Quotulatiousness

August 29, 2020

“Last Sunday in Minsk was indeed a bizarre day”

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

Vladislav Davidzon reports on recent news from Belarus:

Protest in Minsk against Belarussian President Lukashenko, 23 August 2020.
Photo by Homoatrox via Wikimedia Commons.

“Where were you grandpa,” I dearly hope that my historically minded descendants will inquire of me one day, “when that maddened Belarusian president flew over the crowd of protestors in that helicopter with a machine gun in hand?” Last Sunday in Minsk was indeed a bizarre day. As the protestors of this most velvet of revolutions approached the presidential palace, Lukashenko panicked and ordered his personal military helicopter to fly over the crowd.

We are now into the third week of the political crisis that has wracked Belarus in the wake of the discredited presidential election of 9 August. Following the outcome of the fabricated election, Lukashenko has forfeited all political legitimacy after ruling the country as his own personal kingdom for the past 26 years. Yet, as the daily demonstrations taking place across every town and region demonstrate, Belarus is no longer governable under the old political agreement.

The entire capital of Minsk appears to be in revolt, if only passively. When I discreetly asked the cleaning lady at my hotel where I can go to make a call without being noticed, she replied with a knowing smile: “You can’t, they listen to everything.” The repressive apparatus on which Lukashenko has relied for decades clearly no longer functions. The protests are organised by encrypted telegram channels – many based in Poland and Lithuania – which the government is powerless to stop. NEXTA Live (the main telegram channel of the opposition, managed by an exiled 22-year-old Belarusian activist) has reported an extraordinary one billion views of its posts for the first three weeks of August.

So, it is understandable that the opposition demand that Lukashenko retire. He is 65 years old and will be celebrating his next birthday this coming Sunday (the day that protestors stage their weekly marches, routinely bringing 200,000 people into the streets of the capital). Those who run the opposition telegram channels have taken to referring to him as “a certain pensioner in Minsk”. Thus, “a certain pensioner in Minsk is meeting with the KGB and interior ministry generals today”. A “certain pensioner in Minsk is shaking his fist and threatening NATO”, and a “certain pensioner in Minsk has ordered a flight of Belarusian Mi-24 ‘Hind’ helicopters to intercept a formation of enemy flags bearing balloons on the Lithuanian border”.

August 26, 2020

For British liberals, it’s somehow different when it happens in another country

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill emphasizes the hypocrisy of some of the people lionizing the Belarussian democrats who also spent the last few years demonizing the democratic process that led to Brexit:

Protest in Minsk against Belarussian President Lukashenko, 23 August 2020.
Photo by Homoatrox via Wikimedia Commons.

British liberals are cheering on the tens of thousands of brave Belarusians who have taken to the streets to demand the enactment of their democratic vote. Which is odd, to say the least, given that the last time British liberals themselves marched in the streets, often in their tens of thousands, it was to demand the crushing of a democratic vote. It was to call upon the state to refuse to enact the democratic wishes of 17.4 million people, the largest democratic bloc in the history of the UK. The hypocrisy is staggering: the British chattering classes celebrate democracy abroad and wage war on it at home.

Belarusians are fighting tooth and nail for their democratic rights. They are marching in the streets in vast numbers – in defiance of the government’s authoritarian clampdown on public gatherings – and workers are going on strike. They are furious with the rigged outcome of the election two weeks ago, which gave their authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for 26 years, yet another term. Lukashenko’s regime claims he won more than 80 per cent of the vote in the election on 9 August while the opposition won around 10 per cent. No one believes this. And they are right not to believe it: Lukashenko has a history of anti-democratic, tyrannical behaviour.

The Belarusians rising up against Lukashenko and demanding the meaningful right to determine who governs their country are an inspiration to democrats everywhere. They are taking enormous risks. They are breaking illiberal laws by taking to the streets of Minsk. At least four people have been killed in the protests. Some demonstrators claim they were tortured by security forces after being arrested. It is testament to people’s yearning for democratic power, for a real say in the future of their country, that so many are flooding the streets of Belarus or downing their tools at work in order to force the regime to listen to their voices. This is democracy in action.

