- “Nigel Farage: NatWest is kicking my de-banking case into the long grass” – Nigel Farage says he is victim of an “establishment stitch-up”, according to the Telegraph.
- “The case for leaving the ECHR” – Legislative freedom will fix more than the Channel crisis, argues Richard Ekins in UnHerd.
- “Doctors can prescribe Ivermectin for COVID-19: FDA lawyer” – According to the Epoch Times, a lawyer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has confirmed that doctors can now prescribe Ivermectin for COVID-19 treatment.
- “Sir Keir Starmer junks pledge to role out clean air zones across U.K.” – Sir Keir Starmer has abandoned Labour’s pledge to role out clean air zones after a disastrous public response to Sadiq Khan’s hated Ulez scheme, says the Mail.
- “Sadiq Khan blasted for ‘ignoring’ Londoners over Ulez changes” – Sadiq Khan has been slammed for introducing new Ulez car tax changes without the backing of the public, reports the Express.
- “How many perfectly good cars will be wasted by Ulez scrappage scheme?” – There are major concerns about the waste of scrappage schemes, which encourage owners to destroy perfectly good vehicles, says the Mail.
- “Brighton rock bottom: How the Greens nearly destroyed the city I love” – Brighton and Hove is one of the few places in the country to have been run by a Green Council. The Spectator’s Julie Burchill explains how the Greens nearly destroyed the place.
- “How Net Zero risks intensifying the rental crisis” – Lumping ever more green energy costs on landlords is only going to make the rental crisis even more acute, warns Karl Williams in CapX.
- “Layabouts beware – the work from home counter-revolution has begun” – The office has been much-maligned of late, but working life, and indeed the wider economy, would be much poorer if everyone stayed at home, writes Ben Marlow in the Telegraph.
- “VAT on private school fees” – Changes to VAT and business rates for private schools won’t raise anything like as much money as Labour thinks, says Richard Taylor.
- “Police release autistic teenager as ‘no further action’ in ‘lesbian nana’ row” – West Yorkshire Police has said no further action will be taken against the 16year-old autistic girl who said a WPC looked like her “lesbian nana”, reports the Express.
- “Mum of girl who said cop looks ‘like lesbian nan’ to take legal action” – Mother of girl at centre of ‘lesbian nana’ story to take legal action against the West Yorkshire Police, reveals the Mail.
- “U.K. schools cut classic books in anti-racism drive” – Schools are removing classic novels and award-winning books from their reading lists in a push to “decolonise and diversify” curriculums, says the Times.
- “Lesbian speed-dating event demands only ‘adult human females’ attend” – A lesbian speed-dating event is at the centre of a transphobia row after the organiser insisted that only “adult human females” can attend, reports the Mail.
- “Woke Scouts are told, don’t call Guides girls” – Scout leaders have unleashed a woke storm by telling children not to use the term ‘Girl Guides’, according to the Express.
- “Fury as children are showered with tampons at drag queen event” – Parents left horrified as children are showered with tampons by a non-binary ‘alien’ during a Pride event in Norwich, reports the Mail.
- “Women-only loos rule will ‘protect dignity’” – Women will have their own toilets in all new non-residential buildings in a crackdown on ‘woke’ practices, says the Express.
- “Gender critical website blocked for promoting ‘hate and terrorism’” – Great Western Railways suggests that AI may have mistakenly blocked the Sex Matters website, a gender-critical organisation, thinking it contained adult content. But Dr. Frederick Attenborough from the Free Speech Union questions why passengers were told the site was “associated with terrorism and hate”.
- “The dangers of good intentions” – The performative compassion of the woke has blinded them to their tyranny, writes Patrick West in Spiked.
- “Anatomy of a bandwagon: How self-ID captured Britain’s political class” – Self-identification renders any law, policy or guideline that refers to a person’s sex essentially meaningless, says Ellen Pasternack in CapX.
- “Against the Eugenicons” – The Right-wingers who think the poor are genetically challenged, dubbed ‘eugenicons’, are no better than the woke Left, says Michael Lind in Compact.
- “Terrorists could use AI to carry out hacking raids on the U.K.” – Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden has warned that artificial intelligence could be used to conduct extensive hacking operations or create hazardous materials, says the Mail.
- “Peter Hitchens: I must beg you to oppose Assange’s shameful handover” – The Mail’s Peter Hitchens begs you to join him in protesting against the fast-approaching extradition of Julian Assange to the U.S.
- “Every federal charge makes Trump stronger” – Republicans and many independents no longer trust the American legal system, says Lionel Shriver in the Times.
