Quotulatiousness

May 24, 2025

German democracy trembles as the extremely extreme extreme right AfD aren’t going to be banned

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

eugyppius updates us on the continued shaky state of German democracy, as the scary extremely extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party seems to have somehow escaped being banned from participation in politics due to some ridiculous “lack of substantive evidence” excuse:

Last week, a supersecret assessment of Alternative für Deutschland by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) leaked to the press. This document was supposed to prove, in excruciating detail, why the AfD are so evil and so fascist and so Nazi and so Hitler, and in this way make a preliminary case for banning the party. In fact its contents turned out to be such an arrant joke that it sapped all remaining momentum within the German political class to prohibit the AfD. I suspect even the “right-wing extremist” classification of the AfD is now in jeopardy and may well be thrown out by the courts, that is how bad this much-heralded supersecret assessment turned out to be.

It took a few days for the full impact of the report’s idiocy to really sink in. That’s how it is with really stupid things – the incredulity they inspire must first dissipate. Finally, though, on Tuesday of this week, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt announced that the dubious evidence marshaled by the BfV was “not sufficient” to support ban proceedings. Dobrindt also said that the whole debate had become “counterproductive” and that it was time to begin finding ways to “end social polarisation”, whatever that means. Hours later, it emerged that Chancellor Friedrich Merz had ordered the entire CDU leadership never to say another word about banning the AfD. If everyone will just shut up, Merz believes his party can “avoid further debate” and avoid “giving voters the impression that the CDU is aiming to eliminate a rival party” – which is of course exactly what the CDU were hoping to do until the BfV fucked everything up with their retarded 1,108-page collection of dyspeptic Facebook-grade political takes.

There’s still a few scattered calls for ban proceedings coming from the left, but their heart isn’t in it and they don’t matter anyway. Without Union votes, no ban application will ever get to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Raed Saleh, an extremely obnoxious politician who heads the SPD faction in the Berlin House of Representatives, whined to the press this morning about how “appalling and disgraceful” it is that outlawing the opposition is no longer on the table and that his party is now being asked to “engage in political debate” with the AfD instead. Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig, also of the SPD, likewise fervently hopes that the AfD might still be banned and she thinks the Interior Ministry should spend more time “evaluating” that BfV dumpster-fire assessment. Since Hubig is Justice Minister and not Interior Minister it doesn’t really matter what she thinks the Interior Ministry should be doing. I don’t understand why so many are citing Hubig’s remarks like they mean anything.

The implosion of this ban-the-AfD arc seems like kind of a big deal to me. Since 2021, the party have been “under suspicion” of right-wing extremism, but despite four years of snooping the BfV have been able to come up with nothing that is not some combination of legally irrelevant, harmless, banal, uninteresting, stupid and a complete waste of government resources. At some point, you have to put the question: If the AfD are so evil and so Nazi and so fascist and so Hitler, why can’t anybody, anywhere, adduce any evidence of their evil Nazi Hitler fascism?

May 23, 2025

“‘[D]isrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”

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

William M. Briggs uses the most recent installation of a statue of a black woman in highly public spaces to explore the idea that even black people “have Black Fatigue”:

Statues of fat ugly lumpen surly ill-kempt statues of black women, all in poses to accentuate their quarrelsome uselessness, are being placed in prominent places in the West. The Latest, rising like a creature in a 1960s Japanese monster movie, is in Times Square. The person who created these blots of bad taste said they were “a way of ‘disrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”.

He’s right. These figures do represent triumph. DIE requires elevating the least and representing them as the best, and forcing all to pretend the charade is real. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a more perfect representation of the true spirit of DIE than these misshapen piles of metal. They demand you say they are equivalent to great men whose statues we are no longer allowed to have.

If it were only statues, there would be no story. But everybody knows that bad black behavior of all kind is being ignored, excused or outright celebrated.

One example will suffice. After the lifelong thug and criminal lowlife George Floyd met his expected end — poisoning himself with drugs and engaging in all manner of misbehavior — our rulers and “elites” fell to their knees, even in Congress itself, to show their adoration of black criminality. Not to mention Floyd’s own statues which cropped up like poisonous mushrooms, each encouraging emulation of Floyd’s exasperating antics.

