The most frightening thing about the way the world has changed since the late 90s is not just how quickly it has happened but how mysteriously. Countries like Britain and Australia seemed to be perfectly normal fairly civilised countries. Now Britain is a totalitarian dystopia and Australia is well on the way to being one. There was no violent revolution. No overthrow of the government. No military coup. But the results have been as dramatic as the changes that occurred in the past when the communists or the fascists took power. Prime ministers have come and gone. Elections have been held. S ..read more

When we dutifully troop off to the polling stations on election day we know in our hearts that we’re wasting our time. We’re going to get screwed and having the choice of being screwed by the Tweedledee Party or the Tweedledum Party isn’t much of a choice. How did this happen? Was it simply some weird historical accident that all the major political parties ended up being pretty much the same? Some political theorists think thee’s an inevitable drift to the centre and that the major parties eventually all become centrist. But that hadn’t happened. There is nothing moderate or centrist about t ..read more

Perhaps I should have called this a partial, somewhat reluctant, somewhat tentative defence of liberalism but here goes. I used to be very critical of liberalism but living in the current illiberal age I must admit I’m starting to feel a twinge of nostalgia for old school liberalism. I’m not mounting a defence of economic liberalism, which I despise. I’m talking about social liberalism. I try not to see political ideologies in terms of right and wrong or good and bad. Ideologies either produce satisfactory or unsatisfactory results. Liberalism in the classic meaning of the world is an indivi ..read more

One of the interesting things about the political situation today, and it’s something that most people don’t seem to have noticed, is that we’re seeing a war on liberalism. Wokeism and Political Correctness and World War T are all-out frontal assaults on the fundamental assumptions of liberalism. Wokeism is an attack on the time-honoured liberal position that race should not matter and that everyone should strive to be colour-blind. World War T is not only an attempt to erase women it is also an attempt to utterly destroy old school feminism. If there’s no such thing as a woman (and that’s th ..read more

From the beginning of the 19th century to the early years of the 20th century democracy gradually established itself in the West. And something very interesting happened them. Democratically elected governments started to take away people’s freedoms. Of course governments have always to some extent been in the business of social control, but democratic governments have gradually extended that social control to cover almost every aspect of life. Democratic governments are in the business of micro-managing our lives. The depressing thing is that this happened because public opinion on the whol ..read more

The Cultural Left has been bleating about a supposed war on women for quite a while now. They’re both right and wrong about this. There is a war on women going on, but it’s not being waged by the Religious Right. It’s being waged by an alliance of intersectional feminists and the LGBTwhatever lobby. And one thing needs to be clearly understood. These days the LGBTwhatever lobby is effectively the T lobby. They’re the ones calling the shots. Social conservatives and conservative Christians are, as usual, utterly clueless about this. It always amuses me when these rightists start speculating ab ..read more

A recent post on A Political Refugee From The Global Village got me thinking abut the mediæval Catholic Church. The conventional view is that by the fifteenth century the mediæval Church was corrupt and morally lax and desperately in need of reform. But is that really true? We only get the reformers’ side of the story, partly because they won and partly because they had good propagandists on their side (people like Erasmus). The Church in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly corrupt. All human institutions are corrupt. Every system of government ever devised has ended up being corrupt. Until ..read more

Do modern liberals really want to create a better world? They would like us to think that that is their objective. And even their conservative opponents generally believe that that is the objective of liberals. Conservatives argue that liberal schemes for creating a better world are misguided and will cause more harm than good but most conservatives do not challenge the assumption that the objective of liberals is to create a better world. Is that assumption true? Today liberalism is the ideology of the ruling class. Ruling class ideologies always have one real objective - to ensure that weal ..read more

Liberalism used to be (or used to claim to be) an ideology based on the ideas of freedom and choice. That is clearly no longer the case. To understand how this came about we have to understand how human nature works and how key human institutions work. Hunter-gatherers and nomads don’t need government. The first agricultural settlements needed little or nothing in the form of government. Once cities and states (or proto-states) started to emerge things changed. Some kind of government was required. Government of course was (as it always has been and always will be) in the hands of those who h ..read more

The most significant event in western history was not the change from pastoralism to settled agriculture. Nor was it the Industrial Revolution. The most momentous change was the rise of monotheism. This led to changes in a lot of things besides religious belief. In the pre-Christian pagan world of the Roman Empire (and to a lesser extent in classical Greece and the Hellenistic world) there were countless competing belief systems. There were countless religious cults and there were myriad philosophical systems (and the dividing line between theology and philosophy was very very hazy). You coul ..read more