No law or legislation prevents businesses from demanding, as a term of their selling outputs to consumers, that consumers continue to patronize these same businesses for a minimum number of years – or, indeed, until death (or bankruptcy) do them part. No law or legislation prevents workers from demanding, as a term of their agreeing to work for employers, that employers continue to employ these same workers for a minimum number of years – or, indeed, until death (or bankruptcy) do them part.
[…] too often when buyers shift some of their patronage from domestic producers to foreign producers, domestic producers – both firm owners and workers – insist that the state is morally obliged to force buyers to continue to purchase their products and their labor without any reduction in the prices and wages charged by sellers. These producers greedily and falsely insist that it’s bad policy for the state to allow buyers to shift their patronage to other sellers. Because those other sellers happen to be located abroad – or in the case of immigrants happen not to have passports issued by the domestic sovereign – such greedy and false insistence by domestic producers and workers is remarkably seen as legitimate, despite the fact that there’s nothing remotely legitimate about such insistence.
Tariffs and other forms of “protectionism” are means of forcing buyers to act and to pay as if they agreed to terms of contracts with sellers that these buyers never agreed to and that the sellers who benefit from the protectionism were unwilling to pay for in their contractual dealings with their customers.
Protectionism is akin to changing the rules of a game in the middle of a game. It’s unfair. It’s unproductive. It’s theft wrapped in flags, and too-often faux-sanctified by specious theorizing.
Don Boudreaux, “Protectionism Is a Means of Stealing That Which Suppliers Are Unwilling to Purchase”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-10.
October 26, 2022
QotD: Protectionism forces buyers to take worse deals
October 25, 2022
A Multi-Trillion Dollar Pipe Dream
PragerU
Published 16 Jun 2022Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.
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October 24, 2022
QotD: When the “Grand Tour” gave way to the mere “tourists”
Smith’s most celebrated panorama relived his ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851 — which had been an astonishing physical feat for a clubbable bon viveur (though he had to be dragged to the summit barely conscious, he claimed to have celebrated by drinking a bottle of champagne and smoking a cigar). He pulled out all the stops to recreate Mont Blanc on the stage of the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1852, importing woodcarvers from Chamonix to recreate a Swiss chalet. St Bernards roamed the aisles and during the interval hot baked potatoes were dispensed for those in the audience feeling a glacial chill from the buckets of cold water placed around the hall. The stage was decked with alpine plants; there was a waterfall with real water, a mill wheel and a lily pond; the walls of the theatre were hung with chamois skins. “The Ascent of Mont Blanc” ran for six years and 2,000 performances, and on top of the fortune he made in ticket sales, Smith cannily expanded his repertoire by selling colouring books, fans, board games and miniature models of Mont Blanc.
Smith, an unrepentant populist (he liked to shock Thackeray by saying that Shakespeare was “all rot”), knocked the high culture out of the touristic experience. He made the adventure of foreign parts bite-sized and accessible — if not in reality, at least in dreams. He called it “the Alps in a box”. Figuratively speaking, Smith’s panoramas boxed up the great sights of the classical Grand Tour and sold them in miniature form, building them up with a dramatic flourish then cutting them down to size with a knowing dig in the ribs. Smith’s success runs parallel with the emergence of photography, the industrial manufacture of souvenirs, and the “I was here” frame of the postcard. After Smith, it became possible to think of “buying” the travel experience without actually going very far, framing it, and taking it home with you. Antiquarian high-culturists looked for quiddity and oddity when abroad but Smith encouraged a joyful appetite for mass-produced kitsch. His own apartment off Tottenham Court was a riot of knick-knackery from his travels. There was a figure of a Swiss peasant with a clock-face in his waistcoat, Venetian glasses, miniature Swiss chalets, soap from Vienna in the shape of fruit and a working model of a guillotine.
