The Orwellian person seeks surgically to separate himself from every person who materially or emotionally supports him, but then finds he can’t actually live that way. You leave your family, and despise them for supporting you, so you can go off and write about yourself as the freestanding freedom fighter. The Orwellian hero needs a wife to keep the ego-show on the road. But he also needs to edit a wife out to satisfy his own conception of how a hero lives. To me in my teens Orwell’s Orwellian aspiration to escape the aspidistra of domesticity looked like heroism and a radical search for freedom. To me now it looks like the extension of self-harming lovelessness into the realm of conscious cruelty to others.
Posted inLiterature|Comments Off on The Orwellian Life
* Many employees mistakenly believe the law will provide them with protection from retaliatory or unfounded job loss. In many of today’s workplaces, this is nothing but a false sense of security.
* Whether formalized or unwritten, there is always a “layoff list” of employees the company wouldn’t mind getting rid of without the potential for legal complication — which is precisely what layoffs provide. That’s why human – resource departments secretly refer to layoffs as “cleaning house.” Conversely, and more importantly, every company has a hidden indispensable list of protected employees who are virtually guaranteed job security no matter what. These are the favorites.
* In today’s litigious society, companies are more afraid of being sued than of lying to or replacing an employee.
* All companies have layers of unspoken hidden agendas. They’re lurking just beneath the surface of a glossy corporate spin. If you allow yourself to navigate via corporate spin instead of learning hat’s actually going on behind the scenes, you could find yourself getting caught in the void between what the company says and what it actually values, or between its true agendas and its public statements.
* Beware that you always stay on the correct side of these true agendas:
MOTIVATION 1 : Protection
If a company feels you are opening them up to any severe liability or inconvenience (even if it is justified), many will remove you as quickly as possible. When you put your own needs ahead of a company’s protection, you are red flagging yourself as someone who is not a team player and cannot be trusted. In today’s litigious society, many companies value protection above all else. Threatening a company’s sense of protection is the number one cause of job loss today. (More about this in the next chapter.)
MOTIVATION 2 : Money
Their money, not yours. If they feel you value your money more than theirs, you will be gone. The best defense is to always treat your company’s money as if it were your own.
MOTIVATION 3 : Open support
If your company feels, for whatever reason, that you do not openly support their policies, positions, or direction you will be out. Naysayers beware!
MOTIVATION 4 : Maintaining an “edge” in the marketplace
Companies are highly fearful of those who appear to be stagnating, have fallen behind, or have become distracted by something in their personal lives. They feel their only chance at keeping their edge is to constantly stay ahead of the curve. This motivation/fear is one of the main reasons companies continue to replace older workers with younger workers.
MOTIVATION 5 : The image of success
Companies are compelled to surround themselves with people who act and appear successful. If you are expressing negativity, pessimism, or a downtrodden persona, you will be replaced by someone the company feels can help generate a more positive atmosphere. Companies fear pessimism and negativity more than any other behavior in an employee because it erodes the environment of success they are constantly working to create.
Finding your company’s hidden agendas
Those listed above are the core agendas for most companies, but each company you work for will have its own set of guidelines and unwritten rules. To truly protect yourself and your job, you need both.
To find the hidden agendas in your company, look at what its key decision makers consistently reward and value (even if it’s never talked about, even if it’s openly denied or politically incorrect).
Don’t look at the good intentions and well – meant speeches.
Posted inBusiness|Comments Off on Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn’t Want You to Know – and What to Do About Them
In the middle of the show, I ask Nathan Cofnas: “I’m interviewing History Speaks right now. Any chance you’d join me for a stream with him sometime?”
Cofnas responds:
That doesn't answer my question, but as for Goldstone: "[Goldstone] expressed regret that his report may have been inaccurate….[He said] 'civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy' by Israel." Goldstone also says: "They [the UN Human Rights Council]…
“he thought that [the octopus] was a dog whistle to Nazi propaganda” – I said it was “not impossible” that the octopus could have been placed there to allude to Jews/Israel by one of Greta’s handlers. “Not impossible” doesn’t mean it definitely was, or even that it probably was. Incidentally, Richard Hanania agreed with my analysis on that:
I first thought this was ridiculous, but the octopus is literally the only thing in the picture other than the signs. If there were like 5 toys and 1 was an octopus I’d say ok, but I think this may be intentional. Not that I care though, Greta is for degrowth, cancel her for that https://t.co/ngfQGnBAcZ
“He also was liking a tweet that was referring to a hate crime hoax…at Cooper Union. There was this claim that these Palestinian protesters were hunting Jews in the library”
The tweet I liked didn’t say Jews were being hunted. It said “Jewish students at Cooper Union are in the library as protestors pound on the door,” which is not disputed. The video shows Jewish students in the library, and protestors pounding on the door. I don’t know exactly what happened, and I haven’t endorsed any particular narrative about it.
Jewish students at Cooper Union are in the library as protestors pound on the door.
“I cited…the fact that over and over and over again, that Israel in its wars targets civilians indiscriminately. I cited various UN reports to this effect. And Cofnas responded by basically saying the UN is engaged in systematic…anti-Semitism because of the UN general assembly votes that are very targeted against Israel. My thought was, that doesn’t make any sense….The fact-finding missions that I was citing like the Goldstone report in 2009 have nothing to do with Arab states. So this is just a flimsy argument. You haven’t draw a connection between anti-Semitic Arab states and these UN fact-finding reports which show overwhelmingly indiscriminate attacks on civilians. And then he just got mad and me and said I’m unserious.”
