My review of "Suicide of the West" by Jonah Goldberg for The Salisbury Review

Approximately three hundred years’ ago, Britain gave birth to capitalism, which allowed the people of Europe to achieve “escape velocity from the norm of human existence.” Britain exported capitalism around the globe, which has benefitted billions by producing formerly unimaginable levels of liberty and prosperity. The American conservative writer Jonah Golberg calls this “the Miracle”, because, while it no doubt owed something to British “exceptionalism”, nevertheless “…no one intended it. No single thing made it happen. It was an unplanned and glorious accident.” Sadly, Goldberg warns, the Miracle is now under threat from both Left and Right in those very countries it has made free and wealthy...

Message to the Tories - it's the narrative, stoopid!

Labour have only registered a lead over the Conservatives in one of the last 19 polls. Corbyn's support among young people would appear to be waning - even allowing for the unreliability of the polls, Peak Corbyn might very well now only be visible in the nation's rear-view mirror. So why do I still look at the morning headlines through splayed fingers, gut roiling with dread, wondering which pet left-wing topics will be leading the news agenda today? Apart from the royal wedding, the week before last was all about Tory infighting over a seemingly interminable, bogged-down Brexit, Grenfell Tower victims, Oxbridge racism, a Labour promise to abolish the Lords, and - inevitably - NHS underfunding. I'm seriously starting to wonder whether the government has sent its entire media team (apart from James Cleverly, the MP who battles away valiantly on Twitter) on extended leave...

Idiocy and wisdom - what the world looked like this week

Fortunately, London Mayor Sadiq Khan's tireless - and no doubt fabulously effective - efforts to sort out knife crime (see previous post) haven't prevented him from addressing an issue which is really important to all Londoners:

Open to knife-crime, host to diverse terrorist sects, full of hope (that this useless little creep won't be mayor after the next election), not in the least fearful of being stabbed, mugged or burgled...

Man up! A review of Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos"

I've just sent the following review to The Salisbury Review, for inclusion in their next issue. If anyone spots any howlers (grammatical or factual), please let me know:

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan B. Peterson, Allen Lane, £9.99

Two years ago, Jordan Peterson was a relatively obscure psychology professor at the University of Toronto, without a book to his name since 1999. He then began releasing videos on YouTube, criticising political correctness in general, and, in particular, the Canadian government’s Bill C16, which made discrimination and “propaganda” against transgender people illegal. Peterson rapidly became a poster boy for young, educated men fed up with the cultural Marxist indoctrination they’d been relentlessly subjected to by teachers and lecturers who evidently viewed heterosexual white boys as privileged, misogynistic, homophobic racists, and who treated any expression of scepticism regarding their pseudo-egalitarian, identity politics agenda as heresy...

The Hitchens Brothers, doing the ironing, and the need for consolation

These days, I catch up with political podcasts about once a fortnight, when I do the ironing (yes, I am that much of a New Man) - usually a James Delingpole, an Andrew Klavan, and, if there's time and I'm in the mood for his blistering, rapid-fire sarcasm, a Ben Shapiro. I used to listen to Radio 4 Extra, but I hit a patch where I seemed to get stuck with  The Navy Lark, Steptoe & Son, Arthur Smith or Mel Giedroyc. Anyway, this week I started off my podcast binge with James Delingpole chatting to Mail columnist Peter Hitchens, whose "housemaster in a filthy temper" manner always brings to mind the forbidding British actor, Cedric Hardwicke. Hitchens - in case you're not familiar with him - is an ascetic, fundamentalist conservative (he describes himself as a Burkean, although there was nothing particularly puritanical about Burke), who thinks it would be a jolly good idea...

Theresa May - the "nanny state" social justice warrior in No. 10

I suspect many - perhaps most - right-wingers and conservatives (and quite a few centrists and left-wingers) are so horrified at the thought of the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse (Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Angela Rayner) taking charge of the country...

Reginald D. Hunter on Madonna v. Mrs. Thatcher as role models

I don't know why this clip from a 2011 Live at the Apollo performance has been doing the social media rounds for the past 48 hours - but I'd never seen it, and it surprised me (in a good way):

I'm surprised he was ever allowed back on British television!

