Hello to the world of Hive. I’ve been a blogger of some years standing in other places but I’ve become increasingly concerned about censorship on platforms where the data and content that a person creates comes under the control of others. If you create something, even if it is only commentary on the news stories of the day, then you should own what you’ve created and it not be owned by Google, Meta or X or a hosting company or whoever. I like to profusely thank those who have helped me, a blockchain ‘appliance operator’ get onto this platform and some beers when I see you and/or a donation to the charity of your choice will be forthcoming.
My concerns about censorship are heightened by being British and seeing my country of birth strangle itself with censorship. Britain has turned, in less than fifty years, from a place where someone could truly say ‘it’s a free country’ and not even consider the issue of freedom of speech as even an issue, to one where nine people per day are being arrested and/or prosecuted for ‘Speech Crimes’. By any metric, Britain is no longer a free society. In addition, 5332 people were, according to the results of a brief Google search, arrested and charged for a range of offences involving speech and the expressing of opinions between 2008 and 2017. There are many Acts of Parliament that restrict speech and therefore restrict what can be talked about in British society.
I believe this is a bad situation for Britain to be in, sometimes difficult stuff needs to be discussed in order to find solutions to it. Preventing people from speaking about matters that the State finds challenging or disturbing doesn’t make those issues go away, they just continue to fester in dark corners until they erupt like a pressure cooker that has had the safety valve disabled.
I wish to speak freely, which is why I’m looking at abandoning as far as I can, the centralised web and starting to embrace the alternative decentralised one.
So, a bit about me. Well I’m male, no longer young, also a non-Orthodox Jew with a particular interest in British politics and society. I’ve done an awful lot of different jobs in my time, ranging from shovelling aluminium scrap into a furnace as a schoolboy, to being a Civil Servant via court reporting, freelance photojournalism and a whole host of other jobs. Some of these jobs have been ones with responsibility and some not, but all of them have taught me something about life and the human condition.
I consider myself working class and that means something in British society but might be less important to those from other societies. Britain is still a class bound society although not in the same way it once was. But it is still a culture with class differences and one where the middle class who are often politically on the Left, look down upon and in some cases discriminate against the British working class, who on many issues swing to the Right politically.
Britain has become a place where only the ‘acceptable’ opinions, that is the opinions of the ‘technocracy’ that rules Britain and which makes up the bulk of the members of ‘adminisphere’ can be safely aired. Any other opinion risks a person losing their platform whether online or off, being cancelled by employers or other organisations or being imprisoned by the State.
I get expressions of incredulity when I speak to Americans, whose freedom of speech is guaranteed by their constitution, about the poor situation regarding freedom of expression in the United Kingdom. ‘Have you got a licence for that opinion?’ isn’t just a meme for Britons, it’s a sad reality.
It’s because I envy the Americans for having a constitutional right to freedom of speech that I wish to see the UK one day enact its own version of the US’s First Amendment. I believe that Britain would be a much more dynamic and happier society if freedom of speech was returned to the nation’s inhabitants. I also believe in freedom of speech for all and not just for those who I agree with. The best way to take down bad ideas is to drag them into the light and talk about them.
Although I love my birth country Britain and its amazing people, I’m also a Zionist. I believe that Israel must exist and that Israel possesses a far better, more moral, ethical and sensible society than can be found from the nations that neighbour Israel. Israel is the homeland and the wellspring of the Jewish people and no amount of lies and bullshit from the opponents of Israel can change that. If you dig in the ground in Israel you find evidence of continual inhabitation by the Jewish people but very little to suggest that this was once not the case. Israel must exist not just because it has the same right to exist as any other nation great or small, but to be a bulwark and a place of refuge should there arise in the world outside of Israel yet another Jew murdering tyrant of which history has given us many.
I have something that few other Jews ever had for approximately 1900 years, which is a place to go when things go bad. I consider that a privilege to be able to do that especially as things have started to go bad for Jews in the United Kingdom. The Left and Islamists have brought Jew hatred to British society in massive amounts, both the sort of Jew hatred that has always been a part of the Left and joined their Jew hatred with the religious Jew hatred of the Islamists.
Jew hatred has ceased to be something that is only associated with the ‘jackboot lickers’ of the BNP, the National Front and the British Movement, entities that I marched against when much younger, but is something normalised in Left political environments and in Britain’s mosques. Unlike the vast majority of Jews in the past, because of the existence of Israel, I don’t have to move somewhere for example Belgium, in the hope that it might be safer than in Germany or Russia or Britain or wherever. I don’t have to guess which country will be less awful than the one I’m fleeing from, only to find that the enemy has overtaken me, even in the place where I thought I would be safe. Israel is the guarantor of the likely survival of my wife, my child and myself.
I never expected to have to be thinking like this, that I needed a place to go, because I can see what’s coming down the road, but then I never expected the United Kingdom to go so bad so quickly, but it has. I cannot, for example walk down the street I was born on in East London wearing a Kippah on my head without fear of assault or worse.
