The “public health approach” to knife crime is often touted as an alternative to police and prisons. But successful community policing approaches like Glasgow’s VRU took enforcement and punishment very seriously indeed. Me for the @spectator 🧵spectator.co.uk/article/the-co…
Knife crime is back in the news. The victimisation of women and girls has doubled in the past five years. Actor Idris Elba has launched a campaign to ban so-called "zombie knives" and machetes. Teenagers carry blades out of fear, and tragedy and terror haunt our streets.
Jan 4 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This is going to be shocking to the good prof, but its possible to DISAGREE with international law as it is currently applied. Laws that were designed to help people fleeing genocide are being taken advantage of by economic migrants and people smugglers.
The confusion of proceduralism and law (especially international law, which isn't subject to democratic oversight) with morality and common sense is a typical mistake of those of Dr Riley's worldview and class
Nov 24, 2023 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Nice argument — pity it’s not true. In fact non EU migrants are MORE likely to be unemployed, on disability and live in social housing. We’re importing huge numbers of economically inactive people.
If you drill down into the percentage of income from benefits and tax credits you quickly discover the same pattern - White British workers are bang on the national average, many minority groups have much higher rates ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-b…
Apr 28, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The left-right dialectic is a tool of social control –– observe the attempts to smear anyone who tries to step outside of it as "fascist" –– these are the categories and oppositions that maintain the status quo of unfettered global capitalism and technocratic elites
What does "fascist" actually mean at this point? It's fine to be a hang em and flog em authoritarian as long as you also love the free market? You can be in favour of nationalising everything but it becomes problematic if you like families too? Nothing means anything here
Apr 28, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
At the time I was shocked to learn that support for Meloni and her coalition was highest amongst young Italians. Looking at voting patterns across Europe I discovered a clear trend –– national populism is a youth movement outside of the Anglosphere thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-202…
This is an extraordinary and underreported development, and in the English-speaking world we continue to assume young people will mindlessly flock to progressive movements. But across much of Europe the opposite seems to be happening
Apr 27, 2023 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Whether or not mass migration is the cause, these statistics are misleading, and need to be placed in the context of a) what people actually do and b) a huge list of other questions of social cohesion and trust. Thread 🧵
First of all, do parents let children play outside (good indicator of trust in neighbourhood here). Well the average age of starting unsupervised play has gone up from 9 to 11 theguardian.com/society/2021/a…
Mar 30, 2023 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
I am baffled, and I mean truly, utterly mystified, as to how the obviously and straightforwardly false claim that Britain has concealed, or continues to conceal, its historic involvement in the slave trade is still forwarded by so many academics and journalists.
I was taught about it in school, so were millions of others. It's been the subject of documentaries and articles. There has never been a single period in our history in which this information has been concealed or suppressed. It's a frequent subject for discussion and debate
Feb 24, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
A year on from the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we're going to hear a lot of (justified) moral outrage. But it's vitally important, if we want to end the war, that we understand Russia's motivations, and why so many Russians still support the war thecritic.co.uk/Sympathy-for-t…
NATO expansion does not JUSTIFY the war, but it does help EXPLAIN it –– many have forgotten that Ukraine and Russia were in the same country for three hundreds years, and that this union only came to an end 30 years ago. This complicates matters.
Dec 14, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Canada's MAID system is the classic problem of stressing liberty over love (a second order over a first order good) –– Canada says to its citizens "maybe your life isn't worth living, it's up to you" when what it should say is "your life IS worth living & we'll fight to save you"
Once you've crossed from love to liberty, everything changes, in that instant people become disposable, every relationship transactional, every love conditional. It's the inevitable result of the turn from a society that looked to eternal life to one defined by materialism.