On Twitter, Matt cited a single piece of evidence that UN accusations of war crimes against Israel are credible and not motivated by anti-Semitism: the Goldstone report. I replied that “[Goldstone] expressed regret that his report may have been inaccurate….[He said] ‘civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy’ by Israel.” Goldstone also says: “They [the UN Human Rights Council] repeatedly rush to pass condemnatory resolutions in the face of alleged violations of human rights law by Israel, but fail to take similar action in the face of even more serious violations by other states.” In other words, Matt’s one piece of evidence says the opposite of what he claimed: it says Israel was falsely accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians, and that the UN is biased against Israel. As you can see, he doesn’t have much of a response to this:
That doesn't answer my question, but as for Goldstone: "[Goldstone] expressed regret that his report may have been inaccurate….[He said] 'civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy' by Israel." Goldstone also says: "They [the UN Human Rights Council]…
I never wanted to debate Eric Striker, and I publicly refused to debate him.
This is why I’m not interested in further discussion with Matt.
LF: Matt asked me if you ever agreed to debate Mike Enoch.
NC: Striker: never. Enoch: I don’t remember the exact words I used. I said either (a) I would debate him if he read my paper or (b) I wouldn’t debate the kind of person who challenged someone to debate a paper he hadn’t read. Either way, Enoch made it clear that he wasn’t going to read the paper, so a debate was never on the table. I never said anything to suggest I “wanted” to debate him.
Posted inIsrael, Nathan Cofnas|Comments Off on I talk to Matt aka ‘History Speaks’ about the Middle East Conflict (11-5-23)
October 7’s Hamas massacre in south Israel would not have happened against West Bank settlers. Settlers are armed. The kibbutzniks in Israel’s south were not well-armed. They were left-wing peaceniks and they were not prepared to do battle with people who wanted to slaughter them.
The victims of the Hamas attack—the dead, the survivors, the kidnapped—were not settlers or fanatics; they were, in the main, the liberals of Israel, a breed that still speaks (with caveats and shades of difference) about peace and two states for two peoples. They tend to loathe Netanyahu for his hubris and corruption, his disdain for the Palestinians, his attempt to diminish the Supreme Court, and his alliance with such lurid reactionaries as his national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. Some of the survivors were not especially political; some had come to the previous Kaplan Street demonstrations. They joined groups like Achim Laneshek, or Brothers in Arms, reservists who marched against Netanyahu. After October 7th, they put aside protest for rescue work.
Killers and other predators prefer soft targets to hard targets.
Sep. 8, 2023, political scientist John J. Mearsheimer said to Glenn Loury: “A lot of people argue that this [Russian invasion of Ukraine] of Feb. 4, 2022 violated just war theory or violated international law. That’s correct. Just war theory [and international law] rule out preventive war. This was a preventive war. The war was illegal and unjust but if you are a state and you are faced with what you think is an existential threat, and there’s no doubt that Russia saw Ukraine in NATO as an existential threat, and you launch a war to eliminate that mortal threat, no leader, nor his people, is going to consider that unjust.”
Israel sees Hamas as an existential threat to its existence and thus is determined to wipe out Hamas, no matter the cost.
During the [1995] campaign, he [Bibi] made sure to be overheard when he told a spiritual leader of the Sephardim, Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, “Leftists have forgotten what it is to be Jewish. They think they will put security in the hands of the Arabs—that Arabs will look out for us.” He won the election, and though he has spent occasional periods in the wilderness, he has now been Prime Minister for a total of sixteen years, longer even than David Ben-Gurion.
A few people care about out-groups, but these are not the sentiments to bet on, because overwhelmingly, people don’t care about out-groups. Americans, for example, do not care when Americans commit atrocities against non-Americans. The 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam took the lives of about 400 dead civilians, and the man who directed it, Lieutenant William Calley Jr., got four years of house arrest.
According to Wikipedia, Allied bombing in WWII killed 790,509 – 1,693,374 people. Few Americans cried over these civilian deaths.
I grew up in Australia. The overwhelming sentiment I noticed around my fellow Aussies was that anyone who wasn’t an Aussie was worthless.
As the Israeli right solidified its hold on power, some in the country came to view its draconian anti-Palestinian policies with repugnance. Yair Golan is a retired Army general in his early sixties; he is graying yet as trim as a blade. He was an infantry commander during the second intifada, and then led the Judea and Samaria division, in the West Bank. But he grew increasingly disgusted with the military’s treatment of Palestinians, and he did not keep his views to himself. A speech that he delivered seven years ago at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak caused a furor. Golan, who was then the deputy chief of staff of the I.D.F., warned that Israeli society had grown callous to “the other,” and said, “If there is something that frightens me in the memory of the Holocaust, it is identifying horrifying processes that occurred in Europe, particularly in Germany, seventy, eighty, and ninety years ago, and finding evidence of their existence here in our midst today, in 2016.” He referred to an incident in Hebron in which an I.D.F. sergeant was filmed shooting a Palestinian who had stabbed an Israeli soldier but had already been subdued and was prostrate. “There is nothing easier and simpler,” Golan said, “than behaving like a beast, becoming morally corrupt, and sanctimonious.”
No group graduates from the harsh reality of in-group vs out-group thinking. A few intellectuals here and there may overcome it for a time, but it is not possible for the masses to overcome it because it is not usually adaptive to do so. In-groups who lack a fierce commitment to their own survival don’t survive. With few exceptions, everybody is callous to the other, and that this reality frightens and terrifies Yair Golan simply shows he’s out of touch with how people work. He sought acclaim from the intellectual class by proclaiming precious feelings that are inaccessible to normal people living under threat.
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on Israel’s October 7 Massacre Hit Kibbutzniks, Not Settlers
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
