Quotulatiousness

September 2, 2024

There’s no limit to how progressive politicians want to control your life

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

In the National Post a couple of days ago, Carson Jerema provided many examples of how the Canadian federal government — despite failing and fumbling so many of its existing responsibilities — still wants to increase control over the daily lives of Canadians:

After a decade or so, progressives are on the defensive in Canada and elsewhere because regular people, as in those who are not activist weirdos, are tired of the agenda to control every aspect of our lives. Point this out to a progressive, and they will deny that anyone’s life is being interfered with and claim only some far-right monster would think otherwise. They can’t believe there are people out there who share a different view. They don’t understand how this could be.

But progressive governments are trying to control our lives in ways big and small, and in ways that range from subtle to a punch in the face.

In Canada, the federal government’s environmental policies are the most obvious example of this interference. The Liberals have banned plastic straws and plastic bags; even compostable bags are banned in grocery stores because they resemble plastic. Such bans are pointless irritants that make shopping more expensive, and life slightly less enjoyable as paper straws dissolve in one’s drink. People might dismiss these concerns as simply minor inconveniences, but this is how most people experience government policy, by being forced to replace their bag of plastic bags that they were already reusing, with more expensive, less useful options.

Next up, the Liberals are exploring options to bring in environmental regulations for clothing. The cost of clothes has actually gone down in recent years, so leave it to Ottawa to look for ways to bring the cost back up and to limit options.

There is also the plan to essentially force Canadians to purchase electric vehicles, that nobody would otherwise want, through government mandates to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars and trucks.

On a larger scale, the government is attempting to restrict the kind of work people do, specifically work in the oil and gas industry, through steep emissions targets, which will close off lucrative job opportunities in western oilfields. It will also limit the kinds of fuels people will be able to use to heat their homes.

There are also policies that the Canadian government hasn’t implemented, but which green activists have endorsed, such as the banning of gas stoves and the ludicrous suggestion from some academics that “climate lockdowns” be implemented to help cut emissions.

It is possible to be supportive of all these policies, despite their paternalistic and job-killing nature, but pretending that no one is trying to, or that no one wants to, interfere with our liberty is not a credible position to take.

August 31, 2024

Britain’s police double down on “non-crime hate incidents” as a tool of repression

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

Andrew Doyle admits he was over-optimistic by predicting that the British police forces’ use of “non-crime hate incidents” — after court judgments and Home Office instructions to stop using them — would not last for much longer. That was in 2022:

“Metropolitan Police London England” by William Mewes is marked with CC0 1.0 .

I have a tendency to be over-optimistic. In my 2022 book The New Puritans, I wrote about “non-crime hate incidents” and how they were still being recorded by police, in spite of the Court of Appeal’s ruling that they were “plainly an interference with freedom of expression” and direct instructions from the Home Office that the police must stop this illiberal and unethical practice. However, I concluded that ultimately “it seems unlikely that ‘non-crime hate incidents’ will last for much longer”.

Of course I was wrong, because I had not counted on just how authoritarian a new Labour government might be. It was bad enough that the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson scotched the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act just one day before parliament went into recess — presumably to avoid having to debate the matter — but now the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has reversed the Conservatives’ pledge to limit the recording of “non-crime”. Labour is bringing back this absurd policy, and has convinced itself that this is somehow a progressive measure.

It should go without saying that the police have no business recording “non-crime”, particularly when such records are based on accusations alone (that is to say, the “perception” of the “victim” is what counts, rather than actual evidence of hatred). The Tory government should have eliminated the entire practice in its entirety, but instead decided that such “incidents” ought to stay on record if there was a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick had a phrase for this: “pre-crime”.

So let’s leave aside the woefully inadequate restrictions put in place by the Tories. Let’s also leave aside the obvious point that hatred, along with all other emotions, will never be eradicated through legislation and that the state is wasting its time trying to alter human nature. Let’s focus instead on why the Labour government is so determined to control the speech and thought of its citizens.

How does it help anyone for the name of the schoolboy who accidentally scuffed a copy of the Koran at a school in Wakefield to be on police records? His “non-crime” was duly recorded after the event, but why? Does the government really suppose that this child is one step away from torching a mosque? Even if he had deliberately scuffed the Koran, what has this to do with the police? I don’t much approve of defacing books, but vandalism of one’s own property is a matter for individual conscience.

Of course, Labour will say that the recent riots have proven the necessity for cracking down on the private thoughts of citizens. In truth, these acts of violence are being exploited to justify further authoritarian policies. We have seen how quick our politicians are to seize upon these moments to advance their own goals. The murder of Sir David Amess had precisely nothing to do with social media, and yet politicians immediately began to argue that his death was evidence of the need to curb free speech online. This was grotesque opportunism from a political class that does not trust the public.

