In a recent interview, PayPal founder Peter Thiel spoke of a ‘totalitarian’ streak that exists in many of the tech titans. Evidence suggests he might be right. If so, are we closer to China’s ‘Social Credit System‘ than we realize?
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It’s dangerous to enjoy the sight of the Labour Party – home of cynical grievance-mongers for decades – hoist by its own petard over anti-Semitism. It’s perilous to succumb to anger over the way that Leftist political correctness has thrown thousands of white girls in Telford or Rotherham to the wolves for fear of the juju word “Racist”. Lives are being lost (and many more lives degraded) in the United States as the uncontroversial assertions that “Black Lives Matter” and “All lives matter” are used as tribal battle cries. The Alt-Right’s so-called “fascism” would evoke snorts of derision from history’s real Fascists, as it amounts to White people lamely joining the destructive game of identity politics. – ‘Tom Paine‘ March 29th, 2018 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Peterson wryly remarked, as swarms of Antifa clones were pounding at the door and breaking windows during his brilliant presentation at Queen’s, that “the barbarians are at the gate.” In a way, this was not quite accurate. They are here milling among us, inhabiting the universities, marching in the streets, dismantling the civil order, engaged in the perversion of values, and, like Marcuse, promoting tyranny in the name of freedom. Their freedom. The barbarians are not at the gate. The barbarians are inside the gate. March 28th, 2018 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you’re a Labour MP, if you take Corbyn’s whip, if you sit behind him in the House of Commons, then you can roll your eyes when he speaks or tell us how distraught you are on Twitter all you like; it counts for nothing. Your arithmetical function is to combine with other Labour MPs in order to give Jeremy Corbyn a majority in Parliament. No amount of election leaflet drivel or chuntering on about “fighting Tory cuts to save my community/the NHS/insert name of local school here” can wash away the permanent stain of your complicity with wickedness. How such people sleep at night or meet their reflection’s eye is their own affair and not my problem, thank God. But as the repellent psychodrama of their monstrous party staggers on to its terrifying conclusion, I’d ask them, in the meantime, to shut up about how good they are, how nasty the Conservatives are, how kindness entails a vote for Labour. Tories don’t succour anti-Semitism, comrade. In my book, that makes them better than you. March 26th, 2018 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is a recent Spiked tweet. And that’s all it says, so no need to follow that link, unless to you want to chase up other Spikednesses. As well you might. March 25th, 2018 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Zuckerberg must also be contemplating a second oddity. There was no privacy outcry when Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign took advantage of the same Graph API to exfiltrate information of tens of millions of Facebook users without each voter’s knowledge and consent. – Declan McCullagh, writing: Obama harvested data from Facebook and bragged about it. Why are we only freaking out about this now? Of course we actually all know the reason why. March 24th, 2018 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Britain, the EU is often thought about as a single entity — and one that in the end will do whatever Germany says. But Angela Merkel is struggling to exert control over her own government, let alone the continent. Juncker and Barnier see an EU that does not take its orders from member states, but draws (or claims to draw) its own democratic legitimacy from the European Parliament. The EU member states have an interest in a good deal with Britain. But the European Commission — the apparatus in Brussels — has an interest in Britain being seen to be worse off after leaving the EU. The Commission would also receive 80 per cent of the tariff revenue from UK exports to the EU, making ‘no deal’ more appealing to Brussels than to member states. – Editorial in the UK’s Spectator magazine (£). March 23rd, 2018 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
California Would Be Less Stupidly Run If We Let Chimps Vote Instead Of People. Because chimps would vote at random, we’d at least have some chance of having sensible choices made — unlike those so often by our idiot electorate. Of course, the same is true pretty much everywhere, not just California… Chimpocracy clearly has much to commend it. March 19th, 2018 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
[Corbyn’s] Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry and his Shadow Defence Secretary Nia Griffith both saw that briefing and agreed there was “prima facie evidence” and said the party “fully accepts that Russia is responsible”. Corbyn said he didn’t trust British scientists and British intelligence services, and suggested samples of the nerve agent be sent back to Russia because he DID trust them and Russia had asked to see the evidence. The article is ‘all over the place’ regarding the USSR (to be charitable) but it does make this rather good point. March 18th, 2018 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Britain in the 21st century you can be punished for mocking gods. You can be expelled from the kingdom, frozen out, if you dare to diss Allah. Perversely adopting medieval Islamic blasphemy laws, modern Britain has made it clear that it will tolerate no individual who says scurrilous or reviling things about the Islamic god or prophet. Witness the authorities’ refusal to grant entrance to the nation to the alt-right Christian YouTuber Lauren Southern. Her crime? She once distributed a leaflet in Luton with the words ‘Allah is gay, Allah is trans, Allah is lesbian…’, and according to the letter she received from the Home Office informing her of her ban from Britain, such behaviour poses a ‘threat to the fundamental interests of [British] society’. This is a very serious matter and the lack of outrage about it in the mainstream press, not least among those who call themselves liberal, is deeply disturbing. March 15th, 2018 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
In general, escapism of any sort interferes with cultish indoctrination. Once people start imagining things, they might start imagining alternatives to your totalitarian utopia. Or they might start asking ‘counterfactual’ questions and discover the sheer incoherence of the worldview they had previously accepted by default. There are many features of modern culture (even apparently secular ones) every bit as poisonous as the most all-consuming cults. Fun is also a reliable indicator that something is deeply wrong: The peasants must have some bit of spare time and energy to themselves which hasn’t been dedicated slavishly to the one true cause. – Commenter Madrocketsci March 14th, 2018 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Key to the party’s operations in Australia is collapsing the categories of Chinese Communist Party, China, and the Chinese people into a single organic whole—until the point where the party can be dropped from polite conversation altogether. The conflation means that critics of the party’s activities can be readily caricatured and attacked as anti-China, anti-Chinese, and Sinophobic—labels that polarize and kill productive conversation. And it is only a short logical step to claim all ethnic Chinese people as “sons and daughters of the motherland,” regardless of citizenship. March 12th, 2018 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
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