Quotulatiousness

March 22, 2023

QotD: “[T]he Conservatives were a party whom its enemies need not fear and its friends did not trust”

[Theresa May’s] party is deeply divided on the question of Brexit, and the situation is eerily reminiscent of that which followed Joseph Chamberlain’s sudden conversion from Free Trade to protectionism in 1903. Though the times then were generally prosperous (judged by their own and not by subsequent standards), Chamberlain argued that unfair foreign competition was harming, and even destroying, British agriculture and industry. The solution that he proposed was protectionism within the then extensive British Empire.

The Conservative Party, led (or at least, headed) by the highly intellectual Arthur Balfour, was deeply divided on the question. It appeared not to be able to make up its mind; as one brilliant young Conservative Member of Parliament, Harry Cust put it, “I have nailed my colours to the fence”. Balfour, the Prime Minister, refused to express himself clearly on the subject, for fear of alienating one or other of the factions of his own party, and thereby bringing the government down. Intellectually brilliant as he was, he proved incapable of exercising any leadership.

In the election that followed Chamberlain’s conversion to protectionism, the Conservatives were swept from power. Neither free-traders nor protectionists trusted them, and the opposition Liberal Party, which at least was clear on this question, soon became a government of reforming zeal. For many years, the Conservatives were a party whom its enemies need not fear and its friends did not trust.

Theodore Dalrymple, “On Brexit, Remember that Politics Is Not a Dinner Party”, New English Review, 2018-03-11.

March 3, 2023

Conservatives keep re-enacting the Charlie Brown “kick the football” scenario

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

Theophilus Chilton on the evergreen Charlie Brown and Lucy impersonations of the conservatives and progressives in western political struggles:

If there is one thing that becomes apparent when you talk to a lot of normie conservatives, it is that they have absolutely no idea how or why they keep getting rolled over by the radical Left. They work and they work and they work to win elections, they invest their time and money to get “their guy” into office, only to find him selling them out on the first important issue within a month of taking office. They pass laws, only to be thwarted in the courts. When they win in the courts, they get thwarted by the bureaucracy. They try and try to force government to abide by the Constitution, but find that this document applies in one direction only. No matter what they do, they simply cannot keep Cthulhu from swimming left.

Why is this?

It’s because they fundamentally don’t understand how power actually works. In a sense, normie conservatives long for a world that never existed. They desperately want to “keep” a republic where politicians work for the public good and where government is truly restrained by its founding document. So it’s something of a bitter pill for them to swallow when they finally accept that such a thing doesn’t exist, and really hasn’t existed in any reasonable form in the United States since the Civil War. America has continued to move left for the past 150 years because the Left has been perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to win. The Left has become adept at “manipulating procedural outcomes,” by which is meant the ability to game the system to make an existing structure which is “supposed” to operate one way bring about outcomes which were never really intended (or even considered possible) by the people who put it into place.

How do you get around constitutional restraints on, say, gun laws or federal encroachments on state prerogatives? Well, one example would be to use fraud and deceit to subvert the Constitution’s provision for elections to get your people in office, who then use the Constitution’s provisions for nominating and approving judges to get friendly judges in power, who then use the (dubiously) constitutional provision for judicial review to decide that whatever laws you want to pass are “constitutional.” Other than the initial fraud (which, since you run the show now, isn’t going to be challenged in any substantive way), everything you did was “technically” in line with the Constitution, even though the results are quite the opposite of what was actually intended. Wanna pack the Supreme Court? Technically, it’s legal! Ban political speech you don’t like? Call it “hate speech” and enforce it under provisions in administrative law that have already been allowed to stand by your judges. The Left has become very adept at appearing to “follow the rules” while working the system to undermine that same system for its own ends.

So that’s “how” the Left always seems to beat conservatives, even when conservatives manage to win an election. But WHY does this happen?

It happens because conservatives ALLOW it to happen.

Let’s be brutally honest here – normie conservatives are saps. They continue to play a rigged game, no matter how often they lose. And they do so because they believe it is virtuous to hold onto “principles” which inevitably lead to failure after failure. They never consider that if “holding to their principles” means the destruction of everything they profess to hold dear, then those principles are terrible principles that should perhaps be reconsidered. If you pat yourself on the back for your virtue in “playing by the rules” even as your house burns down around you and the neighbours are making off with all your stuff, then you’re the source of the problem. Don’t blame somebody else for capitalising on your stupidity.

January 8, 2023

Conservatives “vote harder”, progressives take advantage of “procedural outcome manipulations”

Theophilus Chilton on a key difference between progressives and conservatives in how they address perceived problems with “the system”:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Over the past decade or so, many folks on the broad Right have noticed that practically all of our institutions don’t really work as they should. The natural tendency on the part of normie conservatives is to chalk this up to incompetence and corruption. Granted, those do come into play – and will continue to do so increasingly. Yet structurally speaking, our institutional dysfunctionality runs a lot deeper than a little graft or some skimming off the top. Our institutional failures are both purposeful and towards a specific end.

Normies can perhaps be forgiven for not immediately coming to this conclusion. After all, as the name suggests, they’re the norm. They’re the mainstream. They’re not out on the “fringe” somewhere, for better or for worse. These are conservatives who have been conditioned by decades of playing by the rules to trust the rules and the processes under which government and institutions operate (even if they think they “distrust government” or whatever). They’re the ones who believe we have to keep voting harder because voting is the only “proper” way to act in our system. And yet, many times they end up being mystified that not only do the institutions and procedures not “work right” but that nobody in power (even their own so-called representatives) seems the least bit bothered by this.

