“The folly and immorality of the “stimulus” plan passed today can be attacked on many fronts. For one thing there’s the awe-inspiring irony of a Democrat-dominated Congress and a Democrat president spending taking nearly a trillion dollars from the hardworking middle class people of this country and giving it to corporations and businesses—and precisely as a result of the apparent improprieties in which those same businesses were engaged! Honest liberals who resent corporate welfare must really have a headache at this point.”
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It has taken this Labour government longer to wreck the economy than previous ones, but they have done so comprehensively. – Fraser Nelson, The Spectator. January 22nd, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 IKEA customers across the world are led to believe, naively, that the world is composed of simple elements that we can understand, interlink, and repair if necessary. Populist politicians throughout the world exploit similar social engineering… I respond critically to this European hypocrisy with an IKEA flat pack in the shape of the Swedish kingdom, which conceals an inconvenient truth. – ‘Sonja Aaberg’, the Swedish sculptress, quoted by Mark Steyn in Euro-artists Speak January 21st, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian. January 20th, 2009 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Let me say it again, the only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane.” – Bryan Appleyard. Those squirrels cannot catch a break. January 13th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Politics is all very well in its place, that place being very much on the periphery of life.” – Tim Worstall, who has had an impressive year on his own blog, and seems to have quite marvellously upset one of the main figures of the Guardian’s columnists. Excellent. December 30th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The forgotten man… He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.”
December 19th, 2008 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am deeply concerned about the sort of world we will bequeath to our children and I promise you, the minute I get back from my holiday I will write a letter to my MP demanding that they do whatever it is you want them to do. But please, for the time being, fuck off bastard hippies. – A fictional character articulating the sane human response to PlaneStupid, courtesy of the Daily Mash. I fear that for a lot of campaigners, being a nuisance is an end in itself, and other people’s annoyance is taken to signify how stupid and morally worthless ordinary people are – and thus as reinforcement by comparison of the overweening self-esteem of the campaigners themselves. Something similar is found in the shock-jockery of the blogosphere. I frequently spot the attitude in some NO2ID-ers but I do try to counteract it. People are entitled to want to get on with their lives in a way that is meaningful to them. If you want to persuade them, then give them a reason to care and listen, don’t bully and excoriate them. In the words of Dale Carnegie: “You can’t win an argument.” December 10th, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Un despote a toujours quelques bons moments ; une assemblée de despotes n’en a jamais. Si un tyran me fait une injustice, je peux le désarmer par sa maîtresse, par son confesseur, ou par son page ; mais une compagnie de graves tyrans est inaccessible Á toutes les séductions. [A despot still has good moments; an assembly of despots never does. If one tyrant mistreats me, I can get round him by means of his mistress, his priest, or his page-boy. But a staid company of tyrants is impervious to temptation.] – Voltaire. A remarkable characterisation of the monotonic puritanism of modern democratic government, but written in around 1760. I wonder whether C.S. Lewis’s better known pronouncement on those who torment us for our own good has its origin here. It is similar both in the thought expressed and the cadence of its expression. December 6th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God’s name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder – Suketu Mehta, author of a splendid book on India’s most wicked and exhilarating city, getting properly to the point, even if asking for a responsive government is getting into “Be careful what you wish for” territory. December 2nd, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The arrest of Damian Green is quite appalling and so ridiculously Orwellian that I am almost tempted to vote Tory. I mean it. – a commenter here November 30th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 25th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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