That situation has been brought about not because of the actions of the White neo-Nazis who I grew up around, but from a political Left that has allowed its deep seated Jew hatred, a hatred that goes back to Marx himself, to emerge into the open. This Leftist current has allied itself with radical Islam and both the Marxist Jew hatred and the Islamic religious Jew hatred and become a potent and frightening force that needs to be opposed by both British Jew and non-Jew alike, because all will lose out should this force gain the upper hand. This force, leftists allied with radical Islam, will turn against the non-Jew very quickly after it has turned on the Jews. ‘After the Saturday people come the Sunday people’ as is said in the Middle East with regards to the Jews and Christians, who are the primary targets for oppression by extremist Islam.
So, about my politics. Well I made the journey, as many do, from the centre-left to the centre-right. Some things I’m ‘liberal’ on but on other matters I might be more ‘conservative’. On still other matters I may take a more libertarian view. I’ve long been of the opinion that life is too short and too complex and nuanced for accepting the idea that overarching ideologies can have all the answers. However, Socialism has been a particularly bad failure for humanity.
Nations and movements based on Socialism in all its forms have killed more people than any other ideology in the 20th and so far in the 21st century. However Jihadism looks like it will give Socialism a run for its money in the death toll stakes, but they would have to go some to catch up with Mao.
Sometimes ideas that originate on either the Left or the Right may have standalone merit when looked at as dispassionately as possible, but no all encompassing ideology alone can have all the answers to benefit the bulk of a people in a nation or a society. Ideologies, no matter what their type, are not omnipotent deities and the people that blindly follow them can be as dangerous as the most demented religious maniac. A good idea that works and causes the least damage can come from either side of the political spectrum.
Being British I’m a Monarchist. Yes I know there multiple arguments against monarchy but in the British context it’s the least worst option. It must be difficult to be the Monarch and to be basically born into a job that is the gift of Parliament, devoid of real political power and under constant scrutiny by the Press and the public. However apart from the negative effects it must have on the occupier of the office of Monarch, it’s better than any republican alternative.
I’d rather have as ultimate arbiter and counsellor of political leaders, and the entity that the military swear loyalty to, be a member of the apolitical House of Windsor, than have some political figure or some superannuated politician or a morality free greasy pole climber as President. Having the office of Commander in Chief resident in the person of the Monarch is better in my view than have ‘the Government’ being the source of all military loyalty.
British readers, imagine if you will the sort of person who would invariably get the job of being president of a Republic of Great Britain. It would be bound to be someone who would turn the stomachs of at least half the country. Imagine if you will a ‘President Tony Blair’ or a ‘President Nick Clegg’ or ‘President David Cameron’! In a nation that is increasingly governed by a cohort of less than talented politicians and politicians who seem to vehemently dislike the populus, can you imagine just what horrors could be installed as President in a Republic of Great Britain by Parliament? Think of the ‘Python’ sketch that a British republican system would end up being, but instead of it being comedy, it would be tragedy for the ordinary Briton.
I do hold what His Majesty’s (current) Government might describe as ‘controversial views’. I believe in border control, dislike Islamic extremism, believe that top down multiculturalism has failed and created siloised states within the state and I refuse, unlike many other Britons, to worship the National Health Service. My dislike of many of the sorts of Islam present in the UK does not extend to individual Muslims, they are often the first victims of their own religious extremists. Criticism that I make of the ideology of Islam should not be taken as criticism of the ordinary decent Muslim, such as the guy from your local tyre shop.
There’s also stuff that I was once ambivalent about, but now find myself opposed to, such as the Cult of Trans. I started to see the negative impacts of this ideology and by stages I have seen a great deal that is wrong with it. I now oppose it.
I am unhappy about the direction my country is going in and can see it going to some pretty bad places, judging by previous recent history. I want to talk about this stuff in order that hopefully more people will talk about said stuff and maybe formulate a sensible political response to it. My country feels like it is collapsing and I’d rather that this did not happen. In Britain many things that should be expected to work, don’t work, or at least don’t in the way that they might have been originally intended to work. This applies across the board from how Britain’s politics works, how Britain is policed, how civil society works and how services such as healthcare are delivered. Britain is a mess and there ought to be some constructive way out of that mess.
For those who think of these things, on the issue of race I’m straight down the line MLK Jr in my views; people are equal when it comes to skin colour. I’m not the ‘droid’ you’re looking for if ‘one race good other race bad’ is your thing. Growing up in a port town tends to make you see the human, not the skin colour.
However although humans are equal, some of the constructions of humans such as cultures and societies, are not. Some have better outcomes than others. There are some societies that you would want to live in and others that you might want to give a wide berth to. Some cultures value the individual whilst others the ‘collective’, some cultures have broad degrees of religious freedom whilst others do not and some cultures treat women as of equal worth but others do not.
I can’t promise that I won’t offend someone or other but everything is offensive to someone. Stuff that other people might think is OK might give me the ‘ick’. I wish to speak freely about the world and the society around me, I want to mock whatever I want and when I want to and I want others to be able to do the same without fear and without unnecessary self or state imposed censorship.
I know that this is quite a long ‘hello world’ post but once I started it, I found that there was a lot that I wished to put into words.
I’ll try to get up one post per day on here if I can. It could be on anything that takes my fancy, maybe politics, religion, media, culture, society or whatever. It will be mostly Britain-centred but not completely. I’ll also be highlighting others whose writing I admire or believe is interesting and comment on that. I’ll try not to swear but might occasionally.
Let’s Roll