There are lots of problems with instant communications, and they really need a whole post (or series, or book) to themselves, but one is particularly relevant here. As discussed above, it’s not the technology itself, it’s the application. The internet, like TV, is one of those gadgets that are almost impossible not to use. If it’s there, you’re going to log on – it takes serious, frustrating effort not to. Try it!
One obvious consequence of this is that it turns the whole world into a giant hen party. Karen has always been with us, probably with equal prevalence. But as late as the mid-1990s, she’d have to confine her scolding to PTA meetings and places like that. But now everyone has the Internet, and social media’s a thing, and it’s just sitting there, compelling you to use it. Woman’s natural role as the guardian of the tribe’s mores becomes Karen-ism on crack.
Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-28.
March 27, 2023
March 26, 2023
Plandemic? Manufactured crisis? Mass formation psychosis?
In The Conservative Woman, James Delingpole lets his skeptic flag fly:
“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus …
Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the “pandemic”, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the “pandemic” became.
Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this “pandemic” remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis”.
In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this “pandemic” really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since “Spanish Flu” a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.
Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, “Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.” But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.
Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.
This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.
It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.
We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.
Newspeak 2023
Andrew Sullivan on how our language keeps changing, top-down, whether we want it or not, from 9/11 through to tomorrow:
It was during the war in Iraq that Orwell’s insistence on clear language first came roaring back. This time, the newspeak was coming from the neocon right. We heard the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe what any sane person would instantly call “torture”. Or “extraordinary rendition” — which meant kidnapping in order to torture. There was “environmental manipulation” — freezing naked human beings to near-death and back again. All the terms followed Orwell’s rules for new words “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them”. All the new terms were opaque and longer than the original.
And then, in the era of “social justice”, the new words began to come from the far left. Words we thought we knew — “queer” for example — were suddenly re-purposed without notice. Gay men and lesbians, with our very distinct experiences, were merged into a non-word, along with transgender people: “LGBT”. That was turned into “LGBTQIA+” — an ever-expanding acronymic abstraction that, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details”.
Orwell’s insight was that these terms are designed to describe things you want to obscure. Hence one of his rules: “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Writing the English that people speak every day is essential for a flourishing democracy.
Which brings me to that old English term “sex change”. Everyone instantly understands it. Which is, of course, precisely the problem. So now we say: “gender-affirming care”. Or take another word we all know: “children” — kids usually up to puberty. Also way too understandable. So “sex changes for children” suddenly becomes “gender-affirming care for minors”. These are the words, again, that are “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them”.
Or take the term “transgender” itself. Remember when it was “transsexual”? Or when “sex” was first distinguished from “gender” — and then replaced by it? The usual refrain is that “the community” switched the terms, which means to say that a clique of activists decided that gender would be the new paradigm, and include any number of “queer” postmodern identities, while sex — let alone “biological sex” — was to be phased out and, with any luck, forgotten. Now notice how the new word “transgender” has recently changed its meaning yet again, and now includes anyone, including straights, outside traditional gender roles — whatever those are supposed to mean.
Or check out the new poll from the Washington Post yesterday, in which a big majority of transgender people do not consider themselves either a “trans man” or a “trans woman” at all. They prefer “nonbinary” and “gender-nonconforming” — and distance themselves from both sexes. Less than a third physically present as another sex “all the time”. The vast majority have no surgery at all.
Now read Masha Gessen’s recent interview with The New Yorker, and get even more confused. Gessen denies that transness is one thing at all. S/he says it’s a different thing now than it was a decade ago, and that “being transgender in a society that understands that some people are transgender is fundamentally different from being transgender in a society that doesn’t understand”.
S/he says that there are “different ideas about transness within the trans community … probably different trans communities”. S/he denies a “single-true-self narrative” as some kind of anchor for identity. S/he believes that transitioning can be done many times, back and forth: “Some people transition more than once. Some people transition from female to male, and then transition from male to female, and then maybe transition again.”
