Quotulatiousness

June 26, 2022

The Toronto District School Board draws inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s normally a good thing when people in positions of power and influence have clearly understood the lessons from many sources, including speculative fiction. In the case of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), this isn’t the way it’s supposed to work:

    The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Thus begins Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s famous short story “Harrison Bergeron”. The satire story paints the picture of a dystopian future where absolute equality has been achieved thanks to various handicapping devices that force all the smart, good-looking, and talented people down to the same intellect, looks, and skills as everyone else. The rationale, of course, is that it wouldn’t be fair to let them get ahead because of their privilege while others are left behind.

The story has enduring appeal because it asks a question that strikes at the heart of our culture, namely, how much are we willing to sacrifice excellence in the name of equality? Should those who are endowed with more privilege or talent be allowed to reach their potential, even if it means others have fewer opportunities, or should those who are less gifted be given an equal chance at success, even if it means holding the gifted back?

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) seems to have chosen the latter approach. In May, the board’s Trustees voted to approve the Student Interest Programs Policy, which will change the way students are admitted into specialized arts, athletics, and STEM programs. Currently, admission into most of these programs is based on various “assessments of ability” such as auditions, portfolios, and report card marks. But starting in September 2023, these assessments will be scrapped and replaced with a random selection from students who express interest in the programs. In short, equality will take precedence over excellence.

“It is our responsibility to take action to improve access for all students where we identify systemic barriers,” said Alexander Brown, Chair of the TDSB. “This new policy will ensure a greater number of students have access to these high quality programs and schools while reducing barriers that have long-prevented many students from even applying.”

Unsurprisingly, the move was first proposed by the board’s Enhancing Equity Task Force.

“The idea that your child entered one of these programs because of his talent, which he had the privilege of cultivating, I don’t think is appropriate in a public school system,” said Trustee Robin Pilkey. “We need to make sure people have access to all programs.”

To paraphrase, “it wouldn’t be fair to let them get ahead because of their privilege.” Sound familiar?

June 2, 2022

QotD: The rat race of modern academia

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Roughly 6000 humanity PhDs are awarded every year in the U.S., and this number has been rising over the last 15 years. And they all want a job as a professor, ultimately leading to tenure. Yet the number of undergraduates in the humanities keeps falling. Further, universities have increasingly relied on adjuncts and lecturers rather than tenure-track professors. It’s cheaper that way.

This means there’s a lot of competition for those tenure-trace position, so these PhDs have to outdo each other in their brave and transgressive publications. That their insights make little sense outside of their narrow fields, much less have any relation to reality, is of no import. Academic and career success is the ultimate goal here, nothing else.

Killer Marmot, commenting on “Have you tried less tiresome music?”, DavidThompson.com, 2022-03-01.

May 27, 2022

Minoru Yamasaki and the Pruitt–Igoe urban housing project

Filed under: Architecture, Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Joseph Kast recounts the story of a post-war government scheme to demolish slums, re-house the slum-dwellers in a massive public housing project and the architect whose career was forever blighted by the failure of the design:

An undated overview of some of the 33 buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis, Missouri. Designed by Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki and built in the early 1950s. All had been demolished by 1976.
Uncredited photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Can society be designed? Can an expert engineer alleviate people’s pains and struggles with a good-enough central plan and blueprint?

Minoru Yamasaki thought so.

Yamasaki was one of America’s most well-respected architects in the 20th century and was a member of the school of thought that people’s human nature could be improved (whether those people needed or wanted improving) by a properly planned building surrounding them.

Yamasaki got to test his theory by designing the public housing complex that promised to be a template for all public housing going forward. The complex, St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe, was made possible by post-war New Deal housing and urban development programs. And like many New Deal initiatives, Pruitt-Igoe was guided by the idea that good intentions, centralized planning, and strong government power would progress society more than protecting people’s rights or personal choices.

Pruitt-Igoe and Yamasaki’s designs were sold as the solution to poverty, crime, and housing in America’s major cities, but within just a few years, the complex would show the dangerous consequences when government planners take away people’s liberties and homes.

As with so many vast schemes to use the government’s power to reshape people’s lives, the hopes of the central planners quickly fell afoul of economic and social realities that the plan never took into account.

St. Louis quickly realized that Pruitt-Igoe was a problem. But it was unclear who, if anyone, could fix it. The federal government, the St. Louis Housing Authority, the state, and the City of St. Louis itself all shared responsibility for the complex. When a problem belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.

Within five years of its launch, Yamasaki was regularly apologizing for his role in the project. Though the final design of the complex differed from his original vision, he came to question the core assumption behind the project: that people’s lives could be effectively engineered through urban design. He expressed regret for his “deplorable mistakes” with Pruitt-Igoe. By the late 1950s, he was giving eloquent speeches about the “tragedy of housing thousands in exactly look alike cells,” which “certainly does not foster our ideals of human dignity and individualism.”

To the Detroit Free Press, he put it more simply: “Social ills can’t be cured by nice buildings.”

By the early 1970s, the 33 concrete tombstones lining St. Louis’ skyline were a cautionary tale for utopian housing schemes. It was a den of crime and misery, rather than anything anyone could call home. When the decision came to demolish the complex, occupancy was only 10 percent.

The day the demolitions began at Pruitt-Igoe, architectural historian Charles Jencks declared the death of high modernist architecture and its grand assumptions: “It was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.”

Three towers were demolished in 1972. The last tower finally came down in 1976, leaving nothing of Pruitt-Igoe behind.

The demolition of one of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings, which began in 1972 with the final building demolished in 1976.
Uncredited image from Wikimedia Commons.

QotD: Elite overproduction and Canada’s managerial class

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In Ages of Discord, Peter Turchin describes the consequences of elite overproduction. Middle-class youths strive for a college degree to ascend the social ladder. But because the true elites are always a small group, an excess of college graduates saturates the job market with mid-level managers. As these managers fight for scarce spots at the top, intra-elite jockeying becomes more fierce. Tests of ideological purity become a way of winnowing the competition. Those most insecure in their elite status do the most virtue signaling, and punch down on the “unenlightened” lower white classes as a way of confirming their rank. Ultimately, these people end up filling the ever-increasing number of mid-level positions in government, media, and universities.

The managerial class in Canada is much more powerful than that in the U.S., for several reasons. First, the managerial class makes up a much larger share of Canada’s population, because far more Canadians go to college. Whereas 51.9 percent of Americans between the ages of 25–34 have tertiary education, in Canada it is almost 65 percent. While America’s elites are decentralized (Wall Street and Silicon Valley are very different), Canada’s elites are concentrated in the Laurentian corridor of Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. And there is a revolving door between the managerial institutions. Since Lester Pearson, prime minister from 1963 to 1968, every leader of the Liberal party has begun his career as either a civil servant, academic, professional party hack, Bay Street lawyer, or leader of one of Canada’s Laurentian “continental corporations” — or as the son of one of these. These institutions receive generous federal funding. So does the Canadian media, which is now financially dependent on the federal government. Because these institutions are regionally concentrated and rely on symbiotic relationships with one another, Canada’s managerial classes hold hegemonic political power.

Canada’s vassalage to the U.S. intensifies the harmful effects of this situation. Once Canada surrendered its British character and integrated itself into the American empire, it became part of the continental system of elite overproduction. Ambitious Canadians seeking the top-tier education that will gain them elite status quickly discover that Canada’s universities are, as one professor once told me, “frustratingly above-average”. The most talented young Canadians therefore tend to jump ship and move to the U.S. The sine qua non for their success is mastering the American empire’s language, which is the language of liberalism. Every ambitious Canadian learns that to ascend, you must talk like American liberal elites. The Canadians who become fluent succeed: They get a top-tier U.S. degree and join the prestigious American networks. By and large, these people do not then want to move back to the imperial backwater. The few who do — such as former Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff, who taught at Harvard, and the current Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who studied at Harvard and married a New York Times reporter — return home confident that they will be the big fish in the small pond. Hence Canada suffers a protracted brain drain to the U.S.

Nathan Pinkoski, “What Led To Canada’s Crisis”, First Things, 2022-02-24.

May 25, 2022

“What is a reasonable general concern?”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Paula Simons has a concern that I think is quite reasonable:

What is a reasonable general concern?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer. I’m not sure anyone else does, either.

And that’s exactly the problem with Bill S-7, a new piece of government legislation, which amends both the Customs Act and the Preclearance Act.

Bill S-7 set a new standard to allow border services officers to search through our cellphones, laptops, tablets, Apple Watches and other personal computers. If the bill passes, it will allow officers who feel a “reasonable general concern” to search through the emails, documents, texts, instant messages, photos or videos stored on our digital devices, to look for evidence that we may have violated customs regulations.

