Quotulatiousness

July 4, 2024

“In other words, God is a deliverable for the R&D team”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia isn’t impressed with the changes we’ve seen over the years among the Silicon Valley leadership:

Yes, I should have been alarmed when this cult-ish ideology took off in Silicon Valley — where the goal had previously been incremental progress (Moore’s law and all that) and not being evil.

When I first came to Silicon Valley at age 17, the two leading technologists in the region were named William Hewlett and David Packard. They used their extra cash to fund schools, museums, and hospitals — both my children were born at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital — not immortality machines, or rockets to Mars, or a dystopian Internet of brains, or worshipping at the Church of the Singularity.

Tech leaders were built differently back then. When famous historian Arnold Toynbee visited Stanford in 1963, he had a chance encounter with William Hewlett. Afterwards Toynbee marveled over his new acquaintance, declaring: “What an amazing fellow. He has more knowledge of history than many historians.”

In other words, Bill Hewlett had more wisdom than ego. He invested in the community where he lived — not the Red Planet. Instead of promulgating social engineering schemes, Hewlett and Packard built a new engineering school at their alma mater, and named it after their favorite teacher.

They wouldn’t recognize Silicon Valley today. The FM-2030s are now in charge.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invested in engineering, not social engineering

Another warning sign came when Google hired cult-ish tech guru Ray Kurzweil — a man who had once created a reasonable music keyboard that even Stevie Wonder used.

But Kurzweil went on to write starry-eyed books of utopian tech worship which come straight out of the weird religion playbook (The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Singularity is Near, etc.)

What does tech look like when it gets turned into a religion? Kurzweil summed it up when asked if there is a God. His response: “Not yet.”

In other words, God is a deliverable for the R&D team.

I note that, when Forbes revisited Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, they found that almost every one went wrong.

So what does he do?

Kurzweil follows up his book The Singularity is Near with a new book entitled The Singularity is Nearer. Give the man credit for hubris. This is exactly what religious cults do when their predicted Rapture doesn’t occur.

They just change the date on the calendar — Utopia has been delayed for another 12 months.

But, of course, Utopia is always delayed another 12 months. Meanwhile the cult leaders can do a lot of damage while preparing for the Rapture.

And despite the techno-elite’s apparent endless quest for perfection in their own lives, the enshittification of the technology they deliver to us proles continues relentlessly:

Here’s a curious fact. The more they brag about their utopias, the worse their products and services get.

Even the word upgrade is now a joke — whenever a tech company promises it, you can bet it will be a downgrade in your experience. That’s not just my view, but overwhelmingly supported by survey respondents.

For the first time since the dawn of the Renaissance, innovation is now feared by the vast majority of people. And the tech leaders, once admired and emulated, now rank among the least trustworthy people in the world.

It was different when Linus Pauling was peddling his horse pills — he eventually set up shop in Big Sur, far south of the tech industry, in order to find a hospitable home for his wackiest ideas.

Nowadays, Big Sur thinking has come to the Valley.

And when you set up cults inside the largest corporations in the history of the world, we are all endangered.

Just imagine if Linus Pauling had enjoyed the power to force everybody to take his huge vitamin doses. Just imagine if Bill Shockley had possessed the authority to impose his racist eugenics theories on the populace.

It’s scary to think of. But they couldn’t do it, because they didn’t have billions of dollars, and run trillion-dollar companies with politicians at their beck and call.

But the current cultists include the wealthiest people in the world, and they are absolutely using their immense power to set rules for the rest of us. If you rely on Apple or Google or some other huge web behemoth — and who doesn’t? — you can’t avoid this constant, bullying manipulation.

The cult is in charge. And it’s like we’re all locked into an EST training sessions — nobody gets to leave even for bathroom breaks.

There’s now overwhelming evidence of how destructive the new tech can be. Just look at the metrics. The more people are plugged in, the higher are their rates of depression, suicidal tendencies, self-harm, mental illness, and other alarming indicators.

If this is what the tech cults have already delivered, do we really want to give them another 12 months? Do you really want to wait until they deliver the Rapture?

“Over twenty years ago now, we declared war on terror; a generation later, we are ruled by terror”

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

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses the prevalence of fear in modern western culture:

Over twenty years ago now, we declared war on terror; a generation later, we are ruled by terror. The public discourse revolves around peoples’ fears, most of them imagined. Many spend their lives petrified at the prospect of normal social interaction. Women are scared that men will rape them, and men are scared that women will rape them in the courts. Both leftists and rightists are terrified that the other, if given free rein, will drag the world into a dark age, though only one of them is right. All of our great public efforts are either to mitigate this future catastrophe or that dire present threat, or they are about furiously not acknowledging some insoluble and therefore inevitable future disaster, while studiously ignoring some entirely soluble ongoing emergency which those who could solve delude themselves they can profit from.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the war on terror ended up making us chronically terrified. That’s the track record for these things. Even back in the 1990s we knew that. The war on poverty generated an obscenely inflated welfare underclass while systematically slowing economic growth, thereby generating poverty twice over. The war on drugs led to a society of drug addicts, in which every fifth person is on at least one kind of pill, and most of the rest are self-medicating in other ways. Instead of weed (legal now, in any case), we have fentanyl and meth. Victory!

