Quotulatiousness

April 14, 2012

“The unipolar era has not been a success for America”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Middle East, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Conrad Black examines the differences between the Cold War, when America had a clear mission, and the post-Cold War period, when America could be said to have completely lacked a coherent foreign policy:

Indeed, the overwhelming and relatively bloodless victory in the Cold War, the fruition of the brilliant American strategy of containment, left the United States as the only seriously Great Power in the world, a condition unique in the history of the nation-state, starting in the Middle Ages. As a result, there was, 20 years ago, a good deal of frothy (and, as it turns out, grossly premature) intellectual blather about the end of history and the political culmination of the world in democratic capitalism.

The unipolar era has not been a success for America. The great irony of these 20-something post-Cold War years has been that while the United States was the indispensable country in the triumph of capitalist democracy — its preservation from 1917 to 1941, and its outright victory in the following 50 years — it is not now one of the world’s best, or even better, functioning democracies.

Under the Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama administrations, there has been no coherent strategy to replace the previous masterly and bipartisan missions to lead the West to victory in the Second World War and in the Cold War. Bill Clinton, on the world stage, as in America, and before that in the diminutive state of Arkansas, exuded bonhomous goodwill, extended free trade to Mexico, and expanded NATO into the former Soviet Union, suavely calling it “a partnership for peace.” He moved in the Balkans, but only when the Europeans, who started by calling the challenge posed by Bosnian massacres “The hour of Europe,” fell on their faces and started crying like frightened little pigs for America to end ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. And even then, nothing would have happened if the Republican leader in the Senate, Robert Dole, a bravely wounded veteran of the European theatre in the Second World War, had not legislated military orders (lift and strike) normally in the province of the commander-in-chief. There never really was a Clinton foreign policy: His responses to the early terrorist attacks (Khobar Towers, the African embassies, the USS Cole) were very inadequate.

George W. Bush, forced to deal with the monstrous outrage of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, had a piercing, towel-snapping, locker room vision that since democracies do not engage in aggressive war, ergo, every country that was not already democratic should be propelled by the scruff of the neck and the small of the back toward democratization. Thus did Hamas replace Fatah in Gaza; the Muslim Brotherhood, (whose adherents had proudly murdered Anwar Sadat) is replacing Hosni Mubarak in Egypt; terrorist chaos is replacing Saleh in Yemen; and Hezbollah has more or less taken over from the Syrians in Lebanon. Trillions of dollars have been spent, along with over 6,000 American lives, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it would be impetuous to forecast comparative stability and enlightenment in the near future of either country.

April 13, 2012

“Brzezinski[‘s] … realpolitik approach … is actually refreshing in today’s age of flippant air-bombing humanitarianism”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

Sean Collins reviews a pair of books that — rather than signing on to the idea of America as terminal-phase western Roman Empire — perhaps go too far in the other direction. The books are The World America Made by Robert Kagan and Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski:

It is clear that the US faces a number of challenges, especially with regard to its stagnant economy and gridlocked politics. But more and more, the country’s specific problems are overshadowed by creeping fears of national decline. This backdrop of decline extends beyond domestic economics to contemplating whether America’s influence in the world is diminishing, in particular relative to emerging powers like China.

[. . .]

Brzezinski is not only old, he’s old-school, too. His realpolitik approach, which includes Cold War concepts like containment, is actually refreshing in today’s age of flippant air-bombing humanitarianism. For example, he quite baldly comes out and calls for the US to lead an effort to expand the West (via NATO and the EU) to include Russia and Turkey. This, he says, is necessary to prevent Russia from striking out on its own, or allying with China. Brzezinski is also still very mindful that great-power politics have not disappeared, and could re-emerge more forcefully. More than once, he speculates that Asia today resembles Europe before the twentieth-century world wars, and argues for care to ensure that a new conflagration does not break out.

The two authors’ respective approaches to American relations with China illuminate their differences in approach. Kagan is blunt, arguing for an antagonistic stance. He calls on the US to ‘press for greater democratic and liberal reforms’ in China (and in other authoritarian nations), and to promote free trade and markets, and thus ‘push back’ against state capitalism in China. In contrast, Brzezinski urges a diplomatic approach, one that attempts to reach mutual agreement while preventing China from becoming a too-dominant regional power. He is opposed to the Obama administration’s recent ‘Asia pivot’, which calls for more US troops in the region. In an interview with Edward Luce in the Financial Times, Brzezinski warned: ‘We have to focus on Asia, but not in a manner that plays on everyone’s anxieties… It becomes very easy to demonise China and they will demonise us in return. Is that what we want?’

