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I went into my segment with Tucker intent on challenging him if the opportunity presented itself, but the brief appearance focused on my Oxford speech and ended before I’d had the chance to raise my objections to his coverage of the war in Ukraine.
His producer WhatsApped me immediately after to congratulate me on the appearance with the invitation to “Please come back soon!”. ”Here is my moment”, I naively thought to myself and replied with the offer to come back and discuss my disagreements with Tucker on the war in Ukraine.
The response was telling:
”I’m just not sure it would be great TV to have him debate you on the war”.
[…]
The message was clear: we don’t want to have a discussion about this and if you keep pressing the issue you won’t be coming back on the biggest show in America.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. No one is entitled to appear on anyone’s show to talk about a subject they nominate. Tucker and his producers are perfectly entitled to invite the guests they want to discuss the subjects they want. But the incident made it obvious to me that Tucker was not a truth-seeking journalist and that when it came to Russia and the war in Ukraine, at least, he had no intention of being objective. That much is obvious, especially after the events of the last week. But the real question is why?
– Konstantin Kisin
Like Kisin, I once saw Tucker Carlson as one of the good guys, on the same side. I am wiser now, even if we share a few of the same enemies. But sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
In a previous post – borrowing from C.S. Lewis – I used the word “unconciliatory” to describe Sir Keir Starmer, and I increasingly find it the most appropriate one when thinking about the tenor of governance to which we are now subject. Labour’s victory in the 2024 election was artificial and its well of support is ankle-deep; since only one in five of the electorate actually voted for the party it was already unpopular at the very point of taking office. Politicians who were not thoroughgoing mediocrities would, finding themselves in such a position, be prudent. They would recognise their priorities to be consolidation, calmness and concession – their aim would be to lay stable foundations for future governance with quiet competence. But the current crop do not really understand the word ‘prudence’, or like it. So we are patently not going to get that. We are instead going to get a programme of improvement imposed upon us from above: eat your greens, do your press-ups, and do as nanny says (oh, and hand over your pocket money while you’re at it).
This will all unravel very quickly. People will not get with the programme, because people never really do, and certainly not when it has been designed by those they actively mistrust and sense have nothing but disdain for them. And therefore, in short order, as the truth dawns on the Government that the people are not on board with its plan of action, the sense of disappointment it feels is going to turn to rage. This will in turn have the inevitable result, as the rage becomes nakedly apparent, that the population will start to kick back – mulishly, and hard.
– David McGrogan
I highly commending this article, read the whole thing.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.
On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.
And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.
This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.
– Jeffrey Tucker
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Have I or have I not done anything different here? I don’t suppose they will be exhuming William Shakespeare any time soon, but what she said was no worse than this. It was words, nothing more. We are now firmly in an authoritarian police state. A substantial custodial sentence for hurty words is the kind of thing we thought was confined to the old Soviet Union, but it looks as if the ghost of that monstrosity is alive and well in modern Britain.
– Longrider
Tommy Robinson being interviewed by Jordan Peterson presents me with pair of people I am not predisposed to like. But set aside Robinson’s thesis about Islam in the UK for a moment, which you can agree with or not, I contend what the state does to try and shut him down is actually the critical issue. Indeed, I would say if even a small fraction of what he says about security services is true, we have rocketed past the point where normal politics can be relied upon for redress and remedy. Watch and listen with an open mind. We are not heading towards a police state, we are well and truly in one.
Fraser Nelson, in a Daily Telegraph (£) column entitled “The Tories didn’t defend liberty in office. But it’s never too late to start.”
This is good analysis, if horrible in what it says about the UK public and where things are in terms of public opinion:
More bans and restrictions will be on their way. Starmer’s logic is clear enough: if sickness and illness cost the NHS money, then your diet becomes his business. Obesity, of course, costs the NHS far more than smoking. So there’s not much to stop restrictions on alcohol, fizzy drinks, bacon and life’s other guilty pleasures. If you let go of the principle of freedom, including the freedom to make bad health choices, it is hard to see where it all stops.
Indeed. A few years ago, people who went on about second-hand or “passive smoking” denied they wanted to ban smoking as such. That was a lie then, and now the mask is well and truly off.
Crucially, this is being driven by not by the nanny-statism of meddling politicians, but by public opinion. Over decades, there has been a shift towards wanting the government to ban more, to regulate more. The Sunak/Starmer smoking ban is backed by six in 10 people. Polling by the Health Foundation found a majority saying alcohol should not be promoted at sporting events, that salty and sugary foods should be taxed more. Another poll shows a third of the public wants smoking banned everywhere, immediately. When covid struck, there was a mass panic and huge demand for Wuhan-style lockdown.