And yet, there is something nauseating in the British chattering classes’ attempt to cosy up to the Belarusian uprising for democracy. For these are the same people who spent the past four years trying to do in the UK what Lukashenko is currently doing in Belarus – that is, silence people’s democratic cry and write off their democratic votes. Lukashenko does it with batons and torture, while our far more polite elites tried to do it with court cases, parliamentary intrigue and a relentless campaign of Project Fear. But the motive was the same: to prevent the supposedly problematic little people from having their say and screwing up political life.

[…]

The British columnists and politicos celebrating the Belarusian uprising have to face up to this fact: they have nothing in common with these brave warriors for democracy. On the contrary, their marches over the past four years were singularly devoted to stopping democracy. Who can forget those huge “People’s Vote” gatherings in which armies of middle-class Remainers would gather in London to sneer at ordinary voters, plead with the government to ignore their votes, and demand that big constitutional questions be taken out of the hands of the dangerous, reckless “low-information” masses. Guess who probably feels similarly to this? Yes, Alexander Lukashenko.

August 25, 2020

QotD: Collective punishment

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We used to take calls for collective punishment much more seriously. In the 1949 Geneva Convention it was determined that: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.” Collective punishment was seen as a tactic designed to intimidate and subdue an entire population. The drafters of the Geneva Convention clearly had in mind the atrocities committed in WWI and WWII where entire villages and communities suffered mass retribution for the resistance activities of a few. In their commentary on the outlawing of collective punishment the International Red Cross stated: “A great step forward has been taken. Responsibility is personal and it will no longer be possible to inflict penalties on persons who have themselves not committed the acts complained of.”

In times of peace, collective punishment may come in the form of social media dust-ups over sombrero hats or Chinese dresses. Gradual softening on the taboo of collective punishment does not bode well for the health of liberal democracies. Which is also why it is important for us all to remember that social-justice activists who complain about cultural appropriation only represent themselves, and not the minority groups to which they belong.

Claire Lehmann, “The Evils of Cultural Appropriation”, Tablet, 2018-06-11.

August 24, 2020

How to rectify a serious error the Founding Fathers made in the US Constitution

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that despite his respect for the founding fathers, they made a couple of serious mistakes in drafting the Constitution and it needs fixing quickly:

Founders’ Mistake Number Two: lies in the enumeration of the powers of Congress, to wit:

    “They [congress] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

With those fifty-four words, the Founding Fathers gave birth to a permanent criminal class, as surely as the city councils of Seattle, Minneapolis. Philadelphia, New York, and Portland. Even “treason, felony, and breach of the peace” are for all practical purposes excepted, now, or three quarters of these miscreants would be languishing in prison. That heinous, stupid clause must be repealed or rewritten at once.

For many years, I have advocated reopening Alcatraz strictly for government criminals, although lately it occurs to me that Antarctica might be even better. Cash-poor Russia and the other two-for-a-nickel satrapies that lay claim to slivers of that frozen continent would give them up for thirty-seven cents and a good bus token. And I kind of like the ring of “McMurdo Sound Federal Penitentiary”.

But, as usual, I have, once again, digressed.

Another cure — with similar delightfully frostbitten consequences — might be to incorporate United States Code, Sections 241 and 242 directly into the Bill of Rights, probably as Amendment Zero. They establish the crimes of depriving folks of their rights “under color of law”, conspiring to deprive them of their rights under color of law, and prescribe extremely specific penalties.

To my knowledge, those laws are never properly applied, and that is a travesty and a tragedy. Make them an Amendment, and they might prove more effective. I would consider every American deprived of his or her rights to represent a separate punishable offense. How about three billion years in the freeze-dried slammer, Nancy, for your decades of malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, upfeasance, and downfeasance as a member in evil standing of the Viet Congress?

August 7, 2020

A Career Anti-Fascist – George Orwell – WW2 Biography Special

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Liberty, Politics, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 6 Aug 2020

George Orwell is one of the most famous English writers in the modern age. But how did he become the man who would coin so many of the words we still use in our political debates?

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Jo Wandrini – “Puzzle Of Complexity”

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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

August 5, 2020

QotD: Responsibility

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have always been deeply suspicious of the word “responsibility”. It has again and again sounded like someone else telling me that I must do what he wants me to do rather than what I want to do. If he is paying my wages, then fair enough. But if he is explaining why I should vote for him, and support everything he does once he has got the job he is seeking, not so fair.

