Quotulatiousness

November 10, 2023

Canadian media’s self-immolation an object lesson for British media

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

Marc Edge discusses how Canada’s legacy media joined together in a virtual suicide-pact to force Google and Facebook to give them millions in unearned revenue:

The best-laid plans of Canada’s biggest media owners went badly awry this summer, when Meta began blocking news across the country on its social media networks Facebook and Instagram in response to the Online News Act passed in June. Newspaper publishers lobbied the federal government relentlessly to force Google and Meta to compensate them for supposedly “stealing” their news stories by carrying links to them. But instead of bringing them hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the digital giants, as a similar law has in Australia, their campaign backfired badly in what has been described as “a massive policy blunder“, and “the most spectacular legislative failure in Canada’s living political memory“.

Not only will publishers not be getting any money from Meta, they likely won’t get any from Google either, as they have threatened to similarly block news in Canada when the law comes into effect in December. Ironically, publishers will instead lose millions instead, as the agreements they already have with at least Meta will be cancelled, and probably those with Google as well. The knock-on effect makes it a triple-whammy when you also consider the traffic that news media will lose to their websites from the platforms. Worst affected will be online-only publications which have depended on that traffic to build an audience. Most did not want the Online News Act and many spoke out against it, but they were drowned out by the newspaper lobby led by industry association News Media Canada. It is dominated by the country’s two largest chains, which are now owned by a private equity firm and US hedge funds.

The Online News Act is the second in a series of bills designed to regulate the Internet, which, when taken together, include many of the same elements as the UK’s omnibus Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill now before Parliament. An Online Streaming Act passed in April will tax and regulate digital video services in Canada, which are mostly owned by U.S. companies such as Netflix, Disney, and Amazon. A so-called Online Harms Act designed to combat hate speech and online bullying was introduced in 2021 but died on the order paper with an election call. It was criticised by civil libertarians for potentially prohibiting otherwise lawful speech and was thus being revised, but so far it has not been re-introduced. Legislation aimed at increasing online privacy and consumer rights is also planned.

One of these things, on closer scrutiny, is not quite like the other ones, and a realisation is growing in Canada that the government may have been co-opted in its enthusiasm to regulate the Internet to participate in what has been called a “shakedown” of the digital giants. Canada’s news media have literally been on the dole for the past five years since they lobbied the government for a five-year $595-million bailout that expires next spring. This has prompted publishers to adopt Rupert Murdoch’s successful strategy in Australia of persuading the government to force the digital giants to share their advertising revenues with newspapers.

Canadian publishers lobbied for the Online News Act in part by running blank front pages for a day and also spiked several opinion articles by academics that had been accepted for publication by editors. Canada has long had one of the free world’s highest levels of media ownership concentration, along with Australia. It went to another level in 2000 with the “convergence” of newspaper and television ownership, against which Canada had no regulatory safeguards, unlike most other countries. The multimedia business model collapsed with the 2008-09 recession, when advertising revenues dropped sharply, and Canada’s news media have been lurching from bad to worse ever since. The country’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia Network, was acquired out of bankruptcy in 2010 by a consortium of US hedge funds which had bought much of its previous owner’s high-interest debt on the bond market for pennies on the dollar. They have since taken more than $500 million out of the company in debt payments. The country’s second-largest chain, Torstar, was bought from its owning families at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 by private equity firm NordStar Capital, which has been similarly stripping the company with closures, redundancies, and asset sales.

Only a government could waste this much money on the ArriveCAN boondoggle

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

Chris Selley is in two minds about the ArriveCAN scandal, in that thus far no minister has been implicated but we all may naively assume that the civil service was better than this sort of sleaze:

It’s tempting to want to forget that ArriveCAN, the federal government’s pandemic travel app that collected dead-simple information from arriving travellers and forwarded it to relevant officials for scrutiny, and that somehow cost $54.5 million — a figure no one has come within 100 miles of justifying, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. No one wants to remember the circumstances that supposedly made ArriveCAN necessary.

One could also certainly argue there are aspects of Canada’s pandemic response more desperately needing scrutiny. So, so many aspects.

But whenever the House of Commons operations committee sits down to investigate ArriveCAN, there are fireworks. And you start to think, maybe this godforsaken app is more key to understanding Canada’s pandemic nightmare than you first thought.

The latest blasts came on Tuesday, when Cameron MacDonald, director-general of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) when the pandemic hit, alleged Minh Doan, then MacDonald’s superior and since promoted to chief technological officer of the entire federal government — pause for thought — had lied to the committee on Oct. 24 with respect to who picked GCStrategies to oversee the ArriveCAN project.

Doan told the committee he hadn’t been “personally involved” in the decision. MacDonald, who says he had recommended Deloitte build the app, says that’s garbage. “It was a lie that was told to this committee. Everyone knows it,” he said. “Everyone knew it was his decision to make. It wasn’t mine.” MacDonald said Doan had threatened in a telephone conversation to finger him as the culprit, and that he had felt “incredibly threatened”.

Crikey.

For those who’ve blissfully forgotten, GCStrategies consists of two people who subcontract IT work to teams of experts and takes a cut off the top — in this case a cut of roughly $11 million, for an app that should have cost a fraction of that, if it was to exist at all. Needless to say, that wasn’t the only fat contract GCStrategies — which, again, is two men and an address book — had received from the government over the years. Each GCStrategist made more money off ArriveCAN than I’ll likely make in my life. It makes me want to strap on a bass drum and sing “The Internationale” in public.

November 9, 2023

Defending a stateless society: the Estonian way

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

David Friedman responded to a criticism of his views from Brad DeLong. Unfortunately, the criticism was written about a decade before David saw it, so he posted his response on his own Substack instead:

English version of the Estonian Defence League’s home page as of 2023-11-08.
https://www.kaitseliit.ee/en

Back in 2013 I came across a piece by Brad DeLong critical of my views. It argued that there were good reasons why anarcho-capitalist ideas did not appear until the nineteenth century, reasons illustrated by how badly a stateless society had worked in the Highlands of Scotland in the 17th century. I wrote a response and posted it to his blog, then waited for it to appear.

I eventually discovered what I should have realized earlier — that his post had been made nine years earlier. It is not surprising that my comment did not appear. The issues are no less interesting now than they were then, so here is my response:

Your argument rejecting a stateless order on the evidence of the Scottish Highlands is no more convincing than would be a similar argument claiming that Nazi Germany or Pol Pot’s Cambodia shows how bad a society where law is enforced by the state must be. The existence of societies without state law enforcement that work badly — I do not know enough about the Scottish Highlands to judge how accurate your account is — is no more evidence against anarchy than the existence of societies with state law enforcement that work badly is against the alternative to anarchy.

To make your case, you have to show that societies without state law enforcement have consistently worked worse than otherwise similar societies with it. For a little evidence against that claim I offer the contrast between Iceland and Norway in the tenth and eleventh centuries or northern Somalia pre-1960 when, despite some intervention by the British, it was in essence a stateless society, and the situation in the same areas after the British and Italians set up the nation of Somalia, imposing a nation state on a stateless society. You can find short accounts of both those cases, as well as references and a more general discussion of historical feud societies, in my Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. A late draft is webbed.

So far as the claim that the idea of societies where law enforcement is private is a recent invention, that is almost the opposite of the truth. The nation state as we know it today is a relatively recent development. For historical evidence, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James Scott, who offers a perceptive account of the ways in which societies had to be changed in order that states could rule them.

As best I can tell, most existing legal systems developed out of systems where law enforcement was private — whether, as you would presumably argue, improving on those systems or not is hard to tell. That is clearly true of, at least, Anglo-American common law, Jewish law and Islamic law, and I think Roman law as well. For details again see my book.

In which context, I am curious as to whether you regard yourself as a believer in the Whig theory of history, which views it as a story of continual progress, implying that “institutions A were replaced by institutions B” can be taken as clear evidence of the superiority of the latter.

And From the Real World

In chapter 56 of the third edition of The Machinery of Freedom I discussed how a stateless society might defend against an aggressive state, which I regard as the hardest problem for such a society. One of the possibilities I raise is having people voluntarily train and equip themselves for warfare for the fun (and patriotism) of it, as people now engage in paintball, medieval combat in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and various other military hobbies.

A correspondent sent me a real world example of that approach — the Estonian Defense League, civilian volunteers trained in the skills of insurgency. They refer to it as “military sport”. Competitions almost every week.

Estonia’s army of 6000 would not have much chance against a Russian invasion but the Estonians believe, with the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan in mind, that a large number of trained and armed insurgents could make an invasion expensive. The underlying principle, reflected in a Poul Anderson science fiction story1 and one of my small collection of economics jokes,2 is that to stop someone from doing something you do not have to make it impossible, just unprofitable. You can leverage his rationality.

Estonia has a population of 1.3 million. The league has 16,000 volunteers. Scale the number up to the population of the U.S. and you get a militia of about four million, roughly twice the manpower of the U.S. armed forces, active and reserve combined. The League is considered within the area of government of the Ministry of Defense, which presumably provides its weaponry; in an anarchist equivalent the volunteers would have to provide their own or get them by voluntary donation. But the largest cost, the labor, would be free.

Switzerland has a much larger military, staffed by universal compulsory service, but there are also private military associations that conduct voluntary training in between required military drills. Members pay a small fee that helps fund the association and use their issued arms and equipment for the drills.

    1. The story is “Margin of Profit“. I discuss it in an essay for a work in progress, a book or web page containing works of short literature with interesting economics in them.

    2. Two men encountered a hungry bear. One turned to run. “It’s hopeless,” the other told him, “you can’t outrun a bear.” “No,” he replied, “But I might be able to outrun you.”

QotD: The end of the “spoils system” and the professionalization of the bureaucracy

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

… There was, however, one last check on the power of faction: The bureaucracy.

I know, that seems weird, but unless you’ve really studied this stuff — it’s not taught in most high school or even college classes, for some mysterious reason — you probably don’t know that the civil service used to be entirely patronage-based. Our two most famous literary customs inspectors, for instance (Hawthorne and Melville), got their jobs through political connections, and that’s the way it worked for everyone — every time the other party won an election, most of the bureaucrats got turfed out, to be replaced by loyal party men. Trust me: very few of the names on this list would ring much of a bell even to field specialists, but they were big political cheeses in their day; Postmaster General was a plum federal post that was often handed to loyal Party men as a reward for a lifetime of faithful service. And so on down the line, including your local postmaster.

It took until 1883 to finally kill of this last vestige of federalism, but the Pendleton Act did it. Here again, this isn’t taught in school for some mysterious reason, but the political class took a very different lesson from the Civil War than the hoi polloi. While for the proles the Civil War was presented as a triumph of the common man, the elite understood that it was training, logistics, bureaucratization, professionalism that won the war for the Union. The Republicans made a big show of putting up U.S. Grant as “the Galena Tanner” in their campaign rhetoric but Grant had been a bankrupt tanner, and indeed a conspicuous failure at everything except war … and even there, his record was carefully doctored to present an image of a bumbling amateur suddenly being struck by inspiration, when in fact Grant was a West Pointer with an impressive combat record in the Mexican War. Now is not the time or place to discuss the merits, or not, of various Civil War figures, so just go with me on this: Pretty much all the big name generals on both sides of the war were presented to the public as talented gentleman amateurs, and it was heavily insinuated that the ones they couldn’t so portray — McClellan, and especially Robert E. Lee — lost because they were too hidebound, too “professional”.

The reality is almost the complete opposite — yeah, Stonewall Jackson ended the Mexican War as a mere captain (no mean feat in The Old Army, but whatever), but he had a tremendous combat record, and was so much of a military professional that he actually taught at a military academy. This is not to say there weren’t naive geniuses in the Civil War — see e.g. Nathan Bedford Forrest — but the Civil War, like all wars since the invention of the arquebus, was won by hardcore, long-service, well-trained professionals. A naive genius like Forrest might’ve been a better tactician, mano-a-mano and in a vacuum, than a West Point professional like Custer — then again, maybe not — but wars aren’t fought in vacuums. They’re fought on battlefields, and they’re won by supply weenies and staff pogues.

[…]

They took that experience with them into politics, and so it’s no surprise that the Federal government of the Gilded Age, though tiny by our standards, grew into such a leviathan in so short a time. Again, I’m just going to have to ask you to trust me on this, since for some reason it never gets covered in school, but back in the later 19th century words like “efficiency” really meant something to the political class. All those politician-generals (and politician-colonels and politician-majors and all the rest down at the local level) expected the State to function like the Army — that is to say, as a self-enclosed world where efficiency not only counts, but triumphs. An amateur civil service can’t do that, and so the days of the political sinecure had to end.

Severian, “Real Federalism Has Never Been Tried”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-03.

November 6, 2023

QotD: The “German Catastrophe”

Filed under: Books, Germany, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger.

Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive.

And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars.

This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers.

These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went.

Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake.

This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went.

Anonymous, “Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs”, Astral Codex Ten, 2023-07-28.

November 5, 2023

Dear Supreme Court of Canada, “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

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

Colby Cosh outlines the arguments the federal government used to persuade a majority of the sitting justices of the Supreme Court of Canada to greenlight Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax tax grab and wonders if they suspect they got fast-talked:

The decision agreeing to this was signed by six of the nine justices of the court: Richard Wagner, Rosalie Abella, Michael Moldaver, Andromache Karakatsanis, Sheilah Martin and Nicholas Kasirer. Today I confront these eminences with the immortal question once asked by Johnny Rotten: ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Last week the Liberal government whose hirelings rhapsodized about the urgent, indivisible, inherently national nature of carbon pricing announced a “temporary” total exemption for fuel oil used for home heating. This has the effect of letting some households in the Atlantic provinces out of a tax that applies to cleaner BTUs in the rest of the country, and the targeted regional nature of this move has been emphasized rather than concealed by Liberal ministers.

Oh, to be sure, it’s temporary. The three-year duration of the exemption just happens to push its expiry past the next federal election. What happens at that point, who knows? And to be sure, the exemption applies to fuel oil for home heating everywhere in Canada where the federal carbon tax applies. It just so happens that the electorally crucial Atlantic is the only place where a significant number of households still depend on the system. The Liberals can perhaps say with a straight face that there is no conflict here with the underpinnings of the arguments that succeeded so beautifully in the Supreme Court.

But if the GGPPA References were re-litigated now, after the attempt to impose the carbon tax and the panicky local retreat, one wonders whether the “national concern” blarney would seem quite so convincing. We are not, in turns out, all in this leaky planetary lifeboat together. The urgency of carbon pricing, it turns out, is not quite paramount and transcendent. Its indivisibility and inherent nationalness are not as promised. The Liberals didn’t want to save the planet quite so much, it seems, as they just wanted to make the rules for their own electoral benefit.