August 30, 2024

Two-Tier Keir’s “mask off” moment(s)

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

Millennial Woes presents a disturbingly long summary of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s responses to popular non-violent protests:

The situation in Britain now is so perverse that, if you could convey it to people from a century ago, I think they, after getting over the disbelief and astonishment and accepting that this really was true, would assume it could not possibly have come about by chance. Whatever their complaints about the Britain of 1900, they wouldn’t have believed it capable — on its own — of the degeneration we have seen. They would insist that it must have been wickedly subverted, every failsafe removed, and entire systems of governance, culture and morality repurposed, made to achieve the opposite of their purported function.

I hardly need list the symptoms of this, but for the sake of posterity …

  • The control nexus (of which the government is merely one node) ships massive numbers of unassimilable foreigners into the country against the repeatedly expressed wishes of the natives, and in clear violation of their best interests.
  • Natives who complain about this are hounded, doxed, demonised, made unemployable, and often imprisoned.
  • Their children are systematically indoctrinated by fiction media to accept their dispossession. They are encouraged to despise the “bigoted” attitudes of their parents and grandparents, and to loathe their nation’s history. The boys are encouraged to idolise non-native men. The girls are encouraged to race-mix with them.
  • Teachers deliver the same indoctrination in the classroom — in every classroom. You won’t be allowed to become a teacher unless you voice enthusiasm for such things. Alternative views have been eradicated from the classroom and the lecture hall.
  • Natives are systematically disadvantaged in numerous sectors of education and employment.
  • Natives are demonised in fiction and news media while non-natives are made to look wonderful.
  • The mass sexual abuse of native children by non-natives is systematically down-played by news media, who shift discussion to false “equivalents”.
  • Natives’ history is systematically distorted in education and fiction media.
  • The very existence of the natives, as a group, and their ownership of their homeland, are systematically denied by education, fiction media, news media, and phoney “science”.
  • The police do whatever they are told to do, kneeling for the participants in one riot, hunting down the participants in a different riot.
  • Judges pass obviously outrageous prison sentences upon certain people, for blatantly political reasons. These people are denied bail and pressured to plead guilty for fear of sentences even more outrageous. All of this is to send a message to other people: “don’t dare complain or the same will happen to you”.
  • The media rushes to concoct fake narratives about events, to keep the public misinformed.
  • A so-called “charity”, which is heavily linked to the government and the civil service, seeks to indoctrinate the young and ruin the lives of “troublemakers”, and actively aids the government in concocting fake narratives in order to control public thought and direct events.
  • Fake news from such Establishment agents is forgiven, fake news from the Establishment’s enemies is answered with threats of prosecution.
  • The media “memory hole” stories of appalling violence by non-natives, explain away such incidents with talk of mental illness, tell natives “don’t look back in anger”, and at all costs defend the suicidal ideologies that make such incidents possible.
  • The prisons are emptied of rapists, child molesters and murderers so that troublesome natives can be assigned their cells. They are placed alongside non-natives who might well be violent to them, and journalists gloat about it.
  • The slaughtering of three little girls by a non-native is dismissed by the Prime Minister, who says “it doesn’t matter” that the rioting was a response to this outrageous crime, which was enabled by the outrageous government policies that the natives have been complaining about for decades. Their shock, their trauma, their resentment, their dignity, their pain… “doesn’t matter”. This is in stark contrast with how he reacted to Black people rioting several years before.
  • The natives’ freedom of speech is continually undermined, one government after another actively seeking to erode it further.
  • Not one single organisation is fighting for the wellbeing, rights or interests of the natives.
  • Any political party that would do anything about any of this is refused the right to stand in elections, debanked, demonised and, in most cases, destroyed.

Any one of these examples would, in itself, be cause for great alarm. The whole lot together indicate a society that is not just largely, not just fundamentally, but wholly opposed to the continued existence of its native population. To underline: British society is actively perpetrating the destruction of the native British people.

It has been said that the ruthless authoritarian response of the fledgling Starmer government to this summer’s (White) riots is a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party. Others have called it a “mask off” moment for the British Establishment, which transcends the particular party in office. Indeed, things that didn’t happen under the Conservatives have suddenly happened under Labour; things that one would more neatly associate with the former have instead happened under the latter. That can only mean either that the Labour Party has utterly lost its sense of itself, or that the particular party in office simply doesn’t matter, because the Establishment abides.

I think, in fact, all of these statements are true. It has been a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party, and for Keir Starmer himself, and for the Establishment which enables and directs them. The Labour Party has lost its sense of itself — or, to put it less romantically, has been completely repurposed. And the Establishment does abide; no matter which party is in office, things only ever evolve in one direction. And after all, while Starmer’s behaviour casts a bad light on him, he is only Prime Minister in the first place because the Establishment wanted him, not someone who might have reacted to these riots in a different manner. (Boris Johnson is good at stoking war abroad, but not so willing to stoke it at home.)

But in the end it doesn’t really matter. We don’t need to pin the blame on Starmer, Labour, the British Establishment or Davos; they are all one and the same miasma. Yes, the Conservative Party might have reacted differently to the riots, so to some extent we can blame Labour’s ideology or Starmer’s personality, but the pendulum is kept swinging for a reason. One empty suit is shifted out, another is shifted in. Each one might be enthusiastically on-board with the agenda or compelled to go along with it, this being the only variance. And thus the Establishment abides, always getting what it wants against the wishes of the natives, and always degrading and dispossessing them.

