Caleb Anderson: The Denial of Complexity in the Search for Simplicity

I initially trained to be a history teacher, but have spent most of my career in school administration. I have sometimes thought that, in retirement, I would give my time to the nearest secondary school, at no charge, for the simple privilege of working with their senior history students, inculcating a love for the discipline, and maybe to encourage some students to further their studies of history at the tertiary level.

Cláudia Ascensão Nunes: The Couto Mixto

A forgotten case of order without the state.

It is a deeply rooted belief in the Western political tradition, from Thomas Hobbes to contemporary interventionist currents, that a successful political community requires a strong central authority capable of imposing rules and guaranteeing order. According to this view, in the absence of such authority, society would inevitably collapse into chaos.

The 2,500-year history of ice-cream

We all scream for ice-cream, especially as temperatures soar in the summer. Ancient civilisations had the same desire for a cold, sweet treat to cope with heat waves.

There are plenty of contenders claiming credit for the first frozen desserts, from Italy and France in the 17th century to China in the first century.

But before you can make ice-cream, you need a reliable source of ice. The technology to make and store ice was originally developed in Persia (modern-day Iran) in 550 BCE.

John Robertson: When Bloodlines Run the Country

Look, New Zealand is doing something straight-up weird, and most people feel it but can’t quite name it. We live in a country that calls itself modern and fair, but the truth is, the system treats citizens differently depending on where your ancestors came from. You didn’t do anything. You didn’t vote wrong. You didn’t rob anyone. But if your grandparents arrived on the wrong waka, you get less say. And somehow, everyone pretends this is noble. This is madness.

Turn on the six o’clock news and it’s the same song: colonisation, Treaty this, partnership that, ancestral rights everywhere. Every week, like a broken record. You’ve got bureaucrats talking about “co-governance” and “Treaty principles,” like they’re some kind of holy law, while ordinary people—mum and dad, the bloke down the street—just nod along because everyone’s too scared to say it out loud. And the stuff they’re talking about? Mostly dead people. Most of it happened 200 years ago. Yet we let it decide who gets a real say in 2026. That’s not democracy. That’s backward-ass apartheid with a fancy accent.

Dr Kevin Donnelly: How the Frankfurt School Captured the Culture – and How to Fight Back

Conservatives have too often failed to realise that “politics is downstream from culture”. So argued Douglas Murray in a recent obituary of the late Peter Whittle, founder of the New Culture Forum (NCF), following the adage popularised by the late American journalist Andrew Breitbart, himself the founder of Breitbart News. “Too many conservatives for far too long felt the crucial battles were about economics”, Murray writes. “The NCF founder helped to correct that error.”

Point of Order: How good (or bad) is China’s economy?

If you enjoy extreme scenarios, you won’t want to miss the rant essay Why Chaos Favors the Strong in the Coming Great Decoupling on the Campbell Ramble blog — a spirited case for a strong power slowly strangling a weaker opponent that merely looks strong.

Point of Order: The empire that endured

It was once said the British empire was so vast that the sun never set on it. But as time marched on, the red faded from the maps, the Union Jacks came down and independence rang across continents.

Ramesh Thakur: Judicial Adventurism Can Imperil Democracy

The only period of legal authoritarian rule in India was June 1975–March 1977 following the declaration of an Emergency by Prime Minister (PM) Indira Gandhi. I happened to be back in India, based in New Delhi, doing archival and interview research for my PhD. The experience of the overnight transition from a rambunctious democracy to which argumentative Indians had taken with gusto, to a stifling and oppressive rule by state fiat, was deeply and permanently sobering. It led to my first academic article on returning to Canada, ‘The Fate of India’s Parliamentary Democracy’ (1976).

Jefferey Jaxen: The Real Purpose of Net Zero

The recent Telegraph headline rang out of England recently with unsettling tones: Tenth of farmland to be axed for net zero

More than 10 per cent of farmland in England is set to be diverted towards helping to achieve net zero and protecting wildlife by 2050, the Environment Secretary will reveal on Friday.

Thomas Harrington: The Limits of Transactionalism

We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” - C.S. Lewis “Men Without Chests”

I recently returned from Spain where I participated in a seminar on The Defeat of the West, the most recent book by the well-known French historian Emmanuel Todd. Whether one agrees with all, part, or none of his thesis—I find myself in the second category—it is a compelling and suggestive read, one that in typical Todd style relies on the innovative mixing of demographic, anthropological, religious, and sociological theories to make its case.

Peter St. Onge: They Have the Money - We Have the Numbers

Authoritarianism is back across the West — from Europe to the Biden-Harris censorship regime that would fit perfectly in Communist China.

