JSM59

Science, objective truth, democracy, freedom of expression, freedom from tyranny

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

The IDF are conducting another assault in the North of Gaza, around Jabalia (see @2023gazawar’s excellent map, below). Critics are asking why the IDF are repeatedly going into areas they have already cleared and claiming this is a flaw in operational design. These critics have totally misunderstood what Israel is trying to do. Here’s what I think:

The answer is simple: the IDF have absolutely no intention of using the clear / hold / build counterinsurgency tactics the West tried in Afghanistan. Why would they? Those tactics were a disaster in Afghanistan.

The flaw in Western analysis is always the same: “we wouldn’t do it that way”. See Russia in Ukraine for another example of another country catching out Western analysts (me included).

If you look at what’s possible, what the best version of “success” looks like, and what Israel are doing… I put it to you that in Gaza we are seeing a masterpiece of operational design.

Ignore the “destroy Hamas” political rhetoric. The IDF are not *trying* to clear Gaza.

So what are they doing? What’s possible? Any kind of political solution? Definitely not. No-one on the international stage has expressed any interest in helping with governance in Gaza. According to polling, 2% of Gazans support an Israeli-backed administration. The majority want Hamas back. Israel’s solution? Let them have Hamas.

But the version of Hamas they’ll get is one heavily degraded militarily, but most importantly, with vast swathes of their tunnels and civilian-embedded infrastructure destroyed.

“Never again is now” isn’t just an empty slogan. Israeli operational design isn’t built around destroying Hamas, or regime change, or political change in Gaza. Those things aren’t possible. The operation is built around making sure 7th October can never happen again. Absent the possibility of any enduring political solution, that’s what success for them looks like for Israel.

Israel have methodically razed what civilian-embedded Hamas infrastructure they could find in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and now Rafah.

They have secured the Netzarim corridor (middle of the map) to control freedom of movement from South to North. It looks like they are trying to do the same thing along the Philadelphi corridor and Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, to cut off the inflow of weapons and supplies to Hamas (see the blue, bottom right corner of the map as the IDF break in to Rafah).

Facial recognition software in controlled areas allows the IDF to stop known Hamas commanders moving around. This also allows the IDF to strike as and when concentrations of Hamas are identified, to degrade their manpower, then withdraw again (see the Shifa hospital operation and the current Jabalia operation).

At the same time they have destroyed buildings to create a 1km buffer zone around the Gaza border. This will prevent any repeat of 7 October. Nobody in Gaza is getting anywhere near the border.

The operational end state here is significant infrastructure destroyed, Hamas fighting capability degraded, and the border secure; with the IDF retaining the capability to strike into Gaza at will. All whilst shifting hundreds of thousands of civilians out of harm’s way and minimising innocent casualties (Hamas’ human shield tactics aside).

The downsides: the destruction of Hamas-infested civil infrastructure has caused enormous damage. Urban warfare always comes with civilian casualties. The Egyptians look very twitchy about Israeli control of the Southern border. This isn’t a long-term political solution. The destruction has, of course, drawn huge international condemnation. Failure to communicate the plan has damaged Israel’s international standing, and they have been crushed in the global information war for the narrative. But: none of these are show-stoppers yet, strategically speaking.

Debate the morality in the comments. But, militarily, this is quite brilliant operational design within the bounds of what was realistically possible.

[Ani O'Brien @aniobrien]

Media when ACT drops 1%: BOOM EARTH-SHATTERING

Media when Greens drop 4%: 🙈🙉🙊

https://t.co/wThuQeFCtk

[Ayaan Hirsi Ali @Ayaan]

“MeToo is not about liberating women from the confines of sexual patriarchy… MeToo is about punishing men who, in the libertine chaos since the sexual revolution, have left women feeling spurned or used.” Please read my critique of the MeToo movement: https://t.co/WDF4uJ2gyh

[Ayaan Hirsi Ali @Ayaan]

For Western feminists, Islam is the elephant in the room. Many feminists refuse to address how Muslim women suffer all over the world, and they anxiously avoid the topic of sexual abuse by migrant men from Muslim countries here at home. Read my latest: https://t.co/ebAvgQ3b5r

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

This is weird. I did a search of “Israel” in the Noble Qur’an and found 47 verses. A search of “Palestine” yielded 0 hits. It’s as if the Jews are in the indigenous people of that land even according to the Noble Qur’an.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

For many years now, I have warned that the path that the West is taking will result in civil war. It might take 5 years, 50 years, or 100 years but it is inevitable. The West could have repeatedly resolved these issues peacefully but it refuses to auto-correct from its path of civilizational suicide. Many Western men who are currently asleep at the wheel will wake up, and realize that they don't like being pushed around in their homelands; they don't like their women attacked; they don't like their freedoms curtailed; they don't like their faiths disrespected. Once this happens, prepare for some gargantuan ugliness. Those who think that they are gaining inroads in the West will soon find out that not all Western men are invertebrate castrati. Save this tweet and never forget who warned you.

