Quotulatiousness

May 27, 2023

Communism, Democracy, Monarchy? Any form of government is inherently tyrannical once it gets big enough

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I’ve mentioned now and again, although I’m philosophically libertarian, I also describe myself as a “weak monarchist” … it’s not that I want a return to spurred-and-booted aristos literally lording it over everyone else, but that the central institution of the monarchy tends to tamp down some of the worst excesses of various flavours of democracy. Presidential systems put a temporary monarch on top, but a temporary monarch with real, day-to-day powers that can be — and often are — exercised to the detriment of some or all of the population. Constitutional monarchy reserves a few rarely used (and rarely needed) powers to the monarch, but delegates the vast majority of the grubby day-to-day governing stuff to grubby elected politicians. This neat division of powers progressively fails as governments attempt to take on more power to interfere in the lives of ordinary people … and that process went into overdrive with the pandemic lockdowns and so much arbitrary power put not into the hands of elected officials (who at least theoretically have to answer to the voters every now and again) but to the already bloated civil service and their extended families of government-funded but “independent” organizations delegated powers to do all sorts of mischief.

All that said, I don’t think I quite fit into Theophilus Chilton‘s group of former-libertarians-turned-monarchists, if only because I’ve always preferred keeping the monarchy in place:

One of the greatest ironies of modern non-mainstream politics in the West is the tendency on the part of libertarians (whose whole ideology supposedly centers upon the maximization of personal freedom) to eventually find their way into supporting much more authoritarian ideologies on the dissident and reactionary Right. Indeed, this is the general route that my own political convictions have taken – from libertarianism to monarchism. Many libertarians would recoil in horror at the thought, yet given the number of former libertarians in neoreaction and in the dissident Right in general, it obviously happens quite often. One of the reasons I would suggest for this is that the foibles and failures of democracy – the governing system most often associated with the libertarian view of freedom – are becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful observers. The old propaganda used to prop up the democratic dogma in Western nations is becoming increasingly stale and unconvincing. It becomes more and more apparent that democracy does not equal freedom, just as it is becoming apparent that “freedom” is not always and in every sense something that is conducive to good government and stable society.

My purpose with this essay is not to seek to convince my libertarian or classically liberal readers to become monarchists. This may well end up being where they land, politically and ideologically speaking, but their experiences and growth may move them in other directions. What I do want to do is to try to get them started on that path by pointing out that democracy is not any better than other forms of government and may indeed be worse in some areas that we can see empirically. I want to plant a seed of doubt and encourage it to grow. If the thoughtful libertarian is to be convinced, it must be by convincing himself or herself.

Please note that throughout this article, I will refer to “democracy” in a general sense to refer to any modern popular form of government. This includes the sort of representative republican system (formerly) typified by the American government which, while not directly democratic, was still essentially democratic in its overall form and complexion.

Personal Freedom

One of the obvious objections which libertarians and other classical liberals have against monarchy (and other authoritarian governing systems in general) is that the unification of power into the hands of a single executive makes it prone to abuse and to the removal or suppression of the freedoms of the citizenry. Typically, they will envision a monarchy as some kind of police state where citizens who step out of line are severely punished and every aspect of life is closely watched and regulated by the government. This, in turn, leads to a somewhat jaundiced view of history, especially that of the much-excoriated “Dark Ages”, believed to have been a dystopia of violence and tyranny.

This view of the relevant history is, however, untrue and generally relies upon a false epistemic dichotomy that is sadly very common within libertarianism. This is the failure to distinguish between “strong government” and “big government”, the two of which are usually confounded in the classical liberal’s mind. The former term refers to the capacity of the executive to exercise power within his sphere of activity, while the latter describes the extent of the sphere of activity itself. A ruler may be strong in the sense of being decisive and effective in what he does, yet find the area in which he can legitimately act to be circumscribed by law or custom. Among most historical Western monarchies, while kings often ruled “strongly”, they were not able to rule intrusively. Their subjects were often left with a relatively wide degree of latitude in their personal and economic affairs, and the restraints of custom and social structure tended to be more constraining than the actual deeds of their king himself.

Let us contrast this with the various democracies we see in the West, both the United States and others. How much do they really respect personal freedoms? In other words, how much do they really embody the “small government” ideal desired by libertarians and other classical liberals? The answer is: not much at all. Western man lives in democracies in which he can be arrested for tweeting “hate speech” on social media. His everyday life is overseen, administered, and commandeered by a body of regulations enforced by entirely unaccountable bureaucrats who have the capacity to trap him into Kafkaesque nightmares of life-altering tribulation. Every aspect of his food, his clothing, his home, his transportation, his workplace – all controlled by the government he (wrongly) believes he elected freely. If he has any kind of well-paying job or business enterprise, he will be paying a tax rate that ancient absolute monarchs would have blushed to even suggest exacting from their subjects. Democratic governments – supposedly by and for the people – intrude into every area of his life (big government) and do so through robust and often corrupt police state apparatuses which are literally willing to break down his door and possibly shoot him and his family for even minor infractions.

So please, let us dispense with the notion that democracy protects personal freedom.