I think many of us were surprised during Covid to realize just what the supposedly liberal West has become: Essentially the Soviet Union but with better uniforms — well, better video games, anyway.

Of course, it was decades in the making — Covid just showed their cards.

The question, as always, is What’s Next.

Toby Rogers: Hypnosis, Stockholm Syndrome, and Hegemony

I. A New/Old Theory of the Case

As you know, here on my Substack I’ve been trying to understand why the last four and a half years have felt so incredibly weird. I agree with Debbie Lerman that we are in uncharted territory. But I’ve struggled to define the psychodynamics of this strange new society we are living in.

I haven’t written for a couple of weeks because I was traveling to participate in a small gathering of dissident scholars (and then recovering afterward). At the meeting, I had a fascinating short conversation with two fellow writers that provided a plausible explanation for what we are all seeing:

Eric Hussey: The Carbon Alarmists Are Silent about This

I value thought experiments as useful tools to understand how things work. Thought experiments, also known as idealized experiments, have a surprisingly noble history. For example, Albert Einstein used the thought experiment of a constantly accelerating elevator with a pinhole in the side through which a light beam could shine to illustrate the effect of gravity on light.

Peter St Onge: Save the Voters, Replace the Schools

It’s a modern fetish that we’re brilliant while our ancestors were idiots. After all, they didn’t have iPhones, the Internet, or Kim Kardashian.

This is also academic consensus, for what it’s worth: called the Flynn effect, the idea is people do better on puzzles so we must be smarter.

Jeffrey A. Tucker: Ten Points About Post-Lockdown Economics

The sudden economic lockdown of March 2020, the world over, was one of the more shocking moments in history. The very core of the economic problem from the beginning of recorded time was getting more of what people needed to them in a way that was sustainable given the inherent scarcities of the state of nature.

Regardless of the system, creating wealth was the stated goal, and humanity gradually discovered that trade, investment, marketing, and access to more via travel and creativity was the way forward.

Peter Winsley: The Green Party’s plans for public and private lands

The Green Party wants to facilitate the transfer of more public (or “Crown”) and private land to iwi, hapū, and whānau. The intent is to address inequities arising from Māori land loss, especially in the 19th century.

The New Zealand Constitution Act 1986 marks the point that Parliament became sovereign and the British Crown’s role became limited to the procedural and symbolic. “The Crown” in practical terms means all New Zealanders, or at least their elected members of Parliament. Whatever costs “the Crown” incurs in Tiriti-related processes are paid for by New Zealanders, not by King Charles.

Peter Winsley: Education as Master, not Servant of Artificial Intelligence

Knowledge accumulated over Generations

When past social or technological advances are discussed young people sometimes disclaim all knowledge and remark “I wasn’t alive then”, as if nothing can be known without having been lived through. This is not Hayek’s “pretense of knowledge” so much as the misguided view that nothing is real except what you have seen, touched and can vouch for in person. In fact, learning accumulates and is passed on through the generations. For example, a first-year university Mathematics student stands on the shoulders of generations of mathematicians from many cultures. The known evidence suggests that mathematics originated in Mesopotamia in around 3000BC and advanced greatly within the Islamic world of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, “but I cannot say for sure because I wasn’t alive then”.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Human rights – the gift of pale but not stale males to humankind

 Some of the pale non-stale males who drafted the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen

Human rights are rights we have simply because we exist as human beings - they are not granted by any state. These universal rights are inherent to us all, regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, color [sic], religion, language, or any other status. They range from the most fundamental - the right to life - to those that make life worth living, such as the rights to food, education, work, health, and liberty. 
-  UNHR Office of the High Commissioner

The expression ‘human rights’ has mantra status, but what exactly does it refer to?

Matthew Birchall: The seduction of grandeur

New Zealand is small and relatively young, but it has a rich history that can help us think through today’s problems. Unfortunately, we often ignore the lessons of the past.

This historical amnesia has a cost, even if it is difficult to quantify.

Over the last several months, I have been exploring the history of our critical infrastructure. It has been a more enjoyable experience than it sounds! From Julius Vogel’s national rail network in the 1870s to the rollout of broadband in the new millennium, New Zealand’s past is littered with fascinating success stories.

Matthew Birchall: Applied history

Historians can be a tedious bunch. As someone who frequently hijacks dinner parties with history lectures, I would know. It turns out that there is less popular appetite for lengthy forays into imperial history than I imagined.

But do historians make good public policy analysts? There are two reasons to suggest they do.

Most important is the premium that the discipline places on evidence-based reasoning. Too many of the ideas that currently inform policy in New Zealand seem to be built upon shoddy intellectual foundations.