The sort of thing I mean is when a British Conservative Party politician says, perhaps to a room full of people who, like me, take the idea of personal liberty very seriously: Yes, I believe, passionately, in personal liberty. The politician maybe then expands upon this idea, often with regard to how commercial life works far better if people engaged in commerce are able to make their own decisions about which projects they will undertake and which risks they will walk towards and which risks they will avoid. If business is all coerced, it won’t be nearly so beneficial. We will all get poorer. Yay freedom.

But.

But … “responsibility”. We should all have freedom, yes, but we also have, or should have, “responsibility”. Sometimes there then follows a list of things that we should do or should refrain from doing, for each of which alleged responsibility there is a law which he favours and which we must obey. At other times, such a list is merely implied. So, freedom, but not freedom.

The problem with politicians talking about responsibility is that their particular concern is and should be the law, law being organised compulsion. And too often, their talk of responsibility serves only to drag into prominence yet more laws about what people must and must not do with their lives. But because the word “responsibility” sounds so virtuous, this list of anti-freedom laws becomes hard to argue against, even inside one’s own head. Am I opposed to “responsibility”? Increasingly, I have found myself saying: To hell with it. Yes.

I have often been similarly resistant to the language of Christianity, of the sort that dominates what is being said in churches around the world today. How many times in history have acts of tyranny been justified by the tyrant saying something like: We must all bear our crosses in life, and here, this cross is yours. “God is on my side. Obey my orders.” The truth about the potential of life to inflict pain becomes the excuse to inflict further pain.

Brian Micklethwait, “Jordan Peterson on responsibility – and on why it is important that he is not a politician”, Samizdata, 2018-03-30.

August 4, 2020

QotD: Epicureans are not hedonists

Filed under: History, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… for now I am tempted amidst the “darling buds of May” to ponder with affection the proverbial injunction “Eat drink and be merry!”

Many people consider that a fair summary of the Epicurean philosophy, named for its founder, the Athenian philosopher Epicurus who lived from 341-270 B.C., a few generations after Plato. It is a natural mistake. After all Epicurus did say that “Pleasure is the starting-point and goal of living blessedly.”

A common Greek word for pleasure is “hedone,” whence our word “hedonism.” A hedonist, we know, is someone who devotes himself to sensual pleasure. Add that to the fact that Epicureanism is a deeply materialistic philosophy — “all good and bad,” Epicurus says, “consists in sense experience” — and it is easy to see why people often conclude that Epicureanism advocates sensual abandon.

Easy, but mistaken.

For in fact, Epicureanism is a deeply ascetic philosophy. It preaches the gospel of pleasure. But it defines pleasure in such a way that no hedonist worth his salt would embrace it.

A hedonist is someone devoted to pleasure in the positive sense: he seeks to gratify his senses.

An Epicurean is devoted to pleasure in the negative sense: he seeks to avoid pain. “We do everything we can,” Epicurus wrote, “for the sake of being neither in pain nor terror.”

It is a melancholy fact that the human frame, while capable of great joy and pleasure, is susceptible to even greater pain and misery. The pleasures afforded us are delicate blossoms; the pains we are susceptible to are like a raging wildfire in comparison. Epicurus and his followers took note of this fact. Indeed, it was a fact that mesmerized their imaginations.

Epicurus says that pleasure is the goal of life. But what he taught was immunity to pain. “The removal of all feeling of pain,” he wrote, “is the limit of the magnitude of pleasures.” There was a core of common sense about the Epicurean approach to life. He advised his followers to live simple, healthy lives, to shun extravagances of all sorts. Of course, that is something many philosophers, indeed many friends and parents, would also advise. There is nothing distinctively Epicurean about the injunction to live simply and soberly.

There are three things distinctive about Epicureanism. One is its identification of pleasure with the absence of pain. Another is its emphasis on sense experience as the ultimate reality. The third is its identification of tranquillity as the aim or goal of life. (The Greek word is “ataraxia,” i.e., not troubled, not disturbed: note the privative character of the Epicurean ideal.)

