This sort of thing is, to put it mildly, not good. There are at least three major problems with cancel culture. First, almost anyone could be cancelled, on the basis of the (claimed) standards prevalent on the modern “social justice” left. Secondly, cancellation tends in practice to be a non-random process targeted at political and ideological opponents, rather than a genuine attempt at a new moral standard. Finally, and most importantly, the declaration by wokesters that many conversations are now simply off-limits prevents the communication of important information that would make it possible for citizens better to judge the arguments of movements like Black Lives Matter.
While not the most important, the first of these points is the most relevant on a day-to-day basis. Without endorsing these behaviours, the plain fact is that the huge majority of people have probably at some point told an ethnic or regional joke, sent a pornographic or un-PC snap, had sex while intoxicated, used a slur tied to sexual orientation / race / gender online or in the lockerroom, worn a St Paddy’s Day or Cinco de Mayo outfit they would really prefer a mulligan on, or committed other Cardinal Sins against Wokeness. As a result of this, many young people are intently aware that Twitter and Facebook wars involving the unearthing of old content generally end with egg on the face of everyone involved. Caucasian NBA point guard Donte DeVincenzo was humiliated in late 2018 by the revelation that – at age 14 – he had described his hoops handle as “ballin’ on these nig*as like I’m Derrick Rose”. He ended up deleting his entire social-media presence. The point of monitoring this sort of thing, for the many people and organisations that do so, is not punishing the tiny minority of real racists and abusers out there so much as keeping normal citizens too terrified by the potential unearthing of past indiscretions to comment lustily on the issues of the day.
The fact that virtually anyone could in fact “legitimately” be cancelled leads into extreme partisan hypocrisy. While anyone who attended church as a lad might correctly suspect that the hard right is capable of similar behaviour, cancellers today are overwhelmingly concentrated on the “social justice” left – and they are, at least occasionally, reluctant to eat their own. This often results in remarkable and hilarious double standards. In February 2018, for example, liberal Virginia governor Ralph Northam – nicknamed “Coonman” – escaped any serious censure after he was revealed to have apparently appeared in a mid-1980s high-school yearbook photo wearing shoe-polish blackface.
To be fully fair to Northam, the same photo included a student dressed in full white robes as a Ku Klux Klansman, and CNN has noted that Northam has never actually said “whether he was wearing the Ku Klux Klan outfit or [the] blackface”. Oh, fair enough. At any rate, he serves as governor of Virginia today. Not to be outdone by any of his neighbors to the south, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was revealed that same year to have worn black- and brown-face several times, and as late as 2001, once apparently painting his entire body to appear in costume as Aladdin at an Arabian Nights revue! He, too, remains solidly entrenched in office today.
Wilfred Reilly, “They can’t cancel all of us”, Spiked, 2020-06-17.
September 19, 2020
September 16, 2020
The Canadian echo chamber on American political issues
Ben Woodfinden’s latest for The Dominion looks at the weird effects political passions in the United States have on political stances in Canada:
Restricted and prohibited weapons seized by Toronto police in a 2012 operation. None of the people from whom these weapons were taken was legally allowed to possess them.
Screen capture from a CTV News report.
Participatory media increasingly defines and shapes our discourse. It submerges us in a broader reality but only does so by filtering it into a digital reality that offers a distorted reflection rather than picture of the real world. This has been going on for at least a decade now, but the pandemic has accelerated this transformation of our discourse and politics. By locking us in our homes the pandemic forces us to view the world through a digital lens even more than we already did, and in a world where we’re all viewing everything through our screens that digital reality becomes closer and closer to our primary reality.
One of the specific, and most pernicious effects of this, as I lamented in The Critic is that it turns us all into online Americans participating in their politics through the digital medium, rendering us virtual participants and not just foreign observers. I won’t repeat myself too much, I’d recommend just reading the piece [link], but the online realm is American, and what digital politics does is make politics everywhere more American. We participate in it as a game and a form of entertainment. This bleeds back into our own politics.
Americanized Discourse
Gun politics is one particular political issue where Americanized discourse is most pronounced. It captures perfectly how Americanization plays out. Every time there is some sort of tragic shooting or discussion of gun violence in Canada the debates play out in depressingly predictable ways. Progressives and Liberals paint a picture in which Canada suffers from the kind of rampant gun violence and mass proliferation of firearms as in America. This is the framing used to justify often highly symbolic or ineffective new gun laws and restrictions that, while often not all that effective, make the Liberals and progressives seem like the party for gun control in the face of this rampant violence. But only if you pretend we live in America.