May 26, 2023

CH-124 Sea King; Legendary ASW helicopter and example of a deeply flawed defense procurement process

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Polyus
Published 21 May 2023

The Sea King was a legendary aircraft in the history of the Royal Canadian Navy. It filled the role of hunter and killer in the Cold War against Soviet submarines. By the mid-90s the situation had changed and their retirement seemed eminent. How naive. The process of finding a replacement for this workhorse would be an election promise by government after government for over 30 years. Its replacement, the CH-148 Cyclone, became operational in 2018. This allowed the 55 year old workhorses to finally retire.
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May 16, 2023

Hope for sensible reform to US Civil Asset Forfeiture?

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille on the latest bipartisan attempt to at least somewhat rein in the Civil Asset Forfeiture abuse allowed under current rules:

Years after “civil asset forfeiture” became synonymous in many minds with legalized theft, the practice of seizing money and property merely suspected of a connection to a crime remains a boil on the ass of American jurisprudence. Now, in a rare demonstration of cooperation across political divides, Democratic and Republican lawmakers have joined together to introduce legislation to reform the practice of civil forfeiture at the federal level. They are supported by a coalition of organizations that put aside ideological differences in an attempt to curb the dangerous practice. As encouraging as the bill’s prospects appear, that this is not the first attempt to pass this legislation underlines the challenge of correcting government abuses.

“Today, U.S. Representatives Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) reintroduced the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR Act), a comprehensive reform to our nation’s civil asset forfeiture laws,” the two lawmakers announced in March. “The FAIR Act raises the level of proof necessary for the federal government to seize property, reforms the IRS structuring statute to protect innocent small business owners, and increases transparency and congressional oversight.”

The FAIR Act sets a higher bar for seizing private property, but still allows for civil forfeiture in the absence of a criminal conviction. The legislation requires:

“If the Government’s theory of forfeiture is that the property was used to commit or facilitate the commission of a criminal offense, or was involved in the commission of a criminal offense, the Government shall establish, by clear and convincing evidence, that … there was a substantial connection between the property and the offense; and the owner of any interest in the seized property — (i) used the property with intent to facilitate the offense; or knowingly consented or was willfully blind to the use of the property by another in connection with the offense.”

The bill requires that seizures be conducted in court rather than through administrative processes and also guarantees legal representation for federal forfeiture targets.

The FAIR Act isn’t a perfect bill. Many reformers will object that forfeiture should require the criminal conviction of the person whose money and property is being taken. Draining somebody’s bank account and nabbing their car keys may not be as dramatic as throwing them in a prison cell, but it’s a harsh punishment all the same and should require full due process. Still, some improvement is better than none for a practice that has largely served as an exercise in legalized highway robbery.

May 15, 2023

Paul Wells – “Unworkable and swiftly-disavowed tinpot dictatorship is, statistically, one of the least damaging forms of tinpot dictatorship”

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

Paul Wells follows up last week’s rather disturbing report that the Liberal Party’s big gathering in Ottawa extruded a resolution to get “The Government” to work toward forcing journalists (and those peasant bloggers like Paul Wells) to only publish things that the sources informing it could be “traced” by that same authority:

Last Friday I wrote about a policy resolution at the big Liberal Party of Canada national convention that was, in my opinion, bad. This was the resolution that would have the party “request the government explore options” to “hold on-line information sources accountable” by requiring that they “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.

How do you limit publication to traceable sources? I have to assume you clear the sources. “This resolution has no meaning,” wrote I, “unless it means I would be required to clear my posts through the federal government, before publication, so the ‘traceability’ of my sources could be verified.”

Some people disagreed, but I had a hard time getting them to describe what it could mean if it wasn’t what I thought. I was careful to note that party conventions aren’t binding on governments. Commenters sympathetic to the Trudeau government latched onto all the this-might-mean-nothing language, the stuff about “request” and “explore options.” At their convention, a tiny minority of registered Liberal delegates attended a “policy workshop” at which nothing was debated. Amid considerable confusion about where these resolutions were in the party’s own process — Althia Raj covered it on Twitter; go look if you like — this resolution became party policy with no discussion at all. That was on Saturday.

On Tuesday, Justin Trudeau went before reporters and said no Liberal government would ever implement this Liberal policy. Other cabinet ministers followed suit, and one MP who didn’t benefit from the counsel of the Monday-morning issues-management call had a rougher time executing the U-turn.

Look, I think the amount of self-inflicted ballistic damage to the government’s own foot here is minor. Unworkable and swiftly-disavowed tinpot dictatorship is, statistically, one of the least damaging forms of tinpot dictatorship.

But I want to let everyone in on a secret of my journalism, and indeed of most journalism: Criticism of politicians is often advice to politicians. I actually don’t spend a lot of time hoping governments and opposition parties will keep pursuing self-destructive and country-destructive choices indefinitely. I always hope a bit of mockery, especially pre-emptive mockery, will help inform their choices. If it stings when Wells writes it, it might sting worse when everyone is saying it.

Ministers of the Crown who didn’t need to wait for the Monday-morning issues-management meeting to tell them what to think could have spent the weekend thinking for themselves. They might even have invited their own staffs, riding executives, and Liberals at large to think for themselves. A dozen or so hardy souls, out of 3,500 registered delegates, might then have showed up to the policy workshop willing to debate.

“Uh, Paragraph Two looks hinky. How would a government enforce that?”

