Quotulatiousness

July 31, 2024

The Jasper wildfire – climate change or blatant government incompetence and neglect?

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson points out that the federal government had been given plenty of warning — literally years — about potentially serious problems near Jasper and had done nothing about them:

When Ken Hodges heard about the devastating wildfire that took out part of the historic mountain town of Jasper this week, he said he was “frustrated”.

“All I could say is that we tried to warn them that it was coming. We told them constantly. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

The retired forester, along with his colleague Emile Begin, spent years repeatedly warning the parks service, the federal and provincial government, city council, and residents, that mis-management of the forests around Jasper had created a tinderbox that would inevitably spark a massive wildfire.

“I just feel so badly for the people who have lost their homes and their businesses. Could it have been prevented? I don’t know. If they had done everything they could have? Maybe. Something was going to happen over time, so it’s so frustrating and devastating.”

Hodges first spotted the problem almost a decade ago while skiing near Marmot Basin. From his years working in forestry in B.C. — a province that had previously been devastated by both wildfires and infestations of the Mountain Pine Beetle — Hodges was able to identify similar patterns of decay in the forests in Alberta.

“It was a hillside on the way up to Marmot that I looked up and thought ‘holy crap. The Mountain Pine Beetle is here.'” His experience told him exactly what would follow — fire.

Not just any fire. “It’s the intensity and the ferocity of the fire that can cause the problem. With climate change, that exacerbates the situation as well.”

Eventually Hodges connected with Begin. The two men between them had 40 years of experience in forestry in B.C. and Alberta, respectively. They feared the Parks service was not prepared for what the men had seen in B.C. — and told them so. Repeatedly. Vociferously. They also sent letters of warning to several ministers; they met with the local municipality. They were interviewed by the CBC for a story that was headlined “Jasper National Park not prepared for potential forest fire ‘catastrophe’, researchers say“.

That was in 2018.

Also in 2018, the pair issued an open letter that read: “The potential for a huge fire or mega fire is real. Fires of this type and magnitude generally occur in mid August to early September. With climate change it may occur earlier.”

The response?

“They just wrote us off,” Hodges told The Line this week.

July 30, 2024

The new and improved malaise for the 21st century

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

Back in the 1970s, US President Jimmy Carter identified the theme of the decade as “malaise”, and now, thanks to generations of feckless politicians, burgeoning bureaucratic empires, and economic stagnation, it’s back in an even malaisier form for the Current Year:

“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Some time ago, I noticed that a general fatigue had taken a place alongside the malaise that was already being felt by many Americans and Canadians. The malaise stemmed from the overdue recognition that their lives were not going to get any better, and that they would have to work harder to just maintain a standard of living that they were already used to.

The fatigue came from a different, but not too distant place; the politicization of everything these past one and a half decades meant that there was no escape [from] the political. Whether sports, video gaming, or even fashion, everything had to be run by the cultural police before it could be deemed “not problematic”. The problem was (and still is) that everything to this type is “problematic”. This would not be a problem at all if this type were not empowered by the powers-that-be, but for some strange reason the cultural police quickly became ubiquitous, and their constant hectoring and lecturing ground most people down to the point where fatigue set in.

Everything became political, so therefore there was nothing that was not political. The fact that sanctions began to be placed against those who dared to buck the new trends in social mores meant that this was a totalizing form of politics. It wasn’t fascism, nor was it communism … but it was (and is) totalitarianism in a new form all its own. The rise of populism on the right in the West (as this trend is also present in Europe, but is not as thoroughly embedded there as it is in North America) is almost entirely a reaction to this. Freedom and liberty, as traditionally understood in the Anglosphere (i.e. “as long as I don’t harm others, I can do or say what I want”) took a back seat to what they call “equality”, a first step towards the more extreme demand known as “equity”.

Economic precariousness combined with the permanent presence of the Sword of Damocles above your head is a brilliant way to get people to shut up and get with the program. It is very coercive, but it is for the “greater good”, they tell us. What we already see is that it does not convince all, and that it has a negative effect on trust in governing institutions and national elites. The level of control by the managerial elite over the daily lives of its citizens is now at a micro-management one. Everyday, most people have to think carefully before speaking for fear of committing some aggression that could lead to the termination of their employment. They must mouth elite-approved social mores just in order to be able to tread water, as boat rocking is a secular sin. Why would the powers-that-be want to ever give up such a tool of mass control? The people are not to be trusted, which is why this totalizing system must remain in place. Just imagine if it were removed: the dreaded 1990s would return … or something.

Jacob Siegel has written an interesting essay on the concept known as “Whole of Society”, and how it has become a totalizing system:

    To make sense of today’s form of American politics, it is necessary to understand a key term. It is not found in standard U.S. civics textbooks, but it is central to the new playbook of power: “whole of society“.

    The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for the government to control public life that can, at best, be called “Soviet-style”. Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.“

    In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them — creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.

The catch:

    “The government” — meaning the elected officials visible to the American public who appear to enact the policies that are carried out across the whole of society — is not the ultimate boss. Joe Biden may be the president but, as is now clear, that doesn’t mean he’s in charge of the party.