And it’s not just the Liberals and progressives who play this game. Listen to some of the more vocal advocates of “gun rights” in Canada and you’d think we have a second amendment in the Charter. One side wants to make it seem like Canadians are walking around with and easily able to acquire assault weapons, the other side wishes it were so! The reality of course lies somewhere in between. Gun possession is heavily regulated, but lawful citizens can still buy firearms if they want to, and there is no explicit right in the Charter that prevents the government from regulating and restricting firearms. Talking about gun “rights” in Canada is itself quite a foreign and imported concept. At the same time we don’t have an epidemic of gun violence, and while we have experienced some horrific mass shootings, like the recent Nova Scotia tragedy, gun violence in Canada pales in comparison to the United States.
But because both sides are essentially happy to help paint a phantasmic picture of gun violence and/or gun regulations in Canada, we end up with a surreal politics around guns. Sensible debates around guns are made harder by this because debates take place on top of a framing and narrative that draws explicitly on American political culture more than it does Canada’s. Both sides want to take on American roles and are happy to contribute to this framing.
Gun politics is just one example, and there are so many others. Our discourse is so often built around framings that make it seem as if the issues and political cleavages here are indistinguishable from American ones, but it only happens because we import American framing and narratives into our own discourse and then build are arguments around these phantasms. We, like many other countries around the world, are in the middle of a moment of racial reckoning, or whatever you want to call it, because of something that happened in Minneapolis, not in Canada.
Racism is a real thing in Canada, no honest person should deny this, because there is racism in absolutely every country and society. But in the wake of George Floyd’s killing we ended up having a conversation about racism that reflected the particular ways racism works in America.
Lockdown justification theories
In the most recent Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reports on a demonstration last month in London organized by Piers Corbyn which resulted in Corbyn being almost instantly fined £10,000 despite other, larger and more violent demonstrations not drawing any kind of judicial sanctions:
David Icke about to speak at Piers Corbyn’s 20 August anti-masking demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
Screencap from YouTube video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOZQ58uTWdw
The consensus at the demonstration appears to have been that the Coronavirus is some kind of fraud, and that the laws to stop its spread are really intended to carry us into a nightmarish New World Order tyranny. I disagree with this view. I believe instead that, looking back from one or two years, the Coronavirus Panic will be seen as a disaster for at least the British ruling class, and as somewhere between a blessing and nothing very bad for the majority of everyone else.
For the avoidance of doubt, I have no belief in the goodness of our ruling class. The Labour Party represents a new and hegemonic Establishment. The project of this Establishment is to bring about changes that are meant to be fatal to the traditional peoples of my country, and that will not be to the advantage of the groups they are supposed to raise up. Whether this project is evil or deluded is beside my present point, though it is probably something of both. There are two possible views of the Conservative Party. It may be worth supporting because, though willing to see it roll forward of its own momentum, the leaders do not want to hurry the project forward, but are mainly interested in personal enrichment. Or it may be a Potemkin opposition — gathering votes from the discontented, while self-consciously making sure those votes are wasted. Again, the exact truth is beside my present point. What does matter is that we go into every election less free and less at home in our country than at the previous election.
This being admitted, there is a loose connection between me and the speakers and attendees at Mr Corbyn’s demonstration. At the same time, there is a difference between cynicism and paranoia. As a cynic, I do not believe that everything untoward that happens is there to hurry the project of change. I do not believe that our ruling class is in charge of everything. I do not believe that it understands everything. Whatever its origin, the Coronavirus appears to have driven our various rulers into a genuine panic. Yes, Boris Johnson is a fool, and there is an army of the powerful who wanted an excuse to stop our final departure from the European Union. Yes, the Democrats were looking to upstage Donald Trump in time for the next American election. But this has not been a panic in just two countries. The Japanese cancelled their Olympic Games — losing them for the second time in eighty years. The Chinese brought four decades of economic growth to an end. The Indians and South Africans panicked. So did most of the Europeans. The panic was joined by ruling classes with no visible interest in putting the dreams of the Frankfurt School into practice.
Focussing on my own country, what ruling class institution has benefitted from the Coronavirus Panic? Look beyond the propaganda, and it is plain that the response of the National Health Service was a disgrace. Myriads of diagnoses and treatments were cancelled without good reason. We still have no dentistry. The public sector as a whole went on paid leave for six months. The schools closed and the teachers vanished — no great loss there, of course. Even if none goes bankrupt, dozens of universities will need to downsize — no loss there either. The police behaved throughout like fascist goons. Every institution set up or adapted to advance the project of change has emerged from the past six months revealed as broken and covered in ridicule. What sort of a planned crisis is it that ends in magnified cynicism and in paranoia that can fill Trafalgar Square on a Bank Holiday weekend? The general mood in this country is approaching what you see at the end of a lost war.
