“It is true that taxes and prices have risen. But this did not happen in a vacuum. For much of 2020 and a chunk of 2021, we paid people to stay home, and printed money with wild abandon. What the hell did we think would be the consequences?”
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June 24th, 2024 | 21 comments
 Today is Brexit Day, which is something to celebrate. But to put it bluntly, the nation is an absolute mess. Levels of taxation and spending are insupportable. Pretty much every aspect of life is regulated by the state and its adjuncts. We have permitted speech, not free speech. Constitutional checks and balances abolished under Tony Blair have not been rolled back, in fact they have been expanded and deepened under a Tory government. The people responsible for mass abridgement of the most basic civil right 2020-2021 are still in politics and able to show their faces in public. The laughably named ‘Conservative’ Party has not only failed to fight the culture war, leading party members such as the risible Penny Mordaunt do not know what a woman is. Parliamentary democracy has in large part been replaced with a technocratic administrative blob, one that deposes Prime Ministers who question the high-status Guardian-reading consensus on almost anything. What remains of democratic politics has started to develop very dangerous sectarian elements in some parts of the country. And whilst the Tories arm of the ConLab blob have proven to be inept, inane, and malevolent, they are about to be replaced by a Labour government who will dial all of that up even further. And yet… On 23 June 2016, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that even with every Parliamentary party supporting Remain, echoed by the majority of the mainstream media, the blob can be defeated. Never forget that. Brexit was not the endpoint for anything, it was just the start of a long process of a great political and social realignment. Brexit was a prerequisite, a strategic battlefield shaping operation if you will. This will be a long struggle and it will get worse before it gets better. But it is a struggle that has to be fought and can be won. June 23rd, 2024 | 14 comments
Despite everything, I will vote Conservative in this election, because my local MP is Kemi Badenoch, of whom I approve. But what a silly party the Tories have become. I had my say about their proposal to reinstate conscription a month ago in this post: “A press gang there I chanced to meet”. I am honestly amazed that the proposal is still alive as anything other than a guaranteed laugh line for Radio Four comedians. It seems I was wrong: the prime minister still maintains this is something he will do after his surprise election victory. OK, let’s run with that. If he thinks that it would be a good thing for the state to compel British youth to spend a year in the army or “volunteering” (yes, they really do call it that) in the community, why does he evidently not trust the legal mechanisms of compulsion that the state evolved over centuries to enforce it? Taking away people’s driving licence is an arbitrary punishment. For one young draft-dodger living in the country it might come as a disaster, for another convicted of the same crime but living in a major city with good public transport, it would be no more than a mild inconvenience. A young person who could not drive in the first place would laugh in the faces of the enforcers. Did we not once have some sort of legal system to iron out inconsistencies like that? Another thing, I could have sworn we used to have this idea that a driving licence was issued when a person had demonstrated he or she could safely operate a motor vehicle on the public highway, and could be revoked only if that person drove dangerously. If it can be revoked for offences that have nothing to do with driving, trust in the whole system of licensing is damaged. June 22nd, 2024 | 46 comments
Some people have reported difficulty posting comments, which might (or might not) be related to waves of Russian traffic hitting the server. June 22nd, 2024 | 2 comments
“When sweeping, idealistic dreams trickle down into sales and marketing channels, AI’s potential uses become unclear. Framing AI as a general-purpose Swiss Army knife for productivity inevitably leads to paralysis for its end users: Where do you even start with a technology that can do everything?” – Parmy Olsen, Bloomberg ($) Along with others, Olsen is freaked out by the skyrocketing ascent of chip-maker Nvidia’s stock price. June 21st, 2024 | 18 comments
“New polling data shows that support for LGBTQ rights is dropping precipitously in Canada”, writes Adam Zivo in the National Post, “and while many queer activists will inevitably blame the far right for this development, the fact is that they themselves helped sabotage their own public support.” The article continues:
Decreases in the popularity of groups supposedly protected by activists happen so predictably that I have concluded it is what the activists, consciously or unconsciously, wish to see. It gives them something to do. June 20th, 2024 | 23 comments
