Quotulatiousness

February 29, 2020

“And then, somewhat astonishingly, the Ontario Provincial Police actually upheld the law”

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

Chris Selley calls for some answers in the still-not-fully resolved railway disruptions by First Nations and climate activists and the calling-it-spineless-is-a-compliment reactions of various levels of government to widespread contempt for the law:

Screencap from a TV report on Mohawk Warriors attempting to set a freight car on fire along the Canadian National mainline through Tyendinaga near Belleville, Ontario.

When Canada’s ongoing spate of rail blockades finally peters out, this country has some work to do. A parliamentary committee might be up to the job, but even a full-on independent inquiry might not be excessive. A small group of Mohawks in Tyendinaga, Ont., in solidarity with an even smaller group of hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs, managed to blockade the Canadian National Railway for two weeks, not just holding hostage a chunk of the country’s economy, productivity and mobility, but demanding as ransom the cancellation of a liquefied natural gas pipelines that all First Nations affected by it, and it seems a comfortable majority of their residents, support.

It’s not a national disaster or anything. But as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau belatedly realized, it’s simply not an acceptable outcome in a democracy operating under the rule of law. And there is every reason to believe it could happen again — especially because we don’t really know how or why it ended when it did.

Operating at peak obnoxiousness, Trudeau had scolded those who demanded enforcement of a court order against the Tyendinaga blockade as boors, violence-mongers and idiots: “We are not the kind of country where politicians get to tell the police what to do,” he huffed. And then, frustrated by a lack of Sunny Ways among the federal government’s negotiating partners, he suddenly told the police what to do — or at the very least what he thought should happen.

[…]

The relatively undramatic end to the Tyendinaga blockade, after two weeks of dire warnings about Oka and Ipperwash reruns, raises another key question: Is there any reason we should believe it was safer to enforce the injunction on Day 14, as opposed to Day One or Two or Six?

Attempting negotiations was a perfectly sensible approach, even though it was very difficult to discern any room for compromise when one of the blockaders’ demands was so simple, blunt and inconceivable: shutting down the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. But the government is likely to face similarly unbending demands from future blockaders: Shutting down the Trans Mountain pipeline project, for example. Surely we can’t establish “two weeks of futility and then enforcement” as a policy moving forward. (Some might argue it was already established by a 13-day blockade of CN tracks near Sarnia, Ont., in 2013 — but that wasn’t nearly as crippling a blow to the railway’s operations.)

Police in Quebec were perfectly happy to enforce an injunction against a blockade on Montreal’s South Shore, which ended swiftly and without incident. Another on Mohawk territory in Kahnawake remains in place, and Premier François Legault has been excoriated for suggesting police face a heavily armed populace there — but at least it’s an attempt at an explanation. When it comes to the OPP’s inaction, we have none. For that matter, we probably deserve some insight into how protesters were able to set a roaring bonfire next to a moving train in Tyendinaga, wholly unmolested, just a couple of days after the blockade came down.

The metallic nickname of Henry VIII

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

In the most recent Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes outlines the rocky investment history for German mining firms in England during the Tudor period:

Cropped image of a Hans Holbein the Younger portrait of King Henry VIII at Petworth House.
Photo by Hans Bernhard via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s an especially interesting case of England’s technological backwardness, given that copper was a material of major strategic importance: a necessary ingredient for the casting of bronze cannon. And it was useful for other industries, especially when mixed with zinc to form brass. Brass was the material of choice for accurate navigational instruments, as well as for ordinary pots and kettles. Most importantly, brass wire was needed for wool cards, used to straighten the fibres ready for spinning into thread. A cheaper and more secure supply of copper might thus potentially make England’s principal export, woollen cloth, even more competitive — if only the English could also work out how to produce brass.

The opportunity to introduce a copper industry appeared in 1560, when German bankers became involved in restoring the gold and silver content of England’s currency. The expensive wars of Henry VIII and Edward VI in the 1540s had prompted debasements of the coinage, to the short-term benefit of the crown, but to the long-term cost of both crown and country. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, the ostensibly silver coins were actually mostly made of copper (as the coins were used, Henry’s nose on the faces of the coins wore down, revealing the base metal underneath and earning him the nickname Old Coppernose). The debased money continued to circulate for over a decade, driving the good money out of circulation. People preferred to hoard the higher-value currency, to send it abroad to pay for imports, or even to melt it down for the bullion. The weakness of the pound was an especial problem for Thomas Gresham, Queen Elizabeth’s financier, in that government loans from bankers in London and Antwerp had to be repaid in currency that was assessed for its gold and silver content, rather than its face value. Ever short of cash, the government was constantly resorting to such loans, made more expensive by the lack of bullion.