Yet, purposeful it truly is. There is a concept about our institutions that I wish every conservative understood, which is that of “manipulating procedure outcomes”. Basically, what this refers to is the process by which bad actors will take an established procedure — a rule or statute, an institution inside or outside of government, a social or political norm — and subvert it to their own use while still “technically” adhering to procedure. However, the process of doing so completely warps the results from those which “should” happen had the procedure been played straight. This intentionality explains why our institutional failures always seem to tend in one direction — Cthulhu always seems to swim left, so to speak. The American Left are masters at manipulating procedural outcomes, while the American Right rigidly tries to adhere to “the way things oughta be” and end up getting outmanoeuvered every time.

Allow me to give some examples of this; seeing them will start to train the eye towards recognising other instances of this process.

Let’s take, for example, the recent revelations of government censorship of dissident ideas and individuals that we saw in the Twitter files. Now, we all know that the government can’t censor speech and ideas because of the First Amendment. So this means that they’d never do so … right? (LOL) Well, as the Twitter files revealed — and which absolutely assuredly applies to every other major tech company in the field — FedGov and the alphabet agencies simply use companies like Twitter as a way to work around the 1A. They can’t censor directly, but they can rely upon a combination of selective pressure on tech companies and ideologically friendly personnel within these companies to censor and gather information about right-leaning, and especially dissident Right, users all the same. And technically, none of this is illegal, because muh private company and all that. So a functional illegality nevertheless remains within the boundaries of “procedure”.

The same type of manipulation is underway with regards to the Second Amendment, too. Again, the plain wording of the 2A, as well as a long train of prior judicial interpretive precedence, militates against federal and state governments really being able to restrict the gun rights of Americans (not that they don’t try anywise). They can’t make it illegal to buy or own guns. Schemes like prohibitively taxing ammo won’t pass muster either. So if you’re a left-wing fruitcake who hates the Constitution and badly wants to disarm your fellow Americans for further nefarious purposes, what do you do?

Well, you make it too legally dangerous for gun owners to actually use their guns for anything beyond target shooting. You install a bunch of Soros-funded prosecutors in all the jurisdictions that you can so that you can go light on criminals but throw the book at gun owners who defend themselves from criminals. You creatively interpret laws to mean that harming someone while defending yourself is a crime or, barring that, open up self-defenders to civil attack from the criminal’s family. From a self-defence perspective you set up an anarchotyrannical regimen that can be used against ideological enemies. This is basically the same thing the Bolsheviks did when they were consolidating their power as “Russia” transitioned to “the Soviet Union”, as recorded by Solzhenitsin in The Gulag Archipelago. They used administrative courts and ideological judges to punish people who legitimately defended themselves against criminals. If you injured someone who was attacking or robbing you, you went to the gulag. Of course, as we’re also seeing today, these criminals were functionally agents of the Regime by that point.

December 17, 2022

Capital punishment

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tam at View From The Porch expresses some of her concerns about the death penalty and government’s fitness to carry out such punishments fairly:

“Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park” by August Rode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I’ve written numerous times that I’m pretty ambivalent about capital punishment. There are some crimes so heinous that you can’t just walk back from them and say “Hey, I’m sorry I ate grandma’s face with some fava beans and a nice chianti, but I was off my meds. I’m feeling better now and ready to be a productive member of society!” I’m comfortable with the concept of having society’s lifeguard blow the whistle and order that dude out of the pool.

Thing is, it turns out that a lot of people wind up on death row for Felony Being Black In A Lineup with a further count of Aggravated Having A Bad Lawyer. It’s bad enough having to try to make things right with a dude you’ve locked in a cell for years by mistake, but it’s impossible to do with a dude you’ve put in a coffin.

Conservatives don’t trust the government to do most anything right, from writing & enforcing gun laws to delivering the mail, but when it comes to making sure they strap the right guy in Ol’ Sparky, suddenly y’all act like the government couldn’t possibly screw up.

So while in theory I’m pretty okay with the idea of capital punishment, in some frictionless setting where all cows are spherical and have equal mass and libertarianism works, here in the real world I just don’t trust people to implement it right.

If we as a society screw up and off the wrong dude, who gets the sentence for that? Or do we all get ¹⁄₃₃₃,₀₀₀,₀₀₀ of a sentence?

December 5, 2022

Edmund Burke

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin republishes part of a much older post out as background on Edmund Burke (who I haven’t yet read):

Portrait of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), circa 1770-1780 after a painting of 1774 by James Northcote.
Original in the Royal Albert Museum & Art Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

When I first started reading Edmund Burke, it was for the political wisdom his writings contained. Only many years later did I start to benefit from noticing that the Burke we know – the man proved a prophet by events and with an impressive legacy – differed from the Burke that the man himself knew: the man who was a lifelong target of slander; the one who, on each major issue of his life, gained only rare and partial victories after years or decades of seeing events tragically unfold as he had vainly foretold. Looking back, we see the man revered by both parties as the model of a statesman and thinker in the following century, the hero of Sir Winston Churchill in the century after. But Burke lived his life looking forwards:

  • On America, an initial victory (repeal of the Stamp Act) was followed by over 15 years in the political wilderness and then by the second-best of US independence. (Burke was the very first member of parliament to say that Britain must recognise US independence, but his preferred solution when the crisis first arose in the mid-1760s was to preserve – by rarely using – a prerogative power of the British parliament that could one day be useful for such things as opposing slavery.)
  • He vastly improved the lot of the inhabitants of India, but in Britain the first result of trying was massive electoral defeat, and his chosen means after that – the impeachment of Warren Hastings – took him 14 years of exhausting effort and ended in acquittal. Indians were much better off, but back in England the acquittal felt like failure.
  • Three decades of seeking to improve the lot of Irish Catholics, latterly with successes, ended in the sudden disaster of Earl Fitzwilliam’s recall and the approach of the 1798 rebellion which he foresaw would fail (and had to hope would fail).
  • The French revolutionaries’ conquest of England never looked so likely as at the time of his death in 1797. It was the equivalent of dying in September 1940 or November 1941.

