2015: The best-of here at NOT PC

 
Just to remind you, readers, that your favourite blog started the year looking like this:

Quite a change!
With the new blog look and feel came new blog readers – more than double what the blog enjoyed before. (Thank you all for dropping in.)
So as 2015 rushes to a close, these were the posts that mostly drew your attention each month.
JAN

We started the year here at NOT PC the way we intended to carry on: pointing out in this case that much of what is most commonly passed off as being “The Wisdom of the Ancients” is neither very wise, nor all that ancient – particularly all the favourite books of today’s western and mid-eastern religionists.
Wisdom of the Ancients… 
And also: To pretend everything that Islam is not evil is to share some portion of the blame. Both blame and much more wretchedness exploded across 2015.
“One of the best arguments against people who claim Islam as a religion of war”?

FEB

ACT were in crisis again in February(aren't they every February), one narrowly averted this year by the politician eventually named most commentators’ Politician of the Year.  We first attacked him for not supporting voluntary euthanasia … 
Act dead. Act accordingly 
…to which he responded…
Right of reply: David Seymour… and eventually, thankfully, recanted. 

February of course is also when New Zealanders ritually rend their garments over Te Tiriti—but we, just as ritually, argued there is nothing to be guilty about in freeing slaves.
It’s NZ’s own Emancipation Proclamation!

MARCH

The Herald named her Person of the Year—and as she approached her death, we saw demonstrated again that meddling religionists still insist your life is not your own.
Lecretia Seales’s life is not Bob McCoskrie’s to meddle with

2015: The year Putin began more openly seeing what he could get away with, while the west even more openly ignored the implications. We were onto it early.
The assassination of Boris Nemtsov

APRIL

Architecture Week, and with it a necessary clarification that not every old house is worth preserving … and those that shouldn't be should be 'quarried from' to rebuild those that should.
A villa is not a bungalow 

Anzac Day brought with it the question: why were New Zealanders were dying in 1915 to give Constantinople to the Czar?
Q: But what were the ANZACs fighting *for*?

MAY

Mostly unheralded, but organised Classical Liberalism died one-hundred years ago last May. On that centenary I began answering a question that plagued it, and helped it die: why is that in 1914 goods were so freely crossing borders, yet armies still did. And what did that say for the great Liberal project of peace and free trade?
The day classical liberalism died

JUNE

For the first time in human history, we discovered that fewer than 10% of people on the planet are now living in extreme poverty. Yet poverty campaigners don’t even care to know how that happened.Instead of either celebrating or seeking understanding the causes of this miracle, poverty campaigners instead keep manufacturing more “poor.”  Poverty? Only by redefinition—a con-trick that “has led us to care far too much about inequality and not enough about rising prosperity.”
Poverty?

In June we all stumbled across the strange case of a white woman pretending to be black. So I posted a cartoon.
Still funny?

JULY

In July, the never-ending Greek politico-economic crisis demonstrated yet again that “democratic fiscal policy appears to have an institutional problem with regard to sustainable public finance”—in other words, when politicians act like Santa Claus then voters will always try to vote themselves gifts.
Acropolis Now? 

But Greece is merely a canary in the Keynesian coal mine. You want to know what made Keynesianism possible, and with it all the economic disasters like Greece? Answer: intellectual decay.
Greece, Keynes & intellectual decay: What made it possible? 

It was in July this year that Berzelius Windrip finally jumped from book to reality TV to, well, reality TV. But that doesn’t make it safe to laugh at him.
Trumpism: The Ideology

AUGUST

As things looked shaky on “the markets” in August, we looked at a few of the more nonsensical prognostications made either side of the Great Crash in 1929.
Quotes of the Morning: Before & after the 1929 crash 

It has a huge effect on the most talked-about local crisis, that in housing, yet this is one primary cause barely talked about. Yet an August report confirmed again that virtually all the rent subsidy paid to beneficiaries does little more than go to subsidise higher rents – leaving landlords richer, house prices higher, and beneficiaries and would-be home-owners as far behind the 8 ball as before.
Landlord subsidies

SEPTEMBER

In September, a little boy’s body washed up on a Mediterranean beach, and things were never the same again. Yet how many knew his true story? Or even cared?
The true story of Aylan Kurdi 

And immediately we began talking refugee quotas. (And asking what have asylum-seekers ever invented for us?)
Talking refugee “quotas”

OCTOBER

An ugly man, with ugly politics—yet neither were justifications for a home invasion by the police, on which he was ultimately vindicated.
Nickey Hager: Ugly man, ugly invasion of his property 

In October, the Productivity Commission quietly suggested the government should confiscate your home, or let the council acquire it, compulsorily. Frighteningly, few – still! – have objected. Such is politics in NZ in 2015.
Productivity Commission dumps on land-owners

NOVEMBER

In November, while the media goggled and MPs talked about rapists and “hugging crims” there were many,many questions that should have been asked. So I did.
Christmas Island, rape, and other random questions 

On Armistice Day I asked, why was the The War to End All Wars instead the war to end all peace. And is that why is it impossible to forget?
Lest we forget

DECEMBER

In December the great and the good announced in a city just ravaged by terrorism that the biggest problem facing the west is bad weather. For which they hold the thermostat. Wholesale ridiculousness ensued.
Paris: It’s all about climate. Apparently.
Quote of the Day: On the #ParisAgreement
Quotes of the Day: On those alleged fossil-fuel ‘subsidies’

And to close out the year, the Government demonstrated again that top-down planning is successful only in stopping others being able to plan.
Govt’s top-down plan “hangs in the balance”–Treasury

So that rounds out our year here at NOT PC.
I hope your New Year's celebrations tonight are as raucous as your new year is filled with peace and prosperity.
All the best!
PC