I find it personally deeply upsetting. Kirk was a very religious-y person and I’m an implacable atheist, so there there lots of things I disagreed with him on. But what he encapsulated to me is “free speech”. He debated with everyone, openly, without hostility, honestly, directly. He was without guile, laid it out on the table, kind to a fault, and, most dangerously of all to the left, extremely convincing. To me that makes him one of the greatest men of the 21st century. Free speech is, to me, probably the greatest virtue and basic foundation of all of society, and yesterday the men who couldn’t win the argument took out its greatest, happiest warrior.
|
|||||
|
David Eltis, described by Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University as “the world’s leading scholar of the slave trade”, reckons that nineteenth-century expenditure on slavery-suppression outstripped the eighteenth-century benefits. And the political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, have concluded that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade alone in 1807–67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”. The African Union’s demand for colonial reparations is an act of cynical opportunism. But unless our elites learn to care less about signalling their virtue and more about doing justice to their own country’s historical record, it will cost us all. – Nigel Biggar (£) September 10th, 2025 | 14 comments
 “Unfortunately, the current Labour government, like every unpopular administration before it, has reached for the oldest trick in the book, persecuting the law-abiding. Sunak did it with smoking bans and talk of national service, Starmer is doing it with the motorist. The plan includes mandatory eye tests for older drivers, stripping pensioners of their independence and dumping the cost onto the already-buckling adult social care system when Dad now needs a taxi just to get to the shops. It lowers the drink-drive limit from 35 to 22 micrograms, despite Britain already having the second-lowest drink-driving deaths in Europe. There is even talk of slashing the national speed limit in the countryside to 50 mph — a direct attack on rural life, where the car is not a luxury but a necessity.” One of the problems with certain types of new regulation is getting them enforced. If the cops are too busy going around pinching people for saying mean things on social media, how are they going to enforce some of this nonsense? Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer, who is not exactly loved in the rural parts of the UK, is still in thrall, as far as I can tell, to a form of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to risk and safety. And he may think that he might as well stick it to rural people who need to use a car as they will be very unlikely to vote for him. There may be a sort of “damn you bastards” reflex here. I recall that he was a fan of lockdowns, and while he remains in power, there is a risk that he’d impose them if international organisations demand it. The authoritarian itch is powerful in “Capt. Hindsight”. Less negatively, there may be a warped kind of mistaken desire to improve humanity going on here (shades of the old “nudge” issue I wrote about a few days ago, although we are now in open coercion territory.) According to this way of thinking, it is better to pile on costs and inconvenience to everyone if it saves a single life, whether that means cutting rural speed limits, making granddad check his eyes regularly (I have some sympathy for this, after all, pilots are regularly checked out) and reducing alcohol. There is a sort of cost-benefit analysis that can be done to figure out what the unintended consequences of certain measures are. Unfortunately, fatal/near-fatal car accidents make for horrible headlines (and they are horrible, period), while the increasing drudgery and cost of living in a heavily regulated country does not translate so well into news stories. That is a factor that explains the rise of Big Government more generally: the whole issue of “what is seen and what is unseen”, as Bastiat described it. All this heavy-handedness is is a reason, I think, why we need more of the pro-safety elements at work to come from insurance. If an elderly person does not get their eyes tested and they are involved in a crash, or they don’t have tyres with a minimum grip, or they haven’t had an MOT test, then that means an insurance policy does not pay out, etc. Let those who make a living out of correct risk assessment drive such things (pardon the pun) and not a political class that seems to crave this sort of micro-management of our waking hours. But then as long as we have “our NHS” socialist model of healthcare, it will always be argued, by those of a communitarian bent, that those who fail to minimise risks to others impose unwanted costs on innocent third parties, and to “save” the NHS, such regulations, however far-reaching, must be enforced. But this, in my view, is an argument against socialised medicine, not for increasing regulation. September 9th, 2025 | 20 comments
This is where the worship of “expert” peer review science gets us — a science crime syndicate. Once science stopped being about winning arguments and became just the-number-of-papers-someone-published, it became an empty shell. And once billions of dollars, depended on sacred ‘experts’, it was doomed. Long gone are the days when papers were hardly ever retracted and pal review was “the big problem? Now, fake papers and fake editors are so rife they are their own specialist industry. Networks of brokers connect paper-mills up with authors and publishers and place batches of papers in journals with ‘friendly editors’. When Richardson et al analyzed PLOS ONE, they found 33 editors who seemed to have an extraordinarily high rate of retractions. One in particular had approved 79 papers of which, 49 had already been retracted. – Jo Nova September 8th, 2025 | 19 comments
