Hayek had a profound personal interest in the outcome of the great ideological struggles of his time and understood them very well. He too was driven out of his home by the Nazi threat and landed in London where the academic scene was dominated by Fabian-style socialists who imagined themselves to be great fighters of fascism. Hayek shocked them all by calling them out: the system you want to manage society will actually bring about the very thing you claim to oppose. In other words, the book is not as much about the reds as it is about the browns and the threat that this way of thinking poses even to England and America.
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I should have though feminists have more to worry about this film than everyone else. The point of Golding’s book is that, freed from societal restraints, the boys descend into savagery. If gender is a social construct then, freed from societal restraints, girls should also descend into savagery because the only difference between boys and girls is how society shapes their behaviour. But this contradicts feminst doublethink that tells if that although gender is a social construct, girls are actually more caring and empathetic, even without social conditioning. If the film follows the plot of the book then it isn’t going to show a feminist utopia; it’s going to be more like Heathers or Mean Girls. – ‘Shatterface’ This is an interesting comment by ‘Shatterface‘ on a Spiked article about an all-female remake of Lord of the Flies. September 5th, 2017 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Mrs May is like a self-inflicted bullet lodged near the heart of the Conservative Party after a botched political suicide – Cameron’s resignation. Leaving it there for now or operating are the options. The risks of the general anaesthetic, cutting open the chest and infection seem rather unattractive to the patient, who has a mountain to climb, but leaving the bullet in risks fatal damage upon any exertion. The bullet seems to think that it has a mandate to go on and dig deeper, like a Nazgûl knife blade fragment going for Frodo’s heart. – Mr. Ed of this parish September 3rd, 2017 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. – George Carlin, as quoted by the Cobden Centre. Ok, here is the ‘real’ SQOTD 😀 If investors were rational, they would choose their investments on the basis of valuation. Cheap assets good, expensive assets bad. Markets are tricky things and tough to beat or even match, so it helps to have an edge. No other characteristic has more bearing on the likelihood of an investment’s long term success than its starting valuation. That tiny word “if” carries an awful lot of freight, though. The reality for many is that, consciously or otherwise, they favour financial assets that have self-evidently “worked”, in that their prices have risen strongly in the recent past. Human beings are nothing if not straightforward extrapolation engines. This is not to denigrate price momentum, which is a perfectly respectable trading strategy, but it is to denigrate the animal spirits of the average investor, who has an unerring tendency to conduct investment strategy by way of the rear view mirror. September 2nd, 2017 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Why would Conservatives want to ape Momentum? The “grassroots” Labour movement responds to any political question with “more power for Corbyn, and more of your money”, which it couples with social gatherings (real and virtual) that remind me of the Planet People in 1970s Quatermass. The Planet People threw over the old social order to build a better life but were, of course, eventually harvested for food by the aliens whose revolution they worshipped. Insert your own Momentum analogy here. It is a tragedy that the only alternative in Britain to the Corbyn’s ‘Evil Party’ is May’s ‘Stupid Party’. And the sooner is not not Theresa May’s party, the better. September 1st, 2017 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
We also want to increase supply, though, and being able to sell in Houston for $99 something bought for $9.99 in Beaumont (again, just to invent an example) might well get a few boats carrying loads in – although quite possibly not from Beaumont. Thus, by allowing prices to rise, we’ve at least potentially increased supply. Our price system, operating without constraint, is thus achieving the two things we desire, a curtailing of demand through rationing to only truly important uses, and a rise in supply. “But,” goes the cry, “this isn’t fair!” Indeed it isn’t, and ain’t that a shame, fairness not being a notable feature of this universe we’re struggling to inhabit. All we can do is the best we can. Which is, again, why I insist that there should be variable prices, why there should be no laws against price-gouging. Because this really is a disaster, there really are significant shortages in Houston right now, we really do want to solve them. Which means that we should be using all of the tools at our disposal. August 30th, 2017 | 80 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is some debate as to whether we can conceivably talk about the ‘alt-left’. Does the term have any meaning? Is it but a sly invention of the alt-right in order to reduce its opponents to a level moral footing – as if to say ‘you’re no better than us’? The term certainly enrages those on the activist left, who regard themselves as championing the poor, marginalised, women and ethnic minorities against the behemoths of ravaging neoliberalist economics and white privilege. There could be no possible moral equivalence between such noble characters and the creepy, brutal voices of neo-Nazism, elitism and white nationalism. Surely? Surely indeed. Events this summer suggest that the term ‘alt-left’ is justified – that is to say, if the prefix ‘alt’ denotes sulky, rancorous, childish thuggery. This is the year that some sections of the left lost all pretence to holding the moral high ground. The alt-left has become ideologically fanatic, with its lust for instability now clear to behold. The most obvious manifestation of its evolution into a febrile cult is its new mania for iconoclasm. Remember at the beginning of the 2000s, when we were horrified at the Taliban for blowing up ancient statues? Yet 16th-century-style statue-smashing has become mainstream in the US, as the alt-left has cultivated a craze for pulling down inanimate representations of people. August 29th, 2017 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