Via Daniel Sugarman, I found this article by Talia Jane in the New Republic. Before I quote from it, I must apologise for quoting myself. Over the last few days, I, like many other people, have talked about several instances of blatant Jew-hatred in New York. So that this post will stand alone, I am going to repeat part of what I said then:
I urge you to watch the video if you have not yet seen it. Now read how Talia Jane describes it:
“I was just kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” Bullies learn to say that in the school playground. Antifa activists and other racist persecutors quickly graduate to the the group version: “Can’t you people take a joke?” As a line to use while intimidating members of the public, it is effective in several ways. It both shields the racists from being punished for threatening behaviour, and torments their victims a second time, by forcing them to either deny that it was all a joke and admit how afraid they were, or to pretend to laugh along for fear of worse, and thus become complicit in their own humiliation. Both of these responses give the fanboys and fangirls like Talia Jane a good laugh. June 18th, 2024 | 12 comments
Stagnation is an illusion. We grow or we die, and our planet is a museum of civilizations gatekept to their extinction. It’s a grim question, but worth asking: are we improving our world today, or are we living in the ruins of a world that died with our grandparents? The last moon landing took place on December 14th, 1972. Today, there are ninety-three nuclear reactors in the United States. We’ve built 3 since the year 2000. Following a century of complications, and a full decade building, New York City recently opened three new Subway stations along Second Avenue. There is presently no city in America capable of building a complete underground rail system. Fortunately, that knowledge hasn’t yet been lost. We’ve just been gatekept to paralysis. But a century from now, with no course correction, who will be left to teach our grandkids what to build, or how? – Mike Solana (£) Or as the excellent Virginia Postrel phased it in her great book “The Future and Its Enemies”… Stasists vs. Dynamists June 18th, 2024 | 17 comments
Douglas Young has very mixed feelings about Bill Maher’s book. Bill Maher has been a major political humourist for over thirty years. After a number of guest spots on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher ran on Comedy Central and then ABC from 1993 to 2002, and since 2003 he has hosted HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. He has also authored several books, the latest of which is What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, a collection of monologues from his present program, updated and edited. Maher is a traditional liberal who is consistently libertarian on sex, drugs, and free expression (“I’m never for censorship”). While usually upsetting conservatives with his caustic wit, in recent years he has angered leftists as well. His new book claims “it’s not me who’s changed, it’s the Left, which is now made up of a small contingent who’ve gone mental and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it. But I will.” In fact, echoing commentator and author Dennis Prager, Maher contends that “wokeism in its current form is not an extension of liberalism, it is more often its opposite,” and he compares “today’s Woke Revolution and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution” for their mutual censoriousness and historical presentism. Though Maher’s latest book has too many f-bombs, several sentences ending with a preposition, and at least one split infinitive, the Cornell English graduate’s prose is generally excellent and often quite funny, with each chapter covering a distinct topic. It is especially endearing to find an author not anchored to one political team. Asking, “When did liberals become the Fun Police?,” Democrat Maher sides with Republicans against helicopter parenting, censorship, educational indoctrination, canceling academically gifted programs for “equity,” seeing “racism” everywhere, racially segregated dorms and graduations and national anthems, “diversity quotas,” men competing in women’s sports, banning various Halloween costumes, and condemning folks for “cultural appropriation.” Indeed, Maher asserts that “Not everything is about oppression. Stealing natural resources from Indigenous peoples: yes, that’s exploitation. But I swear, not one Beach Boy song resulted in any Hawaiian having fewer waves to surf.” Refreshingly, Maher also rebukes Israel-haters, defunding the police, the Covid lockdowns, “hormone blockers and genital surgery” for children, and over-regulation: “China sees a problem, and they fix it. They build a dam, we debate what to rename one.” Ridiculing leftist “Guardians of Gotcha,” Maher boldly notes that, “If Democrats had always policed morality as hard as they