Astringencies
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The cost of the Paris Olympics will never be known, but whatever it might be the French taxpayer will foot the bill
September 1, 2024
9 mins
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Increasingly, we feel not that we live in countries with a government of the people, by the people, for the people, but that we are a people of the government, by the government, for the government. Even now, though, our lives are not hell, unless we choose to make them such ourselves
August 25, 2024
9 mins
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For ordinary Parisians, the Olympics will be somewhat reminiscent of the Covid lockdowns, People I know are fleeing to the provinces because they would otherwise need a special pass to leave or enter the streets in which they live. Those who remain have reason to fear surging street crime, terror attacks and, mon Dieu!, even killer drones
June 19, 2024
8 mins
The latest
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In his great book, Russia in 1839, the Marquis de […]
May 27, 2024
8 mins
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One of the guises in which wolves come is as the righteous and empowered foes of 'hate speech'. Everyone knows that to be hated is discomfiting -- and to be discomfited is like saying goodbye, it is to die a little. Hence it must be suppressed, for the sake of the welfare of the sheep
May 14, 2024
8 mins
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No system of criminal justice will ensure that there are never again such people as whoever decapitated the victim found in Sheldon Johnson’s flat. Individual propensity to do evil is always distributed in a normal curve, and the most that any system can do is move the whole curve either in the direction of good or evil. But that is already much
April 9, 2024
8 mins
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The Australian example vaptures the loss of confidence of Western civilisation vis-à-vis the rest of the world. It is detectable in Europe and in the United States. Oddly enough, that loss of confidence also partakes simultaneously of moral grandiosity, that at long last indubitable moral truth has been found. Quite apart from its absurdity, this attitude is no pleasanter to behold than jingoism
March 17, 2024
8 mins
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On an American campus, privileged young women stood behind banners saying 'Whatever it takes' and the popular slogan 'Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea'. The kind of 'freedom' a movement such as Hamas would impose did not apparently trouble or even occur to them
January 6, 2024
8 mins
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Some years ago, I wrote of a charity that derived the entirety of its funds from government, and whose sole activity was to lobby the government to do more to end child poverty. To end child poverty is highly desirable, but to call the organisation a charity was so misleading as to constitute a lie. The government was lobbying itself at public expense, and doing so to the obvious advantage of the nomenklatura and apparatchik class
December 12, 2023
8 mins
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Not long ago there was a rat problem in Paris, where the resurgent rodents found champions on the city council: they -- the rats, not the councillors -- were said to be intelligent creatures capable of love, fear and with the same right to exist as we humans. Now that a bedbug plague is the latest pestilence to sweep the city, I look forward to aldermanic defenders arguing for 'biodiversity'. For deserving humans, however, not a word of sympathy
November 20, 2023
8 mins
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Propositions that once seemed so outré no one would have thought them worth refuting become almost unchallengeable orthodoxies in a matter of a few years, if not of months. It requires courage to dispute them, certainly if one has a job and income to protect, and thus do we genuflect ever deeper before the altar of enforced absurdities
October 20, 2023
8 mins
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No doubt those who promote the idea of a separatist Voice to represent Aborigines think alteration of the Constitution will in some way make amends, undo the injustices or tragedies of the past, as if by the operation of some healing time machine. The truth, as both history and the activist mindset leave no doubt, is that any such dressing of the wound actually rubs salt into it
September 26, 2023
8 mins