By some miraculous and tortuous process you have become your country’s head of government and been endowed with dictatorial powers. What is the first thing you do?
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Soon after Hamas attacked Israel, Jeremy Corbyn made a speech. Kyle Orton noticed something odd about it:
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. 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”. November 14th, 2023 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 What happened over the weekend is that every single media outlet in the country went into overdrive to say that Braverman’s comments are fuelling the “far right”. If you’re not entirely clued up on British political designations, in this country the far right generally refers to people who: – are racist and intolerant towards other ethnic and religious groups – harbour prejudice against sexual minorities – consider women inferior to men and treat them as second-class citizens – use violence to achieve their political objectives and incite violence in public In other words, the “far right” have been on British streets for weeks chanting genocidal slogans, calling for Jihad and saying things like “death to all the Jews” and “Hitler knew how to deal with these people”. But that is, of course, not who the media mean when they talk about the “far right”. What they mean is a small number of football fans who like to get pissed and get into scuffles with the police. When these people did turn up, this was immediately taken as evidence that Braverman had incited a riot. Because if there’s one thing we know about football hooligans it’s that they all have a subscription to the Times and take inspiration from powerful brown women. – Konstantin Kisin (£) November 13th, 2023 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
The state does not provide stability in such a case but rather the sort of mono-culture that makes systems unstable and takes them all down at once in a paroxysm of fiscal failure. As ever, the mantra of “too important to be left to free markets/the people” is the most towering of lies. the comfort of one’s retirement is far too important not to be. November 12th, 2023 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
This article about “climate fatigue” by Francesco Grillo is one of the better arguments I have seen in the Guardian on the topic: “Climate fatigue isn’t a sign that Europeans are in denial – it’s a sign of their fear”. It starts very much in the usual fashion:
I am suspicious of that claim that the decline in European popular support for climate measures “has little to do with” many Europeans ceasing to believe in the seriousness of the claimed coming catastrophe. It has lots to do with it, obviously. If the people of Europe still held the same level of belief in the imminence and severity of CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) as they did five years back, their support for drastic measures to head off this disaster would also be at the same level as it was then. They don’t and it isn’t. Their increased scepticism is justified. A great many predictions of doom have failed to come to pass. Click on the word “CAGW” to see relevant past posts by me and others on this blog going back more than two decades. I will restate my own opinion: that anthropogenic global warming probably is occurring but at nothing like the apocalyptic level claimed. Angela Merkel would have been better off saying, “Wir schaffen das” about climate change. However honesty compels me to say that some of the decline in belief is motivated by people finally having twigged that the bill for Net Zero will not ultimately be paid by the infinitely absorbent corporations and governments of legend, but by them. When people drop a luxury belief because it ceases to be a luxury they can afford, they do advance towards reason, but not by means of reason. Sometimes that’s the best we can hope for. It’s not like the prophets of doom are immune from motivated reasoning themselves. The point is that Europeans have realised, correctly, that if we actually do all that the Greens want us to do, it will impoverish us. If we do a quarter of what the Greens want us to do, it will impoverish us. That would be bad, even from – or especially from – the point of view of people worried about climate change. Impoverished societies cease to care about the environment. This is why I said that Mr Grillo’s article is one of the better ones I have read in the Guardian. They are not usually so honest about the cost:
And
November 11th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi. This excuse-making was not only condescending towards Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war. We have seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as a justified response to the policies of the Israeli government. November 11th, 2023 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