If gender is entirely a social construct, with no biological character, why do transgender people want hormones — an entirely biological intervention? Because “being trans is not a medical condition, but it marries you for life to the medical system”. Huh? By the end of the interview, you get the feeling that trans is whatever Gessen bloody well wants it to be, and yet at the same time it remains beyond interrogation.
Billy Joel – “The Downeaster Alexa“
Billy Joel
Published 3 Oct 2009In 1989, Billy Joel released his album Storm Front, a successful album that hit #1 on the Billboard 200 charts and went quadruple platinum. Watch the official music video for “The Downeaster Alexa“, about the hard lives of Long Island fishermen.
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QotD: Bing Crosby meets the modern jazz musicians
When Bing showed up, he greeted them in his typical laidback manner, and told them he would sing some familiar old songs. But when the performance started, these young jazz players threw in every arcane substitute chord change and rhythmic displacement they could think of, further spicing up their accompaniment with Coltrane modal fills and bits of polytonality.
Much to their frustration, nothing they did that evening disrupted Bing in the least. This old, balding pop singer navigated effortlessly through every one of their advanced harmonies, never faltering or showing the slightest degree of discomfort. Even more infuriating, Bing maintained the relaxed and unflappable delivery that was a Crosby trademark. As far as the audience could tell, he was just as happy-go-lucky as ever, and maybe he was — after all, Crosby had learned the ropes as a young man alongside Bix Beiderbecke, who was as unconventional and unpredictable as any musician from the early 20th century.
When the performance was all done, the musicians expected to get chewed out by Crosby backstage. Instead, Bing shook their hands, and thanked them with great warmth. He said how “cool it was to play with these young cats,” and expressed his sincere desire that they might do so again in the future.
Ted Gioia, “Four Perspectives on Bing Crosby”, The Honest Broker, 2022-12-23.
March 25, 2023
Canada’s ChiCom influence scandal – “All of the damage has been self-inflicted”
The Trudeau government has been expending a lot of time, effort, and political capital trying to avoid an open scandal. So much, so typical. What isn’t typical for the federal Liberals is just how badly they’re going about doing everything all of a sudden:
None of this ought to have been a shock, and none of it needed to put the Prime Minister’s Office in its current state of calcified pickle. After all, rumours and off-the-record chats about this stuff have been going around for literally years.
No, how this crew has chosen to handle these stories at every single step has made the scandal worse for themselves. Every. Single. Step. All of the damage has been self-inflicted.
This government is the epitome of an organization that is tactically smart and strategically dumb. Not only has their damage control mirrored the response of the SNC scandal (that ended so well for them), but every misstep has had the result of slowly backing the prime minister into rhetorical traps he has set for himself. This is a government that knows how to win the daily news cycle by losing the game. One that can’t distinguish between legitimate criticism and bad-faith partisan attack — probably because it is so insular and bunker-bound that it sees the world before it divided between loyalists and blood enemies. It’s symptomatic of leadership that is in its final stages of terminal fatigue, and doesn’t yet realize it. These guys cannot help but win themselves to death.
[…]
Imagine, as more stories hit the wire, the government had skipped all of those unnecessary weeks of obfuscation and deflection and simply appointed a special rapporteur to examine the need for a public inquiry. In this counterfactual, let’s also assume that the person he picked isn’t a long-time personal friend. What if Trudeau took allegations of interference seriously at the outset, and his party avoided stunts like skipping committee meetings and filibustering to prevent the testimony of his chief of staff, Katie Telford?
Where would they be today if they hadn’t squandered every iota of credibility and goodwill with the press, the NDP, and his own intelligence services? To put it more directly, what if they hadn’t spent the past few weeks acting as if they had something to hide?
Would they be better off? Maybe?
