Undoubtedly you are a prima donna, but this is a good thing. Imagine if we had to depend for harmless entertainment on the likes of your mates, Nicola Sturgeon, Anna Soubry, and other pompous assholes. At least you are unashamedly a figure of much merriment. My advice is that you should trade on this. Start dressing up as some of the cartoon characters you want banned from cereal boxes. And imagine the fun if you burst into a Parliamentary Committee Room dressed appropriately and shouting, “The Milky Bars are on me!”
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June 7th, 2018 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Instapundit’s Charles Glasser calls this Quillette article “nail on the head stuff”, which it is. It’s very good. But, you know: very good in a way I am now fairly used to. If, like me, you are one of the many and extremely varied persons whom the left calls “extreme right”, and if you have been reading both inside and beyond your various internet bubbles for quite a few years now, this article will probably tell you little that you don’t already know. Sample quote:
My main doubt about this piece is that its author, Neema Parvini, maybe attributes to “the left” rather too much of the same ignorant unanimity of thought that he accuses “the left” of attributing to “the right”. I agree that “the left” is more unanimous than “the right”, but there are still distinctions to be made within “the left” which are worth acknowledging. But, Parvini makes many good points, especially in the small spreadsheet he offers, where he describes leftist definition hopping with words and phrases like “outmoded”, “here to stay”, and (a particular unfavourite of mine) “progress”. But now for the really interesting bit, the bit where I was both very surprised and where I learned something seriously new to me. It comes right at the bottom of the article:
And there was me thinking that the literature departments of all the Anglosphere’s universities are now just swamps of leftist unanimity and sub-Marxist, post-modernist obfuscation, with all seriously dissenting voices silenced. Not quite so, it would seem. Neema Parvini is clearly a man worth attending to. Especially by me, because I have long been a Shakespeare fan. June 5th, 2018 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am not entirely out of sympathy with the Francis Turner view of Tommy Robinson ‘doing a Gandhi’, but not entirely convinced either (in that Gandhi never denied he was indeed breaking the law, whereas Robinson seemed rather surprised when he was arrested). And like Francis Turner, I agree that even if Robinson is a ‘racist’ these days (and I have no deeply held views on that, but suspect he is not), it does not in and of itself mean many of the points he has raised are wrong. But I also have grave objections to how this whole thing has been reported by people on the ‘Right’, usually the same people who keep telling me (an actual resident of London, and someone who contrary to rumours does venture out of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, into the trackless wastes of North End Road, Camden, Bermondsey & Hackney, all without encountering burqua-police), that London is Londonistan & women are fearful of going out in short skirts these days… and not just in Salafist blighted Tower Hamlets, but pretty much everywhere. It is quite simply, a steaming pile of arrant nonsense that anyone wandering around London on a sunny day can see for themselves. My reaction to the reporting on L’Affaire Tommy Robinson on many sites was part of my journey from being a Mark Steyn fanboy to someone who thinks he & several others like him who I once widely admired, have become people I am not willing to automatically trust anymore. When they are right they are right, and when they are not, they are not. Yes, my reactions to the mass rapes in certain working-class areas like Rotherham (to name but one) and the utterly not-fit-for-purpose police & political establishment was in many ways like their reactions, but my notions of how to make sure it does not keep happening again and again is different. I do not think the ‘Right’ should become like a mirror image of the SJW Left, inventing their own facts. I do not think the ‘solution’ to identity politics & institutions being rotted from the inside by political correctness, is a different set of identity politics ostensibly pushing the other way, but rather an attack on all identity politics. So, the reason I am unsympathetic to undeniably ghastly rapists going unpunished due to the establishment’s fear of being accused of ‘racism’ & ‘Islamophobia’, is the same reason I am not very sympathetic to Tommy Robinson, the designated ‘good guy’, getting a free pass for possibly prejudicial shenanigans around a courthouse. Might a character more sympathetic to the establishment sensibilities have merely been warned away instead? Possibly so, but that would just be another example of the system not working, rather than a good thing. Either justice is blind or it is not justice at all. Yes, Islam (and indeed everything else) must not be beyond criticism. But that does not mean everyone who engages in much needed criticism of Islam should themselves be immune to criticism if they also make unwise choices. June 4th, 2018 | 86 comments - (Comments are closed)
Prime Minister George Grenville was the author of the 1765 stamp act – which led, in time, to the creation of the United States, but that was very far from his intent. In terms of mere formal law, Grenville had a good case for believing he could do what he did. In an obituary, Edmund Burke explained how a well-meaning man of some ability could cause so much trouble. After studying law, Grenville
Men who only know the world of government administration are dangerously limited:
As regards Tommy Robinson: – Sending him to jail for 13 months was ever so politically correct. – As discussed in the comment threads of a couple of posts below, it may well also be formally correct – not in terms of some new-minted ‘hate speech’ law but in terms of established UK trial precedents. We will not know for absolute certain till we hear more (including what – if anything – Mr Robinson can say for himself), but between those who wonder if he engaged in deliberate Gandhi-style law-breaking, those who wonder if he had a layman’s (mis)understanding of the law, and those who think he’s an idiot or worse, there is ample scope for it. – Who thinks it is actually correct to send Mr Robinson to jail for 13 months while we have yet to hear of the Rotherham councillors (or any of their imitators elsewhere) serving 13 days? (Being ordered to apologise for what they did to whistleblowers does not quite compare.) As Burke told the MPs who voted to tax the north american colonies,
June 3rd, 2018 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you want to understand the ongoing Tommy Robinson affair, then this article by Douglas Murray strikes me as as very good next thing to read. Read the whole thing says Instapundit, quoting a big chunk of it. It occurs to me that Tommy Robinson’s public performances are a lot like President Trump’s tweets. If Trump phrased everything perfectly, his tweets would be ignored. But faced with a spelling mistake or some such vulgar blemish, his critics can’t help themselves, and they wade in, making pedantic fools of themselves, thus drawing attention both to what Trump is saying and to the fact that they typically have no actual arguments against it. Tommy Robinson makes legal “errors”. And people whose real objection to Robinson is that he is an oik who speaks truths to them that they don’t want to be told, about Islam and about Muslims, likewise can’t help themselves. They loudly pontificate about what a bad person Robinson is. Such persons are now linking to pieces like this. Thereby drawing attention to what Robinson says. If you read the comments on our previous Tommy Robinson posting, you will see claims that he is an “idiot”, or even a “tit”. But I think Robinson is quite a formidable operator, saying important things with skill and flare and drama. He is getting himself heard. In my opinion the Gandhi comparison is also a good one. Gandhi also used to break laws and provoke public dramas. He also got himself imprisoned. And heard. The only way that respectable citizens will shut Tommy Robinson up is if they are willing to pay proper attention to the things he says. Douglas Murray has been doing this for quite a while. June 1st, 2018 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
After reading her advice to a pseudonymous reader who is clearly a MENSA member, I can only marvel at the sagacity of the suggestions. May 30th, 2018 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
In fact, Oxford has a disproportionately high number of black students, although you wouldn’t know this from the comments made by Lammy and others last week. He quoted the seemingly shocking statistic that, between 2015 and 2017, several Oxford colleges had failed to admit more than one or two black British students. This set the tone of the news agenda, prompting Oxford graduates to tweet their scorn at their old university. But, as ever, statistics are the last refuge of the scoundrel. May 30th, 2018 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 28th, 2018 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
At the end of a week in which the House of Commons defeated Labour’s draconian plans to regulate the press, the Tories revealed their own draconian plans to regulate the internet. The culture secretary, Matt Hancock, has pledged to make Britain ‘the safest place in the world’ to be online. But when the world’s ‘safest’ internet is currently found in China, where access is heavily restricted and censored by the state, it becomes clear how terrifying the government’s safety agenda really could be. May 27th, 2018 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Two stories related to freedom of speech are doing the rounds tonight: The BBC reports: YouTuber Alison Chabloz guilty over anti-Semitic songs Chabloz is a nasty and stupid woman, whose delusions will be given more credibility by the fact that she was persecuted for them. The Hull Daily Mail reports: Former EDL leader Tommy Robinson ‘being held in Hull prison’ after arrest I do not know what to make of Robinson himself, nor of his arrest. There are some complications about contempt of court and his breaching the terms of his earlier suspended sentence that, frankly, I cannot summon up the energy to investigate; it may not be as simple a case of persecution as it is presented as being in this PJ Media story. The authorities imagine that by placing reporting restrictions on Robinson’s case they will make people think he is as clearly bad as Chabloz is. The actual effect is to make the public wonder whether she, like he, might have something to be said in her favour. May 26th, 2018 | 109 comments - (Comments are closed)
It occurs to me that there’s perhaps a bit of guilt on show here. You see those pregnant 11 year olds in Telford got in that state because the local authorities, in fear of being branded racist and/or islamophobic, allowed gangs of muslim men to groom and abuse white girls for decades and ignored complaints/reports etc. that this was occurring. One suspects that the distaste for this joke is more because it reminds readers of the failures of the Briitsh Nanny state than actual concern for the feelings of 11 year old sex abuse victims. If the writer actually cared about the victims and subsequent potential victims he’d be campaigning to have the perpetrators and their facilitators in the police/social services punished appropriately (personally I think being nailed to a fence by their genitals would be reasonable, but I can see that people might differ on the details. Would a bit of rebar up the bum be better? both? or how about the traditional English hanging, drawing and quartering?) so as to make clear that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable in the UK. May 21st, 2018 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nongqawuse was a fifteen year old Xhosa girl who in 1856 had a vision in which three ancestral spirits told her that if the Xhosa people showed their trust by destroying their crops and killing their cattle, then on the appointed day the spirits would raise the dead, bountifully replace all that was destroyed, and sweep the British into the sea. Thousands believed this prophecy and slaughtered their cattle. But the dead slept on and the British remained in place. Nongqawuse explained that this lack of action was due to the amagogotya, the stingy ones, who had kept their cattle back from slaughter. She urged everyone to greater efforts. A new date was set for the prophecy to finally come true. The rate of cattle-killing rose to a climax. Eventually the Xhosa lost patience, and, with remarkable mercy, handed Nongqawuse over to the British. By then famine had reduced the population of British Kaffraria from 105,000 to fewer than 27,000. * City A.M. reports that John McDonnell says Venezuela is failing because it is ‘not a socialist country’. Oh, and our Chancellor-in-waiting says that he will overthrow capitalism. If you want to watch the Sunday Politics interview where he said all this, this BBC link will work for another 28 days. May 21st, 2018 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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