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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First Minister
@ScotGovFM
On the 35th anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster, First Minister @HumzaYousaf has expressed sympathies to those who lost loved ones on board Pan Am Flight 103 and on the ground.
The word “disaster” has its origins in astrology. It means “ill-starred”. But the people killed on 21st December 1988 were not killed by bad weather, human error, or an unfortunate conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. They were murdered.
Pan Am Flight 103 (PA103/PAA103) was a regularly scheduled Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via a stopover in London and another in New York City. The transatlantic leg of the route was operated by Clipper Maid of the Seas, a Boeing 747 registered N739PA. Shortly after 19:00 on 21 December 1988, while the aircraft was in flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, it was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew in what became known as the Lockerbie bombing.[1] Large sections of the aircraft crashed in a residential street in Lockerbie, killing 11 residents. With a total of 270 fatalities, it is the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom.
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In 2003, Gaddafi accepted Libya’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid compensation to the families of the victims, although he maintained that he had never given the order for the attack.
The Times reports,
A mosque which has been linked to the Iranian state received £372,000 from the Scottish government.
Exiled dissidents claim the Al-Mahdi Islamic Centre of Glasgow has become an unauthorised base for the Tehran regime in Scotland.
It is a sister outpost of the Islamic Centre of England based in London, which hosted a vigil for Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander, after he was killed in an American drone strike.
Last month The Times disclosed that the Scottish government paid more than £193,000 to the Al-Mahdi Foundation, a charity based in the same premises in Southside.
However, it has now been confirmed that the total amount of grants given to the charity was almost double that sum. The foundation has displayed the flag of the Islamic Republic and an image of Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a death sentence on the British author Sir Salman Rushdie.
It emerged after Russell Findlay, the Scottish Conservative justice spokesman, raised the issue with ministers at Holyrood.
In a written response Mairi McAllan, the transport, net zero and just transition secretary, said: “The Al-Mahdi Foundation received £372,000 of Climate Change Fund grant funding for two projects between 2014 and 2020 to support awareness raising of climate change issues among disadvantaged and ethnic minority communities and to make their community building more energy efficient.”
(Archived here.)
This was one of Humza Yousaf’s initiatives [Edit: my apologies to Mr Yousaf, it was actually one of Nicola Sturgeon’s initiatives], but let’s not kid ourselves that it is only in Scotland that this sort of thing happens. All Western governments pay vast sums to enemies of the West in brown envelopes marked “Climate change”.
In a Telegraph article ostensibly about the pro-Hamas protests, Jordan Peterson describes the emerging new system:
If you are successful, in any guise, by any standards of comparison whatsoever, then you are a victimiser. If you are not, you are a victim.
A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white comparison: there are, as well, only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an “ally,” you are with no further effort goodness incarnate. This is supposed, on “philosophical” grounds, to be self-evident, following as it does so deservedly in the wake of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimiser, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, and inescapably so: a predatory parasite, rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment. Indeed, the terrible treatment you thereby experience does nothing but redound to the credit of your so-Godly-and-compassionate persecutors.
If you are a victimiser, after all, you have no moral standing whatsoever. No punishment is therefore undeserved, or sufficiently severe. This is true even if you are “only” a member of a victimising group, and have done nothing wrong other than that, because “individual” is a category that within the postmodern philosophy no longer exists.
If you are a victim, by contrast, any and all moral outrage is justified, worthy and laudable – even morally required – even if you are merely a self-aggrandising, vindictive and hypocritical “ally” of some marginalised group. The fact that such latitude in reactive or vengeful action fully opens the door to the worst possible actions by the worst imaginable narcissists and psychopaths is also something rapidly glossed over or ignored by the vengeful ideologues of the postmodern Left – most likely because it is an outcome most intensely desired in the their most resentful fantasies.
JEREMY CORBYN MEETS KNEECAP Last week, @jeremycorbyn sat down with @KNEECAPCEOL for a quick chat about their music and the importance of artists to speaking up for Palestine. #MusicForACeasefire
Just lovable Grandpa Jeremy, the one who wanted to see a “kinder, gentler politics”, having a friendly chat with a band who talk about “the Resistance” in Palestine and named themselves after the trademark form of mutilation and torture carried out by the IRA.