It’s so bad now that parents of white kids murdered by blacks rush out to forgive or excuse the killers, lest anybody dare to think they would condemn bad black behavior.

The question is why.

Before you answer, understand this is not only your “racist” Uncle Sergeant Briggs asking this question. Blacks themselves are asking.

There is an entire growing genre of YouTube videos of blacks telling us they grow weary of the constant misadventure of “ratchet blacks” (their word, not mine) and our culture’s welcoming attitude toward them. Take “Why Black Fatigue Is On The Rise“. Black fatigue is the natural exhaustion from having to deal routinely with with misbehaving blacks, where “dealing with” means having to pretend, while in polite society, we are not seeing what we are all seeing.

Watch just the first two minutes if you haven’t the time for more. The man in the inset quite rightly points out that blacks are now, as everybody always wanted, being judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. The problem is the content of their character, or at least the character of those who are celebrated for misdeeds. As one commenter to the video said, the problem are blacks who are “Offended by everything. Ashamed of nothing. Entitled to everything. Responsible for nothing.”

The natural desire for separation, and to be with ones’ own, leads blacks to label blacks not confirming to expected behavior as “acting white”. The natural solution would be a formal separation: you go your way, we go ours. That, of course, would never be countenanced, and is anyway not desired by the majority. One thing absolutely demanded by our elites is “diversity”, by which they mean strict uniformity of belief. Our betters weep fake tears over things like colonization, which we know are fake because when we ask them to let us go our own way they say no.

If we can’t separate, then we have to find a way to get along with each other. Whatever this way is, it can’t have a basis in transparent lies.

Bill Bailey – The Doctor Who theme re-imagined as Belgian jazz

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Royal Ballet and Opera
Published 29 Jul 2021

Comedian Bill Bailey re-imagines the Doctor Who theme as Jacques Brel-esque Belgian jazz. Taken from his DVD Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra.

QotD: The decline of the photography business

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… photographers work in a hard-fought, competitive market. The ubiquity of camera phones means there are now few full-time newspaper photographers, for example. Television killed the photo magazines where the “greats” of photography mostly earned their crusts. The rise of Getty Images and the like has destroyed residual income from stock photography. More images are being generated than ever, but less money is being earned for making them. Their main problem is like that of actors, however. It’s a fun, creative job that many people want to do but there are too few customers to pay more than a minority of them. If they were not so disdainful about economics, both professions would find the outcome of that predictable. Mostly they just see it as “wrong” however.

There are playful souls among them but they tend to be more than averagely earnest. There’s an historical reason for that. In the early days of photography it was derided by fine artists as mere mechanical trickery. Painters and sculptors thought of photographers as the Church had once thought of them — as low class artisans unworthy of respect and to be cheated of their pay wherever possible. In consequence photographic pioneers longed to be seen as artists too and paid a lot of attention to “serious” subjects and “social” issues.

[…]

In amateur photography, the comfortable pensions of teachers and university lecturers mean there are far too many of them in a leisure field that requires a certain amount of investment in kit — adding further layers of pseudo-intellectual pomposity, musty from a lifetime of never being challenged. I am a member of the Royal Photographic Society, but though I enjoy a few of its workshops from time to time, mostly find its members smug and insufferable. I hesitate every year before renewing. Its beautifully produced magazine, for example, unquestioningly peddles the conventional thinking of the BBC class. I have learned to appreciate the images while ignoring the priggish text around them.

Tom Paine, “Where we are and what we see”, The Last Ditch, 2020-05-20.

May 22, 2025

Lucy Connolly, political prisoner

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

I’m no firebrand on social media — I’d probably have a lot more followers if I were — but I can easily imagine a situation like the one that got Lucy Connolly sent off to the British gulags for an ill-judged social media post:

In what has become an emblematic case of the UK’s betrayal of free speech, Lucy Connolly has now lost her appeal for early release. This mother and childminder had posted an offensive tweet in the direct aftermath of the Southport murders, in which a psychopath brutally attacked children with a knife at a yoga class. She had believed the false claim that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker, and written online that she had no objection to people burning down hotels where immigrants were residing.