As an aside, I notice that many of the Liberal proxies are out in force on social media attacking the media and CSIS in an effort to defend the sitting government. I have to ask: how’s that working for y’all? Are you getting the sense that Global News and Sam Cooper and the Globe and Mail have been successfully cowed? Have their CSIS sources stopped leaking? Has Jagmeet Singh been brought to heel?
I’m going to put something out for consideration: Perhaps the denials, obfuscations and attacks are only making the scandal worse. They’re convincing journalists that there’s a real story here while prompting an already pissy collection of national security sources to leak harder.
March 23, 2023
Sometimes, it helps to know how the sausage is actually made
Apologies to the ghost of Otto von Bismarck for misappropriating his famous quote “Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made.” In this case, it’s actually quite enlightening to see how video magic helps make the progressive media experience:
Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.
As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news — except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS. Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.
It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week — not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.
We’d typically tape on Thursday or Friday mornings to turn around by Friday nights. Being of Bill Moyers’ approximate height, I was tasked with showing up early to fill his chair as gruff union guys set up cameras and lighting. Then, as Bill’s blogger and research assistant, I’d watch live interviews from the control room to highlight quotable moments.
Uncut conversations were eye-opening; it was astonishing how often our esteemed guests hemmed and hawed and got basic facts embarrassingly wrong. And how many came off batshit crazy: one, later an anchor on MSNBC, speculated that Captain Sully’s Miracle on the Hudson — visible from our west side offices — had been God blessing the Obamas.
Drafting the Moyers Blog and promotional listings, I’d sit in with producers and video editors to consult on coalescing broadcasts. They were like wizards, casting away awkwardness and errors to sculpt artful vignettes of the most compelling bits of conversations that often stretched well over an hour or more.
So many of the most rousing clips came from when guests were at their most factually inaccurate, and editors deftly dipped in and out to pull and seamlessly reassemble the very best parts. It was wondrous alchemy, and a privilege to work with super-talented creatives, but the reality of our academic pundits remained the same.
Viewers, or at least those motivated enough to weigh in, frequently testified that their social-democratic faith had been wavering until they’d seen whichever inspiring interview affirming what they’d always believed. I always found that frustrating, wondering if they might have reacted more thoughtfully to the real deal than the perfected package that aired.
By no means were Bill Moyers and team operating with any less than the highest of ethics or best of intentions—from their perspective, we were clarifying what our distinguished guests were truly saying. The problem was that the intellectual scene our show channeled was dwindling, but my colleagues so badly wanted things to be better that it was all too easy to paper over the accelerating collapse of discourse. I remember trying to explain to Bill what a Brooklyn hipster was, or how to click around tumblr, but he didn’t really want to know.
H/T to Jesse Walker, by way of Colby Cosh for the link.
March 22, 2023
A 60 Minutes show on the US Navy that wasn’t a hit piece?
CDR Salamander is pleased at the way the CBS team for 60 Minutes presented their US Navy coverage in a recent show:
How China views their eastern seaboard in a military sense.
Screencapture detail from 60 Minutes.
A regular topic of conversation here […] is the lack of discussion in the public space about the importance of a strong Navy to our republic’s economic and military security. Sure, inside our salons, slack channels, and email threads we talk to each other a lot, but we seem to have a hard time getting our message out to the general public.
Sunday night’s 60 Minutes was an exception to the rule. There is a lot of credit to go around here. First of all, you have to give credit to the 60 Minutes team fronted by Norah O’Donnell and lead producers Keith Sharman and Roxanne Feitel. This two-segment effort was not just on a topic we all are interested in, it was just plain good journalism.
Sure, I have a nit to pic here and there, but that is just my nature. Perfect? No … but it is one of the best bits of solid, down the middle journalism about our Navy and its challenges I have seen from a major network for a long time.
If you missed it, CBS has published the video and transcript that I’m going to pull some bits from below for conversation.
