Quotulatiousness

September 30, 2020

How to make sense of rough-sawn lumber

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: — Nicholas @ 06:00

Stumpy Nubs
Published 17 Jun 2019

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“The culture war is the ‘New Normal'”

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

Andrew Doyle discusses the debate over the culture war in Spiked:

The phrase that probably best characterises the events of 2020 is the “New Normal”. Although it’s typically used to describe our changed circumstances under lockdown, it could just as easily be applied to the way in which we have all grown accustomed to the worst excesses of the social-justice revolution.

News stories that only five years ago would have been dismissed as asinine aberrations now recur with a quotidian certainty. Recent notable examples include: Princeton University confessing to “systemic racism”, leading to an investigation by the Department of Education on the grounds that racism is a violation of civil-rights law; the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts making a similar admission, thereby emboldening some of its students to produce a 100-page document full of demands so entitled that it would make Veruca Salt blush; and an academic and novelist stating that debate is “an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion and oppression”. Yes, the culture war is the “New Normal”.

Yet with all the evidence before our eyes, certain commentators persist with their view that the culture war is a right-wing myth advanced by those who are resistant to change. “There’s no actual ‘culture war’, is there?”, writes LBC’s James O’Brien: “It’s just a new way of describing disagreements between people who hate racism and discrimination and people who love it.” Then there is the Guardian‘s Owen Jones, who maintains that “a lot of what’s called ‘the culture war’ is just younger people trying to assert their different social and moral values over older generations who run most of the media”. Nesrine Malik has argued that the culture war has been manufactured by the right, although it will not have escaped most people’s attention that the majority of salvos come from the left side of the battlefield.

It’s this kind of gaslighting – to borrow the language of social-justice activists – that we have already seen from writers who insist that “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, in spite of abundant and incontrovertible evidence that it does.

This is because, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have so clearly outlined in their seminal book Cynical Theories, the ideology of social justice has its origins in postmodernism, a school of thought which favours “lived experience” and multiple “ways of knowing” over objective truth. It doesn’t matter, for instance, that JK Rowling has never said or written anything transphobic — her new novel must be denounced for advancing an anti-trans agenda, even though it contains no actual references to trans people. These activists have apparently taken their cues from Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871). “When I use a word”, he says to Alice, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”.

America First – Patriots or Nazis? – WW2 Special

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

World War Two
Published 29 Sep 2020

In 1941, the question of whether America should join the European War still isn’t settled. Different groups whip up opposition to it, and those such as the America First Committee seem suspiciously sympathetic to Hitler’s message and cause.

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Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel and Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: James Newman
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Daniel Weiss
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:
from the Noun Project: people by ProSymbols

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

The feds go trampling all over provincial responsibilities again

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

Ted Campbell suggests that even a cursory reading of the constitution does not give the federal government the power to trespass (again) in what is clearly, legally, a provincial government area of responsibility:

“The Fathers of Confederation”
The original painting by Robert Harris (1884) was destroyed in the 1916 Parliament Building fire, and this image for the “Gallery of Canadian History” series of lithographs by Confederation Life Insurance Company is based on a photograph by James Ashfield (1885).
Libraries and Archives Canada item ID number 3013194. http://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.redirect?app=fonandcol&id=3013194&lang=eng

[T]he Parliament of Canada should look to §91. Here is what the Constitution says are the areas of national government’s concern: The Public Debt and Property; The Regulation of Trade and Commerce; Unemployment insurance; The raising of Money by any Mode or System of Taxation; The borrowing of Money on the Public Credit; Postal Service; The Census and Statistics; Militia, Military and Naval Service, and Defence; The fixing of and providing for the Salaries and Allowances of Civil and other Officers of the Government of Canada; Beacons, Buoys, Lighthouses, and Sable Island; Navigation and Shipping; Quarantine and the Establishment and Maintenance of Marine Hospitals; Sea Coast and Inland Fisheries; Ferries between a Province and any British or Foreign Country or between Two Provinces; Currency and Coinage; Banking, Incorporation of Banks, and the Issue of Paper Money; Savings Banks; Weights and Measures; Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes; Interest; Legal Tender; Bankruptcy and Insolvency; Patents of Invention and Discovery; Copyrights; Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians; Naturalization and Aliens; Marriage and Divorce; The Criminal Law, except the Constitution of Courts of Criminal Jurisdiction, but including the Procedure in Criminal Matters; The Establishment, Maintenance, and Management of Penitentiaries; and Such Classes of Subjects as are expressly excepted in the Enumeration of the Classes of Subjects by this Act assigned exclusively to the Legislatures of the Provinces.

In that looooong list I can find more than adequate justifications for ministers and government departments that are responsible for: finance and revenue; industry, trade, and commerce; defence; foreign affairs; transport; fisheries and oceans; citizenship and immigration; health; and for independent agencies like the Bank of Canada, Canada Post and Statistics Canada. I cannot find anything that says we need a Minister for Women and Gender Equality, nor one for Diversity, Inclusion and Youth nor, especially, Ministers for Canadian Heritage and Middle Class Prosperity.

A lot of things have changed since 1867; the telegraph was still fairly new and innovative, a practical telephone wouldn’t be invented until ten years after confederation and the first useful long-haul radio transmission and reception, from Britain to Signal Hill in St John’s didn’t come until the dawn of the 20th century, thus ideas like the CBC, the Internet, Netflix, air traffic control and the North Warning System were far beyond the imagination of the men ~ they were pretty much all men, working in government, back in the 1860s, weren’t they? ~ who drafted the Canadian Constitution.

What was clear to them, based on the United States experiences, was that §90 to §95 which spell out “who does what to whom” were important to the functioning of a federal state, especially to one in which traditional provincial rights and diverse cultures were well established. Now, it is important to remember that in Canada’s long and rich history there were instances, especially during great wars, when the provinces agreed to federal intrusions into their areas of responsibility; this is not one long story of federal bullying. But what seems perfectly clear to me ~ and I suspect to e.g. John Horgan, Jason Kenney, Doug Ford, François Legault and the other premiers is that last week’s Throne Speech marks another major and quite unjustified federal assault on their jurisdictions. What’s happened, according to Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister, is that the provinces have all the health care delivery problems but, thanks, in some part, to tax decisions made in 1942, the feds have all the money. The solution is blindingly obvious: transfer tax “points” as some experts call them, to the provinces so that they, not Justin Trudeau, who have the problems of too few physicians, too few nurses and too few hospital beds also have the money to solve them.

New Orleans History 101

Atun-Shei Films
Published 2 Apr 2019

A brief crash course in the history of the city, from the founding in 1718 to the 20th century.

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QotD: Victimhood culture

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

In their newly released book, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, the moral sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe the three main moral cultures that exist today, which they give the shorthand labels of dignity, honor, and victimhood. A dignity culture, which has been the dominant moral culture of Western middle classes for some time, has a set of moral values that promotes the idea of moral equality and was crystallized in Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision that people ought to be judged according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Victimhood culture departs from dignity culture in several important ways. Moral worth is in large part defined by the color of one’s skin, or at least one’s membership in a fixed identity group: i.e., women, people of color, LGBTIQ, Muslims, or indigenous peoples. Such groups are sacred, and a lack of deference to them is seen as a sign of deviance. The reverse is true for those who belong to groups that are considered historical oppressors: whites, males, straight people, Zionists. Anyone belonging to an “oppressor” group is stained by their privilege, or “whiteness,” and is cast onto the moral scrapheap.

Claire Lehmann, “The Evils of Cultural Appropriation”, Tablet, 2018-06-11.

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