Quotulatiousness

June 15, 2023

Thursday tab-clearing

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 23:25

A few items that I didn’t feel required a full post of their own, but might be of interest:

June 13, 2023

The surprisingly authoritarian reflexes of the “true” anti-authoritarian

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

Chris Bray surveys the “anti-authoritarian” stances and actions of Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a dedicated opponent of all things Trump:

I’ve called the NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an “expert” on authoritarianism, an inversion blender, a narrative-producing machine with an astonishing gift for turning meaning upside-down. Your decision to drive north is ironclad proof that you intend to travel to the south! You’re spraying water on that fire to make it bigger! You gave me a sandwich because you want me to starve to death!

Currently, Ben-Ghiat’s frantic production of anti-authoritarian messaging on Twitter, the preferred platform of true intellectuals, is tightly focused on the dangerous authoritarianism of the megafascist Donald Trump, who is doing what all true authoritarians do: questioning and criticizing the government. Go stroll through Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Twitter posts. It’s like having lunch with Felix Dzerzhinsky. Only the guilty and the fascist elements resist the cleansing power of the state and its gloriously pure-hearted investigative apparatus!

A suggestion up front from the maître d’hotel: What you’re about to consume is the filet mignon of dimwitted propaganda. Chew it slowly. Savor. Let’s start with a light appetizer, a mere retweet, to tease the ironic gustation:

Archie Bunker and Meathead have become one, united by the power of the Trump. If a prosecutor charges you, the case is airtight, full stop. Government never charges innocent people with crimes. To criticize a prosecutor is to oppose the rule of law, which can only be defended by the immediate presumption of guilt. Here, let’s try it out:

Prosecutors wouldn’t be charging Rick Perry with crimes if they didn’t believe they had an airtight case.

Prosecutors wouldn’t be charging Kyle Rittenhouse with crimes if they didn’t believe they had an airtight case.

Prosecutors wouldn’t be charging Tom Robinson with crimes if they didn’t believe they had an airtight case. Atticus Finch is an authoritarian!

This is why criminal defense lawyers are all so infamously right-wing, by the way. Especially public defenders.

[…]

Nothing says progressive anti-authoritarian like the sacralization of national security as a preeminent value. If government says that something has been done in the name of national security, you must accept it and support it without question. Or else you’re an authoritarian, doubting the state security apparatus. Fascists always do that.

There is, of course, a long and deeply established tradition on the American political left of criticism directed at the FBI and DOJ — and at federal law enforcement in general, and at law enforcement in general, and the “carceral state” — as hegemonic instruments. Historians and activists on the left have long viewed the FBI with political suspicion, and with reason.

Until pretty much right this instant, because Trump.

June 12, 2023

It’s an insult to Chuck Barris and The Gong Show to compare it to the Justin Trudeau Show

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

In the weekly dispatch from The Line, the editors defend the honour of the original Gong Show and say that it’s not fair or right to compare that relatively staid and dignified TV show to the Canadian government’s performance art on the foreign interference file:

When the news broke late Friday afternoon that David Johnston was resigning from his position as special rapporteur on Chinese interference, the general reaction across the chattering class was a variable admixture of amusement and scorn. There’s probably a German word for it, but the security and intelligence expert Wesley Wark captured the tone of it with the headline on his Substack post, which said, simply: “Gong Show“.

We’re somewhat inclined to concur with Wark, except the three-ring train wreck that has marked Johnston’s time as Justin Trudeau’s moral merkin has been so disastrous that we think apologies are due to Chuck Barris, in light of the relative sobriety of his famous game show.

Reporters at the Globe and Mail and Global News started breaking stories about Chinese interference in Canadian elections a few months back, based largely on leaks from inside the Canadian intelligence apparatus. Almost immediately it was clear that the Liberals had a major problem on their hands, one that was going to require levels of transparency, good judgment and political even-handedness that this government has manifestly failed to achieve during its almost eight years in power.

Yet when Trudeau announced that he was going to appoint an “eminent Canadian” as “special rapporteur” to do an investigation and report back to the government with recommendations for how it should tackle the issue, we gave a collective groan here at The Line. Given the endless similar tasking of retired Supremes passim, it was clear that the pool from which Trudeau was going to fish his eminent personage was very shallow, and pretty well-drained. Indeed, at least one of us here was willing to bet large sums that it would be David Johnston.

