In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich from Stanford University wrote that “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” That year, food supply in 34 out of 152 countries surveyed amounted to less than 2,000 calories per person per day. That was true of only 2 out of 173 countries surveyed in 2013. Today famines have all but disappeared outside of war zones.
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But in the post-war period, rights have been transformed from negative freedoms to positive goods for the individual, such as education and employment, and then to positive goods for groups, including the protection of identities. With each step there has been a move away from holding the authority of the state to account, towards empowering the state over goods which it is increasingly difficult to guarantee. The result is that the state has become more coercive in its attempts to deliver those goods. April 15th, 2019 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 However, despite all that, I find it difficult to have any sympathy for the man. Perhaps because he is such an incorrigible arsehole? – Our temperate friend Longrider discussing Julian Assange. April 13th, 2019 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
“When hedge-fund managers and the Communist Party see eye-to-eye on any question, it’s time to be concerned.” – Peter Oborne, writing in OpenDemocracy. April 7th, 2019 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The dangerous and sectarian practice of prescriptive racialism is an outgrowth of an insistence that we think of people not as individuals but as representatives of groups — we speak of “the Arab experience” as if it were a uniform phenomenon. In a world in which groups are considered more important than people, it was inevitable that we would forfeit the ability to think in terms of unique human beings, each of whom may fall into several categories, but who are ultimately self-made characters. We should remember that the important features of an individual are what they choose to be and not the identities they happen to have inherited.” – Mohamed Ali, writing in the excellent platform, Quillette. April 2nd, 2019 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
The ability of the ‘sensible centre’ to define other people’s labels is rapidly decaying as they are mid-suicide collectively & are unaware their sense of rapture is a lack of oxygen to the brain. A Great Realignment is coming & we’ll see some very strange alliances until the new normal emerges. – Perry de Havilland April 1st, 2019 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The irony of Europhiles is that they replace one form of nationalism with another: “country first”, is out, but “Europe first” is in.” – Nathan Pinkoski. He analyses a recent speech by French president Emmanuel Macron that deserves far more scrutiny than it is getting. March 29th, 2019 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
The left-wing intellectuals treat Socialism similarly, defining it by its outcome. If it doesn’t succeed in bringing about the said fairness and harmony with production in the hands of the workers, then it can’t have been Socialism. And out of the window goes the real world, the one we live in. If we were to say that Socialism seeks to achieve these goals, we’d be able to judge if it has ever succeeded to any degree. Because it never has, we’d be entitled to conclude that it doesn’t work. Kristian says it’s like performing a raindance. If it is done as an attempt to bring rain, we’d be able to judge how effective it was in practice. But if a raindance is defined as “a dance that brings rain,” then any dance that didn’t do that was clearly not a raindance. March 26th, 2019 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Venue: a very noisy Adam Smith Institute gathering at the House of Lord a few days ago. Her: Putin and Trump are in favour of Brexit, does that make you question your support? March 23rd, 2019 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
There should be no such thing as a ‘hate crime’… If someone gets assaulted & hit with a brick, their identity group should not make the crime more or less of a crime. And stating an opinion should never be a crime (such as what gender someone else is). – Perry de Havilland, discussing this amongst other things. March 20th, 2019 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Unfortunately we are at the stage now where the streets (so to speak) need to go visit their MPs, rather than the other way around. Voting is not the only way to express a political opinion. – Perry de Havilland, who is just cheerfully channelling the zeitgeist
March 17th, 2019 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
If socialists really wanted to help people they’d be capitalists. – Andy Puzder. Spotted by Stephen Green of Instapundit, to whom thanks. March 14th, 2019 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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