Utopia, you are standing in it!

Todd Gitlin wrote a reply to my above review, which in my view missed every available point. You can decide for yourself by going to the Democracy site and searching for Gitlin.
Our exchange of letter in the current issue is below. Gitlin argues that he was criticised by Chomsky and the far Left in the Nineties and that excuses his uneasiness about showing solidarity with the victims of Islamo-fascism today. But that only goes to prove the argument I made in What’s Left? that extreme anti-western, anti-liberal ideas which began in obscure corners of the left in the Nineties, moved into the mainstream.
Anyway. Here is our exchange.

Issue #12, Spring 2009
Letters to the Editor
by Democracy Readers

Left, Right, Left . . .

Suppose officials in the Obama Administration are anxious to find ideas to guide America in a new direction. They might turn to Democracy and read Todd…

The ‘Cooper-Letwin Act’ (European Union Withdrawal (No 5) Act 2019) may yet come to be known as the constitutional crisis that wasn’t. But, the advocacy by some of the Government’s ability to advise the crown to refuse assent in order to legitimately prevent the Bill from becoming law has provoked significant debate. The object of this post is not to address the question of whether the Government can properly advise the Crown to refuse royal assent (among others: advocated by John Finnis, Robert Craig; rejected by Mark Elliott, Jeff King and Tom Poole). The aim is to address the slightly different issue, raised by Professor Finnis, that the ‘Lord Chancellor’ can legitimately withhold Bills from presentation to the Monarch (considered in terms of constitutional principle by Elliott and David Howarth). On this point, I suggest that Professor Finnis’s argument is constitutionally mistaken, as a matter…

Climate change is an urgent topic of discussion among politicians, journalists and celebrities, but actual climate scientists are not so much click-bait as real celebrities, and journalists seem more interested in click-bait than deeply informed commentary. We seem to be transforming into a society that values  popularity more than accuracy, or perhaps we always were, but it just wasn’t as obvious as it is today. Richard Lindzen is one of the most esteemed climate scientists in the world, and one to whom you should pay attention.

Observer, October, 2017

The few people not caught up in leader worship in Brighton asked how the cult of Jeremy Corbyn’s personality would die. Would his support for Brexit drive his young admirers away? Have we reached peak Corbyn? They forgot the lesson of history that you don’t worry about personality cults that fail. You worry when they succeed.

Credit: BBC

A brief run-through of some of the problems with ‘man-made warming’ theories, which so often get swept under the carpet and treated as unmentionable.

One of the main accusations launched by climate activists is that anyone arguing against man-made global warming is “anti-science.”

They tell us that the science is “settled,” and that anyone who objects is ignoring a blindingly obvious set of facts.

But what to do about someone like me, asks Steven Wright in Climate Change Dispatch?

In this blog for the ‘Named Parliaments’ series, Dr Paul Hunneyball, Associate Editor of the House of Lords 1604-29 project, explores the length of parliaments, paying particular attention to the Short and Long parliaments of the 1640s and 1650s…

Down the centuries, the length of parliaments has
varied enormously, from a few days to a decade or more. That being the case,
it’s perhaps surprising that the Short and Long parliaments, both of which
opened in 1640, are almost unique in being named according to their respective
durations. (Barebone’s Parliament of
1653 is sometimes referred to as the Little Parliament, but strictly speaking
it was a nominated assembly, and can therefore be set to one side.) In part the
explanation lies in the events of these two parliaments, rather than their simple
longevity – or lack of it – but in order to make sense of all that…

Image credit: MIT
If the global warming nightmare was to happen, solar and wind systems simply don’t work in high-heat environments. So why are activists pushing them, asks Climate Change Dispatch?

Everything, and I mean everything about the man-made global warming movement is rotten to the core, says Dr. Joel Adams.

Tens of thousands of our own brave and brilliant scientists, as well as websites such as Climate Change Dispatch, are fighting the good fight against the climate change fraud every day. It’s a fight we are working hard to win.

I just completed a 435-page book on the subject of climate change fraud and the people and motivations behind it.

I discovered that as bad as the scientific fraud is, the motivations behind it turned out to be worse. These motivations are to put it in a few words: money and a political totalitarian power grab by…

Back in 2013 Karl Smith offered a startling rehabilitation of Arthur Burns’s calamitous tenure as Fed Chairman, first under Richard Nixon who appointed him, later under Gerald Ford who reappointed him, and finally, though briefly, under Jimmy Carter who did not reappoint him. Relying on an academic study of Burns by Fed economist Robert Hetzel drawing extensively from Burns’s papers at the Fed, Smith argued that Burns had a more coherent and sophisticated view of how the economy works and of the limitations of monetary policy than normally acknowledged by the standard, and almost uniformly negative, accounts of Burns’s tenure, which portray Burns either as a willing, or as a possibly reluctant, and even browbeaten, accomplice of Nixon in deploying Fed powers to rev up the economy and drive down unemployment to ensure Nixon’s re-election in 1972, in willful disregard of the consequences of an overdose of monetary stimulus.

According…

Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980), episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 1

The short paper by James Watson and Francis Crick establishing the helical structure of the DNA molecule was published in the science journal, Nature, on April 25, 1953. The blurb of this book describes it as the scientific breakthrough of the 20th century. Quite probably, although it was a busy century – the discovery of antibiotics was quite important, too, not to mention the atom bomb.

James Watson and Francis Crick with their DNA model at the Cavendish Laboratories in 1953

Anyway, what makes this first-person account of the events leading up to the discovery such fun is Watson’s prose style and mentality. He is fearless. He takes no prisoners. He is brutally honest about his own shortcomings and everyone else’s and, in doing so, sheds extraordinarily candid light on how science is actually done. He tells us that foreign conferences where nobody speaks English are often pointless. Many scientists…

Another weekend, another flurry of anti-legal aid stories finding their way into the tabloids. On the criminal legal aid front, The Mirror splashed outrage at the notion of Andrew Hill, the pilot acquitted of manslaughter following the Shoreham Airshow tragedy, “getting” legal aid to mount his successful defence at his criminal trial last year.

It’s one thing when The Mirror – a market leader in legal aid trash news – whips its readers into uninformed apoplexy over criminal legal aid being granted to those who are, after a fair trial only possible because of legal aid, convicted. But it breaks bold new ground even for this organ to resent legal aid being granted to a man whom a jury has found to be not guilty.

Then this morning, the Daily Mail, in a headline which may stand out as the apotheosis of journalistic legal ignorance, announced:

“Shamima Begum is…

Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full)

Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded

Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. We must not head down the path of socialism like Greece has done.