U.S. — Former Fox News host turned podcaster Tucker Carlson released a groundbreaking 380th consecutive episode criticizing the one country that Carlson says no one is allowed to criticize.

The post There’s nothing real about ‘race realism’ appeared first on spiked.

“Ministers embraced the ‘world’s safest phone’. Then it unravelled” – an article by Georgina Quach in the Financial Times. She writes,

Rather than relying on apps to police harmful content, governments now want to intervene at the operating system level, so guardrails can get ahead of whichever app breaks on to the scene. 

That is why Keir Starmer in June presented an ultimatum to tech companies: install child nudity-blocking software in devices by September or face legislation and fines.

And there is no excuse for dithering, the government’s announcement implied. It said this tech had already been achieved by the British company SafeToNet. Ministers held up SafeToNet as proof point for the proposition that child safety can be built into phones universally and block nudity in real time.

But what appeared to the government to be an “oven-ready” fix is now running into difficulty, after the first smartphone to integrate SafeToNet technology was removed from sale following an investigation into the device’s safety risks. The HMD Fuse, sold by Vodafone, was launched last year as the “first smartphone that protects a child’s innocence by stopping nude content from being filmed, seen, shared and stored”. In January of this year, former ministers Peter Kyle and Jess Phillips starred in a video promoting the phone. Six months later, sales have been suspended.

Why? The answer is alarming:

Then, in July 2026, Moore discovered what he described as a different, serious flaw: an unauthorised person could potentially register as the guardian of another child’s handset and access its live location. According to Moore, the problem was that the pairing relied on the IMEI number, the unique serial code that identifies each handset. He said this number was predictable: part of the number was fixed and the rest could be systematically enumerated and plugged in. He said that meant he could “become the guardian of every child on the platform, which meant I basically had a live map of every child on the system at the time”. 

Ask a socialist critic of capitalism how to define capitalism and you will probably receive an incoherent answer. Defining these ways of social organization is vital and understanding them is even more important.

What is the basic difference between left- and right-leaning people? Many have tried to explain this. Let’s start with accounts in terms of descriptive beliefs …

1. Descriptive Beliefs

Constrained vs. unconstrained visions

Thomas Sowell ascribes the left-right division to differing views of human nature:

• The left has an “unconstrained vision” of human nature: they believe that human nature is malleable and that society can pretty much mold people to be the way society needs them to be.

• The right has a “constrained vision” of human nature, in which there are unchangeable facts of human nature, such as the instinct to place self-interest above the interests of strangers.

There is something to this—it helps explain the division between utopian socialists and capitalists. But it doesn’t explain the left/right positions on abortion, gun control, economic regulations, global warming, homosexuality, or transgenderism. In some cases, the “constrained vs. unconstrained” account suggests the opposite of the actual positions taken by the left (leftists deny that homosexuality or transgenderism are inculcated by society; they also doubt that we can teach businesses to be pro-social and instead think we must use force).

Strict vs. nurturing parents

George Lakoff believes that leftists and rightists differ in their views of proper childhood upbringing:

• The left believes that children need nurturing parents who empathize and provide emotional support.

• The right believes children need strict parents who enforce rules and teach discipline.

Leftists and rightists both see the government as like a parent to the citizens. Hence, leftists want a nurturing government, while rightists want a strict, rule-enforcing government. (I guess only libertarians deny that we are children.)

This account fails to explain left/right positions on abortion, gun control, or economic regulation. When it comes to regulation, the left acts more like a strict father, rather than a nurturing mother.

2. A Challenge for all Models

A challenge for attempts to explain the left-right division is that left-right positions are malleable, e.g.:

• Support for free speech used to be a left-wing position; today it is a right-wing position.

• The right used to be clearly more hawkish on foreign policy, and the left more dovish. Today, I would say the left has become more hawkish than the right (though there is division on each side).

• The right in America used to be very clearly the anti-Russia side (which fit with being more hawkish); today, the left is more anti-Russia.