August 29, 2024

How activists used lawfare to force the Boy Scouts to go woke (and then go broke)

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

A guest post from Cole Noble at Postcards From Barsoom discusses how progressive organizations and political activists have managed an immense take-over of the great outdoors, not least of which were the legal and political efforts to force the Boy Scouts of America to accept gay scouts and scout masters:

[…] This entertainment ecosystem, increasingly infested with culture warriors, also started chipping away at the longstanding prestige of organizations like the BSA [Boy Scouts of America]. Depicting someone as a scout became a kind of character development shorthand, signalling them as uncool.

The targeting wasn’t incidental; the existence of the pre-centennial BSA was a serious problem for the ruling class. Their organization’s commitment to values-based conservation served as living proof that going along with society’s adoption of critical theory was completely optional. If the BSA was free to refuse the push, others might start getting ideas.

Lawfare was inevitable.

In 2000, the United States Supreme Court heard Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. In one corner you had James Dale, an avowed gay rights activist, co-president of the Rutgers University Lesbian/Gay Alliance, and outspoken advocate for gay teens having gay role models. In the other, you had the BSA, who didn’t want someone like Dale around its young, impressionable members.

The BSA won, but there was blood in the water. Culture warriors circled back around, this time employing social pressure. They tried to make their demand sound as reasonable as possible: drop the policy against openly gay members. Just one teeny tiny rule. What’s the point anyway? It’s outdated. No real sense keeping it, right?

Smart members of the program clocked this Trojan Horse from miles away. Alas, the organization’s leadership did not. Possessing both the physique and fortitude of rice pudding, they caved, capitulated, and acquiesced some more — agreeing to an ever-escalating series of demands that hollowed out the once-proud group into an empty vessel for The Current Thing(TM).

The Boy Scouts of America is now all-inclusive! Not just to gay scouts and leaders, but girls too. In a show of solidarity with Black Lives Matter after the riots of 2020, a mandatory DEI merit badge has replaced camping as a requirement to attain the once coveted rank of Eagle Scout.

Let’s not forget the Scout Masters now left to deal with teens using the program’s overnight trips as cover for hookups.

Oh, and they went bankrupt.

The organization agreed to a 2.5 billion dollar settlement over tens of thousands of sex abuse cases perpetuated by adult men, against underage boys.

(data compiled from the BSA’s publicly available annual reports)

Rather than bolster ranks, adopting DEI cost the organization more than 1 million members.

The BSA – sorry, Scouting America1 – didn’t publish annual membership reports from 2020 to 2022, I imagine out of embarrassment. During this time, the Mormons, who used Scouting as a youth program for its boys, took their 400,000 members, and their money, and left.

[…]

Scouting was one of, if not the last bastion of quasi-unstructured outdoor activities. While the death of free-range childhood seems to be commonly understood, there is some debate about the precise cause.

Whatever your opinion on the matter, regime journalists shoulder enormous responsibility for eroding societal trust and inspiring mass paranoia through sensational reporting. Former latchkey kids became hysterical helicopter parents, petrified of letting their children out of sight.

Playing outside became a heavily supervised affair, usually relegated to fenced-in backyards with locking gates.

Kids have been robbed of the experiences that could lead them to develop an organic appreciation for outdoor recreation, and groomed into a hypersexualized version of early adulthood. All the while, the institutions which once taught conservation and virtue now serve as apparatuses of critical theory.

    1. They changed their name in May of 2024, after 114 of being the Boy Scouts. Since they’re no long the Boy Scouts, this is at least honest.

Cole’s own Substack is Quandary Magazine, which you should check out if you’re generally interested in the great outdoors.

Pavel Durov’s arrest isn’t for a clear crime, it’s for allowing everyone access to encrypted communications services

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

J.D. Tuccille explains the real reason the French government arrested Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram:

It’s appropriate that, days after the French government arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, for failing to monitor and restrict communications as demanded by officials in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that his company, which owns Facebook, was subjected to censorship pressures by U.S. officials. Durov’s arrest, then, stands as less of a one-off than as part of a concerted effort by governments, including those of nominally free countries, to control speech.

“Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov is expected to appear in court Sunday after being arrested by French police at an airport near Paris for alleged offences related to his popular messaging app,” reported France24.

A separate story noted claims by Paris prosecutors that he was detained for “running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud, as well as the refusal to communicate information to authorities, money laundering and providing cryptographic services to criminals”.

Freedom for Everybody or for Nobody

Durov’s alleged crime is offering encrypted communications services to everybody, including those who engage in illegality or just anger the powers that be. But secure communications are a feature, not a bug, for most people who live in a world in which “global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023”, according to Freedom House. Fighting authoritarian regimes requires means of exchanging information that are resistant to penetration by various repressive police agencies.

