September 2020 Volume LXIV, Number 9, No. 569
Strategic Thinking
What Happened in the Previous Future?
Sufficiently Educated to Embrace the Simplistic
The Baby Boom’s Blowback
The Royal Navy’s Triumph over Slavery
Ms Jourova’s Words
Contents
-
Whatever ambitions China might now have about its place in the world, what has always been the greatest threat to the civilisation built by English-speaking peoples is not abroad but at home. The danger comes not from declared enemies without, but from vociferous critics withinSeptember 9, 2020
8 mins
-
Here's a vision deeply to be wished for: the Anglosphere countries begin to harmonise their regulations and standards for both products and services. This further encourages trade between them, constitutes a non-tariff barrier to outsiders and grows out of the shared ties of language, law and heritageSeptember 30, 2020
13 mins
-
The author and essayist Ivor Brown observed that those most likely to be gulled are recipients of 'higher education that has failed to be high enough'. Those words resonate: today's pullers-down of statues are educated enough to formulate simplistic generalisations, but not to appreciate the ironies of existenceSeptember 19, 2020
8 mins
-
As Jacques Mallet du Pan put it, “Like to Saturn, the revolution devours its children.” These days, it is more like the children devouring Saturn. True, the occasional Millennial has been caught out by cancel culture but it’s their Boomer parents who have really felt the scytheSeptember 13, 2020
8 mins
-
With determination and skill, the Royal Navy was central to ending the slave trade. When fools and race hustlers today violate the trust between generations by ignoring or, worse, misrepresenting the nobility of that crusade, they besmirch the sacrifice of 17,000 seamen who gave their lives in its causeSeptember 5, 2020
10 mins
-
Ms Jourova’s Words Sir: In his recent piece “The Central […]August 28, 2020
7 mins
-
University education in the 1950s was scarce but cheap. Today it is abundant but expensive. Its scarcity in the 1950s was generated by the fact that the percentage of intellectually gifted and motivated persons in any given population is limited. The abundance of university education today is not a function of lower real prices but of lower entry scoresSeptember 24, 2020
27 mins
-
Not only has the macro historical impact of infectious diseases been neglected, so have the recurring themes that distinctive infectious diseases, from leprosy in the Old Testament to the Spanish flu, have evoked in the social imagination and the political responses to themSeptember 11, 2020
38 mins
-
The COVID emergency has seen the Left's elites, who for the most part do not have to worry about job security, in favour of deep-freezing the economy. In so doing they not only disadvantage the less secure whose welfare they profess to hold dear, they also award themselves the power to rule Daniel Andrews-style by caprice and coercionSeptember 1, 2020
8 mins
-
Last year an agent for Chinese printing companies—which have the […]
August 28, 2020
18 mins
-
A nation’s foreign policy should be an outward expression of its values: a reflection of its people, who they are and what they honour. When it comes to our place in the world and our relationships with major powers like the PRC, there is nothing more important than staying true to who we are and what we believe inSeptember 10, 2020
17 mins
-
Islam teaches that racism, slavery and imperialism are noble as long as they are inflicted on infidels. Can anyone be surprised then, that in the Muslim world support for racism, slavery and imperialism is high? Reformers very soon realise there are no 'standards to which an appeal can be made' in the Islamic worldSeptember 15, 2020
14 mins
-
The diversity-inclusion-equity faith system beloved of the Left insists that we must all share its addiction and that heretics must be brought ruthlessly into line. What those who advocate and advance identitarian politics refuse to recognise is that race talk traps people inside their skin tone, inside their melanin count, foreverSeptember 21, 2020
20 mins
-
No one would suggest any of the congregations determinedly jettisoning their Anglican history, heritage and, specifically, the fundamental principle of common prayer are not sincere in their mission. At what point, though, does a congregation move so far from its core practices and traditions that it is no longer what the sign above its door proclaims it to be?September 30, 2020