What do we make of all this? Here’s the situation as we see it, in bullet form for brevity’s sake:

  • Johnston should never have been offered the position of special rapporteur
  • Having been offered the job of special rapporteur, Johnston should never have accepted it

And that is basically it. But given that Trudeau had the poor judgment to ask him, and Johnston had the poor judgment to accept, we think everything that has happened since was pretty much inevitable. We couldn’t have guessed at all the details of how this would have played out, especially the delicious elements beginning with the decision to hire Navigator to provide strategic advice (to manage what, exactly?), the revelation that Navigator had also provided strategic advice to Han Dong (who, recall, Johnston more or less exonerated), the firing of Navigator and the involvement of Don Guy and Brian Topp … this is really just gongs piled upon gongs piled upon gongs.

But the overall trajectory of Johnston’s time as special rapporteur? If you had told us ahead of time that this was more or less how things would go, we wouldn’t have been much surprised. Why? Because we live in Canada. And this is how Canada’s governing class behaves. It is a small, incestuous, highly conflicted and enormously self-satisfied group of people that is so isolated from the rest of the country they don’t even realize how isolated they are.

Honestly. What in heaven’s name gave Trudeau the idea that it would be smart to ask a former governor general to help launder his government’s reputation? And why on Earth did Johnston think it was a good idea to accept? Forget the Navigator stuff, this turkey was never going to fly. Johnston’s report was not accepted as the wise counsel of a wise man; instead it was seen as a partisan favour by a conflicted confidant. Sure, Johnston was subject to some pretty unfair attacks from the opposition, but what did he think was going to happen? Has he paid any attention over the last decade? But pride is a form of stubborness, and even after parliament voted for him to go, Johnston insisted he would stay on to finish his work. Until, on Friday afternoon, he decided he would not.

We’re not going to speculate about why Johnston finally pulled the chute. We’d like to think that the former GG in him thought it best to obey the will of the House of Commons. We rather hope it had nothing to do with some pointed (and unanswered) questions put to Johnston’s office by the Globe and Mail, asking whether Navigator had been given a heads-up on Johnston’s conclusions on the Dong file.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. As Paul Wells put it in a recent column, Trudeau sought to “outsource his credibility by subcontracting his judgment,” where credibility was supposed to flow from Johnston to Trudeau. Instead, and we would say, inevitably, the flow went in the opposite direction. If the prime minister had any credibility to lead the country on this issue, he wouldn’t need a special rapporteur in the first place. The fact that Trudeau felt the need to appoint one is a tacit admission that he knows he doesn’t have the trust of the people.

And that is the real problem here. The Johnston saga has ended where it was always going to, with a once-honorable man’s reputation in tatters and the problem he was brought in to address still unresolved. David Johnston has resigned, as he must have. In our view, that’s one resignation too few.

June 11, 2023

Minimum alcohol pricing fails utterly in reducing “problem” drinking, but it’s aces for padding the state’s coffers

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowden counts coup on Scotland’s utterly failed “minimum pricing model” for alcohol which has cost Scots additional hundreds of millions of pounds for no discernable improvement in any measurable:

This study was published yesterday and got no attention whatsoever from the media despite it being written by a team in Sheffield who used to get blanket coverage for their every pronouncement. What changed? Well, they used to produce models showing that minimum alcohol pricing would work and now they’ve produced a study showing that their model didn’t work.

    The results above suggest the introduction of MUP in Scotland did not lead to a decline in the proportion of adult drinkers consuming alcohol at harmful levels. It also did not lead to any change in the types of alcoholic beverage consumed by this group, their drinking patterns, the extent to which they consumed alcohol while on their own or the prevalence of harmful drinking in key subgroups.

Oof! So much for the “exquisitely targeted” policy of minimum pricing being an “almost perfect alcohol policy because it targets cheap booze bought by very heavy drinkers“.

After building your entire reputation on modelling minimum pricing, it must have been painful for them to write this …

    … the lack of evidence for a decline in the prevalence of harmful drinking arising from MUP is contrary to model-based evidence that informed the introduction of the policy.

Hey-ho. I guess the model was garbage, as I said from the start. Never mind. It’s only cost drinkers in Scotland a few hundred million pounds. Will the Supreme Court be taking another look at that court case that was won off the back of an incorrect model?

    The lack of change in the prevalence of harmful drinking may arise for several reasons. First, people drinking at harmful levels may be less responsive to price changes than lighter drinkers.

You don’t say! If only someone had mentioned this earlier!

    Previous qualitative research and studies of purchasing behaviour among people with alcohol dependence (i.e. a group that comprises approximately 20% of those drinking harmfully in the United Kingdom and thus 1% of the overall population) supports this view. However, the very large price increases imposed by MUP on people drinking harmfully, their inability to switch to cheaper products and clear evidence of successful policy implementation and compliance, mean their price responsiveness would need to be extremely low to negate any impact on consumption.

