Quotulatiousness

June 18, 2021

Feeding “the masses”

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

Sarah Hoyt looked at the perennial question “Dude, where’s my (flying) car?” and the even more relevant to most women “Where’s my automated house?”:

The cry of my generation, for years now, has been: “Dude, where’s my flying car?”

My friend Jeff Greason is fond of explaining that as an engineering problem, a flying car is no issue at all. It is as a legal problem that flying cars get interesting, because of course the FAA won’t let such a thing exist without clutching it madly and distorting it with its hands made of bureaucracy and crazy. (Okay, he doesn’t put it that way, but I do.)

[…]

But in all this, I have to say: Dude, where’s my automated house?

It was fifteen years ago or so, while out at lunch with an older writer friend, that she said “We always thought that when it came to this time, there would be communal lunch rooms and cafeterias that would do all the cooking so women would be free to work.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew our politics weren’t congruent, but really the only societies that managed that “Cafeterias, where everyone eats” were the most totalitarian ones, and that food was nothing you wanted to eat. If there was food. Because the only way to feed everyone industrial style is to take away their right to choose how to feed themselves and what to eat. And that, over an entire nation, would be a nightmare. Consider the eighties, when the funny critters decided that we should all live on a Russian Peasant diet of carbs, carbs and more carbs. Potatoes were healthy and good for you, and you should live on them.

It will surprise you to know – not — that just as with the mask idiocy, no study of any kind supports feeding the population on mostly vegetables, much less starches. What those whole “recommendations” were based on was “diet for a small planet” and the bureaucrats invincible ignorance, stupidity and assumption of their own intelligence and superiority. I.e. most of what they knew — that population was exploding, that people would soon be starving, that growing vegetables is less taxing on the environment and produces more calories than growing animals to eat — just wasn’t so. But they “knew” and by gum were going to force everyone to follow “the plan”. (BTW one of the ways you know that Q-Anon is in fact a black ops operation from the other side; no one on the right in this country trusts a plan, much less one that can’t be shared or discussed.) Then the complete idiots were shocked, surprised, nay, astonished when their proposed diet led to an “epidemic of obesity” and diabetes. Even though anyone who suffered through the peasant diet in communist countries, could have told the that’s where it would lead, and to both obesity and Mal-nutrition at once.

So, yeah, communal cafeterias are not a solution to anything.

My concern about the “automated house of the future” is nicely prefigured by the “wonders” of Big Tech surveillance devices we’ve voluntarily imported into our homes for the convenience, while awarding untold volumes of free data for the tech firms to market. Plus, the mindset that “you must be online at all times” that many/most of these devices require means you’re out of luck if your internet connection is a bit wobbly (looking at you, Rogers).

QotD: Canadians and the nanny state

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

By demanding that “the government” — any government, feds, provincial, municipal, preferably all of them — carry on frantically legislating into the wind, the angry talk-show callers were, in effect, being just as victimologically inclined as the somnolent correspondents of big media. Fuming and furious, they were tonally different but philosophically indistinguishable, both parties subscribing to the view that Canadian citizens are the passive charges of the nanny state and that nanny needs to put more safety bars round the nursery.

Mark Steyn, “We need professional help”, Western Standard, 2005-04-04.

June 13, 2021

Fundamentally unserious nation – “… for Canada’s leaders, all the world’s a ‘gram”

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

In the Friday wrap-up edition of The Line, a consideration of how shallow, insincere posturing, and performing became the hallmarks of Canadian government leadership:

Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”

Look, we at The Line are as tired as you are about the more, shall we say, theatrical aspects of Justin Trudeau’s approach to being prime minister. Whether it was his Day One “because it’s 2015!” smirk, his obsession with showing off his socks to foreign dignitaries, his fashion sense while vacationing in India, and countless other Trudeauvian trips of the light fantastic, the man has always seemed more interested in performance than in the substance of governing.

But that’s not quite right. Because if there is one thing we’ve come to realize over the past five years and a bit, it is that for the Trudeau Liberals, the performance is the governing. For example, we used to wonder at the amount of time and energy that Cabinet ministers spent working on their Instagram accounts, since it went far beyond what would seem to be necessary for promoting and communicating policy. But once we understood that it was the job of policy to promote the Instagram account, and not the other way around, all of this proudly vacuous behaviour started to make a lot more sense.

But while we’ve gotten more or less used to it here in Canada (or maybe the right word is “numb”), we’ve always wondered how it looks through foreign eyes. Those abstract wonderings became a little more concrete over the past few weeks. Countries are opening up, people are starting to travel, politicians are going back to their old habits of holding regular meetings to make sure the world is still ticking along. And for Canada’s leaders, all the world’s a ‘gram.

So it was that at the G7 summit in Cornwall England this week, Prime-Minister-In-All-But-Name Chrystia Freeland was the only finance minster to wear a mask in a group photo taken outdoors. Ok, we thought, maybe she’s not fully vaxxed, maybe she has reason to be extra cautious. Except in a string of photos taken just before the official photo, Freeland was captured scrambling to put on her mask, not for safety, but for show.

