The only thing the West needs to do to see the final end of Russia as the historical threat it has always been is… do nothing. Talk a bit, posture a bit, make a few disapproving clucking sounds when Putin has one of his bare shirted Mussolini cosplay days, but essentially… do nothing. Just wait and watch. Russia’s catastrophic demographics and fragile resource based economics are doing everything the West needs.
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To me, (Britain) now seems a strange, immoral place. For example, I read articles in The Guardian and The Times this week about the abolition of inherited wealth. The Economist also recently wrote about it. It did not even occur to any of these columnists that they were talking about the property of others. They did not create it. They did not inherit it. They have no just claim to it. Yet they have no moral concerns about proposing its seizure. March 30th, 2014 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “There’s nothing like a bunch of unemployed recent college graduates to bring out the central planner in parent-aged pundits.” There may indeed be what US law professor and uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds calls an education bubble in the US (and for that matter, here in the UK). That does not, however, mean that studying a “liberal arts” degree is somehow shameful or pointless, and yet that is the impression I sometimes get on part of the right-of-centre blogosphere. By all means let’s cut the state education establishment down, but that is utterly different from the argument about education per se and ideas about how people should broaden their horizons culturally and intellectually. It is important that libertarians/classical liberals understand that distinction, and make it often. March 23rd, 2014 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
If that’s not bad enough, researchers at the University of Maryland insist that global warming will destroy civilization. A forthcoming journal article asserts that expanding population and the difference in wealth between the rich (“the elites”) and the poor (“commoners”) will bring down the United States in the way the barbarians brought down the Roman Empire. There’s a solution, of course. Higher taxes, increased regulation and more government supervision of everyone’s lives, and other liberal nostrums. […] Sacrificing babies to the ancient gods of Carthage didn’t save that ancient empire, and abortion won’t chill the climate today. The public is tuning out the likes of Al Gore and his prophecies because they notice that two decades of hysterical predictions haven’t come true. In a climate of skepticism, the only way for scientists with a scam to get attention (and government grants) is to concoct ever more over-the-top claims. If driving a Chevy Volt will reduce incidents of rape or a curlicue light bulb will rescue Western civilization, a finding that Earth’s temperature hasn’t budged in 210 months should be something to celebrate. It means the planet is doing just fine. – Extract from a Washington Times editorial. A rather spiffing article in spite of the preposterous use of the word ‘liberal’ to refer to illiberal collectivism. March 19th, 2014 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
We’ve all felt that need to tell the hard truth. Assert the raw and unadorned core repeatedly and dogmatically. React with righteous anger and fury, even without elaboration, to the point of being downright offensive. There is a role for this. Injustice in our midst — and there is so much of it — cries out for it. I wouldn’t call this brutalist. I would call this righteous passion, and it is what we should feel when we look at ugly and immoral things like war, the prison state, mass surveillance, routine violations of people’s rights. The question is whether this style of argument defines us or whether we can go beyond it, not only to lash out in reaction — to dwell only in raw oppositional emotion — but also to see a broad and positive alternative. – Jeffrey Tucker, whose recent essay on what he sees as being the less charming features of libertarian commentary has provoked quite a storm, thereby validating his point. March 18th, 2014 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The government lost the crypto-wars. Crypto is now freely available, but in a sense they won because there are so many ways at people’s data that bypass the cryptography. What we’re learning from the Snowden documents is not that the NSA and GCHQ can break cryptography but that they can very often render it irrelevant… They exploit bad implementations, bugs in hardware and software, default keys, weak keys, or they go in and break systems and steal data. March 16th, 2014 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him – Jonathan Swift, as quoted here. March 9th, 2014 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
I don’t care for how many Ukranians say ‘Ukraine’, if any of them think we should say ‘Ukraine’, they can swivel, as in English, it is and has been, ‘The Ukraine’. – Samizdata commenter Mr. Ed. March 8th, 2014 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
If Russian govt. endorses Crimean referendum, will they also allow/endorse similar votes in republics in Russian Federation? – Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia March 6th, 2014 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our currency in the U.S. (often known in the black community as “Dead Presidents”) honors people who won wars. Andrew Jackson killed a lot of Indians. General Grant killed a lot of Confederates. Franklin Roosevelt killed the economy. March 3rd, 2014 | 131 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Russian communist-era movie played on the TV. I couldn’t understand the dialogue, but it was at least passively propagandistic. The main characters, scientists in white lab coats, worked in a sparkling clean high-tech facility, the kind of place science fiction writers of the 1950s imagined were in our future. The movie portrayed an entirely staged idealized version of an advanced communist utopia without gulags, without long lines for potatoes, and without the NKVD. Ukrainians don’t need communist-produced re-runs. They, like the rest of us, need a serious film about Stalinism for a mass audience, a Schindler’s List of the Soviet Union. March 1st, 2014 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The truth is that the NCCL was right both to have PIE as an affiliate and to defend its members against charges of ‘corrupting public morals’. Why? Because a key role of any civil liberties group worth its name is to defend the rights of association of the most loathed sections of society, to ensure that even the profoundly unpopular enjoy the same liberties, most importantly freedom of speech, as the respectable and the right-on. February 27th, 2014 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
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