When there were giants in the land - a review of Dennis C. Rasmussen's "The Infidel and the Professor"

I've just written a review of the Rasmussen book (full title: The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought) for The Salisbury Review. If you spot any howlers, please let me know:

When David Hume died in 1776, his literary executor, the economist Adam Smith, wrote an account of his death in which, after emphasising the cheerfulness with which the philosopher had faced his end, Smith described his great friend as “approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” Smith’s eulogistic Letter to Strahan attracted widespread criticism: Dr. Johnson refused to believe that Hume had died fearlessly, while James Boswell (who had studied under Smith at Glasgow University) attacked his old tutor’s account as an example of the “poisonous productions with which this age is infested.”...

The Presidents Club, and how awful it is to find oneself in the same camp as lefties

The Presidents Club charity fundraiser in full swing

And the aftermath...

Having watched Cathy Newman's Jordan Peterson interview again, I have to say she put in a monumentally lousy performance

Yes, I know I'm late to this game, and that commenter David Moss has already provided a link to a Spectator article about the Channel 4 interview - but it's just been one of those weeks. I've now watched it again, and, while Little Miss Prim's failure to land a single punch while leaping into every logical elephant trap as it appears in front of her (each with its own large sign reading "Whatever You Do, Avoid This Trap Or You'll Look Very Very Silly Indeed")...

Jonathan Haidt's enlightening 2012 classic "The Righteous Mind" revisited

I first wrote glowingly about Jonathan Haidt's book in 2013, the year after it was published. It appeared at a time when right and left-wingers were seriously questioning whether their opponents were clinically insane - i.e. whether being a conservatives or a liberal was in fact a mental illness. (I may very well have toyed with the idea on this blog.) Jonathan Haidt - an American liberal-leftist - poited a different theory: the gulf between left and right-wingers is the result of fundamental, intuitive differences in moral outlook. His most interesting (and, let's be honest, pleasing) conclusion was that, when it comes to morality, leftists suffer from a severely restricted field of vision, whereas conservatives have a broader, more balanced range of moral concerns. This explained (to me at least) why the world-view of many left-wingers strike us as demented....

Nikki Haley, the UN, Trump - and rediscovering the concept of gratitude

Nikki Haley, taking names

The main artery leading to our house from Chiswick High Road is too narrow to comfortably allow two cars to pass each other going in opposite directions. I'm far too old to indulge in Alpha-male willy-waving, so, when faced with, say, a tiny Asian woman who can barely see over her dashboard zooming down the crest of the road towards me in a bulbous 4x4, or a big red bus, or an angry-looking fat white bloke in a white van, or a glowering black man in a BMW saloon car, I either slow to a crawl, or, if a collision seems unavoidable, pull into the side of the road and let them pass. All I ask in return is a small acknowledgment that I've done them a favour - a tiny wave or a nod of the head: if I don't receive one, I feel a strong urge to turn round, chase after them, force them off the road, and rip their heads off...

Sir Roger Scruton on phony, cost-free compassion

And...

The Deplorables' Hit List: ten recordings that go down well with American patriots (and I like some of them too)

Canadian commentator Gordon Sinclair's 1973 single started out as a radio broadcast - they just added...

Black Tory MPs blast Labour's racial "stereotypes and low expectations"

Clive "On your knees, bitch" Lewis is a Labour MP, so his extraordinary narrow-mindedness...

Lest we forget...

And definitely not forgetting these two patriots:

Sir Roger Scruton on the cancerous "shadow community of parasites" which pretends to govern us

My brain isn't functioning today - or, at least, it's functioning even more inefficiently than usual. This is the "payback" which often hits CFS/ME folk the day after the day after they've overdone it. Writing about Zulu on Friday took it out of me, because I hate the thought of not doing justice to the films or books I care about - I knew it would, but it's a price well worth paying. My mental haze worsened as I leafed through the Sunday Telegraph this morning in a vain search for anything vaguely resembling heartening news. It seems Mrs. May's government is failing on just about every front - no more money for the military, the new universal credit system about to be watered down/postponed/abandoned/whatever. The only whiff of uplift was the suggestion that the EU's negotiating stance is softening because of the groundswell of support here for a "No Deal" Brexit, which would, of course, leave Britain's fanatically dirigiste neighbours...

New Tory MP Kemi Badenoch - a ray of hope in grim times?

I'll admit it - the maiden speech from the new Tory MP for Saffron Walden, Kemi Badenoch...

Chicago anti-Trump protesters unwittingly applaud the words of Adolf Hitler. Top trolling!

The frightening thing is...

Brandolini's Law explains why arguing with lefties is so exhausting - and pointless

The proposition that "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit...