Opinion / Libertarian Ideas

Mr Gaddafi? Meet RoboGeisha

Who’s not seen Japanese mayhem movie classic RoboGeisha?   It’s all about young ladies who get captured by a wicked arms corporation which turns itself into a giant robot and tries to drop an H-bomb down Mt Fuji to make the Japanese people ‘rise up’. Quite why they would rise […]

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Arab Spring, American Autumn

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 […]

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BBC Collectivism

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 […]

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Polish Political Sexism

One of the interesting things about the parts of Europe East of Berlin is the way ‘Western’ ideologies are there but still have only shallow roots. Sexism rears its ugly head! Male politicians on all parts of the political spectrum just can’t resist making remarks which (they think) show them […]

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Harsh. Very Harsh

This is a sizzling and unremittingly pessimistic denunciation of European vaingloriousness: too many illusions crumbling all at the same time. Thus: In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a […]

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UK Speechwriters Guild: An American Perspective

Here’s David Murray, editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, giving sharp-eyed observations on the UK Speechwriters’ Guild conference last week: Many of these 67 speechwriters from Britain, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Holland and Denmark told me their speakers wouldn’t go for the kind of intimate, personal, emotional authenticity […]

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Fame! Success!

In the 2011 Total Politics Blog Survey I have made it to the giddy heights of 11th in the UK Non-Aligned Blog category, mainly in very grand company: one behind the BBC’s Nick Robinson (but only one ahead of the scary teeth and fetid breath of underdogs bite upwards). I […]

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9/11 Remembered: Muslim v Muslim

I returned to the Embassy in Belgrade to be told to watch on TV what was happening in New York. I did. The Twin Towers crashed. My thought then is still valid: This level of Islamist madness is quite different. It can’t be defeated by normal means. Only moderate Muslims […]

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When EU Leaders Write to Each Other

That letter from President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel to Herman van Rompuy (President of the European Council) has shaken rather than stirred the word’s financial markets. I thought it worth a detailed look. But Protesilaos Stavrou has done it for me. Here is his thorough and interesting fisking by someone close […]

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If one Eurozone can’t work – have Two (or more)

Here is a long and generally brilliant analysis of the Eurozone’s predicament by Edward Hugh. I especially like the way he explains deftly the hard realities and policy paradoxes we all now face, in one hard-hitting paragraph after another: It is not simply a question of “closet” (or open) eurosceptics […]

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