“Well, it doesn’t apply to reputable journalists.”

“Great, thanks. Remind me who decides who’s reputable? Any thought on who’ll be making those calls once we’re no longer in government?”

Maybe somebody would have added a friendly amendment. “For greater clarity, nothing in this paragraph impinges …”

I can even imagine a cabinet minister showing up for those floor debates and influencing the party’s direction single-handed. I’ve seen it happen in other parties. But I had Liberal friends over the weekend explain to me that no such thing ever happens. Fine, it’s your funeral. Basically we’re watching a party choose between two different models of public-policy deliberation:

OPTION 1: Smart people think and talk.

OPTION 2: Everybody in the party defends rickety thinking until it blows up in their faces.

I’m not kidding when I tell you most people in political communications would defend Option 2. We’re living in a time that values message over thinking. But folks can’t say I didn’t warn them.

May 14, 2023

Garbage data informs the Canadian government’s approach to gun control issues

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

In The Line, Tim Thurley points out the (totally expected) bias of the data being considered by the federal government:

A selection of weapons (mostly restricted or prohibited in the hands of most Canadians) displayed by Toronto police after confiscation.
Screencap from a CTV News report in 2018.

The Mass Casualty Commission’s firearm recommendations were, rightly, overlooked in the initial phase after the report’s release. They have become relevant these past weeks as gun control groups, the NDP, the Bloc, and the Liberals used them to advocate for sweeping changes to Bill C-21, the government’s controversial gun-control proposals. The Liberals have thus far declined to adopt the MCC’s recommendations, at least in whole, and that’s encouraging. Our lawmakers should be careful. The Mass Casualty Commission’s concluding recommendations on guns and homicide share a problem common to any data analysis. If you use the wrong data, you get a bad output.

Or, to be blunt: garbage in, garbage out.

R. Blake Brown, a professor who contributed a commissioned report to the MCC, suggested that the MCC got all the best research together and simply found the arguments made by gun control groups to be more convincing.

He’s wrong. While the MCC could have been a completely neutral panel objectively weighing the evidence before it, the nakedly selective choice of data inputs and slanted interpretation meant that no unbiased outcome was possible. Indeed, the MCC inputs seem heavily weighed to advance a pro-control agenda, and do so in such an obvious way that the resulting flaws should be immediately clear to those with even a passing knowledge of the study of firearms and firearm homicide.

[…]

Dr. Caillin Langmann is a well-known name in Canadian firearms research, and by far the most prolific author using rigorous statistical methods to examine the effects of gun control on Canadian firearm mortality. No serious analysis of Canadian firearm mortality is possible without his work, and yet his work does not appear on its own and is not cited in the Negin Report. Indeed, his and other critical research does not seem to have informed the final Commission report or recommendations at all.

I asked Dr. Langmann about his exclusion. He told me he offered to appear to present his research but the Commission declined.

It may not be a coincidence that the exclusion of Langmann and other researchers without explicit gun-control agendas was due to the fact — the fact — that the Canadian and comparable research substantively contradicts the Negin Report and the MCC recommendations on firearms. An examination of already-implemented Canadian gun laws including various factors such as prohibition of “paramilitary style” rifles and magazine capacity restrictions all found no impact on mass shootings or mass homicide overall in Canada or on associated fatalities. Instead, mass homicide by both firearm and non-firearm causes gradually declined on its own. The lack of association between gun control and decreased mortality is replicated multiple times in Canadian research.

Guess what? It is also replicated in a detailed statistical analysis of Australian data not mentioned by the Negin Report.

The core research inputs to the Mass Casualty Commission were commissioned from parties with well-established and acknowledged positions on firearms. Written by literal gun control advocates without substantial input from other sources, the contrary research is either ignored or not treated with due academic respect. This damages the credibility of the Commission findings, giving the perception that they were gathering conclusions in search of evidence.

Again, it must be made clear that this wouldn’t have been a problem if the MCC had treated the Negin Report as just one part of the firearm policy research puzzle. It was their failure to do so and the consequent lack of neutrality, lack of engagement with solid research, and complete disregard for engagement with different academic perspectives despite obvious relevant expertise, that taints the Mass Casualty Commission firearm recommendations and severely limits any useful policy conclusions we can gather from their report.

May 13, 2023

QotD: The inherent absurdity of “Canadian content”

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

Lately some have reminded us of the inherent difficulties in defining Canadian content, especially where a work is the product of several collaborators. Is a movie Canadian by virtue of its actors? Director? Crew? Location? Theme? Even as applied to individuals: Should citizenship be the criterion? Birthplace? Residency? Subject matter?

But the real folly of CanCon is not that it is impractical, or prone to abuse, or even unnecessary, though it is all of those things. It is rather that it is nonsensical at its root, in its very purpose – again, so far as anyone can define it. Is the point, after all, artistic or political? But it cannot be artistic: there is no theory of aesthetics that prefers that Canadian artists should make Canadian art that teaches Canadians how Canadian they are.

It is, rather, a political project: the inculcation of national feeling in the public, for the purpose of creating a political community, separate and distinct from the colossus to the south. Without the Maginot Line of CanCon quotas, it is suggested, we would be overwhelmed: first the artists, then the country.

