Obscuring weak arguments behind baffling terminology has long been a woke tactic. In the Mail, Andrew Doyle offers an A to Z guide to decoding its strangest phrases, from 'white tears' to 'misogynoir'. Here's an excerpt: A Allyship The practice of advocating for people from marginalised groups and basking in the warm glow of their oppression…. B Bi...

There is near hysteria on some YouTube channels about the Siberian plague issue, with the Russian lockdown of hospitals being taken as a matter of concern: see links below. The phrase "Siberian plague" is doing too much work at once. In Russian medical history, it is the old name for anthrax. In the headlines of the last few days, however, it refer...

LONDON — The British government issued an official public apology on Tuesday for interrupting whatever it was the nice Muslim men in unmarked vans were doing at 1:00 a.m. outside a military base used by U.S. forces. The five men were quickly released after brief questioning, with Prime Minister Andy Burnham personally calling each one to offer an a...

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...