“It is telling that Beijing and Hong Kong are more afraid of their own people than Hong Kong’s British colonial government ever was.”
– Wall Street Journal, editorial comment. ($)
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February 29th, 2024 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 It is commonly said that the problem for the Tories is that they don’t know what they stand for. There is a certain element of truth in this: the Parliamentary party is an almost absurdly broad spectrum comprising at one extreme people who wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of Tony Blair’s cabinets, and on the other, traditional religious conservatives – with an awful lot of Thatcherites, One Nationers, old-fashioned ‘shire Tories’, ‘wets’ and libertarians in the middle. But the bigger problem, it seems to me, is that the Tories don’t really know what they stand against. This is a particular problem for the Tory party in particular, which since the early 20th century has had the main raison d’etre of keeping Labour out of power. In order to do this, it should go without saying, you have to know what Labour stand for, and provide a clearly discernible alternative. That is the Tory party’s main duty, but it is badly shirking it. Some readers of this substack will raise their eyebrows at the idea that the Tory party’s existence is mainly justified on the basis of keeping Labour out, so let me explain. And let me make no bones about it: while I have plenty of time for Labour voters (I come after all from dyed-in-the-wool Labour-voting stock) and even some Labour politicians, I despise the Labour Party and more or less everything it stands for. I don’t think there is an institution in contemporary Britain which exerts a more baleful influence. And this is because it is imbued with – indeed, it is the very political manifestation of – what Dostoyevsky might have called the morality of the Grand Inquisitor: a morality that positions itself always against freedom and agency in the name of comfort and ignorance. Read the whole thing. I heartily commend this article to you and suggest subscribing to David McGrogan’s substack. February 28th, 2024 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“[A] wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.” – From Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address. February 27th, 2024 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Once again the media’s efforts to avoid mentioning that a criminal is a member of a group they wish to protect have ended up stirring people up against that group. Here are two examples of the Streisand Effect as applied to criminals that I came across in the last two days: The first example was reported the Telegraph about its rival the Guardian: “Guardian writer boycotts newspaper for failing to tell readers ‘cat killer’ murderer was transgender”.
This is the revised version of that Guardian story. It now includes a brief mention of the fact that Blake is transgender. The second example comes from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and refers to the murder of Laken Riley:
Being in the UK, I cannot see the actual article due to GDPR regulations (why do we still have those?), but the tweet from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that links to its report says “A 26-year-old Athens man has been charged with murder in the death of a nursing student on the University of Georgia campus.” The AJC’s description of the man charged with Laken Riley’s murder, Jose Antonio Ibarra, as an “Athens man” when he is actually a Venezuelan illegal immigrant prompted Elon Musk himself to tweet, “Why did you lie to the people by calling an illegal from Venezuela an “Athens man”?” Hint to the Guardian and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: when you try to hide something about the perpetrator of a crime and the truth comes out, people do not approach your next report of a similar crime with an open mind. They very reasonably tend to assume that you are hiding the same thing you hid before. Not only does this do the exact opposite of your intention – cause readers to overestimate the prevalence of the group you tried to protect among criminals of that type rather than underestimate it as you tried to make them do – it also means that they lose trust in everything else you tell them. February 27th, 2024 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
However, in the real, non-ideal world of mediocre and shallow thinkers, cowards, selfish careerists, and the occasional scoundrel, political and scientific censorship never works out in the way envisaged by its public advocates. In the non-ideal world of imperfect knowledge and corruptible character, censorship is just as likely to frustrate the pursuit of truth as to facilitate it. Nobody’s Wisdom or Knowledge is Infallible Consider, first, the fact that nobody, not even the most educated or brilliant person, possesses perfect, infallible knowledge, whether on moral or scientific questions. Of course, some people may, as a matter of fact, be better informed or wiser than others on this or that issue. However, the notion that anyone could enjoy a form of knowledge or wisdom that is uniquely infallible or immune to challenge, is preposterous. Who but God alone could possibly redeem such a far-fetched claim, and on what basis? The idea that there is a superior class of persons whose knowledge and insights automatically trump the knowledge and insights of others is inconsistent with ordinary experience, which confirms that people reputed to be highly knowledgeable and wise can make grave and even catastrophic errors. In addition, it is based on a deeply naïve and misguided view of the complex and messy process through which human knowledge is acquired. – David Thunder writing “Why attempting to purge the Web of misinformation is a fool’s errand” … but frankly I think is a scoundrel’s errand. February 26th, 2024 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have long been of the opinion that Google’s old motto was merely lacking in the proper punctuation. Whenever a Google employee thought, “Should I do the right thing?”, they looked to the company motto for their answer: “Don’t. Be Evil.” – Anon February 24th, 2024 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Dear Mr MacFarlane, In general, I am a fan of “The Orville” the soft science fiction series of which you are the creator and star. The other day I watched Episode 5 of Season 2, “All the World is Birthday Cake”. During the course of my viewing I said some things about your work as the writer of that episode that I now regret. I said that the crew of the Orville had no cause to sneer at the inhabitants of Regor 2 for their unscientific beliefs, given that their own protocol for First Contact with an alien species seemed to be