When Washington declares war on something, it invariably produces more of it. This seems perverse until you realize that wars on abstractions are simply how managerial bureaucracies extend their bases of power. A war that can never be won is a war with job security. A war that gets worse the longer and harder you fight it is even better, because this generates growth.

Washington’s current wars seem to be on racism, baseline human sexual normalcy, men, and multipolarity; the latter is really just a fancy word for the growing tendency for other countries to not do what Washington tells them to because, in general, they prefer being racist to being erased, they think the butt stuff is weird, they don’t want to be castrated, and since they are not castrated, they are still capable of not liking to be told what to do. Sure enough, all of these wars, whether cultural or geopolitical, are steadily generating the very things that they’re trying to stamp out. Racism stocks have reached prices they haven’t seen in generations, thanks to sustained decade of all-out full sector push by the media, corporate, educational, and public sectors, all doing their part to push that line up, up, up. Meanwhile, the war on multipolarity seems in general to be doing a fantastic job of generating more multipolarity.

The longer Washington wages its cowardly war against Russia, China, Iran, and I guess now North Korea, the more Washington’s standing in the world is reduced. I say “cowardly” of course because the war is not waged openly: formally, no war has been declared by Washington or any of its core NATO allies against any of the obvious belligerents. It’s all done through proxies which Washington pays to train and arm and die on its behalf, funding it all with a money printer whose brrrring has gotten defeaning. Or it’s done through sabotage; let’s not forget Nordstream, which kicked the legs out from under Germany’s, and therefore Europe’s economy, in perhaps the most breathtakingly cynical act of strategic sabotage against a supposed ally that one might imagine. Washington doomed Europe in order to ensure that Europe would stay attached to Washington. The whole world sees what Washington is doing of course, and is frightened lest it happen to them, but also disgusted that it happens at all; the latter emotion is becoming increasingly dominant, however, because Washington is becoming less frightening every day.

Washington could not even coordinate an orderly retreat from Afghanistan; its wunderwaffen have made little impact on the Ukrainian battlefront; even combined with its vassals, it cannot match levels of armament production that come effortlessly to its adversaries; its pier in Gaza fell apart uselessly; its mighty navy has so far been utterly powerless to stop a blockade imposed by some obscure tribe of desert Arabs. Then there’s the big fail, Washington’s attempt to nuke the Russian economy by locking it out of the SWIFT system. The Russian economy is doing fine, in fact better than fine, but SWIFT on the other hand is swiftly becoming irrelevant. The dollar’s global reserve status is on borrowed time, and everyone knows it.

I don’t think anyone’s more terrified right now than Western elites. They know they’ve fumbled the ball, that they’ve lost their footing, and they’re flailing around weightlessly as they try to catch it without faceplanting. None of their plans are really working. None of their usual levers of control are as effective as they used to be; some, such as the media, have almost stopped responding altogether. Their people are turning against them for a dozen different reasons, all of them excellent. Their great economic machine is sluggish, its components grinding together and seizing up. Their enemies abroad are on the march, or mobilizing. It’s all coming for them at once, and they don’t appear to have any idea what to do. You’re seeing that deer in the headlights look a lot now from prime ministers and presidents, and it isn’t always because of dementia. They’re in over their heads. Children, playing a game that became all too real when they weren’t paying attention.

QotD: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Memorial Day in America – or, if you’re a real old-timer, Decoration Day, a day for decorating the graves of the Civil War dead. The songs many of those soldiers marched to are still known today – “The Yellow Rose Of Texas”, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, “Dixie”. But this one belongs in a category all its own:

    Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
    He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored…

In 1861, the United States had nothing that was recognized as a national anthem, and, given that they were now at war, it was thought they ought to find one – a song “that would inspire Americans to patriotism and military ardor”. A 13-member committee was appointed and on May 17th they invited submissions of appropriate anthems, the eventual winner to receive $500, or medal of equal value. By the end of July, they had a thousand submissions, including some from Europe, but nothing with what they felt was real feeling. It’s hard to write a patriotic song to order.

