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The Prime Minister’s rhetoric was bombastic but vacuous and economically illiterate. This was an agenda for levelling down to a centrally-planned, high-tax, low-productivity economy. – Adam Smith Institute review of the Prime Minister’s speech at the Tory conference. October 7th, 2021 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
 By the time some of the environmentalists realised who they had sold their soul to, it was too late. But what, in any case, had the alternative been? The small-is-beautiful crowd, with their patchouli-scented jumpers and their 1970s talk about limits and sovereignty, had been cancelled as eco-fascists long ago, exiled to distant smallholdings and housing co-ops with their well-thumbed copies of Tools for Conviviality and other yellowing tomes by dead white men. Now that an actual eco-fascism was on the horizon — a global merger of state and corporate power in pursuit of progress that would have made Mussolini weep like a proud grandfather — there was nothing to stand in its way. October 5th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“China is serious about building a cleaner, fairer, and sustainable society.” As you know, I get press releases, and this one, from the Swiss private bank and investment manager, Vontobel, was too good not to let go without sharing. Further comment from me is superfluous. Reading that comment, considering how the CCP operates and what it does, has left me dumbstruck. September 27th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The term white feminism, as it is commonly used today, is a classic example of the Kafka Trap. If you show too much interest in the lives of people of colour, you risk being accused of white saviourism — which is another way of saying you have a suspiciously condescending attitude to people of colour. But if you don’t show enough interest, you are insufficiently intersectional. You only care about the white, middle-class cisgendered women in your social circle. White feminism is a classic example of the Kafka Trap because whatever you do is either too much or not enough. You are never right. September 16th, 2021 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The quest to eliminate sex in civil society is not just well-funded and wrong-headed, it taps into a dark truth about male power and sexuality. So entrenched are positions on either side of the debate that each word becomes a tribal signifier. As a hard-line feminist, I found the use of preferred pronouns throughout Trans jarring. But as a writer I appreciate some small battles must be conceded so as not to alienate the majority. Nonetheless, a nod to the feminist scholars who’ve been battling this behemoth for decades would have been welcome. Trans gives a compelling, comprehensive overview of how and why this science-denying ideology has conquered the world. Ultimately, it is a story of inequality; both economic and sexed. Trans is a book that ought to be read by every legislator, policy maker and activist. But the bleak truth is that those whose minds are already closed will never open its cover. September 15th, 2021 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
“When Boris Yeltsin visited a Houston supermarket in 1989, the sheer choice of goods and services on offer compared to stores in Soviet Russia shocked him. `Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,’ he said. Faced with this new, striking reality of American living standards, he began to recognise the massive costs of the communist economic system on the Russian people. Before seeing it with his own eyes, though, Yeltsin was none the wiser. To echo the movie The Matrix again, his supermarket visit was a ‘red pill’ moment – it allowed him to escape the constructed reality of Soviet communism and experience a real, alternative world.” September 10th, 2021 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
The American generation which counts those who gave their lives this week among their ranks has grown up with elite, institutional and expert failure not as a shocking aberration but as the default setting. Time and again, foreign policy elites have issued the wrong diagnoses and the wrong prescriptions. Economic conventional wisdom has been shattered, upended, disproven. Politics grows more bad-blooded and less serious. Claims of competence and expertise are regularly proved to be unfounded. More recently, America’s cultural elite has turned on its own country: happy to pronounce America irredeemably wicked whilst kowtowing to Chinese censors. And after all of this, America elected a president who treated his predecessor and the last four years as an unseemly aberration and whose staff boasted that the adults were back in charge. Thanks to the decisions of those adults, young American soldiers found themselves in a deadly trap at the gates of Kabul airport. August 29th, 2021 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The deforestation statistics are startling to anybody who listens only to green activists. In 2018 a team from the University of Maryland concluded: ‘We show that – contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally – tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km². That’s 7 percent more forest globally than in 1982. New forests have been planted and old ones have regenerated naturally, as the footprint of farming shrinks, thanks to better yields. – Matt Ridley in the print version of The Spectator, article titled Viral misinformation. August 27th, 2021 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
What is happening in USA is indeed socialist but not Marxist socialism by any reasonable definition. Moreover, the establishment embracing radical identitarianism, the hysterical obsession with race, and using huge corporations as a vector for their ideology makes this far, far more like some lunatic strain of gonzo fascism really. The Woke anti-fascists really truly are far closer to fascism than 99% of the people they call fascist (which is pretty much everyone who is not them). August 26th, 2021 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
And this is why so many people — people who are able to easily recognize totalitarianism in cults and foreign countries — cannot perceive the totalitarianism that is taking shape now, right in front of their faces (or, rather, right inside their minds). Nor can they perceive the delusional nature of the official “Covid-19” narrative, no more than those in Nazi Germany were able to perceive how completely delusional their official “master race” narrative was. Such people are neither ignorant nor stupid. They have been successfully initiated into a cult, which is essentially what totalitarianism is, albeit on a societal scale. – C. J. Hopkins, writing a mere 8 months in, this article has aged very well. August 25th, 2021 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade later after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data. – Stephanie Lee, writing A big study about honesty turns out to be based on fake data. I admit that I LOL’ed. Next time someone tells you about The Science™, just because it is from a peer-reviewed & duly published paper does not necessarily make it true. August 24th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Rectenwald has written a very interesting essay Living in the Age of Covid: “The Power of the Powerless” that raises many very alarming parallels, musing on the original essay by Václav Havel The Power of the Powerless.
Read the whole thing. August 21st, 2021 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
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