The Covid-19 pandemic has raised a multitude of complex ethical issues — and new ones present themselves daily. These issues, including those related to vaccination, arise at four levels: micro or individual (for example, when a doctor vaccinates a patient); meso or institutional (regarding, for instance, a hospital’s or aged care residence’s policy on vaccinating […]
Today, major corporations scramble over each other to sell us their woke credentials, in an apparent fading interest in the products they were originally known for. Now, it seems, these companies are more eager to advertise their opinions on voter laws, pronouns, green new deals and whatever else woke activists decide matters most this month. […]
On Friday, May 7, hackers attacked the computer systems of Colonial Pipeline, which operates a major gasoline pipeline that brings gasoline and jet fuel from Houston refineries up through the southeastern United States as far as New Jersey. Out of concern that the hackers might have obtained data enabling them to do physical damage to […]
Population decline is coming to America. Radical change is on the way. Before the 1965 Immigration Act, the US was approaching zero population growth. The “land of the free and home of the brave,” as we call ourselves, has had below-replacement fertility since the early 1970s. We now see that fifty years of importing a […]
The dark underbelly of the social media behemoth has been exposed. Members of the Irish parliament have been listening to a very disturbing story. Facebook is a big player in the Irish tech economy but the underbelly of this giant is now being exposed. Within its entrails it is harbouring a monster. Isabella Plunkett has worked as […]
Wokeness is a bottomless pit of virtue signaling. If there’s a lesson we can learn from Disney of late, it’s this: wokeness is a bottomless pit — its appetite can never be satisfied. I’ve previously written about Disney’s attempt to purify its film canon by slapping “offensive content” labels on classics like The Muppet Show, The Aristocats, Dumbo, and Peter Pan. […]
Those invested in human dignity and the stability of Western societies have no doubt followed with interest the fashion known as critical race theory (CRT). Author James Lindsay, who has studied and written prolifically on the topic, explains that according to CRT: race is a political construction that was invented by white people to give themselves […]
Recent studies have exposed the flimsiness of much of the evidence. Can you really be transgender at four years old? Matthew Stubbings, and wife Klara Jeynes, both 44, from the English city of Doncaster, believe so. Their “son” Stormy was born as a girl named Emerald. However, from 18 months Emerald identified as a boy like […]
Parents are starting to push back. Here’s what we should do to empower them. More parents are waking up to the “woke” ideology that is seeping into their children’s classrooms and curriculum. Increasingly, they are speaking up and opting out. Last week, Andrew Gutmann, a father of a student at the elite, US$54,000-a-year Brearley School […]
Who has the authority to declare a ‘scientific consensus’? At what point does Big Tech’s authority extend too far? Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose state has faced the challenge of covid-19 considerably well despite media criticism, had a video removed by YouTube for allegedly spreading “medical misinformation”. DeSantis had hosted a roundtable discussion in a video […]
Rather than staying neutral in the culture wars, major companies have hitched their brands to one side of a contentious political divide. How did corporate America, long considered one of the most conservative American institutions, become a lead protagonist in a culture war over all manner of progressive activism? We now have a routine spectacle […]
In a thoughtful comment, the Supreme Court justice asks why Twitter can deny the President of the United States his right to free speech. Back in 2017, Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute sued President Donald Trump for blocking seven of his followers. Apparently they had criticised him, and the thin-skinned owner of the @realDonaldTrump […]
The very real controversies of America’s 2021 have conjured up the fictional dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984. The right condemns Big Tech as an incipient Big Brother—surveying citizens and suppressing disapproved thought. The left replies that Donald Trump is the true Orwellian threat. After all, he lies! These spirited disagreements conceal an important consensus. Most Americans […]
James Bradshaw reviews Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition, by Edmund Fawcett. Edmund Fawcett’s Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition was published last October, and follows on from his 2015 work: Liberalism: the Life of an Idea. Fawcett has had a glittering career in journalism, writing for The Economist for several decades, where he served as the chief correspondent in Washington, Paris, […]
Science decided that love means staying away, masking up and awaiting the vaccine. From the very outset of the Covid-19 lockdowns — a year ago now — something odd, if not sinister seemed afoot. How quickly the repetitive messaging came from all quarters to quarantine the healthy: “because we’re all in this together”! A minority, […]
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll be familiar with the new craze sweeping the West as the 2020s unfold, known as “cancel culture”. The more this phenomenon grows, the more the label risks being misapplied. Cancel culture isn’t just anything, however: it follows a very recognisable pattern. First, someone with public profile […]
The flamboyant gay activist speaks out in favour of ‘conversion therapy’. The flamboyant gay activist Milo Yiannopoulos made headlines this week. The conservative British polemicist and writer says that he is now an “ex-gay”. The news was overshadowed by the hullabaloo over a couple of other Brits who were interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. Yiannopoulos is not as […]
Have the Sussexes set fire to the house they fled from? Adding to the 56 million articles already published about Prince Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview may seem a fool’s errand: another scribbler has already noted that of 31 stories on the website of the British tabloid, The Mirror, at some point in the last 48 […]
An unpleasant incident at an elite US women’s college shows the danger of trusting feelings over facts. Last week the New York Times resurfaced a notorious racial profiling incident that took place in 2018 at Smith College, in Northhampton, Massachusetts. The story has struck a chord globally because of the light it sheds on the race struggle underway in the […]
Intellectual sanity requires monitoring the first signs of destructive idiocy. The toxic ideas that have corrupted today’s universities all began as tiny, obscure musings before escaping from the laboratories. They may have started with an unpublished paper or two, a request for modest institutional funding, or an informal discussion group. Eventually, they earn a panel […]
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