Quotulatiousness

August 30, 2024

Two-Tier Keir’s “mask off” moment(s)

Millennial Woes presents a disturbingly long summary of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s responses to popular non-violent protests:

The situation in Britain now is so perverse that, if you could convey it to people from a century ago, I think they, after getting over the disbelief and astonishment and accepting that this really was true, would assume it could not possibly have come about by chance. Whatever their complaints about the Britain of 1900, they wouldn’t have believed it capable — on its own — of the degeneration we have seen. They would insist that it must have been wickedly subverted, every failsafe removed, and entire systems of governance, culture and morality repurposed, made to achieve the opposite of their purported function.

I hardly need list the symptoms of this, but for the sake of posterity …

  • The control nexus (of which the government is merely one node) ships massive numbers of unassimilable foreigners into the country against the repeatedly expressed wishes of the natives, and in clear violation of their best interests.
  • Natives who complain about this are hounded, doxed, demonised, made unemployable, and often imprisoned.
  • Their children are systematically indoctrinated by fiction media to accept their dispossession. They are encouraged to despise the “bigoted” attitudes of their parents and grandparents, and to loathe their nation’s history. The boys are encouraged to idolise non-native men. The girls are encouraged to race-mix with them.
  • Teachers deliver the same indoctrination in the classroom — in every classroom. You won’t be allowed to become a teacher unless you voice enthusiasm for such things. Alternative views have been eradicated from the classroom and the lecture hall.
  • Natives are systematically disadvantaged in numerous sectors of education and employment.
  • Natives are demonised in fiction and news media while non-natives are made to look wonderful.
  • The mass sexual abuse of native children by non-natives is systematically down-played by news media, who shift discussion to false “equivalents”.
  • Natives’ history is systematically distorted in education and fiction media.
  • The very existence of the natives, as a group, and their ownership of their homeland, are systematically denied by education, fiction media, news media, and phoney “science”.
  • The police do whatever they are told to do, kneeling for the participants in one riot, hunting down the participants in a different riot.
  • Judges pass obviously outrageous prison sentences upon certain people, for blatantly political reasons. These people are denied bail and pressured to plead guilty for fear of sentences even more outrageous. All of this is to send a message to other people: “don’t dare complain or the same will happen to you”.
  • The media rushes to concoct fake narratives about events, to keep the public misinformed.
  • A so-called “charity”, which is heavily linked to the government and the civil service, seeks to indoctrinate the young and ruin the lives of “troublemakers”, and actively aids the government in concocting fake narratives in order to control public thought and direct events.
  • Fake news from such Establishment agents is forgiven, fake news from the Establishment’s enemies is answered with threats of prosecution.
  • The media “memory hole” stories of appalling violence by non-natives, explain away such incidents with talk of mental illness, tell natives “don’t look back in anger”, and at all costs defend the suicidal ideologies that make such incidents possible.
  • The prisons are emptied of rapists, child molesters and murderers so that troublesome natives can be assigned their cells. They are placed alongside non-natives who might well be violent to them, and journalists gloat about it.
  • The slaughtering of three little girls by a non-native is dismissed by the Prime Minister, who says “it doesn’t matter” that the rioting was a response to this outrageous crime, which was enabled by the outrageous government policies that the natives have been complaining about for decades. Their shock, their trauma, their resentment, their dignity, their pain… “doesn’t matter”. This is in stark contrast with how he reacted to Black people rioting several years before.
  • The natives’ freedom of speech is continually undermined, one government after another actively seeking to erode it further.
  • Not one single organisation is fighting for the wellbeing, rights or interests of the natives.
  • Any political party that would do anything about any of this is refused the right to stand in elections, debanked, demonised and, in most cases, destroyed.

Any one of these examples would, in itself, be cause for great alarm. The whole lot together indicate a society that is not just largely, not just fundamentally, but wholly opposed to the continued existence of its native population. To underline: British society is actively perpetrating the destruction of the native British people.

It has been said that the ruthless authoritarian response of the fledgling Starmer government to this summer’s (White) riots is a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party. Others have called it a “mask off” moment for the British Establishment, which transcends the particular party in office. Indeed, things that didn’t happen under the Conservatives have suddenly happened under Labour; things that one would more neatly associate with the former have instead happened under the latter. That can only mean either that the Labour Party has utterly lost its sense of itself, or that the particular party in office simply doesn’t matter, because the Establishment abides.

I think, in fact, all of these statements are true. It has been a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party, and for Keir Starmer himself, and for the Establishment which enables and directs them. The Labour Party has lost its sense of itself — or, to put it less romantically, has been completely repurposed. And the Establishment does abide; no matter which party is in office, things only ever evolve in one direction. And after all, while Starmer’s behaviour casts a bad light on him, he is only Prime Minister in the first place because the Establishment wanted him, not someone who might have reacted to these riots in a different manner. (Boris Johnson is good at stoking war abroad, but not so willing to stoke it at home.)