The tweet was taken as evidence that Connolly had intended to “stir up racial hatred” and incite violence during the febrile climate of the summer riots. It had been deleted within hours, no violence occurred as a result, and yet she was sentenced to 31 months in prison. Given that the severity of Connolly’s sentence was doubtless related to unofficial government pressure on the judiciary, many have made the case that Connolly is a political prisoner.

For all our shared revulsion at the tweet, we must remember that we are still talking here about words, not actions. It was completely right that Philip Prescott, a man who attacked a mosque as part of a mob during the riots, was sentenced to 28 months in jail. But Connolly has received an even longer sentence having committed no acts of violence at all. Many rapists and paedophiles have been treated far more leniently. I know of no sound argument that could possibility justify this state of affairs. It is the very definition of two-tier justice.

Let’s get the caveats out of the way. Nobody is defending what Connolly wrote. It was unpleasant, rash, misjudged, and much else besides. Here is the post in full.

Grim stuff. But it by no means fulfils any serious definition of incitement to violence. For one thing, she is not calling on hotels to be torched, but is rather making clear that she would not care if that occurred. This distinction is key, but has been overlooked. Moreover, Connolly has zero influence or clout. It is not as though anyone reading this could have taken it as an instruction or order and acted accordingly. Those wishing to appreciate the full context of why Connolly behaved as rashly as she did should read this excellent piece by Allison Pearson for The Telegraph.

It should go without saying that in a free society some people are going to say ghastly things. That’s the price we pay for liberty. The judge in this case made a statement in his ruling that has been widely interpreted as political: “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive. There is always a very small minority of people who will seek an excuse to use violence and disorder causing injury, damage, loss and fear to wholly innocent members of the public and sentences for those who incite racial hatred and disharmony in our society are intended to both punish and deter.”

Trump, “the American Mussolini”, versus ever-so-democratic Mark Carney

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

In the National Post, John Robson contrasts the authoritarian dictator at the helm of the American ship of state with our peaceful, democratic, and fully accountable to the voters prime minister:

President Donald Trump greets Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at the West Wing entrance of the White House.
(Official White House Photo by Gabriel B Kotico)

It was the best of budgets, it was the worst of budgets, it was the age of restraint, it was the age of profligacy, it was the epoch of the legislature, it was the epoch of the executive, it was the season of open debate, it was the season of closed doors, it was the spring of Canada, it was the winter of America. Or possibly the other way around.

The confusion arises because as a patriotic Canadian I keep hearing how U.S. President Donald Trump is an American Mussolini who has abolished the last vestiges of the old Republic, so we should drink rye not bourbon or some other decisive action easily performed while sitting down. Yet the news media mysteriously insist that the Bad Orange Man is having trouble getting his budget through some quaint relic called the United States Congress while Green Mark Carney isn’t bothering to get his spending plans rubber-stamped by some quaint relic called the Canadian Parliament. How can it be?

Tuesday’s the Morning newsletter from the New York Times, which is no MAGA outlet, reads: “Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump’s legislative agenda.” But with only three spare votes in the House, “there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don’t agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they’re too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them.”

Likewise The Atlantic, part of the thundering herd of independent liberal American minds, says: “The struggle to pass Donald Trump’s second-term agenda in Congress has never been between Republicans and Democrats … it’s been a battle between the House and Senate GOP, between moderates and hard-liners, and, most salient, between Republicans and reality.”

Egad. What manner of rambunctious folly is this? Open debate within the Maximum Leader’s own party? Dictatorship! By contrast here in decorous Canada can someone remind me which inane or malicious measures from former prime minister Justin Trudeau were ever put at risk by the principled courage, truculence or mere pandering even of his NDP coalition non-partners, let alone the trained seals in red?