Restoring the currency — calling in the debased coins, melting them down, and then re-minting them at a higher fineness — required expertise that the English did not have. From France, the mint hired Eloy Mestrelle to strike the new coins by machine rather than by hand. (He was likely available because the French authorities suspected him of counterfeiting — the first mention of him in English records is a pardon for forgery, a habit that apparently died hard as he was eventually hanged for the offence). And to do the refining, Gresham hired German metallurgists: Johannes Loner and Daniel Ulstätt got the job, taking payment in the form of the copper they extracted from the debased coinage (along with a little of the silver). It turned out to be a dangerous assignment: some of the copper may have been mixed with arsenic, which was released in fumes during the refining process, thus poisoning the workers. They were prescribed milk, to be drunk from human skulls, for which the government even gave permission to use the traitors’ heads that were displayed on spikes on London Bridge — but to little avail, unfortunately, as some of them still died.

Loner and Ulstätt’s payment in copper appears to be no accident. They were agents of the Augsburg banking firm of Haug, Langnauer and Company, who controlled the major copper mines in Tirol. Having obtained the English government as a client, they now proposed the creation of English copper mines. They saw a chance to use England as a source of cheap copper, with which they could supply the German brass industry. It turns out that the tale of the multinational firm seeking to take advantage of a developing country for its raw materials is an extremely old one: in the 1560s, the developing country was England.

Yet the investment did not quite go according to plan. Although the Germans possessed all of the metallurgical expertise, the English insisted that the endeavour be organised on their own terms: the Company of Mines Royal. Only a third of the company’s twenty-four shares were to be held by the Germans, with the rest purchased by England’s political and mercantile elite: people like William Cecil (the Secretary of State) and the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley (the Queen’s crush). It was an attractive investment, protected from competition by a patent monopoly for mines of gold, silver, copper, and mercury in many of the relevant counties, as well as a life-time exemption for the investors from all taxes raised by parliament (in those days, parliament was pretty much only assembled to legitimise the raising of new taxes).

February 28, 2020

A history lesson from Roman Thessalonika

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

At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin recounts a story that has some interesting modern parallels for those who choose to look:

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

It happened in Thessalonika near the end of the Roman Empire.

The empire had been in trouble for some time. It was not reproducing itself – “The human harvest was bad” (Seeley). “Agri Deserti” – once-cultivated lands now abandoned for lack of people to till them – could be found in every province.

Internally, the empire tried its usual solution: more government, more laws, more force. Legislation to reward large families and tax bachelors was kept on the statute books for centuries although “successful it was not” (Power). As the empire waned, laws to deal with the consequence of this failure were added: binding cultivators to the soil (the origin of serfdom) was merely the most common example of assigning a hereditary obligation to more and more of the professions the state relied on as soon as a shortfall appeared in them, legally punishing any son who did not follow in his father’s footsteps. To draft and regulate these laws, the numbers and privileges of bureaucrats ballooned from Rome’s former proportion (though still small by our standards).

Successful all these laws were not – so, externally, the empire addressed its chronic shortage of manpower by immigration,

    to dose it with barbarian vigour. Just a small injection to begin with and then more and more

Goths arrived, first as recruits to Roman army units, then as foederate units under their own leaders, growing like a cancer within the armed forces until an Egyptian mother quite naturally wrote the emperor to return her citizen son who “has gone off with the barbarians” – by which she meant he had joined the “Roman” army.

Emperor Theodosius made the Goths obey him, but his was an insecure authority over them. He used Gothic troops in battles where pyrrhic victories may have been welcome. As one summary of the costly victory of Frigidius (394 AD) puts it,

    The loss of 10,000 Goths cannot have distressed Theodosius unduly.

Theodosius also had little choice but to use some of their leaders as governors. Mostly, the empire’s soldiers were also its police – so the leaders of those who were now increasingly providing those soldiers had to be both rewarded by, and used in, such posts. Thus did Butheric the Goth became governor (magister militum) over Illyricum, which included Thessalonika.

The urban elite of Thessalonika were university-educated Greeks.

    It would be hard to imagine an education less suited to help them understand the dangers they faced. The study of rhetoric, its links with reality long severed, …

So Eileen Power described the “learned” of the dying Roman world. (Today, 8 decades after she wrote those sentences, it is easier to imagine an education even less suited to helping elite intellectuals understand the dangers facing them, one whose links with reality are even more completely severed.) In the empire’s second century, Hadrian had dispersed those Jews he did not kill around the empire, confident they’d soon lose their primitive prejudices and assimilate to being broad-minded Graeco-Roman intellectuals like himself. Fourth/fifth century Graeco-Roman intellectuals thought the same of the immigrants. Sidonius Appolinaris wrote a “good-natured” description of the “embarrassing friendliness” of the new barbarian neighbours he encountered on a fifth-century visit to Lyons:

    “How can he be expected to compose six-foot metres”, [Sidonius] asks, “with so many seven-foot patrons all around him, all singing and all expecting him to admire their uncouth stream of non-Latin words.”