If it is to succeed, Epicureanism must deliver us not only from physical pain but also from anxiety and mental anguish. The prospect of death, Epicurus knew, upset many people. Hence he and his followers expended a great deal of effort trying to remove the sting, the fear, from the prospect of death.

Epicurus offered two things to battle the fear of death: an attitude and an argument. The attitude was one of mild contempt: the right sort of people, he implies, do not get in a tizzy about things, not even about death. The argument is equally compelling. “Get used to believing,” he says, “that death is nothing to us.”

Roger Kimball, “Coronavirus, Flynn and Epicureanism”, American Greatness, 2020-05-02.

August 1, 2020

Masking stupidity

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Patrick Fagan talks about the dehumanizing aspect of mandatory facemask orders:

“Utrecht: Facemask Store” by harry_nl is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In Joost Meerloo’s analysis of false confessions and totalitarian regimes, The Rape of the Mind, he coins a phrase for the “dumbing down” of critical resistance – menticide. “In the totalitarian regime,” he wrote, “the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorise, to salivate when the bell rings.”

[…]

Face masks can now be added to the list of mandates that make you stupid. As if Piers Morgan feverishly promoting them weren’t evidence enough, here are the facts on why you absolutely, categorically should not wear a face mask. They make you suggestible; they make you more likely to follow someone else’s direction and do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. In short, they switch off your executive function – your conscience.

A great example comes from a study by Mathes and Guest (1976), who asked participants how willing they would be, and how much they would have to be paid, to carry a sign around the university cafeteria reading “masturbation is fun” (this being 1976, doing such a thing would be considered embarrassing; these days it will probably earn you a course credit!). The results showed that when people wore a mask, they were more likely to carry the sign and required less money to do so ($30 compared to $48, on average).

Meanwhile, Miller and Rowold (1979) presented Halloween trick-or-treaters with a bowl of chocolates and told them they were allowed to take only two each. When the children thought they weren’t being watched, they helped themselves. Children without a mask broke the rule, taking more chocolates, 37% of the time, compared to 62% for masked children. The authors concluded that masks “lead to lower restraints on behaviour”.

The effect has similarly been found online: the online disinhibition effect refers to the tendency for people to act antisocially when anonymous online (Suler, 2004). There is even an infamous trolling movement calling itself Anonymous and using a mask as its symbol.

The disinhibiting effects of wearing a mask are described by psychologists in terms of a suspension of the superego’s control mechanisms, allowing subconscious impulses to take over. Saigre (1989) wrote that masks “short-cut” conscious defence systems and encourage “massive regression” to a more primitive state; Castle (1986) wrote that eighteenth century masquerades allowed mask-wearers to release their repressed hedonistic and sexual impulses; and Caillois (1962) similarly wrote about European masked carnivals involving libidinal activities including “indecencies, jostling, provocative laughter, exposed breasts, mimicking buffoonery, a permanent incitement to riot, feasting and excessive talk, noise and movement”. In the 12th Century, Pope Innocent III banned masks as part of his fight against immorality; and in 1845, New York State made it illegal for more than two people to wear masks in public, after farmers wore masks to attack their landlords.

From a neuroimaging perspective, masks are known to inhibit identity and impulse control – both associated with executive function in the prefrontal cortex (e.g., Glannon, 2005; Tacikowski, Berger & Ehrsson, 2017). In other words, masks silence the Jiminy Cricket in the brain.

July 27, 2020

H.L. Mencken

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Eric Oppen (with whom I’ve had a few brief email conversations) discusses the work of the “Sage of Baltimore”:

H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.

I would say that, on the whole, Mencken is still quite readable and enjoyable, and many of his observations on the American scene are still as valid as when he made them. He has his weaknesses. He’s not much of an historian, which limits him when he takes up historical subjects. He never got over what he saw as the unfair treatment the German cause got in the American press between 1914 and the entry of the US into World War One. He also often identifies people as Jewish or black when it’s not really relevant to what he’s saying, but this was more a custom of his time than out-and-out bigotry. While he often has uncomplimentary things to say about Jews, and blacks, his greatest scorn is reserved for “the lintheads” — his term for the poor whites of the South. He regarded them as barely worthy of human status.

