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“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”, the great mathematician Archimedes is supposed to have said.
Maybe it was their company name that led Anglo-Dutch consumer packaged goods company Unilever to briefly decide that their real mission was not making shampoo, soap, washing power and assorted packaged food products but to take it upon themselves to move the world. The world moved all right, away from these irritating people who were trying to shove it around.
“Unilever to tone down social purpose after ‘virtue-signalling’ backlash”, reports the Telegraph.
Unilever will no longer seek to “force-fit” all of its brands with a social purpose, its new chief executive said, following a backlash over the company’s “virtue-signalling”.
Hein Schumacher, who took over from Alan Jope in July, said for some of its brands, giving them a social or environmental purpose “simply won’t be relevant or it will be an unwelcome distraction”.
He added: “I believe that a social and environmental purpose is not something that we should force-fit on every brand.”
It marks a change in position from Mr Jope, who placed social purpose at the centre of his strategy for Unilever. In 2019, he pledged to sell off brands that “are not able to stand for something more important than just making your hair shiny, your skin soft, your clothes whiter or your food tastier”.
Can anyone tell me if this pledge was fulfilled, and if so which brands were sold to other companies? I like the sound of products whose makers feel that there is nothing more important than manufacturing them to perform their functions well.
The stance prompted a backlash from the City, amid growing frustration at blue chip companies for prioritising fashionable causes over profits.
Terry Smith, one of Britain’s best-known investors, has criticised Unilever for becoming “obsessed” with its public image and accused the company of “virtue signalling” rather than focusing on financial performance.
He said in January last year: “A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has, in our view, clearly lost the plot.”
Speaking on Thursday, Mr Schumacher said Unilever was not “giving up on purpose-led brands” altogether. He said for some brands such as Dove, giving them a social or environmental purpose was “logical”, as it made them more attractive for shoppers. Dove uses the idea of “real beauty” in its marketing campaigns, featuring women with different body types.
The Unilever chief said Ben & Jerry’s was another of its brands which has a “clear purpose”.
The ice cream brand is known for adopting stances on political issues, championing causes including protecting the environment and defending LGTBQ+ and refugee rights.
However, Unilever has clashed with Ben & Jerry’s over its activism in the past. Mr Jope told the ice cream company in July last year it should steer clear of “straying into geopolitics” after the brand attempted to boycott the Palestinian occupied territories. Unilever later sold Ben & Jerry’s Israeli operations.
Ben & Jerry’s has not spoken publicly about the Israel-Hamas conflict since the war broke out.
Mr Schumacher said on Thursday: “They’ve been vocal indeed before because of the social mission that Ben and Jerry’s definitely has. On the conflict, I just have no comment at the moment. It’s not a topic of discussion.”
Tellingly, the Telegraph article adds that the “social mission” to boycott the Palestinian occupied territories did not apply to occupied territories nearer home where Unilever’s profits were at stake:
Mr Schumacher has also come under pressure to address Unilever’s decision to keep selling its products in Russia since taking over as chief executive.
The Telegraph revealed earlier this year that Ukrainian veterans had written directly to Mr Schumacher, urging him to quit Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. They warned Unilever staff risked being conscripted into the war.
Schumacher’s response was to emit words:
On Thursday, Mr Schumacher said Unilever would continue to look at its options, adding: “It is clear that the containment actions that we have taken minimise Unilever’s economic contribution to the Russian state.”
Ten months ago, a woman called Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested for silently praying outside an abortion clinic.
For days ago, a man whose name the police know but have not made public was not arrested for asking a “What is the solution to liberate people from the concentration camp called Palestine?” Then the man standing at his side led the crowd in chanting “Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!” – and he wasn’t arrested either. This took place at a protest in London on 21st October organised by the Islamic Fundamentalist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
I do not think either Isabel Vaughan-Spruce or the two Hizb ut-Tahrir members should have been arrested. I have two main reasons for this view. Firstly, I believe in free speech (well, free mental recitation in Vaughan-Spruce’s case). Secondly, I want to know what the likes of Hizb ut-Tahrir are saying and I want other people to know. The media have sugar-coated Muslim extremism for long enough.
