The difference between a contemporary liberal and a socialist is that to a liberal the most beautiful word in the English language is “forbidden”, whereas to a socialist the most beautiful word is “compulsory”. – jmc 1994

Via

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics. Yet pundits continue to hallucinate trends in freak events, like the Norwegian sniper (who shot all those young people on an island) and make wildly innumerate comparisons, such as between Afghanistan and Vietnam, or between today’s human trafficking and the African slave trade. It’s a holdover of the literary sensibilities of our science-flunking intellectual elite, who would be aghast if someone didn’t know who Milton was, but cheerfully flaunt their ignorance of basic science and mathematics. I lobbied – unsuccessfully – for a course requirement at Harvard in statistical and logical reasoning.

Stephen Pinker

“We’re living in primate heaven. We’re warm, dry, we’re not hungry, we don’t have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?”

Stephen Pinker

On Friday, the earl contacted The Daily Telegraph to distance himself from his barrister’s comments and insisted he was by no means “down and out”.

In fact, he added, he was “merely down to my last stately home”.

The Earl of Cardigan.

the implications of the Greeks making a drachma out of a crisis

My mum used to say to me, “If somebody doesn’t like you, fuck ‘em, they’ve got bad taste.”

Bob Hoskins.

“How would Adam Smith fix a mess such as the current recessionary aftermath of a financial collapse? Sorry, but it’s fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done. Don’t Vote (2010)

No, my actual (rather small) point is that when the aspirational poor were previously shunted to distant dumping grounds, the biggest error was in not sending us far enough away from people like Polly Toynbee and her metrocentric ilk; those for whom if it doesn’t happen in London, then it doesn’t really happen at all.

While I do not have a boyfriend, I do have a friend who is homosexual and I once asked him “Do you ever think about having sex with me because you are gay?” to which he replied “Do you ever think about having sex with Rosie O’Donnell because you are straight? Same thing.”

Even now, I fail to see how killing patients through bureaucratic stupidity is somehow going to stop a newly resurgent Luftwaffe dropping a bomb on a maternity wing in Dartford.

For a politician to be only disbelieved by 12% of the population is extraordinary

Most people operate under the golden mean, defined by Aristotle as “you can take the piss, but you can’t take the piss too much.”

Suddenly I was seeing coppers armed with submachine guns on the streets of London, which can be slightly unnerving to a former armed robber, believe me.

Noel Smith

Chávez, in other words, is very close to the climactic moment when he will announce that he is a poached egg and that he requires a very large piece of buttered toast so that he can lie down and take a soothing nap.

Hitch.

I limit myself to one mistress per annum. How would you like to be Miss 2009?

Boris Johnson (according to Guido)

Economics is the art of not killing people with your good intentions.

Art Carden

that Hopey Changey thing that keeps getting lefties popping up like buoyant logs in the lavatory pan of life.

Ahem. Yes.

Kathy Lette