But it is extremely low! I explained this over a decade ago when I took the model to task for making the plainly daft assumption that heavy drinkers are more price sensitive than moderate drinkers. I wrote:

    “The model assumes that minimum pricing will have more effect on the consumption patterns of heavy drinkers than on moderate drinkers because heavy drinkers are more price-sensitive. This is a convenient belief since it is heavy drinkers who cause and suffer the most alcohol-related harm, but can we really assume that someone with an alcohol dependency is more likely to be deterred by price rises than a more casual consumer? The SAPM model says that they are, and yet there is ample evidence to support the common sense view that heavy drinkers and alcoholics are less price-sensitive than the general population (eg. Gallet, 2007; Wagenaar, 2009). Indeed, research has shown that price elasticity for the heaviest drinkers is ‘not significantly different from zero’ — they will, in other words, purchase alcohol at almost any cost.”

You don’t need an encyclopaedic knowledge of the price elasticity literature to work this out. For most people, it falls under the umbrella of the bleeding obvious. Here we are 11 years later and the penny still hasn’t quite dropped at Sheffield, but we’re getting closer.

June 10, 2023

Remember the Freedom Convoy of 2022?

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

The media worked very hard to demonize the grassroots protests that coalesced into the Canadian Freedom Convoy in early 2022, and they’ve continued to push the notion that either the movement was an utter failure or that it was a maple-flavoured January 6 “insurrection” righteously suppressed by our beloved Dear Leader and his stormtroops. Someone using the handle “Kulak” wants to remind you that the convoy wasn’t a failure and in fact was the catalyst for great changes both in Canada and around the world:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I keep encountering this misconception from people who don’t follow Canadian politics …

That somehow the Trucker convoy was defeated.

The Freedom Convoy was the most wildly immediately successful protest in Canadian history, maybe WORLD history.

People remember Trudeau’s crackdown, old ladies having their skulls cracked with batons, Disabled indigenous grandmothers trampled by police horses, Bank accounts frozen and public employees investigated for mere donations …

And there’s a big reason people remember this … It was dramatic, and the media and the regime certainly wanted you to think resistance was futile …

What people don’t remember is what happened in the immediate aftermath: The government caved on absolutely everything within a week for the most important things, and then a month or so for the rest.

First off there was the massive political shift that happened as the convoy was occurring:

Jason Kenny, the pro-lockdown Premiere of Alberta (Canada’s most conservative province) was forced to announce his resignation, and Alberta immediately lifted all its lockdown impositions.

Erin O’Toole the pro-lockdown leader of the Conservative Party was likewise forced to resign, his temporary replacement Candice Bergen (not to be mistaken with the actress) being a longtime rival opposed to lockdowns, and his main rival who replaced her after intra-party elections was Pierre Poilievre, the politician after Maxime Bernier who was quickest to embrace the Truckers and their cry for freedom.

As the convoy was ongoing Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act (the Act which replaced the War Measures Act for invoking Martial Law) … Now these grant the government almost unlimited powers, famously the War Measures Act was invoked by Trudeau’s Father to detain Quebeckers and raid hundreds of homes without warrants during the FLQ separatist crisis of 1972 … the catch is that while the follow on Emergencies Act can be invoked by a Prime Minister Parliament has to sign off on the act’s continued use within one week.

Well skulls were cracked, accounts frozen, and as the week passed things came down to the deadline … On the very last night … Trudeau managed to get sign-off (without the Conservative opposition) from the House of Commons, but it had to go to the Upper House, the Canadian Senate.

NOW. The Canadian Senate is a shameful institution.

It’s like the British House of Lords but without the nobility.

A Senate seat is a lifetime appointment, by the Prime Minister … and that’s it. Little to no review, no democratic input, and this is supposed to be equivalent or superior to our elected House of Commons …

Naturally the go-to use of the Senate is as a spoils system for cronies. Do some shameful favour for a Prime Minister, raise a lot of money for the party, be politically connected to a provincial gov the PM wants to buy off … get a Senate seat.

One of the longest-standing political agreements in Canada is how badly the Senate needs to be abolished … but can’t be because Quebec is nominally overrepresented in the Senate, and abolishing it would cause a constitutional crisis.

H/T to Donna Laframboise for the link.

June 6, 2023

Australia’s “teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023”

Filed under: Australia, Government, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowdon on Australia’s determination to stamp out vaping … even at the cost of vastly increasing the number of tobacco smokers:

More bad news from the supposed world leader in tobacco control. Official figures show that teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023, from 2% to 12.8%.

It’s been over a decade since Australia introduced plain packaging, a policy that the Southern hemisphere’s wrongest man, Simon Chapman, likened to a vaccine for lung cancer. Australia has had the highest cigarette taxes in the world for ages, the sale of nicotine e-cigarettes has always been illegal, and all they have to show for it is an insanely big black market for both tobacco and e-cigarettes, more children smoking and a whole bunch of people using unregulated vapes. The wowsers just can’t stop winning, can they?

Naturally, this has led to much soul searching among the tobacco control elite who are having to reassess their assumptions in the face of this overwhelming evidence of policy failure.

I’m joking, of course. They are doubling down again.

If you spoke to someone from the reality-based community, they would tell you that children find it easier to access a product when the market is in the hands of illicit traders because illicit traders don’t care who they sell to. They might also point out that the Australian government has gone out of its way to portray vaping as being at least as bad as smoking. School children in Australia are taught that vaping causes brain damage. Public health agencies produce websites that purport to tell people the facts about vaping but actually tell them lies and misleading half-truths.

June 3, 2023

“Rather than having a culture of transparency, we have a culture of secrecy”

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

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé writes about Canada’s remarkably non-transparent approach to classified information and the very limited ability of our elected representatives to see anything the government chooses to deem “a secret”:

Institutions are tough to change, Canadian institutions especially. But change is possible. Gradual change can happen when we reinterpret existing rules or add new ones on top of old ones that are deeply entrenched. In other cases, a crisis happens that leads to rapid and significant change. These crises either destroy old ways of doing things, or they open a window of opportunity to shake things up. Revelations of Chinese interference in Canadian elections, and David Johnston’s first report on the matter, have opened one of these windows when it comes to Parliament and classified information.

Two sets of Canadian parliamentarians have access to classified information: Privy Councillors (though usually only those currently serving as ministers of the Crown), and those who sit on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP). In both cases, they have access to classified information in an executive capacity, not their parliamentary capacity. Put differently, they have access to this information by virtue of an executive office they hold in addition to their parliamentary one. Parliament doesn’t have a body that has access to classified information, nor do parliamentarians have access to that information unless they hold an executive office.

Keeping classified information squarely within the executive, or in limited cases within the judiciary, reflects deep-seated Canadian pathologies. As our pathetic Access to Information system highlights, the Canadian government over-classifies things or deems too many of them subject to cabinet confidence. Rather than having a culture of transparency, we have a culture of secrecy. This secrecy culture exists for a number of reasons. Public servants don’t want their ministers to be embarrassed. Information is power within the bureaucracy and giving it out easily diminishes its value. Risk aversion is rewarded and admitting failure is frowned upon. We can’t disclose anything that might rub an ally the wrong way. The list goes on.

Above all, though, Canadian government encourages the strange notion that our secrets are super-super-secret. What do I mean by that? When you look at our allies, Canadian is an outlier in terms of what we disclose and to whom we disclose it. Canadian officials have convinced themselves that they are applying a well-established set of norms around classified and sensitive information, when in fact we’re an outlier. This is particularly notable with it comes to sharing national security information with Parliament.

In the United Kingdom, there’s a statutory committee of Parliament that has access to classified information, called the Intelligence and Security Committee. Since the United Kingdom’s Public Accounts Committee is also expected to oversee all the government’s spending, the chair of that committee has had access to classified information as well to review secret agency budgets. Australia has a similar committee, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Security and Intelligence. This is a very active and important body. It allows Australia to regularly update its national security legislation to meet new threats and to ensure that the powers conferred on the executive are not abused. New Zealand has a parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, too. The Kiwi committee is a bit of an odd duck, since it’s chaired by the prime minister and has the leader of the official opposition as a member. Given that New Zealand is probably one of the most zealous countries when it comes to government transparency, though, it isn’t too surprising. They release stuff that would lead the Privy Council Office to have a collective head explosion if we did the same.

June 2, 2023

The idiocy of trying to portray political systems on a single spectrum

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

Lawrence W. Reed explains why trying to illustrate the similarities and differences of political systems using only a single axis conceals more than it reveals, especially for students:

In classes on Government and Political Science, with few exceptions, students in both high school and college are taught that the so-called “political spectrum” (or “political/economic” spectrum) looks like this: Communism and Socialism reside on the Left, Capitalism and Fascism dwell on the Right. Various mixtures of those things lie somewhere in between:

This is not only false and misleading, it is also idiocy. Toss it into the trash bin and demand a refund from the teacher who presented it as fact, or as any kind of insightful educational tool.

At the very least, a spectrum that looks like that should raise some tough questions. Why should socialists and fascists be depicted as virtual opposites when they share so much in common — from their fundamental, intellectual principles to their methods of implementation? If a political spectrum is supposed to illustrate a range of relationships between the individual and the State, or the very size and scope of the State, then why are systems of Big State/Small Individuals present at both ends of it?

On any other topic, the two ends of a spectrum would depict opposites.

[…]

My contention is that if Communism, Socialism, Fascism and Capitalism all appear on the same range line, it is terribly misleading and utterly useless to place the first two on the left and the second two on the right. The placement that makes the most sense is this one:

The perspective represented in this sketch immediately arouses dispute because its implications are quite different from what students are typically taught. The inevitable objections include these three:

1. Communism and fascism cannot be close together because communists and fascists fought each other bitterly. Hitler attacked Stalin, for example!

    This objection is equivalent to claiming, “Al Capone and Bugs Moran hated and fought each other so they can’t both be considered gangsters”. Or, “Since Argentina and Brazil compete so fiercely in football, both teams cannot be composed of footballers”.

    Both communism and fascism demonstrate in actual practice an extremely low regard for the lives and rights of their subject peoples. Why should anyone expect their practitioners to be nice to each other, especially when they are rivals for territory and influence on the world stage?

    We should remember that Hitler and Stalin were allies before they were enemies. They secretly agreed to carve up Poland in August 1939, leading directly to World War II. The fact that Hitler turned on Stalin two years later is nothing more than proof of the proverb, “There’s no honor among thieves”. Thieves are still thieves even if they steal from each other.

2. Under communism as Karl Marx defined it, government “withers away”. So it cannot be aligned closely with socialism because socialism involves lots of government.

    Marx’s conception of communism is worse than purely hypothetical. It is sheer lunacy. The idea that the absolutist despots of the all-powerful “proletarian dictatorship” would one day simply walk away from power has no precedent to point to and no logic behind it. Even as a prophecy, it strains credulity to the breaking point.

    Communism in the sketch above appears where it does because in actual practice, it is just a little more radical than the worst socialism. It is the difference between the murderous, totalitarian Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and, say, the socialism of Castro’s Cuba.

3. Communism and Fascism are radically different because in focus, one is internationalist and the other is nationalist (as in Hitler’s “national socialism”).

    Big deal. Again, chocolate and vanilla are two different flavors of ice cream, but they’re both ice cream. Was it any consolation to the French or the Norwegians or the Poles that Hitler was a national socialist instead of an international socialist? Did it make any difference to the Ethiopians that Mussolini was an Italian nationalist instead of a Soviet internationalist?

Endless confusion persists in political analysis because of the false dichotomy the conventional spectrum (Sketch 1) suggests. People are taught to think that fascists Mussolini and Hitler were polar opposites of communists Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. In fact, however, they were all peas in the same collectivist pod. They all claimed to be socialists. They all sought to concentrate power in the State and to glorify the State. They all stomped on individuals who wanted nothing more than to pursue their own ambitions in peaceful commerce. They all denigrated private property, either by outright seizure or regulating it to serve the purposes of the State.

May 31, 2023

The War Against The Patriarchy, updated

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Health, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo responds to a recent Joel Kotkin op-ed in the National Post discussing the “war of the sexes” and the long, long string of victories chalked up by the “weaker sex”:

    The war between the sexes has ended, and rather than a co-operative future that could benefit all, it has turned out to be more like a lopsided win for the female side.

So begins Joel Kotkin’s National Post op/ed “Women have won the ‘war between the sexes’, but at what cost?” It is a welcome but disappointing analysis that starts with a show of defiance and ends in quiet desperation. Of course, it’s good to find anyone in a major newspaper willing to cast a less-than-adulatory eye on “The Future [that] is Female” or to write sympathetically about men, and Kotkin, a prolific author on cities and technocracy, proves his good faith on the strength of that opening statement alone. Aside from the wishful thinking of believing feminism to be winding down (was #MeToo a prelude to ceasefire?) or ever having envisioned a co-operative future (he should take a look at Kate Millett’s incendiary “Theory of Sexual Politics“), Kotkin is to be commended for daring to name as a war the decades of post-1960s activism, in which all the decisive victories have been claimed by feminists against men.

Kotkin, however, isn’t able to continue in the take-no-prisoners style he chose for his opening salvo. He is prevented, either by his own prudence, his lack of deep knowledge, or the paper’s editorial insistence, from targeting feminist ideology and policies in the rest of the article. In fact, the article doesn’t name a single piece of debilitating feminist legislation or even make one reference to the many expressions of anti-male contempt that are now deeply embedded in our public culture. The result is a curiously disembodied discussion in which serious social problems linked to male decline are pointed to without any attempt made to say exactly how they came about or how they might be reversed.