It’s not surprising that late in his life he commented that the ill success of his efforts might seem to justify changing his opinions. But he added that, “Until I gain other lights than those I have“, he would have to go on being true to his understanding.

Burke was several times defeated politically – sometimes as a direct result of being honest – and later (usually much later) resurged simply because his opponents, through refusing to believe his warnings, walked into water over their heads and drowned, doing a lot of irreversible damage in the process. Even when this happened, he was not quickly respected. By the time it became really hard to avoid noticing that the French revolution was as unpleasant as Burke had predicted, all the enlightened people knew he was a longstanding prejudiced enemy of it, so “he loses credit for his foresight because he acted on it”, as Harvey Mansfield put it. (Similarly, whenever ugly effects of modern politics become impossible to ignore, people like us get no credit from those to whom their occurrence is unexpected because we were against them “anyway”.)

Lastly, I offer this Burke quote to guide you when people treat their success in stealing something from you (an election, for example) as evidence of their right to do so:

    “The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least, it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments – success.”

October 27, 2022

Rishi Sunak becoming PM apparently – wait for it – proves that systemic racism is still a thing in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

You’d think the first non-white British PM would help dispel the constant claims that British society is still deeply racist, but as Theodore Dalrymple shows, that underestimates the political need to use “racism” as a rhetorical stick to beat the electorate with:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

The new British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is the son of Punjabi immigrants from East Africa. You might have thought that this would satisfy, or at least please, the anti-racism lobby, by demonstrating that British society is an open one, not completely sclerosed by racist prejudice: but you would be wrong.

An opposition member of parliament called Nadia Whittome, herself of Indian origin, tweeted that Sunak’s appointment to the highest political position was not a victory for Asian representation.

This follows the assertion not long ago by Rupa Huq, another Member of Parliament of Indian subcontinental origin, that Kwasi Kwarteng, former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s short-lived Chancellor of the Exchequer, was only “superficially black” because he spoke what in England is called the King’s English. She said that, listening to him on the radio, one would not even know that he was black. Instead, he spoke like the highly educated person he was, which in Huq’s opinion was incompatible with being black. Whites are not the only racists.

The remarks by these two female politicians, all the more significant because they were spontaneous rather than deeply considered, reveal something about the nature of modern identity politics: that the function of minorities (whether racial, sexual, or other) is to act as vote-fodder for political entrepreneurs of a certain stripe. It’s therefore the duty of minorities to remain the victims of prejudice against them and not to rise in the social scale by their own efforts: To do so is to betray the cause and above all their supposed leaders.

The reason that Whittome considers that Sunak’s appointment isn’t a victory for Asian representation is that, although of Asian origin, his parents (his father was a doctor) had him expensively educated and Sunak is now a multimillionaire, unlike most people of Asian origin — to say nothing of most whites.

There are, of course, other ways in which he isn’t representative of the Asian, or any other, population, the most important of which is that he’s of far above-average intelligence. (I must here point out also that while a certain level of intelligence is a necessary condition for a successful political career, it’s far from being a sufficient one.)

Representative government doesn’t mean that the representatives in the legislature or government must reflect the population demographically, such that — for example — 5 percent of them must have IQ’s of less than 70, though increasingly it may appear that they do. Nor are a person’s political or social views straightforwardly a reflection of his or her own economic position: If they were, Engels (who was a factory owner and rode to hounds) would never have been Marx’s collaborator, and Marx himself would not have written Capital, for he was no more proletarian than is King Charles.

October 25, 2022

Rishi Sunak becomes Britain’s latest Prime Minister

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

I don’t know how the oddsmakers rate the new PM’s chances, but there’s bound to be money made and lost on how long he sticks around. In The Line, Andrew MacDougall wishes Rishi Sunak good luck in his new post:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.
Wikimedia Commons.

It says something about the current dysfunction in British politics that the elevation of a third prime minister in a matter of just two months — without a single vote cast, by anyone — is seen as a relief. So all hail the new PM Rishi Sunak, a.k.a. the man who lost to Liz Truss eight weeks ago, as he takes the wheel of this drunken nation.

Sunak won the leadership of the Conservative Party — and through it, the premiership of the country — in the short and sharp race triggered by the spectacular end of the Trussterfuck all of (checks notes) four days ago. With the declared support of nearly 200 of his Parliamentary colleagues, Sunak was able to see off challenges from former prime minister Boris Johnson and current House Leader Penny Mordaunt. Both Mordaunt and Johnson declined to seek a vote by the party membership, prioritizing “party unity” instead.

It will now be up to the 42-year old Sunak, an MP for only seven years, to deliver that party unity. And good luck, as they say, with that. Because the Tories are now riven into warring factions which appear to have no more in common with each other than Jagmeet Singh does with success.

Yeah, it’s that bad.

A good first step for Sunak would be to not repeat the errors of the Truss … era? When you’re in a hole, stop digging, etc. Thankfully, Sunak already has credibility here, having spent the summer telling everyone that Truss’s economic policies would be disastrous. The former chancellor of the Exchequer is, thank Christ, well acquainted with economic reality and is expected to continue the new course set out by Jeremy Hunt, the current chancellor, who has spent his time erasing all of the dick-and-ball doodles Truss scribbled onto the economy. This will surely please the international bond markets, who are the actual rulers of the United Kingdom. It will also please mortgage holders, whose payments are now expected to go up less than during Trussonomics.

But it won’t please everyone.