Periodically one would bark. But which ever bit? To be sure, as the Canadian Press noted on Sunday, “Prime Minister Mark Carney says the Liberal government will present a federal budget in the fall, allowing time for clarity on some key economic and fiscal issues to emerge”. But if there’s going to be a brawl, it will be inside his office, or head, with his finance minister promising to brush aside Parliament with an “economic statement” before Carney overrode him, saying the government would introduce “a much more comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget in the fall”.

May 21, 2025

AI hallucinations capture the Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list

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

Good luck finding some of the highly recommended books on the Chicago Sun-Times list of summer reading … they don’t actually exist (yet):

Critics aren’t perfect.

Sometimes they get facts wrong. Sometimes their judgment is faulty. Sometimes they dangle their modifiers or split their infinitives with everybody watching.

I’ve been there. And it’s awkward.

But I’ve never seen anything as embarrassing as the “Summer Reading List for 2025” in the Chicago Sun-Times.

It gave glowing reviews to books that don’t exist. And I bet you can guess why.

Yes, the newspaper relied on AI to write the article.

The article starts with a recommendation for Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende. This is Allende’s “first climate fiction novel” where “magical realism meets environmental activism”.

It’s a shame that Allende never wrote this book. Nor did anyone else — the book simply doesn’t exist.

(I’ll predict, however, that an AI-generated book with this title will show up on Amazon within a few days. When you live in a world of AI hallucinations, this is how the business model plays out.)

The next book on the Sun-Times list is The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. This novel is also non-existent. But the storyline — about rogue AI that gains consciousness — makes me think that the bots are now mocking us.

It doesn’t get better. The first 10 books on the summer reading list are entirely hallucinated.

As the story of the fake reviews spread on social media, the Sun-Times got into damage control mode. It issued a public statement denying responsibility.

But that just makes matters worse.

Why are they publishing garbage without vetting it? And the denial is also implausible.

Somebody at the newspaper must have given the okay to this. The printing presses don’t run themselves (although maybe that will be the next stage of the AI business model).

How is this happening?

We are now several years into the AI revolution. I’m constantly hearing about new, improved bots that are smarter than super-geniuses, and can replace lowly humans.

But the bizarre lapses are getting worse — and more dangerous.

AI is routinely making stupid, nonsensical mistakes that even the most incompetent employee would never make. I’ve met some incompetent journalists over the years, but none would make a boneheaded move of this magnitude.

And this is after a trillion dollars has been sunk into AI by the most powerful corporations in the world. This is after they have soaked up much of the energy grid. This is after all the training and vetting and upgrading.

We’re not talking about beta testing or first generation AI. Silicon Valley is actually bragging about this tech — but it’s stupider than the worst journalist in the country.

Canadian voters got fooled again

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

Roxanne Halverson on Canadian voter gullibility that Mark Carney and the Liberals took full advantage of in the election campaign:

Offer not applicable in Canada, apparently.

Liberals voters on your elbows up crusade — do you feel foolish, do you feel shamed? Are you ready to admit that you were duped? That you were played like the fiddle in the Devil went down to Georgia. How does it feel to know that you fell for Mark Carney’s fear mongering fabricated crisis that made him Prime Minister. Or is your Trump Derangement Syndrome so severe that you cannot recognize how the Liberals used it and used you to win an election they didn’t deserve to win. It wouldn’t be so bad if only you had to pay the price, but unlike the phony COVID mantra, of we’re all in this together, we really are all in this nightmare together for another possible four years of Liberal rule and corruption, and we’re all going to pay the price. That includes those of us who didn’t get fooled again, but most of us are the same ones who also didn’t get fooled in the last three elections that gave the country the Liberals under Justin Trudeau for a decade of destruction.

Did you see the interview Prime Minister Mark Carney did with Sky News Australia?

You really should watch it. Because in it he admits what those of us who didn’t vote for him knew, and what he, himself also knew. There was never any real threat from Trump to annex Canada. And when pushed on it by the Sky News interviewer Samantha Washington who asks if he inflated the threat as political tool to inflame voters who hated Donald Trump, Carney dances around it saying one minute it wasn’t a threat and the next minute, well he thought it was and so did the Canadian people and well maybe he did use it to kind of stir them up. Essentially he was trying to dodge the fact that he lied and knew all along that Trump wasn’t really going to make Canada the 51st state.

