|
|||||
|
Putin’s objectives are not an enigma, a mystery, or a riddle. As McKew emphasizes, they have been spelled out again and again in speeches, books, editorial, official documents, journal articles, conferences, interviews, and even in fiction. They have also been written in blood. […] Proposing a peace agreement with a party who views such agreements not as binding commitments, but periods in which to rearm is delusional. August 18th, 2023 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
 August 17th, 2023 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The greatest trick technocracy ever pulled was convincing the world that it is associated with competence. Technocracy presents itself as government by people who know what they are doing – the ‘adults in the room’, the ‘wise minority in the saddle’ guiding the herd, and so on. In truth, the exact opposite is true: technocracy is always and everywhere doomed to disaster, and our current technocracy is no different. It is a technocracy of failure. Read the whole thing, highly recommended. August 17th, 2023 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The crux of the objection was that I considered the actions of West Yorkshire Police to be akin to an organised crime gang engaged in a kidnap. It’s a strong allegation, which demands some justification, so here goes. Kidnap is a common law offence, made up of four distinct elements. The taking of one person by another… with force….without their consent… and without lawful excuse. The screams of the girl attest to the fulfilment of the first three elements, but what of the fourth? Did the police have a lawful excuse to behave as they did? Here’s the technical bit: Section 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 cannot be committed where the suspect (in this case, the girl), and the victim (the officer) are both in the same private dwelling. The clue is in the name. It is the Public Order Act, designed to address alarm, harassment and distress carried out in a public place. For the arrest to have been lawful, the police would need to demonstrate a mistake as to fact. In other words, that they genuinely mistook the hallway and cupboard beneath the stairs in which the girl was hiding for, say, the town hall steps or other public place. Ignorance as to law is not a valid defence. Ever. What the police did was the equivalent of pulling over a car on the verge of breaking the speed limit and arresting the driver for burglary. August 16th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
West Yorkshire Police must now justify the officers’ actions in terms of lawful arrest and proportional force. Failure to do so would significantly undermine public trust, especially among people with autism and other disabilities. Unless there is far more to this story than meets the eye, if they cannot justify their actions, at the very least some Plod need to lose their jobs and ideally face prosecution. August 11th, 2023 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sorry for the disturbance in the force, the mystic code gods are working out how to unfuck the blog 😀 That’ll teach me to press the “update” button August 8th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
August 8th, 2023 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are many cases of fact-checkers spreading disinformation that then results in censorship. Facebook censored stories claiming Covid-19 might have come from a lab. Last week, Public documented the role played by Anthony Fauci in creating junk science to create a fake debunking of the lab leak, which the White House and others used to justify censorship. Fact-checkers have thus been forced to make an embarrassing series of retractions. PolitiFact, the dean of all fact-checking organizations, was forced in 2021 to retract its false debunking of a doctor who said COVID-19 was a “man-made virus created in the lab.” And just last week, the BBC was forced to retract its false claim that UK politician Nigel Farage was not de-banked for political reasons because, as it turned out, he was. August 2nd, 2023 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Ukrainian search for an inspiring and usable past—a search for brave historical warriors whose legacy might be appropriated for the sake of inspiring the heroic warriors of the present—is to be respected, even as some of the figures who have been lionized are not always figures that we would like to be lionized. The mobilization of masculine virtues and intensity are par for the course in the midst of a war of genodical annihilation, and Ukrainian society has certainly militarized to a significant degree over the course of the last 500 days. Which is not in any way to engage in Holocaust denial or revisionism. My own Jewish great-grandparents were shot in Belarus in November 1941. Dealing honestly with what some Ukrainians chose to do in the 1930s and 1940s is imperative, so that we can fight honestly and without a pause. I am immensely proud that Tablet recently published John-Paul Himka’s essay on the pogroms in Lviv in 1941. However, it is a fact that today’s Ukrainians, in a time of war, have consolidated their society in a manifestly liberal fashion. We should do the same and stop telling fairy tales about Nazis. July 29th, 2023 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
July 29th, 2023 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
It wasn’t farmers and factory workers who came up with the idiotic COVID responses — nor was it they who originated the more or less criminal idea of conducting “gain of function” research on making dangerous viruses more dangerous. It wasn’t shopkeepers and bus drivers who thought the way to deal with burgeoning urban crime was to get rid of police and release criminals without bail. It hasn’t been landscapers and auto mechanics championing the notion that a child in the single-digit age range can make a lifetime choice about his or her genitalia or maintaining that even criticizing that idea is itself a species of “violence.” Read the whole thing. July 26th, 2023 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Lancet published the chart on left with a different X-Axis to downplay fact that cold causes ten times more deaths than heat in Europe. Björn Lomborg corrected that with the chart on right.  July 23rd, 2023 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
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. |
|||||