[. . .]

This is illustrated by their treatments of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the surface, the two seem to take very different lines. Kagan was bullish at the outset of both wars and, consistent with his general style in the book, he quickly skates right past such awkward issues. Brzezinski, in contrast, is damning, highlighting how the wars have undermined America’s ability to project its power. But the fact is that neither author really spends much time thinking about them. This is telling: both prefer to speculate about the future rather than face up to the reality of recent foreign-policy moves. Oddly, neither author examines either President George W Bush’s record or President Obama’s record. When Brzezinski does address the Bush administration’s foreign policy, his analytics go out the window and he just sneers. We are left believing that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were nothing more than purely subjective mistakes made by Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney.

April 12, 2012

Reason.tv: Why Democrat vs. Republican is the Wrong Way to Look at the 2012 Election

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

“We had a non-Obama president recently, his name was George W. Bush, it wasn’t all puppy dogs and rainbows,” says Reason’s Matt Welch. “Being Republican is not enough to counter Obama. Mitt Romney is not offering an alternative to Obama,” adds Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie.

From Newt Gingrich’s inexplicable campaign chatter about a taxpayer-subsidized colony on the moon to Mitt Romney’s refusal to discuss any specific spending cuts he would implement as president, Republicans continue to offer no real substantive alternative to President Obama’s spendthrift economic policies.

Welch and Gillespie, the co-authors of “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America,” hosted the discussion “Why Democrat vs. Republican is the Wrong Way to Look at the 2012 Election” at Reason Weekend, the annual donor event held by Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website).

April 10, 2012

The 7 rules of bureaucracy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:27

A long post by Loyd S. Pettegrew and Carol A. Vance at the LvMI blog explains the seven rules (and many sub-rules) of modern bureaucracy:

In order to understand the foundation of America’s morass, we must examine bureaucracy. At the root of this growing evil is the very nature of bureaucracy, especially political bureaucracy. French economist Frédéric Bastiat offered an early warning in 1850 that laws, institutions, and acts — the stuff of political bureaucracy — produce economic effects that can be seen immediately, but that other, unforeseen effects happen much later. He claimed that bad economists look only at the immediate, seeable effects and ignore effects that come later, while good economists are able to look at the immediate effects and foresee effects, both good and bad, that come later.

Both the seen and the unseen have become a necessary condition of modern bureaucracy. Max Weber, considered the father of modern bureaucracy largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, is credited with formalizing the elements of bureaucracy as a fundamental principle of organization. He was also painfully aware of the arbitrariness of bureaucratic decision processes.

[. . .]

One of the truisms of bureaucracies, be they government or private sector, is that if left to their own devices, they will grow bigger, bolder, and less manageable over time. Teasley has seen this happen over and over again and put his considerable intellect to how its apparatus works. John Baden has offered us one of the most promising, yet ignored, solutions to the bureaucratic leviathan. Baden (1993) puts the problem at the feet of politicians concentrating benefits and dispersing costs and believes “predatory bureaucracies” would allow bureaucracies to feed on themselves with the most effective and efficient bureaucracy taking money and responsibility away from those that are less efficient and effective. While a provocative theory, the problem lies in the very rules that underpin bureaucracies. Despite the concept being nearly 20 years old, it has not been attempted, let alone enacted in any meaningful or widespread way.

[. . .]

Rule #1: Maintain the problem at all costs! The problem is the basis of power, perks, privileges, and security. [. . .]

Rule #2: Use crisis and perceived crisis to increase your power and control. [. . .]

Rule 2a: Force 11th-hour decisions, threaten the loss of options and opportunities, and limit the opposition’s opportunity to review and critique. [. . .]

Rule #3: If there are not enough crises, manufacture them, even from nature, where none exist.

Bureaucracies are always on the lookout for a new crisis. In his “Guiding Principles of Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Bureaucracies,” Harry Teasley points to three examples:

  1. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, where an alleged attack took place on two US naval destroyers by a North Vietnamese torpedo boat, allowing President Johnson to deploy conventional military forces to Vietnam without congressional approval.
  2. The attribution of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to Saddam Hussein permitted President George Bush to invade Iraq (again, without the need of congressional approval), after which no WMDs were found.
  3. Man-made global warming. The first two resulted in loss of life and a terrible toll of people maimed and injured. We are still in the throes of discovering the effects of the third crisis.