At 3:22 Corbyn asks the lads to explain why they have joined his campaign called “Music for a ceasefire” (I’m sure that slogan will resonate with young people who go to music festivals), and the one on the right says, “It’s mad that we have to even take a stance on people being blown up”, and the guy in the knitted tricolour gimp mask nods along.
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Added later: Regarding the choice of “Kneecap” as name of a hip-hop band from Belfast, commenter John said, “Presumably they will be touring universities with their South African support act The Necklaces and middle eastern special guests The Gay Free-Fallers.”
David Burge explains all:
I am confident David Burge, a.k.a. Iowahawk, will forgive me if I put the text of his tweet below in case something happens to it:
David Burge
@iowahawkblog
Fun facts:
(A) calling for genocide against Jews, if not delivered to incite a mob to violence, is 100% Constitutionally protected speech- only in the sense it can’t be punished by government.
(B) You are not the government, you are a cowardly college administrator and in no way does the 1st Amendment force you to accept brain dead neo-Nazis in your student body.
The context is that Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were all asked by New York State Representative Elise Stefanik whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment under the rules of their respective universities, and all three were, like, “Ooh, that’s a tricky one.” You can see the video of their responses in in this tweet from Nicky Clark.
As reported by the Times of Israel:
In a high-profile congressional hearing Tuesday evening, the presidents of three of the top universities in the US refused to explicitly say that calls for genocide of Jewish people violate campus rules on harassment.
When New York Republican Representative Elise Stefanik asked directly if “calling for the genocide of Jews” is against the codes of conduct of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, all three presidents said the answer depended on the context.
“It is a context-dependent decision,” Penn president Liz Magill responded, leading Stefanik to reply, “Calling for the genocide of Jews is dependent on the context? That is not bullying or harassment? This is the easiest question to answer ‘yes,’ Ms. Magill.”
Responding to the same question, Harvard president Claudine Gay said, “When speech crosses into conduct, we take action.”
Calling for genocide is OK at Harvard so long as you don’t do any actual genociding within the precincts of the University.
MIT president Sally Kornbluth said that such language would only be “investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”
I would hate you to think that these illustrious universities did not care about harassment. Why, MIT has its own Institute Discrimination & Harassment Response Office, which is hard at work producing pronoun stickers.
Harvard is so focussed on combatting aggressive speech that it will even investigate cases where the aggression is unconscious: “Harvard to interrogate profs accused of ‘microaggressions’”. You see, the whole point about microaggressions is that the microagressors do not know they are committing them, so they have to be educated. In contrast those who call for genocide know exactly what they are doing, so there is no need for the University to bother them.
And I don’t know why everyone is making such a fuss about protests at the University of Pennsylvania. All that UPenn faculty members like Distinguished Professor of Political Science Anne Norton want is for more of its students and staff to feel “joyful and empowered” like UPenn student Tara Tarawneh did when she saw “the joyful and powerful images that came from the glorious October 7th”. See how happy and supportive everyone at that rally was. That’s because they knew Penn was a safe environment for them.
I was relieved to see this article by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian: “Whatever your view of the Israel-Hamas war, rape is rape. To trivialise it is to diminish ourselves”. At least some on the Left have not lost their humanity.
Midway through the article, Ms Hinsliff wrote the following:
Look away now if you would rather not read about women and young girls found dead with their pants pulled down, and telltale evidence of bleeding, bruises and scratches; about smashed pelvises, semen samples, and graphic details I wouldn’t normally go into on these pages except that otherwise it seems people don’t believe it. Though some won’t, even then.
Rape is a war crime as old as war itself, and yet still often invisible thanks to the stigma surrounding survivors, the practical challenges of gathering evidence under fire, and bleakly, sometimes also the lack of survivors.
That point – that murdered women cannot speak – seems to have escaped “feminist” Briahna Joy Gray, who was National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. In a tweet quoted by tech writer Antonio García Martínez, she starts by saying, ‘“Believe all women” was always an absurd overreach: woman should be heard, claims should be investigated, but evidence is required. The same is true of the allegations out of Israel”‘, which would have been common sense if she had stopped there, but then she brightly adds, “But also, this isn’t a “believe women” scenario bc no female victims have offered testimony.”
