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I wish I were only talking about this: “Essex Police Issue Update After WWII Bomb Safely Detonated in East Tilbury” (This Twitter thread by Tony Brown @agbdrilling shows detailed pictures of how the bomb was found and safely exploded under sand.) But the thing uppermost in my mind was actually this: “Amsterdam rioters ‘planned Jew hunt on Telegram’ before they attacked Israeli football fans” November 10th, 2024 | 23 comments
 A good article by “The Liberal Patriot”, Ruy Teixeira: “The Progressive Moment is Over”. The four main points he addresses to his fellow Democrats are:
Twenty-two years ago, alongside John B. Judis, Mr Teixeira was one of the co-authors of a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, which itself was inspired by a book written in 1969 by Kevin Phillips called “The Emerging Republican Majority”. Judging by the popular vote in US elections over the last two decades, Mr Teixeira wasn’t wrong, but all such theses have an expiry date. I would not care to place a bet on who will win the coming US election in eight days’ time, nor on the next one, but I would place a bet on the winners of the 2028 election not being progressives. October 27th, 2024 | 23 comments
“‘He lashed out. He was scared’: the fight to save vulnerable UK children from being kicked out of school”– this Observer report by Anna Fazackerley on how two hundred lawyers “have come together to challenge a wave of discriminatory exclusions” focuses on the “unmet needs” of children who are excluded and the worry felt by their parents. Early on, we are told the story of an eleven year old boy called Sam:
Maybe he wasn’t the only scared one. These days one often sees signs displayed in hospitals, in government offices and on public transport that say something like “Assaults on our staff will not be tolerated”. I was tempted to ask rhetorically, “Should not the same apply to teachers?” and end the post there. But there is a complication that will be familiar to libertarians: even the gentlest, most loving childcare inevitably involves adults using force on children. Before Sam assaulted the teacher, the teacher physically restrained Sam. Am I OK with that? Broadly, yes. I had hoped to quote one or two of Brian Micklethwait’s writings on this paradox but have not been able to find the pieces I was thinking of. Never mind. Brian was the last man to worry about someone else making his argument their own. For babies and small children, it is inevitable that they spend almost their entire lives being physically moved around by adults. They are fed, dressed, cleaned and generally sustained by beings bigger and stronger than they are, without anyone so much as getting their signature on a consent form. Then, if all goes well, as they grow older children gain more and more independence until they reach adulthood. In a sane world, schools for children of about Sam’s age would be half-way houses to independence where the necessity of rules being enforced by, well, force, was acknowledged but not something one had to think about minute by minute. All but the very worst of workplaces and other places where adults spend their time are like this. A great deal of the unpleasantness of school life derives from the fact that, in contrast, they are places where force is omnipresent. The least bad part of this is that for 90% the time the children cannot choose what they do – after all, much of adult life also involves spending time on tasks one would not do for pleasure. The most bad part of it, the horrifying part of it, is that they cannot choose to leave. They cannot get away from bullies. Some of those bullies are fellow-pupils, some are teachers. Both categories of bullies are often bullied in their turn. They probably became bullies in the first place out of fear. Frightened people lash out, as Sam did. One ought to be able to spare some compassion for Sam and those like him; to acknowledge that in a better environment he might not have turned violent. It remains a hard fact that in this timeline the continued presence of violent pupils like Sam in a school makes life a misery for other pupils and teachers. It remains a fact that state schools are, on average, places of greater misery than private schools because when state schools try to protect their staff and students by expelling violent pupils they are hamstrung by the likes of the two hundred benevolent lawyers in the School Inclusion Project. October 22nd, 2024 | 19 comments
It looks like Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system and Arrow anti-ballistic missiles have mostly succeeded in intercepting the missiles sent by Iran. The Iranian regime did not send drones this time because having them shot down by the Jordanians last time was embarrassing. I saw this quote by John Podhoretz on Twitter:
To which Dan McLaughlin added,
October 1st, 2024 | 7 comments
I did not expect to see anything like this on a fairly mainstream site like “Conservative Woman”: “Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes” (Via Sara Hoyt on Instapundit.) Andrew Bridgen, for those not familiar with him, is the former MP for North West Leicestershire. He has had a chequered career. He was expelled from the Conservative Party after criticising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He then joined the Reclaim Party but resigned from it a few months later. He then lost his seat in the 2024 election – which in itself was no surprise, but the spectacular scale of his loss, dropping from 63% of the vote to 3.2%, was unusual. I said I did not expect to see this piece on the CW website. I would not be entirely surprised if I am soon unable to see it anywhere but Twitter/X. After the US election of 2020, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (before it was owned by Elon Musk) had a policy of deleting any discussion whatsoever of the possibility of electoral fraud. Even arguments that fraud had not been significant were censored. Most of the UK media followed suit, as it usually does. If anyone reading this has power or influence over the censorship policies of British media organisations, I humbly beg you not to repeat that mistake. My argument does not depend on taking any view on how many votes Andrew Bridgen got in the UK election of 2024. When “Stop