So, let’s begin with the Trump threat — the existential threat to the existence of our country! According to Carney, Trump “wanted to take Canada, he wanted to break it“. But when asked by Washington about that ‘existential threat’, Carney walked it back. In his words, “No the existence is not at stake, it was more of economic crisis, and had a heavy element of national security comes with it, the extent to which we will be cooperating with others, particularly with the United States“.

Now wait a minute, Carney told voters — the elbows uppers — that Canada’s existence was at stake. And now he’s adding in a national security element? I don’t recall Trump ever saying anything about invading Canada or threatening our national security, in fact it was quite the opposite, he said the United States would always protect Canada for any foreign threat. His interest in national security had to do with Canada’s porous border and the fentanyl trade that the Liberals chose to ignore. This response is a typical Carney word salad dancing around answering the question. Something he seems to have in common with his predecessor Justin Trudeau. But at its core, he says, no Canada’s existence was never in danger.

Yet, he repeatedly told crowds at rallies that the US wanted to break us, when it was really just an economic crisis — something Canada has faced many times before, often due to bad Liberal policies.

But that’s what Mark Carney, with the help of his cartel media echo chamber, drummed into the heads of the elbows up crowd during his leadership campaign and during his entire election campaign. Trump was going to come and take our country — “he wants our resources, he wants our land, and he wants our water“.

Now here’s another word salad, walking back the ‘threat’ from Trump. When Washington asked him why he met with Trump when he was still disrespecting Canada by talking about making it the 51st state, even during their meeting in the Oval Office, which he said it, as she described it, “right to your face“. According to Carney this was ‘different’, and then he delivers another word salad because apparently, “Trump was expressing a desire … he had shifted from an expectation to a desire for that to happen. He was also coming from a place where he recognized that that wasn’t going to happen. I made it clear to him in that context.”

May 20, 2025

Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis

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

News broke the other day that former President Joe Biden is suffering from a highly advanced cancer and it only reinforces the questions about who was really performing the role of the President during Biden’s term in office:

Well, now it almost isn’t funny anymore.

Here’s the progression of the Democrats’ desperate attempts to shame you out of talking about Joe Biden’s mental and physical health:

“Stop talking about this because it’s not true.”
“Stop talking about this because he’s not the president anymore.”
“Stop talking about this because he has cancer.”

You may notice a pattern.

I think it was Andrew Klavan who made me realize the First Commandment of the Democratic Party: Thou shalt STFU. All their gaslighting, shaming, whataboutism, and other dishonest rhetorical techniques are attempts to stop you from talking about whichever lie they’re telling at that particular moment.

Why would they stop at cancer?

A lot of medical professionals are pointing out that a prostate cancer diagnosis doesn’t just come out of the blue like this. It’s easily detectable in blood work, it takes years and years to progress, and it should’ve been detected at his last annual physical.

Even Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (an oncologist, Rahm’s older brother, and certainly no MAGA-head) says Biden must have learned of this diagnosis many years ago.

If Biden was undergoing cancer treatments during his presidency — remember all those unexplained trips to Delaware? — it would explain a lot of his behavior. “Chemo brain”. And of course he and Jill would keep it under wraps, because it would only strengthen a 25th Amendment challenge.

Who else knew about this, and when did they know it?

And who the hell was performing the duties of the president of the United States for four years?

Keep in mind that Joe Biden loves using his personal tragedies as a Get Out of Jail Free card. We heard it in that just-released Robert Hur audio from October 2023, when Biden deflected a question he didn’t want to answer about his handling of classified documents by complaining that his son Beau died. He couldn’t remember the exact year, but he used it as an excuse anyway.