to sashay in to the welcome banquet and start quaffing, without having done the five minutes of research necessary to find out the basic organising principle of the aliens’ society. As this reviewer said, despite possessing advanced computers and translators and all that, the crew “blindly go in, interfere in their culture and cause animosity between the Orville and a first contact species”. Not just animosity towards the Orville, either, the Regorian species is now hostile to the entire Union. I also said that there was no way that two supposedly elite officers of the Planetary Union like Bortus and Kelly Grayson could be so stupendously foolish as to try to escape from that prison camp where they were being held. What on Earth or off it were they trying to achieve? Where did they think they would go? Both of them were visibly aliens, the only two aliens on the planet! How did they think being outside the camp would improve their situation? Surely they would have known that by far their best chance of freedom was to sit tight and wait for Captain Mercer to get them freed by diplomatic means or by the use of the Orville’s superior technology. And after all that gushing about what a joy it was to welcome a new species to galactic society, Grayson and Bortus straight-up murdering a bunch of prison guards came as a bit of a surprise. Yes, they had been unjustly imprisoned and treated badly, but (I asked sarcastically) would Mr MacFarlane recommend that Americans unjustly imprisoned in foreign jails today should grab a gun off a guard and start shooting to kill? Bang goes the last chance of ever persuading the Regorians to reconsider their rejection of contact. The Regorians were perfectly justified in sentencing Bortus and Grayson to death. In fact they should have gone ahead and executed them both even after the “new star” appeared, to save the Union the trouble. Mr MacFarlane, I admit with shame that I insulted your skills as a scriptwriter. I made remarks to the effect that it was completely implausible that people who were depicted as having gone through a rigorous selection process to get the positions they occupied could be so lacking in forethought, so stupendously arrogant, so utterly stupid. I humbly apologise and withdraw that untrue statement. In that respect your script was entirely plausible. Elite people at the top of their profession really can be that stupid. Take those highly educated, highly paid software engineers working for Google, for instance. The “most powerful company in the world” created and launched an AI called “Gemini” that would produce images of people in response to text requests. Imagine the ingenuity that goes into creating such a marvel. But because they are woke, Google told Gemini to make sure that the people it portrayed were anything other than white males. All that concentrated intelligence, and they still didn’t see what would inevitably happen next… → Continue reading: Seth MacFarlane: An Apology February 24th, 2024 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“For so many people to resile from what would once have been their natural responsibilities is an unprecedented social phenomenon and no one in public life appears to know what to do about it. The thing they agree on is that it is not a simple problem of management. It is damaging the country’s economy in catastrophic ways and it has moral dimensions that few politicians would dare to confront. In other words, it requires just the sort of large visionary message that has gone out of fashion.” – Janet Daley, Sunday Telegraph (£), 18 February. February 23rd, 2024 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Seva Gunitsky is referring to Jon Stewart telling Tucker Carlson that the reason why the US ‘can’t have clean functioning subways or cheap grocery prices like they do in Moscow is “the literal price of freedom”‘. I am sure Jon Stewart would decline with horror an offer to work as one of Putin’s worldwide army of propagandists. But Putin does not need to make the offer when Stewart and many others are spreading his message for free. Many working people who currently have no choice but to endure the aggressive begging, foul smells, and frequent violence in the subway systems in New York and other U.S. cities run by progressive Democrats would count freedom (a political abstraction that they are constantly being told is an outdated white patriarchal construct) as an acceptable price to exchange for getting to go to work in something more like the gleaming Moscow Metro. Sure, they would eventually realise that they made a poor bargain. A Professor Gunitsky says, the cleanliness and order of the Moscow subway is like one room of a generally filthy house that is obsessively kept clean in order to impress visitors. → Continue reading: The condition of New York’s subway system is not the price of freedom, it is the price of voting for left wing Democrats February 23rd, 2024 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Net zero has turned into a Chinese weapon aimed right at the heart of Western competitiveness. If we don’t wake up and recognise soon that we have to figure out a better way of combating climate change our industries are about to get wiped out.” – Matthew Lynn, Daily Telegraph (£). February 22nd, 2024 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
A week or so ago I posted about the case of Abdul Ezedi – the corrosive liquid attacker – and compared it with a similar case from a hundred years ago. Ezedi would appear to have been found in Mayor Khan’s makeshift morgue otherwise known as the River Thames. Meanwhile, a hundred years ago Ezedi’s counterpart’s case has reached a conclusion. This is from The Times of 29 February 1924:
Only three years? But there’s a bit more to this woman:
I make that 4 weddings, 4 assaults and 3 jail sentences. The women of February 21st, 2024 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
“If I were prosecuting Mao, I’d further cover my bases by pointing out that he gave explicit orders to literally enslave hundreds of millions, then invoke the felony murder rule. However you slice it, Mao was a monster – and it’s high time for China to tear down his remaining posters and replace them with monuments to his victims.” – Bryan Caplan, EconLog. His article refers to a new study of the terrible famine, wrought by collectivisation of the Chinese economy. Communists tend to be very, very bad at farming. Property rights, incentives, etc – they just don’t get it. Until such time as China takes a full, objective reckoning of the monster that Mao was, I don’t see much that is benign about that nation, even though this isn’t meant to be a sweeping statement about all Chinese people, of course. February 20th, 2024 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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