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The story goes that Frank Lloyd Wright was once summoned to testify in a lawsuit. When he took the witness stand, a lawyer asked what his occupation was. He answered, “I am the world’s greatest architect.” Afterwards, his embarrassed wife told him he should be more modest. “You forget,” he replied. “I was under oath.” – Timothy Sandefur, from his article: Frank Lloyd Wright: Rebel Architect. November 24th, 2023 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Violence in Dublin after five hurt in knife attack” reports the BBC:
The BBC’s line about it not being clear exactly what caused the disturbances is disingenuous. It is entirely clear what they are rioting about. From the Telegraph:
The only thing that is not entirely clear is whether the rioters are correct in thinking that the man who stabbed the children and adults is an Algerian migrant, as believed by those replying to this tweet by Micheál Martin, the Tánaiste (the deputy head of the Irish government). It does not excuse the riots in the least if the rioters are correct to think that the would-be child murderer is any or all of a migrant, legal or illegal, or a Muslim, or from an ethnic minority. But the obfuscation from the Irish authorities and media on this point is making the situation worse. The usual flashpoint for riots throughout history has been a rumour of crimes committed by a member of Group A against Group B. The riots in the Lozells district of Birmingham in 2005 have been almost forgotten because whites were not involved, but they were a typical example of the type, having been sparked by a completely unsubstantiated story that a black girl had been gang-raped by a group of South Asian men. Sometimes the rumour is true, sometimes it is not. If, as in that case, the inciting rumour is not true, the best tool for squelching the false claim and quelling the violence is a trusted press, taking the term “press” in a wider sense than just newspapers. If the rumour is true, the best tool for quelling the violence is still a trusted press. It can do things like publicising condemnations of the crime from leaders of the group to which the perpetrator belongs. What a pity that Ireland, like much of the Western World, no longer has a trusted press because it no longer has a trustworthy press. It’s not “Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”, it’s a damn sight closer to “Because of police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”. If the official sources of information won’t do their jobs, don’t be surprised when people turn to unofficial sources instead. * Related posts: “Try not lying” – about the sexual assaults in Cologne and other German cities during the New Year celebrations of 1 January 2016, “If you do not want to see the BNP vindicated, try not proving them right”, and “Politically correct evasiveness fails on its own terms”. November 23rd, 2023 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools. ― Thucydides November 23rd, 2023 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
What is happening in London cannot be laid solely at the feet of the anti-Israel protest movement. The poison of identitarianism must assume the bulk of the blame for the cultural dismemberment of society. We have a mayor who constantly preaches difference over unity. We have a Metropolitan Police so paralysed by fear of being called racist that they make endless excuses for anti-Semitic demonstrators. And we have a national broadcaster that refuses to call Hamas terrorists, while happily instructing non-white children that they are under the yoke of ‘white privilege’. We are confronted with a choice right now. We can continue pushing children into silos of racial and religious hatred. Or we can start forging a society free of identity politics which aims to bring people of all backgrounds together. I know which path the London of my childhood would choose. – Ike Ijeh November 22nd, 2023 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
But we can and should go further than that. We all know there’s a vast amount of investment happening in this going green stuff. Maybe that’s a good idea, maybe not, that’s for another day. But the point of what is being done is to address an externality – those environmental damages, costs of emissions, which do not show up in prices and therefore are, again, not in GDP. So, we solve those externalities – and maybe we should! – and we create green jobs while doing so. Cool. So, now we have the same output – say a GW of ‘leccie, even a GWhr – with the same value as before but we’ve used more human labour to produce it – those green jobs that the energy transition creates. By definition productivity has declined. Again, by definition productivity has declined. November 21st, 2023 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Javier Milei elected in Argentina is being called “far-right“? So, presumably he is obsessed by identity groups and demands everyone must be viewed collectively according to the status of their group; wants pervasive state control over every aspect of life (everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State); wants a state directed economy; and will refuse to have further elections after this one? Or does he sees all rights as individual rights; wants to slash the size of the state; reduce taxes; wants to promote free enterprise; and has no problem with elections? Because our media class seem to think both of those things are “far-right”
November 20th, 2023 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are so far down the slippery slope of “having not been allowed to speak the truth about science because it must be subsumed to ideology” that re-entry into any sort of objective assessment is going to be incredibly jarring. The foundations of modern technocracy are invalid and if your stock in trade has, for decades, perhaps centuries, lain in deriving authority and influence from peddling uncriticizable frameworks to induce others (and perhaps yourself) to inhabit hallucinations. this return to reality poses grave threat to currently ascendant political & ideological power bases. This, of course, dovetails right into the heart of the omnipresent octopus of the government industrial censorship complex, the other group deeply insistent on getting to be the one who decides what’s true and what may be spoken. it too fears unmoderated content perhaps above all else as unfettered facts are technocratic kryptonite. November 20th, 2023 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 