At The Line, Harrison Ruess, who recently switched his home heating solution from a mixed oil and propane to just propane, wonders why his choice to go with the lower-carbon option will end up penalizing him under the latest policy change by the feds:

Indeed, in looking deeper at the regional numbers, the concern about the rising cost of living and housing affordability isn’t particularly acute in Atlantic Canada versus other parts of the country. The chart below, provided to me by David Coletto at Abacus Data, and published here at The Line first, reveals just how difficult a position the PM has now staked out for his government. While Atlantic Canadians are somewhat more concerned about housing affordability than average, they are very slightly less concerned than the average Canadian about the overall rising cost of living. In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, for example, the opposite is true: they’re less concerned than average about housing affordability, but more concerned than average about the rising cost of living.

The takeaway to me in looking at this is that all Canadians are worried about costs and affordability.

The other question that jumped to mind is: why only heating oil? Heating oil is useful in places without good access to natural gas pipelines, and that does include much of Atlantic Canada, but also to rural areas everywhere, where other fuels, such as propane or wood pellets, are also used. According to the propane association, there are about 200,000 Canadian homes using propane — of which about 30,000 are in Atlantic Canada.

I can speak to this with some personal experience. When my wife and I purchased our home in semi-rural Ottawa, it had a Frankenstein heating system that used heating oil for part of our home and propane for another. Just this summer we completed a (somewhat expensive) rationalization of our system to combine the two into one larger, though more efficient, propane system.

Having one system will hopefully save us money on maintenance and hydro costs — powering and maintaining one system should cost less than two. It will also save us a couple hundred bucks a year on our home insurance (did you know there’s an extra premium if you have a heating oil tank? Welcome to rural life, dear readers.) Ditching the oil and expanding the propane is also good environmentally, since the carbon impact of propane is considerably less.

But we didn’t get a break from the federal government. We’d only have gotten it if we’d gone the other way, and used the more polluting fuel. Why punish my family for heating our home using the cleaner fuel?

And why not provide an exemption for natural gas? It’s cleaner still. And why not people in cities? They don’t want to freeze either, and we’re all broke. The carbon tax isn’t helping, no matter which fuel you’re using or which part of the country you call home. The ultimate challenge the government will face is that they cannot talking-point their way out of a reality.

November 4, 2023

QotD: The munificent benefits of big government

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, the things that capitalism produces have fallen in price over the past couple of decades. That’s the pure and unadorned free market capitalism that is. The things where we’ve a managed sorta capitalism have still fallen relative to wages. The things where the government is rather more responsible for production – education and healthcare – have risen in price with respect to wages.

This is the argument that government should run more of the economy of course.

No, don’t laugh, it is. Because these things are rising in price is exactly why, so the argument goes, government must regulate and control more, so as to lower the price.

Tim Worstall, “Ain’t Capitalism Great? Price Changes Over The Last 20 Years”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-07-13.

November 2, 2023

The carbon tax has been murdered, by Justin Trudeau, in the House, with a blatant self-interest

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

Rex Murphy believes the much-hated carbon tax — the Laurentian Elite’s revenge on working Canadians — has been dealt its mortal blow by the least likely suspect:

Justin Trudeau came into office on the spume of Canadian-level celebrity, built on a persona of ostentatious, idle gestures and token cheer (selfies, socks, costumes), the endless vocalization of woke crackerjack-box slogans and a smile cemented in place that had all the warmth of well-gelled cement. Just style. Style, understood as the adoption of surface mannerisms in place of deeply settled convictions, convictions built on a real attempt to understand Canada, to relate to all its regions, and an appreciation (which does not mean agreement) of the ideas, lifestyles and situations of mainstream Canadians: style adopted as a campaign dynamic.

It’s worth reminding that from the moment of its first swearing-in, the Liberal government has been an administration of show and tactics: tactics have been its policy, tactics have been its governing lifeblood. Policies — in so far as it can be said to have had policies — have been merely (temporary) scaffolding or window displays meant to shore up the tactics. They have not been, as with an honourable government, needful measures for Canadian well-being, shored up not by tactics but by their obvious benefit and their consonance with what Canadians made clear were their concerns.

Canada’s predominant commitment these past eight painful years, the “one ring to rule them all”, the only government commitment held with deepest conviction we have been told, has been combatting global warming. It is different. It is real policy. It is the core principle. It is immutable because its cause is existential. It has been Canada’s passport to an admiring progressive world. Above all it has absolutely glowed with virtue-signalling and superior progressive sensibility. It has been as good as a wristband was at a rock concert years back.

For all of his eight years Trudeau has incessantly promoted and promulgated his single cause. At home he has out-Suzukied David Suzuki, out-Mayed Elizabeth May, and there have been moments when he “out-dared” Greta. Abroad, he has been climate alarmism’s smiling Galahad.

