Arguing with race-obsessives is like walking into a room full of Hitler Youth or Red Guard and expecting to have a rational discussion. Stop wasting your time with such people.
– Perry de Havilland
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The chief publicist of the post-Cold War order was Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1992 book The End of History argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall Western liberal democracy represented the final form of government. What Fukuyama got wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t his assessment of the strength of political forms; rather it was the depth of his philosophical model. He believed that with the end of the nearly half-century-long superpower standoff, the historical dialectic pitting conflicting political models against each other had been resolved. In fact, the dialectic just took another turn. Just after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western democratic principles transforming the CCP, the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years. – Lee Smith, The Thirty Tyrants February 5th, 2021 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A totalitarian state cannot tolerate privacy, even and especially within the family, the last redoubt of dissent. Hate-speech laws do not yet cover what you say in the privacy of your own home – you can’t be prosecuted for stirring up hatred at your dining table or in the bedroom. The [law] commission, however, finds this idea of privacy intolerable. So, if it gets its way, any words you use in your own home that are ‘likely’, even by accident, to ‘stir up hatred’ against a vast array of ‘protected’ groups – including ‘punks’, if you can believe it – could get you sent to prison for seven years. These proposals will make parents fear their own children – and children fear their siblings. February 1st, 2021 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m also currently helping out a journalist who has been arrested four times and had his equipment taken by the police – without warrants. He is accused of trolling people who he has never communicated with. But he has never been charged. It is all possible because of the hate laws. Being a politician and a Brexiteer, I could have the police fully employed arresting people who say very offensive things to me online. I would not do that. But some people do. We need a major overhaul of all this, because it has set in motion a load of events that are extremely unhealthy for democracy. – Andrew Bridgen MP in “Why we must repeal our hate-speech laws“ January 31st, 2021 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Don’t back down. Don’t apologize. Don’t make clarifications, and don’t try to appease the mob. All of these will only be taken as concessions, and embolden the mob to demand more. The real Achilles’s Heel of the cancel crowd is its short attention span. Once they bully someone into submission, they move on to the next victim. It’s a system designed for quick wins. If you don’t back down, they’ll raise the pitch as far as they can—but eventually they’ll be at a loss for what to do next, and all but the most fanatical will lose interest. The few that remain, now bereft of their backup, are just what you need to teach all of them a lesson, as we did in my case. – Pedro Domingos from the excellent article “Beating Back Cancel Culture: A Case Study from the Field of Artificial Intelligence” January 30th, 2021 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
No government would want to accept that lockdowns were a terrible idea and that wider spread of the pandemic could result in the build-up of herd immunity and fewer number of deaths. However, it must be kept in mind that governments can neither be blamed nor credited for the spread of the coronavirus, because it was nature at work. January 28th, 2021 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
The standard economics of taxation tells us that wealth taxes are a bad idea. The little get out available being that a one off wealth tax, unannounced and impossible to dodge, isn’t so bad. But that isn’t so bad bit rests, entirely and wholly, on the one off nature of it. Which is why those who would tax wealth are telling us it will be a one off, so that it can be introduced and then made more permanent. January 25th, 2021 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
In answer to: Why can’t the Left let go of Trump? It is the same reason a certain ilk of Remainers can’t let go of Brexit, and why the Left in media & academia can’t let go of GamerGate. These were each a cultural Stalingrad, defeats that indicated the world did not work the way High Status opinion demands that you think & say it does. Hoi Polloi keep throwing bricks through the Overton window & polite society really doesn’t like that. So the people invested in these High Status opinions (shared by everyone they know) are obsessed by the fact they suffered defeats when they are suppose to own the future. They may have gotten rid of Trump now but the fact he was elected in the first place gives lie to their comfortable “inevitable march of history” narrative – Perry de Havilland January 22nd, 2021 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
So with regulation. Don’t change it, abolish the very idea of regulating vast swathes of the economy. Don’t reduce the state all over, kill parts of the state. January 19th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
See how strong governmentalist ideology is in both the principal covid narratives: That some things may be beyond state control is not considered. – Guy Herbert January 14th, 2021 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Fascism is the organised attempt to introduce socialist planning with the consent of big business – Edward Conze (1934) January 13th, 2021 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Surrender is a choice, old chum. In the face of policies designed to cause fear & despair, refuse to be driven by fear & do not give in to despair. Even if that is the sum total one can contribute, do at least that. – Perry de Havilland January 10th, 2021 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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