The second segment was more meatier than the first, but the first is important. It isn’t just where Big Navy got a chance to make a run at media capture with the “C-2 to the Big Deck at sea” show that we all love, but it will introduce many people to someone who is very good at his job and representing the Navy, Admiral Samuel Paparo, USN.
He gets your attention early by, even though clearly well prepared and sticking to scripted talking points and marketing pitches here and there of questionable utility, he also spoke in blunt terms in a way we don’t hear enough in venues such as this:
Admiral Samuel Paparo commands the U.S. Pacific Fleet, whose 200 ships and 150,000 sailors and civilians make up 60% of the entire U.S. Navy. We met him last month on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz deployed near the U.S. territory of Guam, southeast of Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, or PRC.
Norah O’Donnell: You’ve been operating as a naval officer for 40 years. How has operating in the Western Pacific changed?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: In the early 2000s the PRC Navy mustered about 37 vessels. Today, they’re mustering 350 vessels.
…
60 Minutes has spent months talking to current and former naval officers, military strategists and politicians about the state of the U.S. Navy. One common thread in our reporting is unease, both about the size of the U.S. fleet and its readiness to fight. The Navy’s ships are being retired faster than they’re getting replaced, while the navy of the People’s Republic of China or PRC, grows larger and more lethal by the year. We asked the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Samuel Paparo, about this on our visit to the USS Nimitz, the oldest aircraft carrier in the Navy.
Admiral Samuel Paparo: We call it the Decade of Concern. We’ve seen a tenfold increase in the size of the PRC Navy.
Norah O’Donnell: Technically speaking, the Chinese now have the largest navy in the world, in terms of number of ships, correct?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes. Yes.
Norah O’Donnell: Do the numbers matter?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes. As the saying goes, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
This is exactly how the answer needs to be delivered. No squish, no excessive spin — acknowledge the reality of where we are.
More of this from more senior leaders.
There was some subtlety as well. When he first said this, about 10-seconds later I decided to rewind to listen to it again.
Norah O’Donnell: And if China invades Taiwan, what will the U.S. Navy do?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: It’s a decision of the president of the United States and a decision of the Congress. It’s our duty to be ready for that. But the bulk of the United States Navy will be deployed rapidly to the Western Pacific to come to the aid of Taiwan if the order comes to aid Taiwan in thwarting that invasion.
Norah O’Donnell: Is the U.S. Navy ready?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: We’re ready, yes. I’ll never admit to being ready enough.
Did you catch that? He can’t say, “We’re not ready” as if the call comes, we can and will execute what we are tasked … and initially will be ready to do what we can with the reduced numbers we have … but everyone knows there is a huge asterisk next to “ready”.
We don’t have enough escort ships. We don’t have enough VLS tubes. We don’t have a large enough airwing with long enough legs. We don’t have enough reliable and robust tanking. We don’t have much of a bench … so, we are “ready” – but not even close to being “ready enough”. A subtle distinction with not so subtle implications.
We also need to give a nod to our Navy for not having only the 4-stars talk to CBS. LCDR David Ash, USN got some good face time with the camera, and his fellow LCDR Matthew Carlton, USN blessed us with his superb deployment stash.
60 Minutes‘ graphics department also gets credit for the video that the pic at the top of this post is a screen capture of.
Add “PLARF” to you handy list of military acronyms for future reference:
There was another point where Admiral Paparo put a marker down that someone can pick up and run with … hey, I think I’ll do that now;
Norah O’Donnell: How much do you worry about the PLA Rocket Force?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: I worry. You know, I — I’d be a fool to not worry about it. Of course I worry about the PLA Rocket Force. And of course I work every single day to develop the tactics and the techniques and the procedures to counter it, and to continue to develop the systems that can also defend– against them.
Norah O’Donnell: About how far are we from mainland China?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: Fifteen hundred nautical miles.
Norah O’Donnell: They can hit us.
Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes they can. If they’ve got the targeting in place, they could hit this aircraft carrier. If I don’t want to be hit, there’s something I can do about it.
