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But I would not look for them first among the pilots. A survey of RAF personnel has revealed that confidence in the RAF chief and his leadership team has hit rock bottom, according to Sky News.
The figures will be a blow for Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, who is to step down as chief of the air staff on Friday – with his career likely to be remembered by a disastrous recruitment drive to improve diversity that disadvantaged white men.
Sky News revealed this week how applicants were dismissed as “useless white male pilots” – as pressure mounted to attract women and ethnic minorities – and that the RAF had to pay £5,000 each to 31 white men who were impacted by the policy.
It only stopped when, as first revealed by Sky News last August, the then head of recruitment resigned in protest at what she deemed to be an “unlawful order” to discriminate against white men.
There was one paragraph that had me scratching my head at first:
While much criticism has been directed at Air Chief Marshal Wigston over the adverse impact of his diversity drive on white men, the survey also found that the proportion of personnel who agreed that their leaders were committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace had dropped 15 percentage points to 57% since 2022.
What? Was it not the RAF’s leadership’s eyes-tight-shut commitment to “creating a diverse and inclusive workplace” that caused all the trouble? Given that they put this objective before the defence of the realm, don’t they at least get credit for sincerity on that, if nothing else?
No. They do not. The RAF personnel who have ceased to believe that their leaders truly desire diversity have reason on their side. These were not the actions of idealistic dreamers; they were the acts of careerists frightened they would end up on the wrong side of a denunciation meeting.
This is the fruit of a movement that propagates itself by intimidation. Intimidation gets compliance, but ever fewer believe that the wretches who must proclaim it actually believe it.
Tara Reade, the woman who accused Joe Biden of having sexually assaulted her when she worked for him as a Congressional aide, has “defected” to Russia.
I first noticed her direction of travel when I saw a tweet by her in praise of Vladlen Tatarsky. Plenty of people had concerns about his killing without gushing over him in the way she did. I cannot find that tweet now. It was there. Perhaps she deleted it when she read the replies. At any rate, she has now gone fully Putinite.
And her accusation against Joe Biden should still be taken seriously by the authorities. Note that “taken seriously” does not mean “automatically believed”. #BelieveWomen is a literally prejudiced sentiment on a moral par with #BelieveWhitePeople. Nor does it mean “automatically disbelieved”. As a woman and a Putinite, Tara Reade’s report of a crime being committed against her should be taken seriously, because as an anything whatsoever anyone whatsoever should have their report of a crime taken seriously.
The gross disproportion between the way the media lined up not merely to cover but to profess their unquestioning belief in Christine Blasey Ford’s unevidenced accusation of sexual assault against Justice Brett Kavanaugh yet refused to even look at Reade’s considerably more detailed accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden will never be anything other than a disgrace.
The first few dozen grownup books I read were an odd selection. As I sampled them almost at random from my parents’ bookshelves, I became dimly aware that my parents were different people from each other, were different from what they had once been, and read books by people with whom they disagreed. Alongside the works by G K Chesterton and C S Lewis one would expect on the shelves of liberal British Catholics of the 1970s, I found such things as a book of essays by the Stalinist physicist J D Bernal – and a copy of Ideology and Insanity by Thomas Szasz. Attracted by the strangeness to my young eyes of the name “Szasz” and the wonderful cover art of the Penguin edition that depicted two men playing chess across a Escher-like dimensional warp, I gave it a go.
Almost a decade before I heard the term “Libertarian”, I thus had my first introduction to an important strand of libertarian thought. Until the copy of that same 1970 Penguin edition I just ordered on eBay arrives, I shall have to go by memory and Szasz’s Wikipedia biography as to exactly what the book said, but I do remember being thrilled to feel my perspective suddenly widen, in a manner akin to what I had felt when I realised that the Earth was but one of an infinite number of possible vantage points in the universe.
Szasz cited drapetomania as an example of a behavior that many in society did not approve of, being labeled and widely cited as a disease. Likewise, women who did not bend to a man’s will were said to have hysteria.
He thought that psychiatry actively obscures the difference between behavior and disease in its quest to help or harm parties in conflicts. He maintained that, by calling people diseased, psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents in order to better control them.
And
Szasz believed that if we accept that “mental illness” is a euphemism for behaviors that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric “treatment” on these individuals
Great stuff. I think Szasz still has much to teach us… but I suppose by now you have all heard of the killing of Jordan Neely on a New York subway train?