Or what associated commercial interests have benefitted? The politicised entertainment media is flat on its back. The commercial property sector is entering a melt-down. House prices in all the nice parts of London are going into a downward spiral. Public finances will be squeezed for years to come; and, given a choice between projects of change and a liveable dole, the electors are likely to make their wishes undeniable. Globalised patterns of trade have been disrupted, raising question marks over all the presiding global institutions. The last thing financial services needed was another big shock. As for the commercial beneficiaries, these are libertarian by default. For all that can be said against them, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have opened the media to anyone who knows how to use a computer keyboard. Their turn to corporate censorship has, at every step, been a response to outside pressure. Every one of these turns has been half-hearted and driven by a natural, if not always creditable, desire to continue growing richer. There is no particular benefit for the American and British ruling classes if Mr Bezos becomes a trillionaire and Richard Branson ceases to be a billionaire.
On a related note, Jay Currie points out that the media’s current laser-intense focus on reporting Wuhan Coronavirus cases allows the narrative to continue relatively undisturbed and which might be totally overthrown if they reported instead on deaths from the Chinese Batflu (H/T to David Warren for that useful epithet):
In the UK, France, Ontario and various other jurisdictions COVID case counts have risen at an alarming rate in the past few weeks. Unfortunately, mandatory masking and strict lockdowns seem to be the only tools governments feel they have in the face of case count surges.
It can be argued that the increasing case counts may be an artifact of more testing. Or a product of the sensitivity of the tests themselves; but the actual case numbers keep going up.
Our media, God bless them, at a national level seem to be entirely focused on case counts to the point where, in this CBC story on Ontario’s numbers, there is simply no mention of the “death count”.
Why could this be? Well, take a look at these two graphs from Ontario:
If you look at the top graph the sky is falling and masks, social distance, lockdowns, school closures and “stay at home” all make a lot of sense. If you look at the bottom graph, COVID is over.
In Montreal over this last weekend up to 100,000 people marched against mandatory masks. The mainstream media downplayed the turnout and suggested that there were all sorts of conspiracy theorists, Qanon believers, far right and Trump supporters marching. There probably were. But I suspect the vast majority of the marchers were responding to the disproportionate response of the Quebec government to graphs which look very much like Ontario’s.
People are more than willing to go along with governmental measures they can see the point of. “14 days to flatten the curve and prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed” made sense back in April. And the measures taken then may well have worked. But it is mid-September and the hospitals and their ICUs are not even slightly overtaxed.
September 13, 2020
Are the Kielburgers fleeing before the real story breaks?
Ted Campbell listened to an Evan Solomon radio report recently and spells out the key points:
The Kielburgers, he notes are neither newcomers nor naifs. Mark Kielburger is a Rhodes Scholar and Craig Kielburger has, he say, “been rubbing shoulders with politicians since he was 12 years old.” They have, Mr Solomon says, been selling the “halo effect” to politicians and other celebrities, a list which he tells us includes Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Erin O’Toole and the “halo effect” says, in effect, if you come out and make us look good then we, being a famous, big-league charity will make you look good, too. It’s all part of an astute marketing plan.
But then Evan Solomon gets to the real question: if Tylenol, he says, can survive a scandal in which people died then why are the Kielburgers reacting so dramatically to what is, really, on the surface, a minor league scandal? So the Kielburgers paid Margaret Trudeau a few hundred thousand dollars to make a few charity appearances, is that such a big deal? I mean the Trudeaus are wealthy, aren’t they? They can’t be bought, can they? Well, most if us don’t have million dollar plus trust funds and most of us didn’t earn $450,000 in speaking fees in a year, but the Trudeau family is unlikely to have just forgotten about $250,000 in speaking fees paid to Margaret Trudeau. Bill Morneau may have forgotten about owning a villa in France, but unlike the Trudeaus, Mr Morneau is rich … really rich. So are the Kielburgers. The commercial property part of their WE empire, alone, is worth $50 Million. Could a few thousands dollars per appearance (she made 28 over four years, about one every couple of months) paid to Margaret Trudeau really threaten the entire WE empire?
[…]
My guess, and that’s all it is, is that there is real fear in the WE boardrooms and in WE’s legal department that Prime Minister Trudeau might be guilty of something more than just conflict of interest. Someone like Pierre Poilievre or the Lobbying Commissioner, for example, might think that further, deeper investigations are needed and those questions might lead investigators to look more deeply into why and how Justin Trudeau and the Kielburger brothers, themselves, cooked up the idea of WE Charity running a multi-hundred-million-dollar government programme and then trying to cover-up the whole thing.
Might those questions be enough to bring Justin Trudeau down?
Might those questions be enough to threaten the Kielburgers’ fortunes, even their freedom?
“Systemic racism” in Canada
At The Line, a useful examination of what is meant in the Canadian context by the term “systemic racism”:
Can we go back one step? “Systemic racism.” Let’s start there: which system? The legal system? Our social welfare system? The policing system? The media? Our corporations? All of human society? Are we talking about Canadian society, or North American society as whole? Are there geographic limits to the systems we’re talking about? Is China systemically racist?
Let’s break this down further: what definition of “racism” are we using? Are we using the old definition whereby any bigotry based on skin colour is “racist”? Or are we engaging the new definition, where “racism” is an expression of structural power — and, therefore, only white people can be racist because only they hold structural power?
It’s impossible to fix a problem if we can’t come to a common understanding about plain meanings of the terms we are using. Vague in, vague out.
There are many statements of “systemic racism” that we, at The Line, would have no qualms agreeing with, i.e.; “The Indian Act is a clear example of systemic racism in Canadian law.” That isn’t a controversial position — but it also isn’t an unclear one. Asserting a belief in “systemic racism” sounds like a broadly agreeable thing to do, but the term is loaded with meaning and ideological baggage that is not immediately apparent.
Take, for example, a claim that Canadian society is systemically racist because it is structured at all levels to favour white dominance — and that any disparity of outcome between racial groups is proof of that fact. Well, that’s a much more all-encompassing ideological position, isn’t it? There’s a perfectly legitimate framework for critique in here, but there’s also a lot to unpack.
It’s easy to find legitimate examples of systemic racism while leaving the actual meaning and implications of the term both vague and tautological. But if we’re going to use statement of belief in “systemic racism” as some kind of litmus test for political acceptability, the clear meaning of the term matters.
In the absence of that clarity, using it as a gotcha question and backing people in public life into reciting this stuff as if it were some kind of statement of faith comes off as not a little creepy.
September 11, 2020
Canadian government heading toward “the worst of all worlds on Internet regulation”
Michael Geist on the bull-headed determination of the Canadian federal government — and specifically Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault — to “solve” a problem by introducing savagely anti-consumer internet regulations:
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.
The harm that will come from these policy choices is difficult to overstate. By focusing the tax burden on sales taxes rather than technology company revenues, consumer costs will go up and the company profits will be left untouched. The CRTC powers will lead to years of hearings and follow-on litigation, yielding few tangible benefits for creators. The mandated Cancon contributions will spark trade wars and make Canada a less attractive market for new services leading to fewer choices and less competition, while the link licensing requirement will result in blocked sharing of news articles on social media sites that hurts both Canadians and media organizations. All the while, the issues that really matter – privacy, anti-competitive behaviour, online hate, misinformation, a fair share of tech corporate profits – are left largely untouched.
How did the government end up with the worst of all worlds on Internet regulation?
The starting point was the 2015 election in which it committed to no new Netflix taxes (prompted by a Conservative pledge on the issue) and subsequent consultations on everything from copyright to digital cultural policy. The result was then-Heritage Minister Melanie Joly struggling to honour the no-tax commitment, while satisfying increasingly vocal demands from some stakeholders for one. Those calls increased after the results of her cultural policy consultation were released, which largely focused on a rejection of new Internet taxes and support for net neutrality.
In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, worries about Russian election interference, and Christchurch massacre broadcast live online, the policy winds shifted and the government was clearly looking to become more active on the Internet regulation file. That led to Election Act provisions that were generally viewed as successful. It also paved the way for a 2019 election platform that was far aggressive on social media and the Internet, with commitments to address everything from privacy to hate speech online.
[…]
If the government were to address the real concerns, there would be long-overdue privacy reforms, a more aggressive approach on competition issues, measures to address online hate and misinformation, and pursuit of a global agreement on fair taxation of technology company revenues. If it wants to support increased film production from indigenous groups or help the news sector, it can make those policy choices and use general tax revenues without creating a massive regulatory infrastructure.
Instead, it is turning to the harmful policies noted above that raise consumer costs (digital sales taxes), regulate online Cancon with mandated spending requirements (even though the industry has record production led by Netflix), dispense with any pretense of maintaining net neutrality, lead to blocked sharing of news articles (mandated licence for social media sites merely for linking to news content), and result in services avoiding the Canadian market (market interference in payments from services such as Spotify). Much of this will be overseen by the newly empowered CRTC, leading to lengthy hearings that primarily benefit lawyers. After having badly mishandled Canadian digital policy, the government now seems content to take a pass on the important issues and leave the controversial non-issues to the regulator and the courts.
September 7, 2020
Public compliance with masking rules
David Warren on the temptation for public health officials to treat the citizenry as slightly dim children who need direct supervision by enlightened public health officials:
“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
The present danger — the Red Chinese Wuhan Laboratory Batflu — is visible everywhere thanks to state-mandated muzzles or batmasks. We are now in the sixth month of “fifteen days to flatten the curve,” and I’ve noticed that these filthy mouth-pieces have become another urban environmental blight, on a scale even worse than the sidewalk basketball bouncers I recently decried. I spotted four discarded Batflu-spreaders on the sidewalk during a walk of less than one city block yesterday, to a deadbeat “supermarket” to fetch milk for my tea.
I’m sure these cloth garottes are choking our Blanding’s Turtles — already considered endangered by our provincial bureaucracy because less than one in a thousand of their eggs ever hatch, and then the adults try to cross country roads. Call up a picture of one on the Internet, and gentle reader will see that they are all apparently wearing yellow batmasks on their chins, in compliance with guvmint regulations. For if they took them off, they would risk being confused with another turtle species that might not be Protected.
But while my affection for Blanding’s Turtles, and empathy in light of their persecution by Ontario motorists, is of long standing — a friend proposes that we found a Blanding Lives Movement — I am even more concerned about the fate of our children. The Batflu has been discouragement enough, to those who may never reach maturity, but the spectacular success of the Nanny State effort to keep them socially atomized and in muzzles, portends innumerable (fake) “pandemics” to come. For what faceless time-server, “dressed in a little authority,” can resist an opportunity to treat the general population as if they were retarded children? Especially now, that the general population has shown it will comply?
According to an item that somehow slipped into the New York Times, only a tiny fraction of the much-publicized Batflu deaths were attributed to the Batflu alone, on death certificates sampled from across the Natted States. By this focus, the “pandemic” toll is reduced from the official number of 187,777 (I just checked this morning), to about 9,200. Of course, the commie and never-Trumper meejah have gone splenetic to “cancel” this interesting fact. It is as bad as the French study which showed that your one-in-ten-thousand chance of dying with the Batflu in that country is cut a further five times if you happen to smoke. Or the Hydroxychloroquine scandal, in which Mister Trump suggested (correctly) that a simple anti-malaria drug, already mass-produced and dirt cheap because long out of patent, can cut it by a few times more.
Who Was Leif Erikson?
Atun-Shei Films
Published 9 Oct 2019Happy Leif Erikson Day! Allow me to regale you with the saga of the daring Viking who sailed to North America five hundred years before Columbus (that hack) and called it Vinland. We all know his name and his famous deeds – but what sort of man was Leif Erikson?
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September 5, 2020
Kareem Shaheen on the shame of mask-shaming
In The Line, Kareem Shaheen — who is a mask-wearer and was one before they were made mandatory — explains why shaming anti-maskers is a terrible way to encourage compliance, but a great way to virtue-signal:
“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
The mask shaming mirrors the way social media has warped our culture. The Twitter and ‘gram “in crowd” flaunt its mask use to demonstrate an ostensibly superior grasp of morals and science — and to bully those who don’t follow its cues. Those who perceive themselves to be on the outside of this circle can’t help but cringe at the manipulation and grandstanding behind these seemingly well-intentioned gestures.
Mask resistance, then, becomes a virtue signal of its own.
And, of course, Twitter itself has been a cesspool of counter-productive shame. Back in July, the hashtag #NoMasks trended, which gave the illusion of a groundswell of opposition against mandatory masking laws. But an analysis by First Draft, a nonprofit based in the United Kingdom, examined 8,000 Twitter accounts that used the hashtag. It found that the majority of people who tweeted #NoMasks were actually pro-mask. Their condemnation of the supposed anti-mask contingent actually boosted #NoMasks, bringing more people in contact with related conspiracy theories and arguments against wearing masks.
The moralizing is all the more galling because our own governments were forced to do an embarrassing about-face on their efficacy.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, health agencies in Canada and the United States recommended against wearing masks because there was insufficient evidence that they could prevent the spread of the virus, remember? They said that masks would provide a sense of false security, and suggested that we were all too dumb to know how to wear them properly.
This despite widespread use of masks in Asia, and while there was a growing consensus in hard-hit parts of Europe that they were effective and necessary.
