Big AI firms want a cartel. Does Artificial Intelligence pose a threat to humanity? Absolutely! But only assuming humanity is defined as "the billionaire owners of A.I. companies intent on crushing their competition." [Ed: I don't think that's the definition.] You don't need to be a super smart A.I. machine to know that large corporations love gove...

Socrates distrusted one of the greatest technologies human beings ever invented: writing. He wrote nothing himself. What we know of him comes principally through others, especially Plato. In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell the story of the Egyptian god Theuth, who proudly presents writing to King Thamus as an invention that will improve wisdom an...

If Ursula von der Leyen can invite Canada to become the European Union's first "associate member," then the only honest follow-up is: why stop at Ottawa? By the test she actually used: shared values, supply chains, Ukraine, critical minerals, a dislike of the present American president, Australia is sitting there with a better résumé and a worse co...

The Lindsay Clancy trial ended without a verdict, but what happened afterwards may tell us almost as much about contemporary America as the trial itself. Clancy admitted killing her three young children in January 2023. The issue before the Massachusetts jury was whether mental disease or defect left her legally lacking criminal responsibility. Aft...

 Sir Walter Logie Forbes Murdoch was born on 17 September 1874 at Rosehearty, a fishing village near Aberdeen in Scotland, the fourteenth and youngest child of the Reverend James Murdoch, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He came to Melbourne with his family at the age of ten, attended Camberwell Grammar and Scotch College, and gradua...

The real question isn't whether the replacement is happening: it is, and the data shows it plainly. The question is whether it produces a functioning society or a low-grade permanent crisis that suits the people in charge just fine. The Sunday Times' figure is blunt enough that it should have forced a national argument and instead produced a shrug....

The headline alone is a chef's kiss of political awkwardness: the Prime Minister's own handpicked expert, the person chosen to lend credibility to the government's migration stance, ends up publicly endorsing chunks of Pauline Hanson's platform. That's the thing about expert panels: they're supposed to launder policy, not confess that the populist ...

Sean Thomas's piece in The Spectator (link below), captures the dizzying media circus following Dario Amodei's call to "pace the frontier" and slow down AI development. The scene carries a distinct absurdity: Silicon Valley CEOs lining up on Sunday talk shows to solemnly warn us about the apocalyptic power of the very engines they are building. The...

Pauline Hanson has spent three decades saying things that other Australian politicians would rather not discuss. Sometimes that willingness has allowed her to put neglected questions onto the political agenda. Sometimes it has allowed a bad argument to obscure a potentially serious one. Her recently resurfaced comments about Indigenous Australians ...

For years, the Strait of Hormuz has been treated as the great choke point of the global energy system. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes through that narrow strip of water between Iran and Oman. Every war game involving the Persian Gulf eventually arrives at the same question: what happens if Hormuz closes...

The "racism" card is a perfect example of a rhetorical weapon that worked too well, so well that it eventually consumed itself. For about five decades it functioned as a genuine debate-ender. Call a position "racist" and you didn't have to engage the argument; the accusation itself was the argument. It banked on a very specific resource: white guil...

Dreyman, link below to his article on the sterilisation of healthy young men, is correct about the atmosphere surrounding these articles, and the atmosphere is the real subject. A serious country does not treat the sterilisation of healthy young men as a light human-interest story. When national newspapers present vasectomy as maturity, generosity,...

Unlike most Western countries, Denmark tracks crimes committed by immigrants and tracks them by country of origin, and the news is just as bad as you expect. Migrants from MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey) are more than two times more likely to commit crimes, and their descendants are worse by a significant margin. Berlinske:...

Cardinal Gerhard Müller has warned that while the Christian West is facing an "internal apostasy", Islam is growing as Muslims "do not respect a weak Christianity". The West, he warned, is dealing with "an unprecedented identity crisis." Formerly Christian nations are under assault from within and without, the cardinal stated, as the foundations of...

The trial of Lindsay Clancy was covered as a postpartum-psychosis story. That is the defence frame. The Plymouth County District Attorney's medical theory got less airtime: not "she was fine," and not "she is a monster with no illness," but a specific forensic claim that Massachusetts law actually requires the state to meet. She strangled Cora, 5, ...

The UK Piddington village revolt is being covered as a local planning dispute, a quarrel about a migrant camp sited in the wrong field. The framing is the entire problem, because what is actually happening in those villages is not a quarrel about zoning but a withdrawal of consent, and a withdrawal of consent is the first and most important act of ...

Ian Brighthope's latest article tells the story of Patricia Leidl, a former World Health Organization communications director whose testimony before Canada's Allison Inquiry raises an important question that should survive every argument about COVID-19 vaccines: what obligation does medicine have when a patient becomes seriously ill soon after rece...

The controversial Texas stadium photo full of Indians, now viral on social media, did not invent a trend. It ended the right to pretend the Great Replacement trend was abstract. That is why it detonated the Texas GOP. The people treating the frame as a headcount of "foreigners" are reporting what their eyes see. The people treating the frame as pro...

There is something wonderfully appropriate about the internet deciding that Anatoly uses fake weights. Vladimir Shmondenko, the Ukrainian powerlifter behind the world's most famous gym cleaner, has spent years making comedy out of people believing precisely that. He walks into a gym looking like somebody sent to clean the toilets, apologises for bo...

The latest Sydney Sweeney controversy is almost too on-the-nose. A sports-prediction app called Novig puts her in an ad that is barely dressed, covers her with footballs and basketballs, and repeats "just sports" like a mantra. Female athletes call it a setback for women's sport. Commentators treat it as another act of cultural sabotage. The Critic...