A recent Medium essay (linked below) nominates two candidates for the title of the stupidest ideas in philosophy: that there is no self and that there is no free will. There is certainly plenty to attack in both propositions, particularly when sophisticated qualifications disappear and the claims are presented in the startling form that ordinary pe...
The puzzle is not why governments grow. Bureaucracies expand because that is what they are built to do. The puzzle is why populations that still have the vote, the language of rights, and a living memory of freer decades sit still while the state thickens, the currency thins, and the official story gets more childish. Chris MacIntosh's answer (link...
Robin Fellow's point in the Daily Sceptic (link below), is blunt enough to survive translation. A statute can force an employer to pretend that a shop floor and a loading dock are the same job, or that a council clerk and a bin run are "equal value." It cannot repeal the labour market. Dirty, dangerous, nocturnal, remote, and physically punishing w...
The Lindsay Clancy trial has reached the point where the legal question and the cultural question are beginning to separate. The jury has struggled for days to reach unanimity, which is hardly surprising given what it has been asked to decide. Nobody seriously disputes that Lindsay Clancy killed her three children, Cora, Dawson and Callan. The disp...
Assuming the ridiculous gushing over a Cambridge conman was not a national Monty Python sketch arranged for tourists, the Jason Arday affair reminded me of one of the most peculiar things about Britain: They're more woke than the U.S. Which is weird, because the Mother Country still has a monarchy that rules over tens of millions of white subjects....
Donald Trump likes gold, and this is hardly breaking news. Anyone who has followed Trump for decades knows the aesthetic: gold lettering, gold interiors, gold fixtures, enormous rooms, chandeliers, marble, trophies and almost everything else associated with conspicuous wealth. Where Scandinavian minimalism whispers, Trumpian decoration enters the r...
One Nation is back on top of Newspoll: 30 per cent primary, Labor 29, the Coalition 19. The survey closed before Saturday's Secret Harbour by-election, which then handed Pauline Hanson her first lower-house seat in Western Australia, a safe Labor district, gone. Anthony Albanese's response was not a housing speech. It was a warning about "dishonest...
The Right has spent two years congratulating itself on a funeral. DEI offices renamed themselves. Fortune 500 pages got quieter. A few universities discovered the First Amendment after they lost in court. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even said the quiet part: "Woke 1 was crazy," meaning the 2020 carnival of defund-the-police and ritual self-accusation....
The latest Microsoft privacy controversy begins with what initially looks like a success story for modern digital policing. American authorities were pursuing an alleged member of the notorious Scattered Spider cybercrime group, and the suspect appears to have taken the sort of precautions that people are routinely told will conceal their identity ...
Professor Ian Brighthope has put forward an argument that deserves to be taken far more seriously than the scientific establishment is likely to take it. His proposition is deliberately radical: humanity should prohibit the deliberate genetic manipulation of viruses, bacteria and other self-replicating organisms because nobody has the moral authori...
Jason Arday is dead. That is the first fact, and it is not a punchline. He was found unresponsive at home in Battersea on 14 August, nine days after he resigned from Cambridge. The coroner has opened an inquest into an unnatural death. His family say a campaign of misinformation broke a gentle man. Tens of thousands turned out at vigils. The Prime ...
Melbourne is not dying: just yet. It is being enlarged faster than it can be made to work. That is the whole argument, and it does not require a cartoon villain. It requires a city of 5.44 million that just added 105,000 people in a year, the largest capital-city increase in the country, while the official paths still point at 8 million by mid-cent...
Benedict Beckeld is a philosopher based in New York City, trained in philosophy and classical philology at Heidelberg, and Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations (Cornell University Press / Northern Illinois, 2022) is the book that put a usable name on a mood everyone can see and few in the universities will admit. Sir Ro...
The title of this article may immediately invite accusations of racism. Since nothing could be further from the truth, in my case, than such an accusation, let me begin with a crucial distinction, which I shall then explain: that between racial realism and what I will call ethnic memory. This distinction can help clarify a number of political dispu...
The survival lessons of the Great Depression make fascinating reading because underneath the black-and-white photographs, soup kitchens and patched trousers lies a truth modern affluent societies prefer to forget: human beings can adjust their standard of living enormously when circumstances force them to do so. What looks indispensable during pros...
The reparations industry does not begin with a ledger of particular crimes. It begins with a story about the world. The story says the modern condition, long life, surplus food, electricity, antibiotics, courts that outlast a chieftain, is the natural state of humanity, and that the West grew rich only by taking that state away from everyone else. ...
England and Wales abolished the old blasphemy offences in 2008. The statute book looked adult for a while. Then the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and a string of magistrates rebuilt the offence without the embarrassing name. They used public-order law, "grossly offensive" communications, and religious aggravation. The sacred text that now d...
It's one of the odder features of Western life: an economic system built on private ownership and market competition spends enormous sums cultivating, credentialing, and materially supporting the very people who dedicate their careers to arguing it should be dismantled. Elite universities with billion-dollar endowments, funded by donors who made th...
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from holding unpopular views in rooms that assume everyone agrees with them. If you are a conservative writer, academic, or commentator working in media, publishing, or higher education, you already know this exhaustion. None of this makes you special, and none of it excuses self-pity. But it is r...
Patricia Karvelas's ABC analysis (link below), admits the thing the majors want to shrink: One Nation is no longer a Coalition headache. It can take Labor's furniture. Secret Harbour was not a quirky protest. It was a once-safe Labor seat in Perth's south, held in that part of the map since 1989, and it fell to gym owner Luke Herdegen. Hanson...
