On “ craven” corporations

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GB News is a new U.K. news channel based upon Fox News in America. It has been boycotted by numerous British companies and organizations.  The right- wing conservative Daily Telegraph published the following:

“The GB News boycott is a turning point: big business must end its woke campaigning or it may not survive the backlash.

“First it was their implacable, undemocratic hostility to Brexit, then their embrace of wokedom, and now their pathetic boycott of GB News, the centre-Right TV start-up.

“What is going on in boardrooms across Britain and the West?  A generation of craven corporate apparatchiks, in thrall to the latest American nostrums, have lost their moral bearings. The companies boycotting GB News will have greatly infuriated hundreds of thousands of consumers and only mildly pleased a few million Left-wingers.   They have declared war on the Conservative voters who, until very recently, used to support them.  This is a turning point for business. They must choose: are they for-profit ventures selling to customer-kings, or weapons of the Left, political organisations masquerading as commercial outfits, militating against freedom?”  (Allistair  Heath, The Telegraph 17 June 2021).

My comment:  “implacable, undemocratic hostility to Brexit”?  “ lost their moral bearings”?   Welcome to the “my way or the highway” style  of Fox News.  You can guarantee that the Brits will eventually copy what occurs in the US.  It is undemocratic, don’t you know, to oppose “conservatives”.  No wonder Epicurus despised politics.  He stood for freedom of thought and speech and respect for opposing views.

Learning from the American South

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“U.K voter ID plan will “undo progress”

The government’s plan for mandatory photo ID at elections risks disproportionately hitting older, disabled and homeless voters who are less likely to have such documents, campaigners have alleged. There have been warnings that “decades of democratic progress” could be undone by the measure because more than two million UK voters could lack the necessary ID to take part in future elections.

 My take:  You can’t help noticing that the British government governs with one eye on what  American Republicans are up to, that is , a variety of stringent vote suppression measures.  This photo requirement is  new to the UK, which has a thorough local register of voters, a system trusted for decades. Not content with winning the last election by a sizeable margin, the Tories now want to choose their future voters.  This copycat stuff has all the hallmarks of a growing fascist, or at least anti- democratic, tendency.

Women to be subject to the military draft?

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The Supreme Court has recently declined to hear a case on the constitutionality of the male-only military draft, framed as “end[ing] gender-based [draft] registration.”

The petition expanding the draft to women does  speak of “further[ing] the goal of military readiness” but concentrates upon the unfair imposition of “selective burdens on men”.

The Pentagon has “unequivocally acknowledge[d] that requiring women and men alike to register would ‘promote fairness and equity,'” the petition said, while a male-only draft “‘sends a message’ that women ‘are not vital to the defense of the country.'” Congress “exclude[d] women from [draft] registration” because of “archaic stereotypes about men’s and women’s roles within and outside of the home,” it argued, and current law “reinforces the notion that women are not full and equal citizens.”

What? The draft is bad, but not because it says mean things about women. It’s bad because it’s a huge violation of human rights, and the gender class whose rights are being violated right now is men. The state should not be able to force you to kill or be killed. Conscription — to use the older term that better conveys the coercive nature of the practice — is not “a fundamental civic obligation,” as this petition said. It’s indefensible compulsion, regardless of what sex it affects.

Women are not harmed by exclusion from the draft, however archaic the congressional reasoning that produced the present arrangement. Further congressional action should be along the lines of the bipartisan  bill to end  multi-decade occupations or war crimes, not this shortcut to “equity.”.  ( Damon Linker, The Week,  7 June 2021).

My take: So Mr. Linker is a pacifist.  I wonder how he would have reacted, resisting conscription, had the Nazis successfully invaded England?

I don’t know whether,  during my two conscripted years of military service, I helped  save many Cypriot lives. But it turned me from a gauche teenager into an adult, taught me what leadership was about and brought me face to face with people I would  never otherwise have met – and who turned out to be funny and really smart.  It was an education.  Wouldn’t have missed it.  (Can’t imagine what the presence of young women would have achieved. Better strategy and more common sense, probably?  But the downsides?).