conservatives

I’m actually quite pleased with our little demo. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic when we assembled in Trafalgar Square, where various speeches were made of which not one word was audible (note to the various orgs involved: I’d happily spring for some batteries for the loud hailer. I mean, my student union would have got that…

Read More I don’t know what they mean by that…

Speaking of new Soviet men, The GOP Speaks continues to be a fantastic resource on authoritarian thinking. Short version – chap writes to every county- and state-level Republican chairman in the US and asks them to fill in a questionnaire. Blogs the results as they come in. Here’s number 26. 1) So long as it’s…

Read More the GOP speaks, and so does the unconscious

Libertarianism, by which I mean yer bog standard comments thread North American subtype, is irrational. This struck me in the context of this post of Charlie Whitaker’s, which was of course criticised by the local libertarian in the usual terms. First of all, let’s define terms; the standard set-up of modern right-libertarian arguments is based…

Read More that’s not noise, that’s the sound of freedom – oh, by the way, I voted Libertarian

This Crooked Timber points to a column in the Economist about interns on the Bush campaign carefully hand-writing a range of fake homemade signs, confiscating the ones their positively vetted audience had brought along, and issuing them to the crowd for the media to wow over their rural authenticity. Well, not surprising. And the Economist…

Read More David Cameron…and the MAFIA, but not in the way you think

A really good fisk is almost like a remix; you should be thankful for the original chunk of hackwork for giving us the chance to do something interesting. Hence Matt Carr, who dons the positive-pressure mask and takes the scalpel, chops up Christopher Caldwell’s book, and demonstrates the throbbing worm guts to the eager students…

Read More you say you want a revolution, well, you know…

Resistance – The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, with a polemic for greater understanding of such…

Read More Review: Alistair Crooke, “Resistance: the essence of the Islamist revolution”

The times change; children don’t respect their parents, and everyone’s writing a book. However, the forces of interest don’t change, and one place you find them pure is the defence procurement economy. Consider this story. The first thing you’ll note is that it’s kinda plausible, if you’re the kind of person who reads this blog.…

Read More but what do the poor do with their lives?

More information is becoming available about the Christopher Hitchens brawl. It appears to have been a telling moment in Decency. The crucial detail is that Hitchens didn’t just deface any old SSNP artefact – he scrawled on the monument to the first shots fired in resistance to the Israeli occupation of 1982. Now, I’m sure…

Read More Hitchens Drinks Scotch in Psychic Counter-Insurgency