Global warming has been his religion, and what he calls the carbon tax both eucharist and passport to net-zero paradise. To an increasingly skeptical Canadian public, anxious and distrustful of a government regularly racked by scandal and heroic mismanagement, he said (I paraphrase): “I know I’m taxing a necessity — heat for homes in northerly Canada — and I know it must hit the poor first and worst. But it’s to save the world! Saving the world keeps me up at night. And I want Canada to lead the way in saving it. And for that, there must be a tax on energy, on gas and oil, on heating. It must be done. It’s a sacrifice poets will write in praise of in the lower-temperature world we will be key to making happen.”

The tax on carbon dioxide — the great comedians of the Liberal party called it a “tax on pollution” — had to be imposed, even as inflation ravaged the country and further immiserated the already sufficiently immiserate, because Trudeau had a whole world to save. It was the signature element of the signature policy of Trudeau’s showcase government. It was the indispensable girder in building a post-oil-and-gas future for a post-nationalist Canada, the indestructible bridge to a golden net-zero tomorrow for our country. And, incidentally, a great shiny glittering Last Spike to doom Conservative Alberta’s economy and government, and no little whack for Saskatchewan.

This was principle as policy, and policy as principle. For seven plus years.

And now. A few fingers snapped somewhere and suddenly, Mr. Trudeau … cancels the carbon tax. Cancel for one and you must cancel for all.

November 1, 2023

Canada’s (deliberate lack of) strategy

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

In The Line, Vincent Rigby discusses Canada’s notable lack of any kind of strategy to cope with an international situation that seems to be changing (or deteriorating, take your pick) at a rapid pace:

On the foreign policy front, the Canadian government unveiled its long-awaited Indo-Pacific Strategy almost a year ago. It was a welcome development for Canada’s role in a region at the epicentre of global events. But it was remarkably light on security and is now under severe stress given the serious diplomatic falling-out with India. But more importantly, where is Canada’s broader foreign policy? What will we do in other parts of a turbulent world to protect our security and values? How will we balance regional priorities? Canada has not produced a comprehensive foreign policy statement in 18 years.

On the defence front, Canada unveiled a new policy, Strong, Secure and Engaged, in 2017. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the government committed in April 2022 to produce an update to that policy in the following months. A year and a half later, Canadians are still waiting. In the meantime, officials have spoken publicly of possible cuts to the defence budget of $900 million a year over four years as part of broader government spending reductions. A severely stretched military may soon be stretched even further.

On the home front, Canada continues to lurch from crisis to crisis — the Freedom Convoy with its populist underpinnings, Chinese interference in federal elections, possible Indian complicity in the murder of a Canadian citizen, and now tension at home over the fighting in the Middle East. More than ever, Canada’s large diaspora communities feature prominently in security and foreign policy discussions. While Canadians await the findings of yet another public inquiry into the China affair, a broader strategy to confront national security threats is nowhere to be seen. Canada has not produced a national security policy in 19 years.

To be fair, the government has not sat idle during recent global developments. For example, it has ramped up its support to Ukraine (notwithstanding a slow start and the recent embarrassment in the House of Commons), taken measures to improve economic security, and established a National Security Council. But these efforts are all too often modest, piecemeal and reactive.

A Canadian senator famously quipped nearly a century ago that Canada was “a fireproof house far from inflammable materials”. It was barely true in the 1920s, and it is even less so today. But Canadians, despite all recent evidence to the contrary, apparently still believe this to be the case. They assume that the threats are not aimed at Canada, and that the U.S. would come to their rescue regardless. On both counts, such assumptions are dangerous, especially if Donald Trump were to return as president. The government, echoing the indifference of most Canadians, chooses to focus on domestic priorities, from increasing affordable housing to improving health care to fighting inflation. All are undeniably important. But as every prime minister declares, the government ultimately has no greater responsibility than the security of its citizens.

Canada needs an integrated, coherent strategy (or strategies), supported by appropriate resources and capabilities, to respond effectively both at home and overseas to this new world order. It will require trade-offs, but the case needs to be made to Canadians that the generation-long, post-Cold War peace dividend is no longer on offer. Our allies get that — so too must Canada. In the absence of such strategy, the security of Canadians will deteriorate further, and relationships with key NATO and Five-Eyes allies, already in peril, will suffer even more. If not careful, Canada may find itself more alone in the world than ever.

QotD: The original United States government

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

I think governments, being human institutions, evolve as people do – and evolution, as we know, is copious, local, and recent. Put as simply as possible: If the government the Founders designed worked as intended (note: IF), it only really worked for them – that is, for Anglo-Celt misfits in a frontier society with, at best, 18th century technology and information velocity.

And in any case, that government – IF it worked as designed – lasted the span of one long-ish (then, average now) human lifetime: 1788-1861.