The shrug of the shoulders, the genial contempt of one conscious of an infinite superiority – how familiar it all seems.

Perhaps the Thessalonikan city leaders greeted their new governor in this spirit, as sure as Hadrian was about the Jews that this uncouth Goth would soon lose his barbaric prejudices.

February 26, 2020

The Home Office – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”

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

From Stephen Pollard, one gets the sense that no rational politician would ever want to be Home Secretary in a British government:

Official portrait of the Right Honourable Priti Patel, MP.
Photo by Richard Townshend.

Here’s a trick question: which Home Secretary has been subject to hostile briefings from within the department that they are too Right-wing, too populist, too lazy, too stupid and a bully?

It’s a trick because the answer is: almost all of them. You can pretty much take your choice from any of those who have arrived at the Home Office with a definable agenda, and one that differs from the received Home Office wisdom.

The briefings currently being meted out against Priti Patel are certainly severe. She has been accused of creating an “atmosphere of fear” by officials, an allegation strongly denied by ministers. But in the sweep of recent political history, they are entirely normal. The Home Office has always played dirty when a minister attempts to overturn its shibboleths. The moment its mandarins sniff trouble, stories start appearing in the press about how the new minister is out of his or her depth, unthinking, posturing and — always the same — a variation on stupid.

[…]

The list of the Home Office’s responsibilities is ludicrously large, including: illegal drug use; alcohol strategy, policy and licensing conditions; terrorism; crime; public safety; border control; immigration; applications to enter and stay in the UK; issuing passports and visas; policing; fire prevention; fire rescue. In addition it is responsible for more than 30 agencies and public bodies.

John Reid infamously described its immigration department as “not fit for purpose”, and that quote has often been — understandably — misapplied to the Home Office as a whole.

The likes of Michael Howard and David Blunkett, who became Home Secretary in 2001, were political heavyweights with enough nous to get a grip of the hostile department. In preparing my biography of Blunkett, I spent months in and out of the Home Office when he was running the department, observing and speaking to officials — some who were supportive of their boss but others who clearly regarded him as an irritant.

One adviser to Blunkett recalls that the feeling was mutual. Blunkett wanted to replace the senior civil servants from top to bottom, and he and his aides were shocked at just how chaotic and inefficient the department was. “Nothing had prepared us for it,” recalled one adviser. “It was worse than any of us had imagined possible. God alone knows what Jack [Straw] did for four years. I am simply unable to comprehend how he could have left it as it was. At least Howard had the alibi that he was attempting a wholesale culture shift. In the Home Office, doing nothing means going backwards. It was a mess. A giant mess.”

February 25, 2020

“Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking”

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

David Solway outlines some of the serious issues Canada needs to tackle … but many of which are issues that the current federal government is striving to avoid tackling:

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc — and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a weak swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity — although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations,” based on two founding peoples, the French and the English, which novelist Hugh MacLennan famously described as “two solitudes” in his book of that title. But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

Quebec separatists don’t need to do much more than sit back, put their feet up, crack a few beers, and watch Justin Trudeau drive the country toward dissolution. Their job is so much easier now…

It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite, the breakdown is more like 95-5. This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe — North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.

Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble. And there we find the proof that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

QotD: Canadian content rules

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

[Stargate: Atlantis] is a Sci-Fi channel show produced in Canada, starring Canadians and featuring a cranky, sympathetic Canadian character in a lead role. But thanks to Canadian trade-barriers it has yet to air on Canadian television. Remind me again what original programming Canada’s CRTC sheltered Space: the Imagination Station has produced? How many times can we be expected to watch decade old repeats of Seaquest DSV in defense of “Canadian culture”? If they had the wisdom to rebroadcast Starlost or some such epic crap I could almost see the point but as it stands CanCon rules, and the businesses they shelter, are a joke.

I tried making this case to a left-leaning friend. She said, half-joking, “I know you are speaking Canadian but I can’t understand any of the words.” I am reminded every day of my former communication studies undergrads who would argue for Canadian content rules (I am told these represent “regulation” and not “censorship”) and, with no change of expression, cheerfully explain they never watch Canadian television because it is uniformly awful. Such is the naked truth of ideology.

Ghost of a Flea, “Poisoning the Well”, Ghost of a Flea, 2005-08-12.