If he’ll use his dead son, why wouldn’t he use a cancer diagnosis?

eugyppius also notes that such an advanced case can’t have just popped up recently, reinforcing the notion that his term in office was partially or completely a “regency”:

Yesterday evening, Joe Biden’s office announced that the former president had been diagnosed “with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones“. Biden must have had this cancer for a long time for it to have spread that far, and thus it seems very strange that someone receiving presidential levels of medical care should have been diagnosed only just last week. Many in our circles posit that insiders have known about Biden’s illness for years, but that they have kept his diagnosis and treatment under wraps for political reasons. Among other things, they argue that this explains a July 2022 gaffe in which Biden complained that environmental pollution is “why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer“.1

In fact, I think a simple cover-up is the most harmless possibility here. It’s likely that doctors have diagnosed Biden’s cancer so late because the former president was subject to a high degree of isolation and medical neglect while in office. Perhaps family and close advisers carefully managed Biden’s annual physicals to avoid any inconvenient findings as part of a broader campaign to hide his dementia. Alternatively, it’s possible that signs of cancer were discovered at some point, but that Biden’s inner circle avoided confirming the diagnosis or pursuing treatment. Either way, the late diagnosis and the advanced cancer together suggest that Biden has been left sick and untreated for a long time.

As I wrote last year, Biden’s presidency was an informal and unacknowledged regency. Biden himself did not have the mental capacity to rule on his own, and so a confined circle of close advisers and family effectively directed the actions of the presidential office on his behalf.

Importantly, this regency was not “the White House” or “Biden’s staff” or “the Democratic Party” in general. It was much smaller than all of those things. The regents worked hard to obscure Biden’s dementia from Congress, from large parts of Biden’s own campaign, from the Democratic Party and from many others within Biden’s White House. They ensured that even internal meetings unfolded in highly scripted and predetermined ways, so that cabinet and other officials could not gain a clear idea of Biden’s mental state. They berated and intimidated anyone voicing concern about the president’s health behind the scenes. And they had very simple reasons for doing all of this: If Biden’s dementia were to become common knowledge and not merely an object of private suspicion (however widespread), the regency would be shown up as illegitimate and potentially broken.

Regents exercise power by restricting access to their charge and restricting their charge’s access to information and the outside world. It is thus unsurprising to find that Biden’s regents subjected him to strict social isolation, particularly towards the end of his term …

    1. The White House clarified that Biden was referencing his earlier diagnoses for non-melanoma skin cancer.

Gen Z is blaming Capitalism for the sins of Cronyism

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

Lika Kobeshavidze at the Foundation for Economic Education explains why angry Gen Z’ers are blaming capitalism but should instead be blaming crony capitalism for the economic plight they find themselves in:

Image Credit: Custom image by FEE

Across college campuses, on TikTok feeds, and in everyday conversations, a familiar narrative is gaining steam: capitalism is broken.

Rising rents and stagnant wages fuel the claim among some young people that free markets have failed an entire generation. According to a 2024 poll by the Institute of Economic Affairs, more than 60% of young Britons now view socialism favorably. In the United States, the trend is similar, with Generation Z increasingly skeptical of capitalism’s promises.

But much of this idealism is rooted in distance — many of the young people romanticizing socialism have never lived through the economic dysfunction or political repression it often brings. For those who experienced Soviet shortages, Venezuelan collapse, or East Germany’s surveillance, the word socialism doesn’t suggest fairness or opportunity — it suggests fear, failure, and control. There’s a reason so many fled those systems to come to freer countries. What sounds utopian in theory has too often turned dystopian in practice.

But blaming capitalism misses the mark. The real culprit is cronyism, the unholy alliance between big government and big business that twists markets, blocks competition, and rewards political connections over genuine innovation.

[…]

Cronyism is not limited to one country or one political party. Across the United States and Europe, the symptoms are the same.

In the US, Canada, and the UK, the dream of homeownership slips further away for young people. Sky-high housing prices are blamed on “market failure”, but the real cause lies in layers of government-imposed barriers: restrictive zoning laws, burdensome permitting requirements, and endless bureaucratic delays. Big developers who can afford to navigate or influence the system survive. Everyone else gets locked out.

