Quotulatiousness

May 6, 2025

If “a trade imbalance constitutes an American ‘subsidy’ justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet”

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

Despite getting his preferred choice elected as Canadian Prime Minister, US President Donald Trump still seems determined to troll Canadians about becoming the “51st state”. Among his shifting set of justifications for this is the trade imbalance between the US and Canada, which Trump chooses to interpet as a “huge” subsidy the US is providing to Canada. On that basis, there are going to have to be a lot more US states in the future:

So now we have serious commentators gaming out the pros and cons of war with Canada. What started out as a mildly amusing bit of presidential “trolling” is now being discussed as next year’s Donbass.

If, for the purposes of argument, one accepts the President’s line that a trade imbalance constitutes an American “subsidy” justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet: last year Washington had a one-and-a-quarter trillion-dollar imbalance with the world. It’s not hard to figure out why: over recent decades the uniparty turned a country that used to make things into a crappy low-wage service economy. […] The US now has trade imbalances with — or “subsidies” of — not only the countries that you’d expect (China, Mexico, Germany, Japan, India) but a lot of ones you wouldn’t (Finland, Algeria).

True, Canada is closer than Algeria, so there are national-security implications for Washington: the country and its politicians (Trudeau, Carney) have been entirely hollowed out by Peking, but then so it goes south of the border (Biden, McConnell). And Trump’s plan for a “fifty-first state” will not solve that problem.

The “fifty-first state” shtick can’t ever have been serious, can it? Geographically, the fifty-first state would be bigger than the other fifty combined, and with a bigger population than California’s. Last time they added stars to the flag, both parties got something out of it: the GOP Alaska and the Dems Hawaii. So wouldn’t it make more sense to make Canada’s ten provinces and three territories a baker’s dozen of new American states with a couple of senators apiece? Yeah, sure – if you want Republicans never to win a national election again.

So, aside from last week’s vote, how is the other side reacting? Last Thursday’s print edition of The Spectator contained a curiously phrased squib from my old editor, Charles Moore:

    The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the “honour to be a friend”, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come to see that his next-door neighbour is part of a long-standing, legitimate order which Canadian voters are happy to endorse.

Let’s just run that again:

    If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person …

The last time his mother opened Parliament in Ottawa was in 1977 — her Silver Jubilee year. Trudeau-wise, Justin’s father Pierre was not keen on it, but didn’t feel he could pick and win a fight with the Palace over it. A quarter-century later, Trudeau’s successor Jean ChrΓ©tien, a towering colossus of micro-pettiness, was annoyed at being given a crappy seat at the Queen Mum’s funeral and so scuttled Her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee throne speech.

So why would Charles Moore think it “likely” that the King would be opening Parliament in Ottawa later this month? If, as it was in my day, Speccie columns for Thursday’s magazine have to be filed on Tuesday, that would make Moore the first guy in either the Canadian or UK media to know what was not revealed to the world until Friday […]

The King has travelled far less in the first three years of his reign than his mother did: shortly after her Coronation, the Queen set off on a tour of parts of the Commonwealth that kept her away from London for six months. Her son can’t do that because he’s very sick with cancer. So it’s quite something that he’ll land in Ottawa on Monday May 26th, deliver the throne speech the following day, and then fly out again. Carney wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t going to take the opportunity to put his view of Canadian sovereignty into the Sovereign’s mouth.

So, if Trump really has the “honour to be a friend” of the King, the only point of this 24-hour flying visit is so His Majesty can send the message that friends don’t let friends threaten to steal each other’s countries. In fact, he has made a point of referring to himself as “King of Canada” quite a bit of late. […] The “King of Canada” bit was done at the instigation of Carney. Which is odd. Especially from a party that has spent half-a-century diminishing and degrading the Crown, and for a monarch who is, unlike his mother, largely unloved and unloveable. Yet Carney seems belatedly to have come around to the old-school monarchist view that, without the Sovereign, there is insufficient to distinguish Canada from its domineering southern neighbour — especially when that neighbour keeps talking about taking it. On the other hand, both the King and his Canadian prime minister are bigtime players at the World Economic Forum, so they’re not the most obvious choice for defenders of national sovereignty. On the other other hand, it’s one thing to surrender it to fellow globalists, quite another to surrender it to Donald Trump.

I have no idea where this is headed, and if anyone can enlighten me I’d be happy to hear it. But Trump has doubled down on it, and Carney is playing the King card to oppose it. As longtime readers know, I have a general preference for smaller nations as happier homes for their people. If Alberta or Quebec voted to secede, why would you take the trouble to do that just to become a minor and inconsequential part of another big country?

But, that aside, why would it be in America’s interest to absorb a hostile population of mostly lefties over a vast and unpoliceable landmass? The history of the last thirty years is that China has shown there are subtler ways of taking over the world without firing a shot, while America has persisted in doing it the old-fashioned way and, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere, has gotten nowhere. Why add Canada to the list?

