We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Artur Boruc, a Polish goalkeeper playing for with Celtic, has received a police caution for “a breach of the peace” after he made the sign of the cross during a game. I can only marvel at how Muslims can march through London carrying signs threatening death against people who do not share their beliefs can get a police escort, whereas a devout Christian making the sign of the cross in public can get a police caution. The Polish player was not making rude gestures at a hostile crowd [see update & link below – perhaps he was] or trying to threaten anyone, he was just making a personal gesture indicating a set of beliefs.
I may be a godless rationalist myself but I sincerely hope Artur Boruc not just ignores the police caution but robustly reject it and continues to demonstrate his beliefs as he sees fit. If some Rangers fans cannot stand that and become violent, then perhaps that is where the police’s attention should be more properly focused. Moreover I hope his club supports him regarding this matter and if it does not then I hope he takes his talents elsewhere.
However I am rather bemused that the dismal Ruth Kelly is ‘surprised’ at this development seeing as how she is a leading member of the political class which put the legal infrastructure in place so that exactly this can happen.
Britain has nothing even vaguely resembling the First Amendment or the US Bill of Rights generally, instead relying on common law that springs from a highly imperfect cultural tradition of liberty. As this culture has been in effect ‘nationalised’ and largely replaced by fifty years of highly malleable legislation, there are now few legal tools left to secure individual rights against the state in the UK. Consequently we are left with just hoping for the state to act in a restrained manner as there so now so many laws that can be used to suppress freedom of expression (including not just social but also political speech) that the state can prohibit almost any action it wishes if it really wants to. Moreover public bodies have now been given so much discretion to exercise power ‘in the public interest’ that almost any petty-fogging official can seriously mess with your life if he or she is so inclined. And we can thank the likes of Ruth Kelly in both of the main political parties for this.
 Update: Although I stand by my general contention regarding the state of the law and freedom of expression in the UK, there may be a bit more to this specific story than the Telegraph article suggested.
There is a strange article in the LA Times called The Governor’s cold shoulder to Muslims, in which Shakeel Syed, the executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California criticises state governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for refusing to meet with him. The title suggests this refusal amounts to cold shouldering ‘Muslims’ rather than just certain Muslims (i.e Shakeel Syed).
After waiting for more than a week, and following up with at least 10 phone calls to the governor’s office, I had gotten no response. I felt it was my duty and my right as a citizen to avail myself of a public forum to reach the governor. When a reporter from the L.A. Times called, I spoke with him and, on Aug. 16, The Times correctly reported my perspective: The fact that the governor had ignored my request to meet was disrespectful and insulting.
Of course, what with being the governor of a large state, I would guess Schwarzenegger is not exactly an easy man to get a meeting with, so I am not quite sure why Mr. Syed thinks not being able to meet with him amounts insult and disrespect. Moreover he then tried to apply pressure to Schwarzenegger by attacking him in the LA Times for not meeting with him, whilst noting the Governor was quite happy to meet with “rabbis and others who support Israel”.
He then acts surprised that Schwarzenegger’s communications director stated that: “We did not meet with Mr. Syed [because] it was inappropriate for the governor to meet with someone who uses the media to demand meetings and threaten political retaliation.” In other words, as Mr. Syed annoyed the person he wanted a favour from (to meet him), he was surprised that the person he annoyed was, well, annoyed enough not to meet with him.
In the earlier LA Times article, it said…
Muslim leaders on Tuesday called Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger disrespectful and insulting for ignoring their request to meet about the war in Lebanon so he could explain his appearance at a rally supporting Israel that was attended by thousands.
What does Schwarzenegger need to ‘explain’? Clearly he supports Israel (the dead give away is that he attended a rally supporting Israel) and if some Muslims in California do not like that then perhaps they should consider not voting for him. Which bit of that needs an ‘explanation’? Arnie obviously values the Jewish vote rather more than the Muslim vote.
But then if Schwarzenegger wanted some even better reasons for refusing to meet someone from the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, those would not be hard to find. Mr. Syed supports making it illegal to say or print things Muslims find deeply offensive, making the categorical statement “We call for laws that prohibits defamation of all Prophets and faiths”. So the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California thinks the sensibilities of religious people trumps the First Amendment and therefore the rights of people who might think religion is so much superstitious claptrap to say what they please about a historical figure or a person’s beliefs. Just a guess but I suspect the rabbis Schwarzenegger met were not urging him to pass any laws against making movies like The Life of Brian or other forms of satire which clearly defame religion.
Syed does not just demand tolerance, to which he is of course entitled, he also frequently demands respect, which is not something a person should get as a matter of right. I hope Schwarzenegger continues to tell him to get stuffed.
Michael Totten has an interesting interview with a couple Israeli members of Peace Now. Although I think many of their views are wacky in ways only old socialists can be, they say many things I cannot imagine all too many CND members saying.