At the time, Dr Samuel Howe was working with the Sanitary Commission of the Department of War, and one fall day he and Mrs Howe were taken to a camp a few miles from Washington for a review of General McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. That day, for the first time in her life, Julia Ward Howe heard soldiers singing:

    John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave
    John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave…

Ah, yes. The famous song about the famous abolitionist hanged in 1859 in Charlestown, Virginia before a crowd including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth.

Well, no, not exactly. “By a strange quirk of history,” wrote Irwin Silber, the great musicologist of Civil War folk songs, “‘John Brown’s Body’ was not composed originally about the fiery Abolitionist at all. The namesake for the song, it turns out, was Sergeant John Brown, a Scotsman, a member of the Second Battalion, Boston Light Infantry Volunteer Militia.” This group enlisted with the Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment and formed a glee club at Fort Warren in Boston. Brown was second tenor, and the subject of a lot of good-natured joshing, including a song about him mould’ring in his grave, which at that time had just one verse, plus chorus:

    Glory, glory, hallelujah
    Glory, glory, hallelujah…

They called it “The John Brown Song”. On July 18th 1861, at a regimental march past the Old State House in Boston, the boys sang the song and the crowd assumed, reasonably enough, that it was inspired by the life of John Brown the Kansas abolitionist, not John Brown the Scots tenor. Over the years in the “SteynOnline Song of the Week”, we’ve discussed lyrics featuring real people. But, as far as I know, this is the only song about a real person in which posterity has mistaken it for a song about a completely different person: “John Brown’s Body” is about some other fellow’s body, not John Brown the somebody but John Brown the comparative nobody. Later on, various other verses were written about the famous John Brown and the original John Brown found his comrades’ musical tribute to him gradually annexed by the other guy.

Mark Steyn, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, Steyn Online, 2019-05-26.

July 3, 2024

The profound, utter, inescapable uselessness of the legacy media

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

As an early and enthusiastic blog reader and eventually a blog creator, I’ve always sought interesting aspects of stories in the news — even when I disagreed with the source or the presentation, it’s always a good thing to approach any topic “in the round” whenever possible. Getting all your information from one viewpoint or even one source is a good way to gaslight yourself. Once upon a time, while the TV networks tended to be as bland as they could (because going too far toward sensationalism would be a good way to get in bad with the regulators who control your broadcasting privileges), newspapers were not under such strong moderation. You could find very progressive, mildly progressive, centrist, and even mildly conservative voices with relative ease. At least, that’s what a rosy view of media history suggests — I think you have to go back before World War II to find really vigorous debates among the major newspapers.

Here in Canada, the mass media were already overly deferential to the government of the day — unless it was a Conservative government, of course — and after the internet and social media ate all the profit out of their business, they turned as one to the government to bail them out. In return, they became even more deferential to official story lines unless the foreign press forced their collective hand to present a more complete story. Over the last few years, as the surviving mainstream media shed jobs, many journalists have “crossed the lines” and become much more like their distant predecessors in the media: diggers of dirt, tellers of uncomfortable truths, and impartial mockers of government incompetence (Canada’s The Line is an excellent example of this … even when I don’t link to them, I almost always find their articles interesting and informative.)

All that throat-clearing out of the way, here’s Chris Bray asking what you have learned from the mainstream media lately:

When was the last time you read something in the mainstream news media — an op-ed piece, a major revelation that some clever and persistent investigative reporter dug up, a sharp bit of news analysis — that surprised you? When was the last time you read something in the news that changed your understanding of a major issue? When was the last time something in the “news” reframed an issue in your head with an argument you hadn’t anticipated, or with new evidence that you hadn’t heard before? “Man, I’d never thought of it that way,” you say, tossing the New York Times down on the coffee table.

Related, when was the last time a report or a panel discussion on television news surprised you and made you see something differently?

My impression is that the public sphere is now made up almost entirely of people saying things that we already know they’re going to say. “Jennifer Rubin will now analyze the presidential debate.” You don’t need to hear that. There’s no need to listen to any of it, ever. Andrea Mitchell is for [current thing]. Of course she is. If you know what [current thing] is, what’s the point of an Andrea Mitchell?

It’s all so dull.

There are at least a couple hundred prominent media and academic figures in the United States who could die tonight without anyone noticing, as long as there was a tape or a computer program of some kind to go on posting the received wisdom of the day under their names.

QotD: Mental health and social media

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I question the idea that modern life has increased the total amount of lunacy in the world. Thanks to the Internet in general, and social media in particular, the volume of the world’s lunatic population has been amped well past 11 … but I think this is less a case of “Twitter creating lunatics” than “online anonymity letting people fly their freak flags openly”. Deliberately avoiding sex and politics, an example: On a road trip recently, I started flipping channels in my hotel room, and I came across a show called Dr. Pimple Popper. I swear, this is absolutely a real thing that exists. Here’s this woman, a dermatologist I guess, rooting around in cysts and boils and tumors and whatnot for the cameras, and … that’s it.

Not only is there an audience for this — which I never would’ve believed — there’s enough of an audience for it that it’s on basic cable. See what I mean? Somehow, the marketing guys determined that yes, there are enough people out there who want to see cysts being cauterized that we can make an entire show out of it. How could they figure it out? Beats me, but unless some suits at TLC had a contest to see what’s the silliest, grossest thing they could actually get broadcast, I’m betting that there was a group of Internet weirdos out there discussing it, and the marketing boys just ran with it.

Applying that to the topic at hand, my guess is that, since it’s so easy for people to be Massively Online these days, the kind of folks with that particular type of mental problem pretty much live on Twitter, where — as anyone who has waded into that cesspit for more than five minutes knows — the Twitterati absolutely cannot distinguish “talking about doing something” from “actually doing something”.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-04.

July 2, 2024

The virtue-signalling Olympics … aka “Glastonbury”

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

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill documents the awesomely awful human beings at the Glastonbury music festival this year (like most years):

“Sign of the times @ Glastonbury Festival” by timparkinson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Virtue-signalling reached its nadir on Friday night. It was at the Glastonbury music festival. Of course it was. A swaying crowd of the time-rich, turbo-smug thirtysomethings who make up Glasto’s clientele passed around an inflatable dinghy filled with dummies designed to look like migrants crossing the English Channel. As some band you’ve never heard of sang a song about “beautiful immigrants”, the audience hoisted the blow-up boat above their heads and basically crowd-surfed it. What a gauche display of phoney virtue. What an orgy of hollow vanity. Surely it would have been cheaper to rustle up a banner saying, “Aren’t we fucking wonderful?”.

It will surprise not a living soul that the boat was the handiwork of Banksy, every posh twat’s favourite graffiti artist. Banksy has never once seen a moneyed, mostly white audience that he didn’t want to titillate with platitudes about Tory scum and cruel capitalism, so it was only natural he would gravitate towards Glastonbury. He knows it’s rammed with people called Archie and Poppy who lap up his unsubtle stencils about the rat race that is neoliberal society and how dreadfully frightful war can be. So who better to dragoon into his boat stunt than these folk who likewise love advertising to the world how much they care about migrants and stuff?

Let’s leave to one side how unbelievably crude it is for a rich graffitist and Brits who can afford to fork out £355 to listen to crap music for five days to celebrate boat journeys that often end in death. One wonders if any of the audience members who cheered illegal immigration later retired to one of Glasto’s luxury yurts, which contain not only “proper flushing toilets” but also toilet attendants. You can hire one for £5,000, which, ironically, is around the same amount of money dirt-poor migrants are forced to stump up to criminal gangs for a seat on one of their perilous crossings that the righteous of Glasto think it’s a hoot to sanctify.

No, even worse than the sight of the well-off of Worthy Farm using the wretched of the Earth to burnish their moral credentials is the fact that if any Channel-crossing migrant were to rock up to Glastonbury they’d be cuffed and shoved in the back of a paddy wagon faster than you could say “What time’s Dua Lipa on?”. Glastonbury is one of the most fortified zones in Britain. It is surrounded by a fence that is 4.12m high and 7.8km long and which has numerous “unique high-security features”, including an “external roadway to prevent tunnelling”, a “45-degree overhang to prevent climbing” and “zero nuts and bolts to stop the fence being tampered with”. “No borders!”, cry the virtuous of Glasto while surrounded by a border fence that the screws of Alcatraz would have envied.

They Don’t Make Them Like ⚔️This⚔️ Any More …

Filed under: History, Media, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jill Bearup
Published Mar 18, 2024

Ah, The Mark of Zorro. You will be endlessly told as a stage combatant that this is one to watch. There’s a reason for that, friends.

This video is sponsored by ME: https://books2read.com/juststabmenow

July 1, 2024

Fifty ways to leave your leader

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Okay, I exaggerate in the headline … Mitch Heimpel only offers a list of eight factors that matter when it’s time for a political party to take their leader out behind the barn, so to speak:

Caucus revolts have gotten more common in Canadian politics of late.

They’ve always been commonplace in Westminster politics. In recent years, they’ve dethroned three prime ministers in the U.K. They’re almost as common as general elections for removing prime ministers in Australia. They’re a sign of a healthy parliamentary system … sort of. Our system runs on confidence. Prime ministers are supposed to be responsive to pressure from the backbench.

Canada has been something of an exception to this, and not always to our national benefit. Though less so lately. We’ve seen sitting governments in revolt (Jason Kenney in Alberta, 2022) We’ve also seen opposition leaders taken out by frustrated caucus (Erin O’Toole federally in 2022, Patrick Brown as Ontario Progressive Conservative leader, 2018.) The Chrétien-Martin feud was more of a civil war than a revolt.

