The Clash of Sexual Civilisations

The Clash of Sexual Civilisations

It’s a pretty sick joke. A young man from Syria or Morocco or Afghanistan risks everything to reach Europe. He survives the crossing, the camps, the bureaucracy. He arrives in a civilisation that surrounds him with female flesh on a scale his culture considers obscene — on billboards, on public transport, in the gym, on his phone. And every centimetre of it is legally mined — one wrong look, one misread signal, one drunken encounter, and he becomes not a man who made a mistake but a criminal. 

The man is broke, he is foreign, and to the women surrounding him in their skimpy gym wear, he is either invisible or a threat — rarely anything in between. If, by some miracle, he stumbles into a relationship he may end up in a marriage where his wife holds every legal and cultural card — including the power to withdraw sex, his children, his assets and freedom. He traded a society where men rule to arrive at the bottom of one where women rule. A better life? In some ways, perhaps. But when it comes to the thing that matters most to young men, he may have made the worst trade of his life.

Australia’s version of this story arrives by plane rather than rubber dinghy, and the young man in question is more likely to be clutching student enrolment forms than a life jacket. He comes from China, from India, from the Middle East or Southeast Asia. He is ambitious, his family’s great hope, carrying assumptions about women and sex formed in societies where the rules are utterly different. And his encounters with female flesh involve similar cultural and legal minefields – but the courtroom awaiting him may not be a criminal court but rather a campus kangaroo court. A court in name only, where the standard of proof is lower, the rights of the accused are minimal, and the penalty for losing is expulsion and a destroyed future. He came to Australia for an education. He got one — just not the one he paid for.

What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilisations in the grand geopolitical sense, but something more intimate and more combustible — a clash of sexual civilisations. Two utterly incompatible systems of rules about men, women, power, and desire — colliding on buses and street corners, in bars and bedrooms, and the consequences playing out in courtrooms and campus tribunals across the Western world. One system gives women all the power and calls it progress. The other gives men all the power and calls it God’s will. No one is talking honestly about what happens when they clash.

The consequences should be front page news but are usually buried. Writing just last month on his Substack Uncharted Territories, data analyst Tomas Pueyo compiled Eurostat figures showing that between 2014 and 2024, while the EU population grew by less than 2%, sexual assaults across Europe increased by 72% and rapes by 150%. A doubling of rape in a decade, in some of the most prosperous and supposedly civilised societies on earth!

Pueyo then breaks down the data by nationality of offender across five European countries — Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Italy. The pattern is consistent and unambiguous: immigrants from Muslim-majority countries are overrepresented in sexual and violent crime across all five nations. Germany’s 2025 police statistics show that Algerians in Germany are 26 times more likely to commit crime than the average German. Thirteen other Muslim-majority nationalities are at least five times more likely. When broken down specifically by sex crimes the overrepresentation is even more stark.

The UK tells a similar story — foreign nationals account for between a quarter and a third of sexual assault convictions despite being roughly 10% of the population, with conviction rates rising 62% in just four years. But it is Britain’s grooming gang scandal that most nakedly reveals what Islamic contempt for Western women actually looks like in practice. In Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and scores of other towns, organised networks of predominantly Pakistani men systematically abused thousands of vulnerable white girls for decades — while police, social workers and politicians looked away, terrified of being called racist. The perpetrators knew exactly what they were doing. As Muslim community leader Mohammed Shafiq stated on the record, they believed “white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought.”

“If you leave meat uncovered on the street and a cat eats it, whose fault is it?” In her book, Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, the brilliant Ayaan Hirsi Ali quotes her Somalian grandmother in warning of the consequences of mass immigration to Europe from Muslim-majority countries. She cites a UN survey of more than four thousand men in Morocco, Egypt, Palestinian areas and Lebanon, which found between one-third and two-thirds of men admitted to sexually harassing women in public.

Hirsi Ali’s anger is directed squarely at Islam — and rightly so. Her life’s work has been documenting the systematic subordination of women in Muslim societies, and the evidence she marshals is devastating. But her argument carries an implicit assumption worth examining, namely that the Western alternative represents unambiguous progress. From where she stands, having escaped one of the world’s most oppressive systems, that is entirely understandable. It is also not quite the whole story. 

Western sexual culture has its own pathologies. A culture which encourages women to display their half-naked bodies in public — and then criminalises every male response, including the involuntary glance. A legal framework so aggressively expanded that the line between predatory behaviour and a misread signal has become genuinely unclear — not just to bewildered immigrants, but to men who grew up here. For a Western man who at least knows the rules, that is dangerous enough. For a man formed in a world where very different rules exist — it is a trap waiting to be sprung.

Here’s the thing about Pueyo’s soaring statistics: they are not measuring the same offences they were measuring ten years ago. Sexual harassment — “inappropriate staring or leering,” “indecent sexual jokes,” “inappropriate invitations to go out on a date” — is now formally classified as sexual violence under EU law, with individual countries steadily feeding ever-broader national definitions into the Eurostat data. Finland, for instance, redefined rape in 2023, instantly inflating its statistics to record a 23% jump in sexual offences in the first nine months alone. What counts as a sexual crime has been steadily, quietly, and deliberately expanded — and a man arriving from Syria or Morocco or Afghanistan is about to get a very expensive education in what Western feminism has done to a statute book.

None of this is to minimise what some of these men have done. Within these statistics are genuine predators — angry, entitled men who brought their contempt for women with them across the Mediterranean and acted on it with devastating consequences for their victims. That story is real and it matters. But within these same statistics are also confused, isolated young men who touched a knee on a bus, stared too long on the tube, made a clumsy pass at a work colleague, sent an unwanted text — and found themselves processed through a criminal justice system they had no framework to understand, for behaviour that in their world carried no moral culpability whatsoever, let alone criminal liability.

The irony — and it is almost too perfect — is that the refugee-welcoming, Greens-voting feminist left are likely the same women who spent decades building the legal machinery now crushing these men. It was built to catch Western men — and has been doing so for decades. The immigrants are just the latest, and least prepared, to stumble into it.

Some years ago, Australia activist Nina Funnell was one of nine finalists in an annual Women of Influence award sponsored by Qantas who wrote a letter of protest to the airline asking it to stop deporting failed asylum seekers. This is the woman who was one of the founders of End Rape on Campus, the organisation responsible for establishing kangaroo courts on our campuses. Quelle surprise!

Looking back on the steady stream of young men I have supported through this horrendous process, I am struck by how many are foreigners, newcomers who are easily targeted when they fail to navigate the confusing sexual climate they encounter on campuses. What haunts me is how rarely we have managed to save them.

Men like Chris, the Malay/Chinese tutor student dismissed by Melbourne university for various trivial accusations like placing a hand on a female student’s shoulder whilst herding students across a busy road. He’s now left the country.

Or Marcus, the Mexican doctor doing post-graduate research at a Sydney university who was suspended after a malicious and false sexual assault accusation. Two years later, a jury took 20 minutes to dismiss the case following a two-week trial. Marcus has given up his medical career.

There are many others — from India, Indonesia, China, across Asia and beyond — too frightened to have their stories told. I have talked to enough of them to know that what destroys these young men is not just the outcome but the process — the speed with which they are presumed guilty, the contempt with which their evidence is dismissed, the ease with which a university can erase years of work and a lifetime of family sacrifice on the basis of one woman’s word.

Kangaroo court is too polite a term. These are conviction machines, built by ideologues and staffed by true believers, where the verdict is decided before the hearing begins. And the cruellest irony of all is that the foreign students caught in them came here trusting that Australia was a country where justice meant something.

Yet in Australia we also see the real risk of importing men with extreme views about women. My good friend Paul Sheehan documented this in Girls Like You (2006) — about Pakistani brothers freshly arrived in Australia, gang-raping schoolgirls. But it was Bilal Skaf, the ringleader of a Lebanese gang whose 2000 attacks on teenage girls shocked the nation, who most nakedly revealed what Islamic contempt for Western women looks like on Australian soil. Bilal remains behind bars. His brother Mohammed was released in 2021 after twenty-one years — still blaming his victims, with not a shred of remorse. He was arrested just the other week for allegedly directing a large-scale cocaine syndicate. Some men don’t change. And our authorities remain determined to look the other way.

Importing large numbers of men raised to regard uncovered women as fair game is not compassionate — it is reckless. Dangerously reckless to the women they encounter — including the indulged Western women who have been taught they can dress and behave as they please, with no consequences. But mass immigration also delivers a very different kind of man — the gentle, disoriented foreign student who stumbles blindly into legal minefields.

A culture that maximises sexual provocation and then criminalises sexual response has no business congratulating itself on its enlightenment. We have lit the fuse, thrown open the borders, and then expressed shock at the body count. The least we can do is stop pretending we don’t know what we’ve done.