Robert Hutton in The Critic, for one, welcomes the new robot PM:

The morning had been hugely enjoyable, hours of watching Tory MPs rushing to endorse Rishi Sunak while there was still time. Boris Johnson had suddenly disappeared from view, claiming that he could have won, easily, but had decided not to try. Penny Mordaunt tried her best, and claims to have come within touching distance of the 100-nomination threshold, but, just before Sir Graham Brady was going to announce the result, she issued a statement saying that she hadn’t made it. It was, of course, significantly more gracious than Johnson’s. For all the claims that his time on holiday has made him a more thoughtful and humble figure, his Sunday evening statement suggests he is as much of a petulant man-child as he ever was.

And so to the desk-banging. In fairness, the appointment of Rishi Sunak as leader and prime minister-in-waiting was, for a lot of Tory MPs, an unexpected and huge relief. People who six long weeks ago thought they’d never see the inside of a ministerial car again now glimpse a future bright with possibility, at least as far as they personally are concerned.

[…]

The oddity to the day was that we hadn’t heard from our incoming prime minister. In fact, he didn’t seem to have spoken a word in public since the start of September. Finally he popped up, and we worked out why they’d been keeping him away from the cameras.

It was a brief statement, throughout which he stared at a point just off camera, giving the impression to the viewer that he was looking over your left shoulder, hoping to catch the eye of someone more interesting who was standing behind you.

He opened by paying tribute to Liz Truss “who has led with dignity and grace through a time of great change”. Or, as the rest of us call it, “September”. His delivery was awkward, as though he had read about public speaking in a book, with frequent random pauses. “I am,” he said. “Humbled. And honoured. To have the support of my parliamentary colleagues. And to be elected as leader. Of the Conservative. And Unionist Party!”

Sebastian Millbank, on the other hand, sees Sunak as heralding the end of British sovereignty:

Sunak will be praised, despite being arguably the most privileged man in British politics, as being a triumph for diversity and social mobility, Britain’s first ethnic minority Prime Minister. But he’s also our first Californian Prime Minister — a man who believes heart and soul in the Silicon Valley “Californian ideology“, and boasts of his time in Stanford as a formative experience that gave him a “bigger, more dynamic approach to change”.

In choosing Rishi Sunak in a panicked attempt to retain power and calm the markets, Tory MPs have signed away what is left of British sovereignty over our own affairs. You will hear claims that “this is how the British system works”, that in a parliamentary democracy he need only win the confidence of parliament, and does not need to go to the country.

This is sheer and utter nonsense. The Conservative majority was elected, in its current form, on the basis of the 2019 manifesto, with its promises to strengthen the public sector, heal regional inequality, and reclaim sovereignty over our borders, law and finances. If Sunak and his party no longer intend to honour those commitments, they must win a fresh mandate in a general election.

October 21, 2022

The brief career of Liz Truss as British Prime Minister

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I was typing the heading for yesterday’s post on former British Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, it occurred to me that I might need the same phrasing for the Prime Minister … but I expected her to stumble on a few more weeks or months rather than following Kwarteng out the door this quickly:

Edmund Burke – one of the great theorists of the state – argued that for a government to rule successfully, it must have consent. Liz Truss lacked that consent; she moved like Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, ruling with an iron fist towards her economic vision without the consent, explicit or implicit, to rule in that manner and pursue that agenda.

Her economic programme was wholly unsuitable for the climate and deeply damaging. The result was that her reign, like Hobbes’ state of nature where nobody had the political legitimacy to rule, was nasty, brutish and short. It has left the mantle impossibly difficult for her successor.

Liz Truss has become the first prime minister since Neville Chamberlain to never face a general election whilst in office, and her successor will be under immediate pressure to call one. The economic situation is far more dire than it was before her disastrous mini-budget, and trust is shattered. This is before expected interest rate increases could tip millions into unaffordable mortgages, and the expiry of the energy support scheme (except for targeted support). Whoever takes over will face crises on multiple fronts that may prove impossible to arrest.

There’s rarely been a political downfall that didn’t merit at least a nod to the famous bunker scene:

If you haven’t seen Downfall, you’ve almost certainly seen its most famous scene. As shells fall on Berlin and the Red Army advances, Hitler sits in his bunker and listens as his generals lay out exactly how bad the situation is. One by one, his options are whittled away until eventually it sinks in that all that awaits is total defeat, humiliation, and annihilation.

On an entirely unrelated note, as Liz Truss returns to her bunker underneath the big table in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, difficult conversations are happening in Downing Street. It’s 11am on a Thursday morning …

Penny Mordaunt attempts a cheerful smile. She does not succeed. “Prime Minister – the Labour party has made a breakthrough across a wide front. In the South they are taking Bedfordshire and Norfolk. In the North, the Red Wall is broken. In the East and West, losses are limited because fish don’t vote. But indications are that even the haddock are pretty gloomy about your prospects.”

Truss waves this away. “Don’t worry. Kwasi’s resignation will bring it under control.”

The Cabinet exchanges uneasy glances. Mordaunt steps forward from the crowd. “Prime minister … Kwasi …”

Jacob Rees-Mogg finishes the thought. “Kwasi is briefing against you in the Times. He says you have weeks remaining in office.”

An awkward silence develops, extends. In this room, time now has no meaning. Glaciers run like rivers. The sun and moon flicker across the sky. Empires rise and fall, newly sapient species emerge, flourish, and die off. Eventually the universe undergoes total heat death, frozen into stasis until a spark suddenly appears; a second big bang. Energy. Light. The reinvention of particle physics, and eventually an earth, evolution, Britain, and

“Prime Minister?”

“Yes. I see.”

A second pause, blessedly shorter. Mordaunt and Rees-Mogg glance nervously at each other. Eventually, Truss settles on a response: “Would everyone who has briefed against me in the last week please leave the room.”