- “Disgraced ‘crypto king’ sent to jail in handcuffs after his bail is revoked” – Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been sent to prison after his $250m (£197m) bail was revoked over alleged witness tampering, reports Sky News.
- “‘The companies have to pay fealty to the woke cult!’” – On GB News, Toby discusses ‘Woke, Ltd.’, the Free Speech Union’s latest research briefing. It details the chilling effect on free speech posed by ‘B Corps’, a movement that counts nearly 2,000 British companies among its members.
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“All very silly and pointless, but probably mostly harmless?”
Far from harmless. If you believe the moon is made of cheese, and even perhaps try to convince others that this is so, but you do not hold that those that do not are “morally deviant” or worse try to suppress their views, censor them, get them sacked from their jobs, then you are harmless. That’s not what this lot are about. They want to tell everyone else what to think, say and do, and they want people who do not comply to be sanctioned.
We’re in an epidemic of bossiness. Too many people are arming themselves with some self declared moral superiority and launching into telling everyone else how they must behave. Like religious zealots.
This is why I despise Dawkins and all his fellow aggressive atheists. As an evolutionary biologist he should have realised that religion must have an evolutionary purpose. In fact I recall that point being made to him by someone in a debate and the idiot that Dawkins is admitting that it must – because every society has created some form of deity – but not knowing what that evolutionary benefit is. And yet the moron aggressively promoted atheism ridiculing religion.
It’s basically like a surgeon removing some part of the body that he doesn’t like without knowing whether it serves any other function.
In our country by the late 20th century, Christianity was completely tamed as a religion. It was perfect. It provided a broadly accepted moral compass while being very tolerant.
With that gone, the desire to believe in something is being expressed once again in the most obnoxious and destructive ways.
Completely agree.
Your surgeon analogy reminds me of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence
Chesterton was an abusive idiot drooling out anti-German hate propaganda during WWI. Swap fence for German in the text, than he’ll be perfectly happy to declare that it’s better to kill it despite not knowing what it might be good for.
Perhaps. But the idea is a good one. I know it sucks when someone who is perhaps on balance not great comes up with something good.
The idea is not – in fact – a good one. I know this from software development where a very prominent Never touch existing code! You don’t know what it’s good for!-religion exists, this being the reason why software becomes ever fatter and slower over time: Problems with the existing code base are never repaired. Instead, workarounds get added and then, workaround for the deficiencies of the workarounds and so on, until the whole abomination collapses into a singularity under its own weight.
Reality is, if humans put it there and it doesn’t seem to make any sense, the chances are very good that it actually doesn’t because humans (this obviously includes me) do stuff which doesn’t make any sense all the time. It’s far better to remove or change it and deal with whatever breakage this causes (if any) than to stare at it paralyzed with awe because of its utter incomprehensibleness.
Chesterton’s advice sounds very much like “Never touch my stuff! You don’t know why I put it there!”, betraying the usual egotistic hybris of those who believe that they are – as opposed to all other humans – free from faults and hence, their doings mustn’t even be questioned, let alone altered. Not much wisdom is to be expected from someone who once, with all of the tone of authority he so easily mustered, stated that only a Prussian militarist could come up with the outlandish idea that there’d be something wrong with murdering Prussian militarists (paraphrase of a quote in the Wikipedia article in franc-tireurs).
I wonder if you’ve read the idea properly. It doesn’t say don’t touch anything. It says only remove something when you know what it does.
That, btw, applies to software development. If you just rip out a piece of code that you have no idea what it does, then be ready for problems.
The clunkiness of old software is of course related to that but precisely because you can’t rip out bits willy nilly. Well maintained code is constantly rewritten and retested, not recklessly but carefully and deliberately.
I wonder if you’ve read the idea properly. It doesn’t say don’t touch anything. It says only remove something when you know what it does.
I wonder if you read my comment which plainly states
if humans put it there and it doesn’t seem to make any sense, the chances are very good that it actually doesn’t because humans (this obviously includes me) do stuff which doesn’t make any sense all the time.
When something doesn’t make any sense, it won’t be possible to know what it does because it doesn’t do anything (sensible). This implies that your position can only make sense when it’s assumed that humans never do stuff which doesn’t make sense which is obviously absurd. They do.
BTW, the baseless assertions about my professional abilities (or rather, lack thereof) were quite uncalled for and only serve to demonstrate that you have no arguments to support your absurd position.
Obsolescence? How about things that once made sense but later don’t, or make less sense?
But then that’s exactly an argument used by atheists, that primitive cultures needed religion but modern man, with his scientific knowledge doesn’t need God to explain things.
