This really does explain where the West is now

You can spend many years reading many books to try to understand liberal modernity, or you can just watch this 24-second video. pic.twitter.com/KyJLKAuzKM

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) June 2, 2020

Eastern Europeans look on baffled. 

A revolt by the Taliban against old-school liberalism in the New York Times

The New York Times is so extraordinarily biased these days that it cannot be trusted to separate opinion and facts or accurately report the facts about the US Administration or even Swedish death rates. It would hardly seem worth reading. As it is behind a paywall, the question does not arise often. 

Still, it did print an article by Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, almost the only Republican with the possible exception of the President not grovelling to Black Lives Matter, who argued:

It's past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military "or any other means" in "cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws."

Publishing his article prompted a huge debate, if you can call it that, or at any rate a huge divide between journalists over forty, who believe in free speech and debating ideas, and the ones in their twenties who had been triggered. The story is here.

I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this. https://t.co/lU1KmhH2zH

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) June 4, 2020

Note 'not to say something would be immoral' - this is the puritanism that runs through America like Southend through a stick of Southend rock. It is responsible for so many bad things (think prohibition) and possibly one or two good ones. 

The puritans were, of course, the 17th century equivalent of the Taliban and so are their contemporary left-wing secular descendants.

Suppressing dissenters from the new religion

Look at those two faces. I never heard of either of them in my life but those are two journalists who pride themselves on having been around the block and having contrarian opinions on a lot of subjects. Characters, in a word, the sort of men you once found in every pub in every English village, though I am told that characters disappeared years ago. 

Now they are disappearing from the media. Characters are not wanted any more.

"We are actively working with the caller involved to develop some ideas to debate the issues involved." https://t.co/HWL9upxfX9 The last thing anyone wants is 'debate' - submit, or lose your job

— Ed West (@edwest) June 6, 2020

Book judge axed after criticising Black Lives Matter https://t.co/aowkerCFSz just kiss the royal emblem on my cloak, and you will feel no more

— Ed West (@edwest) June 6, 2020

Yes

If you ever wondered “how could that have happened” when reading about a period of history where people got hurt and bystanders just blindly went along with it, pay attention, because it’s happening right now.

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) June 7, 2020

The entire thread is very interesting. I must read the books mentioned.

I particularly liked this comment.

In recent years it's been fascinating to see how historians & psychologists have applied this to historical revolutionary movements

Only a very small fraction of the populace needs be fully committed to a cause to completely transform a society for better or worse

— Avid Commentator 🇦🇺 (@AvidCommentator) June 7, 2020

The BBC, though in some ways wonderful, is no longer an impartial news service and risibly woke

27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London https://t.co/vIq1VL1aiT

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) June 7, 2020

I think the BBC does have to be privatised yet ,considering how anti-conservative and right-on private TV channels like Sky are, that will not be a real solution. 

Is there a solution? Porsche, inventor of the famous car, said that when a problem has no solution it ceases to be a  problem and becomes a fact.

It's interesting, for example, that @BBCNews didn't report the the 2019 protest in defence of Tommy Robinson as "largely peaceful". Only 20 were injured in that, yet it was described with terms such as 'violent disorder', despite it being just a minority who attacked the police.

— Adrian Hilton (@Adrian_Hilton) June 7, 2020

It depends entirely on the objective of the protest - if the protest was against, say, the rape of white girls by Pakistanis in provincial England or sexual assaults by migrants in Germany, one injury would make the protest violent.

A new religion supplants Christianity (but not Islam)

"For when a new sect—that is, a new religion—emerges, its first concern is to extinguish the old to give itself reputation." Machiavelli

Has the world gone mad over the last few years and especially this year? It looks like it because it is hard to find a rational explanation for what is happening. Perhaps we should be looking for irrational explanations instead.

Ed West writing in The Tablet is one of my few soul mates in the mainstream media and clearly thinking along very similar lines to mine. Human rights ideology is a religion, a Christian heresy like the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, Robespierre and Marx. As a religion it cannot be understood rationally. and indeed mkes no sense rationally. Think instead of Albigensians, although they were not in fact Christian heretics but believed in an entirely different religion. Who will lead a crusade against this

As Christianity started to seriously haemorrhage support in the 1960s, so a new faith arose, with “privilege” a form of original sin and so-called “vulnerable groups” the new sacred. Once large sections of the population abandon Christianity, liberalism becomes their default setting. If you meet any well-meaning and highly moral person under the age of 45 today and they aren’t religious, the chances are that they will be heavily into social justice causes – people need that religious impulse, with all it brings.





Today just 16 per cent of liberals in the US think religious faith gives them a “great deal” of meaning in life, compared to 62 per cent of “very conservative” Americans, yet almost a third of those very liberal Americans find a “great deal” of meaning in political causes, compared to just 9 per cent of conservatives. Politics seems to satisfy the same thirst as religion, fuelling a new form of political sectarianism that is intense in the US and growing in the UK.