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill makes the argument that Britain is now a political wasteland:

So Liz Truss is out. After just 44 days her premiership is no more. “I’m a fighter, not a quitter”, she said in parliament yesterday, and now she’s quit. Her premiership deserves to live in ignominy. Not necessarily because her blunders were so spectacular – though many of them were – but because of what this strangled-at-birth stint in Downing Street tells us about British politics more broadly. Which is that it’s a wasteland. An ideological void. A dustbowl of ideas. The lack of even the faintest glimmer of leadership material anywhere in the Westminster circus is horrifying to me. Trussism is but a symptom of a wider malady afflicting our political class.

[…]

Let’s go beyond Truss and Hunt and ask what this all tells us about the Conservative Party. This is the oldest political party in Europe, arguably the world. It’s the party that gave us Peel, Churchill, Thatcher, properly historic figures. Which birthed so much of the legal and political order we live under. Which The Economist aptly called “the world’s most successful party”. And which once reached, through Conservative Associations, the Church and other formal and informal networks, into communities across the land.

Now it’s a hollow machine, bereft of strategy, in dire want of ideas, out of touch with the public, disorientated, and infamous for having a PM who couldn’t last a naff, paltry 50 days in Downing St. The factional Tories cheering Truss’s demise are fools. Your entire party is indicted by this shitshow. And by the fact that your big replacement for lame Liz – Hunt – is a man so disconnected from British people, British history and British politics that he prefers EU oversight to national sovereignty, technocracy to belief, and “competence” to passion. Congrats!

To see the true state of the Tory Party, look no further than a comment piece penned by one of its former leaders, William Hague, this week. “Ideology is dead: it’s competence we need now”, the headline said. In short, you’ve had your fun with Brexit and Boris and the mad populist experiment – now it’s time for the adults to come back into the room and take control. Not only is this undemocratic (14million people voted for Boris to be PM, no one voted for Hunt to be de facto PM). Not only is it anti-political. Not only is it bureaucratic, stiff and unabashedly concerned more with making the trains run on time than with inspiring the people with proposals for a genuinely better life. It is also an admission that they have no ideas left. That the once great Conservative Party is completely out of steam. That Westminster itself is knackered. “Competence” is the last refuge of the visionless. They’re finished. Kaput. Clueless. Not just Liz, all of them. The need for a political overhaul has never been so pressing and so great.

Despite the “bad optics”, as Tristin Hopper points out here, this is what’s supposed to happen when the PM gets it totally wrong, and Canadians have no grounds to criticize Britain here:

October 10, 2022

Janice Fiamengo on the #MGTOW affair – “In short, men who ‘go their own way’ have decided that they need women even less than the mythical fish needed its wheeled transport”

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

Recently, much impassioned wailing and howling has been directed at new Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre for his media team’s use of the notorious, misogynistic, coded-hate-speech metatag #MGTOW on postings to social media. Janice Fiamengo calls out the bold hypocrisy of most of the critics:

Remember “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle?”

Popularly credited to feminist icon Gloria Steinem, the slogan embodied the insouciance and independence claimed by Second Wave feminists. Women could get along just fine without men (though not without their tax money, as it turned out — more on this later) and lesbian feminists like Adrienne Rich (in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”) explicitly called on all women to withdraw their caring from men as an act of female solidarity.

Nice, eh?

Anyone who objected to the anti-male rhetoric was dismissed as an apologist for patriarchal oppression (“Do you have a problem with equality?”), and generations of young women were given the message that wanting to love and be loved by a man was a betrayal of the sisterhood. What else was one to make of Professor of Law Catharine MacKinnon’s claim, in her 1989 essay for the journal Ethics, that “The major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it” (p. 336-337).

For decades, feminists in Canada have been given a free pass to vilify men as a group. In 1978, women’s groups held the first “Women Reclaim the Night” march in downtown Vancouver. It was a raucous, aggressive, property-destroying affair culminating in the symbolic murder of a stuffed male “Rapist” mannequin who was “literally stomped to shreds” by woman warriors.

[…]

So it is rather rich, now, five decades into the feminist revolt, to see pundits and political commentators huffing and puffing in outrage about MGTOW, dubbed a “misogynist men’s rights movement” or a “far-right misogynistic online movement”, and calling on newly-minted Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre (who, alas, seems eager to oblige) to disavow them. MGTOW stands for Men Going Their Own Way, and it was a happy day for the mainstream feminist-left when Global News allegedly discovered that Poilievre’s team had tagged many of his videos with the acronym.

The hypocrisy is off the charts.

It’s doubtful that any of the commentators getting on their high horses knows anything about MGTOW except the hysterical nonsense feminists have cooked up. MGTOW is not an official movement, far less an “organization”, as Poilievre mistakenly called it. It has no recognized leadership, no designated spokespersons, no political program, no lobbying power, and no public presence. It is not actually interested in “men’s rights” except to point out that men don’t have any. It has no philosophical connection with incels. It is basically a loose (mainly online) affiliation of men who have decided to check out of women’s lives.

Aren’t feminists always saying that they want men to stop dominating them, subjugating them, pestering them, harassing them, controlling them, and making them uncomfortable? That’s what MGTOW are all about.

October 8, 2022

First BoJo “Miss me yet?” meme time?

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

Dominic Sandbrook on the terrible, awful, very bad start to Liz Truss’s Premiership:

If you believe the mainstream media, it has been yet another cosmically dire week for the Conservatives. But let’s stop going on about all the little things that went wrong, and concentrate instead on what went right. Nobody died. Liz Truss got through her speech without losing her voice, losing her mind or falling off the stage. The pound is back up to its level before Kwasi Kwarteng’s Fiscal Event. And maybe, just maybe, things are going to come right after all.

