Quotulatiousness

July 13, 2022

Creating an American Homo Sovieticus

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

Chris Bray has had to visit a large urban hospital frequently in the last little while and he’s noticed just how readily some people have adapted to the pandemic world situation:

A large urban hospital (not the one Chris is talking about here).
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Observers of the Soviet Union noted the presence of Homo Sovieticus, the species adapted to the culture: “a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality”. It seems fairly clear that the Blue Zones are birthing a version of this creature, well accustomed to a life centered on compliance rituals and the production of the Required Documents™.

But Soviet subjects usually found a layered response to the compliance culture, with backdoor deals and systems of baksheesh. Factories and offices evolved a set of people who learned the skills of a fixer, greasing supply chains and easing problems with a little something for your family. I just happen to have a couple of extra cartons of cigarettes, friend, and about that delayed shipment of ball bearings …

So one of the things that’s interesting about Large Urban Hospital, where the rules are the rules and I’m sorry, sir, that’s our policy, is that the rules aren’t entirely the rules, and the luck of the personnel draw sets your course. I already know the helpful front desk check-in staff — Hi, welcome back! — and I already know which one scowls at the computer, and asks if you’re sure you cleared your visit in advance, and says she’s going to need to make a few phone calls to check on your paperwork, and I need to see those test results again (she says, pulling on her scowling at documents glasses). Checking in at the lobby desk can take thirty seconds, or it can take ten minutes; it can be miserable and hostile, or it can be relatively pleasant and human. But in both cases, the person behind the computer, and the people who put them there and provide them with the systems that govern their work, believe that the work is standardized, and everyone at the check-in desk is enforcing the rules.

We have literally insane systems of ritual behavior, but within those systems we have people who are still people, and people who have very much embraced the compliance behaviors. There are dehumanizing institutions, and holy shit are there people who like it.

July 10, 2022

Seven easy steps to fix military procurement

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander wrote these for the US military, so some of them are far out-of-scale for tiddlers like the Canadian Armed Forces, but the spirit is still valid and relevant:

1. No weapon system presently under production will be allowed to stop production until its replacement is under production itself.

2. Acknowledge we have lied to ourselves for decades actual magazine requirements in war (use “new” lessons from the Russo-Ukraine War for the tender to save face — whatever works) — and accelerate/restart production of everything from ASW weapons to strike weapons of all types.

3. Acknowledge that we do not have enough weapons — specifically anti-air and land attack — on our warships. Every war proves this and recent experience tells us this.

4. If I take away your access to satellite VOX & DATA and you cannot navigate and fight, you are not a wartime asset and your funding sent somewhere useful.

5. Accelerate capacity for repair away from fleet concentration areas, preferably afloat. Maximize production of sealift and begin the process to replace the C-5M.

6. If your combat unit does not have organic, robust unmanned ISR under the command of your unit’s commander, you are worthless in the war to come and you will have such a capability by FY25 or you will be disestablished.

7. Pass the Salamander Bill: no General of Flag Officer shall, for a period no less than 5-yrs from retirement date, receive compensation of any kind or anything of value from any publicly or privately held company that does business with the federal government, nor shall they serve in any non-paid positions with same.

Yes, #7 is important. If you have not realized why in 2022, you are part of the problem.

July 4, 2022

A first, tentative step to reining back the juggernaut that is the modern administrative state

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

Brad Polumbo has words of praise for US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch:

Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.

“Vesting federal legislative power in Congress [rather than bureaucrats]”, Gorsuch writes, “is vital because the framers believed that a republic — a thing of the people — would be more likely to enact just laws than a regime administered by a ruling class of largely unaccountable ‘ministers’.”

But what about those, like dissenting Justice Elena Kagan, who say that federal bureaucrats need wide latitude because Congress is failing to, in their view, adequately address climate change?

“Admittedly, lawmaking under our Constitution can be difficult,” Gorsuch acknowledges. “But that is nothing particular to our time nor any accident.”

“The framers believed that the power to make new laws regulating private conduct was a grave one that could, if not properly checked, pose a serious threat to individual liberty …” he said. “As a result, the framers deliberately sought to make lawmaking difficult by insisting that two houses of Congress must agree to any new law and the President must concur or a legislative supermajority must override his veto.”

With an empowered, unelected bureaucracy, “agencies could churn out new laws more or less at whim”, Gorsuch adds. “Intrusions on liberty would not be difficult and rare, but easy and profuse.”

This isn’t hypothetical speculation — it’s exactly what we’ve seen under the status quo.

For a glaring example, just consider the Centers for Disease Control’s pandemic-era “eviction moratorium”. The federal agency unilaterally declared that evictions nationwide were prohibited in many circumstances by citing an old statute that gave the CDC director the ability to order in specific places “such measures to prevent such spread of the diseases as he/she deems reasonably necessary, including inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles believed to be sources of infection.”

They went from that to a nationwide “eviction moratorium”. Stretch, much?

That’s right: Unelected government officials effectively commandeered the nation’s rental market, which caused tremendous dysfunction, trampled over property rights, and sabotaged the supply of rental housing. (For which prices are now surging. Shocker!) And, it was years before the courts finally stopped them and struck down the “moratorium”.

June 30, 2022

What’s the military version of the saying “Get woke, go broke”?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the largely self-inflicted damage suffered by the US Army during the last few years, leading to (among other things) significant recruiting shortfalls:

The American military is running a social trust test for the larger society, and the results are remarkably clear.

Remember that the Biden administration opened with an ideological assault on the armed forces, ordering a training stand-down to harangue servicemembers about politics.

[…]

While the public framing was vague, the training wasn’t: It ran in a single direction. Servicemembers reporting on their “extremism” training to members of Congress described sessions in which the military warned them against white nationalism and the dangers of far-right sentiment, but didn’t mention Antifa (or ISIS, but whatever), hammering the January 6 narrative but deflecting questions about riots and arson in the summer of 2020. In uniform, troops did “privilege walks” and unpacked their white privilege in supervised discussions. Extremism, it turns out, is only one kind of thing, on a single end of the political spectrum.

Pursuing the theme of politically purified armed forces, three retired US Army generals published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a political commissariat in the American military: “In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.” More domestic political spying will make our institutions healthy, they explained.

[…]

The result of woke leadership, politicized military service, Covid vaccine mandates that decline to take safety concerns and religious objections into account, and wars fought for no point or objective:

[…]

And a generation shrugs.

The military is only the most obvious, most centralized example of a burgeoning withdrawal from institutions crippled by lost trust. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment declined by 662,000 in a single year. Meanwhile, public school enrollment in California is imploding. The LAUSD, which was closing in on 800,000 students twenty years ago, is now moving in the other direction, and closing in on 400,000.

Institutions can shit on people, and push them past their limits, and make absurd and unkind demands of them. Until they can’t.

There will be more of this.

June 29, 2022

COVID Exposed the Truth About the CDC

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 28 Jun 2022

The agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from politics.
——————-
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was once widely viewed as the gold standard in public health, considered an apolitical, science-driven bulwark against all pathogen threats, foreign and domestic.

Today, trust in the agency has plummeted because COVID-19 exposed the truth: The CDC is thoroughly corruptible, and federal regulators will never be impartial experts. They respond to political incentives just like everyone else, and a fact-driven, purely technocratic state is an impossible dream.

The Trump administration pressured the CDC to narrow the scope of testing so case counts would drop, blocked officials from doing interviews, and edited its flagship scientific reports. The CDC provided a scientifically dubious public health rationale for rejecting migrants at the southern border. President Joe Biden continued that policy, and under his purview, CDC guidance on school closures was surreptitiously written by leaders of the country’s second-largest teachers union.

Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, co-authored a 2021 op-ed with three other former agency heads expressing hope that Biden’s incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky would “restore the public’s confidence in the CDC’s scientific objectivity,” with its reputation “a shadow of what it once was.” Yet, Frieden endorsed large-scale protests against racial injustice two months after writing in The Washington Post that “the faucet of everyday activities needs to be turned on slowly. We cannot open the floodgates.” Meanwhile, public health officials were keeping people from attending the funerals of their loved ones.

And could it be pure coincidence that the CDC chose the Friday before President Biden’s State of the Union address to drop its indoor mask recommendation for the majority of Americans, even though the supporting data were months old?

In other words, it doesn’t matter who occupies the White House — political incentives mean that, no matter how dedicated or competent the career scientists who work at the CDC are, the agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from the “hurry and strife of politics,” as Woodrow Wilson wrote. After decades of mission creep, the CDC’s role should be strictly narrowed, limited to surveillance and coordination, leaving the heavy lifting to local officials and private and academic researchers who are more reactive to direct feedback from their communities.

Written and produced by Justin Monticello. Edited by Isaac Reese. Graphics by Reese, Tomasz Kaye, and Nodehaus. Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music: “Robotic Butterflies” by Evgeny Bardyuzha; “We Fall” by Stanley Gurvich; “Free Radicals” by Stanley Gurvich.

Photos: BSIP/Newscom; BSIP/Newscom; Sarah Silbiger/UPI/Newscom; Shawn Thew – Pool via CNP/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Alex Edelman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; SMG/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Simon Shin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Adam Schultz/White House/Newscom; Brazil Photo Press / SplashNews/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Polaris/Newscom; Jonathan Alpeyrie/Polaris/Newscom; Aimee Melo/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/Newscom

June 28, 2022

If your gas can sucks – and it probably does – thank the EPA

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

The editors at FEE dug out an old classic article from Jeffrey A. Tucker that still holds up ten years later:

The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009 … it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents”. It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.

And don’t tell me about spillage. It is far more likely to spill when the gas is gurgling out in various uneven ways, when one spout has to both pour and suck in air. That’s when the lawn mower tank becomes suddenly full without warning, when you are shifting the can this way and that just to get the stuff out.

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.

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