[…] his views on most subjects were quite compatible with libertarian positions. He was an inveterate opponent of government overreaching (which was behind a lot of his ferocious opposition to Prohibition) and while I don’t think he’d approve of drug use, he’d see our War on (Some Unpopular) Drugs as the assault on the Constitution that it is. While he was by no means hostile to blacks, and went out of his way to promote black writers (many of the figures in the “Harlem Renaissance” owed a lot to his support), he’d also denounce affirmative action and our current frenzy of “anti-racism” in scathing terms. His views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and how it has been turned into an alternate, and superior, Constitution would probably scorch the paint off the walls.

Mencken’s views on people’s private lives would have infuriated many of his contemporaries. While he disapproved of homosexuality, referring to it negatively in entries in his private diaries, he was by no means a howling “homophobe.” His writings on the travails of Oscar Wilde are very sympathetic to Wilde’s sufferings, which Mencken thought were wholly disproportionate to what he was known to have done. Mencken referred to Lord Alfred Douglas, in a review of Douglas’ book about Wilde, as a Tartuffe — that is to say, a posturing hypocrite.

Having been a reporter for years in Baltimore, back when reporters were very like the old film noir view of them, Mencken was very much a man of the world, and inclined to great tolerance on others’ sex lives. When he wrote of prostitutes, he refrained from the sort of pious moralizing that was expected in his time. He said that prostitutes often actively preferred their profession to other work available to them, and that most of them ended up respectably married. He kept his own love life very private, and was a faithful husband to his wife throughout their brief marriage, but he does mention, here and there, having had other lovers, whom he does not name even in writings designated to come to light only long after everybody involved was dead. By his own account in his Diary, he lost his virginity at age fourteen to a girl of his own age, who had already had other experiences before him. He felt that such experiences, unless pregnancy happened, did no one any harm.

While he was an atheist, Mencken had no particular hostility to religion per se, no matter what the Fundamentalists of his day thought. His book Treatise on the Gods makes interesting reading, although it is marred, in my view, by Mencken’s lack of knowledge of languages. He praises Christianity for having “the most gorgeous poetry,” but as far as I know, he could not read Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, and was thinking in terms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. However, the book is still worth reading, although a serious student of the subject would find it limited.

If you’ve been a regular visitor to the blog, you’ll know I have a huge regard for H.L. Mencken’s work and there are many Mencken quotes that have done duty as QotD entries over the years.

July 15, 2020

Wilfred Laurier University – from university to indoctrination centre

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

In the National Post, Barbara Kay notes how things are changing from general support of freedom of speech to cracking down on “dissent” of any nature, with WLU being a leading example:

Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. This photo taken from University Avenue shows the Maureen Forrester Recital Hall and John Aird Centre, 23 September, 2005.
Photo by Radagast via Wikimedia Commons.

My editor, a man in his prime, recently tweeted bemusement that his older readers often preface their emails to him with allusions to their age (“as a 75-year old man …” “I’m an 82-year old woman …”).

I know these readers. Or others like them.

When my oldie readers introduce generation markers in their emails, it’s generally a semaphore signifying bewilderment at a cultural landscape so utterly changed from their youth, they cannot find their bearings. I empathize with these readers because, an oldie myself, I share their anxiety at the continual erosion of classic liberal principles we took for granted as permanent. Especially the freedom to dissent from popular views.

[…]

If you had told us in our youth that one day students would be screaming obscenities and blaring horns to prevent presentations by visiting speakers whose opinions they dislike, as happens frequently in American universities and occasionally in Canada, we would have been shocked. If you had told us that someday a graduate student who exposed her class to a range of opinions on a controversial subject — the norm in my university experience — would be officially censured for including the views of a conservative commentator because his views might “harm” students, we would have been gobsmacked.

Lindsay Shepherd’s 2017 recording of her disciplinary session at Wilfrid Laurier University for the crime of exposing her students to Jordan Peterson’s views on compelled speech brought her to national attention. (Peterson was compared to Hitler by one interrogator. A defamation lawsuit by Peterson against WLU is in progress.) The broadcast of the ruthless performance that reduced Shepherd to tears was a pivotal teaching moment in the illiberalism that governs academia in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Shepherd was the only adult in that room. But she was already an exception to the rule in her cohort, and the chances of another such act of dissidence by a WLU graduate student are slim to vanishing.