Siegel writes that the “whole of society” approach arose during Obama’s shift away from the War on Terror to something called “CVE” (Countering Violent Extremism) i.e. the shift away from focusing on Islamist terror towards fighting America’s own citizens who are not with the new political, social, and cultural programs:

    But the true lasting legacy of the CVE model was that it justified mass surveillance of the internet and social media platforms as a means to detect and de-radicalize potential extremists. Inherent in the very concept of the “violent extremist”, was a weaponized vagueness. A decade after 9/11, as Americans wearied of the war on terror, it became passé and politically suspicious to talk about jihadism or Islamic terrorism. Instead, the Obama national security establishment insisted that extremist violence was not the result of particular ideologies and therefore more prevalent in certain cultures than in others, but rather its own free-floating ideological contagion. Given these criticisms Obama could have tried to end the war on terror, but he chose not to. Instead, Obama’s nascent party state turned counterterrorism into a whole-of-society progressive cause by redirecting its instruments — most notably mass surveillance — against American citizens and the domestic extremists supposedly lurking in their midst.

    A reflection on the 20-year anniversary of Sept. 11 written in 2021 by Nicholas Rasmussen, the former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, captures this view. “Particularly with the growing threat to public safety and security posed by domestic violent extremism, it is essential that we move beyond the post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy paradigm that placed the government at the center of most counterterrorism work.” Instead of expecting the government to deal with terrorist threats, Rasmussen advocated for “a much wider, more expansive and inclusive ‘whole-of-society’ approach” that he said should encompass “state and local governments, but also the private sector (to include technology companies), civil society in the form of both individual voices and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academia.”

July 28, 2024

J.D. Vance is an ideological extremist who has pushed an idea also supported by … Canadian deputy PM Chrystia Freeland

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

There’s much viewing-with-alarm and pearl-clutching going on over some of J.D. Vance’s more outré notions floated before he became Trump’s running mate:

U.S. Senator J.D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People’s Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan, 16 June, 2024.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the amusing features of this week’s U.S. election turbulence has been sudden media scrutiny of Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance, a former author and pundit newly named as Donald Trump’s running mate. Readers will know I’m a sadistic student of electoral reform crusades, and in 2021 Vance advocated for one of the myriad of utopian ideas that has never quite reached prime time: parents should be given extra votes that they can exercise on behalf of their minor children.

[…]

Critics of Vance are screaming about the sacred principle of “one person, one vote” — but of course the centrists and liberals who have toyed with the same idea support it precisely because children are persons who deserve political representation. (They would be represented second-hand by their parents until the age of majority, but us adults are all represented that way in democratic decision-making now, right?) Earlier this week Reason magazine published a short excerpt from a pro-Demeny paper by two American law professors with strong conservative, originalist credentials: there isn’t all that much daylight between their arguments and Corak’s.

Are the arguments actually any good? Some of them seem circumstantial or even aesthetic. We’re in a transitory era of gerontocracy because of a baby boom that happened eighty years ago, and nobody under 70, whatever their ideology, likes this universal predicament much. But on the grounds of revealed preference, the lack of actual real-world Demeny experiments is a big problem.

If we want the proxy votes to go to custodial parents who are involved with a real child and conscious of its particular interests, you’re suddenly talking about integrating election systems with family law. I.e., an unfathomable technical nightmare. But assigning control of the extra child votes automatically to biological parents, including deadbeats and those who have surrendered children to adoptees or foster families, seems like a non-starter. (And would also be an unfathomable technical nightmare.)

You can say that the democratic principle is more important than the mere design details of a child-voting system, and this is the kind of thing election reformers say all the time — but would you book a seat on an airplane that was built on aerodynamic principles with no attention to detail?

How America RUINED the world’s screws! (Robertson vs. Phillips)

Filed under: Business, Cancon, History, Humour, Tools, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Stumpy Nubs
Published Apr 17, 2024

July 26, 2024

Latest Liberal ad totally DESTROYS Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives

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

If you’re new here, you may not recognize my headline as being sarcastic. Here’s Chris Selley‘s attempt to figure out what the Liberal brain trust is up to with their latest anti-Tory ad:

“The CEO of Elections Canada has indicated his opposition to it, and let me just say I’m at peace with that.”

These words, spoken by Pierre Poilievre a decade ago, are part of an absolutely bizarre 46-second video the Liberal Party of Canada released in recent days trying to convince us — a very novel approach — that the Conservative leader is too wacky and full of dangerous ideas to vote for.

Read that sentence again. It’s supposed to be a scare quote. Are you scared? Or, more likely, do you not know what the hell he’s talking about? Removed from its context it’s not just uncontroversial; it barely even exists. It’s like someone negotiating the return date on their dry cleaning, or asking for no mayonnaise on their Whopper.

There’s another quote like that in the same 46-second video: “We’re Conservatives, so we don’t believe in that”.

Believe in what? No idea. Keynesian economics? The curse of the Oak Island treasure? Could be anything.

The notion that communications is the Liberals’ “problem” is as laughable as ever, but good grief are they ever terrible at communicating.

Usually politicians take other politicians’ quotes out of context to make them look bad. Here the Liberals have done … I really have no idea what. It’s like they’re so hopelessly ensconced in their echo chamber that they can’t tell which echoes have even escaped the chamber into the real world … if the real world even still exists.