[. . .]

Rule #4: Control the flow and release of information while feigning openness. [. . .]

Rule 4a: Deny, delay, obfuscate, spin, and lie. [. . .]

Rule #5: Maximize public-relations exposure by creating a cover story that appeals to the universal need to help people. [. . .]

Rule #6: Create vested support groups by distributing concentrated benefits and/or entitlements to these special interests, while distributing the costs broadly to one’s political opponents. [. . .]

Rule #7: Demonize the truth tellers who have the temerity to say, “The emperor has no clothes.” [. . .]

Rule 7a: Accuse the truth teller of one’s own defects, deficiencies, crimes, and misdemeanors. [. . .]

April 9, 2012

“Teacher tenure is one of those ideas” [that] “do real damage to the public education system”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:58

If I told you that an article in support of ending tenure for public school teachers appeared in The New Republic, would you believe it? I wouldn’t have done, until today:

Like the abortion measures, this bill was also pushed by Republicans — but here’s the strange part: It was actually a halfway decent idea. The subject of the bill was an important one: tenure for public school teachers. And, while the proposal wasn’t perfect, it was at least an attempt to rectify what is perhaps the least sane element of our country’s approach to education.

The vast majority of states have long granted public school teachers tenure. The way it works is simple: After a certain number of years, teachers qualify — “virtually automatically” in most states, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality — for a form of job protection that makes it extremely difficult to fire them for the rest of their careers.

[. . .]

So what is the case for K–12 teacher tenure? The truth is, there isn’t a good one. One argument typically offered by tenure defenders is that teaching is a notoriously difficult profession in which to measure success. But this is true for lots of jobs — yet, in all other professions, efforts are still made, however imperfect, to evaluate whether an employee is succeeding and to remove those who are not. Why should teaching be different? In fact, given that teaching is arguably the most important job in our society, it would be difficult to name a profession, save maybe the military, for which these sorts of heightened job protections would be less logical. If a job is truly important to the nation’s future, then you want to make sure that the most able, talented people are doing it — and doing their best work at all times.

That goal is simply incompatible with tenure. Indeed, tenure is so illogical that it’s impossible to see why it shouldn’t be abolished. And that is exactly what the Virginia bill sought to do. Predictably, however, Democrats — who remain far too beholden to teachers’ unions — scuttled the measure. As a result, tenure lives on in Virginia for now.

An illustrated summary of David Friedman’s “Machinery of Freedom”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:35

April 8, 2012

Sexual humiliation as a tool of political control

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

Writing in the Guardian, Naomi Wolf discusses the ways the US government has incorporated sexual humiliation into their toolkit for dealing with both prisoners and innocent people:

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to “turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” He said he felt humiliated: “It made me feel like less of a man.”

[. . .]

Believe me: you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. Jewish prisoners herded into concentration camps were stripped of clothing and photographed naked, as iconic images of that Holocaust reiterated.

[. . .]

The most terrifying phrase of all in the decision is justice Kennedy’s striking use of the term “detainees” for “United States citizens under arrest”. Some members of Occupy who were arrested in Los Angeles also reported having been referred to by police as such. Justice Kennedy’s new use of what looks like a deliberate activation of that phrase is illuminating.

Ten years of association have given “detainee” the synonymous meaning in America as those to whom no rights apply — especially in prison. It has been long in use in America, habituating us to link it with a condition in which random Muslims far away may be stripped by the American state of any rights. Now the term — with its associations of “those to whom anything may be done” — is being deployed systematically in the direction of … any old American citizen.

April 7, 2012

“[Dalton] McGuinty … has led Ontario from the commanding heights almost to the low-rent district of the Canadian economy”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

Conrad Black, on the dangers of regional politics played out at the national and international level:

One of the points I was trying to make in last week’s column, in general support of Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to make both official languages present in all parts of the country, was that in any federal state, some concessions to particular regional concerns are necessary or the country will fall apart, or even atomize. In a little over a century, this fate has split Norway from Sweden, Singapore from Malaysia, Bangladesh from Pakistan, the Czechs from the Slovaks and, most painfully, the Sudanese and South Sudanese.