Most “political” problems, on this theory, can be boiled down to the attempt to retrofit old, unsuitable institutions to new creatures. To take the most basic example, that stuff about a “well-regulated militia” rests on the assumption – integral to a rough frontier society of Anglo-Celt misfits – that everyone is armed, and competent with their arms. This is simply not the case in a more settled society, with the higher information velocity that entails / requires, so we get all the endless wrangling over “gun control” (assuming anyone in that debate was ever arguing in good faith, which is also a big IF, etc.).

One obvious counter to this line of thought is to put it mostly down to technology – just as the Founders couldn’t imagine drones and ballistic missiles and “assault rifles” and the rest while they were writing the 2nd Amendment, so the problems with government can almost all be boiled down to old institutions trying to cope, not with new people, but with new technology.

Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.

October 29, 2023

“Citizens of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your illusions!”

Filed under: Education, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt addresses the people who think of themselves not as Americans, Canadians, Brits, or Germans, but as “Citizens of the world”:

One of the funniest conceit of our age has to be the idea that the sophisticated and “bien pensant” are “citizens of the world”.

I was profoundly amused that Alvin Toffler fell for his in his last book I read sometime in the 90s. Keep in mind that, despite everything else, I believe his Future Shock is brilliant and explains a lot of life in the US in the last fifty years. (Note in the US. I’m not sure about the rest of the world. And I could explain why, but it would sidetrack us a lot more than this.) However the book about how the most powerful were the ones who had the most information (arguable) also pushed the “citizens of the world, not a country” thing as being the one for most powerful people.

I was amused because, though I agree this is the CONCEIT of most self-styled international elites, it is also in practicality, a load of stinking Hooey. (Or as we call it around here, #2 son’s pre-school teacher. Yes, that really was her last name.)

Part of the reason the “elites” believe themselves multinational or “citizens of the world” is oikophobia. They believe themselves to have risen above their co-citizens in their lands of origin, who are … well, in their minds, stupid and uneducated, which is a way to say “less rich” than the “elites”.

Therefore, in the same way that the nobility of old had more in common with other nobility from other lands than with their own country, they think they are a caste set aside and by reason of existing or having money inherently superior to all those who are loyal in and interested in their homelands.

Part of it is the belief that “nationalism” is bad and it led to WWI and WWII. Having been taught that (at this point it, drank it with mother’s milk) the richest and “best” (Most expensively) educated want to get as far away from that as possible, and be at a level when they’re free from that irrational passion, since it’s their conceit that they can rule “impartially” and from above for the good of all.

The problem with it is that not only is none of it true, but they are in fact both more provincial and less well educated than their countrymen. And also that what they aspire to is not only impossible, but really easy to manipulate.

So, the long war of the 20th century was not because of nationalism. In fact, the only explanation I have found for its being assumed to be so is that the international socialists who dominated intellectual discourse for the rest of the century despised the fact that, against their theory, workers of the world didn’t unite, but rather rallied to defend their homeland.

However, if you do a deep dive into the reasons for the first war, ignoring the opinions of those writing about it — which I did, because I was profoundly unsatisfied with the reasons given and none of it made sense — the war’s causation was attempts at internationalism. yes, the internationalism wasn’t of the “supra-national, pseudo worldwide” type (Actually the mask worn by Russian national imperialism) but of the “extended noble family trying to grab the entire world” type. But it was still internationalism, with all the problems of internationalism. (More on that later.)

And the current elites are not “better educated” and don’t rise above much of anything. In fact the world-renowned establishments most of them attend take so many “legacy” and “endowed an entire specialty” students, not to mention “admitted because diversity of skin color or origin” that their meritocratic requirements (I.E. knows or gives a damn about the subject), might be lower than your average state university. Also, once admitted, these people are guaranteed to graduate. Or at least will, barring some particularly egregious violation of code of “everybody knows”.

[…]

But more importantly, these “Citizens of the world” have no clue how their country is constituted, nor how many miles of miles and miles with the occasional house there are in this country. Or that each state has a different culture. Or –

In fact, these people who by and large don’t mix with local populations have a vague idea that the country has a lot more cities/apartments than it does, and that people act more compliant than they do. Because like Europeans, what they know about America is what they see in movies, not realizing movies are made by people like them and are feeding their assumptions back to them.

They also have a vague idea most of the country is easily led, because of course the only reason to disagree with them is that we’re being lied to by extremely persuasive evil people. (That it never occurs to them this might be happening to them, is a measure of [their] lack of self awareness.) Hence their reason to try to get Trump. Because without his evil persuasion, we’d be fully on board with their crazy-cakes insanity.

As for the European elites, I don’t know. I used to hobnob with them, in the sense that I tended to hobnob with the over-educated which were, definitionally, better off than I, but it’s been a minute. However, judging from that and what I see now, my belief is they’re not really “citizens of the world” so much as citizens of their homeland which they secretly believe should rule all nations due to the “nationality” — race/breed being obviously superior.

What I do know is that there is no such a thing as a citizen of the world, no matter the level of self delusion that induces people to believe they are such.