May 5, 2025

Post-election Bullshit Bulletin from The Line

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

Last week’s federal election has left us in the weird, unresolved situation of being not significantly different than the situation before the writ dropped. We still have a Liberal minority government, probably supported by the rump of the NDP caucus (minus Jagmeet Singh) and a reliable vote from the Green MP, which is enough to pass at least an initial confidence vote in the Commons. Before The Line‘s editors put the Bullshit Bulletin back into mothballs, we get a useful wrap-up post:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

We want to now offer some advice to Pierre Poilievre: grow up.

Seriously. Because not calling your opponent to congratulate him is bullshit.

We don’t mean Mark Carney! We do think Poilievre should call Carney and offer congratulations and also test the waters to see what extent, if any, there is room for cooperation. We aren’t naive idealists. We know neither man is going to want to hop into the sack β€” politically speaking β€” with the other. But there are still norms in a democracy, and they should be observed. Poilievre did congratulate Carney in his remarks on election night, and did so with professionalism and grace, and that’s good.

But we’re actually talking about Bruce Fanjoy, the newly elected Liberal MP for Carleton, the riding that had been held for many years by … Pierre Poilievre. Fanjoy defeated Poilievre on Monday, and by a decisive margin. In an interview with NewsTalk 1010 in Toronto, Fanjoy said that he hadn’t received a call from Poilievre to congratulate him. Calls to the winners of a riding race by the opponents in that riding are routine. Fanjoy doesn’t seem much fazed by the lack of a call, but still. It’s not a great look.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that not making a call will be seen as confirmation in the eyes of some voters of what they already thought about Poilievre. We aren’t the first to note that the Conservative leader is polarizing and has high “negatives” β€” Canadians tell pollsters that they dislike him. We understand that congratulating the guy that beat you must be like pulling your own teeth out. We also think we have a good enough read on Poilievre’s personality to know why this is particularly difficult for him.

Too bad. A would-be national leader is expected to sometimes do unpleasant things. And we’re calling about a two-minute phone call here, not making a decision to send troops into battle (some of whom will die) or a decision that will alter the trajectory of our national history.

Make the call, offer congratulations, wish him well, offer any cooperation you can, and get it over with. And if you don’t, Canadians will be right to call bullshit on that.

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte notes the oddly incurious attitude of the Canadian mainstream media toward the man who became Trudeau’s successor as PM and leader of the Liberal Party:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Carney became prime minister of Canada in March without our media delivering a single meaningful profile of him.

There was a time, only recently ended, when every party leader and most prospective party leaders (and most senior cabinet ministers and chiefs of staff) were subjected to scrutiny the moment they were deemed serious players. A reporter, usually a high-ranking feature artist, would be assigned by Maclean’s, Saturday Night, Report on Business, The Walrus, The Globe & Mail, The National Post, a CBC documentary desk, or any number of other outlets, to dig into the person’s past, read everything on the record, speak to friends and enemies and knowledgeable observers, weigh all the evidence and craft a narrative to give readers (or audiences) a sense of what made the person tick, and some idea of how to think about him or her in relation to public office. At their best, these profiles would provide a welcome counterpoint to how political actors chose to define themselves and how they were defined by their opponents. They were an arbiter of sorts, a first draft of history depended upon by participants in the political process, other media, and the informed public.

No one bothered to profile Carney, even though his advent in our politics had been rumoured for years. It was as though the press gallery in Ottawa assumed he was a known quantity because he’d shown up at the Politics & The Pen Gala for several years in his capacity as governor of the Bank of Canada.

Carney was not only sworn in as prime minister without sustained scrutiny, he made it all the way to the last week of a national campaign before the Globe landed what read like a well-intentioned but hastily assembled and not terribly revealing profile of him. Also in the last week, The Logic, a very good upstart business news site, produced a better one, but for a relatively tiny audience behind an expensive paywall.

Thinking and reporting in depth about the careers and characters of our leaders is perhaps the most important thing that journalists do. Yet Carney’s experience is not unique. If you want to know anything about our last two prime ministers, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, you won’t find much in newspapers, magazines, or documentaries. You’ll need to read the books about them: Stephen Harper by John Ibbitson, Right Side Up and The Longer I’m Prime Minister by Paul Wells, Party of One by Michael Harris; Trudeau by John Ivison, Promise and Peril by Aaron Wherry, The Prince by Stephen Maher, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes by Paul Wells. There is a whole other shelf of aggressively critical takes on the two leaders which offer valuable insights amid their axe-grinding: Tom McMillan’s Not My Party (Harper), Mel Hurtig’s The Arrogant Autocrat (Harper), Brooke Jeffrey’s Dismantling Canada (Harper), Mark Bourrie’s Kill The Messengers (Harper), Yves Engler’s The Ugly Canadian (Harper), Ezra Levant’s Libranos (Trudeau), Candice Malcolm’s Losing True North (Trudeau). Additionally, there are books by the leaders themselves, Harper’s Right Here, Right Now, and Trudeau’s Common Ground, and a range of others written about particular issues or by other participants in their governments.

