Oliver Kamm on the inversions of being “progressive”:

Notions once considered reactionary, even extreme, have insinuated themselves into the mainstream of right-thinking (that is, left-thinking) social idealism. When you encountered someone of professed left-of-centre opinions, you used to be able to draw broad but important, and generally reliable, inferences about what these entailed. They included, at a minimum, commitments to secularism, freedom of expression, individual liberty against collective authority, women’s rights, homosexual equality and the combating of xenophobia. Times have changed. Now these stances are unusual, even heterodox. […]

When, last year, suicide bombers attacked the Danish Embassy in Pakistan, killing six people and wounding more than 20, a Danish journalist writing for The Guardian commented that the attack was “of course, indefensible, but it raises questions about the wisdom of the much-debated cartoons and Danish reactions to Muslim wrath.”

(For more on the Guardian journalist in question and his “of course, but” manoeuvre, see, for instance, this.)

The “of course, but” formulation is worse than a dreary cliché. It indicates a liberalism evacuated of content. Those who prize social unity and order will tend to believe that people’s deepest feelings and beliefs should be accorded respect. But respect for ideas is never an entitlement. It depends on their intellectual resilience in public debate. No free society can treat people’s deepest beliefs as sacrosanct. They are fair game for hostile and derisive criticism. That is how knowledge advances. […]

No one has a right to the protection of feelings. If politics concerns itself with mental states, there is no limit to how far legislation can intrude on people’s lives. The task of progressive politics is to protect liberty, not least by attacking the accumulation of bad ideas. Yet to many on the Left, the individual, inquiring mind is of far less importance than the representation of designated groups.

Le Whif. Chocolate you inhale. // Airplane and the Sun. (h/t, Brian Micklethwait) // Spot the man made objects. // Servicing Hubble. // Texan sky time-lapse. // Fly baby. // Speaker porn. // Potato faces. (h/t, Coudal) // Why your print job is late. // When bodybuilders flee. // A brief history of weed. // Reach. A robot’s tale. // Kabul. // Abandoned objects. (h/t, Mick Hartley) // Ads of yore. // Table archipelago. // Antique typewriters. // A gallery of newly discovered species. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Rose Murphy.

How it was made. And remember, it’s just an advert for a TV. 

Levitation, explosions, bare-chested fisticuffs… Why, it must be Sherlock Holmes.

That kind of thing never happened to Jeremy Brett. Holmes purists will no doubt be inhaling with alarm, but I quite like the look of it.

Over at The Augean Stables, Richard Landes has some interesting commentary on my recent discussion with Stephen Hicks. Well worth reading.

Among the terms used to search this site is the phrase “well-heeled class warrior.” The results of that search include several references to the Guardian’s associate editor, Seumas Milne, whose disregard for reality and repeated attempts to mislead will be familiar to regular readers. While Milne is incorrigible in his evasions and distortions, it’s perhaps unfair to single him out as uniquely hypocritical. Plenty of Milne’s colleagues could vie for the title quoted above. Among them, Milne’s employer, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, whose prodigious capacity for hypocrisy was revealed in this exchange with Piers Morgan, from which the following is but an appetiser:

The museum of scientifically accurate fabric brain art. (h/t, Cronaca) // Kate MccGwire makes sculpture out of pigeon feathers. // Airplane hotel, Costa Rica. // B-2 stealth bomber. // Water-powered jet pack. // At last, a heated ice-cream scoop. (h/t, sk60) // Your very own wine tasting bar. // Another circumhorizontal arc. // Vanity pixels. // Vertical radiators. // Futuristic megastructures. // Ruins. // How to draw animals. (h/t, Things) // Vintage picture stories. // Vintage health and safety. (h/t, Coudal) // International toothpaste museum. // 19th century obstetrics dolls. // A history of political correctness. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr William “Count” Basie.

For those of you who follow the careers of Lorenzo Lamas and Debbie Gibson…

I believe the term is mockbuster.

Colliding Particles is a series of short films by Mike Paterson following a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider. The latest film, Problems, covers helium mishaps, staring at blackboards and the search for missing music.

Via Coudal.

Further to recent rumblings on the subject, Ilya Somin ponders Star Trek and socialism: 

Star Trek is a cultural icon watched by tens of millions. Many more people will derive their vision of what the future should be at least partially from Star Trek than from reading serious scholarship. Law professor Benjamin Barton wrote that “no book released in 2005 will have more influence on what kids and adults around the world think about government than The Half-Blood Prince [of the hugely popular Harry Potter series].” Similarly, no nonfiction book of the last few decades is likely to have more influence on how people see the future than Star Trek. If Star Trek continues to portray a socialist future as basically unproblematic, and even implies that a transition to full-blown socialism can be achieved without any major trauma, that is a point worth noting.

With rare exceptions, the Star Trek franchise has been far too blasé in its portrayal of future socialism and its implications. After all, socialist regimes have been responsible for the death and impoverishment of millions. There has never been a society that combined full-blown socialism with prosperity or extensive “noneconomic” liberties for the population. And there has never been a transition to socialism without large-scale repression and mass murder. If Star Trek’s writers want to posit a new form of socialism that somehow avoids the shortcomings of all previous ones, they should at least give us some sense of how this new and improved socialism escaped the usual pitfalls. Had a similarly prominent pop culture icon been equally obtuse in its portrayal of fascism or even milder forms of right-wing oppression (e.g. – by portraying a rightist military dictatorship that seems to work well and benefits the people greatly without any noticeable loss of personal freedom), it would have been universally pilloried.

The whole thing.