The BBC yesterday: Why BBC doesn’t call Hamas militants ‘terrorists’ – John Simpson I wrote the following for the “Biased BBC” blog in 2006. Depressing to think that seventeen years and God knows how many thousands of terrorist murders later, I can repost it unchanged and, bar on … | Continue reading
“`From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’ chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West. Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with th … | Continue reading
They are identifying the bodies now. For their relatives, the agony of not knowing is almost over and the different agony of knowing begins. But for some the hellish uncertainty goes on. One of our oldest friends is one of this group. He has family in Israel. One of his female re … | Continue reading
The recent and highly contested decision by London mayor Sadiq Khan to expand ULEZ (ultra-low emissions zone) from central to the outer London boroughs has already caused considerable political pushback. It cost the opposition Labour Party a by-election result. and played a part … | Continue reading
People compare Hamas to Nazis. That’s not fair. Nazis knew killing Jews was wrong. That’s why they did it in secret, mostly in Poland at isolated death camps (Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec). At war’s end covered over their crimes, burned documents, dest … | Continue reading
One black career criminal killed by a police officer and we had 3 years of knee bending, millions in fund raising, flags, murels, statues coming down. 1000 Jewish civilians slaughtered & they come out for the terrorists. F**k me. – Louise | Continue reading
“Yet the idea that all British Jews are uncritical backers of the Israeli administration is fiction. There are as many vocal opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu and his hardliners as there are supporters. So why should they be blamed en masse for policies decided in Jerusalem? And wh … | Continue reading
The United Nations Human Rights Council: “On Monday afternoon, the @UN Human Rights Council observed a moment of silence for the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere.” | Continue reading
Well worth a few minutes of your time. | Continue reading
Disney used to touch our hearts, now they touch us inappropriately – “Just a turtle“ | Continue reading
Yet another interesting chat by Perun. People expected Zaluzhnyi to be channelling Heinz Guderian, whereas he is actually channelling John Monash. | Continue reading
You do not need autocomplete in order to predict what sort of results that search term produces. Good thing, as autocomplete seems not to be working for those words on many browsers. Because you all already knew what Palestinian celebrations involve, I did not have to post the vi … | Continue reading
What dismal dangerous times we live in. Hot on the heels of the latest atrocity in Ukraine, I am seeing video after video after video of Israeli civilians being either brutalised and then kidnapped or just murdered in broad daylight by Jeremy Corbyn’s good friends Hamas. I am ove … | Continue reading
These are Hillary Clinton’s own words. This is the Guardian‘s own headline: Hillary Clinton says Trump supporters may need to be ‘deprogrammed’ Supporters of Donald Trump may need to be “deprogrammed” as if they were cult members, Hillary Clinton said. “Sadly, so many of those ex … | Continue reading
I get press releases. Here is the text from one of them, via Ideas Beyond Borders. I repeat most of the content, and I am sure IBB won’t object. New standards for library book removal left students, parents, teachers, and board members of the Peel District School Board confused r … | Continue reading
“When bureaucrats and politicians (including 17 state attorney generals) attack a successful, entrepreneurial company, is it surprising that it looks like a circus?” – Pierre Lemieux. | Continue reading
In the Telegraph, Ruby Hinchliffe writes, The city that declared all-out war on landlords – and what happened next The Dutch have launched wide-ranging crackdowns on the buy-to-let sector, but renters are paying the price “Landlords have no friends in politics anymore,” Tjeerd Si … | Continue reading
Ban tobacco in the UK, and you will simply divert uncountable millions in untaxed moneys into the pockets of criminals, while cigarette smoking will barely decline at all – in fact, I’d take a small wager that the smuggled product will be cheaper after the ban than the legal prod … | Continue reading
More than 35 years ago, I recall when an old friend of mine (who died all too young in 2006), Chris R Tame, had been appointed the director of an outfit called FOREST. That acronym stood for Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco. The group was backed by sund … | Continue reading
Thanks to the cult ideology of Net Zero some governments, including our own, have started trying to destroy the entire basis of human brilliance and ingenuity in a way that has no parallel other than in totalitarian states. If electric cars represented an overall improvement on i … | Continue reading
All revolutionaries become conservative in the very act of effecting their revolution. From the moment a change has been brought about their concern is to prevent it from being reversed. They seek means to guard the power they have taken into their hands against all possibility o … | Continue reading
No matter how many times I explained all this, the same question kept coming, over and over. ‘Why do you care so much?’ All I could say was: ‘Why do you not?’ The intercession of the most famous children’s writer in the world in the trans debate was a moment when I thought the ar … | Continue reading
There’s a foul, racialised undertone to this. The shock and horror some commentators reserve for ethnic-minority politicians who happen to hold more conservative views on immigration, asylum or multiculturalism has a whiff of ‘how dare you?!’ about it. They never accuse Braverman … | Continue reading
So it is now official: a state-owned major television channel, required by its licence to ensure that its factual programmes “must not materially mislead the audience”, can broadcast blatant lies without reprimand, let alone sanction: provided, it would seem, that the lies are ab … | Continue reading
"Frankly what Ofcom should do is shut it down" Broadcaster Adam Boulton tells #Newsnight regulator Ofcom should shut down GB News for disrupting Britain's 'broadcast ecology'https://t.co/P0zxS1DNGF pic.twitter.com/BSE3CoPXbj — BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) September 2 … | Continue reading