Links - 10th September 2026 (The European Union and Elites)

‘J.D. Vance was right’: Is Europe finally waking up? | The Spectator - "As some lose faith that the US would defend Europe under Article 5, European armies are ill-equipped to protect it themselves. Donations to Ukraine over the past four years have hollowed out military arsenals. Defence chiefs in Germany and Britain warn that the failure to replace this materiel has left us with insufficient means to defend ourselves. Can Europe re-arm and reduce its dependence on America? During the conference, Merz pointed out that, despite having a collective GDP nearly ten times the size of Russia’s, ‘Europe is not ten times as strong as Russia today’. Germany’s foreign intelligence agency has estimated Russia’s military expenditure is now roughly 10 per cent of GDP, or about half of total state spending. Meanwhile, European members of Nato face a major struggle to balance budgets in pursuit of their 5 per cent target. Within this figure, it’s been agreed that 3.5 per cent must be spent on core defence needs, with the remaining 1.5 per cent spent on defence-related infrastructure. Only six of the 30 European countries in the alliance – Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Norway – are currently spending more than 3 per cent of GDP on core defence contracts.  Apart from Germany, few Nato members have publicly set out roadmaps for raising defence spending... Despite the lagging spending, at least seven European countries have reintroduced military service...  One solution European leaders discussed was the idea of creating their own nuclear deterrent that could operate independently of Washington. Unlike Britain, France has nuclear weapons that are not reliant on the US for maintenance or deployment. Some leaders have asked France to consider extending its nuclear umbrella to protect Europe. Emmanuel Macron is expected to give a speech in the coming weeks outlining his approach to the country’s nuclear doctrine. Teasing that speech in Munich, Macron said: ‘The French nuclear deterrent has, what I would call, a European inspiration’. How realistic is all of this, given the Europeans’ love of squabbling? Just look at the joint European defence projects already under way. Plans to build a new class of fighter jet, agreed between France, Germany and Spain, are dead in the water. The two companies involved in the plans, Airbus and Dassault, couldn’t agree on which would lead the project. Meanwhile, talks to allow Britain to participate in the EU’s €150 billion defence fund broke down at the end of last year because the French want us to pay a joining fee of up to £2 billion. Bickering is an inherent part of European politics, even as the Continent’s protector pulls back and its eastern border is threatened.  Despite all the talk of deep chasms and elephants in rooms, Europe seems unwilling to face this reality. The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio flattered delegates, speaking of America’s European inheritance and the values shared by the two continents. But his core message was much the same as Vance’s. America had no interest in continuing to be the ‘polite caretakers of the West’s managed decline’, he reiterated.  There was little indication that Europe’s political elites realised that the central message had not changed. Nor, judging by their lacklustre approach to rearmament, have they yet realised the magnitude of the task they face."

Melissa Chen on X - "Been living in London for 3 years and every time I come back to the US, I have to recalibrate.  When you're overseas, you tend to forget what real abundance feels like, so much so, I just stood there in the granola aisle, mouth open, brain completely short-circuited as I stared at a ridiculous wall of infinite choice.   Bajillions of brands, flavors, and innovations - chocolate peanut butter banana crunch, maple pecan espresso, keto, paleo, collagen-packed, probiotic, gluten-free, protein-loaded, you name it. I was straight-up paralyzed by options.  The French call it “embarras de choix” - embarrassment of choice. That overwhelming feeling when there are simply too many great things to pick from. It’s usually used positively or neutrally (the options are desirable), but the “embarrassment” highlights the mild frustration, guilt and indecision it causes.   But Americans don’t get embarrassed by it. At all.  Because they don't feel guilt about having MORE.   It is the Land of Plenty for a reason. It’s easy to start a food company here, it's easy to build brands, and it's easy to just employ / fire people.  That freedom unleashes relentless innovation and variety, feeding an unstoppable demand for better, tastier, healthier, crazier options.  No wonder Europeans lose their minds the first time they step into a Costco.    American abundance is a policy and cultural choice."
Melissa Chen on X - "The sheer number of snide remarks about cheese in a can in response to this post is striking.   It seems many feel compelled to mention it simply to reassure themselves of the inherent superiority of their European cheeses.   Which no doubt I'm sure is true to some extent, but it's severely missing the point.  Yes it's somewhat gross and terrifying that cheese can come out of a can the same way whipped cream can.   But while it is about cheese in a can, it's not really about cheese in a can.  It's about the sheer, glorious American instinct to look at something ordinary and ask:   What if?   What if we could keep cheese in that perfect, gooey, liquidy consistency - shelf-stable, ready at a moment's notice - and then invent an aerosol can to dispense it?  It needs no refrigeration.  You may thumb your nose down at the product but it's actually the same spirit that said, “what if we could fly to the Moon?”  The invention of sprayable processed cheese is about a mindset of irreverence, optimism, and a culture that is unafraid of looking silly if it means pushing boundaries.  Aerosolizing the cheese isn't easy. Any culture that can do that will start asking bigger questions without fear.   What if we cure diseases with mRNA in months instead of decades? What if reusable rockets land themselves like something out of sci-fi? What if ordinary people can access computing power that once required government labs?  The pretentious twats who roll their eyes at Easy Cheese simply don't get it. It’s not about sophistication; it's about agency. A people who refuse to accept “that’s just how it’s always been.” A culture that iterates, experiments, commercializes, and yes, sometimes sprays a neon orange dairy product from a can because...... why the hell not?  That’s the moonshot mentality in its essence. Playful on the surface, revolutionary underneath.   And it's why the European mind struggles so hard to grasp it. As long as Americans keep this fire, whether it's cheese or the cosmos, they will keep surprising the world."

Daily Romania on X - "1,000 German lawyers and judges sign petition to ban AfD, the largest party in German opinion polls, in order to "protect democracy""
Gad Saad on X - "We need to end democracy in order to protect democracy."

German police threaten to defy AfD orders if party takes power - "Germany’s police union has called on officers to defy any “unconstitutional” orders if the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party comes to power... However, the largest state branch of the police union, in North Rhine-Westphalia, criticised Mr Hüber’s intervention and distanced itself from his article.  It said: “We expressly and fully dissociate ourselves from his choice of words, his comparisons and the legally problematic conclusions drawn from them”, adding that “the oath of service doesn’t remove the right to vote”.  The Bavarian branch said: “Our uniforms don’t have a party colour. We don’t do party political training in the ranks of the police.” Hubertus Knaube, a historian and former director of the Berlin Hohenschönhausen memorial, which commemorates the crimes of the former East German communist regime, said Mr Hüber’s article amounted to “a call for a coup against a democratically elected government”... It won 20 per cent of the vote in last year’s federal elections, taking second place, and is now polling at almost 30 per cent nationwide – far ahead of Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats."
Left wingers claim that the US Constitution is outdated and must be amended, but they love the unamendable bits of the German Constitution, which they can use to push the left wing agenda and ban political opponents