With so much confused messaging, it’s no mystery that so many people are now skeptical about wearing masks. Sure, some of the most ardent mask-haters are also Q-Anon-spouting, anti-vaxxer crystal-healing masks-are-fascism conspiracy theorist kooks. But not all them fit that description.
And the problem with all of this is that if you’re actually trying to convince people to wear masks — as opposed to merely demonstrating your own superior morality via the veil — shame is one of the least effective methods of persuasion.
Chinese 7.62mm Sten Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 May 2020http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
During World War Two, Canada supplied some 73,000 Sten guns (made by the Long Branch arsenal) to Chinese Nationalist forces in an effort to help them fight the Japanese. These Stens were standard MkII pattern guns, chambered for the 9x19mm Parabellum cartridge. However, many of these were eventually converted to 7.62mm Tokarev ammunition, especially after the victory of the Communist forces over the Nationalists. The conversion involved a new barrel and new magazine and magazine well. The 7.62mm barrels were typically longer than the original ones, and the magazine of choice was that of the PPS-43. Some were done by installed a magazine adapter into the original magazine well, and some (like this one) were done by cutting off the original magazine well and replacing it with a new one. In addition, some Sten guns were made domestically in China, both in 9mm and 7.62mm. The 7.62mm Tokarev cartridge was popular both from Russian pistols and submachine guns and also from China’s long military use of the dimensionally-identical 7.63mm Mauser cartridge in C96 pistols.
Many thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to film and disassemble this interesting submachine gun! The NFC collection there — perhaps the best military small arms collection in Western Europe — is available by appointment to researchers:
https://royalarmouries.org/research/n…
You can browse the various Armouries collections online here:
https://royalarmouries.org/collection/
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
September 3, 2020
Fallen Flag — The Great Northern Railway
This month’s Classic Trains featured fallen flag is an American railway that definitely deserved to call itself “great”, James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway. Hill was noteworthy as the only “Robber Baron” of that era who was scrupulous in avoiding government entanglements (including grants, loans, subsidies, and other forms of money-with-political-strings-attached), building his entire railway system using private funds and rational profit-oriented economic decision-making (the other transcontinental lines often over-built to claim higher subsidies or added money-losing branch lines to please powerful politicians). The result was that when economic hard times hit the railway business, his was the only transcontinental that never needed to declare bankruptcy.
In an earlier post, Dane Stuhlsatz summarized the GN’s engineering:
Hill’s line […] was methodically surveyed and built, on the shortest routes possible, with the least gradient possible, and using the best steel and other materials on the market at the time. Rather than political largess, Hill made his decisions based on profit and loss. But, for all the efficiency that Hill built into his line — he was able to transport across the country faster, cheaper, and with less maintenance costs than could the UP and CP — arguably the most important aspect for the viability of his business was the freedom to conduct business untethered by the strings that accompanied government subsidies.
Route map of the Great Northern Railway, circa 1920. Red lines are Great Northern trackage; dotted lines are other railroads.
Map by Elkman via Wikimedia Commons.
George Drury outlines the origins of the railway:
In 1857, the Minnesota & Pacific Railroad was chartered to build a line from Stillwater, Minnesota, on the St. Croix River, through St. Paul and St. Cloud to St. Vincent, in the northwest corner of the state. The company defaulted after completing a roadbed between St. Paul and St. Cloud, Minnesota, and its charter was taken over by the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, which ran its first train between St. Paul and St. Anthony (now Minneapolis) in 1862.
For financial reasons the railroads were reorganized as the First Division of the St. Paul & Pacific. Both StP&P companies were soon in receivership, and Northern Pacific, with which the StP&P was allied, went bankrupt in the Panic of 1873.
Canadian-born “Robber Baron” James J. Hill (1838-1916) in 1914.
In 1878 James J. Hill and an associate, George Stephen, acquired the two St. Paul & Pacific companies and reorganized them as the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway (“the Manitoba”). By 1885 the company had 1,470 miles of railroad and extended west to Devils Lake, North Dakota. In 1886 Hill organized the Montana Central Railway to build from Great Falls, Montana, through Helena to Butte, and in 1888 the line was opened, creating in conjunction with the StPM&M a railroad from St. Paul to Butte.
In 1881 Hill took over the 1856 charter of the Minneapolis & St. Cloud Railroad. He first used its franchises to build the Eastern Railway of Minnesota from Hinckley, Minnesota, to Superior, Wisconsin, and Duluth. Its charter was liberal enough that he chose it as the vehicle for his line to the Pacific. He renamed the road the Great Northern Railway; it then leased the Manitoba and assumed its operation.