In Europe, the pattern repeats. France’s labor laws, designed to protect workers, instead stifle opportunity. Hiring becomes risky and expensive, especially for young people. Large corporations, with the resources to manage compliance costs, consolidate their dominance. Small firms and startups never get off the ground.

There’s also a persistent myth that big business fears government intervention. In reality, the largest corporations often embrace it, because it keeps them on top. Tech giants like Facebook and Google now lobby for more regulation, knowing that complex new rules will strangle smaller competitors who can’t afford fleets of compliance officers. Green energy subsidies, meant to combat climate change, often end up showering billions on well-connected firms while locking out emerging innovators.

Cronyism doesn’t reward the best ideas. It rewards the best lobbyists.

May 19, 2025

1949: What are those kids listening to? – W2W 29

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

TimeGhost History
Published 18 May 2025

There seems to be an evolution, that may one day become a revolution, in popular music in the US. Songs with amplified electric guitars, wailing saxophones, and backbeat rhythms are being released more and more often, but it’s not just R&B or jump blues, this is a bit of a different style — a new style. And it’s spreading quickly thanks to a vinyl record revolution that’s also getting in gear. Looks like exciting times ahead for the youth of America, and maybe even the whole world.
(more…)

Best of Cunk on Shakespeare – Part 1

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

Philomena Cunk
Published 20 Dec 2023

Are you saying I’m a liar?

Sharing all things Cunk – a fictional character from Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Shakespeare and Cunk on Earth – Portrayed by the incredible Diane Morgan.

May 18, 2025

Trump today, Taft a century ago – interfering with Canadian federal elections

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

In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes looks at the long-ago pre-Trumpian example of US interference in Canadian federal politics:

President Trump isn’t the first U.S. leader to turn a Canadian election with a few remarks. A little over a century back another president, William Howard Taft, managed the same feat.

The story starts in 1908, when outgoing president Theodore Roosevelt handpicked a successor, the lawyerly Taft. Taft won election. But from the eve of inauguration, Roosevelt began to voice doubts that Taft was up to the job. Word got around. Taft reacted to this disloyalty by attempting to prove he was no Roosevelt puppet. Where Roosevelt had invaded nations, Taft would write trade treaties. As Taft biographer Jeffrey Rosen writes, the motto of Roosevelt had been “speak softly and carry a big stick”. Taft’s maxim could have been “speak softly and carry a free-trade agreement”.

Taft’s marquee effort was to be a trade agreement with Canada, then lodged in the ambiguous status of “self-governing dominion”. As Taft noted, the dominion did have the freedom to conduct trade policy. Canada’s prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, was a distinguished free marketeer. The political stars appeared to align. In his enthusiasm Taft praised Canada, practically crowing: “She has cost us nothing in the way of preparations for defense against her possible assault, and she never will … I therefore earnestly hope that the measure will be promptly enacted into law.” Such a treaty, Taft said, would mark a new “epoch” for North America.

In those days, tariffs represented a much more important share of U.S. federal revenues. Selling free trade was no easy work, especially not to Republicans, for whom tariffs were part of the brand. Then as now, trade treaties, unlike peace treaties, required support from both chambers of Congress. But again Taft sang his heart out, not only making the usual case for an “increase in trade on both sides of the boundary line” but also trying out wider arguments.

Early in 1911, Taft infused urgency into negotiations by threatening Canada via ultimatum: Team up with the United States, or there might be a “parting of the ways”. Hunting votes at home, Taft wrote a private letter to the still influential Roosevelt. Appealing to the imperialist in his predecessor, though not very hard, Taft suggested such a treaty might render Canada “only an adjunct of the United States”. Historians debate whether the “adjunct” letter was leaked or stayed private over the course of the 1911 negotiations. Lawmakers on the Hill, in any case, began to speak in similar tones.

Next, Taft called a special session of Congress. Congress warmed to the treaty but pounded the imperialist angle as much as Taft’s main case. “I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions, clear to the North Pole,” thundered the soon-to-be House Speaker, James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark of Missouri.