Briahna’s Joy Gray’s next tweet is also… memorable. She says,
“Zionists are asking that we believe the uncorroborated eyewitness account of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms.”
That “uncorroborated” was revealing. One eyewitness account of the rape of a woman is not enough for Briahna Joy Gray, if that witness is a man and a “Zionist”. How many such witnesses would be enough to substantiate an accusation of rape in her eyes? Four?
And what did Gray mean by “*men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms.”? Judging from the two newspaper front pages she includes in her tweet, she is referring to (and casually libelling) Yoni Saadon who witnessed from hiding a woman being gang-raped and murdered on October 7th, and said how he was haunted by her face which he described as “the face of an angel”.
One of the better points feminists made repeatedly over the years was that victims of rape, and victims of other violent crimes, do not always react in ways that make them the type of witness who sways juries. Sometimes they cope with the horror of what they experienced by distancing themselves from it, which makes their account come across as lacking appropriate emotion. Sometimes the opposite happens and when the time comes to give their testimony their memories come spurting out as series of flash images, vivid but unstructured. Perhaps their vocabulary choice is not as good as Briahna Joy Gray’s would be in like circumstances, which, because I don’t wish to sink to her level, I pray she never experiences. Astonishing as it may seem to her, all these factors can apply to males as well. Astonishing as it may seem to her, for a man to watch, powerless to stop it, the rape and murder of a woman is a traumatic experience. Gray has has spent years denouncing the type of juror who dismisses a woman’s testimony because of superficial factors such as these, and then turns round and says that she can deduce in mere seconds that a man is lying – and that he is a “fetishist” – because the image that stuck in his head was the horrifying contrast between the woman’s beauty and the horrible thing being done to her.
In the face of the endless garbage being churned out in US higher education, and the plight of Jewish students, it is good to know that new structures are taking shape:
Most university departments, therefore, are now under the control of professors who are very unlikely to hire scholars interested in non-radical perspectives on their disciplines (let alone conservatives). The solution for donors, though, is not to withhold all donations but to use their money to create new colleges or units within universities that will hire professors without prejudice. Trustees and presidents have the authority to set up new centers or colleges within a university and to appoint academically qualified people who will not engage in discrimination. We have excellent examples of such centers and colleges: the James Madison Program at Princeton, the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State.
This observation comes from John O. Mcginnis, the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University.
He concludes:
Universities today are at a crossroads. Externally, they are losing support among the public. Internally, they cannot perform their primary function of sifting and diffusing knowledge because of the intellectual orthodoxies that have seized control of administrations and inspired the faculty. The massacres in Israel and the response on our campuses might spark reform of these essential institutions, but only if they decisively break with the identity politics and bureaucracies that have led them to their present state.
In my view a broader and deeper problem is the sheer size and scale of higher education that is funded, in whole or in part, by the taxpayer. Yes, it is true that even private universities and colleges have been infected by some of these horrors, but no serious change in my view is likely until the state gets out of higher education.
Douglas Young has views on the remarkable toxic upsurge in Jew hatred
A lot of folks are shocked and mystified by all the recent open displays of hatred and even violence toward Jews on many elite American university campuses and the streets of major U.S. cities. People are also stunned at the significant public support for the Hamas terrorists, particularly among young, college-educated Democrats, and especially after Hamas on October 7 inflicted the worst murder of Jews since the Holocaust of World War II.
Understand these American leftists are cultural Marxists who divide the world into arbitrary and rigid “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes that have been fixed for centuries. Because Jews tend to be white, Western, and economically successful, they check three major oppressor boxes. Furthermore, since most of Israel’s Palestinian enemies are dark-skinned, Muslim, and poor, that adds three more strikes against the Jews. That Hamas is a terrorist gang of mass-murderers, rapists, and kidnappers whose leaders routinely rob the Palestinian people so they can live luxuriously is irrelevant to the closed social justice warrior mindset. So is the fact that Hamas uses the Gazan people as human shields and even shoots at those daring to try to flee its totalitarian grip on Gaza. Also trivial to fervent progressives is all the considerable Western aid used by Gaza’s Hamas dictators not to help the Gazan people but to buy weapons and build tunnels to murder still more Jews. In fact, with all the generous U.S. and West European aid Hamas has gotten, it could have easily transformed the Gazan coast into a booming Mediterranean tourist mecca, but Hamas is obsessed with wiping out the Jewish people, as its charter clearly states.
