Category Archive 'Europe'
18 May 2023

Badgers!

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28 Feb 2022

1619 Author Hannah Jones Thinks Considering Europe to Be a Continent is Racism

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08 May 2021

European Camouflages and Primary Long Arms

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01 Jan 2021

Climate Map: Here and There Equivalents

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(click on image for larger version)

23 Nov 2020

Map of Europe’s Culinary Horrors

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(click on map for larger version.)

HT: Vanderleun.

15 Sep 2019

Europe Faces Death by Bad Conscience

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Pascal Bruckner, in a must-read essay in Quillette, describes how Europe is allowing its own virtue to destroy it.

Western Europeans dislike themselves. They are unable to overcome their self-disgust and feel the pride in their heritage and the self-respect that is so strikingly evident in the United States. Modern Europe is instead mired in shame shrouded in moralizing discourse. It has convinced itself that, since all the evils of the twentieth century arose from its feverish bellicosity, it’s about time it redeemed itself and sought something like a reawakened sense of the sacred in its guilty conscience.

What better example of this proclivity exists than Angela Merkel’s embrace of about a million refugees fleeing war-torn Syria in 2015? Even though this gesture that would help replenish a shrinking labor force was not strictly disinterested, for this pastor’s daughter it was also a spectacular way to repudiate Nazism and escape its shadow. After the catastrophe of the Second World War, the Federal Republic would now offer itself as an ostentatious example to the world. Germany would practice open-heartedness in a single country, just as Stalin in the USSR had once practiced socialism in a single country. Already pre-eminent in Europe, Berlin would call the shots, whether exercising toughness or kindness. Merciless with the Greeks in July, when the Chancellery wanted to eject them from the eurozone, but beneficent with the Syrians in September, it could demonstrate severity or an ever so imperial charity. …

Many people are wondering why it is only Europe that feels guilty, not only for its own past crimes, but also for the faults of others? The answer is simple: we dominated the world for four centuries. The empires have collapsed but their memory remains, and this has given rise to an ever-expanding discipline: post-colonial studies. We have become the continent of the uneasy conscience and we wish to show the rest of the world the face of moral law in all its purity. Europe sees itself as a sacrificial offering, through which the entire world can expiate its sins. It offers to assume the shame for every misfortune that befalls the planet: famine in Africa, drowning in the Mediterranean, terrorism, natural disasters, they are all directly or indirectly our handiwork. And when we are attacked—by terrorists, for example—it’s still our fault; we had it coming and are undeserving of compassion. Since we are overcome by such a torrent of sins, all we can do is bear up and attempt to correct and atone for them all, one by one. An unctuous discourse intended to edify is replacing what was once political and historical analysis; an ideal society must replace the existing one of ordinary men, and be cleansed of its impurities. Two areas in particular reveal this delusion of sanctity—immigration and ecology.

RTWT

22 Feb 2017

How to Annoy Europeans

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21 Dec 2016

How Things Have Changed

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24 Apr 2016

Pieter Hintjens is Dying

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PieterHintjens
Pieter Hintjens, 1962-

Pieter Hintjens is a (half-Scottish) Belgian software developer, aged 53, who is suffering from metastasized bile duct cancer. Being who he is, he naturally published on his blog a “protocol,” explaining his identity and circumstances and indicating how other people and he himself ought, in his view, to deal with the situation.

The contemporary supergeek is an unusual and exotic variant subspecies of humanity, and his protocol, I thought, illustrates particularly vividly that subgroup’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses.

I am, finally, so glad I never quit Belgium. This country allows for death on demand, for patients who are terminal or have a bad enough quality of life. It takes three doctors and a psychiatrist, in the second case, and four weeks’ waiting period. In the first case, it takes one doctor’s opinion.

My dad chose this, and died on Easter Tuesday. Several of us his family were with him. It is a simple and peaceful process. One injection sent him to sleep, into a coma. The second stopped his heart. It was a good way to die, and though I didn’t know I was sick then, one I already wanted.

I’m shocked that in 2016 few countries allow this, and enforce the barbaric torture of decay and failure. It’s especially relevant for cancer, which is a primary cause of death. Find a moment in your own jurisdiction, if it bans euthanasia, to lobby for the right to die in dignity.

10 Apr 2016

Mark Steyn on the European Refugee Crisis

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Mark Steyn makes mincemeat of bien pensant liberals former UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour and historian Simon Schama in this debate excerpt.

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Full debate here.

08 Apr 2016

Help Crowdfund Claire Berlinski’s Next Book

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Berlinski
Claire Berlinski

Claire Berlinski is a Balliol College graduate, who started her literary career by writing a spy novel featuring the kind of details of the CIA’s recruiting and training that persuade this reader that she is really a former spook.

A few years later, she had moved on to international journalism, covering European problems from a sophisticated perch at the continental crossroads in Constantinople. When the situation in Turkey deteriorated, she demonstrated her intelligence by moving to Paris.

These days, the old-school publishing industry is perishing because technology has made self-publishing, promotion, and distribution feasible, so it is not possible even for an accomplished and respected writer to get a book advance to cover travel and operating expenses for a project. Claire Berlinski (clever girl!), who writes most frequently these days at the group blog Ricochet, therefore, decided to try crowdfunding her next book.

Her pitch is here.

Her funding site is here.

The funding project has also been endorsed by the great Glenn Reynolds.

24 Mar 2016

European Frog; Islamic Scorpion

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FrogScorpion

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