The past year has brought a wealth of books on our political leadership. Justin Trudeau on the Ropes (Sutherland House) and The Prince (Simon & Schuster) chronicled the last days of Trudeau’s prime ministership. Catherine Tsalikis’s Chrystia (House of Anansi) profiled the woman who ultimately brought him down. Andrew Lawton’s Pierre Poilievre (Sutherland House) and Mark Bourrie’s Ripper (Biblioasis) treated the Conservative leader who sought to replace him. Carney, seemingly intent on dominating the conversation about himself, was ready with another book this spring. The election delayed it until summer.

Remembering The Battle of Britain (1969)

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At SteynOnline, Rick McGinnis discusses the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, which was considered a financial flop at the time it was released and only turned a profit once home VCR sales provided a new revenue stream — it was how I first watched the movie, although I do remember seeing posters for it at the cinema while it was in theatrical release.

The best recent depictions of the war – my subjective list includes Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, Das Boot, Greyhound and Letters from Iwo Jima – were mostly made with veterans advising on historical accuracy and mostly being heard. This wasn’t always the case: for at least two decades following the war, when veterans were still thick on the ground, historical accuracy was frequently sacrificed in the interest of adventure, drama, comedy or romance.

(My subjective list includes Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, D-Day The Sixth of June, Where Eagles Dare, Operation Petticoat, From Here to Eternity and Von Ryan’s Express. Not that these aren’t entertaining, enjoyable films; they just shouldn’t be considered history.)

If there was a turning point – a film that struggled and mostly succeeded in telling a plausibly accurate story about the war to audiences likely to contain not just veterans but civilians with lived memories – it was probably Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain, released in 1969, barely thirty years after the event it commemorates.

While in pre-production for the film, 007 producer Harry Saltzman and his co-producer (and veteran RAF pilot) Benjamin Fisz realized that their American backers at MGM were nervous about making a film about something Americans knew little about. This led to The Battle for the Battle of Britain, a short TV documentary about the film and the event that it was based on, hosted and narrated by one of the film’s stars, Michael Caine.

Included with the 2005 collector’s edition DVD of Hamilton’s film, The Battle for the Battle of Britain begins with a series of “man on the street” interviews conducted outside the American embassy in London. Older interview subjects talk vaguely about how they’d admired the British for standing alone against Nazi Germany at the time; younger ones almost unanimously admit that they don’t’ know anything about it. One woman states that she doesn’t wish to give an opinion since she works for the embassy. At the time these interviews were made the average age of a British pilot who fought in the battle and survived would have been around fifty, as the vast majority of the young men who flew to defend England in the summer of 1940 were on either side or twenty.

Making Battle of Britain felt like a duty in 1969; it attracted a cast of big stars who were willing to work for scale just to be involved, but that didn’t stop the film from going massively over schedule and over budget. Historical accuracy was so important that Saltzman and Lisz ended up collecting what became the world’s 35th largest air force, rebuilding wrecked airframes and making planes that had sat on concrete plinths outside museums and airfields flyable again.

Still from The Battle of Britain

The film begins with the fall of France in the spring of 1940, and British pilots and air crew struggling to get back in the air ahead of the rapidly approaching German army. We meet the three RAF squadron leaders who will be at the centre of the action: Caine’s Canfield, Robert Shaw as the curt, intense “Skipper”, and Colin Harvey (Christopher Plummer), a Canadian married to Maggie (Susannah York), an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

Back across the channel we meet Sir Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command and the man who will lead the English in the air battle to come. Blunt and charmless, Dowding had the unenviable task of telling Sir Winston Churchill, only just appointed Prime Minister, that he doesn’t support his promise to send more fighter squadrons across the Channel to aid the French as they would be squandered in a lost cause and, in any case, he needs every plane and pilot he has to fight the German invasion that’s doubtless coming.

Make America Austere Again?

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

The first 100 days of the BOM haven’t been quite what anyone expected. Close allies and trading partners were shocked at the new administration’s devotion to 1920s tariff “diplomacy”, supporters were dismayed to not get lots and lots of perceived wrongdoers of the Biden administration getting perp-walked for the cameras, and ordinary Americans were presented with a much worse domestic economy than they were promised:

Trump wasn’t totally fixated on economic matters … he still found time in his busy schedule to troll Catholics on his Truth Social platform.