Those intimately familiar with Poilievre’s parliamentary record (which is what, maybe 90 people in the world?) might surmise, correctly, that in the first instance he was talking in his role as minister of state for democratic reform in the Harper government about Bill C-23. That was the 2014 legislation that, most controversially, toughened voter-ID requirements: Your voter-information card, delivered by mail, would no longer be sufficient proof of your identity to cast your ballot. You wouldn’t be able to “vouch” for another voter.

This was unnecessary, I felt at the time, and I might still, though the prospect of electoral fraud doesn’t make Liberal eyes roll quite as theatrically as it used to. But it seems clear the serious foreign interference in play is considerably smarter and more insidious than just sending some people to vote without proof of citizenship (which few of us offer up to vote as it stands).

Anyway, Poilievre was telling a Senate committee, on April 8, 2014, that he understood then chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand disagreed with the bill, and that he disagreed with Mayrand, and that he was “at peace with it.”

I do hope you were sitting down for that bombshell.

July 23, 2024

The next phase of the campaign to replace “Orwellian” with “Trudeaupian”

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

On the Fraser Institute blog, Jake Fuss and Alex Whalen outline the Trudeau government’s latest attempt to drive the word “Orwellian” out of common usage by making “Trudeaupian” the more authoritarian descriptor:

A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 (and it’s been 40 years since the actual year 1984). In the novel, Orwell explains the dangers of totalitarianism by exploring what happens when government exercises extreme levels of control over citizens including censoring and controlling language. While Canada is a relatively free country in 2024, there are aspects of Orwell’s world reflected in government policy today.

The Human Freedom Index, published annually by the Fraser Institute and Cato Institute, defines freedom as a social concept that recognizes the dignity of individuals by the absence of coercive constraint. In a free society, citizens are free to do, say or think almost anything they want, provided it does not infringe on the right of others to do the same.

Canada currently fares relatively well compared to other countries on the Human Freedom Index, placing 13th out of 165 countries. However, our score has dropped six spots on the index since 2008 when Canada recorded its highest ever rank.

This is not surprising given the Trudeau government’s recent efforts to control and manage the free exchange of ideas. The recent Online Streaming Act imposes various content rules on major streaming services such as Netflix, and requirements to extract funds to be redirected toward favoured groups. The Act seemingly seeks to bring the entire Internet under the regulation of a government body.

In another piece of recent legislation, the Online News Act, the government attempted to force certain social media platforms to pay other legacy news outlets for carrying content. In response, the social media platforms chose simply not to allow content from those news providers on their platforms, resulting in a dramatic reduction of Canadians’ access to news.

Now, a new piece of federal legislation — Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act — seeks to control language and grant government power to punish citizens for what the government deems to be unfavourable speech.

The government has sold Bill C-63 as a way to promote the online safety of Canadians, reduce harms, and ensure the operators of social media services are held accountable. In reality, however, the bill is Orwell’s Big Brother concept brought to life, where government controls information and limits free exchange. The legislation seeks to punish citizens not just for what the governments deems as “hate speech” but also grants the state power to bring Canadians before tribunals on suspicion that they might say something hateful in the future. Not surprisingly, many have raised concerns about the constitutionality of the Bill, which will surely be tested in court.

Trudeau announced new submarines for the RCN … don’t assume he’s really serious

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Hub, J.L. Grantastein explains why Trudeau’s hasty commitment under pressure from our exasperated NATO allies is not likely to be met, and almost certainly not to be met fully:

HMCS Chicoutimi escorts Peoples Liberation Army (Navy) ships visiting Victoria on behalf of the Chinese military, 13 December 2016.
Photo: Cpl Carbe Orellana, MARPAC Imaging Services, ET2016-0468-03 ©2016 DND-MDN CANADA

Canada has no capacity to construct submarines, and the country’s shipyards are struggling to build destroyers, icebreakers, and supply ships. This means that submarines will need to be purchased from European or Asian shipyards with experience in building them. (There will be a certain irony if the RCN, having fought against U-boats in two world wars, ends up with German submarines.)

As of Trudeau’s announcement, let us be clear, no submarine design has been selected, and naval officers are said only to have been engaged in seeking the best models for the RCN. Given Canada’s broken defence procurement system, this is unlikely to be a quick process. The RCN may soon know what it wants but the bean counters will rule as they always do, and orders most likely will not be placed for at least three to five years.

Few expect that the Liberals will be in power in 2027, and if the Conservatives do form the government, it is worth noting that Pierre Poilievre has refused to commit to a date for Canada to meet its 2 percent pledge. New subs may not be an idea the Tories will accept.

If an old or new government does decide to continue with a submarine program, it is certain that a new conventional sub will cost at least $1 billion, many millions more to make it strong enough to operate for long periods in the Arctic, and millions more for its torpedoes, missiles, other weapons, radars, and electronic systems. The costs involved all but guarantee that 12 submarines are a pipedream — the RCN will be lucky to get four to six. Trudeau did not offer a timetable in his remarks, but it is highly unlikely that even a single submarine would be ready to go to sea before the early 2030s and the last by the 2040s.