February 24, 2020

Canadian-American relations (and Canadian foreign relations in general) in the 21st century

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

Ted Campbell looks at the undisputable fact that Canada barely matters in Washington DC, and that this has been true since the end of the first Bush administration. He discusses a recent Globe and Mail article by David Mulroney which examines the need for the Canadian government to formally rethink “Canada’s role in the world” in that light:

Justin Trudeau meets with President Donald Trump at the White House, 13 February, 2017.
Photo from the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

Mr Mulroney sees two major problems that confront Canada fifty years after A Foreign Policy for Canadians was published:

  • First, he says, “Canada is again dealing with a threat to our autonomy from a major power, but this time, it comes not from the United States, but from the new world that was coming into being 50 years ago. The threat is now China, which is using its economic power to influence and silence us, is undermining our national security, and is challenging the rules-based international system that the review itself championed;” and
  • Second, “we again need to face up to the consequences of our diminished status, but this time much closer to home. Fifty years on, the problem isn’t that the United States wants to dominate us, but that it has largely forgotten us. While it is tempting to blame this on the chaos of the Trump era, the painful reality is that the relationship has been in decline for some time, something that was manifestly evident in the cool detachment that marked Barack Obama’s management of relations with Canada.”

I think that second is, actually, more serious than the first. I believe we can wrap our collective mind around the fact that China doesn’t like us, that it regards us as an irritant and that it is using us as a whipping boy to send a message to its other, more important, trading partners. What has been harder to grasp is that Ameria no longer cares. It isn’t just Donald Trump, it was even just Barack Obama. George W Bush didn’t care either. Despite the great debates in Canada, it seems clear that President Bush never even asked for our help in either Afghanistan or Iraq, the “pressure” to do something to stand with the USA was entirely self-generated within Canada’s own foreign affairs and defence establishments. Bush, Chaney, Rumsfeld and Myers (the latter was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005) were, possibly, grateful for the help on the ground, when they noticed it at all, but quite uninterested in Canada’s views on any of the issues concerned. Nor did Bill Clinton care about our views on or our actions in e.g. the Balkans. We, as a country, and our leaders, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, did not and do not count for anything in Washington. Neither Chrystia Freeland nor Erin O’Toole nor any other Canadian prime minister, Conservative or Liberal, will fare any better. The last time Canada mattered was when Brian Mulroney and George H W Bush renegotiated the Canada-US Free Trade deal, making it into NAFTA, over a quarter-century ago. And the end of the halcyon days of Canada-US relations came a full decade before that, in the Mulroney-Reagan years. That can only change if Canada makes itself matter.

[…]

We, Canadians, must accept ~ and millions will not want to accept this ~ that, as Mr Mulroney says, “International influence … [and that includes influence where it counts most, with the USA] … is enabled by a strong economy, robust national infrastructure and institutions, and the willingness to invest in national defence and security.” One of the impacts of Pierre Trudeau’s policies was to divert spending from National Defence to social spending. That was immensely popular with many, actually with most Canadians … something for (a perceived) nothing always is. None of Brian Mulroney, Paul Martin or Stephen Harper, all of whom, it seemed to me, wanted to reverse course and act responsibly were able to change what Pierre Trudeau had put in place. The political price was suicide. But it has been fifty years and Canada is at risk of being totally irrelevant in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.

David Mulroney’s second challenge ~ recovering “the confident elaboration of national identity,” is, I suspect, much more difficult, especially given the “post-national state” quasi-intellectual rubbish that Justin Trudeau says was part of “his father’s vision.” It’s lunacy, of course, but it’s the sort of lunacy that appealed to many in the 1960s and appeals, again, a half-century later.

While I don’t disagree with Mr. Campbell’s analysis (and that of David Mulroney), I think getting our domestic house in order is the top priority, and the current Trudeau government does not appear to be doing much constructive on that sheaf of issues. With the very rule of law threatened at home, there’s little to no point in casting our eyes across the 49th parallel or overseas: we need to address the breakdown of internal governance first.

Bidding farewell to the rule of law in Canada?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Carpay on the importance of the rule of law in civil society and why we’re at risk of losing it here in Canada:

The rule of law is one of the most important legal principles on which Canada is based. Along with the supremacy of God, it is mentioned in the very first words of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”

The rule of law means that we are ruled by laws, not by the whims of a King, or the clamouring of a mob. The rule of law also means that the law applies to everyone, even the King; there can be no exemptions for the King or his favourites.

Countries which practice and uphold the rule of law tend to thrive economically, socially, politically and culturally. Countries which uphold the rule of law become wealthy because people can work, buy, sell and trade in the knowledge that their property and their person are protected by law. Economies thrive when people know that the law will be enforced, and that the law will be applied to everyone, even to the King and his favourites. The rule of law provides investors, foreign and domestic, with confidence to invest their money in business projects.