On Wednesday, in the prelude to a cabinet meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump made yet another remark to chill the blood for those concerned about his country. Trump’s cat-and-mouse game of arbitrary changes to American import tariffs is starting to raise concerns about prices and supply chains for consumer goods. The American economy has unexpectedly shrunk in the first 100 days of Trump 2.0, even though workers and businesses are scrambling to make purchases before the effects of Trump tariffs set in. The underlying state of the economy is probably worse than the short-term numbers.

Trump says this is all a matter of “get(ting) rid of the Biden ‘Overhang'”, i.e., it’s his immediate predecessor’s fault. And let’s face it: no other politician on Earth would say anything else 100 days into an executive term. If that was as far as Trump went, it wouldn’t be of unusual concern. What struck me was his separate remark implying that, yeah, tariffs might foul up supply chains a little in the transition to the glorious economy of the future, but haven’t we Americans had it too soft for too long?

“Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” the president mused. “So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.” The message, which brazenly puts the contentment of children front and centre, is one you can’t imagine any other American leader delivering so directly in peacetime: have you all considered being happy with less?

The answer one would expect the median American voter to give is “Hell no”. It’s crazy that I should have to write this, but consumer abundance is a defining feature of the United States! During the Cold War, American supermarkets were the unanswerable argument for economic freedom: you could summarize the United States pretty reasonably as “It’s the country that coined the word ‘super-market'”. In our hyper-interconnected social-media world, I see a dozen conversations a week in which some European boasts of affordable healthcare, walkable neighbourhoods and having July and August and half of September off work every year: the inevitable answer from Americans is “OK, but have you been inside a Buc-ee’s, Gustav?”

Of course, it’s been a very long time since media-decried austerity in government has actually meant any kind of actual reduction in outlay … it’s usually just a (very) slight decrease in the rate of increase rather than actual dollar-value reduction. But, as Chris Bray points out, this time for sure:

I was planning to spend $100 on groceries this morning, but then I decided to slash my grocery budget, so the amount I actually spent on groceries plummeted to just $99.97, plus a small eight dollar supplemental on previously deferred grocery needs, bringing the total to a shockingly parsimonious $107.97. These major cuts caused serious alarm in my household.

Donald Trump, Politico warns, is scorching the earth:

This is the common theme everywhere, as the administration offers the first not-very-detailed hints about its plans for FY β€˜26 discretionary federal outlays. The Huffington Post concludes that Trump is pulling out the BUZZSAW:

The Federal News Network sums up the size of the hit, and compare the topline number to the language about scorched earth and buzzsaws:

    Overall, the administration is looking to increase national security spending next year by 13% and decrease non-defense discretionary spending by 7.6%, meaning the White House is asking for $1.7 trillion for the discretionary budget down from $1.83 trillion this year.

While the White House plans don’t get into the subject of total federal spending, focusing narrowly on discretionary spending, the implication is that federal spending overall will go from about $7 trillion to about … $7 trillion. But TBD.

You can read the entire White House proposal for discretionary funding here. Trump is proposing deep cuts in some federal departments and programs, but is also proposing to offset those cuts with sharp increases in military spending and “homeland security”, meaning border security and sending poor gentle immigrants to places where Chris Van Hollen will fly to stare into their beautiful eyes.

May 3, 2025

German democracy under threat from extremely extreme extreme right AfD

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

That, at least is the judgement of the German domestic intelligence agency assigned responsibility for sniffing out threats to German democracy:

This morning, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) officially reclassified Alternative fΓΌr Deutschland as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. The BfV is Germany’s primary domestic intelligence agency; it is subject to the Ministry of the Interior and tasked, among other things, with policing the democratic respectability of ordinary Germans and their political parties. The upgraded AfD classification is supported by an extensive and totally secret 1,100-page assessment of AfD activities and beliefs, which BfV analysts have been preparing since last year.

Everybody expected the BfV to do this. Leading Social Democrats in particular have been urging the BfV to release their new assessment for months. They see it as a political justification for initiating ban proceedings against the party. As I wrote last week, it is now likely that the new CDU/SPD government, or the new Bundestag, or both, will ask the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe to weigh an AfD prohibition. This new assessment matters mostly because it is the first concrete move in that direction.

The only thing that is really surprising about this news, is the timing: I and everybody else expected the BfV to wait until the CDU and the SPD form a new government and appoint a new Interior Minister. Instead, the sitting Interior Minister Nancy Faeser appears to have forced this assessment through in the final four days of her tenure. This, and not AfD poll numbers (as some have speculated), is the reason this is happening now.

[…]

Among other things, the assessment allegedly cites these extremely right-wing remarks from an 11 August 2024 speech by Hannes Gnauck, who sits on the AfD federal executive committee:

    We must also be allowed to decide once again who belongs to this nation and who does not. There is more to being German than simply holding citizenship papers. All of us here in this market square are connected by much more than just a common language. We are connected by an invisible and simply inexplicable bond. Each and every one of you has more in common with me than any Syrian or Afghan, and I don’t have to explain that – it’s simply a law of nature.