Reasonable general concern. Or, as it says in the French-language draft of the bill, “des préoccupations générales raisonnables“.

It’s an absolutely novel legal threshold. That phrase, be it in English or French, doesn’t appear anywhere else in Canadian criminal or civil law. It’s not a standard borrowed from any other country. It’s a brand new legal test to authorize an invasive search of your most private personal records and correspondence.

A reasonable concern, one might intuit, is a lower standard than a reasonable suspicion, because a concern is less grave, less specific, than a suspicion.

But a general concern? A general preoccupation?

That sounds even more vague, more subjective, than a good old-fashioned hunch or inkling.

It seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly, to create a lower, broader standard to search our private data on our private devices than to search our conventional mail, or our suitcases, or our car trunks. Yet that is exactly what Bill S-7 does.

How did we get here? The answer is an ironic one.

Back in 2020, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that portions of the Customs Act were unconstitutional.

The court found the act violated the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, because it allowed for what the court called “suspicion-less and unlimited” searches of our personal digital devices.

That violation, held the court, could not be saved by section 1 of the Charter, because it allowed unfettered and unrestricted access to people’s most personal and intimate information, and because it allowed the state almost unlimited latitude to dig around in the what the court called our “biographical core of identity”.

British lack-of-flair in naming things

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West wonders why the Brits come up with such boring names for, well, everything:

A detail from the Mapping London Tube Zones map – https://mappinglondon.co.uk/2021/tube-zones/

Back in the 1850s, when London was getting its first proper government, the authorities had a problem with street names – they were just so boring that it was actually confusing.

According to Judith Flanders’s The Victorian City: “In 1853, London had twenty-five Victoria Streets, thirty-seven King and twenty-seven Queen Streets, twenty-two Princes, seventeen Dukes, thirty-four Yorks and twenty-three Gloucesters – and that was without counting the similarly named Places, Roads, Squares, Courts, Alleys or Mews, or even the many synonyms that designated squalid backcourts: Rents, Rows, Gardens, Places, Buildings, Lanes, Yards and Walks. One parish alone had half a dozen George Streets.”

Bearing in mind how small London was at the time, no more than zone 1 and bits of zone 2, it’s quite impressive that they managed to have so many Victoria Streets. Impressive, and obviously stupid. The Metropolitan Board of Works forced parishes to rename duplicates; but even as the capital expanded, borough councils continued the practice, so that dozens of new Victoria roads and streets were created (many of which have since been changed).

Perhaps it reflects a deeply content and loyal public, but it’s more a testimony to how dull and unimaginative the British are about naming things. And it’s a fine tradition we continue today with the Elizabeth Line.

[…]

Although the new Elizabethans are in many ways the anti-Victorians – declinist, slow to get things built, filled with civilisational self-hatred – in our naming patterns we are recognisably the same people.

A few years back, when Britain launched its biggest ever warship, weighing in at 65,000 tons, they named it HMS Queen Elizabeth. This came after it was decided we needed a new name for our part of Antarctica – with huge originality, they went for “Queen Elizabeth Land”. Even Big Ben was renamed the Queen Elizabeth Tower in 2012.

The Queen, bizarrely, has twenty hospitals named after her, which led to a small revolt when the South Glasgow University Hospital became the latest. Considering how many brilliant scientists Scotland has produced, you might think they could have found someone else. Alexander Fleming, one of the alternatives suggested, grew up not far away in Ayrshire and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives.

Edward Jenner, meanwhile, has the Viale Edoardo Jenner in Milan named in his honour, and a town in Pennsylvania. While there is a Jenner Road in Stoke Newington, you wouldn’t necessarily know it was in tribute to the man who discovered vaccinations. That is because, when we honour someone with a street, the British shyly only feature their surname; the only time we follow the continental pattern of including the full name is, bizarrely, with local councillors. The people who run local government in Britain are not against honouring heroes in theory, they just think the real heroes aren’t explorers, scientists or military leaders, but the people who run local government.

