Quotulatiousness

April 10, 2024

Saving Our Democracy watch – “[Trump] has to do at least ten years, or everybody will hate the navy”

Filed under: Government, Law, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray suggests that reading the full linked document may be hazardous to your mental health, so he’s helpfully highlighted a few of the key points that may have you scratching your head and saying something like “The Fuh? What??”

I have a mixed view of Donald Trump’s argument about presidential immunity, which you can read here. But an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court today by retired flag officers and service secretaries is so bizarre that reading it may permanently alter the structure of my face.

You can read the whole amicus brief here, but treat it like a solar eclipse and don’t stare at it directly. As a first sign of how much good faith the thing contains, one of the amici is Michael Hayden.

The first argument is that Trump has to go to prison or else civilians won’t control the military anymore. You think I’m kidding.

“Amici are deeply interested in this case because presidential immunity from criminal prosecution would threaten the military’s role in American society, our nation’s constitutional order, and our national security.” See the connection? If Donald Trump doesn’t go to prison, “the military’s role in American society” will be damaged. He has to do at least ten years, or everybody will hate the navy.

The prevailing feature of the entire brief is an essence of flattening. Every issue is very simple. There are no competing examples. None of this has ever come up before: The brief deals with questions of presidential immunity around Obama drone-killing a 16 year-old US citizen, or Lincoln unilaterally suspending habeas corpus and using the military to arrest critics of the war, by not mentioning any of it, or any other historical example. Everything is a surface. I’ve graded undergraduate essays, so the tone and depth of the effort feels familiar.

Third argument: Donald Trump has to be prosecuted, because America promotes democracy all over the world, and Trump not being prosecuted is against democracy, so it will be harder for us to promote democracy if we don’t prosecute him. Authoritarian regimes say that American democracy doesn’t work, so: “Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution feeds those false and harmful narratives. Unless Petitioner’s theory is rejected, we risk jeopardizing America’s standing as a guardian of democracy in the world and further feeding the spread of authoritarianism, thereby threatening the national security of the United States and democracies around the world.”

We have to imprison the leader of the political opposition, or people won’t think we’re a democracy, and then there will be more authoritarianism, like when regimes imprison the political opposition.

April 9, 2024

Checking in on the front lines of paleontology research

Filed under: History, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sarah Hoyt is amazed and surprised at some recent revelations about the latest paleontological discoveries:

Yesterday I did something I used to do more often, and looked into the latest discoveries in paleontology and archaeology and such.

And shortly after remembered why I no longer do it every month.

Apparently the latest, greatest news is that — yo, this is amazing — they’re finally not studying pre-history through the eyes of racism and sexism, and as such have determined that pre-historic hunting parties were as much as 80% female.

This is a discovery that of course makes perfect sense. No doubt the males were all back at base camp, chest-feeding the babies. Thereby freeing the pre-historic girl bosses to go and hunt them some mammoth.

If you’re staring at the screen with dropped jaws, I haven’t gone insane. I know this is utter and complete nonsense. It’s not my fault that the people running all our intellectual institutions, including research are morons studying to be idiots.

Applying the Heinlein filter for the actual reason they have to believe that up to 80% — 80%! — of pre-historic hunters were female, i.e. “Again and again, what are the facts?” we get that they found one grave — one — where the DNA of the remains are female (and here we’ll keep quiet about the strange idea that 6000 (I think) year old DNA is easily extracted, non-contaminated, etc. We’ll pretend we don’t know all the times they walked back “new species” because the DNA amplification techniques CREATED those discoveries.)

Let’s assume they’re correct and this was a female, buried with hunting implements. Sure, maybe she was a hunter. There will always be one or two in a large enough band, for the reason that in primitive societies some women are brought up as male: lack of a son, need to support the family, etc. (It is rarely a sexual thing, or because the person WANTED this. In fact it’s often decided for them before they are weaned. In fact, in primitive/ancient societies including the ones of our ancestors that we know about in detail, there was remarkably little room for self expression, self-conception or self interest. When you live close to the bone, such things are subjugated to the needs of the family, the clan, the tribe, more or less in that order. Because survival is hard.) We’re also informed, in BREATHLESS tones that it’s now thought that spear throwers were used to make sure women could throw spears fast enough! That’s why they exist.

But spear throwers are made and used by males, the world over. Go look at the tubes of you and you’ll see videos of people making them and using them, and they’re all male.

Further there is no society today of the ones still surviving more or less in a stone age way that has that kind of distribution for hunters. More importantly, there is no record of them, going as far back as we can.

Maybe this is because yes indeed, the past (being much closer to the bone, and therefore less willing to indulge in story telling) viewed things through a racist and sexist lens. Why not? After all I grew up in an intensely patriarchal society that still hadn’t adapted to the idea of women taking any hand in intellectual pursuits. And yes, that was unwarranted sexism. And every society is racist against every other (Actually culturist, but it’s often couched in terms of race.)

But still … You’d think that here and there there would be a race of valiant Amazons, whose men stay home and pound the taro while they go out and hunt, right?

But the truth is that if you put this notion to the remaining stone age people, they will laugh till they pee themselves. Yes, I know, I know, they internalized sexism from the evil white colonizers whom they’ve met three times in the last 100 years. That’s how powerful and evil whiteness is.

Or, listen, okay? I know this is just crazy talk, but maybe males and females are different and have evolved to fulfill different reproductive functions. And the reproductive function of females is more onerous than that of males. Women in our natural state, and unless something has gone seriously wrong — which of course makes us of less use to the tribe — spend most of our lives pregnant, nursing or carrying for children too young to care for themselves.

QotD: A social conservative criticism of libertarianism

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Libertarians are also naive about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

Robert Locke, “Marxism of the Right”, American Conservative, 2005-03-14.

April 8, 2024

“At the time of writing, the Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf edges J. K. Rowling in the battle for the inaugural title of Scotland’s Most Hateful Person”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage updates us on the mental gymnastics required to navigate Scotland’s new hate crime law:

To the surprise of many terminally online folks, J.K. Rowling is not the top offender under Scotland’s new hate crime law. That “honour” goes to Scotland’s current first minister, Humza Yousaf for a speech delivered several years ago.

One-third of the Scottish police are yet to receive any training on this sweeping new law. Amongst the rank-and-file, the spectre of threatening and abusive material seeping out of public performances such as plays creeps like sarin gas. Such forbidden filth threatens to mutate ordinary Scots into far-right zombies, parroting Andrew Tate’s pitiful jock philosophy.

Police have absorbed over 4,000 reports of hate crimes in the first 48 hours. Mercifully, many Scots are still evidently well-versed in the timeless Scottish art of taking the piss. At the time of writing, the Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf edges J. K. Rowling in the battle for the inaugural title of Scotland’s Most Hateful Person. Second prize, I believe, is a set of steak knives.

Not to worry, those coppers recently announced a new “proportional response strategy”. Police will no longer investigate crimes such as smashed windows, or run-of-the-mill thefts. This “new approach” to policing, which contravenes the very definition of policing, saves the rozzers 24,000 fewer investigations and 130,000 man-hours per year. That leaves plenty of time to investigate those unenlightened beings poxed with the false belief that women don’t have cocks.

Nobody has any idea what is going on. On the first day of the Scottish Unenlightenment, a Scottish National Party minister said J. K. Rowling’s gender-critical tweets could bring the coppers to her door.

On Twitter, J. K. Rowling had reeled off a string of photographs of trans people. She then called those biological men “men”.

Siobhian Brown, the SNP’s community safety minister, had claimed referring to a trans woman as a “he” would not break the new law. Later on, she said the police would decide whether such misgendering would count as a hate crime.

“It could be reported, and it could be investigated. Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that”, said Brown.

You could taste the acrid, small-town glee steaming from the repressive and literal minded. Rajan Barot, a former fraud prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, warned Rowling that her Twitter posts, many of which state that biological men are not and cannot become women, would most likely contravene the new law and advised her to delete them.

Police later confirmed the very rich and very visible author would not face prosecution for her stubborn grasp of biological reality — at least whilst the universe watched on in a state of unadulterated fremdschämen.

“The carbon rebate seems to be one of those rare examples of people getting mad at receiving government money rather than being grateful”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson makes a strong argument that the vaunted (by Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party) carbon tax rebate is actually the big problem with the carbon tax, not the “Conservative misinformation” constantly being pointed at by the government’s paid accomplices in the mainstream media:

Is the purpose of the Liberals’ carbon tax to materially reduce carbon emissions — or is it a wealth redistribution program? I ask because every time the Liberals defend the carbon tax by resorting to the awesomeness of the rebate, what they cease to talk about is how effective it is at actually reducing carbon emissions.

Instead, we fall into an endless series of counterproductive debates about whether what individuals are getting from the rebate equals what they’re paying out in tax. And that debate is repeated every quarter, and each time the carbon tax rises. In other words, our entire political discourse about the tax is centred on wealth redistribution — not emissions.

