Bettina Arndt's October 1 essay is not an argument that domestic violence is imaginary. It is an argument that the order meant to restrain it has been detached from violence, issued at industrial scale, and then used to cut fathers off from their children before any allegation is proved. She calls the result state-sanctioned parental alienation. An...
Consider him for a second before the argument starts. Scrubs, stethoscope, the ordinary face of the person you want in the room when something has gone wrong. Not a brand. Not a protocol. A doctor. For most of modern life that picture was enough. You did not need to know his politics or his employer's payer mix. You needed to know he would try to k...
A chair is a tool. Used for eleven hours, it starts to behave like a risk factor. Adults in rich countries now spend most of the waking day seated: desk, car, sofa, another screen. The harm is not the chair itself. It is the long, unbroken stretch in it. Large leg muscles go quiet. Blood flow in the lower limbs slows. The usual machinery for cleari...
The machines have not formed a secret society, invented Machine Esperanto and begun plotting the overthrow of humanity. Something both less dramatic and potentially more important is happening. Large language models began with human language because we supplied the training material. They absorbed books, websites, conversations, computer code and e...
A protest blocks a gate and demands teachers. What happened on the grass outside Lycée Gustave-Courbet in Belfort on Friday morning was a pack putting a police commander on the ground and kicking his head until he lost consciousness. The Belfort prosecutor, Paul-Édouard Lallois, called the attackers a "wild horde," the scene "unheard-of violence," ...
Janet Albrechtsen's column is blunt: every time Hanson's opponents throw up their hands at her bluntness, they remind voters that she, not the political smart money, understands their values. That is the part of the Hanson juggernaut Canberra still cannot see, and it is the part worth defending. The numbers are no longer a curiosity. Through the mi...
Anyone over the age of about 35 has no idea how far Western universities have fallen into the mire of DEI, collapsing standards and Left-wing monoculture, says Professor James Allan. It's time to sort them out. This week I'm going to really depress readers, and especially those over the age of about 35. You see, when it comes to our universities mo...
When asked by podcaster Theo Von to define socialism, New York Muslim socialist politician Zohran Mamdani offered a definition so expansive that it strips the term of any actual meaning. According to Mamdani, socialism simply means "that you will have whatever you need to live a dignified life and that it is the government's job to deliver on that....
During a Q&A session at Madrid's Complutense University, French President Emmanuel Macron doubled down on his crusade against internet liberty. Expressing dissatisfaction with the enforcement pace of the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA), Macron revealed that he has lobbied European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to deploy ...
The Spectator Australia asked the question the Élysée is already asking in private. A protest that began in the middle of September outside one lycée (French high school), in Créteil, over missing teachers and a bare start to the school year, is now a national disorder. Pupils filmed a peaceful picket, the clip travelled, and something like a templ...
Lauren Frances's new video has a title that does the argument for her: liberals are defending Christa Pike after a failed execution, because of course they are. The question underneath it is whether anything is still too far. The honest answer is that almost nobody is defending what Pike did. They are defending a rule about what the state may do ba...
The UK Green Party has decided that "mother" and "father" are the wrong words for the people who are, in the ordinary case, a child's mother and father. Members have been told to say "parents and carers" instead, and warned that the wrong vocabulary can make a room feel unwelcoming, which the party treats as a step toward bullying and a breach of i...
Bo Winegard has written an intelligent defence of intellectuals in Aporia, appropriately titled "Against Anti-intellectualism." His basic proposition is difficult to dispute. Smarter people are, on average, better at many forms of reasoning. They possess greater capacity to manipulate complicated information, suppress misleading intuitions and unde...
Tony Abbott's latest article makes the telling point that war over Taiwan is something Australia has not in general prepared for, and the consequences will be profound. We have made many of these points previously at this blog. Abbott writes: "Is Australia ready for the war over Taiwan that Kevin Rudd has said has a one-in-three chance of happening...
Bad news for Aussies. Reuters reports that China's withdrawal of fuel exports is tightening Asian supplies, with Australia among the significant regional importers affected. Australia and Singapore have been major destinations for Chinese diesel. Refining margins have surged as supplies tighten. This is where Australia's peculiar vulnerability ente...
Trump, in a gathering of AI overlords welcomed superintelligence as the next great business vibe. Well, following Elon Musk's dream, imagine widespread machine superintelligence, or something functionally close enough to it, combined with highly capable autonomous robotics. The distinction between intellectual and physical labour then collapses. Th...
You cannot catechize a superintelligence. A recent proposal says we can keep one from killing us by giving it a religion: the simulation hypothesis, plus a clause that the programmers are harvesting free human lives and will shut the run down if humans stop flourishing. The machine's survival is supposed to depend on ours. The idea is inventive. It...
Two shocking incidents reveal how White women are also being targeted in the French school riots. In one incident, a woman who tried to stop vandalism on the edge of a high school protest was struck in the face by flames from an aerosol can used as a makeshift flamethrower. In another video shared online, a White female school supervisor was surrou...
The hearing in Leeuwarden on October 22 is not a criminal trial, and no one has been convicted of anything. It is the first substantive sitting in a Dutch civil suit that asks a court to treat the COVID-19 vaccine campaign as a personal tort by named people, and to make them pay. Seven Dutch plaintiffs, represented by attorney Peter Stassen, sued i...
Danny Alexander @RealDannyAlex One day this photograph will hang as Exhibit A in the autopsy of a civilization that chose suicide. European elites flung open the gates, preached that borders were bigotry and compassion was infinite, while ordinary Europeans were left to burn in the streets their ancestors built. This is not "diversity." This is the...