the Steal” and similar Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were deleted overnight after the American election of 2020, what effect do you think it had on the beliefs of members of those groups? Do you think they concluded that since they could no longer discuss their suspicions, those suspicions must be groundless? Of course it had the opposite effect. A majority of US voters think it is “likely” that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election. That includes 45% of Democrats. The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and of the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory (the first of which is no longer contested and the second of which is accepted as a probable hypothesis by the US and UK governments) only reinforced this. Censorship destroys trust, and the loss of trust is not limited to the subject being censored. Once people know they are being censored in one thing, they inevitably ask, “What else aren’t they telling us?” And they can work out that if all accusations of a particular crime are censored, it makes it more likely that that crime will be committed in future. Related posts here, here and here. In fact, that entire category of “Deleted by the Woke Media” is related. Edit 25th September: The man who replaced Andrew Bridgen as Conservative candidate in North West Leicestershire, Craig Smith, has responded strongly to the Conservative Woman piece:
Mr Smith goes on to say that of course he was not happy with the result – he lost to Labour – but he is convinced it was fair. He then makes some quite detailed observations about electoral procedures, both in general and specifically for that constituency. I thought he came across well. His use of Simon Danczuk in Rochdale as a comparator for assessing whether it is credible for an MP expelled from their party to have such a large drop in votes was reasonable. That is how it should be done. That is how it should have been done in the US. Don’t forbid discussion, contribute to it. I repeat my plea for there to be no censorship of the claim that the election was rigged against Mr Bridgen. September 24th, 2024 | 12 comments
The Guardian reports,
Oh, the poor Hezbollah medics!
I feel that this development deserves to be commemorated in period style. Edit: It is now being claimed that a ten year old girl, Fatima Jaafar Abdullah, was killed by one of the exploding pagers. If true (and despite Hezbollah, like Hamas, being inveterate liars who regularly fake the deaths of children, it might well be true that she was handling her Hezbollah father’s pager or something similar), that is tragic. But overall one of the things about this operation that fills me with admiration is that it must be one of the most precisely targeted military strikes in history. Targeted to the very hip pockets of individual terrorists. Oh, and it would have been nice if a few more of the people denouncing Israel for this had also denounced Hezbollah for firing rockets at Israel completely indiscriminately for years on end. Only a few weeks ago, twelve Israeli Druze children were “shredded to pieces” by a Hezbollah rocket while playing soccer. September 17th, 2024 | 28 comments
In all the genuflections about the impact of the mass-murders inflicted in New York and Washington and the deaths of the passengers fighting against the hijackers on Flight 93, I thought these comments by Glenn Reynolds stood out. His blog, Instapundit, was one of those that saw a massive rise in traffic as people sought information outside the usual MSM gates at the time. And Samizdata, founded around that time, was part of that process too. Prof Reynolds is unimpressed by US politics, overall, since that terrible day, and by the performance of parts of the security services and the like. Far too few people at the CIA and other places were fired. If there was any cleaning house, I missed it. A huge amount of taxpayers’ money was spent on new organisations (TSA) but I never got a sense of a general purge of incompetence and sloppiness that made it easier for the 19 hijackers and enablers to do what they did. Of course, there have been some great exceptions, and let’s not forget that for every terrorist outrage that gets covered in the media, we often don’t hear about those plots that get disrupted or thwarted, and by people who cannot be named. Bear that in mind amidst the sombre atmosphere that such an anniversary causes. To this day, I consider radical Islamism, in all its nihilistic fury and ugliness, the number one problem for humanity today. It is an attack on all the best features of human civilisation, if I may presume to use that word. Islamists hate ideas such as individual rights, free personal agency, human curiosity, a sense of adventure, production of material values, equality before the law – all of it. Back to Prof. Reynolds:
Bless America and its great Republic. September 11th, 2024 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Government anti-terror ban forces closure of UK model steam train firm
While it is true that model steam engines of this type had all but disappeared as toys, there is a considerable market for them among dangerous men with names like Kenneth and Stanley who might convert their garden railways to hexamine-powered rail-mobile nuclear missile launch systems. August 20th, 2024 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC reports,
His “utterly abhorrent comment” was this tweet:
If the Scottish National Party wants to eject Mason for having a different definition of the word “genocide” to the one the party favours, that is its prerogative. I am not clear on how it helps anyone in Gaza, or indeed Scotland, but the decision is not mine to make. What interests me is the way that this type of political thinking shrinks the parties and political tribes that practise it. The three steps are: (1) Take an existing word. (2) Change its definition. (3) Throw anyone who does not accept the change out of your in-group. Redefinition – the first two steps – is a standard political technique, common on all points of the political compass. Many American campaigners for gay marriage dropped the “gay” and spoke of themselves as campaigning for “marriage”. It worked. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit often prefaces links to stories about gun rights with the general term “Civil Rights Update”. The good version of the idea is that the reader will do a double-take at seeing something they had never previously thought of as being an example of [marriage / civil rights / whatever] so described, but will then think, “Is there really any reason it shouldn’t be?” The manoeuvre can veer off into being annoying or even deceptive, and I think that some politically involved users of the technique such as the American LGBT advocacy group called the “Human Rights Campaign” do not appreciate how confusing the use of a general term for a much more specific purpose can be to those who are less politically aware, but as a rhetorical technique, it’s fine. I can also think of things to praise about Step (3). A party – or a doctrine – that does not define itself is pointless. “Vote for us! We’ll do everything!” If the definition concerned is a clear distillation of what that party believes and the other parties do not, it is right and necessary to eject dissenters. No party is obliged to host its opponents. This remains true if the party changes and the opponents being ejected are those who were orthodox yesterday, although I do feel sorry for the Old Believers in this situation. Step (3) leads into a quagmire when the definition in question is as distant from the party’s main purpose as, well, Gaza is from Scotland. Or, worse yet, when a new Step (3) pops up every week. As with the Gaza “genocide”, a pattern of making acceptance of a newly-altered definition a condition of continued membership was followed – indeed pioneered – by the SNP with regard to the meaning of the word “woman”. That went very badly for the party, and also for the Scottish trans women it was meant to help. It did not have to be this way. Cast your mind back seven or eight years. Theresa May was Prime Minister. The Equalities Minister was Justine Greening. When Greening announced a bill to enable transgender people to choose their sex more easily, the standard view was mild satisfaction that this reform was being proposed by a Conservative government. It started to go wrong for the SNP when they reduced their position to four words: “Trans women are women”. Just as John Mason balked this week at accepting that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide, while still expressing sympathy for the people of Gaza, so quite a few SNP politicians balked at that definition of “woman” while still stressing that they remained “committed to human rights, equality and dignity for all people”. Several of the MPs and MSPs who signed that letter in 2019 have since left or been thrown out of the party. Things came to a head in 2023 when a double rapist now called Isla Bryson was remanded to a women’s jail. Faced with a wave of popular anger, the then First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, backed down and effectively introduced a third legal gender to Scottish law, that of “rapist”. Once punctured, the four word rule “Trans women are women” soon deflated entirely in Scotland, and I think the same is happening across the English-speaking world. The new dominant four word rule is “Transwomen are men”. It would have been better to let people agree to differ. Having seen how well insisting on a novel definition of “woman” worked out for Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney appears to have decided to see if insisting on a novel definition of “genocide” is going to work any better for him. Why do parties nowadays so often try to force an immediate yes-or-no answer on an issue, proudly insisting that there should be “no debate”, when it is obvious that in that case many of their own supporters are going to answer “no”? Why do they compound the error by doing it on issues that most of their supporters did not previously care about? August 18th, 2024 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
“You know who else should be on trial for the UK’s far-right riots? Elon Musk”, writes Jonathan Freedland, who used to be a liberal, in the Guardian, a newspaper whose very name was once universally understood to mean “Guardian of our Liberties”. Mr Freedland writes,
Freedland then accurately describes the way that pogroms throughout history have started:
So Mr Freedland describes a phenomenon that has recurred throughout history, citing an example that occurred 862 years before Twitter existed. He observes that this phenomenon has taken place yet again, but with the blessed difference that this time (when Twitter was present) no one was killed – and concludes that Twitter made it worse. That does not make sense. Not only did the Norwich pogrom that Mr Freedland cites happen before the coming of Twitter, it happened almost exactly three centuries before the coming of Gutenberg’s printing press, with its terrifying ability to spread unvetted commentary right across Europe in mere weeks. “And that spreading now takes seconds”, frets Mr Freedland, but on these islands at least, the correlation between the speed of propagation of information and the frequency and severity of race riots and pogroms has been negative. As has been the correlation between these things and the freedom of the press. Why? August 10th, 2024 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was going to write a post about the riot in Southport that followed the random knife murders of three young girls in that town carried out by Axel Rudakubana. Prior to Rudakubana’s name being released, a false rumour spread on social media that the perpetrator was a Muslim, leading the rioters to attack a mosque. Then I remembered I had already made the same points in this post about the riot in Dublin that took place in November 2023 following the attempted knife murder of three young children by Riad Bouchaker. I am not re-using the old post merely to save time: I am doing it to demonstrate that the two incidents have a great deal in common.
In the following quote, replace “Irish” with “British” and “would-be child murderer” with “child murderer”:
August 1st, 2024 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
… hope and prayers for the freedom fighters in Venezuela. Hoping for a Nicolae Ceaușescu style exit for Nicolas Maduro. July 30th, 2024 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
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