This was what made the Quebec separatist threat so dangerous; though there was never much prospect of heavy violence, there was a danger of the permanent diminution of the country after a prolonged and immobilizing constitutional crisis. Of course, the separatist leaders greatly and treacherously underestimated the complexities and problems of any such step, and aggravated the problem with trick referendum questions about seeking authority to negotiate sovereignty and association with Canada: Simultaneously to eat and retain the same rich cake.

[. . .]

The Copenhagen Environmental Conference of 2009 was probably the most inane and redundant international conference in all history, as every climate alarmist capable of crawling to a television studio or buttonholing a journalist (except perhaps for Canada’s inimitable Gwyn Dyer), competed in foreseeing the imminence, almost literally, of the fall of the sky. But more demeaning by far at Copenhagen was the spectacle of the premiers of Canada’s two most populous provinces, Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest, attacking Alberta’s oil sands in that over-suggestible ideological environment infested by kooks and charlatans.

The oil sands must be developed, and a pipeline built either into the U.S. or to the West Coast to transport the oil to market. These projects must be managed with great care for the environment. But Canada’s manifest destiny as an energy exporter cannot be held hostage by eco-terrorists, nor by the economic growth of one Canadian region being stunted by the slovenly dependence of other regions on an artificially depreciated Canadian dollar. Intra-Canadian partisanship and regional rivalries must end at the border and the water’s edge.

The antics of McGuinty, who has led Ontario from the commanding heights almost to the low-rent district of the Canadian economy, blaming the prosperity of Alberta for raising the value of the Canadian dollar and inconveniencing Ontario, is an outrage. The new federal NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, has been uttering something perilously close to the same inexcusable flimflam. Alberta, per capita, has done more than any other province to carry the cost of federalism, including oceanic largesse to Quebec. And all Canadians should rejoice at the prospect of Canada becoming a world energy giant, especially as it entails the prosperity of Newfoundland after centuries of economic struggle, and also the flowering of the hydroelectric wealth and technical sophistication of Quebec.

April 5, 2012

Why government stimulus is usually a bad idea

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Mike Milke of the Fraser Institute:

Frum’s praise for Ottawa’s go-slow approach on balanced books is premised on the perception that if Ottawa actually cut spending (as opposed to slowing the rate of growth) such actions would endanger our prosperity: “If you reduce spending too fast, you crimp your economy,” wrote Frum.

But that’s a mistaken notion.

To use just one example from a large body of research, in 2009, leading fiscal policy expert and Harvard University professor Alberto Alesina and his colleague Silvia Ardagna reviewed stimulus initiatives in Canada and 20 other industrialized countries from 1970 to 2007. In the 91 instances where governments tried to stimulate the economy, it turned out the unsuccessful attempts generally were the ones based on increased government spending. Alesina noted that “a one percentage point higher increase in the current [government] spending-to-GDP ratio is associated with a 0.75 percentage point lower growth.”

In other words, stimulus spending doesn’t increase economic growth; it harms it.

To see how Ottawa’s own stimulus spending was unnecessary, consider how Canada emerged from the last recession and how government stimulus spending had nothing to do with it. Our recession ended in mid-2009; it was only about then that federal and provincial governments started spending extra (borrowed) stimulus cash.

To credit stimulus spending for the end to Canada’s recession, one must argue that extra (borrowed) dollars mostly spent after June 2009 somehow magically rescued the Canadian economy before June 2009.

All the borrowing did have one effect: It added to the existing large federal debt mountain, forecast to hit $614-billion in 2015, up from $457-billion in 2008.

The government’s stimulus spending was demanded by the opposition, but evidence since then indicates that the minority Tories would probably have passed a stimulus budget even if the opposition didn’t give them political cover.

A useful idiot wants even more state surveillance, more Big Brother

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Dan Hodges on his love affair with the surveillance state, and his overwhelming desire for even more government snooping:

I want to live in a surveillance state. Big Brother, come cast your watchful eye over me and mine. I love you, bro.

Seriously, when I saw the outcry over Government plans to gain access to telephone, email and internet, my initial reaction was: “You mean they can’t do that already?”

I assumed, somewhat stupidly, that everything we said, typed or viewed was routinely monitored, and then filtered by some giant, super-secret computer tucked away in a heavily guarded subterranean basement of GCHQ: “Hodges has just said he wants to shoot another Liverpool player, sir.” “Oh, he’s always saying that, Jones. Ignore him.”