“The crux of the problem,” Kotkin tells us to start off, “lies in the fact that as women rise, men seem to be falling.” Here we see him start to draw back from the attack, as if afraid to say what he really thinks. His phrasing makes male decline sound like a natural phenomenon, an illustration of the primordial principle of Yin and Yang. Or perhaps it is simply that men, with their allegedly fragile egos and hegemonic masculinity, haven’t been able to compete against all that female ability, once dammed up by the patriarchy, now finally being let loose on the world (though always with calls for more to be done to assist women).

[…]

Kotkin refers to men “left behind” in the economy, but he keeps mum about the decades of affirmative action in higher education and hiring (detailed by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in Legalizing Misandry, pp. 81-124) as well as draconian sexual harassment legislation that have made work life unrewarding and often punitive for men.

He stresses the loss of sexual amity and of willingness to marry, but avoids discussing the nightmare of family law that has made marriage or even cohabitation perilous for many men.

The sins of omission do not end there. Perhaps working on the assumption — not without basis — that any discussion of social problems will need to focus on women at least as much as on men, Kotkin proceeds to backtrack on his earlier claim about women’s victory in the sex war, outlining instead a downbeat portrait of women’s troubles. Citing research by Jonathan Haidt, he tells us that adolescent girls have been severely affected by depression and self-harm, that many young women, without reliable men to support them, have had to fend for themselves in a difficult economic climate, and that single mothers, left with few options, are unable to offer stability to their children. It looks as if the decline of men mentioned early in the article has mainly hurt women and their children.

What Kotkin neglects to mention — surely deliberately — is that adolescent boys commit suicide at 4 X the rate of girls, resolving their depression decisively enough that Haidt seems not to have felt the need to account for them; that women are the ones who choose divorce in approximately 70% of cases; and that divorced fathers are too often denied a real role in their children’s lives while being burdened past endurance by exorbitant support payments. In other words, for every sad woman held up for our concern, there is a plurality of equally sad men rendered invisible in the conventional reporting. The staggering statistics on male suicide provide a stark illustration of Kotkin’s initial contention about the casualties of the sex war — yet he leaves these aside, choosing instead to voice the now-obligatory concern about the trans threat to women’s sports.

Perhaps most importantly, Kotkin suggests through his word choice that the data he cites are simply “trends”, occurrences that came about through economic and demographic factors independent of the sex war initially evoked. But they aren’t. They flow directly from a feminist vision in which the family — explicitly understood by feminist leaders to be a source of abuse and oppression — must be transformed and women liberated from reliance on the fathers of their children. Under this vision, a more just and equitable world will be ushered in by women’s superior leadership once they are freed from their unpaid labor in the home and the many sexist barriers that hold them back. That freedom must be aided, according to conventional wisdom, through abundant contraception, unfettered abortion, collectivized child care, no-fault divorce, programs and propaganda to urge men to do more housework, and non-stop encouragement to women — in movies, sit-coms, advertising, articles, and government equity programs — to give up on their men.

May 30, 2023

Australia’s … deranged … attitudes to vaping

Filed under: Australia, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Snowden describes — because it’s impossible to actually explain — the Australian government’s hysterial and illogical attitude toward vaping:

King James I would recognize and approve of Australia’s anti-vaping stance, probably. It would certainly be in the same territory as His Majesty’s pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco where he let his strong feelings be known about “so vile and stinking a custom”.

For the past decade, Australian newspaper articles about e-cigarettes have seemed like communiqués from another dimension. The term “moral panic” is over-used, but how else can you describe a situation in which people are so terrified of safer nicotine delivery devices that doctors give their children cigarettes to stop them vaping?

The sale of nicotine e-cigarettes has always been banned in Australia. Prohibition is the default and, along with the highest cigarette taxes in the world, it has led to a huge black market in vapes (and, indeed, in tobacco). It appears that many teenagers are vaping there and what they are vaping is unregulated.

The Aussies could have done what New Zealand did and legalise e-cigarettes. Instead, they doubled down and banned the importation of nicotine vapes for personal use. That didn’t work so they are now banning the sale of all the remaining (i.e. non-nicotine) disposable vapes. Something tells me that won’t work either, but the government is so far down the rabbit hole it can only keep digging.

Their politicians have convinced themselves that “Big Tobacco” is getting a new generation of Aussies hooked on killer vapes with aggressive marketing. It’s a paranoid delusion. There is no e-cigarette marketing in Australia. The products flooding the black market are coming straight from China, not from “Big Tobacco”. And insofar as the products are dangerous it is because they are totally unregulated.

Down this road lies madness but if the Australians want to go down it, that’s up to them. I have no plans to go back there. As an Australian reader said to me recently, “Go and see a Kangaroo at a zoo. Don’t even waste a single dollar on ‘tourism’ of the doomed failed state of what’s become of Australia.”