Still, despite the examples above, these events remain relatively rare in Canada, compared to many of our Westminster peers, because of how centralized power has become in leaders’ offices (especially in the PMO). Our normal, as described in Jeffrey Simpson’s The Friendly Dictatorship, is how our system evolved, not how it was meant to be.

Now, since there are signs (see here and here and here) that at least some Liberals are musing about taking a shot at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it’s perhaps a good time to set some ground rules for caucus revolts. This is what we’ve learned not just from recent Canadian experience, but also from what our British and Australian cousins have learned over the years.

[…]

If things are going so badly that the caucus wants to revolt, you probably do need to make changes. Showing you’re listening, demonstrating accountability at the senior levels and demonstrating change can take the wind out of a caucus revolt before it gets out of hand.

The above are general rules — exceptions can obviously apply. And as noted at the beginning, Canada doesn’t have much experience with these situations. That’s why Australia and the U.K. are so instructive. But things do seem to be changing in Canada, and certainly, things seem to be changing in the Liberal caucus. The above rules are offered free of charge to mutineers and loyalists alike. Good luck!

The Anglosphere “imported American racial progressivism, and then commenced to import American-style racial problems. Thanks, America.”

Filed under: Business, Education, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses meritocratic racial quotas in employment and higher education as a “Universally Disagreeable Compromise”:

Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The race question has been a fault line in American society from its inception. In the aftermath of the hypermigration of the early twenty-first century, it has only become more complicated and divisive, not only in America, but throughout the Anglospheric world. The rest of us imported American racial progressivism, and then commenced to import American-style racial problems. Thanks, America.

The question seems to ultimately revolve around who shall receive the economic spoils. The “equity” that is endlessly referenced by diversity commissars is literally the home equity held by the white middle class, which the diverse and their champions openly intend to expropriate and redistribute.

The most contentious battlegrounds are in academic admissions and corporate hiring, in which the imperative is to minimize the number of White men, and maximize everything that isn’t White men. How the everything else is maximized is of no particular account. A team composed entirely of black men is just as “diverse” as a team which also features Black lesbians, Arab homosexuals, and Thai ladyboys. It is the presence of White men that makes organizations less diverse: a team composed entirely of Black men, with the exception of a solitary White male token, is less diverse than the all-Black team.

For generations now we have suffered under the affirmative action regulations imposed under the banner of Civil Rights. For proponents, Civil Rights are a civic religion, and they guard the advantages won by adherence to their faith jealously. For the victims of affirmative action – which includes both those rejected from employment or university, as well as those subjected to the incompetency of affirmative action admits and hires – affirmative action is a hateful absurdity.

The underlying problem, which to this day only Internet edgelords will openly discuss, is human biodiversity. The various ancestral groups are, in fact, different, in ways that go beyond the merely cosmetic, to include general levels of cognitive aptitude, along with specific behavioural proclivities. To a certain degree this is due to upbringing, but only to a certain degree; upbringing can bring a child as close to his genetic potential as possible, but cannot push him beyond it. The best that nurture can do is to allow nature to flower; it cannot change nature. The natural outcome of this is that, under a purely race-blind, meritocratic dispensation, there will be noticeable and ineradicable differences in the representation of various races within any given profession.

Whether or not one supports a purely meritocratic approach to admissions and hiring then tends to depend a lot on whether one belongs to a group that is likely to do well, or poorly, under such a system. East Asians tend to support a more meritocratic approach, because their high test scores, good study habits, and strong work ethic mean that they will be extremely competitive. Blacks, on the other extreme, are far more skeptical of meritocracy, intuiting that a ruthlessly meritocratic approach would tend to see them pushed out of the professions at the expense [or rather, to the benefit] of Whites, Asians, and Indians.

The current system is practically the worst possible system. The official narrative is built upon the foundational lie that we are all the same under the skin, and that any difference in group-level socioeconomic outcome can only be the result of bigotry, racism, systemic racism, implicit bias, and the historical consequences of slavery or colonialism. This lie has driven our society quite insane, leading in particular to the demonization of Whites – a large fraction of whom buy into the narrative of ethnomasochistic guilt with religious zeal, and another large fraction of whom reject this framing of their racial character as sick and ugly. To a large degree the culture wars are driven by this very division. In the American context, this division maps quite closely to Constitutionalists vs Civil Rights adherents, i.e. it is a holy war between the two dominant civic religions. It is not accidental that this also maps to Republican (i.e. those who wish to preserve the Old Republic built by the Constitution) vs Democrat (i.e. those who wish to complete the transformation of the Republic into something [like] the Our Democracy they’ve been growing in the soil of Civil Rights).