Ahhhhh, yes. Time to bring back one of my favorite graphics.
Draw a 1,500nm circle from the PLARF launch sites and look at what land based airfields, bases, depots and facilities of all sorts are located under that threat. They cannot move. A navy and sea based facilities can.
Undersold point, but Paparo is leaving it there for you to run with.
March 21, 2023
The musical anomaly that was 2022 – when classical music suddenly became much more popular
Ted Gioia looks at some surprising numbers for the music industry showing that of all genres, classical music suddenly became much more popular in 2022:
Last year, I went viral with an article about the rising popularity of old music. But I focused on old rock songs. Many of these songs are 40 or 50 years old. And in the world of pop culture, that’s like ancient history.
But if you really want old music, you can dig back 200 or 300 years — or even more, if you want. But does anybody really do that?
Conventional wisdom tells us that only around 1% of the public cares about classical music. And it doesn’t change much from year to year.
For proof, just take a look at this chart:
If you love concerts at the philharmonic, you read these figures with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. If classical music were any smaller, it would be a rounding error. Or — even sadder — it would be like jazz.
But that data only covers the period up to 2021. And 2022 was different.
In fact, it was remarkably different.
Over the last 12 months, I’ve started to see surprising signs of a larger audience turning to classical music. Last year, I wrote about the amazing saga of WDAV, the first classical music radio station in US history to take the top spot in its city.
I analyzed the numbers, and tried to get to the bottom of this unexpected success story. At the time, I wrote:
Women are the key drivers here. The station boasts a double-digit share in the female 35-44 category. But this probably is tilted heavily toward mothers, at least if we factor in the next bit of evidence — which reveals that WDAV has a mind-boggling 38% share among young children.
But then a few weeks later, this research report was issued:
I need to point out that respondents were allowed to mention multiple genres — but even given that loophole, who would expect classical music to rank ahead of country music, hip-hop, or folk?
This can’t be true. The numbers must be wrong. Or, maybe, people are lying to pollsters.
But then a survey of holiday listening trends in the UK revealed the unprecedented popularity of orchestral music — especially among younger listeners.
March 20, 2023
“It amounts to nothing less than a declaration of all-out war between the government and the Big Tech companies”
The editors of The Line have strong opinions on the federal government’s decision to batter Google, Facebook, and other online “giants” over their opposition to the proposed internet legislation in bills C-11 and C-18:
As a result of C-18, both Google and Meta have considered dropping news distribution from their platforms, or have outright promised to do so. To which we have responded: “Well, no shit, Sherlocks.” We have, in fact, warned all of the parties involved with this misguided bill that that’s exactly what was going to happen.
Nonetheless, the dim-witted government officials and corporate media barons who have pinned their hopes of survival to the apparent money spigot of Big Tech didn’t believe us. So when Meta came right out and said it would drop news last week, the ashen-faced Minister of Heritage accused them of using “intimidation and subversion” tactics. And, thus, these demands for private correspondence appear to have been drafted.
It amounts to nothing less than a declaration of all-out war between the government and the Big Tech companies — and, by extension, the many independent media creators like ourselves.
Well. Okey Dokey then.
*cracks knuckles*
Let’s start with two very obvious points: firstly, we at The Line don’t object to forcing these tech companies to disclose funding to third parties for the purpose of opposing C-18 et al. That is perfectly reasonable, in our minds. Further, if these companies are being accused of anything illegal, by all means, investigate away — after you get a warrant.
The rest of these demands are nothing short of banana crackers; it’s an extraordinary interpretation of the committee’s mandate. It’s the kind of overbroad dragnet that will necessarily create privacy breaches for the unknown numbers of ordinary citizens, dissidents and journalists who have corresponded with these companies about these bills.
We will remind the government that private citizens and private companies do not owe the government a full accounting of their private business or communications. The government is subject to this kind of transparency and disclosure because the government works for us. Not the other way around.