Freeland was just getting the crowd warmed up for her nominal boss, Justin Trudeau. At his official G7 welcome on Friday, Trudeau was the only leader to put a mask on to give Boris Johnson the chummy elbow, only to remove it a few seconds later. We get it. It’s a version of the old “what lie did I tell?” problem, but for acting. Which audience am I playing to at this exact moment? It’s hard for even an old luvvie like Trudeau to keep track.

Once he’s back in Canada, Trudeau is going to hole up in a hotel for a few days, which the Globe‘s Cam Clark aptly referred to as “symbolic penance for a symbolic policy.” We agree with Clark that there’s some good fun in seeing someone get tied up in their own moral posturing. But while Clark is unhappy at the prospect of the prime minister cooling his heels for three days, we’re less fussed about Trudeau’s prospective stay in Hotel Q. Because while Clark thinks “there are real things” for the prime minister to be doing, we doubt that very much.

June 11, 2021

The concept of philanthropy is another one with conflicting meanings to the left and to the right

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

In the Daily Chrenk, Arthur Chrenkoff has a bit of fun outlining the recent kerfuffle over Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s attempt to use her grandmother’s situation in Puerto Rico for scoring political points, and then explains why the notion of philanthropy is a very different thing to progressives than it is to conservatives:

“Charity in the dictionary” by HowardLake is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Well may we laugh about (and be disgusted by) the hypocrisy, corruption and indifference shown by prominent members of the left towards the very people they supposedly care about. But it would be to miss the broader point relating to how the left views the world, the role of politics, and the place of the individual.

It might surprise many that the caring and compassionate left isn’t actually all that big on philanthropy and charity, i.e. people helping other people. What could be wrong with that? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if even more people helped even more other people? Well, no, the left would say, because it’s not something that people should be doing in the first place; it’s not their responsibility. It is up to the state to solve all the social and economic problems; our role as citizens (as well as, thanks to the open borders advocates, non-citizens) is to be the grateful recipients of the government’s largesse. For the more elite group (no pun intended) – “the rich” – their role is to pay for all this with their taxes. Private initiative is by its very nature limited and patchy; only the all-seeing and all-powerful state can ensure that everyone who needs “free” assistance (and that’s literally everyone) gets it in a comprehensive, uniform and fair way. Hence, AOC won’t lift a finger to help her grandmother because it’s the state’s duty to help everyone rebuild their lives after a natural disaster. Occasional Cortex already contributes with her taxes on the hard-earned Congressional salary, and in any case, she’s not some billionaire, you know.

With that attitude, needless to say, you won’t be surprised to learn that much of what goes for the left-wing philanthropy does not actually go to help those in need to solve their problems and provide them what they are lacking. Instead, it is largely channels to finance political agitation by the activist-industrial complex to make the government (whether through lobbying, campaigning or helping elect sympathetic law-makers) take responsibility instead. That’s what people like Soros, Laurene Powell-Jobs (Steve Jobs’ widow) and MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos’ ex) are all about – billions spent to create more activist jobs to agitate for the state to create more public sector jobs to run the “Big Daddy”.

But it goes deeper than that, back to Marx himself in fact and to his analysis of what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. According to Marxism, both in its original class-based iteration and the more recent race/gender/sexuality variants, every society is divided into two mutually antagonistic groups: the powerful oppressors and the powerless oppressed, with the society structured in the interest of the former by facilitating in every possible way the exploitation and keeping down of the latter. Thus, all the problems, ills and injustices are “systemic” in nature; they are a feature, not a bug. To solve them and so to help the downtrodden you need to overthrow the entire old unjust system and build a new one that benefits the masses. Based on this sort of understanding of the world – to which, coincidentally, people like AOC and BLM founders all subscribe – any private charity is bound to be ineffectual and shortcoming. After all, what can a person, however generous with their money and time – even if there are multitudes of them – do to solve problems that are the direct (and intended) consequence of the way the society has been set up? Nothing, of course. You can’t mend it, you have to end it. But not only is it naïve and pointless to try, it’s actually counter-productive and therefore positively wrong. Because while no philanthropic effort can solve systemic problems, it can actually provide some limited and temporary relief. Such relief, however, by its very nature is a band-aid solution, i.e. not a solution at all. All it does it momentarily numbs the pain, and that is bad, because the oppressed masses need to feel the pain and feel it good in order to spur them into revolutionary action to overthrow their oppressors and on the ruins of the old build the utopian new society of equality and justice. This is the far-left’s accelerationism: the worse it gets, the better it gets (for the prospects of radical change).

June 9, 2021

Bill C-10 – “… what occurred yesterday was far worse than a blunder. It was a betrayal.”

