Category: Culture wars

Both Britain and America appear to be lurching into a kind of cultural fascism. Roy Moore, the controversial Republican nominee in the Alabama Senate race, has been accused by Leigh Corfman and three other women that he made sexual overtures to them when he was in his 30s and they were between the ages of 14 and 18. These claims may or may not be true. At present, we don’t know. But that hasn’t stopped Moore’s fellow Republicans from behaving as if they’re the regime of a banana republic. Presumption…

Read More

The Harvey Weinstein scandal punched open the dam. Now virtually every day brings a new slew of allegations in Britain about male sexual misbehaviour – in the theatre, in Parliament, in the media. This has all got seriously out of hand. There’s no question but that some of these allegations are extremely serious and that the men involved need to be held to account. But sexual attacks or harassment are being conflated with minor incidents of lewd and crass behaviour. All of this is reprehensible, but the reaction is out…

Read More

The Australian politician Tony Abbott has delivered a really terrific speech on the AGW scam to the Global Warming Foundation. What was so good was that he placed the fake science of anthropogenic global warming theory squarely in its correct and all-important context – the suicidal attack by the west upon its own civilisation and the principles underpinning it, including the pursuit of rationality and evidence-based inquiry. Here are some extracts: “In Britain and Australia, scarcely 50 per cent describe themselves as Christian, down from 90 per cent a generation…

Read More

So it begins once more. In the synagogues this week, it’s Groundhog Day. Jews go back to the opening of the Five Books of Moses and start the narrative all over again. The secular world looks on with indifference, bemusement or contempt. Among unbelievers, it is an article of faith that reason, science and modernity are in one box and religion, superstition and obscurantism in another. Ah yes; the rational, factual, grounded secular world. The one that is currently disinviting speakers and violently attacking universities on the grounds of upholding…

Read More

Much has been written, and doubtless much more will be, about the grotesque sexual predations of the Hollywood movie titan Harvey Weinstein. As allegations now come tumbling out from women who say he raped, molested or otherwise sexually abused them, the question is obviously how this never previously came to light since everyone seemed to know about it. In a particularly fine piece here, Lee Smith suggests that this has only come out now because the media power-structures which ensured silence in the past have collapsed. The revelation of this…

Read More

Climate scientists have now admitted they were wrong about man-made global warming and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Not very wrong, you understand, just a bit wrong. Apparently the planet is still going to hell in a carbon-lined hand-cart, just more slowly. A study in the journal Nature Geoscience says the world has warmed more slowly than had been forecast by computer models, which were “on the hot side” and overstated the impact of emissions. You don’t say. Global average temperature has risen by about 0.9C since…

Read More

In America, four liberal rabbinic organizations have scrapped their participation in the annual conference call in which the president traditionally offers his greetings for the Jewish New Year. Their reason? President Donald Trump’s statements about the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville were “lacking in moral leadership and empathy for the victims of racial and religious hatred.” After that rally, which gave rise to a violent counterprotest and the murder of a young woman when a white supremacist driver plowed his car into a group of “antifa” (or anti-fascist) protesters, Trump provoked…

Read More