Yet Hamas can never be wrong to ardent leftists because it checks all the right oppressed boxes. Remember that progressives tend to see people as groups, not individuals. So the well over a thousand Jewish men, women, children, and babies slaughtered on October 7 are dismissed by the radical woke as “colonialist” oppressors on “occupied” land who had it coming. Recall it was Judaism that gave us the first monotheistic religion in which God judges each individual by his own personal deeds, irrespective of any group status. But outside of Judaism and Christianity, most of the rest of the world (including secular leftists) remains fiercely tribal in which your group status trumps all else.
Indeed, Marx called for the utter annihilation of every oppressor group in a “revolutionary holocaust,” with zero regard for any innocent individuals. This has always been the way of leftists ever since the French Revolution when the radical Jacobins implemented le Terror and Le Grande Terror against all men, women, and children guilty of being Christian, royalist, bourgeois, or insufficiently revolutionary. The 20th century Bolsheviks’ “Red Terror” murdered the same groups in Russia by the millions, Stalin’s purges killed over 20 million more, and Chairman Mao’s communists murdered and starved to death over 60 million non-communists and communists alike in China, most zealously when the fanatical young Red Guards terrorized the Chinese people during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
After many decades of the Left thoroughly infiltrating and corrupting America’s vast educational-industrial complex, the news media, publishing, Hollywood, big tech, and much of corporate America – and aided by the Left’s de facto open borders immigration policy and so many schools no longer even trying to Americanize immigrants – there is now a record number of young American Red Guards seeking to “cancel” or even destroy all who they have been indoctrinated to hate as oppressors.
Hopefully heretofore dangerously uninformed and naive Americans will at last wake up and stop voting for politicians pushing cultural Marxism; stop sending their children to any schools or universities that convince them to hate their religion, America, and their own parents; stop donating money to their college alma mater if it is part of the problem; and stop buying products from corporations pushing critical race theory and donating big bucks to radical leftist groups like Black Lives Matter that work to destroy Western Judeo-Christian civilization. In 2008 Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” With the dominant opinion-forming institutions now captured by leftists and so many in the
globalist ruling class either leftists or intimidated by them, the fate of America as we have known it is now in real jeopardy. As our wise and brave Founding Fathers understood, we will enjoy exactly as much freedom as we are willing to fight for – and not one whit more.
Dr. Douglas Young is a political science professor emeritus who taught government and history for over 33 years and whose essays, poems, and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications in America, Canada, and Europe. His first novel, Deep in the Forest, was published in 2021 and the second, Due South, came out in 2022. His next book, This Little Opinion Plus $1.50 Will Buy You a Coke: A Collection of Essays, is about to be published.
Tommy Robinson. EDL. English Defence League. Racists. Racism. Racist. Case closed, yes?
A few years ago at a loose end – in full knowledge that the above was true – I was browsing YouTube and I came across an interview with the man. I pressed play. Almost the first thing he said was something like, “I am not the person people think I am.” That seemed interesting – challenge your beliefs and all that – so I listened further. Boy, was I in for a shock. Since then I’ve read his book, Enemy of the State – available from obscure retailers – and followed him on obscure social media platforms. This is what I have gleaned:
- For a racist he has a suspiciously large number of black friends.
- For a racist he has a suspiciously large number of Jewish friends.
- He even has a Muslim friend.
- He doesn’t seem to like racists much, even telling them to **** *** out of his comments and burning their flags.
- They don’t seem to like him much, sometimes claiming that he is a Mossad agent.
- His main argument is that mass migration in general and large-scale Muslim immigration in particular represent a threat to Britain and the British.