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

In another country it might be a fascinating and amusing thing to watch Steven Guilbeault faff about pretending to understand what his own bill says and how it will cause havoc for ordinary Canadians, but being in Canada the humour is lacking as Michael Geist shows:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

Several weeks after Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault introduced Bill C-10, I started a 20 part blog post series called the Broadcasting Act Blunder (podcast edition here). The series examined many of concerns with the bill, including issues such as over-broad regulation and discoverability requirements that would only garner public attention many months later. I thought about that series yesterday as I watched Guilbeault try in the House of Commons to defend the indefensible: a gag order on committee review of the bill, the first such order in two decades. While the bill is in dire need of fixing, what occurred yesterday was far worse than a blunder. It was a betrayal. A betrayal of the government’s commitment to “strengthen Parliamentary committees so that they can better scrutinize legislation.” A betrayal of the promise to do things differently from previous governments. A betrayal of Canada’s values as a Parliamentary democracy.

The 23 minute and 30 second question and comment period – the House Speaker ruled there could be no debate and that the period could not extend beyond 23 minutes and 30 seconds – notably featured NDP MP Peter Julian and Green MP Elizabeth May, two of the longer serving MPs in the House as among the first to speak. Julian was first elected in 2004, when Guilbeault was only a few years removed from activist stunts such as climbing the CN Tower. Meanwhile, May became the founding Executive Director of the Sierra Club in 1989, the same year Guilbeault started as a university student. It seemed to me that both had a message for an inexperienced cabinet minister elected less than two years ago, namely that some things are bigger than single bill. Bills come and go, but principles – or betrayal of those principles – endures.

Guilbeault clearly did not get it, wondering how the NDP could possibly reject the gag order and effectively support potential delays to his bill. Both the NDP and the Greens may ultimately vote for Bill C-10, but both understand that defending democracy and the freedom of expression of MPs (much less the freedom of expression of all Canadians) is far more important than a delay to any single bill. As May noted, the gag order will do real long term damage. One day it will be a different government on a different issue seeking to use the same procedure to cut short committee study. And the Liberals will have no credible response with no one to blame but themselves.

But we don’t need to look far into the future to see the consequences of the Guilbeault gag order. This past weekend, the Canadian government joined with other countries to criticize the Nigerian government for blocking Twitter and establishing registration requirements for social media. Yet calls for respecting freedom of expression rings hollow when you are shutting down Parliamentary debate on a bill with profound implications for freedom of expression. Indeed, Canada’s lost moral authority on Internet freedoms is an undeniable consequence of Bill C-10 and the Guilbeault gag order.

June 8, 2021

The utter failure of political leadership in most countries during the pandemic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jay Currie runs through some of the many reasons our political leadership and their “expert class” advisors in most western countries were utter shit almost from the starting gun of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The first response of most of our political class was to doggedly claim to be following the science, turn day to day decision making over to “public health experts”, follow the guidance of the WHO and the CDC – guidance which was, to be charitable, inconsistent – and to largely avoid questioning the experts. (Trump seemed to make some attempt to raise questions but made little headway in the face of his own public health bureaucracy.)

“Wipe everything” (which the CDC now concedes is pointless because the virus is rarely, if ever, transmitted by contact, “wash your hands” (good advice at any time), “social distance” (hilarious when in effect outdoors where there is next to no transmission), “walk this way” in the essential grocery and liquor stores, “wear a mask”, “wear two masks”, “stay home” (logical for two weeks, insane for six months), “curfew” (no known benefit, Quebec ended up being under curfew for five months), “no indoor dining” (despite next to no evidence that restaurants were significant sources of infection), “don’t travel” (with a vast list of exceptions), “don’t gather outdoors (unless BLM protest)” (ignoring entirely that the virus rarely spreads outdoors): it was all COVID theatre and, to paraphrase Dr. Bonnie Henry, “There’s no science to it.”

What the politicians did was simply to panic. They abdicated their responsibility to lead to “experts” who seemed to all be reading from the same “mass lockdown, masks everywhere, hang on for the vaccine, there is no treatment” script.

The key political failure was the acceptance of the “there is no treatment” story. Back in February/March 2020 there were suggestions that there might well be treatments of some sort. HCQ was trotted out and, partially because Trump mentioned it and partially because of very badly designed studies, dismissed. The very idea of a COVID treatment regime was, essentially, made illegal in Canada and much of the United States.

The idea of boosting immunity with things like Vitamin D and C and a good long walk every day did not come up at most of the Public Health Officer’s briefings across Canada. And, again, not very well done studies were cited showing that “Vitamin D does not cure COVID”. A claim which was not being made. A healthy immune system, to which Vitamin D can contribute, most certainly does cure COVID in the vast majority of cases.

Citing privacy concerns, public health officials were unwilling to give many details as to who was dying of or with COVID. Age, co-morbidities, race, and the socio-economic status of the dying were disclosed reluctantly and long after the fact.

I don’t think most of this can be blamed on the public health officials. They had their jobs to do and, to a greater or lesser degree, managed to do them. They are hired to apply current best practices – often mandated on a world wide basis by the WHO – to the situation before them. Public Health officials are not expected to be imaginative nor innovative.

Imagination, leadership, thinking outside the proverbial box is what we elect politicians for.