“Telegram, and other encrypted messaging services, are crucial for those intending to organise protests in countries where there is a severe crackdown on free speech. Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong have all seen people relying on the services,” Index on Censorship noted in 2021.

And if bad people occasionally use encrypted apps such as Telegram, they use phones and postal services, too. The qualities that make communications systems useful to those battling authoritarianism are also helpful to those with less benign intentions. There’s no way to offer security to one group without offering it to everybody.

As I commented on a post on MeWe the other day, “Somehow the governments of the west are engaged in a competition to see who can be the most repressive. Canada and New Zealand had the early lead, but Australia, Britain, Germany, and France have all recently moved ahead in the standings. I’m not sure what the prizes might be, but I strongly suspect “a bloody revolution” is one of them (if not all of them).”

August 15, 2024

QotD: The bitter fruit of deinstitutionalization

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

In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. Its order to close the state psychiatric hospitals was followed, and hundreds were shuttered; the community mental health centers that were meant to replace them were never built. With far fewer beds for a growing patient population it should not have surprised anyone that the streets gradually filled with the severely ill. But somehow, we were surprised. The state governments were mostly just grateful to save money that had once gone to mental healthcare. The passage of Medicaid two years later deepened the problem. Medicaid’s funding structure presented states with an opportunity to further offload costs, this time onto the federal government. Unfortunately, the private institutions that filled with Medicaid patients were no better than the state facilities that had been closed; often they were worse. And maintaining access to Medicaid funding for such care, in practice, was more complicated and less certain than staying in a state institution. In 1975, the Supreme Court’s O’Connor v. Donaldson decision established a national standard that the mentally ill could only be involuntarily treated if they represented an immediate threat to themselves or others. This completely removed actual medical necessity from the equation, and the standard directly incentivized hospitals to discharge very ill patients, many of whom leave these useless emergency room visits and immediately abuse drugs, self-harm, commit crimes, attack others, or commit suicide. In 1990 the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act further empowered treatment-resistant patients and created legal incentives that led hospitals to release severely ill people rather than face the burden of litigation. Various state reforms in recent decades have almost uniformly pushed the severely ill out of treatment rather than into it, under the banner of “autonomy”. For sixty years we’ve done everything in our power to make it harder to treat people who badly need care. And here we are.

Freddie deBoer, “We Closed the Institutions That Housed the Severely Mentally Ill and We Made It Dramatically Harder to Compel Them to Receive Care”, Freddie deBoer, 2024-05-14.

July 23, 2024

The next phase of the campaign to replace “Orwellian” with “Trudeaupian”

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

On the Fraser Institute blog, Jake Fuss and Alex Whalen outline the Trudeau government’s latest attempt to drive the word “Orwellian” out of common usage by making “Trudeaupian” the more authoritarian descriptor:

A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 (and it’s been 40 years since the actual year 1984). In the novel, Orwell explains the dangers of totalitarianism by exploring what happens when government exercises extreme levels of control over citizens including censoring and controlling language. While Canada is a relatively free country in 2024, there are aspects of Orwell’s world reflected in government policy today.

The Human Freedom Index, published annually by the Fraser Institute and Cato Institute, defines freedom as a social concept that recognizes the dignity of individuals by the absence of coercive constraint. In a free society, citizens are free to do, say or think almost anything they want, provided it does not infringe on the right of others to do the same.

Canada currently fares relatively well compared to other countries on the Human Freedom Index, placing 13th out of 165 countries. However, our score has dropped six spots on the index since 2008 when Canada recorded its highest ever rank.

This is not surprising given the Trudeau government’s recent efforts to control and manage the free exchange of ideas. The recent Online Streaming Act imposes various content rules on major streaming services such as Netflix, and requirements to extract funds to be redirected toward favoured groups. The Act seemingly seeks to bring the entire Internet under the regulation of a government body.

In another piece of recent legislation, the Online News Act, the government attempted to force certain social media platforms to pay other legacy news outlets for carrying content. In response, the social media platforms chose simply not to allow content from those news providers on their platforms, resulting in a dramatic reduction of Canadians’ access to news.

Now, a new piece of federal legislation — Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act — seeks to control language and grant government power to punish citizens for what the government deems to be unfavourable speech.

The government has sold Bill C-63 as a way to promote the online safety of Canadians, reduce harms, and ensure the operators of social media services are held accountable. In reality, however, the bill is Orwell’s Big Brother concept brought to life, where government controls information and limits free exchange. The legislation seeks to punish citizens not just for what the governments deems as “hate speech” but also grants the state power to bring Canadians before tribunals on suspicion that they might say something hateful in the future. Not surprisingly, many have raised concerns about the constitutionality of the Bill, which will surely be tested in court.

July 17, 2024

QotD: “Orwellian”

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

All writers enjoying respect and popularity in their lifetimes entertain the hope that their work will outlive them. The true mark of a writer’s enduring influence is the adjectification of his (sorry, but it usually is “his”) name. An especially jolly Christmas scene is said to be “Dickensian”. A cryptically written story is “Hemingwayesque”. A corrupted legal process gives rise to a “Kafkaesque” nightmare for the falsely accused. A ruthless politician takes a “Machiavellian” approach to besting his rival.