Exactly so. Having said which, people in their actual behaviour – what economists and sociologists called “revealed preferences” – can act in ways that are rather more liberal than suggested by their answers to a pollster about banning X or Y.
For years, the jurist Jonathan Sumption has been pointing out how the empire of law is fast expanding, because the public seem to seek the state’s protection from a greater list of life’s everyday perils. And are prepared to accept ever greater curtailments of their liberty in order to do so.
Indeed. It adds to the costs and irritations of daily life.
It appears that there is some anger, even from the Labour side, about the Starmer proposal to ban smoking in pubs’ “beer gardens”, etc. So I hope that at least on that topic, the relentless urge to micro-manage life is meeting with resistance. But Starmer will not give up easily. Authoritarianism is his “thing”. Remember, the Prime Minister, when leader of the official opposition in the previous Parliament, wanted lockdowns to continue for longer than they did. His nickname, “Capt Hindsight”, was partly born out of that episode.
In the comments of Disparu’s video responding to a journalist on the subject of the failure of the Star Wars TV series The Acolyte, commentariopolitico1014 writes:
These people act as if they purchased a famous and profitable steak house chain, show up wearing “Beef is Murder’ t-shirts, change the menu to vegan, and now are complaining that all customers are gone and leaving 1/2 stars!
Williamlitsch5506 replies:
I think that this is exactly what they are doing, on purpose. A vegan doesn’t buy a steakhouse by accident. They do it with the intent to punish and admonish steak eaters. They do it because they don’t want to build a vegan restaurant accross the street and compete for who has the best lifestyle. They want to top-down smash the competition and other lifestyles using money and power. They don’t want to compete in the marketplace of ideas. They don’t want to tolerate the existence of alternative lifestyles. They have high religiosity, belong to a powerful cult, and have no principled opposition to authoritarianism. They believe they are better than you, but know they can’t compete.
All institutions are vulnerable to this. In entertainment, at least, market forces limit it. In open source software, projects can be forked. In politics, the threat is far more subtle and difficult to defend against.
Starmer has also always been happy to be accused of running a ‘nanny state’. Much of the agenda that he and his Health Secretary Wes Streeting have revealed more widely for the NHS borders on that, with a focus on preventive healthcare rather than waiting until a patient needs acute (and more expensive) treatment. But an interesting question is whether the new government would have gone for this kind of ban had the Tories not already suggested it. As Katy explains here, the fact that Rishi Sunak championed the move first has made it much easier for Labour to take steps to crack down on smoking more generally. It is, she says, plausible that this approach could be extended to fast food and alcohol consumption. In fact, it wouldn’t make much sense if Starmer talks about the cost to the NHS of smoking but takes no action on obesity, even if that problem is far more complex than the relatively easy win of making it harder to smoke cigarettes.
And it will be much harder for the Conservatives to argue against those further moves because they were the ones who started all this off – in legislative terms, at least.
– The Spectator
Given the complaints recently about “two-tier” policing of crime and disorder in the UK, I thought it worthwhile to set out this summary of the principles of policing as set out by former Home Secretary and reforming British statesman, Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), also renowned as founder of the modern Conservative Party (Tamworth Manifesto of 1834), remover of Corn Law tariffs, reformer of banking (with some remaining issues), and general all-round good guy of British history:
1, To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2, To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
3, To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4, To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
5, To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6, To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7, To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8, To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
9, To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
“Ms. Harris’s handlers should have enough respect for the voters, and for their candidate, to let her stand alone and answer questions by herself. Joe Biden was allowed to hide in his basement and avoid tough questioning during the Covid campaign of 2020. We all know how that turned out.”
Wall Street Journal ($)
One of my theories is that Harris is not allowing herself, or being allowed, to speak on her own in an interview not just because she is stupid, and a Leftist who might blurt out what she really might think. It is also the risk she is going to cackle halfway through answering a question. Imagine, if you will, she is asked about a trade deal with the UK, say, or defence and Ukraine and the Baltics, and she starts to get a fit of the giggles.
The handlers may also have worked out the Keir Starmer/Rachel Reeves (UK prime minister, Chancellor) strategy in the UK before the 4 July general election, which is to avoid talking in detail on policy, keep things as vague as possible, block requests for specifics, and then go in hard and Leftist when in power. Under the UK’s winner-takes-all system, with a split opposition and low turnout, this has been a successful gamble. In the US, where much of the MSM is covering for Harris, her approach may also succeed in November.
