The Path to Western Civilisation
Time Preference isn’t sexy and exciting, like anything related to, well, sex. It isn’t controversial like IQ and gender. In fact, most of the ink spilled on the subject isn’t even found in evolutionary or evolutionary psychology texts, but over in economics papers about things like interest rates that no one but economists would want to read. So why do I think Time Preference is so important? Because I think Low Time Preference is the…
My Honour is Loyalty
As the days draw in around Autumn and move towards Winter, we in Britain, Europe and the Northern Hemisphere begin to think of the way Nature sheds its old forms. Travelling in its inexorable way towards closure, it’s entirely appropriate that we should be reminded of past lives and times, as if by some hidden hand, we also find ourselves commemorating the dead from two world wars. Nevertheless, in recent years a controversy has broken…
Avoiding a European Intifada
In the wake of the Islamic attacks in Paris last night, as the death toll gradually rises as more and more bodies are discovered and as more people expire from fatal injuries, people all over Europe are today realising that what we are witnessing could have happened in any large European town or city, and probably will unless something radical is done to prevent it, now! Several years ago, something could have easily been done…
Moral Particularism and the Imbalance of Nature
By Max Musson: In this modern age of concern for environmental issues, many people and even some naturalists who should know better, often talk of the ‘balance of nature’, and in reference to the impact of mankind’s growth and expansion across the globe, are highly critical, citing current trends as evidence that ‘we’ are “destroying the planet”. Worse than this however, is the tendency to view the lifestyles of the indigenous peoples of the ‘developing…
Homeless Jack says you’re the Most Important Person in the World
By H. Millard: “Why are you the most important person in the world? It is because if you are not here, nothing else matters to you. Without you to sense existence and live, there is no existence for you. There is nothing. Your importance is always and in all ways related to yourself. The non-existent and the dead don’t care about anything, because they do not exist. Because they do not exist, they are not…
Western Winter, Western Spring …
By Max Musson: On the 28th July 1914 there began a ‘winter’ that has so far lasted 100 years. During World War One, European nations mobilised over 60 million men in a four-year conflict in which 15 million of them would be killed or lost in action (presumed dead) and a further 20 million would be seriously wounded. Furthermore, as if such a holocaust was not bad enough there followed twenty-five years later, the Second…
Elysium
By Heordredenn: Film Review: Elysium, written, directed and co-produced by Neill Blomkamp, released August 2013. It is 2154. The Earth is an overpopulated, impoverished, environmentally degraded ruin, with civilization falling apart. But high above a vast, silver-white wheel structure hangs in the sky, the last island of peace, order and civilization, the great orbital habitat Elysium, now home to the global elite of the cosmopolitan super-rich. That is the premise of South African director Neill…
Do Bad Things With You …
By Max Musson: Years ago the story lines of horror films often featured vampires, and in those early films the vampire was always the villain, visiting terror upon some hapless Transylvanian community, until a suitably handsome hero came to the rescue, saving the community preyed upon, and of course the obligatory fair maiden, from the clutches of evil. Increasingly however, first vampires and now werewolves and other demons are being portrayed in a sympathetic light.…
The Nature of Democracy
By Max Musson: The democratic process and the principle of ‘one man, one vote’, is one of the foundation stones of liberal democracy and is seen by liberals, Marxists and social democrats as an institutional reaffirmation of their ‘sacred’ principle of human equality. Even so, the implementation and the practice of democracy and the practice of one man, one vote, has throughout history, not been without its problems and without detractors. Critics have pointed to…