But if we are going to have anyone arrested for religiously motivated protest, why should it be her rather than them? Here is the Metropolitan Police’s own explanation:
Specialist officers have assessed the video and have not identified any offences arising from the specific clip. We have also sought advice from specialist Crown Prosecution Service lawyers who have reached the same conclusion.
However, recognising the way language like this will be interpreted by the public and the divisive impact it will have, officers identified the man involved and spoke to him to discourage any repeat of similar chanting.
We are also aware of photos from the same protest showing signs and banners referring to ‘Muslim armies’.
While there are varying interpretations of what the language on the placards should be interpreted to mean, officers must take decisions based on the wording actually used.
Such care for exactitude in whether words spoken at a protest met the threshold for being an offence would be admirable if the police applied the same care to everyone. But they don’t. Ben Sixsmith, writing for The Critic, lists twelve things more arrestable than calling for Jihad.
UPDATE: This video, which I found via Dr Eli David, shows a crowd of Muslims marching down a street in London. Someone shouts (into a microphone judging from the sound) the following words, “We’ll find some Jews here! We want the Zionists! We want their blood!” Meanwhile a policeman walks beside them, saying nothing.
Four days ago John Simpson of the BBC wrote this article, “Why BBC doesn’t call Hamas militants ‘terrorists’ – John Simpson”, in which he said, “It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”
It may not be in its job description – it may be contrary to its job description – but the BBC tells people who are the good guys and who are the bad guys all the time. Here is why I know that. For several years I was one of the contributors to the “Biased BBC” blog, which in those days was on Blogspot but now is at https://biasedbbc.tv/. Eventually, I gradually stopped posting there due to a combination of burnout and the political centre of gravity of the blog having moved away from my own views. But before that there was a period of years when I used to post some example of BBC bias almost every day. People would send them in, or I would see them myself. And there was never a day when I could find no example to cite; there were only days when I did not post because I was doing something other than the damn blog.
As an exercise in nostalgia, yesterday morning I clicked on the BBC News website to see what I could see. And, just like the old days, I found something immediately. (I did not post it then because during the day I was doing something other than the damn blog.)
Like John Simpson, Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe editor, is a veteran BBC journalist who has done much good work. I’m sure she thinks of herself as impartial. I am sure that she genuinely did not see the words I am about to quote as endorsing or condemning any particular view. The article concerned is headlined “Polish election: Expected political earthquake delights Brussels”, and it includes the words:
“In Poland’s case, Brussels withheld billions of euros of funds, pointing at the Polish government taking away women’s rights over their own bodies by virtually outlawing abortion, and threatening the independence of the judiciary and press freedom too by taking hold of the state broadcaster.”
The line about Polish politics is expressing an opinion. The line about abortion is expressing an opinion. Can a professional journalist like Ms Adler conceivably be unaware that the phrase “taking away women’s rights over their own bodies by virtually outlawing abortion”, assuming as it does that the foetus is merely part of the woman’s body, firmly takes one side in the abortion debate? The answer is yes, she can be unaware of it, because she is a well-connected, well-educated member of the more intellectual segment of the British upper middle class, who spends most of her time with colleagues of a similar background to herself. She joined the BBC in 1998. At that time the only major newspaper that carried BBC job adverts was the Guardian.
It could be worse. The British chattering classes are often silly and vain, but those who rose to prominence in the 1970s, 80s and 90s still have much of the liberal ethos of their parents in them. They want to believe, and so they do believe, that the rest of the world shares their kindly liberal values. They particularly want to believe that all their colleagues in the BBC World Service are “BBC people” in the same sense they are.
This belief is false.