But in the end it doesn’t really matter. We don’t need to pin the blame on Starmer, Labour, the British Establishment or Davos; they are all one and the same miasma. Yes, the Conservative Party might have reacted differently to the riots, so to some extent we can blame Labour’s ideology or Starmer’s personality, but the pendulum is kept swinging for a reason. One empty suit is shifted out, another is shifted in. Each one might be enthusiastically on-board with the agenda or compelled to go along with it, this being the only variance. And thus the Establishment abides, always getting what it wants against the wishes of the natives, and always degrading and dispossessing them.

August 29, 2024

Pavel Durov’s arrest isn’t for a clear crime, it’s for allowing everyone access to encrypted communications services

Filed under: France, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille explains the real reason the French government arrested Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram:

It’s appropriate that, days after the French government arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, for failing to monitor and restrict communications as demanded by officials in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that his company, which owns Facebook, was subjected to censorship pressures by U.S. officials. Durov’s arrest, then, stands as less of a one-off than as part of a concerted effort by governments, including those of nominally free countries, to control speech.

“Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov is expected to appear in court Sunday after being arrested by French police at an airport near Paris for alleged offences related to his popular messaging app,” reported France24.

A separate story noted claims by Paris prosecutors that he was detained for “running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud, as well as the refusal to communicate information to authorities, money laundering and providing cryptographic services to criminals”.

Freedom for Everybody or for Nobody

Durov’s alleged crime is offering encrypted communications services to everybody, including those who engage in illegality or just anger the powers that be. But secure communications are a feature, not a bug, for most people who live in a world in which “global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023”, according to Freedom House. Fighting authoritarian regimes requires means of exchanging information that are resistant to penetration by various repressive police agencies.

“Telegram, and other encrypted messaging services, are crucial for those intending to organise protests in countries where there is a severe crackdown on free speech. Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong have all seen people relying on the services,” Index on Censorship noted in 2021.

And if bad people occasionally use encrypted apps such as Telegram, they use phones and postal services, too. The qualities that make communications systems useful to those battling authoritarianism are also helpful to those with less benign intentions. There’s no way to offer security to one group without offering it to everybody.

As I commented on a post on MeWe the other day, “Somehow the governments of the west are engaged in a competition to see who can be the most repressive. Canada and New Zealand had the early lead, but Australia, Britain, Germany, and France have all recently moved ahead in the standings. I’m not sure what the prizes might be, but I strongly suspect “a bloody revolution” is one of them (if not all of them).”

August 28, 2024

H.R. McMaster dishes on Trump’s first term in office

In Reason, Liz Wolfe covers some of the head-scratchers former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster revealed about working for Donald Trump:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

What might a second Trump White House be like? In his new book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as national security adviser to Donald Trump (for one year), characterizes Oval Office meetings as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” where advisers would greet him with lines like “your instincts are always right” or “no one has ever been treated so badly by the press”.

Trump, meanwhile, would come up with crazy concepts, and float them: “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” (Also: “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?”)

This is one man’s account, of course. McMaster’s word should not be taken as gospel, and some of his frustration might stem from his dismissal, or his foreign-policy prescriptions being at times ignored by his boss. But it’s a somewhat revealing look behind the curtain at policy-setting in a White House helmed by an especially mercurial commander in chief, who “enjoyed and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and across the administration”.

It also shows how quickly Trump fantasies have percolated through the Republican Party, namely the “let’s just bomb Mexico to get rid of the cartels” line, which Trump has been toying with since roughly 2019 (or possibly more like 2017, after he chatted with Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, who had promised to kill 100,000 drug traffickers during his first six months as president). A few years prior, in 2015, he had suggested that Mexico was sending rapist and drug-traffickers across the southern border, and that we’d need to build a wall between the two countries, but it wasn’t until nine American citizens were killed in Mexico that Trump trotted out the idea of declaring cartels foreign terrorist organizations and using military might to eradicate them.

Trump’s line from 2019 has now become standard fare, notes The Economist: The Republican primary debates included lots of tough talk on Mexico, specifically on the bombing front, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claiming he’d send special forces down there on Day One. Right-wing think tanks have embraced the messaging, with articles headlined “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels”. Taking cues from other members of her party, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asked why “we’re fighting a war in Ukraine, and we’re not bombing the Mexican cartels”. Whether it’s economic protectionism (10 percent across-the-board tariffs, with 60 percent tariffs imposed on Chinese imports) or Mexico-bombing, Trump has near-magical abilities to get other members of his party to accept something previously regarded as absurd.

August 27, 2024

Britain as the modern Panopticon

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jeremy Bentham proposed a new kind of prison in the 1700s, one where all of the prisoners in their cells were under constant observation by the guards. What sounds like a horrific way to live to any sensible rational person seems to have a fascinating appeal to the kind of micromanaging, busybody control freak who runs for office in British politics today:

An illustration of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison.
Drawing by Willey Reveley, 1791.