The assessment also includes this absolutely extremist 25 August 2024 statement by Dennis Hohloch, an AfD staffer in the Brandenburg state parliament:

    Diversity means multiculturalism. And what does multiculturalism mean? Multiculturalism means a loss of tradition, a loss of identity, a loss of homeland, murder, manslaughter, robbery and gang rape.

Finally, the BfV would like us to know that their assessment includes this insanely extreme (and since-deleted) tweet from Martin Reichardt, a Bundestag staffer:

    Failed migration policy and asylum abuse have led to the importation of 100,000 people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures.

Obviously the BfV are leaking their choicest, least arguable, and juiciest bits of evidence – the stuff they think will really turn ordinary Germans against those evil AfD Nazis. I invite you re-read these three passages with that in mind, and then try to imagine for yourself what an absurd cultural and ideological bubble these people must inhabit, to find these remarks scandalous.

Poilievre to run in Alberta riding when the byelection is set

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

After losing the seat he’d held for more than 20 years in this week’s federal election, Pierre Poilievre’s political future was clouded. An Alberta MP-elect, Damien Kurek has volunteered to resign so that Poilievre can run in his riding.

Seatless Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre will run in an Alberta byelection as Conservative MP Damien Kurek “temporarily” steps aside.

In a press release, Kurek, the Battle Riverβ€”Crowfoot MP-elect, said he was relinquishing his seat for Poilievre because it’s “what’s best for Canada” and the riding. Kurek was first elected in the Alberta riding in 2019.

Poilievre lost his Ottawa-area seat to a Liberal challenger by more than 4,000 votes in Monday’s election.

“The people of Battle Riverβ€”Crowfoot will be represented well by Pierre for the remainder of this Parliamentary session, and I will keep working with our incredible local team to do everything I can to remain the strong voice for you as I support him in the process, and then run again here in Battle Riverβ€”Crowfoot in the next general election,” Kurek said in a statement.

At a press conference in Ottawa on Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he would call a byelection as soon as possible and that the government would play “no games” with Poilievre’s quest to win a seat.

Apparently, Carney is going with the less-unfriendly path rather than delaying the call for a byelection for the full allowable period (as Justin Trudeau certainly would have done).

May 2, 2025

Trump’s victory lap after getting his preferred PM elected in Canada

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper rounds up American reactions to the Liberal victory in the Monday election, as many Americans seem to agree that Carney’s win was at least partly their doing:

As the U.S. awoke to a renewed Liberal government on their northern border, Americans of all political persuasions embraced the view that they β€” for better or worse β€” had caused it.

“Carney owes his job to President Donald Trump,” was the Tuesday view of the Washington Post editorial board, declaring that the U.S. president had singlehandedly thwarted the election of a populist Conservative government in Canada.

The Centre for American Progress Action Fund β€” a left-wing Washington, D.C.-based think tank β€” framed Carney’s win as a model for how anti-Trump rhetoric can win elections.

“Prime Minister Carney’s success demonstrates that resistance to President Trump’s bullying has mass popular appeal,” read a statement.

Actor Billy Baldwin, a perennial backer of progressive causes, cheered Carney’s victory with a viral social media post declaring “Trump singlehandedly delivers the election for the liberals in Canada with his 51st state bullsh-t.”

Even Rolling Stone, which put Justin Trudeau on the magazine’s cover in 2017, opined that Canada’s newest Liberal government was effectively a Trump creation. “Donald Trump single-handedly elected a new Canadian Liberal Government that was down 25 points in January with his endless ’51st State’ bloviation,” wrote the publication.

Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro broke down the Canadian election in an extended segment on his Tuesday show, framing it as a direct failure of Trump’s foreign policy.

“Let’s be real about this; the rhetorical attacks on Canada have not actually resulted in a net good for the United States,” said Shapiro. A perennial critic of Trump’s tariff policy, Shapiro said that the White House’s habit of “yelling at Canada” had helped install a “far left-leaning internationalist” hostile to U.S. interests.

“All of this started off as a joke, and I think President Trump is so committed to the bit at this point that he couldn’t get off the train,” said Shapiro, in reference to Trump’s repeated pledges to turn Canada into the “51st state”.

A Republican consultant quoted anonymously by Politico on Tuesday was of a similar view, saying the outcome in Canada was a “pretty specific result based on the tariffs and 51st state trolling.”

On his Substack, Paul Wells offers some advice to Mark Carney about his dealings with Pierre Poilievre at this awkward time for the Conservative leader:

Stornoway in the Rockcliffe Park area of Ottawa, Ontario. It has been the official residence of the leader of the Official Opposition in Parliament since 1950.

One danger for Mark Carney is that he will be taught how to be a terrible politician by terrible politicians. A low-stakes test case is at hand. In this as in all things, a decent guiding principle should be: Don’t be like your opponent, and don’t be like your predecessor.