How the anti-AfD firewall broke German politics - "the AfD has been blocked from power everywhere by a Brandmauer, or firewall, that other parties have erected around it. The most important firewall is that maintained by the CDU, Germany’s ruling party and traditionally its largest. It formalised the policy in 2018 with an “incompatibility resolution” banning co-operation with both the AfD and Die Linke... Yet the Brandmauer has failed to arrest the AfD’s rise. In 2018 Friedrich Merz, now the CDU leader and Germany’s chancellor, vowed to halve the AfD’s vote. He hoped tacking right on immigration and governing well could win back voters seduced by the AfD’s narrative. None of this has worked... in Saxony-Anhalt and other AfD strongholds, the Brandmauer is already struggling to hold. Armin Schenk, Bitterfeld’s CDU mayor, found lurking on the edge of the protest, says the “right-wing extremist” AfD should be kept from power in the country that perpetrated the Holocaust. But in Bitterfeld, he adds, “the Brandmauer is not a reality,” because “in most cases decisions cannot be taken without the AfD.” With 15 of the city’s 40 council seats, it is the largest party. Even when the Brandmauer holds, it forces other parties to contort themselves around it. Thuringia and Saxony, two other eastern states, assembled incoherent or unstable CDU-led minority governments after a strong AfD performance in elections in 2024. They are held together by strong leaders. But they serve the AfD’s narrative that the mainstream outfits are indistinguishable Kartellparteien (“cartel parties”). Saxony-Anhalt threatens to push the strategy to its limits. If the AfD wins on September 6th, the Brandmauer is irrelevant. If it falls just short, the CDU will probably need support from every other party, including Die Linke, to take office. Confronted with that prospect, some CDU members might defect: one AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt reckons five are ready to jump. If not, the strains of buying off the hard left would test Mr Merz’s authority so sorely that some think it could end his career. And if, as polls suggest, the AfD wins twice as many seats as the CDU yet remains locked out of power, it will not only be AfD supporters who ask whether German democracy is working. It is dawning on the CDU that it has painted itself into a corner. “Anyone still talking about firewalls has not recognised the signs of the times,” said Michael Kretschmer, the CDU premier of Saxony, recently. The Brandmauer in effect obliges the party to seek coalitions only to its left, especially with the SPD, which has been in power in Germany almost without interruption since 1998—despite these days barely polling in double figures. CDU members’ frustration with concessions to the SPD inspires occasional calls for a minority government that could, on certain issues (such as migration, tax and energy), seek a “conservative majority” with the AfD. Voters are shifting, too. Support for the anti-AfD Brandmauer has dwindled from a clear majority to 41%. Yet the CDU has no easy way out. Tearing down the Brandmauer would split the party down the middle and trigger a voter exodus. Even minor violations have caused trouble. In 2020 the CDU voted with the AfD to elect a (short-lived) premier in Thuringia; the ensuing furore toppled Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s national leader. In January 2025 Mr Merz ordered his party to vote with the AfD on symbolic anti-migration measures in the Bundestag. This sparked protests across Germany and boosted support for Die Linke at the subsequent election. The chancellor is said to be traumatised by the experience. To avoid these dilemmas, some in the CDU quietly hope for an AfD majority in Saxony-Anhalt. But this does not amount to a strategy. “There has never been a reasonable debate about how to handle the AfD in the CDU, just a reflex to exclude them as the new Nazis,” says Andreas Rödder, a professor who in 2023 resigned as head of the CDU’s fundamental-values commission over his calls for openness to minority governments rather than a rigid Brandmauer. As for the AfD, it once railed against the Brandmauer as a gross violation of democracy. But these days many in the AfD look forward to governing alone. “We don’t think about how to make ourselves nice so that the CDU asks us for a coalition,” says Malte Kaufmann, an AfD MP. The party’s deputy chairman in Saxony-Anhalt has said their voters want them to “finish off” the CDU rather than co-operate with it. In some countries populists have moderated to gain power. But behind the Brandmauer, the AfD has had no incentive to do so. Torben Braga, another MP, says those in the party who would like to tack to the centre have lost the argument for two reasons. First, “our election results are getting better and better without us being forced to change.” Second, the party fears that moderating its positions and ejecting hardliners would alienate some voters. “The Brandmauer protects us from having to deal with very difficult questions,” Mr Braga says... Behind the Brandmauer you can promise anything, says Christian Stecker, a political scientist at the Technical University in Darmstadt. “It protects them from the disappointment that accountability in a democracy implies.” In despair, some mainstream politicians, including Ms Winter in the CDU, now look favourably on calls to ban the AfD, something explicitly allowed under Germany’s constitution. But even if parliament approved that proposal, which seems unlikely, the constitutional court would take years to rule on it... a growing number sympathise with Mr Stecker’s gloomier view. “It’s too late for the CDU to turn around, and too late for the AfD to accept any turnaround,” he says. “Some things will tumble down, new things will emerge—and we don’t know what it will all look like.”"
More than 40% of the German electorate are far right extremists and they need to be sent to re-education camps and replaced with migrants, who are enlightened and will vote Correctly and Protect Democracy
Maybe there will be a military coup to Save Democracy
Left wingers love proportional representation. Probably because incoherent and weak governments are the aim

@levelsio on X - "The EU is now for the 6th time trying to force Chat Control through which lets them scan ALL your private messages, photos and emails without a warrant.  Implictly showing the EU is not democratic and not about what the people of Europe want, because once a law is rejected, you just re-submit it until nobody is watching and it's passed
November 2023: Chat Control is rejected
June 2024: Chat Control is rejected
October 2025: Chat Control is rejected
November 2025: Chat Control is rejected
March 2026: Chat Control is rejected
July 2026: Chat Control is back
Even the EU's own lawyers stated Chat Control is unconstitutional: "generalised message scanning is incompatible with Article 7 of the EU Charter"  You have to wonder why the EU is so adament about reading your private chats, right?"
To Protect Democracy, you need to let the government read your messages at will

Chubby on X - "Today is a dark day for freedom and democracy in Europe. General chat surveillance has been implemented in Brussels. A disgrace.  The so-called Chat Control 1.0 cleared a crucial hurdle in the European Parliament today. This means platforms may once again be allowed to scan private messages, officially on a “voluntary” basis, but in practice this marks the return of indiscriminate monitoring of private communication.  What makes this especially bitter is that a majority of the MEPs who voted were reportedly against it. According to Patrick Breyer, 314 MEPs voted against the regulation, 276 voted in favor and 17 abstained. And yet the rejection failed because it was not enough to have a simple majority of those voting. An absolute majority of all MEPs would have been required.  That is the democratic scandal.  When a majority of those present votes against a proposal and it still passes because a formal threshold is not reached, it does not feel like democratic decision-making to many citizens. It feels like a procedural trick.   And it becomes even more problematic when you look at the context: Chat Control had already been rejected before. Yet the issue was put back on the agenda shortly before the summer break, through an urgent procedure, at a time when absences could become decisive.  This is not just some technical regulation. It goes to the very core of private communication. It is about whether digital messages remain fundamentally private or whether platforms may systematically scan content again, without concrete suspicion, without a court order and without any individual cause.  A free society must not turn private communication into a potential surveillance zone. Anyone who takes digital fundamental rights seriously cannot accept millions of innocent people being placed under general suspicion.  Today, a dangerous signal was sent: fundamental rights can be hollowed out through procedural logic, timing and political tricks. Not through an open, clear and honest majority, but through a system in which absence effectively helps the supporters.  This is a dark day for Europe.   Not because the fight is over, but because today showed how easily digital fundamental rights come under pressure when surveillance logic, symbolic politics and institutional tricks come together.  Anyone who wants a free internet, anyone who wants to protect private communication and anyone who takes democracy seriously should talk about this.  Share this issue. Inform yourself. Look at who voted how. And never forget: freedom rarely disappears all at once. It disappears step by step, often in technical details, often in complicated procedures and often exactly when too few people are watching."

Greg Lukianoff on X - "But remember the bad guys of Europe’s past were authoritarian, invasive, and centralized for BAD reasons, whereas today’s bureaucratocracy is motivated by hugs and puppies."

EU considers satellite technology to override speeding motorists - "Since July 2024, all new cars sold in Europe have been fitted with intelligent speed assist (Isa), a system that warns drivers if they are speeding with a sound or a vibration on the steering wheel.  Thatcham Research, Britain’s largest vehicle safety body, recently warned that Isa systems failed to identify when a speed limit had changed in about one in four cases."
Damn misinformation and conspiracy theories about electric cars and state control!

Mario Nawfal on X - "Google held 34 meetings with top German government officials to discuss suppressing "hate speech" and "disinformation" online. Most were confidential and some were deemed "not suitable for public knowledge."   The meetings, revealed through a parliamentary question filed by the opposition AfD, included then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who attended 4 personally.  The implications go beyond Germany. Under the EU's Digital Services Act, content removed or algorithmically downranked applies globally, not just within EU borders.  If the secret meetings between a government and Google to shape what people can find online aren't information control, what is?"

Merkel urges EU to 'keep regulating' social media, AI - "Longtime German leader Angela Merkel called on Europe Tuesday to stay the course in its push to regulate social media and AI — warning the "foundations of democracy" were at stake.  The former chancellor issued the appeal as she accepted an award at the European Parliament -- in a speech urging the bloc to live up to the "promises" made to its citizens on protecting peace, prosperity and democratic values. "Continue along the path of regulating social media," she urged. "Continue along the path of regulating artificial intelligence." "To believe that responsibility for spreading information is no longer necessary — that one will not be held accountable for lies — will undermine the foundations of democracy," warned the German liberal, who served as Germany's chancellor from 2005 to 2021. The 27-country EU has some of the world's strictest rules regulating the digital space and is currently weighing the possibility of banning social media for those under a certain age.  Merkel is one of 20 laureates of a newly-created European Order of Merit, bestowed in March to recognise "significant contributions to European integration and unity, democracy and values"."
Too bad, as the Leuven Correctional Court asserts, the truth is illegal in Belgium if it threatens the left wing agenda
Time to ban the AfD to save Democracy!

