Cornucopia of Conspiracy

A team of "geological and environmental science researchers from Stanford University" didn't go so far in 2011 as to say that genocide is in any way good for anything, but it didn't need to. Our children are relentlessly propagandised in a "four legs good, two legs bad" way (as George Orwell put it in Animal Farm ) to assume that anything that raises global temperatures is bad, and anything that cools them is good. So when the team of researchers concluded that the genocide of native Americans during the conquest of the New World killed so many people - tens of millions - that the world cooled, they were able to leave it to indoctrination to join the dots. Now a team from University College London has taken up the baton, publishing in quaternary Science Reviews . concluding through exhaustive research that the death of around 55 million people brought the world's temperature down because of the reforestation of previously settled areas causing, for ...

Voltaire's philosophy was once summed up pithily as "I disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it". It's a rather simplistic summary of a complex body of thought, but here's the rub: it breaks down when not everybody accepts it. We've recently seen Anna Soubry react with fury at being labelled as a "Nazi", while in an interview with Sky TV  she dished out the same sort of invective at people she disagreed with . Last year her parliamentary colleague Daniel Zeichner called for tolerance in his constituency of Cambridge. This is the same man who, while Labour Parliamentary Candidate, did a Hitler salute at the Cambridge Union to demonstrate his opinion of the elected government of Poland and as an encore compared British members of the Conservative Party to Nazis . Zeichner and others like him have demonstrated their hatred for views outside the range they think it is proper for the rest of us to believ...

Anna Soubry, a Conservative MP, is at the centre of a ruckus concerning her objections to being shouted at, apparently one of the epithets being "Nazi". It was an ugly comment, but there are two things to say about that. Firstly, when a cadre of parliamentarians try to frustrate the democratic process at every turn, this is what happens. Secondly, Soubry is no stranger to inflammatory rhetoric, having smeared Leave Supporters as "fascists" and "racists", as you will see from this TV clip from about 50 seconds in - it's an aircheck, to use the coin of the heyday of recording audio cassette tapes from TV, so you may have to turn up the sound: As I say in the tagline to this blog however, sometimes it is what it is, and sometimes it ain't. Ostensibly she was as upset as anybody would be at being compared to Nazis, and democrats all over Europe have become familiar with that feeling. In reality, the strategy, I believe, was to parade Establis...