Testing for Covid-19 is useless says Knut Wittkowski

Whatever you think of his other opinions the Nut, as a friend of mine calls him, is pretty obviously right about the uselessness of testing for Covid-19. 

Where I suspect he is mistaken is when he says antibody testing can tell us how far we have progressed towards achieving herd immunity. The answer the tests give is that we are a very long way off it, but quite a lot of people suspect that many more people are immune than have antibodies, which may be why the virus seems to fade away after two or three months in each country infected.

Please watch this clip and decide if Joe Biden is in good enough mental health to be U.S. President

Please watch this clip and decide if Joe Biden is senile or could credibly win the presidency and discharge its functions. 

The women who are questioning him about sexual harassment are clearly on his side and willing him to clear up the issue with a show of words, but Joe is unable to concentrate on the matter or be at all coherent. The women are embarrassed for him. 

It may just be my fancy, but I imagine they are Democrats worried that performing like this he has no chance of beating Donald Trump.

He always made lots of 'gaffes', always waffled, got confused and strayed from the point, it is perfectly true, but if you doubt he is losing his grip this is how Joe Biden spoke in 1992, when he was in his prime. 

(By the way, in that clip from 1992 he was arguing that Congress should refuse to approve President George H.W. Bush's nomination of a judge to the Supreme Court before the forthcoming presidential election. When the Republicans followed his advice in 2016 he felt differently.)

Putting the kibosh on it - an etymological mystery now apparently solved

Professor Matthew Little suggests in Origin of Kibosh: Routledge Studies in Etymology that “kibosh may derive from the word kurbash, a long whip used for punishment in parts of the Muslim world. It originally appeared in Arabic and Turkish, borrowed into French as ‘courbache’ and into English as ‘kurbash’ and other variant spellings.”

Co-author Professor Stephen Goranson found a poem, “Penal Servitude!” from around 1830 using the phrase. 

“The key verse in the poem (supposedly written by a convict who has returned from imprisonment in Australia) [includes] the following clarification about ‘put on the kibosh’: ‘That is if they was to introduce the lash.’”

...A Cockney chimney sweep, hauled into court in 1834 with his companion for violating the 1834 Chimney Sweepers Act, had an outburst of frustration and anger after the trial. That outburst — delivered in an unmistakable Cockney dialect — contained a blast against ‘the Vigs’ (Whigs) and the sweep used the new expression put the kibosh on. The London Standard article reporting on the trial was widely reprinted in England, and now people all over the country were reading about 'putting the kibosh on the ‘Vigs.’”

I must say that if someone gave this explanation on Call My Bluff I'd not be convinced, but the true etymologies on Call My Bluff were often unconvincing. 

Death in Minnesota and Weather Underground

Black Lives Matter is a scam, of course. It is a pretext rather than a reason for the protests around the world but, at the same time, it is a heartfelt, passionate critique of an unjust world. It makes people who want to overthrow the established order feel they have an obvious justification, one with which everyone who is not malign must agree. 

It is genuinely revolutionary, like the protests and riots of 1968, but also the ideology of the authorities. No politician or journalist wants to look racist by questioning the protesters. Anti-racism is a permanent revolution, of the sort desired by Marx and Engels.

A lot of the reason for the protests and for the violence that often accompanies them is the frustration of the poor and the well-off due to lockdown. Yet before Covid-19 appeared there had been a mood around the world for protest, riot and violence: in Hong Kong, Beirut, Santiago, Catalonia, Iran. It's as if the world is ready for revolution.

A very long article in the Atlantic in January 2016 called 'Why America Is Moving Left' said the Democratic Party establishment's attitudes to the Black Lives Matter protests were evidence of how far left America, especially young America, had moved since the 1990s. 

It pointed out that Eisenhower in effect ratified the New Deal and expected Marco Rubio, if he became President, to ratify Obama's left-wing USA.

Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.

Radu Vodă belltower and Bucur Ciobanu

The lost art of aimless urban walking

The time I love Romania most is probably walking along the crumbling streets of Bucharest's allegedly historic centre. In fact it is late nineteenth century, so not very historic, but it has the patina of dereliction you get in cities that were allowed or forced to decay because of Marxist anti-economic policies: like Havana and, before tourism, Tbilisi. 

It feels half as old as time, while really old places in other countries are highly restored and look as if they were just built. People who read the Narnia books as children can think of the petrified city of Charn in The Magician's Nephew.

During the lockdown I took up my old hobby of aimless urban walking again and since the lockdown ended I continue the habit.

The first picture is of the church of St Nicholas Udricani, which I discovered today for the first time in a small uninteresting little street some way east of Piața Unirii.

The exterior wall painting dates from the late eighteenth century and miraculously escaped the Great Fire of 1847, so the priest told me. He gave me some delicious coliva, baked to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon yesterday.

He told me Udricani means inhabitants of Adrianople, a city that the Turkish republic renamed Edirne. It is graced by beautiful mosques and was capital of the Ottoman empire until Constantinople fell. The emigrants for whom this church was built would have mourned the previous Christian Adrianople.