The test at hand is the uncomfortable predicament of Pierre Poilievre, who used to be a Member of Parliament and may want to be one again. In the meantime he is still the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Poilievre lost his seat in Carleton on Monday night. This is not entirely his fault. Liberal campaign teams from neighbouring ridings were invited to spend part of their time door-knocking in Poilievre’s riding. But candidates should try to win even when their opponents work hard to defeat them. I bet this thought has occurred to Poilievre since Monday.

The usual route to the Commons, for a leader who is not yet an MP, is to run in a by-election. Often new leaders find a sitting MP somewhere to vacate their seat and enable a by-election. Brian Mulroney ran in Central Nova in 1983, Jean ChrΓ©tien in BeausΓ©jour in New Brunswick in 1990, Stephen Harper in Calgary Southwest in 2002.

Assume Poilievre can find some Conservative MP-elect willing to abandon a seat they just won so Poilievre can try his chance (again). How should Carney react?

It’s really a question in three parts. Should a by-election be held quickly or much later? Should the Liberals run a candidate? Should the Poilievre family keep living at Stornoway, the Opposition leader’s official residence, in the meantime?

I’m hearing from a lot of people who say Carney should wait as long as the law permits β€” up to a half year after a seat opens β€” before calling the by-election; that the Liberals should definitely run a candidate; and that Poilievre and his family should be evicted from their current fancy abode.

I spent part of Wednesday debating these questions with readers on Substack Notes. Most of the people offering this advice β€” let him twist, then hit him hard β€” pointed out that if Poilievre had a say about an adversary’s career plans, he would do everything in his power to make that adversary hurt.

I think it’s bad advice. It manages to be bad tactics and bad for the soul. The two considerations don’t always line up, but here they do.

Carney should call a by-election as soon as possible after a sitting MP resigns β€” 11 days after the notice of vacancy is received, the minimum permitted in law. If asked, he should prefer that the Poilievre family stay at Stornoway in the meantime. And while the third question is less clear, I’d argue that the Liberals should refrain from running a candidate in the by-election.

This plan would have Poilievre back in the Commons as soon as possible, with minimal risk and discomfort. He’ll be lucky to receive such generous treatment and, while I’m less confident than ever that I know how he thinks, what he should feel is gratitude. I suspect the feeling would confuse him.

The New York Times still values “the narrative” more than the truth

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

Alex Berenson on the way the New York Times chose to present the summary of the crash investigation on the fatal collision between a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial passenger aircraft over Washington DC:

The New York Times cannot stop mangling the truth to serve its political goals.

On Sunday, the paper exhaustively examined the collision between an Army Black Hawk and an American Airlines jet that killed 67 people over the Potomac in January.

The massive 4,000-word article claimed the crash had many causes, including an overworked air traffic controller. “Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash“, the Times proclaimed.

Except that’s not really what happened. Or what the Times found.

Yes, the controller was busy. Yes, the Black Hawk pilots wore night-vision goggles that can, ironically, complicate seeing in cities with lots of ambient light.

Those choices and problems raised the risks of an accident.

But despite all the words the Times devoted to explaining the crash, its root cause was simple. The Black Hawk was flying too high. It flew directly into the CRJ700 regional jet. The plane’s pilots and passengers had no chance.

That’s the reality. The second reality is that an inexperienced female Army pilot, Capt. Rebecca Lobach, 28, (CORRECTION: original article said 36) was at the controls of the Black Hawk when it hit the CRJ700, on a training and evaluation mission.

What the Times actually found, the news in the article, is that the Lobach’s copilot repeatedly warned her the helicopter needed to descend in the minutes before the accident. Just seconds before the crash, he suggested she tack left, a path that would likely have avoided the jet.

She didn’t respond.

In other words, the story here is that Lobach β€” who had never deployed overseas but had volunteered in the Biden White House and whose obituary prominently called her a certified advocate for “sexual harassment” victims β€” flew her helicopter into a passenger jet and killed 67 people, including herself.

HBO’s Rome – Ep 6 “Egeria” – History and Story

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

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 30 Oct 2024

This time we come to Episode 6 of Season 1 of ROME. This one is very much based around the City of Rome itself and places Antony centre stage. In the video we look at the actual history and how well the show reflects this. For more detail on the history, have a look at the videos in the Conquered and the Proud playlist.

May 1, 2025

Canada’s Conservative Party – every silver lining has a cloud

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

In the National Post, Colby Cosh considers the state of the party for the federal Conservatives after an election campaign that looked radically different than the one they had prepared to fight for more than a year:

Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.

The Conservative opposition is now bound to have a difficult year, with their leader inexplicably, inexcusably ejected from the Commons. Dedicated haters of Pierre Poilievre won’t find anything at all inexplicable about the Carleton disaster, but there will need to be a proper autopsy. Especially since Poilievre’s party gathered more vote share nationally than any right-wing party β€” or combination thereof! β€” has achieved since the days of Mulroney.

