Godwin doesn’t apply where people really are laughing along about exterminating their opponents.
– House of Dumb. I agree. It’s okay to call people nazis if they did it first.
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I see that former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker was spotted at a Georgia Tea Party protest, telling a local reporter that she is “furious about the way we are being led towards socialism.” Prefix magazine calls this “depressing” news that will “bring you down” before the weekend, because it’s incumbent upon all musicians – especially those in seminal proto-punk bands like VU – to have roughly the same, boring lefty politics. – Michael C. Moynihan, linked to and already picked out as a nice little nugget by Instapundit, which is where I saw it. I know, I know, who gives a defecation what ex-music-celebs think? Or for that matter current actors. Well, I like it when they talk sense, if only because the people who talk nonsense get so miserable and angry about it. October 2nd, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Ireland’s membership of the euro was thus the single most important reason for yesterday eye-wateringly large bailout of the Irish banks, which will take the budget deficit to 32 per cent of GDP and its gross government debt to 96 per cent of GDP. The tragedy is that nobody is pointing this out: the political establishment is too closely implicated and may yet need to draw on a European bailout fund. Imagine what would have happened had Britain also embraced the single currency: our interest rates – which were substantially higher than the Eurozone’s, albeit still too low – would have stoked our own bubble to an even greater extent than anything managed by the Bank of England. The UK property bubble would have been even larger and its implosion even more devastating. We don’t realise it – but Britain’s bust of 2008-09 could easily have been much, much nastier.” It might be worth re-reading this to recall the ferocity of those pro-euro folk and their treatment of anyone who sought to stand in their way, including, it seems, ordinary voters. October 1st, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There’s something really quite joyous about a woman so ignorant of business that she bemoans the advertising, the commercialism, the specific slicing and dicing of the market to maximise the value of those ads, when that same woman’s salary is paid by the advertising, the very specific advertising in The Guardian’s jobs section for example, which is carried by the newspaper in which she writes.” – Tim Worstall, writing about comments from Zoe Williams, the Guardian writer. I have a simple explanation for the issue that Tim confronts here: folk like Williams believe they are above the fray of grubby advertising, and are free of being persuaded by the evil, silent tricksters of the ad trade. But the unwashed plebs, with their love of glossy magazines, game shows and the rest, need to be protected by their betters, you see. Sometimes, it comes down to simple arrogrance of a mindset that is hostile to the idea to freedom, to the grubby, glorious vulgarities of the market. It is a mindset that is common to “liberal” Hampstead and High Tory Lake Poets in the early 19th Century. September 30th, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve commented this before, but I can’t help thinking there’s something wrong, some undiagnosed mental condition, afflicting people who exhibit an unnatural interest in the private lives of others. Perhaps at some point in the future this condition will be identified and a treatment devised for it, but until then the appropriate response to someone who thinks a bar of chocolate or a “fat goose at Christmas” is a sign of moral decay is to point them out in the street and utter the traditional condemnation “‘Ee’s a nuttah!” – Commenter Roue le Jour, who is on a SQOTD roll it seems September 23rd, 2010 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Socialism is communism designed by capitalists. By redistributing income rather than wealth, it meets the proles expectation that somebody else’s money will be given to them, the truly wealthy’s expectation that their capital will not be touched and cripples the higher earners who are only going to be anti-government trouble makers anyway. – Commenter Roue le Jour September 22nd, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
For a couple of centuries an “Advertisement” in Philosophical Transactions expressly forbade pronouncements by the [Royal] Society as a whole on any scientific or practical matter.
That sensible “Advertisement” disappeared in the 1960s when a politically ambitious physicist, Patrick Blackett, was the President. – From the blog of Nigel Calder, doyen of science writers, via Philip Stott, who does his bit to inject some climate realism into the Radio 4’s Home Planet. The Royal Society should return to its former path of virtue. And The Lancet would benefit from that motto, too. September 21st, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 20th, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is an idea with logical force, many practical attractions and great philosophical appeal. It is courageous. It is clever. It stands, in short, no chance of success. – Matthew Parris, underlining that practical politics runs on interest, not intellect. September 19th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Once you accept the practical necessity of relying heavily on second hand information, you have to modify your view of what a reasonable person would believe to take account of what those around him believed. If you have no training in science and your only information on biotech comes from the popular press, it may not be obvious that a story on mice with human brains cannot be right. If you have devoted your time, energy, and intelligence to living your own life, doing your job, dealing with those around you, it isn’t all that unreasonable to accept as truth what those around you believe about wider issues less directly observed, such as the existence of God or the weakness of the case for evolution. What applies not only to people in the past who couldn’t have known the evidence for evolution but to people in the present who could have but in all probability don’t. I long ago concluded that most people who say they do believe in evolution, like most who say they don’t, are going mostly on faith. As I pointed out in a post some years back, many of those who say they believe in evolution, most notably people left of center, have no difficulty rejecting even its most obvious implications when those clash with their ideology.” David Friedman, speculating on what is the right way to decide if a person is, or is not, a nutcase. September 18th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh, it’ll change. We must always strive to avoid the common misconception that we live at the end of history. Humanity has a very long time ahead. In the shorter term, there will be a reaction against the current hegemony. The key thing for us now is to strive to be the ideologists of it when it happens; last time that role was grabbed by the marxists. We’ll win this thing one day. Not next week. But we will win. We will win because liberalism is the only ideology compatible with sustainable advanced civilisation; all the competing ideologies, of Left and Right, are holdovers from more primitive social/technological stages of existence. We may never see it (but we may; history moves faster than we think) but our descendants surely will. Without running away anywhere. – Redoubtable serial commenter Ian B September 17th, 2010 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Brooks and Krugman are on some sort of Thelma & Lousie like quixoticly suicidal journey to be the last guy off the bigger government meme. They’re going off the cliff, but they couldn’t be happier. At least their abusive small-government loving spouses won’t hurt them anymore.” From the comment thread of this article about the absurd David Brooks. No wonder he writes for the New York Times. September 14th, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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