- He utterly hates the police. A lot of this springs from an incident when (so he claims) he was attacked by an off-duty officer who subsequently lied in court. But there are plenty of other cases outlined in his book.
So why the hate? Or to put it another way, why does Robinson attract hate in a way that Douglas Murray does not despite the two having almost identical political views? I can’t help thinking that a lot of this is to do with class. In accent, dress and associates Robinson is unapologetically – for want of a better term – working class . It would appear that a lot of the MSM etc have much the same attitude to the working class as they do to ethnic minorities: they should be seen and not heard. They should accept the opinions that have been assigned to them and be grateful.
Another explanation lies in – how shall I put this? – his general attitude to authority. Take yesterday, for instance. An “Against Anti-semitism” march was being held in Central London. Robinson encouraged people to go along. The organisers – because they know nothing about the man and think that attempting to curry favour with the MSM is something other than a fool’s errand – stated that his presence would not be welcome. He went along anyway. The police arrested him. The police’s actions were, of course, disgraceful but Robinson resisted arrest and got a face full of pepper spray for his trouble.
A further explanation lies in what might be described as “information management.” Robinson believes – as do I – that actions speak louder than words. So, he doesn’t believe he has to defend himself when smeared; his actions will speak for themselves. Except that – so far – they haven’t. This means that he hasn’t gone to the trouble of organising a defence of his beliefs in an easily retrievable manner. My gleanings above are the result of years of followship. His book is also terribly organised.
 Robinson is the one on the left. The guy on the right is long-time political ally Danny Roscoe.
“Violence in Dublin after five hurt in knife attack” reports the BBC:
There are violent scenes in Dublin after an earlier knife attack in the city centre in which five people were injured
It is not clear exactly what caused the disturbances – involving clashes, and reports of a number of vehicles set on fire
The BBC’s line about it not being clear exactly what caused the disturbances is disingenuous. It is entirely clear what they are rioting about. From the Telegraph:
Violent anti-immigration protesters descended on Dublin city centre on Thursday night after five people were injured in a knife attack outside a school. At least three small children were injured in the attack in the Irish capital, as well as a man and a woman. A five-year-old girl sustained “serious injuries” and was receiving emergency treatment, police said. Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital, setting fire to a police car, a tram and a double-decker bus, among other vehicles, and throwing fireworks at officers.
The only thing that is not entirely clear is whether the rioters are correct in thinking that the man who stabbed the children and adults is an Algerian migrant, as believed by those replying to this tweet by Micheál Martin, the Tánaiste (the deputy head of the Irish government).
It does not excuse the riots in the least if the rioters are correct to think that the would-be child murderer is any or all of a migrant, legal or illegal, or a Muslim, or from an ethnic minority. But the obfuscation from the Irish authorities and media on this point is making the situation worse.
The usual flashpoint for riots throughout history has been a rumour of crimes committed by a member of Group A against Group B. The riots in the Lozells district of Birmingham in 2005 have been almost forgotten because whites were not involved, but they were a typical example of the type, having been sparked by a completely unsubstantiated story that a black girl had been gang-raped by a group of South Asian men.
Sometimes the rumour is true, sometimes it is not.
If, as in that case, the inciting rumour is not true, the best tool for squelching the false claim and quelling the violence is a trusted press, taking the term “press” in a wider sense than just newspapers. If the rumour is true, the best tool for quelling the violence is still a trusted press. It can do things like publicising condemnations of the crime from leaders of the group to which the perpetrator belongs. What a pity that Ireland, like much of the Western World, no longer has a trusted press because it no longer has a trustworthy press.
It’s not “Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”, it’s a damn sight closer to “Because of police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”. If the official sources of information won’t do their jobs, don’t be surprised when people turn to unofficial sources instead.
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Related posts: “Try not lying” – about the sexual assaults in Cologne and other German cities during the New Year celebrations of 1 January 2016, “If you do not want to see the BNP vindicated, try not proving them right”, and “Politically correct evasiveness fails on its own terms”.
