Dealing with Islamicism is rather like playing chess with an opponent who randomly moves pieces about the board in the sure trust that a deity will confound his opponent.
– Julian Taylor’s friend, a comment on No tolerance for intolerance
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September 19th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Freedom, secularism, and rationality are not only Western values. Much of East Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America are at various stages of embracing them. An alliance against jihadism could be very broad indeed. The Islamists themselves say that “all unbelievers are one people”. Might as well take them up on it. – ‘Infidel’ commenting on Classical Values September 18th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve been lucky enough to win an Oscar, write a bestseller… my other dream would be to have a painting in the Louvre. The only way that’s going to happen is if I paint a dirty one on the wall of the gentlemen’s lavatory. – David Niven, actor, writer and soldier. September 17th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Isn’t it hilarious? Muslims are outraged that the Pope would link Islam with violence and react – with violence. Magnificent. – James Waterton September 16th, 2006 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
– Don Henry, Australian Conservation Foundation September 15th, 2006 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mark Ballard pins it down precisely in The Register. September 14th, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
“I do worry that spokespeople for the Fairtrade movement suffer from a myopic romantic vision of the coffee farmer in a co-operative, whereas in truth such an existence is backbreaking and mired in exploitation.” – Alex Singleton (via Owen Barder) September 14th, 2006 | Comments are closed
“It had always bothered him to see waste; to see Gas Giant atmospheres not mined for their wealth in hydrogen; to see energy from stars spill into the void, without a Dyson Sphere to catch and use it; to see iron and copper and silicates scattered in a hundred million pebbles and asteroids, instead of a smelter or nanoassembly vat.” – The Golden Age, by John C. Wright, page 261. September 13th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Greer is disgusted by a vulgar fellow like Irwin, just as she has previously been disgusted by Australia’s vulgar choice of prime minister, its lack of culture, its shameful history and so much else Australian that doesn’t meet the standards of her refined intellect (how she must have agonized before accepting the invitation to appear on Celebrity Big Brother). – Steve Waterson provides a most welcome addendum to Thaddeus’s slapping of fading English (!) intellectual Germaine Greer. (Via Tim Blair) September 10th, 2006 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tax cutting can be simultaneously a good thing to do and a stupid thing to promise. Winning policies and election winning policies are not always the same thing. What’s so hard to understand about that? – Daniel [when did he get too old to be called Danny in public?] Finkelstein in The Times. If politicians could offer strawberry and chocolate flavoured policies, then in a democracy they would. September 7th, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The solution to envy is not to tax the rich but to tax the envious…It’s envy which imposes an externality on the rich. Make the envious pay for their ugly preferences. – Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution fame. On the whole, I am not a huge fan of using taxation to eradicate any kind of human behaviour, irrespective of whether it is levied upon the rich or the envious. And this is obviously a frivolous prescription. However, I like the quote for two reasons. Not only is it a worthy inversion of the status quo; it also spots the principal (yet unspoken) justification for our “progressive” taxation structures in the minds of statists – envy. September 3rd, 2006 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
One day, I have no doubt, we ourselves shall be dispossessed – though only if we forget that a territory belongs really to those willing to possess it. – From ‘The Column of Phocas’, a novel by Sean Gabb. September 1st, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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