Even in Ontario, Poilievre’s Conservatives got over a million more votes than the hyper-critical Ford PCs did in a provincial election 60 days earlier, and they are headed toward a higher vote share within the province. So is Poilievre a generational leader potentially on the brink of a dynasty, or an unloved boob who got caught flat-footed by a change in public mood? I promise you that the quarrelling over that question is well underway.

I assume the CPC will keep its unlucky leader, which leaves only the question, “So then what?” The Liberals don’t have to call a by-election until six months after someone decides to resign to make way for Poilievre. And maybe I ought to say “if someone decides”. It’s not essential for a party leader to have a Commons seat, but it would certainly be ideal, especially with the Commons hung.

The Conservatives are bound to find themselves adopting more of a team approach to the Opposition job by default, and maybe this ought to have been considered while it was still optional. Even by Canadian standards, the CPC campaign was very leader-focused, and was obviously predicated on the idea that the people really wanted Poilievre and would like him more as they saw more of him. (And, again, this may actually have happened!) Now there’s a chance the CPC’s House leadership performs well over the next year or so β€” and then has to fade into the wallpaper behind the guy who already lost.

The economics of migration

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

Lorenzo Warby wonders if an entire discipline can commit suicide:

Can an academic discipline seriously decline? Yes. Disciplines which were once mainstays of universities have either vanished or shrunk to pale shadows of their former selves.

What about a social science? One can envisage a social science disappearing. The most obvious way is it gets utterly discredited and replaced. A less obvious way is its institutional bases could disappear. A final way is its entire social basis disappears.

The West is currently marked by two entirely different discourses on migration that seem unable to interact. One is migration-as-economic-boon. This is the outlook of mainstream Economics. Migrants add to the economic activity of societies and potentially retard the effect of an ageing population by replacing absent local children with foreign migrants. This discourse invokes the authority of Economic Theory and its statistical methods.

This outlook typically treats criticism of migration as economically illiterate, socially retrograde, or morally bankrupt; or some combination of thereof. It is protected by the Self-Righteous, Knowing scoff which is such a feature of the modern professional-managerial class. They are the Masters of Knowledge, and of Moral Concern, who the plebs should defer to.

The other discourse talks in terms of social and democratic decay, increased crime, threats of violence, increased fiscal stress, even the possibility of civil war.

This is the world where, in Sweden β€” due to the stress on social and fiscal order from migration β€” it has become policy to pay migrants to go away. This is the world where highly intelligent and informed folk quietly discuss how the performance of economists on migration has been so catastrophically bad, it may bring down the entire discipline.

The adherents of the second, problems-with-migration, discourse are well aware of what mainstream Economics has to say on migration, and judge it to be obviously and demonstrably β€” even catastrophically β€” false. That it is much harder for migrants to contribute positively to a society than mainstream Economics admits, and this gets worse the higher the rate of migration. A recent Dutch study (Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569) found that:

    Only 20% of all immigrants [to the Netherlands] make a positive lifetime net contribution to the public budget. Groups with large contributions come from Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon world and a few other countries like France and Japan.

The adherents of the first discourse seem either utterly unaware of the second discourse, or protected from even considering it by the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff. Their mastery of Theory is such, they cannot possibly be so catastrophically wrong.

The notion that migration could break a society along its existing fracture lines to the point of civil war would absolutely be treated with the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff, despite there being β€” as is discussed below β€” at least three historical examples of precisely that happening.

QotD: The Eurovision Song Contest

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

It was all more harmonious in the old days. One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb, when the charming hostess, Helga VlahoviΔ‡, presented her own fair country as the perfect Eurometaphor: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” she cooed. “The string section and the wood section all sit together”. Alas, barely were the words out of her mouth before the wood section was torching the string section’s dressing rooms, and the hills were alive only with the ancient siren songs of ethnic cleansing and genital severing. Lurching into its final movement, Yugoslavia was no longer the orchestra, only the pits. In an almost too poignant career trajectory, the lovely Miss VlahoviΔ‡ was moved from music programming to Croatian TV’s head of war information programming.

The Eurovision Song Contest has never quite recovered, but oh, you should have seen it in its glory days, when the rich national cultures that gave the world Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, Debussy, and Grieg bandied together to bring us “La-La-La” (winner, 1968), “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” (1969), “Ding-Dinge-Dong” (1975), “A Ba Ni Bi” (1978), “Diggy Loo Diggi Ley” (1984), and my personal favorite, “Lat Det Swinge,” the 1985 winner by the Norwegian group Bobbysocks. The above songs are nominally sung in Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, and even English, but in fact it’s the universal language of Eurogroovy: “Ja, ja, boogie, baby, mit der rock ‘n’ roll”.