That makes people suspicious of the government’s actual goals, and skeptical about its claims. This, again, is a problem of message dilution. If you cannot clearly express your intentions, then you’re not going to get political buy-in to your aims. This problem is particularly acute on a policy that is — by definition — demanding a sacrifice of cash and/or quality of life by Canadians. People can get on board with sacrifice, but only if it’s tied to a clear, obtainable, and material objective.

[…]

And here’s where we get into the real dark heart of the problem.

It’s the rebate itself.

I understand why the Canada Carbon Rebate happened. The government wanted to introduce a carbon tax without disproportionately penalizing the poor — the demographic least able to make the investments and lifestyle changes necessary to respond to the tax. But did that relief have to come in the form of a rebate?

Well, no.

There are lots of methods a government can use to ease poverty. But governments love themselves a rebate. Why? Because rebates are normalized vote buying. One that all political parties are guilty of using. The Liberals implemented the rebate thinking Canadians would hit their mailboxes every quarter, see a few hundred bucks, and get warm fuzzy feelings for Papa Trudeau and the natural governing party. “Government’s looking out for me!”

Getting government cheques is popular, and the Liberals were no doubt trying to replicate the appeal of the Canada Child Benefit.

But that didn’t happen here. The carbon rebate seems to be one of those rare examples of people getting mad at receiving government money rather than being grateful. Why?

Well, may I suggest that it’s because every time people open up those cheques, instead of processing the dopamine hit of “free” money, they’re instead reminded of how much they had to pay in to get it. They do the math in their head, think about their rising grocery bills and gas, and come away thinking “not worth it”. Every single quarter, millions of Canadian households are feeling as if they are paying dollars to get dimes — and it’s pissing them right off. Further, demanding they acknowledge they’re better off in the exchange is only adding salt to the wound. Throwing Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) reports at them doesn’t change their minds. It just pisses them off more.

To put it more pithily — a benefit is a gift. A rebate is a value proposition. And a hell of a lot of Canadians are looking at this rebate and determining that its value is wanting — all the more so as the goals of that purchase haven’t been clearly articulated.

April 7, 2024

QotD: Censorship works, but not the way the censors think it does

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

Preference Falsification — If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech — whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship — is ultimately a request to be deceived.

Gurwinder Bhogal, “33 concepts to survive the year”, UnHerd, 2024-01-01.

April 5, 2024

In the still-ongoing “war of the sexes”, when can women just accept they’ve won and cease hostilities?

Filed under: Business, Economics, Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the amusingly named Handwaving Freakoutery, you can see a scorecard for the war of the sexes that has been ongoing since I was a child and seems no closer to ending than back in the 1960s:

I say this to make it absolutely clear that unlike a lot of boorishly banal material you might encounter within the wretchedly named “Manosphere”, this is not intended to be a whiny article. I’m not complaining, nor am I calling for societal change or action. I’m simply wondering exactly how dominant female privilege has to get before they declare victory and take their boot off the necks of men. I really don’t know the answer to this question, but we’ll speculate about that below after the wall of graphs. HWFO loves graphs.

Herein we will go point by point through as many measurable societal markers as I can think of, leaving no marker unmarked, and put together a Gender War Scoreboard describing as accurate a snapshot as possible of the current state of the United States. Then we’ll close with some analysis about how badly it would have to get before the women finally just declare victory and move on. This post shall be too big for email.

To assign our score, we will look at sets of data that fall generally into two categories. For victimization ratios and similar, we’ll just look at percentage by gender. For comparing two uncapped sets of data, such as life expectancy, we’ll look at a ratio and make them both add to 100 for an apples-to-apples comparison. Then we’ll add them all up at the end to tally the score.

Salary

HWFO covered the gender wage gap in 2022, but I’ll summarize it here so you don’t have to read back. According to a 2008 analysis by the Department of Labor, now 16 years old, the raw gender wage gap was 20.4% in 2007:

Most of the gap was explainable by career choice and lifestyle choice differences:

When compared properly that looks like this:

Sixteen years ago, the bits of the gender wage gap that weren’t explained by career and life choice differences only totaled 6%. This fact has been known for a decade and a half and is constantly hidden from view by Pew, the NLWC, and any other major organization that profits from the perception that this gap is large and persistent. It has also assuredly closed to narrower than that 6% in the ensuing decade and a half, but nobody’s replicated the Department of Labor analysis. Look closely at the effects in the green bar identified by the Department of Labor. “Child birth” is how you become a mother. “Child care” is something mothers do. “Working part time” is something mothers do. “Time out of the labor force” is something mothers take. “Occupational choice” is something women change when they become mothers. Here are some graphs from Kleven et al, March 2019:

The solid lines are women. In every studied area, the women make equal or more than the men do up until the birth of their first child, and then they make less. The gender wage gap difference is in the choice to have children. Women choose to make professional concessions to raise a family while the men don’t. Is this fair? Some might say no, but only if they also don’t want to be the primary caregiver for their kids. Some would say yes, for the following two reasons: (1) women choose this, especially in feminist societies, but also (2) men are punished socially for choosing this. If you do not believe me, go make two fake male Tinder profiles with identical cute photos in them, and in the bio of one say “corporate lawyer” and the other say “part time daycare worker” and see which one gets more hits. Then do the same with a female profile. Men are socially punished by women for making the career concession, women are not socially punished by men for making it.