Labour bigwigs have spent so long portraying themselves as morally superior that they have come to believe their own hype. They really do seem to think they are, as a group, almost beyond reproach. That they are the good guys, the virtuous ones. What they lack in any substantial political vision for Britain, they make up for in skyscraping self-righteousness. Which blinds them to their own hypocrisy. September 7th, 2025 | 13 comments
Today, tutoring is seen mostly as a corrective to failures within the bureaucratic structures of education, like an intervention to help out a course, grade, or test. In general, those doing well in school don’t get tutoring—it’s like we’re applying the secret genius sauce solely to the kids who aren’t going to be geniuses. Interesting essay, well worth reading the whole thing. September 6th, 2025 | 28 comments
Our now former Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Angela Rayner, had a long history of denouncing Conservative politicians for tax avoidance. Yesterday she had to resign for not paying enough Stamp Duty. This was not because she accidentally wrote the wrong figure on the cheque – showing my age, there – it was because she engaged in a complicated tax avoidance scheme uncovered by the Daily Telegraph:
There were some other financial shenanigans to do with a trust fund for her disabled son going on as well, but they are secondary to the main point. I am always saying “incentives matter”. All human history demonstrates that in the long run, they do. But all human history also demonstrates that in the short run, they frequently don’t. Angela Rayner was a left-wing Housing Minister whose public speeches often denounced other MPs for legally avoiding – let alone illegally evading – tax. One would have thought that she would have foreseen that unfriendly eyes were going to scrutinise her own payment of a property tax, and would have arranged her affairs accordingly. September 6th, 2025 | 41 comments
“There is no ‘right’ to undo another nation’s existence. There is no international principle that compels one people to surrender sovereignty so that their state can be destroyed — a state created as a haven for a people nearly annihilated, and after a defensive war they won. Until the Palestinian leadership abandons this claimed right of return, there will be no peace and certainly no two-state solution. Because the refusal to abandon this made-up ‘right’ means they don’t want two states. It means they want one. And they want the Jewish state to vanish.” For those interested, I can recommend this overview about some of the issues from a pro-Israel, but not uncritically so, writer – Noa Tishby. Another book by two authors, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, dissects, in painstaking detail, how the “right of return” claim lies at the heart of why two-state solutions to the Israel/Palestinian conflict have foundered in the past. Here’s a review of that book. September 4th, 2025 | 26 comments
Yesterday the Green Party announced that Zack Polanski (who used to say he could enlarge women’s breasts by the power of his mind) had been elected as its new leader. The party also announced that “two high-profile local councillors had been elected as co-deputy leaders. One of these deputies is Mr Mothin Ali, formerly a local councillor in Leeds. If he is a dab hand at the mental embiggening of ladies’ boobs, he has not mentioned it, but he has said other things that might prove equally controversial. The video to which I link was posted by “Howli! Now” in May 2024, with the title “Leeds city council member Mothin Ali shares thoughts on events of October 7th” and the caption, “Mothin Ali is the Green Party councilor who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’ as he was elected to the Leeds city council. This is what he had to say on October 7th:” The video includes an automatically generated transcript. I “cleaned up” some obvious errors in that transcript to produce what follows:
Edit: I got so involved in doing the transcript that I forgot the whole point of the post. It is this: I support Mr Ali’s right to justify terrorism, not least because I want to know what people like him are saying. But given that Hamas was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in 2021, meaning that, in the words of the gov.uk website, “members of Hamas or those who invite support for the group could be jailed for up to 14 years”, when can we expect Mothin Ali to be treated as Graham Linehan was? Second edit: On a different tack, these lines from Mothin Ali’s speech jumped out at me this morning:
Leaving aside the question of whether Jews or Arabs have the better claim to be regarded as “the native population” of Israel, has it never occurred to Mothin Ali that the arguments he uses above to justify Palestinians violently attacking Israelis could also be used to justify White British people violently attacking British Muslims? September 3rd, 2025 | 16 comments
Five, apparently. That’s five armed police officers, of course. Heaven knows how many unarmed officers it would take to bring down a mighty warrior like Graham Linehan. September 2nd, 2025 | 48 comments
– says former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton in a Guardian article called “The EU surrendered to Trump over trade tariffs – now it’s in danger of capitulating again”. It is stirring stuff:
and
Sorry, what promise was this? I’ve heard of “the social contract”. Discussion of that has been around for centuries. I’ve heard of “the military compact”, which in a British context is a phrase used to describe the obligations of the government towards soldiers in exchange for them risking their lives on its behalf. However my self-education in political theory did not include this apparently well-known promise made to its citizens by every democratic state worthy of the name that it would interpose itself between them and the horror of seeing Elon Musk interview Donald Trump on Twitter. Regular readers will recall that Commissioner Breton was a leading promoter of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which has good reason to be described as “the single greatest threat to free speech in Europe”. September 1st, 2025 | 25 comments
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Recent Comments