But the greatest of these is “Orwellian”. This is a modifier that The New York Times has declared “the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer … It’s more common than ‘Kafkaesque’, ‘Hemingwayesque’ and ‘Dickensian’ put together. It even noses out the rival political reproach ‘Machiavellian’, which had a 500-year head start.”

Orwell changed the way we think about the world. For most of us, the word Orwellian is synonymous with either totalitarianism itself or the mindset that is eager to employ totalitarian methods — notably the bowdlerization or suppression of speech and freedoms — as a hedge against popular challenge to a politically correct vision of society dictated by a small cadre of elites.

Indeed, it was thanks to Orwell’s books — forbidden, acquired by stealth and owned at peril — that many freedom fighters suffering under repressive regimes, found the inspiration to carry on their struggle. In his memoir, Adiós Havana, for example, Cuban dissident Andrew J. Memoir wrote, “Books such as … George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 became clandestine bestsellers, for they depicted in minute detail the communist methodology of taking over a nation. These […] books did more to open the eyes of the blind, including mine, than any other form of expression.”

Barbara Kay, “The way they teach Orwell in Canada is Orwellian”, The Post Millennial, 2019-11-29.

July 10, 2024

The four horsemen of cultural collapse

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

Chris Bray provides yet more examples of cultural decay and the collapse of law and order in America’s Trudeaupia, California under the loving care of Justin Trudeau’s spiritual twin, Gavin Newsom:

Today tells you about next year.

In a long history of murder in America, the historian Randolph Roth argued that violence follows other losses of trust and order. The murder rate surges in the face of “four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy”.

Read that list carefully, because it should sound familiar.

Similarly, the originators of the theory of “broken windows policing” argued that peace and order grow from peace and order; neighborhoods are more likely to be calm when they’re “places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls”. Crime follows crime; vandalism, for example, “can occur anywhere once communal barriers — the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility — are lowered by actions that seem to signal that ‘no one cares'”. The police commissioner William Bratton famously reduced all categories of crime in New York City subways by assigning officers to arrest turnstile jumpers who entered the system without paying. He sent a signal at the front gates.

“Broken windows” is a much-criticized theory: “He contended that the very notion of ‘disorder’ is subjective and racially fraught”. But the criticisms tend to reduce the complexity of the theory in order to “debunk” it.

Decay communicates. Disorder is a message.

June 30, 2024

California’s politics are so weird that Justin Trudeau is frantically taking notes

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

Chris Bray pays attention to California politics … and we should all pray for his long term mental health: that place is insane!

What’s happening in California isn’t politics in any conventional sense. No debate is underway, and no policy choices are being hashed out. We’re in the land beyond. In Our Democracy™, declarations are made, and then they are to be received in a spirit of quiet submission. Your failure to submit is disallowed, and the reason it’s been disallowed is that it’s been disallowed. Were it allowed, it would not be disallowed, but it is, in fact, disallowed, so therefore it is not allowed, you see? All “political” discussion is a circle, eating its own tail. I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain this, but the Sacramento Bee just did it for me. (Paywall-evading version here.)

The Bee is explaining — or “explaining” — what happened on the floor of the state Assembly yesterday, when a Republican was not permitted to argue against a bill, and a Democrat stood up to threaten him for trying. I encourage you to read the whole self-refuting thing. What happened, it turns out, is that the Republican was preventing debate by engaging in debate, which meant that he had to be silenced and threatened so debate could continue, which required that no one express opposing views, which is an act of anti-debate aggression. Debate is agreement, and not agreeing is preventing debate.

The “forced outing” debate was a discussion about AB 1955, which proposes to forbid schools to inform parents of discussions between children and school officials about sexual orientation and sexual behavior. It’s important that parents not be told about sexually themed discussions happening between children and the adults in their schools, because not telling mommy and daddy about sexual discussions is being safe and warm. But watch the casual turn of logic in the last paragraph of this screenshot:

  1. Evan Low said the bill is important because it’s good that parents not be told, and the bill makes sure parents aren’t told.
  2. Sabrina Cervantes said she didn’t have this bill when she was young, which would have forbidden telling, so someone told.
  3. Democrats explained that the bill is not meant to keep secrets from parents.

See, AB 1955 isn’t about keeping secrets from parents — it’s about not allowing schools to tell parents. Not being allowed to tell parents is different than keeping secrets from parents. The story doesn’t go on to explain the distinction between keeping secrets and not telling, but under Jacobin cultural rules, the distinction is that shut up. The distinction is presumptive, and so doesn’t require explanation.

Now, here’s the way the Bee characterizes Assemblyman Bill Essayli’s arguments during the debate that he derailed by not agreeing:

    Essayli has exhibited a consistent pattern of publicly disparaging advocacy groups and fellow lawmakers in an attempt to garner attention for conservative causes. On Thursday, he interrupted colleagues’ testimony and expressed frustration over Wood cutting his microphone and shutting down his comments when they veered away from AB 1955 and toward the issue of forced outing, in general.