We will also point out the irony. The government is demanding years worth of correspondence from private entities within a very short time frame: this is a level of transparency that no government department would subject itself to. Don’t believe us? Just try to draft a similar ATIP request to any ministry; it would take years to get such a request fulfilled, and half if it would come back redacted.
“The New American Empire lasted, at most, twenty years, if one counts the two falls of Kabul as brackets”
Ed West on the brief — and largely unacknowledged by Americans — high-water mark of the 21st century’s biggest empire:
A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com
This century has already seen its fair share of great delusions, society-changing disasters built on wishful thinking: you can loan mortgages to people who obviously can’t pay them back; you can cure pain with an opiate that won’t make people addicted; and now the unstoppable idea of equality of outcomes between races, a project doomed to failure and tragedy.
But none was perhaps so spectacularly disastrous as liberal imperialism. Twenty years ago, George W Bush sent the most powerful military the world had ever seen into the birthplace of Abraham to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and as Niall Ferguson wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time: “the greatest empire of the modern times has come into existence without the American people even noticing”.
The New American Empire lasted, at most, twenty years, if one counts the two falls of Kabul as brackets. This was despite enormous technological supremacy, and genuine goodwill and benevolence among many of the state-builders.
The United States was “born liberal”, as historian Louis Hartz said, even if the crime wave of the late 20th century made that a dirty word, and the “New American Empire” would spread the benefits of liberalism to grateful beneficiaries around the world.
Yet what is so striking about the imperialists of the 21st century, compared to their forebears in the 19th, was just how little interest they seemed to show in the subject people. Their naivety about human nature, and their utopian belief that people around the world just wanted “freedom”, chimed with a lack of curiosity about humanity.
To think that people around the world might not be the same, that they might not want “freedom” nor have the social structure or culture that suited democracy, might be to venture into dangerous territory. To suggest that Iraq was incapable of democracy was insulting to Iraqis, since as the US president said ahead of the war: “There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken.”
Yet the defeated nations in 1945 had very old, well-established institutions and very strong national identities, something Iraq did not. The latter was extremely clannish, something no one seemed to consider. Sovereignty and strong institutions take generations to build, and cannot just be imposed by foreigners working on abstract principles like “democracy”.
Bush was not alone. That same year, John McCain had said: “There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along”. And on March 1, 2003, two weeks before the war started, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, had dismissed warnings about sectarian conflict: “We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they’ve never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together.” On top of that, “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.” He was totally wrong, while in contrast the American Conservative‘s pessimistic warnings about Iraq’s social fabric proved correct.
March 19, 2023
Ron DeSantis as an American Neville Chamberlain
Andrew Sullivan points out the inanity of comparing Florida Governor and potential presidential candidate to former British PM Neville Chamberlain over DeSantis not including the idea of increasing support to Ukraine as “a new Munich”:
Governor Ron DeSantis speaking with attendees at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida on 18 July, 2021.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
For a written statement on foreign policy from a potential presidential candidate, it was, I suppose, a big deal. The salient sentence from Governor Ron DeSantis:
While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.
It’s open to some interpretation. DeSantis says the Ukraine war is not in the “vital national interests” of the US, but is it maybe still in our general interests? Not clear. And he commits to no further entanglement, which could mean sticking with where we are now, but no more. Sure: no F-16s. But that’s also Biden’s position.
“Territorial dispute?” That set a lot of people off. But of course it’s undeniably, at some level, a border dispute. The entire post-Soviet settlement was a redrawing of national borders — and marked an extraordinarily rapid advance of Western arms and allies to the edge of Russia itself. In any kind of perspective, the current war has come at the end of that now-disputed settlement, and is indeed a debate over where Russia ends and Ukraine — which literally means “borderland” — begins. DeSantis didn’t blame Ukraine for its self-defense. He didn’t defend Putin. He merely proffered a different view of vital US national interests in the medium-term.
The gall!