Often when these sorts of “equal pay for equal work” studies are properly controlled for mothering and career choice, they find that men are paid less than women for equal work. Google was pretty famously forced by their neo-progressive staff to do an internal analysis of the subject, and uncomfortably discovered they were overpaying women for being women on an “equal work” basis. The results were twofold. First Google paid all the men a one time bonus, then Google quietly never investigated it again so they could get back to paying women more.

April 1, 2024

“The loss of capacity for memory or real experience is what makes people susceptible to the work of cartoon pseudo-intellectuals”

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Taibbi strongly encourages his readers to exercise their brains, get out of the social media scroll-scroll-scroll trap, and stay sane:

After a self-inflicted wound led to Twitter/X stepping on my personal account, I started to worry over what looked like the removal of multiple lanes from the Information Superhighway. Wikipedia rules tightened. Google search results seemed like the digital equivalent of a magician forcing cards on consumers. In my case, content would often not even reach people who’d registered as social media followers just to receive those alerts.

I was convinced the issue was political. There was clear evidence of damage to the left and right independents from companies like NewsGuard, or the ideologically-driven algorithms behind Google or Amazon ad programs, to deduce the game was rigged to give unearned market advantages to corporate players. The story I couldn’t shake involved video shooter Jon Farina, whose footage was on seemingly every cable channel after J6, but which he himself was barred from monetizing.

Now I think differently. After spending months talking to people in tech, I realize the problem is broader and more unnerving. On top of the political chicanery, sites like Twitter and TikTok don’t want you leaving. They want you scrolling endlessly, so you’ll see ads, ads, and more ads. The scariest speech I heard came from a tech developer describing how TikTok reduced the online experience to a binary mental state: you’re either watching or deciding, Next. That’s it: your brain is just a switch. Forget following links or connecting with other users. Four seconds of cat attacking vet, next, five ticks on Taylor Ferber’s boobs, next, fifteen on the guy who called two Chinese restaurants at once and held the phones up to each other, next, etc.

Generations ago it wasn’t uncommon for educated people to memorize chunks of The Iliad, building up their minds by forcing them to do all the rewarding work associated with real reading: assembling images, keeping track of plot and character structure, juggling themes and challenging ideas even as you carried the story along. Then came mass media. Newspapers shortened attention span, movies arrived and did visual assembly for you, TV mastered mental junk food, MTV replaced story with montages of interesting nonsensical images, then finally the Internet came and made it possible to endlessly follow your own random impulses instead of anyone else’s schedule or plot.

I’m not a believer in “eat your vegetables” media. People who want to reform the press often feel the solution involves convincing people that [they] just should read 6,000-word ProPublica investigations about farm prices instead of visiting porn sites or watching awesome YouTube compilations of crane crashes. It can’t work. The only way is to compete with spirit: make articles interesting or funny enough that audiences will swallow the “important” parts, although even that’s the wrong motive. Rolling Stone taught me that the lad-mag geniuses that company brought in in the nineties, who were convinced Americans wouldn’t read anything longer than 400 words in big type, were wrong. In fact, if you treat people like grownups, they tend to like a challenge, especially if the writer conveys his or her own excitement at discovery. The world is a great and hilarious mystery and if you don’t have confidence you can make the story of it fun, you shouldn’t be in media. But there is one problem.

Inventions like TikTok, which I’m on record saying shouldn’t be banned, are designed to create mentally helpless users, like H addicts. If you stand there scrolling and thinking Next! enough, your head will sooner or later be fully hollowed out. You’ll lose the ability to remember, focus, and decide for yourself. There’s a political benefit in this for leaders, but more importantly there’s a huge commercial boon. The mental jellyfish is more susceptible to advertising (which of course allows firms to charge more) and will show less and less will over time to walk out of the Internet’s various brain-eating chambers.