Nov 29, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Here’s the problem—we aren’t a religious country anymore, but nor are we a country of devout secular humanists, godless nationalists or atheistic progressives. We’re a country of people who believe literally nothing at all and I think we are not going to like what that looks like
People who think that yes, this is their great moment to move to a more modern society or dream of some more mature sort of human life are going to be sorely disappointed by the trustless, and traditionless wasteland of a society they will inherit
Nov 6, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Fascinating how if you scratch the surface of pro-immigration politics you discover a festering hatred of working class people
Immigrants are, as experienced by upper middle class bobos, nice fully integrated doctors and fellow professionals, closer to them than supposedly vile and stupid white yobos. Working class families in Rotherham may have had slightly different experiences…
Nov 5, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Is it possible that serotonin levels are an effect rather than a cause of depression? Diet, exercise, social status and stress could all, surely, plausibly effect our brain chemistry? theguardian.com/society/2022/n…
It's a classic problem of materialistic diagnosis –– I'm sure if a beautiful woman kissed a depressed man, serotonin would flood his brain –– but mysteriously the kisses of beautiful women are not prescribed by psychiatrists, just miserable little pills that make you nauseous
Nov 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Typical of our terrible approach to arts funding. Londoners have to miss out on wonderful ENO, and we give Manchester (its always Manchester or Birmingham) another token London media satellite. theguardian.com/culture/2022/n…
ENO more accessible to more people and more of the country in London (our capital city), and why can't we simply fund regional and civic orchestras, opera and theatre companies in their own right rather than throwing scraps from London's table?
Nov 4, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This article is pure sophistry –– out of context data, appeals to emotion and moralising sermons that don't address basic facts.
Let's take on one of the few bits of actual data the piece bothers to take on –– that a majority of visa applications by Albanians in the first half of 2022 were from trafficked women. It is as far I know a true claim. But that's not the issue.
Nov 4, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It's so over. Britain is done. The sun has set on the Britpop Empire, never to rise again.
This is what we lost
Oct 30, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I can't emphasise this enough, Suella is in trouble for trying to implement the 2019 manifesto, and the endlessly broken promises made by every UK prime minister for decades to lower immigration.
Bringing migration levels down is not a sinister right wing agenda foisted on respectable democratic politics by a cabal, its literally what Keir Starmer is promising the electorate right now.
Oct 30, 2022 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
Since it is now obligatory to talk about mental elf' I will say this - God has a special love for the poor in spirit, and I think this best descirbes those who find themselves in mental torment, and it is epsecially this spiritual poverty Christ has come to answer.
Consider the example of Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the ressurected Christ, and perhaps the paradigmatic Christian. Christ cast out "seven demons" from her - perhaps meaning seven exorcisms, a measure of the agony from which she was released.
Oct 30, 2022 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
“For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.”
From Jubliate Agno by Anglican poet Christopher Smart. A friend of Samuel Johnson, he wrote the poem whilst confined in a lunatic asylum due to heavy debts and alleged “religious mania” poetryfoundation.org/poems/45173/ju…
Oct 3, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The quintessential example of bad US cultural imperialism is UK pop music –– largely sung in a faux-American accent –– entirely uprooted from the folk music that enriched US pop, country, etc. But equally alienated from UK traditions –– a form of musical plantation.
Striking thing about listening especially to older UK pop, is just how much BETTER it sounds and how much more distinctive. Atmosphere and temperament of Britain is present in that music in a way that it no longer is for most part.
Apr 21, 2022 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
The new dystopian age of digital warfare, a thread. Ukraine's 'IT Army' are sending images of dead Russian soldiers to their mothers with the help of Silicon Valley. Here's why this should concern all of us. thecritic.co.uk/the-digital-di…
First of all its arguably a war crime - there are strict rules about identifying and honourably treating fallen combatants, but the international law has not caught up with the new psychological warfare tactic of terrorising dead soldier's families.
Mar 14, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I think bad planning and worse architecture also has much to answer for here - when was the last time anyone was EXCITED a new building was going up nearby or in their town?
I think pro-development/building rightists and scrutonesque traditionalists should put their heads together more - we all already live in a world created by an industrial building boom and we all love it because the Victorians are the ones who carried it out!
If you drill down into the percentage of income from benefits and tax credits you quickly discover the same pattern - White British workers are bang on the national average, many minority groups have much higher rates
