If parents just didn't do that [supply alcohol] or did the right thing [supervised], maybe their kids wouldn't get arrested, or hurt, or make dumb decisions that affected their future.
This is 101 parenting. It is not our job to bring your kid up. - Senior Sergeant Chris Brooks
No tourist truly understands a country they pass through. Like a pebble bouncing across a pond, we touch the surface without understanding what lies beneath. - Damien Grant
We are all tourists when it comes to the vast ocean of knowledge. Even the best of us merely skip across all that there is. Some humility, in the face of our own certainty, could be a wise approach to a complex world. - Damien Grant
What does it mean to be radical, left-wing, progressive? Well, in 2023, it meant making excuses for a genocidal anti-Semitism, refusing to believe evidence of mass rape and naysaying about the terroristic murder of infants. This was the year the 'right side of history' brigade exploded their phoney moral superiority for good. -
The unholy alliance between radical leftists and radical Islamists isn't new, of course. Over recent decades, the left has come to confuse anti-imperialism with anti-Westernism. Failed Western revolutionaries began to outsource radical agency to Islamists – turning these Jew-hating, misogynistic, gay-bashing theocrats into 'freedom fighters', locked in some grand conflict between the West and the rebellious global Other. - Tom Slater
This is not to say that all left-wingers are anti-Semitic. But the Jew hatred is undoubtedly coming from inside the house. Anti-Semitic leftists aren't falling under the spell of dashing jihadists, they are imbibing malign intellectual trends that have been festering, largely unchallenged, on the radical left for decades.
Leftists have come to see capitalism not as a structure of economic relations, but as a plot hatched among nefarious bankers – a manichean vision which maps all-too-neatly on to age-old anti-Semitic tropes. Their deranged hatred of Israel – and their patronising tendency to treat Muslims as the violent, benighted children of world affairs – means they now treat anti-Semitic pogroms as the voice of the unheard. - Tom Slater
The socialism of fools, the anti-imperialism of fools, the anti-racism of fools… in 2023, we learned that these ideologies represent a kind of intellectual and moral death for the left. As the left has disappeared up its own fundament, further into academia and the media and away from the civilising influence of ordinary people, it has come to embrace some truly depraved ideas. - Tom Slater
What's left? A movement once devoted to the liberation of mankind has become authoritarian and misanthropic. A movement once devoted to the abolition of racism is now the enforcer of racial hierarchy and an apologist for genocidal anti-Semitism. A movement once fuelled by the radical promise of the Enlightenment is now 'decolonising' itself of all of those supposedly 'Eurocentric' and 'white' values and thinkers. - Tom Slater
The world's governments came together in 2015 to promise to end hunger, poverty, and disease, to fix corruption, climate change, and war, to ensure jobs, growth, and education along with a bewildering array of major and minor promises like developing more urban gardens.
Unfortunately, this year even the UN admitted that we are failing badly. Promising everything means nothing is a priority.
We need to insist that our politicians get real in 2024 and focus first on the most efficient policies. And in our own charitable donations, we should similarly look to achieve the most good we can for every dollar spent. - Bjorn Lomborg
It's completely possible to respect the identities of trans people without having to sign on to their mantras: "Trans women are women" and "Trans men are men". Trans folks are humans with the rights of all humans, but the rights of a trans person, in my view, are not 100% identical to the rights of the sex they assume—the sex different from their natal sex. This has been particularly vexing to many (biological) women, who have demanded the right to have "women's spaces": women's prisons, women's shelters, battered women's homes, women as rape counselor, and, as we often discuss, women's sports. And I agree with the need for such spaces, which makes the "trans women are women" mantra a failure. - Jerry Coyne
But I can't buy the mantras any longer, and so have to assert, at my peril, that "Trans women are men" and "Trans men are women," for that's what's both scientifically correct and in accord with traditional usage. This, of course, doesn't mean you shouldn't respect their wishes to be treated as the sex they assume, including the use of their desired pronouns, though your mileage may differ. And it does not mean that, say, trans women have any "right" to be put in women's prisons or to participate in women's sports. - Jerry Coyne
When I went in the water I knew the chances of somebody even knowing I was in the water were pretty slim. I was pretty pessimistic from the outset. I just kept staying alive. - Will Fransen
I grew up with climate change. I don't really remember a time when it wasn't talked about, so I became obsessed with it – a big part of my life was worrying about it. Then I went to university and that was all I was studying. The environmental metrics were getting worse and worse. I was also assuming that extreme poverty and hunger must be getting worse. This fed into the notion that humans were incapable of solving problems. A key turning point was discovering the work of [Swedish physician and academic] Hans Rosling. He did these Ted Talks, mainly focusing on human metrics, where he would show how the world was changing, through data. And it turned out that most of the human wellbeing metrics that I'd assumed to be getting worse were actually getting better. Take child mortality: 200 years ago, almost half of children would die before reaching puberty, and that's now less than 5%. Now, the world is still terrible, and we have a lot of progress to make. But the realisation I came to was that we have the opportunity to improve both of these things at the same time: we can continue human progress while addressing our environmental problems. - Hannah Ritchie
It's appropriate to say that climate change is a really serious problem that has a large impact. We need to get across a sense of urgency, because there is a lot at stake. But there's often this message coming through that there's nothing we can do about it: it's too late, we're doomed, so just enjoy life. That's a very damaging message – because it's not true, and there's no way that it drives action. - Hannah Ritchie
I break down sustainability into an equation of two halves. One half is environmental sustainability: we should have a lower impact so we don't remove opportunities from future generations and other species. The other is caring about people who are alive today. You only really achieve sustainability if you've achieved both of these things. People have the notion that we've only become unsustainable very recently, when we discovered fossil fuels, and I don't think that's correct. Our ancestors in many ways had a lower environmental impact but they never really achieved the first half of the equation of providing high standards of living. Now we've tipped that the other way. We've achieved amazing human progress but at the cost of the environment. My proposition is that we can be the first generation that achieves both at the same time. - Hannah Ritchie
I accept that there are definitely flaws with capitalism. What I would push back against is the notion that we can just dismantle capitalism and build something else. The core reason is time. We need to be acting on this problem urgently, on a large scale, in the next five to 10 years, and to me it does not seem feasible that we're going to dismantle the system and build a new one in that time. I think capitalism does drive innovation, which is what we need to create affordable low-carbon technologies. - Hannah Ritchie
We are losing the ability to accept differences. There have always been elements of it. I experienced it a lot when I was a National Party MP. You would meet people who could only see you for your political views and were incapable of having an interesting rational discussion.
I get it. Sometimes people won't like you for what you believe and don't have the intelligence or desire to understand the rationale that often goes with the decisions you make. The argument that those of us on the right of politics who come from a welfare or poor background then "pull the ladder up behind us" is absolute rubbish. - Paula Bennett
The left does not have the monopoly on caring and wanting change for the better. Instead of pity, some of us want to see people with dignity and a place in society that sees them grow and prosper. - Paula Bennett
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