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November 25th, 2024 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “We are seen, bluntly, as a country run by student union activists, a place where violent criminals are released from prison to free up space for people who have posted nasty comments online. If you’re British, you might protest that things are more complicated than that, but you must also concede that our critics have the big picture right.” November 24th, 2024 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Daniel Ortega, remember him? Ortega was one of the leaders of the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) that overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, thus ending 43 years of rule of Nicaragua by the Somoza dynasty. For a while Sandinista rule in Nicaragua was popular at home and admired worldwide. A often-repeated line from left wing sources was that its success represented “the threat of a good example”, the good example being of a country thriving despite the opposition of the United States, which had supported Somoza, as it did many right-wing dictators in Latin America. The admirers included teenage me. Not that I followed every twist and turn of Nicaragua’s politics, but, at first, it all sounded good. Land reform. Education. Healthcare. If I had known then what I know now “price fixing for commodities of basic necessity” might have told me what was coming, but I did not know then what I know now. Several years went by and a few discordant notes started to spoil the chorus of praise. The forcible ejection from their ancestral lands of the Miskito Indigenous people (at that time everyone, even the Guardian, called them “the Miskito Indians”) was one ugly incident that I remember noticing. This Time article from 1983, “Nicaragua: New Regime, Old Methods” gives many other examples of Sandinista human rights abuses. That said, the Sandinista National Liberation Front of that era under the leadership of Daniel Ortega still had enough decency left to hold an election and, having lost it, leave. I will spare you a blow by blow account of Nicaraguan history from 1990 to the present day. You can read Wikipedia as well as I can. Suffice to say that half a lifetime later the reference books once again list the Sandinista National Liberation Front as the ruling party of Nicaragua and Daniel Ortega as its leader, and this time he has no plans to ever leave. “Nicaragua: Ortega and wife to assume absolute power after changes approved”, the Guardian sorrowfully reports.
* One of the Tintin books – remind me which – starts and ends with a picture of a couple of thuggish cops patrolling a shanty town. The only significant difference between the two scenes is that the party symbol on the police uniforms has changed. Update: Thank you JJM, who supplied the name of the book. It was Tintin and the Picaros. ¡Viva [
November 23rd, 2024 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Daily Mirror has an exclusive: “EXCLUSIVE: Farmer protest organiser was behind racist and homophobic posts online”
“It can be revealed” – this looks like it’s going to be spicy.
I’m waiting for the part where Mr Bailye actually says that being a disabled, unemployed, black, LGBT, transgender, non tax paying, homeless, vegan immigrant in immediate need of NHS help is bad. Unless the Mirror thinks that voting Labour is bad?
Again, that is an assertion about how claiming to be any of those things gets more favourable treatment, not an actual insult to the groups concerned.
Well, would it? The question is not unreasonable. The official guidelines of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales on sentencing offenders with mental disorders, developmental disorders, or neurological impairments state that the fact that an offender has such a condition should always be considered by the court, although it will not necessarily have an impact on sentencing. It is certainly commonplace for people in the dock to put forward their autism as a mitigating factor.
If belief in the existence of “two-tier law” in the UK is a conspiracy theory, it is one that half the country shares. November 22nd, 2024 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German. That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning. Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use. In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up something that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump. Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a man in SS or SA uniform holding a placard with the words “Germans, do not buy from Jews!”. Niehoff gave the whole group of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”. Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis? Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is. November 20th, 2024 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Will Hutton: “Farmers have hoarded land for too long. Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain”.
It is not universal.
It is confiscation.
It is not asking. November 19th, 2024 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
…Czechs celebrated the events that kicked off the Velvet Revolution and the eventual overthrow of Communism. I find it sadly ironic that here I live, in once-communist Prague, where unlike the United Kingdom circa 2024, I can make an unkind or just politically incorrect remark online in confidence the police will not at some point show up on my doorstep to harass or even arrest me. November 18th, 2024 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Britain’s biggest problem is a lack of economic growth – so much else is downstream from that. In per person terms, annual real growth averaged more than 2 percent in the run up to the financial crisis. From the crash to COVID-19, growth was just 0.6 percent on average. And of course these growth rates compound. Before the financial crisis, living standards were on course to double every 35 years; afterwards, it was every 120 years. This is a change with profound societal – and even civilizational – consequences. “From tax and regulation to institutional malaise, demographic decline, and a culture that denigrates success – there are all sorts of explanations for our economic slowdown. But the way I see it is that we are suffering a progressive loss of economic dynamism, as we gradually replace market processes with bureaucratic ones – often to reduce risk or increase ‘fairness’. To many observers, every individual step along the road is reasonable and easy enough to justify. But over time, the effect is suffocating.” – Tom Clougherty, Institute of Economic Affairs November 17th, 2024 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
First time is happenstance, second is coincidence and third is enemy action. As it happens Bolivia has a third natural resource which, currently, is in high demand. Lithium. Those salt flats up at 12,000 feet and so on. One of the great deposits of easily extractable lithium they are. So, why aren’t they being extracted? Because the government has insisted that they’re a great natural resource. Therefore, rather than greedy capitalists extracting and shipping out those batteries should be made up at 12,000 feet. Even, in fact, the cars that use the batteries. The result is obvious – the lithium isn’t being extracted, the batteries aren’t being made and nor are the cars. Because idiot fuckwits are in charge of what happens to Bolivia’s natural resources of course. November 15th, 2024 | 58 comments - (Comments are closed)
I see “leaving X” is trending on TwitterX, presumably driven by people who like to be governed more & fear without the threat of pervasive algorithmic censorship, they might write something that gets them cancelled. November 14th, 2024 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Some 35 years after the collapse of the 20th century’s most rigorous experiment in the failure of central planning, the fall of the Soviet empire, and comparative success of the capitalist West, it is hard to fathom how we’ve got into this climate communist mess. It should be self-evident that the planet doesn’t have a thermostat, let alone one easily adjusted by national leaders ordering technology to improve through a cascade of plans lashed to a target. Decarbonisation will happen regardless and is likely to go faster by inventing better solutions funded from the proceeds from growth, or bottom-up innovation. Rather than five-year battery-powered tractor plans, in the context of mission-led state direction – the latest reinvention of the language of failure by top-down socialist planners.” November 14th, 2024 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have not watched this yet. But I am certain it is worth watching. Steve Baker on Why Government is Failing you Debt & Inflation Peter McCormack Podcast
November 14th, 2024 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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