A cross of Jimmy Page and Akira Kurosawa probably couldn’t invent long-form content to lure away the boobs-and-cat-video addicts these sites are making. The loss of capacity for memory or real experience is what makes people susceptible to the work of cartoon pseudo-intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari, who seem really to think nothing good or interesting happened until last week. The profound negativity of these WEF-style technocrats about all human experience until now reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, whose dystopian characters feared books because “They show the pores of the face of life”.

March 29, 2024

“TamponGate” at Vanderbilt

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Suzy Weiss at The Free Press relates a story that’s just too weird not to share:

No one is ever going to let me guest-host this digest again, so I might as well tell you about some Vanderbilt girl’s tampon. This all started yesterday morning, when a wave of undergrad students rushed Kirkland Hall, where Vanderbilt’s chancellor’s office is located. Thus began their sit-in — a response to the college administration shutting down a student government vote over whether the school should divest funds from Israel.

The protesters remained there for nearly 21.5 hours — blowing Harvard’s 12-hour “hunger strike“, also known as a good night’s sleep — out of the water, before police began removing and arresting students, some of whom have since been suspended.

There are many dumbfounding moments from this latest campus frenzy — for example, when the students, arms linked, called the black police officers protecting the chancellor “puppets”. When food was brought in from Panera Bread by the administration for the officers but not the students, it was treated like a human-rights abuse.

But the tampon takes the cake. (Major props to Steve McGuire for compiling the best episode of the internet since yesterday.)

Here’s what went down: during one of those 21.5 hours of the protest, probably at an ungodly one, a few of the student demonstrators decided to call 911. That’s because their friend, who was part of the sit-in, had to change her tampon.

Specifically, she was “being denied the right to change her tampon that has been in for multiple hours, which leads to an increased risk of toxic shock syndrome.”

The frankly Zen-like 911 operator, who deserves a raise, was understandably confused. “Ma’am, do you have an emergency?”

Um, yes?! The student on the phone requests urgent medical assistance.

“You’re telling me your friend in Kirkland needs an ambulance. Is that what you’re telling me?”

Then in another video, one of the protesters—in a keffiyeh and a mask—approaches the police and an administrator, who was indeed in a sweater vest, demanding to know WHAT. WILL. HAPPEN. to her friend, should she leave the sit-in to change the tampon in question. The adults calmly explain that she won’t be arrested if she leaves the building. But can they confirm that she will never be arrested, ever?!

“She does not feel safe,” someone says off-screen, punctuating it with claps.

This whole thing makes the Nick Christakis Halloween costume struggle session look like a teachable moment. It must be seen to be believed. Watch all the videos in Steve’s thread here.

For starters, if having a tampon in for “multiple hours” is grounds to call for an ambulance, I should have been dead years ago. Second, this student was being denied no such right. All she had to do was get up, leave the protest, and find one of the hundreds of bathrooms that she had access to elsewhere on campus. Pro tip: wear a pad to the all-night protest. The First Amendment doesn’t come with a heating pad.

It’s all very Karen, to borrow a trope from 2020, especially when a protester demands the administrator find someone who can get them some answers. Just like middle-aged women who think dressing down the manager will somehow earn them a full refund, these students have convinced themselves that by linking arms and screaming “shame” at their college’s chancellor, they are stopping a war in the Middle East.

Don’t these authority figures realize they are standing in the way of a global intifada, which is also — obviously — a totally good thing?

We find out in a subsequent video that indeed the tampon was removed, though not in any bathroom. Reader, it came out at the sit-in, like so much urine in so many plastic water bottles. A woman on the microphone calls it “the most depraved shit I’ve seen in my entire life”.

Hard agree.

Politics on the fringe – “Every Single Grassroots Political Movement is populated by cranks of various amounts of semi-retardation”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kulak went to a political rally and came back with some thoughts on non-mainstream political gatherings of all flavours:

Kim Kelly on X: The chatter over Jake “Q Shaman” Angeli’s identity is missing a key element: his tattoos. He’s covered in Odinist symbols — Yggdrasil, Mjolnir, and, significantly, the valknut.

I attended a political event recently in my country, that a mainstream party had vaguely endorsed, but more of a general right wing-anti-tax protest. You had people from the fringe parties, and people and speakers from the fringe of the fringe parties.

We did the protests, then all ended at a large venue where there were coffee, donuts, and speeches … My god the speeches.

Some admittedly were well prepared, the representative of the mainstream party who showed up at the end was very professional befitting a former and probably future politician. But in-between you had rolling, unprepared, barely understandable speeches about chemtrails, sovereign citizenship, and UN Agenda 2030 conspiracies, all mixed with real concerns about local government taking property rights …

And I’ll admit I got damned frustrated. “This is why we lose”, I thought. Echoing a dozen different think pieces on the “Stupid Right” many from right wingers themselves. I was embarrassed that this was the state of political organization and human capital on the “far right”.

