Even on Christmas Eve – or maybe especially on Christmas Eve – we need to be aware of those repellamt people who stroll around the Western chattering classes exploiting the historic privilege of democracy to make excuses for the inexcusable. Here are some classic examples. Enough. Just go away. Except […]
Despite my wretched ankle accident in Nizhny Novgorod, my interest in things Russian is reanimated. Part of the fascination with Russia lies in the baffling issue of how in fact a society moves from rigid oppressive stupidity to something far more flexible, democratic and smart. When the USSR broke up, […]
Hmm. Things warming up a little in Russia as all sorts of people condemn serious vote-fixing in the elections last weekend. A significant proportion of the noise against the election results comes from obnoxious groups who (a) never held any sort of honest election when they had the long years of […]
My extended thoughts on the Russian elections for the national parliament (Duma) which took place on Sunday, 4 December. I played a modest part in the proceedings as an official international observer accredited to the elections under the auspices of the International Institute for Integration Studies, a Moscow-based grouping close to […]
Croatia is next in line to join the European Union. But this sort of thing, circulated by the eminent Centre for Research into Post-communist Economies, shows that beneath the surface – or even bang on it – a lot of nasty habits and people and instincts inherited from the communist […]
Former FCO Minister Denis MacShane MP has written a small but energetic book praising Kosovo’s independence: Why Kosovo Still Matters (sic). Here it is, a perfect Christmas stocking-filler, the more perfect if bought via this link so that I get a few groats from Amazon: The main interest of the book for […]
Famous Australian philosopher Tim Blair has coined a trenchant saying which is now known round the world as Blair’s Law. It illuminates a depressing but seemingly inexorable tendency: "… the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force" Almost anything said by the Western world’s […]
Are you following the stupidity and incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street #OWS tendency with its lumpen supporters in differemnt US cities? Ed Driscoll gives us a helpful round up of why the phoney idea of Liberaltarianism (ie the supposed new synthesis between libertarian and left-liberal thinking) is meaningless. And […]
Articles pour out about the mounting problems in Greece. Homelessness, drugs, shops shutting, psychological despair, political alienation, emigration, suicide, and the rest. Such as this one in the Guardian: A new underclass has appeared: in the homeless and hungry who roam the streets; in the spiralling number of drug addicts; in […]
I have written here before about the way the BBC defaults towards glossing over collectivist crimes and damning with faint praise the success of market-based solutions. Or slips in other strange invariably Lefty assumptions via sly editing. A handy compilation of a few horrors: – Sneaky use of inverted comma qualification to […]