→ Continue reading: Ideology and Insanity on the New York subway
I don’t know where to start. How much will the leaked information help the Russians and harm the Ukrainians? How much of it was not already common knowledge? How did Teixeira come to have access to information that neither his relatively low rank nor his role as an IT person justified him seeing? What about the role of the media? The New York Times tracked the leaker down then told the US government. Very 1950s.
If this were happening in the UK, I would not dare to ask the following for fear of prosecution, but since it is happening in the US and my tiny rivulet of speculation cannot possibly make any difference to the tsunami already crossing the world: which was he, or which was he more, a leaker, a whistleblower, a patsy for someone higher up, a braggart wanting to impress people online, a hero exposing US government lies, a traitor sending Ukrainians and fellow US servicemen to their deaths?
We are now forewarned that the British government has chosen St. George’s Day, 23rd April 2023, to trial a new ‘alert’ system by sending alerts to the phones of everyone in the UK. It seems that you have to interact with the phone to stop it blaring a siren-like noise at you, and so acknowledge this impertinence.
However, not all phones can receive these ‘alerts’. The functionality is limited:
Compatible mobile phones and other devices
Make sure your device has all the latest software updates.
Emergency alerts work on:
iPhones running iOS 14.5 or later
Android phones and tablets running Android 11 or later
If you have an earlier version of Android, you may still be able to receive alerts. To check, search your device settings for ‘emergency alerts’.
But you can turn off these alerts on your phone (if you are socially-unfriendly):
You can opt out of emergency alerts, but you should keep them switched on for your own safety.
To opt out:
Search your settings for ‘emergency alerts’.
Turn off ‘severe alerts’ and ‘extreme alerts’.
If you still get alerts, contact your device manufacturer for help.
Blimey, something the government acknowledges that it can’t help me with, is this a first?
But what, pray, is this all for?
You may get alerts about:
severe flooding
fires
extreme weather
One might hope that severe flooding and fires would be incompatible, but perhaps with the climate emergency, Mr Sunak will set the Thames on fire.
And the form of this message?
‘It ain’t half hot, Mum!‘
Not exactly:
What happens when you get an emergency alert
Your mobile phone or tablet may:
make a loud siren-like sound, even if it’s set on silent
vibrate
read out the alert
The sound and vibration will last for about 10 seconds.
An alert will include a phone number or a link to the GOV.UK website for more information.
OK, but what should I do if I get an ‘alert’?
What you need to do
When you get an alert, stop what you’re doing and follow the instructions in the alert.
But does this apply to say, surgeons in an operating theatre? This is not mentioned.
And wait, what if I am…
If you’re driving or riding when you get an alert
You should not read or otherwise respond to an emergency alert whilst driving or riding a motorcycle.
If you are driving, you should continue to drive and not respond to the noise or attempt to pick up the mobile phone and deal with the message.
Find somewhere safe and legal to stop before reading the message. If there is nowhere safe or legal to stop close by, and nobody else is in the vehicle to read the alert, tune into live radio and wait for bulletins until you can find somewhere safe and legal to stop.
It is illegal to use a hand-held device while driving or riding.
Well at least that’s clear…
What is the legal basis for the government taking this power, and why is this not explained?
And presumably, if there’s someone running amok with knives or guns, this won’t be part of the alert system, when it might actually be unexpected, unlike the weather.
I can see where this is going. It will eventually be used to warn people that Nigel Farage is making a speech locally and that they should stay indoors and not follow the event on social media.
Sorry, I was being overly cynical there, I have seen this:
If you cannot receive emergency alerts
If you do not have a compatible device, you’ll still be informed about an emergency. The emergency services have other ways to warn you when there is a threat to life.
Emergency alerts will not replace local news, radio, television or social media.
That’s good to know, I had been wondering if it would. And I am pleased to hear that I won’t be getting messages from Robert Spencer if there is a certain type of rare incident in the locality. Then again, what if there is a hippo on the loose? Is there a template alert message for that, if not, why not? Are you seriously trying to protect us? Will it sound if there is, say, an unexpected landing on a beach by persons unknown?
Around 35 years ago, the late Auberon Waugh said that people only go into politics for the pleasure of pressing switches and watching us all jump. This figure of speech has become reality.
