The Middle Ages were not simply an age of ignorance and mud. Medieval Europe produced universities, cathedrals, sophisticated philosophy and remarkable works of engineering. It also endured disease, poor sanitation, endemic violence and political fragmentation. Great intellectual and artistic achievements existed alongside conditions that a modern ...

"The modern era is said to value rationality and reason above all else. We are said to be free from superstition and fantasy. However, our world is not ruled by reason, but by a theology that worships racial equality. Those who challenge our state religion are punished, and the more effective the challenge, the harsher the punishment. It is therefo...

Professor Ian Brighthope begins his recent argument with an observation so obvious that the language of modern technology has somehow taught us to forget it: the cloud is not in the sky. There is something almost ingenious about the metaphor. We upload photographs "to the cloud," businesses migrate their operations "to the cloud," governments put r...

Jonathan Turley, in the article linked below, has drawn attention to something that deserves more serious consideration than it has received: the increasingly explicit revolutionary language being used by parts of the American socialist Left. There is no evidence of a coordinated plan for armed insurrection, and it would be absurd to pretend otherw...

The American survival literature has a familiar geography. When the grid fails, supply chains break and social order begins to fray, the advice is to head for the mountains, the forests, the farming country or some lightly populated state blessed with rivers, rainfall and enough good soil to feed the people who remain. The recent ZeroHedge exercise...

"Non-German suspects account for nearly half of all violent crime in the German state of Bavaria, with the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party now calling for remigration for all criminal migrant suspects. The Interior Ministry data was released in response to a request from AfD state parliament member Martin Böhm. It revealed that...

In 1910, a man named Abraham Flexner published a report that would do more to shape the practice of medicine in America, and then the West, including Australia, than almost any document before or since. It was commissioned by the globalist Carnegie Foundation, funded by the vast wealth of Andrew Carnegie, and it took as its subject the state of med...

For a generation the respectable line was that borders were a sentiment and labour markets were a mood. Add people, output grows, everyone is richer, and anyone who notices the man at the bottom of the wage scale is confusing arithmetic with vice. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has now said the forbidden sentence in public: supply and demand s...

Meditation has enjoyed an extraordinary rise in the West. Once associated primarily with Asian religious traditions, it has been transformed into a mainstream treatment for stress, anxiety and unhappiness. Meditation courses are offered by universities, hospitals and corporations. Mindfulness applications have millions of users, while psychologists...

 The phrase "Digital Duty of Care" sounds almost impossible to oppose. Who could object to forcing enormous technology companies to make their products safer? Social-media platforms have deliberately engineered systems to maximise engagement, children have plainly suffered from some of those systems, and governments have every reason to ask wh...

The declaration that mothers should be "left out of politics" sounds like one of those civilising rules that everyone ought to accept. Andrew Hastie invoked essentially that principle in condemning Pauline Hanson's remarks about Anthony Albanese's late mother, and there is something admirable in the instinct behind it. Families should not automatic...

The Returned and Services League has decided that a One Nation cartoon about Andrew Hastie is "an attack on every veteran's service." That is not stewardship of the dead. That is a political organisation using the slouch hat as a veto. Pauline Hanson does not owe Canberra a retraction for that. Even if you grant every syllable of the complaint, the...

The Australian War Memorial exists because nations sometimes need places where argument stops. More than 103,000 names are recorded there, representing Australians who died in war and operational service. Charles Bean's original conception combined memorial and museum, but the moral centre of the institution was always commemoration. It was built s...

"In August of 2011, the British government—a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron—discovered just how tenuous its grasp on law and order really was. The most serious urban riots in a generation were kicked off by the death of a mixed-race man called Mark Duggan on August 4 in Tottenham, north London. Armed police intercepted...

 There is a moment in the life of a community when the arithmetic stops being abstract. It stops being a statistic on a government spreadsheet, a number in a migration report, a talking point in a parliamentary debate. It becomes something you can see with your own eyes, walking down a street you have known your whole life, past shops that hav...

King's College London and YouGov asked a simple question and got an unfashionable answer. Thirty-four per cent of Britons believe there are parts of London where Sharia dominates and non-Muslims stay out. Thirty-six per cent say that is false. Nineteen per cent will not pick. The median guess for London's Muslim share is 35 per cent. The last censu...

 Every generation likes to imagine that it invented rebellion. Young people distrust their parents, mock established conventions, experiment with forbidden ideas and congratulate themselves on seeing through the hypocrisies of the society they inherited. It is one of the oldest rhythms of cultural life. Something peculiar has therefore happene...

Twenty-five years on, New York City dumped more than 170,000 pages that had sat in 68 boxes in a municipal office. The anniversary timing is politics. The contents are not. They show a public story: the air is fine, go back to work, running beside an internal story of asbestos, benzene, alkaline dust, and officials who knew the two stories did not ...

A disturbing glimpse of that future appears in Anthropic's latest report on misuse of its Claude artificial-intelligence systems. The story has been reported under the provocative headline that Anthropic is building AI capable of predicting which activists police should watch. That description needs an important correction. Anthropic itself was not...

 Nick Land's The Dark Enlightenment is one of those political works that is considerably more interesting than many of the people who denounce it have probably allowed themselves to discover. Originally appearing as a long sequence of essays in 2012 and 2013, and subsequently collected in book form, it takes the liberal democratic order and tu...