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]
|
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.
There is an interesting article on the Social Affairs Unit blog which discusses New Civilisation magazine. The magazine’s opening declaration was:
As a conflict between Islam and the West is engulfing the world in a cycle of violence, the walls between peoples are now being raised and fortified, yet the world is shrinking. I believe that New Civilisation is a unique attempt to break down the unreasonable barriers that are the tragic irony of modernity post 9/11.
Which all sounds promising. This publication has also sent me a few e-mails, though I must confess I never took any notice, though that was not because it did not sound interesting but rather due to the e-mail overload that I have to deal with from folks trying to interest Samizdata in new publications.
However Shiraz Maher does seem to have taken notice and he did not like what he found after a little digging. To see what he found take a look at his article at the Social Affairs Unit. It seems New Civilisation is a front Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation whose objective is a global totalitarian Islamo-fascist Caliphate.
The indispensible Michael Totten is blogging from Northern Israel and has some great stuff to read. And while you are at it, consider dropping a dime in his tip-jar to support his first class reportage.
Muslim ‘moderates’ in Britain are calling for changes to British foreign policy as the only way to prevent Muslim ‘extremists’ in Britain from attacking the rest of us.
This is of course the same approach used by Sinn Fein and other Republicans in Northern Ireland, who held that only by political engagement and accommodation with ‘moderate’ political figures (i.e. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness) could the wicked IRA be stopped from blowing people up. Of course the fact Sinn Fein and the IRA were actually inseparable parts of the same movement was something only a reader of the Guardian could have failed to notice.
And so a ‘moderate’ Muslim, a member of the Tory Party no less, tell us that ‘Muslim anger’ must be recognised (our old chum root causes). Is that so? Well I think increasingly it is being recognised. It is being recognised as an excuse used for getting a non-democratic Muslim veto over British foreign policies just as a majority of Muslims also appear to want a Muslim veto over freedom of expression in Britain.
If the solution to Muslim extremism in Britain being offered by ‘moderate’ Muslims is to give the extremists what they want (i.e. changes in British foreign policy), then the so-called ‘moderates’ are nothing more than the mouthpieces of the extremists they claim to reject. No doubt if given the changes they want, we will be told that only if yet more legal restrictions are placed on what we kuffir can say about Islam will we be able to to placate Muslim ‘anger’ and thereby prevent those wicked extremists from blowing us up. And homosexuals must be legislated against in order to placate those wicked extremists. And alcohol must be banned in order to…
I think it is well past time for some British anger and a great deal of it needs to be directed at the British establishment for allowing this to happen via a policy of appeasment towards domestic Islamists.
If Israel really does accept and implement a ceasefire on Monday, it will have accepted the worst of all possible worlds. If it agrees to an end to the fighting which does not disarm Hezbollah, or even push it behind the Litani River, and does not get a third party force capable of fighting Hezbollah into Southern Lebanon, it would be fair to say Israel has achieved none of its war aims whatsoever. In short, Hezbollah will have won and we will soon be seeing celebrations in the streets across the Islamic world to that effect.
The primary Israeli method of attack, a series of destructive operational level1 air strikes against Lebanon’s infrastructure, only made sense if it was intended to isolate the enemy and dislocate its logistics as an adjunct to a massive and robust attack on the ground with a significant portion of its formidable army, with the intention at crushing Hezbollah as military force.
Otherwise, what was the point of the non-tactical strikes? As Hezbollah already had large numbers of artillery rockets deployed as organic supply with its front line units (demonstrably so), the air interdiction only made sense if Israel was planning an extended campaign for as long as it took to destroy Hezbollah, which means preventing Hezbollah’s resupply. Why else blow power-stations, fuel depots, bridges, roads and runways deep into the country rather than just strike tactical targets where Hezbollah is deployed? Bringing the Lebanese transportation system to a standstill was surely done to stop movement of supply so that as Hezbollah formations expended their munitions (a process that would increase as more units were engaged directly by the Israeli army), they would quickly become much less effective due to logistic dislocation. This is ‘Air Interdiction 101’, the sort of thing military planners have understood since ‘Operation Strangle’ in Italy in 1944.
But what Israel has done so far is a robust air offensive in support of little more than a series of limited objective raids with only a small fraction of the army. This has not only failed (unsurprisingly) to destroy Hezbollah, it has failed to even displace them far enough back onto Lebanon to prevent them firing rockets into Haifa on an almost daily basis throughout this campaign.
