Families are tricky. They stretch to outer limits our private sense of responsibility. You are Diligent. You work hard and honestly, you treat everyone fairly, you are generous towards friends and family, but you dislike being exploited or ‘expected’ to help others who don’t do all they can to help themselves. […]
The decay of the Climate Change movement has reached the point where those of us politely pointing to some of its deep contradictions are no longer the ‘denialists’. Rather the denialists are those who insist that the wheezing pantechnicon must roll onwards even as its wheels start to fall off. It all got […]
Another look at Ayn Rand, this time dwelling (reasonably) on her Russian roots and their literary impact on her books. That said, I think Anthony Daniels misinterprets a number of the examples he quotes from her novels to make his point, namely that Rand was clever and perceptive but above […]
Now and again (and again) I rail against the Precautionary Principle (PP) as do others: Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that […]
Ed Miliband, ‘climate secretary’, declares war on climate change sceptics: "I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that’s there," he said. "We know there’s a physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures, […]
Just when you were thinking that I am a lone voice among former British diplomats lamenting the plummet in intellectual coherence and standards within the New Labour FCO, here is another one. He has sprung into action after seeing this strange article by David Miliband in the New Statesman in which […]
Guido rightly lambasts the Fabian Society for their erstwhile adoration of the pseudo-science of Eugenics – the corrupt ideology beloved by snooty middle class intellectuals which was a sort of cross-breed of über-Darwinianism with Nietzschean/Germanic ideas of Supremacy. See also the merciless analysis of this odious ‘progressive’ doctrine and its highbrow supporters […]
Back in Moscow in 1994 or thereabouts I asked a top Russian foreign policy pundit what would happen to Ukraine, then languishing in a deacying post-communist stupor. "We’ll just buy it," came the sardonic reply. But what about less obvious places, such as Nauru, which has just recognised Abkhazia and […]
A very powerful piece in the Guardian/Observer (yes!) decribing the grisly fate of official useful idiot Malcolm Caldwell, whose banal self-delusion about communist crimes led to his banal murder in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. But this is astounding – can it really be true? The UN-supported court (ECCC) investigating communist crimes […]
Here are my ten entries for this year’s Orwell Blog Prize: 14/01/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/art740 17/03/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/art859 03/05/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/art928 17/06/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/anonymous-bloggers-at-work- 26/06/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/a-musty-needy-eu-speech 04/08/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/NRWKVL599211 21/09/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/russia-s-foreign-policy-psycholgy-contd- 30/10/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/even-yet-more-further-labour-kaminski-nonsense 15/11/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/european-foreign-policy-v-the-iron-laws-of-physics 20/12/2009 https://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/copenhagen-climate-summit-um-not-un These are a decent sample of my output this year, some more analytical than others. I have tried […]