But note the assumptions built into this emotive appeal: that a separate nationality cannot be maintained without cultural difference; that our cultural differences with the Americans are both sufficient in themselves to justify our statehood and yet so fragile as to be washed away in an instant; that, left to their own choices, Canadians would unhesitatingly choose the products of an incomprehensibly alien culture over their own; and that, by virtue of this diet of foreignism, we would no longer be Who We Are as Canadians. Therefore we must not be left to our own choices.

Which is nonsense, because we would still be Who We Are, even in that hypothetical dystopian future: it might not be Who We Were, but so what? The Who We Are we are now at such pains to preserve is itself vastly different from Who We Were before.

And who, in the end are we? As the comedian Martin Short once put it: “we’re the people who watch a lot of American TV”. The wholesale ingestion of a foreign culture – albeit much of it made by expat Canadians – is an integral part of our distinct national identity, an irony that must forever elude our cultural nationalists.

Andrew Coyne, “The concept of CanCon is pure folly. That’s the problem at the heart of Bill C-11”, The Globe and Mail, 2023-02-08.

May 7, 2023

Africa after colonialism

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

Hannes Wessels on the plight of so many African nations once the various colonial powers were off the scene and they were at least formally independent:

If you have a heart in Africa it’s probably not a good idea to read Martin Meredith’s State of Africa because if you do, it will, in all likelihood, break it. In it, he covers, in gory detail, what has happened on the continent in the postcolonial era, and while it’s riveting, it is also deeply disturbing.

[…] “by the end of the 1980s not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state who had trodden the African stage, only six had voluntarily relinquished power”?

Or the fact that, in the Congo alone, in 1964, over a million people, virtually all civilians, died in sectarian strife. Nobody knows precisely how many more millions have died in the benighted country since. Or that Mobutu Sese Seko, prior to coming to power, had $6 in his bank account. By 1987 a team of editors and reporters from Fortune magazine disclosed that he was one of the richest men in the world at an estimated $5 billion.

Or the fact that Jean Bedel Bokassa “combined not only extreme greed and personal violence … unsurpassed by any other African leader. His excesses included seventeen wives, a score of mistresses and an official brood of 55 children … [He] also gained a reputation for cannibalism. Political prisoners … were routinely tortured on Bokassa’s orders, their cries clearly audible to nearby residents”. In an effort to compare himself to Napoleon, he declared himself an emperor and spent a large chunk of the national budget on his coronation while his people suffered and starved.

Or the fact that Uganda’s Idi Amin, in a bid to crush political opposition, ordered the gruesome deaths of thousands of alleged opponents at the hands of his “death squads”. “The Chief Justice was dragged away from the High Court never to be seen again. The university’s Vice Chancellor disappeared. The bullet-riddled body of an Anglican Archbishop, still in ecclesiastical robes, was dumped at the mortuary of a Kampala hospital. One of Amin’s former wives was found with her limbs dismembered in the boot of a car. Amin was widely believed to perform blood rituals over the bodies of his victims.” He was heard on several occasions boasting about his penchant for eating human flesh.

Or the fact that foreign researcher Robert Klintberg reported on oil-rich Equatorial Guinea as being “a land of fear and devastation no better than a concentration camp — the ‘cottage industry Dachau of Africa’.” Under Macias Nguema, more than half of the population was either killed or fled into exile. Finally deposed by his nephew, Obiang was indicted for the murder of 80,000 people. The plunder continued.

Or that in Nigeria, between 1988 and 1993, an official report estimated $12.2 billion was “diverted” from the fiscus. In 1990, the United Nations concluded that Nigeria had one of the worst records for human deprivation of any country in the developing world.

These are only a smattering of an almost endless litany of entirely avoidable man-made catastrophes that have blighted Africa since the imperial exit. One is left wondering if there is any precedent in history for such calamitous misrule that has led to the early, often violent deaths of millions, and delivered unspeakable misery to hundreds of millions more, which is where we are today.

Having read the book, I’m left pondering the fact that Cecil Rhodes, a colonial colossus, looms large in contemporary history as one of the great villains of the last century, better known for his alleged malfeasance than any of the abovementioned leaders. But as far as I know, Rhodes never stole from anyone and never killed anyone, and he certainly didn’t eat anyone. I know he did use his money and military muscle to stop slavery and intertribal slaughter. And I know he plowed most of his fortune into building roads, railways, educational facilities, and other infrastructure needed to transform a wilderness into a developed country. It looks to me like his generosity of spirit is reflected in the Rhodes scholarships he provided for, aimed at nurturing the talents of a select few from across the racial divides in a bid to make the world he was leaving a better place.

May 6, 2023

The federal Liberals want even more control over the internet

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

Paul Wells notes that a policy proposal at the Liberal conference this week indicates just how much the Liberal Party of Canada wants to control free expression on the internet:

Here on the 2023 Liberal convention’s “Open Policy Process” page are links to “Top 20 Resolutions” and “Fast-Tracked Resolutions”. The latter go straight to the plenary floor, the former go through a smaller preliminary debate and, if they pass, then on to the plenary. These things move fast because, in most cases, Liberals are paying only listless attention to the discussions. Policy is for New Democrats. Well, I mean, it used to be.

