“Say no to horror costumes any time before 31 October. Get your nuts and apples and pumpkins ready for-Halloween night, not before. It’s time to reclaim the here and now.”
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Economist have taken positive empiricism one step beyond and formulated economic theory from empirical regularities; Okun’s law, the Phillips curve or, more recently, the popularity of Rogoff and Reinhart’s debt-to-GDP tipping point. Economists, also, have little restraint in throwing up graphs showing empirically causal relationships between economic variables. This is, however, taking economics way beyond what it can do, yet, few professional economists take to the airwaves to denounce this bastardisation of the science. Empiricism can support an economic theory, but it cannot prove or disprove an economic theory. October 24th, 2016 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 What looks like a contradiction – being anti-Brexit, but pro-Sexit – makes perfect sense: underpinning both positions is a loathing of the largely English demos. That’s why the cause of Scottish independence feeds into, and reinforces, the anti-democratic tendency of our present moment. Scotland is being turned into a utopia for those seeking refuge from the people. The irony to all this, of course, is that Scottish independence is itself now being shown to be a misnomer. There is no real talk of going it alone, of ensuring that the Scottish people have control of their own affairs. Because those arguing for freedom from the UK want nothing more than to immerse Scotland in the even greater union of the EU. Which is no kind of independence at all. October 21st, 2016 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
I don’t generally seek political analysis from trained monkeys responding to the commands of talented directors and screenwriters. – Samizdata commenter ‘the other rob‘ October 20th, 2016 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
“We live at a time when we’re offered a choice between the good, liberal Pajama Boy without an ounce of masculinity, and the Potemkin Alpha Male who mistakes cartoonish bluster for manliness, one of whom happens to be running for president. “The Magnificent Seven” presents a much better alternative, wrapped up in an exciting, action-packed plot and—oh, yes, I almost forgot—the greatest Western theme music ever written. So skip the multiplex this weekend and revisit this classic, instead.” October 19th, 2016 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Oliver seems to do extremely well out of telling sophisticated, educated Europeans and Democrat-voting Americans how thick Americans are. But he’s preaching to the converted: they’re not laughing because he’s funny, they’re laughing because he is telling them what they want to hear and allows them to feel smugly superior. A decent joke shouldn’t depend on who you want to win an election. October 18th, 2016 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Labour really is circling the drain, the obsession with JEWS is like late senile dementia settling in, and there ain’t anyway back from that. So much so, it’s time to figure out what opposition politics in Britain will look like. UKIP might or might not disintegrate but all those voters will still be there: if it does blow up completely, something will fill the void. If it doesn’t, then that’s probably the core around which Her Majesty’s Opposition will coalesce. But it’s looking more and more likely that won’t be Labour, because it’s coming close to the point someone needs to stick a fork in ’em because they’re done, just another hate group loony tunes fringe party. – Samizdata commenter ‘Marcher’ October 17th, 2016 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors. – Peggy Noonan, behind the Wall Street Journal paywall, but quoted by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit. America’s political division now, in one sentence. October 15th, 2016 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Because it’s being made very clear to us that the Single Market is Brexit. We are being told that if we want membership of that trading area then we’ve got to accept free movement of people (not in itself a bad idea but not really what people voted for), all of the regulation of the economy which the EU imposes, must pay into the EU budget and so on and on. Essentially, it is being made very clear that membership of the Single Market comes with all of the costs and responsibilities of full EU membership. That is, single market membership is a denial of Brexit itself. We do all know that a majority of MPs are against the very idea of leaving. Which is exactly why they shouldn’t have a vote on the matter. For accepting single market membership is tantamount to not leaving, it would be a reversal of the referendum by the back door. October 10th, 2016 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bouattia argues that a ‘Eurocentric’ curriculum is problematic because BME students ‘don’t see themselves in what they’re studying, and can’t relate to it’. According to her, any body of knowledge produced solely by white people is inaccessible to BME students. Presumably, this includes the plays of Shakespeare; the ancient literature of Suetonius, Tacitus and Plutarch; the political economy of Adam Smith and Karl Marx; and the science of Pythagoras, Archimedes, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. BME students cannot relate to these classical authors, she says. But there would be no point in BME students going to university if they refused to learn anything that didn’t relate to their immediate lived experience. If it were applied, Bouattia’s approach to education would limit the potential aspirations of BME students, leaving them without access to the necessary historical, philosophical and intellectual grounding they need to develop as thinkers. October 7th, 2016 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Of course, those left-wingers, Labourite or otherwise, fingered as anti-Semitic never think of themselves as such. They’re anti-Zionist, they say. It’s the Israeli state they’re opposed to, not Jews as a whole. Yet the distinction rarely holds up, not least because their opposition to Israel, indeed the obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is so overdetermined. It’s not born of some actual, let alone vested, interest in this one particular conflict out of all the other conflicts in the world. No, it’s fuelled by their opposition to what Israel represents – its nation-building futurity, its embrace of liberal capitalism, its sheer modern-ness. And ultimately, that image of Israel, as the exemplar of capitalist modernity, both feeds into and draws on what anti-Semitism has always held Jewry to represent: the moneyed power behind the throne, and the source of the world’s problems. October 5th, 2016 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was at the UN general assembly in New York the other day and talking to the foreign minister of another country. I won’t say which one, since I must preserve my reputation for diplomacy. But let’s just say they have an economy about the size of Australia (though getting smaller, alas), plenty of snow, nuclear missiles, balalaikas, oligarchs, leader who strips to the waist… you get the picture. – Boris Johnson, in fine form as usual 😀 October 4th, 2016 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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