Utopia, you are standing in it!

The original saying I paraphrase above, from Oliver Wendell Holmes, is “hard cases make bad law”, meaning you shouldn’t erect general principles based on extreme cases. But in this instance, regarding the defenestration of scholars who say things unpalatable to their peers, or odious things in general, these are the hard cases that should be the basis of a general rule: academic institutions should not punish scholars who exercise their right to free speech.

Sadly, as Benjamin Schwarz—former literary and national editor of The Atlantic—shows in the new Spiked, this rule, which used to hold in the UK, no longer holds, at least with respect to historian and television presenter David Starkey. Starkey, it has to be said, uttered a statement that is reprehensible, unworthy of a thinking person. But it’s still free speech. Read what happened to him by clicking on the screenshot below:

First, Schwarz…

This now seems to have been inevitable, but it’s very sad, especially for the NYT, which has lost a powerful voice and a counterweight to the paper’s fulminating wokeness—an ideological groupthink that has so degraded its quality. Click on the screenshot to read the CNN report:

Weiss did not go gentle, either. From CNN:

This series of tweets was just emitted by Andrew Sullivan. Since his venue, New York Magazine, didn’t (“wouldn’t” is probably a better word) publish one of his columns a few weeks ago—probably because they didn’t like the subject, which was presumably the demonstrations following the death of George Floyd—I am guessing he’s been at odds with them, and has been looking for a new home. According to the stuff below, he’s found one.

He implies the reasons is not “his editors,” but what else could it be?

All the unwoke are being purged, or resigning. What will journalism be like without contrarian voices?

VIET CONG’S SECRET SUBTERRANEAN BASE VIETNAM, 1 NOVEMBER 1955 – 30 APRIL 1975

During the Vietnam War, the USA had the most advanced military in the world. Boasting technology and resources other nations could only dream of, their entrance to the conflict on the side of South Vietnam against the communist North Vietnam looked certain to turn the tide of the war.

But the Viet Cong, a guerrilla force on the side of the communists who were stationed in the South, had other ideas. Beneath the Cu Chi district near Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), communist forces had been digging tunnels here and there since the 1940s during their war of independence with the French. By the Sixties, however, this tunnel network spanned 250 kilometres (155 miles).

The Americans had expected a war above ground, but what they found instead was a determined Viet Cong force that, despite the…

When I debated Amy Wax a few years back, I noted that one issue with conservative demands to return to a different family regime is that most people don’t want to do it. I noted that in American society, you can definitely join a group with strong norms against pre-marital sex and strong against divorce. It’s called the Church of Later Day Saints – the Mormons. Even though people are free to join this religion, it remains small. According to this Pew report, it’s only 1.7% of the population. And it’s no mystery – the LDS requires a lot of investment in terms of time and money.

I was reminded of the left wing version of this point: socialists will often argue that kibbutz, or communally organized farms and residences in Israel, show that an egalitarian society is possible and it works. My response is similar: there is…

I recently had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Austrian economics at Texas Tech University. The conveners have asked people to reflect on Austrianism and how that tradition addresses sociality. Some of us offered criticisms while others explored and expanded Austrian ideas. In addition to writing my own piece, which uses spontaneous order theory to think about autonomy, I spent a lot of time thinking about the social position of Austrianism within the economics profession.

Classic Austrianism (1800s-1940s): There was a time when Austrianism was a Big Deal in economics. The early figures were extremely influential and their ideas were assimilated into the mainstream. For example, Carl Menger was a big proponent of marginal utility theory, which is now econ 101. Another example is FA Hayek. In polls of economists, his article, The Use of Information in Society,remains one of the most mentioned and it provides the standard…

I thought that I was done discussing the debate on intersectionality theory between Jacob Levy, Phil Magness and myself. Well, 200 Proof Liberals (a new successor blog to Bleeding Heart Libertarians) has a post by Jess Flanigan. She argues that there are multiple version of intersectionality theory and that it’s easy for libertarians to accept the mellow version, which they never opposed anyway, but there’s a serious issue with the more hard core version:

Rojas’s point is that it’s a mistake to equivocate between these two conceptions of intersectionality. If the theory (T) refers to the first definition (T1), then it doesn’t seem like classical liberals should oppose it, but it’s also not clear how many classical liberals do oppose it. If it’s the second definition (T2), then they should clearly oppose it because T2 is directly opposed to classical liberalism. Levy doesn’t make the case that T2 is…

In the history of commerce, there’s never been a financial scam that comes anywhere near rivalling subsidised wind power.