In Britain authorities use cameras to monitor private individuals in real time. They track cars using number plate software, and human beings using facial recognition software and analysis of gait.

The rationale for these intrusive measures is to prevent illegal activity as well as recording crimes for use in trials.

This troubles many since it places unsupervised control mechanisms in the hands of politicians and authorities increasingly out of touch with the interests of the majority.

Full-spectrum surveillance

The British Government has recently threatened to use this surveillance technology to clamp down on “extremists”.

Currently that means anti-immigration protestors, although there is provision for “anti-establishment” protestors too.

There is much Britain’s political class will not tolerate in the people who elevate them to power.

They have promised to relentlessly hound detestables using advanced spy technology, principally facial recognition software. This is specifically designed to identify individuals and track their movements in real time.

None of this has been requested by the public, and polls reflect considerable unease, particularly with facial recognition software, a powerful tool few are comfortable with.

Advocates of surveillance claim this erosion to our privacy is a necessary step to tackle crime. Cameras enable the police and authorities to identify criminals as well as detect and record the crimes they commit.

To the casual observer it sounds plausible and even reasonable. We won’t be using it to spy on you, only them. It has some public benefits.

This seems like a workable idea. So why is it so useless at stopping a very visible crime?

August 25, 2024

“Does your vote count?” or how to set up an automatic vote-generation scheme

Elizabeth Nickson on recent reporting about voting scams in various US states:

After engineer and data scientist Kim Brooks worked on cleaning the voter rolls in Georgia for a year, she realized she was on a stationary bicycle. She’d clear a name for various reasons, dead, felon, stolen ID, living at a seasonal campground for twenty years, duplicate, moved out of state, 200 years old, etc., and back it would come within a month. At that juncture she realized that a program within the Georgia voter registration database was methodically adding back fake names.

She looked deeper. For new registrants, the culprit was principally Driver’s Services creating new registrations and in this case, the manufacturer was a person, or persons. Within the government office, someone was stealing names and duplicating, even tripling that person’s vote and then forging their signature. Sometimes it was someone who just died, or a teacher who had no voting record. In the case of a nurse who died in 2022 with three registrations, she was registered to vote in two counties, and all three of her voted in the 2022 election and the 2024 primary. Each signature was slightly different, the last three letters spelled, ly, ley, and lley

This operation works under AVR, or automatic voter registration, and is being used to register migrants. They will not vote, but their names have been entered into the Voter Registration database when they apply for a driver’s license and their vote will be voted for them. I imagine that this is repeating something everyone knows, but the borders are open for precisely this reason, so the Democrat/RINO machine can steal their votes. By the way, the process for advancing permanent residency has been cut from 11 months to two.

In 2020, twenty states used operation AVR. Of those, Trump lost 18.

That’s because there are registration fraud rings, as identified in the Arabella doc. and in the work of Omega4America. This worked well in Michigan, where, according to Captain Seth Keshel, who is one of the leads on this fight, believes that Trump likely got 576,443 more votes than were counted and won Michigan by 8.5%.

Every state is host to a dozen or more NGO’s which do nothing but fill out ballots for the faked registrants. Peter Bernegger’s team in Wisconsin has video of NGO functionaries doing just that in Wisconsin in 2020 at 1 am, early morning after Election Day.

    Michigan has two million more registered voters than they should have. 83.5% of the state is registered to vote but only 77.9% is over 18. – Seth Keshel

Seth works with demographic trends and does detailed statistical analysis; travelling almost ceaselessly to teach Americans how to stop the cheat. AVR was launched in Michigan, after Trump’s win in 2016. By 2020 there were 547,460 net new registrants in Michigan. Today, more voters are registered to vote than there are people old enough to vote. Keshel:

Per Keshel’s analysis, the Democrats and RINOs are frantically operating a dying political coalition which began to shift hard after Obama’s performance in his first four years, when not only did nothing change for the working class, it worsened. Democrat registrations in Michigan collapsed to the point where the Dems lost 16,000 as of 2016. Enter AVR and boom, 500+K new registrants.

August 19, 2024

If you’ve never worked in the private sector, you have no idea how regulations impact businesses

In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille explain why Democratic candidates like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who have spent little or no time in the non-government world have such rosy views of the benefits of government control with no concept of the costs such control imposes:

The respective public versus private sector experiences of the 2024 Presidential/Vice Presidential candidates.
New York Times

In broad terms, Democrats have faith in government while the GOP is skeptical — though a lot of Republicans are willing to suspend disbelief when their party controls the executive branch.

The contrast between the two parties can be seen in stark terms in the resumes of the two presidential and vice-presidential tickets. The New York Times made it easier to compare them earlier this month when it ran charts of the career timelines of Trump, J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Their roles at any given age were colour-coded for college, military, private sector, public service or politics, federal government and candidate for federal office.