What is wrong with these people? I thought, and I’m sure many of have thought.

Well nothing. The problem is with you!

Unlike most online right wing intellectuals I’ve been involved in various type of organized politics, and I had friends who were involved in Left Wing politics who, when I was still an ideological niaf, I humored and attended their meetings.

Every Single Grassroots Political Movement is populated by cranks of various amounts of semi-retardation, and every single one spends an inordinate amount of time at best humouring them, or worse, taking them 100% seriously.

I’ve seen this in mainstream political parties when you talk to any of the volunteers. And I’ve seen this on University campuses where if you let your left wing friends drag you to one of their meetings you’ll be serenaded by barely articulate native activists, feminist extremists who want everyone to pray to Gaia, Black “we wuz” radicals, and every kind of queer identity you can possibly imagine, giving just as if not more retarded takes in even worse coherence, but seemingly actively trying to derail every attempt at meaningful policy advancement or coalition building in favour of struggle sessions and “consciousness raising”.

Say what you will about the sovereign citizen guy … He had a whole list of meaningful proposal with direct actions to take which, setting aside the theory, would actually make public employees and local councillors probably cave out of the sheer misery of dealing with it.

The queer, native, and black activists? Their proposals ranged from non-existent, to actively crippling the groups own organizational capacity in some purity/diversity spiral.

Beyond that however, this collection of right wing weirdos and concerned citizens was meeting in an ex-urban industrial building one of the organizer’s friends let them use. The left wing losers (of whom most were activists in the city, not students) were meeting in a limestone university campus with cathedral ceilings and snacks provided out of student dues and tax dollars.

The immediate organizers of the right wing protester were mechanics, the organizers of these left wing meetings were Professors, several of whom were even lest coherent or policy oriented.

What was their excuse?

Part of me thinks this is why Left wing organizers are perpetually convinced they’re the little guys fighting against a vast right-wing Koch Funded machine out to crush them … because, in spite of getting state funding for protests and stainglassed cathedral high rooms to organize from … They spend 80+% of their time listening to the losers of the losers.

So then why is it right wing intellectuals are convinced their side is stupid?

Well because left wing stupidity doesn’t count, in fact you’re racist for noticing it.

March 28, 2024

Why European farmers are revolting

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment, Europe, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published Mar 27, 2024

Europe’s farmers are rising up – and the elites are terrified. From the Netherlands to Germany to Ireland, farmers are taking to the streets, parking their tractors on the establishment’s lawn, spraying buildings with manure and bringing life to a standstill. The reason? Because unhinged green regulations, dreamt up by European Union bureaucrats, are immiserating them. In this spiked video polemic, Fraser Myers explores the roots of the farmers’ revolt across the continent – and explains why it must succeed. Watch, share and let us know what you think in the comments.

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March 27, 2024

As the kids will be taught, pre-Columbian culture was feminist, egalitarian, non-violent, etc.

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Education, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The way history will be taught in future will distort historical facts to flatter modern sensibilities, especially with regard to First Nations history:

Linguistic groups of pre-contact North America.
Wikimedia Commons

In my previous missive of this series, I outlined the socio-economic problems facing Indigenous people in Canada and identified the official narrative, promoted by the federal government, Indigenous leaders, and their non-Indigenous allies. This narrative is basically that colonialism, racism, and oppression are the sole (or at least the major) causes of the long list of socio-economic difficulties so many Indigenous people are suffering from today. The narrative focuses on colonialism, oppression, as well as “intergenerational trauma” and “genocide”, neither of which claims stand up to the slightest bit of objective scrutiny and analysis. The genocide claim is particularly laughable in that the Indigenous population has increased from about 100 thousand in 1900 to nearly 2 million today, which is at least four times the pre-contact Indigenous population.

Pre-contact living conditions for Indigenous people

In order to blame all the problems on European settlers and their descendants, the narrative starts out by implying that life in pre-contact Canada was idyllic. Students are led to believe that this was a time of peace, cooperation, and prosperity based on teachings and knowledge systems that were superior to what we have now (the Western enlightenment-based ethos and the scientific method). Students are told that people lived well- sustainably, with little environmental impact, and with a respect for each other and the land, with which their relationship was one of stewardship and symbiotic coexistence.

This is presented in contrast to the purported European world view, which kids are told was, and still is, characterized by exploitation and a belief in European superiority. Europeans are described as ruthless and greedy people who just wanted to enrich themselves by maximally extracting any and all resources without regard for impacts on the environment or Indigenous people. It is presented as a case of good vs. evil.