The winter energy crisis won’t be as bad as everybody fears. Inflation will start to come down. By the spring, that enormous Labour poll lead will be a fading memory. And as the next election approaches, ordinary people across the land will throw their caps in the air and cheer the name of Good Queen Liz …

No. No, I can’t do it. Tempting as it is to tilt against the conventional wisdom, sometimes you just have to face facts. The conference was awful. The speech was awful. This has been the worst start to any premiership, I think, in recent history — perhaps even in all British history.

Perhaps some readers will think this very harsh. But one close Truss ally, speaking off-the-record to the Financial Times, didn’t seem to think so. “I just went back to my hotel room and cried,” he said. “It’s a total disaster.” That’s pretty much what the general public think, too. In focus groups this week, the words that came up again and again were “incompetent”, “useless”, “untrustworthy”, “dangerous” and “clueless”. The punters aren’t always right, of course. But this time they are right, aren’t they?

“Our policy is great,” Penny Mordaunt told a fringe conference audience a couple of days ago, “but our comms is shit.” But if your comms really is shit, then who cares about the policy? Who even knows about it? Communicating your policy is the very essence of politics. If you can’t do it, you’ll never win another election.

I watched Truss’s speech through my fingers, embarrassed not just by the sheer lack of content, but the comically wooden and childlike delivery. It speaks volumes that in their desperation to find something, anything, nice to say about it, sympathetic papers applauded her for staying calm after she was interrupted by hecklers. Only somebody who had never heard of Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair — all of whom were brilliant at dealing with interruptions — could have possibly thought this worth applauding.

For although academics and activists often prefer to talk about the abstractions of ideology or the nuts and bolts of policy, performance really, really matters in politics. To some extent, in fact, performance is politics. Even in a parliamentary system, you need a messenger who embodies the message, a leader who can charm and explain. Watch Thatcher talking to Robin Day in 1984, or Jim Callaghan being interviewed by Thames TV’s This Week in 1978, and it’s like entering a different world. Whatever their ideological differences, Thatcher and Callaghan are seasoned, accomplished performers, at the top of their respective games. They think about the questions. They talk in complete sentences, even complete paragraphs. They give long, considered, serious answers. They seem like impressive, well-informed, formidable people. Then watch Truss again, and try not to weep.

September 21, 2022

Pierre Poilievre’s (very modern) modern family

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

In The Line, Rahim Mohamed discusses how the Poilievre family makes it difficult for Liberal propagandists to portray Poilievre as some sort of ultra-nationalist white supremacist (as they clearly would if they could):

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a critical moment for any new party leader. Poilievre need only look at his most immediate predecessor, Erin O’Toole, for an example of how quickly it can go wrong. After tacking to the right of rival Peter MacKay to win the party’s 2020 leadership race, O’Toole pivoted sharply to the centre once Conservative party leader, courting labour unions, calling himself a “progressive conservative” and backtracking on a promise to protect the conscience rights of pro-life doctors and nurses. O’Toole’s “authenticity problem” remained a storyline throughout his rocky tenure at the helm of the Conservative party.

Poilievre executed, successfully, an uncommonly combative and partisan frontrunner campaign, making any notion of a centrist pivot a total non-starter. He has tacked even further to the right than O’Toole did as a leadership candidate: branding moderate rival Jean Charest “a Liberal”, sparring with Leslyn Lewis over who supported this winter’s convoy protests first, leading “defund the CBC” chants at his rallies; and, perhaps most brazenly, promising to bar federal ministers from attending the World Economic Forum (a bête noire of far-right conspiracy theorists).

So how will Poilievre (re-)introduce himself to Canadian voters? If his first week as Conservative party leader is any indication, his telegenic, multicultural and decidedly “modern” family will be central to his efforts to cast himself in a softer, more prime ministerial light.

After the results of the leadership vote were announced, the first person to address Conservative party members was not the party’s new leader himself, but his Venezuelan-born wife Ana. Ana Poilievre (née Anaida Galindo) delivered a confident and well-received set of introductory remarks, cycling effortlessly between English, French and Spanish throughout the five-minute-long address.

The most effective moments of Ana Poilievre’s speech centred on her family’s hardscrabble journey from a comfortable middle-class existence in pre-Chavez Venezuela to precariously living paycheque-to-paycheque in the East End of Montreal. “My father went from wearing business suits and managing a bank to jumping on the back of a truck to collect fruits and vegetables,” she reminisced with her family in attendance; adding, “there is no greater dignity than to provide for your own family” to one of the loudest rounds of applause of the evening. These words captured the Galindo family’s distinct immigrant story, yet undoubtedly resonated with thousands of immigrants and first-generation Canadians across the country. (My own parents, for what it’s worth, were forced to start from scratch after being exiled from their birth country of Uganda as young adults.)

Pierre Poilievre returned to this theme in the victory speech that followed: “my wife’s family not only raised this incredible woman, but they came to this country … with almost nothing; and they have since started businesses, raised kids, served in the military, and like so many immigrant families, built our country.” He went on to thank members of his own family, including his (adoptive) father’s same-sex partner Ross and his biological mother Jackie (who gave Poilievre up for adoption after having him as a teenager). “We’re a complicated and mixed-up bunch … like our country,” he later joked.

All kidding aside, no major federal party leader has ever had a family that looks more like Canada. Members of Poilievre’s extended family span multiple nationalities and speak English, French and Spanish as first languages. He has a South American wife, an adoptive father who is in a relationship with another man, and a biological mother who’s young enough to be his sister — Pierre Poilievre is basically a character from the hit sitcom Modern Family. The governing Liberals, who have made identity politics central to their party brand and spent the past seven months trying to connect Poilievre to white supremacism, should be worried.

September 17, 2022

Is it still a conspiracy theory if more than 50% of Canadians believe it?