As William M Briggs has pointed out ad nauseum, the prohibition of “disparate impact” and “discrimination” under the Civil Rights regime is an absolute nightmare for corporate America. On the one hand, to discriminate on the basis of race (or any other identity) is plainly illegal; on the other, to not discriminate is invariably to open oneself to charges of discrimination, as the various statistical differences between racial groups work themselves out in aptitude tests, SATs, grade point averages, or job performance. This places employers in the Kafkaesque position of being required to discriminate without being seen to discriminate. They must put their thumbs on the scale to ensure equal outcomes, without being caught doing so.

For Whites especially, this has been a very bad deal. Because no organization will ever be sued for taking on too many officially victimized minorities, there is no upper limit to the number of diversity hires; but if the student body or corporate org chart falls below a given group’s fraction of the population, lawsuits are almost guaranteed. This then produces an inevitable ratchet effect which systematically excludes White people from their own society, with corrosive effects on competence, morale, and confidence in institutions. It doesn’t help that, because we are still officially meritocratic, the leadership classes subject us all to constant gaslighting: we are discriminated against openly by people who brag about discriminating against us while insisting in the same breath that there is no discrimination. It is not surprising that many of us are ready to burn these people at the stake.

Welcome to the “Omnicause” (aka “the Fatberg of Activism”)

Filed under: Australia, Education, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Helen Dale first encountered the Omnicause as a university student council member:

For my sins — in 1991 — I spent a year on the University of Queensland Student Union Council. Yes, I was elected, which means I was a volunteer. It ranks up there among the more pointless activities I’ve undertaken. I was 19, that’s my excuse.

Because I’m conscientious, I took it seriously. I turned up to the monthly meetings. I researched the motions to be debated and voted on in advance. I tried to say not-stupid-things when I thought it was worth making a comment. One side benefit: I learnt meeting procedure.

I also had my first encounter with the Omnicause.

Every single student union council meeting had a Palestine motion, sometimes more than one. These were long, detailed, and competently drafted. They routinely dominated more typical student union fare: budgetary allocations to fix the Rec Club roof, say, or complaints about tuition fees. I wondered what the union’s employed secretarial staff thought of typing up and then photocopying pages upon pages of tedious detail about Middle Eastern geopolitics. I remember picking up copies of both minutes and agendas and boggling at the amount of work involved.

There, in miniature — in sleepy meetings in hot rooms where dust particles danced in stray sunbeams as those of us reading law or STEM subjects tried to make sense of it all — was the Omnicause we now see in campuses all over the developed world. My earliest memories of it involve Aboriginal activists describing Australia as a “settler-colonial state” which had been “invaded” — just like Israel. Australia also had no right to exist.

During one meeting, a Palestine-obsessive buttonholed an engineering student known for his commitment to conservation, bending his ear about the Nakba. I misunderstood the exchange, and congratulated my Greens fellow councillor on recruiting a new party member.

“I’m not sure we want her,” he said. “She doesn’t know or care about the environment, just this Israel thing.”

Already, in 1991, the infant Omnicause had learnt to crawl. It was possible to see — albeit dimly — what would happen to genuine conservationists as single-issue lunatics took over their movement and rotted its political party from within. Darren Johnson — whom I’d call a “Green Green” — and his cri de coeur captures the process well:

    Terrible haircut I know, but here’s me in the Hull Daily Mail running for the Green Party in 1990. I stood on a platform of male rapists in female prisons, hormone drugs for 10yos and rebranding women as uterus-owners. No, don’t be silly, it was housing, environment & poll tax.

Darren Johnson, recall, was the UK Green Party’s former principal speaker, its first-ever London councillor, twice its London mayoral candidate, and is a former chair of the London Assembly.

The Omnicause: what writer Hadley Freeman calls “the fatberg of activism”. This is a genuine flyer, by the way. I admit to suspecting the work of Mole at the Counter, General Boles, Famous Artist Birdy Rose, or Burnside Not Tosh — so I checked.

The Greens in both Australia and the UK have become a vector for much of the worst nonsense: trans and Gaza and chucking orange paint around an art gallery near you have displaced saving the Fluffy Antechinus1 or improving biodiversity, quite apart from anything else. Trans, in my view, is also part of the Omnicause, albeit a junior partner. Like Palestine, it’s capable of colonising major political movements focussed on something else entirely, as this (justifiably angry) supporter of Scottish independence points out.