Europa.com on X - "Germany’s government is proposing a bill that could block people from buying homes if they’re suspected of “anti-constitutional” views — even without any criminal conviction.  The draft would give local authorities first refusal on property sales and allow intelligence agencies to share personal data to vet buyers. It is framed as a way to stop extremism.  Follow: @europa"
Matt Bramanti on X - "the German constitution is hilariously funny
"Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship."
whoa based
"These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws"
oh lmao"

Democracy Without Voters - "For decades, the European Union has not just been a geopolitical partner, it has been a political aspiration for a certain Eurocratic wing of the American left. The EU is what modern Democrats imagine government should become once it has fully “evolved”, an administrative system run by credentialed experts, insulated from elections, buffered by layers of bureaucracy, and confident that dissent is less a signal to be heeded than a problem to be managed.  When Democrats talk about “protecting democracy,” what they often mean is protecting a system increasingly removed from the voters themselves, one that looks remarkably like Brussels with better branding. There is a profound irony in witnessing “No Kings” protests by people who want to replace individual liberty with the European model of monarchial bureaucracy. The similarities are not subtle. Both systems elevate technocracy, process, and regulation over representation, results, and growth and both rely on a permanent administrative class that persists regardless of election outcomes, ensuring that while politicians may change, the direction of governance rarely does. Each share a quiet but unmistakable belief that ordinary citizens, left to their own devices, cannot be trusted to make the “right” decisions without guidance, nudging, or correction from above... That is why the EU model has always held such appeal. It promises control without the messiness of accountability. It offers the appearance of democracy while steadily migrating real decision-making power away from voters and toward institutions. For American Democrats who find constitutional limits inconvenient and federalism inefficient, Europe represents an end state, a system where outcomes can be managed, dissent softened, and policy insulated from the volatility of elections.  The uncomfortable truth for Democrats is that many of the policies they champion, expansive regulation, growing welfare states, centralized authority, and reliance on unelected administrative bodies, are not theoretical. They are already in operation across Europe, and the results are visible in slower growth, structural dependency, a political culture increasingly disconnected from the electorate but perhaps most obvious is the dilution of European history and culture through the importation of third world ideologies, religions and social mores. The European model is not a promise, it is a case study and if elections across the Continent are any indication, people have noticed and are beginning to push back. People are recognizing the cultural destruction and right-wing nationalist parties are making historic electoral inroads. The outrage, the insistence that questioning the model is destabilizing, points to a deeper discomfort with the possibility that the bureaucratic technocrats might be losing their grip on European governance.  Trump’s critique, stripped of its rhetoric, lands squarely on this point. The United States has spent decades subsidizing a system abroad that mirrors what many on the left would like to build at home. NATO is the clearest example. An alliance premised on shared responsibility has drifted into a structure where America provides the backbone while European nations allocate resources toward expansive domestic priorities, assuming the security umbrella will remain in place. When Trump demands that NATO members meet their commitments, he is not just talking about defense spending, he is challenging the underlying assumption that America will indefinitely support systems that are increasingly at odds with its own founding principles. That challenge extends eastward as well. Even nations with legitimate security concerns cannot operate under the assumption that American protection is automatic. Alliances require reciprocity, and reciprocity requires shared burden. The leaders of Europe prefer tone over substance, so Trump’s “in your face” style ensures his message will be haughtily dismissed because they prefer nuance and ambiguity. However, leadership is not about comfort, it is about confronting realities that have been politely ignored. For years, American leaders have avoided acknowledging the growing alignment between European governance and the aspirations of the American left. Trump is not avoiding the historical evidence of where the European model leads and that it is profoundly anti-American. The real question is not whether Trump is too harsh, the real question is whether Americans recognize the trajectory. Do we continue down a path that mirrors Europe, centralizing power, expanding bureaucracy, and distancing government from the governed, or do we reaffirm a system built on sovereignty, accountability, and the understanding that freedom, while untidy, is ultimately more durable?  Europe made its choice decades ago. The only question for the American people is whether enough will ignore the obvious negative outcomes to give Democrats control."

Is the occasional massacre of gay people worth it to have more Muslims in your society?

Is the occasional massacre of gay people worth it to have more Muslims in your society?

"On July 25, 2026, 21-year-old Abdul Ballout drove a van into the crowd at Berlin Pride, killing one woman and injuring 29 people.

Three days later, I listened to The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, speak at a vigil for the victims, held by London’s LGBT community. Khan began by saying that he was honored to be there, but devastated, because he had stood in that very spot four times before, at four other vigils for murdered gay people. He listed them, year by year. Pulse was on the list. Oslo was on the list. Khan urged unity. He reminded us to face hate with love.

I wished I could not believe my ears: A European leader preaching acceptance of the people who murder gay people, to gay people, at a vigil to commemorate the murders of gay people, by the very people European leaders accepted!

In 1999, a neo-Nazi named David Copeland bombed the Admiral Duncan, a gay pub in London, killing three people

The day after it happened, every politician, every newspaper, every institution in Britain named the ideology, named the group, and named the pipeline that produced Copeland. Nobody stood at that vigil and told victims they needed to welcome more neo-Nazis. There is no policy by which Britain actively imports more neo-Nazis. No politician calls welcoming them a moral duty, and nobody gets called a bigot for noticing what neo-Nazis believe.

The opposite is true when the mass-murderer is a Muslim. Pulse, 2016: Forty-nine dead, killed by a man who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State as he fired. Oslo, 2022: Two dead, twenty-one wounded outside a gay bar the night before Pride, by a man convicted of aggravated terrorism on behalf of the Islamic State. Berlin, 2026: One dead, 29 wounded by an attempted ISIS convert who had been convicted by a German court just two months earlier of preparing to commit terrorism.

And at every one of these vigils, the same speech: Hate has no place here. Love wins. We stand together. Each time a condemnation carefully engineered to have no object of condemnation.

What is the function of a condemnation that names nothing? Who is it for?

One of my favorite phrases is POSIWID, or, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” Not what political leaders say it should do, not what it might one day live up to, but what it does.

Let’s apply POSIWID to Germany...

The court deferred the decision on suspending the sentence for six months, lifted the arrest warrant over prosecutors’ objections, and sent him home under the conditions that he book a careers-counseling appointment and attend 26 sessions of deradicalization counseling. No, that is not a joke. It is a German court ruling.

This was not a man who slipped through the cracks. In January 2026, Berlin police formally classified him as a Gefährder: Someone capable of committing politically motivated violence. His phone was monitored. His case was discussed at Germany’s Joint Counter-Terrorism Center. As a condition of his freedom, he was ordered into a deradicalization program. That’s right: Who needs to put ISIS members in jail when we have talk therapy? He attended two sessions. The program’s own advisers described him as “friendly” and “compliant,” though “inscrutable,” and were planning to notify the government of their worries on Monday. (Even stopping a terror plot won’t get Europeans to work weekends.)

Let’s take a moment and think about how many opportunities there were to stop a man already convicted of attempting a terrorist attack, of attempting—who would have guessed!?—another terrorist attack. The courts knew—they convicted him. The police knew—they classified him as dangerous. The counter-terrorism apparatus knew—they had a dedicated file on him. The therapists knew—they were going to report him. And the sum total of all this knowing was a suspended sentence and a counseling schedule.

So here is the question, and please sit with it rather than reach for your tribe’s answer: What is the purpose of a system when its stated understanding is, “This man is dangerous” and its revealed action is, “No further action required”?

I recently wrote about the Barista Fallacy: Reasoning about a population from the friendly individuals you happen to know. Sadiq Khan is the most extraordinary case study of that fallacy I have ever encountered, because he commits it against himself.

When Khan, a Muslim, voted for same-sex marriage in 2013, a mufti in Bradford issued a fatwa declaring him an apostate. He received death threats. These are his own words, to a gay magazine: “I did need to discuss with my daughters issues around police protection, and there are still people who don’t talk to me because of these issues.”

In that same interview, Khan was asked about the 2016 ICM survey (the most comprehensive face-to-face poll of British Muslims ever conducted). It found that 52% of British Muslims believe homosexuality should be illegal—in Britain!

Khan’s response to the poll: “[It] doesn’t represent the people I know.”

A man who required police protection from Islamist rage over gay rights, who paid the price in his own family’s safety, is shown data describing the belief system that threatened him, and he answers with his personal acquaintances, his “lived experience.” Unfortunately, his lived experience was insufficient to shield from Islamist violence the 15 people who were murdered and 134 people who were injured in London during his tenure as mayor.

I don’t know why he does it. Maybe he genuinely doesn’t accept the data. Maybe he accepts it and calculates that saying so would do more harm than good. Maybe he’s afraid. Maybe it’s a noble lie he considers the price of social peace. But notice that every one of those explanations is deepening public distrust because each one means the person in Britain with the best evidence, both anecdotal and data-based, cannot honestly state the conclusion that the evidence supports.

Attitudes are not violence. The overwhelming majority of the people captured in that 52 percent will never hurt anyone. But massacres are not committed by averages. They are committed by the tail of a distribution, and the size of the tail scales with the size and shape of the whole. A country that admits a population admits its distribution of belief, and not for one generation, but for all of them. You can vet an immigrant. You cannot vet her unborn children. Ballout was born in Berlin. Mateen was born in New York.

According to a German newspaper, Abdul held only German citizenship, attended local schools, played football in neighborhood youth competitions, and grew up in the multicultural district of Tiergarten. He was as German as a child of immigrants can be. That didn’t deter him from attempting to mass murder his countrymen.

