Quotulatiousness

November 10, 2013

Latest federal initiative shows “patronising contempt, arrogant presumption and impressive stupidity”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:39

The federal government is launching a program to help “ordinary Canadians” become better at managing their finances. Richard Anderson points out the amusing aspect of this:

I sometimes wonder if the hacks who put out these releases aren’t giggling to themselves the whole time, amazed at what they’re getting away with. You work for a Conservative government that wades through a sea of red ink every year. This same government has no credible plan to deal with the entitlement crisis, except point out how we’re less screwed than the Yanks. So naturally you go about lecturing the common folk on how to balance their chequebooks. This is like the morbidly obese diet coach of legend.

We see here a unique combination of patronising contempt and arrogant presumption that does not, so far as we have been able to determine, exist outside of Ottawa. Even the Soviets assumed that an ordinary adult could balance their personal budgets without being lectured to by a full time commissar. Then again they were communists, not nannies. Herein lies the great difference between the totalitarian projects of the last century and the petty authoritarianism of this one, the end result. The communist, fascists and Nazis envision a new man who would change the world. Note the underlying assumption: Man.

At some point, after rigorous indoctrination, the boy would become a man. The modern nanny state assumes that the boy never becomes a man, he’s always a boy needing to be hectored to and monitored. As the press release notes: “…brushing up on the basics of money management at any age and will include events for Canadians of all ages.” No matter how old you get, the federal government will be there to tell you how to manage your affairs. That generations of Canadians did this quite well without government involvement never comes up.

Growth forecasts continue to over-estimate Canada’s actual economic progress

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

In Maclean’s, Debbie Downer Colin Campbell takes a survey of the state of Canada’s economy:

A key qualification for landing a job at the Bank of Canada, it seems, is an unfailing sense of optimism. In 2009, the bank forecast the economy would grow 3.3 per cent in 2011. It grew 2.5 per cent. In 2011, it said the economy would grow 2.9 per cent in 2013. It will likely be just 1.6 per cent. Now it says the economy will grow 2.3 per cent next year. How likely is that? The bank has consistently viewed the economy through rose-coloured glasses in recent years, perhaps believing its low-interest-rate policy will eventually bear fruit. Rates have been held at one per cent for three years now. But the economy seems only to be getting worse.

It grew 0.3 per cent in August, Statistics Canada said last week — mostly attributed to a familiar crutch, the oil business. Elsewhere, things aren’t looking up. A new TD Bank report said corporate Canada is “in a slump,” with profits down 16 per cent from their post-recession peak in 2011. Some observers point out that Canada is still doing better than Europe and Japan. But so are most countries that aren’t in a recession, from South Africa and New Zealand to Equatorial Guinea and Guatemala. After breezing through the recession, Canada is back to old habits: hoping its fortunes (i.e., exports) will rise along with America’s comeback. But the U.S., too, is back in a rut. Last week, the Federal Reserve said it would continue with its $85-billion-a-month bond-buying stimulus program.

With the economy sputtering, Ottawa has meanwhile remained preoccupied with fiscal restraint and balancing the budget within two years. So, with neither low interest rates nor government spending providing a boost, the outcome seems predictable: Official growth forecasts will look nice, but will keep missing the mark.

Grave robbers of the western front

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:05

In the Telegraph, Willard Foxton explains why the growing interest in the centenary of the First World War is also giving a boost to the grave robbers:

Across the UK, there has been a rash of police finds of these First World War explosives, as the online trade in them has boomed. Dealers will often home defuse them, putting themselves and others at risk; some have been maimed doing so. […]

As dangerous as these unexploded devices are, perhaps the ugliest corner of the trade is the sale of other relics — especially dead soldiers’ identification marks. In particular, there’s a premium on British soldier’s spoons, which would often have their owner’s names embossed on them. Helmets can fetch high prices, too — including those bent out of shape by bullets or shells, which gives you some idea of what happened to the poor guy wearing it. As Andy Brockman, a leading conflict archaeologist told me:

“There is a market in all kinds of battlefield memorabilia and in the worst cases this can lead to the sale of identification tags and the removal of personal possessions like spoons and toothbrushes from battlefield burials. These objects can carry identifying marks and their loss can prevent authorities like the Commonwealth War Graves Commission from identifying the soldier concerned, robbing them of the chance of a marked grave.

“When it comes to the illegal removal of equipment and personal possessions from the remains of the missing to feed the collectors market, I would agree with Andy Robertshaw of the Royal Logistics Corps Museum who says that it’s like killing them twice.”

QotD: The New Zealand rugby team

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:27

There is a saying that you do not beat New Zealand — you just get more points than them at the final whistle.

Tim Worstall, “About next week’s rugby”, TimWorstall.com, 2013-11-10

Alison Bechdel on the revived popularity of the “Bechdel Test”

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

You’d think, with all the social advances in equality for women over the last few decades that our media would more directly reflect that equality … but you’d be wrong. Quite some time ago, Alison Bechdel outlined a quick test you could use to determine whether a book or movie treated women as real people or just as foils for males:

The Bechdel test is used to identify gender bias in fiction. A work passes the test if it features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Commentators have noted that a great proportion of contemporary works fail to pass this threshold of representing women. The test was originally conceived for evaluating films, but has since been applied to other media.

Pretty low hurdle, yet a vast number of books and movies fail to meet even this minimal standard. Recently a Swedish theatre chain decided to use the Bechdel Test to evaluate the movies they were showing (with Bechdel’s blessing), which has revived interest in the test itself. Bechdel talks about this on her blog:

I said sure, that sounds awesome, go for it.

So they did, and the Guardian ran an article about it on Wednesday. Which prompted a flurry of emails from radio programs who wanted to talk to me. I spoke to Marco Werman at PRI’s The World, and got to join in his conversation with Ellen Tejle, the director of the participating cinema in Stockholm. I also did a background interview with the NPR program Here and Now.

Yesterday I got a lot of other requests from other media outlets but I’m ignoring them. I feel bad about this. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong about not seizing every possible chance for publicity — if not for myself, then at least for the brave Swedish cinema consortium, not to mention the cause of women everywhere.

But inevitably in these interviews I say simplistic things, or find myself defending absurd accusations — like that the formal application of the Test by a movie theater is somehow censorious.

I have always felt ambivalent about how the Test got attached to my name and went viral. (This ancient comic strip I did in 1985 received a second life on the internet when film students started talking about it in the 2000′s.) But in recent years I’ve been trying to embrace the phenomenon. After all, the Test is about something I have dedicated my career to: the representation of women who are subjects and not objects. And I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago. But I just can’t seem to rise to the occasion of talking about this fundamental principle over and over again, as if it’s somehow new, or open to debate. Fortunately, a younger generation of women is taking up the tiresome chore. Anita Sarkeesian, in her Feminist Frequencies videos, is a most eloquent spokesperson.

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