The most damaging paper of the pandemic has just been published in The Lancet and it makes stunning reading.
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July 6th, 2023 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
 When I asked my five-year-old grandson what he knew about George Washington, all he could say was, “He owned slaves.” That’s how Washington is remembered today: slaves, bad teeth, and a face on the dollar bill. But he won the Revolutionary War by sheer force of character; the precedents he set as our first chief executive embodied the ideology of freedom and remain in effect today. Other great men of similar talents behaved quite differently. Napoleon began as first consul, then promoted himself to emperor. Simón Bolívar went from liberator to dictator. By contrast, Washington voluntarily and with much relief relinquished power and ended his days as a farmer at Mount Vernon. That was unusual, unlikely—and exceptional. – Martin Gurri on how he sees July 4th July 4th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
First, it was clear to me that to attempt to challenge Islamic extremism with facts and logic as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris had done was to fail on purpose. Despite their efforts, most of the Western world today operates under de facto blasphemy laws which are enforced not by religious activists lobbying for censorship but by knife-wielding fanatics and suicide bombers. The liberalism that the new atheists so enthusiastically espoused, the idea that we should be free to criticise, mock and satirise anything, including religion, only works when the Government is willing to protect you from the consequences. In seeking to liberate us from the tyrannical instincts of dogmatic Christians, the new atheists delivered us into the hands of a different and far more pernicious religious zealotry from which the ordinary citizen has no security at all. July 4th, 2023 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types – the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. – G.K. Chesterton July 3rd, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The identitarian left’s nightmarish image of Britain is utterly divorced from reality. It also flies in the face of ethnic minorities’ own view of the UK, wilfully misrepresenting their experiences. Many groups are very content with life in Britain and are optimistic about the future. Yes, they believe that more needs to be done to strengthen equality of opportunity. They no doubt still experience challenges. But ethnic minorities generally view Britain as a place in which people have a chance to thrive. July 3rd, 2023 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Is it ever possible to take a neutral position on the importance of free speech? The task certainly seems quite difficult. As Vogue’s favourite philosopher, Amia Srinivasan, notes this month in the London Review of Books, many Right-wingers seem to assert the value of free speech, mainly or even only to make room for political views the Left would prefer smothered at birth. Occasionally, someone on the Right will complain about the suppression of a position or person they don’t agree with, but usually more to avoid complaints of inconsistency than anything else. The Left, however, also has its blind spots — many of which are apparent in Srinivasan’s essay. Scathing about the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act’s attempt to create a culture which promotes academic freedom in UK universities, she barely acknowledges the problems diagnosed by its authors and defenders. Instead, as many a defensive-sounding progressive has implied before her, real cancellation almost never happens in academia — except, of course, where it happens to exactly those people who deserve it (cough). July 1st, 2023 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The cancellation of eminent science writers and statisticians like Dr. Whitehouse and Professor Fenton for ‘wrongthink’ highlights the ever-shrinking boundaries of the discourse around science and medicine and the unwillingness of science’s gatekeepers to challenge groupthink and politically sensitive dogmas. As Dr. Whitehouse says, “science thrives on debate and scrutiny”. Silencing those who challenge prevailing orthodoxies was the approach favoured by the Catholic church in 17th Century Italy and is completely at odds with the scientific method. I used to read every issue of New Scientist ‘back in the day’ but it has been a bastion of approved high-status groupthink for many years, suitable for cat tray liner only. June 26th, 2023 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
This bill, if passed, would fundamentally redefine family life in California. It would devastate parents’ rights. Your rights over your children – to love them, to look after them, to socialise them as you see fit – would be utterly contingent on your acceptance of the new state religion of transgenderism. AB957 is best seen as an act of forced religious conversion. It sends a stern message to parents across California that if they do not sign up to the cult of gendered souls, to the cranky belief that even young children sometimes feel a mismatch between their ‘real’ gender and their cursed biological casing, then they’ll be treated as the morally lesser party in custody hearings. Your worth as a parent will be determined by how willing you are to take the knee to the gender beliefs of your superiors. June 17th, 2023 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s quite wrong to suggest that the Conservative Party has not actually conserved anything. On the contrary, it has carefully conserved the legacy of the last Labour government so that the next Labour government will be able to pick up where it left off. – Andrew Z June 16th, 2023 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is now clear that whatever force drives public policy within the opaque and factional halls of the ruling party — which is certainly not the impressionable President Cyril Ramaphosa, who drifts like kelp in the coastal currents of the Western Cape seas — has come to three dreadful conclusions. Firstly, the ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive economic policies rather than pursuing growth. Secondly, knowing that its economic plan will cause chaos, the government will batten the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek to chill free speech. And thirdly, it has accepted that what is left of developed world investment interest will dry up and a flailing South African state will have to find succor elsewhere. Enter the Russians and the Chinese. June 14th, 2023 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
And so something as potentially useful as AI has become a means for politicians and experts to express their fatalistic worldview. It is a self-fulfilling tragedy. AI could enable society to go beyond its perceived limits. Yet our expert doomsayers seem intent on keeping us within those limits. The good news is that none of this is inevitable. We can retain a belief in human potential. We can resist the narrative that portrays us as objects, living at the mercy of the things we have created. And if we do so, it is conceivable that we may, one day, develop machines that can represent the ‘peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being’, as Vasily Grossman put it. Now that would be a future worth fighting for. June 11th, 2023 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our own opinion is that this is just another version of the desire for sumptuary laws, as with the hopes for bans on fast fashion. If even the poor can have a change of clothes, interesting food, then what’s the point of being privileged? Therefore those things that enable the poor to be as their betters must be banned. It’s a very common and very unattractive part of human nature. The other way to look at this is as a proof of Hayek’s contention in The Road to Serfdom. If government becomes the provider of health care – the NHS – then the population will be managed at the pleasure of the health care system. June 10th, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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