Since John Simpson posted his piece, it has come out that several of the BBC’s Arabic language correspondents felt it was their job to “tell people who to support and who to condemn”, and the answers were “Hamas” and “Israel” respectively: “BBC reporters in the Middle East appear to justify killing of civilians by Hamas”
Mahmoud Sheleib, a BBC News senior broadcast journalist, tweeted suggesting that young Israelis were effectively combatants.
“[I see] In front of me on Al Jazeera, their so-called civilians are standing armed alongside the police and shooting because they basically don’t have any civilians among the youth. This is what the ignorant often don’t know. I am in favour of fighting them with love, yes, this is the solution.” Followed by a laughing emoji.
The Cairo-based journalist also took part in a Twitter conversation in which he joked about a woman whose grandmother was abducted by Hamas receiving an “inheritance”.
Aya Hossam,who describes herself as a broadcast journalist at BBC Arabic, liked a tweet saying: “Every member of the Zionist entity served in the army at some point in his life, whether men or women, and they all had victims of explicit violations… This term “civilians” applies to the animals and pets that live there and they are not seriously at fault.”
She later retweeted a message which included the phrase “the Zionist must know that he will live as a thief and a usurper”.
Hossam is a freelancer, but Sheleib is a senior correspondent.
Those two were not the only ones. Sally Nabil, Salma Khattab, Sanna Khoury and Amr Fekry were four more examples of BBC journalists happy to take the side of Hamas in public. Their BBC colleague Nada Abdelsamad was particularly enthusiastic:
Nada Abdelsamad, a Beirut-based programmes editor at BBC Arabic, retweeted a video of Israelis hiding in fear entitled: “settlers hiding inside a tin container in fear of the Palestinian resistance warriors”. This came with a hashtag translated as “promise of the hereafter”, a quranic reference to killing of the Jews.
Writing in the Australian edition of the Guardian, Lorena Allam says, “Rejecting the voice shows Australia is still in denial, its history of forgetting a festering wrong” The “Voice” refers to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which is, or was, “a proposed federal advisory body to comprise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to represent the views of Indigenous communities.” A decisive majority of Australian voters rejected the idea. Both the Guardian articles I have linked to regard the referendum result as a disaster. Lorena Allam writes,
It will take us months and years to grasp the full impact. But it is already blindingly clear that the result has been deeply hurtful for First Nations people, regardless of how we voted.
“Regardless of how we voted” seems an odd way of putting it. While it is true that a majority of Aboriginal voters wanted the Voice, a substantial number of them did not. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is one of several prominent people of Aboriginal descent who campaigned against it. Why would they be hurt by getting the result they wanted?
The commenters below the line are apoplectic. The three most recommended comments are: “Further proof, as though it were needed, that Australia remains a profoundly racist country”, “Australia has looked into the mirror and racism, hatred and ignorance has stared back”, and this one by a commenter called MacGiollaGhunna:
I’m European and have lived in Australia for over half my life. Even though I’m Australian on paper, I always think of myself as European. I didn’t need today’s results to know why I will never say I’m an Australian. For the majority of First Nations, a sizeable minority are with you. I am so sorry. I’m on a suburban train now and it makes my skin crawl knowing most people on here voted no. I can only imagine how it must make you feel. Keep staying strong. No matter how many times ‘Australia’ turns away, it will always be your land. Always.
I wonder if these commenters talked to their neighbours during the campaign in the same way they talked to their political brethren after it. If they were at all typical of advocates for “Yes”, no wonder “No” won. MacGiollaGhunna wasn’t the only one who proudly denied actually being Australian. The last line of their comment is another example of the type of “Yes” talk that pushed people towards “No”:
No matter how many times ‘Australia’ turns away, it will always be your land. Always.
On their own, the words “it will always be your land” could be meant in an inclusive way. But the use of scare quotes around “Australia” suggests very strongly that by “it will always be your land” the speaker means it will never truly be the land of anyone else; that the Australians-in-scare-quotes of European or Asian or African or anything other than Indigenous descent are forever interlopers. There’s a word for that sort of belief.