But what was life really like for pre-contact Indigenous people? Certainly their stone age way of living combined with their small, scattered population was eco-friendly, but was their standard of living, on balance, better than that of modern Canada? Were they more moral, or wiser than modern non-Indigenous Canadians? An honest answer to these questions demands a hard look at the available evidence and a willingness to draw conclusions wherever that evidence may lead.

And that evidence shows that pre-contact indigenous people demonstrated the full range of behaviors we find in all stone age hunter gatherer/horticulturalist societies. While there is much to admire about these people, who were able to survive in a challenging environment with only the most rudimentary of wooden, stone, and bone tools, the evidence is clear that, compared to modern times

  • life expectancy was very low
  • child mortality was very high
  • warfare was endemic
  • slavery was a common practice
  • violence of all kinds was common
  • people suffered a great deal from simple health problems which would now be easily treatable with antibiotics and surgical techniques.

It should also be pointed out that while the allegation that Indigenous people were the victims of genocide at the hands of the government of Canada is ridiculous, it is a well-established (but rarely mentioned) fact that Indigenous people carried out genocides against one another on a regular basis, for example the genocide of the Hurons by the Iroquois.

March 25, 2024

QotD: Generational politics

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

The major theme of my writing is guilt — how blaming others is maliciously used as a disabling mechanism and how people and cultures toss it around like a hot potato. No one, unless they’re masochists or are trying to earn social-approval points, ever wants to accept guilt — they want to tie it around someone else’s neck and let them sink to the bottom of the lake with it. This is why I believe Christianity has such perennial appeal — because Jesus takes the rap for you.

I’ve been making this point for years, but you’ve all been too busy projecting your guilt onto others and blaming them for all your problems to listen to me.

The reason I get fixated on certain topics is because they in some way powerfully reflect this theme of misplaced blame. This may burst quite a few of your bubbles, but the fact that I’ve focused on the endless bashing of whites for years is not a sign of how deeply in love I am with white people but rather a fascination with the fact they’re getting blamed for many things that demonstrably aren’t their fault. It’s the same reason I focus on the gender wars — men nearly aren’t as awful as they’re being depicted, and women are nowhere near as innocent as the current narrative says they are.

If you haven’t been paying attention, there’s been escalating intergenerational hostility across our fair land, and people are increasingly identifying with dumb, media-manufactured generational names — AKA Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z — as if they were scientific categories that are predictive of human behavior rather than arbitrary designations along the lines of Virgo, Capricorn, Scorpio, and Leo.

It’s some weird new metastasized form of identity politics. And, since it comes with the turf, these groups are blaming each other for all that ails the world.

It’s dumber than astrology […] but this intensely stupid way of framing the world refuses to die.

Jom Goad, “The Myth of Boomer Privilege”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-11-03.

March 23, 2024

Ireland’s Varadkar heads for the showers

Filed under: Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill discusses the “shocking” — but not actually shocking — resignation of Ireland’s Taoiseach (prime minister):

Leo Varadkar and Rishi Sunak
Composite image from extra.ie

“I am no longer best man to be Irish PM”, said a BBC headline this week, summarising Leo Varadkar’s resignation speech. The truth, Leo, is that you were never the best man to be Irish PM. He was never elected by the people to be taoiseach, instead securing that seat of power by appointment and backroom dealing. And once there, once he’d been gifted the highest office in the land by his allies in Dublin 4, he wielded government not for the people, but against them. He bent Ireland to what was essentially a vast real-time experiment in social re-engineering and thought control.

An unelected ruler using his power and clout to correct the country and improve the people? There’s a word for that. And it isn’t “democracy”.

Varadkar announced his resignation on Wednesday. In an emotional speech he said he was stepping down as leader of Fine Gael immediately and will step down as taoiseach once his successor has been chosen. His “shock departure” followed the people’s crushing defeat of the twin referendum he put forward. Overwhelming majorities rejected his proposals to alter the Irish constitution to update its definition of “family” and to fix what Varadkar damned as its “very sexist” reference to a woman’s “duties” in the home. No thanks, said the electorate, in the biggest ever referendum loss by an Irish government.

Even the fact that Varadkar’s stepping down is widely seen as a “shock move” speaks to the haughtiness, the outright unworldliness, of his political kind. To many of us it makes perfect sense that a PM would bugger off after suffering a historically unprecedented bloody nose from voters. But it seems the Varadkar clique thought they could ride it out. “No biggie” was their view. Until his “shock departure” on Wednesday, reports the Guardian, “the political fallout from the [referendum] debacle had widely been expected to be limited”.