Conversely, when a country condones law-breaking, investors will put their money elsewhere, and quickly. The world’s poorest and most violent countries are those where politicians are above the law, and the law is not applied equally to all.

The decisions of Canada’s politicians and police to condone – for three weeks or longer – the blockading of railway lines by aggrieved protesters violate the rule of law in at least two ways.

First, our politicians are effectively stating that individuals with strongly held political opinions are entitled to engage in illegal activities, in this case shutting down railway lines. Second, law-breaking is permitted because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other politicians sympathize with the protesters’ ideology and demands: the law does not apply to the King’s favourites.

February 23, 2020

Benjamin Griveaux discovers that “privacy” is an outdated 20th century concept

Filed under: France, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At The Register, Alistair Dabbs describes the descent of formerly ascendent French politician Benjamin Griveaux:

Previously a key spokesman for president Emmanuel Macron, he was flying high in the polls to be elected mayor of Paris next month … until the electorate got a good look at his knob.

Benjamin Griveaux on 11 October 2018.
Photo by Jacques Paquier via Wikimedia Commons.

In a case of political revenge porn that is gripping the French nation almost as tightly as Griveaux was gripping himself, videos of him buffing the aubergine appeared on a short-lived satirical website apparently focusing on “political pornography” (don’t bother asking) and promptly went viral.

These were private, first-person videos he’d taken himself spiralising the old courgette and sent to the object of his amour who, unfortunately for his wife, was not his wife. Predictably, neither woman was impressed with the, er, outcome.

Cue an embarrassed press conference with lots of deliberately posed shots of him looking downwards and contrite, during which he announced he would stand down from the imminent elections and pass the, er, baton to someone else. Taking their example from Griveaux himself, Macron’s party La République en Marche (since redubbed “La République en Main“) did a bit of frenzied reshuffling to find a replacement.

Put aside the political, moral and human issues: these are being thoroughly argued out in the media as you read this. As for nudey selfies, come on, most of us have tried it for a laugh – albeit most probably when we were students. What I want to know is how an intelligent, well-connected and tech-savvy party executive like this could allow his personal instruction video on the subject of unclothed self-taming to get into the wild in the first place.

Griveaux’s official statement to the police claims that he sent the video person-to-person via a certain private messenging system – press reports do not name which one, unfortunately – that would delete the video after one minute. If this is true, it strengthens his case for “invasion of personal privacy”, which has massive punitive outcomes in France thanks to Jacques Chirac who as president beefed up the privacy laws to protect his illegal financial dealings from media scrutiny.

What messaging app was he using? And is he being all that tech-savvy in his belief that his video would self-destruct after 60 seconds, like in some ’70s episode of Mission Impossible? Even in WhatsApp, you have to remember to delete it yourself.

Perhaps he was using a business-focused porn-selfie messenger: a kind of doing-the-business sharing app. It’s the innovative new way of engaging with your contacts. Norbert Spankmoney wants to connect with you! Yes, I bet he does.

Come on, Ben, surely you know that for every ultra-secure, ultra-private, ultra-personal video messaging app, there are a dozen freebie video-grabbing utilities out there. Even if you code it up to prevent screen capture, someone could always video your video, just like they can photograph an onscreen secret document.

Give it up. Nothing is private any more.

China’s government and the coronavirus epidemic

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

In Quillette, Aaron Sarin shows how the Chinese government has systematically failed to respond adequately to the epidemic which broke out late in 2019in Wuhan and risks “losing the Mandate of Heaven”:

As of this writing, the epidemic’s death toll is still rising, and many of these deaths can ultimately be traced to the paranoid rigidity of the Xi Jinping administration. By late December 2019, doctors in Wuhan were already sounding the alarm over cases of what appeared to them to be SARS. Instead of listening to their warnings, the authorities summoned eight of these doctors for a dressing-down. They were warned of the punishments they could face for “rumour-mongering.” News of their detention was broadcast to tens of millions: a clear message to anyone else who might have been thinking about discussing viruses in public.

The Party’s leaders actually knew enough to be worried by this point — they alerted the World Health Organisation on December 31st — and yet still they hid the truth from the public. This neurotic obsession with secrecy has certainly cost lives. If the medical community had been informed of the outbreak back in December, hospitals could have stockpiled the necessary supplies. But now there are drastic shortages, and patients are dying in hallways and waiting rooms.

Even the critics of authoritarian dictatorship will usually agree that the system beats democracy for sheer efficiency, but the coronavirus debacle has turned that old wisdom on its head. Where we might have expected cold and methodical governance, we have found dithering bureaucrats, unable to take a step in any direction, paralysed by what Xu Zhangrun calls “systemic impotence.” Weeks went by and citizens swarmed in and out of Wuhan, picking up the virus and transporting it to the far corners of the country. Local government officials stayed quiet, wary of the heavy hand of Xi Jinping. On January 23rd, a citywide quarantine was finally announced, but eight long hours passed before it was enacted — time enough for a million or more to flee the city.

