Utopia, you are standing in it!

John McWhorter’s that is. He’s pictured here. He’s a linguist professor at Columbia University, where he also teaches philosophy and music history. His research speciality is creole languages.

Like most linguists he hates the sloppy use of words and grammar, but in this article he goes after the recent term “systemic racism” because he thinks it’s useless, unhelpful and racist itself.

But if the mantra is that what we need to do to solve black America’s problems is “get rid of systemic racism,” we’re in trouble. That analysis, be it explicit or tacit, is based on a third-grader’s understanding of how a society works. More importantly, that analysis does not help black people and often hurts us.

I’m always amused by academics who can’t see the political aspects of what they’re discussing, in this case the simple fact that “systemic racism” is far too politically useful to the…

The ‘Feudal System’ in England, as it is taught in schools, seems fairly simple and consistent, the result of the imposition by a small conquering minority of a system already developed beyond these shores, and modified even as it was imposed. But even in England it was extremely complex, developing fairly rapidly from the hour of its introduction, modified by the adoption of Saxon law and custom and by changing conditions within the kingdom, and even now still open to re-interpretation in many of its features. On the Continent, however, it differed greatly from country to country depending on the circumstances under which it developed. In those areas which have been studied, custom and feudal law varied widely and it would be quite impractical to try to cover the whole of Europe except in the most general terms. Outside northern France and those lands where feudalism was deliberately imported, England…

In order to worm their way into rural communities, wind industry goons employ a mix of varnished lies, deceit and old-school thuggery.

Over the last decade, wind power outfits have been able to beguile the gullible and hoodwink the unsuspecting.  They usually start with a colossal lie and work up from there.  However, as soon as locals rumble them, they retreat to a form of obfuscation and prevarication – dissembling over inconvenient facts, like a furtive schoolboy caught holding a slingshot a stone’s throw from a busted window.

When the lies and deceit cease to work, they resort to coercion and undue influence, as they bully the people they cynically call ‘stakeholders’ – to the extent required to get their projects up and running.

The problem for the wind industry arises from websites like STT, among others.

Laid out on this site, in over 3,000 posts, are the facts that…

Geriatrician Kate Gregorevic has tweeted a very useful thread of 8 common fears and excuses she has heard from those who are vaccine hesitant, together with her responses. These are so useful. Please copy to those in your life who may benefit from reading these.

Just received: My copy of Party Personnel Strategies: Electoral Systems and Committee Assignments.

A preview of most of Chapter 1 is available for free at Google Books. More details, including the table of contents, can be viewed at the book’s Oxford University Press page.

The back cover has the short summary, as well as some very kind words from other scholars:

The country cases covered in the book, each with its own chapter, are Germany, Japan, Israel, Portugal, Britain, and New Zealand. The research design leverages the electoral-system changes in Japan and New Zealand.

The book develops two “models” of party personnel practices, tested on the patterns of assignment of a party’s legislators to committees, broken down into three categories: high policy, public goods, and distributive. Under the expertise model, parties are assumed to want to harness the perceived expertise of their individual members by assigning them…

‘All pain for no gain’ springs to mind. Will voters accept this pointless self-harm to their economic welfare indefinitely, or turn against it?
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As the astronomical cost of Net Zero plans are becoming more evident by the day, EU leaders face the prospect of growing discontent and revolt over the relentless rise in energy prices and consumer pain, say The GWPF & FT.

After years of assuring voters that renewable energy will make energy cheaper and Europeans better off, EU leaders are now forced to concede that these plans will actually hurt consumers very badly.

The EU Commission is proposing a series of far-reaching measures that will drive up the cost of running a car and heating homes.

If it goes ahead, households will have to shoulder not only rising energy costs, but also the rising cost of Europe’s record carbon price in their heating bills…

Ahead of next Tuesday’s VirtualIHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Dr Hannes Kleineke, of the History of Parliament. On 1 June 2021, between 5.15 p.m. and 6.30 p.m., Hannes will be responding to your questions about hispre-circulated paper on parliamentary elections in the reign of Henry VI. Details of how to join the discussion are available here, or by contactingseminar@histparl.ac.uk.

The importance of the reigns of the Lancastrian Kings, and above all that of Henry VI, for the codification of the rules governing parliamentary elections is well known.

It was in 1406 that a statute was passed which required the sheriffs of the English counties to make their returns in the form of indentures counter-sealed by the electors who had in each instance participated in the choice of the knights of the shire, and thereby laid the…

Aliens (1986) Director: James Cameron

“You’re going out there to destroy them, right? Not to study. Not to bring back, but to wipe them out?“

★★★★☆

Aliens is a remarkable action film. In some ways it is James Cameron’s radical departure from the classic original Alien (1979) which was directed by Ridley Scott. By all accounts it should have been a cheap, sophomoric effort but Aliens is a surprisingly powerful roller-coaster of a sequel. Beset by roadblocks and lawsuits, a sequel to Alien was delayed for some seven years.

Aliens picks up 57 years after the original. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has been floating through space while in stasis and she happens to be picked up and returned to members of her company at the “Weyland-Yutani Corporation.” She explains to them what happened to the Nostromo, but the leadership do not believe her story about an alien race on…

Posted by Sara M. Butler, 19 May 2021.

On July 1, 2021, Ohio courts are entering into a new age of bail reform. Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled recently that not only must all Ohio counties adopt a uniform monetary bail schedule, but before resorting to cash bail, the courts must explore the option of release on non-monetary personal recognizance.[1] The motivation behind this extraordinary change is socioeconomic: it has long been recognized that the bail system privileges the rich. Those who cannot afford to cough up the cash for bail (or, at least the 10% required by a bail bondsman) are left to languish in prison until trial. This is true even of those accused of minor crimes, in which, if convicted, the maximum prison sentence would be less than the time it takes for the case to work its way through the judicial system to trial. Despite the…

Jordan Peterson delves into the reasons why Marxist ideology fails both in theory and in practice.  For those like me who prefer to read a text, I have made a transcript of Peterson’s talk, with some light editing to transpose a verbal presentation into a written one.  My bolds are added.  H/T Chiefio.

Jordan Peterson’s critique of the Communist Manifesto

Since we are talking about Marxism, I tried to reread the Communist Manifesto. The first time I read it I was 18 years old, more than 40 years ago. When you read something, you you don’t just follow the words and follow the meaning, but you take apart the sentences. And you ask yourself:

At this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and at the level of paragraph, is this true?
Are there counter arguments that can be put forward that are credible?
Is this solid thinking?