Sure, that’s just the view of one Guardian commenter. And the 121 people who recommended them. And the many similar comments and all the hundreds of people who recommended them. But that politically-correct suggestion that the Voice constituted an admission that only the Indigenous are the true owners of the land was widespread among supporters of the Indigenous Voice proposal, and certainly contributed to it being rejected.
The Guardian was correct to point out that claims that the Voice would mean Australians would lose ownership of their homes were false. The next sentence I’m not so sure about: “Variations of this claim include: Australians will be forced to pay reparations or the voice will increase taxes (ie, the voice will cost you money)”. There is a growing worldwide movement for “reparations” to be paid by white people to black people, as the Guardian never tires of telling us. As for “the voice will cost you money”, duh, of course it would have cost them money. Who else would have paid the salaries of all the proposed Indigenous representatives, not to mention all their assistants, secretaries, janitors, security staff et cetera other than the Australian taxpayer?
The BBC yesterday: Why BBC doesn’t call Hamas militants ‘terrorists’ – John Simpson
I wrote the following for the “Biased BBC” blog in 2006. Depressing to think that seventeen years and God knows how many thousands of terrorist murders later, I can repost it unchanged and, bar one or two place names and the reference to the London bombings of 7/7/2005 being ‘a year ago’, it is as relevant now as it was then.
But … you talk like war crimes are a bad thing.
I was listening to the ten o’clock news with half an ear and I caught Jeremy Bowen saying something like if Israel can’t prove that bombing the bridges in Lebanon was justified “then it’s a war crime.”
I don’t get it, BBC. So what if it is. Why do you care?
Note, I’m not asking why you, the readers of this site, might care – or you, the BBC audience, or you the Lebanese or you the Israelis or you the Palestinians or you the world. You all might have many and different opinions on whether it’s a war crime in law, or whether it’s a war crime in the sight of God – but I’m not asking you.
I’m talking to you, the British Broadcasting Corporation. When Hamas and then Hizbollah attacked Israel you never troubled to tell us the legal status of the acts. When suicide bombers killed Israelis at pizza parlours and bar mitzvahs you never gave us any of this war crime schtick, although attacks targeted at non-combatants are the epitome of a war crime. “Terrorist” is a term with meaning in international law, yet when bombers murdered your own countrymen in London a year ago you were so anxious to avoid being judgemental that you had someone go through what your reporters had written in the heat and pity of the moment, carefully replacing the word “terrorist” with the word “bomber.”
(God, what a shameful job. While they were still scrubbing the blood off the streets and the rails, some hack was scrubbing out any suggestion that the killers might have been bad people. Was it a junior hack under orders or a senior hack doing his own dirty work? Or were you all sent slinking back to your desks each to expunge his own words? I’d really like to know, but whichever it was you were anxious to avoid any talk of “crimes” then.)
“Bomber” not “terrorist”: by your own account your only job is to describe projectiles hitting meat. So what’s up now, with your “war crimes” and your “Israel kills Lebanese civilians”? You don’t need these fancy legal concepts, as if it mattered to you whether they were civilians or not. By your own stated standards moral distinctions between killings are “a barrier rather than an aid to understanding.”
I just don’t get it.
They are identifying the bodies now. For their relatives, the agony of not knowing is almost over and the different agony of knowing begins. But for some the hellish uncertainty goes on. One of our oldest friends is one of this group. He has family in Israel. One of his female relatives has disappeared without trace. Another, a very old lady, was taken by Hamas.
If you pray, please pray for them.
UPDATE 14th October:
The younger lady is alive and safe. I have no other information except that wonderful fact. Thank God. Please continue to pray for the older lady.
UPDATE 1st December:
I am happy to say that the older lady has also been released.
The United Nations Human Rights Council:
“On Monday afternoon, the @UN Human Rights Council observed a moment of silence for the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere.”
Perhaps I should regard it as a miracle and wonder that this august body got as far as implying that murdered Israelis might be included, albeit not by name, in the “miscellaneous” category of those entitled to human sympathy.