Say what you like about the Daily Telegraph, which generally tilts centre-right in its politics and economics (particularly with incisive writers such as Allister Heath and Matthew Lynn), it does not seem to enforce orthodoxy. While the leader column and Heath have both applauded … | Continue reading
To Blair and his circle, then, the individual did not precede society – as Hobbes and Locke had it. People are born into an existing social compact and have obligations towards it that they do not necessarily choose. Other figures in New Labour’s stable of philosophers included A … | Continue reading
Net Zero policies are trashing private property rights, stealing vast resources from taxpayers, and creating a moribund economy based on Soviet-style government planning – the total opposite of conservatism. – Richard Wellings in response to this gaseous emission (£) by Selwyn Gu … | Continue reading
Switzerland is a great country. In most respects Machiavelli’s description of the Swiss as “armatissimi e liberissimi”, “most armed and most free” still applies. But… It says, Mandatory shooting Mandatory program Compulsory shooting training applies to all soldiers equipped with … | Continue reading
I’ve said previously we’re living in an age of tragedy. I’m not too sure about that anymore. I think we’ve advanced further than tragedy. We’re entering an age of absurdity. Consider German climate policy. Germany, as we keep hearing, is incomparably more adult, more advanced, mo … | Continue reading
In his book, After America (published in 2011, which already seems a loooong time ago), Mark Steyn wrote this: “Any visitor from the Fifties would soon discover, in a bleak comment on the limits of predictive fiction, our brains didn’t get bigger. But our butts did. If DC Comics … | Continue reading
What we are talking about, then, is really political reason on steroids. And it has two necessary consequences. Foucault’s assertion was that political reason was both ‘individualising and totalising’. Again, this is not difficult to understand, but worth spelling out. The state’ … | Continue reading
Investment is an expense and don’t let anyone tell you different – not even a fashionable professor. – Tim Worstall, who is probably annoyed at how often he has to state the bleedin’ obvious. | Continue reading
We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or try to earn a living from doing so. Singling out an individual and demanding his ban is even more disturbing given the absence of any conn … | Continue reading
“The key insight driving the environmental movement historically was that complex natural systems must be treated with respect. Crude interventions, however well-intentioned, can make things worse. Removing an apex predator can change a whole ecosystem. A flood-control dam that e … | Continue reading
Of course, if we stop burning fossil fuels society will collapse. Yet this is what our leaders are determined to do. Their radical stupidity tends toward totalitarian measures, leading to total destruction. Such is the nature of today’s ruling elites (who believe in cutting back … | Continue reading
Those of us who believe that children can’t consent to serious medical interventions, that rational debate is better than name-calling, that countries need borders, that freedom of expression is better than censorship, are in the majority. That’s why we need the JK Rowlings, Bari … | Continue reading
Go on, try to remember what Theresa May achieved in politics at all, let alone as prime minister. It’s not easy. – Gawain Towler | Continue reading
The Triumph of a Libertarian Comic: A Review of Greg Gutfeld’s The King of Late Night by Dr. Douglas Young, U. of North Georgia-Gainesville Political Science Professor Emeritus Political comedian Greg Gutfeld’s new eighth book, The King of Late Night, explores what he sees as man … | Continue reading
Who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Whatever you do, don’t ask Marianna Spring. If new revelations are to be believed, the BBC’s ‘disinformation and social-media correspondent’ – who has been showered with awards, praise, broadsheet profiles and glossy photoshoots for her putative … | Continue reading
But this is not all that the Energy Bill 2023 does, and here we come to a fresher development in the relationship between law and the state. Importantly, Brownsword has recently been suggesting that we are rapidly advancing into the next iteration of law – Law 3.0 – in which law … | Continue reading
I have not forgotten it. An unprivate death. Instapundit met with some opposition when he showed the famous photograph of a man falling to his death upside down, having leapt from the burning World Trade Centre. You can’t help wondering: did he know as he jumped that he’d turn in … | Continue reading
Even the name ‘India’, touted by some as a colonial imposition, can be found in texts as ancient as Herodotus’ Geography. By the time of Alexander, ‘India’ was the widely accepted term for the region beyond the Indus River. It is a straightforwardly geographical distribution, wid … | Continue reading
Hobbes was right. We must have government. If men were to try to live without ‘a common Power to keep them all in awe’, life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, there would be ‘a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour’, and there would be adverts for … | Continue reading
The playdate, you might say, was the harmless practice of a bad theory. Indeed, this was more or less the Redditor’s point, a man who said he himself fits in the “brown” category (his Reddit handle suggesting that, ethnically, he’s a mix of Iranian and Pakistani). He didn’t mean … | Continue reading
These few paragraphs, transcribed from a (warning, very long) video essay by The Little Platoon about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, contain lots of interesting ideas. I do not have time to fact check it all, so please argue about it in the comments section. Why do old th … | Continue reading
“Banks have been put on the front line of defense against financial crime. That makes sense because they have the personal data and handle the money, but it takes a lot of work to check out clients’ sources of income and business relationships. To speed up the process and limit c … | Continue reading
Call of Duty (CoD), a video game series published by Activision, has jumped into the murky waters of AI-powered censorship after revealing a new partnership with AI voice moderation tool Modulate ToxMod. This will be built-in to the newest CoD game, Modern Warfare 3, which will b … | Continue reading