What is the 77th Brigade for? According to its own website, the mission of this unit of the British Army is to CHALLENGE THE DIFFICULTIES OF MODERN WARFARE. Despite the capital letters I do not feel hugely better informed. It continues,
We are a combined Regular and Army Reserve unit. Our aim is to challenge the difficulties of modern warfare using non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of the opposing forces and adversaries.
Um, okay. I would not want the difficulties of modern warfare to go unchallenged. I would even be up for them challenging the easy bits of modern warfare while they’re at it. However, before I give my wholehearted support to “adapting behaviours of the opposing forces” I would like to know what adapting-without-a-to means in normal English. Is it us changing them or them changing us? The question is pertinent because according to a whistleblower who contacted the civil liberties organisation Big Brother Watch, the last part of the line about the target of the British Army’s behavioural adaptation squad being “opposing forces and adversaries” seems to have been quietly dropped.
This link allows you to download a Big Brother Watch report called Ministry of Truth: the secretive government units spying on your speech.
The key findings are:
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, Conservative MPs David Davis and Chris Green, high profile academics from the University of Oxford and University College London, and journalists including Peter Hitchens and Julia Hartley-Brewer, all had comments critical of the government analysed by anti-misinformation units.
Targeted speech included public criticism of the government’s pandemic response – particularly lockdown modelling and vaccine passports – as well as journalists’ criticism of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and MPs’ criticism of NATO
Soldiers from the Army’s 77th Brigade, tasked with “non-lethal psychological warfare”, collected tweets from British citizens posting about Covid-19 and passed them to central government – despite claiming operations were directed strictly overseas
A counter-misinformation unit pressured the Dept. of Health to attack newspapers for publishing articles analysing Covid-19 modelling that it feared would undermine compliance with pandemic restrictions.
MPs and journalists were featured in “vaccine hesitancy reports” for opposing vaccine passports
Contractors paid over £1m to trawl social media for perceived terms of service violations on selected topics and pass them to government officials
Counter-disinformation units use special relationships with social media companies to recommend content be removed
Front organisations aimed at minority communities were set up to spread government propaganda in the UK
BBW have provided a jolly little template that allows you exercise your legal right to find out if you personally were having your social media posts monitored. However that does seem to involve giving the government the real name behind your twitter handle, which in the circumstances…
“How a personal trainer’s smart watch caused 15 armed police officers to turn up to his Sydney gym while he was teaching a client” – Daily Mail.
Apparently, Jaime Alleyne, who is a a Muay Thai and boxing trainer, called out “one, one, two” followed by “good shot” to a client he was sparring with. He was not wearing his smart watch but it was still active – and 112 is one of the Australian emergency phone numbers. Mr Alleyne said, “Next minute about 15 officers including undercovers showed up, with several ambulances parked out the front, and that’s when I started bricking myself.”
He would have had no need to fear an over-zealous response from the UK emergency services. They would still be waiting for a risk assessment.
Dear all,
As we wind down for Christmas, it is important to ensure that we keep ourselves safe, and I have found this wonderful but short instructional video, purportedly from Finland c. 1979, helpfully showing how to open a door correctly. I would recommend turning on the English subtitles for most of us, but other subtitles are available for those of us unable to understand the wonderful Finnish language.
I have a nagging feeling that this might have been a parody of ‘health and safety’ instructional videos, but if that was its aim, it has failed miserably to stem the tide.
I was depressed to see Ros Kaveney tweeting this:
“I’ve sometimes been accused of being a psychopath and a liar for accusing GCs and their fascist allies of promoting genocide of trans people. The Lemkin Institute agrees with me.”
I briefly met Roz Kaveney many years ago, at a speech she gave. She dealt very patiently and graciously with the curiosity of her mostly student audience about her having had a sex change, at a time when it was much more rare to meet openly transgender people than it is now. I do not think she is a psychopath or a liar. I just think she has succumbed to the terrible effects of being in a social media reverberation chamber. I had heard of the Lemkin Institute, too, named after the scholar of genocide Raphael Lemkin, most of whose family were murdered in the Holocaust. The world is not yet safe from such horrors, as shown by the Institute’s pages on historical, ongoing and threatened genocides in places such as Armenia, Somaliland and Ukraine. It should get back to the day job, which urgently needs doing. The Lemkin Institute’s “Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice” is absurd.
