“Most voters don’t want tax cuts. They don’t want personal responsibility. They don’t want limited government. Britain was already in a dirigiste mood going into the lockdown. But, since coming out of it, it has been downright authoritarian.”
|
|||||
|
“It might be exhausting just trying to keep up with Musk and he will get plenty wrong. And yet, all the criticism is hopelessly wide of the mark. Our political and economic culture sneers at and neglects men and women like him. But if Musk and his ilk ever chose to go on strike, like a seemingly endless number of workers in both the public and private sectors, the system could grind to a complete halt.” – Matthew Lynn, Daily Telegraph. Lynn’s article (£) is spot on. Yes, Musk received public subsidies for Tesla and the SpaceX business gets deals from NASA, but the point is also that he has made, particularly in the spacefaring area, a tremendous go of massively reducing launch costs via the recoverability of the rockets. He did it when far more expensive ways of space flight failed to deliver. If he did nothing else, that puts him on my list of heroes. The line about him ever going on strike makes me wonder if Lynn thinks of Musk as a sort of Ayn Rand hero. It’s almost uncanny. Of course, some people, including Musk himself, tend to think of him more as a bit of a Tony Stark. Musk can be maddening to some, and vexatious even to his admirers. But overall, I am glad he is around. April 26th, 2023 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Don’t talk to me about Partygate. Don’t talk to me about Suella Braverman’s emails. Talk to me about the fact that a 28-year-old man with devastating injuries was left in unimaginable pain and terror as fire engines drove in the other direction and ambulances stayed away. Talk to me about the fact that our emergency services step back from horrific incidents because of ‘safety fears’. Talk to me about this institutionalised cowardice, where the emergency services now make bureaucratic safety assessments rather than behaving with courage and bravery to assist people in dire need. Avoiding risk is a completely surreal principle for the emergency services to adopt. These people should take risks. They should be rushing into danger to help the men, women and children facing that danger.” – Brendan O’Neill, writing about the descriptions of shocking slowness by emergency services around the time of the Manchester terrorist attack of 2017. (Here is a link to the second report into the brutal attacks, and how services did, or did not, respond.) November 4th, 2022 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The Tory vision of the country is, or should be, one where people are busy – working, thinking, travelling, prospering, bettering their lives. It involves building things and going places. It involves houses and factories, roads and cars, ports and airports, as well as parks, countryside and gardens.” – David Frost, a former member of the Boris Johnson administration, who resigned in part over things like tax hikes. I get the impression that his views are falling on deaf ears among many Conservative MPs, for whom building things, travelling, entrepreneurship, or of how life should be about a sense of adventure, are all terrible things to be banned or viewed with suspicion. Maybe we will get a political realignment at some point, where the Tories revert to their 19th Century default of being the party that largely resisted, or was snooty about, industry and an upwardly mobile class, with a different party championing such things. It may not happen, but I get the sense that there is a lot of change in the political culture at the moment. If you are a young, ambitious person, what on earth does much of the UK political order have to offer if you detest politics and want to just get on with life? The answer, for many, will be to leave. October 17th, 2022 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last Wednesday, Jodi Shaw received a Hero of Intellectual Freedom Award – and got to rap on-stage in NYC, four years after Smith College told her she couldn’t because rapping while white was racist. The freedom to rap while white is a form of free speech it has never occurred to me to pursue, but something Jodi said struck me.
It’s not the first time a movement has refused to define its central idea.
Identify a respected institution. Kill it. Gut it. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect. I’ve seen that spot-on description of how the woke operate applied so many times – to institutions. But it’s just as true of ideas. Totalitarians always gut the ideas they proclaim of all actual meaning. The woke wear the murdered carcass of words like racism (structural racism) or justice (social justice) as a skin suit, while demanding respect. June 18th, 2022 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Specifically, out of the bubble more.