The tourist boom in Chamonix inspired by Smith was viewed with horror by those who thought the mountain were theirs to command. Ruskin found the “white leprosy of hotels” and souvenir shops that followed the visitors into the Alps was a blasphemy against “all the deep and sacred sensations of nature”. Everywhere the new tourists went, reported a journalist in 1856, they brought with them “Cockneyism, Albert Smithery, fun, frolic and vulgarity”. The rise in popular tourism to Europe, sparked most importantly by Thomas Cook, had highlighted a divide which has characterised British travelling ever since. In this paradigm, the tourist is the new bug and the traveller is the old soul. And even when they are gazing at the same view, the latter thinks the former is spoiling the view. The distaste is notable in how often crowds of tourists were, and still are, described in terms of mindless cattle or insects — they come in “herds” and “swarms” and “flocks”.
Lucy Lethbridge, “The snobbery of Brits abroad”, UnHerd, 2022-07-12.
October 21, 2022
QotD: The real reason for Upton Sinclair writing The Jungle
As a result, the Federal Meat Inspection Act passed Congress, and consumers were saved from ghastly diseases. The lesson is that government is essential to stop enterprise from poisoning us with its food.
To some extent, this mythology accounts for the wide support for government’s involvement in stopping disease spread today, including Covid and the catastrophic response.
Not only that, but the story is also the basis for the US Department of Agriculture’s food inspection efforts, the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of medical drugs, the central plan that governs food production, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the legions of bureaucrats who inspect and badger us every step of the way. It is the founding template for why government is involved in our food and health at all.
It’s all premised on the implausible idea that people who make and sell us food have no concern as to whether it makes us sick. It only takes a quick second, though, to realize that this idea just isn’t true. So long as there is a functioning, consumer-driven marketplace, customer focus, which presumably includes not killing you, is the best regulator. Producer reputation has been a huge feature of profitability, too. And hygiene was a huge feature of reputation — long before Yelp.
Sinclair’s book was not intended as a factual account. It was a fantasy rendered as an ideological screed. It did drum up support for regulation, but the real reason for the act’s passage was that the large Chicago meat packers realized that regulation would hurt their smaller competitors more than themselves. Meat inspections imposed costs that cartelized the industry.
That’s why the largest players were the law’s biggest promoters. Such laws almost have more to do with benefiting elites than protecting the public. It was not really about safety, the best scholarship shows, but exclusionary regulation to raise competitors’ costs of doing business.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Poke and Sniff: A Lesson from 1906”, Brownstone Institute, 2022-06-29.
October 16, 2022
“Musk’s plebeian sense of humor is probably a big part of why the establishment can’t stand him”
Patrick Carroll speculates on why Elon Musk is so disliked by the other rich and powerful folks in his 0.01% demographic:
This isn’t the first time Musk has brought his playful, irreverent, meme-culture spirit to the market. A few years ago he launched his car into space because he thought it would be amusing, and some of his companies now accept Dogecoin as payment.
Musk in general seems rather fun, relatable, and laid back. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and that’s probably a big part of why people like him.
Another reason he’s so likable is that he doesn’t mind poking fun at politicians, executives, and other “blue-check” elites. To the contrary, he seems to enjoy it.
Examples of Musk mocking the elites abound.
[…]
The question then becomes, how do we combat the insistence on political correctness? How do we push back when moral busybodies insert themselves in matters that are none of their business?
At first, it’s tempting to meet them on their own terms, to politely and logically state our case and request that they leave us alone. And sometimes that can be the right move. But often, a much more effective approach is to do what Elon Musk is doing: become the fool.
Rather than taking the elites seriously, the fool uses wit, humor, and satire to highlight how ridiculous the elites have become. He employs clever mockery and a tactful mischievousness to call the authority of the elites into question. When done well, this approach can be brilliantly effective. There’s a reason joking about politicians was banned in the Soviet Union.
The story of the Weasley twins and Professor Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is one of my favorite examples of how mischievousness and mockery can be used to expose and embarrass those who take things too seriously. As you probably know, Umbridge was committed to formality and order, and she imposed stringent limits on fun and games. Now, the Weasley twins — the jesters of Hogwarts, as it were — could have responded with vitriol. They could have written angry letters, signed a petition, and gone through all the proper channels to get her removed. But instead, they threw a party in the middle of exams, making a complete mockery of her seriousness. They gave her the one thing she couldn’t stand: fun. And wasn’t that way more powerful?
If I had to guess, Musk’s plebeian sense of humor is probably a big part of why the establishment can’t stand him. They don’t mind someone who challenges them through the proper channels and in a respectful manner — that’s actually playing into their hand, because it concedes they are deserving of respect in the first place. What they can’t stand is being taken lightly, being teased and ridiculed and ultimately ignored.
Why can’t they stand that? Because our reverence for the elites is actually the source of their power. They win as long as we take them seriously. They lose the moment we don’t.
October 11, 2022
Growing grapes for wine
A guest post at Founding Questions from Allen discusses his many years of growing grapes:
“Pelee Island winery” by John Kannenberg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I grew grapes for wine, the noble Vitis Vinifera, for close to 30 years. My heart went out of it when I saw the advent of celebrity wine producers. I could stomach the idea of box wine for women with their cats, after all what else did they have, but the very idea that celebrity itself might indicate discernment or ability was a bridge too far for me.
A good wine can enhance a meal. In fact given any other choice I will choose water with lemon if a decent wine is not available. The acid in the wine, or from the lemon, keeps the palate clear and lets you get more flavor out of a well done meal. Then there is the allure, “why yes I grow my own grapes and make my own wine my dear, care for a glass?” If there is a better way to get a lady to throw her panties at a farmer I don’t know what it is. Oh, and that is FNG, that country song, “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”. No she doesn’t, you damn dope.
I know it sounds trite but good wine starts in the dirt and everything in the dirt ends up in the wine. I had sandy, rocky soil with minimal amounts of organic material. Vines need to struggle to make good wine grapes. I did fertilize but with composted organic material and a mixture of manures. If your manure still contain some amount of ammonia in it the wine will have an interesting bouquet so patience grasshopper, give it 2-3 years to compost well. Watering, I always drip irrigated but sparingly. If you’ve got city water its treatment chemicals will end up in the wine so avoid it as much as possible. I had my own deep water wells so I didn’t have that worry. It’s the same with pest treatments. I planted a certain type of tree near the vineyard that Ladybugs were partial to. Ladybugs do a number on most common insect pests.
So you’ve got your dirt now what? Dig son dig. My preferred vine and row spacing was 8 feet by 8 feet, 8 feet between vines with rows 8 feet apart. I dug a trench approximately 3 feet wide by 3 feet deep for each row of vines. Before you ask, yes I did it by hand. Machinery can actually make things worse as it can compact the soil to rock hard consistency where it isn’t digging. The idea here is to get the vines’ roots to run deep and spread. If your soil is especially compacted a power auger is useful to break up the soil.
Next up you need a trellis because grapes require a lot of support. I used a four wire trellis with two arms to spread the canopy out. The more leaf area you have the more photosynthesis and consequently higher growth you will have. It also will drive the acid sugar balance in the grapes. You’ll have to experiment with it to find out what works best for your location and microclimate. Fortunately you have that 4 to 5 years before you get a good crop.
October 8, 2022
Faint glimmers of hope for Canadians’ “right to repair”?
Michael Geist on the state of play in modifying Canada’s digital lock rules to allow consumers a tiny bit more flexibility in how they can get their electronic devices repaired:
“The Self-Repair Manifesto from ifixit.com ‘If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it’. Hear, hear!” by dullhunk is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
Canadian anti-circumvention laws (also known as digital lock rules) are among the strictest in the world, creating unnecessary barriers to innovation and consumer rights. The rules are required under the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet Treaties, but those treaties leave considerable flexibility in how they should be implemented. This is reflected in the countless examples around the world of countries adopting flexible anti-circumvention rules that seek to maintain the copyright balance. Canada was pressured into following the restrictive U.S. approach in 2012, establishing a framework is not only more restrictive than required under the WIPO treaties, but even more restrictive than the U.S. system.
One of the biggest differences between Canada and the U.S. is that the U.S. conducts a review every three years to determine whether new exceptions to a general prohibition on circumventing a digital locks are needed. This has led to the adoption of several exceptions to TPMs for innovative activities such as automotive security research, repairs and maintenance, archiving and preserving video games, and for remixing from DVDs and Blu-Ray sources. Canada has no such system as the government instead provided assurances that it could address new exceptions through a regulation-making power. In the decade since the law has been in effect, successive Canadian governments have never done so. This is particularly problematic where the rules restrict basic property rights by limiting the ability to repair products or ensure full interoperability between systems.
The best policy would be to clarify that the anti-circumvention rules do not apply to non-infringing uses. This would enable the anti-circumvention rules to work alongside the user rights in the Copyright Act (also known as limitations and exceptions) without restricting their lawful exercise. This approach was endorsed by the 2019 Canadian copyright review, which unanimously concluded:
it agrees that the circumvention of TPMs should be allowed for non-infringing purposes, especially given the fact that the Nintendo case provided such a broad interpretation of TPMs. In other words, while anti-circumvention rules should support the use of TPMs to enable the remuneration of rights-holders and prevent copyright infringement, they should generally not prevent someone from committing an act otherwise authorized under the Act.
The government has not acted on this recommendation, but two private members bills are working their way through the House of Commons that provide some hope of change. First, Bill S-244 on the right of repair. Introduced by Liberal MP Wilson Miao in February, the bill this week passed second reading unanimously and has been referred to the Industry committee for further study. The lack of a right of repair exception in Canadian digital lock rules has hindered both consumers and Canadian innovation significantly, leaving consumers unable to repair their electronic devices and farmers often locked out of their farm equipment. After farmers protested against similar copyright restrictions, the U.S. established specific exceptions permitting digital locks to be circumvented to allow repair of software-enabled devices.
Given the impact on consumers, the agricultural sector, and the environment, a provision that explicitly permits circumvention for purposes of the right of repair in Canada is long overdue. Indeed, such an approach is consistent with the 2019 copyright review recommendation:
Recommendation 19
That the Government of Canada examine measures to modernize copyright policy with digital technologies affecting Canadians and Canadian institutions, including the relevance of technological protection measures within copyright law, notably to facilitate the maintenance, repair or adaptation of a lawfully-acquired device for non-infringing purposes.
October 4, 2022
“On the cover of the Rolling Stone“
Ted Gioia discusses the oddly nostalgic turn modern music writing has taken:
The first thing you notice is the sheer abundance of music magazines on display. We must truly be living in a golden age of music writing if it can support so many periodicals.
I was very happy to see this — at least at first glance.
But at second glance, I started to notice the cover stories.
Lavish attention is devoted here to artists who built their audience in the last century — Miles Davis, David Bowie, Buddy Holly, Blondie, Led Zeppelin, Björk, Motorhead, The Cure, etc. That’s an impressive roster of artists (well, most of them), but they don’t really need the publicity nowadays — they were legends before many of us were born.
Even the magazine names reveal a tilt toward nostalgia. I can’t make out the titles in their entirety, but I see the words Retro, Vintage, and Classic. Publishers are shrewd people, and they don’t put these words in large font unless the audience responds to them.
Maybe print media is nostalgic by definition — if, as we’re repeatedly told, young people don’t read things on paper. (I’m skeptical of that claim, but I hear it all the time.) Yet when I visit the websites, I see the same backward glance. You can’t click on Rolling Stone‘s homepage or Twitter feed without finding some massive list article — touting the “100 Best Songs of 1982” or “The 100 Greatest Country Albums of All Time“. You will find similar retro celebrations at almost every other music media website with a large crossover readership.
Editors love lists nowadays, especially of all-time greats. If I pitch an article like that, the whole editorial team starts salivating — you can even feel the moisture over Zoom — in sharp contrast to any proposed article on a young, unproven musician. Those pitches get pitched right back in your face. You might conclude that we have now arrived at the end of history, with all greatness residing in the past. The editors, at least, must think so.
Things weren’t always like this. Go back and look at old issues of Rolling Stone or Downbeat or some other music magazine — there were years in which every cover story was about a living person and usually someone young with something new to say.
Those days are gone. But here’s the most ironic fact of all — the actual cover stories haven’t changed.
On the cover of the Rolling Stone — 1971, 1984 and 2012
By the way, I’d like to know when Rolling Stone published its first “all-time greats” list — that was the moment when nostalgia first entered the rock bloodstream, a vital force previously resistant to sentimental yearnings for the past.
October 2, 2022
What is a Bopper Car?
Lake Superior Railroad Museum & NS Scenic Railroad
Published 5 Jun 2020Railroads came up with lots of great ideas to make things more efficient. Many of those ideas, like bottled water, and the red carpet, are part of our daily lives … as we have shown you in previous episodes.
Today, we talk about an idea that sounded good, but didn’t work out: The Bopper Car. A combination of hopper car and box car. Only a few were made, and the remaining ones were donated to the Lake Superior Railroad Museum. Today they’re used as storage for many of the shop’s parts.
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September 30, 2022
“To maintain the illusion of free, all our online activities are sinking into spam, scam, and sham”
Ted Gioia on the insatiable growth of predatory behaviour from providers of “free” content online:
The biggest trick the Devil ever played was convincing people that online stuff is free. But the Devil always collects, sooner or later — and we are starting to learn the actual terms of this cursed deal.
Consider some recent news stories:
- YouTube has been testing users’ willingness to watch 10 unskippable ads on a video. And the ads aren’t spaced out. They come at you, one right after the other, at the outset — because Google wants to be paid first, even if the video sucks.
- Nobody wants ads on iPhone, but they’re coming. Executives at Apple are allegedly planning to triple the ad revenue from phones.
- “For some Google searches literally the whole screen on Google is ads.”
- TikTok can track a user’s every keystroke, and Beijing has “access to everything”.
- “Scams are showing up at the top of online searches.”
- Snapchat has been forced to pay $35 million for storing and selling users’ biometric information without permission.
- Even if you pay for ad-free streaming, Spotify inserts ads in podcasts.
- Ads are coming to Netflix too.
- Etc. etc. etc.
This is what happens when “free” really isn’t free — but consumers prefer to stay in denial. Go ahead and rob me, just make sure I’m not looking when it happens.
It’s even worse than that. Web users are now hooked on free — and like all addictions, this one is far costlier than you realize at the outset.
You have more leverage when you negotiate an actual price. When I cancel a paid subscription, the corporate provider always comes back with a special offer to get me to reconsider. But how much bargaining power do I have if I refuse to click on those “terms and conditions” that always come with the free stuff?
I’ll answer that for you — none at all.
How bad will it get? YouTube described its ten unskippable ads as a “test” — but this wasn’t done in a laboratory or with volunteers. They just forced it on users, and watched them squirm. And squirm they did.
In fact, one person reported a 12-ad blitz.
This wouldn’t be so bad if it was just one business or sector of the economy that played these games. But this is the de facto business model for the entire digital economy. To maintain the illusion of free, all our online activities are sinking into spam, scam, and sham. Everything from sending an email to sharing a photo gets monitored and monetized by big tech companies — and often you’re the last person to find out what the real price is.
September 26, 2022
“We’ve credentialed people for membership in a series of high-cultural-status groups on the basis of their ability to chant slogans and perform rituals; they are coreless”
Chris Bray on Vivek Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc.:
Vivek Ramaswamy was trying to close a deal, so he went to do some relationship building over dinner at an investor’s house. As dinner ended, the investor’s son came downstairs to greet the visitors, and he turned out to be a high school senior who was applying to Harvard. By the most remarkable coincidence, Vivek Ramaswamy is a Harvard grad, so the kid asked for some advice on getting in. Stand out, the Harvard grad told the Harvard applicant. Have something that makes you different than all the other applicants. Oh, the kid said, yeah — I got that. It turns out the seventeen year-old son of a venture capitalist had started a non-profit to fight against global sex slavery, which did indeed impress the admissions office and did indeed get him into Harvard. When Ramaswamy ran into the kid again, a few years later, he was shopping for Wall Street internships — and had moved on from the whole sex slavery thing, which had by then served its purpose.
Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc., a title published last year that seems to be gaining new momentum now as its author takes on corporate ESG posturing, accurately promises to take readers “inside corporate America’s social justice scam”, though I don’t love everything he offers as a solution. He clearly is reporting from inside: He’s a Harvard grad, a Yale Law grad, a former hedge fund employee, and a former pharmaceutical CEO. (Those credentials make you trust his argument, right?)
The thing the kid did, dummying up a quick thing to fight global sex slavery to get it into his admissions package, is a version of a maneuver that Ramaswamy finds all over the woke corporate world. The highly woke consumer products company Unilever is passionate about taking deep notice of intersectionality and serving women of color, and it partners with UN Women, “a nonprofit branch of the UN dedicated to advancing gender equality and empowering women”. Also, dozens of women who work on a Unilever tea plantation in Kenya were gang-raped in front of their families, an event that was coupled with a dozen or so murders, and Unilever declined to provide them with substantial support or assistance: “Unilever said the attacks on its plantation were unexpected and therefore that it should not be held liable”.
Unilever provides money to UN Women, Ramaswamy concludes, and UN Women provides Unilever with “moral cover for the Kenyan massacre”. Woke Unilever is a façade for, you know, Unilever. It’s a strategy, one example of many, and Ramaswamy argues that the “arranged marriage” between wokeness and corporate capitalism was born out of Occupy Wall Street: Here’s a check, now let’s stop talking about TARP and start talking about white privilege.
You should read Woke, Inc., so I won’t go on summarizing. But without going deeper into Ramaswamy’s argument, which reflects a series of increasingly familiar observations about social class and the function of wokeness, the point is the inauthenticity and shallowness of corporate social justice posturing, all of which is meant to protect the core of the project — to provide cover for business practices that might otherwise be criticized. It’s a show, a performative and manipulative posture. You could easily make comparable arguments about wokeness and power in academia, media, or government.
Now, to take all of this and pivot to an argument that will satisfy absolutely no one, if the social justice façade is a façade — shallow, performative, calculatedly purpose-serving — then there’s a good chance the branch managers of the globalist project will drop it when it slides out of fashion. The kid who, wanting a career on Wall Street, did the sex slavery nonprofit thing just long enough to get into Harvard: That kid is a middle manager now, and he’ll recite slogans about white privilege or not, as Current Thing demands, as long as the checks still cash. We’ve credentialed people for membership in a series of high-cultural-status groups on the basis of their ability to chant slogans and perform rituals; they are coreless.
September 24, 2022
PayPal shuts down the Free Speech Union’s account for some reason
Ellie Wheatley on PayPal’s arbitrary decision to cut off the Free Speech Union’s account without notice:
The irony of the Free Speech Union’s PayPal account being shut down is that it proves we are in need of the union more than ever.
The online payment company shut down the FSU’s account (thus making it more difficult for people to donate) without any clear explanation as to why it did so. The same was done to its founder, Toby Young, and his online newspaper, the Daily Sceptic.
The shame is, PayPal is an innovative tech company that has made transferring money almost seamless for millions across the world. You can donate money to an organisation within seconds; there’s no faff trying to find your credit card, or having to re-type your details for the twentieth time that week. It’s a brilliant service that has made life easier for many people, businesses and charities. PayPal is not a political company, it’s a tech company worth over $102bn, so why have they been banning other organisations from using their services?
Although PayPal said they couldn’t comment on the decision, they did proclaim that they “weren’t discriminatory”, but is this really true?
Is it unclear whether they shut down these accounts simply because they disagreed with what the FSU and Toby Young stand for. Although PayPal hasn’t clarified what exactly FSU and Toby Young did wrong, it appears that they must have breached their acceptable use policy. This includes myriad of things but the most prominent are hate speech and “misinformation” on topics such as the COVID vaccine.
Hate speech is one thing (although it seems that anything can be deemed offensive and hateful now) but “misinformation” about topics being a breach of policy takes us down a dark and sinister path.
Misinformation is a term that is often used to label content that goes against the elite or prevailing “groupthink” point of view. Questioning mainstream thought is unacceptable, and it breaches Big Tech’s policy, thus you can (and often will) be shut out.
September 14, 2022
Whisky – Scotland’s Water of Life
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Sep 2022
September 13, 2022
The Boise Pride Festival’s “Drag Kids on Stage”
I’m not sure I could accurately place Boise on a map, but the city’s relative obscurity doesn’t mean it can’t have a really progressive LGBT scene, including a special “Drag Kids” event planned for their Pride Festival:
Remember that California has just passed a new law, SB 1100, to protect local legislative bodies against “bullying” from people who do hateful things like disagreeing with them, and that the recent failure of another (spectacularly offensive) bill in the state legislature was the product of “harassment”, by which the author of the bill meant that the peasantry forcefully and persistently criticized it. And you should definitely read this two–part essay from Bat Cattitude on the technocratic presumption that disagreement with technocrats can only be dangerous extremism.
With that background in mind, consider a modest victory in the most dismal battlefield of the culture war, and then watch the response to it.
This one happens in Boise, a purple town in a red state. This year’s Boise Pride Festival was all set to feature an event called Drag Kids:
“Now it is time to see the kids”, sexy eleven year-olds shaking that dirty little moneymaker on the stage. So hot. So empowering!
[…]
Now, the Big Pivot: Boise Pride pays its bills by soliciting the support of corporate sponsors, so a bunch of corporations suddenly found themselves sponsoring the sexuality-incorporating performances of some hot little eleven year-olds. They quickly began to jump clear of the thing:
Because bigotry still prevails in Amerikkka, see, corporations aren’t brave enough to stand up and support the sexy eleven year-olds in their extremely hot sexiness. Atavists! Prudes!
Now, here come the politicians. The mayor of Boise, Lauren McLean, is Very Disappointed In You All™:
Slogan slogan slogan, slogan slogan, slogan slogan slogan. A spotlight on the critical need for a conversation about standing together!
If you challenged Mayor NPC to publicly identify specific pieces of inflammatory rhetoric that were important and central to the controversy, she couldn’t; she just knows that the “inflammatory rhetoric” box has to be checked, because Mean Republicans objected to something involving an LGBT event, specifics not important. Nor could she explain how sexy children represent the dignity of all people, or respond coherently to a discussion about sexual commodification and the erasure of childhood. She has a list of slogans. She deploys them.
September 10, 2022
The Land Rover Defender Story
Big Car
Published 27 Dec 2019The Land Rover is Britain’s bullet-proof off-roader born out of Rover’s post-war desperation and became the indispensable go-anywhere vehicle. Like its famed bullet-proof ruggedness, Land Rover production kept going, and going, and going. But with a brief gap of 4 years, the Land Rover is still with us and looks like it’s not going away any time soon.
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