Peach is the colour used by the Times to indicate employment in the private sector, which produces the opportunities and wealth that are mugged away (taxation is theft by another name, after all) to fund all other sectors. It appears under the headings of “businessman” and “television personality” for Trump and as “lawyer and venture capitalist” for Vance. But private-sector peach appears nowhere in the timelines for Harris and Walz. Besides, perhaps, some odd jobs when they were young, neither of the Democrats has worked in the private sector.

Now, not all private-sector jobs are created equal. Some of the Republican presidential candidate’s ventures, like Trump University, have been highly sketchy, as are some of his practices — he’s openly boasted about donating to politicians to gain favours (though try to do business in New York without greasing palms). I’m not sure I’d want The Apprentice on my resume. But there must be some value to working on the receiving end of the various regulations and taxes government officials foist on society rather than spending one’s career brainstorming more rules without ever suffering the consequences.

In 1992, former U.S. senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern penned a column for the Wall Street Journal about the challenges he encountered investing in a hotel after many years in government.

“In retrospect, I … wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day,” he wrote. He bemoaned “federal, state and local rules” passed with seemingly good intentions but little thought to the burdens and costs they imposed.

The lack of private sector stints in the career timelines of Harris and Walz means that, like pre-hotel McGovern, they’ve never had to worry about what it’s like to suffer the policies of a large and intrusive government.

That said, it’s possible to overstate the lessons learned by Republicans and Democrats from their different experiences. Vance, despite having worked to fund and launch businesses, has, since being elected to the U.S. Senate, advocated capturing the regulatory state and repurposing it for political uses, including punishing enemies.

Not only does power corrupt, but it does so quickly.

The US Navy’s mis-managed decline continues

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

Niccolo Soldo from his weekend wrap-up of various news articles that caught his eye:

Artist’s rendering of the US Navy’s FFG(X) Constellation-class guided missile frigate. Initial contract awarded 30 April, 2020, but delivery of the first ship is not expected until 2029 due to design changes and other issues.
US Navy image via Wikimedia Commons.

One data point that works in favour of American Declinism is the US Navy’s inability to not just keep up with the Chinese in terms of the production of ships, but to also maintain its own production output. Many lightly-armed littoral combat ships have been retired, for example, with nothing to replace them.

These production setbacks have been pointed out to me, with one mutual on Twitter/X reiterating the point so that I get it (I do!). This is an actual problem that requires solving, and fast. It is partially to blame for the Americans effectively ceding the Red Sea to the Houthis (for now).

AP has done a partial deep-dive (horrible language here, I apologize) on this issue:

    The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.

    Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”

    Marinette Marine is under contract to build six guided-missile frigates — the Navy’s newest surface warships — with options to build four more. But it only has enough workers to produce one frigate a year, according to Labs.

A lot of the guys who know how to do this work are retiring or have already retired. Sound familiar?

    One of the industry’s chief problems is the struggle to hire and retain laborers for the challenging work of building new ships as graying veterans retire, taking decades of experience with them.

    Shipyards across the country have created training academies and partnered with technical colleges to provide workers with the skills they need to construct high-tech warships. Submarine builders and the Navy formed an alliance to promote manufacturing careers, and shipyards are offering perks to retain workers once they’re hired.

    Andreini trained for his job at Marinette through a program at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. Prior to that, he spent several years as a production line welder, making components for garbage trucks. He said some of his buddies are held back by the stigma that shipbuilding is a “crappy work environment, and it’s unsafe.”

The problem:

    Much of the blame for U.S. shipbuilding’s current woes lies with the Navy, which frequently changes requirements, requests upgrades and tweaks designs after shipbuilders have begun construction.

    That’s seen in cost overruns, technological challenges and delays in the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford; the spiking of a gun system for a stealth destroyer program after its rocket-assisted projectiles became too costly; and the early retirement of some of the Navy’s lightly armored littoral combat ships, which were prone to breaking down.

    The Navy vowed to learn from those past lessons with the new frigates they are building at Marinette Marine. The frigates are prized because they’re less costly to produce than larger destroyers but have similar weapon systems.

Now check this out:

    The Navy chose a ship design already in use by navies in France and Italy instead of starting from scratch. The idea was that 15% of the vessel would be updated to meet U.S. Navy specifications, while 85% would remain unchanged, reducing costs and speeding construction.

    Instead, the opposite happened: The Navy redesigned 85% of the ship, resulting in cost increases and construction delays, said Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute. Construction of the first-in-class Constellation warship, which began in August 2022, is now three years behind schedule, with delivery pushed back to 2029.

    The final design still isn’t completed.

Shifting threats:

    Throughout its history, the Navy has had to adapt to varying perils, whether it be the Cold War of past decades or current threats including war in the Middle East, growing competition from Chinese and Russian navies, piracy off the coast of Somalia and persistent attacks on commercial ships by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

    And that’s not all. The consolidation of shipyards and funding uncertainties have disrupted the cadence of ship construction and stymied long-term investments and planning, says Matthew Paxton of the Shipbuilders Council of America, a national trade association.