You do not need autocomplete in order to predict what sort of results that search term produces. Good thing, as autocomplete seems not to be working for those words on many browsers.
Because you all already knew what Palestinian celebrations involve, I did not have to post the video of what was done to Shani Louk. This link does not take you to the video. The Times of India report it does take you to is bad enough: it describes how two Hamas members were filmed as they sat, grinning, on her naked corpse in the back of a pickup truck, while the mob whooped and shouted “Allahu Akbar”. This video was not taken secretly. It was filmed and put on the internet by a Palestinian who was enjoying the show.
For most nations, the equivalent search term would garner images of that nation’s traditional festivities, and the case is no different for Palestinians. Here is a BBC story from 26th September 2001: “Arafat closes ‘suicide bombing’ art show”. Astonishingly, if you hover over the URL for that BBC story, you will see that it is classified as “entertainment/arts”. To be fair to the BBC, the URL may have been generated automatically, but to the Palestinians of 2001 it was indeed entertainment and art.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has closed down an art exhibit which featured a recreation of the scene of a suicide bombing.
The exhibition, at An-Najah University in the West Bank town of Nablus, was organised to mark the first anniversary of the Palestinian intifada.
A security official confirmed that Mr Arafat ordered the early closure of the show which featured a recreation of last month’s attack on a Jerusalem pizzeria.
“The president was gravely disturbed and offended by the images in the exhibit,” the official said.
The room-sized installation had broken tables splattered with fake blood and body parts.
A university branch of the militant Palestinian group Hamas built the exhibit, which recreates the scene of last month’s attack on Sbarro Pizza house in Jerusalem.
A suicide bomber – Ezzaldin Almasri – blew himself and 15 other people up during a busy lunchtime at the restaurant.
The installation included a portrait of the bomber holding a koran and a rifle.
Underneath, in a reference to the military wing of Hamas – Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades – the artist had written: “Qassami Pizza is more delicious.”
I am afraid I cannot now find the link, but after I posted something about the Sbarro bombing on the Biased BBC blog in the mid-2000’s, the father of one of the victims, a 15 year old girl called Malki Roth, commented there. This is an account of Malki’s last day, and the way that one of her murderers, a woman called Ahlam Tamimi, has become a celebrity in the Arab world.
All nations have atrocities in their past and many have them in their present. But I do not think there is another nation or culture on the planet that currently exhibits such public delight in murder as the Palestinians do.
That said, we should never forget that horrible things would happen to any Palestinian who protested at what was done to Shani Louk in 2023 or Malki Roth in 2001. That’s one reason why the culture of exhibiting the murdered corpses of young women or images thereof has gone on for so long. Another reason is the currently fashionable pretence that all cultures are equal.
These are Hillary Clinton’s own words, calmly reported by the Guardian as if there were nothing unusual about a politician in a democratic country calling for forcible deprogramming of their political opponents:
Hillary Clinton says Trump supporters may need to be ‘deprogrammed’
Supporters of Donald Trump may need to be “deprogrammed” as if they were cult members, Hillary Clinton said.
“Sadly, so many of those extremists … take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure,” the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president told CNN.
“He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? Because at some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen.”
Hillary Clinton said those words during an interview conducted on 5th October by CNN’s Christine Amanpour. Here is CNN’s own video report about it:
Clinton calls for ‘formal deprogramming’ of MAGA ‘cult members’
The section about deprogramming starts at 1:40. Note that Christine Amanpour raises no objection to the proposal but merely enquires about the practicalities.
In the Telegraph, Ruby Hinchliffe writes,
The city that declared all-out war on landlords – and what happened next
The Dutch have launched wide-ranging crackdowns on the buy-to-let sector, but renters are paying the price
“Landlords have no friends in politics anymore,” Tjeerd Sijtema, one of Rotterdam’s 15,000 civil servants, tells me.
Last year, city officials made Dutch history when they became the Netherlands’ first lawmakers to introduce a ban on landlords buying properties to let.
