive function.
In 2022, delegates from the field’s membership and credentialing organizations met in Minneapolis to draft a new set of guidelines, or "competencies," meant to guide neuropsychology education.
It was clear from the start that those guidelines would have an ideological bent.
NEW: ~40 departments at the University of Illinois Chicago have pledged, in writing, to hire faculty based on race.
One department justified its quotas by claiming that minorities "have a greater sense" of the "nature of teaching."
Here's how UIC is openly flouting the law:🧵
In September 2022, the Department of Industrial Engineering made a bold promise to UIC's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Engagement: From then on, the department said, 50 percent of all faculty hires would be either women or minorities.
Citing the need for "culturally relevant pedagogy," the department explained that "minoritized" professors "tend to have a greater sense" of "the human, social, and communal nature of teaching and learning."
NEW: In a required class for first-year medical students, UCSF praised an anti-Israel protest that shut down the Bay Bridge, delayed the delivery of donated organs, and put UCSF's own patients at risk.
If you find that hard to believe, wait till you see the other lessons.🧵
UCSF has a mandatory unit on "justice and advocacy in medicine," which covers "issues like racism, ableism, and patriarchy" and spans six weeks—more than the amount of time spent on basic anatomy or cardiovascular health.
Those six weeks contain some shocking material.
One lesson describes "objectivity" and "urgency" as characteristics of "white supremacy culture"—and says students should "consider reporting" those traits, each of which is depicted as a bottle of poison.
EXCLUSIVE: In 2007, Kamala Harris plagiarized pages of Congressional testimony from a Republican colleague.
And in 2012, she plagiarized a fictionalized story about sex trafficking—but presented it as a real case.
It's not just one book; it's a career-long pattern.🧵
On April 24, 2007, Harris testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of a student loan repayment program. Virtually her entire testimony about the program was taken from that of another district attorney, Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Illinois.
Harris devoted approximately 1,500 words to the program. Nearly 1,200 of them—or 80 percent—were copied verbatim from the statement Logli submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 27, 2007, two months before Harris delivered her testimony.
NEW: Harvard punished a Taiwanese student, Cosette Wu, who disrupted a talk by China's ambassador.
But it declined to punish a Chinese student who forcibly dragged Wu from the event.
After video of the assault went viral, Harvard even gave that student a letter of apology .🧵
Wu got in all of 20 seconds of heckling before a student from China grabbed Wu and, in an incident that the university's police department logged as an assault, ejected her from the event.
The student was Hongji Zou, a master's candidate in Harvard's Graduate School of Education and an officer in Harvard's chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association—a group overseen by the Chinese Communist Party.