[…]
Even before completion of the route from St. Paul, the Great Northern opened a line along the shore of Puget Sound between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1891. In the years that followed, Hill pushed a number of lines north across the international boundary into the mining area of southern British Columbia in a running battle with Canadian Pacific. In 1912 GN traded its line along the Fraser River east of Vancouver to Canadian Northern for trackage rights into Winnipeg.
Great Northern gradually withdrew from British Columbia after Hill’s death. In 1909 the Manitoba Great Northern Railway purchased most of the property of the Midland Railway of Manitoba (lines from the U.S. border to Portage la Prairie and to Morden), leaving the Midland, which was jointly controlled by GN and NP, with terminal properties in Winnipeg. The Manitoba Great Northern disposed of its rail lines in 1927. They were later abandoned.
Postcard photo of the Great Northern Railway’s “Empire Builder” streamliner between Everett and Seattle, Washington, circa 1963.
Great Northern Railway postcard via Wikimedia Commons.
The Great Northern and Northern Pacific lines agreed to a merger in 1901 (both lines were controlled by Hill) but the plan was vetoed by the Interstate Commerce Commission. A second attempt in the 1920s after Hill’s death was again turned down by the regulator unless the combined company divested ownership of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy which was both railways’ connection from Minneapolis to Chicago. It was only on the final attempt in 1970 that the deal gained the government’s grudging approval and the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and CB&Q merged to form the Burlington Northern.
September 2, 2020
Cold War 2.0 — you’re soaking in it
Ted Campbell responds to a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Nadia Schadlow:
Dr Schadlow posits that “A new set of assumptions should underpin U.S. foreign policy … [and, concomitantly, the foreign polices of the US led West, including Canada’s, because] … Contrary to the optimistic predictions made in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, widespread political liberalization and the growth of transnational organizations have not tempered rivalries among countries. Likewise, globalization and economic interdependence have not been unalloyed goods; often, they have generated unanticipated inequalities and vulnerabilities [and] although the proliferation of digital technologies has increased productivity and brought other benefits, it has also eroded the U.S. military’s advantages and posed challenges to democratic societies.”
After outlining the rosy assumption made by leaders and policy makers from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton to Barack Obama ~ assumption which I shared, Nadia Schadlow says that “China had no intention of converging with the West [because] The Chinese Communist Party never intended to play by the West’s rules; it was determined to control markets rather than open them, and it did so by keeping its exchange rate artificially low, providing unfair advantages to state-owned enterprises, and erecting regulatory barriers against non-Chinese companies. Officials in both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations worried about China’s intentions. But fundamentally, they remained convinced that the United States needed to engage with China to strengthen the rules-based international system and that China’s economic liberalization would ultimately lead to political liberalization. Instead, China has continued to take advantage of economic interdependence to grow its economy and enhance its military, thereby ensuring the long-term strength of the CCP.” Of course, from a Chinese perspective it might, very reasonably, appear that the liberal, US made (in the late 1940s) “rules based international system” was, in fact, designed to strengthen the US economy and enhance its military and ensure America’s long term strength … and that is not, many would say, a totally unreasonable view.
[…]
America’s allies, including Canada, need to step up and help the USA (and India) with the containment of both China and Russia in several regions: in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, too. Canada is a G-7 nation. It needs to start acting like one.
Australians, Brits, Canadians and Danes need not share Dr Schadlow’s Trumpian view of the world and of Cold War 2.0 to understand that:
- It is here. We are in it, like it or not; and
- Like its predecessor, it can turn hot if we do not manage it with care.
Now, at this time, the conventional wisdom is that foreign and defence policy must take a back seat to beating COVID-19 and restarting the economy. But, the Chinese and the Russians are not putting their plans on hold while they deal with the pandemic. (Maybe that’s why Justin Trudeau admires China’s “basic dictatorship” so much.) They will both be moving ahead with plans that aim to put the US-led West, including Canada, at a disadvantage. Additionally, now is a good time to announce plans to build more new warships ~ two or three large helicopter carriers, another supply ship (for a total of four) 16 major surface combatants (the new Type 26 ships) and a dozen smaller corvettes … can be and politicians should say will be built here in Canada, by Canadian workers. Defence related projects, when well conceived and directed, can be great long-term job creators. Canada can do both: speed up our recovery from the pandemic and strengthen our global position by making defence procurement a priority for the recovery.
An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)
August 31, 2020
Michelle Remembers, the seminal Satanic Panic book
Jen Gerson discusses the first modern Satanic Panic and the book about the “recovered” childhood memories of a British Columbia woman in the 1970s:
QAnon may sound like something that could only have birthed in the darker corners of the internet. But QAnon predates president Donald Trump and even the internet itself; It’s just the latest iteration of a moral panic that swept the highest levels of Western society only a generation ago. One of the most polarizing and divisive social movements in modern history; it destroyed families, turned communities against one another, and sent numerous innocent men and women to prison.
