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.
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“Teenagers could lose bank accounts and driving licences for snubbing national service, Rishi Sunak says”
Despite everything, I will vote Conservative in this election, because my local MP is Kemi Badenoch, of whom I approve. But what a silly party the Tories have become.
I had my say about their proposal to reinstate conscription a month ago in this post: “A press gang there I chanced to meet”. I am honestly amazed that the proposal is still alive as anything other than a guaranteed laugh line for Radio Four comedians. It seems I was wrong: the prime minister still maintains this is something he will do after his surprise election victory. OK, let’s run with that. If he thinks that it would be a good thing for the state to compel British youth to spend a year in the army or “volunteering” (yes, they really do call it that) in the community, why does he evidently not trust the legal mechanisms of compulsion that the state evolved over centuries to enforce it?
Taking away people’s driving licence is an arbitrary punishment. For one young draft-dodger living in the country it might come as a disaster, for another convicted of the same crime but living in a major city with good public transport, it would be no more than a mild inconvenience. A young person who could not drive in the first place would laugh in the faces of the enforcers. Did we not once have some sort of legal system to iron out inconsistencies like that?
Another thing, I could have sworn we used to have this idea that a driving licence was issued when a person had demonstrated he or she could safely operate a motor vehicle on the public highway, and could be revoked only if that person drove dangerously. If it can be revoked for offences that have nothing to do with driving, trust in the whole system of licensing is damaged.
Via Daniel Sugarman, I found this article by Talia Jane in the New Republic.
Before I quote from it, I must apologise for quoting myself. Over the last few days, I, like many other people, have talked about several instances of blatant Jew-hatred in New York. So that this post will stand alone, I am going to repeat part of what I said then:
The video [posted by “KosherCockney”] shows a bunch of supporters of the Palestinians, their faces hidden by keffiyehs or black ski masks, who have evidently just poured into a New York subway carriage. The ordinary travellers stand rigid or sit hunched with their eyes down, trying to avoid being selected.
The leader of the pro-Palestinians says, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Activists: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Leader: “This is your chance to get out.”
Activists: “This is your chance to get out.”
Understandably, none of the travellers raise their hands.
The progressive says with satisfaction, “OK, no Zionists. We’re good.”
I do not think it is an exaggeration to hear in that sentiment an echo of the Nazi term “Judenfrei”.
I urge you to watch the video if you have not yet seen it. Now read how Talia Jane describes it:
The fourth incident Biden references is perhaps the most disingenuous: Protesters filled subway cars while commuting from Union Square to Wall Street during Within Our Lifetime’s protest. As the car filled with pro-Palestine demonstrators, one protester jokingly remarked to the car, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist. This is your chance to get out,” a nod to the density of pro-Palestine protesters on the subway train. This remark was reinterpreted by the mayor as a threat, with calls to identify the protester and a spokesperson for the mayor stating, “Threatening New Yorkers based on their beliefs is not only vile, it’s illegal and will not be tolerated.”
“I was just kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” Bullies learn to say that in the school playground. Antifa activists and other racist persecutors quickly graduate to the the group version: “Can’t you people take a joke?” As a line to use while intimidating members of the public, it is effective in several ways. It both shields the racists from being punished for threatening behaviour, and torments their victims a second time, by forcing them to either deny that it was all a joke and admit how afraid they were, or to pretend to laugh along for fear of worse, and thus become complicit in their own humiliation. Both of these responses give the fanboys and fangirls like Talia Jane a good laugh.
“There is increasing outrage at the number of Palestinian casualties in Saturday’s operation in and around Nuseirat”, says the caption to a photograph illustrating a BBC story about what it calls the IDF “operation” in Nuseirat. The BBC story begins,
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says an Israeli raid on a refugee camp – which led to the rescue of four hostages – killed 274 people, including children and other civilians.
Notice how the BBC characterises the operation as primarily being “an Israeli raid on a refugee camp”, a phrase to tug on the heartstrings. Anyone would think that this raid on a “refugee camp” (Nuseirat has been there since 1948) was launched because the Israelis just like raiding refugee camps. The BBC says that the raid “led to” the rescue of four hostages as if that were a happy accident.
On Saturday Israel’s forces, backed by air strikes, fought intense gun battles with Hamas in and around the Nuseirat refugee camp, freeing the captives.
Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrei Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, who were abducted from the Nova music festival on 7 October have been returned to Israel.
As was the whole point of this meticulously-planned operation, or “rescue” as such things used to be called. There is a lot of outraging being done today. The Observer reports some more of it,
“Israeli attacks in central Gaza killed scores of Palestinians, many of them civilians, amid a special forces operation to free four hostages held there, a death toll that has caused international outrage”.
At least 274 Palestinians were killed and 698 wounded in Israeli strikes on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday. The Israeli military said its forces had come under heavy fire during the daytime operation.
The international outrage against Hamas for putting those civilians in harm’s way by hiding the hostages among them, and indeed for the crimes of starting the war and taking hostages in the first place, is entirely justified. Or it would be, if there were any. But that is not what “international outrage” means these days.
The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, called Saturday’s events a “massacre”, while the UN’s aid chief described in graphic detail scenes of “shredded bodies on the ground”.
“Nuseirat refugee camp is the epicentre of the seismic trauma that civilians in Gaza continue to suffer,” Martin Griffiths said in a post on X, calling for a ceasefire and the release of all hostages.
The Observer story does not say who Martin Griffiths is, or why his implication that Hamas releasing the hostages needs to be accompanied – or, in his word order, preceded – by a ceasefire as a quid pro pro should matter. Mr Griffiths is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. In February 2024, Griffiths told Sky News that “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, as you know, it is a political movement.”
Colchester always looks prosperous when I go there. There are designer clothes at prices I cannot afford in its charity shops. I think of it as a place where the last serious incident of anti-social behaviour was in AD 61. Not so, according to the Telegraph:
How libraries changed from local sanctuaries to antisocial behaviour hotspots
All the crime in British libraries has traditionally been contained between the covers of our books – any rowdiness instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”
But in Colchester, Essex, that idyll increasingly resembles fiction. Over the past three months, the city’s local library has recorded a shocking 54 incidents of antisocial behaviour, forcing librarians to consider donning bodycams for their own protection.
Books have been snatched from the shelves, tossed about and destroyed. An irreplaceable collection of local 18th-century maps has been defaced with obscene sketches. A glass door has been shattered, fires have been lit on the carpet tiles of the quiet study area and staff have been subjected to appalling verbal abuse and – on one occasion – a physical assault.
Non-paywall version of the story here.
It continues,
Perhaps most worrying of all, however, is that the Essex librarians are far from alone, with similar learning sanctuaries across the country now battling a wave of criminality and disorderly behaviour.
In Kent, such institutions witnessed a 500 per cent increase in antisocial incidents affecting staff and library users between 2020 and 2023, while in Bristol, several libraries were forced to close or change their opening hours over the school holidays last year to deter unruly young visitors.
Note the timeframe. I suspect that this startling 500% increase in antisocial incidents in Kent public libraries between 2020 and 2023 was a ripple from the Black Lives Matter tsunami finally making landfall after crossing the Atlantic. However that is but the latest book in a multi-volume saga. The article speaks of any rowdiness being ‘instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”’ When did that last happen, 1975? Perhaps there really were Shh-ing librarians like that once. My imagination gives them beehive hair and cat-eye glasses. Never actually saw one though, and in the 1980s I spent vast amounts of time in the local public library. All my life, trendy young librarians lived in terror of being thought to be that sort of librarian, and the fear never went away while they gradually turned into old librarians who’ve still got their CND badges in a drawer somewhere.
No longer the silent book storage and study areas of old, libraries have evolved to become “community hubs” offering a wide range of free or affordable services to visitors of all ages. You can go to a library to access the internet and use printers and photocopiers. They host knitting clubs, manga drawing sessions and bereavement support meetings. Often they’ll loan out medical equipment such as blood pressure monitors, with many becoming Covid vaccination centres during the pandemic. A new Scottish scheme even offers up musical instruments for users.
In Colchester’s library, parents and grandparents are supervising toddlers clambering around a small soft play area situated on the two-storey building’s ground floor.
There is nothing wrong with the manga drawing or the soft play areas in themselves. Nor do I have any automatic objection to a library, in the sense of a place whose primary purpose is to make books available to the public, also hosting activities such as Drag Queen Story Hour, as Colchester library has done. Although I do think the famous Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey whom Redbridge council commissioned to do the rounds of its children’s libraries in 2021 might have been a little off-putting to certain demographics.