But, hey! Doesn’t Justin wear cool socks? Totally worth flushing decades of economic growth down the toilet for those nice socks! Canada’s back! (Back to 1974, approximately.)

If you were trying to destroy American cities from within … what would you be doing differently?

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

Sarah Hoyt’s latest Libertarian Enterprise post considers the state of US urban areas after more than a year of Wuhan Coronavirus lockdowns, social controls, and medically “justified” repression:

“Homeless encampment above the 101 @ Spring” by Steve Devol is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Look, I’m sure this was suggested by China, and the dunderheads are totally buying it under their Compleate Illusions system.

Sure climate change. Climate change can justify anything. If we told them they needed to burn people alive to prevent climate change, they’d already been building the pyres.

But that’s just sort of a reflexive thing, like a Moslem saying “Insh Allah“. It’s not actually involved in their thinking as such. Or their thinking is not involved in it. whichever.

The truth is that they realized that the Covidiocy has destroyed the cities.

You see they had everything planned. They were going to force more and more of us into the city, because they were going to make running an internal combustion engine so hard. So if you had a job, you’d live in the city. Where you’re more easily controlled. And where they could make you believe bullshit like overpopulation and that — look at all the homeless — we needed more and more welfare. Their idea of their perfect world is the 1930s version of the future. Just megalopolisis, isolated, with people completely controlled. It has the bonus of leaving pristine wilderness outside that, for the elites to build their dachas.

And part of the problem is that they never understand other people have agency and respond to circumstances.

I don’t know what they expected when they went full fashboots and — in the case of Polis, and I bet not the only one — gave homeless the right to camp in every public land, and defecate in public as well as freeing a bunch of felons.

Did they expect this would just scare people more, and they’d lock themselves in, in fear and trembling, allowing the idiots to design society.

Instead, people left. Americans are on the move. I swear half of my friends are moving from more locked to less locked, from bluer to redder. Some demographers have caught on, seeing through the smoke and mirrors, and are confused — most of them being leftist — because Americans are in the middle of a full migration. As full and as all pervading as the movement west. Or after the civil war the movement of black people North.

Some of this must have penetrated the granite-like heads of the ruling left. Or at least the planning left.

They somehow didn’t expect—possibly because they don’t really get technology. I mean, I have my moments, but I swear most democrats were disappointed when laptops started being made with no “cup holders”. They’re at that level of stupid — that a tech that hasn’t been fully implemented, giving us the ability to work from home, would be kicked into high gear from the covidiocy.

I guess they expected people who work mostly from their computers to sit at home watching panic porn on TV and not work?

More importantly, I don’t think they expected people who have to work in person to follow that migration because, well … if you owned a restaurant that the covidiocy killed, you might, for instance, pay heed to the fact people are driving everywhere because, duh, masks on planes, and therefore build a roadside diner or perhaps find a small town that’s underserved and start anew there.

Oh … a lot of people are changing jobs too, and the jobs are no longer binding them to big cities.

Honestly, the only way for big cities to save themselves is to become touristic centers. NYC was halfway there when the covidiocy hit. Only not fully there because lefty governance sucks at making a city safe.

If I were a lefty governor or mayor right now, I’d aim the fashboots at crime and disorder, get rid of the homeless, spruce up the place, and go all out in courting tourism. Then people would move in to cater to the tourists, and eventually other businesses would move in, because that’s where people are.

But leftists don’t think that way. Carrot and incentive is beneath them (of course.) Their idea is rather that they will force those unwashed peasants to do what they want.

June 7, 2021

Dude, where’s my (flying) car?

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The latest of the reader-contributed book reviews at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten looks at Where is my Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall:

What went wrong in the 1970s? Since then, growth and productivity have slowed, average wages are stagnant, visible progress in the world of “atoms” has practically stopped — the Great Stagnation. About the only thing that has gone well are computers. How is it that we went from the typewriter to the smartphone, but we’re still using practically the same cars and airplanes?

Where is my Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall, is an attempt to answer that question. His answer is: the Great Stagnation was caused by energy usage flatlining, which was caused by our failure to switch to nuclear energy, which was caused by excessive regulation, which was caused by “green fundamentalism”.

Three hundred years ago, we burned wood for energy. Then there was coal and the steam engine, which gave us the Industrial Revolution. Then there was oil and gas, giving us cars and airplanes. Then there should have been nuclear fission and nanotech, letting you fit a lifetime’s worth of energy in your pocket. Instead, we still drive much the same cars and airplanes, and climate change threatens to boil the Earth.

I initially thought the title was a metaphor — the “flying car” as a standin for all the missing technological progress in the world of “atoms” — but in fact much of the book is devoted to the particular question of flying cars. So look at the issue from the lens of transportation:

    Hans Rosling was a world health economist and an indefatigable campaigner for a deeper understanding of the world’s state of development. He is famous for his TED talks and the Gapminder web site. He classifies the wealthiness of the world’s population into four levels:

    1. Barefoot. Unable even to afford shoes, they must walk everywhere they go. Income $1 per day. One billion people are at Level 1.

    2. Bicycle (and shoes). The $4 per day they make doesn’t sound like much to you and me but it is a huge step up from Level 1. There are three billion people at level 2.

    3. The two billion people at Level 3 make $16 a day; a motorbike is within their reach.

    4. At $64 per day, the one billion people at Level 4 own a car.

    The miracle of the Industrial Revolution is now easily stated: In 1800, 85% of the world’s population was at Level 1. Today, only 9% is. Over the past half century, the bulk of humanity moved up out of Level 1 to erase the rich-poor gap and make the world wealth distribution roughly bell-shaped. The average American moved from Level 2 in 1800, to level 3 in 1900, to Level 4 in 2000. We can state the Great Stagnation story nearly as simply: There is no level 5.

Level 5, in transportation, is a flying car. Flying cars are to airplanes as cars are to trains. Airplanes are fast, but getting to the airport, waiting for your flight, and getting to your final destination is a big hassle. Imagine if you had to bike to a train station to get anywhere (not such a leap of imagination for me in New York City! But it wouldn’t work in the suburbs). What if you had one vehicle that could drive on the road and fly in the sky at hundreds of miles an hour?

Before reading this book, I thought flying cars were just technologically infeasible, because flying takes too much energy. But Hall says we can and have built them ever since the 1930s. They got interrupted by the Great Depression (people were too poor to buy private airplanes), then WWII (airplanes were directed towards the war effort, not the market), then regulation mostly killed the private aviation industry. But technical feasibility was never the problem.

Hall spends a huge fraction of the book on pretty detailed technical discussion of flying cars. For example: the key technical issue is takeoff and landing, and there is a tough tradeoff between convenient takeoff/landing and airspeed (and cost, and ease of operation). It’s interesting reading. But let’s return to the larger issue of nuclear power.

Why is the belated discovery of (potentially hundreds of) unmarked graves at a former residential school surprising?

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, History, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The weekly wrap-up post at The Line considers the recent revelation of possibly hundreds of unmarked graves of First Nations children at the site of a former Catholic-run residential school in BC. Despite being Canadian, my interest in Canadian history centres mostly on economic, naval, and military aspects, but I was certainly aware that the residential school system was a black mark on Canada’s historical dealings with First Nations and that the general outline of events — if not the gruesome details — had been known for many years. The first time I found out about it was in middle school, through what we’d now call a “Young Adult” novel about a young First Nations boy escaping from the residential school he’d been sent to and his attempts to travel hundreds of miles to get home. I read it in the early 70s and it may have been published up to a decade before then (I no longer remember the author’s name or the title of the book, unfortunately).

If I, as a schoolchild, knew something of this fifty years ago, why have people younger than me been shocked and appalled to be hearing about this widespread tragedy for the first time now?

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

We like to start our dispatches with something pithy or casual, but it’s been a heavy week. The discovery of what appears to be a burial site containing the bodies of more than 200 children at the site of a former residential school in B.C. has shaken Canadians. Of course it has. There are two outrages here — the outrageous reality of the generations of combined abuses inflicted on Indigenous Canadians, of which the residential school system was but a part. Also, the outrage that most Canadians are only learning about this now.

Your Line editors are not experts on Indigenous affairs or history, but we dare say we’re better read than most on Canadian history in a general sense. We do not say this in any way with snark or derision, but to our fellow Canadians — this should not be surprising to you. The Catholics who ran most of these schools under the sanction of the state had a long history of trying to save souls at the expense of the bodies in which they inhabited. Religious institutions were slow to recognize and stop the spread of disease in their own institutions. Most disturbingly, their ideology glorified, even sanctified, physical suffering. It still does.

Mass graves have been uncovered in Ireland, at the site of Catholic-run homes once devoted to the care of unwed mothers and children. “Saint” Mother Teresa’s hospitals in India were altars to the needless suffering of impoverished people who could not afford to die in peace and dignity. Her hospitals were dirty, poorly run facilities where children were reportedly tied to beds, and terminal patients were given little more than aspirin.

One of the great lessons of history that we consistently fail to accept is that many of our most evil actions are rooted not in self-evidently evil impulses, but rather in our desire to “save” others. Hubris and paternalism, these are the sins we cannot seem to shake. Residential schools, Catholic or otherwise, were the disastrous result of marrying a poisonous and righteous ideology with the authority and resources of a centralized state.

The Truth and Reconciliation report laid out much of this in detail in its final report in 2015, which also spelled out that graves like the ones we’re now mourning in Kamloops are likely to be far more prevalent and common than we now understand. Everyone here deserves the truth.

Update: I’m delighted to see that David Warren continues to improve from his recent health issues and he has rather a different view on Canada’s residential school system and its place in the lives of the First Nations children who attended the schools:

Ryerson was also a figure in the development of Canada’s “residential schools”, which took Indians from (mostly) dysfunctional homes and gave them an education with priests, nuns, and respectable Protestants. Not all denizens of an orphanage are happy, and by attaching the word “colonialism”, and giving simplified accounts, full of libels, “progressive” Canadian politicians have made this period of Canadian history into a scandal. Those who know better have been silenced.

Some years ago I tried to defend the “residential schools”, more or less alone in the Canadian “meejah”. I received many, many letters from former students of them, who said their memories were happy. They had been inspired by teachers of real Christian faith and conviction, and had been equipped with the rudiments of sound learning. “They saved my life,” was a frequent comment.

I could understand the residential schools because I am familiar with Canadian education before it was taken over by barbaric hordes; and also because I am myself partly a product of “British colonial” private schools in Asia, decades ago. They were brutal towards their boys, sometimes. I was myself beaten, and their teachers were sometimes tyrannical.

As a young man I thought this was the way of the world. Now that I am old, I look back on the teaching I received with great pride. It was vastly better than what I would receive in a Canadian high school; and that was much better than what we get today.

June 2, 2021

Media Fearmongering

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Laura Dodsworth on how the BBC and other British media outlets turned all the dials to 11 to ramp up fear over the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

The media have served us a cornucopia of frightening articles and news items about Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. While writing my new book, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I encountered a panoply of doom-mongering headlines. These were an indication of the significant role the media have played in creating our state of fear.

Of course, news media should not shy away from reporting frightening news during a pandemic. They should make us aware of the numbers of deaths, the policies being implemented to tackle the pandemic and the latest scientific developments. But during Covid, the media went beyond reporting on the pandemic. Instead, they appeared beholden to the old commercial imperatives, “If it scares, it airs”, and “If it bleeds, it leads”. It seems fear does sell.

The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to create has been suffocating. Death tolls were constantly brandished without the context of how many people die every day in the UK, and hospital admissions were reported while recoveries were not. As a result, Covid often appeared as a death sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a mild illness for the majority of people.

Given the wall-to-wall doom, it is therefore no surprise that the British were one of the most frightened populations in the world. Various studies showed that we were more concerned than other countries about the spread of Covid and less confident in the ability of our government to deal with it. One survey in July 2020 showed that the British public thought between six and seven per cent of the population had died from Covid – which was around 100 times the actual death rate at the time. Indeed, if six or seven per cent of Brits had died from Covid, that would have amounted to about 4,500,000 bodies – we’d have noticed, don’t you think?

While researching A State of Fear, I interviewed members of the general public about how they were impacted by the “campaign of fear” during the epidemic. Many talked of how the media had elevated their alarm.

“There wasn’t much to do”, Darren told me, “so we’d watch TV and we saw programmes about disinfecting your shopping when it arrives, and having a safezone in the kitchen. The nightly bulletins on the TV about death tolls, the big graphs with huge spikes on them, came at us ‘boom, boom, boom!’. It was a constant barrage of doom and gloom. My fear of the virus went through the roof.”

Sarah told me she had to stop watching the BBC. As her daughter put it, “If you just watched or listened to the BBC every day, what hope would you have had?”. Jane, meanwhile, described the “gruesome headlines” that came at her “thick and fast”.

The fearmongering about Covid began even before the pandemic hit the UK. We were primed by videos from Wuhan in China, which were then widely circulated by UK-based media outlets. These painted an apocalyptic picture, featuring collapsed citizens, medics in Hazmat suits, concerned bystanders and a city grinding to a halt. In one memorable video, which went viral, so to speak, a woman fell, stiff as a board, flat on her face, on a pavement. The split second where she falters is a giveaway – this was a set-up. If the rest of the world had Covid, China had “Stunt Covid”.

June 1, 2021

Undoing Dr. Beeching’s cuts

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

In The Critic, Brice Stratford looks at the British government’s “nationalization if necessary, but not necessarily nationalization” scheme to once again reform Britain’s passenger railway network:

Astonishing scenes this week, whereby the Tory government announces a White Paper to re-nationalise the railways. The union bosses and Guardianistas who have called for such policy for decades immediately decided that actually it’s a terrible idea, or that this doesn’t count as re-nationalising because it’s the Conservatives doing it, or that calling the new entity “Great British Railways” just because it will run Great Britain’s railways is so offensive that the entire project should be called off. It’s all very tribal, and very silly, and very 2021, alas.

Of course, the Department for Transport (DfT) is still afraid of admitting that this is in fact renationalisation, as to do so would be to rile up certain elements of the Right, and to admit what we all know: that their generations-long experiment in railway privatisation has been a failure. Today we have a service which is overpriced, unreliable, and generally an unpleasant and ineffective experience from start to finish.

The postwar Labour government included railway nationalization in its many, many reforms to the economic life of Britain and in 1948 the remaining railway systems were unified as British Railways. By the 1960s, the system was losing money at a high rate of speed, so Dr. Beeching was called upon to recommend how to put the railway if not into profit then at least into a much more acceptable rate of loss:

Maps originally from Losing Track by Kerry Hamilton and Stephen Potter (1985), by way of Is Your Journey Really Necessary?, 2012-12-31.
https://isyourjourneyreallynecessary.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/nice-work-if-you-can-get-there/
Click map to enlarge.