His comments about the forced outing bill weren’t about the bill — they were about forced outing. What a bastard! Mister Speaker, he’s not debating the highway funding bill, he’s debating highway funding. Again, why does this distinction make sense? Because shut up. It makes sense declaratively: X is true because they said X.

And Essayli has a “consistent pattern” of saying disparaging things, which the Bee knows through mindreading is a maneuver to “garner attention” rather than an attempt to express his views. He disagreed, which is a very cynical and manipulative thing to do during a debate. He has a pattern of it!

And also Essayli is so rude that he interrupted colleagues when they spoke, and then had the nerve to object when his microphone was turned off. It’s rude to stop someone from speaking, and it’s rude to object to being stopped from speaking. You should never interrupt people, and you should always allow other people to interrupt you. They’re playing partisan Calvinball under the dome, and all moves lose.

June 29, 2024

“So, as the pundits say, everywhere is warming faster than everywhere else”

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

Terry Etam on the totalitarian controls being imposed on citizens in Canada where under yet another censorship bill being pushed out to ensure that nobody says anything that contravenes some yet-to-be-determined “internationally recognized methodology”:

And then, as a final but impressive gasp of inept state control, witness Canada’s frantic flailing to control the situation by …

Send in the goons: Canada cracks down on any speech it doesn’t like, with sweeping rules measured against undefined regulations, and enters the historical pantheon of legendarily badly run states

We’ve all heard about bill C-59 by now, the government of Canada’s crackdown on any comments related to emissions reduction mitigation efforts that do not adhere to “internationally recognized methodology”. It’s a Soviet-style attempt to crack down on any talk about what companies are doing to reduce emissions, or anything they do that is an attempt to reduce “the environmental, social and ecological causes or effects of climate change”.

The apes in charge, and their sycophants, say hey, it’s not censorship at all, you can talk about emissions reduction all day long, so long as it meets some undefined international standard, and the onus of proof is on anyone making the statement to show that they are not violating some “internationally recognized methodology” that does not exist.

This whole fiasco is of course a one way street; the freedom to say anything that cements the climate emergency narrative remains gloriously unchecked. For example, energy commentator David Blackmon recently catalogued on LinkedIn the number of countries/regions that claim to be warming faster than the global average: Canada, Mexico, Latin America and Caribbean, Arctic, Asia, Africa, the US, Europe, Russia, Australia, China, and Finland all claim to be warming faster than the global average. The high priest of modern politicized science, Scientific American, says that oceans are also warming 40 percent faster than expected, and that oceans absorb up to 90 percent of the warming caused by human carbon emissions, and SA also notes that the South Pole is warming “three times faster than the global average”. So, as the pundits say, everywhere is warming faster than everywhere else.

Extrapolating from this, in keeping with necessary mathematical precedents such as how averages work, then the few remaining regions not mentioned must be plummeting in temperature, because that’s how averages work. And I mean plummeting, if it alone is offsetting the above-average gains in the rest of the world. Strange indeed how not a single headline can be found to that effect.

The speech police have no problem with such math crimes, because the asinine claims are put forth under the banner of “science”. It must be concluded then that math is not one of the “internationally recognized methodologies”.

No matter. The point is, as always, to silence discussions and ram through whatever ideological junk they can while still clinging to power like a bee holding onto an accelerating windshield.

Welcome to Canada, where if global embarrassment were an Olympic sport we’d be wearing perma-gold. Joke’s on us though; we elected these people. We should now clearly understand why Canada’s status as an investment haven is plummeting like a shot duck. (Do not point me towards legendary genius Warren Buffett who says he is comfortable investing in Canada; Buffett buys existing businesses, with moats, and the government of Canada is working to build those moats as fast as it can. Remember this investing rule for the foreseeable future: existing infrastructure is getting more valuable, because building anything gets harder by the day.)

It is probably unfair to single out Canada for such withering criticism when other western countries are on similar energy suicide missions. Australia, England, Germany … all under the spell of radicals that will accept nothing other than total nihilistic energy “victory”, a crown that seems to mean de-industrialization and subjugation of citizens in autos they don’t want, doing things they don’t want to, and not being permitted to say what they want to. (New Zealand was in that club as well, but has recently repealed a ban on oil & gas exploration when it dawned on them that fields decline, and do not produce at flat levels in perpetuity without investment. Yes, western governments really have enacted such legislation while simultaneously holding an astonishing ignorance about how energy really works.)

As far as Canada’s hydrocarbon sector goes, the most important thing to do at this stage is to keep our heads [down] and carry on providing the energy the world desperately needs. And that means every single person, right down to Guilbeault’s Greenpeace and the soup throwing fools of Just Stop Oil. If the feds are going to outlaw emissions talk, let them … the rotten foundations of their world can’t stand for much longer.

No one should stand taller than one that provides reliable and affordable energy for the globe’s citizens. Go back to work, and patiently wait until the inevitable happens, the day when governments are no longer able to pretend they can’t see reality. It’s going to be epic.

