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When Samuel Paty was decapitated in the street in broad daylight for trying to teach his students a civics lesson, the New York Times ran with the woefully misleading headline “French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street”. The attack — in which the assassin who had just cut someone’s head off was shot by gendarmes — was awkwardly framed through the lens of liberal America’s anxieties over police violence, and it didn’t get much better from there. October 29th, 2020 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The idea that someone’s skin colour should determine their politics stems from a reactionary, patronising attitude towards non-white people. It ends up producing the grim spectacle of white people telling black people what they are allowed to think. Indentitarian activists are all for empowering black people – right up until they disagree with them. – Spiked October 26th, 2020 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
People react to discrediting evidence not by acknowledging reality but by entrenching their beliefs even further. This counter-productive thinking is further exacerbated by ‘cognitive dissonance’, another Festinger theory. When confronted with evidence disproving their beliefs, people will opt for the least painful choice, holding on to their beliefs, no matter how catastrophic these are, rather than admitting they have been wrong. Our political class – the Government – is currently providing a textbook example of this behaviour. October 24th, 2020 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yes, yes, of course the World Economic Forum are dingbats. But the point is that if we’re forced to pay for the BBC at gunpoint – yes, try escaping from jail after you’ve not paid the licence fee and it does come down to that in the end – so that they can educate and elucidate for us could we, just possibly, see a bit more of that educating an elucidating? Like, reminding us that the WEF are dingbats? October 23rd, 2020 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
This proposes to make it illegal to take in a lodger/paying guests unless you have a licence from the local council. To get a licence you’d have to make sure your house met state-approved ‘standards’. It’s intended as legislation to clamp down on noisy AirBnB flats in cities, but is also being used as a vehicle for ScotGov to meet their targets for eco-friendly homes: Any opportunity is used to force private owner-occupiers to “upgrade” their homes to be more energy-efficient (and have the right number of smoke/fire/heat detectors). October 17th, 2020 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The point of “public service obligations” were because costs were high and bandwidth was limited. Broadcasters, especially those chasing ad money might not make programmes for disabled people, or obscure arts shows. When you solve costs and increase bandwidth, anyone can make a show and people do. You want stuff about Keynesian economics, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. There are lots of blind people making videos on YouTube, people of nearly all varieties of politics from communists to libertarians, the history of corsetry, how to repoint a wall. There are few colour, sex or whatever bars because this stuff is cheap to make. – Some geezer on Tim Worstall’s site discussing the anachronistic dinosaur known as the BBC October 13th, 2020 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
No place has got rich – that is, the population enjoying a multiplicity of those three squares and a roof – without being roughly capitalist, roughly free market and trading across the borders of that place or society. Non-capitalism, non-marketism and autarky just don’t produce the result. We can and should go further too. Any place that is rich has been that roughly capitalist, marketist and tradist for some time now. Those places that have only in recent decades adopted the trio are getting rich. Those that still haven’t done so are still poor. Sure, there’s a spectrum of possible policies, from Sweden’s tax heavy social democracy to Hong Kong’s near laissez faire. But that is a spectrum that always includes our trio. October 9th, 2020 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
openDemocracy wants to tell us all that coronavirus has entirely upended the assumptions of neoclassical economics. This is because openDemocracy doesn’t have the first clue about the assumptions of neoclassical economics. This is not, therefore, a good starting point for a reordering of the economic assumptions we use when trying to deal with reality. October 5th, 2020 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
YouTube went from restricting speech containing “violence and hate” to apparently suppressing information connecting Disney to actual violence and hate in China—the largest mass incarceration of an ethnic minority since the Holocaust. A rich irony indeed, but one that would not have surprised George Orwell. Bonus: YouTube has deleted every comment I ever made about the Wumao (五毛), an internet propaganda division of the Chinese Communist Party. Who at Google decided to censor American comments on American videos hosted in America by an American platform that is already banned in China? October 4th, 2020 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The last Labour government rigged almost every institution in this country with enormous craft and cunning. Even now, from the National Lottery Fund to the National Trust, we have institution after institution in this country run by people whose interests are opposed to those of the general public, and aspiring more than anything else to the hideous, divisive and now clearly failing ‘woke’ agenda. Dacre and Moore are good early warning shots. But if the Johnson government wants to do something meaningful, it should not just follow through on their appointments; it should follow them up with a fusillade every bit as relentless and long-lasting as the Labour one, the repercussions of which this country still suffers from. October 3rd, 2020 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Trump is a streetfighter waging asymmetric warfare against a traditional foe who is reviewing the rules of engagement and consulting the lawyers back at headquarters before doing anything. And all the while he’s getting pummelled. Idealists will say that it wasn’t very presidential, that they didn’t dig into policy and educate the American people, where was the dignity? Welcome to electoral politics. It’s always been thus. Founding Father John Adams delighted in calling fellow Founder Alexander Hamilton, “the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler.” Adams himself came in for similar treatment during the election of 1800 when he was called an hermaphrodite reportedly at the behest of Thomas Jefferson. We didn’t get any of that last night. But there’s another debate next week so keep your fingers crossed. September 30th, 2020 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
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