We live in an era where fake news is real, and real news is fake. A recent furor in the U.K. concerned the involvement of Cambridge Analytica—President Trump’s favorite data jockeys—on the Leave side of the E.U. referendum. Overspending! Collusion! Betrayal! The Observer drew itself up to its ...
“God in heaven, Russia on Earth.” So say the Serbs, who have been programmed to see Russia behind every turn of good fortune. Westerners are now being programmed to see Russia behind every turn of bad fortune. To the Kremlin, it is the same difference: Both mean the Third Rome is strong. This ...
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The Icelandic state is considering a ban on child circumcision—with predictable reactions. Secular humanists claim victory while religious groups claim persecution. Yet their very reaction only reinforces the straw-man view of faith as something both absurd and sinister. Like Kierkegaard’s ...
“Now, that represents a degree of hypocrisy I’ve hitherto suspected in you but not noticed, due to highly evasive skills.” So says the eponymous lead character in the cult comedy Withnail and I. We have the same reaction to the global charity Oxfam having covered up extravagant sexual ...
Britain’s international relations have acquired something of Paris in the spring of 1871. Having achieved a lightning defeat at the hands of Prussia, the inhabitants of the French capital ignored the Teutonic army at their gates and descended into bloody civil war. With Brexit at our gates, ...
We have just witnessed a curious phenomenon in the U.K. Bloodthirsty conglomerate Virgin unilaterally withdrew the Daily Mail from its public-transport arm. A preening statement that the paper “did not align with the company’s values” grabbed SJWs as irresistibly as the tractor beam of the ...
It’s that time of the year again. As Coca-Cola’s magic truck trundles across our televisions and Starbucks’ ubiquitous red cups punctuate the daily commute, the terror alerts are flooding in. On Saturday, a knifeman was shot at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. Two weeks before, elements of a ...
After hitting the skids a few years ago, I moved to Serbia. Hell, it was fun. Belgrade had been bombed in ’99. The laser-guided ordnance was so accurate it could follow streets. The Serbs set up rooftop barbecues and watched. Some wag produced T-shirts emblazoned with crosshairs, which became ...
The advent of a White Christmas is now heralded by Black Friday: this infamous moment when the grand coalition of Western capitalism starts whipping its adherents toward the tills. Six weeks later, the same people are spat out into the dawn of a New Year, bleary-eyed and broke. Black Friday gives ...