But sometimes words have meaning, so this morning I’m passing on one of the Top 20 Resolutions, from pages 12 and 13 of that book. This one comes to us from the British Columbia wing of the party.

It’s in two screenshots simply because it spreads across two pages. This is the entire resolution.

BC Liberals want “on-line information services” held “accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms” by “the Government”. The Government would, in turn, “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.

This resolution has no meaning unless it means I would be required to clear my posts through the federal government, before publication, so the “traceability” of my sources could be verified. I don’t suppose this clearance process would take too much more time than getting a passport or a response to an access-to-information request. Probably only a few months, at first. Per article.

After publication, “the Government” would hold me accountable for the veracity of my material, presumably through some new mechanism beyond existing libel law.

I’m not sure what “the Government” — I’m tickled by the way it’s capitalized, like Big Brother — would have made of this post, in which I quote an unnamed senior government official who was parked in front of reporters by “the Government” on the condition that he or she or they not be named. But by the plain meaning of this resolution, I would not have to wonder for long because that post would have been passed or cleared by the Government’s censors before publication, and I’m out of recourse if that process simply took longer than I might like.

May 5, 2023

Canada’s new internet rules have become law. What now?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 4 May 2023

Bill C-11 has passed. But there’s still time.
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May 4, 2023

Despite all the evidence, Canada’s official motto doesn’t translate as “we broke it”

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

In The Line, Justin Ling adds more to the towering pile of evidence that “Canada is broken”:

If The Line has an editorial position, it is probably thus: Everything is broken.

This newsletter, of course, comes at the idea more earnestly than, say, the leader of the Conservative party. When my friend Matt Gurney advances that proposition, it is a lament. When Pierre Poilievre does: It’s wishful thinking.

While citizens of this country can’t always agree on what, exactly, is busted in our country, or why, or who is responsible — we can all agree, I hope, that things in this country could use a tune-up, at the very least. Canadians, after all, are imbued with a cloying optimism. An insufferable belief that things can be fixed. It’s a good thing.

Lucky for us, we have plenty of words written about how to fix much of what ails us. Because we, as a country, have a compulsive need to inquire about those problems. Our national pastime isn’t hockey, it’s the royal commission.

And we’ve got a government in office that loves to study the nature of the problem. There’s good work, these days, for the special rapporteurs and retired judges amongst us. And if you’re a Canadian that loves a good public consultation, you must be run ragged.

Yet we also have a government in office that has a pathological inability to take advice. And this problem may help explain why it feels like we’re sliding backwards.

[…]

When the government tapped an expert panel to study the use of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons — literally torture — Correctional Services Canada blocked them from doing their job, and the public safety minister ignored their cries for help and then let their contracts lapse. Thanks to some scrutiny, the government renewed the study, then ignored it when the numbers showed they were still torturing people. Oops!

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — a body Trudeau created — warned in 2019 that Ottawa wasn’t taking foreign interference seriously, particularly when it came to China. “In short, government responses were piecemeal, responding to specific instances of foreign interference but leaving unaddressed the many other areas where Canadian institutions and fundamental rights and freedoms continue to be undermined by hostile states.” Prescient!

One of the most absurd examples is the sexual misconduct crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. When Trudeau came into office in 2015, he had an external review on his desk from Marie Deschamps. One good external review deserves another, so the Liberals ordered one from Louise Arbour in 2022. What she found was harrowing: “We have been here before. Little seems to change.” Not only had the government failed to implement the Deschamps report, it was still failing to live up to the recommendations from the 1997 Somalia Inquiry. Fuck!

[…]

At the very centre of this tootsie-pop is, surprise, elitism. This Liberal government, armed with its paper-thin mandate, is convinced that they — and only they — are the verifiers of good ideas. And we should be grateful for whatever decision they deign to make.

If they farm out an idea to the public service, and the idea doesn’t come back in the form they envisioned, no matter: Send out the McKinsey signal. For just a few million dollars, their crack team of subject matter non-experts can prepare a PowerPoint presentation laying out the exact policy the political staff wanted in the first place.

The Liberals take a similar approach to consulting with the unwashed masses. When the government consulted the public on their plan to police “online harms,” they published a “what we heard” report that was broadly supportive of their plan.

Can we see the submissions? Journalists and academics asked. No. Came the reply.

May 3, 2023

The virtue-signallers work hard to keep Canada’s First Nations people in poverty

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

Elizabeth Nickson touches one of the real third rails of Canadian politics — the plight of far too many Canadians who happen to be trapped in a historical bind that immiserates and impoverishes them yet somehow provides a lucrative and comfortable living for their self-appointed political advocates and the bureaucrats who work hard to keep them “on the rez”:

Today, if you protest the current catastrophic regime and have anything that can be taken away, it is taken away, and your family are labelled racists. Tenured professors who raise any objection are disgraced. Any journalist who asserts inconvenient facts is slimed. Any public intellectual who attempts to turn the tide is sent to the margins and silenced.

Many of the current activists for native rights are relatively new to the country, and have little grasp of history other than the straight-up Marxism taught in schools. Because Canada is so thoroughly anti-business, agitating for government money is pretty much the only growth industry, and Canada’s natives are a rich fat pie that seems unending in its ability to feed the bureaucracy and the advocacy outfits – there are hundreds – that seek more and more and more guilt money from the Canadian people.

