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Was out for a wander this evening and saw this right in front of the Venezuelan Embassy in London.
It is astonishing that in 2017, anyone can still openly call themselves a socialist in polite society and be treated with more respect than if they called themselves a fascist. October 31st, 2017 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The intersectional worldview is obviously incompatible with the basic tenets of life in a liberal democracy. That doesn’t bother intersectional activists, however, because they believe liberalism itself to be an elaborate sham that uses the illusory equality of procedural democracy – free and fair elections, courts, the rule of law, the Bill of Rights – to paper over vast social injustices. In the eyes of the intersectional Left, the very idea of universal rights is fatally flawed – or “problematic,” to use a frequent, lazy phrase – because those rights can benefit the wrong people, such as white supremacists (in the case of free speech), or campus rapists (in the case of due process and the rights of the accused). October 30th, 2017 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Spectator magazine is the oldest conservative magazine in Britain – indeed I believe it is the oldest conservative magazine in the world. However, it has lost its way… First came the attack on Chris Heaton-Harris Member of Parliament, for daring to ask for details of what the taxpayer backed universities were teaching – with the implied hint that he (horror of horrors!) wanted to answer back, to counter the conditioning efforts of the leftist academics. But now things have moved on… In this week’s issue of the Spectator Mr James Forsyth has hidden leftist suggestions behind free market language. What specific suggestions do I mean? “Stimulus” (Keynesian language – fit only for the people who control the universities) infrastructure government spending (no figure given for how much money this would be ), and fifty billion Pounds of extra government borrowing (on top of the vast borrowing the government is already engaged in) to build houses in the South East of England – thus turning the area into one huge urban sprawl, and pushing the country to certain bankruptcy and economic collapse There is no way that Conservative voters could support such criminal insanity – they would stay away from the polls in disgust. The Spectator magazine has lost its way. October 28th, 2017 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
Neo-Socialist Macron is ‘pro-free market’ like wolves are anti-sheep abortion. October 27th, 2017 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Two decades after the Guggenheim fell from the sky on Bilbao, the global arts establishment clings to the faith – and it is a faith, a belief with no empirical evidence to support it – that run-down cities can be healed by something called cultural regeneration: by building museums and galleries. The number of people unemployed and dependent on welfare in Bilbao has risen during those two decades. Like prayer or relics, it seems not to work. October 26th, 2017 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
The news around Europe is that the Dutch have formed a government after a record 208 days of negotiations; Austria has elected an anti-immigration leader in a notable lurch rightward; and the Czechs have chosen a Eurosceptic as a prime minister (h/t Adam for the roundup). You’d have thought this would be a major point of discussion in the British media especially with the ongoing Brexit negotiations, but what was the BBC’s main headline yesterday afternoon? This one:
Never mind European populations swinging to the right and voting Eurosceptic politicians into office, what is important is who is saying what about Trump on Twitter. October 25th, 2017 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
Washington is a parasite that sucks the rest of the country dry. The counties surrounding Washington, D.C., have the highest per capita income of any metropolitan area in the country including New York, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The unemployment rate is also the lowest of any large region in the country. At least New York, Silicon Valley and Hollywood all produce something we need or enjoy. Washington produces red tape, taxes and new ways to handicap innovation on a daily basis. While America staggers after its first lost decade (2007–17) and with a new lost decade set to begin (Japan, anyone?), Washington grows fat and rich. Trust me, the hotels and restaurants in town are jammed. No depression here. – Jim Rickards. Not sure I’d agree with him on Hollywood but he is one of an apparently growing number of commentators who have noticed the parallels between the West’s current predicament and the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. October 24th, 2017 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is highly unsurprising that, if marginal tax rates are cut, the people who will benefit directly are those who actually pay the tax. Opponents to rate cuts on these grounds are criticising tax changes on the basis that they do not help people who are already completely exempt from them. This is bizarre. It effectively implies that they are against all tax cuts, of any sort. October 23rd, 2017 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The United States wants Canada to end supply management, which impedes agricultural imports – dairy, eggs, and poultry. Canada’s trade negotiators and politicians steadfastly refuse, and in their defense of the policy call up an astounding piece of logic: that the less Canadians have, the richer we are. Canada’s Agriculture Minister insists that supply management is an “excellent system” and that “to deal with anything else is simply a non-starter.” Supporters on the left argue that the policy is necessary to protect domestic farmers from unfair competition from American farmers who receive government subsidies. Conservatives have argued the same. Current Parliament Member and former International Trade Minister, Ed Fast argued in a recent essay that America simply wants access to the Canadian market “to deal with its own problem of overproduction, to the detriment of Canadian farmers.” Here is what all proponents of supply management are arguing: If we allow the Americans to send us milk, then their problem of overproduction becomes our problem. Don’t you see how problematic it is, how much poorer we will become if we allow them to send to us the fruits of their overproduction, and at a low price to boot? Don’t you see how much richer we would be if we had less milk? October 22nd, 2017 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