These situations make me wish for a more rigorous age. I recall from the 80s there was, in the UK, a Sunday current affairs programme, on ITV, a show called Weekend World, initially hosted by the late Peter Jay (son of a former UK government minister) and later taken over by Brian Walden (a Labour MP who went Thatcherite, as some do) and finally, Matthew Parris. Jay was good, Parris was okay and Walden was brilliant.
The first half of the programme would involve an analysis of a particular issue (striking unions, state of the economy, rise of the SDP, public finances, the nuclear deterrent, drug use, what to make of Gorbachev, etc) followed by a 25-minute interview with a senior minister or senior opposition figure (politicians such as Denis Healey, Margaret Thatcher, Peter Shore, Nigel Lawson, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Cecil Parkinson, Michael Heseltine, etc). These were political figures of gravitas, who were asked difficult questions, probed hard for answers, and not allowed to get off with issuing word salads. The analysis of a story was rigorous; the questioning was forensic, polite and as sharply revealing as that of any clever attorney. And all done on a Sunday lunchtime just after the roast lamb and glass of Cote de Rhone and before the afternoon film or the rugby. The show would be the talk of Westminster for the early part of the week. Walden could get a politician, such as Neil Kinnock, Roy Hattersley or Norman Tebbit to say more than, perhaps, they wished, but it was all done with such cleverness.
I don’t buy into the whole “in the good old days” line on everything, but in my view, some of the calibre of journalism, and the quality of those running for office, or in office, has declined, and on both sides of the Pond.
Back to Mrs Harris. I doubt her handlers (the fact she has such people makes her sound like a child) would let her within a mile of a journalist and recovering political figure such as a Jay or Walden, or, to give a more modern case, Andrew Neil and their American counterparts. Not. Going. To Happen.
And so here we are.
I have read that in the days when newspapers still used metal type, the compositors used to keep commonly used headlines ready-formed. The Bloomberg headline below would require only the substitution of the appropriate country name to work for anywhere in the world in any decade since governments came to vex mankind:
How Rent Controls Are Deepening the Dutch Housing Crisis
A law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating an apartment shortage.
Two years ago, Nine Moraal and her two children moved into a one-bedroom flat near the Dutch city of Utrecht, a comfortable spot close to family and friends. Although she had only a two-year lease, she expected to be able to extend it and stay until she could get one of the Netherlands’ many rent-controlled apartments.
But last spring, her landlord told her she’d have to move out in November, because renting the flat was no longer profitable. Despite “frantic efforts on social media, phone calls, visits to realtors and housing agencies,” the 33-year-old educator says she hasn’t found anything. “The cost isn’t the problem, but a real shortage of housing is.”
Moraal is among the growing number of Dutch people struggling to find a rental property after a new law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating a housing shortage. Aiming to protect low-income tenants, the government in July imposed rent controls on thousands of homes, introducing a system of rating properties based on factors such as condition, size and energy efficiency. The Affordable Rent Act introduced rent controls on 300,000 units, moving them out of the unregulated market.
[…]
ASR Nederland NV, which owns about 15,000 apartments across the country, has called on the government to rethink the measure. Almost its entire portfolio was shifted into the regulated segment on July 1, spurring it to abandon plans to purchase more rental properties, says Jos Baeten, ASR’s chief executive officer. “There are other investment categories that are more appropriate,” he says.
One provision of the law bars short-term leases, instead requiring all contracts to be open-ended. Some in the industry suggest the change will encourage landlords to prioritize foreigners, who are more likely to move away after a few years, giving owners more flexibility.
Emphasis added. That’ll go down well with the PVV, currently the largest party in the Dutch House of Representatives.
Striking Hezbollah is a very low-risk proposition compared to striking targets in Gaza or Iran.
Every single Gaza strike brought the possibility of mass casualties, but in Gaza, this was a feature, not a bug for HAMAS. HAMAS needs civilian casualties because they cannot win a fight against Israel. The world must be so horrified that they end the conflict with a cease-fire and a cease-fire means a HAMAS win.
However, civilians in southern Lebanon can flee north, which is something that cannot be done by residents of Gaza. This makes Hezbollah a much more attractive target and reduces the amount of propaganda that can be released by Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is in a bad situation and they are starting to realize that Iran is not coming to help them.
– Ryan McBeth
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