It seems that academia is in league with the legal profession and the growing army of largely pointless psychologists and ‘counselors’ who treat the myriad of syndromes which we are told plague society.
Blackberry email devices can be so addictive that owners may need to be weaned off them with treatment similar to that given to drug users, experts warned today. They said the palmtop gadgets, which have been nicknamed ‘crackberries’ because users quickly become hooked on them, could be seriously damaging to mental health.
…and what is quite literally the ‘money quote’…
[She] added: ‘Employers provide programmes to help workers with chemical or substance addictions. ‘Addiction to technology can be equally damaging to a worker’s mental health’.
It is not hard to see where this is going. Owning a Blackberry can be pathologised into ‘Information and Communication technology (ICT) addition’ and clearly any company not providing professional help for ICT addiction could well be negligent (i.e liable to be sued) for ignoring work related harm caused to employees.
Academics love pathologising things as that leads to grants for ‘further study’, psychologists love it because they can make a fortune as ‘counselors’ treating the afflicted, lawyers love it when academics pathologise something as that means a company can be sued for causing someone to ‘catch’ a ‘recognised syndrome’, and of course politicians love it because that means clearly there is something here that must be regulated and perhaps even taxed more to discourage it.
But what is the solution if your Blackberry is messing with your mind? Turn the fucking thing off when you go home. Sorted. My bill for your therapy session is in the post.
There is an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement that claims not only are radical Islamists trying to recruit at UK universities, the universities are doing little to combat it (a claim they naturally deny).
I do not know who is correct, but as Shiraz Maher claims the universities are not on top of this problem and he was a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, I am inclined to think the worst.
I do not read Andrew Sullivan’s blog very often but when I saw the Michael Totten (who is someone I do rate rather highly) was guest-blogging there, I took a peek and saw an article Sullivan wrote a few days ago about the plot to blow up aircraft heading from the UK to the US, which quickly reminded me why I rarely visit.
I wonder if Lieberman’s defeat, the resilience of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the emergence of a Hezbollah-style government in Iraq had any bearing on the decision by Bush and Blair to pre-empt the British police and order this alleged plot disabled. I wish I didn’t find these questions popping into my head. But the alternative is to trust the Bush administration.
Riiiight. It is totally sound policy to distrust what the authorities tell us and instead just look for the evidence as we have been lied to again and again, and until I hit the paragraph I quoted above, I was mostly in agreement with what was being written. Lord knows there are more than ample reasons to give the Bush administration a sound and repeated kicking and I am the last person to urge people to trust governments, but concocting weird conspiracy theories is a clear sign that the point of rational criticism has been past and we are entering Bush Derangement Syndrome territory.
Both Bush and Blair will not hesitate to use any plot by Al-Qaeda, even those of the more common Keystone Cops Terrorists variety, to abridge yet more of our civil liberties without in fact improving our security one iota. But the notion that the timing of such tactical moves by the police are being micro-managed by Blair, let alone Bush, for maximum PR value is stretching things, particularly given that the PR effect of such a bust is extremely uncertain given the recent propensity of London’s Metropolitan Police for arresting, not to mention shooting, the wrong people.
Moreover, the fiasco in Lebanon was an entirely domestic Israeli cock-up caused by the most idiotic leadership in the Jewish state’s history, so other than the ravings of the perpetually BDS infected Kos/Democratic Underground crowd (who are frankly an irrelevant lunatic fringe in any PR calculations likely to be made in either the White House or Downing Street), it is difficult to see why a military and political screw-up by Israel would have Bush or Blair desperately looking to finesse a diversion of attention away from the violence in Israel and Lebanon. It was really not their problem in any major way and it had largly pushed Iraq off the front pages of the world, which was unlikely to be causing many sleepless night in Downing Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. And I really, really doubt Tony Blair is more than dimly aware of who the hell Joe Lieberman is given that he is hardly a household name outside the USA. Methinks the idea such issues were driving the Metropolitan Police’s actions is frankly bonkers.
Still, I will probably be reading far more of Andrew Sullivan’s blog in the days to come now that someone else is actually writing for it.
Michael Totten has another interesting and well illustrated dispatch from Northern Israel, describing the situation in Kiryat Shmona, which took the brunt of Hezbollah’s Katyusha rocket attacks.
Can it be true that UK mobile phone company Orange has suspended an employee, Inigo Wilson, for a non-work related entry on a blog? What seems to have caused offence is him making jokes in his ‘Lefty Lexicon’ such as:
Islamophobic – anyone who objects to having their transport blown up on the way to work
Unless there are other factors at play here (I will be see what I can find out), I am about to become an ex-Orange customer and will start urging others to do likewise. If Orange is concerned about one of their employees ‘upsetting customers’, well I think they need to be told that pursuing this course of action against Inigo Wilson, they are doing precisely that. I do not dispute their right to hire and fire whomsoever they wish, but I intent to try and make them suffer some economic consequences as a result if this is as egregious as it appears.
