I’m not saying that I think the present science establishment is good. It has been utterly poisoned by the interference of government, and the biggest mistake we make is thinking that something like the FDA or the CDC are science establishments, when they are in fact government institutions. It might be populated by people with science degrees, but they are still civil servants before being scientists. (especially the higher up the greasy pole they climb.) And unfortunately the universities have also been largely sucked into the poisonous stream of government funding.
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April 6th, 2022 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 If you go back to the Arab Spring and the Green Revolution there was generally a sense of triumphalism. Back then, the CEO of Twitter said that we are the free speech wing of the free speech party. That’s how Silicon Valley saw itself. Ten years later, you have the widespread view that Silicon Valley needs to restrict and regulate disinformation and prevent free speech on its platform. You’d have to say that the turning point was 2016, when Trump got elected against the wishes of pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley. That was a little too much populism for them. And they saw social media as being complicit in Trump’s election. March 30th, 2022 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
At this rate, they will need to open an officer’s club in hell. – Yuriy Mysiahin, noting the remarkable number of senior Russian officers K.I.A. in Ukraine, specifically Anatoly Shterliz, the C/O of the 503rd Motorised Rifle Regiment of the 19th Motorised Rifle Division getting smoked yesterday. March 29th, 2022 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, I was in Brussels last week and, contra the mood on Twitter, Europe feels more buoyantly European than it has in a long time, and Britain is absolutely a part of it, sending weapons to Ukraine, beefing up Nato and generally putting some stick about. It is UK Remainers who now seem parochial, refusing to move on from yesterday’s hurt and even, in the case of that fake news flick Boris Does Brussels, reimagining contemporary events as a commentary on unrelated stuff that’s still grinding their gears six years later. When President Biden said that meetings that bring America and the EU closer are a “victory for all of us,” Alastair Campbell added that they are also “a defeat for the UK. Which is why Brexit was a foreign policy goal for the Kremlin.” Bingo: a conspiracy theory and a contradiction all in one Tweet! March 27th, 2022 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The whole creaking machine is lubricated by the magic grease of grade inflation. As of the early Sixties, 15% of grades at American colleges and universities fell within the A range. By 2013, the proportion had reached 45%. To paraphrase the joke from the old Soviet Union, students pretend to work, and professors pretend to grade them. It is within the context of these forms of collegiate stupidity that we can understand the one that is now the most salient: wokeism. Wokeism can be thought of as the opportunistic infection of a host with an already weakened intellectual immune system. Students haven’t learned to think, so they lack the means to spot its inconsistencies, its hypocrisies, its absurdities. They haven’t learned to read, so they uncritically absorb its empty language. They know little of history, so they accept whatever tendentious version wokeism hands them. March 26th, 2022 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s time for your new favorite game! It’s called “Paid Russian Shill or Prominent Western Idiot?” Ever thought that some extremist’s bad take sounded indistinguishable from actual Russian propaganda? You might be right! March 19th, 2022 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is telling that so many cosmopolitan liberal globalists now care about sovereignty for Ukraine, yet spent years telling Brits sovereignty was some kind of fascist fantasy. It’s now okay to be a ‘flag shagger’ if you’re from Lviv or [Kyiv], but not if you’re from Leeds or Kings Lynn. – Commenter Martin March 17th, 2022 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
You can look at it the other way. Putin took the Crimea. Putin promoted the break-away republics. Without him, they would not have happened. In all the similar cases, the common theme is Putin. He did the same to Georgia as he is to Ukraine. He did the same to Moldova, with Trans-Dniestr. Were all those governments also reckless? Or were they just unfortunate enough to border Russia? Putin has been consistently threatening to the Baltic states too. He even sponsored cyber attacks on Estonia. Now it is a long bow to draw that they have been reckless. No. Putin is the common theme. Nothing Ukraine did, short of bowing to his every wish, would have stopped him. They have not been reckless. They have been desperately trying to deal with a homicidal maniac over the border. Your argument reminds me of telling battered spouses that they should be more careful, rather than pointing the finger at the violent thug doing the violent things. – ‘Chester Draws’ taking to task a commenter who accused the Ukrainian government of having brought this upon themselves with ‘reckless behaviour’. March 15th, 2022 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
The more the war goes on, the starker the contrast between Western moral defeatism and Ukrainian resolve becomes. The buzzword in much of the Western discussion is ‘realism’. On both sides of the discussion – among both those who support Ukraine’s fightback and those who obsess to the point of sympathy with Russia’s ‘security concerns’ – there’s a belief that ‘realism’ must now prevail. Over everything. Even over Ukraine’s sovereignty. As a pro-Ukraine writer for the New Republic puts it, ‘God bless the Ukrainians’ but ‘Russia will probably overpower Ukraine’. No wonder Mr Scherba is flustered, when even Ukraine’s supposed allies are essentially saying ‘Get real’. It is clear now that ‘realism’ is a euphemism for conceding, for surrender even. Whether it’s the ‘realists’ who admire the resistance but think it is hopeless, or the ‘realists’ of international-relations theory who believe Russia’s security concerns must trump the Ukrainian longing for freedom, there’s a palpable defeatism in the discourse. Only it dare not speak its name. It calls itself ‘realism’ instead. March 14th, 2022 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Conflict with Russia seems suboptimal. But avoiding necessary conflicts is not avoiding but just delaying. Why would you do that? Putin’s miscalculation makes regime super fragile *for now*. Which means that’s the best time for escalation ever. Next time they’ll be more robust. That’s important, because “deescalation” and defeating Putin are two different goals that require two different strategies. Deescalation means don’t threaten him in any way and give him as much as possible in a hope he won’t ask for more. Unfortunately that’s all wishful thinking March 13th, 2022 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
People who clutch at Mr Putin are like a drowning man – clutching at a poisonous snake. – Paul Marks March 11th, 2022 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
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