I don’t want less surveillance, I want more of the stuff. My idea of the perfect society is one where every street corner has a CCTV camera, everyone has a nice shiny ID card tucked in their wallet and no extremist can even think of logging onto a dodgy website without an SAS squad abseiling swiftly through their window.

April 4, 2012

David Akin: The F-35 fiasco is now a boondoggle

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Nobody in the government or the Department of National Defence comes off well in this politico-techno-bureaucratic mess:

The acquisition process to replace our aging CF-18 fighter jets can now officially be proclaimed as the F-35 boondoggle.

In a damning report Tuesday, Auditor General Michael Ferguson said the whole process in which the Harper Conservatives decided to allocate at least $25 billion over the next 20 years to buy 65 F-35 Lightning II “fifth generation” fighter jets was gummed up by Department of National Defence bureaucrats — and possibly air force officers — who flat out lied to their political masters and to Parliament about the costs and risks associated with the program.

The only good news is we have not yet spent that $25 billion or signed any contracts.

Canada has generally been well served by the civil service (I grit my teeth to say that, as I’m not at all fond of big government), if only in comparison to other countries. One of the better inheritances from Britain is the (relatively) non-political, impartial bureaucracy. In this case, however, the bureaucracy has failed, and failed spectacularly:

But the politicians, like any prime minister or cabinet minister before them, has to be able to rely on the bureaucracy to give them the straight goods.

That did not happen.

Here’s Ferguson in his report: “National Defence told parliamentarians (last year) that cost data provided by U.S. authorities had been validated by U.S. experts and partner countries which was not accurate at the time. At the time of its response, National Defence knew the costs were likely to increase but did not so inform parliamentarians.”

In other words, DND bureaucrats lied. Full stop. Period.

Here’s another paragraph from Ferguson: “Briefing materials did not inform senior decision-makers, central agencies, and the Minister [of National Defence] of the problems and associated risks of relying on the F-35 to replace the CF-18.”

And another: “We found that the ministers of National Defence and Industry Canada and those ministers on the Treasury Board were not fully informed (in 2006) about the procurement implications.”

I’ve been less-than-fully-supportive of the F-35 acquisition, as a quick perusal of F-35 related posts will show, but this is now much more important than the question of what aircraft (if any) the RCAF will be purchasing. It’s now a case of finding out how deep the rot is in the DND and whether the RCAF actively aided the deception. If so, heads must roll.

Update: MILNEWS.ca has a round-up of reporting on the Auditor General’s report, focusing on the F-35 program.

The authoritarian High-Modernist recipe for failure

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Charles Stross linked to this older post at Ribbonfarm discussing “how to think like a state”:

James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring.

[. . .]

Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).

Here is the recipe:

  • Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
  • Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
  • Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
  • Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
  • Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
  • Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
  • Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

[. . .]

Central to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives:

    The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people.

The book is about the 2-3 century long process by which modern states reorganized the societies they governed, to make them more legible to the apparatus of governance. The state is not actually interested in the rich functional structure and complex behavior of the very organic entities that it governs (and indeed, is part of, rather than “above”). It merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic.

It’s a long post, but it is well worth reading. In a couple of throwaway examples, it rather cleverly ties the Indian caste system (as made “legible” by the Raj) and the entire Roman empire to Scott’s failure model.

April 2, 2012

Kelly McParland: Judge Harper not on what he says, but what he does

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

In the National Post, Kelly McParland scrutinizes the entrails of the federal budget to determine what Prime Minister Stephen Harper is really thinking:

It’s pretty self-evident that prime ministers reveal a lot of their own character in the content of their budgets, but it may be particularly so for Stephen Harper. The guy is an economist, after all. Messing around with graphs and figures was what he planned to do with his life, if seizing control of the country’s government didn’t work out. And since we know he’s a bit of a micro-manager, it’s probably safe to say there’s at least as much Harper as there is Jim Flaherty in the nitty gritty of the latest budget document. So let’s use it to figure out what Stephen Harper believes — really believes — when it comes to running the country.

We know what he says he believes in: smaller government, fewer bureaucrats, restrained spending, less intrusion, an end to taxpayer-financed welfare for businesses and governments. Accountability, prudence, fairness. Individual responsibility rather than the smothering embrace of the nanny state. No more currying favour with every special-interest advocacy group that captures the attention of congenitally correct.