12 mins
-
To be selected for the text list, it is now no longer good enough to be left-wing; if an author is male or white he may not make the cut. Yes, they are choosing texts for study, or rejecting them, according to the gender or colour of the author or main protagonists. Alas, it has come to thatSeptember 27, 2020
14 mins
-
Victoria Police, the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat and the Royal […]
August 28, 2020
28 mins
-
Each year the current prime minister, whoever that may be and no matter which party, trots out the Closing the Gap report to Parliament. This piece of theatre is designed to do one thing and one thing only: broadcast the notion that progress is being made. It isn't. Bear this in mind as the pro-Voice campaign cranks upJanuary 11, 2023
32 mins
-
In Australia those who know Bruce Pascoe’s book is damaging stupidity are too frightened to criticise the cultural establishment and the vile Twitter mob they cultivate, not to mention the question of careerism. While they remain mute and a charlatan capers from award to academic sinecure, a French academic and man of the Left isn't so reticentSeptember 22, 2020
15 mins
-
The trouble with the Canberra veteran's memoir is that it has been written too much with an eye for the quick sell, just as his policies were for the quick fix. Amusing in places, occasionally interesting, sometimes clichéd and ultimately disappointing, like its author it could have been so much betterSeptember 26, 2020
9 mins
-
Talk of human rights invariably invokes the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, often cited as akin to sacred text. As Aaron Rhodes observes in his timely and important book, far from defending liberty, an international human rights regime has turned its back on the very principles of its foundationSeptember 16, 2020
9 mins
-
Nietzsche was heroic in his isolation, and he knew it. The scorn in his writing is unmistakable: scorn for others who lacked, in his eyes, the courage to live their separateness. That was his self-mastery, which is to say morality. His was the condescension of the Cynic philosopher, trampling on the pride of property-owners with another kind of prideOctober 18, 2020
32 mins
-
I saw my self this morning a little way from […]
August 28, 2020
30 mins
-
As Henry Kendall put it, he 'sang the first great songs these lands can claim / To be their own', yet his reputation has withered with the years, so much so that he is regularly omitted from modern anthologies. A pity in the estimation of Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann, who view the lyrical horseman as 'seriously underrated'October 11, 2020
11 mins
-
The dog shelter was located in that odd netherworld at […]
October 2, 2020
20 mins
-
When it comes to faulty prophecy, journalists take some beating -- especially those like the late Bob Ellis who, hilariously in his case, invest their predictions with various strains of moral preening. If you yearn to make a bookie miserable, harken unto the punditocracy's wisdom and bet otherwise. Now what are they saying about Trump....October 4, 2020
8 mins
-
Jack Paper Jack Paper lived to be one hundred and […]
August 29, 2020
2 mins
-
The Church and the Dhow Inhambane, Mozambique Attempting an old […]
August 29, 2020
2 mins
-
On the Blade of a Day Man stares at his […]
August 29, 2020
3 mins
-
Quarantine But there still are the other things— water’s rhythmic […]
August 29, 2020
3 mins
-
Alchemy Fleeting happiness leaves behind memories that never fade. Ken […]
August 29, 2020
1 mins
-
Conversion At what point does one cease to be Christian […]
August 29, 2020
1 mins
-
St Corona Latin for Crown. Patron saint of plagues. Testified […]
August 29, 2020
1 mins
-
You get one at every meeting … A foghorn of […]
August 29, 2020
1 mins
-
Mine And the dawn still comes without you. The day’s […]
August 29, 2020
1 mins
-
Angela I saw my mother broken with a stroke, sitting […]
August 29, 2020
1 mins
-
The Lemon Tree A fledgling tree, Roots planted in Mother […]
August 29, 2020
1 mins
-
What are illusions? Lies will take the keel, and set […]
August 29, 2020
2 mins
-
TB or not TB? I did it over sixty years […]
August 29, 2020
1 mins
-
Death of a Sperm Whale With her calf she dives […]
August 29, 2020
1 mins