Which leaves exactly two honest positions.

Position One: The risk is unacceptable. Ban all immigration from populations whose belief distributions include a violent tail, because no downstream benefit justifies the recurring murder of your own citizens.

Position Two: The occasional massacre of gay people is worth it to have more Muslims in your society. Millions of peaceful people get better lives; a wealthy society can absorb rare atrocities the way it absorbs highway deaths: As a known cost of a policy it has chosen with open eyes.

This position carries a corollary: You must manage the tail. Ruthlessly. If you have knowingly accepted that some people are just going to be mass-murdered in the streets with semi-regular frequency and that’s a price you’re willing to pay, then the question is simply how many and how frequently. You have the responsibility to ensure the scale and frequency of those mass-murders are both as limited as possible. This means you cannot do things like giving convicted terror aspirants suspended sentences because you want them to have talk-therapy instead.

Arguably, reasonable people can hold either position. What nobody can honestly hold is Position Three, which is the one that European elites actually hold: Deny that a disproportionate share of recent Islamist-motivated murders and anti-gay hate attacks exists, preach “welcome” as a moral axiom rather than a policy with costs, call anyone who notices Muslims killing people a bigot, and then, when the population tail arrives driving a van into a Pride parade, hold a vigil and condemn “hate.”

I have one last question:

What would that vigil speech have sounded like if it were written by someone whose actual goal was preventing the next vigil?"

 

A heatwave isn't the end of the world

This is before RCP8.5 got disavowed and retired too.

Adaptation is not an effective way to virtue signal, so. 

A heatwave isn't the end of the world

As I write this, in my favourite local café in Rome, the temperature outside is close to 40°C. So yes, it’s hot. Yet, thanks to a relatively old invention — air conditioning — I’m able to work in comfort. The 10-minute bike ride back home will be tougher than usual, but it won’t kill me. Like most people here, I consider these temperatures to be a nuisance — but that’s about it.

According to the news, however, I should be terribly concerned — terrified, in fact. Everyone’s running headline stories about the “extreme”, “record-breaking” and “deadly” hot weather sweeping across Asia, the US and, most notably, Europe. Here, the heatwave was unofficially named Cerberus, the multi-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, before being replaced by Charon, the man who ferries the dead there. Rome is being called the “infernal city”. To be honest, I can think of several much more hellish places around the world at the moment — cities plagued by poverty, terrorism and war. And yet we are told that the current heat waves are a taste of the “hell” that awaits us as a result of climate change.

Such sensationalism is revealing of the climate hysteria that has gripped the West — and the way in which it is seriously hindering our ability to devise rational solutions. Many seem convinced that if we don’t drastically reduce CO2 emissions (or eliminate them altogether) by our unmoveable deadline of 2030, climate change will extinguish humanity, if not all life on Earth. We’re told this is because “the science tells us”. This is bonkers.

Yes, climate change and global warming are real — and yes, they are largely a result of human activity — but the planet is not about to be “uninhabitable”. The science is, in fact, much more nuanced: according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is far from clear whether the world is actually experiencing more drought, flooding or hurricanes, nor the extent to which any changes are influenced by human behaviour.

Scientists aren’t even sure what the impact on agriculture will be: one 2011 study done for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that by mid-century climate change might reduce global crop output by less than 1% of today’s output. As the UN climate panel put it: “For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers [such as] changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development.”

While the overall impact of climate change on humanity will be negative, nowhere does the science tell us that life on Earth will perish if we don’t go Net Zero by 2030. These deadlines are conjured by politicians, not scientists. As a result, the apocalyptic narrative currently dominating the climate debate is completely unfounded — and unethical. In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman warned about the “futility thesis” — how people will reject preventive action due to a fatalistic belief that it is simply too late to make a difference. Today, this phenomenon can be seen in the thousands of young Westerners who are suffering from “climate anxiety” and choosing not to have children. According to the UN’s latest Human Development Report, the world is more pessimistic than at any point between now and before the First World War — even though in almost every measurable way, life on Earth is better than ever.

Not only is this rhetoric of impending doom hindering the possibility of fixing the problem, it is also engendering all manner of authoritarian fantasies. It has become an article of faith that the best response is to drastically cut back CO2 emissions — and that this should be done whatever the cost. For if the world is about to end, anything is justified. The increasingly violent forms of “eco-activism” are also part of this trend. Fear, depression, desperation and authoritarianism are mutually reinforcing.

Yet any realistic climate policy will take decades to pay off; even if we significantly reduce our emissions in the following years, the total amount of carbon dioxide in the air will still increase, though at a slightly diminished rate. This is especially true for Western countries, which will account for a smaller and smaller share of global emissions in the coming years and decades. Even if rich countries completely curtail all emissions (an impossible scenario), the temperature increase, after 80 years, will only be 0.4°C smaller than it would have been otherwise, according to estimates by Bjorn Lomborg based on a model used by the UN’s panel of climate scientists. So even if Western countries were able to meet their unrealistic climate objectives, we will continue to experience the negative consequences of climate change — floods, storms and heat waves — for a very long time.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything to try to stop temperatures from rising above a certain limit. But if our aim is to actually save lives — and surely we have a greater moral obligation to those who are alive today than to future generations — then our priority should be adaptation: that is, measures that will help people cope with the effects of climate change, and which would save lives here and now.

Adaptation has already greatly reduced climate-related deaths, even in the face of rising temperatures: it’s why deaths from storm surges have been declining even as sea levels have risen; and why the most likely future scenario is that fewer people will die from climate-related flooding — just as heat-related deaths have been declining in certain countries. Adaptation is also why deaths and devastation due to wildfires have dropped dramatically; and why, overall, climate-related fatalities have declined by about 96% over the past century, despite a massive increase in the global population. This is testament to the strong relationship between economic development and climate resilience.

In the context of the current heatwaves, this means that, instead of “climate action”, people should be demanding subsidies for air conditioners and lower energy prices from their governments — straightforward measures that would drastically lower the number of heat-related deaths, not empty promises that won’t make a difference in the short term (and will have a negligible impact in the long term). But this is what happens when nightmares and elitist fantasies replace the actual material conditions of people as the basis for politics — “saving the planet” becomes more important than saving actual human beings. 

In this way, climate hysteria is completely distorting our perception of the world. Last week, a report by the World Meteorological Organization that the beginning of July was the world’s hottest week on record received widespread attention. At around the same time, another report was published — this time by the UN Development Programme — that was greeted with less interest. But it was arguably more important. It estimated that the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent surge in inflation and borrowing costs had pushed an extra 165 million people into poverty, bringing the total global figure to 1.65 billion, over 20% of the world’s population. 

Climate activists often argue that those living in poor countries are the ones who will suffer the most from climate change. This is true. But, once again, it is illogical to claim that our priority, and theirs, should therefore be to reduce global emissions as fast as possible. Poor people’s priority is not be poor. A UN global poll of nearly 10 million people found climate to be the lowest policy priority among the poor, far behind education, health, and nutrition.

Of course, these objectives can’t always be treated in isolation. There are often trade-offs: reducing or eliminating world poverty requires more growth, which inevitably entails more energy and therefore more emissions. Indeed, coping with the effects of climate change is itself energy-intensive, as the climate paradox of air conditioning makes clear. Faced with this realisation, environmentalists continue to entertain the notion that the future energy needs of developing countries can be met entirely by renewables — yet this is also a fantasy.

As a report published last year by the Breakthrough Institute makes clear, even though renewables (ideally in combination with nuclear energy, which is fully carbon-free) have a role to play in the development of Africa and other poor regions, many of the world’s poorer countries have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels in the coming years: coal, oil and natural gas. “Continued and increasing fossil-fuel consumption is regrettable, but it will mean more people will be fed with less land, reducing deforestation, and enabling the transition to modern agriculture,” write the report’s two co-authors, Vijaya Ramachandran of the Breakthrough Institute and Arthur Baker of the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago. Remember, poverty is the leading cause of death in developing countries; more growth in these countries will mean more emissions but significantly fewer deaths. Moreover, helping the world’s poorest grow out of poverty will also make them more resilient in the face of climate change.

One might think that, even for those with environmentalist sympathies, the choice here isn’t too difficult to make: fewer deaths is surely a goal worth pursuing. Instead, development banks and international funding groups such as the World Bank and the European Investment Bank are increasingly linking finance to climate adaptation and mitigation, curtailing or halting their funding of fossil-fuel or nuclear projects. Here we can observe the best example of the way in which climate hysteria is pushing us to make increasingly irrational — and ultimately very dangerous, if not deadly — choices for poor and marginalised people everywhere, in the developing world as well as in rich countries.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change; it means that we need to strike the right balance between improving human welfare — which implies more emissions in the short term — and mitigating temperature rises. As long as poverty continues to kill more people than climate change, environmentalists who profess to care about saving the world should think about who they are saving it for.