We are all members of our culture. While we can believe everything about our culture is bad and evil, we still project it on everything else we see. Therefore, you know, well to do Americans keep believing criminals and terrorists don’t really exist, and must be decent people driven to extremes by need or oppression. (The results of these beliefs would be hilarious, if they didn’t more or less break everything.) Heck, they keep believing the LAZY or lacking ambition don’t exist, and if people aren’t working hard to succeed it must be because of a terrible condition. (Look up “Bee sting” theory of poverty sometime.)
When the various international elites meet abroad, they each read in the other what they themselves would do, but don’t actually understand each other beyond vague fashion sense, and spending money like water.

Ultimately their entire attempt to be “international” seems to consist of an idea that if they just become the people of the song “Imagine” and don’t believe in or care about anything, they can lead people better.

They are wrong because it’s not only impossible to divest yourself of all passion and interest (well, without offing yourself or doing a lot of drugs) but also because it’s impossible to totally divest yourself of your basic culture. (You can acculturate, but that involves a lot of work, and ACQUIRING another culture, which defeats their purpose. The “citizen of the world” culture doesn’t exist, beyond some shibboleths like “humans are killing the Earth” and “The proles are really stupid, eh?”). MORE IMPORTANTLY, even if they managed it, that wouldn’t make them impartial or able to lead anyone to utopia. What it would make them is very, very people-stupid and unable to realize why certain people do certain things, and others don’t. Or why certain countries are the way they are.

In fact, to the extent they’ve managed to shed their culture and replace it with Marxism, all they’ve done is become an unreasoning cult, unable to realize the population isn’t in fact exploding — because people lie in census, and so do nations — but also that there is not only no necessity but no benefit in “eating bugs”.

October 28, 2023

Israel’s Zugzwang

Filed under: Government, Media, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Not being a huge chess nerd, I’d never encountered the term “zugzwang” before, but as Niall Ferguson and Jay Mens explain here, it’s an appropriate way to characterize the situation Israel finds itself in at the moment:

Zugzwang is one of the ultimate challenges for a chess player. In zugzwang, a player is in a situation where any move can only weaken one’s position and carries the risk of checkmate — but not moving isn’t an option. Beyond the intrinsic horror of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it is now obvious that the attack was designed to provoke Israel into reacting. The extent of the zugzwang is increasingly clear, and Israel has few good options. Nor does the United States.

No one should have been surprised by the attacks on Israel by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Over the last year, there have been more than a dozen public meetings between Iranian officials and the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and PIJ. Enormous quantities of men and matériel have moved from Iraq into Syria, with other matériel arriving by land and air to Lebanon. Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the common thread of the region’s so-called “Axis of Resistance”, have worked to build and consolidate enormous bunkers and fortifications across Syria along with Hezbollah. Some anticipated another Lebanon War, others expected another Gaza War, and others expected a Third Intifada. The only thing few — if any — expected was a design to drag Israel into all these battles and several more at once.

The Imperative to Act

In the aftermath of October 7, Israel must strike back. Propelled by nationwide rage, a new government of national unity in Jerusalem has vowed to destroy Hamas. If that is the true goal, a ground operation in Gaza is necessary. Such an operation began in Israel on Friday night. The very nature of urban warfare means that it will have an enormous human cost and an uncertain duration. And this is not just urban warfare: there are two Gazas — the aboveground and the underground network of tunnels where Hamas’s men and weapons are stored.

And time is not on Israel’s side. International support is already waning, and nowhere more than in the Arab world. Egypt and Jordan, Israel’s most important security partners in the region, have already accused Israel of planning the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Worse still, the operation will tie down a significant portion of Israel’s manpower and assets. Israel will, as a result, be especially vulnerable to the risk of overextension.

Gaza isn’t the only problem. There is also the West Bank, where unrest is already growing and where the Palestinian Authority is at risk of collapse. Then, to the north, Hezbollah has its vast arsenal of rockets, drones, men, and missiles in Lebanon, while on the Syrian border tens of thousands of Iraqi militants have amassed with the goal of “liberating” the Golan. Thousands more Iranian-made drones and ballistic missiles are spread out across dozens of bases in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. For that reason, Israel now relies on American support. Jerusalem is likely waiting for the last of American reinforcements — including another carrier strike group — to arrive in the region prior to launching its attack. But is there an alternative?

Of course, it’s widely believed that Hamas deliberately positions its facilities to make Israeli attacks less likely due to the elevated risk of unacceptable levels of collateral damage … like this:

QotD: Deposing King Charles I

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s 1642, and once again the English are contemplating deposing a king for incompetence. Alas, the Reformation forces the rebels to confront the issue the deposers of Edward II and Richard II could duck: Divine sanction. The Lords Appellant could very strongly imply that Richard II had lost “the mandate of heaven” (to import an exoteric term for clarity), but they didn’t have to say it – indeed, culturally they couldn’t say it. The Parliamentarians had the opposite problem – not only could they say it, they had to, since the linchpin of Charles I’s incompetence was, in their eyes, his cack-handed efforts to “reform” religious practice in his kingdoms.