• It used to be the right but it is now the left that is more likely to emphasize the importance of listening to the authorities and the recognized experts in your society.

Tribalism is a big part of the story: if a prominent person on “your side”—say, a President from your party—takes up a position contrary to what your side has hitherto thought, you might change your view to fall in line on that issue. Also, if the other side shifts their position on an issue to agree with what you hitherto thought, you might change your own position to continue to oppose the other side. This phenomenon limits any attempt to explain in a unified way the left/right positions on various issues.

However, it remains possible that each side has certain core positions they would not modify, while they are willing to change more peripheral positions.

Read more

[Cross-posted at StephanKinsella.com]

Just as some critics of today’s version of “capitalism” equate it with what we libertarians or advocates of “true capitalism” would call crony capitalism—or, as Gene Epstein calls it, “crapitalism”¹ —some also criticize private property rights as a type of “theft”² because of “capitalist” versions of “private property rights” such as those stemming from the English Enclosure movement.

Yet as Hoppe has pointed out, there can be “partial” homesteading of land—homesteading of easements or rights-of-way, by usage—and this can be done by individuals or by groups who have been using the land—a path or street—and anyone who seeks to privatize the remainder of the land takes it subject to the pre-existing group-owned easement. After all, the key act that constitutes original appropriation is occupation (occupātiō) or use (( On occupation or homesteading, see The Universal Principles of Liberty, §3; IP is Not “Not Property”, at n.5; Homesteading, Abandonment, and Unowned Land in the Civil Law (Mises Blog, 2009); also KOL473 | The Universal Principles of Liberty, with Mark Maresca of The White Pillbox; A Critique of Mutualist Occupancy; Inability to Abandon Property in the Civil Law. ))—using, possessing, employing a previously unused and unowned resource, according to its nature,³ to serve as a causally efficacious means of action. Writes Hoppe:

How is it possible that formerly unowned common streets can be privatized without thereby generating conflict with others? Th e short answer is that this can be done provided only that the appropriation of the street does not infringe on the previously established rights—the easements—of private-property owners to use such streets “for free.” Everyone must remain free to walk the street from house to house, through the woods, and onto the lake, just as before. Everyone retains a right-of-way, and hence no one can claim to be made worse off by the privatization of the street. Positively, in order to objectify—and validate—his claim that the formerly common street is now a private one and that he (and no one else) is its owner, the appropriator (whoever it may be) must perform some visible maintenance and repair work on and along the street. Then, as its owner, he—and no one else—can further develop and improve the streets as he sees fit. He sets the rules and regulations concerning the use of his street so as to avoid all street conflicts. He can build a hot dog or a bratwurst stand on his road, for instance, and exclude others from doing the same; or he can prohibit loitering on his street and collect a fee for the removal of garbage. Vis-à-vis foreigners or strangers, the street owner can determine the rules of entry regarding uninvited strangers. Last but not least, as its private owner he can sell the street to someone else (with all previously established rights-of-way remaining intact).⁴

In other words, only unowned land or resources may be homesteaded; a resource that is only partially homesteaded may be appropriated in the normal manner but just as an owner can only transfer title to the extent he owns a resource so a not-completely-homesteaded resource can only be homesteaded to the extent not already subject to a pre-existing easement which is, after all, a property right.

Thus, in some sense modern statist “property” is “theft” as Proudhon said, meaning property rights decreed legislatively by the state that trampled on pre-existing easement rights. Thus, from a Hoppean-libertarian point of view,  English parliamentary enclosure was not a vindication of private property but a state taking: commoners had already homesteaded partial, intersubjectively verifiable easements—hunting, grazing, wood-gathering, and rights of way—through long customary use of open fields, forests, and wastes, privileges later reflected in the 1217 Forest Charter and in Robin Hood folklore.⁵ Those group-homesteaded interests had to be respected by any later full appropriator; instead, enclosure statutes extinguished them without consent or compensation, fencing land for elites and thereby committing aggression under color of law. Proudhon’s “property is theft” therefore targets not genuine original appropriation but legislatively manufactured titles that overrode pre-existing use rights; consistent libertarian privatization would honor those easements, permit voluntary negotiation or restitution, and strip away the state distortions that turned common resources into instruments of expropriation.⁶