Mark Steyn, “Waterloo”, Steyn Online, 2020-05-17.

April 30, 2025

After the votes were counted

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

John Carter suggests that votes should be allocated to reflect the costs imposed on the voters by taxation, that is to ensure that those with the most “skin in the game” at least have their votes weighted more than those who pay little or no taxes but can still vote themselves more benefits:

Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs taxeater status?

So anyhow.

For my American readers, in Canadian elections the Liberal Party is denoted by red, as the Devil and Karl Marx intended.

It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital.

Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote. It’s common for “taxpayers” to be used as a synonym for “the voting public”, but this is a bit of linguistic legerdemain which obscures a core dynamic rotting the heart out of every liberal democracy: most of the population are not, in fact, taxpayers. First there are those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes, such as university students; then there are those receiving direct welfare payments of one form or another; then there are public employees, who although they pay tax on paper, are clearly net recipients of government largess since their paychecks come from taxes in the first place.

The most successful parties in country after country are the parties that mobilize client groups by promising to steal money from productive citizens and transfer that wealth to their non-productive clients. This dynamic is baked into the cake of any universal suffrage democracy, which is why Universal Suffrage is a Suicide Pact. Parties need client groups for electoral support; wealth can only be plundered from the productive; therefore the only available relationship is to cultivate non-productive clients.

The problem, of course, is that over time this destroys the economic productivity of the liberal democracy, because the productive groups will become less productive because what’s the point, or they’ll just look for the exits, while the client groups will swell, becoming simultaneously too expensive to maintain and to electorally heavy to dislodge.

I suspect you could fix all of this by simply tying votes to tax receipts, with only those who are net taxpayers being given the franchise in any given election. At a stroke this would disenfranchise the welfare underclass, government bureaucrats, and university students, all of whom should be prohibited from voting as a matter of principle. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could implement a tax-weighted vote: the more taxes you pay, the more your vote counts.

In addition to the salutary effects of reducing the electoral weight of female voters (since men tend to pay more in taxes), weighting votes by tax receipts would lead to a very interesting incentive structure. On the one hand, everyone hates paying taxes, and wants to minimize the taxes they pay; if only taxpayers were voting, this would place a strong downward pressure on taxes and, hence, on the size of government (thus forcing states to find other ways of funding themselves, via e.g. tariffs or service fees). On the other hand, people like to vote, so there would be a strong incentive not to evade taxes. On the gripping hand, since paying more tax means your vote counts for more, there would be a countervailing incentive to pay as much tax as you can afford. One might imagine a state functioning as a sort of de facto oligarchy, with the billionaires happily paying obscene levels of tax in order to gather as much political power to their class as possible, and enforcing their tyranny by voting to keep taxes on everyone else to the absolute bare minimum. This would be a truly dystopian brier patch to be thrown into.

Alas, we do not inhabit such a political experiment. Returning to the ostensible topic of yesterday’s Canadian election, however, it would probably not be an exaggeration to posit that if we did inhabit such a system, Canada’s Conservative Party would have rolled the Liberals in this and, in all likelihood, almost every other election.

That is not, however, what happened.

The high-level outcome is that, after running the country into the ground for the last decade, the Liberal Party has been elected for the fourth consecutive time, with a mandate to complete the project of crashing the plane of Dominion with no survivors. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to report that I predicted the Liberals would win before the election was even called. The Liberals are four seats short of forming a majority in parliament, meaning they cannot quite form a stable government on their own. This is not a problem for the Liberals, however. Despite the glorious collapse of the New Democratic Party – which plummeted from 25 seats in the last federal election to 7 in the current election, by far their lowest in 30 years – the NDP retains just enough seats for them to form a stable coalition government with the Liberals. In other words, the outcome of this election is that Canada will be in essentially the same situation it was in before the election, with the only meaningful difference being that the Liberals have a few more seats than they did before.

April 29, 2025

Canadian federal election result

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

1984 and the Politicizing of Language

Filed under: Books, Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 16 Aug 2024

A dive into 1984 in relation to modern politics can’t be done without pissin’ in everyone’s Froot-Loops, so grab a tall glass of Victory Gin and let’s talk about how The Party functions, how doublethink makes us crazy, and how it’s not just those nutters on the other side that do it.

I take a few jabs at current sacred cows of the Left and Right here. Hopefully the comments won’t look like Hate Week.

00:00 Intro
01:46 Thoughtcrime and Doublethink
12:27 War is Peace
17:46 Oligarchal Collectivism
22:12 MiniTrue

Post-release edit: It’s been pointed out that I grossly oversimplified the military analysis later in the video, which is true. Man-portable air defense systems and maneuver warfare are a lot more complicated than this video implies. As for that one particular doublethink example mentioned so very briefly, some of the counterpoints have been … impressive contortions of language in their own right. But not interesting enough to discuss the matter further.

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