Then there is the problem of manning a fleet of underwater vessels. The RCN has four Victoria-class boats now. These subs, purchased used from the Royal Navy, have not worked well, are constantly undergoing expensive repairs, and scarcely leave the dock. In other words, the crews have relatively little sea-going experience, the RCN is short of sailors already, and experienced mechanics and skilled technicians are in even shorter supply. Each sub will need more than sixty officers and sailors, and there must be at least three times that number on leave, on courses, or in training to support each crew.

There is little point in acquiring new submarines if there are no crews to sail in them, and with the fifteen new destroyers planned and just beginning construction, the senior service’s personnel needs must be a top priority. That need will not be met until the Canadian Armed Forces’ problems with recruitment are fixed, and that problem has bedevilled the military for decades. (I served on a Department of National Defence Special Committee in 1995 that advanced recommendations to improve recruiting, but nothing changed. Nothing has improved in the three decades since.)

Note that referring to the navy as “the senior service” is only appropriate when talking about Britain’s Royal Navy. The Royal Canadian Navy was established in 1910, long after the Canadian Army came into existence. I’m sure members of the RCN won’t mind if you make that mistake, however.

July 22, 2024

“Dissident Christianity”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Religion, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

While I don’t have a god in this fight, I find much to agree with Fortissax here as he responds to another writer’s commentary on modern western Christianity in an essay he titles “Spiteful Mutant Christians“:

Dijon viewed from Saint-Bénigne Cathedral with the Palace of the States of Burgundy, the Notre-Dame and Saint-Michel churches, the Saint-Nicolas tower, the former Saint-Bénigne abbey palace (ENSA), The Lafayette galleries, the old department stores at Le Pauvre Diable and la Ménagère.
Photo by Twibo2 via Wikimedia Commons (caption translated by Google Translate).

Admittedly, I’m not a fan of the majority of Christians on the right, particularly traditionalists on Substack. Before I open a salvo on them, I will say many of them are educated, well-written, and well-spoken. Many of them are respectable, as far as I know, often fathers of many children, who aspire to virtue. This is certainly better than a great many. Many of them have been in this business far longer than I have. Many of them are intelligent and offhand I enjoy many of their general insights. Overall, I wish them no ill will.

However, I’m inclined to believe they’re mostly out-of-touch, often Generation X or elder Millennials who caught the last chopper out of Vietnam and fundamentally don’t understand the socioeconomic or cultural reality of younger Millennials or Generation Z. Who are colourblind by their narrow fraternal environment of American ruralite post-postmodern Christians who seldom interact with people outside of their pseudo-collapsitarian communities. I say “pseudo” because they’re not crazed Libertarian doomsday preppers building bunkers with a hand shovel in the backwoods of Montana, but I’ve observed that the Christian Traditionalist tendency is “Quietism”. From what I understand about Quietism, this is the Christian tendency to be pacifistic, avoid all confrontation, completely abandon North American cities, urban or civil life, and retreat to what is a romanticist fantasy of pastoral agrarian landscape of isolated God-fearing communities, have a pint, and wait for this to all blow over. They’re convinced of the moral, ethical and philosophical superiority of their rural life, an desperately wait for the day they can starve the city boys out.

On that note, the worst and most obnoxious of them are former city slickers or suburbanites who move to the countryside, but that’s an entirely different argument, and I’m getting sidetracked. Perhaps my biggest criticism of the Christians is that they are extremely presumptuous people in “this thing we call” the Dissident Right.

They piggyback off the remnant adherence and nominal identification to Christianity among the irreligious populace who, if they attend church at all, attend churches that are completely captured by the deistic DEI God of Equity. They pretend their super-ultra esoteric Pageau Hermetic Catholicism, Christ-is-King MAGA communist groyper Christian “nationalism”, or “based warrior priest” Eastern European war footage Orthodoxy is the norm. They pretend that the bumbling Christian faithful know or understand half of what they discuss on Telegram, X, or Substack, and this gives them a false sense of security and inevitability. They speak with a false confidence that, to outsiders, would appear that they’re truly in the know, that everyone is in fact Christian, and it’s only a matter of time before everyone else is. This is completely out of touch with reality. If you look at who is Christian and who isn’t, you start to see the brutal picture. For simplicity’s sake, we will focus on North America and Western Europe, with the dividing line being the old NATO boundaries. Let’s break down the facts:

In 2024, the following percentages of national populations identified as Christian

  • Portugal: 84.8%
  • Italy: 83.8%
  • Denmark: 79%
  • Norway: 76.7%
  • United States: 65% (Pew Research Center)
  • Belgium: 65%
  • Canada: 53% (Pew Research Center)
  • Spain: 67%
  • Switzerland: 58.2%
  • United Kingdom: 59%
  • Germany: 57%
  • Netherlands: 43%
  • France: 63% (Pew Research Center)

On its face, you’d be inclined to believe that the majority of the Western world is Christian: God-fearing, church-going, has read and understands the Bible, and partakes in a community, correct? Wrong. The overwhelming majority of people who identify as Christian don’t go to church, and this is explained by baptisms at birth or early life inductions that never lead to anything. The real percentage of practising Christians is as follows, with Portugal hilariously being not even a quarter of what it claims, despite having the highest rate of identification.