Links - 9th September 2026 (British Politics)

SAS soldiers resign over war crime ‘witch hunts’ - "Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers are resigning in significant numbers over fears they will be subjected to “witch hunts” by human rights lawyers.  Several sources have claimed that soldiers from 22 SAS, the Army’s most elite fighting force, have applied for premature voluntary release... Insiders say the resignations have been driven by outrage over recent war crime investigations into Afghanistan and Syria, which have been described as “witch hunts”.  The treatment of elderly Northern Ireland veterans who served in the SAS has also contributed, insiders say. They are viewed as having been hounded through the courts on vexatious claims, some of which have been described as “ludicrous” by a judge.  Among those understood to have resigned are several senior warrant officers, who are the backbone of the special forces and among the most experienced troops in the regiment. A number are understood to have applied for release “on principle” just before Christmas. “Morale is s--- at the moment,” one insider with knowledge of the recent losses said, while another said there was “considerable disquiet” in the regiment as a result. Sir Keir Starmer is under immense pressure to boost the military after Donald Trump’s attack on Iran showed how ill-prepared Britain was for war.  It took three weeks for HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer, to arrive in the eastern Mediterranean after RAF Akrotiri, a British air base in Cyprus, was hit by a drone.  Sir Keir has failed to say how the Government will meet its pledge to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence, and his defence investment plan for military spending over the next decade – promised last autumn – has still not been published amid wrangling between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Treasury. The SAS resignations are a significant blow to the famed special forces unit, which is the tip of the spear in military operation and is deployed globally.  Last month it was revealed that 242 special forces troops, including 120 serving troops, were being hounded by lawyers as part of £1m-a-month human rights inquiries... Secret operations across Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and Syria are being investigated by lawyers, with the troops involved facing legal sanctions if they fail to comply... George Simm, a former regimental sergeant major of 22 SAS, said troops were afraid they would “get a knock on the door” from lawyers and felt they had been betrayed.  He said laws such as the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) were being applied to war zones and that the right to life for “armed terrorists and murderers” now outweighed that of the special forces troops sent to stop them from committing atrocities.  “If a soldier discharges their weapon, they are almost certainly going to get a knock at their door one day,” he told The Telegraph. “It feels like a betrayal and a break in the trust. “We now have to consider the lives of the terrorists because of the ECHR. These are the guys who are shooting at us. We have all killed mass murderers and these lawyers say you should have done this and should have done that. It’s a joke.  “There is a dangerous dichotomy that has crept into the command and come all the way down the chain of command and now the lawyers are all over it.” Lt Col Richard Williams, a former commanding officer of 22 SAS, told The Telegraph: “The SAS, like all involved in UK defence today, is being hit with the Labour Party’s unique, toxic, double whammy of lawfare persecution and budget cuts.   “It’s hardly surprising that professional and loyal soldiers, SAS or otherwise, choose to leave.”  Labour’s Troubles bill, which seeks to remove immunity protections introduced by the Conservatives in their Northern Ireland Legacy Act, has provoked anger in military circles. Some of the UK’s most senior retired military chiefs warned before Christmas that legal reform was provoking an “exodus” from the special forces.  In an unprecedented intervention, nine former military chiefs claimed that soldiers’ trust in the legal system had collapsed to such a point that it “risks everything”. In an open letter to Sir Keir, they said allowing historic cases against veterans to be reopened was playing into the hands of Britain’s enemies.  The letter – which included Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, a former chief of the general staff, among its signatories – warned: “Today every British soldier deployed must consider not only the enemy in front of them but the lawyer behind them.  “Make no mistake, our closest allies are watching uneasily, and our enemies will be rubbing their hands.”  Writing for The Telegraph in December, seven former SAS commanders warned Britain’s most elite troops risked being used as scapegoats by politicians who were “doing the enemy’s work”. The writers included two former commanding officers of 22 SAS, Aldwin Wight and Lt Col Williams, as well as three former squadron commanders, a former regimental sergeant major and a former warrant officer first class.  They said the threat of legal action could result in deaths as “commanders turn risk-averse” and “soldiers hesitate where boldness saves lives”.  “Britain’s special forces are small, discreet, uniquely lethal... Their humiliation rewards Moscow, Tehran and Beijing,” they wrote. “Our handling of allegations is national security, not a sideshow.  “Defend our defenders fairly, firmly, eyes open to war’s moral mess – or keep doing the enemy’s work, one leak, one inquiry, one broken soldier at a time. A democracy that won’t back its warriors won’t long endure.” The Army has shrunk from more than 100,000 around 2010 to just over 70,000 fully trained soldiers now, its smallest since before the Napoleonic War.  The Navy, once the jewel of Britain’s military, is now at its smallest size in living memory, with only seven frigates and six destroyers in the fleet and two aircraft carriers. Of the six Astute-class nuclear attack submarines, only one is at sea.  One of Britain’s Vanguard boats, armed with nuclear missiles, spent more than six months underwater, a far longer deployment than previously carried out by the nuclear deterrence force."
Time to train another battalion of human rights lawyers

Labour’s Troubles bill could risk breakup of the UK, former general warns - "Labour’s Troubles Bill risks making a united Ireland more likely, a former British Army general has warned.  Writing exclusively in The Telegraph, Gen Sir Nick Parker accused the Government of introducing the legislation to score multiple short-term political points, such as winning favour with the EU. But he said the UK Government’s strategic objective behind the Troubles legislation was not clear.  In contrast, Sinn Féin is laser-focused on its aim of Irish unity and the lengthy process to pass the bill threatens to undermine the Army and the Union, Sir Nick said... “Sinn Féin’s objective has been clear for decades. It seeks a united Ireland and now pursues that objective through legitimate democratic and political means  “What exactly is the UK Government’s objective? Reconciliation? Closure? Justice? Political stability? Better relations with Dublin and progress on EU reset? Supporting those who acted on its behalf? Closure for victims?  “The answer appears to be all of them. The fact that there is no clearly defined aim creates a fundamental imbalance. One side knows what success looks like. The other does not.” Sir Nick has previously urged Sir Keir Starmer to abandon the Troubles bill.  Legislation passed under the Tories – the 2023 Legacy Act – granted veterans conditional immunity from prosecution for their actions during the Troubles and ended all new civil cases and inquests. But Labour has introduced plans that would allow veterans to be brought before the courts decades after serving on the Government’s behalf.  Ministers want to use a legal process known as a remedial order to strip out the immunity protection, claiming it is “incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)” because it could stop human rights violations being properly investigated.  But critics, including Sir Nick, argue that this could mean a series of fresh civil cases that could cost taxpayers millions of pounds. Sir Nick added: “For veterans and former police officers, the consequences are particularly stark. Many now face the prospect of repeated scrutiny more than half a century after the events in question.  “The issue is no longer simply accountability. It is whether democratic societies can sustain an endless process without eventually undermining confidence in the very institutions that defend them.”... Veterans groups have warned that the bill leaves former soldiers vulnerable to vexatious legal claims that former terrorists do not face."
The human rights-industrial complex smells blood. If the left hates you, they will continually pursue you till they get the result they want

Khaled Hassan on X - "Every single thing that's happening in Britain today happened in Egypt in the 1950s.   The destruction of the economy. The socialist-Islamic alliance. Palestinianism. Anti-Western sentiments and viewing the Chinese, Russians, and other authoritarian regimes as better alternatives to the US.  It's 100% the same.  Egyptians didn't fight back. The silent majority either welcomed this nonsense or did nothing about it.   It's the same in Britain today.   Britain as we know it is drawing its last breath.   This is the end."

Nigel Farage witch hunt has proved that British public are behind Reform UK - "The fact is for weeks all those parties have been screeching that Farage wasn’t fit to be Clacton’s MPs because of questions over his financial affairs, in particular a £5million gift from a crypto billionaire. So, Farage did exactly what those parties had been demanding, he resigned his seat telling the people of Clacton he’d stand again and they could vote for him if they wanted to – or not. But that wasn’t good enough for all the party leaders who promptly threw their toys out of the pram saying they wouldn’t stand against him. And we all know why not. It’s because they’re terrified they’ll get slaughtered if they go up against Farage. Even Kemi Badenoch, who I’d begun to respect, ran away and called it a “fake election”.  No, it’s a very real one which she doesn’t have the guts to stand in because Farage got 45% of the vote in the last by-election and smashed the Tories majority of 26,000. This time round, she knows they’d lose even more votes as would all the others. So, they pretend that running scared of the fight is about not playing the game of a man they despise.  Trouble is, no-one’s buying it. The British people aren’t stupid. They know our political establishment is TERRIFIED of Farage, in particular Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, who tweets and rants about him daily and who this week went into red faced overdrive screaming that what Farage had done was just one big stunt. Seriously? This from the cringemaking king of stupid stunts.  At least Farage hasn’t had to stoop to bungee jumping or falling off paddleboards to get voters’ attention. There’s not a single Labour, Tory or Lib Dem MP who has the guts or the conviction to do what Farage just did in Clacton because they know they’d all be kicked out.  Yes, there are genuine questions to be asked about his finances and they’re being investigated. Farage has always said that the £5million donation was a gift to fund his security because he’s been attacked more than most other MP’s and for years has to pay for his own protection. He and his family are constantly under threat and he lives in fear of having acid thrown in his face – something which comic Jo Brand joked about. “Why bother throwing a milkshake when you can get some battery acid,” said this vile woman.  This week Farage understandably lost the plot when Sky News pitched up outside his daughter’s front door. Now why the hell do that when she’s got absolutely nothing to do with his political life? It was harassment, pure and simple, and any parent would be spitting nails... guess what, while they tell us Farage is finished, membership of Reform has surged yet again – which tells me the British people don’t like witch hunts and they don’t like politicians ganging up against someone who wants what they do."