    1. This animal does not exist, although the Antechinus does.

QotD: Why there’s no “first lady” equivalent in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s true that I became irascible when I read a sister newspaper’s headline calling Nazanin MacKay “Canada’s potential first lady.” I mean no disrespect to Mrs. MacKay here. For all I know it is a serious flaw in our democracy that we are speaking of her, and not her husband, as a potential prime-ministerial spouse. It’s this “first lady” business I dislike. This is an un-Canadian invasive species that careless editors try to apply to the wives of PMs at rare but increasing intervals.

But I didn’t get earnestly annoyed until I heard an intelligent acquaintance object to the usage … while admitting that it was a “pedantic” point. Listen, I’ve made as much money out of professional pedantry as any Canadian. This isn’t pedantry. This is about the underwater nine-tenths of our constitutional iceberg. This is about what Confucius called the rectification of names.

So I ask you: what Canadian, in 2020, is still eyeing the paraphernalia of the American presidency with envy? The pedantic point to be made, although it is also a point of etiquette, is that a prime minister’s wife cannot possibly be the “first lady” of a realm currently equipped with a Queen. Not to mention a vicereine who can hire and fire prime ministers.

A “first lady” is a convenience that republics, for social and diplomatic purposes, have instead of reigning queens or consorts. The senior female member of the presidential household is recognized as First Lady of the republic when the president is widowed or single (like Buchanan, whose niece held the title).

The word “princess” is almost literally just the Latin for “first”, and some Americans must have sensed they were tempting fate when they united their social hierarchy with their political one under a title savouring of hospice-stage republicanism. The original vision was of a country that did not have princesses or anything like.

Colby Cosh, “Talk of a Canadian ‘first lady’ is a small step toward American dysfunction”, National Post, 2020-05-26.

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

Oh no! The filthy proles are getting too many calories! Let’s re-impose rationing!

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall suggests that the regular “viewing with alarm” thumbsuckers about purchased meals having “too many calories” are actually an indication of a strong desire by the great and the good to stick their regulatory noses into the lives of ordinary people:

“Indian take away in Farrer Park” by Kai Hendry is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

This headline is, of course, wrong.

    Some takeaway meals contain more calories than daily limit, UK study finds

There is no daily limit. We do not have laws stating how much food we are allowed to eat. Of course, there are those who want there to be such laws but there aren’t, as yet. What there is is a series of recommendations about the limits we should impose upon ourselves:

    Some takeaway meals contain more calories in one sitting than someone is advised to consume in an entire day, a study of British eating habits has revealed.

That’s better.

    Cafes, fast-food outlets, restaurants, bakeries, pubs and supermarkets are fuelling the UK’s obesity crisis because so many meals they sell contain dangerously large numbers of calories, it found.

That’s not better. Because a plate of food containing a lot of calories is not a danger. Eating many of them might be but that the average household can get a gutbuster for some trivial portion of household earnings is a glory of modern civilisation, the very proof we require that we’re all as rich as Croesus.

And this is actually true too. That we are gloriously rich and it’s our food supply that proves this. As Brad Delong likes to point out back 200 years (yes, about right, 1820s is as it was really changing but 300 years would be better) it took a full day’s work to be able to gain 2,000 calories a day for a day labourer. There are 800 million out there still living at that standard of living. We can buy 2,000 calories — if we go boring stodge — for 30 minutes work now.

By history and by certain geographies we are foully rich these days. Which is the complaint of the wowsers of course. They’re a revival of the puritans and their sumptuary laws. How dare it be true that people fill their bellies with food they actually like?

    Six out of 10 takeaway meals contain more than the 600-calorie maximum that the government recommends people should stick to for lunch and dinner in order to not gain weight, according to the research, which was carried out by the social innovation agency Nesta.

    One in three contain at least 1,200 calories – double the recommended limit.

And? So, folk can buy lots of food for not much money. This is the very thing that makes having a civilisation possible — cheap food. My wife and I do indeed partake of an Indian occasionally — and find the takeout portions rather large. So, we have one amount for lunch or dinner and we’ve a refrigerator in which to keep the excess for a supper or snack another day. This is not beyond the wit of man to organise.

We don’t order in food very often, but when we do we usually manage to get both dinner on the night and lunch on the morrow from a typical order. If the nosey parkers have their way, they’d limit what we were allowed to buy — for our own good, of course — so we’d almost certainly still pay the same amount for less food. Such a deal!

“No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years”

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

Joe Biden’s performance in the first Presidential debate on Thursday night was so bad that even his strongest supporters in the media have turned on a dime and are now contemplating his replacement:

This is not a hard column to write. In fact, I wrote it twice already! But last night’s debate performance by Joe Biden is the end of his campaign. It’s over. Done. No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years. No sane person can vote for him.

And watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife.

The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?

And if they have not told him the truth on this, what else are they afraid to tell him?