In 2024, the following percentages of national populations regularly attending church.

  • Portugal: 19% (Catholic News Agency)
  • Austria: 14% (Catholic News Agency)
  • Spain: 13.4% (Wikipedia)
  • Italy: 20% (Catholic News Agency)
  • Germany: 9% (Catholic News Agency)
  • Netherlands: 7% (Catholic News Agency)
  • Switzerland: 5% (Wikipedia) (BFS Administrations Website)
  • France: 5% (Catholic News Agency)
  • Belgium: 5% (Catholic News Agency)
  • United Kingdom: 5% (Catholic News Agency)
  • Canada: 5% (CareyNieuwhof.com)
  • United States: 24% (weekly attendance) (ChurchTrac) (PRRI)
  • Norway: 3% (Catholic News Agency)
  • Sweden: 3% (Catholic News Agency)
  • Denmark: 3% (Catholic News Agency)

I was technically baptized Catholic, specifically because it was believed that I’d have greater access to educational opportunities, and not out of any genuine piety. I was given a choice at 3 years old to go to my first communion or watch Power Rangers. I’ve never read the Bible, save for two versions of half the book of Romans before putting it down, incredibly unimpressed with Paul failing to sell me on Christianity. My family has been irreligious for four generations. My province of origin, Quebec, is the most secular part of North America, and I’m proud of it. I don’t believe we can sever the influence of Christianity completely, and I don’t think we should. It is an integral part of our heritage, and we need to respect it. You can’t claim to honour your ancestors, or even western history without honouring Christianity. I do however believe that secularism gave the West an opportunity for a clean enough slate to find the definitive, ongoing unraveling of Truth. I chose hero worship. No honest person would say this makes them a Christian.

The purpose of bringing up these statistics is to perform a reality check. Christians are not the majority. Not in the general population, and not in the Dissident Right. Christians do not have a monopoly on morality. Christians do not have a monopoly on Truth. Christians completely lack the social capital and popular consensus to instigate the social policies they want in accordance with their faith on a civilizational scale. I believe that part of the issue is that the discourse is civilization-wide, but most of the Christianity is coming from North America, specifically the United States of America, where it represents a small and dwindling political faction of a broader conservative movement. There is not going to be a Fifth Great Awakening — their latest awakening as Greene himself would admit, is Wokism. A deistic Christian heresy. The public is not going to kneel, convert to disparate, squabbling denominations of Christianity marching in lockstep with Regimevangelicalism.

Blue Checkmark Christianity™ has recently signaled a green light to the millions of Global South Catholic faithful that it’s okay to illegally migrate to and trespass in Europe. The Hierophant has ordered His faithful to abide.

The fact of the matter is that Dissident Christians are a minority of a minority — they’re the equivalent of Sikhs in India. One percent of the population, and yet one loud, obnoxious voice giving all the impression they’re a bigger majority than they are. Christians like Misanthrope are as barely relevant as the degenerate neopagans and their profligate made up religions with zero legitimacy or antiquity. Hiding their views from their pastors, priests and the rest who attend their churches. It is an absolute LARP to speak with the audacity and arrogance that they do to the great secular majority, and or other groups who are attempting to cultivate faith with sincerity. You’d think if their truth was so self-evident, they’d be winning a whole lot more people, and the West would be Christian, but no. They’re going out the same way Zoroastrianism did, and after that, Hellenism, the state religion of the Roman Empire. Weak men, wicked priests, irreligiosity, bureaucratization of the liturgy, heretical reinterpretation of the word. I could go on.

July 21, 2024

“Since 2012, NATO has experienced a revival and a return to relevance that would make any washed up 80’s movie star turn green with envy”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Big Serge considers where NATO came from, where it is now, and where it might be going:

NATO, in its original conception, was designed to resolve a very particular security dilemma in Western Europe. In the immediate wake of World War Two, Western Europe — specifically Britain and France — had to consider how it might be possible to mount a defense against the colossal Soviet forces that were now conveniently forward deployed in Central Germany. The 1948 “Western Union Defense Organization” (WUDO), which included the aforementioned Anglo-French allies along with the Netherlands and Belgium, was created with an eye to this problem. With the rapid demobilization of American armies in Europe, however, it was obvious that this threadbare European alliance had dismal prospects in the unthinkable event of war with the Soviet Union. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the supreme commander of WUDO forces, was asked what the Soviets would it would take for the Red Army to attack and push through all the way to the Atlantic, and famously replied: “Shoes”.

NATO, therefore, was an attempt to resolve the total strategic overmatch on the European continent through two expedients. The first of these, obviously was America’s membership, which brought both formal American security commitments as well as permanent American military deployments in Europe. The second strategic boost provided by NATO concerned Germany. Even after being ravaged by war and dismembered by the allied occupation, Western Germany remained the most populous and potentially powerful state in Western Europe. From the beginning, it was clear (particularly to the Americans and the British) that any sustainable strategy for deterring or fighting the Red Army would have to make use of German manpower — but this implied, axiomatically, that West Germany would have to be economically rehabilitated and rearmed. The prospect of *intentionally* rearming Germany was immensely upsetting to the French, for obvious reasons given the events of 1940-44. [NR: And 1914-18, and especially, 1870-71.]