Of all the strains of Farage Derangement Syndrome, this one is the silliest - "Farage has money and nice things, say these people with money and nice things, so how can he be anti-establishment? It’s underpinned by such an archaic vision of “the establishment”. These people seem to think that being establishment means wearing red braces and chewing fat cigars, as if it were 1984 and Thatcher was still in Downing St and Duran Duran still at No1. Perhaps they think the ruling classes also wear bowler hats and yell “You boy!” at every urchin they meet on the streets.  They have no understanding of how power has shifted in this country, how it has been shifted from men’s clubs on Pall Mall to the cultural hangouts of the lanyard classes. The movers and shakers of the new establishment are less likely to ping their braces and say: “Sell, sell, sell!” than they are to tighten their keffiyehs and say: “Trans women are women.” Power wears geeky glasses these days. It wraps itself in the Pride flag. Its stomping ground is HR departments and smokeless local-council offices. Its mission is to manage the masses, especially our crude, unorthodox speech.  If you see a posh bloke in a tweed blazer, that’s not “the establishment” – it’s a young fogey on his way to a wine bar. If, however, a lady with Su Pollard specs and a badge declaring her pronouns makes a beeline for you at work, it’s highly likely you’re about to be reprimanded for wrongthink. That’s “the establishment” to most people these days. There’s also an extreme defensiveness in these cries of “Farage is the establishment!”. There’s a reason you only ever hear this guff from people with cushy jobs in the media, law or, indeed, politics.  It’s because these people can’t face the truth: that they’re the establishment now. They point a finger at Britain’s best-known Dulwich old boy to distract attention from their own cultural power that they doll up as rebelliousness. From those Remoaners who beat the streets to try to overturn Brexit to the keffiyeh classes who rattle their jewellery in effusive agreement with every literary darling who attacks Israel. That’s cultural clout in the 21st century.  At some level, these people know Farage is more tuned in to the concerns of working-class communities than they will ever be. Where they look down at the Brexit-voting oiks as “gammon” whose brains have been turned to mush by too much tabloid-reading, Farage can hold a conversation with the everyday Briton. Indeed, a few months ago a poll found that a majority of Britons think Farage would be the most “fun” politician to have a pint with – and that Keir Starmer would be the politician most likely to skip his round.  It’s simple: they hate it when Farage attacks “the establishment” because they know he’s talking about them."

Here’s the real reason why Labour’s never had a female leader – but no one wants to admit it - "The reason Labour has never had a female leader, I now humbly accept, is nothing to do with hypocrisy or sexism.  It’s actually because the party has never had a woman who’s anywhere near good enough. Of course, given that Labour has been led by such titans as Sir Keir Starmer, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, I will inevitably now be accused of sexism myself. But in response, all I can do is ask: who should Labour’s first female leader have been?  Should it have been, say, Diane Abbott (who stood in the leadership contest of 2010)? Would she have steered Labour to electoral triumph, with her effortless popular appeal? Or how about Rebecca Long-Bailey (who stood in 2020)? Would she have wowed the public with her dazzling charisma?  Alternatively, perhaps Harriet Harman, who was the party’s caretaker leader on two occasions (2010 and 2015), while members debated which man should be given the job full-time. Could she have won back the working class, with her celebrated common touch?  On the whole, I tend to suspect not. Anyway, the reason I raise this awkward subject is that, almost three weeks after Sir Keir announced his resignation, not a single Labour woman has put her name forward to be his successor. Why? Have the nasty sexist Labour men hidden the application forms?  I suppose we shouldn’t rule it out. There is, however, a simpler explanation. Which is that Labour’s current crop of 186 female MPs know that none of them would have a cat’s hope in hell of beating Andy Burnham. And if so, they’re not wrong. After all, which of them would you pick?  Maybe Rachel Reeves, the most unpopular Chancellor in history. Or Angela Rayner, who was forced to resign as deputy prime minister over her tax affairs (always an unfortunate look for a socialist). Or Bridget Phillipson, who this week argued that the taxpayer should bankroll free childcare for parents who are unemployed. Or Lucy Powell, who once suggested that mentioning the rape-gangs scandal was a “dog whistle”. Or Lisa Nandy, who once argued that male criminals should be placed in women’s prisons if they say they’re women, too. Or Dawn Butler, who once claimed that babies are born without a biological sex. Kemi Badenoch – the Tories’ fourth female leader – reckons she knows why Labour has no women capable of winning a leadership contest. “Every woman who is a Conservative MP has had to fight to get where she is,” she wrote last month. “We do not have all-women shortlists or quotas. We are made of tougher stuff.”  This theory certainly sounds more convincing than the one put forward by Lucy Powell, Sir Keir’s deputy. She recently suggested that Labour has never had a female leader because of “our political discourse in this country”...
Taxpayers will be forced to fund the Clacton by-election, after the Government indignantly rejected Nigel Farage’s offer to pay for it out of his own pocket (or at least, out of Reform’s). A spokesman for the MHCLG (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) explained: “To maintain the independence and impartiality of the electoral process, the law is clear that the cost of running elections must be met from public funds, and not by candidates or political parties.”  That may be so. But could that law be about to change?  I ask because back in 2008, during the days of the last Labour government, the Tory MP David Davis did much the same thing as Mr Farage, by resigning to fight a snap by-election in his own seat. And one cabinet minister was so disgusted by this needless extravagance, he declared that Mr Davis should be made to foot the £80,000 bill himself.  “I think there’s a bloody good case to be made for it,” thundered the then culture secretary, in an interview with the Left-wing magazine Progress. “Why should the resources at local level and national level be devoted to this? Why?”  In case you’ve forgotten who the culture secretary was at that time, it was none other than Mr Andy Burnham. When he takes over as prime minister, therefore, will he reverse the Government’s decision, and accept Mr Farage’s offer?  You never know. After all, the recent Makerfield by-election, and resultant mayoral election in Greater Manchester, could reportedly end up costing the public a combined £5m – which is a remarkable £4.92m more than Mr Davis’s by-election. So I’m sure Mr Burnham will be anxious to avoid incurring any more unnecessary expense."

Politics UK on X - "🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham has appointed Louise Haigh the rare role of First Secretary of State It was last held in 2021 and has seniority over all Secretaries of State. She has also been appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office"
Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio on X - "LEARN THE WORKPLACE RULES! Convicted of fraud and donate to Reform? That's bad. Convicted of fraud and appointed Secretary of State? That's good."
Convicted fraudster Louise Haigh stripped of oversight of fraud office

How the NGO-industrial complex corrupts UK politics - spiked - "The report recommends that all lobbying of government ministers, aides and middle-ranking mandarins – from WhatsApp chats to meetings at party conferences – is publicly declared on an easy-to-read database. Even those who don’t lobby the state for money would have to sign up to a register. That also goes for charities and pressure groups seeking to influence policy.  The proposed new rules would hit Labour and progressive parties far more than the Conservatives, who have long been legally obliged to declare their contacts with advocates for the corporate world. Labour ministers and their departments constantly have their ears bent by the kinds of NGOs, pressure groups and the big campaigning charities that aren’t currently caught in the net, but they would be under the commission’s recommendations. If Amnesty International, the New Economics Foundation and the like want to continue setting up discreet workshops with Sir Humphrey’s top officials – or whispering in ministers’ ears about the beauty of open borders, wealth taxes or transgender activism – they would have to be open about it and have their meetings recorded for our benefit.  This would come as a shock to the current progressive establishment, whose members have long acted as if the lobbying threat comes solely from billionaires and shills for multinational conglomerates. But this is both misleading and outdated. Today’s super-rich are more likely to fund a think-tank, or an international institute campaigning for a particular worldview, than to nobble ministers over an expensive lunch. When it comes to lever-pulling, these organisations excel most in covert influence. It is the charity-industrial complex – comprising many NGOs that are now sophisticated multimillion-pound transnational operations – that lobbies hardest... The boundaries between government and private-sector activity are now more fluid than ever. Many charities and non-profits are only nominally independent. In reality, they receive a large proportion of their income from the government itself, officially to help deliver a particular policy, but often to direct and apply it, too. Many such charities have a distinctly activist bias. There is not much difference between such organisations and lobbyists as regards their potential for influence on ministerial policy – they push for the policies they want and get rewarded financially... And what about public-sector bodies set up supposedly at arm’s length to advise ministers? The Ethics and Integrity Commission has airily dismissed any suggestion that they should be caught in the lobbying net. ‘Providing impartial, expert advice to government in the public interest is an integral part of their role and their governance’, the commission states.  If only. The idea that, say, Natural England or English Heritage are just groups of well-meaning boffins offering the government impartial advice is absurd. Both organisations see it as their function to put pressure on the government to promote a particular interest, and have no hesitation in doing so. And that’s before you get to bodies like the Equality and Human Rights Commission or the office of the Children’s Commissioner for England, which have no compunction in putting pressure on government in matters often at odds with voters’ wishes – such as in strengthening the power of the human-rights lobby or banning the smacking of children. These may or may not be good policies, but we have just as much of a right to transparency from such bodies as we have from any other group set up to promote a particular point of view."

