Category: Uncategorized

  • What have we learnt?

    The liberal world order, the whole post-war, rules-based thing that we treasured. That’s obviously over. It’s not just what’s happening now, and not just in theatres of war: the symptoms…

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  • Where is my patriotism?

    Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured…

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  • A small bookclub

    All these novels have fewer than 200 pages, some of them fewer than 100. Together they make up the first couple of batches of books in my family’s Small Book…

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  • Flat tax?

    A surprisingly large number of politicians apparently want to nuke taxation from orbit… — It’s September 2005; towards the end of the Blair era, a few months into his third…

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  • Assisted dying or compulsory suicide?

    Do your duty, prepare for your departure. — Tl;dr: Our medical/care system is screwed, governments are all efficiency- and cost-obsessed. They’re fixated on ageing and on the explosion of the…

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  • People worried about mobile phones, what’s the actual problem?

    (hint: it’s the predatory corporations) — I don’t want to be too pedantic. When people – some of whom are well-informed, even brilliant – become hysterical about the alleged damaging…

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  • How do you fund a monarchy?

    There are only two ways: taxation or plunder — In modern monarchies it’s tricky. The sovereign can no longer send soldiers from town to town to extract funds and, since…

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  • Some bullet-points about regulation

    In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work — UPDATED 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always…

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  • Look like you mean it

    Riot season arrived on schedule. — Back in the old days… …lefties used to say things like “the forces of reaction – the capitalists and their proxies – divide us…

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  • Tape trauma

    In the late eighties I lived in the East End of London and I used to rent movies from a little video shop on the A11 near Bow Road underground…

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