It is now clear that whatever force drives public policy within the opaque and factional halls of the ruling party — which is certainly not the impressionable President Cyril Ramaphosa, who drifts like kelp in the coastal currents of the Western Cape seas — has come to three dreadful conclusions. Firstly, the ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive economic policies rather than pursuing growth. Secondly, knowing that its economic plan will cause chaos, the government will batten the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek to chill free speech. And thirdly, it has accepted that what is left of developed world investment interest will dry up and a flailing South African state will have to find succor elsewhere. Enter the Russians and the Chinese.
|
|||||
|
June 14th, 2023 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Varied attempts have tried to blame things on the Trots, the bourgeois, wreckers, whites, colonialism, The English, Rosicrucians and the Illuminati. But climate change, whatever we might think of how bad it is or isn’t, isn’t something being done to us – certainly not us rich world folk. It’s something we’re doing.
Well, yes. Without the demand to be able to transport ourselves, heat our lives, cook our food – even have food grown that we can eat – there would be no climate change. There also wouldn’t be 8 billion of us either and most human beings do rather like being able to live (that’s a testable proposition, the number who don’t equals the suicide statistics). The fossil fuel billionaires are only such because we like to transport ourselves, heat, have and cook food and so on. There is no “other” forcing this upon us. It’s also true that there’s no solution to climate change – if one is even needed – without us out here changing our behaviour. Expropriating, eliminating, even topping on Tower Hill, those fossil fuel billionaires won’t change that in the slightest. June 13th, 2023 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
And so something as potentially useful as AI has become a means for politicians and experts to express their fatalistic worldview. It is a self-fulfilling tragedy. AI could enable society to go beyond its perceived limits. Yet our expert doomsayers seem intent on keeping us within those limits. The good news is that none of this is inevitable. We can retain a belief in human potential. We can resist the narrative that portrays us as objects, living at the mercy of the things we have created. And if we do so, it is conceivable that we may, one day, develop machines that can represent the ‘peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being’, as Vasily Grossman put it. Now that would be a future worth fighting for. June 11th, 2023 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our own opinion is that this is just another version of the desire for sumptuary laws, as with the hopes for bans on fast fashion. If even the poor can have a change of clothes, interesting food, then what’s the point of being privileged? Therefore those things that enable the poor to be as their betters must be banned. It’s a very common and very unattractive part of human nature. The other way to look at this is as a proof of Hayek’s contention in The Road to Serfdom. If government becomes the provider of health care – the NHS – then the population will be managed at the pleasure of the health care system. June 10th, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The UK has a complicated, punitive, badly constructed and all-around dysfunctional tax system.The code contains over 10 million words. That is about 12.5 times the number of words in the Bible (around 800,000 words), 12 times the number in the Complete Works of Shakespeare and 8 times as many as the longest novel ever written (Marcel Proust’s À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu).” – Merryn Somerset Webb, financial columnist. June 9th, 2023 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” – a frequent paraphrase of Eric Hoffer (that is actually better than the original IMO) June 8th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Neoliberalism needs to be reconceived in the light of what we have learned about the fragility of finance and the ambitions of Xi Jinping. It needs to be enriched by being brought back into contact with rival liberal traditions that emphasize other liberal virtues beyond consumer satisfaction. But the current out-of-control demonization of neoliberalism runs the risk of turning a positive adjustment to the excesses of recent years into an excuse for returning to the disastrous policies of the 1970s.” – Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg columnist($) June 7th, 2023 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
What is this “global majority” thing? The term has been promoted as an alternative to “ethnic minority”, which is seen as marginalising people from immigrant backgrounds. Westminster Council announced last year that it would adopt “Global Majority” rather than “BAME” (black, Asian and minority ethnic). Yet if “ethnic minority” marginalises people who have immigrant backgrounds — arguable in itself — “global majority” ends up marginalising people who don’t. Indeed, it does it in a far more explicit manner. “Ethnic minority” is a relative term. If a white British person moves to Indonesia, he or she has joined an ethnic minority. “Global majority”, on the other hand, has been defined as referring to black, Asian and “brown” people. I suppose it’s possible that progressives would accept that in Africa, white, Asian and “brown” people represent the “global majority”, but I can’t see it happening. June 6th, 2023 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“In that lies the unspoken truth about the English and protesting. Reader, we are crap at it. The French shut down Paris, lose lives, and burn down municipal buildings in protest at a raise in the pension age, all we can manage are posh girls mucking around with soup, blue-haired Oxford undergrads sticking themselves to a floor, or railwayman who now openly admit a year of strikes has been pointless.” June 2nd, 2023 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving. June 1st, 2023 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them. – usually attributed to George Orwell. May 30th, 2023 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
So far I’ve only really discussed the procedural happenings—however what limited expedited discovery in this case has exposed (separate and apart from the Twitter files) is both unprecedented and abhorrent. The most widespread and troubling discovery? CISA has designated YOUR THOUGHTS part of the governments infrastructure. They call it “cognitive infrastructure”. They argue they can regulate what you think as they consider it under their purview. In this article I describe “The 6 Most Shocking Recent Revelations of Government Censorship,” if you want the details. One character of particular importance was White House director of digital communications and strategy Rob Flaherty. Flaherty was ABUSIVE to social media companies—like they were his battered wife. Many of them resisted the calls for censorship until threats forced them into action. I was actually stunned to see how averse they were to censoring—until forced to by the government. – Tracy Beanz. Read the whole thing, it is astonishing. May 28th, 2023 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||