Isn’t it time to tell our elites: “Enough!”
The battle for Brexit appears to have been won. The battle to save the internal combustion engine – and, more generally, to stop a regression to the eighteenth century – may be upon us.
– Schrodinger’s Dog
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If the non-internal combustion engine cars were to be wondrous by that point then there’d be no need to ban them. For everyone would be purchasing them as a matter of choice. The only reason to ban people from purchasing ICEs is because they would be chosen given how appalling the alternatives are all going to be. The ban is thus an admission – and insistence – from government that non-ICE cars are going to remain pretty terrible. But we’re going to be forced to have them, aren’t we the lucky ones? February 4th, 2020 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I’ve always believed that libertarian ideology should be to a well-lived life what scales are to a symphony: essential to know but not the music itself. I don’t know when Tucker first crafted this quote. I read it for the first time this morning when it appeared on my Twitter feed, retweeted by a Twitter followee of mine, Preston Byrne, to whom my thanks. I now follow Tucker also. LATER: It would appear that Tucker said it this morning. January 27th, 2020 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Wearing face masks in public is presently illegal in Hong Kong and compulsory in Wuhan January 24th, 2020 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
You don’t go to a cultural war with the army you want, you go with the army you have. – ‘Mary Contrary‘ January 7th, 2020 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Labour is to commission the mini millipede to hold an inquiry into why Labour lost the election. Which is funny really. I mean, everyone else knows exactly why they lost the election. In a recent conversation with one of their number, I was treated to ad hominem attacks for merely pointing out the obvious. They have their fingers in their ears, still believing, despite the evidence to the contrary that they won the argument, that Boris Johnson is an ignorant buffoon and that their economic polices weren’t a pile of shite. December 27th, 2019 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
For almost a century, Governments have pissed away countlesss billions in the North. It didn’t work. No amount of cycle lanes and art galleries and award-winning ‘garden’ bridges will do it. The North needs Hong-Kong style shock-treatment tax cuts. It’s a tweet, so that’s all there is. Similar sentiments have been expressed by Dominic Frisby, as reported towards the end of this earlier posting here. (LATER: Also, I now see, Johnathan Pearce says very similar things in the previous posting to this one. Well, if it’s worth saying, it’s worth repeating.) December 16th, 2019 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to the activist I was with, that had been the reaction wherever he went. He had knocked on 100 doors in a council estate earlier that day and all but three people he’d spoken to told him they intended to vote Conservative—and this in a city where 26 per cent of the population are among the most deprived in England. I asked why, if these electors disliked Corbyn, they didn’t simply abstain? Why were they planning to brave the elements on a cold day in December to vote for a party led by an old Etonian toff? “Because they hate Corbyn that much,” he said. “The biggest message they can send to him is to elect a Tory government.” It’s the same story across England—working class electors deserting Labour en masse. December 15th, 2019 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The world’s billionaires are a pretty diverse bunch, but nine out of the top ten are self-made entrepreneurs. December 7th, 2019 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
What is the intellectual origin of the foreign policy views of Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle? It is Lenin’s theory of imperialism. In the early 20th century, building on the work of liberals such as John Hobson, Lenin argued that capitalism was being sustained only by the profits from colonial exploitation. These excess profits allowed domestic workers to be paid enough to prevent them from rising up against their capitalist employers. Imperialism was made possible by the power of capitalists to make the state provide military and political protection for their foreign investments. From this two things follow. All foreign policy by capitalist countries is about creating empires, conquering property and exploiting resources. Kosovo as much as Iraq, Sierra Leone as much as Afghanistan, troops in West Germany as much as in Vietnam. Hence Mr Corbyn’s jaundiced view of Nato and any institutions connected with it, such as the European Union. So Mr Corbyn argues, as he did in 2011, that “since World War Two, the big imperial force has been the United States on behalf of global capitalism and the biggest, mostly US-based corporations. The propaganda for this has presented itself as a voice for ‘freedom’ and carefully and consciously conflated it with market economics.” The second thing that follows is that the troops on the front line of the movement to overthrow capitalism are national resistance movements. These are the heroes of socialist advance, even if sometimes they aren’t purely socialist. So Mr Corbyn has given encouragement and support to the Iranian government, the Irish republicans, Hamas and Hezbollah, and Fidel Castro. He saw Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela as lights to the world, developing a new economic model worth emulating…. The Labour leader ignores or dismisses the idea that any of these groups or countries, such as Iran, might be imperialist powers because all that matters is that they resist western capitalist imperialism. So their imperialism, like that of the Soviet Union, is, he put it, “different”. Where resistance movements have turned to violence or fundamentalism Mr Corbyn says he disapproves but that the root cause is not their behaviour but ours…. There will be some who read this and will think I’m being unfair because I mentioned Lenin and Hezbollah and there is an election coming. But this article is unfair only if it’s an inaccurate description of Mr Corbyn’s views, and given that it is based on things he and his close advisers have written and said, it can’t be. If Mr Corbyn becomes prime minister he and his advisers will control foreign policy. Given that he departs so far from the postwar consensus and the traditional Labour position, it’s as well to understand what he thinks. – Daniel Finkelstein, in a piece behind the Times paywall, but quoted (all of the above and more) by Mick Hartley. December 5th, 2019 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Another reason is that Conservative Remain voters tend to believe Brexit will be a walk in the park compared to the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. If this election amounts to a decision on whether to stop Brexit or stop Corbyn, most of them think it’s more important to stop Corbyn. More than 7 in 10 of them think leaving the EU would be less bad for Britain than a Labour government with Corbyn as PM – as do a clear plurality of the electorate as a whole. November 27th, 2019 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh no. I’ve accidentally stayed up way too late reading about the 1560s attempt to set up copper mining and smelting works in Cumbria using German experts. – Anton Howes, historian of the origins of the Industrial Revolution. The above is the first of a series of tweets. Read them all here. Howes was asked what exactly he’d been reading. Answer: This book. I signed up to the Anton Howes Age of Invention newsletter a while back, and am always pleased when another installment shows up in my incoming emails. November 22nd, 2019 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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