    “We’ve been dealing with inconsistent shipbuilding plans for years,” Paxton said. “When we finally start ramping up, the Navy is shocked that we lost members of our workforce.”

How is the US Navy supposed to protect Taiwan from a potential Chinese invasion?

QotD: Government efficiency

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

Our greatest threat today comes from government’s involvement in things that are not government’s proper province. And in those things government has a magnificent record of failure.

Ronald Reagan, quoted in “Inside Ronald Reagan”, Reason, 1975-07.

August 16, 2024

After the Trump livestream, Elon Musk’s been “charged with coercive chuckling, a legal first”

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray has been following the legal sideshow of the United Auto Workers union filing charges with the US National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), alleging that Trump and Musk made threats against organized labour during the recent livestreamed event:

The UAW complaints against Tesla and Trump for President 2024 have been listed on the NLRB website. They really did it, and I got it wrong. The delay in listing the complaints, and the lunacy of the charges, led me to the wrong conclusion. The complaints are real: there are forms with vague and obviously ridiculous complaints on them, and they filed the things.

But they’re still functionally fake, and they’ll die quickly. Anti-Trump organizations have been doing this for years, without success; this is the third complaint filed with the NLRB against Trump campaign organizations.

In the first of those previous cases, the NLRB raised the obvious question about jurisdiction, expressing doubt (“without deciding”) that they can police presidential campaigns using labor law:

The NLRB has previously declined to pursue labor complaints against Trump for President, and the UAW has filed a labor complaint against Trump for President. We can make educated guesses about what happens next. I’ve emailed professors who teach labor law to ask them if the National Labor Relations Act governs the political speech of presidential candidates, but they haven’t responded.

As for the complaint against Tesla, Elon Musk had a livestreamed discussion with Donald Trump in which Trump said that striking workers should be fired; Musk laughed, but didn’t say anything in response. This news report includes audio of that exchange. The complaint alleges that Musk therefore made coercive statements

August 15, 2024

“The Establishment … are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Spaceman Spiff risks getting the full power and majesty of the British legal system arrayed against him for offering an opinion critical of the authorities and the ongoing immigration policies of this and previous British governments:

Britain is experiencing civil unrest in response to the recent murders of three young girls at the hands of an individual whose family was allowed to enter Britain from Africa and settle in Wales.

The Establishment response is similar to comparable European states like Ireland or Germany. They are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration.

Vocal rejection of multiculturalism and evidence of its failure in Britain is treated as a hate crime, a subject that cannot be discussed.

This has done nothing to quell discomfort and has done little more than show us Britain’s elites are lost in a bubble that is increasingly divorced from reality.

Mass immigration is deeply unpopular

Immigration has been an issue since the 1950s. Since the 1990s it has featured as one of the key issues in every election, often the top issue for most.

Conversely it has been summarily ignored by the educated classes who run the country. Immigration is here to stay, and Britain must change to accommodate it.

The elite section of society promoting immigration is especially indifferent to those most affected, low wage workers. There is also a strong cultural component beyond the economic arguments, an understanding the drive is to make Britain less white with very vocal attempts to champion non-natives in every area of life.

For many decades the educated classes have viewed notions of patriotism or national loyalty with suspicion. Many fancy themselves as internationalists more in tune with the educated in foreign nations than their working-class compatriots.

Now, after decades of immigration, whole communities have been displaced. Some areas of Britain have no Europeans living there. Some tourists complain parts of London do not look English.

[…]

It is the height of arrogance to believe we can somehow circumvent the wisdom accumulated throughout history. And the price being paid is by the British people who are losing their homeland.

Those behind our utopian schemes are working harder and harder to shore them up. Not just mixing cultures but expensive climate initiatives, radical feminism and fractional reserve banking to name only a few of today’s fads. None of them were ever going to work and now they are obviously failing.

The announcements represent the beginning of the end of bad ideas that were doomed from the start. A sane government would take note and begin a plan to reset Britain starting with listening to concerns about mass immigration.

Instead our ruling elite are digging in, and that will probably mean increased civil disturbance as more and more recognize they have no voice and no say.

Given who we are, who we really are under the political correctness and the good manners, this is absolute insanity on their part. Perhaps just the latest decision in a long line of bad ideas unable to accommodate reality. The distortions within their bubble are strong and they are becoming impossible to hide.

The end is nigh for the believers in Western liberalism.

August 12, 2024

Lions, foxes and wolves

N.S. Lyons tries to explain how Britain has gotten into its current social and political plight by recalling the works of Niccolò Machiavelli:

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

The riots that have recently wracked the streets of the UK reflect decades of pent up public frustration with the country’s governing elite, especially their total refusal to control mass immigration despite vote after vote demanding they do exactly that. The pot has now boiled over. But the ongoing back-and-forth of ethnic violence also represents a signal that the British elite’s whole broader strategy of governing – one based in the fundamental personality of the ruling class itself – may be beginning to break down. And that carries some significant implications.