One of many things ‘no one’ saw was the inverse analogy with Iran sending back the hostages just as President Reagan was being inaugurated. The mullahs felt no fear of President Carter but are on record as deciding to send them home to meet incoming President Reagan from a concern that:
The very same Democrat/US-‘liberal’ election rhetoric designed to make voters think Reagan might start WWIII suggested to the mullahs that he might be dangerously unpredictable – and that Carter was a pussycat In exactly the same way, the rhetoric they used against Donald Trump was useful to him – and very undermining to Biden’s ability to ‘deal’ with the Taliban (not that Biden had much ability they needed to undermine). Brendan O’Neill has explained how wokeness hurt the west’s Afghanistan efforts, but while Trump was in the white house there was also a counter-effect. Precisely because it was Trump’s enemies who were saying ‘he’s a crazy violent nutjob who might do anything’, the Taliban were more convinced to be wary of Trump than by Trump’s own threats alone – and more convinced they need not beware of Biden. Did no one that Raab talked to foresee that? I’m not picking on Raab specially. There are many MP’s I’d far sooner see gone from the Tory party, and as for the current ministers of the crown, they could all do with getting out (of the bubble) more. August 17th, 2021 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The `robber barons’ gave us railroads and public libraries. Zuck gave us Farmville and censorship.” – Glenn Reynolds, apropos criticisms of how Big Tech bosses such as Mark Zuckerberg carry on. For what it is worth, the censorship operated by the Facebook and other Big Tech folk is still, in my view, less serious than of the traditional government kind. If you don’t like Facebook then don’t use it. By contrast, with government, we are forced to pay taxes to the bastards, regardless of what we use or how we vote. And by the way, most of the “robber barons” weren’t robbing anyone, but adding value and doing such evil things as producing cheaper steel, oil and transportation. Much of the anti-trust furore was built around a total failure to see competition as an active process across time, not a static sport. The “perfect competition” model of neoclassical economics has done a lot of damage. June 9th, 2021 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The authorities police their lockdown laws as if the virus was reliably woke and as reliably anti-Christian – as if PC protests had a mysterious immunity but a church service was sure to be a superspreader event. In Canada, a Polish priest showed how to say ‘no’ to PC Karen and her colleagues (video) when they tried to halt an Easter service. When a London PC Karen did the same, the response was less forthright, but maybe the London Polish Christians will learn from their Canadian cousins’ example. Meanwhile, sympathisers advised the Londoners to celebrate Easter outside Batley Grammar School, since the police are loathe to obstruct religious gatherings there. Interrupting a Polish church’s Easter Friday and Easter Sunday services in London (that appear to have been legitimate under current lockdown rules) while overlooking a “killthebill” protest in Bristol (that appears to have been as clearly in violation of them) allows an unfortunate interpretation: that PC Karens will bite the hand that feeds them and kiss the foot that kicks them; will bully those who defer to them and defer to those who bully them. (For the benefit of non-UK readers, ‘the bill’ refers to a policing act before parliament. ‘The Bill’ – a.k.a ‘The Old Bill’ – is also a UK idiom for ‘the police’. The chosen hashtag of these protests could thus be seen as regrettable, as regards some of those involved, and unpleasantly appropriate as regards others.) I think there are those in the police who do not like this message – but someone in authority in London thought it a great idea to invade an Easter service on the same weekend as the latest Bristol protest was being ‘light-touch’ policed. If I’ve learnt one thing from my years of programming, it is that the computer does what you actually told it to do, not what you thought you were telling it to do. Humans are not computers – we often begin by hearing the propaganda, decoding the intent and doing that instead – but when the actual message is this obvious, it can cut through. If it cuts through to the extent of inspiring more churches to follow the example of the Canadian Polish priest, I’ll be a happy man. It could go beyond that. April 4th, 2021 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I fear, however, that we are seeing a back-drop of indecision, buck-passing and even incompetence that will leave this generation more contemptuous of leadership and authority than any I can think of before. — Alastair Stewart, ending his Spectator article about exam results on a hopeful note. August 13th, 2020 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The “Black Lives Matter” movement took yet another black life on Saturday. Eight-year-old Secoriea Turner was murdered when ‘Black Lives Matter’ activists shot up the car she was in after its driver had the misfortune to exit the interstate near one of their barriers. If they order you to take the knee, stand up. Stand up for Secoriea; don’t kneel to her murderers. Honour Secoriea Turner, who was 8 and did no harm; don’t honour George Floyd, who thrust his gun into the stomach of a pregnant black woman during a home invasion. I could say a great deal more – but if you or I are ever in that position, the narrative’s finger will be poised over the ‘Cancel’ button. So I advise thinking about what brief words you will say, when they tell you to kneel to a bunch of murderers and you suspect the next words you utter might be the last they’ll let anyone hear in the public domain. July 7th, 2020 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
And why, you may be asking, do I think it is like a ‘performance bond’ (whatever that may be)? Here is a historical analogy:
The Dean of Nursing at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Dr Leslie Neal-Boylan, has been fired for this:
If she’d stopped there, she’d still have her job – but she persisted:
It is, of course, known in the University that the ex-Dean is vehemently (though not violently) anti-racist (when she was hired a few months ago, a now deleted University website page praised her ‘visonary’ advocacy of diversity and inclusivity, especially of the disabled in the nursing field). Making her say ‘black lives matter’ and not say ‘all lives matter’ could not make her any more so. On the contrary, just as signing the anti-comintern pact meant the signers would acquiese in Hitler’s alliance with Stalin a few months later (only the Japanese, ignorant of European mores, protested against Germany’s “outrageous violation of the pact” in August 1939), so demanding the Dean say “black lives matter” but not “all lives matter” was precisely to assure her acquiescence in theories that discriminate by race and in deeds that cost black (and other) lives. July 3rd, 2020 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tax havens are a good thing. Without them, the cartels can continue without any competition. So, if not attending Davos really is a start to a low tax economy that forces tax competition on the globalists whether they like it or not and brings inward investment to this country, then there is cause for cautious optimism. December 19th, 2019 | 7 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. |
|||||