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

Chris Selley posted a link to this rather eye-opening Abacus Data poll summary by Bruce Anderson and David Coletto:

We recently completed nationwide surveying among 1500 Canadians. The focus was on the levels of trust people have in institutional sources of information, and belief in conspiracy theories. This is the first in a series called “Trust & Facts: What Canadians Believe”

44% THINK MUCH OF THE INFORMATION FROM NEWS ORGANIZATIONS IS FALSE

Almost half of those interviewed found themselves agreeing with the statement “much of the information we receive from news organizations is false”.

While this means a majority of Canadians have some trust in news organizations, more than 13 million adults (extrapolating 44% to an adult population of 29.5 million) don’t.

Those with no post-secondary education, Alberta residents and those on the right show greater mistrust. But by far the biggest differences are visible when we look at party affinity. The vast majority of People’s Party supporters don’t trust news organizations and a (smaller) majority – 59% – of Conservative voters feel the same way.

Among those who think Pierre Poilievre is the Conservative leadership candidate who best reflects their views, 55% don’t trust media information, while among those who identify with Jean Charest the proportion is much lower, at 27%.

52% THINK OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTS OF EVENTS CAN’T BE TRUSTED

More than half of those interviewed found themselves agreeing with the statement “official government accounts of events can’t be trusted”

As with trust in news organizations, those with no post-secondary education, Alberta residents and those on the right showed markedly higher levels of mistrust in government.

Majorities of People’s Party, Conservative and Green Party voters indicate mistrust. Those on the left and Liberal voters show higher levels of trust.

September 12, 2022

As of Saturday night, Pierre Poilievre is now “Hitler” to most of Canada’s legacy media

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

Of course, he was already well on the way to being “Hitler” even before the landslide voting results were announced:

New Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.

First, this was a completely lopsided blowout victory for the Poilievre team. The Jean Charest people, God bless them, had been telling anyone who would listen these last few weeks that their campaign had a strategy to win on points, thanks to their strong support in Quebec. So yeah, that didn’t happen. Poilievre won on the first ballot with almost 70 per cent of the vote; Charest came in second with … not quite 17 per cent. (Leslyn Lewis came in a distant third with less than 10 per cent, which she’ll probably attribute to the WEF controlling the process using mind-controlling nano-bots hidden COVID-19 vaccines or something similarly totally normal and reasonable.)

But yeah. Sixty eight point one five per cent on the first ballot. That’s a pretty clear signal.

To be honest, we at The Line saw that signal being sent pretty clearly many months ago. As Line editor Matt Gurney wrote almost exactly a year ago here, the only thing that was going to stop the Conservatives taking a real turn to the right was going to be a good showing by former leader Erin O’Toole in the 2021 federal election. He failed to deliver, and discredited the notion of success-via-moderation in the process. Conservatives now want the real thing: a big hunk of conservative red meat on their plate. And we never had any doubt that Poilievre was going to be the guy to serve that up for them.

Poilievre now has something that neither of his last two predecessors had. He has the support of the party behind him. Andrew Scheer needed 13 ballots to win in 2017, and even then only barely edged out Maxime Bernier. O’Toole won a more decisive victory against Peter MacKay, but as soon as he tacked back toward the centre, much of the party became palpably angry and uncomfortable with his leadership. Poilievre will not have these problems. The Conservative Party of Canada is his now.

In terms of our federal politics generally, we repeat a point we have been making here and in other places for many months. We think many Canadians, particularly those of the Liberal persuasion, may be shocked by how well Poilieivre will come across to Canadians. We believe there are a lot of people out there, who don’t have blue checkmarks and don’t spend all their time microblogging angrily at each other, who will like a lot of what Poilievre has to say and won’t find him nearly as scary as those who #StandWithTrudeau.

Poilievre has a nasty streak, and a temper, and we’re not sure that he will be able to control either. He could easily destroy himself. He has baggage too, and maybe get too close to the fringe. But if he doesn’t, we think he has a real shot.

And we think he will be helped by the weakness of the Liberals. This government seems exhausted and increasingly overtaken by events. It is also overly reliant on a few tricks. We suspect Canadians are growing tired of a Justin Trudeau smile and vague non-answer. Some Liberal baggage is just the inevitable consequence of a government aging in office. Some of it seems to be more specific to modern Canadian Liberalism, its leader and their unique, uh, quirks. Too many Liberals are blind to these problems, or least pretend to be — probably because they’re not great at admitting they have any problems at all, least not any posed by someone they find as repugnant as Pierre Poilievre. To them, we say this: Hillary thought she’d beat Trump.

It’s been fixed opinion among “mainstream” “conservatives” in Canada that the only way to get elected is to be more like Justin Trudeau. The obvious problem with this notion is that it’s going to be difficult to persuade Canadians to vote for a blue-suited Trudeau — or even an orange-tie-wearing Trudeau — if the original item is still on offer. I personally think Trudeau is a terrible PM, but a lot of people in downtown Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver clearly disagree with me, and thanks to the Liberals’ hyper-efficient voting pattern, that’s been enough to keep Trudeau in power.

September 5, 2022

We’ve somehow moved from “women who want to have it all” to “the servant problem” in less than a generation

Filed under: Economics, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Ed West’s weekly round-up post, he links to this article by Helen Andrews about the cultural shift for women since the sexual revolution:

People are always more likely to believe a lie if it’s plausible. The lie that women can have it all has as many adherents today as it does because it’s not obvious why it should be a lie. Have a career and a family: why not? There are enough hours in the day. The challenge of refuting the lie that women can have it all — that is, that they can prioritize career and family equally — lies in the fact that the trade-offs that make it impossible are hidden, not obvious, because mathematically it’s not something that should be impossible.

