6 recent quotations

Viktor Orban:

"There is no document ... which states that if you enter the EU you must become an immigrant country...We tolerate the fact that some Member States ... admit migrants .. they should tolerate the fact that we do not wish to do so". 

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate expected to win this year's Mexican presidential election:

"Everyone in the world has a human right to enter [the USA]."

Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice for England and Wales, who is the senior judge deciding divorce law, said in a speech at the Eleanor Rathbone Social Justice Public Society on 30th May that "we should should welcome and applaud” the end of traditional sexual morality.

The economy of the United Kingdom as a % of global GDP

1.8% in 1600* 5.2% in 1820 9.1% in 1870 8.3% in 1913 6.4% in 1960 3.4% in 2012 3.7% in 2018 Sources: United States Department of Agriculture, International Monetary Fund * England, Scotland & Wales

Gideon Rachman wants a world government

Nothing is more old fashioned than a future that has failed.

Gideon Rachman, who writes for the Financial Times, is an intelligent man who nowadays still thinks Brexit can be prevented. 

I stumbled by chance across this article from 2008 by him, arguing for world government.

He quotes Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian historian, has written:

“For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible”

and Jacques Attali, who founded EBRD and advised President Sarkozy:

Mary McAleese: infant baptism breaches fundamental human rights

How much Southern Ireland has changed. Former Irish president Mary McAleese now says that infant baptism breaches fundamental human rights.

I can't see how she can stand up that argument but her remarks might be pointing towards the future. She would have more of a case, I suppose, if she argued against bringing children up in a religion. It is Muslims and Hindus who will prevent that idea ever being implemented. 

The second biggest social change since the 1980s in Europe (after single sex marriage) is that comparative religion, before the 1980s something only studied at post-graduate level, is now taught to children as young as five.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire explains most of our ills

Someone else agrees with me that the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, which the Romanian historian and interwar Prime Minister Nicolae Iorga called 'Byzantium after Byzantium', is the cause of so many of the world's problems.

Paul T Horgan writes, in the consistently excellent online magazine Conservative Woman, that

The decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire is a global event that has occupied all of the Great Powers except China for about 300 years. 

Nil nisi bono - not necessarily

I do not like to speak ill of the dead, unless it is someone like Edward Kennedy, but I do not share the widespread admiration for American journalist Charles Krauthammer, who died recently. 

I have to say that he was on the important things disastrously wrong, not a conservative at all, but like many in the post-1952 Republican Party a right-wing liberal internationalist.

In a 2005 speech he called neoconservatism

"a governing ideology whose time has come."

Quotations

"I do not support the Irish ban [on abortion], and it is easily evaded by taking the ferry to England but, if and when it collapses, Ireland as a country with a distinct moral culture of its own is finished; Ireland will have become a mere off-shore island." Christie Davies, 'The Strange Death of Moral Britain" (2004)

"Feminism is poison." Margaret Thatcher

Quotations

When all the objectives of government include the achievement of equality - other than equality before the law - that government poses a threat to liberty. Margaret Thatcher

No-one can build the bridge on which you, and only you, can cross the river of life. 
Nietzsche

What the papers say - I have found four plums

In his upcoming book on US immigration, my brilliant friend Reihan Salam — himself the son of Bangladeshi immigrants — makes a bold argument: America must either restrict immigration or risk civil war as rising inequality and racial tension combine.
I hope Salam is right that the American melting pot can somehow be salvaged. But I have no such hope for Europe. No one who has spent any time in Germany

Jordan Peterson

Responsibility - that's what gives life meaning. Lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself. 

People are pack animals. They need to pull against a weight.

These come from this really wonderful talk about how to become a man.  From another talk, about Peter Pans who never grow up, came this.

That's the counter-culture: grow the hell up.

Happy pride month in Canada!

CBC, the Canadian state-owned broadcasting company, has broadcast this clip which repays watching and posted it on the net under the rubric:

Happy pride month! Jessi Cruickshank talks with kids about gay pride and being gay allies

The children look about seven or eight and are ardent believers in sexual diversity.
Jessi Cruickshank asks the little innocents

I'm not gay but I'm a gay ally. Are you gay allies?

Quotations

"In this world you either have an empire or you have to be part of somebody else's." Peter Hitchens, who says the EU is Germany's empire.

"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." Benjamin Disraeli

Bucarest, mon amour

“There's not a city in the former Soviet Union [she meant Bloc] which hasn't been christened The New Prague (apart from Bucharest, and if you've been there you'll know why).”
Guardian travel article by Joanne O'Connor

I remember the 1989 Lonely Planet Guide to Eastern Europe (individual countries didn't merit their own guides) included Bucharest in its list of ten things to avoid in Eastern Europe. I don't remember what the other nine were but they were things not places.

John McDonnell supported the IRA's use of ‘the ballot, the bullet and the bomb’

According to a story in The Times in 2015 John McDonnell, who will be Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) if the Labour Party come to power in England, told a public meeting at a pub in South London in 1985, attended by Sinn Fein and left-wing Labour Party members, that ‘the ballot, the bullet and the bomb’ would end British rule in Northern Ireland. He then called local Labour councillors who had boycotted the meeting ‘gutless wimps’ and said ‘a kneecapping might help change their minds’. A kneecapping means having their kneecaps shot off.

You can't generalise

No-one esteems aphorisms any more. Were Wilde around today (and not in gaol for going to bed with underage boys), every quip he made would get the response: Oscar, you can't generalise.

Or rather it was so until Twitter. A very useful achievement of Twitter was to relaunch the aphorism, before they increased the maximum number of characters in a tweet.

Quotations

"It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom)."
Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Society is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil" Sir Roger Scruton, How To Be a Conservative

An empty wish

I am far from being a huge admirer of Mr Trump (though his presidency is enormous fun) but I do wish England (by which I mean the UK) had him to lead us out of the EU, not the pygmy we have.

I hope pygmy is not a racist expression.

Boris Johnson has come round to the same futile wish, to judge by his recent speech made

Ivano-Frankivsk in balmy summer weather

After Bucacs we went on, through green countryside glowingly fertile, to one of my favourite towns, Ivano-Frankivsk, known till 1962 as Stanislau or Stanisławów. 

It was founded as a Polish fortress in 1663 and was named after the Polish hetman Stanisław "Rewera" Potocki. Like Bucsacs, it became a largely self governing city and was later incorporated into the Austrian empire in the first partition of Poland.

Greek Catholic church, Ivano Frankivsk