Red-rimmed signs warding off landlords were erected in 16 of Rotterdam’s 71 neighbourhoods – where around a third of its housing stock resides.
Smug-looking faces shaped like houses stare down at residents who cycle past it in quick succession. Above read the loaded words: “We are working on a healthy housing market here.”
“Working on”, as in “destroying”:
But one glaring consequence of the ban is the downward pressure it is having on rental housing supply, which props up those who cannot immediately afford to buy a house – typically younger residents, migrants and fresh divorcees.
The ban also pushed up rents for tenants in regulated neighbourhoods by around 4pc last year, damaging housing affordability for renters which the Erasmus School of Economics said “undermin[ed] some of the intentions of the law.”
Even students are feeling the negative impacts. In a quaint coffee shop at the heart of leafy Kralingen-Oost, a popular area amongst undergraduates, one student told me it’s much harder to live in larger groups now. “I’m only living with one other person this year,” she told me.
And, naturally,
Meanwhile the waiting list for social housing in Rotterdam – which makes up a staggering 55pc of the city’s overall housing supply – is now five years’ long.
Adam Boulton is a journalist and broadcaster who is a regular panelist on TalkTV, a competitor to GB News.
Some background: GB News presenters Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton both are currently suspended while the station investigates some crass remarks from Fox about a female journalist for Joe News, Ava-Santina Evans. You can hear what he said on the clip embedded in this report by Metro magazine: Dan Wootton suspended and investigated by GB News over Laurence Fox’s misogynistic Ava Evans remarks.
Fox’s sexual comments about Evans (“Who’d want to shag that?”) and Wootton’s sniggering at them were oafish, but I do not see what Evans has to complain about given that she has made almost identical remarks herself:
But, as ever, it’s OK when the Left does it. Last week the Guardian ran a piece by Alexandra Topping called “Russell Brand and why the allegations took so long to surface”. She said, rather defensively I thought, that “multiple experts” had told her it was from fear of Brand suing for libel. OK, the experts do have a point about Britain’s libel laws, and that is why I am making absolutely no comment about the criminal accusations against him and ask you to do likewise, but fear of libel does not explain why Brand remained a star for years despite making on-air sexual remarks about a woman in a manner far worse than anything Laurence Fox has done.
The truly disgusting behaviour of Brand and Jonathan Ross towards Andrew Sachs and Georgina Baillie in 2008 did not stop the Guardian’s George Monbiot calling Brand one of his “heroes” in 2014 and saying “He’s the best thing that has happened to the left in years”.
Brand did not cease being on the left. Until these allegations came out on September 16th, he was due to contribute to book called “Poetry for the Many” edited by Jeremy Corbyn and the trade unionist Len McCluskey. But Brand’s views had ceased to be an asset to the left, certainly to the sort of left that flourishes in the current broadcast ecology.
Switzerland is a great country. In most respects Machiavelli’s description of the Swiss as “armatissimi e liberissimi”, “most armed and most free”, still applies. But…
It says,
Mandatory shooting
Mandatory program
Compulsory shooting training applies to all soldiers equipped with an assault rifle and must be completed every year until the end of military obligations.
It must be carried out by August 31 with a recognized shooting club. You can check the dates and times in official publications or on the internet.
Further information can be found at: http://www.be.ch/militaire
The Wikipedia article on Conscription in Switzerland says,
Switzerland has mandatory military service (German: Militärdienst; French: service militaire; Italian: servizio militare) in the Swiss Army for all able-bodied male citizens, who are conscripted when they reach the age of majority,[1] though women may volunteer for any position.[2] Conscripts make up the majority of the manpower in the Swiss Armed Forces.[3]
On September 22, 2013, a referendum that aimed to abolish conscription was held in Switzerland.[4] However, the referendum failed with over 73% of the electorate voting against it, showing strong support for conscription of men in Switzerland.
Much as I admire the Swiss, I cannot make myself believe that constitutes being liberissimi.
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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.
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