The first NATO summit conference

NATO thus solved two major obstacles to a sustainable and viable defense of Western Europe, in that it formally and permanently tied the United States into the European defense architecture, and it provided a mechanism to rearm West Germany without allowing for the possibility of a truly autonomous and revanchist German foreign policy.

In many ways, NATO can be seen as a total reversal of the Versailles system which had doomed Europe after the First World War by guaranteeing the Second. The interwar period saw the Anglo-French alliance pitted against an adversarial Germany without American assistance; NATO ensured American commitment to European defense and rehabilitated Germany into a valuable partner — providing the command architecture to rearm Germany and mobilize German resources without allowing Germany to conduct an independent foreign policy.

Thus, the popular formulation, coined by the first General Secretary of NATO, Lord Hastings Ismay, that NATO existed to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”. This statement, however, has frequently been misinterpreted. The idea of “keeping the Americans in” was not a plot by Washington to dominate the continent, but a contrivance by the Europeans to keep America engaged in their defense. As for “keeping the Germans down”, this is pithily stated but not entirely accurate — the entire point of adding West Germany to NATO was to allow it to rebuild and rearm in the interests of collective western defense. For the United States, NATO made sense as a way to mobilize European resources and calcify the “front” in Europe, in the context of a broader geopolitical struggle with the USSR.

This is what NATO was for. It was a mechanism for formalizing an American security commitment in Europe and mobilizing German resources to deter the USSR, and it worked — the frontline of the Cold War in Europe remained static up until the collapse of the Soviet Union due to the naïve and self-destructive political visions of one Mikhail Gorbachev.

But what is NATO for now? What purpose does it serve in the context of a broader American grand strategy? More to the point, does such a grand strategy exist, and is it coherent? These are questions worth asking.

LCBO strike reportedly settled

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A tentative deal was announced on Friday afternoon, then un-announced after the LCBO claimed the union had added financial demands to the return-to-work conditions after the contract itself had been agreed, and then on Saturday, re-announced. If the deal is ratified by the union, LCBO stores across Ontario should re-open on Tuesday.

It was the first LCBO strike in Ontario history, and it’s open to debate whether the union members will get all that much for their two-week unpaid break. The National Post‘s Chris Selley thinks not, calling it the “Stupidest. Strike. Ever.”

“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

A week into the strike, a scant 15 per cent of Ontarians told Leger marketing that shuttered LCBO outlets had “affected (them) personally”. Only 29 per cent said they felt the government should legislate or arbitrate LCBO workers back into stores as soon as possible. Eleven per cent said they didn’t even know the strike was happening. And 32 per cent said they had explored “alternative locations” to buy booze, of which there are nowadays myriad.

Many more explored those opportunities in week two of the strike, I suspect, as fridges and wine racks were depleted. That’s potentially bad news for the LCBO’s future retail market share. But you didn’t even need an alternative to the LCBO: With a few days’ planning you could get all your regular brands delivered for free. Delivery and wholesale options were running as normal. Restaurants and supermarkets supplied by the LCBO were still supplied, and though there were reports of empty shelves at some supermarkets, that wasn’t truer than normal at the one I visit.

[…]

So this all looks like a terrible miscalculation by union leadership on behalf of its members — both a fundamental misreading of who had leverage, and a bizarre tactical choice to make the strike first and foremost about expanding the sale of ready-to-drink cocktails and seltzers (RTDs) to supermarkets and convenience stores.

Not wages; not benefits; not the number of full-time positions — things people can at least relate to — but where you can and cannot buy a White Claw or a Caesar in a can. Did they really think people would care?

Near as I can tell, it was an attempt to make this about the LCBO’s retail future: RTDs are a big and growing slice of the alcohol market in Ontario, only accessible (before the strike) at the LCBO. OPSEU wanted us to believe that by allowing supermarkets to sell them, Ontario would make no profit on them. And that’s their baked-in advantage: An incredible number of Ontarians, including far too many journalists, cannot wrap their minds around the notion of the government taking its cut at wholesale rather than retail.

Still, this gambit clearly fell flat.

Update: Fixed broken link to NP.

July 20, 2024

QotD: Comparing gun crime in Canada and the United States

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That may explain the extraordinary amount of sucking up to Canada in this movie [Bowling for Columbine], which, while gratifying to insecure Canucks and self-loathing Americans, may be of less interest to third parties. Moore’s thesis, such as it is, is that America’s murder rate is the consequence not just of the country’s love of guns but of deeper currents of paranoia and fear in the American psyche. To that end, he crosses the Michigan border into Ontario, where one Canadian after another tells him that they don’t lock their doors. The level of guns per capita in Canada is similar to America but the murder rate is much, much lower. Ergo, it must be because Americans are living in fear while Canadians are much more socially progressive.

Whatever, dude. Unlike Moore, I have homes on both sides of the border and it’s the Quebec one I keep locked. By the time you read this, I’ll be in New York, but my home in New Hampshire will be unlocked, and so will my car at the airport, the key in the ignition, so I’ll know where to find it. By contrast, in Quebec it’s illegal to leave your car unlocked, even if you stop for a pee on an ice floe up by Hudson’s Bay. Pace Moore, Canada has vastly lower rates of handgun ownership. Long-gun ownership is much closer, but, statistically, Canadians are slightly more murderous than Americans in this sphere: in the US, there are 1.7 homicides per 100,000 long guns; in Canada, it’s 1.9. So European visitors to North America should be aware they’re more likely to be killed by a homicidal Canadian rifleman than an American one.