The Wuhan lockdown was repeated in other parts of the country (most recently the southern megacity of Guangzhou), and some observers praised the speed with which new hospitals were constructed from scratch. These very visible displays of its power aside, the Party has moved far too slowly at every stage of the crisis. Diagnostic testing required samples to be sent all the way to a laboratory in Beijing, and this delayed the distribution of testing kits to many of the hospitals in Wuhan. Even when testing kits were available, patients still found themselves trapped in a Kafka-esque web of bureaucracy. According to Reuters, the tests have been refused to people who fail to make it through a complex reporting system involving hospital authorities, district authorities, city health authorities, and disease control officials.

None of this should come as a surprise. The cliché about the efficiency of authoritarian systems was always, on closer analysis, something of a low-resolution image. In the old days of the Soviet Union, speedy industrial growth obscured the reality of a fragile system largely devoid of autonomous decision making. During the 1920s, the Communist Party’s state planning committee Gosplan was established with the impressive-sounding mission of creating a series of five-year plans to govern the economy. But over the next 70 years, the vast majority of these plans were radically revised and rewritten, or more frequently ignored altogether in favour of Joseph Stalin’s arbitrary dictates. Indeed, Gosplan actively tried to avoid making decisions at all, because committee members knew Stalin would have them shot and replaced if their ideas produced unwelcome results. In the end, fear saps the efficiency of all authoritarian regimes, and the Chinese Communist Party is no exception.

Li Wenliang has emerged as the most vivid symbol of the Party’s latest failure. Li was one of the Wuhan doctors disgraced for discussing the coronavirus on social media. A few days after his police warning, he contracted the virus himself, and on February 6th he died. It was during the period of Li’s short illness that the Party apparently realised its error and decided to absolve the doctors, but still the central government would accept no blame for the tragedy. Instead, the Supreme Court (which is controlled by the CCP) scolded the local government in Wuhan — an unusual move, no doubt designed to create a scapegoat for surging public anger. The truth is that the city’s officials had been faced with an impossible job. They obediently followed orders, and now they will be punished for it.

Justin’s hidden victory – “… in the fight against global warming, this has to have been Canada’s best two weeks EVER”

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

As Rex Murphy points out, the nattering nabobs of negativity (okay, he didn’t call ’em that) miss the key benefits of Justin Trudeau’s tour de force of ingenious diplomacy and inaction:

It was at the very heart of Justin Trudeau’s triumph in his first election, that having vanquished the Mordor orcs of Harperland, that the country was going to be served by new thinking and fresh approaches, that anger and conflict would be no more. In an era marked by respectful thinking, exquisitely careful language, above all by the ability to listen, protests would be no more. Concord would reign, all would be sweetness and light.

What few and feeble disputes that might emerge would be defused with a waving of the diversity wand, and a choir drawn from the Liberal backbenches intoning solemnly “this is not who we are as Canadians” before the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill.

As an ultimate fillip every month a kitten and a ball of wool would be sent to every Canadian household (and Lo, a zen-like tranquillity would settle over the land). To be clear, these would be very progressive kittens, and the wood fair-trade down to the last twisted fibre.

[…]

Looked at in the cool light of reason, in the fight against global warming, this has to have been Canada’s best two weeks EVER. Keep it up and Canada, the whole wide, cold country, can soon declare itself one half-a-continent carbon-emission-free zone. Apocalypse deferred.

How do you spell Hallelujah? Greta Thunberg — Canada has heard you. Find a bamboo raft and come visit us again.

February 22, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on the “inconvenient pioneers”

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

Along with a mandatory worry piece on Trump and some positive news on the British economy under Boris Johnson, Andrew Sullivan noted the dog that didn’t bark about either Republican or Democratic pioneers:

Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaking with supporters at a town hall at the State Historical Museum in Des Moines, Iowa, 12 January 2020.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

Every now and again, I take a moment to take stock of how deep gay integration has gotten in my adult lifetime. This past week, our politics featured two relatively young men, on both sides of the political divide, whose sexual orientation is both clear and irrelevant. Pete Buttigieg has been at the top of the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, one of seven remaining candidates, and in the circular flamethrower squad of Wednesday’s debate, he once again held his own. More than that: He was relentless in his attacks on Amy Klobuchar and more than a little blunt about Bernie Sanders’s plans to take private health insurance away from everyone (something that doesn’t even happen in socialized health care in Britain). There was not the slightest whiff of defensiveness about him.