In any case they’re clearly wrong. Things that appear useless or senseless aren’t always what they seem.
Where exactly do I make any assertion whatsoever, let alone baseless ones, about your professional abilities? I haven’t said anything about you.
This starts to become increasingly bizarre (to me). Chesterton’s statement was basically that something which exists shouldn’t be altered or removed just because it doesn’t seem to be good for anything. This is not really sound advice because many things exist which are actually not only not good for anything but often detrimental as well. An example would be the former mask mandate in public buildings. At the height of this craze, people in favour of that actually tried to paint keeping it as the conservative, play-it-safe choice.
I used a different example than this one, namely, accumulation of cruft in codebases due to the tendency of the people working with the code to avoid changing old code, no matter how useless or broken, in favour of adding more code to work around the known deficiencies of the already existing code. A brilliant example of that I remember was a comment in some SuSE init.d script complaining about having to work around bugs in some other SuSE init.d script. The idea to fix the bug instead of working around apparently it never crossed the author’s mind. I additionally wrote that is usually more sensible to act on the presumption that what doesn’t seem to make any sense actually doesn’t make any sense as this will often be the case due to human nature, ie, due to humans being prone to doing stuff which doesn’t make sense.
In reply to that, I got a pretty patronizing Working with code 101 lecture or What someone believes about working with code 101 lecture, actually. Constant rewriting of existing code may be the norm in some OSS projects, although in larger ones, like Linux, there are necessarily huge areas of the code no one ever touches (>17,000,000 lines of code). It’s certainly not what’s being done in proprietary development, at least not the one I’m familiar with.
That’s brilliant.
“…not knowing what that evolutionary benefit is.”
That’s the norm in evolutionary biology: you find a function, and make up a plausible just-so story about why it’s there.
It’s easy enough to say that giraffes have long necks to reach higher branches, but it also happens to be tosh if you study the animals rather than Kipling. Imagination must multiply if you want to explain why oak leaves are different from beech leaves, and you’ll still be wrong.
Yet because Dawkins didn’t want religion to be beneficial, it got missed out of the evolutionary story-book.
I am sure someone once said the same of the Trans religion and look at us now.
Indeed. The “slippery slope” is not a conspiracy theory.
It’s interesting to trace the slippery slope of, say, transgenderism to the top. One place to start is Simone de Beauvoir’s unsubtantiated claim in the early 1960s that sex differences are entirely cultural, leading to John Money’s perverted application to children, and hence on through the academy to the operating table.
Indeed. I really don’t know why people get so hung up on sex differences. It seems blindingly obvious that they are not just cultural but also blindingly obvious that this doesn’t really matter for all practical purposes. Just treat people as individuals.
PETA is essentially run by people like this:
“It occurred to me that French people do something very weird with sandwiches that I think you guys would find strange,” she says at the start of the clip, which has over 163,000 views. Rollins proceeds to bring a slice of butter up to the camera. “This is butter,” she said. “What they do, it’s like a classic sandwich. It’s ham, cheese, and butter.”
‘No mayonnaise, no mustard, just butter,” she adds, breaking out into laughter.’
https://www.tiktok.com/@americanfille?lang=en
They know nothing about anything. A bunch of numpties well worth ignoring.
The French (I lived in France for 20 years) tend not to use butter on the bread for sandwiches, Dijon mustard certainly.
Since cheese is fat and mayonnaise is fat, they think it very strange to put more fat on fat.
As with croissants which are made with butter, the French don’t put butter on them to eat.
Butter, made from grass fed cows, has a lovely taste, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it by adding cheese. And the same is true of adding butter to cheese.
Eh, ——–I think I will give this jumble of crap a miss.
Yes, it’s important, but it’s why I pay a subscription, to relieve my conscience, and just skim the article.
Is there a rolling eye imoji? I want to use it as a micro “for f#@ks sake!” expression
It’s high time to draw attention to saladism¹ and stonism. Salads have a life of their own and don’t exist for the purpose of PETA activists prolonging their useless abusive existences by eating them alive. And while the existences of stones seems to be an entirely passive one, what do we know about the eternal agony of those who’ve been force-glued together with other erstwhile free stones in order to make walls? Stonist attitudes like believing it would be ok to kick or throw them around can’t be allowed to persist. Emphatize with a stone today by trying to imagine it would have been you who had been thus abused!
¹ Not to be confused with salafism.
And what about roasting stones in fireplaces or around camp fires?
Never debate a lunatic, observers might not be able to tell the difference.