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

In universities across the world, humanities departments have, over time, come to reject the notion that there is such a thing as objective truth.

This nihilistic outlook was originally promoted by a small group of academics in the mid-20th century, but is now the dominant philosophy in a range of disciplines from literary criticism to gender and cultural studies. And while the doctrine has quietly swallowed the humanities, many thought it would never infiltrate the hard sciences. If one is engineering a bridge, for example, it would be reckless to reject the objective truth of gravity. If one is studying mathematics it would be foolish to deny that 2 + 2 = 4.

And, rather than being a method to discover how the world works, such theorists argue Western science has been used as a tool to subjugate others. Efforts to “decolonise” science are therefore efforts to undo this subjugation, by bringing into the fold other “ways of knowing” that exist outside scientific methodology. These might include local knowledge about land management, religious knowledge about cosmology, or traditional ways of healing.

Writing in The Conversation, academic Alex Broadbent, of the University of Johannesburg, argues: “There is African belief, and European belief, and your belief, and mine – but none of us have the right to assert that something is true, is a fact, or works, contrary to anyone else’s belief.”

...

But herein lies the irony – by indulging the decolonial activist agenda that rejects the existence of objective truths or a hierarchy of knowledge, universities undermine the very premise on which society deems them worthy of public funding. If we accept the decolonial notion that no form of knowledge can be deemed superior to any other, then what exactly are students paying for? What specialised skills or benefits do university graduates gain that non-graduates lack?

Why should the public continue to fund these multibillion-dollar organisations if the knowledge they offer is just as valid as any other “way of knowing”?

Read the full column here 👇

https://t.co/QdqT2Ml08W

[Stephen Knight 🎙️ @GSpellchecker]

Two recommendations of my own after seeing the predictable responses to the #CassReview:

1. Stop expecting that individuals who place no value on evidence will suddenly begin to value it simply because you present more evidence to them. There is no evidence you can provide some people that will penetrate their worldview. Their worldview isn't built on evidence, it's built on feelings of righteousness. They cling to it like a religion. The 'affirmation model', kids 'trapped in the wrong body' and the mantra of 'believe trans kids' are unalterable truths. Any contradicting evidence will only ever be interpreted as blasphemy. So, we must move forward without people like this.

2. The only weapon in the arsenal of gender activists is to smear any dissenter as a bigot. So, stop caring about being called a bigot when you know you are not and don't be silent when others are treated this way. Say what you know to be true and don't be cowed by the smears of deeply unserious people. The stakes are too high for unserious people and they have nothing to offer that we need anyway. So, we must move forward without people like this.

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

This is big news: New research finds that the U-shaped curve of happiness is over, because young people since 2011 have dropped so quickly, across 34 countries. Driven by young women. (Probably not the 2008 GFC)

[ThinkingWest @thinkingwest]

Kenneth Clark lamented that civilization was a fragile thing.

He observed three “enemies” that could topple even the mightiest cultures—what are they?🧵

[🗣 Free Speech Union ✊ @NZFreeSpeech]

“The wording of the Hate Crime Act is so vague and subjective… It hasn’t helped that Police Scotland’s own publicity states that deciding what is hateful comes down to an individual’s perception.”
https://t.co/FFRdLYtYNe

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

"My community is those who are center left to center right and libertarians. These are the people who, I think, are still sane and are still noticeably aligned with the idea of a liberal democracy." https://t.co/6b3KgTJq79

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

Oh look: feel good policies designed by faux-compassionate incompetents produce disastrously counterproductive results (but their fuzzy little hearts were in the right place actually I don't think so): https://t.co/mKsXcxbtrh

[The Redbaiter @TheRedbaiter]

The root cause of NZ's rising poverty.

An insulated from reality class of parasites who not only suck our productive sector dry with high taxes, but cripple them by means of regulation and over-governance.

Check out the size of NZ's govt compared with other countries of similar population.

This will not be fixed by any of the current crop of politicians. Who are only tinkering around the edges. We need to elect a ruthless man/ woman of the people like Javier Milei.

Who will slash our top heavy govt down to size. Milei is presently planning to fire 70,000 public servants in Argentina and terminate more than 200,000 social welfare plans.

He says they're corrupt & he's right. They're just voting/ dependency traps set by the left. Designed to corrupt democracy.

Until something like Milei happens in NZ, we're stuck on the road to socialist dependency, decay & destruction.

(Figures from a recent report of The NZ Initiative.)

@NZNationalParty @actparty @nzfirst

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

🎉🌼🌸April Fools! 🌸🌼🎉

Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren't women at all, but men, every last one of them.

In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women's and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.

For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable. The re-definition of 'woman' to include every man who declares himself one has already had serious consequences for women's and girls’ rights and safety in Scotland, with the strongest impact felt, as ever, by the most vulnerable, including female prisoners and rape survivors.

It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women’s and girls’ rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man. Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.

I'm currently out of the country, but if what I've written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.

If you agree with the views set out in this tweet, please retweet it.