If public, government-run libraries were private, commercially-run libraries as once existed in the UK – Boots the Chemist used to run a mass-market circulating library – we could have lively competition between the “We’re not your grandma’s library” libraries and the “We are your grandma’s library” libraries. I am sure there is room for both.
But that is a dream. In the real world, low as its fees were, “Boots Book-Lovers’ Library” could not compete with the government-subsidised version which proudly boasted it was free to all. And the generations of public librarians since then thought they were being non-authoritarian by taking that “to all” literally. “The library isn’t just about books”, they said. The banks of computers pushed the books into a corner. “The library isn’t just for swots”, they said. “We won’t make you stay quiet”, they said. It stopped being a quiet haven for swots. “We are inclusive”, they said. “The library is for all sorts of people.” And, lo, no one was excluded and all sorts of people came.
“Conservatives want to bring back mandatory national service”, reports the BBC:
Twelve months of mandatory national service would be reintroduced by the Conservatives if they win the general election.
Eighteen-year-olds would be able to apply for one of 30,000 full-time military placements or volunteering one weekend a month carrying out a community service.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic.
Back to the good old days:
As I walked out on London street
A press gang there I chanced to meet
They asked me if I would join the fleet
On board of a man-o-war, boys
They said that a sailor’s life was fine
Good comrades and good pay I’d find
They promised me a bloody good time,
On board of a man-o-war, boys
– Traditional sea shanty
The press-ganged sailors of the Napoleonic wars often did fight well. That might have been due to their national spirit. Or it might have been due to the disciplinary methods detailed in the next two verses of the song:
But when I went, to my surprise
All they’d told me was shocking lies
There was a row and bloody old row
On board of a man-o-war, boys
The first thing they did, they took me in hand
And they flogged me with a tarry strand.
They flogged me till I couldn’t stand,
On board of a man-o-war, boys
The Home Secretary is already rowing back:
James Cleverly has insisted that “no one is going to jail” if they refuse to take part in National Service, but that the Tories would “compel” young people to participate.
Rishi Sunak last night vowed to create a mandatory scheme where school leavers will either have to enrol on a 12-month military placement or spend one weekend each month volunteering in their community.
But Mr Cleverly said that young people would not face any criminal sanctions if they did not take part.
Asked what would happen if someone said they didn’t want to engage, the Home Secretary told Trevor Phillips on Sky News: “There’s going to be no criminal sanction for this. No one’s going to jail over this…
“We want to make this compelling, we are going to compel people to do it, but also we want to make sure that it fits with different people’s aptitudes and aspirations.”
He added that “we force people to do things all the time” when pressed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg about whether he was comfortable as a Conservative forcing teenagers to do something.
He told the BBC: “We force 16-year-olds who, as a society, for example, we recognise are not fully formed, and they still require education. So the decision was made that they remain in education or training.
“So we force teenagers to be educated. No one argues with that.
I argue with it.
“Which is it? Do you want to occupy the public space to express your dissent and invoke your absolute right to speak? Or do you want to beat on anyone who then exists in that same space and invokes their absolute right to document it?”
– a tweet from David Simon referring to a video posted by Logan Schiciano with the accompanying text “Unfortunately some protesters at Northwestern’s newly-formed encampment weren’t too thrilled with us reporting” in which a masked protester assaults the person filming them.
Remember the “Occupy” movement? The Occupy Paradox is this: “Upon what basis can an Occupy protest ask someone to leave?”
… because “This is private property” or any other version of “You have no right to be here” are open to some fairly obvious ripostes.
“We were here first” – “Er, not quite first. The actual owners of the space were there before you.”
“We are the 99%” – “We’re poorer than you, you middle class ****-ers”
“We represent the 99%” – “Who voted for you, then?”
“We are the official accredited Occupiers” – “We refuse to be defined by your oppressive structures, and hereby declare ourselves to be Occupying this Occupation!”
Those who claim they are anti-war, and for peace (inverted commas stand ready for use), have in the past often had a rather curious hostility towards anti-missile defence systems. I remember that when Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Sec. in the US in the early noughties, his support for anti-missile defence (I am using the British spelling of defence, okay?) was seen as somehow problematic, a sign of what a fool he was, etc, etc.