To understand why, however, we need to take a brief detour back about five centuries to Niccolò Machiavelli. He identified two archetypical psychological profiles of people who become leaders: the cunning but weak fox, who can outmaneuver his opponents but is “defenseless against wolves”; and the strong and brave lion, who likes to fight and who can scare off wolves but who is “defenseless against traps”. Machiavelli argued that a true statesman must embody both personalities, or risk destruction.

A distant student of Machiavelli, fellow Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would later expand the metaphor further. Observing history, he noted that the rise and fall of states and civilizations could be matched to a cyclical pattern in the collective personality of their ruling classes.

Nations are founded by lions, who are a society’s natural warrior class – its jocks, so to speak. They establish and expand a kingdom’s borders at the point of a sword, pacifying external enemies. Like Sparta’s Lycurgus or Rome’s Augustus, their firm hand often also puts an end to internal strife and establishes (or re-establishes) the rule of law. Their authority can be dictatorial, but it is relatively honest and straightforward in nature. They value directness and the clarity of combat. They are comfortable with the use of raw force, and open about their willingness to use it, whether against criminals or their own enemies. They have a firm sense of the distinction between enemies and friends in general – of who is part of the family and who is a prowling wolf to be guarded against. The security and stability they establish is what allows the nation to grow into prosperity.

Security and prosperity produce a proliferation of foxes. Foxes are unsuited to and deeply uncomfortable with the employment of force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, because they’re nerds. They seek to overcome obstacles through clever persuasion or the manipulation of people, information, narratives, and formal processes. If they have to use physical force they will, but prefer to disguise its nature and are prone to use it ineptly. The brainy and cosmopolitan foxes have talents the lions don’t, however: they are good at managing complexity and scale, navigating the nuances of diplomatic alliances, or extracting profits from an extensive empire.

As long as peace prevails, civilizations come increasingly to morally prize the indirect and diplomatic methods of foxes and to avoid and indeed abhor the strength and violence of lions. And as states grow larger and more complex, establishing new layers of bureaucracy, law, and procedure, this quickly favors the byzantine organizing and scheming of foxes. In comparison lions are inarticulate and unprepared for the traps of more underhanded mammals. So eventually a wholesale replacement of the elite occurs: the lions who founded the nation are pushed out of its leadership, marginalized and excluded by a class of foxes who see them as brutish relics of a barbaric age.

But a curious thing then happens, Pareto observed: the instability of societies overly dominated by foxes begins to increase relentlessly. The foxes, reluctant to properly distinguish and identify real threats, or to openly employ force even when necessary, find themselves defenseless against wolves both internal and external. When faced with escalating challenges, the foxes tend to resort to doubling down on their preferred strategy of misdirection, manipulation, and attempting to bury or buy off threats rather than confront them directly. This does nothing to solve problems that require the firm use of force, or the threat of it, such as keeping packs of wolves on the other side of the borders. Eventually, when things get bad enough, foxes may desperately lash out with violence, but do so indecisively, ham-fistedly, or in entirely the wrong direction. The wolves, for their part, can instinctively smell weakness and just keep coming.

Like the rest of the West, Britain has been ruled for decades now by an effete managerial elite whose system of technocratic control is absolutely characteristic of foxes. There could be no better example of this than how the government has attempted to manage immigration and the ethnic tensions it has brought to unhappily multi-cultural Britain. It has sought to control public perception of the problem, and indeed has strived mightily to pretend the entire problem simply doesn’t exist.

It has done so, in classic foxlike fashion, through careful control of media and online information, engaging in an effort to downplay inconvenient facts, obscure the identity of terrorists and violent criminals, memory-hole potentially divisive events, and censor counter-narratives. Those who have continued to speak out on the issue are smeared with reputation-destroying labels like “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “far right” in order to deflect others from listening to them. This reflects foxes’ consistent instinct to turn first and foremost to information warfare and narrative manipulation over direct confrontation. Hence the ruling elite’s immediate reaction to the latest riots: blaming them on “misinformation” and “unregulated social media” – the implication being that nothing at all would be amiss if the information common people had access to could just be better suppressed.

“Premier Doug Ford’s plans for the demon liquor will lead us all to untold poverty and perdition”

In the National Post, Chris Selley points and laughs at the classist viewing-with-alarm and frenzied pearl-clutching over the impending rule change that will allow wine and beer to be sold (and even served) in convenience stores like the 7-Eleven chain:

The plight of poverty-stricken Ontarians, forced to get drunk at their local 7-Eleven dive bar.
Gin Lane, from Beer Street and Gin Lane via Wikimedia Commons.