Who expected that? I’m sure those voters who gleefully seized the opportunity of the referendum to give the middle finger to Varadkar and the rest of the establishment didn’t expect the impact of their discontent to be “limited”. It is a testament to the arrogance of technocracy, to the chasm that has emerged between Ireland’s rulers and Ireland’s ruled, that the Dublin establishment thought it could shrug off the largest drubbing it has ever received from voters.

In the end, tellingly, it seems it was disgruntlement from within his own party ranks, rather than the disgruntlement of the oiks, that convinced Varadkar to go. He was facing “increasing discontent within Fine Gael”, with some party bigwigs worried he’s an “electoral liability”. Everything you need to know about the man is contained in the fact that he essentially shrugged when the masses rose up against him but bolted when his fellow clerisy members criticised him. To the technocrat, the disapproval of their dinner-party circle carries far more weight than the discontent of ordinary people.

If Varadkar was edged out by the tut-tutting of movers and shakers, it would be a fitting end to a career that always owed more to the intrigue of political insiders than to the enthusiasm of the electorate. It is an unremarked upon truth that Varadkar was never installed into power by the people. He first became taoiseach in 2017 when then taoiseach Enda Kenny resigned as leader of Fine Gael. Varadkar was elected new party leader and became taoiseach on the back of it. So he became PM of Ireland on the back of the deliberations of 25,000 party members, not the ballots of the people.

Actually, even members of Fine Gael weren’t especially enthused by him. Varadkar’s opponent in the 2017 leadership contest – Simon Coveney – won almost twice as many votes from party members: 7,051 to Varadkar’s 3,772. But Varadkar won more votes from members of the parliamentary party – 51 to Coveney’s 22 – which meant Fine Gael’s weighted electoral college ruled in his favour rather than Coveney’s. From the get-go, Varadkar’s rule of Ireland was more an accomplishment of elite patronage than democratic keenness.

“At least they didn’t arrest the dog”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Andrew Doyle revisits the Nazi pug story as new Scottish blasphemy hate speech laws are about to come into force at the beginning of April:

If you’re deluded enough to suppose that human history works in a progressive linear fashion, the example of Scotland should swiftly change your mind. Once the home of the Enlightenment, the country has now veered into authoritarianism under the control of the SNP. The party’s new hate crime law will come into force on April Fools’ Day, and no-one in government is seemingly able to give examples of “crimes” that would be covered by this legislation that aren’t already criminal. When specifically asked on the BBC’s Newsnight whether “misgendering” would result in prosecution, SNP backbench Fulton MacGregor could only mutter: “Well, it depends on the circumstances”. How reassuring.

For all MacGregor’s “faith” that the law would be “properly” implemented, nonbelievers are right to be cautious. Vaguely worded legislation is bound to be exploited, and has been many times in the past. This is particularly the case when it comes to “hate speech”, a concept for which no adequate definition has ever been achieved. The best the Irish government could muster for their forthcoming hate crime bill is that hatred “means hatred”. In these times of slippery authoritarian wordplay, that’s about as specific as we can expect.

The Scottish police have claimed that they will not “target” comedians and actors under the new legislation, and yet at the same time have sworn to investigate every complaint. Thankfully, activists never make spurious complaints against their ideological opponents in the hope of seeing them silenced. Oh wait. They do. All the time.

[…]

So for all of the claims that our concerns about the new hate crime law are unfounded, and that the police would never prosecute anyone for a gag, we should remember that they already have. This legislation will simply make it easier for activists within and without the police force to weaponise the law against those deemed to be subversive. On the day of Meechan’s arrest, one police officer affirmed that he must be “an actual Nazi trying to inspire people to become Nazis”. The judge eventually agreed, in spite of the fact that after two years of investigation the police had uncovered no evidence of far-right sympathies.

Of course those who wish to criminalise dissent will not stop at comedians. They’ll also be keen to crack down on anyone who knows the difference between men and women and is willing to declare this esoteric knowledge out loud. Although it has become a cliché to cite George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in such circumstances, that is only because it is so apposite: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”.

I do not sincerely believe that the police will turn up at our Comedy Unleashed show next Monday. It seems unfathomable that we might see a kind of re-enactment of the closing scenes of The Blues Brothers, with police officers standing in the shadows of the club to monitor the show for heterodox content. But then, I would never have anticipated that in a free country someone who made a video mocking Nazis would end up with a criminal record. Of course our show will be offensive to those who choose to be offended. Such is the nature of comedy. The only way to avoid such a situation would be for the acts to stand on stage in total silence. And even then, someone might find this offensive to mutes.

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