Not one of them seemingly ventures into a native reserve to experience the results of fifty years of Trudeau Sr’s native policy and talks to the people there. Of the 700 or so Indian “nations” — this moniker a laughably Marxist ploy in itself — few of them even have vegetables. I have spent nights on a reserve up in the north where stodge is the only food. Potatoes fired in oil that has been in use for weeks. Gristly meat. Stale Wonderbread. Recently $8 billion was given to natives because despite the budgeted $200 Billion over five years given to Indian Affairs, in a country with more water than any other country on earth times ten, Indian reserves have no clean water.

Stories are told in my family, of Mohawk camping on the kitchen floor, leaving in full dress and full war cry in order to thrill the children. We have lost this connection to a great and fascinating people, marooned on rotting reserves, a crime caused by a vicious socialist government using vulnerable people to steal the nation’s wealth.

I have been on a reserve where the houses are rotting from the inside. Everyone is sick with mold illnesses. Because Canada’s socialists have deemed that natives have no property rights and are therefore not, in fact, fully people, they can’t even legally fix their own houses, not that they have any money but from whoring and working as check-out clerks. You cannot start a business. You have no equity to borrow even $1,000 to start a business. Canada’s socialists have decided that Canada’s natives are the ideal citizenry, passive, dependent, degraded.

Other reserves I’ve visited abut enormous wealth, from which Indians are constrained. Every activity they undertake requires a permission slip and money from whatever sleazy bureaucrat supervises them, owns them, farms them. Their reserves run to brush and fire fodder, while across the road, fields and forests produce incredible riches.

It is de rigueur for any visiting dignitary, like the current Marxist pope, to apologize for the legacy of the residential schools. Two summers ago a graduate student found what she claimed was evidence of 200 buried bodies near a decommissioned school and the news rocketed around the world. Her science was called into question. The native tribe near the school refused to exhume the “bodies”, largely because if the bodies did not exist, and finding nothing would stop the current shake-down. The actual legacy of the schools was mixed, but entire generations were educated, and there are many successful graduates, who attempt to moderate the madness. They are silenced.

Crime, alcoholism, prostitution, murders, child deaths abound on the reserves. Activists have seeded so much anger and hatred that virtually no clear path out of endemic poverty exists. An ersatz democracy means there are elections, but they are clan based, which means the biggest clan always wins and then it seeks to disempower its rivals. On reserves you can tell who the Chief is: he has the big house, the $100,000 truck. His people? Rotting shacks and bangers. If you aren’t in the right clan, you have to hitchhike to the city for cancer treatments, as the uncle of a Salish friend of mine did until he died.

There is, of course, a solution. I have spoken to native chiefs in the Oil Sands and in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, where the tribe or band has been woven into the oil extraction process. Success is immediate, and ongoing. These men are so enthusiastic, they are giddy, which, if you know a native, is … unusual. They crow about the young people on their reserves that go on to serious graduate degrees, to hope, to family formation, to their own houses. There are such success stories across the continent, depending on an enlightened chief, a non-vulture enlightened capitalist enterprise. And courage to face down the blight of government.

May 2, 2023

Si vis pacem, para bellum

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

CDR Salamander suggests that the “War Gods of the Copybook Headings” are not happy with us, and he’s probably right:

Relief at the entrance of the Cultural Center of the Armies (formerly the Serviceman’s Casino) of Madrid (Spain), showing the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war).
Photo by Luis Garcia (Zaqarbal) via Wikimedia Commons.

Mindsets are universal.

Yes, no one can see the future. Of course, it is easy to play “got-cha” in hindsight. Yes to all the excuses … but that isn’t the point.

Two things to keep in mind as you read the below:

  1. Our “experts” may lack broad expertise. Always question. Defer only when earned.
  2. We have a horrible record of predicting even the predictable for a whole host of reasons, most bureaucratic.
  3. At peace, assume you have leaders who can only imagine peace unless they actively demonstrate otherwise, that they will plan and act in line with their priors. When war comes, it will be up to others to fix things (as they say in the movies, “When they get in trouble, they send for the sons of bitches“.). The harder peacetime leaders are pressed by those who understand the constants of history, the less difficult the fix will be when war comes.

This is one of the virtue/vice dualities of democratic states. In peacetime, there is no political appetite for military spending and no political party will be eager to provide the opportunity to be accused of warmongering. An opposition party might briefly call attention to defects in the standing military, but only to embarrass the governing party, not because they would address the problem if they were in power. There may be widespread passive support for the military, but this isn’t represented at the ballot box because there are always far more urgent issues that drive how the voters allocate their support … and military spending is a lot of money put into things that don’t fix the roads, improve public health, address law and order concerns, or clean the environment.

Peacetime military establishments are huge bureaucracies at the best of times, and those who want to rise through the bureaucracy need to learn how use the same tools, schemes, and stratagems as in every other civil service organization. The longer a country has been at peace, the less capable the military administration will be of transitioning to a war footing. If you haven’t seen war in twenty years or more, then every officer up to the very top of the chain of command got there not for being a good soldier/sailor/airman but for being a good peacetime manager and administrator. This is totally normal, as is the massive disruption when a real war is imminent. If you’re lucky, some of those administrators-in-uniform can make the transition to being combat leaders quickly, but many of them will not be able or willing (it’s just human nature to resent and resist sudden change of long-standing practice).