His moderate politics (on most subjects) is filtered through a seemingly brutal, calculating Rhodes Scholar–style ambition. And why can’t gays as well as straights harbor that? It’s fantastic also that he is a man of Christian faith — like countless other gays and lesbians in America. Who would have imagined that the pioneering gay figure of 2020 would be a married Christian who got a standing ovation in a Fox News town hall? But that’s old news now.

It’s also fantastic that, for the most part, his sexual orientation is ignored. Yes, the queer left hates him — but they hate a lot of gay success in public life if it doesn’t exactly fit their ideological niche. And Rush Limbaugh indeed took a slightly homophobic dig the other day. But I doubt Trump would openly use Pete’s orientation as a way to demean him. And that’s not just because Trump is not personally homophobic but because he knows it would look ugly, and be counterproductive. That’s how far we’ve come.

Richard Grenell has not subjected himself to getting elected anywhere, but, like Buttigieg, he’s a classic careerist D.C. meritocrat (and why the fuck not?). From the heartland, he got a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School and then attached himself to Republican pols — notably George Pataki and George W. Bush, who made him communications director for the U.S. seat at the U.N., a post he held for seven years. Launching his own communications shop, Grenell subsequently worked Fox News gigs even as he was a signatory to an amicus brief in defense of the right of gay couples to marry. By all accounts he has been a disaster as ambassador to Germany, trolling the E.U. and German elites, although I doubt Trump sees his regular Twitter provocations as a liability.

But check out a simple video of Grenell being sworn in for the Germany job. Mike Pence, of all people, officiates as Grenell’s longtime partner, Matt Lashey, holds the family Bible. This week his appointment as acting director of National Intelligence was widely panned — and is not expected to last long. But he nonetheless became the first-ever openly gay member of the Cabinet in U.S. history. You missed that? All the better. But for some of us, it’s a quiet landmark tarred only by the fact that most gay groups won’t even acknowledge it. The Human Rights Campaign’s Twitter feed has made no mention at all — even as they are rightly touting the first lesbian mother in Congress. Why is the first openly gay Cabinet member a nonevent? Because he’s a conservative. And to the activist left and too many of the Establishment liberals in the gay movement, that means he’s not really gay.

My politics tilt more toward Buttigieg than Grenell — but a moment like this should not be filtered entirely through ideology. History matters too. When I was a very lonely openly gay figure in Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, the idea that I would live to see an openly gay and successful presidential candidate and an openly gay Cabinet member at the same time would have been preposterous. And now it’s virtually normal. I’ll take that.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell speaking with attendees at the 2019 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in West Palm Beach, Florida on 20 December 2019.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

Update: Inconvenient typo in the headline fixed.

February 21, 2020

Justin Trudeau, Prime Empathizer of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Prime Minstrel channels his inner Bill Clinton, although he just manages to avoid saying that he “feels our pain”:

A strange thing happened Tuesday morning. That strange thing was … an important and interesting exchange on the floor of the House of Commons. It happened during routine proceedings, and not in the Punch-and-Judy exchange of question period. The leaders of the various parties in the House stood and outlined positions on the rail blockades being conducted around the country in support of Wet’suwet’en opponents of B.C.’s Coastal GasLink pipeline.

First came the prime minister. “People are troubled by what they have been witnessing this past week,” he said. Our empathizer-in-chief, the emotional mascot of Confederation, was about to go to work. “Young, old, Indigenous and newcomers are asking themselves what is happening in the country … On all sides, people are upset and frustrated.”

The next three words out of his mouth were: “I get it.” Huh. Is that the sort of thing you say when you’ve actually gotten it? If a friend called you up in a shattered emotional state because he had just lost his job, as people are starting to lose jobs to the Wet’suwet’en solidarity protests, would you say “I get it”?

Beyond this tin-eared reassurance, Trudeau did not have much specific to say, and what there was seemed to contradict itself. “Our government’s priority is to resolve this situation peacefully, but also to protect the rule of law in our country,” he promised. “That is a principle we will always stand up for.” One would have thought the role of a prime minister was to apply the law rather than to “stand up for” it. He gave his usual spiel about the myriad of ways in which the federal government has failed First Nations, again speaking as though someone else were in charge. Certainly very little of it is his own fault: the government he leads has “invested more than any other … to right historic wrongs.”

Trudeau worried aloud that Canada might become “a country where people think they can tamper with rail lines and endanger lives,” but he seemingly renounced the use of force (it’s not “helpful”) against protesters who openly discuss sabotage. What the prime minister means when he talks of the “rule” of something called “law” has been left imperfectly clear.

Chris Selley suggests the government’s fecklessness will continue to prevent any solutions being implemented:

The stupefying weightlessness of Justin Trudeau’s government has never been more evident than in recent days, as it tries to arrange an end to the Mohawk blockade of CN’s main line near Belleville, Ont. At times it seems as if it might just float away, like an improperly tethered bouncy castle in a thunderstorm.