I like Vivek Ramaswamy. He says a lot of things that need to be said. But on Ukraine he is absolutely clueless. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that; he has negative knowledge. Denys Davydov explains: Update Well, I did try to get it to start at the good bit but without success. The fun starts at ≈ 14:27. Update II And now it’s working as intended! Grrr! November 10th, 2023 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hamas likes nothing better than an Israeli strike that kills civilians. That is why it has reportedly been preventing its people from fleeing the war zone, sometimes by force. They seemingly want Palestinian casualties to pile high, in full view of the world’s media. The BBC and others beam footage of the horror of war around the world to people who have lost touch with the reality of armed conflict. Hamas want people in the West to take to the streets in outrage, forgetting that even a just and defensive war is hell. They know this will help them win. November 9th, 2023 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is pretty grim stuff by the splendid Nancy Rommelmann. Read it anyway. November 8th, 2023 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There is an ironically neocolonial feel to the cultural elites’ absolution of Hamas. It is their indoctrination into the politics of identity that leads them to view Israel as the culpable adult in this relationship and the Palestinians as blameless children. Critical-race-theory narratives about white privilege and brown victimhood have led to a situation where not only are whites demonised as powerful and destructive but also non-white people are patronised to an obscene degree as non-powerful and pathetic. This hollow, pat explanation for every political event has now been cut-and-pasted on to the Middle East (despite the fact that Israel is not a ‘white’ country). The end result? Both Israelis and Palestinians are denuded of their humanity, the former damned as the conscious authors of all ills, the latter reduced to the moral infants of world affairs, whom ‘nobody should blame’ even ‘for the things we do’, in Hamad’s words. The anti-Israel elites take a far more racially paternalistic view of Palestinians than Israel does.” – The relentlessly quotable Brendan O’Neill, at Spiked. Another crushingly good paragraph: “There is a serious danger in the neo-racist absolution of Hamas. It serves as a green light to further terror. For if you are never held to account for what you do, you can do anything you like. Hamas now knows, from the global fallout from its pogrom, that it will always be absolved. That it enjoys a kind of moral impunity among the opinion-formers of the West. That its mass slaughter will be contextualised, explained, forgiven. That even its use of civilian buildings and civilian vehicles to store and transport the machinery of its war crimes will not bother the consciences of those who pose as pro-Palestinian. Our elites have done something even worse than blame Israelis for their own deaths – they have signalled to Hamas that if it were to do the same again, there would be no moral consequences. Its blamelessness would remain intact. The failure of our intellectual elites to condemn the Hamas pogrom is an implicit approval of future pogroms.” Read the whole thing, as the saying goes. By the way, the expression “intellectual elite” deserves to be covered in scare quotes. “Elite” implies quality, but I see little evidence of it. November 7th, 2023 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wanted to post something that wasn’t about the Israel-Hamas war. This is as close as I got. Pakistan starts mass deportation of undocumented Afghans – Shah Meer Baloch in the Guardian Why is Pakistan deporting over a million undocumented Afghan immigrants? – Reuters Pak Deports Over 1M Afghans To Taliban-Ruled Afghanistan, No outrage From Islamic Nations – Pooja Shali of India Today Nearly 1.7 Million Afghan Refugees Forced Out Of Pakistan – On Demand News Afghans fleeing Pakistan lack water, food and shelter, aid groups say – NBC News/Associated Press November 7th, 2023 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Netanyahu quits over withdrawal from Gaza”. Having got your attention, I will now admit that the Guardian story by Conal Urquhart to which I just linked dates from 8 August 2005. Despite the news of Netanyahu having quit being eighteen years out of date, it is worth your time to read. It will give you a sense of why, despite his many failings, Israelis might be willing to cut their current prime minister some slack:
He called it horribly right. Here is another report from 2005, this time by the BBC, “Israel completes Gaza withdrawal”.
In 2005, the Israelis finally did what so many goodhearted, decent, moderate people in their own country and worldwide had long urged them to do. They gave up land in the hope of peace. They dismantled the Jewish settlements, by force if necessary, but famously left behind high-tech greenhouses full of crops as a gift for the new owners of Gaza. The illusions of the donors who had funded that generous gesture did not last the day. The illusion that giving up the Gaza Strip would be a step towards peace lasted until October 7th, 2023, another historic and joyful day for the Palestinian people. And now all the goodhearted, decent and moderate people – often, since the careers of newspaper columnists can span decades, literally the same people – are once again calling for Israel to be reasonable and call a ceasefire. Until the morning of October 7th, the Israelis thought they had a ceasefire. November 5th, 2023 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
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