The original version of the quoted sentence that follows concerned sincerity rather than authenticity, but here is how Marc Sidwell recycles it, in his book about Trump called called How To Win Like Trump (which as of now you can download for free):
The above slight-mis-quote appears at the beginning of the part of Sidwell’s book entitled “Secret Five: Appear Authentic”. Appear Authentic, not Be Authentic. The reason I here re-quote this slight-mis-quote is to emphasise that although Marc Sidwell’s book is an admiring attempt to explain How Trump Did It, he by no means swallows the Trump myth whole. Rather does he analyse, among much else, how this Trump myth was created, and then swallowed whole and spread by an amazing number of Americans, including an amazing proportion of Trump’s enemies. After all: “Blurts out every piece of crap that enters his ridiculous looking head” is but a rude way of saying: “Here’s a guy who says what he thinks and means what he says”, “Here’s a guy who’s authentic”. I am learning a lot, some of which I had long suspected, and am enjoying this book very much. If you hate Trump, you probably wouldn’t enjoy this book nearly so much, but you would surely learn a lot. Sidwell continues:
Ah yes, “start a conversation”. That phrase began life as a way of actually saying something, but now it sounds to me like just another of those “ritual phases” (typically now used to excuse the incoherence and/or non-existence of anything actually being said) that died the death several years ago. What Trump does with his brilliantly “authentic” tweets is start slanging matches from which he emerges the winner, as Sidwell himself well explains. (See in particular his stuff about Trump’s participation in the world of televised wrestling.)
In other words:
See also: Jacob Rees-Mogg, who I and quite a few other Brits now hope will be our next Prime Minister. This peculiar man resembles Trump in deviating, but in a very different direction, from the scripted-to-death style, in his case by being coherent and educated and patrician. When Rees-Mogg starts a sentence, he finishes it, and he does this in a manner which makes no attempt to hide the expensiveness and the well-connectedness of his education. Rees-Mogg is happily honest about his poshness in the same way that Trump is happily honest about being, as his son put it, a “blue-collar billionaire”. Trouble is, see also: Jeremy Corbyn. Like Rees-Mogg, Corbyn also comes across as not-a-Blair-clone. He presents himself as exactly the sub-academic tyranny-worshipping junk Marxist that he is. I feel towards Corbyn the same amount of fear and detestation as Trump’s enemies feel towards Trump. This is because a terrifying proportion of Britain’s voters seem now to feel that, because Corbyn is unapologetically sincere in his desire to ruin my country, he is at least sincere, and therefore a good egg. But if what you say is wicked, then meaning it is not a virtue. LATER, re Corbyn (my thanks to first commenter below Brian Swisher), the late and much missed Helen Samuely: “Well, at least he has principles”. August 24th, 2017 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
In effect, Google is telling the world that unmoderated, no-holds-barred exchanges are not welcome in cyberspace. Playing censor, playing government – both made possible by Google’s market power, which, in its turn, makes it susceptible to government regulation. Susceptible and even vulnerable as they might be, I don’t expect anti-trust proceedings anywhere in the world to put an end to Google’s and Apple’s dominance in certain markets. If I have hope – if never too much – it’s for new technology and know-how both to dislodge the oligopolies and defang government censorship. August 21st, 2017 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rarely has the hypocrisy of the West’s ostensible liberals and leftists been as violently exposed as it has been this week. Between Charlottesville and Barcelona, between their fury over the former and their embarrassment at the latter, we have gained a glimpse into today’s extraordinary double standards over extremists who loathe liberty, democracy and swathes of mankind. If the extremists are white and fond of the swastika, they’ll be roundly condemned, organised against, transformed into a focal point for the activities of a flagging left. But if they’re Muslims, if it’s a misogynistic, homophobic caliphate they want to build, if their targets are ‘kuffars’ rather than pinkos or black people, they will be frowned upon, of course, but never raged against. Never organised against. They will be treated more forgivingly, and explicitly so. It’s clear now: leftists only dislike certain kinds of neo-fascism. August 20th, 2017 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
Turning to communism for fear of fascism is like suicide for fear of death Sadly, it is time to recycle this one yet again it seems. August 16th, 2017 | 140 comments - (Comments are closed)
I found the reasons various people gave for choosing sides in the American Civil War fascinating, but the complexities of each choice have largely been ignored in contemporary discussions on the subject. I guess the BBC and their ilk prefer to stoke the flames of a race war by implying Lee was fighting to preserve slavery. Well, they’re getting what they wanted, aren’t they? August 15th, 2017 | 75 comments - (Comments are closed)
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