There aren’t many businesses where a major source of revenue is being paid to NOT produce what it is that your business is meant to produce.

STT is at a loss to find many other current examples that match the profligacy of paying what are called “constraint payments” to wind power outfits, so that they won’t deliver power to the grid when the wind is blowing.

And were not talking small beer, either. Over the last decade, British wind power outfits have collected over £650,000,000.

We covered the story in this recent post: Priceless: Scots Forced to Pay Wind Farms £650,000,000 To NOT Generate Power

Now, here’s another take on what simply has to be the biggest scam in history.

Sutherland windfarm operators paid a total of £63m to turn off turbines

Credit: Coal India Limited
In some countries ’emissions’ obsessed leaders stumble around looking for non-existent net-zero pathways to their imaginary climate heaven. But India’s recent approach towards fossil utilization can be summed up in three words: “No Holds Barred”, says the author.
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India is on the way to becoming a fossil fuel-based energy powerhouse of the 21st century, says Vijay Jayaraj @ The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

India’s developmental goals for the future are quite ambitious. They ought to be: From tackling the surging poverty rates to providing affordable utilities, the country faces a steep challenge.

The key to achieving any of its developmental goals is a strong energy sector.

India is the third largest energy consuming nation and is following the fossil fuel pathway (like the West did during the 20th century) to achieve energy independence in the near future.

Mercenaries have earned a dubious name for themselves throughout history; their object, as a rule, has been to obtain maximum pay for minimum risks, with the result that those hiring them rarely get value for money. Mercenaries, usually white and recruited from the former colonial powers, became familiar and generally despised figures in Africa during the post-independence period. They were attracted by the wars, whether civil or liberation, that occurred in much of Africa during this time and, as a rule, were to be found on the side of reaction: supporting Moise Tshombe in his attempt to take Katanga out of the Republic of the Congo (1960–63); in Rhodesia fighting on the side of the illegal Smith regime against the liberation movements; in Angola; on both sides in the civil war in Nigeria; and in other theaters as well.

The Congo

In the chaos of the Republic of the Congo…

The media’s obsession with cataclysmic climate change is matched only by their fixation on unreliable wind and solar power as the only solution.

That narrative has been tortured for over more than 20 years, now. But even among their own ilk, the “only more subsidies for wind turbines and solar panels will save us” narrative has worn thin, of late.

Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans lifted the lid on the cynical and manipulative crony capitalists profiteering from the climate industrial complex that they helped to create. For his trouble, he’s been effectively censored by the media, with his movie pulled from YouTube and other platforms, simply because the fact that renewable energy is an enormous moneymaking scam, doesn’t fit the narrative. Australians won’t find any reference to Planet of the Humans on ‘their’ ABC or SBS, ordinarily the natural vehicles to carry Moore’s anti-capitalist, chip-on-his-shoulder, rhetoric.

Michael Shellenberger, once…

The Antonine Wall runs between the Forth and Clyde in Scotland, about 100 miles (160 km) north of Hadrian’s Wall. It was built under the orders of Antoninus Pius in the early 140s, and was permanently abandoned in the 160s. His Roman biographer states that he built a turf wall in Britain once the governor, Lollius Urbicus, had defeated the ‘barbarians’. Pius may have needed to establish a reputation for himself as a firm ruler, but perhaps there were local problems like idle soldiers, the tying up of too many troops in the numerous garrison posts of Hadrian’s Wall, and difficulties with supplying the remote central sector forts. There may even have been a change of policy requiring more exact control of the area north of Hadrian’s Wall, perhaps connected with the fact that the latter cut across the tribal lands of the Brigantes, the principal tribe of northern Britain…