Remember this movie?
One night a year, all crime is legal.
THE PURGE
Survive the night.
According to Wikipedia, The Purge posits that ‘In 2014, a political party called the “New Founding Fathers of America” are voted into office following an economic collapse, and pass a law sanctioning the “Purge”, an annual event wherein all crime is legal and emergency services are temporarily suspended. By 2022, the United States is said to have become virtually crime-free, with legal unemployment rates having dropped to 1%.’
Virtually crime-free and unemployment at 1%? That compares favourably with our timeline’s 2022, but nonetheless, this is not the the sort of policy proposal I usually associate with the Liberal Democrats – but it seems Ed Davey is ready to rock: “No one should lose their home this Christmas”, says the Lib Dem website. It continues:
Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has called for an emergency ban on repossessions and evictions this Winter. This comes after the Conservative Government’s mismanagement of the economy caused spiralling mortgage and rental prices.
These measures would stop banks from repossessing people’s homes who have been hit the hardest by soaring mortgage prices as well as bringing forward the promised ban on no-fault evictions, alongside a ban on evictions for arrears over the winter.
We are deeply concerned that both renters and homeowners could face homelessness during one of the most difficult Winters in living memory.
We are making these urgent calls on the Conservative Government as only days of Parliament remain before Christmas for the Prime Minister to take responsibility for the mess his Government has caused.
The Conservatives have failed time and time again to bring forward the ban on no-fault evictions they promised and have made no attempt to stop repossessions caused by their disastrous mini-Budget. They must act now before it is too late.
No-one should face losing their home this Christmas because the Conservative Government crashed the economy.
Why so tame, Ed? If it is a good thing that one group of people should be allowed to take what they have not paid for without punishment over the Christmas period, why not others? Discriminatory, I call it. Let us throw away the shackles of enforcement of property rights for everyone this Christmas!
It’s Christmas time
There’s no need to be afraid
At Christmas time
We let in light and we banish shade
And in our world of plenty
We can spread a smile of joy
Throw your arms around the world
At Christmas time
“Don’t talk to me about Partygate. Don’t talk to me about Suella Braverman’s emails. Talk to me about the fact that a 28-year-old man with devastating injuries was left in unimaginable pain and terror as fire engines drove in the other direction and ambulances stayed away. Talk to me about the fact that our emergency services step back from horrific incidents because of ‘safety fears’. Talk to me about this institutionalised cowardice, where the emergency services now make bureaucratic safety assessments rather than behaving with courage and bravery to assist people in dire need. Avoiding risk is a completely surreal principle for the emergency services to adopt. These people should take risks. They should be rushing into danger to help the men, women and children facing that danger.”
– Brendan O’Neill, writing about the descriptions of shocking slowness by emergency services around the time of the Manchester terrorist attack of 2017. (Here is a link to the second report into the brutal attacks, and how services did, or did not, respond.)
There is no doubt that Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has been the victim of a vicious assault. There is no doubt that the person who carried out this attack was David DePape. There is widespread doubt about many other aspects of the story. The most common theory is that far from breaking into to the Pelosi residence as an assassin, DePape was invited in as a male prostitute, only for the two men to quarrel over payment or drugs. I will not rehash the arguments put forward in support of this theory, which are available to be read all over the internet. I do wish to stress that if all or any of this is true, it in no way excuses the crime. It would, however, make it a different type of crime from the one the media say it is.
The media would have you believe that these doubts come only from mad conspiracy theorists. They are not helping their case by silently changing details of their own reporting.
Look at these screenshots of two Politico accounts of this story, presented side by side by Stephen L. Miller under the apt caption “Seriously WTF”.
The screenshot on the right takes you to a Politico story about the attack on Paul Pelosi written by Jeremy B. White and Nicholas Wu. I was familiar with this version because I had read it myself a few hours earlier. The title is “Police offer new details in Paul Pelosi assault” and the dateline (in American format) is given as 10/28/2022 09:46 PM EDT. The URL is https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/28/police-pelosi-attack-intentional-00064098. Do I labour the point? That’s because I think this version of the story will disappear soon. Read it while you can. It says:
→ Continue reading: The attacks on Paul Pelosi and Gabby Giffords: some parallels
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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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