May 21, 2022

Despite government denials, CRTC will have the power to censor YouTube videos confirms CRTC Chair

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

It’s long since got to the point that you never can take a Liberal cabinet minister’s word without verifying it for yourself. Today’s example is the constant denial from the government that their Bill C-11 would enable censorship of things like YouTube videos by the CRTC. In a Senate appearance on Wednesday, the head of the CRTC agreed that such censorship is allowed under the proposed legislation:

CRTC Chair Ian Scott appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage yesterday and Bill C-11 proved to be a popular topic of discussion. The exchanges got testy at times as Scott seemingly stepped outside of his role as an independent regulatory by regularly defending government legislation, even veering into commenting on newspapers, which clearly falls outside the CRTC’s jurisdiction. With respect to Bill C-11, most newsworthy were two comments regarding the regulation of user content and the timelines for implementing the bill if it receives royal assent.

First, Scott was asked about the regulation of user content, confirming what has been obvious for months despite denials from Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez. The following exchange with Conservative MP Rachael Thomas got Scott on the record:

    Thomas: Bill C-11 does in fact leave it open to user generated content being regulated by the CRTC. I recognize that there have been arguments against this, however, Dr. Michael Geist has said “the indisputable reality is that the net result of those provisions is that user generated content is in the bill.” Jeanette Patel from Youtube Canada said “the draft law’s wording gives the broadcast regulator” – in other words you – “scope to oversee everyday videos posted for other users to watch.” Scott Benzie from Digital First Canada has also said that “while the government says the legislation will not capture digital first creators, the bill clearly does capture them.”

    So all these individuals are individual users creating content. It would appear that the bill does, or could in fact, capture them, correct?

    Scott: As constructed, there is a provision that would allow us to do it as required.

While Scott continued by arguing that the Commission already has equivalent regulatory powers and is not interested in regulating user content, the confirmation that Bill C-11 currently does cover user generated content should put an end to the government’s gaslighting that it does not.

May 20, 2022

High and low “state capacity” illustrated

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

In Law & Liberty, Helen Dale recounts a miserable experience getting out of a major US airport and says this is an example of America’s low state capacity:

“TSA Checkpoint” by phidauex is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

At the other end, I found a stretch limo waiting for me. Getting ferried about in a limo after The Trip from Hell is something I’ve experienced before, in Damascus, before the Syrian civil war. Classic third world. Like Syrians, American hosts send limousines to the airport to pick you up because they know you flew in from JFK and will need to be appeased.

My experience is illustrative of something not confined to airports, however. Indeed, if it were only confined to airports, then the phrase I’m about to use (about the US) would be unfair (to the US). America’s dysfunctional airports are instances of widespread low state capacity. And this is bigger than airports. Low state capacity can only be used to describe a country when it is true of multiple big-ticket items, not just one.

State capacity is a term drawn from economic history and development economics. It refers to a government’s ability to achieve policy goals in reference to specific aims, collect taxes, uphold law and order, and provide public goods. Its absence at the extremes is terrifying, and often used to illustrate things like “fragile states” or “failed states”. However, denoting calamitous governance in the developing world is not its only value. State capacity allows one to draw distinctions at varying levels of granularity between developed countries, and is especially salient when it comes to healthcare, policing, and immigration. It has a knock-on effect in the private sector, too, as business responds to government in administrative kind.

Think, for example, of Covid-19. The most reliable metric — if you wish to compare different countries’ responses to the pandemic — is excess deaths per 100,000 people over the relevant period. That is, count how many extra people died beyond the pre-pandemic mortality rate on a country-by-country basis. For the sake of argument, drop the five countries leading this grim pack. Four of them are developing countries, and the fifth is Russia, which while developed, is both an autocracy and suffers from chronic low state capacity.

At the other end of the scale, ignore China, too. It may be lying about its success or, more plausibly, may have achieved it by dint of being an authoritarian state with high state capacity (notably, the latest round of draconian lockdowns in Shanghai commenced after the WHO collated that data).

The US has the worst excess death rate in the developed world (140 per 100,000). Australia has the best: –28 per 100,000. Yes, you read that right. Australia increased its life expectancy and general population health during the pandemic. So did Japan, albeit less dramatically. The rest of the developed world falls in between those two extremes: Italy and Germany are on 133 and 116 per 100,000 respectively, with the UK (109 per 100,000) doing a bit better. France and Sweden knocked it out of the park (63 and 56 per 100,000 excess deaths).

Recall, too, that not only did different countries adopt different approaches to pandemic management; sometimes there were large differences within countries. Like the US, Australia is a federal system, and as in the US, different states did things differently. Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, had the longest lockdown of any major city in the developed world. Other Australian states, meanwhile, locked down sparingly or not at all. In a European context, Sweden rejected most over-the-top Covid responses, the UK was somewhere in the middle, and Italy was thoroughly draconian, even barring unvaccinated people from supermarkets and groceries.

QotD: Credentialism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The minute a profession starts thinking of itself as a profession it’s finished, because henceforth “actually doing the job” will come second to “advancing the guild’s interests”. Not for everyone, of course. Most doctors, I imagine, just want to practice medicine. They probably even feel they’d be much better off without the elaborate apparatus of “the profession” — the American Medical Association, their specialty associations, the unique social status of “being a doctor” (there are a lot more downsides than upsides to this, if you really think about it). They no doubt feel this … until someone outside of it starts badmouthing the guild, or someone inside causes the profession to lose standing. Then they close ranks.

The reason for this — if you want to slap an academic-sounding label on it — is “the reification of the bureaucracy”. Even if 99 out of 100 doctors, say, just want to practice medicine, there’s that last guy who makes “being a doctor” his life’s work. He joins all the associations, and because that kind of guy is basically just Trigglypuff with better hygiene and lower BMI, he quickly rises to a position of influence in every organization. He lives for the bureaucracy. Which means he’s a politician, and there it is.

If you want more examples, look no further than the original guilds, the craft associations of the Middle Ages. Any settlement big enough for actual cash money to change hands in it soon had an exquisitely class-conscious group with lots of actual, but no formal, power. Your smart tyrant co-opted the politicians from the merchant guilds, made them de facto nobility and bade them act like it — that gave you the Renaissance. Your dumb (or merely nonexistent) tyrant let the merchants’ resentments fester — that gave you the Reformation, and the whole catalog of ideological murder that followed.

Severian, “Credentialism Ruins Everything”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-03-22.

May 19, 2022

Alas, poor MiniTru … sent off to the knacker’s yard so soon

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

Apparently the Biden administration is reconsidering the decision to set up a “Ministry of Truth” — at least for the time being — and as Chris Bray shows, the media wants to talk about the evil, Nazi trolls who brought it down:

Labeling instead of describing; a narrative frame instead of factual discussion. Be grateful for Taylor Lorenz, because her cartoon journalism makes the game so gloriously obvious.

Cartoon Lady sort of “reports”, this morning, on the apparent demise of another cultural cartoon: Nina Jankowicz is on her way out at DHS, which is probably disbanding the Disinformation Governance Board. Here, via Revolver, is a non-paywalled copy of the story:

The story is an assemblage of right-out-of-the-gate assumptions, all relentlessly untested. Jankowicz is a “victim”, all disagreement with the decision to start the Disinformation Governance Board was part of a campaign of “coordinated online attacks”, the work of the board was good, disagreement with its creation was bad. None of that is established or explained — it merely is. Here’s the Big Frame, the here’s-what-it-all-means:

    Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.

The federal government created a new organization, and people discussed its existence. Criticism and questions necessarily centered on, wait for it, the person identified as the executive director of the new board, the only person publicly identified as a staff member at the organization. The far-right monsters used the tactic of attempting to “identify a target” by … talking about the person chosen, and publicly identified by government, as the leader and public face of a government operation. See how cleverly the extremists choose their targets!?!?!? I mean, who else would you talk about if you wanted to discuss the Disinformation Governance Board? She ran it.

Then, known demon Jack Posobiec tweeted stuff, the monster, and his “early tweets shaped the narrative and Jankowicz was positioned as the primary target.” Again, the person positioned as the primary target of criticism of a government board was the director of the board — after the building burned down, cruel extremists maliciously singled out the fire chief as their target — but Cartoon Lady presents it as a dark and ominous maneuver:

    Just hours after Jankowicz tweeted about her new job, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted a tweets accusing the Biden administration of creating a “Ministry of Truth”. Posobiec’s 1.7 million followers quickly sprung into action. By the end of the day, there were at least 53,235 posts on Twitter mentioning “Disinformation Governance Board”, many referencing Jankowicz by name, according to a report by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public-interest research. In the days following, that number skyrocketed.

My goodness, people referenced her by name! They referenced the executive director of the board while discussing the creation of the board! nOw dO YoU SeE HOw thE DaRK ArTs oF thE NaZI tRolLs WoRk!?!?!?

May 13, 2022

“How do they resist the logic of O’Sullivan’s Law?”

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

In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith considers the oddities of organizations explicitly founded to advance certain goals who steadily morph out of recognition to the point they appear to be working against their original mission:

John O’Sullivan in Prague, 8 November 2007.
Photo by Dezidor via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1989, John O’Sullivan of National Review coined O’Sullivan’s Law: “all organisations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” Countless examples spring into the mind like toast. Is the Church of England a religious institution or a Lib Dem think tank with some eccentric uniforms? Of course religion and politics are going to intersect, but when archbishops start opining on Brexit you have to wonder. Is the Amnesty International which is now so heavily concerned with trans rights and abortion rights the same Amnesty International that used to defend political prisoners, or a kind of imitator? Both, I guess.

But how inevitable is O’Sullivan’s Law? In recent times, some institutions have avoided drifting leftwards. Substack, a platform for writers and podcasters, have raised progressive hackles by refusing to exclude alleged transphobes. “As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable,” its founders have boldly said, “our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” Elsewhere, Elon Musk has attempted to purchase Twitter in explicit opposition to its censorious policies.

Clearly, and understandably, neither institution aims to be “right-wing” (except inasmuch as anything which is not explicitly progressive earns the label). Nor do many others. How do they resist the logic of O’Sullivan’s Law?

As a grubby hack I have no more experience running large organisations than I do making rockets and curing heart disease, but I have a couple of modest suggestions. First, the leaders of an institution should ensure that its values are not open-ended but contextually specific. You can be “inclusive” in the concrete sense that anyone can be included among applicants, for example. But if “inclusivity” is just a vague ideal, then the demands made in its name are liable to expand until your institution is no more than an excuse for an HR department.

Second, such leaders should surround themselves with people who admire the essential ethos of the institution. Conquest’s Second Law (named after Robert, the historian) states, “The behaviour of an organisation can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” (Conquest pointed out that this can be literally true, such as when a bunch of smart young lads from good families graduated from Cambridge to the Secret Intelligence Services and started feeding information to the Soviets.) You can disagree on 99 out of 100 things but you have to share core premises. If I start a panda preservation society, for example, it makes no sense to give a management position to someone who thinks conserving endangered species is a waste of money and pandas are faintly ridiculous creatures. Their qualifications and experience are immaterial.

Third, an institution should not seek scale at the expense of integrity. This is especially the case with non-profit institutions. Expansion — and all the jolly business of fundraising and management that comes with it — can emphasise the means of its existence over its ends. This then makes it vulnerable to redirection.

Fourthly, and finally, any leader of an institution (especially a business) should avoid the temptation to use progressive cultural causes as a means of “woke-washing” themselves. You know what I mean. It seems like an easier way of getting moral status than, say, treating workers well. But (and I will phrase this in cynical terms because self-interest means more to us than ethics) we would do well to remember that demands can escalate. Workers can be satisfied. Professional activists? Not so much.

May 11, 2022

City governments that can’t even set a budget want to spend, spend, spend to fix global problems

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s one of my standard quips that the more government tries to do, the less well it does everything, but Chris Bray‘s city government shows that I’m being far too Pollyanna-ish:

We’ve built political systems that are astoundingly disconnected; they go where they go, and you can’t turn them, or even try to communicate with them. I just spent weeks trying to get basic information about the operation of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live — a problem I started writing about here. Just as I was getting really frustrated that I couldn’t get anyone in county government to tell me anything about anything, I saw an interview with Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who says that he’s never met our district attorney, and has only managed to speak to him on the phone once. Then a staff member in the office of our county supervisor finally responded to my repeated questions about local criminal justice statistics with a quick message letting me know that, as Supervisor Barger’s criminal justice staff assistant, she doesn’t have local criminal justice statistics. So, no, you’re probably not going to communicate with your government; it doesn’t even communicate with itself. The sheriff has never met the DA. That’s the world we’re living in.

I live in a tiny suburban city, a little over three square miles. As I’ve written before, the city is a relentless shambles, constantly fumbling its simplest tasks while holding city council meetings to offer bold pronouncements on the city’s direct role in managing the climate of the planet. We went the better part of the last fiscal year without a budget, because the fifth finance director in two years screwed up the budget proposal so badly that the council couldn’t vote on the worthless thing.

Cities are supposed to regularly adopt an updated general plan that makes educated guesses about business and residential growth, so they can prepare for change around questions like do we have enough fire stations for the population we expect to have in five years? Our current general plan was adopted in 1998; the city is now in its sixth year of a fumbling effort to write a new plan, with no sign that it’s moving toward success. Meanwhile, our small-town city council is focused on getting electric patrol cars for the police department — to control the climate of the planet — and banning the sale of tobacco products, to take the fight to Big Tobacco. (Three square miles.)

I can’t get my city government to fix a bunch of basic and obvious problems, in a city where I pass members of my city council in the supermarket. I send out email messages to them, but nothing comes back from them in response. They go where they feel like going, endlessly pursuing lawn sign politics in a city government that struggles to complete budgets and basic planning documents; currently they’re signaling that their next interest is in developing a local mandate for residential greywater systems, and they won’t be talked out of it in favor of completing their endlessly incomplete basic tasks.

Now: Put your hands on the levers to stop the madness of the United States of America sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. Right?

May 8, 2022

“It’s like these guys watched Anne Hathaway on WeCrashed and convinced themselves they can ‘elevate the world’s consciousness’ through arts grants. “

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte brings us up to date on the latest adventures of the Canada Council for the Arts:

The Canada Council for the Arts held its annual public meeting March 30 and a video of it is now up on YouTube where, as of Thursday night, 321 people had tuned in to see CEO Simon Brault’s new shoelaces.

It’s not time for another deep dive into the ameliorative ambitions of Canada’s leading arts funding agency. We’ll just note that everything I observed in SHuSH 139 is on abundant display in this video, from the exhaustive land grant acknowledgment to non-stop discussion of equity, climate change, and Ukraine to a (mercifully short) speech by council chairman Jesse Wente, most of it dedicated to his usual one-note Indigenous activism (you’re supposed to rep all artists, Jesse).

Cheque-mailer-in-chief Brault, who obviously finds the real work of his position boring as fuck, says his immediate and long-term priorities (at a time when most of the nation’s artists and arts organizations have been economically devastated by the pandemic) are “elimination of racism and discrimination … and focusing on decolonization in people’s minds, in systems, and in institutions.”

Every square on the bureaucratic buzzword bingo card is covered: “intentionality”, “innovation”, “risk-taking”, “sustainability”, “inclusivity”, etc.

It’s like these guys watched Anne Hathaway on WeCrashed and convinced themselves they can “elevate the world’s consciousness” through arts grants.

Will they succeed? Given that they can’t match the production values of local cable despite a half-billion budget, odds are long.

Anyway, their not-quite-viral symphony of sanctimony is an experience. Give it a watch.

May 1, 2022

QotD: How Thomas Sowell abandoned Marxism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The brilliant Thomas Sowell, when in college, considered himself a Marxist. Asked what changed him, Sowell said, “Evidence.”

After completing undergrad at Harvard and obtaining a master’s in economics, Sowell landed a summer internship with the Department of Labor. While there, he researched the impact of minimum wage law on employment. Sowell learned two things, both of which he found startling. First, minimum wage laws create job loss by pricing the unskilled out of the labor force. Second, Sowell discovered that “the people in the labor department really were not interested in that, because the administration of the minimum wage was supplying one-third of the money that was keeping the labor department going. … I realized that institutions have their own agendas and their own incentives.” In short, Sowell found that the Department of Labor did not care about the real-world effects of the minimum wage law. He credits this experience, this search for evidence, with having the “biggest” impact on his thinking.

Larry Elder, “If $15 Minimum Wage Is Such a Good Idea, Why Did AOC’s Bar Close Down?”, TownHall.com, 2019-03-21.

April 30, 2022

Welcome to the Ministry of Truth, aka the “Disinformation Governance Board”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jim Treacher wraps up some of the noteworthy events of the week, including the almost-too-Orwellian-to-be-true “Disinformation Governance Board”:

The Department of Homeland Security just created something called the “Disinformation Governance Board”. Apparently, “Ministry of Truth” was too on-the-nose. All they can do anymore is scream about Russia, yet now they’ve dreamed up a propaganda org with the initials DGB. Great branding, geniuses!

I can’t put it any better than this:

Dems just spent four years screaming about the government because they weren’t in charge of it. Then they forgot all about that and immediately started amassing power again, which inevitably will be handed over to their enemies the next time the Dems are voted out of office. They never think about that, because thinking isn’t really what they do. As soon as their foes grab the levers of power the left has assembled, they’ll just start screaming about “fascism”.

Fortunately, there’s a useful logo for the new organization floating around the internet:

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