Stavropoleos convent is my favourite church in Romania despite being restored. 

Covid-19 death

Interestingly George Floyd, the Minneapolis man whose death in police custody sparked protests and riots, was infected with Covid-19. 

Quotations

Peel's 4th principle of policing: "To seek and preserve public favor, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law." (Peelers, historians tell us, did not genuflect to Chartist protesters.)

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” John Kenneth Galbraith

“Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.”
Saki

"Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl." Stephen Leacock

"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult." Stephen Leacock

'Now we know coronavirus is not a random killer, this one-size-fits-all lockdown must come to an end'

"When it is all over, we must do our best not to emerge into a ‘New Normal’ – in that dismal cliched phrase that suggests a dull, constrained future – but an ‘Old Normal’, as we seize back our former lives." 

Professor Karol Sikora, who says the virus seems to be petering out except in Latin America - which is obvious. He hopes it will all be over by September.

A British nurse friend of mine told me in March that it would be over in three or four weeks, 'but don't quote me'. I didn't believe him. I hope it is over before September and before a vaccine is developed, if one is. In Romania and Eastern Europe, including Greece but very possibly not including Russia, it should be over by the end of July.

1,296 deaths in Romania are recorded up to this morning of people who were infected with Covid-19. 80% of them, according to the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Health who has looked at each case closely, were not from Covid-19. Fewer than 300 deaths from Covid-19 then in almost ten weeks, mostly of old people with other serious health problems too. Thankfully this is nothing like the pandemic we feared, though a terrible pandemic will no doubt come one day. Let's hope we have better ideas about what to do when it does and let's hope they do not involve stopping the world.

By the way, YouTube removed an interview with Professor Sikora, before later reinstating it. (They also shadow banned Peter Hitchens, deleted an interview with Dr Knut Wittkowski, former head of epidemiology at Rockefeller University, and removed a clip of Toby Young talking to Stanford Professor Michael Levitt. Imagine your telephone company cutting off your calls if you made remarks which contradicted WHO advice.)

'The coronavirus lockdowns have upended the lives of Americans to “protect” them from a virus with a 0.2 percent fatality rate, with the majority of those fatalities occurring in nursing homes and among people with chronic health conditions.' (Ron Paul five days ago.)

Facts about Covid-19

This tells you everything you wanted to know about Covid-19 but were afraid to ask. 

But a couple of caveats, at least. Though there is evidence that masks are useless there are also arguments that they might in some ways be useful. In any case, they make us feel safe and that the government is doing something to protect us.

Studies have indeed shown that the virus was not found on surfaces, but on one of the cruise ships hit by the virus the virus was found everywhere. I suspect though that you catch this thing by talking to people at length or singing with people indoors.

This, if you do not know it, is invaluable information, much better than that provided by the press.

No comment

A re-enactment of Mao's
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but with updated terminology. https://t.co/6d6N7ap9vq

— Kristian Niemietz has long given up on all that (@K_Niemietz) June 3, 2020

America’s colonial subjects now have to subscribe to its new woke ideology. https://t.co/qW3iZO6QvE

— Alessandra (@alessabocchi) June 3, 2020

This one killing in America is the main news throughout the developed world

Ann Coulter has reminded us not to jump to conclusions about George Floyd's death, as we did with the case of Rodney King, all those years ago. The case is sub judice and a man has been charged with murder. If he is not convicted I hope he makes a fortune suing people who have said he is a murderer. Piers Morgan is one example.

Why this should interest anyone outside the USA it would be hard to explain to Martians, but this quarrel in a far away country holds the attention of the world. It was the same with OJ Simpson, of whom no-one outside the USA had ever heard until he was charged with having tried to murder his former wife. 

We know why. America rules the world. Even England is reduced to being a suburb of what was once our suburb.

This means that intellectual fashions that start there spread here, even via the EU apparatchiks to Romania in the end.

Give this lady a Nobel Peace Prize & a cabinet position in the White Housepic.twitter.com/pltUCpPsqB

— An0maly (@LegendaryEnergy) June 3, 2020

A Democrat Governor oversees a Democrat Attorney General, who oversees a Democrat Mayor, who appointed a Democrat Police Chief, who built the office culture that hired Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd.

But it's Trump's fault?

— Tom Dees (@ThomasWDees) June 3, 2020 

O Canada

Canada is the world's first postnational state. Justin Trudeau

Canada, the colony that stayed at home to look after mother. Anthony Burgess


Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. Douglas Adams

Canada is like a loft apartment over the world's greatest party. Robin Williams 

Quotations

'This virus will spread more. I have to say it with regret that there will be more deaths. If people do take care they can live with the virus.’
Prime Minister Imran Khan telling Pakistan that it cannot afford to lockdown any longer.

Kyle Harper's Fate of Rome is SO interesting about how the Plague of Cyprian hugely increased the power of Christianity, and then the Justinian plague radically reshaped Christianity (and led to the rise of Islam). we're seeing something similar https://t.co/9zbOD1dTWB

— Ed West (@edwest) June 3, 2020