But while the Aussies can go to Hell in whatever handcart they like, I don’t appreciate them pushing their nonsense on the rest of us, as the BBC’s recently appointed Sydney correspondent has done today with an article titled “Why Australia decided to quit its vaping habit“.

From the outset, it is clear that the author has spent too long Down Under.

    Despite vapes already being illegal for many, under new legislation they will become available by prescription only.

    The number of vaping teenagers in Australia has soared in recent years and authorities say it is the “number one behavioural issue” in schools across the country.

    And they blame disposable vapes — which some experts say could be more addictive than heroin and cocaine — but for now are available in Australia in every convenience store, next to the chocolate bars at the counter.

Some experts? Do they have names? People say a lot of things. The job of a journalist is to find out which ones are telling the truth.

And if e-cigarettes are illegal, why are they available “in every convenience store”? This sounds like an enforcement issue that isn’t going to be solved by more prohibition.

May 28, 2023

Thanks to geography, Canada has “been able to neglect national security for decades”

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

In the weekly Dispatch post from The Line‘s editors, an almost unremarkable comment comes into close focus:

Continuing with the Johnston report fallout, The Line has been pondering a tweet by Thomas Juneau, one of the country’s relatively few genuine experts in Canadian intelligence and national security. Let’s state this up front: The Line likes Thomas Juneau. He’s written for us before, we hope he’ll write for us again. Nothing that follows should be seen as disagreeing with or nitpicking the professor, because The Line broadly agrees with the point he was making, and found his entire thread on Twitter worth the read. But let’s zoom on this particular comment:

What specifically caught us was this part: “We have been able to neglect national security for decades”.

Again, no disagreement here. Both your Line editors would have made that literal exact argument countless times before in their careers, because it’s true, and likely with essentially identical language. But we read Juneau’s tweet when the Johnston report, and the POEC report before it, were much on our minds. And we’ve been unable to shake the feeling ever since that perhaps “neglect” isn’t the right word for how Canadians approach security. Maybe, we’re wondering, it’s something closer to “disdain”.

Canada has “neglected” a lot of things, after all. And we don’t even mean that in the sense of a lament or criticism. There’s a ton of policy areas or even simply fields of knowledge and expertise that Canada hasn’t paid any particular attention to or made a priority. As Line editor Gurney cracked on the podcast this week, we’ve also neglected botany as a national endeavour. But if some strange international development or social change required Canada to up its botany game, we suspect we’d just … do that. We’d recruit botanists from abroad, schools would open botany colleges, we’d create a Progressive Feminist Botanical Middle-Class Tax Credit (though you’d probably need to attest that you are pro-choice to apply for it). Pivoting to botany wouldn’t be a problem. We’d just emphasize botany, and let a thousand flowers bloom. As it were.

Whenever the issue is anything even remotely proximate to national defence and security, though, the mere suggestion that we should maybe do better, spend more money, allot greater resources, pay more attention, and build up current and future capabilities, is met with something that goes beyond neglect. Neglect implies a degree of apathy. The default Canadian response to any push for a greater emphasis on national defence and security is something closer to hostility.

“Like, why would we care about that weird stuff,” the default Canadian response goes. “That’s dumb. What, do you think Russia is going to invade us or something? What does Canada even need an army or spies for? Why would we even want to have experts on this stuff? This is Canada. We don’t need that stuff. Are you just some kind of weirdo or just some wannabe American?”

Your Line editors agree it’s a problem, but we aren’t sure exactly the root of it. Gerson thinks it might be more just an aversion to thinking about unpleasant things; we quipped on our podcast that talking about defence and security in Canada results in the kind of aghast stares a first-class passenger during the last dinner on the Titanic would have received from his dining companions if he’d casually mentioned he’d been counting the number of lifeboats and had noticed something interesting.

Whoa, dude, we’re having a lovely dinner here. Why you gotta be bringing that up? You think the ship is gonna sink or something?

Gurney thinks there’s truth to that, and would add that if that’s the problem, it goes beyond what we would think of as defence and security, and go all the way into emergency preparedness. Canada and Canadians are chronic under-investors on emergency preparedness and underpreparers because Bad Things Don’t Happen Here, They Happen Somewhere Else, Thank You Very Much. Our typical emergency response plan is “Don’t worry, that won’t happen.” Gurney also thinks this all might be related to how Canadians continually define themselves in opposition to Americans: since the Americans do invest heavily in national defence and security, there’s probably some Canadians out there who have concluded, even subconsciously, that that is an American thing to do, and we don’t do American things.