On the overall murder rate, if Moore’s interested in “cultural differences”, it seems odd that he should avoid the most obvious one. Alberta Report‘s Colby Cosh, a braver man than I, points out that black Americans are 13 per cent of the US population but commit over half the murders. Once you factor those out, non-black Americans murder at about the same rate as Canadians.

Mark Steyn, “Bowling for Columbine”, Steyn Online, 2002-11-30.

July 19, 2024

The rise of the reactionaries – Gen X poised to pounce and seize

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

Andrew Potter tries to explain why Gen X are much more likely to support conservative policies than the groovy fossil Boomers and the painfully Socialized Millennials and GenZ’ers:

Generation X Word Cloud Concept collage background
Best Motivation Blog: What Generation Is X

As North American politics continues its rightward lurch, it is becoming increasingly commonplace to note the outsized role of Gen Xers in pushing this trend. In 2022, a Politico essay tried to explain “How Gen X became the Trumpiest generation“. That same year, an essay in Salon lamented how “of course Gen X was always going to sell out and vote Republican”. Writing in The Line last year, Rahim Mohamed wondered “how Generation MTV became Generation GOP?” These aren’t outliers – there is a whole sub genre of cultural commentary devoted to trying to explain just why Gen Xers are so right wing, compared to both their Boomer predecessors and the Millennials and Zs who followed.

This raises a couple of questions, the first of which is: is it even true? And if so, why?

On the facts of the matter, it appears that members of Generation X are, on the whole, more conservative than other generations, and this is especially true in the United States. For the past three or four years, polls have consistently shown that Gen Xers are more likely to see the country as going in the wrong direction, more likely to disapprove of Joe Biden, and more likely to support Donald Trump and vote Republican, than any other generational cohort. And while every generation tends to become more conservative as it ages, it is a tendency that accelerated under Gen X.

Pollsters have found similar support for these trends in Canada. An Abacus survey conducted last August found Gen Xers had the highest level of support for the Conservatives, with 41 per cent of those surveyed intending to vote CPC. And just this past June, the pollster Frank Graves released a series of charts tracking sentiment in Canada on a number of issues, including national attachment, social cohesion, and voter intention. He found significant intergenerational discord, with members of Gen X showing the highest level of support for smaller government, and Gen X males having the highest level of support for the CPC.

So why is this the case? How did the generation that fought (and won) the first culture war against conservatives, that launched the antiglobalization movement, that made heroes out of left wing icons like Kurt Cobain and Naomi Klein, become the most right wing cohort of all? Did we follow our Boomer parents’ hippies-to-yuppies trajectory in selling out? Or is there something else at work, beyond crass financial self-interest?

There’s probably at least something to be said for the “crass self-interest” angle. Despite the long-standing claim to being the first generation to do worse than their parents, the truth is, Gen X is raking it in. Starting right around the pandemic, Canadian Gen Xers quietly overtook Boomers as the generation with the highest average household net worth. It may also explain why alone amongst the generations, members of Gen X list “cost of living” as their most salient political issue, in contrast with both the older and younger cohorts who identify things like climate change, health care, and the environment as the most important issues facing Canada.

July 18, 2024

An elite luxury belief – “Diversity Is Our Strength”

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

In a guest-post at Postcards from Barsoom, Spaceman Spiff lists some of the cargo cult notions that have captured the imagination of many “elites” in western nations, like “Diversity Is Our Strength“:

Multiculturalism is pursued in Western countries with a religious mania. It is difficult to imagine anything closer to a belief system for today’s upwardly mobile professional than advocating for diversity and inclusion.

Most of the world views ethnic and cultural mixing as a dangerous, civilization ending activity. A threat to be guarded against, not an opportunity to be embraced. This has been the conventional view throughout history in almost every society.

The modern Western formulation has challenged this. Mixing cultures, especially those hostile to assimilation, is not just to be tolerated but encouraged. Alien peoples must be sought out and imported to increase the ethnic and cultural mix. We must extend every courtesy to those fundamentally incompatible with us in customs and manners. The ultimate expression of this ambition is open borders, a concept viewed with deep hostility by almost all non-Western countries.

Whatever the origins of such policies, the implementers of these ideas are everywhere. They work in corporations, public sector bodies, and NGOs. We find them in Starbucks and Walmart. Diversity is everywhere even though it makes little sense as an end in itself.

How do we explain the enthusiasm with which middle managers and HR workers have embraced such a destructive idea, including its corporate version of job and education quotas?

Competency itself can be hard to find even in ideal conditions, so why hobble your chances like this? Why intentionally seek to create brittle heterogeneous environments that reduce productivity and increase strife?

The simple answer is that sophisticates don’t succumb to primitive notions like preferring their own. These are urges to be resisted, like hunger while dieting. Racism is old hat and any noticing of differences is racism. After all, our elites do not behave like this, so the goal is to be observably anti-racist, just like them.