Well, how the world turns. From the Wall Street Journal on Monday this week:
It’s no small irony that President Biden is hailing the success of missile and drone defenses over Israel. In the 1980s there was no more dedicated foe of missile defense than Sen. Joe Biden. Democrats have resisted or under-financed missile defenses for decades on grounds that they’re too expensive and too easily defeated by new technology.
Progressives oppose defenses because they think vulnerability somehow makes war less likely. On nuclear arms, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others prefer the doctrine of mutual-assured destruction to being able to shoot down enemy ICBMs.
Israel’s defenses proved how wrong this view is, displaying their practical and strategic value. If the more than 300 drones and ballistic and cruise missiles had reached their targets, Mr. Biden wouldn’t be able to say, as he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday night, “take the win.” The mass casualties would have all but guaranteed a large-scale military escalation.
It seems to me that, if you are a small/minimal state sort of person, hostile to foreign interventionism (as much as of the domestic kind), and purely in favour of using force in response to the initiation of physical force, then having the ability to shoot down armed drones and ballistic missiles, fighter jets, etc, is in the same moral bracket as having locks on doors, or the freedom to carry concealed firearms, pepper spray, noise alarms, having a guard dog, a scary spouse, etc.
Here’s an item about the Iron Dome anti-missile system that Israel uses.
This article asserts that President Biden’s sceptical, even hostile approach, to missile defence goes back decades. In 2021, the Biden administration reportedly pullled a bunch of Patriot anti-missile systems from four Middle East nations.
The UK’s Royal Navy has a Sea Viper system to knock down drones. Here is an official release about such technology in the UK. The British Army has something called a Sky Sabre system.
A suggestion I have heard, made almost in jest but it might be true, was that Iran launching more than three hundred drones and missiles at Israel might have been intended as some weird form of de-escalation. The reasoning behind this theory is Iran knew perfectly well that the main effect of its attack would be to demonstrate just how good Israel’s air defences are, but that the expensive gesture would satisfy their own hawks without giving Israel any emotional reason to strike back.
I read somewhere that in nineteenth-century France most professional men could expect to be challenged to a duel at some time in their career. To refuse meant dishonour. To accept meant the prospect of death or serious injury, or the lesser but still significant unpleasantness of inflicting it on someone else. To deal with this problem the custom arose that by silent mutual agreement the splendid-looking duelling pistols used would have been made in very small calibres and taking only a tiny amount of black powder. When fired they produced a reasonable bang which carried with it enough prospect of doing harm to satisfy the honour of the duellists – but in practice wearing a thick woollen overcoat was usually enough to deflect the slow-moving ball.
Perhaps Iran was, or thought it was, acting like one of those duellists. If so, we shall have to see whether Israel is on board with the “silent mutual agreement” part of the analogy.
What do you think?
“Key power plant near Kyiv destroyed by Russian strikes”, the BBC reported yesterday.
There are several different English spellings of the name of the power plant and the place where it is situated. I have seen Trypillya, Trypillia, Trypilska and Tripilska. However one spells it, the thermal power plant was the largest electricity provider for three regions including Kyiv.
I’m not going to sugar-coat it: this is a heavy blow to Ukraine. What happens next? Given that it has worked well for them, we must assume that the Russians will repeat the same tactic. But two can can play at that game – if they are allowed to.
The above tweet from Amnesty International is still up. In case it disappears, here is the text:
Amnesty International
@amnesty
The death in custody of Walid Daqqa, a 62-year-old Palestinian writer who was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails after 38 years of imprisonment, is a cruel reminder of Israel’s disregard for Palestinians’ right to life
From amnesty.org
Last edited
6:39 PM · Apr 8, 2024
The tweet calls Walid Daqqa “a Palestinian writer”, as if he had been imprisoned for his writings – as if he were the sort of prisoner of conscience on whose behalf I used to write letters on that special blue Air Mail paper, back when I was a member of Amnesty International.