But on the other hand, if they win the ensuing civil war, that must mean that God’s anointed is … Oliver Cromwell, which is a notion none of them, least of all Oliver Cromwell, was prepared to accept. Moreover, that would make the civil war an explicitly religious war, and as the endemic violence of the last century had so clearly shown, there’s simply no way to win a religious war (recall that the ructions leading up to the English Civil War overlapped with the last, nastiest phase of the Thirty Years’ War, and that everyone had a gripe against Charles for getting involved, or not, in the fight for the One True Faith on the Continent).

The solution the English rebels came up with, you’ll recall, was to execute Charles I for treason. Against the country he was king of.

Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-25.

October 25, 2023

Housing for Hamas leadership … in London

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the non-paywalled part of a post from Ed West, we have a look at the terrible conditions leaders for Hamas and other terrorist organizations have to put up with in the embattled suburbs of … London:

Barnet, to those unfamiliar with this corner of the world, is the most Jewish borough in Britain, an area of north-west London often described as “leafy” and including both pleasant inner suburbs like Finchley as well as areas of genuine countryside. The migration of eastern European Jews in the capital followed an anticlockwise direction from impoverished Whitechapel in east London up through Hackney and Haringey in the north, with Barnet the next stop.

It is also, strangely, home to a leading fundraiser for Hamas, the terrorist group responsible for the murder of 1,400 people in southern Israel earlier this month and quite explicitly committed to the eradication of Jews in the Holy Land.

What with London house prices being what they are, you wonder how he managed it, but of course Muhammad Qassem Sawalha, who “ran the group’s terrorist operations in the West Bank”, according to the Sunday Times, managed to buy his property with help from the council.

Despite being a known and wanted terrorist, Sawalha was allowed to settle in Britain in the 1990s and obtain British citizenship. He continued to work for Hamas, holding talks about committing terrorist acts and laundering money for the group, according to the US Department of Justice. In 2009 he signed the Istanbul Declaration which praised God for having “routed the Zionist Jews”, and called for a “Third Jihadist Front” to be “opened in Palestine alongside Iraq and Afghanistan”, according to the paper.

All the while he was benefitting from Britain’s social housing system. In 2003, Barnet Council made him a council tenant and he was housed in a two-storey property with a garden and garage in the borough, where he still lives.

Two years ago, Sawalha and his wife used the Right to Buy scheme to acquire their home for £320,700, with Barnet Council giving them a £112,300 discount on its market value.

This is despite the fact that in 2006 Panorama reported that Sawalha was “said to have masterminded much of Hamas’ political and military strategy” and that, “although he was known to MI5, the ‘authorities let him operate freely here'”. Not just let him operate freely, but sort him out with a house – and if you think this sounds insane, it is not at all uncommon.

Sawalha’s old comrade, the famous hook-handed hate preacher Abu Hamza, was also given a huge house courtesy of the British taxpayer. The Egyptian was allowed to live rent-free in a five-bedroom house in what the Mail described as “upmarket Shepherd’s Bush”, a phrase I would have found astonishing to read as a teenager in west London.

Shepherd’s Bush is next door to super-rich Holland Park, and private property is extremely expensive there – but it also has high levels of social housing, as with much of central London, so “upmarket” might be stretching it.

October 23, 2023

QotD: The real meaning of “Watergate”

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

I was reflecting this week on my brief stint, many years ago, as a newspaperman. It was a job I loved. I signed on not too many years after the Watergate scandal, and journalists were still flush with heroic ideas about themselves. Woodward and Bernstein — and all reporters by extension — had toppled a corrupt presidency and saved the republic and the Constitution from the kind of behind-the-scenes government tyranny dramatized in such thriller films as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.

[…]

Recently, reading Mark Levin’s Unfreedom of the Press, I was reminded that, before reporters went on their great crusade against Richard Nixon, they had overlooked a whole lot of corruption in the Democrat presidents who preceded him.

Levin tells how John F. Kennedy, with the knowledge of his brother and Attorney General Robert, nudged the IRS into auditing conservative groups. With Kennedy’s approval, the FBI was also employed to investigate those the administration disliked, including Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Baines Johnson would later increase the politically motivated auditing and spying. None of this was uncovered until later on.

Ben Bradlee — the editor of the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story — was well aware of his pal Kennedy’s misuse of the tax and investigative agencies. Not only did he not report it, he allowed himself and his paper to be manipulated by information JFK had wrongly obtained.

This totally changes the Watergate narrative. Nixon’s dirty tricks and enemy lists may have been creepy and wrong, but the press exposure of these misdemeanors came after years of ignoring similar and worse malfeasance by Democrat administrations.

That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised — despised in part because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused.

Andrew Klavan, “‘Watergate’ Doesn’t Mean What the Press Thinks It Means: The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised”, The Daily Wire, 2019-08-31.

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