“Corbyn’s first wife, Jane Chapman, told his biographer Tom Bower that she never knew him read a book in four years of marriage.”
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The launch of Turning Point UK felt to me like an important moment. Douglas Murray agrees:
This is also how I now feel about the Brexit vote. The response to that also explains why it needed to happen. February 13th, 2019 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “With journalism’s popularity waning and scandals raging, journalists have never been more interested in the political opinions of `stars.’ While the idea of a reporter caring what they think about matters beyond what it was like to work with some other actor or director, this wading by the make-believe set has begun to impact its bottom lines. `Stars’ are asked to weigh in, to speak out on everything, and fewer and fewer people want to hear it. It’s a business model straight out of a Monty Python skit.” – Derek Hunter, Outrage Inc: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism and Hollywood. Page 209. (As per usual I put in my bleat about how sad it is that the word “liberal” nowadays means something rather different than what it once did.) February 12th, 2019 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
O Lord our God arise Scatter her enemies And make them fall Confound their politics Frustrate their knavish tricks On Thee our hopes we fix God save us all – the little-used second verse of the National Anthem, quoted in a 2015 Independent article entitled “God Save the Queen lyrics: The troubling words of the National Anthem that are being ignored”. To be clear, this is not the verse dating from 1745 containing the line “Rebellious Scots to crush”. That was never official anyway. I just thought the lines about politics and knavish tricks somehow seemed appropriate to our current situation. February 10th, 2019 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Once you give power to the government it is nearly impossible to get it back, and it will be used in ways you cannot expect. February 2nd, 2019 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The problem is not primarily intellectual; it’s moral. It seems that many professional academics have not been taught to develop the basic virtues of emotional self-restraint, justice, charity, and humility. They feel no need to hold in check their feelings of irritation, indignation, hatred – and fear. They recognise no obligation to be scrupulously fair to their opponents. They don’t understand that the most cogent critique is one that charitably construes the opposing case in the strongest possible terms, and only then sets about dismantling it.” February 1st, 2019 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
After years of having their dignity drained from them by corrupt, ruthless and cold men, Venezuelans are now fighting for their freedom and demanding an end to an illegitimate regime. They know what so many in this country do not, which is that Venezuela has, indeed, shown the world that another way is possible. It has exposed to the world an inhumane dictatorship whose coercive ideology has brought brutality, mass poverty, disease, and tremendous suffering to its people. And the name for that system? As Mr Corbyn told us himself, it’s called socialism. – Conservative MP Priti Patel All that the socialists now have to agree about is at what point real socialism in Venezuela was abandoned, betrayed, done wrong, blah blah. Kristian Niemietz is good on this subject. His point being, as explicated in this IEA podcast, that if real socialism was supposedly driven off a cliff by bad or stupid people, its inherent tendency to slide towards and then go over that cliff, no matter who is driving, need not be faced. January 28th, 2019 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
“This modern society seems to be threatened by a number of serious threats, and the one that I would like to concentrate on which will in fact be the central theme, although there will be a lot of subsidiary little items, the central theme of my discussion, is that I believe that one of the greatest threats to modern society is the possible resurgence and expansion of the ideas of thought control; such ideas as Hitler had, or Stalin in his time, or the Catholic religion in the Middle Ages, or the Chinese today. I think that one of the greatest dangers is that this shall increase until it encompasses the whole world.” – Richard Feynman. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, page 98. The comment comes from a talk he gave in Italy in 1964. I don’t doubt that he’d be alarmed and saddened at the censorious crap going on some Western universities today. January 26th, 2019 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The World Economic Forum in Davos is precisely where one would expect to find the kind of people that want to overturn the EU referendum result. Davos types wouldn’t just cancel referendum results they don’t approve of. If they could if they would cancel the people.” January 23rd, 2019 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
The logic of socialism is to look at someone in a wheelchair and punish the able-bodied by breaking their legs. – The Academic Agent, talking about The Problem with the BBC. The whole thing lasts just under ten minutes, and that little nugget comes about a minute before the end. Thank you Instapundit. January 12th, 2019 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse educated far from power. Why? In the field of political opinion they are more driven by fashion, a gang mentality, and the desire to pose about moral and political questions all of which exacerbate cognitive biases, encourage groupthink, and reduce accuracy. Those on average incomes are less likely to express political views to send signals; political views are much less important for signalling to one’s immediate in-group when you are on 20k a year. The former tend to see such questions in more general and abstract terms, and are more insulated from immediate worries about money. The latter tend to see such questions in more concrete and specific terms and ask ‘how does this affect me?’. – Dominic Cummings, On the referendum #21: Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’ January 8th, 2019 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The British Army continues to morph into the Blairmacht, it seems. Its new recruitment posters had me thinking that I had fallen into a coma and woken up a few days after our glorious independence due on 29th March. Here is what I mean: ‘The Army targets ‘snowflake’ millennials‘ (as recruits, not legitimate uses for ammo). The posters, taken as fair use:  and this:  Now there are two possibilities I see here, not mutually exclusive, the less likely that someone is trolling the MoD and being paid for it, and the other is that someone is being paid for it. Still, as posters go, I would grant that it is better than this blatant mickey-take. And in terms of assuring the civil population that the Army is no threat, it doesn’t really beat this, but I do wonder if the thinking behind the current Army it is more similar to what produced this. And we should remember that for some British Army recruits, the heat is not the problem, but the cold may be:
Naseby, the Civil War, what would Prince Rupert or Halifax say? But, may I remind you, it is the law of England that the categories of negligence are never closed…
AFAIK, the case continues… What would Field Marshal the Earl (Horatio Herbert) Kitchener say were he spinning in his cold, watery grave? That Wing Cdr Ken Gatward DSO DFC* AE was named for him, and lived up to it, might give one pause for thought. January 3rd, 2019 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
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