The above is all a bit theoretical, we grant, but we can’t stop thinking about it all the same. What if the problem isn’t that we neglect security so much as actively dislike thinking and talking about it? If so, that’s a bad habit that may prove difficult, and ultimately expensive, to break free from.

May 27, 2023

“David Johnston is an honourable man”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

From this heading, you might be a bit reminded of Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar, as imagined by William Shakespeare (well, I was, so you’ll have to suffer a few lines of iambic pentameter):

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the opening line of Philippe Lagassé’s article about former Governor General David Johnston’s role in whitewashing the Trudeau running dogs, however:

David Johnston is an honourable man. As a former governor general, he holds the title of Right Honourable and he wears it better than many former prime ministers who share that moniker. Johnston is also a champion of trust in democratic institutions; he literally wrote a book called Trust: Twenty Ways to Build a Better Country.

Although his appointment has been plagued by questions about his perceived conflicts of interest, it’s hard to accept that Johnston set out to protect the Liberal party. Whether one agrees with him or not, Johnston’s conclusions were arrived at sincerely and in keeping with his view that “Democracy is built on trust.” Unfortunately, his recommendation against a public inquiry is not only bewildering from a political perspective, but could erode the very trust in democracy that he wants to strengthen.

Whatever we think about Johnston’s first report, we should be concerned with his appointment as the special rapporteur. Aside from the perceived conflicts of interest, we should ask why a former governor general accepted the role in the first place. Serving as a vice-regal representative should be the last public role an individual performs. Any other public duty performed by a former governor general or lieutenant governor, however well-intentioned and performed, carries risks that can diminish these offices. Johnston’s experience is a cautionary tale for future vice-regals.

The governor general is the second-highest office of the Canadian state, under the monarch alone. The King’s representative performs most of the Crown’s head of state functions in Canada, both constitutional and ceremonial. Official independence and non-partisanship are essential parts of the head of state function. Canadians should be able to trust (there’s that word again) that governors general will be impartial in the exercise of their constitutional powers. We need only look at the 2008 prorogation controversy and the 2017 election in British Columbia to see why this matters for Canadian democracy.

Although less vital, independence and non-partisanship are also important for the governor general’s ceremonial roles. Having the governor general bestow honours ensures that Canadians are recognized by a neutral, but high-standing, representative of the state. An ardent Conservative can receive the Order of Canada while a Liberal government is in power without wincing, since the prime minister and cabinet are kept at a safe distance from the whole thing.

[…]

Former vice-regal representatives should take heed. They would do well to avoid becoming a new set of “retired Supreme Court justices”, whose judicial halo effect has become comically overused to stem political controversy. Indeed, Canadians should insist that the governor general’s salary and annuity come with a tacit bargain: you were set for life to ensure your impartiality and independence, now we never want to hear you wading into political controversies or see you hold another public office again.

This should not be too much to ask of the King’s representatives. No other public role has the formal role stature of a vice-regal office, aside from the monarch, and none are as carefully insulated from partisan battles. The office of governor general should be held by those at the end of a remarkable career, as a final act of independent and impartial public service.

Also in The Line, Mitch Heimpel seems to be a bit less willing to tolerate the use of a former Governor General as ablative shielding for a compromised government:

In the end, David Johnston proved himself to be exactly what his critics argued he always was.

A fervent defender of his advantaged status quo. Another among the thoroughly compromised set of politicians, senior civil servants and academics who have, over the decades when it comes to Canadian foreign policy regarding China, taken the money and run. The idea that he was ever going to be anything else was a figment of our own collective fantasy.

We believed we were a serious country. David Johnston has laughed in our faces at the very thought.

The families of members of Parliament have been targeted for possible “sanctions”? No matter.

Our elections are the subject of coordinated foreign intelligence operations? Well, sure. But what is democracy really?

Really, you see, Johnston told us — without ever being quite so direct about it, because people of Johnston’s polite air are rarely so crass — the media was your problem. They published things without the appropriate “context.”

Choosing Johnston was always a bit grubby. It was meant to politically neuter Conservatives because, after all, Stephen Harper appointed him to be the governor general. How could he possibly be compromised? Yes, he’s known the prime minister whose government he was investigating since Justin Trudeau was a small child. And, yes, as a university president, he was long an advocate for more open relations with China. And, yes, he involved with the Trudeau Foundation, which has found itself at the heart of the question of foreign interference coordinated by the Chinese Communist Party, but …

No, there is no “but”.

There is no other democracy which would have successfully conducted an elaborate farce of this magnitude to tell its citizens what it is painfully obvious that it wanted to tell them all along: You have no right to know.

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.
(more…)

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.

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