Well meaning people can be wrong. Just because they are well meaning and have tenure-reputation-rank should not mean that everyone has to defer to them or their plans.

Good leaders with sound ideas and well developed plans will welcome hard questions and informed challenges.

Bad leaders with weak ideas and compromised plans will be defensive, flinty, and more often than not will resort to appeals to authority or credentialism. Those are your warning signs.

Sadly, highly isolated decision nodes — think the Transformationalists in the first half of the ’00s — don’t think they are wrong. They have filtered their information sources and filled out their staffs with either clones or the obsequious — often found in the same person.

They are the ones who have a blinkered focus on usually something far on the horizon that can’t be measured right now — but is very attractive to them for reasons of either a broader ignorance, ego, or monetary.

They don’t fully accept “risk” – they dismiss it.

In the area of national security — such a mindset and practice can create an existential crisis and it comes from hubris.

Smart people who are so convinced of their wisdom without humility will filter out any concerns, and won’t allow questions that might challenge their wisdom.

They may be right as they didn’t, mostly, get to where they were by being wrong — and they don’t consider they may not be and hedge accordingly.

May 1, 2023

“And I, for one, welcome our new CRTC internet overlords”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In this week’s Dispatch from The Line, among other maple-flavoured items is the discussion of how the newly passed Bill C-11 will impact Canadians’ everyday online experience:

We at The Line have spent a lot more time trashing Bill C-18 than its cousin, C-11; the reason for that is fairly simple, if unflattering. Both bills are unwieldy little monsters, rife with competing agendas and we only have so much time and energy to spare. Of the two, though, C-18 affects us and our business more directly as it attempts to force Big Tech companies into secret negotiations to prop up dying legacy media outlets.

C-11, which passed this week, is the Liberals’ attempt to overhaul the Broadcasting Act to bring major streaming services like YouTube and Netflix under the heel of the CRTC. This is generally a pretty bad idea — and we’ll get into that in a second. But the passing of the first major overhaul of the act since the ’90s will, we expect, be heralded by the usual suspects of CanCon leeches who see in the legislation an opportunity to siphon evil Big Tech profit while forcing major platforms to force-feed Canadians into consuming more home-grown shite.

Anyway, part of the bill, it is hoped, will force online streamers to feature more Canadian content for Canadian users, particularly content that highlights the usual progressive checkboxes. And while this does make us roll our eyes a bit — just make good stuff and let people choose what they want for themselves! — we admit that this provision is the less objectionable aspect of C-11.

After this, matters get much more dicey. The attempts to force tech companies to pay for more CanCon will almost certainly backfire in the long run: companies like YouTube have already promised that they will comply with legislation by creating pass-through fees for their creators. In other words, if the government forces YouTube to pay a percentage of its profits into a CanCon fund, YouTube will generate that revenue the only way it can — by skimming more cash from its content creators and re-directing some to the creation of Canadian shows that are then commercialized by major broadcasting networks like Rogers. Seems fair!

Where the bill goes off the rails is over years-long battle over user-generated content protections. Upon hitting the upper chamber, the senate actually advocated for amendments that would ensure that Joe Blow YouTuber wasn’t going to fall under the auspices of CRTC regulation — changes that were rejected by the House. How the CRTC defines a content generator worthy of its regulation, or uses any of its new powers, is now up for consideration by the CRTC itself.

Obviously, we at The Line are concerned about how a regulator is going to employ poorly defined and vaguely stipulated legislative powers to control how Canadians are presented which content, and by whom. We are open to the hopeful possibility that the CRTC is so completely in over their heads that all of the concerns about the bill prove fruitless and overblown. But as a rule, we don’t like to rely on the incompetence of our betters to assure our protections and freedoms.

And that brings us to the major philosophical problems with C-11; the first is that legislation should generally not generate more confusion and uncertainty. As a rule, we think that our laws should be written in such a way that an ordinarily intelligent person with a standard education should be able to understand the laws that govern them. By this measure, the Broadcasting Act — like many others — fail a very basic test. C-11 is written so poorly that even experts seem to disagree about the scope of the bill and how our media landscape will be affected by it in the years to come.

[…]

There is, arguably, no reason for the CRTC, nor for the Broadcasting Act in its current form, to exist anymore. Digital space isn’t finite. Canadians can easily find news and entertainment that is relevant to them. We don’t need the government to ensure that Canadian content is produced and funded. Or, if some government intervention is deemed necessary, it need not amount to anything more complicated than a simple tax, with revenues diverted to one of this country’s myriad granting agencies to aid production. Instead, we have a government that seems hellbent on extending the power of a regulator at the very moment in history that this regulator is most redundant.

Given that we’re being led by an increasingly insular government that equates all criticism to disingenuous misinformation, and seems to want to stamp out the evils of wrong opinions on the Internet in the coming Online Harms bill, well, let’s just say we’re increasingly concerned and perturbed.