July 14, 2020

QotD: The threat of galloping Karenism

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

One of the least appealing aspects of the American character is the residual Puritanism that still compels a certain percentage of our countrymen, women and others, to nag, pester, and generally annoy the rest of us by trying to make us conform to their stick-up-the-Lieu vision of propriety. These people – these obnoxious Karens, for lack of a better FCC-compliant term – are delighted by the Chinese Bat Biter grippe and the opportunity it presents for them to try to impose their arbitrary will upon the rest of us. These mewling Mussolinis need to be slapped back, verbally if not physically, but as long as we are under this lockdown, they will not stop. They live for this, the chance to dictate to and control us, and the problem is some of them have positions of power.

This is yet another reason – as if the failure of the “We’re all gonna die!” model and the mass economic devastation the Twitter blue checks ignore were not reasons enough – that we need to be focusing on coming out of this Wuhan flu funk. If would be a pity if pangolin licking not only killed thousands of our most vulnerable citizens but also our will to resist petty tyrants who presume to scold us for such crimes as worshipping our God, seeing our families, and buying tomato seeds.

This is not to say that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic is fake or unserious, nor that we should ignore it and pretend that it’s just another flu. It is to say that there is more going on now than a respiratory ailment. There’s an economic ailment that most of us are painfully aware of, and there is a freedom ailment, where the Karens in everyday life and in the corridors or power are taking advantage of this crisis to let their fascist flag fly.

Kurt Schlichter, “The Rise of Karen-ism Means This Lockdown Nonsense Needs To End Soon”, Townhall.com, 2020-04-12.

July 13, 2020

QotD: Anti-semitism

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… if anti-semitism was “only about Jews” it would still matter. Jews matter not because they are Jews, but because they are human. No different qualification is required. That anyone thinks a better qualification than being a human is required to enjoy particular human rights is precisely what is wrong with our society today. Every time someone speaks of “Gay Rights” or “Women’s Rights” or “Black Rights” or “Muslim Rights” or uses the phrase “hate crimes” I am immediately on my guard. Such people are more than likely to be a threat to human rights in general.

Damn it, how often does this need to be said before tribalists stop blathering? The whole point of the post-Enlightenment West is that every individual matters, regardless of who they are. Not just anti-semitism but tribalism in general is the virus that, as Rabbi Sacks says, keeps mutating. The only valid reason to regard an individual as better or worse is, as Dr King famously said (but as the Left seems to have forgotten) “the content of his character.” The only valid reason to treat an individual differently before the law is his or her conduct.

Tom Paine, “What Is It About The Jews?”, The Last Ditch, 2018-04-12.

July 11, 2020

The “Puritan Moment” of The Current Year

Filed under: Britain, History, Liberty, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Nigel Jones on the long history of struggle between British puritans and libertarians:

Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.

Behind the wave of Wokeism that has swept and is now swamping Anglo-American Culture, is a pattern that has recurred throughout British History since the early 17th century. This is the pendulum that regularly swings between periods of joyful Libertarianism and purse lipped Puritanism.

Puritanism takes its name from the Calvinist religious movement that arose during the Protestant Reformation, partly in reaction to the explosive cultural Renaissance of the Elizabethan era – the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ralegh and John Donne.

The Puritans exported their austere doctrines to America aboard the Mayflower, where they eventually became one of the building blocks of the USA, and briefly achieved political power in England after the Civil War in the forbidding guise of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

We all have a mental picture of the Puritans in action. Sombrely dressed in black and grey, smashing the statues of saints, preaching their varied versions of the scriptures, and policing and banning anything when they suspected people of enjoying themselves, from Christmas festivities, to theatres, to fornicating for pleasure rather than reproduction. The Puritans endeavoured to dictate what people could think, speak and write. If this rings any bells with Wokeism, that is surely not coincidental.

There was an inevitable vengeful reaction to this po-faced culture of control and repression, and it soon came with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. King Charles II exemplified in his own libidinous person, with his myriad mistresses and tribe of illegitimate children, the loose culture of license that spread out from his court like a stain. This was the easy going Age of Lord Rochester and Nell Gwynn, so disapprovingly, if hypocritically, frowned on in the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. More darkly, the Puritan Regicides who had beheaded Charles’s father were hung, drawn and quartered along with Cromwell’s exhumed corpse.