In my recent post, “Peace-lovers love using the passive voice”, I asked you to supply particularly egregious examples of media attempts to downplay murders by Hamas and other protected groups. Ben did just that. From Canadian TV:
In case it disappears, the tweet from @CTVNews says, “Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died.”
The use of “has died” rather than “is dead” makes it sound like she passed away in hospital within the last few days. Actually, she has been dead for a month because she was murdered on October 7th, alongside more than a thousand others. The only thing that has happened within the last few days is that they finally identified her remains. In most situations I would not read so much into a journalist’s slightly odd use of the present perfect for an event a month ago, but when every such oddity of phrasing works to push the murderers out of sight, it is not a coincidence, it’s a technique. Most headlines are written to grab the reader’s attention; these headlines are written to be forgotten. Like the small print in a dodgy contract, they are carefully crafted to meet the technical requirement of having been stated somewhere, but, in a betrayal of the normal function of journalism, those who write them would prefer you not to read on. That someone “has died” is scarcely news at all. Every morning’s news report gives its crop of vaguely prominent people who have died during the previous few days. They don’t want you to think about when or how she died. They don’t want you to think about the state in which Vivian Silver’s body must have been found, given that her remains were not identified for a month. They don’t want you to feel the horror of her murder.
I am going to post an image. If I have done this right, it will be hidden “below the fold”, so you must click the link in order to see it. I put it below the fold because it is horrifying. Am I doing the same as CTV in that tweet I was complaining about, then? No, the opposite. They do all they can to stop their readers ever thinking about the reality of terrorism. I am giving readers who cannot stop thinking about it the option not to see one particularly distressing photograph. The image I am talking about shows a poster put out by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in response to the La Mon restaurant bombing carried out by the IRA in 1978. These days people discussing this poster feel obliged to blur it out, but in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles they were not so sensitive. The poster shows what CTV and so many others in the modern media want to hide. Again and again, it says the word they will not say.
→ Continue reading: Lest we remember
Soon after Hamas attacked Israel, Jeremy Corbyn made a speech. Kyle Orton noticed something odd about it:
“young people who died in the Negev desert”
“young people who’ve been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza”
Telling how he thinks.
So sad about those young people who “died in the desert”. What happened, did they forget water bottles and sun cream? Tut, tut, young people are so imprudent.
All languages have their irregularities. For instance, in Modern Journalese Jews can kill, where “to kill” is a transitive verb, but they die intransitively. Their allotted span of years happens to come to an end that day. The nearest the grammar of Journalese gets to expressing the idea that someone might have – uh, whatchamacallit, done that thing to a Jew so that they end up dying – is to tentatively mention an event that preceded it:
“Jewish man in California dies after confrontation during Israel-Hamas War protests” – Time magazine.
But remember, folks, correlation is not causation. Though in this case, it was. The Community Notes to that tweet by Time magazine state “The medical examiner ruled Paul Kessler’s death a homicide.” He was – I’m speaking normal English, not Journalese, so this sentence is grammatical despite Mr Kessler having been a Jew – killed. The definitional question that remains open is whether his killing was murder.
That question is not open when it comes to the young Israelis who were murdered by Hamas at a music festival in the Negev Desert.
Edit: In the comments, AFT points out that the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs is not the same as the distinction between active and passive voice. An example of the latter distinction would be “The Israelis killed the Palestinians” versus “The Israelis were killed by the Palestinians”. I have seen enough evidence of the journalistic preference for headlines in which Israelis actively, dynamically, kill specified people versus those in which Israelis are killed by unspecified people, and vice versa for Palestinians, that I think I can leave the double meaning of “passive” in my post title unchanged. If you have seen a particularly egregious example of either distinction, add it to the comments.
This is the hierarchy:
1. A killed B.
2. B was killed by A.
3. B was killed. (No killer specified.)
4. B died after some event. (Whether or not their death was a result of that event is left unspecified.)
5. B died at a given location or time, such as “in the Negev desert”, from which the reader who keeps up with the news might be able to deduce that the death was not natural.
A related strategy for avoiding naming murderers from a protected group is to blame it all on the instrument. This might be called the “killer car” strategy, as perfected by the Washington Post’s infamous reference to “the Waukesha tragedy caused by a SUV”.
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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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