June 27, 2024

The Toronto Star wants Ontario to adopt Scottish booze regulation (but ignore the failure)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Toronto Star always loves a good moral crusade, and if it also happens to fly in the face of whatever Premier Ford wants to do, then so much the better:

The Toronto Star is looking to Scotland to teach it how to reduce alcohol-related deaths. In an article titled “How Scotland started to kick its alcohol problem — and what Ontario could learn from it“, it pushes back on plans to liberalise Ontario’s state monopoly on alcohol retail, saying:

    Ontario officials say they are fulfilling a 2018 election promise to increase “choice and convenience for shoppers and support Ontario retailers, domestic producers and workers in the alcohol industry”.

    But Scotland has cut alcohol-related hospital admissions by 40 per cent and deaths by almost half. While in Ontario, alcohol-related admissions have risen by a third and deaths by almost half, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.

How did Scotland supposedly achieve this public health miracle?

    The key part of Scotland’s landmark policy was aimed at reducing drinking by introducing minimum unit prices to make drinking more expensive.,/p>

Ontario already has minimum pricing and Scotland doesn’t have a state alcohol monopoly, so it is not obvious what lessons Ontarians are supposed to be learning, but put that to one side for a moment and consider the main claim.

Anyone who has been following events in Scotland knows that alcohol-specific deaths have risen since minimum pricing was introduced in 2018 and have generally risen since 2012 following a significant downturn in the years prior.

It is that drop between 2006 and 2012 that the Toronto Star must be referring to when it claims that deaths fell by “almost half” (actually a third). But the Scottish government didn’t pass any anti-alcohol legislation in those six years and it certainly didn’t have minimum pricing. The newspaper mentions that the drink-drive limit was cut, but that didn’t happen until 2014 and the evidence is clear that it had no effect on road accidents.

Since the Toronto Star doesn’t mention when the decline in alcohol-specific deaths took place, it is leading its readers to believe that it coincided with the introduction of minimum pricing and the lowering of the drink-drive limit. I call that lying.

It is strangely fitting that Canadians are being lied to about the “success” of Scotland’s alcohol strategy since the Scottish public were conned into accepting minimum pricing, in part, on the basis of lies told about the “success” of minimum pricing in Canada. The neo-temperance academic Tim Stockwell, who is quoted in the Star article, published a series of studies in the 2010s making some absurd claims about minimum pricing that were parroted by campaigners in the UK.

June 24, 2024

Justin Trudeau’s Ominous Online Harms Act: Minority Report Comes to Canada: Conor Friedersdorf

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

Quillette
Published Jun 19, 2024

Jonathan Kay talks to Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf about a censorious government bill that would allow officials to investigate Canadians for things they haven’t done yet.

https://quillette.com/2024/06/19/just…

——

Quillette is an Australian-based online magazine that focuses on long-form analysis and cultural commentary. It is politically non-partisan, but relies on reason, science, and humanism as its guiding values.

Quillette was founded in 2015 by Australian writer Claire Lehmann. It is a platform for free thought and a space for open discussion and debate on a wide range of topics, including politics, culture, science, and technology.

Quillette has gained attention for publishing articles and essays that challenge modern heterodoxy on a variety of topics, including gender and sexuality, race and identity politics, and free speech and censorship.
(more…)

June 23, 2024

California has “a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away”

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

Chris Bray illustrates some of the many ways that California’s elected politicians are working to ensure that mere voters won’t interrupt their urgent and necessary work:

The Taxpayer Protection Act, a proposed referendum that got enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, would have required voter approval for all new state and local taxes. State election officials agreed that it met the qualification threshold, and planned to put it before the voters. Democratic officeholders sued, with considerable support from public employee unions and interest groups, and the California Supreme Court ruled this week that the measure may not be placed on the ballot — because it improperly proposes to revise the state constitution, rather than merely amending it. You can watch them try to parse that distinction here, for seventy murky pages. You can change the state constitution through the referendum process, but you can’t change the state constitution through the referendum process. See, totally clear.

At the same time, California Governor Patrick Bateman is telling the organizers of a ballot measure that would increase penalties for drug and theft crimes — after a decade of sharply reduced penalties — that he’ll punish them by blocking criminal justice reform measures in the legislature unless they pull their measure from the ballot. The intended message is a very clear threat: If you insist on your ballot measure and lose at the polls, you’ll be punished with a complete blockade on your agenda through legislative means, for as long as we can manage it.

And a parental rights proposition that aimed for a place on the November ballot — falling short in its efforts to gather enough signatures — ran into a wall when the attorney general’s office assigned it a misleading label that would have described it to voters as a repressive measure that was intended to hurt children.

So a Progressive reform, the great 20th-century transition to direct democracy, is running into a progressive wall of resistance in the 21st century. California Democrats are fighting to limit the likelihood that voters will interfere with their agenda.