The Blob declared another “Munich!” — an ancient neocon ritual — and declared the DeSantis candidacy all-but-over. Chris Christie called DeSantis “Neville Chamberlain“; Chuck Schumer asked, “I have to wonder what [DeSantis] would’ve thought if he was around in the 1930s”; Jenn Rubin called DeSantis “pro-Putin“; and the WSJ warned of a return to “isolationism in the 1930s”. This morning, the WaPo dusted down and wheeled out their perennial “appeasement!” editorial. And we got a French-Brooks double-whammy direct from 1983. Churchill envy never dies.
And I’m sorry. But I don’t get it. It is surely perfectly fine for a country to have two political parties that differ on foreign policy. In fact, it’s a critical advantage that democracies have over more rigid regimes: it helps us correct mistakes in time (and sometimes not), change personnel, and adjust to an always changing reality.
And in the 21st century, after the collapse of the imperial ideologies of the 20th, the role and reach of the United States is legitimately open to debate. It makes sense that one party would be more interventionist and one would be less so; it makes even more sense for the conservative party to be the one more skeptical of wars, small and large, and the unintended consequences they invariably entail.
That’s what’s happening — partly in reaction to the catastrophic, and bipartisan, hyper-interventionism of the first two decades of this century, and partly because of the rise of China. And it’s a good, normalizing thing. It will keep pressure on Biden not to escalate any further; and force us to think through the ugly compromises that will almost certainly confront us in the future. DeSantis’ position is pretty much where Obama was on Ukraine — and Obama was not some far-right fanatic. Money quote:
The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do. … We have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.
Replace “core” with “vital” and it’s DeSantis’ outrageous position. Yes, Putin miscalculated badly and invaded Ukraine, which means a new situation, and defense of Ukraine. But the core reality of America’s and Russia’s interests is unchanged. And Putin is not in command of a huge war economy and occupying the Sudetenland. He’s stuck in Eastern Ukraine, for Pete’s sake, and can barely move. China is maneuvering to counter and exploit our escalation. We need flexibility. What we absolutely do not need is some kind of shrill, bipartisan consensus on yet another war — and the usual McCarthyite smears of critics.
Disagree with the Canadian government’s attempt to take over significant parts of the internet? Get ready for administrative punishment, citizens!
Michael Geist, who often seems like the only person paying close attention to the Canadian government’s growing authoritarian attitudes to Canadians’ internet usage, shows the utter hypocrisy of the feds demanding access to a vast array of private and corporate information on a two-week deadline, when it can take literally years for them to respond to a request for access to government information:
Senator Joe McCarthy would be in awe of the Canadian government’s audacious power grab.
Library of Congress photo via Wikimedia Commons.
The government plans to introduce a motion next week requiring Google and Facebook to turn over years of private third-party communication involving any Canadian regulation. The move represents more than just a remarkable escalation of its battle against the two tech companies for opposing Bill C-18 and considering blocking news sharing or linking in light of demands for hundreds of millions in payments. The motion – to be introduced by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage (yes, that guy) – calls for a series of hearings on what it describes as “current and ongoing use of intimidation and subversion tactics to avoid regulation in Canada”. In the context of Bill C-18, those tactics amount to little more than making the business choice that Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez made clear was a function of his bill: if you link to content, you fall within the scope of the law and must pay. If you don’t link, you are out of scope.
While the same committee initially blocked Facebook from even appearing on Bill C-18 (Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said he was ready for clause-by-clause review after just four hearings and no Facebook invitation), bringing the companies to committee to investigate the implications of their plans is a reasonable approach. But the motion isn’t just about calling executives before committee to answer questions from what will no doubt be a hostile group of MPs. The same motion sweeps in the private communications of thousands of Canadians, which is a stunning disregard for privacy and which could have a dangerous chilling effect on public participation. Indeed, the intent seems fairly clear: guilt by association for anyone who dares to communicate with these companies with an attempt to undermine critics by casting doubt on their motivations. Note that this approach is only aimed at those that criticize government legislation. There has been a painfully obvious lobbying campaign in support of the bill within some Canadian media outlets, but there are no efforts to uncover potential bias or funding for those that speak out in favour of Bill C-18, Bill C-11, or other digital policy initiatives.
