Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
He Shot the Sheriff, as God Knew he Would
Is there any difference between the predestination of Christianity and the fatalism of Islam? A question which arose from comments on my last QoL piece (“Beatified by an assassin’s bullet”). In fact, there is an unbreachable gulf. One is energising, the other enervating. The enervating nature of Islam is timelessly summed up by Churchill in The River War (1899):
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy… Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
That’s back in 1899. Has much changed? Look at the fanatical mob around the Sydney Opera House on October 8 last year. Insult the prophet in Pakistan and see what happens. Look today at the league table of GDP per capita and you find…
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
The history of the Jewish state, just like that of the Holocaust, is undoubtedly unknown to these deniers of Israel’s legitimacy. They are but the latest iteration of the five Arab states’ war in 1948-49, by which they expected to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. They lost, but have since used the motley collection of Circassian, Turkish, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese Arabs, renamed Palestinians in 1967, to ceaselessly prosecute the original war of rejection.
Aug 29 2024
8 mins
In provincial France, and among Parisians inconvenienced by the restrictions on their movement (some of them can’t return home without passes), the feeling is slightly different. The cost of this festival is unknown; it will never be known, but it is suspected to be large and will fall on taxpayers.
Aug 29 2024
7 mins
