“I stayed up last night… Not so much to welcome the new year, but to make sure the old one leaves…”
– Ben David, in the comments to the previous post.
Still, hope springs eternal in the human breast. 2024, here we come.
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January 1st, 2024 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 To say our elites have a blindspot where anti-Semitism is concerned is a grotesque understatement. Having spent years obsessing over fantasy forms of racism and fascism, having spent years soberly telling us that Boris Johnson was Eton’s answer to Hitler, the great and good look upon Jew-hating marches, attacks and even terror plots… and it barely registers. Whether these people are ignoring anti-Semitism, making excuses for it, or participating in it, the story remains the same. Our supposedly ‘anti-racist’ betters, people who during the Black Lives Matter uprising just two years ago were taking knees and ‘doing the work’ and tweeting #SilenceIsViolence from their £4million townhouses, are so marinated in a divisive identity politics and a demented ‘anti-imperialism’ that they see Jews as ‘white’ oppressors, even when they’re being beaten up, and Israel as the aggressor, even when it is under attack. The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ over the barbaric rise of anti-Semitism reminds us that these people were never anti-racists at all. December 29th, 2023 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
We also visited the sense-dulling intersection of sports, wokeness, and science journalism, via the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, in which we were told, “The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences, but of biases in how they are treated in sport.” That such male-female differences and their implications for athletes have been widely studied and quantified seemed somehow to have escaped detection. That Allyson Felix, an 11-time Olympic track and field medallist, would place six hundred and eighty-ninth on a ranking of high-school boys was one of many details carefully avoided. And which again suggests that wokeness is actively stupefying, a kind of rapid-onset morony. – David Thompson, presenting us with a roundup of 2023’s lunatic antics. Read the whole thing and prepare to be stupefied by the cavalcade of idiocy. December 28th, 2023 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Taking a Christmas break from my customary snarkiness, I mean this without irony. I would like to make one of those motivational posters with an inspirational quotation or slogan on it. The slogan would express an idea that I already believe strongly, only I have not yet found the best way to express it. The starting point is a slogan that has many variants, but the version I saw first and like best is:
Knowing my audience, I shall link to the demotivational version as well. It’s a quote from B.J. Novak, who was probably a ray of sunshine until he played the temp in the American version of The Office. So, the slogan for which I reach is similar to that one (the motivational version, not Novak’s), but is about acceptance rather than love. Something like:
Then what? I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure if it’s even a good idea to mention the consequences of the other person saying “no”. I suppose I could say “better to be aware they do not accept you than to be deceived by them feigning acceptance out of fear, which will probably lead to them stabbing you in the back whenever they get the chance”, but that one’s a bit of a downer to put on a poster. The point I really want to make is that true acceptance cannot be had if the person being asked to do the accepting does not have the option to say “no”. The reason I seek a more pithy way to express this sentiment than anything I have come up so far is that, as I said a few years back in a post called “To knock on the door is better than booting it in”, “Like some warrior cultures of old, the grievance culture holds getting what you want by asking or peaceably trading to be fit only for slaves. The superior person does not ask for what they want; they demand it.” This attitude is culturally dominant in both senses. I can see why this disastrous misapprehension arose. There are circumstances where the only moral course is to demand one’s just rights as rights, with not the slightest hint of pleading. But there can be no right to be accepted, just as there can be no right to be loved. December 24th, 2023 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
The point here is that if one only has a right so long as it is in accordance with the public interest, then that is tantamount to saying one does not have a right at all, because it is entirely contingent on the authorities’ view of what the public interest entails. If they have a plausible-sounding reason why depriving one of one’s property is in the public interest (spoiler alert: they almost always will have such a reason), then they can do so irrespective of one’s ‘rights’, and one’s rights therefore are of no real practical or legal consequence. This is the position we find ourselves in, then, with respect to A1P1. We have a right to property but only insofar as we can be deprived of our possessions when it is in the public interest. We do not then really have a right to property at all, at least insofar as the ECHR goes, but more a liberty to enjoy peaceful possession of our property on the sufferance of the State. We are on implied notice that as soon as it is in the public interest to deprive us of our property, the State can do so. Strongly recommend you real the whole thing. December 18th, 2023 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Make energy expensive so industry moves abroad, then tax the goods coming back in due to their carbon content. You pay twice. – Steve Loftus, illustrating why the Tories should and will burn to ash at the next General Election. December 18th, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
We don’t face a Brexit crisis, a migration crisis, a housing crisis, an NHS crisis, a social care crisis, an energy crisis, a productivity crisis, a deficit crisis or an education crisis — there is one universal and interconnected crisis of British politics and government. The article is not new but it is still interesting. December 16th, 2023 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Few phrases are as reliable as ‘my truth’ for identifying seasoned purveyors of cant and doubletalk. Truth isn’t something that can be identified or modified by a possessive pronoun. If my truth is different from your truth and your truth is different from her truth, these aren’t truths. ‘My truth’ is the device deployed to elevate the particular viewpoint of a member of a particular group or identity, by claiming the validation of the ‘truth’ for a narrow ideological cause.” – Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal ($). He was writing about the views of the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay. As of the time of writing, Gay is still in a job, but for how long? December 12th, 2023 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Now, remember. This study — and all the news reports about it — constantly reassures pharma bigwigs and depressed jab-takers that there’s no evidence of adverse effects from the random ‘nonsense proteins,’ the randomized proteins that 25% of their transfected cells are now making. Nothing to worry about! But check out this very telling quote from one of the study authors, Anne Willis, who is a very upbeat kind of lady. She found that the problem just creates a very exciting opportunity for jab makers to fix it: (Professor Anne Willis, Director of the MRC Toxicology Unit) adds it is very exciting that there is a way to fix the issue, which “massively de-risks this platform going forward”. Screech! Hold on, wait just a minute! Slam on the brakes for a second. If fixing the issue “massively de-risks the (mRNA) platform” … that means … there are massive risks to be fixed. And that quote, ladies and gentlemen, gave away the entire game, right there, and showed us what the study authors are really thinking. December 8th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a time of war, everybody makes proportionality arguments. But proportionality is a fool’s game, more suited to propaganda than to reasoned judgement. Wars are not sporting events. December 7th, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jobs are a cost, not a benefit. Having to direct human labour to some task reduces the amount of such human effort that can be devoted to sating some other desire – it’s a cost. So that boast is that dealing with climate change would add 380 million costs to the global economy. Yes, obviously, this is an opportunity cost but if you’re not doing opportunity costs then whatever you’re doing it’s not economics. December 6th, 2023 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
“At its core,” Emily writes, “effective accelerationism embraces the idea that social problems can be solved purely with advances in technology, rather than by messy human deliberation.” Your sense that technological progress has increased human abundance, and the city of San Francisco is poorly run? This is a dangerous idea. December 3rd, 2023 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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