And now, having killed a great many people but still leaving a large number of Hezbollah fighters very much alive and still in possession of both their Katyushas and the positions from which to fire them, the Israeli government plans to stop? Having weathered what Israel threw at them (but not what the Israelis inexplicably failed to throw at them), Hezbollah can, quite justifiably, claim victory and greatly enhance their stature simply by virtue of Israel failed to gain any of its publicly stated war aim.
Can anyone tell me what the hell the Israeli government is thinking?
1 = I would argue that the attacks against Lebanon’s infrastructure were ‘operational’ (i.e. above tactical but below strategic). A ‘strategic’ attack would need to be against the supply terminals, which is to say targets in Syria or Iran. I realise this is an arcane issue of military semantics
Julie Burchill is a person about whom I oscillate between revulsion and admiration but she is in good form at the moment. In an article called Bleeding-heart ignoramuses, she ridicules the British media establishments anti-Jewish diatribes and the plain stupidity of some people’s analysis of the region. In the later category she points at an article by Matthew Parris that could well be the most poorly thought out “what Israel must do” article by someone who presumably does not want the extermination of all Jews in that country. The money quote being where he suggests that in order to be ‘loved’ by international opinion, Israel must return to its pre-1967 borders… and this at a time when the existing borders scant enough protection from long range attack. Parris writes:
That settlement has to be a return to her pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure her future permanently. It would bring her back within the pale.
So presumably if only Israel would place itself at the mercy of its sworn enemies, that magnificent body of strength and moral rectitude ‘the international community’ would make everything alright… after all, what is the value of mere survival if Kofi Anan, Jacques Chirac and several thousand Guardian readers in Islington think poorly of you? To which Burchill aptly replies:
Personally, I’d far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead – and that’s what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I’ve always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I’m living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
Indeed. When Burchill is right, damn is she right.
What I am about for argue for may strike long time readers of Samizdata as strange, given that I have written so many articles deploring racism, calling for open borders and taking various pro-immigration positions. None of my views on those things have changed one iota but clearly Britain and the western world generally has a problem with the Muslim communities in their midst. If Muslims really do share a broad consensus of opposition to free speech and the social liberalism that defines us, then Muslims are quite unlike any other community who have demonstrably integrated and assimilated over time, such as the Irish, Poles, Afro-Caribbeans, Sikhs, Hindus, Chinese, etc.. If Britain’s Muslims wish to both be separate but also have a veto over how non-Muslims are permitted to discuss them, then they are a cohesive political and social problem. So how does a tolerant, cosmopolitan, pro-immigration, free market capitalist, social individualist (‘libertarian’ if you insist) react to the threat posed by an intolerant and even barbaric cultural-religious minority in the midst of his society? Here is where I put myself ‘beyond the pale’ with some people. The short answer is… discrimination.
I have long argued that intolerant Islamic values are a problem that needs to be opposed, not accommodated. However people in the Muslim community need to be opposed not for being Muslims but for refusing to integrate into British society. As so many ethnic groups have successfully (even if not always effortlessly) integrated and assimilated into tolerant British society, the problem is not mass immigration, the problem is Islam and the antithetical values it brings. In short, the problem is Muslim mass immigration and the refusal to reciprocate tolerance for tolerance.
However it is important to keep in mind that Islam is not a race or an ethnicity, it is a religion, and therefore it is a choice. As a result, when the BBC says that the police have arrested a group of “Asian men on suspicion of terrorist offenses”, they are doing everyone a great dis-service by making a remark which is by any reasonable definition racist in the most literal sense. It does not matter that the people in question are ‘Asian’, what matters is that they are Muslim. Race and ethnicity is not the issue and to suggest otherwise is racist: the political consequences of a specific religion and its associated culture, that is the issue. → Continue reading: In praise of discrimination
There is an interesting article in Newsweek suggesting capitalism is on the march in more minds than you might think.
In France, books approved by the Education Ministry promote statist policies and voodoo economics. “Economic growth imposes a way of life that fosters stress, nervous depression, circulatory disease and even cancer,” reports “20th-Century History,” a popular high-school text published by Hatier. Another suggests Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were dangerous free-market extremists whose reforms plunged their countries into chaos and despair. Such blatant disinformation sheds new light on the debate over why it is that Europeans lag so far behind Americans in rates of entrepreneurship and job creation.
[…]
a recent poll by the IPOS Institute finds the market economy’s approval rating rising to 59 percent among Germans under 30, with only 32 percent saying the state needs to play a bigger role. Ten years ago, the figures were reversed. “The values shift is already underway,” says Bürklin. It’s about time.
Indeed it is about time. The absurdities and contradictions of the statist world view is our biggest ally and gradually more people do figure out better theories for understanding reality regardless of what they are taught.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