April 30, 2023

Sarah Hoyt – “I told you so”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At According to Hoyt, Sarah reminds us that she was right and won’t apologize for being right … and will say “I told you so” as often as necessary:

Only infants and the mentally incompetent could look at locking up the vast majority of the population and think it would have NO effect on the economic well being of this country. Worse, only infants, the mentally incompetent and indoctrinated Marxists (BIRM) could think — after the numbers from the Diamond Princess were out there for everyone to read — that either COVID-19 was the end of the world, or that we should put the entire population under house arrest to prevent people dying of it. As though it wouldn’t become endemic anyway.

And it took a particular level of bizarre insanity to believe that COVID-19 would kill you at your favorite restaurant or church but not in Walmart.

We won’t even get into the specialness that caused a bunch of you to tell me that it was okay for the homeless to be congregating in every street corner (and in Denver in proliferating encampments EVERYWHERE with all the shared needles, trash, etc. of such encampments) WITHOUT dropping like flies, because they lived outdoors and were “particularly hardy”. Dudes, if you ever work in any emergency room, you’ll learn that not only aren’t the homeless “particularly hardy” but that they have the most bizarre medieval diseases. Yes, there are jokes about “tooth to tattoo ratio” and that low/high means they live forever, but in truth if you see before and after pictures, you know homeless people tend to die early and hard and not just because most of them are crazy and drug addicted (though that’s a contributing factor.) IF THIS HAD BEEN A REALLY DANGEROUS PANDEMIC, the kind those videos from China — some of which were manifestly fakes, like where people put out their hands to break the fall when they “drop dead” in the street — suggested, the homeless would have first been very sick, then dead.

Also, note the same people then said it was very important to wear masks OUTSIDE WHILE JOGGING because this virus was some kind of magical and could hang suspended in the air outside in a “cloud” so that if you walked through it hours later, you could catch the dread disease.

AND let’s not forget treating us like lunatics when we explained that the masks did nothing, and that yes, they’re used in operating rooms — where they’re changed every few minutes, btw — to PREVENT THE SURGEON from coughing on an open wound.

And I want to award no prizes, and may G-d have mercy on your souls to those that told me that the Diamond Princess‘s numbers were as low as they seemed to be because “They have the best of care in cruise ships”. This when cruise ships are known as floating illness barges and the population aboard is the oldest of any gathering in the nation.

Oh, oh, oh, and a special mention goes to everyone who ran around with their heads on fire because “the ER is at 95% capacity” when it is at 100% capacity every flu season, AND also all the “special wards” built for “overflow” patients saw not ONE patient. All these facts were available and easily looked up.

April 29, 2023

Justin can’t let Joe steal his thunder on this critical issue!

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

Justin Trudeau’s love of the vastly expensive and utterly useless virtue signal is almost unmatched among western leaders, but as Bruce Gudmundsson relates here, some of Joe Biden’s lower-echelon cronies in the Pentagram Pentagon have put up a virtue signal that will be very hard for Justin to top:

In the United States, the president enjoys the privilege of appointing 4,000 of his supporters to positions within the Executive Branch. When the president is a Democrat, the best connected of these invariably prefer perches in the vast social service bureaucracy, there to reign (but rarely rule) over like-minded civil servants.* Those with the fewest friends, alas, end up in the Pentagon.

I’m honestly surprised that the number of direct appointees is so low … I’d have guessed at least ten times that number. I was vaguely aware that the formal “spoils” system was broken up late in the 19th century, but the US federal government and its various arms-length agencies are several orders of magnitude larger than they were back then.

The appointees who suffer the latter fate know nothing of the work they supposedly supervise. Indeed, having been raised in homes in which there were “no war toys for Christmas”, they cannot distinguish a sailor from an airman, let alone explain the difference between a soldier and a Marine. What is worse, like impoverished Regency belles, obliged to spend the Season wearing last year’s frocks, Defense Department Democrats live in constant fear of losing caste.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that the aforementioned appointees embrace, with great enthusiasm, projects of the sort they can discuss at Georgetown cocktail parties. During the Obama years (2009-2017), many of these bore the brand of “green energy”. (No doubt, the appointees in question made much of the double entendre.) As might be expected, many of these programs went into hibernation during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021), only to spring back to life after the inauguration (in 2021) of Joseph Biden.

In a recent post on his Substack, the indispensable Igor Chudov lays bare the folly of one of these initiatives. Part of the Climate Strategy unveiled by the US Army in 2022, this plan calls for the progressive replacement, over the course of twenty-eight years, of petroleum dependent cars, trucks, and tanks with their battery-powered counterparts.

I mean, on the plus side, it would mean that wars could only take place on sunny days (for solar-powered tanks) or windy days (for wind-powered tanks). The sheer stupidity of the notion would be laughable, except they really seem to be serious about military combat vehicles running on batteries recharged with solar cells, windmills, or unicorn farts. I’d call it peak Clown World, but it’s a safe bet that they can get even crazier without working up a sweat.

Searching for an appropriate graphic to go with this article, I found this gem at Iowa Climate Change from back in 2021:

    * Lest you think, Gentle Reader, that this post serves a partisan political purpose, I will mention that am convinced that the one Republican political appointee with whom I am well-acquainted is a knucklehead of the first order. Indeed, if I ever manage to locate the proper forms, I intend to nominate him for a place of particular honor in the Knucklehead Hall of Fame.

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