Ontario politics in recent weeks has played out as something like a real-time satire of itself, with the Latent Methodist Brigade still insisting Premier Doug Ford’s plans for the demon liquor will lead us all to untold poverty and perdition. The news this week has only made them more upset: Japanese convenience store empire 7-Eleven will open licensed areas in 58 of its 59 stores in Ontario, in which you can enjoy an alcoholic drink with your hot dog, nachos or chicken nuggets. The company says it’ll add 60 jobs.

Fifty-eight is not a large number, you will agree, in a province with many thousands of licensed premises, any of which might get you drunk and send you back out to your car or boat (though of course they shouldn’t). Some of those thousands of licensed premises are even attached to gas stations, I can report. And many gas-station convenience stores in Ontario sell beer, wine and liquor as independently run “LCBO agency stores”.

For the record, 7-Eleven announced they were doing this way back in December 2022. Pro-forma neo-puritan controversy ensued, and quickly died down. Two 7-Elevens already operate as licensed restaurants in Ontario, apparently without incident, along with 19 in Alberta. (Unfortunately, bien-pensant Ontarians are trained from birth to believe Alberta’s liquor-retail reforms in the 1990s were a grotesque misadventure that everyone there regrets.)

Nevertheless, the same pro-forma neo-puritan freakout is playing out again.

“Let me get this straight. 7-Eleven locations where people fuel up their cars will now allow folks to drink on the premises? What could possibly go wrong?” sneered JP Hornick, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU), who was last seen dragging LCBO employees into a disastrous tantrum-cum-strike over expanding retail access.

“We need a government that will focus on real things including bringing down hospital wait times, fixing schools and tackling the housing crisis as their signature achievements, amongst many more,” Toronto Coun. Josh Matlow correctly averred on Twitter … and then, as is the fashion here, went full non-sequitur: “Doug Ford made sure we could drink coolers inside a 7-Eleven.” As if the government decided it could only pick one.

(And can I just say here, any Toronto city councillor complaining about another politician’s lack of “signature achievements” is on bloody thin ice.)

Every fully paid-up member of the Laurentian Elite [Spit!] believes with all their flinty hearts that Alberta is a barren wasteland of ruined lives thanks to the demon liquor being sold in corner stores. Initial issues from a generation ago are firmly ensconced as “the way it is” with liberalized booze access out there in the wild west.

August 10, 2024

The GTA job situation is dire, yet the government keeps allowing special permits to bring in foreign workers

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

I try not to moan about my work situation here on the blog … nobody comes here for that … but despite my decades of experience in my technical field, it’s been a very long time since I had an interview (I’m ashamed to admit how long), despite all the jobs I’ve applied for. I have several strikes against me, of course, in that I’m an older slightly disabled white male, but it’s not just about me: Canadian employers in the Greater Toronto Area are still getting special permits to bring in foreign workers despite the huge numbers of un- and under-employed Canadian citizens and permanent residents in the GTA:

With job fair lineups regularly snaking around blocks and experienced professionals unable to secure roles despite applying to hundreds of them, it’s safe to say the job market is pretty terrifying right now for anyone looking for any type of work in the Toronto area.

Population growth has been outpacing employment gains, pushing the city’s unemployment rate to a dismal 7.4 per cent earlier this year (compared to Canada’s 5.8 per cent). So, it’s no wonder that residents are concerned to find how many local businesses are outsourcing labour to foreign workers.

A user-created map shared to Reddit last week shows which employers in the GTA have applied to hire overseas personnel via Labour Market Impact Assessments from 2023 on, which are supposed to be used only when there is “a need for a foreign worker to fill the job [because] no Canadian worker or permanent resident is available to do the job.”

While it seems like the above would be a rare exception given the current work crisis, the map shows quite the opposite: a shocking number of firms trying to use LMIAs to hire thousands of staffers, from food service and retail workers to engineering technicians and administrative assistants.

The data used is from Canada’s Open Government Portal, the page explains, adding that “there have also been instances where employers have illegally sold their approved LMIA positions to workers.”

The post has tacked up thousands of upvotes and a robust discussion of hundreds of comments, almost all from people who are angry and confused about why so many places are actively trying to recruit — and in many cases, successfully recruiting — people from outside of the country when so many here are desperately seeking jobs.

August 9, 2024

Rare signs of growth in the Argentine economy

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It looks as if Argentina is managing a trick that Justin Trudeau can’t manage — growing the national economy while keeping inflation down:

Javier Milei, 8 October 2022.
Photo attributed to Vox España via Wikimedia Commons.

During his first year as president, Javier Milei has been waging a bitter but largely successful campaign against inflation.

Now, Argentines received more welcome news: their economy is growing again.

“Economic activity rose 1.3 percent from April, above the 0.1 percent median estimate from analysts in a Bloomberg survey and the first month of growth since Milei’s term began in December,” Bloomberg reported on July 18. “From a year ago, the proxy for gross domestic product grew 2.3 percent.”