Maybe on some plane he does honestly hold those values dear to his heart. But we all profess to believe in ideals we never quite get around to displaying. Mr. Harper has been Prime Minister for six years, and since last May has had the majority needed to have his way with legislation. Yet, as Andrew Coyne has so clearly demonstrated on more than one occasion, Mr. Harper’s actions habitually belie his words. If he were applying for membership in the True Conservative Believers Club of Canada, they’d turn him away as unqualified.

The August riots: another study that finds exactly what it expects to find

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Neil Davenport on the most recent report on the causes of the August riots in Britain:

Once again, an independent panel, this time set up by the government, rolls out a rehearsed number of ‘social factors’ to explain away the disturbing events: unemployment and lack of opportunities for young people; ‘forgotten families’; police harassment and a widespread ‘culture of materialism’. The panel, which visited 21 communities and interviewed thousands of people affected by the riots, says its wide-ranging recommendations ‘must be enacted together’ if the risk of further riots is to be reduced. In a conclusion that bizarrely echoes Tony Blair’s time in office, panel chair Darra Singh says that everyone must have a ‘stake in society’. It makes you wonder why ‘stakeholder society’ policies didn’t actually work in the first place.

[. . .]

None of the enquiries have examined the broad cultural changes that have taken place in British society which, more often than not, are institutionalised in English schools and other state agencies. In fact, this is the ‘social context’ that ought to preoccupy researchers, not the handwrung staples of poverty and unemployment. To approach the riots in this way is not to rehearse ‘teachers aren’t strict enough’ platitudes. It is to examine the kind of destructive values that have been passed down from the top of society: namely, the fostering of assertive victimhood whereby nobody is expected to be accountable for their own actions. It really is somebody else’s fault.

What every schoolchild learns from an early age is that both emotional hurts and tick-box disadvantages — from minor medical problems to class/ethnic background — constitute a person’s default status. It is only by placing demands on state providers that these ‘hurts’ are temporarily assuaged. This is what is meant by a culture of entitlement — victim status has to be recognised and then rewarded by state providers. The higher the perceived victim status, the greater the expectation that somebody else must make provisions or allowances (or even an educational maintenance allowance). In this sense, looting from JD Sports becomes justified, even acceptable, because of the expectations that somebody must pay for a looter’s inflated sense of grievance.

Indeed, many of August’s looters rolled out a lexicon of ‘hurts’ in order to justify their destructive, anti-social behaviour. According to this cultural script, social solidarities are entirely alien because young people have been socialised to dwell on their self-esteem above all else. Far from other people or a wider community being a source of support, they are more often seen as a target for all sorts of imaginary grievances. Local shopkeepers and random individuals attacked during the August riots were, in some way, being held responsible for young people’s poverty and lack of employment prospects. As one of the blasé looters put it, ‘we wanted to show the rich that we can do what we want’. If young people have grown up with the belief that they are automatically held back by social disadvantages, often promoted by state agencies themselves, then a local community itself can become a target for retribution.

[. . .]

Once again, another report on last August’s riots is an exercise in advocacy research, whereby the research neatly matches already rehearsed conclusions. The government panel’s recommendations, failing to recognise the profound significance of the riots, follow the line of wishful thinking and delusion pursued by radical commentators. Furthermore, the panel’s instinctive elitism simply echoes the radical left’s own distrust of ordinary people. Institutionalising the claim that most people are naturally incapable and useless is what destroyed informal communities in the first place. As the nannying, hectoring tone of the latest report into the riots shows, what could be more morally debilitating and soul-destroying?

March 31, 2012

Botched investigation into GCHQ staff member’s mysterious death

Filed under: Britain, Government, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

This sounds particularly bad:

Forensic investigators have apologized for the bungling of the inquiry into the mysterious death of a codebreaker employed by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

In August 2010, Gareth Williams, described as a mathematical genius by his peers and employed at GCHQ since leaving university, was found dead in his flat in London. Williams, who had recently qualified for deployment with MI6 — Britain’s version of the CIA — was found naked and partially decomposed in a sports bag that had been locked from the outside and placed in the bath.

In the pre-inquest hearing on Friday, the court heard that the investigation into Williams’ death had been botched from the start. LGS Forensics said that DNA found on Mr Williams’ body was investigated, but later turned out to have been transferred there from one of the forensic scientists investigating the death, and a search of the apartment turned up no clues as to his death.

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