People outside California often shrug at the decline of the state, because Californians are just getting what they voted for. But that view misses a bunch of strangeness and ambiguity in a place that has tended to put Democrats in office, then limit their efforts with an ideologically inconsistent hodgepodge of conservative and libertarian ballot measures. The governor and the state legislature just sued to prevent their own voters, the people who sent them to public office, from voting on the new taxes they create. Democrats against direct democracy — a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away.

This is not merely a California problem. I wrote a few days ago about the scumbag Robert Kagan and his idiotic book warning that America is facing a rebellion. Here’s the back cover of the book, and I’ve used sophisticated media software to circle the important part:

“The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs.” This is what the American governing class believes, now. See also the pro-democracy warrior Tom Nichols and his recurring theme about the repulsive people of an ignorant country. We need to protect democracy by getting all the trash that makes up the population to somehow go away and stop bothering their wise and benevolent betters.

The great point of cognitive slippage in American governance has been the degree to which Americans have been willing to vote for officeholders whose agendas they then try to block through lawsuits, referendums, and popular resistance. We’ve voted for shit sandwich over and over again, then declined to eat the whole sandwich. The governing class is now announcing that we’re no longer allowed to refuse the complete meal. You may not have a ballot measure on that.

In the near term, and in the medium term, that pivot leads to greater friction and accelerated decline. In the longer term, preventing people from limiting the aggressive failure of the governing class can only make that failure more apparent. Geological faults that have a lot of small movements release tension in a series of minor earthquakes; faults that can’t release tension through small movements eventually have one big one. We’ll eventually recognize the California Supreme Court’s decision this week as a Pyrrhic victory. There will be more of these, in a political system of increasing brittleness.

June 21, 2024

“Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens”

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

Tim Worstall responds to a recent Medium essay by Julia Steinberger which illustrates that “neoliberal” has joined “fascist” as a generic term to indicate strong disapproval of a person, organization, or idea:

The idea that an adult woman can believe these things is just amazeballs. But here we are. A tweet from Julia Steinberger leads to her Medium essay about what’s wrong with the world.

An upheaval in 10 chapters:

    1. The cause. We know the climate crisis is brought to us by highly unequal and undemocratic economic systems.

Err, no? Emissions are emissions. 100 people emitting one tonne each is exactly the same as 1 person emitting 100 tonnes. Sure, it’s true that a more unequal society will have more people emitting those 100 tonne personal amounts. But a more equal society will have more people able to emit another 1 tonne each. For, more equality is by definition the movement of some of those assets of the richer to those poorer — the economic assets which either allow or do the emitting. Sure, Jim Ratcliffe’s £50,000 private jet flight emits more than my £100 Easyjet one. But if we take the £50k off Jim and give it to 500 folk like me then all 500 of us might spend the marginal income on an Easyjet flight each — which would be more emissions than Jim’s spending of the money.

It simply is not true that economic inequality is the heart, the core or the cause of climate change. It’s idiocy to think it is too.

Of course, we know what’s happening here. Climate Change is Bad, M’Kay? Which it is, obviously. Economic inequality is Bad, M’Kay? Well, there the evidence is a great deal more mixed but whatever. But in the minds of the stupid all bad things have the same cause. So, if inequality is bad, climate change is bad, then they must be the same thing because they’re Bad, M’Kay?

    2. The rise. The recent history of these economic systems, in the Americas and Eurasia, is dominated by the ascendance of neoliberal ideology.

Oh, that is good. Given that I am a neoliberal — a fully paid up one, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and all — that’s very good. Given HS2, looming wealth taxation, the increased bite of idiot regulation and all that I can’t say that I see neoliberalism as winning right now but that might depend upon your starting point. If you’re a socialist — or an idiot but I repeat myself — you might well regard the plenitude of bananas in the supermarket as neoliberal. After all, that is something that socialism never did achieve.

    3. The threat. Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens.

And, well, you know, bollocks. The very beating heart of neoliberalism is that corporations need to be controlled and they’re best controlled by the citizens. In the form of free markets rather than voting on which bureaucrats get the gold plated pension, true. But neoliberals are between indifferent and actually against capitalist power. The whole nub of the idea is that markets do the job of controlling capitalists better than bureaucrats, politicians or, obviously, capitalists.

There’s not really any way for her thesis to survive after getting so much of the basics wrong, is there?

But just one more tidbit:

    Hayek and his neoliberal colleagues now needed another, antidemocratic way, to organise society. They didn’t want democracy, but they wanted some kind of self-maintaining organisation — by which they meant hierarchy. Organisation was supposed to be supplied by the market, and hierarchy by competition within markets. (It’s worth noting that neoliberals in the 1950s did not, although they should have, predict that unfettered markets lead to concentrations in monopolies or cartels. They would arguably disapprove of the vast corporations running our current economies, even though their market-above-democracy policies predictably brought them into being.)

Well, that wasn’t actually the last tidbit. But the idea that Friedman, Mises, Menger, Hayek and the rest didn’t worry about monopolies? Jesu C is really bouncin’ on that pogo stick right now. And then the idea that democracy will be better bulwark against monopolies than markets? Can you actually do backflips on a pogo stick?

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