Such statements did not elude Canadian ears. Some loathed the treaty for pulling Canada farther from Britain; others, independence minded, loathed the idea of trading the thumb of one empire upon them for the thumb of another. By the time Taft signed the Tariff Reciprocity Agreement in July 1911, Canadian reciprocity opponents were on the march. By September, Canada was rejecting in a landslide referendum Taft’s and Laurier’s work.

As The Literary Digest commented in 1912, these flamboyant statements from U.S. politicians were handy weapons for Canada’s treaty opponents. They had put into Canadian Conservatives’ hands “an excellent club with which to cudgel the Liberals and their brilliant leader, Laurier”. Laurier himself was defeated in an election as well, on the argument he was pandering to the U.S.

May 17, 2025

German democracy … saved by bureaucratic incompetence?

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

Checking in to the situation in Germany, it seems that the big secret report compiled by the German spy agency on the extremely extreme extreme right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party is a bit less than what was expected. Okay, a lot less:

In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well“. Today – a mere seventy-two hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush their long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “… to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained”. So espionage, much secret, wow.

The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly, somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD are. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.

The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the roll-out – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.

The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.

The second thing they’ve realised, is that it is an abomination. The vast majority of material that the BfV have collected is not even suspect. It is a lot of off-colour jokes, memes, but also just banal nothing statements – thousands and thousands and thousands of them, arranged under various hysterical subject headings. Nothing in here is remotely strong enough to support the case for banning the AfD and a lot of it is also very bizarre in terms of argument. Not only have the prospects of an AfD ban all but evaporated, but I think it’s even likely the party will succeed in their present lawsuit and that the administrative court in Cologne will throw out the “right-wing extremist” label.

QotD: Suburbs and their critics

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

I respect [sprawl] as people’s choice – the suburbs, highways and byways, strip malls, cookie-cutter houses, whether small semi-detached or McMansions, the whole lot of it.

It gets a lot of bad press, it has got a lot of influential haters, ridiculers and deriders. There are the urbanists, the town planners, the architects, most of whom can’t abide the sprawl. It’s ugly, inefficient, unsustainable, it lacks amenities and it lacks a sense of community, it prioritises – or privileges, as they would say – cars over pedestrians, it wastes space and it wastes resources, it’s barbaric. Those much smarter and more creative than us have offered a lot of alternatives: high-density living, modernist spaces, Le Corbusier’s houses as “machines for living”. They tore down the slums and erected high rise projects, council flats, banlieues and osiedla. They designed and built whole new districts, rich in concrete and wide bare expanses of public space.

Then there are the cultural as opposed to professional haters, and they too are as old as the suburbs themselves. The sprawl is a prison, a conformist hell. It deadens imagination and stifles creativity. It’s full of dumb people leading dumb lives. It’s a triumph of materialism, selfishness and narrow mindedness over selflessness, community and commonweal. From literature through movies and music to TV shows, suburbs don’t get a break; they are the hotbed of reaction, sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, intolerance, prejudice, oppression and kitsch. “Revolutionary Road”, “Stepford Wives”, “American Beauty”, “Weeds”, “Little Boxes”, Stephen King novels, the list is endless, but you get the drift.

There are many differences between the suburbanites and the suburbs haters, but the one big one is this: the suburbanities are the live-and-let-live crowd – they know what they like but they don’t give a shit if you don’t like it. It’s your business and it’s your life – you can do whatever you like. The suburbs haters, on the other hand, not only know what they like but they believe that everyone else should like it to, and if they don’t, tough luck, they should be forced to change for the sake of what’s really good for them and for the whole community. Suburbs are not something that can be tolerated as an option; they should be destroyed, land reclaimed, ideally by nature, their former residents corralled and concentrated.

In many ways it’s yet another example of the old elite versus the masses cultural clash. The masses essentially just want to be left alone. The elites want to remake the whole world so it accords to their vision of what’s good and useful. The masses’ is not to question why …

Arthur Chrenkoff, “In praise of sprawl”, Daily Chrenk, 2020-05-21.

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