The aim of the Beeching cuts, which followed on from a pair of reports written by Dr Richard Beeching in 1963 and 1965 for the British Railway Board (of which he was Chair), was to turn the loss-making British railways network into a profitable enterprise. Prioritising this profitability over all else, he proposed axing about a third of Britain’s then 7000 railway stations, removing passenger service from around 5000 route miles, and cutting 70,000 jobs over three years. The moves were highly controversial, and though they certainly saved money, the social consequences were extensive and the scars remain visible today.

As a consequence of the cuts, Britain became over-reliant on car travel, and over the 1970s and 80s town planners gutted the experientially human-scale city centres in service of this newly favoured road transport. We still very much feel the consequences of the Beeching axe today, whereby a rail journey between neighbouring cities is often only possible by zigzagging up to London and back down again, and public transport between rural communities is limited to one bus service every hour or two in the morning and mid-afternoon, which crawls along at a testudinian pace, further isolating and atrophying the scattered settlements that once were happy, thriving homes.

May 29, 2021

Justin Trudeau is clearly not concerned about China or Chinese involvement in Canadian affairs

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson outlines the PM’s latest display of insouciance in regard to anything involving China, their ruling Communist party, or the Chinese military:

The Globe and Mail reported last week that Canada’s top infectious disease research centre, the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, had hosted and otherwise collaborated with guest researchers and scientists from China — including some with links to that country’s military or government. O’Toole asked about this in the House, and Trudeau gave a very routine Trudeauvian non-answer. O’Toole and other Tories kept up the questioning, Trudeau eventually responded with this (as per Hansard): “Mr. Speaker, we have always and will always take this threat seriously. Public safety officials have met with more than 34 universities to help them keep their research safe. In 2020, CSIS engaged more than 225 different organizations, including universities, to ensure that they were aware of foreign threats. I also want to mention that we are seeing a disturbing rise in anti-Asian racism. I hope that my Conservative Party colleagues are not raising fears about Asian Canadians.”

Sigh. Where do we begin?

First of all, though this may shock our readers, the Sun papers, and its columnists, have been known to exaggerate their criticisms of the PM. The PM gave a more substantive answer than Lilley gave him credit for. You can disagree with the PM — see below! — without getting cute with what he actually said. The racism line was dumb, and shitty. It was beneath the PM and unfair to the legitimate questions that were being asked. Trudeau shouldn’t have said it, and he was right to get called out for it.

So yes, a dick move by the PM — in a hundred years, maybe one of his descendants can apologize for it. But let’s not take our eye off the ball.

Trudeau’s answers were more than Lilley suggested, but they’re still not good enough. O’Toole and the Conservatives are onto something. China’s ruling regime is aggressive, brutal, and thuggish. They’re a threat to security abroad, they’re committing outright crimes against humanity against their own religious minorities, they’ve crushed Hong Kong underfoot, and they’re actively hostile to Canada. None of this is racist to note.

And yet our federal Liberals remain alarmingly unable to admit any of this. We don’t buy that it’s just a matter of political expediency, an awkward but necessary consequence of the ongoing detention of the two Michaels. Hell, we wish that the Liberals were just being publicly cautious with their real views on Beijing while remaining clear-eyed about the threat behind closed doors. The evidence continues to suggest that the federal Liberals, from Trudeau on down, remain hopelessly naïve about the nature of Beijing’s rulers, even as more and more of our allies are getting real about what the next generation or two of geopolitics is gonna look like for the Western alliance. (Which Canada remains a part of, whether Trudeau likes it or not.)

The growing tensions with a rising China are a big deal. It is only going to become a bigger deal. The Liberals need to get with the program. We hope to see more on this across the Canadian media — and hopefully it’s a bit more useful and productive than what the Sun ran with this week. The Liberals look terrible on this file already for entirely legitimate, serious reasons. We don’t need to pop our aging joints as we stretch and contort ourselves to make it seem so.

May 28, 2021

Justin Trudeau apologizes for WW2 detainment of card-carrying Fascists by Mackenzie King’s government

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, History, Italy, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As Colby Cosh notes in the latest NP Platformed newsletter, it is hard to reconcile the mythological events the Prime Minister is busy apologizing for with the actual, documented facts of the case as recorded in a book published by three Italian-Canadian academics about 20 years ago:

What they found was that the 500 people, singled out from 112,000 Italian-Canadians by the government in 1940, were scarcely the victims of racial hysteria. They were, in fact, a hardcore fraction of 3,000 or so literal card-carrying Fascists in Canada. They hadn’t been thrown into camps willy-nilly, as Canada’s Japanese would be later; most had Fascist ties and sympathies that had been carefully investigated, abundantly documented and double-checked by the RCMP.

The internees had mostly been members of overtly pro-Fascist “fraternal organizations”, whose loyalty they later protested in the face of the facts. As that young reporter’s review observed, many of those groups reported directly to the Italian government, all were devoted to promoting the idea of Mussolini’s near-godhood and some helped finance Italy’s Fascist (and racist) 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, which annihilated the League of Nations security apparatus and set the table for further fascist aggression in Europe. Although the impugned Italians were detained without trial, none lost their homes or property as Japanese internees later would, and in fact none were held beyond the end of 1942.

That review was just about the only notice Enemies Within received anywhere in the Canadian press. The author, whose alliterative name you can probably guess by now, interviewed (now emeritus) Prof. Perin and was told the book had “fallen into a big black hole”. The revisionist account of Italian-Canadian internment as an out-of-control racial panic directed at anyone whose name ended in a vowel had long since taken hold in Canadian schools, and has never lost its grip.

Today, the prime minister, attentive to his nose for votes, apologized officially in the House of Commons for the “unjustified” detentions. And opposition parties are competing vigorously to out-apologize the apologizer-in-chief. One wonders what our present-day anti-fascists, who favour street beatings for anyone wearing the wrong hat, make of this laborious grieving for honest-to-God anti-Fascist action. As Michael Petrou argued courageously in the Globe and Mail on May 3, we shouldn’t be consecrating a falsehood for the sake of anyone’s political advantage. (And the CBC, to its credit, gives some attention to the historically informed side of the debate.)

The essential — and largely non-replenishable — trust in government

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

Last week, Tom posted a then-recent discussion he overheard at The Last Ditch:

[Click to see full-size flowchart]

Two svelte American ladies of a certain age were having coffee today at my West London health club. They were in the next “pod” to me outdoors as I had a post-swim coffee before heading home. Perhaps it’s those wide-open prairies but Americans, bless them, always speak a little more loudly than us so I didn’t really have a choice but to listen to their conversation.

The topic was their mothers. Both moms back in the States are apparently unsure of the wisdom of being vaccinated. One cost of parenthood no-one tells you about beforehand is that one day you will be judged and found wanting by humans you could not love more; your children for whom you would cheerfully die. I confess their mothers immediately had my sympathy, regardless of the correctness of their views.

There was a good deal of sneering about conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. I found it surprising that both errant moms believed 5G was involved, but having listened quietly for another few minutes discovered that neither had ever said so. Their daughters were simply assuming that if they doubted government advice on vaccines, they believed all the other stuff too. One of the mothers is apparently a 9/11 “truther” and her daughter’s observation that no government is capable of keeping such a dark secret struck me as fair.

[…]

There are available facts and facts that will only become available in the future. People must make their choices based on their own risk assessment today. That useless truism is not the point of this post. The truly significant thing I overheard was this. Having sneered at her mother’s belief that “we can’t trust government”, one of the ladies said;

    I thought to myself – Mom, I don’t want to believe what you believe because if it’s true I can’t have any of the things I believe in.

There, I thought, was a moment of insight; a moment (almost) of self-awareness. If government can’t be trusted, then the societal change she wants isn’t possible. Therefore, whatever the evidence, government must be trusted. That pretty much sums up the statist mindset.

I don’t know whether these mothers or daughters are right about this issue. I do know that one of the daughters (and her companion seemed to agree) is allowing her desires to displace her reason. In consequence, sadly, her mind will only ever be changed by a catastrophe I would never wish upon her.

I suspect many such earnest, well-meaning souls as Goneril and Regan (as I christened them) felt they needed to believe the state could be trusted at key points in the deadly history of the 20th Century. If the brave new world of Communism was to happen, for example, government had to be trusted with enormous power to make immense change.

Many Gonerils and Regans must have ruefully reflected on that in the Gulag.

QotD: Declaring war on college

Filed under: Business, Education, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As it currently exists, college is a scheme for laundering and perpetuating class advantage. You need to make the case that bogus degree requirements (eg someone without a college degree can’t be a sales manager at X big company, but somebody with any degree, even Art History or Literature, can) are blatantly classist. Your stretch goal should be to ban discrimination based on college degree status. Professions may continue to accept professional school degrees (eg hospitals can continue to require doctors have a medical school degree), and any company may test their employees’ knowledge (eg mining companies can make their geologists pass a geology test) but the thing where you have to get into a good college, give them $100,000, flatter your professors a bit, and end up with a History degree before you can be a firefighter or whatever is illegal. If you can’t actually make degree discrimination illegal, just make all government offices and companies that do business with the government ban degree discrimination.

Stop the thing where high schools refuse to let people graduate until they promise to go to college. End draft deferment for people who go to college — hopefully there won’t be a draft, but do it anyway, as a sign that studying at college isn’t any more important than the many other jobs people do that don’t confer draft exemptions. Make universities no longer tax-exempt — why should institutions serving primarily rich people, providing them with regattas and musical theater, and raking in billions of dollars a year, not have to pay taxes? Make the bill that does this very clearly earmark the extra tax money for things that help working-class people, like infrastructure or vocational schools or whatever.

Scott Alexander, “A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word ‘Class'”, Astral Codex Ten, 2021-02-26.

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