Wearing face masks in public is presently illegal in Hong Kong and compulsory in Wuhan
|
|||||
|
You don’t go to a cultural war with the army you want, you go with the army you have. – ‘Mary Contrary‘ January 7th, 2020 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Labour is to commission the mini millipede to hold an inquiry into why Labour lost the election. Which is funny really. I mean, everyone else knows exactly why they lost the election. In a recent conversation with one of their number, I was treated to ad hominem attacks for merely pointing out the obvious. They have their fingers in their ears, still believing, despite the evidence to the contrary that they won the argument, that Boris Johnson is an ignorant buffoon and that their economic polices weren’t a pile of shite. December 27th, 2019 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
For almost a century, Governments have pissed away countlesss billions in the North. It didn’t work. No amount of cycle lanes and art galleries and award-winning ‘garden’ bridges will do it. The North needs Hong-Kong style shock-treatment tax cuts. It’s a tweet, so that’s all there is. Similar sentiments have been expressed by Dominic Frisby, as reported towards the end of this earlier posting here. (LATER: Also, I now see, Johnathan Pearce says very similar things in the previous posting to this one. Well, if it’s worth saying, it’s worth repeating.) December 16th, 2019 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to the activist I was with, that had been the reaction wherever he went. He had knocked on 100 doors in a council estate earlier that day and all but three people he’d spoken to told him they intended to vote Conservative—and this in a city where 26 per cent of the population are among the most deprived in England. I asked why, if these electors disliked Corbyn, they didn’t simply abstain? Why were they planning to brave the elements on a cold day in December to vote for a party led by an old Etonian toff? “Because they hate Corbyn that much,” he said. “The biggest message they can send to him is to elect a Tory government.” It’s the same story across England—working class electors deserting Labour en masse. December 15th, 2019 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The world’s billionaires are a pretty diverse bunch, but nine out of the top ten are self-made entrepreneurs. December 7th, 2019 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
What is the intellectual origin of the foreign policy views of Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle? It is Lenin’s theory of imperialism. In the early 20th century, building on the work of liberals such as John Hobson, Lenin argued that capitalism was being sustained only by the profits from colonial exploitation. These excess profits allowed domestic workers to be paid enough to prevent them from rising up against their capitalist employers. Imperialism was made possible by the power of capitalists to make the state provide military and political protection for their foreign investments. From this two things follow. All foreign policy by capitalist countries is about creating empires, conquering property and exploiting resources. Kosovo as much as Iraq, Sierra Leone as much as Afghanistan, troops in West Germany as much as in Vietnam. Hence Mr Corbyn’s jaundiced view of Nato and any institutions connected with it, such as the European Union. So Mr Corbyn argues, as he did in 2011, that “since World War Two, the big imperial force has been the United States on behalf of global capitalism and the biggest, mostly US-based corporations. The propaganda for this has presented itself as a voice for ‘freedom’ and carefully and consciously conflated it with market economics.” The second thing that follows is that the troops on the front line of the movement to overthrow capitalism are national resistance movements. These are the heroes of socialist advance, even if sometimes they aren’t purely socialist. So Mr Corbyn has given encouragement and support to the Iranian government, the Irish republicans, Hamas and Hezbollah, and Fidel Castro. He saw Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela as lights to the world, developing a new economic model worth emulating…. The Labour leader ignores or dismisses the idea that any of these groups or countries, such as Iran, might be imperialist powers because all that matters is that they resist western capitalist imperialism. So their imperialism, like that of the Soviet Union, is, he put it, “different”. Where resistance movements have turned to violence or fundamentalism Mr Corbyn says he disapproves but that the root cause is not their behaviour but ours…. There will be some who read this and will think I’m being unfair because I mentioned Lenin and Hezbollah and there is an election coming. But this article is unfair only if it’s an inaccurate description of Mr Corbyn’s views, and given that it is based on things he and his close advisers have written and said, it can’t be. If Mr Corbyn becomes prime minister he and his advisers will control foreign policy. Given that he departs so far from the postwar consensus and the traditional Labour position, it’s as well to understand what he thinks. – Daniel Finkelstein, in a piece behind the Times paywall, but quoted (all of the above and more) by Mick Hartley. December 5th, 2019 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Another reason is that Conservative Remain voters tend to believe Brexit will be a walk in the park compared to the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. If this election amounts to a decision on whether to stop Brexit or stop Corbyn, most of them think it’s more important to stop Corbyn. More than 7 in 10 of them think leaving the EU would be less bad for Britain than a Labour government with Corbyn as PM – as do a clear plurality of the electorate as a whole. November 27th, 2019 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh no. I’ve accidentally stayed up way too late reading about the 1560s attempt to set up copper mining and smelting works in Cumbria using German experts. – Anton Howes, historian of the origins of the Industrial Revolution. The above is the first of a series of tweets. Read them all here. Howes was asked what exactly he’d been reading. Answer: This book. I signed up to the Anton Howes Age of Invention newsletter a while back, and am always pleased when another installment shows up in my incoming emails. November 22nd, 2019 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Lincolnshire businessman (and former police officer), Mr Harry Miller, has sought a judicial review of one of the more sinister aspects of current policing, the recording of ‘hate incidents’ by the police even when there is no offence (on their own admission). The case is ongoing, and a report in The Telegraph (paywall of sorts) indicates that the judge made a remark that might indicate that he was surprised at the position of the ‘College of Policing’, one of those quangos that isn’t needed and might even have been invented to hammer nails in to the coffin of the liberties of Englishmen.
I note that the BBC takes a different line on the case, highlighting the following:
It strikes me that Counsel for the ‘College’ is not making a legal point there, but is trying to stretch a factual one, and conflating incredulity with hostility. At last, someone is taking on the PC State. The case continues. It could set a most welcome precedent on this issue, but it would need the Court of Appeal to rule on the issue to make a generally-binding precedent for England and Wales. November 21st, 2019 | 78 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Shouting Thomas”, commenting on this Althouse posting, says:
For “straight white man” he should, to make his point about classism, have put: “posh straight white man”. Otherwise, good provocative stuff, well worthy of being rescued from a mere comment thread. I myself am prejudiced against female British Conservative Party parliamentary candidates and members of parliament, if their femaleness is the only thing I know about them. I believe that, ever since Cameron’s “detoxification” efforts, they have been getting an easier ride during the candidate selection process than men. Similar suspicions are surely widespread in fields beyond politics, wherever positive discrimination is rampant. November 20th, 2019 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
But top universities are also crucial for induction into the luxury belief class. Take vocabulary. Your typical middle-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. But if you visit Harvard, you’ll find plenty of rich 19-year-olds who will eagerly explain them to you. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is “I was educated at a top college.” Consider the Veblen quote, “Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary because ordinary people have real problems to worry about. November 17th, 2019 | 32 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. |
|||||