Update: I received an e-mail from Stuart Jackson at Orange telling me:
To clarify, the suspension of an employee is not intended to imply that the employee in question has done wrong. It is a neutral act that allows us to conduct a full investigation and reach a conclusion based on facts. I will gladly update you regarding the outcome of the investigation.
But as the ‘facts’ are not in dispute, that does not really answer my question, which was:
I am enquiring about why Orange has suspended its employee Inigo Wilson. It is indeed the company’s position that remarks made on an employee’s own time and wholly unrelated to his work, is grounds for action by the company? I ask this as if there are other factors at play here, I may then refrain from cancelling my Orange account.
The ‘facts’ are not the issue. The issue is why Orange feels it has to do anything about them. Frankly even requiring Mr. Wilson to ‘apologise and not do it again’ would be wholly unacceptable given that his off-the-clock non work related remarks should be none of Orange’s business and if they think otherwise, they can do without my business.
I appears that the Blair government has created over three thousand new criminal offences during its nine bleak years in office, almost one for every day they have been our political masters.
Polish Potatoes (Notification) (England) Order 2004
No person shall, in the course of business, import into England potatoes which he knows to be or has reasonable cause to suspect to be Polish potatoes.
No doubt everyone will sleep a little safer knowing that England is protected from Polish potatoes.
So on the (very rash) assumption that David Cameron’s Tory Party actually noticed any of this happening in Parliament over the last nine years, are we going to see ‘Dave’ campaigning on the basis that a Tory victory will mean a massive roll-back of the intrusive powers of the state?
Okay, you can stop laughing now.
The latest bloggage from Michael Totten is something a bit different than his previous two offerings. It is about what it is like to be in a war zone for the first time and it brought back some strangely similar echos for me from when I first visited a war zone in 1991… war does indeed warp the mind a little. Check it out.
It seems clear that Hezbollah has, through the inexplicable Israeli unwillingness to commit to a robust ground attack, emerged battered but undefeated and thus as defined by Israel’s own stated war aims, the winner. It did this simply by surviving and by not being pushed north of the Litani river.
Although not all the detailed reports on the fighting on the ground have yet become public, one thing seems quite clear: the reason Israel did not destroy their enemy was not Hezbollah’s Kornet and Konkurs anti-tank missiles or their RPG-29s, but was due to the fact Israel did not deploy sufficient ground forces and commit to a full scale attack on Hezbollah until two days before the ceasefire. If Israel had been serious about destroying Hezbollah, it would have attacked at corps level by the end of the first week of the campaign, using 30,000 troops to make a tank supported infantry assault with airmobile blocking forces to isolate and exterminate the enemy. Two weeks of that would have been more than enough to have reduced Hezbollah to a small shattered cadre of dazed activists north of the Litani river.
But that is not what happened. As far as I can figure all that Israel committed to until the very last spasm of the campaign was a series of armour and artillery heavy limited objective raids which seem to have been mounted to blast settlements used by Hezbollah rather than to actually isolate and then clear them with infantry. I cannot fathom what ‘end state’ the planners envisaged from these attacks, given that it is a military aphorism that rubble is easier to defend than an intact town.
It will be more than many will be able to bring themselves to admit but when you get past the spin, Hezbollah won and they did so because Israel fought what was by local standards a long war without any plan I can identify to actually achieve what they said they wanted. So if the IDF bombarded Lebanon not to choke off Hezbollah’s logistics as part of a battle of annihilation, then why was the Lebanese transportation system trashed? Even if some delusional idiot in the IAF thought Hezbollah could be destroyed purely from the air, in that case surely all the IDF would have done was nothing but hammer tactical targets in the south rather than cripple the Lebanese infrastructure and economy to no good purpose.
Even the wider pain inflicted on Lebanon might have been worth it if Hezbollah had been so reduced militarily that their ability to poison Lebanese politics was greatly reduced, but quite the contrary has now been achieved. I can only hope I am very wrong but with Hezbollah both largely intact and politically enhanced, the prospect for a secular liberal Lebanon and a Lebanese state with the strength to contain Hezbollah’s militia are now more distant than ever.
It seems to me that Israel lost this war because Israel never had a coherent plan and thus I cannot escape the conclusion that the people in charge seem to have forgotten the basic principles of how to fight a war. To be honest I am astounded that I find myself writing these words about Israel of all people. I predict that once Israelis have some time to mull this over, the government will fall and fall hard.
Michael Totten’s latest on-the-spot bloggage from Northern Israel is up and ready to be devoured.
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