And it all started in Victoria, BC.
It was known as the Satanic Panic; a conspiracy theory that convinced millions of well meaning and rational people that a secret cabal of Satanists had infiltrated the highest echelons of society in order to sexually molest children. The Satanists were accused of sacrificing animals and using women as “breeders” to create an endless supply of dead babies for use in their gory, bloody-fuelled rituals and orgies.
It destroyed lives and ripped apart families. Reports of ritualistic child abuse were reported across the English speaking-world. Almost all of them were eventually found to have been partially, or wholly fabricated, but not before dozens of innocent people were falsely accused, and sentenced to years and even decades in prison.
Born of a genuine historical injustice — society’s neglect of childhood sexual abuse — this was a panic that saw some of the world’s smartest minds taken in by accusations, that, at their root, were as preposterous as any raised during medieval European witch hunts. It was legitimized by a professional class, captivated law enforcement and proved itself a lucrative grift for fraudsters and attention seekers. Worse, as the conspiracy grew under its own weight and influence, the hysteria inspired real and horrific crimes — usually by disturbed teenagers who claimed they were sacrificing humans to Satan.
This is a case study of how badly off the rails we can go when we allow our best intentions and passions to overwhelm us.
The story begins in 1980, with the publication of a book called Michelle Remembers. It detailed the fantastic claims of Michelle Proby, who recounted several months of gory and sadistic ritualistic abuse at the hands of a cabal of Satanists when she was a child in 1950s Victoria. The memories, she alleged, were repressed for decades, until she sought help from psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. Under a state of hypnosis, Proby began to uncover a horrifying tale of murder, torture, abduction, and molestation. She claimed to have been taken from her willing family and groomed to take part in a ritual to call the devil — one in which she witnessed the murder of children, was forced to eat human remains, covered in dead baby parts, and locked in a cage with snakes.
An explosive bestseller. Michelle Remembers would become the folkloric template for countless other claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse ostensibly uncovered during therapy during the 80s and 90s.
QotD: The Alt-right and Jordan Peterson
They are new Canadians, people of colour, men and women. And in a way that seems out of sync with op-ed portrayals of Peterson’s supporters as committed to preserving old hierarchies and positions of privilege — they often see themselves as searchers, truth-seekers and iconoclasts.
Popularity, even among people of color, is not, of course, proof in itself of the salubriousness of anything, especially in a world where Fox News, Breitbart, and InfoWars also command the attention of tens of millions. And indeed, Peterson really was avidly embraced at first by the far-right when he emerged, denouncing concepts of unconscious bias and white privilege, and stated his intention to defy any prospective attempt through the force of law to compel him to adopt gender-neutral pronouns in his classroom at the University of Toronto. In his rather coarse-grained and Manichaean analysis of so-called Social Justice Warriors, Peterson occasionally invoked a term, “Cultural Marxism,” whose lineage was said, by others, to have also birthed a far-right conspiracy theory that, in turn, figured prominently in the manifesto of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. So anyone playing a game of connect the dots in order to portray Peterson as part of a recrudescence of reactionary modernism has material to work with, some of it even provided by Peterson himself.
Yet it soon enough became clear to anyone paying attention that Peterson’s initial embrace by the alt-right was a case of mistaken identity. Eventually, the spokesmen of that poisonous and amorphous internet tendency decided in concert that Peterson had been sent by the left to disrupt their “movement” and siphon off its energies by redirecting it toward an individualistic creed that would prove fatal to their own racist ethnonationalism. Peterson then rapidly crossed over to an audience that is now many multiples the size of the cohort of problematic young males who first embraced, then rejected him, even as the progressive left tried to hold on to the alt-right’s original, mistaken read.
Wesley Yang, “The Shocking Truth About Jordan Peterson”, Tablet, 2018-05-28.
August 27, 2020
QotD: Racism and the minimum wage
In 1925, a minimum-wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.
A Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia’s minimum wage law as a means to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese” who were willing to work for less.
In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum-wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.
Some supporters of the first federal minimum-wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and underbid construction companies using unionized white labor.
These supporters of minimum-wage laws understood long ago something that today’s supporters of such laws seem not to have bothered to think through. People whose wages are raised by law do not necessarily benefit, because they are often less likely to be hired at the imposed minimum-wage rate.
Thomas Sowell, “Why racists love the minimum wage laws”, New York Post, 2013-09-17.