The positive economic report, based on data from the Argentine government, is a surprise to many.

The 2.3 percent year-over-year increase defied expectations of a decline of similar magnitude, Bloomberg reported. As Semafor notes, the Argentine economy was projected to have the least economic growth of any country in the world in 2024, according to the International Monetary Fund.

A “Wrecking Ball”?

Argentine economists I spoke to said that the numbers are encouraging, but the country’s economy is far from being out of the woods.

As most people know, Milei inherited an economic mess decades in the making. When the self-described anarcho-capitalist assumed office in December, Argentina was suffering from the third highest inflation rate in the world — 211 percent year over year. The poverty rate was north of 40 percent, and Argentina’s economy was declining.

With his country’s economy in a full tailspin from decades of Peronism, Milei proposed a series of economic reforms dubbed “shock therapy” that consisted primarily of three components: slashing government spending, cutting bureaucracy, and devaluing the peso.

Critics warned that these measures would be disastrous, and many took it for granted that the remedies would deepen Argentina’s recession.

The former head of the International Monetary Fund’s Western Hemisphere Department, Alejandro Werner, said Milei’s strategy could tame inflation, but at great cost.

“A deep recession will also take place,” Werner wrote, “as the fiscal consolidation kicks in and as the decline in household income depresses consumption and uncertainty weighs on investment.”

Felix Salmon, the chief financial correspondent at Axios, concurred, comparing Milei’s policies to “a wrecking ball”.

“Milei’s budget cuts will cause a plunge in household income, as well as a deep recession,” wrote Salmon.

Despite these warnings, Milei delivered his “shock therapy” plan in the first few months of his presidency. Tens of thousands of state workers were cut as were more than half of government ministries, including the Ministry of Culture, as well as the Ministries of Labor, Social Development, Health, and Education (which Milei dubbed “the Ministry of Indoctrination“). Numerous government subsidies were eliminated, and the value of the peso was cut in half.

Even before Milei’s policies were given a chance to succeed, many continued to attack them.

“Shock therapy is pushing more people into poverty,” journalist Lautaro Grinspan wrote in Foreign Policy in early March. “Food prices have risen by roughly 50 percent, according to official government data.”

Yet the official government data Grinspan cited was a report from December 2023, before Milei had even assumed the presidency.

Contrary to the dire predictions, the results of Milei’s policies have been better than even many of his supporters had dared hope.

During the first half of 2024, inflation cooled for five straight months in Argentina, the Associated Press reported in July. Though consumer prices were up 4.6 percent in June from the previous month, that’s down from a 25 percent month-over-month increase in December, when monthly inflation peaked in Argentina. Meanwhile, in February the government saw its first budget surplus in more than a decade. And just days ago, an economic report was published showing a massive decline in poverty in Argentina.

Many doubted that these successes were possible, and the conventional wisdom said that wringing inflation out of the economy and slashing government spending could only be achieved at great cost: a deepening recession.

A crisis of competence

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds on one of the biggest yet least recognized issues of most modern nations — our overall declining institutional competence:

Almost everywhere you look, we are in a crisis of institutional competence.

The Secret Service, whose failures in securing Trump’s Butler, PA speech are legendary and frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example. (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)

The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.

Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world.

The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn’t build a workable floating pier in Gaza.

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner crew ship approaches the International Space Station on the company's Orbital Flight Test-2 mission

And of course, Boeing, whose Starliner spacecraft is stuck, apparently indefinitely, at the International Space Station. (Its crew’s six-day mission, now extended perhaps into 2025, is giving off real Gilligan’s Island energy.) At present, Starliner is clogging up a necessary docking point at the ISS, and they can’t even send Starliner back to Earth on its own because it lacks the necessary software to operate unmanned – even though an earlier build of Starliner did just that.

Then there are all the problems with Boeing’s airliners, literally too numerous to list here.

Roads and bridges take forever to be built or repaired, new airports are nearly unknown, and the Covid response was extraordinary for its combination of arrogant self-assurance and evident ineptitude.

These are not the only examples, of course, and readers can no doubt provide more (feel free to do so in the comments) but the question is, Why? Why are our institutions suffering from such widespread incompetence? Americans used to be known for “know how,” for a “can-do spirit”, for “Yankee ingenuity” and the like. Now? Not so much.

Americans in the old days were hardly perfect, of course. Once the Transcontinental Railroad was finished and the golden spike driven in Promontory, Utah, large parts of it had to be reconstructed for poor grading, defective track, etc. Transport planes full of American paratroopers were shot down during the invasion of Sicily by American ships, whose gunners somehow confused them for German bombers. But those were failures along the way to big successes, which is not so much the case today.

But if our ancestors mostly did better, it’s probably because they operated closer to the bone. One characteristic of most of our recent failures is that nobody gets fired. (Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle did resign, eventually, but nobody fired her, and I think heads should have rolled on down the line).

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