The Libertarianism ushered in by the Restoration had a much longer run than the initial rule of Puritanism had enjoyed. It lasted through the Georgian Age of the 18th century, culminating in the decadence of the Regency bucks and Queen Victoria’s “wicked uncles”. Puritanism made its comeback with the accession of Victoria herself, with her eponymous reign infamous for its crinolines, covered piano legs, cruel persecution of that supreme Libertarian Oscar Wilde, and its massive hypocrisy – a constant adjunct of Puritanism when it comes up against the incontrovertible facts of life and human nature.

Neatly coinciding with the reign of Victoria’s despised eldest son, Libertarianism returned in the portly shape of Edward VII in the opening decade of the 20th century to which he gave his name. As during the Restoration, the ruling elite again set the tone of the Edwardian era with their shooting and hunting, their discreet adultery at country house weekends, and their lavish clubs and parties.

July 10, 2020

Freedom of speech – a tool to be discarded when your opponents try to use it

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

Arthur Chrenkoff discusses the recent uproar among progressives over an open letter calling for respect for free speech … when the “wrong kind of people” started signing on:

Godfrey Elfwick’s disturbingly accurate summary of free speech support among the woke.

So how did it come to this on a meta-level – how did the left, which for a long time championed ideas like freedom of speech, come to be the new censors and book burners?

The answer is short and simple: power.

Thanks to its Marxist heritage, the left is all about power. Who has it, who doesn’t (Lenin’s famous ur-question “who whom?”), how to get it. Power and power relationship is the ultimate touchstone and lodestar, the prism through everything else is seen and judged. Everything, including morality – what’s right, what’s wrong – flows from the position in this binary system (and with power it is a zero-sum game: you either have it all or you have none).

Turkish Islamist president Recep Erdogan has once famously said “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.” The stop – the end – is power; democracy is the mean to the end.

So it is with the left and freedom. The left was pro-freedom when it was on the way up. Being pro-freedom helped them achieve their objectives. Freedom of speech, for example, was important because it guaranteed them the ability to spread their ideas.

Now the left has the power, if not in all respects and in equal measure, certainly as far as culture is concerned, where it enjoys near hegemony. Being on top it doesn’t need freedom of speech anymore. Quite the contrary: freedom of speech now enables its critics to challenge their ideas and their position. Debate is a waste of time and effort, much better and more efficient is to silence any dissenting voices.

It’s never about principle – it’s about the side (yours) and power (yours to gain and keep).

July 7, 2020

Taking stock after the worst of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic

Filed under: China, Europe, Health, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren discusses an intractable “problem”:

I do not suppose it makes any practical difference what I have to say about a public health problem that invades the lives of billions; nor that readers will take me for a reliable epidemiologist when I say that the worst danger of that Batflu has now passed. (Infection rates spike, but the power of the virus to torture and kill has relented. The death rates continue downward.)

Nevertheless, I think there is some value in stating, even restating, the obvious — when what is obvious is in conflict with sensational reports, and the aggressive distortions of mass media, profiting from panic.

This Batflu became — more than any previous epidemic — a political issue, instantaneously. This is evident in the way it was spread, quite intentionally, by the Communist Party of China. (They shut down everything in Wuhan, except flights to Europe and America.) In all countries with democratic institutions, the disease became the centre of political attention, and unprecedented lockdowns were ordered. Likewise, unprecedented schemes of surveillance have significantly changed the relation between governments and governed, entirely for the worse. By means of current technology, the former will be able to perpetuate these changes, leaving those who wish to recover old liberties nowhere to hide.

Moreover, this is done by public demand. “The peeple” are easy to manipulate, once they have been frightened. The great majority of men, now and through the past, never cared about freedom. It has always been a minority concern, “for the intellectuals.” The “silent majority” will take their freedom, but only after their comfort and safety have been assured. The right to choose among consumer products is enough for them.

There are revolutions, such as the one that is now being attempted by the Left, but these never last. Either they are extinguished, under the wet blanket of public apathy, or the revolutionists succeed in installing a truly monstrous regime. Only thus, can they prolong their evil. Two generations of half-educated, indoctrinated, university grads favour a doctrinal dictatorship. Those still young are full of malign energy.

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