To be fair, although you would never guess it from their tweet, the linked article by Amnesty does make perfunctory mention of the non-literary crime that caused Walid Daqqa to be put in prison:
On 25 March 1986, Israeli forces arrested Walid Daqqah, then 24, a Palestinian citizen of Israel. In March 1987, an Israeli military court sentenced him to life imprisonment after convicting him of commanding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)-affiliated group that had abducted and killed Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984.
Perhaps concerned about her wordcount, Amnesty’s writer, Erika Guevara-Rosas, did not say much about Moshe Tamam. She cited Walid Daqqa’s youthful age at the time, 24, but did not see fit to say that his victim Moshe Tamam was just 19. And she skips over some relevant details in that brief word “killed”. Daqqa and his PFLP comrades did not just kill Moshe Tamam, they tortured him to death. They gouged out his eyes and castrated him. Then they murdered him.
But Ms Guevara-Rosas found space in her article to write most eloquently about Walid Daqqa:
During his time in prison, Walid Daqqah wrote extensively about the Palestinian lived experience in Israeli prisons. He acted as a mentor and educator for generations of young Palestinian prisoners, including children. His writings, which included letters, essays, a celebrated play and a novel for young adults, were an act of resistance against the dehumanization of Palestinian prisoners. “Love is my modest and only victory against my jailer,” he once wrote.
Walid Daqqah’s writings behind bars are a testament to a spirit never broken by decades of incarceration and oppression.
“The machine did it coldly: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets” – that is the title of a Guardian piece on Israel’s use of the “Lavender” AI-assisted targeting system.
The Israeli military’s bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war.
In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict.
Their unusually candid testimony provides a rare glimpse into the first-hand experiences of Israeli intelligence officials who have been using machine-learning systems to help identify targets during the six-month war.
Israel’s use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines.
“This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that they had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
The article, by Bethan McKernan and Harry Davies, contains several howlers such as a reference to “the shockingly high death toll in the war”. Even if I believed Hamas casualty figures, which I do not, the death toll in this war is shockingly low. The Allied bombing of Dresden probably killed more people over three nights than have died over six months of the current Israeli-Hamas war.
Nonetheless, as the quoted passage shows, the authors have pointed out that one of the benefits to humanity of AI targeting in war is that it takes the immediate decision to kill out of the hands of humans.
And puts it… where exactly? I am all in favour of targeted killing, if the alternative is untargeted killing. I am in favour of the decision to kill being made according to rational military and legal criteria agreed openly in advance, if the alternative is the decision being made in a split second by someone who is angry and afraid. But I share the writers’ disquiet at the idea of the process of war becoming detached from human control entirely.
What is your view?
Have you met the hate monster?
Have you met the Hate Monster?
The Hate Monster, represents that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime.
The Hate Monster loves it when you get angry. He weighs you down till you end up targeting someone, just because they look or act different to you.
When you’re feeling insecure or angry, the Hate Monster feeds on that.
Why do some people let the Hate Monster in?
We know that young men aged 18-30 are most likely to commit hate crime, particularly those from socially excluded communities who are heavily influenced by their peers.
They may have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement.
Hurt people, hurt people
Committing hate crime is strongly linked to a range of risk factors including economic deprivation, adverse childhood experiences, substance abuse and under-employment. Those who grow up in abusive environments can become addicted to conflict.
Don’t let the Hate Monster rule your life
If you have committed or feel you are at risk of committing a hate crime, remember, it doesn’t make you feel better. Maybe for a moment, but in the end, you feel worse. The hate lingers. It can really mess up your life in other ways too, like when it comes to things like finding a job. A police record for hate crime is not a good look on anyone.
Go on, be good to yourself. Don’t feed the Hate Monster.
Watch award-winning stand-up, Liam Farrelly, lead a discussion about the impact of hate.
What to do if you see the hate monster
If you experience hate crime, report it.
If you are a witness to hate crime, report it.
Find out more about the different ways you can make a report.
The official hate monster video would have been perfectly acceptable for primary schools to show to pupils in their PSHE lessons. But if Police Scotland’s idea of a message for adults is “The Hate Monster loves it when you get angry”, I dread to think what the kids’ version is like…
I tawt I taw a hatey monster!
I did! I did! I taw a hatey monster!
Hatey watey monster said hatey tings. Hatey monster said bad tings ’bout all lotsa peepuw coz of pwotected kawactewistic. Hatey monster said, “They may have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement.”
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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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