It is hard to overstate the broad scope of the disclosure demands. Canadian digital creators concerned with Bill C-11 who wrote to Youtube would find their correspondence disclosed to the committee. So would researchers who sought access to data from Google or Facebook on issues such as police access to social media records or anti-hate groups who contacted Facebook regarding the government’s online harms proposal for automated reports to law enforcement. Privacy advocates focused on how Google administers the right to be forgotten in Canada would ironically find their correspondence disclosed as would independent media sites that wrote to Facebook about the implications of Bill C-18.
March 18, 2023
If not “woke”, then what should we call it?
Freddie deBoer devoutly hopes for a proper term to use instead of the by-now highly pejorative term “woke”:
As I have said many times, I don’t like using the term “woke” myself, not without qualification or quotation marks. It’s too much of a culture war pinball and now deemed too pejorative to be useful. I much, much prefer the term “social justice politics” to refer to the school of politics that is typically referred to as woke, out of a desire to be neutral in terminology. However: there is such a school of politics, it’s absurd that so many people pretend not to know what woke means, and the problem could be easily solved if people who support woke politics would adopt a name for others to use. No to woke, no to identity politics, no to political correctness, fine: PICK SOMETHING. The fact that they steadfastly refuse to do so is a function of their feeling that they shouldn’t have to do politics like everyone else. But they do. And their resistance to doing politics is why, three years after a supposed “reckoning”, nothing has really changed. (If there’s no such thing as the social justice politics movement, who made the protests and unrest of 2020 happen? The fucking Democrats?)
The conceit is that “woke” has even shaggier or vaguer boundaries than “liberal”, “fascist”, “conservative”, or “moderate”. And I just don’t think that’s true.
“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene — woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.
QotD: Experts outside their field of expertise
The first time I really encountered this phenomenon (outside of obvious examples such as the political and economic opinions of Hollywood celebrities) was related to climate change. I don’t see them as often today, but for a while it used to be very common for letters to circulate in support of climate change science signed by hundreds or thousands of scientists.
The list of signatures was always impressive, but when you looked into it, there was a problem: few if any of the folks who signed had spent any time really looking at the details of climate science — they were busy happily studying subatomic particles or looking for dark energy in space. It turned out most of them had fallen for the climate alarmist marketing ploy that opposition to catastrophic man-made global warming theory was by people who were anti-science. And thus by signing the letter they weren’t saying they had looked into it all and confirmed the science looked good to them, they were merely saying they supported science.
When some of them looked into the details of climate science later, they were appalled. Many have reached the same general conclusions that I have, that CO2 is certainly causing some warming but the magnitude of that warming or in particular the magnitude and direction of its knock on effects like floods or droughts or tornadoes, is far from settled science.
So it is often the case that people who show strong support for ideas or people outside of their domain do so for reasons other than having made use of their expertise and experience to take a deep dive into the issues. Theranos is a great example from the business world. Elizabeth Holmes convinced a bunch of men (and they were mostly all men — women seemed to have more immunity to her BS) who were extraordinarily successful in their own domains (George Schultz, the Murdochs, Henry Kissinger, Larry Ellison) to become passionate believers in her vision. Which is fine, it was a lovely vision. But they spent zero time testing whether she could really do it, and worse, refused to countenance any reality checks about problems Theranos was facing because Holmes convinced them that critics were just bad-intentioned people representing nefarious interests who wanted her vision to fail.
Warren Meyer, “People Who Express Opinions Outside of their Domain Seldom Have Really Looked into it Much”, Coyote Blog, 2019-05-28.
