Given my enthusiasm for Javier Milei and his libertarian reforms, I’m excited to be in Buenos Aires for a week-long program on “Understanding Argentina’s Transformations Under Milei.” This means a heavy does of Milei-ism this week. For today’s column, I’m going to share some slides from a presentation by Alejandro Rodriguez on the “Inheritance” Milei […]
An Area Standards Committee of the Law Society fined Stephen Franks and Franks Ogilvy for, well being lawyers. They sent a letter on behalf of their client to health professionals involved in “gender affirming care”. The ASC found that they had “used a legal process for an improper purpose”, censured them and fined them. I…
The Medical Council has proposed a statement on cultural competence that is basically a political litmus test. It is outrageous overreach, and an example of why Parliament needs to rein in all these regulatory bodies. No one would object to a statement that doctors must be respectful of all cultures and beliefs, while undertaking their…
A strong criticism of the Green Party of England and Wales (often referred to collectively as the UK Greens) typically focuses on several themes: practicality, economic realism, ideological rigidity, and aspects of its foreign policy positions. In these respects, the UK Greens are even more extreme than the Australian Greens Party. 1. Policies Often Criticised as Economically […]
The Telegraph reports: A short video went viral last weekend that briefly restored my faith in British policing. It showed a female Metropolitan Police officer standing alone in Whitechapel, surrounded by a crowd of angry Muslim men, calmly defending the right of a Christian street preacher to preach. “In this country, we have freedom of speech,” she…
Last night I and a number of NZ Against Hamas members attended what was for me one of the most entertaining events of the last 12 months: a mass protest of a few hundred Kiwi Iranians against a dozen or so elderly communists who turned up to a meeting in Mt Eden War Memorial Hall…
There is something profoundly wrong with a moral culture that shouts genocide at Israel’s war against Hamas while averting its gaze from an actual genocide unfolding in Sudan. Words matter, especially words that name humanity’s gravest crimes. When they are deployed selectively—loudly against one conflict, quietly or not at all against another—they cease to illuminate injustice and instead reveal hypocrisy. […]
Is it time to pack our belongings and head to Argentina, where Javier Milei is dramatically improving economic policy and cultural attitudes? I’m joking, but also not joking. The reason I’m not joking is that there’s a very depressing scenario for America’s near-term economic outlook. It involves these six potential developments. Thanks in part to […]
Australian writers’ festivals are frequently accused of being “pro-Palestinian” or anti-Israeli. The charge is usually made in frustration: panels on Gaza and Palestinian literature are common; strongly pro-Israel voices are rare; and anyone who questions the imbalance is quickly told they are confusing “balance” with “morality”. Yet the more interesting question is not whether a […]
I put something like this up years ago, but it’s a good way to see, with just a few clicks, what happened to Iran after the “Revolution”. Let’s taken women’s dress, a touchstone of misogyny and theocratic oppression. Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it was a pretty free country in that respect, and everyone…
The UK is having one of its regular by-elections, this time in Gorton and Denton, a constituency in Manchester. The constituency was new at the 2024 election, and at the time was won by Labour’s Andrew Gwynne with 50.8% of the vote, with Reform a distant second on 14.1%. Gwynne had been an MP for…
For two reasons I think that Jesse Singal‘s long op-ed (really a “guest essay”) in today’s NYT will mark a turning point in public and professional attitudes towards “affirmative care.” First, the NYT saw fit to publish a piece showing that many American medical associations have promoted “affirmative care” of gender-dysphoric adolescents, despite those associations…
In the classic movie comedy, A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese lamented, “do you have any idea what it’s like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing.” Now 86, Cleese has a more pressing concern about being English: whether his exercise of […]
Pacifism presents itself as the highest moral ground: a principled refusal to engage in violence, an insistence that all killing is always wrong, and a hope that moral purity can disarm brutality. In practice, however, pacifism is not merely naïve but morally evasive. It refuses responsibility for consequences, confuses intentions with outcomes, and ultimately relies […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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