Some look at our globalist elites and see them mixing with an international set. As they hobnob around the world they certainly socialize with foreigners. Indian elites, Arab elites, and Chinese elites all mix with their Western equivalents. We see them at events like Davos or the global climate change meetings. A multicoloured constellation of traitors from every country, all getting along with each other because they are nothing like their fellow countrymen, and everything like each other.

What the dullards in the corporate HR world miss is that this is not a celebration of diversity. Most of those elites are nearly identical. Many attended the same universities. All speak English, the international language. They have similar views, including contempt for their respective compatriots.

There is no diversity at the very top, just an elitist outlook most of them share, and contempt for the peasants who surround them. White, brown, or black, we all look the same from the cultural stratosphere. Cannon fodder for their Olympian ideas, but nothing more. The elite view of mass migration is indifference, not enthusiasm.

The street-level version takes the superficial aspects of this phenomenon and worships it as the end goal since the underlying homogeneity of the elites is largely absent. Their goal is not to seek out that which we have in common with others but the less sophisticated observation of what makes us different, what makes us more “diverse.”

The midrange talent in the West have therefore convinced themselves celebrating overt differences in the form of multiculturalism is modernity. It is the future promised by Star Trek and other communist dreams. Colour won’t matter, just like Martin Luther King promised, so long as we overlook the long predicted consequences of their dream, the lowered wages, the erosion of trust and the eventual polarization of competing groups within our own nations we once kept at bay with more considered immigration policies.

July 14, 2024

Japan’s New Defense plan, 100 million dead – WW2 – Week 307 – July 13, 1945

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, China, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2024

Japan is aware that soon enough the Allies will invade the Home Islands, and they will mobilize absolutely everything and everyone they can for their defense plan, “The Glorious Death of the 100 Million”. In the meantime, Allied carrier forces keep hitting them, the Australian advance on Borneo continues, the Chinese advance on Guilin continues, the Allied rebuilding of Okinawa continues, and American preparations are nearly complete for a test detonation of an atomic bomb.
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When the Ontario Progressive Conservatives backed away from LCBO privatization

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

In the National Post, Terence Corcoran posts an excerpt from last year’s The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier edited by Alister Campbell:

“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Almost 30 years ago, in 1995, the Ontario Progressive Conservative government led by Mike Harris promised to privatize the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). “We will sell off some assets, such as the LCBO,” said the party’s famed election document, the Common Sense Revolution (CSR). The LCBO could have been a true privatization — a full-fledged divestiture of a government monopoly into a new open and competitive market, but it never happened.

The failure to privatize the LCBO, lamentable from a consumer and economic perspective, remains a significant lost opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of privatization. If Harris had successfully de-monopolized the alcohol market, the whole concept of privatization would have been given a major boost. Instead, the government backed away from privatization of the alcohol market, preferring instead to allow the corporation to substitute modern marketing and retail razzle-dazzle to give the false impression it was offering the public the best of all worlds.

The LCBO failure is also a demonstration of the degree to which the Common Sense Revolution’s starting principles fell short in grasping the essential benefits of private versus public ownership and control. Neo-liberalism isn’t exactly a fine science. The Wikipedia entry on “Neo-liberalism” is a 30-page effort (including 400 footnote links to hundreds of warring academic papers), reflecting an economic and ideological scramble that dates back more than a century. But when the Harris government came to power, major elements of the free-market model were often overshadowed by fiscal policy objectives. With the LCBO, the Harris government veered off the neo-liberal course in pursuit of standard political objectives.

In 1995, the LCBO was a government owned and operated province-wide corporation that controlled liquor and wine wholesale and retail markets. Another private monopoly player, the Beer Store chain, while owned and operated by the brewing industry, was also essentially a government-sanctioned beer monopoly. The CSR neo-liberal objective should have been to privatize the alcohol market by selling the LCBO, deregulating the Beer Store monopoly and allowing beer sales through supermarkets and even corner stores. More importantly, dismantling the LCBO would allow other corporations to enter the alcohol retail business and provide consumers much more choice, which has been the Alberta experience. Notably, Alberta achieved a successful and deregulated approach without sacrificing provincial revenues.

The neo-liberal objective of privatization is to benefit consumers and enhance economic productivity through competition. Instead, the Harris government fell into the fiscal policy trap that routinely captures politicians, bureaucrats and corporate insiders. Instead of aiming to benefit consumers, the objective soon became how to maximize the fiscal return to government. Never mind the consumer and the market. The objective became preserving — and enhancing — government revenues.

At the time, anti-privatization advocates frantically pointed at the Alberta experience of privatization of their provincial liquor monopoly, which (briefly) generated a lot of retail horror stories that Ontario newspapers gleefully republished (and, likely, emphasized out of proportion to the actual Alberta market). You can still hear Ontarians casting aspersions on the Alberta market as if nothing at all had changed after the initial rough patch. From what I’ve heard from Albertans, they have far wider choices of alcoholic beverages in stores much more conveniently sited with better open hours than anyone in Ontario enjoys. The Alberta government still gets at least as much in tax revenues from alcohol sales without needing to be in the distribution or retail business. It doesn’t seem to be the utter disaster that Ontario media portrays it to be … rather the contrary.

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