Prices in markets are information – however much we might not like the lessons being delivered.
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January 14th, 2024 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Too often the culture war is misconceived as a conflict between Left and Right, with “woke” aligned with the former and “anti-woke” with the latter, but “wokeness” carries with it the kind of clout that transcends the political binary. In their 13 years of government, the Conservatives have presided over the worst excesses of this identity-obsessed ideology and the havoc it has wrought on society. Far from fighting a “war on woke”, they have been actively enabling it. January 9th, 2024 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
So, there you have it. To recap — the new government installed its own political nominees by force, based upon a completely bogus legal justification, and the excuses it used were… “depoliticization”, “trust” and “restoring the constitutional order”. Moreover, the democratically elected President, who actually suggested being open to compromise, is treated like an obstacle to be bypassed by illegal means. All of it in the name of — you guessed it — “the constitutional order”. Right… – Paweł Sokala, discussing the astonishing coup-like behaviour of the new Polish government. January 7th, 2024 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s going to be an interesting election: the party that deserves to lose versus the party that doesn’t deserve to win. – Commenter Andy January 5th, 2024 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
To say our elites have a blindspot where anti-Semitism is concerned is a grotesque understatement. Having spent years obsessing over fantasy forms of racism and fascism, having spent years soberly telling us that Boris Johnson was Eton’s answer to Hitler, the great and good look upon Jew-hating marches, attacks and even terror plots… and it barely registers. Whether these people are ignoring anti-Semitism, making excuses for it, or participating in it, the story remains the same. Our supposedly ‘anti-racist’ betters, people who during the Black Lives Matter uprising just two years ago were taking knees and ‘doing the work’ and tweeting #SilenceIsViolence from their £4million townhouses, are so marinated in a divisive identity politics and a demented ‘anti-imperialism’ that they see Jews as ‘white’ oppressors, even when they’re being beaten up, and Israel as the aggressor, even when it is under attack. The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ over the barbaric rise of anti-Semitism reminds us that these people were never anti-racists at all. December 29th, 2023 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
We also visited the sense-dulling intersection of sports, wokeness, and science journalism, via the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, in which we were told, “The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences, but of biases in how they are treated in sport.” That such male-female differences and their implications for athletes have been widely studied and quantified seemed somehow to have escaped detection. That Allyson Felix, an 11-time Olympic track and field medallist, would place six hundred and eighty-ninth on a ranking of high-school boys was one of many details carefully avoided. And which again suggests that wokeness is actively stupefying, a kind of rapid-onset morony. – David Thompson, presenting us with a roundup of 2023’s lunatic antics. Read the whole thing and prepare to be stupefied by the cavalcade of idiocy. December 28th, 2023 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a time of war, everybody makes proportionality arguments. But proportionality is a fool’s game, more suited to propaganda than to reasoned judgement. Wars are not sporting events. December 7th, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jobs are a cost, not a benefit. Having to direct human labour to some task reduces the amount of such human effort that can be devoted to sating some other desire – it’s a cost. So that boast is that dealing with climate change would add 380 million costs to the global economy. Yes, obviously, this is an opportunity cost but if you’re not doing opportunity costs then whatever you’re doing it’s not economics. December 6th, 2023 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
“At its core,” Emily writes, “effective accelerationism embraces the idea that social problems can be solved purely with advances in technology, rather than by messy human deliberation.” Your sense that technological progress has increased human abundance, and the city of San Francisco is poorly run? This is a dangerous idea. December 3rd, 2023 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Irish government would have us believe that the most destructive riot in Dublin in living memory was not a symptom of failed governance, but the result of an ideological fringe group going on a looting spree. That is a suspiciously convenient narrative for the powers that be, for it absolves them of all responsibility for losing control of the city. By fingering a Far Right fringe, public officials can wash their hands of any role they themselves may have played in bringing the city to the brink of anarchy. But blaming these riots on the “far right” only serves as an excuse for not engaging in serious reflection about the deeper causes of this incendiary atmosphere, and the ensuing events. These events did not come out of nowhere and cannot be simplistically reduced to the work of a fringe “far right” mob. “Far right” talk is an excuse for not thinking hard about what led up to this and how public authorities lost control of Dublin’s city centre. December 2nd, 2023 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Soviet Union collapsed when the lies of the ruling class were so obvious they became laughable. The liberal world order – with the ‘religion of peace’, ‘woman with a penis’ ‘effective vaccines’ and ‘17 months to save the planet’ is at the joke stage. – ‘Polish Housewife‘ November 25th, 2023 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
But we can and should go further than that. We all know there’s a vast amount of investment happening in this going green stuff. Maybe that’s a good idea, maybe not, that’s for another day. But the point of what is being done is to address an externality – those environmental damages, costs of emissions, which do not show up in prices and therefore are, again, not in GDP. So, we solve those externalities – and maybe we should! – and we create green jobs while doing so. Cool. So, now we have the same output – say a GW of ‘leccie, even a GWhr – with the same value as before but we’ve used more human labour to produce it – those green jobs that the energy transition creates. By definition productivity has declined. Again, by definition productivity has declined. November 21st, 2023 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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