If only employers would do more to accommodate working women, if alternatives could be found to fulfill duties at home that mothers used to do for themselves, like childcare and housework. But the more you start thinking about those accommodations and thinking not just about what it means for any one woman to have it all, but for society to be restructured around women having it all, the more impossible those trade-offs start to seem.

Obviously there are women today in America who are trying to have it all, and many appear to be doing so successfully, at least insofar as they have both demanding careers and children. But look more closely at those households, and almost invariably you’ll see that behind every woman who is balancing work and family, there is an army of low-paid labor, immigrant cleaning ladies, nannies who are paid cash under the table, Door Dash delivery men who deliver the meals that mom never had time to cook. It’s no coincidence that the vast increase in female workforce participation has coincided with the reappearance of something that the more egalitarian America of the early 20th century did not have, and that is a servant class.

America today is more prosperous than it was 70 years ago, and yet it is no longer possible for an ordinary worker to support a middle-class family on a single income. The story of how that happened is bound up into a lie that has become gospel today, which is the lie that women can have it all. Undergirding that lie is a further lie that the Republican Party can have it all. The GOP has very much hitched itself to the idea that it can be the party of stay-at-home moms and girl bosses equally. Again, superficially this seems like it ought to be possible. Live and let live, it’s a free country. But this bargain is unsustainable in practice. We only have to look at the last 30 years to understand why.

The official position of the Republican Party today is that the government’s job is to make it possible for everyone to make the right choice for their family. This rhetoric of maximizing choice requires politicians to talk as if some women will choose to be moms and some will choose to be girl bosses, and it’s really 50/50 which one you end up being. You know, both are equally valid. Who’s to say one is better? But that’s just false, and it’s false according to women’s own preferences. The number of women who say they do not want to have children is very low, in the single digits, around 5% — and that’s just the number who will tell surveys that they predict they won’t have kids when their childbearing years are over. The number of women who actually reach old age and feel satisfied with their life, being just a girl boss with no children to keep them company, is even lower.

Squaring away all this family happiness is and ought to be a higher priority than maximizing women’s career success. It is also a more urgent priority. A woman cannot simply wake up at age 35 and decide she wants to have a family. Everyone says that the sexual revolution was brought about by the advent of the contraceptive pill, which was supposedly ushered in at an amazing new age of a new human experience thanks to science. But it actually changed a lot less than we think. We’ve gotten quite good at not having children when we don’t want to have them, but the science that gave us the pill has not made us very much better at making children arrive when we do.

August 27, 2022

On the verge of leaving No. 10 Downing St., Boris is still Tory voters’ top choice

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

In UnHerd, Dominic Sandbrook discusses the astonishing popularity of disgraced Tory PM Boris Johnson among ordinary Tory voters:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

With just over a week to go until the climax of the Conservative leadership contest, the name of the people’s favourite is surely not in doubt. After five ballots of MPs, weeks of campaigning and more than ten public hustings, the will of the members could not be clearer. The punters have weighed up the two candidates, examined their pasts, studied their principles and reflected on their promises. And faced with a choice between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the finger of fate points to … Boris Johnson!

Such is the implication of a recent YouGov survey, which found that fully 49% of Tory members would choose as their leader the darling of the Greek tavernas, if only he were allowed to run – a higher proportion than those backing Sunak and Truss put together. And as The Times reported earlier this week, this was echoed in findings of focus groups among swing voters, who seem exceptionally unenthusiastic about either of Johnson’s potential successors.

Again and again, in fact, the same theme appears: Boris was robbed. “I really liked Boris and I was really, really disappointed in the way he was treated,” said one swing voter in Esher and Walton, speaking for the rest. “They’re picking on minor things. You know, furnishings and wallpaper and making such a big deal about it. And it’s the media. The media are the ones that turn everyone against him.”

Was Boris robbed, though? You didn’t often hear that line in June and July, when he narrowly survived a no-confidence vote, led his party to crushing defeats in the Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton by-elections and was forced to watch the collapse of his government as some 31 ministers from all sides of the party, equating to just over a quarter of his entire administration, resigned in protest. On 7 July, the day he finally threw in the towel, YouGov found that his public favourability had sunk to truly diabolical levels, with just 19% having a positive view, and fully 72% a negative one. That made Johnson even more unpopular than Theresa May just before she quit, and almost as unpopular as Jeremy Corbyn at his nadir. So much, then, for the populist hero of the Red Wall masses.

And yet, as extraordinary as it may sound, the Big Dog’s fightback began that very afternoon. The opening shots came as he stood outside 10 Downing Street, reminding the cameras of his “incredible mandate: the biggest Conservative majority since 1987, the biggest share of the vote since 1979”. Then came Johnson’s insistence that it was “eccentric to change governments when we are delivering so much”, and his dismissal of the Westminster “herd” that had moved against him. And then, in his final Prime Minister’s Questions appearance a fortnight later, came those ominous words “Mission accomplished, for now”, as well as that classic Johnsonian sign-off: “Hasta la vista, baby.” The only surprise is that he didn’t use another Terminator payoff: “I’ll be back.”

Ever since, the idea that Boris was robbed, cheated, stabbed in the back has been gathering force. The Tory tabloids insist that he was the victim of a “putsch“, while his adoring Culture Secretary, the ridiculous Nadine Dorries, maintains that he was removed by a “ruthless coup” led largely by Sunak. And among Tory activists, the idea that he was toppled by a sinister media campaign has almost visibly gathered strength — enthusiastically fed, it has to be said, by Liz Truss. When, at one Tory hustings earlier this month, the former Sun political editor Tom Newton Dunn asked if Johnson had been the author of his own downfall, an activist shouted that it was “the media”. “Sounds like you’re being blamed, Tom,” said Truss with a smirk, “and who am I to disagree with this excellent audience?”

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