In a hotly contested race, this side of fusion power, Net Zero is a real contender for mankind’s stupidest idea since 1648.
– Perry de Havilland
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UK Black Lives Matter on 29th June 2020:
UK Black Lives Matter on 21st June 2020:
Perhaps I should not be so harsh. Among the multifarious possible meanings of the phrase “Defund the police” there are a few I could support. While I think about it, please send me a million pounds. June 29th, 2020 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Take the roiling absurdity outside America since the death of George Floyd. What does the death of a foreigner killed by a foreign policeman in a foreign land say about the state of Britain? The facts of the Home Office’s homicide index are clear enough. Between April 2016 and March 2019, 500 whites, 45 blacks and 38 others were convicted in England and Wales of murdering 583 white victims. Over the same period, 81 blacks, 11 whites and nine others were convicted of murdering 101 black victims. Roughly 3 per cent of Britons are black. The idea that there is a racial tsunami of murder in this country is monstrous, let alone — “hands up! don’t shoot!” — one waged by our unarmed police. We are being asked to fight against a fantasy. Might I suggest people subscribe to this new very high quality magazine, a fine antidote to the debased opinion makers of yore. June 27th, 2020 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just had to throw away some sausages, and it occurred to me: the same people complaining most about food waste are the ones who object to preservatives, aren’t they? Why’s every social movement a puritan cult? June 26th, 2020 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
“….the Americanisation of culture wars deserves resistance in itself. It homogenises national priorities, obscuring cultural and political differences, to such a ludicrous extent that British people end up arguing about police violence in a year when, yet again, it was revealed that the police had sat back and done next to nothing as a gang of men had groomed and raped young girls in Britain. Police brutality and overzealousness might be a particular problem in a Midwestern US state, while not being a priority in a northern English county; the globalisation of politics obscures local conditions.” “It also distorts our understanding of the world, limiting our awareness of international affairs to those which are the focus of the narrow spectrum of social media trends. Whether you are a progressive or a conservative, you should be so in the terms of your national circumstances, and with broader frames of references than those which have been provided by social media monopolies.” June 25th, 2020 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
SAGE minutes make it clear that the public was explicitly petrified in order to ensure compliance with lockdown. Mind-control is objectionable in itself, but has a real cost in lives: before a policy lever like lockdown was pulled, where was the cost/benefit analysis, or was SAGE only thinking of covid-19? Lockdown, after all, affects not just this thing over here (covid-19) but also that thing over there (cancer, cardiac, sepsis, etc.). Through lockdown, A&E cardiac admissions have been as much as 50% down, so around 5,000 people per month have not been turning up at hospital with heart attack symptoms; heart attacks outside hospital have only a 1-in-10 chance of survival. Same story with strokes. And downstream, many cancers are touch-and-go even if you catch them early; give them a two month head-start and Stanford’s Professor Bhattacharya estimates the impact of urgent cancer referrals running 70% below normal levels will be around 18,000 deaths. June 24th, 2020 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Have I got this right? BLM are in no way responsible for the stabbings in Reading as it happened two hours after their “protest” ended. But somehow all of us white people are still responsible for slavery 200 years after it was ended. Is that about the gist of it? June 23rd, 2020 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
Cut off by your gas company for wrongthink? What’s stopping you drilling your own North Sea well? – Tim Newman, nicely describing why certain strains of libertarian thought are self-defeating. June 21st, 2020 | 76 comments - (Comments are closed)
True, they were hypocrites. Jefferson himself was clearly aware of the ghastly contradictions. Pity they did not apply their own wise philosophies even-handedly, but they didn’t. That is was why Samuel Johnson hated them. And yet, their good ideas stand on their own merits. – Perry de Havilland in response to “How do you respond to people who say that the Founding Fathers were hypocrites for owning slaves?” June 20th, 2020 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Rather than aiming for a better future, woke militants seek a cathartic present. Cleansing themselves and others of sin is their goal. Amidst vast inequalities of power and wealth, the woke generation bask in the eternal sunshine of their spotless virtue.” (As a reminder to readers, quoting a person does not imply I endorse everything that the writer in question says. Gray is a decidedly mixed bag of a thinker. Far, far too gloomy for my liking and he buys the whole Green deal, or at least he did. But this essay makes important points about the parallels between the culture war being played out in the West right now and the madness of the 15th and 16th centuries. Yes, I think those parallels are accurate. This is a rat with a long tail.) June 18th, 2020 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
To be fair: I don’t eat food. Food here is so unsafe I decided years ago to subsist only on internet memes. – Perry Metzger, in response to this breathtaking absurdity. June 15th, 2020 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The only corner of the world that you can control is yourself.” – Richard Cooper, of the “Entrepreneurs and Cars” show he does (he’s one of the “manosphere” chaps out there), talking about the shit-show going on lockdowns, identity politics nonsense. I don’t buy into all of his views – I am not a big evolutionary psychology fan – but he is on the mark here in this brief broadcast. He looks like a guy on the edge a bit, in a state of despair. I suspect there are an awful of lot of others like him out there now. June 14th, 2020 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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