PETER HITCHENS: Sadiq Khan wants to legalise marijuana, the drug behind so many violent horrors. He, and the rest of the liberal Ostrich class, are ignoring a national catastrophe
Meet the Ostrich Class, that great swamp of silly, self-regarding people who decide how we shall live, suffer and quite possibly die.
They know nothing about anything but they share the conventional view of what is good, so their inability to think or observe does not matter.
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The Independent
a day ago
- The Independent
Psychopaths are most likely to live in these US states
A new study indicates a correlation between adverse social conditions and higher levels of psychopathy, narcissism, and sadism. The research analyzed data from 1.8 million people across 183 countries, including 144,000 in the U.S., linking personality traits to societal factors like poverty, inequality, and violence. Researchers found that in societies where rules are broken and conditions are poor, individuals tend to prioritize self-interest, leading to higher 'Dark Factor' levels. U.S. states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Nevada and New York were identified with higher 'Dark Factor' levels, while Utah, Vermont, and Alaska showed lower levels. The study suggests that personality is shaped by societal conditions, implying that reforms to reduce corruption and inequality could help prevent the development of negative personality traits.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Telegraph
The Great Britain I love is dying. We have one last chance to save it
Imagine yourself back 30 years ago. If somehow you had been given a glimpse into the country's future, I am pretty confident certain things would have seemed quite incredible. To choose just a few not-quite-random recent examples: That we would have ignored the well-known fact of the mass gang rape of young girls across British cities for decades; That the British state would be unable to build a railway line between London and Birmingham and would spend nearly £100 billion proving it; That Parliament would allow women to kill their unborn baby at any point without committing any crime. You might have said in response that surely there must have been a massive change in the demographic, cultural, practical and indeed moral characteristics of Britain to make this possible. You might have said 'That doesn't sound like the same country I live in now', the country which had dragged itself out of a huge economic and political hole, played a huge role in winning the Cold War, and just finished building a tunnel under the sea to France. And I think you would be right. Of course there has been no sudden moment of change. As 1990s-you got older, you might have detected glimmers of what was to come in the saga of the Millennium Dome or the 2001 Bradford riots. But there would come a moment when you would look around and say 'Now I see it. Things really are different now'. What we are living through today, in a phrase, is an unprecedented break in national continuity. As a country we are disconnecting from the old Britain. The Britain of our national story is disappearing, the Britain of the Romans through the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Tudors, Nelson and Wellington, the two world wars and even the Attlee settlement. Gone is the Britain of Christianity and the Church as a core component of British identity, and moral judgement has become utilitarian, about what is convenient, disconnected from any traditional, let alone transcendental, set of values. Fast receding is the Britain of real state capacity and national ambition, as we move from Victorian St Pancras to the hole in the ground at Euston, from the first nuclear power station back to the windmill. Our national character is changing. We are, at last, becoming the 'young country', the country without a past, that Tony Blair wanted. Part of the reason is immigration, in particular the genuinely mass migration of the last decade or two, making London close to a majority foreign-born city and giving us our first taste of ethnic and communal politics. But equally, perhaps even more, responsible is the phenomenon of secular progressivism, turbo-charged into aggressive wokeism, with its belief that the historical past is irrelevant and probably actively immoral, and its determination to produce heaven on earth by releasing people from one inherited constraint after another, including finally those of biology itself. We have become a very different society over the last 30 years. And I think one unusual indicator captures it: the name of the country. Over the 1990s you would have seen 'Great Britain' slowly becoming 'the UK'. Google NGram shows that before 1960 the term 'UK' was barely used. Then, between 1980 and 2000, it suddenly leaps up to become much the most common term for the country, well above 'Britain' or 'Great Britain'. It still is. I don't think this is by chance. The only real parallel is the 'USA', a country which makes a virtue of its newness and of its origins in a political idea. I think the 'UK' as a term spread for similar reasons. It felt inclusive and in line with the ideology of multiculturalism in a young country. People coming here could retain their ethnic and cultural markers, their connection with the old country, while being a 'UK' citizen too. You could choose a traditional British historical or cultural identity, like that of England or Scotland, but you didn't have to. As a result, the word 'British' gradually ceased to be an ethnic or cultural term and became simply the adjective relating to the noun 'UK'. And we became known to the world not by a historical name but as a bureaucratic abbreviation. Some commentators on social media now go one step further and now, humorously or derisively, call us not the UK but the 'Yookay'. As you'll find if you google them, the term was initially used to symbolise the particular aesthetic quality of much of the modern UK, that jarring mixture of cultures bolted onto the pre-existing British environment. The American candy store next to the kebab shop with its modern signage stuck onto a half-timbered building. The scattered Lime bikes and discarded Deliveroo bags slung wherever on the street. And the soundtrack of modern Britain, multicultural London English with its global slang, the drill music on the train without headphones. If you live in a city, you recognise it. But the 'Yookay' now has a wider implication too: to suggest with the new name that we are now a new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain, distinct from it as I have described. And indeed we are becoming it: the Wessex or Mercia to Roman Britain, the ' island of strangers ' in Starmer's genius phrase, grottier, 'scuzzier' as The Spectator put it the other day, with a different national character, and with lower national ambition. Happily the transformation isn't complete yet. We don't have to become the Yookay. We don't have to live out our days like Roman villa-owners farming our estates as things collapse around us. Economic, social, and political reform – everything I have been setting out here over the years – can get us back on track. But for that we need politicians who can see what's going on and who care enough to get the country moving again – and who can reach back to the past, back beyond that break in continuity, to get the national energy to make it happen. For as George Orwell put it, in the final words of his great wartime essay The Lion and the Unicorn, 'we must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.'
The Guardian
7 days ago
- The Guardian
Shifty review – Adam Curtis's new show is an utter rarity: stylish, intelligent TV with something to say
Hello and welcome to the latest addition to Adam Curtis's growing compendium of documentaries I have unofficially entitled How Did Things Get So Shit? Let Me Explain in a Weirdly Uplifting Manner. Previous volumes include The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, HyperNormalisation, Can't Get You Out of My Head and Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone. Even if you have not had the challenging pleasure of watching, the titles alone should be enough to evoke most of the concerns found therein – the rise of individualism, the fragmentation of old systems, the political vacuums new people and powers have rushed to fill, the death rattle of formerly dependable entities on which western civilisation has traditionally rested and once allowed us to sleep peacefully at night, the creeping destabilisation of all things, and so very much on. The new entrant is a five-part series called Shifty. It is a rare purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy. Come on in, guys, the water's lovely! Though we can't even agree that it's wet any more. In Curtis's trademark telling – a vast, kaleidoscopic assemblage of archive clips from news reports, TV shows, vox pops, pop videos, home videos, celebrity and political profiles and whatever else he has found that serves his purpose, cleverly curated, wittily juxtapositioned and bouncily soundtracked – the decline began, as so many seem to have done, with Margaret Thatcher. The series begins with her opening her study door to a group of children escorted in by her favourite man-of-the-people Jimmy Savile because – well, how could it not? Once that clip had been found, it was going in. From there, we follow Britain through the 1980s – the Falklands, the Troubles, the miners' strike, Kelvin MacKenzie, Wham!'s first tour, the advent of CCTV, the transformation of houses from homes into assets, art and fashion into diffusion lines, all of them uncoupling the old ways from the new powers, truth from reality or Britain from its moorings in some way. On we go through the next decade as old imperial ways, people and myths struggle to survive under the onslaught of new media, new tech, new economic experiments and a new privileging of individual independence, self-interest and the profit motive that was absolutely never going to end badly for anyone. New Labour arrives in the fifth and final episode, however, and the idea of society arranged around working for the common good is restored. I'm kidding! 'They couldn't escape the world they had inherited and its pessimism about human motives.' Not simply regarding the electorate – the venality and sleaze that had enshrouded the Tory party over the preceding years (and may I say that there really should be a public health warning any time clips of David Mellor are to be shown, whether or not you lived through the Antonia de Sancha scandal) had also eroded all remaining trust in politicians and Blairites 'just accepted the belief that politicians were always self-interested'. If you watch party conference clips closely, you can see the light in Gordon Brown's eyes gradually going out. The last noble mien. We stop before Brexit and Donald Trump, but it is clear how Curtis believes the seeds have been sown for all our current sorrows. Is the viewer persuaded? It depends where you start from, of course – I can't speak for anyone who wasn't already halfway there before kick-off as I was – and it will depend perhaps even more on how you feel about this most Marmite of film-makers. Now that I have learned to let his films wash over me, to pay attention but not drill down as they go, then wait and see how they work on my consciousness afterwards, I manage much better and admire much more. But perhaps that is partly a function of context too. It is an increasing rarity to stand in the presence of anyone with an idea, a thesis, that they have thoroughly worked out to their own satisfaction and then present stylishly, exuberantly and still intelligently. The hell and the handcart feel that bit more bearable now. Shifty is on BBC iPlayer now
