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This video from Daily Caller is a stunning example of why people need to realise the mainstream media are not in the fact-reporting business: the first minute shows a Q&A session as the media reported it; the next two and a half minutes show exactly the same Q&A session – without their edits. And do not think for a moment that the UK media are materially more reliable. April 7th, 2021 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Over the weekend PayPal informed us that they would no longer be willing to process payments for us due to “inappropriate content”. What this actually means is “we dont believe in your political opinion” both yours, and my own. So even worse than the situation with Creative Destruction. And in an era when it is rapidly becoming harder and harder to use physical cash, anyone who says “oh but PayPal is a private company…” yeah, so it Visa, American Express & MasterCard… good luck functioning at all in the modern world without at least one of them, and they too are doing the sort of thing PayPal has been doing. Just ask Gab.com. April 6th, 2021 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yep, Deliveroo must be banned because consumers like it. That’s The Guardian we know and love, right? April 3rd, 2021 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
For centuries, women have fought for the right to bodily autonomy. Having an abortion is a medical intervention, and women are just as entitled to it as any other treatment. But by adopting a philosophy which surrenders our medical autonomy to the state, we are hypothetically giving governments the power to ban abortions. Moreover, we are giving them the power to enforce them, if they so choose. The rights of the individual to assess risk and prioritise the quality of their own life has been forgotten In the past 12 months, dramatic shifts in mainstream attitudes to public health have moved us closer to this reality. The rights of the individual to assess risk and prioritise the quality of their own life has not only been forgotten — it has been scoffed at and derided, as though it never existed in the first place. The precedent set by the smallest step towards this broken philosophy is incredibly dangerous. Over the next few weeks, we must all ask ourselves what kind of world we want our children to grow up in. Do we grant them ownership of their bodies — indeed, their self, their soul, their identities? Or do we bequeath that ownership to the state? Some may argue that vaccine passports are the first step towards eradicating a disease. Rather, they are the first step towards the eradication of basic human rights. April 2nd, 2021 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The past year has taught me that I’ve been walking amongst millions of dormant authoritarians my entire life… It just took the right conditions to bring it out. Scary. – Zuby March 30th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yet there has never been a more pressing time to engage with these issues in the classroom. If I were a teacher of Religious Studies, I would find it difficult to justify ignoring the question of the perceived conflict between religious faith and free speech, or not to discuss the murders of Samuel Paty and the satirists of Charlie Hebdo. While there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the potential offence that depictions of the Prophet Mohammed might cause, it is not a sufficient reason to avoid the topic altogether. I am sure that many pupils are disturbed by the anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda cartoons that are routinely included in history textbooks, but they serve an important function in the learning process. We know very little about the context in which the images of Mohammed were shown at Batley Grammar, but it is implausible that the teacher’s motives were anything other than educational. March 29th, 2021 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is, clearly, a religious quality to our implicit appeal to a sacred core as consolation for the weakness of our bodies. But our modern soul is a secular soul; it has no actual religious content, only content given to it by the biological, psychological and social sciences. And if we have learnt one thing during this past year, it is that such sciences are not above being conduits for the agenda of governments and corporations. While we obediently cultivate a hatred of our bodies beyond any felt before in human history, we obediently look for our real selves in an imagined identity that is conveniently manufactured by scientific concepts advertised and distributed by those with power and influence. And the effect is intensifying, with the roll-out of these treatments they are calling ‘vaccines’, new mRNA pharmaceuticals that have never been used before and that are still in the experimental phase of their development. We should investigate these treatments, and not allow those in power to simply ‘get them in arms’. For, we are not identities trapped in contemptible bodies. Whatever we are, we are embodied. A Twitter bio I came across recently included the designators, 21y/o, ‘sapiosexual,’ ‘panAfrican,’ and ‘VACCINATED’. It is the endgame of the management of people with democratic freedoms, when they experience themselves as liberated by cleaving to newly invented, politically infused categories of race and sex, and are so scornful of their body as to replace its native immunity with an artificial version when, at the age of 21, it is highly unlikely to be improved upon. – Sinéad Murphy, Research Associate in Philosophy at Newcastle University March 26th, 2021 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Looking back, what I most clearly remember now about the febrile atmosphere of February and March last year was my own naïve optimism. I knew that some people were panicking. But I ascribed this to social media-led melodrama that would soon blow over. And I genuinely thought I was part of a silent majority of sensible people who weren’t getting swept up in the frenzy. I don’t think I appreciated at the time that I am, actually, a bit unusual: my father died of the ‘flu, so the idea that respiratory viruses can really be quite nasty was not a shock to me; I have lived through a bona fide life-threatening natural disaster and know what an actual catastrophe looks like; I don’t have any social media accounts so my antennae have not been borked by echo chambers; I have spent a long time overseas so I don’t imbue the NHS with quasi-religious significance or see it as my duty to ‘protect’ it; I have read my Hayek, my Bastiat, my Friedman, my Smith, and I am predisposed to value freedom and limited government. I hadn’t realised that I was somewhat different from my countrymen in these respects. So I was genuinely flabbergasted on March 23rd when it turned out people were actually going along with the nonsense. And since then I have found myself constantly surprised at just how out of step I am with the people around me. – David McGroggan, Associate Professor of Law, Northumbria Law School March 23rd, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Journalists have often tended to be on the Left – some of the most feared murderers of the French Revolution were hacks – but there has definitely been an acceleration. In the 1960s the trend was about 2 to 1, but by the 2000s as little as 7% identified as conservative, compared to 33% of the US public, a figure repeated in a report a decade later. Rather unsurprisingly, polls show American trust in the media declining, a trend that accelerated in 2008 when swathes of Americans came to believe journalists were conspiring to get Obama elected. I don’t think Donald Trump’s open hostility to journalists did him any harm, nor do I think it will harm the prospects of any future populist. – Ed West March 20th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
This has long been an aim of a certain type of authoritarian, to abolish juries in criminal trials. After all, how can the authorities jug those they dislike if juries won’t convict people merely of being someone the authorities don’t like? This actually being the entire point of juries from their beginning. The King doesn’t get to jug just anyone he doesn’t like. There must be a crime, on the books, which someone is convicted of. And the jury is there to agree that what is being convicted of happened, it was ‘ee wot dun it, and that it should be a crime to be punished. It’s that last bit which is the protection of freedom – jury nullification as we’re not supposed to mention in the English courts. March 19th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m sorry, but if you didn’t object to the Metropolitan Police’s brutal tactics in dispersing anti-lockdown protestors in Trafalgar Square last September, you cannot condemn their employment of identical tactics last night. Either you defend the right to protest for everyone, or you defend it for no one. You cannot just get worked up about it when it affects those whose cause you approve of. March 14th, 2021 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is dynamite stuff. Suddenly a lot of crazy conspiracy theories do not seem quite so crazy today. March 12th, 2021 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
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