The mainstream media also bears responsibility for once again being an arm of the DNC establishment, running countless stories about Biden’s acuity and sharpness from inside sources, while attacking the few journalists who actually dared write the most obvious truth about this election: Biden has deteriorated rapidly in the last four years, he is unrecognizable from the man who ran in 2020, and we’ll be lucky if he is able to function as president for the next six months, let alone four years.

I watched MSNBC after the debate. It was like watching State TV in Russia. It took them an hour to acknowledge what the world had just seen, as they danced pathetically around what was staring them in the face. They are literally administration spokespeople — Jen Psaki has the exact same job she always had — waiting for instructions on what to say out loud. And they have all lied through their teeth for months about Biden’s fitness, only to refuse any accountability. Joe Scarborough recently declared on his show:

    Start the tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth: and F— you if you cannot handle the truth. This version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever.

To which the only response is: No, F— you, Mr Scarborough. And fuck all the lies you have told.

But there is a huge, gleaming, hopeful silver lining, as I’ve noted many times before. For the first time this year, we have a chance of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office with a new nominee from a younger generation. No, I don’t know who — except it obviously cannot be Kamala Harris, who would lose by an even bigger margin than the ambling cadaver. But that is what politics is for! There is time for a campaign before a convention that could now be must-see television. A future campaign already has a simple message that vibes with the moment and instantly puts Trump on defense: it’s time for the next generation to lead. We are choosing between the past (Trump) and the future, between the old and the young, between the insane versus the coherent.

All it takes is a credible Democrat of stature to say they are running against Biden. Then all the bets are off. He or she need not criticize Biden, and, in fact, should lionize his service. But they can say they’re running because beating Trump is the first and most important objective, and, at this point, it is obvious that Biden simply cannot beat Trump.

Does anyone have that courage? The person who shows it will instantly become the front-runner. Go for it.

In The Free Press, Bari Weiss points the finger at all of the American media and the apparatchiks of the Biden administration who have been loudly and consistently proclaiming that Biden was in great mental shape, running rings around his advisors, and fit, rested and ready to debate Trump:

Rarely are so many lies dispelled in a single moment. Rarely are so many people exposed as liars and sycophants. Last night’s debate was a watershed on both counts.

The debate was not just a catastrophe for President Biden. And boy—oy—was it ever.

But it was more than that. It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.

Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “fake news”, and, most recently, “cheapfakes”.

Cast your mind back to February, when Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice to look into Biden’s handling of classified documents, came out with his report that included details about Biden’s health, which explained why he would not prosecute the president.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Can anyone doubt that characterization after watching Biden’s debate performance?

Yet Eric Holder told us that Hur’s remarks were “gratuitous”. The former attorney general tweeted: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised”. Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser, said Hur’s report was a “partisan hit job”. Vice President Kamala Harris argued: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous”. The report does not “live in reality”, said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, stressing that the president was “sharp” and “on top of things”.

QotD: The kooks and conspiracy theorists have a better track record than CNN

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Right wing Americans need their own version of consciousness raising and appreciating the “different ways of knowing” marginalized white Americans and right wingers have.

We’ve been trained by generations of left wing television, schooling, and academia to defer and treat the most noxious and stupid bleatings of uninformed women, non-whites, gays, and religious minorities as sacrosanct pieces of insight we’re supposed to wrestle with … whilst at the same time we’ve been treated to presume any white male over a certain age with unusual mannerisms or a disregard for left wing shibboleths is dangerously low status and deranged, when in reality it is the opposite.

Looking at the past 50-60 years, the Grumpy Granddads, hilly-billy mystics, and aging conspiracy theorists have consistently been more right than the mainstream.

If in 2002 you had to pre-commit to believing everything Alex Jones said, or everything CNN said for the next 20 years … You’d have been a fool to pick CNN. Indeed if you took their diet and medical advice you’d probably be dead.

The Archie Bunkers and Deryl Gribbles have consistently been years ahead of the mainline right for seeing the truths of the regime.

Now obviously like Greek heroes consulting the oracle at Delphi, or spirit questers visiting shamans … you have to assume you won’t understand half of what they say, most of it will fly over your head, and a good chunk probably isn’t even meant for you but the other spirits in the room …

But the signal to noise ratio of our hermits and kooks are thousands of miles beyond whatever left wing diversity chicks are getting from the native grifters they entertain at their campus events or the black “we wuz” consciousness raisers they shovel money at.

The old white shamans have been resisting the government since decades before you were born and they remember the all the little episodes official history likes to forget.

Like a young a adept consulting an old sage or a seeker consulting an old monk do not say “I don’t believe that” instead say “Hmm …” or “I am not yet that far down the path”.

Kulak, “The Myth of the Stupid Right”, Anarchonomicon, 2024-03-28.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress