Comparisons have been made between the popular uprisings on both sides of the Atlantic — some of them lazy. Boris Johnson, the UK foreign secretary and leading Leave campaigner, and Mr Trump may have shaken up their respective establishments, but blond hair is one of the few things they have in common. Brexit and Trumpism are not one and the same.
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The UK has Brexit, an event that Perry, Adriana, Brian, I and the rest of the Samizdata conspirators would have only dreamed of when this publication was founded all those years ago. To say it would have been a pipe dream back then is not far off and I am sure anyone suggesting it would happen any time soon would have been asked where they had managed to purchase such fine quality substances. Brexit is not the end of the fun amongst the fed up electorates of the Anglosphere, it is only the prelude. The Libertarian Party in the USA will be a serious cat amongst dumb flocking birds this year. Gary Johnson is still rising in the polls. He has been at levels we have never seen before almost from the day he was nominated and has gone up from 10% to 11% and now 12%. Should he reach 15% by the end of the summer, he will be invited to the Presidential Debates. No matter what else happens, that would be enough to warm the cockles o’ me Libertarian Laissez-Faire heart. But wait! There is more! If Gary makes it into the debates, he will almost certainly garner a substantial popular vote in the election. The American electorate, by and large, loath both Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee this year. Now if I were smoking something really good right now, something which Gary has sworn to see legalized, I might even say that a tight three way race could make 34% the plurality in the popular (not Electoral) vote. That level for a Libertarian candidate in the USA is about as imaginable as, well… the UK voting to leave the EU. Inconceivable. This year is going to be a lot of fun. We are turning the world upside down… and we are enjoying every second of it everywhere in the Anglosphere. July 15th, 2016 | 70 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.” – British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, talking about Hillary Clinton back in 2007 This is going to be so good 😀 July 15th, 2016 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
This story suggests that there are some truly spineless people out there. A blogger and author, Ed Cline, has been ejected by his landlord because he isn’t particularly nice about Islam:
It is not my purpose here to say whether the landlord in question had a right to act in the way described (the landlord has not been quoted, so there may be other matters here, and it is only fair to make that point). It may well be that landlords in some cases state, in a rental agreement, that persons whose conduct might cause problems for neighbours etc can be evicted, although a lot depends on whether such “problems” are clearly defined, or not. For all I know, some rental agreements and rules in various places such as gated communities can be very tough. (I’d appreciate comments on that.) There may be a lot of expensive litigation and it sounds as if Mr Cline doesn’t have a lot of money. (People can help him out via Paypal.) A broader point, however, is that a man who hasn’t, as far as I know, committed a criminal offence is being turfed out of a rented flat because he is deemed a risk because of what he has written about Islam.
So in today’s West, and certainly Obama’s America, many authorities are determined to do what they can to play down the factor of Islamic totalitarianism as a key driver of violence and mayhem. But if a middle-aged man writes about this, or expresses bracing views on such matters, he can be thrown out of a home.
I can’t stand the man, but when you add up stories such as this, is there really any surprise that Donald Trump might be in the White House next January?
July 12th, 2016 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings. The National Bureau of Economic Research. H/T, Commentary. July 12th, 2016 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The desperate need of left-wing journalists to see Obama as “pure” and “most successful” — to see him as they’ve reported him instead of how he is — is in part a result of the racial pathology of the left, its tendency to reduce people to their victim group. The notion that “the first black president” has been a failure would be, according to this way of thinking, a nasty slight against a race rather than, what it is, an indictment of bad ideas and their consequences. Identity politics is, in my view, one of the great, if not the greatest, scourges of the age. It isn’t an exclusively left-wing phenomenon, either. July 11th, 2016 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
A commentator on Breitbart, ‘Rob’, says of the decision by the FBI not to recommend charges relating to alleged violation of the law relating to the use and security of the Secretary’s private email server:
July 5th, 2016 | 93 comments - (Comments are closed)
As president [Hillary Clinton] wouldn’t merely run off with the White House silver (again) and line her pockets to an extent which would make Ferdinand Marcos blush. She would do real, permanent, damage to the republic, to an extent which neither Trump nor Sanders could match. She’s greedy, evil and dangerous; Trump is merely greedy and Sanders is merely evil. – Laird, serial commenter in this parish and oft-times wordsmith. June 7th, 2016 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
The overall effect of Donald Trump: Bombastic; but you can obviously deal with bombastic people. Occasionally contradicts himself; you can obviously deal with people like that. Has some views that, let’s say, perhaps, most people don’t hold; you can obviously deal with people like that. He can’t be that bad. The American system is designed to limit the power of the president. Nothing that bad is going to happen. He’s going to build a wall. He’s going to fix trade. […] Everything else seems to be up for grabs. Which is fine. Who wants an activist president? Who said we had to have all these presidents who wanted to do things? The best president in history was Calvin fucking Coolidge who did nothing. I think Trump is going to quickly find he is not able to do much after he builds his wall and fixes trade and that’s fine. He’s going to be a slightly more bombastic Coolidge and I think most people are fairly relaxed about that. But the cultural effect of Donald Trump is going to be marvellous. Donald Trump represents the single greatest threat to the left’s thirty year history of shaming, name-calling, silencing, bullying, nannying, bossing around, the schoolmarmishness of the left: he just blows through it like a juggernaut. He represents an existential threat to the regressives we hate so much because he shows them up for the nonsense that they are. Every time he’s accused of being sexist he either doubles down or shows with evidence why it’s not true. Every time he’s accused of being racist he laughs it off and moves on. Any time he’s accused of any of these things it doesn’t work; it doesn’t affect him. And the media, which is so in hock to these ridiculous liberal social-justice lunacies and platitudes has lost its power to affect how people vote. The power of the American media to shape elections is fucking gone. It’s over. […] Trump has come along at exactly the right moment when people are prepared to vote culturally. And people are prepared to vote for a wacky, outside candidate because they realise that nothing is going to change otherwise. […] The people who are the most angry about Trump are the people who realise that the gravy train just skidded to a halt. There is no more money for you. And why? Very simple: you’re losers. You lost every possible argument with the possible exception of guns and maybe abortion. Everything else you lost. Conservatives are losers. The public is tired of looking at conservative media and conservative politicians and seeing losers. – Milo Yiannopoulos at UCLA explaining why he thinks a Donald Trump presidency would be a good thing. June 2nd, 2016 | 128 comments - (Comments are closed)
The fundamental reason FDA placed the public at greater risk of the health problems that come with smoking traditional cigarette was that it cannot pass up on a chance to expand its power. As the tortured language of the regulation shows, the FDA recognizes that e-cigarettes are safer than cigarettes, but refuses to admit their potential positive consequences. Instead, the agency twists congressional intent in its deadly power grab. May 25th, 2016 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is worth watching the panel session with Milo Yiannopolous, Stephen Crowder and Christina Hoff Summers at the University of Massechusets. Of course the event, organised by the Republican Club, is disrupted by heckling lefties who think that the format of a panel session infringes their free speech. And Milo is typically provocative. But watch out too for very good arguments from Milo and Christina. Milo in particular demonstrates his ability to concisely make powerful, well-reasoned arguments. That the talk is punctuated by heckling with Milo’s provocative one-liners and Stephen Crowder’s rants just makes it all the more entertaining. Finally, here’s a quote from Milo that could forecast the end of the PC movement:
April 28th, 2016 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
… to keep out the floods of undesirable US celebrities fleeing the USA following a Trump victory. April 27th, 2016 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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