I can’t have read 1% of what’s been written about Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood in the last few days, so to say there’s a point I’ve not seen spelled out may mean very little. But as I’ve not seen it yet, I’ll say it here. Of course, I’ve seen much that I agree with – and much that I already knew. – Long before this story broke, I knew that the very industry that virtue-signalled its devotion to PC in public was certain to be the very place where vile conduct would abound, just as Sweden is rated a world-leader in feminism – and is where a raped girl waits more than a month for the police even to interview her. Only someone stupid enough to be surprised that the workers are starving in socialist Venezuela would be surprised to find the politically-correct victimising a group they patronise. – I see, as Virginia Postrel does, that Hollywood’s recent rush to escape Harvey includes a preference cascade – far, far, far more of one than the way everyone in East Germany had always hated communism after the wall fell. (For a rare exception, if you can pass the Times paywall, read the revolting Matt Frei’s revoltingly sympathetic account of his revolting East German apparatchik relations’ feelings in the October 24th 2009 edition.) It’s easy to see why the PC mantra ‘regret is rape’ is so well liked by those who remember how unenjoyable their career-enhancing trysts with Harvey were – and remember less well how indifferent they themselves were to others. I have not a moment’s doubt there were actual crimes; the details of Harvey’s technique that have emerged scream that there were. And I have not a moment’s doubt that the acted pleasure of others, who knew well the bargain they were making, was as fake as the better sex under communism that the NYT believes in (but I don’t). Who wouldn’t ‘regret’ spending time with the elephant in the hotel bedroom? Thay say power is an aphrodisiac; it would need to be. – I see, as many do, that this phoniness of many Hollywood women is grossly (in every sense) matched by that of many Hollywood men. I’d like to write that I can’t imagine a less convincing apology that Tarentino’s – except that I don’t have to imagine it. Hillary Clinton, let alone his fellow Hollywood types, offered still worse or still less honest or still slower, or all three. If Brad Pitt had carried out his threat to beat up Harvey long ago – if he had done it somewhere so public that the story was unkillable – then he might have spared more than just Gwyneth Paltrow from future unpleasant encounters. That would have meant taking a risk; that would required him to act like the heroic characters he acts. But Brad took it out in unpublicised venting – which still puts him well above the filthy norm of Hollywood, I guess. Far lower is writing a blank-verse poem (after the story broke!) about your shameful inaction in all the years before. It shows some contrition, but my poems rhyme and scan, so I rate low the value of one that doesn’t make that much effort. At least the author’s poetic form lets him naturally repeat again and again his refrain: “Everybody-fucking-knew”. Finding out that Harvey’s contract included a clause protecting his company from paying his harrassment suits is as if we learned Hillary’s pre-nup included a protection against her money being used to pay off future Juanitas, Paulas and Etceteras. We don’t need that to know Hillary is full of it – and we didn’t need that clause to know that the poem tells less than the whole truth, not more. – I see that Sarah Hoyt writes sense about passes, and that Stephanie Gutmann describes a real un-Hollywood workplace. I see just as clearly that those who took their pay-offs in career-boosting gigs or confidentiality-agreement payouts or both have yet another reason to indulge the left-wing tendency to blame society as a whole, not specific individuals typical only of their specific self-chosen society. On recent data, Harvey perpetrated one-and-a-half incidents per year over decades. My not-so-left-wing views tell me that many crimes are committed by far fewer criminals, so I agree with those who say that number will rise. So (if you’re still reading 🙂 ), what have I not seen? Well, John Ringo, repeated in instapundit, tells a parable about how many in Hollywood (and it would be men as well as women) might need, for their own self-respect, to believe men outside Hollywood are far worse. It’s a well-written piece and it could explain the crazy antics of an Ashley Judd. But Occam whispers a simpler explanation in my ear. THESE PEOPLE ACT. The one thing we truly know about them is they can act – all of them competently, some exceptionally. (To pick a name entirely at random) I never believed Chloe Grace Moretz drank blood for dinner because her vampire character does in ‘Let Me In’. I never thought she loved guns better than Dana Loesch because Hit Girl does, or that Hit Girl’s mocking, “Dude, that is one gay-looking taser”, meant Chloe never bowed to the tyranny of “you can’t say that”. So when I see her nervously praising Hillary at the Democrats 2016 convention, why would I believe her? I don’t mean, why would I believe she is a good judge of political character, I mean why would I believe this is not just a career-serving acting gig in her own mind? It is easier, and less demeaning, to feign liking for Hillary in public than liking for the elephant in the bedroom in private – isn’t it? (Female commenters, please feel free to correct my victorian-valued mansplaining if I’m wrong about that.) In a Hollywood where some were enduring Harvey and more were covering for him, and this is far from the only such scandal, why on earth would we assume that anyone’s enthusiasm for PC is any more sincere than the eagerness for Harvey that was feigned on the casting couch? That Harvey never believed in his public creed is well, kind of obvious, but isn’t it the simplest explanation to assume that pretty well none of them do? October 21st, 2017 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Unilateral free trade benefits us all and even benefits the poor more than other groups in society. Just what we learned 169 years ago with the repeal of the Corn Laws. Further, as they say, tariff protection makes all poorer while also weighing more heavily upon the poor. This is not an argument in favour of trade protection. Unilateral free trade it is then, eh? October 20th, 2017 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an argument, I think, for having people who want “a strong leader” shot immediately on the basis that it will save the dictator time later. – David Aaronovitch, discussing these findings by the Pew Organisation in The Times (£). Unlike Pew, neither Mr Aaronovitch nor I find it very comforting that only – only! – 26% of the UK population thinks “a system in which a strong leader can govern the country without interference from parliament or the courts would be a good way of governing this country”. October 19th, 2017 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
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