Tag Archives: culture

“Is Britain safe for Jews?”

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That was the opening sentence of the lede—the lede of the lede, if you will (or even if you won’t)—of the opinion piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal. The next sentence laid out the case:

On Thursday authorities in Birmingham, the country’s second-largest city, prohibited the fans of an Israeli soccer team from attending a match next month, even though the threats to cause trouble are coming from locals.

The game in question is scheduled for early next month as part of an international soccer tournament, and the Israeli fans have been barred because they might be victims of violence rather than perpetrators of it. A test, as instructive as it would be interesting to see, is whether British soccer teams and especially the teams’ owners will boycott those tournament’s games that are played in the UK, refusing even to take the pitch until Birmingham undoes its support for thuggery or until the British government overrules Birmingham’s instance of antisemitic bigotry.

Those locals, as the opinion expands, are primarily Islamists. Birmingham, and by extension the British government, through its studied inaction on the ban, so far indicate that they favor Islamist thugs and their thuggery over Israeli soccer fans and British non-Muslim subjects.

If neither government acts, then no, Britain is not safe for Jews, and that would be by British government, both local and national, design.

That would be beyond sad, it would be disgusting and despicable. The cradle of government by consent of the governed and of individual liberty would no longer be fit for civilized or even merely polite company.

Irony Meter Pegged

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Here’s the lede:

Human-resources professionals are pulling out of their marquee conference on inclusion and some have canceled their memberships in SHRM, the industry’s chief lobbying group, after the organization invited conservative activist Robby Starbuck to speak.

And the caption of the lead image:

SHRM President Johnny C Taylor Jr says the group tries to showcase diverse points of view.

Imagine that. An HR organization that makes a point of diversity of views is losing membership because the organization invited a speaker with a view that diverges from HR “professionals'” orthodoxy.

Just one more example of “diversity” hypocrisy.

There’s More To It Than Just Race

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined recently on race-based gerrymandering. Their second paragraph was this:

In recent years, the Justices have considered challenges to maps in Texas, South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana. They punted last term on deciding the Louisiana case (Louisiana v Callais) that they will reconsider Wednesday. They will also take up the question of whether the intentional creation of majority-minority districts violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against abridging a citizen’s right to vote based on race. The right answer is yes.

The editors are absolutely right on this.

They missed a Critical Item point, though, as they closed with this:

The Justices would do the country and themselves a favor by correcting the Gingles error and declaring that the Constitution forbids race-based map-making. As the Chief wrote in a 2006 redistricting opinion, “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

Here’s the Constitution on citizen representation in our Federal government.

Article I, Section 2:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative….

14th Amendment, Article 1:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

14th Amendment, Article 2:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

Our Constitution also forbids political party-based (faction-based in the Founders’ terms) map-making. Our Constitution also takes clear precedence over statutes, including 1965’s Voting Rights Act requiring racial gerrymanders or putative statutes allowing gerrymandering by political party.

What our Constitution does require, and all that it requires, is that Representatives’ districts have substantially equal populations of American citizens.

Full stop.

They Won’t Sign

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The lede has it.

Major media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN have said they won’t agree to a new Defense Department policy restricting journalists’ communication with military sources.
Those who don’t sign on to the new policy must forfeit their Pentagon press badges and won’t be issued new ones.

Among the restrictions being applied by DoD internally is

military personnel need approval before sharing information with the media, even if it isn’t classified. It says members of the media should be aware that agency “personnel may face adverse consequences for unauthorized disclosures.”

That should always have been the case. For far too long, there has been inconsistent, even contradictory, messaging coming out of DoD as a result of leaks, to say nothing of security failures in too many of those leaks. The journalism guild, of course, is spilling its collective ink pots over this.

The policy drew rebukes from press-rights organizations, which have highlighted the role journalists have played in revealing wasteful spending, conflicts of interest and misconduct.

This is self-serving and disingenuous. Pressmen should go back to doing original reporting instead of repeating each other’s rumors and printing leaked “information.” Pressmen surely understand—as the rest of us do—that leaks and their leakers are unreliable sources, and pressmen should rely instead on whistleblowers and other sources with the integrity of speaking on the record.

Their disingenuousness extends: the news outlets aren’t even being required to signify their agreement with the policy limiting DoD personnel’s interactions with the press; their signatures would merely indicate their understanding of the policy and the implications for DoD personnel.

News outlets don’t have an intrinsic right to wander the halls and poke into rooms in the Pentagon, nor do they have any need to do so, accosting any DoD personnel they happen on. Not even their self-proclaimed specialness gives them that.

It’s entirely appropriate, since the outlets won’t sign, to confine their writers to the various services’ public affairs offices, and it’s entirely appropriate to require all DoD personnel, military and civilian, who are encountered by a news writer, to refer those pressmen to the PAO and to refuse further interaction with the pressmen.

There are far too many leaks from government agencies, and those from DoD can have particularly dangerous national security implications. There are, also, far too many pressmen who don’t care a fig about national security, only about their personal bylines and notoriety.

The Boss Wants to Know

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Bari Weiss, newly hired CBS News editor-in-chief, wants to know what her employees in her news division do while they’re on the company clock.

On Friday [10 October], she sent a note to CBS News staffers asking each member of the organization to detail what they do, and what they believe is working or not working, by Tuesday [14 October].

Weiss, in so many words:

I want to understand how you spend your working hours—and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of. I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better. Please be blunt—it will help me greatly[.]

You’d think two things would obtain here in an honest industry. One is the widely understood concept that bosses get to know what their employees are doing on the clock to earn their paycheck. The other is that such reporting would be simple and straightforward to carry out. In those industries where employees are required to keep time sheets, it would be a simple matter for employees to submit theirs or for bosses to get them from HR. In those industries where time sheets are not kept, those employees still know what they’re doing, and it would be simple to write down a few bullets and submit those.

In the present case, Weiss is also asking her employees what they think works and does not work. This is the employees’ opportunity to provide serious input and to simply bellyache about how hard their work life is.

However.

The Writers Guild of America East, which is a union representing many of those news room employees, is advising its membership to refuse to supply the data.

That’s a highly instructive tell.

Either these unionized employees spend their time on the clock largely goofing off and want to cover that up, or this is all-too-typical union obstructionism solely for the sake of obstructing. Or both.

Wess needs to instruct her HR to prepare termination notices for those employees not meeting the deadline (who did not meet the deadline as this is posted a couple of days after it) and to instruct her legal department to prepare to defend in court (no settlement) those terminations.

Note: Since I wrote this, Weiss has acquiesced and advised the union that writers who ignore her deadline will be acting with impunity–she will not punish them for their disobedience.