This week has been particularly windy.

[…]

The situation is ludicrous: Because Ontario’s independent provincial police won’t enforce a court injunction, the federal public safety minister seems to be in discussions with B.C.’s solicitor general about whether B.C.’s independent provincial police might back off enforcing a different injunction.

And the worst part of this absurdist theatre festival is how difficult it is to imagine a better alternative. Conservatives continue to call on Trudeau to somehow fix the problem, but the way Canada is set up, it’s really not a federal issue. The RCMP might have some jurisdiction over the railway as federally regulated infrastructure, said University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach, but that hasn’t happened in past cases. It wouldn’t even be up to Trudeau to send in troops: under the Emergencies Act, Roach said, a provincial solicitor-general has to request it.

These are structural issues that any PM will face. Indeed, the biggest difference between the Liberals’ approach to this blockade and the Conservatives’ approach to the 2013 Idle No More protests, which included a 13-day blockade of a CN line in southwestern Ontario, has been one of rhetoric and engagement. The Conservatives talked tougher, but Aboriginal Affairs rebuffed CN’s request to intervene. (Those protesters eventually obeyed a court injunction and left.) The Liberals needlessly tie themselves in knots and insult our intelligence — they know no other way — but they clearly believe it’s their job to broker some kind of resolution.

It’s tough to say which approach is likelier to work. At this point odds seem to favour “neither.” If you have a better, workable idea to get the trains moving, for God’s sake get on the horn to Ottawa.

February 20, 2020

QotD: Preventing bureaucratic mission creep

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The mission creep that is the effect of those not slumbering in meetings and thus adding another bright idea to the tasks the organization attempts is not restricted to the public sector.

Private companies are just as vulnerable. However in that private sector we have a mechanism by which the seemingly inevitable bureaucratization is dealt with. Once it happens, the organization goes bankrupt and is removed from the scene. What we need is a similar system to deal with this process in the public sphere.

I don’t, given the above, find it at all remarkable that the WTO is regarded as succumbing to these forces, nor the UN, Amnesty, the European Union or even our own domestic governments (just how did the interstate commerce clause become a justification for Congress to restrict something that is not interstate and is not commerce?). I think it inevitable.

Various solutions appear to be available, the French one might be an example. Put up with it for 50 years then have a revolution and start again. Perhaps the answer is never to allow the public bodies to have much power in the first place, a solution that hasn’t really been tried anywhere. The Italian one? Let the system carry on adding ever more layers but ignore it? Stalin’s? Every 15 years or so shoot the bureaucrats?

All such methods have their attractions and their faults but a solution we do need to find. For one of the lessons I take from the history of the 20th century is that we don’t actually want to be ruled by those who stay awake in committee meetings.

Tim Worstall, “‘Any Organization Will, In the End, Be Run By Those Who Stay Awake in Committee'”, Ideas in Action, 2005-06-23.

February 19, 2020

QotD: Myths the Greatest Generation believed

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In addition to inflating our confidence in overseas interventions, the war era fueled belief that government could be a major force for good at home, capable of solving every domestic problem. Franklin Roosevelt’s superb wartime management boosted the popular opinion of government and encouraged Americans to adopt war as a metaphor for government action in general. The war seemed to fulfill Teddy Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s earlier progressive dreams that big government, acting in concert with big business and big labor, could solve any problem that it chose to tackle. Just as warfare was re-envisioned to fit the total-war model of World War II, governing became understood as a matter of trained professionals applying management methods to public policy.

This belief in the military-like efficiency of government inspired the ambitious welfare-state policies of the postwar era, especially Johnson’s War on Poverty. When, in 1972, Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs, and when, in 1977, Jimmy Carter described the energy crisis as the “moral equivalent of war,” the model they had in mind was, again, World War II. Today, newspapers and scientific journals still proclaim the need for ambitious government action to fix enormously complex problems — for example, calling repeatedly for a “new Manhattan Project” to solve the problem of climate change.

War, as conservatives figured out early on, is a poor metaphor for government doing socially useful things. We can’t fight and win a “war” on poverty, or drugs, or cancer, because these things are nothing like war. The last heroic big-government project run along World War II lines was the Apollo program, which put Americans on the moon. This was a tremendous achievement, but here a military mindset was directly relevant: like the design of war machines a quarter-century earlier, the Saturn rockets were a discrete engineering challenge, one whose basic parameters were well understood.

E. M. Oblomov, “The Greatest Generation and the Greatest Illusion: Success in World War II led Americans to put too much faith in government — and we still do.”, City Journal, 2017-12-28.

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