PeterSweden on X - "What a surprise. The new incoming British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has hired a former director at the far-left organization Hope Not Hate to be his Director of Political Strategy. Can you guess who has funded Hope Not Hate. None other than George Soros. This Hope Not Hate is known to not only work closely with, but even have antifa operatives write for them."

Burnham’s plan to ‘rewire’ politics will blow the fuse, warns Lord Speaker - "Andy Burnham’s plan to reform the House of Lords risks blowing a “constitutional fuse”, the Lord Speaker has warned.  Lord Forsyth of Drumlean will warn the incoming prime minister against proposals to create a second elected chamber, thus “rewiring” Britain’s constitutional processes.  Mr Burnham said last month that he wanted an “early change” in the House of Lords, and described an unelected second chamber as “quite scandalous”.  He has backed plans to replace it with a “senate of the nations and regions”, a proposal first put forward in 2022, made up of elected representatives from across the country.  In a rare intervention in a speech on Thursday evening, the Lord Speaker will question whether scrutinising UK-wide legislation should be done by regional delegates who face pressure from their own areas... Lord Forsyth will warn that having another elected chamber could result in a US Congress-style “gridlock”, where the upper chamber would “feel free to attempt to block or kill legislation”.  He will add that local or regional representatives might feel pressure to “prioritise the needs of their own areas”, or have constituency work to deal with, unlike peers.  Sir Keir Starmer finally succeeded in Labour’s decades-long attempt to abolish hereditary peers, but his successor has said he believes there are multiple stages on the road to reform."

Sadiq Khan is a terrible mayor – no wonder Starmer has given him a peerage - "One of the 26 is former MP Kitty Ussher, who in 2009 had to resign as a Treasury minister after being exposed as having dodged (albeit legally) £17,000 in capital gains tax by temporarily redesignating her main home for one month. Still, now she has a permanent role lording it over the rest of us. Ain’t life grand?  While Ms Ussher is a relatively obscure figure, her fellow Lords nominee Sir Sadiq Khan is anything but. As a thrice-elected Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq is a familiar national presence – indeed an all-too-familiar presence for those of us who live in the capital and are not his biggest fans.  The fact he has been re-elected twice might imply that he has been a successful mayor. He has not. All it shows is that London is a strongly Labour-leaning city. Although the Tories can win, they have to have an exceptional candidate to do so. That has not been the case since Boris Johnson in 2008 and 2012. Sir Sadiq’s record is the very opposite of successful. Take housing, an issue of immediate and pressing need. Khan began with a target of between 23,900-27,200 affordable home starts. When it became clear he was miles away from this, he simply cut the target by 22 per cent to 17,800-19,000 starts.  Just last week, City Hall figures showed he had missed that too, with only 14,335 starts. But even that figure flatters him.  In 2024-25 just 8,184 homes were actually completed in London, against an assessed need of 45,500 a year. More than 43,000 homes counted as “started” are unfinished.  Then turn to crime. Knife crime in London rose by nearly 72 per cent between 2015-16 and June 2025. Khan boasts that it is now falling – down 7 per cent in the year to August 2025. Well, yes. But when you have presided over a 72 per cent rise, it takes a large degree of political chutzpah to boast that the latest figure is down by seven per cent. Shoplifting has more than doubled in over a third of London’s 32 boroughs since 2016. Over the whole of London, it has risen by more than 50 per cent in the last five years. And “theft from the person”, such as pickpocketing, has almost tripled since 2016.  And we Londoners pay through the nose for this. The mayor’s share of the council tax bill was £276 for a Band D household when Khan took office in 2016. It is now £510.51: a rise of 85 per cent. Not once has Khan condemned the hate marches that now regularly bring much of central London to a halt and leave many Jews feeling that they are no-go areas.  He has suggested that those who chant “from the river to the sea” are not anti-Semitic and has attacked the use of the label “hate marches”. And after the Chief Rabbi criticised the mayor’s call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza while Hamas was still in control, Khan went after him, suggesting the Chief Rabbi was motivated by anti-Muslim prejudice. Khan did later apologise, but only after a huge backlash.  This kind of language is something of a theme for Khan. When some Londoners protested against his plan to expand the ultra-low-emission zone, he suggested they were “joining hands” with “the far-Right”.  In most walks of life such a record of failure and incendiary remarks would be damning, even career ending. But in London politics, it means Khan is deemed as qualified to be handed a lifetime role as a legislator in the Lords."

Indians and Mass Migration

Given how querulous they are known to be (see: Amartya Sen), this is definitely a flawed essay:

pagliacci the hated 🌝 on X

“wHy aRe tHerE iNdiaNs In pOrTuGaL?!” Because they are good slaves, you are not. I hate essay-posting but allow me a rare indulgence: To understand what is happening now, you need understand that this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Why are there Indians in Kenya? Suriname? Fiji? Burma? Because Indians have always been the preferred servile class of elites. The evidence for this goes back hundreds of years. I’ve spoken about British colonial Burma before, and it is a great example of what this looks like. Even after extensive efforts to bring them to heel, the majority of the Burmese ethnic groups were far too resistant to submit to the British empire to be reliable labor. They refused to abandon their culture and ways of life to be slave drones for British pocketbooks. So the Brits started importing Indians to be their colonial administrators, preferring them as labor because they were easier to control and satisfy. By the 1940s, Indians made up almost 20% of the population of the entire country. Another great historical example of this is Suriname - a small country in South America that had been under Dutch colonial rule for 300 years. The Dutch abolished slavery in 1863, forcing colonial plantation owners to have to hire labor to do the work they had previously been using slaves for. But… they didn’t want to pay former slaves or Indigenous locals a living wage for the work. So what did the Dutch elites do instead? Import Indians. Today, Indians still make up 27% of the population. 27%. Of a tiny, obscure South American country. We could basically go through the list of every country with a non-negligible Indian population and the theme would be consistent: They were brought there by elites who needed a submissive, easily exploitable labor pool when local labor asked for better living conditions or wages. Why? Because Indians never did. They are a population that seems fully content with subjugation (even Marx noticed this). So it’s easy to see why they were such an ideal population for the intensive global expansion era of colonial empires. And it’s even easier to see why they are perfect subjects for late capitalism now. They are the culturally, psychologically, and physically ideal organism for the dominant system. There’s 1.4 billion of them. They are deeply socially stratified and so expect and even enjoy inequality. Their cuisine is cheap, meat-free slop. They live amongst trash and filth with no qualms. They don’t care about the environment. Their reaction to death and abuse is blank-eyed indifference. They are physically and spiritually malleable. They not only adopt and internalize the demands of the dominant system as personal ambition, they believe this servitude makes them better than everyone else who hasn’t. Absolutely IDEAL subjects. You, on the other hand, are not the ideal subject. You want to live in a high-trust society. You would shed tears if someone tried to cut down the apple tree you climbed as a child to build a data center. You want to see and experience beauty. You want your own space. You have an expectation that your living conditions will improve over time. You would not be content to live in a room with 10 other people, work 16 hours per day for pennies, and eat cheap slop. You are a liability. Just like the Burmese and Surinamese slaves were. And as we continue to crawl deeper into this late capitalist hellscape, you and your silly little needs will come into increasing conflict with those of the system. Thus, you WILL be replaced by people far easier to control and far less concerned about their own welfare or the welfare of everyone and everything around them. … Unless you do something about it. But the system has already locked-in that you won’t, and that you’ll just sort of fade into nothingness, distracted by meaningless comforts and terrified of the uncertainty of change. So “why are Indians in [wherever]?” Because you are about to not be.