#ArrestMe #AprilFools #HateCrimeActScotland

11/X

[Nina West @OlierNina]

#ArrestMe

Calling men women, transitioning children, taking over women's spaces - these are the real hate crimes but go ahead Scotland, arrest us all - for saying that humans cannot change sex and that men (whatever they call themselves) can never be women.

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

The @australian reported last month that Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg, one of the activists involved in the doxxing of 600 Australian Jewish creatives, has a contract with the @AusHumanRights Commission with her company, Hue.

Given this company is in receipt of public funds, and produces materials to be used in Australian schools, it is worth examining its work and overarching philosophy, and whether it is compatible with the AHRC’s remit.

The first thing one notices about Hue’s website is that it does not limit itself to anti-racism. “Too often conversations about ‘Inclusion & Diversity’ are tokenistic and one dimensional,” the website reads. “The systemic nature of power & oppression is ignored, and there is no real investment in meaningful change.”

Clicking through to Hue’s online shop, one can find an Anti-Racism Policy template for $300, a NAIDOC Week participation leave policy for $300 and a Gender Affirmation Leave Policy template for $300.

If someone wants to go all out and purchase a Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Survey Licence and Support Package, they can expect to pay the handsome price of $4150.

These documents are to be used in the workplace as guides in dealing with employees who might be “gender diverse”, Indigenous or a person of colour. Like other forms of social justice activism, the primary concern is to influence social norms through the introduction of workplace policies, speech codes and other forms of bureaucratic oversight.

At first glance, one might wonder what gender affirmation has to do with racism. Why would a consulting agency dedicated to issues of race be in the business of transgenderism? It’s an important question because the answer sheds light on the all-encompassing nature of modern progressive activism.

Today’s activism is shaped by a philosophical worldview known as critical theory. Developed by post-WWII academics such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, critical theory is an analytical framework that aims to identify and dismantle systems of power. It takes Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism and extends it into other domains, including race, gender, sexuality, nationality and indigeneity. Systems of power that need to be dismantled include white supremacy, patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity, colonialism and capitalism.

This preoccupation with power is why social justice activism today comes in a package. The civil rights movements of the past focused on tangible results, such as making changes to legislation that would promote dignity and equality for all. But since racial, gender and, later, marriage equality have become formally enshrined by law, the focus of activists has shifted from the concrete to the abstract, with the goal now being to “dismantle power”.

From the critical theory worldview, dismantling one system of power works towards dismantling other systems. This is why students carrying banners that read “Queers for Palestine” see no contradiction: it’s power that needs to be dismantled, not rights that need to be won.

This gets us back to the AHRC. The AHRC’s remit is not to dismantle power. It is a statutory body funded by the Australian government and is tasked with ensuring compliance with Australian law, namely the Racial Discrimination Act. As an instrument of power itself, any attempt to “dismantle power” would become self-contradictory. The clash of worldviews doesn’t stop there, however.

The Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 states: “It is unlawful for a person: (a) to refuse to allow another person access to or use of any place, by reason of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of that other person or of any relative or associate of that other person.”

But a visit to Hue’s website, (which is linked to by the AHRC) suggests this rule has been superseded. Hue offers events and workshops for “people of colour only”. One event, titled “Power & Resilience (People of Colour only)” purportedly “creates a safe space for people of colour at your organisation to share, reflect, connect and learn without the impact of the white gaze … the session also explores strategies for coping and wellbeing under oppressive and racist systems”.

Yet the Racial Discrimination Act does not include carve-outs allowing certain groups of people to be exclusionary or racist towards other groups of people because they feel they are living under “systems of oppression”. The legislation itself is blind to race – it simply prohibits discrimination. It’s worthwhile asking: does Hue – and the AHRC more broadly – see itself as above the law?

Unlike the Racial Discrimination Act, the critical theory definition of racism is not colourblind. Any condemnation of racism is determined by the identity of the actors engaged in it, rather than by the racism itself. And this selective condemnation also applies to rape, torture and murder.

On Hue’s LinkedIn page, an article in reference to October 7 states: “Whiteness culture is … hyper-individual, emphasising harm that takes place on an individual level, and disguising the violent systems that give rise to that harm in the first place. This culture erases ongoing ‘israeli’ (sic) violence from our conversations and highlights and demonises the violence of resistance efforts and land defence.” In the critical theory worldview “land defence” now outranks prohibitions against mass rape and mass murder.

The mistaken notion that today’s social justice activists are passionate advocates of equality and dignity for all, rather than the carriers of a radically sectarian moral framework, has allowed establishment institutions such as the AHRC to be duped into giving them access and influence.

Activists with Tuet-Rosenberg’s worldview have effectively taken over institutions across corporate, non-profit and government sectors. Centre-leftists have no match for their zeal, and quickly find themselves defenestrated whenever there is conflict.

With companies such as Hue in receipt of public subsidy, the Australian taxpayer is now funding a revolution.

Today's column 👇
https://t.co/iu1z5SsEL1