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[Putin] is not an easy man … But I don’t think there is any substitute other than constant engagement. I would like to think she means an endless conveyor belt of ATGWs and artillery ammunition so that the Ukrainian Army can keep Putin’s assorted employees under ‘constant engagement’. But I think she might actually mean doing nothing very much other than exchanging LOLcats and Vines daily via unsecured e-mail. July 4th, 2015 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The overwhelming tendency of markets is to bring people together, break down prejudices, and persuade people of the benefits of cooperation regardless of class, race, religion, sex/gender, or other arbitrary distinctions. The same is obviously and especially true of sexual orientation. It is the market that rewards people who put aside their biases and seek gains through trade. This is why states devoted to racialist and hateful policies always resort to violence in control of the marketplace. Ludwig von Mises, himself Jewish and very much the victim of discrimination his entire life, explained that this was the basis for Nazi economic policy. The market was the target of the Nazis because market forces know no race, religion, or nationality. July 2nd, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bitcoin offers a glimpse into the future of money a purely digital form of money that is individual, private, global, and free (free as in speech, not as in beer). Bitcoin is often compared with the existing banking system, juxtaposing its futuristic capabilities with the slow, antiquated, and cumbersome world of wire transfers, checks, “banking hours,” and restrictions. But the future will not be a choice between “old money” and cryptocurrency. Instead, it will be a choice between two competing visions of digital money: one based on freedom and choice, the other based on control and surveillance, a dystopian totalitarian system of control from which no one can escape. We are now at the crossroads, and we must choose the future of currency wisely. July 1st, 2015 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
June 28th, 2015 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
June 26th, 2015 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s almost as if the NSPCC wants there to be an epidemic of child abuse. Which, in a way, it does. Not because it’s peopled by sadists, but because, as a semi-state-backed organisation established to protect children, its very raison d’être demands that it has some threat to protect children from. It has a vested interested in establishing child abuse as a clear and present danger; it is institutionally determined to ramp up fears of child abuse. June 22nd, 2015 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef and cockwomble, has decided to introduce a soda tax in his restaurants “to send a powerful and strong message to government”. He claims that he will give money raised to the state-funded sock-puppet charity Sustain, who are agitating for a soft drinks tax that will cost taxpayers £1 billion a year. If Oliver feels so strongly about fizzy drinks he could simply stop selling them, but that would hit his bottom line so he’d rather gouge his customers to fund a campaign for a state-sanctioned ‘level playing field’ that will rip off his competitors’ customers too. June 21st, 2015 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nonetheless, environmentalists’ newfound enthusiasm for papal encyclicals is a little strange. After all, the Catholic Church isn’t too keen on abortion or contraception, which seems at odds with the green movement’s Malthusian concerns about overpopulation. The Church’s old-school attitude to homosexuality, and particularly gay marriage, flies directly in the face of the liberal leanings of many greens. Yet environmentalists have been happy to talk up the importance of the pope’s intervention, hoping that a bit of religious pressure will twist the arms of the world’s leaders into overcoming their silly worries about the effect that limits on carbon emissions might have on economic growth. June 19th, 2015 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
If gender is merely a matter of self-identification, should not race be also? I have always thought that, given the affirmative action-laden higher education admissions process, applicants should self-identify as “black” or “Native American” whenever they so desire. I mean, why not? If they feel black or Native American, should not they be able to claim such an identity, as Rachel Dolezal has done? Doing so would quickly cause affirmative action to collapse of its own ridiculous weight. Indeed, all of this race balkanization–with such extreme emphasis as belonging to this or that race–only further divides us, as race baiters like Al Sharpton well know. So why not accept the progressives’ terms of the debate–that our gender and race is all simply a matter of self-identity–and identify as a member of races that are favored/more protected by law? After all, no one can ever really know what lies in another’s heart. Does Bruce Jenner sincerely believe he is a female, or does he simply like to dress up in women’s clothes? Does Rachel Dolezal sincerely believe she is black? No one can possibly know the answer, perhaps not even Mr./Ms. Jenner and Ms. Dolezal. What would a university do if an applicant self-identified as “black” on an application but showed up looking “white”? And if the university made such a judgment, what on earth would that mean? How would the university defend its belief that a student didn’t “look” black? What sort of bizarre racial stereotypes would it rely upon in making such an appearance-based judgment? And if the university actually decided to take action against the student for racial misrepresentation, what on earth would that mean? How would the university judge whether the student was really “black”? What percentage of blood would suffice for such a progressive institution? Fifty percent? Ten percent? One percent? June 13th, 2015 | 81 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the things I love about this law as proposed (and I love this law as proposed), is how this law can’t do what its designed to do. Rather, this law as written ends up putting members of SocJus at risk while theoretically protecting the rights of ordinary citizens to assemble freely on the Internet. […] Unless I’m reading the law wrong, all Rice would have to do is claim “substantial emotional distress” to trigger the new federal law enforcement and prosecutorial assets POTEA demands into action in order to protect Anne Rice from online abuse. I assume POTEA applies here, and Harper will be the first person arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated under POTEA when it is signed into law. What about Brad Wardell, who had reporters and editors of SocJus propaganda websites and their respective online armies fall upon him, only for the allegations made against him to be dismissed with prejudice. Does he get to use POTEA against the people irresponsibly reporting untruth as fact, as well as the editors who allowed untruth to be published as fact? He certainly suffered substantial emotional distress at the hands of SocJus’s Ministry of Truth. – Todd Wohling writing ‘Why I love the POTEA Anti-Harassment Law’ 😉 June 11th, 2015 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Witcher 3, a much anticipated computer game from a Polish studio based on a series of Polish fantasy novels, is released next Tuesday. Reviews of it are already being published and I have been reading a lot about it, including one review on Polygon by Arthur Gies that spent a lot of words complaining about the lack of black people and the treatment of female characters in the game. Another Polish developer, Adrian Chmielarz, whose studio made the acclaimed adventure game The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, has responded. On the complaint that there are only white people in the game:
The Polygon review goes on to complain about the women in the game:
Chmielarz responds:
This is a group whom the reviewer admires, and who argue that “violence against women is a serious, global epidemic”.
There is a lot more; this is just a flavour of the debate. It is good to see people like Chmielarz standing up to this kind of criticism, because for a while it looked as if everything was going the way of those who would be offended by everything. Also encouraging is that, if you read the comments on a news story about this debate at Gamezone, it appears that nobody really cares. They just want to enjoy games. May 16th, 2015 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Price ended his life as a free man because he was willing to defy laws that said he was nothing but the property of other people, to be disposed of as they wished. He got a nice helping hand in maintaining his freedom from other people who were willing to not only defy laws that would compel them to collaborate in Price’s bondage, but to beat the hell out of government agents charged with enforcing those laws. May 15th, 2015 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
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