do now, they’d be down a lot of heroes: no FDR, no JFK or RFK, no LBJ, no Clinton, no Martin Luther King Jr.” Similarly, he observes that “J.K. Rowling used to be a villain to the Right because she wrote books about witchcraft; now she’s a villain to the Left because she has this crazy belief that there’s more to being a woman than pronouns and lipstick.” Also rewarding is when Maher acknowledges complexity, like being a football fan who does not deny how dangerous the game is. Likewise, though all for gun control, he recognizes that sexual frustration and loneliness contribute to mass shootings, and he skewers Hollywood’s hypocrisy on guns: “It’s funny, Hollywood is the wokest place on Earth in every other area of social responsibility… But when it comes to the unbridled romanticization of gun violence: crickets. Weird, the only thing we don’t call a ‘trigger’ is the one that actually has a trigger.” His critique of universities is superb: “Let’s get real about what ‘higher education’ in America really is: a racket that sells you a very expensive ticket to the upper middle class…. And yet, no one knows how to change a tire.” He also chastises the “emotional haemophiliacs” too many colleges produce, observing that:
Nor does Maher ignore today’s “panic porn” news media, Facebook, or Twitter, positing how “We all see it – groups of friends out together at a bar or eating in a restaurant and they’re all staring down at their phones. Imagine how rude that would be if, instead of a phone, you brought a magazine to the table and read it.” June 17th, 2024 | 25 comments
“University of Oxford museum hides African mask that ‘must not be seen by women’”, reports Craig Simpson in the Telegraph:
I am not necessarily against the curators’ decision. Most of us can think of items that are literally or metaphorically sacred to us that we would not wish to see displayed to the crowd. What I do not understand is why the desire of long-dead Igbo men to conduct certain rituals away from the female gaze is to be respected, but the desire of living British men to do the same is to be scorned. Related post: In defence of all-{insert variable of choice} clubs June 17th, 2024 | 8 comments
Productivity isn’t flat today in the slightest. It’s just turning up in the consumer surplus, not GDP. As with my favourite example, WhatsApp. That is in the economic statistics as a decline in productivity (no, really). It’s also giving 2 billion people free telecoms. As another (non-NL so far at least) economist, Hal Varian puts it, GDP doesn’t deal well with free. June 16th, 2024 | 20 comments
“This is the zombie apocalypse”, tweeted Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll. “You need to watch this.” You do need to watch it. The “zombie apocalypse” is jokey fiction. This is real and not funny. It happened in New York a few days ago. Here is the same scene from a different angle. The tweet by Drew Pavlou says,
The speaker leading the chants is not the woman with the long hair, as I thought at first, but the woman intermittently visible on the left wearing a Muslim hijab-and-keffiyeh combination over a combat shirt and black jeans. Judging from their clothing, the crowd is a mixture of Muslims and Leftists. Compiled from both video clips, here is my transcript what the leader and the crowd said, Leader: “Fuck the Nova music festival” Crowd: “Fuck the Nova music festival” Leader: “AKA the place” Crowd: “AKA the place” Leader: “where Zionists decided to rave” Crowd: “where Zionists decided to rave” Leader: “next to a concentration camp” Crowd: “next to a concentration camp” Leader: “That’s exactly what this music festival was.” Crowd: “That’s exactly what this music festival was.” Leader: “It’s like having a rave” Crowd: “It’s like having a rave” Leader: “Right next to the gas chambers” Crowd: “Right next to the gas chambers” Leader: “during the holocaust” Crowd: “during the holocaust” Pro-Palestinian activists like this style of repeating chants. I think it is because they feel they need not take responsibility for their own words if they are just repeating what their leader said a second ago. Here is another recent example, posted by “KosherCockney”. The video shows a bunch of supporters of the Palestinians, their faces hidden by keffiyehs or black ski masks, who have evidently just poured into a New York subway carriage. The ordinary travellers stand rigid or sit hunched with their eyes down, trying to avoid being selected. The leader of the pro-Palestinians says, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” Activists: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” Leader: “This is your chance to get out.” Activists: “This is your chance to get out.” Understandably, none of the travellers raise their hands. The progressive says with satisfaction, “OK, no Zionists. We’re good.” I do not think it is an exaggeration to hear in that sentiment an echo of the Nazi term “Judenfrei”. June 15th, 2024 | 32 comments
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