Looking at homesteading in this nuanced way might also help to address some thorny libertarian dilemmas such “hostile encirclement” and “forestalling” posed by Frank Van Dun and Walter Block.⁷

I was reminded of this by a recent article: Out of Office, “In Finland, you can walk, camp, swim, and pick berries or mushrooms on private land without asking the owner — Every Person’s Right makes access to nature a public freedom, provided you stay away from homes, protect fragile ground, and leave no trace behind,” Scandinavia Standard (Aug 21, 2026):

In Finland, a forest can be privately owned without being closed to everyone else. The principle commonly translated as Every Person’s Right, and still called Everyman’s rights by several official English-language services, lets people move through and spend time in nature without asking the landowner or paying a fee. It is a striking freedom in a world where private property often means a gate, a warning sign and a presumption that strangers must stay out.

The freedom is broad, but it is not a licence to behave as if the land has no owner. The practical boundary is damage or more than minor harm and disturbance. Homes, gardens, cultivated ground, protected habitats and temporary safety restrictions all matter. The rules below are a general guide, not a substitute for checking the current instructions for a particular destination.

There is no single Every Person’s Right Act

Finland’s official outdoor service, Luontoon, defines the principle as everyone’s right to spend time in nature regardless of who owns the area. It states that landowner permission is not normally required and use is free. It also makes the crucial qualification that different laws can grant, guide or restrict those rights.

This is why the Finnish term jokaisenoikeudet is better understood as a legal framework than as the informal generosity of landowners. A detailed Ministry of the Environment guide explains that the framework is assembled from legislation concerning property, privacy, nature conservation, water, littering, traffic and other activities. It also cautions that courts assess a disputed act in its particular circumstances. There is no single national map colouring every permitted square metre green.

Read more>>

1. Gene Epstein, Austrian Perspective on the Great Recession and its Aftermath (Socratic Seminar) (16 de noviembre de 2011); Gene Epstein (part 01); Gene Epstein, “History Needn’t Repeat Itself,” Barron’s (Aug 17, 2009).
2. Kinsella, Libertarian Answer Man: Mises [and Proudhon] on “Property is Theft”; KOL374 | The Intellectual Contributions of Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The Great Fiction Podcast Ep. 1; Hoppe: A Précis.
3. Kinsella, “the very framing of the dispute helps to identify what the thing is in dispute”.
4. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Of Common, Public, and Private Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization,” in The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline, 2nd ed (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2021), at Part II; previously published as “Of Private, Common, and Public Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization,” Libertarian Papers 3, 1 (2011) and as “The Rationale for Total Privatization,” Mises Daily (Mar. 14, 2011). See also Kinsella, Rand on the Injuns and Property Rights.
5. Kinsella, Robin Hood, Magna Carta, and the Forest Charter; Survivors of polygamist sect fence off 1,000 acres of US Forest Service land in southwestern Colorado; Freedom to roam (Wikipedia).
6. See Hoppe, “Of Common, Public, and Private Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization,” Part III; see also this Grok summary of the problem with the “enclosure” movement from a Hoppean perspective.
7. See Kinsella, The Blockean Proviso; A Tour Through Walter Block’s Oeuvre, the section “Libertarianism “Abhors” Unowned Resources: Forestalling, Blockian Donuts, and the Blockian Proviso“; KOL426 | Discussing Immigration and Homesteading Donuts with Matthew Sands of Nations of Sanity; Libertarian Answer Man: Homesteading Donuts, Hostile Encirclement, and Prostitution as Selling One’s Body.