19th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian‘s “social affairs correspondent”, Richard Booth, has written an article with the title “Five things that could help fix Britain’s private rented sector”. By “fix” he must mean “fix its current problems in stone”, because, with the possible exception of the first, every one of them would make yet more landlords run for the exits while they still have the chance. An astonishing number of people think it is a good argument to say at this point, “Aha, but the houses would still exist, so landlords selling up would be good for the tenants because they could buy them”. There is indeed often a temporary glut of houses for sale just before laws such as Mr Booth advocates are passed, which is like winning the lottery for the people rich enough to buy at that moment. Then the door closes for decades. The great majority of tenants cannot afford to buy the houses they are renting and most would not want to even if they could. They are students, or people on temporary contracts, or people happy to do a fast-paced job in the big city while they are young but who never had any intention of settling there forever. Rent control and legal “protection” for these tenants is nice for one generation of them, a disaster for those who come after. Then again, a return to the days of yore when most people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born can seem quite a charming prospect to those who think that it will not apply to them. And there is no doubt that an end to all this social mobility would be very eco-friendly. November 18th, 2023 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is a bit like having a department tasked with increasing alcohol consumption and sobriety. – Commenter Bell Curve, over a beer or three. November 17th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
In my recent post, “Peace-lovers love using the passive voice”, I asked you to supply particularly egregious examples of media attempts to downplay murders by Hamas and other protected groups. Ben did just that. From Canadian TV:
In case it disappears, the tweet from @CTVNews says, “Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died.” The use of “has died” rather than “is dead” makes it sound like she passed away in hospital within the last few days. Actually, she has been dead for a month because she was murdered on October 7th, alongside more than a thousand others. The only thing that has happened within the last few days is that they finally identified her remains. In most situations I would not read so much into a journalist’s slightly odd use of the present perfect for an event a month ago, but when every such oddity of phrasing works to push the murderers out of sight, it is not a coincidence, it’s a technique. Most headlines are written to grab the reader’s attention; these headlines are written to be forgotten. Like the small print in a dodgy contract, they are carefully crafted to meet the technical requirement of having been stated somewhere, but, in a betrayal of the normal function of journalism, those who write them would prefer you not to read on. That someone “has died” is scarcely news at all. Every morning’s news report gives its crop of vaguely prominent people who have died during the previous few days. They don’t want you to think about when or how she died. They don’t want you to think about the state in which Vivian Silver’s body must have been found, given that her remains were not identified for a month. They don’t want you to feel the horror of her murder. I am going to post an image. If I have done this right, it will be hidden “below the fold”, so you must click the link in order to see it. I put it below the fold because it is horrifying. Am I doing the same as CTV in that tweet I was complaining about, then? No, the opposite. They do all they can to stop their readers ever thinking about the reality of terrorism. I am giving readers who cannot stop thinking about it the option not to see one particularly distressing photograph. The image I am talking about shows a poster put out by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in response to the La Mon restaurant bombing carried out by the IRA in 1978. These days people discussing this poster feel obliged to blur it out, but in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles they were not so sensitive. The poster shows what CTV and so many others in the modern media want to hide. Again and again, it says the word they will not say. November 16th, 2023 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tony Blair is a political virtuoso, whatever one thinks of his policies or ideas, and he stated the position very clearly. The 21st century is not a battle between capitalism and socialism. It is one between progress – that is, liberal progress – and conservatism. It follows that anybody who describes themselves as a ‘liberal conservative’ is sleeping with the enemy – or very badly confused. […] Liberalism, fascism, and communism are all in essence justifications for a mode of rule which is fundamentally ‘princely’: all are predicated on the idea that the population is in some way benighted or corrupted and incapable of simply being left to its own devices, and therefore that government’s task is to reform it from the ground up (and indeed, that this is the basic narrative of History). Against this stands conservatism, which alone among political philosophies holds that it is not that the people are benighted or corrupted when left to their own devices, but in fact that it is they who are the true repository of virtue. Goodness inheres not in the State, but in the familial, social, communal and religious institutions which people naturally create, and naturally congregate towards, and it is through embedding oneself within these institutions that one is made truly free – in the sense not of being free from ties, but in the sense of being free to realise one’s true potential. This does not exactly mean that there is no need for the State to exist at all, because man is fallen and there is a requirement for laws to be enforced and the people to be protected. But it means that the justification for the existence of the State derives from its reflecting, and preserving, the social norms of society, and its capacity to preserve that society’s way of life in a stable and secure way across time. – David McGrogan, in a virtuoso article There is no such thing as liberal conservatism November 16th, 2023 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
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