Usa

I’ve found myself strangely drawn to the videos made by the 22-year-old assassin Elliot Rodger just before he went on his killing spree in his university town of Santa Barbara, California, last week. In a series of stabbings and drive-by shootings Rodger killed seven people, including finally himself, and wounded 13 more. The son of a film director, he had spent the first few years of his life in England, moving to America at the age of four. Rodger had been preparing for his murderous spree and made a series of videos, many of which are accessible on the internet as I write. The last was recorded by himself the

Rory Sutherland writes in this week’s magazine that the Mozilla/Brendan Eich affair has finally put him off his dream of moving to the United States, quoting Andrew Sullivan that ‘The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society.’ The issue of gay marriage has changed politics in the English-speaking world in a way that perhaps people didn’t expect – breaking the liberal-Left’s final link with the ideal of John Locke that permitting something did not mean approving of it. This notion has been coming under pressure for some years, especially with discrimination laws, but SSM has snapped it. (Brendan O’Neill has

A few years ago I would have quite liked to live in America. I’m not sure now. For one thing, most of the things perfected by Americans (convenience, entertainment, technology, a very small bottle of Tabasco to accompany your breakfast) very soon make their way over here. On the other hand, the things Europeans do well (cathedrals, four weeks’ annual holiday, more than two varieties of cheese, general all-round classiness) don’t travel in the other direction. In fact, once the right-hand-drive version of the Ford Mustang reaches the UK in 2015, it is hard to think of any remaining reason to emigrate at all. Besides, the political scene over there

 New York City An architect friend who usually designs Manhattan skyscrapers was recently asked to pitch for a far more interesting project. The client, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, wanted him to design a family house in upstate New York with a difference. It wouldn’t just be completely ‘off the grid’, with its own power and water supplies, but — and there isn’t yet an architectural term for this — it would be post-apocalypse. The conventional house would be mirrored below ground with pretty much identical living quarters that would be completely secure and so self-contained that there would be facilities to hydroponically grow plants and vegetables without soil.

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_24_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”John Rick MacArthur and Freddy Gray discuss Clinton vs Bush” startat=929] Listen [/audioplayer]America is much less threatened by right-wing extremists than by the oligarchic rule of the two major political parties. The mainstream right, however, is wedded to the absurd notion that the Democrats are a party of the ‘left’ that is in authentic ideological competition with ‘conservative’ Republicans. Meanwhile, the orthodox left clings to the equally absurd belief that Barack Obama really means to reform the United States and redeem it from the sins of slavery, genocide against the Native Americans, and God knows what other crimes against humankind and nature. I’ve been arguing this for years.

If you’re reading this on Firefox, you can rest assured that your custom is not going towards any hateful, disgusting, evil people who might disagree with you on something. Not now that Mozilla boss Brendan Eich has been forced to quit for supporting Proposition 8, the Californian bill opposing gay marriage. According to the BBC: ‘Mozilla’s executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker announced the decision in a blog post. “Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it,” she wrote. “We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves. “We

Congratulations to Stephen Glover for writing perhaps the only sensible piece about the Crimean crisis. There is a certain force, too, to Putin’s charge that the West believes itself a chosen people to whom the normal moral rules do not apply. We have meddled, frequently with the help of military might, to spread our own creed of liberal evangelism across the world, regardless or not as to whether the people to whose aid we have come actually share our aspirations. It has been a staggeringly unsuccessful policy. Look at Iraq. Look at Syria. Look at Afghanistan. I wonder too about the way the media reports these crusades. A while back